Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

His marriage to Galina had come about very soon after they met. At one of the office parties he paused to have a chat with the girl from accounts with the distinctive shock of blonde hair, and to his surprise he ended up seeing her home, all the way to the fifth floor of the block of flats in Mustamäe where she lived. Galina then rode him so vigorously for half the night that Särg was surprised at his own stamina. And at how interested the girl seemed to be in him. Since the next day was Saturday, neither of them had to hurry anywhere. Once out of bed, however, Särg was a little embarrassed to discover that Galina’s elderly mother had clearly had no choice but to listen to their moaning and groaning from her neighbouring room. Once they were properly introduced she assured Särg that her age notwithstanding she slept very well, although she struggled to stifle a yawn as she spoke. As an experienced interrogator Särg could draw the obvious conclusions. In any case, his future mother-in-law Varvara Sergeyevna had already made them a hearty plateful of fried eggs and rashers of bacon, which she’d just bought fresh from the market. There was a sports programme of some sort on TV, and Särg had to pretend to be interested since it had been put on especially for him. Then he and Galina went to the park and walked hand in hand for a while. He was invited to stay for lunch as well but decided that it would be politer to decline.

The following month was probably the only time in his life that Särg’s conviction that people were essentially machines driven by their desires and fears was shaken. Särg had no idea at all what the real state of affairs was – that Galina’s period was already quite late and that the likely culprit, one Yevgeny, no longer wanted anything to do with her. A couple of days later in the canteen he casually sat down at Galina’s table with his plate of pork chops and glass of compote, having in fact waited for her for some time there. Galina’s friend quickly left, and they agreed that they would go to the cinema that very same day to watch a film about which they later remembered nothing at all. It probably had some kind of psychological subject matter. When it transpired a few days later that Varvara Sergeyevna was going to be staying at a sanatorium in Haapsalu for two weeks, Särg went back to his rented room to fetch a toothbrush, shaving gear and a couple of changes of underwear, after which he had no reason to go back there for the whole two weeks. He was gradually overcoming the awkwardness that had at first prevented him from reciprocating when Galina touched him so tenderly in all the right places. Särg hadn’t exactly been starved of sex in his former life, but he’d always had the common sense to settle for second best and so he’d never felt particularly moved by any of his encounters. Meanwhile Galina found it easy to convince him that their sexual compatibility was down to a special bond between them, not the experience she’d gained from years of practice.

But when one morning Galina’s dilemma unexpectedly resolved itself (human biology can work in weird and wonderful ways) and her feelings for Särg suddenly seemed to cool, Särg interpreted this in his own way, put his best suit on, bought ten red roses and a bottle of champagne, and took the bus to Mustamäe. His heart was pounding uncontrollably and he’d not slept a bit the previous night. Galina asked for a little time to think things over, but by now Galina’s mother, who had arrived back from the sanatorium, had taken a liking to Särg – he was a polite and decent young man, and even though he didn’t drink himself, he would always be sure to fill the ladies’ glasses. After having tried drinking a couple of times Särg had indeed decided that he would be best off living without alcohol. He’d noticed that one shot would make him unpleasantly edgy, that he needed a second and third shot to help with that, and after the third all sorts of ideas which he would normally not countenance started to seem sensible to him.

After weighing up her options Galina said yes to Särg. Anton was born a little less than a year after their wedding, and looked exactly like Särg. The young family were allocated a flat, and they managed to swap that and Galina’s mother’s flat for a very pleasant three-room place in Keldrimäe, where they now lived. By now Särg could no longer imagine his life without Russian borscht and stuffed cabbage.

Galina’s maternity leave had come to an end and Särg’s mother-in-law was managing fine looking after little Anton. And it could be said that even with his rational view of the human character, Särg had come to understand his nearest and dearest better.

But all that Särg told his wife was that he was transferring to slightly different work. The most important difference was that they could now treat themselves to a holiday in Poland, and Särg had already put them on the waiting list.

The cases which Särg had to investigate in his new role were generally much like the previous ones, only larger in scale, more sophisticated, and wider in scope, and therefore more interesting. Another advantage was that he now got far fewer calls from on high advising him “perhaps you shouldn’t follow so and so’s lead quite so zealously, if you get my point…” If there were cases where a policeman or even a colleague from those same security organs got nabbed, then they wouldn’t be let off the hook. Of course the cases never reached court: the individuals in question would just disappear. No one knew exactly where to. Maybe Barnaul, or Chimkent, or Naryan-Mar – places where they would never have gone of their own volition, but would now be living to the end of their days. Sometimes they would go to work as guards in the prison camps, having saved themselves from becoming prisoners by agreeing to go for longer. Sometimes they were even sent down for the sins of their children, like those loutish Interior Ministry officers whose sons set light to Sassi-Jaan barn and Niguliste church.

Särg had need of his innate mathematical abilities quite often now, because the money which unseen hands dragged into crooked schemes tended to be converted into foreign currency and then back into roubles, and obviously not at the rate set by the Soviet Foreign Trade Bank. Särg also quickly acquired a thorough knowledge of icons, tsarist gold coins and other things which the underworld elite considered held their value well. Of course he knew the hourly rate of the prostitutes in various Tallinn hotels, and how much the bars there charged for different types of tipple, including Viru Valge vodka and Vana Tallinn liqueur, although naturally they could be bought in the shop round the corner for no more than a tenth of the price. But that was all another world for him, which he was happy to observe as if through a window, without feeling the slightest desire to enter it.

By now he was earning enough that Galina didn’t need to go back to work, but for Galina the work itself had always been the least interesting aspect of her job. She needed people around her to discuss the ways of the world; she needed someone to impress with some new make-up or matching outfit and jewellery, since the men in her life certainly didn’t know how to appreciate such things. And Särg promised that she would now be able to spend her whole salary on herself, since at the end of the month there was always housekeeping money left over in the red and white polka-dot “Cocoa” box.

However, Galina didn’t want to go back to work at the Procurator’s Office. The atmosphere there was too strict, and there were too many people who still remembered her previous lifestyle. So after a brief search she found herself a cushy job in the Tallinn offices of Aeroflot. The mood was much more pleasant than her previous place, and the job meant she could get hold of tickets to places like Simferopol, Tuapse and Mineralnye Vody – not just for her own family, but for a seamstress friend, her hairdresser, and the head of department in the furniture shop, who in turn arranged for a decent corner sofa to finally arrive in their living room. And it wasn’t completely without importance that at her new job Galina didn’t have to encounter a single document written in Estonian.