Chapter 5 from the novel "Plague Grave" (Katkuhaud, Varrak 2007)
Translated by Christopher Moseley
In the beginning there were just two feelings: pity and hatred for Kaata’s wholesome misery and the surrounding corruption, which made you consider it a human dwelling or home only with effort – later, when my mind had got very miserable, I called myself to account, asking whether it was cosier to lie with your head poking into the trampled slush than to still be able to perceive your own situation; and hatred because Kaata had got herself into such a situation in the first place. The sense of awareness of playing a game was shamefully strong in me, just as was the complete inability to tell anyone else about it.
In order to regard the path to her present situation as describable at all, you had to know Kaata thoroughly. If a person is eighty years old, looks like a bundle of different-coloured rags, is starving to the marrow, in a cold house, it is senseless, even cruel, to talk of her descent into wretchedness as if it were a play.
At any moment Kaata might lose her reason. But that knowledge, that her appearance and condition had the effect of an accusation, still existed in her.
I don’t take my clothes off in the evening any more, the house is cold, there’s no hot water, I throw myself down with all my clothes on, I wrap myself up in newspapers, and so I go on, I’ve always told the young ones: don’t throw out the newspapers once you’ve read them. In the daytime I read them, some of them I read every line of from start to finish, I was once given a radio for my birthday, but the Boy took it up to the second floor, I can’t get up there any more. And I don’t want a radio anyway, Kaata excuses herself, people’s voices sound strange, the talking sounds as if it comes from some other world, brisk and clear and somehow a bit too solemn. I don’t care for the radio.
When I wrap myself in newspapers in the evening and pull the blanket over me, I try to lie quite straight, so that if death steals a march on sleep and the Boy finds me, I won’t have to be laid out straight. I will have frozen straight.
Kaata was standing with her back to the window, I couldn’t see her expression – I myself had good sight, I tried not to react, I tried now to be as neutral and numb as possible – when I told this to Sonny, Kaata continued, I saw that her eyes were glistening slightly, he’s a sensitive boy, but you can’t see his heart.
I didn’t know anything more, when I saw with my eyes, I’d kept myself away from this house for twenty years, five years ago I visited a few times, carrying out a survey, carrying it out, really carrying it out, because then Kaata was very forceful, so forceful that sometimes she forgot the pretence of being hard of hearing – but then, as she saw me off at the bus stop, she would ask: Is this a dream? I wasn’t dreaming that you’ve visited me?
In at the kitchen window flashed the lights of the Soinaste television mast – that anxious on-and-off blinking went on day and night, but on a dull day, and especially at night, that signalling tower made itself felt forcefully – I hadn’t sat so long in that kitchen that I would sense the continual marvellous presence of the transmitter of television pictures and the century of technology.
And when the first Sputnik that could be observed in our land peeped its message, with Gagarin up there somewhere, I was already outside the substitute for a home. I was outside, but nothing was blinking. Suddenly I was no longer in any of the familiar places, and if Kaata sometimes did think of me, I don’t know what she imagined me as. Even imagination needs points of support, to distinguish it from fantasy.
Or had I, even then, fallen into those states, indescribable for Kaata – and for Sanna even longer, which Kaata’s fantasies about the known and the unknown put her beyond verification, beyond doubt, so that she could say whatever she wanted to her relatives, it was all credible. Of these family relations, none had penetrated the children’s home, the name of the boarding school deceived the uninitiated simply with its exotic-sounding name.
She won’t forgive me to the end of her days for putting her in boarding school, I heard Kaata sometimes say, the teachers were offended anyway, so they said. I clenched my teeth and didn’t say anything. Kaata built a house and Sanna bought a house – which, it is true, she exchanged years later for a co-operative flat – their lives moved and operated ever wider apart. I learned and refused to think about my own situation.
Kaata was standing, her back against the kitchen sideboard, in front of her the table with the food things I’d brought, and eating in turn, as her false teeth creaked and clicked, bread, jellied meat and yoghurt; she broke a piece of bread, sniffed and kneaded it between her fingers, ah! that’s so good that I’ll take another piece! – adjusted her splayed legs, I asked something, Kaata didn’t hear or understand at once so that she could answer the question, I looked, my head cocked, at the landlady of my former and only home, waited and listened as her stomach started rumbling and gurgling – so it seemed, so it sounded to me – while Kaata concentrated on what was for her an abundance of food.
Time stopped, there was no past or future time, my feet were sweating in my winter boots, I looked with concern that the doorpost on which I was leaning was clean and wouldn’t leave marks on my clothes.
Alma was here recently and said that Päts [Note] was a Russian agent, said Sanna, prodding her yoghurt with a spoon. She smacked her lips with her tongue, gasping with relish. Could it possibly be true?
What relative do we have with the name of Päts? I asked, dismayed.
So wasn’t the president of independent Estonia called Päts? Kaata said, looking at me in a matter-of-fact way. It was Päts, wasn’t it?
Yes, our president was indeed Päts.
All the time he had been giving information about Estonia to the Russians, taking large sums in return. It made him stinking rich. Alma had press cuttings about it all, she was going on about it all day. Then she wanted to stay the night here, but I wouldn’t let her.
But you’ve got rooms – why didn’t you let her?
She’s got fleas, replied Kaata, as if she were talking about a mongrel. So was he a Russian agent or wasn’t he?
Well, I thought, for the first time in history Estonia had its own state, and our leaders simply couldn’t behave like statesmen. There were always economic things that they took money for. I think that’s nothing short of treason.
But we didn’t get our independence anyway. I heard this and I was amazed: it was the first time Kaata had talked directly about politics.
Our diplomacy was weak. The leaders of the other countries were just as stupid – or careless, or accommodating – but nobody could guess the unquenchable greed of the two great bandits. They just gave in and hoped that if we sell just this one more country to Hitler for the sake of peace, if we give in a little here and there, there’ll be no war.
But the Finns put up a fight, interjected Kaata again, drily.
I was downright amazed that in this chaos and confusion, having completely lost hope, as she had put it herself a moment ago, Kaata was suddenly talking about the Estonian state and Päts. The ugliness of the end of life and the perceptible nearness of death had knocked me senseless at a stroke, no abstraction visited my brain, it was as if I felt only primitive emotions – hatred, coolness, cold, hunger – when Kaata, in the presence of the food, took up questions which she’d evidently been chewing over for days. I did understand that her choice of subjects was not just by chance. It didn’t matter what I asked or talked about; in Kaata’s head, wrapped in berets and a scarf, it was the life and work of President Päts that was running its course.
So what is to become of us if even our presidents betray us and everyone fills their own pockets? There’ll be nothing left of us. And Päts was deported too. Then they dug him up, brought him to Estonia, buried him with full honours – so what is he, a traitor or an honourable man? Should he be respected or cursed?
Both of those, I said with a forced laugh. Actually we ought to think about him, I added, stressing the “think”. We should learn from history. It can’t be right that for thousands of years a tug-of-war goes on with other states and powers, and then, if you’re lucky enough to win yourself a little bit of independence, you suddenly have the actions and the dignity of a free man. It takes time to grow to independence.
Kaata shifted onto the other foot. The lights of the television mast blinked in the dimmed kitchen as if their source were here, in this kitchen, this house: Careful, there’s something here that it wouldn’t pay you to visit!
But what if there’s no time, what if it’s not given? You can’t just turn around when it all comes to an end.
That era is really over. It ended with the Second World War. Some were able to flee to the West, others were deported, killed or imprisoned. Those who stayed were broken and tamed. Fear and caution remain like a germ in the blood, which, when danger arises, changes to militancy or attack, I explained, as if to fill the time.
Those who were able to flee with their parents as children are now coming back like white people to a land of half-wits, noted Kaata. They’re coming to take our property away from us, as if we ourselves had given the land and houses away to the robbers along with our own selves.
Kaa-ta, for some reason you’re on the warpath today.
You fled with your parents from your home in the middle of the night and you cried from Risti to Prandi. You cried for ten kilometres without stopping. It was very quiet. They were still asleep in the wayside villages. So that the crying of a child wouldn’t be heard, Sanna and Valter had buried you under a pile of clothes at the bottom of the cart. They were very frightened themselves then that you’d suffocate down there, they’d made a little space in the clothes to let the air in. But your house was burned down to make firewood for the collective farm. Only the foundation stones are left.
The refugees’ boats and ships were fired at, many found a cold grave, and no-one was waiting for them in foreign lands. We stayed in Estonia. I had said these things to the deportees too, because it was harder for them than for those who stayed at home.
They don’t know anything about how the intervening years were for us, said Kaata, not letting the matter of the refugees rest. They don’t want to know. The Päts era is like a pretty fairy-tale to them. – Our own country anyway, I managed to butt in to Kaata’s stream of words. Thanks to that memory, the young people have been learning Estonian abroad. They’re educated men and women, as Tõnu has been telling me. At first it might have been hard for them, living in a free country, among people. All opportunities for learning were open if you were diligent. Estonians are diligent; they’re working they way up everywhere.
Well, that’s good. There are Estonians on every continent of the globe now.
They came back, took the land and the houses back. Unlike us, they had money too, to rebuild or restore their homes. It’s as if they were better than us.
You’re, like – angry?
No, sighed Kaata. Who was deported or whose family was disrupted, couldn’t even think of studying or of getting ahead. But if all Estonians had fled or gone away, there would be nowhere for these ones to come back to. Estonia would have been full of Russians.
You’re accusing! I exclaimed. Kaata really surprised me. If I’d known then what Kaata still had to say to me, I would have remained silent.
Tõnu says that it doesn’t make much difference whether we’re sold to the East or the West, Estonia’s past or future weren’t going to trouble Kaata’s stubborn cussedness.
Nobody’s going to sell us apart from ourselves. Why do you talk about us as if we were dumb animals, continually being done to, as if we had no choice but to be victims.
But that’s how it was; in the end, even Päts did harm to our country.
Our country was occupied. Päts left you in a horrible way, not even his destiny was anything to be envious of. If he would just leave you in peace.
Kaata put the spoon on the table, sat down carefully on a stool pushed up to it, looked at the patch on the table between the washed jars, and was quiet for a while.
I’ve been very cruel to you, but I can’t talk about it today. Perhaps you’ll come back some time.
And before you go, please shut the grate on the stove. A bit of human warmth in here.
We had always taken the risk of lighting that stove, which flared up immediately, and was the source of heating all the air in the house. I got the feeling that a deliberate problem had been made out of lighting the stove. It was too early to decide whether Kaata was hoping to entice Tõnu to heat it up and stay and chat cosily to her or the Son was frightening his mother into it.
The grate of the stove was high up under the ceiling, and a pole with a hook had been made to open and shut it. I couldn’t understand what sort of giant they’d had in mind when they put the grate so high up under the ceiling.
I pushed the grate shut; Kaata had come from the kitchen to see what I was doing.
Now if you really have to come back, bring me some nappies; you can ask at the chemist’s for old people’s nappies. They’re not expensive at all. I can even pay you for them.
Kaata had a sample in her hand; I checked the size of it while Kaata smiled apologetically. I keep myself together with them, I use all sorts of rags and patches, but now I’ve got an ulcer in the small of the back. If I lie on my back, the piss collects there.
I stood like a heap of misery, I didn’t even try to look at the ulcer; I only promised I’d bring them, and made to leave.
When I shut the gate, Kaata was standing inside the front door, her face against the pane, looking like a condemned prisoner. Then I was on my way and I didn’t look back.
Since it was still early, I went home by bus. Later when I was getting ready to stay the night, I ordered a taxi.
Which kind of vehicle I selected was like a summary expression of the formula of the day’s tension. And still the corpse-like face of Kaata stared at me through the pane in the door, her hands on both sides of the pane to balance her body. Kaata’s beautiful young person’s hands, which she washed after cleaning the door-knobs, like a surgeon, rolled her sleeves up above the elbows, soaped inside, scrubbed with a brush, rinsed, repeated the procedure several times, searched, her hands raised high, for the clean and ironed towel that had been set aside for this occasion, wiped her hands, keeping them vertical all the time, so that not a drop of water would drip back onto her fingers.
Sometimes she didn’t want to stop the washing procedure at all. Once I happened to look at Kaata at a moment when she was washing her hands, and I noticed at once that in places they were almost blood-violet and dark blue.
I got into a panic, completely forgetting Kaata’s acting abilities. Do you ever feel your palms and fingers, and do they hurt much - - I didn’t know in what order things had to be done, I’d never seen gangrene in my life before – and Kaata just soaped and scrubbed with a little soft-bristled scrubbing-brush, so that the blood and veins under the skin appeared.
This is nothing, said Kaata, I want to get my hands clean. I don’t look in the mirror any more, haven’t done for ages, but I do look at my hands, they’re not an old person’s hands. I have beautiful hands. Kaata raised her hands again to eye level, studied and sniffed them, and turned back to the sink.
No, no! I shouted. Enough of that! Just leave your hands alone!
Oh well, perhaps that is enough for now. I taught Tõnu too: check that your hands and under your nails are always clean, have a regular manicure, educated, well-brought-up men always care for their hands, make sure your shirt collars and cuffs aren’t crumpled, that your socks don’t smell, your trousers usually aren’t pressed perfectly – it’s all a matter of style – and your shoes should shine like a mirror!
And keep your tie straight, I chuckled.
Yes, I used to really stress the matter of the tie. Ärni even used to wear a tie when he was at home. In the beginning I really liked that. Actually I liked it right to the end. He was the only one of my admirers who wore a tie. Even the male teachers at school didn’t often have one, but Ärni did.
My mother taught her children what she had seen while working as a chambermaid; we were always very correctly and tastefully dressed. In later life I always paid attention to what anyone was wearing, how they wore their clothes or hat, their table manners, their knowledge of how greet each other in passing; I taught all that to Tõnu.
Yes, yes, I said, looking at what Kaata had done meanwhile, struggling with the chaos. Her passageways were as clean as possible. The crockery washed. Only the scraps and garbage dropped on the floor couldn’t always be cleaned up, so the layer newspapers thrown over them was growing profusely. As was the row of rubbish-bags, their tops tightly fastened, in the corridors, the stairs and the toilet, so that when Sonny came, he’d load them into the car and take them somewhere where bags like that belong.
So it was no surprise that I hadn’t dragged them into the adjoining garage – like Kaata, I was always hoping that when Tõnu comes,… But when Tõnu did come, he would put it off until tomorrow, or he was in a hurry to get back, so the row of bags kept on growing. So by now I was mentally dragging them every morning and evening, and since my hands weren’t the hands of a healthy person, in my imagination I was even pulling them between my teeth, crawling along the flagstones to the garage.
Moments that never go away, not even when I too cannot think of Kaata without the image of Fate stepping in. Sympathy, empathy, would have the significance of a primeval participation in the whole, not subject to common sense and the logic of cause and effect. Maybe the flower that enjoys the warmth and sunshine does go on vibrating after all those that have been left in the shade or withered prematurely, in another way than the human mind imagines – the situations expand.
So it was that Kaata once spent a whole week lugging wood indoors, and then checking with her own eyes how little was left in the shed.
I chose the pre-dawn time of morning and brought the bundles inside in twos. At first I could hold one under my arm and the stick in the other, to keep my balance, but in the end I simply crawled, by turns with the bundles under my arm or in front of me. I didn’t want the neighbours to see how little wood there was and that Sonny had been gone the whole week. Sometimes I got cold, and then I’d rub myself with a cloth soaked in spirits, but at other times the strain of it got my blood circulating.
But I’d made a start, Kaata cheered me. As long as my bladder holds out, if I can get myself washed, if I had slightly more comfortable surroundings, perhaps I could still revive. Kaata’s voice sounds like sighing. Yearning all alone makes your mood lighter.
That was when I started asking Tõnu: let’s get things done, let’s wash the floors a bit, take Mother to a sauna somewhere.
Oh no, no, you can’t get to a sauna, the Irlanda sauna is under repair right now, that’s where Mum always used to go, I looks, brings, does, let’s put up with it a bit longer.
What’s this I looks, brings, does – who is this, whose problems are solved in the third person – I couldn’t understand, although evidently Tõnu was talking about himself.
I can’t manage to carry Kaata up the stairs, I explained to Tõnu, I just can’t do it.
But that’s not your business, Tõnu replied sternly. Looks at that business later. Got this far, can go on a bit longer.
You’ll be here tomorrow too, asked Tõnu and his look was stern. Why do you talk in terms of days? And after a pause: of course, it’s not my business, I don’t care, as long as she’s simply with someone. You’ll bring food too, money’s a bit tight for me at the moment.
You know those newspapers in the bed…
Yes, yes, I know. I told you already, my wife and I haven’t been able to get her used to sleeping between sheets.
You’re joking, a shouted indignantly. There’s nobody more particular about cleanliness than Kaata in the whole family.
But look, now it’s like this, said Tõnu, spreading his arms. She wasting, wasting away slowly, I told you that on the telephone when you rang before you came here and you asked how she’s living, how she is. Well, look, that’s how she is.
She’s sick and she needs medicine.
It’s old age, just settle for that, it’s old age. No doctor can make her younger.
She says she’s gone three months without washing. In all that time you haven’t found an opportunity…
No, I haven’t. I go to work. I’m busy. My wife goes to work too and she’s busy too. Mother gets on very well, you see how she washes the knobs, she can scrub herself with damp cloths, she’s mostly in her room, flat on her back sleeping. She sleeps for days. Sometimes she doesn’t even hear when I come home, but she tells the people close to her and the neighbours that she hasn’t seen me for weeks. You should remember from the times you were together what a good imagination she has. In the end she’s starting to believe her own lies, and then others do too. Sometimes I think that she won’t let anyone in here any more, I’ll be taking the key from her friends too, and that’ll be the end of the tale-telling.
Oh, I cry, oh! Don’t to that! I’m starting to beg Tõnu, as he walks restlessly from room to room, not looking Mother or me in the eye, we follow him as he walks, a tall young man in a dark suit, hands in his trouser pockets, his head slightly arched, looking downward, past us, he stops, studies his well scrubbed clean nails, when Mother asks something afterwards it occurs to me that Mother is trying to ask him something in my presence – he replies, in passing mumbles something insincere under his breath, before finally leaving.
Even several years later I’m wondering why I didn’t scream harshly at Sonny or demand that he fulfil those obligations to his old and infirm mother that are to be rightly expected of eldest children. I drew his attention to it, yes, I even begged, but I was short on harsh words.
Translator’s note: Konstantin Päts (1875-1956) was the last president of independent Estonia up to the Soviet invasion of 1940. He was deported to Siberia and died in exile there.
Translated by Christopher Moseley
In the beginning there were just two feelings: pity and hatred for Kaata’s wholesome misery and the surrounding corruption, which made you consider it a human dwelling or home only with effort – later, when my mind had got very miserable, I called myself to account, asking whether it was cosier to lie with your head poking into the trampled slush than to still be able to perceive your own situation; and hatred because Kaata had got herself into such a situation in the first place. The sense of awareness of playing a game was shamefully strong in me, just as was the complete inability to tell anyone else about it.
In order to regard the path to her present situation as describable at all, you had to know Kaata thoroughly. If a person is eighty years old, looks like a bundle of different-coloured rags, is starving to the marrow, in a cold house, it is senseless, even cruel, to talk of her descent into wretchedness as if it were a play.
At any moment Kaata might lose her reason. But that knowledge, that her appearance and condition had the effect of an accusation, still existed in her.
I don’t take my clothes off in the evening any more, the house is cold, there’s no hot water, I throw myself down with all my clothes on, I wrap myself up in newspapers, and so I go on, I’ve always told the young ones: don’t throw out the newspapers once you’ve read them. In the daytime I read them, some of them I read every line of from start to finish, I was once given a radio for my birthday, but the Boy took it up to the second floor, I can’t get up there any more. And I don’t want a radio anyway, Kaata excuses herself, people’s voices sound strange, the talking sounds as if it comes from some other world, brisk and clear and somehow a bit too solemn. I don’t care for the radio.
When I wrap myself in newspapers in the evening and pull the blanket over me, I try to lie quite straight, so that if death steals a march on sleep and the Boy finds me, I won’t have to be laid out straight. I will have frozen straight.
Kaata was standing with her back to the window, I couldn’t see her expression – I myself had good sight, I tried not to react, I tried now to be as neutral and numb as possible – when I told this to Sonny, Kaata continued, I saw that her eyes were glistening slightly, he’s a sensitive boy, but you can’t see his heart.
I didn’t know anything more, when I saw with my eyes, I’d kept myself away from this house for twenty years, five years ago I visited a few times, carrying out a survey, carrying it out, really carrying it out, because then Kaata was very forceful, so forceful that sometimes she forgot the pretence of being hard of hearing – but then, as she saw me off at the bus stop, she would ask: Is this a dream? I wasn’t dreaming that you’ve visited me?
In at the kitchen window flashed the lights of the Soinaste television mast – that anxious on-and-off blinking went on day and night, but on a dull day, and especially at night, that signalling tower made itself felt forcefully – I hadn’t sat so long in that kitchen that I would sense the continual marvellous presence of the transmitter of television pictures and the century of technology.
And when the first Sputnik that could be observed in our land peeped its message, with Gagarin up there somewhere, I was already outside the substitute for a home. I was outside, but nothing was blinking. Suddenly I was no longer in any of the familiar places, and if Kaata sometimes did think of me, I don’t know what she imagined me as. Even imagination needs points of support, to distinguish it from fantasy.
Or had I, even then, fallen into those states, indescribable for Kaata – and for Sanna even longer, which Kaata’s fantasies about the known and the unknown put her beyond verification, beyond doubt, so that she could say whatever she wanted to her relatives, it was all credible. Of these family relations, none had penetrated the children’s home, the name of the boarding school deceived the uninitiated simply with its exotic-sounding name.
She won’t forgive me to the end of her days for putting her in boarding school, I heard Kaata sometimes say, the teachers were offended anyway, so they said. I clenched my teeth and didn’t say anything. Kaata built a house and Sanna bought a house – which, it is true, she exchanged years later for a co-operative flat – their lives moved and operated ever wider apart. I learned and refused to think about my own situation.
Kaata was standing, her back against the kitchen sideboard, in front of her the table with the food things I’d brought, and eating in turn, as her false teeth creaked and clicked, bread, jellied meat and yoghurt; she broke a piece of bread, sniffed and kneaded it between her fingers, ah! that’s so good that I’ll take another piece! – adjusted her splayed legs, I asked something, Kaata didn’t hear or understand at once so that she could answer the question, I looked, my head cocked, at the landlady of my former and only home, waited and listened as her stomach started rumbling and gurgling – so it seemed, so it sounded to me – while Kaata concentrated on what was for her an abundance of food.
Time stopped, there was no past or future time, my feet were sweating in my winter boots, I looked with concern that the doorpost on which I was leaning was clean and wouldn’t leave marks on my clothes.
Alma was here recently and said that Päts [Note] was a Russian agent, said Sanna, prodding her yoghurt with a spoon. She smacked her lips with her tongue, gasping with relish. Could it possibly be true?
What relative do we have with the name of Päts? I asked, dismayed.
So wasn’t the president of independent Estonia called Päts? Kaata said, looking at me in a matter-of-fact way. It was Päts, wasn’t it?
Yes, our president was indeed Päts.
All the time he had been giving information about Estonia to the Russians, taking large sums in return. It made him stinking rich. Alma had press cuttings about it all, she was going on about it all day. Then she wanted to stay the night here, but I wouldn’t let her.
But you’ve got rooms – why didn’t you let her?
She’s got fleas, replied Kaata, as if she were talking about a mongrel. So was he a Russian agent or wasn’t he?
Well, I thought, for the first time in history Estonia had its own state, and our leaders simply couldn’t behave like statesmen. There were always economic things that they took money for. I think that’s nothing short of treason.
But we didn’t get our independence anyway. I heard this and I was amazed: it was the first time Kaata had talked directly about politics.
Our diplomacy was weak. The leaders of the other countries were just as stupid – or careless, or accommodating – but nobody could guess the unquenchable greed of the two great bandits. They just gave in and hoped that if we sell just this one more country to Hitler for the sake of peace, if we give in a little here and there, there’ll be no war.
But the Finns put up a fight, interjected Kaata again, drily.
I was downright amazed that in this chaos and confusion, having completely lost hope, as she had put it herself a moment ago, Kaata was suddenly talking about the Estonian state and Päts. The ugliness of the end of life and the perceptible nearness of death had knocked me senseless at a stroke, no abstraction visited my brain, it was as if I felt only primitive emotions – hatred, coolness, cold, hunger – when Kaata, in the presence of the food, took up questions which she’d evidently been chewing over for days. I did understand that her choice of subjects was not just by chance. It didn’t matter what I asked or talked about; in Kaata’s head, wrapped in berets and a scarf, it was the life and work of President Päts that was running its course.
So what is to become of us if even our presidents betray us and everyone fills their own pockets? There’ll be nothing left of us. And Päts was deported too. Then they dug him up, brought him to Estonia, buried him with full honours – so what is he, a traitor or an honourable man? Should he be respected or cursed?
Both of those, I said with a forced laugh. Actually we ought to think about him, I added, stressing the “think”. We should learn from history. It can’t be right that for thousands of years a tug-of-war goes on with other states and powers, and then, if you’re lucky enough to win yourself a little bit of independence, you suddenly have the actions and the dignity of a free man. It takes time to grow to independence.
Kaata shifted onto the other foot. The lights of the television mast blinked in the dimmed kitchen as if their source were here, in this kitchen, this house: Careful, there’s something here that it wouldn’t pay you to visit!
But what if there’s no time, what if it’s not given? You can’t just turn around when it all comes to an end.
That era is really over. It ended with the Second World War. Some were able to flee to the West, others were deported, killed or imprisoned. Those who stayed were broken and tamed. Fear and caution remain like a germ in the blood, which, when danger arises, changes to militancy or attack, I explained, as if to fill the time.
Those who were able to flee with their parents as children are now coming back like white people to a land of half-wits, noted Kaata. They’re coming to take our property away from us, as if we ourselves had given the land and houses away to the robbers along with our own selves.
Kaa-ta, for some reason you’re on the warpath today.
You fled with your parents from your home in the middle of the night and you cried from Risti to Prandi. You cried for ten kilometres without stopping. It was very quiet. They were still asleep in the wayside villages. So that the crying of a child wouldn’t be heard, Sanna and Valter had buried you under a pile of clothes at the bottom of the cart. They were very frightened themselves then that you’d suffocate down there, they’d made a little space in the clothes to let the air in. But your house was burned down to make firewood for the collective farm. Only the foundation stones are left.
The refugees’ boats and ships were fired at, many found a cold grave, and no-one was waiting for them in foreign lands. We stayed in Estonia. I had said these things to the deportees too, because it was harder for them than for those who stayed at home.
They don’t know anything about how the intervening years were for us, said Kaata, not letting the matter of the refugees rest. They don’t want to know. The Päts era is like a pretty fairy-tale to them. – Our own country anyway, I managed to butt in to Kaata’s stream of words. Thanks to that memory, the young people have been learning Estonian abroad. They’re educated men and women, as Tõnu has been telling me. At first it might have been hard for them, living in a free country, among people. All opportunities for learning were open if you were diligent. Estonians are diligent; they’re working they way up everywhere.
Well, that’s good. There are Estonians on every continent of the globe now.
They came back, took the land and the houses back. Unlike us, they had money too, to rebuild or restore their homes. It’s as if they were better than us.
You’re, like – angry?
No, sighed Kaata. Who was deported or whose family was disrupted, couldn’t even think of studying or of getting ahead. But if all Estonians had fled or gone away, there would be nowhere for these ones to come back to. Estonia would have been full of Russians.
You’re accusing! I exclaimed. Kaata really surprised me. If I’d known then what Kaata still had to say to me, I would have remained silent.
Tõnu says that it doesn’t make much difference whether we’re sold to the East or the West, Estonia’s past or future weren’t going to trouble Kaata’s stubborn cussedness.
Nobody’s going to sell us apart from ourselves. Why do you talk about us as if we were dumb animals, continually being done to, as if we had no choice but to be victims.
But that’s how it was; in the end, even Päts did harm to our country.
Our country was occupied. Päts left you in a horrible way, not even his destiny was anything to be envious of. If he would just leave you in peace.
Kaata put the spoon on the table, sat down carefully on a stool pushed up to it, looked at the patch on the table between the washed jars, and was quiet for a while.
I’ve been very cruel to you, but I can’t talk about it today. Perhaps you’ll come back some time.
And before you go, please shut the grate on the stove. A bit of human warmth in here.
We had always taken the risk of lighting that stove, which flared up immediately, and was the source of heating all the air in the house. I got the feeling that a deliberate problem had been made out of lighting the stove. It was too early to decide whether Kaata was hoping to entice Tõnu to heat it up and stay and chat cosily to her or the Son was frightening his mother into it.
The grate of the stove was high up under the ceiling, and a pole with a hook had been made to open and shut it. I couldn’t understand what sort of giant they’d had in mind when they put the grate so high up under the ceiling.
I pushed the grate shut; Kaata had come from the kitchen to see what I was doing.
Now if you really have to come back, bring me some nappies; you can ask at the chemist’s for old people’s nappies. They’re not expensive at all. I can even pay you for them.
Kaata had a sample in her hand; I checked the size of it while Kaata smiled apologetically. I keep myself together with them, I use all sorts of rags and patches, but now I’ve got an ulcer in the small of the back. If I lie on my back, the piss collects there.
I stood like a heap of misery, I didn’t even try to look at the ulcer; I only promised I’d bring them, and made to leave.
When I shut the gate, Kaata was standing inside the front door, her face against the pane, looking like a condemned prisoner. Then I was on my way and I didn’t look back.
Since it was still early, I went home by bus. Later when I was getting ready to stay the night, I ordered a taxi.
Which kind of vehicle I selected was like a summary expression of the formula of the day’s tension. And still the corpse-like face of Kaata stared at me through the pane in the door, her hands on both sides of the pane to balance her body. Kaata’s beautiful young person’s hands, which she washed after cleaning the door-knobs, like a surgeon, rolled her sleeves up above the elbows, soaped inside, scrubbed with a brush, rinsed, repeated the procedure several times, searched, her hands raised high, for the clean and ironed towel that had been set aside for this occasion, wiped her hands, keeping them vertical all the time, so that not a drop of water would drip back onto her fingers.
Sometimes she didn’t want to stop the washing procedure at all. Once I happened to look at Kaata at a moment when she was washing her hands, and I noticed at once that in places they were almost blood-violet and dark blue.
I got into a panic, completely forgetting Kaata’s acting abilities. Do you ever feel your palms and fingers, and do they hurt much - - I didn’t know in what order things had to be done, I’d never seen gangrene in my life before – and Kaata just soaped and scrubbed with a little soft-bristled scrubbing-brush, so that the blood and veins under the skin appeared.
This is nothing, said Kaata, I want to get my hands clean. I don’t look in the mirror any more, haven’t done for ages, but I do look at my hands, they’re not an old person’s hands. I have beautiful hands. Kaata raised her hands again to eye level, studied and sniffed them, and turned back to the sink.
No, no! I shouted. Enough of that! Just leave your hands alone!
Oh well, perhaps that is enough for now. I taught Tõnu too: check that your hands and under your nails are always clean, have a regular manicure, educated, well-brought-up men always care for their hands, make sure your shirt collars and cuffs aren’t crumpled, that your socks don’t smell, your trousers usually aren’t pressed perfectly – it’s all a matter of style – and your shoes should shine like a mirror!
And keep your tie straight, I chuckled.
Yes, I used to really stress the matter of the tie. Ärni even used to wear a tie when he was at home. In the beginning I really liked that. Actually I liked it right to the end. He was the only one of my admirers who wore a tie. Even the male teachers at school didn’t often have one, but Ärni did.
My mother taught her children what she had seen while working as a chambermaid; we were always very correctly and tastefully dressed. In later life I always paid attention to what anyone was wearing, how they wore their clothes or hat, their table manners, their knowledge of how greet each other in passing; I taught all that to Tõnu.
Yes, yes, I said, looking at what Kaata had done meanwhile, struggling with the chaos. Her passageways were as clean as possible. The crockery washed. Only the scraps and garbage dropped on the floor couldn’t always be cleaned up, so the layer newspapers thrown over them was growing profusely. As was the row of rubbish-bags, their tops tightly fastened, in the corridors, the stairs and the toilet, so that when Sonny came, he’d load them into the car and take them somewhere where bags like that belong.
So it was no surprise that I hadn’t dragged them into the adjoining garage – like Kaata, I was always hoping that when Tõnu comes,… But when Tõnu did come, he would put it off until tomorrow, or he was in a hurry to get back, so the row of bags kept on growing. So by now I was mentally dragging them every morning and evening, and since my hands weren’t the hands of a healthy person, in my imagination I was even pulling them between my teeth, crawling along the flagstones to the garage.
Moments that never go away, not even when I too cannot think of Kaata without the image of Fate stepping in. Sympathy, empathy, would have the significance of a primeval participation in the whole, not subject to common sense and the logic of cause and effect. Maybe the flower that enjoys the warmth and sunshine does go on vibrating after all those that have been left in the shade or withered prematurely, in another way than the human mind imagines – the situations expand.
So it was that Kaata once spent a whole week lugging wood indoors, and then checking with her own eyes how little was left in the shed.
I chose the pre-dawn time of morning and brought the bundles inside in twos. At first I could hold one under my arm and the stick in the other, to keep my balance, but in the end I simply crawled, by turns with the bundles under my arm or in front of me. I didn’t want the neighbours to see how little wood there was and that Sonny had been gone the whole week. Sometimes I got cold, and then I’d rub myself with a cloth soaked in spirits, but at other times the strain of it got my blood circulating.
But I’d made a start, Kaata cheered me. As long as my bladder holds out, if I can get myself washed, if I had slightly more comfortable surroundings, perhaps I could still revive. Kaata’s voice sounds like sighing. Yearning all alone makes your mood lighter.
That was when I started asking Tõnu: let’s get things done, let’s wash the floors a bit, take Mother to a sauna somewhere.
Oh no, no, you can’t get to a sauna, the Irlanda sauna is under repair right now, that’s where Mum always used to go, I looks, brings, does, let’s put up with it a bit longer.
What’s this I looks, brings, does – who is this, whose problems are solved in the third person – I couldn’t understand, although evidently Tõnu was talking about himself.
I can’t manage to carry Kaata up the stairs, I explained to Tõnu, I just can’t do it.
But that’s not your business, Tõnu replied sternly. Looks at that business later. Got this far, can go on a bit longer.
You’ll be here tomorrow too, asked Tõnu and his look was stern. Why do you talk in terms of days? And after a pause: of course, it’s not my business, I don’t care, as long as she’s simply with someone. You’ll bring food too, money’s a bit tight for me at the moment.
You know those newspapers in the bed…
Yes, yes, I know. I told you already, my wife and I haven’t been able to get her used to sleeping between sheets.
You’re joking, a shouted indignantly. There’s nobody more particular about cleanliness than Kaata in the whole family.
But look, now it’s like this, said Tõnu, spreading his arms. She wasting, wasting away slowly, I told you that on the telephone when you rang before you came here and you asked how she’s living, how she is. Well, look, that’s how she is.
She’s sick and she needs medicine.
It’s old age, just settle for that, it’s old age. No doctor can make her younger.
She says she’s gone three months without washing. In all that time you haven’t found an opportunity…
No, I haven’t. I go to work. I’m busy. My wife goes to work too and she’s busy too. Mother gets on very well, you see how she washes the knobs, she can scrub herself with damp cloths, she’s mostly in her room, flat on her back sleeping. She sleeps for days. Sometimes she doesn’t even hear when I come home, but she tells the people close to her and the neighbours that she hasn’t seen me for weeks. You should remember from the times you were together what a good imagination she has. In the end she’s starting to believe her own lies, and then others do too. Sometimes I think that she won’t let anyone in here any more, I’ll be taking the key from her friends too, and that’ll be the end of the tale-telling.
Oh, I cry, oh! Don’t to that! I’m starting to beg Tõnu, as he walks restlessly from room to room, not looking Mother or me in the eye, we follow him as he walks, a tall young man in a dark suit, hands in his trouser pockets, his head slightly arched, looking downward, past us, he stops, studies his well scrubbed clean nails, when Mother asks something afterwards it occurs to me that Mother is trying to ask him something in my presence – he replies, in passing mumbles something insincere under his breath, before finally leaving.
Even several years later I’m wondering why I didn’t scream harshly at Sonny or demand that he fulfil those obligations to his old and infirm mother that are to be rightly expected of eldest children. I drew his attention to it, yes, I even begged, but I was short on harsh words.
Translator’s note: Konstantin Päts (1875-1956) was the last president of independent Estonia up to the Soviet invasion of 1940. He was deported to Siberia and died in exile there.