Chapter 13 from the novel "The Sleep of Ahasvuerus" (Ahasveeruse uni, Tuum 2001)
Translated by Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov
What does she remember? On the wall of the largest room in the dwelling house of her home place there were five or six photos in heavy frames. The frames were wide and embossed. All of them had important strict faces. One woman in a large hat had got lost in among the men, but her gaze and expression were proud and serious.
The room was dark all the time on account of the curtains being drawn as if for ever, but for some reason the framed faces loomed up precisely because of the weak light. Perhaps the reason for that was that the room drew her to itself because of those very pictures.
She put her hands behind her back and walked past the photos several times. Slowly at first, staring into each face, then more quickly, she would like to have chatted with them, played with them. It seemed to her that their expressions changed when she spoke to them. One old man twitched his moustache, another raised his eyebrows, a third kept an eye on her every move, wherever she went in the room.
Once her mother secretly watched her from the door. What are you looking at them for? Her mother's voice had been puzzled and dismayed. At the time it was simply a difference in her mother's voice and a hint of unease that she detected. She had the distinct impression that her mother wanted to forbid her, and yet did not want to, and her mother's hesitation made her even bolder than she really was.
Who's that man?
Antonius, snorted her mother from the door. Well, they say Antonius, so Tõnis really. And this one? Anna. And this one? I don't know. Why are you looking at those pictures in the dark.
I'd like a picture like this of me too.
Would you like to be that old?
Yes.
Live a bit first. Then see. They'll hardly take pictures like that of you.
Why?
Times are different now. And now you have me. You haven't drunk your bedtime milk yet. Come on out now!
It's strange, the effect of the sentence: you haven't drunk your bedtime milk! Leave your ancestors' photos alone, forget your bedtime prayers even, but drink up your milk. And if there is no more milk – then forget that too, I interjected – you don't know how a beating affects people, she said suddenly. It affects children in one way, adults probably in another. I got with fewer beatings, but I was thrashed all the more mercilessly because I never begged. They so badly wanted me to beg, to bow, but my knees didn't bend.
Really!
Slave beats slave most cruelly, most cunningly. He beats all his own misery into the other body, and he thinks that he's stronger. Be the thought only for a moment.
My first four years were a golden age, blissful even. I was a very important personage – she was fiddling with the photo of the child – to refer to yourself as a person seems somehow bland. My mother did have a go at me from time to time just to let the Reiters see: you don't go hungry and we know how to dress our children too. – We've served masters as well, I interrupted again, though I didn't know then, or now, why exactly, or why I persisted with this kind of sentence. – But all the chastising was just for show, we'll see what comes of the story. I'll show you all with this child.
But she didn't, I said, raising my voice slightly, in a regretful and matter-of-fact tone. Nobody will prove anything to anybody, she placed her right hand flat on top of the left, rested her upper body on the writing desk, leaned over the desk and looked at the wall opposite.
She has three tables in the country house. Four rooms, three writing desks. Only in the kitchen there isn't one. Nor in the guest room.
Why have you got so many writing desks in the country?
It just happened that way. At one time there were three people working in the house at the same time and each one needed a table. Now I'm the only one who sits at all the tables.
All at once? At the same time?
Tables were cheaper then, if that's what you mean. Estonians often think about how much these tables cost. And which one is fancier. They think about that too.
So do you, just like everybody else.
I don't know. At times I don't know what I think, what I'm thinking, I mean, or whether I think at all. My head is never completely empty exactly. Something's there. And then it isn't again. I've never actually read from anywhere else but books that Estonians did this and Estonians did that, the Estonian cause, the Estonian language and homeland. I shouldn't really say that, because freedom is something I have thought about.
Soviet time was actually a repeat of several periods that were familiar from previous times.
?
When I think about how much the Germans have been bad-mouthed, the night of slavery talked about, then it starts to feel sort of strange. With all that bad-mouthing – hate sessions in fact, accompanied by an almighty drum roll – the feeling of resistance deepened even more. But actually resistance was more of a personal thing.
In fact, the point of talking about the night of slavery was this: to talk away the centuries-long differences of rank by inciting hatred. It's as if our foreign-language upper class was created for the slogan equality for all. Although we had learnt something from serving masters and just by copying their customs, we longed for greener pastures by seeking education, ignorance stemming from an inferiority complex continued to blossom in other forms.
Why have you got such a puzzled look on your face all the time, as if I was speaking Chinese. It's you own fault if you haven't learnt languages!
As a child I was always looking at manors, parks actually. I've already talked about that before too. Villu in Juhan Liiv's Shadow made me laugh. Yes, he did. It's just not so simple, that the master is an animal and the quick-witted peasant is beaten soft and stupid. If only that forest weren't in the way, sighs Villu – or whoever? – and he looks in the direction of Lake Peipsi. But he doesn't really look. I look into the water. – You see your own face there! – Yes, I look at the water and the horizon, the forest must just be in between them somewhere.
The childish description of the masters' life made you laugh, I interrupted with a shout, but she paid no attention.
The first time that something clicked for me was when I read Villu's Fights. There's a scene there where another Villu surveys the fallen and in the moonlight he sees the face of his Estonian friend, the face of the knight Goswin Herice. The Germans fought on one side, the Estonians on the other, but on occasions it was a brother-kills-brother war too. This sentence latched onto my eye, and in my heart I felt only pain. We've been forest dwellers for a long time, but even on the edge of Europe and further east you can't stay in the forest for ever. When I was looking around manor buildings and parks, I was as much here as there. I didn't even dare speak of how very much there I sometimes felt. So when reading about the Estonian fight for freedom, I was fighting on my own side against myself. Now she started to laugh, as if this train of thought seemed silly to her too.
How must that Priidu with his tongue cut out have felt as the son of a knight and commoner mother. He lived as a free farmer, but he had to think as a serf. At least that was the way Bornhöhe had visualised Priidu, and Villu as well, dying for freedom. Of course, now it's easy to make yourself belong as a German or whatever nationality, if you could just get the corporal punishment out of your memory.
Do you admit that at least?
Of course. When I went to the History Archives, I saw those whipping sentences with my own eyes. But yes, the parish court churchwarden, and later chief judge, was my grandmother Anna's maternal grandfather. And my grandmother's grandfather's line changed their name to Reiter at some point.
The parish court churchwarden was the manor and peasant go-between, who checked to see that people who were completely unprovided for didn't starve, that widows and widowers left inheritances to the children of their previous marriage – a letter of permission was necessary in order to remarry – and he performed other court duties too.
Coachman Juhan wishes to get married, but he has nothing to give to his own children.
So what became of Juhan and his children?
I don't know. Anna's grandfather knew, but he died half a century ago. Generally, whatever was to be left to some child or another was listed: a horse, a cow, sheep, wool, clothes, a dowry – everything is recorded precisely.
And informing on one another was fashionable. A prank was played and then someone let the cat out of the bag and a third person made a complaint and witnesses were called in and the offenders called witnesses and it all ended when the parish clerk drew up a protocol in nice handwriting: It has been decided to give Mart of Mäe fifteen lashes of the rod. As if to a child, although it was a grown man. That is the way justice was carried out then, now it is different. For fifty years people didn't try any cases. People's understanding of themselves is changing. What is cruel for one, is just a hiccup for another. One sees theft as no big deal – for the rich have and I don't, so you have to take it away, even if on the sly! –, another dies of shame at the very thought of theft. – She doesn't die! – Anyway, the thought itself makes her ashamed, even if it just crosses her mind.
Later, when I lived with my mother's sister Agatha – actually, Agatha lived with me, but that's neither here nor there right now – yes, when Agatha and I lived together, somebody told a tale on me, that in my aunt's absence I had broken something, sprayed someone with water, and I don't know what else, and so after Agatha had let the grown-ups have their say, she asked me: is that what happened? No, it isn't, I replied. – Then it truly isn't. – And placing her hand on my shoulder Agatha said: She doesn't lie. She was made like that, she doesn't lie. Aren't you ashamed of yourselves for slandering the girl like that. – And is that how it was left? Yes, it is, but later I wondered how Agatha actually knew that those people I'd spent the weekend with when she was away had agreed, even in my hearing, to cut the little brat down to size.
In the manor would you have been beaten without another word?
I don't know. In the end all discussions are simplifications and coloured by the present day, so history is made from this present that you look back from. There are as many presents as there are people in the world, so that I can't even say anything about history or human freedom.
Was that what you were thinking in this picture?
There I wasn't thinking about anything. There I felt that I was important. That I am actually important to my chastising mother. Why else would she she grumble: look, what are they – the Reiters? – talking about, when we know perfectly well how to take care of our child.
You mentioned freedom. You brought up the Estonian cause.
But perhaps there's no such thing. Or there is, when people want to talk about a cause but there isn't even a hint of freedom yet. I don't know if Tõnis took part in the War of Independence at all or not. He was already fifty-four years old at that time. This feeling must have come from somewhere, that we live in our own land and everything that happens is up to us. As a child I wanted to be an explorer. Later, when I'd already left home, I was frightened even of the forest. When I travelled outside Estonia for the first time, I was afraid that I would be stolen. I was already a grown-up, but somewhere inside was this feeling that they would steal me, lose me, and that no one would find out where I was left.
That feeling hasn't completely disappeared even now.
The Estonian cause is a mixed-cause. I only understand that now. Many nations have passed through here and many have stayed. Country and language make Estonians, not blood, not a cause, not property, not honour. Estonians still don't really have honour. Honour doesn't follow nations. Neither Estonians nor any other nation can have some kind of special or different honour. Everything begins with a person and ends with a person.
Near Küti there was a small manor.
And a park?
A park too. The manor belonged to Estonians and I often saw the manor owner's daughter going to the library. In Küti they would even say: Wilhelmiine is the manor owner's daughter, but she married a common boy. The father had left his daughter without an inheritance and after the war this worked in favour of the daughter's family. The daughter's son was ill all the time. Actually he wasn't, but his mother made out that she took better care of her child than those who weren't in fact of breeding.
Listen, I'll tell you the story of the Kütts now. I myself don't know what to make of it. But of later times I do, because that boy became a young man and there was no one to set him an example any more. No experience. The former times had passed too. The manor itself means nothing if there's no manor owner there. If the manor is only property, then there's no manor either. Wilhelmiine's son became a drunk. Then there was no talk of Wilhelmiine's family at Küti, but she had asked every summer how Alo was and what he had learnt. As for Alo himself, I only remember the time when he was still a child.
It's really too bad if a childhood lasts for centuries. Who said that, I don't know. I only repeated somebody else's words.
I was certainly a bit surprised that both my mother's and my father's ancestors – Reiters and Saars – are all connected in one way or another with the manor, she continued. Grandmother Maali Saar's father was the manor oxherd, for the oxherd's father left his son without an inheritance because he married a poor girl, Maali's father-in-law was the steward of another manor. The Reiter's origins are so confused that I'm doubtful of some things, so it's better that I don't talk about it. At thirty-one Anna married a thirty-nine-year-old man who was born at Muuga manor, and who at twenty left the country to go to town. When I researched the history of Muuga manor a bit, I discovered that the ten years that Eduard Vilde lived at Muuga manor as the son of the storekeeper, my grandfather and Vilde had a childhood in common, at least in terms of place and people. I had even studied Vilde's story My First Stripes at school – if we believe Karl Mihkla, Vilde was beaten for getting baron Grünewald's illegitimate son's clean clothes muddy! – but that my grandfather, three years younger than Vilde, might have overheard the hue and cry of that punishment was a surprise.
What's funny is that the consequences of this childish fight of the son of the storekeeper, forest-ranger according to his papers, in hindsight turned into a symbol of social inequality in Vilde's writing. So it is that our childhoods will later be described in relation to the time that our retrospective view departs from. In actual fact, in both town and countryside at that time, there was movement of free people, officials and craftsmen, and intellectuals with parents of different ranks and nationalities, but in the zeal of national awakening we needed oppositions that would help unite the self-consciousness of the masses into the Estonian nation. The peasants awoke, the country folk got a name. Those who had inherited freedom or who were educated from generation to generation faced their first serious choice, where to belong in the changing sense of history. Their home language was mostly German, Estonian was only needed in certain jobs.
At that time, Muuga manor already belonged to Carl Timoleon von Neff – the son of a Baltic baron of dubious credentials and a French governess, therefore an illegitimate child himself – who turned the manor into a museum almost. Once when ten-year-old Vilde was walking around the manor halls, he was so staggered that later he evolved into Estonia's first professional writer. So, to broaden your horizons, your imagination must get food. Your imaginative horizons aren't determined by rank, but by level of education.
Now she examined her thumbs and didn't look at me at all. Blood pressure wasn't affecting her head. Doctors weren't nagging her. Rats had nothing to tell.
Estonia is a small country. Manors are many and few. Every time I ask someone about their birthplace, I immediately wonder which manor the place once belonged to. I would think as if through a network of layers placed regularly on top of each other, the nodes intertwined. This intertwining is in the landscape, the manors, the farms. All around you can feel the breath of the who-have-been-before-us. The dreams of one appear to another in order that our ancestors' ideas are not lost from the sky and the air, from within (and from behind) the ground that is called the real state of affairs.
Yeah, yeah, I interrupted with a smirk, Vana-Põltsamaa manor belonged to the Gagarins for nearly the whole of the nineteenth century, and in that old prince's family you can find high government officials, artists, freemasons, Jews and a mix of other nationalities, so just let your imagination fly, if you really can't help it. But how does this concern you and Estonia, but she wasn't even listening to me.
If only I knew what made my grandmother Anna angry with my mother so that there was such a fuss before the picture was taken. Memory is strange. I would never have guessed that I would remember so much about taking that photo. Dreams also reveal long-forgotten events over again, that's why we remember them. Afterwards it's good to study the probable basis for recollection.
Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm wandering from place to place and time really doesn't matter. And from all sides, from all sides my grandmother Anna's pure-bred, proud face is looking at me. Before – as a child – I wasn't afraid of that face. When I was in my father's house – my home! – then I STILL wasn't afraid of that face. But now I am, I don't even know why.
There's a picture of me at a young age, where I very much resemble Anna. ONLY ONE PICTURE, where I'm just like grandmother! Really odd, how attitude shapes facial features. In later photos you can see this and that, the self taking shape over a lifetime, but in that one photo ...
Then I wanted to be an explorer too. An actress or an artist. I enjoyed drawing. I caught and preserved butterflies. I collected stamps. I played chess. I wrote songs too, though I couldn't sing myself anymore.
Maybe I was a talented child, but life didn't work out for me. Only trying things out and art. I myself an artwork of art, if our life that was called shared was the stage production of a theology seminarian. Local devils did the rest of their own free will and on their own.
Certainly THE WORLD WAS WIDE OPEN, my goodness, how wide open the world was – she continued in a moment of delirium – my parents were in the forest, all right, but the world was still full of sun and light. Now I fall into the cellar with my writing desk and that's it.
Moods kept changing, as if not even the weather knew where to turn, and in the same way her state of mind was unsettled too.
In 1959 Agatha went to her husband again and announced that she wasn't going to educate other people's children. The last Christmas we spent together at the manor – so at school, in fact – the school director organised a party for the staff. Aunt Agatha took me with her that time. I was the only child that Christmas. – Strange, she said, that really was Christmas, and the director of that little school in December 1952 was a real suicide case. How did I not think of that before. I recited a poem by the fir tree, but that didn't even come to mind, for Christmas is forbidden. – I already knew then that I was going to a different school and that I'd be a boarder. I still got home at weekends – there was a place to go to – but when secondary school was over, I started to earn my own living. Summers at Küti, winters at school, up to university.
We celebrated Christmas in the country now and not exactly in secret. We just took the New Year tree into the house earlier. Of those Christmasses I only remember blood sausage, sauerkraut and meat with cowberry preserve. There really never were any worries about food at Küti.
Thanks be to our Heavenly Father, my stomach is full again, said Maali and put her hands together. What do people need besides clothes and food. Nothing at all.
Translated by Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov
What does she remember? On the wall of the largest room in the dwelling house of her home place there were five or six photos in heavy frames. The frames were wide and embossed. All of them had important strict faces. One woman in a large hat had got lost in among the men, but her gaze and expression were proud and serious.
The room was dark all the time on account of the curtains being drawn as if for ever, but for some reason the framed faces loomed up precisely because of the weak light. Perhaps the reason for that was that the room drew her to itself because of those very pictures.
She put her hands behind her back and walked past the photos several times. Slowly at first, staring into each face, then more quickly, she would like to have chatted with them, played with them. It seemed to her that their expressions changed when she spoke to them. One old man twitched his moustache, another raised his eyebrows, a third kept an eye on her every move, wherever she went in the room.
Once her mother secretly watched her from the door. What are you looking at them for? Her mother's voice had been puzzled and dismayed. At the time it was simply a difference in her mother's voice and a hint of unease that she detected. She had the distinct impression that her mother wanted to forbid her, and yet did not want to, and her mother's hesitation made her even bolder than she really was.
Who's that man?
Antonius, snorted her mother from the door. Well, they say Antonius, so Tõnis really. And this one? Anna. And this one? I don't know. Why are you looking at those pictures in the dark.
I'd like a picture like this of me too.
Would you like to be that old?
Yes.
Live a bit first. Then see. They'll hardly take pictures like that of you.
Why?
Times are different now. And now you have me. You haven't drunk your bedtime milk yet. Come on out now!
It's strange, the effect of the sentence: you haven't drunk your bedtime milk! Leave your ancestors' photos alone, forget your bedtime prayers even, but drink up your milk. And if there is no more milk – then forget that too, I interjected – you don't know how a beating affects people, she said suddenly. It affects children in one way, adults probably in another. I got with fewer beatings, but I was thrashed all the more mercilessly because I never begged. They so badly wanted me to beg, to bow, but my knees didn't bend.
Really!
Slave beats slave most cruelly, most cunningly. He beats all his own misery into the other body, and he thinks that he's stronger. Be the thought only for a moment.
My first four years were a golden age, blissful even. I was a very important personage – she was fiddling with the photo of the child – to refer to yourself as a person seems somehow bland. My mother did have a go at me from time to time just to let the Reiters see: you don't go hungry and we know how to dress our children too. – We've served masters as well, I interrupted again, though I didn't know then, or now, why exactly, or why I persisted with this kind of sentence. – But all the chastising was just for show, we'll see what comes of the story. I'll show you all with this child.
But she didn't, I said, raising my voice slightly, in a regretful and matter-of-fact tone. Nobody will prove anything to anybody, she placed her right hand flat on top of the left, rested her upper body on the writing desk, leaned over the desk and looked at the wall opposite.
She has three tables in the country house. Four rooms, three writing desks. Only in the kitchen there isn't one. Nor in the guest room.
Why have you got so many writing desks in the country?
It just happened that way. At one time there were three people working in the house at the same time and each one needed a table. Now I'm the only one who sits at all the tables.
All at once? At the same time?
Tables were cheaper then, if that's what you mean. Estonians often think about how much these tables cost. And which one is fancier. They think about that too.
So do you, just like everybody else.
I don't know. At times I don't know what I think, what I'm thinking, I mean, or whether I think at all. My head is never completely empty exactly. Something's there. And then it isn't again. I've never actually read from anywhere else but books that Estonians did this and Estonians did that, the Estonian cause, the Estonian language and homeland. I shouldn't really say that, because freedom is something I have thought about.
Soviet time was actually a repeat of several periods that were familiar from previous times.
?
When I think about how much the Germans have been bad-mouthed, the night of slavery talked about, then it starts to feel sort of strange. With all that bad-mouthing – hate sessions in fact, accompanied by an almighty drum roll – the feeling of resistance deepened even more. But actually resistance was more of a personal thing.
In fact, the point of talking about the night of slavery was this: to talk away the centuries-long differences of rank by inciting hatred. It's as if our foreign-language upper class was created for the slogan equality for all. Although we had learnt something from serving masters and just by copying their customs, we longed for greener pastures by seeking education, ignorance stemming from an inferiority complex continued to blossom in other forms.
Why have you got such a puzzled look on your face all the time, as if I was speaking Chinese. It's you own fault if you haven't learnt languages!
As a child I was always looking at manors, parks actually. I've already talked about that before too. Villu in Juhan Liiv's Shadow made me laugh. Yes, he did. It's just not so simple, that the master is an animal and the quick-witted peasant is beaten soft and stupid. If only that forest weren't in the way, sighs Villu – or whoever? – and he looks in the direction of Lake Peipsi. But he doesn't really look. I look into the water. – You see your own face there! – Yes, I look at the water and the horizon, the forest must just be in between them somewhere.
The childish description of the masters' life made you laugh, I interrupted with a shout, but she paid no attention.
The first time that something clicked for me was when I read Villu's Fights. There's a scene there where another Villu surveys the fallen and in the moonlight he sees the face of his Estonian friend, the face of the knight Goswin Herice. The Germans fought on one side, the Estonians on the other, but on occasions it was a brother-kills-brother war too. This sentence latched onto my eye, and in my heart I felt only pain. We've been forest dwellers for a long time, but even on the edge of Europe and further east you can't stay in the forest for ever. When I was looking around manor buildings and parks, I was as much here as there. I didn't even dare speak of how very much there I sometimes felt. So when reading about the Estonian fight for freedom, I was fighting on my own side against myself. Now she started to laugh, as if this train of thought seemed silly to her too.
How must that Priidu with his tongue cut out have felt as the son of a knight and commoner mother. He lived as a free farmer, but he had to think as a serf. At least that was the way Bornhöhe had visualised Priidu, and Villu as well, dying for freedom. Of course, now it's easy to make yourself belong as a German or whatever nationality, if you could just get the corporal punishment out of your memory.
Do you admit that at least?
Of course. When I went to the History Archives, I saw those whipping sentences with my own eyes. But yes, the parish court churchwarden, and later chief judge, was my grandmother Anna's maternal grandfather. And my grandmother's grandfather's line changed their name to Reiter at some point.
The parish court churchwarden was the manor and peasant go-between, who checked to see that people who were completely unprovided for didn't starve, that widows and widowers left inheritances to the children of their previous marriage – a letter of permission was necessary in order to remarry – and he performed other court duties too.
Coachman Juhan wishes to get married, but he has nothing to give to his own children.
So what became of Juhan and his children?
I don't know. Anna's grandfather knew, but he died half a century ago. Generally, whatever was to be left to some child or another was listed: a horse, a cow, sheep, wool, clothes, a dowry – everything is recorded precisely.
And informing on one another was fashionable. A prank was played and then someone let the cat out of the bag and a third person made a complaint and witnesses were called in and the offenders called witnesses and it all ended when the parish clerk drew up a protocol in nice handwriting: It has been decided to give Mart of Mäe fifteen lashes of the rod. As if to a child, although it was a grown man. That is the way justice was carried out then, now it is different. For fifty years people didn't try any cases. People's understanding of themselves is changing. What is cruel for one, is just a hiccup for another. One sees theft as no big deal – for the rich have and I don't, so you have to take it away, even if on the sly! –, another dies of shame at the very thought of theft. – She doesn't die! – Anyway, the thought itself makes her ashamed, even if it just crosses her mind.
Later, when I lived with my mother's sister Agatha – actually, Agatha lived with me, but that's neither here nor there right now – yes, when Agatha and I lived together, somebody told a tale on me, that in my aunt's absence I had broken something, sprayed someone with water, and I don't know what else, and so after Agatha had let the grown-ups have their say, she asked me: is that what happened? No, it isn't, I replied. – Then it truly isn't. – And placing her hand on my shoulder Agatha said: She doesn't lie. She was made like that, she doesn't lie. Aren't you ashamed of yourselves for slandering the girl like that. – And is that how it was left? Yes, it is, but later I wondered how Agatha actually knew that those people I'd spent the weekend with when she was away had agreed, even in my hearing, to cut the little brat down to size.
In the manor would you have been beaten without another word?
I don't know. In the end all discussions are simplifications and coloured by the present day, so history is made from this present that you look back from. There are as many presents as there are people in the world, so that I can't even say anything about history or human freedom.
Was that what you were thinking in this picture?
There I wasn't thinking about anything. There I felt that I was important. That I am actually important to my chastising mother. Why else would she she grumble: look, what are they – the Reiters? – talking about, when we know perfectly well how to take care of our child.
You mentioned freedom. You brought up the Estonian cause.
But perhaps there's no such thing. Or there is, when people want to talk about a cause but there isn't even a hint of freedom yet. I don't know if Tõnis took part in the War of Independence at all or not. He was already fifty-four years old at that time. This feeling must have come from somewhere, that we live in our own land and everything that happens is up to us. As a child I wanted to be an explorer. Later, when I'd already left home, I was frightened even of the forest. When I travelled outside Estonia for the first time, I was afraid that I would be stolen. I was already a grown-up, but somewhere inside was this feeling that they would steal me, lose me, and that no one would find out where I was left.
That feeling hasn't completely disappeared even now.
The Estonian cause is a mixed-cause. I only understand that now. Many nations have passed through here and many have stayed. Country and language make Estonians, not blood, not a cause, not property, not honour. Estonians still don't really have honour. Honour doesn't follow nations. Neither Estonians nor any other nation can have some kind of special or different honour. Everything begins with a person and ends with a person.
Near Küti there was a small manor.
And a park?
A park too. The manor belonged to Estonians and I often saw the manor owner's daughter going to the library. In Küti they would even say: Wilhelmiine is the manor owner's daughter, but she married a common boy. The father had left his daughter without an inheritance and after the war this worked in favour of the daughter's family. The daughter's son was ill all the time. Actually he wasn't, but his mother made out that she took better care of her child than those who weren't in fact of breeding.
Listen, I'll tell you the story of the Kütts now. I myself don't know what to make of it. But of later times I do, because that boy became a young man and there was no one to set him an example any more. No experience. The former times had passed too. The manor itself means nothing if there's no manor owner there. If the manor is only property, then there's no manor either. Wilhelmiine's son became a drunk. Then there was no talk of Wilhelmiine's family at Küti, but she had asked every summer how Alo was and what he had learnt. As for Alo himself, I only remember the time when he was still a child.
It's really too bad if a childhood lasts for centuries. Who said that, I don't know. I only repeated somebody else's words.
I was certainly a bit surprised that both my mother's and my father's ancestors – Reiters and Saars – are all connected in one way or another with the manor, she continued. Grandmother Maali Saar's father was the manor oxherd, for the oxherd's father left his son without an inheritance because he married a poor girl, Maali's father-in-law was the steward of another manor. The Reiter's origins are so confused that I'm doubtful of some things, so it's better that I don't talk about it. At thirty-one Anna married a thirty-nine-year-old man who was born at Muuga manor, and who at twenty left the country to go to town. When I researched the history of Muuga manor a bit, I discovered that the ten years that Eduard Vilde lived at Muuga manor as the son of the storekeeper, my grandfather and Vilde had a childhood in common, at least in terms of place and people. I had even studied Vilde's story My First Stripes at school – if we believe Karl Mihkla, Vilde was beaten for getting baron Grünewald's illegitimate son's clean clothes muddy! – but that my grandfather, three years younger than Vilde, might have overheard the hue and cry of that punishment was a surprise.
What's funny is that the consequences of this childish fight of the son of the storekeeper, forest-ranger according to his papers, in hindsight turned into a symbol of social inequality in Vilde's writing. So it is that our childhoods will later be described in relation to the time that our retrospective view departs from. In actual fact, in both town and countryside at that time, there was movement of free people, officials and craftsmen, and intellectuals with parents of different ranks and nationalities, but in the zeal of national awakening we needed oppositions that would help unite the self-consciousness of the masses into the Estonian nation. The peasants awoke, the country folk got a name. Those who had inherited freedom or who were educated from generation to generation faced their first serious choice, where to belong in the changing sense of history. Their home language was mostly German, Estonian was only needed in certain jobs.
At that time, Muuga manor already belonged to Carl Timoleon von Neff – the son of a Baltic baron of dubious credentials and a French governess, therefore an illegitimate child himself – who turned the manor into a museum almost. Once when ten-year-old Vilde was walking around the manor halls, he was so staggered that later he evolved into Estonia's first professional writer. So, to broaden your horizons, your imagination must get food. Your imaginative horizons aren't determined by rank, but by level of education.
Now she examined her thumbs and didn't look at me at all. Blood pressure wasn't affecting her head. Doctors weren't nagging her. Rats had nothing to tell.
Estonia is a small country. Manors are many and few. Every time I ask someone about their birthplace, I immediately wonder which manor the place once belonged to. I would think as if through a network of layers placed regularly on top of each other, the nodes intertwined. This intertwining is in the landscape, the manors, the farms. All around you can feel the breath of the who-have-been-before-us. The dreams of one appear to another in order that our ancestors' ideas are not lost from the sky and the air, from within (and from behind) the ground that is called the real state of affairs.
Yeah, yeah, I interrupted with a smirk, Vana-Põltsamaa manor belonged to the Gagarins for nearly the whole of the nineteenth century, and in that old prince's family you can find high government officials, artists, freemasons, Jews and a mix of other nationalities, so just let your imagination fly, if you really can't help it. But how does this concern you and Estonia, but she wasn't even listening to me.
If only I knew what made my grandmother Anna angry with my mother so that there was such a fuss before the picture was taken. Memory is strange. I would never have guessed that I would remember so much about taking that photo. Dreams also reveal long-forgotten events over again, that's why we remember them. Afterwards it's good to study the probable basis for recollection.
Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm wandering from place to place and time really doesn't matter. And from all sides, from all sides my grandmother Anna's pure-bred, proud face is looking at me. Before – as a child – I wasn't afraid of that face. When I was in my father's house – my home! – then I STILL wasn't afraid of that face. But now I am, I don't even know why.
There's a picture of me at a young age, where I very much resemble Anna. ONLY ONE PICTURE, where I'm just like grandmother! Really odd, how attitude shapes facial features. In later photos you can see this and that, the self taking shape over a lifetime, but in that one photo ...
Then I wanted to be an explorer too. An actress or an artist. I enjoyed drawing. I caught and preserved butterflies. I collected stamps. I played chess. I wrote songs too, though I couldn't sing myself anymore.
Maybe I was a talented child, but life didn't work out for me. Only trying things out and art. I myself an artwork of art, if our life that was called shared was the stage production of a theology seminarian. Local devils did the rest of their own free will and on their own.
Certainly THE WORLD WAS WIDE OPEN, my goodness, how wide open the world was – she continued in a moment of delirium – my parents were in the forest, all right, but the world was still full of sun and light. Now I fall into the cellar with my writing desk and that's it.
Moods kept changing, as if not even the weather knew where to turn, and in the same way her state of mind was unsettled too.
In 1959 Agatha went to her husband again and announced that she wasn't going to educate other people's children. The last Christmas we spent together at the manor – so at school, in fact – the school director organised a party for the staff. Aunt Agatha took me with her that time. I was the only child that Christmas. – Strange, she said, that really was Christmas, and the director of that little school in December 1952 was a real suicide case. How did I not think of that before. I recited a poem by the fir tree, but that didn't even come to mind, for Christmas is forbidden. – I already knew then that I was going to a different school and that I'd be a boarder. I still got home at weekends – there was a place to go to – but when secondary school was over, I started to earn my own living. Summers at Küti, winters at school, up to university.
We celebrated Christmas in the country now and not exactly in secret. We just took the New Year tree into the house earlier. Of those Christmasses I only remember blood sausage, sauerkraut and meat with cowberry preserve. There really never were any worries about food at Küti.
Thanks be to our Heavenly Father, my stomach is full again, said Maali and put her hands together. What do people need besides clothes and food. Nothing at all.