Among the Russians(46)

Meanwhile the Russians themselves, picnicking in their spartan tents, listened to the expatriates’ jubilation with faint distaste or bemusement. This Soviet middle class was repeated through all the campsites where I stayed. They were technicians, engineers, minor civil servants, perhaps earning three hundred roubles (some 380 dollars) a month. They drove their family cars with the cautious pride of new owners. Their pale eyes watched me with reserve: an instinctive defensiveness in public places. They seemed stoically incurious.

As for the Estonians, some were of Scandinavian height, and statuesque. They spoke in a vowel-filled tongue close to Finnish, and the television aerials which covered the city rooftops were not receiving Moscow, but Western-orientated programmes from Helsinki fifty miles over the water. Tallinn’s great semicircular bay, where ships idled on a grey calm, reminded me of their age-old love for the communicating sea.

Tallinn itself is redolent of those centuries of twilit confusion—history spent in the shadow of others—which shuffled the Baltic states between German merchants, Swedish kings and the rising might of Russia. The old town descends from castled heights in jumbled lanes and turrets to the sea. The pastel facades of its houses lean and overlap under pitched roofs and high-pointed gables. Iron gates swing onto courtyards of yawning emptiness. The town seems still to belong to those three centuries before 1561 when it was fat with Hanseatic burghers and dominated by the Teutonic Knights—a city not built for show, but for expedience, trade and creature comforts. A bourgeois modesty pervades it. It is more crowded and intimate than its Russian counterparts, sweeter, more proportional, yet a little sombre. The larger buildings do not spread in the Russian way, but rise suddenly, as if by accident, round the corners of winding streets. Gothic replaces Byzantine. Collegiate churches and guildhalls nudge together under Lutheran steeples and spires, and the skyline blossoms into a sudden delicacy of weather-vanes—iron or copper banners flying in the wind, crowned by mermaids and dragons.

Nothing seems to belong to the native Estonians. The German walls climb in broken ramparts to an ancient Danish citadel. The cathedral aisles drip with the hatchments of Baltic barons long since gone, and the grave-slabs of German guilds—butchers, cobblers, cordwainers—crowd its nave, with the tombs of Swedish marshals and a Russian admiral. Only the limestone hill where all this stands is attributed to the colossal and mythic progenitress of the Estonian people. It is not a hill at all, they say, but the grave-mound of the folk-hero Kalev, piled up by his mother, whose tears formed the lake beyond. A statue of this formidable ancestress, swathed in a decolleté bear’s skin, was unveiled in the years of Estonia’s incompetent but treasured independence between 1919 and 1940, and still presides over a park frequented by lovers and drunks.

I followed alleys filled with idiosyncracy: wrought-iron lamp-brackets, a tremulous seventeenth century clock, lintels sculptured with the crests of Hanseatic cities—Novgorod, Bruges, London. Sometimes the ramparts grew strong with turrets or split into gutted gate-towers splashed by creepers. A few Russian tourists were about, and Estonian sailors walking in pairs. Once, from behind high walls, I heard the Tyrolean lilt of an accordion. Then the battlements became grey and troubled, and shouldered their path through lanes dank and almost unlived-in. Cobbled alleys roughened and swelled underfoot, and once the way darkened to a cul-de-sac where tombstones were clamped to fetid walls, blazoned with extinguished arms. From a Dominican monastery, whose entrance was superscribed ‘Here truly is the house of God and the Gate of Heaven’, the chanting rose reedy and hesitant from an ageing congregation.

I sat down on a bench. An Estonian docker with the bleared eyes of the perpetually drunk sank beside me and asked so candidly for drink money that I gave him twenty kopeks. He kissed my cheeks and marched away. Even in summer a leftover feeling of wartime brooded over the town. The interiors of offices and banks were austere and wan-lit. The restaurant where I lunched was the same. Sad-faced waitresses with plaited Rhine-maiden hair were serving sausages to tourists instead of gold to the Nibelungen, and an elderly violinist was persecuting the Russian holidaymakers with German folk-tunes. I settled to a dish of macaroni and Smetana, and tried to talk to the swarthy Estonian opposite. He grunted that he didn’t speak Russian, and kept his harsh eyes fixed on his meal, as if it might escape.

But the feeling of poverty is half an illusion. Life here is better than almost anywhere else in the Soviet Union. The people are brighter dressed, better paid. They enjoy cultural freedoms unknown to Moscow. Abstract art has made a shy beginning; the bookshops, I noticed, stocked Proust, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Jack Kerouac.

In the old market square I saw a man with To the Lighthouse sticking out of one pocket, and made it an excuse for conversation. Jaan turned out to be a chemist and a Methodist. Behind his thin-rimmed spectacles the eyes shone heavy and slow, and the waxy pallor of his face, swept by black locks, lent him a starved, Bohemian look. He seemed older than his thirty-one years—his gangling body was stooped—but when he spoke about what mattered to him his voice became urgent, even harsh, and its stammer made him angry. He talked to me freely. Either my nationality or my evanescence incurred his trust.

The familiar refrain of Russian immigration came up. The development of Baltic industry—heavy engineering, chemicals, oil shale—had created jobs which the native people were too few to fill, he said. So the Russians came. He spoke of them as an Englishman might speak of the Irish. They lived in great apartment blocks, dirtily, like pigs. They had money enough, but spent it on drink. That was the problem with his own saddened people too, he said. Many Estonians and Russians drank away half their salaries. ‘They drink because they’re bored—they’ve nothing else to think about. They’ve nowhere to go, nothing to do. When they remember the emptiness of their lives, they drink.’