Among the Russians(47)
As we drove to his home, the Russian districts fell behind us in sterile flat-blocks, and we entered a pure Estonian quarter: stucco or wooden houses coddled in their gardens. Jaan lived with his wife and infant son on the upper floor of his parents’ home—a cottage in a garden going to wild under the pines. Gooseberry bushes and tiger lilies grew together in weird propinquity, and a buxom dog lived in an upturned crate among the flowers.
Jaan’s wife was like a Nordic angel: blue eyes, china skin. Their baby son, who was fairer still, took his first step in my honour, before falling in a rubbery heap. She apologised for their three rooms, floored with worn linoleum and set with roughly-carpentered furniture. Jaan and she were waiting for a house of their own, she explained; they were on the lists.
‘And we’ll have to wait a long time,’ he said. ‘That’s what can happen to Methodists here. It’s unspectacular, this persecution, but it’s everywhere. You may wait longer for a house, a car, a new job, anything. Our pastors are the worst hit. They’re less likely to be arrested on some trumped-up charge—they’re too conspicuous—but they may be harassed for years.’ His voice started to stammer. ‘At university I was threatened with expulsion five times because of my faith, but I survived. I had a Christian friend who said he’d keep God in his heart and conform officially to Communist ritual—but he took to drink. The outward signs, you see, are important. I know a girl who was posted to a distant village as schoolmistress. She couldn’t go to church there without being noticed, so she had to choose between her faith and her profession—and she chose her profession.’ Suddenly he looked bitter. ‘That’s how they take our souls.’
He and his wife seemed to live in Calvinist purity. They didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke. They didn’t even do things a little na levo, as the Russians say.
‘Everybody cheats here,’ Jaan said. ‘If you want to sell your car, for instance, you do it automatically on the black market. You take out a receipt at the official rate—three thousand roubles, perhaps—then you sell for eight thousand, cars are so scarce. But how can a Christian do things like that?’ He leant forward and took his wife’s hand in her lap. ‘We can’t. So of course we’re poor.’ But they were both smiling, as if this were an irrelevance. ‘My wedding suit cost me three months’ salary. That was without my tie and shoes.’
We ate a frugal meal together, Jaan saying grace. The walls of the kitchen were hung with posters of cities and landscapes which they would never see: Milan, the Dordogne, Africa. A calendar read: ‘Come to Cornwall for the International Church Youth Conference.’
Methodism, Jaan said, had survived in the Soviet Union only in Estonia. ‘In Leningrad, in Moscow, in Latvia, we were wiped out. Only here we were strong and lasted. In Tallinn we often have a Sunday congregation of seven hundred, so that two hundred have to stand. Sometimes I look round them and marvel how they’re either young or very old. That middle generation—the Stalin generation—isn’t there. But I know many who are secret Christians—professional people, mostly. They take communion in their homes. That happens here….’
Next morning, when I peered into the Methodist headquarters near the market square, I found only a tiny old pastor who lived in the flat upstairs. His splayed feet were clothed in splitting slippers, and a gold watch-chain dribbled from his trouser pocket as if in memory of some happier time. He showed me the meeting-room with its few chairs and piano. So I was from England? He could remember Portsmouth, Hull….
A typical Estonian, I thought, he knows the seaports. He began to reminisce in a mishmash of German and English. But it was hard truly to envisage the past of a man of his age (he was almost ninety) and nationality. When the Latvians and Estonians fought off the Russians in 1918-19 and took their independence, he was already a serving sailor. And by the end of the Second World War—through Stalin’s 1940 deportations and his execution of over sixty thousand Estonians, through the Jewish holocaust of the Nazis’ return and the mass internal exiles of the Russian revenge—he was far into middle age. What had he not seen?
But it was not these things which floated in the old man’s mind. ‘My memory, I’m so old now….’ His eyes puckered with the uncertainty of thinking. He hunted for words. He remembered going to sea at the age of sixteen, when Tsar Nicholas II was still young on his throne. He had worked on a clipper carrying timber from Riga to Yarmouth. ‘And from Yarmouth I walked to Hull. I had no money, you see. But what’s that to a young man?’ He massaged his head as if to warm up memories, pictures. A glaze of white hair trickled in his fingers. ‘From Hull I worked on steamers as a deck-hand or stoker. In the winter I found jobs in the boiler-room away from the cold. In the summer I got posts on deck away from the heat.’ He twinkled fitfully with the memory of his cleverness. Then, five days out from Oslo, his ship had caught fire. A burnt finger of his right hand was amputated in an Oslo hospital. He held up the stub where it should have been; the skin, after seventy years, was discoloured, almost translucent.
‘But that was my way to God,’ he said. ‘My nurse in the hospital was a girl of eighteen, a Methodist, and she converted me.’ He laughed again—at himself, I think. He was remembering. ‘For two years I studied in the Frankfurt seminary, then returned to Estonia as pastor of a flock of fifty in Tapa. That was my first congregation….’