Standing Trams

Time for some fiction. The following is an extract I've translated from a novel by a contemporary Estonian writer, with the author's permission - in my opinion, the novel, while sensitively written, is more interesting for the view it gives of life in 1970s Estonia, then still under rigid Soviet military occupation, than for its characterization and plot. The most vivid scenes are those in which the characters are seen enmeshed and struggling with the crushing social reality that surrounds them in Tallinn, Estonia's capital city. Russia is the colonizing power, Estonia the colony. The human beings in the narrative are fighting for air to breathe, one feels, and the conflict between the desire to live and the forces of death that are omnipresent gives this book a strange, macabre intensity that is unusual. I've called the extract


STANDING TRAMS


Year after year their New Year's tree had a gold hammer and sickle on it. It carried no conviction. They hung it on the tree automatically, without thinking about its shape or meaning. The hammer and sickle had been bought in the 1950s when there was probably nothing much to choose from, and now brought up from the cellar each year and hung on the tree. At midnight, on the eve of the New Year, they all watched the brilliantly lit Kremlin and clinked champagne glasses during the Soviet anthem:

'The great Russian nation, creating the
unbreakable union of free countries...'

Everyone quietly spat at that phrase: to hell with it! And if they were drunk enough by that time, they started mocking those sentences: ''Unbreakable union, my foot! Bloody union! Who wanted them anyway!'
After the New Year’s party, the golden sickle and hammer were gently wrapped into several old newspapers, placed in a cardboard box and taken back to cellar - carefully avoiding the puddles of urine - to wait for next year. They lived in a new, sloppily built four-storey apartment house where the area in front of the cellar door stank of the urine of cats and humans. They had to pass this place every time Guido came to see her. The fact that she lived in a house where people used the front of the cellar door as a toilet was nothing unusual. Others lived in wooden workers' barracks in Kopli dating back to Tsarist times (they still live there, some in partially burnt down houses - nobody knows how they got burnt down - with the wind whistling in through the remnants of the walls, white snow covering the floor of the communal toilet in winter). Brown two-storey wooden houses, with long dark corridors and doors along both sides. One-room flats with tiny kitchen corners to the right and left of the corridor, the gloomy cupboards and a shared toilet. These houses were just as dismal as hers, but they still had a few advantages. Their front doors were usually locked at 10 in the evening, and no one thought of using the front of their cellar door as a urinal. In fact they did not have a cellar door, indeed they had no cellar. Thus the only smell upon entering was that of an old wooden house. Nothing out of the ordinary about that.
The out of the ordinary thing was that Guido lived in a house that was completely different, had a different background.
The front of the cellar door was one of Helen's numerous childhood fears and humiliations. Coming home from school, she always tried to reach her door upstairs, very quickly, not looking left or right. It seemed like a race where life and death were at stake - would she reach her door, unlock it and get in, before a drunk or a flasher (these turned up too, from time to time) or a drunk having a smoke could catch up with her. No one ever chased her. It was fear that conjured up such an image and turned it so real. She was later tormented by revolting images of a dirty man standing in a pool of urine and asking her to come closer so that he could show her how the real thing was done. And she agreeing, because she wanted to know.
It was not the kind of toilet where men (or women whom she had seen crouching there) came from their own homes to urinate. It was a place located between home and tram stop, home and bus stop, or home and shop. Emerging from the tram, they could not hold on any longer, popped into the house, unbuttoned their flies (only a few had zipped trousers - these were a step towards a more liberal way of thinking, to be admired or despised; buttons were the usual thing: sew buttons to my trousers; did you get buttons for my trousers; I lost a trouser button), took out their prick and splashed their urine against the cellar door or grey wall. Bladder empty, the man resumed his way down to the coast, home. To the wooden barracks near the sea, or cheap hostels or Stalinist brick houses. When the Saturday night dance at the sailors' house finished - one tram stop away - people walked in couples along the street and entered their building, together. Sometimes there were more, two or three couples waiting outside for their turn. They laughed and joked and went into the house to urinate. They tried to pick a fight with anyone who happened to be passing at this late hour. Helen often heard cries for help under her window. Her mother had rung the militia several times. They never came. Helen herself had once had reason to scream in terror when she and Guido came back from a party at the Art Institute. She heard somebody say: 'Estonians are coming. Don't let them pass', and two couples placed themselves firmly in front of them. Helen screamed and her mother ran downstairs in her underwear and a thin blouse on her back. Panties had no lace nor any beauty to them - made of cotton, stretched out of their original shape, a faded pink colour. And Helen caught herself thinking that she felt ashamed of her Mum's underpants. Not of her running down in underwear but of the way they looked. They were pulled up right under her bra ,baggy ,flopping around her thighs. That was what burned her with shame. That Guido saw it, saw those ugly, revolting panties her mother wore. Why couldn't they have been black, with plenty of lace, and decent? And did Guido's Mum possess a nice pair, or was she wearing the same as her mother? One of the Russian sailors shouted at her: 'Go to hell, Estonian bitch!' Russians hated Estonians, and Estonians hated Russians. The conquerors and the oppressed. The Russians had an advantage, though. When their hatred threatened to become overpowering, making life intolerable, they had always the chance to go back to Russia, to their own people. Estonians had no such opportunity.
In her childhood, when she was visiting Leningrad with her parents, she had asked her father in the middle of Nevsky Prospect: Daddy, who was this Nevsky? An aggressor, who else, replied the father. Sharing the same hill in winter for sledging, quarrels between Estonian and Russian children were a daily occurrence. Estonian children were rudely chased off the sledging hill. It was the foreign grannies who cruelly pushed them: 'A nu-ka poshol otsyuda!' Someone shouted in a loud voice: 'Bloody Russians, you've come here to eat Estonian bread!' Helen had been shocked at such courage. This was her own friend Katre, same age as herself, just turned eight. Helen had stood bewildered, waiting to see what happened next. It probably meant revenge, a serious fight, tearing of hair and clothes. But nothing happened at all. No-one had even understood the words. Most Russians never bothered to learn the local language. And why should they? Power and authorities were on their side. A third of the local population had died because of them in the freezing depths of distant Siberia, another part had taken the risk and crossed the sea in small boats to escape them. Those who stayed were tired, frightened, and bitter. All those useless little protests occurred on the sledging hills, at school doors during the evening dances, during hours-long swearing and cursing at birthdays and wedding parties.
The glass panes of the front door of their house were often smashed, or kicked in or broken by a stone. It didn't really matter how it was done - the panes simply never survived intact. Nothing much was needed anyway - just a kick with a boot. At first the glass was replaced, a new pane put in, but soon the inhabitants of the house gave up, until every single pane was smashed. When Helen reached secondary school, all the windows were covered by rusty sheet iron. If you flung the door open, it banged against the wall with a clatter. In windy weather the door rattled horribly. Even Helen in her second floor room could hear it perfectly. The speed and violence with which the door slammed against the wall was a good indication of the weather: slightly, moderately or extremely windy. When the door banged against the wall with horrifying noise, a storm was due. When someone wondered what the weather was like, they usually listened to the noise of the door.
This was just as common as power cuts, which occurred with a frequency that still managed to surprise them. Or cold radiators. Sometimes for days on end. They lived by candlelight in rooms that were heated to only seventeen or eighteen degrees. Everyone wore tracksuits and heavy sweaters. In the kitchen, the gas cooker was turned on: this was the only source of heat and provided at least a bit of light in the small flat. They learned to cope and take things easily.
'No electricity,' she told her elder sister who had just come home and was about to switch on the radio.
'Really.' It seemed to Helen that she was the only one to feel helpless, poisonous rage. This life could not be right. She knew people lived differently elsewhere. Normal lives. Like human beings. She had a feeling that she was missing out on something, all the time. When a few years later she happened to watch Moscow television and heard Popanov say in 'Summer of 1953': 'If only one could live like a human being', she pressed her nails deep into her palms and felt a need to lift her face to the sky and howl like wolf, hopelessly, desperately. Helen perceived the passing of time acutely, being forever afraid that she could not experience everything. She yearned for something more, was not prepared to give up. Helen saw her life as a row of dark grey, pointless, dull, mechanical actions that would one day come to an end in quiet tedium, leaving behind only a question hanging in the air - what was the point of it all?
The building where Guido lived was inhabited solely by Estonians. Tammeorg, Kurvits, Kask. When Helen stepped off the tram, she felt as though she had returned to the Republic of Estonia, a period she had heard talked about so often. This was how she imagined it to have been. Even the streets seemed cleaner. And the houses built at that time possessed a strange capacity to soothe and instil security. They had been built THEN, IN THOSE DAYS. When everything was different. When people were different.
One tram stop further on was the Soviet military base. Whitewashed brick walls, green gates with red pentagrams. Sometimes she had to pass the base on foot. It was when the trams were 'standing'. This meant there was no electricity, or a tram had run off the tracks. People walked to town and back home. Mostly those who lived a few stops away. Men in brown nylon jackets, and grey hats; women in green or brown woollen coats with mink collars. It was like a voluntary October march in front of the military base. Like a march of gratitude. A soldier in greenish uniform at the gate, leaning carelessly against the sentry box, shouted 'devushka, a devushka' to every girl who passed.
To Helen it seemed so humiliating. Stupidity at every step. For her, the meaning of these years was darkness.
It meant a rapid changing of wallpapers when Finnish visitors were due. It meant using all their contacts to obtain enough black caviar to give to the Finns. (Helen ate half of it, by tiny spoonfuls, until almost half of the one litre jar was empty; this caused a huge quarrel in the family - how could she do such a nasty thing, what are they going to give to the Finns now, what will they think of us! The stuff was too expensive to be eaten just like that, they simply did not have the money for it). It meant false pride and shame, saying they did not need anything while prepared to accept everything, eyeing the bulging colourful plastic bags, guessing their contents. It was bewildering to people actually accepting the most awful, the lowest way of life, and even boasting about it. Helen could only ever see self-inflicted cruelty in that, pure blindness. Their complacency, their readiness to shut their eyes to everything surrounding them depressed her. Like racehorses who were supposed to see only what lay ahead of them.
The Finns are coming!
The half jar of black caviar was transferred to another, smaller jar and given as a present.
'Please! Help yourselves!' the visitors were proudly told at the groaning table. Smoked sausages, lamprey, salmon, sprats, brawn, potato salad. Everyone was supposed to realise that this kind of food was quite common here. They might have everything in Finland, but we were not complaining either! In reality, the two sisters could easily have a fight over a cheap plastic raincoat that was meant to be used only once and across the Gulf of Finland was sold for ten marks at every little kiosk to protect a person against an unexpected shower of rain. Helen's sister refused to talk to her for weeks when Helen had once, not finding her umbrella, taken her precious raincoat instead. 'You'll have to pay me for it!' screamed the sister. And when Helen said she was not going to do that for the simple reason that it was worthless, cost nothing and she had got it for nothing as well, the sister stopped talking to her. In her opinion Helen was insolent; and their mother agreed that Helen had to pay. It was all such a charade. Here they were, fighting over a miserable piece of plastic, and at the same time smiling sweetly to the visitors, playing the game 'everything's all right'. 'It's not so bad, really...'
That was true. It was worse.
Freedom was mixed up with tables laden with food, caviar, weak Finnish coffee and a cake of 'Lux' soap. But the reason the foreigners were to be envied was something quite different. Not for their prettier bottles of lemonade, bananas or exclusive clothes. Not for coffee and soap.
They were simultaneously admired and despised. What was admired were their clothes and wealth, the possibilities they had and their indifference towards it all. At the same time it was found worthy of contempt. There are more important things in life than economic well-being!
There were indeed. But why did they have to be reached through misery?
'Oh, no, you shouldn't... we've got enough...' These words were accompanied by hypocritical smiles.
It was actually true. And even if it wasn't, people managed without so many things. They were not what was missing here. There was something missing inside people.
The Finns were free to come any time and receive their jar of caviar, just because they thought it was not worth spending money on themselves. They were free not to exert themselves when receiving visitors. They did not have to prove anything.
Their freedom included the possibility to move to Sweden, the USA, Canada, and nobody would regard them as traitors of their homeland. A person could live anywhere, where he felt good, where he easily assimilated and accepted the language and customs of the other nation. Nobody tormented them afterwards with questions like '...so you left... and who are you now then?' or comments like '...it's obvious why you went away - to have a better life, that's why!'
They had that freedom. It was not a freedom given to them, this freedom was inside them, in their very souls.
Their indifference towards the wealth in their country was taken as showing off. One had to protect oneself against it, compete with it, prove it worthless. They, on the other hand, showed not the slightest pride or arrogance. They were free to do so.
It wasn't their fault. The fault lay with people here. They were as if compelled to explain, to prove something that did not exist. They had to demonstrate that they were not inferior. But had anyone bothered to wonder if the Finns really were better, with all their coffee and bananas? It would have been easy to reach the conclusion that actually they weren't - they were overtaxed and building monuments in honour of the great friendship between the Russian and Finnish peoples. Despite that, the Finns were so natural, so simple amidst the abundance, and people here - tense, frightened, timid, defensive, forever ready to prove themselves. Any sign that they were considered inferior in some way was expected like a court sentence. But nobody considered them inferior, and they were not. They simply could not believe this, could not see it.
It is only natural that people often try to seem cleverer than they really are. But here, people also tried to show that they were better. Soviet power reigned here, but it wasn't so bad after all! 'We can offer you caviar and lamprey. We can take you to a restaurant. In fact, we can afford just as much as you over there, with all your bananas and pretty clothes. We can afford more!' This was the attitude. The same attitude as saying with contempt: 'Abba? No, I never listen to THAT.' Arrogant superiority. They were infinitely better, cleverer, more cultured. Despite everything. There was nothing left for them but their pride and bitterness. Their bitter pride.
The Finnish education system was no good. 'We have nothing to learn from them, our school system is much better,' boasted the director of an elite school.
A clever man can learn from a stupid one.
A stupid man can never learn from a clever one.
Coffee in gold-rimmed cups 'made in USSR'. Coffee services made of thick porcelain, the kind that was obtained from under the shop counter in order to give to newly-weds, to one's brother-in-law on his fortieth birthday, to one's sister's silver wedding anniversary. Helen hated those cups, she would gladly have given them to somebody, the whole set, or else smashed them against a wall. They looked awful, tasteless, completely lacking the fragility of proper china. Nothing like 'Royal Albert' or 'Royal Doulton'.
Potato salad on huge plates hand-painted in 'Ars'. Czech wine glasses, with tiny flowers painted on them, for which the parents had to pay extra, to get them at all. Lifting a Czech crystal salad bowl, we passed it politely on: 'Ole hyvä'. This was not what Helen wanted to see. But it was what she wanted to demonstrate: 'We are not any worse than you! Not in the least. We have something too! We have 'Ars'! We have Czech wine glasses, Czech crystal. We have gold-rimmed robust coffee cups, with dirty colours, floral ornaments printed on them'. Amid cigarette butts and stinking entrance halls and things bought with bribery, we really had something to show.
But not even Helen could deny that it was better this way. The posing, the ostentation; of course the new wallpaper was better than the old, faded, worn out and torn at the corners. Helen had to face the dilemma - would she have preferred a freshly wallpapered room in a dirty apartment house, full of cigarette butts and stinking of urine, or a room in the same house with greasy, stained wallpaper? The latter would perhaps still have had some kind of style, in spite of everything. To be quite honest - however much she hated all the preparations and fuss before the arrival of visitors, she nevertheless preferred to receive them in a room with fresh wallpaper, still slightly moist and smelling of paste. Nevertheless. She preferred that, it was true, but she would never have made such a fuss, or stayed up all night. She wouldn't have bothered.
The light yellow wallpaper with tiny flowers was replaced by large-patterned violet paper. The fifteen square metre room was suddenly reduced to nine square metres. But they were lucky to get any wallpaper.
The new wallpaper was by no means the worst ostentation. Theatre and opera tickets were bought, friends were dragged to performances where they could hardly understand a word - they had to be educated!
'Oh, no, you shouldn't, we have more than enough,' they said with false modesty, only to slip the 'Lux' cake of soap minutes later into their linen cupboard.
'Really, we've got coffee here too...' they mumbled, taking the pack of coffee and putting it on display on a kitchen shelf, for showing off to friends and relatives on birthdays, October holidays and Women's Days - here, have some good coffee, the Finns brought it! The gold foil of the coffee pack was later carefully washed on both sides, left dripping over the washbasin, dried with a towel, to be used for some other purpose. This was what life was like here. Did people want it? Had they chosen it themselves? Hardly. It had descended on them like an unexpected natural disaster, and they had learned to make the best of it. As if there was another way out.
Helen did not want to give in. She wanted out. In a tram, passing the Soviet military base, she was overwhelmed by contradictory feelings. There were times when she felt nothing but blind hatred, revenge, urge for justice. At other times she was completely indifferent, as if having finally accepted their inevitable presence. But more than anything else she felt powerless to change the smallest thing, her weakness to do anything but escape. Go away. She would dream about waking up one morning and discovering that it had all been a nightmare, there never were any military bases, or soldiers walking aimlessly around, questions and answers in a foreign tongue.
'Standing trams' were not the concern of their 'domesticated' northern neighbours. They were never compelled to walk for miles, in rain and snow. The ambiguous comments of Russian soldiers never reached their ears.
One more tram stop from the military base, and you came to hostels and ugly apartment houses built in the 1960s. The neighbourhood was dismal and threatening. This was a place best avoided at a late hour. It was rather creepy even in daytime. But what places were really any better? Four or five stops further from where Helen lived? There were hostels and military bases there, too. They were everywhere.
These buildings still haunted Helen in her dreams. Like evil monsters they appeared in her heavy dreams. Dark, cold and bleak. Silently threatening with their faceless grey walls.

She had everything. Good looks, a good life. She lived in a comfortable apartment in a stone-built house - didn't have to stoke stoves or use a freezing communal toilet in winter. Finns visited them and brought all sorts of goodies. Sometimes Helen let me use her deodorants. In my opinion she simply wasted them, squirting the liquid straight on to her skin. They should only be used on your clothes, I thought to myself. It will wash off. Once I overheard one girl teaching another: 'You don't use the deodorant on your skin, but on your clothes, the smell will stick longer.' I thought at the time, that she was right, that girl. I never had the chance to taste Finnish coffee, Helen's mother kept an eagle eye on it, for holidays and relatives. Actually, once I did smell it. Mmm... In my home we only had cheap, low-quality coffee. Another time she gave me some liquorice candy. Helen was truly lucky. What did I have? Only myself - a large-boned woman, with fair hair and big feet, and my brother who was clever, kind and good, and whom everybody adored. I had to look up to him, take him as a model. And I did just that, many years, all these years. I'm still obliged do it. 'Mart is much kinder than you,' says my mother. 'You ask Mart, he knows what's best for you.'
'Hey, everyone, let's hear what Mart has to say about that!' my mother cried at every single birthday party of every single relative. She made everyone look at him and listen to his opinions. Or, when she doubted someone's story, she tilted her head and stared at Mart, expectantly, and asked: 'Well, Mart, and what do you think of it?' My role was to keep my mouth shut. If someone happened to ask how I was doing, why I didn't say anything, mother snapped: 'Oh, Katre... she's the silent one!' I blushed, embarrassed, and stared at the floor. Like a mentally retarded person. I'm sure many people thought that I was one. I enjoyed the moments spent with Helen. It felt like escaping to the Black Sea with her, I could be myself, I didn't have to adore her or look up to her (although I still couldn't help doing that, in secret). We were two young women, ready for adventures, but sensible enough not to get ourselves into trouble. I admired Helen's confidence, her ability to emerge from every situation a winner. I had much to learn from her. And I did. Sometimes I imitated her, unwillingly, often without being aware of doing it. At times I adopted her opinions and presented them later as my own. I sometimes felt that she considered herself wiser than me. Maybe she was. Like when the Russian army marched into Afghanistan. I remember Helen's face when I said what I thought about it. But I was certain I was right: would it have been better if Afghanistan had been conquered by the American troops? I was later forced to admit that Helen had been right, but I never told her that.

from Longing and Desire by Riina Muljar