The Ice Museum (30 page)

‘I have so many books on the theme, so many books still to read, and there is not so much time. What I know already is this: Pytheas is regarded as the first professional explorer,' said Meri, into the gloom, ‘and Pytheas wanted to explore the northern part of Europe. There is no doubt that he was in England, because Cornwall was the main source of tin, at this time, so he was certain to have gone there. But my interest is a little different. Let me start like this: we know that some meteorites reach the earth from time to time. There is a huge and beautiful lake in North Finland, from such a landing we believe. All those huge craters were made long before human life began. Thanks to some Soviet researchers, I became aware a while ago that the island of Saaremaa was an exception.'

A meteorite landed on the island of Saaremaa, which lies off the Estonian coast. For a long time nobody knew when it had hit the ground. There was a great crater left in the earth, which had filled up with water.

‘Saaremaa,' Meri added, ‘is a very beautiful place, you should visit if you can. The Soviet researchers were not interested in giving an exact date for the landing of the meteorite; they were much more interested in trying to evaluate what traces an explosion of such force might have left on the soil. But when they got the results, they seemed to show that the explosion happened seven hundred years before Christ. I was forced to ask myself whether there are any symptoms in the collective consciousness of Estonians from the event still living on into our time. In the Bronze Age, something which fell with the force of the Hiroshima bomb, well you would think this would have a deep abiding effect on the way of thinking or the way of understanding the world. A meteorite approaching the earth would be moving like a super sound wave, and this would mean that on its way it would be first heard after it had passed. It was something very bright—let's say, like sunshine, and you could see this from a very far distance away—as far even as seven hundred kilometres, let's say.'

A blinding light which looked like the sun, and then a great boom, as the meteorite carved out a great hole in the earth. The president was staring carefully at me. He stretched out his hands, to suggest distance. He said:

‘The very simple thought crossed my mind. When the meteorite landed on Saaremaa, it was something that could be compared by the Germans to the setting down of the sun. Seen from certain areas, from the Swedish coast maybe, it was the sun setting in the east. That is so very unnatural that it must have had a very strong influence on the ancient Swedish and German myths about the end of the world—the end of the gods. In thinking about these old times, one always has a small political spark in one's mind, and the thought that
Götterdämmerung
, the myth about the death of the gods, had its origin here on this small Estonian island gave me a lot to laugh about, when I thought of those bombastic last days in Berlin, after Hitler had shot himself and they played Wagner on all the radio stations.'

He was speeding up; the silence was retreating, wafted back through the door, into the neat library. Meri lifted his head. He was declaiming this last part, making an effort, trying to push his theory out. ‘This was something that consoled me,' he said. ‘I thought about Pytheas, the first great explorer, moving towards the east, perhaps arriving in the region where the tradition of the meteorite was known. It was interesting,' he said, smiling, ‘in the descriptions of Pytheas's voyage there was a phrase, “the barbarians showed him the place where the sun went to rest.” And people had always thought this meant the sun, that the barbarians showed Pytheas where the sun set.

‘But I suddenly thought it might be the terrifying event, the sun falling to the earth, the meteorite, a burning disc like the sun, crashing into the island of Saaremaa. According to your Oxford dictionary, the words “Ultima Thule” can be explained only partly. Ultima is understandable, but Thule—your dictionary says it is a word of unknown origin. But
tuli
in Estonian means “fire.” '

He smiled in the semi-light.

‘You may be shocked,' he said, ‘because I know that Tacitus said that Britain was Thule. The very idea that Ultima Thule might be Estonia would be appalling to every English person, I fear, and it will be more appalling to every Norwegian. It was, I believe, Nansen who placed Thule not far from Bergen.'

In the dark room, the president smiled at his small victory against the elusiveness of the sources, the strangeness of the history of his country. Outside, the land stretched to the dark sea, and everything was cloaked in dusk. The dog was barking loudly at the quietness, and there was a shuffling sound by the door, as a man stuck his head into the room.

‘If I could perhaps . . .' he was muttering.

‘Yes, of course,' said Meri, raising his head. He was polite to everyone, deliberately so, it seemed. The new arrival moved across to Meri and said something quietly in Estonian. I shifted in my seat, aware of a slight headache from the coffee. The room was cold; I reached for a coat and dragged it across my shoulders.

There was a short exchange in Estonian; then the man shuffled out.

I stood to leave, and Meri smoothed down his tie, smoothed his hands across his jacket.

‘So you have the story of Thule,' he said, bringing everything to a final point, rubbing his hand across his forehead.

He stood and stared around the room.

I admired the man; his canvas was vivid and broad-brushed. It had a sense of drama: the blinding light, the flushed red sky, the darkness spreading across the land. The Germanic tribes saw the sun falling to the earth in the east; dust rose and clouded across the skies. The explosion was immense and the effects could be seen for hundreds of miles around. The cataclysmic event passed into folklore—the burning island, the setting of the sun. When Pytheas came along the coast, the natives, speaking an early Baltic language, said, ‘Tuli! Tuli!,' pronouncing it
Tooley, Tooley,
and pointed to the east. Fire, fire, this was where the fire had fallen, where the sun had crashed to the earth. This was where Saaremaa burned.

He thought it was true, like Nansen, like Burton, like the long line of explorers and writers, solving the ancient mystery of the north. Meri believed his own words, believed them passionately. But there was something more to Meri's Thule. Thule had become a story about purity, about an ideal land. Meri had said himself that the movement towards independence had burgeoned from environmental beginnings. At the end of the 1980s, purging the land became bound up with purging Estonia of influences from Moscow. Meri had been an environmentalist, a nature writer; he had argued against the Soviet exploitation of Estonian soil. As president, Meri had often defined Estonia as an environmentally friendly Scandinavian country, trying to lift the land out of the years of occupation. Thule was part of this reserve of symbolism, part of this sense of the Nordic allegiances of Estonia. It was another politicised Thule, another Thule for independence. Thule for regeneration, deployed to draw a small country out of the dark aftermath of World War Two.

The sky outside was dark. Meri moved slowly through his rooms, lined with books, to the entrance hall. I shook his hand, and he bowed.

‘Thank you for coming,' he said, smiling. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay in our beautiful land.'

The tall man stood in the doorway of his house, as the peninsula stretched away under the cold evening. His study was full of books he had to read. There was not so much time, he had said, perhaps there would not be time to do everything. But he had added his voice to the argument, the ancient debate about Thule. He waved at the car, as I drove away. The night was cold as I drove along the Viimsi Peninsula, back towards Tallinn, where the lights of Toompea shone up the hillside.

 
 
The meteorite fell on the island of Saaremaa, so I drove towards the south.

I drove through the juniper glades and the evergreen forests, the twisted ruins of Communism scattered among the trees. The route ran along a deserted single-lane road, dwindling at the edges into rubble. The view scarcely changed: the long level roads, the forests stretching away, the red trees shining in the rain. The road was covered in rainwater and the car slid past the collective farms, their blue tiles and Soviet functional outhouses left to decay, grass growing through the shattered windows. At the town of Paldiski I was trying to find something to eat, but there was nowhere to buy anything in the town except a barren supermarket, its shelves bare. The town was a bleak place to pause at: a cluster of crumbling high-rise apartment blocks, some of them standing empty, awaiting demolition. The shops were plastered with dull signs; the men and the women stood on the street talking and staring. The buildings were streaked with fading blue paint. Smoke was rising from the chimneys of the main boiler house, a block of dirty bricks, surrounded by patches of grass and dirty puddles. Around the boiler house stood the ruins of functional offices, jagged iron skeletons, standing neglected on sodden waste ground.

There had been Russians here since Peter I built Paldiski into a port, intending to fortify it, though the work was never finished. The scrubland stretched to the cold blue sea. The earthworks for Peter I's fortification remained along the windblown coast, where the trees had been bent by successive lashings from the sea. The town was used and smashed and burned during World War Two; it was a naval base for the Soviet forces, and the civilians were bundled off, sent elsewhere, sent away into the juniper forests. It was filled with Russian sailors, and then the Germans arrived and made it a prisoner-of-war camp. When the war turned and the Soviet Army marched back towards the town, the German soldiers torched it as they retreated. During the Soviet era Paldiski was a garrison, and the outskirts of the town were full of military relics, significant objects, ugly decrepit concrete bunkers, crumbling slowly. By the coast there was a gargantuan office complex, with rooms stacked like prison cells in tight columns. A line of trees stood before it, branches outstretched, failing to hide its decayed walls. Looking for somewhere to buy some food I drove around this ancient office relic, a route no Estonian could have taken during the Soviet occupation, because the area was sealed off and civilians were forbidden to go there. The windows were empty, the glass was shattered, the roof had fallen down. It was a concrete skeleton, brooding on a windblown stretch of coast.

I found two women talking on a street corner by the building, staring indifferently across the patchy grass towards the blank sides of the building. ‘What was the building?' I asked, shouting above the noise of the sea and the tormented sounds of ancient cars moving along the road. They didn't understand, I had to repeat the question, pointing and smiling, and then one of them said, ‘
Akula
,' and turned away. Looking back at the concrete relic, it was surprising, but I saw that it was shaped like a submarine, with a central tower and two slab-like arms on either side, stretching across the orange scrubland. It would have housed a replica submarine, used for training, hidden inside one more piece of Soviet concrete.

The building had been fenced off, but now the fence was broken and easy to climb. There were fences throughout Paldiski, red fences with signs telling the inhabitants to keep out, some of them defunct, breached in places, others apparently functional, enforcing contemporary prohibitions. There was a ring of fences around the silent derelict buildings on the outskirts of the town. Faded fences, tottering on their posts.

There were dirty secrets, smuggled away after independence, like the nuclear contents of a pile of cream bricks, on the edge of Paldiski, with a rusty red-and-white chimney rising above. The Russians had kept the contents to themselves—a reactor or two, a laboratory—speeding the spent fuel back to Russia on tracks built for the purpose, a decontamination express train, carrying nuclear litter across the Russian border. They buried the rest in concrete.

When the train had disappeared and the tracks had disintegrated, there were still Russians in Paldiski. Estonia was still full of Russians. In Tallinn the lucky ones ran restaurants and tipped vodka into the glasses of the newly rich like Karin and Mart, who called the Russian bars kitsch and ordered up blinis and caviar. But many of the leftover Russians were still living in bleak towns, coastal ruins, living in the shattered blocks left by the Soviet Union. They were joined by the Estonian poor: the unemployed, the single parents who were sent to cheap housing in towns no one wanted to live in. The Russians lined the streets of Paldiski, whiling away the hours. They talked in groups, their eyes on the ragged coastline and the concrete blocks. Maybe the men were drunk, maybe they were just moving slowly through the afternoon, because there was nothing to do with the evening.

 
 
At the end of the empty road was the muted town of Pärnu, where the pebbled beach stretched to the cold sea. There were lines of wooden houses, the paint falling off their walls, the bricks crumbling like parchment. There was a fairground with a Ferris wheel, the empty carriages rocking in the wind. On a cranky carousel which kept stopping, children were screaming and clapping their hands, and then the rain fell, swift and hard, across the beach, and they were all picked up and taken away.

In Pärnu I stopped at the former summer house of a German-Portuguese millionaire named Ammende. Ammende built the place at the turn of the century in a wilfully, buoyantly decadent style. From the outside the building was a modernist brick parody of a country house with a superfluous tower sticking out of the roof. It stood out; the rest of Pärnu was low and wooden, like a lost Swedish village stranded on a Baltic coast. But Villa Ammende was celebrating its facelift. The place had been picked out of the ruins, dusted and painted, reopened as a Jugendstil hotel.