Miss Kolkhoz
Tuesday 6 September
Now, after a hot summer, the river is just a trickle winding between the high overgrown banks, with only the cool springs in the distance behind the meadows to protect its depths. The aster beds in the gardens of individual houses along the river are still in lilac-and-pink bloom. The brown kraft paper covering the new schoolbooks smells … brownish. A salty smell, like a hot ham taken out of a sooty oven in a rusty smokehouse. The school bell’s plate-iron throat calls out the same old sinister ring as ever, but this autumn something’s actually different.
We saw her today on the long break, me and Liidia!
We’d gone to buy kama chocolate, and we happened to leave the shop at just the right moment. Liidia stopped abruptly in front of me, I thumped her on the back, my mouth full of sawdust-dry sweetness. It’s a wonder I didn’t choke or trip over on the top step! For a moment Liidia stumbled, but she didn’t so much as look behind her, didn’t even glance in my direction. And then I looked and saw, too. The pale chocolate melted in my hand, and it’s possible that I wiped my fingers on the folds of my checked school skirt. I strained my eyes so that the vision would appear to me as clearly as possible from across the square of crumbling concrete slabs that sprawled out in front of the shop.
Her! She stopped all of a sudden, right at that moment, before our eyes. She stopped, and her high heels sank into the earthen gap between the slabs and she was sprouting out of the concrete like a flower. Like an autumn dahlia. Those stockings, those tights, Liidia! Black, in an outrageous lace-patterned big-meshed knit coquettishly covering too-slim legs, the fabric rising ever higher up her legs without ever meeting the hem of the dress. And what a dress! It’s possible that my mouth was hanging open like an idiot’s. I was gawping like a fool, like a complete yokel. A short, knitted dress that glowed like the Leida flowerbeds in the evening dusk on the last Sunday of summer, brightening up the grey day in the square outside the kolkhoz canteen.
Maybe I’d seen dresses like that in a foreign movie. Or around Liidia’s, on the pages of a Koti-Anttila magazine from Finland, bought with her pocket money at the bus station kiosk and thumbed to pieces by both of us in Liidia’s low-ceilinged room. Around her waist the beauty wore a patent leather belt the width of my palm, just a shade darker than the dress and fastened with a brightly shining buckle. Her slender wrist was adorned with a spruce-forest-green plastic bangle, and her slim fingers ended (ooh!) in very long nails the same shade as her dress.
With nails like those you can’t weed potatoes.
The new hairdresser freed herself from the slabs and clattered with short precise steps up to the canteen under the transfixed stares of the tractor drivers and stiff-shouldered office women arriving for lunch and vanished from our field of vision.
Her hair, Liidia, her hairstyle! Did you even see her hair? It was scandalous. Big hair, bleached curls pinned up and swaying over her smooth forehead, abundant dark curls gathering around her high cheekbones and firm chin, cascading down in big shining ringlets.
In the lessons that followed I didn’t see the smudged chalk writing on the board and didn’t hear the teacher’s monotonous voice. Whenever I closed my eyes I could see those bleached locks and high curls swaying before me. Big hair, a too-big hairdo for that small body.
Thursday 15 September
The hairdresser’s workshop is on the ground floor of the kolkhoz office, and its door is right opposite the payroll office. When we first started school there was still a picture of Liidia’s mum hanging on the honours board for front-rank workers on the far wall of the main hall. Twice a month the tractor drivers and mechanics queue up for their wages until the cashier counts out their money, breathing in the eye-wateringly strong smell of curling fluid hovering in the dim foyer into lungs already steeped in engine oil and Priima or Rumba tobacco.
Yesterday in the afternoon we studied at Liidia’s and sang the patriotic songs we remembered hearing on the radio at the end of summer. In the room behind the old farmhouse kitchen we played around with trigonometry and later with Liidia’s mum’s electric curling tongs. Liidia’s got another sewing project under way. She’s taken her grandad’s old leather coat down from the attic, unpicked it at the seams and cut out pieces for a skirt for herself from the outer layer. The patterns come from Soviet Woman, copied on to wallpaper and the measurements adjusted. She has the patience for things like that. Unfortunately, Liidia’s sewing came to a halt yesterday because one of the needles of the old Singer machine got stuck in the thick leather of the coat and Liidia’s mum wouldn’t let her use the electric machine with the foot. The needle broke off. Because Liidia can be pretty clumsy. She’s got a blue mark on her hand like a plum. I didn’t ask whether she’d fallen over or something.
She looks like a whore from Viru Street
said Liidia’s mum. Not about Liidia, about the new hairdresser. I don’t really know what a whore from Viru Street looks like. We did see some punks there on our class trip to Tallinn in the spring, and we all stared at their leather jackets covered in safety pins and hand-painted slogans, dyed hair stuck up with spray, until our bus slowly juddered off over the cobblestones. The punk boys were brimming with pride, with superiority, and the girls were wearing short denim skirts with ripped hems and net stockings. Their eyes were outlined with thick black lines drawn on with pencil. We sat silently in our seats; it was unpleasant being on the bus in that heat. We sat there looking out of the dusty window of the LAZ bus, watching life in Tallinn like a Wednesday film at the House of Culture. Like poachers watching animals in the Serengeti.
Liidia’s going to the hairdresser’s! She was practically buzzing as she told me, looking elated. Her mum won’t give her any money for that. And definitely no permission either.
Let us linger to behold the golden wheatfield on your head.
were the teacher’s words when Liidia let down her hair in the middle of a lesson one time. We’re not actually allowed to have our hair down at school. And it was a metaphor, or something like that, because the class teacher is the Estonian language teacher.
Liidia will think of something – she’s used to always thinking of something.
Saturday 24 September
My tears keep flowing. I got up from in front of the TV and went to my room so Mum and Dad wouldn’t see. So that they wouldn’t have to hide their tears. Words can’t describe the enormity. Somewhere in my belly a different, immense force is beating away. It’s like I’m flying on the lightweight bike myself, circling the track, over the line like a bird with strong wings. Through the window I can even see the sky shedding tears! The whole world is weeping with joy for her. I’d like to pick Erika up like a little girl, dry her cheeks with a handkerchief, press my nose into her hair and hug, hug, hug …
I call Liidia, her mum answers, her voice sounds different today, the plosives are soft when she calls Liidia.
Tuesday 18 October
Today, after school, we caught the bus into town to get photos taken at the photographers. Liidia needed a picture of her new hairstyle. The kiosk in town had Polish cosmetics in so we could buy pearl lipstick before the photos were taken. There were no fishnet tights, nor any with patterns. There were no tights at all.
I still have money left from the hoeing I did at the work-and-recreation camp in summer, and Liidia had some roubles from her dad. Quite a few, I guess, because on 21 June Square we even got milkshakes with plum juice at the refreshment bar, in heavy tea glasses, two each. The photographer came out from behind the camera and arranged Liidia’s hair and shoulders as she sat in front of the brown-black curtain. He held Liidia’s chin in his hand, palm up, as he leaned over her to adjust her posture. If the shadow falls right, the dark bruise on her high cheekbones won’t be visible. Liidia looked boldly into the eye, into the lens. She hasn’t always been like that. Maybe it’s the new hairstyle
The weather has become bleaker, the wind was getting in through my coat today. Liidia has a new jacket, fluffy with pink stripes on the sleeves. She looked like she was from Tallinn today.
We came back on the five-o’clock bus, and that was also where I heard what Liina from the shop said about the hairdresser. I don’t like taking the bus. That winter when Gorby visited Estonia, a February day when we all crowded on the same square to watch the head of state’s cortege (did you see Raisa’s coat, Liidia), wearing waterproof jackets and ski hats, every bloody Wednesday of that winter I went into town to the group leader meetings at the Pioneers’ House. Once, on the bus back home, a man sat behind me while another sat next to me. As the bus moved off, the one behind me threw his arms around me, forced his hands under my jacket straight to my breasts and pressed me hard against the back of the seat. The reek of vodka and beer made me want to puke. He might have smelled of puke, too. I couldn’t get away, what with the other one sitting next to me and the bus packed full of standing passengers. I tried to pull myself away somehow, but those hands kept on squeezing. Then I tried looking out the window but saw only the infinite darkness of the snowless winter behind the sweaty windowpane. The man said something to me, more a grumble than actual words. When the bus turned towards the centre, the other man said right, now let the girl be, or something. What I was most afraid of was them getting off at the same stop as me.
A prostitute. Who does she think she’s waggling her bony arse?
said Liina from the shop, still audible over the noise of the bus, and her double chin wobbled with glee at gossiping. She was holding a bulging plastic bag, its handles reinforced with sticky tape, with MARLBORO written on it in red letters.
Wednesday 19 October
A grey, protracted and joyless day. Liidia didn’t come out today or around my house to pick up the Mahavok record. Her mum must still be mad about her hair.
She didn’t come to school either! It’s weird.
Thursday 20 October
Liidia’s sick. She didn’t come to the phone, her mum said:
Sick.
And hung up.
Monday 24 October
It wasn’t a cold. The class teacher told someone at break time that Liidia had fallen badly when carrying wood indoors from the shed. Slipped and immediately fell. Sometimes she’s clumsy when she walks.
Wednesday 2 November
I know that Liidia burns a candle on the windowsill in her room on the evening of All Souls’ Day as well. The window looks out on to the dark old apple orchard, there’s no light on the road. It’s a big orchard, under the mossy trunks of the apple trees everything tends to run wild, sometimes Liidia’s dad cuts down the tall grass there with a scythe, in summer they have cabbage and potato fields and hay for the animals. In the heat of last summer the old peonies under Liidia’s window bloomed rapidly, at first pink with a finer stem, and then fleshy, large-petalled white ones with a blood-red core.
Mum thinks it’s better if I don’t go around to Liidia’s right now. I burn a twisted candle on an old gold-rimmed saucer and listen to Madonna, a tape I borrowed from Liidia. She certainly got a very good haul at the cassette dealers at the autumn fair, one side of this cassette ends halfway through, but still!
I hope it’s all right to dance a little on All Souls’ Day.
Monday 14 November
True, I could be thinner, although no one’s made jokes about my figure. And we need new swimsuits. For the summer. My mum says we won’t be getting nice ones. There are never any nice ones to buy. I called Liidia on Saturday after television closedown. Luckily she picked up the phone, so her parents must have gone to bed. Straight away I blurted out my idea. She has to enter the pageant when she’s sixteen! Maybe sooner, next year? Liidia’s taller than me, busty. And eloquent. More beautiful than Heli, I think. Heli wasn’t Liidia’s favourite either, she liked Sigrid, who became Miss Press, whereas I thought she was too ordinary. Our hairdresser would have looked great in that shiny swimsuit.
Everyone, absolutely EVERYONE at school today discussed who they liked and who should have won, someone had noticed the princess who came second with dark hair and high cheekbones was biting her lips and holding back the tears when the tape went around and she realized she wasn’t going to win.
It must be hard, losing in the Leninites’ Cloister in front of the whole Estonian people. Thought our class teacher. She still came third, though, that Eha.
Tuesday 15 November
Half the boys in our class have a new haircut. Short on top, long at the back. No one’s getting the back of their neck trimmed any more. Mum complained that you needed to make an appointment with the hairdresser even for an ordinary cut, not just for perms, the queue was so long she couldn’t face waiting. You might as well go into town during working hours. After all, people are starting to come here from the city.
When I went to school this morning, I saw the cleaner washing the large window of the hairdresser’s studio. From the outside. His bare hands were red, and the bucket was steaming as he balanced on the ladder. There was a smell of turpentine in the cold air. It was definitely below freezing, the frozen turf was all silver in the morning, black ice glittered on the asphalt. That night someone had written in brown floor paint across the hairdresser’s window: WHORE. That’s what they said at first break.
Wednesday 16 November
It was before the folk-dance evening, and I was sitting on a low bench in front of the stove in Liidia’s kitchen and waiting while Liidia’s hair, which reached right down her back, was combed by her mum. Liidia sat in an old chair with a plywood base, facing the window, I couldn’t see her face, but I could see her mum’s strong jawline in the light of the windows. Her mouth was twisted, as if there was a bitter taste on her tongue as she brushed Liidia’s long hair with jerky movements. The brush kept getting stuck in her long, fair hair, as if pain were giving it curls and loose hairs floated in the dusk of the low-ceilinged farm kitchen. Liidia’s shoulders stayed motionless, not a word nor a sound came from the three of us, only a furniture beetle ticking in the old log wall, and I thought I heard Liidia’s scalp crackle. We might have been eight or nine years old at the time. Sometimes even now when I brush my own unruly hair, I remember Liidia’s hair being combed, and I can feel pain in the roots, in my follicles.
On TV today after school, they showed the representatives in session. Somehow the mood was different. They don’t usually broadcast programmes on Estonian TV at this time of day, but the television was on. I stopped and watched, sweet jam juice dripping from the pastry on to the red rug, the tassels of the fringe getting together. A blind woman here knits these rugs to order.
We ourselves don’t even understand what we have done today.
said someone from the rostrum, and the TV picture jumped and flickered.
Liidia was finally back at school today.
Thursday 24 November
Liidia didn’t come to the school party, so I’ll have to report to her tomorrow. Who dances with who, how the boys sneak off to the toilets together and come back bolder each time, get closer when dancing, how sweaty their hands will be. Who among the girls has knitted a blue-black-white headband. And my mum finally sewed me a skirt. It’s a dark denim-like fabric, quite narrow, with a zip up the side, but not as short as Liidia’s. I’m going to put laundry bleach on it to make it look like stonewash. Mum’s not that good at these things.
In the evenings, when all the daytime lights have been turned off and the noise in the dark school corridors has subsided, everything’s different. It turns into a mysterious, quiet place. Even the music coming from the Estonian language classroom, where the disco ball of mirror shards glued on to a basketball is being tested for the first time, sounds like it’s from somewhere far away when you’re out in the corridor. I spent a while by myself looking from one darkness to another, the yard, the first snowflakes hovering in the lantern circle, but only the blackest of the autumn darkness remains outside the yellow circle of light.
Sunday 27 November
An Estonian rock band performed on the youth programme Noortestuudio pärastlõuna, and the synthesizer player was a blonde woman with a hairstyle like Liidia’s and a straight nose. She had something shiny on her cheeks and eyelids. The men were wearing folk shirts or something like that, the bass player had a kind of Mulgi-coat-like garment on. It didn’t really go with the music – perhaps it went with the lyrics. Anyway, she hadn’t done the folk dress thing, she stood behind the synthesizer in a snow-washed denim jacket and a very short skirt over long legs. She was as thin as the hairdresser.
I could have called Liidia.
Monday 5 December
Twenty-four, twenty-five, you can do more than that! Who’s going to hold your legs THEN, will your dad hold your legs?
The bone in Liidia’s arm – that unlucky fracture – hadn’t quite knitted together. To the displeasure of our smallpox-scarred, shiny-scalped teacher, Liidia didn’t have to join in with all this today. She could sit on a long gym bench and watch us other girls groaning on hard mats. Liidia’s face was thinner somehow, more mature. Beautiful. At least she’d got out of it for once, the hall ragged at the edges from endless series of abdominal exercises and somersaults on the torn-seam, foul-smelling mats, dodgeball concussions and sweat under the armpits that in the past few months we’d had to wash off with cold water.
When I came in the changing room I told her what my mum had read in the paper. That a large mine in Virumaa has been on fire for the whole of November, aflame under the ground for weeks on end. After the last lesson, Liidia and I stood in front of the school building on the thin layer of snow, school bags pressed to our shoulders, and we took turns imagining how beneath the cold soil, the decaying asphalt, the handiwork class in the basement, the damp cellar of our apartment building, beneath the concrete floor of every single cellar storage space with its rough board door, everything had long been steadily glowing, a fire secretly blazing.
Does hell exist, Liidia? What about God? Over the past year a lot of people at school have started to think so.
Tuesday 13 December
It’s always better when Liidia’s around. We went on a carefully planned trip to the cinema. My mum knew we were going to see a movie in town, she gave me the money, too, but I didn’t tell her which one. A cinema van arrives at the kolkhoz House of Culture on Wednesdays, but unfortunately the best films don’t reach the countryside, and Little Vera is being screened only at the cinema in town. This cinema is actually a long wooden building with a low ceiling, and the smell of damp coats, decay and sweat suffocates you as you sit there on a hard wooden chair. Sometimes there’s a smell of burning. It comes from the film reel. Under-sixteens are banned from seeing the film, but this time it was me who told Liidia it would be fine.
She looks older than me. The crowd was unbelievable, jostling in front of the ticket desk, elbows out.
Are you minors going to watch pornography?
asks no one, no one asks us anything.
It was cold outside afterwards. The heavy wooden door of the bus station building was locked, so we couldn’t keep warm on the hard brown wooden benches, and all the buses had left.
Liidia was gazing far into the distance, to the other side of the wasteland behind the bus station, beyond the dim yellow circle of the streetlight.
I can go to some trade school, to a dorm, to Tallinn, to Juhkentali.
I felt an anxious lump in my throat as she said it, the something’s-wrong feeling of school mornings. I thought about Vera’s parents, Vera’s father and Liidia’s mum, even though I didn’t want to, really didn’t want to. I would much rather have thought about Vera’s hairstyle and falling in love.
Once we finish high school, I’m out of here, Liidia said. My teeth were chattering.
Leave home, go and live my life.
Liidia’s mum is always telling Liidia, even in my hearing, about how at the age of just fifteen, she was living her own life at technical school, on a farm, on a wage. Our class teacher would just be annoyed. At her dropping out of high school. Liidia’s way ahead of the rest of us in maths, and she takes part in school competitions in the district.
We drove home in a private taxi, it was a beige VAZ-2107, new furry covers on the seats. So Liidia’s dad had given her money after all, he must have done it without her mum knowing. The pay’s good in the barn, too, but Liidia’s mum has principles. When children come around to their house asking for treats on St Martin’s Day or St Catherine’s Day, the lights are out and the front door is locked. They just get the kitchen dirty, give them sweets, apples, they’ll chuck those apples around at school. We both got out of the car at the end of the path to Liidia’s house, the taxi driver had talked the whole way, peeking at Liidia, who was sitting in the front seat, and asking about the film.
Did you see any tits?
In the kitchen window of Liidia’s small house the light shone from around the shadow of the tall spruce hedge on the main road.
It would be better for Liidia if she could live her own life.
Liidia stood at the roadside under an oak, one foot in the ditch, warming herself with her hands.
Can I stay around yours tonight?
We walked down the dark hill together towards the new houses, the starry sky promised a cold night.
Thursday 15 December
It’s strange that Liidia wasn’t sent home from school this morning. She’s crazy! We could all see the Estonian language teacher was upset, and the boys kept hovering around us at each break. We couldn’t even go to the toilets and talk in peace. Because of the skirt. It was pretty short. Liidia has beautiful legs, straight and long enough, Liidia has everything in the right proportions. The black leather is tight around the hips, the way her hairstyle stays in place is super. She must have pinched some of her mum’s Elnett. Mai hairspray is like furniture varnish, if you spray it a bit too carelessly your hair immediately clumps together. At least she had a school blouse on.
I should call Liidia before nightfall. I should ask.
Where did Liidia get that eyeshadow?
You hiding bruises?
asked a year-eight idiot.
Friday 30 December
Come, anyone who wants to, come, anyone who’s got no money, come, anyone, poor or rich …
On the next-to-last day of the old year, I went over to Liidia’s. I wanted to make sure that she would still be at the big spruce tree in front of the kolkhoz office tomorrow night. Blue, red and green bulbs have been glowing at the top of the tall tree for several days already, and you can buy tickets for the new year lottery in the store. Quite a few families had put trees up in their homes earlier than usual this year, but the big party is usually on New Year’s Eve.
Liidia’s mum was asleep at the kitchen table, her hair rolled up in rubber rollers, her head resting on her big hands with long strong fingers, her slightly saggy cheek on a sticky checked oilcloth. Liidia had just cleaned up, brushing the butt ends off the shovel and into the stove, putting them on the briquette, brown crumbs catching in her fair hair when she pushed strands out of her eyes.
… you will find the eternal life of heaven … The music came from Liidia’s room, the four vocalists of the group Sõnajalg coming out of the tape recorder.
We closed the door and started putting on makeup in front of a round-cornered mirror that had faded with time. The sky was low today, there was no festive feeling that we were giving the old year a send-off, although the snow was thick on the ground. But the room of the old house was nice and warm, warmer than at home, as the heating in the apartment blocks has been cutting out a lot recently. It means that Liidia had also managed to heat the stove.
We belted out the song: You will find the creator, the eternal father… Liidia’s dad hadn’t come home from the workshop yet, they were still at work in there. Her dad’s always spent a lot of time at work. As a child, Liidia went to a nursery where her mum would leave her on Monday and not collect her until Friday. I didn’t know nurseries like that existed before Liidia told me, before we became friends. We met on the first day of school, me and Liidia with her thick golden pigtails. Although their old house is actually quite close to the new-builds.
Suddenly Liidia’s mum appeared at the door, probably wanting to say something to Liidia, noticed me and paused. She looked as if she couldn’t see clearly. Swaying. She closed the door just as sharply. Liidia and I looked each other straight in the eye, Liidia suddenly gave a horrible laugh and at the same time drew a line under her eye with a black pencil. Her shoulders were shaking, and I was afraid she was going to stick the pencil in her eye. I went to the door and let the heavy door hook, once beaten in a village smithy, fall into the iron latch.
Thursday 5 January
The school holidays will be over soon.
Today Liidia’s mum had a grey look about her again. She was older, even though she’s years younger than my mum. The line of her mouth was narrower, the smoker’s lines above the upper lip deeper than usual.
Kids make you age fast.
Go to the sauna, Liidia’s there.
Sometimes she even smiles at me, but it’s Liidia who’s made her mother old. She ruined her mother’s life. She had to leave technical school: no education, a life spent in the barn looking after the cows.
The smell of strong bleach hit me as I came through the outer door of the sauna. I hung up my jacket. An empty container of Lilia-3 laundry bleach lay on the floor beside some old sauna whisks. The sauna stove was heating, and the smell of laundry bleach mixed with that of scorching damp wood, mouldy old sauna whisks and soaking laundry. Liidia had already spread the jeans out on the scouring grate and was applying the strong solution over the legs. Neither of us knew how long it ought to stay on. We would have to keep an eye on it. We sat in the dark steam room, where it was warmer, and waited. Liidia was quiet, focused. That’s kind of how she is mostly. She acts calmly, sometimes withdrawing into herself. And then does something surprising. Like now with this half-packet of Tallinn cigarettes. Liidia’s mum is temperamental, quick-tempered. Mixed blood. Her dad’s more like Liidia. We were squatting right there in front of the sauna stove, and we threw the butt-ends into the fire. Liidia said no one would come and bother us if they knew I was with her. Liidia said she’d like to fall in love. But with whom, Liidia, with whom?
Finally it was time to wash my trousers. We left them in the sauna to dry.
Wednesday 11 January
The summer holidays are finally here. Liidia and I have decided to run away from home to take part in the beauty pageant in Tallinn. We meet on the other side of the main road in a meadow and rest there, lying in a pile of hay in the June heat, the warm smell of fresh hay everywhere, and a round full moon pouring light from the high sky on to the meadow and on to us. Around Liidia’s big hair shines a silver circle of moonlight. We both have new hairstyles. Earrings pinch our ears.
The smell of the night-cold water of the river is very close by.
When I awoke from my dream, I was glad that Liidia was with me. That she was in a safe place.
Thursday 2 February
When I was studying with Liidia today, I found an envelope in her Russian exercise book. An ordinary envelope with no letters, white, purple on the inside, the kind sometimes used for giving funeral photos to relatives. There was a packet of black-and-white pictures in the envelope. Liidia had gone out to the toilets.
I took all the pictures out of the envelope for a moment. I had never seen these pictures before, but I could tell from the hairstyle that they must be from this winter.
I only looked at the three top ones and then quickly put the photos back in the envelope, the envelope back in the book and the book on the desk, underneath Liidia’s things. My hands might have been slightly shaky when the door opened. We started to study maths and didn’t talk about anything else.
Thursday 23 February
My mum’s view is that she doesn’t blame Liidia’s mum. Because it’s a disease. And Liidia’s mum’s had a hard life. It’s like she blames Liidia’s dad. And I don’t get it.
How the sports teacher sneered when the children pointed and laughed at the blue marks on Liidia’s straight white legs in the changing room. Joked about it. I didn’t get that. Nine-year-old Liidia said, yes, it was the cord of an electric kettle. It’s not easy being Liidia’s mum.
Friday 3 March
Today at school the Russian language teacher lost control of the class. She’s pretty young. Rural schools struggle to find teachers. Anyway, she was recruited straight after high school, and her nerves couldn’t take it. Go fuck a goat,
that was what a boy said in the middle of the lesson in clear Estonian. And after that we were all told about how ALL of us are the result of drunken fooling around behind a tractor, and that where imbeciles like us belong is the home in Imastu, not a school for normal children. Then the teacher walked out, slamming the door behind her, and didn’t come back. When she arrived last winter, she looked brilliant. Still young, made her own clothes, great hairstyle. But. We all knew she didn’t want to be here. She was killing time before she could start her real life somewhere else.
When the father drinks, half the house burns. When the mother drinks, the whole house burns.
said our class teacher in year five, he lost the run of himself for a moment while the whole class sat on the kolkhoz bus and the bus was waiting at the end of the road to Liidia’s house, the bus driver left the engine running, and the smell of diesel was seeping into the bus and it was difficult to breathe, and the boys, who were furious after having just got out of bed, were likely to start mouthing off. We were going on a school trip, it was a long way, we needed to get to the ferry, everyone knew that we had to start from the school early that morning, be on time. All the mums knew.
You always sit next to her, run, knock on the window. Wake her up.
Thursday 9 March
After Women’s Day, the snow melted away with a murmur, boots and stocking tops were damp when we arrived at school and the hairdresser’s windows were covered up on the inside with cardboard. On the white door in the hallway a sign carelessly attached with thumb tacks said CLOSED.
At my mum’s job they talked about poison-pen letters. They were slipped in under the door, put in the postbox in the hallway. Someone’s long legs had walked through the school grounds into the stairwell on a number of evenings. Someone had grabbed her by the shoulders in the hallway, murmured in her ear, maybe there was the stink of machine oil and vodka. Someone had pushed her against the rough plaster of the wall of the stairwell, her cheek was scratched, an earring fell on the stairs.
What kind of wondrous creature does she think she is, some kind of princess, right, a fucking Miss Kolkhoz.
I remember that sentence, the grim laughter in the canteen queue, the words had the cloying smell of rancid fat and wet dishcloth.
The pink-and-red carnations in Mum’s vases are like tousle-headed, slightly stubborn girls. Yesterday all the parties and vases were full of flowers like these. Suddenly I remembered the photos in Liidia’s desk drawer, the thick envelope between the pages of the Russian exercise book. Maybe she had them taken because to enter the beauty pageant applicants had to send pictures of themselves. As well as a portrait, you also need a full-length photograph. Of your whole body.
Thursday 13 April
Carnations, bouquets of flowers, several rows of faces behind the carnations and only women’s faces, women’s and girls’ faces. There might have been some men, but newspaper photos are always so blurred. I hadn’t thought about it before, but Mum’s got a little shovel in the boot of the Zhiguli. It’s for digging the car out when the roads get blocked by snowdrifts. Or when it all starts melting in the spring, heavy rain might mean you get stuck in the ground, in the mud.
It’s a sapper’s shovel after all.
When I looked at these newspaper photos, I remembered my mum’s shovel, but I didn’t go to the garage to look more closely at it. I already knew that the handle was short, the edges sharp. Mum could protect herself if she had to. If it turned out to be necessary.
Saturday 27 May
All the girls will wear a black skirt and a white blouse to the graduation ceremony. My mum’s making me a skirt from an ancient dress that’s been waiting in the wardrobe for the right moment. If only she had more free evenings! These citizens’ committees have taken all her free time, night and day, this May. Liidia sews for herself. The sewing machine is surrounded by black wool and crape, black chintz and silk. Liidia draws lines on the black fabric with white tailor’s chalk. Her dead grandmother’s old wardrobe seems to be bottomless. And then their house still has an attic, all those chests of drawers and plywood suitcases. And the barn that’s falling apart next to the stable. On long autumn evenings we sometimes spent hours trying on these clothes, the smell of dried lavender and mustiness mixed with hairspray and Liidia’s mum’s perfume from Leningrad. Rose-coloured, hand-sewn chintz dresses, tight at the waist, colourful gauze scarves and heavy woollen suit jackets turned us into strangers, precocious orphans, into little women with painted lips and heavy cotton-padded shoulders. Sometimes we twirled in front of Liidia’s mirror until the windows turned black as it grew dark outside, the smell of frying salted meat beginning to escape from the kitchen, and as the evening advanced with ever-louder sounds I began to fear the dark walk home. Then Liidia took a rectangular torch from the cold hallway, put on rubber boots and shadowed me along the road, the muddy tracks, until the lights of the new houses could be seen from the hill.
Tuesday 30 May
Me and Liidia revised for our maths exam and sunbathed at our favourite place, where the river winds between the meadows.
The warmth of the May sun gently touched our pale bodies on the faded blanket.
Under bright photographic lights, the body expands, changes, is suddenly a full-grown, ready body that has shot up with unexpected speed like a tomato plant on the windowsill in the light and heat of spring. With each new day its embarrassment and humiliating imperfection become concealed in shadows, the clumsiness of its movements lost in curvature, the skin lost in the shiny smoothness of photographic paper. The camera has peeled off a skin that fears touch and needs to be concealed, and a new Liidia emerges from her former skin like a snake in a springtime clearing. And I want to look and yet I don’t. She’s looking at me, though. Even in pictures like these, Liidia’s not afraid to look straight into the camera. It takes me back to the summer after year six stepping shakily, hesitantly towards the diving tower of the old reservoir, a stone-cold feeling in my belly and a certainty that I’m too scared to jump. Back then Liidia jumped. And jumped again.
She’s jumping again. And all I can do is wait for her to surface. Her mum mustn’t find out, quick-tempered as she is. No one can ever know anything.
Before leaving Liidia tested the water again, wading barefoot to the soft turf of the shore.
Thursday 8 June
I turn the rotary dial, my finger gets stuck in the holes as I dial the number, and the receiver in my powerless hand is as heavy as an axe. I listen to the dialling tone for a long time, but no one responds. I hang up, only to do it all again a moment later.
Saturday 17 June
For several months now the district newspaper has had a new, old-fashioned-sounding name. The picture they published in yesterday’s paper is the same photo, the one with the new hairstyle. Taken in October, that time that Liidia and I went to the studio in town together.
Slim build, mid-length fair hair, grey eyes.
Maybe wearing a nylon sports top with striped sleeves, a short skirt and low-heeled shoes.
Has anyone seen her?
The ink spreads on the soft paper, the half-tone roughens the facial features. Eyes drown in fog like riverbanks in the early morning.
Wednesday 21 June
It barely gets dark any more.
Late this evening I was walking behind the kolkhoz meadow by the river, near Liidia’s house. Even on a hot summer’s day it’s still cool around the ford. Here the river runs deeper in its grassy bed, the sky meeting the earth as a reflection. The grass at the edge of the meadow that was trampled by the search parties has started to grow again.
I like it when the sky is high. Sometimes on early summer evenings, when it smells of freshly mown grass and moist soil between the kolkhoz apartment buildings, I look up, my head falls back and I fly or I fall. I fall into the sky. We had dandelion wreaths on our bouffant hair as we came from the river, the blue-pink sky filled the May night, and the trees had pushed out damp green leaves. As we tilted our heads back, Liidia’s yellow crown fell from her thick hair on to the rich spring grass.
Liidia didn’t come to the graduation ceremony or the maths exam. The militia came to school and to our house. And I went to the militia. I told them everything I knew about what she was planning. That she actually wanted to leave home and live her life.
Should I have told them about the photos? Liidia really was beautiful in those pictures, although I had to look away at first: she was so brave, her body so fearless. It was a different kind of beauty, one that was unfamiliar to me. Liidia, but viewed differently. Her sharp chin jutted towards the camera, covered with shadows and shaped by light, and the light and darkness were what created THIS Liidia, with the dark patterned curtain of the photo studio in the background.
And what if Liidia’s mum were to find them, I thought that afternoon as I quietly put the envelope back between the pages of the exercise book without telling Liidia.
They didn’t ask, though. Liidia, would you have wanted me to tell them?
Dark water twisted the blossoms of late lilacs as I climbed up the riverbank. Cold air burst from the riverbed like a deep breath, and for a moment I felt Liidia right here, next to me.
They didn’t ask, Liidia.
I didn’t ask.
The hay was still unmown in these meadows. The fog was gathering. My trainers were soaking wet from the evening dew when I got to the main road. The asphalt was still giving off the day’s heat, but I shivered as I crossed the road. There was a light on in the kitchen window of Liidia’s house. I walked closer along the narrow gravel road almost up to their spruce hedge. Liidia’s dad was sitting at the kitchen table and looking towards me through the dusty windowpane without seeing me. There, under the old and sparse hedge, my damp cheeks covered by the fragmented cobweb of Liidia’s dad’s blank stare, I no longer move. No one knocks on the window.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lilli Luuk (b. 1976) first appeared on the Estonian literature scene in 2017. Her debut short story ‘Auk’ (‘Hole’), published when she was still an unknown author, received the Friedebert Tuglas Short Story Award. A few years later the story ‘Kolhoosi miss’ (‘Miss Kolkhoz’; 2022) received the same distinction and was also nominated for the annual prize of the Literature Endowment of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. In 2023 Luuk received the Looming annual award for her short story ‘Mäed’ (‘Mountains’). Her first novel, Minu venna keha (My Brother’s Body), won third prize in a historical novel competition in 2022, was nominated for the A.H. Tammsaare Literary Prize and in 2023 Luuk was named Estonian Writer of the Year. Her second novel, Ööema (Night Mother), won the A.H. Tammsaare Literary Prize as well as the National Cultural Award of Estonia.