:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

I went to the cinema last night to see ‘Sex and Death’, a collection of short films by Estonians. Merle warned me they’d be surreal, but I still wasn’t quite prepared.

The first started with a young man selling ice creams in a street cart. When he didn’t sell enough, his boss said he had other work for him and took him to a dinghy hotel room for a porn shoot. The girl he’d partner with was just as reluctant as him, but she dutifully spread her legs to have her hair trimmed while he took a shower. When the young man couldn’t get an erection during the dialogue, the director ordered the camerman to give him a blowjob, but even through his shame, he ejaculated before they could start shooting.

The second was of a wife who’d loved her husband until he had an accident and ended up in a wheelchair, at which time she’d started having an affair with a doctor friend and was expecting his baby. The doctor came to visit the couple socially and both the husband and wife, for their own reasons, asked the doctor to leave a needle full of morphine when he left. He did so grudgingly and the wife got drunk so she could commit the act. When the doctor arrived the next morning, he was delighted to find that the husband was still alive, but of course, when he went to share his joy with the wife, he found her dead with a big smile.

The third began with soldiers in a trench, bizarrely firing to both sides. One of their number was shot and died with his finger on the trigger. A stray bullet took the life of the hero’s twin brother. When all were dead, the hero picked up his brother and began the walk home (presumably). Along the way, he heard strange sounds and was shot at from all directions. One night, his brother was taken while he slept. When he followed the drag marks the following morning, he found his brother in a field of dead soldiers. ‘You’re not like the others,’ he told the dead brother. ‘You can get up and walk again. See, you’ll be able to walk when I can fly. I’ll show you.’ He ran around the field with arms outstretched until he was exhausted, stopping with his back to his brother. The brother got up, picked up the gun and shot him. As the camera panned around, the whole field was full of dead soldiers in parade formation.

The last was a couple who fought because he was too boring for her. In the showdown, she said she wanted to be fucked by Black Peter’s big black cock. He got drunk. She fell asleep. He went out to find a black man to do the job. She woke up screaming, he pulled a knife, the black man ran off and the couple made some kind of peace.

We all needed a drink after that, so we went to a bar called ‘the Hairdressers.’

The beautiful Russian Orthodox church stands on the highest point of the upper town, but the Estonians don’t think it’s beautiful. It’s a reminder of the occupation, when Russia decided to ‘save’ them from German occupation, only to create their own. And it’s built on the grave site of the father of one of Estonia’s national heroes. ‘Everyone knows you can’t build on a grave site,’ Merle told me with a smirk. ‘We’re all waiting for him to roll over in his grave and bring the whole building crashing down.’

Merle took me for a walk around the old town, telling me legends, but also her personal history with the Singing Revolution. She’d held hands in the line across the Baltic states looking for independence. More frighteningly, her father and brother had stood on the hill in upper town on the night the Russian army responded to a call for help from the Parliament House. Thousands of Estonians had stood in the square between the Russian Orthodox church and the Parliament House, singing national songs and songs of freedom.

When the tanks arrived, they found the one road up the hill blocked by large boulders so the soldiers had to leave their tanks and walk. They stood in line with their guns pointed at the locals, waiting for a cause to shoot. The Estonians gave them none, all focussed on their singing. Eventually an Estonian representative was allowed to talk with Gorbachev and negotiated their independence. The Russian army left without a shot being fired.

A couple of nights ago, we went to a concert in the main square of Tallinn. A Slovenian industrial band called Stroj Machine created their own earthquake through the old town. Eleven people hammered away at 44 gallon drums, keyed compressed air through a ring of flutes, blew tubes of metal welded into trumpets and wound air-raid sirens. I’d have bought an album if I had the space and was sure they’d be as interesting on a recording as they were live.

We met a few of Merle’s friends and went to a bar to talk and listen to a Spanish jazz band. There, we started talking about anthropology. One of the friends, a man from Colombia who’s studying anthropology, said that he’d seen little interaction between the Russians and Estonians since he arrived (50% of the population are Estonian and 40% are Russians) and when they did interact, it was generally with animosity. Merle, who’s spent years doing PR for the country, disputed this, saying that cultural communities within a mixed society were common everywhere and if they didn’t interact, there was no problem.

The Danes were losing the battle for Estonia, their knights being held back by Estonian farmers at the place where the wall now stands. They had to get up the hill and into the flag tower which would signify their victory, but they couldn’t break through the defences put up by the locals. They’d all but given up when a flag, red with a white cross, fell from the heavens. Inspired by the sign from their god, they doubled their efforts and broke through to conquer Estonia. The flag remains their national symbol to this day.

‘Oh, don’t you know about the legend of the maiden?’ asked a girl in a cream hooded cloak.

Merle shook her head with me. She’d told me that the Old Town was divided into the upper section (Danish landowners) and lower section (Estonian and Danish merchants) who didn’t get on. The girl in the cloak sat at the bottom of a wall that separated the two.

She continued in a sing-song Scandanavian accent. ‘Well, there were bunch of maidens staying in that tower and one of them fell in love with a knight from the upper side, but they had to be secretive about their affair because they came from enemy sides. So one night, the girl took a lantern and walked along the wall to where her lover would be. It was a windy night and her lantern went out and she fell to her death. She’s up in the tower still.’

Estonia is far enough north to have a midnight sun and even now, in late May, the city of Tallinn was bathed in light as we landed at 11pm. It’s been a mild winter, according to Merle, but summer hasn’t brought the expected warmth. A northerly wind today gave the city both blue skies and an icy disposition as I wandered the old town, hearing the stories. Merle says that there are many stories about every building in the old town and I learned a few from her and from the costumed locals scattered around town. More to come on those stories.

On the plane, I’d read an article by an English tour operator who was disappointed with Estonia’s lack of commitment to their tourism industry. They had a lot to offer, he said, but if shops close two days each week, tourists wouldn’t hang around to see it. I haven’t been here long enough to see the shops shut, but the commitment is apparent in the costumes people wear in the old town and the smiles they throw to all the tourists make it look like they enjoy the fancy dress. A woman in a red and black cloak mans the entrance to the Town Hall Tower (64m up to a bell tower overlooking the main square). Girls in burgandy robes encourage tourists to come try the monks’ cooking. Men in white shirts and braces serve at a traditional restaurant and a girl in a hooded cloak sits at the bottom of the Maiden’s Tower, telling of the legend of the maiden.

My only disappointment is that, according to another article, the locals have all abandoned the city to the tourists and fled to their traditional place in the countryside, so I don’t know which of the people I see about town are truly Estonian. It will be good to get out to one of the 1500 islands this weekend to see something more definitely local.

My brother had arranged to take a Jack the Ripper tour with a friend, so I joined them for a night in stereotypical English weather. The guide was a Beefeater, who had a great knowledge of the city and a flair for story telling. He took us to each of the murder sites, described the environment and atmosphere as it would have been in the late 1800s and gave a summary background of each of the victims.

He threw in a conspiracy theory about the then King, the Freemasons and an illegal affair, but the real interest was the victims themselves. All prostitutes, they were generally in their forties because they weren’t attractive enough to work the centre of town. None of the murders was exactly the same, though there were clues to tie them all together. The key characteristics were placement of the arms and legs, the skirt rolled up to bare the pubic region and a double slit of the throat. The killer seemed to get more confident and more brutal with each killing until the last had her innards stomped into the dirt floor of her flat. Jack was almost caught one night when a passerby saw his feet when he first discovered the body. Jack left the mutilation incomplete and picked up another prostitute, who he proceded to butcher neatly in less than 14 minutes.

The surprise for me was that he stopped at five women. To have a reputation like he has, I assumed he’d murdered twenty people. The conspiracy theory explains this, and seems to be the only theory that explains all the other facts – as they were presented by the guide. But I guess we’ll never know.

I got a lift with Jahnavi and Scott to Paris on Sunday, after lunch at Sabine’s parents’ own little manor, ready to catch the train to England on Monday. The roads got wider but more congested the closer we got to Paris until it took as long to do the last fifty kilometres as it had the first two hundred.

With all the time I’ve spent in France, I’ve never bought a souvenir. I’ve never been interested in trinkets that I can hang on the wall, so I dragged my friends into town on the Sunday morning to find a shop that sold red wine goblets. A small store on a sharp corner did the trick. It carried a bizarre range of stock from boomerangs to silver platters and in the front window sat a box of four glass goblets of the type I was looking for. I wanted at least six glasses, but the lady behind the counter quickly informed me that she only had the four. In the end, I took a box of six taller, narrower goblets that were somewhere between glass and crystal. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but she tapped one on the counter to show how strong it was.

Once again, the lady was extremely friendly and helpful, speaking French unless it was obvious I didn’t understand. And she went out of her way to package them for the trip home – bubble wrapping each glass, padding around the first box inside a second – all at no extra cost. Perhaps it’s only the Parisians who are so unfriendly to outsiders.