Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter

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СКАЧАТЬ I could see people queuing, waiting to test loaves in the bread racks. The drumbeat of dripping water was punctuated by the slamming of the heavy wooden door to the bread store as people left with their purchases. A little bit further down the same street, I passed a dimly lit café where, through a gauze curtain, I could see pensioners carrying their tin trays to metal tables and an old crone mopping up the broken tiles on the floor. I entered a quiet alleyway that ran along the city wall. At last, I came to a cul de sac where I was surprised to see an old woman with a few wisps of scraggly gray hair, a lined face and a dazed look in her wide open eyes. She stood motionless in the rain holding a tin can filled with pencils and made no effort to speak, looking past me as if I wasn’t there.

      Shortly before ten I returned to the hotel where a group of Finnish tourists were showing the effects of heavy drinking. Finally, I walked to the door and glanced behind me. On the upper mezzanine, I saw the man with the attaché case.

      At ten o’clock, I met Ratas at the Tallinna Kaubamaja. “They’re following you!” he said, his face completely contorted. “Be here tomorrow, two o’clock.”

      The next morning I went with my guide to an agricultural institute outside Tallinn. The meeting lasted for several hours. I excused myself from the lunch that had been prepared and left the institute at 1 pm.

      As we rode back to Tallinn, I tried to imagine how to meet the dissidents without being followed. Suddenly, I recalled a rundown hotel in the Old City called the Hotel Baltika that I had noticed the previous night. As we approached the Old City, I asked the driver to leave me off at this hotel. There was a moment of confusion but the guide agreed that the driver could stop there.

      I got out of the car. I then cut back through a small park and started to climb the stone steps to the Upper City. Factories and railroad lines, the yellow cranes of Tallinn harbor and rows of brown and grey Soviet apartment blocks spread out before me. Glancing back, I turned and saw a man in a silver jacket at the bottom of the steps climbing rapidly. I hurried along a narrow path between the stone houses. Looking back again, I saw that my pursuer had reached the top of the steps. I turned into the entryway of a Lutheran church where an official Soviet guide, mistaking me for a tourist, began to describe the torture of heretics that had been performed there.

      I left the church, turned down a cobbled path between two stone walls and then hurried across a broad square. My pursuer appeared from around a corner. Finally, in desperation, I turned and began to advance on him. When he realized that I was coming toward him, he quickly turned his back. I changed directions and doubled back behind one of the government buildings and made my way to the wall of the Upper City. I began going down the steps, watching for my pursuer. To my surprise, I did not see him. I plunged into the crowded streets of the Old City and flagged down a cab. With 15 minutes to go before the scheduled meeting, I arrived at the Tallinna Kaubamaja, where scores of people were stepping through the slush. There were old, fat women with canes, young women with pallid faces and stringy blonde hair, nondescript men in worn overcoats and, off to one side, the old woman with the can of pencils whom I had encountered the previous night.

      At exactly 2 pm, Ratas appeared on the street and led me to a nearby courtyard. He said that KGB agents were everywhere and the group had decided that it was too dangerous for us to meet in Tallinn. They wanted to meet not in Tallinn but in Moscow. I asked Ratas if he had reached Kalnins to tell him about the loss of my notes. He said “our friends” had been informed.

      The train for Moscow left as darkness fell and I was relieved to see that my companion in the compartment was a woman engineer in her 50’s with a dark mustache. As we rode to Moscow, I tried to restore my notes from memory, adding to them and elaborating on them.

      The next few days in Moscow were uneventful. Life assumed its previous rhythm. I began to think that the events in the Baltics were an aberration and maybe even, to some extent, the product of my imagination. One night, about a week after I had gotten back, I decided to call Kestutis in Vilnius although I had no doubt that Udam had already told him what happened on the Riga to Tallinn train. I called from the central telegraph office reaching him at the institute where he worked as an archivist.

      After I described the loss of my suitcase, there was silence at the other end of the line. “What happened” Jokubynas asked, “were you drunk?” “Kestutis,” I said, “We have to be careful. They may be listening.” “Oh, yes,” Kestutis said and then his voice began to tremble. “They’re listening. Of course, they’re listening. They’re listening to every word.” With that I broke off the conversation and promised to call him again.

      A week passed and there was no word from anyone in the Baltics until one night I received a frantic call from someone who said he had to meet me and was waiting in front of the Puppet Theater across the street from my apartment on the Ring Road. I didn’t recognize the caller’s voice and after the affair in the Baltics, I was wary of provocation. But I decided to go. When I pulled up in my car, I saw Antanas Terleckas and Ints Tsalitis.

      We got into my car and began looking for a place to talk. It was too dangerous to talk in an apartment and we would have had to queue for hours to get into a café. Finally, after driving around for half an hour, we adjourned to the stairwell of a building on Leninsky Prospect.

      Neither Terleckas nor Tsalitis appeared upset about the consequences for them of the loss of my suitcase. They were more concerned to make sure that I did not lose the opportunity to write about nationalism, particularly in Lithuania. During the next hour, they repeated to me the information that I had received in the Baltics, much of which I had already reconstructed from memory. When my notes were complete, we left the building and went for a ride in my car.

      “The one thing you’ll never find,” Terleckas said as we drove, “or at least almost never find is a Russian who is willing to recognize a small people’s right to its own country. If you talk about Lithuania, they say that’s our Russian land, our country.”

      I remarked to Antanas that I liked the Russian people. “They are good, sweet, kind people,” he replied, “but it doesn’t occur to them that the Lithuanians consider Lithuania to be their country and want to be able to live in it without them.”

      “By the way,” Tsalitis said. “Why didn’t you meet our friends in Estonia?” Below us, Moscow was a carpet of apartment lights broken by the shadows of gothic government skyscrapers. “They called me and wanted to know why you never contacted them.”

      “Who called you?”

      “The Estonian nationalists, Udam, Ratas …”

      “They said I never contacted them?”

      “Yes.”

      “Ints, I spent two days in Tallinn with Udam and Ratas. I’m expecting them to meet them here. Did either of you get a telephone call from Estonia telling you that my suitcase with the notes on Latvia and Lithuania had been stolen?”

      “No,” Tsalitis said, “we heard about it from Kestutis.” I pulled the car over to the side of the road. A light snow began to fall and the snowflakes seemed to hang immobile in the arcs of light cast by the streetlamps.

      I turned to look at Tsalitis and Terleckas who were sitting in the back seat. “If I didn’t spend those two days with Udam and Ratas,” I said, “then who did I spend them with?”

      There was silence in the car.

      “Do you mean?”

      Antanas smiled. “They’re clever. You’ve got to hand them that.”

      “Yes,” СКАЧАТЬ