Paul Binding's review of Treading Air was published in the TLS of
June 20, 2003.
Jaan Kross; translated by Eric Dickens
TREADING AIR
346pp. Harvill. Paperback, £15.99.
1 84343 036 3
Jaan Kross and the lost lives of Estonians
What did he occupy himself with all those forty years?" the narrator of
Treading Air asks towards the end of his inquiry into the life and
achievements of his old schoolfriend, Ullo Paerand. The answers he arrives
at are at best sketchy, mere blueprints for the fuller biography which, he
knows, will always elude him. The exigencies of history have seen to this.
He begins another chapter with the admission: "I saw neither Ullo nor
Maret for ten years". These gaps, so irritating to the intellect, so
disturbing to the emotions, can be explained by the events that overtook the
Estonian people, but they also have meaning in themselves. Their very lack
of interesting detail symbolizes the bleak fate of a minority nation,
sandwiched between the rival powers of Germany and the USSR, whose culture
and inheritance simply didn't interest the rest of the world. One
achievement of Ullo Paerand's that would have been hailed as significant,
had history run differently, was his agonized wrestling with the wording of
the "Declaration of the Government of the Republic of Estonia to the
Estonian People", drawn up in September 1944:
"Today in a decisive moment for Estonia, the Government of the Republic
of Estonia has been created, which comprises representatives from all the
democratic parties of Estonia. Estonia has never voluntarily renounced its
independence or recognised either the Soviet or German occupation of our
country. In the present war, Estonia remains an entirely neutral state.
Estonia wishes to live as a sovereign nation in peace and fellowship with
all its neighbours and does not wish to support hostilities against either
of the warring powers."
Ullo goes over this text, in both Estonian and English, and reads it
thirty-nine times over the radio, worrying over word after word. "Decisive"?
Can something be "decisive" when it is strictly of the present and
has not yet had any consequences? Is "renounced" a suitable word
(in preference to "yielded" or "surrendered")
considering the violence of the opposition to an independent Estonian
nation? Ullo is working and broadcasting in that brief, doomed interval
between the retreat of the Germans and the re-occupation of his country by
Soviet Russia. But even as he considers the merits of the declaration's
terminology, the Red Army has pushed through the border town of Narva. So
should the hopes indulged in by Ullo and his like and the efforts they made
be written off as mere marginalia in Western history, as (at best)
sympathetic pieces of quixotry? This is an interpretation to which many
characters in Jaan Kross's considerable body of fiction incline.
Reality - especially for a novelist as attentive to the actual as Kross -
surely resides in the order of the day, in the network of political, civic
and commercial obligations from which individuals cannot extricate
themselves, no matter how strong their private dreams. Ullo, who has never
succeeded in altogether renouncing his earlier expectations of life, spends
his later years making cheap suitcases in a dreary factory. One part of him
- and one part perhaps of the narrator too - accepts this as the logical
consequence of entertaining hopes, born of a Platonic international code of
political beliefs, beyond his real national station. And yet, and yet . . .
. Our inability to arrive at any conclusion about these ineffective past
acts, pre-determined to fail, is now compounded by our thankful
acknowledgement of a free and democratic Estonia, imminent EU member, a new
state in which the elderly Kross has played a prominent part, politically
and culturally.
For Jaan Kross, born 1920, is by general consent Estonia's leading prose
writer (her leading poet is Jaan Kaplinski, born 1941), one who has shared
to a significant and intimate degree the experiences of both the biographer
narrator and his subject in Treading Air. His infancy coincided with the
infancy of the independent Estonian republic between the wars, a country
able to cherish its own language and to pursue pluralist, democratic ideals.
A brilliant student, Kross attended a prestigious grammar school, the
Westholm in Tallinn, which under the name of Wikman's has entered his
fiction.
Kross put his school at the centre of his novel, The Wikman Boys (1988), where
the classmates under scrutiny include Ullo Paerand himself; in Treading Air,
the two men meet there as boys. From Westholm Kross proceeded to study law
at the University of Tartu, an institution he has evoked - together with the
old city of which it is a part - throughout his oeuvre with a loving
richness of detail. The young Kross became a lecturer in Law, and the Law's
attempt, morally and aesthetically, to impose order where it was lacking is
a dominant theme in his fiction.
Perhaps its fullest expression is Professor Martens' Departure (1984), a
historical novel set in June 1909, whose central character (and narrator) is
an international lawyer of humble Estonian origins who has made himself
indispensable to the Russian government by advice on treaties, in particular
that concluding Russia's damaging war with Japan. Professor Martens, a man
of near inexhaustible ambiguity and half-acknowledged contradictions, is
under no illusion about the durability of what he has so carefully worked on
- in the world of international politics, the strong will succeed, the weak
will go under. And yet, if only for the time being, if only as ultimately
jettisoned currency, the satisfactorily coded treaty has its value, is worth
the time and intellectual energy spent on it. Yet - as the Professor makes
his long summer's day journey from the Estonian coast to St Petersburg and
memories come back to him with every change of the landscape, every major
station - his certainty that in our imperfect world we should aim for the
practicable "better" rather than the unrealizable "best"
is gravely shaken.
Perhaps then the madman's way is really preferable to the jurist's; in The
Czar's Madman (1978), another historical novel, the Estonian nobleman Timo,
in the ludicrous belief that the Emperor Alexander will welcome his plain
speaking, presents the ruler with a written denunciation not only of the
very notion of absolute monarchy but of his own handling of this
unjustifiable role. True, Timo's "mad" action leads to his
imprisonment, later commuted to house arrest in his native Estonian
countryside, and eventually to his murder, but it gives him an inner
integrity that the wily, jesuitical Professor Martens could never know. And
the same goes for the unhappy, frustrated Ullo Paerand.
Jaan Kross himself was no "politique". During the Soviet occupation
consequent on the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the young Kross involved himself
with Estonian independence and his activities led to his arrest by the
invading Nazi Germans in 1941. This first imprisonment was for a few months;
the Soviets, reoccupying in 1944, gave Kross a "5+5" custodial
sentence, first in a labour camp, then in working exile in Siberia, from
which he was freed in 1954. Those wishing to know more about Kross should
read The Conspiracy and Other Stories, to which the translator, Eric
Dickens, has contributed an invaluable introduction (as he has to his
version of Treading Air). These stories, which must be taken in sequence,
add up to a sort of fragmented novel of the fortunes of one Peeter Mirk, a
stand in for Kross, and like him a lawyer, an anti-reactionary nationalist
and internationalist, between 1939 and 1955. One of these stories, "The
Wound", deals with Peeter's involvement with a girl from a German-Balt
family who accepts Hitler's invitation for full repatriation in the Reich;
another, "The Conspiracy", describes Peeter's Soviet-ordered
prison life, focusing on an uncharacteristic but nevertheless disturbing act
of sadism by the protagonist, while "The Days Eyes Were Opened" is
about Peeter's return to his homeland, and his speculations as to whether he
can ever achieve any of his long-held hopes when both he and Estonia have
suffered such depredations.
Treading Air, which was first published in Estonia in 1998, is not of quite
the same artistic calibre as the other works by Kross which Harvill have
made available to us. This is mostly due to its cumbersome central narrative
device. Jaak the narrator has decided to interview the elderly Ullo for a
biography, but Ullo is an unreliable interviewee, and his life-story has to
be dragged out of him, in often quite unsatisfactory dribs and drabs. This,
of course, is consonant with the idea of the lost lives of Estonians of
their generation, but unfortunately it also ensures that the middle (and
longest) part of the book lacks any necessary sense of trajectory
(especially when compared to the wonderful intertwining of past and present
in Professor Martens' Departure, where the jurist's chronology-defying
memories on his train journey provide an enthralling forward movement). Ullo
is most promisingly introduced to us as a boy at Wikman's - long and thin
and small-headed, from an unsatisfactory family around which the winds of
scandal blow, a kind of Grand Meaulnes in waiting, an identity to be
vindicated in the moving later chapters which describe his work in the
Resistance, his bungled career as an amorist and his later humiliations.
But in the body of the novel the significance he is intended to have all but
disappears in the slow teasing out by Jaak of often less than galvanizing
information about too various events and whereabouts. Then there is also a
certain reductive starvation of the visual sense, again surprising in a
novelist remarkable for both his sense of place and his awareness of the
painter's art; Ullo's amorous life in particular suffers here. Eeva, Timo's
wife, in The Czar's Madman, is wonderfully caught; her beauty of gesture and
manner as well as of body pervades the entire novel, from her girlhood to
her dignified later years; and the love-interlude in Professor Martens'
Departure - his idyll with a Belgian painter after he has rescued her from a
railway crossing in which she has caught her shoe - has an erotic charm and
an emotional power. In comparison, Ullo's liaisons are perfunctorily
executed, and this diminishes his humanity. It is in the depiction of his
unrealized hopes and of his surrender to the drab round of assembly-line
work that Treading Air excels.
But whatever the novel's disappointing features, we cannot afford to pass it
by. The Czar's Madman is, I believe, of the same rank of achievement as
Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, a historical work that irradiates
subsequent periods because of the authoritative intensity of its grasp of
human motive. But all Jaan Kross's work is the product of a deeply
distinguished mind. Surely the Swedish Academy should give him the Nobel
Prize for Literature for which he has for some years been a deserving
candidate.
