Fiction by Mati Unt
Estonia

We, Actors and Writers When fall comes, when I see the colors of the end of August on the ground and in the sky, all I can think of is mushroom gathering. I am in the woods for days on end; in the evenings I marinate or fry parasol mushroom cutlets or puffball roasts. I'm the richest mushroom gatherer in these parts, because I pick up all edible mushrooms, whereas the choice of the others is limited to golden-flesh boleti, green russulas, and milk mushrooms. Even champignons are regarded hereabouts as worthless, not to mention false death caps (by the way, there was a time when I was afraid of picking these because a German specialist warned me against them). I leave behind neither wood blewits nor maned agarics; blushers, too, fit the bill. Parasol mushrooms and puffballs were mentioned earlier. I am especially fond of violet blewits (or masked tricholoma), large waxen mushrooms, children of the late autumn. In connection with these, I have a particular memory. I was a rather small boy, and twilight was already setting in when I came to a spruce forest, an old spruce forest without any vegetation, where it was even darker than under the aspens, and there on a thick layer of needles I saw a large magic circle of violet blewits. I knew that upon the approach of night the dark powers, the fays and witches, the werewolves and forest fairies would begin from here their flight to the sabbat. Then an oriole cried out nearby. I crouched under a fir and stared in the dusk at the broken, seemingly fluorescent circle. When will the lightning flash? When will they, whom our earthly eye ordinarily never sees, fly thunderingly into the sky on a broom? But then the oriole cried even more threateningly and I got up and ran through the woods, which were getting quite perceptibly darker; it was as if someone were pursuing me, and at the gate of our house stood mother and aunt Ella, who had come for a visit from the city, and all were worried: how had I strayed so far away.--In the morning aunt Ella, who slept in the loft, said that she had heard a long drawn-out rattle, and she had decided that the love-crazed cats were shoving at the partition door of the loft. But father, who had been to a neighbor in the morning, said that a truck with its headlights off had driven about in the forest at night and that several bursts of an automatic had been fired from it into the woods. "And I thought that the cats were shoving at the door," repeated aunt Ella pointlessly.--Yesterday, however, when I again happened among the violet blewits, the following story came to me as if by itself. We are in the mushroom forest, my friend Soorang, the actor, and I. We walk and chatter about the fact that the season begins in the fall; the actor tells stories about women. Both our baskets are half full and neither of us seems to remember that there's a war on, that our country is more or less occupied. And so, in the middle of a luscious mushroom outing, soldiers of the hostile country appear from behind a bush and take us away. Carrying our baskets of mushrooms, we arrive at a staff tent hidden deep in the forest. With a nudge in the back, we are pushed inside and stand in front of an officer. I gaze at the occupant's uniform, his glasses and sparse beard, and try to remember what's familiar about him. And suddenly I realize that before me stands the famous writer and essayist John Bauer, whom I saw a few years before the war in the capital at a conference on aesthetics. I remember John Bauer's lecture, which was cold-blooded and sober about the situation, despite his search for a third possibility. Now then, forcibly conscripted, I reflect and feel relieved. I address him; he is astonished, but soon he smiles; yes, he too remembers sharp clashes between the differing aesthetic schools. But I have to shoot you, he adds; weapons silence the muses; law is law; and you have penetrated into the territory of our secret weapon. Actor Soorang interferes, jumps forward and announces that he has played the lead in Bauer's drama The Black Lily. Bauer, who was ready to have us taken away, stops, looks at Soorang with his short-sighted humanist's eyes and presses his hand. They talk about the details of the production, but I am feverishly thinking of what to do. Finally I interrupt their discussion: "Sir, before you stands the translator of The Black Lily." "Oh," says Bauer, and looks at me intently with his penetrating eyes. "Really?" I nod, whereupon he suddenly asks what the first sentence of the third act is. Naturally I am unable to reply. He asks what is the opening of the play. "This famous sentence," he reiterates, and Soorang nods. I do not answer and Soorang does not prompt me. Bauer smiles sadly: he has been deceived, again deceived; he smiles one more time, even more sadly, and calls a soldier. Soorang says farewell to me with a deep bow. He respects me, a man condemned to death. But John Bauer does not even look my way when I am taken on my last journey. Such thoughts come to me while gathering violet blewits, now already several days in succession, in the same dell, under the same firs. Later I go home, I marinate the mushrooms, and I serve them in the city when my friends come to visit me, including the actor Soorang, and when all the visitors have left, I take a small leatherbound volume from the shelf and read the works of John Bauer, those short, spell-binding plays that synthesize with a strange simplicity the political sharpness of Brecht and the pathetic mysticism of Claudel. The Everdying Farm Across the river from my father's house, on the slope of a glacial ridge, stands an abandoned, decaying farm, in which I have been interested for quite some time. Walking in the marshy forest on this side of the river, I always had my camera with me, and I took many pictures of the house with a telephoto lens. I remembered the time when the farm still lived. I used to pass it often and feared the vicious, as if intentionally unchained dog. I have always feared dogs. I already feared them in the first grade, on the way to school, everywhere. I passed every farm with dogs with a wide detour over the fields, often, moreover, with a stick in my hand and stones in my pocket. I also feared the German shepherd on this, the by now decayed farm. I climbed on tiptoe through the nettles so as not to awaken the dog, so as to reach the narrow plank over the stream where dogs do not follow because without special training they have poor balance. But occasionally this dog's barking brought us glad tidings from across the river: visitors from the city were coming by bus. Now I was photographing this farm from a distance with a telephoto lens, but I did not as yet go near it. That happened several years later. I was walking around my native village with a new companion who was interested in collecting antiques, especially chairs, but also other old things. One cloudy and windy August evening we went to the decayed farm. We almost fell into the cellar hole which was covered with grass reaching to our chests. The wind was making the white rye fields undulate; thick clouds were passing over us when we reached the steps of the house. I knew that an old alcoholic, who was finally killed in a tavern brawl, had spent the end of his days at the farm, but only now was his home exposed to us in all its hideousness. Dirty, malodorous items of clothing flowed out of open drawers, mold blossomed in spray cans, a sooty layer of grease covered the dishes. The floor was littered with tattered textbooks. My companion kept his head and rummaged avidly in the smelly trash until he pulled out a coffee mill. He passed it to me and I tried to turn it, but the shaft had gotten stuck. Then I felt an unexpected physical revulsion against my companion, which has never left me. Suddenly I realized that we were in the stomach of a cadaver, the inside of a corpse. It got dark behind the windows, but the field stayed magically white: the ripe grain was already spilling. A few drops fell on the dusty windowpane. I had forgotten my flashlight. Did someone breathe? All houses, also living houses, breathe. I knew that from the time I was a child. We had to leave; I could no longer distinguish what was happening in the dusky corners. We stepped into the rainy evening, a musty taste on our tongues, our hands slimy; my companion carried the rusty coffee mill. I did not dare look back. I was afraid I would see someone. I know that there never is anyone, but a hallucination can frighten even someone who has studied its causes at the university. Later I hatched a thought.--I remembered an American underground film in which San Francisco (or more precisely the bay and harbor) was being filmed from a hilltop. For days only a few frames per hour were being shot. The consequence was the following spectacle: on the gigantic bay below little ships, ocean liners and cruisers are swarming. They flash in and out of the bay: plop, they're in; flick, they're out. We, however, are like God. We look from above, without interfering, without getting ourselves mixed up in the business, but our overview of the thing is simply horrifying, and suddenly we understand in a flash that we are in actual control of this pandemonium, that we are its beginning and end. We realize that the world is our handiwork. In our hands is the trumpet that will signal the day of judgement, but we will not blow, we will not blow for quite some time. We are caught in overall contemplation. That was the underground film. Thinking of the farm, it became clear to me that it would never die. As much as I saw it in the course of five years, it was always dying, but it did not die. One should film that house, a few frames per hour, through night and day, in the spring, summer, autumn and winter. In the completed film we would see the farm on the slope of the glacial ridge, in the middle of a field. The sun would rise and set, the grass would sprout and wither, the snow would fall and melt, but the dying farm would be deathless in its dying, and with this it would finally be proven that progression is simultaneously movement and stasis. But leaving aside the fact that no one would finance it, leaving aside the fact that the result would probably be too meaningless and esoteric even for a benevolent snob and that the impression would bore even me the next day, the film will never be made for the simple reason that I myself, in my opinion, have many more important things to do than to spend a whole year making aesthetic calculations behind a camera in the boondocks. I live in cities. I lack the enthusiasm of the Italian director who put a bomb in a bar in order to film the disaster and who cried real tears when his wife accidentally died in the explosion, but who did not forget to call over his shoulder to his assistant: film how I am crying! I look upon the plains and wait for the hour when new measuring stakes spring up there overnight, I sense the approach of bulldozers, I hear the shouts of bricklayers. I will soon be thirty years old. Translated from the Estonian by Maire Jaanus and Mardi Valgemae