Something was bound to happen.

That year, as every other year, there were lots of signs and omens to influence those prepared to be influenced by them. Yet the autumn brought an extremely bounteous harvest of mushrooms; it had been a long time since there had been ceps in such abundance. There were too many apples, too; they kept falling into the grass all through the night, the canneries and juice presses could not cope with the enormous quantities of them, and large heaps of fruit were affected by rot. Several airplanes were hijacked in the wide world, although it was an offence widely condemned and severely punished. Despite the population increase, the afternoons were strangely quiet. All of it taken together was somehow reminiscent of life, but it also tended to put a body on guard, and Eero, as always, had a presentiment of evil.

On June 26, a driverless Diesel locomotive drove out of a railway station near the city. The engineer, or his assistant, had jumped off the moving engine for a moment, but hadn't been able to jump back on subsequently. The engine broke the barrier at the gate of the factory, drove on to the junction, and then continued along the trunk line leading toward the city, only to meet a passenger train going at 80 kilometres an hour head on. But the engineer of the latter kept his cool. Seeing the approaching engine, he managed to stop his train and reverse its direction. The two engines touched only after their speeds were more or less the same. Thus the accident was avoided at the very last moment. This happened a couple of days after Midsummer Day. A fortnight later another strange thing took place.

They visited a colleague of theirs on his anniversary, in a beautiful backwoods village in southern Estonia down near the Latvian border. They conversed the whole night through on melancholy topics to the accompaniment of Bach's music, coaxed out of a pipe by a tall, bearded man. Later, they went out into the yard and listened to the nightingales, to their strange panting song–by then it was already beginning to get light. No one slept a wink. It was early morning and bright and hot outside when they began to take their leave. The host wanted to see them to the station, but his wife wouldn't let him go, which was the right thing to do. They left at six, with the wide blue sky above them. The flowers gave off a pungent aroma, but everybody had forgotten their names, to say nothing of the Latin ones. A bearded man, a former opera tenor dubbed Marino Marini whose real name was Mortenson sang in a loud voice among the fields, performing arias unsuitable to him, for example the Night Queen's part for soprano from The Magic Flute, including the place where the Night Queen orders Pamina to kill Sarastro. But he soon wearied After a short while, his high spirits and frolicking died away. He walked gloomily on alongside his comrades, failing even to shout greetings to passers-by or to wish more elbow grease to collective farmers going to work, the way the others did. He didn't respond to the jokes made at his expense. It came to light only at the railway station of the town of Valga which they finally reached, and at which they intended to take the train back to the city. They had already bought their tickets and were walking toward the train across the wide platform. But halfway there Marino Marini suddenly vanished into thin air, silently, though he had been right beside the others only a split-second before. It was as if he hadn't been there at all–a thought which couldn't help flashing through the tired minds of his companions. They began to look for him though, merrily at first, and then more and more anxiously; they searched both the station and the train. Marini wasn't there. What's gone is gone, his friends decided, their thoughts taking a fatalistic turn, and so they simply hopped on the train. The opera singer was gone a couple of days. Oh, the accusations his wife showered his friends with! Mortenson was believed dead when he reappeared and told his story. Some kind of a shadow had fallen on him. In the afternoon he had found himself deep in Latvian territory. He had been sleeping in an old village cemetery between some graves grown over with grass. The inscriptions were in Latvian, Marino Marini said, that's how I knew I was in a strange place. But as the border between Estonia and Latvia is open, the incident caused no trouble at all. A kind-hearted collective farmer had driven him back to the Estonian border in his car. It appeared that the singer had walked close to thirty kilometres in the heat. The only possible explanation was a case of pathological intoxication. It's a wonder the Latvians didn't knock you off, one of his friends remarked earnestly, God knows what you told them on the way, what you incited them to do, and what you sang. I think I kept quiet, Marini replied, as far as I know, I just walked, dumb and quiet, until the coolness of the graveyard lulled me to sleep.

At the same time there was an earthquake in China. There had been earthquakes already in Guatemala and on the Karmadec Islands and in Triaul. A Palestine camp was taken in Beirut, with tens of thousands of people killed. In Estonia the earth didn't quake that year. Instead, the Estonian television sponsored a competition to discover new Estonian writers, because they were growing scarcer–up till then, that small people had boasted a large number of writers. Hope had not utterly vanished, however: the TV appeal was answered by 296 budding writers, of which 18 per cent were boys and 82 per cent girls.

In an open space on the outskirts of the city a group of objects of art was erected, deserving general attention. Sven Grünberg's band played at the opening ceremony. Eero, too, attended the opening. He looked at the red-striped tubes stuck into the ground with a sensuous eye. He took delight in the moving, quivering objects. Some of them emitted sounds, inspiring the art loving Eero with an urge to engage in natural, free behaviour. Looking at the fountain-shaped object which squirted out real water, Eero felt an irresistible desire to realize his novel sense of internal freedom in outward natural behaviour, and to drink from the object's enticing spout. He did so, but noticed that afterwards the flow decreased: the healthy squirting decreased to a mere trickle. It had occurred to him too late that the object was not connected to the water main: the circuit in it was definitely a closed one. Through his natural behaviour Eero had disrupted the natural function of the object. A dissonance developed between Eero and modern art, as he walked along a dirt road from the objects toward the city.

Eero was a poet. He wrote verse, although he didn't know for whom. The reviewers also pointed out that his poems were often not addressed to anyone in particular. This was a cause of serious worry to Eero, for addressing his poems to no one was not what he intended. He had an address himself, the sender's address, but he didn't know the address of the receiver. The streets were crowded with people, but Eero was afraid to ask them if they had read his poetry and what they thought of it. He was afraid of hearing a negative answer.

July 6th marked the 500th anniversary of the death of Regiomontanus, a German mathematician and astrologer. Eero wasn't familiar with astrology; true, he had made an attempt to learn something about it at the university, but he never got anywhere. Thus Regiomontanus's jubilee, a significant day to many, meant nothing to him.

He lived on the sixth floor of a large prefab in the centre of the Mustamäe housing development amid other similar houses, sharing his building with several hundred other people. He didn't know those people, with the exception of a few whose more interesting or individual appearance he had remembered from the street in front of the house, from the yard or from the lift. (Once he'd been jammed in a lift with a married couple for two hours, feeling a common shortage of air and a common urge to. pass water, which was even more embarrassing.) All the people he knew by sight knew him, too, but they didn't show it in any way, and Eero responded similarly. There was one very sympathetic old man whom Eero had kept on greeting very stubbornly at first, he didn't know why; but the old man was superstitious and didn't greet him back, so Eero soon gave up–why frighten such a nice grandpa by bidding him good day?

So Eero knew his surroundings above all as a townscape crowded with moving figures.

True, life made itself felt sometimes. Shouts could be heard now and then: one person called out to another. An airplane flew low over the house, blinking its lights. Yet the district was rather a quiet one. The big thoroughfare passed 'behind the houses, and the noise of the motors didn't reach the fields. It was particularly quiet in winter, when the children stayed indoors. Sometimes when he opened the window, Eero could sense the smells of humans. When the window of the flat below his was open, he felt a warm ascending current, and smelled perfume and soup. Someone lived there. But he knew nothing else about him. Someone lived behind the wall, too, and above him. But they were all quiet people. They seldom shouted. No one below, beside or above Eero had ever shouted yet. The prefabs were pretty large, yet Eero fully agreed with Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher, that the houses were big indeed, but one couldn't say they were tall, because they lacked a vertical measurement, which was one of the most important things that made a house a house. Namely, they had no cellars with rats, snakes or dragons creeping about–or any other chthonian creatures to stir the depths of psyches. Likewise they had no lofts where the nearness of the sky would evoke noble thoughts, where the spirit could live free in the attic. The flats had merely been stacked one on top of the other. And because the houses were compact and strongly rooted to the ground they were not dependent on the environment and had no bonds with the cosmos. Storms didn't shake their walls. Gusts of thunderstorm didn't carry away their roofs.

Yet Eero loved to watch the monsters he invariably found in his field of vision every morning. He felt a sort of affinity toward them when he regarded them simply as large nameless objects in changing light and weather. The human element had been eliminated, the individual one caused no confusion, taste had no role to play, only pure form remained. They were large rectangular boxes in a field, huge sculptured monuments. Eero wasn't one of the antiurbanists. He didn't yearn for a house with a thatched roof. He found the high-rise neighbourhood had its moods and secrets. He watched the awaking and dying of the play of shadows on the crude walls of the prefabricated sections. He found that indirectly, the cosmos revealed itself even there, treating even the plainest texture with welcome kinship. Eero didn't despise the city as such. He found in the city a rhythm fascinating in its oppressiveness, a strain distressing in its power, and some bitter joys. This also made up part of the world, didn't it? People went to Egypt to see the pyramids, or climbed the Eiffel Tower–yet this city, too, had some sensations to offer. One just had to be a little susceptible, to open oneself just a bit to the surrounding world. One had to approach the window.

On hot summer days, the sections of the wall blinded Eero; they resembled white desert towns in the Sahara where Eero had never been, but which he had often seen in his mind's eye. Toward evening, the wall sections wilted, still offering some interesting sensations of shade and hue. Sometimes the houses stood in stark sunlight, but the sky above them was black with a rising thundercloud. Then the building was like a white island of hope before destruction and chaos. Sometimes at sunset, the black silhouette of the house was frightening in its urbanistic brutality; it evoked majestic but dismal thoughts. After storms, the buildings looked weird–sometimes patchy with snow, sometimes black with rainwater–like ruins, like the monuments of an extinct culture, like an excavated jungle town.

There were plenty of secrets inside the houses, too. The lifts clicked on their wayward tracks, cats stared at the passersby with their burning eyes; new names, one stranger than the other, were written on the name plates in place of the old ones that had been wiped out. On the staircase, now and then Eero had the feeling that someone might grab him by the shoulder from behind. A reader of poetry? He would switch on all the lights before and after him, calming down only after he had slipped into his own flat by some stroke of good luck. Eero was quite certain that there were house ghosts living in his prefab, but only in areas of common use. Staircases and halls were not sacred territory. There, you were not in, you were still out, in the everyday world. And whatever was out was also unsacred, as could be felt from the smell: only the cats urinated there, marking off their animal territories. People urinated in the lifts, which was an intermediate, neutral territory, a borderland where it was still possible to meet demons. The demons weren't necessarily malicious, but in any case, they could be very subtle, to paraphrase Einstein. They were so subtle as not to assume the common well-known shapes, but prefer obscure forms of expression and incarnation. The cricket had been replaced by the cockroach, and the weasel by the rat. Some demons had fairly innocent appearances–just try and find out who they were. The mythologies of several ethnic groups maintained that the house ghosts looked like their masters, for whom did the ordinary tom cat searching for scraps in the dustbin resemble? Whom did the noble Siamese, the only one of its kind, resemble? They looked like people.

Eero preferred to stay in the warm, comfortable flat where he did his work which was of no real benefit to the people.

August Kask lived in the same house as Eero, but on the ninth floor. His point of view was an elevated one and his field of vision was wide. Eero didn't know August Kask, nor did August Kask know Eero. They had most probably met, but with no results for the time being. Kask didn't confine himself to an impressionistic observation of the surroundings. He loved preciseness and had done some statistics, Without anyone except his conscience ever having asked it of him.

There was another building the size of his own opposite his. Its windows were divided into nine lines, counting from bottom to top (the house had nine floors), and into thirty-two vertical lines, counting from left to right. Consequently, this side of the building (the one facing Kask) had two hundred and eighty-eight separate rooms, as did the side of Kask's house facing the opposite house. (Kask knew for sure that his house had two sides, but the other house could very well be only a painted facade, for all he cared.) Two hundred and eighty-eight counting only the living rooms–not taking into account the WC's, bathrooms, halls and built-in cupboards. Sixteen of the vertical lines also had balconies at the windows (which made one hundred and forty-four balconies altogether, and consequently, an equal number of rooms with a balcony). Clothes were usually drying on a couple dozen balconies–the number remaining constant–only it wasn't the same balconies all the time; however, most had the potential for fulfilling such a function, having been provided with clothes-lines. Special balcony flowers grew on forty-two balconies (some of them were present in the summer months only, as they were annuals, or were taken inside for the winter). Skis stood on twenty-five balconies of the 144. On four balconies, more serious attempts had been made to change their appearance: the view had been obstructed with a large, elaborate trellis to support climbing plants, or curtains had been put up to screen off the whole balcony, etc. To the children's delight, or at least with children in mind, some Walt Disney characters had been painted on the interior walls of three balconies. Beside that building was a five-storey one with twenty vertical lines of windows, and consequently, with one hundred windows and one hundred living rooms on this side. That house had thirty balconied rooms (on this side), but August Kask collected no other statistics about it, because a birch grove hid some of the windows from his view. All in all, Kask could see eighteen houses (including the farthest roofs), of which seven had five and eleven had nine storeys. Between the houses was a lawn; above the houses was the sky.

August Kask was a barber. Almost all people had hair to be cut, though that didn't exclude the possibility that it might fall out later. Its colour depended on the same pigment found in human skin, namely, melanin, which determined the degree of darkness of the hair. Hair was usually black, light hair occurring only in some European and Australian peoples (although absolutely white hair didn't exist, even in albinoes). August Kask loved his work, but naturally he didn't know how great the mythological importance of hair was. Neither did he know anything about the Bible, so he didn't have the slightest idea who Samson and Delilah were. He knew that prisoners', conscripts' and schoolboys' hair was shorn or shaved in quite a few civilizations: he'd likewise heard that hair was cut on marriage, but he'd heard nothing of the archaic custom whereby hair could be a substitute for its owner, and in order to capture someone's soul, you had only to procure a little of his or her hair. August Kask had cut men's hair all his life, but he had never saved it. No one had ever instructed him to do so. Of course, August Kask would have been shocked to learn that psychoanalysts regard hair as the symbol of the genitals, and think that the cutting of the hair represents a control and suppression of the primary aggressive impulses, or bluntly put, castration (C. Berg. The Unconscious Significance of Hair. London, 1951). By the way, some other authors are of the opinion that hair is a more universal symbol, not merely a sexual one, and that ritual cutting of the hair is a conventional human sacrifice, especially since the soul resides in the head (G. A. Wilken, Über das Haaropfer. Revue coloniale Internationale. Amsterdam, 1866). Later on, the whole set of problems was treated using an entirely different set of terminology, the cutting of hair being regarded as an act of communication with conspicuous social meaning, and it has been said that the magical power of hair is derived from its ritual context, not the other way round (E. Leach, Magical Hair. In: Myth and Cosmos. Ed. by J. Middleton). All through the ages, hair has been a dreary thing, no matter how it was interpreted. From Greek mythology we know of Gorgons with serpents for hair; when the head of one of them, Medusa, was chopped off (something even more terrible than setting a haircut), her serpent hair continued to radiate its power. But as has been pointed out already, August Kask was innocent of all this. He was a man with a realistic attitude towards life who had no use for occult proceedings or sorcery. And had he heard anyone talking about such things, he would have told them to go to hell. He was just doing his job.

Nevertheless, he had some interesting occupational observations. Towards the end of the sixties, he began to run out of work. Younger men and teenage boys no longer came to him. Some of them stopped cutting their hair altogether, and some had their girl-friends or mothers cut it. That is why August Kask had less work for the next five years. Naturally, the middle-aged people continued to visit the barber shops, and they even asked to be shaved and sprayed with eau de Cologne, but the absence of young people was nevertheless very conspicuous. August Kask didn't know exactly what had happened in the world in those five years. True, he read the newspapers regularly, but that didn't inform him of matters essential to his particular trade. He was not aware of the great ideological weight his trade acquired in the world in the late sixties. During the French revolution, clothing had carried an ideological meaning; but then, decisions about people were made, and sometimes even their fates were determined by the length of their hair. The police did the work of the barbers. The bourgeoisie, armed with scissors, launched an attack against young people, and the society sanctioned such lawlessness. Public haircuts were carried out, the way people were once put in stocks or burnt at the stake. There were cases of people being killed because of the length of their hair. Subconsciously the society realized what sort of a challenge it was confronted with. Men became awfully jealous, especially bald ones. A special musical entitled Hair was staged. "I wonder whether it's d man or a woman" became the bourgeoisie's favourite gibe. This never failed to interest them, and not just the bourgeoisie. One night in Copenhagen, theatre critic Jan Kott saw a couple kissing, but he couldn't tell which was which. So upon this experience, he built a conception which became world famous and was discussed at conferences. However, August Kask knew nothing of this world barber news. And even if he had known it, he wouldn't have been able to connect it with all that took place in the world, for example in 1968 (student unrest in Paris, the Federal Republic of Germany and the USA, the Czechoslovak events, the Red Guards' book fires in China, the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy). August Kask's scissors just kept clicking away. His atomizer kept hissing. He saw life in terms of its concrete manifestations. Few men entered the barber shop.

In recent years, barbers had begun to get more work little by little. The long-hair craze was over, and Kask noticed that young people began to visit him once more to have their hair cut. The rebels made up with the world; they no more wanted the impossible. Yet the youth protest movement had left a certain mark on the contemporary world picture. Kask couldn't help admitting that for a long time after the craze was over, average men continued to wear their hair a little longer than usual. By and by, men with their heads shaven bald reappeared, as did men with parts and electric waves. Elaborate hairdos became fashionable, men painted their lips, and wore earrings. A new craze was approaching, and as a barber, August Kask felt it especially clearly, standing guard under the lofty August sky, his gaze directed down upon corrupt mankind. Afterwards he ate porridge. He made himself porridge for several days to come. No one disturbed him. August Kask was a bachelor.

Architect Maurer wasn't one of the chief designers of the quarter, but he had taken part in the project from the very beginning, first in one sector, then in another. He could refer to himself as a city builder. He had a pretty good idea of the city. And to a certain extent, he also knew what kind of place he was building the city upon.

Under the city was a bedrock of igneous and metamorphic rocks, lying at a depth of approximately a hundred and fifty metres. These were covered by maritime sediments: fine-grained sand and silt. The area had had a continental climate since the Silurian Period (for about four hundred million years). But glaciers had also moved over these parts several times. The ice sheet melted for the last time about ten thousand years ago. The melt water of the ice formed the so-called Baltic Ice Lake which, eleven thousand years ago, was connected to the Atlantic Ocean and became the Yoldia Sea, which existed as such for one and a half thousand years. Then there was another uplift, the outlet to the ocean closed, and the Ancylus Lake was born. Looking out of his window, architect Maurer could see in the distance the Mustamäe slope, formerly the coast of the sea. Now, long covered with wind and marine sediments, it was still the same limestone escarpment that formed outcroppings in many places in northern Estonia. Pines grew on the hills of Mustamäe. And because they looked blue from afar, they had earlier also been called Blue Hills. The whole district was called Mustamäe now, although it would have been more correct to say pre-Mustamäe. The sea floor began to emerge from the water during the Litorina stage, and by the Limnea period it was already dry here.

Who had lived here of old? Maurer wasn't very well versed in history but he knew that as early as the Preboreal stage (8th millennium B.C.) the place had been inhabited, although no one knew anything definite about those people. It is presumed that they came from the south, and theirs was known as the Kunda culture. In the second half of the third millennium, people leaving traces of the so-called Comb-Marked Pottery culture arrived here, most probably the ancestors of the Baltic Finns belonging to the Uralic race. Early in the second millennium, Baltic tribes, too, emerged (the so-called Boat-Axe culture). These two cultures intermingled.

In his book Hõbevalge (Silvery White, Tallinn, 1976) Lennart Meri wrote about schoolteacher Spreckelsen's having unearthed some 4,000-year-old arrow-heads and scrapers at Mustamäe. He wrote that at the time those instruments were made, the curve of the coastline lay somewhere here at Mustamäe, and fish were caught where the Kännu Kukk Restaurant stands at present. He wrote about coins minted in Rome between 139 and 161 A.D. found at Mustamäe, while at Õismäe and on the Naissaar Island, coins which came from the Bulgar region. Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Bagdad, Badakhshan and Antioch were unearthed. Thus Lennart Meri proved that this place had a long history. There had been something there before, although that seemed hard to believe looking out of the window. Maurer had played there as a child, and at that time, there had' been nothing except sand dunes. But by then, the sea had long since retreated far away. 3,300 years ago, the sea still washed the vicinity of Town Hall Square; 2,100 years ago, the shore was at the Coast Gate; and 1,600 years ago, at the Viru Gate. In Lennart Meri's book the following witty description of those times was to be found: "At the present site of the Art Institute, the Oxhead River, three hundred metres wide, emptied into the Revala Cove; the main banquet hall of the Viru Hotel was swarming with jellyfish. The land was 2.4 to 2.7 metres lower. Age-old oaks rustled on the Kopli Peninsula."

Maurer had learnt these things, and he also remembered that the cultural layer on the former seabed was only half a metre thick, a little more in but a few places; he could even have talked about things like a valley filled with moraine and sand just outside Tallinn, and when, on a sleepless night, disturbed by the cold patter of rain, he would look out of his window towards the Mustamäe bank, his mind would tell him unwillingly that the coastal dunes reached 63 metres above sea level near the ski jump. Such parasitical knowledge made architect Maurer uneasy. He would have liked to know less about the city, but it was too late.

He knew history by heart. He flawlessly could quote dates without hesitation, even when caught unawares. Demography was no problem to him.

Now Tallinn had about four hundred thousand inhabitants. At the time the action of this novel took place, about 45.5 per cent of them were men, and 54.5 per cent were women. Thus there were 119 women for every 100 men. 56 per cent were Estonians, 35 per cent Russians, 3.7 per cent Ukrainians, 2 per cent Byelorussians, 1 per cent Jews, and 0.8 per cent Finns. 20.7 per cent were minors, 62.2 were gainfully employed and 17.1 per cent were past working age. 66.1 per cent of the men and 53.5 per cent of the women were married.

Tallinn was comprised of several distinct quarters, of which the old Kalamaja slum of wooden tenements, the garden suburb of Nõmme, and the informally planned high-rise quarter of Mustamäe should be listed as extremes. To the latter, the new housing developments of Väike-Õismae and Lasnamäe were soon to be added. Architect Maurer's personal, individual beginnings were tied to a small suburban street on the outskirts of the city. His memory retained it all: the mild, warm summer evenings, the old women walking their dogs, the children romping about in the dust, the ripe currants. In a particularly placid mood old men, poorly but tidily dressed, leaned out of the windows, looking into the distance and not saying a word. Exuberant lilacs concealed mysterious windows, a violin played soft music, and secret citadels opened up in the yards. Artificial fertilizer, garden wheelbarrows, and rolls of netting were to be found in the sheds. In the middle of the yard stood a dried-up pump well. Stonecrop and saxifrage blossomed in front of the house and rambler roses grew by the fence at the back. On the living-room wall hung a huge painting (probably a copy of Kuindzhi) with a moonlit, white Ukrainian village appearing in the distance, in the foreground a black river of the type inhabited by water-sprites, and on its bank, the helpless silhouette of a lonely wayfarer (perhaps one of Gogol's villagers from Dikanka). Works by Strindberg, Feuchtwanger, Meyrink and Hindrey could be found on the bookshelves. One of the books, with a strange cover, was about mandrake, a root shaped like a man which cried when it was pulled out of the ground. White sheets covered the big armchairs. A beige lamp-shade cast all its light mildly onto the ceiling. A Telefunken radio with two black knobs stood on a small table. An aunt cultured to refinement was always sitting in a corner knitting a cardigan of mohair combed from their shaggy dog. Sometimes she talked about her travels abroad. As a child, architect Maurer had especially liked the story of her aunt sliding on her backside down an inclined plane into an abyss in the Salzburg salt mines (there must have been an amusement park in the Salzburg salt mines). The aunt's blind mother roamed and wheezed about the flat, engaged in an endless study of its geography. She slept in the other room which had beds with tall stacks of white pillows on them and a rich growth of potted plants before a lace-curtained window. A boarder occupied the third room–a young radio engineer, a do-all-yourself fanatic who spent his nights catching foreign gibberish with his naked, uncrated mechanisms. The night train into the port, hooting intimately as it passed by the other side of the fence, blended into the monologues from Vienna and Budapest jammed by static. On the shelves there were guidebooks to Austrian towns. To add dissonance, the desperate bawling of the philosophy professor's son could sometimes be heard from upstairs.

Thus, architect Maurer came from an environment utterly differing from the one he was shaping. Yet he didn't nurture a cheap nostalgia. True, it was with a certain emotion that he remembered the post-war years of his youth. There were things which seemed irretrievably lost. The air had been cleaner. Bright summer sun shone into the windows. Milk vans made their rounds. Sweepers were busy raking in the streets. Dew drops sparkled on onion tops in the gardens. Large asters, fleshy pumpkins, chlorine-smelling water, preserves on the cellar shelf, global uncompromisingness, ancient etuis, reliable neoclassical buildings, fresh-smelling bed linen, cones of green cheese, fifteen brands of ice-cream, ten brands of beer, eels, Georgian table wines, Raimond Valgre's music. I'm probably reminiscing like any other ageing man, Maurer thought.

He didn't eat fish. This was his greatest oddity. That's how he referred to it himself. Fish didn't actually nauseate him, but he didn't like it either. From early childhood he had been able to manage only larger fish of the fleshier sort that lacked a specific taste. He detested fish soup and fried fish. I'll never eat fish in my life, he had told his mother as a child. What are you going to do then? mother had asked. I'm going to build cities, Maurer had prophecied, as if that were the proper alternative.

And the prediction came true. He had become a city builder and he didn't eat fish. He built with zeal. He never let his hands stand idle. He could not, for Tallinn had a terrible secret. Tallinn could never be completed. If it was, legend had it, an old man would come out of, Lake Ülemiste to drown the completed city. Maurer knew nothing about the legend's background, even if its motif did seem universal to 'him. Naturally lakes and lake men didn't wait for the completion of towns. Likewise, they were known to have got angry at those who polluted their water and to have destroyed sinful towns, as they sometimes came down on incestuous people (this, for example, is how Lake Valgjary was reputedly born). Doctor Annist had suggested that a contract may have been drawn up with the lake on the foundation of Tallinn, or a certain material reward may have been promised to the lake. But the matter could also have a more realistic implication: Lake Ülemiste was situated at an elevated position in relation to the city and it had actually threatened to drown or more precisely, flood Tallinn on as many as three separate occasions (1718, 1867, and 1879). That was that, but nowadays things seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. The town was not sinking into the sea or drowning for any other reason. Instead, it was rising from the waters at the rate of 3 mm a year. Architect Maurer kept an eye on that miraculously slow yet steady rise. He had also heard that the Swedish coast (across the sea) was sinking. The land is going to break up, Maurer thought; a high, rocky mountain chain will probably rise here in a few million years. Another thing Maurer knew was that if there were things in the world whose probability was actually 100 per cent, regardless of what the statisticians said, then it was certain that he, Maurer, wouldn't be there to see that mountain chain completed.