Architect Maurer was forty. He lived with his wife and had a permanent job. He slept at home. He ate, drank and led his daily existence like other people. He wasn't an old man yet, but he was a lone angler in the current. His wife was older than he, although she looked younger. Especially if she got dressed up. Earlier on, Maurer had had some hobbies. He had fished to get revenge on those sorry creatures who were not to his liking. He had tried to build ships in bottles, but one day it had struck him that a ship's place was not in a bottle; one could as well bottle airplanes. He had also lit fires and looked into the flames. In recent years, however, he had dropped these unnecessary activities one by one. Now he was searching for perfection in everything.

Laura remembered that her TV set had broken down once. It had been terrible. Several days before, the set had begun to crack and to smoke. Laura knew that such a condition presented a fire hazard, yet she didn't switch off the set. Sometimes the screen would be covered with a tangle of crisscrossing lines for several minutes running. The voices were muted by the crackle. But then the apparatus had recovered and showed good picture with a nice sound. In a couple of days came the end. There was no current whatsoever, and not a sound could be heard, even if you put your ear close to the set. Although Laura herself worked at the telephone exchange, she didn't have a good enough idea of technical equipment to know what was the matter with the picture box. The house stayed empty and bleak for several days. Laura tried to switch on the set the next day, hoping it had got well of its own accord, but to no avail. She was forced to call in a technician, a man from the place where she worked. Now the back side of the set was opened and Laura saw for the first time what the inside of a TV looked like. She saw what a multitude of wires another person went through before appearing before her. The technician answered Laura's questions willingly. He pointed out to her some twenty tubes and explained what they were for. Afterwards the TV set worked again.

Laura was about thirty. She lived in a two-room flat at Mustamäe with her son. Far, far away she could see a bit of the sea, a centimetre's worth of it between the houses. In the evening she would curl up on the sofa, cover her knees with a red plaid afghan and watch TV. She usually kept a bottle of sherry or strawberry liqueur at home. During a programme she would pour herself a glass and sip at it from time to time. She liked to nibble a sweet with her liqueur. Although she had no husband, she was not afraid. She very rarely felt frightened. Sometimes she would hear some sort of thumps on the walls of the house. She never knew their origin. It was as if a huge creature were beating its tail against the prefab. Who had angered it? Once there had been a real earthquake. Then Laura had been afraid for sure, because she was convinced that the earth never quaked in Estonia. The house seemed to wave to and fro, and some coffee spilled out of the cup. This time, the wall sections stayed put, but what would have become of Mustamäe in a stronger earthquake?

Laura lived on the top floor. The lift howled, ascending and descending in its shaft near her door. The air smelled of mouse droppings and foodstuffs. A ladder led from the landing to the roof. Bums used to climb up it. They would shout their obscure slogans as they went to carry out their secret rituals on the roof. They obviously had a kind of a bridgehead there. They were certainly engaged in something masculine up there under the sky. Perhaps they were performing initiation rites. In any case, they had never knocked or rung the bell at Laura's door. And she didn't think about them. Actually she never thought very much about the world. She didn't consider herself a very decisive person. She wasn't in a hurry to express her vain opinion about the world, because she realized she knew practically nothing' about it. She didn't make use of this world in order to feed her anger.

Once she read an exotic short story by William Somerset Maugham. "They bathed together in the creek: and in the evening they went down to the lagoon and paddled in a dugout, with its great outrigger. The sea was deep blue, wine-coloured at sundown, like the sea of Homeric Greece: but in the lagoon the colour had an infinite variety, aquamarine and amethyst and emerald: and the setting sun turned it for a short moment to liquid gold. Then there was the colour of the coral, brown, white, pink, red, purple: and the shapes it took were marvellous. It was like a magic garden, and the hurrying fish were like butterflies. It strangely lacked reality. Among the coral were pools with a floor of white sand and here, where the water was dazzling clear, it was very good to bathe. Then, cool and happy, they wandered back in the gloaming over the soft grass road to the creek, walking hand in hand, and now the mynah birds filled the coconut trees with their clamour. And then the night, with that great sky shining with gold, that seemed to stretch more widely than the skies of Europe, and the soft airs that blew gently through the open hut, the long night again was too short. She was sixteen and he was barely twenty. The dawn crept in among the wooden pillars of the hut and looked at those lovely children sleeping in one another's arms."

Maugham had set his story on a South Sea island. As for Laura, she knew that Estonia lay in the temperate zone. The name of the zone (at least in Estonian, parasvööde, and hardly did die gemäbigte Zone, temperate zone) was already conspicuously anti-exaggerative, and Laura knew that a delicate but severe northern charm was typical of these parts. Laura had heard countless times that her tiny native land was beautiful. The only thing Laura could reproach it with was the absence of amethyst, emerald and aquamarine. Grey and green prevailed. Even the people were dressed in grey. How seldom did men wear red or yellow trousers! How seldom did their briefcases have a yellow shine to them!

Once, in a resort town, Laura had had a boy-friend, but they had parted. Later she lived with her aunt in Tallinn. The boy-friend from the resort town had visited Laura a couple of times, but he had grown tired of her and introduced her to a friend of his from Tallinn, a tall stage hand. After that, the boy from the resort town disappeared from sight. Laura went to the café a few times in the stage hand's company. He was very masculine. He even smelled like a man; or at least he said that a man should smell of sweat, vodka, and tobacco. He never complained, he swore little and likeably. He was always merry and he laughed, showing his white teeth. As any young man fitting the dreams of a young girl, he was called Sven. After a night at the cafe the stage hand saw Laura home and wouldn't leave. He climbed into her room through the window, being so expert about it that the landlady didn't hear a thing and had no idea how her home was being desecrated. Laura confessed to him with shame that she was a virgin, to which the white-toothed stage hand gave a gurgling, good-natured laugh, and. Laura felt even more ashamed. Immediately afterwards the stage hand began to kiss and undress her. Laura didn't fight him off, in order to avoid looking even more old-fashioned and spinsterish. She felt no sexual joy, but as the stage hand explained, lying on his back, smoking and plucking at the black hair on his breast, that was how it always was the first time. He intimated that he had a wealth of experience, and to a certain extent he inspired Laura with awe. I have a man of my own now, she thought with secret joy, I'm no more dependent on my two old aunties; I'm a grown woman. The stage hand came to see Laura a few more times, then he began to invite her to his place. A month later it appeared that Laura was pregnant. The stage hand asked how on earth it could have happened, and Laura said she didn't know. The stage hand got very angry: why hadn't she told him? Laura didn't understand him. The stage hand didn't believe Laura could be so naive. Don't you know anything then? he asked. A little, Laura answered, but it didn't occur to me. The stage hand sulked a long time and then announced that he was a gentleman and would marry her. She was twenty-two when they got married. They lived together two years. Then the stage hand began to drink and brawl, a little at first, and then more and more. Afterwards, he always came home drunk, saying that he drank because Laura was a cold woman, and that both in films and in life women behaved quite differently. He made perverse demands on Laura. She complied at first, but it disgusted her and soon their marriage lost all meaning. Finally, when her husband attempted to beat her, she started divorce proceedings. He of course laid claim to the child, quoting a modern philosopher who had asserted that men were equal to women and could cope perfectly with the bringing up of children. The stage hand didn't drink during the trial and declared that he could raise the child to be a good citizen. When this didn't help, the stage hand resumed drinking and threatened to kill himself and the child. He alleged in court that Laura had gone swimming in the nude one night. He himself had compelled her to it, and it must have been on that night that the child was conceived. Now it sounded like an accusation. The stage hand was tireless. One morning at dawn, Laura was visited by a committee who came to check up on her morals. She was roused out of a sound sleep; they told her to open the wardrobe door and even looked under the bed. There was no man in Laura's room. This verification by the committee of schoolteachers determined the case. As Laura didn't have a new man, she was awarded custody of the child. She devoted herself to its upbringing. Because of her job, she often had to stay out evenings, and she couldn't be as good a mother as she wanted. The stage hand made use of that circumstance and lodged several complaints, claiming to be a more orderly person than Laura. But his weak point, too, was his night work. So he achieved nothing in court.

At her place of work, Laura had no friends. She spent her evenings watching TV. Television in no way bored her. She sympathized with the people who suffered and fought behind that glass. For the most part the fighters were men. Some of them mishandled women, even beat them, but then good men came to punish the bad ones, to kick them in the stomach or to throw them off the roof of a skyscraper. In real works of art, bad men won; in cheap art good men were the winners. This was the difference between real and cheap art.

That night Laura put the boy to sleep as usual and watched a serial whose main character, a young policeman of Puerto-Rican descent, didn't get on with his boss. The chief kept holding back the young man's seething energy. At first the young man put up with it, but then unexpectedly his sister was kidnapped. The girl was kept in a dark garage where she was threatened by some drivelling young punks. The young policeman gave up his job altogether and began to fight the gangsters on his own. He bribed one of them for a moderate sum and had himself hidden in a safe awaiting transportation. After prolonged danger of suffocation, he picked the safe open from the inside right in the gangsters' headquarters. He went down a shaft to the shack where they held his sister. He killed both guards in a brutal fight and took her home.

Laura didn't like such shows, but she watched them somehow automatically. They had happy endings, and that's what the makers had intended. With much greater interest, Laura waited for a new serial film which was to start in the next few days. It was a sad programme about love, named Cunningham. The whole town was talking about that film. They said that it was not mass culture but art. Someone had even termed it oppositional culture. It was a programme Laura was very eager to see.

Theo the doorman at the bar also lived in Mustamäe, and he worked at Mustamäe, too. His pub was a third-rate one, nevertheless, it had a wide clientele. It was in one of those few old buildings preserved among the new ones, a one-time 'early bird' in the wasteland that was once outside of town. The weird, anachronistic building in a mixture of styles was four-storeyed, with the tavern on the ground floor, and ordinary flats on the three upper ones. It must be made clear from the very start that in the mornings, Theo didn't think of his doorman's job as his main occupation. Yet he knew he was a doorman. What am I? he asked himself sometimes in the morning, scrutinizing himself in the mirror. Where has the path of life led me? What social class do I belong to after all? His place in the contemporary social hierarchy was a problem for Theo. True, there was a multi-volume work (L. Thorndike. A. History of Magic and Experimental Science. New York, 1923-1958) lying on his table, but next to it were some sausage skins and glasses with traces of liqueur in them; some tarts had recently left the place, there was theosophical literature around, but his member was sore again, and pustules marred his face. Theo considered himself an intellectual and a debauchee at the same time, or perhaps neither. He rubbed his forehead with some eau de Cologne and inspected himself, asking, what am I? He recalled the names of the chicks he had balled last night: Anya and Valli. It occurred to him that all through the party, an indefinite sense of hopelessness had persisted in his soul. Those chicks had somehow been mixed up in his bargaining over some fur hats. Fur hats! Theo thought; at a time when I'm at odds with the whole world–at a time like this I'm bargaining over fur hats! It's like being a smuggler, but at the same time I'm filled with a vague indignation against God and universal rules. Theo took his diary and put down the essential data about the dames, leaving the logarithms to be calculated the next time. Anya was a Venus of course, although a dull one. Obviously it was because she came from the provinces. He had failed to ask her if she lived elsewhere and had only come to Tallinn, the capital, for a visit, or if she had moved to town already. Theo's spirits didn't improve as he wrote. He felt that the whole day had been spoilt all the way to the night, and he made an entry to that effect in his diary.

Then he laid the diary aside and took his scientific paper, the 'secret baby' he had been working at for three years, since he was thirty. The book was titled Man and Woman. At first Theo had hesitated about the heading: wasn't it too pretentious, top trite, too general? But getting deeper into his work he had found that the heading contained a beautiful simplicity and even a civic boldness The society was greatly in need of. He had been accustomed to work on the book in the morning, but of late, orgies had gained the upper hand. Some men and chicks, too, were in the habit of turning up at his place, making use of the fact that Theo was an interesting person and had a flat all to himself. This interfered with the work, although it also provided him with material. It was only on occasions like this that some of the deviations became apparent. But he could work only till one o'clock. At two he had to be at the pub. Tackling his book in the evenings was out of the question, because there was always something cooking at the joint. If he tried to make notes there, someone might think he was an informer.

What were the main principles of Theo's book? The first half was devoted to psychological problems, the other half to sexual ones. Theo thought men loved adventure while women didn't. Men detested loud, expensive clothes; women, on the contrary, adored them. Men didn't consider women equal to them in all spheres, such as war, hunting, science and art. Men were not afraid of large dogs; women screamed upon meeting up with them. Women valued straightforwardness and sincerity; men didn't speak their minds in all situations–they held their tongues. If a man were attacked by a tiger on a narrow cliff ledge, he would take up the fight regardless of the odds. A woman in his place would jump in fright. Men didn't weep. Women did. Men didn't value art collections or collect art. Art was collected by women and effeminate men. Men were glad to play a risky game; in fact, it was risk they valued above all, women, however, avoided danger and risk. If a man were told that the end of the world was near, he would retain his composure and take measures to prevent it from coming. But a woman would lose her head and take poison. Women liked to stand on the seashore and admire the sea. Men detested the sea and only used it in cases of necessity. Men' joked, women did not. Men thought that maternity was women's most important task. What women thought was men's most important task, Theo hadn't been able to excogitate. But he comforted himself with Freud's confession to the effect that no one could understand what women were after. On the whole, Freud was not a favourite of doorman Theo. He was more familiar with works by Marquis de Sade, even if only via a couple of German expositions. Theo couldn't decide to this day whether he was a philosopher of sex or an astrologer. He had no one to ask, either. His friends had limited mental capacities, and to speak with women about philosophy wasn't worth the trouble. That was the reason Theo was writing the book–because he had no one to speak with. But he wanted to speak. He had something to say. What he had experienced didn't fall to any man's lot. Theo knew the flavour of life.

For the past few weeks, he had been in low spirits. The book wasn't going anywhere. The rising moon gave rise to cold thoughts, and Mars to cruel ones, he said to himself as an astrologer. He was pestered by telepathic sensations and prophetic dreams. His health kept getting worse and worse. Tetracycline took effect very slowly. Besides the member and his throat, most of the left side of his mouth was aching. In the evening, he had stood at the window. The night was a light one, a waning moon hung upside down in the eastern sky; the weather was clearing and the tedious storm blew over. He had tried to calculate astrological logarithms, but had been disturbed by a vague feeling of anger against things in general. He had gone to a tiny cafe and returned with two broads. He didn't remember if he had screwed them both, and if he had, how many times. This angered him most of all now, because he lacked the data to note down in his diary. All he could do was enter both Valli and Anya under Nos. 234 and 235 in his list of women–nothing more. He likewise remembered the dream he had had toward morning: he had cholera and wanted to kill someone before he died, but he only had two cartridges. When he remembered the dream about the gun, Theo got restless: he went to the wardrobe to find out if it was still there–you could never tell what a couple of dames might decide to take along when he had a black-out. Once, he had made a big mess–he had started showing off the pistol in front of a couple of broads. Luckily, they didn't believe it was real. At least Oleg said they didn't. But once he got into the habit of showing off the gun, it could very easily happen again.

Theo glanced at his watch. It was twelve o'clock: time to tidy up and get ready for work. He took two more Tetracycline pills (he probably had a temperature: at any rate he was shivering); he brushed his teeth, rinsed his bleeding gums, and got dressed. He had the lousy feeling that his best days were over. Earlier, even his parapsychological powers had been stronger. Once, when the moon was full, he had drunk Indian tea and taken a bunch of caffeine pills, and he had guessed 95 per cent of the cards right, which was an awfully good result. Business had also got much worse–downright rotten to put it bluntly. After all, Theo had once worked in a first-class joint downtown where you could get anything under the table for price. But he got caught and had to split the groovy scene before things got too hot. He was even called into the prosecutor's office a couple of times, but he managed to play the fool quite successfully. Afterwards, he had worked at the mental hospital at Seevald–as an attendant, of course. It was a dark, drab place with no opportunities whatsoever. Business was slack. The doctors were petty. Theo immediately developed warm relations with some of the younger female inmates, so he was soon fired. Now it was no use even dreaming about a job downtown. He had to move out to the suburbs, but he consoled himself with the thought that it was better to be Number One in the country than Number Ten in town.

Arriving at his place of work, Theo put on his uniform right away and went en t over to the kitchen to have a chat with the women. He had slept with almost all of them, except Anna Schenkenberg who was soon due to retire. The women were cutting bloody raw meat and passing a glass of wine around to cure their hangovers. They offered the glass to Theo, but he never bothered to do anything about his hangover. He drank every night, but never attempted to clear his head. He didn't think it was right. The hangover syndrome was one of the surest symptoms of chronic alcoholism. And it was also the sign of a weak man. How Theo wanted a glass of beer some mornings! He would swill what seemed like gallons of tap water, but water didn't quench his thirst. Still, he had decided to hold out as long as possible. True, he didn't jog when he had a hangover or try anything else that might get himself killed like some idiots he knew. Those men treated their hangovers with exercise. No wonder one of them had had a heart attack already. The only thing Theo permitted himself in the morning was a pickled cucumber, some very salty tomato juice, or large quantities of milk. He regarded even drinking vinegar as harmful. He didn't want to let himself go like so many of the men around him. He could see them degenerating and getting feebler by the year. Even now he didn't stay for a longer chat with the women. He didn't want their booze and didn't feel like shooting the breeze with them too much. In the mornings, Theo felt like an aristocrat. After all, those women here were much too common: they were okay when there was nothing better around, but after all, they were just a bunch of winos. Theo considered consorting with such base creatures immoral and avoided it whenever he had the sense to. Now doorman Theo clicked his tongue, said, watch out! and went to the vestibule. It was a quarter of an hour till the opening of the pub. He sat down behind the counter to wait till he could open the doors, till the first thirsty customer appeared. Theo gazed at the door with transparent, bright yellow eyes. The aching side of the mouth distorted his face into a grimace. Otherwise he would have been quite a handsome man, or so he had been told at the start of his career. Soon things would be hopping. It would take a while for business to pick up, and then the place would really swing.

Theo's mood had improved, compared with the morning. He always got livelier in the afternoons. The mornings were a waste fit only for despondency. In the evenings, there was lots of dough and more chicks than he could count, and he could cop a few deals if he were lucky. Business was pretty slow, but he hoped he'd hear something from somebody that night. It was a pity life had to be wasted on all this petty shit while his unfinished masterpiece on man and woman was waiting to be completed. Obviously, it would take him a while to get it done. There was no time for nobler ideals. And even when the book was completed, doorman Theo thought bitterly, there would certainly be great difficulties getting it published. Conservatism was hard to get rid of in society; there were blockheads and hypocrites everywhere running interference on anything new. So for the time being, he had no choice but to do a few numbers here and there, because no one believed in barefoot prophets any more. Theo leaned on the counter. The smell of meat from the kitchen reached his nostrils. His fingers were drumming on the counter. He was ready.

Laura's son Peeter studied what surrounded him, limiting himself to his immediate environment. He resided in a room that had four walls situated at right angles to one another. The room was longer in one direction than the other. Overhead, there was one more wall; it was called the ceiling, and it was white. And underfoot was another wall; it was brown, and it was called the floor. In the end wall, there was a window you could see through. Light entered the room, but the wind didn't; that's what glass was for. And the window could be opened so that nothing remained between the world and the room. When the window was open, the wind blew in. But now the window was closed. At the other end of the room was the door you couldn't see through, because it was made of wood. The door was generally open. It was shut very rarely–when one didn't want to disturb the other, or when one was sleeping and the other was playing music or watching TV. The room had only one door. Whoever came in had to go out the same way. Peeter had seen rooms with several doors. Some of those doors were called back doors. You could leave through the back door if enemies arrived. In some flats, the rooms were arranged in a circle. If you walked from one room to the next, eventually you would wind up back where you had started. Here, the room was like a blind alley. A large wall unit ran the entire length of one side of the room. It consisted of various units—cupboards up above, shelves in the middle and drawers down below. The cupboards and drawers contained things not intended for strangers to see, such as private letters, underpants, corn plasters, documents, handkerchiefs, and screwdrivers. The things on the open shelves were meant for others to see: vases, books, fancy worked scarves, eggs, and matchboxes. On the biggest shelf of all stood the TV set, its face turned towards the room—where else? In front of the big cupboard there was a small table with some apples and a women's magazine on it. Across from the table on the other wall was a bed you couldn't sleep on in the daytime, but could at night after it had been opened up. In the daytime it was a sofa. On the floor was a carpet to keep your feet from freezing. And that was all there was in the room. The room had a right and left side. Actually, it had many sides. If you stood with your face toward the window, the wall unit remained on your right and the sofa on your left. But if you had your back toward the window, the wall unit was on your left and the sofa on your right. If you stood with your back to the wall unit, you had the sofa in front of you, the window to your right, and the door to your left. Left and right were inside a person, not outside him. Nothing else varied this way. The wall unit was made of wood, regardless of whether you stood with your back or your face toward it. The sky was there even when you didn't look at it, because the window was transparent at all times.

Peeter was born and had grown in Mustamäe. He lived in the older part of the district. He was astonished to notice sparrows walking on the outside walls of the buildings. They held on to the bumps in the walls. Birds didn't usually act like this. They were like big flies. Among living beings, he also knew the mouse, the cat, the dog, and the mole. None of them crept along the wall. What made the birds do it? They probably ate grubs from the cracks between the sections of the wall. Peeter didn't believe sparrows could eat stones. He didn't eat stones himself. He even spat out cherry stones. Stones were hard and not fit to eat. Peeter liked soft food. But porridge was too monotonous. You could eat it all up, and still nothing had happened. Soup was more interesting; there was always something to be found in the murky liquid. He drank milk but didn't like creamed soups, because they skinned over. He liked white bread better than dark bread, and margarine better than butter. Honey tasted too sweet, especially after it had hardened. Ordinary fruit juice was good, but the way lemonade scratched your throat was even better. Peeter ate both meat and fish, and used both pepper and mustard. He didn't like garlic, but would eat onions. One autumn he had thrown up eating apples, because an apple peel had got stuck in his throat and wouldn't go down with the rest. So this autumn, he was eating only peeled apples. Of the colours, he liked combinations of black very much: black and yellow, black and orange, black and red, black and blue. He didn't particularly like blue and red together, or combinations of blue and green or red and green. He did like red by itself, and purple if it was really deep, and silvery white, which was best in combination with black.

All of this together made tip the world. Besides these visible things, he heard mention of invisible ones. Of God above all. Of God, everyone knew that He didn't exist. Yet He was spoken about all the time. They wouldn't have talked so much about something that didn't exist. Grandmother had once said that God was in heaven. Why heaven? Peeter had asked. So He can see everything, Grandmother had said. Why does He have to see everything, is He curious? Peeter had asked. He didn't believe God could see everything. Especially in the dark, and through the roofs. Through the ceilings, the wallpaper and the blanket. Peeter knew that the Earth was round and revolved. The Sun illuminated only one side of the globe at a time. The other side was dark. It was night there. Did God see only one hemisphere at a time? And which one? Did He see by day or by night? Or could He see through the globe? Granny said it wasn't nice to ask such questions. Mother said there was no God. He had been invented by evil people who killed and oppressed. They had invented Him to justify their actions. All geniuses had fought against God. There is no God, Mother reaffirmed. What is there then? Peeter asked. Everything else, Mother replied, everything you can see. But X-rays are there, and you can't see them. And infrared rays. And you couldn't see air, although scientists maintained that air existed. Scientists have determined the composition of air, Mother explained. Air consists of oxygen and nitrogen. But God doesn't exist, because He isn't composed of anything. You are composed of water and flesh. All people are composed of water and flesh. I learnt that at school, and saw a programme about it on TV. You know that. But the Devil exists after all, Peeter suggested. He gets talked about even more often than God. He doesn't exist either, Mother explained, 'devil' is just a very bad and horrid word. The word exists, but there is nothing to show for it. Why is it a dirty word then, if it doesn't mean anything? It means a very bad thing. What kind of thing? The Devil, exclaimed Mother, totally exasperated. I see, said Peeter, that means the Devil exists.

Adam Chamo

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