Death in Tallinn

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It was a bad place for a view.

Not because of the view itself. From this vantage point up on the edge of Toompea Hill, the tourist or visitor from out of town, could enjoy a great panorama. Below were the roofs and spires of the Old Town, a miraculous fossil surviving from the Middle Ages: narrow cobbled lanes, the tall houses of the German merchants, and the churches their profits built, the Town Hall with its slender gothic minaret sitting at the edge of the Square. And everything squeezed snugly inside the city walls with their covered walkways and round towers. Beyond the Old Town could be glimpsed the ships tied up at the quays. And if you looked further, and the smoke drifting over from the plywood factory wasn’t too thick, there was the deep blue of the Gulf of Finland.

And another view by night. The array of lights measured the extent of the growing city. The lights of the Old Town, irregular and unpredictable, sunk in the narrow alleys, even the cafes on Town Hall Square blotted out by the invisible silhouette of the Town Hall itself. Beyond, to the north and east the regular streetlights of the New Town, and over to the west the dim and random twinkling of the crowded slums and expanding suburbs. And at the water’s edge, blackness. But if you stood at the railing, the darkness permitted the living sounds of the city to rise up like a miasma; fragments and slivers of noise, hints of unseen living. A single word called out, a laugh, a trumpet’s blue note, a car horn, the whinny of a horse. And the odour of night: wisps of cooking, cigar smoke, malt of the brewery, rendered hoof from the glue plant.

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