The silent treatment

Friends in Estonia showed me the ERR website, the state news and broadcasting service, in the hope of my improving my rudimentary Estonian. I occasionally looked at it since, and then more recently, with more interest. The content in English is excellent, and the site also provides a weekly news bulletin every Friday written in “easy Estonian”, which I can now read without much trouble.

Keen to develop contact with ERR – to pitch my blogpost of buying an island in Estonia, so out of self-interest – I wrote to the editor. No reply.

This was something we struck quite often when speaking with Estonians. On telling an anecdote, the end would be met with an inexpressive silence. In New Zealand, you would normally hear something like, “oh okay”, or “what happened next”, or “that reminds me of”, or a change of subject. In Estonia, nothing.

“An Estonian is being friendly when they look at your shoes instead of their own,” a young academic told me as a joke, when discussing the Estonian personality. With a ring of truth, perhaps.

Estonian pop musician Kerli Kõiv was once quoted online saying she spent a day filming in which the crew said not a word, and that this was normal behaviour. There is an Estonian saying, she said, “talking is silver, silence is gold”.

Three months have gone by since writing to ERR, and I think of an old song our father taught us as children - Tule ääres istun mina / Õhus lend’vad sädemed / Öösel keegi mind ei sega / Kõik on vait ja vagusi.                

This translates as, “By the fireside I sit, sparks fly through the air, at night no one disturbs me, all is quiet and still.” In following verses, the singer wakes early the following morning, feels compelled to wander out into the wide world, and the listener then learns an unanswered love has driven him from his home.

Here it is different, a desire to reconnect with the land our father and grandmother were exiled from. Time passes, and I continue to read lihtsad uudised igal reedel on ERR, in silence.