Deep in our family memory is the farmstead, the talu where grandma grew up and where dad spent a winter and spring during the war. While Erika worked for the German railways in Tallinn during the Nazi occupation, auntie Johanna sewed a woolly sheepskin into dad’s coat to not freeze on his way to and from school. Skiing in gathering dark he once heard a lynx scream, dad would tell us, and tears of fright froze to his cheeks, as he poled home as fast as he could.
Toiletry was at one end of the long farmhouse, the rehielamu, where the barn animals lived. Dad would run through snow around the house in bare feet to then stand inside in warm muck. The house was in the old style, a large log cabin with small windows, the walls made of trimmed pine logs, burned black over many years from the sun.
A chimney ran through the centre of the house, and dad would lean against it on the second floor reading Zane Grey stories translated into Estonian. He imagined himself a cowboy and as soon as the sheep took to the fields in spring, they were the Indians, the victims of dad’s stone throwing with a slingshot. Until came the time for shearing. Uncle Bernhard, a kindly figure in dad’s telling, used hand clippers, and soon discovered stones stuck in the fleece. That was not all the sheep had to worry about. Bernhard often made mistakes, and had a rabbit’s foot in a pot of tar for treating cuts. Dad said the sheep often looked more like a road map than a farm animal when let back out into the paddock.
Johanna was a competent rider, and in booted feet would kick the horse’s deliberately bloated stomach, to then pull the girth a notch tighter, so the saddle would stay in place. To ride, dad would climb a stone wall to get on the horse, which as often as not would step aside just as he tried to leap aboard.
The Lehovas’ was a long, thin property, like others in the neighbourhood, a thin front to a road, and extending through pasture and barley and other crops back into a forest, the source of firewood, berries and mushrooms at times of the year, and in winter timber for making furniture. Dad’s grandfather Mart stood 2 metres tall, and would scan the forest for tree limbs of the right shape for making rocking chairs. He had fought in the 1905 Russia-Japan war in the Tsar’s army, and returned home with a samurai sword and a Japanese rifle. When the Soviets invaded in 1939, he wrapped these in oilskin and concealed the package in a stone wall on the property. I had wanted to locate the weapons one day, but Greg laughed at the idea. When he first visited Marinu 34 years ago dad’s cousin Erik was living alone at the farmhouse, and nothing from earlier times remained. Collective farming had erased all that was traditional or reminded one of family, leaving an open landscape suited to mechanised harvesting.
We cycled to Marinu on a day of rain northwards from Rakvere, the name Lehova talu still visible on an online map, though the Lehovas had sold the property long before and moved elsewhere. Apple trees ringed the house, and we saw a dog like a miniature husky looking at us indifferently. I walked up to the door of the Frolovs, and knocked. An older woman puffing on the remains of a cigarette opened the door a chink, peered at us, and I explained in my basic Estonian that we were from New Zealand, travelling Estonia, and this was the house our father had lived in during the war. Could we wander around and take a few photos? She muttered something unintelligible, and shuffled back inside and closed the door on us. There was a greenhouse, a vegetable garden, and unmown grass. We did a quick circuit in the rain, got back on the bikes and rode off.
Old farmhouse at Kogeva open air museum, island of Muhu
Estonia is full of old farmhouses in various stages of repair or of collapsing, and what became to us a familiar array of outbuildings: a granary or barn that is often nowadays a woodshed or store shed, a sauna, a cellar dug into the ground to keep food cool in summer and not freeze in winter. Water is drawn from a well or bore.
Outdoor museums of farm buildings near Tallinn and on the small island of Muhu showcase the old life, and did more than our fleeting visit to Marinu could do to bring our father’s memories to life. It’s a thing, we learned from Estonian friends, for townspeople to buy up old farmsteads and restore them, and in this way keep alive and live an age-old rural tradition. You can join a social media page where people doing this share experiences and photos, and compare notes.
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