Autumn Ball, 1979 (extract from the book)
	Mati Unt

	He lived in the middle of Mustamäe, on the sixth floor of a high-rise block of flats, amidst other similar buildings, together with hundreds of people. He did not know these people, except a few who looked a bit more interesting, more striking, people whom he remembered seeing in the street in front of the house, in the courtyard or in the lift. (He once got stuck in the lift with a married couple for two hours, and they all suffered both a lack of air and an urgent need to piss, which is even more embarrassing.) All these people knew his face too, but they never showed it in any way, and neither did Eero. There was one especially nice old man, however, whom Eero at first greeted, persistently, but the man was suspicious, didn't reply, and Eero soon gave up - why frighten the nice old man with his hellos? Eero therefore knew his surroundings primarily as a landscape filled with moving figures. True, life occasionally interfered. There was shouting from time to time, one human being calling another. An aeroplane would fly over the house, very low, and blink its lights. The area was on the whole rather quiet. The main road ran further behind the houses and the roar of the engines was barely audible. Winter was particularly quiet, because children stayed in. When Eero opened a window he sometimes caught the smells of people. When the window below him was open, warm air and the odour of perfume and soup wafted up to him. Somebody lived there. This was all he knew about that person. Someone lived behind his walls, and above. But they all were very quiet. Eero observed that people were generally rather quiet. They shouted but rarely. Nobody had ever raised his voice under, beside or above Eero, never. The buildings were really big, but Eero had to agree with the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard that the houses were big, but definitely not high, because they lacked vertical dimension, one of the essential factors that defines a house. They had no cellars where rats, snakes, dragons and other deep psychological and underground creatures crawled around. They also had no attics where closeness to the sky evokes noble thoughts, where the free spirit dwells. The flats were simply placed one atop another. Besides, these houses were compact, firmly attached to the ground and so not dependent on the environment, and they had no connection with the universe. Storms did not rock the walls of these houses. Gusts of thunder did not blow off their roofs. Eero nevertheless loved to look at the monsters that he found unchanged in his field of vision every morning. He felt a certain affection when he regarded them as nameless huge objects in different shades of light and weather. Everything human was eliminated, the individual did not count, tastes did not matter, only pure form remained. Big square boxes in the fields, big monumental sculptures. Eero did not belong among the anti-urban people. He did not long for primitive ancestral cottages. He found moods and secrets in the urban district. He watched the awakening and fading of shadows on the rough walls of the big panels. He found that the universe revealed its charmingly tormenting rhythm, its frustratingly powerful tension, its bittersweet joys. Wasn't that a world too? People travelled to Egypt to see the pyramids, or went to admire the Eiffel Tower, but it was possible to have experiences right here as well. You only had to be sensitive, open up a bit to the surrounding world. You only had to go to the window. The wall panels blinded Eero on a hot summer day, like white Saharan towns which Eero had never been to but had seen many times in his mind's eye. In the evenings the panels faded, nevertheless offering an interesting display of tonality. Occasionally the sun shone at full blast on the houses, whilst the sky in the background was black with gathering thunderstorms. The house then looked like a white island of hope in front of destruction and chaos. Sometimes at dusk the black silhouette of the building was frightening with its urban brutality, evoking elevated but melancholy thoughts. After storms, the houses definitely looked odd - blotchy with snow, or washed black by rain - like ruins, memories of dead cultures, like jungle cities revealed at excavations. There were also enough secrets inside the houses. The lifts clanked and clicked on their unfathomable paths, the cats followed the passers-by with eyes aglow, new names were written on the nameplates and erased, the next weirder than the last. In the corridors Eero sometimes had the feeling that someone might grab his shoulder from behind. A reader of poetry? [Eero was a poet - Ed.] He switched on all the lights, ahead and behind, and calmed down only when he had safely slipped into his own flat. Eero was utterly convinced that house spirits inhabited his building, but only the parts that were in common use. Staircases and corridors were not holy territories. There you were not actually inside, but still out, in the everyday world. What lay outside was profane as well, and you could smell it: the cats pissed there, marking their animal domains. People pissed in the lift, which was an intermediate, neutral area, a borderland where it was possible to come across a demon or two. These demons were not particularly evil, but they could be extremely sly. So sly in fact that they never acquired well-known shapes, but preferred vague incarnations. Crickets were replaced by cockroaches, weasels by rats. Some demons looked perfectly innocent - there was no telling who they were. The mythology of various nations claims that house spirits have the faces of their masters. Whose face did the ordinary tomcat have, busy rummaging in the rubbish bin, and whose the noble Siamese, the only one of its kind? The face of the people. [...] Eero preferred to stay in his warm and cosy flat. He did his work there, which brought no real profit to the nation.
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