Some organisation - if my memory doesn't deceive me, it was the Civilisation Front of Estonia - commissioned me to write an essay that was supposed, as far as I could make out, to undermine and, if at all possible, totally condemn the (nostalgic) pseudo-culture that laments the passing of Soviet Russian era.

What they had in mind more specifically - this was conveyed by a peculiar flash from behind dark glasses - was the cantata "To the Black Sea" by the vocal-instrumental band "Friendship Boulevard" - although it was never actually said out straight.
I readily agreed, but instantly forgot about it, as you do all unpleasant things.
Two months later I was reminded of it.
I said I had just completed my pamphlet on the European Union...
They indicated that this was not their topic. This was nostalgia!
The board of that Front or Fund was obviously made up of young angry men.
At the time, my room had not been tidied up, 1 May 2004 was approaching, the Moon was still waxing, and I could not make my broom as yet.
One evening...
The sky had been clear for some time, but the plentiful winter snow was luckily still keeping the ground damp; I sowed, hopeful, but nothing came up emerged, not even the onions, so exceptionally fond of drought. Then one evening when I thrust my hand furiously into the soil, dragging out a few golden-topped miserable jokers and placed them under the magnifying glass - were teensy-weensy bits of fluff under their bellies, light as a missionary's pubic hairs, supposed to be the roots of my crop?! - the next moment I noticed above the horizon that the Moon was remarkably full of itself. On the left side, however, the celestial fruit that was slowly ascending amongst Berenice's Hair, at first resembling a golden orange artificially lit from inside, was not yet quite a full circle.
The day after tomorrow, I thought, I could perhaps make a new broom. But then I realised that the expected days of cleansing would be postponed after all, because at the side where the Moon was soon to be filled so that it could take along all the dirt and start vanishing from the other side, at the not yet full eastern side - someone had bitten and set it backwards again!
It was either 4th or 5th of May, if I went by the calendar I would have known precisely when the Lunar Eclipse started!
I am not entirely sure whether I am able to describe, within the limits of the six thousands characters entrusted to me by the Avant-garde of Estonian Future Mission, the entire drama of the subsequent night.
I mark the major landmarks in the course of events point by point in order to later analyse what lies under Earth:
1. The Moon flees in clockwise direction;
2. The Devourer is close behind;
3. The wound bitten into the Moon rather resembles the shape of the Earth (a mouth?);
4. The Moon escapes under the barn roof gable, so I push the cart to another place, let the handles down again and reoccupy my seat in the thus created armchair;
5. The cart is an efficient one-wheel armchair, I also use the spyglass my father brought to me from Moscow in 1976;
6. The spyglass reveals the same growth as pumpkins have;
7. The Earth is not a mouth, but dirt, if not... because it now makes the Moon totally 'sooty';
8. I climb up a tree, everything necessary to make a broom with me;
9. The broom complete, I try to sweep the Moon clean.
The tradition of cleaning the Moon had steeped my consciousness from the deepest layers of local folk culture, and instantly invigorated my senses, my mind and my will, as a cascade of ice-cold stream water.
Behaviourist analysis of my activities does not yet allow to decide that I share the belief that Earth is a disc, and that there is another under its edge.
Although from the phenomenological point of view my feeling is genuine.
As I didn't dare cut this simple sweeping implement down to normal size in the gathering darkness, my hands got quite weak when I stretched the terrifyingly long handle towards the Moon (up in the tree I was at the same height with the Moon), but suddenly I was certain I was touching the Moon.
And although it would not get any cleaner, I was ... while recovering afterwards under the tree in that extraordinary light... I was ... am! - certain that I had done everything I could! .... Done my bit.
Although at first when I woke up in the dead of night under the tree, having obviously dozed off, aware of nothing but an increasing exhaustion and realisation that the Moon had been mournfully swinging up and down for quite some time...
And then, waking in that extraordinary light, I was truly disconsolate for a moment to have slept through the highlights of cosmic struggle - getting rid and shaking off the sooty demon - what shall I tell my son should he ask?
Standing up and leaning on my broom, however, I realised that I did not need to deny my part here - the rest I just have to invent.
I remember while sliding down the tree, wrists all stiff, no longer able to grab hold of anything, chin against the rough bark, I could still distinguish the clear outline of Polaris between Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
The institution that I currently serve might now naturally hope that the Moon-cleaning broom is an elaborate and ramified euphemism, some kind of whining from between wooden gums for the Soviet times.
This is not so.
I read two newspapers. Tuesday's "Forward" (16 June 1987) and Wednesday's (2 October 1985) "Pärnu Communist".
The 1985 paper had still something genuine in it:
Yesterday, a large group of publishers and editors of local papers from the Soviet Federal Socialist Republics of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, Uzbekistan, Moldova and other fraternal Soviet republics visited Pärnu. Views were exchanged, questions asked, and the guests learned that the "Pärnu Communist" earns a profit of 100,000 roubles a year, achieved by selling the print run and classified advertisements. The latter mostly comes from private individuals.
The paper has six (6) death notices from private individuals, three notices about exchanging flats and one offer of an exchange of cows.
Making public the top secret state financial indicators (100 000 etc) in the 1985 paper was naturally the result of Gorby's instructions about the self-sufficient economy! Let us remember with restrained irony that Lauristin's Financially Independent Sovereign Estonia (the Estonian abbreviation was IME which also means 'miracle') was nothing but a modest moon-cleaning appendage of this principle. And even this 'supremely bold' drivel had to wait for several years.
The paper also had an advert not from a private individual:
0.5 m long firewood will be sold to the invalids and veterans of the Great Patriotic War, industrial accident invalids classes I and II, the families of those killed in the Great Patriotic War and to those over 70 years old living in Pärnu. 2 metres long firewood will be sold to other Pärnu citizens on 8 October at 9 a.m.
On 8 October in the old wooden district of Pärnu, nobody went to work or enjoyed a lie-in, instead everybody turned up at half past four in the morning and queued at the door of the Firewood Office despite the cold.
Two years later, a progressive newspaper of another wooden Estonian town, the university town Tartu, writes about the opening of the memorial stone for Forselius seminary.1* The cleaning of the Moon had truly advanced!
The idea that the Estonians' activity had not the slightest impact on the collapse of the Soviet Union, is not in the least popular in my homeland.
One shouldn't automatically conclude here that the Estonians also believe that Earth is flat.
We have been swinging the broom up in the tree for centuries.
It is not impossible that this has been futile...
In Soviet time all laws were wrong. It was wrong that the veterans of Waffen-SS had to use 2m firewood.
Painting the sign of the sun in the Party committee's toilet was also cleaning the Moon.
Longing for a girl with a pioneer's scarf is... its equivalent today.
The same goes for an old man.
Cleaning the Moon is not an ideological system, but the phenomenal darkening of the mind.
As dark as the urge for freedom of an editor who uses the verb "reside".
A western sociologist might say that a revolt should have erupted in October 1985 in Pärnu - in such a climate!
He wouldn't understand. What erupted was the cleaning of the Moon!
A wondrous urge to undertake that celestial cleaning does not care one bit whether the laws come from Moscow, Mother Nature, or Brussels.
Our traditionally vague thrashing about must forever remind our kinsmen on Earth:
There is another, a real disc hidden behind this one!
There must be!
Naturally we admit nothing of the kind publicly, directly, so that it could be analysed.
We will, however, sing longingly about the sea which is Black when the other one, the Mediterranean, has just been opened up to us.

Jüri Ehlvest (1967), writer. One of the most significant short story writers in the 1990s. His key words are prose of the absurd and active intertextuality. He has won twice the Tuglas prize for short stories and twice the cultural price of Estonian Cultural Endowment.