nights. It is the weekend, the few revelers who pass by sound loud enough for giants, big voiced and rudely made.
In the morning, the drinkers have given way to small herds of folk trailing behind tour guides, each with a number held aloft on a stick. I think of birds in flocks, the way they turn, of the bellwether, ant highways, ways of moving together. I let them walk on by and then pick my way through two-hearted Tallinn like an invalid. Tallinn has two old towns—Toompea, the administrative town, on the high ground, and, below and toward the harbor, the much larger mercantile town. On a map, the towns look like a cell about to divide. Walking, the difference is altitude. Toompea looks out over its city walls, the lower town does not. And after a quick circuit of Toompea, I head back down, preferring the alley called the “short leg” not only for its name (the alternative route is the “long leg,” after all), but because it’s steep and crooked. In spite of the reputed attractiveness of big views, it’s the lower town in Tallinn that gets the crowds.
From outside, it’s hard to get a comprehensive look at the Holy Spirit Church. Air transport would be required. From street level, if the structure stands out, it’s only because it’s painted a severe white. Tourists with cameras generally settle for a photo of the clock face that overlooks the small and triangular Great Guild Square, or they stand and shoot up, taking a picture of the corby-step gable and the spire. In spite of that spire, the white church has a squat look, as if it had hunched down among its neighbors and held on, for almost seven hundred years. But inside, the massive limestone walls and pillars are rendered almost weightless. I’m not sure how. The groined ceiling vaults have the feel of nine tents pitched in the open, in a field maybe, so distant do the adjoining buildings seem. In Tallinn, I visited the Holy Spirit Church many times. I studied it, I submitted to it. I watched the light shift with time and weather. I listened to a concert, a boy’s choir, the timbre of the little boys’ voices the very quiver of innocent flesh. I made friends with the cat that sometimes prowled there, scratching its belly as it sat next to me in a pew. I stood at the back, listening to a sermon.
I want to praise the Church of the Holy Spirit, but the terms elude me. Perhaps it’s not so hard to describe. The plank floors, all the finish gone except tight against the pews, where it shows dark brown. The simple, blackened oak of the pews themselves. The still light. I want to use the word sober as a term of praise. And serious. And quiet. A place for the small, honest voices to be heard, of conscience, of simple recognition, and of welcome. Nothing for show, no reaching, not even for heaven. There is room here for sorrow, that good sadness we can’t resist and really live.
In the tradition of almshouse churches, the Church of the Holy Spirit has a main and a side aisle. The main aisle is centered on the choir, in which stands the fifteenth century altar, the work of Bernt Notke and his workshop in Lubeck. The altar is a triptych with double, folding wings. Fully open, the way I see it, the altar reveals carved and polychrome figures. The central panel depicts the Pentecost, the apostles clustered around Mary, who looks up to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The mood expectant, the scene hushed. The altar, the only thing in the church that could be called splendid, stands back in the choir, at a considerable remove from the main hall. Close, it might be too much. But although Mary looks beautiful against her gold robe and the gilt plaque of her halo, there is something of the puppet in the apostles, something naïve. And this naïve quality sits well with the church hall, where the primary decorations are the simple, painted illustrations of biblical stories.
When I walk down the aisles, the church goes in motion, the pillars on either side move in front of the walls, in front of the barrel vaults in the walls. The pillars support the shallow raised choirs that run the length of the church and connect visually with the organ loft at the back. A great rail runs in front of the choirs and the loft, on three sides, and it is this rail that is divided into the painted panels, the biblical illustrations—Noah preparing for the flood, the rainbow sign, an Annunciation, Christ baptized, Christ walking on water under a brown sky—over sixty in all. The illustrations on the rail and the railing itself are painted in a restricted palette, somewhat like the Baltic woods would look in full summer. Ivy green and olive; burnt sienna; brown; a little muted red; a dark, watery blue, dense enough to float an ark, for a man to stroll on. Supported by the brown pillars, the whole suggests a forest canopy, as if in the hall you stood in a meadow, under peaked pavilions, and looked out at surrounding trees. This would be the church for me, if only.
I stand for a moment in the doorway, in the thin light of evening. Then I am walking, and walking I remember a line of poetry, written about the time the church was built, by Charles d’Orleans, a prisoner then, in England. “My ghostly fader, I me confesse.” That word, ghostly, for holy, that is what calls up the old poet. A presence felt but not seen, or if seen, just glimpsed. Something apparitional, just fading from sight. A white reflection before the glass goes clear. The ground under your feet, sinking away. Or to wake in the night reaching out for a disappearing world. So much of what we sense, what we want, won’t hold still for our embrace. And we are left to live in the tangible world, a world that at least persists in seeming to be there.
Here, too, the ice cream colors, even sorbets, orange and raspberry sorbet, the colors too intense to admit an admixture of cream. The alleys bending, curvaceous, the old buildings again made smooth. Everything beautiful in the long evening. Another day I visit the church of St. Nicholas, now a museum. Not all the old churches have been reconsecrated after the half-century of communism. I take my time. Here, too, there are altarpieces with double wings—or as they are also called, shutters. And I notice how one, from the workshop of Adriane Issenbraut, painted around 1515, features a crucifixion in the foreground, and a panorama of Jerusalem behind, blued by distance, a walled Jerusalem that looks suspiciously like Tallinn. I don’t hurry, I walk on, and after a while I find myself in a crowd of school children, just as I am sitting down in front of another work by Bernt Notke, his justly praised Dance of Death. The children’s teacher stands in front of us, lecturing, pointing first at the lively dead dressed in their winding sheets, then at one or another of the living, the Cardinal, the Emperor, the Empress, the Pope, or the King. I am amused that in the painting it is the living who look the stiffs, while the dead rock on. The children, in their matching uniforms, try to attend, to follow what their teacher is saying, but wide-eyed, the hum of their own lives is just too much for them; they can’t listen for long. Then the teacher calls the kids to order and marches them away, leaving me alone with the high-stepping, dancing dead. I consider them. The world the living in the painting knew has gone with them. And Bernt Notke’s warning looks to go unheeded at St. Nicholas. The museumgoers walk the length of the twenty-five-foot panel, not afraid. Not one of them seems to heed the warning, looks as nervous as the Cardinal or the King, nor raises a hand overhead to dance a step or two with the dead, who are perhaps too dead, too long dead, to have the force of poor Yorick for Hamlet, who “knew him.” I think I see the tourists in the picture, though, in the background, in the two oblivious strollers out walking their scampering dogs. Still, our eyes often bear false witness. It’s more than likely that at least some of the old, and perhaps even some of the young, walk in front of that Dance with a dead friend.
::
Riga
Here, the trolleys are still running. The time of trolleys is still now, and I ride them daily, thinking it was a good time and a time not so distant that I can’t remember trolleys in Portland, where I grew up, raining sparks down from the wires strung overhead. They’ve brought light rail back to Portland, in a very limited way, but in Riga the trolleys never left. Screech and clangor, forty cents for any ride, which is good, as my ride out to Mezaparks, where I’m staying, takes me clear to the end of the line.
In Riga, too, the old town is the big attraction, the alleys and squares set with tables and chairs for the trade. But there are not so many old buildings here, and I know why. I’ve seen the photos, the old town bombed out and looking a sad ruin by the end of WWII. What remains is the plat of the streets, a few old buildings, and a lot of infill, some of it attractive, without a doubt. But perhaps even the plat is
