The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
salu Bay, dreaming of oceans but batted for centuries between Hiiumaa and
the western mainland coast near Rohukula. The only wave to escape this purgatory
was the protagonist of the fourth novel, who carried a Danish ship
from King Sweyn’s court to western Estonia to Hiiumaa during a winter
storm.
Tiima became obsessed with the metaphorical implications of the fourth
novel in the series and eventually wrote a manuscript of his own about the
passengers of that ship, which, he believed, was not fictional. His manuscript,
Arabs of the North Sea, contended that the key to Estonian identity
was an item of tremendous power and worth that al-Idrisi brought from the
still center of the earth, Baghdad, to the frozen and benighted wastelands
between the Baltic Sea and Lake Peipsi. In the dying days of the Soviet
Union, when faith healers, fortune-tellers, tyromancers and pyromancers and
gyromancers all became temporary norths for the wildly wavering needles of
lost citizens’ need to believe, Tiima’s theory enjoyed a brief vogue in villages
west of Tallinn. He even dared to hold a reading and discussion group in the
back room of his cottage, whose walls he decorated with seaman’s memorabilia
inherited from his father: a mariner’s astrolabe, a sextant, and a copper
board attached to an old rope.
Local citizens held an illegal vigil in Keila-Joa’s main square when Tiima
was found murdered, shot once in the back of the head in the forest behind
his house by a pistol of the same type that local policemen carried. The vigil
stayed peaceful, but the citizens did not disperse when ordered to. News of
the civil disobedience spread quickly throughout the country, and though
no violence, rioting, or even further sympathetic demonstrations followed,
every single citizen of Keila-Joa participated in the “Baltic Way” chain three
years later.
Estimated value: A nine-hundred-year-old rope attached to a greenish
rectangle of copper might fetch $10 at a junk store. It might fetch nothing;
it could easily be mistaken for garbage. It might fetch $30,000, as did a
kamal supposedly used by Vasco da Gama’s chief navigator.
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