Raivo opened his eyes as he roused himself from another deep sleep and gazed at the place where the window used to be. Nothing. Just as the day before, and the day before that. He tried hard not to let himself lose control. He had to be strong. For the sake of the family, he must surely be strong.
It wasn't enough, he thought to himself, that there was a war on and times had gotten hard, but now this...this...nightmare. Or was it? There was simply no way to know. The last any of the family knew, it was August, 1939. The Soviets were marching into Tallinn, and things were not looking good. And what had he, Raivo, done? Merely wished with all his might that things could be different. So perhaps he was responsible. Perhaps he was the reason they were now trapped in their house, a house that they had awoken one morning to find no longer had doors or windows.
It had been...what? three months now, since they had last seen the light of day? A chill passed through him as he remembered how they had panicked when they could find no way out, and had no way of knowing what had happened. No doors, no windows, the phone had disappeared, they were well and truly cut off from the outside world, if indeed it even still existed.
Gradually they had become resigned. They discovered that they would not starve, for somehow they had only to imagine what they would like to eat and it would magically appear on the kitchen table! There was no accounting it. Any of it. It simply was what it was. There was no way out. They had tried to break through the walls, but nothing they used made the least bit of difference.
Raivo heard his brother Andres moving about, so he got up and went to greet him. "Good morning, Andres", he said. Andres looked at him blankly. "Is it?", he asked. "please Andres, we must try..." Andres cut him off with a look as his sister Leida entered the room. She gazed at her brothers and then cast her eyes downward. She couldn't bear to look at the others anymore. All of them had gradually changed since they had been cut off from the world. Their faces had become unrecognizable, all of them with oddly round eyes and a rictus grin.
"Are the others up yet?", Raivo asked Leida in as light a tone as he could muster. "Yes", she replied simply. "Then what shall we have for breakfast?" he asked. Leida thought for moment and then said, "Strawberries, Raivo. I should like to have some strawberries."
Raivo nodded and they proceeded to the kitchen, knowing full well what would be waiting for them on the table. Life must go on, he thought to himself, but he wondered how and when he would confess to the others that it was his simple innocent wish that they could be spared the misery that would surely ensue with the coming of the Soviet soldiers that had probably led to the twilight zone they now found themselves in.
One must always be careful what one wishes for, Raivo thought to himself as he contemplated the strawberry he was about to bite into, but the alternative was something he could not bring himself to contemplate.
[The painting I based this story on is called Strawberry Eaters. It is a Naivist painting by noted Estonian artist Paul Kondas, and hangs in the KUMU Arts Center in Tallinn, Estonia, where I took the photo.]
