BOOK REVIEW : The Baltic Everyman With No Way Out : THE GOOD REPUBLIC<i> by William Palmer</i> Viking $18.95, 300 pages
“You have no choice.”
This is the key phrase in William Palmer’s novel about the lacerated modern history of the Baltic states. It is spoken twice, once in paraphrase.
The first time, it comes from a Nazi officer who presses a pistol into the hand of a young assistant, a native of the occupied country, and orders him to finish off one of a group of machine-gunned Jews. The second time, it is spoken by a KGB official to an elderly Baltic exile, returned on a visit, whom the Russian attempts to force into spying on his own exile organization.
The young man and the old one are the same, of course; separated by half a century of history. It is a history that in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia has taken all kinds of right-angle turns.
There was the independence of the late ‘30s, undermined by competing Soviet and Nazi pressures, the Soviet domination after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Nazi occupation after Hitler invaded Russia, Soviet annexation at the war’s end and, in the last few years, a glimmer of independence, a shadow of its denial. And despite all these changes, there is perhaps no change at all. The message may still be: “You have no choice.”
“The Good Republic” dramatizes this stifled history with eloquence and irony. A poet, Palmer is an artist of atmospheres: The numb shock of an occupied city, its multiple individual lives and customs indifferently trampled and smeared; the sense of the land and water, the dark firs, the gold afternoon light of the North Sea countries. More poet and moral thinker than novelist, in fact, Palmer’s story and his characters are stolidly fitted into their roles; they do not live in history so much as mark it.
Palmer’s protagonist is Jacob Balthus--a Baltic Everyman, the name declares, perhaps too obviously. His country is not named, though it seems to be a mix of Estonia and Lithuania; its capital is Kalnins (Tallinn-Vilnius?).
At the start of the novel, he is an old man; a bookseller living in London and a leader of the exile community. His wife, Ella, is a fellow exile. A Polish Communist in the ‘30s, she moved to Kalnins on orders of the party, met Balthus, married him after the war and moved with him to England.
The time is virtually the present. The nationalist movement, previously suppressed, is flourishing in Jacob’s country. He receives an invitation to return to attend a conference of the movement. As he flies home, the story moves back to his younger days.
Jacob is the son of a senior official in the nationalist government of the late ‘30s. When the Russians partly occupy the country in 1940, they offer Jacob’s father a high post if he will cooperate. He refuses, is arrested, tortured and killed.
Jacob goes into hiding. He helps the anti-Soviet partisans in a minor fashion and celebrates with them when the German Army moves in. Palmer is able to make us see how, to a small country so Western in its outlook and under harsh Soviet rule, the German invasion could for a while seem like a lesser evil if not an outright deliverance.
Jacob, whose family has German relatives, is given privileges and a good job by the occupiers. His Nazi superior orders Jacob to reveal the location of the old partisan camp he was in touch with. Jacob complies, telling himself that the partisans are long gone. But several hundred Jews are there instead. Jacob is forced to witness the machine-gunnings and to take up a pistol himself.
Back in the present, Jacob arrives in Kalnins and is feted by his hosts. The KGB is still there, though; an agent threatens to disclose his role under the Germans unless he provides them information on the exiles in London. Ella--blackmailed for her old Communist connections--had been doing so all along, the agent reveals.
Cornered and broken, the crippled Jacob speaks for his country’s history. “What right? What right have you? You destroyed it. It was a good place. A good Republic. A good people.”
“The only good Republic is that of the dead,” the KGB man replies.
As the Everyman of a country helpless before history, it is appropriate that Jacob Balthus should waver back and forth under its buffetings. Palmer, however, makes him too much of a blank sheet; the better, of course, to inscribe all he has to say. The trouble is, though, that Jacob is so blank as to be utterly flavorless.
Few of the others have much flavor either; and some of what they do have is canned. There is a clutch of ranting, swinish Nazis, some coldly brutal Russians and a wealthy fellow-exile who has flourished as an English capitalist, works with the Russians and finances the opposition. Only Jacob’s cynical, civilized and stalwart father emerges in a character that survives the turning of the page.
Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Private Lies” by Warren Adler (William Morrow).
