On March 9th my mother would contact her children. Heedless of time zones, exam schedules, work obligations or social engagements, her call on March 9th was a command performance. She had to speak directly to each child. When I moved to Fredericton to complete my undergraduate studies in 1978 I blithely forgot to forewarn my roommates. “Your mother called,” I was advised in an alarmed tone. “She said it was an emergency. I told her you were at the library (this being the code for any parental call) and she wanted the number there.” As it happened, I had been at the library that particular March 9th and had descended from the stacks with a book on Etruscan pottery (Art History) to find a sign printed in large, even black magic marker capital letters at the checkout: “CHRISTINA TARI: CALL YOUR MOTHER, IT IS AN EMERGENCY”. After a quick panic, I focused on the date now stamped on the card inserted in the back pocket of the book on Etruscan pottery: Date Borrowed: March 9, 1978.

The emergency was always the same. “I am calling to check that you’re alive. It’s March the 9th, you know. It’s a very unlucky day for us. In fact, remember that the whole month is unlucky. Be careful. Don’t travel. Don’t drive anywhere. Stay inside.”

Through the years I came to understand that her mother and favourite sister were killed in a Soviet air raid on March 9, 1944. The recount of this fact was always a cause for tears for my mother. I remember thinking that March 9th was the date on which my grandmother became beatified for my mother. One year she started crying with the announcement that she had now outlived the age reached by her mother. “I guess I am going to die soon,” she moaned dramatically amid tears. Seasoned by at least eleven March 9ths, I couldn’t condone this logic. “Your mother died when a building fell on her in an air raid,” I recited, “that would not constitute a natural cause of death.” Logic was unwelcome on March 9th.

The tag line warning against the dire danger of driving on March 9th derived from a near fatal collision involving my mother and sister that took place in the Spring following my Dad’s leaving us. My mother was a menace behind the wheel even without tears in her eyes. Eventually, the insurance company would refuse to cover her. That particular accident, of course, had to take place on March 9th.

As a baby boomer, born and raised in the peace of a first world country, I didn’t have a lot of compassion for the trauma that this date clearly caused my mother. Frankly, the annual hysteria was often an embarrassment. I couldn’t help noticing that no one else’s mother seemed to freak out to this degree on any particular date. At other times it was an inconvenience, a predictable obstacle to circumvent. Like the years when Easter fell in March and my Dad would take my sister and I on the annual trek to Washington to see the cherry blossoms and the three-dimensional copper-coloured Abe Lincoln sitting in his white Greek temple, high above all those steps. We’d have to call every night to reassure my Mom that we were still alive. I remember shuddering when I learned that the Easter holiday was to be reconstructed as a non-denominational “March break” for school children. By this point I was thankfully through the school system.

When I turned 42 my cousin sent me a long letter. In an effort to understand my mother’s past I had asked her to recollect anything that she could of my mother’s family history. She observed that the war, and particularly the night of March 9th had fundamentally changed my mother. Apparently a naïve, happy-go-lucky, sheltered twenty-three year old, she had been engaged to marry and had obtained a coveted posting at an electrical company, a promising career. Then came the war and a wave of death. Her fiancé was killed first. An air strike shortly before March 9th had loosened the chandelier in my grandmother’s dining room. Gravity directed the fixture downward to kill my mother’s infant nephew, the son of her favourite sister, Nina, a child of whom my mother was particularly fond. The baby had been placed in a carrier on my grandmother’s dining table, while his mother was removing her coat. On March 9, 1944 my grandmother took Nina to the cinema. It is easy to imagine the attempt to distract a grieving young mother.

Reading my cousin’s letter I wondered that my mother, the consummate videophile, had not gone with them. And mixed with a sudden understanding of the extent of the trauma that my mother had suddenly been forced to endure in this timeframe, and a bit of guilt at how callous I had been through the years in my reaction to her observance of March 9th, was a sudden appreciation for the vagaries of destiny. I suddenly understood the impact on my life of my mother’s physical placement on March 9, 1944. If she had gone to the cinema, I would not be reading my cousin’s letter.

My mother had gone looking for her mother and sister on that March 9th. She’d ended up having to take shelter in the basement of a building when the air raid made the streets intractable. She’d taken off her shoes at the door, leaving them in the doorway. When she emerged, the shoes were gone. My cousin reported that she had eventually arrived at their country property, days later, barefoot, joining with the family of her second eldest sister, my cousin’s family, the only relatives that she could find. It was the ‘theft’ of her shoes that represented some turning point in my mother’s mind, my cousin reported. Shoes were not easily found during the war and my mother’s tiny foot size was very different from my aunt’s. A pair of ill fitting white summer shoes was scrounged up for her, the only pair that she would own for many months to come. “She was some twisted incarnation of Imelda Marcos,” a young woman helping me clean out my mother’s house observed last week, encountering a cupboard full of worn, tired shoes that properly ought to have been thrown out a long time ago.

“Today,” my cousin wrote, “every one accepts that trauma can be addressed and there is therapy. But then, any sign of mental illness was a sure ticket to Siberia or a firing squad. We focused on the need to re-establish our lives, and tried to forget the past. Give thanks that we live in a time of peace.” My mother emigrated with my aunt and my cousins in August of 1944, wearing her ill-fitting white summer shoes.

In December of 2001 I had the opportunity to visit Estonia. In the mad whirlwind of my life as a yuppie establishing her mark in the peace of a first world country, I didn’t have time to do any research on my destination before leaving home. I bought an English guidebook in a travel bookstore in Stockholm, turning to the part captioned “Tallinn, What to See”. I was surprised to find peppered references to the Soviet air raid of March 9, 1944. For some reason, it had never occurred to me that this was an event that had marked a whole country. In my frame of reference, March 9, 1944 was strictly a family event. But I was stunned to find this passage:

On leaving the church, turn right to the memorial to the writer Eduard Vilde (1865-1933). The illustrations depict scenes from his novels and plays. The two stones represent an open book. Proceed down the steps to Harju and then turn right again. This bombed site has deliberately been left as it was after the raid of March 9 1944. The inscription commemorates the 463 people killed by the raid.

In all the observations of this date that I had endured, there had been no mention of 461 other people. For a moment I imagined 461 other crazy mothers causing black magic marker notes to be left at the check out in libraries around the world on March 9th. And the site was still there. I would have the opportunity to commune with the be-sainted grandmother and aunt of legend. Clearly, this was a site that I was not going to miss.

Finding the site, however, proved a challenge. I realized my mistake as soon as I asked the question. This twenty something year old serving the coffee at this wonderful café in the Town Square in Tallinn and staring at me with a stunned, blank look, clearly couldn’t even imagine 1944. “It suggests that it’s near Harju Street,” I explained, patiently. Politely, she advised that she’d seek assistance. The ensuing conference established the following. No one over the age of 23 was working this shift. I was a tourist woman at the front counter with a funny accent looking for some place that had something to do with 1944. And 1944 was obviously a date in a prehistoric era. Frustrated, I interrupted. “Please just direct me to Harju Street” I asked, and was rewarded, to our mutual relief.

We passed it. I realized when I saw the stone pillars of the Vilde monument that we must have come too far. A street cleaner was standing near the monument. He looked old enough to at least have heard of 1944. “Excuse me, I’m looking of the site preserved after the bombing in 1944,” I ventured. “Ah”, he responded, his bright blue eyes twinkling, “the Estonian Pompeii. Just walk this way,” he pointed. “It’s maybe 10 meters”. But for the relative precision with which he had described the distance, we probably all would have missed it again. And when my travel companions pointed it out, I realized that I would likely never have found it on my own.

The site contains maybe five former foundations, loosely protected by a chain-link fence that has developed sagging gaps. Ancient, low, stone walls that once formed basements, were now bleached to tones of white and sand from the years of exposure to sun, wind, snow and rain. They were dusted with snow on this December morning, with small tufts of dried yellowed grasses growing between them. Sheltered, rounded old building bones, that seemed to be calmly, quietly, resting. A vibrant, healthy and colourful urban city was growing up in the background. I immediately grasped the understanding that I would not be communing with the ghost of any grandmother or aunt. There were no souls left here, only a feeling of peace.

I was stunned to realize that what I was feeling was a profound disappointment. It wasn’t because I wouldn’t be able to commune with the icons of my family past. It was, I understood, a disappointment in the physical reality of the scene itself. I realized that I had expected black, scarred, torn walls. Billowing black smoke obscuring my vision, thick, slippery oily pools in the streets, and acrid smells that would stay in my nose for days. I had anticipated total bedlam, with people screaming hysterically, their cries vying for attention with the whining whistle of bombs descending earthward. George Lucas might have manifested what I’d pictured.

I stood on the sidewalk on the opposite side of Harju, resting my back against the façade of a relatively modern building, looking at the site. The “inscription”, in four languages, printed in neat black capital letters, read:

Tallinn was bombed by the Soviet air Forces during the evening and midnight of March 9, 1944. 53 per cent of living space was destroyed. ca 20,000 people lost their homes. 463 people were killed and 659 were wounded.

Reluctantly, I took out my camera, recording the view. I didn’t think it would be an image that I’d particularly want to see again, but didn’t know whether I’d ever again have the opportunity to retake this shot. And there certainly wouldn’t be any postcards. And as I stood, focusing the lens, I thought how appropriate was the moniker ’Estonian Pompeii’. Images of pages of history books and photo reproductions in the National Geographic passed through my mind’s eye. This quiet, bleached scene was like those ancient ruins in Italy. Once vivid frescoes now faded relics. I thought back to the reaction of the young woman at the café, and to that of her friends, the genuineness of their responses. March 9, 1944 was a long time ago. A point in the past. A travesty. A tragedy. A date of genocide. But a date from which new generations and a revitalized country was moving on. And good on ’em, I thought in my best Maritime vernacular. Proper t’ing. It is far too easy to remain captive in a date best relegated to history.

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