Once There Lived an Old Woman

Who knows where she came from, but she settled alone in the forest, hoping to manage on her own. Her name was Ida Rass. We always called her Forest Ida. According to her own story, she had once worked as a dairy worker and cheesemaker.

She spoke very badly about her children and also about her husband, and when she talked about them she became very angry. Perhaps her family had treated her badly. She certainly was an unusual person when she came to live in the Võstermäe forest at Laupa. She did not really have proper shelter there. There was only an old hut, built into a sand hill and left from the pre-war Defence League, which had not been used for a long time. Now the old woman made it her home. She did not simply sit there doing nothing. With a mattock she immediately began making herself a garden out of rough forest ground where strongly scented wild plants grew. She cleared a large piece of land, carried two buckets of water at a time from the village on a shoulder yoke, fertilised the poor soil, and before long vegetables and strawberries were growing there. She planted a double spruce hedge as a boundary and dug a small pond for drinking water. She also made an altar with words formed in moss — a dedication to God. It was a verse from the Bible, which unfortunately I no longer remember.

When the garden work was more or less done, she began building a new little hut. That caused her plenty of trouble. She cut down young pines as thick as pulpwood without permission, and the forest guard caught her. Jüri, as the guard was called, told her, 'I'll show you!' Ida was never short of an answer and replied, 'Can I see from here, or should I come closer?'

The forest guard feared that a mad person might eventually set the forest on fire. Apart from that, Ida was very helpful, kind and hardworking. When needed, she came to help my mother and father gather hay from the meadow. From time to time she would burst into song and could be very humorous and cheerful. But when she became upset, she could not even tolerate a jay calling from a tree. In her mind it was old Stalin, the man who had swallowed up the Estonian state. With help from village men, her hut was completed. A few panes of glass were put into the windows and even a small stove was installed. From summer to autumn life went normally. Her nimble fingers gathered forest produce for the school people, and in that way she earned her bread money. But when winter began and life became harsh, she constantly waited for some money transfer that she believed would arrive any day. It existed only in her imagination and, of course, never came.

One winter day I went to visit her. My mother was tending the collective-farm cattle, and Ida had once asked that if any cow calved, we should bring her some of the first colostrum. I was surprised to see no tracks at all in the snow and wondered where she could have gone. I began calling, and from inside came a weak reply. I entered the hut, and what I saw there astonished me.

A grave had been dug in the middle of the hut. Spruce branches had been placed beside it, and some kind of door lay over the hole. Ida herself was lying on her ragged bed, wearing a white linen dress edged in black and a black ribbon on her head.

So she had been waiting for her own death. Yet death did not come. She had no food and had already been starving for several weeks, becoming extremely thin. Even then she refused food from me and wanted only to have her lips moistened with water. She said this was God's will and that she intended to follow it. She asked me to saw a few logs and warm the room a little. It was a wonder that she had not already burned to death there, because there were signs of fire in the hut.

I came home and told the villagers what condition Ida was in. That same day she was taken to a farm, where at first she was fed only a thin flour gruel.

I remember an April day when she had regained her strength and came to our home. Her legs had become as thin as sticks. She herself said, 'I have gained so much weight now!'

After that the village council took her to Pikasilla. At Pikasilla there was a feldsher's station, where simpler health care than a doctor's treatment was provided in those days. I no longer remember how long she stayed there, but she did return.

My children later told me that an old woman had been in a shop asking for bread and promising to pay with berries, but the shopkeeper would not give her any. The children thought it really was the forest woman. We bought bread and the children went to take it to her at Laupa. She had already visited my mother and said that Aunt Allman had given her some, and that she was hurrying home.

She could not remain in her longed-for home much longer. Someone came for her and she was probably taken back to Pikasilla. Nothing more is known of her later fate. She has surely been gone from this life for a long time.

Ida's little house was demolished and the wood was taken to the sanatorium as fuel for the children. A lone birch, the hedge and the pond remain as reminders of the past. Old buckets and pieces of the stove lay on the ground. Heather has begun to grow again on the land she once cultivated, beside the dried wild-rose bush that stood under the window of the hermit's home. All of it remains as a reminder. This is the story of that person's life, as much of it as has remained in my memory.