It was a little mouse that was in the picture, but I don't really like mice all that much, and that's why the thing that came out was a story about the bridge.
What kind of a bridge was it?
It was a long bridge across the sea.
In the morning boys would walk over it to play in the sand on the shore.
There were three of them, and they were friends.
They crossed the bridge every morning and then would play in the sand the whole day long.
It was white and crumbly, the sand - white and crumbly like what? - like sugar - and it felt pleasant to touch it and to scrabble in it with one's fingers.
Under this sand was another kind of sand, damp and brown, and to get down to it you had to dig out a lot of white sand first.
And near the water itself there was no white sand at all, only brown, and tall castles could be made from it, but the water would attack them.
And if you took it away - the sand - to where the waves couldn't reach, the castles wouldn't turn out so well, because all the water would have drained out of it, and then you couldn't get such high sand-dripped spires on the top of the tower.
But if you were to build at the edge of the sea, you could surround the castle with fortifications: with a wall and even a moat.
Most of the waves didn't get as far as the moat, but even if one wave out of eighteen managed to splash into it, the wall would begin to subside, and the moat would become filled with water and sand and soon look as smooth as all the other places close to the water.
Then one more wave would splash over the sunken wall - and the wall, as they say, met the same fate as the moat.
After that the castle itself began to go under, and the towers and the turrets would slide down as if they were on sledges.
(And then, lifting your face, you would notice that the wind was coming nearer and that the light was waning and the sea changing its colour and that the bridge was disappearing into the mist of sea-spray.)
And once, playing and digging in the sand, the boys came across something hard.
They began to dig deeper, but their fingernails got broken, and they couldn't dig any more.
Then they pushed the sand back into the hole and waited till the evening, so that nobody would find this place by accident, and went home across the bridge.
Why did they go home?
To get shovels and spades.
Then, at night, when the moon was full, they returned to the shore over the bridge and set to work together and uncovered first the long boards and then the whole very big wooden chest itself.
What was in this very big wooden chest?
Precious amber: the whole chest was packed full with precious amber. And then from that amber they built themselves a house, and in this house all three of them lived together.
The sea around all the 1500 islands off the coast is calm, and you can stand at the very end of the promontory of Saaretirp (according to legend, the unfinished bridge between the islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa) and see how it fades into the smooth silver-grey surface of the Baltic.
But soon a stormy wind is raised which re-awakens the waves, and breakers begin to toss themselves and wash over the sand.
Now the waves roar, the adverse, baffling sea wind rushes inland, covering the causeway which leads to Saaremaa with surge, battering with whiplashes of water the grass-grown and the pebbly beaches of Hiiumaa and Muhu and the thick forests of the Kopu peninsula, and all the coastal dunes, boulders and juniper bushes. The strong gale advances on ports, fishing villages and sea-gates, rushing from the Gulf of Tallinn into the mouth of the Pirita River, reaching over the highway into Kadriorg Park and drenching the memorial to a sunken ship. The storm sweeps the bays and harbours of the mainland, prevails over the islands along the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland and rages through the straits between the Baltic and the North Sea. The lighthouses agitatedly twinkling around the shore vanish in the thick fog, and the precipitous sea submerges the apparent time and shatters the time-scale of memory.
A bridge, a narrow bridge stretches across the sea which is full of song like the cavity of the mouth; a very narrow bridge extends above the multitude of waves where the restless fulmar flickers like the spirit over the turbulent surface.
The towering shape looms larger and larger, curved and multi-coloured. It seems slowly to rotate, at times reaching east towards St Petersburg, at others north-west towards Sweden, and at others still, south-west towards Denmark.
And now, at this very moment, a moment of exceptional visibility, we can clearly see how it is slowly drawn, like the wheels of a plane, into the vault of the sky.
