A DREAM TO SOME, a nightmare to others. The month rolled in, full of fog and gray misunderstandings. And then one night in bed with Lata, I recognized the very moment when everything had turned wrong, and where my main path had diverged from the River of Good Intentions. Lata was dressed in black and tried to comfort me, but it just kept on flowing and flowing, and there was no turning back. Years of unresolved feelings came spurting out. For weeks after that I was a mess. I was riding the trains. How did it even happen? I likened it to the kalima, the orange Saharan sands that drift across the blue sky of the Canaries. Maybe it was spring or maybe it was the sun. Or maybe it was just another kind of cracked awakening.
There it was in the wind, a streak of hazy yellow over the horizon.
It was whispering in a woman’s voice, “you made me into a dream.”
At the start of the winter, I had one last encounter with Dulcinea. She had jumped me by the airplane factory and cut out my heart with an icicle, if only to free herself from my stubborn love. And for a while after that I wandered. It was a dark, hard, peripatetic life. I slept under eaves and in back alleyways. I met other strangers afflicted by various maladies and misfortunes. I was one of them. Lost, cold, and heartless. But the thing is — my heart grew back. At first, it was just a tiny beating red lump. Then as big as an apple. She must not have cut the whole thing out. A small shred of tissue had been left behind. It regenerated. Whatever freedom she had sought, or tried to retrieve, it had all horribly backfired. Whatever spell she had tried to undo, she had doubled it. I wondered what happened to the old cut-away heart.
The new heart was even more powerful.
Then one morning, I understood that all along, I had only wanted to give life to her. I wanted her to bloom and blossom with life. I wanted to see her as rich and flowering with life as the jungles of India. This idea made me very happy and later on, when a Nepali woman asked who I was, I told her the story. The Nepali woman listened, and seemed to understand everything.
She nodded and said, “We must remain true to our ideas.”
THOSE WERE WEIRD NIGHTS. One night I went to Dubai, which happened to look like the freeway in California. There were motels with green swimming pools and chain restaurants serving up greasy fare. The bus was there to take some Estonian soldiers to the war. They were all geared up and camouflaged. But at a sandy rest stop outside of San Bernardino, or the Dubai equivalent, while they were standing around smoking, I took one last look at the boys and slinked off toward some cluster of desert trees. Yes, I felt like a coward, but so what?
On another night, an Estonian woman I know kept telling me about her love for her ex-boyfriend, Charbel, who was Lebanese. From the outside, she was a beautiful soul, and had a beautiful appearance too, but when you looked inside this soul of hers, you realized she was still smarting from the breakup. She loved Charbel and not me, which was OK, but I could never understand what one could love in either of us. What was there to love about men? We had no breasts. We had no hips. We had no life-giving powers. We also lacked the ability to see into souls. Well, most of us. We were just our lonesomeness and our hobbies and our thoughts and our hard, sinewy muscles. It seemed like a losing proposition, to waste one’s love on a man, but she had loved one at least, and his name was Charbel. The Lebanese had hurt her.
The weirdest moments though came in the early mornings. Again, I saw the sparks in the apartment. These were tiny bursts of light, almost like the glow of a firefly, but they moved through the air slowly. It was almost like the tip of a cigarette, yet with no cigarette and no hand to hold it. It traced a snaky path through the air and then it faded into the air of the room. It was there long enough to hold my attention. It was strange enough for my mind to register it and to understand that it was unusual and that I really had seen nothing like it before. That tiny light tracing a path through the air. I saw the sparks two times. Were these those ghostly orbs I have heard so much about? But they didn’t seem to be orb sized. Smaller. Whatever they were, I could not make sense of them. They seemed neither threatening to me nor benign. They were just naturally manifesting. I made a decision to contact a ghosthunter.
IT WAS ARRANGED that I would do some field work with another anthropologist from the initiative. We were dispatched to a viewing platform at night. From there, we would make observational notes about human behavioral patterns. I had never worked with this woman before. She had brown hair, glasses, and blue eyes. She was not exceptionally pretty but not unattractive either. The first thing she said when we got on the platform was, “We should just get this part out of the way.” With that, she inserted her hands under my shirt and into my trousers and began to feel around. It was as much an inspection as an introduction. At times, she squeezed me, but not too hard. I just lied back and let her explore me. It wasn’t unpleasant.
After work, I went to a nightclub where they were playing Prince. The cut was “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” off of 1983’s 1999. Igrayne was at the bar with some of her friends. She was wearing a loose, open blouse and her golden hair was pulled back in a braid. She was sipping some awful fruity drink, and her light eyes were funeral black from midnight romps with surly strangers, angst, anguish, hangovers, and other bloody nightclub stories. “I want to kiss you,” I told Igrayne. “But we’re just friends,” she said. “This is all just friendship. That’s all this is.” At that, I began to lick her neck in a very friendly, neutral way. “This is just friendship,” I told her. “We’re just friends.” It felt good to kiss Igrayne’s warm neck. My daughter of course happened to walk by at this moment, a little distressed by the whole scene. “Daughter,” I said. “Meet Igrayne, your new stepmother.” They stared at each other curiously, like furry forest animals.
I slipped out the back door.
The tiki bar was up on the jungle plateau outside the town. Only a single dirt path led up to it. It was built of jungle wood, and drew a certain kind of crowd, mostly Hells Angels and Satanists. It was dark when I finally got up there. At the bar, I ordered a drink that came in a coconut that had been carved to look like a human skull. I was standing at the bar when I noticed a familiar man coming my way through the dark. It was none other than Charlie Watts, the late drummer of the Rolling Stones. “But Charlie, you’re dead,” I said. “Not here, I’m not,” he answered. He was tan and his hair was still brown. He wore a t-shirt, jeans, and sandals. He said, “Would you mind holding my drink? I’ll be right back. Just need to do some things.”
“Sure, Charlie,” I said. There I stood at the tiki bar, holding Charlie Watts’ iced coffee. I stood there for a long time. I imagined he had gone to find a bush, or was having some words with the owner of the bar. But Mr. Watts never came back for his iced coffee. It was in a clear plastic cup with a straw, and the ice cubes were melting. They clinked around inside the brown liquid like shards of glass. It looked as if he had bought it at Starbucks. I waited and waited and walked around the tiki bar and called out into the jungle night, “Charlie! Charlie! What about the coffee?” But Mr. Charlie Watts never came back for his melting iced coffee.
IT WAS A FEW WEEKS LATER that I returned to the capital, taking an evening train to Liiva, so I could spend the night on a friend’s couch before an early morning TV appearance.
The logistics of getting from the provinces, the periphery, to the capital city, are at times challenging. There is no way to be in Tallinn that early other than to drive, and who wants to drive to Tallinn from the South during January blizzard weather, though this is often done?
I barely slept and was afflicted by a profound melancholy all night long, and found myself yearning for elusive feminine comfort, and sort of clutching my pillow, only to have a half dozen horror stories replay in my mind, as if warning me to be careful of what I wished for. I didn’t mention a word of it to my friend as we drank coffee in his kitchen at 7 am. Nõmme is probably a coveted place to live, and expensive, though I haven’t asked about prices, but it’s just like Tähtvere in Tartu or any other place in this country. You look out the window and you see other windows, and maybe other people behind those windows, but you barely know who they are, and you probably never will, and the city mindset is, why would you care to know?
This is how people think. In 1968, the American soul group Sly & The Family Stone released a song called “Into My Own Thing,” and it seems that everybody here these days is into their own thing everywhere. Especially in neighborhoods like Nõmme, where the houses are separated by plots of fenced-off land and large, view-obscuring trees. This is a quiet suburb, where one can be left alone, mostly, to read his books and drink his coffee alone and be into his own thing. In the morning, I ordered a Bolt to take me to the Postimees House, across from the Sikupilli shopping center. My friend told me that only the criminally insane shop at Sikupilli. He also said that a real writer would walk through the snow and not take a Bolt.
“I guess I am not a real writer yet,” I told him.
When he asked me what I planned to do in Tallinn, I told him I was going to visit Kopli.
“Why would you even do that to yourself?” he asked.
“Because I feel like it,” I said. “I haven’t been there in 20 years.”
***
AFTER MY INTERVIEW, I headed into town with snow and ice blowing in my face. I had breakfast at Must Puudel, the Black Poodle, right off the Town Hall Square. This café was only recently introduced to me by an old friend. I don’t know these things, you know, where to go to Tallinn, where to eat, who has the best coconut macchiato. I usually go to Reval Café in that big yellow building across from Sõprus, the one that also houses the Vallikraavi Bar and that looks like it should be in a Wes Anderson movie. That might be my favorite building in Tallinn and I aim to study it. I often go there and eavesdrop on conversations, but this time I chose Must Puudel, because I had read an article recently that said that Estonia’s slowburn economic crisis was causing regular Must Puudel patrons to skip cake and just order coffee, so I decided I would patronize the place and help them out. Of course, I was dreaming that I would meet someone interesting or that something interesting would happen. Maybe an archaeologist might need someone to help him find some treasure, or a woman would dump all of her marital problems on me in a bid to get me into bed and to forget about her personal life.
These things just don’t happen in cafes anymore. Not to me. They happen on Messenger, maybe, and people come into cafes and just sit there behind their computer screens and try to look busy, which is what I was doing. I did manage to befriend a cultural organizer from Rakvere, who said she likes a good day in Tallinn. She doesn’t want to live here, she says, but she enjoys these moments, an early morning’s coffee at Must Puudel, with the snow outside. One of those orange Omniva delivery carts had wheeled up beyond the window and the mailman was out delivering to the nut sellers and karaoke bar owners. Or so I imagined. I do love those Omniva delivery carts. The last time I was in Tallinn, I even took a picture of one.
***
AND THERE I WAS, waiting from Tram No. 1 to take me out to Kopli at last. I usually dodge this tram whenever I go to walk around Kalamaja, but here I was, getting aboard. All I could remember about the old place was the adjacent gray sea, and the burned wood houses, the result of many drunken winter heating mishaps. I used to teach English to a kid who lived out there years ago, whose mother was from Narva, and I used to pass the old burned out Kopli houses and marvel at them. When you are away from Estonia, you forget about this indigent element, living on the margins of the city, warming itself by a wood-heated furnace. You forget about these ghosts of alcoholism, desperation, frostbite. How many souls has this city swallowed up like little tins of salted fish? The troubled father of a friend’s boyfriend was out in the streets during the most recent cold snap and froze to death. It’s strange, but somehow you learn not to look, to obscure your own vision, to forget about the burned houses of Kopli.
Yet there they were again, with open windows. Nobody bothers to live in them anymore. At least not officially. The Kopli tram was mostly empty, and the only people I noticed speaking to each other were a girl of maybe 12 years with dark hair and dark eyes, and a boy who was a little older. She was sitting in his lap and talking to him in her purple parka. Maybe they were a couple? When we got to the last stop, they both got out. I was certain they were Russians or Ukrainians, but no, they were speaking Estonian to each other. They looked like they could have been Japanese, or at least the Ainu who live in Hokkaido, Sakhalin, or some other place.
Not all Estonians look like the little blonde girl on those Anneke chocolate bars.
They hung around in the snow for a moment and then dispersed to wherever they came from. This was their Kopli life. It happened every day, and I only got to catch a glimpse of it. For just these moments, our paths had crossed. The tram had the name of a popular Estonian folk group called Curly Strings on it. Their most popular song is probably “Kaugses Külas,” “In a Faraway Village,” the refrain of which is, “to get tan by the second of June.” In Kopli, even on Kopli Beach, in January, that hope is a faint dream. The kids on the Number 1 tram don’t talk about getting tan. I have no idea what they were talking about. Maybe K-Pop or Pokémon.
***
SO THAT WAS MY DAY, my big Tallinn day, spent walking around, kind of aimlessly. I had a few interviews for some stories I was working on, and walked between the various cafes where they were scheduled. I was supposed to meet Igrayne at the Reval Café on Pärnu maantee, which is the area where the Bronze Soldier riots were most fierce during that tense night 17 years ago. I wonder what happened to those kids who got arrested and spent the night in D-Terminal. They probably all got jobs, or have done something else with their lives. What else is there to do? Loot shops in perpetuity over some war monument? Would the same thing happen these days? Maybe not. Tallinn has just changed, and even the Bronze Soldier is a distant memory. Everything is fading into this new city. It is changing and renewing day by day. I even noticed that the notorious fast food kiosk had disappeared from the corner across from the Tallinn Central Library, and that the place where it stood had been overtaken by Swedbank.
As long as I had known Tallinn, that fast food kiosk had been there. Even on my first day in town, which was 29 August 2002, it was there. At some point, during the early Ansip years, I think some Swedish tourists tried to pick a fight with me there while I waited for french fries at about 2 am. There had been a second time, many years later, while staying at the Hotel Palace, when I was awakened multiple times in the night by the loud sounds of disagreements, climaxing with the crash of shattered glass and the howl-cry of anguish in the Finnish language, which is the most terrifying language, spiced with words like vittua and perkele. But it was all gone now. Yesterday. People accuse me of living in the past, but I need at times to catch up with the present. It takes time. You can’t just wipe it all away, clean slate. The kiosk used to be here. When I referred to the place in discussions with a friend, she called it the löögi-öögi burgeri koht.
This means something like, the hitting-vomiting burger place. Alas, it is no more.
Just a memory.
***
I KEPT WAITING, as I said, for some kind of adventure to present itself in Tallinn, but nothing really happened that day. Later, at Fika, talking to another journalist, I related my frustration. “You know, you get off the train in Bangalore, and already you are accosted by a rickshaw driver who wants to take you somewhere, or you see a dead dog lying in the middle of a street, or a beggar sleeping in a carpet, and things happen. The bus breaks down and you have to walk, but in Tallinn, things just happen predictably.” My friend, who is an Estonian and has lived here for almost 30 years, agreed and nodded. He’s a few years older than me, but has this good-natured boyish quality to him, though he does have a few wrinkles now. He recounted sad stories of programmers who washed up in Tallinn from places like Egypt or Indonesia and couldn’t make any friends. None at all. They suffered through seasons of silence and introversion and gave up. This has been changing though as more expats arrive and befriend each other. Once, I said, I happened to encounter a whole table full of Irish women sitting at a café. There were enough Irish women in Tallinn to fill a whole table. One had come for love.
“How do people even fall in love in Tallinn?” I asked my friend. My uncle, for example, had met his wife on a train in New York. It seemed like the natural kind of place where people met each other. They sat across from each other and talked and then exchanged numbers in those days. But I can’t recall ever having met anyone on a train in Estonia. It just didn’t happen.
I felt like I was locked outside of everyone else, but maybe that wasn’t Tallinn. Maybe that was all of us, disappearing into our own private digital worlds. It was just compounded by the city’s northern aloofness, which at first can feel soothing and wonderful, but later starts to haunt you, gives you a raw, melancholic feeling. Sometimes too much fresh air can hurt your lungs.
The city of Tallinn can hurt you in that same way.
“That’s just how it is,” my friend said. People meet at parties, he said. They do meet.
***
AT NIGHT, I took the Number 3 tram out to the Koidula stop in Kadriorg. Somehow, I had forgotten all about Kadriorg that day. For a lot of people, Tallinn is Kadriorg. It’s Kumu and Nöp. It was here, up a few streets, that I met another friend, who was seated behind a desk, running a dress shop like some character in one of those old Ibsen plays. She had a calculator in front of her, a computer, and a long yellow measuring tape. It was all arrayed before her, and it was very quiet and still snowing. She has three children now, and one of them had left some bits of cookies on her blue dress. She had white-blonde hair, big blue eyes, and looked tired.
After she closed up her shop, we walked to a cafe. One variety of homemade hummus cost €17 per kilo. Some organic meats were more than €40. These high-end goods are for people who think they have the money to afford them, I was later told, but all throughout my day, I had actually sensed the lingering trace of poverty. Even in the Solaris supermarket, I found myself gazing in wonder at a yellow truck full of Navelina oranges and green grapes, and marveling at piles of Costa Rican bananas and Polish and Dutch apples and pears, only because I can recall that 20 years ago in Tallinn, Stockmann had the only supermarket that sold Italian mozzarella, and it felt like luxury. Now you can buy three varieties of mozzarella at any corner shop. Those old post-Soviet poor days were done. These were the days of €17 hummus.
After dinner, we walked through Kadriorg and stared up at the windows of the houses. I liked Kadriorg, with its big houses, its shortcuts between them, it’s slanty roofs. It’s like a big fishing village. One of those windows is where my friend lives with her family, her husband and children. Other friends live behind other windows in houses nestled behind fences or right on the street. Behind one window, the naturalist Fred Jüssi is still living, perhaps drinking hot tea.
My friend is my age, 44, almost to the month, and we are both experiencing that brief midlife hangover moment. It seems this is the moment in life where you either give up, or you get going. I’ve known Tallinn for a long time now, so long it feels like eternity. So many things have happened here, I can no longer remember them all. But I am not giving up just yet. No, I am merely catching my breath here, taking stock, remembering, processing, and understanding. The only real choice is to keep moving forward. All feelings of hopelessness will be renewed. And just as old broken cities are made new, so too can people reinvent and restore themselves.
MEETINGS WERE HELD in the house weekly. Or more like lectures or seminars. It was an old wooden house in an older wooden district of the town. I happened to be walking by through the snow when some friends saw me and invited me to come along. The staircase up to the second floor was creaking and crooked, but the seminar room had been renovated. It was full of listeners. I found a spot on one of the long couches. That was when Esmeralda walked in.
Esmeralda looked bored and tired and taciturn. She was not particularly happy to see me, and I wondered if she at all understood how much I liked her. She must have had some idea or hint, because she sat down right next to me in her red sweatshirt. Quietly, silently, taciturnly. If that is even a word. Oh you, and your Baltic Finnic jõnn. What did I even see in this girl? Esmeralda said to me, “I feel a bit cold. I should have brought a blanket.” I left to find one for her at once.
I left the house, walked some ways down the street. Eventually I reached the house of my grandmother, who had just passed away. My father and mother and daughter were inside, sorting through baskets of my grandmother’s possessions. I promised them I would be back soon, and found a yellow blanket from the linen closet downstairs. I went back to the house, this time taking a public transit bus. It was winter still, cold and dark, and snow was falling.
Inside the house, the meeting was still going on, and Esmeralda was sitting there, as taciturn as ever. I came into the room and put the warm blanket on her. She curled up beneath it, sighed and yawned. We sat there for a while, just the two of us, watching some PowerPoint presentation. She said nothing to me. After some time, I said, “If you want, you can lie down next to me.” Esmeralda didn’t answer, but she slowly lowered her head and stretched out on the couch. I didn’t say a word to the beautiful girl. Nothing. My movements were slow and deliberate. I dared to not even look at sleepy Esmeralda. I could only watch her breathe.
AFTER I RETURNED from the lake incident with the oldest of the three brothers, I went to stay in another house on the lake. Here I met a dressmaker whom I had known for some time. She was there with her husband and children, but very much wanted to make love to me. This would-be seduction took place while her family was out on the balcony. I could hear them playing. She was herself dressed up in something blue and billowing. Her yellow hair was all over the place and she had a tear in her eye, but she just could not excite me, no matter how hard she tried. I felt humiliated after that and impotent and went out to walk the streets.
Later, I arrived at the home of a friend, a woman a bit older than me, and she too offered that we make love. She was very voluptuous, and it was a joy to pull off her leggings and see her white fleshy legs. She had always been a strong supporter of me and had given me so much comfort in this troubled life, and I was grateful to return that love any way that I could. I gave into the passion, and there was only more of it, the way you might disappear into a swirl of delicious rainbow cotton candy hunger. But things started to feel weird after that, the sun dimmed, and there were clouds in the sky. Everything was gray and shadowy and then blood started to trickle out of her. It worried me, those red ribbon strands of blood. It worried me.
Her auburn hair was pulled up, and she looked down at me with those freckled cheeks and lifted her hips and said, “Don’t mind all the blood, love. Be good and soft and keep loving me.”
THREE BROTHERS came to Viljandi. They were all darker haired and darker skinned. I think they were from the Middle East. They took up with local girls, girls I had once loved, and for this nurtured a suspicion or ill feeling toward me. Not that I was a threat, but it was clear that we could never be friends. Then one day, I happened to go fishing at the last minute with the eldest of these three dark brothers. He was the shortest of the three, but also the oldest, and imagined himself as powerful and influential. We paddled out into the lake, but then a storm came up. It was hard to explain, it was almost like a sun storm. There was a shift in celestial energy, a strong gravitational pull. The lake currents started to pull hard toward the south.
“Look at how far along we already are,” I told this oldest brother. “We have to head back!”
We tried paddling, but it was no use. The water was shallow enough though that we could walk our boat to shore, even though we were waist deep. From there, we pulled the boat back to port, using a rope. We walked over stone walls and across lawns. Families were out grilling and there were other springtime festivities. When we got back to the port, we went up the hill. We arrived to the house the brothers were renting and went in.
“Now, don’t you see that I am your friend?” I told the oldest brother. “You’ve nothing to fear.” He looked at me with some suspicion, but things were better between all of us after that.
north! 