ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER TRAIN. This one was a new luxury mode of transport. It had glass ceilings, so we could watch the snow-dusted and ice-covered winter trees canopy over our heads as we raced north from Switzerland into the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Every destination had its own box, sort of like different gates in an airport. Warsaw people, Tallinn people. Helsinki was the final destination. The trees were magnificent, a white kaleidoscope, forming and reforming. I tried to capture the way they reshaped themselves with my camera but nothing came of it.
When we arrived to Tallinn, we went into an tsarist concert hall that had somehow survived the March bombings. There was a grand piano there at its center and an elevated stage. Esmeralda was there waiting for me, holding a white Fender electric. Esmeralda Kask. She knew the chords to every song. But what was she doing here and why was she playing one of his songs?
She was a small and taciturn lass, with her potato-peel hair and narrow eyes and quit demeanor She wore only jeans. Esmeralda played the chords to the song, and then a guitar appeared in my hands too, one of those oddly shaped sunburst Gibson Thunderbirds. I couldn’t restrain myself from doing some impromptu Stevie Ray Vaughan riffs on it. I was surprised I could play “Love Struck Baby.”
Esmeralda just strummed away. Diligently. Professionally. She looked so unimpressed with me. Didn’t she know that I wanted her so badly? That I wanted to take her away to a lush, faraway island, where our descendants would form the population’s main stock, like those HMS Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island and Tahiti? I wanted to pull a Fletcher Christian. But this was a rehearsal space. No dice. Esmeralda yawned and walked over to the piano and I stopped playing. Then I followed her over.
north! 