minor swing

I HAD A GO at the guitar playing “”Minor Swing.” There was even a small audience around me. To be honest, it was the only tune I could convincingly play and my hands were clumsy. It was recognizable, and it gave one the impression that I knew what I was doing. Most people had heard “Minor Swing” somewhere, maybe in a movie, or maybe playing the back of some coffeehouse. I was surrounded by women dressed in silvery gowns, again those flapper women from the 1920s parading around my subconscious. They were supple, silverwhite, and lovely.

This was all taking place at some neoclassical mansion on the coast of oligarchy and oblivion.

Of course, Rhys Jonathan had to show up at this point. We used to sit next to each other in AP History. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and a baseball cap. I handed the instrument over to him and he began to wow and astonish. Zola, one of the silver-draped flapper women, draped her hands over his shoulders and neck. I grunted “yeah,” because that’s what fellow musicians do during gypsy jazz performances. Yeahhh. This is how we all show how pleased we are. Watching Zola caress Rhys, I understood I had lost her. She was with him now, him and his agile fingers. “I told you,” I said to Rhys. “You’re the next Al Di Meola.” “No way,” he said, strumming and plucking away. “No way I’m Al Di Meola.” “Yes way,” I said. “You are Di Meola.”

I left Rhys with his flapper groupies and went for a walk around the terrace. Adam, another old high school classmate was there. This lanky, sandy-haired troublemaker had later joined the Israeli Defense Forces, and was trying to chase away shellshock and PTSD by consuming handfuls of mochi. I put my hands on his shoulders, told him that everything would be jake.

Halfway down the terrace, between many other partygoers, I encountered Igrayne. She was crying because she hadn’t been invited to one of her friend’s birthday parties. Igrayne was seated there on the edge of the terrace with tears in her eyes. She was wearing a crisp white blouse. Her gold hair was pulled back. Up on the terrace, I could still hear Rhys Jonathan serenading the women playing “Minor Swing,” just better. Then I started to kiss young Igrayne. Her lips were full and pink. I didn’t know what else to do. “They didn’t invite me,” she sobbed.

How else do you stop a bereaved girl from crying?

soul brothers

SOME THINGS IN LIFE shatter us into pieces. There’s nothing solid left. We become free-floating mosaics, like those icy rings surrounding Saturn and Neptune. When viewed at a distance, we almost look whole. Get a closer look and you can see the light between these diverse leftover chunks of soul, feelings and memory. They are suspended there in time.

This was the condition I found myself in while wandering through a strange place. The name of the place was Crown Heights, at least as far as I knew, but it looked a lot more like the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC. It had snowed for days and the landscape was thickly white. But the sun had come out and various soul brothers from the neighborhood were out catching some rays. I could tell they were soul brothers because they were all wearing leather jackets and sunglasses. Some of them built little nests out of snow and ice and sat back there, soaking up the sunshine on this January day. A few of them were jazz cats of the old school and were holding conversations about Miles Davis and the Coltrane Quartet.

I slipped inside a house nearby, which was surrounded by small children. They were Dutch or Danish. Blonde children with slight accents. They were building snow forts and having snowball fights. In the house, there were only more people coming in and out. Through a shadowy hallway, I was approached by Celeste, who I hadn’t seen in forever. She was wearing a white t-shirt and she looked as beautiful as ever. Jungles of redgold hair bobbing all over the place, plus those fierce and somewhat frightening blue eyes. She walked past me several times, ignoring me each time she came by, as if she was allergic to me. I tried my best to be invisible.

At last, Celeste looked up and said, “Why have you been such a jerk to me?” I hugged her at once and said, “I haven’t been a jerk. I just loved you.” “If you really loved me, you would be happy for me,” she said. “See how happy I am here!” “I am,” I said. “I am. But this is the kind of sadness that just never goes away.” I started to weep then. I wept so much, I soaked us in tears. Her shirt was all wet. It was embarrassing. There didn’t seem to be any remedy for these blues.

They were neverending.

ole, lihtsalt ole. hull. by metslind

I’VE BEEN WAITING to write about this new Metslind record, because I am not sure how to approach it. In the early morning hours, as I began slurping down my first coffee of the day, I still had the somewhat jangly sounds of her guitar ringing between my ears. “She’s like The Smiths crossed with Fleetwood Mac,” I think. “As if Morrissey and Stevie Nicks had a baby.” Then I am somewhat terrified of the idea of a child with Morrissey’s face and Stevie Nicks’ hair and body. I don’t want anyone else to have that image pop into their heads. But maybe if Johnny Marr and Christine McVie had collaborated on an album in Estonian it might have sounded like this one. Maybe, but not really. Metslind is her own phenomenon. It’s a pitfall of Western and Estonian journalists alike that we look for these equivalents. Estonia must have its own Elvis, its own Michael Jackson, and its own Nokia, but there is only one Metslind. Not everything can be translated over.

Metslind’s record is two EPs combined. It arrived to me by Smartpost more than a month ago. I now have it on vinyl, but I gave my record player away, because it wasn’t very good. So now I just have an LP I cannot play. The album though is a kind of shrine, a shrine to the record player I will someday acquire. Then I will be able to play the album as intended. I will wake up and listen to Metslind at 7 am. In the meantime, I will listen to its conjoined EPs on Spotify. One is called Ole, lihtsalt ole (Be, just be) and the other one is called Hull (Crazy). The song titles paint a somber image. Other than the title tracks, there’s “Valu, Sa Oled Mul Jalus” (“Pain, You’re in My Way”), “Ära Sõdi” (“Don’t Fight”), and “Päris Inimesed” (“Real People”), along with “Rabalumm” (“Bog Enchantment”). There’s also “Tahan Olla Hea” (“I Want to Be Good”), “Ma Ei Tea Mis Saab” (“I Don’t Know What Will Happen”), “Mina Võin Ja Sina Võid Ka” (“I Can and So Can You”) and one more called “Elupuu Elab Mind Üle” (“The Tree of Life Will Outlive Me”).

This last title is the most puzzling one. Elupuu in Estonian refers to evergreens, but in my mind the name conjures up Yggdrasil, the tree of life in Norse mythology and the world tree of Estonian and Finnish mythology, which has stars in its branches and snakes at its roots. According to Metslind, the lyrics toy with Estonian trees like the evergreen (elupuu) and aspen (haavapuu, literally “wound tree”). “In the song, the Tree of Life outlives me,” says Metslind, “and the Wound Tree heals before I do. I say that it’s so good that I am no longer so young and that I don’t know what awaits me in life, though of course I would like to be younger and I would like to know what will happen. It’s about trying to have faith in the way things are.”

This is the Metslind musical universe. It’s a world of bogs, trees, and introspection. Her pop-infused indie guitar rock is expressed in dreamy tapestries of haunting vocals and layers of carefully selected sounds, but masks a kind of slow-burning inner torment.

*Girl with guitar, photo by David Evardone*

According to Metslind, whose family calls her Maarja, a lot of this music came out of her separation from her long-time partner. In fact, “Hull” is about playing dumb when people would ask her uncomfortable questions about the split. “I started to give strange answers to their questions, so they wouldn’t know what to say or ask me about it anymore,” she says.

To this I have to agree. There are never satisfying answers to explain away life’s irrationality.

Metslind is fond of her name, which means “Wild Bird” in Estonian. “Every bird has its own song,” she says. “And I like it when a performer has a different name. They can be a different person.” Maarja also happens to be the name of a singer in Estonia, one that is trademarked.

But Maarja didn’t want to just be another singer named Maarja. Her Metslind persona was born. When she is not on stage, she is a music teacher, mostly of voice with some guitar teaching. She started attending music school at the age of seven in Kohila, and at her own instigation. Her family has supported her music, for which she considers herself lucky.

Other than the emotional tumult that led to sings like Ära Sõdi, which literally means “Don’t Wage War” and only coincidentally came out when the Ukrainian-Russian War intensified, Metslind is also somewhat unique in that she has chosen to sing in Estonian, rather than try to approach the international market with English-language songs. In fact, she used to write and compose her songs in English, but an encounter with Estonian musician Vaiko Eplik, who like Metslind is from Rapla, a town in North Estonia, encouraged her to switch back.

“You know, I have always listened to a lot of English-language music and singer songwriters,” she says. “I didn’t have a plan to write in Estonian, but then these songs just started to come.”

I would say it’s a welcome addition to the world of Estonian music. While listening to this record, I started to think about where Estonians listen to music, or where I hear Estonian music. Estonian-language music is played sometimes in major supermarkets, so that Estonian songs remind me of perusing produce, looking for good quality bell peppers. Estonian music is played at summer festivals, so that Estonian songs remind me of sitting outside in some amphitheater. And Estonian music is played during family get-togethers. So Estonian music reminds me of grilling šašlõkk while Kihnu Virve and Anne Veski’s golden hits are played.

*Solitary songsmith. Photo by Meeli Viljaste.*

Metslind’s music is not the soundtrack for supermarkets, summer festivals, or grilling šašlõkk. It’s more for long walks alone while you are trying to sort out various unresolved past issues. That, at least, was my experience of it. I don’t have a favorite song on the record, but I remember liking “Rabalumm” the most on the first listen. A good bog is medicine to the heart.

She herself mentions Joni Mitchell when asked about her approach. She uses Joni’s Open D tuning on her semi-acoustic Ibanez, which is as much a part of her look as her whiteblonde hair. She plays it with a chorus pedal which gives it that lovely atmospheric sound that almost reminds one of Peter Buck from REM. These are my own musical references, so bear with me.

The album was recorded in the studio at Linnahall in Tallinn, a sprawling stone monster of a building once called the VI Lenin Palace of Culture that was constructed for the 1980 Olympic Games (which the US boycotted on account of the then recent Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan).

“This is one of the last things that’s still functioning in that ruined old building,” says Metslind.

Metslind is an admirable character, I must conclude. She composes, she performs, she travels the roads with her Ibanez. She sings of the Tree of Life, bogs, and heartbreak. I find her to be an honest, direct artist. The Estonian word is siiras, but it doesn’t have an exact English-language equivalent either. And she will continue. “It would make more sense not to be a musician,” she says, “and I have tried many times to not be one. But when I tried, I started this new project That I called Metslind. What else can you do when your heart starts to sing?”

a new map of long island sound

I NEVER KNEW there were so many islands in Long Island Sound. Long, stretching, sandy islands, islets, and shoals covered with driftwood, birds, seals, and poison ivy. No mariner’s map demarcated them but they were there, about halfway between Drowned Meadow and Connecticut. Maybe the Navy was using them for bombing practice, just like Nomans Land off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. I know the islands in Long Island Sound are real though. I saw them when we crossed the sea by ferry on our long journey up into New England and Canada.

When we returned it was a sunny day in Bridgeport and, to my surprise, the harbor was full of cranes and trucks. They were building a bridge to Long Island from Bridgeport, which would now live up to its name. A high, winding four-lane highway to carry car traffic from Connecticut to its younger brother Long Island. There were also pedestrian paths along the sides of this to-be completed highway and I hiked up them with my family. The first third of the Connecticut-Long Island Highway came down on one of the secret isles. Here we paused to rest, picnic, and admire its dreamy, desert-like beaches and nesting terns and cormorants.

training

RIKEN SUGGESTED I get in shape by running to the airport. We were going to do this Rocky style. He would ride a bike and supervise the run. There he was in his desert camouflage hiking gear. The bike was second hand. He had only paid €5 for it. He had related this to me with some typical understated pride. Riken the Japanese mountaineer was known far and wide for his thrift and his ability to subsist on under €20 per day, sometimes getting by only on a few cans of precooked lentils and boiled rice to survive. He carried herbs and spices in his pockets.

I wasn’t sure what airport I was running to, but in my mind it was JFK. Yet the terrain was unfamiliar. Perhaps Tallinn Airport was the real destination. Or even Tartu? The first 20 kilometers or so went smoothly. I ran down a slope by a school where children were out playing. Riken was up on his bike. “Steady,” he called out to me. “Steady.” I felt depressed when I reached the end of that road though. Only 20 kilometers and maybe 100 more at least to go.

It seemed like an impossible objective to accomplish. How would I ever make it there on foot?

Instead, I went into a diner by the roadside. There were some women inside, Klaudia among them. She was sitting in the back corner in a booth. I could barely see her, but went to sit with her and ordered a full breakfast with lots of black coffee. It was so dark, but I could make out her curly blonde hair, her red blouse. She was wearing some kind of necklace. I got closer to the necklace and began to study it. It looked like some kind of archaeological find. Could it be from the Ming Dynasty? Late 16th Century? “You know, if you’re going to get so close to me like that,” she said, “we might as well just take things all the way.” That’s how I wound up making love to Klaudia in the back of a diner in nowheresville. Klaudia smelled like breakfast.

Riken was outside all this time, standing stoically beside his bike, engrossed in meditation.

the gift

LATA FOUND ANOTHER LOVER, but he was doing it all wrong. His technique was off. I know because I watched them make love. He was on the surface a solid choice, in good shape, what women consider handsome. But his performance was suboptimal. Cut and dry. Same old, same old. Curiously, I was not jealous, probably because I never formed that kind of emotional attachment to her. Later, after they were done, we also made love. Lata was just insatiable.

Afterward, I went to visit Brynhild. I had a gift for her. It was something like a tapestry that had various declarations of affection written all over it. When I got to Brynhild’s house, she was sleeping. The idea of having any relationship with her seemed out of the question. She sat up in bed, beneath the blankets. Brynhild had aged since I was away. She seemed very confused.

Then Lata showed up. She told me to give her the gift. “I’m the one who came up with that template, that design,” she said, pulling on one end of it. “Give it to me, give it to me now,” she said. She was aggressive. That was a side of her that I had never found appealing. It kept me away. There was real hardness in her. “Give it here,” she said, tugging away. “Give it to me now.”

I’m not sure what happened after all of that. I could hear someone vacuuming out in the hall.

epistles of paul

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I had been advised to go and see Paul. “Go and see Paul,” they said. “You have to go see Paul.” This was always said to me with a certain conviction. I simply had to go. There would be no either/or, this or that. It would be done. I would go see Paul. It was just a matter of time. “When are you going to see Paul?” The invitation came via an intermediary named Aki, another one of these Finnish drifters who has surfaced in Viljandi in recent years, along with Mika Vesalahti, who runs the art studio on Kauba Street, and Henrik, an older fellow with a terrific moustache who likes to frequent the Paulina Kohvik ice cream parlor.

I moved to Viljandi from Tartu, but Aki came via Saigon where he rented a room on the tenth floor of an apartment building (because the big spiders are usually on the ground floors). Aki is a bit rootless, a bit of an adventurer. He’s older than me and lives a thousand times more intensely than me, but he somehow looks younger. He has dark hair, a bit of a youthful moustache. Whenever an opportunity presents itself, Aki leaps into action. He gets a call to go to Kyiv, and the next day he’s already there. From there he gets another invitation to go to Italy and he’s there the day after that. Why not? This is Aki’s life. He specializes in writing about philosophy and pens articles for Finnish boating magazines like Vene for travel money on the side. And there’s more where he came from. One by one, more Finns are coming. Whether the Viljandiers like it or not.

I haven’t seen Aki in forever though. I used to see him all the time, but he’s vanished completely. I run into a group of the Finns at the Mai Jooks, the Great Run Around the Lake. Mika Vesalahti the painter is with them, as is Henrik, the old Finn with the white whiskers. Of course, none of them are running. When I inquire as to what has happened to Aki, they whisper among each other. He is in Viljandi, they can confirm, but will not discuss further.

A mysterious character this Aki. The most mysterious of the Viljandi Finns.

It was years ago that Aki and I became acquainted when Paul had an exhibition at the Paul Kondas Centre for Naive Art. We were all at lunch and Paul was trying to explain hynopsis to us and drawing diagrams about consciousness on a napkin. “You see, this is your mind going into this state, here, but if you trick your mind just at this point, it can actually go here.” Paul seemed like the kind of Viljandi person I should know and not just because he was an American but because he was unique in that he did not come for the love of a woman.

Paul came to Viljandi just because he liked it.

He is of German extraction — all four grandparents were immigrants — and this becomes apparent the moment you step through the door at his house and you see the ordered stacks of books. I only discovered this the last time when Kati came to visit, because I had promised to go see Paul so many times, and it was only when Kati herself insisted that we absolutely must go see Paul at once, that we just went to his house by the lake, knocked on the door, and he let us in. Paul had been holding an exhibit in his house featuring Rabelais and Cervantes caricatures, and there even had been an opening hosted by none other than Mr. Aki, but I didn’t show because I was at the cafe writing. Yet it was a spring day and Kati insisted.

Paul’s house is a part of town I have spent little time in and that has somehow evaded me on my night walks and sojourns. There are streets that run along the lake down here with fine names like Aia, Pihlaka, and Luha. Almost everything is crooked in some way in this neck of town, the roofs, the fences. In spring, one enjoys the sight of firewood stacks, apple blossoms, the fragrance of this tiny nook of the universe where Paul has told everyone he intends to die.

There was even a film made about this called Surmatants, “The Dance of Death.” Kati was at the viewing at Kondase Keskus just weeks ago, which is how she became enamored with Paul, this curious old man with the white-blond ponytail and sandals. He invites you in and makes you tea or coffee. His principal obsession actually is the Dance of Death, the Danse Macabre. Bernt Notke’s painting at Saint Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn is his inspiration, the work of this Lübeck master, a painting that has been copied and recopied. Paul scours old libraries and book shops across Europe in search of reproductions. His collection has expanded in recent years to about 200 prints by the French caricaturist Daumiere, many arrayed on his desk.

Downstairs, a wooden canoe imported from Papua New Guinea is suspended from the ceiling. To get this to Estonia, it was shipped from Papua New Guinea, to San Francisco, to Colorado, then down to the Gulf of Mexico, across the Atlantic, up the Baltic, and then to Tallinn and later Viljandi. The rest is a museum of 18th century caricatures, ancient Egyptian art, and Tibetan masks sprouting third eyes. A lot of Paul’s neighbors down here by the lake are pensioners like him. “But the truth is,” he says, lounging in his yard with me and Kati. “I was born in 1936. Most of the people my age are already dead. We lose more and more each day.”

John McCain is gone. So is Vaclav Havel. Robert Redford somehow looks exactly the same.

Maybe Robert Redford and Paul are the lucky ones.

***

Paul is surrounded by admirers today. Some have come to help in the garden. Two are graybeards — Soviet-era hippies from deep in Mulgimaa. There is a younger woman too who befriended Paul long ago, and some young long-haired kids who pops by named Argo who is also keen to garden. Kati is also here, but only visiting from Võru. She has come up from Võru in her slack, bohemian dress, with long-hair flowing, and her young daughter clings to her when she is not poking around Paul’s place. Võru and Viljandi are arguably similar towns — both smaller, both in the south, both full of culture. But Kati says that Võru is not as freewheeling as Viljandi. These are the longest conversations she has had with strangers in months, she says. In Võru, you have to know the Võru dialect, and say words like määne and sääne to let them know you are one of them. But in Viljandi, anyone can join in. Even Paul, whose Estonian language is limited. He somehow fits into this town called Viljandi just fine.

It’s sunny out, not yet May, and the graybeards are engrossed in talk. They look like the old farmers and fishermen of Johannes Pääsuke’s time before the First World War, when he was going around with his camera and photographing traditional farm life. We are all copies, after all. Copies of copies. In 60 years time, Kati’s young daughter might look just like these graybeards here. Death, permanence, aging — these are Paul’s main themes. In his earlier days, he had a somewhat Indiana Jones-like nomadic existence. He was squatting out there in the hills of Tibet or Mongolia. He’s stayed in huts called “yents” and drank Mongolian kumis, the fermented mare’s milk drink. “This is really awful tasting stuff,” Paul says. “I don’t recommend.”

“I tell you,” he continues in his garden, “what they should teach you is how to get old. In fact, it’s the opposite. They only teach you how to stay young, how to look younger, how to feel younger. Dye your hair, get in shape. But nobody is out there teaching people how to get old!”

Both levels of Paul’s house are rich libraries with volumes on Native American art, Scandinavian mythology, two books about drums by Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead’s drummer, Indian tantra cults and the like. It is a nerd’s paradise which is to say, I fit right in.

“This is a living, open place,” says Paul. “I want you to feel at home. Take whatever you want to read and read it. Make yourself at home. If you see a book you like, grab it off the shelf.”

He has various editions of the Kalevala and Kalevipoeg. Much of his work has focused on the similarities in shamanistic art around the globe.

“Take two different cultures — say Latin American and Tibetan — and they will contain the same elements, the same concepts. This was at a time when nothing was written at all. ‘The dream time,’ as the Aborigines of Australia call it.”

Outside the graybeards are still enjoying their tea, coffee, and cake. Kati has since been overwhelmed by a desire to work in the garden. “Don’t you enjoy this work?” asks Kati. “I can’t resist. When I see people raking, I just want to pick up a rake.”

“Not really,” I say.

Instead I head out a rickety gate into the street, where you can see the sparkling waters of the lake. He came here because he liked it here, you know. There was no beckoning female character. Paul has been married before and has since sworn off romantic stuff. He’s decided to fly solo. I wonder if this will happen to me too. Maybe it already has. Maybe it already did.

Written May 2019

viiratsi’s white cats

VIIRATSI is a community on the margins of Viljandi. On one hot day in July, there was nothing but blue in the sky and it’s fields and parks were green and sun-kissed. Coming down the road from the mechanic’s shop where I left my car, I noticed a white cat that peered at me for a moment, then disappeared into the overgrown brush that had sprouted up between rows of abandoned garages. I waded into the growth, pushing aside flowers and weeds, searching for my little white friend. This was kind of like Alice in Wonderland, I thought. White cats. White rabbits. Where did the cat go? The garages were from the Soviet era, made of white bricks from the factory up north. Someone had built them, maybe in some forgotten summer in the 1970s. Now they were in ruins and the windows were shattered. Just more leftover Soviet crap.

Between the garages, there was a concrete platform. I stared at the platform for a while and couldn’t understand for what purposes it had been built. It looked almost as if one could land small aircraft on it, but that couldn’t happen here, could it? There was just no use for such a thing. What was this place? I heard something rustle behind me and turned to see if it was my friend, the white cat, but it was just a bird. The cat was gone, I decided. I returned to the road and the way back through Viiratsi. The mechanic said he would call me when the car was fixed.

I came down the hill to the park and its two large ponds. On one side of the park, a man was seated on a bench. He wore a black coat and held a book in his hands. I nodded to the man, but he did not return the gesture. Then, as I came closer, I discovered that his eyes were closed. I could see the sweat on his brow, hear him snore. He was asleep. I decided not to disturb him.

I followed the path by the ponds to an empty bandstand overseeing dozens of benches, all of them empty. At some point, a concert might have been held here, yet there was no sign of life. The bandstand was made of new wood and the benches too had been cared for. The smell of freshly cut grass was in the air and I sat on the bandstand to rest. The pond waters were still.

Where was everybody?

The community of Viiratsi is ancient. One can even find the name “Weiratz” on old maps from the 18th century. Today, you would not guess its age. Even the old apartment blocks have new facades. Many homes have lush, organized gardens. There are swings and terraces and grills. Not a few would qualify for Estonian Home of the Year. In a nearby park on most days, children experiment with skateboards and lick ice cream. Somewhere a radio plays American pop songs. Even here the names of Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez are known yet we are far from the streets of Los Angeles. This place is so clean, so safe, so cared for, that the only bad thing that could be said about it is that it is almost too nice, too quiet. Almost every property fits into a tight grid. It reminds me a bit of those Playmobil toys, where the scenes of life are reduced to a home and garden, or an ice cream truck, and the toy people have toy smiles.

At the bus stop in the center of the village, I noticed one of those new, blue local transport buses that have bright yellow folk patterns painted on them and say V I L J A N D I M A A. The bus was just standing there, idling, but there was no-one on the bus, and there was no driver. I suppose he had just stepped away to use the toilet or buy some peanuts from the Viiratsi Konsum. After waiting for the driver to return, I walked on, the bus still idling behind me.

I wondered what had happened to the driver and started to think that maybe a UFO had just kidnapped everybody in Viiratsi. It was just too quiet. I came up Sakala Street puzzled by the silence. At the crest of the hill, I at last spied sweet Viljandi across the lake, with its wooden slums all piled up on top of each other. Viiratsi was over here, clipped and cared for, Viljandi was over there, disheveled, chaotic, and unruly. There was no question to where I belonged.

***

A few days later, I received the message that the car was ready. This time I came down Kõrgemäe Street. Then I turned up Tartu Street and took it all the way down to the highway through the wetlands. Once I reached Viiratsi, I took a footpath back into the silent town.

The old man was no longer asleep on his bench by the two ponds. This time, there was no one in the park at all. I looked up at the sky and saw the trail of an airplane but heard no engine roar. All was very calm and quiet again. I looked around for my white cat, but only encountered a black one, running out from behind one of the garages. He was in a hurry and didn’t look up.

At the mechanic’s shop, I discussed payment with the owner, a cheerful type in overalls. On the wall, there was a poster of a woman with chestnut hair peering over at us from her bed. She looked like a French woman, I thought, with dark eyes. Her skin was flushed, and she looked satisfied, as if she had just made love. I looked into those eyes, but when I imagined them looking at me, all I sensed was indifference. As I turned to leave, something else caught my eye. A white cat was standing beside my car. It eyed me curiously. Hadn’t we met before?

“Unbelievable,” I told the mechanic. “This is the same white cat that I saw here the first day.”

“Oh her? Don’t be fooled by the cat, man,” said the mechanic. “Viiratsi is full of white cats.”

Written June 2018

veeriku thieves

I WAS ROBBED outside of Veeriku Selver in Tartu. It happened just last night. There were three of them, but a ringleader, of course. I’m seldom violent, but the joke about “stealing his backpack” turned into a non-joke. I don’t remember what the other two of them looked like. One was thinner and had darker hair. The other one was chunky. The ringleader was named Andreas or some variant on the name Andrew. Only later, I recognized his physical similarity to Bree van de Kamp’s son from Desperate Housewives, whose name was also Andrew. But he was speaking Estonian. So I was robbed by Andrew van de Kamp’s Estonian doppelganger.

She, a lady of my life, was AWOL meantime. She had reconnected over social media with an old lover from the Canary Islands. A British traveler who had retained a faded photograph taken at night on a beach in Maspalomas. In the photograph, he was noticeably older, with white already intruding into a red-colored beard and a flat cap. She was who she was at that time, looking somewhat naively out at the camera (and who took that photo? Probably some other tourist who had been passing by). That had all happened back in 1999. They had found each other. “Can’t you see,” she said, showing me the photo. “He was the real love of my life!” He was older now. Back then he was late forties. Now he was 70+. Age, they said, was just a number.

God, I hated my life, having to contend with undying 1990s soap operas and getting mugged at Veeriku Selver. It was almost as bad a lifetime sentence to suburbia. But, as Rage Against the Machine once sang, anger is a gift. I made short work of the Veeriku thieves. The other two retreated into the alleyways, and I picked “Andreas” up and brought him inside. He called me a coward and unmanly for not settling things the old-fashioned way and for leaving him with the guards. I told him that I wasn’t a policeman, it wasn’t my job to deal with criminals. Later, he tried to tell the Tartu Police that it had all been a gag, that he had just been pretend-stealing.

Inside of Veeriku Selver, I encountered Erland and his Musi examining some carrots and potatoes. They were gathering ingredients for soup, but seemed lost in their cooperative world of steady relationship. Upstairs, I discovered a room for guests and sat on a couch. I turned on the old-fashioned TV set. The TV was showing M*A*S*H. Alan Alda was making another one of those jokes I could never understand. And there was that other character, Radar. I can’t say I ever enjoyed M*A*S*H but it was the only thing on Estonian television.

Uncle Frank then appeared at the door with a box of pizza. Uncle Frank was a family friend, so he was not a biological uncle, but he fulfilled many uncle-like duties in his time. He had gray hair, blue eyes, wore a blue polo shirt open at the collar. He reminded me, vaguely, of the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island, though a more sober, slimmed down version. Uncle Frank was also my godfather and he was also dead. Uncle Frank sat across from me on the couch. He opened the pizza box and began to eat a slice and I did the same. We both sat there watching M*A*S*H and eating pizza. Uncle Frank sighed. He said, “Well, kid. You’ve had a hell of a life.”

uueveski

On Kõrgemäe Street stands a faded sign that reads “18%” and shows an incline.

THE ROAD HERE shoots straight up and down, more or less, and even to traverse it by automobile requires a certain leap of faith as you release the break and pump hard on the gas. It reminds me of those high scary San Francisco hills, like on Divisadero Street, or Powell Street, where you rocket up to the precipice only to behold that gleaming beautiful San Francisco Bay below. Here Kõrgemäe winds down to a pacific lake, one cornered by soldierly lines of succulent shady green pines. On either side of Kõrgemäe Street, pretty Alpine-looking homes with great glass windows and red roofs and eaves and balconies frame this wondrous sharp descent. Yet there’s almost no-one here and those who are, are lost in their own stories.

In the distance, a couple walks a dog.

Down the way, a man takes a break and surveys the work to be done, a cigarette stub dangling and glowing from his rough hands. Terraces separate the homes, as do neat stacks of yellow firewood that line the peripheries of the properties. There are also the trampolines and tree houses, piles of rubbish from springtime renovation projects begun anew. German Shepherds crow at you from gates, but even their outbursts are a bit weary and resigned as the orange sun sinks in the sky, bringing the still nude tree branches of late April into sharp relief.

I step away from Kõrgemäe and head toward Peetrimõisa, crossing Jakobsoni Street, the main road that leads out of town, and heading toward the hills and the watery crash of the falls.

This part of Viljandi remains a mystery to me. I never come here, but I have no reason. Tonight though, I feel an itch to explore, to stretch my legs. I’d walk the whole world if I could, cross the frozen expanses of the Bering Straits. First I have to cross Jakobsoni, then turn onto Allika — “Spring Street” — and then turn again down a tiny side street — a põik — following it through the terraces and tidy homes and stacks of firewood, past lush hedges tailored and manicured to perfection — before turning up Pihlaka Street, and then crossing Uus, another major road here, before I begin to ascend Kalda Street, getting closer to the sounds of rushing crying water. Up, up, Kalda Street I rise, feeling the strain in my thighs, loving the strain.

Even as a child, I loved nothing more than to get lost like this, to follow the ways, disappear down the alleys. I loved nothing more than peering over fences, or overhearing the mothers scold their errant but deep-down good sons. “Mida sa tegid jälle?” “What did you do again?”

To hear it this evening in Estonian is a special treat.

At Kalda, the sound of the water grows stronger and I discover a path leading down to a small river that feeds a tiny body of water called “Kösti Lake” on maps. So there’s another lake in Viljandi? Nobody told me about this. Someone had built this staircase, a hardworking, resourceful local DIY type — hammered metal pipes into the ground and then placed cement blocks on top of them, creating a walk that leads down steep to the mossy muddy banks. I half expect it to give out on me as I amble down carefully, looking around and still seeing no one. When the stairs end, I walk as I did as a boy, keeping my feet against the incline as not to fall.

I look up at the houses, which loom above the woods. My brother-in-law used to live over here in this part of town, which is called “Uueveski,” or “New Mill,” years ago, before he died. He had mowed lawns like these, trimmed hedges like those. He had walked his dog here along the river bank. I had driven these same streets in the dark those nights. Yet that was all done now. He was gone, already for a long time, but the birds of Uueveski sing on.

I take in a great breath and go further down toward the waters enjoying their sound, hanging onto tree branches to slow my descent. I come up one side of the bank where the water swirls and consider traversing a line of rocks that leads to a little wooden staircase on the other side, and then see another line of rocks a bit of a ways down and try to cross that one too.

The space between the stones though is too great though, and the water is too deep, spinning in clear whirlpools, and I don’t feel like wading waist deep across. Lovely vibrant yellow flowers are in bloom here along the blank, as pert and ornamental as buttons on a beautiful woman’s waistcoat. I stoop to pick a few and put them away in my pocket. Think of all the trouble I saw in the forests when I was a boy, or how I would climb to the peaks of pines and descend with sap everywhere, and how my mother would use a solvent to get the tree sap off of my hands.

I just want to leap to the other side of the creek, but I don’t have the courage to do it. The rocks are too mossy. I’d be certain to fall in the water. My boyhood self would have done it gladly, and would have loved to fall. I am not my boyhood self though. I prefer to keep dry.

Defeated, I climb the steps to Kalda Street again, now high above the creek, and survey it as far as I can toward the other end. I still see no bridge to cross, but I keep walking down it anyway. If I had to, I would walk all the way around the little waterway, even to Rangoon. I’d love to walk, because I’m tired of writing and I have absolutely no use for people.

Down Kalda Street, the wooded banks of the creek open up to a large grassy park that rolls and rolls with small hills like the prairies of North Dakota. In the center of the park, someone has already set up a huge stack to be burned. I walk down past the bonfire pile, all wooden planks and discarded chairs, and come upon a new wooden bridge. The wood of the bridge is still yellow, and there is no marking on it, no graffiti, not even a pair of footprints. To think, I almost wound up swimming across the creek when this bridge had been placed here for me.

Just for me. I feel the wood of the railings, smooth and sanded perfect. Down and along the creek there is still no one. There are rows of castle-like homes rising on the other side, the part of town called “Peetrimõisa.” There are trampolines there and picnic tables, great green lawns, half moss, half grass. There is no one. This is dreamy solitude blanketed up in solitude.

At the center of the bridge, I pause a moment and listen to the water rush below me. I read recently in a book that what women most desire from men is that they would be present, that they would be there. Just there. Something to depend on. Something to latch on to. Not perfect, but present. There. We must be there. Our duty was to play the river bank, to lay perfectly still and muddy and mossy and calm and let their waters gurgle over us. When I first read it, I thought it was ridiculous. Nonsense! Why should I spend my life lying down on my back for someone else, all for her? Listening to the water singing and spurting beneath that wooden bridge, I acknowledge begrudgingly that it might be nice to get soaked now and then.

Sooner or later I was going to have to join up with another one of them. Some men try to ignore them, or to pretend they could have as many as they want. In their souls, they remain as only halves of hearts, yearning to unite with that something, as night is to day, light is to dark, heavy is to light, or struggling to remain autonomous, independent, which is a ruse. There was really no other way forward for me. I would have to reattach. “Women are like trolleys,” a tuttav, a friend, a mother of four children, had told me once. “One drops you off and another one comes and picks you up and takes you somewhere else. You just have to get on.”

The trolley of another woman would come by and open its doors and I would notice the conductor from beneath her cap and I would get on. “On the ovarian trolley,” as Henry Miller put it well way back in 1938 in Tropic of Capricorn. The water kept gushing. I would get on.

Written April 2018