IN THE BACK of the East Rajasthan Health Clinic, there is a cloak roam and waiting area. Metal chairs are arranged in two rows, one facing the other, and there is a large window above that allows in plenty of light on sunny, springtime days. The cloak room is full of the distinct and colorful angharka robes and jama jackets of the Rajasthani people. Here, they sit and wait for the woman with the maang tikka to call their number. There are several good Rajasthani physicians working to serve Tallinn’s Indian community these days. While they consult their patients, the others sit quietly. A few leaf through Indian magazines. And as for me, I was just catching my breath after being pursued by the traffic police when I first disappeared inside.
***
I am still not sure what the traffic offense was. Maybe Raivo forgot to pay a parking ticket, or rolled through a red light on the Pärnu Highway. We were cruising through town in a white Ferrari Testarossa. The same kind that Crockett and Tubbs traveled around in in Miami Vice. I suppose Raivo was Crockett. I was Tubbs. I always liked Tubbs more anyway. Raivo is my translator and faithful friend. In middle age, he is in spectacular shape. He runs marathons and spends the weekends toiling away on pointless home renovation projects. He was driving the Testarossa when he saw the flashing lights in the rearview mirror. “Probleem,” Raivo mumbled.
When I looked in the window, I could see we were being pursued by a young blonde police officer. She had shoulder-length hair, a pleasant, round face, but very cool, remote blue eyes. There was something vaguely alien about her facial expressions, as if she had never known joy or sadness, torment or love. At Freedom Square we roared past St. John’s Church and then turned up the small road that leads past the Kiek in de Kök and up to Nevski Cathedral and the Parliament House. The police car was right behind us. Raivo parked the car down a side street. We got out and began to run in different directions. Raivo went that way. I went this way.
The Estonian policewoman pursued me into an alleyway, but I managed to give her the slip. I tumbled down the embankment to the Snelli tiik or pond, and that’s when I saw it, a new and modern building. Ida-Rajasthani Tervisekliinik, a sign read, and in Hindi below, पूर्वी राजस्थान स्वास्थ्य क्लिनिक. There are so many Indians in Tallinn now, they say that it’s only a while before they make Hindi a second official language. Without hesitation, I gripped the door handle and went in. I was instantly engulfed in the aroma of incense and young boys were walking through the health clinic crying out, “Chai! Chai! Samosa! Chai!” I bought a paneer samosa off one of the young Estonian Rajasthani sellers and went to the waiting room to hide and wait.
***
After a while of sitting in the East Rajasthan Health Clinic, I began to worry about Raivo. Maybe the policewoman had arrested him? I decided to venture outside, to see if it was safe. And there he was, standing on the street corner across from the Baltic Station talking to her. It was almost as if he was sweet talking her. I saw her nod a little and him lift both of his hands in a gesture that said, “What can you do?” Then she began walking toward me. Those strange blue alien eyes of hers were on mine, but she walked on by. I went over to Raivo and asked him what had happened, he shrugged and said, “Just some nonsense.” We agreed to meet up again in Tartu, and he went back to fetch his abandoned Testarossa. I crossed the street and boarded a train to Viljandi, but not before encountering a certain familiar American actor.
“Alec!” I said. “What are you doing here?” “Just strolling around the Old Town,” said this master actor from Massapequa. “I really love Estonia. All of the history, all of the culture. I am very impressed with the startup scene, by the way. What are you doing here?” he said. “I was hiding in the East Rajasthan Health Clinic after being pursued by the Tallinn police,” I answered. “Oh,” Mr. Baldwin’s Irish blue eyes lit up. “How was that?” “Well, it’s not so bad. They have samosas and chai. And if you ever need to hide from the police, I would suggest the waiting room. Nobody will ever find you in there.” Mr. Baldwin smiled and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks for the tip, kid,” he grinned. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.” He strolled on ahead.
A few moments later and I was already on a Viljandi-bound train. There was a young woman I knew on the train who had platinum blonde hair. I hadn’t seen her in a long time and we began to catch up. She had on a navy blue sweater and navy blue pants and there was something soothing about the contrast of her light hair with all of that navy blue billowing around her like starry evening sky. I began to tell the woman about the police chase in the Testarossa, the alleyway getaway, the East Rajasthan Health Clinic interlude, the chance meeting with Alec Baldwin beside the Snelli tiik. I don’t think she believed a word I said, but she humored me as the train glided toward Tallinn-Väike, Kitseküla, Liiva, and Points South. I was deep in my tale as the last views of the Old Town’s spires and government houses slipped from sight.
THERE I WAS having another coffee with Rory and Ella in a cafe when someone ‘pantsed’ me, as we used to say, pulled down my trousers while I wasn’t looking. I had on my military-style jacket, so I wasn’t exposed up front, but all of the cafe society people got a good look at my ass. To make matters worse, I was so shocked by what had happened, I couldn’t manage to pull my pants back up. I fumbled with the button and the zipper, but they just wouldn’t close. Rory, stalwart poet that he was, had a good laugh. Ella was dressed up like a flapper, but with a pair of butterfly wings, the kinds little girls wear at Halloween. She reclined in her seat, crossed her white stockinged legs and licked her lips. She was very entertained. She sipped from her latte.
Just then Saint-Malo marched in and arrested me for exposing myself. I was hauled off to an open Scandinavian-style prison, but thoroughly tested and prodded before being admitted to my room. Saint-Malo was younger than me, but he was already gray at the temples and had a gruff, indifferent manner. He wore military fatigues, even though he was a jazz musician and not a prison guard. Still, the denizens of the town had elected him to be a sheriff of sorts, preventing robberies of the burger truck, for instance. “You and your ass are a disgrace to the good clean folk of Viljandi Town,” Saint-Malo peppered me with scorn. “But I didn’t drop my trousers on purpose,” I said. “Someone pantsed me in Kodukohvik.” “Silence,” Saint-Malo said.
My prison days passed like that until Jorma showed up and broke me out. He invited me to a “pancake and drug thing” in the Haight. All of the bands were there. The Dead. The Charlatans. Janis was still alive. “Psychedelic pancakes,” said Jorma. “Eat up, man.” This was young Jorma, with the black hair and Beatle boots. The syrup, as I took it, was spiked with LSD. That might have been why Mr. Garcia got an extra helping. The Dead were called up on stage and performed an acapella version of “We Bid You Goodnight.” Jerry, Phil, Pigpen, Bill, Bobby, even Micky. They were all up there singing. They were moving in unison just like the Temptations.
After the Haight-Ashbury pancake drug breakfast, I went for a stroll, eventually winding my way through North Beach and climbing to the top of Coit Tower. From here, I could look out on all of sunny San Francisco. There was the Presidio over there. And I could see Alcatraz gleaming like a mirage off in the distance. Whenever the wind blew off the bay, the top of Coit Tower would move along with it. The engineers had even built a strange system where the top was set on wheels, so that it would rotate along. It felt good to be out of prison, though I was still trying to digest the acapella Grateful Dead performance. Plus those LSD-spiked pancakes.
Rory and Ella came up the steps at that moment. They reached the top of Coit Tower and were also taken aback by its breathtaking views. Lotta was with them. Another cafe person, in fact a regular in the local co-working space. She was wearing a colorful dress and sunglasses and clutching a cappuccino. Lotta blew me a kiss. “Come over here,” she said. “Let’s all take a selfie.”
BEFORE I GO ANY FURTHER, I should tell you more about Montrone and Canneto, these two towns outside of Bari that have grown together. For centuries they remained apart, distant, at arm’s length, and in fact they maintained two very different dialects. One of the towns hosted a Norman French garrison in the 11th century, and its dialect was therefore influenced by French. The other was settled by Greek refugees in the 10th century, and its dialect was infused with Greek. Cousin Lorenzo says it’s possible to tell someone from Montrone, a montronese, from someone from Canneto, a cannetano, by the way they say the word for “bread.”
“They say, u pan,” says Lorenzo. “But we montronese say u pen.“
The official word for bread in Italian is pane. In French, it’s pain. So the local dialect word, which is common in the dialects around Bari, called barese, is a bit closer to French. To me both of the versions sound almost exactly the same. U pan, u pen. U pen, u pan. U pan …
There are these tiny differences, you see. But a single vowel can give away your identity.
One must realize that the country or nation of Italy is largely a fiction, or at least a coincidence of geography. Every region, every city, every town, even every neighborhood has its own history and its own dialect, many of which are so unintelligible to outsiders that they are considered their own languages. It is said that the singer Frank Sinatra’s mother, Natalina, who played a role in local politics in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Sinatra was born and raised, was successful in part because she could speak all the dialects of the Italian peninsula. This made her indispensable when dealing with the immigrants who thronged New York City a century ago, people like my great grandfather Domenico Abbatecola, who was from Bari, or my father’s grandfather, Salvatore Petrone, who came from a village in Calabria. Even during my first trip to Italy, at the age of 22, I became aware of the language issue when I was stopped by an older man with a white mustache from Palermo on a street in Bologna. He was looking for the train station. People had responded to him in the Bolognese dialect. He was unable to understand their directions. “I can’t understand a word these people say,” the old Sicilian told me that day.
How odd then, that I could understand him. When I was 22, I really didn’t speak Italian at all.
Now and then I replay that moment over and over in my mind. How did I understand him?
***
FROM THE PORT OF BARI, where the ships leave for the ports of Bar in Montenegro, Dürres in Albania, and Dubrovnik in Croatia, it is about 15 straight kilometers south into Montrone and Canneto. These towns, however, no longer appear on maps because in 1927 they were united into one municipality called Adelfia, from the Greek word αδελφός (adelphos), “brother.”
On a map, at least, the Montrone and Canneto sections of Adelfia are distinguishable. Canneto, to the west, with its ancient Torre Normana, or Norman Tower, is the larger of the settlements. Montrone is the sleepier, eastern side of Adelfia. The main landmark here is the public gardens, with its Fontana dell’emigrante, or Fountain of Emigrants, which is a fitting name because my great grandfather Domenico was born and grew up right across the street.
Just a few houses down, there is a little cafe called the Pasticceria Caffetteria Petrone, where you can get a pastry and an espresso in the morning. There is nothing better than waking to the sounds of the church bells, or to the neverending calls of the people in the streets, and walking to the Caffeteria Petrone. The owner, as far as I know, is not a relative, and is from Naples. There are many Petrones in southern Italy, and we are not all close relatives. There, you take your place at the counter, and wait for that little white cup to arrive. Everyone is here, the dentist, the postman, the cosmetologist. And even if they don’t know you, they still know you. The eyes search each other, the cup is lifted, and you are wished a buon giorno.
“Good morning,” or, actually, “good day.”
This is how the montronesi start their days, and just a few hundred meters down the Via Vittorio Veneto, and over the old aqueduct, the mornings of the cannetani are much the same. Only that they call bread u pan and the montronesi call bread u pen. There are other divisions. For example, no one in these two towns can agree on exactly where the border between them lies. This I was told one night, strolling around with cousin Lorenzo. While the aqueduct seems like a natural boundary, only the people from Canneto believe that. The montronesi say the boundary between the towns is really a column on an old building just over the bridge. “This is where Montrone really ends,” said Lorenzo one night as we paraded around the old lanes of Montrone, venturing into disputed territory. “Beyond this point, they say u pan and not u pen. Beyond this point, you are dealing with the cannetani, who speak a very different dialect.”
He gestured quickly with his head, as if these people, the cannetani, were an alien race.
***
I DON’T KNOW how old my Italian cousin Lorenzo is, and I have never asked, but I assume he is about my age. At the time we first met, he was working for a software company that designs platforms for managing airports. He had returned to Bari after many years in Rome and he was single and had decided on something of a career change, to go into academia after a life in the private sector. I cannot fully understand how the Italian economy even works because I only see these people eating and meeting with family members, but during the working hours, they do disappear someplace, to do at least some work, just a little, before returning to the table.
Lorenzo’s father, Giuseppe, works in agriculture, a job he quite enjoys. In the evenings, he heads out to the piazza in Adelfia to play cards and share stories with old friends. Night after night, the old men are out there in their caps talking and making noise. At night, Italy is even livelier than during the day and I am always impressed to see the offices of the country’s political parties on the piazzas in the evenings, the windows lit up, and people seated around inside eating pasta together. They are more like social clubs than real political parties. In the US, they would be outside with signs, yelling at each other. In Adelfia, the only thing they yell is something like, “Would you please pass the bread?” Or, “How about another espresso?”
Lorenzo against this backdrop casts a more lonesome, stark figure. He is tall, dark-haired, at times silent, at times with great humor. He is instantly likeable. Some people just have this kind of quality. You can’t help but like them. While his career path is in mathematics and science, he loves to talk about traditions and he is very thoroughly grounded in the local culture. That same night we went out to see the disputed border between Canneto and Montrone, we also stopped into a church to light a candle and view the shrine to San Trifone, the patron of Adelfia. The interior of the Church of Saint Nicholas of Bari and Saint Tryphon Martyr is beautiful. Its high ceilings are covered with pastel blue and frescoes, triumphant angels, and nativity scenes. And beneath all of this color moved a figure clothed in black named Lorenzo.
I cannot say that Lorenzo is a nationalist, because how could a montronese belong to a nation? Italians are not a nation in this sense, they are a combination of many now forgotten peoples, mingling on the soils of this land over generations. The Greeks, the French, the Albanians, the Visigoths. But Lorenzo is proud of the south and of his home here in southern Italy, and is sensitive to the stereotypes about the southerners that pervade Italy, and elsewhere, that they are dangerous, criminal, and violent. He also likes to talk about history, and how Bari and adjacent areas of Italy were sacked and plundered by foreign armies. In the 9th century, Islamic invaders created the Emirate of Bari, but just a handful of years later the Byzantines took it back from the Ottoman Turks. Then, in 1071, Robert Guiscard and his swashbuckling Norman adventurers swooped in. Among other feats, they built the Norman Tower right here.
Not only the tower remains, but the blue eyes and light hair that exists to this day among some of the inhabitants of Adelfia are a reminder of these Normans. My great grandfather Domenico also had blue eyes as does my mother Christine. As do two of my three children. As a child, it linked my mom and her towering Italian grandfather. He would look down and say, “Our people came from the north.”
“For centuries, Italians were subjected to invasion after foreign invasion,” Lorenzo told me that night. “Only in 1860 were we able to stop being picked apart and fought over by others. Then came the risorgimento, the unification under Giuseppe Garibaldi. Some say that it was a unification, but others say that the piedmontese just annexed the rest of Italy. They helped themselves to the resources and labor of the south, but they think that we are criminals.”
“But my grandfather Petrone, my father’s father, said that our people were criminals,” I insisted. “I have heard that Calabria, where the Petrones were from, was legendary for its banditry.”
“No, no the Calabrese weren’t bandits,” said Lorenzo. They were briganti. Brigantines! They were a movement, trying to wake up the north, to tell them what was going on in Italy.”
Such were the lectures of my cousin Lorenzo. He seemed offended that I would even suggest that our countrymen were anything other than noble Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, fighting the powerful and wealthy families of the north by flouting their laws and creating their own codes of justice. One man’s brigantine was another man’s criminal. His body language was subdued though. Lorenzo is not your stereotypical Italian who argues loudly, flailing his arms. It’s hard to imagine him yelling out a car window while pounding away on his horn. But in his quiet certainty about the nature of Italy, I felt I had said something wrong, even though I was proud of these stories of criminality that we had carried with us from the south. In America, such tales of lawlessness had a kind of mystique. Who wanted to descend from law-abiding Italians, when you could claim your cousin was a notorious outlaw?
“People are afraid of the south,” I pressed on. “A Florentine told me it’s dangerous. They say they lock their cars when they see Neapolitan license plates. Even when they are driving.”
“Florence is far more dangerous than Bari,” my cousin Lorenzo shook his head. “That’s what’s so funny about the northerners, you know. They think the south is full of criminals. But since all the money is in cities like Milan, that is where all of the real criminals go. Milan is more dangerous than any city in the south.” To his credit, nobody robbed us that night as we paraded around Montrone and Canneto in the dangerous south of Italy. The only thing I was ever robbed of in the south was hunger though, because it seemed like all we did was eat.
***
SOME DAYS LATER, we had a fine meal at a restaurant in Adelfia, consisting of tiny mozzarellinis, polenta baked in marinara sauce, and many other delights, such as sauteed chicken hearts. Lorenzo was there, as were Pamela and Antonella and Lello. Platter after platter of food arrived, glasses of wine were consumed, and I began to worry who would be picking up the bill for this feast. There was even a mozzarella the size of a loaf of bread. On the way out, I asked the chef at the counter about the bill. I imagined that it was enormous.
He in turn simply asked me if I preferred Northern Italy or Southern Italy.
“Whose side are you on?” said the chef. He was a roly-poly man with Sinatra blue eyes.
“The South,” I told him with my most casual Italian shrug. “Naturally.”
“Good! In that case, your meal was free,” the chef said and bowed his head. “Grattis.”
Much later, I found out that my cousins had already settled the bill. But I like to live in that illusion that just professing a love for the South over the North could earn you a free meal anywhere south of Rome. All you had to say was that the South was better, and a waiter would bring you a tray of free mozzarellinis and the cooks in the back would start baking polenta.
I HAD ALWAYS BEEN, even without knowing it, a lost son of Italy. I think most Italian-Americans are the country’s lost sons and daughters. We forgot our language, we forgot our family stories. We forgot what our names meant and we forgot what roles we had played in history. In America, we were supposed to be new people. Some of us changed our names or we gave our children names that would not, on first notice, smack of any kind of ethnic affinity. It was only through my own personal interest and research that I had learned the family stories. In uncovering these forgotten stories, I began to learn the real reasons why we left Italy.
The story about how I learned the truth started when I was 30 years old, to the day. I had spent the night before celebrating my birthday with friends at a restaurant in Estonia, then taken a night bus to Tallinn Airport, pausing only to buy a few gifts for relatives, mostly boxes of Estonian and Finnish chocolates, and one bottle of vodka, which would be prized among any nation other than the Italians. I would come to regret purchasing that bottle of vodka.
***
That morning the plane carried me from the November frosts of the Baltic and across the expanse of the German countryside to Munich, where I changed planes. From the air, Germany was a tidy patchwork of church steeples and fields. These were disrupted by the massive Alps, rocky and jagged, spiked with ice. Then came the valleys of the Po, and those black-green, forested hills, the Apennines. From the mons of the Alps sprang this nether region called Italy, dark and intriguing, the genitals of Europe swaying down into the Mediterranean.
I was a little nervous as that plane descended toward its destination. I had been to Italy before then, but as a simple tourist. This trip though would take me to places I hadn’t been before and put me into situations I had never experienced. I was to travel from the capital Rome deep into the South, meeting with relatives I had never met before, serving as a kind of self-appointed family ambassador, making up for decades of no contact. I had no idea what to expect, but I was willing to take the plunge. I was married, had two small children, and was soundly employed. I did feel kind of stuck. I had just turned 30 and things needed shaking up.
Inside, I still had the heart of an adventurer, I think. I yearned to discover something new. This new discovery would be Italy, but not the Italy of Rome or Venice, of art galleries and souvenir shops, or fashion boutiques and tours of Tuscan vineyards. I was already aware, vaguely, that I was about to leap off into the unknown, into a world where nobody spoke English, and I spoke only a little bit of Italian. Still, I have always enjoyed these kinds of challenges.
At last, we landed in Fiumicino, right on the coast at the very spot where the Tiber begins its snaky crawl toward the heart of the old empire. Here I found my way through an apocalyptic wasteland of industrial parks splashed with graffiti, the reeking armpit of the capital. Whichever way you turned, Rome was dirty and foul, a pungent and fermenting heap of trash and history. The air smelled of trains, of fried foods, of espresso, car exhaust, cigarettes, and pigeons. It smelled of the crisp uniforms of the carabinieri, the tangled shampooed locks of the Roman women as they sped by on Vespas, clutching the waists of their daredevil boyfriends.
I took a train into the central station, and then walked a few blocks to my hostel. The manager on duty took my money and shook my hand and wished me a happy birthday, as he had noticed it was my birthday when he copied down the information from my passport. He next gave me the keys to my room. It would only be a night there before I left for Bari. In the next room, some young American women were already drinking wine in the afternoon and boisterously toasting to each other. “To a happy vacation in Italy with lots of hot Italian men!”
I strongly doubted that they would consider me to be one of these exotic men and I felt a little insulted by the idea that that’s all an Italian could ever mean to them. A quick fling on a Roman holiday. Some Mediterranean spice to their otherwise white bread lives. They would go home and marry some boring man in Indianapolis or Houston or god knew where they called home. They would marry a normal man with a normal name, but there would always be Italy!
I was so annoyed by them that I decided the only thing that could lift my spirits would be a walk to see the Colosseum and a slice of pizza. I remember that moment, sitting with my back against the wall, listening to those girls. Sometimes, I wasn’t proud to be an American.
That was one of those times.
***
THE NEXT MORNING I was back at the train station with my backpack, stuffed with boxes of Estonian chocolates and that bottle of Estonian vodka. I bought a ticket for Bari Centrale and took a seat on the train across from an older woman who wore a giant crucifix around her neck and spent her time surfing the web on a laptop, or calling by phone to check on various relatives. This is a four-hour journey that takes you to the outskirts of Naples and then straight across to the other side of the peninsula. You know you are close to Bari when you can at least see the Adriatic from your window. You see the quiet Adriatic and the lights from the ships sailing on it. When we at last arrived at Bari Centrale, I somehow could not believe it. I couldn’t believe I had gone back, even though I had never stepped foot in the city. For a moment, I almost thought it was a film set, to see that sign hanging above informing me that this was the real Bari: the Bari I had only seen in photos and atlases. It was evening and the moisture of the Adriatic was everywhere. That smell of the sea put me at ease. It was familiar to me, and I felt my body relax, even though I was about to come face to face with a relative.
A cousin that I had never met.
I knew of course that my ancestors had come from this port city in the south, and thanks to some correspondence my cousin Mary Ann — a granddaughter of the famous Uncle Vinny — had initiated, as well as some social media dialogues with this newly discovered relative named Cousin Lorenzo, I now had an invitation to dinner in Adelfia, which sits outside the city.
Cousin Lorenzo and I met via Facebook. Perhaps only because of his last name, he was suggested as a friend to me, considering all of the other Abbatecolas on my friend’s list (Abbatecola being my mother’s maiden name). Not only was I interested in him, he was interested in me. He wanted to meet this lost American relative. Something about the promise of America still stirs the fantasies of Italians. Bright lights, big cities. Fame and fortune. New York, Chicago, Hollywood and Disneyland. Almost every Italian has a lost relative to the American Dream. Almost none of them came back to old Italy, and after a while, all contact with these dreamers ceased. Before I arrived at Bari Centrale, Lorenzo sent me a message.
He wrote:
I am in station. Yuo take off and wait. See a black hat in my hand.
There he was, Cousin Lorenzo, standing beneath the big sign that said Bari, with dark hair and a familiar face. We approached each other with great curiosity. From what we had determined, Lorenzo was a distant cousin to me. My great grandfather, Domenico was the son of a man named Vincenzo Abbatecola, who was born in the year 1846, when Italy wasn’t a country. Lorenzo’s forefather was Vincenzo’s brother. His name, as you might expect, was also Lorenzo.
I remember that feeling of meeting Cousin Lorenzo for the first time. I would not say it was an odd or funny feeling, but everything about him was so familiar to me. It was as if I had staggered into the bathroom at some early hour and glanced at myself in the mirror. Many people had told me that I didn’t look like a real Italian, because I was so tall, but Lorenzo was as tall as I was, and he looked me directly in the eyes. We were undoubtedly related, we few tall Italians, and I wondered about who our common tall Italian ancestor was, who looked this way, and when he had lived and under what circumstances. Was there once a tall villager in some village in Italy in the 17th century who looked like me and Lorenzo? Was he also one of us?
After having known Cousin Lorenzo for a few seconds, I determined he was everything I imagined an Italian cousin should be. Lorenzo was about the same age. We had entered this world at the same time and had grown up on opposite sides of a great ocean, speaking different languages, unaware of each other’s existence. Lorenzo was here in Italy. I was over there in America. He was doing his Italian things, like kicking a soccer ball against a wall. I was doing my American things, like also kicking a soccer ball against a wall. Only that that wall was in America, not in Italy. We did not know each other and yet, in a second, by looking into each other’s eyes, we arrived both at an understanding. Two shadows meeting on a train platform.
“Cugino?” Lorenzo said to me at the train station. “Cousin? Is it really you?”
***
AFTER THAT, I was more or less immediately accepted into the warm bosom of my new family. Each night, I was invited to dinner at Cousin Lorenzo’s parents’ house in Adelfia. Adelfia was a patchwork of multi-story stone houses of indeterminate age, separated from each other by narrow streets and narrower alleyways. There was an ancient, dusty, almost Middle Eastern feeling to these rows of beige and white homes. Lorenzo’s house was among them, accessible from the street through a metal gate. Meals in general were the domain of Giuseppina, his diminutive and vivacious mother, who worked through the day to prepare them. Giuseppe, her husband, would later arrive as would Lorenzo’s sisters Pamela and Antonella. All of them showed great curiosity in me, as if I was an alien or something and brought me different kinds of sweets, dolci, and explained their regions of origin and historical significance. “This is a local sweet,” Antonella would say. “But this one here comes from Sicily. See, you can tell by the use of orange slices.” Antonella had wonderfully thick black curly hair. She looked like one of those women from an ancient Greek vase. Pamela had a fun, playful, boundless energy to her.
Antonella’s boyfriend Lello would also be there while I was being instructed about different sweets, yawning through the evening news. The most important news in Italy at the time involved Piero Marrazzo, the governor of Lazio, a region adjacent to Rome, who had been filmed taking drugs and having sex with some Brazilian transsexuals. One of these transsexual prostitutes died later in a mysterious fire. By eating together with the family, I therefore learned a great deal about Italian culture. Much had changed since my great grandfather left.
Some things remained the same.
Cousin Lorenzo showed me the lemon trees in the yard, as well as the wine press in the basement. Each year, Lorenzo’s family would harvest the grapes from the vineyards and make wine at a certain time, all so that it would be ready for the great Feast of San Trifone, the patron saint of Adelfia, as every Italian village and city has its own patron saint, if not several of them. Meals with his family were familiar, salad, pasta, fish or meat, washed down with this same homemade wine. After the meals, they would munch on stalks of garden-grown fennel, or then indulge ripe fleshy slices of cachi, or persimmons. The tiny cups of hot espresso would come around and a shot of limoncello, the famed liqueur made with grain alcohol, sugar, and boiled lemon rinds, or its lesser known cousin, mandorino, which is made with the skins of oranges. Then these sons and daughters of Italy would lean back and make conversation.
Such were their ways.
***
ONE AFTERNOON, Uncle Vincenzo, or “Enzo” for short, was invited over to discuss the history of the family with me. Enzo was the son of Michele, my great grandfather Domenico’s older brother. At that time, he was about 70 years old, a spry old man with gray hair and glasses and palpable energy. Enzo marched into the dining room, where we were sitting around eating cachi and pointed. Enzo said, “Your great grandfather was the one who beat up the priest.”
Everyone laughed then. I and what surprised me was that they all seemed to know the story. As for me, I was speechless and did not know how to react. I had never heard the story, and yet I was not surprised. That side of my family was known for these kinds of transgressions. Relatives were known to wield a bat with people who crossed them the wrong way. Tempers flared, impulses could not be contained. Sometimes an argument overheated and the police might be called in to calm things down. In a way, I was almost relieved that Domenico had only beaten the priest and not killed this man of god. Certainly, I was embarrassed by the story and the attention. To think that I had come all this way to be confronted by Domenico’s past.
But he was my great grandfather. Surely he had had his reasons.
This had happened in the early 1900s. More than a century ago. The story had been carried forward though, and Enzo was now closing the circle. He was pulling the threads between then and now, between America and Italy, between me and him. The priest, he said, had taken a liking to Domenico and Michele’s sister. He had crossed the line on several occasions. And so Domenico and his younger brother Saverio, who were running a brewery, decided to settle scores. They attacked the lecherous priest with police batons, injuring him badly. The news soon spread quickly, and my great grandfather and his younger brother sought counsel from their father, a businessman, as well as older brother Michele, Enzo’s father, a policeman. “He said, if it was anyone else I could protect you,” Enzo recalled his father’s words. “But this is a Catholic country. If you beat up a priest, you will go to jail. You have to leave the country.”
This is what had sent Saverio and Domenico to the Port of Naples seeking passage to New York. Later, Enzo told me there was more to the story. The incident was not only related to protecting the honor of their sister. They also had “big political problems,” as Enzo had put it.
“They were anarchists,” he said, anarchici. “That’s why they did it.”
“Anarchists?”
Enzo nodded. Anarchici. The word sounded strange and dangerous. It sounded like men with mustaches lurking in the vestibules of churches with police batons ready to pounce. It sounded like terrorists robbing banks or cutting the throats of policemen in their sleep. I had read once of anarchists in Italy who had stolen and burned bank records in a bonfire, as to eliminate any records of people’s debts. With no debts, people could start again fresh. They could rebuild their lives. I remembered thinking that it sounded like a wonderful idea.
Many people I knew had all kinds of different people in their families. Especially in Estonia, it wasn’t hard to meet someone who descended from a notorious Communist, or perhaps someone who had helped the Nazi German regime a little too enthusiastically during the grim and bloody war years. But anarchists? Anarchici? I was the great grandson of an anarchist? What did that even mean? Could anarchism be passed down, like so many other things?
Was I an anarchist too?
***
WHEN I LATER called my mother and told her the story, she said that she had heard something like this whispered around her when she was a child. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but they knew that it was bad. That was our family. We were passionate, but perhaps too passionate. Whether we were followers of the anarchist Errico Malatesta and read his paper Umanità Nova, or claimed to know nothing of it, you didn’t want to cross us.
For me, personally, this story opened a door to another era. It helped me to better understand my links to this country we left behind. Not long ago, there had been a predecessor just like me, who felt passionately about various injustices in the world. He had sat here in this same comune or municipality outside of Bari, under the influence of the revolutionary anarchists. The story of the two brothers and the priest therefore helped me to feel closer to my origins. It kicked open a door. Just as that door had opened before me, many others would open.
AFTER DULCINEA went to the convent I didn’t see her for some time. I did keep her in my thoughts though. Any happenings with her, though few in recent years, allowed me to survive the long Estonian winters. A memory that I kept especially close to heart was of her seated beside the seaside in the summer, in her white sweater, with the cool July winds toying with her straw hair, and that wondrous look in her midnight eyes. She was like summer that night. Dulcinea could become summer just as she could become any season. But she left after that and went to the convent and I didn’t see her again until our paths crossed in a strange way.
She was working with a French priest whose job it was to retrieve lost children and it so happened that I too was assigned to cover the case of the lost little boy for an Estonian magazine. As I understood it, Sister Dulcinea had taken on a secretarial role within this Catholic detective agency. There she was, clad in white. I wondered how long it would last. Would not the pleasures of the flesh, or at least the heart, be the undoing of her virtuous vows? How was I to look upon this woman of god, if not with desire? Something about the gold cross that dangled across her neck was only more seductive and erogenous. She was, in person, quite professional and mostly ignored me, side-eyed me, or didn’t appear at all.
Over time though, I began to realize that our connection, while not expressed in words, was pulsing in the air. After the French priest finally found the lost little boy, who had been kept by kidnappers in an old house somewhere in the south of France equidistant between Grenoble and Lyon, there was a celebration. The sun was setting magnificently that evening and the boy’s grateful parents gathered around and thanked the French detective, who I imagined was something like Poirot and Maigret mixed together and clothed in the black clothes of the Christian faith. It was then that lovely Sister Dulcinea walked toward me, her hands toying with her beads, and kissed me passionately. “That’s that,” she said. So much for the nunnery.
ON THE SHIP TO MUHU, with my daughter and parents, I was surprised to discover my friend Anton was also on board, and that he had a special need to be delivered to the nature preserve at the head of the Sõrve peninsula, an expansive strip of island land that dangled suggestively down toward the Gulf of Riga. It was already night when the ship docked in Kuivastu Harbor and the bus began to roll across Muhu and then the causeway to Saaremaa.
By the time we got to the hotel in Kuressaare, it was bedtime, for sure, but the hotel was jumping, with a restaurant up front, as well as blackjack tables and slot machines. My parents retired to their room, and I left my daughter in ours, and then went searching for Anton so I could take him to Sõrve. Anton himself had disappeared upon disembarking. Where was he? I sent him some messages, but he only sent back photos of himself and friends tearing up various nightclubs in Kuressaare. There was even a shot of a mounted police officer trying to rein in the island pub crawl chaos. This guy wanted a free ride? But a promise was a promise.
I went down a series of long hallways that seemed to stretch on forever. Well-lit, wood-paneled corridors, no doubt created by some Nordic design firm. I kept walking and soon I was near Mändjala Beach. Such long passageways, I thought. How was it even possible? At the end of the final hallway, I saw there was a sauna and swimming complex outside, and old ladies were relaxing in the warm bubbles of a hot tub. Inside there was a breakfast buffet set out with the most delicious looking choux pastries, topped with lingonberry-flavored cream. Inside the breakfast area, some old Scandinavian couples had fallen asleep at the dining tables. I helped myself to four or five of these special pastries and turned back while a DJ was setting up.
As I returned to the entrance of the hotel, with no word from Anton, who was probably sleeping in the drunk tank at the Saaremaa police station, I encountered the maître d’hôtel, an older gentleman with gray hair and a fine mustache, who informed me that I now owed the hotel a pretty sum for the pastries. “You had five umeå-brests,” he said. “That will cost you €25 at the very least.” “But I have stayed here many times before,” I told the maître d’hôtel. “As far as I recall, the umeå-brest pastries were always free.” “Times have changed in Estonia,” said the maître d’hôtel. “We now charge for almond milk, honey. Umeå-brests are certainly no longer free.” No, nothing was complimentary anymore in this odd nation. With a heavy heart, but a belly full of brests, I retired to my hotel room at last. Sõrve was not in the cards. Who knew what had become of Anton. And besides, it just then occurred to me, I didn’t even have a car.
SOMETIMES I WONDER how I ever wound up here.This northern land of trees where there’s snow on the ground from November through April. The Estonian doctors told me long ago that my body wasn’t designed for this climate. I have come to believe them. My body was designed for sun-baked countryside, for almond and olive groves, for the spray of the sea and for tins of tuna fish. But I am not there, where I should be. I am here and it is snowing again.
Such thoughts ramble through my mind as I make my way to an establishment called the Grand Hotel. There’s a gym in the basement there and you can book it for an hour at a time. That small hotel gym basement has become my sanctuary in the winter months. Outside, it’s dark, freezing, but down there it’s warm and I can wear shorts. There’s also a TV mounted on the wall. My favorite channel is the history channel. It almost exclusively shows documentaries about Hitler and Mussolini. Sometimes the old film reels of Mussolini bother me. I look like some of the blackshirts crowding around Il Duce. There’s a cranky old Estonian man who gets coffee at the same cafes that I do here, and he refers to me as one of the “Mussolini nation.” “What are you doing in Estonia?” the old man asks now and then. “You’re an invasive species!”
***
THE CRANKY OLD ESTONIAN MAN, whose name is Imre, and who also sometimes visits the hotel for late night and early morning coffees, isn’t here this time, but Ragne is at the desk as always. Oh, Ragne. Ragne is about five years younger than me and has declared her singular interest in older men. We’re just so mature and worldly. She likes to wink at me, fluster me, to toy with me, and then tell me that she has absolutely no interest in me. She is a serious Estonian woman, who prefers serious Estonian men. A sentimental Italian is of no use to Ragne. She plays with her blonde hair. Life is better as a blonde, Ragne says. Ragne has a new manicure every other day. She also always has to remind me to be on time. She has to remind me because I often roll in 10 minutes late. Not on purpose. It just always happens that way.
Ragne finds my tardiness infuriating. This time I have decided to book my gym hour for 5 pm.
“That means 5 pm Estonian time!” Ragne calls out to me as I walk back out the door. This somehow gets under my skin, strikes at my very identity. 5 pm Estonian time. Invasive species. One of the Mussolini nation. How did I even wind up in this land of snow and no nonsense?
“But didn’t you know?” I call back. “Time doesn’t really exist. It’s just numbers!”
“That’s not true,” Ragne shouts back over the desk. “Time does exist.”
“No, time doesn’t exist, Ragne,” I reply, giving her my best Italian shrug. “Time is crap,” I say.
Then I leave.
***
I DECIDE TO HEAD DOWN the street to the café for an espresso, Ragne’s words nipping at my heels like little dogs. If I’m not operating on Estonian time, I must be operating on Italian time, I think. And Italian time, as I have noted, is flexible. Italian time is so limitless that it doesn’t exist. Whole years can disappear into seconds in Italy. Seconds erupt forth from years. The idea that you could be late for an appointment is surreal, absurd. Do you think Fellini was ever late for anything? Fellini was always on time, because whenever Fellini arrived, it just happened to be the right time to arrive. Life does happen, you know. Life has its own plans. You don’t know what might happen in life. Here I am reminded of a story about my great uncle Vinny, who was the older brother of my mother’s father Frank. This happened way back in the 1950s or 1960s, before the era of smartphones, a time when one picked up the receiver and said, “Give me New York 555,” and a dispatcher connected your phone line to another one. As my Estonian cafe espresso arrives black and hot, I think about the story about Vinny and time.
It goes something like this.
***
ONE DAY, my mother Christine, then maybe an adolescent with a soon-to-be very dated permanent hairdo, received word that her Uncle Vinny and his entourage of wife and six children were on their way to visit her father Frank, and that he intended to be there later that same morning. So she put on her best white dress and went outside to sit on the stairs and to wait for Uncle Vinny to show up. It was a fine summer’s day and somewhere the Four Seasons were probably playing on a radio. Frankie Valli was singing. My mother was waiting patiently.
Uncle Vinny operated a restaurant on the south shore of Long Island, which is the largest island in the United States and juts out into the ocean east of Manhattan. Like New Jersey to its west, Long Island became a sandy, coastal destination for Italians longing to escape New York City. They moved there and built their homes, their children went to school, and within a few years, they became new Long Islanders, living side by side with the original British stock, happy to live in such a fragrant place. The name of Vinny’s restaurant on Long Island was “Vinny’s Happy Landing.” It was from this beachy enclave on the south shore that Uncle Vinny was traveling in his bid to make it to the north shore of Long Island to visit his brother Frank, who lived in a New England-feeling coastal village clustered around a harbor called Northport. My mother was there waiting for him to arrive in the morning, sitting outside in her dress.
I’ve only seen one photo of Vinny as a young man in the 1940s, but I could immediately recognize the slant of his eyes and white-toothed smile, finished off with curly-black hair on top. He seems to have been quite charismatic, and I can imagine my mother waiting for this man to show up that morning, maybe even with a gift of some kind, or perhaps a bouquet of flowers. But Uncle Vinny got distracted along the way. Maybe he had some car trouble, but more likely he ran into some friends, and got invited over for coffee or something like that. Then he met another friend who offered him a quick lunch and, as you know, it’s impolite to refuse a meal. Morning turned to noon. Noon turned to late afternoon. My mother kept waiting. The Four Seasons were no longer playing. Now it was maybe the Everly Brothers. Afternoon turned to evening. The crickets began to chirp. My mother was still sitting there. All day long she waited for the magic uncle to make an appearance, but Uncle Vinny never came.
***
THIS SAME GIRL grew up to be legendary for lateness too. It was a joke in the family that if a party started at 4 pm, it was best to invite my mother at 2 pm. That way she would show up two hours late and be right on time. I must admit, I have inherited this carelessness about time when it comes to being anywhere, even if it is for my own time at the gym in Estonia. Of course, I only allow myself to be five or 10 minutes late on those occasions, and I do make it to flights mostly on time, even though I always feel a little annoyed by punctuality and the rigidness of the non-Italian world. People are late because the fates of life interfere in their schedules. Can one always prepare himself for every flat tire or broken-down train? What if someone asks you in for lunch? Would you really refuse? But it is an insult to refuse lunch.
Wallowing in my wintry blues in Nowheresville, Estonia, I think about such things. Other people talk about the weather, real estate, or the soaring prices of cappuccinos, but I am still contending with Ragne’s pronouncement that I should turn up on “Estonian time” and not a second too late or too early. What is it with these Northerners and time? I often wonder what it is they are running from here, or trying to accomplish. How great is the fear of these numbers on the wall? Don’t they know that time is elastic? I understand, at least logically, that the hotel here needs to manage its gym appointments. I am never dramatically late. I don’t show up in the morning or the evening. But five minutes? Ten minutes? Come on! Is it really such a sin to be late? What happens to you if you are not on time? Do you burst into flames? Sometimes I like to be late, honestly. I feel that I am slowly teaching the local people a lesson about the futility of clocks. They need to learn such things and I am here to teach them.
***
A FEW YEARS AGO, when I was in Bari, a coastal city on the Adriatic and the ancient home of my mother’s family, the Abbatecolas, my cousin Michele told me he would be at my rented apartment at 5 pm. Michele’s grandfather, also named Michele, and Domenico, the father of my grandfather Frank and his ethereal brother Vinny, were brothers. As such, Michele and I are rather close relatives and treat each other as such, with the obligatory pecks on the cheek.
From there, Michele would take us to dinner in Adelfia, about 15 minutes or so from downtown Bari. Being a somewhat dutiful resident of a Northern European country, I made preparations just in case he might actually show up at 5 pm. But true to his nation, our special “Mussolini Nation,” Michele did not show up until about 6:30. There he was, standing outside my apartment, holding his phone, waiting for me. Italians are often stereotyped as being short people, but Michele is as tall as I am. He has great gray hair, wears glasses, has a patient manner and friendly smile, and is anything anyone would want in an Italian cousin. Michele himself is about 15 years older than me. He plays guitar in an REM cover band, and sometimes I have helped him make sense of Michael Stipe’s muddled lyrics. This is not an easy task for me either.
And so there he was. He was also an hour and a half late, and yet didn’t even bother to acknowledge it or to apologize. I didn’t ask him any questions. We were on Italian time that night and Italian time felt great. Italian time was wild and unstable and truly exciting. You never knew what might happen on Italian time. That was part of its everlasting allure and fun.
***
DURING THAT SAME TRIP, my 10-year-old daughter Anna got frustrated with living a humdrum existence in a rented apartment around the corner from Bari Centrale, besieged by scooter traffic in the mornings, while her father downed espressos in little dive cafes and engaged in meandering conversations with relatives in Italian at night. To calm her need to do touristy things, I rented a car from a firm near the central station and took off across the country to the famous Pompeii. There she saw the fossilized remains of Latins who had given up the ghost in AD 79. She was so impressed by the ruins that she posed for photos by the stone corpses and we drove back to Puglia happy. “My classmates will be so jealous,” she said.
On the way back though, we were impossibly late to return the car. There had been an unusual snowfall — it was November — and just getting past Salerno was a slippery nightmare of traffic jams and cursing drivers. The renter, a short, scrappy, amiable fellow who had once lived in New Jersey and spoke excellent English, had specified a return time of 9 am. It wasn’t until 11 am that we showed up at the agency to return the car. Curiously, the man had stepped out of the office but left the door ajar. I went inside and left the keys. I was expecting him to call me up and demand another day’s rental fee for the late return. That’s what they would do to you in Estonia or in the United States, or other countries run by punctual people. Later, I went back to apologize. It seemed like the right thing to do for my error of returning the car late. The proprietor had just walked back from having another espresso and was in rather high spirits.
“But we were two hours late!” I said. “I am so very sorry. Please forgive me for my late return.”
The man just gave me a wonderful Italian shrug in his leather jacket. “The contract says you had to return it in the morning and it’s still morning,” he said. “Mattina è mattina,” he said. “Morning is morning.”
***
I REVISIT THAT PHRASE “morning as morning” on this snowy morning as I sip my coffee and the flakes cascade and sparkle down. The cranky old man is at the counter now. He’s talking about politics but has not yet come by to speak of Mussolini and invasive species. In Estonia, an easy-going expression such as “morning is morning” is seldom heard, I think. Up here, things happen on Estonian time, which can be as ruthless and unforgiving as the weather. Up here, people fear clocks. Down Italy way, nobody looks at them. In Italy, morning is just morning.
I remember that morning when I returned the rental car in Bari late. I remember how I paused to look at the palm trees that stand in the park in front of Bari Centrale that special day, so proud and so tropical. There was something so warm and supportive about Italy. It was as if my body had been created from its fertile fields. In Italy, it felt like the whole country loved you. You could talk to a stranger and he would talk back. You could be late with a rental car and the renter wouldn’t be annoyed. You could stand outside in winter admiring palm trees. I had been told that place was not my home. I didn’t speak the local dialect. My forefathers and mothers had left it all behind. But how could it not be home? Maybe home isn’t a place? Maybe home is something that simmers away inside of you like a hot espresso on a northern day.
Soldiers of the Continental Army, a 1781 sketch by a French officer
THAT SAME DARK, misty, and evil-feeling November night when the outcome of the American elections became clear, I fell violently ill. I’m still not sure if it was because of the election results or because I had eaten too many pumpkin seeds. It took me weeks to recover. Half of the time I was couch ridden, staring up at the ceiling, the other half, I sat in cafes peering out of windows while strangers tried to engage me about politics. All of November passed by like that in a half dream. I was numb and I felt at that time that something had broken or had died. Something had vanished. But for all eternity? What the hell was going on?
November has become the line though, the line between before and after. It’s only recently that I have understood that everything that has happened since is mirroring what came before. Everything that has happened after has happened before, but in other ways. We’ve just forgotten about these things, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen. Why we now have to relive them is lost on me, but maybe this is all necessary. Maybe we have to relive all of this.
As I write this now it’s a bright March morning. The daylight is streaming through the curtains and the coffee has come to a sumptuous boil. The alarm clock told me that it was six when I woke but the news has informed me that I must be still dreaming, because the news is absurd. Trump’s envoy to Moscow Mr. Witkoff says that Putin is a wonderful person. Maybe he would like to say that to my neighbors who fled a bombarded Kharkiv three years ago? Vice President Vance and his wife Usha and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz are en route to Greenland where Usha will take in a dog-sledding event and Vance and Waltz will visit a military base. The Greenlandic prime minister has already called this a provocation. He’s from there. Greenland is home. So why do the Americans then say that they have the right to take it away?
By now, I don’t remember how many times Trump has said that Canada could be America’s 51st state. They could keep their national anthem. The American president has promised them at least that. He’s such a generous man that he would even allow them to keep their flag too. America would cherish its 51st state in the same way that it would cherish its Gaza hotels and casinos, he has said. For Trump, Canada is an illogical political entity. For him, the Canadian and American border was drawn at random “decades and decades ago,” as he said recently in the White House. In reality, the border was fixed in 1846 between Great Britain and the US. In reality, the US received its independence from Great Britain in 1783. It was not Canada that drew that line, because Canada did not have its own prime minister until 1867. The math tells me that this all happened 180 years ago. Eighteen of those many “decades and decades.”
That was all in reality, but reality is no match for Trump. He also said that a Dane once sailed to Greenland 200 years ago and that’s why Denmark doesn’t have a legitimate claim to Greenland. But the Scandinavians were living there in the Viking era, and those who remained joined the Inuit. That Danish ship sailed 300, not 200 years ago. Why do I even waste my time arguing, I wonder. Everyone knows that reality doesn’t matter. Trump said in his March speech that we will get Greenland one way or another, and the Republicans only stood and applauded. Trump even has his own explainers and supporters in Estonia who appear each day on social media to explain to the Estonian people why the Orange One is always correct. It’s been strange to witness how they do this and they do it with such enthusiasm. Maybe they had nothing better to do than to hand over their souls in exchange for nothing. A shame, because America was in its bloody moments of birth against authoritarianism, or so I was taught.
When you read Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, it’s all well explained. Americans no longer wished to live under a hereditary monarchy, Paine wrote. Their desire was liberty. “Give me liberty or give me death,” were the words of the Virginian Patrick Henry in 1775. Henry also said, “There is no retreat but in submission and slavery.” But some Americans want to be slaves. They wish to share their slave joy with their Canadian and Greenlandic brethren. Even when they don’t want to be Americans, they shouldn’t have the right to decide on the matter. Rather, they should be the competent, loyal slaves of their spiritual master. This is their logic.
The same logic also underpins Russian foreign policy. The Ukrainians have forgotten how wonderful it is to be the slaves of Moscow. One day they will forget who they are and they will only think the thoughts of their tsar and speak in the language of their tsar too. This is how the Russians think, but can the people who think in such a way really be Americans? America isn’t just flags, eagles, guns, and money. America is, or was, an idea of the Enlightenment. Just as Estonians still live in part in the 1920s with their land reforms, bowties, black cars and state officials, because that is when their country was created, Americans have one foot in the end of the 18th century when debates raged over the Rights of Man. I must admit, I am starting to understand the tumult of that era more. The old questions are resurfacing. We have been here before, haven’t we? We’ve just forgotten all about those days, but we are remembering them.
When Trump speaks about Canada, I am reminded of General Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated expedition to the north in 1775. It was the desire of the Americans that Quebec would join in their cause against the British. Two armies were sent to Canada the summer before American independence was declared. One army went north from New York. This was the army of Richard Montgomery. Arnold’s army went through the wilderness of New England. At first it must have seemed simple. If you look at a map, it looks that way. But the route was treacherous and there were a lot of waterfalls. Arnold’s forces carried small boats along the way, with the hope they could use them upstream. A third of his army deserted him. The others fell ill and were starving. In the end, just half of his army made it to Canada. In the pitched battle at Quebec City, Richard Montgomery was slain and Arnold was wounded.
The Americans had to retreat back home.
I don’t know why this one event stands out in my mind. Most experts are talking about Germany and the 1930s these days. In London, there are even signs on the Tube that show Elon Musk giving the Roman salute and which proclaim his Teslas can accelerate from “0 to 1939 in 3 seconds.” People look at Elon Musk and think about Adolf Hitler. I listen to Donald Trump and think about Benedict Arnold’s futile march through the wilderness into Canada. Some thought the Canadians would be on the side of the Americans, but it was all an illusion. They were deceived by their fantasies. The Americans did control Montreal for some time and the French disliked them because their administration of the city was poorly organized. When Trump now talks about how Canada could become the 51st state, I wonder if he has even read any history? Of course not. He will continue to tell us his tall tales. We must sit uncomfortably on the couch, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio during the infamous meeting with Zelenskyy, looking for a way to hide ourselves inside of the furniture. Surely this current discomfort will pass. Surely our generals will realize that it was foolish to invade Canada.
By now, you might have figured out that I have read a little too much about the American Revolution. But the Revolution has always fascinated me since I was a little boy. All of that bloody drama and all of those three-cornered hats. All of those bayonets and buxom ladies in poofy dresses. At that time, I probably wanted to live through such a momentous period of time. As I write this, I’m not so sure that was such a good thing to wish for anymore. I am often asked as an American here what I think and I have to answer that all of the uncomfortable questions about the American project are now resurfacing. All of the old ghosts have been stirred and are restless. We are starting to sense these ghosts and to understand them.
The greatest question raised by these restless ghosts concerns America. Because, while we talk about the right of Canada to exist, the right of Greenland to exist, the right of Ukraine or Taiwan to exist, one also wonders what right the United States has to exist. An America true to the ideas of its founding exists as an idea, and therefore as a kind of country. An America denuded of its basic premises, one that deports people without due process, just as the British Empire removed the French from Nova Scotia, is no longer its old self, but just a bunch of territories patched together, where the president is something like the owner of a large estate. It loses the qualities that distinguish it as a country and so it becomes cosmetic, the kind of fake country that Putin railed against in his mad rambling treatise on Russians and Ukrainians.
Without its ideas, America is just the land it took from its indigenous peoples. No matter how many nuclear warheads it has, or how many people it deports, or how many federal workers it lays off, no matter how many dissidents are jailed, this truth cannot be ignored. Here I am reminded of an interview I heard not long ago with Joe Stahlman, a scholar and researcher of Tuscarora descent, who remarked on the attempts of his ancestors to create peace with the restless Europeans who had turned up on their shores. They called these Europeans “younger brothers,” because they were the newest peoples to live on Turtle Island. In the belief systems of the Natives, it was believed that the Earth existed on the back of a turtle and that this giant turtle was swimming through space. “They tried to educate their younger brothers on how to conduct themselves on Turtle Island,” he said, without remarking on whether or not this attempt had been successful. Probably not. Perhaps someday. It is hard for me to watch America without thinking of that troubled younger brother who couldn’t be reasoned with.
They tried to teach their younger brother how to behave, but he just didn’t listen.
An Estonian-language version of this article appears in Edasi. Special thanks to Dea Paraskevopoulos for helping to translate it, and to Joe Stahlman, for advice and wisdom.
THEY TROOPED IN from a party and one of them was just perfect, fuzzy-haired and round, just like a fire spark. I still don’t know her name or who she was, and maybe there’s no reason to. She was probably a nobody with a nothing story. But maybe that was just me trying to write her out of my mind. Maybe she was the most vivid fire starter of all. I’m not afraid to get burned anymore, you know. I’ve got those sous-chef hands. I’m not afraid of fires. I like mine hot. I want my fires hot just like her, plump and flickering, orange, red, yellow and warm, rimmed with gold, and blue at the core, with eyes the same color that wink back to you just like a blueburst flame. Every oscillation is another step out of cold dark winter’s heartache.
IN THE CITY CENTER, a woman was managing a small aquarium. She filled this small water pool with different elements, which began to coalesce and take shape, creating new fish-like creatures, which emerged into sight as they swam in circles. Some of them looked like the kinds of strange fish one might find in a Swedish market, burbot, cod, and terrifying anglerfish, with their ugly toothy jaws. The woman was quite discrete about the fish. She wore a white raincoat and made sure they were fed. When I asked her what they were for, she said it was hard to describe, or that she couldn’t say. “You’ll see,” she said. “It will all start to make sense.”
Later, when there was another drone and missile attack in the center of the city, and pedestrians crouched and took shelter in between fast food kiosks and t-shirt vendors, I noticed that soldiers in white uniforms with backpacks emerged into the streets. With small hoses, they sprayed down parachuting Russian soldiers, who were rendered powerless by a thick pink goo. This, as I understood it, was the toxic by product of the new fish. The woman in the white raincoat had been creating a new form of biological weapon, fish that could kill.
I tried to tell my pal El Scorcho all about it as we walked through the city later when the latest missile attack had ended, but he was too busy talking about his music career. “She’s raised a whole mini-aquarium of biological terror,” I told him. “You wouldn’t believe it. It’s so far-fetched even I have trouble believing it.” El Scorcho was lost in his world. “Can you believe they want me to headline next year’s festival?” he said. “I’m think of covering some Paul McCartney solo stuff.” We arrived at a supermercato in the middle of town, one where you had to ride an escalator up to a second floor. The building itself was made of yellow adobe, so it looked as if El Scorcho was entering a pueblo. What a pueblo was doing in a Northern European city under constant in-coming Russian attack escaped me. El Scorcho tossed some bags of potato chips and plantains down the escalator at me after he bought them. He smiled down while sipping at a bowl of mate. “Will you shut up about those weird fish, man,” El Scorcho said. “Nobody cares.”
north! 