finland, finland

IT WAS A KIND OF RESORT, in Finland. In one part, there was a dining area, but very dim because the lights had been turned off. When you turned them back on, the lights were too bright and harsh. I was waiting there at the old bar. Later that afternoon, I was supposed to give a lecture on Estonians at the University of Helsinki. Sanna Marin was going to be there. A young couple arrived to the dining area next. The man was shorter, with dark brushy hair and was wearing a suit with a bowtie, and the woman had on a light blue dress and had light brown shoulder-length hair. A young, newly wed couple full of cake, if not hope. The girl was carrying with her an umbrella, to keep away from the rain, the sun, and the dining area lightbulbs too.

THEY ASKED ME if I would take some photos of them together, but the lighting was either too bright or too dark. We played around with positions, “You sit there, now turn your head this way,” and then turned on the bar lights, but turned off the rest of the lights in the room, but it was still impossible to get a shot. After a while, I just gave up. I couldn’t get one good photograph of this newly married Finnish couple. They just could not be photographed.

INSTEAD, I WANDERED DEEPER into the resort, to where there was a kind of food street open, or concessions area. It was early in the morning, and most of the restaurants and kiosks were closed. But there was an espresso machine. Success! The small recycled cardboard cup was filled with the hot black drink. I decided I needed something sweet for my little Finnish fika, but all of the shops and kiosks were still closed. So I stole a few pieces of Fazer chocolate from one that hadn’t opened up yet but then, after some deliberation, put them back. Finland was a respectable, law-abiding kind of place, where one just did not steal Fazer chocolates.

AROUND THE CORNER, I encountered some people. A woman went walking by me with some kind of “euro burrito” served on a tray and drowning in white and red sauces. A line led to one little pop-up restaurant, where I could see the corpses of whole chickens that had been deep fried in grease, sprawled about in tins like dead boiled lobsters. The man behind the counter looked like a cross between Ryan Gosling and Steve Carrell. He was American for sure, and had a mustache and was wearing a red vest. “What can I get you?” the man said. “The list of specials is written right up there.” He gestured at a chalkboard and a list of greasy, meaty, deep fried fare. “Actually, I’m just looking for some chocolate.” “Well, if you get hungry for a real meal, come back,” he said. “But whatever you do, don’t get food from the lady next door. Her food sucks.” Behind him, I could see the fry cooks salting a fresh batch of tasty golden fries.

Someone called out the number for an order. I slinked away.

WHO WAS THAT Finnish university lecturer I once knew? I thought as wandered back through the resort. Was his name Ahto? Ahti? Antti? Aki! Aki was his name. What was he up to today? Maybe he could help me prepare for my upcoming talk at the university. I only had 10 minutes, 10 minutes to bedazzle them with tales of the Estonians. Sanna Marin, as I said before, was going to be there. I wanted to impress her. When I reached the dining area, I could see that the newly wedded couple had already separated. The young man was still seated at the table. The woman was in the corner.

“Marriage just didn’t work for us,” she told me, while twirling her umbrella. “We were just too different.” “That’s too bad,” I said. “Here, quick, would you please feel my breasts?” the Finnish bride said. She pulled down the front of her blue dress, exposing herself. I reached over and felt her breasts. “Very soft,” I said. “Just lovely.” The Finnish bride smiled. “That’s what you get when you come to Finland,” the Finnish girl told me. She had large and friendly beautiful eyes.

Somewhere on a nearby bandstand, a children’s chorus had assembled. They were singing a haunting tune. I couldn’t make out the words, but I think they were saying, “Finland, Finland.”

the rehabilitation of dulcinea

SOME THINGS DON’T DIE EASY. This I learned the hard way. I had to tell my story to someone, so I told the Count, who is descended from some Russian aristocratic family, but actually grew up in the South Estonian countryside and doesn’t speak a lick of the Russian language. He wears cool band t-shirts and a flannel shirt over them, like it was 1992, or ’82 for that matter, and his brown hair is going gray. When he wears his glasses, such as when perusing a menu, he almost looks like a person who should be taken seriously. And this was the setting for me bawling my heart out over Dulcinea, the girl who broke my heart in two.

Or at least blocked me on social media.

“Why did she block you?” asked the Count. He had his glasses on when he asked, and seemed quite serious. “I wrote her too many romantic letters,” I said. “I had promised her I wouldn’t.”

“Then why did you write more to this girl, what did you say her name was again?” “Dulcinea.” “Dulcinea,” he repeated. “The name does sound familiar.” I showed him her picture. “Well, she is attractive,” he said. “Yes,” I agreed. “But if someone tells you to stop doing something, maybe you should stop.” The Count set the menu down on the table, like a lawyer resting his case.

I nodded in silence and my french fries arrived. I let them sit. “I didn’t want to write more romantic letters to Dulcinea,” I told the Count. “There was just this feeling building inside of me. If I hadn’t written those romantic letters to the girl, I would have just exploded into bits.”

The Count removed his glasses and wiped them clean with his flannel shirt. Underneath I could see his blue t-shirt. The t-shirt had written on it, it big block white letters, The Clash. He put his glasses back on. “Yes,” the Count said staring. His smart eyes were beady black. “That’s what the serial killers say too.”

“Fortunately, I’m not a serial killer,” I said, wondering how the Count knew so much about serial killing. I didn’t get a chance to ask. His tarot-toting mistress arrived. She too knew the sad tale of Dulcinea. I showed her a photo of the girl. Her strawberry blonde hair was draped about her shoulders and she was wearing a black hat in the photo. It had been taken in the countryside. “This girl Dulcinea does seems to have a kind of witchy energy,” the Count’s consort said. Was she the Countess? Actually, the girl had supposedly seen the light and eschewed the occult for good. But the line between sorcery and Christianity in Northern Europe had never been clear. Earlier that day, I had drawn The Devil from the Countess’ deck. When I had asked about Dulcinea, I saw the Tower engulfed in flames and white lightning.

Still it wouldn’t leave me. The idea of her put a chill in me like the air before a thunderstorm.

like a phantom

AT FIRST LIGHT, I fell back into a deep sleep. White light, honeysuckle light. Suddenly I was swimming in darkness. There were some youths there, or younger people. They were talking to me about how much Harry Potter had changed their lives. One of them was a young man with dark hair. He was dressed up like an old-fashioned movie theatre usher, same kind of ridiculous suit, like one of those dancing monkeys you find beside the ancient organ grinders.

He was most enamored with the Potter franchise.

“Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!” the monkey man kept saying. “Brilliant!” A younger woman was with him. She had on a similar costume, but looked more like a barmaid at a German-themed restaurant. Oktoberfest. She looked at me and smiled. While he was talking, I became aware that I was in the arms of a woman. It was as if I had tumbled back and falled into warm water. There was an older woman with tufts of yellow hair there. I could feel her as she caught me. Then I put my head on her soft breasts. She was wearing all black, but this was gauzy, amorphous, atmospheric, oceanic, cosmic. It danced all around me like the northern lights.

“Is it okay if I just rest my head here like this?” I said. She just breathed, but I could tell that it was okay. The restful breast led up to a neck. “Is it okay, if I kiss you here like this?” I asked. Now she spoke and said that I could do as I liked. “All the answers,” she said, “are already inside of you.” I could see her arm extend around me, but most of her was not visible. She was like a phantom, a ghost, more sensed than felt, but there was nothing ominous about her presence. Everything progressed from there, as it does, and there was a long deep kiss, explorative, intense, and dreamy. But no matter how many times we tried to make love, it just didn’t work.

We tried and tried, but no connection. We were just content to kiss then, like that, and for a long time. Sometimes more isn’t necessary, you know. Sometimes kissing is good enough.

old school

A LOT HAD CHANGED. The school used to sit on the top of a hill overlooking a nice green park, with tennis courts and such, and a baseball diamond, but in the intervening years, some genius had decided to expand it, so that it now resembled some sort of horrible municipal building erected in Philadelphia or Boston, or some other godforsaken concrete nightmare built with state money, and the green park was long gone, as was its murmuring pretty creek, to which our preschool teachers would take us in those happy new years for sunny picnics.

Yes, the happy years. The first day there was one of holding my breath, just so that I wouldn’t be the only little boy who cried for mother. I made it through that day and others. My first classroom was to the left, I remember, and the second one was down the hall. The swimming pool was down at the far right. It was here where we would change, and I still have a memory of a little boy telling me that he knew how we could spy on our swim instructors as they changed into their bathing suits. This was the first time this particular idea of voyeurism even popped into my young mind. The thought had just never occurred to me. Naked teachers?

Anyway, there I was again, at the entrance to the school. Somehow I got inside the building. The walls were all paneled, and there was a dry, beige carpet that ran the length of the hallways and corridors. There were some people seated at desks. I walked right by them, as well as beneath a large metal clock. What had happened to the place since I left? Almost nothing was familiar to me, but the shape of the building had been retained. Down the hall toward the swimming pool, I encountered a man with a moustache and and the baseball cap of a team that is generally ignored by the New York fans. Maybe it was the Montreal Expos? He had glasses and curly red hair. He said, “Excuse me, sir. Are you looking for something here?”

“I’m looking for the swimming pool,” I told the man in the Expos cap. “I used to go swimming here, when it was a preschool.” The man looked at me oddly. “Oh right, I have heard it used to be a preschool,” he said. “But I have never heard about a swimming pool. Oh well, nobody goes down to that end of the building anymore.” “Oh,” I said, imagining a caved-in swimming pool behind locked wooden doors, slowly being reclaimed by nature. Maybe at some point during the George W. Bush administration they had just forgotten it, left it to rot, focused on expanding the building over the nice green park and creek. Now only the squirrels knew of it.

“When did you go to school here, might I ask?” the man in the Expos hat asked me in the hallway there. “In 1984 or so,” I said and shrugged. “Probably 1983 to 1985 was when I was here,” I told the strange man. “Oh,” he said with a frown. “But that was before I was born, you know. That was before any of us were born.”

petrograd

WE TOOK THE NIGHT BUS up to Saint Petersburg. I was surprised they even gave us visas, or allowed us over the border. When we got there, it was still night, or perhaps it was already dawn. There was a kind of blue hazy light along the canals. The city was as I imagined it would be. It had had many names in its history, among them Petrograd and Leningrad. I knew the locals just called it “Peter,” or “Piiter,” as the Estonians put it. I was standing around with some Estonian women outside of our hotel and one of them, an artist who I thought was my friend, was talking. But when I managed to say something, to ask a question, she told me to shut up. “Nothing you have to say is interesting,” she said to me. “God, why are you so damn annoying.”

After that I went and hid myself away in the shadows. The rest of them were shown to their rooms. Later, the proprietor came back, Irina, and I asked if I too could be shown to my room, or at least given a place where I could sleep. Irina, who was a young blonde woman, understood me a little, because I could not speak Russian, and managed to say, “All the Estonians are sleeping on the third floor.” She led me up a few back staircases until I came to the door or where everyone else was staying. A half-naked Estonian woman opened the door a crack and said, “You? No. You’re not allowed in here with us.” “Don’t you dare let him in,” I could hear another say. “He’s not allowed to be with us.” I could hear them whispering more.

I realized that I would be sleeping outside that night, and made a place in the hall outside. On one side there was just an old metal barrier that looked out into a courtyard. I stretched out there with my bag under my head and tried to sleep. It was a lonely feeling to be there in Saint Petersburg or Leningrad or Petrograd. Whatever they were calling it this days. A cold feeling.

nightfall

THE APARTMENT had a balcony. That much I remember. I remember the waning light and the curtains that moved with a light sea breeze. The bed sheets were dark, so dark that when night fell all was dark. It was Linnéa’s apartment, and then at some point she came home. I couldn’t see her in all that darkness. I could only hear her voice. She was taking about something, quite engagingly. There was some self analysis, a few projections and forecasts. She has this kind of crystalline voice that gets inside you and blows around you like a cool wind. Linnéa got into bed after that. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her body pressing against mine. I could feel her legs, her warm bottom and her hair, which was everywhere.

For a moment, the wind picked up and the curtains parted. I could see her gold hair laid out across a pillow. And then there was that pink breast. It seemed to be the perfect shape, it was as soft as a cloud or as a dream, and sweet as passion, and my hunger for it even surprised me. I was still slurping on that thing until first light broke, and just one of them. Linnéa only looked down at me with pitying curiosity, as if she was an avid bird watcher. “You’ve been waiting to do this for a long time, haven’t you?” said Linnéa. “There’s no shame in it. It’s in your heart.”

müra and jura

THEN I WENT TO TALLINN where Linnéa was waiting for me in her office with colleagues. She was dressed in black and admonishing me for all my shortcomings in life. This dressing down went on for some time, considering there was so much wrong with me. Her colleagues seemed to enjoy the show, particularly the moment where I cracked and simply said nothing and nodded as I was verbally undressed and assessed. I cannot say that it was a good feeling.

Later, Linnéa felt sorry and invited me over for tea. She was wearing her national folk costume, the one with the big funny hat, and looked like a print from some Estonian-themed matchbox. Linnéa was sharing her apartment with two other women and her daughter. It was sort of like Full House, starring Linnéa as the Bob Saget character around whom all other stories turn. She told me then that she loved me, that under all of the müra (noise) and jura (nonsense) was love.

“Don’t you know that I really love you?” she said, gesturing in her national folk costume.

This time I actually believed her.

Linnéa left after that to take her daughter to her ex-husband’s apartment and I left to take the train back to Viljandi. But walking down the sidewalk toward the Baltic Station, I realized that my feet were very cold and wet. I had left my shoes behind at Linnéa’s apartment! How could that even happen? Who forgets their shoes? When I got back, all of the lights were out. I could hear someone stirring in bed. Maybe it was her? I searched around, and at last found my shoes beneath some piles of national folk costumes. Then I slipped them on and ran toward the station. The train was about to depart and I just made it through the doors before they closed for the last time. The long train south was thick with passengers. It was standing room only.

you made me into a dream

A DREAM TO SOME, a nightmare to others. The month rolled in, full of fog and gray misunderstandings. And then one night in bed with Lata, I recognized the very moment when everything had turned wrong, and where my main path had diverged from the River of Good Intentions. Lata was dressed in black and tried to comfort me, but it just kept on flowing and flowing, and there was no turning back. Years of unresolved feelings came spurting out. For weeks after that I was a mess. I was riding the trains. How did it even happen? I likened it to the kalima, the orange Saharan sands that drift across the blue sky of the Canaries. Maybe it was spring or maybe it was the sun. Or maybe it was just another kind of cracked awakening.

There it was in the wind, a streak of hazy yellow over the horizon.

It was whispering in a woman’s voice, “you made me into a dream.”

At the start of the winter, I had one last encounter with Dulcinea. She had jumped me by the airplane factory and cut out my heart with an icicle, if only to free herself from my stubborn love. And for a while after that I wandered. It was a dark, hard, peripatetic life. I slept under eaves and in back alleyways. I met other strangers afflicted by various maladies and misfortunes. I was one of them. Lost, cold, and heartless. But the thing is — my heart grew back. At first, it was just a tiny beating red lump. Then as big as an apple. She must not have cut the whole thing out. A small shred of tissue had been left behind. It regenerated. Whatever freedom she had sought, or tried to retrieve, it had all horribly backfired. Whatever spell she had tried to undo, she had doubled it. I wondered what happened to the old cut-away heart.

The new heart was even more powerful.

Then one morning, I understood that all along, I had only wanted to give life to her. I wanted her to bloom and blossom with life. I wanted to see her as rich and flowering with life as the jungles of India. This idea made me very happy and later on, when a Nepali woman asked who I was, I told her the story. The Nepali woman listened, and seemed to understand everything.

She nodded and said, “We must remain true to our ideas.”

tiny sparks

THOSE WERE WEIRD NIGHTS. One night I went to Dubai, which happened to look like the freeway in California. There were motels with green swimming pools and chain restaurants serving up greasy fare. The bus was there to take some Estonian soldiers to the war. They were all geared up and camouflaged. But at a sandy rest stop outside of San Bernardino, or the Dubai equivalent, while they were standing around smoking, I took one last look at the boys and slinked off toward some cluster of desert trees. Yes, I felt like a coward, but so what?

On another night, an Estonian woman I know kept telling me about her love for her ex-boyfriend, Charbel, who was Lebanese. From the outside, she was a beautiful soul, and had a beautiful appearance too, but when you looked inside this soul of hers, you realized she was still smarting from the breakup. She loved Charbel and not me, which was OK, but I could never understand what one could love in either of us. What was there to love about men? We had no breasts. We had no hips. We had no life-giving powers. We also lacked the ability to see into souls. Well, most of us. We were just our lonesomeness and our hobbies and our thoughts and our hard, sinewy muscles. It seemed like a losing proposition, to waste one’s love on a man, but she had loved one at least, and his name was Charbel. The Lebanese had hurt her.

The weirdest moments though came in the early mornings. Again, I saw the sparks in the apartment. These were tiny bursts of light, almost like the glow of a firefly, but they moved through the air slowly. It was almost like the tip of a cigarette, yet with no cigarette and no hand to hold it. It traced a snaky path through the air and then it faded into the air of the room. It was there long enough to hold my attention. It was strange enough for my mind to register it and to understand that it was unusual and that I really had seen nothing like it before. That tiny light tracing a path through the air. I saw the sparks two times. Were these those ghostly orbs I have heard so much about? But they didn’t seem to be orb sized. Smaller. Whatever they were, I could not make sense of them. They seemed neither threatening to me nor benign. They were just naturally manifesting. I made a decision to contact a ghosthunter.

Maybe they could provide some explanations.

charlie watts’ iced coffee

IT WAS ARRANGED that I would do some field work with another anthropologist from the initiative. We were dispatched to a viewing platform at night. From there, we would make observational notes about human behavioral patterns. I had never worked with this woman before. She had brown hair, glasses, and blue eyes. She was not exceptionally pretty but not unattractive either. The first thing she said when we got on the platform was, “We should just get this part out of the way.” With that, she inserted her hands under my shirt and into my trousers and began to feel around. It was as much an inspection as an introduction. At times, she squeezed me, but not too hard. I just lied back and let her explore me. It wasn’t unpleasant.

After work, I went to a nightclub where they were playing Prince. The cut was “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” off of 1983’s 1999. Igrayne was at the bar with some of her friends. She was wearing a loose, open blouse and her golden hair was pulled back in a braid. She was sipping some awful fruity drink, and her light eyes were funeral black from midnight romps with surly strangers, angst, anguish, hangovers, and other bloody nightclub stories. “I want to kiss you,” I told Igrayne. “But we’re just friends,” she said. “This is all just friendship. That’s all this is.” At that, I began to lick her neck in a very friendly, neutral way. “This is just friendship,” I told her. “We’re just friends.” It felt good to kiss Igrayne’s warm neck. My daughter of course happened to walk by at this moment, a little distressed by the whole scene. “Daughter,” I said. “Meet Igrayne, your new stepmother.” They stared at each other curiously, like furry forest animals.

I slipped out the back door.

The tiki bar was up on the jungle plateau outside the town. Only a single dirt path led up to it. It was built of jungle wood, and drew a certain kind of crowd, mostly Hells Angels and Satanists. It was dark when I finally got up there. At the bar, I ordered a drink that came in a coconut that had been carved to look like a human skull. I was standing at the bar when I noticed a familiar man coming my way through the dark. It was none other than Charlie Watts, the late drummer of the Rolling Stones. “But Charlie, you’re dead,” I said. “Not here, I’m not,” he answered. He was tan and his hair was still brown. He wore a t-shirt, jeans, and sandals. He said, “Would you mind holding my drink? I’ll be right back. Just need to do some things.”

“Sure, Charlie,” I said. There I stood at the tiki bar, holding Charlie Watts’ iced coffee. I stood there for a long time. I imagined he had gone to find a bush, or was having some words with the owner of the bar. But Mr. Watts never came back for his iced coffee. It was in a clear plastic cup with a straw, and the ice cubes were melting. They clinked around inside the brown liquid like shards of glass. It looked as if he had bought it at Starbucks. I waited and waited and walked around the tiki bar and called out into the jungle night, “Charlie! Charlie! What about the coffee?” But Mr. Charlie Watts never came back for his melting iced coffee.

No, Charlie never did come back.