võru apartment house

IN VÕRU, in the south-eastern corner of Estonia, there is a paneelmaja, or apartment building. This apartment building is made of the same elements of all the other apartment buildings of the 1960s. It is, in that sense, a standard Brezhnevka. However, there are some characteristics that separate it from others. For example, it’s built in a precise square with a courtyard at centre, including an old swimming pool. Nobody has been in that pool since Gorbachev was premier and it’s now used for storing potatoes. It’s covered in graffiti referencing Billie Eilish.

This common courtyard though is a place of interaction for the tenants of the Võru apartment building. They can watch each other, spy on each other’s comings and goings. I went there to stay in the building to spend some time with my child. What I found there was true delirium.

What kinds of people live in the Võru apartment building? Woodsy lumberjack-looking tenants with a predilection for the New Age. That means men in red flannel shirts and beards with tiny Ganesha statuettes bedside. They are all meditating and fasting when they are not sharpening their sharp axes. The women of the house make good use of them, and partners are switched and swapped out like lightbulbs. The men give when they are asked to and ask no questions. Such is the way of the Võrumaa matriarchy. When they are no longer needed for sexual favors or car repairs, they head into the Võru forests to tap birch juice or chop more wood for winter.

Children roam the halls of the Võru apartment building freely. I have seen small blonde children leaping between the floors. I myself was heading up a set of concrete stairs when I encountered a small boy in striped pajamas teetering dangerously on the edge of a balcony, the guard rail of which had collapsed. This small boy I took in my arms and went racing around the building looking for his mother. She turned out to be in bed managing her online business while listening to a few self-help podcasts from a guru. A light-haired blonde woman in a homemade blanket. She was still in her pajamas. She was stretching, blinking strangely at me.

“Your son almost fell off the balcony,” I told her. “Maybe you should take better care of him.”

“Don’t worry about Joosep,” said the lady. “He likes to play on the balcony but he never falls.”

russia surrenders

AFTER RUSSIA surrendered to Estonia, celebrations were held in both capitals. Estonians were able to roam the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow at will, taking photos of themselves lounging in its furniture. Koit Toome reclined by the fireplace, taking turns stoking the fire with Tanel Padar. Mart Sander was playing billiards in the other room with Anu Saagim. Someone had torn Lavrov’s portrait off the wall. One could only see half of Lavrov’s face.

My friend Stig decided to hold an ancillary meeting for the Estonian and Russian communities in the Canary Islands, which happened to coincide with his 18th annual 30th birthday party. It was held at the MTV Beach House, which meant Stig and Riken, the worldwise wandering Japanese mountaineer, spent much of the time networking and pressing the flesh with various dignitaries around the pool, which was filled with tanned young beautiful people in Baywatch red bikinis and swimming trunks playing volleyball. Stig was dressed in his summer finest, which included a Hawaiian shirt and matching shorts. Riken wore loose desert camouflage garb, including pants and jacket, and I wondered if he always was dressed to hike, or if those were the only clothes he owned. They walked around the pool celebrating New Victory Day.

“The Sign” by Ace of Base was playing.

Somewhat tired of the scene, I retired to my room at the Canary Islands MTV Beach House, where I began to work on the next chapter of what would surely prove to be a poorly received and misunderstood work. But Stig and Riken were soon at the window, chastising me for living more in the digital world and less in the real world, “where people stop being polite and start getting real,” as Stig put it as he admonished me. After that I returned to the party, only to meet a boisterous woman who looked Spanish but was speaking Estonian. She was clothed in a flowing blue dress and she had lots of silver rings on her fingers. She was sipping some kind of fruity cocktail and regaling her girlfriends with stories of outlandish behavior. These are the kinds of women I like, I thought. The ones who are truly horrible. The ones with filthy souls.

“We should go on a date,” I told the woman in the blue dress. “A date?” she answered me while licking a line of sea salt off her wrist before swallowing another shot. “You mean a date date?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can wear nice clothes and I can wear nice clothes. We can meet together somewhere and eat food. I will even offer to pay, but will accept if you refuse. Then we can talk about our lives, our jobs, who broke our hearts.” The woman in the blue dress wiped some of the tequila from her lips and said, “It doesn’t sound so bad, the way you put it. And I thought you had promised the world that you would never go on another date.” “Well, Russia just surrendered,” I told her. “Koit Toome is in the Kremlin. Surely that’s cause for celebration.”

lyndon

LYNDON JOHNSON, resurrected, back from the dead. Or maybe it was his ghost. He was wearing a freshly pressed gray suit, and standing on the edge of a corn field. It was warm, if not summer. From time to time, he removed a handkerchief from his front pocket and dabbed the sweat from his forehead. Only later did I notice that he was barefoot and hovering about an inch off the grass. He was speaking of Luigi Mangione and the killing of Brian Thompson.

“I tried to warn them, I tried to tell them this would happen,” said Lyndon. “I warned them.”

Lyndon liked to stare off into the distance when he spoke. He was wearing his glasses and his hair was slicked back. This was solidly 1964-era Mr. Johnson, though he had slimmed down some in heaven. Maybe dying had been good for him. He seemed to be in good spirits. Relaxed. He took a peanut out of his pocket, cracked it in half and munched on both tasty nuts inside.

“You can’t take credit for everything,” I told Lyndon. “You must give your vice president credit.”

Lyndon smiled. He said, “You must mean my dear Humphrey. Yes, Hubert’s a top-notch man. As I was saying, if America had carried out my War on Poverty and become the Great Society.” After that, he seemed to be distracted by his own thoughts and kept muttering the name, “Kefauver, Kefauver.”

“What do you think of Mr. Mangione?” I asked Lyndon. “Troubled,” came the response. “But we all know why. I tried to warn them.” “Do you think Mr. Biden should free Mr. Mangione,” I asked Lyndon. “Now, now. I never said that.” He dabbed at his forehead again. I had to admit that, Vietnam War aside, he seemed like a decent man. Maybe those folk stories about how he secretly engineered the Kennedy Assassination were just Kremlin dezinformatsiya passed along via willing stooge Oliver Stone. Maybe Lyndon Johnson was a good man deep down.

north seas

NORTH SEAS. Or, to get from Point A to Point B. Or, riding public transport along the Scottish Coast, somewhere near John O’Groats. From there I could see, as the rain was breaking and giving way to a December sunset, an old ruined castle perched on a bluff of a nearby island, which the mapmakers tell me could be Stroma or Muckle Skerry. I disembarked the bus and lost my way snapping photographs and was lost for quite some time then wandering until I stumbled into the outskirts of what I thought was Edinburgh. A few fishermen encountered me and asked me where I was going. “Ireland,” I told them. “Ah,” one answered. “It’s over there.”

LATER, I wound up in the embrace of a voluptuous Inuit throat singer. Somehow she had become my girlfriend and somehow we were staying in a hotel room in Reykjavik that overlooked the entire city, which meant it must have been up by the Hallgrimskirkja. She had kakiniit sprawling all over the lower parts of her body like vines. I was coolly unsurprised that this was my new fate in this life, but having been denied emotional connection for so long, I found myself indifferent to this latest bedsheet romance. When she kissed me goodbye, I blinked. It wasn’t that I had no feelings for her. It was that I could barely remember my name.

After that my daughter came to live with me in the Hotel Reykjavik. We were there, wondering what on earth there was to do in Iceland other than visit hot springs and museums, when the lights went out. I thought it might just be the hotel electricity, but when I looked out the window, I could see the whole city of Reykjavik was dark. Then I began to hear a loud rumbling sound. “Maybe the Russians are attacking,” I told my daughter. “But why would they attack Reykjavik?” “I don’t know. Indefensible NATO country?” I said. I found an old radio and turned it on, but static came through. After adjusting the antennae, I was unable to pick up any signal.

unitarian universalist

ON THE ROAD, like Jack Kerouac, except this time in Ida-Virumaa, along the north coast. This time I was hitchhiking and was picked up by some lady who claimed to be Kerouac’s aunt. She brought me back to her homestead and gave me tea. She said that hitchhikers were thronging the roads of Ida-Viru due to the recent posthumous publication of Kerouac’s secret diaries of a 1964 trek through Soviet Estonia. She proved her point by gesturing outside where a classmate I hadn’t seen since junior high was drinking tea in the yard with the chickens. Dan had last been seen in about 1994 or so wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. “But I haven’t seen him since chemistry class,” I told Kerouac’s aunt. “He barely came to school.” Dan had gone gray in the intervening 30 years. He wore a black leather jacket, drank tea, and scribbled poetry. “Dan’s been here for months,” the lady said. “He also loves Ida-Virumaa. It’s become a hipster magnet.”

Later, I took a bus along the north coast in the direction of Tallinn. My bus left me off down by the port near the ferries to Helsinki. MacDougal, another former classmate from the Nineties, was on the bus. Having become a hotshot attorney since, he was less friendly than he perhaps should have been. He was in a hurry to catch the last boat to Finland. When we got off the bus though, we noticed that someone had left behind a knapsack full of contraband alcohol. MacDougal, freckly Scotsman that he was, advised we leave it at the ferry ticket office, but not before insisting that the alcohol be refrigerated in its office. “We can’t allow the poor fellow’s drink to attain room temperature,” he said. “When he retrieves it, it should be chilled.” MacDougal found room for the bottles in the office fridge and then went to the boat. “Nice seeing you, man,” MacDougal said before rushing off. “Let’s meet again in another 30 years!”

A snowstorm blew through the city after that. It obscured everyone’s vision, including my own, a total whiteout. When the storm withdrew, I realized that I was no longer in Tallinn, but at the docks in Nantucket. I watched as a solitary jeep drove over the ice and cobblestones down to the ferry terminal. Wiping the ice and snow from my eyes, I started up Main Street. All of the cafes, boutiques, and book shops were closed. At Orange Street, I turned left and walked ahead until I looked up and saw the haunted Unitarian Universalist Church, with its golden glinting sun-like dome. It looked like a distant junior cousin of the Helsinki Cathedral. I stood there and admired the church through the snow and mist. It was for me another lost friend.

narva station

SHE LIVED WITH HER BOYFRIEND in the main building of the Narva Station. They commuted each day to Tartu, where he worked at the Vanemuine Theatre as an actor. He was tall, thin, and of solid disposition. He looked like Max von Sydow. She was more beautiful than I had ever given her credit for being. Photographs it must be said do not always do justice to the person. You have to see them in the flesh. She looked like the kind of woman that I always like. She had brown hair and was fond of wearing pink. This girlhood love of pink had not been shed in her womanhood for other, more sober or befitting colors. She had lively eyes and well-rounded features. Other men would have thought she was fat. I thought she was delicious.

I went out there once to the Narva Station. I was following her, but not in a menacing way. We left from Tartu and the train curved through the vistas and wildernesses of the northeast, past the derelict Kreenholm Textile Mill, to the ancient train station. Here she ascended those steps to the top, where her apartment was. Later I saw her come down with the Max von Sydow-lookalike. He was holding an umbrella for her. They had a relationship. I was somewhat disheartened. But knowing what I knew of relationships, I didn’t take it as a knockout blow. People in relationships were seldom happy and such bonds broke easily. Everyone knew that.

My friends of course all told me to forget about her. “She is a young and talented beautiful woman,” one said. “She is an accomplished musician. And you are …” She trailed off without finishing the sentence. “Scallywag writer” was the only correct response. What kind of life was this turning into anyway? A sad one. A life of impossible dreams. What would Fitzgerald do?

Later, I went back to the family home. This was an old tropical resort that somehow seemed to exist in Tartu’s cold climate. The pool in the front though hadn’t been cleaned in ages. There were also weird old people lurking around every corner. Just strangers with white hair who would ask you awkward questions. My mother said they had all sought refuge there during the pandemic. My father would go out on the back terrace in the afternoons and trade stories with these old-timers. I guess he had become one too. I asked my father if he had seen my shoes.

He didn’t hear me.

Two of my children and their mother wanted to go to town to go shopping, but I couldn’t find my shoes. I ran the lengths of the hotel looking for footwear. “You can wear my old shoes,” their mother told me. This woman, who used to be my wife. I was never quite sure of how to refer to her, in front of others or within myself. I put on her shoes, but they wouldn’t fit my giant feet. I kept running the lengths of the hotel, bumping into its strange old guests with their white hair and probing stares. I found piles of shoes in closets, but none of them were mine. How could this be? I had just come back from the Narva Station. Just the night before. Where had my shoes disappeared to? Maybe the hotel’s weird older guests had stolen them?

The family certainly must have left for town. There was no way she would have waited for me as I searched for my shoes. And it was getting darker outside. It was 3.30 pm now and daylight was running out in Estonia. In the hotel foyer, she came in, the accomplished musician with her actor boyfriend holding her umbrella. The scene startled me. They were led to a room on the opposite side of the courtyard in the hotel. So now she would be staying here? In our tropical hotel? With him? Why had the gods brought her to me again? There were no matching shoes to be found anywhere on the hotel grounds. My family had left me behind at the hotel.

Outside one of the garages, which used to be an old horse stable, I then encountered Brynhild. She had come looking for me in this mess of a life. She was singing to herself and admiring the flowers. Curvy and curly-headed Brynhild looked at me through her sunglasses and remarked, “My, you’ve developed this place nicely.”

women writers

FOR A WHILE THERE, I enjoyed a correspondence with a woman who happened to also be a writer. She was 10 years older than me, but claimed to be a hundred years ahead of me. She had been born in 1969. Me in 1979. She claimed that I was stuck in the 1920s. She claimed to be a woman of the 2020s. We barely got along but it was, but her own admission, quite vivid even though she was an ardent feminist and argued that I would never be able to understand her brilliance on account of my “feeble male brain.” I found her view of men startlingly grotesque.

One of her core critiques of me was that my favorite writers were only “dead white men.” This was not true, though certainly Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac were all dead and of Northwest European provenance. Yet Haruki Murakami was still living and was not white by any metric. He was Japanese. This was swept under the carpet. He may not have been white, but he was male, which still made him suspect and lacking in feminine virtue.

The sad thing is that I thought she was right. It wasn’t that I hadn’t read Margaret Atwood or Annie Proulx, it was that they hadn’t left much of a trace on my own writing. I recalled the brouhaha in ’16 over Gay Talese’s admission that he had no female writers that inspired his own career. However, the more I thought about it, I realized that this was not correct. I had been inspired by a lot of women writers. They just aren’t the ones you would think about in the pantheon of women writers. No Zadie Smiths, no Virginia Woolfs, no Toni Morrisons, no Sylvia Plaths, no Joan Didions. Not even JK Rowling was on my list. There are some familiar names.

Esther Forbes (1891-1967). It’s kind of interesting how little we know about and have heard about the author of Johnny Tremain. Even after looking for information on her, I can’t say I discovered anything particularly stirring. It seems she was a Yankee lady who had a career in publishing and in the writing of historical novels. I read this book many times when I was about 10 years old. It certainly left an impression, or at least inspired the idea that it was possible to write fiction at all.
Lynn Reid Banks (1929-2024). Also when I was a kid, my friend’s mom brought me autographed copies of The Indian in the Cupboard and The Return of the Indian. I still have these on my shelf. Again, I think the idea that it was possible to write stories originated with multiple readings of these books.
Blue Balliett (born 1955). I read her 1984 book The Ghosts of Nantucket: 23 True Accounts about a million times when I was an adolescent. I can still see traces of her style, her descriptive writing, and different themes in my own stories, articles, and books. I know I have lifted phrases from her books too, but for me it’s the same kind of borrowing that goes on in blues music, for example. It’s unintentional, but even my “dream stories” follow some of the layout that her ghost stories had.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977). Well, here is someone who might past muster among the feminine literati. I haven’t read of all of her books, but I do own Little Birds and Delta of Venus. I think women writers are more capable of what I call “layer cake writing,” which is that they are able to move between different levels of perception or experience, so that something that might seem trivial, a slight detail, speaks volumes about a person’s inner world. Nin taught me to pay more attention to those small details and how they can be so evocative.
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). A British-born Mexican surrealist. This is a writer I also know little about, even though it seems she produced quite a body of work. I came to possess a collection of her short stories some years ago called The Skeleton’s Holiday and I have never been the same since. This completely changed my approach to writing, even my approach to writing straightforward nonfiction work. I began to tap more into my subconscious and to produce automatic writing thanks to that book.

I don’t know what happened to my feminist writer friend. She disappeared one day during the pandemic and I never heard from her again after that. None of my letters were returned and that, as they say, was that. I did come across her once more. It was unexpected. I was dreaming and found myself on the north coast of Australia, of all places. It was near one of those coves that are known to be full of hungry sharks. There were a series of canvas tents pitched in the hills around the cove and, while walking by one, who should step out but Madame Ardent Feminist herself. She was dressed in her finest khaki explorer attire. She seemed to be happy there, wherever it was she had gone to. At least that’s what she told me.

esmeralda

I SAW ESMERALDA in a large museum. There were many floors which opened on a vast, well-lit atrium. Perhaps it was like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or like Kiasma in Helsinki. It was very crowded there that day and there were lines to get in and out of the exhibits. Esmeralda was there, but she didn’t see me, or didn’t want to see me. She was a small woman, with dark hair pulled back into a braid, and she wore her blue sweater and her blue pants and her white shoes. She was an Estonian girl, light complexioned with light blue eyes, and she chose her words with care. I savored every spare sentence she was ever willing to share. I could never understand why I had attached to her, or come to depend on her in some way. I wasn’t dependent on her doing something or anything. Dependence was more linked to her existence, her presence. There had been times I had thanked the stars that I happened to be born at the same moment she existed in the universe. Two comets passing in the cosmos. Such was my love for Esmeralda, if such a phenomenon could be explained with a simple word.

She didn’t see me. Maybe she didn’t want to see me. If that was the case, I couldn’t blame her.

My therapist was there too at the museum. I noticed her in the line for the women’s toilet, and knew that Esmeralda had also gone inside and was perhaps adjusting her hair in front of the mirror as she waited. Maybe they would meet there in front of the mirrors? Maybe she would at last see this girl of my dreams? I awaited with eagerness her official psychological diagnosis.

Later, I found myself outside at a kind of garden party. It was like something out of Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn. There were tables loaded with Scandinavian goodies, and everyone was wearing old-fashioned clothes. Paula was there with her kids. Her husband Paulo was nowhere to be seen. Where could he be? Paula was wearing a pink dress. She came and lied down next to me. We began to cuddle and soon made love, right there in the grass in the middle of a springtime Swedish party. It seemed to heal something. There were various ways to reconcile disagreements, but this was perhaps the most honest way there was. Oh, the sweetness of a woman’s sex. Like raspberry ice cream, it occurred to me. Just like raspberry ice cream. But she still wasn’t Esmeralda. None of them were. Whatever woman came, she wouldn’t be her.

“None of them are you,” I wanted to tell Esmeralda, if she would ever listen to me or even honor me with a passing glance. “I like them all, it’s true, but none of them will ever be you.”

junibacken pillow

SHE INVITED ME over, she said she wanted to do something that would embarrass and humiliate her boyfriend. She had dark hair and looked a little bit like Margarita Simonyan though thankfully smelled better. We cuddled in a rather standard contemporary bedroom on beige sheets, the whole place buzzing with air conditioning, but I felt the natural desire to flee. I hid out in a neighboring building where there was a hair salon. Later, I took a boat and arrived at Junibacken in Stockholm, with a whole troupe of travellers. They took photographs.

Here I found a curious pillow, one that if you held onto it would lift you up in the air, as if you were flying. I grabbed hold of the Junibacken pillow and flew up into the air, floating beside the clocktower’s clock. While I was up there, I waved down at the other travellers, and then I saw Igrayne standing in the corner. She asked me to let go of my flying pillow and to come down and dance with her. I gladly danced with Igrayne. Later we made love passionately, but Igrayne stiffened and had unhealed father wounds and stared away into the remote distance.

I held her from behind but it was just no use.

the non-existent train to geneva

THE NON-EXISTENT TRAIN to Geneva. At least, I didn’t know there was a connection. There was, but it was obscure, complicated. It was one of those Google Maps Directives that tells you to get off at one stop and walk four hundred meters, then turn left, et cetera. Somehow doing this, I would be able to arrive at the conference in Geneva in two hours and thirty minutes.

If every step was accomplished smoothly.

But getting to the train station proved to be harder than I thought. I decided to go on foot and stopped by the Green House Café on the corner of Koidu and Tartu Streets. It had snowed, perhaps the first snow of the season, and I walked in with my bags and asked Põder, or “Moose,” the cheerful barista, if he would make me an espresso, to be consumed at the bar, but instead he made me a flat white, which was like drinking snow. Sven, the owner and operator of the establishment, was outside meantime, digging away. Flat white in hand, I headed up Tartu Street toward the town center, hoping to make the train to Geneva. There was still time.

There I could hear, on Turu, or Market Street, the sounds of an electric guitar. Guillermo was inside a small club there, fileting some riffs on his axe. A small crowd had gathered around him, and I saw my bass was on stage. “Do you know how to play any Rage Against the Machine?” Guillermo asked. His black hair was down his back. I told him of course I knew how to play their songs, that I had taught myself “Freedom” at age 15. This was one of the more intricate riffs I had learned how to play at a tender age. The gig turned out fine. But then I was stuck having to lug my bass guitar and amplifier to the town train station in a snow storm.

Along the route, where I stepped past locals out shovelling more snow, and it was already dark out, and the car lights illuminated the big wet flakes as they fell down, I decided on a solution. I would stop by Brynhild’s house on the main street, which was Tallinn Street, and leave my musical equipment there. Through the window I could see her sitting on a couch in her pajamas. Her dark hair was wet and she was toying with it. I could hear a second voice coming from inside the living room. This person was not visible. They spoke in soft but excited tones.

Another man! I thought. I went and hid down the street in an alley. Then I waited until the visitor exited, only to learn that it was an older woman, perhaps an old friend or acquaintance.

She just happened to have a very deep voice.

“What are you doing out here in the snow, you fool?” Brynhild asked. “Come in, you can leave your pill, your instrument in the back.” I stepped down the hallway, and left the bass guitar and amplifier in a dark back room that was serving as storage of some kind. The idea crossed my mind back there that this was my room and that these were all my things. I had a room at Brynhild’s house, I wasn’t always aware that it was there. After I deposited my things in the back room, I joined her in the living room. It was spare and modern. She sat in her chair, still wet, still in her pajamas. She had pulled them over her enormous freckled breasts. Then I felt aroused. There was just something about arrogant women with wet hair and warm breasts.

I got closer to her. Brynhild looked up. “You’re going to miss your train to Geneva,” she said.

“The thing is,” I said. “I think I already did.”