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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”