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 talking 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.

i should have brought a blanket

MEETINGS WERE HELD in the house weekly. Or more like lectures or seminars. It was an old wooden house in an older wooden district of the town. I happened to be walking by through the snow when some friends saw me and invited me to come along. The staircase up to the second floor was creaking and crooked, but the seminar room had been renovated. It was full of listeners. I found a spot on one of the long couches. That was when Esmeralda walked in.

Esmeralda looked bored and tired and taciturn. She was not particularly happy to see me, and I wondered if she at all understood how much I liked her. She must have had some idea or hint, because she sat down right next to me in her red sweatshirt. Quietly, silently, taciturnly. If that is even a word. Oh you, and your Baltic Finnic jõnn. What did I even see in this girl? Esmeralda said to me, “I feel a bit cold. I should have brought a blanket.” I left to find one for her at once.

I left the house, walked some ways down the street. Eventually I reached the house of my grandmother, who had just passed away. My father and mother and daughter were inside, sorting through baskets of my grandmother’s possessions. I promised them I would be back soon, and found a yellow blanket from the linen closet downstairs. I went back to the house, this time taking a public transit bus. It was winter still, cold and dark, and snow was falling.

Inside the house, the meeting was still going on, and Esmeralda was sitting there, as taciturn as ever. I came into the room and put the warm blanket on her. She curled up beneath it, sighed and yawned. We sat there for a while, just the two of us, watching some PowerPoint presentation. She said nothing to me. After some time, I said, “If you want, you can lie down next to me.” Esmeralda didn’t answer, but she slowly lowered her head and stretched out on the couch. I didn’t say a word to the beautiful girl. Nothing. My movements were slow and deliberate. I dared to not even look at sleepy Esmeralda. I could only watch her breathe.

don’t mind the blood

AFTER I RETURNED from the lake incident with the oldest of the three brothers, I went to stay in another house on the lake. Here I met a dressmaker whom I had known for some time. She was there with her husband and children, but very much wanted to make love to me. This would-be seduction took place while her family was out on the balcony. I could hear them playing. She was herself dressed up in something blue and billowing. Her yellow hair was all over the place and she had a tear in her eye, but she just could not excite me, no matter how hard she tried. I felt humiliated after that and impotent and went out to walk the streets.

Later, I arrived at the home of a friend, a woman a bit older than me, and she too offered that we make love. She was very voluptuous, and it was a joy to pull off her leggings and see her white fleshy legs. She had always been a strong supporter of me and had given me so much comfort in this troubled life, and I was grateful to return that love any way that I could. I gave into the passion, and there was only more of it, the way you might disappear into a swirl of delicious rainbow cotton candy hunger. But things started to feel weird after that, the sun dimmed, and there were clouds in the sky. Everything was gray and shadowy and then blood started to trickle out of her. It worried me, those red ribbon strands of blood. It worried me.

Her auburn hair was pulled up, and she looked down at me with those freckled cheeks and lifted her hips and said, “Don’t mind all the blood, love. Be good and soft and keep loving me.”

three brothers

THREE BROTHERS came to Viljandi. They were all darker haired and darker skinned. I think they were from the Middle East. They took up with local girls, girls I had once loved, and for this nurtured a suspicion or ill feeling toward me. Not that I was a threat, but it was clear that we could never be friends. Then one day, I happened to go fishing at the last minute with the eldest of these three dark brothers. He was the shortest of the three, but also the oldest, and imagined himself as powerful and influential. We paddled out into the lake, but then a storm came up. It was hard to explain, it was almost like a sun storm. There was a shift in celestial energy, a strong gravitational pull. The lake currents started to pull hard toward the south.

“Look at how far along we already are,” I told this oldest brother. “We have to head back!”

We tried paddling, but it was no use. The water was shallow enough though that we could walk our boat to shore, even though we were waist deep. From there, we pulled the boat back to port, using a rope. We walked over stone walls and across lawns. Families were out grilling and there were other springtime festivities. When we got back to the port, we went up the hill. We arrived to the house the brothers were renting and went in.

“Now, don’t you see that I am your friend?” I told the oldest brother. “You’ve nothing to fear.” He looked at me with some suspicion, but things were better between all of us after that.

keep on truckin’ mama

WHEN I GOT HOME Kevin Costner told me I had to clean out my apartment, no ifs, ands, or buts. This was after I had dropped Silvia and her aunt off at the apartment downtown. My apartment was a mess. There were glasses and dishes everywhere. While I was moving a box of them toward the garage they fell on the ground and shattered. Some of these were heirloom glasses. Some of them even contained the souls of dead ancestors. When I looked into one of the frosted glasses I could see my great grandfather the physician with his Victorian Era mustache. This glass was salvageable and had only been slightly damaged. I picked up the shards and put them inside the glass. I was certain I could glue the shards back into place.

At night, I tried to get back to her, but the car just wouldn’t start. I left it in the garage and took my bike instead. Viljandi had changed a lot. It was hillier. It all looked like La Jolla, California. Yet it was unmistakeably Viljandi. The Centrum shopping center was there, it was just now on a hill and been significantly remodeled. All of the streets were in their right places, Tallinn Street was over here, and Posti Street was over there, but all of the buildings had changed. It was summer warm and there was a sticky humidity in the air. I rode my bike toward Centrum and then decided to take that route through the parking lot past Jysk that would eventually bring me back to Silvia’s. There were some Finnish tourists on the bike path.

I told the Finns to get out of the way.

I had on a pair of jeans and my old Hot Tuna t-shirt. Instinctively, I began to whistle their old song, “Keep on truckin’ mama, truck my blues away.” Off 1972’s Burgers. What had ever happened to that shirt? And would I ever see Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady play it again? And what was Silvia doing now? She was at her house in the woods down Posti Street. Probably making tea. I could almost see her blonde hair bundled up in a red handkerchief. I could almost see her blue eyes through the woods. I could almost hear the teapot whistle.