a lift to the city

MIHKEL RAUD gave me a lift to the city. It was in one of those old-fashioned Volkswagen Beetles, beige exterior, red interior, remarkably clean. I couldn’t tell if he was just being friendly or had gone into the taxi or Bolt driver business, and I wasn’t really sure why I had got in the car to begin with, as I had no plans to go to the city. He wore his flat cap and looked the part of a driver, parked the Beetle on one of the lower levels of the Viru Keskus parking garage. Mihkel Raud hopped out and wished me a good day.

There I was, back in the city. A lot had changed since I was away. Tallinn looked sort of like Manhattan, but in the 1950s or 1960s. Brick buildings, iron railings, snow-covered cars, trash cans. Why did I feel like I was in Little Shop of Horrors or Rear Window? Tarja came walking by in a nice pink dress and waved to me. “But what are you doing here?” she said. “What brings you to town?” Her black hair was done up, she eyed me with her usual sparkling curiosity. “Well,” she said. “I need to get some shopping done. My children are hungry.” And she left.

At the end of the street, I noticed Esmeralda. Young Esmeralda Kask. I hadn’t seen her in ages. She looked quite beautiful in her dress, her chestnut hair was pulled back. There was something about those blue pearls of eyes, the slope of her cheeks. There was no one as beautiful as Esmeralda Kask. Not in this world. Something strange was happening though. She was leading a flock of sheep. When had Esmeralda become a shepherd? Or was she a shepherdess? I was too old for her, but I loved her anyway. Such loves are non-negotiable.

Just then my mother emerged from a store, clutching her grandmother’s pearls. “You, young lady,” she called out to Esmeralda. “What do you plan to do with all of those sheep?” Esmeralda blinked a few times. “I am going to sheer them,” said Esmeralda. “It’s been such a cold winter. I am going to make myself a warm coat.” “That sounds like a lovely idea,” my mother said and waved. Their interaction brought a tear to my eye. For Esmeralda Kask was what the Estonians would call a silmarõõm, my one true love. The tear swelled and rolled down my ice cold cheek.

hollow road

HOLLOW ROAD was a shady road. If you followed it from one end to the other, it would carry you from the Village Green to Cedar Street. It was called Hollow Road because it ran the length of a hollow. Atlantic coastal deciduous trees rose up on both sides, tall, towering oaks, cedars, and maples. In all seasons, the hillsides were covered with their colorful rotting leaves. About halfway down on the left, as you traveled the road toward Cedar Street, there was an old cemetery where the original British settler families like the Conklins and Bayles were entombed behind iron gates and beneath Victorian angels. But I never went up in there.

On this day, I walked on ahead, gingerly, freely. It was late spring, early summer, or the onset of fall. The sun shone through the leaves into the darkness of the hollow and as I exited this kind of natural tunnel, I found myself at the foot of Suffolk Avenue. On the right hand side though, I could see that several newer houses had been constructed since I went away, in a style someone might call Scandinavian contemporary. Such buildings would not be out of place on the other side of the ocean. In fact, the more I observed them, the more I began to realize that this part of Hollow Road matched Hariduse Street, which means Education Street. At least the houses looked like the kinds that one found at the start of Hariduse Street, just before the old Airplane Factory. But this was not Estonia. This was Long Island. I was sure of it. The trees were proof. Estonia didn’t have these trees.

The houses were deserted. I didn’t see one trampoline in a yard or car in a driveway. They were made of wood with yellow corrugated metal roofs. All of the trees around them had been cut down, the underbrush removed. The land had been ploughed through and reshaped and covered with fresh green sod from the sod farms out east. It was just too vacant and peculiar. I walked up one of the gravel driveways and found myself at the door of one of these Scandinavian contemporary houses on Hollow Road. The door was ajar and so I went in.

There was almost no furniture in the house. A table, a couch. But someone was living here. On the table, I saw piles of chocolate wrappers from Ghirardelli and other big name manufacturers. On the walls hung the glinting paintings of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. I stood there in that unlit room admiring the Klimt paintings when a woman walked in and startled me. “Who are you? What are you doing here in my house?” she said.

She was younger than me and she had raven black hair. This was pulled up in a messy braid. She wore a white jacket. Her eyes were light and remarkable but not threatening. I told her quickly that I had used to live in the neighborhood, how I can discovered the strange houses, how I had decided to look inside, how my curiosity had got the best of me. She told me that she was a translator, a chocolate translator, and how she was responsible for translating all of Ghirardelli’s packaging and marketing materials into other languages. But how did she come to acquire the Klimt paintings? Weren’t they worth millions? They were beautiful pieces.

“Yes, I also like them very much,” she said. At that moment, I began to feel a familiar, wavy sea-like sensation. It was like the floor was being pulled out from beneath me. She just stood there, staring at me. She had very light, soft skin. It was like milk. She looked too familiar. Who was she? The maritime sensation continued. “Well,” the woman said. Her voice tinkled like faint, far off music. “What now?”

bonds

LINDA HAD TO GO to Pakistan and she left me in charge of her house. This was a three-storey Scandinavian style mansion full of personal libraries and well-stoked fireplaces where staircases rolled and ascended. It stood at the top of the hill overlooking a foggy harbor that in winter was frozen over and packed with ice. It was here that she slept in a grand canopy bed.

Before she had left, Linda had shown me the place, including a stack of green, government-issued bonds, made out to her and members of her family, with the instruction to guard them with my life. She was a tawny, vivacious Estonian woman with two very thrilling gray eyes. In the old black-and-white photos of Linda on the shelves, the ones taken during her youth in the faraway 1980s, I had detected a superficial beauty, a kind of dewy, youthful innocence that was somehow neutral, asexual and unappealing to me. But over the years, through the kicks and betrayals of time, her puissance sexuelle had grown only more abundant and her pull had bloomed. Imagine the sun, that glowing hot orange globe, sizzling and radiating heat and fire.

That was Linda.

Next my friends came over and made themselves at home. Toomas was an older sort with thick orange-yellow hair, some dark-rimmed glasses. He was also a career criminal and immediately looked for ways to rip poor Linda off. Markus was younger with a thin mustache and tended to go along with whatever Toomas dreamed up. His idea was to rewrite the government-issued bonds in our own names, but only a handful of them. These he would pocket and later cash in, and Linda and her prestigious family would be a little less richer, but so what. They would never notice. Beneath a lamp at an old desk, Toomas went to work with his forgery. Neatly and precisely he amended them with some ink and a pen knife while firewood crackled in the hearth. I watched him slumped over in concentration in the blue light of a February afternoon. By the time Linda got back, Toomas had already departed, the revised bonds tucked neatly in his pocket. Markus drove. They both imagined themselves to be rich.

I was left behind to clean up. In the waste bin, I found the shreds of the bonds that had been altered and tossed them in the fireplace. Then I rearranged the library, which contained volumes of artwork by Miro, Modigliani, Kangilaski, and others, so that the money stash place would be obscured and Linda might never go to look for the bonds again. It was snowing when her car pulled up, and I went out to greet her. The snow was tumbling down, collecting on the white birches, making them look all fuzzy. Linda got out of the car and leaped into my arms, wrapping her legs around my waist. “Well,” she said to me, making me blush. “How was it? At least you didn’t burn the house down.” I tried to tell her the truth, that my friends were thieves, and that I was one too, but I just couldn’t. It didn’t feel good to keep such secrets.

kristi kangilaski’s ‘however it feels’ at rüki galerii

THE TEMPERATURE has remained below freezing this winter, but artist and illustrator Kristi Kangilaski has brought some warm tropical colors to Viljandi with her new exhibition, “However It Feels.” The exhibition opened on 15 January at the Rüki Gallery on Tartu Street and will last until the end of February.

Kangilaski was born in 1982, the same year that Brezhnev died, though before his death which means that, in all likelihood, she is not the reincarnation of Leonid Brezhnev. In fact, it’s the opposite: our Kangilaski is no fat, hairy Communist. Rather, she’s a tall, charming woman who at some point tattooed the words “left” and “right” on her wrists so that she wouldn’t forget which was which. With her hat and long dark coat, this Estonian Academy of Arts-educated artist resembles Mary Poppins from a distance. Her well-marked, magical hands never rest.

When she is not at work as the Viljandi city artist, Kangilaski has created a whole exhibition-full of acrylic paintings. She works at home, somewhere between the bedroom and kitchen, and her warehouse is a corner in her daughter’s room. She uses acrylic paints because she likes to work quickly and acrylic paints dry quickly. “I’m an impatient, restless person,” she says. The paintings emerged according to how she happened to feel. She had no certain plans or preconceptions. Slowly, the collection assembled itself. Almost all of the paintings were undertaken in 2025 — one of them was even finished this January.

At the opening, wine and grapes were served.

At the exhibition, a visitor encounters images of people, horses, elephants, black cats, crocodiles, birds, and bears. In part, the atmosphere is playful and childlike. When I arrived to the gallery the second time to view the exhibition, an entire art school class was there and some little boys even hid themselves beneath the gallery couch and still wouldn’t come out, even when I tried to join them there.

Yet, as another viewer remarked to me, there are also more serious themes. The painting “Black Cat” depicts a mother’s difficult daily life, and “Crocodile” shows a woman seated at a table, with a man’s shadow in back, and that fearsome creature behind them. There is also “Fire Heads,” two red heads in opposition, which brings to mind an argument.

The style is interesting. I was reminded of Picasso and Modigliano’s primitivism as well as Viljandi’s own Paul Kondas, the godfather of naïve art. But Kangilaski herself can’t say exactly what style it is or what inspired it. “I’m especially inspired by different arrangements or compositions that happen appear before me,” she says. “And I have always loved colors,” she adds. “Inspiration is drawn from everything around me.”

Kangilaski agrees that the current colorful exhibition does leave one feeling as if they’re in the jungle. And in the jungle, one can experience all kinds of emotions. The artist has even considered bringing some palm trees to the gallery next time she has an exhibition and I have agreed in principle to help her move them. When she is not out looking for palm trees in Estonia, Kangilaski paints on. As an illustrator, she is just about to begin a new book project.

An Estonian version of this review appears this month in the Estonian magazine Edasi.

coldplay

COLDPLAY WERE BOOKED to perform at the Viljandi Folk Music Festival. And not only just perform, but to headline it, with their concert scheduled for the festival’s last evening. I’m not sure whose brilliant idea this was, but I suppose that after NÖEP performed in the same slot in 2025, the door was wide open for the likes of Coldplay and their “Adventure of a Lifetime.”

I was in the press office as usual right before they went on, but an older amber-haired woman, whom I understood was my wife, was there with me. She was a steadfast supporter of the band and had bought Parachutes after “Yellow” started getting played on MTV. But she wanted more than just to see Coldplay play Viljandi. She wanted me to make love to her during the concert. This seemed to be physically impossible: where would we find a proper spot? Her solution was an old ironing board. “See, I’ll just put my elbows here, like this,” she demonstrated to me during a break in their sets. “And then, when they play ‘Yellow’ and it peaks you can take me from behind.” “You’re crazy,” I told her. “I’m not having sex with you during a Coldplay concert!”

While we discussed the matter, Chris Martin led the crowd in a singalong of one of their blasé, forgettable songs. Not from the earlier catalogue, some album track from 2015 or so. The entire band, including Martin, wore those rain ponchos that are so popular at Folk, and it was raining. The band reclined on an old beige couch, plucking their instruments, tapping their drums, while Martin held up an umbrella and sang. Visually, it was stunning, but the music still didn’t find its way into my heart. Meantime my wife was demanding that I help her to climax during “Yellow.” I felt alone there standing next to that ironing board. “Please,” she whispered.

***

While all of this was happening, Klaudia was waiting for me on a beach. She was wearing a red swimsuit that highlighted her ample bust and the salt from the sea had teased her hair into a bouquet of sunshine. She was wearing sunglasses and saying, “You are going to have to choose, you know. You are going to have to choose between her and me. You must choose between her and me.” I could see myself reflected in Klaudia’s sunglasses, which meant that I was on the beach even though I was at the festival. “Which of us two will you choose now? Which one?” Grains of sand were in my eyes, grains of time, the sky above was pastel blue.

***

I guess I caught the rest of Coldplay’s performance. I remember Chris Martin took his shirt off, only to reveal his body had been tattooed in Celtic symbols. Before the encore, he also came over to me on the side of the stage and asked me how they had done. I told him it had been a wonderful show. Later, The Who came on, as a special mystery guest, and began to warm up the crowd. Keith Moon told me that if I wanted to hear their set better, it would make sense to go up one of the towers on the edge of the stage. That way my ears wouldn’t bleed when they were done serving up Maximum R&B. Up the steps I went. When I got to the third floor of the stage tower, I found myself in a room full of Estonian women dressed in traditional costume, with red headscarves. One of them was a younger, dark haired woman whose name was Mai. I knew Mai from the streets of Viljandi. We had shopped at the same Konsum.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mai said. Her gray eyes peered out at me from beneath the red scarf. “You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.” “Two women are after me,” I said. I felt an outlaw bandit or robin hood. Always on the run from women and ironing boards. Then, glancing down at her in her red skirt, I asked, “Can I hug you?” “Muidugi!” she said. “Of course, you can!” “You mean you’re not afraid of me?” Mai just embraced me, warmly, softly. She was a robust, loving country woman. She helped take the pain away. “Why should I be afraid of you?” she said. “Besides, it’s not my fault I’m so sexy and young!”

After that, I think we kept on hugging. I held onto Mai like she was flotsam from the Titanic. The Who played their set.

alonette, lisanna, and tomás

Alonette, Lisanna, and Tomás, in that order.

I WAS HAPPY TO CATCH the most recent loft concert at Tomás del Real’s house in Viljandi this past Saturday. He calls these intimate musical events the Viljandi Home Sessions, or VHS. This one was VHS Volume 5. I have been to every single session. The last session, about two weeks before Christmas, featured Lonitseera band members Kaisa Kuslapuu and Kristin Kaha doing renditions of obscure Estonian holiday songs. That was undoubtedly the most unique and chaotic session, as there was a dog present and the electricity went out. In my opinion, they undersold themselves. Kaisa’s keyboard playing was fun and unorthodox, her singing is always great, and Kristin has some alarming and impossible notes stored away in her vault of a mouth. There were certainly a few “holy shit” moments. But, in true Estonian fashion, when I complimented them on their performance they sort of shrugged and said, “Eh, it was okay.”

This session had more of the cuddly folkie feel that Tomás was probably going for when he dreamed it up. No dogs or babies were present, and no electrical outages occurred. A fox did visit Tomás on the day of the session, maybe to provide him with some luck. A singer songwriter from Chile, Tomás has lived in Viljandi for some years now. He opened with some of his songs, including a new one, “Algún día,” which I felt innovated on the material he recorded for Principios de Declaración and Notas Rotas. I wouldn’t say it was better, but there were some changes and melodies in there that surprised me. Some new landscapes emerging from familiar terrain. Then came Lisanna Kuningas, who played three of her own songs on the guitar. Lisanna is also the keyboard player for Araukaaria, and did a wonderful session with the band’s singer and guitarist Pepi Prieto in November. These were really fun and enjoyable.

And then there was Anett Tamm, performing songs from her 2025 album Compass under her artist name Alonette. I personally found the melodies to be interesting. Every time I thought I knew where a song was going, she turned it around and went sailing off in another direction. I’m a taller, larger person, and when I am at these sessions, I like to lie in the floor in the back. It’s just more comfortable for me. There’s a nice strobe light employed, and so when I look at the ceiling back there, as the performers play, it’s almost as if I am staring up at the stars as they shoot over me. Because of this effect, while listening to Alonette, I had the sensation that I was drifting through space. Her songs have an amorphous quality to them, they expand and contract, and so I started to feel like I was watching the aurora borealis. At one point, I looked over at Tomás as if to say, “She is great, isn’t she?” Tomás just nodded as if to say, “I know.”

Thanks for the music and thanks for the photos Tomi Palsa.

obama in tartu

I WAS INVITED to give a talk at the new community center in Tartu, across from the Lõunakeskus shopping center. There I stood, in a small modern classroom, lecturing on the fate of the Eastern Algonquians to a small class of perhaps a dozen curious Estonians, an American flag hanging in the corner, when a middle-aged man who looked like Flava Flav in a blue jumpsuit walked in and began shouting slogans. “We have to get behind Trump!” he said. “To own the libs and end woke!” The students backed away, not knowing what to do. Then in walked Obama, calmly, coolly, boldly. He stood at the center of the classroom dressed in desert khakis, like a soldier from Operation Desert Storm and said, “Please go ahead with your presentation. I for one found it to be most informative and, in my opinion, quite patriotic.”

After Obama and the man who looked like Flava Flav left, I walked home, whistling, hands in my pockets. How could it be that Obama was in Tartu? What was he doing here? Later I found out that, under pressure in the US from the Trump administration, the Obamas had decided to rent a house on the periphery of Tartu. Obama had been to Estonia several times and found it a most welcoming place. He was particularly impressed by its sauna and singing culture and enjoyed a mouthful of moose pasteet. Obama and Michelle would cycle to the market in the warmer months to inspect the eye-watering array of cucumbers, tomatoes, and berries. In the cooler months, Michelle would fill her basket with handfuls of glorious chanterelle mushrooms and prepare at home for Obama his favorite dish, chanterelle sauce with potatoes, laden with dill. Obama would smack his lips. “Michelle, baby,” he would say, wrapping an arm around her waist. “You’re the greatest woman who ever lived. This kukeseenekaste is just perfection.”

The Obamas became a fixture of Tartu life after that. Somehow, even though he was from Hawaii, or Indonesia, or Kenya, or Chicago, or wherever he was from, he fit right in to the city’s free and inventive-thinking population. He would wave at university students as he rounded the turn onto Kroonuaia Street, his arm lifted joyously in the air. He took part in fencing matches at EÜS. Michelle could be seen at H&M in Kvartal, digging through the sock bin, or weighing deals on cosmetics at Tradehouse and Douglas. They were true Tartu lovers.

Then it so happened that I was dispatched to the house of a soothsayer or witch on the opposite side of the River Emajõgi, set back deep in the pine and birch forests. I went there to undergo something called constellation therapy. When I got to the house, a white colonial built at the top of a hill, something immediately felt off. It was winter by then, the snow hardened and iced over, and there was an eerie stillness, even in the light of a February day. The front door to the house was ajar. As I approached it, I began to hear the cries of wolves coming from the woods. Not knowing what to do, I went inside. Its interior was full of expensive lifeless furniture, the kind that wealthier people acquire not knowing what else to get. White couches and dark wooden tables. Some tasteless art beside the cold fireplace.

At its back though, I encountered an old university friend, Chas Flaubert, an architect from Charleston, South Carolina, who had gone to high school with Stig, an Estonian expatriate. Small world indeed. Chas informed me that, during his time in South Carolina, Stig had lived his life as a gay man, but had a sort of reverse coming out experience, suddenly discovering at the age of 20 or so, that he was a robust heterosexual, and that he only had feelings for women. After that, the posters of Fabio, Madonna, and Ricky Martin in his teenage bedroom came down and were replaced by pinups of Farrah Fawcett, Sally Field, and Miss Cheryl Tiegs. “I’m not sure how that happens,” said Chas in his molasses drawl, while puffing on a marijuana cigarette, “but that’s the truth.” “It’s very funny, because Stig is probably the straightest hetero I know,” I said. A suave, one-man nightclub variety show act nicknamed “the gray fox” for his striking hair, Stig Sandbrook was known to have lain with women from Lake Tamula to Lake Titicaca. “He’s more hetero than hetero,” I went on. “Do you mind if I hit that joint, Chas?”

Our conversation was interrupted by the howls of the wolves. Looking out the window, we could see three or four of the shaggy sinister beasts beat a line toward the backyard. “We’re done for,” I told Chas. “Once they get inside, they’ll eat us all for dinner!” We stood there at the windows, awaiting our certain doom. There came a loud crackle and a kind of zipping sound. One of the wolves toppled over, then the next. After four crackling sounds, they were all dead.

It was then that I saw who had shot them. Obama descended the slope in winter hunting gear, rifle in hand. He waved to us. “God bless that Obama,” said Chas. “Where would any of us be without him?” “In the belly of those wolves,” I replied. Obama whistled and a flatbed truck came down the slope. With an Estonian friend, he loaded in the wolf corpses. After sharing a smoke with the driver and some chit chat, Obama climbed into the truck and they drove off.

berglind and celeste

THE FIRST BUS dropped me off in the center of the city, somewhere near the New York Public Library. There were a lot of people there, I think there had been more demonstrations against the government. I could see the blue uniforms of the police and the street camoflage of the federal agents. The air smelled of tear gas and fries. Somewhere, a Salvation Army Santa Claus was ringing a bell. Out of this mess of faces and catastrophe, Celeste and Berglind emerged, both walking in the same direction, which on the real map of Manhattan would have been toward Bryant Park, but here became a sort of long, white corridor that led back to their apartment in a sparkling white dormitory. Along they sauntered, in a carefree, unfazed way.

“If you want, you can stay at our place,” said Berglind. “That way we can play all night.” Celeste and Berglind were about eight or 10 years younger than me, but seemed much younger now, in their colorful Moomin pajamas. Each dragged along a dolly and yawned as they did it. Celeste looked especially lovely with her chunks of curly red-gold hair. At some point, midtown Manhattan turned into Kalamaja. When we got to their apartment, I had second thoughts. I looked at the two women with their pajamas and dollies. They looked like little girls. I was too old now to spend the night with them. I had my own bed and that’s where a man like me belonged. Besides, I figured Celeste and Berglind would have a better time together without me.

I kissed them both goodbye.

On the way home, I stopped to think about Celeste. I leaned against a bank façade and thought of how I had missed her in my bones, in my soul, in my blood. Years and years had gone by, and nothing seemed to rid my spirit of hers. A thousand blurry kisses in a thousand blurry doorways couldn’t wash her residue away. She was stuck to me like salty barnacle grime. Nothing to do about it but leave her be with her dolly and her friend and her dormitory room. I kept walking through the city, until I saw something unusual on the next street.

My daughter was there and she was standing outside a second bus. My eldest daughter, who I hadn’t seen in ages. She was about 18 years old now and wearing a blue top and her hair was back in a ponytail. Beside her, there was a tall blonde girl, about the same age, dressed in about the same way. Her name, she said, was Oksana, and she was from Ukraine. My daughter and Oksana said they had stolen this second bus. I had no idea why. They didn’t know either. “The thing is,” my eldest daughter said, while biting her lip. “Neither of us even knows how to drive a bus!” I observed the vehicle from head to end. It was a vintage blue bus, probably made more than half a century ago by some Swiss or German manufacturer. What was it doing here?

I climbed the steps to the spacious driver’s chair, took a seat behind the wheel, which was so big it looked like it could have been used to pilot the Titanic. I felt a little like Captain Smith. My daughter and Oksana got on, and soon we were cruising along while Tallinn became New York again and Tööstuse Street turned into Amsterdam Avenue. I didn’t even bother to wonder where I was anymore, or where I was going. Where we were going. The windows were open and the sky was a dense, otherworldly gold and pink. The wind was in our hair. I felt just fine.

canada

AT SOME TIME IN THE 1920s, a small contingent of Estonians arrived on the shores of British Columbia and set up a trading post on a rocky island off the coast, somewhere between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. The Estonians befriended and intermarried with the Coastal Salish people, and the city of New Tartu was constructed at the head of a clear, deepwater bay. The whole island was renamed New Estonia.

This amused old Estonians to no end, as not only was Estonia pancake flat (mostly), but Tartu was a river city, not a seaport city. But if Halifax, a country town southwest of Leeds, could in the new world be remade into the pearl of Nova Scotia, so too could New Tartu become a busy port, with cargo destined for the dockyards of Singapore, Tokyo, and Freemantle, Australia.

It was there, at New Tartu Regional Airport, that our Air Canada plane touched down and I disembarked after a long trip abroad. At the airport café — a brightly lit place, made out of fresh pine — I went to buy a riisipirukas and coffee, but discovered that my wallet had disappeared and my old 2018 Samsung phone, which I had pledged to use until it broke down, had at last disintegrated. The screen had come unglued and the frame had frayed. There was no way to pay for my food and there was no way to pay for a taxi for the ride back home.

I convinced the Bolt driver that my wife would pick up the tab when we got to the house, but when we got there, she was livid with me. “What kind of man uses the same phone for eight years?” she scolded me. “You always expect me to bail you out. Here,” she said, paying the driver. The children were sleeping on the floor in the kitchen when I came in and I was so tired that I went to sleep right next to them on the gray carpet.

***

Sometime later, I took my two oldest daughters to Montreal. We went to visit the old brass foundry that my great great grandfather, Aloysius Desjardins, had run in the city, only to learn that all the old houses along Cadieux Street had long since been demolished and taken over by red light district brothels, Chinese restaurants dangling roasted Peking ducks, and UQÁM.

Cadieux Street was now a canal, and there was an elevated train that ran above it, so that we stood along the manmade waterway, its murky waters fed by the Fleuve Saint-Laurent, waiting for the elevated train to take us back to our bed and breakfast, which was somewhere in an apartment block nestled in the sprawl on the opposite side of the city. Just then, I told my daughters, “If we’re in Montreal, we might as well go visit the graves of my great great grandparents Aloysius and Oona Desjardins. They’re buried in Mont-Royal.” My older daughter shook her head. “I didn’t come all the way to Montreal to go and visit dead people,” she said. “Yeah,” affirmed my second daughter. “Who cares about Canadian cemeteries and dead Québécois?”

They were right, but I still tried to sell them on the excursion. “Mont-Royal is a very trendy neighborhood, girls. There are a lot of crêperies!” They weren’t having it. What I think happened after that is that they went back to the bed and breakfast together and I decided to go visit old Aloysius and Oona Desjardins alone in the cemetery in Montreal. I don’t remember ever getting there though. The next thing I knew, I was waking up on Toomemäe in Tartu, the real one in Estonia, face down in the January snow. The snow had a refreshing, minty taste.

***

I wondered if I had been assaulted. Maybe someone had struck me on the back of the head and that’s how I passed out? Or maybe this was what had happened before? Is that how I lost my wallet? How Mont-Royal and Toomemäe had been fused together was beyond my powers of comprehension. Or perhaps we were still in Montreal, and Estonians had settled here too? It looked remarkably like Toomemäe though. Kristjan Jaak’s statue was over there, the cathedral ruins were visible through the icy mist. I began to hear voices, two boys talking in Estonian, and I hid behind a small snow dune until they passed by. Then more Estonian boys came, on skis, sleds, snowboards. I was amazed by the gusto with which they approached their descents. Down they went, flying high through the air, landing fine, crying and whooping in celebration.

I began to stroll toward Näituse Street, where it terminates at Kassitoome, and there discovered a small, familiar cottage, built halfway into the hill. Inside, a blonde Estonian woman was baking bread. She was wearing an old-fashioned apron and I could have sworn we had met before, but her name eluded me. No doubt, she was a Liis, Triin, or Tiina. She had lovely golden hoop earrings that dangled in the light of the kitchen. Who was she? She seemed to know me just fine. A moment later, we were joined together on the kitchen floor. When I raised my head, I could see the loaves of black bread rising in the hot oven.

I said something awful like, “I am going to now do to you everything I have ever wanted to do,” and she looked up over her shoulder and said something wonderful like, “Yes, please. Please do everything you have ever wanted to do to a woman with me.” This is what she had been waiting for in her heart. She had been yearning for just this kind of trouble. It was like the sweet and yummy cloudberry jam at the bottom of a cup of Alma yogurt. “Please,” she said again. “Please be as horrible with me as you wish.” And that’s how that part of the story ended, on a Tartu kitchen floor. Or were we in Montreal? Had I passed through a time loop in that cemetery? The Estonian woman sighed such musical sighs. Such sighs of kitchen ecstasy. The black bread loaves kept rising.

the narva greenland summit

I WAS DISPATCHED to cover the Greenland Summit, which would take place in Narva, Estonia, of all places. Delegates from the Kingdom of Denmark, the autonomous territory of Kalaallit Nunaat, the Republic of Estonia, and the United States of America were to descend on the old castle of Narva to feel each other out. At the last moment, it was announced that Vice President Vance would also be joining the Narva Greenland Summit. I drove up there through the pines of Ida-Virumaa and parked my car at the foot of the ancient fortifications.

But it was here that I encountered Els Stenbock, the poetess and repeat winner of the annual Lydia Koidula Prize, as well as the recipient of much Estonian Cultural Capital largess. She was sprawled out on a knit blanket in the snow by the castle, eating an apple and reading a book, clad in a light blue summer’s dress. “Oh,” she said, cocking an eye at me. Her amber hair was braided and her fair skin shined like the snow. The cold wind lifted her dress. How she wasn’t cold when yr.no, the Norwegian meteorological website, had predicted temperatures of -15 degrees Celsius was hard to understand, but she looked as lustrous as a patch of summer sunflowers. “Come here,” Els Stenbock said. “Let’s read some of Koidula’s poetry together.”

Soon we were kissing, long, sumptuous, lingering kisses. I had forgotten all about Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance. But Els Stenbock was not satisfied with me. “Next time we meet in Narva, you should really wear some clean socks,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I would wind up kissing the best poetess in Estonia today.” “Mmm,” she said. “But your socks should always be clean, just in case you do.” Didn’t she have a husband? Or at least a domestic partner? But these Estonian women, they knew no loyalties. They were only loyal to their present whims, how they felt at that moment. She felt like this. “Kiss me more,” Els whispered. Her light blue eyes attained a kind of supernatural effect. “More, more, more.”

Supposedly there was also a farmer’s market taking place in Narva, to coincide with the Narva Greenland Summit. But I could not find it. I walked along the river later and turned up a road, but when I got there, I only found dilapidated farmhouses and it was getting dark already. This area by the river scared me, not because of the risk of being kidnapped by marauding Russians, but because it supposedly was stalked by a werewolf of some kind, which had devoured several pedestrians. Up the hill, I saw some lights by the old Lutheran church, and headed up that way, expecting to find the market. Maybe they were also selling Narva Greenland Summit merch? But when I got to the church, it was empty and there was no one there at all. There I stood, watching the flakes tumble down. Slowly, slowly the snowflakes fell into winter bleakness.

At the foot of Narva Castle, Els Stenbock was still waiting patiently on her blanket. She had a little picnic basket with her. Some Russians or Ukrainians were milling around nearby, and so I went over to them and asked about the Narva Greenland Summit farmer’s market. To my surprise, they responded in Estonian, but said it was being held in an adjacent town. Maybe Narva-Jõesuu. I returned to the poetess and lied beside her. “Is it true that you got all of last year’s cultural capital budget?” I asked. “To publish 10 volumes of poetry?” Els looked up at me with her hungry blue werewolf eyes and said, “Shut up and kiss me, lollpea. More, more, more.”