finland, finland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the rehabilitation of dulcinea

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

Or at least blocked me on social media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

easter in lanzarote

IF PEOPLE HAD EVER colonized the moon, they would have built such houses. White stone rectangles clustered across the lunar black rock interior of Lanzarote. This is the most volcanic Canary Island, the least vegetated. The capital Arrecife is just a conurbation of white housing blocks, sectioned off by streets and palm trees. To its south is Puerto del Carmen, the resort town, where there are hotels, pools, tennis courts, and holiday guests. Most of them are English, but some of the guests are Estonians too. There are some Welsh people here as well.

“That’s why we make you pay a toll at the end of the bridge,” a Welsh woman shouted at an Englishman by the pool. “To stop all you English from coming into our bloody country!”

You can find the Estonians ringing the pools, paperbacks in hand. Their goal is to soak up the sun, to get brown by the second of June, et saada pruuniks, teiseks juuniks, as the refrain to a popular song goes. Upon return to the fatherland, the quality of their vacation will be assessed by their skin tone. The old ladies will grip them by the wrist outside the Konsum supermarket and study them through their spectacles. “Oh, my, look how brown you are, dear.” This is what the Estonians pay for. Some tan well, becoming a moreno mellow gold, and the ones with light hair and light eyes look exotic with their brown skin. Others cannot get brown for their lives, but rather turn more miserable shades of wet pink, like a melting strawberry ice cream.

Estonians on holiday are not really friendly to other Estonians. There is little sense of camaraderie in crossing the paths of fellow countryman on a far-off isle. They do come from a rather small country and speak a rather unique language, but this is viewed as purely incidental, a rather irrelevant technicality. Those other Estonians are still strangers. I’m reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. I identify with Quoyle. My daughter is like Bunny.

***

I don’t have the resources to put on an Italian or Estonian Easter for our daughter, aged 8, who is with me this Easter on Lanzarote. When we booked the package trip a year ago, we must not have paid attention exactly to when Easter was. To put on an Italian Easter requires family, and we have no other family here, and it also requires a feast, and I don’t have the patience or skill to assemble trays of manicotti and lasagne for just two people. To put on an Estonian Easter requires a box of eggs and a bag of onions, just so I can use their peels to dye the eggs that wonderful kaleidoscopic color, as the Estonians do. Then she and I can play that game where you hit the eggs against each other to see whose egg is strongest. Whoever thought up that game must have been really bored. I decide to give the girl an American Easter. I purchase a dozen chocolate eggs from a nearby shop and hide them in our bungalow. She finds them.

***

Every night at the resort there is a children’s disco. Could there be any better evidence of the success of the European project than an Estonian girl sipping ginger ale through a straw and playing games with German, Dutch, and Danish children? Her best friends are a set of red-headed twin girls from England. They get into all kinds of mischief. They get sticky goo from a vending machine full of cheap kids toys and toss it until it sticks to the ceiling. Then they stand on the pool table and use the cues to scrape it down. Sometimes I have to help them.

Mimmo, a Sicilian with a pencil-thin mustache and white hat who entertains the children during the disco, has befriended me because according to him we are both Italians. Canarios can count the number of Americans they’ve seen on the islands on one hand. Maybe four.

The woman who entertains the children with Mimmo is named Marcela. She is a native Canaria and is very vibrant, loud, playful, enthusiastic, voluptuous. Marcela has chestnut hair and green eyes and freckles on her cheeks. Canarian women are as welcome to me as the sun itself. Whenever I see Marcela, or Teresa, who is from La Gomera but lives on Lanzarote, and who works at the supermarket down the street, I feel warm. I linger there as I buy bananas.

***

After breakfast, I rent a car and we drive to the north of the island. We leave Puerto del Carmen and then pass Arrecife, ride along the pretty rocky coastline to Guatiza, Mala, Arrieta, and Punta Mujeres. “Are you sad you’re not with your family on Easter?” I ask my daughter, who is half dozing in the passenger’s side seat, while munching on a bag of potato chips. “No,” she says. We pass some more black stretches of volcanic rock and come into Orzola, a fishing village at the north end of the island. The main street is called Calle la Quemadila, where we park our car. Many rows of white rectangle houses, some trimmed with royal blue, stand along the street. Mysterious Canarian women with chestnut hair blowing in the salty wind, their hard-luck brothers pressing seafood menus into hands. The cafes are full of locals, fishermen with white curly hair and thick brown fingers smoking pipes and lazing aimlessly in the sun.

I feel so comfortable here, on an island. I grew up on an island, and when I am in Estonia, I hear from the people of Hiiumaa Island and Saaremaa Island that they feel the same. We need the sea around, a coast, a line where things begin and end. Who could really settle for a river or a hill with a castle on top? To live inland will drive any real islander mad. To stare out at the sea, to look out on all that endless blue, that blends into the sky, blends into more blue gives one a feeling of solitude that is awesome, infinite, and terrifying. It swallows all, just like time.

By the harbor, I see there is an apartment for rent. “Do you like it here?” I ask my daughter, her yellow hair tossed about by the ocean winds. “Yes, I do,” she says. “It’s so warm here, and in Estonia it’s still so cold. Estonia is like, well, like a cold land.” A bead of sweat leaves her forehead and runs down her cheek. It looks like a tear. We could just take that room for rent, get a plate of fried fish, I think. Later go back the hotel to pick up our things. There’s nothing to lose. There’s nowhere to run to, as Martha and the Vandellas once sang, nowhere to hide.

Se Alquila.

We could just stay here now if we really wanted to.

Written in March 2016, revised April 2024

rotermanni sketch

I ARRIVED TO TALLINN and was again surprised (pleasantly) by the way the port area has developed. It looks like a real city. When I came here the first time in ’02, none of this was here. Now Rotermanni kvartal is as bourgeois as it gets. Why not shop for a new suit while listening to gurgling electronic music and sipping on a smoothie, or noshing on some fresh sourdough bread from RØST while imbibing a warm cappuccino with coconut milk? Everyone in the window advertisements is lean, beautiful, effortlessly wealthy, and has lots of sex, most likely in fine hotels or in the back of sports cars. If that’s not what life is about, then what is?

But despite all the trimmings of the nordic nouveau riche, one cannot escape the cold sea wind or the gray sky. Sometimes the sun does come out though. It is odd that we are supposedly considered under threat from the Russian Federation, as if they were going to lob missiles into the nearby H&M. You would like to think that all of these things would protect you, but they don’t. It did make me think though what an angry, regressive energy is Putinism. How could anyone long for a day when half of Europe was under surveillance and home arrest? Age is a factor. He’s a post-1989 headcase and never really adjusted. He wants it back.

And the reason I am bringing this up is that so much has changed in Tallinn, and in Estonia, since that time that the country is due a narrative revision. A rewriting of the story. The Soviet period is slipping away into the past. It’s like watching those last pieces of the Titanic slip into the ocean. How can you define the story of a country by referencing something that doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore? This place is Hanseatic materialism redux. I continuously feel like I am in a mini-Stockholm or some other such northerly place where men in glasses who part their hair on the side sit around doing business deals with a stiff upper lip while wearing scarves inside, and weary eyed women walk their small dogs in the morning, bearing a cup of coffee before them as if it was a flashlight or rosary beads and looking as if they don’t have time for anyone or anything and whatever you have to say to them, they really don’t care.

the trumpet player from barcelona

AT THE START OF MARCH, our cat Kurru started behaving strangely. Kurru is a striped female cat, aged about 17 years. She’s thinned out in her elderhood and doesn’t eat with the same enthusiasm she once had, but she is still quite active, when she’s not sleeping the day away on the kitchen table. From time to time, I’d find her staring out the window. The winter was ferocious and long, but with the warmer weather, she’d become less intimidated by the idea of going outside.

She would usually sleep through the night, but when March began, she became more active in the early mornings. At about six, she would start to make odd noises that are difficult to transcribe. Let’s just say that all of Estonian’s lovely vowels were represented, such as ä, ö, ü, and õ. “Äöüõ! Äöüõ!” This wasn’t your usual “meow.” It was different. Naturally, it got on my nerves and I would have preferred to slumber on in silence beneath my warm blanket. A few times I shouted at her to be quiet, and even threw a pillow at her. The cat Kurru then ran to the other window and continued with her cat’s lament. Then one morning I looked out the window and saw who she was talking to. There was a beautiful black male cat there, who was saying the same things to her in that same strange voice.

Our cat isn’t of child-, or kitten-, bearing age anymore. I think. She’s an old lady. Seventeen! This would be as if Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren got pregnant. Maybe it’s still possible, but it just doesn’t happen every day. But this reality doesn’t seem to make a difference to the other cats. Someone in the cat community has apparently spread the news that in this apartment — our apartment — lives a female cat. And so those male cats arrive at six in the morning and line up beneath our Kurru’s window. I can hear their agony through the glass. Cats apparently can’t masturbate. Or can they?

I don’t really want to know, but anyway, our cat has had to live with this constant torment, that the neighbor boys just won’t give up. Sometimes I think she even enjoys this little mating season drama. She is more waiting for it than fearing it. Sometimes the black cat is beneath the window, but other times there is a fat orange cat with a flat face that looks like Boris Yeltsin. These cavaliers are waiting, steadfast. They want Kurru to come away with them. They don’t seem to be ready to give up any time soon.

How come they never give up?

***

But enough about cats! I actually wanted to talk about music today and Barcelona. And not just about music, but about a certain musician. At the edge of our town dwells a certain family of considerable means, they are nouveau riche — as far as I know they lack an aristocratic pedigree — but they have learned to live like the old rich live, to sleep in the best hotels, to drink the best wines, to appreciate fine art, travel, and the good life. Some time ago, these travels brought the mother and daughter of the family to Barcelona, where they stayed in an exclusive hotel suite. From the windows, one could look out on all that Barcelona had to offer.

The mother of the family is a little older than me, a mature, beautiful and intelligent woman, who wears wonderful clothes. Her daughter is about 20 and is studying international affairs in Geneva. She has blond hair and has a good sense of humor. She’s also quite playful and likes to make jokes, like a puppy, I guess. It’s always fun to pal around with her. For me though she has always just been my friend’s youngest daughter. She has never been anything more.

This is an important fact, because one night she met a man who is about the same age as me. A little younger, but not much. This happened when they decided to visit a Barcelona jazz club called “Tony’s Swing Club.” In the band, there was an American who sang and played the trumpet. I don’t know where he really was from, but I like to think he came from New Orleans.

“I’m sorry,” my friend’s daughter said some time ago when she told me about him, “but that trumpet player looked a lot younger than you.” “Does he have three daughters,” I asked in response. “No, he has no children,” she answered and added, “and he’s never been married either.”

“Well, that’s why he looks so young,” I said. “Give him three daughters and a rough divorce and let’s see how young he looks.” “Yes, it’s hard to say what he’s done in his life,” the young lady agreed. “Apparently he’s just been playing the trumpet.”

He definitely played the trumpet and quite well. So well that my friend, the young lady’s mother, invited him to their hotel for a private concert. And that almost 40-year-old musician from New Orleans went along, of course. I don’t know what he looks like, but I imagine something like Harry Connick, Jr. At the hotel, he serenaded them. Maybe he performed something from the Louis Armstrong songbook. “And I say to myself, what a wonderful world …” The woman and her daughter sat and watched and listened. When the concert was over, they applauded.

Later they all drank some good Spanish red wine.

“I thought that musician was interested in me,” the mother of the family acknowledged to me later. She really is an attractive woman and charismatic, and these kinds of women are known to often drive men crazy. “But then I understood that he was actually in love with my daughter.”

I don’t know if this revelation disappointed her. The woman will soon turn 50. The daughter is in her early twenties. But, to borrow a line from the American President John F. Kennedy, “the torch was passed to a new generation, a generation born in this century.” Unfortunately, the musician’s young muse wasn’t interested in him. The trumpet player was sad about it, but he still didn’t give up.

***

Quite the opposite. A few weeks later he arrived to Estonia. Officially, he was here to attend a music festival, but he really came for the young lady. I have a hard time understanding just what exactly he was after. Love? That this young lady — half girl, half woman — would respond to his interests? But what would become of the young lady’s career in international affairs? Or did he want to marry her? Or maybe just to steal a kiss?

Here, I admit that I’ve had similar experiences. Because of that, I can tell you that he had no idea what he wanted. Sometimes a woman’s spirit gets so deep inside of you, it’s hard to exist without it. It takes over your whole body and soul. It’s even hard to breathe. It’s hard to think. It’s hard to be. It makes men do stupid things, not on purpose, but because if they don’t buy those plane tickets or send that love letter, they will go insane or explode. It’s such a big ball of energy, like crashing waves on a stormy ocean.

The waves will flow, whether you like it or not. The only question is how to navigate them.

This time, when my friend’s daughter’s musical suitor appeared in Estonia, she was quite direct with him. She told him all kinds of nasty things and then blocked him on every channel.

“I told him that I was sad that he was so old and had accomplished so little in his life,” the young lady told me. “I didn’t mean it, of course. I just wanted him to leave me alone.”

With a broken heart, the trumpet player dragged himself back to Barcelona. Maybe he even cried, as I have cried. Maybe he wrote to her, as I have written to women. Maybe he even lied to himself, as I have lied to myself.

“She was too young.” “She wasn’t the right one.” “Who wants to be with a woman who is still in college?” the trumpet player lied to himself. He went back to his jazz club, met some Spanish woman named Maria, got drunk and wound up in bed with her. But all through the night he spent with Maria, he was haunted by a tiny Estonian plika.

It’s not so easy to free yourself from a woman’s spirit.

In the morning, he grabbed his smartphone and tapped out some sentences to her and pressed send.

“Does he still write to you?” I asked the young lady recently. “No,” she answered but then whispered, “actually, he does, but I don’t respond. But, yes, he still writes.”

“See,” I said. “Some people just don’t give up.”

***

There are a lot of stories like this and I hear them all the time. Most women are tired of these characters. A real man should be like a Cleveron robot who goes where you want him to go and then says something when you press a button. When you say, ‘Don’t write to me,’ he won’t write because he’s a good robot.

But some still write. And not just men. Women too. This has become my strange hobby. I ask friends if their suitors are still writing them, or if they have given up. I am trying to understand their psychology and my own. I have a friend who left her partner long ago because he was smoking too much pot. She blocked him everywhere and told him she never wanted to see him again. The reasons for the split were clear. But the man kept on calling, until his number was blocked too. “I don’t understand what his problem is,” the woman said. “Do I really have to spend my whole life with my ex-boyfriend haunting me?” That guy just won’t give up though. He is stuck inside a prison he built for himself, where his thoughts spin round in circles. With all channels blocked, maybe he might send a message by carrier pigeon?

“Sometimes it seems to me that when a woman falls in love, it’s nice, but when a man falls in love, it can be catastrophic,” a famous Estonian singer once told me, who is considered to be something of a love expert.

One of my male friends though said that it’s programmed into the culture. “Women play hard to get. Are they flirting or not? In films we often see how the main characters hate each other at first but become lovers in the end.” This happens in many old and new movies, he noted.

“What else do people have left, when they can’t even believe in love?” asked another friend rhetorically, who has become a well-known actress. “People like to believe that they know what’s best for them. And if this good thing is this girl who tells you no all the time, they still believe that she will say yes in the end. That she will finally see the same things that you see, and that a happy ending still awaits.

“For me, the most interesting thing is that we still think we know what’s best for us,” the actress went on. “I certainly don’t think that I know what’s best for me. Life knows best. And if life doesn’t offer me that boy I want, then naturally he’s not the right one for me. That’s why I don’t pursue people in such a way.”

According to this actress, some people just don’t listen to life, but she acknowledged the game of love can be confusing. “Especially when all women supposedly want you to compete for their hearts,” she said. “Then you have to figure out if you should still compete for her love or just leave her alone.”

***

I don’t know what became of that trumpet player from Barcelona. It’s possible that he’s still performing in the same club. Or maybe he’s moved on, to Madrid or Paris. Maybe his heart was so broken that he moved back home to New Orleans. Maybe he met a nice person along the way and they’re now married and expecting a daughter. Maybe he doesn’t look so young anymore. If he still thinks of that Estonian girl, maybe she has inspired him to play the blues only better. Maybe his solos are more emotive now, more intense, richer and deeper. Maybe when he sings, his voice cracks as if he’s about to cry. Maybe it was necessary for him to get his heart broken, so that he would get to the next level.

In this way, pain can be a blessing. As I have found with my own pain. I could of course write about the person who broke my heart. I could write about her until the end of my days. Novels, short stories, and poems. Some part of this experience won’t ever leave me, no. Part of my heart just won’t give up on her.

I find myself still thinking of her, especially in those early mornings at first light, when the cat goes to the window to give her cat’s concert. Our sturdy, mature feline awaits her suitors on the other side of the glass. It’s terrifying sure, but also a little thrilling.

And there she sits. She sits and she waits and she never gives up.

An Estonian-language version of this piece recently appeared in Edasi.

nightfall

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

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

müra and jura

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

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

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

This time I actually believed her.

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

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.

return to tallinn

IT WAS A FEW WEEKS LATER that I returned to the capital, taking an evening train to Liiva, so I could spend the night on a friend’s couch before an early morning TV appearance.

The logistics of getting from the provinces, the periphery, to the capital city, are at times challenging. There is no way to be in Tallinn that early other than to drive, and who wants to drive to Tallinn from the South during January blizzard weather, though this is often done?

I barely slept and was afflicted by a profound melancholy all night long, and found myself yearning for elusive feminine comfort, and sort of clutching my pillow, only to have a half dozen horror stories replay in my mind, as if warning me to be careful of what I wished for. I didn’t mention a word of it to my friend as we drank coffee in his kitchen at 7 am. Nõmme is probably a coveted place to live, and expensive, though I haven’t asked about prices, but it’s just like Tähtvere in Tartu or any other place in this country. You look out the window and you see other windows, and maybe other people behind those windows, but you barely know who they are, and you probably never will, and the city mindset is, why would you care to know?

This is how people think. In 1968, the American soul group Sly & The Family Stone released a song called “Into My Own Thing,” and it seems that everybody here these days is into their own thing everywhere. Especially in neighborhoods like Nõmme, where the houses are separated by plots of fenced-off land and large, view-obscuring trees. This is a quiet suburb, where one can be left alone, mostly, to read his books and drink his coffee alone and be into his own thing. In the morning, I ordered a Bolt to take me to the Postimees House, across from the Sikupilli shopping center. My friend told me that only the criminally insane shop at Sikupilli. He also said that a real writer would walk through the snow and not take a Bolt.

“I guess I am not a real writer yet,” I told him.

When he asked me what I planned to do in Tallinn, I told him I was going to visit Kopli.

“Why would you even do that to yourself?” he asked.

“Because I feel like it,” I said. “I haven’t been there in 20 years.”

***

AFTER MY INTERVIEW, I headed into town with snow and ice blowing in my face. I had breakfast at Must Puudel, the Black Poodle, right off the Town Hall Square. This café was only recently introduced to me by an old friend. I don’t know these things, you know, where to go to Tallinn, where to eat, who has the best coconut macchiato. I usually go to Reval Café in that big yellow building across from Sõprus, the one that also houses the Vallikraavi Bar and that looks like it should be in a Wes Anderson movie. That might be my favorite building in Tallinn and I aim to study it. I often go there and eavesdrop on conversations, but this time I chose Must Puudel, because I had read an article recently that said that Estonia’s slowburn economic crisis was causing regular Must Puudel patrons to skip cake and just order coffee, so I decided I would patronize the place and help them out. Of course, I was dreaming that I would meet someone interesting or that something interesting would happen. Maybe an archaeologist might need someone to help him find some treasure, or a woman would dump all of her marital problems on me in a bid to get me into bed and to forget about her personal life.

These things just don’t happen in cafes anymore. Not to me. They happen on Messenger, maybe, and people come into cafes and just sit there behind their computer screens and try to look busy, which is what I was doing. I did manage to befriend a cultural organizer from Rakvere, who said she likes a good day in Tallinn. She doesn’t want to live here, she says, but she enjoys these moments, an early morning’s coffee at Must Puudel, with the snow outside. One of those orange Omniva delivery carts had wheeled up beyond the window and the mailman was out delivering to the nut sellers and karaoke bar owners. Or so I imagined. I do love those Omniva delivery carts. The last time I was in Tallinn, I even took a picture of one.

***

AND THERE I WAS, waiting from Tram No. 1 to take me out to Kopli at last. I usually dodge this tram whenever I go to walk around Kalamaja, but here I was, getting aboard. All I could remember about the old place was the adjacent gray sea, and the burned wood houses, the result of many drunken winter heating mishaps. I used to teach English to a kid who lived out there years ago, whose mother was from Narva, and I used to pass the old burned out Kopli houses and marvel at them. When you are away from Estonia, you forget about this indigent element, living on the margins of the city, warming itself by a wood-heated furnace. You forget about these ghosts of alcoholism, desperation, frostbite. How many souls has this city swallowed up like little tins of salted fish? The troubled father of a friend’s boyfriend was out in the streets during the most recent cold snap and froze to death. It’s strange, but somehow you learn not to look, to obscure your own vision, to forget about the burned houses of Kopli.

Yet there they were again, with open windows. Nobody bothers to live in them anymore. At least not officially. The Kopli tram was mostly empty, and the only people I noticed speaking to each other were a girl of maybe 12 years with dark hair and dark eyes, and a boy who was a little older. She was sitting in his lap and talking to him in her purple parka. Maybe they were a couple? When we got to the last stop, they both got out. I was certain they were Russians or Ukrainians, but no, they were speaking Estonian to each other. They looked like they could have been Japanese, or at least the Ainu who live in Hokkaido, Sakhalin, or some other place.

Not all Estonians look like the little blonde girl on those Anneke chocolate bars.

They hung around in the snow for a moment and then dispersed to wherever they came from. This was their Kopli life. It happened every day, and I only got to catch a glimpse of it. For just these moments, our paths had crossed. The tram had the name of a popular Estonian folk group called Curly Strings on it. Their most popular song is probably “Kaugses Külas,” “In a Faraway Village,” the refrain of which is, “to get tan by the second of June.” In Kopli, even on Kopli Beach, in January, that hope is a faint dream. The kids on the Number 1 tram don’t talk about getting tan. I have no idea what they were talking about. Maybe K-Pop or Pokémon.

***

SO THAT WAS MY DAY, my big Tallinn day, spent walking around, kind of aimlessly. I had a few interviews for some stories I was working on, and walked between the various cafes where they were scheduled. I was supposed to meet Igrayne at the Reval Café on Pärnu maantee, which is the area where the Bronze Soldier riots were most fierce during that tense night 17 years ago. I wonder what happened to those kids who got arrested and spent the night in D-Terminal. They probably all got jobs, or have done something else with their lives. What else is there to do? Loot shops in perpetuity over some war monument? Would the same thing happen these days? Maybe not. Tallinn has just changed, and even the Bronze Soldier is a distant memory. Everything is fading into this new city. It is changing and renewing day by day. I even noticed that the notorious fast food kiosk had disappeared from the corner across from the Tallinn Central Library, and that the place where it stood had been overtaken by Swedbank.

As long as I had known Tallinn, that fast food kiosk had been there. Even on my first day in town, which was 29 August 2002, it was there. At some point, during the early Ansip years, I think some Swedish tourists tried to pick a fight with me there while I waited for french fries at about 2 am. There had been a second time, many years later, while staying at the Hotel Palace, when I was awakened multiple times in the night by the loud sounds of disagreements, climaxing with the crash of shattered glass and the howl-cry of anguish in the Finnish language, which is the most terrifying language, spiced with words like vittua and perkele. But it was all gone now. Yesterday. People accuse me of living in the past, but I need at times to catch up with the present. It takes time. You can’t just wipe it all away, clean slate. The kiosk used to be here. When I referred to the place in discussions with a friend, she called it the löögi-öögi burgeri koht.

This means something like, the hitting-vomiting burger place. Alas, it is no more.

Just a memory.

***

I KEPT WAITING, as I said, for some kind of adventure to present itself in Tallinn, but nothing really happened that day. Later, at Fika, talking to another journalist, I related my frustration. “You know, you get off the train in Bangalore, and already you are accosted by a rickshaw driver who wants to take you somewhere, or you see a dead dog lying in the middle of a street, or a beggar sleeping in a carpet, and things happen. The bus breaks down and you have to walk, but in Tallinn, things just happen predictably.” My friend, who is an Estonian and has lived here for almost 30 years, agreed and nodded. He’s a few years older than me, but has this good-natured boyish quality to him, though he does have a few wrinkles now. He recounted sad stories of programmers who washed up in Tallinn from places like Egypt or Indonesia and couldn’t make any friends. None at all. They suffered through seasons of silence and introversion and gave up. This has been changing though as more expats arrive and befriend each other. Once, I said, I happened to encounter a whole table full of Irish women sitting at a café. There were enough Irish women in Tallinn to fill a whole table. One had come for love.

“How do people even fall in love in Tallinn?” I asked my friend. My uncle, for example, had met his wife on a train in New York. It seemed like the natural kind of place where people met each other. They sat across from each other and talked and then exchanged numbers in those days. But I can’t recall ever having met anyone on a train in Estonia. It just didn’t happen.

I felt like I was locked outside of everyone else, but maybe that wasn’t Tallinn. Maybe that was all of us, disappearing into our own private digital worlds. It was just compounded by the city’s northern aloofness, which at first can feel soothing and wonderful, but later starts to haunt you, gives you a raw, melancholic feeling. Sometimes too much fresh air can hurt your lungs.

The city of Tallinn can hurt you in that same way.

“That’s just how it is,” my friend said. People meet at parties, he said. They do meet.

***

AT NIGHT, I took the Number 3 tram out to the Koidula stop in Kadriorg. Somehow, I had forgotten all about Kadriorg that day. For a lot of people, Tallinn is Kadriorg. It’s Kumu and Nöp. It was here, up a few streets, that I met another friend, who was seated behind a desk, running a dress shop like some character in one of those old Ibsen plays. She had a calculator in front of her, a computer, and a long yellow measuring tape. It was all arrayed before her, and it was very quiet and still snowing. She has three children now, and one of them had left some bits of cookies on her blue dress. She had white-blonde hair, big blue eyes, and looked tired.

After she closed up her shop, we walked to a cafe. One variety of homemade hummus cost €17 per kilo. Some organic meats were more than €40. These high-end goods are for people who think they have the money to afford them, I was later told, but all throughout my day, I had actually sensed the lingering trace of poverty. Even in the Solaris supermarket, I found myself gazing in wonder at a yellow truck full of Navelina oranges and green grapes, and marveling at piles of Costa Rican bananas and Polish and Dutch apples and pears, only because I can recall that 20 years ago in Tallinn, Stockmann had the only supermarket that sold Italian mozzarella, and it felt like luxury. Now you can buy three varieties of mozzarella at any corner shop. Those old post-Soviet poor days were done. These were the days of €17 hummus.

After dinner, we walked through Kadriorg and stared up at the windows of the houses. I liked Kadriorg, with its big houses, its shortcuts between them, it’s slanty roofs. It’s like a big fishing village. One of those windows is where my friend lives with her family, her husband and children. Other friends live behind other windows in houses nestled behind fences or right on the street. Behind one window, the naturalist Fred Jüssi is still living, perhaps drinking hot tea.

My friend is my age, 44, almost to the month, and we are both experiencing that brief midlife hangover moment. It seems this is the moment in life where you either give up, or you get going. I’ve known Tallinn for a long time now, so long it feels like eternity. So many things have happened here, I can no longer remember them all. But I am not giving up just yet. No, I am merely catching my breath here, taking stock, remembering, processing, and understanding. The only real choice is to keep moving forward. All feelings of hopelessness will be renewed. And just as old broken cities are made new, so too can people reinvent and restore themselves.