the 6 am circle k coffee

*I’ve spent half my life in Helsinki Airport.*

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a 6 am coffee from Circle K. Actually there is something better, and it’s the special Finnair blueberry juice. During the flight over the Atlantic, they just leave it in the back of the plane in the kitchenette, and you can help yourself to as many cups as you like. I feel like Finnair is also my home in a way. And Helsinki Airport. Like I told my mom before I left, I don’t mind a layover in Helsinki, Finland.

I’ve spent half my life waiting in that airport.

I like Finland. Finnish, and by extension Estonian, women are super cute. I can see in my younger self, a sort of terrible but innate and unavoidable lecherousness, which is in and of itself a part of the biological condition. Such things can be ignored for only so long. Herein lies the conundrum of the suburbs. We are raised in comfort and expected to fall in line, but then things go haywire for so many of us and we do rather stupid and adventurous things. Restless people wind up in America, and you think that their descendants are somehow not like them? We are somehow more mellow and set in our ways, because we happened to be raised with a Nintendo and trusty pizza place up the way? I’ve got former classmates scattered all over the earth. You have to wonder, what went wrong here with all of us?

Or did anything go wrong at all?

Maybe things are just as they are.

Do you realize I have been crossing the North Atlantic by plane for more than two decades now? I’ve got grainy photos of me standing in Christiania in Copenhagen trying to pull a sword from a stone. Or that cold morning bus station in Stockholm, the day I fell ill and went to see the Vasa for the first time? I also remember my first trip to Iceland, which was in March 2001, and being on the Icelandair flight, which already had personal screens installed, and watching Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic” video, and the Icelandair attendant coming by and asking me if I wanted some coffee and knowing just by the look in her eyes that I was dealing with some other, non-American Icelandic lifeform.

Iceland had always intrigued me because I had been assigned to write a country report about it in the sixth grade. I had zero interest in this place. But it grew on me, the fermented shark meat, the geothermal pools. Among the first things I did on my first trip to Iceland was go to the supermarket and pick up some skyr, a yogurt that you can find tubs of in any American supermarket today, but was like an exotic food even back then. I put the skyr sticker in my passport like a souvenir, and you can imagine how the passport control officer looked at me when he went to stamp my passport and this sticker fell out.

Life just sort of went that way, and I went from Iceland to Denmark, and from Denmark, after some interludes in Norway and Sweden, to Finland, from which I predictably wound up in Estonia. I forget these things from time to time. I think when you are younger, maybe 25, you have a much shorter, more dynamic self narrative, but when you get to 44, there is so much time, and there were so many phases, that huge chunks of them can just drop off into the abyss like melted Greenlandic icebergs. You are reminded of stuff you did and think, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Happens every day. Years melt into years.

I wonder about the vantage point of older people who talk about stuff that happened in the 1960s. Like that’s a whole other block of time removed from the present, and how can you recall stuff that happened in 1966 without it being repackaged into new narratives. I mean, does your recall remain the same, or are you rewriting those past moments every time to remember them? My parents are still cruising around Long Island listening to something called Yacht Rock Radio, where they play the Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, and some DJ who sounds like a guest star on The Love Boat or Fantasy Island treats you to all the best yacht rock hits. “It was the era,” my father says with the wind in his hair listening to Michael McDonald. “The era!”

Anyway, where was I?

The Circle K 6 am coffee. Circle K is a lifeline to anyone past midnight in Estonia. Everything else is closed. French fries are the sole sustenance, unless you are brave enough to eat one of those double-barrelled hot dogs. The french fries, mind you, costed me only €1.50 per portion. In Sag Harbor, they would be like … $10. People keep asking me, do you ever think of moving back to Long Island? I say, sure, when I get my $7 million dollar advance on my next book, I’ll pick up a nice house next to Drew Barrymore’s and we can play tennis together. You’re all invited! I mean, come on. Let’s get real. Even diehard East End Long Islanders are fleeing because they have been driven to eating roadkill because of the ultra rich. The rich destroy almost everything they touch. They come into an area of cultural diversity, and the ‘just folks’ people who made it that way are eventually forced out, leaving behind executives with tennis courts.

So I am here, in Tallinn, with my 6 am coffee. I still call Circle K Statoil out of habit, and because I liked the Statoil branding better. Statoil also sounded better in Estonian. All kinds of characters exist in Statoil/Circle K in the early hours. There’s a kind of rough-edged party element in places like Tallinn, but also in Copenhagen, Reykjavik, especially in summer. In New York, the people sleeping in the train station are homeless, but in these places, they are more like young women (or men) who just had too much to drink last night. And also jetlagged people like myself who are hungry and on some weird inverted vampire sleep schedule, so that I want to sleep when everyone else is awake and vice versa. But, oh look, there’s the Linnahall. And there’s the spire of St. Olaf’s Church. This place. How did I even get here? I have no idea. Here I am, buying coffee.

To borrow a quote from Full Metal Jacket, “This is my Circle K 6 am coffee. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”

traditional music

I ALWAYS KNEW they had rooms for rent, or stay, in the cellar of the Pärimusmuusika Ait, or Traditional Music Center, but I did not know they had these kinds of exclusive suites, or that a woman had been living down there for some time. I didn’t even know how I happened to get into that room, or into her bed for that matter. We were lying together in a queen-sized bed, with messy beige sheets. The frame of the bed was made of a darker wood, and there were some shelves across from us lined with vinyls and compact discs of groups and solo performers supported in one way or another by the center, plus thick compilations of runo songs collected from various rural municipalities over the preceding century and a half.

None of that matters though. What matters I think is the quality of those kisses in that basement bed. She was a younger woman, she had a round face, freckles, blue eyes, and inside of those eyes was kindness. In situations like these, you don’t even need to kiss, you don’t even need to touch, you can just look at each other. It’s better than a kiss. There we both were, beneath the blankets, perched in some kind of euphoria. The young lady said, “Mother was right about you. She said you were a good kisser. And so good in bed.” This of course was fluff to my ears, and I almost found myself adopting a Sean Connery accent, “Yes, yes. Of course, Domino. Of course.” But that word that preceded it, mother, made me sit straight like a rock.

“Who is your mother?” I asked the beautiful girl. “You know very well who she is,” she said, in a playful way. “She’ll be here soon.” But didn’t even know that she had an adult daughter, and still was confused about it. Sexual anxiety throbbed in my veins. I pulled my trousers from a chair, buttoned up my blue shirt, and ran upstairs, the girl’s warm kisses still all over me. In the garderoob or coat room of the center, a number of folk musicians were arriving, among them the mother. She was so busy talking to a guitar player though that she didn’t see me as I grabbed my things and was out the door. I felt bad for her. I felt bad for everyone. I felt like I had done something wrong. I hoped that she would never know about this. She should remain blissfully unaware of the cellar tryst with her daughter. And it was still a loving experience.

You can’t deny that.

periphery

A PERIPHERY, a wilderness, a place of doom, fog, and thick dark forests. There was however a settlement nearby on the margins to which I was exiled to live in a small house. The woman in the neighboring apartment had been there for a long time. She was about my age and had red hair and a black dress. She was an attractive girl and covered in freckles. Her bedroom had old-fashioned furniture, and there were pictures and mirrors hanging on the wall. A lamp glowed in the corner. “Why am I still here?” she complained to me. “I hate this place and I’m still here. I’ve been stuck here forever. I want to leave.” She kicked at the air and turned over.

IN THE MIDDLE of the settlement I later overheard a quarrel between two older women who had been exiled there. Both of them had gray hair. One chased the other down a muddy alley until she subdued and overtook her, kneeling over her with a dagger. It was some kind of disagreement over a decision of the architectural review board, but the garden club and historical society were also involved. Small-town grievances. The rivalry had been going on for some time, and I even was shown footage later of a Memorial Day Parade in the year 2000, which was increasingly looking, in perspective, like a really creepy year. The two old women were much younger then, just going gray, and were interviewed in the local news media. Two community activists (who really hated each other). Such things happen in every small town.

NOT LONG AFTER THAT I arrived to a cafe in Tanzania. I suppose it was along the waterfront of Dar-es-Salaam. It was getting dusk and the city was smoggy, and I could see the jungle trees and big birds flying between them, their black silhouettes against a sinking orange sun. Jerry Seinfeld was there, trying to sell books to some local merchants. He took offense when it turned out these African merchants were also doing brisk trade with Newman, whom he called his arch foe. “Newman,” said Jerry. They were all seated around a table except for Mr. Seinfeld, who was standing. “I don’t think I have to remind you how unreliable Newman is. He’d sell his own grandmother.” Somewhere in the distance, the audience laughed. The African merchants, in crisp white linen shirts, conferred and shared a water pipe. I couldn’t understand their weird language, but I could hear them say, “Seinfeld, Newman. Newman, Seinfeld, Newman.”

It was like a form a Morse Code.

AT LAST THE TRAIN arrived to the Baltic Station in Tallinn and I disembarked with my two youngest daughters. It was snowing and dark, and we stepped over the tracks. We decided to go get some dinner at the Baltic Station Market, which is open until 8 pm. But the way was obscured by a new hockey rink. Who had put a hockey rink in the middle of the Baltic Station? I thought about skating across, but there was a game on. That might not be the best move. It could get violent. How to get around the rink? There had to be a way. If we just walked deeper into Kalamaja, we could get around it. It had been a weird adventure and I was very hungry.

like a european movie

IT’S EIGHT THIRTY AM, and I’m getting on board a northbound train in Viljandi. Two women sit nearby, waiting as well. Over their shoulders I can see that Lavazza instant coffee machine gleaming white in the sun. The last time I took a train here, I got an espresso in a paper cup, but by the end of the day, and after many coffees more, I looked like someone who had been on a nasty amphetamine binge, and so this time, I have decided to forego the morning espresso. The machine is nice though. It’s a welcome Italian brand. More than a few weeks ago, I decided to sojourn out to Vasknarva, which is at the very edge of the European Union, so I could take a hard look at the fearsome Russian Federation on the other side. Through swamps and forests I journeyed, until I at last saw the onion domes of the Vasknarva church, and trekked down to the harbor where I met some fishermen. They tried to speak to me in Russian, but since I don’t speak Russian, we got by with a few hand gestures and some Estonian words. “Kala,” one of them said. As I stood there, looking over the river at the smoky shanties on the other side, I saw it again. There was a Lavazza coffee machine in Vasknarva.

I could drink coffee and watch Russia.

“Estonski?” one of the fishermen asked me.

“Nyet, amerikanski,” I told him.

His eyebrows raised upon hearing this and he gave me a puzzled smile.

Of course, I ordered myself an espresso from the machine. For me it served as proof that I was still standing in the civilized world, as I saw the border patrol glide up the river in a boat. This feeling of Europeanness means something to me. This is what Europe was supposed to be about. Efficiency, precision, the ability to use a chip card to order an Italian espresso from a machine at the murky riverside of the Western world. These small coffees do mean a lot.

***

AN HOUR AND A HALF later and we pull into Saku. The grass is lush green and dotted with yellow marigolds. Odd new geometric buildings stand in circles near the approach to the town, like a jumble of Lego toys. Europeans like to live in these kinds of Lego buildings. Not too long ago, I was standing on this same platform in the snow cold when the train pulled up. The Estonians call these trains “carrots,” because of their orange color, but I still can’t bring myself to say I took the “carrot” to Tallinn. I was standing there and through the glass, I could see a young woman who I knew, just sitting on the train. There was something cinematic about that vision, of the train pulling up in the winter dark and seeing her seated there through the glass. After some time, I worked up the nerve to go and talk to her. She was on her way back to Viljandi. She’s very young, but she looked a bit sleepy, world weary. She keeps herself busy, I think. You have to appreciate the romance of these trains though. When I write to old friends back in the US, they especially like these kinds of details. How I saw a girl I knew on a train, or how someone came in on the train and left the same day. Or how someone missed the train. For them, it’s reminiscent of that old movie Before Sunrise with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

In California, most people drive. In New York too. Here, I almost never drive anywhere.

Estonians, I think, wouldn’t make these connections. They don’t see how similar their lives are to the French and the Austrians and the “real Europeans.” I will admit that the country does feel mostly like a wilderness. Whenever I drive from Riga and begin to see those dense birch forests, I get the sense that I am heading to the very edge of the world. To leave these forests and go to a city like Rome or Barcelona or Paris is, in the Estonian mind, to go to Europe. But this same Europe also contains other far-flung corners, whether they be the Scottish Hebrides, or the Norwegian fjords, or the rocky Greek islands. The Estonian north woods are part of this larger experience, and through them one can travel on reliable little trains that some call “carrots.” The train pulls up and you can see someone you know through the glass.

***

NOW THERE ARE THE CRANES and graffiti of Tallinn. From here, Viljandi feels like a distant world. For me, Viljandi is just another provincial European town. It has its castle ruins, its old churches, its hotels and bars, its cafes and bakeries. Something about its sloppiness, those old falling-down fences and unpainted facades, makes it especially Gallic in feeling, as if I got lost somewhere outside of Lyon and turned up in this dusty place. Surely the fishing villages of Brittany must be home to similar layers of decay and renewal. Old barns renovated into cafes and bars. Haunted lost old factories. And did you know that there are three Americans living around the corner from me now? One from Florida, one from Massachusetts, and one from West Virginia. There’s an Argentine and a Dutchman too, and an Australian cycles by daily and waves. For the middle of nowhere, it’s some kind of somewhere. A small French town, as I said, that happens to be up in the north woods, and where they speak Estonian instead of French.

Sadly, the wine and bread and cheese aren’t as cheap, but you can get other things at the markets here, and they are playing the same 1980s hits that they play everywhere in Europe. Here they sell cloudberries, black and red currants, and dead eels. In the fall, there are piles of chanterelles and buckets of golden potatoes. There are weird aspects to life here, for sure, but those weird aspects are in every place. The other day I parked my car, and a man started yelling something across the street at me, something about Estonians and parking. An older man with gray hair. I think he was drunk. But there are these kinds of people everywhere. I’m used to it. In America, they yell at you about Jesus and Trump and Obama, here they yell at you about Kalevipoeg and parking. Every society has its pressures, its idiosyncrasies. These things change wherever you go. Often in Estonia, I can feel the weight of the ideas of its people on me. They talk about things as if I know what they mean. My favorite is when Estonians tell you to “be normal,” or to “be concrete.” I imagine turning myself into a stony slab. Even better is when an Estonian will say to you, “but I’m a normal person.” Olen normaalne inimene. Yeah, right. I just shrug my shoulders. I have learned to. It’s too tiring to pay it any more attention.

I don’t take Estonia as a place that needs to satisfy my desire for everything I want. These days, I just take life here as it is. I do like those touches, the instant coffee machine on the Narva River, the smooth running trains gliding into Saku at night, the sleepy-eyed young people on their way to somewhere. I’ve been living in Europe off and on for two decades now, and I wonder if it has changed me, if I too have become a European in this time. I’m not sure what that means. I think my inner American appreciates these little scenes a bit too much for me to be a real European. I still think I am living in some European film. Sometimes it’s an erotic thriller. Sometimes it’s a comedy. More recently, it’s been turning into a historical drama about the lead up to a big war. It’s Midnight in Paris starring Owen Wilson, except Morning in Estonia, starring Justin Petrone. But you know what, I like this movie that I’m in right now.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

An Estonian version of this piece appeared in the newspaper Sakala this week.

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 light bulbs 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 I 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, in 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 seem 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.