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.

THAT CREAKING, rocking, squeaking, Elron (Hubbard?) Train, lurching south, all the way through Saku, Rapla, Türi. At Tallinn-Väike, the girl got on. But who was she? Me, overtired, my hands still stained with dirt from when the wind blew my hat into a city gutter in the morning, and from pulling it from all of that avenue street mud, and eating something starchy and disgusting from the Baltic Station, and blowing my nose in the meantime, and just nothing that could ever be cleaned up and made presentable. A werewolf. Even if bathed, my soul is dirty.

Her, blonde, clean, tidy, and well-organized, with pink full lips, typing away on a laptop with some homespun manicure. But look how she types, and how absorbed she is in her deep work. Why, she just seems like the most pragmatic, industrious chick there is! I briefly ask her if she can hear me, because I think she might have headphones on, or ear pods or whatever they are called nowadays, and she says that she can, but that’s all that she says. Her look at me is as blank as school wallpaper. There’s nothing coquettish here. This girl is from Rapla. She is a shock worker. Her hair is so light. She should be out marketing muesli with creamy yellow curls like those. She has a head like soup noodles. A golden yumminess like warm sun rays.

A day later in the deep tech lounge of the conference, I am dodging robots and weaving in between the Swedbank People in their orange shirts. People from the past drift through my mind. I think of Linnéa and accept her death from my life. I’ve turned passive. I’ve stopped trying. I’ve stopped caring. Nothing. And all of these startup investment people are boring as fuck. But who was the girl on the train who disembarked at Rapla? Does she always ride the last train? If I keep riding the trains south to Rapla, will our paths cross again? Will she once again sit across from me, oblivious, tapping away? Is it even romantic to think such thoughts, or somehow against the rules? That’s how his lifetime obsession started, riding the Rapla-bound train. Waiting for the tubli girl with the laptop and no-nonsense demeanor. The lonesome bachelor, scribbling mad in his notebook. That was how the whole affair started.