‘BELOVED CHEF DEAD,’ so read the headline of the local newspaper that morning. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it, because Smith was depicted there in a photo to accompany the article. He was wearing a khaki cotton suit, and had on a flat cap. Smith was sitting in the photo, but leaning forward, as if he was game for whatever life had on offer. He had a broad smile. He looked like an African prince on his way to study economics at Oxford. Oh, yeah, our Smith was a handsome fella if there ever was one. He drove the girls crazy. But now he was dead. The article said he had been electrocuted during a hairstyling incident. The police were investigating. I just couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t. Now it was him? When would it be me?
For a while, Smith had been running a restaurant and catering business in the Old Town. I walked by the place reading the paper, and then went down the hill to the new hotel and spa. For a long time, they had talked about building a hotel and spa in town, but nothing had come of it. Perhaps it had been worth the wait. It was vast and mostly open air, like the famed Blue Lagoon on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. In the distance, I noticed large white and brown objects floating in its frothy hot spring-fed pools. Soon, one of these objects drifted closer, and a large white seal turned belly up in the waters near the white stone steps. The seal looked quite content to swim like that, and from my position, I could also see a large rocky island in the center of the swimming area. “That’s a nature preserve for the animals,” someone told me. “We’re not allowed to swim out there.”
Intrigued, I took a walk along the waterfront. Little cafés had opened up to serve the guests. You know what I am talking about, street food joints, with little round tables shielded with umbrellas from a non-existent Estonian sun. It was actually partly sunny or partly cloudy on that day, and there was a light breeze. I looked over the barrier into the pools and saw a few black bears swimming by. At one café table, Erland was seated, freshly returned from Sweden. His hair was still long, down to his shoulders. I walked over and took a seat next to Erland.
“Did you hear about Smith?” I asked him.
“No, what about him?” he said. “I haven’t seen him since I got back to town.”
“He’s dead.”
“What? But how is that even possible? Did someone murder him?”
I shook my head. “He was accidentally electrocuted at the hair salon.”
“That’s too bad. It does seem like everyone is dying these days. First Agostinho, now Smith. Hopefully we’re not next.”
“Yes, hopefully,” I said.
Our drinks arrived and we sipped them. In the meantime, Erland’s infant son had climbed up on the table and then accidentally slipped onto the ground. He was there on the concrete sobbing in a pool of tears. I went over and picked the child up, but he seemed uninjured and I handed the tot over to Erland. Smith’s widow Külliki came to the café, with their daughter Stina. They were both dressed in light-colored dresses. Neither seemed particularly upset.
“Is it really true,” I shouted out to Külliki. “Is Smith really dead?”
She nodded, but in a nonchalant way. She was picking flower petals and admiring the spa.
“These things just happen,” Külliki said, picking at her flower. “These things just happen.”
IT WASN’T THAT LATE, but I was exhausted. It had been a long day, and between the minus temperatures and heavy meal at the German beer house, I was ready for sleep. I went into the rental apartment and made my bed on the pull-out couch. I even turned my phone off, so that I could sleep peacefully. I thought I was asleep, actually, until I heard several people enter the main room of the apartment. “Who’s there?” I called out. “Identify yourselves.” No answer came, but I could hear them all talking to each other. “Who’s there? Who’s there? Who’s there?” I cried. About 25 people then came into the room and sat around me Indian style in the dark. They said they were my readers and that they wanted to know about my new book.
It was an interesting crew of attendees. Sting, for example, was sitting in the front row, looking like he did around the time that he played a bell boy in Quadrophenia. He told me not to let anyone else know about his secret visit to Tartu. Then another familiar personage stood up among the readers and identified himself. “My name is Keanu,” said the dark-haired man. “I am probably best known as the bassist for Dogstar.” “That’s not true,” I said. “You are best known as Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan of Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure. And what about The Matrix?” “But Dogstar is my true passion!” commanded Keanu Reeves. “Tell us all about your new book!”
I was in my pajamas, so this was kind of an uncomfortable meeting with readers. Later, we went out to tour the city, making stops at the City Theatre and the Botanical Gardens. Much of it was organized byDavča, a bow-tied Czech entrepreneur, former executive at Maersk, and major figure in Baltic Sea trade. A young woman who bore a passing resemblance to the singer Nicki Minaj came along, and would not let me resist her sexual advances. “Please, please, can I be with you!” She wouldn’t leave me alone. “Fine,” I said, “let’s do it right here.” We went into an alleyway, where I began to lick her rather large brown breasts. This went on for some time until Davča popped his head into the alleyway and said, “Hey, you two, no more time for breasts! Keanu, Sting, and the others are waiting!” It was time to go visit the Christmas Fair.
I DIDN’T REALIZE that there was a cluster of houses in a hollow across from Kassitoome in Tartu. How I had never walked into this secret hideaway neighborhood was a mystery to me. That it had been repossessed by hipsters and eco-hippies was not surprising. I suppose it had once been a little industrial alley of shoemakers and blacksmiths in the old days, but now there were little red brick bungalows and wobbly lean-to wooden huts serving up tropical smoothies and chickpea-flour wraps. Men with well-groomed beards recounted their adventures in climbing Nepalese mountains, or picking avocados in the Southern Hemisphere, or how they got the first of a whole series of tribal tattoos, while their dreadlock-headed consorts flagrantly nursed their babes in plain view and talked about vaccines and Chinese astrology.
At the end of this alley, there was a tall building that opened up on the other side onto Jakobi Street. This served as a newer part of the University of Tartu Museum, but there was some office space upstairs. I walked into the lobby, and took the elevator up, hoping to come out on Jakobi Street on the other side. But instead, the great glass elevator only went higher and higher until it reached the very top floor. It continued to rise, and I could feel the elevator itself begin to come apart. I panicked and held onto a bar, in case the floor collapsed out from beneath me. Then I kicked the door to the elevator apart, as hard as I could. At last, the glass shattered, and a man in a suit came running from the desk of the museum and helped me out. He looked a bit like Steve Carell in his role as “Michael” in The Office. “Michael” apologized for the inconvenience, but I didn’t care. I was just happy to get out of that Tartu death trap alive.
MY BROTHER came to visit me in Estonia. He hadn’t been here in 20 years and was amazed by how much things had changed. “It used to look like Gorky Park,” he said. “Now it looks like this!” To tell you the truth, I had been away just before he came, and took a ship from Stockholm back to Tallinn to meet him. Somewhere near one of the Åland Islands, though, I dropped my keys in the sea. They just tumbled out of my pocket. Even though the water was shallow there, and I could see the white rocks just below the water’s surface, I was unable to retrieve the keys and the ship sailed on. Which meant that when he showed up off the flight from New York, we had to take a rickety Bolt rickshaw down to the Baltic Station Market.
He didn’t seem to mind though. It looked as if he hadn’t changed since he got out of work in Midtown Manhattan. He was impressed by the new market, and the different kinds of exotic foods one could buy there. In fact, he spent the whole evening going from one stall to another. “You can get a slice of Sicilian over there,” I told him. “There’s a South African eatery here too. And whatever you do, you are not to miss out on the legendary and delicious VLND Burger!”
He tried them all and even had some ice cream, but then the jet lag set in and I suggested we take another Bolt rickshaw up a few streets into Kalamaja and then Viljandi beyond. But then I remembered the Omniva smart hotel. All you had to do was enter in the access code, and one of the doors in the parcel machine would open up and convert into a budget hotel room. There was even a bunk bed. My brother climbed to the top bunk and was soon fast asleep. His jacket was tucked beneath his arms as he snored in the top bunk of an Omniva parcel machine smart hotel room. To my amazement, there were no food stains on his crisp white business shirt.
THAT NIGHT I went out for a stroll in the early evening snow. I walked up by the new church and then turned left and came around by the great department store or shopping center or ostukeskus. Whatever they are calling it these days. Half a dozen underwear models fawned over me from a lit-up billboard and Christmas lights were blinking everywhere. At the crosswalk, there was a red light and I stood and waited in the cold. There was a girl waiting on the other side of the street, in the snow and wind, all dressed in white. She wore a white parka, which was pulled up over her golden hair, and she had on white pants and white snow boots.
For a moment, I was reminded of Dulcinea. Dulcinea, love of loves, muse of muses. She always had such a brisk and wild energy to her. She was like a little chunk of sunlight, warming everything wherever she went. I then wished that Dulcinea was the one standing across from me. I imagined how beautiful she would look with such a white parka and such white boots. When was the last time I saw her? In the summer. She walked by me in the park, and her eyes were the same. They were always so kind, her eyes. Dulcinea’s eyes are impossible to forget.
They’re like stars.
I remembered those words she had typed out to me long ago. “With you, it’s always some kind of soup.” But the girl standing across from me wasn’t her. It was just someone else. Some random pedestrian. The light turned green and we walked by each other. The girl in the white parka wasn’t Dulcinea. She looked nothing like her.
WE WERE TRYING to escape. From what I don’t know. It was through some kind of cave system, or tunnel. I cannot say if it was man-made or not. What I do remember is that I was surrounded by Ingrian girls. Dozens of them, maybe. Hundreds. There were so many of them, and they were all trying to climb out of the passageway and get out into the cold but welcoming December air. I don’t know what their names were, but they seemed to have been of uniform age and appearance. They had red curly hair and their skin was milk white. They wore black shirts and blue jeans. They were beautiful but desperate and very aggressive.
One Ingrian girl climbed up my back and then sort of pushed herself over my head, as if doing some kind of acrobatic trick. and another pushed by my arms. There were just so many of them. I can’t say anything was really inviting about the thing. It was a stampede. Ingria was the historical name of the territory connecting what is now Estonia with the current Finnish border. It covers the swampy area where Peter the Great decided to build his imperial city.
The only hint at civilization in the cave was an old monument that had been built into the walls. Words were chiselled into the granite, maybe about the Estonian War of Independence, or perhaps the Finnish Winter War, but I could not read them. I only gripped the stone as I pulled myself out into the light. A dozen or so Ingrian girls were already standing there looking down at me. I remember their curly red hair, the slope of their faces, those haunting blue eyes.
SOMEHOW, I wound up visiting Kermit Haas at his art studio on the opposite side of the lake. I think he picked me up after a plane connected to a local agricultural company had flown over the coastal plain and sprayed it with pesticides. I happened to be outside when that happened, by a lake-side vacation home, and standing among the golden reeds at sunset when that goop rained down upon me. I remember reaching and touching the back of my neck and scraping off a handful of green slime from the pesticide plane. It was like Agent Orange or something. I began to worry about my health after that and if I had been exposed to something really toxic.
But then Kermit picked me up in his car and we drove off.
It was actually a single-storey, Scandinavian style art studio. I didn’t realize that Kermit had so many people working for him. He gave me a towel to clean myself from the green goop, and his young assistant brought me a mug of coffee. A simple, spare, well-lit place. It was almost as if Ikea had done the interior, but the quality of the desks and bookshelves was many times higher, and I am sure he had designed every cranny of that place. Kermit is this kind of engaging character. He’s about 10 years older than me. He studied at an art school in France. He has long, graying hair, and likes to wear sweaters and scarves, when the weather requires it. Kermit has this vague sort of Europeanness about him. He’s not really Estonian or French. He is sort of like one of those in-flight magazines on Finnair or Lufthansa. It feels European, it looks European, and it even smells European, but you can’t really say why it’s so European.
The coffee was good and strong, but a little too hot, and I was clumsy after the plane pesticide incident. I spilled some coffee on a nearby table, and a little ran off onto the floor, where it pooled. Urmas’s assistant immediately went to fetch a towel to clean it up, and I began to apologize. But then I noticed that the wet spot was only growing, and soon a clear water began to roll into the studio. It was the water from the lake! It was rising! The water was rolling in, and it was warm and ankle deep. This had not been from the coffee. “We need to get out of here,” said Kermit. “And quick!” We ran to his car. He stuffed a dozen precious canvases into the trunk. My computer bag was already soaked, and I was sure the electronics were ruined. “Good thing all of my work is on Google Docs,” I said. “I am sure your things will be fine,” Kermit responded. I tossed my guitar in the back too. It was in an odd, turtle-shaped case I had never seen before. Then we all jumped into the car and sped away, to escape the flood.
I don’t know what happened to that assistant though. She was too willing to resolve all of our problems. Maybe she stayed behind? Maybe she was tasked with cleaning up after the flood?
THE SCHOOL was constructed in the Colonial Revival style sometime at the tail-end of the 1930s, financed by a local tycoon. It featured four large white columns, and incorporated elements of Federal and Georgian architecture. At its founding, it served as a public school for local students in Sowassetville and adjacent communities, from kindergarten through 12th grade, but eventually, as the population grew, it was developed into a middle school in the 1960s. I hadn’t been there in years, but when I was invited back, along with other members of the ninth grade class of 1995, I decided to return, to see if it could inspire any memories.
To my surprise, the interior of the school had been completely redone, and a large stone-surfaced park had been installed, along with a bronze memorial to the Estonian War of Independence (1918-1920). A solemn soldier stood at its precipice, holding a sword up into the air. His head was decorated with a wreath. In the front of the school, there was a new staircase leading to a second level. From this level, one could take a glass-enclosed corridor into a new extension of the school. It was like something from an aquarium. “I don’t remember any of this,” I told an old classmate, who was clutching unreturned library books, such as The Great Gatsby. “None of this was here when we were. It’s like the entire school has been changed.”
I went down a back staircase into a cafeteria. But only more confusion ensued. It was like a big billowing cloud of confusion. I was reminded of a New Order song by the same name. Because Raivo, my faithful translator, was seated at one of the booths in the cafeteria. He was there in a button-down shirt in one of the booths, digging through a Caesar salad. Raivo said that we had to get a translated version of one my short stories to the editors as soon as possible. I still was baffled to see him there. And then when I turned my head, I noticed that the lovely Atlacamani, the mysterious Azteca goddess of storms, was also seated in the cafeteria. She was wearing a red shirt and blue pants and was seated with musicians from the Viljandi Cultural Academy.
They were all eating fries.
El Scorcho, a Chilean folk singer with a slight mustache who lives and thrives in V Town, arrived with a tray full of food and drink. His guitar was slung across his back. He was wearing one of those gray ponchos they wear down in the Andes. He said, “You look so funny. You should see your face.” I said, “What’s going on? What are you all doing here?” El Scorcho just smiled. “A lot has changed since you went to junior high school,” he said. “Todo es diferente.”
HEIDI WAS STRETCHED out on some kind of wooden platform at the intersection of Sun and Moon Streets. It was right in front of the large brick edifice that once belonged to a local Jewish merchant. That was in the interwar years, before the Great Death. She was stretched out there in the sunlight, with her rear exposed and also her back. The rest of her bundles of clothes were bunched up around her knees and neck. The wind blew through her gold hair. I wondered what I should do about the whole scene. I walked around her on the platform and examined her. I wondered if I should take things a step further. But didn’t she have a boyfriend? Prince Hans of the Seven Isles? I left and walked farther down Moon Street.
Smith had opened a new café a few doors down from the Bhutanese restaurant. He called it “Smith’s Espresso.” A large ceramic cup was suspended from a hook above the door. Inside, there were just a few tables and a coffee machine. Smith wore an apron and a old-fashioned cap and fixed me the drink. There was another patron, a college student of about 19, who was from some other country, a Hungarian maybe. He wanted to know about Jack Kerouac. He was reading The Dharma Bums. I told him of my personal connections to the legendary beatnik, and how I had once interviewed the bartender who sold Jack many a drink in downtown Northport on Long Island. He had told me that Kerouac was a bad drunk. “And he gave me a copy of his book, Tristessa. I couldn’t make any sense of it,” he said. “I threw that junk away.”
“Can you imagine? The old fool bartender threw an autographed copy of Tristessa into the trash bin.” “Tragedy,” the Hungarian said. He had written a haiku to Gary Snyder but hadn’t heard back. He had on a sky blue scarf fixed around his neck, though it wasn’t particularly cold. He had light hair and blue eyes, and looked sort of like he belonged at a 1970s ski resort. I imagine that such stylish accoutrements were necessary for the up-and-coming hipster set.
After I left Smith’s Espresso, I decided to stretch out my legs. I peered down Moon Street and saw Heidi still sprawled out there, with her milk white buttocks in the air and autumnal sunshine, and went the other way. I found my way to the Botanical Gardens, and two ladies came out of the hedges and greeted me. They were both highly manicured and treated women, belonging to the town’s caste of the upwardly mobile and aspiring nouveau riche. The kinds of women who had marvellously sculpted eyebrows, buffed fingernails, and pants that seemed to perfectly stick to every contour of their legs and hindquarters. Friendly, but somehow of another tribe, as I too belonged to some other tribe, the Tribe of Kerouac.
They started to pepper me with questions. They wanted to know if I was good in bed or, rather, their friend Gunna, who worked in the market, who had red hair, and red paints, and red freckles, and barely spoke, needed to know. Badly. Somehow sex had never come up between us, but now I understood that it was actually all about sex. Everything had always been about the sex all along. The only question was if I would be willing to give it. The answer was a tentative yes, I told the two ladies outside the Botanical Garden. I doubted, for a second, just a second, in my lovemaking abilities, and if I would be able to please Gunna as she needed.
SOMETIME IN THE BLEAK DEPTHS of the pandemic, I became aware of the arrival of some dark-haired, shadowy strangers in town, mysterious characters who would lurk at the margins of parties, or whose strumming of guitars might be overheard whenever I passed the room they were renting on Posti Street. The Chileans! The way people around me referred to them, it was as if a whole orchestra from Valparaíso had been shipwrecked on the shores of Lake Viljandi. In reality, there were just two: Tomás del Real and Javier Navarro. But they were important. They were part of something new: a little South American community in Viljandi.
Viljandi, despite its rather small size, has always hosted pocket-sized minority enclaves. One stretch of Pikk Street was once called “Jew Street,” because of the active Jewish community that dwelled there before the Soviets deported some and the Germans and their evil helpers murdered the rest. Viljandi’s Jews even had their own sauna and fire brigade. There are also stories about the Romani people, or mustlased, who once camped in the forests where the Metsakalmistu, or Forest Cemetery, is now located, and how the Romani women tried to convince Mayor Maramaa to buy them horses so that they could leave. As far as I know, there was never a Latin American community here, until the arrival of Tomás and Javier from Chile, and Pepi from Argentina, and Tito from Cuba, and Miguelito from Mexico too. Slowly, something new is coming into existence.
Of these Latin Viljandiers, musician Tomás del Real is perhaps among the better known. On August 26, he performed at the Pärimusmuusika Ait, or Folk Music Center, to celebrate the release of his latest album, Principios de Declaración. Del Real is no stranger to the iconic Ait. He even used to live in the cellar when he first arrived in Viljandi and got an artist’s residency.
“Downstairs is where my room used to be, and every time I go there, my heart skips a beat,” he says. “Next to it is the rehearsal room, and that also gets me emotional.” Tomás recalls staring at the stones in the wall, or looking out the windows of the Ait on winter days when everything about Estonia was new, and he would take long walks around the old castle ruins. “Every spot in the Ait contains memories,” he says. “Every time I perform in the Ait, I get nervous, because it matters to me.”
His own performance, in front of a mostly packed house, came off flawlessly. While the songs on the record have diverse origins, the quiet introspection of Viljandi life has seeped into all. He also structured his show in a unique way, with one half of the stage divided between a standing microphone, where he addressed the audience as would any singer songwriter, standing and at times, and discussing the political situation at home in Chile. On the other part of the stage, he had a “living room,” where he played his tunes just as if he was at home. Tomás says this is part of the duality of being a character and a witness to music being created. He adds that during the “living room” segment of his show, he for a time felt like he was home, which, for now at least, means Viljandi’s Old Town. He even has a composition on the record called “Viljandi.” Though he grew up so far away, he also says there are certain commonalities between Chileans and Estonians. The era of the military dictatorship in Chile officially ended in 1990, while Estonians restored their independence the following year.
Tomas del Real on stage in Viljandi on August 26. Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.
“We have both been oppressed and in difficult situations,” says Tomás. Because of that, he says, both cultures value friendships, because they have learned to rely on each other. “It’s the only way that people who have suffered for so long can function as a society,” Tomás says. He adds that Chileans have also learned to be tight-lipped like Estonians, for the same reasons.
Viljandi has also fostered a creative streak in Tomás, which is another reason why he has stayed here. At one point, he was writing one new song a day, some of which appeared on a record he cut with local musician Lee Taul last year, calling their duo Don’t Chase the Lizard. The rest of it populates the hypnotic tunes on his latest solo outing. But Tomás is not the only musician from South America in Viljandi these days. There is at least one other sudamericano.
He is the one known to all as “Pepi”.
Indeed José “Pepi” Prieto might, in some future almanac authored by local historian Heiki Raudla, be considered the pioneer Latin American in Viljandi. He was the first to explore it, the same way that explorer Juan Diaz de Solis once dropped anchor in what is now Argentina in 1516. A native of Buenos Aires, Pepi had almost anything one could dream of by his early twenties: a steady girlfriend, a band, a career. He was restless though, and decided to go abroad for a spell, where he worked as a programmer in Indonesia. A chance encounter with an Estonian woman there inspired him to come to the northern margins of Europe, just as it once inspired a young American journalist to do the same. It was a decade ago, and just a few days before Christmas. “I was told that it was -30 degrees, but I had no idea of how cold it actually was,” he says of this frosty arrival. Like any true South American, he showed up in Estonia in December wearing shorts. “We went straight to the shop after that to buy a good coat and boots,” he says.
Then he came to Viljandi. Immediately, it struck him as a quiet, inspiring place, where his creativity for unknown reasons began to surge in the same way that it would for Tomás later. For years, Pepi kept a room in the Koit Seltsimaja, or Koit Society House, on the corner of Koidu and Jakobsoni Streets that once housed the Ugala Theatre from the 1920s until the 1980s.
For a time he even managed a creative space there, called the Sama Sama Studios.
“I started to feel like I was the guardian of that house,” says Pepi. “I was the person bringing people to the house, and always showing people the rooms.” It also inspired him to write new music, to invite people to collaborate on music and to perform.
Araukaaria, as seen through the gates of the Koit Society House. Pepi Prieto, Lee Taul, Johannes Eriste, Fedor Bezrukov, and Norbert De Varrene. Photo by Paul Meiesaar.
These days, Pepi performs with Araukaaria, a quintet that also features Lee Taul on violin and vocals, as well as percussionist Johannes Eriste, a guitarist called Norbert De Varrene, and a bassist from Narva named Fedor Bezrukov. The band’s music is informed by South American psychedelia from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Estonian folk. They have an earnest but passionate sound. The band named itself after the sacred tree of the indigenous Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina, and araucano is a Spanish name for the Mapuches. “I grew up seeing these trees,” says Pepi, whose father was Chilean. “They have always been in my life.” Pepi sees other kinds of trees these days though. Birches, pines, and alders. He loads them into his wood-heated furnace. He also has a summer place outside town where he is raising cucumbers and potatoes with his Estonian family.
That’s right, Pepi, like myself, has contributed to population growth in the Republic of Estonia. He can now be seen walking a small blonde child down the street and speaking Spanish to her. Sometimes his friend Leandro, another programmer from Argentina whom he enticed to Estonia, tags along. Leandro is also a regular in town, but has opted to live in Tallinn full time. When I see both of them, I have to look twice. Latin Americans in Viljandi? How did it even happen?
“They are not like stereotypical South Americans, because they enjoy winter and silence, so in that sense they are in the right place,” says Lee Taul, who collaborates with Tomás and Pepi. “We are richer that they have come here, and they also know how to attract people with their energy,” she says, describing both del Real and Prieto as industrious, motivated musicians.
“They love nature too,” says Lee of her respective bandmates. “That is perhaps one reason they are here, because the forest is in the city,” she says. “For every true artist, nature provides a rich environment, a golden nest from which to hatch something new to life.”
Tomás for his part concurs with her assessment, calling the Estonians’ relationship with nature as “connected and profound.” “It’s absolutely true that I am more creative here because of the environment,” remarks Pepi. Here I would have to say they are correct, even if I am not a South American, or only in my heart. I am grateful for the arrival of these Southerners. Not only are they inspired by Viljandi, but they have inspired me. I agree with them, and wholeheartedly.
north! 