STANDING IN LINE in Telliskivi, waiting to enter a French-themed can-can bar behind an older lady with short gray hair parted on the side, and spectacles, like an aged Frau Farbissina from the Austin Powers franchise. At the desk they requested her recovery, vaccination, and booster codes, and she was lacking one, fumbling through her purse, speaking in broken English, so they sent her away. When it was my turn, I spoke to them in Estonian, but the security guard, a husky type with a handlebar mustache, informed me that he had no knowledge of that language. Then an older man came out of the establishment and addressed him in German so perfect, I later marveled that my mind could reproduce the German language in such a believable way. He was trailed by a French-speaking couple. Same story. There were some Estonians working the front desk, but they gave me that dreadful Soviet legacy service, just shrugged their shoulders and blinked and did nothing. “Not my problem.” I left the can-can bar and went somewhere else. I didn’t have three passes anyway. Persona non grata, that’s what I was. No can-can for me. Not this time.

ONE NIGHT I dreamt of Kärt and Anselmo, her Latin husband. We were at their penthouse in the city. It was late morning and Kärt was sprawled out nude in her bed, engulfed in crisp, white sheets. The sun was through the window on the sheets and illuminating her tufts of wild golden hair. I was kneeling beside the bed suckling on one of Kärt’s breasts while she took part in a Teams meeting via her phone. Kärt is not one to let bedside reveries get in the way of work.

Sometimes though, Kärt did get thirsty and dispatched me to fetch her some water or coffee, which I was only too glad to do. Then Anselmo, that brooding Spaniard, would enter, tying his tie for work. He would take his turn kneeling on the opposite side of the bed, and being attentive to Kärt’s other breast. My breast was her right breast. Never did I venture to the left. That was Anselmo’s territory. Likewise, he never took her right nipple in his mouth. It was my job to be attentive to Kärt’s right breast.

This went on like this for some time in the dream, the jug worshipping, until it was time for us to both leave. Kärt needed to prepare for a working lunch. Anselmo meanwhile had ignored me for the entirety of this exercise (other than to lecture aloud, as if to a spellbound audience, that visitors had to keep their hands above the sheets, that is, only breast licking was permitted in the penthouse and nothing more). At the door though, Anselmo for the first time turned to me and asked, “What do you think, Justin, is it really possible for a man not to have faith in himself?” 

It was a very serious question and Anselmo looked me in the eyes as he asked it to me. To which I replied, “Well, if he has done all that he can and it still doesn’t work out, I suppose a man has reasons to doubt himself.” Anselmo nodded repetitively as if making a series of calculations. Then he called me a defeatist and marched out the door to work.

I am relating this tale to you now because one of my friends told me that I should try to write more about sex. She is a long-time confidant, a middle-aged woman and a mother of three. But she wants to read about sex. Sex involving me? Like what? Positions? Experiences? Advice? 

When I told her that it would be difficult for me, ethically at least, she suggested that I write about dreams instead. “Use your imagination. You can get away with anything in your dreams.” This she said with a wink and was out the café door holding several bags of fresh coffee. 

That dream about Kärt and Anselmo is a recent one and I really enjoyed it because it was so different. Breast worshipping? A Teams meeting? I could never make these things up while I was awake. These kinds of dreams are interesting because they always find ways to surprise you. It’s always a treat just who you wind up with in your dreams, and often you wind up dreaming about people who maybe aren’t so attractive to you in your waking life but are quite thrilling to be with in bed when you are asleep. Then you awake in delirium, feeling as if a great truth has been revealed.

One night, I dreamt again that I was back in Tallinn. I was down by the Linnahall, which had now become a tropical location, with a bright sandy beach lined by palm trees just like in Belize. The Linnahall was overgrown with vegetation and vines, like some kind of ruined Mayan temple, and the waters of the harbor were crystal clear and warm, and you could see your feet below. That was not all you could see, because it was then that I realized that I was completely naked. So there I was, naked in the capital. I managed to steal a towel from someone on the beach, and soon was sauntering through the Rotermanni kvartal wearing my makeshift diaper. 

Of course, when I reached the publishing houses on Maakri Street, I happened to see Linnea, the beloved author of many prominent and revered books, who was exiting some swanky party. When I looked over and saw her shapely form attired in one of her flowing elegant dresses my heart sank. To make matters even worse, Linnea was walking right my way. Soon after, we were making love on a bench on Maakri Street, she in her elegant dress and me in my stolen towel. Then I noticed the photographer from Kroonika had arrived to take a few photos of our scene. Rather than flee, Linnea only pulled me closer into a sumptuous kiss. “Don’t worry,” Linnea said. “You and I are going to sell lots and lots of books.” Her words soothed any remaining concerns. And soon after, the city was full of the sensual sounds of sighing, suckling, satisfied dreamers. 

Who would ever want to wake up from a dream like that?

THIS IS THE SEASON, the season of heavy boots and crackling fires, of warm blankets and dark nights. It’s a relief at times to feel winter’s cold hands on your face. As hard as it is on the body, as hard as it is on the mind, and hard on the soul, there is a stunning beauty in the diamond elegant hardness of winter, in those frosted-out branches reaching to the moon in full, mirroring back light like phantom fingers.

Outside, the local men march and return, ascending crooked staircases, great armfuls of birch and alder to burn, held tight in their muscles. That hard-headed determination, that clenched desire to survive and keep warm. Inside their wives and girlfriends are making them soup or tea. Sometimes their girlfriends are other men’s wives.

On some cold nights, it’s all too much. On some nights, it feels good to shiver, to let the cold have its way with you. Let it all in. Let it in through the doors, and windows, through the floor. Then it’s morning and I wake up thinking about Brynhild, which is some Old Norse goddess name I have given to one woman who appears from time to time. I think of the comfort of her breast, and how weak I am for it, and how she is unrepentant for betraying her husband. “It’s complicated,” she says.

I don’t like being weak, or vulnerable, or in need of comfort, but when the opportunity arises, that’s when I understand how famished I am. My life is full of hard things. Heaviness, wintryness, ice floe hardness. There is no natural softness in me, so I seek out the soft. I dream of the warmth and of the soft as I head out to the wood barn and the flakes are fluttering down in the moonlight at midnight. I crawl up and sleep in the room beside the hot flames in the furnace and awake beneath the blanket at the very first signs of light.

Outside, there are already people on their way somewhere, stepping over mounds of snow to head to the cafe or to the apothecary, bundled in hats, gloves, shawls, boots, and just a little room for their wild eyes. Sometimes I ask myself, do I love Brynhild? The answer I think is no. I don’t love anymore. Sometimes I try, but it never goes anywhere. You get that big feeling and all you are left with is some words, or an idea, or the memory of being content for a while. Sometimes the women I think I love have partners, which means they are locked up tight like princesses in some castle, and there’s no getting at them anyhow, even as they blow kisses at you from the tower. Sometimes they don’t, but they are always looking for something better. Sometimes they pass you on the street with another man. Most times they don’t look back. They might wave to you. That’s when I think that love is just some word someone made up once upon a time. Like a fever dream, I wake up restless again and aching for comfort. I think again of Brynhild.

Sometimes you don’t fully understand how hungry you can be for a woman until she’s lying there nude beside you. Sometimes the experience is so confusing, so euphoric, and so grotesque, that I don’t know what to think. I keep coming back for more. I have to go back because I want more. Anything to keep warm on cold nights. This is it for me then, the restlessness, the shuffling, the drifter’s life. Like some bluesman hobo of the American South, moving from town to town. You listen to the blues and fall asleep to them at night. You get up, put on your snow boots and head out. Maybe some princess in a tower might blow you a kiss. Or maybe Brynhild will at last take pity on your soul. Maybe today will be different.

THE NORTH STAR STIPEND, an annual allotment of state support for the arts. I badly needed the money and I badly needed help with my project. I decided to go visit Christian and Anita, who live down the street. They’re both heavily involved in the arts scene and have been awarded various state honors, medals, sashes, and accolades and have had their words chiseled into granite. Christian has been passed up too many times for a Nobel, but will surely receive his invitation to Stockholm someday. The residence is brimming with stacks of books, a lovely old fashioned-drawing room where Christian sits, thumbing a gray beard and smelling of pipe smoke. There he reads Bergman’s The Magic Lantern and contemplates existence. I knew Christian would help me win the stipend. Yet he was not at home. His wife Anita was. She beckoned me to the second floor, and then into her bathroom, complete with large windows and big white bathtub, and thus began to undress herself from a loose-fitting gown. Anita was a much older woman, with white hair and light eyes. She was once a stage actress, a contemporary of Jane Fonda and Catherine Deneuve and other legends, heavily courted by many of the world’s most decadent and monied men of industry, but chose this life instead, a life of letters, libraries and literature, a life with Christian. She was visibly older now, with plenty of wrinkles everywhere, lines no cream or cosmetic could conceal from the cruel illumination of the sun. There she was beside me, undoing her shirt slowly, and I felt at her breasts, which were still quite smooth, supple, and firm. It went on from there, slowly, deliberately, as a connoisseur sips a well-aged wine. We were only disturbed by good-natured whistling of Christian coming in downstairs, jingling his keys. “Honey, I’m home.” Anita dressed, and I came down the stairs alone, holding my head as if wounded, trying to look nonchalant. “Aha, Christian, it’s you.” “What are you doing in my house?” I was stricken with shame and embarrassment. “I came to ask your advice on a project. I am applying for the North Star Stipend.” “The North Star Stipend! Why, yes, of course. Of course, I myself received it many times. Even the first time, back in 1968. Or was it in 1969?” In my flustered, post-adultery mindset, I couldn’t express myself quite well. I stammered and mumbled, and couldn’t even remember what my idea was about. I left their home feeling like a true savage loser, and knew Christian would look at me differently the next time our paths crossed. I had so wanted to be a great writer, that was all I had really wanted, but I was just some actress’s part-time bathroom consort, it seemed, good for wet kisses and thespian breast fondling. At my own apartment, I could see my fellow writer Eeva out on the terrace. She was now living next door to me and seated in a chaise lounge reading a book, dressed up nicely in an old-fashioned 1940s Hollywood dress, complete with a hat, and her blonde hair was drawn about her shoulders. She had some visitors too, but when I called out to them, Eeva said that they were from Russia and didn’t speak any other tongue. “Ah,” I said then. “Harasho!” Everybody laughed, and for a while I forgot all about the North Star Stipend. Later, I returned to Christian and Anita’s house. Christian wasn’t home again, but Anita was, and again we repeated the bathroom sex scene. Again that feel of eerie sensual decay. I enjoyed it. Who wouldn’t. But it troubled me so, the whole sordid thing. After a long lingering kiss, Anita looked at me and said, “You know, I think we should stop this thing between us. I can’t really see it going anywhere.” We agreed, and I left soon after, never having consulted Christian, not having made progress. Later, my application for the North Star Stipend was denied by the review board, on which several of Christian’s colleagues sat, but I was fine with this dismissal, just fine to leave this bizarre macabre tale of secret loving behind. I still had my novel. I should concentrate all of my energies there. I went back home to the apartments, where Eeva was still lounging on the terrace, reading a paperback and eating an apple. She looked quite nice there in her old-fashioned dress and the Russians were long gone. It was nice to have such a pretty and talented neighbor, even if she always had her nose in a book. I decided to join her on the terrace with my writing machine and she never stopped reading. Then I sat down behind my clackety typewriter, rolled up my sleeves, and got back to work.

FISH’S WEEK NOW WENT LIKE THIS. Monday’s were spent at the Tallinn Viimsi Spa, followed by a Tuesday residence at Laulasmaa. Wednesday was his Tartu day. He would take his lunch in the atrium at the Kvartal Spa on the top floor of the department store complex, with scheduled appearances in the Finnish sauna and Russian banya at 2 pm and 3 pm, respectively.

Thursday was a day Fish spent on the road, with an afternoon lunch in Suure-Jaani, then an evening alternating guest slot at some of the lesser-favored Pärnu bath houses (the Estonia Spa was his favorite Thursday night haunt, but he sometimes would spend time at Terviseparadiis — the Health Paradise — just to curry favor with the ownership). Most of Friday too was occupied by Pärnu slots, Hedon and others, and then he would helicopter out to Saaremaa for an evening massage at the Grand Rose. This was covered extensively in the local media, and Fish was even offered his own guest column in Oma Saar newspaper.

By Saturday, Fish was in Haapsalu being bathed in hot mud at Spa Hotel Laine. Sundays he took quietly in downtown Tallinn Water World and Spa. It was a tight schedule, and friends remarked on his new ruddy, broiled complexion. Fish had many girlfriends in each of the spas who came to depend on his regularity, and there were many social media posts that featured the handsome, dark-haired man waving, engulfed by adoring blondes.

For whatever reason, I had remained unaware of Fish’s new gig as a regular on the spa circuit, a new concept cooked up by an Estonian creative marketing team called the “spa celebrity.” As far as I knew, he was still working as a tour guide in Vienna, showing tourists around the haunts of Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Adolf Hitler, and other great men. Each tour would end with an evening at a beer hall and complimentary baskets of pretzels. He led an abstemious lifestyle, and shared a small apartment in the Favoriten District with a local accordionist. Yet he took readily to his glut career as a celebrity spa guest. He became so full of himself that he forget to tell me that he had moved to Estonia. Disappointed in Fish I was, you might say, yet so intrigued.

It was there, visiting Fish during an appearance in Pärnu, that I noticed that the Windy One had returned to work as a physical therapist. There she was with her chocolate hair, full lips, oblivious as always to my love and presence. She just stood there quietly in the corner, folding some white towels, dressed in the light blue shirt of the spa staff. It seemed somehow appropriate that I would encounter this particularly intangible soulmate in some hidden floor of some forgotten spa while visiting someone as otherworldly as our Fish.

The Windy One did not want to see me. She did not want to talk to me. She ignored me, wanted nothing of me. Yet I said nothing as I took her hand and pressed it into mind, and then we kissed each other and the love channels were reopened. “There, see,” I told her. “Now everything can breathe. Now we can begin again.” The Windy One nodded and went back to folding her towels. When I returned to the foaming hot baths with Fish, a surfeit of Pärnu lasses was clinking cocktails around us. Fish said I had changed.

“It’s you, old buddy!” he gripped me by the shoulders. “You’re back! Where have you been these years?”

“I just went to get a fresh towel,” I said.

“Good times, man. Good times!”

I furnished a waterproof dictaphone and began. “How does one become an Estonian spa celebrity? Start with your childhood. Were you always drawn to spas?” And on it went.

RUSSIANS ON MY MIND, some were passing through Viljandi Town, tourists perhaps. Russians are so different. They are not like Estonians. They look at you on the street, they might even make eye contact or acknowledge your presence in some other way. They might even make a little joke. We share this same plane of existence. How refreshing!

The Russians don’t need to invade, they’re already everywhere. Yet the Russians are stuck in the 1950s. Hopelessly stuck. The men still have those short haircuts, the leather jackets, the spotless jeans. The women wear generous helpings of makeup, their hair is blond and frosted. They look like they should be on Happy Days. They are heading to a sock hop. The great Russian sock hop. Comrade Buddy Hollyvitch will be playing, “That’ll Be the Day (When Stalin Dies).”

Later, I came home and I noticed my room had been ransacked. All my journals had been rummaged through, and someone had written over my thoughts in blue ink, so that it now read, “When the US humiliated Russia by allowing the Baltics into NATO,” here, or, “And that’s why Putin is such a strong resolute leader,” there. Strange, these NKVD KGB FSB ramblings inserted into my journals. Trying to get inside me, inside my mind, inside my inner monologue. Trying.

I asked my daughter if someone she didn’t know had stopped by the house. Indeed, someone had. “You mean that strange man in the leather jacket who was smoking?” The smoking man. He fit the description. “He said his name was Dmitri,” she said. Of course, I thought. It had to be Dmitri. Dmitri, Dmitri. Who else could it be?

AGAIN I SEE VESTA. She’s at the parchman farm with her husband, the Pole Radek, but all the pressures of farm life have toppled her over the edge. Clad in blouse and skirt, she loses control, cries and howls, reaches for Radek’s silver pistol and lets loose, shooting friends, relatives, neighbors. Radek and his brother Marek stack the corpses in an old cellar, the bodies laid along the wall shelves like in some early Christian catacomb. The brothers panic and scheme. They ride away in their truck and then it’s just me and Vesta, who seems tired by all the bloodletting.

I am afraid she will kill me too, so we play nice and as she gets into bed for the night, with her golden locks strewn across the pillows gleaming like patches of wild summer strawberries, she looks up at me and sighs and we embrace and exchange. Her flesh comes alive to the touch, her strawberries rise up as if to taste the rain, but then she pushes me away. “You have to go,” she says. “He’ll be back soon.”

Downstairs, she shows me an old Russian tractor with an odd curved key. It takes some time to get it started. Then I hoist her up on its lid and bury my face below her skirt into that brilliant fertile crescent. It feels as if I have surrendered my very soul up to kingdom come and my heart now is at ease. “You really must go,” she says again. “I love it, I do, but you have to go. He will be back very soon!”

I look at Vesta in the light of the barn and think about the bodies stacked up in the cellar. She looks gorgeous but it is time to go. Then I ride the sputtering old tractor over the hill and into the starry evening darkness. “As soon as I get home, I’m calling the police,” I think to myself. “Then I will tell them about the murderers and where the bodies are.”

WE WOUND UP going to some kind of art cinema in Tallinn’s Old Town, you know the kind, with walls painted black, with folding chairs. Igrayne likes to wave her hands around when she talks, and then puts them on her hips, to feign disgust and outrage. She has long, light-colored hair and is not afraid of donning a miniskirt. I remember where I met her. It was at a festival.

Igrayne’s hair used to be some natural color. Now it’s? Something else. Pink? Platinum? Bottle yellow? It’s fun to watch Igrayne communicate. Her violent words spurt out like free jazz, peppered with slang, salted with broken English. She thought the film was “terrible shit eks ole“, and was annoyed for having to even endure it, but I told her that it had some merits. Then we had a wet kiss and it seemed to resolve her internal conflicts about the setting and scenery.

After that, we rode home together in a yellow school bus, during which time Igrayne went down on me. We were like two cats, really. Just like two cats. But that is already another story.