estonia/eesti/estland – Page 22

I WAS PARKED at an Olerex gas station with a new red jeep when a jolly woman showed up out of nowhere with lots of freckles and wavy red hair. She then demonstrated to me how the back of the jeep could be converted into beds, and it wasn’t too long after that I found myself in her warm lush embrace with lips locked and souls blending into rainbow oblivion. That’s right, the good stuff, all in the back of a jeep at an Olerex in Tartu. That was at least satisfying to my soul.

Then somehow I wound up on the bridge from Narva to Ivangorod with Raivo H., whereupon we encountered Noam Chomsky crossing the bridge. “Mr. Chomsky, Mr. Chomsky, I have read many of your books!” He was not impressed and rather a dick in person. He just wanted to go to some Russian bistro on the other side and load up on their greasy Slavic dishes.

I eventually lost Raivo too, who felt too comfortable speaking Russian to the Russians, and decided I had had my fill of Russia and had to go back to Estonia. In Russia, it was night, and there was a lot of graffiti and garbage and sad-eyed people seated around cafes and restaurants drinking. In Estonia, it was daytime and painfully clean and painfully quiet. Even the Estonian Russians of Narva were silent as they went about gardening and cycling.

ON THE FRONTIER, a woman I know has gone face first into the survival enterprise. They are planting trees along the property line to obscure the view of the farm by travelers and passersby, the fields have been turned over for crops, and a symphony of domesticated birds plays on from morning until night and again restarts at first light.

Brahma, the fattest of the hens, escorts dozens of tiny black chicks around the yard. Named for the Hindu creator god, she has slow, deliberate movements, thick, voluptuous, golden-feathered thighs, and the youth gather around her wiry legs underneath, reassured by her confident mama strut. In the distance, the roosters are crowing, not only to announce the dawn, but to announce the coming of the new age.

Soft yellow flowers sparkle in the sun among fat green blades of grass, and the trees are coming into full bloom. It’s a barn yard candy land. This is in the Deep South of the Estonian countryside. The Russian border is a jagged line crossing corners here and there, but on the other side of that border, there is just more forest and more countryside, more chickens and women in handkerchiefs. Few people here have the disease, but there is this idea that when, not if, but when everything crumbles, this will be the safest place. That’s why they need to plant the trees, to keep the hungry travelers away and out of their foodstuffs.

This is not an isolated case. All across the countryside here, people are preparing for the apocalypse. They always have been, but now it seems palpable and they can taste it. And now they know that all of that work will pay off and mean something. That’s what they’ve been telling me. There is a brisk trade in chicks, and people circulate the latest explain-it-all theory. Some people haven’t been to the shop in months, and a van makes deliveries of milk and cheese to the frontier survivalists. They don’t have time for shops because there is so much more farm work to be done, and they still fear the disease. Their only company are vetted visitors who have been in quarantine, and the chirping birds who serenade both day and night.

“Isn’t Brahma a good hen?” the woman calls out to her young daughter. The girl stops with her watering can and eyes the bird. “Yes, emme,” she agrees. “Brahma is such a good hen. Just look at her with all of those chicks!”