viiratsi’s white cats

VIIRATSI is a community on the margins of Viljandi. On one hot day in July, there was nothing but blue in the sky and it’s fields and parks were green and sun-kissed. Coming down the road from the mechanic’s shop where I left my car, I noticed a white cat that peered at me for a moment, then disappeared into the overgrown brush that had sprouted up between rows of abandoned garages. I waded into the growth, pushing aside flowers and weeds, searching for my little white friend. This was kind of like Alice in Wonderland, I thought. White cats. White rabbits. Where did the cat go? The garages were from the Soviet era, made of white bricks from the factory up north. Someone had built them, maybe in some forgotten summer in the 1970s. Now they were in ruins and the windows were shattered. Just more leftover Soviet crap.

Between the garages, there was a concrete platform. I stared at the platform for a while and couldn’t understand for what purposes it had been built. It looked almost as if one could land small aircraft on it, but that couldn’t happen here, could it? There was just no use for such a thing. What was this place? I heard something rustle behind me and turned to see if it was my friend, the white cat, but it was just a bird. The cat was gone, I decided. I returned to the road and the way back through Viiratsi. The mechanic said he would call me when the car was fixed.

I came down the hill to the park and its two large ponds. On one side of the park, a man was seated on a bench. He wore a black coat and held a book in his hands. I nodded to the man, but he did not return the gesture. Then, as I came closer, I discovered that his eyes were closed. I could see the sweat on his brow, hear him snore. He was asleep. I decided not to disturb him.

I followed the path by the ponds to an empty bandstand overseeing dozens of benches, all of them empty. At some point, a concert might have been held here, yet there was no sign of life. The bandstand was made of new wood and the benches too had been cared for. The smell of freshly cut grass was in the air and I sat on the bandstand to rest. The pond waters were still.

Where was everybody?

The community of Viiratsi is ancient. One can even find the name “Weiratz” on old maps from the 18th century. Today, you would not guess its age. Even the old apartment blocks have new facades. Many homes have lush, organized gardens. There are swings and terraces and grills. Not a few would qualify for Estonian Home of the Year. In a nearby park on most days, children experiment with skateboards and lick ice cream. Somewhere a radio plays American pop songs. Even here the names of Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez are known yet we are far from the streets of Los Angeles. This place is so clean, so safe, so cared for, that the only bad thing that could be said about it is that it is almost too nice, too quiet. Almost every property fits into a tight grid. It reminds me a bit of those Playmobil toys, where the scenes of life are reduced to a home and garden, or an ice cream truck, and the toy people have toy smiles.

At the bus stop in the center of the village, I noticed one of those new, blue local transport buses that have bright yellow folk patterns painted on them and say V I L J A N D I M A A. The bus was just standing there, idling, but there was no-one on the bus, and there was no driver. I suppose he had just stepped away to use the toilet or buy some peanuts from the Viiratsi Konsum. After waiting for the driver to return, I walked on, the bus still idling behind me.

I wondered what had happened to the driver and started to think that maybe a UFO had just kidnapped everybody in Viiratsi. It was just too quiet. I came up Sakala Street puzzled by the silence. At the crest of the hill, I at last spied sweet Viljandi across the lake, with its wooden slums all piled up on top of each other. Viiratsi was over here, clipped and cared for, Viljandi was over there, disheveled, chaotic, and unruly. There was no question to where I belonged.

***

A few days later, I received the message that the car was ready. This time I came down Kõrgemäe Street. Then I turned up Tartu Street and took it all the way down to the highway through the wetlands. Once I reached Viiratsi, I took a footpath back into the silent town.

The old man was no longer asleep on his bench by the two ponds. This time, there was no one in the park at all. I looked up at the sky and saw the trail of an airplane but heard no engine roar. All was very calm and quiet again. I looked around for my white cat, but only encountered a black one, running out from behind one of the garages. He was in a hurry and didn’t look up.

At the mechanic’s shop, I discussed payment with the owner, a cheerful type in overalls. On the wall, there was a poster of a woman with chestnut hair peering over at us from her bed. She looked like a French woman, I thought, with dark eyes. Her skin was flushed, and she looked satisfied, as if she had just made love. I looked into those eyes, but when I imagined them looking at me, all I sensed was indifference. As I turned to leave, something else caught my eye. A white cat was standing beside my car. It eyed me curiously. Hadn’t we met before?

“Unbelievable,” I told the mechanic. “This is the same white cat that I saw here the first day.”

“Oh her? Don’t be fooled by the cat, man,” said the mechanic. “Viiratsi is full of white cats.”

Written June 2018

veeriku thieves

I WAS ROBBED outside of Veeriku Selver in Tartu. It happened just last night. There were three of them, but a ringleader, of course. I’m seldom violent, but the joke about “stealing his backpack” turned into a non-joke. I don’t remember what the other two of them looked like. One was thinner and had darker hair. The other one was chunky. The ringleader was named Andreas or some variant on the name Andrew. Only later, I recognized his physical similarity to Bree van de Kamp’s son from Desperate Housewives, whose name was also Andrew. But he was speaking Estonian. So I was robbed by Andrew van de Kamp’s Estonian doppelganger.

She, a lady of my life, was AWOL meantime. She had reconnected over social media with an old lover from the Canary Islands. A British traveler who had retained a faded photograph taken at night on a beach in Maspalomas. In the photograph, he was noticeably older, with white already intruding into a red-colored beard and a flat cap. She was who she was at that time, looking somewhat naively out at the camera (and who took that photo? Probably some other tourist who had been passing by). That had all happened back in 1999. They had found each other. “Can’t you see,” she said, showing me the photo. “He was the real love of my life!” He was older now. Back then he was late forties. Now he was 70+. Age, they said, was just a number.

God, I hated my life, having to contend with undying 1990s soap operas and getting mugged at Veeriku Selver. It was almost as bad a lifetime sentence to suburbia. But, as Rage Against the Machine once sang, anger is a gift. I made short work of the Veeriku thieves. The other two retreated into the alleyways, and I picked “Andreas” up and brought him inside. He called me a coward and unmanly for not settling things the old-fashioned way and for leaving him with the guards. I told him that I wasn’t a policeman, it wasn’t my job to deal with criminals. Later, he tried to tell the Tartu Police that it had all been a gag, that he had just been pretend-stealing.

Inside of Veeriku Selver, I encountered Erland and his Musi examining some carrots and potatoes. They were gathering ingredients for soup, but seemed lost in their cooperative world of steady relationship. Upstairs, I discovered a room for guests and sat on a couch. I turned on the old-fashioned TV set. The TV was showing M*A*S*H. Alan Alda was making another one of those jokes I could never understand. And there was that other character, Radar. I can’t say I ever enjoyed M*A*S*H but it was the only thing on Estonian television.

Uncle Frank then appeared at the door with a box of pizza. Uncle Frank was a family friend, so he was not a biological uncle, but he fulfilled many uncle-like duties in his time. He had gray hair, blue eyes, wore a blue polo shirt open at the collar. He reminded me, vaguely, of the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island, though a more sober, slimmed down version. Uncle Frank was also my godfather and he was also dead. Uncle Frank sat across from me on the couch. He opened the pizza box and began to eat a slice and I did the same. We both sat there watching M*A*S*H and eating pizza. Uncle Frank sighed. He said, “Well, kid. You’ve had a hell of a life.”

uueveski

On Kõrgemäe Street stands a faded sign that reads “18%” and shows an incline.

THE ROAD HERE shoots straight up and down, more or less, and even to traverse it by automobile requires a certain leap of faith as you release the break and pump hard on the gas. It reminds me of those high scary San Francisco hills, like on Divisadero Street, or Powell Street, where you rocket up to the precipice only to behold that gleaming beautiful San Francisco Bay below. Here Kõrgemäe winds down to a pacific lake, one cornered by soldierly lines of succulent shady green pines. On either side of Kõrgemäe Street, pretty Alpine-looking homes with great glass windows and red roofs and eaves and balconies frame this wondrous sharp descent. Yet there’s almost no-one here and those who are, are lost in their own stories.

In the distance, a couple walks a dog.

Down the way, a man takes a break and surveys the work to be done, a cigarette stub dangling and glowing from his rough hands. Terraces separate the homes, as do neat stacks of yellow firewood that line the peripheries of the properties. There are also the trampolines and tree houses, piles of rubbish from springtime renovation projects begun anew. German Shepherds crow at you from gates, but even their outbursts are a bit weary and resigned as the orange sun sinks in the sky, bringing the still nude tree branches of late April into sharp relief.

I step away from Kõrgemäe and head toward Peetrimõisa, crossing Jakobsoni Street, the main road that leads out of town, and heading toward the hills and the watery crash of the falls.

This part of Viljandi remains a mystery to me. I never come here, but I have no reason. Tonight though, I feel an itch to explore, to stretch my legs. I’d walk the whole world if I could, cross the frozen expanses of the Bering Straits. First I have to cross Jakobsoni, then turn onto Allika — “Spring Street” — and then turn again down a tiny side street — a põik — following it through the terraces and tidy homes and stacks of firewood, past lush hedges tailored and manicured to perfection — before turning up Pihlaka Street, and then crossing Uus, another major road here, before I begin to ascend Kalda Street, getting closer to the sounds of rushing crying water. Up, up, Kalda Street I rise, feeling the strain in my thighs, loving the strain.

Even as a child, I loved nothing more than to get lost like this, to follow the ways, disappear down the alleys. I loved nothing more than peering over fences, or overhearing the mothers scold their errant but deep-down good sons. “Mida sa tegid jälle?” “What did you do again?”

To hear it this evening in Estonian is a special treat.

At Kalda, the sound of the water grows stronger and I discover a path leading down to a small river that feeds a tiny body of water called “Kösti Lake” on maps. So there’s another lake in Viljandi? Nobody told me about this. Someone had built this staircase, a hardworking, resourceful local DIY type — hammered metal pipes into the ground and then placed cement blocks on top of them, creating a walk that leads down steep to the mossy muddy banks. I half expect it to give out on me as I amble down carefully, looking around and still seeing no one. When the stairs end, I walk as I did as a boy, keeping my feet against the incline as not to fall.

I look up at the houses, which loom above the woods. My brother-in-law used to live over here in this part of town, which is called “Uueveski,” or “New Mill,” years ago, before he died. He had mowed lawns like these, trimmed hedges like those. He had walked his dog here along the river bank. I had driven these same streets in the dark those nights. Yet that was all done now. He was gone, already for a long time, but the birds of Uueveski sing on.

I take in a great breath and go further down toward the waters enjoying their sound, hanging onto tree branches to slow my descent. I come up one side of the bank where the water swirls and consider traversing a line of rocks that leads to a little wooden staircase on the other side, and then see another line of rocks a bit of a ways down and try to cross that one too.

The space between the stones though is too great though, and the water is too deep, spinning in clear whirlpools, and I don’t feel like wading waist deep across. Lovely vibrant yellow flowers are in bloom here along the blank, as pert and ornamental as buttons on a beautiful woman’s waistcoat. I stoop to pick a few and put them away in my pocket. Think of all the trouble I saw in the forests when I was a boy, or how I would climb to the peaks of pines and descend with sap everywhere, and how my mother would use a solvent to get the tree sap off of my hands.

I just want to leap to the other side of the creek, but I don’t have the courage to do it. The rocks are too mossy. I’d be certain to fall in the water. My boyhood self would have done it gladly, and would have loved to fall. I am not my boyhood self though. I prefer to keep dry.

Defeated, I climb the steps to Kalda Street again, now high above the creek, and survey it as far as I can toward the other end. I still see no bridge to cross, but I keep walking down it anyway. If I had to, I would walk all the way around the little waterway, even to Rangoon. I’d love to walk, because I’m tired of writing and I have absolutely no use for people.

Down Kalda Street, the wooded banks of the creek open up to a large grassy park that rolls and rolls with small hills like the prairies of North Dakota. In the center of the park, someone has already set up a huge stack to be burned. I walk down past the bonfire pile, all wooden planks and discarded chairs, and come upon a new wooden bridge. The wood of the bridge is still yellow, and there is no marking on it, no graffiti, not even a pair of footprints. To think, I almost wound up swimming across the creek when this bridge had been placed here for me.

Just for me. I feel the wood of the railings, smooth and sanded perfect. Down and along the creek there is still no one. There are rows of castle-like homes rising on the other side, the part of town called “Peetrimõisa.” There are trampolines there and picnic tables, great green lawns, half moss, half grass. There is no one. This is dreamy solitude blanketed up in solitude.

At the center of the bridge, I pause a moment and listen to the water rush below me. I read recently in a book that what women most desire from men is that they would be present, that they would be there. Just there. Something to depend on. Something to latch on to. Not perfect, but present. There. We must be there. Our duty was to play the river bank, to lay perfectly still and muddy and mossy and calm and let their waters gurgle over us. When I first read it, I thought it was ridiculous. Nonsense! Why should I spend my life lying down on my back for someone else, all for her? Listening to the water singing and spurting beneath that wooden bridge, I acknowledge begrudgingly that it might be nice to get soaked now and then.

Sooner or later I was going to have to join up with another one of them. Some men try to ignore them, or to pretend they could have as many as they want. In their souls, they remain as only halves of hearts, yearning to unite with that something, as night is to day, light is to dark, heavy is to light, or struggling to remain autonomous, independent, which is a ruse. There was really no other way forward for me. I would have to reattach. “Women are like trolleys,” a tuttav, a friend, a mother of four children, had told me once. “One drops you off and another one comes and picks you up and takes you somewhere else. You just have to get on.”

The trolley of another woman would come by and open its doors and I would notice the conductor from beneath her cap and I would get on. “On the ovarian trolley,” as Henry Miller put it well way back in 1938 in Tropic of Capricorn. The water kept gushing. I would get on.

Written April 2018

võru apartment house

IN VÕRU, in the south-eastern corner of Estonia, there is a paneelmaja, or apartment building. This apartment building is made of the same elements of all the other apartment buildings of the 1960s. It is, in that sense, a standard Brezhnevka. However, there are some characteristics that separate it from others. For example, it’s built in a precise square with a courtyard at centre, including an old swimming pool. Nobody has been in that pool since Gorbachev was premier and it’s now used for storing potatoes. It’s covered in graffiti referencing Billie Eilish.

This common courtyard though is a place of interaction for the tenants of the Võru apartment building. They can watch each other, spy on each other’s comings and goings. I went there to stay in the building to spend some time with my child. What I found there was true delirium.

What kinds of people live in the Võru apartment building? Woodsy lumberjack-looking tenants with a predilection for the New Age. That means men in red flannel shirts and beards with tiny Ganesha statuettes bedside. They are all meditating and fasting when they are not sharpening their sharp axes. The women of the house make good use of them, and partners are switched and swapped out like lightbulbs. The men give when they are asked to and ask no questions. Such is the way of the Võrumaa matriarchy. When they are no longer needed for sexual favors or car repairs, they head into the Võru forests to tap birch juice or chop more wood for winter.

Children roam the halls of the Võru apartment building freely. I have seen small blonde children leaping between the floors. I myself was heading up a set of concrete stairs when I encountered a small boy in striped pajamas teetering dangerously on the edge of a balcony, the guard rail of which had collapsed. This small boy I took in my arms and went racing around the building looking for his mother. She turned out to be in bed managing her online business while listening to a few self-help podcasts from a guru. A light-haired blonde woman in a homemade blanket. She was still in her pajamas. She was stretching, blinking strangely at me.

“Your son almost fell off the balcony,” I told her. “Maybe you should take better care of him.”

“Don’t worry about Joosep,” said the lady. “He likes to play on the balcony but he never falls.”

notas rotas by tomás del real

WHAT IS WRONG with the youth of today? The world’s on fire, the clock is ticking, and Tomás del Real is hanging in backyards from Canada to Estonia, tinkering with his guitar, jamming with fellow travelers and otherwise observing the downfall of civilization coolly from behind his sunglasses. Even the cover photograph for his single “Prólogo,” released last August, shows the chill Chilean in media res, as if he was caught off guard while he was contemplating something more profound. He looks like a Latin Sigmund Freud, I think, one who just survived a natural disaster because there are broken couches around. Maybe that’s exactly who he is.

*It’s the end of the world as we know it, but Tomás feels mostly fine.* *The cover to the album’s single ‘Prólogo.*‘

While listening to the entirety of the album Notas Rotas, I hear many interesting things. Released in the dreariest days of late November, it has a warmth to it. The opening song “Prólogo” is a burst of warm air, propelled by the violin of Alan Mackie and flute of Katariina Tirmaste. Right up front, this record promises something that food critics might call fusion cuisine. There’s del Real’s contemplative, Tropicalia-laced meditative poetry and innovative melodies coupled with what sound like North American and Estonian influences and driven forward by a thunderstorm rhythm section of percussionists Magnus Heebøll Jacobsen and Steven Foster: the former from Denmark and the latter du Canada.

On the cover of the album, they all look like a bunch of farmers who took some time off from the harvest to fashion 10 incredible songs, and then went back to messing around with a tractor or something. But there was a method to this folk madness for del Real is the consummate artiste.

*The album cover. From left to right, del Real, Foster, Mackie, Tirmaste, and Heebøll Jacobsen.*

“In every album, we try to shape and find the reason and the language in which the songs exist,” remarks del Real. “There were a couple of musical languages that were present in the picture.” In the case of ‘Prólogo,’ Alan Mackie, who also played bass on the record, was a co-composer and co-producer of the single, as he was on many of the album’s songs, bringing along his own sentiment (Mackie is from Prince Edward Island). In combining with del Real’s own Latin American folk, they have created a blend of music they jokingly refer to as LatinAmericana. But there are Old World influences too.

“There are a lot of European folk influences, such as Eastern European uneven time signatures,” says del Real, “which we tried to implement in a very organic way, and some Scandinavian influences, both in the percussion and in different colours in the instrumentation and arrangement.”

While del Real wrote the songs on the album and the record is credited to his solo project, it is very much an ensemble effort and grew out of an ongoing collaboration with Mackie and Tirmaste. Mackie and del Real even hit the road and toured Asia at the beginning of their co-sojourn, with dates in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. “I had a bunch of songs waiting to be something and we decided that could be a good place to try them out,” says del Real. “From that experience we started to shape where the sound was going and it felt very natural to start working on this.”

Katariina Tirmaste was “another fundamental pillar” in the creation of Notas Rotas, helping to flesh out the compositions and to arrange them. Del Real credits her as a “creative and emotional performer,” one of who provided sensitive, flexible parts to the different songs that eventually made up the new record. “She’s incredibly versatile and also without taking up more space than needed, which is a very humble and Estonian approach in my opinion,” he says.

*LatinAmericanaEstoniana on stage: Mackie, del Real, and Tirmaste.*

The record itself was put down in home studios in Toronto, the south of France, the west coast of Sweden, not to mention a multitude of closets in apartments in Estonia. From this pastiche of on-the-fly audio recordings, a sound engineer of fortune called Jorge Fortune in Patagonia mastered the sonic tapestry of Notas Rotas, which is that rare record that sounds good whether it’s been played in the car, through headphones, or on your smartphone.

I know because I have tried listening to it in all three environments. These recordings hold up.

Del Real I have known as a musician for years and have attended his shows, including some with Tirmaste and Mackie. While I hesitate to say anything about his songcraft, I can say that some of the melodies on this album challenged me and required multiple listens to fully digest, which for me, as a listener, is the mark of the very best music. Having a minimal knowledge of Spanish, even after years of instruction in high school, his lyrical intent remains a mystery to me. In his own words, it reflected the transient nature of his life as he moved around as well as the emotional winds blowing through. “It had a lot of reflections around inconclusive situations, self-awareness, letting go, and letting life take its course,” del Real says.

He was also demoing the material on the road and in front of his fellow musicians, which took him out of the more introverted, isolated settings that fueled the creation of his last album, Principios de Declaración. Solo albums can be complicated territory for any musician, though del Real is a singer songwriter and thus a solo artist by default. With Notas Rotas I am reminded of David Crosby’s solo outings, particularly his first venture, If I Could Only Remember My Name, recorded at the very dawn of the singer-songwriter era in 1971, which saw a whole cast of characters join Croz in the studio (there’s even a cut with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead paired with Neil Young and Santana drummer Michael Shrieve).

While Croz’s musical influence might not be immediately apparent on Notas Rotas, his spiritual influence is everywhere and I think, might he have lived a little longer and heard the record, he would have approved. The kind of camaraderie that fueled Croz’s effort can be seen here, because these fellow musicians are del Real’s confidantes and he trusted them with this music.

*A band apart or, for you non-Godard aficionados, a band of outsiders*.

When this album was first released, del Real encouraged listeners to post their favorite songs. But what I have found upon multiple listenings is that my favorite track changes with each listen. Today, on a snowy January day, it is the sixth track, “Distracciones” with its vibrant fiddle parts. Any one of these tracks is sticky enough and interesting enough to catch a listener in its web. Perhaps “La Primera Nieve” or “The First Snow” is the most appropriate for this colder season. And then there is the finale, “Los Sueños” (which can be translated as ‘Dreams’ or ‘Visions’) which is carried along by lovely backing vocals like a ball being carried away upon the waves.

There is, whether it exists or not, and whether intended or not, a maritime fluidity to this music.

For del Real who, like the writer of this review, calls Estonia home, it was this seabound country that most manifested itself in this latest work. It found its ways into its lyrics, its melodies, its colors and moods. “Personally I think it’s very inspired by Estonia, its pace and imagery,” del Real says. He also sees in it a breakage with his past, or the path he was once on, and a fresh intimacy that he credits with producing its raw, unfiltered, and, I would add, touching result.

russia surrenders

AFTER RUSSIA surrendered to Estonia, celebrations were held in both capitals. Estonians were able to roam the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow at will, taking photos of themselves lounging in its furniture. Koit Toome reclined by the fireplace, taking turns stoking the fire with Tanel Padar. Mart Sander was playing billiards in the other room with Anu Saagim. Someone had torn Lavrov’s portrait off the wall. One could only see half of Lavrov’s face.

My friend Stig decided to hold an ancillary meeting for the Estonian and Russian communities in the Canary Islands, which happened to coincide with his 18th annual 30th birthday party. It was held at the MTV Beach House, which meant Stig and Riken, the worldwise wandering Japanese mountaineer, spent much of the time networking and pressing the flesh with various dignitaries around the pool, which was filled with tanned young beautiful people in Baywatch red bikinis and swimming trunks playing volleyball. Stig was dressed in his summer finest, which included a Hawaiian shirt and matching shorts. Riken wore loose desert camouflage garb, including pants and jacket, and I wondered if he always was dressed to hike, or if those were the only clothes he owned. They walked around the pool celebrating New Victory Day.

“The Sign” by Ace of Base was playing.

Somewhat tired of the scene, I retired to my room at the Canary Islands MTV Beach House, where I began to work on the next chapter of what would surely prove to be a poorly received and misunderstood work. But Stig and Riken were soon at the window, chastising me for living more in the digital world and less in the real world, “where people stop being polite and start getting real,” as Stig put it as he admonished me. After that I returned to the party, only to meet a boisterous woman who looked Spanish but was speaking Estonian. She was clothed in a flowing blue dress and she had lots of silver rings on her fingers. She was sipping some kind of fruity cocktail and regaling her girlfriends with stories of outlandish behavior. These are the kinds of women I like, I thought. The ones who are truly horrible. The ones with filthy souls.

“We should go on a date,” I told the woman in the blue dress. “A date?” she answered me while licking a line of sea salt off her wrist before swallowing another shot. “You mean a date date?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can wear nice clothes and I can wear nice clothes. We can meet together somewhere and eat food. I will even offer to pay, but will accept if you refuse. Then we can talk about our lives, our jobs, who broke our hearts.” The woman in the blue dress wiped some of the tequila from her lips and said, “It doesn’t sound so bad, the way you put it. And I thought you had promised the world that you would never go on another date.” “Well, Russia just surrendered,” I told her. “Koit Toome is in the Kremlin. Surely that’s cause for celebration.”

eistneskt hús

AT THE GAS STATION on the edge of Tartu, a blue car pulled up containing two very over partied, overtired, hungover young women. They were red-headed sisters, and looked a little like the O’Mara sisters who used to live at the end of the street, except they were Estonians. I was standing there, obviously not minding my own business, when they invited me to pass the time with them and stay warm in the passenger seat. “We haven’t slept at all,” one of them said. “We came here straight from a party.”

They drove me down to the center of the city, where the Tartu Kaubamaja department store had been possessed by the university and where the former sites of Apollo, Tokumaru, Copenhagen Tiger, and Tommy Hilfiger had been replaced with seminar rooms. One of my classmates from elementary school, a nice Jewish girl who had since become a wildly successful Indian devotional singer, came out of one of the seminar rooms and I patted her on the sleeve. I was reminded that she had been, at one time, my square dancing partner. Tartu had been turning into a kind of mecca oasis. Everyone was here these days. Happening place.

BUT I WAS RESTLESS. School wasn’t for me, so I obtained a cheap ticket to Reykjavik. I arrived and took the bus into town from Keflavik and walked down to the harbor. It was a brisk, blue-skyed winter’s day. At the harbor master’s office I went inside, looking for the Icelandic Estonian House, Eesti Maja, or Eistneskt Hús. I was told it was on the eleventh floor, and I had to take a sophisticated in house funicular system to get there, one that also delivered the mail.

There at the top, I met up with the head of the Hús as well as a teacher. The director was a charming, younger lady, who looked as if she was Spanish. The teacher had affected a Robin Hood look, with a green beret and goatee. I thought then if I should contact Katla, if she still harbored ill will toward me. Maybe she did. Maybe it was better to let sleeping Icelanders lie.

unitarian universalist

ON THE ROAD, like Jack Kerouac, except this time in Ida-Virumaa, along the north coast. This time I was hitchhiking and was picked up by some lady who claimed to be Kerouac’s aunt. She brought me back to her homestead and gave me tea. She said that hitchhikers were thronging the roads of Ida-Viru due to the recent posthumous publication of Kerouac’s secret diaries of a 1964 trek through Soviet Estonia. She proved her point by gesturing outside where a classmate I hadn’t seen since junior high was drinking tea in the yard with the chickens. Dan had last been seen in about 1994 or so wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. “But I haven’t seen him since chemistry class,” I told Kerouac’s aunt. “He barely came to school.” Dan had gone gray in the intervening 30 years. He wore a black leather jacket, drank tea, and scribbled poetry. “Dan’s been here for months,” the lady said. “He also loves Ida-Virumaa. It’s become a hipster magnet.”

Later, I took a bus along the north coast in the direction of Tallinn. My bus left me off down by the port near the ferries to Helsinki. MacDougal, another former classmate from the Nineties, was on the bus. Having become a hotshot attorney since, he was less friendly than he perhaps should have been. He was in a hurry to catch the last boat to Finland. When we got off the bus though, we noticed that someone had left behind a knapsack full of contraband alcohol. MacDougal, freckly Scotsman that he was, advised we leave it at the ferry ticket office, but not before insisting that the alcohol be refrigerated in its office. “We can’t allow the poor fellow’s drink to attain room temperature,” he said. “When he retrieves it, it should be chilled.” MacDougal found room for the bottles in the office fridge and then went to the boat. “Nice seeing you, man,” MacDougal said before rushing off. “Let’s meet again in another 30 years!”

A snowstorm blew through the city after that. It obscured everyone’s vision, including my own, a total whiteout. When the storm withdrew, I realized that I was no longer in Tallinn, but at the docks in Nantucket. I watched as a solitary jeep drove over the ice and cobblestones down to the ferry terminal. Wiping the ice and snow from my eyes, I started up Main Street. All of the cafes, boutiques, and book shops were closed. At Orange Street, I turned left and walked ahead until I looked up and saw the haunted Unitarian Universalist Church, with its golden glinting sun-like dome. It looked like a distant junior cousin of the Helsinki Cathedral. I stood there and admired the church through the snow and mist. It was for me another lost friend.

narva station

SHE LIVED WITH HER BOYFRIEND in the main building of the Narva Station. They commuted each day to Tartu, where he worked at the Vanemuine Theatre as an actor. He was tall, thin, and of solid disposition. He looked like Max von Sydow. She was more beautiful than I had ever given her credit for being. Photographs it must be said do not always do justice to the person. You have to see them in the flesh. She looked like the kind of woman that I always like. She had brown hair and was fond of wearing pink. This girlhood love of pink had not been shed in her womanhood for other, more sober or befitting colors. She had lively eyes and well-rounded features. Other men would have thought she was fat. I thought she was delicious.

I went out there once to the Narva Station. I was following her, but not in a menacing way. We left from Tartu and the train curved through the vistas and wildernesses of the northeast, past the derelict Kreenholm Textile Mill, to the ancient train station. Here she ascended those steps to the top, where her apartment was. Later I saw her come down with the Max von Sydow-lookalike. He was holding an umbrella for her. They had a relationship. I was somewhat disheartened. But knowing what I knew of relationships, I didn’t take it as a knockout blow. People in relationships were seldom happy and such bonds broke easily. Everyone knew that.

My friends of course all told me to forget about her. “She is a young and talented beautiful woman,” one said. “She is an accomplished musician. And you are …” She trailed off without finishing the sentence. “Scallywag writer” was the only correct response. What kind of life was this turning into anyway? A sad one. A life of impossible dreams. What would Fitzgerald do?

Later, I went back to the family home. This was an old tropical resort that somehow seemed to exist in Tartu’s cold climate. The pool in the front though hadn’t been cleaned in ages. There were also weird old people lurking around every corner. Just strangers with white hair who would ask you awkward questions. My mother said they had all sought refuge there during the pandemic. My father would go out on the back terrace in the afternoons and trade stories with these old-timers. I guess he had become one too. I asked my father if he had seen my shoes.

He didn’t hear me.

Two of my children and their mother wanted to go to town to go shopping, but I couldn’t find my shoes. I ran the lengths of the hotel looking for footwear. “You can wear my old shoes,” their mother told me. This woman, who used to be my wife. I was never quite sure of how to refer to her, in front of others or within myself. I put on her shoes, but they wouldn’t fit my giant feet. I kept running the lengths of the hotel, bumping into its strange old guests with their white hair and probing stares. I found piles of shoes in closets, but none of them were mine. How could this be? I had just come back from the Narva Station. Just the night before. Where had my shoes disappeared to? Maybe the hotel’s weird older guests had stolen them?

The family certainly must have left for town. There was no way she would have waited for me as I searched for my shoes. And it was getting darker outside. It was 3.30 pm now and daylight was running out in Estonia. In the hotel foyer, she came in, the accomplished musician with her actor boyfriend holding her umbrella. The scene startled me. They were led to a room on the opposite side of the courtyard in the hotel. So now she would be staying here? In our tropical hotel? With him? Why had the gods brought her to me again? There were no matching shoes to be found anywhere on the hotel grounds. My family had left me behind at the hotel.

Outside one of the garages, which used to be an old horse stable, I then encountered Brynhild. She had come looking for me in this mess of a life. She was singing to herself and admiring the flowers. Curvy and curly-headed Brynhild looked at me through her sunglasses and remarked, “My, you’ve developed this place nicely.”

the non-existent train to geneva

THE NON-EXISTENT TRAIN to Geneva. At least, I didn’t know there was a connection. There was, but it was obscure, complicated. It was one of those Google Maps Directives that tells you to get off at one stop and walk four hundred meters, then turn left, et cetera. Somehow doing this, I would be able to arrive at the conference in Geneva in two hours and thirty minutes.

If every step was accomplished smoothly.

But getting to the train station proved to be harder than I thought. I decided to go on foot and stopped by the Green House Café on the corner of Koidu and Tartu Streets. It had snowed, perhaps the first snow of the season, and I walked in with my bags and asked Põder, or “Moose,” the cheerful barista, if he would make me an espresso, to be consumed at the bar, but instead he made me a flat white, which was like drinking snow. Sven, the owner and operator of the establishment, was outside meantime, digging away. Flat white in hand, I headed up Tartu Street toward the town center, hoping to make the train to Geneva. There was still time.

There I could hear, on Turu, or Market Street, the sounds of an electric guitar. Guillermo was inside a small club there, fileting some riffs on his axe. A small crowd had gathered around him, and I saw my bass was on stage. “Do you know how to play any Rage Against the Machine?” Guillermo asked. His black hair was down his back. I told him of course I knew how to play their songs, that I had taught myself “Freedom” at age 15. This was one of the more intricate riffs I had learned how to play at a tender age. The gig turned out fine. But then I was stuck having to lug my bass guitar and amplifier to the town train station in a snow storm.

Along the route, where I stepped past locals out shovelling more snow, and it was already dark out, and the car lights illuminated the big wet flakes as they fell down, I decided on a solution. I would stop by Brynhild’s house on the main street, which was Tallinn Street, and leave my musical equipment there. Through the window I could see her sitting on a couch in her pajamas. Her dark hair was wet and she was toying with it. I could hear a second voice coming from inside the living room. This person was not visible. They spoke in soft but excited tones.

Another man! I thought. I went and hid down the street in an alley. Then I waited until the visitor exited, only to learn that it was an older woman, perhaps an old friend or acquaintance.

She just happened to have a very deep voice.

“What are you doing out here in the snow, you fool?” Brynhild asked. “Come in, you can leave your pill, your instrument in the back.” I stepped down the hallway, and left the bass guitar and amplifier in a dark back room that was serving as storage of some kind. The idea crossed my mind back there that this was my room and that these were all my things. I had a room at Brynhild’s house, I wasn’t always aware that it was there. After I deposited my things in the back room, I joined her in the living room. It was spare and modern. She sat in her chair, still wet, still in her pajamas. She had pulled them over her enormous freckled breasts. Then I felt aroused. There was just something about arrogant women with wet hair and warm breasts.

I got closer to her. Brynhild looked up. “You’re going to miss your train to Geneva,” she said.

“The thing is,” I said. “I think I already did.”