WE TOOK THE NIGHT BUS up to Saint Petersburg. I was surprised they even gave us visas, or allowed us over the border. When we got there, it was still night, or perhaps it was already dawn. There was a kind of blue hazy light along the canals. The city was as I imagined it would be. It had had many names in its history, among them Petrograd and Leningrad. I knew the locals just called it “Peter,” or “Piiter,” as the Estonians put it. I was standing around with some Estonian women outside of our hotel and one of them, an artist who I thought was my friend, was talking. But when I managed to say something, to ask a question, she told me to shut up. “Nothing you have to say is interesting,” she said to me. “God, why are you so damn annoying.”
After that I went and hid myself away in the shadows. The rest of them were shown to their rooms. Later, the proprietor came back, Irina, and I asked if I too could be shown to my room, or at least given a place where I could sleep. Irina, who was a young blonde woman, understood me a little, because I could not speak Russian, and managed to say, “All the Estonians are sleeping on the third floor.” She led me up a few back staircases until I came to the door or where everyone else was staying. A half-naked Estonian woman opened the door a crack and said, “You? No. You’re not allowed in here with us.” “Don’t you dare let him in,” I could hear another say. “He’s not allowed to be with us.” I could hear them whispering more.
I realized that I would be sleeping outside that night, and made a place in the hall outside. On one side there was just an old metal barrier that looked out into a courtyard. I stretched out there with my bag under my head and tried to sleep. It was a lonely feeling to be there in Saint Petersburg or Leningrad or Petrograd. Whatever they were calling it this days. A cold feeling.
I ARRIVED TO TALLINN and was again surprised (pleasantly) by the way the port area has developed. It looks like a real city. When I came here the first time in ’02, none of this was here. Now Rotermanni kvartal is as bourgeois as it gets. Why not shop for a new suit while listening to gurgling electronic music and sipping on a smoothie, or noshing on some fresh sourdough bread from RØST while imbibing a warm cappuccino with coconut milk? Everyone in the window advertisements is lean, beautiful, effortlessly wealthy, and has lots of sex, most likely in fine hotels or in the back of sports cars. If that’s not what life is about, then what is?
But despite all the trimmings of the nordic nouveau riche, one cannot escape the cold sea wind or the gray sky. Sometimes the sun does come out though. It is odd that we are supposedly considered under threat from the Russian Federation, as if they were going to lob missiles into the nearby H&M. You would like to think that all of these things would protect you, but they don’t. It did make me think though what an angry, regressive energy is Putinism. How could anyone long for a day when half of Europe was under surveillance and home arrest? Age is a factor. He’s a post-1989 headcase and never really adjusted. He wants it back.
And the reason I am bringing this up is that so much has changed in Tallinn, and in Estonia, since that time that the country is due a narrative revision. A rewriting of the story. The Soviet period is slipping away into the past. It’s like watching those last pieces of the Titanic slip into the ocean. How can you define the story of a country by referencing something that doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore? This place is Hanseatic materialism redux. I continuously feel like I am in a mini-Stockholm or some other such northerly place where men in glasses who part their hair on the side sit around doing business deals with a stiff upper lip while wearing scarves inside, and weary eyed women walk their small dogs in the morning, bearing a cup of coffee before them as if it was a flashlight or rosary beads and looking as if they don’t have time for anyone or anything and whatever you have to say to them, they really don’t care.
I MOVED INTO an apartment that happened to be located inside a Tokumaru Japanese restaurant in Helsinki. The interior design was white and spotless. I didn’t mind sharing my living quarters with the clientele nor the smell of gyoza being served in ceramic bowls. Then one day, Jonas came to find me so he could threaten me about talking to his girlfriend Margot. He stood outside the Helsinki Tokumaru with his face against the glass. I wasn’t sure how he had even found me. I had moved out of my last apartment for the same reason. There he was. His white, angry face was pressed against the window, and his teeth were clenched. I could see the steam of fury in his dark-rimmed glasses. His hair was combed neatly. Margot stood nearby, staring into space. Her eyes were black with mascara and shame-terror. “How dare you, how dare you write to my girlfriend!” he stormed. The Finnish owner offered Jonas some black coffee and tried to soothe his jilted nerves. I was unaware that Tokumaru served coffee.
Supposedly, the Tokumaru coffee was very good.
While Jonas was distracted, I fled out the back door. I wanted to take the ship back to Tallinn to get away, but there had been a major storm. The waters of the Baltic Sea had flooded the city, and there, at the foot of Korkeavuorenkatu, I looked up, only to see an enormous Tallink cruise ship come crashing down the street, crushing every building in its way. I looked the other way, and saw another Eckerö Line ship floating on its side. There was nowhere to run and the waters rushed into the Helsinki Tokumaru, washing away everyone with them. Jonas, Margot, the Finnish-Japanese owner. They were all drowned in the sea. I grabbed onto a floating navigation buoy that had washed in from the archipelago and survived. Later, the storm calmed and the sun came out and the waves died down. I could even hear birds singing.
FIRST ABOVE GERMANY. Fluffy foamy carpets, white, and between them rolling hills or knolls, nubs, crests, with little motherboard looking settlements below, and lines of wind turbines churning. The mind ping-pongs, skirting memories, realities. The clouds turn to a frosty desert, layered upon other deserts. You think of her dreamy eyes that can give you a thousand blisses. You think of other people and then you think of yourself, a change in focus.
Below is nothing, not a road, not a corner, not a coast, or a line of white trees. The sea seems endless. The clouds absorb the orange and pink from that slowly-slipping January sunset. There is an almost fascinating rainbow glow. Then rolls of milk white that crest like sugary whipped cream. The clouds suddenly look gray and somehow cold. They are lower here, lying in a sort of cloud valley beyond. Big gray hunks of gray coldness drifting, almost like that shattered ice in the Gulf of Finland. No signs of civilization, no planes, no tiny houses, no little glowing lights below. It feels as if we are getting closer to the North Pole. Maybe we passed it?
Then, for a while, nothing, just purple. White clouds spin beyond. They look like French crullers. They are arranged, moving in gentle circles, like gears. Bigger clouds drift in, chunky and heavy, like fists. The longest descent ever. The clouds are so low here that they drift around the tops of houses. The color is almost navy blue fading into gray, an almost depthless bleak fog. The houses are faint and gold, like fire embers. By the time we finally dip below the cloud cover, I can read the signs on the buildings. I can see the icy lunar surface of the lake.
SOME KIND OF GURU or shaman came to these shores and so we set about arranging an event to host him. This conjurer from Jaipur was booked for an evening at Helsinki’s Royal Sibelius Hall. Petra, my wife, played an important role in organizing the conjurer’s airfare, found him a place to stay, made sure his dressing room was outfitted with Ravi Shankar records and mounds of rice and chana masala. My job was simple enough, to make sure the concessions operated smoothly, but of course I botched this too, like everything I touch, and the price list wasn’t posted properly and a fist fight broke out over the sweet gulab jamun.
Petra was annoyed. “I give you one little thing to organize and you mess that up too! No wonder I’m divorced you!” I apologized and slinked away, but started to question things. Why was I always apologizing to people who had hurt me and humiliated me? Was there a limit? It was shameful to experience. But there was a time before them all, before all of this. I had been a person then too. Psychological terror. It had scarred me, but I was still there, beneath it all.
Outside people gathered after the conjurer’s talk. A tango group had been commissioned and began to play the square in front of the Royal Sibelius. El Scorcho, the Chilean guitarist, was there, with some friends. They began to dance the tango. Petra also began to move to the music. She was standing right next to me. Did she want to reconcile? Did she even want to dance? Of course not. A few minutes later, her date arrived. He was tall and pale and all dressed in black, with a cowboy hat to top it off. She said he was from the countryside. His name was Tex. Petra and Tex disappeared into the crowd and began to tango, tango away.
Then the wind picked up. It was a strong gust. I tried to hold onto the iron fence outside the hall, but it was no use. I began to drift away toward the head of the Esplanaadi. It was here where I had met Petra, years ago when we were younger. That was where it all began, by that fountain right there. And this is how it ended. Soon I was over the Swedish Theatre. I tried to move in some direction, maybe I could float over to the Eira neighborhood? It was no use. I was at the wind’s mercy. I was tired of people anyway. I was tired of the evil of the human heart. It seemed every heart around me was poisoned. They went to fists over Indian sweets.
THE LAST TIME I saw Dulcinea, it was December. It had been snowing for weeks, and even when the sky was clear, it seemed like thousands of little perfect snowflakes continued to flutter down and dance along the breeze. At night, it was the same, and I wondered if it was just the wind passing around the snow, or if it was fresh snowfall. It was cold at night, deathly cold, but I decided to go for one long walk by the lake. I needed to think about a few things.
I was over by the abandoned factory when she jumped me. When she leaped on top of me, I slid and fell. I had never been stabbed in the heart before, especially by a beautiful blonde girl with an icicle, but the icy blade found its mark. I let her cut me, and the steam of my suffering rose up into the air like ghosts. She said a few things, but I could only understand a few of them. She kept talking about how our age difference made her uncomfortable. “Such a big age difference! Such a big age difference!” I reminded her that Donald Trump’s wife was 25 years younger than him. We had a far lesser gap between us both. This didn’t seem to soften her blows. There were more. “Don’t ever write to me again!” “With you, I don’t feel like I’m free!”
I just lied back and took it, like a man, I suppose. I felt like I was having the very life pulled from my body. I curled up with my knees to my chest and I faced the forest. I remember staring at those birch trees, all covered in snow and ice. Dulcinea finally took from me what she had come for and ran off toward town. When I reached up and felt my chest, all I could feel was a bloody wound on the left. My heart was gone. She had cut out my heart! She had cut it free from my body with an icicle and ran with it into the snow. There I was, bleeding out in some kind of agony. This was really the last time. The last time I would cross paths with Dulcinea. I summoned all my strength and stood with my half-frozen aching heartless body. Then I stumbled towards the lake. The way was black and ran by the woods. I kept walking.
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.
MORNING ON the Viking Line, Helsinki bound, the special Circle K discount line. It is good to be away from smalltown Estonia and all of the same smalltown faces, the faces that know you, or think they know you, the faces you think you know but do not know. You know what I mean.
Last night was spent in the company of Finnish tourists. They took over the sauna. Some of them looked like my children’s uncles, Priit and Aap. What is this parallel universe of Estonian lookalikes called Finland? What is this strange “speaking in tongues” language? In Estonia, sauna steam is called leili, but in Finland, it’s löyly. Try saying that word three times fast.
The Finns are so white and pale. Milk white. Maito white. I am always just a little pink. At least a little. The Finns need to supplement with iron and B vitamins. They are aloof, but pleasantly aloof. The men do not flatter the women. They are not Italian men, who blow kisses from passing scooters. The Finns are not lovers. This explains a lot. This may explain my entire life.
My soul is kind of foggy, udune, as the Estonians say, but my libido is strangely intact. It waxes and wanes with the moon. It is currently at full, full moon peak. It’s nice to sit in Stockmann though, just like this now. It’s nice to be anonymous. I like watching Finnish people. I like watching Finnish women. I wonder, which kinds of women do I like? I don’t like the women who wear a lot of cosmetics and have intricate manicures. They probably expect lots of money, and round-the-clock maintenance. This is my prejudice. That’s just how I see them.
I do like the women who seem a little shy, or to exist in their own worlds. There was a nice Finnish woman selling baked goods in Kamppi. She was wearing an apron and dressed in white, and was pleasant and round. And she had that beautiful white-blonde hair. There is something about hair like that. I also like the women who look a little strange, or even dangerous. I like the women who make unusual fashion statements, or look like they are members of a) some religious sect; b) obsessed with a musical group; c) forming a revolutionary cell. These women tend to be younger. When you are young, you can be bold.
At least they look interesting.
But then I have intrusive toxic thoughts. So intrusive and toxic as I sip my juice at Joe and the Juice. I don’t have enough money, I am going to be 44 soon. I have three children and have been classed out of the reproductive cycle. But I have actually written almost three books in the past few years. Doesn’t creativity count for anything? Or is it all about the money? These little thoughts are like like Stockmann shoppers. They elbow their way in, but they didn’t originate with me. Who put these intrusive thoughts in my head? Was it you? Or you?
Better to think of nice Finnish women selling baked goods. Something else. Something nice and cozy, or mõnus and hubane, as the Estonians say. The bookstore here is amazing, Akademiska. Bookshops will never be replaced by online. No way. There is just no way to replicate this sensation of drifting along, being drawn in by some book or its cover art, or title, or, “Hey, that’s Murakami!” I try to write like Murakami. I try to do a chapter a day. To punch in and punch out. I am not just satisfied with some ideas and a few paragraphs. But I am a father. I am running and I don’t always have the juice to do it.
It’s funny, I thought that if I came to Helsinki, I would be inspired. But I already know Helsinki intimately. I know what this city feels like. It’s in my bones. Turning 44 is somehow bothering me. It feels like the point of no return. Forty sounded kind of youthful. And these last four years just blew by. Gone. Around the corner from here is a bakery. I even once wrote a story about it, because one morning I was here, and I thought I saw Dulcinea working at the bakery. Yes, Dulcinea. I suppose she does look like a Finnish girl. I don’t have many love stories you know. Just a few. Sometimes, I would like to excise them. Sometimes, like with you, I buried them, and I can’t remember where I put them. Oh, I have tried to alter history. I have gone to psychologists, psychiatrists, healers, witches, tarot card readers, Hindu shrines, Orthodox retreats. Most people just tell me, as common knowledge, to leave the past in the past.
Things do fade but other things, and other people, they don’t always go fully away. Not 100%. They are just part of the scenery, the furniture. They are a room in the house of you.
I do want to get a new book before I go though. Some crime novel by a Harlem writer. I like crime fiction, it helps me with everything else, with structure, with pacing, with dialogue. I went to go buy it, but then the bookstore was closed. A milky white security guard with a beard said it was closed, kinni. The book was Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Hines.
After that, I went back to Stockmann and got another exorbitantly priced sandwich. Which is basically what an Estonian sandwich now costs. I watched the bourgeois Finnish couples coming and going, smelling of perfumes and colognes. Why was I not able to play that role in life? Who am I even writing to? And how come, no matter how much I write, nobody answers me? I feel like I am writing to a dead person. Maybe I am writing to Vahur Afanasjev. I remember that day, when I saw the headline about his death. Now I have become accustomed to disappearing acts, including by the living. Because when a friend leaves your life, alive or dead, it feels the same way, like a little death of sorts. I can’t say I am surprised by it anymore.
ON SOME DAYS, I like to hike out to Karula Lake outside of Viljandi. It’s about eight kilometers door to door and it’s very pretty. The fields of rapeseed are in bloom, blanketing everything in delicious yellow. Agricultural laborers toil away in the fields. The Estonian countryside does have a certain desperate, Depression-era flavor to it though. Those abandoned, splintering houses, lost to time and graffiti. That empty bottle of whiskey tossed carelessly into a farmer’s field at some particularly fraught moment in the cold winter, only to be revealed later by the thaw, like the corpse of some ancient mastodon.
Sometimes I wonder about the local indigent people who might shelter in these discarded structures on the outskirts of Estonia’s country towns. Maybe they make bonfires at night and play harmonica like the bluesmen of the past? What kinds of horrors have these walls seen? In India, I once saw a man sleeping curled up in a rug by the roadside. I imagine it was something like that here. The countryside is mostly quiet, but one can always hear the birds singing. The Estonian birds are social and talkative. The people not so much. I have done this route many times, down to the lake, past the Baltic German cemetery. Then it’s back out onto the highway.
Other walkers come by, but nobody looks at you out here. It would seem that this would be the most opportune occasion to exchange some kind of pleasantries, or to acknowledge each other’s existence. Two strangers meet along a lonely highway on a hot summer’s day. I don’t expect much, you know. I understand that this is not California, and there will be no “have a terrific day!” wished upon me by some life-loving passing jogger. Still, a nod might do. Or some eye contact. There is nothing.
Yesterday, a young woman walked right past me. She was within arm’s distance. I looked to her, just to acknowledge that we existed along the same plane of reality. Was I really here? Was she? The wind was playing with her straw-colored hair. Her face was pale, as were her eyes. She looked like an extra from one of those Netflix Viking dramas. I wondered what she was thinking about. It must have been very important. Maybe she was wondering about what classes she should take, or how much her cousin Tõnu’s new car cost. “I wonder how much it cost? I wonder, I wonder.” Then it occurred to me that maybe she didn’t see me. Maybe I was invisible. What other explanation could there be? I didn’t know when my invisibility began to manifest itself in Estonia. Naturally, she didn’t say hi. She couldn’t see me.
***
A day later, I recounted the story to a friend in a local cafe in town. Well, at least I consider her to be a friend. Estonian is a Finnic language, which means it’s not at all related to Indo-European languages, though there are plenty of loan words. In Estonian, though, the word for “friend” is “sõber.” An Estonian sõber, however, is not exactly like an English friend. A friend in English is sort of like a person with whom you feel a kind of rapport or affinity and have shared some times together. A fellow traveler. A companion in life. Maybe sometimes you meet for a drink. An Estonian sõber demands more from you. If their car breaks down, they expect you to come and help. If they run out of money, they will ask you to loan them a hundred euros. If you say no, they might be disappointed. “But I thought we were friends” your Estonian friend will say.
An Estonian friend might also ask you for strange things, with no context for the request. You might be at home making coffee in the morning and receive a mysterious message, such as “Do you have a hammer?” To which you might wonder if it’s a trick question, or maybe it’s a state survey. Is Statistics Estonia compiling data on hammer ownership? It also happened once that a friend contacted me at midnight to inquire if I had any ice. “Do you have any ice?” I remember staring at the weird message. This kind of thing only happened in Haruki Murakami novels, I thought. Where could this request for ice lead? Maybe I would soon be blackmailed or drawn into some erotic thriller? I turned over and went back to sleep. It later turned out that she was at a neighbor’s making cocktails with friends. Had I known this, I might have really brought them some ice.
I just don’t understand these things. How does being friends mean that you have the right to borrow my hammer at a moment’s notice, or to go through my refrigerator for cocktail ice?
***
These are the kinds of things that happen to you when Estonians know you and consider you a friend, or at least an acquaintance or tuttav. In Estonia, personal relationships are very precise. Sometimes even if you have been in the same class, you are just called a classmate, or kursaõde or kursavend, a “class sister” or “class brother.” I am unsure if class sisters qualify as acquaintances. I can speak this language, but it still makes no sense to me. Sometimes I try to understand the roots of words to fish out their deeper meanings. That might help me understand Estonians better.
When I told my Estonian friend about my experiences on the lonesome highways, where everybody ignores each other and walks by as if you are invisible, she did not seem surprised.
“But of course, they didn’t say hello to you,” my Estonian friend said. “You’re võõras.”
Võõras. A word that translates roughly as “foreign,” “strange,” and “unknown.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “Everyone here in town knows who I am.”
“Yes, but they don’t really know you.”
There it was. I was a known unknown. I would only have to wait until a mutual Estonian friend introduced us in a social situation, or if we happened to take part in the same shared activity, maybe a kannel or folk dancing class, to say hello to these strangers. Then we would know each other. Only once we had been formally introduced could I greet them alone on the road. Until that time, we would remain apart. I could not, for example, walk across the road and actually introduce myself to the others. That would be alarming. I would have to wait until we knew each other. Then I would no longer be a stranger.
Selge pilt. A clear picture.
That word started to haunt me though. Võõras, võõras. Where did it come from? The word “stranger” in English derives from the Latin, “extra” and French estrangier, meaning “outsider.” “Foreign” similarly derives from a Latin word meaning “door,” so, again, an outsider. “Unknown” has a Germanic root in cnāwan, which means to identify, or to recognize.
This word might be closest in meaning to the Estonian word võõras.
I am not a linguist though, so I contacted the Estonian Language Institute to ask about the origins of the word võõras. I was then referred by someone to a special online query form where I could submit a question to the institute. I checked the online resources, and then plied my luck with the new translation tool for Finno-Ugric languages made recently available from the University of Tartu. It seemed that the Estonian word võõras exists in Karelian, where it is vieras, in Veps, where it is veraz, and in Livonian, where it is vȭrõz. This was a shared Finnic word, which meant that it developed from the shared mindset of the Baltic Finns. They had their own ways of determining who was known and who was unknown, who was a friend and who wasn’t. These people had their own systems for intuiting the world, and their language was just one manifestation of it. To be a friend was to be available at any moment to loan a hammer or give them some ice. If you had not been introduced, then you would always just be a stranger.
***
I started to ask around though. I wanted to see if anyone could provide more information on the Estonians’ behavior, on their determination of who was võõras and who wasn’t. At the café, I queried the esteemed diplomat Jaak Jõerüüt and his consort, the poetess Viivi Luik.
Jõerüüt blamed the Soviet regime. “This is Soviet stuff,” he said. In the old days, before Estonia fell to Comrade Stalin, before the war, collectivization, and Georg Ots’ singing career really got going, the Estonians were a jollier lot, Jõerüüt said. They were sitting around with big steins of beer and playing accordions and if you saw one in the countryside, he would call you over, and maybe cut you a slice of black bread. The horror years of Communism had done away with all of that. Who knows. I could be a bloodthirsty metsavend or “forest brother” out on that country highway. Or even NKVD.
“It’s better not to bother with other people,” said Jõerüüt. “It’s best to avoid contact.”
Jõerüüt offered another hypothesis. He noted that Northern Europeans have a tendency toward introversion. There are, I admit, some famous photos of Swedes and Finns waiting for buses and trains, where each one leaves plenty of distance between each other, and they don’t talk to each other either. This is the precious personal space that Northerners relish. They love nothing more than being alone, so that they can think lonesomely about things that affect them only. Their anthem is Depeche Mode’s 1990 hit “Enjoy the Silence.” “Words are very unnecessary. They can only do harm.” Depeche Mode played this August at the Song Festival Grounds in Tallinn.
They have a lot of fans here.
There are other theories. One musician friend blamed the cold weather. “People don’t want to waste energy communicating if they don’t want to,” she said. “Every ounce of energy is needed for the long winter.” Another musician friend said it had nothing to do with the Soviets at all. This woman, who is about 30 years old, was born after the restoration of independence. She said that she was taught in the 1990s that you always greeted people you saw in the countryside. In urban settings, anonymity was the rule. It had more to do with new technology. To be fair, many times I passed fellow walkers, they were staring at their phones.
They had vanished into a virtual existence. That’s what was happening.
One fellow cafe goer, who is from Australia, had his own theory about the Estonians that he was only too happy to share. “Oh, I think it’s clear that everyone in Estonia is suffering from a mild version of Asperger’s syndrome,” he said. He’s even been checking the scientific literature, but the Estonian Genome Center has yet to put out a paper on the high prevalence of autism in Estonians. Or maybe they already know about it and are merely hiding the truth from all of us?
About a year ago, I went to Copenhagen for a few days and was overwhelmed by the gregariousness of the Danes. I had conversations with people in cafes, in museums, on the trains. I talked with bartenders and waiters. The Danes seemed much livelier, earning their reputation as the Latinos of the Nordics. Then I returned to gray, quiet Estonia, only to stand in line at the supermarket, where every shopper stood apart from the other. None of them interacted, and when the time came to pay the cashier, one woman looked away as she deposited the money into the plastic dish, to avoid all possible eye contact. What was wrong with these people? I thought. Why do they behave in such a way? They won’t look you in the eye, and then they will ask you for ice at midnight. They’ll take your hammer and won’t say thank you. Yet a few days later, I too stood apart from the others. I was lost in my thoughts. I ignored eye contact with the cashier.
Three days. That’s all it took to become one of them.
***
Years ago, after returning from New York, I took the long train ride down into the South Estonia countryside and wondered again how I had even wound up living in such a place, though the scenery was nice. It seemed so far away from everything though, and I almost couldn’t believe that Estonia really existed. There were those familiar bales of hay though, rolled up and covered in tarps. Some Estonian farmers had covered their hay in blue, black, and white.
One night, I took a drive down to Abja-Paluoja to go to the sports and health center. I bought my ticket, went into the changing room, disrobed, and headed into the sauna to get a good sweat. Inside, there were four or five naked Estonian men sitting on the sauna benches, their red legs dangling. Not one of them looked at the others and not one of them said a word. They didn’t know each other, you see. They had not been introduced at a folk dancing course yet. They were all võõrad. Strangers. As was I.
The sauna had a speaker installed, and it was playing Radio Elmar, a national radio station, that evening. The song on the radio was “Pole Sul Tarvis” by Kukerpillid, a legendary Estonian country music act. The refrain to the song translates roughly as, “It’s not necessary for you to know what I’m doing.” That was just it. Forget “Mu Isamaa” or “My Fatherland,” the official national anthem. Kukerpillid’s “Pole Sul Tarvis” was the real one. I looked at the others. They did not look at me. What else was there to do than toss another ladle full of water on the sauna and listen to Kukerpillid in contemplative silence? We may have all been naked and in close proximity, but that’s where any familiarity ended. One more ladle full.
My notes from this year’s Viljandi Folk Music Festival, held 27-30 July 2023 in Viljandi, Estonia
THURSDAY, YESTERDAY, was the first day. Festivals are difficult to cover, because you cannot be in every place at every time. Concerts or events overlap, and so you just cannot see everything. Of the concerts I saw yesterday, my favorite was Mari Kalkun’s performance, which happened at Kaevumägi, or the Well Hill, one of the festival’s primary stages.
I have probably either known or known of Mari Kalkun for more than a decade. She is a popular folk singer, and specializes in songs sung in the South Estonian Võro dialect or language.
I think what makes Mari special as a performer is her ability to sustain intensity over what can be atmospheric and amorphous compositions. She plays with all of the foreboding of purple rain clouds in the distance. She comes in and leaves like a thick white fog. There is sunshine sometimes too.
Many folk artists can provide nonstop, horn-blaring, bass-drum-pounding, action-packed intensity, while others are capable of crafting beautiful lullaby-like landscapes. Those landscapes though will soon lull you to sleep, just as that intensity will wear you down quickly.
Rare is the artist who can sustain such intensity wrapped up in lush and haunting melodies, and across an entire set list.
For this performance, Mari was joined by Australian bassist Nathan Riki Thomson, and most of the material was off her latest album Stoonia Lood, released on Real World Records this year.
They also performed later in the evening at the Folk 30 concert which celebrated three decades of the Viljandi Folk Music Festival.
OTHER THOUGHTS OF FOLK
One thing I notice every year when I attend this festival is the lack of American performers. I think it might be because American folk music is popular music. When an American says “folk,” he thinks probably immediately of Bob Dylan. But Bob Dylan isn’t hurting for gigs and it would be hard to entice Bob to come on down to Viljandi to sing to us. There is also this issue of the American folk blues tradition. Estonia has a blues festival too. Should American traditional acts perform there instead?
“Folk” in Viljandi is blended with something called etno or “ethno.” It’s very fusion, and in line with the general philosophy of the Viljandi Culture Academy to make the old new again, or to build off of Estonian and other folk traditions. So “Folk” is not exactly “folk” as an American might understand folk to be. The Estonians have taken the English word “folk” and changed the meaning slightly. The Estonian word is pärimus, which means something more like original or traditional. There are always different ways to translate English words into Estonian, but the meanings are not always exactly equivalent.
I like the size of this festival. It’s very cozy, and I am glad it has not become a Coachella, Glastonbury, Roskilde-like event. It’s a social gathering. Old friends get together. It is distinctly for the locals, and in that way, its reach is limited. Combining international artists with this Estonian content must be a challenge.
For example, the opening ceremony was entirely in the Estonian language, as it should be, but I found myself wondering how an outsider might see it. I am not arguing that there should be simultaneous translations or anything like that, but this is a niche festival. At the same time, people who have visited just for one festival have often returned for the unique vibe. It has that effect on visitors.
OF LEIK, ANDRE MAAKER, AND BUBBLES
Leik is a duo consisting of Kelly Veinberg and Elina Kasesalu who (mostly) sing and play violin, but also add viola and the special hiiu kannel.
I have seen Elina and Kelly a lot in Viljandi, and on trains to Viljandi, and from Viljandi, and also once in a shopping center in Tartu. And probably other places, toting their instruments.
Andre Maaker is a guitarist. I could call him a virtuoso, but he’s not really, and I could call him a guitar slinger, but really, he’s just a guitarist. He’s the kind of guy who sleeps next to his guitar, “just in case he gets a good idea.” He loves guitars, and based on the set they played yesterday at Käevumägi, he has a whole toy shop full of stringed instruments at home, such as the acoustic “world stick” he pulled out of nowhere, or the four-stringed tenor guitar. He filled out Leik’s sonics best with a 12-string acoustic, which has that lovely, dulcimer-like ring to it, and has always been used in folk music, as he noted to me afterward (yes, it has, and should be used more often).
According to Leik, the addition of Maaker has allowed them more room to focus on their vocals and instruments, as in the past, they often had to work to fill out the depth of the pieces. With that guitar, there’s just more sound.
Andre used to teach Kelly and Elina, and they asked him to partner on this project, which has seen them recently tour the islands. Much of their repertoire includes songs from Saaremaa, Hiiumaa, and Vormsi, as well as some self-penned compositions, and they carried them all well. There’s something wonderful about the blend of voice and strings here that continued to ring in memory for hours.
According to the musicians themselves, they were well received in the islands and were again yesterday.
This was probably the best concert I saw yesterday. It provided some sorely needed introspection during a festival that can get tiring quickly, with all the people, music, food, and conversations.
FRIDAY
Friday raised the question, is it possible to overdose on bagpipe music? According to radio journalist Arp Müller, who was diligently assembling his kit in the press room, it’s possible to overdose on anything.
Cätlin Mägi and the VKA bagpipers begged this question with their afternoon performance. At best, the bagpipe evoked misty landscapes and ancient moods. It has a kind of cleansing quality to it. At worst, it can sound like a flock of angry ducks. According to a German folk journalist (yes, they really exist), Estonian bagpipes are unique, as is the Estonian bagpipe tradition. He came all the way up from Scholzland to write about it.
He also noted that the Folk audience is unique, in that it is concentrated among younger people. In other countries, its an older person’s genre. Even the musicians of Trad.Attack!, Jalmar, Sandra, and the incredible percussionist Tubli, are in their mid-to-late 30s and considered old hands.
Trad.Attack! puts on a mobbed, flashy, wall-of-sound show. Unfortunately for an outsider, a lot of the runo song-based melodies are lost on someone who isn’t from here.
I will add here, that I did not witness one drunken brawl or act of violence yesterday. Folk does not invite the quasi-white nationalist biker crowd to brawl over grilled meat, beer, and heavy metal. They are somewhere else. One feels safer here.
The last concert I saw last night was Tintura, which is really one of the weirdest groups out there. They offered up a contrabass, violin, keyboards and electric guitar, turntables, and then, of course, a blazing saxophone solo. This was funk, folk, electronica, and wedding band fusion. Or as a friend put it, “kompott,” a jam.
PS. I am also proud to report that I survived an entire Irish folk music concert given by Flook yesterday, though I initially doubted in my fortitude. After a few numbers though, I actually started to like it. One might say that it’s an acquired taste.
SATURDAY
SATURDAY. Let me choose my words carefully. On Friday night, someone I know started drinking. On Saturday, he was still drinking. If you are reading this, you probably think you know this person, but the fact is, it applies to multiple people at this festival. They may still be out there drinking, somewhere.
Music. It is impossible to see all of the concerts. You must choose. Often, the choice is not yours. The line for the Kaisa Kuslapuu Trio was out the door. Supposedly, I missed a great concert, but I couldn’t attend it. Instead I saw Svjata Vatra and Rute Trochynskyi and also Julia Kozakova, which is a Romani act from Slovakia. You really have to appreciate Svjata Vatra (one of these photos is of the crowd at the concert). Ruslan is just so funky, and his daughter is brave and can sing. I told my daughter that next year we should perform just like Ruslan and Rute, but she was not amused.
Other interesting finds were Le Diable à Cinq, a furiously intense Quebecois band, and Rahu the Fool, from Latvia. I have this bias against Latvians from living here. It’s as if we ignore them, because they are so close, sort of the way that New Yorkers ignore the Quebecois. “Oh, right, them. They’re over there.” This group was fun. They even played “Mack the Knife.” People want to be entertained, you know. You can be the best accordionist in the world, but if you can’t entertain people, then so what. Latvians do seem a shade darker than Estonians, and about 1000 percent livelier. I think I had written once about a lost Roman legion that had settled the banks of the Daugava. This performance reminded me of that myth.
At some moment yesterday, I became overcome by exhaustion. I could barely walk, really, and just sort of stood against a tree reading the obits for Sinead O’Connor on my phone. I disappeared into the press office, where I ate most of the cherries and zoned out and dreamed of certain things. There were too many people, and there was too much going on. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.
VÄGILASED
So, this was Vägilased on Saturday night. The Estonian word “vägi” means something like “force,” “might,” or “energy.” Perhaps Vägilased could be called “the mighty ones.”
This is one of the old guard bands that used to play the festival many years ago but reunited for this year’s concert. It consists of Meelika Hainsoo on violin and vocals, Reigo Ahven on drums, Cätlin Mägi, who also sings and plays bagpipes and the jaw harp, Jan Viileberg on guitars, and Marti Tärn on bass. They were joined by Andre Maaker on guitars, Leik’s Kelly Veinberg and Elina Kasesalu on violins and vocals, and Francois Archango on percussion. They were also joined by graybearded Aapo Ilves playing a wolf (although my daughter said he looks like Jesus), Toomas Valk on karmoška, Kristjan Priks, an emcee named Päär Pärenson, and a whole school of percussionists.
This concert started at 21.30, and I was already tired. The long, flowing dresses of the performers reminded me of night gowns, so I came to think of the Vägilased concert as a sort of pajama party. Of course Meelika is a captivating singer (she is so soulful and sincere, commented Lauri Räpp), but I was also impressed by the outstanding bounce of the rhythm session. Whoever did the sound for the concert deserves credit. It was balanced, light, and funky.
Also, just when you thought this concert was over, it wasn’t. There was another song, and another. The concert ended with the vast audience holding hands and singing the chorus to one of the songs.
Like most Estonian folk acts, this one relies on traditional runo song structures as a foundational element, but there’s a subtle reggae influence to the way the compositions are performed. I was just very happy when it was all over, and the yellow moon was waxing watchfully in the sky, soon to reach its most potent and illimitable size and shape.
Apparently, this was a one-off concert, and there won’t be anymore Vägilased for some time to come. If you were there last night though, you were there. Easily one of the best concerts I have been to in recent years. There is an emotional depth here that is lacking in a lot of other groups. Vägilased make you feel things.
SUNDAY
Technically, Sunday began at the stroke of midnight, meaning that this photo taken of Untsakad performing was made around that time.
As a person without roots here, all of these indigenous rhythms are at times lost on me. As a friend recounted, once an Estonian hears them, something goes off in his brain, and he starts to dance. The Estonian can be anywhere, cutting the grass for example, but after hearing a few bars of an Untsakad song, he will go into a trance and start to dance a jig.
Sunday morning started off with sunshine, but halfway through the day, it began to rain and never stopped. I saw the Quebecois again, and the Slovakian act again. There was also some atonal folk music from the Middle East performed by a cat called El Khat.
I don’t really remember what else I did or saw, just a lot of truncated conversations. It seems like Folk is one big therapy session, where people confide in each other about their relationship problems, or seek out advice from others. Women advise bold gestures of love. The men in the know say you must remain aloof. “It drives them crazy. They will chase you for years!” I will only comment that it is interesting to have nearly every love interest you have had in a seven-year timespan confined into a small area patrolled by security and catered by mobile kebab vendors.
All of the bands are different. Some are more purist at heart. Julia Kozakova’s group made me feel as if I was at a traditional Roma wedding. Zetod are traditional fusion supreme, mixing in rock, funk and reggae, and basically everything else.
We should probably talk about Jalmar Vabarna too. Years ago, he was just this earnest folk music kid, but now, I can barely get near him because he has a little entourage of Seto bodyguards around him and wears sunglasses at almost all times. Well, not completely true, because the last time I saw him, he was handing out strawberries at a high school graduation in Setomaa. He is most himself on stage, I think. I have never seen him more natural, more happy, than on a rainy stage at midnight. When you see him perform, as he did closing out this year’s festival, you get the true Jalmar.
north! 