OUR PLANE had to be diverted to a regional Scandinavian airport on account of sightings of drones or other unidentified flying objects. I was traveling with what I suspected was the legation from the Danish foreign ministry on its way back from the United Nations meeting in New York. I clearly heard one call the other “Jens,” which seemed to settle it for me. They all wore matching navy-colored outfits, perhaps the attire of the diplomatic corps. The plane passed through the clouds in the moonlight. We landed wherever it was we happened to be.
The airline put us up in a hotel that had been built, based on the architecture, in the 1960s or 1970s, or at least designed to look that way, with its angular roofs and big glass windows. It looked like the setting for an ABBA video. As the rest of the hotel was already full, I was given the penthouse suite, which included a loft. The loft had a bathtub directly below a skylight and a sleeping area, while the lower floor had a couch, television and entertainment center, and a kitchenette opening out onto a balcony, from which a series of steps led down to a parking lot.
I was there on the main floor changing into a t-shirt to sleep in when there came a knock at the door. Outside it was dark and misty, and I couldn’t see who was behind the glass. I went over and opened the door, only to be visited by a strange woman in a red cape with the hood up. She slowly pulled back her cloak to reveal her face and her long golden hair. It was Linnéa! “You,” I said, stepping back. “What are you doing here?” Linnéa came into the room, shutting the door behind her. She rushed in like a gust of autumn wind. She said, “We need to talk.”
I looked at her standing there in her red cape. We were all alone in some hotel in Denmark or Norway. Or was it Sweden? This was an ideal moment to finally consummate the relationship. However the night would end, there was no doubt in mind that sex was on the agenda. How could it not be? Sex had always been in the plans, hot, karmic, transcendent sex. Linnéa’s eyes lit up for a brief second as if reading my mind, but otherwise she gave no hint that she was interested in sleeping with me. Instead she asked, “Do you have a place where I can clean up?”
I showed her the ladder to the loft and its big white bathtub. Linnéa climbed the ladder and began to run the water. Soon the steam from the tub was wafting down to the lower level. The steam fogged the windows. I looked up and could see Linnéa standing there in the nude beside the tub, each one of her breasts as pert and round as a cinnamon roll. It occurred to me that I had never seen Linnéa naked before. That was her, in the flesh. “You know,” I yelled up the ladder. “I could use a bath too! Our plane was diverted because of drones.” But Linnéa pretended not to hear me, or maybe she really didn’t hear me. Either way, I left her alone.
At last, thoroughly bathed and refreshed, she descended the same ladder in her red cloak. She went to a bag and pulled out a magazine. I forget the name of the magazine but it was also red and had something to do with the Tallinn arts scene. She ran her fingertips across the glossy magazine cover in an adoring, reverent way. Linnéa had beautiful fingers. She said, “We need someone to help with this new magazine and you’re just the one to help out. You’re such a great writer. I don’t think there’s a better writer in Estonia. Would you please write for us?”
Linnéa was talking but I was leaning in, centimeter by centimeter, more and more, until I was within kissing distance. But Linnéa pushed me away. She only wanted to talk business. There was no time for love. How long would I have to wait then? How long would I have to wait until Linnéa was here beside me? Something about it depressed me. All of these women, they just wanted to work and to do great things. They were so busy doing great things that it seemed that the simple pleasures of life had been forgotten all together. Food was there to fill an empty belly, drink to quench a dry throat. Sex was just sex, you know. But work was important.
“So, what do you think?” Linnéa asked. “Will you help with the magazine?” At that moment, there was another knock at the door and I went to get it. Into the suite poured the rest of the Danish legation from the plane. There were maybe 10 Danes standing around in their matching uniforms from the foreign ministry with bags and suitcases. The one named Jens stepped forward. He said, “I’m so sorry, but we all have to spend the night.” My heart sank. There would be no intimacy. Another opportunity lost. Of course, I agreed to help with the magazine. I’d write a hundred articles for Linnéa’s magazine if that would keep that woman in my orbit. Somehow, some way.
SOMETHING WAS WRONG with their new house. They told me that it was “possessed.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I went over to see for myself. It was down one of the older, zigzagging walking streets in the Old Town. The interior hadn’t been refurbished since the Imperial Swedes had the run of the place. When I walked up the steps into the kitchen, I noticed how musty and dreary the house was, but that hadn’t stopped my father-in-law and his wife from acquiring it. He was there by the sink, but looked different. His cheeks were pink and rosy. His eyes had turned orange or yellow, and his pupils were white instead of black.
He did seem in good spirits as he involved himself in some mundane task. His wife came over and kissed him on the cheek, but her eyes were also orange-yellow. I looked at him and said his name, but he cocked his head as if he had never heard it. “Don’t you know what your name is?” I asked him. He was almost too jolly. My father-in-law, or former father-in-law, was not especially known for jolly moods while undertaking renovation. He was a taciturn, quiet sort of man. He chuckled loudly and the white wisps of hair around his ears made him look comical.
I walked up to him and pushed his chest. “Don’t you remember your name?” I said, pushing him. He seemed taken aback. “You need to wake up and remember your name,” I said. I pushed him so hard he fell on the floor, and in that dizzying instant, I saw his orange-yellow eyes flicker to a light blue again. He wiped them and looked around the kitchen, dazed and blinking.
“What is going on here?” he said. “Where am I?”
It was true then that the house was possessed. But where was the ghost? I was waiting for it to make itself visible, to manifest, appear, but as I searched it from top to bottom, I saw nothing, only cobwebs and dust. Maybe the entirety of the house was possessed and so it would be impossible to see just what was possessing it. From the outside of the house though I noticed I could see a white bird flying on the second floor of the building. The bird hovered there as if to land and then fell dead on the floor. Then through a ground floor window, the scene repeated itself as a white bird went to land in the kitchen and fell dead into the kitchen sink.
My youngest daughter then came skipping out of the house. She said, “Daddy, I want to go to town.” I hoisted her up on my shoulders and said, “Good, because I want to get the hell out of this place.” We went walking toward the center of the town, past rows of English hedges and fieldstone walls. Windmills twirled in the distance. Eventually, the main street sloped down, just like the road into Tallinn, Estonia, and we came down the hill, by which time we were at an intersection that looked like Sörnäinen in Helsinki. Where even was this place? There were some young families seated on pink blankets over the tram tracks. They were having a picnic.
It was a sunny day in a northern city, whatever city it happened to be, and the white clouds were beautiful and enormous. My youngest daughter told me that we should stop and sit a while. It felt good to be away from the possessed house. That episode already felt like a dream.
IN STOCKHOLM on a peaceful July day– at last. Bryggartäppan is a children’s playground, the size of one city block approximately, with clusters of leaning red buildings set up to look like an old Swedish village. There’s even a wooden putka here where two fine-looking ladies make coffee for the parents, mostly mothers, even on a Sunday. Tiny birds flit around and one of the sellers is most fetching, a sturdy lass with silver hoop earrings. Her eyes are as blue as the sky and her hair is pulled back. Such Swedish playground baristas are the last respite of the recently divorced father.
But maybe it’s not just her that toys with my senses but that smell of baking waffles, coupled with all of those cream-colored buildings around us. There was even a little yellow fly that landed on my hand before. Have I ever seen an insect that color? Is everything in Stockholm made of gold? “I don’t want water, there’s juice there, there’s some juice over there!” This is what my youngest daughter, age 5, is shrieking in Bryggartäppan. Then she cries aloud in Estonian, “Ma saan nii kurjaks,” “I’m getting so angry!”, and punches her older sister, age 9. Then she begins to sulk and cry. The youngest is wearing a light blue headband from Copenhagen Tiger, and totes around a blue fairy balloon from Gröna Lund, the amusement park. This troubles her older sister. “I told you at the park that I also wanted you to get me a balloon but you didn’t get me one!”
At last the seller returns from making waffles and hands over a box of äppel juice. Quickly, the straw is in the little one’s mouth, and she is quiet for a moment. The other children here are Swedish. They are pale, thin, and have straw-colored hair. They are physically active, and on occasion expressive, but I have not witnessed the kind of seismic outbursts of which our children are so ready and capable. I search our family trees for some culprit — is it their mother’s Komi great grandfather? A plosive mix of Siberian and Greco-Roman blood? — but there is no answer.
The parents here at Bryggartäppan are, as a rule, older. Perhaps a few of them are actually grandparents. Swedes are a peculiar breed though. They are married to modernity. They are infatuated with their perfect civilized society, yet so haunted and repressed by this civilizational impulse that they have the emotional temperament of office wallpaper. They hide away their thoughts, dreams, dark sides behind apartment doors, sunglasses, and politely phrased, thoughtful sentences that implore only moderation. Rows and rows of perfectly symmetrical apartment windows, cascades of identical balconies, rising up and up and up, peaking in crescendos of tiled roofs and towers. The pursuit of wealth, the proper means to express it, these are the chief concerns of the Stockholm Swedes. Everything here must be perfect. A little girl with her face painted and her hair done up in cornrows goes skipping by, and another waits patiently for the five year old to dismount a small rocking horse. When she does get off the horse she sulks again and then announces to the lot, “I am so bored!” To which a little boy nearby, who understands English, chides her. “Be quiet,” he says. “You’re acting like a baby.” “I am not,” she says, and smacks at the air with her balloon. “I am not a baby,” the five year old sobs and then takes her apple juice and squeezes the liquid all over her older sister’s drawing on a table beside the playground café. “You are bad!” the nine year old scolds her, to which she only shouts, “I’m not bad!” “You poured juice on my picture — that’s bad.” “I did not.” “You did too.” “Tegid küll.” “Ei teinud. SA VALETAD!” “YOU LIE!” These are perhaps the loudest sentences that have been uttered on Swedish soil since Estonian pirates sacked the old Swedish capital Sigtuna in 1187. There are lots of pregnant Scandinavians in the park here today, paging through magazines and pretending not to hear this terrible squall. Their days will come.
“Here’s an idea for a good life,” my Swedish pal Erland said yesterday, skulking around the Pressbyrån at Slussen with his hands in his pockets and harbor wind in his hair. “Meet a girl, have a bunch of kids with her,” he said. “Then you can all be wonderfully miserable together for a few years. Doesn’t that just sound like the greatest idea?”
STORA BLECKTORNSPARKEN is an urban park a bit farther south on Södermalm with the same kinds of Bullerby buildings as Bryggartäppan. There is more graffiti here, though, and shreds of rubbish, broken glass shards, fruit peels, chipped paint and rust, the illusion of safety. “Dad? Dad? Dad!” “What?” “Look what I can do!” The nine year old swings away as the five year old arrives, panting. “Daddy, my knee hurts, look what happened. I slipped on the rocks.” I survey the wound only to be interrupted by, “Dad? Dad? Dad! Watch me swing!” And she swings higher and higher. Mothers sit around us tinkering with their phones. More wonderful park birds flit about. It feels good to breathe and write in Stockholm. To write without any project or desire for money. Just writing with feeling, without that evil thought looking over your shoulder, the one that says that every word has to count toward something. But maybe that thought came from the office or from some editor. Maybe it was never my thought to begin with.
“When you are with someone, you become someone else,” says Erland. “You change yourself. When I was with Henrietta I was someone else. And when I was with Agnetha I was someone different from that person. And when I was with Gunnhildur, that Icelandic football player, I was also someone else.” Erland has been a lot of people. “Dad? Dad? Dad! Come here, help me off this swing. Come, Dad. Come!” These children. They so crave my attention. If I only had some time off I could be such a better father to them. I could never have any more children. Not now. I would go crazy. That would just be the end of the story. Not with these thin Swedish women. Not a chance. Although the lady who made me coffee was rather nice and might get me to reconsider, especially if she turns out to be some Zelda Fitzgerald type who can ruin me and provide me with loads of material about her schizophrenia. This playground is a madhouse. All the sobbing, crying children. All the childhood drama and trauma. The pale thin mothers call after their offspring, their barn. One of the children steals the five year old’s balloon and I have to run after him and take it back, causing a puzzled look from the toddler, who thought the balloon was his.
In the meantime, a mouse ran over the nine year old’s shoes at the bottom of the slide. The parents here all look at each other. I suppose this is one way to pass the time at a playground on a hot day. A Muslim family arrives, the mother’s head covered, the daughters bare to the sun. They look truly happy, content, and I sense no disturbance or cultural conflict. The Swedes don’t dress so differently from Americans. They seem maybe more capitalistic though. A Swede is the sum of all he or she consumes. The patterned dresses, the well-groomed facial hair. A barber shop stands on every other corner, catering to the perfectionism of the Swedish man. The women shop for dresses at the boutiques in between. One must exude one’s wealth and value. A haircut, a shave, a flowing cut of textile, this is worth nothing alone. It’s the effort that goes into being Swedish. This is what pays the real dividends.
At night, we find ourselves at another playground nearby on Nytorget. Teenagers stand among the benches singing songs and playing ukuleles. “Södermalm is like the best place ever,” my nine year old says. “There is no traffic, the houses are pretty, and everyone has time to do whatever they want.” This is the fun of a playground in the dusky twilight of midnight in Stockholm. As the children play on, and the ukuleles strum, and I admire the lights from the cafes around the park, I read a sign about local history. This was once the site of a large garbage heap, it reads. And in the 18th century it also was the location of the gallows and a major site of public executions. I wish I could have seen Stockholm then when it was rough and tumble and full of pickpockets and convicts, truants and robbers, counterfeiters, highwaymen, gentlemen of the day and ladies of the night. Before the boutiques and barbers, there were wards of the state sentenced to hard time. Looking around nighttime Nytorget, this seems impossible. It’s as if it never happened.
ON KATARINA KYRKOBACKE, at 8:30 am or thereabouts. A small street winding with the cool air through the bluffs of Södermalm, damp and refreshing, creamy houses with mustardy finishes and black stovetop pipes protruding, cobblestones and fine hemmed in trees. These give way to red wooden dwellings with toys and yellow flowers in the windows and everywhere that faint chirping of Stockholm birds. In the distance the roar of construction by the locks of Slussen winds up. Outside a school, a father is gently combing through his daughter’s white-platinum hair and a black car breaks the silence, its wheels finessing the stones of the road. A man in a flat cap jaunts by, clears his throat loudly, spits on the street. Despite this, there is the feel of polished cleanliness everywhere, that well-to-do feeling, as if the Swedes have always known wealth and wealth is all they’ve ever known.
Back at the hotel, we have a good breakfast of scrambled eggs with chives and onions, big bowls of yogurt, dried banana, crisp dried coconuts, and three cups of the finest coffee there is. “Of course, you drink more coffee here,” says Erland, a steaming mug in his hands. “You’re in Sweden.” He says it as if we have all died and gone to heaven. This Swedish angel is proud of his homeland. He even approves of its bike paths and pedestrian walks. “It’s not like in Estonia where BMWs and Lexuses blow by you, splashing you with water,” he says bitterly. I am surprised he chooses to recall the makes of the cars, but Sweden is old money and the Estonians are nouveau riche. It’s that old old money, new money thing, along with some shared hand-me-down of clumsy woodsman’s poverty. I feel blessed to be here. I remember my first trip to Stockholm in ’01, staring up at the wreck of the Vasa in the VasaMuseet, a museum I had read about in a children’s book my grandparents once gave me but never expected to see with my own two eyes. After breakfast, we head to the Nordiska Museet, where my children make for the playroom first and never really leave, hoisting toy wooden buckets into an old make-pretend farm.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to stay in Sweden, I consider, to elope with that redhead from the Pressbyrån in Slussen, to lie beside her at night, listening to ship’s horns in the harbor, and hear of the inner workings of this marvelous convenience store. “We were out of Maribou chocolate.” “It was time to refill the cups.” To lie sprawled in bed sheets with a woman who reeks of cinnamon buns, kanelbulle. In the mornings, she is off to the shop, to prepare the coffee, stor cappuccino, lite cappuccino, the whir of the machine, and there she is again behind the counter, processing people’s payments in her blue shirt and saying, varsågod. The blue of her shirt brings out the blue of her eyes, just like the water licks at the docks of Östermalm where we step off a boat later and are surprised by the golden glitz of the gilded Royal Drama Theatre.
I keep processing this idea for a children’s book, about a Stockholm teenage girl with a ne’er-do-well father who turns to petty theft to make ends meet. Then one day she is caught and sent away to Långholmen, the old prison island down the harbor. I play with this idea all the way to the ship that takes us back to Estonia, the front bar of which has been permanently converted into a playroom. The five year old’s balloon is still with us, believe it or not, this artifact from Gröna Lund. It may be the best balloon we have known collectively in all of our lives. It cannot be lost, deflated, or stolen. In the playroom, they play Estonian children’s disco music, oi-oi-oi, ai-ai-ai, a strobe light projects dancing rainbows across the floor, and I take a seat beside a Swedish mother whose hair is a mess and is probably as full of ice cream as mine is. She looks to be about as tired as I am, sapped, haggard, and so hungover by life. This is how we set sail on a gray day to face our decisions and memories.
More or less directly transcribed from a notebook I kept in the summer of 2017.
“HONEY,” SHE SAID. “I want to see if that tree will work over here.” We had bought a new house at the end of a road all the way out in the far north woods. But she said there wasn’t enough greenery up front to block out intrusive neighborly eyes. Her solution was to uproot a tree from another property and replant it on our own. You can imagine how much I grumbled doing this. It was one thing for someone to tell you to replant a tree, it was another thing to do it, even knowing that its position might not be satisfactory and that I might have to do it again.
Instead, I dug a hole and held the tree in place while she went out and examined it from different angles. The tree, an Estonian pine, was as tall as a Manhattan skyscraper. It just went up and up into the clouds, and it was very hard to keep erect. It would tilt from one side to another, its trunk was heavy, and, in a moment of distraction, I let the pine slip and watched it with some horror crash into the corrugated metal roof of a nearby house. Its sole inhabitant, an old woman with white hair held back in a headscarf, came out and surveyed the damage.
The old gray granny whistled loudly.
With enough strength, I was able to position the tree in the hole again, holding it aloft through sheer exertion so the lady of the house could at last decide if this was a suitable location. But by this time, the lady of the house had disappeared to somewhere to inquire about acquiring some rhododendrons. The tree, frustrated by the whole scene, wilted at this moment, drooping over like an unhappy flower. “There there,” I told the pine tree. “No need to get upset.” It was no use, in a flash the tree removed itself from my hands and ran quickly away.
Into the woods, I assume.
When the lady of the house returned she asked about the tree. “What kind of man loses a pine tree?” she scolded me. “Only you could lose a whole pine!” I told her that the pine tree was upset. It had been waiting to be replanted all day. “Very well then,” she said. Our daughters gathered around her and she went to the barrel sauna, immersing herself in its bubbling waters. Then, pounding upon the surface of the waters, she began to chant. “I know how to retrieve lost trees!” she said. The children watched their mother with some alarm. But soon enough the tree came out of its hiding place in the woods. Begrudgingly, meekly, sheepishly. Arborescently.
I REMEMBER THE GRAY LIGHT, streaming in through the windows in the earliest hours of what could be called a day. I hadn’t wanted this to happen, but such things become impossible to avoid, especially when the woman’s will to bed you is so strong. She was a pale mess of light skin, light hair, sweat and blue eyes. I felt like I was making love to HC Andersen’s Snow Queen.
This was not going to turn out well. That I already knew. Some kind of love story would manifest in her mind and it would become impossible to extricate myself from such a romantic morass. When I couldn’t summon any love feeling for her, I would be cast out, called all kinds of horrible names, denounced before her girlfriends, and, in general, take on a new layer of black sheep status in the community. “He was the one who broke her heart.” The mathematics behind such situations were ironclad. They followed a predictable score of seduction, sex, and disappointment. She surprised me however when she told me, with gray light in her blue eyes, that I had to leave soon. “Another man is coming at 11 o’clock,” she said in a melancholic way.
So that was that and I was back out in the streets, buttoning up my shirt as I walked the short distance home. When I opened the door to my apartment, I discovered that I had been away even longer than one evening and one morning. In my time away in bed with the snow queen, tree roots had invaded the house. Floorboards were popping up and a mouse had made his home in the rusted ruins of the old stove. I didn’t know what to tell the landlord about all of this, but I was sure she could fix it. “Just a little sawing here, some hammering there,” my handy landlord would say upon inspecting my uprooted home. “It will all be as good as new.”
I USED TO TAKE THE TRAIN from Albertslund to Copenhagen Central Station, or Københavns Hovedbanegård, on the line that if you took it west, led all the way out to Høje Taastrup. I remember those sleepy gray mornings staring out the windows at sad-looking greenery and gray blue shadows on the trestles and tracks. At some point they must have created a similar environment as a part of the Rail Baltica project, because just yesterday I took a train that looked just like the Danish one from Pärnu to Tartu. When the Pärnu-Tartu train stopped at Viljandi, a host of Argentinian and Chilean musicians got on. From there we traveled east to Tartu, and again I stared out of the windows into that melancholy light, listening to the gentle lullaby of a slowly rocking northern train as it mechanically glided ever forward to infinity.
I must have fallen asleep, because by the time I opened my eyes, I was westbound again, rolling across the green plains outside of Tartu City. About 25 kilometers outside of town, I disembarked, not sure if I should just try to walk the distance, or if I should take a Bolt or even hitchhike. To my surprise, a music festival was being set up here, and there were a lot of people streaming out of the train and ambling down the steps to the dirt paths that led to a small country village. Celeste had even come with her children, although these “children” looked more like dolls. There she was, eyeing me with her blue eyes in small portions, while she combed the hair of her doll children. She was wearing a light blue summertime dress.
The dress seemed to blend into the sky with its clouds behind her.
At the center of the village, there was a church, just like all of the old churches that you can find out in the countryside. Inside, the pews were already filling up. There were two other priests waiting at the doorway. One of them looked like Pope Leo. He said, “Which one of us wants to be the first to start hearing confessions?” I volunteered and made my way down the aisle to the confession booth as everyone watched. It occurred to me that I wasn’t wearing a cassock or any other item that would represent the priesthood and that I didn’t even have a cross on my body and that I wasn’t quite sure if Jesus was the son of God, as they said. The Holy Trinity was a mystery to me still, but when Pope Leo commands, what else is there to do? Then, crossing myself in a brief moment of religious courtesy, I opened the door and went in.
ON THE SHIP TO MUHU, with my daughter and parents, I was surprised to discover my friend Anton was also on board, and that he had a special need to be delivered to the nature preserve at the head of the Sõrve peninsula, an expansive strip of island land that dangled suggestively down toward the Gulf of Riga. It was already night when the ship docked in Kuivastu Harbor and the bus began to roll across Muhu and then the causeway to Saaremaa.
By the time we got to the hotel in Kuressaare, it was bedtime, for sure, but the hotel was jumping, with a restaurant up front, as well as blackjack tables and slot machines. My parents retired to their room, and I left my daughter in ours, and then went searching for Anton so I could take him to Sõrve. Anton himself had disappeared upon disembarking. Where was he? I sent him some messages, but he only sent back photos of himself and friends tearing up various nightclubs in Kuressaare. There was even a shot of a mounted police officer trying to rein in the island pub crawl chaos. This guy wanted a free ride? But a promise was a promise.
I went down a series of long hallways that seemed to stretch on forever. Well-lit, wood-paneled corridors, no doubt created by some Nordic design firm. I kept walking and soon I was near Mändjala Beach. Such long passageways, I thought. How was it even possible? At the end of the final hallway, I saw there was a sauna and swimming complex outside, and old ladies were relaxing in the warm bubbles of a hot tub. Inside there was a breakfast buffet set out with the most delicious looking choux pastries, topped with lingonberry-flavored cream. Inside the breakfast area, some old Scandinavian couples had fallen asleep at the dining tables. I helped myself to four or five of these special pastries and turned back while a DJ was setting up.
As I returned to the entrance of the hotel, with no word from Anton, who was probably sleeping in the drunk tank at the Saaremaa police station, I encountered the maître d’hôtel, an older gentleman with gray hair and a fine mustache, who informed me that I now owed the hotel a pretty sum for the pastries. “You had five umeå-brests,” he said. “That will cost you €25 at the very least.” “But I have stayed here many times before,” I told the maître d’hôtel. “As far as I recall, the umeå-brest pastries were always free.” “Times have changed in Estonia,” said the maître d’hôtel. “We now charge for almond milk, honey. Umeå-brests are certainly no longer free.” No, nothing was complimentary anymore in this odd nation. With a heavy heart, but a belly full of brests, I retired to my hotel room at last. Sõrve was not in the cards. Who knew what had become of Anton. And besides, it just then occurred to me, I didn’t even have a car.
THEY TROOPED IN from a party and one of them was just perfect, fuzzy-haired and round, just like a fire spark. I still don’t know her name or who she was, and maybe there’s no reason to. She was probably a nobody with a nothing story. But maybe that was just me trying to write her out of my mind. Maybe she was the most vivid fire starter of all. I’m not afraid to get burned anymore, you know. I’ve got those sous-chef hands. I’m not afraid of fires. I like mine hot. I want my fires hot just like her, plump and flickering, orange, red, yellow and warm, rimmed with gold, and blue at the core, with eyes the same color that wink back to you just like a blueburst flame. Every oscillation is another step out of cold dark winter’s heartache.
I LIVE IN A LITTLE WOODEN TOWN. Or so it’s been called by people who live in larger wooden towns. Each morning I rise and follow the same trajectories. I can see the milky light stirring behind the curtains, and I remember my third grade teacher telling us how there were places in the world where the sun never set in the summer and the winters were so dark.
Strange, I think, that I wound up living in one of these places. I wake up, shower and dress. I walk down one street toward one café, or I walk down another street to another. I cross by the courthouse, or that apartment building that used to be a dance school. There’s the park that used to host Joala, or the Konsum that used to be an A ja O. The preschool, the hairdresser’s, the Armenian restaurant. Estonian towns are full of bizarre surprises. In Viljandi, there’s an establishment called Suur Vend or “Big Brother” and another one called Sahara. There’s the Nuremberg Building, the façade of which is painted to look like it’s part of some German mountainside town. In three minutes you can travel from 1984 to Bavaria to North Africa. These small town trajectories are being engraved into my mental map. I call this my internal landscape. Your mind knows that the bank is here and the church and school are there.
Your mind knows, even when you aren’t paying attention.
DURING THE PANDEMIC, I started a writing project, one where I would write down my dreams in narrative form. I called this experiment “dream fiction.” What has resulted is a catalogue of stories, maybe a hundred already, that tell, in a way, my own story over the past five years. But it’s not only my story, it’s the story of the world. During the pandemic, I would have dreams about vaccines. When the war started, I had dreams about rockets. After Assad was overthrown, I had a dream about Russia surrendering to Estonia, and Koit Toome and Tanel Padar lounging in the Grand Kremlin Palace. There they sat stoking the flames in the fireplace beneath a torn portrait of Lavrov and complaining about how hard it is to be famous.
Another story was called, “Elon Musk’s Italian Restaurant.” I wonder how many of us are having dreams about Elon these days. I noticed in the dream that my mental landscape blended Viljandi with Stockholm, a city I have spent a lot of time in and that means a lot to me. In this combination of Stockholm and Viljandi — Stockholmdi? — Paalalinn and its lake were in Norrmalm. Elon Musk’s Il Colosseo was on one side of the lake, and his competitor’s was on the other. To get from one side of this lake, you had to take the metro, like you might in Stockholm. Viljandi had its own version of the T-Bana. Viljandi had its own Pressbyrån.
In another dream, Kihnu Island had merged with Viljandi, creating Kihlandi, so that all of the streets remained in their places, but the houses had been replaced by tall pines and red-painted wood barns, and the roads were gravel. There were fieldstone walls marking the boundaries of Joala Park. In another part of the town, San Diego was superimposed on Viljandi, creating Viljandiego. Viljandi was in the same layout, but all of the buildings were taken from the Gaslamp Quarter. There were even Kihnu women waiting for me on the other side of town, knitting in their red headscarves. I rode my bike past the mariachi bands and Mexican restaurants to get home. In this way, my town became half fantasy, half reality. I think that’s what happens when you live somewhere. Places get inside you. They fill your inner world.
***
People are arranged in such ways too. It’s not just streets and avenues, eateries and esoteric shops and lamp posts. Someone might be fixed in a certain place, such as the love of your life, for example. This woman is always there in that one spot, just like a mountain is always in one spot. You look up and see the mountain and it gives you a reassuring feeling, just like a certain person can reassure you through their presence. The mountain is always there and she is also always there in that place where she always has been. People become fixed in these places. Women become like mermaid statues spurting water. You go to visit them and to admire them.
It’s not easy to move mountains or mermaid statues and it’s not so easy to move people. This is how you can remain in love with the same person for years, even when it makes absolutely no sense, even when it causes you suffering. Buddhists call this attachment. They want to slip from place to place without ever paying these landscapes much notice. These people, these places, this yearning, it’s all like clouds drifting by. Do not get attached to women or to mermaid statues either, they say. Yet you do get attached. They are fixed in that place on your map, as much as Konstantin Päts’ enormous disembodied head is watching you from its perch beside the Estonian Theatre. You could try to move Päts’ head, but it’s too damn heavy. It’s been put there. So you just let it be. The woman you love is as fixed on your map as Päts’ head is fixed. It’s always just there, even if you don’t notice it every day. Sometimes you do notice it.
Some people do attempt to alter their inner landscapes through force. They get desperate and try to blow everything up with dynamite. I’m guilty as charged here and I have learned the hard way that it just doesn’t work. Movement creates countermovement, as the British-American philosopher and entertainer Alan Watts said in his lectures. Whatever you push against will push back against you doubly as hard. This creates balance and harmony, but people don’t want either. They want to be in control. They want this person here to be moved there. They want that person there to be erased. Out with the old and in with the new! From a cartographic perspective, this is like saying you would like Liivalaia to be relocated to Gonsiori. You want Rüütli Street in Tartu and Malmö Street in Pärnu to switch places. Let’s put Pirita in Kakumäe. Let’s move Rakvere to Karlova. But why? Because you think it will be better. You think that if you were able to redraw the map, everyone would be happier. You’re tired of loving that woman, or she doesn’t love you back. She has even said so. You want to exchange loyalties. You want to give your love to someone else, someone more deserving of your love.
But what happens in these ambitious inner world renewal projects? Things just fall back into place. Everything you did to rearrange your inner world was a total waste of time. There was no point in even trying. The world has its own natural order, just as towns do. In this way, whether you like it or not, she will remain the woman you love until one day, when there is a great earthquake or mudslide, or some other natural cataclysm that changes everything. This creates a before and after, just as burned cities only in part can be fully restored and rebuilt.
Estonian towns are full of such well-tended green parks that used to be grand structures. You walk through them all the time. Children play there, old women are out walking dogs there. Where there once were houses and hotels, there are now ice skating rinks. I wonder sometimes if we can still sense these places, even though they are no longer there, in the air about where the Golden Lion once stood before the March 1944 bombings, for example, in the same way we can still feel the presence of a woman in our lives through her long absence.
In this way, a lost person becomes both there and not there, just like the Golden Lion Hotel.
***
Recently I wrote down these words. I said that some things in life shattered us into pieces, leaving nothing in solid state. I said that in these situations, we become like free-floating mosaics, like the icy rings around Saturn or Neptune that, when viewed from a distance, almost look whole, but that upon closer inspection can be seen through. The light is visible between these leftover chunks of soul, feelings, and memory. They are suspended in time.
I wrote these words and then left to go to work on a rare sunny winter morning. On my left, I could see through some trees the spire of a small church, and on the right, I could see the sun on the windows of the courthouse. Often I am inspired to take photos of these little pieces of the town. I photograph sunlight against the wooden facades of old houses, I photograph frozen laundry strung across backyards, I capture the symmetry of the rail lines at Ülemiste.
Sometimes I see something interesting, like an old doll staring out a window at me. On that morning, my phone was dead and I could only watch the yellow light on the facades. A lot of people I know are nature enthusiasts. They ascribe to the Fred Jüssi School of Forest Asceticism. They try to fill the holes in themselves with birch juice, buckets of blueberries, and lake swims. For me, the sun on the facades of the buildings has become my own way of filling in those cracks, of gluing the pieces of myself together. Most people think we are all separate from each other and from our environments. I am me, you are you, this place is this place. I don’t think this is correct, because people are also places. This has become obvious. The universe is a continuum. I now know that this is true, but I am still trying to figure it all out.
I’VE BEEN WAITING to write about this new Metslind record, because I am not sure how to approach it. In the early morning hours, as I began slurping down my first coffee of the day, I still had the somewhat jangly sounds of her guitar ringing between my ears. “She’s like The Smiths crossed with Fleetwood Mac,” I think. “As if Morrissey and Stevie Nicks had a baby.” Then I am somewhat terrified of the idea of a child with Morrissey’s face and Stevie Nicks’ hair and body. I don’t want anyone else to have that image pop into their heads. But maybe if Johnny Marr and Christine McVie had collaborated on an album in Estonian it might have sounded like this one. Maybe, but not really. Metslind is her own phenomenon. It’s a pitfall of Western and Estonian journalists alike that we look for these equivalents. Estonia must have its own Elvis, its own Michael Jackson, and its own Nokia, but there is only one Metslind. Not everything can be translated over.
Metslind’s record is two EPs combined. It arrived to me by Smartpost more than a month ago. I now have it on vinyl, but I gave my record player away, because it wasn’t very good. So now I just have an LP I cannot play. The album though is a kind of shrine, a shrine to the record player I will someday acquire. Then I will be able to play the album as intended. I will wake up and listen to Metslind at 7 am. In the meantime, I will listen to its conjoined EPs on Spotify. One is called Ole, lihtsalt ole (Be, just be) and the other one is called Hull (Crazy). The song titles paint a somber image. Other than the title tracks, there’s “Valu, Sa Oled Mul Jalus” (“Pain, You’re in My Way”), “Ära Sõdi” (“Don’t Fight”), and “Päris Inimesed” (“Real People”), along with “Rabalumm” (“Bog Enchantment”). There’s also “Tahan Olla Hea” (“I Want to Be Good”), “Ma Ei Tea Mis Saab” (“I Don’t Know What Will Happen”), “Mina Võin Ja Sina Võid Ka” (“I Can and So Can You”) and one more called “Elupuu Elab Mind Üle” (“The Tree of Life Will Outlive Me”).
This last title is the most puzzling one. Elupuu in Estonian refers to evergreens, but in my mind the name conjures up Yggdrasil, the tree of life in Norse mythology and the world tree of Estonian and Finnish mythology, which has stars in its branches and snakes at its roots. According to Metslind, the lyrics toy with Estonian trees like the evergreen (elupuu) and aspen (haavapuu, literally “wound tree”). “In the song, the Tree of Life outlives me,” says Metslind, “and the Wound Tree heals before I do. I say that it’s so good that I am no longer so young and that I don’t know what awaits me in life, though of course I would like to be younger and I would like to know what will happen. It’s about trying to have faith in the way things are.”
This is the Metslind musical universe. It’s a world of bogs, trees, and introspection. Her pop-infused indie guitar rock is expressed in dreamy tapestries of haunting vocals and layers of carefully selected sounds, but masks a kind of slow-burning inner torment.
Girl with guitar, photo by David Evardone
According to Metslind, whose family calls her Maarja, a lot of this music came out of her separation from her long-time partner. In fact, “Hull” is about playing dumb when people would ask her uncomfortable questions about the split. “I started to give strange answers to their questions, so they wouldn’t know what to say or ask me about it anymore,” she says.
To this I have to agree. There are never satisfying answers to explain away life’s irrationality.
Metslind is fond of her name, which means “Wild Bird” in Estonian. “Every bird has its own song,” she says. “And I like it when a performer has a different name. They can be a different person.” Maarja also happens to be the name of a singer in Estonia, one that is trademarked.
But Maarja didn’t want to just be another singer named Maarja. Her Metslind persona was born. When she is not on stage, she is a music teacher, mostly of voice with some guitar teaching. She started attending music school at the age of seven in Kohila, and at her own instigation. Her family has supported her music, for which she considers herself lucky.
Other than the emotional tumult that led to sings like Ära Sõdi, which literally means “Don’t Wage War” and only coincidentally came out when the Ukrainian-Russian War intensified, Metslind is also somewhat unique in that she has chosen to sing in Estonian, rather than try to approach the international market with English-language songs. In fact, she used to write and compose her songs in English, but an encounter with Estonian musician Vaiko Eplik, who like Metslind is from Rapla, a town in North Estonia, encouraged her to switch back.
“You know, I have always listened to a lot of English-language music and singer songwriters,” she says. “I didn’t have a plan to write in Estonian, but then these songs just started to come.”
I would say it’s a welcome addition to the world of Estonian music. While listening to this record, I started to think about where Estonians listen to music, or where I hear Estonian music. Estonian-language music is played sometimes in major supermarkets, so that Estonian songs remind me of perusing produce, looking for good quality bell peppers. Estonian music is played at summer festivals, so that Estonian songs remind me of sitting outside in some amphitheater. And Estonian music is played during family get-togethers. So Estonian music reminds me of grilling šašlõkk while Kihnu Virve and Anne Veski’s golden hits are played.
Solitary songsmith. Photo by Meeli Viljaste.
Metslind’s music is not the soundtrack for supermarkets, summer festivals, or grilling šašlõkk. It’s more for long walks alone while you are trying to sort out various unresolved past issues. That, at least, was my experience of it. I don’t have a favorite song on the record, but I remember liking “Rabalumm” the most on the first listen. A good bog is medicine to the heart.
She herself mentions Joni Mitchell when asked about her approach. She uses Joni’s Open D tuning on her semi-acoustic Ibanez, which is as much a part of her look as her whiteblonde hair. She plays it with a chorus pedal which gives it that lovely atmospheric sound that almost reminds one of Peter Buck from REM. These are my own musical references, so bear with me.
The album was recorded in the studio at Linnahall in Tallinn, a sprawling stone monster of a building once called the VI Lenin Palace of Culture that was constructed for the 1980 Olympic Games (which the US boycotted on account of the then recent Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan).
“This is one of the last things that’s still functioning in that ruined old building,” says Metslind.
Metslind is an admirable character, I must conclude. She composes, she performs, she travels the roads with her Ibanez. She sings of the Tree of Life, bogs, and heartbreak. I find her to be an honest, direct artist. The Estonian word is siiras, but it doesn’t have an exact English-language equivalent either. And she will continue. “It would make more sense not to be a musician,” she says, “and I have tried many times to not be one. But when I tried, I started this new project That I called Metslind. What else can you do when your heart starts to sing?”
north! 