i saw the sun a few days ago

I SAW THE SUN a few days ago. It was low in the sky but visible between some of the buildings on Posti Street. For a moment, I couldn’t quite understand what I was looking at. What was this strange orange glow? It cast its warmth on the wooden facades of the street. I stood there and wondered what I was dealing with. I knew it was sunlight and was amazed I had forgotten it. In the summer, there were whole 24-hour cycles where it was almost always by my side. In the summer, I took the sun for granted. I thought that it would never fade from my life. Little by little it was scissored away, until I forgot it even existed. I told my father it wasn’t so bad. “Just imagine that it’s night all the time. You get used to it. It’s like you’re always dreaming.” You do get used to it. You slow down inside. You trade away your White Nights for your Dark Days. One day, when you’re strolling down a street in a small wooden town in December, it appears.

The sun. Your old friend. The sun waves to you and you feel its presence. And then it vanishes.

***

When I think about the sun, I am reminded of a book of Greenlandic folk tales I have on my bookshelf at home. It’s one of my favorites. Inside, there is a story about the sun and the moon. According to this story, the moon slept with many women but was not satisfied by any of them. He then decided to sleep with his little sister, the sun. He disguised himself and slipped into her tent at night. The sun was very satisfied by her brother until she learned of his true identity. Then she cut off her breasts and mixed them in a bowl with urine and blood and gave this porridge to the moon to eat. “If you want to see how I taste,” the sun told the moon, “you can taste this.” The sun ran away. The moon paused to taste her breasts, of course, and then went after her. The lusty moon continues to chase her, but the sun is always faster than him. Because of this, night always follows day.

I’m not sure why I like this story so much, maybe because like most stories of the Greenlanders, it’s grotesque and involves incest and mutilation, but also because it says something about nature’s beauty and brutality. I feel it these December days. The lack of sunlight robs you of something, but so does the cold. Just walking from one end of the street to the other is a challenge. In summer, the sidewalk seemed as soft and warm as butter. In December, I am tending to the fire in my fireplace, listening to its assuring hot crackle. The sound of the fire is like Christmas music as I sit here reading about the moon and the sun.

***

A few days ago I found myself in an Orthodox chapel. There were icons on the wall of the Karelian saints. Colorful old men with beards enveloped in gold. I think I saw a few women there with their heads covered. I don’t know their names. A little research afterward yielded the name of Sergius, a Greek monk who had traveled the rivers northward to spread Christianity to the Finnic tribes in the forests. For some time, the Orthodox Church was a presence in my life. When I joined the church, I told the priests that I was an Italian, and therefore could not belong to any Estonian or Russian church. They informed me that it was all one church, and so this idea whether you belonged to one or to another was unimportant.

At the little Estonian chapel, I was told that they were an Estonian Orthodox chapel, not a Russian Orthodox chapel. There would be no risk of being forcibly abducted into the Russian World, or Russky Mir. Some of my friends are atheists. For them, these icons might as well be Legos or a woman’s lingerie catalog. They mean nothing to them, because they don’t believe in the idea of god or gods, let alone that a person, say Jesus, could be the son of a god, or have arrived to this world by a virgin. For me, there is no difference if his mother was a virgin and if his father was god. The icons of the Karelian saints are another window through which I might understand existence. Whether the Virgin Mary was a virgin or not makes no difference to me.

I went to confession once in the church after which the monk forbade me to have Communion for a year. “If I plant potatoes in sand, nothing will grow,” the monk had said. “But if I fertilize it for a year, you will see them take root.” Being forbidden from Communion pushed me more toward the world of animism and toward the blues in which voodoo also plays a part. In these worlds, I understood that I would be received as I was, without any kinds of expectations. Maybe I could learn something too, as I wandered among the seal hunters and the bluesmen.

***

By this point, you might start to wonder, what do all these things have to do with each other? How is the sun connected to weird Inuit folk stories? How are these connected to Karelian saints? How are Karelian saints connected to the blues? And what does any of this have to do with Christmas? For me, they are very connected. Christmas was created on top of pagan holidays to celebrate the winter solstice, the moment when light begans to grow again, or when the sun, everlastingly pursued by an oversexed moon, outruns him around the universe. Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus, which makes it in a way a celebration of fertility. And in the American South, the blues were considered to be the Devil’s music, the opposite of Christianity. These are not extremes or polarities, but elements of a larger truth. Christmas connects them. Christmas is the needle. Different threads pass through its eye.

One does not need to choose one over the other, but rather embrace and combine all aspects. In the Greenlandic book, it is reported that in the time before memory, the heavens and earth were covered in darkness. According to the Greenlanders, the fox wished for sunlight, so that he could catch more seals. The bear was opposed. He was better at hunting at night. But the fox was better at witchcraft, and so sunlight came into being. This is why the Inuit don’t eat foxes. Now that I think about it, I have never heard of an Estonian who ate fox meat either.

As I write this, Estonian girls in folk costumes are spinning around a stage at a Christmas fair in Põltsamaa. There are also Estonians in top hats and knickers. Someone is wearing a cowboy hat. As they dance, I have been searching for a blues song about Christmas. John Lee Hooker has a good one called “Blues for Christmas.” He’s sad, he’s drunk, and he’s broke. He’s waiting for his rich girlfriend to come back to him. He’s begging Santa to send her back. I used to think BB King was one of the more respectable, well-mannered bluesmen, but he’s got a song called “Back Door Santa.” He comes around daybreak, while all of the fathers are asleep. He gives the children pennies to leave him and their mothers alone while they have some fun. And Santa Claus only comes once a year, but BB King comes all the time and his girlfriends do too.

These are real Christmas songs, I think. These are Christmas songs that tell the truth. According to Wikipedia, BB had between 15 and 18 children, none of them with his two wives. I’m sure he would have also been forbidden from taking Communion and for more than a year.

***

ON THE WAY to the Christmas Fair in Viljandi today I found myself listening again to the blues. I listen to the Rolling Stones perform “Parachute Woman” off of 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet. “Parachute woman, land on me tonight.” Inside the fair, everything smells like candles and happiness. The emcee is on stage speaking of gingerbread. There is something calming about the scene for me, and for a while I start to feel very tired of this rambling life. I have been running from everything, and sometimes I wonder where I am running to. My main goal is survival, I told my therapist. I’m running to survive. Hea küll siis, the lady said, very well then. But what will you do with your life if you survive?

Through my jumble of thoughts, feelings, and epiphanies, consciousness and truth begin to reassert themselves. If Christmas is the moment of regeneration, when darkness gives way to light, when the sun outruns her brother, and when all the points of light align through the positions of the stone circles, then might it be a similar moment for my own soul? Maybe Christmas could set me right. Or make me correct, as the Orthodox priest once said to me.

At the same Orthodox cloister, one of the Greek nuns did take pity on me while we were out gardening. She said I had a good soul, the soul of a saint. Another friend told me that I should listen more to the nuns and less to the monks. The Christians do like to talk about love. Only I wonder if it’s the same love that I understand it to be. The kind that flows through you and remakes you? That would be a worthy kind of love. That’s the love they sing about in the blues. The love that makes the moon chase his little sister through the cosmos, trying to catch her.

He never does, but he never stops trying.

An Estonian version of this story appears in Edasi.

Special thanks to Lawrence Millman, author of A Kayak Full of Ghosts.

eistneskt hús

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

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

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

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

north seas

NORTH SEAS. Or, to get from Point A to Point B. Or, riding public transport along the Scottish Coast, somewhere near John O’Groats. From there I could see, as the rain was breaking and giving way to a December sunset, an old ruined castle perched on a bluff of a nearby island, which the mapmakers tell me could be Stroma or Muckle Skerry. I disembarked the bus and lost my way snapping photographs and was lost for quite some time then wandering until I stumbled into the outskirts of what I thought was Edinburgh. A few fishermen encountered me and asked me where I was going. “Ireland,” I told them. “Ah,” one answered. “It’s over there.”

LATER, I wound up in the embrace of a voluptuous Inuit throat singer. Somehow she had become my girlfriend and somehow we were staying in a hotel room in Reykjavik that overlooked the entire city, which meant it must have been up by the Hallgrimskirkja. She had kakiniit sprawling all over the lower parts of her body like vines. I was coolly unsurprised that this was my new fate in this life, but having been denied emotional connection for so long, I found myself indifferent to this latest bedsheet romance. When she kissed me goodbye, I blinked. It wasn’t that I had no feelings for her. It was that I could barely remember my name.

After that my daughter came to live with me in the Hotel Reykjavik. We were there, wondering what on earth there was to do in Iceland other than visit hot springs and museums, when the lights went out. I thought it might just be the hotel electricity, but when I looked out the window, I could see the whole city of Reykjavik was dark. Then I began to hear a loud rumbling sound. “Maybe the Russians are attacking,” I told my daughter. “But why would they attack Reykjavik?” “I don’t know. Indefensible NATO country?” I said. I found an old radio and turned it on, but static came through. After adjusting the antennae, I was unable to pick up any signal.

the swedish rocket

MY FATHER CALLED ME. He said, “Look up!” I looked up and saw the rocket flying overhead. It traveled slowly. It was painted yellow and looked like a telescope except that its narrow end, where you would look into the telescope, was in front. There was a red light blinking near the front of the rocket. It had the appearance of an oversized child’s toy. “So that’s what those new Swedish ICBMs look like,” I said. The rocket traced its path beyond the island and landed somewhere on the mainland. But no explosion came. Maybe it was just being transferred to a more powerful launcher to protect against a Russian advance? “Did you see it?” my father asked through the phone. “I saw it,” I said. We all had seen the rocket soar by overhead.

All of Viljandi Town had been evacuated to this island in the Baltic for at least part of the year. It looked much like Gotland or Saaremaa, but I had never visited the place before we were forced to flee the war. Of course, we brought along with us all of our small-town drama which had continued on as if nothing happened. During the days, I would cycle along the gravel roads of the island, traveling from community to community. Sometimes I would go to the main island town and write there at a café on the square. Everyone seemed to be affected by a kind of midlife ennui. We were stuck in some apocalyptic version of St. Elmo’s Fire or The Big Chill.

All we needed was a more memorable soundtrack.

Unfortunately, I got caught up in some romantic hijinks. One day, I came home only to discover my friend’s wife wandering around in my kitchen wearing my underwear. Yes, my pale blue boxer briefs. I was surprised that they didn’t just slide right off of her. She had nothing else on, and was speaking to me in a very inflected accent. I don’t remember was she was saying, I just knew that she was trouble. Eventually I got her to leave, fully clothed. She was standing there in the main square when the Swedish rocket went over. “Did you see it?” I called out to her. “Did you see the rocket?” “Yes,” she nodded. She was wearing sunglasses and clutching a small bag, as if that might give her some peace in this harsh world. “Yes, I saw it.”

Just then her husband appeared, wearing a black hat, the kind that Zorro might have worn. He came walking in my direction like a hungry, impatient dog, but did not run. “I warned you,” he growled. “I warned you to leave my wife alone!” “I found her in my kitchen!” I protested. “She was totally naked. She was wearing my underwear!” I said this last part as if I had been the victim of this romantic island triangle. How dare she? How dare she even show up naked in my kitchen, with her lovely breasts all over the place. And to involve my underpants in this mess?

“I have no interest in your girl,” I told him.

The angry husband stopped there in his Zorro hat and eyed me. This was like a scene in some old Western. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I was waiting for the man to draw and to shoot me dead. Instead he took off his black hat and gestured at the sky. “You know, I believe you this time,” he muttered. “We have more important things to worry about these days anyway.”

the vestergade music shop

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a music shop on Vestergade in Copenhagen. It was at an intersection in a white building, but lower than the street level inside, so that you could stand inside and look out the windows onto the sidewalk. On the wall there were maybe six sets of headphones and six sets of albums. New albums. One of these new albums was called Sound-Dust by a French-British outfit named Stereolab. It was released on 28 August 2001. A week later, Stereolab would play at Pumpehuset, a local city venue. I know this because I was there.

In the music shop on Vestergade there also worked a young woman who had in her possession at least one white-and-blue striped shirt. She was a quiet, aloof Danish lass, and had very light blonde hair and freckles. I can only barely remember the contours of her face, but I remember them because I have been looking for them ever since in the faces of other women. She would wear a black hat sometimes, a sort of floppy 1920s newsboy looking thing. I’m surprised by how intimidated I was by this quiet Danish record store girl. Who was she? Where is she? Almost every action of hers glided away with silent proficiency. She took my kroner, handed the music over to me in a paper bag. Only once I saw her outside the shop. She was either coming or going. She had on black stockings and black shoes and the white-and-blue shirt.

That was a gray, cool, somber Danish autumn. The leaves in the city turned yellow and orange and then fell into the yard of the Nicolaj church. The news cut right through all the skin and blood to the core of your bones. In the Albertslund communal kitchen, another American student was leafing through a magazine that showed Manhattanites leaping from the tower windows, their clothes fluttering in the wind. The student, who was from Maine or Washington State, or some other place with lots of pine trees, tossed the magazine across the table and announced, “I can’t stand to even look at this stuff anymore!” I picked up the magazine and looked at the photographs. They unsettled me in ways that I could not understand. I couldn’t articulate how they had unsettled me. I also put the magazine down.

Autumn turned to winter, and the sidewalks were covered in frost, and the windows of the shops and boutiques were strung with blinking Christmas lights. There were holiday parties in the streets. In the bookstore windows there were new editions of The Lord of the Rings, because the first film in the trilogy would soon be released. At the Vestergade music shop, the Danish mystery pige took down Stereolab’s Sound-Dust and replaced it with a newer record.

But which one did she choose next? Which record did she choose?

the 6 am circle k coffee

*I’ve spent half my life in Helsinki Airport.*

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a 6 am coffee from Circle K. Actually there is something better, and it’s the special Finnair blueberry juice. During the flight over the Atlantic, they just leave it in the back of the plane in the kitchenette, and you can help yourself to as many cups as you like. I feel like Finnair is also my home in a way. And Helsinki Airport. Like I told my mom before I left, I don’t mind a layover in Helsinki, Finland.

I’ve spent half my life waiting in that airport.

I like Finland. Finnish, and by extension Estonian, women are super cute. I can see in my younger self, a sort of terrible but innate and unavoidable lecherousness, which is in and of itself a part of the biological condition. Such things can be ignored for only so long. Herein lies the conundrum of the suburbs. We are raised in comfort and expected to fall in line, but then things go haywire for so many of us and we do rather stupid and adventurous things. Restless people wind up in America, and you think that their descendants are somehow not like them? We are somehow more mellow and set in our ways, because we happened to be raised with a Nintendo and trusty pizza place up the way? I’ve got former classmates scattered all over the earth. You have to wonder, what went wrong here with all of us?

Or did anything go wrong at all?

Maybe things are just as they are.

Do you realize I have been crossing the North Atlantic by plane for more than two decades now? I’ve got grainy photos of me standing in Christiania in Copenhagen trying to pull a sword from a stone. Or that cold morning bus station in Stockholm, the day I fell ill and went to see the Vasa for the first time? I also remember my first trip to Iceland, which was in March 2001, and being on the Icelandair flight, which already had personal screens installed, and watching Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic” video, and the Icelandair attendant coming by and asking me if I wanted some coffee and knowing just by the look in her eyes that I was dealing with some other, non-American Icelandic lifeform.

Iceland had always intrigued me because I had been assigned to write a country report about it in the sixth grade. I had zero interest in this place. But it grew on me, the fermented shark meat, the geothermal pools. Among the first things I did on my first trip to Iceland was go to the supermarket and pick up some skyr, a yogurt that you can find tubs of in any American supermarket today, but was like an exotic food even back then. I put the skyr sticker in my passport like a souvenir, and you can imagine how the passport control officer looked at me when he went to stamp my passport and this sticker fell out.

Life just sort of went that way, and I went from Iceland to Denmark, and from Denmark, after some interludes in Norway and Sweden, to Finland, from which I predictably wound up in Estonia. I forget these things from time to time. I think when you are younger, maybe 25, you have a much shorter, more dynamic self narrative, but when you get to 44, there is so much time, and there were so many phases, that huge chunks of them can just drop off into the abyss like melted Greenlandic icebergs. You are reminded of stuff you did and think, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Happens every day. Years melt into years.

I wonder about the vantage point of older people who talk about stuff that happened in the 1960s. Like that’s a whole other block of time removed from the present, and how can you recall stuff that happened in 1966 without it being repackaged into new narratives. I mean, does your recall remain the same, or are you rewriting those past moments every time to remember them? My parents are still cruising around Long Island listening to something called Yacht Rock Radio, where they play the Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, and some DJ who sounds like a guest star on The Love Boat or Fantasy Island treats you to all the best yacht rock hits. “It was the era,” my father says with the wind in his hair listening to Michael McDonald. “The era!”

Anyway, where was I?

The Circle K 6 am coffee. Circle K is a lifeline to anyone past midnight in Estonia. Everything else is closed. French fries are the sole sustenance, unless you are brave enough to eat one of those double-barrelled hot dogs. The french fries, mind you, costed me only €1.50 per portion. In Sag Harbor, they would be like … $10. People keep asking me, do you ever think of moving back to Long Island? I say, sure, when I get my $7 million dollar advance on my next book, I’ll pick up a nice house next to Drew Barrymore’s and we can play tennis together. You’re all invited! I mean, come on. Let’s get real. Even diehard East End Long Islanders are fleeing because they have been driven to eating roadkill because of the ultra rich. The rich destroy almost everything they touch. They come into an area of cultural diversity, and the ‘just folks’ people who made it that way are eventually forced out, leaving behind executives with tennis courts.

So I am here, in Tallinn, with my 6 am coffee. I still call Circle K Statoil out of habit, and because I liked the Statoil branding better. Statoil also sounded better in Estonian. All kinds of characters exist in Statoil/Circle K in the early hours. There’s a kind of rough-edged party element in places like Tallinn, but also in Copenhagen, Reykjavik, especially in summer. In New York, the people sleeping in the train station are homeless, but in these places, they are more like young women (or men) who just had too much to drink last night. And also jetlagged people like myself who are hungry and on some weird inverted vampire sleep schedule, so that I want to sleep when everyone else is awake and vice versa. But, oh look, there’s the Linnahall. And there’s the spire of St. Olaf’s Church. This place. How did I even get here? I have no idea. Here I am, buying coffee.

To borrow a quote from Full Metal Jacket, “This is my Circle K 6 am coffee. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”

like a european movie

IT’S EIGHT THIRTY AM, and I’m getting on board a northbound train in Viljandi. Two women sit nearby, waiting as well. Over their shoulders I can see that Lavazza instant coffee machine gleaming white in the sun. The last time I took a train here, I got an espresso in a paper cup, but by the end of the day, and after many coffees more, I looked like someone who had been on a nasty amphetamine binge, and so this time, I have decided to forego the morning espresso. The machine is nice though. It’s a welcome Italian brand. More than a few weeks ago, I decided to sojourn out to Vasknarva, which is at the very edge of the European Union, so I could take a hard look at the fearsome Russian Federation on the other side. Through swamps and forests I journeyed, until I at last saw the onion domes of the Vasknarva church, and trekked down to the harbor where I met some fishermen. They tried to speak to me in Russian, but since I don’t speak Russian, we got by with a few hand gestures and some Estonian words. “Kala,” one of them said. As I stood there, looking over the river at the smoky shanties on the other side, I saw it again. There was a Lavazza coffee machine in Vasknarva.

I could drink coffee and watch Russia.

“Estonski?” one of the fishermen asked me.

“Nyet, amerikanski,” I told him.

His eyebrows raised upon hearing this and he gave me a puzzled smile.

Of course, I ordered myself an espresso from the machine. For me it served as proof that I was still standing in the civilized world, as I saw the border patrol glide up the river in a boat. This feeling of Europeanness means something to me. This is what Europe was supposed to be about. Efficiency, precision, the ability to use a chip card to order an Italian espresso from a machine at the murky riverside of the Western world. These small coffees do mean a lot.

***

AN HOUR AND A HALF later and we pull into Saku. The grass is lush green and dotted with yellow marigolds. Odd new geometric buildings stand in circles near the approach to the town, like a jumble of Lego toys. Europeans like to live in these kinds of Lego buildings. Not too long ago, I was standing on this same platform in the snow cold when the train pulled up. The Estonians call these trains “carrots,” because of their orange color, but I still can’t bring myself to say I took the “carrot” to Tallinn. I was standing there and through the glass, I could see a young woman who I knew, just sitting on the train. There was something cinematic about that vision, of the train pulling up in the winter dark and seeing her seated there through the glass. After some time, I worked up the nerve to go and talk to her. She was on her way back to Viljandi. She’s very young, but she looked a bit sleepy, world weary. She keeps herself busy, I think. You have to appreciate the romance of these trains though. When I write to old friends back in the US, they especially like these kinds of details. How I saw a girl I knew on a train, or how someone came in on the train and left the same day. Or how someone missed the train. For them, it’s reminiscent of that old movie Before Sunrise with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

In California, most people drive. In New York too. Here, I almost never drive anywhere.

Estonians, I think, wouldn’t make these connections. They don’t see how similar their lives are to the French and the Austrians and the “real Europeans.” I will admit that the country does feel mostly like a wilderness. Whenever I drive from Riga and begin to see those dense birch forests, I get the sense that I am heading to the very edge of the world. To leave these forests and go to a city like Rome or Barcelona or Paris is, in the Estonian mind, to go to Europe. But this same Europe also contains other far-flung corners, whether they be the Scottish Hebrides, or the Norwegian fjords, or the rocky Greek islands. The Estonian north woods are part of this larger experience, and through them one can travel on reliable little trains that some call “carrots.” The train pulls up and you can see someone you know through the glass.

***

NOW THERE ARE THE CRANES and graffiti of Tallinn. From here, Viljandi feels like a distant world. For me, Viljandi is just another provincial European town. It has its castle ruins, its old churches, its hotels and bars, its cafes and bakeries. Something about its sloppiness, those old falling-down fences and unpainted facades, makes it especially Gallic in feeling, as if I got lost somewhere outside of Lyon and turned up in this dusty place. Surely the fishing villages of Brittany must be home to similar layers of decay and renewal. Old barns renovated into cafes and bars. Haunted lost old factories. And did you know that there are three Americans living around the corner from me now? One from Florida, one from Massachusetts, and one from West Virginia. There’s an Argentine and a Dutchman too, and an Australian cycles by daily and waves. For the middle of nowhere, it’s some kind of somewhere. A small French town, as I said, that happens to be up in the north woods, and where they speak Estonian instead of French.

Sadly, the wine and bread and cheese aren’t as cheap, but you can get other things at the markets here, and they are playing the same 1980s hits that they play everywhere in Europe. Here they sell cloudberries, black and red currants, and dead eels. In the fall, there are piles of chanterelles and buckets of golden potatoes. There are weird aspects to life here, for sure, but those weird aspects are in every place. The other day I parked my car, and a man started yelling something across the street at me, something about Estonians and parking. An older man with gray hair. I think he was drunk. But there are these kinds of people everywhere. I’m used to it. In America, they yell at you about Jesus and Trump and Obama, here they yell at you about Kalevipoeg and parking. Every society has its pressures, its idiosyncrasies. These things change wherever you go. Often in Estonia, I can feel the weight of the ideas of its people on me. They talk about things as if I know what they mean. My favorite is when Estonians tell you to “be normal,” or to “be concrete.” I imagine turning myself into a stony slab. Even better is when an Estonian will say to you, “but I’m a normal person.” Olen normaalne inimene. Yeah, right. I just shrug my shoulders. I have learned to. It’s too tiring to pay it any more attention.

I don’t take Estonia as a place that needs to satisfy my desire for everything I want. These days, I just take life here as it is. I do like those touches, the instant coffee machine on the Narva River, the smooth running trains gliding into Saku at night, the sleepy-eyed young people on their way to somewhere. I’ve been living in Europe off and on for two decades now, and I wonder if it has changed me, if I too have become a European in this time. I’m not sure what that means. I think my inner American appreciates these little scenes a bit too much for me to be a real European. I still think I am living in some European film. Sometimes it’s an erotic thriller. Sometimes it’s a comedy. More recently, it’s been turning into a historical drama about the lead up to a big war. It’s Midnight in Paris starring Owen Wilson, except Morning in Estonia, starring Justin Petrone. But you know what, I like this movie that I’m in right now.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

An Estonian version of this piece appeared in the newspaper Sakala this week.

finland, finland

IT WAS A KIND OF RESORT, in Finland. In one part, there was a dining area, but very dim because the lights had been turned off. When you turned them back on, the lights were too bright and harsh. I was waiting there at the old bar. Later that afternoon, I was supposed to give a lecture on Estonians at the University of Helsinki. Sanna Marin was going to be there. A young couple arrived to the dining area next. The man was shorter, with dark brushy hair and was wearing a suit with a bowtie, and the woman had on a light blue dress and had light brown shoulder-length hair. A young, newly wed couple full of cake, if not hope. The girl was carrying with her an umbrella, to keep away from the rain, the sun, and the dining area light bulbs too.

THEY ASKED ME if I would take some photos of them together, but the lighting was either too bright or too dark. We played around with positions, “You sit there, now turn your head this way,” and then turned on the bar lights, but turned off the rest of the lights in the room, but it was still impossible to get a shot. After a while, I just gave up. I couldn’t get one good photograph of this newly married Finnish couple. They just could not be photographed.

INSTEAD, I WANDERED DEEPER into the resort, to where there was a kind of food street open, or concessions area. It was early in the morning, and most of the restaurants and kiosks were closed. But there was an espresso machine. Success! The small recycled cardboard cup was filled with the hot black drink. I decided I needed something sweet for my little Finnish fika, but all of the shops and kiosks were still closed. So I stole a few pieces of Fazer chocolate from one that hadn’t opened up yet but then, after some deliberation, put them back. Finland was a respectable, law-abiding kind of place, where one just did not steal Fazer chocolates.

AROUND THE CORNER, I encountered some people. A woman went walking by me with some kind of “euro burrito” served on a tray and drowning in white and red sauces. A line led to one little pop-up restaurant, where I could see the corpses of whole chickens that had been deep fried in grease, sprawled about in tins like dead boiled lobsters. The man behind the counter looked like a cross between Ryan Gosling and Steve Carrell. He was American for sure, and had a mustache and was wearing a red vest. “What can I get you?” the man said. “The list of specials is written right up there.” He gestured at a chalkboard and a list of greasy, meaty, deep fried fare. “Actually, I’m just looking for some chocolate.” “Well, if you get hungry for a real meal, come back,” he said. “But whatever you do, don’t get food from the lady next door. Her food sucks.” Behind him, I could see the fry cooks salting a fresh batch of tasty golden fries.

Someone called out the number for an order. I slinked away.

WHO WAS THAT Finnish university lecturer I once knew? I thought as I wandered back through the resort. Was his name Ahto? Ahti? Antti? Aki! Aki was his name. What was he up to today? Maybe he could help me prepare for my upcoming talk at the university. I only had 10 minutes, 10 minutes to bedazzle them with tales of the Estonians. Sanna Marin, as I said before, was going to be there. I wanted to impress her. When I reached the dining area, I could see that the newly wedded couple had already separated. The young man was still seated at the table. The woman was in the corner.

“Marriage just didn’t work for us,” she told me, while twirling her umbrella. “We were just too different.” “That’s too bad,” I said. “Here, quick, would you please feel my breasts?” the Finnish bride said. She pulled down the front of her blue dress, exposing herself. I reached over and felt her breasts. “Very soft,” I said. “Just lovely.” The Finnish bride smiled. “That’s what you get when you come to Finland,” the Finnish girl told me. She had large and friendly beautiful eyes.

Somewhere on a nearby bandstand, a children’s choir had assembled. They were singing a haunting tune. I couldn’t make out the words, but I think they were saying, “Finland, Finland.”

petrograd

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.

rotermanni sketch

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.