Category: published work

the trumpet player from barcelona

AT THE START OF MARCH, our cat Kurru started behaving strangely. Kurru is a striped female cat, aged about 17 years. She’s thinned out in her elderhood and doesn’t eat with the same enthusiasm she once had, but she is still quite active, when she’s not sleeping the day away on the kitchen table. From time to time, I’d find her staring out the window. The winter was ferocious and long, but with the warmer weather, she’d become less intimidated by the idea of going outside.

She would usually sleep through the night, but when March began, she became more active in the early mornings. At about six, she would start to make odd noises that are difficult to transcribe. Let’s just say that all of Estonian’s lovely vowels were represented, such as ä, ö, ü, and õ. “Äöüõ! Äöüõ!”  This wasn’t your usual “meow.” It was different. Naturally, it got on my nerves and I would have preferred to slumber on in silence beneath my warm blanket. A few times I shouted at her to be quiet, and even threw a pillow at her. The cat Kurru then ran to the other window and continued with her cat’s lament. Then one morning I looked out the window and saw who she was talking to. There was a beautiful black male cat there, who was saying the same things to her in that same strange voice.

Our cat isn’t of child-, or kitten-, bearing age anymore. I think. She’s an old lady. Seventeen! This would be as if Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren got pregnant. Maybe it’s still possible, but it just doesn’t happen every day. But this reality doesn’t seem to make a difference to the other cats. Someone in the cat community has apparently spread the news that in this apartment — our apartment — lives a female cat. And so those male cats arrive at six in the morning and line up beneath our Kurru’s window. I can hear their agony through the glass. Cats apparently can’t masturbate. Or can they?

I don’t really want to know, but anyway, our cat has had to live with this constant torment, that the neighbor boys just won’t give up. Sometimes I think she even enjoys this little mating season drama. She is more waiting for it than fearing it. Sometimes the black cat is beneath the window, but other times there is a fat orange cat with a flat face that looks like Boris Yeltsin. These cavaliers are waiting, steadfast. They want Kurru to come away with them. They don’t seem to be ready to give up any time soon.

How come they never give up?

***

But enough about cats! I actually wanted to talk about music today and Barcelona. And not just about music, but about a certain musician. At the edge of our town dwells a certain family of considerable means, they are nouveau riche — as far as I know they lack an aristocratic pedigree — but they have learned to live like the old rich live, to sleep in the best hotels, to drink the best wines, to appreciate fine art, travel, and the good life. Some time ago, these travels brought the mother and daughter of the family to Barcelona, where they stayed in an exclusive hotel suite. From the windows, one could look out on all that Barcelona had to offer.

The mother of the family is a little older than me, a mature, beautiful and intelligent woman, who wears wonderful clothes. Her daughter is about 20 and is studying international affairs in Geneva. She has blond hair and has a good sense of humor. She’s also quite playful and likes to make jokes, like a puppy, I guess. It’s always fun to pal around with her. For me though she has always just been my friend’s youngest daughter. She has never been anything more.

This is an important fact, because one night she met a man who is about the same age as me. A little younger, but not much. This happened when they decided to visit a Barcelona jazz club called “Tony’s Swing Club.” In the band, there was an American who sang and played the trumpet. I don’t know where he really was from, but I like to think he came from New Orleans.

“I’m sorry,” my friend’s daughter said some time ago when she told me about him, “but that trumpet player looked a lot younger than you.” “Does he have three daughters,” I asked in response. “No, he has no children,” she answered and added, “and he’s never been married either.”

“Well, that’s why he looks so young,” I said. “Give him three daughters and a rough divorce and let’s see how young he looks.” “Yes, it’s hard to say what he’s done in his life,” the young lady agreed. “Apparently he’s just been playing the trumpet.”

He definitely played the trumpet and quite well. So well that my friend, the young lady’s mother, invited him to their hotel for a private concert. And that almost 40-year-old musician from New Orleans went along, of course. I don’t know what he looks like, but I imagine something like Harry Connick, Jr. At the hotel, he serenaded them. Maybe he performed something from the Louis Armstrong songbook. “And I say to myself, what a wonderful world …” The woman and her daughter sat and watched and listened. When the concert was over, they applauded.

Later they all drank some good Spanish red wine.

“I thought that musician was interested in me,” the mother of the family acknowledged to me later. She really is an attractive woman and charismatic, and these kinds of women are known to often drive men crazy. “But then I understood that he was actually in love with my daughter.”

I don’t know if this revelation disappointed her. The woman will soon turn 50. The daughter is in her early twenties. But, to borrow a line from the American President John F. Kennedy, “the torch was passed to a new generation, a generation born in this century.” Unfortunately, the musician’s young muse wasn’t interested in him. The trumpet player was sad about it, but he still didn’t give up.

***

Quite the opposite. A few weeks later he arrived to Estonia. Officially, he was here to attend a music festival, but he really came for the young lady. I have a hard time understanding just what exactly he was after. Love? That this young lady — half girl, half woman — would respond to his interests? But what would become of the young lady’s career in international affairs? Or did he want to marry her? Or maybe just to steal a kiss?

Here, I admit that I’ve had similar experiences. Because of that, I can tell you that he had no idea what he wanted. Sometimes a woman’s spirit gets so deep inside of you, it’s hard to exist without it. It takes over your whole body and soul. It’s even hard to breathe. It’s hard to think. It’s hard to be. It makes men do stupid things, not on purpose, but because if they don’t buy those plane tickets or send that love letter, they will go insane or explode. It’s such a big ball of energy, like crashing waves on a stormy ocean.

The waves will flow, whether you like it or not. The only question is how to navigate them.

This time, when my friend’s daughter’s musical suitor appeared in Estonia, she was quite direct with him. She told him all kinds of nasty things and then blocked him on every channel.

“I told him that I was sad that he was so old and had accomplished so little in his life,” the young lady told me. “I didn’t mean it, of course. I just wanted him to leave me alone.”

With a broken heart, the trumpet player dragged himself back to Barcelona. Maybe he even cried, as I have cried. Maybe he wrote to her, as I have written to women. Maybe he even lied to himself, as I have lied to myself.

“She was too young.” “She wasn’t the right one.” “Who wants to be with a woman who is still in college?” the trumpet player lied to himself. He went back to his jazz club, met some Spanish woman named Maria, got drunk and wound up in bed with her. But all through the night he spent with Maria, he was haunted by a tiny Estonian plika.

It’s not so easy to free yourself from a woman’s spirit.

In the morning, he grabbed his smartphone and tapped out some sentences to her and pressed send.

“Does he still write to you?” I asked the young lady recently. “No,” she answered but then whispered, “actually, he does, but I don’t respond. But, yes, he still writes.”

“See,” I said. “Some people just don’t give up.”

***

There are a lot of stories like this and I hear them all the time. Most women are tired of these characters. A real man should be like a Cleveron robot who goes where you want him to go and then says something when you press a button. When you say, ‘Don’t write to me,’ he won’t write because he’s a good robot.

But some still write. And not just men. Women too. This has become my strange hobby. I ask friends if their suitors are still writing them, or if they have given up. I am trying to understand their psychology and my own. I have a friend who left her partner long ago because he was smoking too much pot. She blocked him everywhere and told him she never wanted to see him again. The reasons for the split were clear. But the man kept on calling, until his number was blocked too. “I don’t understand what his problem is,” the woman said. “Do I really have to spend my whole life with my ex-boyfriend haunting me?” That guy just won’t give up though. He is stuck inside a prison he built for himself, where his thoughts spin round in circles. With all channels blocked, maybe he might send a message by carrier pigeon?

“Sometimes it seems to me that when a woman falls in love, it’s nice, but when a man falls in love, it can be catastrophic,” a famous Estonian singer once told me, who is considered to be something of a love expert.

One of my male friends though said that it’s programmed into the culture. “Women play hard to get. Are they flirting or not? In films we often see how the main characters hate each other at first but become lovers in the end.” This happens in many old and new movies, he noted.

“What else do people have left, when they can’t even believe in love?” asked another friend rhetorically, who has become a well-known actress. “People like to believe that they know what’s best for them. And if this good thing is this girl who tells you no all the time, they still believe that she will say yes in the end. That she will finally see the same things that you see, and that a happy ending still awaits.

“For me, the most interesting thing is that we still think we know what’s best for us,” the actress went on. “I certainly don’t think that I know what’s best for me. Life knows best. And if life doesn’t offer me that boy I want, then naturally he’s not the right one for me. That’s why I don’t pursue people in such a way.”

According to this actress, some people just don’t listen to life, but she acknowledged the game of love can be confusing. “Especially when all women supposedly want you to compete for their hearts,” she said. “Then you have to figure out if you should still compete for her love or just leave her alone.”

***

I don’t know what became of that trumpet player from Barcelona. It’s possible that he’s still performing in the same club. Or maybe he’s moved on, to Madrid or Paris. Maybe his heart was so broken that he moved back home to New Orleans. Maybe he met a nice person along the way and they’re now married and expecting a daughter. Maybe he doesn’t look so young anymore. If he still thinks of that Estonian girl, maybe she has inspired him to play the blues only better. Maybe his solos are more emotive now, more intense, richer and deeper. Maybe when he sings, his voice cracks as if he’s about to cry. Maybe it was necessary for him to get his heart broken, so that he would get to the next level.

In this way, pain can be a blessing. As I have found with my own pain. I could of course write about the person who broke my heart. I could write about her until the end of my days. Novels, short stories, and poems. Some part of this experience won’t ever leave me, no. Part of my heart just won’t give up on her.

I find myself still thinking of her, especially in those early mornings at first light, when the cat goes to the window to give her cat’s concert. Our sturdy, mature feline awaits her suitors on the other side of the glass. It’s terrifying sure, but also a little thrilling.

And there she sits. She sits and she waits and she never gives up.

An Estonian-language version of this piece recently appeared in Edasi.

the uncle frank story

Every Uncle Frank has his own Uncle Frank.     

I THINK EVERY ITALIAN FAMILY has at least one good Uncle Frank story. This is for the simple reason that there are so many Uncle Franks. Frank, or Francesco, continues to be one of the most popular Italian names, and even in the 2020s, it ranks second only behind Leonardo among newborn Italians.

My grandfather’s name was Frank, and so to all of his nieces and nephews, the children of the famous Uncle Vinny, he was their Uncle Frank. My mother’s brother is also called Frank. Believe me, we have a lot of Uncle Frank stories concerning this particular Uncle Frank. The funny thing is that all of those Uncle Franks also had their own Uncle Franks. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope or prism; you point it at one Uncle Frank and then suddenly there are hundreds of them reflected in tiny pixels, a fantastic mosaic of Franks for the eyes.

This is not to be confused with Cousin Frank. Cousin Franks, sometimes nicknamed Frankie, are a different phenomenon. Thanks to Italian naming traditions, I have at least two Cousin Frankies that I know of, and there may be more. Years ago, when I briefly toyed with the idea of compiling a family biography, I began collecting stories. I knew that I had a Cousin Frankie who was in a rock band. Because of his dark and mysterious looks, he had at least for some time been nicknamed Cochise, after the Apache Indian guerrilla. 

There was another cousin that I had heard of, however, who had ventured to the South Pole. And then there was a cousin who was running a pizza restaurant out in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The book project was going well, and I imagined all of these as three separate profile pieces. The rock musician, the Polar explorer, the pizza guy. After some investigation, however, it turned out that all of these cousins were the same person, Frankie Abbatecola, one of Uncle Vinny’s legions of grandchildren. Had I written the book, most of it would have been about the same person. This energetic Cousin Frankie is a Mötley Crüe devotee not much older than me, who slings pizza dough during the day, wakes up the neighbors with his electric at night and yes, even once made it to Antarctica, or at least some place where there happened to be lots of penguins. Today, Frankie runs a busy, buzzing pizza restaurant in Massachusetts called “I Love Frankies.”

Whenever anyone questions my Italian identity, I just tell them about I Love Frankies.

 “That’s my Cousin Frankie’s place,” I say. They seem satisfied by this information.

***

BUT THIS STORY is not about Cousin Frankie. This story is about Uncle Frank, and a certain Uncle Frank who happened to be the older brother of my grandfather Jerry’s mother Rosaria. I suppose to me, he would be a great great uncle, the sibling of my great grandmother Rose. His real name was Francesco Petrellis, and he was born on that mountain top in Calabria in the village of San Giorgio Albanese overlooking the Ionian Sea, the same place I spent the night watching Godzilla dubbed into Italian. His birth year was 1889. It was a long time ago. At that time, America had not even yet formed itself on the lips of my predecessors. It’s interesting to imagine that if I rewound the clock back a century, most of my family was not even speaking English to each other. They were Italians, born and bred into the soil.

Uncle Frank emigrated to the United States with his family in 1900. It seems his father, whose name was Carmine, and who came from an old Greek family in San Giorgio Albanese, had already crossed the mighty Atlantic before, but this time decided to make the move with his whole family. There was Francesco, Rosaria, Maria Theresa, and their youngest sister Rosina.

It’s hard for me to imagine what the lives of this immigrant family was like because Carmine, the father, was illiterate, and when they later purchased a house in the town of Huntington on Long Island in the 1920s, where I was born decades later, it was Carmine’s much younger wife, Anna, who signed the contract, because her husband didn’t even know how to write. By that time, they had come to call themselves Peters, instead of Petrellis, to make their American life more manageable. This was a fundamental aspect of American identity. Even if you were not born in America, and obviously were not an American, you could give yourself an American name. Petrellis became Peters. For some of the Abbatecolas, their unwieldy name was shortened to Abbott to make it easier for bank tellers and telemarketers. It was a cosmetic change though. You can change your name, but that doesn’t change who you really are.

As such, the newly minted American “Frank Peters,” known to anyone within his circle of family and friends still as “Francesco Petrellis” was a loyal citizen of the United States to whoever wanted to know, but spoke Italian as a native tongue. He married, perchance, a Hungarian immigrant named Ethel, who was from a village called Nyírbátor near the Romanian border. I know much of this information because in 1920, she applied for a passport to visit Czechoslovakia. What I find fascinating about this is that she had never had a passport before then. In the early 1900s you could sail from country to country and settle with no documentation.

It seems that Uncle Frank and my grandfather Jerry had something of a rapport. Perhaps because Jerry did not get on so well with his own father, Salvatore, which was understandable considering that he had once left him bound in a basement cellar. According to my grandmother Margaret, they would go and visit Uncle Frank and share some coffee together.

Jerry had met my grandmother Margaret, who was not Italian, while working for a construction company in Virginia. They were introduced by friends and married impulsively after knowing each other for just a few weeks. Margaret at that time was working as a school teacher. Her grandfather was a German architect, but most of her ancestors were British settlers who had crossed the sea centuries before the Italians. One can only imagine this young Virginian school teacher being introduced to the enigmatic Uncle Frank, with his fedora hat and thick Italian accent, and his equally mysterious Hungarian wife Ethel. He told the government whenever they asked him that he did odd jobs for a living. But according to various family members, Uncle Frank really made his living as a chauffeur for underworld figures. My father claims it was to Vito Genovese himself, “Don Vitone,” the founder of the Genovese crime syndicate who dominated the American mafia for most of the 20th century. Others claim that he drove around another mobster called Capone. 

Whether true or not, Uncle Frank was well paid for whatever kind of work he was doing in his career of odd jobs. One day in early 1965, when he was already an old man, Uncle Frank paid his nephew Jerry a visit and gave him a $500 bill. This banknote, which is no longer in circulation, featured President William McKinley on the front. My uncle still recalls the scene of the old man in his fedora sitting in the family kitchen and handing his nephew the money. But Uncle Frank actually visited all of his relatives and similarly gave each one of them a $500 bill. This became the Uncle Frank Story, the old relative who showed up, handing out $500 left and right. He then departed the United States, ceased being Frank Peters, and resumed being Francesco Petrellis and died several months later in San Giorgio Albanese, his home village. After he died, my grandfather Jerry went over to his uncle’s house. Frank’s wife had died the previous year and the house was empty. To his surprise, he discovered bags of money, hidden in various places. There were several purses full of banknotes that had been stuffed in the oven.

***

WHEN I RETURNED to New York after my adventure in Southern Italy I showed the photos of San Giorgio Albanese to my Virginian grandmother, who was 91 years old then, and still quite lucid, though slowly fading mentally. Grandma was in every way of a different breed than my grandfather. Her body was trim and lean, and she had her own kind of measured or balanced energy that she carried with her. Like most women in my family who had lived to an advanced age, she seemed almost preternaturally perceptive, and could listen and understand many things, without revealing any of her thoughts or opinions. It was all there, hidden behind the eyes. 

This same Virginia school teacher had fallen in with some Calabrian construction worker in the South. To a woman like her, he must have been dark and exotic, and, well, it must have been a passionate relationship. You just don’t marry someone after two weeks if it isn’t a scorcher. Often when I think of this story now, I consider how I got married in more or less the same way. There is a wild streak in the family, but it’s hard to pinpoint its origin. Surely, some of it is rooted in the rugged mountains of Calabria. Yet maybe some of it comes from the swamps of Virginia.

At my parents’ house that Christmas, everyone had gathered around to see the images from my great Italian adventure, and my mother’s brother Frank even thanked me for at last re-establishing contact with our Italian cousins. “It was good of you to do that,” he said. My father’s mother had looked at the photos with some interest, but said little. Once she went back to her home, where she lived a solitary life watching CNN, listening to the radio, and playing her piano, she somehow discovered an old photo that had once been sent to Jerry from a relative. 

The photo showed a man in a coffin, covered with bouquets of flowers. The photo read, in Italian, “On the 9th day of June 1965, in San Giorgio, died Petrellis Francesco.” The photo had been taken by A. Triolo, also of San Giorgio, and the photo was signed by Cosmo Petrellis. 

This family curiosity had traveled across the Atlantic and across decades of forgotten memories, only to find its way into my hands, hands that had recently returned to that same village. In thinking about Uncle Frank with his fedora hat and bags full of mob money, I felt that I had understood something that perhaps only another Italian could understand. That whoever we were, and wherever we lived, and whatever names we called ourselves, we were still this illusory thing. Italians were just another unexplained meteorological phenomenon, like those tall waterspout tornadoes rising up like the mighty staff of Poseidon from the depths of the Ionian Sea. We came and we left, we appeared, vanished, and reappeared. One day, we might show up at your door in a crisp gray suit and fedora with a bag full of $500 bank notes. The next day we were gone. And weeks later, we might turn up in the old village, to greet our many relatives. 

Just as I had done weeks before in San Giorgio.

Uncle Frank was Frank Peters to the US government and Francesco Petrellis to the Italian one. His odd jobs were driving bigshot mobsters around. But Italians belonged to other kinds of systems. Governments didn’t mean as much as family. The mafia was just another kind of human organization, as legitimate or illegitimate as the local police. Laws were distant, arbitrary, written by strangers. Politics, like in the mafia, was personal, dangerous, and corrupt.

And time, as I have said, was just imaginary. Everybody knew that it didn’t really exist.

soy loco por tí, estonia

SOMETIME IN THE BLEAK DEPTHS of the pandemic, I became aware of the arrival of some dark-haired, shadowy strangers in town, mysterious characters who would lurk at the margins of parties, or whose strumming of guitars might be overheard whenever I passed the room they were renting on Posti Street. The Chileans! The way people around me referred to them, it was as if a whole orchestra from Valparaíso had been shipwrecked on the shores of Lake Viljandi. In reality, there were just two: Tomás del Real and Javier Navarro. But they were important. They were part of something new: a little South American community in Viljandi.

Viljandi, despite its rather small size, has always hosted pocket-sized minority enclaves. One stretch of Pikk Street was once called “Jew Street,” because of the active Jewish community that dwelled there before the Soviets deported some and the Germans and their evil helpers murdered the rest. Viljandi’s Jews even had their own sauna and fire brigade. There are also stories about the Romani people, or mustlased, who once camped in the forests where the Metsakalmistu, or Forest Cemetery, is now located, and how the Romani women tried to convince Mayor Maramaa to buy them horses so that they could leave. As far as I know, there was never a Latin American community here, until the arrival of Tomás and Javier from Chile, and Pepi from Argentina, and Tito from Cuba, and Miguelito from Mexico too. Slowly, something new is coming into existence.

Of these Latin Viljandiers, musician Tomás del Real is perhaps among the better known. On August 26, he performed at the Pärimusmuusika Ait, or Folk Music Center, to celebrate the release of his latest album, Principios de Declaración. Del Real is no stranger to the iconic Ait. He even used to live in the cellar when he first arrived in Viljandi and got an artist’s residency.

“Downstairs is where my room used to be, and every time I go there, my heart skips a beat,” he says. “Next to it is the rehearsal room, and that also gets me emotional.” Tomás recalls staring at the stones in the wall, or looking out the windows of the Ait on winter days when everything about Estonia was new, and he would take long walks around the old castle ruins. “Every spot in the Ait contains memories,” he says. “Every time I perform in the Ait, I get nervous, because it matters to me.”

His own performance, in front of a mostly packed house, came off flawlessly. While the songs on the record have diverse origins, the quiet introspection of Viljandi life has seeped into all. He also structured his show in a unique way, with one half of the stage divided between a standing microphone, where he addressed the audience as would any singer songwriter, standing and at times, and  discussing the political situation at home in Chile. On the other part of the stage, he had a “living room,” where he played his tunes just as if he was at home. Tomás says this is part of the duality of being a character and a witness to music being created. He adds that during the “living room” segment of his show, he for a time felt like he was home, which, for now at least, means Viljandi’s Old Town. He even has a composition on the record called “Viljandi.” Though he grew up so far away, he also says there are certain commonalities between Chileans and Estonians. The era of the military dictatorship in Chile officially ended in 1990, while Estonians restored their independence the following year. 

Tomas del Real on stage in Viljandi on August 26. Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.

“We have both been oppressed and in difficult situations,” says Tomás. Because of that, he says, both cultures value friendships, because they have learned to rely on each other.  “It’s the only way that people who have suffered for so long can function as a society,” Tomás says. He adds that Chileans have also learned to be tight-lipped like Estonians, for the same reasons. 

Viljandi has also fostered a creative streak in Tomás, which is another reason why he has stayed here. At one point, he was writing one new song a day, some of which appeared on a record he cut with local musician Lee Taul last year, calling their duo Don’t Chase the Lizard. The rest of it populates the hypnotic tunes on his latest solo outing. But Tomás is not the only musician from South America in Viljandi these days. There is at least one other sudamericano. 

He is the one known to all as “Pepi”.

Indeed José “Pepi” Prieto might, in some future almanac authored by local historian Heiki Raudla, be considered the pioneer Latin American in Viljandi. He was the first to explore it, the same way that explorer Juan Diaz de Solis once dropped anchor in what is now Argentina in 1516. A native of Buenos Aires, Pepi had almost anything one could dream of by his early twenties: a steady girlfriend, a band, a career. He was restless though, and decided to go abroad for a spell, where he worked as a programmer in Indonesia. A chance encounter with an Estonian woman there inspired him to come to the northern margins of Europe, just as it once inspired a young American journalist to do the same. It was a decade ago, and just a few days before Christmas. “I was told that it was -30 degrees, but I had no idea of how cold it actually was,” he says of this frosty arrival. Like any true South American, he showed up in Estonia in December wearing shorts. “We went straight to the shop after that to buy a good coat and boots,” he says.

Then he came to Viljandi. Immediately, it struck him as a quiet, inspiring place, where his creativity for unknown reasons began to surge in the same way that it would for Tomás later. For years, Pepi kept a room in the Koit Seltsimaja, or Koit Society House, on the corner of Koidu and Jakobsoni Streets that once housed the Ugala Theatre from the 1920s until the 1980s. 

For a time he even managed a creative space there, called the Sama Sama Studios. 

“I started to feel like I was the guardian of that house,” says Pepi. “I was the person bringing people to the house, and always showing people the rooms.” It also inspired him to write new music, to invite people to collaborate on music and to perform.

Araukaaria, as seen through the gates of the Koit Society House. Pepi Prieto, Lee Taul, Johannes Eriste, Fedor Bezrukov, and Norbert De Varrene. Photo by Paul Meiesaar.

These days, Pepi performs with Araukaaria, a quintet that also features Lee Taul on violin and vocals, as well as percussionist Johannes Eriste, a guitarist called Norbert De Varrene, and a bassist from Narva named Fedor Bezrukov. The band’s music is informed by South American psychedelia from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Estonian folk. They have an earnest but passionate sound. The band named itself after the sacred tree of the indigenous Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina, and araucano is a Spanish name for the Mapuches. “I grew up seeing these trees,” says Pepi, whose father was Chilean. “They have always been in my life.” Pepi sees other kinds of trees these days though. Birches, pines, and alders. He loads them into his wood-heated furnace. He also has a summer place outside town where he is raising cucumbers and potatoes with his Estonian family.

That’s right, Pepi, like myself, has contributed to population growth in the Republic of Estonia. He can now be seen walking a small blonde child down the street and speaking Spanish to her. Sometimes his friend Leandro, another programmer from Argentina whom he enticed to Estonia, tags along. Leandro is also a regular in town, but has opted to live in Tallinn full time. When I see both of them, I have to look twice. Latin Americans in Viljandi? How did it even happen?

“They are not like stereotypical South Americans, because they enjoy winter and silence, so in that sense they are in the right place,” says Lee Taul, who collaborates with Tomás and Pepi. “We are richer that they have come here, and they also know how to attract people with their energy,” she says, describing both del Real and Prieto as industrious, motivated musicians. 

“They love nature too,” says Lee of her respective bandmates. “That is perhaps one reason they are here, because the forest is in the city,” she says. “For every true artist, nature provides a rich environment, a golden nest from which to hatch something new to life.” 

Tomás for his part concurs with her assessment, calling the Estonians’ relationship with nature as “connected and profound.” “It’s absolutely true that I am more creative here because of the environment,” remarks Pepi. Here I would have to say they are correct, even if I am not a South American, or only in my heart. I am grateful for the arrival of these Southerners. Not only are they inspired by Viljandi, but they have inspired me. I agree with them, and wholeheartedly. 

Ma olen nõus. Estoy de acuerdo!

the 400 blows: an account of some months off social media

The 400 Blows | Blow movie, Film stills, Film

A scene from The 400 Blows (1959) directed by François Truffaut

TUESDAY, the 21st of September was my first day off social media. It also happened to be my father’s birthday, but these two events were not related. I did feel guilty for not being there to wish him a happy birthday in front of everybody, but this prompted another perplexing question: Where was this ‘there’ where I was supposed to be? It almost reads like an absurd poem. In the old days, I might get him a card. Nobody had to witness any moment of it. I did not go out in the street and loudly proclaim my sentiments. We might gather, yes, and he might be served a cake. Someone might take a picture. I have no idea where the ‘there’ is where I was supposed to be on that day, my father’s birthday, but I could sense that I was absent from that place. If it is a place.

Why I decided to leave social media is I guess of some interest. A simple answer is: addiction. Scrolling social media developed into my most sacred ritual over the years. It was the first thing I did in the mornings, the last thing I did at night. And if I had happened to wake up in the middle of the night, I would do it again. I would check posts, notifications. I felt some kind of pleasure when I saw that someone had liked something, or expressed something. I am sure this is correlated to a surge in dopamine, but I didn’t see it that way. In all my time spent as a mouse in that artificial labyrinth, I had barely noticed how it was all set up. Looking back I have to wonder if all of that time I spent there, in that place, wherever it is, was worth it. Perhaps a tenth. More likely 1 percent of the time I spent on social media platforms enriched my life in any way. Therefore I had wasted a part of my life using the 21st century version of an online bulletin board, or one of those usenet groups that emerged in the 1990s at the dawn of internet time. Yet for now at least, those days have come to a rest, if not an end. I had left the shared space. For many, it seemed, I had vanished. “Where did you go?” a concerned friend wrote to me. “But I didn’t go anywhere,” I told him truly. “I’m right here where I have always been all along. Here.”

***

There is a saying among the Irish for people who leave a family event without saying anything. They just feel like it’s time to go and then silently slip out the door. My grandmother was Irish, and so I’ve been made aware of this situation, particularly when one of my uncles just disappears, leaving people wondering where he went, and why he hadn’t bothered to kiss everyone, in the Italian fashion. They call it the “Irish Goodbye” and, in a way, I had given social media the Irish goodbye. One morning, I just wasn’t there. But it was necessary. Social media was not only an addiction. It had become a war zone. It perhaps had always been one, a virtual conurbation of unhappy people airing grievances and settling scores. In the year 2021, this became the terrain of a scorched earth war between new vaccine advocates and opponents. 

Feelings throughout the pandemic had been heated. Before the pandemic, it was the Trump presidency that gave lifeblood to the arguments. In the summer of ’21, it was now epidemiology. I began to feel my own psychosis set in as I was exposed to diatribes by social justice warriors turned vaccination advocates on one part, and conspiracy theorists trying to feed me livestock dewormers on the other. It was relentless and it was unhealthy. Data, data, data. One morning, I awoke to a friend describing his desire to load a tranquilizer gun with miRNA vaccines and drive around town shooting people. People from both sides accused the other of being accessories to murder. Being exposed to this daily torrent of discontent had a bad effect. Any remaining peace of mind was shattered. It would take me hours to shake off the feeling.

Social media also fed massive insecurity issues within me, I think, and reinforced a sense of isolation or apartness from others. When I was using it, I would tune out the people who were actually inhabiting the same physical space as me. I ignored the rich detail of real life, yes, real life, this one that one can taste, touch, and smell here now. When I deactivated my accounts, however, I felt a massive void open up. Somehow, I felt as if I had lost everything. I had lost nothing of course. Most of those people were not my real friends. In fact, I had never seen most of them in the flesh. So they were not “leaving” my life, as they never were in my life to begin with. The sense of loss was synthetic. Yet there was also this odd sensation of disconnecting from the world, because nobody knows where you are anymore, or what you are having for lunch, except the person who is seated next to you, or the server who brings it to you on a tray. 

I want you to think about this for a moment, because it is very important. How can you “leave the world” by deactivating an online account? Regardless, I felt this void open. Only in the evening on the second day off social media did I start to feel something like normal. That night I watched The 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut about some French kids in Paris in the 1950s. This was actually a beautiful film, one I couldn’t take my eyes off. Watching those little boys run around the city back in 1959, I began to realize that when I was 10 years old, circa 1989, my life wasn’t so different from theirs. In the past, I had thought 1959 was a very long time ago. Now it suddenly seemed comforting and familiar, even if it was in some other language.

I realized that I belonged to some other species, the people who had grown up before this. There had been a real life, one that came before the advent of social media. That was a world I used to inhabit. The real one, as I saw it, which was being displaced by this flimsy fake one.

 Going off social media isn’t a miracle cure though. It takes weeks, if not months, for one’s mind to return to its natural state. People don’t realize how much they have changed. How much it influences their identities, their self-concepts. One day in that first week off social media, I ran into the TV host and producer Teet Margna in a restaurant, and he wanted to tag me in a photo. He kept searching for my name from his friend list, but was frustrated because it wasn’t there. “But where are you?” said Teet, pressing the phone with his thumb in frustration. “Where did you disappear to?” “I’m right here, Teet,” I told him. “I am standing beside you.”

***  

On the third day off of social media, I even managed to read a book. It was called The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, and it was about failed English attempts to colonize the Atlantic coast of what is now the US in the 1580s. I didn’t realize that Sir Francis Drake landed 300 Central American indigenous women and 200 Africans and Turks in the Outer Banks of North Carolina and just set them loose. They disappeared into the wilds and perhaps were assimilated by Indians. Nobody knows what happened to them. In Haiti around the same time, English adventurers discovered dozens of skeletons scattered on a beach, perhaps bodies from a shipwreck. Nobody knows what happened to them either, and there is no record of who they were. Nobody had marked themselves as safe during the Great Haitian Shipwreck of 1590. It was just lost to time. That same night, I dreamt I was in the Russian Embassy in Tallinn. I needed a special visa to enter the embassy, and my visa was only valid for three hours. The inside of the embassy was rather posh, like a nice boutique hotel in Rome, with carpets on the staircases. There was also a nice buffet with croissants and freshly squeezed orange juice. In the back, I discovered, the Russians had constructed an indoor water park, and I decided to go for a swim. Later I asked the concierge at the embassy where my eldest daughter, who would soon be 18, was, and he said that she was last seen getting into Mr. Putin’s car wearing an orange dress. I did not like the thought of my daughter alone with Mr. Putin, and ran into the street in my swimsuit. When I awoke from the dream, I wrote some memories down into my notebook. I have actually been maintaining handwritten journals for more than 20 years, old-fashioned some say, but in these days off of the social media machine, I have suddenly found them more relevant in my life. I notice how the books feel in my hands, and enjoy the sensation of writing for my eyes only. I read somewhere that Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite writers, had once dived head first into the social media universe, only to also retreat into solitude, and hide himself away from that world. In an interview, he said he had to leave social media behind because the writing was so bad. As a good writer, he needed to read other good writing to continue to produce good writing. 

This made perfect sense to me. It sounded like a good idea. There is something counterintuitive to all this, of course. For writers, social media is actually a blessing. It’s a lightning quick way to reach more readers. But to be a good writer, you must stay very far away.

***

Of course, I cheated a few days after that and checked my Instagram account. It seemed like a harmless vice. At first glance, Instagram is less addictive and menacing than Facebook, with its deluge of angry political outbursts, but it also peddles in illusions of people who are so beautiful doing such wonderful things. Somehow someone named Brigitte Susanne Hunt had been added to my feed. I had no idea who that was. Also Kelly Sildaru was there. I sort of knew who she was. I used to follow Anu Saagim, but I got tired of all the posing and pictures of the sweet life. In my real life, my cat had just thrown up again in the kitchen. The bubble of fantasy had burst. 

If you leave Instagram for a while and return, you will notice how strange people look in their selfies. They have an odd gleam in their eyes, a kind of satisfaction as they transmit some photo of themself doing something to the rest of the world. If you are away from it for a while, such photos start to look stupid and absurd. There is a perversness there, a narcissism you don’t notice until you are away. This is what 21st Century life has been reduced to. And I mean, almost all of 21st Century life. I have a stream of content posted going back to at least 2008, when I was convinced to get a Facebook account. It hangs there suspended in time, accessible at almost from any point in the future. This has blurred my sense of time. If all these images are accessible at any moment, then at what moment on the time continuum are we? If I can look through 2008 and 2018 at the same time, in different windows of the same browser, it all becomes part of the same experience of reality. But it isn’t actually how we remember our lives or experience them really. 

Even days off of socal media won’t heal a fractured mind. You still remember things you have seen, comments people made. Arguments that happen online continue in your mind when you step off line. You go for a long walk in the woods, replaying these dialogues and then see a bird or a tree and want to share it. Then you realize the depths of your addiction. One night, a week or two after I had quit social media, I went out for a walk and turned off my phone data. I wondered where I was in 2001 at this time, 20 years ago? I had no mobile phone, I only used the internet at a university computer lounge. In the year 1998, before I left for college, I did not use the internet at all. I worked in a music shop that summer and I can recall a woman asking me for something called an email address, which I did not have. I remember how my family went out to the islands that summer and I spent my days searching around in used records and book shops. 

If we can access photo albums from 2008 with a click, perhaps I can access that time? If I can leave this place called social media, perhaps I can go back to that place too. That’s where I want to go. I don’t want to go back in time. I want to resume time as I once knew it and leave everyone behind, floating away into the depths of black digital space. I’ve just got to get away.

***

It actually took about a month for me to forget about social media altogether. It was during this time that I came down with Covid-19 and was locked away in isolation for about two weeks. I’m somehow glad that my bout with this illness was private, and that I did not provide status updates on every cough, runny nose, ache or pain or feeling of weakness or sense of disorientation. 

Sickness is now political and invites the rabble to comb through your behavior (“Did you wear two masks? Did you get your booster?”) or to score your own illness according to symptoms and play doctor (“I would say it was a mild case”). When I was ill, I needed none of that in my life at all, because illness is personal and doesn’t actually involve people on the internet. They aren’t there with you in bed as you sleep sick. When I awoke from the fever dream of Covid-19, I saw on the news there had been a rally in Freedom Square led by the Helmes and Igor Mang had also made an appearance. It seemed so distant and irrelevant to my real life, but apparently the incessant arguments had continued, the neverending social media war. I had left it, but it had gone on. Think of all the energy expended, the sleepless nights, the unhappy arguments. This was how much of humanity was spending its life. I was in bed recovering and people were arguing on their phones about the sickness I had. It seemed too strange to be true.

As I said, I was completely off social media and had even forgotten about it. Before the local elections, I had heard a friend talking about a mutual acquaintance who was running for city government in Tallinn and I said I hadn’t heard about her campaign. “But how could you not know?” the friend said. “It’s everywhere!” Interesting, I thought. Where was this “everywhere?” Because in Viljandi it was nowhere, as there were no signs for Tallinn candidates here, especially those a bit farther down the list who were more interested in boosting their popularity online.  People would start conversations with me on the presumption that I had seen their morning post, then act agitated when I said that I had not seen it, as if it was my job to be on Facebook all the time. It may be hard to believe, but I forgot that Facebook even existed. The word was strange. Face? Book? A book of faces? It sounded like an old catalogue for a modeling agency. If they even make those anymore. Sometimes I would see people in cafes with that ugly layout open on their screens. It was really like something out of a science fiction film. Each person deep in that space, that idea of “there,” this fictive place where they felt they needed to be all the time. 

They had become robots.

***

Other than being ill, those months off of social media brought me feelings of balance and clarity. I felt my mind realign itself to a more natural tempo, and I was more creative too. So you might ask, why on earth would I reactivate my account? The answer was simple: to sell more books. 

Yes, social media, the marketplace for attention. I had a new book coming out, and felt I must do everything to support its launch. If the eyes of the world were on Facebook, then that is where my book needed to be. Part of this is my livelihood and my children depend on this, so I cannot just write it off as a need for greed, or a desire for attention. There was a material need. 

Going back onto Facebook at first seemed harmless. Its layout is horrible, by the way, and it is a pain to navigate. It’s odd to think that so many people have spent part of their lives staring at this ugly thing. All of these little boxes, strips of text, windows of images, a headache. If I had to look at it any longer, I thought, I might go insane or blind. But I did. The first days back, I used it judiciously. Slowly though, I began to check it again and again, and engage in the same arguments I once loathed. Once again, I was checking it in the mornings, and at night, and at all points in between. Once again, a grown man could be seen standing alone in a forest, or in the aisle of a supermarket, staring at a small rectangular object and pressing it with his thumbs. The access to other people’s personal lives was also offputting. Suddenly I had living dossiers on virtually any person of interest. If you saw a pretty girl and knew her name, you could find out almost anything about her with a few clicks, which felt somehow deeply wrong and unfair, not only to her, but to yourself and the natural flow of life. It felt like you were cheating life, using social media, and yet being cheated yourself in the end, as technology made the very prospect of a naturally manifesting existence impossible. Everything and nothing were at your fingertips. The same disappointment in the experience began to haunt me, and I decided to go away again. It happened to be my ex-girlfriend’s birthday, the 3rd of February, when I pulled the plug again. The two events were not connected, and yet I could no longer spy on her life, even if I wanted to. It also happened to be a new moon, supposedly the time for new beginnings and fresh new starts. 

We shall see, of course, how long it will last this time. We shall see.

coffee with mati

ALMOST EVERY MORNING, I have coffee with Mati in town. We have no set arrangement; we just happen to visit the same cafe when it opens. Mati likes to drink his coffee black and gets it refilled in his own half-broken mug. I typically have a cappuccino. We look quite different. He looks like an old painter, with his long beard. But we are growing more similar over time. We both make absurd jokes to the women behind the counter who smile but don’t understand us. I must admit that sometimes, most times, actually, I don’t understand Mati’s jokes. He tells me that I am incapable of understanding them though because I am not a native Estonian speaker.

“Your small Indo-European mind is incapable of understanding the deep nuances of Estonian,” Mati has said. He may be right. If my Indo-European mind is so different, how could I ever grasp the intelligence of the Baltic Finns?

These are the kinds of conversations you have in Estonia though. In the United States, I don’t recall having these kinds of conversations. What did we even talk about when I lived back in America? For starters, I never even thought of myself as being back in America. America was a vast, sprawling entity, consisting of different regional identities, each with its own history. One commonality in American thought though, is the idea that the United States is a kind of great social project. More than being a country, consisting of the people who live there, America is an idea, a concept, and the United States is supposed to be the greatest country to ever exist, or so I am told.

As such, a lot of American discourse revolves around how this greatest country disappoints, or has not yet lived up to its promise. This is why you have these strange far-right vigilante groups, like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who ransacked the Capitol when Trump lost the election. On the left side of the spectrum it’s the same. How can the greatest country in the world have once enslaved a sizable part of its population? Could it be that it is actually not so great? We are all living in an imaginary world, where a mythical America has been promised to us. When we gather together at cafes, people talk about how the country is going in the wrong way. And baseball. Nobody talks about the small minds of Indo-Europeans, or ancient Finnic beliefs.

Estonia instead is very tribal and that word rahvas, which gets translated as “people” or “nation” seems to have some greater meaning that I can’t fully intuit, given my own pathetic Indo-European roots. When someone says that a person is of different ethnicities, or nationalities, or peoples, for Estonians, it’s almost as if a cow and a pig got together and had a baby. A Norwegian? And a Greek? Got together? And had children? I don’t understand what the reason for the surprise is. Even in the town where I live, a new race of Estonian children has emerged, who are half Swedish, half Japanese, half Argentinian, half Ghanaian. As I have predicted, in the future, the most popular Estonian names will be Trochynskyi, Keränen, and Petrone.

Of course, to be an Estonian, they say all you have to do is know the Estonian language. Once you speak Estonian, you become one of them, in which case, I am well on my way to becoming a member of this superior race, the Estonians, the Finns, the Karelians and Veps. I find it funny that the word for language and tongue are the same: keel. Estonians might say that someone has “keel suus,” meaning they know the language. But in English, this would translate as the person has a tongue in their mouth. Mati keeps telling me over coffee, but you still don’t have the Estonian tongue in your mouth, “Sul pole veel eesti keel suus.” I tell Mati that I have had plenty of Estonian tongues in my mouth, just not my own tongue. This makes him laugh so hard that he nearly chokes on his drink and even has to wipe away a tear of joy.

“Oh, you Indo-Europeans,” says Mati, “with your stupid Indo-European jokes.”

a gray day in town; or, the irish poets

IT’S A GRAY DAY IN TOWN today, and I still haven’t ordered firewood for the winter. I keep waiting for the price to drop, but there is no drop in sight, and so I wait and put it off, as I do with most things. At an intersection, I paused to watch a half-torn paper bag float down the sidewalk in the wind, along with some rustling red leaves. There is an old house there that hasn’t been renovated, a grand 19th century ruin, and someone has spray painted an image of a man screaming on it.

On Sunday, I was in Treimani down on the southwest coast for a friend’s birthday. We went into the forest, and he brought along a friend who knows about forestry and what the names of the trees are and how to manage them. Treimani is a peaceful place, and I like that nearby there is a village called Metsapoole, “into the woods,” because I can think of no better name for a village, or the circumstances of my life. We learned about ash trees, and there were a few baby spruces we were urged not to step on. My friend recently inherited his farm, and when we went there, relatives turned up and gave him buckets of potatoes. My friend is different from me; he still lives with his family. In the field there in Treimani, there are mushrooms as big as saucers.

Recently, I had something like a panic attack. I did not know what to call it, because I was never taught words for these things. This is actually a problem for men, naming our feelings. We certainly feel things, we just were never taught what they were. This is why the default emotion shown by men is typically anger. This feeling though I have decided to describe as a panic attack. First, there is a wave of energy that makes it hard to focus on anything else. It can happen after being reminded of something or seeing someone you’d rather not wish to see. There you are, trying to write, and it just appears in the distance, a storm of bad feelings, then swoops in with lightning. I try to ignore it, but to manage them, I go home, lie in bed, and caress myself, rubbing my arms, and saying soothing things. I talk to myself — it’s almost like another person is speaking to me. Then I say, “Don’t worry, this will pass. Of course it will! You’ll get through this, you always do.” 

For whatever reason, thinking of Wes Anderson films helps me to survive these situations. I like to think of Isle of Dogs and Rushmore, I like to think of Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch. Sometimes I think that I am just one of these characters from one of his films. My life is just a film, and so I don’t need to worry about what happens in the film and should rather enjoy it as an observer. I think of Federico Fellini movies too, like 8 1/2. That one is my favorite. The main character might as well be me, lost in fantasy, memory, reality.

Flying up in the air. 

In a world shaped by external circumstances, in which there are few certainties, and role models are hard to come by, any kind of help I can get is therefore appreciated. One day, I came across an old article about the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who underwent a special procedure at the age of 69 that reinvigorated his sexual appetite, and he spent the rest of his days bedding young radical poets and journalists. His erotic adventures fed his creative output and he died happier, if not a truly happy man. Something about this story helped me to imagine a future in which I was not a dispossessed soul at the whims of panic but one who could enjoy life. Maybe there was another way, the way of Yeats, the way of the debauched and lascivious Irish poets. History might remember them as bastards, but to survive in this cold, cruel and windy world, one has to be a bit of a bastard it seems.

An Estonian version of this column appears in the November 2022 issue of the magazine Anne ja Stiil.

a glass half full

FOR MOST PEOPLE, COVID-19 was a negative experience. It was the virus that made them ill. It kept them bedridden. They could not go to meetings, or on trips, or perform at concerts. It took away their senses, made it hard to breathe, left them fatigued to the point where they could barely walk. It obviously killed many people, including my cousin, who would not get vaccinated, made a trip to visit her sister in a different state, and died in a hospital intensive care unit after being on a ventilator for weeks. My experience last autumn was mild in comparison to what so many have gone through, but it was an intense two-week-long journey. It also changed me in profound ways.

To begin, I didn’t even know that I was sick. I had somehow made it through the Harvest Party, an annual folk music event, where I had heard from friends that many had been infected, and came out unscathed. I had started to believe that I was immune, or that I had already had the infection. I had, after all, been sitting in cafes throughout the pandemic while visitors coughed and sneezed their way to their next espresso or piece of cake. That Friday, I went to see the new James Bond movie at the cinema. I have a feeling that it was there that I met the virus. The name of the film was No Time to Die.

Two days later, I drove down to Karksi to deliver some supplies to my former father-in-law and his wife, who were laid up with the virus for the second time. I left the small bag of vitamins at the doorstep, called to them, and got into my car to drive home. It was then that I began to start coughing. It was a strange, dry cough. It felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of my lungs. It was worrying enough for me to get a rapid antigen test done the next day at a shopping center. That evening the result came back. I was negative. Of course, I went back to the cafes the next day, even as I began to develop a tremendous head cold. But something else was wrong. I just did not feel completely myself. I felt slower and a little sad. My doctor helped secure a PCR testing appointment, and the following day I walked, yes, walked, to the white tent to have my nose swabbed. Later I got a call informing me of the result. I was positive.

The next 10 days are a blur. The only other person I interacted with was the Bolt delivery man, who left orders of hot curry on the other side of the door. I did not lose my sense of taste or smell, and I credit that spicy curry with helping me get through the experience. I binge watched old James Bond movies. Hours and even days were swallowed up by sleep. I could do, at most, three things a day. Wash a few dishes, maybe a load of laundry. I tried to write. The rest of the time I slept in my bed or stared at the ceiling. At one point, I was almost certain that a young woman I knew was in the room and had brought me a glass of water. I even remember taking the water from her hand and drinking it. When I awoke, she was gone. I also thought I was driving Bond’s Aston Martin DB5. This turned out to be a sweaty blanket.

At some point, I became so disoriented, that I only had a marginal idea of who I was. I knew, in a sort of roundabout way, what my name was, and where I had been born and when, who my parents were. I had some memories, but these memories seemed irrelevant to who I was. My name was just a bunch of sounds put together. Memories were just things that had happened. Thoughts had originated from beyond me. Those were things that other people had told me, or that I had read. As such, thoughts, ideas, and theories had nothing to do with me. They were fake, pieced together in elaborate ways, but not really tied to the act of being alive.

Almost a year later, this transcendence of consciousness has had a positive impact. I can no longer judge others by their words, because I know that their words, or attitudes, are not really who they are. They are just words. They come and go. Likewise, I can recognize connections with others that are significant and powerful, but do not need words to define them. If you do feel for someone, what is the use in telling them, because they probably feel the same. I remember the morning the virus left me though, and the sensation of it leaving my body, as if it was tired of messing with me and was hungry for a new victim. It was like possession. The spirit sat up and floated away out the door. A few days later, I came out of isolation and went to the shop. The girl who had brought me water was there, looking at me. I told her about my vision and thanked her for bringing me that glass of imaginary water. The girl gave me a weird look, but I think she understood that I was just grateful that she existed.

*

An Estonian version of this column appears in the September 2022 issue of the magazine Anne & Stiil.

the game of hockey

AFTER SHE HAD finally purged her life of her husband, Céleste invited me over. I wasn’t surprised they had gone their separate ways, but Céleste had often spoken lovingly of Georges, a man of business, a man of ideas, a man she could depend on. It was a relationship consecrated in a cathedral, celebrated at a manor, formalized with the necessary paperwork.

They also had a child.

Then, just like that, in a matter of eighteen months or so, there had been a crumbling, a dissolution, a reversing of the course. Everything she loved about Georges she now despised. She disliked the way he drove, especially. I wasn’t sure if infidelity was involved. I never dared to ask, but I had my suspicions. If anything, Georges was more married to Pierre on his hockey team than he was to his wife Céleste. As soon as she had banished him from the home, she invited me over to dinner. I went there accordingly. I had no idea what to wear or to expect.

When I arrived at their house, the door was open. I knocked and rang the bell and when no one answered, I went in. I could hear that someone was in the shower downstairs, and then Céleste’s mother came out from the kitchen, holding little Antoine in her arms. She invited me in, and I saw that Georges was very much still in the house, eating dinner together with Pierre. They said they were both going to play ice hockey, and then asked if I’d like to come along.

Naturally, I thought they were plotting to kill me. Georges must have known there was something going on between me and Céleste. Perhaps he had even read our erotically charged letters? Or seen some of the photos she had sent in her more vulnerable, early morning moments? I studied him as he walked toward the rink. He was no doubt regarded as handsome, I thought but at the same time, a rather stale, dry kind of character, the kind who breezes through life into positions of power, even ascends to the presidency, or who collects great wealth, but in person is rather a bore. Such a character is the very epitome of manhood by all metrics, yet lacks anything that would distinguish him as a man. The only thing that defined Georges was his love for hockey. He knew statistics associated with all of the players. He played hockey. He watched hockey. He was hockey. During that solemn walk, I did not dare mention his failed marriage, but the man never mentioned it. Instead he spoke of the game with Pierre, and they recalled with great accuracy different plays from the season. His only lament was a sore shoulder that was taking too much time to heal. I suggested he take some time to recuperate. Georges sneered at me as if I knew nothing and said one word: “Never.”

I left the two players at the rink and walked back to the house for my dinner with Céleste. The evening had just begun and yet had already taken a strange turn. Even the trees down the boulevard looked sinister. In a nearby park, a man tossed some breadcrumbs to some pigeons.

At the house, Céleste was waiting for me. She had put on a red dress, and draped herself in a white shawl. Her blonde hair was pulled back. She held a glass of red wine before her and stared at it in contemplation. I knew she wanted something from me, but did she want it all, and tonight? The grandmother had apparently left, and Antoine was sitting in his high chair.

“Well,” said Céleste. “At least you came.”

Dinner was nice. Afterward, she told me she wanted to show me the cellar. We came down an iron staircase to a series of underground rooms, full of antiques, magazines, and a plush bed in the corner beneath a ground floor window, through which shone some early evening sun. The child held to its mother. When she set him down on the ground, he started to scream.

“Please kiss me now,” said Céleste. I obliged and kissed her. She fumbled with my pants, grasping at my underwear. “Now I want you to make love to me,” she said. “Would you?”

Of course I said yes. “Please do it. Here, like this. Take me from behind.” I complied. Antoine kept sobbing. Then, from outside the window, I could see a shadowy figure approaching us.

“Don’t stop, ” Céleste said. “Whatever you do, do not stop.” “I am not stopping,” I told her. 

The figure put his face to the window and began to speak through it in hurried French. 

It was Georges! He had returned to the house to fetch a hockey stick. That was all he said. Céleste put her face up to the window and began to pelt him with obscenities. I tried to make myself invisible, but this was impossible. How do you make yourself invisible when you are servicing another man’s wife in a messy basement with a screaming child on the floor? I was wrapped up tight, deep inside the lady of the house. There was no way back or out of this thing. “Céleste, please come to your senses,” I heard Georges say through the small window.

“No, I want you to watch,” Céleste responded. “I want you to watch this all, Georges. This is how I feel now. This is exactly how I feel about you, and us, and about the game of hockey.”

the road to a folk hangover

THURSDAY IS THE first day of the Viljandi Folk Music Festival. I have decided to do this year’s festival sober, which may explain my melancholic mood. Also the rain, which sends me and my youngest daughter to seek refuge beneath some trees, only makes things less joyful. The rain is heavy and floods the streets, soaking the kebabs and donuts. I bailed on the opening ceremony because of the rain. Of course, the Folk people are starting to trickle into town. You can spend all year in Viljandi and never see these people, but then suddenly they are back and swarming in. Where do they go for the rest of the year? Maybe they sleep in the hills behind the castle ruins? When people do come, you look at them. I think lingering eye contact is the currency of Folk. Somehow a look is more meaningful than any words. What does that look mean? Sometimes different things. It can mean I like you, or think that you are beautiful. But it can also mean that I don’t want to have anything to do with you, leave me alone. Sometimes people just look familiar though. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Maybe that is what all these looks mean. I have learned to trust people’s looks. They are meaningful moments, moments that linger and haunt you, even while the accordions are blaring and the Cubans are performing. I wonder how many stories start with just a look in a crowd at a music festival.

The highlight of Thursday night is inarguably the Korean ensemble, whose name nobody can say, even though they have a special language lesson in the middle of the concert. (They are actually called “Ak Dan Gwang Chil“). They have great costumes and I can make no sense of the structure of their songs or melodies. I cannot name most of the instruments they are playing. This is exactly how the best music must be, challenging. I am surprised by the turnout for the Koreans, even on a Thursday night. I can only guess that pandemic-era restrictions have increased people’s appetites for live music. Afterward, I head to Romaan to hear Gilly Jones and the Evocations playing in the new samasama.studio in the back. Gilly Jones is from Ghana and leads a band of the “cream of rhythm players” in Estonia. They play afrobeat and highlife music. Even I have to dance to this music. The best dancer is of course Pepi, who manages this creative space. He is from Argentina and has the moves. I am studying Pepi to improve my dancing. The night ends in Joala Park, drinking wine from a plastic bottle with DJ Jaanika and Inxu. Inxu is a vivacious and sharp young woman who is giving an impromptu lecture about US domestic politics. A few young men are seated across from us. One of them is especially proud that he is seated on the spot, more or less, where the Joala Monument was. “And it was located right here where I am sitting,” he says.

AT ABOUT 7 PM on Friday night, Marko Veisson from Puuluup undertakes a stage dive. It is in the middle of their set on the Second Cherry Hill, or II Kirsimägi, and happens while the duo is performing “Roosad suusad,” “pink skis,” which is a song about pink skis. The dive is a success and the crowd is pleased by Puuluup’s performance. The band’s reggae-inflected repertoire is stunningly ridiculous. Even old people like Puuluup’s music. Especially old people. The show ends with applause, unanimous cheers, joy, whistling, and this “three, four, good band” cheer. 

At 8.30 pm, there is a young man in a kimono grooving to the guitar licks of a Malian performer called Samba Touré on Kaevumägi. Three kids in Pokemon hats walk by and I see them again at the Hempress Sativa concert, which is pure Jamaican reggae, along with some speeches about the sacrament of marijuana. There is a funny mood. In general, the music on Friday night is good and satisfying like that. By 11.30 though, I walk by a teenager who is leaning against a tent and watching Geneza, a Ukrainian band, play rock music in Freedom Square. There is something about the blank look on his face opposite a rock band that speaks to the exhaustion of Folk. Even the young get tired. I can’t tell if he is burned out or sleepy, but fatigue has set in. It’s the bagpipe music. I think. It gets to you. But how much bagpipe music can you hear? How many dances can you dance? How many old friends can you greet?

Of course, there are the real Friday night stories. The real thoughts you think while you are wandering around at the festival. The real feelings you feel when you see certain people you know. The memories you have. The ones that you can’t forget. The people you have lost in the crowd. The impossibility of dreaming of anything, and yet the bravery to still be hopeful in life, if only because you have no other choice than to be hopeful. There are secrets you can never tell. Even on your most honest and forthcoming day, you can never tell the complete truth.

SATURDAY DAWNS the same way that every Folk Saturday dawns, with flies tickling your nose. You walk to the café, any café, to get some coffee. Strangers emerge from tents, cars, and apartments, wearing those little quasi-religious “Folk hats.” One wonders about the true lives of these devotees. Maybe they lead a humdrum existence in Tallinn border towns like Jüri, working as accountants, pushing along in drudgery through the year. Now and then they spot the Folk hat in the back of the closet and sigh to themselves, knowing it will be maybe half a year until the next festival. 

The peak of Folk, I think, is the slow Saturday afternoon before the bigger crowds show up. This is when you can take time to eat with your kids, sit around and reflect. You hear church bells chime, the creak of the hammocks tied between the trees. You have time to sit and think. Teenage fry cooks struggle to fill all of the orders for fries. And sometimes people forget their orders. “Maarja” has apparently disappeared to see Polenta, a Finnish group. The cooks keep calling for “Maarja” to pick up her fries, but “Maarja” never comes to claim them.

At 8 pm on the First Cherry Hill, Black Bread Gone Mad takes the stage. This is one of my favorite local bands. During the encore, bassist Mati Tubli asks people to sing along, but the lyrics to their songs go, “u-ja-ei-u-ja-ei-u-ja-ei,” or something like that, and then the next one is “ayibobo.” Okay then. After that, Zetod storms the Second Cherry Hill and the crowds are stricken. Much longer after that, I decide to see Untsakad which, believe it or not, I have never seen. There is a long table behind these Untsakad fellows — it is their 30th birthday celebration — and notable musicians like Ruslan Trochynskyi and Brad Jurjens are at the table. It reminds me a bit of King Arthur’s Roundtable, with Sir Galahad and Percival. I confess, I am jealous. Who wouldn’t want a seat at the Untsakad’s table? The music is Estonian traditional song, but I am surprised by the numbers of young people who are dancing boldly to tunes like “Metsavendade Laul,” a song about postwar guerrilla fighters. This year it is especially relevant.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Imar Kutšukali, a Dutch adventurer and part-time folk musician, informs me in the yard of the Green House Café that he understands most of Untsakad’s lyrics. This is perhaps the highest level of Estonian comprehension you can have. The next level is understanding what drunk men mumble to you outside the bottle returns and trash bins. Imar is wearing a cowboy hat he picked up in Louisiana, and plucking at a friend’s mandolin, then switching to his own fiddle. Kutšukali is so embedded in Estonian Folk culture, he can name the members of Untsakad. Later, I drag my acoustic bass guitar out of my house, making sure to wipe the dust off it, and dive into a jam session with some other musicians. Folk music operates according to other rules. It has a repetitive, spiraling quality, almost like a cyclone, and it can billow up high or swirl down deep. Providing the bottom end is a challenge, what to play, what not to play, but it seems my fellow musicians welcome my contribution. We even joke about forming a band. Later, at another concert, I run into Ramo Teder from Puuluup who informs me that he also wanted to stage dive during the performance of “Pink Skis,” but there weren’t enough strong men in the audience to support both him and Marko. Maybe next year.

The evening ends in the company of Silver Sepp and Kristiina Ehin, who cannot walk a few paces without meeting old or new friends. Talking with both of them is a challenge, but Silver more so. We just can never manage to have a straightforward, average conversation. It can only go from absurd to more ridiculous. Dancing is easier with this cultural power couple. Kristiina is a sensitive dance partner, and Silver slips me some pepper vodka during VLÜ’s set, most of which I spend dancing frantically with a Swiss psychiatrist. By midnight, people decide to move to the upper floors of the Ait. Within this confined space, there are constricted dances, and there is some kind of guitar, fiddle, accordion jam. I had promised myself this would be a sober Folk, but it is proving once again to be impossible. Kutšukali is seated with Ando Kiviberg. They are drinking cognac and I pour myself a big glass. Veisson is there too. I am asking him if women are constantly trying to seduce him on account of his fame. Veisson assures me that this is not the case, but I am doubtful. A guitarist named August is seated with Lee Taul, and they offer me wine. I inform Ms. Taul that I’ve had too much to drink and am perhaps enjoying myself too much this year. She responds that you’re actually supposed to enjoy yourself at Folk. “Come on, it’s a party,” she says. “You’re supposed to have a good time.”

An Estonian version of this article appears in the 3 August 2022 edition of the newspaper Sakala.

the danish girl

Frederiksborg Slotskirke, May 2022

SOME TIME AGO, when I was an undergraduate, I lived in Copenhagen, the capital city of Denmark. I don’t actually remember much of what I was doing in Copenhagen in those days, other than hanging out in night clubs on weekends and confessing to various Danish women that I loved them, “jeg elsker dig.”

One Danish girl did take me seriously enough to arrange a second meeting, which I was not brave enough to attend. I’m not even sure I told her why I loved her. It sounds absurd doesn’t it? But my Danish was primitive, and perhaps it was just the nicest thing I knew how to say to a member of the opposite sex.

I got to thinking about this long-lost Copenhagen night club girl a few weeks ago, on a trip to the Scandinavian city with my daughters. We were over by the university and happened to walked right by that same exact night club, and I only briefly remembered the girl. There were others from that time that began to flit in and out of memory. A Norwegian called Ingrid who was studying economics. Åsa, a Swedish designer. There was an Icelander named Ester, who lived with a fellow Icelander named Jón, who had a very taciturn expression and never said much. Lena from Jutland. What had become of all of them?

THAT WAS THEN and those were my memories of that time, but I certainly never visited any castles when I studied in Denmark. But it was to one such castle, the impressive Fredericksborg, situated in the Danish town of Hillerød, where I took a train with my daughters during the first warm days of May. Fredericksborg was built by King Christian IV in the 17th century. My teenage daughters love castles, you know. They love castles and they love royal costumes, and they love pageantry and jewelry. The castle at Frederiksborg is now an art museum and it is impressive. There are floors of paintings, portraits, clicking wooden clocks that ring and chime, dangling chandeliers, hand-carved beds, mirrors and tapestries, and a movable celestial globe and astronomical clock from 1656.

These were once the possessions and likenesses of noblemen and noblewomen, courtesans and artisans, consorts and escorts. The ceilings and walls are adorned with frescos of angels and gods, characters from antiquity, the stars and the heavens, pineapples and other exotic fruits. The clocks tick, tick, tick, ringing out every 15 minutes, on the half hour, then the hour. Through the warped window glass, one can see the baroque castle gardens on the other side of the lake, nestled in the sun.

One exhibit tells of the origins of the Danish flag, and the 13th century Battle at Lyndanise in Tallinn between the Danes and the Estonians. My daughter noticed the three lions of the Danish coat of arms in the castle. “That used to be on the 1 kroon coin!” she said. “When I was small, we didn’t have the euro, you know. We had kroonid.”

WHILE WE WERE in the museum, I started to became aware of a vague female presence. She was a younger woman, with curly hair, dressed in a sweater and skirt, and I cannot really say any more about what she looked like. That hair was familiar to me. There is something about girls with curly hair, and sometimes I think I continue to fall in love with different versions of the same woman who looks just like this.

Something about this person was so familiar to me, though, and I noticed that when we passed each other, we would look away, as if to ignore one another, and then look back, only to smile. It’s funny how these things work, how people just recognize each other. There was something so comforting about her presence in a haunted old castle, that I badly wanted to know her name. Even if it was something average and Danish, Sine or Stine, Mette or Jette, whatever it was, I wanted to know it.

I felt a little bit like that Shinagawa monkey in the Haruki Murakami story, who steals women’s names. I didn’t want to steal the name of the lady of Frederiksborg though. No. I wanted to cherish it forever. All I needed to know was her first name and I could build her into a breathtaking and beautiful illusion. I would devote myself to her name, pledge my very soul, rechristen cities in her name, rename navy ships, bastions, fortresses. I would write great novels and epic poems, and then affix her name to the cover, or perhaps some reference to her appearance. Something to remember this moment by. Something to last.

ALAS, SHE DISAPPEARED into the museum ahead of me, and I never saw her again. In the gardens I looked for her too, and in the town, and on the train back to the city. I kept waiting for her to walk in with her curls and look at me like she looked at me in the castle, but it never happened. She was just gone and maybe it was better that way. No need to fall in love. No need to troubleshoot a long-distance relationship. No need to worry about what went wrong. No need for anything other than the memory of an ancient castle with chiming clocks and celestial globes and gardens.

Farewell, my Danish girl. Jeg elsker dig. Thanks for the memories!

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An Estonian version of this column appears in the June 2022 edition of the magazine Anne & Stiil.