TWENTY-THREE was a productive year. I wrote two or three books, if you count the material generated for this site as future book material. There were diverse stories, some of them articles, others observations, others dream fiction. The top five most-read stories of the whole year were:

“Memoirs of an Invisible Man,” published 19 August 2023. This piece was published in the magazine Edasi under a different title. This article reveals some of my American influences, in which the Estonian countryside takes on a Great Depression-era, Dust Bowl flavor. People seem to like these articles about cultural differences, for whatever reason, and I have been too happy to write them, in fact, I seem to specialize in them. This one seemed to really hit the mark.

“Principios de Declaración by Tomás del Real,” published 12 July 2023. Nothing like some web traffic generated off the back of a popular folk singer. This was my attempt to do a quick, magazine-style review of del Real’s newest album. I don’t feel I did the record full justice, but I got it up and posted in time for the maestro’s 30th birthday. People seem eager to read about Tomás. Another story I wrote about South American musicians in Viljandi, that featured interviews with Tomás, as well as Pepi Prieto and Lee Taul from Araukaaria, was among the top 10 most-read stories.

“My Love, She Speaks Like Silence,” published 28 December 2022. This story raised quite a few eyebrows. Who was she? I actually managed to write several stories this year about an unnamed muse, who remained anonymous to everyone, including herself most likely (hopefully). The title of this one derives from a Bob Dylan lyric from the song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” I am not capable of writing like this on demand. I have to feel it, and I cannot make myself feel things. I have to feel them naturally. And as long as nobody gets hurt in the process, then, well, why not? I only know that some people wish I could write this way about them.

“Za Tallina, Za Rodinu,” published 26 September 2023. This reflection on Estonians and Russians in Tallinn was actually requested by Edasi, and I wrote it in Estonian, and later translated it into my native language. Most of it was written during coffee breaks during the Tallinn Digital Summit. All of the photos are mine. It’s been a black-and-white kind of year.

“Art Nouveau,” published 1 August 2023. After the Viljandi Folk Music Festival, I was exhausted and went to Tartu for a few days. I stayed in a friend’s apartment. It happened to be during a film festival, and so I could hear the 1995 movie Heat playing loudly through the windows. I took an herbal sleeping aid, and then the events recounted in this story more or less transpired. I was terrified when I woke up. The next morning I went over to Kohvipaus and typed up this story, which is probably among the weirdest I have ever produced.

What I like about dream fiction is that I am not responsible for the content. I am merely the messenger. And I plan to write many more stories in ’24.

ACTUALLY, THE SONG IS CALLED, “Za Stalina, za rodinu” (“For Stalin and the homeland”) in Russian. Even I know these words, their meaning and context. I once saw a documentary about the Second World War, which contained a Soviet propaganda clip created at this time when the Soviet Union was no longer on friendly terms with Nazi Germany. And there they were, Red Army soldiers marching and singing about what they were fighting for. For their leader and their country. The only question is, where this homeland actually is, because sometimes it seems to me that, for Russians, “the homeland” is wherever they happen to lay their heads at the end of the day. Even New York could be their homeland. Once, I was parking my car in Brighton Beach, which has a large Russian community, and I asked a young man if I was allowed to park there. He stared at me with an odd look and said, “что?” (chto, “What” in Russian).

I drove on.

When I arrive to Tallinn, I often sing my own version of this old Russian song: “Za Tallina, za rodinu.” It’s a bit of a mean-spirited joke. I know that it would annoy the Estonians in Tallinn, who remain the city’s linguistic majority. More than half of Tallinn residents are Estonians. Russians are a third. But Estonians are somehow silent, or they are in their offices, or cars, or on the internet, or just don’t speak up, which means that I often hear Russian more frequently on the streets of Tallinn than I do Estonian. This bothers me, but not because I am a nationalist. I am not an Estonian, and I therefore can never be a nationalist. That would be funny. An American who is an Estonian nationalist. I would have to send myself home then.

No, I worry more that someone will ask me something in Russian, and while I speak English and Estonian, and some Swedish and Danish, and Italian and even a little Spanish, and could even tell you where to go in Portuguese — esquerda! — I don’t speak Russian, and I don’t feel like learning it either, because I came to Estonia and learned Estonian, and they can do the same.

And not just me. Swedes learn Estonian. Ukrainians, of course. Syrians. And also Russians. Recently, I was in a pharmacy at the Baltic Station Market where I heard another American ask for help from the seller in Estonian! He was totally unknown to me, an American who spoke Estonian with a California accent. So, we have learned, but why is this random Russian in Tallinn so special that he doesn’t have to? Yet it still happens that someone will ask me something in Russian, and he can’t understand that I can’t respond to him. Then he goes on his way, looking for help elsewhere. Of course, he will find it, but these experiences are confusing for me. How can you live so deeply in your own world that you cannot recognize that another world exists? How does it feel to live in a reality where you have to ignore the majority of people most of the time? To feel like a life-long tourist? I don’t know. I only know that I find myself singing some old Russian song from the last great war.

“Za Stalina, za rodinu.” 

Or, in my version, “Za Tallina, za rodinu.”

***

Long ago, when I had just moved to Tallinn, and lived with an Estonian girl from Karksi-Nuia in the city center, we would go to the Central Market on weekends to buy fruits, buckwheat, cheese, butter, and milk, for example.

This was probably my first experience with Russians and Russian culture. Of course, I am a child of the Cold War, and Russians, or the Soviets rather, were always suspicious characters in our films. Later, when I was in college in Copenhagen, I had a classmate named Viktor, whom the police stopped one night, only because he looked like one of these suspicious Russian characters. Maybe he was a criminal? He was a great person though. Sometimes, when I would call him “comrade” as a joke, Viktor would shift uncomfortably in his seat, eye me, and inquire if I happened to be a Communist.

But in Tallinn I had to live among these suspicious characters. Old ladies at the market would sit around listening to Russian radio programs. I remember thinking that they existed in another reality. In our world, Estonia was part of Europe. Estonia was a small northern country, like Iceland or Denmark. Most people spoke Estonian, a close relative of Finnish. This was the year before Estonia joined the EU and NATO. A time when people dreamed of Schengen and the euro. But they were still sitting around and listening to the news from Russia, as if nothing had changed. For them, it was still 1990. This was the Russian world, or russki mir, about which I later heard so much. The only trouble was that other worlds, in addition to that one, also existed. What was I supposed to do about it?

In some ways, as a person who derives from another diaspora, the Italians who settled New York at the start of the last century, it’s not hard for me to understand them. My great grandparents probably did not know English very well. A neighbor girl taught my grandfather how to speak English. He was born in New York, but didn’t speak English until he was seven years old. At the same time, he learned it. He didn’t expect New Yorkers to learn Italian. In that sense, New Yorkers can be quite strict. I have witnessed conductors on trains who have refused to sell tickets to people who ask for them in Spanish.

Once, when I was speaking to that Karksi-Nuia girl in Estonian on the train, I noticed that some people gave me weird looks. How could I be so bold as to not speak English on the train? For them, it was probably uncomfortable. Which doesn’t mean that it was right, but that’s what I was accustomed to.

In Estonia, I learned the language in part because of this mentality. I thought that’s how things worked. But at the Central Market, the old ladies had different ideas about languages and cultures. That was 20 years ago. If they are still alive, maybe they are still there talking away and listening to the news in Russian. I do remember that a very beautiful young Russian woman worked in the market at that time. She had blonde hair and would wear a red apron. Even though she was about my age, she already had a look of resignation in her eyes, though resignation too can be a mark of beauty in its own way.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to her. Did she become a mother? Is she still selling there? Or has she found a better job? What was her life back then? Cheese, milk, and some weird American client? When Estonia’s Russians were part of an empire, their lives were still just milk and cheese, but they belonged to something greater, at least in their minds. In the Republic of Estonia, they were a minority. That young woman is at least 40 years old now. Does she wear a scarf on her head these days? She had the most melancholic blue eyes. Those lovely Russian eyes.

***

Today I arrived in Tallinn, mumbling “Za Tallina, za rodinu.” The bus was full of Estonians who don’t talk. In the bus station, I only heard Russian spoken, although there are lots of languages in Tallinn. People have come here from all over the world, but Russians are still the largest minority.

Tallinn is under construction, and I had to pull apart a few metal gates and step over a barrier to get to the conference. I felt like a little New York boy again. It gives me great satisfaction to break the rules. A few construction workers were shouting to each other in Russian. I hoped that they wouldn’t start talking to me. Imagine that something was about to explode, and they needed to tell me to run. How could I understand them? But what else is there to do? Most people in Tallinn speak Estonian. It’s actually their problem if they can’t make themselves understood, but also mine as well.

On the street, I saw a Russian teenager who was talking loudly in her phone. I realized that I had gotten accustomed to the silence of the Estonians. There was also an older woman who was wearing so much makeup, I thought at first that she was an actress from the Ugala Theatre. There are these little differences that for people in the Estonian world, or in my world, are not typical, but for them are everyday things. Europe remains a continent of tribes, and my tribes are nearer to me. For others, the Italians are, for example, utterly ridiculous, but for me, they seem completely normal. I feel the same way about the Estonians now, because my children are Estonians. Even if the Estonians have this weird thing that they won’t look you in the eye, or they always have this “no bullshit, get to the point” mentality, even when their conversations are so stupidly business-like and dull they are still, in a way, family to me.

Even in Helsinki I feel this sense of closeness, because many of the Finnish girls remind me of my daughters. Recently, I offered as a joke to my youngest daughter that she could get a job at Boost in some shopping center, because she likes their smoothies so much. She’s just 12, but she answered with sarcasm. “But I can’t work there because then I have to speak to clients in Russian.” Her cousin worked at Circle K in Tallinn and had to handle clients in Russian all the time, or at least she tried to. She is only 25. She doesn’t know Russian so well.

My daughter only complained more. “I don’t understand them. Why don’t they just use their Vladimir Putin Pocket Translator if they want to order something?” It made me sad to hear this, but I laughed when I imagined a gadget called the “Vladimir Putin Pocket Translator.” It’s not just sadness for a child who doesn’t want to work somewhere because she might have to speak Russian, but also for those Russians who, when faced with an Estonian server, can only blink at them like that kid in Brighton Beach and say, “что?”

There are, of course, loads of Russians who speak Estonian fluently. They also have to deal with the stereotypes perpetuated by their compatriots. And, as an American, I do know what it’s like to travel in a world where every other person has a negative opinion about you.

I once had a problem with a Russian man in Estonia, who thought that my car door had hit his car door. He was an older, self-confident character, who boasted that he had brought his wife from Russia, and that she knew not a word of the Estonian language. They lived together, mostly peacefully, in their own reality. People were afraid of him, but I wasn’t because I am not an Estonian and I don’t have the same kind of relationship with Russians and the Russian Empire. I can whistle “Za Tallina, za rodinu” with ease.

As a New Yorker, and a Mediterranean, I know that if someone threatens you, you have to threaten them back, naturally. He threatened to call the police if I did not give him any money, I told him to get the police and the army, he wouldn’t get a cent out of me. Instead, he left quietly and with empty pockets.

Fortunately, Italy is not located next to Russia. That would be really crazy.

***

Recently, I met a man who was born in Tallinn the same year that I was. His brother was baptized in the Orthodox church in the Old Town. But he was not granted citizenship automatically when they restored the state, because his family had arrived after 1940. His family left for the US instead in the early 1990s. They were poor. They had a lot of problems. But he managed. Today, he is a successful businessman. We sat together in a restaurant and I thought it was such a shame that he left Tallinn. He’s smart, talented. He could have been of great use to this country. His only problem was that he happened to be born into a complicated situation. I still don’t think the Russians fully understand who the Estonians are though. They understand that they are a people with a different language and culture, appearance. But the Estonians are actually an indigenous people. They are like one big, extended family. Becoming an Estonian is not as simple as learning the language and getting a passport. These are things I cannot change.

It’s still a shame that man left for America. But I am still here. I am in the Culture Hub at the Tallinn Digital Summit, where Danes and Lithuanians speak English to each other. I am sitting in the corner, listening to their English-language discussions and typing this up in Estonian. I have long since forgotten about that old Soviet war song. Everyone here is talking about the Nordics, about Europe. How interesting that it only takes a few steps. Just a few steps and you can leave the Russian world and arrive to the Nordic one.

Just a few hundred meters and everything is different.

–

An Estonian-language version of this article appears in Edasi. I wrote the Estonian-language version first and later translated it into English.

IT WAS NAIVE of me to think that I could have ever replaced you. I tried so hard, for years, and failed spectacularly. I don’t even know why I started trying, or how many astrologers, witches, healers, tarot card readers, and other masters of the black arts I consulted, only to be led deeper into my own delusions. I did it for you, to free you of me, and to free myself of you. I saw it as a mutual liberation. That’s what you asked of me. In retrospect, it was wrong of me to wish for anything, one way or the other, and especially wrong to try to course correct and to play god. I had to learn the unfortunate lessons that all people must learn, that the more you tinker, the more you pry, the more you struggle against the web of time, the harder things become, the less natural they are, the worse off everyone in the end is. The only right path forward is the raw and honest one, I think. There isn’t any other legitimate way. I could find 15,000 substitutes, and they would all crumple in the end. I didn’t make it so. That’s how it is.

YESTERDAY, the high lonesome highway. The countryside has a certain Prohibition-era flavor to it. The abandoned, splintering houses, lost to time and graffiti. That empty bottle of whiskey tossed carelessly into a desert-like wheat field at some desperate moment in the winter, only to be revealed by the thaw, like some ancient mastodon. Sometimes I wonder about the local indigent people who might shelter in these discarded structures on the outskirts of the town. Maybe they make bonfires at night and play harmonica. What kinds of horrors have these broken walls seen? In India, I once saw a man sleeping curled up in a rug by the side of the road. I imagine it was something like that, only colder and more forlorn. The countryside is blooming though, stubbornly. One can hear birds in the trees, singing. The birds are social. The people not so much. I have done this route many times, down to the lake, past the Baltic German cemetery in the woods. Sometimes I revisit one spot where I went swimming with a particular lady friend, though our peculiar brand of friendship has since been dissolved. Then it’s back out onto those long elevated roads. Other walkers come by, but nobody looks at you. It would seem that this would be the most opportune occasion to exchange some kind of pleasantries, or to acknowledge each other’s existence. Two strangers meet along a lonely highway on a cool but sunny spring day. I don’t expect much, you know. I understand that this is not California, and there will be no “have a great day” wished upon me by some passing jogger. Still, a nod might do. Or some eye contact. There is nothing. Yesterday, a young woman walked right past me. She was within arm’s distance. I looked to her, just to acknowledge that we existed along the same plane of reality. The wind was playing with her straw-colored hair. Her face was pale, as were her eyes. She looked like an extra from one of those Netflix Viking dramas. I wondered what she was thinking about. It must have been very important. Maybe she was wondering about what school she might get into, or how much her cousin Tõnu’s new car cost. “I wonder how much it cost? I wonder, I wonder.” Then it occurred to me that maybe she didn’t see me. Maybe I was invisible. What other explanation could there be? I didn’t know when my invisibility began to manifest itself. Naturally, the girl didn’t say hello. She couldn’t see me.

THIRTY YEARS from now, where will we all be? In 2053? In the yard, sipping espresso, or shots of limoncello, or playing bocce ball? God, I hope so. Then someone will put on Pinkerton. “I don’t want to be an old man anymore.” And Rivers Cuomo will still be writing songs, somewhere. And Weezer will still be putting out color-coded albums, somewhere. That’s where we’ll be, in the yard, playing bocce ball and listening to “Across the Sea,” with grandchildren or great-grandchildren on our knees. We’ll be sunning ourselves tranquilly, by the seaside, beneath the beach pine canopy. That’s where I’ll be in ’53.

I SAW YOU the other day, in the shop, buying cognac or vodka or something with astronomically high alcohol content at about ten minutes to closing time. I saw you there in your scarf but you didn’t see me. I didn’t want you to see me, because I wanted to let you be over there, in that new, more manageable universe you have created around yourself, the one where I no longer exist. I’m not actually sure if it was the same you I saw though. Maybe you no longer exist either, or at least the way I once knew you. Maybe that’s over. I remember how just a few years ago we were drinking wine together in your rented room overlooking the street and had some young friends over. We got down and kneeled beside each other and were praying and laughing. What was so funny? I can’t even remember what the joke was. I remember the candles though, and the taste of the wine. That’s one memory I have. It’s just a memory and maybe there is no point in writing about it or talking about it. “Sometimes,” you told me tersely toward the end, “people just go their separate ways.” I did try to forget about you. In fact, I had almost erased you. You were nearly deleted, and when I went in there that night, my spirits were high and my soul was swinging. I wasn’t even upset by seeing you in the back there, with him. You mostly looked the same, or at least your eyes had the same visible vibrance. You always did have beautiful eyes. I will at least acknowledge that. I went to the other side and stood over there so you wouldn’t have to deal with the trouble of seeing me. I waited for a while and read a special magazine about the German occupation. When I looked back, you were gone.

I WAS KICKED out of bed and lost for a good while. Then I reached a mountain village, up in the hills beside the French Riviera. I had to go to the diva’s house. Brynhild. She was on tour somewhere, performing Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, with valkyrie headdress. She left me multiple envelopes full of instructions on what I was to do and not to do while in her palazzo. Inside, there were mountains of old records piled up. Earth, Wind & Fire. Nina Simone. Neil Diamond. It was so dark inside, and yet bright, because all of the interiors were painted white. It was cold, like an ice palace in the mountains. Her dog was there, sniffing around. The house was so cold, especially after the sun went down on the Riviera, and I was up there, all alone. She told me that I had to get a fire started in the furnace, but I didn’t feel like it. I was just too tired for fires and decided to sleep. When Brynhild arrived back from the concert, still wearing her headdress, the house was cold and she was disappointed. Brynhild scolded me and went to wash herself.

WHO IS SHE? Wouldn’t you like to know. Sometimes you only catch a glimpse of her, out of the corners of your eyes. You think you see her coming your way down the street, or that you see her from behind at the shop, examining some bananas, but then she turns around and you realize that it isn’t her and you are disappointed. Sometimes the girl has the same scarf, same build, same boots, same way of walking, but it’s not her. Another good question might be, what is it that makes her who she is? That one is also difficult to answer. You just don’t know. Idiot poets struggle and wrestle and hassle themselves with such questions. Idiot painters too. They keep painting, and the songsmiths keep writing, just trying to get it all down on record or on paper. Is it in the curves of her eyes, the way that she walks, the sound of her voice? God no. There is some kind of radio signal broadcasting from the bosoms of people and hers is the one that is hitting you the strongest, starting to reverberate in your core. The sound continues to fill you. Sound is one word. It’s also like seawater. Remember, how you used to go and swim at the seaside as a child, and you could feel its waves pulsing through you hours later when you were all sandy and sleeping in the back seat on the long car ride home? That’s what it’s like. It fills you from end to end, rolling like the waves, from the hairs on the crest of your head to the final peninsulas of your toes and back again. Naturally, I tried to get away to preserve my autonomy. I told myself all kinds of pleasant lies to distract myself from the truth. She was too young or too old. Too fat or too thin. Her voice was too high or too low. Whatever I was, it was too much or too little. I was overly abundant and inadequate. However the math squared, it would never work out. But math is wicked and deceptive. Thoughts are self-sabotaging. And sometimes there really is no way out. The only way to go is in. I don’t see her always, but she is always there, just beyond sight, a blurred figure at the end of a misty street. The last time I saw her in real life at a birthday party, she was stunning. It was as if someone had cut a piece of the night-time sky away with a pair of scissors and made a woman from this celestial fabric. All of the little lies I had told myself were washed away. I thought everything was normal and tried to convince myself such, but about half an hour later, I started to feel that pull again. The mighty ocean had picked me up and was tossing me about with its heavy waves. I was being sucked out into water. I confided in my friend about what was going on, and she said that it all sounded beautiful. “Go with those waves,” she told me. “Ride them.”

AND THEN I whispered to her, that we are no longer in a cold house in a cold town, and that we are actually beneath a waterfall in a tropical jungle, and she began to purr like a kitten. This was its own kind of love, a sensual love, a true love. Love isn’t only theatre tickets, dresses and ties, dangling earrings, vacation getaways, social media posts, and anniversaries. That’s bourgeois love. Sensual love is another sort of love, an untreated, crude, imperfect and raw love. Just the way I like it.