I WAS GETTING READY to go to the Rolling Stones concert when a Spanish witch showed up. She called herself Lourdes. A vigorous woman from the west Pyrenees. “¡Deja que te lea el futuro!” I allowed this so-called witch or soothsayer to at least tag along, and out we set on our sojourn toward the Song Festival Grounds, at which point, some of her forecasts started to molest my conscience, so I sat down at a bus stop for a rest. Then Lourdes hugged me, rubbing her fleshy dowry in my face and patting my head. I was hesitant to partake at first, but was soon sobbing and licking away. Again I had succumbed to comforts of the opposite sex. “Sí, sí,” said Lourdes, stroking, brushing, caressing. “Conmigo puedes hacer lo que quieras. No hay nada prohibido.” After the concert, we arrived to a manor house, which was more like a chateau. The bedroom was beautiful, just like one of those gilded 18th century Versailles interiors they once displayed at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was our chestnut-haired witch Lourdes, with her great dark olive tree eyes, engulfed up and buoyed in white-tipped waves of soft sheets and duvet-covered blankets, illuminated by wax-dripping candles and candelabras. I thought she was reading a book on sorcery at first, but it turned out to be a European women’s handball video game. Lourdes was quite engrossed. Soon after she began to lecture me about my novel. When would it be finished? How many more pages left? Carla, my other publisher, came in and the two chicas sat together in the Versailles bed, blankets all pulled up. An impromptu business meeting. “Ah, I see you have been discussing your literary plans with this Spanish witch and not with me,” said Carla the publisher. I didn’t know even how to respond. More negotiations ensued. Soon after, my publisher left the room and Lourdes went away to take a shower. When she came out, I beckoned her over and she embraced me and sat in my lap. Then I said, “Is it okay if I dance with you, Lourdes?” “¡Claro que podemos bailar!” the bosomy witch said, and there we began to waltz slowly beside her bed, Lourdes in the dripping nude, me with my hands slowly advancing toward that plush cushion bottom. With a growl of thunder, the manor owner arrived, a Napoleon-like silhouette against the white nocturnal mists that engulfed the chateau, with hat and cutlass visible in the shadows. I climbed out the window and ran to an orchard, and tugged myself up into one of the lower branches of the tree. From there, I watched as Napoleon marched in to inspect his wife and property. Before this happened, Lourdes had cried out to me from the window, “Come back you scoundrel, there is nothing here to fear!” She was still naked and wet. She had yet to dry herself.

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, my friend has lived a vagabond existence. He was the last supposedly happily married one in our gang, and had watched no doubt anxiously as each one of our marriages came undone over the years. One day, it was his turn. He informed us that his wife and the mother of his two daughters wanted a divorce. He denied the divorce, and a cold peace, or separation was agreed. Putin flew in from Moscow for the negotiations, and everyone walked away waving a white paper. It was decided to share the kids, meaning they would be with him some weeks, with her others. Ever since then, he’s been on the road in his off weeks, as far as it can take him in the pandemic era, which is still anywhere. He’s become another one of the rootless middle aged, his home is where he lays his head at night, his heart is a swirl of memories and yearning. He does not seem unhappy. He sends us dispatches from wherever he happens to be, or remarks on the quality of the coffee or reliability of the local wifi. He’s taking it well, I think, or at least I hope. You might think you know who I am talking about, and the truth is that you both do and you don’t. You probably don’t know him as a person, but you have surely met someone like him in recent years. There are many of us, the dispossessed. Legions. Enough to fill Freedom Square in Tallinn with torches and dread. I meet them everywhere in every situation. Just the other day, my friend invited me over for coffee and gave me a new address. “But I thought you lived in the country,” I told him. It turned out that his wife stayed in the country and he had rented a house in town. The kids shuttle between their old house, now called “mom’s place,” and the apartment, now called “dad’s place.” They seem somehow less troubled by it. From the outside, that’s how things seem. I can’t say it’s any surprise to me now, that all of these families are tumbling apart. It’s become a trite and terrible cliché. The only thing that still surprises me is how business-like couples often are about these big decisions. It’s as if after over a decade of life together, the most significant life events one can have, the wives (and according to some estimates, between 70 and 90 percent of divorces are initiated by women) just wake up one day, decide it’s over and then just have to break the news, like a landlord telling a tenant she has sold the apartment and the tenant has a month to move out. Or maybe a Swedbank marketing meeting where they decide to nix one advertising campaign over another. It’s just a thing, you know, lihtsalt üks asi. It reminds me of all of those countries that lined up to go to war after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. They thought it would be a little war way back in 1914. A territorial gain here, some losses there, and maybe just a few soldiers would die. A century later and we are still grieving it. There is no sense in trying to understand catastrophe. The only good question is how to stay sane. That question has led me to look elsewhere. It has led me away from questions, from thoughts themselves. For a time, the only way I could even function was to stop thinking. I had to stop thinking and trying to make sense of it, because I was never going to arrive at an answer. It didn’t make sense. All of the folk healers, psychologists, astrologers, witches, and the like, weren’t going to help me either. They tried, they did, but most of it was up to me. I take refuge in memories, mostly memories of myself when I was small, before I could comprehend some of these things. Before I was an adult and before I was married, I was still a person and I still existed by myself. More than that, I always had the right to exist, independent of how anybody else assessed me or evaluated me, or was satisfied with my performance as me being me. This memory of existing on my own, not because I fulfilled someone else’s idea of who they thought the perfect man was, has given me comfort in my days as a vagabond. When I consider my existence, I forget about everything that has happened to me and I forget about everyone else. I don’t want to think about them anymore. I don’t want to remember anymore. I am tired of thinking and I am tired of remembering. I want to be like my friend, head for the islands, or vanish into the snowy mountains, find a café with good coffee and free wifi and write. 

I think he’s onto something.

*

This article appears in Estonian in the January 2022 issue of Anne ja Stiil. The title is borrowed from the Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa duet, “Coração Vagabundo” off their 1967 LP Domingo.

AT SOME MOMENT in the night, I heard a door slam shut. It was a loud, forceful sound, as if a person had closed it on the way out in a hurry. I thought it must be the wind, and it must be one of the corridor doors, but when I awoke, and upon scrutiny, detective work, and inspection, I discovered they were all shut tight. After the door slam, I began to hear a strange tinkling sound, almost like a xylophone imitated by a computer, but with no particular melody, just tinkling and transmitting into the air, blending with the Christmas lights of the tree. “Aliens,” I thought. “They have come to abduct me. Just like in Whitley Streiber’s Communion!” Instead, a shadowy, stealthy four-legged creature prowled out of the darkness into view.

It was Kurru the Cat.

Once before, I had a strange experience with Kurru, when, half asleep, I heard someone whisper, “Look over here, look at me over here,” and awoke and turned my head in the direction of the whispers to see Kurru eyeing me from a chair and licking her fur. It was 3 or 4 am. Again it was 3 or 4 am when Kurru arrived to the sound of the strange tinkling electronic xylophone music. I stared at her for a while and she stopped and stared at me. This was highly irregular, as Kurru seldom allows me to even pet her and only shows me any notice when she wants to go out or needs food. Yet there she was, staring at me mysteriously through the dark.

“Is this strange sound your cat language?” I thought. “Is this what the cats hear when they talk to each other?” Kurru just watched me. It wasn’t as if an animal was watching me. It was as if a fully embodied, advanced entity had taken notice of my awareness of its existence. Then I turned over in my blanket and I heard Kurru’s paws shuffle into my daughter’s room and next I heard her jump up onto the bed, where she usually sleeps most nights. She made herself a nest, licked her paws a few times, and soon was asleep too. I got the sense that we belonged more to her than she belonged to us. The roles were actually reversed. We had been her pets.

Kurru the Cat was master.

SOME TIME in the countryside. The big difference between the town and the country is the isolation. I’m used to hearing people, seeing people, taking note of people, and this, believe it or not, gives one a feeling of security. Even if I am accosted on a town street by a troubled person, there are multiple eyewitnesses, which reduces the likelihood of something getting out of hand or control. But when you wake up in the countryside at 4 am or so, and look out those windows into the black, and see nothing except the movement of some cat, or maybe the gray light of the moon filtering through the gauzy wisps of the clouds, every horror movie you’ve ever watched starts to replay in succession. In the Estonian countryside, I am afraid less of monsters and more of the drunks and other disturbed and indigent wild people. Of course, the real predators out there are the foxes and even the wolves. The last time I was here, I saw a very large deer jaunt across the road, and yesterday I saw some local hunters in their orange vests. My reference point is still the United States. Estonia is like Maine, I think, minus the mountains. It really is. I would like to go into the woods later just for a stroll, but I do worry about those hunters. I don’t want to be mistaken for a moose. I think they only hunt controlled areas. I hope so. Yesterday, I had an Italian moment. I was feeding the dog, as we had some leftovers. Without knowing I started saying, “Hai fame? Vuoi qualcosa da mangiare? Guarda, qui.” The dog speaks Estonian, and was acquired from Russia, so probably also knows a little bit of Russian, but it blinked at me with blue eyes. A very strange character indeed.

AT THAT TIME, the Gaeltacht was shrinking, but the west of central Ireland still spoke Irish. Particularly the misted foothills and peaks of the ancient Slieve Bloom Mountains, which run through Laois and Offaly, and are among the oldest mountain ranges in Europe today, remained an Irish-speaking stronghold. This was an area once controlled by the O’Moores, but the English in Dublin did not feel comfortable with Irish rule in central Ireland, so they set up forts and plantations, and brought in English and Scottish settlers to pacify the local Irish. This was back in the 16th century. Then the O’Moores and their allies, the O’Connors, sheltered in the shadows of the Slieve Bloom, from which they led attacks on the forts and raided the settlements. They fell on the planters at night and in the morning nothing more remained of their dwellings but charred wood and smoke. A lengthy period of reprisals followed, a season of revenge killing and blood feuds. This happened centuries before the birth of Margaret Delaney and her daughter Catherine Collier in Laois. Delaney is an Irish name that originally was Ó Dubhshláine. This was a local sept. According to one source, peace was at last achieved by the year 1600, and the O’Delaneys and other families were given pardons and allowed to remain in the county. They did until the 1850s, when Margaret and Catherine left Ireland behind forever. They were Famine Irish. Margaret was the mother of Catherine and Catherine was the mother of Mary. Mary was the mother of Genevieve and Genevieve was the mother of Annabelle, who was my grandmother. So it goes back, hand over hand, chain hooked into chain, for hundreds or even thousands of years.

THE NEWSPAPER POSTIMEES recently asked me for Christmas movie recommendations, in light of the recent publication of my new book Jõulumees (“Santa Claus”). I sent them the following:

1. A Hard Day’s Night. There was a time, almost two decades ago, when Kalamaja was an apocalyptic ghetto neighborhood behind the Baltic Station, when I lived in a small apartment, munched on gingerbread from Säästumarket, and watched little Estonian children sing “Jõuluingel” in a singing competition. That Christmas long ago, for some strange reason, ETV broadcast The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. Yes, really. Now, I know what you are thinking. A Hard Day’s Night doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas. Nothing. There is no shot of John, Paul, George, and Ringo decorating the tree or singing Christmas carols. If anything, the next Beatles movie, Help! is more like Christmas. This is the Beatles movie where they hide away in the Alps and can be seen sledding and skiing. But they that snowy evening they showed A Hard Day’s Night. And forever more, I shall associate gingerbreads, glögi, and verivorst with shots of Ringo Starr wandering aimlessly around the city in his trench coat. So, to be honest, A Hard Day’s Night is a holiday favorite. 
2. Then there is Love Actually, which I don’t mind at all, because it’s like having all my favorite Brits over for Christmas. I mean, if Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Rowan Atkinson, Keira Knightley, and the late Alan Rickman all turned up at your house for Christmas, wouldn’t you let them in? I think a lot of you would prefer their company to your own families. There is nostalgia in this film too. Long before COVID-19, long before Boris Johnson, long before Brexit, there was Love Actually, a fictional Britain where Hugh Grant was prime minister. Unfortunately, this never happened, but each Christmas we can imagine what could have been.
3. There are a lot of American Christmas classics going back to It’s a Wonderful Life from 1946. My father loves It’s a Wonderful Life, and one Christmas set a record when he watched it about 25 times. He knows every word. None of these classic Christmas films are my favorite though. I much prefer Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer from 1964 and A Charlie Brown Christmas from 1965. These are the movies that I saw year after year as a child. A Charlie Brown Christmas has an excellent soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi Trio that one can even hear played in Estonia today in shopping centers.
4. There are also quite a few Estonian Christmas movies out there, and the one that comes to mind is Eia Jõulud Tondikakul, which touches on all the popular domestic themes, workaholic parents, mixed families, gingerbread, the healing properties of nature, and bad guys who want to destroy the forest. It’s also nice to see a movie about Estonia with a happy ending.
5. I actually do have one more favorite Christmas movie. It’s called Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas and originally aired as a TV special in 1977. Emmet was an otter living in a poor rural community and his mother was a wash woman, who washed people’s clothes in her washtub for money. Then Emmet borrowed her washtub to make a washtub bass, an essential part of any proper jug band. He formed a group and they took part in a music competition. I think people from this part of the world would appreciate this movie. There is something about a bunch of forest animals forming a folk band that reminds me of the groups that play at the Pärimusmuusika Ait here in Viljandi.

So, whenever I hear otters playing folk music, I know it’s time for plenty of gingerbread and to remind myself: it’s Christmas time again, and all will be well in the world, just like in the old days.

MY GRANDMOTHER DIED ON SUNDAY. She was almost 97 years old. I have some memories of her. She was my mother’s mother, and I remember once at a family party introducing her to my father’s father (who was married to my father’s mother) and saying, “Why don’t you two get together!” I was probably five years old. My grandfather and grandmother rather awkwardly dismissed this idea. My grandmother’s husband had died long before I was born. I also remember staying with her as a child a few times. She would wake up so early, at 5 am, to a radio alarm clock, and make coffee. She would read the paper. She asked me if I wanted my pancakes early in the morning or later. I remember she had loose skin, the skin of an older lady, and asking how it got so loose, and she explained how it would happen to me too when I got older. Then Mr. Snuffleupagus the gray cat would come in for food. “Snuffy.” Snuffy had been fighting with some other cats, or had eaten a bird. I can’t remember that part, only that Snuffy seemed like a very tough, self-reliant cat. I also remember Grandma’s hands deep in that stuff they call “hard sauce” at holidays. This was some mixture of sugar, butter, cream, and whiskey. An Irish family staple. Nothing like being a six year old and loading up on some minced meat pie and a few spoons of hard sauce. I was probably a little tipsy before I even understood the meaning of the word. I remember all of that religious artwork around the house. There was an angel doll in a glass case, and some very ancient looking paintings on the wall. I remember that when John Paul II at last died, and Benedict was selected, Benedict’s portrait promptly arrived on the wall in the kitchen, and then when he abdicated, Pope Francis’s portrait was just as swiftly there in Benedict’s old spot. Grandma actually knew a lot about religious history and various Catholic societies, the Josephites, Jesuits, Franciscans. I remember showing her an image of the Black Madonna that I had taken in an Italian church, and her explaining to me the significance of the artwork, and also after watching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves her discussing the Crusades with me. I also remember a few stories about her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. In case you were wondering, it wasn’t some happy wonderland of glowing memories. Actually, it seemed a rather drab and somber period to be a child. “The Great Depression.” I remember her telling me about how she used to go ice skating in Queens, and how another little girl was abducted by some kind of pervert who frequented the rink. New York in the 1930s could be a downtrodden, gloomy place. She had four brothers and two older half brothers and her mother was annoyed with her when she was a teenager, because she liked to wear trousers (she called them “slacks”) and not dresses. She was actually very tight-lipped about the past though and about herself. She did like to talk about her grandfather, Dr. Michael T. Carroll, a physician in Manhattan in the 19th century, and her great grandmother, Catherine Murray, who ran a cotton brokerage on Water Street and did business as “CE Murray” to disguise her gender in a male-run world. Grandma traveled a lot later on and went to Italy and to Ireland. I remember she brought me back a piece of peat from a bog in Ireland. It was the greatest gift anyone had ever given me. Imagine that, a tiny piece of Ireland in a little plastic bag. I still have it somewhere. Years later, when I was in Dublin, I was researching the family history at the archives and looking for a roll of microfiche from a parish in Laois where her great grandmother’s family, the Colliers, were from. It so happened that that roll disappeared from the library on the very day that I had arrived. They searched everywhere, and it seemed that someone had pocketed it that same morning when they had ordered it from the archive. So many times when I started researching that line of my family, microfiche would disappear, computers would shut down, notes would be lost. It was very strange and I came to accept that our Irish ancestors just didn’t want to be found. I told Grandma about that story the same day. I called her from a phone in the hotel corridor in Dublin and we had a laugh. “You’ll never guess where I am.” She told me how she had a similar experience at the library, and how she had done more or less the same thing and never told me. She had been working with a librarian to find books about her mother’s family, the Carrolls, and only found herself deeper and deeper in information she couldn’t make sense of. Grandma had a funny sense of humor, and as I got older, it seemed like that was one place where we could overlap and enjoy each other’s company. She was an extremely devout Catholic and sometimes wore a Celtic cross on her neck. For the rest of my days, whenever I see the round Celtic cross, gold and ornamented like in the Book of Kells, I will think of her.

IN THE MORNING we had to leave Stockholm and go back to Estonia. It was me, Petra, our kids, and my mother and father. But everyone was tardy. Petra wanted some money from me, but all the coins I gave her were in some other currency. There was even that Danish 1 krone coin, the one with a hole in the middle of it. The children wouldn’t stop playing with the other kids in the courtyard. My mother started to make sandwiches. “But there’s a huge buffet on the ship!” I said. She kept cutting away there in the hotel kitchen, slicing up sandwich bread. My father meantime was upstairs lounging on the couch and watching MSNBC, his suitcase mostly unpacked. I quickly thrust some of my belongings into a bag as he just lay sprawled there, his hands behind his head. “You know, you should really get yourself some new pants. And a new jacket,” he said. “Look at me,” he gestured to his black Lacoste Polo shirt, “I still look cool, but you don’t.” “We don’t have time for this fashion shit, we’re going to be late!” Somehow I got them all into the transport van that would take us to the harbor. It was a balmy day in Stockholm, but with a slight maritime breeze that made the palm trees sway ever so slightly, or at least appear as if they were, and the Kungsholmen orange groves looked especially juicy with fruit. The van was overcrowded with travelers, and somewhere along Norr Mälarstrand a young man in a Hawaiian shirt disembarked and said he would walk the rest of the way. Somehow we made it, and with time to spare, and the white ship buoyed us in its sanctuary. Stockholm was more tropical than I remembered it being, with lush gardens and parrots singing from the verandas. It was all so different. It was fever hot.

BALTI JAAMA TURG, or Baltic Station Market, is a microcosm of the changes in the capital. It used to be this sprawling, post-apocalyptic, no-man’s-land of vene (Russian) putkas (booths) selling World War II leftovers (helmets, posters, pins), and big mama sellers weighing out kilos of potatoes and onions with a scale and making calculations with an abacus and a rickety giant calculator that even a blind man could figure out. “Kakzkyen krooni, palun.” And then they just razed it and built this monster thing. I call it Scandinavian, because I feel most of Estonia’s consumer culture is Scandinavian. It reminds me very much of Copenhagen, even more than Stockholm. There is that emphasis on everything being colorful, precise, well organized, and child friendly. We are Legoland people now, leading our Legoland lives. Indeed, Balti Jaama Turg is where the newly monied families of Kalamaja come to push their higher-end baby strollers and buy Italian and Middle Eastern produce. Some of the old sellers are still there, selling mounds of gooseberries, lingonberries, and chanterelles when they are in season. Some people lament that loss of the grungy post-Soviet ghetto element, but, you know, I was there, and I pushed a baby carriage through it in a whiteout snowstorm. Good riddance.

ZA TALLINNA, ZA RODINU. I saw a Soviet World War II propaganda film once, where the soldiers were singing, “Za Stalina, za rodinu,” (“for Stalin and the motherland!” in Russian) and so I think of this song when I come to Tallinn, mostly because as soon as I disembark at the train station, I am greeted by little clumps of ancient babushkas chittering away like city pigeons in Russian, the language of Tallinn’s sizeable linguistic minority. Tallinn is not essentially a Russian place though, so much of it is Scandinavian cookie cute commercial culture (the advertisement for the bakery Gustav painted on the trams, for instance, or even just the muted colors of the buildings, nothing loud anywhere, no neon orange or yellow, everything pastel this and creamy that, so mild and so restrained). There is this cartoonlike, childlike quality to the urban culture, it’s as if I am living in a life-size Christmas story of sorts, complete with the picture perfect Christmas fair in the Town Hall Square, or the indigent man mumbling to himself and sipping happily from a can of beer on the side of the road. There is also that brisk sea air chill, which you miss when you live inland, but which is unmistakable. I’m happy I have known this place and for such a long time. There are few other places I have known as long, and with such repeated interaction. Even cities I have spent a lot of time in, like San Francisco, those visits are in and out in a flash, I see some trolleys rolling by, have a look at the Golden Gate, visit the Haight maybe, get lost in the Presidio, and then it’s done. Or Reykjavik. I take the bus from Keflavik, check into the hotel, buy food from the Bonus supermarket, have a swim at Sundhöllin, interview Kári Stefánsson, buy some autographed Sjón books at Hús máls og menningar, and it’s over. It’s not like Tallinn and me. We go way back. We’ve got stories.