little wooden towns

I LIVE IN A LITTLE WOODEN TOWN. Or so it’s been called by people who live in larger wooden towns. Each morning I rise and follow the same trajectories. I can see the milky light stirring behind the curtains, and I remember my third grade teacher telling us how there were places in the world where the sun never set in the summer and the winters were so dark.

Strange, I think, that I wound up living in one of these places. I wake up, shower and dress. I walk down one street toward one café, or I walk down another street to another. I cross by the courthouse, or that apartment building that used to be a dance school. There’s the park that used to host Joala, or the Konsum that used to be an A ja O. The preschool, the hairdresser’s, the Armenian restaurant. Estonian towns are full of bizarre surprises. In Viljandi, there’s an establishment called Suur Vend or “Big Brother” and another one called Sahara. There’s the Nuremberg Building, the façade of which is painted to look like it’s part of some German mountainside town. In three minutes you can travel from 1984 to Bavaria to North Africa. These small town trajectories are being engraved into my mental map. I call this my internal landscape. Your mind knows that the bank is here and the church and school are there.

Your mind knows, even when you aren’t paying attention.

DURING THE PANDEMIC, I started a writing project, one where I would write down my dreams in narrative form. I called this experiment “dream fiction.” What has resulted is a catalogue of stories, maybe a hundred already, that tell, in a way, my own story over the past five years. But it’s not only my story, it’s the story of the world. During the pandemic, I would have dreams about vaccines. When the war started, I had dreams about rockets. After Assad was overthrown, I had a dream about Russia surrendering to Estonia, and Koit Toome and Tanel Padar lounging in the Grand Kremlin Palace. There they sat stoking the flames in the fireplace beneath a torn portrait of Lavrov and complaining about how hard it is to be famous.

Another story was called, “Elon Musk’s Italian Restaurant.” I wonder how many of us are having dreams about Elon these days. I noticed in the dream that my mental landscape blended Viljandi with Stockholm, a city I have spent a lot of time in and that means a lot to me. In this combination of Stockholm and Viljandi — Stockholmdi? — Paalalinn and its lake were in Norrmalm. Elon Musk’s Il Colosseo was on one side of the lake, and his competitor’s was on the other. To get from one side of this lake, you had to take the metro, like you might in Stockholm. Viljandi had its own version of the T-Bana. Viljandi had its own Pressbyrån.

In another dream, Kihnu Island had merged with Viljandi, creating Kihlandi, so that all of the streets remained in their places, but the houses had been replaced by tall pines and red-painted wood barns, and the roads were gravel. There were fieldstone walls marking the boundaries of Joala Park. In another part of the town, San Diego was superimposed on Viljandi, creating Viljandiego. Viljandi was in the same layout, but all of the buildings were taken from the Gaslamp Quarter. There were even Kihnu women waiting for me on the other side of town, knitting in their red headscarves. I rode my bike past the mariachi bands and Mexican restaurants to get home. In this way, my town became half fantasy, half reality. I think that’s what happens when you live somewhere. Places get inside you. They fill your inner world.

***

People are arranged in such ways too. It’s not just streets and avenues, eateries and esoteric shops and lamp posts. Someone might be fixed in a certain place, such as the love of your life, for example. This woman is always there in that one spot, just like a mountain is always in one spot. You look up and see the mountain and it gives you a reassuring feeling, just like a certain person can reassure you through their presence. The mountain is always there and she is also always there in that place where she always has been. People become fixed in these places. Women become like mermaid statues spurting water. You go to visit them and to admire them.

It’s not easy to move mountains or mermaid statues and it’s not so easy to move people. This is how you can remain in love with the same person for years, even when it makes absolutely no sense, even when it causes you suffering. Buddhists call this attachment. They want to slip from place to place without ever paying these landscapes much notice. These people, these places, this yearning, it’s all like clouds drifting by. Do not get attached to women or to mermaid statues either, they say. Yet you do get attached. They are fixed in that place on your map, as much as Konstantin Päts’ enormous disembodied head is watching you from its perch beside the Estonian Theatre. You could try to move Päts’ head, but it’s too damn heavy. It’s been put there. So you just let it be. The woman you love is as fixed on your map as Päts’ head is fixed. It’s always just there, even if you don’t notice it every day. Sometimes you do notice it.

Some people do attempt to alter their inner landscapes through force. They get desperate and try to blow everything up with dynamite. I’m guilty as charged here and I have learned the hard way that it just doesn’t work. Movement creates countermovement, as the British-American philosopher and entertainer Alan Watts said in his lectures. Whatever you push against will push back against you doubly as hard. This creates balance and harmony, but people don’t want either. They want to be in control. They want this person here to be moved there. They want that person there to be erased. Out with the old and in with the new! From a cartographic perspective, this is like saying you would like Liivalaia to be relocated to Gonsiori. You want Rüütli Street in Tartu and Malmö Street in Pärnu to switch places. Let’s put Pirita in Kakumäe. Let’s move Rakvere to Karlova. But why? Because you think it will be better. You think that if you were able to redraw the map, everyone would be happier. You’re tired of loving that woman, or she doesn’t love you back. She has even said so. You want to exchange loyalties. You want to give your love to someone else, someone more deserving of your love.

But what happens in these ambitious inner world renewal projects? Things just fall back into place. Everything you did to rearrange your inner world was a total waste of time. There was no point in even trying. The world has its own natural order, just as towns do. In this way, whether you like it or not, she will remain the woman you love until one day, when there is a great earthquake or mudslide, or some other natural cataclysm that changes everything. This creates a before and after, just as burned cities only in part can be fully restored and rebuilt.

Estonian towns are full of such well-tended green parks that used to be grand structures. You walk through them all the time. Children play there, old women are out walking dogs there. Where there once were houses and hotels, there are now ice skating rinks. I wonder sometimes if we can still sense these places, even though they are no longer there, in the air about where the Golden Lion once stood before the March 1944 bombings, for example, in the same way we can still feel the presence of a woman in our lives through her long absence.

In this way, a lost person becomes both there and not there, just like the Golden Lion Hotel.

***

Recently I wrote down these words. I said that some things in life shattered us into pieces, leaving nothing in solid state. I said that in these situations, we become like free-floating mosaics, like the icy rings around Saturn or Neptune that, when viewed from a distance, almost look whole, but that upon closer inspection can be seen through. The light is visible between these leftover chunks of soul, feelings, and memory. They are suspended in time.

I wrote these words and then left to go to work on a rare sunny winter morning. On my left, I could see through some trees the spire of a small church, and on the right, I could see the sun on the windows of the courthouse. Often I am inspired to take photos of these little pieces of the town. I photograph sunlight against the wooden facades of old houses, I photograph frozen laundry strung across backyards, I capture the symmetry of the rail lines at Ülemiste.

Sometimes I see something interesting, like an old doll staring out a window at me. On that morning, my phone was dead and I could only watch the yellow light on the facades. A lot of people I know are nature enthusiasts. They ascribe to the Fred Jüssi School of Forest Asceticism. They try to fill the holes in themselves with birch juice, buckets of blueberries, and lake swims. For me, the sun on the facades of the buildings has become my own way of filling in those cracks, of gluing the pieces of myself together. Most people think we are all separate from each other and from our environments. I am me, you are you, this place is this place. I don’t think this is correct, because people are also places. This has become obvious. The universe is a continuum. I now know that this is true, but I am still trying to figure it all out.

An Estonian-language version of this piece appears in the magazine Edasi. Special thanks to Dea Paraskevopoulos for assisting with the Estonian translation, and to Casey Kochmer of Personal Tao for guidance.

crane neck

DR. STERN’S HOUSE was at the end of Crane Neck. He was a gynecologist, I think. Or an orthodontist. Something like that. He wasn’t home when I arrived to this cedar-shaked masterpiece of architectural fusion, a crisscross of colonial and modernist influences. The property was green, the driveway pebbled. Birds glared down silently from the oaks and the maples. The taxi driver left me at the gate and I walked up to the house and went inside.

Inside the house, there were various characters hanging out and passing through. One of them was a businessman of the old breed, with a pocket watch and pince-nez glasses. He said he had made a fortune rigging baseball games in his day, but had discovered a new source of wealth and materiel: diamonds. He had on a red coat and was walking through the kitchen talking about his dealings in the gem business. There was a skylight and the gray light of the day shone down on his whiskers. “Indeed, the gem business is the best business, if I say so.”

Behind him, my grandmother emerged. Her hair had taken on a golden hue and she was more animate than ever. “Grandma? Is that really you?” She grabbed me by both hands and we spun in circles. “I’m 106 years old,” she said, “and I haven’t felt this good since the New York Yankees won the 1941 World Series!” There were others behind her carousing and I wondered what kind of parallel reality was dawning on me. Grandma kept telling me how great she felt and looked now that she was dead. She said so in her very genteel and proper Virginia accent.

Grandma let go of my hands and like that, I was out in the garden and the grounds were covered in snow. I was with my daughter and we began walk through a series of stalls, not unlike the little putkad that dot the Town Hall Square in Tallinn during the Christmas Fair. Everywhere I looked though, I only saw stacks of baked goods. Flour, flour, and more flour, covered with sugar, sugar, and more sugar and some chocolate. I bought my daughter some tasty candied quince in a paper bag and we walked away from the market, only to be chased down by several wild big black dogs. When a hellhound like that falls on you, it’s a real terror. My daughter fell in the snow as the dogs got closer, so I ran over and pulled her back into the house by her arm. I remember just seizing her by the hand and pulling the girl back inside.

And then I opened my eyes. We were back in the kitchen of the house and the sunlight was on our faces. Someone announced, “Dr. Stern is here to take you home now.” We went outside and there he was, standing beside a black 1934 Buick Victoria. It was a beauty of an automobile. He was wearing a purple tie-dye Grateful Dead shirt and had on a pair of khaki shorts. He had curly hair and seemed like the kind of doctor who had smoked a lot of dope back in med school. “Well, what are you all waiting for?” said Dr. Stern, opening the door to the black Buick. “Just get in!”

two gunnas

I GOT MYSELF a little helicopter, just like James Bond’s Little Nelly from You Only Live Twice, flying out to the east of the island, admiring all of the pine trees and swamps. Keeping close to the estuary, I looked down only to see Jack, a British adventurer in a khaki jacket, hiking across the wetlands with his son. Beside them was an enormous brown lump. It looked moist, pungent. Jack looked up at me and waved, I could see his gray hair. “Ahoy, what is that thing down there?” I shouted above the rotor sounds. Jack shouted back, “It’s a giant poo, mate!”

At the other end of the bay, I set Little Nellie down. Gunna was there, with her fringe or bangs cut across the front. She was at her usual position in the shop, wearing her apron, and appearing rather matter of fact. But over at the juice and taco bar, I encountered Gunna again, blending fruits and vegetables and scooping salsa. I looked back over to shopgirl Gunna, only to discover she was there at the same time. How could it be? How could Gunna be in two places at once? “But didn’t you know there are two of us?” Gunna said. She had a lovely, toothy smile. I once told Gunna that her smile was my greatest birthday present. I kept looking back and forth at the two Gunnas. “Yes, she is me and I am also me,” Gunna said. “We’re all me.”

“But how can that be?” I asked, scratching my head. “Because there are as many of me as there needs to be,” Gunna said, making another taco. She really was a cute girl. She looked like a three year old in a full-grown woman’s body. I reconciled myself to the idea of there being many manifestations of Gunna, just as all seven Matrikas were thought to be manifestations of Lakshmi. Each manifestation of Gunna, the Hindus had said, embodied some different aspect. Indeed, temple art unearthed by archaeologists showed the many faces of the goddess Gunna.

“She is me and I am also me,” she said. “She is me and I am also me.”

minor swing

I HAD A GO at the guitar playing “”Minor Swing.” There was even a small audience around me. To be honest, it was the only tune I could convincingly play and my hands were clumsy. It was recognizable, and it gave one the impression that I knew what I was doing. Most people had heard “Minor Swing” somewhere, maybe in a movie, or maybe playing the back of some coffeehouse. I was surrounded by women dressed in silvery gowns, again those flapper women from the 1920s parading around my subconscious. They were supple, silverwhite, and lovely.

This was all taking place at some neoclassical mansion on the coast of oligarchy and oblivion.

Of course, Rhys Jonathan had to show up at this point. We used to sit next to each other in AP History. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and a baseball cap. I handed the instrument over to him and he began to wow and astonish. Zola, one of the silver-draped flapper women, draped her hands over his shoulders and neck. I grunted “yeah,” because that’s what fellow musicians do during gypsy jazz performances. Yeahhh. This is how we all show how pleased we are. Watching Zola caress Rhys, I understood I had lost her. She was with him now, him and his agile fingers. “I told you,” I said to Rhys. “You’re the next Al Di Meola.” “No way,” he said, strumming and plucking away. “No way I’m Al Di Meola.” “Yes way,” I said. “You are Di Meola.”

I left Rhys with his flapper groupies and went for a walk around the terrace. Adam, another old high school classmate was there. This lanky, sandy-haired troublemaker had later joined the Israeli Defense Forces, and was trying to chase away shellshock and PTSD by consuming handfuls of mochi. I put my hands on his shoulders, told him that everything would be jake.

Halfway down the terrace, between many other partygoers, I encountered Igrayne. She was crying because she hadn’t been invited to one of her friend’s birthday parties. Igrayne was seated there on the edge of the terrace with tears in her eyes. She was wearing a crisp white blouse. Her gold hair was pulled back. Up on the terrace, I could still hear Rhys Jonathan serenading the women playing “Minor Swing,” just better. Then I started to kiss young Igrayne. Her lips were full and pink. I didn’t know what else to do. “They didn’t invite me,” she sobbed.

How else do you stop a bereaved girl from crying?

soul brothers

SOME THINGS IN LIFE shatter us into pieces. There’s nothing solid left. We become free-floating mosaics, like those icy rings surrounding Saturn and Neptune. When viewed at a distance, we almost look whole. Get a closer look and you can see the light between these diverse leftover chunks of soul, feelings and memory. They are suspended there in time.

This was the condition I found myself in while wandering through a strange place. The name of the place was Crown Heights, at least as far as I knew, but it looked a lot more like the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC. It had snowed for days and the landscape was thickly white. But the sun had come out and various soul brothers from the neighborhood were out catching some rays. I could tell they were soul brothers because they were all wearing leather jackets and sunglasses. Some of them built little nests out of snow and ice and sat back there, soaking up the sunshine on this January day. A few of them were jazz cats of the old school and were holding conversations about Miles Davis and the Coltrane Quartet.

I slipped inside a house nearby, which was surrounded by small children. They were Dutch or Danish. Blonde children with slight accents. They were building snow forts and having snowball fights. In the house, there were only more people coming in and out. Through a shadowy hallway, I was approached by Celeste, who I hadn’t seen in forever. She was wearing a white t-shirt and she looked as beautiful as ever. Jungles of redgold hair bobbing all over the place, plus those fierce and somewhat frightening blue eyes. She walked past me several times, ignoring me each time she came by, as if she was allergic to me. I tried my best to be invisible.

At last, Celeste looked up and said, “Why have you been such a jerk to me?” I hugged her at once and said, “I haven’t been a jerk. I just loved you.” “If you really loved me, you would be happy for me,” she said. “See how happy I am here!” “I am,” I said. “I am. But this is the kind of sadness that just never goes away.” I started to weep then. I wept so much, I soaked us in tears. Her shirt was all wet. It was embarrassing. There didn’t seem to be any remedy for these blues.

They were neverending.

ole, lihtsalt ole. hull. by metslind

I’VE BEEN WAITING to write about this new Metslind record, because I am not sure how to approach it. In the early morning hours, as I began slurping down my first coffee of the day, I still had the somewhat jangly sounds of her guitar ringing between my ears. “She’s like The Smiths crossed with Fleetwood Mac,” I think. “As if Morrissey and Stevie Nicks had a baby.” Then I am somewhat terrified of the idea of a child with Morrissey’s face and Stevie Nicks’ hair and body. I don’t want anyone else to have that image pop into their heads. But maybe if Johnny Marr and Christine McVie had collaborated on an album in Estonian it might have sounded like this one. Maybe, but not really. Metslind is her own phenomenon. It’s a pitfall of Western and Estonian journalists alike that we look for these equivalents. Estonia must have its own Elvis, its own Michael Jackson, and its own Nokia, but there is only one Metslind. Not everything can be translated over.

Metslind’s record is two EPs combined. It arrived to me by Smartpost more than a month ago. I now have it on vinyl, but I gave my record player away, because it wasn’t very good. So now I just have an LP I cannot play. The album though is a kind of shrine, a shrine to the record player I will someday acquire. Then I will be able to play the album as intended. I will wake up and listen to Metslind at 7 am. In the meantime, I will listen to its conjoined EPs on Spotify. One is called Ole, lihtsalt ole (Be, just be) and the other one is called Hull (Crazy). The song titles paint a somber image. Other than the title tracks, there’s “Valu, Sa Oled Mul Jalus” (“Pain, You’re in My Way”), “Ära Sõdi” (“Don’t Fight”), and “Päris Inimesed” (“Real People”), along with “Rabalumm” (“Bog Enchantment”). There’s also “Tahan Olla Hea” (“I Want to Be Good”), “Ma Ei Tea Mis Saab” (“I Don’t Know What Will Happen”), “Mina Võin Ja Sina Võid Ka” (“I Can and So Can You”) and one more called “Elupuu Elab Mind Üle” (“The Tree of Life Will Outlive Me”).

This last title is the most puzzling one. Elupuu in Estonian refers to evergreens, but in my mind the name conjures up Yggdrasil, the tree of life in Norse mythology and the world tree of Estonian and Finnish mythology, which has stars in its branches and snakes at its roots. According to Metslind, the lyrics toy with Estonian trees like the evergreen (elupuu) and aspen (haavapuu, literally “wound tree”). “In the song, the Tree of Life outlives me,” says Metslind, “and the Wound Tree heals before I do. I say that it’s so good that I am no longer so young and that I don’t know what awaits me in life, though of course I would like to be younger and I would like to know what will happen. It’s about trying to have faith in the way things are.”

This is the Metslind musical universe. It’s a world of bogs, trees, and introspection. Her pop-infused indie guitar rock is expressed in dreamy tapestries of haunting vocals and layers of carefully selected sounds, but masks a kind of slow-burning inner torment.

*Girl with guitar, photo by David Evardone*

According to Metslind, whose family calls her Maarja, a lot of this music came out of her separation from her long-time partner. In fact, “Hull” is about playing dumb when people would ask her uncomfortable questions about the split. “I started to give strange answers to their questions, so they wouldn’t know what to say or ask me about it anymore,” she says.

To this I have to agree. There are never satisfying answers to explain away life’s irrationality.

Metslind is fond of her name, which means “Wild Bird” in Estonian. “Every bird has its own song,” she says. “And I like it when a performer has a different name. They can be a different person.” Maarja also happens to be the name of a singer in Estonia, one that is trademarked.

But Maarja didn’t want to just be another singer named Maarja. Her Metslind persona was born. When she is not on stage, she is a music teacher, mostly of voice with some guitar teaching. She started attending music school at the age of seven in Kohila, and at her own instigation. Her family has supported her music, for which she considers herself lucky.

Other than the emotional tumult that led to sings like Ära Sõdi, which literally means “Don’t Wage War” and only coincidentally came out when the Ukrainian-Russian War intensified, Metslind is also somewhat unique in that she has chosen to sing in Estonian, rather than try to approach the international market with English-language songs. In fact, she used to write and compose her songs in English, but an encounter with Estonian musician Vaiko Eplik, who like Metslind is from Rapla, a town in North Estonia, encouraged her to switch back.

“You know, I have always listened to a lot of English-language music and singer songwriters,” she says. “I didn’t have a plan to write in Estonian, but then these songs just started to come.”

I would say it’s a welcome addition to the world of Estonian music. While listening to this record, I started to think about where Estonians listen to music, or where I hear Estonian music. Estonian-language music is played sometimes in major supermarkets, so that Estonian songs remind me of perusing produce, looking for good quality bell peppers. Estonian music is played at summer festivals, so that Estonian songs remind me of sitting outside in some amphitheater. And Estonian music is played during family get-togethers. So Estonian music reminds me of grilling šašlõkk while Kihnu Virve and Anne Veski’s golden hits are played.

*Solitary songsmith. Photo by Meeli Viljaste.*

Metslind’s music is not the soundtrack for supermarkets, summer festivals, or grilling šašlõkk. It’s more for long walks alone while you are trying to sort out various unresolved past issues. That, at least, was my experience of it. I don’t have a favorite song on the record, but I remember liking “Rabalumm” the most on the first listen. A good bog is medicine to the heart.

She herself mentions Joni Mitchell when asked about her approach. She uses Joni’s Open D tuning on her semi-acoustic Ibanez, which is as much a part of her look as her whiteblonde hair. She plays it with a chorus pedal which gives it that lovely atmospheric sound that almost reminds one of Peter Buck from REM. These are my own musical references, so bear with me.

The album was recorded in the studio at Linnahall in Tallinn, a sprawling stone monster of a building once called the VI Lenin Palace of Culture that was constructed for the 1980 Olympic Games (which the US boycotted on account of the then recent Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan).

“This is one of the last things that’s still functioning in that ruined old building,” says Metslind.

Metslind is an admirable character, I must conclude. She composes, she performs, she travels the roads with her Ibanez. She sings of the Tree of Life, bogs, and heartbreak. I find her to be an honest, direct artist. The Estonian word is siiras, but it doesn’t have an exact English-language equivalent either. And she will continue. “It would make more sense not to be a musician,” she says, “and I have tried many times to not be one. But when I tried, I started this new project That I called Metslind. What else can you do when your heart starts to sing?”

a new map of long island sound

I NEVER KNEW there were so many islands in Long Island Sound. Long, stretching, sandy islands, islets, and shoals covered with driftwood, birds, seals, and poison ivy. No mariner’s map demarcated them but they were there, about halfway between Drowned Meadow and Connecticut. Maybe the Navy was using them for bombing practice, just like Nomans Land off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. I know the islands in Long Island Sound are real though. I saw them when we crossed the sea by ferry on our long journey up into New England and Canada.

When we returned it was a sunny day in Bridgeport and, to my surprise, the harbor was full of cranes and trucks. They were building a bridge to Long Island from Bridgeport, which would now live up to its name. A high, winding four-lane highway to carry car traffic from Connecticut to its younger brother Long Island. There were also pedestrian paths along the sides of this to-be completed highway and I hiked up them with my family. The first third of the Connecticut-Long Island Highway came down on one of the secret isles. Here we paused to rest, picnic, and admire its dreamy, desert-like beaches and nesting terns and cormorants.

training

RIKEN SUGGESTED I get in shape by running to the airport. We were going to do this Rocky style. He would ride a bike and supervise the run. There he was in his desert camouflage hiking gear. The bike was second hand. He had only paid €5 for it. He had related this to me with some typical understated pride. Riken the Japanese mountaineer was known far and wide for his thrift and his ability to subsist on under €20 per day, sometimes getting by only on a few cans of precooked lentils and boiled rice to survive. He carried herbs and spices in his pockets.

I wasn’t sure what airport I was running to, but in my mind it was JFK. Yet the terrain was unfamiliar. Perhaps Tallinn Airport was the real destination. Or even Tartu? The first 20 kilometers or so went smoothly. I ran down a slope by a school where children were out playing. Riken was up on his bike. “Steady,” he called out to me. “Steady.” I felt depressed when I reached the end of that road though. Only 20 kilometers and maybe 100 more at least to go.

It seemed like an impossible objective to accomplish. How would I ever make it there on foot?

Instead, I went into a diner by the roadside. There were some women inside, Klaudia among them. She was sitting in the back corner in a booth. I could barely see her, but went to sit with her and ordered a full breakfast with lots of black coffee. It was so dark, but I could make out her curly blonde hair, her red blouse. She was wearing some kind of necklace. I got closer to the necklace and began to study it. It looked like some kind of archaeological find. Could it be from the Ming Dynasty? Late 16th Century? “You know, if you’re going to get so close to me like that,” she said, “we might as well just take things all the way.” That’s how I wound up making love to Klaudia in the back of a diner in nowheresville. Klaudia smelled like breakfast.

Riken was outside all this time, standing stoically beside his bike, engrossed in meditation.

the gift

LATA FOUND ANOTHER LOVER, but he was doing it all wrong. His technique was off. I know because I watched them make love. He was on the surface a solid choice, in good shape, what women consider handsome. But his performance was suboptimal. Cut and dry. Same old, same old. Curiously, I was not jealous, probably because I never formed that kind of emotional attachment to her. Later, after they were done, we also made love. Lata was just insatiable.

Afterward, I went to visit Brynhild. I had a gift for her. It was something like a tapestry that had various declarations of affection written all over it. When I got to Brynhild’s house, she was sleeping. The idea of having any relationship with her seemed out of the question. She sat up in bed, beneath the blankets. Brynhild had aged since I was away. She seemed very confused.

Then Lata showed up. She told me to give her the gift. “I’m the one who came up with that template, that design,” she said, pulling on one end of it. “Give it to me, give it to me now,” she said. She was aggressive. That was a side of her that I had never found appealing. It kept me away. There was real hardness in her. “Give it here,” she said, tugging away. “Give it to me now.”

I’m not sure what happened after all of that. I could hear someone vacuuming out in the hall.

epistles of paul

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I had been advised to go and see Paul. “Go and see Paul,” they said. “You have to go see Paul.” This was always said to me with a certain conviction. I simply had to go. There would be no either/or, this or that. It would be done. I would go see Paul. It was just a matter of time. “When are you going to see Paul?” The invitation came via an intermediary named Aki, another one of these Finnish drifters who has surfaced in Viljandi in recent years, along with Mika Vesalahti, who runs the art studio on Kauba Street, and Henrik, an older fellow with a terrific moustache who likes to frequent the Paulina Kohvik ice cream parlor.

I moved to Viljandi from Tartu, but Aki came via Saigon where he rented a room on the tenth floor of an apartment building (because the big spiders are usually on the ground floors). Aki is a bit rootless, a bit of an adventurer. He’s older than me and lives a thousand times more intensely than me, but he somehow looks younger. He has dark hair, a bit of a youthful moustache. Whenever an opportunity presents itself, Aki leaps into action. He gets a call to go to Kyiv, and the next day he’s already there. From there he gets another invitation to go to Italy and he’s there the day after that. Why not? This is Aki’s life. He specializes in writing about philosophy and pens articles for Finnish boating magazines like Vene for travel money on the side. And there’s more where he came from. One by one, more Finns are coming. Whether the Viljandiers like it or not.

I haven’t seen Aki in forever though. I used to see him all the time, but he’s vanished completely. I run into a group of the Finns at the Mai Jooks, the Great Run Around the Lake. Mika Vesalahti the painter is with them, as is Henrik, the old Finn with the white whiskers. Of course, none of them are running. When I inquire as to what has happened to Aki, they whisper among each other. He is in Viljandi, they can confirm, but will not discuss further.

A mysterious character this Aki. The most mysterious of the Viljandi Finns.

It was years ago that Aki and I became acquainted when Paul had an exhibition at the Paul Kondas Centre for Naive Art. We were all at lunch and Paul was trying to explain hynopsis to us and drawing diagrams about consciousness on a napkin. “You see, this is your mind going into this state, here, but if you trick your mind just at this point, it can actually go here.” Paul seemed like the kind of Viljandi person I should know and not just because he was an American but because he was unique in that he did not come for the love of a woman.

Paul came to Viljandi just because he liked it.

He is of German extraction — all four grandparents were immigrants — and this becomes apparent the moment you step through the door at his house and you see the ordered stacks of books. I only discovered this the last time when Kati came to visit, because I had promised to go see Paul so many times, and it was only when Kati herself insisted that we absolutely must go see Paul at once, that we just went to his house by the lake, knocked on the door, and he let us in. Paul had been holding an exhibit in his house featuring Rabelais and Cervantes caricatures, and there even had been an opening hosted by none other than Mr. Aki, but I didn’t show because I was at the cafe writing. Yet it was a spring day and Kati insisted.

Paul’s house is a part of town I have spent little time in and that has somehow evaded me on my night walks and sojourns. There are streets that run along the lake down here with fine names like Aia, Pihlaka, and Luha. Almost everything is crooked in some way in this neck of town, the roofs, the fences. In spring, one enjoys the sight of firewood stacks, apple blossoms, the fragrance of this tiny nook of the universe where Paul has told everyone he intends to die.

There was even a film made about this called Surmatants, “The Dance of Death.” Kati was at the viewing at Kondase Keskus just weeks ago, which is how she became enamored with Paul, this curious old man with the white-blond ponytail and sandals. He invites you in and makes you tea or coffee. His principal obsession actually is the Dance of Death, the Danse Macabre. Bernt Notke’s painting at Saint Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn is his inspiration, the work of this Lübeck master, a painting that has been copied and recopied. Paul scours old libraries and book shops across Europe in search of reproductions. His collection has expanded in recent years to about 200 prints by the French caricaturist Daumiere, many arrayed on his desk.

Downstairs, a wooden canoe imported from Papua New Guinea is suspended from the ceiling. To get this to Estonia, it was shipped from Papua New Guinea, to San Francisco, to Colorado, then down to the Gulf of Mexico, across the Atlantic, up the Baltic, and then to Tallinn and later Viljandi. The rest is a museum of 18th century caricatures, ancient Egyptian art, and Tibetan masks sprouting third eyes. A lot of Paul’s neighbors down here by the lake are pensioners like him. “But the truth is,” he says, lounging in his yard with me and Kati. “I was born in 1936. Most of the people my age are already dead. We lose more and more each day.”

John McCain is gone. So is Vaclav Havel. Robert Redford somehow looks exactly the same.

Maybe Robert Redford and Paul are the lucky ones.

***

Paul is surrounded by admirers today. Some have come to help in the garden. Two are graybeards — Soviet-era hippies from deep in Mulgimaa. There is a younger woman too who befriended Paul long ago, and some young long-haired kids who pops by named Argo who is also keen to garden. Kati is also here, but only visiting from Võru. She has come up from Võru in her slack, bohemian dress, with long-hair flowing, and her young daughter clings to her when she is not poking around Paul’s place. Võru and Viljandi are arguably similar towns — both smaller, both in the south, both full of culture. But Kati says that Võru is not as freewheeling as Viljandi. These are the longest conversations she has had with strangers in months, she says. In Võru, you have to know the Võru dialect, and say words like määne and sääne to let them know you are one of them. But in Viljandi, anyone can join in. Even Paul, whose Estonian language is limited. He somehow fits into this town called Viljandi just fine.

It’s sunny out, not yet May, and the graybeards are engrossed in talk. They look like the old farmers and fishermen of Johannes Pääsuke’s time before the First World War, when he was going around with his camera and photographing traditional farm life. We are all copies, after all. Copies of copies. In 60 years time, Kati’s young daughter might look just like these graybeards here. Death, permanence, aging — these are Paul’s main themes. In his earlier days, he had a somewhat Indiana Jones-like nomadic existence. He was squatting out there in the hills of Tibet or Mongolia. He’s stayed in huts called “yents” and drank Mongolian kumis, the fermented mare’s milk drink. “This is really awful tasting stuff,” Paul says. “I don’t recommend.”

“I tell you,” he continues in his garden, “what they should teach you is how to get old. In fact, it’s the opposite. They only teach you how to stay young, how to look younger, how to feel younger. Dye your hair, get in shape. But nobody is out there teaching people how to get old!”

Both levels of Paul’s house are rich libraries with volumes on Native American art, Scandinavian mythology, two books about drums by Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead’s drummer, Indian tantra cults and the like. It is a nerd’s paradise which is to say, I fit right in.

“This is a living, open place,” says Paul. “I want you to feel at home. Take whatever you want to read and read it. Make yourself at home. If you see a book you like, grab it off the shelf.”

He has various editions of the Kalevala and Kalevipoeg. Much of his work has focused on the similarities in shamanistic art around the globe.

“Take two different cultures — say Latin American and Tibetan — and they will contain the same elements, the same concepts. This was at a time when nothing was written at all. ‘The dream time,’ as the Aborigines of Australia call it.”

Outside the graybeards are still enjoying their tea, coffee, and cake. Kati has since been overwhelmed by a desire to work in the garden. “Don’t you enjoy this work?” asks Kati. “I can’t resist. When I see people raking, I just want to pick up a rake.”

“Not really,” I say.

Instead I head out a rickety gate into the street, where you can see the sparkling waters of the lake. He came here because he liked it here, you know. There was no beckoning female character. Paul has been married before and has since sworn off romantic stuff. He’s decided to fly solo. I wonder if this will happen to me too. Maybe it already has. Maybe it already did.

Written May 2019