narva station

SHE LIVED WITH HER BOYFRIEND in the main building of the Narva Station. They commuted each day to Tartu, where he worked at the Vanemuine Theatre as an actor. He was tall, thin, and of solid disposition. He looked like Max von Sydow. She was more beautiful than I had ever given her credit for being. Photographs it must be said do not always do justice to the person. You have to see them in the flesh. She looked like the kind of woman that I always like. She had brown hair and was fond of wearing pink. This girlhood love of pink had not been shed in her womanhood for other, more sober or befitting colors. She had lively eyes and well-rounded features. Other men would have thought she was fat. I thought she was delicious.

I went out there once to the Narva Station. I was following her, but not in a menacing way. We left from Tartu and the train curved through the vistas and wildernesses of the northeast, past the derelict Kreenholm Textile Mill, to the ancient train station. Here she ascended those steps to the top, where her apartment was. Later I saw her come down with the Max von Sydow-lookalike. He was holding an umbrella for her. They had a relationship. I was somewhat disheartened. But knowing what I knew of relationships, I didn’t take it as a knockout blow. People in relationships were seldom happy and such bonds broke easily. Everyone knew that.

My friends of course all told me to forget about her. “She is a young and talented beautiful woman,” one said. “She is an accomplished musician. And you are …” She trailed off without finishing the sentence. “Scallywag writer” was the only correct response. What kind of life was this turning into anyway? A sad one. A life of impossible dreams. What would Fitzgerald do?

Later, I went back to the family home. This was an old tropical resort that somehow seemed to exist in Tartu’s cold climate. The pool in the front though hadn’t been cleaned in ages. There were also weird old people lurking around every corner. Just strangers with white hair who would ask you awkward questions. My mother said they had all sought refuge there during the pandemic. My father would go out on the back terrace in the afternoons and trade stories with these old-timers. I guess he had become one too. I asked my father if he had seen my shoes.

He didn’t hear me.

Two of my children and their mother wanted to go to town to go shopping, but I couldn’t find my shoes. I ran the lengths of the hotel looking for footwear. “You can wear my old shoes,” their mother told me. This woman, who used to be my wife. I was never quite sure of how to refer to her, in front of others or within myself. I put on her shoes, but they wouldn’t fit my giant feet. I kept running the lengths of the hotel, bumping into its strange old guests with their white hair and probing stares. I found piles of shoes in closets, but none of them were mine. How could this be? I had just come back from the Narva Station. Just the night before. Where had my shoes disappeared to? Maybe the hotel’s weird older guests had stolen them?

The family certainly must have left for town. There was no way she would have waited for me as I searched for my shoes. And it was getting darker outside. It was 3.30 pm now and daylight was running out in Estonia. In the hotel foyer, she came in, the accomplished musician with her actor boyfriend holding her umbrella. The scene startled me. They were led to a room on the opposite side of the courtyard in the hotel. So now she would be staying here? In our tropical hotel? With him? Why had the gods brought her to me again? There were no matching shoes to be found anywhere on the hotel grounds. My family had left me behind at the hotel.

Outside one of the garages, which used to be an old horse stable, I then encountered Brynhild. She had come looking for me in this mess of a life. She was singing to herself and admiring the flowers. Curvy and curly-headed Brynhild looked at me through her sunglasses and remarked, “My, you’ve developed this place nicely.”

women writers

FOR A WHILE THERE, I enjoyed a correspondence with a woman who happened to also be a writer. She was 10 years older than me, but claimed to be a hundred years ahead of me. She had been born in 1969. Me in 1979. She claimed that I was stuck in the 1920s. She claimed to be a woman of the 2020s. We barely got along but it was, but her own admission, quite vivid even though she was an ardent feminist and argued that I would never be able to understand her brilliance on account of my “feeble male brain.” I found her view of men startlingly grotesque.

One of her core critiques of me was that my favorite writers were only “dead white men.” This was not true, though certainly Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac were all dead and of Northwest European provenance. Yet Haruki Murakami was still living and was not white by any metric. He was Japanese. This was swept under the carpet. He may not have been white, but he was male, which still made him suspect and lacking in feminine virtue.

The sad thing is that I thought she was right. It wasn’t that I hadn’t read Margaret Atwood or Annie Proulx, it was that they hadn’t left much of a trace on my own writing. I recalled the brouhaha in ’16 over Gay Talese’s admission that he had no female writers that inspired his own career. However, the more I thought about it, I realized that this was not correct. I had been inspired by a lot of women writers. They just aren’t the ones you would think about in the pantheon of women writers. No Zadie Smiths, no Virginia Woolfs, no Toni Morrisons, no Sylvia Plaths, no Joan Didions. Not even JK Rowling was on my list. There are some familiar names.

Esther Forbes (1891-1967). It’s kind of interesting how little we know about and have heard about the author of Johnny Tremain. Even after looking for information on her, I can’t say I discovered anything particularly stirring. It seems she was a Yankee lady who had a career in publishing and in the writing of historical novels. I read this book many times when I was about 10 years old. It certainly left an impression, or at least inspired the idea that it was possible to write fiction at all.
Lynn Reid Banks (1929-2024). Also when I was a kid, my friend’s mom brought me autographed copies of The Indian in the Cupboard and The Return of the Indian. I still have these on my shelf. Again, I think the idea that it was possible to write stories originated with multiple readings of these books.
Blue Balliett (born 1955). I read her 1984 book The Ghosts of Nantucket: 23 True Accounts about a million times when I was an adolescent. I can still see traces of her style, her descriptive writing, and different themes in my own stories, articles, and books. I know I have lifted phrases from her books too, but for me it’s the same kind of borrowing that goes on in blues music, for example. It’s unintentional, but even my “dream stories” follow some of the layout that her ghost stories had.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977). Well, here is someone who might past muster among the feminine literati. I haven’t read of all of her books, but I do own Little Birds and Delta of Venus. I think women writers are more capable of what I call “layer cake writing,” which is that they are able to move between different levels of perception or experience, so that something that might seem trivial, a slight detail, speaks volumes about a person’s inner world. Nin taught me to pay more attention to those small details and how they can be so evocative.
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). A British-born Mexican surrealist. This is a writer I also know little about, even though it seems she produced quite a body of work. I came to possess a collection of her short stories some years ago called The Skeleton’s Holiday and I have never been the same since. This completely changed my approach to writing, even my approach to writing straightforward nonfiction work. I began to tap more into my subconscious and to produce automatic writing thanks to that book.

I don’t know what happened to my feminist writer friend. She disappeared one day during the pandemic and I never heard from her again after that. None of my letters were returned and that, as they say, was that. I did come across her once more. It was unexpected. I was dreaming and found myself on the north coast of Australia, of all places. It was near one of those coves that are known to be full of hungry sharks. There were a series of canvas tents pitched in the hills around the cove and, while walking by one, who should step out but Madame Ardent Feminist herself. She was dressed in her finest khaki explorer attire. She seemed to be happy there, wherever it was she had gone to. At least that’s what she told me.

esmeralda

I SAW ESMERALDA in a large museum. There were many floors which opened on a vast, well-lit atrium. Perhaps it was like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or like Kiasma in Helsinki. It was very crowded there that day and there were lines to get in and out of the exhibits. Esmeralda was there, but she didn’t see me, or didn’t want to see me. She was a small woman, with dark hair pulled back into a braid, and she wore her blue sweater and her blue pants and her white shoes. She was an Estonian girl, light complexioned with light blue eyes, and she chose her words with care. I savored every spare sentence she was ever willing to share. I could never understand why I had attached to her, or come to depend on her in some way. I wasn’t dependent on her doing something or anything. Dependence was more linked to her existence, her presence. There had been times I had thanked the stars that I happened to be born at the same moment she existed in the universe. Two comets passing in the cosmos. Such was my love for Esmeralda, if such a phenomenon could be explained with a simple word.

She didn’t see me. Maybe she didn’t want to see me. If that was the case, I couldn’t blame her.

My therapist was there too at the museum. I noticed her in the line for the women’s toilet, and knew that Esmeralda had also gone inside and was perhaps adjusting her hair in front of the mirror as she waited. Maybe they would meet there in front of the mirrors? Maybe she would at last see this girl of my dreams? I awaited with eagerness her official psychological diagnosis.

Later, I found myself outside at a kind of garden party. It was like something out of Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn. There were tables loaded with Scandinavian goodies, and everyone was wearing old-fashioned clothes. Paula was there with her kids. Her husband Paulo was nowhere to be seen. Where could he be? Paula was wearing a pink dress. She came and lied down next to me. We began to cuddle and soon made love, right there in the grass in the middle of a springtime Swedish party. It seemed to heal something. There were various ways to reconcile disagreements, but this was perhaps the most honest way there was. Oh, the sweetness of a woman’s sex. Like raspberry ice cream, it occurred to me. Just like raspberry ice cream. But she still wasn’t Esmeralda. None of them were. Whatever woman came, she wouldn’t be her.

“None of them are you,” I wanted to tell Esmeralda, if she would ever listen to me or even honor me with a passing glance. “I like them all, it’s true, but none of them will ever be you.”

junibacken pillow

SHE INVITED ME over, she said she wanted to do something that would embarrass and humiliate her boyfriend. She had dark hair and looked a little bit like Margarita Simonyan though thankfully smelled better. We cuddled in a rather standard contemporary bedroom on beige sheets, the whole place buzzing with air conditioning, but I felt the natural desire to flee. I hid out in a neighboring building where there was a hair salon. Later, I took a boat and arrived at Junibacken in Stockholm, with a whole troupe of travellers. They took photographs.

Here I found a curious pillow, one that if you held onto it would lift you up in the air, as if you were flying. I grabbed hold of the Junibacken pillow and flew up into the air, floating beside the clocktower’s clock. While I was up there, I waved down at the other travellers, and then I saw Igrayne standing in the corner. She asked me to let go of my flying pillow and to come down and dance with her. I gladly danced with Igrayne. Later we made love passionately, but Igrayne stiffened and had unhealed father wounds and stared away into the remote distance.

I held her from behind but it was just no use.

the non-existent train to geneva

THE NON-EXISTENT TRAIN to Geneva. At least, I didn’t know there was a connection. There was, but it was obscure, complicated. It was one of those Google Maps Directives that tells you to get off at one stop and walk four hundred meters, then turn left, et cetera. Somehow doing this, I would be able to arrive at the conference in Geneva in two hours and thirty minutes.

If every step was accomplished smoothly.

But getting to the train station proved to be harder than I thought. I decided to go on foot and stopped by the Green House Café on the corner of Koidu and Tartu Streets. It had snowed, perhaps the first snow of the season, and I walked in with my bags and asked Põder, or “Moose,” the cheerful barista, if he would make me an espresso, to be consumed at the bar, but instead he made me a flat white, which was like drinking snow. Sven, the owner and operator of the establishment, was outside meantime, digging away. Flat white in hand, I headed up Tartu Street toward the town center, hoping to make the train to Geneva. There was still time.

There I could hear, on Turu, or Market Street, the sounds of an electric guitar. Guillermo was inside a small club there, fileting some riffs on his axe. A small crowd had gathered around him, and I saw my bass was on stage. “Do you know how to play any Rage Against the Machine?” Guillermo asked. His black hair was down his back. I told him of course I knew how to play their songs, that I had taught myself “Freedom” at age 15. This was one of the more intricate riffs I had learned how to play at a tender age. The gig turned out fine. But then I was stuck having to lug my bass guitar and amplifier to the town train station in a snow storm.

Along the route, where I stepped past locals out shovelling more snow, and it was already dark out, and the car lights illuminated the big wet flakes as they fell down, I decided on a solution. I would stop by Brynhild’s house on the main street, which was Tallinn Street, and leave my musical equipment there. Through the window I could see her sitting on a couch in her pajamas. Her dark hair was wet and she was toying with it. I could hear a second voice coming from inside the living room. This person was not visible. They spoke in soft but excited tones.

Another man! I thought. I went and hid down the street in an alley. Then I waited until the visitor exited, only to learn that it was an older woman, perhaps an old friend or acquaintance.

She just happened to have a very deep voice.

“What are you doing out here in the snow, you fool?” Brynhild asked. “Come in, you can leave your pill, your instrument in the back.” I stepped down the hallway, and left the bass guitar and amplifier in a dark back room that was serving as storage of some kind. The idea crossed my mind back there that this was my room and that these were all my things. I had a room at Brynhild’s house, I wasn’t always aware that it was there. After I deposited my things in the back room, I joined her in the living room. It was spare and modern. She sat in her chair, still wet, still in her pajamas. She had pulled them over her enormous freckled breasts. Then I felt aroused. There was just something about arrogant women with wet hair and warm breasts.

I got closer to her. Brynhild looked up. “You’re going to miss your train to Geneva,” she said.

“The thing is,” I said. “I think I already did.”

side eye

I DO REMEMBER something of it. We were at the music festival, and my wife was sharing a blanket by the castle ruins with a strange woman. As I got closer, I could see it was Dulcinea. Upon watching me approach, her muscles stiffened, and she gave me what is known as the side eye. Several side eyes. My wife got up and left at this point, stretched in the sun, and said, “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”

It took Dulcinea a great amount of self-control to slowly turn her head in my direction and speak to me. She looked older, and her voice was different. She was wearing red nail varnish, which seemed out of place. She had been a free-spirited hippie girl. When did she go all corporate woman on me? Alas, that’s what happens to people. They change over time. She looked tired and worn out though. She did speak. We were able to have some kind of conversation. I apologized once again for having liked her so much. The love letters, the entirety of the predicament. The whole thing had been too much for any normal lady to bear. What young woman at the start of her young life needed the love an older, washed up man?

That was the first day of the folk festival. On the second day, I was in Italy, where I had booked an Airbnb. My daughter came along. I remember when we walked into that hilltop house in the hills around Bari. “From here,” the owner said, “you can get direct access to the highway and drive to any place in Italy.” The apartment was strange. There was a bedroom with a loft, but these looked like they belonged more to a doll house. I was afraid that if I crawled up into that loft the whole Barbie Dream House looking thing would collapse. There was also an Estonian journalist there who wanted to interview me at a nearby café. Her invitations were relentless.

I left my daughter alone in the Dream House and did the interview, but she wanted to make Instagram videos too teasing the interview. All of that time my phone was ringing with some urgency as my daughter asked where I was. She wanted to go back to the folk festival. I wondered how my wife and Dulcinea were getting along. I felt guilty, as if I had only brought limitless dark clouds into their otherwise sunny existences. Back in Italy, the journalist still wouldn’t let me go. Wouldn’t I make her pasta too? We were supposed to drink wine! At last, I got fed up with the whole thing and ran back to the hilltop house. My daughter was already waiting by the car, fuming. “Where were you?!” she stomped. It was misty and raining. “Come on, kid,” I said, jogging over to the driver’s side door. “Let’s just get the hell out of this place.”

truth talkers

IT WAS A ROOFTOP PARTY, and I was explaining my most recent love story. Two women were listening, but one of them wasn’t buying. This girl was unfamiliar to me, but she was an Estonian, she had shoulder-length brown hair, sharp features, and glasses, and the gist of her prognosis was that I was continuing to swim in the warm waters of self-delusion. “You do this over and over again,” she said. “You fall for some girl, but nothing comes of it. She’s too young for you anyway,” the woman said. “Our people are pragmatic! Pragmatic!” Quite self assured, she stood up and looked down on me, with her hands of her haughty hips. I wondered a) why I continued to attract such “truth talkers” and b) why I was attracted to such arrogant women. With some additional psychological hocus pocus, I would soon be assembling her furniture.

Instead I left the party and bought a plane ticket to nowhere. I didn’t even know the name of the city. It was somewhere in the American Midwest, and the confluence of several great and legendary rivers. Perhaps the Mississippi was one of them. Maybe this was that bend where the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio all splashed into each other, north of Memphis, south of Saint Louis. Someplace like that. When the plane came into land, I noticed the airport was unusual. There were trees on both sides of the landing strip, for example. The whole area had a Deep South jungle feel to it, with moss in the trees, and vultures on the tree branches.

This was some kind of private airport serving the three rivers confluence area. We were taken aboard a train, where the conductor pointed out the various renovation facilities for old planes. “No plane ever winds up on the scrap heap,” the conductor said. “Every fuselage is saved and refurbished for future use.” I could see several planes being upgraded by men in white suits who looked like Dahl’s Oompa Loompas. They were lifting, hammering, and drilling.

At last we reached the main part of the airport. Most of the people there were headed toward some of the other cities, but I had to get to my still unnamed third city destination. There were several metro trains heading this way and that. The name of the public transport company was “Ringreis,” which seemed odd, as if some Estonians had settled this part of the Midwest and I had just never heard a word about it. To get to my destination, I needed to take the 5 Train. I stood in line with the other travelers, who were talking about Harris and Trump, and soon enough the 5 Train arrived and I got on. To get to my city though, I needed to take a ferry too. At the port, I boarded the ferry, and could see another city in the distance. It looked quite wealthy and developed with large office buildings topped off with gold glinting domes.

“That’s Waynesboro,” I heard someone say from behind me. “Obama won that city back in ’08.”

So Obama had some soft support out here in the larger river cities of the Midwest. Where was I going? I still had no idea. The river water was choppy, there were big waves, and the river water sprayed my face. “Look over there,” another person said. “That’s Chuck Berry’s birthplace!” So, it was, but it wasn’t mine. To think I had come all the way over here to the middle of nowhere to get away from some Estonian girl on a rooftop. A girl with long hair, glasses, and big opinions about everything that was wrong with me. I should have just kept my mouth shut and nodded along with whatever she said. It would have been easier that way.

maybe later

IT WAS AUTUMN, the sky was gray, the trees were nearly stripped of their leaves. We were driving through the country though it was unclear what country. There was a field and then we crossed the railroad tracks. The crossing gates were up and, truth be told, it didn’t look like there was a lot of freight traffic on that route. After the tracks, we entered a forest and there were houses on both sides, with long driveways leading up to them. Old wooden houses. The driver turned to me — I was in the passenger side seat — and said, “You know, your great grandmother Genevieve lives up that road over there, do you want to go and meet her now?”

“My great grandmother?” I asked. “Lives?”

“Yes, your great grandmother lives in that house there. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.”

But my great grandmother Genevieve was dead. She had been dead for 40 years. Or had she? Maybe she had just moved into this forest here, a little way’s away from the railroad tracks. Maybe she had been hiding out all this time, minding her own business, waiting for visitors. I imagined her sitting at the window there, waiting. What would I even say to her? The last time I saw her, I was only three years old. She was born in the 1890s. If she was still alive, she would be the oldest person in the world. Pushing 130. Something for the record books, for sure.

“Should I turn back?” the driver asked. He was maybe 10 years older than me, had lighter hair, working class manners and and a working class accent. Being a driver seemed to be his job.

I thought it over. I wanted to see her, but the thought of having tea with a 130-year-old Irish lady on a dreary day in some country house, well, it just didn’t sit right with me at all.

“Maybe later,” I told the driver. “We can go and see my great grandma later. Some other day.”

second looks

THIS IS NOT A STORY, and it has no beginning and it has no end. All I know, or remember rather, is that I was standing outside an old wooden house in the middle of town, next to an unfamiliar door. When I opened it, I could see my table and all of my furniture just sitting there, collecting dust. It was my apartment, but everything had been rearranged. The windows were not where they should have been. Unmistakably though it was my place. Even my guitar was sitting there in the corner. My books were on the shelves. I walked through one part of the apartment and came out the other end. The sink was different, it looked like one of those metallic sinks from the 1960s, the kinds that were bolted to the wall. The biggest difference was that the apartment had two doors. I exited the other door into a courtyard. I waited there.

There was a bus stop there with a faded sign. I couldn’t read the name of the village bus stop, but the other houses didn’t look much different from mine, being old, wooden, and in various stages of decay. An old bus pulled up and Esmeralda was seated in the back, with her clever eyes and brown hair pulled back. She was talking to someone else, and I knew that she was aware of me, that I was waiting there for her. But she wouldn’t even cast a look in my direction. She was wearing that red sweater of hers. I did love her. Whatever earthshattering mistake that was. The bus rolled on, but I didn’t get on. Esmeralda wasn’t going to give me the time of day, so I wasn’t about to go chasing after the young lady. I had been there, done all of that.

After that, I went for a walk around town. I stopped at the train station and thought I could catch a train to Tartu, only to find out the train had been booked by a school to take them farther out on the north coast, and so was heading in the opposite direction. I got off the train in the heights around the city. Here, too, there were surprises. Things had developed in an interesting way, there were old saltbox New England-style homes with shake facades, and lush green ivy crawling around the windows and chimneys. It was a gray, overcast kind of day, but the yellow flowers in the English gardens stood out. Where was I? It looked like Nantucket.

When I eventually got home, my daughter came to the door and told me there had been an accident in the kitchen. When I went in, I noticed that Gilberto, one of the neighborhood’s local Portuguese settlers, had tried to make some dish but the oven had blown up and there was burned food all over the floor. This was confusing for me because Gilberto didn’t live with us, but rather had rented a place nearby. “Don’t worry, I’ll clean it all up,” Gilberto said. He was dressed in his pajamas. He hadn’t slept very well. Understandably, I found it hard to explain to my daughter why stray middle-aged Portuguese men like Gilberto were using our kitchen.

I guess when you’re lost, you take pity on the other lost ones, the ones who are as lost as you.

päikesekiir

ONCE IN A WHILE you need to write some romantic fluff. I once saw a girl here, whom I would remember as päikesekiir. Which means “ray of sunlight,” but sounds better in Estonian.

She was as pale and yellow as straw, and was trying to do yoga, of course.

Later she came over and spoke to me, because she knew who I was, and afterward my daughter said, “Who was that girl you were talking to?” And I said, “Girl?! That was a woman!”

After that I saw her somewhere else staring off into the distance. She was both light as air but thick with a heavy, desperate feeling. I wanted to run after her, but she was gone in a blink.

Which goes to show you that you can’t chase after sunlight.