ONE DAY AFTER MANY HOURS of work, I decided to explore Paalalinn. This is not something I usually do on purpose. In fact, the more years pass, the more I try to avoid leaving the Old Town and its environs altogether. I have all I need here, food, shelter, clothing, vinyl records, and the gym at the Grand Hotel where I can work out and watch documentaries about Stalin in peace. Everything that anyone could ever need. Yet I decided to go and seek adventure in Paalalinn. There was something there that people said I should see.

Paalalinn is a district in Viljandi about which I know very little. I don’t even know how it got its name, or if there even ever lived someone named Paala. A few years ago at Vinoteek Mulks, I did meet some old-timers who had grown up in Paalalinn before the building boom of the 1960s. They said that Paalalinn used to be a country place, before all of the housing projects, and children frolicked in the forests and along the streams there. At some point though, they built those large apartment buildings, and the man-made lake alongside them, now called Paala Lake. 

This is now a popular summer spot for locals, who come to sun themselves on its sandy beach, play on its playground, and buy ice cream from a small ice cream cafe at lake’s edge. This is also, as I recently learned, the site of an intriguing dive called the Paala Järve Vaala Baar, or the “Paala Lake Whale Bar.” It is built into the side of one of the hills. Apparently, it is such an inspiring place that Puuluup, the eclectic musical duo, had to write about it. In the video for the song, they can be seen swimming fully clothed and singing in the water, as well as wrestling in the beach sand. The song itself is structured like choral music. There is a mysterious, Eastern inflection to this tune that recalls the incantations of holy monks. Puuluup are like monks, I have thought, which makes it strange that they would hang out in bars, especially this bar I had never heard of. Somehow after years of living here, I had never managed to encounter the Whale Bar. 

Because of this, I decided to undertake my pilgrimage.

Getting to Paalalinn is not difficult, but not particularly pleasant either. I walked past the two buildings that burned in the summer down Jakobsoni Street, following the road past the earthworks for the hospital that’s being built, and then by Leola, that building that encloses another legendary underground bar, the one that locals call auk or “hole,” presumably because once you go in, you never come out. Also, auk, as I have learned, means “blood” in the Inuit language. Something to keep in mind. At last, I came upon the lake and saw the buildings of Paalalinn towering against a gray horizon. The people of Paalalinn are different from the ones in the Old Town, but how, I cannot say. The few I saw on my walk seemed indifferent to me, neither particularly happy nor sad, and I decided not to trouble them with my search for the Whale Bar. Instead I pressed on toward, eventually discovering it across from the beach. There was a table outside the bar, and the door was open. Smoke curled from a chimney which, because of the way the bar is built, made it seem as if smoke was coming out of the ground. Inside, a client was talking with the bartender, but they stopped their talk as soon as I entered. 

“So this is it,” I said, admiring the place.

“This is what?” the bartender said.

“The Paala Järve Vaala Baar, of course.”

“No,” the bartender said. “This is the Järve Baar. The Lake Bar.”

“But I thought there were supposed to be some whales here.”

“No,” said the bartender. “There are no whales here. There is a lake here though. That is why it is called the Lake Bar and not the Whale Bar. I don’t know why people keep coming here and asking about whales, really. It makes no sense to me. There are no whales in Paala Lake.”   

“Maybe because it just sounds nice,” I said. “Paala, vaala. See, it’s like poetry.”

“You’re probably right,” said the bartender.

I ordered a drink and took one last look around the bar, whatever its name was, and left. This trip to Paalalinn was over. 

Recently while talking with a local writer friend whom I will call Jaak, he remarked on how much he has missed Venice in the pandemic years and, to cheer him up, I suggested that they could replace the streets in Uueveski, where he lives, with canals, and that way he could take a gondola to the cafe in the morning instead of his bike. “And look at all the work they are doing on Uus Street,” I said, referencing the construction that has left this major thoroughfare completely dug up. “They’re already installing the canals! All they have to do is fill Uus Street with water and it will be ready.” Jaak was not amused. He wanted the real Venice, not some fake Venice, but as I walked back from the bar in Paalalinn, I considered how much of our town experience is imaginary and how much of it is real. In some ways, Puuluup’s Paala Järve Vaala Baar really exists, for many even moreso than the actual bar. And my idea of turning Uueveski into the Venice of the North is now unforgettable. Close your eyes and you can see it. So, who knows, maybe in a few years there really will be a Whale Bar in Paalalinn, and gondolas on Uus Street. 

All we have to do is dream and dream well, and our dreams will become the new reality.

***

An Estonian version of this piece appeared this week in Sakala.

I BARELY ATTENDED this year’s Harvest Party (Lõikuspidu) at the Viljandi Folk Music Center (Pärimusmuusika Ait). I saw two concerts: Johanna-Adele Jüssi and Peko Käppi, a jouhikko musician from Tampere, Finland. Folk music is repetitive music, and from this repetition, one can extract or achieve serenity, provocation, insight, inspiration, or true ponderous burdensome boredom. I appreciated Jüssi’s music because she knew when to begin and end her songs. Each one was a well-crafted knot, perfectly tied up. Käppi’s music was like a tarred old coil of ship’s rope, hastily discarded at the docks. His songs were longer and wilder, but he managed to well conjure the ideal folk musician, a traveling bard who goes from town to town telling stories with a sack of instruments slung across his back. That’s the twist when it comes to institutions like the Folk Music Center or the Viljandi Cultural Academy. How can you institutionalize traditions that always existed outside of institutional caretaking? Of course, much of the Harvest Party is about making an appearance, socializing with old friends, partaking in the long jam sessions upstairs. Estonia’s extended folk family is tightknit and its nice to be a part of it. Yet, maybe I am getting a bit older here, but I preferred to be in bed watching Harry Potter with my youngest. I’ve done my time downing bottles of whatever and shamelessly carousing. A warm blanket sounds far more enticing.

PART II was the chase scene. I had been renting a small room downtown on Castle Street for conducting interviews, typing up manuscripts, that sort of thing, and I had gone into the building to pay the rent in cash to the proprietor, who sat before one of those old-fashioned concierge desks with the keys all hanging on the wall, like some kind of San Francisco flophouse, you know what I mean? When I was paying her, she pushed her glasses up her nose and handed me a business card. “Two suits came to inquire after you,” she said. The card had a German name on it, something long, terrifying, and Teutonic like Hauptwerke or Buchmalerei. “They said you owed them money.” “That’s impossible,” I said. “I paid off all of my lenders.” “That’s not what they said,” the proprietor responded. Outside I got in the car with my daughter and began to drive back to the hotel where we were staying. But on the road, I noticed we were being followed by an aggressive driver in a yellow bus. He eventually ran us off the road, or rather up onto two wheels, though the car fell back into place. Neither of us were hurt, but we were both shaken. In the hotel, this sort of luxury Miami resort full of guests who looked like they belonged on Fantasy Island, we rushed through the halls until we got to our suite, which fortunately was full of various members of the family, that is not real family members, but soldiers, enforcers, the kinds of cats who drive up and down Howard Beach in Queens looking for some action on a Friday night. That is not to say they were true mafia, or made men, but rather had seen enough Italian-American cinema to know how to behave properly in circumstances like these. This makeshift army came face to face with the Hauptwerke collection agency mercenaries in the hotel corridor and there was a bloodfest. In the end, the Hauptwerke men agreed to forgive all of my debts and called it just a simple misunderstanding. They even pretended to be on friendly terms with the family enforcers and humored their requests to come back sometime and drink. I felt ashamed though. My daughter was not pleased by the car chase and the mercenaries chasing her father. “We were supposed to go see the pandas in Helsinki,” was all she could say through sobs. “You promised! You promised we would go see the panda bears in Helsinki.” I felt bad that she had the misfortune of having being born into such a mess. Yes, I promised her. There would be no change in plans. I would take her to see the pandas in Helsinki at the zoo just as I had promised.

I KEEP RETURNING to Henry Miller (1891-1980) whenever I feel all hope is lost, or down in the blues. Whatever the proper phrase is. One cannot call the author of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring, The Colossus of Maroussi, and many other books, a hero, though certainly he is a literary hero to some. He was once working a rather dull job at a telecommunications company, or precursor thereof, in Brooklyn in the 1920s, and then left that to move to Paris. He was not successful in his enterprise, at least financially, and became renowned for mooching off friends and lovers for sustenance. And yet, even in that bottom-feeding roll, he was still a survivor. Others of his generation poisoned themselves with worry and drink. They wallowed in their own catastrophes. Not Henry. He looked at a terrible spot, a true catastrophe of life, and decided that he would like to make the catastrophe grander, more spectacular, amazingly horrible. If one is going to fail in life, then why not fail brilliantly? I think I first took note of Miller from his interviews in Reds. I thought: who is that guy? He seems so familiar. He talks just like one of us. He really did. There was something in Miller’s attitude that echoed that of my peers. Maybe it is true that the souls of the dying generation inhabit the bodies of the newly born. So that when we were being birthed into this world sometime in that gray Three Mile Island haze of the lost Carter years, the ghosts of the Great War and the Roaring Twenties were finding new hosts. It’s a thought that gives me comfort, that sort of muscular individualism they developed. No, they were not heroes of any sort. They were bootleggers and loafing slacker writers. Drifters. Scoundrels. Yellow journalists. Playboys. Actresses. Observers. Experiencers. Artists. Survivors.

THE VERY FIRST THING that caught my attention when I woke up was the black shirt. It lay draped over the ironing board across from me, a black, long-sleeve shirt that I had been intending to iron for days, maybe even weeks, but somehow couldn’t find the time or even desire to do it. For a moment though the shirt looked like a dress, a black dress, one of those black dresses that she used to wear. There used to be a woman who would come here, I remembered, she would stay here in this room, and iron her black dresses in the mornings. I loved her in those old days. Back then. Or at least I thought I did. Did I still love her? I couldn’t be sure anymore of anything. But I think I loved her then. It all seems quite faint now. The sound of her getting up in the morning. The sound of the coffee boiling. The sound of her ironing her black dresses. She always ironed her clothes. Always. The attention she paid to her appearance was hypnotic. She once was here, right? That happened, didn’t it? Isn’t that the same ironing board she gave me once? The one she wanted to get rid of because she found a new one? I opened my eyes again. The shirt just hung there, limp and morose. She was long gone. She was gone forever from here. Forever gone. She used to be here though. That part of it wasn’t a dream. In the evening, I went to an Italian restaurant to eat. It had by all measures been a good week. Deadlines had been met, articles produced, interviews arranged, others transcribed, and there had even been some free time, time for socializing, time for writing. The money was adding up, which meant that it had been a successful week. There was a hole in it though, a big black hole that somehow was difficult to fill, even with some answer or explanation for why it was there. If the week had been productive and successful, then why did it somehow still feel like a let down? Wasn’t success in work, or financial reward, enough? I had pushed the ghost of the black dress far from my mind. That seemed the safest strategy. In a world built on self control, where the libraries of self-help books could be seen stacked in towers high enough to reach the sun, towers of books on meditation courses, chakras, healers, angels, and tarot card readings, tomes on psychology and psychiatry, in a world built on the very premise of controlling one’s self, controlling one’s heart, controlling one’s emotions, I had done a commendable job of ignoring any nostalgia or sadness I felt. Yet there was a big hole in the middle of it. I didn’t know what to do about it. I ordered myself some spaghetti and tried to read a book but gave up after a while. Then a stranger approached my table. A round woman with curly red hair. A disheveled look. There was a meekness in the way she approached me that bothered me. She seemed afraid. I’ve long since become accustomed to reading people. The signals I was receiving troubled me. “Do you mind if I join you?” the stranger said. I gestured for her to sit down. “What are you writing?” she asked. I shrugged and said nothing much. “Just trying to empty my mind,” I said. I was writing about the shirt, the ironing board, those kinds of things, but then I started to write about the woman across from me. Her chipped fingernail polish. Her rough hands. The thing was, I thought I recognized her. In the summer, I had met a woman like this, except she had platinum hair. She had approached me and followed me home, asking me if wouldn’t I like to go back to her place and have sex. I had walked quickly home ignoring that woman, closing the door to my home, where my children played inside, looking out the window until she was safely gone from the yard. And here she was, back again. Or someone who resembled her. The owner of the restaurant brought the stranger a pastry and an espresso, and she ate it. Then she excused herself for troubling me and left. Relief was what I felt as she put on her jacket and walked away and out that door. Relief. The proprietor of the restaurant came over to me and said she was sorry. Then she told me the woman’s story. “She’s in a complicated relationship,” she told me. “It’s really worrisome. I am afraid that she is going to wind up dead one way or another.” I nodded to the owner. It was an ugly situation, alright. “She has such a hole inside of her and she will do anything to fill it.” That is how she put it. I nodded, ate the rest of my spaghetti, paid my bill, put my things away, and went on my way. Outside, the street was dark already. There was nobody there. I walked home alone in silence. Many nights were like this now. Empty streets. Empty parks. Empty beaches. Emptiness. Isolation. All you had were some memories, some thoughts, and even when confronted with sympathetic strangers you were still alone and they were too. It was so hard to bridge that divide these days. So hard to get through to someone else, to even tell them you still cared about them very much. There were good things in this life though. I was sure of that. There were. There were wonderful mornings with women ironing their dresses. There was the smell of coffee boiling. There was gold sun streaming through the windows. There were pastries and espressos. These were unquestionably good things. Then you blinked and they were gone.

I’M NOT SURE what day this is off of social media. I have cheated though, with some Instagram posts. Instagram is less addictive and menacing than Facebook, but it also peddles illusions of beautiful people doing wonderful things in beautiful places, and everyone is just so happy! This feeds a kind of collective narcissism. When you have been off the stuff a while and then revisit these images of people posing themselves for both self gratification and the amusement of others, it all looks so absurd and stupid. “A photo of me doing something on the internet.” This is what 21st Century life has been reduced to. I wish I could write more about my life, or rather my rich inner life. There are just things I can barely tell anyone, and even my psychologist isn’t always fair game. Who is watching? Who is reading? I did see a very beautiful woman one day in front of the Orthodox church on Mäe Street. The kind of beauty one could lose oneself in, the kind I rather need, that gateway to an abundance of fertile, Mediterranean love. I am not one of these Northmen who see beauty and love in hard work and stark landscapes. My kind of love is a Roman orgy of the senses. For me why bother being alive if you cannot enjoy the fruits of paradise? I saw this woman again last night at an event in town. This was a warm and reassuring moment, for I do not know what her name is or anything about her, nor am I tempted to look. But she does exist. That was what was most reassuring about it. It all wasn’t a dream or my imagination. Still I am haunted by the social media vortex. It’s not just the arguments online, it’s the information that gets carried offline into private discourse, people repeating things they have seen or read. It is going to take a much longer time to detox from this. Away, away, away. That is my dream. Last night, I turned my data off as I was walking. I thought, where was I in 2001? I had no phone, I only used the internet at a computer lounge at my school. In the year 1998, before I went to college, I did not use the internet at all. I went away for a week or so to Nantucket with my family, and I had no connection to the world via that route. I spent my time digging through a used records store or just people watching. That is where I want to go. Not back in time. A resumption of time. To skip over this part, leave everyone else lost floating in deep digital space. Away, away, away. Away.

LAST NIGHT was the book launch for Linnéa’s new book, Visions of Jakarta. I was late to the event, which took place in a university auditorium. There were rows and rows of readers awaiting Linnéa, who walked in and stood at the front and began to lecture about her days spent in Indonesia. Then she gestured to the ceiling and it began to rain inside the auditorium. Warm, tropical rain splashed down on the attendees, on their hair, hands, and books. Visions of Jakarta! “Tonight, I decided to share with you some Jakarta rain,” Linnéa said. After the launch, Linnéa came up to me and embraced me. “Please tell me you’re not leaving yet,” she said. “Come with me tonight to Riisipere! We leave at once.” Riisipere was an unusual name, though I was sure I had heard of it before. Riis (rice) pere (family). Rice family? Come with me to Rice Family? We leave at once? Some preliminary research revealed that it was the site of a ruined manor house that had once belonged to key Baltic German lords, Master Peter von Stackelberg among them. The night after the Visions of Jakarta launch I went out again with Linnéa. This evolved into a brutal pub crawl, and cisterns of wine and liquor were consumed. It all got to be a bit much, so I decided to take a plane back to Tallinn. We flew with Captain Sven, who brought us up and over Saint Petersburg to reduce altitude ahead of approach and landing. I could see all of Petersburg’s white houses and white ships and blinking lights. It looked like a fairytale winter city. Then Captain Sven brought the plane lower and flew beneath the Kronstadt Bridge, which terrified me, before setting down on a landing strip somewhere in a field in Püünsi. We were all safe but it was a rough landing and some of our belongings fell into the sea. I was happy to swim and retrieve them. When I got to town, Linnéa was already there with her yellow hair and fun smile waiting with an autographed copy of Visions of Jakarta and a freshly uncorked bottle of wine.

THIRD DAY FREE of the social media soul abyss. Last night, I even read a book. It was called The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, and it was about the failed English attempts at colonization at Roanoke in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, about two decades before Jamestown. Two facts surprised me. One was that Drake’s fleet landed 300 Central American indigenous women and 200 Africans and Turks in the Outer Banks and sailed away, allowing them to fend for themselves. Perhaps they were massacred by the indigenous Algonquians, but this I seriously doubt, because they were already weakened by intertribal conflict, conflict with the English, and disease. More likely they were assimilated into other tribes. The second was that when John White returned to the Americas, the ships landed at Tiburon in Haiti and encountered skeletons strewn on the beach, perhaps jettisoned sailors from some wreck or other mission. One can imagine that ghost wind blowing, licking the bones of the dead with sand. It makes me wonder how often sailors washed up on American beaches in this forgotten time. At night I dreamt I was inside the Russian Embassy, presumably in Tallinn. Like Russia itself, I needed a visa to enter the embassy, and my visa had a three-hour time window for me to get everything accomplished inside. The inside of the embassy was rather like a comfortable bed and breakfast, with carpeted staircases and an old-fashioned, white wooden desk for the concierge. There was an outdoor water park too, and I went for a dip in the sun with two of my children. The third, the eldest, was nowhere to be seen. When I asked what had become of this teenage girl, the concierge at the embassy B&B alerted me that she was last seen getting into Putin’s black car wearing an orange dress. I did not like the idea of Putin alone with the girl. There I waited, anxious for their return.

I’M STILL NOT OUT OF IT, by far. I would not say my mind has been damaged. This is the wrong concept. But my mind is elsewhere. I am thinking of old discussions, arguments, intrigues, images. My mind is awash in these images as I walk down streets, past old houses and barns. If you asked me what color those houses were, these would have barely registered, because as I said my mind is elsewhere, in the cloud. When you do turn off, other people’s behavior becomes fascinating. I watched a woman walking down the street today staring at her little rectangular device screen, laughing her head off. I realized, I was probably the only person who saw this sight. The girl next to me at the café had her nose in her phone. It’s become severely bizarre. Just days ago, I was the same. Walking around Viljandi, staring at my screen to change the song that was playing or reply to some message. Sadder are the images of my children when they were small. In nearly every one, a laptop is open. This is where my life went, straight into this digital dimension. Nearly every person I interview is connected in some way with the digital economy, the digital ecosystem. They create content and solutions and so do I. Even this here is content. Even this here is part of the ecosystem. It’s not Orwellian just yet, or maybe it is, but either way, I cannot really attach a moral value to it. I only know that I feel my mind is changing, and that I do feel slightly more at peace today and slightly more in my true reality. If only slightly. This is the second day off social media.