ON KATARINA KYRKOBACKE, at 8:30 am or thereabouts. A small street winding with the cool air through the bluffs of Södermalm, damp and refreshing, creamy houses with mustardy finishes and black stovetop pipes protruding, cobblestones and fine hemmed in trees. These give way to red wooden dwellings with toys and yellow flowers in the windows and everywhere that faint chirping of Stockholm birds. In the distance the roar of construction by the locks of Slussen winds up. Outside a school, a father is gently combing through his daughter’s white-platinum hair and a black car breaks the silence, its wheels finessing the stones of the road. A man in a flat cap jaunts by, clears his throat loudly, spits on the street. Despite this, there is the feel of polished cleanliness everywhere, that well-to-do feeling, as if the Swedes have always known wealth and wealth is all they’ve ever known. Back at the hotel, we have a good breakfast of scrambled eggs with chives and onions, big bowls of yogurt, dried banana, crisp dried coconuts, and three cups of the finest coffee there is. “Of course, you drink more coffee here,” says Erland, a steaming mug in his hands. “You’re in Sweden.” He says it as if we have all died and gone to heaven. This Swedish angel is proud of his homeland. He even approves of its bike paths and pedestrian walks. “It’s not like in Estonia where BMWs and Lexuses blow by you, splashing you with water,” he says bitterly. I am surprised he chooses to recall the makes of the cars, but Sweden is old money and the Estonians are nouveau riche. It’s that old old money, new money thing, along with some shared hand-me-down of clumsy woodsman’s poverty. I feel blessed to be here. I remember my first trip to Stockholm in ’01, staring up at the wreck of the Vasa in the Vasa Museet, a museum I had read about in a children’s book my grandparents once gave me but never expected to see with my own two eyes. After breakfast, we head to the Nordiska Museet, where my children make for the playroom first and never really leave, hoisting toy wooden buckets into an old make-pretend farm. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to stay in Sweden, I consider, elope with that redhead from the Pressbyrån in Slussen, to lie beside her at night, listening to ship’s horns in the harbor, and hear of the inner workings of this marvelous convenience store. “We were out of Maribou chocolate.” “It was time to refill the cups.” To lie sprawled in bed sheets with a woman who reeks of cinnamon buns, kanelbulle. In the mornings, she is off to the shop, to prepare the coffee, stor cappuccino, lite cappuccino, the whir of the machine, and there she is again behind the counter, processing people’s payments in her blue shirt and saying, varsågod. The blue of her shirt brings out the blue of her eyes, just like the water licks at the docks of Östermalm where we step off a boat later and are surprised by the golden glitz of the gilded Royal Drama Theatre. I keep processing this idea for a children’s book, about a Stockholm teenage girl with a ne’er-do-well father who turns to petty theft to make ends meet. Then one day she is caught and sent away to Långholmen, the old prison island down the harbor. I play with this idea all the way to the ship that takes us back to Estonia, the front bar of which has been permanently converted into a playroom. The five year old’s balloon is still with us, believe it or not, this artifact from Gröna Lund. It may be the best balloon we have known collectively in all of our lives. It cannot be lost, deflated, or stolen. In the playroom, they play Estonian children’s disco music, oi-oi-oi, ai-ai-ai, a strobe projects dancing rainbow lights across the floor, and I take a seat beside a Swedish mother whose hair is a mess and is probably as full of ice cream as mine is. She looks to be about as tired as I am, sapped, haggard, and so hungover by life. This is how we sail on a gray day to face our decisions and memories.

from my journal, July 2017

STORA BLECKTORNSPARKEN is an urban park a bit farther south on Södermalm with the same kinds of Bullerby buildings as Bryggartäppan. There is more graffiti here, though, and shreds of rubbish, broken glass shards, fruit peels, chipped paint and rust, the illusion of safety. “Dad? Dad? Dad!” “What?” “Look what I can do!” The nine year old swings away as the five year old arrives, panting. “Daddy, my knee hurts, look what happened. I slipped on the rocks.” I survey the wound only to be interrupted by, “Dad? Dad? Dad! Watch me swing!” And she swings higher and higher. Mothers sit around us tinkering with their phones. More wonderful park birds flit about. It feels good to breathe and write in Stockholm. To write without any project or desire for money. Just writing with feeling, without that evil thought looking over your shoulder, the one that says that every word has to count toward something. But maybe that thought came from the office or from some editor. Maybe it was never my thought to begin with. “When you are with someone, you become someone else,” says Erland. “You change yourself. When I was with Henrietta I was someone else. And when I was with Agnetha I was someone different from that person. And when I was with Gunnhildur, that Icelandic football player, I was also someone else.” Erland has been a lot of people. “Dad? Dad? Dad! Come here, help me off this swing. Come, Dad. Come!” These children. They so crave my attention. If I only had some time off I could be such a better father to them. I could never have any more children. Not now. I would go crazy. That would just be the end of the story. Not with these thin Swedish women. Not a chance. Although the lady who made me coffee was rather nice and might get me to reconsider, especially if she turns out to be some Zelda Fitzgerald type who can ruin me and provide me with loads of material about her schizophrenia. This playground is a madhouse. All the sobbing, crying children. All the childhood drama and trauma. The pale thin mothers calling after their offspring, their barn. One of the children steals the five year old’s balloon and I have to run after him and take it back, causing a puzzled look from the toddler, who thought the balloon was his. In the meantime, a mouse ran over the nine year old’s shoes at the bottom of the slide. The parents here all look at each other. I suppose this is one way to pass the time at a playground on a hot day. A Muslim family arrives, the mother’s head covered, the daughters bare to the sun. They look truly happy, content, and I sense no disturbance or cultural conflict. The Swedes don’t dress so differently from Americans. They seem maybe more capitalistic though. A Swede is the sum of all he or she consumes. The patterned dresses, the well-groomed facial hair. A barber shop stands on every other corner, catering to the perfectionism of the Swedish man. The women shop for dresses at the boutiques in between. One must exude one’s wealth and value. A haircut, a shave, a flowing cut of textile, this is worth nothing alone. It’s the effort that goes into being Swedish. This is what pays the real dividends. At night, we find ourselves at another playground nearby on Nytorget. Teenagers stand among the benches singing songs and playing ukuleles. “Södermalm is like the best place ever,” my nine year old says. “There is no traffic, the houses are pretty, and everyone has time to do whatever they want.” This is the fun of a playground in the dusky twilight of midnight in Stockholm. As the children play on, and the ukuleles strum, and I admire the lights from the cafes around the park, I read a sign about local history. This was once the site of a large garbage heap, it reads. And in the 18th century it also was the location of the gallows and a major site of public executions. I wish I could have seen Stockholm then when it was rough and tumble and full of pickpockets and convicts, truants and robbers, counterfeiters, highwaymen, gentlemen of the day and ladies of the night. Before the boutiques and barbers, there were wards of the state sentenced to hard time. Looking around nighttime Nytorget, this seems impossible. It’s as if it never happened.

from my journal, July 2017

IN STOCKHOLM on a peaceful July day– at last. Bryggartäppan is a children’s playground, the size of one city block approximately, with clusters of leaning red buildings set up to look like an old Swedish village. There’s even a wooden putka here where two fine-looking ladies make coffee for the parents, mostly mothers, even on a Sunday. Tiny birds flit around and one of the sellers is most fetching, a sturdy woman with those hoop earrings that always seem to mesmerize me. Her eyes are as blue as the sky and her hair is pulled back. Yes, I have appraised her thoroughly, but maybe it’s not just her that toys with my senses but that smell of baking waffles, coupled with all of those cream-colored buildings around us. There was even a little yellow fly that landed on my hand before. Have I ever seen an insect that color? Is everything in Stockholm made of gold? “I don’t want water, there’s juice there, there’s some juice over there!” This is what my youngest daughter, age 5, is shrieking in Bryggartäppan. Then she cries aloud in Estonian, “Ma saan nii kurjaks,” “I’m getting so angry!”, and punches her older sister, age 9. Then she begins to sulk and cry. The youngest is wearing a light blue headband from Copenhagen Tiger, and totes around a blue fairy balloon from Gröna Lund, the amusement park. This troubles her older sister. “I told you at the park that I also wanted you to get me a balloon but you didn’t get me one!” At last the seller returns from making waffles and hands over a box of äppel juice. Quickly, the straw is in the little one’s mouth, and she is quiet for a moment. The other children here are Swedish. They are pale, thin, and have straw-colored hair. They are physically active, and on occasion expressive, but I have not witnessed the kind of volcanic outbursts of which our children are so ready and capable. I search our family trees for some culprit — is it their mother’s Komi great grandfather? A plosive mix of Siberian and Greco-Roman blood? — but there is no answer. The parents here at Bryggartäppan are, as a rule, older. Perhaps a few of them are actually grandparents. Swedes are a peculiar breed though. They are married to modernity. They are infatuated with their perfect civilized society, yet so haunted and repressed by this civilizational impulse that they have the emotional temperament of office wallpaper. They hide away their thoughts, dreams, dark sides behind apartment doors, sunglasses, and politely phrased, thoughtful senses that implore only moderation. Rows and rows of perfectly symmetrical apartment windows, cascades of identical balconies, rising up and up and up, peaking in crescendos of tiled roofs and towers. The pursuit of wealth, the proper means to express it, these are the chief concerns of the Stockholm Swedes. Everything here must be perfect. A little girl with her face painted and her hair done up in corn rows goes skipping by, and another waits patiently for the five year old to dismount a small rocking horse. When she does get off the horse she sulks again and then announces to the lot, “I am so bored!” To which a little boy nearby, who understands English, chides her. “Be quiet,” he says. “You’re acting like a baby.” “I am not,” she says, and smacks at the air with her balloon. “I am not a baby,” the five year old sobs and then takes her apple juice and squeezes the liquid all over her older sister’s drawing on a table beside the playground café. “You are bad!” the nine year old scolds her, to which she only shouts, “I’m not bad!” “You poured juice on my picture — that’s bad.” “I did not.” “You did too.” “Tegid küll.” “Ei teinud. SA VALETAD!” “YOU LIE!” These are perhaps the loudest sentences that have been uttered on Swedish soil since Estonian pirates sacked the old Swedish capital Sigtuna in 1187. There are lots of pregnant Scandinavians in the park here today, paging through magazines and pretending not to hear this terrible squall. Their days will yet come. “Here’s an idea for a good life,” my Swedish pal Erland said yesterday, skulking around the Pressbyrån at Slussen with his hands in his pockets and harbor wind in his hair. “Meet a girl, have a bunch of kids with her,” he said. “Then you can all be wonderfully miserable together for a few years. Doesn’t that just sound like the greatest idea?”

from my journal, July 2017

YESTERDAY WAS ONE of those days when I actually emerged from my cave or shell. Most days I am locked up tight within, but on some days, those precious few days, I stick my head out and explore the terrain around me. It was cool and it rained a few times during the day. The sun also came out. August in Estonia is like November in Italy. Wouldn’t you know, there were a few Italian tourists in town who came to escape the heat of the mezzogiorno, and from Puglia, the province of my mother’s people. I showed them the water and the Old Town. They were content. At the café, where I was supposed to be working, I was a real chatterbox. I found myself beside my friend, who is a rather correct or korralik type from Järvamaa, and with whom it is safe to flirt. She looked very cute with her ruddy cheeks and slanted eyes and I told her so, but with the usual legal disclaimers. “I’m so sorry for flirting with you again,” I said. “I know I flirt with all the girls.” “You’re not sorry though,” she said, over her dish. “You don’t need to lie to me and say you are.” “Very good,” I said. “Because I am not really sorry, but I do feel like giving you a big hug today.” What a warm and satisfying hug. Is there anything as satisfying as a hug from a real Estonian country woman? We have this kind of agreement between us. I like to imagine romantic stories with different women. My fantasy for her is that we are forced to go on some tasteless cruise, to Hawaii or some place, and at first are at each other’s throats but later learn to love one another. It seems like a good setup for a love story, but she knows I am only joking. I also know that I am not the kind of man who could make her happy. In her heart, she longs for some credible, sturdy, reliable Viking type, with even a beard perhaps, with some good muscle she can cry into. He brings in the firewood and she makes him some soup. Those simple, honest pleasures. In principle, she agrees with this diagnosis. “I am sure there are actually men like this out there for you,” I told her. It seems plausible to me. I have met many of these guys walking around with hammers. Some of them are renovating a house just down the street and listening to the radio. While I can figure out what could make her happy, I am at a loss when trying to dream up a different reality for myself. I’m just some café rascal, blowing kisses to all the girls and giving Italian tourists impromptu tours. Maybe I do need a strong woman who can put me in my place. The only question is for how long would I stay there? Recently, I swapped notes with some other men about our ideal women. It was nighttime and we were gathered around a fire, roasting things from the ends of sticks. One chose the wife of a famous writer, who was pretty, loyal, supportive, and kind. She was the kind who could make him happy, he said. The other chose some sarcastic and slim Hollywood actress, whom he claimed he had dibs on, meaning that none of us were allowed to approach her in any setting for she already belonged to him and him alone. We both agreed to this arrangement. My choice was an Inuit throat singer I once saw perform at the Pärimusmuusika Ait in Viljandi. Her songs were about blood, snowstorms, hypothermia, animal spirits, fire, and foxes. At least in her performances, she is quite robust and even frightening. I imagined her as a wave, a great wave that would take me down and through some crushing and aquatic struggle, I would be reborn. “What I want is a woman who will destroy me,” I told my friends. “I want to be shown no mercy.” My friends did not respond, but I could hear the sounds of concerned owls cooing in the dark. Of course, there is far more to it than just that. Her music is just an output, and in real life she is probably quite kind, and also desires a reliable man who stacks the ice for the igloo and brings in the seal meat. And from my side, of course after some kind emotional or sexual catharsis, one craves peace, warmth, and comfort. The comfort to live through your rebirth and start over. That is also wonderful and necessary. These are complicated thoughts to share over coffee with a Järvamaa woman, or some tourists from Italy, but they are true enough. So it’s inspiration that I seek, a rebirth, a renewal, a revival. Something to shift the shapes, cleanse the senses, an experience transformative to the soul. To wake up feeling both demolished and new. That would make me very happy.

THIS TIME I WAS driving a kind of plastic toy car, like the kind our eldest used to have, down a winding seacoast road lined with pines rising up onto knolls and hills. It was a place like Maine, Scotland, or Washington State. That kind of place. The temperature had just begun to dip below freezing, and there were patches of black ice on the road. I went over a patch of ice, spun around many times, and collided with a black Mercedes parked by the beach. However, as my car was made of plastic, there was no damage, and the owner, a lanky, stiff-upper-lipped British Lord Mountbatten type, merely chided me and told me to “be a little more careful next time, young man.” I apologized and turned my car around and began to ascend the same seaside hill, now covered with fat flakes of wet snow. From its base, I watched a car drive opposite me. It went over the same patch of ice, lost control, went up the embankment, crashed into a tree and was thrown into the side of the other hill, where it exploded into a violent blaze. “Oh,” I thought, watching the red curling flames. “That guy is definitely dead.” I drove on up nevertheless to get a good look. A small crowd had gathered to watch the vehicle burn, and a crane was lifting parts of the wreckage into the air. I didn’t understand it, but they had also lifted the corpse of the driver, and as he was suspended overhead, his head came loose and fell into my arms. I briefly recognized a beard — it was a man — and a hat and then dropped the head in shock and began to run back toward the beach, leaving my car behind. Now I saw there were dozens of corpses piled up in the woods. I kept running and reached an intersection, where my father happened to drive by in a blue sedan and said, “Get in.” And so I got in the passenger’s seat, buckled my belt, and away we went up some road into the hills. “Did you see the crash?” he said. “Terrible.”

THE FULL MOON came and went and I didn’t notice a thing. Usually the tug of the moon resolves unanswered questions, but this time there were neither questions nor answers. Feeling blocked is not a terrible thing, but there is an internalized numbness or indifference that sets in like gray weather. You forget things, you forget your name, you forget your feelings. You do what you need to do, and it is not unpleasant to do it, but it is not pleasant either. It’s neither/nor. When your voice is silenced, when those closest to you shut you down, a hollowing out occurs and you come to doubt your own experiences, your own memories, your own truth. Even the word truth seems doubtful, because it is just your truth, not the truth, the accepted truth, the one truth that others would have hoisted on you like heavy cargo. When your love is ignored or blocked or you are told it’s all in your head, or you are just confused about your own feelings, then you have no love anymore. It’s been blocked. The force was summoned, but where did it go? Nowhere. It went nowhere and led to nothing. Wind in your hands, that’s all. What comes next? I don’t know what comes next. I would like to become unblocked, to flow with energy again, to be in the right, with the current. I would like that very much.

THIS MUST BE ONE of my favorite films. The perfect antidote for a Saturday afternoon. I watched The Shawshank Redemption (1994) on the way to China about nine years ago and again on the way back again. I read the Stephen King story as well, which has some different elements from the film (‘Red’ really is Irish). I remember my cousin also loved this movie too and wanted to name his band Dufresne. As I write this, I can hear a neighbor’s saw and hammer in the yard. I should be working, but my body says it’s time to rest, and no fear of a Lutheran god or hot cup of coffee can convince me otherwise. They sound vaguely maritime to me, that hammer and saw, that metallic clang. I miss ports. Wish I was a longshoreman in San Francisco listening to those seals talk in the fog. Any town in Maine or the Swedish archipelago will do. Maybe I’ll head south to Zihuatanejo like Andy did. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific. It has no memory.

I KNOW A FEW veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War. These are not old men, most of them were born in the 1960s, though some are older. The reason I know they were in the war is that they have alcohol problems. They have trauma. That’s why they drink. Two of them, while drunk, have looked at me, especially when I don’t shave, and had some flashbacks and started mumbling about mujahideen and trying to converse with me in Russian. These people know I am an American and don’t speak Russian, but some switch goes off and they think they are back in the army. I just learned that one of them is now in jail for beating his wife in a drunken rage. As someone said the other night, “The thing about war is that the dead come home but the living stay on the battlefield.”

THIS ALL HAPPENED in some remote agricultural community on the other side of the mountains, a place of rolling green fields and yellow corn pastures, with a silty dark river snaking through it, full of farm run-off and gloomy rocks. At the center was a gray mountain that rose up high into the clouds, its base covered with patches of moss and forest. My grandmother was from the South, true, but I didn’t know she had people here in Kentucky, or that she had left a house in my name. This was a long house, a kind of Swiss chalet, same style of angled roof, with at least five levels, each ringed with balconies. Inside, it was fully furnished with rugs and couches, rotary phones and lamps, mustard-colored curtains and bedspreads. Retro chic, circa the LBJ Years. Yes, it was a fine house, and I was surprised that it had been left in my name, but I had never once considered a life for myself in the landlocked South. Still, the local people were so friendly, far friendlier than the Estonians, I thought. One young local woman, a chummy highlands brunette, even showed up in a plaid dress on the porch and asked me if I wanted to share a bottle of whiskey with her. I looked at her and the high gray mountain, with its slate gray sheets of rock at the precipice. This was like some Welsh mining community, I thought, like Aberfan, the site of that 1966 disaster where the colliery spoil tip collapsed and killed 144 people. This was Aberfan, Kentucky. But there was a house here, a wonderful house in my name, and a woman waiting with whiskey. She was still out there on the porch. Maybe I’d stay.

EVEN THE AMERICANS give up. It may take 20 years, or just 10, but after a long slog in a foreign land, the remaining embassy staff are evacuated and the country falls. It’s incredible how quickly it goes, be it at the hands of the North Vietnamese or Taliban. Liberal democracy is a hard sell in deserts, jungles, and other desperate lands. Religious fundamentalists or Communists do well, for a while, but after a while they too need to make a buck. My own life is a mess, I mean a literal mess. Dishes piled high in the sink. Whirlpools of laundry on the floor, mixed together, clean and dirty. Then the need to generate income in this mess somehow. I am expected to be a fulltime caretaker and fulltime father and fulltime worker. It’s an impossibility. It is impossible to do all the things I am supposed to do, under a cascade of words about how whatever I am doing, it’s not enough, and I should really be far wealthier and better organized given the circumstances. Last night I had some dream about war, but in a really upscale, Scandinavian neighborhood, like that patch of Nørrebro in Copenhagen down near the Søpavillonen, or Lake Pavilion, where the Danish businessmen ride their bikes on lunchbreaks. There were hordes of young scared men running between the houses and some of them were being killed by armed assailants. Some kind of genocide taking place among the fine waterfront buildings and pavilions of Denmark, but I couldn’t understand the reasoning for it. Were they being killed for ideological purposes? Or race? Age? Gender? Sexual orientation? There were men in gray sweatshirts murdering others. Maybe it was somehow connected to these arguments between the vaccine men and the un-vaccine men? These endless bloody arguments? At some point, I came face to face with one of the murderers, but he looked scared and didn’t shoot at me. My countenance was too calm. Then I dreamed of rear-ending some blonde Tallinn businesswoman I know. In a white dress. Sublime that. Sex and murder, from Saigon to Kabul to Copenhagen to Tallinn. I awoke, grabbed my briefcase, and was off to work.