dulcinea stories

I DON’T RECALL the immediate circumstances around how I ingratiated myself with Dulcinea’s parents. What I do know is that at some point we became quite good friends if not just neighborhood acquaintances, and I would bring my daughter there to their house to watch TV with her younger siblings. I felt like a maniac, of course, though my best self-analysis yielded nothing. My motives remained a mystery. In the process of suppressing and lying to myself about what I had truly wanted from her, and from life in general, I had arrived at a strange situation where my own desires and feelings were obscured, inaccessible. Supposedly, this was for her own benefit, but as I was about to discover, it only made things much worse.

Things came to a head when her father, a bearded, fisherman-looking type, confronted me about the small pile of literature I had amassed, my so-called Dulcinea stories. “You,” he said shaking his head at me doubtfully, “I am just in shock, pure shock,” he said. He went into the back room to inform his wife, Dulcinea’s mother, that the “family friend” who was hanging around had been secretly in love with their daughter. “You,” he said again, shaking that head. “You are old enough to be her father!” “Technically, yes,” I said. “If we lived in a pre-industrial, illiterate society then maybe. It’s not all so black and white.” “I’m not going to be the judge of that,” her father said. “I’m going to let law enforcement take care of it.” “But nothing happened!” I repeated. “I just wrote some stories. It’s all just literature. Literary Fiction!”

After that, I quickly left the house with my daughter. She couldn’t understand why she was being dragged away from a comfortable couch and ushered into the back of a car and we began to drive as fast as we could. The police were after me for my ill-fortuned, undying love of Dulcinea. Her parents were incensed. But what was I supposed to do? She wasn’t a child, far from it. Why, maybe some women her age were already grandmothers in illiterate, pre-industrial societies somewhere. Whatever I told myself, it didn’t matter. I had been found out. This had been a particularly cursed case of unrequited love.

On the way down the country road from their country estate, I noticed a change in scenery and greenery. Suddenly, we weren’t in Estonia at all, but back on Long Island. I realized then, that this was Equestrian Court, so-called because an old horse farm where a young Justin once went riding many decades ago was still visible from its back decks and terraces. That was Will Hooker’s house over there and Zimmerman lived right there at the end of the street. Across the way, the O’Malleys with their many children. Everything had changed. The trees had grown so tall, I felt as if I was standing in an old-growth forest. The neighbors were bickering. Someone had neglected to mow their lawn, someone had skipped tree duty. The wind picked up and the snow began to fall. Stony Brook had become Narnia. “Where are we?” my daughter asked me from the backseat. “I don’t even know anymore,” I said, blinking. “I don’t even know.”

the snow queen

I REMEMBER THE GRAY LIGHT, streaming in through the windows in the earliest hours of what could be called a day. I hadn’t wanted this to happen, but such things become impossible to avoid, especially when the woman’s will to bed you is so strong. She was a pale mess of light skin, light hair, sweat and blue eyes. I felt like I was making love to HC Andersen’s Snow Queen.

This was not going to turn out well. That I already knew. Some kind of love story would manifest in her mind and it would become impossible to extricate myself from such a romantic morass. When I couldn’t summon any love feeling for her, I would be cast out, called all kinds of horrible names, denounced before her girlfriends, and, in general, take on a new layer of black sheep status in the community. “He was the one who broke her heart.” The mathematics behind such situations were ironclad. They followed a predictable score of seduction, sex, and disappointment. She surprised me however when she told me, with gray light in her blue eyes, that I had to leave soon. “Another man is coming at 11 o’clock,” she said in a melancholic way.

So that was that and I was back out in the streets, buttoning up my shirt as I walked the short distance home. When I opened the door to my apartment, I discovered that I had been away even longer than one evening and one morning. In my time away in bed with the snow queen, tree roots had invaded the house. Floorboards were popping up and a mouse had made his home in the rusted ruins of the old stove. I didn’t know what to tell the landlord about all of this, but I was sure she could fix it. “Just a little sawing here, some hammering there,” my handy landlord would say upon inspecting my uprooted home. “It will all be as good as new.”

uueveski jollies

*Those were the days. Viljandi’s Uueveski Valley in 1930.*

FOR DAYS, IF NOT A WEEK, I had been planning to meet with Heiki to talk about Uueveski org or, as I call it, Uueveski Park. To me, it’s clear that this large natural area just adjacent to the center of the town is a town park, but on maps it is merely marked as an org or valley, as if it’s such a natural place that it has not yet been fenced in and given something like an official name or status. I had written to Heiki inquiring about the origins of this place and had been told we would have to meet face to face. Such information needed to be communicated in person, he said. This meeting of the minds proved elusive. I was in Tallinn or Tartu, or just too tired. The discussion of the valley’s origins was pushed off. Then one day at the supermarket, Heiki appeared with a basket in hand. It was one of those Viljandi moments, when the person you’ve been planning to see appears effortlessly, as if by magic. I had almost completely forgotten about Uueveski. There he was, ready to instruct. Heiki comes off as wily, clever. He seems to know who lived in each apartment and how they got along with their neighbors. Heiki just has a nose for these things.

In a few minutes, Heiki recounted the history of this sleepy place, which has belonged to the town for all of living memory and into which a series of swimming pools were built back in the 1930s. At that time, Viljandi Lake was a less attractive swimming hole, as it was full of pasture run-off. The pools on the stream that feeds Viljandi’s least known waterbody, Kösti Lake, were clean and cool and more appealing. There are photos of Viljandiers in old-time swimsuits having a wonderful time. These days it’s rare to see someone taking a dip in the pools, some of which have been renovated, but I have been told that vipers like to sun themselves on the stream’s banks. Each time I walk around those pools, I keep an eye out for those vipers.

When I first lived in Viljandi, some 15 years ago, I never visited Uueveski. I’m not sure why. Maybe because my children were small and I was a house husband. Viljandi to me at that time seemed like the Castle Ruins, the Green House Cafe, and maybe the Statoil on the way into town. There was no Uku shopping center then, there was no Kodukohvik, and there was definitely no Asia Billa Nepalese restaurant. During the pandemic, Uueveski Valley became a close refuge for me. It’s a shady, peaceful place. Many times I have found myself standing on one side of that bubbling stream, which they call the “Uueveski River,” wondering if it would be possible to cross it. There are some places where it seems possible, where the rocks are aligned in an almost perfect bridge. Yet I never attempt it. When I was a boy, I would have done it many times by now, but I lack that childhood bravery I once had. One of these days though I am going to try to traverse the stream, even if I get wet. Even if everyone here sees.

On the other side of the stream, closer to the Forest Cemetery, or Metsakalmistu, there’s a series of large villas that bring to mind the chalets of the French or Swiss Alps. For this reason, I have nicknamed this neighborhood “Little Switzerland.” I have no idea who lives in these palatial residences. Sometimes I see little blond children bouncing on trampolines from a far distance. These must be Swiss children, I think. Their fathers and mothers are involved in money laundering. For breakfast, bowls of müsli. For an afternoon snack, bars of Toblerone. In the evenings, they participate in mandatory military training in the grassy hills up there.

The great green lawn in front of Viljandi’s Little Switzerland is so long it must be trimmed by a robot. One day, I went there with my daughter’s dog, who eyed the robotic lawnmower with curiosity and suspicion. Back and forth it scuttled, like some kind of metallic crab, and the dog didn’t know if it should bark and chase it or not. In the end, we just walked on to the old mill.

I wonder who lives in those large chalets. I wonder who the Uueveski Valley Swiss even are. This is a town of hairdressers, of small shop owners, of cafe cashiers. Who are these wealthy denizens of Little Switzerland? Like so much of Viljandi, their stories remain hidden behind fences, trees, curtains. Northern European anonymity creates these kinds of funny fantasies. If you don’t know who your neighbors are, or what they do, then you just have to imagine it all.

Even if the Viljandi Swiss remain apart and mysterious, there are other friends to be made in the valley. Recently, I was walking up the hillside on the other side of the park when two squirrels came bounding in my direction. In New York where I grew up we have fat and lazy, overly satisfied gray squirrels, and in Washington, where I went to college, there are even social black squirrels lounging by the park benches. But these daredevil red squirrels are a feature of the Northern European forests, with their pointy ears and frisky, energetic pace.

Spending more time in nature, I have come to see the animals here as other people. They may not speak to me in a language that I can understand, but I can communicate with them. All around Viljandi, I’ve had run-ins with foxes, for example, who sometimes pause and watch me knowingly, as if they were my guardian angels. Then there are the poor, lost little hedgehogs, who never seem to know where they are going or why. These Uueveski squirrels were busy bodies. They chased each other around the base of an enormous pine. When they saw me, the squirrels froze. For a moment there, we all blinked at each other. Then they looked back at each other as if to say, What is this stranger doing here in our forest? For the Uueveski squirrels, we’re all just intrusive strangers. In their devilish little minds, they own the place. Maybe they do.

An Estonian version of this article, translated by Triin Loide, appeared in Sakala this week.

train blues

I USED TO TAKE THE TRAIN from Albertslund to Copenhagen Central Station, or Københavns Hovedbanegård, on the line that if you took it west, led all the way out to Høje Taastrup. I remember those sleepy gray mornings staring out the windows at sad-looking greenery and gray blue shadows on the trestles and tracks. At some point they must have created a similar environment as a part of the Rail Baltica project, because just yesterday I took a train that looked just like the Danish one from Pärnu to Tartu. When the Pärnu-Tartu train stopped at Viljandi, a host of Argentinian and Chilean musicians got on. From there we traveled east to Tartu, and again I stared out of the windows into that melancholy light, listening to the gentle lullaby of a slowly rocking northern train as it mechanically glided ever forward to infinity.

I must have fallen asleep, because by the time I opened my eyes, I was westbound again, rolling across the green plains outside of Tartu City. About 25 kilometers outside of town, I disembarked, not sure if I should just try to walk the distance, or if I should take a Bolt or even hitchhike. To my surprise, a music festival was being set up here, and there were a lot of people streaming out of the train and ambling down the steps to the dirt paths that led to a small country village. Celeste had even come with her children, although these “children” looked more like dolls. There she was, eyeing me with her blue eyes in small portions, while she combed the hair of her doll children. She was wearing a light blue summertime dress.

The dress seemed to blend into the sky with its clouds behind her.

At the center of the village, there was a church, just like all of the old churches that you can find out in the countryside. Inside, the pews were already filling up. There were two other priests waiting at the doorway. One of them looked like Pope Leo. He said, “Which one of us wants to be the first to start hearing confessions?” I volunteered and made my way down the aisle to the confession booth as everyone watched. It occurred to me that I wasn’t wearing a cassock or any other item that would represent the priesthood and that I didn’t even have a cross on my body and that I wasn’t quite sure if Jesus was the son of God, as they said. The Holy Trinity was a mystery to me still, but when Pope Leo commands, what else is there to do? Then, crossing myself in a brief moment of religious courtesy, I opened the door and went in.

skiing with the dead

I WAS TRYING to find some laundry detergent. That’s really how that whole story started. Someone had, after many years, returned to me a box of clothes, including precious and once-prized pairs of pajamas. The light blue ones with little golden anchors on them that reminded me of Popeye, and the rougher-textured wool ones, with the polar bear print. At the supermarket at the Baltic Station, where the dead-eyed cashier ladies never even so much as acknowledge your very existence, I searched the aisles. While I was trying to make up my mind between Mulieres and Mayeri I passed the media stand. And that’s where I saw it, gleaming to me among the tabloids, newspapers, and glossy magazines about the USSR.

Skiing with the Dead: Stavanger ’72.

What the hell was this? Its cover was a color photograph of the Grateful Dead with the cool, clean and white Scandinavian mountains beyond them. There were some ski chalets in the distance, a period lift. Mickey Hart the drummer was out in front with his headband and dark mustache. Jerry Garcia was behind him. Jerry had on a big wool hat that was incapable of covering all of his bushy black hair. He was smiling. Of course, he was smiling. Why wouldn’t Jerry be smiling while he was skiing at one of the Norwegian resorts. I knew that the Dead had gone on tour in Europe in ’72 and had even recorded an album called Europe ’72. But I didn’t know that the Grateful Dead had ventured as far north as Norway or that they even skied.

This was a strange new discovery. A new chapter in Dead lore. Did Jeff Tamarkin know about this? I beheld this fascinating magazine and skimmed its contents. There was an article about how Phil Lesh dosed the band before they got to the to the famed Bjorli Ski Center, and a recent interview with the other drummer Bill Kreutzman about a long-sought after bootleg recording they did up in the mountains called Trippin’ on the Slopes: the Bjorli Sessions. I shook my head. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Dead. I was very wrong.

At that moment, an older hippie with gray hair and sunglasses happened to walk past me in the Baltic Station supermarket. You know the type, a watered down version of George Carlin in his black sweater years. He had a basket full of produce. He said, “What are you looking at there, young man?” I showed him the glossy magazine. “Did you know that the Dead played shows in Norway in ’72?” I told the hippie. “They went skiing! Can you imagine? Jerry on skis!” “Of course,” the hippie told me. “I was there, man. Skiing. LSD. Norwegians. It was far out.”

birthday call

I PICKED UP MY PHONE and dialed. On the other end, one of the servers at the restaurant picked up. “Can I help you?” she asked. “Yes, I would like to speak to Jane,” I said. “Is she in?” “Yes, she’s here,” said the server. Through the phone, I could hear restaurant sounds, glasses clinking, plates dropping, muffled conversations. The phone changed hands with a quick shuffle and I next heard a man’s deep voice there. He said, “Why are you calling my wife tonight?” “We both have our birthdays soon,” I said. “I wanted to celebrate them together.”

Her husband, Frank, was friendly, cordial, and his voice had a warm, smooth, self-assured tone to it. If he suspected anything, or if there was even anything to suspect, it was hidden well behind that natural, mature, sympathetic charm. “Well, that’s a wonderful idea,” he said. “Except that we already celebrated her birthday.” “Oh,” I said. “I see.” Then thinking quickly I responded, “But perhaps you and I could celebrate our birthdays together. At the restaurant?”

“That would be impossible,” said Frank. “Because my birthday is in the spring.” “Isn’t it spring?” I said. I looked out the windows and saw snow falling. “No, it’s fall,” Frank said. “Your birthday is in November. Our birthdays are in the spring, you know that. Are you overtired or something?” I watched the white flakes cascade down and carpet the yard and the adjacent parks and streets. It was fall, for sure, if not winter. “Oh,” I said. “I guess I’ll just have to celebrate my birthday alone,” I told him. “I suppose so,” Frank said. There was a lengthy and moderately uncomfortable pause. “Can I still talk to Jane?” I pressed him. “I really need to talk to her.”

In the background, I could hear Jane talking. She had a recognizable, infectious laugh. I wanted to have a little piece of that joy for my own, if only for some seconds if not minutes. Just a little piece of joy, like a lucky charm. Her daughter’s voice could be heard whispering intensely nearby. She was asking her father a question. “Daddy,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s just not a very good time,” Frank said. “We’re busy.” “I understand,” I told him. “I’ll try again some other day.”

purgatory by the mystery lights

WHEN THE TOPIC is psychedelic or garage rock, then the dangerous word “retro” is always lurking in the background. People hear it and immediately start to compare it to what came before. “It sounds like 1968!” Are modern musicians really incapable of creating something that’s better than the original?

I should acknowledge that I often like today’s music more, because it was composed, recorded, and performed today, and echoes contemporary issues. I have my favorite groups but one of these is certainly The Mystery Lights, a California band that now resides in New York, but is in its bones and soul a California creation. They’re from Salinas originally, John Steinbeck country, where there are harbors and grassy hills. Something more laidback than your average, anxious worrisome East Coast music.

Their newest LP Purgatory (Daptone Records) was released last fall. The songs are fast, energetic, satisfying, creative. The guitars are wonderful. But the themes? “Ascend to heaven/or descend to hell,” they sing in the song “Purgatory.” The video for the title track shows Satan roaming around Manhattan in a Hawaiian shirt, and the band bedecked in red horns. I have some religious friends, so I’d hesitate to share my new favorite group with them, but at the same time, I feel the themes reflect a lot of what is going on in the modern world as well as in myself. I’m reminded that it doesn’t always pay to be good. Sometimes it feels just heavenly to be the devil. The Mystery Lights still haven’t come to Estonia, but they will be performing at Vega in Copenhagen on 27 May.

An Estonian-language version of this review appears in the magazine Edasi this month.

accreditation

AND THERE SHE WAS, reappeared. She was standing on one of the sacrificial stones behind the castle ruins. She looked the same with those foxy foresty eyes of hers peering ahead, but I hadn’t seen her in so long that I wondered if I knew her anymore. She didn’t acknowledge me, not once, but by overhearing her conversations with others, I learned that she had been busy. Then, as surely as she had reappeared, this mystery girl vanished into the crowds. She was a mercurial woman and barely a woman at that, gone in a flicker. I felt like an arctic explorer who had just seen the sun for a few moments. Those moments were short but reassuring. There was a sun in this world that I had been lucky enough to see. I saw her there, the sun.

She dipped back into darkness.

BY THIS TIME, the opening ceremony of the festival had commenced. It was July but snow had fallen that night, and the entire festival area was under a white blanket. From one side of the hill, I saw mounted Lakota warriors make an entrance in full regalia, whooping into the air and raising their shields made of stretched buffalo hides in a provocative way. “The Lakota warriors are special guests at this year’s festival,” a spectator behind me said. “They came here all the way from Pine Ridge on horseback,” he said. “Did they cross the Bering Strait?” I asked.

OF COURSE, I had forgotten to get accredited, so I walked over to the Pärimusmuusika Ait, or Folk Music Center, and went in. I was given paperwork to fill out. I wrote in my name, the name of the publication, et cetera. I didn’t remember, offhand, the exact links to my previously published work. The woman behind the desk, a blonde who looked more like a bartender than head of press relations, told me I would have to wait while they processed my application, so I went into the press room, where a certain other woman was lying on the couch in the dark.

The certain other woman had just returned from a tantra retreat and was underneath a blanket. Her hair was a mess and she had haunting blue eyes. “Come lie with me,” she said. The lullaby sound of her voice masked a thrilling danger. One thing led to another, and there I was, in her embrace, if such doings beneath a blanket could even be called an embrace. I thought about the object of my affection the whole time I was there kissing the certain other woman. I thought about the woman I had lost in the crowds. I closed my eyes and begged her to love me but felt no reciprocity. I shut my eyes firmer and begged harder, but again felt nothing at all.

I HEARD A RUSTLING from behind the couch. Lata’s adolescent son was seated there, reading a comic book. I don’t know which one. Maybe Asterix or The Groo Chronicles. He yawned and turned the page. “You haven’t seen or heard anything tonight?” I asked him. He looked up and said, “Huh?” “Maybe you should go home,” I told the boy. He was about 12 years old. He got up and walked over to a dumbwaiter, put his comic inside and rang the bell. The door to the dumbwaiter closed and he left me alone in the room with the certain other woman. I followed him out soon after. To the certain other woman, I mumbled something about “accreditation.”

DOWNSTAIRS, my press pass was still being processed. The blonde in the press relations department asked me if I wouldn’t mind helping to shovel the snow outside while I waited. Never before had there been such a snowstorm in July. And during the major folk musical festival, what awful luck. I began to shovel dutifully. Big clumps of wet snow piled up on both sides of the path to the Ait. As I was digging, or pushing the snow, as the Estonians put it, I heard something metallic clatter. It was my keys. My keys had tumbled from my pockets, along with a few euro coins. It seemed like it would be impossible to find them in that avalanche. I kept searching, but I had lost my keys just as I had lost the object of my affection. Her real name was Esmeralda. I thought of her a moment and looked up, only to see a line of Lakota warriors approaching whooping their Oglala war cries. Their faces were grim and painted.

henry miller waves the flag

THE GIRL AT THE SHOP Gunna is still waiting for me. She’s waiting for me there in her white apron, dealing with her clients, patiently, with excellent posture. When she isn’t helping her customers to fresh pies, she has at least one half of an eye open for me. She’s waiting for me to pop in. Maybe I will bring her some chocolates or flowers. Some conversation, jokes, idle chit chat. She wants something else from me. She even said so. Gunna said, “I want very badly for you to make love to me.” I was intrigued by her forthcomingness and straightforwardness and the whole idea. I sized her up in every way. “I just want to know what it feels like,” she said.

I felt a kind of deep shudder pass through me at that moment, one that was hard to describe or put into precise words. It was like a cool breath had passed into me, set inside me, and I was breathing it in and out. There was a mix of excitement and horror, a fear and a wonder. From her toes to her hips. From her lips to her hefty breasts and golden bangs. Gunna was waiting, waiting for me to finally come to her. All I had to do was say yes. Just yes. But I was unsure. “Maybe we should take it slow,” I told her at the register. “Then move on to other things.” Gunna nodded. “We can do other things.” she said. “I’d like to do all sorts of things with you.”

The feeling did haunt me. I imagined how I would arrive one afternoon and she would close up the shop. Then she would spread out a blanket. We would make love between the pies. I suppose I would have to give in. My little war with women had to come to an end one way or another. I couldn’t drag it out indefinitely. I would have to surrender. I’d have to give up. What better place than in the arms of a baker between her sweet-smelling, freshly baked pastries?

Unfortunately, I got involved in a spy ring after that. I had to deliver a document to a drop spot in the Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. I did as I was told, leaving the white envelope beside an office for the police. As I was walking away, I looked up, only to see Henry Miller the writer in his flannel shirt and flat cap, waving down at me from the top of a glinting escalator, as if to say, “You’ve done good, son!” There was a box of flags next to the police office in Penn Station. One was the American flag and the other was the flag of New York, which features its coat of arms against a navy blue background. The blue of this station flag was faded though, so that it was almost a pastel, Caribbean blue. I picked up the New York flag and began to wave it. From the the top of the escalator Henry Miller also brandished a flag and began to wave it, chanting so that all the commuters could hear, “Excelsior! E pluribus unum!” This is the state motto.

Henry Miller came down the escalator with the flag in his hands next and strode over to me. He patted me on the shoulder. I said, “Henry Miller? You were the spy chief all along? The organizer of La Résistance?” Henry Miller said, “Indeed, my friend. You know it. What do you think, I was just wasting my time in Paris all those years consorting with floozies? Of course, I’m involved in international espionage!” “I see,” I said, looking him over. He smelled of good times, good books, pipe smoke. “But now you’ve got to go back to Europe,” Henry Miller said. “Gunna is waiting for you. I’d go to her, if I was you. She’s about to close up soon. D’accord?”

like a little boat

ATLACAMANI PULLED UP in her new car. Don’t get too excited. I think it was a red Volkswagen Golf GTI. She got out of the driver’s seat and was accompanied by two of her boyfriends. She has this kind of entourage around her of lovers and admirers. They parked on the edge of the forest, but when she saw me waiting there in a piney grove, she told the others to get lost, that she wanted to be alone with me. They both turned and left as if in a trance.

Alone time it was, with Atlacamani. It was a northern dusk then, which meant it was nearing midnight. The dark blue of the sky and the gold of the stars seemed to be reflected on her skin, in her hair and her eyes. I sat down there in the moss by the ancient manor house and she straddled me and sat in my lap. Atlacamani is a diminutive but powerful lady. She has very full lips. She looked into my eyes and said, “You wanted to know what it was like to disappear.”

She grasped me then and I was inducted into this Aztec goddess of oceanic storms. She said, “You are like a little boat, always trying to stay dry, always trying to stay afloat on the surface of the water. But tonight I am going to drown you. Tonight, your little boat is going to sink. You are going to become one with me and with this ocean you so fear. Tonight you are going to be swallowed whole,” she went on, whispering to me. “Tonight, I’m going to swallow you whole.”