matching yellow raincoats

AND THEN ONE DAY, I was working as usual, in my usual café, at my usual table, engrossed in dull, painstaking work, unaware of the time, and when I had last eaten, when I looked over the top of my laptop only to see a lovely Cheshire Cat face peering back at me. It was one it took a moment to recognize, considering I hadn’t seen her in almost two decades. Frida was grinning at me with that big pussycat face of hers. She looked the same as she had in college. She was wearing a white Nader-LaDuke 2000 t-shirt and a bright yellow raincoat. She said, “I came all the way to Estonia from Vancouver to find you,” and, “I brought my mother for protection.”

Frida nodded over her shoulder at her mother, who was wearing a matching yellow raincoat. It was a funny thing, because I didn’t notice it was raining that day. This being Estonia though it was poised to rain one moment or another. Not a day went by without some rainfall, snowfall, or intermediate precipitation. Her mother, a sort of older, grayer version of Frida, with glasses, stood silently behind her. She nodded. “There are some things we need to discuss,” Frida said, leading me away from my desk to the basement. “Different topics we all need to address now.”

I came down the stairs and noticed it had been converted into a comfortable, warmly lit meeting space. There were a few chairs arranged with a table in between them, some tea cups and a pot of tea. But what did we need to talk about? I thought we had talked through everything. What did we need to discuss again? I thought she had sworn to never speak to me, of me, or even think about me in any way again. When Frida had married she had become “the married woman,” engaged in a lifetime’s pursuit of self-censorship and border enforcement.

No other man could come between Frida and her legal partner.

Here we were though, taking seats opposite one another in the basement of an Estonian coffeehouse. They were still wearing their matching yellow raincoats. I was nervous. There was a lot to apologize for. I didn’t know where to start or what an apology could ever be worth. The tea was poured. That’s how that began.

pine tree blues

“HONEY,” SHE SAID. “I want to see if that tree will work over here.” We had bought a new house at the end of a road all the way out in the far north woods. But she said there wasn’t enough greenery up front to block out intrusive neighborly eyes. Her solution was to uproot a tree from another property and replant it on our own. You can imagine how much I grumbled doing this. It was one thing for someone to tell you to replant a tree, it was another thing to do it, even knowing that its position might not be satisfactory and that I might have to do it again.

Instead, I dug a hole and held the tree in place while she went out and examined it from different angles. The tree, an Estonian pine, was as tall as a Manhattan skyscraper. It just went up and up into the clouds, and it was very hard to keep erect. It would tilt from one side to another, its trunk was heavy, and, in a moment of distraction, I let the pine slip and watched it with some horror crash into the corrugated metal roof of a nearby house. Its sole inhabitant, an old woman with white hair held back in a headscarf, came out and surveyed the damage.

The old gray granny whistled loudly.

With enough strength, I was able to position the tree in the hole again, holding it aloft through sheer exertion so the lady of the house could at last decide if this was a suitable location. But by this time, the lady of the house had disappeared to somewhere to inquire about acquiring some rhododendrons. The tree, frustrated by the whole scene, wilted at this moment, drooping over like an unhappy flower. “There there,” I told the pine tree. “No need to get upset.” It was no use, in a flash the tree removed itself from my hands and ran quickly away.

Into the woods, I assume.

When the lady of the house returned she asked about the tree. “What kind of man loses a pine tree?” she scolded me. “Only you could lose a whole pine!” I told her that the pine tree was upset. It had been waiting to be replanted all day. “Very well then,” she said. Our daughters gathered around her and she went to the barrel sauna, immersing herself in its bubbling waters. Then, pounding upon the surface of the waters, she began to chant. “I know how to retrieve lost trees!” she said. The children watched their mother with some alarm. But soon enough the tree came out of its hiding place in the woods. Begrudgingly, meekly, sheepishly. Arborescently.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

the east rajasthan health clinic

IN THE BACK of the East Rajasthan Health Clinic, there is a cloak roam and waiting area. Metal chairs are arranged in two rows, one facing the other, and there is a large window above that allows in plenty of light on sunny, springtime days. The cloak room is full of the distinct and colorful angharka robes and jama jackets of the Rajasthani people. Here, they sit and wait for the woman with the maang tikka to call their number. There are several good Rajasthani physicians working to serve Tallinn’s Indian community these days. While they consult their patients, the others sit quietly. A few leaf through Indian magazines. And as for me, I was just catching my breath after being pursued by the traffic police when I first disappeared inside.

***

I am still not sure what the traffic offense was. Maybe Raivo forgot to pay a parking ticket, or rolled through a red light on the Pärnu Highway. We were cruising through town in a white Ferrari Testarossa. The same kind that Crockett and Tubbs traveled around in in Miami Vice. I suppose Raivo was Crockett. I was Tubbs. I always liked Tubbs more anyway. Raivo is my translator and faithful friend. In middle age, he is in spectacular shape. He runs marathons and spends the weekends toiling away on pointless home renovation projects. He was driving the Testarossa when he saw the flashing lights in the rearview mirror. “Probleem,” Raivo mumbled.

When I looked in the window, I could see we were being pursued by a young blonde police officer. She had shoulder-length hair, a pleasant, round face, but very cool, remote blue eyes. There was something vaguely alien about her facial expressions, as if she had never known joy or sadness, torment or love. At Freedom Square we roared past St. John’s Church and then turned up the small road that leads past the Kiek in de Kök and up to Nevski Cathedral and the Parliament House. The police car was right behind us. Raivo parked the car down a side street. We got out and began to run in different directions. Raivo went that way. I went this way.

The Estonian policewoman pursued me into an alleyway, but I managed to give her the slip. I tumbled down the embankment to the Snelli tiik or pond, and that’s when I saw it, a new and modern building. Ida-Rajasthani Tervisekliinik, a sign read, and in Hindi below, पूर्वी राजस्थान स्वास्थ्य क्लिनिक. There are so many Indians in Tallinn now, they say that it’s only a while before they make Hindi a second official language. Without hesitation, I gripped the door handle and went in. I was instantly engulfed in the aroma of incense and young boys were walking through the health clinic crying out, “Chai! Chai! Samosa! Chai!” I bought a paneer samosa off one of the young Estonian Rajasthani sellers and went to the waiting room to hide and wait.

***

After a while of sitting in the East Rajasthan Health Clinic, I began to worry about Raivo. Maybe the policewoman had arrested him? I decided to venture outside, to see if it was safe. And there he was, standing on the street corner across from the Baltic Station talking to her. It was almost as if he was sweet talking her. I saw her nod a little and him lift both of his hands in a gesture that said, “What can you do?” Then she began walking toward me. Those strange blue alien eyes of hers were on mine, but she walked on by. I went over to Raivo and asked him what had happened, he shrugged and said, “Just some nonsense.” We agreed to meet up again in Tartu, and he went back to fetch his abandoned Testarossa. I crossed the street and boarded a train to Viljandi, but not before encountering a certain familiar American actor.

“Alec!” I said. “What are you doing here?” “Just strolling around the Old Town,” said this master actor from Massapequa. “I really love Estonia. All of the history, all of the culture. I am very impressed with the startup scene, by the way. What are you doing here?” he said. “I was hiding in the East Rajasthan Health Clinic after being pursued by the Tallinn police,” I answered. “Oh,” Mr. Baldwin’s Irish blue eyes lit up. “How was that?” “Well, it’s not so bad. They have samosas and chai. And if you ever need to hide from the police, I would suggest the waiting room. Nobody will ever find you in there.” Mr. Baldwin smiled and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks for the tip, kid,” he grinned. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.” He strolled on ahead.

A few moments later and I was already on a Viljandi-bound train. There was a young woman I knew on the train who had platinum blonde hair. I hadn’t seen her in a long time and we began to catch up. She had on a navy blue sweater and navy blue pants and there was something soothing about the contrast of her light hair with all of that navy blue billowing around her like starry evening sky. I began to tell the woman about the police chase in the Testarossa, the alleyway getaway, the East Rajasthan Health Clinic interlude, the chance meeting with Alec Baldwin beside the Snelli tiik. I don’t think she believed a word I said, but she humored me as the train glided toward Tallinn-Väike, Kitseküla, Liiva, and Points South. I was deep in my tale as the last views of the Old Town’s spires and government houses slipped from sight.