estonia – Page 6

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.

ESMERALDA came in wearing a green dress. She arrived with the others, pointing out her name at the registration with her pretty ringed fingers. Her name was there, as was mine just a few lines away. I was surprised that she even remembered me. I was certain I had been entirely forgotten, maybe on purpose. She had skipped town months before, but here she was again in the full flesh. I asked Esmeralda where she had been all this time. If she only knew how many black nights I had walked home thinking of her, or half expecting her to appear from some shadow or behind some corner, only to whistle on alone in solemn disappointment. She said that she had been busy. ‘I’ve been so busy,’ she said. She was a busy kind of woman.

In the summer, during the festival, I would watch her walking up and down the street. She was always talking to someone, and she was mostly in a good mood when she wasn’t having one of her sad-looking sulky days, when she sat in the corner staring out the café windows. I asked Esmeralda why she hadn’t responded to any of my love letters, but she told me that there was no need to. She did this fluidly, as if she was dancing between the registration desk and the coffee. There were many bureaucrats in white shirts buzzing around. Her potato brown hair was pulled back. There was something about those eyes. Esmeralda has clever, fox-like eyes.

I could see her soft comforting milky white chest poking out of the top of that dress she had on, the same way you might see a gold coin reflecting the sunlight at the bottom of a clearwater lake or pool. Or the same way you might see a distant light in the night sky and wonder if it was a planet. What struck me was how at ease we were with this whole thing by now. It had become the default for us. It ebbed, it flowed, it undulated, rolled along and vibrated but it was reliably there, as sure and as trustworthy as the sunshine. ‘But you do know that I love you,’ I told her at registration. Esmeralda only smiled, her smart eyes drawing up into half moons. She placed a finger on my lips and said, “Hush, hush, hush.” Then I felt her all over me and in every part of me like a March wind. In my bones, in my blood, in my hair.

Everywhere.