I WAS SEATED with Igrayne at a round table at a restaurant in Tallinn. She was to my right, drinking a coffee, looking at me. Her hair was open and rested loosely around her shoulders. I was nursing an espresso in a black cup. I think I still liked Igrayne in spite of all of the juicy cleavage photos she had posted on Instagram. I’m not sure why I still liked her. I had met a lot of people, but there was a kind of comfort with this one. Igrayne had led a rather messy life, and that messiness was familiar. It was as if we met just like this, now and then, and relaxed.
There were other people at the round table, but these people were mere acquaintances. A large screen in the corner showed some kind of sporting competition, but this was also vague and obscured, distant. It could have been cross country skiing, tennis, or the Tour de France. Several nosy old ladies though found our table and did not like the sight of me sitting next to this young lady, or rather were distressed by the very idea of it. “You should be ashamed!” one of the nosy old ladies said to me. She was wearing a brown corduroy coat. Indeed, toxic masculinity and the pedophilic lifestyles of the rich and famous dominated the news cycles. Surely, I was just another B-level celebrity who had once sent Jeffrey Epstein a birthday card.
“We don’t have such a big age difference,” I told the nosy old woman in the brown corduroy coat. “When I was born the US president was a Democrat, and when she was born, the president was also a Democrat.” Two Democrats. This prompted some discussion and analysis among the trio of nosy old ladies. I heard different names being tossed around. “Truman.” “Johnson.” “Roosevelt.” “Kennedy.” “Woodrow Wilson.” They stood there and eyed me evilly.
“Did you really need to make this so complicated for them?” Igrayne said to me. “Once again you’ve gone and turned everything into a fucking history lesson.” “It’s not so hard,” I said in my defense. “Who even was president when you were born?” she squinted at me. “Carter,” I said. “The correct answers are Carter and Clinton.” “Nobody remembers Carter,” she said. Igrayne frowned. Her coffee cup was empty. A server came by and replenished our drinks. By this time, some of Igrayne’s other twentysomething friends had joined her and were seated at the table. They were the class of … Who knows when. 2015? Something unknown, unusual. They had tracked the careers of every former member of One Direction, even that one who leapt to a tragic death. But my presidential trivia had done the trick. The village gossips had disappeared.
I WENT TO the Rimi supermarket to buy some bread. Of course, I could have picked up a loaf at any of the many fine bakeries in town, among them the house bakery on Oru Street which is renowned for its delicious rye. The latter I often consume with salted butter, and I can devour a whole loaf in the span of a midnight hour. I could have gone there, but I wanted the gluten-free loaf made by some German company, with its soft yet firm texture, laced with seeds and other delights, fibre-laden and fortified with vitamins, available only here at Rimi supermarket.
As soon as I stepped foot in the supermarket, which is enclosed in a new shopping center built on the site of a former prison, in which some Soviet wartime executions and atrocities once took place, I could sense that something was different. There was virtually nobody inside Rimi’s vast and expansive aisles, save for a few employees pushing metal carts stacked up with boxes. Some kind of retro muzak was playing in the distance, maybe an orchestral version of some old Hall and Oates song. Maybe it was “Maneater,” maybe not. As if it even mattered.
When I got to the gluten-free section, where one can find all kinds of sugar-free, dairy-free, nut-free and allergen-proof goodies, I found that it was no longer there. The aisles were only stacked with plastic bottles, bags of potato chips. “Where’s my favorite bread?” I asked one of the supermarket ladies. “The owners decided to get rid of the natural foods section,” she told me in Estonian. “It wasn’t selling well.” There was a sad, melancholic, deadpan manner to her speech. Her skin was pale, her eyes were deadened. Her hair had been bleached. I imagined if you were paid scant wages, or had not had sex in months, you might begin to talk like that.
Then I noticed that the lights in the supermarket were dimmed. It was quite dark. “Why is it so dark in here?” I asked the woman. “The owners can no longer afford to keep the lights on,” she told me in that same mournful, taciturn way. “It’s a sad story, I’m afraid. We have to work like this all day in darkness.” So this was the final result of years of inflation and high energy prices. A vacant supermarket that only sold chips and bottles of soda, where even lighting was a luxury, and they played horrible retro muzak inside. After that, I searched the aisles. I wandered among them, looking for something to buy, something to eat. I left emptyhanded.
THE ROAD INTO VÕRU is hypnotizingly long. It just keeps going and going, and even when you pass the turn off to Kanepi, it rolls on longer. Time stands still or vanishes all together out here. There are forests and more forests, with farms and old churches tucked in between. You become disoriented, forget where you are. Jaan Kaplinski used to live out here. I suppose it’s a weird Kaplinski kind of place. Just outside of Võru, there is even a settlement called Magari, which means something like, “if only,” or “I wish,” in Italian. That’s right, I think when I pass it. Magari! I do wish! If only!
If only I wasn’t driving to Võru again. What if I was down there in the Mississippi Delta, or maybe in a jeep on the yellow plains of Tanzania? Maybe if I squinted at that horizon toward Lake Tamula long enough, I might see the neck of a giraffe emerge or hear a lion roar? Every place is this mix of what it is and what you make of it. But there are no giraffes in Võru and the only lion is my daughter’s dog, who is named Lõvi*. Võru is, on its surface, a tidy provincial town. It has a nice central square and decent shops and cafes. There’s some funky street art on the facades. The lake promenade is well cared for and it’s enjoyable to walk over that bridge to Roosisaare. At night you can walk over the bridge and see the lights of Võru from across the water. It almost looks like a real city. It’s hard to imagine that this pretty town is the last outpost of Western civilization. Some outsiders who have moved in have warned me never to relocate. They say the old ladies are very nosy and that they use strange words like määne, sääne, and õkva.
This last word is the giveaway that you are dealing with a võrokas. There’s a nice old lady who lives in the same apartment as my daughter and she is always telling me to go õkva somewhere. Legend has it she is one of the original inhabitants of this Khrushchev-era house. Estonians call these kinds of apartment buildings with small kitchens and bathrooms Khrushchevkas. But the houses that were built in the days of Brezhnev are not called Brezhnevkas and nobody has ever boasted of living in a grand Gorbachevka. There are all of these incongruous pieces that fit together so snuggly in their minds but that make no sense to me. Of course, there’s no such thing as a Gorbachevka! Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! But a Khruschevka? That’s different.
I like that old lady who tells me to go õkva though. She has a lovely wrinkled face and seems curious about this stranger from a faraway land who arrives sometimes and takes the lion dog for a walk. She is industrious, always busy. In the winter, she shovels snow. In the fall, she rakes leaves. Now she is tending to the flowers. Whatever you do, don’t step on those flowers.
***
I CANNOT SAY that Võru and the county that surrounds it are another country per se, but they do feel different from other parts of Estonia, or at least the ones I am more familiar with. For the people there, Võru is the capital of their own imaginary universe. Tartu is for school and shopping and Tallinn is for concerts and careers, but Võru is the real sun in their solar system. Even my daughter, who has now lived there for some time, said to me in New York one day, “But we have the same kinds of shops in Kagukeskus!” In the mornings, gas stations with ominous names like Coffee Terminal are busy with worker bees in overalls getting their first caffeine fix, in the evenings, those with a taste for finer things gather together and sip wine in NAMM Resto. Võru is also a destination for unsung musical heroes. Jethro Tull may never play Võru. But Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre played a sold out concert at a venue called Kannel.
It was at Kannel some time ago that I gathered with this rough-hewn tribe of Võru town folk and frontier woodsmen and watched one of the Apteeker Melchior films with my daughter. I felt like I was in a Roald Dahl book. I’m not sure which one, but those scheming farmers from The Fantastic Mr. Fox did come to mind. I should also note though that the Võru women are striking. On many occasions, your dedicated correspondent has found himself standing in line at the supermarket among local ladies who appear to be buxom, straw-haired angels, but have hardened, disillusioned country interiors. The Võru women and their gruff camouflaged husbands, who wear green either out of style or because they’ve been out hunting, seem impenetrable. If you were to ask them a question, the only word they’d reply is mida?! What?! It’s better to stay quiet.
Võru can seem both modern and ancient, and it has the Soviet period as a kind of mystery filling. In Võru, you can walk past the Kreutzwald Museum and feel as if Elias Lönnrot himself was in there having tea at noon, and then visit the Võru Huub Youth Innovation Center. At the Kubija Spa on the edge of town one can in the mornings enjoy a discounted spa package and socialize with old-timers in the sauna. Võru grandfathers discuss the Soviet era here as if it just ended a few weeks ago. “Do you remember, we had full employment? Everybody had work! You didn’t have to look,” I heard one of these men say to another. “It wasn’t like today.”
“But we were all stealing!” the other grandfather shot back. “Don’t you remember how we used to steal food at the cafeteria? We’d take those bags with us and just load up with food. And my friend, he used to work at the milk factory. All of his friends got free milk. All we did was steal!”
“Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re right,” the first Võru grandfather said. Then, turning his attention to the stranger in their midst, he instructed me to toss some water on the kerris.
***
THERE ARE MULTIPLE WAYS out of Võru and one is the southern route to Valga that skirts the boundary with the Republic of Latvia. Here there are new yellow signs that read Nursi, as if Nursi was an up-and-coming residential development, or maybe a business park, like Ülemiste City. But Nursi is a military training ground. This is clear not only because of all of the military traffic on the road, but because of the unfamiliar sound of helicopters floating over the highway. A few summers ago, I was driving near Sänna on a hot and dusty day only to see several tanks cross a bridge beneath which several Võrumaa girls were swimming in a stream.
This military presence is supposed to make us feel safer, but I can only think of movies about the Second World War. “That summer was the last summer of peace,” some narrator says from somewhere against this pastoral backdrop with a stirring orchestral piece playing. “Everything changed after that.” I saw tanks practicing in the fields as I drove toward Antsla. What am I to make of all this? The saga of the Nursipalu base expansion has touched me in various ways. Once in a south Estonian café, I encountered a stressed folk singer named Mari Kalkun studying a notebook as she worked with residents of the expansion zone to save their family farms. Mari is a musician and a usually cheerful one at that. To see her blue eyes moist with concern unsettled me. My friend’s house, perched in a forest along the Mustjõgi will be possessed. He’ll get good money for it, but who knows what will become of this modest estate where he raised his children or scattered his mother’s ashes. Maybe someone will drop a bomb on it. Just last week I stopped by the place, gave it a lookover and admired its stillness in the spring rain. When I am out in the Võrumaa wilds these days, I am reminded only more of Apocalypse Now. I’m waiting for Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz to emerge from behind the sauna with a bundle of birch branches in his hands.
At night, the road to Valga is deserted. Maybe you might see two other cars pass you the entire way. When I am out there alone on those dark roads around Hargla, I am just waiting to see a UFO land and perhaps be abducted. Don’t most UFO abductions take place on roads like these? “I saw a bright light glowing in the forest. Then a strange pale man stopped my car.”
Nothing of consequence has ever happened to me in Valga, and its traffic flow was designed to disorient and fluster outsiders. Not only is it hard to get out of the town, but one hill even leads up into Latvia, where people speak Latvian and everything is different. This is some mapmaker’s idea of a practical joke. Sepa tänav becomes Semināri ielā. Sõpruse, or Friendship Street, ends abruptly without ever having reached the Latvian border. It’s a metaphor for the aloof Estonian-Latvian relationship, I think. Once I did see some Latvian kids at a gas station in Valga ordering french fries at about midnight in the Estonian language though. There was something endearing about hearing their goofy Latvian-Estonian accents. “Frikartulit, palun.” Beyond that gas station, the road leads northward toward a cozy town called Tõrva, which is where the singer Hedvig Hanson is from, and Helme, where my friend is waiting for me at the Helme pansionaat.
***
IT’S HARD TO THINK of a more unusual fate for an English journalist. Some get blown up by rockets, others are on planes that get shot out of the sky by paramilitaries. But here lies my old friend T. in the last room on the left at the pansionaat, stretched out in bed. He looks thinner, the gray hair around his bald pate is as gray as ever. His blue eyes are still lively. He’s been here since the winter. The windowsill is a shrine of bowls of peanuts and other snacks his Estonian children have brought him. He became aware that he was having a stroke when he got out of bed one morning, he says. T. lives alone, or lived alone, and was only able to alert his neighbors to his predicament by knocking on the floor. His mind is as fresh as it has always been, but his left leg and left arm are still out of commission. “I will recover,” he tells me. “You shall see!”
T.’s roommate is an older Estonian man in his pajamas. The roommate has fluffy tufts of messy white hair and a dreamy look to him. He spends most of his days watching TV and talking to business contacts.
After T. had his stroke, there was some discussion within the Viljandi hospital system as to where he should go to recover. And so he was sent here, to the Helme pansionaat. A modest white building on the edge of nowhere. The nurses come in and position T. into his wheelchair and we sit in the small recreation room beneath a giant screen where Hannes Rumm is interviewing Marju Lauristin. One of the nurses slides a bowl of seljanka in front of him, along with a single slice of wholewheat bread or sepik. He observes the broth with some curiosity. “What do we have here?” he asks. “It looks like seljanka,” I answer. “Hmm,” he says, puts a spoonful in his mouth and swallows. T. doesn’t know Estonian very well, and in the background Rumm and Lauristin are still talking and talking. It’s indeed a strange fate to be a foreigner.
Outside the windows, Helme youths busy themselves playing football between the small apartment houses, oblivious to the struggles of these older neighbors. I brought T. some genoa salami, pecorino romano, artichokes, olives, a loaf of ciabatta, and Saaremaa salted butter. He looks at the food as if it’s a cache of treasure.
“This must have cost you a fortune,” he says. “Where did you get it? Do you usually eat this?” “It only cost me about 15 euros,” I told him. “See,” I tell him. “It pays to have an Italian friend.”
There is hope for T. In a week, he will start rehabilitation at Viljandi Hospital. And this is a man who used to work across the desk from Bill Bryson in London in the ’80s. “If Bryson could only see you now,” I say. “Bryson?” he perks up. “That old chap? Is he still alive?”
Beside the pansionaat are the castle ruins and adjacent to these ruins is a series of sandstone caves. Peasants once hid themselves in these cool dark caves to escape marauding armies, or so they say. Down the hill, there is the so-called Doctor’s Spring, which is said to heal many ailments. Here on its banks I stand for a moment and watch a single small green frog swim across its surface. Other than the bubbling of the water, there is no other sound. If I could bring T. down here, I think, maybe he could be healed. If you just repeat a few phrases and douse yourself in the spring, all can be restored. You need to say the right words the right way.
***
THERE ARE A LOT of stories in the south. Some are pleasant, some are sadder. People down here are living out their lives, passing the time, almost invisible to those in the larger cities and in the north. They are here imagining giraffes drinking from the pristine waters of Lake Tamula or UFO abductions outside of Hargla. They are here eating seljanka in the Helme pansionaat. Once I went to a festival at Õisu Manor, not far from Helme, where there was a dixie jazz band playing. You would have thought we were in New Orleans. Imagine traveling into the Estonian wilds, only to wind up on Bourbon Street. I have a friend who lives in Kalamaja, Tallinn’s premier neighborhood, where lumberjack-looking men with beards push baby strollers to playgrounds with sea views, and where women scurry off to startups in Telliskivi, just like factory workers did a century ago. For them, these tales of the south seem far off, and after a train ride through the forests of the north, they also can feel a world away.
But just the other day I was walking near the beach in Võru when a red-headed young woman came running after me down the street saying, “What are you doing here!” She was wearing a marvelous coat and had on such interesting sunglasses, that it took some time to realize that I knew her from any number of run-ins at Viljandi events. “But what are you doing in Võru?” The red-headed woman said it as if we both happened to be cosmonauts who had crash-landed on the same cold moon. “I’m here often,” I told her. “My daughter lives here.” “Oh, oh,” she said, looking around. “But you know, I have lived my whole life in Estonia and this is the first time I’ve been here,” she said. “The very first time! It’s wonderful,” she paused to wonder at her surroundings. “Here down south, there’s just plenty of excitement and melancholy.”
Quite a few Estonian words appear in this piece. Lõvi is the Estonian word for Lion. Määne, sääne, and õkva are Võru dialect words that mean “which,” “such,” and “straight.” A pansionaat is what Americans would call a nursing home and the British a care home.
THEY TOLD ME that I should marry that girl. They told me that she was rich. She was. She came from a wealthy Greek family. The family house, which might better be described as a manor or compound, overlooked an inlet. Even though we were in Greece it was a gray and cool day there when I went to visit her. There was a storm off somewhere on that horizon, plump purple clouds were drifting across the sky. Thunder rumbled and the wind picked up.
You know what it’s like.
I should never have kissed her and we should never have made love. These were my two easy mistakes. Because I realized after having bedded the Greek woman that she had no intentions of ever letting me leave. The sex, if I can be honest, was not so transcendent. She was beautiful, but that same eeriness hovered above the sheets. “I’ve decided to invite my entire family over,” the woman said. “To celebrate our engagement!” “What engagement?” I said.
With the aunts and uncles and assorted cousins gathering in the kitchen getting ready to carve up a lamb, I made for my exit. I went to one door, only to find it locked tight, and then climbed a staircase where I entered another room. All of the rooms were painted white, in the Mediterranean fashion, and corridors only led to other corridors. The deeper I ventured into this house, the more lost I became. At some point, I noticed a door open and saw lovely Celeste crossing the hallway with her husband and children, oblivious to my very existence. I pushed on ahead down another corridor, climbed another set of stairs. I saw bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms, and libraries. I saw windows that looked out on a disinterested, sad sea.
The thing is this: I never found my way out of that Greek house. As far as I know I’m still there.
WHAT CAME before or after, I cannot say, only that the SUV pulled up to the parking payment kiosk and it was expected that I would get out and pay. This was the kiosk just outside the doors to the Rahva Raamat bookstore in Tartu’s Tasku shopping center. It was a sunny day, as much as I could see from the light beyond the second floor of the parking garage, but whether it was spring, summer, or fall, I had no idea. It was about midday. But how did I even get here?
The SUV was being driven by a woman. She was shorter in stature and had an airy, almost amorphous quality to her. I could only catch glimpses of her, even though she was sitting right next to me, a strand of brown hair, the slope of a chin. She was wearing a gray outfit, loose pants, a loose shirt. Her shirt was open at the top and restrained her bust from sliding out. Her skin had a smooth, cocoa-colored quality and texture. But she was an Estonian. A bronzed one.
Somehow she had managed to get tan by 2 June.
“If you’re going to stare at me like that,” she said, “you might as well just …” I didn’t hear any of the rest. But while we were kissing there, in that parking garage, with the car door still open, I knew that I was in trouble. Big trouble. That kiss was going to mean something. She was going to capitalize on that kiss. But it was a good parking garage kiss, a tasty, sensual, satisfying one. The kind you remember for years to come.
MY YOUNGEST sent me a message. She wanted to meet me in the city. The city here being the City of New York, Manhattan, or however else you’d like to refer to it. She was barely a teenager and who knows what she was up to. I imagine it was quite a steamy jungle with all its open fire hydrants, pickpockets, uncollected trash piles, and Chinatown markets. I drove to the nearest train station, which, for whatever reason, was Freeport, Bellmore, Merrick. One of those. I parked the car and from the parking lot I could see the new Long Island Rail Road trains, which happened to look a lot like a Finnair fuselage. Or maybe Finnair and the LIRR had come to some special deal. The blue F of the Finnair logo was painted on the train exterior.
Inside, I discovered rows of Finnish passengers including my old friend Lasse. He was a good-natured older man, with dark, graying hair. He was seated there sipping on blueberry juice and paging through the day’s Helsingin Sanomat. I took a seat next to him and the train “took off,” rising into the air just like an airplane, only to “land” at the next station. “I don’t understand,” I told Lasse. “Is this a plane or a train?” Lasse grinned at me over the paper and said, “both!”
The train-plane though was heading in the wrong direction. I was supposed to be on my way to meet up with my teenage daughter in Manhattan, but the following stops were Bay Shore and, later, East Hampton. I disembarked the train and found a Finnair stewardess on the East Hampton station platform. “I’m supposed meet my daughter in the city,” I said. “Why are we in East Hampton?” The Finnair stewardess, a short, plump, blonde lady in the airline’s trademark blue outfit, said, “But this is a Montauk-bound joint Finnair-Long Island Rail Road service. You’ll have to wait for the westbound train to take you all the way to Pennsylvania Station.”
The East Hampton train station was enormous, cavernous, with escalators going every which way. The walls were made of thick blocks of red brick. One part of it had been fashioned for skateboarders, a little skate course, optimized for elevated tricks. As I clambered down the embankment to make my way over to the opposite track, I noticed that the grass was a little different here. It was golden, spongey. I was stepping on hand-sized potato chips, but soft ones, like those chewy chocolate chip cookies. I picked a few of these strange chewy potato chips and made my way over to the westbound track, munching on them all along the way.
THE CLOUD COVER above the gulf was dense, cottony. The plane continued its path south. The orange sun, a stripe in the west, extended its rays towards its eastern origin point, but a cool dusk was setting in. Below the clouds, I could see pinpricks of light, crackling red and yellow bursts, which I took to be fireworks or strikes of lightning. Then the captain told us to fasten our seatbelts because we were going to have to make an immediate emergency landing.
I made sure my daughters’ safety belts were buckled in place. As the plane dipped below the clouds, I could see the red tiled roofs of the Latvian capital. We were going to land on one of those long streets that carve up the city centrs, maybe Krišjāņa Valdemāra iela or Brīvības iela. Somehow the captain landed the aircraft softly, pleasantly. Through the windows I could see that truck traffic had stopped moving. Latvians in gray uniforms were positioning anti-drone and missile batteries to fend off incoming attacks. They were not entirely successful. Ambulatory crews carried stretchers of bloody civilians across the street. Several buildings were on fire. Another drone came floating in and the gray-uniformed Latvians neutralized it.
War. We were at war. The Russians had decided to do to Latvia what they had done to Ukraine. And it had started while I was up in the air. Who knew what was Estonia’s fate. A gray-suited Latvian with a golden mustache led me and other other passengers to a point of safety somewhere in the Old Town. I never knew what to make of these Latvians. They seemed like another breed all together. I suppose that if one mated an Estonian with a Frenchman, he might get a Latvian, but only after several attempts. But they took good care of us in Rīga. What surprised me was how matter-of-factly we took it all, as if it was an electrical storm. My children seemed nonplussed about the war. The youngest yawned and curled up in a blanket.
KLAUDIA AND I went walking along the docks. She stopped into small portside store, but complained about not having any money. She wasn’t in any kind of positive mood and she only had 50 cents to her name. “What am I supposed to buy with 50 cents?” Klaudia said. “Half a candy bar? A bite of a sandwich?” Quickly, I removed my laptop from its case and logged into my bank account with my personal ID card. The transfer happened effortlessly, instantaneously. “You have received €1.50 from so-and-so …” That’s what her notification must have read. It wasn’t an unserious sum of money. With €1.50 one might get a bowl of soup. At least the kind that you make in a cup in the microwave at a harbor convenience store.
We walked on through town. Klaudia was wearing a dark, puffy jacket. Her blonde, lion’s mane of hair was quite moist in the seaside drizzle. It was a maritime kind of place. Boats arriving, boats launching, the smell of chopped up bait and the whiff of luxury yacht interiors. We walked up a hill to an old house and went in. It was a well-preserved, Soviet-style habitation, though the wallpaper was slowly peeling from the walls. Old smelling furniture, old smelling bookcases. A woman sat on a couch watching TV. She was watching Wallace and Gromit.
“See,” I told Klaudia. “This is how people live outside of Tallinn.” “I know how people live outside of Tallinn, there are plenty of places like this in Tallinn anyway,” she said. “You’re right, you’re right,” I said. The old woman had dyed red hair that was white at the roots. She offered us a glass plate full of cookies. “Come and watch TV with me,” she said. “I do get lonely.” There we sat, watching Wallace and Gromit. The couch was comfortable. The film was entertaining. It made Klaudia laugh.
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.
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 lass with silver hoop earrings. Her eyes are as blue as the sky and her hair is pulled back. Such Swedish playground baristas are the last respite of the recently divorced father.
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 seismic 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 sentences 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 cornrows 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 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?”
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 call 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.
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 VasaMuseet, 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, to 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 light projects dancing rainbows 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 set sail on a gray day to face our decisions and memories.
More or less directly transcribed from a notebook I kept in the summer of 2017.
north! 