princess

I DON’T REMEMBER how I met the Princess. I do remember that I was in Italy, just outside of Corigliano, on my way to the Sila, when I stopped into a gas station and was nearly seduced by another woman, whose nerves I calmed in Italian. After that, I stole a candy bar from the gas station and was on my way. Later, I heard a lot about the candy bar, but at the time, I was just trying to outdo my scofflaw friends, who had never bought a train ticket in their lives. When I calmed the Italian woman, I told her she was beautiful, of course, that most men were in love with her, but for various reasons why I could not accompany her on the next part of her trip.

Then I went back to the apartment we had rented on the coast and I think that’s where I met the Princess and her entourage. She was undoubtedly the Princess of Wales, but not that Princess of Wales. She looked almost identical to Annikki, except she spoke the Queen’s, or King’s English, and had incredible, royal posture. Her hair was golden and almost alien to the touch, her skin was milky colored, smooth and flawless. The group captain assigned to protect her carried out a very thorough interview with me. This was a younger lad who could have been an ex-quidditch player. Somehow I passed the test. The night was spent watching romantic comedies on a fine couch and sharing bites of cookies. I think the Princess liked me.

And then she was off again, with her dresses and entourage, to complete her tour. Eventually, when I returned home, I heard about two things. One was the deep shame my family felt upon hearing about the candy bar stolen from a gas station in Italy (“And you know, they have it all on video! The owner is so disappointed in you, a fellow Italian stealing!”) but also the elation that their son had finally met a new woman and that she happened to be the Princess of Wales.

“Is it true that she really likes you?” my mother asked. “Yeah, we get on great,” I said. I somehow wasn’t quite sure what all the fuss was about. She was just a princess. “You know,” my father said after a turn. He was standing there dressed in sober black, my consigliere. “This could be good for you. Have you thought about asking her for a royal appointment?” I shook my head vehemently. “You know, I knew you were going to do this,” I said. My father stepped back, as if struck by a dart. “Do what? All I am saying is, she happens to be a princess, you happen to need a job. She likes you. She happens to be in a place where she could get you a gig with a high-paying salary.” “I might have met the new love of my life and all you can think about is how I can benefit financially from it?” I said. “No, no, just listen a minute,” he said. “Don’t forget, you were so desperate you stole a candy bar!” “Oh, I’ll send Mario a whole box of goddamn candy bars!” I shot back. “Same old shit,” I said. “Same old snaky manipulative shit!”

After I left the room, I could hear them argue about who had done what wrong. My mother blamed my father. My father said he was only trying to help. My brother was there in the corridor with a package, wrapped up in plain brown paper and tied with a ribbon. He was standing there patiently in a jacket and tie, like the doorman at a Manhattan hotel. “I thought I’d get you this for your birthday,” he said, then gesturing with his head, “Don’t listen to them. They don’t know anything about princesses.”

I removed the paper and saw what it was, a new Jack Kerouac book. Discovered in the vault of an old mobster, published for the very first time. There were pictures of Jack on the cover seated at a typewriter, or standing somewhere in the desert beside a cactus. The cover and the paper were smooth to the touch and they aroused a kind of tingling curiosity within me. Good old Jack. “I knew you’d like it,” my brother said. “Thanks,” I said. “Now this is a good gift.”

boston

THE MAIN SQUARE of Boston had a large, palatial Edwardian-style home at its center, something like the famous painted ladies in San Francisco. This was surrounded by a number of large oaks, from which dangled ribbons and wooden swings, probably put there by the mayor and his many unruly children. I had boarded the T across the river in Charlestown and saw the city as the train passed over the Charles River. Esmeralda was sitting in the train that September morning, along with some other young woman from the Academy. Esmeralda Kask, whose Estonian parents had named her after a character in a Venezuelan soap opera, was wearing a corduroy jacket. Her potato brown hair was pulled back, so that her eyes could only better reflect the blue from the sky and river and the white from the clouds over the bay.

She was sitting there listening to the stories of some stylish Japanese man, laughing at every motion of his body or every hint of a joke. He was maybe 30 years old, his dark hair was cut almost like John Lennon’s on the cover of A Hard Day’s Night. Probably an artist, I thought. Or a bioinformatician. Esmeralda’s gems of eyes did not stray from the handsome Japanese. I walked by her, changing my seat, with the hope she might take notice of my existence. There I sat in the middle of the train, the part that turns, where the seats are less comfortable, listening to the hum of their conversation. Each mirthful laugh of hers only hurt me more.

At the center of Boston, by the Edwardian mayor’s residence, we all disembarked. I suppose we were near Beacon Hill, or an associated hill. Copp’s Hill? Was there a Faneuil Hill nestled in those bumpy streets somewhere? Esmeralda and her friend disappeared into the crowds, I could see her put her headphones on as she sauntered away, hands in her pockets. The handsome Japanese walked toward the business district. Then I saw him take out his phone and talk to someone, but then grow outraged, shouting, “Five minutes late? Nobody told me!” This was followed by rapid-fire bursts of obscenities, until he threw himself on the ground and his body exploded in a puff of white smoke and crackling fire. People began running after that.

“Come quick,” a woman of Boston said, motioning to me. She was dressed up like a British postal worker from the time of the Second World War, and had her blonde hair tied back in a thick, golden braid. “He seems to have spontaneously combusted!” she said. “Run! Others might start to combust! It could cause a chain reaction!” The British postal worker easily outpaced me as I ran up the hill, passing by a familiar bookstore, one I had visited every time.

My pace slowed though as I reached the edge of the square, even though we were all engulfed in a gray haze. I wondered why I just couldn’t be bothered to run away from things anymore. There was no immediacy to my flight. Maybe I didn’t care if I would be spontaneously combusted that day? If it didn’t happen on that day, it could have happened on any other. All I could think about was Esmeralda Kask and how she had ignored me. Why did she do that?

My running slowed to a half-hearted jog.

Down a street, I went into a building, climbed up a flight of old stairs. This happened to be the studio of a popular area radio station. At once, I was led to a desk where the disc jockey sat opposite me, asking me about the blast, what I had seen, what I had heard. I told him about the train over the Charles River, my encounter with Esmeralda Kask, her affinity for the handsome Japanese. “It seems he had some kind of meltdown because he was late,” I told the man. “And it caused him to spontaneously combust.” I stared out the window behind him, I could see the rooftops of Boston and the smoke rising up in its old-timey streets. Had I caused all of that?

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.

the adventure of the swedish pastries

ON THE SHIP TO MUHU, with my daughter and parents, I was surprised to discover my friend Anton was also on board, and that he had a special need to be delivered to the nature preserve at the head of the Sõrve peninsula, an expansive strip of island land that dangled suggestively down toward the Gulf of Riga. It was already night when the ship docked in Kuivastu Harbor and the bus began to roll across Muhu and then the causeway to Saaremaa.

By the time we got to the hotel in Kuressaare, it was bedtime, for sure, but the hotel was jumping, with a restaurant up front, as well as blackjack tables and slot machines. My parents retired to their room, and I left my daughter in ours, and then went searching for Anton so I could take him to Sõrve. Anton himself had disappeared upon disembarking. Where was he? I sent him some messages, but he only sent back photos of himself and friends tearing up various nightclubs in Kuressaare. There was even a shot of a mounted police officer trying to rein in the island pub crawl chaos. This guy wanted a free ride? But a promise was a promise.

I went down a series of long hallways that seemed to stretch on forever. Well-lit, wood-paneled corridors, no doubt created by some Nordic design firm. I kept walking and soon I was near Mändjala Beach. Such long passageways, I thought. How was it even possible? At the end of the final hallway, I saw there was a sauna and swimming complex outside, and old ladies were relaxing in the warm bubbles of a hot tub. Inside there was a breakfast buffet set out with the most delicious looking choux pastries, topped with lingonberry-flavored cream. Inside the breakfast area, some old Scandinavian couples had fallen asleep at the dining tables. I helped myself to four or five of these special pastries and turned back while a DJ was setting up.

As I returned to the entrance of the hotel, with no word from Anton, who was probably sleeping in the drunk tank at the Saaremaa police station, I encountered the maître d’hôtel, an older gentleman with gray hair and a fine mustache, who informed me that I now owed the hotel a pretty sum for the pastries. “You had five umeå-brests,” he said. “That will cost you €25 at the very least.” “But I have stayed here many times before,” I told the maître d’hôtel. “As far as I recall, the umeå-brest pastries were always free.” “Times have changed in Estonia,” said the maître d’hôtel. “We now charge for almond milk, honey. Umeå-brests are certainly no longer free.” No, nothing was complimentary anymore in this odd nation. With a heavy heart, but a belly full of brests, I retired to my hotel room at last. Sõrve was not in the cards. Who knew what had become of Anton. And besides, it just then occurred to me, I didn’t even have a car.