fish coffins

BY THE SECOND WINTER, I already had a good stack of wood in my barn. It was birch wood and it kept us warm. Sometimes the kids in the neighboring yard would kick a ball over the rooftops. Without a word I would toss it back over and they would continue playing.

This was all part of Viljandi’s shanty life, footballs landing without notice, strange boys knocking at the door. One day a few boys even showed up in the snow. “Has anyone seen Benny?” one asked. “He owes us some money.”

“What do you mean, ‘owes you money’?” I said.

“We bought him ice cream and he promised to pay us back.”

“Well, he’s not here. You’ll have to find him somewhere else.”

Benny was the Swedish Chef’s son. Just eight or nine years old. He was already in ice cream debt.

That second winter, I moved into a larger apartment across the hall. The Chef came to live in the small apartment. It became his base, temporary residence for the next few months while he did side gigs in Norway — two weeks on, two weeks off. A spontaneous little commune bloomed up though, between me and my daughter, him and his three kids, and Musi, his girlfriend, and her son, who also stayed sometimes. All together there were five kids and three adults spread across two apartments. The children would race back and forth, doors slamming. There was howling, laughing, arguments, crying, things were thrown, there was anarchy, chaos and then the Chef made soup or porridge and they all ate.

Sometimes the Chef and Musi would come into my bedroom to check on me. I would be in bed trying to sleep. “Are you sleeping?” they would ask looking down at me in my bed. “It’s midnight,” I would say back. “Yes, but we just made some lentil soup.”

During the day, they built snowmen outside and my youngest came too. Now there were six children. On one hand, I enjoyed the company. On the other hand I never knew who might show up. Once I took a shower and forgot my towel. But Musi just happened to arrive at that moment. I asked her for one and she passed one between a crack in the door.

Having so many people around was really helpful. Clothing was mixed, socks exchanged. There was even a green dress in the laundry. No one knew where it came from. A hamster came to us too — Martinus — and he joined the commune. Then there were the two fish, Tsunami and Tornado. These we had bought off Epp’s old friend in Saaremaa. They were as adored and worshipped as any other creature. In the mornings, I would open the curtains so that they could watch the people in Posti Street. In my mind, it was entirely conceivable that they would live forever.

Tsunami and Tornado, swimming in circles, watching the street.

When we left for Italy, I left them in the care of the Chef and his children. They heated the apartment periodically with the wood from the barn, but one day before we were set to return the temperature slipped to -25.

That was the day the fish stopped swimming.

When we found them there, like that, suspended in cold water, upon arriving back from our trip, my daughter cried the cries of someone in deep emotional anguish. I took two matchboxes and made small coffins for them. Tornado, the blue fish, went into the red matchbox. Tsunami, the red fish, had a yellow matchbox coffin.

“Why don’t you just flush them down the toilet?” asked the Chef as I put their tiny fish corpses into these makeshift fish coffins.

“We have to wait to bury them in the spring,” I said.

“You could just cremate them,” he offered. He had apologized for their cold-water deaths, but wouldn’t be losing much sleep over them. This was a man who gutted salmon and carved up crabs for a living. Dead fish were a part of life.

“They deserve a proper funeral,” I told him. “They were family.”

I kept the fish coffins in the freezer. It became my tiny makeshift morgue for dead fish. Then one day, I opened the freezer to discover the coffins weren’t there anymore. When I saw the Chef, I was furious.

“What did you do to the fish? I know you did something!”

“What do you mean? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You flushed them down the toilet, didn’t you! Or burned them.”

“Never happened.”

“I saw your eyes. You think I’m crazy. You think I am crazy for wanting to bury the fish. You don’t think that they deserve a proper burial!”

“But you are crazy. You’ve completely lost your mind, man.”

“I am not crazy!” I said. Or was I? That winter, with all those people around, with that constant low temperature, I had started to doubt my sanity. Maybe the fish had simply combusted or dematerialized? Or maybe the fish god had taken their souls? Viljandi was a very weird place, and in such very weird places, very weird things like that just might happen.

It was months later that I discovered the two little coffins, packed neatly into the ice in the back of the freezer. They had fallen behind some frozen pelmeenid. They looked like the graves of British explorers left behind in the Arctic wastes, only to be discovered by some later expedition. I took them out to the yard, dug a small hole for them beneath that crooked old tree, and set them to rest there for all eternity.

Written in 2018-19/Revised March 2025

sand street beach

I SWAM OUT to the end of the bay, to where it connects with the sound, just off the point. The water was darker and deeper here and the current was just too strong. Turning back was hopeless, so I let the water carry me all the way around the point to Sand Street Beach. Remember Sand Street Beach? Wasn’t there even a little shelter there, at least in the old days? Maybe it’s still there, with the names of aspiring lovers carved into its sturdy wooden walls.

Joanie loves Chachi.

It was there there that I emerged, dripping salt water and sand. It wasn’t such a long walk home, but a storm was setting in, and the air was thick with thunder and that ominous grayblue feeling. The wind picked up and danced with the cedar branches and I began the hike. Sand Street connected to Christian Avenue. Christian Avenue intersected with Quaker Path. I had this feeling all along that a hundred eyeballs were watching me through the windows of white clapboard houses that had once belonged to dead whaling ship captains.

a bus full of books

I HAD TO GO TO PORTUGAL to pick up some books. The address was somewhere between Porto and Povoa de Varzim. It was a seaside street, ruled by proud white castles of houses. Matteo, of all people, answered the door and we shook hands. Then someone else, another Milanese writer, told me I should relocate to Portugal and that the beach here was “just full of people like us,” in other words other Italians. But I had to drive back to Estonia, I told them. Business demanded it.

On the other side of the street there was a canal, and some local yogis were filling it up with birthday cake. Channels of cake, cream, different kinds of colorful toppings, so that it almost resembled a floating chocolate garden. They were hanging decorations above the canal, too, in preparation for a major street festival. But I was expected back in Tallinn within days with a shipment of books, and so set out shortly after toward Madrid. When I got to Barcelona, I parked my car and went for a walk. On one back street, I passed an aerobics class in session. I could see Linnéa inside stretching. “You can stay and watch me,” she mouthed to me through the glass. “I don’t mind at all.” As she stretched, I caught sight of her undergarments. There was just something about the pattern of the lace on her skin, the way her golden braids dangled down her back. I decided to curl up right there, outside the window glass, and sit beside her as she stretched.

Later, a door opened and I watched Linnéa and the others file out of the class. A Catalan nurse had come to administer fresh COVID-19 booster shots. I remained at a distance, though I could see the tiny glass vials of the Pfizer vaccine piling up. I didn’t want anyone to know of my secret affection for Linnéa. An old colleague happened to turn up and we started to talk about people we had known from our days in New York. Good old Jankauskas! I told him about the bus full of books and the long ride in from Portugal. Jankauskas asked me the books and I told him all about them. You should have seen his eyes as I relayed their plot twists and turns, their heroes and villains. Jankauskas said it sounded like a lot of good reads.