die frau aus estland

WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR, it was just there, a fat letter full of yellowed pages lying in the corridor, written over in thick, black cursive. Her letter. Where had she even been? She had invited me to a party, which was to be held at an old farm out in the country. The roof of the house was thatched with reeds. When I arrived, I noticed that the gate to the yard was uneven.

I stooped down and began to run my fingers through the black earth. I found a hand shovel and began to dig. I pulled up all kinds of curiosities, silver brooches, spoons, plates, and coins. Some were from the Viking age, others from the rule of Queen Christina. I set these finds alongside the gate, padded the dirt back into place. To think of how long these items had slept.

Later, she turned up. She was wearing a white dress with a lace corset. Her chestnut curls were styled in an elegant coiffure. “I’ve seen all of your movies,” I gushed. She just watched me with big saucers of blue eyes. “I’m not really the greatest actress,” she said. “But here I am. Things do happen in life.” The young woman had appeared in several films in the German-speaking countries. The Germans, Austrians and Swiss all knew about die Frau aus Estland, and she had legions of lonely, middle-aged male fans. Certainly, some women fantasized about her.

Around the swimming pool, a hip hop concert began. Mike D was there. He began to rap the words to “Body Movin’.” There was something soothing about those old words. I knew them all, I began to sing along. All this time, die Frau aus Estland stood beside me, watching me with a kind of fascinated silence. She looked like an aristocrat from Versailles. The last time I had seen her had been at the Coldplay concert in the winter, when she offered me solace from hijinks and insanity. That was the day I met Keith Moon. She reached out and touched my arm with her finger. “I’m always here, you know,” said die Frau aus Estland. “I’ve always been here.”

new wedding

THEY TOLD ME there would be a new wedding, a second wedding, a church wedding. It would be held at some old mission in San Francisco. All of my relatives would be flying in. The caterers had been paid; the hotels had been booked. It was all set. This time, everything would be different. A second wedding. I just had to stand there. Look nice. That’s what they said.

My mother arranged it. I was to remarry my ex-wife. There was a glitch though because, as far as I knew, we hadn’t reconciled. And I didn’t particularly feel like being married to anyone. The desire just wasn’t there. I could appreciate the moneymaking opportunities provided by a good wedding, of course. All of those fat checks. There was a financial upshot to these things. But the downside? The whole thing troubled me. “But you have to get married again,” my mother said. She was a big Italian woman. “All of your cousins will be there. They have been waiting.”

I didn’t even know where my ex-wife was during this time. It took some asking around, but eventually I found her living in a hostel somewhere on Van Ness. She was sleeping on the top bunk of a set of bunkbeds. She laughed and said, “I couldn’t care less either way.” That settled it, there would be no wedding. An old blues musician had been hired to play a few sets during the event. I met him outside the mission, borrowed his guitar. I played it there for a while. He said he had been given the guitar by Slim Holmes himself. He showed me new techniques, chord progressions. It was nice. “Hey there, kid,” the old bluesman said. “You play pretty good.”

motown

THE AUDITORIUM hadn’t changed. The murals of the indigenous hunter-gatherers were still on the walls, paintings of the early colonists cutting ice from the bay. It was a school concert. For many years of my life, the seasons had been measured in school concerts. Christmas songs at Christmas, songs of springtime in spring. Musicals, Broadway, pop songs. Do you remember when we sang “Penny Lane”? And how Mr. Asunción played the stirring solo on his trumpet?

The auditorium was full of teenagers in white shirts. It was a Motown retrospective. They were doing “Dancing in the Streets” as they came down the aisles. I knew that the back of the auditorium connected to a secret hallway that led to the music classroom. I followed the singers down the aisle and disappeared into the darkness behind the sleepy American flag.

The secret hallway also hadn’t changed. It was full of boxes of equipment that were used for theatre arts productions. Costumes, scenic designs. We had once stood here, silently sweating in our concert clothes, waiting for the cue to go out on stage. There was a cool air in the hallway, I could hear them all singing. It was “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations.

And then I saw them. Two silver metal towers, modeled on the one in France. They had been used and reused in any number of plays. I took both of them with me, one under each arm. Somehow, I was able to carry both out the door into the school yard. I was able to get them by the crowds of applauding parents. In front of the school, I saw Brynhild’s dog first, then she came walking after him. She looked as she usually did, white, freckly, grotesque. She said, “Well, hello there. How does it feel to be a thief? Don’t you feel any shame?” She laughed when she said it. Brynhild’s weary laugh. She lay in the grass and toyed with some flowers, touching them. She was completely out of context here. The thing is that I didn’t feel ashamed at all. Theft came quite naturally to me. It was as if the old silver towers had always belonged to me.

stowaway

ON THE WAY HOME, I wound up as a stowaway, riding in the back of an old-fashioned mail bus. It had been recently refurbished, and the interior smelled of fresh pine. Crates of letters were stacked up on both sides of the coach. I knew that if I followed the north coast road, I would eventually make it home, but at some point, the road changed. It was generic and unfamiliar, and the forest here was so dense and green that I lost my bearings entirely.

There was also water on both sides of the road now, which made no sense. The south coast was a good 20 miles away. The mail bus rolled to a stop, and a wooden ladder descended mechanically from the back. Into the storage area walked the postman, wearing a striped jacket and a straw hat, as if he had just stepped out of 1910. “Another stowaway, huh?” he said.

The postman wasn’t angry. He fetched a few envelopes and went to stuff some mailboxes. “But where are we?” I asked him. “I thought this was Long Island.” The postman’s eyes narrowed. “You, good sir, are in the most exclusive part of Long Island. Pristine, undeveloped, inhabited by only the oldest, wealthiest families. It’s so off limits that it’s never appeared on any map.”

The postman went on. “See that, over there? That’s Fresh Pond. Most people think that’s the north shore. But out here, there’s this strip of unspoiled land, a grant to the settlers of these parts by His Majesty Charles II.” I stuck my head out of the mail bus and looked around. I saw no homes anywhere, just old-growth forest teeming with wildlife. The air here was so fresh it hurt just to breathe it. How could it be that there was a part of the island I had never seen?

“If it’s so exclusive, how do I get anywhere from here?” I asked. “I don’t think my parents know how to get here.” “Where are you going?” he asked. I told him the name of the town. “No worries,” he said, returning to the front of the bus. “I’ll drop you at the old post office. You’ll have to find your way home from there. And you can never tell anyone that you saw this place.”

ezra gold

I WAS SITTING in a brightly lit cafe somewhere in a northern city when Ezra Gold walked in. In a room full of laconic blondes, he was refreshingly Jewish. Dark hair, one of those ancient philosophical faces that always looks like it’s posing a penetrating question, when in reality, he was probably just looking for some decent coffee, maybe a scoop of ice cream. Ezra looked mostly the same. But he had acquired some wealth. He was dressed in some high-end red-pink zoot suit. He had a joyful countenance. He said, “Hey there, buddy. Good to see you!”

He had two daughters with him, both around 10 years old. They held on to his tailored pant legs; he ordered them both some ice cream. Before he left, he invited me to visit him in America. “You should come back to America, man,” said Ezra Gold. And like that, he was gone.

I hadn’t seen Ezra since we had lived on the same floor in college. I had maintained no contact with him. He was a ghost from the past, but a welcome one. I took him up on his offer, and soon I was hiking down a dirt road somewhere along the mid-Atlantic. The roads curved up into the mountains, the foothills of the Appalachians, and there was a rocky peninsula, surrounded by blue water. Here some tired fishermen sat, tossing their lines into the waters, watching them dance. “Do you know where Ezra Gold lives?” I asked one of them. He was a lonely old hobo type with a few gold teeth, and he pointed toward those hills over yonder.

I kept walking into the hills. It was autumn now; delicious golden leaves blanketed the landscape. Dug into the hills, I could see the brick bones of an old factory, its chimneys still intact, its roof and workers long gone. Eventually I came to a small town and found the building I had been searching for, a kind of orange cream-colored tall apartment tower.

This was where Ezra Gold lived.

“Hey, buddy, glad you made it,” he said, welcoming me in. “Can I get you anything?” He went to the kitchenette and made two coffees. I looked around his home. In the other room, I could see his daughters stretched out on a couch, both absorbed in the glow of the internet. There were piles of clothes on the floor, his bed looked as if it hadn’t been made in weeks. A blue-gray light filled the room with melancholy. That’s when I realized that Ezra Gold’s wife had also left him. He had been deserted, marooned, jettisoned, discarded, abandoned. But he set out two cups on the table as if nothing was amiss. “So,” said Ezra. “What have you been up to?”

the klimt robbery

LINDA AND HER HUSBAND stole Gustav Klimt’s paintings from an exhibition in Helsinki. They decided they would show the Austrian symbolist painter’s artwork to the public, but only at extortionate fees. Just one viewing of one Gustav Klimt painting would cost around €10,000.

“But that’s not fair,” I told Linda. “Gustav Klimt’s work should be freely available to the public. Every man, woman, and child deserves to see The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for free, if not for a small, but meaningful donation to a museum. It’s the only right thing to do.”

Linda was not listening. “We stole the Klimt paintings to enrich ourselves,” she said. “Besides, they are such masterworks that the public should be willing to pay their entire life savings just to appreciate Klimt’s golden phase for a few moments. If you want gold, you should pay gold.”

I tried to find Linda’s husband, an engineer named Roger, to convince him of this art theft travesty, but he was too busy moving the Klimt paintings from their getaway van into a secret warehouse. They were long past middle age. Wasn’t Linda 60? Her hair was still light brown, with streaks of gray, and she was in incredible shape. I threatened to report her to the police.

“You will do no such thing,” she said. Then, with an unbuttoning of a button and the unzipping of a zipper, she became quite persuasive. “You will not turn us over to the police for stealing Gustav Klimt’s paintings,” Linda said while licking me. “And I won’t stop licking you until you change your mind. Oh, you are yummy,” she said, looking up. “Oh,” I said. “You might be right.”

manhattan

TO BE AT THE TOP of a shiny skyscraper, enclosed in metal and glass, is to experience a kind of disorientation. Maybe you are on the 11th or the 26th floor, but really, you are standing on air, walking on air, surrounded by a concrete box of walled-in oxygen. There was a party for all the program members in this Manhattan honeycomb, it took place in a modern room with a single long table. There was champagne, and champagne glasses, and Dr. Henry Kissinger was there. His bush of gray-black hair looked fine enough. He kept trying to talk to me about China. “Strange,” I told Dr. Kissinger. “I thought you were dead.” He said, in his thick accent, “Did you really think I was capable of death?”

There were a lot of beauties from the program there, in extravagant dresses. One woman stood on stage, handing out awards. A guitar appeared on the table; I was surprised I hadn’t seen it there before. It was a Fender Nocaster model, encased in silver trim. I picked up the guitar and began to pluck out a tune on its metallic strings, but when I did, it slipped from my hands and fell on the floor. When I picked it up, I noticed the headstock was gone, and foam was emerging from the top. Kissinger was there at once. He held the glass to the broken neck, and soon it was full of bubbly. “Didn’t you know that all guitars are full of champagne?” he said.

More people kept coming to the party and it was getting late, so I decided to leave. I took the elevator down. I knew I would have to make the last Long Island Railroad train to Port Jefferson. Or would my father really have to come and pick me up in Ronkonkoma? I tried to open up the schedule on my phone, but the page wouldn’t refresh. To make matters worse, when I got downstairs, I realized I had left my shoes at the party. I exited the elevator, looked over at the doorman, and asked him if I could go back up. “Do you have a pass?” he said. “Any form of identification?” “I just came out of the damn elevator,” I said. “Obviously, I’m allowed to be in the building!” The doorman looked puzzled. He knew not what to do. But procedure!

“Fine, sir,” he grumbled, “but only this one time.”

When I retrieved my shoes, I saw that Dr. Kissinger was still inside, charming young women. Then I rode the elevator down again. Outside, the Manhattan sky was a smoggy white. How odd that there were white nights in New York too? And at such a late hour. The streets were full of people in dark coats. Cars honked their way down the avenue. But when was the last train home now? Or was there a Port Authority LuxExpress to Tartu? Impossible. My phone said the next train was at 3:28 am. That was a long time to wait. I decided to call my daughter, to see if I could stay there. “But dad,” she said, “we don’t have any place for you to sleep. We’d have to pile up clothes on the floor to make you a mattress.” “That sounds fine to me,” I told her. The only problem was that I had no idea where she lived in this urban jungle. Then my phone died.

There I stood, in the streets of New York, surrounded by strangers. I considered for a moment that if there was anyone who could help me, it was Dr. Kissinger. He was older than time. He was undead. I began walking back to the building. Certainly, Dr. Kissinger would still be there. Did he ever miss a party?

a proper christian burial

ONE DAY, KAROLA told me the following story. When she was 19 years old, she became pregnant. The father was a jobu, in her words, a jerk, and a university mentor who was 25 years her senior. He had received various accolades, orders, and stars, and had seeded the earth with his progeny. He disappeared when he learned of Karola’s pregnancy and never returned her calls. She carried the baby to term but, not knowing what to do with it or herself, one night she suffocated the child with a pillow. An act of desperation. She sobbed while she did it.

“But it was such a beautiful child, you should have seen him, so pink and lovely,” she told me. Karola couldn’t part with her dead child. So she kept him hidden away in the closet, so that nobody but her could see him. She would take him out sometimes and hold him. He still looked quite the same, like a little baby doll. She had never told anyone about the child before. She shared with me her darkest, most disturbing secret.

The beautiful pink dead child. She let me hold him in my arms. It was then that I told her that the child deserved a proper Christian burial. “You can’t just keep him locked up in the closet for all eternity,” I told Karola. We put the baby in a box, buried him at the foot of a tall pine tree. Karola wore white. I read some psalms I had selected for the occasion. Then it was done. The baby was returned to the earth. Soon it would mulch. There wouldn’t be a trace of him.

But my mother saw us from the window. “What were you doing with that strange girl in the forest that day?” she wanted to know. “Tell me what was in the box.” It was such a terrible feeling, that I had to pretend it had all been a dream. “You were dreaming,” I told her. “There is no girl and there is no box.” Of course, there had been. I kept staring at that tree, wondering about Karola’s baby. I felt like an accessory, but I hadn’t killed him. I arranged a proper funeral. I hoped he was sleeping well there in the ground.

grand opening

SHE CAME TO the grand opening of the spa hotel. This was a glamorous event and many years in the making. It was catered by the finest cafes and confectioners in town, and there were long tables full of food and drink, with local and national politicians elbowing their way to the kool-aid, while the rest of us tried to make sense of the architecture. They said there were 300 rooms in these futuristic cylinders. It was designed to be a convention magnet. One can imagine the various agencies and associations that, after spending years on the same circuit, would warm to the idea of a waterfront getaway in this one-and-only middle of nowhere.

She was also there with one of her girlfriends. She was visibly with child, though not yet full term, and she told me that I was the father. I quickly accepted my fate, began to talk to her about future plans. She was a shapely young woman with brown hair, common features. I think she worked at Swedbank. “I don’t have much money,” I told her, “But I’m sure we can manage.”

She was grateful, of course, that I intended to play a real role in our child’s life. But as I socialized in the gray light of the spa hotel, something began to bother me. Because as willing as I was to accept responsibility for her child, I couldn’t remember ever being with her. When had that happened? There were so many women. They were half the world, if not more. It was hard to keep track of them all. Surely I might remember a few fleeting seconds of lovemaking.

“Don’t you remember last year,” a friend reminded me at the reception. “When you went on a spree?” Ah, yes, the glorious spree. Truth be told, it had never really ended. Still, how could it be that I was about to become a father, but I couldn’t remember the woman? At the food tables, I saw her again. I said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I am not sure if I am the father of your child. I don’t even know your name or who you are.” “My name is Reet,” she said while rubbing her hands over her protruding belly. “But you are definitely the father. There can be no other.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. That “no, I’m not” didn’t seem to move the needle. If she said I was, maybe I was. I couldn’t remember everything. Not knowing what to do, I went to the upper level, where there was a panoramic view of the sea. It was blue and wide, so close you could almost touch its whitecaps. That great heavy sea, the way it sloshed about, washing time and worry away. I glanced down the coast and could see a young couple walking along the water’s edge, with two or three children. They were all wearing sunglasses and striped t-shirts. I could hear the voices of the children and the pleasing meditative rhythm of the vast sea outside of the glass.

vlnd burger

HEADING INTO the Baltic Station Market, I encountered a whole troupe of Krishna devotees. They were milling around outside in tan jackets, smoking clove cigarettes, talking of love and better days. They stood in lines through the doorway, up the stairs, winding around the kiosks, smoothie machines, and pancake huts. Dark mustaches, long hair, sun-kissed women in polka-dot dresses, and what a commotion. Lots of om krishnaya yama and shanti shanti shanti.

Fortunately, all of these George Harrison wannabes were not in line for VLND Burger. The way to my dinner was clear. Or was it? Did I have enough time? If I missed the train back to Viljandi, I would have to stay the night in Tallinn. If I stayed the night in Tallinn, I would have to go to her house, beg for a bed, hat in hand, though I had no hat and it was sticky August.

“Welcome to VLND Burger, what can I get you?” came a reticent attempt at American-style customer service. I scanned the menu. Various burgers, doubles, singles, fries in all constellations and denominations. Loaded, unloaded. “Loaded fries?” I whispered, surveying the print. In the back, a fry cook was clanging a basket. More eats were coming off the press.

If I missed my train, I would have to go to her house. Then we would make love and everything would be turned over again. The story would be torn open again, as she had once put it. She’d hug me in the morning, and I’d already have one foot out the door. What was it that made me run? What was I running from? “Excuse me,” I asked the staff. “But do you happen to know what time it is? My phone died and I need to catch the last train south.” A wrist was raised like clockwork, the young woman at the counter said, “It’s 6:42 pm, sir. Would you like to order?”

Then the fry cook intervened. “No, it isn’t,” said he. “It’s half past nine.” “No, it isn’t,” I told the fry cook. “I mean, that’s impossible. When I came into Baltic Station Market, it was 7:30. I was supposed to be on the 8 o’clock train back to Viljandi. Excuse me, madame,” I said, approaching an older woman in a fur coat who was walking a small dog. “But would you happen to know the real time?” “Yes,” she said, looking at a small silver watch. “It’s 3:30 am. On the nose!” She continued along her way. I couldn’t tell if I had missed my train or if the train hadn’t come yet. I ordered some crispy fries anyway, something tasty to munch on, something to pass the time.