lidl

I HAD NOWHERE to stay, so I made a little nest in the corner of the Lidl supermarket with some discounted German pillows and blankets. I rested my head against a display case full of frozen pizzas. It was late afternoon and for some reason the lights had been turned off and the counters were covered with root vegetables, like radishes, carrots, cabbages, and so on, when I saw her there. Dulcinea, in her dark coat, glinting like gold at the end of a cave, talking to a supervisor in a pleasant but slightly pleading way. Then she saw me, sleeping in the corner and came over and said, “Mother says that I have to get a job. She said they have some openings.”

These were the first words she had said to me in three years. A tear ran down a heavy cheek. I had to pause to collect my poise. “Well, there’s a good chance I’ll still be sleeping here tomorrow night,” I told her, from my makeshift supermarket sleep nest. “Maybe we’ll be seeing each other again.” “Yes, it would be quite nice to see you again,” she told me. She meant it.

When she left, there was a special throb in my chest that I recognized instantly as love, and I allowed it to spread to every part of my body and to ache away in unison. What better feeling was there in this life than this kind of undying chance supermarket encounter love? But then I had to get a job and the sad fact is that I wasn’t at Lidl when Dulcinea started working there.

A conference on agricultural biotechnology, held in lower fourth level of the University of Life Sciences. Why did they build auditoriums so deep in the earth? Room 424B. Or was 403B? I couldn’t remember. It was all quite newly renovated, but what was with this green carpeting, the dark wood panelling on the walls? To make covering the conference more challenging, someone had given me a baby to care for, so I was pushing a stroller with the tyke in front. He was wriggling and at times sobbing quite loudly. The diaper had come loose, and his urine fountained everywhere. Whose child was this? He couldn’t have been mine. Way too blonde.

“I’ll get that little boy all cleaned up,” said a woman who came to help. She looked like Tippi Hedrin’s character in The Birds. She swept away with the mystery infant and I spent the rest of the day in the back row of a stale-aired conference room listening to dull talks about agronomy. Later I realized that I didn’t have a change of clothes for the conference. Could I really recycle the same shirt? The same black pair of pants? It occurred to me that somewhere inside Lidl they probably sold decent clothes on the cheap. So I would go back. Maybe I could find something high quality and German, but at a reasonable price. Maybe Dulcinea would be waiting at the counter. Again the feeling swept over me like cool winds across the steppe. And the fields and grasses rustled, whispering, “Love, love, love,” and “Always, always, always.”

a lift to the city

MIHKEL RAUD gave me a lift to the city. It was in one of those old-fashioned Volkswagen Beetles, beige exterior, red interior, remarkably clean. I couldn’t tell if he was just being friendly or had gone into the taxi or Bolt driver business, and I wasn’t really sure why I had got in the car to begin with, as I had no plans to go to the city. He wore his flat cap and looked the part of a driver, parked the Beetle on one of the lower levels of the Viru Keskus parking garage. Mihkel Raud hopped out and wished me a good day.

There I was, back in the city. A lot had changed since I was away. Tallinn looked sort of like Manhattan, but in the 1950s or 1960s. Brick buildings, iron railings, snow-covered cars, trash cans. Why did I feel like I was in Little Shop of Horrors or Rear Window? Tarja came walking by in a nice pink dress and waved to me. “But what are you doing here?” she said. “What brings you to town?” Her black hair was done up, she eyed me with her usual sparkling curiosity. “Well,” she said. “I need to get some shopping done. My children are hungry.” And she left.

At the end of the street, I noticed Esmeralda. Young Esmeralda Kask. I hadn’t seen her in ages. She looked quite beautiful in her dress, her chestnut hair was pulled back. There was something about those blue pearls of eyes, the slope of her cheeks. There was no one as beautiful as Esmeralda Kask. Not in this world. Something strange was happening though. She was leading a flock of sheep. When had Esmeralda become a shepherd? Or was she a shepherdess? I was too old for her, but I loved her anyway. Such loves are non-negotiable.

Just then my mother emerged from a store, clutching her grandmother’s pearls. “You, young lady,” she called out to Esmeralda. “What do you plan to do with all of those sheep?” Esmeralda blinked a few times. “I am going to sheer them,” said Esmeralda. “It’s been such a cold winter. I am going to make myself a warm coat.” “That sounds like a lovely idea,” my mother said and waved. Their interaction brought a tear to my eye. For Esmeralda Kask was what the Estonians would call a silmarõõm, my one true love. The tear swelled and rolled down my ice cold cheek.

your room

VERY WELL THEN, I’ll make up your room. Yours can be on the first floor. The house is never completely empty, but you’ll have your own entry way, your own door. I’ll give you your own key. The room will be fully furnished, in fact you’ll never suspect that it ever belonged to anyone else or was used for any other purpose. Your room will be as cozy and warm as cozywarm can be, there will be a soft, broken-in, long and lovely blue couch that you can fold out into a bed, and shelves lined with books from any writer who ever wormed their way into your heart: Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

There will be an old-fashioned floor lamp in the corner that you can turn on with the tug of a chain, and a pot of sweet peppermint, camomile, or fireweed tea that has been steeping for ages, and yet whenever you take a cup, it’s always at the right temperature and is never too weak nor too strong for your taste. This will be the little room I make up for you in my heart. From here, you can come, go, and inhabit me. You can put your black stockinged legs up and stretch out, set your tired hands behind your sleepy head, drowse and admire the wallpaper.

on assignment

THE INTERVIEW was somewhere in the countryside. The photographer said that she would take me there herself. She drove a black SUV, the make and the model of which I didn’t notice and I sat in the passenger’s side seat. The car was clean if not new, the interior was comfortable. I sat back and glanced in the side mirrors as the car traveled through the northern forests until these gave way to a series of green hills, pastures, and distant silos.

It was a very gray day that day, there was fog everywhere. It felt as if the sky had descended to Earth. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” I asked her. “Of course,” she said, glancing in the rear view mirror. She briefly licked her lips. They were very red. She was my age with blonde wavy hair and she had on a red blouse. I could just see the slope of her breasts through the material and I observed them carefully, for she was a no-nonsense woman, and I didn’t want to do anything that would set her off. We had worked together on a lot of assignments. She took the photographs and I wrote the articles. She made the images, I made the words.

Somewhere off in those hills, she turned onto a gravel road and parked the car. There was fog all around, floating between the trees and lurking in the runoff ditches. The sky was a milky cloudy abyss, but I could hear birds crying in the nearby woods. I said to her, “What are we doing out here?” She said, “This,” and leaned in and kissed me. “I see,” I said. That might have been the last thing I said that day. Soon she was consuming me. Devouring me. Drinking me. Imagine all that. I thought that I was such a big strong man, but I only slipped and cascaded into deeper levels of vulnerability. Then I felt myself inducted, encompassed, engulfed, swallowed up whole, mind, body and soul. There was a restorative tenderness in her and she held my hand and led me to it, all the way back to the little silver blue spark at the end of the tunnel. It glowed bright with love brilliance. I dissolved. “We both need this,” was all she said.