slovenia notes

It begins with …

PIE IN THE SKY, gauzy cotton carpets, glides the plane toward Riga, the sun shining on its golden wing tip. In some places the clouds pile up like sand, mountains, valleys, crevasses, river deltas, a whole air world stacked on top of the land world. The self is a similar sort of shell game. Now you see it, poof! The Gulf of Riga, container ships slowly chugging somewhere with their cargo.

*A poster for a play in Kranj, Slovenia. It’s only two hours by plane from Riga, Latvia, to Slovenia.*

Upon arrival …

Kranj, Slovenia. #47 on this street or ulica is colored squash yellow, pumpkin orange, old chain-linked fences, weathered stones and concrete, pedestrian murmurings, grape vines, ivy vines, alpine balconies, a trumpet playing somewhere, a bicycle cycling something, whirrish whir displacing air. #16 on another ulica is painted hope-pink. Lekarna is a pharmacy and jaune santiarije is a public toilet, and ne must mean no, because that’s what a woman keeps saying to her dog.

Outside the bookstore, the sellers are smoking and sipping wine and saying something like koushka and Naked Lunch costs 16 euros inside, and outside a building under construction and covered in scaffolding a worker is yelling out “Matjas!” Later, the receptionist at the hotel informs me that the word I heard was kučki, which means two small dogs in Slovene, and prosim is please, of course, of course, a kuža is just a doggie, like the Estonian kutsu.

The next morning…

*Each morning in Ljubljana is cool and foggy, until the sun burns off the mountain valley moisture.*

I DON’T KNOW what to say about Ljubljana, I have trouble spelling and saying the name. Slovenia has Mediterranean elements, Alpine elements, South Slavic elements. I like the way the language looks on signs and billboards and theater posters. In a funny way, it reminds me of Lithuanian, only because of the length and special characters (these languages are far removed). (Vzgojiteljica is ‘kindergarten teacher’).

Reading some genetic studies of the Slovenes, conveniently featured on their Wikipedia page, I learned that they are closer to Czechs than to “real” South Slavs, like Bulgarians and Macedonians. The language? I know nothing. Prosim (please, thank you) gets you everywhere in Slavic land, and “Cheers” is the familiar na zdravje… I forget at times what a vast hunk of Europe is populated by Slavs of all flavors, the Poles, the Slovenes, the Croatians, the Slovaks, the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Ukrainians, and then those more niche groups, like the Ruthenians. Or were the Ruthenians the Ukrainians? Try the Rum Raisin Slavs, the Butterscotch Pecan Slavs, while you’re at it. They’re out there somewhere, inhabiting some valley …

Bear in mind, at times people are just as at a loss when it comes to the Estonians, so they can be forgiven when it comes to distinguishing all of these cultures and subcultures. It takes time to study up on Slovenia.

*During breaks from workshops, your intrepid writer wandered aimlessly around, writing more nonsense.*

ANYWAY, this is a lively city. People are outside in the evening, riding bikes, strolling, talking loudly. It’s by population smaller than Tallinn, but even on its finest summer days, Tallinn just isn’t as lively. People just seem to pour into restaurants and out of supermarkets. A lot of Slovenians are tall, even taller than me, and there is a subset of the guys with really frizzy, nappy hair, which they grow out, so that they look like Thulsa Doom’s henchmen from Conan the Barbarian. Some of them cut it short and ride around on electric scooters wearing puffy black vests or jackets. The Slovenian girls are ranging in packs and talking loudly. Their jackets are also puffy.

How funny that for them, Ljubljana is the world, and they are having modern day street romances by the dozen, and breaking up, and someone is dating someone in Kranj, or someone moved to … where do Slovenes even move to? Probably Vienna. Yes. They split up, and she moved to Vienna for work. Broke his heart in two. All of this drama taking place in this foggy basin, people made born and lived, day by day in Slovenia, and the world shuffles by, barely taking notice.

The hotels (I’ve been spoiled) have retained some continental grace. Very Grand Budapest Hotel, the concierge is overly eager to help. In Estonia, they are too busy texting their friends, or just don’t want to make eye contact at all. There’s no, “Yes, sir,” “Anything else. sir?” Estonia could use a little more Monsieur Gustave H, I think. But who am I to judge?

***

Who was I when I was here 23 years ago? Am I still him at all? What has become of all that? Well, there’s no need to dwell on it. Yesterday went into yesterday, like krill into the belly of a baleen whale, and I don’t recall it all, nor should I.

***

*The long way up the castle hill. This photo snapped accidentally while talking to my daughter on the phone.*

THE LAST TIME I was in Slovenia, it was ’02. A lot of time has elapsed since then, but it doesn’t feel so far away. It hasn’t yet taken on the glow of nostalgia. I didn’t have a phone then, and nobody really knew where I was, although my father said he could track my movements according to the bank statements that were mailed home. It wasn’t a big issue.

I did have a journal with me, so somewhere in my closet, buried underneath all of my other journals*, I can find out more or less what happened, but since I have not retrieved these memories since about that time, I only have some recollections of the bus station, the hotel, some cool-looking teenagers sitting in a park, the church, the river, and not making it up the hill to the castle (which repeated again this time, as I did not hike all the way up. Maybe it will take 23 more years to get there?) And of course the trip to the caves, which are called jama in Slovenian, which means crap or bullshit in Estonian. But that’s about it. Maybe some more will resurface. I was only 23 years old the first time.

Enough about that. In Slovenia, when you walk into a shop, the shopkeepers will often greet you with “dan,” which means, “day,” as in “good day,” dober dan. I was thinking that if your name happened to be Dan, this would be a good city to live in, because every time you went to the supermarket or popped into the bookstore, the sellers would address you personally. “Dan!” Or imagine the unsuspecting Dan who ventured into Slovenia, only to hear strangers saying his name to each other. He walks into the bookstore, but all the girls keep saying his name, or maybe he thinks he’s hearing things. Onset schizophrenia.

“Dan,” they all whisper. “Dan, dan, dan!”

*The city at night, more restless wandering awaits*.

ON A SATURDAY NIGHT, Ljubljana was fairly lively into the late hours, though most boutiques and stores closed their doors by 9 pm. I wonder about these pretty faces through the windows, the Slovenian yuppie set, who do they work for, where do they get their nice sweaters? Some clubs remained open, and I heard all kinds of fun music from the speakers, including Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s “Deep Cover,” followed by some vintage Michael Jackson (pre-Off the Wall, maybe Jackson 5?) and then Tom Jones’ rendition of “Burning Down the House,” followed by Lipps Inc.’s 1980 hit “Funky Town.” A guitar player was singing “Creep” by Radiohead but he couldn’t hit those Thom Yorke high notes.

There were also decent restaurants open late, serving fried seafood, Indian curries, and kebab, which is what you need if you want to get some deep sleep. In the earlier part of the evening, I attended a traveling Flemish production of Medea’s Children with Slovenian subtitles. I think I understood a few phrases in Flemish (their expression for “please,” alsjeblieft, is the same as it is in Dutch) but Slovenian was impenetrable. It looked like a cat had run across the keyboard. (Where are you from is od kod prihajaš? and thank you is hvala!) I was reminded of the fake “Eastern European” language from Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 film The Silence (where the Estonian word for hand, käsi is taught by the concierge to the little Swedish boy in the hotel).

*Ingmar Bergman employed a fake “Eastern European language in his 1963 film Tystnaden or The Silence.*

And then he writes…

Oh, the melancholy sorrow of the pretty youths and sorrow over missing my own pretty youth, long gone and burned away, but can it be resurrected, just like the actress cries on demand for the camera, her cheeks wet and so sincere, the tenderness of lovely youth, and afterwards an after party of salami, prosciutto, Slovenian theatre life, as if I ever knew what I was doing ever.

The next day

*Across from here we had a good lunch of fried fish, potatoes, drenched in a yummy creamy garlic sauce.*

SLOVENIA HAS MIXED/uncomfortable feelings about its southern neighbors, let’s call them that. Someone asked a friend something in Serbo-Croatian, which was taught to all Yugoslav school children prior to 1991 as a common state language. Old-school nationalism, everyone in a single geographic box, speaking the same language, believing in common myths that link their heritage with a mystery genetic component (it’s in our blood) while rooting for certain football teams, praying for Olympic glory, and engaging in armed border conflicts in cultural gray zones, seems antiquated and kind of silly. Yet this was the solution to the imperial collapses of 1914. Come feel the nationalism!

The same Ottoman Empire that once ruled over much of the southern Balkans also ruled over what is now called Israel and Palestine. But up here, this was all Austro-Hungary, Ljubljana is thus a provincial capital of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s odd, I think, that nobody is trying to resuscitate this particular empire these days. The Russians are still crying about theirs and “their ancient land” but the Austrians are, well, I am not sure what they are up to. Maybe bodybuilding. Or skiing. Maybe their beer is just better and so they have fewer complaints.

And just like that, it’s over …

*Back in the north woods of Estonia, where the land is green indeed.*

AFTER LEAVING the mountains around Slovenia and Austria, ‘Europe’ is one big dusty plain of farms, roads, and shiny grain silos, and the occasional large settlement.

This rolls straight up into southern Latvia where things get woodsier north of the Daugava river, and Estonia is even more swampy and green. Also the road, farms, town pattern is less observable, in Estonia it looks like some giant sneezed and the houses went all over. A very dispersed settlement.

That river is the Jägala, I think. Do you know that in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Russians also tried to conquer this region? But that they lost and badly? And that even then the Swedes and Poles supported the governments in Estonia and Livonia because they didn’t want Ivan as a neighbor?

Some things never change.

A compilation of journal entries (in italics) and Facebook-Instagram posts from a recent trip to Slovenia.
Later, I uncovered my journal from ’02, only to discover I was mostly focused on creative projects and my relationship when I was in Slovenia, and barely wrote about the trip at all.

agostino

MY DAUGHTER CALLED ME. She said that Uncle Agostino was sick and that he had decided that, for whatever reason, he would soon board a flight to London, where he intended to die. Why he had selected England as his place of moving on to the underworld was unknown to me, but Uncle Agostino was a history buff, and it’s possible he just wanted to see some of its museums before leaving.

At once, I began my sojourn to Uncle Agostino’s house, down by the port. When I arrived, the old man was seated in a chair, dressed up in a Apulian folk costume. The wisps of his white hair poked out from beneath his cap and his arms were crossed. His legs were up on the counter and he seemed quite peaceful, or molto tranquilo, as they say. “Uncle Agostino,” I said, “is it true that you are going to die?” Agostino said nothing, but briefly glanced at me, as if he registered what I was saying. “And why do you want to die in England of all godforsaken places?” Again, there came no answer from caro Uncle Agostino.

My cousin Gabriele was at my side a second later. In fact, the whole house was full of various relatives. His dark hair had grown longer, his skin was tanned from all of the sun. He was in a fine mood despite the somber backdrop. The countertop was submerged in local cuisine. Panzarotti. Orecchiette con cime di rapa. Spaghetti e polpo. “Don’t mind Uncle Agostino,” Gabriele said. “He’s just preparing his soul for his journey to the underworld.” “I can see that.” “But those clothes won’t do for the funeral later,” Gabriele said to me. “You need to get some new Italian clothes. We Italians like to look sharp at funerals.”

Out into the street I went, searching for my wardrobe upgrade. Gabriele was correct. My shoes were worn so thin, they were coming apart. My pants were baggy and covered with stains. Mysteriously, my belt was too long, though there was no evidence that I had lost any weight. My shirt had been bought in India. Indeed, I was the very picture of a beggar. Again I came down by the port, where a ship carrying refugees from Africa had just docked. I stepped over them in my search for new Italian clothes. The sky was a strange, otherworldly pink, and it swirled high above the sleepy Adriatic, full of pulsating yellow-white blobs. It was a kind of Mediterranean aurora borealis.

“This is not Puglia,” I said, observing the sky. “This is somewhere else.” I turned up a street by the port and walked into a restaurant, where another family was celebrating some event, birth, death, marriage, what have you. But I was escorted out on account of my shit attire. Up the street, I found a shop that sold belts, shoes, pants, and for decent prices. There I was, rummaging through the discount bins, trying to look something like a presentable Italian. Again my phone rang. It was my daughter. “Are you coming?” she said. “Uncle Agostino is ready to go to England now. Agostino says he wants you to come with him.”

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 Victor Hugo novel, 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 cobblestone 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!” The British postal worker easily outpaced me as I ran up the hill, passing by a familiar bookstore, one I had visited each time I was on assignment in Boston.

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 again. Why did she ignore me?

My running slowed to a half-hearted jog.

Down a street, I ducked into a building and 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 Will Ferrell 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, and her affinity for the handsome Japanese. “It seems he had some kind of meltdown because he was late,” I told Will Ferrell. “That caused him to spontaneously combust.” “Mmm,” Will Ferrell said, listening to me live on the air. “Is there anything else you would like to say?” “Only that I feel guilty,” I told him. “I feel guilty that it gave me some pleasure to watch another man destroy himself in public. Because no matter how good Esmeralda’s love is, it shouldn’t be worth the sight of another human being in pain, just because of my own jealousy, my own envy, my own pathetic malice.”

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.

there are no giraffes in võru

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.”

An Estonian version of this article appears in the summer print edition of the magazine Edasi.

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.

a train to the hamptons

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.

rīga

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.

a stopover for migratory birds: impressions of the estonian song and dance festival

MY FIRST IMPRESSION is one of disorientation. I see faces emerging from the crowd, legs, arms, red lips. There are white headscarves, blue and red caps folded down on one side, the black-brimmed hats of the men’s costumes and all kinds of expressions, from the moody and pouting looks of the teenage girls in their traditional regalia to the yellow crooked-toothed grins of old men who need assistance walking. There are lines everywhere here. Lines of ladies moving like migratory birds in unison toward some far-off goal, be it an assembly point or a staging area. Some of them are in line for the toilets, hundreds maybe, others are in line for ice cream. Lines line the stadium steps, take their positions on the fields, and then form ornate and intricate shapes that one can only appreciate by watching the enormous stadium screen.

This is Kalevi Central Stadium in Tallinn, Estonia, on a brisk and windy Thursday evening in early July. Built in 1955, the stadium is said to accommodate 12,000 people, but looking in every direction, I have no way of determining how many people are really here at the Iseoma Song and Dance Festival. I try to do some quick calculations — I count about 100 people, and then trying to guess how many people might be here all together, but then I abandon this task completely. All I can say is that there are a lot of people here, many people. At one end of the stadium, beyond a grove of trees, I find myself inside a tent city of dancers. A man in a black robe, the kuub of the southern Estonian Mulks, is helping a young blonde woman get into her dress beside a tree. Her arms are up in the air and he’s tugging away on her belt. The woman doesn’t look comfortable, but I suppose that such sacrifices are necessary for the nation.

The wind flows over the crowds, chasing away any remaining heat and humidity. Near the podium at the front of the stadium, guitarist Andre Maaker is pacing anxiously with a guitar. I try to make a joke about all the nuns at the event, nodding to the white headscarves, but Maaker is in no mood for jokes. Singer Kelly Vask is standing nearby in a traditional dress waiting. A moment later, I see why, as they take the stage to perform the national anthem.

For me, Maaker’s compositions will turn out to be the most memorable of the dance festival. First there is one called “Lööme Loojanguni Lokku” (composed with Laura Võigemast) and then “Iseoma” which he helped Jaan Pehk arrange. The melodies of these songs are so sweet and so soft that they stick to me like sugar. There are no bold crescendos to them. There is no drama. Everything is just so nice and so tore. This is the Estonian word. Yes, everything is so tore that I almost start crying and I don’t know why. All night long, as I try to sleep off the first night of the festival in a friend’s Mustamäe apartment, I hear the verses of “Lööme Loojanguni Lokku” and feel a profound shift is underway, as if the stars have reached down and pulled me up into the euphoria of the cosmos. I think most people feel like this at the song and dance festival.

A world of delicate music

IN THE MORNING, I take the Number 84 bus back into the city center, sharing the ride with a group of dancers in Seto costume who have been sleeping 10 or 20 to a room in the Tallinna Saksa Gümnaasium. Once, when I was staying at the Sai Baba ashram in India, I happened to spend a few nights in an all-male dormitory that consisted of hundreds of bunk beds arranged in a gym. These beds were filled with Sai Baba devotees from all over the world, in whom I took an almost anthropological interest. One of them, an older Italian man, had discovered his guru through a leaflet, which claimed Sai Baba was the embodiment of god. “If he claims to be god, who am I to argue?” the old Italian told me. Another devotee, a comedian from New Jersey, carried miniature figurines of Hanuman and Ganesha and would worship them every morning. He was counting on these gods to help him with his career in show business. At night, the Indian dormitory was a curious place. Hungarian devotees would have nightmares and start screaming in Hungarian. While watching the dancers in Seto costumes on the bus, I can’t help but wonder if their experiences have been similar. Do the Seto men start yelling in Seto in their sleep? Have there been intriguing conversations about Peko, the thunder god?

I spend most of the day in the warm sun of the rahvamuusikapidu, or the National Music Festival, on Freedom Square, pondering such things while being serenaded by youths playing the violin, kannel, bagpipe, and karmoška. Again, the music is so soft and so sweet that I feel that familiar stirring sensation. Watching the young women strum their kannels, I wonder about their inner worlds too. I wonder what they dream about. How do they feel? What are the desires that they have hidden away behind this pleasant music? This is the only world that they have ever known, a world of EU-subsidized highways, of bountiful supermarkets, a world of choirs, ensembles, and festivals. Their lives are lived from event to event, from rehearsal to rehearsal. There’s no time for worry or existential questions in this world. Theirs is a world of delicate music, where there are no loud voices, no shouting, no despair, no angst, no ennui. The life of the lovely kannel player seems gentle, patient, even kind.

In the evening, I am back at the Kalevi stadium for the final performance of the dance festival. One of my friends is a dance enthusiast and has been vigorously documenting her dance group on social media. But trying to find her or anyone at the dance festival is impossible. Every woman has blonde hair done up in braids just like she does. They are all wearing those kinds of tights and those colored skirts that she wears. They all look like the Estonian dolls they sell in the airport souvenir shops, though I would never tell her she looks like that. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see her flit by, with a big, beautiful smile on her face. She looks happy, happier than I’ve seen her in months. I worry it’s a happiness that can’t be sustained.

On the stage, there is a closing ceremony, and women and men in traditional garb ascend a steep staircase to be recognized for their contributions to the festival. The air is brisk, cool, calming. The sun is just peaking through the clouds over the distant skyline of the city. Behind the stage, there are stacks of what I think are evergreen Christmas wreaths, but these turn out to be made of oak leaves! Each person recognized has the oak wreath or tammepärg placed around his or her neck, so that soon it starts to look as if a whole forest of oaks is up on stage.

“But why do you use oak leaves?” I ask a woman behind the stage. “Because the oak is a very powerful tree,” she says, with an almost mystical glint in her eyes. I wonder about who creates the oak wreaths, where the branches are cut from and what becomes of them. Maybe someone mounts them on the wall of their sauna, to be revered for all time, or maybe they just wind up where everything else winds up in Estonia, as kindling for a fire in the furnace?

Soon our guitarist friend Maaker is also on stage with a wreath of oak leaves around his neck. When I ask him about the experience, he confirms that it was most pleasant. “Those oak wreaths just smell wonderful,” Maaker says. “And everyone at the dance festival was smiling.”

A rainy parade

I SPEND THE SECOND NIGHT of the festival in another friend’s apartment downtown. He’s just moved in and there is no furniture there, so my bed is a camping mattress, a sleeping bag, and a weak pillow. In the middle of the night, I hear people yelling and imagine that my friend is fighting with the police in the next room. I wait for the Estonian police to wake me up and interrogate me, but when I am at last roused from my sleep by the sound of a trumpet player somewhere nearby playing the national anthem at daybreak, I realize everything must have been taking place in the parking lot instead. My friend has in the meantime made a pot of coffee and when I ask him about the police, he says that he has no idea what I’m on about. “That’s just what life is like in Tallinn,” he says. “There are always people yelling at night.”

Tallinn life is a little bit different during the festival. My friend’s apartment is across from the Tallinna 21. Kool. At 10 am, there is a group of men in traditional black hats or kaabud and knickers seated around in front, like extras from the 2019 film Truth and Justice. I walk between these austere characters and enter the school to have a look around. In its atrium, about a hundred children are sitting and standing and sipping from juice boxes. On the second floor, the suitcases are piled up by the windows. Down the hall, I am greeted by a woman in a red headdress or tanu from Pärnumaa. Their group comes from Audru, she says, which isn’t too far from where my children’s grandmother was born. I have a complicated relationship with the Estonians. I am not one of them, nor do I wish to be, but my children are them. So we are relatives of a kind. Inside a classroom, I ask the dancers what it’s like to sleep in a school.

But you can forget any stories about loud nightmares. These people are tightknit and are used to each other’s company. They only respond with, “Noh, täitsa tore oli.” “Well, it was nice.”

The rongkäik or parade is tore, too, but it’s a challenge. One needs stamina, strength to march in this parade. Sheets of rain fall on us all along the route. The poncho I have brought along is quickly soaked, as are my pants. My hair is a wet mess, my skin is cold and damp. My journals are wet, the ink runs in places. My friend and I take refuge in Viru Keskus where I order a hot plate of Uzbek plov. My friend is not the kind of person who cries easily, or expresses any emotion without a joke or healthy skepticism. When you have lived as much as we have, those gentle, peaceful, fluttering kannel-music like moments are few and fleeting. But he admits that he can’t get through a rongkäik without shedding at least some tears. We’ve both been in Estonia for what feels like forever and talk about when Swedbank was Hansapank and when there was no Viru Keskus. Most changes are welcome, but we’re also worried that the Song and Dance Festival will eventually become a cultural attraction, where tourists buy up all the tickets and Estonians are only able to watch it at home. He considers that businesses might start sponsoring these events, so that one day there will be a Prisma, Rimi, or A. Le Coq Choir.

We agree that the festivals are an occasion for social renewal. All societies are made up of such tiny, bite-sized building blocks, like village choirs or dance groups, and of these smaller pieces, more elaborate superstructures are created. The festivals are necessary for society to function. They bond people together and the bonds created must last until the next festival. We hope that Tallinn never becomes another Venice or Barcelona, overrun by Jezz Bezos and other mindless tourists. It’s true that neither of us is Estonian. But we do have Estonian kids. We do worry for them.

The main event

IT’S A LONG MISTY WALK through Kadriorg to get to the song festival on Saturday. I take the Number 1 tram and then cross bridges and climb steps, eventually passing the Japanese Garden and exiting through a parking lot across from the Song Festival Grounds. When a person is caught up in those dense crowds, it becomes hard to construct a timeline of what happens. Even my journals become a mess of discombobulated, half-written entries, jotted down in spare moments and out of order. One thing I do see is a blonde, middle-aged woman running through the food area crying out, “Police! Police! Does anyone know where the police are?” Having seen some guards nearby, I point her in their direction. In chatting with some officers later, I find out that the number one issue they have to contend with is lost children. There’s even a pickup point where as many as 10 children might sit waiting for a parent to retrieve them. One wonders what life is like for the children in this makeshift “kindergarten.”

The police also have to deal with the occasional unruly attendee who has decided to “pregame” for the festival and either gotten drunk at home or hidden a flask of vodka in his underpants. (There is no alcohol on sale at the event). “It’s a shame,” one of the police tells me. “There are some who do not see this festival as a holy event, but as an opportunity to drink.”

The singing is here, but the singing and the songs are only a part of the experience. Yes, we have all come to hear these songs, to sing along, but the festival is also about the circus city that springs up around the stage, or the troupes of children in wet ponchos stumbling across the wet grass, following the instructions of some stern teacher who has commanded them here to participate in this grand event, or the meandering conversations in the press tent where French and Finnish journalists rub elbows and munch on free ice cream. There’s a lot to this thing, much more than any agile camera work or grinning selfie can ever do justice to.

After being drenched by rain for a day and a half, the appearance of the sun toward the end of the concert on Sunday does seem like a small miracle. Then come the best-known songs, “Tuljak,” which is conducted by choirmaster Triin Koch, and “Ta Lendab Mesipuu Poole,” which is conducted by composer Hirvo Surva. These musical personalities are treated with such reverence that every one of their moves is observed with an awesome curiosity. It’s almost like watching Wimbledon. Every flick of the wrist, every nod of the head is somehow meaningful. The conductors look as if they are holding back a mighty wave with the power of their hands.

What is it like to stand up there? I wonder. And how does one feel at the end? Neeme Järvi, the grand old conductor, now aged 88, knows this feeling well. His movements are tight, precise, controlled, but at the end, in a moment of triumph, Neeme Järvi topples over. From the back of the Song Festival Grounds, the Üldala, or general area, no one knows if he has just slipped or if really, being so caught up in the music, Järvi decided that this was his final day and he was going to go out with a cymbal crash. Throughout the entirety of the festival area, there is only silence and concern. This was obviously not planned. Is he alive? Has he died? What kind of festival even is this? But then we see that Neeme Järvi is alive and well and he jokes to the crowd as they chant, “Elagu! Elagu! Elagu!” Which means something like, “Long may you live!”

It is the final festival miracle.

The morning after

AND NOW IT’S THE MORNING of the day after. But when did this day even begin? When the light of the day is nearly seamless and the last people go home after the summer light returns, isn’t it hard to find a line between the two? After the festival, I have trouble sleeping. I awake at three and then five and then eight. I can hear the cries of the gulls and the muddle of downtown life at dawn. Like life, the trams creak back to work, back to normality. Even though my arms and legs are sore from standing for days, and my mouth is dry, my hair is greasy, there’s goop in my eyes, and I’m still wearing yesterday’s shirt, my other clothes piled up on the floor, my socks kicked across the room, the light of the new day is unrelenting. Even when I can’t bring myself to get up, and the euphoria of the festival is still pulsing in my blood, I get back on my feet, because the sunlight won’t leave me alone and life does move onward. Just as I do as I make my way to the Must Puudel cafe in the Old Town where I order a coffee and breakfast, first thing. Hungry city birds are perched, ready to peck at any discarded crumb.

After breakfast I go for a walk to stretch my legs, muddle through this new, post-festival reality that I have awakened to. Some tired singers are lounging in the sun of the Town Hall Square. Who knows when, or if, they ever went to sleep. On nearby Lai Street, I find a lillepärg or crown of flowers lying on the ground. Someone must have left it here in the early morning. I wonder who the woman was who left this flower crown here. I wonder what this crown has seen. By tomorrow, all of its petals will be dry, I think. By tomorrow, the festival will just be a memory.

An Estonian-language version of this piece was published online on 13 July 2025 in the magazine Edasi.

sketches of stockholm

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.

uueveski jollies

*Those were the days. Viljandi’s Uueveski Valley in 1930.*

FOR DAYS, IF NOT A WEEK, I had been planning to meet with Heiki to talk about Uueveski org or, as I call it, Uueveski Park. To me, it’s clear that this large natural area just adjacent to the center of the town is a town park, but on maps it is merely marked as an org or valley, as if it’s such a natural place that it has not yet been fenced in and given something like an official name or status. I had written to Heiki inquiring about the origins of this place and had been told we would have to meet face to face. Such information needed to be communicated in person, he said. This meeting of the minds proved elusive. I was in Tallinn or Tartu, or just too tired. The discussion of the valley’s origins was pushed off. Then one day at the supermarket, Heiki appeared with a basket in hand. It was one of those Viljandi moments, when the person you’ve been planning to see appears effortlessly, as if by magic. I had almost completely forgotten about Uueveski. There he was, ready to instruct. Heiki comes off as wily, clever. He seems to know who lived in each apartment and how they got along with their neighbors. Heiki just has a nose for these things.

In a few minutes, Heiki recounted the history of this sleepy place, which has belonged to the town for all of living memory and into which a series of swimming pools were built back in the 1930s. At that time, Viljandi Lake was a less attractive swimming hole, as it was full of pasture run-off. The pools on the stream that feeds Viljandi’s least known waterbody, Kösti Lake, were clean and cool and more appealing. There are photos of Viljandiers in old-time swimsuits having a wonderful time. These days it’s rare to see someone taking a dip in the pools, some of which have been renovated, but I have been told that vipers like to sun themselves on the stream’s banks. Each time I walk around those pools, I keep an eye out for those vipers.

When I first lived in Viljandi, some 15 years ago, I never visited Uueveski. I’m not sure why. Maybe because my children were small and I was a house husband. Viljandi to me at that time seemed like the Castle Ruins, the Green House Cafe, and maybe the Statoil on the way into town. There was no Uku shopping center then, there was no Kodukohvik, and there was definitely no Asia Billa Nepalese restaurant. During the pandemic, Uueveski Valley became a close refuge for me. It’s a shady, peaceful place. Many times I have found myself standing on one side of that bubbling stream, which they call the “Uueveski River,” wondering if it would be possible to cross it. There are some places where it seems possible, where the rocks are aligned in an almost perfect bridge. Yet I never attempt it. When I was a boy, I would have done it many times by now, but I lack that childhood bravery I once had. One of these days though I am going to try to traverse the stream, even if I get wet. Even if everyone here sees.

On the other side of the stream, closer to the Forest Cemetery, or Metsakalmistu, there’s a series of large villas that bring to mind the chalets of the French or Swiss Alps. For this reason, I have nicknamed this neighborhood “Little Switzerland.” I have no idea who lives in these palatial residences. Sometimes I see little blond children bouncing on trampolines from a far distance. These must be Swiss children, I think. Their fathers and mothers are involved in money laundering. For breakfast, bowls of müsli. For an afternoon snack, bars of Toblerone. In the evenings, they participate in mandatory military training in the grassy hills up there.

The great green lawn in front of Viljandi’s Little Switzerland is so long it must be trimmed by a robot. One day, I went there with my daughter’s dog, who eyed the robotic lawnmower with curiosity and suspicion. Back and forth it scuttled, like some kind of metallic crab, and the dog didn’t know if it should bark and chase it or not. In the end, we just walked on to the old mill.

I wonder who lives in those large chalets. I wonder who the Uueveski Valley Swiss even are. This is a town of hairdressers, of small shop owners, of cafe cashiers. Who are these wealthy denizens of Little Switzerland? Like so much of Viljandi, their stories remain hidden behind fences, trees, curtains. Northern European anonymity creates these kinds of funny fantasies. If you don’t know who your neighbors are, or what they do, then you just have to imagine it all.

Even if the Viljandi Swiss remain apart and mysterious, there are other friends to be made in the valley. Recently, I was walking up the hillside on the other side of the park when two squirrels came bounding in my direction. In New York where I grew up we have fat and lazy, overly satisfied gray squirrels, and in Washington, where I went to college, there are even social black squirrels lounging by the park benches. But these daredevil red squirrels are a feature of the Northern European forests, with their pointy ears and frisky, energetic pace.

Spending more time in nature, I have come to see the animals here as other people. They may not speak to me in a language that I can understand, but I can communicate with them. All around Viljandi, I’ve had run-ins with foxes, for example, who sometimes pause and watch me knowingly, as if they were my guardian angels. Then there are the poor, lost little hedgehogs, who never seem to know where they are going or why. These Uueveski squirrels were busy bodies. They chased each other around the base of an enormous pine. When they saw me, the squirrels froze. For a moment there, we all blinked at each other. Then they looked back at each other as if to say, What is this stranger doing here in our forest? For the Uueveski squirrels, we’re all just intrusive strangers. In their devilish little minds, they own the place. Maybe they do.

An Estonian version of this article, translated by Triin Loide, appeared in Sakala this week.