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.

skiing with the dead

I WAS TRYING to find some laundry detergent. That’s really how that whole story started. Someone had, after many years, returned to me a box of clothes, including precious and once-prized pairs of pajamas. The light blue ones with little golden anchors on them that reminded me of Popeye, and the rougher-textured wool ones, with the polar bear print. At the supermarket at the Baltic Station, where the dead-eyed cashier ladies never even so much as acknowledge your very existence, I searched the aisles. While I was trying to make up my mind between Mulieres and Mayeri I passed the media stand. And that’s where I saw it, gleaming to me among the tabloids, newspapers, and glossy magazines about the USSR.

Skiing with the Dead: Stavanger ’72.

What the hell was this? Its cover was a color photograph of the Grateful Dead with the cool, clean and white Scandinavian mountains beyond them. There were some ski chalets in the distance, a period lift. Mickey Hart the drummer was out in front with his headband and dark mustache. Jerry Garcia was behind him. Jerry had on a big wool hat that was incapable of covering all of his bushy black hair. He was smiling. Of course, he was smiling. Why wouldn’t Jerry be smiling while he was skiing at one of the Norwegian resorts. I knew that the Dead had gone on tour in Europe in ’72 and had even recorded an album called Europe ’72. But I didn’t know that the Grateful Dead had ventured as far north as Norway or that they even skied.

This was a strange new discovery. A new chapter in Dead lore. Did Jeff Tamarkin know about this? I beheld this fascinating magazine and skimmed its contents. There was an article about how Phil Lesh dosed the band before they got to the to the famed Bjorli Ski Center, and a recent interview with the other drummer Bill Kreutzman about a long-sought after bootleg recording they did up in the mountains called Trippin’ on the Slopes: the Bjorli Sessions. I shook my head. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Dead. I was very wrong.

At that moment, an older hippie with gray hair and sunglasses happened to walk past me in the Baltic Station supermarket. You know the type, a watered down version of George Carlin in his black sweater years. He had a basket full of produce. He said, “What are you looking at there, young man?” I showed him the glossy magazine. “Did you know that the Dead played shows in Norway in ’72?” I told the hippie. “They went skiing! Can you imagine? Jerry on skis!” “Of course,” the hippie told me. “I was there, man. Skiing. LSD. Norwegians. It was far out.”

we bid you goodnight

THERE I WAS having another coffee with Rory and Ella in a cafe when someone ‘pantsed’ me, as we used to say, pulled down my trousers while I wasn’t looking. I had on my military-style jacket, so I wasn’t exposed up front, but all of the cafe society people got a good look at my ass. To make matters worse, I was so shocked by what had happened, I couldn’t manage to pull my pants back up. I fumbled with the button and the zipper, but they just wouldn’t close. Rory, stalwart poet that he was, had a good laugh. Ella was dressed up like a flapper, but with a pair of butterfly wings, the kinds little girls wear at Halloween. She reclined in her seat, crossed her white stockinged legs and licked her lips. She was very entertained. She sipped from her latte.

Just then Saint-Malo marched in and arrested me for exposing myself. I was hauled off to an open Scandinavian-style prison, but thoroughly tested and prodded before being admitted to my room. Saint-Malo was younger than me, but he was already gray at the temples and had a gruff, indifferent manner. He wore military fatigues, even though he was a jazz musician and not a prison guard. Still, the denizens of the town had elected him to be a sheriff of sorts, preventing robberies of the burger truck, for instance. “You and your ass are a disgrace to the good clean folk of Viljandi Town,” Saint-Malo peppered me with scorn. “But I didn’t drop my trousers on purpose,” I said. “Someone pantsed me in Kodukohvik.” “Silence,” Saint-Malo said.

My prison days passed like that until Jorma showed up and broke me out. He invited me to a “pancake and drug thing” in the Haight. All of the bands were there. The Dead. The Charlatans. Janis was still alive. “Psychedelic pancakes,” said Jorma. “Eat up, man.” This was young Jorma, with the black hair and Beatle boots. The syrup, as I took it, was spiked with LSD. That might have been why Mr. Garcia got an extra helping. The Dead were called up on stage and performed an acapella version of “We Bid You Goodnight.” Jerry, Phil, Pigpen, Bill, Bobby, even Micky. They were all up there singing. They were moving in unison just like the Temptations.

After the Haight-Ashbury pancake drug breakfast, I went for a stroll, eventually winding my way through North Beach and climbing to the top of Coit Tower. From here, I could look out on all of sunny San Francisco. There was the Presidio over there. And I could see Alcatraz gleaming like a mirage off in the distance. Whenever the wind blew off the bay, the top of Coit Tower would move along with it. The engineers had even built a strange system where the top was set on wheels, so that it would rotate along. It felt good to be out of prison, though I was still trying to digest the acapella Grateful Dead performance. Plus those LSD-spiked pancakes.

Rory and Ella came up the steps at that moment. They reached the top of Coit Tower and were also taken aback by its breathtaking views. Lotta was with them. Another cafe person, in fact a regular in the local co-working space. She was wearing a colorful dress and sunglasses and clutching a cappuccino. Lotta blew me a kiss. “Come over here,” she said. “Let’s all take a selfie.”

montrone and canneto, brothers in arms

BEFORE I GO ANY FURTHER, I should tell you more about Montrone and Canneto, these two towns outside of Bari that have grown together. For centuries they remained apart, distant, at arm’s length, and in fact they maintained two very different dialects. One of the towns hosted a Norman French garrison in the 11th century, and its dialect was therefore influenced by French. The other was settled by Greek refugees in the 10th century, and its dialect was infused with Greek. Cousin Lorenzo says it’s possible to tell someone from Montrone, a montronese, from someone from Canneto, a cannetano, by the way they say the word for “bread.”

“They say, u pan,” says Lorenzo. “But we montronese say u pen.“

The official word for bread in Italian is pane. In French, it’s pain. So the local dialect word, which is common in the dialects around Bari, called barese, is a bit closer to French. To me both of the versions sound almost exactly the same. U pan, u pen. U pen, u pan. U pan …

There are these tiny differences, you see. But a single vowel can give away your identity.

One must realize that the country or nation of Italy is largely a fiction, or at least a coincidence of geography. Every region, every city, every town, even every neighborhood has its own history and its own dialect, many of which are so unintelligible to outsiders that they are considered their own languages. It is said that the singer Frank Sinatra’s mother, Natalina, who played a role in local politics in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Sinatra was born and raised, was successful in part because she could speak all the dialects of the Italian peninsula. This made her indispensable when dealing with the immigrants who thronged New York City a century ago, people like my great grandfather Domenico Abbatecola, who was from Bari, or my father’s grandfather, Salvatore Petrone, who came from a village in Calabria. Even during my first trip to Italy, at the age of 22, I became aware of the language issue when I was stopped by an older man with a white mustache from Palermo on a street in Bologna. He was looking for the train station. People had responded to him in the Bolognese dialect. He was unable to understand their directions. “I can’t understand a word these people say,” the old Sicilian told me that day.

How odd then, that I could understand him. When I was 22, I really didn’t speak Italian at all.

Now and then I replay that moment over and over in my mind. How did I understand him?

***

FROM THE PORT OF BARI, where the ships leave for the ports of Bar in Montenegro, Dürres in Albania, and Dubrovnik in Croatia, it is about 15 straight kilometers south into Montrone and Canneto. These towns, however, no longer appear on maps because in 1927 they were united into one municipality called Adelfia, from the Greek word αδελφός (adelphos), “brother.”

On a map, at least, the Montrone and Canneto sections of Adelfia are distinguishable. Canneto, to the west, with its ancient Torre Normana, or Norman Tower, is the larger of the settlements. Montrone is the sleepier, eastern side of Adelfia. The main landmark here is the public gardens, with its Fontana dell’emigrante, or Fountain of Emigrants, which is a fitting name because my great grandfather Domenico was born and grew up right across the street.

Just a few houses down, there is a little cafe called the Pasticceria Caffetteria Petrone, where you can get a pastry and an espresso in the morning. There is nothing better than waking to the sounds of the church bells, or to the neverending calls of the people in the streets, and walking to the Caffeteria Petrone. The owner, as far as I know, is not a relative, and is from Naples. There are many Petrones in southern Italy, and we are not all close relatives. There, you take your place at the counter, and wait for that little white cup to arrive. Everyone is here, the dentist, the postman, the cosmetologist. And even if they don’t know you, they still know you. The eyes search each other, the cup is lifted, and you are wished a buon giorno.

“Good morning,” or, actually, “good day.”

This is how the montronesi start their days, and just a few hundred meters down the Via Vittorio Veneto, and over the old aqueduct, the mornings of the cannetani are much the same. Only that they call bread u pan and the montronesi call bread u pen. There are other divisions. For example, no one in these two towns can agree on exactly where the border between them lies. This I was told one night, strolling around with cousin Lorenzo. While the aqueduct seems like a natural boundary, only the people from Canneto believe that. The montronesi say the boundary between the towns is really a column on an old building just over the bridge. “This is where Montrone really ends,” said Lorenzo one night as we paraded around the old lanes of Montrone, venturing into disputed territory. “Beyond this point, they say u pan and not u pen. Beyond this point, you are dealing with the cannetani, who speak a very different dialect.”

He gestured quickly with his head, as if these people, the cannetani, were an alien race.

***

I DON’T KNOW how old my Italian cousin Lorenzo is, and I have never asked, but I assume he is about my age. At the time we first met, he was working for a software company that designs platforms for managing airports. He had returned to Bari after many years in Rome and he was single and had decided on something of a career change, to go into academia after a life in the private sector. I cannot fully understand how the Italian economy even works because I only see these people eating and meeting with family members, but during the working hours, they do disappear someplace, to do at least some work, just a little, before returning to the table.

Lorenzo’s father, Giuseppe, works in agriculture, a job he quite enjoys. In the evenings, he heads out to the piazza in Adelfia to play cards and share stories with old friends. Night after night, the old men are out there in their caps talking and making noise. At night, Italy is even livelier than during the day and I am always impressed to see the offices of the country’s political parties on the piazzas in the evenings, the windows lit up, and people seated around inside eating pasta together. They are more like social clubs than real political parties. In the US, they would be outside with signs, yelling at each other. In Adelfia, the only thing they yell is something like, “Would you please pass the bread?” Or, “How about another espresso?”

Lorenzo against this backdrop casts a more lonesome, stark figure. He is tall, dark-haired, at times silent, at times with great humor. He is instantly likeable. Some people just have this kind of quality. You can’t help but like them. While his career path is in mathematics and science, he loves to talk about traditions and he is very thoroughly grounded in the local culture. That same night we went out to see the disputed border between Canneto and Montrone, we also stopped into a church to light a candle and view the shrine to San Trifone, the patron of Adelfia. The interior of the Church of Saint Nicholas of Bari and Saint Tryphon Martyr is beautiful. Its high ceilings are covered with pastel blue and frescoes, triumphant angels, and nativity scenes. And beneath all of this color moved a figure clothed in black named Lorenzo.

I cannot say that Lorenzo is a nationalist, because how could a montronese belong to a nation? Italians are not a nation in this sense, they are a combination of many now forgotten peoples, mingling on the soils of this land over generations. The Greeks, the French, the Albanians, the Visigoths. But Lorenzo is proud of the south and of his home here in southern Italy, and is sensitive to the stereotypes about the southerners that pervade Italy, and elsewhere, that they are dangerous, criminal, and violent. He also likes to talk about history, and how Bari and adjacent areas of Italy were sacked and plundered by foreign armies. In the 9th century, Islamic invaders created the Emirate of Bari, but just a handful of years later the Byzantines took it back from the Ottoman Turks. Then, in 1071, Robert Guiscard and his swashbuckling Norman adventurers swooped in. Among other feats, they built the Norman Tower right here.

Not only the tower remains, but the blue eyes and light hair that exists to this day among some of the inhabitants of Adelfia are a reminder of these Normans. My great grandfather Domenico also had blue eyes as does my mother Christine. As do two of my three children. As a child, it linked my mom and her towering Italian grandfather. He would look down and say, “Our people came from the north.”

“For centuries, Italians were subjected to invasion after foreign invasion,” Lorenzo told me that night. “Only in 1860 were we able to stop being picked apart and fought over by others. Then came the risorgimento, the unification under Giuseppe Garibaldi. Some say that it was a unification, but others say that the piedmontese just annexed the rest of Italy. They helped themselves to the resources and labor of the south, but they think that we are criminals.”

“But my grandfather Petrone, my father’s father, said that our people were criminals,” I insisted. “I have heard that Calabria, where the Petrones were from, was legendary for its banditry.”

“No, no the Calabrese weren’t bandits,” said Lorenzo. They were briganti. Brigantines! They were a movement, trying to wake up the north, to tell them what was going on in Italy.”

Such were the lectures of my cousin Lorenzo. He seemed offended that I would even suggest that our countrymen were anything other than noble Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, fighting the powerful and wealthy families of the north by flouting their laws and creating their own codes of justice. One man’s brigantine was another man’s criminal. His body language was subdued though. Lorenzo is not your stereotypical Italian who argues loudly, flailing his arms. It’s hard to imagine him yelling out a car window while pounding away on his horn. But in his quiet certainty about the nature of Italy, I felt I had said something wrong, even though I was proud of these stories of criminality that we had carried with us from the south. In America, such tales of lawlessness had a kind of mystique. Who wanted to descend from law-abiding Italians, when you could claim your cousin was a notorious outlaw?

“People are afraid of the south,” I pressed on. “A Florentine told me it’s dangerous. They say they lock their cars when they see Neapolitan license plates. Even when they are driving.”

“Florence is far more dangerous than Bari,” my cousin Lorenzo shook his head. “That’s what’s so funny about the northerners, you know. They think the south is full of criminals. But since all the money is in cities like Milan, that is where all of the real criminals go. Milan is more dangerous than any city in the south.” To his credit, nobody robbed us that night as we paraded around Montrone and Canneto in the dangerous south of Italy. The only thing I was ever robbed of in the south was hunger though, because it seemed like all we did was eat.

***

SOME DAYS LATER, we had a fine meal at a restaurant in Adelfia, consisting of tiny mozzarellinis, polenta baked in marinara sauce, and many other delights, such as sauteed chicken hearts. Lorenzo was there, as were Pamela and Antonella and Lello. Platter after platter of food arrived, glasses of wine were consumed, and I began to worry who would be picking up the bill for this feast. There was even a mozzarella the size of a loaf of bread. On the way out, I asked the chef at the counter about the bill. I imagined that it was enormous.

He in turn simply asked me if I preferred Northern Italy or Southern Italy.

“Whose side are you on?” said the chef. He was a roly-poly man with Sinatra blue eyes.

“The South,” I told him with my most casual Italian shrug. “Naturally.”

“Good! In that case, your meal was free,” the chef said and bowed his head. “Grattis.”

Much later, I found out that my cousins had already settled the bill. But I like to live in that illusion that just professing a love for the South over the North could earn you a free meal anywhere south of Rome. All you had to say was that the South was better, and a waiter would bring you a tray of free mozzarellinis and the cooks in the back would start baking polenta.

Who knows. Maybe it is true.

‘cugino? cousin? is it really you?’

I HAD ALWAYS BEEN, even without knowing it, a lost son of Italy. I think most Italian-Americans are the country’s lost sons and daughters. We forgot our language, we forgot our family stories. We forgot what our names meant and we forgot what roles we had played in history. In America, we were supposed to be new people. Some of us changed our names or we gave our children names that would not, on first notice, smack of any kind of ethnic affinity. It was only through my own personal interest and research that I had learned the family stories. In uncovering these forgotten stories, I began to learn the real reasons why we left Italy.

The story about how I learned the truth started when I was 30 years old, to the day. I had spent the night before celebrating my birthday with friends at a restaurant in Estonia, then taken a night bus to Tallinn Airport, pausing only to buy a few gifts for relatives, mostly boxes of Estonian and Finnish chocolates, and one bottle of vodka, which would be prized among any nation other than the Italians. I would come to regret purchasing that bottle of vodka.

***

That morning the plane carried me from the November frosts of the Baltic and across the expanse of the German countryside to Munich, where I changed planes. From the air, Germany was a tidy patchwork of church steeples and fields. These were disrupted by the massive Alps, rocky and jagged, spiked with ice. Then came the valleys of the Po, and those black-green, forested hills, the Apennines. From the mons of the Alps sprang this nether region called Italy, dark and intriguing, the genitals of Europe swaying down into the Mediterranean.

I was a little nervous as that plane descended toward its destination. I had been to Italy before then, but as a simple tourist. This trip though would take me to places I hadn’t been before and put me into situations I had never experienced. I was to travel from the capital Rome deep into the South, meeting with relatives I had never met before, serving as a kind of self-appointed family ambassador, making up for decades of no contact. I had no idea what to expect, but I was willing to take the plunge. I was married, had two small children, and was soundly employed. I did feel kind of stuck. I had just turned 30 and things needed shaking up.

Inside, I still had the heart of an adventurer, I think. I yearned to discover something new. This new discovery would be Italy, but not the Italy of Rome or Venice, of art galleries and souvenir shops, or fashion boutiques and tours of Tuscan vineyards. I was already aware, vaguely, that I was about to leap off into the unknown, into a world where nobody spoke English, and I spoke only a little bit of Italian. Still, I have always enjoyed these kinds of challenges.

At last, we landed in Fiumicino, right on the coast at the very spot where the Tiber begins its snaky crawl toward the heart of the old empire. Here I found my way through an apocalyptic wasteland of industrial parks splashed with graffiti, the reeking armpit of the capital. Whichever way you turned, Rome was dirty and foul, a pungent and fermenting heap of trash and history. The air smelled of trains, of fried foods, of espresso, car exhaust, cigarettes, and pigeons. It smelled of the crisp uniforms of the carabinieri, the tangled shampooed locks of the Roman women as they sped by on Vespas, clutching the waists of their daredevil boyfriends.

I took a train into the central station, and then walked a few blocks to my hostel. The manager on duty took my money and shook my hand and wished me a happy birthday, as he had noticed it was my birthday when he copied down the information from my passport. He next gave me the keys to my room. It would only be a night there before I left for Bari. In the next room, some young American women were already drinking wine in the afternoon and boisterously toasting to each other. “To a happy vacation in Italy with lots of hot Italian men!”

I strongly doubted that they would consider me to be one of these exotic men and I felt a little insulted by the idea that that’s all an Italian could ever mean to them. A quick fling on a Roman holiday. Some Mediterranean spice to their otherwise white bread lives. They would go home and marry some boring man in Indianapolis or Houston or god knew where they called home. They would marry a normal man with a normal name, but there would always be Italy!

I was so annoyed by them that I decided the only thing that could lift my spirits would be a walk to see the Colosseum and a slice of pizza. I remember that moment, sitting with my back against the wall, listening to those girls. Sometimes, I wasn’t proud to be an American.

That was one of those times.

***

THE NEXT MORNING I was back at the train station with my backpack, stuffed with boxes of Estonian chocolates and that bottle of Estonian vodka. I bought a ticket for Bari Centrale and took a seat on the train across from an older woman who wore a giant crucifix around her neck and spent her time surfing the web on a laptop, or calling by phone to check on various relatives. This is a four-hour journey that takes you to the outskirts of Naples and then straight across to the other side of the peninsula. You know you are close to Bari when you can at least see the Adriatic from your window. You see the quiet Adriatic and the lights from the ships sailing on it. When we at last arrived at Bari Centrale, I somehow could not believe it. I couldn’t believe I had gone back, even though I had never stepped foot in the city. For a moment, I almost thought it was a film set, to see that sign hanging above informing me that this was the real Bari: the Bari I had only seen in photos and atlases. It was evening and the moisture of the Adriatic was everywhere. That smell of the sea put me at ease. It was familiar to me, and I felt my body relax, even though I was about to come face to face with a relative.

A cousin that I had never met.

I knew of course that my ancestors had come from this port city in the south, and thanks to some correspondence my cousin Mary Ann — a granddaughter of the famous Uncle Vinny — had initiated, as well as some social media dialogues with this newly discovered relative named Cousin Lorenzo, I now had an invitation to dinner in Adelfia, which sits outside the city.

Cousin Lorenzo and I met via Facebook. Perhaps only because of his last name, he was suggested as a friend to me, considering all of the other Abbatecolas on my friend’s list (Abbatecola being my mother’s maiden name). Not only was I interested in him, he was interested in me. He wanted to meet this lost American relative. Something about the promise of America still stirs the fantasies of Italians. Bright lights, big cities. Fame and fortune. New York, Chicago, Hollywood and Disneyland. Almost every Italian has a lost relative to the American Dream. Almost none of them came back to old Italy, and after a while, all contact with these dreamers ceased. Before I arrived at Bari Centrale, Lorenzo sent me a message.

He wrote:

I am in station. Yuo take off and wait. See a black hat in my hand.

There he was, Cousin Lorenzo, standing beneath the big sign that said Bari, with dark hair and a familiar face. We approached each other with great curiosity. From what we had determined, Lorenzo was a distant cousin to me. My great grandfather, Domenico was the son of a man named Vincenzo Abbatecola, who was born in the year 1846, when Italy wasn’t a country. Lorenzo’s forefather was Vincenzo’s brother. His name, as you might expect, was also Lorenzo.

I remember that feeling of meeting Cousin Lorenzo for the first time. I would not say it was an odd or funny feeling, but everything about him was so familiar to me. It was as if I had staggered into the bathroom at some early hour and glanced at myself in the mirror. Many people had told me that I didn’t look like a real Italian, because I was so tall, but Lorenzo was as tall as I was, and he looked me directly in the eyes. We were undoubtedly related, we few tall Italians, and I wondered about who our common tall Italian ancestor was, who looked this way, and when he had lived and under what circumstances. Was there once a tall villager in some village in Italy in the 17th century who looked like me and Lorenzo? Was he also one of us?

After having known Cousin Lorenzo for a few seconds, I determined he was everything I imagined an Italian cousin should be. Lorenzo was about the same age. We had entered this world at the same time and had grown up on opposite sides of a great ocean, speaking different languages, unaware of each other’s existence. Lorenzo was here in Italy. I was over there in America. He was doing his Italian things, like kicking a soccer ball against a wall. I was doing my American things, like also kicking a soccer ball against a wall. Only that that wall was in America, not in Italy. We did not know each other and yet, in a second, by looking into each other’s eyes, we arrived both at an understanding. Two shadows meeting on a train platform.

“Cugino?” Lorenzo said to me at the train station. “Cousin? Is it really you?”

***

AFTER THAT, I was more or less immediately accepted into the warm bosom of my new family. Each night, I was invited to dinner at Cousin Lorenzo’s parents’ house in Adelfia. Adelfia was a patchwork of multi-story stone houses of indeterminate age, separated from each other by narrow streets and narrower alleyways. There was an ancient, dusty, almost Middle Eastern feeling to these rows of beige and white homes. Lorenzo’s house was among them, accessible from the street through a metal gate. Meals in general were the domain of Giuseppina, his diminutive and vivacious mother, who worked through the day to prepare them. Giuseppe, her husband, would later arrive as would Lorenzo’s sisters Pamela and Antonella. All of them showed great curiosity in me, as if I was an alien or something and brought me different kinds of sweets, dolci, and explained their regions of origin and historical significance. “This is a local sweet,” Antonella would say. “But this one here comes from Sicily. See, you can tell by the use of orange slices.” Antonella had wonderfully thick black curly hair. She looked like one of those women from an ancient Greek vase. Pamela had a fun, playful, boundless energy to her.

Antonella’s boyfriend Lello would also be there while I was being instructed about different sweets, yawning through the evening news. The most important news in Italy at the time involved Piero Marrazzo, the governor of Lazio, a region adjacent to Rome, who had been filmed taking drugs and having sex with some Brazilian transsexuals. One of these transsexual prostitutes died later in a mysterious fire. By eating together with the family, I therefore learned a great deal about Italian culture. Much had changed since my great grandfather left.

Some things remained the same.

Cousin Lorenzo showed me the lemon trees in the yard, as well as the wine press in the basement. Each year, Lorenzo’s family would harvest the grapes from the vineyards and make wine at a certain time, all so that it would be ready for the great Feast of San Trifone, the patron saint of Adelfia, as every Italian village and city has its own patron saint, if not several of them. Meals with his family were familiar, salad, pasta, fish or meat, washed down with this same homemade wine. After the meals, they would munch on stalks of garden-grown fennel, or then indulge ripe fleshy slices of cachi, or persimmons. The tiny cups of hot espresso would come around and a shot of limoncello, the famed liqueur made with grain alcohol, sugar, and boiled lemon rinds, or its lesser known cousin, mandorino, which is made with the skins of oranges. Then these sons and daughters of Italy would lean back and make conversation.

Such were their ways.

***

ONE AFTERNOON, Uncle Vincenzo, or “Enzo” for short, was invited over to discuss the history of the family with me. Enzo was the son of Michele, my great grandfather Domenico’s older brother. At that time, he was about 70 years old, a spry old man with gray hair and glasses and palpable energy. Enzo marched into the dining room, where we were sitting around eating cachi and pointed. Enzo said, “Your great grandfather was the one who beat up the priest.”

Everyone laughed then. I and what surprised me was that they all seemed to know the story. As for me, I was speechless and did not know how to react. I had never heard the story, and yet I was not surprised. That side of my family was known for these kinds of transgressions. Relatives were known to wield a bat with people who crossed them the wrong way. Tempers flared, impulses could not be contained. Sometimes an argument overheated and the police might be called in to calm things down. In a way, I was almost relieved that Domenico had only beaten the priest and not killed this man of god. Certainly, I was embarrassed by the story and the attention. To think that I had come all this way to be confronted by Domenico’s past.

But he was my great grandfather. Surely he had had his reasons.

This had happened in the early 1900s. More than a century ago. The story had been carried forward though, and Enzo was now closing the circle. He was pulling the threads between then and now, between America and Italy, between me and him. The priest, he said, had taken a liking to Domenico and Michele’s sister. He had crossed the line on several occasions. And so Domenico and his younger brother Saverio, who were running a brewery, decided to settle scores. They attacked the lecherous priest with police batons, injuring him badly. The news soon spread quickly, and my great grandfather and his younger brother sought counsel from their father, a businessman, as well as older brother Michele, Enzo’s father, a policeman. “He said, if it was anyone else I could protect you,” Enzo recalled his father’s words. “But this is a Catholic country. If you beat up a priest, you will go to jail. You have to leave the country.”

This is what had sent Saverio and Domenico to the Port of Naples seeking passage to New York. Later, Enzo told me there was more to the story. The incident was not only related to protecting the honor of their sister. They also had “big political problems,” as Enzo had put it.

“They were anarchists,” he said, anarchici. “That’s why they did it.”

“Anarchists?”

Enzo nodded. Anarchici. The word sounded strange and dangerous. It sounded like men with mustaches lurking in the vestibules of churches with police batons ready to pounce. It sounded like terrorists robbing banks or cutting the throats of policemen in their sleep. I had read once of anarchists in Italy who had stolen and burned bank records in a bonfire, as to eliminate any records of people’s debts. With no debts, people could start again fresh. They could rebuild their lives. I remembered thinking that it sounded like a wonderful idea.

Many people I knew had all kinds of different people in their families. Especially in Estonia, it wasn’t hard to meet someone who descended from a notorious Communist, or perhaps someone who had helped the Nazi German regime a little too enthusiastically during the grim and bloody war years. But anarchists? Anarchici? I was the great grandson of an anarchist? What did that even mean? Could anarchism be passed down, like so many other things?

Was I an anarchist too?

***

WHEN I LATER called my mother and told her the story, she said that she had heard something like this whispered around her when she was a child. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but they knew that it was bad. That was our family. We were passionate, but perhaps too passionate. Whether we were followers of the anarchist Errico Malatesta and read his paper Umanità Nova, or claimed to know nothing of it, you didn’t want to cross us.

For me, personally, this story opened a door to another era. It helped me to better understand my links to this country we left behind. Not long ago, there had been a predecessor just like me, who felt passionately about various injustices in the world. He had sat here in this same comune or municipality outside of Bari, under the influence of the revolutionary anarchists. The story of the two brothers and the priest therefore helped me to feel closer to my origins. It kicked open a door. Just as that door had opened before me, many others would open.