A LOT HAD CHANGED in my old elementary school back on Long Island, but the basic layout of the building had been maintained. The hallway led me to the left and I knew very well where it would terminate: at the school library. But the classrooms had been converted into greenhouses. I could see students through the glass, watering tomato plants or checking in on cucumbers. Piles of hay and fertilizer had drifted into the hallways and it seemed as if the roof had been removed all together as the hot sun beat down and some chickens clucked on by.
I was rather impressed. The school’s redirection into horticulture made some sense, it was a return to the area’s pastoral roots. In the 19th century, this had been a farming community. Outside the boys’ bathroom, just before the library, I checked the wall for that old memorial. In the 1930s, one boy had died on the mill pond trying to save another who had fallen through the ice. The fallen boy had been rescued and survived, but his rescuer sadly had perished. Sure enough, the memorial plaque, which had been in the building since that time, was still there.
At the library, things had also changed. Chairs had been set out and a librarian informed me that I was expected to give a lecture on writing. Before I did so, I wanted to have a look around the old library, I told her. I wondered if it had that same old musty smell. And what was the name of that old librarian, the one who first told us that all of the card catalogues would be digitized? Wasn’t it Mrs. von Steuben? At the front of the library, I was surprised to see that there was now a toy store, selling plastic figurines and assorted merchandise from Guardians of the Galaxy, Aquaman, and other Marvel and DC movies. “Whose bright idea was it to put a toy store in a library?” I asked the librarian. She said that the library toy store had been there for at least a decade. “That came long after you left the school,” she said. “Even before I came.”
Just then I had an idea, that I would tell the students the story about how I once borrowed John Lennon’s biography, only to find a biography of one VI Lenin on the shelf beside it and, intrigued by the man’s bald head submerged in a sea of socialist red, took it home at once and read it quietly, so that no one could see. Other than Mein Kampf, was there any more seditious a book in the late 1980s, the era of Glasnost and Perestroika? Perhaps these books were still on the library’s shelves somewhere. They would make good props. I looked out across the library, but didn’t see any books there. Just toys and computers were everywhere. “But where are the books?” I asked. “We’ve stored the books in other parts of the library,” the librarian told me.
Thus I began my adventure in trying to locate the library’s hidden old books. The ones that had been stored elsewhere. I went down a hallway into a section of the library that seemed ancient, as if it hadn’t been renovated since the Victorian Era. Light was streaming into the hall through a series of stained glass windows featuring various Biblical scenes. There were some old dusty books here, but they were more intended for children. At the back of the hall, I made a left and went into a darker system of corridors where there was no lighting. I ran deeper and deeper, closing doors behind me along the way, until I emerged at the library toy store again.
“I couldn’t find what I was looking for,” I told the librarian. “But all of our titles are available electronically now,” she said. “There’s no need for physical books.” About 10 pupils in white t-shirts looked up at me. They were all holding tablets. “Do you remember what you agreed to teach them?” the librarian said. “No,” I told her. “You’re supposed to introduce a writer to them and then teach them how to write in the style of that writer.” “Am I getting paid for this?” I asked. “Yes and quite well,” the librarian said. “Very well then, let’s do Ian Fleming,” I told the class. “I want you to start with Goldfinger, Thunderball, Dr. No,” I said. “Then Moonraker.” “You seem very sure of yourself,” the librarian said. “Are you sure you can do this?” “Naturally,” I said. “I could do it in my sleep.”
I WENT TO the Rimi supermarket to buy some bread. Of course, I could have picked up a loaf at any of the many fine bakeries in town, among them the house bakery on Oru Street which is renowned for its delicious rye. The latter I often consume with salted butter, and I can devour a whole loaf in the span of a midnight hour. I could have gone there, but I wanted the gluten-free loaf made by some German company, with its soft yet firm texture, laced with seeds and other delights, fibre-laden and fortified with vitamins, available only here at Rimi supermarket.
As soon as I stepped foot in the supermarket, which is enclosed in a new shopping center built on the site of a former prison, in which some Soviet wartime executions and atrocities once took place, I could sense that something was different. There was virtually nobody inside Rimi’s vast and expansive aisles, save for a few employees pushing metal carts stacked up with boxes. Some kind of retro muzak was playing in the distance, maybe an orchestral version of some old Hall and Oates song. Maybe it was “Maneater,” maybe not. As if it even mattered.
When I got to the gluten-free section, where one can find all kinds of sugar-free, dairy-free, nut-free and allergen-proof goodies, I found that it was no longer there. The aisles were only stacked with plastic bottles, bags of potato chips. “Where’s my favorite bread?” I asked one of the supermarket ladies. “The owners decided to get rid of the natural foods section,” she told me in Estonian. “It wasn’t selling well.” There was a sad, melancholic, deadpan manner to her speech. Her skin was pale, her eyes were deadened. Her hair had been bleached. I imagined if you were paid scant wages, or had not had sex in months, you might begin to talk like that.
Then I noticed that the lights in the supermarket were dimmed. It was quite dark. “Why is it so dark in here?” I asked the woman. “The owners can no longer afford to keep the lights on,” she told me in that same mournful, taciturn way. “It’s a sad story, I’m afraid. We have to work like this all day in darkness.” So this was the final result of years of inflation and high energy prices. A vacant supermarket that only sold chips and bottles of soda, where even lighting was a luxury, and they played horrible retro muzak inside. After that, I searched the aisles. I wandered among them, looking for something to buy, something to eat. I left emptyhanded.
THE INTERVIEW was somewhere in the countryside. The photographer said that she would take me there herself. She drove a black SUV, the make and the model of which I didn’t notice and I sat in the passenger’s side seat. The car was clean if not new, the interior was comfortable. I sat back and glanced in the side mirrors as the car traveled through the northern forests until these gave way to a series of green hills, pastures, and distant silos.
It was a very gray day that day, there was fog everywhere. It felt as if the sky had descended to Earth. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” I asked her. “Of course,” she said, glancing in the rear view mirror. She briefly licked her lips. They were very red. She was my age with blonde wavy hair and she had on a red blouse. I could just see the slope of her breasts through the material and I observed them carefully, for she was a no-nonsense woman, and I didn’t want to do anything that would set her off. We had worked together on a lot of assignments. She took the photographs and I wrote the articles. She made the images, I made the words.
Somewhere off in those hills, she turned onto a gravel road and parked the car. There was fog all around, floating between the trees and lurking in the runoff ditches. The sky was a milky cloudy abyss, but I could hear birds crying in the nearby woods. I said to her, “What are we doing out here?” She said, “This,” and leaned in and kissed me. “I see,” I said. That might have been the last thing I said that day. Soon she was consuming me. Devouring me. Drinking me. Imagine all that. I thought that I was such a big strong man, but I only slipped and cascaded into deeper levels of vulnerability. Then I felt myself inducted, encompassed, engulfed, swallowed up whole, mind, body and soul. There was a restorative tenderness in her and she held my hand and led me to it, all the way back to the little silver blue spark at the end of the tunnel. It glowed bright with love brilliance. I dissolved. “We both need this,” was all she said.
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.”
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.
THEY TOLD ME that I should marry that girl. They told me that she was rich. She was. She came from a wealthy Greek family. The family house, which might better be described as a manor or compound, overlooked an inlet. Even though we were in Greece it was a gray and cool day there when I went to visit her. There was a storm off somewhere on that horizon, plump purple clouds were drifting across the sky. Thunder rumbled and the wind picked up.
You know what it’s like.
I should never have kissed her and we should never have made love. These were my two easy mistakes. Because I realized after having bedded the Greek woman that she had no intentions of ever letting me leave. The sex, if I can be honest, was not so transcendent. She was beautiful, but that same eeriness hovered above the sheets. “I’ve decided to invite my entire family over,” the woman said. “To celebrate our engagement!” “What engagement?” I said.
With the aunts and uncles and assorted cousins gathering in the kitchen getting ready to carve up a lamb, I made for my exit. I went to one door, only to find it locked tight, and then climbed a staircase where I entered another room. All of the rooms were painted white, in the Mediterranean fashion, and corridors only led to other corridors. The deeper I ventured into this house, the more lost I became. At some point, I noticed a door open and saw lovely Celeste crossing the hallway with her husband and children, oblivious to my very existence. I pushed on ahead down another corridor, climbed another set of stairs. I saw bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms, and libraries. I saw windows that looked out on a disinterested, sad sea.
The thing is this: I never found my way out of that Greek house. As far as I know I’m still there.
WHAT CAME before or after, I cannot say, only that the SUV pulled up to the parking payment kiosk and it was expected that I would get out and pay. This was the kiosk just outside the doors to the Rahva Raamat bookstore in Tartu’s Tasku shopping center. It was a sunny day, as much as I could see from the light beyond the second floor of the parking garage, but whether it was spring, summer, or fall, I had no idea. It was about midday. But how did I even get here?
The SUV was being driven by a woman. She was shorter in stature and had an airy, almost amorphous quality to her. I could only catch glimpses of her, even though she was sitting right next to me, a strand of brown hair, the slope of a chin. She was wearing a gray outfit, loose pants, a loose shirt. Her shirt was open at the top and restrained her bust from sliding out. Her skin had a smooth, cocoa-colored quality and texture. But she was an Estonian. A bronzed one.
Somehow she had managed to get tan by 2 June.
“If you’re going to stare at me like that,” she said, “you might as well just …” I didn’t hear any of the rest. But while we were kissing there, in that parking garage, with the car door still open, I knew that I was in trouble. Big trouble. That kiss was going to mean something. She was going to capitalize on that kiss. But it was a good parking garage kiss, a tasty, sensual, satisfying one. The kind you remember for years to come.
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.
KLAUDIA AND I went walking along the docks. She stopped into small portside store, but complained about not having any money. She wasn’t in any kind of positive mood and she only had 50 cents to her name. “What am I supposed to buy with 50 cents?” Klaudia said. “Half a candy bar? A bite of a sandwich?” Quickly, I removed my laptop from its case and logged into my bank account with my personal ID card. The transfer happened effortlessly, instantaneously. “You have received €1.50 from so-and-so …” That’s what her notification must have read. It wasn’t an unserious sum of money. With €1.50 one might get a bowl of soup. At least the kind that you make in a cup in the microwave at a harbor convenience store.
We walked on through town. Klaudia was wearing a dark, puffy jacket. Her blonde, lion’s mane of hair was quite moist in the seaside drizzle. It was a maritime kind of place. Boats arriving, boats launching, the smell of chopped up bait and the whiff of luxury yacht interiors. We walked up a hill to an old house and went in. It was a well-preserved, Soviet-style habitation, though the wallpaper was slowly peeling from the walls. Old smelling furniture, old smelling bookcases. A woman sat on a couch watching TV. She was watching Wallace and Gromit.
“See,” I told Klaudia. “This is how people live outside of Tallinn.” “I know how people live outside of Tallinn, there are plenty of places like this in Tallinn anyway,” she said. “You’re right, you’re right,” I said. The old woman had dyed red hair that was white at the roots. She offered us a glass plate full of cookies. “Come and watch TV with me,” she said. “I do get lonely.” There we sat, watching Wallace and Gromit. The couch was comfortable. The film was entertaining. It made Klaudia laugh.
STEN GOT A NEW APARTMENT overlooking the capital city. I went to visit him to inspect the place with Riken, the Japanese mountaineer. We stood in a bare white kitchen lit by a skylight. There were unfamiliar varieties of Entenmann’s cakes that contained distinct Northern European flavors on the counter. Who knew that Entenmann’s made pumpkin cakes or ones flavored with lingonberries or cloudberries? I read and reread the ingredients on the boxes.
Sten was discussing with great detail the placement of a couch with Riken, but Riken was of another opinion. Riken rested an elbow against the mantle of the fireplace and nodded up and down as if studying the room and searching for an answer. Sten and Riken often got side-tracked by these kinds of minor details, such as where to put a piece of furniture, or for how long one should sauté the onions. “Hey, Sten,” I asked. “Can I try one of these cakes?” “Knock yourself out, man,” he said. Then he turned back to Riken, “The light from the window is best over here. The couch should go there.” “You’re wrong and you know it,” Riken countered him.
Sten’s girlfriend Pille-Riin stood all this time next to the couch in question with her arms folded and a particularly stiff-upper-lipped, “keep calm and carry on” expression on her face. She looked like a British nurse. Well, an attractive one, if such attractive British nurses still exist. Sten and Pille-Riin had acquired a bulldog in their time away from Estonia and the animal was pacing the apartment as Riken and Sten argued over the placement of the couch.
The dog ran over and licked Pille-Riin’s hand as she waited patiently.
After that, someone came into the apartment and cried out, “narcs!” You should have seen Sten’s face curl up in panic. “Everybody out!” he shouted. “Quick hide!” “What’s wrong?” I asked. “The cakes! The cakes! The cakes are all spiked with drugs!” “They are?” I said, with some cake crumbs on my lips. “Shit.” “Yes, out. Out!” I ran out of the building, only to glance down the street at Tallinn in the mist. It looked different, almost like Gothenburg, or some random Dutch city I had never seen before but knew existed. Rows and rows of red-tiled roofs with some sad-looking skyscrapers in the distance. Sten said he liked this part of town because he could get in and out of the city in a jiffy. Unlike Kalamaja, which had only one road in and out. This choice spot was being put to the test as we all fled the Estonian drug police.
I lost track of the others, of course, ambling across a rye field into a forest. I clambered over an old stone wall, found a sandy spot and began to bury myself in the moss and dirt. If I covered myself well enough, the drug police would never find me. Not long after though, I could hear Sten’s voice coming my way. He was being escorted by several Estonian police officers. He led them right to my hiding place. “There he is,” he said, pointing me out. “What are you doing, man?” I said. “I don’t want to go to jail!” Sten frowned. “It’s no use, man,” he said with a sorrowful voice. “They already know everything about us. The jig is up. We’re all going to jail.”
MY EDITOR CALLED ME. He said that he wanted me to write not one but two profiles of Sabrina Carpenter. “Sabrina Carpenter?” I said. “You mean that blonde lady with the fuzzy eyebrows?” “She’s an acclaimed singer-songwriter,” my editor said. “Men want her and women want to be her.” “If you say so,” I said. How out of touch was I becoming, or had I become? I had never even had a TikTok account. I had never heard one of Miss Carpenter’s songs, though I had heard her talking about a childhood crush on Paul McCartney on some American late night show. Paul McCartney, now that was someone I knew of. I was more of a Sir Paul person.
At that time, I was at my aunt’s house in Sand City, waiting for my father to pick me up. Or was I supposed to meet him at the conference center? There had been some miscommunication about the getting picked up or meeting up part. I kept calling him but each time he answered, I could only hear the sounds of the conference behind him, while he yelled, “Where are you?” through the phone. Then he would lose the call. I’d redial and then be met with that recorded message, “The mobile phone you’re trying to reach is either switched off or out of area.”
My aunt was stroking a new puppy all this time on the porch of her house out there in Sand City. To think, I had originated in this bucolic, waterside town. But that was a long time ago. “Why don’t we go visit the old dairy,” she said, referring to a farm down the street from my grandma’s house. Somehow this had become closer, even though it was in a different town. We started to walk to the old dairy together when a sky blue bus drove past and parked on an adjacent lawn. “That would be your Cousin Linda,” my aunt said. “She’s back from Amsterdam.”
Cousin Linda was living in the blue bus. She had a new daughter and was nursing her as she spoke to us. She had also got a new husband too, a Dutchman named Jan. When this goateed Dutchman came in to check on his wife and daughter, my cousin answered him back in Dutch. Linda was now fluent in Dutch. “Well, I haven’t seen you in a while,” Cousin Linda said. “What are you doing back in Sand City?” “I don’t know,” I told her. “My father left me here and went to a conference. Which is a pity because I’m supposed to be working on two profiles of Sabrina Carpenter for a magazine.” My cousin, who was even older than me, squinted. “Who’s Sabrina Carpenter?” she asked. “An acclaimed singer-songwriter,” I told her. “With fuzzy eyebrows.”
Just then the phone rang again. It was my father. I could hear the conference noise in the background. My father was trying to make himself heard. “Where are you?” he repeated. “Where the hell are you?”
north! 