Читать книгу My Estonia II - Justin Petrone - Страница 5

I toyed with my wedding ring and stared at the tape on the airplane wing. It was August 6, 2003, and I had been married for exactly two months.

I thought the flight from Tallinn to Kärdla would last, at the most, 30 seconds, but we were still up in the air, gliding above the thick, dark forests of western Estonia, bouncing in the wind. I rolled the fat metal band around my finger and realized it had probably been days since I last noticed its slight weight. I had taken the ring off a few times in the two months since it came to reside there, just to see if my hands felt any more at ease, but, no, they actually felt naked without the ring, so I put it back. My finger had come to expect the ring to be there, and there it would stay.

“What are you thinking about?” Epp asked me.

“The tape on the wing.”

“Let me see.” She leaned over, her face illuminated by the August sunshine. “Oh,” her eyes widened as she peered through the small window at the tape, the plastic and glue that held part of the aircraft together. “Wow.” She settled back into her seat and seemed a little troubled. “Anne Helene was in a plane crash, you know.”

“Anne Helene?”

“The designer we’re going to interview.”

“Oh, right.”

“And she was flying this same route.”

“She was?”

I looked at the small plane’s sole flight attendant, seated outside the cabin door, an expression of utter boredom on her face, and wondered why she signed up for this job of all jobs, to fly everyday on an old plane with tape on the wings back and forth to Hiiumaa.

Epp often asked what I was thinking, as if my mind only processed one thought at a time. I usually picked one to answer her, the one that was easiest to describe, but there had been at least half a dozen thoughts crowding in there, mixing and sloshing together. Physically, the two of us were up in the sky. But emotionally, metaphysically, I was at sea, lapped by the tides, knocked around, but strangely, as a whole, unstirred. I used to worry about so many things, but I had come to put my faith in the ocean of life. Everything would turn out alright. I would not sink, and I would not founder. No matter what happened, I told myself, I would stay afloat, seaworthy, treading water to the horizon.

Assuming our plane landed in one piece.

The flight attendant walked the aisle, collecting the wrappers from the one piece of candy that had been distributed to each passenger. I handed her ours, and she returned to her seat, fastening its safety belt as we prepared for descent to Hiiumaa.

Just days before, I was in New York. I went to pick my older brother up at the train station. It was a humid, rainy summer day, and the ride back to our parents’ home seemed like the ideal moment for a brother to brother chat. Eight years older than me, my brother was single, again, and, according to him, “loving every minute of it.” I meantime was a young newlywed and, in most people’s minds, in need of some mentoring.

“So,” he buckled his seatbelt. “How are you doing with this whole thing?” He whispered the question.

“I’m fine with it.”

“Are you sure?” he looked more deeply into my eyes. “Because, you know, it’s a lot of responsibility.”

“Yep,” I turned my eyes back to the road.

“Dude, you’re 23 and you’re going to have a kid!”

“What? People my age have kids.”

“People your age had kids. Like in the forties.”

“Look, I’m fine with it, ok?”

“Ok,” he looked out the window. “If you say you’re fine.”

“I am. I’m fine.”

And I was. I was convincing myself more and more of it each day. When my brother talked about children, he spoke of expenses: diapers, high chairs, doctor’s visits. But what gave me faith these days is the thought of Salvatore, my great grandfather. I had never seen a photo of him and I had never heard a good word about him either. According to family lore, Salvatore Petrone was an immigrant bootlegger who disciplined his kids with a belt. But he was tough. And he had eight kids.

Eight. Epp and I were waiting on just one child. Just one and I had been dreaming about it for weeks.

The baby was not due until January, but Epp had been giving birth in my dreams on an almost nightly basis. Sometimes it was a boy, sometimes a girl, but, whatever it was, the child was coming, and what put me at ease was this image of Salvatore, leaning over my shoulder, the stink of homemade wine on his breath, telling me, “Relax, kid, have a drink. I mean, it’s just one kid!” This mythological Salvatore was usually friendly, but if I ever had a second thought about anything, he got angry, gritted his teeth, and growled at me from the shadows. “Pull it together,” he’d snap, and I could see the sepia-toned outline of his bushy moustache and fedora cap, a pipe suspended from his lips, like an extra from Casablanca. “Be a man!” he would grunt. And I listened to him. To whom else could I listen?

Epp dozed as we descended, the magazine rolled in her hands. Her brows were furrowed, as if she was concentrating on the plot twist of a book she had yet to write. Of all the places I could have been at that moment, I was there with her, and I had chosen to be there with her. It was my choice to be with her on a plane to Hiiumaa, checked in under the Estonian phonetic spelling of our name: Petroon. And even if it gave others pause, I was satisfied with my situation.

From the sky, Hiiumaa looked to me like a diamond or a star. I could see dark forests and patches of farms and open fields, thin lines of roads connecting the tiny hamlets where the islanders, called hiidlased, lived. And all of it was surrounded by water, dark blue seas salted with breaking white-tipped waves.

I wanted to go to Hiiumaa because it seemed far away. I had seen photos of the island’s wild beauty before, images of windswept beaches and commanding lighthouses. I had read that, in winter, people could even travel across the ice to get to the island. It seemed solitary and peaceful. I wanted to be there.

At the airport we caught a cab to Kärdla, the island’s capital. The cab driver kept mostly to himself, other than to grunt from time to time as he turned the wheel. When he heard us speaking English, he turned his head and looked at us with a set of steely eyes, a slight grin on his lips.

“First time in Hiiumaa?” he asked in English.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well, you should know that there have been three great naval powers in history.” I noticed that the driver’s left eye was a little lazy when he said it, and I couldn’t tell if he was looking at Epp or at me.

“Which ones?”

“Guess.”

“I don’t know. The English, the Dutch, and the Spanish?”

“Wrong! Hiiumaa, Saaremaa, and then England.”

“Shut up!”

“I’m serious,” the driver said, turning his lazy eye in my direction. Then he grunted again and returned his gaze to the road.

“Is he joking?” I slunk down in the seat and whispered to Epp.

“I think so,” she answered in a hushed tone. “But you can never tell with these Hiiu people.”

We rolled down past doll-like houses and sunlit gardens into Kärdla, a village by the sea framed by an apothecary, a handicrafts shop, and one supermarket. At the supermarket, we stopped to get a snack. In a nearby park we found shelter under an old oak for a picnic.

We were supposed to prepare for the interview with Anne Helene, but we weren’t talking about her. Instead, we spoke of Airi, the closest hiidlane we knew, the one with whom Epp went backpacking in India two years before on a search for the meaning of life. I had met Airi only a few times. The first time I met her at the publishing house, her hair was purple. The second time I met her at our apartment, it was orange.

“I met Airi one night a few years ago. She came over with a friend,” Epp lazed on her back in the shade of the Kärdla oak. “I said, ‘I’m Epp.’ She said, ‘I’m Airi.’ Then Airi looked around and put her hands on her hips,” Epp sat up to imitate her. “’Well,’ Airi said, ‘what are we doing standing around here? Let's go to the store! Buy some something to eat or something!’ I fell in love with her at this moment, and that’s just how people from Hiiumaa are. They’re jolly good fellows who are not afraid of things. They take you as an old friend.”

On Epp’s lips her name was pure magic. Whenever Airi surfaced, Epp was whisked back in time to some ancient temple in the jungles of India; places where they had gone searching for something. “That time with Airi.” Such tales trembled with possibility. Airi was a constant of some kind, a parallel, and I began to wonder what it was like for our influential Airi to grow up on Hiiumaa.

“I bet hiidlased eat a lot of fish,” I said, staring up at the oak branches.

“Mmmhmm,” Epp nodded dreamily. “And, you know, Airi has a sister, Triin. They are like twins. One year apart.”

Airi and Triin. Hiidlased. I could see them growing up together on this island like twin Pippi Longstockings, nurtured only by their wandering sea captain father, Efraim with his wild beard and seafaring earring.

“Her father’s nothing like that,” Epp rolled her eyes. “His name is Rein. He’s an engineer.”

“Oh,” I was a little disappointed.

“But people from Hiiumaa are different,” Epp said. “Airi writes fairy tales, she even won an award for one. The other big island, Saaremaa, is for, like, hardworking people. Saarlased are very principled, concrete. But hiidlased? They believe in fairies. Airi says that Hiiumaa is full of elves and fairies.”

It sounded so exotic, but I also knew what it meant to be from an island. I was from Long Island, after all, born in the same hospital where my father was born and his father before him and where my great grandfather, the Italian immigrant bootlegger Salvatore, died. This special hospital was just a quick walk from the sea, so the salt had been in my lungs since I could breathe on my own and I’d always been among the horseshoe crabs and starfish and mussels and seaweed, the stench of low tide as familiar to me as the smell of my own shorts.

I remembered how my mother would take me to the seafood store when I was young. The clerk would put a live lobster down on the floor and the two of them would chuckle as the lobster sprinted towards the wailing youth, its alien legs tapping at the tiles. Later, of course, we boiled the lobster alive and ate him with melted butter, so I had my revenge, but I knew the sea well and was acquainted with its creatures.

I also knew what growing up on an island did to you. There was no easy way off. As a boy I thought about how, if the Soviets decided to strike New York City, we would be stuck on that island, nowhere to go, nothing to do except boil in the sea. As teenagers we would sit in parking lots at the beach and plot our escape, maybe across the sound to Connecticut or even beyond to California. A lot of us did manage to escape the island. Some of those who stayed behind went mad. Maybe this was the source of the aquatic tension within me.

“Wait, what time is it?” Epp asked as we lazed beneath the trees.

I checked my mobile. “12.25.”

“We have to go!” Epp stood up suddenly, dusting off her shorts. “It’s time to meet her.”

Anne Helene was a Norwegian designer who had a workshop in Kärdla. Epp was there to write a story about her for Anne. I would take the photos.

I liked being a photographer because I got to look at people, to really look at them because, unless the person was asleep, you couldn’t really look at them. As Anne was a magazine for women, most of the people I photographed were women and if I had looked at Anne Helene in a cafe the way I viewed her through the lens that day, she would have probably gotten up and moved. She would have thought I was crazy. Instead, I had a Norwegian woman standing on a swing with the white caps of the Gulf of Tareste glimmering behind her and the wind tossing her long locks of red hair all over and she was smiling down at me, like she actually liked me. And I kept looking. One might think that a man like me enjoyed this photo shoot too much, that there was nothing more exciting than seeing a woman get pounded by the spray of the surf. But I liked looking at Anne Helene because she was a person and I thought people were interesting. “People always want to look at other people,” Epp had once said. Take a photo of a temple in India and it is static. But put Epp and Airi in front of it, colorful as peacocks, road-weary circles under their eyes, henna on their hands, and suddenly the image is vibrant, people fall in love with it, like I did.

I stole a few long looks at Epp there on the beach, too, but to look at her, to photograph her, was different. Epp was immediate, accessible with her thick dirty blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, her fertile figure restrained by a red tank top, her blue eyes, which always looked like they were smarting with secrets, staring back at me.

With Anne Helene, though, I felt nothing. There was a wall between us, a closed gate through which I could not pass. I stared at her pretty face, her red curls whipped about by the cool winds, but I couldn’t connect with her. Maybe it was because she was a Norwegian, just another aloof northern person it would take eons to get to know. I remembered seeing a poster for a Norwegian comic in Oslo two years before, a billboard of a socalled “entertainer” with sad, droopy, alcoholic Scandinavian eyes. And I couldn’t figure it out. He was a comic, but he wasn’t even smiling. Such manifestations of northerliness could never be explained, I decided. They could only be accepted or ignored. So even with a camera in my hand, with carte blanche to look at Anne Helene any way I pleased, I couldn’t get through to her. And yet, despite her northern aloofness, I still tried to relate to her because even if Norwegians were the obtuse people who gave the world The Scream^[1.], they were still Westerners and I was a Westerner and together we were one.

I hated the term ‘Westerner.’ I hated the very idea of the West. I hated the thought of any imaginary curtains descending between Estonia and me, cutting me from Epp, cleaving me from my own unborn child, carving us up because I had Reagan and she had Gorbachev or we had Volvos and they had Ladas.

Besides, I thought that Estonia, of all countries, was actually a part of the West, a stealth West, accidentally submerged by Stalinism, disconnected by historical aberration, a sort of diplomatic “oops!” at some post-war conference. Estonia wasn’t meant to be part of the USSR. No. It was like Lennart Meri had said in his speeches, the ones I had read in old articles in the Baltic Times office in Tallinn. “Estonia isn’t former Soviet Union,” the former president had said. “It’s former Swedish Empire.” I loved it. It sounded like Estonia was encrusted in gold and emeralds and diamonds, its squares dominated by regal stone lions and ejaculating fountains and string quartets. And it made sense to me. Just look at those windmills and Lutheran churches, those gingerbread houses and artesian wells. Just look at Hiiumaa. This wasn’t some backward, shitridden, fermenting post-Soviet toilet. This was Estonia.

And this whimsical island was among the westernmost parts of Estonia. If any place was former Swedish empire, this was it. If there was any part of Estonia where Anne Helene and I could walk as Westerners, it was in Kärdla. Indeed, the island seemed mostly unspoiled by the Soviet years. There were old rusty watch stations, sure, but they were childlike, like the crow’s nests of forgotten shipwrecks. Even the Soviet apartment blocks, usually jarring in the Estonian towns with their white-brick ugliness, were tucked into wooded lots crossed with dark, deep-running streams, their banks peppered with yellow flowers. I was grateful for this because if there was one thing I wanted to do to Tallinn, it was bulldoze every revolting Communist-era building and hand the property over to Finnish developers, gratis. I wasn’t a destructive person, really. I just wanted Estonia to look like it was supposed to look.

At lunch it was Epp and me, Anne Helene and Maret, the manager of Anne Helene’s design shop. I sensed a little tension in the air. Anne Helene wanted to talk about her work. Epp wanted to know more about the plane crash. “I think it’s my angle,” she had confided in me. “Estonian women will want to read about a designer who’s survived a plane crash.”

But Anne Helene was reluctant to relive the accident. “I was hit on the head. I was bleeding,” said Anne Helene. “I am lucky when you think about it,” she looked out the window at the sea. “And I’ve never flown that route again. I always take the ferry now.”

“But what happened before you crashed,” Epp ventured, “when you were in the air?”

“It was confusing,” Anne Helene frowned.

“I was once on a bad flight,” Maret suddenly cut her off, her fingers fluttering with inspiration. The islander Maret had been quiet all this time, sharing nothing except for a peculiar grin. Now she sat up, her gray, birdlike eyes moistening behind her spectacles. “It was so bumpy. We were frightened. And all the time, we were looking at the one man on the plane and wondering why he wasn’t helping. ‘You are the man!’ we cried, ‘can’t you save us?’ And he did nothing, can you believe that?” she folded her arms and sat back. “The man did nothing!”

Anne Helene looked across the table at me. She made eye contact. I looked back at her. And for the first time all day, I thought we connected. There was a glimmer in her eyes, a quiet understanding passed between us. We said nothing but we shared the same thought: feminism had not yet reached Estonia.

That’s not say that Estonian womanhood was still stuck in a 19th century bodice of kinder, küche, und kirche^[2.]. Some Estonian women had gone on to illustrious careers in politics and business with their form-enhancing power suits, their hair just right, and their make-up just so, but, still, Maret’s comment made me think: What if there had been no man on her flight that night? Who would have been there to save them? And what gave some Estonian ladies the idea that just because there was a man aboard, he knew how to land an airplane in a storm?

You are the man. Save us.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I imagined Anne Helene clucking to herself at that moment that a “Norwegian woman would never say such a thing.” And maybe she was right. I was alarmed, though. If any airplane I was on hit turbulence over this country, I now understood it was my gender-specific duty to get behind the wheel and fly the womenfolk to safety.

“Did you hear her? ‘You are the man, save us.’ Like, just because I’m a man, I know how to fly a plane? Hasn’t she ever heard of Amelia Earhart?”

“Don’t let it into your heart, Justin. Just pedal, and save your energy! We need to get to the other side of this island before it’s too late.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No,” Epp beamed from her bike. “The magazines say that women who are four months pregnant have lots of energy. And I am four months pregnant!”

Epp and I had rented a pair of bicycles in Kärdla and set out for Käina on the southern coast of the island. I didn’t know how long the journey would take, but it seemed we had been on the road for a long time.

“I thought women didn’t need men anymore,” I pedaled on and screamed at her while she rode strongly ahead of me. “It’s like they say on that bumper sticker: a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

“Estonian women aren’t that interested in that stuff,” Epp yelled back, as if the category excluded her. “The Finns say Estonians need more feminism, the Estonians say that the Finnish feminists are ugly. The Estonian women say they have always worked. They think they don’t need feminism.”

Estonia didn’t need to import every fad that had passed through the West, it seemed. They would take our good things and ignore our psychodramas. Yes to The Bold and the Beautiful, no to political correctness. Yes to online shopping, no to feminism. They’d have the EU and NATO, thanks, but don’t expect them to stop saying neeger or believing that all technical issues could be resolved by consulting the nearest male.

It was this last belief that baffled me. All foreign men in Estonia eventually came to understand that there were certain things they were expected to do and not to do. Men were never to offer to make dinner or do the dishes. But when it came to plumbing, electronics, or furniture assembly, it was up to the man to use his God-given divining rod to figure it all out. Epp had been sympathetic. She didn’t push me to fix the plumbing. She called a plumber instead. Still, there had been a few times when she would pore over a task and say blankly, “My father would know how to do it.” That’s all it took to get me down on my knees to revive a broken chair or fix the connection on our TV. We both knew that I was mostly useless. If I did manage to fix something, Epp would applaud. “You’re my hero,” she’d say. If I fixed something as treacherous as a clogged toilet, I might even get a kiss.

“I think Airi’s parents live around here,” Epp said, her voice echoing through the forest as we rolled along. “The trees look familiar.”

The last time I had seen Airi had been at our apartment in Tallinn. She came to visit after Epp and I married in June. Airi and Epp had spent their time together looking at old photos of India and reflecting on their magical wanderings, that is, when Airi wasn’t responding to urgent text messages from her boyfriend Tõnu.

“Why does he keep messaging you?” I asked.

“He says he’s hungry,” said Airi. “He wants me to come home.”

“But if he’s hungry, why doesn’t he make himself something to eat?”

Airi stared at me. “Tõnu? Make food?”

“What? He doesn’t know how to cook?”

“But Justin,” Airi shook her head, “Tõnu is an Estonian man.”

Poor Tõnu. If Airi hadn’t gone home that night he might have starved to death in their kitchen.

“One time Airi and I wrote an article together about looking for fairies in Hiiumaa,” Epp yelled as she pedaled in front of me. “We met some people who said that the fairies had picked up a ship and dropped it in the forest. And they even showed us the shipwreck or something like it!”

“Whoa.”

“And I was looking at them, wondering, were they kidding or were they really being serious? I couldn’t tell.”

“So, there’s a shipwreck in the woods?” I peered into the trees.

“Then, when we went back to the mainland, Airi’s mother called and said that I had left a pair of pink slippers at their house. And I said, ‘What pink slippers? I don’t have any pink slippers.’ And she said that someone had left them there. I mean, was she joking or did they really find some pink slippers?”

“Whose pink slippers were they?”

“I don’t know! They have some weird sense of humor here, or perhaps the weird things really happen? The editor-in-chief read our article about the fairies and heard about the slippers and said, ‘Epp, you must be going crazy.’”

Through the woods, I spied a distant home here and there. This was how the Estonians lived, away from one another. Estonians never met to mend fences, as there were no fences. There was just distance. If luck had it, they wouldn’t meet at all.

It was different from what I had left behind, of hot summer nights spent pub crawling, riding around in the subway trains, tethered to the flashing electronic eyes of emptiness, the deafening thrum of humanity in perpetual motion. This was where I had been a few days before. New York, a giant city, a metropolis, arrested by masses, unable to move freely, unable to think clearly, chafed and displaced in an urban contusion where one had to yell obscenities to merely be heard.

But I wasn’t there. I was on a bike on Hiiumaa and my nerves still felt raw. A few days out of New York and they were still tingling, craving more noise, craving more light. Things seemed too quiet here, a bit too serene, the only dissonance coming from the mosquitoes and the shiny black Mercedes and BMWs that roared past us at astounding speeds, their windows tinted, each containing a male driver in sunglasses: quiet, self absorbed, reckless, Estonian.

“Holy shit these drivers are crazy,” I cried out after another bullet-like BMW shot by. “People don’t drive like that in New York. Why is everyone here in such a goddamn hurry?!”

“Oh, look, an anthill!” Epp swerved off the road into the forest. “Let’s go have a look.”

It wasn’t really an anthill. Knee-high, sandy and round with a dark opening at the top, like a pregnant woman’s belly button, this was like an apartment complex for ants. “There are even more of them over there,” Epp motioned deeper into the forest.

I saw them, thick mounds, the apartment blocks of the Hiiu ants. It was new to me, different. I watched the line of ants trickle down into the long black entrance of the extraterrestriallooking heap.

“We’re a long way from New York,” I said under my breath.

Even Tallinn seemed distant out here in the forests. And who cared about Tallinn? Who cared about its unscrupulous businessmen or vain politicians or death-cheating drunks? Who cared about its ugly old buildings or shiny new shopping centers? Who needed Tallinn? At that moment, to me, Hiiumaa was Estonia.

I’d be lying if I told you they weren’t intimidating. They were large, fat, brown, hairy, ugly, smelly, and spread along the bay, some sitting, others standing, a few swaying down the road fresh grass dropping from their jaws. There were definitely more Scottish Highland Cattle than people on Käina Bay that day and they were looking at us like we were idiots. What kind of people would cycle across an island until their legs felt like butter and still head out for an evening ride after checking into their B&B?

It was evening and what struck me, as I dipped my hand into the dark waters of the bay at sunset and rinsed my face, was the raw sadness of it all, the vast emptiness. It had stalked me all my life and here it was again on Käina Bay. All day long I had cycled under the bluest of blue skies, almost close enough to touch. But now as the sun was about to retire, the island was swept by the same lingering melancholia that fills the air of all northern lands; that tinge of bitterness, like a raw berry that has just burst in your mouth. But I had come back here; I had come back to the sad north. I could only conclude that I liked its taste.

We arrived at our B&B when it was still light out. The B&B owner didn’t come to the door, but her neighbor did, a bucket of berries in her hand, trying to steal a few clients while her competitor was at the shop. The neighbor was blonde going on white with old blue eyes and calloused, grimy fingers, dripping with worm guts and berry seeds. She drifted into the yard in her knee-high rain boots, trying to seduce us.

“What are you paying her?” she asked with a sly smile, and I noticed she toyed with a small knife as she spoke.

“How much do you want for a night?” Epp was interested.

“Oh, nothing,” she shook her head and laughed. “You can stay for free. I could use the company.”

Suddenly, an old car rattled and coughed up the driveway, and the neighbor stepped back into the shadows of her yard, her berry bucket swinging from her arm.

“See you,” Epp waved to her.

The neighbor nodded and winked. Then she disappeared behind her house. The B&B owner emerged from her car, round and clad in a blue dress with a lion’s mane of dyed black curly hair that bobbed in the evening light.

“Just give me a minute,” the owner said, ducking inside her house to deposit an armful of groceries. She reemerged with a set of keys a second later. “Let me show you to your room.”

Ours was located in a separate barn, with its own door to the yard. It was cluttered with old furniture and flies, but I didn’t mind. Instead I sat on the edge of one the beds and undid my sandals, running my fingers along the raised patches of sore skin.

“Almost 30 kilometers,” I sighed. “And we have to ride back tomorrow.”

Epp didn’t respond. She was too busy sniffing the air. “Do you smell it? This place really stinks! It’s moldy here!”

“It is?” I took a few whiffs of the air. To me the room smelled as bad as anything else.

“You mean you can’t smell it?”

“I’m too tired to smell anything.”

“Maybe it’s the pregnancy. I read it makes you more sensitive to smells.”

“Maybe we should try the neighbors’?” I offered. “She said it’s free.”

“Of course it’s not free, Justin. It was just Hiiu humor.”

“Hiiu humor?” “It’s like they say. If you believe a quarter of what a hiidlane says, then you have been deceived by half.”

I did the math in my head. The neighboring B&B was definitely not free.

“Will you go talk to the owner?” Epp asked.

“Who? Me?” I looked up.

“Justin, you’re the man in this family. You need to take the initiative sometimes too.”

“Oh, right. But, you know, my Estonian’s not so good.”

“Fine then, I’ll go talk to her.”

Moments later we were ushered into the B&B owner’s home.

“I have another room for you down the hall,” she apologized. “It used to be my son’s room.”

The interior of the B&B was disappointing. I thought that Hiiumaa was separated by the mainland by more than just water. I expected something with a nautical theme, paintings of ships on the walls, canopies of fishing nets, a complimentary cup of clam chowder, for that added maritime effect. I thought it would be like any B&B in any New England seaside village, the ones I had known as a kid growing up. I would stay there in the moonlight, awake late into the night, listening to the beautifully freckled Irish girls who worked locally as they gathered together in the yard to play guitars and sing sea shanties.

The Käina B&B was nothing like that. It was dark and musty with the sad blue wallpaper and glossy dark Soviet-style bookshelves you found in many Estonian homes. The walls too were plastered with the same black and white photos of the same gang of bored-looking Estonian guys with identical moustaches; no smiles, no body language, not even any Hiiu humor. You could find such photos in any house in this country. You might even be able to switch photos between homes and feel secure that the residents wouldn’t notice the difference for a few weeks.

“Those are my sons,” the owner pointed at the men.

“Do they live around here?” I asked her.

“Not anymore,” she frowned. “Here’s your room.”

Our new room may have been cluttered with baskets of old magazines and dusty furniture, but I didn’t care. I just needed to lie down. I sat down on the edge of the bed and once again undid my sandals.

“It’s not pretty,” Epp shrugged after the owner left. “But at least it doesn’t stink.”

The other guests at the B&B were a German couple. He had a moustache and an expensive timepiece. She had bangs and looked very tidy. For breakfast they ate granola and flipped through guidebooks.

“What will it be today, Ulrika? Maybe start with the Rudolf Tobias museum?” he asked.

“Who’s Rudolf Tobias?”

“It says here that he was a composer.”

Germans. Why did they come to Hiiumaa of all places? Was it to bask in their former glory?

Maybe. Later, in the graveyard of a chapel, on an island called Kassari across the bay from Käina, I stooped down to rub my hands in the grooves of the old stones and crosses. Some merely said Puhka rahus^[3.] but the older ones were inscribed in the language of the German tourists. Were these Hiiu people German? No. But in the 19th century, life was recorded in German, the language of the manor owners. Estonians were born, married, and buried in German. Many had German names and many still do. But, despite this overwhelming Germanization, the Estonians had never become Germans. The stubborn islanders had always remained who they were.

The Kassari chapel was crooked and white, like an old woman. And in the graveyard of the chapel, as we stopped to take a rest, I knelt down to read off the names of the old stones. Georg. Elsa. Karl. Minna. All these people were bones. Anyone that could remember anyone that remembered them was dead. But one name caught my eye. It looked a little different. Alive. It didn’t seem especially German or Estonian. Instead, there was something grander there. It could be the name of an Italian film star or a Brazilian singer.

Marta.

It was like a hot spark. There was energy in that name, adrenaline. Is this how you recognize the right name for your kid? I didn’t know, but it felt right.

“I had a great aunt named Marta,” Epp crouched down beside me.

“Do you remember her at all? What was she like?”

“She died a long time ago,” Epp wrinkled her brow. “But I remember she had a cool doll sitting on top of her cabinet.”

“What do you think?”

“You mean for us?” Epp said and paused to think for a moment. “Well, it does sound international,” Epp said. “And it’s a family name.”

“Little does our Marta know,” I reached out and touched the stone one more time, “but she’s going to be named after some dead chick from Hiiumaa.”

“Let’s do it,” Epp agreed. “It’s the name if it’s a girl!”

On the way back from the Kassari chapel we stopped to take a break in an old fashioned villavabrik – a wool factory. We laid our bikes against a stone wall in the deserted parking lot, but there were no cars parked there and there was no one around, no evidence of life other than the odd home in the distance here and there with its dark wooden walls and thick thatched straw roof looking cozy and ancient, like a movie set for The Lord of the Rings.

“So, when we get back to Tallinn,” Epp began to speak as we walked to the factory door.

“Shh!”

“What?”

“Do you hear that?” I whispered.

“No.”

“Just listen.”

And we stood there, both silent, listening. We heard nothing. Not a sound. No cars. No radios. No construction. And then, in the distance, a sheep let out a gentle cry.

“It’s so quiet here,” I whispered looked out into the fields of flax beyond the stone wall.

“Tere!” a voice boomed from the steps of the factory. I turned to see a man with brown hair, gray on the sides, a cowlick in the back, and a middle-aged paunch. He was dressed in blue overalls, as if he had just come from milking a cow.

“Tere,” Epp answered him. “Is your store open?”

“It is, come in.”

The store was tidy and adorned with caps and sweaters and booties embroidered with colorful folk patterns made in subtle blues and reds, greens and golds, zigzagging and crisscrossing like diamonds, snowflakes, tree branches, insects, and thunderbolts. The air in the room was thick with the smell of pungent wool. Epp found a locally made shawl to bring home with us. As we paid, I chatted with the owner.

“Are you from around here?” I asked.

“Born and raised,” he said. “And I’ve been running this shop since the Russian time ended.” And as he shifted his glance to me, I noticed his left eye was a little lazy. Again, an islander was looking in my direction, but not at me.

“The Russian times, eh, so you’ve been running this shop since 1917?” I winked to the owner.

“Ok, ok since the Soviet time ended,” he said with a peculiar grin, as if he was incredibly amused by something, but not by me.

“So, is it true what they say about Hiiu humor?” I asked him. “Does it really exist?”

“Of course it exists,” the owner answered with that odd grin still on his lips. “An Estonian from the mainland will stop in here and ask, ‘Where does this road lead?’ And I’ll tell him every time, ‘The road doesn’t lead you anywhere, you have to follow it yourself.’ Now that’s Hiiu humor!”

Epp laughed when he said it, but I didn’t, and I didn’t get anything about this country, its wacky humor, its pervasive silence, its sexual mores, but I had definitely married into it. And all this, I looked around at the woolen folk costumes hanging on the wall, had seemingly been my choice.

“I know a joke too,” Epp volunteered. “Why shouldn’t a Hiiu guy tell a joke to a mainlander on Wednesday?”

“Because they start to laugh in the church on Sunday!” the factory owner deadpanned.

“Ha!” Epp chuckled.

“Yeah, that’s a good one!” the owner wiped a tear from his eye and handed the bag to me. “You know, I could go on telling jokes like that all day.”

“Was that joke supposed to be funny?” I whispered and held the door for Epp as we exited the shop a moment later.

“Don’t worry, Justin,” she touched my arm on the way out. “You will probably get it later.”

1 A depressing, world famous painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. [ ↵ ]

2 Children, kitchen, and church (In German) [ ↵ ]

3 Rest in peace (In Estonian) [ ↵ ]