Читать книгу My Estonia - Justin Petrone - Страница 5

Helsinki is not romantic. For most people the ferry docks in the Finnish capital do not evoke the sensual feelings of the Mediterranean.

Yet whenever I find myself anywhere near the Esplanaadi – the long walking street that terminates in a fresh food market near the ferries that go to Tallinn – I am overcome. It was here that I met Epp for the very first time.

I had stood there one gorgeous August day, my body pummeled by jetlag, staring at this young Estonian woman and her mane of curly hair. She wore red pants, a red corduroy jacket, and orange tinted sunglasses. The little waves of the Gulf of Finland lapped the docks, and Epp had stood there smiling in the sunlight, set against a backdrop of happy-looking ships and people selling fresh fish.

“My name is Epp and I am 28,” Epp said, approaching me. “I just got back from India. It’s so weird to see the Baltic Sea again.”

I nodded and introduced myself. Justin, from the United States, aged 22, glad to be far away from home. Glad to be far away from anything. I listened as Epp spoke, and watched her hair flapping in the wind. I watched her smooth tanned body, lithe fingers, and high cheekbones.

Then from somewhere in my body, a tiny voice commanded me to make babies with her – sorry, Janar and Hardo. I instantly felt vulnerable. “Shut up,” I told the little voice. “Whatever you do, don’t get me into any more trouble.”

After my eight-hour plane ride, Epp to me might as well have been some Baltic aphrodite. I couldn’t hold a conversation because I was so tired and delirious. From time to time, it literally seemed as if my vision would wrinkle from fatigue. Supposedly, it was 2 pm here on the docks, but it might as well have been 7 am or 9 pm or 25 o’clock. My body didn’t know what time it was anymore.

And I didn’t know what to expect from Finland, but I knew instinctively that coming here would be an emotional milestone. I was thousands of miles away from most of the people I knew and yet, for some reason, I didn’t miss them. I had watched already as people in our international program had scurried like rats to the Internet cafes to e-mail friends at home. But I sent no messages to my friends, and I only used a pay phone one time to let my mother and father know I was still alive.

I wanted to be detached. I wanted to disconnect. I wanted to be here in Helsinki. I needed to replenish my soul, I told myself, given all the messed up things that had happened in the past year. And the replenishment of one’s soul did not include romantic intrigues with anyone, not even Epp and her red pants.

Besides, I came to Helsinki not for love, but because I was in the Finnish foreign correspondents’ program. I had been searching for a job online during my last semester of university in Washington, DC, and I found Finland instead. I rattled off an essay about my desire to see the northern lights, and managed to impress the interviewer at the ultramodern Finnish embassy enough that I was one of two Americans selected to go. Maybe the interviewer had sensed how desperate I was when she met me.

My life, by that point, had turned into something resembling The Real World, an American TV series that followed the messy personal lives of individualist twenty-somethings as they tried to find themselves against a threatening urban backdrop of nihilism and sexually-transmitted diseases.

My college romance had burned out in a maelstrom of infidelity and emotional upheaval. As much as I had loved her, the garden of love we tended had been mowed down and salted so that nothing could ever grow again. To kill the pain I fell in with ne’er do well bohemians, who ate hashish like candy. Why, some of them even mixed it in their food every night.

They were on the same sad carnival ride to nowhere as I, and no doubt as deeply miserable. Misery does love company. And what was it that that some girl had said to me at a party one night? She said that I had no ambition and she was right. In hindsight, Finland really was my last hope. It was calling me in my sleep from Helsinki: an open-air mental institution on the other side of the world.

Our program, organized by the Finnish foreign ministry, had basically one objective: to entice promising foreign journalists to Finland, brainwash them about how great Finland was, and then send them back to their home countries, where someday, when they became heads of newspapers and TVstations, they could speak with authority about reindeer farms, paper mills, and the Winter War.

It was a smart move by a country known for its former isolation, and today I have no doubt that the effects of the Finnish Foreign Correspondent’s Program are irreversible.

As the program progressed over the ensuing weeks, they would take us to the west coast city of Turku, where one could drink aboard boats turned into bars on the beautiful city canals. We would be introduced to the university town of Tampere, where we could learn to whip ourselves with birch branches in the sauna. Then they would jet us up to Lapland to hike through the stark Arctic wilderness and drink from the same streams as reindeer.

Finland, as we would come to learn, was a country where people put themselves to work with enormous helpings of coffee and put themselves to sleep with sweat and vodka. And how could I say no to all that free alcohol?

It was after a party in downtown Helsinki on one of the first nights after meeting my fellow correspondents that the other American and I took our bus back to the dormitory where we were staying. While she vomited in her purse, I became overwhelmed by my need to piss. Fearing I would wet my pants, I ran off the bus at a random stop and relieved myself on a nearby bush.

The night was warm and black. There was no one around. At first, I was happy about this. But then I realized that I had no idea where I was or any idea of how to get home. Helsinki wasn’t so big, I told myself. Our student hall must be right around the corner.

After what seemed like an hour of trekking anxiously through quiet, dark back streets, though, I came to the conclusion that the only way to get back home was to get back on bus 55. The only problem was that I had wandered so far from our bus stop, I had no idea how to find that either.

Still drunk and incredibly confused, I met a group of young people outside a house party.

A blond-haired young woman said something to me in Finnish. Her hair hung down her back in a long, plated braid. She repeated her question.

“I’m looking for my bus,” I slurred.

“You speak English? Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“New York? What the hell are you doing in Helsinki?”

“I’m in the,” I paused to burped, “Finnish foreign correspondents’ program.”

The pretty Finn with the braided hair smiled with pity and helped direct me to a bus stop where I caught another bus going somewhere. Tired, drunk, and lost, I now poured out my life story to the bus driver, who spoke excellent English.

“I used to be a bus driver in Oregon,” the bus driver said. “And in Estonia too; I was driving buses in Tallinn for awhile.”

The golden-haired bus driver looked at me in his rear view mirror. He seemed to be about the same age as me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Mati.” He reached out and shook my hand quickly, while keeping one hand on the wheel.

“Where are you from?”

“Well, originally, I’m from Estonia.”

“Estonia? There is a girl in our program from Estonia... Epp.”

“Epp. Sounds like an Estonian girl,” he smiled.

“When I first saw the manifest for our program, I couldn’t believe someone could have a name so short.”

“Oh yeah. We Estonians have lots of funny names,” Mati smiled. “My brother’s name is Uku.”

“Yoko?”

“Not Yoko,” he smiled. “U-ku.”

After a long ride through the backstreets of Helsinki, Mati finally pulled up behind bus number 55.

“This is your last chance,” Mati said. “The buses stop running around this time, so you have to run and get on that bus before it’s too late.”

“Kiitos^[1.],” I yelled to him.

“Don’t mention it.”

I made it just in time to reflect on how lucky I was to have made it. What would have I done if it weren’t for Mati? Slept on a park bench? Called the Finnish foreign ministry at 3 am? When I got finally staggered back to the dorm, I was told the students had sent out a search party to find me. I was happy to have so much attention, but depressed because once again alcohol had found me.

“Do you know how to say ‘Fancy a shag’ in Finnish?” an Arab journalist whispered. “It’s ‘Halut sie panna’.”

“Really?

“Oh yes, and “‘I like your new haircut’ is ...”

We were at another Finnish correspondents’ program wine and cheese late night event. Was there a day that went by in Finland where I didn’t go to bed drunk? The Egyptian correspondent in Helsinki, Mohammed, had also had a few too many and was lecturing me about the finer points of life in Finland.

“The thing my readers like most is when I write about the sauna,” he dragged on. “You can imagine how exotic the sauna is for people in Cairo.”

From the throng of other drunken writers, Epp ran up to me, giggling beside Réka, the Hungarian correspondent.

“Do you know the secret?” Epp whispered into my ear.

“What’s the secret?” I asked, intrigued.

“You mean you don’t know the secret?” She hit the last syllable like a bee sting. Epp then turned back to Réka, laughed again, and walked away.

Epp was weird. Of all of our group members, she was the only one who did not drink alcohol. She told me once that it was because of her time spent in an ashram in India, where people lived a “pure” life, and yet, she seemed crazier than anyone else in the program. What was her secret?

Mohammed was right about the saunas, though. In Finland, our group saunaed everywhere, every evening. We saunaed in the city, in the forest, on the islands, even in special Lappish “smoke saunas,” where the walls were black with soot and the air heavy with carcinogenic smog.

One day our group stopped at a summer cottage outside the city of Tampere. The men saunaed in one house, the ladies in another.

“Usually everyone saunas together,” said our host Jari. “But we thought it would be too weird for you since you are all from abroad.” I had heard a rumor during the program that Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja and President Tarja Halonen saunaed together regularly during the heady 1960s. After hearing what Jari told us, I now suspected it might be true.

Saunaing together with a bunch of naked guys wasn’t exactly normal, either. We were expected to disrobe in front of what were still a bunch of strangers, and then snuggle up together on a bench in a hot dark room, supposedly for relaxation.

So what do a bunch of naked foreign guys talk about in the sauna after having a few beers? Most of the time, we were talking about what might be going on in the women’s sauna. Florent, the French journalist, informed us that he was in love with just about every woman in Finland. Matjaz, the Slovenian, tried to find out which one of the girls we were most attracted to. The last thing I wanted to do was answer that question, even though I had a good idea of what my answer would be. Mitchell, the hearty Canadian, and Jevgeni, the boyish Russian, who apparently had not yet started shaving, discussed the finer points of the English language.

“Do you want to know the word for a gentle kiss on the ear?” Mitch asked Jevgeni.

“Oh, yeah, Mitch, please tell me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I really want to know. I have a little book where I write all the new words I learn each day.”

“Jevgeni, the word for a gentle kiss on the ear is dildo.”

“Dildo? That’s fantastic,” said Jevgeni in wonder. He paused for a moment to digest the new word.

“So Mitch, if I go up to a Canadian girl and ask her for a dildo, she’ll know what I am after?”

“Absolutely.”

Everyone in the sauna was talking and joking. But our Finnish guide Jari did not talk. Instead, he began to stoically dump water on the scalding hot rocks of the sauna, producing powerful bursts of steam that stung my ears and made me cover my face in pain. After the steam had cleared he dumped another ladle full on the rocks. Then he dumped another. Nobody said a word. I guess it was a man thing. Nobody wanted to be the first one out of the sauna.

We all hoped Jari would eventually stop and start whipping himself with some birch branches or something, but he didn’t. Instead, he kept doing it again and again, until all of us foreigners were finally forced to leave the inferno. Jevgeni, though, was the only one who seemed quite comfortable the whole time. Not only did Jevgeni not grow facial hair, he apparently didn’t sweat either.

“We’re Finns,” Jari yelled before we got out. “It is our mission to take over the world, one sauna at a time.”

Our cottage stood against the shores of a pristine lake. There was something different about the air up here. It felt as if it was kissing every part of your body; standing around naked felt like the most natural thing to do.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to swim to that island!” declared Jevgeni, who ran and lept, completely nude, into the murky lake water.

I had also noticed the small island before. From the deck outside the sauna, it looked tantalizingly close. I thought of grabbing my swim trunks before getting in the water, but I figured that Jevgeni knew what he was doing, so I, too, dove in head first, completely naked.

Perhaps it would take us only 10 minutes to get there, I thought. At first, the swimming came easy, but halfway across the lake I felt my body tire, and I began to tread water just to conserve some of my energy.

The Russian Jevgeni swam strongly ahead to the island, with confidence. He seemed completely at home in the Finnish environment. With some more effort I followed him, and finally pulled my naked torso onto the mossy beach where I laid gasping for breath, the moss and dirt sticking all over my body.

“You aren’t used to saunas and lake swimming, are you?” laughed Jevgeni. “It’s a Russian tradition, you know.”

“It’s a pretty exhausting tradition,” I gasped.

Suddenly noise broke our island idyll.

“Hey, it’s Jevgeni and Justin!” I heard female voices scream from across the lake. “Go get ’em!”

“Some of the girls have come to our little island,” Jevgeni raised a perverted eyebrow. “Perhaps I should go ask them for a dildo?”

“Who’s here?” I said, quickly covering my most private parts.

“I can hear Maria the hot Latvian and Natalie the hot British girl,” said Jevgeni. “And I can almost see Epp the hot Estonian from here. But, too bad, they’ve all got their bathing suits on.”

“Epp? We’ve got to get back to the cottage!”

“Why?” said Jevgeni. “Are you afraid she’ll see you?”

“Come on, let’s go.”

By now, I had come a long way in Finland. I had done things here that as an American I had never before even had the opportunity to do. I had learned to relax with a bunch of naked guys in a hot room while whipping each other with branches. I had swum across a lake in the nude, my manhood dangling like live bait. But the last thing I needed was for the cute 28-yearold Estonian girl with the secrets to catch me naked and freezing in the bushes covered with moss.

Instinctively, I dashed for the water, paddling back as hard as I could. About halfway across the lake, I began to feel that tired feeling again. My body began to cramp in pain. My arms strained to keep me afloat. My legs would not kick. And yet somewhere too close to my manhood, I saw the dark shape of a fish pass by, just waiting to chomp. I quickened my pace in fear.

I was rewarded with a cool beer by my friends when I finally reached the little sauna’s wooden dock.

“You are very lucky,” said Jari as he helped me out of the water. “Dozens of people drown in Finland every summer doing what you and Jevgeni just did.”

“What are you listening to?” Epp looked down on me as our bus drove back from Turku to Helsinki. My face chafed from the hot evening sun shining through the windows.

“It’s my music,” I said looking up at her nervously.

“What do you mean ‘your’ music?”

“I mean songs that I wrote myself.”

“Can I listen to it?”

“No,” I clung to my discman. “I mean, you can listen to it, but later.”

“You must be the first musician I have met, who doesn’t want anyone to listen to his music,” said Epp.

Epp. At first she had appeared to be so romantic, but now she seemed really intimidating.

It had all started at lunch in Turku. Mitch had gone to use the restroom and asked me to order him another glass of wine. When the waitress came and I asked loudly for “more wine for Mitch,” everyone in our program suddenly looked my way.

They dropped their utensils and glared, and I hung my head in shame, though I didn’t know exactly what I had done wrong. Mitch had wanted more wine. Was it so wrong to ask for another glass?

Later that night on a boat bar in the Turku canals, I asked Epp about what happened.

“You honestly want to know?” she responded.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Because you seem clumsy. You look like a teenager,” she shook her head.

“But Mitch asked me to get him more wine. It’s not my fault.”

“It’s not what you said,” she said, holding her full lips tight. “It’s the way how you asked.”

My inner balloon of self-esteem compressed. Not like it was much of a balloon to begin with.

“A teenager?”

“You seem pretty sad, Justin,” Epp said seriously. “Your eyes seem sad.”

Epp’s words killed me. I knew she was right, but I hated her anyway. At night I laid awake in my bunk, hungover and hot, scribbling my thoughts in my journal. “What comes next? Where do I come from?” I wrote. “I look in the mirror and see a face that I am told is mine. But. But what? Nothing. Nothing to do but slip into drunkenness or slip into sleep.”

“Please let me listen to your music,” said Epp again on the bus. “I really liked it when you sang ‘Ticket to Ride’ during karaoke hour on the ferry last night.”

The only good songs in the karaoke song book had been Beatles songs, so I chose one I could carry. But I didn’t know how much Epp loved the Beatles. She was one of the few who had applauded. The Finns on the ferry just stared at me when I was finished. They didn’t even look in my direction as I exited the stage. They treated every karaoke performer with the same cruel indifference, even the loveable fat drunk who sang “I Love Rock’n’Roll” before me. What was wrong with these people?

Epp narrowed her eyes and smiled at me. She said that she was from Estonia, but sometimes she seemed more like she was from Malaysia, another place that she had once lived and worked. She wore colorful clothing. She had already loaned me CDs of Cantonese electronic pop and Indian chanting music with elephants on the cover. I looked back into her eyes and kept feeling that, if I looked long enough, some supernatural force might materialize. Maybe I would begin to levitate.

“Hey, Justin,” Mitch the Canadian interrupted. “Got any more beer? It’s hot in here.”

“Sure, I snagged a few before we left,” I said, reaching into my backpack.

As I handed a beer to Mitch, Epp reached into my seat and snatched my discman, quickly making off with it to her own seat in front of the bus. My already sunburned face felt hot with embarrassment.

“Give it back!” I cried. “Give me back my music!”

But Epp did not respond. She slunk down in her seat with a mischevous smile and began to play the songs I had recorded alone in my parents’ basement that past summer.

I could hear the drums of the second track of the disc beating from the headphones and I knew it was too late to even bother. Like it or not, Epp had peeled off another one of my layers. Her lips curled as she listened, and I settled, defeated, into my seat. I felt like a crab overturned on a hot beach, my insides open for the plucking.

There, with nothing more than a journal to confess my thoughts, I sat waiting for Epp to give back my CD. I waited all day on the bus, but she kept walking around with the headsets, and I could hear my drums beating when she walked by.

Our group was returning from the Åland Islands. We had gone swimming on a remote beach, or what passed for a beach in Finland. The glacial rocks that seemed to form most of the island of Kökar vanished abruptly into the murky waters. I was nervous about the water, which seemed incredibly black and deep, while Epp dove in and began floating in to the distance, far from the rest of our group.

“Are there big fish in this water?” I asked our Swedish host.

“What?”

“Big fish. You know, like sharks or killer whales?”

“No,” he laughed and puffed his pipe. “No big fish.”

By the time our group had decided to leave the beach, Epp was just a tiny black speck in front of the orange setting sun. After my lake experience, I decided that she might get tired swimming back. I swam out after her. The Baltic Sea, to me, seemed completely foreign and a little threatening. Even if the Swedish host had said there were no killer whales, there could have been other creatures. Giant squids. Killer octopuses. Maniacal walruses.

“What are you doing?” Epp shouted, paddling in my direction. She gasped for air and dipped a bit below the surface of the water.

“I came out to see if you were ok; I was afraid you would get tired!”

“Oh,” Epp laughed, as if I had surprised her with flowers. “I have to give you twelve points for this.”

“Twelve points?” What was that supposed to mean? Many months later, I found out that it was a reference to the Eurovision Song Contest, an event that, at that point, I had never even heard of.

“Aren’t you afraid of being so far away from the island?” I yelled.

“Ha!” Epp declared, gasping again for air. “If you don’t struggle too much, the water will take you where you need to go. It’s like I learned in the ashram! You have to trust the water.”

I didn’t like the way people looked at us when we got out of the sea. Even though we were all in our twenties, with all these new faces, I felt like I was back in third grade.

“So how about you and Epp?” kidded Matjaz the Slovenian.

“Shut up, Matjaz,” I snapped.

“Aww, come on, tell us the details!”

“Give it a rest.”

“Did you two smooch out there on the waves?”

“Let him be, Matjaz,” the Frenchman Florent scolded the Slovenian. “Not everyone is a gossipy little school girl like you.”

I had told myself that I didn’t need a partner. I wanted to be detached and live as some kind of musical monk. Me and my guitar against the world. Sometimes while watching Finnish TV in our dormitory in Helsinki, though, my emotions got the best of me. Each afternoon, Kicki Berg, the perky Swede who hosted a music program called Up North, would come on and take all the pain away. You could say I had a crush on her.

“Justin, you really need a girlfriend,” said Natalie, the British correspondent, as I sat like a zombie and watched my lovely Kicki.

Natalie was a redhead from England and was covered from head to toe in freckles. She was the same age as me, almost to the day, and I felt as if she were some kind of lost twin sister.

“I know,” I sighed.

Epp had finally given me back my CD one day while we were walking around in a little town named Kotka near the Russian border. She followed me and Jevgeni into a music store and pulled me aside in the classical section.

“I have been listening to this for days, and it’s all really good,” she said, handing back the disc. “You should know that you are really talented.” I could feel the energy from her body as it neared mine.

“Talented?” I said, taken by her compliment. “Thanks.”

“My favorite is the song where you sing ‘hopelessly, helplessly’ at the end.”

“I know, I couldn’t decide which word to use, so I used both,” I said. That song meant the most to me, too.

Jevgeni watched us from the hiphop section with a bewildered look on his face. “Why are you two looking at each other like that?” he interrupted.

“Like what?” I said in response. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Epp didn’t even respond to Jevgeni. Instead she looked at me once more and left the store.

I exhaled.

At the start of the final week, we flew to Lapland. The bus from the airport took us over rocky hills through thick forests smelling sweetly of pine as our guides played for us joik music – the wild folk songs of the Sami people.

At a bar in little Lappish town called Inari, we danced with the local people. Later at the bar Mitch and I began toasting one another and doing shots of whiskey.

“The only sin is ignorance,” Mitch said, looking me squarely in the eye. “And missing your chance.”

All my regrets began to line up inside my head. Unable to keep the ghosts away, I collapsed on the table.

“Did you come up with that toast yourself?”

“No,” said Mitch, swallowing his whiskey. “But I think it’s appropriate.”

“Now, why the hell do you have to go and say that?” I slurred to Mitch. “Are you out to ruin my night?”

“See, I knew it was good toast,” Mitch laughed wickedly. “It gets you thinking.” At 34, Mitch was older and wiser than most of us and he was engaged.

“Fine,” I said, “No regrets.” I swallowed another hot whiskey, slammed the shot glass down on the table, and walked outside to find Epp.

Even at 11 pm, the polar sun still shone in Inari. The thick dark trees lined a cool lake that stretched out caressing dozens of islands. Epp sat on a long wooden dock that stretched out into the lake. A biplane was moored at the end and the air buzzed with fat Finnish summer mosquitoes.

As I neared her, the tiny voice surfaced again. Make babies with her, it demanded. This time, I was too consumed in the moment to even pay it attention.

I sat beside Epp. We made small talk, but I couldn’t remember our conversation. All I could do was contemplate on the force of gravity that was drawing us ever closer together.

After awhile Epp leaned towards me and pulled out a small piece of candy paper, which she folded into a miniature boat. She placed it at one side of the dock and it floated underneath to the other side, where I caught it.

“The most important thing is to trust the water,” Epp said with authority. “Always remember it when you swim; if you really trust the water, the water can never hurt you.”

I cupped the paper boat and stared at it for a moment.

“There,” Epp said, satisfied. “Now, you have to promise to keep this boat for the rest of your life. Do you promise?”

Was she joking? I looked at the paper boat again in the golden Lappish twilight, and then looked back at her. “I promise.”

Our merry group of drunken journalists streamed back to the cabins in the woods where we were staying near Inari. As I stumbled down a wooden path in the moonlight, Epp ran out of the darkness.

“I think I saw a reindeer,” she almost screamed, her eyes swimming wildly in the polar night. I could not understand, if she was just making fun of me or if she was really in trouble.

“You did?” I said, terrified. We had seen a few reindeer while we were hiking and they looked big and smelly; possibly very dangerous. I grabbed her hand: “Where should we go?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, “maybe we should go hide behind those cabins?”

As we snuggled in the bushes behind a wooden cabin, Epp put her head against my chest. “There is a full moon out,” she said as I leaned in to kiss her.

Suddenly, something rustled in the bushes. I shot straight up. “What is that? Is the reindeer back?”

Epp burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny?”

“You are.” She laughed even harder.

I looked around in the bushes. It was midnight, but the sky was light gray. Still, I couldn’t make out any antlers in the forest.

“You know,” I said, “we could just be sitting here, and a reindeer could come!”

Epp laughed harder. “Do you want to know the secret?” she asked.

“The what?”

“The secret. The big secret! I have decided to share with you the biggest secret in the universe.”

“Tell me. What is it?” I whispered, leaning closer to hear.

“The secret is that the world is small!” Epp roared with laughter. “It’s not big!”

“That’s the secret?”

“Yes!”

“Really?”

Something rustled again in the bushes.

“Wait, are you sure there are reindeer out here?”

“Oh yes, definitely. Reindeer with big, sharp antlers!” Epp rolled in the bushes laughing.

I grabbed her arms and leaned in closer. As I did, I noticed how high her cheekbones were. In the moonlight, I caught myself wondering if there really was Asian blood running in her veins. Estonian? More like Mongolian.

Before I came to Finland, I had spent the summer watching old James Bond films. I relished the way James used his sexual prowess to get his way with dangerous women. “Sean Connery’s got his act together,” I thought to myself while watching Goldfinger alone late one night. “Pussy Galore is no match for him.”

But the morning after hiding from the reindeer behind the cabins in Inari, I walked nervously into the breakfast room and spied Epp from across the table. Her eyes locked with mine. I nearly spilled my morning coffee. At first, she looked as confused as I did. Then she winked at me. I turned and sat down at a distant table. Where was my inner James Bond in these moments?

“Sometimes I feel that she is sensitive and beautiful,” I told my journal. “Her love is a center of gravity; a home. But other times it just seems too strong. It scares me.”

For the rest of our Lapland trip, I only felt clumsy around Epp. I didn’t know what to say or how to act. I didn’t want to sit next to her, lest I feed Matjaz’s lascivious rumor mill. During our flight from Lapland back to Helsinki, Epp didn’t even sit next to me. She chatted up Jevgeni at the front of the plane instead. I sat jealously in the back, all alone, listening to music. I was on my own at last; a sad individual.

The days continued to drip by in pastels of northern summer twilight and beer. At our farewell dinner in Helsinki – held at a restaurant on an island in the harbor – I decided to sit across from Epp at the table. She had in her hands a biography of Raisa Gorbachev, Mikhail’s deceased wife.

“I am working on an article about their relationship,” Epp said, explaining her interest in the book.

I took the book and flipped through photos of the couple. On the last page, there was a photo of Gorbachev after Raisa had died.

“Poor Gorby, he looks so sad.” I laughed nervously.

“It’s not funny when the love of your life dies,” she said.

“I didn’t say it was funny.” Our eyes locked in tension.

Epp looked distressed. “Let’s go outside,” she said. “I need to walk with you.”

We left the other half-inebriated writers at the table and walked down the long restaurant steps to the island. The golden lights of Helsinki glowed around us as boats passed by in the night. It felt special. At last I had found a place where I felt I was supposed to be.

“What are you going to do when you go back?” Epp asked.

“I don’t want to go back,” I looked at the lights. “I want to stay here.”

“Why don’t you want to go back?”

“Will you just look at it?” I said, gesturing towards Helsinki. “It’s so beautiful.”

“Maybe you should come with me back to Tallinn tomorrow,” ventured Epp. “Maybe it will help you somehow?”

“To Tallinn?” I said, looking at the ghostly boats glowing in the night.

I had heard of Estonia before. When I was a boy my grandmother had given me a book of children’s stories from the Second World War. One of the children was from Estonia. I can still remember how the little girl in the book described rationing, and how she liked it when she had a runny nose, because the flavorless soup she ate would be extra salty. Whenever I thought of Estonia, I thought of this story.

One day during the trip, Sara and Florent, the French journalists in our group, announced that they had visited Tallinn. If they could go, I could go, too. I was also told that Estonia would “soon be part of the European Union” which somehow made it seem more safe.

I had never heard the name Tallinn before, and I felt a sort of unease when I realized that Estonia – this very Estonia where Epp was from – was only an hour and a half’s boat ride across the Gulf of Finland. I knew the location of both places, but somehow Finland’s consignment to the “Nordic countries” and Estonia’s location in “Eastern Europe” kept them far apart in my head.

At that moment, when I figured out how close Helsinki and Tallinn are, the idea of actually going to Estonia revolutionized my internal sense of geography. Estonia had seemed civilizationally different. I imagined the signs to be scrawled in Cyrillic text and onion-domed Orthodox churches looking down over its cities. I imagined pickpockets to be standing on every corner, and untrustworthy women trying to scam me out of money, maybe even Epp. I mean, how much did I really know about this Malaysian-Estonian-Mongolian woman? She was a weirdo; that was the only thing I knew for sure.

As I stood there thinking about whether or not to go to Tallinn with Epp, we were joined by Sara.

“I like you, Justin,” the French journalist confessed with her cute accent while lighting a cigarette. “I have to say that I usually hate Americans, but you are different from the others. You really seem like you are searching for something!”

In the moonlight, I thanked Sara for the compliment.

I sat later that night in front of our TV in the student hall watching mindless shows. Maybe the sexy host Kicki would come on soon. I was miserable now, knowing that our program was over.

Natalie the Brit walked into the room and saw me sitting on the couch. She had just gotten back from the bar.

“Justin, what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Justin, will you just go see Epp,” Natalie shook her head. “I know you want to go see her. I am sure she is back in her room now. It’s our last night, do you understand?”

In my heart, I knew that Natalie was right. I hugged her and walked out of the room without saying a word. Then I took the stairs down to the second floor. I walked to Epp and Réka’s apartment and knocked at the door, hoping that Epp was still awake.

The door creaked open, and I could see her eyes and her mane of hair through the crack.

“I decided to come tomorrow,” I said.

“I knew you would come,” she whispered. “Come inside.”

All night long I stretched out in her bed, listening to our fellow program members bid adieu to one another outside in the dark – many had flights leaving that morning.

Epp meantime organized what seemed to be few personal possessions and then reorganized them again. She had piles and piles of papers littered all over the room, covered in handwritten notes. How could she spend so much time organizing?

“What are you doing?” I whispered to her impatiently at around 4 am.

“I’m still sorting my things,” she said.

I thought that organizing things was just one of her quirks. Later I would find out that it was an Estonian national pastime.

When we left the dormitory to visit Tallinn the next day, I kept my documents close at hand. Who knew who could lift them from my naive American pocket while I wasn’t looking? The Finnish border guards gave me no trouble when we left to board the ferry to Tallinn.

Epp, on the other hand, was uncomfortably scrutinized.

“What have you been doing in Finland for 30 days?” the passport control officer asked.

“I’ve been here on a program,” she said.

“Do you have any proof of your participation?”

Epp dug through her bag for several minutes. It seemed that she couldn’t find what she was looking for. Finally, Epp fished out her wallet, and showed them her press card and the agenda from the foreign ministry to prove that, no, she wasn’t a prostitute or Ecstasy dealer; just a journalist.

In Denmark, when I had studied for a few months in 2001, I had heard jokes about backward, foolish, and drunk Finns. I had even seen a few Finns who met this description. One, an old hippie named Jorma who looked like a blonde Genghis Khan, taught us a few Finnish phrases at a party.

The Danes I was with at the time looked at Jorma as if he had been raised by wolves. And here was Finnish passport control making someone different feel small. It seemed like everyone had someone they could use to make themselves seem better.

After the Finnish passport officer finally let Epp through I felt a little disappointed in Finland.

1 ‘Thanks’ in Finnish. [ ↵ ]