the battle of narva

I WAS CAST to play “Charlie” in The Battle of Narva. Starring opposite me was Sandra, a young actress from the Ugala Theatre. I guess they couldn’t find any other Americans for the part, and the setup was preposterous. Who would have believed that an American disc jockey would have had a radio program in Narva in 1944, when the country was under Nazi German occupation, and about to be flattened by Soviet bombs and bullets? Maybe this “Charlie” was an Ezra Pound-like character, doing Axis propaganda? Yet he seemed like an easy-going lad, nothing like you’d imagine a Nazi collaborator American DJ would be. Maybe it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time? Maybe the Nazis didn’t mind a Yankee DJ on the Eastern Front? Wasn’t one of them a famous jazz collector?

I imagined Charlie was sort of like Chris’s character from Northern Exposure. The episodes of The Battle of Narva would open and close with Charlie’s musings on the state of the war. “But what even is war? What is it good for?” and so on. Maybe he would play some quality recordings from The Andrews Sisters (“Rum and Coca Cola,” anyone?), Bing Crosby, a little early Frank Sinatra. But I think Charlie was more of a hepcat, he’d spin sides by Quintette du Hot Club de France. “It’s morning in Narva,” he would say into the microphone, “and to get all of you Narvans and Narvettes started, I’ve got some ‘Les Yeux Noirs’ to brighten up your day.”

Then he’d cut over to the pure swing of Django Reinhardt. That’s how the people of Narva survived the war, at least until they didn’t. While I had the character of Charlie figured out, remembering the lines was hard. Sandra had so much more training. She would sit in the windows of cafes with the script open, memorizing her lines. I had mine before me, but I improvised too much. This provoked a soft-hearted lecture by the director, Bill Murray, who told me that learning one’s lines was a piece of cake, and that I should go easier on myself. “You just have to say the lines, man. Just say the lines.” He said this to me while they were preparing to film a street battle scene. There were all of these extras in Soviet and Nazi uniforms milling about in the city’s streets. It was a disturbing to see them making small talk.

escape

MORNING, MORNING. It was a school day morning, but not in May, all gray and windy like that day, but, yes, it could have been May, because such gray days can fall in May as they do in any other month of the year up here. Streams and rivers of students with backpacks flowed up and down the long sidewalks, the gravitational pull of an obligatory state education, up the steps of the old brick schools, middle schools, music schools, state kindergartens, and there stood Hanna-Heleena, who was waiting for me with storms in her eyes. When she saw me, lightning sparked and crackled. “You!” she shouted over the heads of the students. Her hair was cut in a fringe or bangs, straight across, and she wore a black coat. “Come over here now!”

That’s when I ran. I turned down a side street, which could have been Castle Street, and then found a small alleyway between two buildings, one I had never seen before. Gray walls on both sides, which led to somewhere else, into a trash-filled passageway, covered in graffiti and stinking of beer and urine, just as I imagined Lerwick might be on a Monday morning. I went through a doorway, and I could still hear Hanna-Heleena’s desperate calls for me. Where even was I now? Inside of a building somewhere. Viljandi, Lerwick. Lerwandi. I started to wonder if I would ever get out of this mess of corridors and hallways, until I saw light shining all around.

It was just behind some taped-up windows, streaming around their cracks, creating bright boxes of sunshine. I could no longer hear Hanna-Heleena. She must have lost track of me somewhere in this maze. Then I heard the voices of school children just beyond those windows. I was getting closer to an exit point. I came to an old wooden door pushed on it and came out at the stop of staircase that led down into a school atrium. It was dark in the school. The children were dressed in blue uniforms. They sat silently, mostly in the atrium, though some were playing table tennis. Sombre teachers observed the stranger as he came slowly down the steps. When I got to the front of the school, I could see that it opened up on a city front that was very close to a seaport. There were wooden ships in the harbor. Out the doors of the school I went, into the never-ending blue gray of a school day, but at least I was free.

startup

TIME COLLAPSES, pancaking into layers. But at first a pure gray light, like the stirring opening note of an orchestral piece, lighting up the room. I am here. He is here. He is there and yet not there. Around a table, a dialogue is underway, as various experts deconstruct. This is the startup jury. Suvi says that she would not support my pitch. “He’s just too soft and kind,” she tells them. “Has too much empathy.” Suvi knows how to run a jury. She is a practical woman and values practicality. The jury agrees with her. “Not very Estonian,” someone says. But that is neither here nor there. The jury is meeting down the street. They are sequestered.

Later he is led into the lounge room. Three women are sprawled out in chaise lounges. They are wearing business attire. He kneels before the blonde chief commercial officer, or whoever she is, and takes her foot in his mouth. I have no idea why I am doing this. Foot in mouth? Why on earth would I want to do that? But the foot is just so delicious, like the tastiest ice cream you’ve ever tasted. Somehow the smooth tan of her foot becomes caramel, her toe is cherry. Why hadn’t anyone told me about this secret? This is the yummiest dessert I’ve ever had in my mouth. Here the light is gray. The grass outside seven stories down is green, the mornings are gray. In the common area, men with mustaches are playing table tennis and there is music playing. In the lounge room of the startup company, it’s foot-to-mouth resuscitation. What is this? The pleasure of submission? I just don’t know anything anymore. All virtue has collapsed.

patchogue

THE OCEAN LINER docked at Patchogue on the south shore of Long Island and we finally disembarked. It had been years since I had been in Patchogue, maybe decades. Hadn’t I bought my first car, the blues mobile, from some nondescript Patchogue homeowner at some moment during the Clinton Administration? But that was a long time ago, and in the meantime, Patchogue had developed into a major Atlantic seaport and international metropolis. Parts of downtown had been declared car free and turned into pedestrian walking streets. It was hard to say what it reminded me of, maybe those winding shopping streets in Ireland and Wales. This was not your grandfather’s Patchogue.

Naturally, I was with my family. We were stunned, awed, by this great change that had taken place on the south shore of Long Island. Why, it was almost as if, after subsistence farming, and clamming and oystering and fishing for centuries, civilization had arrived. It just took time to take root. There was even a small Asian Quarter of Patchogue, where a streetfront spa offered fish pedicures. My wife and children stood in line and soon little garra ruffa fish were nibbling the dead skin from their heels. I tried it too, but it just wasn’t my thing. Instead I went and sat in the waiting area with a fellow islander who was reading The Wall Street Journal.

“Well, are we still at war with Iran?” I asked the man. He was older and Jewish and looked like Paul Simon. Maybe it was him? The man sighed loudly and folded the newspaper. Then he said, “After reading this newspaper, the honest answer is, I don’t know.” “Me neither,” I said. I dug into a cup full of delicious rum raisin ice cream, which had somehow materialized in my hands. “Nobody knows.”

sixty-nine

SHE WAS A WOMAN, a woman who was born in 1969. She was the Class of ’87. She was older than me. She was a Nixon baby. Maybe she was born a few hours after her parents watched Midnight Cowboy, starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Maybe she had been conceived after her parents had returned home from watching The Graduate. She had lived and she had experienced life. All of this living and experiencing, she had found, had left her with profound insight and wisdom that was mostly completely useless. And all of the creams, treatments, and procedures available could not negate the fact that she was slowly disappearing into the oblivion of time like a blood orange sun sinking into the murky Pacific off of Santa Monica.

I found her very attractive. She had lovely brown hair, smart blue eyes. Even her most melancholy moments were as rich and as delicious as a pineapple cake. She may have come out of a bottle on a Saturday night, but nobody could even remember when this Saturday night was, if it had happened at all. It was back there, way back there, in some faded, blurry polaroid. I didn’t think a thing of her being as old as the Moon Landing. But finding a place for our affair proved difficult. We tried not to be public; we found no private space for our steamy trysts. People just did not approve. Wherever we went, we were always on the run. I sought sanctuary and at last, after scouring the neighborhood, I found an old house with a staircase leading down into a cellar. This underground lair was a workshop with sawdust everywhere.

She curled up in the corner and pressed her head against her knees. She closed her eyes, breathed. All of this running, just for peace and security. “You know,” she said. “I just don’t think any of this is worth it.” The stairs began to creak next. The old man who owned this house was coming down to saw some wood. An old man with white hair and a mustache who looked like Wilford Brimley, because we both knew who that was. He would probably be less kind about finding out his workshop was being used as a love nest. But where could we go? There was no way out. We could hide there, behind some shelves. Maybe he wouldn’t see? I leaned in to kiss her, just one more time. But when I did, the kiss even felt old and spent and she didn’t enjoy its flavors one bit. “Can’t you see, don’t you realize?” she whispered to me. “This is all so pointless.”

old carolina

THE HOUSE WAS NEXT to the old Baptist church. This was a white, wooden chapel of worship that had been erected at some point in the 19th century at the behest of prosperous local businessmen and farmers who were tired of traveling to town for Sunday services. The ground here in Carolina was so low and wet that one often felt as if one was half underwater.

That was the church, but I should talk about the house. This too was old and wooden and had seen multiple additions. A screened in front porch. A kitchen in back. Such raised areas of swampland were called pocosins by the original inhabitants of the country, some of whom were among our predecessors. This house was erected upon one, but for reasons unknown to me, it was now inhabited by Uncle Osvald, who was my ex-wife’s mother’s brother and who had been, at least until recently, quite dead and sleeping off eternity in a cemetery in Estonia.

But times had changed and in his newly undead, Carolina form, Uncle Osvald had become a somewhat crusty but dedicated sawyer at the local mill. He was the kind of man who drank a beer every night while yelling at the TV set, slept with his dirty socks on, rarely trimmed a graying beard but had no reason to. But he was practical and kept his keys on him at all times. There was that big silver-colored hoop extending from his alligator skin belt and it jangled as he walked around. You could hear him going outside to the smokehouse, or just for a cigarette.

This is why when returning from Sunday service at the church one day, I discovered that the family house was locked and I had really nowhere to go. Stranger still was the appearance of another unknown Estonian relative, who called himself Jesper and claimed to be my ex-wife’s third, long lost brother. He was a lanky character, his attire showed signs of manual labor, stained pants, etc. He had a rough, unshaven face, his dark hair was going white, and he looked sort of like a Turk, even though he was an Estonian from North Carolina. None of this made any sense, especially since Jesper had never been mentioned once in the previous 25 years.

How could the family have kept the existence of Jesper hidden for so long? Not one photo of him. Not a mention. It was if he had been cut out of every photo following a Stalinist purge. “Where have you been?” I asked. “Where have you been all these years?” “Away,” Jesper told me. I had to take the newly discovered third brother at his word. He was my children’s uncle.

Jesper told me it would be a while until Osvald got back from the sawmill. I told him not to worry. I had a car and the swamps were calling. I’d drive across Perquimans, Pasquotank and Camden into Currituck, ride the road to Powells Point. The ancient village of the Poteskeet. That’s where I was heading.

skylights

THE CITY OF TALLINN was encased within a kind glass bubble or atrium and had been for the entirety of its existence. I had only learned about it on a cool, rainy day when I was walking through the Town Hall Square, and I looked up to see a man dangling from the top of a wobbly ladder, trying to close one of the many skylights that had let in the rain and soaked the houses.

I soon learned that while some of these skylights had been discovered, not all were accounted for. Ladders rose up all across the skyline like cranes, but no one could ever really keep the rainwater out. The 18th century blueprints of the sky of Tallinn were kept at the imperial archives in Saint Petersburg, but nobody had been allowed to see them since the war started.

Two women friends though were able to sneak their way into the Russian Federation by disguising themselves as patriotic Russians and got into the dusty archives, from which they retrieved the prints. These were beautifully sketched in black ink on parchment, and quite bulky. It was no easy task for Peter’s architects to have designed the sky above Tallinn, then called Reval. One wondered if these windows to the elements had already been partially crafted during Swedish rule, and if the Imperial Russians had just improved upon their plans.

The city did need water, it needed water for its parks, its trees and plants, flower gardens and so on. But Tallinn was also getting excessively saturated by the rain, and there needed to be a better way of controlling it. Otherwise we would all be wearing raincoats all year round, when it wasn’t snowing. The two women friends met me on the second or third floor of the Viru Keskus shopping center with the blueprints for the sky. They were really quite excited about the theft of these highly guarded documents. They unrolled them on the floor of Sportland.

After that, I went to work with an Estonian who looked like the actor Tambet Tuisk and maybe was him, closing up the skylights. Now that we had the plans, we knew where each one of the windows above Tallinn was located. The city had special ladders made for the job.

While they wobbled in the wind, and though I was terrified of heights, it was quite breathtaking to look down, hundreds of meters below us, and spot the Finnish Embassy on Toompea, or the little toy spire of Mikaelskyrkan or Saint Michael’s Church below that. When we reached one of the windows, we could see it was ajar and water was pouring through. I reached out, took it by the handle, and thrust upwards. The window sealed silently against the white clouds of the sky. One down. So many more to go.

high water

WE WERE SEQUESTERED in Ülejõe, near the Konsum parking lot, on account of some grave and rising health threat. Rory Lapp was the first to undergo screening and then he was released to return to his schedule. I think Rory was able to get over the bridge, I remember only glancing at him from behind, in his blue jeans and orange vest, but maybe he stayed behind, I don’t know. The sun was sinking into the river by then and the waters were rising.

When I went into the first tent for assessment, a young woman, dark hair and freckles, used a metal implement about the size of a match, a kind of awl, to pierce my skin and remove a small piece of flesh, just as the Lakota did during their Sun Dance ceremonies. Then she took this offering to the creator and instead of securing it in a tube for further analysis, she tasted it, ruminating and focusing on its flavor, as if that could tell her something about my overall state.

“Yes,” she said, nodding and tasting, “Yes, it’s just as I thought.” She never told me what it was.

From the main, brightly lit medical tent, I was led outside. The river waters were even higher, they were overrunning the high banks and running down into this part of the town, creating rapid whirlpools and swirling eddies. I watched as an old orange Volkswagen Beetle was swept away by the high waters, its owner just able to get out before the car was lost for good. High up on the riverbank, I could hear my Krishna devotee neighbors talking while this went on.

They were laughing and toasting the flood.

And then I was brought into a temporary tent, where it seemed like a dozen strangers were trapped in the sticky darkness. One of them, Alma, a blonde civil servant I knew from town, a few years older than me, seemed to jump me at once, crawling on top of me. She said, “Oh, good. I have always wanted to do this to you.” That’s how I wound up making passionate love in the darkness of a quarantine tent. There was a lot of sweating, blending, fusing. I pressed up against Alma’s hair, her ruddy, blushing face. It was rich and cathartic, but the situation gave everything a kind of menacing portent. What else do you do when the world reaches its end?

linnéa and peeter

HALFWAY THROUGH THE NIGHT the hallway closet dissolved. This was more like a built-in storage space, with hooks for hanging coats and some shelving above and below. There had been too many old jackets there and too many old boots, but these had been replaced by a glowing substance, part gauze, part spiderweb, part marshmallow. Cotton candy, if you will.

Through the cotton candy door, I could see Linnéa in her bedroom.

She was trying on different dresses, standing there before a mirror. A yellow polka dot dress, a purple dress. She smoothed out the fabric, turned from side to side, singing gently to herself as she went, lyrics to songs I had never heard of, or whispering comforting phrases. Yes, the blue dress! This was the one! Her hair was a brilliant yellow. Her lashes were plump and long.

Then she noticed me watching her and climbed through the doorway. “We have to talk,” she announced, taking me by the arm. “It’s time that I told you everything.” She hoisted herself up onto my white, queen-sized bed, and stretched out as if she was doing the backstroke. She was a sight. Her long bluestockinged legs stretched out before me like soothing Atlantic horizons. “It’s been too long, it’s been too long since I told you everything,” Linnéa said.

But soon her boyfriend Peeter would be back. Linnéa was now in a serious relationship and I was expected to blend like all other men into a dim gray background, to melt into the anonymous crowds. Such bedside confessionals were strictly verboten. Peeter then entered through the cotton candy door. He was youthful and had a princely moustache. Peeter was wearing a fur vest and had white war paint across his cheeks. He said, “Hello, I am Peeter.”

“I know,” I told him. “And who are you?” He asked. “I am who I am,” I told him. We stood there looking at each other for a while. I was waiting for him to put the hatchet into me. But Prince Peeter did no such thing. Instead his eyes softened a bit. “It’s good of you, it’s good of you to be a friend to Linnéa,” he said. Then he began to talk of more trivial things, like his job, and politics and trade policy, and other things in which I had no real interest. But there was no revenge and there was no heartbreak and Linnéa had selected the exactly right-colored dress.

of dogs and cars

IN A PARKING LOT with Hendrik Hendrikson, James Simmul, who was probably the only Estonian I knew named James, and a talented bass guitarist at that, and small toy car and a dog. Hendrik was talking about an upcoming game night to be held at the old cultural palace. I was barely paying attention. He was originally from Massachusetts and just old enough that he could have been, had he so desired, a member of New Kids on the Block. This made me always look at him strangely, trying to imagine him side by side with Donny Wahlberg and Jordan Knight. Was Hendrik Hendrikson the sixth New Kid? How many of them were there even?

They kind of wandered off after that. The house was an old hospital that had been converted into an commercial building, with a white facade and vague Stalinist and Federalist elements, with ivy growing around the columns in front, and a pale blue visible beneath the chipped paint of the exterior. I heard there was a concert happening at the castle ruins, or maybe near the old manor house? Hendrik Hendrikson and James Simmul roamed off into the crowds, which left me, an Australian sheepdog named Lou and a toy car that I could fit inside of.

This was sort of like my daughter’s toy car, except that it had a front and back seat and a trunk. It was made out of cheap plastic. So cheap that when I tried to back out of the parking lot, with Lou in the back, the steering wheel came off and it rolled to a halt between two very pricey vehicles, which had obviously been leased and indebted their pretend “owners,” a BMW and a Porsche. Oh, the anxiety of watching that car land in the middle, stopping against a wall.

The dog was unharmed, happily panting in the back, and I reinserted the wheel in front. Leaving this parking lot was turning out to be harder than I thought. But I knew my parents place was up the road apiece, and I would just have to navigate that tricky three-way intersection before it would just be shady country roads all the way back to the homestead. The hook that held the back of the toy car shut had come off too, so I jammed the doors together, the dog in the back, and began my tedious journey. Then my daughter Lucinda came running out of the bushes, clad in her overalls, looking almost like I did when I was that age.

“Daddy!” “What the hell are you doing hiding in the bushes?” I hoisted her into the trunk with the dog, and we set off. It was getting evening now, I was worried about rush hour traffic. I wasn’t sure where this place was. The house had all kinds of strange businesses operating inside of it. A New York-style deli on the right. A Soviet-style hospital on the further right.

I got the car going, but then I lost control of the steering wheel again, or rather it came off in my hands, one of the wheels fell off, and the whole car drove headfirst into a stone wall at the other end of the parking lot. Somehow I was in two places as this happened. I was in the driver’s seat and I was behind the car watching it happen, two vantage points at once. Huh?

When I woke up, I was in the hospital in the dark. Maybe I had hit my head? It felt kind of sore. Or maybe those were the drugs wearing off? I found my pants on the floor. Outside the door, I could hear the audio from an Estonian television news program. Priit Kuusk was looking very serious and saying serious things about Ukraine and Russia and drone bits. I had to get out of this place. I knew they were going to probably restrain me, or put me through some formal process, some bureaucracy to get out of it. But I needed to find my dog Lou and my daughter Lucinda and they might still be out there waiting patiently in my little toy car. My pants not even buckled, I was already out the door. We were going to make it, little toy cars be damned.