My Estonia 3. What Happened?. Justin Petrone

“Man, that is exactly how I feel,” he stammered. “And I thought I was alone. And I’ve had nobody talk to.”

      “You can’t exactly tell your wife that her people are a bunch of Nazis.”

      “No, I don’t think that would go over too well.”

      “But, hey, not all of them are like that, and, whatever, you’ve just got to accept them. I’ve learned that I am who I am and they are who they are, and I might as well just live my life and be happy.”

      I didn’t tell Diego that I had been seeing a psychiatrist for years. And whether the emotional temperament of some Estonians had been connected with my depression or not, they had not made my life any easier. Little things would set off my rage. The sight of an alcoholic rummaging through a trash can. The impatience of a person standing behind me in line at the grocery store. I could hear those tight breaths, feel them on my neck because I had bought enough food and drink to last a week, and that person just wanted to buy his ham and cigarettes. Those clicks of the tongue, that nettled sigh that said, “You are inconveniencing me.” In Viljandi, a man would bump into you on a sidewalk, clip you on the shoulder, nearly knock you down, and then grunt and keep on walking, as if nothing had happened. It was all, as they said, normaalne.

      Ninety-seven out of a hundred Estonians would be fine to me. But it was those three Estonians, those garbage-picking drunks and pushy shoppers and rude pedestrians, whom I loathed. I knew it was wrong to hate a whole nation just because of the pitfalls of a few bad characters. Estonia had given me everything: a lovely and loving wife, three children, a writing career, a charming house in a rambling old town, stunning lake views, fun anecdotes about medieval toilets, unearthed mines, and sheep bones. On warm summer afternoons in Pärnu the car would cruise down the streets past the most golden, beautiful women you ever saw. You’d go to “Supelsaksad,” the 1920s-style cafe and eat the best meal you ever ate, sit on the most comfortable camel-humped couch you ever sat on, and then head over to the beach to swim in the warmest water you had ever touched and to breathe in the freshest air your lungs ever savored and roll amongst the soft, wonderful sands.

      And yet I had grown wary of Estonians, even those ones in Pärnu. Every zombie drunk forager, every heel-clicking bureaucrat. My distaste ran so dark and deep that I eventually determined the only way out was either to run away and desert my family or to succumb to tolerance and accept the locals for being who they were, not because they all deserved it, but because not accepting them was unhealthy and could drive me to do dangerous and unreasonable things.

      The way I had come to see it, Estonia wanted you to change. It wanted you to speak its language and think its thoughts. It wanted you to ignore those drunks in the park, and to be more efficient with your shop transactions. It wanted you to grunt and keep on walking when a fellow pedestrian slammed his shoulder into you. And, above all, it insisted that you would never complain about its weather. Even a “Kind of cold today, isn’t it?” would earn you another lecture about wearing warmer clothing.

      In the end, to become an Estonian was to kill some Italian-American or Chilean part of yourself, if you had the fortitude or mental discipline to really do that. Most people didn’t. Most foreigners who reached that point went running back to the mother country.

      I remembered reading an interview with an American-Estonian businessman who had lived in Tallinn for years. I found it in a celebrity magazine shortly after we had moved back to Estonia. While we were unpacking our bags, the businessman’s family was packing theirs. “Ten winters of this is enough,” the guy said in the story. “We’re moving to Hawaii!”

      Back then, I thought Hawaii was for surfers and the weak of mind. I thought I would be tougher than that businessman and others like him.

      By the time Diego had asked me his very big question, I thought I had graduated from the most painful parts of the adaptation process. It had been almost seven years since we had returned from New York with our six suitcases, and I thought that I had at last come to terms with Estonia and my relationship to it. I believed that I was emotionally prepared to spend a long time in Viljandi’s watery embrace. The future, as far as I could see, would be more of the same.

      Little did I know.

      SIX SUITCASES

      You should know that I returned to Estonia with only love in my heart.

      In the cafes and arcades of lower Manhattan, which are haunted by eccentric and deranged characters, like the lady we used to call the “cat woman,” because she was always stroking a feral cat, I felt the long-armed but loving embrace of Estonia, that land I had left behind. Even while the mountains of garbage piled up along the avenues, and the cat woman’s dementia grew worse through the seasons, so that I once saw her with vomit all over her coat and the sidewalk before her, I had that extra bounce in my stride because I knew that I was one of the lucky ones, the ones with alternatives, the ones with another place to go.

      In my New York office, I decorated my computer screen with an image of a lighthouse on Saaremaa, the largest Estonian island, and when I grew tired of sighing over the cool water and rocks, I changed it for an aerial view of Tartu’s Supilinn area, those crooked roofs, the orange and red autumn leaves. I would ride satellite maps across the ocean, to see how close I could get to the cozy studio apartment in Tallinn’s Kalamaja district that we left behind when we moved to New York, and though we were so far away and someone else was living there, I would stare at the tiny red roof for a while, and imagine it was me standing in that sunny driveway beside it, and how I would walk down the road and pass the cats at the dumpster and then head on to the local corner shop, to buy a few boxes of tasty Georgian dumplings and a big bag of Kalev chocolates…

      Some might have called it “homesickness” but, somehow, I was experiencing this longing in my country of birth.

      When Supilinn’s rooftops ceased to soothe me, to console me among the jackhammers and bleating cars and arrogant pedestrians, I found another image of Estonia, a photo of an old farmhouse nestled in green-yellow fields, and put that across my desktop. That farmhouse, the real one in the picture, was from Iceland or Greenland, and it had that Ilon Wikland illustration-like Swedish red, with the white trim around the windows, but in my mind that didn’t matter, because it was my Imaginary Estonian Farmhouse, a place where I thought the greater me, the eternal soul of me, belonged.

      One time, my boss Bernadette caught me staring at it.

      “What’s that?” she asked. Bernadette was anything you could ever want from an Irish woman, with the big hair and the big laugh and that bright, joyous, contagious sarcasm that all us New Yorkers seemed to have. Bernadette and I used to give each other updates not only on the latest biotech industry rumors but also on the cat woman’s condition if we saw her, taking note of her general deterioration into madness, whether she looked clean or dirty, or if she had gotten sick again. And yet neither of us expressed any regret about her. We had to laugh about it because it was so awful.

      “What’s what?” I looked up, blushing.

      “That,” she pointed at the screen with a freckled finger. “You keep staring at it.”

      “Oh that. It’s my Imaginary Estonian Farmhouse,” I said. “See, there’s the main house, and the barn.”

      “So, is that where you’ll be doing your job for us next year?”

      “What? Oh, yeah, sure,” I pointed at the wooden dwelling. “I’ll be writing about biotech from there.”

      People always want to know the “why” of things, why you did this or that, but the truest, most absolute answer is that we left New York because it was leading us around in circles, and something else was calling us from beyond the sea.

      Estonia, Estland, population 1.3 million or so at that time. A speck of marshes and forests on the northern seas, with a few castles and apartment blocks and country estates thrown in for decorative purposes. It was calling us, the same way it had called me with its siren song many years before. Something was going to happen to us in Estonia, and so we had to go there.

      But