My Estonia 3. What Happened?. Justin Petrone

probably wouldn’t have understood what that meant anyway.

      Then, one hot summer night a week or so later, the young couple left the windows to the apartment open, and thieves climbed through them while they were asleep and stole most of their valuables. They were very upset and they asked me for advice about what they should do. I told them to just go and check the local pandimaja – I used this exact word – because the thieves might have tried to sell the stolen goods there. “Just go check the pandimaja. There’s one on Tähe and Pargi Street around the corner.”

      “Pandimaja, what’s that?” the American woman asked me.

      “Oh, that’s right, it’s a pawn shop,” I said. “It’s just been a while since I’ve used that term in English.”

      That was when I knew that my Estonian had improved.

      WOODSMAN MATS

      Our second home in Tartu was in the district of Tähtvere, “the professors’ quarter,” as they called it.

      Tähtvere sat on another hill outside of the city center. This neighborhood had larger, postwar dwellings with smooth, plastered surfaces and big windows and balconies. On occasion, you would see a house with round, porthole-like windows, which gave the structure the appearance of a passenger ship moored on land.

      Some of the larger Tähtvere houses sat on well-tended plots dotted with orchards and gardens, and were painted in creamy, pleasant colors. Others were gray and crumbling and circled by wraith-like trees. When we walked by these kinds of houses, Epp would remind me that most professors were paid little and couldn’t afford renovations.

      The streets in Tähtvere were planned, orderly and mostly tidy. They were named after well-known Estonian National Awakening figures from the 19th Century. Jakobsoni Street was named for Carl Robert Jakobson, the writer, newspaper publisher, and politician; Hurda was named for Jakob Hurt, the folklorist, theologist, and linguist; Koidula for Lydia Koidula, the romantic poet; Jannseni for Johan Voldemar Jannsen, the writer and poet (and father of Koidula); and Hermanni for Karl August Hermann, the composer.

      Most of these people’s faces were featured on Estonian bank notes, I learned. Though, at times, with all of those beards and spectacles, it was hard to tell who was who.

      The neighborhood streets also had some mystical names. Taara Avenue, named after the Estonian pagan god, thought by some to be akin to the Viking Thor, ran straight through Tähtvere. Another street was called Hiie, named after the sacred forests of Estonia’s pre-Christian belief system. And then there was Vikerkaare, Rainbow Street, so called because it was shaped like a Rainbow. It was easy to get lost on that street because you would follow the rainbow around and almost wind up back where you started.

      Most of the houses in Tähtvere we came across were heated by wood and had long barns built alongside of them. It could take half a day to fill these barns with fresh stock, usually ordered in early autumn by calling numbers in advertisements for dry wood, at good prices, found in the backs of the local newspapers.

      And so one day toward the middle of our first autumn back in Estonia, Epp came to the office upstairs in our house in Tähtvere to tell me that Woodsman Mats was downstairs waiting for me to come and help unload the wood. When I came outside in a t-shirt and jeans and shoes, Mats was waiting for me behind his truck. If Karlova Väino had been a rooster, then I would have to say that Woodsman Mats was a bear. Yet there was something gentle and un-bear-like about Mats. Maybe he was more like a pine marten, a metsnugis. He certainly looked a bit like one. He had long, shoulder-length hair, which I found unusual for an older Estonian man, and those slanted Uralic eyes. Later, when I described Mats to my father, his hair, his manner of speech, he only said, “He’s a Native American, Justin.” – “No, he’s an Estonian, Dad.” – “No, Justin. He’s a Native American.”

      The first thing I noticed that day about Mats, after we exchanged greetings, was his hands. Each one of his fingers was fat and swollen and calloused. It was as if he had only thumbs. My fingers were different. My fingers were long and smooth and lined. I had writer’s hands, typist’s hands. He had hands that could be applied to just about any kind of hard labor. I imagined how he could hammer a stake into the ground with his hand.

      But the interesting thing was that, a few hours later, after Mats’ shipment of wood had been unloaded, my hands looked a lot like Mats’. They were red and covered in blisters and a few splinters had been pulled from them. I know what you’re thinking – Justin, why didn’t you wear gloves? Would you think I was weird if I told you that I wanted to feel the wood I was loading into my barn? That I wanted to have that forest in my hands? As soon as Mats backed that truck up to the barn, I took down two pieces and banged them together, to see if they would make that magic sound.

      Kluck? Klick?

      But there was no kluck nor klick, because it was only October then and they weren’t frozen, and so they made no sound at all.

      “You’re supposed to carry the wood, not hit it together,” said Mats.

      I said nothing and began loading the pieces into my arms, ten at a time.

      Over the three winters that we lived in that house, Mats would come over many times and bring his truck full of wood. Through a few conversations, I came to know a little more about him. He lived out in Elva, a small town 20-minutes’ drive from Tartu, he said. It seemed like a fitting home for a man like Mats.

      Anyone who has been to Elva knows that the town is covered by a canopy of sky-tall thick pine trees that cast solemn green shadows on anyone and everything beneath them. I imagined Woodsman Mats out there in his log cabin near Elva, smoking his pipe, and occasionally felling trees that would be brought out to his reliable writer clients in Tähtvere.

      Once, Mats even told us his last name – Talts. Mats Talts. This caused a bit of a stir on our front porch. Was this Mats Talts of the same family as the Estonian weightlifter Jaan Talts, who had competed at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City? Epp had asked. Yes, indeed, said Woodsman Mats. Jaan Talts of Mexico City was in fact Mats Talts of Elva’s brother.

      It surprised me that Epp even knew what Estonians were on the Soviet team in Mexico City in 1968. She wasn’t alive then. I didn’t know which Americans were at the ’68 games. But this was a common Estonian knowledge thing. All Estonians had memorized their Olympic victors going back to the 1896 Games in Athens, I bet. There had been so few of them, so it was easy to remember who they were and if they had won anything.

      Another time, Mats showed up to the house with his wife. This surprised me, because long-haired, slow-speaking, Big Indian Chief Mats Talts, brother of Jaan of Mexico City, had an average Estonian woman as a spouse. She was the type of woman you stood behind in the department store, or passed in open air markets. She sat in the front seat of the car leafing through a recent edition of Kroonika while Mats and I took care of the wood. I had been expecting Pocahontas, the Indian princess, but no: Mats’ wife reminded me a tiny bit of Angela Merkel instead.

      There was some sense to this though. There were different faces in Estonia. Some people, like Mats’ wife, or Priit Pullerits, the ever youthful Godfather of Estonian journalism and Postimees editor, had what I thought of as the German face. His hair was parted on the side, and his mug reminded me of a lion, with a long nose that broadened at its base and a mouth that ran straight across. When he wore his mustache, Pullerits looked a bit like a 1970s soap opera star, and when he shaved the hair from his face, he looked all of 19 years old, even though he was in his 40s. Pullerits had told me once (in an interview for a book about Estonia that I never wrote) how he walked through a town on the French-German border, and everyone spoke to him in German, because they knew a German when they saw one.