Where time meets truth. Argo Järve

o Järve

      Where time meets truth

      INTRODUCTION

      This is a story about a young man misleading travels and challenges in life, about different people and places he visited. About home a school. Love and hate. Money and happiness. Vodka and vices. From life itself. Many readers might recognize themselves in some occasions, maybe even they have experienced something like that or lived it through. Déjà-vu. We're all still humans, and humans often get lost during their travels. There are still fictional characters and events – which are real, which are fictional, is for the reader to decide. The main character Hans, with a restless soul, has traveled to every place is Estonia in search of work & happiness and has often found himself abroad, met & spoken to many different types of people. With nobleman and thieves. Slept under the night sky and also in luxurious hotels. Tasted the waters from a road ditch and tasted wines in the finest restaurants. Felt the power of money and helplessness, when there's no money. Met lies and ultimate honesty on his road. Has he learn`t anything from all of that? That will come out later. One's for sure – there are same types of people over here and across the border. There are no bad and good nationalities; there are only bad and good people.

      I

      Childhood's curvy tracks

      To understand, why that restless soul is constantly on the move and in search for himself in this big world, we have to dig in the past. Hans was born in the seventies in a small settlement which was then under USSR1 & was from a family with many children. He doesn’t remember much from his early childhood. The first memories come from the last group of kindergarten and starting school. In school, he studied as he found fit. He did get some good grades once in a while, but he was not interested in grades, as he loved to say. There were other kids in the family as well beside him. At one point it came out, that the man raising him up wasn’t Hans’ biological father. His parents were divorced and did not get along. They got divorced when Hans was only a baby, and he has no memories about that either. He started to understand only when he was about six or seven years old & realized that the other kids in the family had different surnames. Hans didn’t get an answer at first, why it was like that. His mother bulked from answers and well to be fair, he didn’t understand what a biological father is. Was he too young for these kinds of questions & answers? His life was great until he became about twelve or thirteen. There were often conflicts, in particular with the stepfather. Of course, there had been smaller conflicts and arguments, but now for some reason, they started to happen more and more often, especially when they were alone together. Why? Hans couldn’t answer that question for years. Over time more and more children were born into the family, and the wind of change was in the air. The older the boy became, the more difficult the situation became – the paterfamilias obviously made a distinction between his own kids and step-kids. Nobody but him knows, what changed him. The children were there before as well when he joined the family and took the responsibilities of being a paterfamilias. He had to consider and love them all equally, or he just desired the single woman with kids so much, that he didn’t think sober and just didn’t take the kids into account. Did the desire blind the senses? Or was there something else to it? A chance to put someone in one’s place? Hans got the opportunity to be an October and also a boy scout. Done everything, what one school kid & boy does in their childhood: fooled around, fought, stood in the corner and behind the door for bad behavior. Picked on the neighbor’s cat and plucked the girls’ braids. Had the chance to cry and laugh. There was also a time were finished the 8th grade and had to decide, who and what he was going to become. At the time, there was a psychologist-adviser, who was doing individual tests with the students. It was to get to know, which worthy occupation shall the student get in the USSR. Hans, like most boys at that time, was interested in engineering and space. The matter of honor for every honest and ambitious Soviet Union citizen was to become a cosmonaut or at least a pilot. Militia and chauffeur were ranked right below. Some even wished to become Lenin.2 The psychologist-adviser made it very clear to Hans that he will never be able to get into a cockpit, not to mention into the cosmodrome. His grades and possibly also abilities were far below average and besides, the results of the tests and exams, it came out that engineering wasn’t even fit for him. The boy should instead become a librarian or a gardener. “Eww,” thought Hans to himself and left the office frowning. “You can become a damn gardener yourself,” he mumbled and slammed the door. The summer was close, and there was plenty of time to think about the future. Hans got the hold of his real dad’s address from the back of a card, he had stolen from his mother and also managed to contact his father via a letter secretly. Later during the summer, Hans visited his father’s home and new family several times. They had also met a couple of occasions in school as well, but to keep things cool at home, he didn’t tell about it to anyone. Even though mum suspected it, but she never asked. No one noticed when Hans went on those visits – he had spent nights before, without anyone knowing where he was and without later asking, where he had been. It was easier for everyone that way. Visiting his dad, he found out that on top of the step-siblings he already had at home, there was more, at his father’s place. They were step siblings, but still siblings, as his father loved to say, who was still distant and a stranger to him. The active life of the capital attracted Hans so much that he would have loved to move there immediately. Solely thinking about the life in the city gave him goosebumps. Hans began to look into studying opportunities in the capital. He had to start learning a profession in the autumn, as he wasn’t going to waste time on high school. Unfortunately, the suitable schools didn’t have available rooms in the dorms, and the thought of moving to his dad’s place was too scary. So there was no other way, but to go to a vocational school near his home. At least the dorm there was decent and the thought of being independent comforted him so he filled in the application to enter the school. He was sure that he would get in without much trouble. There were some entrance exams, but Hans had no doubt in his capability of doing those. Summer slipped away, and it was just the time to challenge himself. Hans did the exams and after a few-hour-long waiting got the results. He became a fully fledged student of this vocational school. The day before the beginning of his independent life his parents brought him to the dorm. He was packed with some food, a bag of potatoes and a few rubles on top of that. Then they warned him how to behave and gone they were. The dorm was silent at that time. It was still early, and he was presumably the only person in the building. Even the crooked commandant had left and was pottering about in some nearby garden. Hans clattered around in the dorm, checked the kitchen and just wandered around in other rooms. He sauntered back to the chamber and lied down on the bed. He imagined what will his roommate be like, where is he from and what are his hobbies. Having this on his mind he fell asleep. He woke up due to some loud clatter. He squinted his eyes and sat down. Some 2-meter-tall thug stepped into the room. Rasmus, he said and lied down on the spare bed. They had a moment to introduce themselves. Hans agreed with the guy on the positive side of not having to see the parents and listen to their whining for at least 5 and a half days of the week. Rasmus was interested mostly in heavy metal, motocross and girls. As he was telling, he just had a plenty of them. He took some pictures out of his wallet and gave them to Hans for checking. As he bragged, everyone was crazy for him. The new roommate inspected superficially examined Hans’s life and started unpacking. He drew a big double cassette radio out of his big backpack that Hans thought to be a luxurious item. Because his parents were had a sweet spot at work, he couldn’t complain about the incomes, and the only child in the family got all he wanted. You could see this by the huge bags he as the only kid had been packed with. He stuck the cassette into the radio, and it filled the room with noise. “Judas Priest” yelled the long-haired guy and performed some weird moves he considered as dance moves in the middle of the chamber. Hans could understand this kind of music. He saw it as pointless shouting torturing the instruments. He preferred a mild rock and pop music. “I’ll let my father bring the TV,” said Hans and inspected the room while he thought where he could place it. “We could use a fridge too; I’m not going to store anything in the shared fridge.” These scrubs will stick it up their asses. This finished the topic. Hans liked his roommate. At least he wasn’t cocky he thought. They kept on chatting for about an hour and then it was the time to go to sleep. Even though the official silent hours started at eleven everyone had to already be silent at ten. The tall guy found the switch with his leg and switched the lights

1

USSR – The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known unofficially as Russia, was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991.

2

Lenin – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist.