I stole a few long looks at Epp there on the beach, too, but to look at her, to photograph her, was different. Epp was immediate, accessible with her thick dirty blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, her fertile figure restrained by a red tank top, her blue eyes, which always looked like they were smarting with secrets, staring back at me.
With Anne Helene, though, I felt nothing. There was a wall between us, a closed gate through which I could not pass. I stared at her pretty face, her red curls whipped about by the cool winds, but I couldn’t connect with her. Maybe it was because she was a Norwegian, just another aloof northern person it would take eons to get to know. I remembered seeing a poster for a Norwegian comic in Oslo two years before, a billboard of a socalled “entertainer” with sad, droopy, alcoholic Scandinavian eyes. And I couldn’t figure it out. He was a comic, but he wasn’t even smiling. Such manifestations of northerliness could never be explained, I decided. They could only be accepted or ignored. So even with a camera in my hand, with carte blanche to look at Anne Helene any way I pleased, I couldn’t get through to her. And yet, despite her northern aloofness, I still tried to relate to her because even if Norwegians were the obtuse people who gave the world The Scream2, they were still Westerners and I was a Westerner and together we were one.
I hated the term ‘Westerner.’ I hated the very idea of the West. I hated the thought of any imaginary curtains descending between Estonia and me, cutting me from Epp, cleaving me from my own unborn child, carving us up because I had Reagan and she had Gorbachev or we had Volvos and they had Ladas.
Besides, I thought that Estonia, of all countries, was actually a part of the West, a stealth West, accidentally submerged by Stalinism, disconnected by historical aberration, a sort of diplomatic “oops!” at some post-war conference. Estonia wasn’t meant to be part of the USSR. No. It was like Lennart Meri had said in his speeches, the ones I had read in old articles in the Baltic Times office in Tallinn. “Estonia isn’t former Soviet Union,” the former president had said. “It’s former Swedish Empire.” I loved it. It sounded like Estonia was encrusted in gold and emeralds and diamonds, its squares dominated by regal stone lions and ejaculating fountains and string quartets. And it made sense to me. Just look at those windmills and Lutheran churches, those gingerbread houses and artesian wells. Just look at Hiiumaa. This wasn’t some backward, shitridden, fermenting post-Soviet toilet. This was Estonia.
And this whimsical island was among the westernmost parts of Estonia. If any place was former Swedish empire, this was it. If there was any part of Estonia where Anne Helene and I could walk as Westerners, it was in Kärdla. Indeed, the island seemed mostly unspoiled by the Soviet years. There were old rusty watch stations, sure, but they were childlike, like the crow’s nests of forgotten shipwrecks. Even the Soviet apartment blocks, usually jarring in the Estonian towns with their white-brick ugliness, were tucked into wooded lots crossed with dark, deep-running streams, their banks peppered with yellow flowers. I was grateful for this because if there was one thing I wanted to do to Tallinn, it was bulldoze every revolting Communist-era building and hand the property over to Finnish developers, gratis. I wasn’t a destructive person, really. I just wanted Estonia to look like it was supposed to look.
At lunch it was Epp and me, Anne Helene and Maret, the manager of Anne Helene’s design shop. I sensed a little tension in the air. Anne Helene wanted to talk about her work. Epp wanted to know more about the plane crash. “I think it’s my angle,” she had confided in me. “Estonian women will want to read about a designer who’s survived a plane crash.”
But Anne Helene was reluctant to relive the accident. “I was hit on the head. I was bleeding,” said Anne Helene. “I am lucky when you think about it,” she looked out the window at the sea. “And I’ve never flown that route again. I always take the ferry now.”
“But what happened before you crashed,” Epp ventured, “when you were in the air?”
“It was confusing,” Anne Helene frowned.
“I was once on a bad flight,” Maret suddenly cut her off, her fingers fluttering with inspiration. The islander Maret had been quiet all this time, sharing nothing except for a peculiar grin. Now she sat up, her gray, birdlike eyes moistening behind her spectacles. “It was so bumpy. We were frightened. And all the time, we were looking at the one man on the plane and wondering why he wasn’t helping. ‘You are the man!’ we cried, ‘can’t you save us?’ And he did nothing, can you believe that?” she folded her arms and sat back. “The man did nothing!”
Anne Helene looked across the table at me. She made eye contact. I looked back at her. And for the first time all day, I thought we connected. There was a glimmer in her eyes, a quiet understanding passed between us. We said nothing but we shared the same thought: feminism had not yet reached Estonia.
That’s not say that Estonian womanhood was still stuck in a 19th century bodice of kinder, küche, und kirche3. Some Estonian women had gone on to illustrious careers in politics and business with their form-enhancing power suits, their hair just right, and their make-up just so, but, still, Maret’s comment made me think: What if there had been no man on her flight that night? Who would have been there to save them? And what gave some Estonian ladies the idea that just because there was a man aboard, he knew how to land an airplane in a storm?
You are the man. Save us.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I imagined Anne Helene clucking to herself at that moment that a “Norwegian woman would never say such a thing.” And maybe she was right. I was alarmed, though. If any airplane I was on hit turbulence over this country, I now understood it was my gender-specific duty to get behind the wheel and fly the womenfolk to safety.
“Did you hear her? ‘You are the man, save us.’ Like, just because I’m a man, I know how to fly a plane? Hasn’t she ever heard of Amelia Earhart?”
“Don’t let it into your heart, Justin. Just pedal, and save your energy! We need to get to the other side of this island before it’s too late.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“No,” Epp beamed from her bike. “The magazines say that women who are four months pregnant have lots of energy. And I am four months pregnant!”
Epp and I had rented a pair of bicycles in Kärdla and set out for Käina on the southern coast of the island. I didn’t know how long the journey would take, but it seemed we had been on the road for a long time.
“I thought women didn’t need men anymore,” I pedaled on and screamed at her while she rode strongly ahead of me. “It’s like they say on that bumper sticker: a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
“Estonian women aren’t that interested in that stuff,” Epp yelled back, as if the category excluded her. “The Finns say Estonians need more feminism, the Estonians say that the Finnish feminists are ugly. The Estonian women say they have always worked. They think they don’t need feminism.”
Estonia didn’t need to import every fad that had passed through the West, it seemed. They would take our good things and ignore our psychodramas. Yes to The Bold and the Beautiful, no to political correctness. Yes to online shopping, no to feminism. They’d have the EU and NATO, thanks, but don’t expect them to stop saying neeger or believing that all technical