WHERE THERE’S FIRE, THERE’S SMOKE
First there is fire and then there is smoke. Like clockwork.
I’ve seen it over and over again with my own eyes. You leave the old wood in the same spot through the seasons until it at last arrives, the long-awaited event: Midsummer, Saint John’s Day. Then you stuff it with newspapers, cardboard, douse it with gasoline, oil, some leftover moonshine, whatever you like. Strike the match and with a pull of the wind it erupts, like your own personal volcano.
After the fire catches, you have to wait a bit. Then you hear the squeaking and croaking and tra-la-la-ing of all the little creatures who have made their homes in the pile. Mice, toads, and newts come scampering and hustling out of that miniature hell. Running for their lives, literally. They rush to the forest or to the barn, to the meadows and streams, to the neighbor’s house, where they remember there is a safe hollow behind the walls. The Estonians call this inferno the jaanituli – Saint John’s Fire. There is shared knowledge about these holy flames. The people say that if you run and leap over the fire, you will have good luck for the next year. The Estonians really believe this. They may not believe in humdrum things, but they believe in the power of fire.
I enjoy the fires as well. I like to get bundled up close to them, to listen to the tinder as it cracks and splinters from the heat, so near that I lose sensation in the tip of my nose and the skin over my cheeks. It’s an invigorating flush, a rechristening by blaze. I like to study the colors of the flames, too, how they hue from yellow to blue, blood orange to green. There is a lot going on in just one bonfire.
My life in Estonia has been like a jaanituli. It’s been one passionate and roasting mess. I came here many years ago knowing nothing about what was about to happen, then I got married, had a kid, left for New York for a while, and then came back because I felt it calling me. I thought I might make it as an academic in Estonia, or enter the world of diplomacy, or up my journalism game and write for some famous international newspaper. Instead I wound up writing some entertaining books about Estonia. Then something strange happened. I had to go away again. Now I’m back.
My books are like the smoke from this flame of life. They smell of the thing, but are not the thing itself. They curl up and sail away pleasantly toward the stars, or linger along foggy country lanes and city streets, thick and sinister, making it hard for you to breathe.
That’s all this book is. Smoke. The smoke of fiery years spent in this windswept peninsula land.
THAT HOLE
It was easy to get distracted in the toilet of Cafe Fellin because of the words on the inside of the door.
The words told about the origins of the name Viljandi, the picturesque and peculiar small town in Estonia where we lived. They were written by a local historian and typed below an old photograph of the lake front and its many villas. It was framed and covered in glass. In the cafe with its white wooden furniture and pleasant spirals of floral-printed wallpaper, you could hear the people bustling and glasses clinking, the fidgeting of a jazz guitarist, and maybe somebody waiting on the other side of that toilet door, turning the knob to remind one of the urgency of the situation. But that was too bad. I was still reading.
The Vi was an older form of vee, water in Estonian, the historian had written. The Ljandi brought to mind the ancient name of Tallinn, Lindanisse, which meant a town or stronghold. And so, there it was: Viljandi, the town on the water. It was still true in part. In old illustrations and wood carvings, you could see that the lake beside this town was higher, and the rivers were higher, too. I had heard that one could sail to Viljandi with the right kind of boat, navigating down long-lost waterways. Back then, Viljandi was a Hanseatic merchant town, connected to the outside world by its waters.
Nowadays, it felt more like a backwater. To get anywhere from Viljandi, you needed to drive. A trip to the capital, Tallinn, and back could take five hours out of your day. The second biggest city, Tartu, with our publishing house, was an hour to the east. The beach and spa resort Pärnu was an hour to the west. And I didn’t even bother taking note of how long it took to get to our farm house in Setomaa on the Russian border. On those long days, I just drove and drove.
Some people didn’t think Viljandi was a backwater though. For these self-electing few, Viljandi was a bohemian jewel sparkling with artists and activists and eccentrics, hidden away from the crass commercialism that had afflicted the rest of the country, a respite for those who preferred to see their children fingering zithers and playing among castle ruins rather than sitting behind a computer.
There were also those who condemned the so-called “city” of Viljandi as a depopulated outpost of alcoholics and pensioners. A friend, who had left Viljandi, referred to his hometown as “That Hole.”
“How can you stand living in that hole?” this Estonian friend would ask me. He had left “That Hole” when he was eighteen and never looked back. Now I wasn’t even sure what to call him. His mother had named him Priit, but after he moved to Hollywood and started a career in music and film, he started calling himself “Brad.” Brad Jurjens, you know, like Brad Pitt. Each year, he returned to visit his mother in “That Hole” for a few weeks, then he was gone again, back to the City of Angels. When he did come to visit he would invite me out to a pub, where he would guzzle beers, check out girls from behind his shades, and ask me awkward questions.
“You’ve got to explain it to me. How can an American guy like you stand to live in a hole like this?”
“You really think your hometown is a hole?”
“Of course it is! Why do you think I left?”
The same question was more or less posed to me by my new acquaintance Diego when he stopped by during the Viljandi Folk Music Festival, and asked in a low and weary voice, “How can a guy from New York like you stand to live here?”
“You mean in this hole?”
“Si.”
Diego didn’t ask me this question in front of our Estonian wives. No, he decided to wait until we were out in the street to spring it on me. It still wasn’t much of a street. Sepa, or Smith Street, was more of a dirt path when our family moved in. There were some remnants of cobblestones, but most had been dug up and sold by some entrepreneurial Viljandier in the past, and what was left was so mottled that I had even come to fear it, mostly in autumn and spring when the rains came or when the snows melted, because deep puddles would hide amongst the muck and your car would hit them hard and get stuck. Whenever it did, I would think of my Estonian friend in Hollywood and chuckle about “That Hole.”
The street that day though was still under construction, full of mud and sand and new pipes sticking out at strange angles.
There was also hope. For a long time, I had feared that nothing in Viljandi would change. And yet it had changed in my few years spent there, mostly for the better. It just took longer for the change to arrive to Viljandi than it did in the bigger Estonian towns. I was sure that Sepa Street would once again be proud. Perhaps most of the city would follow. A fully functional cinema would open one day, maybe even a spa.
But that would take more time. On that day there were still rotting planks over the stagnant puddles. The faint musk of dog feces snaked through the air and into the nostrils, and since you could never seem to see the source of the stink, you just had to wonder if it was new excrement or perhaps older, medieval, archaeological scat, that had been unearthed by a workman.
I had taken Diego out into the street to show him the steps to the ancient cellar that had been found.
But the steps were not the only thing. There had been other interesting finds.
When they had pulled up the street, or what had been left of it, the archaeologists went to work with surveying tools and shovels. They were led by Andres, a former neighbor of ours from Tartu. He was another one of those mythical Estonian men who carried around with him a big personality