Today, they have all been renovated, painted, and put into good use. I would stare at those broken windows and peeling paint back then, and imagine how it all could be. And now it has become what I prayed for.
Väino was a pioneer in this regard. He had renovated the house and lived in another house directly behind it. The two houses shared a yard between them, as well as the driveway. As the owner of everything, Väino was sort of like lord of the manor and we were his tenant farmers. But he worked too much for a lord. Late into the night, we could hear him renovating the apartment above ours, drills drilling, hammers hammering, portable radios playing at nine, ten, eleven o’clock. Sometimes I would wake up to the sound of a ghostly saw and my wife would sense my panic, reach out and touch my arm and say, “Don’t worry, honey. It’s only Väino, working.”
Lord Väino dwelled with his young son and teenage daughter. His wife Ly was away in Germany studying international politics. The teenage daughter’s name I don’t remember, but the son was named Karl, “Like a Swedish king,” as Väino had boasted, as if he was secretly loyal to the monarchy in Stockholm and kept a small Swedish flag on top of his dresser. The little King Karl was three, about the same age as our daughter Marta. Karl would play a lot in the mud in our yard and then come to our kitchen window and Epp would let him come inside and wash his hands and face and send him out to play again.
There was a familial relationship between us and our manor owner. When I burned through two computer adapters, Väino took me to the electronics store so that I could obtain a third. And when we set about getting a car, Väino got down on his back and slid as far as he could beneath it, in the snow, to see if the engine was all right, because Väino knew cars as well as he knew houses.
Most of his words of wisdom were imparted to me via translation, so I began to feel as if I had entered a new reality, a dubbed film like Seven Samurai, starring Väino.
His manner was Japanese in a way, or at least how I imagined Japanese warriors to be. Austere. Controlled. His back was straight. His words were incontestable declarations. Even simple utterances like, “It seems to be a fine car,” carried a certain weight with them because Väino had said them, and he knew.
Many of Väino’s teachings were new to these ears. For example, he said that the three-year-old tires on my new car – which had been imported by some worldly and entrepreneurial Estonian from Staten Island in New York – were as good as one-year-old Estonian tires, “Because three years on the American roads are equal to one year on the Estonian roads.”
I didn’t understand how that could be possible then, but would understand soon enough.
Väino also took interest in our manner of heating the furnace. It was tiled in white, and looked almost too beautiful to touch.
But I had to touch it, I even had to start fires in it. The apartment was heated by wood, and it was the first time in my life using wood as an energy source. I brought it in and opened the furnace’s door. Then I stacked the wood, two pieces on each side, then three across, and then three perpendicular to those on top. I twisted up a fresh copy of Postimees1 and put it at the base of this little construction, and set it alight with a match… The newspaper flared up and burned through, but the wood would not catch. Only the bark around its edges smoked a bit and Epp smelled it from the other room and came into see what was going on.
“Hey, it looks like you need a little help,” she said.
“I don’t get it! I just burned through a whole Postimees and still nothing.”
“Don’t be so frustrated!” she said. “You could use a few pieces of cardboard to get a fire started.” She retreived a flap from a broken moving box and set it in the middle and lit another match. In a minute, the entire furnace was ablaze with fire and warmth.
“See,” she said and shrugged proudly. “Just add some cardboard. No problem.”
As a rule, I used ten pieces of firewood for any fire. Ten seemed like a good number as I had ten fingers, and the metal basket I used to transport the good, dry wood from the barn to our house could hold about ten pieces.
Sometimes it created just the right amount of heat. But other times, our kitchen became unbearably warm and sauna-like. It hurt to touch the walls of the furnace because they were so hot. I even feared that the walls might crack, they contained so much energy. On one of these occasions, Väino happened to enter the room, perhaps to do a little electrical work, and also began to sweat. “You are overheating,” he pronounced and wagged a finger at me in his Samurai teacher way. “Overheating.” He had a word for what I was doing, you see. It meant that ten pieces of wood weren’t always the best way to go. Sometimes it would have to be twelve or other times five, depending on the temperature outside and inside and how long had it been since the last fire.
There was a measured art to wood heating that I would have to learn from men like Väino. I was a novice Estonian. He was a pro.
Väino was also always talking about someone named Endel. I didn’t know who this Endel was. The reclusive neighbor next door was an older guy named Aadu. You might catch a glimpse of him and his old-fashioned flat cap if you happened to walk into the shared foyer at the same time. Maybe you might exchange a “Tere” or “Hello” with him, too. There was also Nils, the musician with the ponytail who lived upstairs. He also only said “Tere,” but in a more alert and friendly manner, and you could hear his keyboard music at night.
But Endel? Who the heck was Endel?
What was more confusing, Väino said he had even made our apartment for Endel. It was a luxury apartment, he said proudly, luksuskorter, with tomato red painted walls and hound-tooth patterned Styrofoam moldings around the ceiling, plus that dreamy white-tiled furnace that looked as if he had brought it all the way to Karlova from Versailles. And it was all for Endel! “Ma tegin Endlile,”Väino would repeat. I only nodded.
One day, I asked Epp out of curiosity about this mysterious Endel whom I had never seen but who was supposed to get this apartment before we showed up.
“What Endel?” she asked.
“You know, Endel. Väino is always saying, he made our luxury apartment for Endel. He says,‘Ma tegin Endlile.’”
“Oh, no, Justin,” she said. “He’s saying, ‘Ma tegin end-a-le,’”Epp laughed. “It means: ‘I made it for myself.’”
“Oh.”
“And all this time you’ve been wondering about this non-existent person named Endel? Hahaha!”
That was the extent of her sympathy. After that day, whenever Daki, Tiina, Anna, the other Tiina, and all the other female visitors came to our home, I was instructed to repeat the,“Ma tegin Endlile”joke to their tea-spitting delight, and I always did it well, like a trained circus bear.
Väino’s luksuskorter was a fine place to live. We managed to stay there for five months.
The couple that moved in after us was an American woman and a German man who were both teaching at the university and enjoyed ballroom dancing. They had no children, and so I assumed that those three luxury rooms would suit their needs for some time to come, and maybe they wouldn’t mind Lord Väino’s midnight drilling upstairs.
Väino’s wife happened to be back in Tartu that week and negotiated the contract in German with the German man and they discussed utility bills and other interesting topics. We sold the transatlantic ballroom-dancing