full of elves and fairies.”
It sounded so exotic, but I also knew what it meant to be from an island. I was from Long Island, after all, born in the same hospital where my father was born and his father before him and where my great grandfather, the Italian immigrant bootlegger Salvatore, died. This special hospital was just a quick walk from the sea, so the salt had been in my lungs since I could breathe on my own and I’d always been among the horseshoe crabs and starfish and mussels and seaweed, the stench of low tide as familiar to me as the smell of my own shorts.
I remembered how my mother would take me to the seafood store when I was young. The clerk would put a live lobster down on the floor and the two of them would chuckle as the lobster sprinted towards the wailing youth, its alien legs tapping at the tiles. Later, of course, we boiled the lobster alive and ate him with melted butter, so I had my revenge, but I knew the sea well and was acquainted with its creatures.
I also knew what growing up on an island did to you. There was no easy way off. As a boy I thought about how, if the Soviets decided to strike New York City, we would be stuck on that island, nowhere to go, nothing to do except boil in the sea. As teenagers we would sit in parking lots at the beach and plot our escape, maybe across the sound to Connecticut or even beyond to California. A lot of us did manage to escape the island. Some of those who stayed behind went mad. Maybe this was the source of the aquatic tension within me.
“Wait, what time is it?” Epp asked as we lazed beneath the trees.
I checked my mobile. “12.25.”
“We have to go!” Epp stood up suddenly, dusting off her shorts. “It’s time to meet her.”
Anne Helene was a Norwegian designer who had a workshop in Kärdla. Epp was there to write a story about her for Anne. I would take the photos.
I liked being a photographer because I got to look at people, to really look at them because, unless the person was asleep, you couldn’t really look at them. As Anne was a magazine for women, most of the people I photographed were women and if I had looked at Anne Helene in a cafe the way I viewed her through the lens that day, she would have probably gotten up and moved. She would have thought I was crazy. Instead, I had a Norwegian woman standing on a swing with the white caps of the Gulf of Tareste glimmering behind her and the wind tossing her long locks of red hair all over and she was smiling down at me, like she actually liked me. And I kept looking. One might think that a man like me enjoyed this photo shoot too much, that there was nothing more exciting than seeing a woman get pounded by the spray of the surf. But I liked looking at Anne Helene because she was a person and I thought people were interesting. “People always want to look at other people,” Epp had once said. Take a photo of a temple in India and it is static. But put Epp and Airi in front of it, colorful as peacocks, road-weary circles under their eyes, henna on their hands, and suddenly the image is vibrant, people fall in love with it, like I did.
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:
A depressing, world famous painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
