rel="nofollow" href="#n3" type="note">3. 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 issues could be resolved by consulting the nearest male.
It was this last belief that baffled me. All foreign men in Estonia eventually came to understand that there were certain things they were expected to do and not to do. Men were never to offer to make dinner or do the dishes. But when it came to plumbing, electronics, or furniture assembly, it was up to the man to use his God-given divining rod to figure it all out. Epp had been sympathetic. She didn’t push me to fix the plumbing. She called a plumber instead. Still, there had been a few times when she would pore over a task and say blankly, “My father would know how to do it.” That’s all it took to get me down on my knees to revive a broken chair or fix the connection on our TV. We both knew that I was mostly useless. If I did manage to fix something, Epp would applaud. “You’re my hero,” she’d say. If I fixed something as treacherous as a clogged toilet, I might even get a kiss.
“I think Airi’s parents live around here,” Epp said, her voice echoing through the forest as we rolled along. “The trees look familiar.”
The last time I had seen Airi had been at our apartment in Tallinn. She came to visit after Epp and I married in June. Airi and Epp had spent their time together looking at old photos of India and reflecting on their magical wanderings, that is, when Airi wasn’t responding to urgent text messages from her boyfriend Tõnu.
“Why does he keep messaging you?” I asked.
“He says he’s hungry,” said Airi. “He wants me to come home.”
“But if he’s hungry, why doesn’t he make himself something to eat?”
Airi stared at me. “Tõnu? Make food?”
“What? He doesn’t know how to cook?”
“But Justin,” Airi shook her head, “Tõnu is an Estonian man.”
Poor Tõnu. If Airi hadn’t gone home that night he might have starved to death in their kitchen.
“One time Airi and I wrote an article together about looking for fairies in Hiiumaa,” Epp yelled as she pedaled in front of me. “We met some people who said that the fairies had picked up a ship and dropped it in the forest. And they even showed us the shipwreck or something like it!”
“Whoa.”
“And I was looking at them, wondering, were they kidding or were they really being serious? I couldn’t tell.”
“So, there’s a shipwreck in the woods?” I peered into the trees.
“Then, when we went back to the mainland, Airi’s mother called and said that I had left a pair of pink slippers at their house. And I said, ‘What pink slippers? I don’t have any pink slippers.’ And she said that someone had left them there. I mean, was she joking or did they really find some pink slippers?”
“Whose pink slippers were they?”
“I don’t know! They have some weird sense of humor here, or perhaps the weird things really happen? The editor-in-chief read our article about the fairies and heard about the slippers and said, ‘Epp, you must be going crazy.’”
Through the woods, I spied a distant home here and there. This was how the Estonians lived, away from one another. Estonians never met to mend fences, as there were no fences. There was just distance. If luck had it, they wouldn’t meet at all.
It was different from what I had left behind, of hot summer nights spent pub crawling, riding around in the subway trains, tethered to the flashing electronic eyes of emptiness, the deafening thrum of humanity in perpetual motion. This was where I had been a few days before. New York, a giant city, a metropolis, arrested by masses, unable to move freely, unable to think clearly, chafed and displaced in an urban contusion where one had to yell obscenities to merely be heard.
But I wasn’t there. I was on a bike on Hiiumaa and my nerves still felt raw. A few days out of New York and they were still tingling, craving more noise, craving more light. Things seemed too quiet here, a bit too serene, the only dissonance coming from the mosquitoes and the shiny black Mercedes and BMWs that roared past us at astounding speeds, their windows tinted, each containing a male driver in sunglasses: quiet, self absorbed, reckless, Estonian.
“Holy shit these drivers are crazy,” I cried out after another bullet-like BMW shot by. “People don’t drive like that in New York. Why is everyone here in such a goddamn hurry?!”
“Oh, look, an anthill!” Epp swerved off the road into the forest. “Let’s go have a look.”
It wasn’t really an anthill. Knee-high, sandy and round with a dark opening at the top, like a pregnant woman’s belly button, this was like an apartment complex for ants. “There are even more of them over there,” Epp motioned deeper into the forest.
I saw them, thick mounds, the apartment blocks of the Hiiu ants. It was new to me, different. I watched the line of ants trickle down into the long black entrance of the extraterrestriallooking
