chapel was crooked and white, like an old woman. And in the graveyard of the chapel, as we stopped to take a rest, I knelt down to read off the names of the old stones. Georg. Elsa. Karl. Minna. All these people were bones. Anyone that could remember anyone that remembered them was dead. But one name caught my eye. It looked a little different. Alive. It didn’t seem especially German or Estonian. Instead, there was something grander there. It could be the name of an Italian film star or a Brazilian singer.
Marta.
It was like a hot spark. There was energy in that name, adrenaline. Is this how you recognize the right name for your kid? I didn’t know, but it felt right.
“I had a great aunt named Marta,” Epp crouched down beside me.
“Do you remember her at all? What was she like?”
“She died a long time ago,” Epp wrinkled her brow. “But I remember she had a cool doll sitting on top of her cabinet.”
“What do you think?”
“You mean for us?” Epp said and paused to think for a moment. “Well, it does sound international,” Epp said. “And it’s a family name.”
“Little does our Marta know,” I reached out and touched the stone one more time, “but she’s going to be named after some dead chick from Hiiumaa.”
“Let’s do it,” Epp agreed. “It’s the name if it’s a girl!”
On the way back from the Kassari chapel we stopped to take a break in an old fashioned villavabrik – a wool factory. We laid our bikes against a stone wall in the deserted parking lot, but there were no cars parked there and there was no one around, no evidence of life other than the odd home in the distance here and there with its dark wooden walls and thick thatched straw roof looking cozy and ancient, like a movie set for The Lord of the Rings.
“So, when we get back to Tallinn,” Epp began to speak as we walked to the factory door.
“Shh!”
“What?”
“Do you hear that?” I whispered.
“No.”
“Just listen.”
And we stood there, both silent, listening. We heard nothing. Not a sound. No cars. No radios. No construction. And then, in the distance, a sheep let out a gentle cry.
“It’s so quiet here,” I whispered looked out into the fields of flax beyond the stone wall.
“Tere!” a voice boomed from the steps of the factory. I turned to see a man with brown hair, gray on the sides, a cowlick in the back, and a middle-aged paunch. He was dressed in blue overalls, as if he had just come from milking a cow.
“Tere,” Epp answered him. “Is your store open?”
“It is, come in.”
The store was tidy and adorned with caps and sweaters and booties embroidered with colorful folk patterns made in subtle blues and reds, greens and golds, zigzagging and crisscrossing like diamonds, snowflakes, tree branches, insects, and thunderbolts. The air in the room was thick with the smell of pungent wool. Epp found a locally made shawl to bring home with us. As we paid, I chatted with the owner.
“Are you from around here?” I asked.
“Born and raised,” he said. “And I’ve been running this shop since the Russian time ended.” And as he shifted his glance to me, I noticed his left eye was a little lazy. Again, an islander was looking in my direction, but not at me.
“The Russian times, eh, so you’ve been running this shop since 1917?” I winked to the owner.
“Ok, ok since the Soviet time ended,” he said with a peculiar grin, as if he was incredibly amused by something, but not by me.
“So, is it true what they say about Hiiu humor?” I asked him. “Does it really exist?”
“Of course it exists,” the owner answered with that odd grin still on his lips. “An Estonian from the mainland will stop in here and ask, ‘Where does this road lead?’ And I’ll tell him every time, ‘The road doesn’t lead you anywhere, you have to follow it yourself.’ Now that’s Hiiu humor!”
Epp laughed when he said it, but I didn’t, and I didn’t get anything about this country, its wacky humor, its pervasive silence, its sexual mores, but I had definitely married into it. And all this, I looked around at the woolen folk costumes hanging on the wall, had seemingly been my choice.
“I know a joke too,” Epp volunteered. “Why shouldn’t a Hiiu guy tell a joke to a mainlander on Wednesday?”
“Because they start to laugh in the church on Sunday!” the factory owner deadpanned.
“Ha!” Epp chuckled.
“Yeah, that’s a good one!” the owner wiped a tear from his eye and handed the bag to me. “You know, I could go on telling jokes like that all day.”
“Was that joke supposed to be funny?” I whispered and held the door for Epp as we exited the shop a moment later.
“Don’t worry, Justin,” she touched my arm on the way out. “You will probably get it later.”
OUT IN THE FOREST
Vane, Karin, Rait, Nele…
Epp’s cousin Helina introduced us, but I couldn’t tell one from the other. The quartet lived in a summer cottage in Lilli on the Latvian border. After returning from Hiiumaa, we turned south: for meeting these new relatives, we had to drive down a long forest road, and when we arrived there wasn’t much around, a house here, a house there, and everywhere the thick, looming trees.
Golden-haired Karin, also Epp’s cousin, was the mother. Bearded Vane was the father. Of the two teenage children, I was told skinny Rait was the son and petit Nele was the daughter. Or at least that’s what I thought, because after five minutes I couldn’t remember if the mother was Vane and the daughter Karin, or if the daughter was Rait and the mother was Nele. Estonian names were all the same. “Which one is that?” I would whisper in Epp’s ear. She would tell me, but I would forget.
To make matters more confusing, the relatives all looked the same. Cousin Helina had blonde hair and blue eyes. Her son Ken had blond hair and blue eyes. Vane, Karin, Rait, and Nele? You get the picture. The only one who really stood out in the big family photo we took in the yard was that tall, dark, foreign guy Epp had married. The family was babysitting Paula, Karin’s angelic three-year-old niece, and little Paula refused to even stand near me. “I think she’s afraid of you,” Helina told me as we gathered for the photo. “She’s never seen someone so dark.”
Dark? How was this possible? In America, I was your average white guy. In Estonia, I frightened small children. I had always been aware of the language barrier in Estonia, but I was unprepared for the color barrier. The Estonians even had a word for people like me – tõmmu – the same adjective they used to describe a dark beer or a smoked sausage or a chocolate candy. Tõmmu. It was an appellation with a touch of Latin allure. Once while trying on shirts at a department store in Tallinn, the grayheaded
