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 and yet communicated very little.
Andres was about a decade older than me, a dark-haired, sturdy guy with a square chin. His wife Kärt was a petite woman with a terrific laugh. I would make a droll comment now and then and then she would cackle with her entire body, leaving me to wonder if what I had said had actually been funny or if Kärt was just a bit insane.
Kärt was a brunette, and similar enough in coloring that she could have been Andres’ midget sidekick. But Kärt had an Estonian last name. Andres had a strange last name that had some T’s and V’s in it, and I had heard that his father had been Ossetian, a little nationality wedged in the Caucasus. Andres also had fathered about seven children, three of them with Kärt, but despite this obvious source of stress, he seemed entirely relaxed, and kept a number of pot-bellied pigs in his backyard. During ‘white night’ grilling parties in June, he would take the pigs out and stroke their bellies and grin. That was back in those Tartu days. Sometimes in Viljandi, I did wonder why we had ever left.
Once I had proofread an academic article for Andres. It involved discoveries found in an ancient latrine located just across from the main building of the University of Tartu. Old toilets, as I learned, are goldmines for archaeologists. One can imagine how some Estonian court jester in the Hanseatic days went to relieve himself after a night of dancing and debauchery and dropped his flute into the toilet’s hole. Bloop! Centuries later, Andres showed up with his own gang of merry men and women and found the same instrument encased in the orange-colored clay of the ancient dumping site. According to the article, the flute they found in that old toilet still played. I imagined how Andres had held the precious find aloft in triumph, and then cleaned it out a bit with his muddy fingers, placed it to his lips, and started to play it. When I described this scene, Kärt cackled insanely and said that it didn’t happen exactly that way.
Andres loved his job and I envied him for that. He spent those weeks in our mud hole of a street in Viljandi scurrying back and forth and taking measurements. Each time he passed, I would ask if they had found any skeletons. I was convinced that there had to be dead people under our street. It just seemed like that kind of place.
“So, Andres, have you found any Teutonic knights?”
He shook his head. No knights yet.
“Any Swedish soldiers?”
“Not yet,” he said and trudged on.
I was cautioned by a neighbor about this morbid interest. “God forbid those people find a skeleton,” she had said. “In that case the archaeologists will be digging here for a year! The street will never get done.”
But they did not find any human bones on Sepa Street. There was plenty of trash though. It made Andres’ eyes brighten. There was fog and delirium behind his glasses. And every once in a while, he would come to me to share his special treasures.
“Do you see this beaker shard?” he would hold out a sliver of ancient blue glass in his palm. “This was made in Venice!”
I stared at the shard, trying to imagine how a tiny piece of such a great city could wind up in a hole in Viljandi.
And around the corner, at the end of Munga or Monk Street, Andres said they had found the remains of a potter’s shop. The style of the earthenware matched ceramic shards found in Pskov, a Russian city of 200,000 located 20 km southeast of the Estonian border. It seemed that the potters in Viljandi, the water city, had been trading with the Slavs of Pskov long before any marauding Teutonic crusaders arrived on horseback. Or perhaps a potter from Pskov had gotten in trouble with the local authorities and fled his home to set up shop in quiet Viljandi, a place where it was certain that nobody would ever find him.
There were other curious finds on our street. Some coins, a horse shoe, a stone pendant. And plenty of animal bones.
Even I had my little discovery. I had been raking out a plot of dirt when I turned up a very human-looking jawbone. This led me to all kinds of uncomfortable hypotheses about my neighbors, until Andres came and calmed me and said that it had probably belonged to a sheep.
But the day after brought something truly sinister to the surface – an unexploded mine that had been dug up right next to our barn! You can imagine how happy I was that I had never done any renovation work around there. The newspaper said it had been lying there since the Second World War, and a special bomb unit had been called in to take it away and detonate it. I asked all the old neighborhood ladies I knew, but nobody could remember hearing of any battles on my home street.
Andres didn’t bother himself with such things anyway. They weren’t old enough. But he did find some ancient cellar steps that led straight across Sepa Street. They were formed by huge, rounded boulders, stacked on top of each other by God-knows-who, hundreds, or even a thousand years ago. They went down into the ground and then rose up again on the other side. The archaeologists had marked off the site with a metal fence. They had even brought a video camera to record the dig. Andres said he had been studying maps of the site, drawn by cartographers in the employ of the Polish crown, to which Viljandi and much of southern Estonia had been subject between the 1560s and 1620s. It was one of those periods that only historians bothered to recall, but the oldest, most accurate maps of old Viljandi made by Polish cartographers were actually kept in Moscow, Andres said.
Andres and the archaeologists abandoned their camp when the Viljandi Folk Music Festival came around. But I was impressed enough with the cellar to show it to Diego, my new Chilean friend, that day when he came to visit. And while we were standing there, gazing down into the ancient hole, he had to ask:
“Don’t you go out of your mind with boredom in this hole, man?”
Poor Diego. He was like me. He had come to Tallinn on a whim and met his future wife by chance. Any rational man would have gone back to Santiago and married a local girl named Violeta or Veronica. But Diego was different. He was a romantic. It had been the night before he had to leave and yet he couldn’t forget that Estonian maiden, even in Chile. So he had to marry her and move to Estonia after that.
And so here he was, staring down into some crypt, grateful that he lived up in Tallinn and not down on Sepa Street.
“When you have three kids, you don’t have time to go out to bars or the movies anyway,” I told Diego. “And this place is good for raising kids. I can walk them to school, bike to the shop to pick up some groceries. Our daughters can run to their friends’ houses to play. You can’t do that in Tallinn. Or in New York.”
Diego nodded a bit as if he almost believed me.
“And, I mean, the view of the lake is beautiful,” I added.
“Sure, it is. But do you really want to look at it every damn day?”
A mutual friend told me Diego was having a hard time adjusting to life in Estonia. I knew he had quit working at a graphic design firm, not because of pay or disappointment with the work given him, but because he could not connect with his co-workers for some reason. I bet it wasn’t anything they said or did, but the silence that
