more dehydrated and apathetic. The ground was white, the air was cold, but the warm clothes you had to wear as you trudged about the city made you sweat, so you were never entirely at peace, whether indoors or out. Why had I forgotten about these things? Why hadn’t I noticed how rundown some parts of Tartu were? The city had looked so nice in the pictures. And we still hadn’t found a home since starting our search that morning.
But this one, Väino’s one, was much better than the rest. The other ones were up creaking staircases, connected by dark corridors that smelled of wood smoke and cat urine. Väino’s apartment was clean and new. We could move in tomorrow, if he agreed, and we could have that barn full of quality wood too.
After a day of walking around Tartu that was fine with me. All I wanted at that point was to give Väino the money for the apartment and the wood, go inside, take a shower, and sleep.
The house, what would become our home for some time, was on a crooked street at the mouth of a neighborhood of Tartu known as Karlova. As I later came to know, it was named after a German landowner named Karl. When this Karl, who I always imagined as a reclusive and eccentric count, had lived, no one told me. But his name stayed with the locals.
The name of every Tartu neighborhood meant something.
Supilinn, “Soup Town,” for example, was the bohemian shanty town of dirt roads down by the river. It was a 19th century slum that had somehow made it into the 21st century, limping and bent, but still there, with funny street names that translated to Pea, Bean, Potato, Pumpkin, Celery, Melon, and Berry. They said it was called Supilinn because when the River Emajõgi overflowed, it turned the little neighborhood with its tasty street names into soup. The apartment we looked at there was housed in a hulk of splintered wood that looked like the Vasa after it had been lying on the bottom of Stockholm Harbor for a while. But it had potential! That was Supilinn.
Tucked beyond the railroad tracks was Tammelinn, “Oak Town.” It was the resort of wealthier families, of proud, stately homes and new, shiny tin roofs and oak-lined streets. Prime Minister Andrus Ansip lived around there, it was said. We didn’t bother looking for a place in Tammelinn. Too far from the center, we decided.
Karlova was something of a mix between Supilinn and Tammelinn, more crooked, ancient dwellings, like down by the river, but with cared-for, paved, tree-lined streets. Our new apartment was in an old wooden red house. It wasn’t situated in a peaceful country field like the red house in my old New York computer desktop, but for now, it was close enough. And it was certainly respectable. Half of the homes on the street were still abandoned then.
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.
An Estonian daily newspaper.
