supposed to carry the wood, not hit it together,” said Mats.
I said nothing and began loading the pieces into my arms, ten at a time.
Over the three winters that we lived in that house, Mats would come over many times and bring his truck full of wood. Through a few conversations, I came to know a little more about him. He lived out in Elva, a small town 20-minutes’ drive from Tartu, he said. It seemed like a fitting home for a man like Mats.
Anyone who has been to Elva knows that the town is covered by a canopy of sky-tall thick pine trees that cast solemn green shadows on anyone and everything beneath them. I imagined Woodsman Mats out there in his log cabin near Elva, smoking his pipe, and occasionally felling trees that would be brought out to his reliable writer clients in Tähtvere.
Once, Mats even told us his last name – Talts. Mats Talts. This caused a bit of a stir on our front porch. Was this Mats Talts of the same family as the Estonian weightlifter Jaan Talts, who had competed at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City? Epp had asked. Yes, indeed, said Woodsman Mats. Jaan Talts of Mexico City was in fact Mats Talts of Elva’s brother.
It surprised me that Epp even knew what Estonians were on the Soviet team in Mexico City in 1968. She wasn’t alive then. I didn’t know which Americans were at the ’68 games. But this was a common Estonian knowledge thing. All Estonians had memorized their Olympic victors going back to the 1896 Games in Athens, I bet. There had been so few of them, so it was easy to remember who they were and if they had won anything.
Another time, Mats showed up to the house with his wife. This surprised me, because long-haired, slow-speaking, Big Indian Chief Mats Talts, brother of Jaan of Mexico City, had an average Estonian woman as a spouse. She was the type of woman you stood behind in the department store, or passed in open air markets. She sat in the front seat of the car leafing through a recent edition of Kroonika while Mats and I took care of the wood. I had been expecting Pocahontas, the Indian princess, but no: Mats’ wife reminded me a tiny bit of Angela Merkel instead.
There was some sense to this though. There were different faces in Estonia. Some people, like Mats’ wife, or Priit Pullerits, the ever youthful Godfather of Estonian journalism and Postimees editor, had what I thought of as the German face. His hair was parted on the side, and his mug reminded me of a lion, with a long nose that broadened at its base and a mouth that ran straight across. When he wore his mustache, Pullerits looked a bit like a 1970s soap opera star, and when he shaved the hair from his face, he looked all of 19 years old, even though he was in his 40s. Pullerits had told me once (in an interview for a book about Estonia that I never wrote) how he walked through a town on the French-German border, and everyone spoke to him in German, because they knew a German when they saw one.
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