age (somewhere between forty and seventy), with grey, wavy hair half way down his back, grey beard, wearing a printed shirt and faded pants, holding a small woven backpack in his lap, leaning over a table and sipping tea. He is alone.
“Hi, are you Harri?” I start in as soon as I reach the table. “I’m Epp and I’d like to come and work for you!” My intuition tells me that I can be as free and as bold and intrusive as I like with this strange character.
His blue-eyed gaze stays on me just long enough for me to start feeling a bit uneasy. He’s got the strangest eyes: at once penetrating and still distracted, as if he was somewhere else, and such a lovely shade of light blue, too, shining in his tanned face. He motions for me to sit and begins in a fitful, high-pitched voice. “It’s a long story, but to put it bluntly, I’m not taking anyone along to work with me anymore. One week ago my business visa to the US was revoked and I got a fiveyear entry ban for some bloody bicycle bullshit one of my employees got into over there because he didn’t pay his fine!”
Without giving me a chance to say a word, he launches into his long tale. A Greek tragedy is unfolded before me, about how everyone meant for the best to happen, but what happened in the end was a total mess. How a whole house full of Estonians lived on the island of Oahu, in the city of Honolulu, all with working visas and how everything snowballed when a guy named Leo left a tiny little fine unpaid, which caused a conflict with the officials, that in turn ended up with everyone’s visas being revoked and Harri being blocked from entering the US and flown back before he could even set foot there again. “I told Leo before I left to pay that fine! It was a small amount, just a hundred bucks, just for riding his bike on the sidewalk, but he didn’t pay it! The moment I met him at the airport in Tallinn – he had to leave the US as well –, I gave him a right hook for that, sent him flying to the floor and that’s the last I’ve seen of him!”
I’m listening to that peculiar man sitting in front of me and I already adore him – I’ve always felt unconditional affection towards people who like to tell stories. My emotion is intensified by the strange, pungent smell that emanates from him. It’s a mix of body odor and Indian incense, the scent of faraway adventures and unexplored spaces.
“Oh, I have to show you what I sell – maybe you want to buy something?” In a flash, the storyteller becomes a peddler, and, like a true salesman, he grabs the bag that’s lying in his lap and empties it out on the table to reveal a heap of beautiful silver items with precious stones and a handful of dark brown knobby things. “These here are bracelets from the Philippines, made of grass. They look really small, but when you put them in water, they swell up and you can wear them. Want to buy one?”
“But Harri, just because you can’t get into the US it doesn’t mean that you’ll stay home now, does it?” I ask, feigning aloofness as I handle the various trinkets. The rest of what I’d like to say is simmering inside, “You’re going to sell these things somewhere else now and you probably need someone to help you sell them, right? I don’t need a set salary, I’m happy with just a part of the commission. And I have enough money in my account to buy plane tickets to wherever and get along fine there for some time – even if there’s no real income to speak of at first.”
He stops and stares at me.
“Young wolves do choose their leaders themselves,” he then says. He doesn’t say, “Yes,” but that sentence sure sounds affirmative. My head is swimming, as I realize that something very special is about to begin in my life. How it will all play out and where in the world we will wind up, I don’t know, but something is definitely about to happen.
“I have a husband,” reality pulls me back in for a second. “Can he come too?”
“Come where?”
“Wherever you’re going!”
“But I haven’t even told you where I’m going.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
I’ve made an impression on him. “All right, Epp, you seem like an alert person. I don’t think I’ve met anyone this alert for a long time. Let’s say, yeah, in Indonesia, about a tenth of the people there are alert and that’s something already, most countries in the world have less of these kinds of people.”
“Aren’t Estonians alert?”
“Estonians are a very old and very important people in the history of the world. Russians, after all, are genetically also Estonians, or well, Finno-Ugric people, but they’ve just forgotten their language, having been violently forced to speak the Slavic language. Finno-Ugric tribes have affected Europe as well as Asia much more than all these little busybodies here realize.” He looks me in the eye for a moment and then continues, seemingly on another random topic, “And can you imagine, in Tibet they have a volcanic mountain and can you guess what it’s called, huh?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Tulekeel4! The name of that mountain is Tulekeel!” With a highpitched shout, he jumps up and assumes a half-squatting position, as if he was expecting an explosion, eyes fixed on mine to make sure I understood the full implications of what he was saying.
“Tulekeel?”
“The name of that mountain of fire is Tulekeel!” He’s almost shouting with a passionate expressiveness that has also roused the attention of those around us. “I’ve been researching this, the Estonian people have an ancient legend, according to which our ancestors were gods who came down the mountains high above. I’m sure it was the Himalayas! There are also myths in India about light-eyed gods who came down to earth – we came through there, then across the Ural Mountains and on until the Baltic Sea. And Estonian was a great international language back then, like English is now, all kinds of black and yellow people were learning to speak it. Because after the Estonian gods came down from the mountains and reached men, they taught everyone some of their language. Don’t you agree…?”
“Yes, well, maybe so; it’s an interesting hypothesis,” I quickly answer.
“Do you agree to research these things and spread the word? Because, you see, the lead wolf has his interests as well. The leader of the pack can’t choose his followers, but he sure can run away if those followers don’t suit him!”
Huh? His way of speaking is a bit muddled, but in a way it’s pretty intelligent, full of metaphors and parallels, certainly a lot more inspirational than what I have been dealing with during these last years as a journalist.
“Spread the word? I’m actually a journalist and I’d like to become a writer,” I admit. So far he’s asked nothing about me.
“Oh really?” he responds in a dry tone, a little suspicious.
“My husband is a journalist too. If you want, we can definitely spread the word about your theories… But if you don’t we’ll keep quiet about them.”
“You know what,” he tosses a hand in the air. “Come back at the same time tomorrow and bring your husband with you. I’m going to do some thinking until then.”
That night a classic clash of values plays itself out in one Estonian household.
“How can you imagine just picking up and leaving our life here to follow some old man – and you don’t even know where?”
“Everything is possible. We can put the house up for rent…”
“We have a mortgage, this house belongs to the bank; we’re not even
“The tongue of fire” in Estonian.
