she frowned. “It was gray. It was polluted.”
“But how did it get that way?”
“It took time. It didn’t happen over night.”
As our high-speed ferry from Helsinki bore us into Tallinn Harbor, though, nothing looked gray. I was waiting for some kind of post-communist, northern Byzantium to spring out of the wilderness – Crimea on the Baltic. But the Crimea did not come. There were just more islands and forests.
On the nautical map aboard the ferry, I read out the names of the islands. Aegna, Prangli, and Naissaar.
“Have you ever been to Naissaar?” I asked Epp.
“No,” she said. “People go there, but there’s supposed to be a lot of unexploded… what do you call them… they drop them in the water to blow up boats?”
“Mines?”
“Yes. Unexploded sea mines from the Second World War. Sometimes it is in the paper that somebody accidentally steps on one and gets blown up.”
I decided then never to go to Naissaar without a metal detector. It was a shame that the islands weren’t more inviting. They reminded me of the peaceful archipelago outside of Helsinki, covered in thick pine and birch trees with sun-kissed beaches. A few white boats rimmed Naissaar’s coast in the distance, perhaps captained by those who knew how to stay away from unexploded ordnance from the Second World War.
As we got closer to port, Epp and I walked outside to the top deck. A group of young Finnish guys in denim jackets were talking loudly and drinking cans of beer. It was 10 am.
From the deck, I caught sight of Tallinn, but it didn’t look Eastern. Instead it looked more like Helsinki or Copenhagen or Reykjavik. The skyline was punctuated by the towers of twin Lutheran churches, each painted a sober white. To the left I saw cranes and gleaming glass hotels and office buildings.
“It looks like Helsinki,” I said in surprise. “It almost looks like a Scandinavian country.”
“Estonia kind of is a Scandinavian country,” said Epp. “Just a little less fortunate than the rest.”
We docked and walked into a ferry terminal that didn’t look too different from the one we had left behind in Helsinki. The woman at passport control sighed and looked at my passport. With long blonde hair and sea blue eyes, she looked Finnish, but there was something spicier about her that made her that much more beautiful. Now I knew why there were so many Finnish guys on the boat to Tallinn. Her passport stamp fell and I was permitted to enter. “Eesti Vabariik5,” I mouthed to myself. The language looked like some mutt offspring of Finnish and German, with a hint of Swedish gobbledygook thrown in. It seemed slightly less poetic than the Suomen tasavalta6 we had just left behind.
While Tallinn’s port had looked pretty and modern from afar, I quickly found that first looks could be deceiving. I noticed some nearby buildings were blackened with soot, each one of their windows blown out by the wind or vandals. Up close it reminded me of the rusty post-industrial port cities of New England that I knew from my childhood.
The surrounding architecture was even more dizzying. Here was an old Orthodox church, there was a gas station, and over there was a 24-hour liquor store, where a few Estonian punk kids with mohawks stood amidst piles of trash, sharing a bottle of vodka.
As we walked towards the Old Town, the dirty port area gave way to hotels and currency exchanges. At the medieval gate of the old city, we walked past cafes packed with portly middle-aged Swedish and German and Finnish tourists. I could only tell them apart by the sounds of their languages, because they all looked the same. There were also Russian ladies selling flowers, and pockets of Italians and Spanish tour groups. It was as if all of Europe had been condensed into one street.
“Do you remember any words from our Finnish trip?” Epp asked.
“I remember how to say, “Minä olen mies7”.”
“But here, it’s ‘mina olen mees’8.”
Epp admitted that she had been able to understand a lot of things our Finnish hosts had said when they were speaking to one another. Even the things we weren’t supposed to hear, like when they had complained about the amount we drank during the trip.
“What did they expect?” I was a bit humiliated. “They put a bunch of writers in a room with some open bottles of wine, and they think we’re not going to drink it?”
“I didn’t drink,” said Epp. “I was too busy eavesdropping on what they were saying about us.”
We now climbed through the majestic alleyways of Tallinn’s Old Town. Its cream-colored Hanseatic buildings enveloped me. The travel guide I had in my hands went out of its way to say nice things about Helsinki, but I had a feeling that no travel guide could ever do justice to the Old Town of Tallinn. Estonia’s capital looked much better.
Looking up one crooked medieval street into the dark I said to Epp, “This place is amazing. Could you imagine living here?”
“You could live here,” Epp said lightly. “I have lived in the Old Town of Tallinn.”
I could live here? On the other side of the world? Surrounded by these medieval fairytale buildings?
“But what could I do here?”
“You could teach English.”
For a moment, I considered the idea. Then it drifted away and swirled into the Tallinn’s afternoon sunlight.
“I don’t think I could do that.”
“Ha!” said Epp. “You can live wherever you want to and you can make friends everywhere. I have friends living all over the world.”
Yes, I remembered, Epp had told me about her adventures. In India, she had helped cast a movie. In the UK, she had worked as a babysitter. Epp’s stories darted from location to location. There was India and England and Israel and the Canary Islands. There was Malaysia and Cyprus and Belarus.
“I have worked with cameramen who have worked with Björk,” she said proudly. “They said that she is as crazy and as absent minded as I am. They said she lost one mobile phone a week while they were filming Dancer in the Dark.”
We sat at the top of Toompea, or Dome Hill, a section of the old city that was the seat of the Estonian government. From up here, we overlooked the red tiled roofs of the rest of the Old Town.
“Are you planning to stay here in Tallinn, now that our program is over?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Epp shook her head. “I have been here before. I am still hungry for the world.”
“But where will you go?”
“I really want to go back to the ashram in India,” she said. “You cannot begin to imagine how clean you feel after a week there. I need to go back.”
“I want to go to São Paulo in Brazil,” I said. “I want to go learn how to play bossa nova and samba.” I imagined that I would befriend my heroes Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and that soon
‘The Republic of Estonia’ in Estonian.
‘The Republic of Finland’ in Finnish.
‘I am a man’ in Finnish.
‘I am a man’ in Estonian.
