afternoon. When I asked Epp to ask Sirts where she was, that maybe we could come and help her, the answer came back: Maryland. “Maryland? That’s four hours away! Her flight leaves this afternoon and she’s still in Maryland hitchhiking? Just forget it. She’s never going to make that flight.”
But she did make it. It was hard to believe it when I heard it, but Rüblik Sirts was right on time.
Tea with the Icebreaker
Fred Jüssi was king of the Estonian beatniks. At least that was my first impression of him.
Even if his bebop was bird calls, there was always a touch of the hepcat about the naturalist. Maybe it was that beret he was so fond of wearing. Epp told me that Fred had been born to Estonian parents in Aruba in 1935, which I never believed until I saw a magazine with a grainy black and white image of an infant Fred in the Caribbean sands.
That was when Fred’s life began, back before the war when Estonia was free, long before he ever picked up a camera, ages before he wrote the book Jäälõhkuja, and eons before Mr. Jüssi crossed paths with me.
It was a fortuitous crossing, one that probably changed my life. Not that I decided to pick up a camera and become a naturalist myself, but whenever I saw the images of Fred Jüssi out at work in the woods, I felt a sort of solidarity in our lonesomeness and our dissatisfaction with rote, routine, professional life.
Jüssi just couldn’t help doing what he did. And as journal after journal filled up with handwritten notes scribbled in planes, trains, buses, against city walls, I knew I couldn’t help it either.
First I should tell you a bit more about Jäälõhkuja, that fetching and crazy-looking Estonian word. It was the title of his book.
In the early days of the publishing house I did a lot of the errand work, but I wasn’t exactly proud of it. Dropping off books, receiving books. Meh. I still did my online journalism job, so the money was coming in, but with all the book business buzzing about me in Tartu, with all those fascinating ladies in my kitchen, I wanted to get in on the action, and for me the first way in was in helping to transcribe Fred’s book. I would cozy up beside Epp late at night with the book across my lap and work while the children slept. Epp was impressed that I could do it.
I’m still a little proud.
When I say “transcribe,” I do not mean that I translated it into English. I’ve been learning Estonian for a dozen years as I write this and I still couldn’t do that. It would have been impossible back then, at the very dawn of our book business, because I didn’t even know what jäälõhkuja was. It just looked like an accidental word to me, as if a three-year-old had gotten hold of an Estonian keyboard and typed it out. Even when Epp told me it was a kind of bird that cracks or breaks the ice, an “icebreaker,” it didn’t help me to understand the other long words I found in that book, originally printed years earlier and now so rare it could only be found in a few libraries.
Dog-eared and yellowed, our paperback copy looked as if it been recovered from the belongings of an old woman who had died a century ago. But on the inside, it said it was published in 1986. Only 1986! Or maybe that was already a long time ago? I thought sometimes while I was typing about my own 1986, how I had gone skiing in Vermont that winter and how my friend Brent Usher and I played cards in our bunk beds while the snowflakes glistened outside through the house lights. At the same exact moment in 1986, far away as the globe spun, snow was also falling outside the window of the middle-aged Soviet naturalist Fred Jüssi, who was seated at his desk, enjoying the radiator warmth of his Tallinn apartment, sipping hot tea and stringing together this book with its crazy words.
Like the snowflakes they fluttered by. Words like:
Arvatavasti
Hingeõhku
Kruubiterasuuruses
Loodusetunnetuse
Estonian words! Sometimes our niece Simona would show me comic strips and within the bubbles there would be just one or two words, each of which was about 17 letters in length, followed by some exclamation points. You would see Donald Duck’s familiar grimace and then some absurd statement above his head with many ö’s and ä’s and ü’s, words that looked a lot like, well, like jäälõhkuja. It reminded me of an old LP I had of Greenlandic children’s songs. Track 4 on Side A was called “Sialualaarluni.” Track 5 was called “Kalingaarpoq.” Track 8 on Side B was “Ikinngutinga Naasunnguaq.”
Maybe it was just a northern thing?
Could you imagine fine poetry and prose rendered by such mysterious words? It could, and Fred Jüssi was actually one of the first people to teach me an Estonian poem. That was back at the Hotel Olümpia, our first meeting, years ago. It was September and already cool and gray, and the only colors were the yellow hair on the heads of the Tallinn students that passed beneath the cafe windows, and the pastel blues and reds of their puffy winter jackets, never really put away. Fred emerged through the cafe doors ruddy faced and wearing a wooly sweater, like an Eskimo in from a seal hunt.
He was a sturdy, solid whale hunter of an old man, like one boulder stacked atop another, with the chiseled face of an Indian Chief, and short wiry white hair that stuck out from beneath his beret.
“Fred!” Epp said and she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her lips to his cheek.
“Hello, tere, jah.”
“My pleasure,” I said in Estonian as I stood to shake his hand. “Härra Fred Jüssi, I’m Justin Petrone.”
This caused his sea-gray eyes to recoil back behind those Siberian slits, because Estonians weren’t used to foreigners speaking their language, especially older Estonians who had always thought of their tongue as a sacred secret. Most Estonians’ eyes pulsed with such secrets, as if they all knew some great but unfortunate truth that must never be shared with outsiders.
But Fred’s eyes seem to hold more secrets.
So Fred sat down and we made small talk and drank coffee and ate yogurty cakes with tiny spoons. Mostly the man spoke to Epp, but when the wind howled outside the glass windows of the cafe, the naturalist held his arms across his chest, announcing in English:
“Justin, it seems that you want very badly to learn our Estonian language, so I want to teach you a line from a poem by the poet Juhan Liiv.”
“A poem?”
“Sügisetuul raputab puud…” He rolled the ‘r’ and hit every plosive syllable like a fist, looked up at the ceiling where a fan spun in mysterious circles, and then back at me with those secret-holding eyes. “Care to try it?”
I sat back a bit in my chair and scratched at my collar. “Sügisetuul raputab puud,” I repeated, just like he had said it, and he nodded. I knew the awkward trill of my ‘r’ would never match the grace of his, and that my ‘p’s and ‘b’s were still too different to carry the muddy kick of true Estonian, but I had tried.
“Very good,” Fred Jüssi said. “It means something like, ‘The autumn wind is shaking the trees,’ but it sounds much better in Estonian. Listen. Raputab.” One hand fell into the other. “You can really hear it.”
Fred spent his better days in a forest cabin in Hiiumaa, just listening to the wind or photographing flowers. He would breakfast along streams and dinner behind waterfalls. There were even CDs in our home, Fred’s recordings of birds I had never
