Little Revolutions

Pissed off consumers on one side of the counter. Bitter 50-something Soviet-era shopkeepers on the other.

“This is just unacceptable,” an architect I knew stood with the customers, his face growing increasingly red. “I want you to understand why I cannot use your work.” The smirk on the face of the copy shop’s battleaxe widened in direct proportion to how angry the architect became. “My drawing is green, and look at your copy. What color is it?”

Standing a meter away even I could see that it wasn’t green. “What color is this?” the architect asked me when the shopkeeper put her hands in her pockets and stared away into space.

“It’s piss yellow,” I answered loudly enough she couldn’t ignore it.

“Piss yellow,” repeated the architect who turned again to the shopkeeper. “Are you now going to tell me it’s green?”

The shopkeeper stared at her feet for a good long moment. “No, it isn’t green,” she finally conceded. And then I just about hugged the architect for his small victory over some of the nastiest human beings in Estonia. I had used that copy shop dozens of times, each time secretly hoping its employees would be visited by the plague.

I’m not proud of wishing ill on unfriendly shopkeepers, but I have to admit that I am not above it. Almost every week, during some customer interaction in Tallinn, I think to myself while staring the shopkeeper: Would it be too much to ask for you to just go away and die?

“But it’s not our fault,” the shopkeeper added as soon as she’d conceded that green and yellow were not the same. “It’s the machines!”

As the architect puzzled his way out of that one, an Estonian pianist known for his dramatic flair flew through the door.

“This is a disaster!” he shouted, brushing past all of us in line to the counter where he threw copies of a musical composition in front of another shop worker. “The black is not black, the white is not white! Do you know how much money I have spent in this shop? Twenty thousand euros I would bet you. My entire career I have come here. And now look what you give me!”

As I stood on my toes to peek over the pianist’s shoulder to see if they’d made his music piss yellow, the employee folded her arms to form a shield, jerked her chin skyward, and entered her thousand-yard stare. “It’s not my fault,” she said. “It’s the machines!”

The pianist paused. He looked at the shopkeeper. He looked at the architect. Then he looked at me, his expression saying, Does she really think I’m stupid enough to accept that as an answer?

He was asking for my help, I could see, and I wasn’t going to abandon a man in the right.

“It’s the machines!” I shouted at my highest volume. “The machines have taken over, and it’s up to us to stop them!”

“Oh, my god!” exclaimed the architect. “They’re probably unstoppable now. They’ve taken over the entire city, at the very least the city government.”

“He’s right,” cried the pianist. “Maybe Bruce Willis is available to fight these machines?”

Other customers also got into the spirit of things.

“I’ve warned my son about computers,” said a middle-aged woman, though I was not sure she’d completely understood. “Computers can be dangerous!”

“Perhaps we should set fire to the machines!” offered a very old man with a cane. “That sometimes works in the movies.”

“A great idea!” howled the pianist. “A huge fucking fire! It may be the only thing that will work!”

“I’m with you,” the architect declared. “Perhaps you have a canister of gasoline we can pour all over the copy machines?” he asked the shopkeeper, striking the flint on a ruby red cigarette lighter produced from his pocket.

Such camaraderie and singleness of purpose I had never before had the privilege to be part of in Estonia.

I’d of course heard of the Baltic Chain and Hirvepark, but they were not a part of my youth. Until now, the Estonia I had known was one of passivity, of people shrugging and turning the other cheek. But finally, after 20 years of waiting, I was present for the moment when an Estonian finally put up his hand to say, “Enough.” And it was an object of beauty.

So what if it was only in a copy shop? So what if the adversaries were nothing but some middle-aged ciphers? It was still pure joy to see citizens confront the perverse stupidity of somebody’s system.

I sometimes imagine what it might be like if Estonians collectively got tired of the shenanigans of the city government. I imagine thousands of them converging on city hall some sunny day. When they arrive they knock on the door and are politely received by the mayor.

“Won’t you send these people right out?” asks the people’s representative, who hands the mayor a list. “And examine the list for your own name, too.”

Seeing there are a few thousand people outside, those called have little choice but to come out. And the people show themselves to be in no real hurry, having brought lawn chairs, thermoses of coffee, and pastries wrapped in newspapers, which they happily share between them.

The people on the list report one by one, whereby the people’s spokesman offers them his seat, and calmly delivers the message: You have violated our trust and proved an embarrassment to the republic. You are requested to leave your post immediately and report to a farm in Põlvamaa where you will be retrained with a useful skill. Thank you for your time. That is all.

While the Greeks and French may be talented at setting things on fire, they have a rough and clumsy way about them. There is really nothing more elegant than Estonians deciding they are going to get their way.

Classy protests are few and far between, but when one happens abroad, I often look to see if Estonians are not behind it.

When University of California at Davis students lined the path from Chancellor Linda Katehi’s office to her car to silently shame her for the pepper spraying of students, the composure they showed was an act so elegant in its execution that I scoured news reports and blogs to see if an Estonian name might not be behind it.

Although I wish Estonians luck with their IT, I am not convinced it’s going to be a famous export item. But why not singing revolutions? It isn’t everyone, you know, who possesses enough self-control to not throw a Molotov cocktail.

There is nothing I would have enjoyed more, quite honestly, than to see that copy shop set on fire, but we all knew that nothing of the sort was to happen. The Soviet battleaxes were as safe as they could be. They could only go home that night, like Linda Katehi, secretly ashamed for having let things reach the point they did.

I imagine that copy chop is as puzzling to the architect and the pianist as it is to me. Like me, each time they patronize the shop they speculate as to how it’s possible every single employee can be so bitter.

Perhaps the employees were genetically engineered in a secret laboratory deep inside the Urals? They were people bred to be emotionless, who were simply released on the world when the funding ran out in the 1990s.

Or perhaps all the copy shop staff are orphans, children who grew up without being held in the arms of a loving parent even a single time in their entire lives? They had come from a cold, cruel world, and were only giving back what they received.

Or is their story more quotidian? Perhaps all the workers are former executioners from the Patarei women’s prison?

Or perhaps they are former mistresses of the copy shop owner? They fell hard for him, were nurtured by his love, only to be thrown over for another woman. They were still needy, and they had nothing to do in life but to work in close physical proximity to him, spending their remaining years tearing themselves apart, wondering why they weren’t good enough to be The One.

This is no ordinary copy shop, after all. One could send a troupe of professional circus clowns into the shop, and each would leave in severe need of psychological counseling.

There is a second copy shop within walking distance of the city center, but I do not go there.

Its employees are not especially friendly, either, but they seem to present no great psychological puzzle. When you pay what it costs for copying, if you can’t get good customer service then it’s still nice to get a little something extra, even if it’s only a glimpse of life’s rich tapestry. Just don’t go there looking for quality copies.

***
Enjoy a battleaxe-free purchase.

Back to School

“You’re ten minutes late!” the teacher barked at me as I entered her classroom. “I’ve already started the lesson!”

I’d left my home an hour before the appointment, since the school was in one of those Tallinn neighborhoods right out of the Russian film, "The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!" Upon arrival in the general vicinity, I parked the car and asked directions from a local who sent me to the wrong school.

Although most Tallinn buildings do have a number on them nowadays, the old Soviet axiom still often applies: “If you don’t know where you’re going, then you have no business being there.” With the possible exception of Ülemiste Airport, modern Tallinn was simply not built with anybody but the locals in mind.

Even though I had called the school to say I’d be late and explained what had happened the teacher was still rightly unimpressed. Perhaps she was one who harped on the virtues of being prompt, and so by allowing me to stay she was compromising some formerly unassailable standard? Or perhaps she was in a pissy mood because the teachers’ strike was due to begin in just a few days?

But I couldn’t hold it against her. I was, in fact, late, and in my experience it’s only the better teachers who invite strangers into the classroom.

“Hey, I don’t mind leaving,” I offered. But she decided I should stay.

II.

As the father of a young son, the kind of education he’s going to get in Estonia is of keen interest to me. Critics say Estonian schools still stuff students full of useless facts instead of teaching them to think, and so I am always interested to visit a school and see for myself what the students and teachers are thinking.

I have followed the teachers’ strike, attending the rally on Freedom Square to talk to a few of them, as well as reading the coverage in the newspaper.

(A slight digression: At the rally, I noticed no grammatical errors in any strike sign. About how many protests can you say that?)

While I find it hard to take sides in the strike, it does seem that some politicians have used all available opportunities to belittle the strikers. To call the teachers naïve or suggest their activities evoke the red flag of Communism would seem to say more about the politicians’ understanding of democracy than about the teachers themselves.

As an outsider, to me it seems rather that the strike has fueled a healthy dialogue about education. And the “strike” – three days – can hardly be considered much of a strike by anyone who’s ever seen the real thing. Perhaps the politicians should rather express thanks that the teachers let us off so easily?

From what I’ve gleaned from the papers is that how much a teacher earns – whether above or below the average – depends largely on how you slice and dice the numbers. If I were a teacher, though, I think I’d have a problem with earning anything close to average.

One thing society is surely guilty of is constantly feeding teachers with the talk that they are some of society’s most valuable members, those in whose trust we place the delicate minds of our precious children. But then the 600-and-some-odd euros we pay them each month seems to send a different message: We value you less than a construction worker.

What if the ugly truth is that we as a society do not value teachers at all? That we see them as little more than babysitters with university degrees?

An American friend of mine – a professor of philosophy at an east coast university – has an interesting point of view. “Schools are just a place to get kids out of their parents’ hair during the day,” he argues. Beyond teaching mathematics and serving as a forum to socialize kids, my friend doesn’t think schools have much to offer. “What’s much more important is what happens in the home,” he says. “Are there books around? Is there art? What kind of things do the parents talk about with their kids?”

My friend may be right when the world is seen through the middle- and upper-class prism. But I think he’s wrong concerning the bottom layer of society. It may be my years working in America creeping in here, but I don’t think much education takes place in the homes of those trapped within the cycle of poverty. Just as a school lunch may be the only healthy meal a kid gets all day, a state school may be his only opportunity for an education of any sort.

But since many politicians are career politicians, and since these lawmakers tend to come from the middle and upper classes themselves, my professor friend’s point of view may be more representative than we know. Ilmar Raag probably got it right when he wrote in the pages of Postimees about empathy and government. Most of us in the middle and upper classes – career politicians included – don’t have the faintest clue what it’s like inside the huddled masses. We don’t even want to know.

III.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on life in Lasnamäe, but from talking to the kids in schools and elsewhere, the vibe I get is that kids are getting mostly negative signals from their parents: The deck is stacked against you in Estonia. Even if you speak Estonian without an accent, you won’t get the job because of your Russian family name. Just bide your time until you can emigrate west. And then take us with you.

But the positive message for the children – that not even an angry, disenfranchised parent can take away – is this: EU citizens are welcome everywhere. Get a good education and the world is yours to conquer.

I don’t try to preach to kids, but I do try to point out that university educations in Estonia, even given the low salaries, are about as inexpensive as you’ll find. I also try to suggest that wanting to leave the place you were born is, at least in part, attributable to reasons other than ethnic. When I was their age, all I wanted was to get the hell out of Scarborough, Ontario.

I don’t have the answers to The Russian Problem in Estonia. I won’t even pretend to know the questions. Perhaps over time it will sort itself out. Dissatisfied youngsters will leave the country, and those who want to stay will learn the language despite the difficulties. (If it’s possible for Russians to acquire fluent Finnish to sell wigs and cheap Chinese crap to tourists, then I imagine most anything is possible.)

IV.

When it comes to my own kid, I have to confess I would not want him getting hit with the negative vibes present in some of the schools I’ve visited. Just how much art would we have to discuss at the dinner table to counteract the effect?

Nor would I want him having to endure the daily grind of school in some of the Tallinn’s dilapidated structures. One school I visited (in Mustamäe) was fit for little more than use as a shoothouse for urban warfare training. But that was a year ago, and so maybe they’ve torn it down by now. Or maybe it just fell down.

But I might also not be so eager for my son to study at one of Estonia’s so-called “elite” schools, where I am told a dessert cart is wheeled between the desks and each lucky child removes an iPad for the day’s lesson.

I have been told by students in these schools that they feel pressure via regular reminders that “You are the future leaders of the Republic.” And the stories my friends tell of gaining a place in the school for their children – how they've taken the school director to lunch or dinner, or how they registered their kid at a friend's address in the school's district – these turn my stomach as well.

The good news is that I have also visited Estonian schools much like my own in Scarborough – not elite, though not full of the bitterness of the disenfranchised. In these schools half the class is attentive and the other half stares out the window like zombies. And I feel right at home.

I am not uncomfortable knowing that my son will simply get into whichever school he gets into. While I refuse to wine and dine a school director, I do believe in doing my part to better the overall system. Taking part in it when asked, and supporting the teachers as they do their jobs.

Long term, I think it might behoove us to put some thought into what kind of hypocrites we are. If teachers truly are as important to society as doctors, attorneys, and members of Parliament, should the paychecks not reflect that?

And shorter-term, I think the very least that we as a society can do is to allow the striking teachers to keep their dignity. What we might discover is that in allowing teachers to keep their dignity, we’re able to maintain our own, as well.

***

Read the collected Vello.

Not Kingly, Not Manly

I.

“So what is it you do?” I asked one of the men sitting across from me at a dinner party. But it was clearly the wrong question.

“I’m an intellectual,” he said, exhaling dramatically to indicate that I was a complete idiot for not knowing who he was.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I was tempted to say. “I thought you were just an asshole.” But the specter of Mother Vikerkaar appeared in the room and I thought better of it. “So that’s a job title now?” I asked instead.

Then the man two seats over took up the topic and said he was making films about intellectuals but how Estonian TV networks weren’t interested in airing them. “They only want to hear about Eurovision,” he said.

There had clearly been a mistake in the seating chart. What was I doing with these people?

Then the discussion turned to a debate over which was the most elite secondary school (English College, the 21st, or Realkool? – with no mention of the Woburn Collegiate Institute in Scarborough). Then the dikes finally broke and we were all drowned in a Hit Parade of Western Philosophy. Abélard, Acquinas, Adomo, Aristotle, Augustine. It was if someone were reading off crib notes in alphabetical order.

Well before they arrived at Wittgenstein I felt like standing to quote a character from White Noise about the communal ego: “You say I’m a genius; I say you’re a genius; and we’re all geniuses together.”

But I didn’t have the courage to cause a stink, and so rather I silently recalled the words of Bluto, one of the intellectuals from the movie Animal House: “Grab a brew. Don’t cost nothin’.” Which means I got drunk instead.

II.

Last week, I worked at my friends’ secondhand English-language bookstore in the Old Town, substituting for them while they were away making porno films or assassinating evil African dictators, or whatever it is that booksellers do on their days off.

I was humbled by the fact that every customer who entered the store seemed better read than I, and I lost count of the number of obscure literary references I was supposed to pick up on, because working in a bookshop they assumed I had read everything on the shelves. (I found myself wondering if forest rangers are often asked about specific trees among hectares of forests.)

Also, many people felt compelled to tell me about the size of their personal libraries (thousands of volumes), and they were shocked to learn how light I travel: my library is limited to a hundred books or so.

I could not even escape intellectualism on the bookstore’s radio: “…not singing about frivolous things…” said a talk show host about Leonard Cohen, who then noted that Cohen was writing on the “human condition, duality of our flesh, higher self…” Puleez. Give me my vomit bag.

But one of the things you do in a bookstore is read, and while leafing pages I stumbled upon an observation made by Iivi Anna Masso to Toomas Hendrik Ilves in the book Omal Häälel: “Paradoxically, this is a problem of our northernness – to be ill at ease with elitism is a northern phenomenon, and in the 'old' Nordic countries it's feared even more than in Estonia.” If this were true, I thought, then someone had failed to inform those at the dinner party.

Thinking a bit, I wondered if perhaps the Estonians, though not known for speaking in coded language, have simply employed a euphemism: visionary. I have noticed it is currently fashionable in the country to refer to oneself as a visionary. Is it perhaps the Bud Light-version of Intellectual?

But I have always considered a visionary to be an action figure from Hasbro, or a millionaire with a self-image problem. Even Steve Jobs refused to describe himself as a visionary. (“Technology leader” was his preferred term.)

I somehow believe the real visionaries among us aren’t the guys who call themselves visionaries. (And shouldn’t a true visionary have the courage to call himself an oracle?) And I am sure true visionaries are not the guys who continually post inspirational quotes from self-help books on Facebook. Real visionaries are more the troublemakers and the shit-stirrers, the activists, misfits, the dreamers and the downright crazies.

The moment I hear the word “visionary” I unsheathe and ready my dagger. I want to sit across the dinner table from a visionary just about as much as I want to receive a Jackie Lawson e-greeting card or walk barefoot over broken glass.

III.

I’ve often wondered why it’s not okay to be smart in Europe without branding yourself as such. Perhaps it’s the North American in me, instructed from birth to pretend that class differences don’t really exist, even when they’re staring me right in the face.

I’ve long been a fan of intellectuals who shun the title. Like Joan Didion. She’s said the term “doesn’t make her reach for her gun,” but that she isn’t one because she doesn’t think in abstracts.

But mostly, to me, a peasant boy from Scarberia, Didion seems like somebody I’d like to drink a beer with. From her essay “Insider Baseball“: “[I]t had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations, […] had not gone to Yale or Swarthmore or DePauw, nor had they even applied. They had gotten drafted, gone through basic at Fort Ord. They had knocked up girls, and married them, had begun what they called the first night of the rest of their lives…”

My favorite Canadian intellectual — who will reach for his gun if you employ the term — is a timber framer with little formal education. Michael is a boat builder and collector of antique tools, all of which he employs in his craft. He can speak for hours on the virtues of Damascus steel, the art of typesetting, or Plato’s conviction that books were a poor substitute for dialogue – and convince the listener that each topic is of burning relevance to his own life.

I also find refreshing a diplomat I know in Tallinn with the courage or courtesy (I’m not sure which) to answer in the affirmative with a one-word response: “Rad.” (Probably only in unofficial communication, as the term has not surfaced in the Wikileaks memos.)

Were I to ever achieve status as a writer to the extent that readers make pilgrimages to my home, I would hope to be a recluse in the manner of Cormac McCarthy, who was once reportedly so aloof that he stowed his mail in the trunk of his car – unopened royalty checks, included, until his agent arrived to cash them for him. Or Pete Dexter or William Gay, modern day Hemingways who can make a fist fight real on the page because they’ve started a few themselves.

And so I should have punched out those fool dandies across the table from me, I know. I should have stood, thrown down my napkin, and declared that they had offended the sensibilities of a Thoreauian.

“To be a philosopher,” I might have crowed, “is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.”

But, alas, I did not. And perhaps in Estonia, as in America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler (as Gore Vidal told us). And if you think you’re a great thinker then you must say that you are. Perhaps there is nothing American about it? Perhaps it is simply human? If so, I am saddened.

***

More philosophy.

Friends

Just like you, I’m excited to see if Anna-Maria Galojan will be granted political asylum in Great Britain.

I admire her cohones for attempting that maneuver, but I also have to wonder how she found a British attorney willing to take on her case. They don’t work for cheap, and if she hasn’t somehow squirreled away the cash, will she sell her designer clothes on eBay to cover the several hundred pounds sterling per hour she’s being billed? Or is her tab being footed by a political party? And might she appear again in Playboy? Is she considering hosting her own talk show? Will Estonian Public Broadcasting take it, or is it more a thing for Tallinn TV? Or will she keep her current high-profile position as foreign- and energy policy analyst for that elite English-language diary, The Baltic Times?

And in addition to Anna-Maria, what about that ex-Pirita politician who likes to drink coffee in Amps? Did he only have to return the bribe he got? No jail time? Did he lose friends after his conviction? Did the family stay intact? Will we witness his return to politics after finding salvation in Jesus Christ Our Lord? These are the questions which haunt me when I see him in cafes, sipping coffee and laughing with his friends.

And what about the other Estonian businessmen wrapped up in court cases currently? There are the land scandal guys. Will they have to risk homosexual rape in a penal institution? (Does that even happen in EU prisons?) And who’s going to get only the finger wag, sentenced to lay low for six months before actively rejoining business life as a local hero?

And what about the businessman who may or may not have paid someone to whack his associate? I see him weekly at the grocery store, but I can’t bring myself to ask the obvious question. Would “How’s that murder trial going?” be an appropriate question in a culture which prides itself on the lack of small talk?

Growing up in Canada we never had it so good: you could never see your criminal class in the grocery store. Once a person became even scandal material, he retreated completely from public life. You might witness him step outside his home in a bathrobe to pick up the morning paper, but there was far too much peril in shopping or café sitting. But in Estonia it’s like we’re all in one big Catholic marriage: for better or worse, we’re going to make this thing work.

In Canada, there was my scoutmaster, arrested for indecent exposure, caught showing his tool to a group of small boys in a schoolyard. Reportedly, he revealed himself in the classic fashion (raincoat), but the small children were unimpressed. They went about their business on the playground unfazed, even though thousands of dollars was later spent on them for hours of obligatory counseling. And the scoutmaster? It was before the digital era, and so he packed up and moved to another city several hours away, safe for as long as it took a newspaper clipping to follow.

Then there was my tennis coach, sent to prison for fondling an exchange student. Reportedly, the coach had asked for photos of the Scandinavian boy in his underwear in order to evaluate his physical fitness, photos which were duly sent. When the boy arrived, he was the beneficiary of special off-the-court training sessions. The coach, after his release, also moved several hours away to start a new life, hopefully sans his special kind of tennis.

There was the science museum director, tried for keeping someone else’s artifacts at home, and perhaps selling a few on eBay. Until the end, his family maintained his innocence but the court disagreed and he was both bankrupted and jailed by the system. Released early due to ill health, he moved to a new community and died several years later, presumably from the shame of ostracism. His case was so well publicized that he could never again visit the grocery store without enduring shouts of “Shame!”

The moral here? In a country of 34 million people, criminals are disposable.

Having never had the opportunity to see a prison in Canada, in the 1990s I took advantage of an invitation to visit a prison in Estonia. There were no politicians that I can recall, but rather garden-variety thieves and rapists who were serving their sentences in the filth and squalor of pre-EU prisons. And amongst it all a book club to which I had been invited to speak.

We all hit it off quite well, though I only recall that we never talked about books. Among other things, we did talk about their one celebrity prisoner – a foreigner in for drug trafficking – who did not attend the book club. Perhaps it was because he was my acquaintance? Or perhaps it was because he spoke not a word of Estonian, the language of the book club?

After my first visit, I began to receive telephone calls from a couple of the inmates. “How’d you get my number?” I asked. “And how’d you get a phone?”

“We can get anything in prison,” the caller replied.

They could get anything except me to return, which the warden strictly forbade. “This is a prison not some boulevard café,” he told me when the inmates invited me back for a third time. “You just can’t come and go as you please.”

Several years later, one of the inmates was released, and invited me to tour the Patarei with him. He’d served several years there, and his comments made during the tour demonstrated such remarkable knowledge that the guide – a retired guard – was prompted to ask how a tourist could know so much. After the tour the former inmate approached the retired guard, shook his hand, and told him who he was. He had never been guarded by the guard, but had read a book on prison life authored by the man and respected him very much for it.

My newly free friend and I had a coffee together where he told me he’d been admitted to university, which pleased me very much. I loaned him 500 kroons and I never saw him again, not even in the grocery store.

But I know it’s only a matter of time before we meet. In a country so small, not meeting is probably a statistical impossibility. So when we do meet, given the mores of a small society, how am I expected to behave? Must I, like the rest of Estonian society, tacitly welcome him back to the world by pretending the past is water under the bridge? Because – as an Estonian politician once explained to me – in such a tiny society we need everyone we can get. (We often don’t seem to need those in Ida-Virumaa, though that is another story.)

So should I ask him how he’s doing? Did he finish university? Is he gainfully employed? Is he happy? Does he have a wife? Children? Or will I have the cohones to ask what I really want to know: Am I ever going to see my 500 kroons?

I’ve never met Anna-Maria, but I feel like I know her. Via Facebook, I’ve followed her many adventures, where we enjoy many mutual friends. My feeling is that she’s truly destined to have a talk show, and when she does I hope she’ll answer all my burning questions about a public life on the lam. She has 5,000 Facebook friends currently, but has anyone unfriended her since her conviction? Or has this incident, in fact, brought her more friends? Has she ever turned anyone down for friendship?

I’ve not yet tried to friend her. I wonder would she take me seriously? Would she be my friend?

***

Vello in print.

Muzhiki

Last month in Moscow, Vladimir Putin attended a no-rules, ultimate-fighting bout. The western press drew attention to the fact that the Prime Minister was booed, but what few covered was the fact that the American, Jeff the Snowman Monson, had a leg in his bone snapped by a kick from Feodor the Last Emperor Yemelianenko. As the New Yorker’s David Remnick described it, Monson, beat to a bloody pulp by the Russian, had to be carried away to the dressing room, his lips “as fat as bicycle tires.”

Although Team America may have lost that particular match, to their credit, Americans still love violent sports. Their blind dedication to their rather boring version of football produces problems with memory and concentration, creates speech impediments, headaches, neurological issues, and a higher incidence of depression in its professional players at 19 times the rate of the normal population. And plenty of amateur players (read: children) suffer head and spinal injuries each year for the glory of their parents who live vicariously through their little footballers and teach them the game as toddlers. But still Americans will risk it all for God, Country, or the honor of the neighborhood school.

In Canada, though we haven’t the budget for destruction that the Americans have, we still have the appetite. Our incidence of firearm ownership is through the roof, and hockey, that full-contact sport for middle-sized white guys, usually can be counted on to produce a fight that scatters teeth and paints the ice with blood. And sometimes the players fight, too.

But in Estonia, much like the rest of Europe, citizens enjoy a version of football which is actually played with the feet. There is also badminton and volleyball. And a sport called handball, where tall men struggle to throw a small rubber ball into a net. To wind down after a game, players are known to go home and apply for EU agricultural subsidies.

Sometimes I worry about the Continent.

But Europe wasn’t always full of pantywaists. Dueling was once popular in Estonia and elsewhere, even at the student level. The single goal of a mensur bout was to endure injury stoically. Student corporation members fenced at arm's length, attempting to strike unprotected areas of the opponent's face and head. The smite, the scar across the cheek, chin, or forehead, was considered a badge of honor. Those were the good ol’ days.

A friend of mine is pimping for the foreign owners of a new company to be established in Estonia and has orders to hire a CEO. Recently, he consulted me at my EU-funded think tank where I earn a comfortable living serving in the capacity of Senior Armchair Anthropologist.

Many of the Estonians my friend approached about the CEO job had not only politely declined an interview, but had felt compelled to send page-long essays detailing why the new enterprise would fail. My friend showed me the letters (names blacked out, just in case you sent one, dear reader) many of them ending with some version of the sentence, “I simply can’t afford to be part of a failed enterprise.”

“Not that I expect this to fail,” my friend turned to me for help, “but why can’t they afford to be part of a failed enterprise?”

I had to explain to him, a naïve American who thinks everybody enjoys horror movies and rubbernecking at car wrecks, that while in his country failure – even multiple failures – was no big deal, in Estonia failure was the equivalent of a dueling smite running horizontally across the ass. You could never again enter the sauna with your friends.

The 30- or 40-somethings with experience he wanted to hire were, in American parlance, either chickenshit or already entrepreneurs. If he wanted risk-takers, then he was going to have to either look a lot harder to find his Estonian Richard Branson, or simply give up and hire a 20-something. I counseled deceptive advertising: Instead of “Manager needed for deeds of derring-do,” go with “Warm place to sit, high salary, flash car.”

My friend argued that my theory was bullshit, that the only truly safe jobs in any country were those in government and, in this economy, possibly only those in parliament. In order not to lose the argument, I laughed my superior laugh and used my medical doctor voice to pronounce a diagnosis on the entire 40-something population: Atychiphobia.

If I was wrong, then where were the Estonian businessmen with huge appetites for risk? Where were the ones who, when they board a Tallink ferry in tossing seas, stand on the bowsprit with a harpoon in hand? (Perhaps they’re all in IT? Or working abroad in Russia?) Later I called the American and suggested he hire a Russian.

I don’t know about risk, but macho is an integral party of the Russian culture. And it comes top-down. While I’ve never seen a photo of an Estonian leader shirtless, Vladimir Putin has been, according to David Remnick, "photographed riding horses bare-chested, tracking tigers, shooting a whale with a crossbow, piloting a firefighting jet, swimming a Siberian river, steering a Formula One race car, befriending Jean-Claude Van Damme, and riding with a motorcycle gang.” Remnick wrote that once, on national television, Putin boldly attempted to bend a frying pan with his bare hands. He failed with the pan, but was unashamed. “See,” I told my American friend. “Case and point.”

Of course, not all Russians are like Putin, and not all Estonian 40-somethings are chickenshit. Admittedly, the Estonians I hang out with like to wrestle alligators just as much as any Canadian I know. And who can blame a guy for wanting a comfortable job?

It’s unlikely that the days of the mensur will return to Estonia anytime soon, especially with all that EU money around to incent us to practice good table manners and oppose capital punishment.

But I sympathize with the frustration of my American friend. Which is why I’ve invited him to over to watch the cockfights my French neighbor runs in the basement of his Nõmme home. It’s a setting where there are no international boundaries, where men of all races and creeds are united by our bloodlust and appetite for risk, even though the penalty for fighting roosters in Estonia is probably about as stiff as the two-minute suspension in handball. But, hey, we’re in the European Union, I remind my American friend. Life is supposed to be easy. If any of us wanted to suffer and toil and make a big deal of it, well, just east of here there’s a great place to get shirtless.

***

Vello collected.

Little London

Finally. Among Old Town's impossible number of strip clubs, amber shops, liquor stores, and shoe stores selling only black shoes, emerges a used English-language bookstore.

Slothrop's at Müürivahe 19 forms the lower end of what some are calling Little London (Drink Bar & Grill at Väike Karja 8 demarcating the upper bound), and though two venues perhaps do not London make, it's at least a start.

Of all Estonia's success since independence, I find it hard to count the Old Town among it. Despite its beautiful architecture, it's still a little depressing that it hasn't developed too much beyond being a home for Tallinn's red light district.

(Not that strippers are bad. On my last trip to a strip club I learned the girls are from Belarus and the Ukraine and live in dorm rooms above the club. Some are into real self-improvement, too. “My sister learned Estonian, earned enough money stripping to pay her way through Estonian Business School, and now works in banking,” a young Belarussian told me. I asked what grand plans she herself might have. “Oh,” she demurred, “my sister is the smart one.”)

It’s true that much of Old Town has been nicely refurbished – its architecture is stunning and it’s a great gingerbread destination for seasonal glögg drinkers – but it seems to lack a soul. Its progress seems to have halted before a community was formed.

So perhaps Little London is worthy of emulation: chop up the Old Town into smaller, manageable, intimate units.

On my last trip to Little London I picked up a Charles Portis novel at Slothrop's (thanks for stocking more than Palahniuk), took a seat at Drink Bar to say goodbye to Anchor Liberty Ale (thanks for stocking more than Saku), and started to have Disneyesque fantasies about what I’d do as the Real Estate Developer With the Heart of Gold who leads Old Town to prosperity.

I’d give a block over to musical instrument shops under the direction of the Nunne Street shop selling sheet music (Noodid?), give the art galleries to yellow-doored Temnikova & Kasela, let Vivian Vau rule a clothing district, and put the cafes under the supervision of the Black Poodle and Kehrwieder folks. I’d add an obligatory Little Italy and Little India. And we could surely tolerate a Little Reeperbahn (though let it be little).

Yes, I know, maybe the country's still not affluent enough to support the kind of Old Town we'd all like. So I've taken to blindfolding myself while I negotiate the Bermuda Triangle of Viru Street until I reach Müürivahe. I hang a left after McDonald’s, wave at the girls in the window of the joint I’ve renamed Stringfellows, and then, as the Brits say, Robert is your father’s brother.

Ashram Vikerkaar

For me, a yogi will always be a bear. Or a malapropist baseball player (“When you come to a fork in the road, take it”).

But to Liina, and to much of the rest of the world, a yogi is a yoga practitioner. And some of them are operating an ashram in my house.

The other day I came home to find a half dozen of them wrapped in brown blankets, sitting straight-backed on the second floor of my house, staring out the window at the rare winter sun. WTF? I might have tweeted, if I were the tweeting kind. Instead, I greeted them. Met by silence and assuming they did not hear me, I greeted them again. Then one whispered: “We’re meditating.”

I found Liina down in the kitchen brewing one of those Chinese teas with a name nobody can pronounce. “Who are those people?” I asked her.

“They’re meditating,” she replied.

My first encounter with the East came in the 1980s. One sunny weekend I was walking in Central Park enjoying a cold beer, when I saw a dozen Asians in Mao jackets and pajama pants making synchronized, slow motion movements as if filming a scene for a kung fu movie. I stopped and observed a while, wondering if I might be able to push one of them over, or if they’d re-set their speed and chop me before I could reach them.

It was a while before I encountered the East again, since the Estonia of the 1990s was more engaged in aping someone’s idea of the west: track suits, brick-sized mobile phones conspicuously displayed, and robot-like dancing to German techno music. About the only hint of the East I could find was shaving cream made in India. But just when I started to worry that Estonia had become little more than a vacuum to be filled by the West’s detritus, I met Liina.

If the rest of the country was looking West, Liina had somehow turned East, and she had a small army of friends who had done the same. Some traveled to India, hung out in ashrams, and returned wearing friendship bracelets and spouting phrases – “Dreams are whispers from the soul” – which I could have sworn I’d seen on American corporate motivational posters.

Many of these people started to hang out at our house, though the sincerity of their commitment to all things Eastern, I felt, was sometimes dubious. (A refrigerator full of beer is a powerful magnet and pulls from all directions of the compass. Somebody should put that on a poster.)

The East was a fad for most of them, and the majority soon disappeared into the woodwork, some re-materializing in the early 2000s as bank managers and lawyers. Liina remained committed, however. She did Tai Chi, yoga, worked with pendulums, ayurveda, and read copious amounts about Chinese medicine. I admired her commitment and even tried a few things myself, like fire walking, yoga, and vegetarianism – though the latter lasted only three days.

Liina would be uncomfortable if I described her as a guru – which I understand to mean “teacher” — but she cannot dispute that her commitment to spirituality has attracted some followers.

I have followed her into yoga classes which we attended together while living in Toronto, and I was immediately attracted by the idea that yoga could stop aging. The best yogis appeared to be decades younger than they actually were, and I was told this was the result of a chemical released when the spine is bent.

My interest was piqued by this, since my writer friends in North America had adopted the western solution to slow aging: they used fifteen-year-old photographs of themselves on the jackets of their newest books. I began in earnest my quest to slow the signs of aging through yoga, eventually becoming serious enough to purchase my own mat.

When Liina and I returned to Estonia I joined Jocke Salokorpi’s Ashtanga yoga studio. I liked Jocke, not only because he was friendly and easy-going, but because he didn’t make too big a deal out of Sanskrit. In my previous experience, instructors took sick pleasure in barking the command, Adho Mukha Svanasana, as if everyone in the room had grown up with a Sanskrit-speaking nanny and knew it as practically a mother tongue.

Jocke also made yoga fun, once playing a bit of music from The Last Samurai and having us all holler ninja war cries as if we were about to carve up Tom Cruise with a straight-blade ninjatō.

I have no idea of Jocke’s personal philosophy, but I liked his approach to the East, which seemed to recognize that I wasn’t about to give up everything Western for an orange robe and sandals. Yoga for me was just the one hour a day which equipped me to deal with the bullshit present in the other 23. I am a yoga dilettante, I admit.

Because of this, some of Liina’s peers, including those in the Brotherhood of the Brown Blanket, have not adjusted well to my presence in the Vikerkaar Ashram, as I somehow disrupt the higher vibrations of their more elevated universe. They have suggested to Liina that I might come home a little later in the evening, or enter the house a bit more quietly than I do.

To assert my claim to my own home, I have taken to carefully stocking the refrigerator. Imagine the ashram student who opens the door in expectation of finding his kohlrabi, amaranth, or yerba mate, instead to be greeted by multiple bags of frozen pelmeeni, a three-day old cheeseburger in a greasy McDonald’s sack, and the tongue of a cow boiled until it is the gray of Estonian winter.

And I have acquired a collection of the finest direct-to-video work of actor Steven Seagal, including Exit Wounds, Half Past Dead, and Out for a Kill. There’s really nothing like the sound of the bad guy’s femur snapping to add spark to a session of meditation.

I’ve also taken to greeting ashramites at the door with questions like “Do you have a tattoo of any winged creature on the part of your ass visible just above your belt?” (the women think I’m omniscient), or “Does the scent of grilling animal flesh help or hinder your meditation?”

They still come around sometimes, but those who stay are beginning to understand that I run a different kind of ashram. Chant all you want, but when the Toronto Maple Leafs come on the satellite TV then our house changes from ashram to hockey arena. And then you can pop open a cold beer and sit next to me on the couch, or you can head out to the doghouse for meditation. The dog won’t mind. He’s inside, watching the game with me.

***

Vello's seminal work on meditation available here.