Chefs We Dig: Imre Kose

Given the all-consuming quiet caused by the recession, I thought I'd stumbled into a speakeasy in prohibition-era America. Vertigo is not a small restaurant, and conversation and laughter emanated from both of its large dining rooms.

And the chef was in the house. Imre Kose was dashing back and forth from kitchen to dining room, speaking with guests, holding hurried court as chefs do. And his English. Oh, his English. It's hard to pin down an Estonian accent. To me, it seems less an accent and more a brief pause on the way to having no accent whatsoever. But Kose's accent isn't even that. He's somehow made English his own. Perhaps due to a blend of natural charisma and having to be heard over chattering diners, something unique has emerged. Were I Estonia's dictator, I'd send language teachers and academics to study it.

Over a Jack on the rocks I watched a parade of violin-case-packing middle-aged women enter the restaurant. They were either visiting orchestra members with instruments too expensive to check, or they were about to shoot up the place. Later, halfway into a rack of lamb and Imre approached our table: "There's a Filipino woman, part of some orchestra, and I half-jokingly asked her if she wouldn't want to play a song..." And then there she was, violin unsheathed and under her chin, playing for our table. Playing for the restaurant. Playing for Imre.

Recommended (for those like me who seem to dine out once an eternity): Vertigo.

In the Lõõtsa Cathedral

I once read a magazine article instructing what to do if you were dining out wearing khaki pants and inadvertently dripped on your trousers while urinating. Those few drops, the author was convinced, would be spotted by everyone in the restaurant, and as you returned to your table all eyes would turn to you and your crotch. The solution? Turn on the bathroom faucet and throw water all over the front of your pants. Return confidently to your table and lay the blame on water pressure due to faulty plumbing.

This story came to mind recently when I was doing some freelance writing for a client in an office on Lõõtsa street. This is one of those Ülemiste Technopark buildings, beautifully renovated to impart both modern and warm feelings. There’s a wonderful cafeteria in the building, too, which looks a lot like some expensive Old Town restaurants. It’s an ideal place to grab a bowl of soup and do a little work on the laptop.

The cafeteria bathroom is behind transparent glass, a unisex wonder salon right out of the TV series, Ally McBeal. I always feel a bit uneasy entering these type bathrooms, mostly because I’m unsure of the etiquette. In the men’s bathroom things are clear: When possible, put one empty urinal between you and the next guy, and always look straight ahead, as if there were something terribly fascinating on the wall-tiles in front of you. But in an Ally McBeal bathroom in a building clearly representing the best of e-stonia, did that rule hold true? What if I entered and saw a woman washing her hands at the sink? Should I nod hello? Or should I brush brusquely by her and attend to my business? And were the toilet stalls on one side of the room for men and those on the other for women? And if all the toilets were occupied, where should I stand to wait for someone to exit? Would the person exiting expect that subtle nod of recognition or and ‘excuse me’ muttered under the breath—like on a transatlantic flight—the tacit regulations for two people moving past each other in a crowded space? Or should I wait on the other side of the glass—it was indeed transparent—and wait until a stall became free?

The bathroom, however, was empty. I could hear my footsteps echo off the marble walls. One of the stall doors was open, and I moved quickly to occupy it and finish my business. Exiting the stall, a row of sinks stood in front of me. The place was as empty and peaceful as a church on a weekday, would have been ideal for quiet contemplation, and I paused a moment to appreciate the majesty of this Estonian bathroom. It was nicer even than those which I’d seen in the restaurant Pegasus. This was the cathedral of Estonian toilets.

I placed my hands underneath the faucet. Nothing. I moved them back and forth. Nothing. I moved them in a wider arc. Still nothing. Was the motion sensor broken? Or were the architects of the Lõõtsa toilets having a bit of fun with me? Had they built the most modern and beautiful bathroom in Europe with manual faucets? I reached up and tweaked a knob. No, that was the soap dispenser. But good, I needed soap. There was another strangely shaped object on the wall behind the faucet. Perhaps that was the sensor and I had not passed my hands close enough to it. I moved my hands in every conceivable motion around this silver object. Nothing.

At this point, I began to look around. Partly, it was a subtle cry for help—me hoping to find another human being at a faucet several paces away cheerfully washing her hands. Partly, I was looking around to see if anyone was watching. This was becoming embarrassing. I have a university education and am a member of one of the world’s most technologically advanced cultures. How was it that I could not get water from a tap? Perhaps someone had turned off the building’s water? But, then, the toilet had flushed.

This was not a completely new experience. Once, while traveling, I stayed in a hotel which had installed the most modern shower facility, and I could not figure out how to operate it. A phone call to the front desk had only complicated things, me having to run from the phone to the bathroom, each time trying to tug the little ring under the tub faucet that the clerk had described. Finally, the hotel dispatched its “engineer” to solve the problem via personal demonstration.
Standing in the Lõõtsa cathedral, there was no one to call. Ekspress Hotline did not deal with these affairs. I was too young to get away with dialing 911, not that they would help. I wondered if I wasn’t going to have to leave, soap on my hands, and ask the soup server to show me how to extract water from the tap.

I began to explore the strange button on the wall. It was shaped like an oblong bar of soap, quite beautiful actually. It might have been a control aboard the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, though there was no Mr. Sulu around to drive it. I pushed it left and right. Nothing. Frustrated, feeling as if I’d spent half the day in this bathroom with only soap on my hands to show for it, I slapped the device hard and water exploded from the tap. The high-pressure stream bounced off the shallow designer-sinks, and the front of my khaki pants were completely soaked with water.

My mind did not immediately revert to the previously mentioned magazine article concerning how to deal with wet pants. Had it, I would have seen that I had bypassed the problem and proceeded directly to the solution of being in the position to blame the faulty plumbing. Rather, I recalled a tasteless joke told after the tragic explosion of the American space shuttle: What were the last words heard aboard the Challenger? “Hey, what’s this button for?”

But I’d been as careful as possible. I’d approached the problem from all angles, as methodically as one of the software engineers I was due to meet and write about that day. I felt cheated, the object of a joke. Had there been someone around to laugh at me, I might have even felt better. Instead, I suffered humiliation silently. I cursed the Ally McBeal bathrooms and e-stonia, a nation I deemed so eager to prove its modernity that it would buy any new fangled apparatus from a plumbing salesman in a sharkskin suit.

I removed my coat and folded it over my arm. Carried in front of me, it concealed all. I walked through the cafeteria and back to the office where I was to have my meeting. The software engineer was waiting. “I’ll take your coat for you,” he said, nodding to a closet.

It was then I thought of the magazine article. I confidently handed the man my coat. As he put it on a hanger I saw him look down. He politely looked away, but it was too late. “You probably need to have someone call the building management,” I said with stentorian voice. “The bathroom plumbing downstairs exploded all over me.”

“I guess so,” he noted, my remark having given him permission to publicly acknowledge the spot covering my fly and half the rest of my trousers. “That happened to me once, too,” he said. “Except my girlfriend spilled a drink on me.”

“Well, uh, sure,” I stammered, stunned by the engineer’s perfect manners in putting me at ease, but more so by his explanation for wet trousers, which was far more plausible than what the magazine article offered. Without thinking too much, I lifted my briefcase from the floor, held it directly in front of me, and followed closely behind the man down the hall toward the conference room.

***
In the News:
Read Baltic news in English daily in The Livonian Chronicle.
Baltic Features reviews Inherit the Family: "Book Him, Vello."
And the end-all-be-all of Christmas gifts here.

Survivors

There are periods in a summer’s day when entire Old Town cafes are taken over by Americans. As if Baghdad isn’t enough, they have to have Tallinn, too. I was there—there being the second floor of the Viru Street Apollo bookstore—one rainy afternoon, when a group of seven American cruiseboat tourists held us all briefly hostage. It might have ended peacefully, but then one of them couldn’t find a letter on Apollo’s internet keyboard:

“There’s no ‘W’!” he proclaimed. “How can you have a keyboard with no ‘W’?”

The girl working behind the counter kept her cool. She’d clearly been in this situation before.

“Don’t you have a ‘W’ in your language?”

“We have a ‘W.’ It’s there on the keyboard where the ‘W’ is usually kept.”

“Where? I don’t see it. And there’s no ‘at’ sign, either!”

“We have both symbols, sir.”

From a woman at table nearby: “Hey, I’ve got 36 pictures on my camera so far!”

A man in a cowboy hat: “Does it rain all the time here?”

“Oh, hell, I give up.” The old man at the computer sounded near tears. “This just isn’t worth it.”

“Let me try, dad.” A man in his fifties wearing bright white tennis shoes, crowded in at the keyboard. “Watch me work, pop. It’ll be like watching a painter paint.”

“Do you take American credit cards?” asked 36 Photos.

An obese man in a baseball cap and Bermuda shorts roamed the café photographing plants. “Hotitye smotrit?” he asked an Estonian, thrusting the camera’s display in the man’s face. The man worked hard to not look up from his book.

“I like books, too,” the photographer said in English. “I’ve learned a lot from books, believe it or not. And not just technical things.” He moved on to another plant and the shutter clicked away.

“Hey, I’ve got a hundred emails!” announced the white-shoed son. “And they’re not all for penis enlargements.”

“Have you seen my lens cap?” 36 Photos asked the room. “I was just holding it.”

“I’ve got the exact same telephone you have,” said the roaming photographer to a pretty Estonian girl, her mouth full of cake. She nodded in acknowledgement. He moved in to photograph another plant. How many plants were there in this café? I wondered. “Hotitye smotrit?” He held the camera in front of the girl. “No thank you,” she replied in English, choking down her cake.

“There it is!” shouted 36 Photos. “It’s under that chair.”

By this time, every Estonian customer in the café had found a book and all were concentrating deeply on their reading. One elegant elderly man—he could have been Endel Lippmaa’s doppelganger—studied Women with unusual intensity. Another pretended to be asleep when the photographer turned toward him. Another pulled his legs to his chest, assuming the fetal position. I wrinkled my brow and squinted deep into my computer screen. The photographer circled, feigned a move into the bookstore, and then pounced.

“Hotitye smotrit?”

He was upon me, and so I gave him my best Borat: “Me little English.”

“That wasn’t English, little buddy. I was speaking Russian.”

“I no understand.” This ruse had worked in the past.

“Where you from, pal?”

“Ontario,” I fumbled.

“Well, I like your country” he answered. “Seems to rain a lot here, though. See the quality of this camera? That’s eight megapixels.”

I nodded politely at the camera’s resolution. I could see photography was his social icebreaker, much like a Russian might ask for spichki. All around me Estonian eyes peered over the tops of books, not attempting to conceal delight that they hadn’t been selected.

“Whaddya do here?” He spoke in a Midwestern vernacular.

“I read.”

“Yes, I can see that. What do you do professionally speaking?”

“Me little English,” I repeated.

“Look, little buddy, I can see you’re reading English on your computer screen. So you must understand something.”

I was tempted to break cover and ask him in perfect English if he considered me his little buddy because he weighed three times what I did, or if it was some genetic, hegemonic tendency. But that would have led to me explaining to him where Ontario was, and making a speech about how speaking Russian to Estonians wasn’t the most culturally sensitive gesture. Instead, I looked to the Estonians as a model: speak little, be polite. “Yes, me read much good.” I put about four ‘Rs’ in the word read. “Very nice camera. You are rich man.”

“Well, photography is just one of my hobbies.” There was clear pride in his voice.

“Hey, Dave, now here’s a photograph!” called Whiteshoes from the computer. The photographer must have been Dave, because he raced to the terminal.

“Now I’ve got it!” came the voice of 36 Photos.

To be fair, most Americans who visit Tallinn do not terrorize the local population. The cruisers, in fact, are the top of the tourist food chain, generally highly-educated, wealthy individuals who have often done their reading on the countries they’re visiting. They’re the kind of tourists Estonia should want to return and spend real time, in a five-star hotel instead of on a cruise boat. But this group who had wandered into Apollo to get out of the rain behaved like certified morons—even if one did know some Russian—and I wondered if they weren’t stowaways on the cruise boat, living unobserved on the lower decks where they played dice games and danced on tables with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Fortunately, before I had a chance to ask, they became silent and rose as one, as if pulled by some lunar force, and began to exit the café. Perhaps the stowaways were performing a large-scale Dine and Dash, the time-honored American teenage prank of ordering a big meal and slipping out of the restaurant without paying. But I looked at my watch and it was close to five, so they were more likely slipping out so as not to miss their boat. Despite Dave’s obvious knack for plant photography, he probably had a real job waiting for him somewhere in America.

The retreat of the Americans, however, did not bring silence. English was immediately replaced by German. The group of four krauts at a neighboring table easily matched the Americans for volume, but their conversation was limited to their own party, and they made no humanitarian forays to other tables. Since I speak no German, I could only imagine what they were saying:

“I’ve always thought Euclid was more math journalist than mathematician.”

“Ah, yes, but Archimedes, he was the real thing!”

“You both read too much Stephen Hawking. Let me tell you about math…”

Then they all laughed their sophisticated European laughs.

I know it’s discriminatory to place Europeans on a higher intellectual plane than Americans. There are dumbasses on every continent and making generalizations will inevitably bite you in the ass. One time, dining with French friends in Paris, an entire restaurant became silent to eavesdrop on one family’s conversation. “What’s so interesting?” I whispered to my friend. “Does the father work for Sarkozy?” My friend shushed me. Later she explained that the father had chosen the restaurant to announce that he’d been sleeping with his secretary and his wife didn’t quite react the way he’d expected, treating the entire dining room to dinner theatre.

I know plenty of bright Americans, genuine intellectuals who can name the countries that border their own, who know that Mexicans don’t speak Mexican, and even a few who can credibly hold forth on the Lisbon Treaty. Sadly, this group of cruisers was not the country’s greatest ambassadors. It would take years of PR to make up for their damage.

As the Americans neared the exit, the photographer turned to the room once more. “Hey, little buddy!” he shouted. There was no doubt he was talking to me. “You’re okay with me, pal. Your country is A-okay.”

What do you say to that, a reader may wonder? But I knew exactly what to say. “George Bush!” And I thrust a thumbs-up high into the air. “Hooray, America.”

Several of their party returned the thumbs up. The photographer locked his bare, tree-trunk legs, snapped to attention, and threw me a crisp, almost military salute.

As the Americans disappeared down the staircase, the Estonians slowly put down their books. Each looked around and rare eye contact was made. No words were spoken, but it was clear we were now all connected in a special way by the experience. Like those who walk away from a plane crash or successfully flee a burning building, we were bound together for life. We had lived through the Americans. We were survivors.

***

Read "Ellujääjed" in Postimees. Feed Vello here.

Live Trapping

I don't know if it's because she's a vegetarian, but Liina loves all God's critters. Mice included. Having recently rid ourselves of the cat, we have a mouse who audibly chews paper behind the kitchen garbage can. Liina sent me out to get traps.

It turns out that hiirepüüdmisemasin is not Estonian for mousetrap, but I still got what I needed--and in the process learned that the Russian is мышеловка, a cute little word which sounds very much like what the Russkies would name their nastiest bomb.

But Selver didn't stock the live traps available in Canada (for those who either want to release the mouse elsewhere or not damage his fur for better coat quality), and I brought home the standard wooden traps. Liina refused to allow me to bait them. "But these are 'universe-friendly' traps," I argued, and retreated to my desk to doll them up with a new brand name and slogan, Meet your ancestors.

But Liina still wasn't buying it, and we can still hear the little guy behind the trashcan, making as much noise as a teenager with a bag of Doritos.

HealthScare

The doctor’s face was beet red and not just because he was pissed off at my wife. We could hear the soap opera “Crying Maria” blaring in the room behind him, and he wasn’t at all pleased he’d been called out to examine Liina’s hand.

“What?” the doctor barked. This was Haapsalu, 2001, and Liina had been manhandled by some Russian thugs who jumped a queue to get aboard the Haapsalu ferry. Liina had boldly attempted to do the job of the ferry operators, who were too scared to even voice protest, and in exchange for her trouble the thugs held her arm and bent her fingers back over her hand. While Liina cried in pain in protective custody on the ferry’s bridge, the cops were called to arrest the queue-jumpers as they disembarked the ferry. Then we hopped in the car and raced to the hospital.

“What?” the doctor snapped again. Liina’s slow response time was getting in the way of his soap. “What do you want?”

Liina held up her swollen hand and explained.

“Move your hand like this!” the doctor demonstrated.

Liina moved it.

“It’s not broken.”

“Couldn’t we x-ray it?” Her fingers were as big as sausages. “I’d like to know for sure?”

The doctor reached out with surprising speed and seized her hand. He twisted it. Liina writhed in pain. “It’s not broken,” he repeated. “No x-ray is needed. Head aega.”

And that was that. The doctor returned to his television, and we drove on to a Tallinn emergency room where both a sober doctor and an x-ray machine were more easily available.


Say what you will about the Estonian healthcare system—and everyone has a horror story—I believe one thing is undeniable: it gets better every year. The days of drunken doctors (as well as Russian queue-jumping thugs) are mostly behind us thanks to EU standards, a more consumer-focused society, and the growing self-confidence of a citizenry who increasingly realize they’re not lower than grass on the great lawn of bureaucracy. Of course, there are some stubborn holdouts, who still think the business of society is transacted using brute force, favors from friends, and the occasional bottle of brandy, box of chocolates, or live chicken given as a bribe. These people are the Soviet residue, and they’re found mostly in the segments of government and business least touched by market forces. Which, sadly, is sometimes healthcare.

Last week, Liina accompanied her best friend Piret to the obstetrician at her family doctor’s practice. Piret is freshly pregnant and was quite excited to see her baby on the ultrasound machine in all its alien-like splendor. It’s her first child, and so she admits some of her questions may have appeared naïve to the doctor. Still, she didn’t feel she deserved the doctor’s repeated answer of: “That's of no interest to anyone in the developed world.”

When Piret could not spot her child on the ultrasound picture and asked if there was a chance she wasn’t pregnant, the doctor snapped, “Are you blind, woman? It’s right there in front of you.” To spare herself more humiliation, Piret falsely confessed that she could see her child.

“And how much do we owe you?” Liina asked, stepping in for Piret and ending the visit to the Soviet Doctor from Hell. The doctor demanded 995 kroons. When Piret took out her bankcard, the doctor demanded cash and told her to run to an ATM across the street. To spare them from seeing the doctor’s face twice, Liina produced the cash and the doctor snatched it from her hand as she shooed them out of the office. No respect. Not even a receipt.

When Liina recounted the story to me later that night I couldn’t help but recall our doctor from Haapsalu. “You think that doctor could have a sister in Tallinn?” I asked. Liina said she was afraid that doctor might have sisters in a lot of places.


Before returning to Estonia in 2000, Liina and I lived in the United States where I worked several years as an adjunct faculty member at a university. Adjunct faculty in America are the bottom feeders on the university food chain, and so the health insurance policy I was able to afford was little more than a guard against catastrophe—a 250-dollar monthly premium got me a five-thousand-dollar deductible policy to cover against major illness. Liina, who traveled frequently to Estonia, anyway, was able to use traveler’s insurance. This was quite cheap, but its downside was that it forced her to visit the American emergency room for any matter, large or small. The one time she did need a doctor—a shard of glass in her palm—we waited six hours to see the physician. The doctor was professional, though if he’d have allowed me access to the anesthetic, I could have done the job myself, and Liina would have been out the door in a mere fifteen minutes. And I might have been grateful enough to treat some of the other patients in the waiting room, many of them poverty cases, nutty hypochondriacs, or people suffering side effects of America’s greatest epidemic: obesity. With calisthenics I would have cured half and killed half, but the job would have been done, and the doctors would have been freed to treat people whose jelly-donut-eating lifestyles didn’t invite illness. But rules are rules, and while I might have been able to pass myself off as a doctor in Haapsalu, I wasn’t welcome to practice medicine in America.

Fortunately, Liina and I were both healthy and so were able to view the American healthcare disaster with detached amusement. We met plenty of the middle class who so staunchly defend their rotting system due to a hyped-up fear of socialism, a people so petrified of government at any level that not only were they unwilling to consider the single-payer system functioning so well a few miles north in Canada, but they were happy to entrust their system to insurance- and pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists who clearly weren’t motivated to act in the patients’ best interest. At 100 billion USD per year, it's arguably the world's most expensive and least efficient system.

We also met the underclass, those who rely on the emergency room as their primary caregiver and to whom preventative care is at best a dream and at worst a foreign concept. Mostly, our American experience taught us this: America is not for the meek, and it’s no place to be poor.

For most medical treatments, give me Estonia. Yes, the Soviet-era hospitals in their constant state of decay are rather depressing, and the constant buzz of the fluorescent lighting is probably the cause of more depression than winter darkness. And true, I wouldn’t want to have an organ transplant here, and I wouldn’t want to trust an Estonian doctor to diagnose trypanosomiasis, buruli ulcers, or Cushing’s disease, and it’s a fact the American system is tops in the world when it comes to beating cancer. But if I’m able to keep myself fundamentally healthy and only garden-variety illnesses visit me, I’ll take Estonia any day.

And that goes double for emergency treatment. Last spring, during a routine do-it-yourself project, Liina dropped a shelf on my face and I had to visit the emergency room. Since I wasn’t dying (just bleeding from my forehead), I had the presence of mind to put a stopwatch on the visit. Forty-three minutes in and out. And very pleasant doctors and nurses.

I’ve since been once more to the emergency room (Keskhaigla) for my back, and I can’t praise enough the doctors and nurses there. They’ve got their problems, too—the emergency room is full of people who refuse to see their family doctors for one reason or another—but you don’t wait six hours to see a doctor and you’re spared the humiliating financial triage performed by a curt American administrator.

My Estonian family doctors have always been excellent, too, though I admit I have the advantage of some professor friends at Tartu University’s medical school who have recommended physicians to ensure I don’t end up in the hands of doctors like Piret’s. And so far, I’ve used only state doctors, stubbornly believing that I truly ought to get something in return for a thirty-something percent social tax.


I’m pleased to report that Piret found a new physician and she started over. Thanks to an obstetrician and a team of medical pros who seem to love their jobs, it was a wonderful experience for her, and she’s more excited than ever about having a baby. She had to pay six-hundred kroons to a private clinic for another initial visit, but she didn’t get yelled at, and the doctor helped her see her baby on the ultrasound screen. She even got a receipt.

In a country which so desperately needs babies, this isn’t only a victory for Piret. It’s a victory for us all.

***
Read it in Postimees ("Tervishoid- ja õud") here.

***
Dept. of Shameless Commerce: Give Vello's book for Christmas (in English) this year. (A refreshing alternative to the usual gifts of Kihnu Island sweaters or bottles of Vana Tallinn.) Available in English from Amazon.com here.


Inherit the Family: Marrying into Eastern Europe

Running

How far can a dog run into the woods? was a favorite question of the American marketing professor and beer industry consultant, Robert Weinberg. “Halfway!” Weinberg liked to shout when his students couldn’t come up with the answer fast enough to please him. “Because then the dog is running out of the woods.”

To Weinberg, the dog represented a brand and the running was to illustrate that overexposure to the public isn’t in the brand’s best interest. If the brand becomes too ubiquitous, argued Weinberg, the result is public resentment.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that way about the singer, Ines. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m her fan. I think she’s beautiful, sexy, talented, and she’s probably a great ambassador for Estonia. But lately I’ve tired of seeing her. I open any magazine, turn on any TV channel, and there’s Ines, telling me why she helps deaf kids, why she doesn’t ride a bicycle in the city, why she works out at My Fitness or uses Sensodyne toothpaste (though the last could have been another omnipresent Estonian celebrity). No offense intended, Ines. I love you. But you’re running out of the woods.

Which is one reason I stick to writing. So far, I’ve avoided broadcast media, even though some of the appearance invitations are tempting and come from legitimate Estonian Public Broadcasting programs. A few television appearances probably wouldn’t put me in danger of being asked to talk on camera to a yeti doctor about the importance of dental hygiene, but I’m not taking any chances. (Although in case they pay handsomely, I’ve memorized the lines: I consider regular dental checkups and brushing twice a day to be of critical importance…)

Another reason I’ve tried to steer clear of broadcast media is that being witty on the page doesn’t necessarily mean you can be witty on TV. “Oh, it’s not at all a problem,” said one show host in an attempt to reassure me, “you’re great on the phone. You’ll be great on the air.” But I wouldn’t be great. I’d sweat enough under my armpits and between my toes that at best the studio would flood, and at worst I’d get an offer to do advertising for an antiperspirant (I consider the use of antiperspirant to be of critical importance...).

What I’ve come to understand is that in a small country the need for celebrities is no less than in a big country. The difference is that in a small country, to feed the media machine it’s necessary to operate under the assumption that if you do one media you can do them all. To me, this is like the Estonian Olympic Committee asking tennis-wonder Kaia Kanepi to fill a slot on the Olympic Greco Roman wrestling team, just because she’s an athlete and happens to be in Beijing. For better or worse, I simply don’t have the talent to be a television personality. I talk through my nose, and my thoughts tend to wander and return home after long periods of time—not exactly a skill TV producers are lining up to get.

The issue of my questionable talent aside, I’ve never been comfortable with broadcast media, especially television. The makeup you have to wear gives me a rash, and there is also the inevitable presence of other guests. Should the other guests include Barney the Dinosaur and not Toomas Hendrik Ilves, this has obvious consequences for one’s self-esteem. I once watched an episode of Terevisioon where a guest was interviewed about Estonian national security while an actor in a purple animal suit danced and played in the background. “If I were that guest,” I told my wife Liina, “I’d run over there and beat the shit out of that animal.” Liina replied that that wasn’t the Estonian way. “Okay,” I said, “walk over there and beat the shit out of that animal.” Liina just sneered and said I had a lot of learning to do.

I’m also not the most photogenic guy around. I’m not ugly, but I’ve never suffered from too much beauty, either, and I don’t want to be one of those pain-in-the-ass prima donnas who goes on TV and demands to be lit from the left side or, like I’ve heard Michael Jackson used to demand, requires a bathtub filled with Evian water in his dressing room.

And my Estonian language, which isn’t great to begin with, gets noticeably worse on television. My already strange accent gets even stranger. The few times I’ve tried television and later watched myself, I thought I came off sounding like an idiot. Liina has suggested it has nothing to do with the language.

Finally, in a land of so few television channels, I admit I live in fear that accepting one offer would pave the way to becoming a cheap media whore, the kind of guy who’ll do anything to see his own face on television. “Oh, get Vello,” producers might come to say. “He’ll do anything.” No disrespect intended, but deep inside my DNA I don’t have that gene which pulls me to fame like a moth to the light or a Tarand family member to a gameshow.

Part of what I have against the media in general (print included) is that all of us who participate in it are, to some degree, guilty of feeding the bullshit machine. Even the biggest media with the biggest budgets are not exempt from this trap, and despite CNN’s efforts, they’ve been only somewhat more successful at filling time than even Estonia’s worst television station. Regardless of what anyone says, there is simply not enough real news to fill a 24-hour broadcast, and the CNN “professionals” end up filling the air with so much nonsense, idiots with uninformed opinions, and blatant self-promotion, that I refuse to have it in the home. When I travel, I challenge myself by turning it on in the hotel room to see how long I can endure. Seven minutes is my current record, except for September 11th, 2001, one of the few times in modern history when there simply was no substitute for television.

Writers have other advantages which television personalities don’t. Working on the page gives us time to think about what we want to say and how we say it. If I want to play with a sentence and restructure it a dozen times, I’m only wasting my own time, and no guests sit around quietly suffering. (The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler once tried a “watch me write” live internet broadcast, though most people I know who tuned in soon tuned out in complete disgust, and Butler was promptly awarded the nickname, Robert Olen Butthole.)

You may think I’m taking myself too seriously and perhaps you’d be right. Going on television would give me something new to write about and it would “extend the Vikerkaar brand” (as a friend in marketing tells me I should do), and it might bring opportunities to earn money beyond writing. I myself don’t use Sensodyne (I’m a Blend-a-med man), but I do use Gillette products, and I like Snickers candy bars, A. le Coq beer, and Lay’s potato chips. Might there be a hairy man in a white jacket out there to interview me about my grooming- or junk food habits?

But I doubt I’m in danger of running out of the woods anytime soon. According to Liina, I’ve had my nose up against the first tree I saw for quite some time, examining the bark in great detail and writing essays which speculate about why the ants I see move the way they do.

***
Read this in Estonian in Postimees.

Camping with Koržets

“Hey, you got any vodka?” As soon as the man shouted at us he regretted it, because his wife elbowed him hard in the ribcage. “But I was just asking,” he muttered, massaging the pain under his arm.

We had just entered Estonia’s weekend party headquarters, the Lake Peipsi RMK-sponsored campground. It was only five p.m., but the party already raged.

“You can pitch your tent in any of the marked sites,” the friendly gate attendant had said, but there’d been so much music—techno, rap, a little heavy metal—coming from the forested area the other side of the makeshift barrier, that we told him we thought we’d have a look around first. “Sure,” he said. “Park your car. Look around.” And so we did.

In the parking area, as well as at other strategic places around the camping area, guests were greeted and cautioned by a photo of Vladislav Koržets in a half-bug-eyed pose of excitement, finger in the air to make his point. A speech bubble was supplied by RMK, something to the effect of “Only dipshits burn down forests. Use the fireplace provided.” There was no text about what kind of music best complements birdsong, and it was clear that we weren’t going to hear any wrens or sparrows or blackbirds or nightingales. What we were going to hear was DJ Dima and His Posse of Righteous Russian Dudes. Except that for all the partiers were Estonian.

“Weird,” said my buddy Juss, having opened a beer to get into the party spirit. “These idiots are all Estonian.” And so they were. Every campsite was filled to the brim with Estonians, some of them young rullnokkad, Estonian vernacular for primitives fond of cars, but others—like the middle-aged, vodka-begging husband—were older, professional partiers. But where were the Russians? Was the music so bad that even they’d been driven away? “Tiblad are too smart to pay fifty kroons each to camp with these tshuhna,” Juss said. “They’re probably at home where it’s safe.”

And it was looking like home was where we were headed. We left the RMK party center and scoured the shore of Peipsi for a quiet place to pitch a tent, but we were constantly confronted with signs reading PRIVATE PROPERTY or demands by landowners to pay 100 kroons per person to sleep next to a caravan full of Germans. My Estonian companions had nothing against Germans; rather, since they considered themselves true Estonians, they were categorically opposed to being remotely near any other human being. “Camping here would be like putting up a tent at the song festival grounds,” said Juss, shaking his head out of disgust that his Canadian friend could never grasp the Estonian need for solitude. To me, our party of four (including our occasionally chattering wives) had already ruined any opportunities for solitude, so what were a few Germans in a caravan? Anytime we found a possible camping place, if there was even a single sign of other life, Juss would dismiss it as “another damned song festival.” Although it was a warm, late-summer weekend, and though we were near one of the most heavily trafficked parts of Estonia, Juss was still convinced we would find a solitary and absolutely free campsite with no neighbors inside a 500-meter radius.

As we searched for this paradise, we became hungry. We stopped at a fish stand to buy smoked bream. A friendly local Russian—a Russian, at last!—sold smoked bream, flounder, and salmon.

“Salmon!” Juss erupted, “there aren’t salmon in Peipsi.” Juss took me aside to point out that this kiosk’s SMOKED FISH sign was suspiciously similar to all the others we had seen on the road. Juss believed we were about to be the victims of a McDonald’s-like scam to sell us fish caught elsewhere. “You know that the bream they sell in Selver comes from America?” Juss tried to whisper but was so wound up he shouted. “Lake Michigan! They catch the damned things in Lake Michigan and ship them over here!” Juss paced back and forth like Hercule Poirot solving a case, and then he stopped and struck a pose resembling Koržets, his finger held declaratively in the air. “This is American bream and Norwegian salmon!” he declared. “How dumb do they think we are?”

“I’m hungry,” cried Juss’s wife, Ivi, from the car. “Are you two going to buy anything or not?”

“These aren’t Peipsi fish,” Juss shouted to her. “They’re selling salmon!”

“Well,” Ivi said, “buy some onions then. But get something.” And so Juss returned to the kiosk and ordered a bream.

“My father caught this fish,” the girl said in very good Estonian. “And he’s never been to Lake Michigan.”

“What about this salmon?” Juss demanded.

“Well, salmon do swim up the Narva River, but this one came from Selver. What can I say?” she shrugged. “Some people want to buy them.”

“Maybe they’d buy shark, too.” Juss wouldn’t leave it alone.

“Maybe,” the girl shot back. “Do you know where I can get some?”

“I can’t even find a camping place on hundreds of kilometers of Peipsi shoreline,” he confessed. “Do you think I could find a shark?”

The girl laughed and directed us five kilometers north where she said there was an RMK campsite.

“Oh, we’ve seen that one,” Juss dismissed her.

“No you haven’t,” she insisted. “This one is where normal people go.”

And so we decided to give it a chance. It was only five kilometers to find out what this girl’s definition of normal was. Would there be campers swinging from the trees and smashing empty vodka bottles against each other’s heads? Or would the campers be a young tribe, out to break a Guinness record for loudest outdoor disco?

There, greeting us at the gateway to the park was Vladislav Koržets. “Haven’t we been here before?” Ivi asked.

“This is where normal people come,” Juss said. “But it does seem like déjà vu.” He killed the car’s engine and we sat for several minutes, listening suspiciously.

“Sounds okay,” said Ivi.

“Maybe they just went to get more alcohol,” my wife Liina suggested.

There were three other cars in the parking lot, but there was no gate attendant, not even a barrier. Only a grinning Koržets cautioning us not to burn the place down.

We unloaded our gear slowly, sure that any minute we’d be driven back to our car by gang of Lasnamäe youth wearing leather and gold and throwing lit sticks of dynamite in their wake. But things remained quiet. We passed a campsite occupied by a young family who was listening to soft classical music, a small Russian flag flew from a guy-line on their tent. They smiled and nodded. Another young couple with an infant waved and said zdrastvuitye.

We found a spot nearest the lake and pitched our tents. We made dinner (Norwegian salmon we’d brought from Tallinn) and settled in for the night, bracing for the inevitable party.

Around eleven p.m., when I was half asleep, Liina was met at our tent door by a young Russian. “Do you have any firewood?” he asked in Estonian slightly better than mine. “We forgot firewood. I’d be happy to pay for it.” Liina told him we’d burned what little we had and that she was sorry she couldn’t help. “Are you all alone?” he asked. “Because you could join us around the campfire if you want.”

Liina thanked him and told him she was with her boring husband, who grunted inside the tent in protest to the characterization. The young man laughed and said I was welcome, too.

This was all too civilized, and I wondered how Juss was feeling about it. This was relatively private camping, free of caravans and Germans. And it was almost completely silent: our Russian campers were making less noise than even Koržets.

“Hey, Juss!” I shouted. “Got any vodka?”

Juss told me to shut up. Normal people were trying to sleep.

***
Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

***
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Inherit the Family: Marrying into Eastern Europe
by Vello Vikerkaar