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.

***
Vello in English from Amazon.com, Abebooks.com and Alibris.com. Purchase it here:


Inherit the Family: Marrying into Eastern Europe
by Vello Vikerkaar

Me and My M

Back in the 1990s, I did a favor that enabled an Estonian businessman to earn some money. The man had heard me muse about crossing America by motorcycle, and as a gesture of thanks, he offered to ship my bike—a Russian M—to any place I named. I chose Kansas, because that’s where my Uncle Feliks lived, and because I knew how big America was: half of it was plenty for me. I would ride West to California and, as Hunter S. Thompson had done, “smoke weed in biker bars,” “feel burning oil on my legs” and ride with the “rain in my eyes and my jaw clamped together in fear.”

But anyone who has ridden an M knows that you don’t ride it: you wrestle it. And so I spent much of the time behind the handlebars speculating about what the “M” in the bike’s name might stand for. It certainly didn’t mean Mõnus, though there was a decent chance it was Mure. If the “M” had been English, it would have stood for Mess or Mistake. But since it was a Russian bike, in all its foul-smelling, cloud-farting splendor, I searched my primitive Russian vocabulary. I assigned the “M” to Mучитель, or, since it was almost always broken, Mертвый.

What I had imagined as a romantic ride, cresting flowered hilltops, breathing purer oxygen, a busty blonde hitchhiker next to me in the mother-in-law killer, bore no relation to reality. Most days, I stood around in service stations in one-horse towns while American mechanics and their greasemonkey friends circled the M and peered into its workings. “How could we have been afraid of a nation that built this motorcycle?” scoffed a twenty-something mechanic near Russell, Kansas. “You ought to junk this thing and get a Jap bike.”

“Actually,” said a know-it-all sitting on a stack of old tires tipping back a frosty Coca-Cola, “that’s a German bike. The russkies got ‘em from the krauts as war reparations. Disassembled the factories, put ‘em on railcars, and took ‘em to Russia.”

“Maybe so,” replied the mechanic, “but it’s still a piece of shit.”

But it was my piece of shit, and I liked it. And the advantage of it was that it was primitively simple. Even though I couldn’t fix it, most any farm boy could, and when a part fell off you could always find some local MacGyver who could fashion a new one out of something he found in his yard with grass growing up around it. I replaced so much of it that by two weeks into my journey, you could have said the bike wasn’t Russian anymore. Sure, I still had to wrestle it, but it ran.

I crossed the plains of Kansas, stopping to visit all the state's superlatives: the world's tallest prairie dog, the world's largest hand-dug well, the world's biggest ball of twine, the world's biggest easel, and the world's biggest pallasite meteorite. All these places hoped to snare a passing motorist with a car full of bored kids. But my M trumped them all. I was a superstar. “Look, it’s the Red Baron!” little kids would cry, even though the bike was black and didn’t fly. Since I wasn’t hairy, had no beard or visible prison tats, tourists did not fear me. They offered me cold beers to allow them to sit in the sidecar and have their pictures made.

More than two-thousand miles later, when I finally gazed at the ocean, I didn’t feel the elation Thompson had described. I was dog tired. My body was caked with dirt. The ocean of northern California was far too cold to swim in. I forgot Thompson and thought of Kerouac whose goal was to piss into the Seine at dawn. The Pacific wasn’t the Seine but the sentiment felt right. After zipping up my trousers I turned and walked away, leaving my M on the side of the road. Thieves and buzzards would be too smart to touch it, but a rider with a soul like mine might happen by. And it would surely call his name.

***

Read it in Estonian in Eesti Ekspress.

Europe Imitates Bollywood

Eurovision is usually a trashy spectacle and perhaps this year is no exception. But since the Russians do trashy spectacles like no one else can, maybe that explains why I like it so much this year. A couple of questions and a few observations:

What I don’t get about Eurovision:

1. How does Israel get invited? Since when were they in Europe? And why isn’t Palestine included?

2. Why did France send Patricia Kaas when everyone else sent amateurs? Is this like the Russians attempting to beat the Americans in the Olympics by pitting their pro hockey players against the Americans’ collegiates? (And note that UK brings out the big gun, Andrew Lloyd Webber.) Shouldn't there be a rule against this?

3. Why did Germany not have to compete in the semifinals? Does this have to do with their special relationship with Russia and the pipeline?

My favorites, by the way:

Moldova. Great dancing, singing, catchy tune. I wouldn’t buy the album, but almost. They’re my pick to win, and I’m publishing this story before the winner is announced just in case (23:53, Estonia time).

Estonia. Thank you, Sven Lõhmus, for not giving us English-language drivel this year. You’ll probably get a riigiorden for this one. In the future, may your country be punished by me writing a song in Estonian for every one you write in English.

Denmark. This Eurocountry holds some appeal to me. They might open for Kenny Chesney or play a NASCAR event.

Russia. Bravo. Not afraid at all to be Russian. (This is my second choice for Eurovision winner.)

Norway. That kid is going to get a lot of votes for simply being the cute enough that every woman in Europe will want to take him home. And his song is okay, too.

The Boring and the Beautiful

Brand Estonia strikes again. This time, Estonia’s marketing arm gives us: “Estonia. Positively Surprising.” It’s a slogan that’s, well--and forgive me here--surprisingly unsurprising.

I’m willing to pardon the bureaucrats for not knowing much about international marketing, but they could at least take a lesson from the movies. In Crazy People, Dudley Moore stars as an advertising executive who’s reached his breaking point and, when committed to an insane asylum, starts to produce the best ads of his career by telling simple and compelling truths. Ads like these:

“Jaguar. For men who want hand-jobs from beautiful women they hardly know.”

“Metamucil helps you go to the toilet. If you don’t use it, you’ll get cancer and die.”

Moore also dabbles in tourism: “Forget France. The French can be annoying. Come to Greece. We’re nicer.”

But we can’t blame Brand Estonia entirely. Give most of us tens of millions of euros and the responsibility to promote Estonia, and we too might buckle under pressure and choose the most cautious route. Positively Surprising.

But there is still hope for Estonia. Brand Estonia may not get it, but others do.

Janek Mäggi recently wrote in the daily Postimees that Estonians want to be “the beautiful and the boring” and so offered some better slogans himself: “Europe’s most beautiful women.” For Finland he suggested “Northern Europe’s Cheapest Beer.”

Sadly, Mäggi doesn’t happen to run Brand Estonia. Nor do I. But since my income is connected to the success of this small nation, I’m not above telling them how to do their job. So in the spirit of Dudley Moore and Janek Mäggi, I offer a handful of highly targeted slogans to carry Estonia abroad.

For Russia: “Estonia. The continent’s closest flush toilet.”
To the Italians: “Estonian women are too reserved to slap you.”
For India: “Feel right at home—our taxi drivers will cheat you, too.”
To the Swedes: “Europe’s cheapest breast implants.”
For Africa: “Come be stared at. But not necessarily in a bad way.”
To Americans: “Estonia is Europe’s low-calorie Russia: All the excitement with only half the danger.”
To the Dutch: “Come touch a real live tree.”
For Finland: “Vodka 9 euros per liter.”
For men under 25: “A place where it’s permitted to drive like in Hollywood action films.”
For the French: “After you leave, you’ll appreciate your own food more.”
And to zee Germans: “Welcome home to the land you used to rule.” Or for after the freedom monument is unveiled: “Europe’s Biggest Balkenkreuz.”

Of course you think I’m kidding. Actually, I’m exaggerating. But only slightly. My tasteless slogans may not be as suitable as Mäggi’s, but there’s a grain of truth in every one, a starting place from which a marketing message can be crafted.

In fairness to the marketing wizards at Brand Estonia, we shouldn’t be so naïve to think one sentence is going to cause tourists and investors to come flocking over the border to see what Estonia is all about. Even one sentence plus a lot of money. Seventeen years is a very short time for a country to have formed any sort of identity, to know who it is and what it wants. When I was seventeen I was beset with conflicting goals: I wanted to drink beer and chase girls and show the world what an adult I was. As I later realized, I was bad at drinking beer, worse at chasing girls, and no clever slogan could ever have improved things. It wasn’t that I was a bad guy. I just hadn’t yet understood why I was a good guy. So perhaps we can forgive the shortcomings of a seventeen-year-old Estonia.

Still, though, if we’re going to spend the money, why not get that one sentence right? There are plenty of good case studies. Recently, India greeted guests at the Davos World Economic Forum with a “Dream Team” (to quote Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria) of India’s most intelligent and articulate government officials. There were Hindi tunes, Indian dancers, and free iPod shuffles loaded with Bollywood music. Somehow they even talked the forum’s chairman, Klaus Schwab, into wearing a turban and shawl. Their slogan? India Everywhere. “And it was,” wrote Zakaria.

Good advertising presents a product much like a self-confident person presents himself: as he is, not as he wishes to be. Age seventeen is about the right time for Estonia to look in the mirror and see who we are. To get comfortable in our skin and learn to be ourselves. And then advertise that. A big country with a big budget can get away with forgettable ads—put enough money behind even an inane slogan and it will eventually register. But Estonia doesn’t have that luxury. When your budget is only a drop in the bucket of international media, you actually have to say something memorable.

Every time that Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s Investors Service drops its ratings on Estonia, some government official appears on camera to whine, “But they don’t even know where Estonia is!” Of course they don’t know where Estonia is. And at the rate we’re going—“Welcome to Estonia” and “Positively Surprising”—they’re not likely to know anytime soon. To them, Estonia is no different than Latvia. But hey, there’s an idea in that: “Estonia. The Baltic State that Isn’t Fucked Up.” (Knock on wood, of course. Loudly.)

***

As an exercise in Estonia's image via the web, try googling "Welcome to Estonia." In a normal text search, the fourth entry generated (above the fold, as they say) was a photograph from a porno shoot in a building across from Stockmann. What this says about Estonia's image I'm not quite sure. Maybe it says more about search engines. Thoughts?

Selling Salla: Finland’s Dream for Russia

The Finns have done their part to develop the Salla border region as a Finnish-Russian tourist attraction. The Finnish side boasts ski resorts, visits with Santa Claus, wood sculpture competitions, ceramics, and reindeer petting zoos. But the Russians don’t seem ready. The Finnish Commerce Tourism’s aptly named publication, Salla Border, tries to help, attempting to romanticize what Russia does have—“the Russia side of the border has a petrol station and duty free shop”—but the Russians don’t seem eager to join the campaign. The truth be known, the petrol they sell contains water and the duty free shop’s selection is worse than the tiniest Helsinki-Tallinn ferry.

But let’s not sell Russia short. The Salla Border writers have overlooked the real jewel of the region: the Kandalaksha supermarket. Forget Tallinn, Finnish shoppers, this is where you go for bargains.

Like most things in Russia, it’s not easy to find. If you stay alert on the road from Salla—the roads are so bad, there’s little chance of falling asleep—look for it right after you pass under the railroad bridge. There’s a sign on its concrete front with two thumbs up and text claiming “low prices” and “good quality.” If you can’t read Cyrillic text, look for the thumbs up.

Upon entry, a sober young man will closely scrutinize you. Large bags, cameras, anything big enough to hide a cucumber must be checked. This young man is firm but fair. Unlike in Soviet times, he won’t force you to take a basket, and no one is required to wait in line. (In Soviet times, stores used the number of shopping baskets to regulate store traffic, customers without baskets standing in line to wait for someone to leave.)

Inside the store are stenciled signs, blue block Cyrillic on a white field. If you still can’t find what you want, ask one of the many friendly clerks. They’re the ones in green smocks and tall black hats like horsemen from the Caucuses. They’ll personally escort you to the dairy section and provide advice concerning kefir. “This one’s locally made,” a clerk declared proudly. “That one, Aktiva, will keep you healthy.” She refused comment on a third one made by Danone. There was also a refrigerator full of treats made from curds. These are marketed for children, but I bought a variety for the trip home.

Some things haven’t changed since Soviet times, of course. Eggs still come straight from the chicken, shit-smeared and packed ten to a plastic bag. The meat looked suspicious, the Russians’ idea of a butcher being any man with an axe and a tree stump. And the fish looked like someone had driven over it with a tractor before freezing it rock solid.

In some sections, Russian tradition and western marketing meet head on. Vodka, for instance. There were forty different brands. There was one with a camouflage label, Spetsnaz vodka, named for the Russian Special Forces commandos. “For strong people,” the fine print read. There was every color of label and shape of bottle, the most expensive around four euros per bottle. A friend picked one with a slick black label and English text. He held it up for examination. “That one’s shit,” said a passerby. My friend put it back.

At the checkout, scanners have replaced abacuses. Gone are the surly clerks who could move wooden beads at light speed, point at the wire and wood, and expect you to know how to read it.

In the car, on the way back toward Salla, I opened a coffee-flavored curd treat and settled back to reflect on Russia’s consumer-friendly advances and prospects for the Salla region. But that didn’t last long. No more than halfway into my treat, I was greeted by a long, thick black hair. My vision of the new, hygienic Russia was immediately replaced by an image of a toothless, cursing factory worker who had forgotten her hair net. I rolled down my window and flung the offending curd into the forest.

I wondered if maybe the Salla Border writers weren’t right to confine their praise to the duty free shop and petrol station. People rarely complain about finding a hair in their gasoline.


***

By the way, a note about the new Google Ads. I'm trying them out to get a hands-on education in this internet thing and stinkin' rich at the same time. (Liina pointed out that neither one is likely to happen.) If you're reading from Estonia, you might have seen the ad offering quick loans ("1500 EEK for only 75 EEK")? I'd say that's pretty indicative of both our local internet advertising culture and the economy at large.

A View from the Cheap Seats: Open Estonia XIII

Bear Baiting or “Russians Have Feelings, Too”

You gotta love Kadri Liik for putting the gristle in the conference’s rubber chicken. At the 13th Open Society Forum, she seemed unable to resist a quick jab at Russia whenever the microphone passed her way. To a question about the Kremlin, she garbled something about being persona non grata but then did make clear she was “usually present in more pleasant company like this.” As the staff from the Russian embassy looked on.

Liik noted that Russia feels entitled to its allies in Europe and believes it has the right to “take them back by force” if necessary. Later, she urged to “stop pretending we have any common values with Russia.” Finally, she suggested Medvedev and Putin were criminals who should be tried for war crimes. I looked over at my Russian acquaintances and wondered if pictures of Kissinger weren’t dancing in their heads. Or perhaps Bush.

Russia was discussed as if it were a lab rat in a maze or an anesthetized patient on an operating table. A better analogy: an unloved child at the dinner table, whose behavior his parents bemoan in the third person. (What happens to those kids? In my country, most end up either suicidal or in jail.)

I almost felt sorry for the embassy staff—some of whom I know—but then I recalled episodes I’d seen broadcast from the Kremlin where Mr. Putin laid into visitors, giving them little or no chance to respond. This is how the game is played, I guess, and I had to, in the name of lively discussion, shout a quiet hurrah for Kadri Liik bringing gasoline for the conference fire.

Court Intrigue

Kadri’s attempts at fun were soon enough extinguished by no other panelist eager to play along, and the journalist beside me began killing time by explaining who was (or had been) sleeping with whom in Estonian government. There were plenty of parliamentarians and statesmen around for cannon fodder. Mostly, I just listened, punctuating the journalist’s narrative with the occasional “Really!” to which he responded “Yes,” to which I responded “No!” to which he responded “Yes.”

We foreigners miss so much. Estonia is as incestuous a soap opera as The Bold and the Beautiful. Think again if you were under the impression there’s been no fun in government since Kennedy and Clinton.

Of course, he could have been lying.

I spent my time wondering about my fellow Canadian, Dr. Andres Kasekamp. Certainly a capable moderator and probably good man to have a beer with, but where does he get the brand of English he speaks? Is it a consciously-acquired Euro souvenir to show off when visiting friends back home in Toronto? Or genuinely acquired during his PhD days in London and further churned through a tour of duty in Berlin? And Mr. Ilves? He’s American educated and pronounces “negotiation” like a Brit. Americans say nee-go-she-ay-shun (even though they don’t negotiate). Does Ilves also say shhedule? Jolly good and Bob’s your uncle? To settle the matter, I wanted to take the microphone and ask to borrow a rubber. Whether he tossed me a condom or an eraser would settle the matter once and for all.

Twelve Monkeys

David Foster Wallace’s Twelve Monkeys were there, too. The dry-cleaned cynics of the traveling press. Having undoubtedly seen the same show at a previous stop, they sat with smug grins, checked email, examined clothing for lint, and crossed and uncrossed their legs seeking that position of comfort one can never quite find in a folding chair.

Though generally quite nice people when you talk to them, if allowed to remain silent they project the air of elitist pricks from another planet, with whom you’d expect to have this sort of discussion:

Question: “What do you do?”

Answer: “I’m an intellectual.”

But most really aren’t that sort. These Twelve Monkeys, in fact, were not carrying Mr. Wallace’s identical steno notebooks, though a few wore identical gold-buttoned navy blue cast-off-the-bow-line jackets, the all-purpose, goes-with-anything sport coat. Mostly, the foreign press served as a backdrop before which to closely examine the Estonian press, who appeared to have slept in their clothing and not bathed for several days. That’s the men of course. They don’t own suits and they’ve declared a fatwa on irons. The female reporters favored tight blouses and low-slung jeans which occasionally offered a glimpse of their naughty knickers. The ladies have potential, but if they’re after sassy, I’d direct them to Tina Brown or Arianna Huffington.

Used to, to note that professional dress has not visited the Estonian press would be cheap. But it’s no longer 1992, and the observation on my part is simply unprofessional.

The EU & Russia

That was the topic, and near the end of the panel discussion, things finally got interesting enough for Mr. Ilves to take his hands away from his face and uncross his legs.

George Soros had suggested that the solution for a relationship between Ukraine and Russia was not to be found in NATO membership and Mr. Ilves wanted to take issue. But just when it looked like we were set for a steel cage match, we were out of time. And we’re out of time now. Tune in next year to see George Soros perform a pile driver on Toomas Hendrik Ilves while containing the Ukraine with a left-handed sleeper hold.

Unless the organizers read this and disinvite me.

Montague H. Crakenthorp in Ohio and Alistair Digby Vane Trumpington in London also contributed to this report.

What Crisis?

Every day I read about Estonia’s economic crisis. The newspaper says loans are hard to get and thirty percent of restaurants may close by spring. And there’s a story circulating about Estonians smashing their luxury cars into trees, collecting the insurance, and buying more modest vehicles. I’ve read about falling apartment prices and the greater need for owners to get rental income from empty flats. But I’ve only read about the crisis. I’m still waiting for the anecdotal evidence to catch up with the newspaper.

A friend of mine, a well-known French writer named Guillaume, recently moved to Tallinn. He wanted a quiet place to spend a year finishing his next book, and Tallinn fit the bill: a fairytale city mostly undiscovered by the rest of the world. He searched the web, found a beautiful place in the Old Town, and called up the listed agent.

“You want to see it today?” the agent asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m ready to rent.”

“What about next week?” the agent offered. “Why don’t you call me back then.”

A bit puzzled, Guillaume conveyed the information to my wife. Liina took the phone from him. “I don’t understand,” she said in Estonian. “This guy’s ready to rent today. The apartment is available. You’re even advertising it. This is the easiest money you’ll make this year, and you want to wait until next week?

There was a pause on the agent’s end of the line. Then: “Are you making fun of me?”

Liina turned to us. “He wants to know if we’re making fun of him.” We burst into laughter so loud the agent couldn’t have helped but hear. We honestly weren’t making fun of him. At least not before he made The Most Asinine Remark of 2008.

“We’re not making fun of you,” Liina told him, trying to choke back laughter. “But this guy is ready to move in immediately. He’s motivated.” Actually, it was Liina who was motivated. Guillaume had been sleeping on our couch for several days. He’s a good friend, but even friends wear out their welcome when they’re making camp in the middle of your living room. The agent’s end of the line remained silent. Perhaps he was thinking about how he might kill us and stash the bodies under the apartment floorboards. Or maybe, we hoped, he was entertaining rational thoughts and might deign to do his job and show an apartment. Liina pushed him a little more. “How many people do you have ready to pay the prices you’re asking for Old Town flats?”

“Let me think about it,” came the reply.

Liina hung up the phone. The agent could think as much as he wanted, but Liina had already thought about it. “You’re not going to get that apartment, Guillaume. Go back to the computer and find another.”

Guillaume didn’t understand. “It’s an Estonian thing,” she finally told him. “One of our strange customs of commerce.”

The next agent we reached was taking a week’s holiday and wasn’t willing to show apartments until she returned. Liina asked if someone else from her firm might show the apartment. The agent said she didn’t know.

“Look,” Liina said. “Isn’t better to get part of a commission than no commission at all?” The agent said she’d have to call us back. Of course, she never did.

Guillaume began to worry. He talked about moving to Riga. Or Minsk if he had to. Liina calmed him down. She explained that plenty of foreigners had found places to live in Tallinn. “Maybe Estonians hate me because I’m French?” Guillaume said.

“No, no,” she corrected. “Estonians hate you because you’re the customer.”

Luckily, our third call turned up a broker who was willing to show apartments that very next day. Guillaume took the second place he saw and moved in the same afternoon.

Guillaume is quite happy in the new place, one hundred square meters on Pikk Street. But he’s still shaking his head over the quality of service he’s found in Estonia. When he offered to pay to have a Xerox copy made in a hotel they chased him away because he wasn’t a guest. “It’s easier to get things done in Vietnam,” he’s said several times. He is very suspect of material he sees describing E-stonia and its forward-thinking people.

“You’re a writer,” Liina told him. “Don’t you ever make things up?”

Guillaume is starting to get the picture. He now says that Estonia’s real estate ads are better fiction than anything produced in 19th-century Russia. And he’s looking skeptically at much of the other glowing things written about Estonia. “Summer,” he recently exclaimed, “is another great lie of Estonia. They should be forced to call it something else.”

Guillaume has been feeling down lately, and Liina and I are hoping things will get better for him. But if not, he can spend time with us. And if all else fails, there will always be Minsk.

Missed Opportunity

The Russian child recently abandoned in Estonia is by far the greatest missed opportunity for Estonian propaganda writers.

But I’m willing to help.

The abandoned Russian girl’s name is Svetlana. Little Svetlana. Poor, little Svetlana, symbolic of all the greater problems Russia is suffering. As their stock market collapses and the formerly nascent middle class withers, their lower class grows, and young mothers line up at the Ivangorod-Narva border with babies in their arms begging for an Estonian family to take them, feed them, give them a life they can’t have in Russia, where the average male will not live longer than 59 years and the average female will do little more than watch him drink himself to death.

Some of the Russian mothers, the truly desperate cases, many of whose dacha gardens were ruined by the wet summer weather, prostitute themselves to truck drivers, who then strap the infants to greasy truck axles and carry them as far as Estonia’s first Statoil, where they remove the child under the cover of night and prop her against diesel pumps to await the arrival of a cheerful morning worker. The smiling, uniformed employee arrives, changes the infant’s diapers and feeds the baby, all with goods from the store’s own inventory which she pays for out of her own abundant salary. On a recent Tuesday, Statoil turned over two dozen infants to Estonian social services. (No babies have yet been left in front of Lukoil.)

Ethnic Estonians, unselfish and kind-hearted, form a line at social services (twice as long as the Ivangorod line of mothers, by the way) in hopes of adopting one of the children. “I’ll raise her bilingually,” pledges 28-year-old Liina (not my wife, by the way), who also promises to teach the child a fair and balanced view of history, including the Russian textbook version of The Great Patriotic War.

Secretly, the Estonian government contacts Russia, but the Kremlin remains silent. While there is money to buy Putin’s dog a satellite-tracking collar, there is not enough to feed little Svetlana and the thousands like her. Better for Russia, better for the children, that they make their way to Estonia.

“We will do what is right,” says President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, “regardless of the cost.” Ilves appeals for calm on the rainy Russian side of the border. A bullhorn in hand, he stands atop a Red Cross truck on the Narva River bridge and tells Russian mothers that Estonia will feed their children. Canned goods are dispensed to Russian soldiers who promise it will be delivered to the queue of mothers. “You may keep one of those for yourself,” President Ilves tells a hollow-eyed soldier. But the recruit does not speak German, and so Ilves can only pray the lima beans find the right hands. “Sigareta?” the soldier begs Mr. Ilves. But the president doesn't even carry speechki.

President Ilves speaks to his European colleagues and tells them how these fortunate infants will successfully integrate into a New Europe yet retain their own culture and identity. They will love French wine and Italian cars, use Finnish tech, (and perhaps carve Kalevipoeg figurines from juniper branches), but they’ll be the best balalaika players in their schools. They will grow up to be software engineers and professors of philosophy and have little need to emigrate to Brooklyn and Brighton Beach. They’ll make their home in Estonia. And they’ll be grateful for it.