Eurovision’s Dirty Little Secret

Although it’s enough for most viewers to tap their feet to the Eurovision beat, something within my soul compels me to listen to lyrics and attempt to divine their meaning.

For example, these lines from the Sven Lõhmus song which will represent Estonia at the contest in May:

Daylight fading away

Night silhouettes in the sky

LED lights are flashing in towers

It’s Manhattan’s magical time

Ballerinas dancing to Swan Lake

On a river made of diamonds and pearls

Everything’s a little bit weird now […]

One-two-seven-three down the Rockefeller street

Everything is a little surreal

Weird and surreal, indeed, because I have no clue what Getter Jaani is singing about. Perhaps the author chose “weird” and “surreal” because the phrase “incredibly fucking stupid” is so hard to rhyme in English?

Apologies. I don’t mean to be cynical, but as far as I know, offices in skyscrapers are still not illuminated by LEDs (which would be confined to stairwells or parking garages, and in any case not pronounced like the chemical element with the symbol Pb). The nearest Rockefeller Street is in Randolph, Massachusetts (population 30,000), the definite article has no place before “Street” in that context, and wouldn't 1273 on the Avenue of the Americas would be near the Time Life building, somewhere uptown of Rockefeller Plaza?

Readers will no doubt rally around Mr. Lõhmus, invoking a defense of “nonsense literature,” a legitimate genre that defies language conventions or logical reasoning – and the “Rockefeller Street” lyrics certainly do that. But they do not meet the second test of nonsense literature, which is to have an excess of meaning rather than a lack of.

But wait, readers will interject: it’s so easy to be critical. Anybody can laugh at a Eurovision song.

True, but I have done more. I have, in fact, discovered the genesis of Eurovision lyrics, the fountain from which they all gush. And, it turns out, Sven Lõhmus is not to blame.

Take these lyrics for example:

I like to play with toys

Let’s all have a party

Watch me blow bubbles

It’s fun to make music

Goodbye

Set the words to a catchy tune, add Getter Jaani’s voice, a few godawful dancers, and viewers will shriek at their television screens in orgasmic pleasure.

Or imagine these words recited by a beat poet backed by a contrabass:

When you cook onions and broccoli, why do they stink up the kitchen?

Why is the smell of a dead animal attractive to a vulture but disgusting to you and me?

And why does your morning breath smell so bad that your mom runs screaming from the room?

All are no less worthy of Eurovision than “Rockefeller Street.” And they require no expenditure of creative energy since they are already written: All the passages were excerpted from books in my ten-month-old son Robert’s personal library, a veritable Eurovision gold mine.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I beg the reader to put himself in foreign shoes for a moment. If the Estonian language, instead of English, dominated the world, then how might you be moved if song lyrics were taken from books titled, Vaata, raputa, ja loe; Ahvenapoiss Sulev; or Pese ennast-sa?

Or what if a contingency of foreigners were to compose lyrics in the Estonian language for songs romanticizing your infamous industrialists? Titles like “Hanschmidt Puiestee,” “Kruuda Tänav,” or “Armin Karu Avenüü”?

The solution is for Mr. Lõhmus and his songwriting colleagues to expand their reading lists. What if they sought poets for inspiration? Jaan Kaplinski has some good lines. Or there’s Karl-Martin Sinijärv, who not only is a fine poet but boasts some of the coolest threads in town. And anyone who borrows from a poet immediately basks in associative glory. In this fashion it’s possible to climb several rungs in the cultural ladder by simply leaving the public library’s children’s section.

And if Estonian poetry won’t suffice and international flair is desired, there’s the American master, Wallace Stevens, whose material cries out for song lyrics.

Let the lamp affix its beam

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Were these Eurovision lyrics, a whole new class of listeners might join, who would speculate that the song is about a “forced choice between the gross physicality of death and the animal greed of life.” And the lyricist himself might fire back with an overarching statement that a poem must “resist the intelligence.”

As it stands now we are without that debate, and a lone Postimees columnist is left to hope that the significance of 1273 might amount to more than Tommy Tutone’s 1982 hit, “867-5309/Jenny.” The latter caused thousands to dial the number and ask for Jenny. Yet the former, I fear, will cause only this one curious listener to plug the address into Google Maps.

***

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Gastarbeiter

Imagine everybody who has ever wronged you being in one place at one time, trapped somewhere they cannot escape.

For anyone who has ever built a house in Estonia, that place is the 9:30 p.m. Tallink Friday ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn. It is packed stem to stern with gastarbeiter returning from a week of blessing Finland with their craftsmanship and work ethic.

The ferry crowd resembles a parade of mafia middle management: thousands of short-haired thugs clad head to toe in black. Many sport bling. A few wear arm jewelry, peroxide vixens in heels ever ready to heed the disco’s call.

Looking at the men, I feel I know them all. And some I actually do.

In the pub with three pints before him is Andrus, who got drunk one afternoon and disappeared from ceiling work for 30 days, announcing upon his return that he’d been down with a virus.

By the one-armed bandit is another bandit, Mart the electrician, who worked assiduously for a month and then vanished with several thousand kroons intended to buy a fusebox.

There is Sven the mason who, while boasting of the young masons he had taught their craft, constructed an oven for me that only produced smoke. (He blamed the chimney, forgetting that he’d built that, too.)

Pulling a trolley full of gin long drink is Edgar, who did not own a single tool except a hammer (the only thing he couldn’t get from Ramirent, according to him).

And there, rocking out on his iPod, is Marek, an enthusiastic plumber who disappeared on the second day of work leaving his brand new cordless drill and a dirty pair of sneakers in the middle of my living room floor. He never returned to claim either.

It is a boat full of David Copperfields, all with highly polished disappearing acts. Even those I don’t know personally, I still feel I know their stories, and I mention this to the Finn I’m traveling with.

“They can’t behave like that in Finland,” he says. “They wouldn’t last even a day.”

But I wonder. It seems many have made a career out of lasting less than a day.

I nod to Andrus in the pub, and he looks away. Despite the fact we paid the same for a ticket, owing to the crowd on the 9:30 boat it is more his boat than mine, and I suppose we must play be his rules. A year ago I might have challenged him here, throwing down my glove and drawing my rapier for some therapeutic slashing and thrusting.

But my anger has transformed to wonder. I am dumbstruck by the construction culture: it calls into question everything I have learned about the self-correcting free market system. How can so much incompetence and laziness exist for so long? There are good Estonian workers, yes. Highly professional workers. (So hold your mail!) But they are not this crowd. What could the five workers I know possibly do in Finland? Do they sweep up the sawdust of sober Finnish carpenters? Or do I misread the situation and the explanation truly lies in how an Estonian friend, having seen the horror in my eyes while seated in the passenger seat of his car, explained his aggressive driving: “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t drive like this in your country.”

I wonder for a moment how we would all behave if this ferry went down. Would we degenerate to mayhem and thievery of the nature William Langewiesche described taking place aboard the Estonia in his 2004 Atlantic Monthly article? Or would things reflect the civility expressed by the film line given the Titanic musician: “Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you”?

And if the ferry did go down and all of us with it, would the country of Finland grind to a halt?

I ask, because I, too, am a gastarbeiter.

For several years now, the larger portion of my income has come from Finland. For Finnish firms international enough to need me, I write their magazines, their newsletters, the speeches their CEOs make at the stock exchanges.

I am a double gastarbeiter. I have left Canada for Estonia and, for part of each week, I leave Estonia for Finland. I console myself with the belief that what I do Finns cannot do for themselves. A speech in English by a non-native speaker made to a western audience too often resembles a Monty Python skit. I save the Finns from themselves. Or so I tell myself in order to believe I am different from the other gastarbeiters on the ferry.

But if the ferry went down and I knew I was doomed, Langewiesche would likely have no cause to chronicle my noble behavior. I would grab a lifeboat oar and help speed the journey of Andrus, Mart, Sven, Edgar, and Marek. “Godspeed, boys,” I might utter with each delivered blow.

***

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Go West, Young Man

At the emergency room — don’t ask — Liina was admitted immediately while I hung out in the waiting room with Robert. Having rushed to the hospital without packing baby food, I tried to buy juice from the vending machine. But holding a crying seven-month-old and trying to feed enough air-light 10-cent-kroon coins into a slot proved too much to manage. More fell on the floor than went into the machine.

“Here, let me help,” said an attractive young woman, who fed her own coins into the machine. The apple juice box plopped to the bottom.

“Here, take mine,” and I reached out to hand the young lady my coins.

“You keep them,” she said. “I’m leaving Estonia tomorrow and won’t have any use for kroons.”

Helena was twenty-three and studied art history at a university in Scotland.

“Will you come back to Estonia?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said flatly, and we agreed that there were currently few opportunities for young people in Estonia, or at least for art history majors.

“I know you from Facebook,” said Helena’s mother, joining the conversation from a wheelchair. We had barely enough time to determine our mutual acquaintances when the nurse wheeled the mother away for an x-ray.

“She fell on the ice in Old Town,” explained Helena. “She lives in Norway and was supposed to return home tomorrow.”

“Sometimes I’m not too keen on Estonia,” Helena said. “I fell in the very same spot a week before and people seemed angry that they had to walk around me.” She admitted that her mother had said people were nice to her, even stopping to ask if she was all right. “Maybe it was me.”

The nurse approached again and Helena stood for a chat and returned to her seat.

“Maybe they thought you were a foreigner?” I offered half seriously, suggesting they thought she was a soft westerner accustomed to cities where property owners keep their sidewalks clear of snow and ice.

“It could be,” she agreed. “Whenever I go into shops in Old Town they speak English to me.”

The nurse returned and Helena stood to receive the report that her mother’s leg had a dangerous break. The doctors would operate immediately.

“Well, I don’t know how long you’ve lived in Scotland, but you definitely don’t look or move like an Estonian,” I told her as she gathered her things to join her mother.

“What do you mean?”

It’s not often I get an invitation to deliver my armchair analyses, but I enjoy it when I do. I rose and mimicked Helena’s body language when she received the news of her mother. I put my hands on my hips with elbows behind me. I arched my body back and up in a bowed, I’m ready-to-hear-you posture. “You see, Helena,” I said. “You’re exposing yourself here. This is a vulnerable position. But it’s very confident, too. It shows you fear nothing from this establishment. Most Estonians would not strike this pose.”

“How would an Estonian stand?” she asked.

“Well, there could be many ways, but generally not your way. An Estonian’s pose would cede power to the hospital worker.”

Behind us they wheeled out her mother and pushed her toward a door to another part of the hospital. I raised my hand in salute. Helena stood and offered me her hand. I wished them both good luck abroad.

I looked down at baby Robert in my arms and wondered at what age he might pack his bags and leave Estonia. Although he’s only seven-months old, I’m already plotting his future (to the dismay of his mother). I’d like him to attend primary and secondary school in Estonia, but I think it would then be good for him to leave.

The American professor Robert Rebein has written of small places. Roughly: Small towns give you everything and ask nothing in return, except that you leave and never come back.

I think the same might be said of a small country, at least to some extent. Or, if we want to consider the case of Tallinn, I can think of few towns of 400,000 in North America which are able to offer enough to keep all its sons at home. It would be asking too much, both of the town and of the sons.

I’d like my Robert to leave Estonia so that he may better understand himself and the world. Liina will disagree, but I contend a city without a famous song written about is no place for young people. Small towns are where you settle after you’ve already had your adventures. Liina argues that travel broadens your horizons, and that’s true. But travel is not the same as living abroad for an extended period without the comfort of your pinginaaber and the friends you grew up with. The tourist, as G.K. Chesterson pointed out, “sees what he has come to see.”

There are surely exceptions. E. Faye Jones, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most successful disciples, apparently cheekily declared he would remain in Arkansas and let the world come to him. But that declaration was made later in life, after he’d ventured abroad for a turn flying torpedo bombers in the Pacific Theatre and lived in a half-dozen cities he wasn’t born in.

Maybe Urmas Sisask can stare at the planets from Jäneda and find inspiration. But then, I’d argue, he has as much access to the universe sitting with his piano in his garden under a dark Estonian sky than he would from any place.

But most of us aren’t exceptions.

It’s said there are 130,000 Estonians like Helena and her mother who have packed up and left. I say good for them. I even say we ought to raise a glass every time someone like Helena throws a few items into a bag and ventures out to strike a claim in the big bad world.

I sometimes think that the Talendikoju program ought not to be an invitation for Estonians to return, but rather a giant exchange program, where we bring foreigners in to do jobs which need done, and where we export as many young Estonians as we possibly can.

Not all will return. But those who do will enrich the rest of us. They’ll come back with the confidence of Helena, postures erect from knowing that they are no less than anyone else, and that they are very often more.

And they’ll carry with them higher expectations. Higher expectations for themselves and for the society in which they live.

***

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Donkey Jockeys

It’s a matter of professionalism. And a simple matter of self-respect. But everyone I make this argument to tells me to shut the hell up, that I’m simply wrong, or that I should accept that the battle is lost before it’s begun.

They tell me my criticism is minor compared to the larger crisis in journalism, the major issues we ought to be wrestling with to improve the state of things. But I’d argue the first crisis to be dealt with is the one journalists have created for themselves: their identity crisis.

Lately I’ve been getting out to a few press conferences. I don’t go so much as to write about Mr. Savisaar’s quit-picking-on-me rant du jour or to hear IMF representatives think twice before saying nothing. I go to get out of the house, to see how the world is turning, and enjoy the bizarre, snail-paced spectacle of what Estonians call the pressikas.

The press conferences I’ve witnessed are pretty much interchangeable. The gray mass of journalists quietly trickles into the appointed room, invariably choosing seats at the back of the room. Among the reporters are many sleepy young men in worn sweaters and jeans, hair jutting out in random places in the fashion American collegiates refer to as “nappy head.”

After a short delay, a suit-clad young man with a boyband haircut appears and provides speaker introductions vaguely reminiscent of Vegas nightclubs, even though the speakers are already known to all and name cards are present in front of each.

The speakers themselves appear professional, wearing suits, ties and shined shoes. But they seem terribly annoyed, as if they would very much rather be somewhere else and have deigned only under great duress to attend the press conference that they themselves have organized. Their expressions cast them as the adults who have agreed to indulge the children.

And so the two sides face off: the Narcoleptic Self-styled Bohemians versus the Antsy Irritated Establishment.

As I see the regular lament and hand-wringing about Estonia’s media, it more or less goes like this: The critics say that experienced journalists are too few, most of the senior ones having left long ago to pursue other, better remunerating ventures. Politicians seem to be routinely grumpy with the press, as if they cannot get a fair break, when, by western standards, it has always seemed to me that they tend to get off easy when question time arrives.

The press itself is refreshingly introspective, occasionally even self-flagellating. There is acknowledgement in their own pages that they could do better and they mourn the turn toward yellow led by a compete-for-clicks environment.

While I find neither the Bohemians or Establishment more in the right, it seems to me that like many other areas of Estonian life, the debate itself is healthy, and as long as it goes on we are only in for an improved quality of the press. Where the head goes, the body will follow.

What I would like to see—and where I am told my cause is lost—is an improvement in the appearance of the press. It is my belief that a polished exterior is often the mark of an organized interior. And when that is not the case, an exterior may rally an interior to live up to its example.

Not all Estonian journalists dress down, of course. Should Priit Pullerits, Priit Hõbemägi, or Sirje Rank be in attendance, they will be as professionally clad as their foreign colleagues who may be witnessed on C-SPAN pelting Mr. Obama with questions.

But while Estonia’s politicians and businessmen seem to have too little respect for the press, I can only hold the press responsible for having too little respect for itself.

“What you need to get through your thick foreign head,” says my wife Liina, who was briefly employed in public broadcasting during the Soviet era, “is that the press were bohemians. If you were in the press in Soviet times, then you were a rebel and you dressed the rebel part.”

To which I of course respond that it’s been 20 years since the Soviet Union and most of the journalists attending the press conferences are too young to remember it.

It is also difficult for me to see journalists as rebels. We are every bit a part of The System. One may argue our role is to keep the rest of the system honest (and I’d agree), but does that not make us more policeman than rebel? Have a look at a policeman’s haircut. Would he function better in his job with hair down to his ass?

And, most importantly, if a journalist can write like a rebel, then he hardly need worry about dressing like one. (Flaubert: “In order to write like a revolutionary, you need to live like a bourgeois.”)

A nattily-dressed Estonian editor friend of mine argues that she can’t pay her staff well enough to ask them to dress professionally. But I lack sympathy. Journalists are paid poorly in most societies and the more respectable newspapers still require them to turn out in a tie. And I argue that an affordable, presentable pair of trousers, jacket, and tie cost far less than the designer jeans some of her reporters wear low enough to reveal their pubic hair.

It isn’t as simple as everyone putting on a necktie, my editor friend argues. She’s right, of course. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt things. People treat you how you treat yourself, a motivational consultant once said. My French writer friend Guillaume says that his stylish countrymen “dress to show respect for a place and for ourselves.” Would a well-dressed, attentive, whip-smart journalist inspire better answers from the subjects he interviews? The Antsy Irritated Establishment can best answer that.

A tie-requiring editor I know in the United States likes to inspire his reporters by borrowing from Jeremiah when he sends them out into the world. He tells them to let their subjects “hear the snorting of our warhorses, let them feel the ground tremble beneath their feet, as we approach to devour the land and all that fills it, the city and those who dwell in it.”

Of course it’s hard to leave that impression if you show up riding a donkey.

***

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Animal Planet

Playing in the snow-covered yard were a bear, a fox, and a hedgehog. Drinking vodka on the porch was a tropical bird. An owl answered the door to the house.

“Uhhuu,” the owl cooed, both eyes blackened like she’d been beaten by a husband. If not for the familiarity of the hoot I would not have recognized Liina’s mother in the dark of that Estonia winter.

“The rest of the animals are in the forest,” she said, pointing into the trees. “Look for the bonfire.”

It was New Year’s Eve 2000, and I’d arrived late from Tallinn to Liina’s family’s country house. I hadn’t known Liina long, and she’d invited me to join friends and family to celebrate the New Year. She’d said it was animal party and that I should dress the part.

Twenty animals, Liina somewhere among them, danced at around the bonfire, stopping occasionally to literally howl at the moon. It was something out of Indiana Jones, with me, the western anthropologist, peering over a rock at jungle natives about to engage in a ritual blood sacrifice.

Liina has always been a bit different. In some cases, I have chided her for not being more normal and the trouble it has gotten her into.

Her driver’s license was revoked for several years for reasons, in part, of drawing extra attention to herself by defacing her license with a indelible marker, adding horns and a beard to her otherwise attractive face to give it a Satan-crossed-with-a-female-werewolf look. In most parts of the world policemen are not known for their senses of humor, least of all in former Soviet republics.

Traveling in Iran, she was jailed for a night for being seen in the company of a local man, an unauthorized tour guide. She narrowly escaped getting caught with a bottle of wine in her bag, which, in Iran, still carries a minimum penalty of being buried to your neck in sand and stoned to death.

In a nature reserve in India, she ignored signs telling her to stay on the trail and not touch things. When she exited the park, two armed guards awaited her. “What’s in the bag?” one asked. “Oh, just a few books,” she replied. “And a Bengal tiger skin.” Lucky for her, they actually thought she was funny.

It is as if Liina is on a mission to test the limits of patience and sense of humor of everyone she meets, taking copious notes so that she may one day, like an audit office, release a report to the world, providing us all with more accurate portraits of ourselves.




Several years ago in the tax office, unable to figure out how to manage an ID card reader, Liina and I sat before the unfortunate, humorless woman assigned to assist us manually file our documents. “Do you have any family or dependents to list?” the ametnik asked. “How recently do they need to have been alive?” Liina queried, adding some vague remark about an avalanches and bad luck in general.

For me, situations like tax filing are ones I want to enter and exit as quickly and smoothly as possible. But in Liina’s world all events have equal standing and are part of life’s rich tapestry. “Really,” she rebutted my scolding once we were safely outside the tax office, “why would you want to cheat a bureaucrat out of an interesting day?”

When I suggested that bureaucrats were in fact bureaucrats for the reason that they wanted all their days to be more or less the same, she shot me a disapproving look. “You’re wrong,” she declared. “There’s nobody alive like that.”

I will say this for her: she is never guilty of conscious Bohemian affectations or, as is common with some, trying to be different in the same way. She would never tattoo her body or adopt the Goth look. To her, these people are not at all genuine, and are, in themselves, walking contradictions.

To get on Liina’s good side, it is helpful to one-up her. Had the Estonian policeman checking her license understood this he would have offered her the chance to change into a werewolf, run into the forest, and slay a deer with her teeth and fingernails right before his very eyes. If the tax bureaucrat had been more aware, she might have topped Liina’s avalanche story with a better tragedy, such as an accident with tropical quicksand.

That New Year’s night I observed the animals dancing around the fire for some time. At other parties I’d gone to, it seemed people would sit around a table staring at their feet until the first was drunk enough to engage another. But these dancing animals. . . I didn’t think there was enough alcohol in all of northern Europe to do this to people. (And I would later learn they were mostly sober.)

Finally, I had to play my part, and I stepped into the light to present myself. Eventually they noticed my presence. I wore knee-high boots but was otherwise dressed head to toe in camouflage. Slung behind my back was a BB gun.

“What are you?” came Liina’s voice from a floppy-eared, purple creature. I could have asked her the same, though she appeared to be Barney the dinosaur.

“Take a guess.”

“You’re a praying mantis,” offered someone who was clearly a squirrel. “A chameleon on a branch,” suggested a rabbit.

I unslung the BB gun and raised it high over my head. “I’m a hunter,” I shouted, “and I’m here to take hides.” And with that the animals fled into the forest, correctly playing their parts. I would have my hides soon enough when they got too cold and returned to the fire.

Ever since the birth of our son Robert, we don’t dress up as animals for parties anymore. Partly, this is because we’re too tired, but I think it’s mostly because Liina can dress Robert up. He has already attended one very formal Christmas party dressed as a miniature Santa Claus. He owns a coat where the hood morphs into an elephant trunk. And he has webbed duck feet, shoes which slip on over his regular shoes.

We haven’t happened on any ametniks or policemen yet when Robert is in tow, but I can only imagine it when we do. “We found him in the countryside being raised by a family of wolves,” Liina will say. “Does that mean we can keep him?” And we’ll just have to hope the ametnik has a sense of humor equal to ours. Well, equal to Liina’s, that is.

***

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The Virtues of Blizzards

A community’s traffic culture is often mentioned as an indicator of the health of its society. Within the larger traffic culture is a public transport culture, and Tallinn’s public transport doesn’t have the best image. A former Tallinn mayor once remarked that public transport was for children, the handicapped, and people too drunk to drive. But each year more and more Tallinners seem to abandon their cars for public transport, and the atmosphere aboard the bus grows a bit more similar to that of western cities. And there’s nothing like a blizzard to bring riders into closer quarters and the system under a loop.

Read the entire article here (on ERR).

*

The Dinner Guest

“Daddy, why don’t white people eat carp?”

It was 1977 and my father and I were reclined on a riverbank, our lines in the water and hooks baited with corn.

“Dunno,” he said, taking up a bit of line slack with his reel. “The Chinese eat them. Maybe it’s an ethnic or a religious thing.”

Dad had been a carp fisherman for twenty years. He liked to catch them on a fly rod for sport, or lounge in the bankside shade, watching his young sons fight fish strong enough to pull them in the water.

“Why don’t we take one home and eat it?” I asked. We’d always just let the fish go, or occasionally we’d put several on a stringer and give them to black fishermen, who were always glad to get them.

“All right. But you have to clean it.” Dad was an avid hunter and fisherman who believed his children should understand where supermarket beef came from, and so whatever you killed, you had to clean it and eat it.

Cleaning such a tough-skinned and bony fish was no easy chore, but I managed and handed it off to mom, who added salt and baked it. We sat down to dinner. We chewed quietly.

“Dad,” I broke the silence. “I think I understand why we don’t eat carp.”

Mom made polite excuses and said that she might not know how to season it. Dad said it could be spiced to the hilt and you couldn’t escape the nasty bones. Mom wondered if black people didn’t deep fat fry it. My brother said maybe Asians liked the taste of mud. No, I argued, it was just a bottom-dweller completely unsuitable for consumption. Dad suggested we throw the fish away and go to a restaurant. We fought each other to be the first out the door.

***

“This is a product from our very own kolkhoz!” the hostess declared proudly, entering the room with a silver tray held high above our heads.

It was Christmas 1992 in Estonia. She placed the tray directly in front of me, the guest of honor. It was a five-kilo carp.

“You like carp, of course,” she said.

“Who doesn’t?” I managed. If there was one ironclad rule in my family it was that you never refused something offered when you’re a guest at the dinner table.

The Estonians’ mouths visibly watered. The host forked a huge serving on to my plate and then the family fought over who got the eyes.

I hadn’t expected Estonians to be carp eaters. The worst thing I’d encountered on an Estonian table was headcheese, which had an appearance and texture which could completely extinguish my appetite. Next to that on the fright index was tongue. I’d eaten it once in France, didn’t like it much there, but an Estonian had spoiled it permanently for me by removing the entire organ - including the long, more-disgusting part that runs down the cow’s throat - from a boiling pot and dropping it on my plate. I seem to recall that it writhed. Sea Devils were also frightening, but fortunately the fish was expensive enough that no one had ever served it to me. And then there were those alcohol-filled chocolates, which exploded in your mouth and liqueur ran down your chin and on to your shirt if you weren’t capable of swallowing the vile little treat in one go.

But I’m sure Estonians found some of my Canadian eating habits odd. Before I married Liina, I was able to enjoy an entire bag of Doritos-brand nacho-cheese-flavored tortilla chips at one sitting. I also liked to eat standing over the sink just to avoid getting a plate dirty. To save the work of cleaning a pan, I cooked hotdogs by letting hot water run over them in the bottom of the sink. And I was not unaccustomed to eating food directly from micro-waved bags. Cosmonaut food, as Liina calls it.

With the carp, my strategy was to eat slowly, ostensibly to savor every bite, but relying on the greed of my fellow diners to speedily consume the fish. I also dulled the taste of each bite with a mouthful of vodka, which my hosts interpreted as a positive sign. The carp on the platter quickly became only a skeleton, the others having taken seconds and thirds.

“How’s that fish? Good?” asked the hostess.

“Mmmmm,” I grunted, a thumb thrust in the air to express my approval. But these people knew no more about cooking carp than my mother, and the fish was just as muddy tasting as the one I’d tried to eat as a child.

“Well, you eat as slowly as you want,” she said, “because I’ve got another in the oven.”

Sometimes you just have to take the bullet.

***

Growing up in Scarborough — or Scarberia as we called it — it would be many years before I moved to the city and discovered that my mother was not in fact the best cook on earth and that the culinary traditions of my youth were not five-star.

And it would be many more years before I moved to Estonia, and even then I would never come to terms with refusing something I was offered. While it might be true that an Estonian will not take offense if you don’t eat carp, I could not have brought myself to say so at Christmas dinner in 1992. My hosts had surely gone to considerable inconvenience, if not expense, to offer me that fish, and I could not have insulted them by pushing away a plate.

It’s been years since I’ve been offered carp or bream (a rose by any another name…) in an Estonian home. The nation seems to have turned to salmon, tilapia, and even sashimi. Perhaps the carp are being exported to Russia, or perhaps they’re just finning quietly in the bottom of some muddy waterway, waiting to make a fashionable comeback.

Either way, I’m prepared for them. I’ll declare a unique devotion to another dish on the hostess' table (pasteet, for example). Or I’ll claim fish allergies. Or I’ll say it’s an ethnic, religious, or cultural thing. In fact, I’ll say, my culture requires me to go to the kitchen and eat standing over the sink.

This story recently appeared in the holiday magazine Jõulud.