Portrait of an Immigration Office

2007

“What’s this ‘McCormick?’” asked the Estonian immigration official to whom I presented my application for a residence permit.

“It’s my middle name,” I replied.

“Why’s it have a lower case ‘C?’”

“I don’t know. It’s Irish. That’s how it’s written.”

“But it’s not that way on your passport. Your passport has an upper case ‘C.’”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“Look!”

“You’re right. On my passport it’s written with an upper case ‘C.’”

“Why?”

“All of the letters on my passport are written in upper case.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to call the Canadian Embassy and ask? Is it that important to you?”

The official frowned.


2005

“Where’d you get that chair?” the official asked.

“From the desk next to you,” I answered. There had been no chairs at her desk, and I wanted to sit.

“What if someone needs it?”

“No one needed it. I asked.”

“Oh, you asked, did you?”

“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“You should not take chairs from there. Someone might need them.”

“Okay, from where would you like me to take a chair?”

“I said he could take the chair,” interrupted the official’s colleague at the next desk. “No one was using it.”

“You take chairs from the big table,” my official shouted. “Not from smaller tables!”

I returned the chair to my official’s colleague’s table and selected one from the large table behind me.

“There,” I said. “I now have the correct chair. Shall we proceed?”

The official frowned.


1998

“Do you have the additional documents required?” the official asked.

“I do.” I presented him an envelope.

“I see here that you’re HIV negative.”

“Yes, I went to the state clinic and they administered the test.”

“But how do I know you don’t have AIDS?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Estonian state needs to be certain you do not have AIDS. How do we know you don’t have AIDS?”

“Because I’m HIV negative,” I offered, still not sure what the man wanted.

“Yes, but how do I know you don’t have AIDS?”

“If I’m HIV negative, then I don’t have AIDS. Scientists tell us that to contract AIDS you must first have the HIV virus.”

“Well, I’m not a scientist.”

Until recently, residence permit applicants were required to provide the following: an original university diploma, certification by a state psychologist that they were not insane, and a certificate from a state clinic proving they were HIV negative.
***

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Striptease

“Ignore the girl upstairs in the bed. There’s a friend who’s staying with me and she’s his girlfriend.” My French writer friend, Guillaume, was sitting in my car and talking on the phone to his Estonian landlord. He’d finally had enough of our dark northern days, and I was driving him and his boxes to the post office. His landlord was, at the same time, en route to show the soon-to-be-vacant apartment.

“You don’t have a friend staying with you,” I pointed out to him.

“Yeah, but I can’t tell the landlord I’ve got a stripper in my bed.”

“A stripper?”

“I met her at a club and we kind of hit it off.”

“OK.” I didn’t ask what kind of club. I mean, strippers have private lives, too. Maybe he’d met her sipping vintage Bordeaux in Gloria’s wine cellar.

As we pulled away from his apartment, Guillaume started having second thoughts. “Estonian strippers don’t steal, do they? Maybe I should have taken my laptop with me?”

“Why don’t you just kick her out?”

“Oh, I don’t want to be rude. She’s a really nice girl.”

I told him I wasn’t an expert, but from what I’d read in the papers, strippers frequently steal.

“Prostitutes steal. This girl is a stripper.”

“She doesn’t take money for sex?”

“God, no.” He thought a bit and then added, “Well, not from me.”

To make him feel better, I suggested that since she hadn’t drugged him and left in the middle of the night, the odds were good she might not rob him. Guillaume decided we should drive back, and he ran in to get his computer.

“She’s still asleep,” he said, relieved.

“Did you take your cash, too?”

“I don’t have any cash. There are only books to steal, and she doesn’t read French.”

After we finished at the post office, I returned with Guillaume to his apartment. I wanted to get a look for myself. We passed the landlord on the staircase, and he mentioned nothing about a naked pole dancer asleep spread-eagle in the master bedroom.

She hadn’t stolen anything from Guillaume. In fact, she was seated at his kitchen table, sipping coffee, typing away on her very own—and very expensive—laptop.

“This is my friend, Julia,” Guillaume introduced her. She was tall and attractive. She was sluttier than a post office worker but less so than most of the high-booted girls you’ll find prowling the streets of Tallinn.

I was pleasantly surprised. I’ve been to a few strip clubs in Tallinn and am always disappointed. The “dancing” is generally of a quality lower than a grade school ballet class, and often there’s a shirtless male with a python who effectively douses any desire whipped up by the girls. And if the snake dance doesn’t do it for you, the girls will often ruin the experience by rubbing their bodies against you and saying in a thick Russian accent, “You give me money now, da?”

I admit it’s been several years since I’ve been to the clubs, and it’s possible EU regulations have improved the dancing. But I doubt it. The strippers I’ve seen in Estonia were even lazier than construction workers. Since their clients were mostly catatonic Finns and undersexed Danes, they hardly had to do more than show up and get naked. The Finns we get in Tallinn don’t expect much, don’t speak much English, and so “give me money now” may really arouse them.

But Julia seemed different. She spoke British-accented English, was conservatively dressed, and had a contagious smile. We discussed politics and Europe, and she said she was getting ready to go to Barcelona “on business.” She finished her coffee, closed her laptop, and kissed Guillaume on the cheek. She offered me her hand and wished me good day.

“See,” Guillaume said when the door closed. “See what a judgmental ass you are?”

He was right, of course, but I wasn’t going to admit it. “I’m not the one who ran back for his laptop,” I said.

Guillaume and I drank coffee and talked about the sun-filled cafes of Paris. I told him I’d miss him and all his crazy adventures with people like Julia.

“But we can go see her dance before I leave,” he said.

I told him I thought that was a fine idea.


***
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Life on the Small Screen

In a routine dusting accident, my wife Liina knocked our television off its stand and it hasn’t worked since. Lacking the funds to buy the de rigueur flatscreen, we replaced our TV with a ten-year-old seventeen-inch model with rabbit-ears antennae.

After two weeks of Reporter and Singing with Stars, I’ve concluded that programs on channels 2 and 3 are not suitable for viewing on a small screen. Digital surround sound and a four-hectare screen are in fact necessary: if the sound is loud enough and image big enough, it is possible to induce hypnosis and blind yourself to the programming. Our small screen just can’t hack it: it somehow calls attention to the content.

Reporter is my favorite. It’s a real art to produce a seven-minute segment on a broken sauna window. We learn that a jealous suitor shot it out (an otherwise nice guy, according to a neighbor), there was no one was inside (no kids or animals, thank God), and that the sauna owner was a woman (desired by the shooter of course). Or at least that’s what I thought the story was about. My Estonian isn’t perfect and sometimes I question whether Reporter is broadcasting the nonsense I think it is.

Crime dramas are popular on both channels 2 and 3, and many of them star one of the lesser Baldwin brothers, which means the murderer can be identified by an attentive viewer within the program’s first two minutes.

And then there are the movies. Channel 2 runs things like Bad News Bears 5 and Police Academy 17. Most of these films are banned in Western countries by the Geneva Convention, and American investigators recently discovered that the CIA was using them to break prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Most of channel 2’s other shows are of the quality of what Americans call “community access cable,” which means that airtime is reserved for anybody with a pulse who wants twenty minutes to talk about the future of competitive knife throwing or do an abbreviated production of King Lear starring members of the local insane asylum. Channel 3 is slightly better, and shows like Meie Annid actually do help it halfway redeem itself. I say “halfway,” because the host, Anni, will sometimes put a pork leg in the oven and then step out for a televised Thai massage. I’m not sure what massage has to do with cooking, so the fact that a spa gets airtime has always reeked to me of that particular Eastern European brand of journalistic sleaze—the “ordered” article or program.

Liina tells me the Estonian networks can’t help it. She says they probably have limited budgets and are bad negotiators. I imagine the Hollywood rep to the Estonian buyer: “Sure, we’ve got that Anthony Hopkins picture you want, but you’ll have to buy eleven Goldie Hawn films to get it.”

Liina’s other theory is that Estonian channels are secretly run by an old communist who can’t understand English, and so he lets Janno Buschmann choose the films. Buschmann, in addition to being Estonia’s most ubiquitous film translator, is also the man who gives us Stephen King in Estonian, and so I don’t for one moment doubt the man’s dark sense of humor.

Liina tells me that if I don’t like the channels I don’t have to watch them and says the reason I make fun of shows like Dances with Stars is because I’m jealous. “If they invited you on as a guest,” she blew her top one day, “you’d think they were great shows.”

“Yeah, right,” I replied. “My dream in life is to dance with Ester Tuiksoo and be known as Tantsu Vello.”

“You dumbass!” Liina retorted. “Ester sings! She doesn’t dance.”

“That’s just this season,” I fired back. “They all dance eventually.”

But Liina might have a point. I honestly wouldn’t mind being invited on Riigi Kodanik where I’d sit in an uncomfortable chair with my back straight and dispense brilliant advice on economic policy in my broken but charming Estonian. President Ilves might be watching, and he’d call up his friends in Brussels and get me a think tank job where I’d be paid 200,000 euros a year to drink Scotch and pontificate.

All my problems will soon be solved when the Estonian channels go digital: then I’ll get none of them. And I’m waiting for that day. I’ll miss ETV, of course, but Liina and I will both be better off without the rest. She won’t have The Bold and the Beautiful and The Storm of the Soul. I’ll miss Lost and Galakontsert James Bond. We’ll be relegated to our books. And of course YouTube. Now there’s a small screen we haven’t begun to explore.

Suckers

On a flight to New York, my wife Liina and I killed time reading the Skymall catalog. The Skymall is most wonderfully American: Even in a time of crisis, it sells what absolutely no one needs at prices almost everyone can afford. Such as:

Gravity Defyer Shoes which “propel you forward” ($129.95).
The Indoor Dog Restroom ($64.95).
The Marshmallow Shooter ($24.95, but $49.95 gets you one which shoots twice as far—40 feet).
The Digital Camera Swim Mask ($99.95).
The Ultrasonic Eyeglasses Cleaner ($69.95).
The Germ-eliminating Knife Block ($89.95).
The Instant Doorway Puppet Theatre ($69.95).
The Animatronic Singing & Talking Elvis ($199.95).

Americans are so used to products like these that they don’t find them unusual. It’s said the average North American is bombarded by over five thousand advertising brand messages each day, so you might think we’d grow immune to Skymallesque stupidity.

Not my family.

A few years ago my mother gave me a Big Mouth Billy Bass, which is a battery-powered, rubber trophy fish mounted on a wooden plaque. It has a motion sensor, and when someone walks by, the fish thrashes about and sings a Bobby McFerrin tune ($19.99). The first time you see it you find it cute and clever. After the third time, you want to smash it to pieces with a baseball bat.

Liina likes to laugh at North America’s out-of-control consumer culture, and she used to frequently remark about how gullible we are. She argued that Estonians were immune to such appeals. But later she had to eat her words.

When we lived in the United States, the first thing she fell for was the “12 CDs for a penny” mail-order offer: Get 12 for one cent in exchange for buying ten more over the next two years at “regular club prices.” Liina pored over the catalog, selected the work of twelve artists, and taped her penny inside the envelope. Six weeks later the CDs arrived—along with a bill for 25 dollars for “shipping and handling.” When she canceled her membership she was obligated to return the CDs, and the return postage amounted to around three dollars. That’s a hell of a lot of handling.

Lately, I’ve noticed that America’s aggressive sales culture has gained ground in Estonia. The movement began quietly on the language front: before I knew it, Estonia had the verb shoppama. Soon after came Amway and a salesforce trained in the invasion of private homes.

A company called Lux has been making the rounds selling vacuum cleaners, and their fast-talking sales rep left Liina no room to refuse what would turn out to be a one-and-a-half-hour long in-home sales pitch. But Liina, hardened in the USA, had a secret agenda to get our filthy couch cleaned for free.

I found a convenient excuse to be absent during the demonstration so that my credit card and bank information would be safe. Given how skeptical Estonians claim to be, I feared Estonian door-to-door salesmen would possess powers far beyond their western counterparts. I imagined the Lux rep as a middle-aged, thick-boned woman, a Guantanamo-trained, jackboot-wearing, Olivier-as-evil-dentist type who smiled but was at all times ready to deliver an electrical charge to your gonads in the name of clean floors. (She was probably an attractive twenty-something, but you can’t be too careful.)

“Well, did you buy it?” I asked Liina when I returned home that evening.

“I don’t have any money,” she said. “But someday I’m going to buy it.” After conning the sales rep into cleaning our sofa and two rugs, Liina was wowed by the product and its magical vibrasuck technology.

I tried to argue that it was cheaper to rent such a vacuum, or even hire a professional cleaner, than it was to pay 25,000 kroons, but Liina wasn’t having any of it. She had concluded it was a superior product which could clean faster better. And maybe it could. I had to admit she does most of our vacuuming.

Friends tell me the Lux company is doing quite well in Estonia, especially selling to pensioners who don’t have experience chasing away hard-driving salesmen. I’m told some buy two vacuums (one as a gift for the kids) and pay for them with leasing contracts. I don’t know what business Estonian pensioners have buying a vacuum that expensive, but who am I to tell them what to do? I’ve still got Big Mouth Billy Bass on my wall.

In recent years, the same company who makes Billy Bass has developed a deer—named Buck, of course—a life-sized wiggling deer head which sings “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Low Rider,” and then farts loudly at the end of its performance ($150). Every time I visit my mother, I pray that she hasn’t seen it in stores.

Soul Food

Texas’ best barbecue, according to Texas Monthly magazine, is located in the town of Lexington and open only Saturdays from eight a.m. until the meat runs out (generally around noon). Weekdays, the restaurant’s owner works in a coal mine, and the chef, known as Miss Tootsie, is a 73-year-old former middle school janitor.

Of course, the restaurant has more than a story—it’s got great food. But the story is a large part of its appeal. Which is what I often find myself missing in Estonian restaurants: a story.

A friend of mine likens the Estonian dining experience to eating from vending machines in a hospital cafeteria. Assembly-line dining serving not what’s market fresh but what the wholesaler delivered. Who’ll even care, seems too often the logic of the chef, when everyone is only here to impress each other?

Luckily, that’s changing. Family-run or passionately-run restaurants are slowly sprouting all over Estonia. There’s the Creperie in Kadriorg, Anni Aro’s café in Haapsalu, and and the Chocolaterie in the Old Town. And of course there’s everybody’s old standby, Contravento. I can’t name all Estonia’s soul food joints here—readers will do that in the comments section—but suffice it to say there’s a trend toward restaurants whose interiors do not resemble Nevada brothels and where food itself is the actual draw.

The newest one on that list is the Šoti Klubi (Scottish Club) at the end of Uus Street in the Old Town. What has always been a pretty good bar and average restaurant has become an excellent restaurant with a pretty good bar. Chef Agu Alert supervised the removal of the monster bar which dominated the place and has turned it into a restaurant which is downright, well, European. From your first step in the door, you know it’s a family affair—in this case a family of one. Agu is the restaurant’s proprietor, chef, waiter, barman, and sometimes dishwasher. He’s a one-man show trying to make a go of a place in a market where the pundits say thirty percent of all restaurants will go belly up before spring.

And I’m rooting for him. I want his roe appetizer (given up by the fish under his personal supervision), slow-cooked lamb (the only oven like it in the country), and crème brûlée (not intolerably sweet like most make it) to be around come springtime, when my business picks up a bit and I'm able to dine out more.

I asked Agu how much he was sleeping in order to do every job in the place, and he answered three hours. “You need to get some of those little Knorr’s packages…” my wife Liina suggested. He’d slept so little he found her joke only half funny but resisted bludgeoning her with a rolling pin long enough to seriously respond that nobody would come to eat astronaut or backpacker food.

It it’s true that thirty percent of restaurants will go bankrupt before springtime, then I consider it my job to see that it’s the right thirty percent. Like many others, my business has suffered in this crisis and I live on a lot less than I did a year ago. So I’m even choosier about where I spend my hard-earned shekels. I’ve shunned experimentation and pretense and have gone straight for the soul food—places which Miss Tootsie of Texas might approve of. I want to put good things in my stomach and put my money behind people who give a damn and love the work they do. And if we all do the same, we can count on a beautiful spring.

Code Breakers

“Sometimes I feel like I’m writing the same column over and over again,” I said to my wife, Liina. “Like I made the movie 101 Dalmatians, got good reviews, and so decided to remake the film using Labrador Retrievers.”

Liina just stared at me.

“You know, when I write about Estonian consumers allowing themselves to be screwed. Do you think that people notice the similarities or get tired of reading my pieces?”

“Well,” she said. “For one thing, you don’t have many competitors for your column. And secondly, the columns come out two weeks apart.”

That was not the answer I was after.

Estonians often brag about how straightforward and honest they are, how they’ll speak the truth even if it hurts. And how this is somehow a positive attribute.

When I was a kid, my mother had a cardinal rule for dealing with others: If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all. I still think that most of the time this isn’t a bad rule. Ask yourself: In most instances, is there anything to be gained by saying exactly what you’re thinking? Fools almost always know—or at least strongly suspect—they’re fools. You telling them so isn’t going to make them less foolish; it’s only going to put you on their shitlist.

Liina believes that if you tell someone directly he’s a shithead that he’ll benefit and might even be grateful. “Hey, yes, you’re right. I am a shithead. Thanks for pointing that out. I wouldn’t have known it had you not said it. And since you’ve brought it to my attention, I’ll now rethink my shitheadedness and take constructive steps to be a better human being.”

Would other cultures be better off if they adopted the Estonian model and spoke the raw truth? I’m not convinced.

If you happen to disagree with someone, it’s more fruitful to get him talking, make him think you’re listening, make him think you care. Then, after you’ve softened the beachheads with some nodding, a few “ah hahs”, and a little pretend listening, you very gently suggest there might perhaps be another way of seeing the issue.

Liina claims it’s a simply difference in languages. A direct answer to a direct question is not rude in Estonian, she says, but it can be in English. She calls English a coded language. For example, if an American is asked how he liked the food and he answers “It was interesting,” this probably means he disliked it. (It at least suggests the host should not probe further.) If the same question is posed to an Estonian and he answers in his language that “Toit oli huvitav,” then you know the food challenged his palate. Liina admits an Estonian wouldn’t describe food with the word “interesting,” but it’s the best she could come up with on short notice.

“Raw honesty gives you a new point of view,” she says. “How could you not be happy about it? Isn’t that the whole point?” Well, Liina, thanks. That’s very, uh, interesting.

But what’s wrong with my coded language?

Estonians tend to attach gravity to the question, “Kuidas läheb?” I respect that, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a major achievement. For centuries, people in other cultures have asked “How’s it going?” (Comment ça va? Qué tal? Wie gehts? Kak dyela?) as a form of “hello,” and their civilizations haven’t yet collapsed. When I answer “fine”, I communicate that I’m grateful you asked but that I also understand you don’t want to hear the answer. Because Estonians eschew that perfunctory exchange doesn’t make them special. It makes them contrarian.

“Stop shitting on the Estonian soul,” Liina shouted when I read her that last paragraph. (The reader may decide himself whether Liina benefitted from my directness.)

But if the “how’s it going?” question is the mark of a coded language, then are not most languages coded? What then is Estonian’s code? Is it really not coded? And if yes, is the fact it’s not coded the very code itself? Maybe some sort of code might lend to more self-expression in Estonian society and therefore healthier living?

Liina argues that if I want honey from her lips that I shouldn’t ask her opinion. In one respect she’s right: I get good columns from arguing with her.

But maybe there’s a happy medium between the two extremes, Estonian and western. Maybe Liina does happen to have a point about my coded language. When an American friend tells me something is “just terrific,” I’m of course skeptical. Though when an Estonian friend tells me something is “pask,” I am also filled with doubt—it’s surely not that bad.

An old friend of mine used to wear a t-shirt that read: If you don’t have something nice to say, then come over here and sit by me. A wonderful sentiment, I think, beckoning those with nothing nice to say to vote with their feet, yet still protecting the optimists from a verbal haranguing. I ought to look into printing up several million of those for distribution in Estonia and the USA.

Liina can have the very first one.

Taxi Trauma

When I first came to Estonia in 1991, I tried to be a chameleon. I practiced drinking vodka before noon, kept neatly torn strips of Postimees in my bathroom, and forced myself to eat carp, even though it’s a bottom-dweller that tastes like mud. As the nation developed, these habits quickly disappeared. Yet others remained. Estonians still remove their shoes before entering a home, song festivals still make me cry, and stopping for a red traffic light is still optional. With all the changes, I’ve tried to stay current and behave as a modern Estonian, with the exception of one item: I still don’t like riding in the front seat of a taxi.

In New York, where I lived in the late eighties, nobody would think to sit in the front of a cab. The driver wouldn’t unlock the front door unless you were a sultry Vogue model who looked particularly available. With few exceptions, passengers happily sat in the back behind bulletproof glass. Drivers were rarely models of good hygiene. If from the east, they often reeked of a spice bazaar. If they were white, they generally had the mien of a psycho killer and more body hair than a yeti. There were plenty of good reasons to ride in back.

But when I arrived in Estonia, I noticed passengers routinely leaping into the front seat of cabs without the slightest fear. In the early days, the cabs were mostly beige Zhigulis and the occasional black Volga. To enter the front seat of the cab was to enter the driver’s private world. The factory stick-shift knob would be removed and replaced with something reflecting the driver’s personality, like an animal skull or an enemy’s finger set inside a glass ball. On the dashboard were stickers from foreign lands, or small banners with coats of arms from Estonian valds. In rare cases, the driver had a bobble-headed toy dashboard dog from the DDR.

I tried to be Estonian and ride up front, but I couldn’t help feel I was violating the cabby’s personal domain. It also seemed to compromise cabby-customer relations. When I rode in the back, I was being served. When I sat up front, I felt I might be asked to change a tire.

My place was in the back. Cabbies pushed the Zhiguli’s spare carburetor aside to make room for me. If they thought there was something wrong with me, they were polite enough not to show it. Their silence caused no end to my inner conflict. If I sit in back, I wondered, will he think that I think I’m better than he is? If I sit in front, will he respect me more and cheat me less? If a Zhiguli collides with a freight train, in which seat am I more likely to survive?

I asked all my friends about this front-seat behavior. Was it a Soviet man-of-the-people thing that inspired Estonians to ride up front? Since we are both of equal value in a proper socialist society, would Marx want driver and passenger to sit side by side? This seemed plausible, since the Soviets took great pains to promote the common man. Kids wanted to grow up to be tractor drivers. Songs were written about tram drivers.

I spent years theorizing. Finally, my wife Liina got tired of it and explained that in a Soviet-made car, the front seat was the warmest place, so naturally the customer would sit there.

“Really?” I asked. I thought her reasoning sounded specious.

“Absolutely,” she replied. “It’s a well known fact.”

“But Zhigulis are such tiny cars. The temperature can’t differ that much from front to back.”

“I have no idea,” she confessed. “But you seem desperate for an explanation, so I gave you one.”

I tried out my theory on her about it being something Soviet, about the passenger being the equal of the driver.

“What bullshit!” she choked. “I’ve never heard such nonsense.” She said that Soviet equality propaganda might have been believable in Bear’s Ass, Russia, but Estonians weren’t having any of it.

For a while I put my theorizing to rest. I investigated other matters, like why Estonians wear their wedding rings on the right hand. Like why every Russian I ever passed on the street asked me for matches. You know, weighty matters.

But I’ve always returned to the cabbies. Just last week I stepped into a taxi in Helsinki. The back seat, of course. The driver was one of those avuncular Scandinavian types in a lint-free sweater.

“Hey, does anybody ever ride up front?” I asked.

He thought for a while, then: “My wife does.”

“But what about passengers?”

“Oh, I get the occasional Estonian.”

“Ah hah!” I had struck gold. “So why do you suppose that is?”

It was an eternity before he answered: “I’ve never really thought about that.”

“Well, I have—“ and I launched into my Marxist theory.

He kept two hands on the wheel and looked straight ahead. But I could tell he was interested.