Elites

As infrequently as I fly I am relegated to the cattle section. On my last trip to North America, airline personnel shuffled me into the first class check-in line to speed things along. For a short while, society’s elite, middle class, and heroin smugglers all stood together in the queue, leaving a few of the first class passengers perturbed. A well-dressed man in his late fifties turned to me and sneered about a backpacker who was getting checked in before him: “He doesn’t look like first class material to me.”

A bit put off by his snobbery, I gave the man a conspicuous onceover. “Quite frankly,” I said, “I’m a bit worried about you.”

“What do you mean?” he said, examining his clothing, stunned that I might question his perfect suit and designer bag.

“Well, you could be undercover. What if you’re an Al Qaeda man who’s had plastic surgery? Or worse. What if you’re just some middle-class Joe in an expensive suit.”

He wasn’t quite sure what to make of me. “Look there,” I said. “I believe it’s your turn at the counter.”

I haven’t flown first class in years. Or Upper- or Business- , or Elite-, or Grey Poupon-, or Up Yours Class, or whatever more recent name they’ve dreamed up for it. In the day I flew first class, the airline TWA (The Worst Airline) was still around, and I got to sit in the wide seats only because I flew so often that I was automatically upgraded. But even when I basked in the comforts of first class, I always thought they were overrated.

The food wasn’t that much better, and eating with a metal fork wasn’t significantly more gratifying than eating with a plastic one. The movies were fine, but if you wanted a good one you still had to bring it yourself. Drinks in the first class cabin were free in North America, though every passenger knew they weren’t really free, and first class passengers generally aren’t much for getting drunk on airplanes. Sure, the reclining seat and extra legroom were nice on flights over the Atlantic, but for me those were few and far between. However, there was one benefit to first class that was certainly not overrated: Stewardesses were always nice to you.

Part of the general nastiness of American stewardesses has been attributed to the fact that these poor women joined the airline when they were starry-eyed twenty-year-olds. Flying was a good way to see the world and, back before women’s liberation, working as a stewardess was a pretty sexy job. The ladies joined the union, jetted in and out of Paris, and by the time their fun became work they weren’t twenty years old anymore. They were locked into careers, condemned to serve Coca-Cola at forty-thousand feet for the rest of their working lives.

As the mood of stewardesses began to turn nasty, the US skies saw deregulation, which meant competition and a precipitous drop in fares: the common man could now afford to fly. Soon after deregulation, life got harder for stewardesses when low-cost airlines entered the fray. Anyone who’s had a basic chemistry course knows that if you take a bitter middle-aged woman used to serving the wealthy, pour in a planeload of middle-class boors, all the fun will soon be gone from air travel.

Coach passengers are indeed sometimes the raggedy-assed multitudes who fly once a year and think that the flight attendants are their personal slaves. I’ve more than once seen a stewardess blow up at a coach passenger, informing him that she is first and foremost responsible for his safety. Which is true, but she’s also responsible for getting him a drink and a meal, and I’ve always thought we’d all be better off if a stewardess could just smile her way through a difficult situation.

Of course it isn’t just North America. Even in Scandinavia, under whose socialism we enjoy double extra equality, there’s a difference. First class stewardesses are a bit cooler, but since there isn’t usually a Finn puking in the forward lavatory, they are decidedly more at ease, which translates to a superior flying experience.

Now that the Estonian state will soon have the majority of Estonian Air and is starting to think about change, I’ve got an idea of my own: Make every Estonian Air seat a first class seat.

Estonians are enamored with the idea of first class. During a recent ETV news segment about a manor home, the manager mentioned at least three times that they were targeting “elites.” I recently bought a used Skoda, which an Estonian man deemed a chick car—“Very simple,” he said. “Not enough buttons,” which, he felt, made it “inappropriate for business use.” And more than two Estonians have told me my telephone number is too long. “Prestige numbers come from EMT,” one said, “and your number says ‘cheap plan’.” Move too much beyond Maseratis and designer clothes, and I am useless at recognizing the symbols of Estonia’s upper class.

Coming out of the throes of Soviet poverty, Estonia is understandably caught up in a chase for status. It may take years for people to come back down to earth, so why not simply embrace this quest to be elite by making every Estonian Air seat first class?

But it’s not about giving everyone a wider seat, a metal fork, gourmet food, and unlimited amounts of alcohol, though of course we’ll need those, too. And I’m not talking about stewardesses helping each passenger off with his jacket and hanging it in a dust-free environment, though let’s do that, as well. My idea of first class is that no one will sneer at a backpacker in line. That even the most absurd behavior by the most vile economy-class passenger will be met with an approving smile. Like when dining at Buckingham Palace and the Queen of England blows her nose using the tablecloth because the Latvian president has done so first: Indeed, Her Majesty may be offended, but she knows it’s more important to make the guest feel welcome. I envision the same for Estonian Air.

What if every passenger were addressed as härra, preili, or proua? What if the check-in worker was still glad to see you at six a.m.? What if stewardesses were thoroughly versed in the English language? (They’re the only stewardesses I’ve seen who can make “safety” a three-syllable word.) And let’s teach them to be more assertive. Currently, they’re so quiet they might as well not even be there.

It won’t be easy, of course. We’d need to bring in Peep Vain, possibly the only man who can get an Estonian to smile without the use of artificial stimulants. Or maybe we just forget hiring Estonians and get all our stewardesses from Singapore Air. That would be expedient, but probably not doable, given state ownership.

But what if every passenger exited an Estonian Air plane remarking, “Geez, they were so damned nice to me…” and was somehow dazzled by a positive flying experience. Sure, Estonian passengers may not give a damn about being dazzled, but they’ll fly Estonian Air anyway, no matter how bad it gets. The fact is that if Estonian Air is going to be financially successful, then foreigners are going to have to like it, too. So perhaps this elite business is something Estonians and foreigners can agree on? I, for one, am always ready for someone to dazzle me.

***

Illustration courtesy of Hilde Kokk De Keizer

"Normaalne"

Summer brings me out from under my suburban rock and into the city to witness life once again in my self-appointed role as an amateur anthropologist. I’ve followed the economic decline in the newspaper, but by the looks of Old Town on a sunny day, you’d never know a crisis had visited. Many of the fashionable restaurants are still around, interiors still sleek and modern enough to make a Finnish designer blush. The streets are still packed with Mercedeses, Audis, and the occasional Bentley or Maserati. True, there seem to be fewer locals in the cafes, but those present don’t seem to have lost the spirit of the boom—Hugo Boss all over the men, and women sport more D&G sunglasses per capita than in places on earth where the sun actually shines.

Each new season, much like the black storks who return to Estonia, I begin a search for a café nesting site among my own species, what I call the “normal” people. This means a search for people like me, whose clothing is worn around the edges, who don’t have trophy mistresses, and who can’t remember the last time they went to a nightclub. I search for a place where there is the absence of a thirst for more, where those who sit among the tables appear merely content, without an agenda to impress. I look for those, who, as Marcus Aurelius put it, are not “studious of the popular applause.”

I used to like the Noku klubi, though to get in I had to wait outside until someone leaving let the door swing open long enough for me to enter. (My wife Liina is a member, but she lost her card, and out of principle refuses to pay 100 kroons to replace it.) I’ve thought of applying for membership myself—I know two members who would recommend me, but rumor is they reject everyone who applies who isn’t pals with the owners. More importantly, if I happened to be accepted it would take the fun out of sneaking in. And if I were rejected, my enthusiasm would be soured, sneaking into a place where I am officially unwanted. Also, as Liina pointed out recently, the “No” of Noku stands for “young,” and by Estonian standards, I no longer fit that description.

Another haunt where I look for normal people is the little cigar shop tucked away on Dunkri Street—La Casa del Habano. Its name rings of a place where you might bump into revolutionaries and spies, two types I’m naturally drawn to, if only because I’ve fantasized since youth about being recruited by MI6 and issued a Walther PPK. La Casa, as its known to regulars, is Estonia’s spiritual heir to Rick’s Café Americain. Sans Nazis, as far as I know.

Among La Casa’s regulars you’ll find Belgian Jacques-Alain, a former circus performer. He now makes his living selling WMDs to Arab nations, but after a drink or two you can always persuade him to show you a few moves from his days as a contortionist. His specialty was enterology, which he’ll explain is the practice of squeezing one’s body into a small container that appears to be impossibly small for the human body. I once saw him get almost his entire body inside a cigar humidor no bigger than a footstool. After he did it, others tried it until the humidor broke into a dozen pieces and they had to chip in to pay for it.

There’s a Persian called Shah by his friends, because he could be the doppelgänger of the Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan. Shah always has a CD in his pocket in case a local establishment is playing techno music. It disappoints him when young Estonians think the throb of techno is a danceable beat, and so he flies from table to table recruiting Estonians to join impromptu Bollywood dances. I once saw him lead thirty Estonians as they flexed and gyrated to the Hindu classic “Nimbooda Hum Dil De Chuke.”

There’s another Persian, far more mysterious, who always seems to have a cigar in his mouth and be talking at the same time. This man’s story is never the same twice. One day he’ll claim to be a Zoroastrian descendant of Darius I, the greatest of the Achaemenid kings. The next he’ll regale you with stories of fighting alongside Sir Bart Fitzroy Maclean, though he’s roughly my age which would mean he, at best, fought battles with a toy sword. Darius, as they call him, was educated in English public schools and his favorite parlor trick is to recite poems in Brythonic, a predecessor language of Welsh, which he does without any prompting after his third Campari.

There’s a nubile twenty-three-year-old who is already on her fourth man this season, and she makes no bones about only wanting them for their money. “I’m not interested in Taivo anymore,” she told me while bouncing on the knee of the guy she dumped Taivo for. “Taivo’s credit card got me only as far as London, and by the third shop I visited it was maxed out. I had to buy my own plane ticket home.” I’d met Taivo a couple of times, and I have to believe he’d planned the whole thing, figuring she’d be stranded in London and have to learn humility by sleeping in the tunnels of the Underground. But everyone likes this woman, perhaps because she’s unabashed about her greed. I find her honesty refreshing but on the other hand don’t see how she’s much different than a prostitute. I haven’t yet got around to asking her that.

Another regular is Rein, who is some kind of high-level policeman, probably connected to KaPo or the CIA, or maybe even the KGB. You can always find him in a dark corner smoking strong Spanish cigarettes. He never moves from his seat and quietly surveys the room. I once asked him if he always sat with his back to the wall in case there was a gunfight. He only stared at me, his expression unchanged. After a while he told me he thought guns were overrated, that it was much more fun to kill with your bare hands. Not sure if he was joking, I said that that was also my experience, though I occasionally liked to use a garrote for a little variety. Since then, we haven’t talked much.

Oddly enough, none of these people I gravitate toward fit my definition of normal, and I’ve begun to consider revising it. I’m told by a friend from a village on Estonia’s north coast that they have one resident referred to by the villagers as the normaalne mees, the normal man. This normal guy happens to be the only sober working-age man in the village, and he’s the one called upon if a leaky roof needs repaired. I’ve begun to think the villagers have a point, and perhaps I’m asking too much of “normaalne.”

I’m not sure how I fit into my decidedly abnormal crowd, nor am I sure why the proprietors of the joints where I hang out don’t run me off for being too boring. One reason could be that I always pay cash for my drinks. Or perhaps they like the idea that I one day might write about them and make them legends in print. I suppose the next best thing to having a song written about you is to cut a romantic figure in someone’s newspaper column.

It’s also possible that after this is published the thrill will be gone and I’ll no longer be welcome. Shah will complain that I didn’t properly describe his strapping, youthful figure. Or Darius will be angry that I didn’t mention he also has an excellent singing voice. People are impossible to please.

The frustrating thing is that while I’ve never found the normal people I seek, I am not uncomfortable around this whiskey-swilling band of bullshitters. And if the birds of a feather thing is actually true, then I’m merely nesting with my own kind. And that is the scariest thing of all.

Registered Bastard

“This has no apostille!” So said the lady at the registry of births who examined my marriage certificate. I was trying to register my newborn son with the state, but it seemed the officials weren’t going to have it.

“Sure it does,” I said. “Look right there.” I pointed to the embossed gold stick-on seal in the corner of the document in all its splendor. I drew her attention to the attractive gold tones used elsewhere and the four different signatures on both sides of the page! This document was a bureaucrat’s wet dream. If this wasn’t an apostille, then I didn’t know what was.

The official raised the document to eye level and turned it in the light. “No, that’s just a gold sticker. You need an apostille.”

In 1992, Estonia freshly out of Soviet clenches, a gold seal on a document would have gotten me just about anything. An American friend who taught English in Rakvere once presented his university diploma to a traffic cop and told him he was head of the United Nations and had diplomatic immunity. The cop let him go. The same friend liked to show the police his City of Chicago library card when he was stopped for inspection. He claimed the cops believed it was a driver’s license, but I think an equal argument could be made that they wanted to avoid the extra hassle that arresting a foreigner would bring. Especially one who was also head of the United Nations.

Those were the days when the reverence for shiny stickers was such that any document with stamps and signatures could pass for whatever you said it was. While I remember those days fondly, I’ve stopped living them. I honestly believed that my marriage certificate had an apostille. After all, the marriage certificate had long been accepted by the tax board to justify filing a joint income statement, and it was approved years ago by the immigration authority as the basis for my current residence permit. If it was good enough for them, why wasn’t it good enough for the registry? I put that question directly to the nice lady.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “The immigration authority will only take a document with an apostille. Maybe you had one and lost it.”

“No, I never had one,” I insisted. “Because I remember well when they took away my three-year residency permit. When I reapplied under the basis of marriage, I was only eligible for a one-year permit.”

“The migratsiooniamet will only take an apostillitud document,” she repeated, as if saying it out loud somehow made it true. Or made me a liar.

“Well,” I said, trying a different tactic. “I have lots of foreign friends in common law marriages with Estonian women whose children have been registered. What’s different about my son?”

“Because you and your wife are married.”

But were we? Hadn’t she just told me that in the eyes of the state we were not? She had me thoroughly confused. I pinched myself to make sure I was actually there.

“Well, I can tell you right now that I’m not going to be able to get you the document you want before your 30-day deadline,” and I noted that there were only seven days left. “So go ahead and register my son as a bastard.”

“No!” she gasped. Which quite frankly surprised me.

***

Although Estonians like to brag about their IT accomplishments, I have always been more impressed by something else: their tolerance for alternative ways of living. In the west, where a child born out of wedlock is often viewed as a potential bank robber or murderer, in Estonia nobody bats an eye. But what impresses me even more about Estonia, is that single mothers never indulge in self-pity. They do not take on poor-me-against-the-world attitudes; they do not see their lives as “over”; they do not stand in line twice at the government trough; they do not use the lack of a father as an excuse for everything that goes wrong in their lives. Quite the opposite: they meet reality head on and go through life without any visible chip on their shoulder.

In the west, I’ve often thought many children might do better without a father in the home. I am overstepping my mandate here and speaking as a psychologist, but it seems to me that no father is better than a crappy father. In Estonian society, a woman is free to mate with a deadbeat and drop him, while in the west he is often kept on for appearance’s sake, because a child born out of wedlock is “disadvantaged” and teachers will whisper behind his back in the school corridors: “There goes that poor bastard. With no father around to teach him to use deodorant, it’s no wonder he smells.”

But I don’t care if my kid is a registered bastard, and that’s what I told the woman at the registry. “He’s going to be a Canadian citizen. He’s going to be an Estonian citizen. Why should I care what mark you put next to his name in your book? Make him a bastard and give me my piece of paper so I can take him to the doctor.” I only wanted some mark next to his name. I didn’t care which. Any mark at all would get him, as Walker Percy famously wrote, “a neat styrene card with one's name on it certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist.”

All this time, Robert sat there in his car seat on the bureaucrat’s desk looking ever so helpless. Twenty years ago a cute kid and a box of chocolates would have gotten the job done. No apostille would have been needed. But this official was completely unimpressed. How Germanic, I thought. I reflected that maybe the Estonians would run the EU well in 2018. (And then I wondered if we’d get the roads fixed by then.)

Despite my appeals and the cuteness of my child, the bureaucrat was chained to her system. She believed that Liina and I were married, and she desperately wanted to record in her book what was correct. I admired this, honestly, but it wasn’t all that expedient. My pressing issue was that after 22 hours in labor, Robert’s emergence into the world wasn’t the easiest, and his family doctor thought it might be a good idea to see a specialist. “But don’t take him to a big hospital,” the doctor said. “The doctors will refuse to see him if he’s not registered.” Our options, she explained, were to pay at a private clinic or petition the state health insurance fund to give Robert short-term coverage. “So what am I paying 33 percent social taxes for?” I asked the doctor. She didn’t have much of an answer. “Bureaucrats,” she shrugged.

***

I’ve determined the west is wrong in attributing the troubles of the world to the birth of children out of wedlock. It’s not bastard sons responsible for the ills of the world, but rather frustrated fathers of bastard sons. What bureaucrats fail to understand is that when it comes to my son I am completely indifferent to their tiny pieces of paper and the different positions they arrange them on their desks during the day. If my kid needs a doctor, I’m going to do whatever is necessary to get him one, including stepping over, around, or directly on top of a bureaucrat. Don’t bureaucrats have children of their own? Or are theirs are born with apostilles on their foreheads, completely equipped to navigate life’s labyrinth of ciphers? And, most to the point, why can’t Estonia’s bureaucrats simply be as practical as Estonia’s single mothers?

***

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

Fatherhood

“Lance Armstrong, how does it feel to win the Tour de France?”

How do you answer that? I’ve never been satisfied with the answers athletes give, and so I found myself stumped when friends began calling to ask, “How does it feel to be a father?” I answered like a professional athlete (“Great!”), but I couldn’t help but be disappointed in myself. For someone who values language, the answer didn’t measure up. How should one express the feelings of fatherhood in a telephone sound bite suitable for the 21^st century? Perhaps the greater problem was that I didn’t yet really know how I felt. Some distance was required. It had to soak in before hitting home.

But Lance Armstrong, upon winning the Tour de France and asked about his emotions, is not permitted to shrug his shoulders and answer, “I dunno.” And so I too had to come up with a better answer.

***

At first, all the screaming is charming: a hospital floor packed with women in labor. I’d seen a birthing video, and so I knew the women had been trained to make these sounds. It’s like the mother is pronouncing the letter “U,” and breathing out at the same time, and it comes together in a way which might resemble an orgasm but is far more similar to a pack of coyotes howling around the rim of the Grand Canyon, a pleasant sound I’d used to put myself to sleep on several occasions. But the howling doesn’t last forever, and sooner or later, each woman on the floor begins to scream. It’s then that pleasant comparisons come to an end and you start to think of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

After 22 hours spent in the birthing ward, the screaming ceased to haunt me. It became rather business as usual, or white noise, the background hum of the world in which you dwell. In my case, I entertained Walter Mitty fantasies of what a fine medicin sans frontieres I’d make, the type of man who calmly saves lives amidst the chaos of battle or, in my case, wards of hysterical women.

Physically speaking, giving birth for the first time is difficult. I think those who forgo the laughing gas or epidurals are the Sir Edmund Hillarys of the birthing world. Although aware of the rigors of natural birth, I knew I was up to it. Liina was committed, too, as much as she could be, not knowing what circumstances would dictate. My job, according to the natural birthing video, was to support her in every way possible. To encourage. To enable. To, as politicians say, share her pain.

But, as Liina will attest, I am not the most patient man. I am also slightly competitive, and so nearing the twentieth hour of labor it began to irk me that the howling and screaming were so regularly followed by the crying of someone else’s newborn. As if by clockwork, every hour saw the birth of a child not ours, and each time I felt like someone who had been seated out of order in a popular restaurant: Hey, we got here before they did!

Although Liina and I are bit older than the average couple who gives birth in Estonia, this was our first child, and I tried to remind myself that first births are the most difficult. I had anticipated a birth like in the videos: ten minutes of coyote howls, two minutes of murderous screaming, and then a slimy infant in the arms of a weeping mother. Even though I’m aware there is editing involved in those videos, 22 hours is longer than anyone deserves. And that’s speaking only for myself. I can’t imagine Liina’s pain.

But all birthing videos are accurate in one respect: the child will eventually be born. True to the video’s promise, Liina’s pain ended miraculously and immediately, and mine along with it. There was palpable relief that the child would not attend university inside the womb.

***

As someone whose office is the kitchen table, bringing an infant home means that all work ceases. Life immediately revolves around the infant, and any pre-pregnancy pledges about a disciplined feeding routine are thrown out the window with the child’s first scream. Stopping the hollering becomes the focus of everyone’s life, and the father soon discovers that neither the pacifier, contorting your face, or threatening the child in a mock German accent will have any affect. A child will scream. It’s what they do.

I soon found it helpful to see my relationship with the child much the way the west views Hamid Karzai. Recognize you have to give him aid, but know that he’s almost always out to manipulate you. Remain flexible and in good humor. And constantly seek intelligence about his motives.

I placed my son on my lap as he screamed, and I logged on to Perekool.ee to seek advice from veteran mothers. Despite far more information available in English, I sought comfort from the experience of Estonian mothers, as if my son’s genetic code or their geographic proximity might make their advice more effective. I mummy-wrapped him in towels in the Soviet fashion, rubbed olive oil on his belly to relieve gas, and finally settled on the most cynical e-mother’s advice: I turned on my iPod and set it to maximum volume.

Given Liina’s birthing ordeal and her need to rest, I helped out where I could with our son’s care. I took over the shopping duties and found myself shoulder to shoulder with mothers in the aisles of Selver. An infant in my arms somehow gave me the right to join their lamentation about the poor quality of Fazer pirukad (no filling), the absurdities of sterilized eye swabs (sold only three to a pack), or where to put the oil on the stroller wheel so it will drive straight (I’ve given up).

Occasionally, I would encounter another man engaged in solo care of his infant, and we would naturally bond, sitting on a sunny bench outside the store where we made lists of pithy observations to give our wives who sent us shopping (Don’t put fruit and apples on the same list: the latter are the former, so we buy one and cross them both off. Lehttaigen and filotaigen are similar enough to be interchangeable. And don’t ask us to buy Estonian chocolate when Finnish chocolate is cheaper.)

In my forays with my son I was even given instruction in the Estonian language by fellow parents. For example, one should not ask if a newborn is an isane (male) or emane (female). Poiss or tüdruk (girl or boy) will do just fine. Passing Russian babushkas were so full of advice that I never even once had to ask for it. Store clerks became more patient. With an infant in your arms, it’s as if the whole world is finally on your side.

***

I finally made my peace with the answer “Great!” when someone asked how it felt to be a father. The real answer was simply too time consuming, and I was raised stoically enough to not give it over the telephone or share it with those I didn’t know well. But in the case of someone calling who really did want to know, I answered this way: When your child is born, you understand the phrase “I love you” is much more than three trite words on a Hallmark greeting card. You understand that it is shorthand for “I would throw myself under a train for you.”

And I also learned that at that moment when a child is born, everyone cries for different reasons. The child cries to fill his lungs; the mother cries because that’s what mothers do; and the father cries because, perhaps, he’s finally done something in his life that truly matters.

“Hey, Lance Armstrong, how does it feel to win the Tour de France?”

“Honestly speaking, I feel a lot of love.”

No, I can’t imagine it, either.

***

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

Visit our Dept. of Shameless Commerce.

Longing through Line: Drawing Back One's Home

The Estonia shown to foreigners — or, more accurately, the side of itself Estonia chooses to show — has never struck me as the real Estonia. Brochures with strings of suspicious superlatives about the most meteor craters per square kilometer of island, Laetalu’s record 70 plant species per square meter, or even the country’s impressive number of Olympic Gold Medal winners per capita have never held appeal, and seeing them in print brings to mind the desperation of Kansas farm towns I once witnessed on a car trip with my parents across the prairie: offerings such as the world’s tallest prairie dog, the world’s deepest hand-dug well, the world’s largest coal shovel, and the world’s largest ball of twine. What Kansas had to sell, I thought, was a safe, cheap, Africa. Endless, sweeping vistas with a lower likelihood that one might be eaten by a lion. And so it is with Estonia: its nature is what holds the appeal.

And not just nature. What, to me as an outsider, makes Estonia remarkable in the larger context of the overpopulated, over-hyped consumer society in which we live, is the subtlety of its nature.

But subtlety, by definition, doesn’t lend itself to easy description, which makes it doubly difficult to market. And most marketers would surely look askance upon someone who advocated the appeal of sitting against a tree and staring into the forest to watch light play against pines, or lying on one’s back staring into a Navitrolla sky.

Perhaps, then, representing the subtlety of Estonia is best left to artists. Perhaps art is the only medium which can to justice to Estonia’s subtlety?

The work of artist Jaanika Peerna does it justice. Whether speaking of her drawings or her installations, the Estonian artist’s work is devoid of superlatives and chest-beating declarations. Her drawings, in particular, bring to mind a rural landscape in a particularly cold March: the earth’s still-frozen surface with life below quietly waiting its turn. And he who takes time to contemplate it, somehow sensing the northern energy of spring which will not burst forth, but will emerge in its own paced, measured fashion which, like the Estonian temperament itself, can occasionally deeply frustrate outsiders.

Peerna lives in the picturesque Hudson Valley north of New York City, but spends summers in Estonia. She did coursework in Estonian art schools while earning degrees in art education from Tallinn University and the University of Art and Design in Finland. Her work cannot help but reflect her background and environment. “What I got from Estonia was a sensitivity to light and to the subtle, slow workings of nature,” Peerna says. “Every time I return to Northern Europe, I am reminded of that patience in nature – no big forms, no impressive anything. Only the quite flow of things.”

But to appreciate what you have, you sometimes have to lose it, and being an hour by train from the heart of New York City, for what it has deprived her of, has certainly given her perspective which informs her work. When she and David Rothenberg, her writer-philosopher-jazz-musician husband moved into their home in Cold Spring, New York, deep inside the Hudson Valley, she found herself yearning for open space and horizons. “I caught myself painting long horizontal works with horizon lines which were only visible here if you climbed to a mountain top.”

In her second graduate school experience, working for a Masters of Fine Arts at SUNY New Paltz, Peerna turned to inner landscapes, as well as works with micro- and macro levels of reference, microscopic imagery as landscape. No matter how her art developed, her yearning for an Estonian landscape somehow surfaced in her work.

“I am very aware that the reason Estonia’s nature influences my work so much is because I moved away from there,” she says. “If I was living in Estonia, I might not notice the things I described. So there is some nostalgic and idealistic tone to it all. But what can I do?”

Since the late 1990s, she has quietly recorded Estonia’s subtlety in drawings and video installations and shown them in galleries in New York, Lisbon, Aarhus, and Dubai. Two years ago, after a show at the Galerie Lavignes Bastille in Paris, two of her large drawings were acquired for the French National Art Collection.

Peerna is an Estonian artist better known outside Estonia than she is inside her homeland. This, in large part, comes from not having aggressively pursued a reputation on the Estonian art scene, but it also comes from having developed as an artist outside the traditional Estonian path. A graduate of Tallinn Pedagogical University, Peerna studied art teaching, rather than art itself. “For a career as an artist in Estonia,” she says, “I did not have the right credentials.”

To an outsider, “making it” on the Estonian art scene seems a struggle one might do well to avoid. Estonian artists seem to live in a revolving struggle: Scrape to buy paints and canvas; build a collection of works to show; wait two years to show at a decent gallery; pay the gallery owner; buy alcohol for other poor artists to drink at your opening; endure the obligatory speech about the significance of your work; hope your kultuuri kapital stipend will cover the costs when your work doesn’t sell; and beg any buyers to pay you black cash to escape social taxes. Then do it all over again and again until you die.

But home is in the blood, and sooner or later the artist must journey there. Especially when she’s been painting it for so long. Peerna has slowly begun to close the gap to her homeland, and her first bridge to the Estonian art world was provided by the New York Estonian House in 2001. Since then, she has had only two shows in Estonia (in 2001 at the Art Academy Gallery and at Linnagaleri 2002). She is quietly developing a following among Estonia’s few serious collectors. This June, she will have a solo exhibition at Tallinn’s ArtDepoo, her first show in Estonia for eight years, which she hopes will be one more quiet, subtle step toward being thought of as an Estonian artist.

Being recognized by the art world anywhere is no easy task, and it is certainly far more difficult in the United States than in Estonia. Despite Raul Meel’s rather sweeping, critical view of the Estonian art world in a 2006 Eesti Ekspress, where he wrote at length about lack of public funds for financing exhibitions and general artist survival, getting grants in the United States is even more difficult, because there are so many artists and so little government support.

Statistically speaking, for a nation with an adult population in its prime of only slightly over one-half million, one living artist breaking through in the West would be an achievement. For Estonia to have even a pair (Raul Meel, Jaan Toomik) whose names are familiar to art collectors and gallerists in New York is remarkable in itself.

Jaanika Peerna is too modest to add her name to that list, but she is working toward it. She was recently interviewed and photographed for inclusion in an upcoming American book called PRIME, profiles of international women who are in the periods of their lives where they are at their most productive. The book includes just fifty notable women, including political heiress Caroline Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supermodel Christy Turlington, and Estonian/American artist Jaanika Peerna.

“I’m flattered to be included in the book,” Peerna says, “though I thought my ‘prime’ was ahead of me! There’s so much more to do.” More to do includes shows in her adopted home of New York, but also a kind of spiritual fulfillment and satisfaction for the soul through closer attachment to the art world of her native land.

Jaanika Peerna’s work is at ArtDepoo, June 2^nd through June 30^th.

Class Confusion

“Don’t be friendly with my builders,” cautioned a contractor we hired to work on our house several years ago. “If you get too close, they’ll take advantage of you.” Of course, I’d already gotten too close.

In Canada and the United States, where we’re all part of a conspiracy to pretend class differences are minor, we are inculcated from birth to make extra efforts to show that while some have more money than others, we’re all created equal (or if we’re not, then Colonel Colt made us so). Children are taught to say “yes sir” and “no sir” to even the plumber’s assistant who arrives to remove the giant hairball from the bowels of the bathroom sink. While father may get in his Mercedes to drive to the office, he is not above standing in the driveway for a morning smoke with a crew of workers arrived to put on a new roof. It’s important to make a show of it.

The classes of society may or may not have something in common, but all seem at least superficially engaged in a quest for a classless society. Like Henry V moving incognito among his soldiers’ campfires to take their temperature on the eve of battle, children of America’s middle- and upper classes are often sent to work summers in the company of the country’s lower class, the logic being to help them understand the real world, as well as to appreciate how good they’ve got it.

And so as a North American, it was not unnatural for me to sit in the garden with a crew of Estonian house framers, share a few beers, and discuss everything from a builder’s choice of mountain bike to the merits of steel-toed work boots. Little did I know that from the moment I popped the bottle cap off that first Saku, I had upset a thousand years of Estonian tradition.

***

“Orjapidaja ei räägi orjakeelt,” I’d heard a dozen times—the slave keeper doesn’t speak the slave’s language—though I first saw it only as an explanation why Estonia’s rulers never deigned to learn the language. Only later would I realize that a language barrier is immensely practical: it further ensures a solid class barrier. Had I been unable to speak Estonian, I would have been forced to honor a thousand years of history and not gotten myself in so much trouble. Without a common language, I would have remained an unknown entity. Had they not gotten to know me, they perhaps would have feared me. And as it turned out, the very moment I was no longer mysterious is the moment they started taking advantage of me.

I knew they were drunk because of the questions. An Estonian may have burning questions inside him, but he will rarely ask them until he is drunk. “Tell me, Vello,” dared Sven the floor layer. “How long did it take you to learn Estonian?” It was a compliment, of course, but a devious and calculated one. By answering it I permitted him inside my perimeter. Flatter the manor lord a little bit. Take him off his guard.

While I should have politely answered “six months” and kept on walking, I had a five-minute conversation with him, which led him to conclude I was a pretty good fella. And pretty good fellas stick together. Sven informed me that it was his cat’s fifth birthday and that tomorrow was Walpurgis Night. Of course, this was code for: We’re drunk now and will remain so indefinitely. Over the next two days, Sven and his crew installed floorboards with gaps between them big enough to insert your finger and inexplicably created fist-size holes in sheetrock walls. One simple human gesture had given rise to a full-scale revolt.

***

As a solution to the problem of forming relationships with workers, I’d tried an overseer, the man whose job it is to monitor quality. In practical terms, this means he screams at the workers on a regular basis, as if they were motivated purely out of fear. But the overseer concept never worked for me, since I could not afford to have one on the job site full time, and I tend to want faulty work corrected long before too much of it has been done.

But I see the system’s merits. When the German nobility departed Estonia, they did not leave a vacuum. Estonians themselves (often military officers) stepped into the role of manor lords, and the overseer fit nicely into the new management structure, serving a similar purpose to the overseer on a slave plantation in America’s antebellum South. The language barrier that existed for 700 years in Estonia may no longer be present, but the overseer provides a time-tested buffer to ensure the work process goes smoothly. He is the manor lord’s hatchet man. He knows which swearwords will have effect. He even wields the whip, which I have seen effectively used: a overseer entering the workers’ hut and literally beating the shit out of a drunken plasterer.

Until I served as my own overseer, I believed Estonians overdramatized the country’s class system. How could a people who so readily admitted that they were all once slaves have need to develop such a nuanced system for creating boundaries between them? But it was this way, too, in America’s antebellum South. Lines within the slave class were drawn by both skin tone and the type of work they did: field slaves versus house slaves. Estonians have drawn their class lines via education. Pairing the word “haritud” with an Estonian means far more than he is educated. An educated Estonian is one who is sensitive to the ways of your foreign culture, who likely speaks your language, one with whom you will find something in common. It means that he is less likely to, in the vernacular of Estonian literature, Rehepapp you.

Of course, a builder can be educated. In the west there are plenty of PhDs who can be found toting hammers, and there are plenty of autodidacts (and the occasional published poet or novelist) to be found among tradesmen such as carpenters and cabinetmakers. I find it odd that Estonians, a people who took quick advantage of the German system of higher education offered them, did not replicate the German guild system, the very soul of pride in one’s trade. Indeed, try to find a bonded workman today engaged in residential construction. The best the homebuilder may hope for is a builder with a company which has withstood the test of time, but even he will be relegated to employing some workers who would be far happier lying stone drunk behind a haystack in a sunny field.

There are of course plenty of Estonians lacking formal educations who will not Rehepapp you, but these tend to gravitate toward other fields. To Estonians, there is little sexy about construction, despite that the fact that, when done right, it is honest, even honorable work. On the New York City subway, one may observe tradesmen on their way to work, dressed in stylish work clothing, carrying their tools in bags which can cost nearly as much as the tools inside. Such is the pride in their craft.

***

Although I think I’m closer to understanding the way things are in Estonia (though you may dispute my theory about the class system), it has proved to be of absolutely no practical value. I haven’t learned a damned thing about dealing with workers. Despite keeping my distance, as soon as they learn my name they ask to borrow money. “Doesn’t your boss pay you?” I asked the most recent worker at my doorstep.

“Yes, but not this week.” He scratched his head and then turned around to spit. “Because you weren’t happy with the work.”

“That’s true. You want me to show you the window you installed upside down?”

“I just need to borrow some money. Could you give me a thousand kroons?”

“Only if it’s against money I owe your boss,” I said, hoping to find a way out of it. “So your debt would be to him, and he would have to approve.”

“Oh,” and he looked at his feet, pausing to think about that one. “No,” he concluded. “The boss can’t know.”

“I don’t even think I’ve got any cash in the house,” I said, trying to think of another tack. He was just about to turn away when a voice came from above: “I’ve got five hundred kroons you can give him.”

It was Liina from the top of the stairs. Ruining things. And sending me back to square one with the builders.

***

Illustration courtesy of Hilde Kokk De Keizer.

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

The Info Hole

“The United States dollar will be worth nothing by the end of next week,” declared my friend Tanel only two weeks ago. Tanel is a very smart, highly-educated Estonian man who loves conspiracy theories. He’s so good with Google that he can uproot the most obscure websites run by paranoid crackpots living with their heaviest furniture pushed tight against the door, loaded shotgun by the bed. The trouble is that Tanel sees little difference between a fanatical website and a newspaper of record. To him, all information is equal.

According to Tanel, the world is run by a cabal of white men in black suits with good manicures who spend their days around a burled oak table discussing what to do with the rest of us. Tanel cites the Illuminati, Freemasons, Wall Street, the Jews. Always the Jews. Name a group, and Tanel will tell you how they’re manipulating us.

Conspiracy theories, as I’ve heard them best described, are convenient for those who can’t be bothered to try to understand the complex world around us. They’re ideal for those who are not actually Masons, have not worked at Bank of America or Merrill Lynch, or don’t have any friends who are Jews. Conspiracy theories are ideal for those who want to believe they have made the conscious choice not to participate in The System. Tanel segregates himself, does not get involved, and then convinces himself he’s outside the club because he was refused entry, though in fact he never even applied for membership. Tanel says they know who he is. Just like they know who I am. Like they know who you are. And none of us will ever get anywhere.

What Tanel refuses to believe is that getting into the corridors of power in the United States (the seat of all evil, according to Tanel) is not that difficult. I’ve tried to persuade him that any American with a university education and a lot of resolve can, in fact, penetrate the sacred corridors of power. The worker starts at the bottom, where his most important responsibility will be to make sure the insignificant Congressman he works for (and has only met once) gets his dry cleaning starched and his Chinese food delivered hot. If the young person is smart, he’ll move up quickly, and sooner or later he’ll find himself in close contact with those who make the actual decisions. At some point, he will have to make a decision: Does he want to be a decision maker himself? Is he willing to make the sacrifices necessary to play that key role? I know a half dozen men and women who have worked hard and penetrated the ranks of the power elite in the United States, some in government, some in corporate America. None, though Tanel says I’m wrong, is the genealogical heir to Thomas Jefferson. None was taken as an infant from his crib and raised as a prince in the palace. All took financial and career risks by moving to a major city and getting a job which was far from glamorous, suffering as a small fish in a big pond, despite the fact each owed over 100,000 dollars on two university degrees.

It is this fundamental truth that Tanel refuses to accept: the evil men in suits behind the curtain were once just regular white guys like us. Instead, Tanel views himself as a helpless passenger in the world, with no chance to drive. With no chance to even suggest the route. Tanel is a lost cause, and I long ago stopped arguing with him. But I sometimes worry that Estonia’s young people may be leaning toward a Tanel-style of easy explanation for everything wrong in our lives. I can’t count the times someone has cited a Michael Moore film or YouTube video as an unassailable explanation for the way things are.

Part of our problem is the Info Hole. Tanel is of the generation whose window on the free world was Finnish television. He says Finnish TV showed him how things in the world really were. I wonder. Finnish TV is possibly better than American TV, but it’s still TV. But I don’t want to blame television. It’s too easy a target. Maybe it’s what Tanel’s reading?

Although the Estonian press has been free to write what it wants since 1991, the major papers still occasionally resemble the neighborhood paper I read growing up in Scarborough, Ontario. It was full of small-town-boy-done-good stories and columns by community blowhards titled “As I See It.” Sometimes Estonian journalism catches a case of Scarboroughitis and devotes the front page to a story on the shape of the NATO table (round), its cost (130,000 EEK), or its provenance (Estonia!), when the real news might more likely be how smart the Estonians were to exploit every opportunity to put Hillary Clinton and Anders Fogh Rasmussen on camera saying in plain English that NATO will defend Estonia if Russia attacks. Given the stories about The Table, I half expected a follow-up feature on the length of the delegates’ turds after their meal (served by Carmen Catering, I read) in the Estonia Concert Hall.

True, sometimes international papers are no better. The New York Times publishes information about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s house in Bermuda (550 square meters) and favorite steak (coffee-rubbed New York strip), but the items are not the stories themselves and the paper stops short of putting them on the front page.

I often wonder where is the real meat for Estonian newspaper stories? I often see stories in the local business press which are rehashed versions of what the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal published the week before. Where’s the regular fruit of hard-core original research and reporting? And what kind of stories is Tanel left to read in his native language? By the very nature of the reporting, Tanel is made to feel like an outsider: the west makes policy; Estonia makes tables.

I once needed to conduct a proper background search before meeting an interview subject and called up an editor friend at an Estonian newspaper to ask to borrow the paper’s LexisNexis subscription. “Estonian journalists don’t fly that high” was the answer I received. The paper had no subscription. (LexisNexis joins five billion vetted sources and is the world’s largest collection of public records, opinions, legal, news, and business information. In a journalist friend’s words: “It eliminates from the equation the millions upon millions of bullshit blog posts written by nutjobs in their parents' basements, and takes you straight to legitimate publications.”)

If we want to carry a public conversation beyond the provenance of the NATO table into the realm of political dialogue, and if I want Tanel to ease up on the conspiracy theories, then some better informational tools to widen the view of our journalists are surely needed.

But that’s a small step, of course, and it isn’t likely to have any impact on Tanel. He’s convinced he’s really on to something now, since he predicted the downfall of the American economy. Of course, he’d been predicting that since he first got internet access, so it was only a matter of time. But he still claims he told me so. Which I guess he did.

The one I’m worried about his 2013 prediction for the violent reversal of the earth’s poles, which will basically wipe out humanity. But since he has inside information (a website he refuses to disclose), he’s contemplating the construction of some sort of ark for his family. They’ll float with the earth’s currents until they hit dry land, where they’ll begin anew, eating their just-add-water spaceman food until their first crops come in. He hasn’t invited me to come along, and I haven’t asked. I know there’s no room for people under the spell of The System. Tanel needs fresh thinkers for his new frontier. People who see the world as it really is.

***

Illustration by Hilde Kokk De Keizer.