and knocked at the door, hoping that Epp was still awake.
The door creaked open, and I could see her eyes and her mane of hair through the crack.
“I decided to come tomorrow,” I said.
“I knew you would come,” she whispered. “Come inside.”
All night long I stretched out in her bed, listening to our fellow program members bid adieu to one another outside in the dark – many had flights leaving that morning.
Epp meantime organized what seemed to be few personal possessions and then reorganized them again. She had piles and piles of papers littered all over the room, covered in handwritten notes. How could she spend so much time organizing?
“What are you doing?” I whispered to her impatiently at around 4 am.
“I’m still sorting my things,” she said.
I thought that organizing things was just one of her quirks. Later I would find out that it was an Estonian national pastime.
When we left the dormitory to visit Tallinn the next day, I kept my documents close at hand. Who knew who could lift them from my naive American pocket while I wasn’t looking? The Finnish border guards gave me no trouble when we left to board the ferry to Tallinn.
Epp, on the other hand, was uncomfortably scrutinized.
“What have you been doing in Finland for 30 days?” the passport control officer asked.
“I’ve been here on a program,” she said.
“Do you have any proof of your participation?”
Epp dug through her bag for several minutes. It seemed that she couldn’t find what she was looking for. Finally, Epp fished out her wallet, and showed them her press card and the agenda from the foreign ministry to prove that, no, she wasn’t a prostitute or Ecstasy dealer; just a journalist.
In Denmark, when I had studied for a few months in 2001, I had heard jokes about backward, foolish, and drunk Finns. I had even seen a few Finns who met this description. One, an old hippie named Jorma who looked like a blonde Genghis Khan, taught us a few Finnish phrases at a party.
The Danes I was with at the time looked at Jorma as if he had been raised by wolves. And here was Finnish passport control making someone different feel small. It seemed like everyone had someone they could use to make themselves seem better.
After the Finnish passport officer finally let Epp through I felt a little disappointed in Finland.
A LESS FORTUNATE SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRY
As our ferry moved over the water, Epp asked me how I envisioned the Soviet Union to be.
I told her that, as a young boy, I thought of going to Europe with its colorful old towns and bustling ports and setting sail on a boat from some place like Stockholm or Copenhagen only to arrive across a polluted sea to a land of miserable gray apartment blocks and miserable gray faces.
“But it was like that,” she frowned. “It was gray. It was polluted.”
“But how did it get that way?”
“It took time. It didn’t happen over night.”
As our high-speed ferry from Helsinki bore us into Tallinn Harbor, though, nothing looked gray. I was waiting for some kind of post-communist, northern Byzantium to spring out of the wilderness – Crimea on the Baltic. But the Crimea did not come. There were just more islands and forests.
On the nautical map aboard the ferry, I read out the names of the islands. Aegna, Prangli, and Naissaar.
“Have you ever been to Naissaar?” I asked Epp.
“No,” she said. “People go there, but there’s supposed to be a lot of unexploded… what do you call them… they drop them in the water to blow up boats?”
“Mines?”
“Yes. Unexploded sea mines from the Second World War. Sometimes it is in the paper that somebody accidentally steps on one and gets blown up.”
I decided then never to go to Naissaar without a metal detector. It was a shame that the islands weren’t more inviting. They reminded me of the peaceful archipelago outside of Helsinki, covered in thick pine and birch trees with sun-kissed beaches. A few white boats rimmed Naissaar’s coast in the distance, perhaps captained by those who knew how to stay away from unexploded ordnance from the Second World War.
As we got closer to port, Epp and I walked outside to the top deck. A group of young Finnish guys in denim jackets were talking loudly and drinking cans of beer. It was 10 am.
From the deck, I caught sight of Tallinn, but it didn’t look Eastern. Instead it looked more like Helsinki or Copenhagen or Reykjavik. The skyline was punctuated by the towers of twin Lutheran churches, each painted a sober white. To the left I saw cranes and gleaming glass hotels and office buildings.
“It looks like Helsinki,” I said in surprise. “It almost looks like a Scandinavian country.”
“Estonia kind of is a Scandinavian country,” said Epp. “Just a little less fortunate than the rest.”
We docked and walked into a ferry terminal that didn’t look too different from the one we had left behind in Helsinki. The woman at passport control sighed and looked at my passport. With long blonde hair and sea blue eyes, she looked Finnish, but there was something spicier about her that made her that much more beautiful. Now I knew why there were so many Finnish guys on the boat to Tallinn. Her passport stamp fell and I was permitted to enter. “Eesti Vabariik5,” I mouthed to myself. The language looked like some mutt offspring of Finnish and German, with a hint of Swedish gobbledygook thrown in. It seemed slightly less poetic than the Suomen tasavalta6 we had just left behind.
While Tallinn’s port had looked pretty and modern from afar, I quickly found that first looks could be deceiving. I noticed some nearby buildings were blackened with soot, each one of their windows blown out by the wind or vandals. Up close it reminded me of the rusty post-industrial port cities of New England that I knew from my childhood.
The surrounding architecture was even more dizzying. Here was an old Orthodox church, there was a gas station, and over there was a 24-hour liquor store, where a few Estonian punk kids with mohawks stood amidst piles of trash, sharing a bottle of vodka.
As we walked towards the Old Town, the dirty port area gave way to hotels and currency exchanges. At the medieval gate of the old city, we walked past cafes packed with portly middle-aged Swedish and German and Finnish tourists. I could only tell them apart by the sounds of their languages, because they all looked the same. There were also Russian ladies selling flowers, and pockets of Italians and Spanish tour groups. It was as if all of Europe had been condensed into one street.
“Do you remember any words from our Finnish trip?” Epp asked.
“I remember how to say, “Minä olen mies7”.”
“But here, it’s ‘mina olen mees’8.”
Epp admitted that she had been able to understand a lot of things our Finnish hosts had said when they were speaking to one another. Even the things we weren’t supposed to hear, like when they had complained about the amount we drank during the trip.
“What did they expect?” I was a bit humiliated. “They put a bunch of writers in a room with some open bottles of wine, and they think we’re not going to drink it?”
“I didn’t drink,” said Epp. “I was too busy eavesdropping on what they were saying about us.”
We now climbed through the majestic alleyways of Tallinn’s Old Town. Its cream-colored Hanseatic buildings enveloped me. The travel guide I had in my hands went out of its way to say nice things about Helsinki, but I had a feeling that no travel guide could ever do justice to the Old Town of Tallinn.