Sketches of Estonia. Justin Petrone

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      Originally, Epp was his editor and Fred was her columnist. But there was a stronger bond there too, and I did wish sometimes that I had my own female septuagenarian pen friend. What if Fred Jüssi’s contemporary, the glamorous actress Eve Kivi (who was famous for having played the sexy nun in the Estonian cult movie The Last Relic) had written those kinds of letters to me?

      “Dearest Justin, I strongly advise you not to continue in this direction …”

      Most of the times I encountered Fred, he was sitting down, so I never really had a fixed idea of how tall he was. But to me, Fred was a big man, a boy from Aruba with a face that reminded me of the carved stone deities of Easter Island. I never really saw him smile, never saw his lips curl up or his teeth shine, and could only sense his inner joy or curiosity through his words or the folding of his arms.

      When the new, burlap-textured copy of Jäälõhkuja at last appeared, with its pages of long words and effervescent nature photographs, I was dispatched to bring the author his 20 free copies. I took the bus into Tallinn and hailed a taxi at the foot of the Stockmann department store, gave the driver the address in Kadriorg and we sped away. Fred was supposed to wait for me outside, but I wasn’t sure of how I would be able to spot him among all the well-heeled pedestrians with their fine black coats and shopping bags.

      Kadriorg was a neighborhood where the cream of Estonia lived, and it had the greatest names for its streets: Poska for the great statesman, Vilms for the great statesman, Koidula for the great poet, Wiedemann for the great linguist. Walking its ways, a man could feel as if he too could become any of these great things, or even rise to the presidency and move into the nearby presidential palace.

      In Kadriorg, tall, yellow and red wooden houses jutted out along the streets and into the skies, like the half-finished hulls of wooden ships. The moisture of the close-by sea was always in the air and I relished it – to breathe it in, to be so far from Tartu’s silty river. This is where Fred lived, the place to which he returned after sojourns on the island of Saarnaki or chit-chatting with yellow-breasted buntings and Lapland longspurs. As the cab waited, I searched the faces of the pretty people, women with fox fur coats and white cowboy boots, men with shadowy stubble in sharp dark suits, until I felt the eyes looking back at me. And there he was, with his Amerindian warrior sneer, the eyes of God, standing on the curb in a sweatshirt and sweat pants.

      Härra Fred Jüssi.

      He nodded at me when I approached and we exchanged greetings. We went inside and he made tea.

      “So, what kind of tea do you want?” he asked, searching his cabinet. “We have green tea, black tea, chamomile, peppermint. I’ve even got a box of Japanese tea my friend sent me from over there.”

      “Let’s try that,” I said, working my eyes around his tiny kitchen. Fred filled the pot with the green Japanese tea and let it sit and I looked at the picture of him and a pretty woman on his refrigerator door. She was older, with gray mixed in among the bangs, and very fine features, but it was those eyes that caught your attention. There was so much life in those eyes. They reminded me of somebody else’s eyes, somebody who was very close to me.

      “That was on the way back from Stockholm in 1989,” Fred said.

      “But who’s the woman?”

      “That was my wife,” he nodded. “Helju.”

      “She looks very nice.”

      “She died last year.”

      “Oh.”

      Fred sat down at the table and gestured for me to sit down. Then he poured me some of the Japanese tea his friend had sent him, and we watched the steam rise from the cups, the little flecks of green leaves swirling around in the jasmine water, breathing in that medicinal smell that the tea gives off. Fred supplied honey and I dabbed some in with a spoon and watched its stickiness slide off and dissolve.

      “No, no,” said Fred. “You should never put fresh honey into a hot cup of tea. You have to let it sit.”

      “Oh, okay,” I said and put the spoon back. “Sorry.”

      “Don’t worry,” he waved his hands at me. “You do look a bit worried, you know.”

      “I’m just sorry you lost your wife,” I said. “I can’t even imagine.”

      “Oh, that. Well, Justin, you know, I am getting old, too,” Fred said. “The doctors tell me I have to have heart surgery and I’m not sure if I’m going to make it,” he put one fist up against his chest and let it fall back down to the table. “But that’s how life is. It begins and it ends.” He stared at his tea for a second. “Just think of all the flags I have seen in my long life, this life! First, there was the blue, black, and white Estonian flag,” he held up a finger. “Then came the red Soviet flag, and then the red German flag, and then the red Soviet flag again, and don’t forget about the red and blue Soviet Estonian flag.”

      “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that flag. It has the little waves on it. Kind of pretty. Not bad for a Soviet flag.”

      “It was okay,” he shrugged. “But then the blue, black, and white Estonian flag came back, and now we have the blue and gold European Union flag and the blue and white NATO flag. What is that? Seven?”

      “Or eight, if you count the Estonian one twice.”

      Fred adjusted himself in his seat and leaned in across the table. “Listen, I have seen this country change so many times in my life,” he said. “The way people think. It’s like a weather vane. It goes like this and then like this,” his two fingers spun around each other. “One day everybody believes in one thing, the next day they have completely changed their minds and say that they never believed in it at all. But I can tell you one thing – this Estonian state, the current Estonian state, is not the same Estonian state that existed when I was a child. That was something special, different. It has been irretrievably lost.”

      “Irretrievably?”

      “Irretrievably.”

      “Do you even remember what Estonia was like before the war? I mean Konstantin Päts, all of that?”

      “Of course I remember it.”

      “But weren’t you five years old? And in Aruba?”

      “Oh, but we didn’t stay in Aruba for long. And my brother was born in Curaçao. You should see my passport, Justin. It says I was born in Holland, because Aruba is part of the Netherlands!” He chuckled.

      “Anyway, if the US had fallen apart when I was five, I’m not sure if I would remember how it was.”

      “You would remember it, and I remember it. And it was a different country then, a true Estonian state. People trusted each other back then, they cared about each other. It’s not like it is today,” he gestured with his head toward the window. “This is not the Estonia of my childhood. This is something else.”