My Estonia II. Justin Petrone
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and I didn’t get anything about this country, its wacky humor, its pervasive silence, its sexual mores, but I had definitely married into it. And all this, I looked around at the woolen folk costumes hanging on the wall, had seemingly been my choice.
“I know a joke too,” Epp volunteered. “Why shouldn’t a Hiiu guy tell a joke to a mainlander on Wednesday?”
“Because they start to laugh in the church on Sunday!” the factory owner deadpanned.
“Ha!” Epp chuckled.
“Yeah, that’s a good one!” the owner wiped a tear from his eye and handed the bag to me. “You know, I could go on telling jokes like that all day.”
“Was that joke supposed to be funny?” I whispered and held the door for Epp as we exited the shop a moment later.
“Don’t worry, Justin,” she touched my arm on the way out. “You will probably get it later.”
OUT IN THE FOREST
Vane, Karin, Rait, Nele…
Epp’s cousin Helina introduced us, but I couldn’t tell one from the other. The quartet lived in a summer cottage in Lilli on the Latvian border. After returning from Hiiumaa, we turned south: for meeting these new relatives, we had to drive down a long forest road, and when we arrived there wasn’t much around, a house here, a house there, and everywhere the thick, looming trees.
Golden-haired Karin, also Epp’s cousin, was the mother. Bearded Vane was the father. Of the two teenage children, I was told skinny Rait was the son and petit Nele was the daughter. Or at least that’s what I thought, because after five minutes I couldn’t remember if the mother was Vane and the daughter Karin, or if the daughter was Rait and the mother was Nele. Estonian names were all the same. “Which one is that?” I would whisper in Epp’s ear. She would tell me, but I would forget.
To make matters more confusing, the relatives all looked the same. Cousin Helina had blonde hair and blue eyes. Her son Ken had blond hair and blue eyes. Vane, Karin, Rait, and Nele? You get the picture. The only one who really stood out in the big family photo we took in the yard was that tall, dark, foreign guy Epp had married. The family was babysitting Paula, Karin’s angelic three-year-old niece, and little Paula refused to even stand near me. “I think she’s afraid of you,” Helina told me as we gathered for the photo. “She’s never seen someone so dark.”
Dark? How was this possible? In America, I was your average white guy. In Estonia, I frightened small children. I had always been aware of the language barrier in Estonia, but I was unprepared for the color barrier. The Estonians even had a word for people like me – tõmmu – the same adjective they used to describe a dark beer or a smoked sausage or a chocolate candy. Tõmmu. It was an appellation with a touch of Latin allure. Once while trying on shirts at a department store in Tallinn, the grayheaded clerk had looked me up and down, licked her lips and said: Oi kui ilus tõmmu poiss!5
In New York, there were people who looked like me everywhere. I had never thought of myself as unusual, or even particularly Mediterranean. In Estonia, I was a coffee-flavored ice cream scoop in a sundae of vanilla. I pitied anyone who was chocolate. If someone like me could scare Estonian children, I imagined that the sight of an actual black person might cause trams to collide or construction workers to slip from the tops of Tallinn’s unfinished skyscrapers.
And I knew that even if I mastered the Estonian language, ate sült every night, and taped a blue-black-and-white flag to my window, my looks would always betray my origin. But it wasn’t just looks or language that kept me apart. There were other ways to sort out who was an Estonian and who was not.
I met Helina at a train station on Long Island, New York, the month before. She arrived with her teenage sister Maarja and two rolling suitcases. It struck me immediately how different they were from the other disembarking train passengers. They were both blonde and thin and quiet, polite and tidy. No shirt was wrinkled and no hair was out of place. I played one of my favorite bossa nova songs in the car. By the end of it, my soul swirled with emotion. But the sisters were unmoved. Epp’s cousins didn’t speak, they murmured.
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