My Estonia II. Justin Petrone
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of Salvatore, my great grandfather. I had never seen a photo of him and I had never heard a good word about him either. According to family lore, Salvatore Petrone was an immigrant bootlegger who disciplined his kids with a belt. But he was tough. And he had eight kids.
Eight. Epp and I were waiting on just one child. Just one and I had been dreaming about it for weeks.
The baby was not due until January, but Epp had been giving birth in my dreams on an almost nightly basis. Sometimes it was a boy, sometimes a girl, but, whatever it was, the child was coming, and what put me at ease was this image of Salvatore, leaning over my shoulder, the stink of homemade wine on his breath, telling me, “Relax, kid, have a drink. I mean, it’s just one kid!” This mythological Salvatore was usually friendly, but if I ever had a second thought about anything, he got angry, gritted his teeth, and growled at me from the shadows. “Pull it together,” he’d snap, and I could see the sepia-toned outline of his bushy moustache and fedora cap, a pipe suspended from his lips, like an extra from Casablanca. “Be a man!” he would grunt. And I listened to him. To whom else could I listen?
Epp dozed as we descended, the magazine rolled in her hands. Her brows were furrowed, as if she was concentrating on the plot twist of a book she had yet to write. Of all the places I could have been at that moment, I was there with her, and I had chosen to be there with her. It was my choice to be with her on a plane to Hiiumaa, checked in under the Estonian phonetic spelling of our name: Petroon. And even if it gave others pause, I was satisfied with my situation.
From the sky, Hiiumaa looked to me like a diamond or a star. I could see dark forests and patches of farms and open fields, thin lines of roads connecting the tiny hamlets where the islanders, called hiidlased, lived. And all of it was surrounded by water, dark blue seas salted with breaking white-tipped waves.
I wanted to go to Hiiumaa because it seemed far away. I had seen photos of the island’s wild beauty before, images of windswept beaches and commanding lighthouses. I had read that, in winter, people could even travel across the ice to get to the island. It seemed solitary and peaceful. I wanted to be there.
At the airport we caught a cab to Kärdla, the island’s capital. The cab driver kept mostly to himself, other than to grunt from time to time as he turned the wheel. When he heard us speaking English, he turned his head and looked at us with a set of steely eyes, a slight grin on his lips.
“First time in Hiiumaa?” he asked in English.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Well, you should know that there have been three great naval powers in history.” I noticed that the driver’s left eye was a little lazy when he said it, and I couldn’t tell if he was looking at Epp or at me.
“Which ones?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know. The English, the Dutch, and the Spanish?”
“Wrong! Hiiumaa, Saaremaa, and then England.”
“Shut up!”
“I’m serious,” the driver said, turning his lazy eye in my direction. Then he grunted again and returned his gaze to the road.
“Is he joking?” I slunk down in the seat and whispered to Epp.
“I think so,” she answered in a hushed tone. “But you can never tell with these Hiiu people.”
We rolled down past doll-like houses and sunlit gardens into Kärdla, a village by the sea framed by an apothecary, a handicrafts shop, and one supermarket. At the supermarket, we stopped to get a snack. In a nearby park we found shelter under an old oak for a picnic.
We were supposed to prepare for the interview with Anne Helene, but we weren’t talking about her. Instead, we spoke of Airi, the closest hiidlane we knew, the one with whom Epp went backpacking in India two years before on a search for the meaning of life. I had met Airi only a few times. The first time I met her at the publishing house, her hair was purple. The second time I met her at our apartment, it was orange.
“I met Airi one night a few years ago. She came over with a friend,” Epp lazed on her back in the shade of the Kärdla oak. “I said, ‘I’m Epp.’ She said, ‘I’m Airi.’ Then Airi looked around and put her hands on her hips,” Epp sat up to imitate her. “’Well,’ Airi said, ‘what are we doing standing around here? Let's go to the store! Buy some something to eat or something!’ I fell in love with her at this moment, and that’s just how people from Hiiumaa are. They’re jolly good fellows who are not afraid of things. They take you as an old friend.”
On Epp’s lips her name was pure magic. Whenever Airi surfaced, Epp was whisked back in time to some ancient temple in the jungles of India; places where they had gone searching for something. “That time with Airi.” Such tales trembled with possibility. Airi was a constant of some kind, a parallel, and I began to wonder what it was like for our influential Airi to grow up on Hiiumaa.
“I bet hiidlased eat a lot of fish,” I said, staring up at the oak branches.
“Mmmhmm,” Epp nodded dreamily. “And, you know, Airi has a sister, Triin. They are like twins. One year apart.”
Airi and Triin. Hiidlased. I could see them growing up together on this island like twin Pippi Longstockings, nurtured only by their wandering sea captain father, Efraim with his wild beard and seafaring earring.
“Her father’s nothing like that,” Epp rolled her eyes. “His name is Rein. He’s an engineer.”
“Oh,” I was a little disappointed.
“But people from Hiiumaa are different,” Epp said. “Airi writes fairy tales, she even won an award for one. The other big island, Saaremaa, is for, like, hardworking people. Saarlased are very principled, concrete. But hiidlased? They believe in fairies. Airi says that Hiiumaa is full of elves and fairies.”
It sounded so exotic, but I also knew what it meant to be from an island. I was from Long Island, after all, born in the same hospital where my father was born and his father before him and where my great grandfather, the Italian immigrant bootlegger Salvatore, died. This special hospital was just a quick walk from the sea, so the salt had been in my lungs since I could breathe on my own and I’d always been among the horseshoe crabs and starfish and mussels and seaweed, the stench of low tide as familiar to me as the smell of my own shorts.
I remembered how my mother would take me to the seafood store when I was young. The clerk would put a live lobster down on the floor and the two of them would chuckle as the lobster sprinted towards the wailing youth, its alien legs tapping at the tiles. Later, of course, we boiled the lobster alive and ate him with melted butter, so I had my revenge, but I knew the sea well and was acquainted with its creatures.
I also knew what growing up on an island did to you. There was no easy way off. As a boy I thought about how, if the Soviets decided to strike New York City, we would be stuck on that island, nowhere to go, nothing to do except boil in the sea. As teenagers we would sit in parking lots at the beach and plot our escape, maybe across the sound to Connecticut or even beyond to California. A lot of us did manage to escape the island. Some of those who stayed behind went mad. Maybe this was the source of the aquatic tension within me.
“Wait, what time is it?” Epp asked as we lazed beneath the trees.
I checked my mobile. “12.25.”
“We have to go!” Epp stood up suddenly, dusting off her shorts. “It’s time to meet her.”
Anne Helene was a Norwegian designer who had a workshop in Kärdla. Epp was there to write a story about her for Anne. I would take the photos.
I liked being a photographer because I got to look at people, to really look at them because, unless the person was asleep, you couldn’t really look at them. As Anne was a magazine for women, most of the people I photographed were women and if I had looked at Anne Helene in a cafe the way I viewed her through