You Shall Know Our Velocity (29 page)

It was one in the morning and the night’s black was flat. We were close to the Arctic Circle but we couldn’t see a thing. Were we close to the Arctic Circle? I thought so. The air was mixed with night, the air sucking your breath from you. The landscape was soaked in a grey-black wash from which streetlights stared with a dull intensity. I pretended briefly we were on the moon, and the homes were labs for surveyors. Estonia could be the moon, I
decided—it was one of ten or twelve countries I’d never remotely planned to see, had never heard of anyone seeing, but which now seemed to contain everything we wanted—

“I always felt like Estonia would be the coolest of the Baltics,” said Hand.

“What?” I said.

Hand leaned forward and spoke loudly to the driver. “I always am thinking Estonia is the most great of the Baltic nations!”

“Thank you,” said the driver, turning to examine Hand. “You are from the United States?”

“Morocco,” Hand said.

“No!” the driver said, again turning to look at Hand.

“Today we come from Morocco!” Hand continued, “tomorrow we come from Estonia!”

They both laughed. Where did he get this shit?

What we saw of Tallinn was ancient and dark, but we saw very little on the way. We arrived at the Hotel Metropol and dropped our bags in the simple clean room and then fell back down to the bar, which acted also or primarily as a casino, everything burgundy and bright Kentucky green, with all of the tables, maybe seven of them and one in the back, occupied. We drank burnt umber beer at the bar, Hand closely watching the unabashedly implanted and low-cut woman, blond and with a bright strong face of sturdy opposition, serving our drinks.

“So,” Hand said, “Estonia.”

“We’re in a casino in Tallinn.”

I was exhausted.
You should sleep. Wake up early
. That’s not the way.
It’s the same
. It means less that way. We sleep when we fall. We only sleep when we can’t move anymore.
That’s juvenile
. But it means everything.
It’s the illusion of progress. Staying awake isn’t progress
. The illusion is enough.

There was a man next to us, greasy, showy with a silk handkerchief
waving from his suit, chatting with a younger woman in blue velvet. Beyond them, two men with coats on, skirting around the bar, toward us.

One was tall and burly and sweating heavily under the burden of his coat, his backfat, his small overworking heart. The smaller was wiry and thin-faced, like the bassist for a British Invasion band. They asked us our nationality. We told them American. The bigger swayed toward me, spittle at the corners of his mouth, his eyes unfocused, about to say something.

He said nothing. He lost interest and turned to the silk handkerchief man with the leggy woman. He asked the man a question in Estonian. The man answered something inaudible and to that the large heavy man saluted him with a loud
Heil Hitler!

All eyes darted toward us, to the bar area in general. Had I ever heard someone say that? No. Not in person. But because the man was close to us, and we were newly arrived, it looked like we were with the man. Or that we were responsible, complicit.

I backed off and smiled apologetically to the room while Hand said
Whoa whoa
to the large one, who then took Hand’s beer, poured a third of it into his mouth, and gave it back. He turned back to the silk man and did it again: the salute, the
Heil Hitler
. Then he and his bassist friend left. It was clear I was missing some subtext. Had the Nazis ever gotten this far? Why didn’t I know this? There was so much that Gilbert’s biography of Churchill hadn’t said, and so much that had to be condensed. D-Day, the cornerstone of all American accounts of the war, is summed up in a page or two. Hiroshima gets a paragraph, Nagasaki one sentence. We knew nothing; the gaps in our knowledge were random and annoying. They were potholes—they could be patched but they multiplied without pattern or remorse. And even if we knew something, had read something, were almost sure of something, we wouldn’t ever know the truth, or come anywhere close to it.
The truth had to be seen. Anything else was a story, entertaining but more embroidered fib than crude, shapeless fact.

Hand played poker while we pieced it together. The silk handkerchief man was German, we guessed, and the Estonians still resented the Germans for their role in the Soviet takeover? Hand was sure that Germany had taken Estonia—he knew they took Latvia—and this was reason enough. We settled on this explanation and I watched as Hand lost $100 of my money. It confused me for a minute, the money-losing. It was becoming less clear what was happening with this money. How much had we given away? No idea. It had seemed like a lot but it couldn’t have been over $7,500. We had a long way to go. And only three days, or actually less—sixty hours. How would we do it? And to whom would we give it? Was the point to give it to people who needed it, or just to get rid of it? I knew the answer, of course, but had to remind Hand. Didn’t we figure this out before, in Marrakesh? Always we learned things and forgot them. Almost nothing could be learned for good. Hand wanted to lose money, now, here. We could lose it all here, certainly, easily, and would we be more free? In a way, sure, but—

“Let’s go,” I said.

The casino workers, matching in number the patrons one to one, were busy watching, touching their fingers lightly to the felt, the leather, the burgundy walls.

“Fine,” said Hand. And with that, he was done. I had vague fears that Hand was a secret gambling addict and was now relieved. We were still mobile.

We stepped outside—the cold whipped our bare faces—and asked the cabbie, the same one, still sitting in his Mercedes reading Günter Grass—that was weird, that kind of callback—to take
us to Old Town, the cultural center, and he started the car, while warning us that nothing was still open.

It was two now and Sunday and everything was dead. We had been traveling all day, a waste. We’d done nothing.

The cabbie rolled us through Old Town, windows open, the car moseying over the cobblestones, as he pointed out various landmarks—churches and places of assembly, all presumably older than even the beaches of our own country. I was yawning, eyes tearing from the frozen air, when finally we pulled up alongside a small sign, bearing the silhouette of a curvy and naked woman.

Hand pointed to the sign. “We have to go. Is it open?”

The cabbie said it was; it was the only place open in Tallinn at two on a Sunday night. Do we really want to go to another gentleman’s club?
It’s all that’s open
. But we’ve been to too many of these places.
I know
. We travel thousands of miles east, then thousands north, and always these places where girls and boys pretend to be women and men.
We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake
.

We paid the man and walked down a narrow alleyway and through a medieval wooden round-topped door and then down. Down a low-ceilinged hallway and down again and then through a swinging double-door and finally we were in a sort of basement den, the basement of an ancient building, almost surely once this structure’s dungeon or crypt, where hay would be stacked in one corner and men tortured in the other. In one corner sat two men in suits, separate and each alone, and in front of us, beyond the clear plastic column of water, bubbly and lit green and full of fake flat zebrafish jerking up and down, a topless shiny woman with Barbarella’s boots was swinging wildly around a gleaming golden pole.

We sat down. A booth around a silver table.

With new drinks we watched the woman dance. She was tall, with barn-red hair, petal-white skin and blue eyes. She was not such a great dancer, but she was loving this pole.

“Always the pole,” Hand said.

These dancers love those poles, and they go around and around on the poles, and sometimes they get so acrobatic on the poles, and it’s always lost on me. Upside-down on the pole, twirling on the pole, back against the pole, front against the pole, climbing the pole. The pole is fine, I think but I think maybe the pole is not worth so much concerted attention.

—Hand, people like this can teach us nothing.

—Maybe, but they’re awake and we’re awake. That’s enough.

Or it could be that I wanted a pole myself. These women were doing some impressive maneuvers, but with the pole as home base, as pillar and facilitator. I had no such pole. Could I do more and better things with a golden pole? I had no pole.

She finished and while Hand went to get us more drinks she came to me. A second earlier she had been the dancer on the mini-stage, with the boots and the pole, and now she was here over me, her knee, next to my thigh, on the upholstered bench, her heat on me, the smell of garlic, her shampoo, strawberry-scented and strong, her long hair tickling my nose. She touched my chin, tsk-tsking while scanning the various flaws and scabs, and I smiled politely, in shock.

Her name was Olga. She was Russian, but wanted to go to Sweden to make more money. “This is my last day here,” she announced. After tonight, she would go to Sweden to become a bartender. We asked if she knew how to bartend. She said no.

—You’re not going to Sweden tomorrow.

—I know.

—We are to overpay you to help you on your trip.

—Yes.

—But you will stay.

—Maybe.

—I can’t even begin to know how you got here in the first place.

—You’re more like me than you think.

She had a warm snaggletoothed smile. She looked like a neighbor
I once had, Angela Tomaso. It struck me for a second that this might in fact
be
Angela Tomaso. The idea seemed tantalizingly possible. Why not Angela Tomaso dancing in Estonia? I hadn’t seen Angela for sixteen years, since the summer her brother—

This was not Angela Tomaso. She smiled into my eyes and then turned. Hand had returned—where were the drinks? He’d forgotten the drinks—and now she was on Hand and things were much less polite. She seemed to genuinely like him. She preferred him to me. Even in a transaction like this, she got to choose. He was grinning like mad. Every act of charity has choice at its core. My head was still talking to her.

—I think you do have love for Hand.

—It’s impossible to fake this all the time.

She was straddling him, her hand between his thighs, her other hand in his hair.

—Olga I agree. You can’t fake it all.

—There’s no way to pretend. I have an irregular and bursting heart and that’s why I’m here. It erupts so many times every night and I can’t help it. I know this is a strange way to express it but I feel real love for your friend, and for you. For you it’s more general, it’s my love surveying you from above, approving, you as part of a landscape I love, a human one, while with your friend it’s more specific. It’s his smell, his thick neck—

—Fine. Enough.

Hand was trying to get something—what? Oh, money—from his sock. I was looking at her dimpled and thong-bisected rear as it rose and descended on his crotch.

—But see how we are the same? You and I, Will? We both see strangers and we react. We don’t like to walk by people without nodding. We’re broken when people are rude. We’re broken when people can’t meet us halfway. We can’t accept the limits of normal human relations—chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes, Will!

But as suddenly as she’d come to us, she was back to the dance floor and engaged in more spinning around the gold glimmering pole. Maybe someone else was liking the pole. Maybe I was missing something. I looked around, at the other patrons, half-expecting to find some guy grinning and clapping, going nuts for the pole. No such men were here.

There was a payphone near the bar so I called my mom.

“You’re where?” she said. “I can’t hear anything.”

I pressed my finger into my free ear.

“I’m at a bar in Estonia. What time is it there?”

“Three. I’m staining a footstool.”

“You’re what?”

“A footstool.”

“You’re aiming it? At what?”

“Staining
. Staining.”

“In the garage?”

“I’m outside—”

“Make sure it’s ventil—Oh.”

There was a delay in our connection and it made us tentative. We waited to speak and then spoke at the same time.

The dancer had two fingers in her mouth. Now her ankles held the pole, and she was upside down. The link between the acrobatics and anything erotic was tenuous and slipping. I turned to face the phone, to concentrate.

“You’re where again?” she said, almost yelling.

“Estonia. Tallinn.”

I situated it for her. No one knows where Tallinn is.

“Hey honey,” she said, not caring about Tallinn anymore, “you would tell me if you’d broken something here, wouldn’t you?”

“Broke something? Like what?”

“A plate, a glass, anything.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You know I walk barefoot sometimes.”

“Right. But did you step on some glass? What are you talking about?”

“You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course. But I haven’t been there in months, Mom.”

—Jesus, Mom. What is going on?

“I just wanted to make sure you’d tell me. I woke up this morning and was afraid to walk in there—I was sure it was covered in glass. And you know how hard it is to see that glass, Will.”

“Okay.”

“I can’t have the glass everywhere, hon. I can’t have the broken glass underfoot.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So why Estonia?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t need a visa.”

“I almost went to Denmark once.”

“When?”

“With your father of course. We wanted to honeymoon there. All the tulips.”

“Oh.” I hated it when she mentioned him without malice.

“Get away!” she yelled.

“What?”

“The dog next door. He’s brushing up against my stool.”

—Mom. Bring it together.

“Honey.”

“What?”

“I should let you go.”

“I have time.”

“I don’t.”

“You should see this place. They’ve got these tall fishtanks full of fake fish, and they’re bubbling up to the top, flying up there. Like embers from a campfire. Or like when you try to burn newspaper in the fire, and it gets so light and starts floating around, when it all goes up around your head—”