The bigger the chaos around and in us, the more we wish for a common thread, something to explain things and bind them together into something that makes sense. We name things to tame them: strangers, events, places, even ourselves.
I have a sentence, I carried inside for years: “A stranger is an enemy, unless he is a merchant.” Adding later: “Homo homini lupus.” – “Man is a wolf to man.” – Negative and simple enough to make headlines, but is any of it true?
Who am I in the cacophony of it all?
As a child, I spent my holidays with my grandparents in the countryside, in an old wooden house surrounded by forest in Estonia. The trees welcomed me as somebody who belonged. Trees, birds and snakes. This smell of summer heat and the cool of the shadows, the smell of calamus by the small pond. Timeless smells of home, loneliness, and longing.
Winter was a white waiting, full of silence. Silence was my grandfather after 10 years in a Russian labour camp. He came back, while most men from his village didn’t. He never said much about any of it. “The soil was so rich there, you could eat it, but they don’t know how to love the soil,” was all. He had demanded rehabilitation, some justice. They had lost everything, the land, animals, the oldest son, who died in a Russian military prison. For what? My grandfather whispered his secrets to his rabbits and screamed in his sleep, hand cupped around testicles, feet scratching the bed sheet. His son, my father, shut him down. My father had his career to think about, so he joined special forces and the Party, he joined kgb and left my artist mother, who was too soft and full of dreams. He left me, a mistake in his world. He got titles, money, a big house, a beautiful wife with a suitable career, a son, and a Mercedes.
I must remember to also talk about wolves because there were wolves in my childhood forest. You never saw them in summer, but in winter they came close. I remember the evening when we went to the neighboring village some four km away. The sled, thick blankets, the landscape breathing cold into my face until the warm smell of horses cut through it like a wedge; countless stars above. There were glowing eyes at the edge of the forest to my left as we started to move. The shiver went through horses, but they quickened their pace once we were past the place. Then came the howl of the wolves breaking the silence. I remember my excitement, longing, the feeling of vastness and adventure. This is what stayed with me. The wolves marked me.
My mother died when I was 17 and when I was around 19, my father disowned me. He had been gone since I was 5, now he made it official. Later on he deleted me from the Family Tree. I wasn’t his. I didn’t fit in. I asked too many questions, listened to the forbidden music like Pink Floyd and Queen with my friends, who also played jazz and painted with blood and dreams. “When I was young, I suffered because of my father; I will not suffer again as an old man because of my daughter,” he declared in a tone you don’t argue with. If you wanted to survive in Soviet Estonia, you held your tongue. He said he had never loved me and that he had hoped I’d die at birth, together with my mother, who nearly did.
I buried my mother by myself, with the help of my friends in the sports club. Strangers gave me food and helped me to finish the school.
I couldn’t cry. I had no tears for a full year, I only woke up from time to time at night, screaming. There was a wolf, who came to me in my dreams. I still feel its rough tongue on my face.
I had no idea what I wanted with my life after high school. Not really. I loved photography, but in Estonia you had to have a higher education if you could ever be Somebody. My mother had been about to shift from the Academy of Arts to the International School of Cinematography in Moscow, when she got pregnant with me. So, I decided that is what I was going to do. I had to live for both of us.
I was accepted to the Institute of Cinematography against all odds. For more than three years I was the only woman on the camera line.
So here I was, a student in Moscow in the late 1970s, on a chilly day in February that was to change my life. Everything was gray or brown, dirty, and worn out. I was just passing the Central Train station, on my way to something I no longer remember anything about. Maybe it was one of the daily forays for food. And there they were. Romani families. Women in long skirts, some in colors that caught the eye. Big shawls around their shoulders, over their jackets. Some with small children wrapped in blankets in their arms. The hands that stretched out, begging, worn out cards that appeared and disappeared. Ongoing words. Men strangely invisible. You had to be careful. Who had not known somebody who had had all their money stolen? Who had not heard of predictions starting with promises and ending with curses that came true? Everybody knew that it could get real bad fast. They talked quickly, voices changing from the deepest to the shrillest, flattering, whispering, swearing. You shouldn’t shake their hands, you shouldn’t give them anything, because they would just take the rest. I had grown up in the world of permanent residents, where immobility, roots, are of value not to be questioned. A nomad, unlike a tourist, is a threat here. I was a student. I owned nothing, but still I hurried past, not looking at them. An older man, with streaks of silver in his long black hair and an enormous bouquet of lilacs in his hands, blocked my way. I couldn’t help but look into his black eyes, even though I tried not to. “I don’t want to buy anything. I don’t have any money either.” The flowers cost a fortune at that time of year.
“They’re not for sale!” There was no hurry, no restlessness about him, his eyes resting on me: “I don’t want your money either.”
He was sinewy and strong. “I needed to tell you that you are one of us. You are my daughter.” It was a trick too many. I laughed. I am blond, with gray-green eyes. What did he want from me?
“I was to tell you that your path is long. You should never be afraid, or forget us, your people. These flowers are for you.” He handed me the fragrant branches, pressed them to my chest, and closed my arms around them. They were intoxicating. A plump older woman rushed towards me, her heavy chest moving like a wave. “Take them, my daughter, take them. And whatever my husband tells you, it is true. He always tells the truth. He is the Seer, the Truth-teller of our clan.”
I saw someone being pulled into a circle of rapidly talking women nearby. I caught a glimpse of a wallet. He was rolled. This was a joke. Maybe dangerous. I had to get away. I looked into their faces as they stood there, motionless, side by side. His furrowed, serious, hers gentle, worried. I had to get away. When I turned and looked back, they were still there. The man put his arm around his wife’s shoulders as they watched me go.
The lilacs filled my entire room with an incredulous wonder. My career, my life, was at that point a safe, promising straight line. What did they want with me?
Today, a whole lifetime later, I still look into the Romani seer’s eyes, deeply grateful. He had adopted me; he was my true father. Sometimes I hear his voice. He taught me about love and that dimension in us which knows nothing about time.
Did he know I was to become a refugee? That I was to become a stranger in much of the world, a gypsy feeling at home on the road? Did he see the wolf?