Pia Padukone - The Faces Of Strangers

“Nico,” Paavo said. “Welcome.”

“Nicholas.” He gripped the handle of his suitcase and put his hand out. “Paavo. Good to see you. You feeling better?”

The boy nodded and looked away. “It was nothing that day. I hadn’t eaten.” He took Nicholas’s hand and reached for the suitcase handle with his left. “Was the flight all right?”

“It was long,” Nicholas said, stifling a yawn.

“I hope you are hungry. Mama has been cooking all day for your arrival.”

“I’m starving. I slept through the meals.”

“Come,” Paavo said, turning toward the door. “Papa is in the car outside.”

“I forgot how good your English is.”

“I told you—mostly everyone in Estonia speaks English. After all—” Paavo turned around to face Nicholas, who stopped short behind him “—it is easy when there are only three words in the English language. What are they?”

“Huh?”

“It’s a riddle.”

“Oh. I give up.”

“The English language,” Paavo exclaimed triumphantly. “Get it? One—The. Two—English. Three—Language?”

“Right,” Nicholas said, forcing a smile.

“Anyway, you’ll pick up some Estonian while you’re here. I think you’re taking a class at school. But I can teach you some things, as well.”

“I’d love that.” Secretly, Nicholas wanted the information, vocabulary and pronunciations to travel by osmosis from Paavo’s brain to his own so they could skip all the embarrassing times when Nicholas would feel inferior to Paavo, when he would feel beholden. Nicholas had a good ear—that’s what Senora Hall told him in Spanish II—but he wasn’t sure where his talents lay in a language that sounded as though it had more vowels than consonants.

Nicholas followed Paavo meekly toward the door, feeling as though he were being brought to the gallows. In the small embankment outside baggage claim, the brisk air sent a shiver down his spine. Was it still September in Estonia? It felt so much colder. He zipped his jacket up to his nose, breathing in the salty, damp flavor of his unwashed self. He squinted at the streetlights; their contrast against the inky sky was blinding. A small brown Lada chugged at the curb, streaked with gray stripes of dirt as though it were aging. Paavo swung his suitcase into the trunk and nodded toward the passenger seat.

“Please sit in the front.”

Nicholas opened the door and ducked his head, folding his legs in front of him. The car was warm and smelled like petrol and peppermint. “Papa, Nico. Nico, this is my father, Leo.” The man in the driver’s seat looked nothing like Paavo. He was broad and brown and hairy, reminding Nicholas of a big Russian bear. Leo grunted and grimaced, which Nicholas translated into a greeting and a smile. The evasive Estonian smile would emerge eventually. Coaxing it out of Leo would be one of Nicholas’s first challenges in the Sokolov household. Paavo’s father pulled at the gears, squeaking the car out of the airport road and onto a slip of a highway.

“Don’t mind the car,” Paavo said. “Papa refuses to trade in his trusty Russian beast for something a bit more modern.” Leo threw off a few long sentences into the air. Nicholas tensed at the sound. Was that English? He couldn’t be sure. Paavo sighed from the backseat and spun off a few of his own, ending with, “Papa, English please. For Nico.”

“Nico, I am saying,” Leo said, shifting the car into the next gear, “that this car has been with us for the past fifteen years. There is no problem with it.”

“It’s actually Nicholas,” he said. “And hey, I’m with you. If the car gets you from point A to point B...” he said.

Leo glanced at him. “How was the travel? Are you wanting tired? Wanting sleep?”

“I’ll be okay,” Nicholas said, though the moment he uttered the words, he found himself stifling a yawn. “What time is it anyway?”

“Eighteen thirty. We’ll take it easy tonight. Mama’s made dinner and you can go to bed early. There is a mall where we shop.” Paavo pointed. “And they are building a market there. And another mall there.” Shadowy, mountainous structures sulked in the recesses of deep parking lots. Silhouettes of cranes stood out against the harsh blaze of floodlights. Nicholas could see large pits below them, which would eventually be filled in with cement and the foundations of more shopping centers.

“You’ve come at an interesting time,” Paavo said. “The city has finally begun to fix some of the damage done by the Soviets, so there’s a lot of building and renovating going on.” The land was otherwise flat, but punctuated every so often with a slightly taller structure in the process of being overhauled. There were cranes and heaps of construction material all along the side of the road. The entire city was in a state of flux.

“They have made the old salt-storage building into a museum of architecture, and we have a new multiplex in the city with eleven screens,” Paavo said. “I’ll have to take you there.” Nicholas nodded, deciding not to share the fact that there were numerous movie theaters in New York City that boasted multiple screens. Old brick buildings that had been factories, storage space, silos, were being converted into retail space, lofts and offices. In ten years, when independent businesses would start to do the same to factories and large building spaces in the outer boroughs of New York City, it would be considered “hipster” and all associated retail and services would be priced at triple their actual value.

Tallinn didn’t look very different than Queens, especially near the airport. The existing buildings—from what he could tell in the darkness with intermittent streetlamps shining through—were monstrous industrial edifices, looming in the background as the trusty little Lada zoomed down the road. There was a cloak of darkness settled over everything, as though in September, the country had already settled into hibernation.

Nicholas had been anticipating a long drive, like the one from JFK to Manhattan that could take more than an hour. But the industrial-sized buildings began to shrink in stature, the road narrowed, and soon they were driving over cobblestones.

“We live in Kadriorg,” Paavo said. “One of the nicest neighborhoods in all of Tallinn. We are very near the park, where there is a castle and a pond and most importantly to most Europeans, a football pitch.” Modest wooden houses began to flank them on either side of the road, making Nicholas feel as though he was entering a fairy-tale village. The houses differed in color, size and design; they’d just passed a moss-green cedar-planked one across from a humble mauve ranch-style. Nicholas found himself disappointed when Leo parked the Lada in front of a plain brown wooden cottage, turned the engine off, and the three sat in the silence as the muffler slowly ticked to a halt. Nicholas dreaded going back into the darkness, but Paavo and Leo had unloaded his suitcase and were waiting for him on the driveway.

“Come, come,” Leo said. “We will be late for dinner.” He held his arm out toward the front door, where a tall woman stood. Her hair was either so blond it looked silvery or so silvery it looked blond. Her rosy cheeks were the only color she wore. Her lips held the trace of a smile, but her head was erect and alert as though she had been trained not to slacken her facial muscles. Nicholas had studied the Dust Bowl in United States History the year before; that famous photo of the woman staring into the distance with children clutching at her shoulders reminded him of the woman’s hardened face.

“Tere,” the woman called to him. “You are welcome.” She nodded, as if she were calling a puppy home from its romp outside rather than her new adopted son for the next four months. Nicholas approached her, and at the threshold, wafts of cooked meat mixed with the stark coolness of outside air. “I am Vera, Paavo’s mother. Welcome to Tallinn.” She held out a small posy of orange marigolds. “This is the traditional welcome here in Estonia. You are very welcome to Tallinn and to our home.”