The Faces of Strangers

by Pia Padukone

  “Well, better late than never.” Nico raised his tumbler of vodka and clinked it against Leo’s wineglass. “Does it feel different?”

  “Yes and no,” Leo said. “I can vote now. And I can travel without feeling like I am being denied entry to my own country.”

  “You didn’t tell him the biggest news of all,” Vera said. “Go on. Don’t be shy.”

  “What?” Nico asked. He found himself hoping it was some news about Mari.

  “The chickens,” Vera said. “Say it, Leo.”

  “You finally got rid of them?” Nico asked. “God, you hated those things.”

  Vera laughed. “Guess again. He got his own.”

  “You didn’t,” Nico said. “You’re a changed man, Leo Sokolov.”

  After a small tussle over the check—Nico insisted on paying—they walked out. The food had been excellent—Scandinavian in its preparation and arrangement, and plentiful, but Nico got up from the table feeling hollow. What was Paavo’s word? Dusha. Soul. The food had been bereft of it. He rubbed his stomach. He hadn’t thought he might miss all that soporific meat, the leaden way his head and stomach felt after a classic Estonian meal. He didn’t want to go back to his hotel room after this meal. He would feel even emptier. Why hadn’t he insisted that Ivy join him on this trip? He wished he’d known that Paavo wasn’t going to be here.

  As he held the door open for Vera, someone grabbed his arm. “Nico?”

  Nico answered “Yes?” before he turned to see the man’s face. As soon as he did, he was unsure. The man was tall, dirty blond, pale. A scar stretched across his jaw like a threat, and his clear blue eyes were reminiscent of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin, a gentle reminder that Nico shouldn’t drink anymore. It was important to remain clear, levelheaded. That just because he wasn’t in a New York City restaurant didn’t mean that his behavior couldn’t get back to constituents back home.

  The man’s face burst into a smile. “I thought it was you. What are you doing here?”

  Nico plastered his public smile across his face. He could already feel his vocal cords calibrating before he launched into his politic spiel.

  “I’m visiting...” Nico faltered. He held his hand out. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, I don’t remember...”

  “Heigi.” The man grasped Nico’s hand in his own and pumped it up and down furiously. “From Eesti. You sat in front of me in Estonian Literature.”

  “Heigi,” Nico said, even though he wasn’t sure at all. “Yes, of course. Do you remember Paavo? These are his parents.”

  “The famous Paavo,” Heigi said. “Tere, it is good to meet you all. You must be so proud. What luck running into you. I’m having a party this evening. You must come, all of you. Come.”

  * * *

  At ten thirty, Nico found himself walking from his hotel down the one long street of Old Town that didn’t have a dead end. Walking through these quaint, cobblestone streets didn’t dredge up any memories as he thought it might. In fact, he couldn’t remember half of the squat yellow buildings that surrounded him; he was sure that most of the shops didn’t exist when he went to school a few streets over. Or was Eesti High School that way? Every which way he turned, there were bookstores and restaurants and souvenir shops, which even at that hour of night were open and lively. There were entire stores devoted to Baltic amber, and window fronts glowed from the golden stones embedded in necklaces, key chains and charms. He felt disoriented and lost from the pallor of jet lag that was starting to cast its dreary shadow over him.

  He found himself grateful for the multiple—free—wireless signals that his phone picked up during the walk from his hotel to the address that Heigi gave him, and the little blue dot that stood for his location was starting to blink closer and closer to his destination.

  Nico marveled at Europe. He had forgotten how the streets in this continent were built hundreds of years ago, that there had been countless wars, political battles and social revolutions that had taken place right where he stood. The grandeur of New York City didn’t stand up to this kind of history, however electric the vibe was at any given hour. It reminded Nico of how in high school, they’d spent one year on world history, one on European and two years on American history, a country with a fraction of the history of the rest of the world. He thought back to his apartment, to his parents’ apartment, to the art galleries and hot-dog carts and the trees rich with color in Central Park and of how he wouldn’t trade it for the world, for any other history than the one his city had made for itself in its short life. But he had to admit that the Old World was certainly charming.

  The narrow street took a slight uphill, and his legs began dragging. The street was lit on either side by gauzy, yellow streetlamps, and the click of his heels reverberated across the buildings on either side of the street. A fleeting but vivid memory skittered across his mind of dashing across these very cobblestones with Paavo. Why were they running? The GPS on his phone confirmed that he was at his destination and he looked up. He could hardly believe it. He hadn’t put the two together when Heigi scribbled down the address, but he was standing in front of Pikk 59, the exact place that he and Paavo had scrambled into after they had been running from someone. Paavo told him to run, so he’d run. And then Paavo showed him the structure, and they walked around to the courtyard, found a broken window and crawled inside. The windows that led to the basement were bricked and silent, but the face of the building was still regal with its arched windows and terraced promontories. He could hear the party from the ground floor, lots of laughing, talking, and he was sure he’d heard three champagne corks open in rapid succession.

  Nico rode the gilded cage elevator up to the top floor. The door opened before he’d even had a chance to ring the bell.

  “Nico!” A woman put her glass of wine on the ground and leaned forward to press her cheek against his. “I thought we’d never see you again.” This must be how Nora feels all the time, Nico thought. Why does everyone recognize me, but I can’t place them? He slipped his shoes off next to the pile in the entryway and examined the slim woman with long, dark lashes and blond hair with dark roots, a style that looked regal on her rather than trashy. The European advantage, he thought.

  “Katrin,” Nico said, suddenly recalling her name. “I thought you’d be living in Paris or something.”

  “Ah, that was a childhood dream,” she said. “But I have a new one. Well, I suppose he’s more of a reality. Tim, come meet Nico. Tim, Nico spent a few months on an exchange program here when we were in high school. Tim is a pilot. He’s based in Toronto.”

  “Katrin, let him through the door,” Heigi called. “Then you can show off your new arm candy.”

  “He’s not my arm candy. He’s my fiancé.” Katrin glowered at Heigi, but she stepped aside to let Nico into the living room. There were at least a dozen people milling about, but the space was so large it hardly appeared full.

  “Come, let’s get you a drink,” Heigi said.

  “This is huge,” Nico said, following Heigi around the curve of the living room that led to the kitchen. “Does my memory serve me right? Isn’t this—”

  “The former home of the KGB?” Heigi smiled. “Sure is. Second only to the Bat Cave. How cool is that? My company just finished the work, and I moved in a few months ago.”

  Heigi’s real estate company focused on buildings with histories. They sought out architectural commodities, gutted the insides, gave the facades a face-lift and resold individual lots inside at what, Nico figured, judging by the scotch collection clustered on the bar, must be an abhorrent price.

  “People are dying to live here,” Heigi said. Nico thought about the irony of Heigi’s statement. People had been dying in here long before Estonia had been declared independent. They’d been tortured in the building’s very basement and the windows were still bricked up in a nod to the attempt to sti
fle their screams. He thought about Vera’s parents. Had they been brought to this building before being sentenced to work themselves to death in a Siberian work camp? Nico wanted so badly to ask Heigi what the plans were for the basement. He pictured a finished game room or a communal bar area where residents could gather, immune and ignorant of all that had occurred around them.

  “Are you sure you don’t want something stronger?” Heigi asked, passing Nico a glass of wine.

  “I’m sure,” Nico said.

  “So, have you been doing this for a while?” Nico asked, taking dainty sips.

  “Real estate? Nah. It’s something new. I started out in construction after Eesti, and then a few years later, I met Magnus.” He nodded toward a broad man in a deep blue suit who was talking animatedly to a woman whose face Nico couldn’t see. “He’s Finnish, you see. He was just starting out with the Linna Group when we met. They take over some of the most pivotal structures in major European cities. People are clamoring for these addresses. It’s incredible what they will pay in order to say that they live on the site of the Führerbunker in Berlin. It’s like, the more notorious, the higher the price. It’s quite disgusting, really.” Heigi laughed, and poured himself another few fingers of scotch.

  “Who are all these people?”

  “Actually, I don’t know most of them. Friends of friends and so on. The girls in that corner you know. They went to Eesti. You know Katrin, and there’s Made and Urve. And their boyfriends,” he whispered. “All rich. All foreign.”

  “I guess those are the circles you run in now,” Nico said. He was starting to feel a bit nauseous and wished he’d taken Vera and Leo up on their offer of a nightcap at their home instead. “You have to go after the big fish, right?”

  “Oh, they’re not my clients. They’re the golden ticket out for those gals.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’ve had it with this country. They’d be out of here by now if they could. But they can’t, so they do the next best thing. Marry up and out.”

  “That seems sort of harsh. I thought they all work.”

  “I’m not accusing them of being gold diggers. Maybe the word I’m looking for is opportunist.”

  Nico definitely felt sick. “What’s so wrong with Estonia anyway?”

  “Absolutely nothing, so long as you’re in the right business. We’re a tiny little country, but tech-wise, Estonia is at the forefront. We’re going to be unbeatable one day. TIT is really heating up.”

  “Excuse me?” Nico nearly spit out a mouthful of wine.

  Heigi chortled. “I’m surprised you’re not well versed with the name by now. It’s practically Paavo’s second home. Tallinn Institute of Technology? It’s where he started CallMe with those two guys from Mustamäe?”

  Nico shifted his weight and took a long draught of wine. “I, er, haven’t talked to Paavo in a while.”

  “Man, what a bright guy. He really played his cards right.”

  “It certainly seems so. But it seems he escaped, too, to Prague.”

  “Sure, for now. But he knows what he’s doing. He’ll be back. He’s one of the leaders of the e-revolution. One of his mentees helped to reinvigorate the electronic voting system for the last election. We had more than sixty percent voter turnout.”

  “That’s way more than the States could dream,” Nico breathed. “Incredible.”

  “I know.” Heigi smirked. “But of course, we’re not perfect. We still have things to work on. If you’re not in tech, or something related, there’s a huge perception that life is greener outside our humble borders, so lots of people are leaving. For example, you know our generous maternity leave?”

  “More than a year, right?”

  “One hundred percent paid in full. You know why? We’re hemorrhaging people. Losing them to other countries, other sectors all the time. That maternity policy is an incentive to get people to stay here. But I think it’s only a matter of time before things begin to right themselves. You couldn’t pay me enough to leave right now.”

  Nico smiled at Heigi’s enthusiasm. It conjured Leo’s fond love for this little country when they’d gone foraging for mushrooms all those years ago, even though he’d been denied an Estonian passport for most of his adult life.

  “What about people like him?” Nico gestured toward Magnus, whose arm was around the woman he was speaking to, while the other was gesturing so wildly that the vodka in his glass sloshed over the side. Magnus’s smile was all teeth and grimace, a shark circling its prey. “People are leaving, but he’s coming in?” Nico felt suddenly protective of Estonia.

  “The ones who see opportunity are in the right place at the right time,” Heigi said. “While others are impatient to change their lives overnight.”

  * * *

  Nico moved on to speak with Katrin and Urve, though Made didn’t appear to remember him and disappeared onto the terrace with her boyfriend. But as the evening rode onward into the early hours of morning, he felt really ill. Trendy food didn’t necessarily mean better food, though he was fairly certain that the feeling in the pit of his stomach was despondency rather than food poisoning. What had happened to the innocence of this little fairy-tale country, with its Gothic steeples and cobblestone streets? With its electronic voting and omnipresent wireless connections, and its experimental tech labs into which neighboring countries were funneling money, its position at the forefront of the future seemed secure. Estonia had grown up. As Heigi rounded up the remaining guests to down shots of vodka on the roof, Nico thanked his host, bade a quick goodbye to the girls, took the winding stairs down to the street, where he could still hear the party echoing, and vomited against a bricked-up window of the former KGB headquarters of Tallinn.

  Nico felt instantly sobered, though still confused and disoriented. He felt as if he’d just stepped off the plane in Tallinn for the first time back in September almost a decade ago. And just like that day in September, he felt completely displaced. He could identify the feeling now. It wasn’t an upset stomach. He felt alone, completely alone in a city that was never truly his to begin with. Nico in Estonia without Paavo felt illegitimate; he had no reason to be there. He wasn’t sure what happened between him and Paavo, but he was sure that he didn’t belong here. He wasn’t really sure who did.

  NORA

  New York City

  March 2012

  Nora had never felt more at home than she did in her office, the SafeSpace headquarters. And she was busier than ever; her schedule was in overdrive. She’d gone from having great gaps of time in her days with which to while away the hours doing endless, interminable Google searches, having long romantic lunches with Shahid in the student haunts near Columbia, where he’d been hired as a tenure track professor, splitting apart the frayed ends of her hair, or when the weather changed for the better, taking long, luxurious walks along the lengths of New York City avenues. But then the article in New York magazine had been published and the ringer on her phone seemed as if it was broken—as soon as she placed the receiver in its cradle, it would ring again; as soon as she answered there would be the telltale beep of another caller waiting to get in touch with the psychoanalyst Dr. Grand, whose name and reputation preceded her. She had to hire a secretary to manage her calendar. She hadn’t realized that there had been so many people who might need her, who needed the strength of her abilities. It was her creation—patent pending—that would allow her this sort of fame. That one published essay had reached all five boroughs, even parts of New Jersey and Westchester, pulling out all those disbelievers, all those skeptics who worried about their images, what they’d appear to be if they stared someone in the face and told them their problems. Pure humiliation could sometimes drive people away before they even had a chance to consider therapy. So Nora had created SafeSpace. This was like no other safe space in any other therapy session she’d moni
tored or observed. While technically, all therapy sessions were supposed to be safe, or you had no right to be holding one, SafeSpace was a darkened room with dim lighting where patients could sit or lie or stand erect, however it pleased them. When they were settled, they pressed the glowing green button and a screen would open on the other side whereupon Dr. Nora Grand would emerge and begin. She never saw them; they never saw her, much like a confessional in a Catholic church. But unlike those chiseled wooden screens, decorated with weeping angels and exuding the pungent aroma of a swinging metallic thurible, SafeSpace separated patients with a state-of-the-art slate slider with soundproofing when they just needed a moment—to cry, to talk out loud, to curse.

  Throughout her schooling, Nora had scoffed at all the fads—the sleep therapy, the hypnosis—but during psych lab one day, on a particularly difficult run when she wasn’t able to identify anyone, not her lab mates or even her advisor, she’d had a brain wave. She had to recognize her returning patients; she couldn’t label a disorder or background with the wrong face. She would come across as unprofessional, undedicated, and her condition would undermine the hard work she’d put into everything she’d worked toward.

  So she’d blindfolded her subjects, talking to them through microphones one at a time from the other side of a screen, her voice muffled and her body invisible, and realized the power of physical division. People didn’t like admitting their feelings, their failings or shortcomings, especially not to a stranger. This was the inherent weakness in therapy in general, that you could always feel judged. Therapists were human, after all, and if someone kept returning to an abusive relationship, or couldn’t extricate him-or herself from a deep-rooted gambling addiction, they sat smugly next to you, thinking they were better. They would never make those decisions; they would never stoop quite so low. Nora considered this idea for a long time. She thought first about using masks, but they were frightening to her. She thought about sleep masks, but that was dangerous, too, because patients couldn’t see her but she could see them. Finally, she settled upon the dark partitioned room—a dark space, a truly safe space.