My Estonia. Justin Petrone

      “You could teach English.”

      For a moment, I considered the idea. Then it drifted away and swirled into the Tallinn’s afternoon sunlight.

      “I don’t think I could do that.”

      “Ha!” said Epp. “You can live wherever you want to and you can make friends everywhere. I have friends living all over the world.”

      Yes, I remembered, Epp had told me about her adventures. In India, she had helped cast a movie. In the UK, she had worked as a babysitter. Epp’s stories darted from location to location. There was India and England and Israel and the Canary Islands. There was Malaysia and Cyprus and Belarus.

      “I have worked with cameramen who have worked with Björk,” she said proudly. “They said that she is as crazy and as absent minded as I am. They said she lost one mobile phone a week while they were filming Dancer in the Dark.”

      We sat at the top of Toompea, or Dome Hill, a section of the old city that was the seat of the Estonian government. From up here, we overlooked the red tiled roofs of the rest of the Old Town.

      “Are you planning to stay here in Tallinn, now that our program is over?” I asked.

      “No, I don’t think so,” Epp shook her head. “I have been here before. I am still hungry for the world.”

      “But where will you go?”

      “I really want to go back to the ashram in India,” she said. “You cannot begin to imagine how clean you feel after a week there. I need to go back.”

      “I want to go to São Paulo in Brazil,” I said. “I want to go learn how to play bossa nova and samba.” I imagined that I would befriend my heroes Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and that soon I would be winning world music awards and playing on a float in Carnival.

      “So, why don’t you go?” Epp asked.

      The faces of my parents, who only hesitantly celebrated my acceptance into the Finnish foreign correspondents’ program, then flashed in my head.

      “I haven’t had the chance yet.”

      We walked up to the Toomkirik, or Dome Church, a place where many of Tallinn’s wealthy and influential were buried in olden days. I closed my eyes, and somewhere in my brain the terrible violence of those brutal, torch-lit evenings of the 13th century Danish invasion echoed and a pagan woman standing beside a roaring bonfire screamed out “Eesti9” in blood-curdling anguish.

      I opened my eyes again, and the 100 plus wooden coats of arms of the families of medieval Tallinn stared back at me. “Have you ever kissed in a church?” whispered Epp. I had no time to answer.

      Outside, the Estonian women around me continued to distract me. There was some extra magic in the movements of the blonde-haired maidens that beckoned me to come into their restaurants or to buy some postcards.

      Now and then a gorgeous half-naked woman, her blonde hair tossed over her shoulders, her figure hidden only by a skimpy tank top and a micromini skirt, her blue eyes inviting the most primitive feelings, would pass me by, leaving my body in crisis. I was drunk on the stimulation. I loved it.

      Epp looked very different. She wore baggy brown pants, a weathered black tank top, and sneakers that had seen several continents.

      In the past, I might have followed the images of any one of these other Estonian ladies into my own sensual daydreams. But Epp was far more interesting. The other women faded into the background, as lovely as the views of the city, but no longer of any real interest. My interest stood beside me, talking about the past and the future and, almost obsessively, about India.

      She kept talking about Sai Baba, some guru in the middle of India who actually believes that he is the embodiment of God. It sounded like bullshit to me, but Epp did seem more connected to the spiritual world than I was.

      Epp had stood in line at his ashram, she said, waiting to hand him letters filled with her wishes. One day, he had taken one. “He doesn’t just take letters from anybody,” Epp said proudly. “He knows instinctively whose wishes are worth being fulfilled.”