This is a story about cockroaches (“prussakad” in Estonian) and no, I didn’t wake up one morning feeling like one.

Some months after the first trip, a relative on my father’s side wrote to my mother saying how disappointed she was that mother had not contacted her during our visit. She sounded extremely upset, so I wrote back to her explaining that mother’s health had caused the situation. It turned out that this person was my second cousin and the daughter of my father’s best childhood friend. Regular correspondence ensued, and my written Estonian must have been comprehensible, given the replies I got.

The Ottawa Heart Institute eventually got me fixed up to the point where I could actually think about enjoying traveling. I even felt confident enough to start buying green bananas again. There were a lot of things I hadn’t seen during the first trip to Estonia and I now felt comfortable staying with relatives. Going by myself made things much easier and in particular, I wouldn’t be so tired out from constantly translating for my son. I decided to return next summer.

This time the flight went smoothly. The trip from Helsinki by air was an eye opener. You certainly knew you weren’t in Finland, because almost everywhere you looked there was some eyesore decrepit factory yard filled with rusting junk. The Russian Orthodox Cathedral on Toompea made we wonder if I was flying into Russia itself. Tallinn airport had not been fixed up yet so you didn’t need to look for signs to the washrooms — just followed your nose!

I spent a few great days in Tallinn just wandering the streets by myself. Things had been fixed up quite a bit in a year and didn’t look quite so drab and neglected anymore, particularly the old city.

I enjoyed an interesting lunch at the Olümpia Hotel with an older generation member of my fraternity who was still teaching at Tallinn Technical University. We were both somewhat amused by that fact that the young Estonian waitress was extremely attractive ,but the Russian working girl who was obviously soliciting the after-lunch crowd was extremely unattractive. Those Finnish guys must have strange tastes; I don’t think even a liter of vodka under your belt would have made her look any better.

I also found out that my spoken Estonian, complete with rural island dialect, must have been better than I thought, because my lunch companion asked me twice very thoughtfully if I had really finished university. Told him I had, but couldn’t see any point to reminding him where and how I had learned my Estonian which had to be at least 60 years out of date.

At that time many city people lived in drab five story walk up apartment blocks commonly called “Khrushchev Boxes”. The apartments themselves were spotless but the common areas, particularly the entrance doors were something I hadn’t seen even in the worst slums here. I complimented one of my relatives on her cozy apartment and was told that cockroaches were a real nuisance.

I must confess that I had to look the word up in my Estonian-English dictionary since it wasn’t one my mother had taught me. Anyway, I asked my relative if they had exterminators there yet. It should be easy contracting with a professional outfit to arrive in a discrete unmarked van with specialized equipment to liquidate the pests. My relative looked thoughtful, her husband stared at me in a strange way and for some reason the neighbor lady almost dropped her coffee cup.

Yes, they had such businesses, but the price was a bit high, sometimes they left a mess to clean up because of overkill, and perhaps the solution was a bit heavy-handed. I didn’t much think about this until I got back and visited mother at Eesti Kodu, the retirement home in Toronto.

I told her that our relative had a nice apartment but had complained about the cockroaches. Mother sighed that yes, it was too bad that so many Russians lived in the building, the current uncomplimentary term for them being “cockroaches”.

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