An odd sort of female solidarity

As weeks turned into months, I continued to make progress while shopping at the markets.

It seemed such an arbitrary goal. “Why not just go to the supermarket,” a friend asked me. “You just pick up what you want and take it to the till. Or better yet, online shopping! Then you don’t have to speak to a soul.”

This was true. Even then, before the pandemic, I knew I could get most everything I needed delivered. It would be easy to structure my life to avoid complicated interactions with strangers. Over time, I imagined, I could completely forget what country I was in. I could be anywhere! And that, of course, was the problem.

Slowly, I learned to do the bulk of my food shopping at the two markets. I successfully purchased potatoes from the man with a pick-up truck in the parking lot, pork chops from the butcher in the cellar, and cabbage and parsley from the old man in the back. If you discounted the olive oil (I had brought a twenty-five-liter canister with me from Spain), I’d purchased an entire meal!

Another sign of my progress was that I started intentionally buying things that were a mystery, just to discover what they were. One week, I pointed at a white tub of creamy something. I pointed and asked if it was smetana, which is the Russian word for sour cream. I’d been wanting to buy sour cream from the dairy woman for a while, instead of the packaged supermarket version. But I kept chickening out, confused by the fact that she offered a number of variations, including vanilla-flavoured, which is not something I think is reasonable to do to sour cream.

She didn’t understand my question, possibly because I had suddenly shifted from apologetic English and basic Estonian to a single word in Russian. I decided that I might as well buy some and find out. “Kohupiim,” I said, repeating the word on the sign. “Two hundred grams.”

She asked me an impatient question. I pointed and smiled hopefully. She glared back at me and repeated the question. People began to gather behind me, waiting for their turn. Bewildered, I said yes, in hopes of making it through the transaction. My bluff failed: I was being offered a choice and “yes” was not a useful response.

She lost patience with me: frustrated that I didn’t understand, annoyed that I was making it complicated, and concerned, I like to think, because she didn’t want to sell me the wrong thing. She pointed at two tubs, this one or that one? I had no idea what the difference was.

I pointed at a tub a tub at random. “That one.” She huffed, knowing that I hadn’t a clue what I was buying, and sold it to me anyway.

“What’s that,” asked Cliff when I got home. He was becoming intrigued by the odd items appearing in our larder.

“Sour cream,” I said, but it was too thick to be sour cream. I took a nibble. “Actually, no, it’s….” I took another nibble. It was thick and sweet. A little like ricotta but creamier and sweeter. A little like mascarpone with honey. Not actually like anything I’d ever had before.

I scooped it onto plates as if it were ice cream and then covered it in a strawberry sauce. “I don’t know what it is, other than it’s clearly dessert,” I told him.

He took a spoonful and smiled. “It’s good. You appear to have bought the inside of a cheesecake.”

“And it comes by the tub,” I said. “This is a dangerous thing to know.”

Cliff had been studying Estonian, much more seriously than I had, but in Tallinn there was rarely a need to speak anything but English. As I told him the stories of the market sellers, he decided to go with me to see for himself. We went to Baltijaama turg, which I had come to think of as the upscale market. I tried to let him manage the shopping and the transactions without too much interference. “Don’t go here, he shortchanged me once by 7 cents.” “Sure, those apples look good but if you go to the back, they are always cheaper.” “Don’t buy avocados here, they are guaranteed to be a disappointment.”

In the meat area, Cliff stopped at the English-speaking butcher who labeled their cuts using English terms. I pulled him away. That was cheating and besides, they sold everything at a 25% markup.

My favourite vendor was a woman with a tiny counter who sold only pork. Her offering rarely changed: pork chops, pork belly, “goulash pork” chopped into large pieces, pork knuckle that sometimes dropped to as low as 1.50€ per kilo. She was reliable and her meat was always fresh and of good quality, as long as you wanted pork. She spoke a little English. She had never tried to overcharge me or mess me about. She’d drop what seemed like a random amount of meat on the scale and, unfailingly, it would be exactly the amount that I had asked for. I’d commented before on how easily she eye-balled the weight.

Sometimes, she even smiled.

Cliff wanted to look at every stall, something I didn’t have the patience for. I insisted that we go to the pork lady so I could make chili verde for dinner. Tempted by the promise of a favourite dish, he stepped forward to the counter. She greeted me first and then him, in a blatant sign of preferential treatment. I smiled and deferred to him, who looked at all the pork and then said, “I don’t know. What do you want?” I pointed out the goulash meat and told him that I wanted a kilo.“You said chili,” he said, ever a stickler for detail. “That’s pork for goulash.”

“It’s pork cut for goulash. That’s the same as you would cut it for chili, if chili was traditional here.”

“Goulash isn’t traditional here. It’s Hungarian.”

I clenched my jaw and forced a smile to my face. “One kilo,” I said. “Goulash meat.”

I know she understood me but she gave him her full attention to Cliff as he asked for the pork in Estonian: “Ma tahaksin kilo guljašš sealiha, palun.”

She smiled at him–a broader smile than she’d ever given me!–and reached for the pork. Her eyes remained on Cliff, who was pulling out his wallet as she put the meat on the scales. She said, “It’s a little bit over, is that OK?”

“That’s fine.” Cliff didn’t look at the scale as he nodded. She told him the final price.

I startled. How much?! The glowing numbers on the scale showed that she’d put on a kilo and a half of pork, hardly “just a little bit over.”

Cliff was already counting out money, not the least bit bothered. A kilo and a half was outrageous. And I knew she was better than that. I was going to have to say something.

I took a deep breath and tried to catch her eye. She grinned at me and winked. Confused, I exhaled without speaking.

Cliff handed her the money and she packaged up the meat. “For you,” she said in English with a smile. She handed the pork to me, not to him.

“Thanks,” Cliff said absentmindedly, already moving towards the cheese stall.

Finally, I saw the scene through her eyes.

She knew me. I had shopped there for months. I always bought meat in small quantities; I was clearly not feeding a big family. Now I’d walked up with a man. I’d told him what I wanted and he had paid for it. She’d guessed that he wouldn’t know or care how much a kilo of pork should cost, and she was right. And now, I had an additional five hundred grams of meat and who wouldn’t be glad for that?

I grinned back at her, touched that she might think I needed the extra and flattered that she thought I had a sugar daddy.

It was a small thing, really, an odd sort of female solidarity from a woman whose name I didn’t even know. Maybe she’d have done it for anyone; after all, she also managed to sell more pork. But never before had she weighed or charged extra like that. It was intentional and so was the wink.

It made me feel a little less like a tourist and a little more like someone who belonged there. Like the market wasn’t full of strangers, anymore. Like I had made a sort of a friend.

But maybe, I thought, not everyone would see it that way. Maybe I wouldn’t tell Cliff.