Beware of Naked Men

There’s a joke I used to tell: when I first told everyone that I was staying in Estonia, my American friends were all “How exciting! Where is that?” And my German friends said, “Huh, interesting choice.” And my Estonian friends said, “Why?!?”

Telling my Estonian friends that I’m leaving Tallinn for Paldiski has escalated that “Why?!?” to all caps.

Paldiski is a heavy industry and port town: an 18th-century naval base built over a small coastal village which became a closed city during the Soviet occupation. The inhabitants were moved out of the way with barbed wire protecting the perimeter. The town was expanded with barracks and nuclear reactors to support a Soviet Navy nuclear submarine training center, the largest in the Union. All residents were removed from the local islands, so that they could be used for bombing practice.

I had decided that I was definitely, 100% staying in Tallinn. I knew that I was going to have to move quickly at the end of the high season. I wanted somewhere unfurnished, even though that was more expensive. The furniture felt like all I had left of my life with Cliff; I couldn’t bear the thought of walking away. It was hard enough having to move at all. I scoured the real estate sites looking for somewhere I could call home, at least for a while.

In Soviet times, everything in Paldiski was classified, but, of course, some news made it out of the closed city. Workers at the nuclear reactor plants complained that when the Soviet bombers used the islands for target practice, the nuclear reactors would shudder and shake as if in an earthquake. Sometimes, the Soviet bombers missed. One bomb landed in the cabbage field belonging to the local kindergarten. Another impacted the ground just 15 meters from the working nuclear reactors. Luckily, both malfunctioned and did not explode.

A high-end apartment appeared on my search. It was clearly a mistake, so patently not in my budget. I called it the Silicon Valley CEO apartment: a large open plan one-bedroom apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, a suspended fireplace feature and a bathtub surrounded by rocks. Except that the apartment was in Paldiski, a place where no Silicon Valley CEO would ever dream of living.

Paldiski was officially released from secrecy in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and the military base was left to fall into ruin. Around 1,500 Russian armed forces remained and took over the town, which became a haven for drug and weapon smuggling. On the 16th of March 1993, Estonian police and border guards stormed the town to reclaim it. Since then, the population has hovered around 3,000 to 4,000 people, a sizeable drop from the 20,000 in the closed city.

The monthly rent for the Silicon Valley CEO apartment was extravagant for Paldiski: the average one-bedroom apartment ranged from the size of a parking space to a two-room apartment smaller than my living room. I looked up the equivalent apartments in Tallinn. They were outrageously expensive, three to four times more expensive, thousands of Euros a month.

I couldn’t stop staring at the listing. The apartment made no sense. It was completely and utterly impractical.

I wanted it anyway.

My friends thought I was crazy. “Really, Paldiski?” They used a tone of voice usually reserved for boiled brussel sprouts. “Why?”

I emailed the agent to ask for more information. She responded almost immediately. “You are aware that this apartment is not in Tallinn?”

Yes, I was aware. I asked for details of the utilities and when I might be able to see the apartment.

This time, her response took a bit longer. “I’m sorry for so many questions,” she said, “but the owner wants to know why you want to live in Paldiski.”

Somehow, “Because I fell in love with the apartment,” seemed like the wrong answer. “Because I have no where else to go” was unlikely to reassure the owner. “Because I can live anywhere,” I said.

Wikipedia:

Cliff and I first visited Paldiski in 2017, after someone told me that I should go there urgently to see the remains of the closed city before it disappeared. We drove past the neglected apartment blocks. I remember pointing at one small window with net curtains on it. “People still live there,” I said. There were, in fact, about 3,000 people living in Paldiski at the time. The only shopping was squat two-story department store attempting to sell everything that one might need, ranging from vodka to paint brushes to dry goods and pet food.

The tavern was there, has been there in some form or another since 1716, an old customs building servicing Peter the Great’s Baltic port. The food was good, enough reason to continue to visit on a regular basis for a hot lunch and a wander around the peninsula. The first summer, we noticed that someone had painted the playgrounds in bright colors. Soon after, grass and shrubs appeared on the main roads. Slowly but surely the barracks and other buildings were cleaned up, with more and more windows sporting net curtains and even the occasional flower box. I loved the neighborhood a little bit already, even then, for doing the playgrounds first.

Paldiski had only one way to go, really, and that was up.

I took the train to meet the agent there, leaving enough time for a walk around. An upmarket café and a collection of supermarkets had sprung up since our last visit and the town was starting to look positively enticing.

The apartment viewing supported my Silicon-Valley-CEO theory. The north side of the house had no walls, only windows, in a style that was undeniably more Malibu Beach than Baltic Chic. The en-suite bathroom had no door, the toilet separated from the bed only by an open corridor; no thought for privacy or the dampening of, um, noises. Whoever designed the place had included a beautiful breakfast bar with an odor-filtering aspirator in the middle of a small induction stove-top, a built-in wine fridge and a tiled steam room…. but not bothered to leave space for a washing machine.

“It’s perfect,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

“They speak Russian here,” said the agent, dubiously. I had heard at least three people speaking in Estonian while I walked around. The latest statistics that I’d looked at put the town at 55% Russian speaking.

I smiled at her. “Do you live here in Paldiski?”

“Oh god no. I live in Tallinn.”

As I began organizing for the move, people continued to react in disbelief.

“Paldiski? No, you don’t mean that, you mean Paldiski Road in Tallinn. Paldiski is very far away.”

Paldiski was just over an hour away by public transport. There were fifteen trains a day and there was a bus stop visible from my kitchen window, offering a service to Tallinn every hour from 6am until midnight. I was hardly moving to Siberia.

The man at the phone company winced when I gave him my new address. “Have you ever been there?”

I assured him that yes, I had actually bothered to visit the place that I was moving to.

“Awful place. Beware of vipers,” he told me. “I did my military service there and a viper bit me. I was wearing thick gloves, so I was lucky.”

“Vipers? In the town?”

“Well, in the forest there.” Estonian vipers are in every forest, as far as I know, but as far as he was concerned, it was all Paldiski’s fault.

“Mosquitoes,” said the man at the bank. “You’ll be inundated with mosquitoes.”

“I’m on the 6th floor.”

“Even so,” he said with an unhappy sigh. “They will eat you alive.”

The removal men taking my furniture from Tallinn to Paldiski were equally dubious, although they cheered up when they saw the apartment. “This is amazing.”

“It is,” I said, beaming as if I were personally responsible.

“But beware of the sauna,” one of them told me, quietly and privately. “It’s on the other side of the building. They have separate days for men and women. On the men’s days, they come outside to sit.”

When I didn’t react, he explained. “Naked.”

I smiled. “Young men or old?”

“Both.” Then he gave me a horrified look and scurried back to his companions.

I indulged myself with one last food delivery from Tallinn, with a minimum order of 150€ for them to bring it out to me. The delivery man recognized me from the previous apartment. “Have you really moved here?”

“I have.”

“Why?”

This time I admitted it. “For the apartment.”

“Yes,” he said. “It must be much cheaper here.” He lived in Keila, he told me as he carried my groceries in, halfway between Tallinn and Paldiski and also much cheaper. Then he fell silent, his eyes widening as he looked around. He stuttered for a moment. “Is it OK if I ask you how much this costs?”

I was a bit embarrassed, worried that he would think that I was rich or indulgent or just crazy to live in a big apartment like this all by myself. But when I told him the rent, he just shook his head in wonder. “When you leave,” he said, “could you tell me? So I can see if I can get it for myself?”

I had just about finished unpacking when I got an alert on my phone that it might be possible to see the Northern Lights from my location.

The evening was cold and damp and cloudy. I didn’t really want to hike out on the dirt road in the dark and get caught in the rain.

When the clouds broke up around midnight, I went onto the terrace, just in case, and looked north. I figured the lights of Paldiski would be too bright and it was true, to the naked eye, there was nothing at all. But then when I took a photograph looking out towards the wind farm, there was an undeniable haze of green.

Vipers, mosquitoes and sauna-going men seem a small price to pay.