Catapults and Sausages

Don’t make changes. That was the advice I got from a lot of people: do not make life-changing choices until things stabilize. Do not cause more upheaval in your life while grieving. I had already told the landlord that Cliff and I wished to stay another year while Cliff recovered from his surgery and, I hoped, would undergo chemotherapy and buy us another year or two together. Then, I thought, we could see how he felt and what he wanted to do.

Things did not work out that way.

But when he died, there was some solace in not having to make any decisions. I would run the subletting business that Cliff had set up and spend a year trying to remember how to breathe. As plans went, it seemed pretty sensible.

There were many changes that I did not make. I did not adopt a homeless puppy rescued from Ukraine, although the comfort and routine of a pet were very tempting. I didn’t even feed the black-and-white stray cat that eyed me as I walked home from the market with a thick slice of beef shank in my bag, a decision which I have regretted ever since a pair of seagulls started nesting on my roof. I did not buy a catapult.

I have never before been tempted to buy a catapult, although I had admired this particular one the summer before the pandemic. It is on the sixth floor of Epping Tower, a 15th-century fortification housing a narrow museum of medieval weapons and armor. The first time I visited, the woman selling tickets told me to please feel free to touch everything and then laughed when I stared at her, aghast. “You can’t let me swing a sword! I’ll slice my own head off!” I fingered the chain mail armor but left the weapons untouched until I reached the dusty wooden-floored room with small windows overlooking Old Town Tallinn. In the center of the floor was a full-sized catapult. I barely had a moment to consider threatening the cruise-ship tourists below with siege warfare when the woman came bounding up the stairs behind me, I assumed to tell me not to touch the catapult. “Oh, no,” she said. “I just want to make sure you close the windows behind you. Otherwise the pigeons get in and they make a mess.”

When the owner of the museum posted a notice to say that he was selling the exhibit, as he no longer had the time to dedicate to it, I tried to be helpful by sharing my happy memory of the place. I wrote that I was impressed that I was allowed to touch things and doubly so when I discovered the catapult.

To my surprise, the owner replied to me directly. “You could own it,” he said. And then he named a surprisingly low price.

I could own a catapult.

I could own an entire museum exhibition.

I said no, I couldn’t possibly. Even at the phenomenally low price, it was too expensive for me and I didn’t have time for a new project and it seemed like exactly the kind of big decision that I should not consider while recently bereaved.

But you could own a catapult whispered a treacherous voice in my head.

I don’t know why I suddenly want to own a catapult. Many other luxury items would fit into my life better than a catapult. I could buy a used VR gaming console or rent a tomato patch on the city outskirts or buy an electric bicycle. And yet, it was the catapult that seemed like it would spark the most joy.

I did not buy the catapult.

I also did not sign any rental agreements in advance when the landlord said that perhaps we should redo every contract in February instead of March and July, when they were due for renewal. Why would I? My name was on the leases and we had already verbally agreed a 5% increase in line with the rental price index.

I did buy a backpack. When Cliff was dying and people asked me what I was going to do, all I could think was that I wanted to go to the forest and walk and walk and walk until I fell over. After he died, I realized that I couldn’t anymore. There was no one to come and rescue me.

If I wanted to get lost in the forest, I was going to have to find my own way out again.

I already own a tent and a sleeping bag. If I had some way of carrying them, I figured, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting to the bus stop in time for the bus, never mind the risk of a surly driver pretending not to have seen me as he drives on by. Getting away is hard right now and the weather is not really trustworthy enough for overnight excursions in the wilderness, not to mention that the bears are still very, very hungry. However, as I now own a tent and a sleeping bag and a backpack that can hold them, I could theoretically blindly charge through the forest until I fell over and live on foraged mushrooms until I found my way home again.

Knowing that I can run away does a lot to ease my anxiety.

I also plotted a more civilized escape. There’s a bus that leaves Tallinn late on Monday and Friday afternoons, driving south for four hours and thirteen minutes until it reaches its final destination: a small village called Kuremäe, whose only claim to fame seems to be an ancient religious icon discovered under an oak tree in the late 16th century. The convent, all that is left of the religious community that sprung up around the oak tree, is still home to one hundred and sixty-one nuns. Near the bus stop is a pharmacy which inexplicably has bedrooms upstairs for passing travelers. From Kuremäe, it is only a few hours’ stroll through the forest to the Niinsaare Recreation Center, a lakeside property tucked away into the forest. Reviews are mixed, ranging from “desolate” to “a place for nostalgia” to “rough but in the process of being renovated”. They have “camping houses” that come with access to the shared kitchen and sauna. It is not clear to me if the sauna and the kitchen are the same unit. Whatever. Compared to a rainy night in a tent surrounded by bears, I’m sure it will be bliss.

If I keep heading north, it’s a two-hour hike to the next relic of civilization, the Alutaguse Holiday and Sport Resort, which seems to be clearing in the woods hosting a large parking lot and a squat motel-looking building. Somewhat more upmarket than the recreation center, the overnight price includes breakfast.

Presuming that I ever find my way out on the north side of the forest, it’s another three hours to walk to the capital of Ida-Viru County: Jõhvi, population 10,000, with a website which was last updated in 2019. The train station consists of a small bench underneath a curved plexiglass shelter. Three times a day, the slow train from Narva to Tallinn pauses to pick up passengers escaping from the village, so I should be able to hop on the afternoon train and get home in time for dinner.

This itinerary would describe a new circle of hell for Cliff: No car, questionable accommodation, and who in their right mind would walk for three days just to find a train to get home again?

This alone makes it the perfect trip for me, three days where instead of wishing Cliff were with me, I can be glad that he got to miss it, because he would have been absolutely fucking miserable. If he could thank me for leaving him out of it, he would.

Now I just need to find three days free to match the bus and train schedule.

It feels good to have something to look forward to.Thinking about the future still feels like I’m the coyote running off the edge of the cliff; if I look down into that abyss of “life without Cliff,” I’m afraid that I will start falling and never stop.

When Cliff came out of hospital, after months of barely eating followed by weeks of hospital food, he had a “I shall never go hungry again” sort of moment and ordered four kilos of Montbeliard sausages for delivery. I think he managed to eat two. Sausages, that is, not kilos. I froze the rest. Luckily, they are delicious and as long as I remembered to buy sauerkraut from the barrels at the market, they make for an easy meal, simmering quietly on the stove until I remember to eat.

Three months later, I’m down to the last dozen sausages. I should clear them out of the freezer but I am reluctant. I don’t want to run out of sausages. I know it is nonsensical. I should not save them. They are not a keepsake.

It’s a symptom of a greater issue: I am clinging to items in a way that I never have before. I know that the freezer is full of food and what I need to do, right here and now, is to make room. But that requires a leap of faith; that by eating the sausages, I am not doomed to a life without sausages, I am making room for something else. That there’s still something else to come, something better, if I can just open my mind to that idea.

That’s not what it feels like right now, and so I cling. I cling to the sausages and to his robe hanging by the bathtub and the crates of bottled water. Because once those last traces of him are gone, what will I have left?

The landlord wrote me to say actually, there were extraordinary circumstances, by which she means the invasion of Ukraine and the thousands of desperate refugees that have come to Tallinn with nothing but a suitcase and broken dreams. Apparently, these extraordinary circumstances explain why she needs to increase my rent by 33%.

I cannot tell you how betrayed I feel. The one thing that I thought I had under control is suddenly teetering like a sinking raft.

She’s only increasing the rent on one apartment, as the others are already extended, but it is the most expensive of the three. This change also destroyed the financial plan that I spent weeks building, leaving me at risk of losing money by running the business which was supposed to give me some stability. It seems clear that the rent will increase on the other apartments in April, pricing me out of the building. I presume this is the intent. I need a new plan and I need it quickly. I need to stop licking my wounds and work out where I want to go and what I want to do.

The chaos that Cliff left behind has been such that I’ve been almost unbearably busy with what feels like constant fire-fighting to try to get things right. I was just daring to hope that perhaps soon I could spend some time working out what I wanted to do. That I could finally get to work on my books, which stalled at some point in 2020, and empty the freezer to make way for new things and go walking in the forest for three days.

Now it seems I have important decisions to make. Life-changing decisions of the sort that I thought could wait just a little while longer.

I should have bought that goddamn catapult.