This Is Not Science

The next Friday’s conversation class was very exciting as we had a substitute teacher! The woman who normally led our class was away at a conference, explained a friendly librarian. But it was fine, because the librarian was going to talk to us instead. It was just three of us, me and two Russian women. We all sat down and she smiled at us and we smiled back.

What would we like to talk about?

Silence. We glanced at each other in dismay. Wasn’t it hard enough to try to speak Estonian? Now we were supposed to be interesting, as well?

She waited. We waited. She sighed and picked up a children’s book, announcing that we could read it together. We each read a page about Priit and his schoolboy adventures but when she asked us questions about the story, it was clear that none of us had a clue what Priit was talking about. By page three, she had given up on the idea.

“Come on,” she said, dragging us deeper into the library. Surely there must be something here that would interest us. She led us to the nonfiction room where she held up reference books, asking us to name the subject of each one and whether we knew anything about it.

I struggled to find anything to say until she picked up an astrology book. I remembered the word for teadus, science, from the previous class. Amazing everyone, I spoke up. “Ei ole teadus.” This is not science.

“Tubli!” Well done! Whether this was for the correct categorisation of the book or that I had finally managed a full sentence, I do not know.

We walked past a bookshelf of featured books and I spotted one by Indrek Hargla, a famous Estonian author. He’s best known for his series of mystery novels about Melchior Wakenstede, a meddling apothecary who solves crime in medieval Tallinn. The first book was released as a film last year and broke box office records at its premiere: the only recent movie that has seen greater success was Tenet, and that was just because a number of scenes were filmed in Tallinn. I’m not sure how involved Indrek was with the process of converting Melchior to the silver screen — when I asked him, he grumbled, but in my experience, he mostly grumbles about everything.

I know Indrek as a part of the tight-knit science fiction community in Estonia who were quick to adopt me as one of their own. We spent a drunken evening talking about his novel Merivälja. He explained to me that during Soviet times there were many conspiracy theories including that a metal object found in the district of Merivälja was made with alloys that did not exist on Earth and must have been made by extraterrestrials and abandoned there centuries before. His novel, he told me, combined the various conspiracy theories from the area and combined them into a single narrative.

I was fascinated and over many beers, I quizzed him on the detail of the book, at which point he told me how it ended.

I was aghast. “Did you just spoiler me?”

“Sylvia,” he said. “You will not read this book until either you have learned Estonian or it is translated into English. Either way, you will have long forgotten this conversation.”

And it is true that by the following morning, I no longer remembered what he had told me.

Obviously, I could say none of this to the friendly librarian leading us through but, emboldened by my astrological success, I pointed at the novel on the shelf. “See on minu….” I paused, seeing an õ coming at me at rapid speed. Everyone was staring at me. “See on minu sõber,” I said. That is my friend.

The librarian looked confused for a moment and then spotted the book. “Oh, Indrek Hargla! You’ve heard of him. You must have seen the film!”

“Yes,” I said, because of course I’d seen the film, but that’s not what I’d said.

“Have you seen the second one?” She turned to the other two women and told them about the Apteek Melchior series and that they could watch the first one on television, if they had the local subscription service. “There are three books,” she told them.

“No.” I struggled to find the words. “There are three films. There are many books.” But I used the wrong words, saying something closer to “It is still a book.” By now I was longing to go back to Priit and his schoolboy adventures.

“It is a book and a film,” she said, not understanding why I was trying to start an argument. I think she was missing Priit as well.

“Books. Six. Seven. Maybe eight,” I said. I have since checked and there are in fact seven books in the series. I made her lead us to the H-shelf to take a look at his books. They had just three of the Melchior books, which did little to support my point. “It is a good book,” I said with a sigh, accepting that my attempt at name-dropping had failed completely.

“Tubli!” That’s great! Her face softened as she exhaled. That was enough for one day, she decided, and she gave us permission to escape early, as long as we promised that we would be there the following week. “Tubli,” she said again, this time with a genuine smile. I imagine she had just remembered that our teacher would be back by then and she would not have to teach us again.