What kind of day is it?

There was a storm on Sunday night, everything creaking, lightning out to sea and the wind blowing so hard, I didn’t dare open the terrace doors for fear of never getting them shut again. “I don’t know if this is is normal,” I said to a friend. She pointed out that the peninsula is home to a large wind farm. “It’s probably pretty normal.”

I saw the building manager a few days later. She wanted to know if the apartment was OK, if there had been any trouble during the storm. It was fine, I told her. No windows rattling? Everything stayed safe? She’d sent a friend around to check on me, she told me. He drove over and looked up, checking for any signs of damage or broken windows. The lights were off, she said, so he didn’t want to disturb me.

I didn’t like to tell her that I’d spent an hour staring into the darkness, listening to the wind and watching the lights of the broken ferry parked in the harbour.

After the wind came the snow and then more snow and after a few days of only near-freezing weather, it dropped to a daytime temperature of -8°C.

When the dim sun peeked through the clouds, I walked along the main road towards the lighthouse, but the wind was too bitter and I soon turned back. As I reached the square, I sat down on a snow-covered bench and took out my buzzing phone. The grey slush of the sidewalk masked treacherous patches of ice; I literally did not trust myself to walk and talk at the same time.

It had only been two weeks since winter had overrun Paldiski and I’d already fallen hard, twice.

The sound of a man’s voice interrupted my poking at the phone. I glanced up to see a thin young man in a bulky coat and jeans, carrying a six pack of beer.

I had no idea what he’d said. I smiled in confusion, not sure if he was speaking to me.

He stopped in front of me and said something again. Russian.

I responded in Estonian, saying “I don’t speak…” before my words trailed off. I was going to say, “I don’t speak Russian” but that implied that I did speak Estonian, which I didn’t.

He immediately switched to Estonian as I paused. “Nyet,” I said in Russian, which really wasn’t helping matters. At a loss, I switched back to Estonian. “Do you speak German or English?”

“Saksakeelt,” he repeated thoughtfully, as if considering if he remembered any of his school boy German. The answer was clearly no as he switched to English.

“You do speak English?”

As I had been rather randomly throwing out words, it seemed a reasonable question. “Yes, I speak English.” I smiled.

“Can you tell me what kind of day it is?”

A bloody cold one, I thought, as the icy chill of the bench was beginning to seep through my clothes. It seemed an odd question, very friendly, very un-Paldiski-like. But maybe he was just very friendly. Or, I thought, looking at the beer, pleasantly drunk.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The day.”

It seemed like a lot of effort, going through three languages just to ask me if I was having a nice day. Also there was an earnestness to his voice, as if the answer actually mattered.

What kind of day… Did he mean which day of the week? How the hell would I know? But then I remembered sitting on the sofa this morning, watching the wind on the snow, instead of going straight to the computer. It was a lazy day.

“Sunday,” I said.

“Sunday.” He wasn’t unhappy with the answer; he just sounded unsure.

“Pühapäev,” I said, as he had already demonstrated that he spoke Estonian.

He repeated the word, looking a bit more confident. He nodded at me in acknowledgement.

I nodded back at him and moved to leave, but as he passed me, he turned around to look at me. “You don’t speak Finnish,” he said.

“No.” Where the hell did Finnish come into this?

“You don’t speak Estonian. You don’t speak Russian.”

I nodded in agreement, no longer sure if “yes” or “no” was the right answer.

“What are you doing here?”

“I live here.” The words came out almost belligerently. I tried again. “I moved here, about a month ago,” I said.

“A month.” He paused again and then said, slowly and deliberately. “It will be difficult.”

I didn’t like to explain that compared to the rest of this year, being linguistically challenged was a breeze. Also, he was the first person to speak to me in the street since I moved here. “Yeah, I know,” I said.

He turned to walk away, as did I. What kind of day was it? “Have a good day,” I said, because it seemed it it might be difficult for him, too.

“What?”

I turned to see that he had stopped again and was facing me.

“I said, have a good day.”

He looked at me, bewildered, as such a thing had not occurred to him. I kept my eyes on his face, trying not to look at the beer at 10am on a Sunday. Eventually, he nodded. “You too,” he said. This time he turned and kept walking.

I already am, I thought. I don’t think any of you understand how adorable your town is. It was like meeting a violent grizzly who roared, daring you to poke at it, just to reveal that it was actually a teddy bear, but we must be careful never to let it know that we can all see past that gruff exterior.