The Faces Of Strangers

“Everyone, this is Peter,” Barbara announced, as though he was her own son. “He’s from St. Petersburg.” Paavo realized he’d been holding his breath; he released it slowly and took in cool sips of air. This boy would not spend the next four months in his home with his family. Paavo would not be sent across the ocean to be raised by this boy’s mother, who, it seemed, didn’t appear to be doing much mothering at all. Paavo cupped his elbow with his palm, congratulating himself with this victory.

“And,” Barbara continued, “this is Evan, who will be your program partner.” Evan stepped forward in unsure, jerky movements as though he’d just learned to walk.

“Hi, Peter. It’s nice to meet you.” Evan said, holding his hand out. Peter scowled while shaking his hand.

“It’s Pyotr,” he said in heavily accented English. “Peter is so common.”

“Pe-eter.” Evan smiled, pleased with himself.

“Pee-ott-urr,” the boy said, shaking his head and knotting his eyebrows. “Roll the r.”

“You’ll work on it,” Barbara said, ushering them to the side together. The girls and the other boy were appropriated—Sabine to Jess and Anika to Malaysia. Barbara guided the boy who had smiled at Paavo toward him as her finale.

“Nicholas, everyone,” she said. “You’re paired with Paavo from Tallinn.” Nicholas smiled broadly at Paavo, who remained tight-lipped and nodded his greeting toward his host brother.

“Once everyone has located their luggage, it’s time to head straight to orientation. We have a busy few days ahead of us before the semester starts.” Barbara herded the combined group out, with Rolf bringing up the rear.

“How was the flight?” Nicholas asked. It looked as though his face would cleave into two parts from the breadth and strength of his smile.

Paavo’s face remained stoic and unchanged. “Unfortunately, quite bumpy the whole way. These Polish pilots don’t know what they are doing half the time.”

Nicholas raised his eyebrows and licked his lips. Apparently Estonians had STDs of their own. “You ready for orientation?”

“I suppose so. What are they going to tell us that we don’t already know?”

* * *

The Hallström program orientation was scheduled over two days, with a few hours scattered here and there for sightseeing and getting to know one another. The Berlin Hallström corporate office was an imposing metallic building that glinted so brightly in the sun’s rays that it was impossible to look straight at it with the naked eye. Rumor had it that when the architect was drawing the plans, Hallström himself had insisted on using the most reflective steel in order to create an edifice that dominated the skyline in more ways than one. However, the building was so lustrous that it had succeeded in causing arson; on more than one occasion it had set fires in a few surrounding buildings, melting plastic chairs and beach umbrellas that had been placed on nearby rooftops. Hallström resolutely refused the fire department’s suggestion to sandblast the facade, digging in his heels when the matter was taken to the city council.

The conference room reserved for the orientation was located on the corner of the forty-ninth floor of the building, with light striking against the sharp angles of the balconets so that Paavo had to squint upon entering the room. A long slab of wood constituted the table, the knots still visible but the grain polished and buffed. Around the table sat the Czechs, the Poles and the Russians in that order, geographically from West to East, congregating like a tiny Eastern European Bloc. The American counterparts bookended the Bloc in designer swivel chairs, each of them guarded and their spines straight as they waited for orientation to begin. Barbara had disappeared once they’d arrived, but Paavo could hear her in the hallway, delegating the staff and ordering more ice and soft drinks.

In her seventeen years working as the coordinator of the Hallström program, Barbara had ushered in all types of students. With her keen sieve-like manner, she had succeeded in plucking the right type of student for the program, though their shared characteristics were invisible to the untrained eye. They were all model students, their grade point averages vetted and culled from a stack of applications by a team hired expressly for this mundane responsibility. The students have arrived in packs, or alone, with overstuffed suitcases as though they had been summoned to an expedition down the river on the Amazon instead of into the conveniences of cosmopolitan cities. They have arrived wielding only a simple backpack, causing host parents to worry about hygiene or whether they might have to coax their exchange student to change their undergarments. They have been sent home early for misconduct, which mostly consists of smoking pot or excessive drinking. They have received commendations, accolades, and have been recommended for honors programs at universities. They have been preppy, athletic, rebellious, lazy, overweight. They have come with eating disorders and autoimmune diseases. They have come with clean bills of health. They have come resplendent in designer clothing, exuding riches from every pore and orifice. They have come needy, some almost destitute, but no matter, because entering the hallowed fold of Hallström levels the playing field. They have all come with open minds, with open hearts, of that Barbara is sure. They have come with good intentions, the desire to lead, to fulfill the common Hallström goal.

As he stood upon the threshold of the room, Paavo couldn’t imagine these ten people having anything less in common, not to mention how uniquely disparate he felt amongst them, like a lamb amongst wolves. Paavo glanced at each of the students already seated; the Polish and Russian girls flanked the Czech boy on either side. Pyotr’s face appeared sour, as if he were constantly being forced to chew on lemons. Paavo made his choice to settle directly across from the Russian girl, a decision he immediately regretted because of her hair. It was so long and ratty that he almost wished he’d sat next to her so he could pick apart the tangles with his fingers. Nicholas settled in next to him and reached over immediately to the small bowls of snacks placed in a straight line like a dividing border between themselves and the rest of the group. The room was eerily silent, waiting with anticipation for their leader to enter the room. Barbara entered the room squinting, and held her hand up to her forehead like a visor.

“Looks like we’re all here.” Though she smiled, there was something chilling in her look, as if even though everyone had made it into the Hallström program, she was still constantly assessing and appraising every one of her recruits, to ensure that she had made the right decision.

“Now,” Barbara said, standing in the front of the room and gripping the chair back in front of her, “let’s reintroduce ourselves to one another, just in case we have forgotten names or faces.” Paavo was secretly glad for this, as he had forgotten everyone’s name except for mawkish Pyotr, who sat sullenly between the girl with the unkempt hair and Nicholas.

One by one they were reintroduced as partners: Pyotr-Evan, Sabine-Jess, Tomas-Justin, Anika (Unkempt Hair)-Malaysia, Paavo-Nicholas. Each time Malaysia’s name was mentioned, whether it was during a roll call or introductions, Paavo found himself stumbling over the concept of her. Malaysia was a slender black girl, with hair that puffed out around her head like a cloud of spun sugar. Her skin was darker than any Paavo had seen before. He hadn’t encountered anyone quite like her, and not just because black people were few and far between in Estonia. What kind of a name was Malaysia, he wondered. She was clearly not from the country; their people were tawny-skinned with eyes that seemed to screw together at the corners. He had to force himself to stop looking at her; as if she could sense his gaze, Malaysia lifted her head and shifted her body to face the opposite direction.

Paavo stifled a yawn behind his hand and sat up so that his spine pressed against the back of the seat. It was the only way that he was going to get through this session. He could feel the creep of sleep start behind his eyelids and he twitched his mouth and licked his lips, willing himself to wake up.

Barbara was warming up. She looked out over her audience as though surveying her kingdom. It appeared that there was something there that just wasn’t right. She honed in on something—someone—seated in the center of the table, and before Paavo knew what was going on, she was walking toward Evan. She held her hand out expectantly and Evan looked up.

“Give that to me now, Evan,” she said, her voice like stone. Paavo leaned forward. What did the boy have in his possession? A cell phone? Cigarettes? Drugs? How had she even seen what he’d held in his lap? All the students leaned forward and craned their necks to see the contraband in Evan’s hands. He handed over a small book and looked up at Barbara, his eyebrows knitted with confusion. Barbara held it up in front of her chest. It looked like a guidebook. The words Understanding Russian Culture were typed across the front in a firm, Communist font. “This, ladies and gentlemen, will not be tolerated. Do you understand?” Some of the students nodded, though Paavo didn’t understand; perhaps it had a false cover and was hiding something else. But Barbara held the book over her head and marched to the front of the room, shaking it so that the pages flopped from side to side.

“This is poison,” she said, her voice rising an octave above its normal pitch. “This type of book is what CliffsNotes is to literature. It’s demeaning, it’s degrading and it’s uncalled-for. Hallström is about understanding. It’s about bridging the gap between cultures that have for the past few decades been estranged, unfriendly and misunderstood. It’s about breaking down all the stereotypes that books have printed or movies have compounded. If I see anything like this again, we’re going to have serious words about your future here. Is that understood?”

There were soft murmurings throughout the classroom. Evan looked down at the ground, as though he were about to crumble into tiny pieces. Even Pyotr looked as though he had softened during Barbara’s speech. Barbara lifted the book into the air again with both her hands, and with one swift motion, the book was torn right down its spine into two halves. She tore the pages from the binding in pieces and chapters and tossed them into the trash bin at the front of the room.

“I apologize for destroying your property, Evan,” she said. “But that trash doesn’t exist within the Hallström walls. This should mean more than a bolster on your college applications or simply for just a cool experience.” Paavo flinched at the older woman’s use of the word. It seemed forced and neglectful, creating an even wider gap between her and the students.

With the room shocked into silence, Barbara segued into a long lecture about social and cultural anthropology, about the strength of unique comprehension across borders. She reviewed the scheduled outings, check-ins, protocol for what to do in certain situations, difficulty in school, financial issues. Although each of the students had read all this in their course packets, she rehashed etiquette from both host and guest point of view, and though she stressed constantly that neither of them were to think of themselves as hosts and guests, she didn’t change her choice of verbiage, either. What to do in a cultural conflict, what to do when someone wasn’t understanding you, what to do when you had a problem only your parents could solve but they weren’t there, what to do if you needed something your host brother or sister couldn’t help you with. Barbara drawled on and on, her shiny hair reflecting the fluorescent lights over their heads.

It was when Barbara addressed bullying that Paavo felt all the air rush out of him. Pyotr had been sneering all morning; whether it was at Paavo or whether that was just the general look on his face, Paavo couldn’t tell. But it reminded him of the gang at home. It made him remember things like the raised scab on his right knee. Things like the memory of the trash cans behind the Kadriorg market, and how the boys had threatened to stuff him into one of them and seal the lid shut. They’d seemed friendly enough at first, surrounding him on his walk home from the bus stop on the last day of school, bumping into his sides good-naturedly so that passersby didn’t suspect that he was being walked against his will. In fact, it looked as if the pack of them were all walking together, toward a unified destination and that Paavo was happy to be right in the middle, the most popular boy of all. The gang was thickly cut, each of them like great slabs of black rye bread, and their identical brush cuts made them indistinguishable from one another. They were cartoons of themselves with their soldier-like severity and their fierce blue eyes stabbing into him with each glance.

But as soon as they cleared the busy stretch of Narva maantee, the boys flanked him on all sides in a most unfriendly manner, pulling at his knapsack, tugging at his collar. Russian Rabbit, one of them hissed in his ear. Half-breed. He flinched as a stubby finger traced figures into the back of his skull. Know what that says? another asked. Paavo shook his head. Eighty-eight. A lucky number, the boy said. Next time, I’ll ask you why. As they reached Toompuiestee, the pack of boys shrugged him off like a scratchy sweater. Paavo had kept his head down to the ground the entire time, looking where his feet were stepping rather than the direction he was going. When he lifted his eyes once all the boys were gone, he realized that he was going the right way. They had steered him to the start of his street, which was a blessing and curse. They knew where he lived.

Once, just after he had returned home from school without incident, he’d happened to glance out the window to see one of the boys across the street. The boy looked harmless as he leaned against the gate of a garage, smoking a cigarette nonchalantly. He didn’t tap the end of his cigarette for a long time, waiting for the ash to collect and when he did release it, he caught it in his cupped palm and turned toward the garage gate, his back to the street. Paavo couldn’t make out what he was doing and he waited hours until the boy had left to make sure that he was truly gone before opening his door and approaching the gate. The number fourteen had been written in cigarette ash. Another number. Paavo felt as though he were being numbered, like a cow in anticipation for slaughter. A chill ran down the back of his neck as though someone were watching him. He didn’t know what the number meant, but he ran back into the house and cried in the kitchen, not because he was scared, but because he was a coward.

The next morning, on the first day of summer vacation before his Hallström year, Paavo found that he couldn’t leave the house. He loitered around the living room, toeing the carpet in his football cleats until his mother asked him to remove them lest he tear up the floor or go down to the pitch once and for all and stop floating around like a specter. He went into the den, the room that would become the exchange student’s in a few months, and dragged his fingers across the books lined up like soldiers on the shelf. Leo’s deep obsession with rummage sales and secondhand shops had resulted in an overflow of cheap, dog-eared books that no one would ever read. Perhaps this was the summer to change that. Paavo selected the first three from the top shelf and sat down at the bottom of the case. How to Code, Computer Programming Made Easy, The Software Inside Hardware.

He spent the summer inside or on the back porch as snowy feathers floated through the air from the neighbor’s chicken coop next door, his face buried in a book. His naturally pale skin grew even more luminescent. The house had been his; Mari had spent most of her time in studios, returning home late at night from photography shoots, her face caked with makeup and her toes throbbing from being jammed into sky-high stilettos. Reading was the guise; he knew his parents wouldn’t challenge him to go outside or find a summer job, and even Leo stopped his refrain of telling him to go down to the football pitch and play a game or two when he recognized that his son was studying without being told to do so. It wasn’t that Paavo was a particularly keen student in general, and certainly hadn’t professed any passions about anything much.

But the computer books had whetted Paavo’s interest. At breakfast a few weeks before, Leo had been complaining about the government-funded computer initiatives that were being put in place in order to compensate for a lack of physical infrastructure and a workforce with limited education.

“They’re giving our jobs to machines,” Leo thundered, pounding at the newspaper on the table so that his teacup jumped. “They’re making a mockery out of hard work.” But Paavo had always believed in knowing your enemy. So he read everything he could about computers, including the endowments that had been granted at the Tallinn Institute of Technology.

After he’d exhausted reading the computer books at home, he ventured out to the Tallinn Central Library on a few furtive and brazen occasions to learn more about the information age. He collected a stack of books on programming, wiring and hacking, stowed them in his bag and headed toward the World War II section of the library. He had some research to do, namely on numbers. Eighty-eight was comprised of the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which when doubled, stands for Heil Hitler. Fourteen: the number of words that create the doctrine established by David Lane, a white supremacist who had become one of the voices of the contemporary Nazi party.

“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Paavo whispered the words out loud to himself in the cool stacks of the library over and over before shaking his head as if to release them from his entire being, replacing the slim volume in its place on the shelf and slipping onto a bus back home to Kadriorg.

Across the conference table in the orientation, Pyotr blew air out of his mouth, which was still curled in its perpetual sneer. Pyotr’s hulking frame, his hunched shoulders, his Cro-Magnon brow—they were all too reminiscent of the gang back home. How had Pyotr made it into this program with his belligerent face and his uninterested countenance? Paavo lowered his head down between his knees and took deep breaths.

“Are you okay?” Nicholas whispered.

“Fine,” Paavo said, without looking up.

“Do you need some air? We should probably ask for a break.” Nicholas glanced up toward Barbara, who had just dimmed the lights and was pulling up a PowerPoint presentation on the screen.

“Just taking everything in. Probably should have had some more breakfast.” Paavo raised his head and grabbed a handful of pretzels from a nearby bowl. The saltiness seemed to calm something in him as he crunched and tried his best to concentrate.

At the afternoon’s first set of icebreakers, the students had to share something about themselves that no one else knew. He watched the intensity in Sabine’s eyes as she searched for something interesting to share with the group, how Pyotr chewed on his bottom lip and scowled in thought. Paavo wondered what might happen if he divulged the truth: “I’m Paavo from Tallinn. I am happy to get some distance from home because I am being harassed and bullied by a group of neo-Nazis who want me to join their gang.”

He could only imagine the drama that would ensue after that admission. His parents would be called; they might force him into that all-American practice of going to therapy, lying vulnerably prone while a man or woman analyzed every word out of his mouth. He would be monitored carefully for the rest of the program in case there were signs of weakness or breakdown. That was the last thing he wanted, so he kept his mouth shut and said the following: “I’m Paavo. I’m from Tallinn and I really like riddles.”

Halfway through the session, Paavo had to use the bathroom. He slipped out of his chair and found the men’s room down the hall at the curve of a corridor. He stared at himself in the mirror. His face appeared wan and washed-out, as though he hadn’t slept in days. He rubbed his eyes, and pinched his cheeks, coaxing the blood to flow through his veins. The toilet flushed, and Paavo flinched. He hadn’t realized someone else was in the bathroom with him. Pyotr opened the door to a stall, zipping his fly and grinning—or was it sneering—at Paavo.

“Pathetic,” Pyotr said, as he stood in front of the sink alongside him, wiping something off his face. His eyes met Paavo’s in the mirror.

“Excuse me?” Paavo felt his voice squeak, and Pyotr turned to face him.

“I said, ‘pathetic,’” Pyotr said again, wiping his hands against his thick trunk-like thighs. “This whole thing is just pathetic. As if we don’t know how to behave. Adults never give us enough credit.”

Paavo watched him as he smoothed down his sweater, and rubbed at the tattoo on the back of his neck. Those certainly seemed like numbers printed at the base of his skull.

“Did you hear me? I’m talking to you,” Pyotr said. “Hello?” The set of Pyotr’s jaw was all too familiar. He even had a crooked smile like the gang leader. Paavo could feel his stomach start to fall. He put his hands up in front of him for mercy, and began backing away, his desire to use the bathroom long forgotten.

“Yes, yes,” Paavo said. “I’m just... I’ll see you back in there.” But Paavo’s foot caught on a cleaning mop that leaned against the wall, and he fell backward. The last thing he saw before his head hit a stall door was Pyotr’s face. Then everything had gone dark.

NORA

New York City

September 2002

This was what life after the accident felt like to Nora, as though a switch had been flipped and the spotlight on her life had been turned off. She constantly felt as though she were wandering around in the dark, groping for answers, reading faces, trying to make sense of what had happened in her brain. She’d certainly made sense of her feelings in the year since the accident, and she could communicate how frustrated and helpless she felt. Perhaps she would do well in the support group after all; these things always tried to get you to connect with your feelings. But would acknowledging the feelings help them go away?

After her brother left for the airport, Nora spent a long time lying on her back in her bedroom, clutching her black notebook and staring at her wall of quotes. It had been about a month after the accident that she had first starting writing directly on the wall in permanent marker. She’d done it out of pure rage at first, scribbling angsty snippets from whiny bands that all her friends listened to, and then graduating to more philosophical lines. Words of wisdom from Shakespeare and Sonic Youth each bore equal presence on the wall. It would be another six months before she would abandon the wall altogether and whitewash over it in another fit of frustration, but for now the wall was her own personal therapy.

Her mother had told her not to be late for the group, but she dawdled, opening her notebook and flipping through the pages. She hated overhearing her parents talk about her as though she wasn’t right there. They discussed her at length—out of concern, she had to admit—but it was still humiliating. She had already started living away from them in college. She’d already staked her independence. But after the diagnosis, she found she couldn’t return. She’d been intimidated by the prospects of all those faces: her suitemates, her professors, her thesis advisor. At the end of the summer, once her arm had fully healed and her skin had grafted itself back into her own cells, she called the registrar and told them she was taking the year off. It would be a setback, and it would certainly be embarrassing, Nora knew, but it wouldn’t be as tragic as returning to a campus filled with people who called out to her but whom she couldn’t greet back.

Her stay in the hospital had been over a year ago, but it still felt as if she had just returned. From time to time, her leg pulsed as a cruel reminder of the accident. As if she could forget. In the first few days of her stay at St. Paul’s General, doctors had all tried their luck at diagnosis. They asked her to recall the specifics of the accident.