Belõi Aist—or, How I Thought That I Poisoned an Estonian Cabinet Minister

This is because he spent most of his long life (he died a couple of years ago, well into his nineties) doing everything that doctors warned not to do. He ate fatty pork three times a day, a remnant of having worked during the Soviet times at the Võhma meatpacking factory, where one of the perks was getting tins of fatty pork at a substantial discount, or possibly for free.

When my mother visited him in the newly independent Estonia, she refused to eat at Kalju’s house because some of those tins of meat were from Brezhnev’s era. Her reasoning was not political, but rather, she was afraid of getting food poisoning since some of those tins were twenty years old or more! The other thing that Kalju did, which doctors definitely did not approve of, was drinking a litre of homemade wine every day! My mother declined Kalju’s offer to drive her to Viljandi (her childhood home) because Kalju was not really sober. Neither was he ever drunk, but he probably had a constant alcohol level in his blood. Despite his “bad habits,” he was vital until his death at ninety-something. Only in the last year of his life did he complain that he no longer had “the spark.” This was a reference to one of his other favourite pasttimes—womanizing.