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.
When I moved to Luua, to the “gingerbread house” beside Luua Manor in August 1998, I didn’t know any of the local people. There were a couple of very elderly people still living nearby that remembered my uncle from before the war (the house had belonged to my uncle in that previous era). But most of the people living in the village of Luua had arrived there after the war. Many of them moved there when the Luua College of Forestry was established and these people were employed by the college.
A couple of years later (autumn 2001), I thought that I would throw a small dinner party in order to get to know some of the more important people in my community. One of the guests that I invited was the previous director of the Luua College of Forestry, Villu Reiljan, who was then the Minister of the Environment in the Estonian government.
The guests, including the minister, sipped the brandy and finally one of the guests who I knew the most spoke up and said to me, “This drink is rather tasty, but it is not Belõi Aist.”
The party went well, and afterwards, I offered the guests coffee and cake. Then I thought that I would ask the guests if they wanted any cognac or brandy with their coffee, since I had so many bottles that various visitors had brought that I could never hope to finish them all by myself. I had bottles of all the best French cognacs such as Martell, Remi-Martin, and Hennessy, so I was rather surprised that they chose a Moldovan brandy named Belõi (Belîi) Aist that I was unfamiliar with. I remember thinking that it tasted rather sweet for a brandy, but then again, maybe that is what Moldovan brandies tasted like.
The guests, including the minister, sipped the brandy and finally one of the guests who I knew the most spoke up and said to me, “This drink is rather tasty, but it is not Belõi Aist.”
Cold shivers ran down my spine.
The Pärnu methanol poisoning incident had happened recently, where sixty-eight people in Estonia died from drinking moonshine made from methanol. Frantically, I tried to recall where that bottle had come from. I had heard that one of the local shops sold bootleg liquor under the table, but I had never bought any myself. Still, that didn’t rule out the possibility that someone else had purchased it and given it to me as a present.
I had visions of myself going to jail for the rest of my life if the minister died, since no one would believe that I wasn’t paid by his political enemies to poison him.
After frantically searching my memory, I suddenly recalled that my colourful cousin Kalju, made homemade wine and liquor and used whatever bottles he had handy to bottle his production. I had sampled his homemade liquors many times before. Although they were rather strong, I knew that they were safe.
A warm flush passed through me, not only the result of the liquor, but from the knowledge that I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my life rotting in an Estonian prison!
