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Published: Friday, 20 May 2016 07:25
Paldiski, Baltischport, old German founded seaport west from Tallinn, on the shore of the Baltic Sea. Old greenish five store flats with wooden verandas, pigeons practising Spring, a lonely howling dog in a forgotten two-room Appartment, crying the blues on Pakri-street this afternoon. A bewildered apple tree wastes his blossoms as a late married woman veiling embarrassed her aged beauty. In Paldiski ended independency of the first Estonian republic when sovjets forced the young and vulnerable state to accept red army military bases pretending to support friendship in times of war. That was in September 1939 after the fatal Molotow-Ribentrop-contract which divided Eastern Europe between Germany and Sovjet Union. So began Paldiskis career that gained his high days as a forbidden zone in the seventies when it became a nuclear submarine base. Before the sovjets left the place in the nineties they destroyed the labyrinth of souterrainian caverns where the submarines were hidden. So told us a local who draw a map of the peninsula showing all remains of history. On the peak of the flat cliff surrounded peninsula arises a tall lighthouse 85 meters. The red colour flakes of the walls leaving a omnivisible long stretched map of hidden or sunken countries.
You climb the 500 steps up and look over the green carpet made of birches, weed and prairies. And then you discover this strange building almost looking like a synagogue lost in the nowhere. So you hurry down the steps as if you had seen a seldom bird and you don't want to miss him. When you enter the outburst of spring you find the abandoned, given up house, whose doors are wide open as if the owner has waited for your coming. You walk on glasbricks and listen to the echo of your steps. DON'T SMOKE OR YOU WILL EXPLOSE is written in dark red letters in Russian language on a white door. A gas mask lays at the bottom of a metal ladder as someone had lost his face. Picking up a black glassy sign you discover on the backside a paper showing a map of an island. Height curves surround in slingery lines the archipelago which is named in Cyrillic letters MAINLAND. Where is Mainland you ask yourself and you imagine A kind of motherland. Later in the tavern, peetris tavern, a sinister medieval like inn beside the harbor, run by Russians the owner a veteran of the Chechnya war deciphers the Military map and locates your by accident found Mainland on the Shetland islands in the North Sea. Again you question the coincidence. What if your entire life was meant to bring you here to find this map that calls you to the Mainland? Nothing happens by accident, coincidence is the hidden roadmap of your life. All the little nondescript homey things which crisscross your way daily, moment for moment, they are meaningful and you realize how many tracks you fail to see and you miss to follow. So what to do if you consider all the littered signs, hints or references that you find on your way? Don't look at them? Shut down your awareness? No the answer seems to be as simple as it can be: just slow down your traveling, get attracted, stop, bend over and pick up what is catching your attention, then not you found the abandoned house, the mask, the map, no they found you.
