Heat, Snow & the Art of Being Observed.

Tarmo’s answer comes after a brief pause, voice steady and unsentimental. “There’s always a plan. If the situation deteriorates, I have means in place—fast transportation, discreet contacts, and a jet on standby. We remove ourselves from the board before anyone can lock down the pieces. I don’t leave outcomes to chance.”

His gaze is direct, the message clear: risk is part of the game, but escape—should it become necessary—is never out of reach.

“No, Tarmo. We succeed because failing isn’t an option. Too many in Narva are counting on someone finally asking them what they want instead of telling them what they need.”

“Now we need to go and rest, after all, even anthropologists need their beauty sleep”

Tarmo looks at me a bit confused about the sudden change in conversational tone, but then agrees with a short nod.

Tarmo lifts my coat in both hands, the movement brisk, almost businesslike—until his fingers settle at my shoulders. In the golden spill of the hotel’s vestibule light, he fits the fabric close, smoothing the line with a deliberate touch.

His knuckles brush the back of my neck; for a breath, he lingers there, neither hurried nor hesitant. Then, with a motion so careful it could be accidental, he slips one hand beneath my hair, gathers the heavy strands, and lifts them clear of the collar. His palm is warm at my nape, the gesture intimate only in its precision—hair raised, then let fall in a slow spill over wool.

“There,” he says quietly, his voice rougher than before, “Perfect.”

As I lift her hair out of the way, my fist closing around the thickness, I can’t help but imagine it twisted tight in my grip, pulling her head back—her mouth parted, eyes dark with want.

Just the raunch of it. The urge to yank a little, to see her gasp, to feel her arch against me.

Helping her with the coat, I swallow the thought, but it lingers—buzzing hot and stupid at the base of my mind, rough and dirty as a need.

She steps away, but the image stays: her hair in my fist, my hand guiding, her letting me.

As we leave, I notice the navy-suited man murmuring into his phone. By morning, new watchers will rotate in, new questions will be asked—in Moscow, Brussels, or Washington, analysts will update files on the billionaire and the anthropologist who think they can change the fate of a border city with only conversation.

Three days to prove understanding is more dangerous—and perhaps more powerful—than surveillance. Stakes couldn’t be higher; odds, no better.

I step into the snow, wearing the night’s uncertainty like a second cloak. Across the square, the watcher speaks quietly into his device, posture not quite local.

From a doorway across the square, the man who had been checking his phone under the streetlight earlier maintains his watch, now speaking quietly into a small device. His Estonian is flawless, but his posture suggests he has been trained elsewhere.

And deeper in the shadows, where even the local operative cannot see him, Karim observes them both. His eyes track Elena’s progress through the snow-dusted streets while simultaneously cataloguing the movements of the other watcher. Two different kinds of interest in one Dutch anthropologist, and she remains beautifully oblivious to both.

Tallinn Morning

I woke, limbs tangled and mind half-lost in a haze—was it the rush of the past twenty-four hours, or simply the residual warmth of good wine? Either way, the remnants of last night’s dinner gave way to something brighter: pure pink morning light filtering through the window, snow drifting down in soft, silent curtains. The whole city had transformed overnight into a winter kingdom, dazzling and serene.

I scanned my to-do list, a blur of appointments, sites to see, and CYcrds locations to scout. With a resigned sigh, I made peace with my thick winter boots—today, the silk underwear would remain just a sentimental footnote, sacrificed to the pragmatism of frozen sidewalks.

Breakfast was—well, somewhere and unhurried, as I fueled up for another round of exploration. I pressed on, steady but relentless, crisscrossing the city with purpose, boots crunching on snow, breath catching in the crystalline air.

By mid-morning, I found myself interviewing Siiri—her effortless poise and local wisdom adding unexpected colour to my itinerary—followed by lunch in a lively spot, where stories tumbled out with the steam from a bowl of something hot and restorative.

By four o’clock, the light had already faded to a faint pearly dusk. The city seemed to hush, wrapped in its snowy blanket, and with my list mostly conquered, I decided to indulge in the purest of northern pleasures. I set off in search of warmth, sanctuary, and ritual: a late afternoon sauna, promising both calm and, perhaps, another round of pure, unpredictable adventure.

I fished my card from my wallet, ready to tap and move on—Estonia, after all, was a place where even the market stalls shunned coins.

But the receptionist, face set in pragmatic lines, shook her head.

“Cash, only.”

For a moment, I just stared—astonished, caught between the gleam of modernity outside and the granite persistence inside.

The old East, it seemed, had its own ways of resisting the new.

The receptionist—a woman who could have been carved from Baltic granite—took my payment with fingers that had clearly never known moisturiser.

“Towel,” she said in English thick as porridge, sliding something across the counter that looked more like a dishrag, and a bit small to my taste and experience.

“Is there a dress code or—”

But she’d already turned away, her attention claimed by a stack of papers that seemed infinitely more interesting than my tourist confusion.

I clutched the pathetic square of terry cloth, used to spas from Budapest to the Balkans, where towels were actual towels and rules were posted in multiple languages. Here, I was flying blind.

The locker room hit me like a walk-in freezer—all white tile and fluorescent efficiency.

That’s when I saw it, looming in officious capitals: ujumisriided keelatud aka SWIMWEAR FORBIDDEN.

Too late now.

The door opened with a pneumatic hiss, and I stepped into another world entirely.

Heat. Immediate, suffocating heat that wrapped around me like a wool blanket soaked in steam. The air was thick with birch, salt, and something indefinably human—decades of perspiration baked into wood and stone. Voices echoed from every direction: guttural Russian, melodic Finnish, the occasional bark of Estonian.

And everywhere—everywhere—naked bodies moved with the casual confidence of people who had never questioned their right to exist in skin.

A Finnish woman the size of a refrigerator stretched languorously on a wooden bench, her pale flesh glistening, chatting with her companion about what sounded like grocery prices. Two Russian men with chests like barrels (herring) laughed at some private joke, their voices bouncing off the tiles. Not one person looked remotely self-conscious.

Is this a rite of passage to löyly? I wondered, suddenly aware of how I was death-gripping my pathetic square of fabric.

Because I’m pretty sure I’m the only specimen here, treating it like a security blanket.

The facility sprawled like a fever dream—room after room connected by corridors that seemed designed by someone with a grudge against logical navigation. For what I’d paid (roughly the cost of a decent coffee in the West), I was getting a crash course in post-Soviet wellness architecture.

The salt sauna blazed white-hot, crystals covering every surface like I’d stumbled into Superman’s fortress. The dry sauna was an inferno, where Finnish women sat motionless, like lizards on rocks, occasionally murmuring to each other in voices that barely carried over the hiss of heated stones.

Then there were the showers.

Lord, sweet Jesus, I began to have a Southern drawl all of a sudden in my mind (must have been the shock).

Row after row of shower heads sprouting from institutional tile like a scene from an East Block movie. No partitions, no curtains, just pure, unapologetic communalism. A woman who could have been someone’s babcia scrubbed herself with the methodical thoroughness of someone washing a car.

I navigated toward what looked like a whirlpool, trying to decode the unspoken rules of this place. Smiling seemed safe—universal courtesy, right? I caught the eye of the only man in the bubbling water and offered what I hoped was a friendly, educated acknowledgement.

Wrong. So very wrong. So spectacularly wrong.

What followed was the most surreal game of aquatic cat-and-mouse I’d ever experienced. Each time I casually drifted left, he glided closer. When I angled toward the jets, he materialised at my shoulder like some sort of whirlpool-dwelling predator. His stare never wavered—intense, calculating, like he was playing chess and I was apparently losing.

Note to self: Smiling at naked strangers in former Soviet territories is apparently not recommended tourist behaviour.

I found refuge in the hottest dry sauna, thinking the temperature might thin the crowd. Instead, I discovered the natural habitat of Finnish women. They draped themselves across benches like Roman goddesses, while in reality, they looked like Sumo fighters in female form. Skin flushed pink, discussing what sounded like municipal politics with the same casual air my friends used to debate Netflix shows.

One caught me staring and said something in Finnish that might have been an unfriendly comment. I nodded and smiled weakly, which earned me what I chose to interpret as disapproval.

Anthropological note: In their natural environment, Nordic females display territorial behaviour toward obviously inferior towel-clutching specimens.

The heat was making me dizzy. I retreated to a smaller steam room, finally finding myself alone with nothing but haze and the steady drip of condensation.

I let my shoulders drop for the first time since entering this magnificent, terrifying place. The steam wrapped around me like privacy I hadn’t known I was craving.

This is it, I thought. This is what I came for. Just me and the anthropological gold mine of—

The door sighed open.

Through the steam, a figure emerged like something out of a fever dream. Male, dark curls, clutching a towel with the exact grip I recognised from my own hands, looking around with the wide-eyed bewilderment of someone who’d just discovered they’d signed up for more than they bargained for.

It took me a full three seconds to process what I was seeing.

Karim?

May you accept the unexpected. (and know the moment you crossed from observer to quarry)

Author’s Note

Tallinn writes its stories in layers—icing sugar snow over marzipan cafés, velvet evenings shadowed by the slow calculus of surveillance, and saunas where modesty evaporates faster than hot steam. This chapter is equal parts fieldwork and folklore, a study in contrast: sometimes you’re the researcher, sometimes you’re the observed, and often both at once, negotiating cultural faux pas in towels and diplomatic tangles in candlelight.

Consider these pages a passport: tonight, you traverse the borderlands of heat and snow, slipping between intellectual posture and the risk of being too obvious for comfort. The anthropology here is slippery—sometimes it’s archival, sometimes it’s a game of who can stare the longest without blinking.

Tomorrow, veils drop. Subtext gets traded for skin, and the intrigue turns tactile, with all the unapologetic honesty and inconvenient hunger meaningful encounters tend to provoke. Surveillance fades to darkness as intimacy steps into light: raw, explicit, and not for the faint of heart.

The work is observation. The caution is mine (and yours): what follows will be less dressed, more honest, and as always, not entirely safe.

Consider yourself warned—and, perhaps, invited.

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