Karlova Thresholds

Ahead of the gathering snowstorm, we make haste to the hotel. The lobby bristles with the nervous energy of arrivals and goodbyes: suitcases skidding, someone ordering tea, the bellhop stacking umbrellas by the door.

Tarmo stops inside, posture precise, as if bracing for inclement weather he’s been tracking for days. I catch his eye, receive the slightest nod—a flick of a signal, nothing more. Nothing more needed.

Mikael materialises at his shoulder, murmuring logistics. The director of the hotel hovers nearby. Through it all, Tarmo’s gaze occasionally returns to me, each time measuring, as if weighing the risk of the night.

Then, before the elevator:

“So, in an hour—does that give you enough time to get your affairs in order?”

His tone is even, but the undertow is unmistakable. Precaution, not politeness.

“I’ll make it work,” I say, forcing a steadiness I’m not sure I possess. “What does that even mean, my affairs in order?”

The ride to my room is solitary, the pent-up day trailing me like static. My affairs: a latticework of messages on my phone (“call if you can”), expired notes to self, Hasna’s shard, phone charger, lipstick, spare ID, coat on the chair ready for flight. I shower with the radio silent, listening for the first hiss of sleet against the pane. When I reemerge, I’m steel-willed, hair cooling in the sparse light.

A bottle of someone-else’s champagne sits in the minibar; I pop it one-handed, let the hush of bubbles settle my pulse.

Black velvet slides over my skin; the silver chain finds my collarbone, talisman and warning both. I anchor the look—defiant lipstick, everything cinched and sharp. A naughty thought crosses my mind: “What if I skip the underwear?” My heart beats high in my chest: anticipation and calculation, braided so tightly they’re indistinguishable. There’s no point in pretending it’s just another night.

By the time I check the corridor, my phone is stashed, glass in hand, exit routes rehearsed in my head.

He’s already there, immaculate and contained in a midnight tux, no smile.

“Ready?” His voice is low, controlled.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I reply, in earnest.

There’s no further talk; we descend side by side through carpets and marble, past laughter and wheeled luggage, out into the night.

The Walk: Into Tartu’s Veins

Snow falls in slow motion, thickening the city’s edges to a mythic hush. Streetlights tinge each flake white-silver; the town’s damp sweetness rises from its ancient bricks. We walk in step, gaps between us measured but never slack—a tether of intent that no one else can see.

He keeps one gloved hand free, scanning, every sense tuned for the off-beat.

“You always go to the neighbourhood theatre overdressed?” I offer.

A glance—dry, clinical. “I expected the unexpected.”

His presence at my side is an unasked question. I let it hang.

We pass the river, ice not yet solid, old warehouses in shadow. Supilinn’s periphery, where the fog of boiled cabbage hovers even at night, slides past us in silence. By the time we reach Karlova, laughter and music already ripple from behind red-bricked facades. The theatre waits: windows fuming with condensation, velvet-draped, alive.

Inside: The Karlova

Light spills out as we enter, chaotic and golden. The lobby is half bohemia, half survival: battered boots, sheared coats, people clustered with cheap wine around pamphlets written in Estonian, Ukrainian, Russian. We’re overdressed for the crowd by a factor of ten. If anyone notices, they say nothing—this is Tartu, where eccentricity is unremarkable.

A fundraiser programme is thrust into our hands:

Tonight: performers from Kharkiv and Kyiv, Tartu’s own poets, music threading itself between.

Before we find seats, Tarmo leans near enough for me alone—his voice pitched almost into my shoulder:

“Stay near the side exits. Know where your coat is.”

I nod, hand closing on the warm glass stem.

The lights descend. The small hall hushes. First, a woman in blue reads a poem about leaving Odessa, her voice trembling then sharpening as she traces lines of exile and hope. Next, a guitarist leans into discordant chords that swerve, then resolve, the melody threading longing into the rafters. There are moments of laughter—someone juggles, another recites a fable in a thick southern accent. Through it all, the crowd leans forward, as if by listening perhaps they can rewrite distance, erase borders, invite spring.

Tarmo sits beside me—not touching, not speaking—yet his awareness prickles against my skin each time the door opens, every time applause ripples toward us. I can feel the heat coming up, pfff.

“I can smell her—undeniably intimate, almost shocking in its honesty. How is that possible?” Tarmo thinks.

I watch his profile: restraint incarnate. I focus on the candle-wax light refracting off Hasna’s shard, the pulse under my own skin, the sense that tonight we are both too much in the world and, at the heart of it, unreachably apart.

A Ukrainian singer, exiled for only a month, cracks on her last note; a fierce silence fills the room. Someone weeps openly. The tension in my chest never breaks, only recomposes itself measure by measure, performance by performance. All the while, storm warnings unspool in the back of my mind.

Intermission. A swarm of bodies in the corridors outside—wine, conversation, the faint scratching of coins and folded currency into donation boxes. I ask for coffee at a makeshift stand; the cup is hot and bitter, and the woman who hands it to me gives a look half fatigue, half blessing.

Tarmo stands silent, surveying.

“You see what you are looking for?” I ask quietly.

His answer is a narrow shake of the head. “Not yet. But it’s not midnight.”

Back in our seats for the final act: poems braided with protest, a sixteen-year-old’s hurried monologue about growing up with air-raid drills, more voices than could ever fit in a single evening. Time feels porous; I let each story brush over me, not sure where my own skin begins and theirs ends.

Then, too soon, the final applause—audience rising, the awkward theatre of gratitude and distance, applause that tries to mend more than it can ever touch.

After

We file out into the night, coats up, candles left guttering behind us. Outside the front doors, snowflakes melt on the velvet of my dress, dampening the hem. I feel raw, exposed, as if I’ve been woken from a deep warmth and pushed gasping into the cold.

We look at each other—Tarmo and I; overdressed, out of place. Both suppress a smile.

Neither of us smiles.

“You want a more appropriate entourage?” he asks, his voice deliberate, edged with weariness and dry wit.

I shake my head, exhaling sharply. “Only if they’re serving Champagne.”

He inclines his head, motioning toward the main street. “That’s not unreasonable. After tonight, it seems the least we deserve.”

Shoulder to shoulder now, each of us threaded tight with everything unsaid, we walk out into the thickening storm—coats pulled close, stories still sizzling on our skin, each step away from the theatre a small refusal to become numb to the world, each footfall counting down what the night will ask of us next.

Elena

The warmth of the hotel bar hits me before the doorman’s greeting dissolves; glass and steel ripple in candlelight, worlds removed from icy streets and the hush beneath theatre rafters. I slide onto the leather banquette, tugging loose the last of the cold from my bones, pulse already unsteady from everything unspoken.

Tarmo settles opposite, silhouette painted in amber, tux immaculate, the line of his jaw drawn tight as wire. He flags the bartender with an absent nod, requesting champagne in the clipped Estonian he saves for business.

Tray arrives—a caviar service: blini, cured salt, roe like bright currency, a garnish of lemon. I set my clutch down, tilt from boot to hip, and cross my legs slowly. My lips still taste of stage-light and tension.

“Tell me this isn’t your usual after-show routine,” I say, teasing, as the first flute is set between us—too cold, perfectly sharp.

Tarmo doesn’t quite smile. “I don’t believe in routine,” he says. His eyes avoid me, but not completely. “I prefer…contingency plans.”

I lean forward, a flick of laughter in my throat. “Contingency’s not much fun with caviar and Veuve Clicquot.”

He pauses, and I see something shift in his expression. I wonder if he’s going to say something soft, or cutting, or both.

Tarmo

It’s all surface here—ice in the bucket, pressed linen, a jazz quartet far away—but Elena’s presence cuts deeper than that.

She sits opposite me, posture intent and amused, her hair loosed slightly at the temples, eyes bright with the challenge of surviving the evening. I undo my gloves with practised movements, trying to account for every sensation, every unpredictable variable.

And then it ambushes me again—her scent, raw and intimate, impossible to filter out no matter how much protocol I draw up in my head. It isn’t perfume, it isn’t the fiction of high-end soap or curing champagne. It’s her—honest, immediate, as though the mere distance of a table and velvet could never keep such evidence at bay. I’m astonished by how sharply it unsettles my composure. How is it that something so private can be so present? I keep my hands folded to hide their tension.

“You’re quiet tonight. Even for you,” she says, watching me with a trace of curiosity, perhaps even concern.

I find my voice, measured. “Just…taking in the atmosphere.”

I mean it as a deflection, but I catch the hint of her amusement. Sometimes I think she senses exactly when my mind falters.

She lifts her glass. “To strange contingencies, then.” Her eyes linger on mine a little too long.

I touch my glass to hers—deliberate, controlled. “And to survive our own celebrations.”

For a moment, I almost allow myself to smile. Almost.

She leans closer, voice low. “Is it me, or does the air feel different in here tonight?”

I stifle the urge to answer honestly: It’s you. You’re the difference, every impossible shade of it.

But I say only, “Maybe it’s the storm. Or maybe some things are just harder to ignore, however hard you try.”

She grins—wolfish, knowing. “Then let’s stop trying.”

We eat; we sip; chemistry thrums between us, shimmering and sharp as that first drop of cold champagne.

Elena

By the second glass, my self-control is more echo than substance. It’s luxurious—how far I can push this, the secret I wear under velvet and jewellery, how easily I tease him with a flick of crossed legs or the arch of my back. Tarmo keeps his composure, but I see the signs: the twitch at his jaw, the way he rolls the stem of his flute between his thumb and forefinger, eyes not quite meeting mine.

I lean in, voice low and sure, words soft as static against the jazz:

“You look troubled—practising self-restraint or just trying to do the calculus with faulty data?”

He blinks, slowly. “I suppose that depends on the nature of the data.”

I set my glass down, tilt my mouth closer, actually close enough for him to hear the truth in my tone, if not the words themselves:

“For what it’s worth, I left half my inhibitions in the theatre coat-check. I’m not wearing any underwear tonight, Tarmo. If you’re distracted, you might as well have context.”

He’s silent, eyes hooded. For a moment, the bubbles fizz and the world narrows to the heat simmering inside me—step or stumble, I’m at a threshold, balance kept only by daring.

I let my leg graze his, stop pretending it’s accidental.

“If we stay here long enough, don’t be surprised if I start making very public mistakes,” I murmur, a smile curling more than my mouth.

For once, his composure wobbles. “You are…extraordinary,” he says deliberately, as if pronouncing sentence and blessing in the same breath.

I almost laugh—almost tip over the line I’ve drawn for us both—

INTERRUPTION

—and then my phone, facedown on the table and forgotten, comes to jagged life. The buzz cuts straight through the gloom and possibility:

UNKNOWN NUMBER.

My heart contracts. Tarmo’s eyes sharpen, the heat between us dispersing in a new, colder electricity. I freeze, a beat too long, before I fumble for the device. The words mean nothing; the timing means everything.

I stand abruptly, the mood snapped. “Excuse me. I…have to take this.” My voice is brittle with the effort of toggling from seduction to vigilance.

I walk away, heels a staccato Morse code across polished marble, glass of champagne abandoned and legs unsteady—but not for all the reasons he might have wished.

Behind me, in the mirror, I see Tarmo watching, transformed again—no longer a man reeling in the grip of chemistry, but something else: alert, calculating, already anticipating what crisis or stranger might be calling to break the spell we’d so carefully, carelessly spun.

Phone pressed to my ear: “Hello?” My voice is already shifting—lower, measured—preparing for anything.

Then a shadow detaches itself from behind a marble pillar near the far side of the bar. I catch my own reflection, startled by the quick flicker of fear that crosses my face. Karim. He’s holding his phone, but now he drops it to his side, the call still humming in the space between us.

He steps forward, voice low and urgent, slicing through the low jazz and laughter. “I’m sorry, I had no choice—I need to speak to you. It can’t wait. It’s about Sandi—and the underlying task.”

For half a second, I stop breathing. The spark of intoxication is replaced by something far sharper, jeopardy cut with adrenaline. My mind rushes to fill in the gaps: who or what is compromised? Or have we been compromised—here, now, in this circle of faux glamour and glittering glasses?

I glance back at Tarmo, who is already alert, his whole posture recalibrated, senses strung tight as wire. The air between us—champagne, desire, anticipation—hardens into a corridor of pure alertness.

I nod quickly to Karim. “Okay. We talk. Here, now—no delays.”

My voice is businesslike, but inside, I am a cascade of noise: calculations, dread, the aftertaste of salt and risk on my tongue. I steady myself, ready for whatever truth Karim has dragged out of the shadows, hoping I’m still quick enough to meet it.

Karim wastes no breath. The world of the bar—the spill of laughter, the caviar sheen—drops away as his voice lands, urgent, nearly shaking with suppressed adrenaline:

“I intercepted the man Tarmo was waiting for at the Karlova. Elena, there’s a plot unfolding—bigger than you or I can understand, bigger than Tarmo, bigger than any of us. You have to come with me. Right now. We leave for Zurich—Hasna will explain everything. She’s waiting.”

The words batter at me, each one colder than the last. Plot? Zurich? Hasna? My heart thrashes against my ribs; the floor seems to list beneath my feet, breath shattering into nothing, no formula for air or sense or ground. It feels like stepping off the stage before the play is finished—the curtain ripped open, all cues burned.

I try to collect myself, force my lips into some kind of question—but just as I find words—

Karim’s eyes, suddenly harsher, sweep over my face, then flick back toward the bar, toward Tarmo, the sting in his question unmistakable:

“What are you doing being so friendly with him, anyway?”

For a moment, the world tilts. Doubt needles through me—fine as wire, sudden and hot. Am I being used? Played? What does Karim see that I don’t? The noise of the bar recedes, replaced by a high, static ringing behind my eyes.

But even before I’ve found words, movement at the edge of vision snaps everything taut. Hotel security—two in dark suits, another in staff whites—close in fast, hands firm on Karim’s arms. He tries not to resist, sending one last look in my direction, a strange mix of warning and regret. I’m not sure if I nod or just flinch.

For a breath, I meet Tarmo’s eyes—his expression unreadable, locked tight. I turn away, but this time, it’s not retreat; it’s resolve. My steps are sure as I make my way back to my room. I need facts, not drama. I dial the numbers I trust, ready to demand truth from anyone who will pick up.

Author’s Note

You made it to “Karlova Thresholds”—which, let’s be honest, is less a place than a state of mind (or permanent weather warning). If you’re looking for tidy morals, grand resolutions, or characters shielded from seamier forms of human logistics—my condolences. Here, survival is measured in coats checked, champagne uncorked, and precisely how many ways one can look both overdressed and underprepared for the apocalypse.

What interests me is not heroism, but nerve: how we plot, improvise, and seduce our way through nights where the exits are as vital as the entrances and no one—not even your host—knows where Act Three is heading. As an anthropologist, I’m contractually obligated to admit the world’s mess is rarely aesthetic, but as a sardonic entrepreneur, I can’t help but sell you the ticket anyway.

So, yes, in these pages, you’ll find more than a little silk and sleet, candle wax and contingency. My characters slap their own wrists for being too earnest, then turn around and risk everything on a fragment of hope—or a well-timed insult. Call it philosophy with a side of irreverence. Or just Tuesday night in Tartu.

Thank you for keeping your wits sharp, your glass half full, and your expectations delightfully off-kilter.

May your thresholds be interesting, your exits rehearsed, and your champagne properly chilled.

I.Ph.