Around the heart in eleven years

Epp Petrone

In this frank, self-confessional travel memoir, Estonian bestselling author Epp Petrone goes looking for lost faces and memories and along the way must deal with the baggage she left behind. At twenty-four, the aspiring writer abandons her safe domestic life and high-paying career to follow an eccentric merchant around the world. On the road she finds a mix of exotic men, nomadic philosophers, wandering minstrels, kindred souls, unusual friendships, hard times, and lost children. All of it is captured in her precious journals – journals she leaves behind with an old Spanish sea captain who promises to wait for her. A decade later she decides to go back to retrieve her memories, but in order to get them back, she first has to reckon with her past. The stories here weave into stories, they take readers around the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, across Russia to Central Asia and the Middle East, from asylums to jails, arms factories to aquariums, and open-air markets to apocalyptic battlefields where the secrets of survival are revealed.

Epp Petrone

Around the heart in eleven years

For Marta, who wants to become an astronaut and fly to the moon

Dear reader,

In the beginning, my plan was simple and straightforward: to publish the book of travel features I had written for newspapers and magazines. I had worked as a journalist for over ten years and gathered quite a large catalogue of articles about different places around the world where I had been. All these pieces were just gathering dust in the library archives, and I felt that they deserved a fate better than that.

There were a lot of these articles. They weren’t “the whole truth about me”, but it was still a truth, bits and pieces brought together from exotic lands. My employers back then were either not really interested in the confusing stories about how I happened to end up in one country or another, or they were too polite to ask and just gossiped about it behind my back. As far as I know, they just thought I was someone who went on strange trips every now and then, but at least I always came back and was tremendously productive afterwards in writing new articles.

So I had enough material for a whole book, descriptions of cities, countries and people: moderately exciting, not too uncomfortable, just the way travel stories are supposed to be – and it would have taken me about two days to put it all together. A neat and convenient solution.

But sitting there in the library and reading those published articles…

It tore it all wide open again and I decided to physically and literally stare my past in the face. Already flying back to one of those places I started to understand that the only way to make peace with this book and maybe my life as a whole was to be honest and tell the stories behind the articles. Why and how did I go on those trips? Maybe in the course of writing I could succeed in finding answers to the questions from my past that had remained unresolved? That was the hope.

I was already set to put the last finishing touches on the book, when life added another unexpected (yet long awaited, twenty years to be exact) act and another flight back to the past. So this book became not only the story of a young woman, passionate about travelling, gaining life experiences along the way, but also the story of a son whom one man lost somewhere in this great big world.

I have to apologise because my story is about to start jumping back and forth, here and there, east and west, but isn’t it the same way in life? Stories melt and combine with an absolute disregard for time and all too soon ten years can feel like ten hours. What we left undone yesterday can remind us of its existence again tomorrow. In any case, it seems to me that there’s a common thread that runs through these stories and fates, and that thread has nothing to do with time.

All the events described here are real, at least the way I remember them and as I wro