Mr. Qader recalled thinking: “I think I will never be free until I get my name cleared. I will always be ‘that guy who was in Guantánamo.’ ”  He decided to keep a low profile, declining interviews and telling few people about his past.  That summer, a shop in Tallinn gave Mr. Qader an apprenticeship. The owner later told me how he came to suspect that the refugee was the Guantánamo detainee he had read about in the news media.  He found the dossier online but concluded that its terrorism accusations were “all bullshit.” One morning, he told his apprentice that he was “famous.” Mr. Qader acknowledged who he was, expecting to be told to leave.  Instead, the owner invited him to visit his mother on an Estonian island. Mr. Qader — apprehensive about leaving Tallinn — hesitated for days but went.  Not all Estonians were as welcoming.  Last fall, a drunken neighbor began hassling him about being a foreigner, Mr. Qader said. When it escalated — the neighbor threatened him with a gun and put garbage at his door — he called the police. The harassment ceased.  But days later, two police officers showed up and grilled Mr. Qader — asking where he came from and got money. When he explained, they conferred in Estonian; he understood the word “Cuba.”  They said not to worry. But he said he could not sleep for four days.  Now, when Mr. Qader contemplates the future, he said, he feels like a man holding a “small candle.”  “People tell me ‘don’t look back, look forward,’ but the problem is when I look forward, it is dark,” he said. “That is what scares me the most.”  Estonia recently extended his residency permit by two years. But its population of 1.3 million people includes only a few thousand Muslims and fewer Arabs. Halal food is scarce, and Mr. Qader interprets stares on the bus as hostile.  He would like to return home, but he said he feared that Yemeni or American security forces might mistakenly decide he was working with terrorists and jail him again — or kill him with a drone.  Estonia will permit family visits, but obtaining travel documents has proved difficult. His father, who had a heart attack after finding out he was at Guantánamo, calls him daily, and his mother has taught him to cook over Skype.  Last year, Mr. Qader’s family helped arrange for him to become engaged to one of his sisters’ friends. Estonia permits spouses to join refugees, so they were married in December by a Yemeni judge over Skype. They now talk daily, he said, but his wife has not managed to come yet, either.  In theory, he could visit nearby European countries — he is supposed to consult Estonian officials first — but he has not dared leave. Comforted by the thought that the Estonian government is monitoring him, he fears that if he travels abroad and a bomb goes off nearby, he might be unable to prove his innocence and would be scapegoated and imprisoned again.  Asked what he thinks about the United States, Mr. Qader said he understood why, after Sept. 11, it would detain him. Still, he said, it should have freed him after a year or two; imprisoning him for so long “hurt me very bad.”  Emphasizing that he is “not out for revenge,” he “begged” American officials to consider helping him move on by clearing his name.  “Now you let me go,” he said. “Thank you very much. No hard feelings. But just let me go for real. Say, ‘This guy, we hold him this long and we were mistaken, we’re sorry,’ and show people the truth.”  But Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s special envoy for the closing of Guantánamo, demurred, saying “no apology is warranted” for Mr. Qader’s detention, given the circumstances.  “The United States was correct to pick him up when and where we did and to detain him for a period of years,” he said. “We were also right ultimately to release him subject to security assurances.”  Either way, Mr. Qader knows some things are up to him.  Not long ago, he said, he heard a story about elephants who died in a circus fire. They were tied with a flimsy rope but had been trained in chains as babies, learning not to try to break free.  “When this story hit me, I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to be locked inside my own Guantánamo,’ ” he said. “I promised myself that I have to break free from myself. And I told my wife, ‘I will take you to Paris.’ ”  Mr. Qader said his wife, who has never left Yemen, replied that when she finally reached Estonia: “I will explore the world with you. I will hold you to your word.”  A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Yemeni Seeks Freedom for Soul After 13 Years at Guantánamo. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Ahmed Abdul Qader, released a year and a half ago, said: “I cannot live my life regularly. I try, but it is like part of me is still at Guantánamo.”