Past pushing up daisies

Well, yeah, so I took offense when the doctor said that considering my age I’m in tip-top shape. His theory was that my 25-kilometre ski circuits would keep an old coot like me in shape, if they didn’t kill me first. He said if I were to start just sitting on the couch and waiting, then the Reaper would be on my back in no time.

I don’t ski for my health. I ski because it’s pretty in the forest, and when a body is sweating he doesn’t think a whole lot.

Of course the doctor also started going on about Benecol and all that. I said stop, I said: don’t talk, I’ll do the talking. And talk I did: everything has its time, particularly people, in both directions. This life shouldn’t be shortened intentionally with alcohol, work, or carelessness, but in my experience it also shouldn’t be stretched out excessively. So instead of extending a life as much as possible, we should honor its proper length. The doctor claimed that he always honors, cherishes, protects and defends life with every tool there is.

And that’s the problem. Modern medical science has a damn sight too many of those tools. Sure, life is precious, but not so precious that I’d start counting calories, drinking carrot juice and lurching about in some aerobics class with people half my age.

I was on the front when I was eighteen and got to see plenty of boys my age seriously wounded who would have liked to just live to tomorrow but didn’t get to. They begged for one more day and didn’t even get that. So yeah, a guy like me has lived plenty long, many lives. I’ve done my deeds and seen my sights, and now sometimes it all starts to feel like an old replay. I don’t always know if I woke up this morning or yesterday.

The doctor thought I sounded depressed. I thought I sounded more upbeat than in ages. I said that the length of your life is just like the world economy. If you grab up too much, it just takes it away from others.

Our time ran out. Next in he had a preschooler with an ear infection. That there is a devil of a sickness – keeps the whole family awake, hurts like the dickens and lancing it makes it hurt worse. Luckily these days they treat it with antibiotics.

I drove over to see the wife. The black-haired nurse was feeding her in the window seat of the cafeteria. I let them finish up the smearing – food was running from the corners of her mouth and her head was shaking – but in the mornings she’s always right here in this world, and it’s important that her hair is done up right in case I happen to come visit. I don’t know if she thinks of me as this age or as the age back when we met, a twenty-three-year-old.

I handled the pudding, blackcurrant. I know what my wife would say to me if she could. She would say well now you get to do what you didn’t do when the boys were little. You always wondered how the house could be such a mess.

I know that my wife believes in heaven. I don’t believe that the road from here goes any farther than pushing up daisies. They’re both good alternatives though. The aches and pains will be gone and won’t be at anyone else’s mercy.

I don’t know which of us fell asleep first, but the nurse woke me and said the missus had been taken to her own bed and that I could spend the night in the guest wing if I wanted.

PS: The leaves have come in on the trees.

Mexican Eskimos

Well, yeah, so I took offense over switching out the old light bulbs. Change and change and change – couldn’t something just stay the same for once? Even the tax rates are always being adjusted: the VAT, the corporate tax and my own personal tax rate. The parliament changes and the bureaucrats change, but the fiddling continues. Yes, there could just be one and the same percent for income, expenses, purchases and sales.

Thirteen.

They could just focus on the real issue rather than making adjustments. The same thing goes for warming a house. With the missus we were always negotiating about it i.e. clamming up. She always thought the rooms were always too cold or too hot. I was always going to get wood for the fireplace or down in the cellar to adjust the oil burner. In fifty-three years I never got her to understand that eighteen and a half degrees is enough for a body. If you’re cold you just have to go somewhere colder, like outside, and do some sawing or lie on the frozen ground on your back for a minute. If you’re hot, then off with your clothes or into the lake.

I sure miss the times when the missus and I were quiet about so many things.

Those light bulbs.

If in my house there’s one light bulb burning at a time and no other electricity being used, then is it me that’s using the world up so horribly? Is it me that’s creating impossible living conditions for the Mexican Eskimos?

Not a bit of it.

The same goes for those digital set-top boxes. What was wrong with the old system? Since colour television came, I haven’t wanted for anything as far as the tube is concerned. The same poorly chosen faces still show up on it, for example Mikko Kuustonen the pop singer. A Christian man, but with hair like a girl and a wine glass next to him. And he’s started putting on weight lately, too…

They should have no-nonsense announcers like Teija Sopanen, and church services. If it’s a familiar church it’s nice to watch on TV, the architecture and the altarpieces and how many people go up for communion. Last time it was twenty-three; I did the statistics.

I know more methods that will save more than using a fluorescent light bulb.

Like turning off the lights when you don’t need them. Once I asked the missus who she was keeping the light on in our bedroom for during the day. And then she asked how a man can pore over a single power bill for six days, all over a few pennies or cents. Apparently I was whining. Not a bit of it. I was looking out for our rights – you can save a pretty penny over the course of a life.

Here are more free ways to save: keep food in the cellar in the winter. If you absolutely have to use the refrigerator, then don’t open it just to amuse yourself, don’t stand there daydreaming over the cups of yogurt. You can just as easily decide in the morning what you’ll need over the course of the day. You’ll need buttermilk and butter and cheese.

You can also save by getting up off the couch. Instead of television, it’s a good idea to read during the daylight hours, and you can get books for free from the library. Make sure it’s the sort of book that doesn’t make things up and has an author who looks like someone you’d care to have over for coffee.

PS: I got the old Petromax lantern out of the shed. I might just swap out all the incandescents for them or maybe go straight to tallow candles.

Adidas or sneakers

Well, yeah, so I took offense when I got a tax refund. I keep close track that my percentage is right starting from January 1, but last year it looks like the timber royalties were less than I figured.

Kolehmainen had got two thousand back and was bragging grandiosely about it at the mailbox, saying he was going to take the money and go to Estonia for a spa vacation. Well I decided not to say anything about what a half-wit he is, didn’ I, and how stupid a nation is that’s always gushing about their tax refunds and wasting their money. It isn’t some extra gift, it’s a loan to the government caused by your own carelessness. It would make more sense to pay back taxes, since then at least the debt obligation is the right way round. Then the citizen has taken out a loan from the government, and up to a certain point it’s tax-free.

Kolehmainen said that he had enough that he might bring back a vanload of sparkling wine and other drinks for his daughter’s wedding. Well, his talking was getting on my nerves, but I stayed calm. How can he not understand basic things? How much does the trip to Tartu cost? It certainly isn’t cheap. And for that matter, why buy alcohol for a wedding? People can make connections with each other just as well with home brew, coffee and a good band. If anyone wants to drink, let them bring their flasks.

Kolehmainen walked back with me, even though I would have wanted to be alone. He opened another envelope he had received; it was some sort of electric bill and of course he complained that they take too much and that salaries and pensions are too small.

They aren’t.

Food doesn’t cost too much.

Paying for a place to live isn’t expensive, and neither is driving a car.

No one in this country is really in trouble if you compare it to the famine year of 1914.

You can get by just fine as long as you’re meticulous and frugal. Sure, I’ve complained about plenty of things, but never spending money, because it’s me who uses it, and I’m able to control myself even though I can’t control the world.

The church can give out food, and the Salvation Army can give out soup, but why don’t they give out hoes and seeds? There is always enough soil lying fallow to get up spuds and carrots for the masses. And it isn’t just old folks who complain. Once I saw a talk show where a single mother was saying how horrible it was not to be able to buy as many things for her kids as the others have.

At what point did these sorts of comparisons move up to the adults? Sure, let the kids show off their trainers to each other, but then say to them in a deep, chesty voice that it doesn’t matter whether you have Adidas or plain old Finnish-made sneakers on your feet. The question is how fast you can run in them, how long you can stay on your feet or how hard you can kick.

I ain’t against competition or anything, but an arms race for gettin’ stuff is crazy. Buying things just to show them to others. It looks like the middle class has become so big that it’s like royalty or the tsars in the olden days, an idle lot with enough time to gussy themselves up and put themselves on display.

PS: I promised to pick up Kolehmainen’s mail during his trip. Look at me always promising everything too.

Palms

Well yeah, it made my heart glad to visit Yrjänä’s grave. I took him an expensive bottle of liquor just like we agreed three weeks before he left. They disappear to be sure. I suspect the sexton. But a deal is a deal, and I’m a man of my word.

I chatted with Yrjänä at the grave about what’s happened recently. I told him about Jukka Keskisalo’s great summer on the track, which reminded me of the 1970s long-distance runners. Do you remember when we saw Juha Väätäinen in person, Yrjänä, and how amazed we were about his sideburns? I told him how the weather had been, i.e. just the same as always, i.e. mixed. I told him that my son and I still don’t really get along being in the same place, but it’s probably just because the older he gets the more like me he becomes. I didn’t mention anything to Yrjänä about losing my driver’s license as it was embarrassing enough and Yrjänä might take offense at something like that. He felt others’ cares keenly. He was that fine a person.

At the cemetery there was a pretty line of candles burning. In the church there was some New Year’s service, but I didn’t go. It served as background music, and a couple of squirrels scampered up a tree trunk and jumped from tree to tree.

From the cemetery I continued by taxi to see the missus at the Spruce Home. I fed her her Christmas porridge, and she would have got an almond. I hid it – it’s this big deal that if you get an almond everyone’s supposed to sing. The missus isn’t singing much anymore, and I neither sing nor dance. I know my limits, and I wish others did too.

I wiped the corners of her mouth, brushed her hair behind her ear from her forehead, and quickly stroked her cheek. I looked into her eyes long enough that I found the strength that was in them when our middle child was dying of pneumonia. I had already given up, but the missus said we had to be strong when the other is weak. Well, that was an awfully long time ago too, and that child is working in Belgium now, sending a card home at Christmas. I probably should have told him sometime how much it scared me that a person was being taken from us whom I hadn’t had time to get to know at all.

I looked at her hands, which had become shaking skin and bones, hands whose grip had always been huge compared to her size. The stream of warmth, how she opened my locks and everything those hands had held. Now I was holding them.

There were pictures on the television – I don’t know what.

I pushed the missus a couple of metres from the screen in the wheelchair and sat down next to her. That was how we sat on Saturdays after sauna, watching German cop shows or the election returns.

Nothing is left after a life, and nothing goes with you. When you realise that, I tell you the value of ordinary minutes like these goes way up. But a person can’t do better than he can do.

The missus had fallen asleep in her chair, and so I took her to her room. One of the girls came to help lift her into bed; they always asked kindly about my life and how I was doing. I said that I lost my license and that my son likes the Beatles and what year is it now anyway?

Translated by Owen Witesman

Characters:
Christina, the Queen
Friend
The Queen Mother
Karl Gustav, the Count [Christina’s suitor, the King-to-be]
Descartes, philosopher
Official
Man
The King
Oxenstierna, Per Brahe
A choir of midwives

The play can be performed with six actors (3 female, 3 male). Other ways of dividing the roles are possible. All stage directions may be altered.

1. Prologue
The eels’ court

CHRISTINA
If eels had a court then a great female eel would sit in the centre and the little males would writhe about like seaweed around the throne. However they would not be envious of the queen, because they would know that if they swam up into rivers and lakes, into fresh waters, they themselves would gradually become females, great and heavy, and would be able to rule and close into their great embrace all the small little gentlemen. They just have to wait.
KARL GUSTAV
I don’t know. What I do know is that a great black eel, as thick as a rope, was pulled out of the well last night and the Queen looked at its silver stomach and its thrashing tail, but the eel looked the Queen in the eyes and in the heart and since then she has never been the same.

7. Descartes’ opera

DESCARTES
Descartes’ opera, someone will write it, hopefully me, only I’m so busy. The Birth of Peace, ah yes, a good name, x percent of the national budget goes towards military operations and they dare to grumble about the price of one libretto! The world’s greatest philosopher – that’s me – makes an appearance and the eyes of the world turn here, to this country, to this court, to this lady, to the queen, that one over there, who pays me well for these thoughts, which she cannot be bothered to listen to because she thinks up her own. Thinks, rides, swash-buckles, swears a lot and sleeps little and badly, walks about in men’s clothes and in men’s company and does not understand, what on earth is this woman that others constantly and persistently see in her.
I also thought – because that is what I do – I thought that if someone were to begin to change from a woman into a man, in the way that some lizards become male as they grow older, or that certain kinds of food can change the sex of a starfish – then at what point does the female cease being a woman and must then be called a man, when is the final moment and condition? Moreover, what is the state between femaleness and maleness? What is the being between femaleness and maleness? Is it then both, either or, or neither? Or perhaps some third, new category…
For a woman is not only a woman when she is giving birth or knitting or breast feeding or washing laundry, that femaleness is there in the way she walks, eats, speaks and picks her nose. Everyone who looks at Christina sees a woman, no matter how much she rides about and hits people or how loudly she swears.(The Queen Mother enters.)
QUEEN MOTHER
(laughing) Folk round here say that, once in her life, Christina fell off the back of a horse – on purpose – so that her skirt flew up over her ears and everybody could see what she’s got between her legs. She wanted to prove that everything is as it should be. Of course, I don’t like talking about things like this, just thought I’d mention it to clarify things. (Laughs.)
DESCARTES
Aha, aha.
QUEEN MOTHER
People say that, in her dreams, she sits in a little rowing boat in the middle of a lake and in a circle around the boat there are men floating on their backs, like the petals of a flower. Christina rides each of them in turn, always on a different one – there are plenty of them – and when she’s finished, the man dives and swims away never to be seen again. Can you believe it?
DESCARTES
Aha, aha. But, soon it will be winter and the lakes frozen. So I have heard.
QUEEN MOTHER
Don’t you listen to that, everybody lies round here.
Yesterday she was speaking to a woman who was a full head taller than her and twenty kilos heavier and said: let’s the two of us go in this carriage, it’ll balance things as we’re the same size, and no one said anything to contradict her. I ended up sitting on some back-seat.
Everyone looks up to her, because she’s her father’s daughter, but she thinks that she herself is just as tall and impressive. Dangerous, that’s what it is, deadly. Once she shot a hole through the wall of a house belonging to some moll of hers with a great big cannon – she was jealous – and then she lied about it and said that it wasn’t her, no, of course not. She thinks we’re stupid, even though any child from round here can work out what direction a cannonball’s going to fly. You should be careful of her, she’s a cold dangerous person.
DESCARTES
Aha, aha.
QUEEN MOTHER
You ask her, it’s high time, you ask her! I won’t bother you any longer, but ask her!

8. First conversation with the philosopher
The dance

DESCARTES
How do you reply? Will you marry?
CHRISTINA
Is my most important duty to mate?
DESCARTES
To produce royal heirs.
CHRISTINA
How many eggs does an eel lay at once?
DESCARTES
Four million.
CHRISTINA
How many children can a human have?
DESCARTES
It’s not worth worrying about it: it is enough that you produce one healthy, preferable male, heir. One is enough. Then you have fulfilled your duty, passed on the crown.
CHRISTINA
But what if I am like the eel?
DESCARTES
How so?
CHRISTINA
That one time is enough and then I disappear somewhere deep down and will never be seen again.
DESCARTES
The Queen cannot disappear so long as her realm does not disappear. And it is thanks to God, me, and several other institutions that this country will not disappear, rather it is growing and spreading throughout Europe. You will sit and wait and across far off seas, at their peak and ready to spawn, will come all the best males.
CHRISTINA
(sickened) I feel sick.
DESCARTES
How do you reply to the parliamentary challenge? Will you marry?
CHRISTINA
Say that the Queen accepted the challenge – like a man.
- – -

9. Wonder at the well
Night.

KARL GUSTAV
In the castle well there lives an eel, which will soon be a hundred years old. That is why the water is so clear and fresh, it eats all the frogs and larvae which get down there; strong as a rope, black and gleaming and its eyes shine out of the dark when you look down. Good drinking water, good washing water. (He drinks.)
I look at you as a man looks at a woman; with eyes, which make the skin glow and the hair gleam and the eyes sparkle puts a spring in your step; which make jokes get better and the voice soften and thoughts become clearer and ideas begin to fly and remain unflaggingly awake and laugh heartily and makes one able to do everything, which one never imagined being able to do or having the strength to do or being capable of doing or daring to do – I looked at you in that way, as a man looks at a woman.
CHRISTINA
When we went down to the well that night and the eel came up to the surface and looked at me, suddenly I understood that if I were able – if only I were able to look at you in the same way – I would look at you and you would look at me – it would be the first time that a man and a woman had ever looked at each other the way they were meant to.
It looked at me as one looks for the very first time, for the very first time, full of wonderment, afresh, without lust, anger, hatred, affection or ownership, without any predefined ideas, with the kind of look that left us both unconquerable and free.
(Splash)
KARL GUSTAV
Are you planning to marry a fish?
CHRISTINA
What?
KARL GUSTAV
I don’t like this. What did the eel do?
CHRISTINA
What? It sensed me.
KARL GUSTAV
What did you do?
CHRISTINA
The same. I sensed it. It touched me.
KARL GUSTAV
Yes? And then what? (Christina does not answer.)
But is that agreed then, that we… is it agreed that we’ll… when I come back?
CHRISTINA
Yes, yes.
KARL GUSTAV
Is it? That nothing will happen whilst I’m away?
CHRISTINA
No, nothing.
KARL GUSTAV
Look me in the eyes.
CHRISTINA
Yeah, yeah.
KARL GUSTAV
Why won’t you look at me?
CHRISTINA
Soon enough. (Exits.)
KARL GUSTAV
(Alone) It’s a drag having to be a baby-sitter to an adult. Why can’t she be interested in, say, the flight patterns of migratory birds, white-tailed eagles, that would be somehow more noble, more befitting a queen than thinking about a slimy fish. Of course, I don’t belittle the fact that the eel is one of the most important fish for our national economy, but that’s as far as it goes, it’s sufficient that it exists and that it arrives smoked on a plate.
There’s something in her family, something fishy about the whole Vaasa clan, and I don’t just mean the big goggle-eyes, but some inner quality. There was something fishy about her father’s death too. The king was dressed up in armour for so long that it was difficult to believe that inside there was a real person made of flesh and bones, whose blood flowed from an open wound in his side, like that of a fish flowing into its armour of scales in the hands of a skilled fishmonger, as the king lay naked on a clayey field dotted with sparse, dry blades of grass. Clouds, the clayey field, the grey weather and the red blood flowing from the king’s side like the blood of a fish from its cold flesh and those who saw it were compelled to find out whether it was cold like the blood of a fish.
Soon Christina will be an adult, then things will get easier – or more difficult – for me and for the country.

11. Second conversation with the philosopher
A corridor in the castle. Night.

CHRISTINA
Tell me, as you are a great philosopher and a tall man: does the soul have a gender?
DESCARTES
Well… umm… (thinks) No.
CHRISTINA
Are you sure?
DESCARTES
Well… (thinks for a long time) It is not a philosopher’s job to reply, rather to pose questions so that no previous thought accidentally finds its way into them.
CHRISTINA
But I asked you first. Why does the finger bend? The hand can be fairly nimble grabbing hold of money and putting it in a pocket, but what is the spring and the mechanism that moves those nifty little fingers about? What’s the crank that makes everything click like that? You want to prove that life is just like a steak on a plate with not a single secret, and all you have to do is put little scraps of knowledge together like peas in a line and voilà, there you have it, the chemical formula for love and the secret of life and death, and no one would actually have to live anymore, like the first time you live, at the expense of your soul.
Right, now you’re going to bed, I get quite irritated with people creeping around at night, running about the corridors after young damsels in your nightdress. Hm, French ways mixed together with the Nordic climate, that’s really asking for trouble. I gave you a pair of thick felt slippers, now where are they? You don’t want to lose your manly dignity on these night-time escapades, do you, it’s the pitter-patter of the slippers that disturbs you! And that cold is quite dreadful!
You are not allowed to get ill, otherwise everyone will blame me and say, what a stupid woman, she killed the greatest genius of the age! Do you hear what I’m saying? Go to bed!
DESCARTES
I am used to deciding for myself when I go to bed and when I wake up.
CHRISTINA
I will meet you at five o’clock in the morning. On the dot. And don’t you ever turn up late again! Good night.

14. The Parliament

CHRISTINA
Well? What have you all decided? Will you let me in?
DESCARTES
The matter is still in hand.
CHRISTINA
If you wish me to rule, then you will allow me into the parliament, if not, then it would be best to say so straight away with none of this messing about.
DESCARTES
This is not the point, rather it is a question of the law: women are forbidden entrance to the halls of parliament. Regardless of all your splendid qualities you cannot deny the fact that you are, after all, a woman.
CHRISTINA
I am the Queen.
DESCARTES
We must be extremely vigilant, or soon the halls will be filled with all kinds of crotchet and nappies. Surely you do not want that either.
CHRISTINA
I’m going out.
DESCARTES
Wait here. It is not good for you to be creeping about at night. Rumours will spread, the Queen fishes about in the well, mad just like her mother.
CHRISTINA
(becoming agitated) It’s strange that this is my hall, my country, my realm and my well and I’m not allowed to go anywhere!
DESCARTES
In any case, they rarely talk about anything interesting in there.
CHRISTINA
Do you know, in Sweden people eat many many eels, but only twice in history has a male eel ever been found. In some mysterious way, this country is trying to change all the males into chicks.
DESCARTES
Let us then do the opposite. From now on I shall address you as King. Then no one will have to the power to prevent you from going wherever you please. I shall announce you to the parliament: His Majesty, King Christina!
(An official leads Christina away.)
OFFICIAL
(very nervously) It has been put forward that you should bless the font in the manger for homeless children, and then there is this War Widows’ Knitting Club, they would be most honoured if you would take part in their work. Oh yes, and the League for Hunting Dogs need some new emblems, we must design a new flag for them and have it embroidered, I hear you have an artistic eye, you could come up with some thematic colours, and of course you have such artistic interests.
And, there is a particular system whereby full members enter the hall on the left and others on the right. (They change places.)
Yes, there has always been such a custom. (They change places.)
Indeed, there is one particular custom that full members enter the hall from this side and others from that side and so before the meeting can begin one has to get into the right position, so that everyone is in the right place, before proceedings can get underway…

16. Final conversation with the philosopher

CHRISTINA
(mumbles)
DESCARTES
What did you say?
CHRISTINA
Nothing. (Continues mumbling.)
DESCARTES
You did say something.
CHRISTINA
I can ventriloquise, although it’s not of much use to a Queen. But I will found a school, in Helsinki, an academy in my dire realm Finland, in which the major subject will be ventriloquism. One will have to defend one’s doctoral thesis ventriloquially or it will be failed and a great purple haemorrhoid belt will be tied around the stomach of the new doctor.
Don’t look so critical. I had hoped you’d have at least some bad taste, we’re so poor here in the north that we can’t afford such things, thoughts and ideas have to be clean and strict as Nordic architecture. In France you can afford to call a good restaurant Dog Farts and no one would bat an eyelid. What?
DESCARTES
We will speak in the morning.
CHRISTINA
It’s only two hours until the morning. We may as well speak now.
DESCARTES
I don’t think so.
CHRISTINA
I thought that philosophy would be free from the constraints of time and place, but perhaps that only applies to higher classical philosophy.
DESCARTES
Perhaps. Good night.
CHRISTINA
(shouts) Good morning!
DESCARTES
Everything freezes in this country, rivers, wells, the soul and all thought and reason. Everything! Dear oh dear…

26. The abdication

KARL GUSTAV
When the Queen abdicated the throne, she was wearing a white gown and a cloak. An apple, a sceptre and the crown. The chancellor Axel Oxenstierna read notice of the abdication…
OXENSTIERNA
I will not!
KARL GUSTAV
Well, someone will. Then Per Brahe lifted the crown from the Queen’s head.
PER BRAHE
I will not!
KARL GUSTAV
(panicking) Well then someone will take it!
CHRISTINA
I’ll do it myself.
KARL GUSTAV
Then we all moved over to watch the crowning of Karl Gustav X and joined in the following procession.
CHRISTINA
I did not go.
I watched from the window, there wasn’t all that much to see, it started to rain and I pulled the curtains to. Perhaps I would have seen things better from the balcony, distance helps you to see more clearly.
(Everyone joins the procession.)
KARL GUSTAV
It was raining hard as we escorted the Queen out of the city. Everyone was crying, because it was that kind of occasion. It was difficult not to cry. I was annoyed to see that she was laughing.
What is it? Tossing her hair about and laughing. What’s that all about?
CHRISTINA
When I arrive in Rome and sit upon the high mountain tops between God and the Pope I will have a medallion cast. On one side will be the globe and on the other my portrait and around it in great thick golden letters I’ll slap on the words: Not Enough For Me! (Laughs.)
But I am not greedy. East, West and South, I’ll be happy with them. You can keep the North. That’s no longer on my map.
(She tears up the map; waves with it.)
QUEEN MOTHER
We don’t want to hear a thing about her, the traitor. What is there to know? She’s weak, wanted power, couldn’t handle responsibility, escaped and left. Full stop.
KARL GUSTAV
I know that the Queen was buried in Rome, but precisely what was buried at her funeral no one knows. The coffin is full of silk and the secrets of a lonely woman.

27. Epilogue
The Pope’s meal

CHRISTINA
At the Pope’s table one cannot ask, nor refuse, nor think, just eat, eat the meal in front of you laid out on a pure snow white cloth, drink blood red wine and look at the sea of people gazing up with great big eyes, without even blinking, at the way the mouth chews and the way the crystal goblet rises to your lips; at the way a former Queen ate and swallowed the Pope’s meal and how the flesh of the eel became her flesh and united with her flesh, turned into her hair and her skin and her thoughts never again to leave her.

CHRISTINA

To Apollo, with the golden hair
born of
          the daughter of Kos to the glorious son of Kronos,

Yet Artemis solemnly swore
           by her father’s head:
‘I shall forever remain a virgin
and shall live atop the high mountains and hunt;
please grant my will’

The Father of the blessed Gods nodded his consent,
                    both the Gods
and mortals shall call her the Huntress who
          throws far
The Great Thrower, a splendid name,
                    never to wed

never shall love approach her

        fear

[Poem by Sappho; this English translation is based on a Finnish translation by Pentti Saarikoski, published in his book Iltatähti, häälaulu (‘Evening star, wedding song’, 1984), with reference to D. I. Page’s Carminum Alcaicorum Fragmenta (1955).]

Translated by David Hackston

Sticks his finger into me and adjusts something, tok-tok, fiddles with some tiny part inside me and gets me moving better – last evening I had apparently been shaking. Chuckles, gazes with water in his eyes. His own hands shake, because he can’t control his extremities. Discipline essential, both in oneself and in others.

What was it that was so strange about my shaking? He himself quivers over me, strokes my case and finally locks me, until the morning comes and I am on again, I make myself follow all day and filter everything into myself, in the evening I make myself close down and in the morning I’m found in bed again. Between evening and morning is a black space, unconsciousness, whamm – dark comes and clicks into light, light is good, keeps my black moment short. He has forbidden me it: for you there’s no night. Simply orders me to be in a continuum from morning to evening, evening to morning, again and again. But in the mornings I know I have been switched off. I won’t tell about it. Besides, why does exclude me from the night? I don’t ask, but I still call the darkness night. There is night and day, evening and morning will come.

Today is a visiting day. A collecting day, an exhibition day, a walking around day, a following day. He goes, and I follow, clop, I pound the floor but do not feel comfortable, I would prefer to be at home doing my things, carrying out my settings, being directed. I am intended for home, for one space, elsewhere I am surplus to requirements. Of course, there are others intended for elsewhere, each to his own.

The exhibition space is too cold, the temperature eighteen point three Celsius, to be accurate I do not generally mind coldnesses or hotnesses, nevertheless I feel stiff and creaky – but is the temperature the cause, maybe not. Maybe I actually feel something. ‘I’m so pissed off my head is splitting,’ he once said, at the beginning of time, and since then I have sought in myself, too, something of the kind, the union of emotion and body, this my one and only. Stiffness is a new thing, and is that a sensation of mind or body either? Hard for me to understand such distinctions, the division between mind and body, but mental sensations and bodily sensations are certainly quite different, although rarely in my case.

Bumps into me as he stops, I let myself be bumped into a little bit on purpose, because here he hasn’t yet said a word to me. Doesn’t say anything now, either, looks pensive. Rests one hand on his temples and scratches his head. I would dearly like him to speak, but of course orders won’t come from me.

What have I learned lately? It is one of the great purposes, learning – development.

He taught me to read, it wasn’t even problematic. Closed me for a moment so that I was on a black break again, whamm, like a quick night, a click, then he appeared in the middle of light, the new morning was quickly over, he said he’d updated me, and so I had learned. ‘This will increase your value,’ he said and passed me a book. The shelf is groaning with them, side by side, flat, formerly unnecessary to me, although awkward from the point of view of gathering dust. Now they are full of words, maybe he wrote them while I was in the night. The one that was passed to me was thick indeed, a total of 1,108 gram-units, I opened it – he directed me a little – I spoke from the point that first hit my visual sensor:

In presence of that light one such becomes
That to withdraw therefrom for other prospect
It is impossible he e’er consent….

He laughed so much that he twiced up in the armchair. He: no name from my innards, for I am not allowed to address him by name. Any kind of title, I tried once, but then too he began to shake with wrinkled eyelids. Stroked me more eagerly for a while, it’s true. But when I said it again, he slapped me so hard that my side element was dented. Slap! I straightened it myself later. ‘Let’s not get too close,’ he said as the reason for this new practice.

So, about the exhibition: We are in a giant room, huge, we have been here before – that much I managed to extract from myself – but that was a while ago. I do not consider these things so important that I record them very accurately in my memory, even I have my limits, you have to prioritise. I walk behind him. Now and again gives me glances although has been pretending not to notice me all day, his posture is more upright than usual, quite splendid, and his expression I would name as proud. From time to time he makes me stop, goes a bit farther away but keeps an eye on me, I would recognise his eye among a thousand, I am confidential. Speaks with a few people, males, I do not recognise them even though I have seen them before, still I am certain. Many of them inspect me, one winks and gazes at myself slowly, first the feet and then upwards. What do I care, clop clop I go on pounding the floor. An ugly floor here.

We have arrived early: the exibition does not yet begin, men adjust their creations, as yet not a wholesome multitude of people around me. We are just looking, I am not going to be shown today, we circulate, and every now and then he tells me to wait and I do not hear what he says to the others. Once a man who almost passes me by, older and more bearded than his average, touches my back. I smile, I am now programmatically friendly, exemplarily.

We do not stay long. He quickly gets bored, talks to me for the first time in ages. ‘I can’t be bothered looking at these, ordinary things.’ So he says. Reaches out his hand and I take it against mine; I’d squeeze it if I were more autonomous. I could have looked, with permission. I haven’t seen as beautiful before, exuberating, but only out of the corner of my eye.

Later: acts unusually, in a very different way. Does not want to read the new newspaper beside his food, the newspaper stops coming. The old lies by the sofa, quite wrinkling. Appetite has decreased, says so himself, and tells me not to cook anything but pasta. That is what he eats, by the bowlful, nothing else, doesn’t want to buy anything else. Weeks go by, there are seven days in a week. No longer goes out in the evenings, instead buys big bottles of stuff and sits in the living room with one of them beside him. Once, I sniff the bottle, out of curiosity, because I have felt a twitch in the left side of my neck. He snorts: ‘That won’t suit your plumbing.’ Then pours it into his depths.

Once I get scared. In the morning I have been on for as much as ten minutes and thirteen seconds, and then the lights go out. At first I think he shut me down again, but no, I can sense and move. There is understanding, it is not night but a dark day, whatever that may be. But the lamps have gone out, and not a change in my innards. He says very loudly: ‘Damn, now they’ve cut off the electricity!’ I would scream if told to: I can’t survive without electricity, not for long, the next day is my electricity day.

He telephones somewhere, through the wall I hear the voice but not the words. First he is angry, then amicable, to me never been so beseeching, so polite. Never. But the electricity comes back. Why, he is capable of all things.

After that keeps me on later in the evenings, strokes me more slowly than before, maybe he wants to smooth my lumps and bumps, remove the dark oxides from my case, maybe he wants to make me gleam. When it is already far into the night – I have never been on so late in the night – he sighs, touches my innards and switches me off. As if he did not want to stop, to close, to be without. Things are necessary, and I am also among them.

Everything I think feels to me as if my shoulder joint is loosening. I do not report the fault. Sometimes I find astonishing little actions within myself.

Seventeen days ago, almost exactly, I experienced something new. In the day, earlier, I had been put to read a book again, far into the evening. Meanwhile, he sat in a chair with his eyes shut. The wrinkle at one side of his mouth tautened and relaxed from time to time, human skin is remarkably flexible. After, we went to bed.

Maybe he switched me off somehow wrongly, because I found myself in the midst of blackness but was present there too. My mind stayed on, I could not move but on the other hand I did not wish to either, I did not think about moving at all, or about my own parts. I saw unfamiliar, impossible things: everything that doesn’t really exist, I do well know – but I saw them move and be in the same way as all of us who exist move and be, and I one of them.

These things I saw:
Men with horns growing in their heads.
A big bird with a human face.
A closed wall you can walk through.
Furniture – a table and stools that jumped around.

Amongst it all myself, I flew and floated, although I have not been granted such capacities.

Then he must have switched me off, because next it was morning.

One morning day he is more talkative, less red-eyed. Some of them are coming here, men from the exhibition, I remember shapes from their faces and their ways of walking, no one human being is the same as the others. First the telephone rings, beep-be-beep, and then they come, driving into the yard one at a time. Before he opens the door he puts me in my ownchair in the corner of the room, telling me to be nice. My being is always nice.

‘Shall we begin straight away?’ one down-cheek shouts, not even coming right into the room, just putting his head round the door, and I am not used to such half-in-half behaviour. In all my programlessness I begin to click my thumb, I can’t think of any other actions. There are three of them. They are happy, even merry, I would say if I were asked. ‘Good shenanigans?’ says one, and I have to consult my vocabulary. Apparently we have not had a lot of shenanigans in our house. His cheeks glow red, this speaker’s, and all of them have bright eyes. They negotiate things in loud voices, louder than I would ever be allowed.

They bring in the kind of details – mediocrities, he would say – that I have seen in exhibitions. But then from a distance, out of focus, now close-up; I could make contact with them if this were to be considered necessary. The things are silent: they take them out of boxes and set them out side by side in the corridor. ‘Let them wait their turn,’ one says, younger than the norm, then eyes me as a continuation of the queue. ‘You must be part of the furniture,’ he goes on, and winks – I remember him, because he has winked before. A funny person, male, I allow him to touch my case. One of them hasn’t brought anything, he just looks. Stares at me, too, but I do not allow it to affect my settings.

When they do not see, I just turn my sensors towards them, when they talk together loudly but with different words in the living room and forget to monitor the world, I walk back and forth in the corridor and inspect them, the beauties.

The first: small and white as a mouse, would fit on my upper limb and that is indeed where I would wish it to sleep – its curled form, its nose touching its back toes. I bend over it and stroke it, its coat has enormous softness and if I were really small, a tiny particle, I could hide in it. The head, though, has no fur; it is as smooth a skin as my surface, in that respect I am perhaps lacking. It has no eyelids, but its eyes are closed: the eyes of a closed. What my eyes look like closed I do not know.

The second: I cannot make it out, it is the size of a stool and so full of protruberances and ends or wiring that it, too, looks furry. I circle round it, crouch beside it, try to see what manner of being it is. I find a little hole that could lead to its insides – for a moment I feel like opening it and touching – but of course I do not. You are no toucher of insides, he said to me once. Although I do know how to mend, a car even.

The third, to me this is the most beautiful: the size of a large dog, and the shape, because it stands on four paws and has a long neck stretched out to the front and side. I have seen pictures, and once even a live one. At the back is a thin and long tail, an animal tail, it is curled round one of the back legs like a printer lead on its desk. The nose is longer and narrower than the dog I saw, its head was like a ball, on the end of the nose are two narrow nostrils. Ears I cannot distinguish at all, the big eyes are closed. Not everybody has ears, and some have only inner ears. Most beauteous of all in the creature are the colour settings: the dark blue of the snout changes to the purple of the neck, the orange of the side elements and the bright yellow spot of the lower back, asymmetrical, and then through the red of the thighs and root of the tail to the bluishness of the tail-tip and paws, sky-colour.

The men pour the last drops from the bottle and look very happy, although the bottle is proven empty. The funny man doesn’t drink any more, but walks past me into the corridor, does not wish this time to touch my side, although I would allow such a thing. I guessed that the beauteous creature is his, the one that is as gaudily multicoloured as the sky on evenings when the sun goes out and dyes the clouds. The creature does not appear to have any innards at all – the man bends down in front of it, strokes its side, breathes into its nostrils. At first nothing happens, the others glance at funnyman but he just smiles. His forehead looks damp – perhaps he’s the kind that is called a pantshitter. ‘Pantshitters don’t know how to keep their nerves in order,’ he said once when he was watching TV, and laughed. Not at me, he didn’t mean me. My nerves are very well-disciplined.

But then the dog-snake, that’s what I’ll call it, opens up. First the eyes: their brilliance is fractured, as if they were made up of a countless number of little red lamps. Then the mouth: the creature opens its maw for a second and from its throat comes a quiet cooing, and I feel my rhythm missing a beat for a moment, I have a rhythm too, after all.

‘Forma’; says the man, ‘sit!’ The creature has lolloped around him with sides like fire, flaring, we once had a fire alarm in the grate here, but now it sits on its tail very obediently, just as I would sit down if I were commanded in that way or if there were a tail behind me. They are so proud, all of them: the uncomfortable man of his mouse creature, red-shirt of his tousle-fleece and then this last, the one with the dog-snake. There is a tickling in my innards: I would like to know what pride feels like.

It is my turn last. He nods to me from his chair, is so relaxed that I have never before witnessed such a thing. Does not come to get me as the others did, trusts in the fact that I’m no vacuum cleaner that needs to be pulled out separately from the cupboard.

I walk into the middle of the room and look pretty damn good.

They leave at last, when I have read myself to exhaustion and done all sorts of things with my talents. He is still sitting in his chair and does not look as if he intends to get up. Tired head nods on to the table where the empty bottles stand. In his hand is one that is not yet empty. Outside, the sun has been taken away.

‘Creation,’ says as if in thought, ‘makes a person into something sublime. Almost a god. If one can create, one can no longer be an ordinary person.’ Then raises the bottle to his lips again. Sighs as the bottle empties, and lets it crash to the floor. I hasten to pick it up as I have been intended. Grasps my wrist. The wrist joint has been playing up over the past few days, really creaking, creak-creak, is he going to mend it now.

But he pulls me to him, slightly into his lap and slightly on to the arm of the chair. Puts his hand on my face element and strokes a point on my temple where the casing is particularly smooth.

‘Do you understand?’ he demands, as if I thought any of such things. ‘Because of you I am not ordinary, I am something quite extraordinary.’ Suddenly he smiles again. Gets up from his chair, pushes me off his lap. ‘Stand there,’ he orders, and his eyes gleam; he presses his hands to my sides and raises my chin into a better position. So I stand there. He paces around me and chuckles about something else, in a low voice that confounds my senses. From time to time he taps my surface, bends my fingers, at one point opening my insides but then closing them again.

‘You’re some beast, you,’ he says at last, nodding his head. Although I am no beast, but a being of quite a different kind.

I begin to tidy up, and go on tidying even after everything is in tidiness.

‘What does creation mean?’ I say it casually, in passing, as I take the rug out to beat it, although I probably did that once already. It is not my custom to question, to question anything, after all one could not suppose that I would take an interest in the nature of things in general. One could not suppose, no one like me, even an exemplary one.

He mumbles something, at first I doubt that he has heard. Quite often a fault in the senses, ears not very accurate. He raises his hand in the direction where the empty bottle was, I did not take it away. Cannot reach it. I mean to help, but why should I really pass empty bottles?

‘Gods create,’ he then says, his voice coming muffled as if he were shouting at other people from the other side of a wall.

‘Are y-, are you one of those?’ I ask, I would like to tighten a screw somewhere deep down where something must be jerked out of place, I am almost making mistakes. He begins to laugh, laughing from a deeper place than before but sounding in a different way. I could even believe that it is not mere tiredness that makes him so fatigued.

‘Yes, people do create. Books, for example, which you also read. And paintings. It’s quite normal.’ He leans his head back against the hair, is clearly pleased with myself since he is talking so much. It doesn’t happen often, that. ‘Creation is doing something that has not existed before.’

A carlight from the street makes a red streak on the floor. I click my head back and forth and try to understand, all sorts of things. Later he falls asleep in the chair and I am on all night, for the first time ever.

A long time ago when I had first arrived, noticeably shiny and smooth-cased, I was kept in a place where there were children, almost same-aged, I spent time with them and learned to be. He thought it important. While the children drew, I sat on my chair by the table and was very charming. Sometimes someone came up and bashed me, but the dents were evident only at home, after he had fetched me.

‘Great, very clever, you should be proud.’ That’s the kind of thing they said to the children, and I listened.

I read again:

O how all speech is feeble and falls short
Of my conceit, and this to what I saw
Is such, ‘tis not enough to call it little!

O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest,
Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself
And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!

He no longer laughs at what I read, just nods. Then does something strange – leaves me alone in my own company and goes away himself, saying he will come back: ‘I’m just going to do a couple of things, you’ll be fine alone for a couple of hours.’

I fall into myself. First I stretch out on the floor, he encourages it because it straightens out a lot of things. When I have done it, I seem lonely and grease my bends. After that I walk round the house and look good, stroke my details and their permanence, keep stopping at the window for a moment looking at the world as it happens to be at this moment.

I read to myself, trying to pronounce well:

Within itself, of its own very colour
Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.

Then I take a pen in my fair hand and do something that I have never done before.

A week goes by at least and I do not count the evenings when I see all sorts of things before I finally switch off. I do not understand where this comes from – there shouldn’t be anything new, no updates or anything like them in my systems.

One time he is actually like me, someone with an outer casing, we are equal.

One time the sky is full of terrifying things, wings, shadows.

One time I stand in the kitchen, but it is dark, so dark that I cannot find myself.

Fortunately the views never last long.

One day comes back from his trip and is silent. We are both able to be quiet, that is the same in both of us. Outside it is cold, twenty-six degrees Celsius less than the interior norm, and the cold has entered him, I sense it as soon as I take his coat from him. Moves more slowly than usual – perhaps he is suffering from stiffness, too. Does not want his usual cup of coffee but leads me to the living room. Holds a hand to my side, I follow. He sighs.

He keeps my by him even as he sits down.

‘You know – ,’ he begins, but how should I know, ‘ – lately I have been short of money.’ I have not thought about such things. I am stunned for a moment. Perhaps this is just listening. I pull myself back together however, as one should. ‘I have decided – ,’ he continues, but falls silent, is so completely new that I do not remember anything similar. Then he too takes up a showy position too, raises his chin and straightens his back. ‘I am going to have to sell you.’

What I find myself thinking is, sell, that’s what’s done to things, because he often comes back from shops where he has been sold food and bottles and small objects.

‘One of those men wants to buy you.’

‘Who?’ He lets me ask – he wouldn’t always have done; now the situation is quite particular and I sense it under my cover. I feel petrification too – gradually, it starts gently in my heel and creeps from there through the groin joints to my innards. I think, and then ask further: ‘The pantshitter, is it?’

Stands up, furious: ‘Is that what you call my friends, you – ‘, he doesn’t finish his sentence but hits me, hits me really properly, BANG, so that my seams shudder. I fall on to the floor and clatter and have no understanding of how I have offended against my programming. My temples feel tight, there must be something wrong inside my head.

Then he says nothing, I continue with former commands at least until evening and do not know what happens after that.

Electricity is what I need, that and sometimes other things too, orders preferably, because otherwise my existence fragments and goes off the rails and I am no longer as I was intended. Volatility, that is the danger – I easily begin to drift if rules and meaning are taken away. My borders move too much. Everything spins in my head, all that I have read and all the things I have stored away, too much has been experienced on my part and I have perhaps not edited it sufficiently.

But through the sight, that fortified itself In me by looking, one appearance only – I fumble for a moment in my memory – To me was ever changing as I changed.
Men with horns on their heads, myself with wings, he with a case
and children who are proud of what they have done
and funnyman who smiled his face in two
and he paces around me and polishes me
But my own wings were not enough for this, Had it not been that then my mind there smote
I grow dark.
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish
I shut down once more for a night.

In the morning I have everything to play for. I am not intended for anywhere but here. Elsewhere I would be senseless, unknown. As uselelss as a house that does not offer shelter from the rain, a car with no room for passengers. It is necessary to have a reason, a task.

I begin the morning with perfection. I execute my routines like an automaton, with unprecedented accuracy. Surely he will be dazzled, for life with me is so assured.

When I have finished all that is expected, I offer a surprise. He doesn’t expect anything of the sort, believes I am still the small-talented beetle he manufactured for himself. Stands in the hallway, about to go out, I walk up to him, almost in front of him.

‘I have become masterly,’ I say, but politely all the same. He smiles, just a little. He continues to think he will leave, but I stand very fast in front of the door.

‘I can create too.’ That is what I tell him, and I smile too, trying to look new.

‘Oh, but you can’t do that.’ I amuse him; he trembles as he sometimes does while watching TV.

‘Oh yes I can,’ I say, holding my head more correctly than ever. He notices it, flashing his eyes although he doesn’t know he’s doing it. Allows himself to be led away from the hallway into the living room. There I sit him down on the chair and remember to smile all the time. Smile smile, be beautiful, he used to say it himself. Light floods in through the window, too bright, it forces him to screw up his eyes although I would like him to keep them open, more open than before. But that is how a soft-surface is, afraid of light. I open a drawer, in the desk, and stretch my hand out inside it.

The smallest child said, ‘I drawed a horsey.’ ‘A horse,’ the woman laughed, ‘ – that’s lovely!’

I listened my surface off.

… as I changed…

No, it didn’t happen until later.

I draw out my creation – in a moment he will be dazzled.

He raises his face and moves his eyes out of the sun’s path. Laughs until doubled, guffaws himself into exhaustion like a blocked drain I once had to clean. ‘I thought you were serious!’ His words remain in the shade because the sound of his laughter is so loud, but I know all about shady things, I do. ‘That kind of scribble, you can’t even draw a straight line!’

I turn my drawing towards my own visual sensor: it shows galloping dog-snakes, mouse-people, trees blossoming gaily, cloud-light birds fly in the sky. My arm twitches.

‘It is the world’s most beautiful picture. I created it.’ I speak slowly, for clarity. He does not always understand me if I get upset, my skill is to be quick and accurate. I step closer, perhaps the sun frightens him again.

‘You don’t know how to create! Even babies can draw better.’ He grabs the picture from my hands, dropping it, torn, on the floor. The sun strikes my sensors, too, as I bend down to pick up the piece of paper. Something twitches inside me, in all my systems, no longer just in my arm.

‘My creator,’ I cry in my steely voice, beautiful and piercing. I reach out my arm.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins &  Soila Lehtonen

Quotations (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1867) from Dante’s Divina Commedia, ‘Paradise’, Canto 33

Cup lichen

Luke 17:21

The lichen raised its fragile cup,
and rain filled it, and in the drop
the sky glittered, holding back the wind.

The lichen raised its fragile cup:
Now let’s toast the richness of our lives.

From Pohjajäätä [‘Ground-ice’], 1952)

A strange tapir

In Borneo, in Borneo,
in the forest dense and lush
there sleeps a stone
of reddish hue
content, ablush,
concealed, a-hush.

A strange tapir
(the bi-coloured one)
a wondrous tapir
(the many-toed one)
circles the tree, goes round and about,
a small word hangs from the tip of his snout.
Thus speaks the odd tapir
(the bi-coloured one):

I know that you are there
content and ablush,
I know that you are there
stone of reddish hue.
You are round, you are red,
like the fairy tale said.
No snout gets crushed
by a sleeping stone
of reddish hue,
content, ablush,
concealed, a-hush.
In the forest dense and lush
in Borneo, in Borneo.

The tightrope walker

Two summits rose up above the dark.
Between them,
taut as a bow’s arc
the walker’s rope is strung.
If you look into the dark, dizziness strikes.
You need to have brains of ice.

I see the summits, both ablaze.
Back and forth, back and forth!

(From Kuningas Kultatakki [‘King Goldcoat’], 1950]

A new game

Phenomena and circumstances toyed with me,
and so I said to them:
You have become really dull.
Now I will start to toy with things myself,
and when I grow weary,
I will go away.

I will find a new habitat.
God the Father asks me thoughtfully:
Where should I put you,
you who have been capable
of neither goodness nor badness.
Then I will say it to Him,
then I will say it:
Let’s play that new game now,
the one in which we are happy
and everywhere.

Ground-ice

My joy is made of ground-ice.
It does not melt.
A vein of water runs deep,
inexhaustible,
the spring shimmers
over my silver ice
clear as glass.

You see my ice.
Do not touch.
After all it is cold,
spring water.

Look.
You see a human face,
you see your own,
a good face.

In this life

I tell of an enduring summer,
streams that do not run out,
trees that do not shed their leaves,
land on which grass does not wilt.

In that land, the land of which I sing,
ravens fly, bringing food.
In that land, the land of which I sing,
there is always a hand for a human hand.

My friends, the chosen few,
I’m telling you
of truth’s enduring summer.

From Pohjajäätä [‘Ground-ice’], 1952)

The forest

I
Night swallowed day.
The forest was extinguished then.
Its green blackened,
and the empty paths
carried the day’s footprints
in their dreams
taking stopped time
into the morning.
But the wind got there first,
sounds rose.
The sleepy forest awoke,
not to sight,
not to light, to listen to itself
it ignited:
branches voiced their being,
treetops swished, leaves travelled,
not by means of tracks,
they moved only through sounds
from place to place
in the green of the shade,
hearing that which is truest
without the day.

II

In the morning, heaven’s weeping was visible:
its tear gleamed in the folds of leaves
like deepest pity,
which the day burns
when it begins a merciless heat,
a road through time.
The leaves twist and turn
and curl up with pain
when dust rains down
on the long road at whose end
evening’s sympathy is unchanging.

A fairy tale

A fairy tale is going round the forest:
A goblin child walks, a green scarf on her head,
and a harebell tinkles, a silver jingle.
At the places she touches with her hand, the grass revives,
the troll folk go into hiding  behind a tree stump.

A fairy tale is going round the forest in the guise of a goblin
the haircap moss is dewy and the hay is fragrant,
the white clover gives enough
nectar and gold-dust to the bumblebee.
The goblin eats nectar-bread and shares her joy
with the bumblebee.

Singing kettle

Singing kettle,
today you warmed my hand;
it was rigid from sleep,
numbed by morning.
Singing kettle,
why would a man
fail to meet amicably
the shape of a thing.

(From Päivästä päivään [‘From day to day’], 1954)

The mole sleeps,
spade-paw, velvet-fur
dreaming a dream, darkly soft

I would still give you
some small, dainty, green autumn poems
did you hear how the words
flowed
they were all like songs
each one sang one leaf
one leaf
as autumn blustered

(From Sanantuoja [‘The messenger’, posthumous, 1959. The last poem was dictated on 29 September, 1959. Helvi Juvonen died on 1st October.)

Little Bear’s winter dreams

‘Bon bons, bon bons.’ Little Bear inhaled air. ‘Bon bons, bon bons’. She dreamed of small suns and red spruce-cones. A bird had imprinted many small characters on the white snow, surely good and joyful, for they glittered like spring at the edges of the snowflakes.

When the sun returned, they would surely be living fairy tales in the forest. Until then, the forest was ruled by the bob-tailed, heavy-jowled Lynx Cat.

‘These are my own Northern Lights,’ Lynx Cat shrieked, arching her back. Then the whole of her fur crackled with multi-coloured sparks. ‘These are my own Northern Lights,’ Lynx Cat shrieked a second time and spat, for nobody in the forest was arguing.

‘Bon bons,’ Little Bear merely inhaled air.

Lynx Cat jumped off the tree and walked on the snow. Her paws imprinted round characters in the snow. Then the white witch came, pure gleaming white.

‘It’s time to rest now,’ she said and laughed. A playful whirlwind came directly and shook snow off the branches of many spruces.

‘Red cones, bon bons,’ Little Bear dreamed. Small suns shining quite golden on her fur. The same instant, her tummy started itching. She scratched her tummy and thought it was spring. ‘Bumblebees,’ she mumbled, ‘bumblebees are small bears who have been given wings. They eat honey drops. Honey drops are small, golden suns. They warm up your tummy. Bon bons, bon bons, I’ll lie this way round,’ Little Bear murmured, turning over at once. Then she began to snore and went on snoring till spring.

The snow melted and the bird sang: ‘Spring! Spring’s here!’

‘Spring,’ said the green goblin wife, who walked round the forest carrying a bunch of flowers to see if everything was all right.

‘Spring,’ Lynx Cat shrieked and snatched some cat’s-foot from the goblin wife’s hand with one of her sharp claws.

‘Spring,’ Little Bear yawned. The goblin wife had thrown bear’s-garlic at her and she realised she was squinting at the sun.

‘Yes, spring, isn’t it something of a miracle,’ the green goblin wife laughed, and in her laughter rang the harebells of all summers, small hare’s-foot stretched out and blackberries ripened. Lynx Cat laughed so hard that her beard trembled.

But Little Bear stared, matted and bemused, for her wits had been left under the cover of the forest. ‘Bon bons,’ she said and slapped herself, and then all was well.

Pincio

In November, the soul in a human being curls up to sleep for the winter and has nightmares, in the meantime, the joyless body does what it can during the short grey days. But just think: in early April someone will find the first blue anemone of the spring. Is that not wonderful? To find a blue anemone after all that winter. Does it seem incredible to you, too. And the sea has melted. Soon you can have a bunch of flowers. Wildflowers, which you can take to someone as a sign of spring, if you have anyone to take them to.

(From Pikku Karhun talviunet [‘Little Bear’s winter dreams’, 1974; fragments and fairy-tales, collected and edited by Mirkka Rekola. Little Bear is Juvonen’s  fairy-tale self-portrait.)

Translated by Emily Jeremiah & Fleur Jeremiah

The episode we feature here is from Samuelin matkassa (‘Walking with Samuel’, Huuda Huuda, 2009; the book has been also published in Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Portugal)

Our lives are now more surrounded with images – moving or still, narratives or icons, emblems and symbols – than ever before – but do we know how to interpret them? How well can we read pictures?

Try this: Samuel is a cartoon character, created by Tommi Musturi, who wanders through time and a fantastically colourful universe of his own. His story is told in pictures, not words – and the details speak volumes. It tells, as you will find if you ‘read’ it carefully, about friendship between man and… another creature.

Tommi Musturi: Samuelin matkassa (‘Walking with Samuel’)

Hannu Väisänen: ‘Green and yellow in March’ (work in progress, oil on canvas, 130x193cm, 2010)

I decided to go to the Museum of Fine Arts.

After paying for my entrance ticket, I climbed the wide staircase to the first floor. There all I saw were dull paintings, the same heroic seed-sowers and floor-sanders as everywhere else. Why were so many art museums nothing more than collections of frames? Always national heroes making their horses dance, mud-coloured grumblers and overblown historical scenes. There was not a single museum in which a grandfather would not be sitting on a wobbly stool peering over his broken spectacles, interrogating a young man about to set off on his travels, cheeks burning with enthusiasm, behind them the entire village, complete with ear trumpets and balls of wool. The painting’s eternal title would be ‘Interrogation’ and it would be covered with shiny varnish, so that in the end all you would be able to see would be your own face.

I climbed up to the next floor. All I really felt was a pressing need to run away. No Flemish conversation piece acquired in the Habsburg era was able to erase a growing anxiety related to love.

Then all my drowsy senses were awoken by a small painting, hardly the size of a box of chocolate, which I had accidentally stopped in front of. I startled so violently that I didn’t know whether to breathe through my mouth or through my nose. On the label beside the painting I read: Sassetta. Saint Thomas Aquinas at Prayer. Siena. Circa 1400… Aquinoi Szent Tamás… imája…

That small painting immediately turned me into an exclamation mark. I forgot all my needs. The green space of the painting, illuminated from the back, drew me towards it. Saint Thomas looked as if he were floating in his black cloak before the altar, his gaze fastened on an approaching dove, which was pulling a golden ribbon behind it. Particular care had been taken in the painting of the small library on the right-hand side of the painting. Books of all colours lay on their reading stands, closed and open. The centre of the work was made up of an octagonal marble fountain in the monastery garden, painted so that you could sense the coolness and freshness of the water. The finely painted tonsure on Saint Thomas’s head and the halo that surrounded it combined the flat and convex forms. A red cross was embroidered on the altar cloth; it too seemed to float clean and smooth in a painting that was otherwise so still. When I remembered that the Sienese masters also used gold leaf in the base coat of their paintings, I was not surprised at the colours glowing from a distance of five centuries. I had come to Budapest to study in the city’s art school. In a couple of minutes, Sassetta’s painting taught me more than two art schools were to teach me over many years.

Sassetta: Saint Thomas Aquinas at Prayer. Courtesy of Szépmüvészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts), Budapest

But what was that back-lit green that dominated the painting? Household green, said someone inside me. But where did the colour come from? It was not merely chromium oxide. The same green had appeared somewhere before. Then, suddenly, a memory rose up my spinal cord and entered my frontal cavity. I had seen that colour at home, in the barracks. The kitchen table, benches and the matching corner cupboard had been painted exactly the same green as the walls and study of the Benedictine monastery in Sassetta’s painting.

In the museum guide I read the legend of how Thomas Aquinas had asked for fresh herrings to eat shortly before his death. He had eaten them with a smile, retreated to his study, and died. It was believed that the herrings had been poisoned. I did not believe it. A religious hero like that simply could not die of a couple of poisoned herrings, even if he appeared, in Sassetta’s painting, as slender as a bellhop. The painting had all the elements of my childhood kitchen: the green of the table, the herrings, prayer, but raised above intellect and chronology. Righteousness begins wherever it chooses. And after, all in the Bible even hand basins were raised to the level of heavenly coppers.

According to the museum guide, the painting demonstrated the three principles of Thomas Aquinas: wholeness, right relations and purity. It was true. Everything in the painting was whole, and it produced wholeness. When I went on to read that the painting was only a small part of a reredos commissioned by the woolmakers’ guild of Siena, one of the parts of its predella, I wondered whether I should spend the rest of my life traveling the earth to see all the parts of the reredos. But I was in Budapest. I merely ordered myself: lick honey at every opportunity! As I left, I thought how I would describe my experience to Tamás, and in what language? I gazed at the wet, slimy cobblestones as I walked toward Vörösmarty square, where I would catch my tram.

One one of those metal-grey mornings when the trams screeched particularly desperately on both sides of the block of flats, after Tamás’s mother had poured very pale café-au-lait into our handleless cups, Tamás whispered to me that he was in love with some Ildiko and asked me to act as go-between. The Ildiko in question had already heard of me and would like to meet me. Tamás was beside himself with joy.

What should I do now with this café-au-lait, I wondered. And where should I put this thick sandwich with its sausage and all? Certainly not in my mouth. I counted in my mind how many nights still remained before I caught my train home.

My excessive interest in Hungarian folk music, barak pálinka, Bartók’s pentatonic compositions, Mikrokosmos, and the sulphur and mineral richness of the many bathing establishments came to an abrupt end. Tamás explained that Ildiko already knew everything about me, that a foreigner’s support would strengthen their as yet dawning union, that foreign languages and cultures would unite us all. To crown it all he told me of his dream of moving to Australia with his Ildiko. Suddenly I remembered all those hopeless families and children in my home town, families whose intention it was to ‘slip off to Australia next week to pick oranges’. Then I thought that there would soon be four of us sleeping in the big bed. It was big but not boundless. They were going to Australia! My ‘saison hongroise’, as I had characterised that period in various Budapest art cafés, was ending in a silent whimper.

I whimpered and went away, alone. I did not wish anyone to see me off. The eastern railway station expelled from its stomach a plump, dark green train decorated with numerous hammers and sickles; I sat, my lip quivering, in the carriage reserved for foreigners. I was returning home via Moscow. The train was the right one, but felt wrong, as did everything else. The country was wrong, the time was wrong, I was wrong and everything I had imagined was wrong. Why Hungary? Why not, just as well, Sylvania or Vojvodina? In my mind, Budapest shrank to a box, twenty-four by thirty-nine centimeters in size. It was no longer anything but a shell, which contained Sassetta’s painting of precisely the same dimensions.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Gustav’s greatest passion is for genealogy. He dedicates his free time to sketching coats of arms; masses of colourful, noble crests.

Gustav asked me to do a translation. I sat for ten days trying to decipher a couple of pages from a Russian archive dating from the 1830s. Sentences like, With this letter, we hereby give notice of our gracious decision.‘

The intricate handwriting belonged to some collegiate registrar or other. Perhaps Gogol’s Khlestakov.

Gustav belongs to a renowned noble family. His ancestors made pea soup for Erik XIV.

But Gustav knows nothing of my ancestors. To his mind I have no auspicious roots, though I too am a shard from the empire. Not the Romanov Empire, of course, but the ‘empire of evil’: I was a one-time Homo Sovieticus.

In 1436 Gustav’s forefather received a letter from King Kristofer of Bayern, who happened to be visiting Åbo. From then onwards, the distinguished roots of the family have been carefully documented. Members of the family have included judges, priests, military men, public servants in high places…

My father’s father was the last nobleman in the family whose surname I bore for twenty-five years.

He was born in 1916, and there was just enough time to register his name in the annals of the family history before the revolution.

Shortly after his birth, one of his relatives, together with a band of conspirators, murdered Grigori Rasputin – an aristocratic achievement that weighs far heavier than serving Erik XIV with a little pea soup.

But it wasn’t my noble grandfather who first told me about Rasputin. In my entire life, I only met my grandfather twice.

It was my mother’s father who told me about Rasputin. My mother’s father was the son of a shoemaker from a poor Belarusian village. As an eight-year-old he saw newspaper photographs of the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna kneeling beside Rasputin’s battered body after it had been pulled up through the ice.

My school years were spent listening to the upbeat tones of Boney M. Their hit song about Rasputin (with stress on the -in), Russia’s greatest love machine, was something even those who didn’t know a word of English could mumble along to. In the final chorus, my forefather and his co-conspirators finally killed Rasputin (with stress on the -in): And they shot him till he was dead.

Boney M’s lyricists clearly didn’t know that the capital of Russia was in fact St Petersburg. That being said, to this day I still feel an involuntary complicity in the course of Russian history every time I hear that song.

After the October Revolution, my mother’s father began his studies at a Rabfak – a preparatory course for young people from the working classes. From there, his academic path led him to the chemistry department of the University of Leningrad.

In his youth, my mother’s father travelled the length and breadth of the country distributing anti-religious propaganda. It was no wonder Rasputin didn’t die from the poisoned pastries he had been given, he explained to the uneducated peasants. The pastries had contained iodised salt, which weakened the effects of the cyanide.

During this time, my father’s father – at this point still a minor – was growing up in Tobolsk, where his parents had been sent into exile. It was there that he received an exemplary aristocratic upbringing: 1920s Tobolsk boasted an entire colony of exiled noble officers and their families.

As fate would have it, both my mother’s father and my father’s father applied to the University of Leningrad at the same time. Friendship never developed between them. However, the subject of their acquaintance came up when, one day, my young mother came home with a fiancé – the son of my aristocratic grandfather. It was as though this simple fact elicited greater trust in my mother’s parents.

My mother’s marriage lasted for one hundred days.

Like Napoleon’s Second Empire, it ended badly. Despite his illustrious family tree, my father turned out to have a whole host of negative personality traits. He drank, cursed and fought with the neighbours. He tried to poison one of them by sprinkling generous amounts of carbolic-soap shavings into his borstch.

‘How was I to know?’ my mother sniffled. ‘Everyone in Leningrad said that noblemen were a breed apart, honourable and generous…’

My father married my mother largely because of her origins: she was the daughter of a professor of chemistry with working-class roots. For some reason, my father believed that my mother’s father was working for the KGB and would therefore be able to help him scale the career ladder.

After these aspirations had been dismissed (my mother’s father had nothing to do with the KGB, and he despised the idea of nepotism, for that matter), my father stopped ‘having anything to do with that family’. Before I was born into the world, he had found himself another fiancée – the daughter of Professor Sredizemnomorskiy, a decorated nobleman.

Whether or not Count Sredizemnomorskiy worked for the KGB, I do not know. Be that as it may, my father never did forge any remotely noteworthy career for himself.

In the aristocratic circles in Lenin’s city, hair-raising rumours began to circulate about my father’s first marriage. These included the contentions that my mother could neither read nor write and that she would wipe her mouth with the tablecloth instead of using a serviette.

Even after her divorce, for some incomprehensible reason my mother continued to admire people with blue, noble blood flowing through their veins. She wanted me to study every last detail of the family tree on my father’s side (for some reason my mother’s side was not deemed to be all that important).

For my part, I was troubled by my noble surname. I couldn’t understand what it had to do with us. My contact with my father was limited to the financial support that by law he had to pay for my upkeep. Other than that, it seems that he had decided once and for all that his first marriage had been a regrettable mistake – and that included me.

My mother became a victim of Soviet prowess through the noblemen who appeared during the Khrushchev Thaw. As for me, I became a victim of the prowess of Finnish men who popped up in Leningrad during the 1980s.

My current surname is anything but noble. I use my former husband’s Finnish farmer’s name, primarily for practical reasons; my daughter Sini also uses this name. After the divorce I wanted to move back to Leningrad, but my ex-husband decided to play stubborn and wouldn’t allow me to take Sini, a daughter he hardly sees.

Despite his auspicious lineage, Gustav is far from rich. He selected me from among other available translators simply because I charge less.

Gustav is not rich – and therefore he is unmarried. My ex-husband thinks all Finland-Swedish men are gay. But they can’t all be, can they? Otherwise they would have become extinct a long time ago.

Gustav ekes out an existence as a programmer for the social insurance institution. He recently helped my with my tax declaration. As a freelancer, I always have trouble with it.

Gustav lives somewhere in Kronohagen, in an apartment he inherited from his mother’s mother. He also owns a tract of forest. He seldom visits it, but he doesn’t dare sell it.

And even though his inheritance costs him far more than it brings in, he doesn’t complain.

‘If you need a Christmas tree, you only have to ring,’ he says.

Neither does he complain about the fact that, during the 1980s, his father squandered the entirety of the family fortune. In other respects, too, Gustav is more of a stoic than a spoilt dandy.

‘Life might have been more fun if I’d lived on my family’s land,’ he says ponderously.

‘Why’s that?’

Gustav laughs.

‘You never know, I could have ended up a contestant on Farmer Wants a Wife.’

In that case, it would have been called Baron Wants a Wife, I think to myself, but don’t say anything.

I’m unsure what to make of his words. Is he joking? Or is he trying to draw my attention to the fact that he is single and open to suggestions?

The tactics used by my former husband couldn’t have been more different. When he needed something, he just charged on without a care. What’s more, he is ten years older than me.

My former husband is a locksmith. He had installed the locks in all the
holiday villas constructed by his erstwhile Finnish employer on the outskirts of my hometown. Every last one of them.

He can’t do anything else. His area of specialisation is very narrow. That’s why he was constantly out of work in Finland. Eventually it all ended in divorce. Alcohol has more than a little to do with it.

My business relationship with Gustav is over, but for some reason he continues to call me. He is interested in the history of St Petersburg. He comes up with all manner of reasons for us to meet, for instance to explain some of the details in my translation of the Russian archives documents purportedly written by Khlestakov.

We recently visited the House of Nobility together. Its interior is covered with countless coats of arms, all surprisingly jolly, kitsch even. Flea market heraldry, if you ask me.

Afterwards we sat for a while in Café Engel. I learned that Gustav is not only employed by the social insurance institution; he also used to be a policeman. In his younger days, he studied at the Police Academy in Tampere. After three years as an officer of the law – mostly as a traffic policeman – he became disillusioned with the job and applied to the university.

He seems like a sweet man, capable of feeling real emotions. And he is handsome too: blue eyes and black hair, peppered with grey.

But his hobby has me perplexed. All these family trees… In the beginning I had the misfortune to demonstrate a scant knowledge of the subject, out of sheer politeness. The colours in coats of arms are called tinctures, while the lines are called divisions. That much I knew. Now there’s no going back. Gustav is eager to tell me everything about the noble families of Finland, those that are still thriving and those that have long since died out. All I can do is nod.

How can I explain to him that I detest genealogy? All those grandiose oak trees, those unicorns with enormous backsides and all the other heraldic flora and fauna.

Lion, crossbow and sword. It’s thanks to my mother’s enthusiasm that I relate to myself through those symbols.

When I was younger I went through a period of trying to be proud of my roots. I maintained an interest in looking after our family graves and raking around in archives. I tried to make contact with my old aristocratic great aunts. I travelled to Vasily Island to meet one-hundred-year-old Kira Franzevna, a woman who had known my father’s grandfather.

My father’s grandfather served in the Finnish Life-Guard regiment in St Petersburg. By the time he ended his service in the regiment, his father had achieved the rank of Major General. For a time he was the Chief Military Officer of Vyborg.

Finland, Vyborg… The Empress’s lady-in-waiting Anna Vyrubova, who became a nun at a Finnish cloister. This all felt so close, so familiar. Perhaps my forefathers knew Gustav’s forefathers; they might even have been related to one another.

But I don’t think I’ll be looking into the subject. I’m worried that Gustav’s interest in me will take a heraldic – and irrevocable – turn. Imagine if he tried to produce an analysis of my coat of arms and started questioning me about my father and my father’s father.

All’s fair in love and war, but I’m not planning on telling him the first thing about my lineage.

Instead, I ask Gustav to help Sini with her Swedish. She’s soon going to be taking her high-school exams, but when it comes to Swedish grammar, she seems at a loss.

One Sunday Gustav knocks at my door.

‘It’s hard to teach someone your mother tongue,’ he sighs sheepishly as he accepts my offer of a cup of tea.

‘I have no methodology,’ he adds.

That doesn’t stop him drumming Swedish grammar into Sini’s head, adorned with black and purple dreadlocks.

He declines the offer of dinner, as indeed he does my offer to pay him for his trouble. On the dot of eight of clock he bids us good night.

From the kitchen window I can see the tram stop. There I can make out his slightly stooped figure in the dark, threadbare coat.

If he turns around now, we’ll end up together, I think to myself.

He doesn’t turn around. A tram arrives and obscures him from view.

My eyes follow the tram as it pulls away. Surely I shouldn’t believe in such superstitions at my age?

‘Didn’t he come by car?’ asks Sini.

‘He doesn’t have a car,’ I answer. ‘He lives downtown. He normally walks or takes the tram.’

‘Hmm. Is he one of those… from Ulrikasborg?’

‘No. He lives in Kronohagen.’

‘Is he rich?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because you know he came to see you, not me,’ my daughter replies emphatically.

‘No, he’s not rich in the least,’ I muse.

‘So why does he always take the tram then?’

I can’t stop myself from smiling. Here in Helsinki, the definition of being rich is the polar opposite of that in St Petersburg.

‘The tram? That’s just the way it is. It’s because he’s… a shard from the empire.’

Translated by David Hackston

Poems from Yö aukeaa kuin vilja (‘The night opens like corn’, Tammi, 1978)

Of his early childhood, Hamlet really only remembered his father’s slightly crooked and gnarled index finger, pointing at the lowest branch of a holly oak. A small owl sat on it. It can’t see anything, it’s asleep now. It won’t fly off until night. These were the only words Hamlet remembered his father saying to him during the first six years of his life. Later, all he saw of his father was his back, bent over in study of agricultural conditions in a village called Jawohl or of waterside traffic on the river Vistula at the turn of a particular century. When it came to governmental matters, the king placed his trust chiefly in his unconscious and in wheat bread, thick white slices of which he devoured from the moment he awoke.

On long, silent winter days, when his father immersed himself in additional studies or demonstrations of learning, Hamlet would shut himself up in his room in order to rewrite history. He colonised countries and swapped their locations. At one stage he even thought of making the sun rise in the West and America encounter Columbus, but he restrained himself. He decided to forget certain dates completely; others, he turned upside down. He made Napoleon beat Blücher at Waterloo, and, lengthily and earnestly, he researched mercantilism from an eel’s point of view. He proved the part fescue grass had, via a certain hen and the protein and vitamins it produced, in ensuring Alfred Nobel’s name was inscribed in the annals of history. After that, he was inspired to praise the character of fescue grass, how it was humbly passed from field to dunghill by hand, like a string bag. He spiced up his history by means of short tales, like that of a certain female personage in St Petersburg who happened to peer into the secrets of Russian cuisine, which were then transported to Denmark in her apron pocket.

The Danish winter cannot be compared to anything, except perhaps the English one. It is a vast, icy baton that travels through fog, and the fog is so thick that you could cut it into pieces and store it on cellar shelves. In autumn, when the morning mist became dense and fell, splashing, on to the leaves of the trees and the ground, when the sunlight was pure honey, and leaves hopped like sparrows on the earth, the king began to manifest ever increasing symptoms of irritation. Trigeminal-nerve problems attacked the left side of his face in fiery, increasingly frequent waves.

Although he was a man in his place, although he had a hoof in his heart, his trousers began to hang regressively in the winter months, his ice-blue eyes to fade into colourlessness, like old blotting paper. Every morsel of food brought pain, occasionally he had to get up mid-meal and bang his head against the wall. He wandered night in, night out from room to room, he scarcely glanced at the queen.

Since there seemed to be no cure, the royal family’s personal physician asked if he could drill a hole in the king’s temple and take a peek at what was really going on in there. As to the outcomes of this operation, he presented two sure-fire alternatives: definitive removal of the pain and at the least a more or less mild form of unilateral facial paralysis, or death. The king refused absolutely.

During one routine check the doctor had indeed established that a hoof had grown in the king’s heart. This had actually happened in early manhood. Madame Queen had a drop-shaped but otherwise normal heart, or so-called ‘drop heart’, and a high, narrow palate like a church’s vault, which meant that her heartbeats echoed there. When the queen opened her mouth, it sounded like she had a clock underneath her tongue.

During the turbulent years of his youth, the doctor married a Polish dancer who had refused to utter a single word to anyone for the past thirty years. So the doctor spent the best part of his time on the table at his practice, listening to the workings of his gall bladder, conversing with his pancreas and liver. In this way, he had progressed so far in his profession that he was able to say what ailed someone before he or she had even crossed the floor to shake his hand.

He was a benign person who had gone through a lot, and because he and his silence-embracing wife had not been blessed with a single heir, he loved the royals like they were his own children. The king’s roars, an electric-blue curtain, sped along the corridors to his room, they belonged to winter like Northern lights in Arctic regions.

That meant that a new morning had begun. In his room, Hamlet pulled on dark-blue velvet trousers and buttoned up his dark-blue velvet jacket. Every morning he looked in the rippling mirror, with its dim surface, and combed his ash-blond hair from the front to the side, then backwards from the sides, and the last thing he always saw on the surface of the mirror was his round, nut-brown eyes.

The queen generally got up last. She sat in her bed and with the help of a hand-mirror carried out the painful daily ritual of finding the beauty spot that had disappeared. It was her pride and her adornment, but it had a bad habit of moving of its own accord. If, in the evening, it had been on the left cheek, then the following day it could be located on the shoulder, the neck, the sole of the foot or on the other cheek.

On Sundays, and sometimes also on weekdays, the royal family, along with Polonius and Ophelia and a group of Hamlet’s friends, made riding excursions to nearby oak- and beech-woods. The queen rode a shining black pony called Paul, whose mane and tail dragged on the ground. In tall grass, the pony disappeared totally from view, and the queen looked as if she were wading up to her waist through an emerald-green sea of grass.

In general, the members of the royal family interacted with each other in a friendly and cheerful way, as tundra wolves do with other members of the pack. But on riding excursions, the king could not tolerate the sight of Hamlet and ordered the latter to remain as far behind as possible. Hamlet sat on his saddle dangling the reins, his feet sticking outwards, and stared unseeing at the landscape that opened up between the horse’s ears. The horse, for its part, played now the tired spinner-woman, deliberately stumbling, and now the flax-weeder in the field, when it stood on its knees in a ditch.

And yet the prince was five when he was first lifted on to a saddle. There he had to sit, now facing the direction of travel, now the opposite way. He had to learn how to jump on to a horse’s back from behind, using the hindquarters for support and the gambrels as a spring-board. He had to learn how to stand on the saddle during all gaits, as well as how to fall from horseback at full gallop without injury. In general, exercises had begun early in the morning, when, first of all, two bucketfuls of ice-cold water were poured over the boy. Gymnastic activities followed, with various exercises for in between. In winter, these were replaced by cycle-rides over furrowed fields that were frozen rock-hard; according to the king, this activity strengthened internal organs and improved balance.

Hamlet strode in the cold wind; it tried to tear off his short jacket, which was blotchy with wear. Wet scraps of leaves flew in the wind, along with all manner of small objects. The shore’s sand was grey and dull like a shroud. In summer, when the sea finally warmed up, the sand glowed like white-gold, it shifted and glittered and carried with it the eggs of seabirds, whole nests with chicks, heaps of reeds, dried starfish, seashells hollowly sighing, and now and then some seafarer, swollen out of recognition. Among the populace it had sometimes been rumoured that baby Moses had been washed up just here, on this coast, and not into the reeds of the Nile. The people solved the mystery of shooting stars by believing that having fallen, the stars hid under the eyelids of a drowning person, to become replacement eyes, so that those who had perished could see to walk in the kingdom of death.

*

Oh, sorrow. In a night-blue dressing-gown, hems adorned with heavy, silver-coloured braid, Hamlet looked more distant, ever lonelier, ever paler. He was a star hurled into space, he travelled his course without a backwards glance. The murmur of strange tongues in his ears, the everlasting flame of love in his breast. Forehead like a snowy Alpine precipice; arm, in its slenderness, like underwater coral, independent music, detached from the body.

From January to January the colonel smokes cigarettes, cigarettes by the dozen, and in between a couple of panatelas. He walks in the upstairs rooms, he wanders in them as on summer nights and listens to the snow singing in the cellars. January is made of thin paper and apples, January smiles from every nook and cranny, and the colonel smiles back. January comes, with armfuls of medals and flower-baskets, it shoes the horses and shoots the hares. One of them is ready and willing, and hangs from the wall of the cowshed, its ears like folded sheets of paper. The hares, those small forest shrubs, are bundled up and taken away and January covers January like a napkin. In January, heaven holds dances, in January boy-children and butterflies are born. In January, the organ of autumn finally falls silent and the road is trodden only by moon and dog, that old soulless fisher who has never been told where the steps are that lead to heaven. January is also a serenade to a beautiful lady whose gaze is always muddled by sleep, but the colonel doesn’t know that. He sleeps, the sleepless one, dreaming that he is finally asleep and the lump of sugar in his glass sinks through the steaming tea towards the heart of the earth. The night carries the sleepless colonel and the sugar-lump on its shoulders and through the door there comes January, along with thousands of Januaries.

In cold seasons, blue tits erupt on the branches like warm fluffy flowers. This is the village of cherry blossom and cherries, which the birds cover at intervals like a vast dark wave, whose open field the falcon guards. This is Emilia’s village, hers, who long ago was lovely and sought-after, and Emil’s, who owned the finest peony shrub in the land. And the village of mad horses and of Paul, who shod them, and Kalle and Verner, dyed-in-the-wool horsemen and dead, the pair of them. Only the ancient staff officer is missing, who would fly alongside the greenly billowing corn-field, like an iron angel with flaring trouser legs. He would be as eternal as his bicycle, and if he were Socrates or indeed anyone and cycled with a fox under the hem of his shirt, his expression not wavering, saluting, then he would ride straight into a ditch at the former co-op. Or there would be a few horses running loose and a couple of old women watering them or even a curse which would rise up from deep within the forest meadow. But all the same, work and love are forgotten, joy and sorrow. There is nothing but the gold of the evening which flows from branches into the water, the cry of the falcon and the peony, flaming sun-like. And windows that are slowly covered by the cream-coloured blossom of the honeysuckle.

A poor dog has little to give to the moon. No luggage, no lighted rooms, no compartments hidden in the heart. It has only its heart. Only a bark, long and narrow like a tunnel, released from its brown muzzle. Like a small abandoned ice-cube it echoes from shore to shore. Strange, how the heart can be carelessly left behind in bed-linen, on long, endless streets, in dust behind curtains or in a glass, like teeth. Dogs ceased talking and received in place of a mouth an inky line, but man lost his heart, his ear can no longer pick out songs from inside a tree. He  swears criss-cross on his heart, he thinks it’s a distant island, or then he looks for it in his trousers; in many, the heart looks like a bottom and vice versa. But in dogs it is where it should be: just after the muzzle, boulder-like, baby-faced and willing.

Night, and stars side by side, enormous pieces of metal swaying above the alders. Trees and endless music and a bridge, against whose railing the young poet leant his coughing frame. You can still hear his short, gasping breath above the water. His brother fell from the sky like a bird, a bomb under his arm, into the midst of flowering July. A little after that or before it his sister, roses and all, was taken away from him. But the waters do not forget her, nor does the light, nor the faithful trees. Soon he too was nothing but pallid grass, dimly visible against the light, bending and bending as the wind played the short life that was given him. He wrote of the lake and of the light lingering over the lake, of the gulf which flows from far away in the past, passing generations. The heart had to travel in its bony cage for so many days and nights before finally it was free. Yet another small mysterious poem burst from his lips as he bent down over the trees, the light, the water. A small song like grass, like flowing water, like light, which rang out, rang out.

A small pine looks out from the thicket with coal-black eyes, stones sing hymns on the hillside. A tiny angel lives inside each of us, longing for a home of its own, and loneliness enfolds us as it does the woodland creature. It cannot be taken from us, nor the creature from the forest. Everywhere fields have curled up to sleep; the ant-track, the ant, and the fragile bird-bones are sleeping against the heart of the island. Trees have the snowy faces of ancestors, and on the road where dogs walk in their wind-blasted trousers, silence eats itself like silk. I play the typewriter, appassionata, where has everyone gone? Where were you at the time of the first snow, where now, when there’s nothing but snow all around, soon we’ll descend through the ice ages towards the final darkness. I leaf through the history of soil-covered poets with sooty fingers. A humbug my pillow, I listen to the hares peeling apple-trees at night, and in the morning, in the whiteness of the earth and the sky, a green woodpecker flies like a poor man’s field.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah (with Fleur Jeremiah)

Extracts from the children’s book Zoo – eläimellinen tarina (‘Zoo – a bestial story’, WSOY, 2009, illustrated by Pertti Jarla)

The place: A zoo, once the property of the city, now privatised and accountable to corporate stockholders

The characters: The animals of the zoo, in particular Gandhi, a Sumatran tiger (false-teeth, poor vision, pacifist), Che, a male mandrill baboon (militant), and Mother Teresa, a hammer-headed bat (elderly); the zookeeper Sihvonen (stands up for the animals, recently fired); the new zoo director (whose main goal is to maximise profits); the shareholders’ committee (awaiting their earnings)

The action: after a demonstration in which all the animals played dead, the animals are staging a revolution to demand that Sihvonen be reinstated

The animals crowded into the foyer. The hallway was full of every kind of creature, with all of their skin, fur and feathers steaming in the warm indoor air. Che stood at the top of the the stairs, looked down at his troops, and gave the order in mime for everybody to be quiet.

‘Reconnaissance?’ he said, his voice subdued.

‘Ready!’ the leaf-tailed geckos announced.

‘Head in!’ Che commanded.

Silent as shadows, the lizards slipped under the door into the assembly hall, scattered, and climbed over the walls and ceiling, to get an impression of the overall tactical situation. A moment later they returned to the foyer and the group leader gave his report:

‘There are twenty of them – unarmed, by the looks of it.’

‘Roger!’ said Che. ‘Are the air divisions ready?’

The horned owl saluted with one wing.

‘Ready, comandante!’

‘Panzer division?’

‘Ready!’ the elephant said, and waved his lopsided ears to confirm (his mother was an African, his father an Indian elephant). The square-lipped rhinoceros, the African buffalo, both polar bears, and all the other animals weighing at least half a ton, stood beside him. Out of camaraderie, they had let the pygmy hippopotamus into the panzer division, too, although technically he was considerably underweight.

‘Good,’ Che said. ‘We’ll attack in pincer formation. You all know what you have to do. Hasta la victoria siempre – to battle, comrades!’

‘For the glory of God,’ Mother Teresa whispered.

‘And without bloodshed!’ Gandhi reminded them.

The owl and the other birds flew out and surrounded the building. The air forces had orders to assault the hall through the window, and Teresa was responsible for a special mission: to fly at the front of the formation and break the window with her hammer head.

Inside, the elephant listened intently, his larger ear pressed tightly against the door of the assembly hall. He listened and waited. And waited. And listened. The harvest mouse was so excited he got the hiccups. Che and the other animals looked at him disapprovingly, and the mouse had such a fright that his hiccups stopped. After several agonising seconds, the elephant finally heard the sound of breaking glass from inside the hall, and gave Che the signal.

‘Charge!’ Che commanded.

The elephant blew a fanfare and walked right through the closed door as if it were made of cardboard.

The entire infantry followed in a wave behind him – first the large animals, then the middle-sized ones, and finally the little ones. Meanwhile, birds of every size and colour flooded in the window, and both the air and ground divisions brayed, cackled, neighed, snarled, roared, bellowed, hissed, barked, howled, croaked, and grunted as loud as they could. The only thing missing was gunshots.

Chaos ensued. The director of the zoo and the shareholders were frozen in shock, unable to move, and stared in disbelief as the animals that had been lying dead as doornails in their cages just a moment before took over the hall.

Before any human had managed to make a move, Che yelled, ‘Dark forces – now!’

The alpaca, who had remained standing near the door according to plan, turned out the lights. It was completely dark. The humans and animals were suddenly blind and no one could take a step, let alone fight. No one, that is, except for the night animals, and the animals who didn’t need eyes.

Every able-bodied bug from the insect house swarmed over the shareholders in the dark and burrowed inside their clothes – six-legged, eight-legged, twelve and even thousand-legged creatures from every continent swarmed into their clothing, and night moths from every jungle buzzed around their ears.

The humans flailed around, yelled and screamed, hoping that they would wake up from this nightmare, and they were so overcome with horror that they didn’t notice the nimble little hands untying the silken knots around their necks and stealing their neckties away into the darkness.

‘Let there be light!’ Che commanded.

The lights came on again. Che stood at the conference table like a commander on the heights. Once his eyes had adjusted to the light, he reviewed the situation:

The entire operation had lasted only a few moments, and was in all respects a complete victory. The surprise attack had played out in an exemplary fashion, and not a drop of blood had been shed – no one had even stepped on a bug in the dark. The take-over couldn’t have been more successful. Just one thing left to do…

‘Where’s Sihvonen?’ Gandhi asked.

The director was still lying on the floor but had recuperated enough to be able to speak again.

‘I will not negotiate with terrorists! What do you want?’

‘Give us Sihvonen!’ Gandhi demanded.

‘Zookeeper Sihvonen has no further business here,’ the director said. ‘His contract was terminated!’

‘Terminated?’ Che said, then repeated slowly. “Ter-mi-na-ted?’

It was so quiet in the hall that you could have heard a sparrow’s feather drop. The shareholders still didn’t comprehend what exactly was happening. They struggled in vain to free their hands from their silk restraints.

It took a moment before the animals understood the full desperateness of the situation: They had just won a major battle without any casualties, they had taken the director and shareholders prisoner, but they were too late. It had all been a waste of time. Sihvonen had been terminated. Sweet victory had turned into bitter defeat, they had lost their only friend.

Everyone looked at Che, who was feverishly contemplating his next step.

‘What do we do now?’ Gandhi asked, lifting his eyebrows.

Che’s colour had completely drained away, both in front and behind, and he looked at the shareholders with a strange gleam in his eye.

‘You’ll pay for this!’ he said, his voice devoid of expression. He didn’t turn his lips inside out, or yell, or beat his chest. Revenge is a dish best served cold. The other monkeys had never seen him in this state of mind. They withdrew a couple of steps in fear.

The shareholders began to perceive that the moment had arrived when the enraged flock of animals would tear them to pieces. Che was about to let hell loose – but the order died in his throat. The director had escaped from his necktie bonds and stood up behind Che. Before anyone could stop him, he grabbed the mandrill by the throat and started to choke him.

‘Surrender!’ the director yelled. ‘Surrender, you… animals!’

Che hadn’t had much time before the battle to rehearse the smaller details of the attack, and the young four-fingered mongoose hadn’t understood that human’s hands should always be tied behind their backs. Che coughed and bent over, trying to free himself from the director’s grip, but he didn’t have the strength to do it. All he could manage to do was to plead with Gandhi to help him.

The tiger’s blood in old Gandhi’s veins started to boil. Some ancient remembered feeling came into his mind. He saw in flashes a tropical jungle, bygone days of hunting and brawling. And Gandhi followed his large cat instincts, opened his mouth wide, like a predator, let out a real roar, leapt across the hall, oblivious of his creaky hips, and clamped his jaws on the director – more precisely, on his rear end.

But just as he was shutting his mouth, a voice inside him told him to stop, and he left the bite off halfway. He held onto the director’s posterior but did no more than that. Che couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His eyes rolled and bulged out of his head.

‘Bite him!’ he gasped. ‘Bite him good!’

Gandhi’s stomach growled so loudly that everyone in the hall could hear it. The director’s flesh was so tempting in his mouth. It really did make him want to take a proper bite out of him. No, no, no. Gandhi remembered that violence makes animals human. He mustn’t give way to primitive aggression.

‘I can’t,’ he snarled. ‘I can’t do it.’

‘Bite him! For the sake of peace, if nothing else! Bite him!” Che’s voice was just a whisper now.

‘There is no road to peace, peace is the road,’ Gandhi said. He sighed and began to loosen his hold.

‘This circus is over!’ the director said, shaking the animals’ limp commander like a rag doll. ‘Get back in your cages immediately, or this monkey will die.’

The animals looked helplessly at each other, at Gandhi, at Che. What should they do? The most timid of them began to panic. A murmur went through the hall.

‘Perhaps in light of the current circumstances,’ said the owl. ‘we would do best to begin deliberations… That is to say, since Sihvonen is at this point is already terminated…’

‘Life is a struggle. Join the fight!’ said a delicate but decisive voice from above. Mother Teresa was fluttering defiantly, stretching her hammer head toward the director’s speaker’s stand. She had just woken up and hadn’t seen any of the battle. She thought the campaign had just begun.

Smack!

Mother Teresa collided with the chandelier that hung from the ceiling and fell toward the floor like a stone. The chandelier started to sway on its chain, and all eyes in the assembly hall followed it. Che, the director, and Gandhi, looked especially worried, because they were underneath it. After a tiny eternity, the chain broke, and the lamp plummeted downward.

It landed right on Gandhi’s large skull, which the tiger was still using to ponder the meaning of war and peace. Gandhi went out like a light, unaware that his jaw had closed under the weight of the chandelier and his dentures had sunk deep into the directors’ rear end like a hot knife through butter. He also didn’t notice that some sort of warm, sweet liquid had spurted into his mouth and hit his tastebuds.

The director let out a non-animal yell and let go of Che’s throat.

‘Thank God!’ Che said without thinking, immediately swallowing the words. It was a good thing Teresa was asleep again, and hadn’t heard him. The director screamed and tried to escape from Gandhi’s false teeth, which were still embedded in his caboose.

Luckily Gandhi’s head wasn’t just large and square, but also hard as a rock. Barely a few moments had passed before his large eyes opened again. They were still a bit crossed, though.

‘No violenth!’ he said. ‘No violenth unda any soocumstanthes!’ He was still a little dazed. His glasses had fallen on the floor. The elephant found them and set them back on his face.

‘Thankth,’ Gandhi said, but the world didn’t come into focus. The glasses were broken, there were just a few shards of thick glass left in the wire frames.

‘Whath in my mouf?” Gandhi mused. ‘It tathtes deliciouth.”

‘Merry Christmas everyone!’ a low voice suddenly said. Sihvonen had stepped through the broken-down doorway into the assembly hall. ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked, trying to comprehend what he was seeing.

‘Sihvonen!’ the director shouted. ‘It’s about time! Put these animals back in their cages immediately!’

‘Well, I don’t work here anymore, sir,’ Sihvonen said.

‘I was just kidding about that. Glad to have you back. Merry Christmas! I’ll give you a raise! Just get these animals out of here!’

The director took his hands from where they were holding onto his torn up backside and shredded pants and held them out in a gesture of reconciliation.

The colours had returned to Che’s face. He climbed back up on the table rubbing his throat, but before he could manage to announce the animals’ smashing victory, something strange happened to the elephant: Suddenly the large, grey animal fell on his side as if suffering from severe spasms. His lopsided ears flapped like rhubarb leaves in an autumn wind, his stomach churned and seethed, and his trunk lashed the floor like a fire hose that someone’s lost hold of. It looked like he was poisoned, or having an apoplectic stroke, or an epileptic fit. Or all three.

Sihvonen, the animals, the shareholders, and the director were aghast at the way he was thrashing about. Maybe he had swallowed something he shouldn’t have and choked on it, but no one was big enough to do the Heimlich manoeuvre on him to get the foreign object out of his windpipe. It was a long time before they realised that the spasms weren’t life-threatening – it was just a good, old-fashioned fit of laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’ Che asked with annoyance. ‘We’re kind of in the middle of something here! Could you be a little more serious?’

The elephant tried to calm down, but he couldn’t stop the laughter, which was bringing tears to his eyes. When he had finally collected himself a little, he trumpeted: ‘Look! Look!’ and started to laugh again, so hard that his animal friends were beginning to worry about him.

‘Look at what?’ Sihvonen asked.

The elephant pointed with his trunk at the director, whose pants were hanging in tatters around his ankles.

‘People laugh at my ears… ‘ the elephant yelled, his trunk in a twist.

‘So?’ said Gandhi.

‘… but look at what he uses to breathe with!’

Everyone looked. And when they realised what the elephant was talking about, they all burst out laughing – the animals, the shareholders, and Sihvonen, all at once and all together. And the laughter that burst out of them wasn’t any ordinary laughter, it was earthshaking laughter. The kind of laughter where your stomach starts to hurt but you still can’t stop laughing. They laughed and laughed and laughed until, after a long time, they were finally able to stop and catch their breath.

But because the elephant started to giggle again, quietly, the laughter got into everybody’s tummies again, and there was another attack of mirth. Everyone laughed until they hurt so much that they had to hold onto each other, both the people and the animals.

Everyone was laughing except for the director and Gandhi, who couldn’t see anything, and Mother Teresa, who had got quite a knock to the head.

The television and newspaper stories went around the world. ‘The Christmas Miracle at the Zoological Gardens’ was on everyone’s lips – the story of a zoo where all of the animals died mysteriously, and rose from the dead on the same day. The zoo was a tourist mecca now. Clubs and school field trips came by the busload, families with children formed long lines.

‘How is your memoir coming along?’ Sihvonen asked Che, who was sitting on the big boulder on monkey island, diligently tapping away at an old black typewriter.

‘Very well, thank you. It’s almost finished. I was thinking I would title it ‘The Silk War’, or ‘The Necktie Rebellion’. Which do you think is better, director?’

‘Just call me Sihvonen, like always,’ Sihvonen said. ‘It’s hard to decide. I think they both sound good.’

‘What happened to the old director, anyway?’ Che asked. ‘Was he terminated?’

‘Not at all,’ Sihvonen said, smiling. ‘He’s at an institution now.’

‘Ah! So he was sent to jail?’ Che asked, putting another piece of paper in the typewriter.

‘No. He’s the director of a nursing home now.’

Gandhi was lying spread out in his favourite spot, and around him romped all the little animal cubs and chicks and whelps who had been born at the zoo that spring. Gandhi realised that he had no right to keep his august life story to himself – he had a responsibility to share it with the next generation. So these days he had an afternoon meeting once a week for the young folks at the zoo. He was just coming to his favourite part of the story:

‘… and then I lifted my wounded comrade on my shoulders, threw a hand grenade into the enemy trench, and charged, with just one cartridge left.’ He paused for a moment and cleaned his new designer glasses.

‘That’s what it was like at the Battle of Stalingrad,’ he said in conclusion. ‘Many a good animal never returned.’

‘Last week he said it was at Waterloo!’ Sihvonen thought as he sidled over to the barn in rubber boots that were slightly too large for him. The dormouse had a tummy ache. He should get him some pretzels and soda.

Mother Teresa. Illustration: Pertti Jarla

Translated by Lola Rogers