When I took my first walk here in Udda, along the road down to the end of the bay, my legs wanted to go left up to the forest, while I strove to walk straight ahead. It was an unsteadiness reminiscent of being slightly drunk. A slight vertigo I have already noticed before. Trees soughed through me and the water of the bay tasted almost like salt on my lips. All sorts of things try to pass straight through me nowadays. I am becoming a general store. The few people I know go there and choose, and I try to sell. Most of it is old memories with attendant dust. They are in no chronological order at all, and make involuntary, rapid leaps, like kangaroos. Even when I went to school they hopped around. They forced me to learn my lessons by heart. They continued to skip over me at university and added an extra complexity to my studies in general history: concentrate of reign lengths.

And if I followed my legs and gave not a damn about my dead straight road? Digressions from what was planned provided me later on with my best experiences, and coincidences were grains of gold. Improvisations were lucky throws, or disasters. Afterwards came the restrictions, the constructions, the architecture. Now only that squared-paper notebook remains with its pitfalls. The uncertainty is sometimes imperceptible, but is there: Am I not superfluous? Are not my legs somewhat irrational?

Entangled in such questions, as in a magpie’s nest or in Kafka’s Odradek, I go forward, a dry leaf among a large number of other dry leaves. I reach the empty beach and hear happy voices echoing far away: Finnish children in ‘swimming costumes’ and Swedish tourist children in ‘bathing trunks’. Come on! the Swedish ones shout to the Finnish, but no one comes on, only the autumn wind. Chaos lurks in treetops and above the waters.

I turned and quickly came back. Now my legs walk straight and in harmony with my I, as it is called nowadays.

I annotate myself.

A black spider or something similar crept hairily across the rag rug in the hallway. It gave me a thrill of horror. First I wanted to crush it under my foot. What if it should bite me through my sandals? After that came the thought of picking it up in kitchen roll. Then it approached its hiding place somewhere. It squinted upwards, stopped, cringed. I seized a dustpan and brush which luckily stood in a corner of the hallway, managed to sweep it up, and tossed it out on the lawn.

My house invaded by unknown creatures, insects, reptiles, sprawling bats, mysterious creepy-crawlies of the dark. Odradek with his absence, his laughter of autumn leaves, his immortal, mocking and poisonous daily life, a thread spool of incomprehensibility, without form, without meaning, immortal, small as a child, overshadowing my fear, homeless, for the most part mute. ‘Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.’

Almost painful. Odradek’s muteness and survival, eternal as nuclear waste, gives me the sense of an ill-controlled rage in myself. A scratching sound from the old Persian rug under the living room table: Is it Odradek? The dust’s sharp dust-path from the window, sharp as a sword, shadows as signs – of what? A mysterious mass murderer in a dark gateway who beckons you? A shadow only. An old man clad in white who is glimpsed for a moment, on his way from the sauna to the hawthorn hedge, without leaving any blood-dripping traces? The attic stairs with their dark devil’s gorge that opened on what lacks time and space: emptiness. Odradek: death’s messenger. Out of nothing a dry laughter, like autumn leaves beneath the trampling foot. Have I left grandmother’s ball of wool up in the attic, with the knitting needles stuck into the red body?

What have I expected of the autumn? Serene beauty? Deepest insight: that life is in balance? That the best part of an author’s work is the one that contains nothing private? Do the black spider, sticky flies, fear, Odradek belong to the private?

I suffer from shortness of breath. I go out and walk aimlessly along muddy roads, past dark forests, they are not for me, not yet. I defend myself. The eye clings tightly to the detail, as though the detail could save me. But the soul sees.

The genius is characterised by his openness. Society’s rules do not apply. Mozart writes his coarsely jesting letters to Bäsle, turns a somersault in his inner being, gathers darkness into the greatest weightlessness, ignores court etiquette and established rules, creates without bothering about intentions and programmes: for him music is the breath of life and the foreboding of death. The melancholy, the insight into life’s brevity run through his music like a dark thread. The humiliations he must endure he answers with serene joy. Take the slow movements of his piano concertos: pure, often smiling sorrow. He makes use of everything, landscapes, journeys, insights, humiliations, successes, family life, penury, he gathers it all into something irrelevant: it is the music that guides him and shapes his destiny. He does not drag his ‘I’ into his creation, he rests on his wings in clear air. Down on the earth his heavy I walks about with gravy stains on his velvet jacket. Life is what it is: a mass of adiaphora. Something goes always at his side, yes, almost inside him: the world in all its richness. All the eyes that are trained on him, the hidden jealousy and the incomprehension, the coolness, the envy, he passes by, as if he were moving around a city he himself had built: houses, taverns, squares, wide landscapes, cathedrals. He does not expect anyone to be able to see that city; that is the secret of his loneliness: no one would believe him. It gives him sorrow. He brings it together with his joy. Major and minor: the same light, cruel world. The childishness he is accused of forms part of his maturity. He was born wise, aging, sad-hearted: courageous. He could eat too much of life, but life keeps him between its hands, meets his gaze: I am not the opposite of Death, I am his brother and confidant.

From my portable radio comes his music, his string quintet. Whatever is around me, walls, ceiling, furniture, the table with the paper and the pen, withdraws into insignificance: what he speaks of is the wonderful peace and the dark unease that pass through our lives like a stranger, in a sky-blue cloak. The tragic has its own clarity. We listen to his spiritualised, fervent sorrow: the shadow that follows us. The nameless in me becomes a way to the world, life, human striving: the universal. The spontaneity is a building built of light. All that polyphony! As though I travelled, flew over a radiant, constantly changing landscape. The pause, the lingering in Mozart’s music: the music really interprets silence more than anything else. Emotions? We, the listeners, can squander them. Time? It is the eternity of the moment. Spontaneity? It is that of the man of experience, the old man’s return to his childhood: true maturity.

There are autumn days that only want to be filled with music. If you want to emerge from your worn-out I, listen. There is a note of sorrow there that you cannot avoid. It is your treasure.

Autumn’s child already hears music during the summer as flashes of light in the waters of the womb. He listens with his head, that large head tilted towards the warmth, in the dimness, and the faint notes, like a mist almost, fill it with a vague, unknown longing, a darkness, almost.

Autumn’s child is born and lies so quietly, cries, perhaps, but soon falls silent, with large eyes sees the twilight that surrounds him like a blanket. He grows and listens to the wind that walks along the street with ever louder steps. Now the lamps are lit, swinging and swinging out there, and autumn’s child sits inside in a circle of light and knows that darkness is his confidant. No light is as strong as light in darkness. Autumn’s child knows that, it is his secret, which he himself does not always acknowledge. He is like a shadow with two forms, one from the light, the other from the darkness. Autumn’s child looks round: Was someone following, someone who stopped when the child stopped? Is there not a sense that something got lost when autumn’s child was born?

Autumn’s child sees how the wind tears at the trees and thinks: I knew it. And the clear water has a light, bitter taste. So he grows, autumn’s child, with autumnal gaze, and sees the light film of ice on the water, and hears how the cranes cry their longing and fly far away. Autumn’s child remains, leaves are torn from the trees, the rain falls. The gentle twilight trudges off along the muddy road that leads straight into the forest, where it vanishes.

Autumn’s people move like flickering candles among confiding gravestones, over green grass that still glistens, and already in gateways they see candles lit in the windows of others. They hesitate, then go into their lives with autumn eyes, those that follow the clouds and the living’s sorrow, the almost invisible, tender. But when the winter’s icy wind picks up, they know: It is the darkness that has infected the light, tempered it to a glorious triumph.

Autumn is my season. It came early, lingers for a long time, a whole life almost, until one morning it gives up and looks straight into the light.

The first snow fell in a great joy and gave the autumn darkness the airy, dizzying light that made the children turn their pale faces upwards: out of a nothingness fell, swept, swirled the flakes from the swaying cones of the streetlights and then settled quietly on the black asphalt, now we could scrape together the first snowballs, heavy and sodden. But here in Udda the snowfall came imperceptibly in the twilight and powdered the frostbitten grass with its dry chill.

All that then was expectancy and anticipated Christmas is now crystal-clear, brittle and enduring. No streetlights light up the darkness that presses in and now rests heavily on black water and the outstretched, claw-like branches of trees. The silence is great, the loneliness almost empty of feeling, the ground untouched. My early winter world accommodates itself to old age and says: I send you airy flakes through the darkness, merely as a reminder of what is to come; they will fall into your sleep, just as in your childhood, but tomorrow perhaps they will be gone. Signs only, winter signs! If you go out to the yard perhaps you will feel their wet chill on your lips. You turn, go back into the warmth. Rightly so. Soon enough the darkness will come, and the ice will settle, the year, the years will draw to a close. Like you.

It is a day like this. It is a weight that cannot be effaced. That weight is here, it descends on me like a dead body, pulls out my I, disembodied, a wisp of smoke, a whispering in the corners of the attic. I sit with Odradek, it is just a forgotten ball of wool with two knitting needles stuck in it, no little bat faces, death’s heads, I watch the light that falls like an ironing board from the broken gable window, but the tree behind it there has died its winter death and cannot stretch its arms inside and seize me. The emptiness in me spreads out like the finest dust in the air that settled in layers behind old objects; I am one of them.

It is a room like this. It is a weight that belongs to the mortal body, the skin, the arms, the stumbling legs, the sluggish eyes, the hands that hang like gloves: an empty day. It weighs me to the earth, down into the earth, down into the fire, wants to take me over, annul my I.

It is a struggle like this, invisible, as though in every hour, in every room, in every moment I forced myself to return, from the emptiness, the exhaustion, to return, get up, take the decisive steps away from the ball of wool, the bats, the attic. I push open the door to the darkness of the stairway where time beat me timeless. Vertigo grips me. I must sit down inside my fear, feel how a sense of calm from somewhere gives me back my eyes. Here is the hall, here the kitchen, here my work table, here my text, it is my text, it says to me: Go out to the yard, breathe in, see how far November has come, has it stepped into you, have you no season of your own? All of them? Do you see in autumn spring’s arrival? The smell of earth, of approaching ice.

Strange, all beauty.

Translated by David McDuff

Since I’ve been unemployed, I started a blog called Outsiders. It soon came to serve as work, and I became dependent on its benefits. Although describing being an outsider helped to anaesthetise me, and verbalising all of my afternoons didn’t even take up all my time, the feedback that came in was reward enough. I wouldn’t have taken any other reimbursement anyway because of the restrictions set on recipients of government benefits. Increasingly frequently I found myself longing for more. Even a short blog comment about being an outsider felt even truer than what I with my self-employed, jobless person’s competence was able to achieve in relation to being sidelined as an unemployed person, regardless of what kind of manager I had been in my previous life. When asking for more accounts of other people’s well-being, I wanted them to use their own names. I justified this because I did not want to read lies, which often come from and lead to chatter in cafés and on the web. Apart from the pure enjoyment of being present, using one’s own name – even in wrong-headed topics or notions – makes it easier to approach the harsh laws of the working world. When one knows that by using one’s own signature one is dragging one’s family into the mire, including those who have gone before and those yet to come, one is able to blaze trails along which one can outflank the passive to activate another, equally unemployed. I did not place any further requirements on the other commenters besides first name and surname, as the rules had been drawn up by professionals in their own field. The regulator’s work also requires skill, if not a tremendous craving, for damming up another flood of text so that one’s own advantages do not have a chance to dry up. To facilitate reading for myself and others, I introduced only a couple of restrictions, which I imagined that I, too, would be able to adhere to. Only one side of a sheet of A4 was to be used – that is, one page – and what people wrote had to be true. Truth, beauty and quality ensured that everyone would begin what they had to say by writing about their current work. More stories, anecdotes, even poems piled up than the law permits me to read – much less compile – during working hours. For this book I have selected only 157 stories from the Greater Helsinki area for the sake of efficiency. The faster you can read the work, the less time it will distract you from your main job. I chose to limit things to the capital area so that the stories about well-being from individuals linked to this place would seem to form a more integral work, or document at least, about what was happening in the Big H, the centre of the nation, at the start of the millennium. I will publish the tales of work from beyond the outer ring road at some later stage, if I manage to come to an agreement with the writers concerning intellectual property rights.

Policeman

A blue heart throbs in my blue policeman’s trousers. It is alert, as a poet’s heart is to urgent issues whose solutions the cynics like to mock. Without thinking, automatically everything is immediately at stake: left hand out in front, knees slightly bent, right fist clenched. How come nobody ‘likes’ my updates on Facebook, even though the job of a policeman is so awesomely cool, especially among young people? It was a whole other story after Finnish Independence Day in the queue at the spa. In honour of the public holiday I was sweating with my ex-partner and her son at the ticket window of the Serena indoor water park. We stood side by side with hot steam in our beaks in the full light of day. Bit strange for a shift worker. So muddled up from the good mood following the military parade that I let the lad go for a coffee with his mother and stayed in the queue for my ex-partner. When I got the last key, I gave a cry of joy and shook the girl at the till by the hand. There is justice in the world. The liars behind my back collided with the fists of truth, just like clients at the door of the nick. And there was no chatting in the queue either, if I didn’t seize on my neighbour’s words. These queuing exchanges are social chafing: the subjects come from the day’s tabloid headlines. There’s not much to them, the lady in front of me agreed. Murders and robberies mainly, I said in a rather official tone of voice, and saw the lady’s smile congeal. And the Jokers always lose at ice hockey, I managed to add before she could leave the queue. My husband is over there, she waved in desperation as she let me take her place.

Paper deliverer

The stack of newspapers to deliver goes down slowly. The trolley from which you pick up the ad supplement and bundle it inside the paper always empties much too slowly. You need to fold the paper before the supplements will stay inside. ‘And let’s not forget the keys there’ echoes in the rattle of the wheels. Weather conditions are not so great at the front door of the apartment blocks that you’d happily go back to look for keys in the middle of the run. Small, heavy printed matter is the worst. Bus timetables slip out of the papers. But from which pile? You’ll know it on the eighth floor. And having to go through the junk mail for the entire building. There you’ve got time to think about how paper can swell up when it gets some air beneath its wings. How did they get so much emptiness to make up such a dense pile? And with air, the weight just grows like in a cat that’s awaiting its kittens on the windowsill. As I sigh with empty hands, the scent of the Ehrnroths’ coffee follows me to the door of the lift. I can still smell the President coffee through the chain-link mesh.

Presenter

The presenter asked a personal question. He hit the button, and the audience opened up. True, the presenter didn’t manage to finish reading the book by the second interviewee at the book fair, but a quick skim revealed that it was about the same incest theme as the previous output by the authoress. If a library is a department store of death, book fairs are a crematorium, thought the author. Her mouth said she had made it back from the brink of death thanks to a long course of therapy and pork gravy made with her mother’s recipe, along with the chocolate bars in the blue wrappers. The audience sniffed fresh blood along with comestibles in their snouts, and the presenter prepared his third helping after this fatty portion of interviewing. The works interred on the library shelves are the urns of authors, the condensations of their eras and their bodies. In worshipping the silence of the library, people become aware of their own mortality and the author is buried in her body twice over. Oh, in remembering that mute joy mixed with a sweet tinge of envy before a row of Tolstoy’s works, how she smiled at the customer at the book-signing desk at the Academic Bookstore. And it was repeated over and over again.

School pupils

School pupils generally only think about breaks. During lessons, and especially during maths lessons. Besides breaks, they like PE. That’s what they say and it’s true, unless you think about what the maths teacher is hoping for with regard to his early retirement. And why wouldn’t I say that? Usually in the breaks the girls assemble into cliques and gossip about their friends in the neighbourhood. The boys play football. A bad break is when it’s too cold and frosty. People at school think about careers too early on. Should I become a singer, a chef or maybe a celebrity author? That last one seems easy, we had an author here. Not like the PR person I couldn’t find on Google. A lot of the children go to after-school clubs, and it’s no wonder. It’s not nice to come home to an empty house, when parents are at work, usually, or at their body pump classes. Usually the children do their homework properly. Sometimes they might forget and then they can ask for help on their mobile phone, if they have older brothers or a sister. Or they can ask their mum or dad after the sports news. Or Mum is at the sports hall and Dad is driving to the gym. Friends can help more quickly on the computer. A good teacher is nice, not too strict and fun, like in Finnish class. A bad one is too strict, no sense of humour and a short fuse. In the mornings I don’t feel like doing anything, I just have to. Then it’s a good idea to eat a proper breakfast so you can wait till lunch. I eat two spoonfuls because I’m the baby of our family in the mornings. The food at school is good, the pupils are just suspicious. Especially the girls. The girls don’t eat generally to gain weight exactly, but the boys are a different case. They scoff everything down, especially if it’s meatballs. After school people go to do their activities or spend time with friends. But you have to go home when it’s time. Some are obliged to be interrogated online by people at six, while others only come to chat at eight when the oldies are snoring. At weekends the incomings become the parents’ outgoings. Then when the summer vacation starts, the kids are overjoyed. If you move house, the next school doesn’t begin until autumn. Wild horses couldn’t drag me there, and neither could a bag of sweeties. That’s why I’m writing this. Help, please help the nice children! Of course you know which one of the teachers is planning to postpone his early retirement at that school I won’t go to.

To Harri Virtanen, Programme Director. I am currently working on a novel entitled Outsiders, which consists of around a hundred and fifty narratives up to one page of A4 in length. These page-length entries tell of various professions – or perhaps more accurately, how the joy called ‘work’ drives people to become sidelined in their own lives. I do not believe that even any criminal activity is as antithetical to poetry, philosophy and life itself as the ceaseless bustle of work. When God died, work took his place – for the slave, not the free man. Well-being comes only from work, says the Minister of Finance, to whom well-being means merely the management of freely available resources. In other words: for her, freedom flourishes only when enslaving the slaves. The visual setting and soundscape for these outsiders is Helsinki. The stories are online on the main character’s blog, entitled Outsiders. The repetition of places and soundscapes in the blog entries creates sequences and the plot of a blog novel. It is not my intention to use the auxiliary characters and all the stories in a drama; merely those tensions that will provide material for scenes and entire works. I eagerly await your response, which the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s website promises within two months of the date the offer was submitted electronically. Log line: Those who contribute are content. Being an outsider continues to be the most common occupation in Finland, in large corporations and unlisted companies alike. Possible venues: the Radio Theatre, Television Theatre and downloadable from the web. Target audience: everyone who conceptualises their existence through work. Note from screenwriter: the final work will arise only through collaboration where the experiences of the eyewitness, the writer, the producer, the director and the actor all intersect. Jouni Tossavainen of Pietarinkatu Street, writer.
Greetings, and thank you for your interest. We at the Finnish Broadcasting Company have taken a look at the proposal you submitted. Unfortunately we do not have room for this type of item in our schedules. Yours sincerely, Esko Salervo, screenwriter, Drama / Radio Theatre, Finnish Broadcasting Company.

Translated by Ruth Urbom

Moscow hunched itself in the dry, frosty March night, protecting itself from the touch of the icy red sun as it set. The girl entered the train’s last sleeping carriage, found her compartment, compartment number six, and breathed deeply. There were four beds in the compartment, the upper ones folded agains the wall, while between the beds was a small table, on the table a white table cloth and a plastic flower vase containing a bunch of pink paper carnations, faded by time; the shelf above the end of the bed was full of large, untidily secured parcels. The girl shoved her modest old suitcase, the one she had got from Zahar, into the metal luggage space under the hard, narrow bed; her small backpack she threw on the bed. When the station bell sounded for the first time, the girl went to stand by the corridor window. She breathed in the scent of the train, iron, coal-dust, the smells left behind by dozens of cities and thousands of people. Travellers and those who had come to see them off pushed past her, shoving her with their cases and parcels. The girl touched the cold window with her hand and looked at the platform. This train would take her through villages inhabited by deportees, through the open and closed towns of Siberia to the capital of Mongolia, Ulan Bator.

The man was sitting on his bed. On top of his white business shirt he wore a checked shirt that hung open. Under the folds of the white shirt there glimmered a sweaty, muscular belly. The man took a small orange from the table and began to peel it roughly. Once he had eaten the fruit he pulled out a much-fingered newspaper and said from behind it in an irritable tone: ‘Young people are restless. No patience at all. All that dashing hither and thither. Everything goes at its own pace, time is only time.’

 The man furrowed his brow and sighed.

‘Look here. All you see is an old geezer whose melancholy soul is filled with a dull peace. Even his heart doesn’t beat with emotion, but through sheer force of habit. No more crazy tricks, not even suffering. Nothing but boredom.’

The girl remembered her last night in Moscow: how she had rushed from one place to another, run down the long staircase to the metro and taken the Red line to the Lenin Library, run along its tiled floors through the museum-like hall and the labyrinths lined with bronze statues and climbed, via many steep escalators, up the Blue Line, taken the train past the Arbat, got off at a church-like station decorated with mosaics whose name she no longer remembered, and how she had, under the concrete arch, realised that she had forgotten her shoulder bag containing her train tickets and vouchers, and turned back, jumped from one metro train to another, gone through the stations where she had changed lines and, to her great amazement, found her bag at the Lenin Library stop; it was waiting for her in the middle of the window of the metro attendant’s kiosk.

The train braked and stopped. Soon the engine began to jerk forward and the train set off again. And braked. And stopped. The engine pondered for a second, whistled cheerfully and moved decisively. The wheels jingled apologetically for a second but soon the train, determined, was speeding onward. The sun bounced back off the other shore of the snowfield, lighting up the earth and sky for a second and then disappearing beyond a limitless bog landscape. The man examined the girl with a sharp gaze.

‘Your soul is filled with nothing but dreams? Well, there’s no law against dreaming. Even Mad Ivan lies on the bench by the stove and dreams of a moving oven and of a table that lays itself, but this life, which people wiser than me call a transitory prison, is here and now. Tomorrow death may come and grab you by the balls.’

The man’s narrow face shone with self-satisfaction. He had a fine mouth, narrow lips and a small scar on his chin like Trotsky’s.

‘Death can’t be any worse than life.’

The man closed his eyes and pressed his lips tightly together. Then he began to hum.

‘Don’t be afraid of death, my girl, while you’re alive, for then it does not yet exist. And when you are dead, it no longer exists.’

The girl was woken by the morning light. The man offered her a glass of tea and, putting a large lump of sugar in his mouth, stirred it with a paper-thin spoon, blowing for a long time before slurping the drink. The girl looked out at the landscape on the other side of the window for a moment. The sky was too blue, the snow too bright. In the shadow of a lonely rowan tree stood a small, blue cabin. In its garden stood an old man holding an iron handspike.

‘I belong to the socialist camp, people like you no. People like me have attended all the camps: Pioneer camps, military camps, holiday camps and forced labour camps. My first forced spade was put in my hand when I was just a boy, when I took possession of a couple of cement mixers and carried them off from the factory. I knew I’d be put in chains, but all the same… The worst part was before they caught me, waiting for it. It’s like spinning in the devil’s cogwheel. When the worst has happened you just think that this is part of life. If only you didn’t die of hunger or dropsy. The main thing I remember about it all is the vile smell of rotting fish.’

The frost-dimmed glimmer coloured the icy covering of a snake-like little stream gold. Around the thickets that grew on its banks rose a thick, smoke-like fog. The frosty willow stands stretched slenderly toward the brightly shimmering violet sky. A white-flanked deer ran out of the fog. Its little tail shook.

‘My son is a complete renegade by nature. His heroes should have been Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and General Karbishev, who the Nazis liquidated. But no. He dreamed of the followers of Yazov and is planning to move to West Germany soon as he can save, from his pay as a jobber’s errand-boy, enough dollars to buy a foreign passport.’

The man seemed to collapse. A deep silence descended on the compartment.

‘I wouldn’t move to the other side even if they paid me a thousand dollars. It would be the same as moving a caged bird from one cage to another. I love this country. America is a dungheap that God’s turned his back on.’

The sun swung up to the level of the merry, forested landscape. The compartment’s melancholy evaporated.

‘At home in Moscow I read the newspaper aloud to Katinka and in Ulan Bator to my workmates. Is it OK if I read? It would be a comfort to me. Even just a little bit.’

The girl nodded.

‘Pile-up on the Moscow ring-road – five dead and twenty maimed, a coalmine exploded in the Ukraine – three hundred dead, an oil-pipe failed in Chelyabinsk – one thousand five hundred reindeer drowned in oil, and then a submarine sank in the Arctic Sea – seventy-one soldiers dead, a boiler popped in an old people’s home – one hundred and twenty seven dead, a radiator split in a children’s nursery – forty four children boiled alive, a passenger ship sank in the Black Sea – two hundred and six passengers drowned, a chemicals factory made its workforce redundant – an entire town was wiped off the map, a power station failed in Karelia – thirteen villages sank beneath the waves and seven hundred people were drowned, if an atomic power station tumbles down, a million people will die of radiation sickness.’

The man stopped reading and waited.

He straightened his back, turned the page and breathed in.

‘Soviet pilots lost five cruise missiles on a test flight in Sahalin. It really does say that here.’

The train crawled forward as if apologetically. Against the milk-white sky, the glowing full sun brightened the clean slow. This continued for a couple of hours; then the vainglorious sun was covered for a moment by black darkness. Siberia disappeared totally beyond the window, but slipped back into view again before anyone noticed. The wooden wall of forest grew black and frightening by the side of the track. When it ended, a broad view far away to the river opened up. On the open expanse of snow stood three houses, in front of them a smoke sauna gushing with black smoke. Outside the sauna, in the middle of a cloud of steam, stood a naked, stout, rubicund woman in bare feet. The man offered the girl some Pushkin chocolate. It was dark and fiery.

The man glanced out of the window and caught a glimpse of the woman.

‘The pattern is crap, but it’s well-sewn.’  

The girl doodled for a long time before drawing, on her sketchpad, a Siberian village in the midst of an endless landscape. The man stared at the girl, his mouth slightly ajar.

‘There was a man called Kolya who had a joke that he was always telling: in the army lads like us grew iron jaws, iron cheeks and an iron will. But the welded seams were so well botched that when I got out of the army my frame broke so badly that the only solution was a metre and a half of earth.’

The man went on laughing, but to himself, and had to wipe his damp eyes on his shirtsleeves. He knelt on the floor, took his wrinkled newspaper out from under his bed, folded it neatly and slipped it under his mattress.

‘Another bloke called Kolya, whose dreams hadn’t been realised, painted in white letters against a red background the question: What’s keeping the happy future? He took this placard and went and stood with it in Red Square. He was there for three minutes before a military police car arrived and took Kolya with it. He was sentenced to twenty-five years, the same amount that our forefathers served in the army. And he lost his citizen’s rights for five years. What’s keeping the happy future! Even the Red Square’s pigeons laughed at that!’

The fire-red afternoon sun spread across the wind-whipped sky. Enormous scraps of sleet fell behind the sun. The girl was looking for something in her backpack; the man was laying the table for their evening meal. They ate slowly and quietly, drinking well-brewed tea: black, Indian Elephant tea that the girl had bought in the foreign exchange shop. After the meal, the man would have liked to chat, but the girl wanted to be quiet. The man took a knife from under his pillow and began to scratch the back of his ear with it. The girl rested with her eyes shut. In this way they travelled through the whole dusky night, sleeping and waking in their own rhythm.

The boggy landscape gradually changed to a flat, even terrain: ruined stone foundations buried under the Siberian snow, collapsed wells, bird nesting boxes hanging from birch branches, villages where the dead windows of abandoned houses stared at the train. The caterpillar lorry of the local dairy centre had sunk into a snowdrift; in the field a horse floundered. Its back was as sway as an old sofa. It pulled behind it a hayrack where, instead of hay, there balanced a couple of buzzards, stiff with cold, tied together by the legs.

‘My little friend, do you know what day it is today? It’s cosmonautry day! Not cosmonaut’s day, you see. And that is not all. Today is both cosmonautry day and the ascension day of our deceased great leader, today, the fifth of April. WE all remember that on the fifth of April fifty-three, oh no it was the fifth of March, the strong heart of the great driver of the train of history, Generalissimus Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin made such a strong protest that an hour later the funeral mechanism was in full swing. Joseph Vissarionovich was a man of such terror and steely wisdom that he is still frightening. Now girl, let us celebrate the death of Stalin, even if it is a month late.’

The man began to rummage furiously in his bag. As he rummaged, he calmed himself.

‘I’m sure I’ll find it, I’m sure I’ll find it. A vodka bottle isn’t like a needle that can get lost in a haystack.’

The bottle was not to be found in the bag, but under the mattress.

The man splashed vodka generously into both tea glasses, pushed one over to the girl and raised his own.

‘Let us raise a glass to cosmonautry.’

The man refilled his glass.

‘The next glass is to our compartment’s magnificent young woman and other Finnish mummy-like female figures. A glass to beauty.’

He refilled his glass and set his features in official Soviet mode.

‘Let us raise the next glass to the disputed great figure of world history, the deceased great leader of the Soviet Union, its iron father, the postal robber of Tiflis, the Jew of Georgia and the king of throat-cutters, Joseph Vissarionovich.’

The man drained his glass, bit off a piece of black bread and filled his glass again.

‘Now let us raise our glass once again and it rises anew to the honour of the steel man. Thanks to Joseph Vissarionovich for making the Soviet Union into a strong industrial great power, for sustaining the belief in a better tomorrow and for the gradual relief of human suffering. A stick in the eye for remembering the past, and two for forgetting it…. A glass, too, to General Zhukov, the king of Berlin. Without him the Nazis would have turned Moscow into an illuminated reservoir and purged the globe of Slavs and other unhygienic races, including the Finns.’

The man drained his glass and splashed another drop of vodka into it.

‘The Jews poured poison into the Great Leader’s mouth, and even though I hate the Jews, I thank them for that fine gesture.’

The man drained his glass to the end and grimaced lightly at the window.

‘I remember this murderer and peasant-basher’s death very well. I was in year three at school with Petya. Primary school number five, there was no one or four. One had collapsed in the middle of a school day and construction of four had been left half done. One morning when we went to school, Valentina Zaitseva said that the father of all nations had fallen ill. That piece of information did not exactly touch a child’s mind. The following morning the teacher told us that the Generalissimus was lying unconscious and that the doctors said there was very little hope. So what, we went on playing. On the third morning the teacher sobbed that now the father was dead. Some bright spark asked what he died of. The teacher said that if you keep too strong a hold on life, your breath stops moving and you can die of suffocation…. Me and Petya walked home from school arm in arm, the factory whistles sounded as if in a naval emergency, some men were crying and others smiling in the streets. At home grandfather looked somehow peculiar, naked and strange. I gazed at him for a long time before I realised that the bushy southern moustache had disappeared from above his swollen lips. Now a new life begins, grandfather said, handing us some pretzels. Grandfather was a party member and one of his favourite sayings was that during Stalin’s time this was, for Communists, the most dangerous and most unhealthy place to live.’

The man rubbed his chin for a moment.

‘There are thousands upon thousands of truths. Every bloke has his own. How many times have I cursed this country, but what would I be without it. I love this country.’

The penetrating smell of paraffin hung in the air of the compartment. It came from the full vodka glass which trembled on the table in time with the rattling of the train. The girl moved it away. The man followed the shaking glass with his eyes.

‘Foreigner, you will offend me deeply if you will not drink with me.’

The man bit off a piece of pickled cucumber and stared at the girl, a sharp expression on his face. The girl glowered at the man and then turned her gaze to the floor.

‘Mum always gave me vodka to drink when I was ill. I got used to the taste of vodka when I was a baby. I don’t drink because I’m unhappy or because I want to be even unhappier, but because the serpent within me is always calling for more vodka.’

They sat in thought without looking at each other. The girl thought about her father and about the day when she had told him she was going to Moscow to study. Her father had gazed at her for a long time with a frightened expression on his face and then a tear had run down his cheek. Her father had drunk himself silly, barricaded himself in his Lada and demanded to drive his daughter to the station….

The train jumped violently on the points and stopped as if hitting a wall. They were in Atshinsk. Arisa, the train attendant, shouted that the train would stop for a couple of hours. The man did not wish to go out; all that would happen in the fresh air would be that his fine intoxication would evaporate.

The girl jumped on to the platform and headed toward the centre, which was dozing through its evening activities. She walked along a lifeless avenue to the town centre. A heavy sleet was falling. The town was dark and shapeless, damp and silver-grey, dishevelled clouds hung over the colourful houses, a white moon shone through the curly carpet of clouds. The girl stopped to look in the window of a grocer’s shop. It could have been built by Rodchenko; packets of vermicelli dashed toward the sky like bolts of lightning. The girl felt something warm on her foot. A small mongrel stray dog had peed on her shoe.

The dog looked at the girl warmly with its button eyes, gave a bark and showed its gold canines. It took a couple of steps, stopped, and stared at the girl. The girl realised that the dog wanted her to go with it.

They walked along the deserted street. The girl could not hear the sound of her own steps, although the sleet changed rapidly to snow, which wandered lazily toward the Petrovskiye avenue, turned along a narrow side road and, after reaching the baker’s corner, lost its force and dried away. The frost tightened its grip. The dog stopped and stood by a cellar window. The window opened and from within came a husky voice.

‘How many?’

The girl thought for a moment.

‘Two? Give Sharik a three-rouble note.’

The girl rummaged in her pocket for a note and, after a moment’s thought, gave it to the dog. The dog snapped it up and disappeared through the window. Soon two unlabelled bottles of moonshine appeared on the window sill. The girl took the bottles, thanked the emptiness and walked along the ringing snowy tarmac back to the train. In the train she gave the bottles to the astonished man.

Humming, the man put the bottles into a special vodka pocket in his food bag and fell asleep. After sleeping off the worst of his intoxication, he began to set the table for supper.

When they had enjoyed a long and lazy meal, the man opened the compartment door.

‘Let’s let the world in.’….

When the girl stepped into her compartment, the man was sitting on his bed wearing a pair of army long-johns, filing his toenails.

The girl offered the man a pile of newspapers that smelled of petrol. The man said the train would not be continuing on its journey until morning. This piece of information did not surprise the girl.

She sat for a long time on her bed, smiling. She looked at the man. The man’s gaze was tired and dull, but even that seemed homely to the girl.

The clouds sailed across the darkening sky, bumping into one another. Finally night rolled, heavy and peaceful, over the train.

 Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Paris, 15 November 1897

Constance probably bought this notebook for housekeeping purposes, but forgot it when she left, so I shall take it for my use, and I am not going to tear a single page, because the paper is of good quality and the covers are made of calico. When I write in a small hand there is plenty of room for the text, and when I write in Swedish Constance will not understand, if she chances to see the notebook. She has promised to visit once or twice a week and continue to bring food and do the cleaning (we cleared up the differences of opinion that were related to her departure), even though she has now moved and married a retired officer, having been my housekeeper for nearly 30 years. The laundry she has delegated to Madame L., who lives in this house, although that lady is intolerably nosy and talkative, and she has six smutty children. I have decided to write my autobiography, so that posterity shall receive a full and proper impression of my work. (Let Prof. Schwendener from Berlin and Dr Louis Pasteur be content with minor roles!) I shall not begin until tomorrow, for today I intend to study the specimens of South American lichens Prof. D. has sent if there is enough daylight.

18 November 1897

For my autobiography: I was born in Oulu in 1822. My parents were John Anders N., and my mother, Margareta Magdalena F. My father was a merchant who later lost everything and he had nine children. I began University in 1839 and in 1841 I became a Master of Arts in Helsinki. In 1847 I earned a doctorate in medicine and surgery. From 1857 to 1863 I was Professor of Botany at the University of Helsinki. I resigned my professorship in 1863 and moved permanently to Paris, though no position or means of livelihood was forthcoming.

19 November 1897

I am adding to my autobiography: The first part of the first part of my magnum opus Synopsis methodica Lichenium appeared in 1858 and the second part in 1860.(The second part of the whole book is incomplete and still in preparation; in addition, I want to make corrections to the first part.) In a letter to docent Norrlin written years ago I said that perhaps when I am dead I shall receive appreciation in Finland, too!

27 November 1897

In the morning I went out to buy bread and milk, as I do every day. Today is Saturday, and although it is November, the sun shone from a blue sky. A crop-headed little boy cried out to me: ‘Good morning, Doctor, good morning, Doctor.’ The neighbours on the block call me ‘Dr William’, but fortunately they do not ring the doorbell to get help for their illnesses, for I have not served as a doctor since the Franco-Prussian War when I had to work as an ambulance doctor and a field surgeon. I cannot even take care of my own illnesses. I bought a newspaper and a bottle of Burgundy, which to judge by its expensive price is probably not too bad. C. visited yesterday bringing Navarin of lamb? and thick vegetable soup, so I have food for several days, perhaps the whole of next week. We did not talk a great deal, but I suppose that he is satisfied with her life as an officer’s wife (at home she calls her husband her ‘old man’). It was a great shock and sorrow to C. when her son Charles died of tuberculosis, only 28 years old, and I also mourned. Many people thought that Charles was my son (an impossible idea), but Constance had her child at the age of 19, when she moved from Nancy to Paris 27 years ago. I intend to leave the dirty laundry for Madame L. outside my door, as I do not want that nosy old woman to take even a peek into my home. Her eyes gleam like those of a bird.

21 December 1897

Pro memoria: During my research I discovered as early as the mid-1860s that the air of Paris air was so bad that the lichens were disappearing. The only place where they could still be found was the Jardin du Luxembourg, as the pollution of the air was less there than elsewhere. In a study I published a year ago I was able to relate that lichens no longer grow on the trees of Paris at all.

9 March 1898

A gloomy, cold and foggy day, so contrary to my habits I sat in the café that is situated in a side street off the Quai d’Anjou and ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream, I had enough coins in my pocket, but the taste of the chocolate brought an unpleasant memory to my mind (to be excluded from the biography). In 1857 I walked along these same streets and decided to to kill myself. My brother Oskar put a bullet in his skull in St Petersburg, and it was said that he did so because of a woman, which in my view was extremely stupid. Uncle F. went mad, and one of my brothers did also, but my intention was due not to insanity, but to failures in life, and melancholy. I was penniless, I could not afford to eat every day, and my residence was a dark corner in the Latin Quarter, I did not know whether I would get the post in Helsinki or not I, and my magnum opus the Synopsis was not finished, nor had I made much progress with it because of lack of money and all kinds of difficulties. I had decided to leave my scientific papers to my brother Edvin and jump into the river. I stood on the Pont Marie one cold and windy day and froze, I had forgotten to put on my gloves and my hands were chapped as red and as raw as they were in my days as a doctor in the Helsinki lepers’ hospital, when I had to wash my hands constantly. I had a thin, threadbare scarf around my neck. On my left I saw the embankment of the Île Saint-Louis and the houses along it, in front of me far away the city’s skyline and the Notre Dame cathedral. I peered over the railings into the water, which flowed green and muddy, with slats of timber goodness knows what else floating on it. Suddenly I lost the will to jump, and went to a cafe to drink cocoa with the last of my money. A few days later I wrote to Elise about that I had intended to do, and after reading my letter my sister was so frightened that in her reply she threatened to take train and boat and come and rescue me, but I sent an express letter to tell her not to bother, that I was not going to jump into the cold and dirty Seine. Now I note: I shall not write my autobiography.

23 March 1898

I did not feel up to going to the park or the Jardin du Luxembourg, but walked along the side streets of Plaisance, which stank in the heat of sewage, horse dung, rotten vegetables, wet laundry and smoke. I smelt the stench of all life!

27 September 1898

Summa summarum: Thinking is a great deal harder than talking! I visited the Jardin library, and in the bay between the bookshelves was approached by a Danish woman who had heard that I was a Swedish scientist, but I put her right by informing her that I was Finnish, and answered her in French. The Danish lady was about sixty, quite tall, dark-haired and bespectacled, and she said she was a history teacher who dabbled in botany and chemistry, and was ‘extremely interested in the major achievements of natural science’ such as the theories of Darwin and Pasteur. She took a deep breath and asked if I was really the Professor N. who had devised the chemical method of identifying lichens, and said I was. Her French grated on the ears, but I did not begin to speak Swedish to her, and in nay case did not need many words, for despite the shortcomings of her linguistic skills the lady kept up her oration. From the achievements of science the amateurs of science attempt to distill a world view, which is precisely what reveals their amateurishness. I expect that swarms of similar people hover around the artists, since nowadays even the bourgeois want to refine their tastes, and they will not be content with sugary landscape paintings bought at Place Montmartre, even though this the kind of art they actually like. Years ago in a café I happened to seee how a lady’s face melted with delight and amazement like strawberry ice cream when she found herelf at a table next to a ‘well-known actor’, although this person had just slumped dead drunk with his head on the table. When I finally got rid of the lady my head was completely spinning, and even though she was not the worst sort, I reflected that women’s talk is a kind of leakage of the brain, in which particles of reason are mingled with the phlegm of frivolity.

24 November 1898

I had some business down by the Sorbonne, but as I walked through those quarters I remembered without regret the Hôtel Midi, where I lived during my first sojourn in Paris. I sat down at a café, for I had once again left my gloves at home, the weather was cold and damp, and I and was shivering badly. I ordered hot water and sugar and a drop of rum. At the other tables sat young men, probably students, in the discussion I made out many mentions of the words ‘our time’, and I understood that they were talking about literature, which ought to deal with ‘our time’. I do not know if they mean this year through which we are living now and the events of which we can read about in the newspapers (those events do not greatly interest me), or the whole decade, or the century. Although I do not know much of history, and still less of literature, I found their use of the concept amusing, as these young men would have waved their hands and demanded that history be served immediately at their tables. I could only hear a word or two of the discussion here and there, but soon their red-cheeked zeal began to infuriate me, because I amputated limbs torn and sewed up stomachs in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war, and there I had quite enough of history – the young men used to talk about the ‘the spirit of the age’ , indeed, that was all they kept talking about, fervently hoping that someone (an author, evidently) would tie up the ends of the threads with a satisfactory explanation of the causes and consequences. Outside it was raining and the wind had got up, tugging at the umbrellas and women’s skirts, and raising peaked waves on the surface of the Seine. The rum did not do me any good, because on the way home I fell into dejection as I thought about how my work and my days are sinking to the bottom mud of history.

26 November 1989

Solitude is not dispiriting or sad, but it is sometimes boring, and conclude that this is due to the company in which I am alone.

27 November 1898

Today a pharmacist, D. (there have been many pharmacists in the circle of my acquaintances!), invited me to dinner at his home on Sunday. I went with some reluctance, as the D.’s live in a street off the Avenue de Messina where I had to travel by omnibus, and what was more, Dr D. did not belong to the same botanically cultured group as, for example, the pharmacist Dr R., who at one time did much to help me (my relations with him have broken) – Dr D. is just an ordinary, successful, wealthy pill-pusher. I accepted the invitation none the less, because he assured me that there would be no other guests apart from myself, and that his family had an excellent cook. The dinner was indeed first-rate: Potage velouté aux champignons, Filets de poisson en soufflé, Bifteck sauté béarnaise, Pommes normande en belle vue, vegetables, cheeses, and so on, and good wines. When we rose from the dinner table I had to pay for my meal with some culture! The children’s nanny and Madame D. led into the drawing-room two little girls with curled hair and decked out with bow-ribbons, whom they planted in front of the grand piano to play duets, and after the first piece I applauded, but when they began to play a third I began to fret and wondered when it was going to be the little girls’ bedtime, which fortunately arrived at the end of the fourth. I do not know what error led the D.’s to imagine that I was a lover of music, but luckily I managed to catch the omnibus.

22 March 1899

Whence these strange desires: today I felt an inclination for tobacco when at the window I smelled someone smoking a pipe in the yard, yet I have never smoked, perhaps as an undergraduate I tried it, I cannot remember, but tobacco would not have been good for my bad lungs. The spring flowers in the tumbler have faded, but I cannot bring myself to throw them away. It is pleasant to sense the odour of leaves and grass wafting in through the slightly open window, but I do not have the strength for walking, only for writing my article.

25 March 1899

In the morning I went out to buy bread and milk, but when I returned I could barely climb the stairs, for I was short of breath, and I had to stop several times to lean against the wall, but when I had rested for a short while I felt better. I remembered that one spring and summer I had some frogs in a glass terrarium. They ‘sang’ nicely, but in the winter they died. In April I would be able to buy them again, but obviously I won’t manage to look after them. I had boeuf bourguignon for dinner, it was good, but so heavy that I felt a little nauseous. For the last few nights I have been warm enough with just my coat on top of me, but because of the cough I keep a woollen scarf around my chest.

26 March 1899, Sunday

In the morning I looked out of the window and saw the L. family walking to church, the children had been washed and combed, but there are so many of them that they fill an entire row of pews. I managed to go and look at the flower beds in the yard. There are lots of crocuses now, and they are of many colours! My neighbour Madame R. told me that our baker has won a competition (perhaps at a department store or in a newspaper), and his prize is a trip to Buenos Aires. I wonder what a baker will do in Buenos Aires; the wheel of fortune spins in curious ways. I am tired, and towards evening the cough is worse, but I have no fever.

27 March 1899

It has rained all day, but the air is warm (+17°C), and the rain is merely drizzle, so it will do the plants good.

28 March 1899

Are ‘they’ happier than me, is ‘happiness’ anything more than smug satiety? Perhaps my soul is reminiscent of a dried raisin, but I cannot hate myself, for I have no one else. Annoyingly the letter I had just written (to send to Brussels) got splashed with soup. The letter must be written again, I shall do it tomorrow, for I do not want to give the wrong impression of myself.

Translated by David McDuff

After dining at the Duval on the Left Bank I take the same route back and drop in at the Café Régence to flick through the Finnish papers they have there.

I find my familiar café almost empty. The waiters are hanging about idly, and the billiard tables are quiet under their covers. The habitués are of course at home with their families. Anyone who has a friend or acquaintance is sharing their company this Christmas Eve. Only a few elderly gentlemen are seated there, reading papers and smoking pipes. Perhaps they’re foreigners, perhaps people for whom the café is their only home, as for me.

A little way off at the other end of the same table is a somewhat younger man. He was there when I came in. He’s finished his coffee and appears to be waiting. He’s restless and keeps consulting his watch. An agreed time has obviously passed. He calms himself and lights a cigarette. A moment later I can see a woman through the glass door. She’s hurrying across the street in front of a moving bus and running straight here. Now the man notices her too, and he cheers up and signals to the waiter for the bill. The woman slips through the door and goes straight across to him. They altercate for a moment, come to an understanding and depart hand in hand.

Imagine: there might be a certain person you were waiting for thus. Just think – it might be her, it might be her you were waiting for now. Looking neither to the right nor the left, she’d be hurrying along the boulevard, she’d turn off at the Opera to come this way. Now she’d be over there by that little open market place, La Place du Théâtre Français, waiting for the traffic to go by, to let her cross. I can’t see her – she’s behind that fountain….

‘Evening. You here on your own too?’

The man with his hand on my shoulder is a Finnish acquaintance, someone I’ve occasionally met here before.

‘Oh, hello. So how are things?’

I don’t enjoy his company much, and he’s got nothing of interest in the way of news. He knows no more than the newspapers know – that back in Finland things are looking bad, that there’s talk of our being deprived of our own postage stamps and our own money. It’s truly unpleasant news, and we both shake our heads and sigh. Also, what he says reminds me that there are Fennophiles and Swedophiles back home, and that just now they’re competing for posts. He’s a Fennophile and the Swedophiles are plotting against him.

We’ve nothing much else in common, and we each disappear behind our newspapers.

‘Well, oh!’ he says suddenly. ‘A big engagement here.’

‘So who’s that?’ I ask without interrupting my reading.

He hands me the paper, where I read a front-page announcement in large letters.

Engaged
ANNA HJELM
TOIVO RAUTIO

‘Is that so?’ I hear myself saying aloud.

‘You knew the Hjelm family, didn’t you? Who’s this Toivo Rautio? Is he one of the Ostrobothnian Rautios?’

‘Him I certainly don’t know.’

‘She’s made a quick catch, that girl. I didn’t really know her, apart from having seen her about. Hellishly attractive. I’ve seen her at the theatre, and sometimes she made quite a splash on the Esplanade with her brother.’

‘Garçon!’

‘You off already?’

‘Got to meet a friend.’

Somewhere far down the street I can see the long row of gas streetlights merging. I hear the rattle of wheels and the clatter of horses’ hooves. In front of a shop window an iron curtain plummets down. A whole gable-end is traversed by large brass letters reading Hôtel du Louvre. A large building on the left is pitch-dark, black, a gloomy hulk. There’s an illuminated clock face on some column. Its hands are joined.

Now, in Anna’s room, the two of them will be sitting there on her little sofa. There’ll be no candle in the room. The only light will be what’s coming in from the hall, through the half-open door. If she came out her forelock would be disarrayed, and her cheeks would be flushed.

I walk and walk without considering where I’m going… In the middle of some square, at the edge of a fountain, there’s a group of slimy, greenish water-sprites: human heads with fish-tails. They glisten with wet, and lit by the streetlights they seem to be jeering and sneering.

Where on earth am I off to? That’s the Seine bridge over there, and that gable’s the Chamber of Deputies. It’s La Place de la Concorde! And I live in Montmartre.

‘Ho-op!’

A carriage wheel coming up behind me grazes my sleeve. I’ve just missed being knocked down. The coachman gives me an angry growl.

Oh well, Anna, if you don’t give a damn, neither do I!

And I feel threatened by the evening of my departure, and it begins to weigh on me more the closer I get to Montmartre. I rapidly cross squares and skirt along black-shadowed walls. Well, thank God it’s clear now, at last! Good that the last thread’s been broken, once and for all. No resistance now from the old roots! I’ll thrust them into new soil! I’ll strike hard, make the ground resound – make the trunk shed its old bark!

But what tomfoolery it is, all that! An announcement’s been put in the paper. And how often did we two jeer at those announcements together! All it needs is an announcement of her brother’s engagement, right next to it, in equally large letters. Perhaps there is one! How moving that both brother and sister…! And the wedding would be on the same day, of course!

And, of course too, there was no point in their saying anything to me. Why bother! ‘He’ll see it in the paper!’ They, including, presumably, the brother and the mother, are all naturally delighted with the new son-in-law.

I’ve been walking the Rue Blanche, which winds its way between chilly-looking buildings. Suddenly, at the top of the street ahead of me, up on the slope of Montmartre, is, though I’d forgotten its existence, Le Moulin Rouge. It’s glowing more red than ever. Its red sails, outlined by little electric lights, swing round slowly and invitingly, signalling into the distance. Red lights are flickering in the windows, and below, between the mill’s jambs, the door’s also red.

People are hurrying there from all sides. Individual pedestrians and whole groups are rushing to the Mill, coming from the boulevards and the neighbouring streets. Carriages are stopping one after another in front, then hurrying quickly off to make way for the others. The Mill’s nether region is sucking in and swallowing an unbroken file. They saunter in confidently, happily, knowing the way well, laughing – men and women, as depicted on a church wall, where a joyful crowd dances along the broad highway that leads through a huge gateway into Hell.

That’s where I’ll go too – yes, there – and spend Christmas Eve. How daft of me not to have been there before! Idiot that I am, I’ve walked almost bitterly past this funfair. And crept like some miserable hunched Puritan up the narrow circular staircase to my sixth-floor room in the kingdom of heaven. And why? And to what end?

I hang about in front of the place, watching the passers-by. Through a carriage door pops a woman’s head and knee, and a small foot touches the pavement. Her silks rustle, and a tiny velvet hat sets off her hair.

‘Oh! Oh! Comme c’est chic!’ comes a shout from the crowd outside.

I’m wondering whether to go along or not. What would I actually be doing in there? But a gendarme urges me either to go away or go in. In the doorway I can hear fragments of the dancers’ rhythms, and I feel dragged in almost against my will.

I’m at the top of the staircase, which broadens out and goes down onto the dance floor. It recalls long-forgotten tales from the Thousand and One Nights about underground parties, golden castles and crystal palaces inside the mountains – with no known approaches, but where ‘Open Sesame’ provides an entrance.

Provocative paintings adorn the ceiling above me. Streamers and banners are hanging everywhere, slightly swaying. I see rocky caves, green forests, and at first glance don’t notice that the walls are partly covered with mirrors, partly with frescoes. I can’t make out what’s real and what’s depicted. I see long colonnades and numerous electric lights.

The people milling on the dance floor seem to be occupying an expansive invisible arena. They stretch away, smaller and smaller. They heave and billow about to the music, swaying here, swaying there, in the flow of the waltz. The smooth sides of the silk hats shine and glitter, and the eye’s diverted here and there by white collars, cravats, bare shoulders – or a woman’s neck lingers flirtatiously for a mere moment, whirls round and instantly disappears in the crowd. The music strikes me as melancholy, and a sudden depression grips my heart. I seem to be weakening. I feel weary, my legs tremble. I could almost weep. But above the general buzz shrill hoots of joy break out, dissolving to tinkling laughter. The couples circle round, clutching each other, men and women, breast to breast, almost as one being. Caps are on the backs of heads, heels are in the air, white skirts flash under black ones, a head-high kick reveals a little silk shoe and a red sock above the knee…

The atmosphere’s warm and fervid. The scent of it wafts up in dense waves… sweat laced with perfume… like smoke from an oven of burning human lusts.

I go down and mingle with the crowd. I see the flashing eyes and sense rustling silk, soft arms and shapely shoulders caressing me as they pass by.

I wander from one end of the room to the other, lingering among the dancing groups, trying to concentrate on details among those supple movements of hands and legs, waists and throats.

And for the first time in my life I feel a desire to throw myself into life completely, to taste all that the world can offer fully. I want to let myself go, to glide over the charming greased surface, to be bewitched and intoxicated. And I’m no longer afraid of waking up. Let this world take me, let this Paris squeeze me to death, as long as it first caresses me and carries me in its arms. I’ve got money, I can arrange my own wedding, can’t I? – pay the costs of my honeymoon! Go with the flow, keep afloat above the waterfall I’ll flip my cap in goodbye – to my non-existent friends, my country, its peaceful shores, its alder groves, birch trees, aspens and shady thickets. And I shan’t listen to the waterfall’s roar down below, death’s no threat to me!

I’ll not be sorry for myself any more either! I too have the right to live! I want to enjoy life before my blood goes cold and I ice up in the onset of old age. This evening I want, myself, to kiss and hug, and make up for years and years of vexation.

This atmosphere’s gradually getting my blood up. I’m greedily breathing its voluptuousness. My eyes are getting confident and bold, I’m beginning to get the feel of the place and take note: I’m beginning to choose a figure among the crowd, pick out a countenance that might please me. A connoisseur’s certainty is emerging from the young man I’ve been, and long-unused tendencies are re-awakening. I shan’t go for the first good thing on offer. I’ll reject one, hesitate over another, suppose a third takes my fancy for a moment but reject her too. This one’s too made-up, that one has a suspicious-looking pallor, there’s a coarseness about this one’s mouth, and that one’s eyes are not luscious enough. I must find the finest fragrance, the best there may be.

A serious-looking woman is standing in front of me, and not for the first time. Her figure’s faultless and full, her features pure and refined, almost noble. At the same time she looks good -natured and friendly. She’s wearing no powder and her lips are unstained. Her dress is simple and dark, and her velvet muff has an innocent blue violet pinned to it.

She’s not joining in the dance and she doesn’t seem to have friends with her. Once she walks in front of me and brushes me with her elbow, apparently without noticing. She disappears in the crowd and I turn again to observe the dancers. But when the music stops and the throng disperses, there she is again behind me, and when I pass her she looks me straight in the face, and I can see her eyes are large, and they seem more beautiful than any I’ve ever seen.

She goes off, but now it’s I following her. Perhaps she isn’t one of the regulars, after all; perhaps she’s just here by chance. And I conjure up an adventure for myself – one finer than usual – with a Parisienne, such as I’ve so often read about in novels.

I don’t take my eyes off her, and when she stops, I stop behind her.

Easily, with no further ado, she turns to me and asks:

‘You’re not dancing then!’

‘Sorry, I don’t.’

‘Neither do I. So perhaps you’d be so kind as to offer me a drink?’

She takes my arm, and we sit down at a small table near the wall of the dance hall. I ask her what she’d like.

She feels thirsty and would just like some beer.

After the waiter goes off with the order a silence ensues. I dig out my cigarettes and offer her one as well. She takes one but doesn’t want it lit. She tucks it away in her bosom and says she prefers to smoke at home.

‘You’ll come back home with me tonight, won’t you?’

When I say yes, she presses her knee against mine under the table and drinks to my health.

‘Ah, how thirsty I am!’ And she empties almost half a pint at one draught.

‘You’re very nice. I like you’ she says. ‘Will you spend the whole night with me, or what?’

‘The whole night.’

She empties her glass and we leave. The sad, raucous waltz starts up again.

As I ascend the broad staircase I see the black crowd swaying into movement once more. Across the room I can see the musicians’ platform, the bowings of the violinists, the arms of the conductor.

Why do I suddenly feel like weeping again? Why am I feeling everything so rendingly sad? And what’s making me long to go far away from here?

But she’s sort of curled up against me, and she doesn’t let go of my arm even as she’s collecting her umbrella from the cloakroom.

Outside rain has begun. At the door she flips open her umbrella, gives it to me to hold and, raising the hem of her skirt with her right hand, holds my arm with her left.

The rain’s a fine drizzle. It hasn’t caused any actual puddles, but mud’s being sprayed everywhere, making every step slippery. The street lights and the moving lights of the carriages are reflected in the wet street, as if in a calm canal. The horses’ hooves clack as if on wet ice.

Movement’s a bit ungainly, sharing the same umbrella. She leads the whole time, pulling me along. I ask if she lives far away, but she reassures me:

‘Very near, very near!’ On one street corner she wants me to kiss her.

‘Kiss me, mon ami!’

I kiss her a little awkwardly, but her cheek has a strange fineness, her skin feels soft against my lips, and I kiss her again without being asked.

And simultaneously the gas lamp is casting light and shadow past the edges of her hat, and, as she looks up at me, I seem to catch a glimpse of Anna’s features – the same cheek, the same curl by her ear.

Hearing me moving about she wakes at once.

‘Are you off already?’ she asks.

She seems somehow uneasy; she follows my every movement as I get dressed, resting her head on her elbow. And once I’ve got my overcoat on and am brushing my hat, she can no longer resist asking:

‘You’re not thinking of leaving without giving me a little present?’

When she hears the gold clinking on the stove, she does rise, reaches for her slippers, gathers a gown round herself and comes to show me out. At the door, she offers herself for a kiss, but I resist it, and she doesn’t press me. We’ve both had enough of each other.

Outside it’s a bright, cold Christmas morning. From a neighbouring church comes the ringing of bells.

‘Merry Christmas!’ says my concierge, encountering me on the stairway to my room.

From my window I can see the whole of early-morning Paris, and the roofs and church cupolas are glittering.

Mechanically I hasten to get washed, put something clean on and settle down to get some rest.

And as I lounge there, staring out at the roof, the ice-cold clear mood I recently felt with the woman is lingering on. There’s a sweet lassitude in my body, and I comfortably stretch my limbs, which feel supple and pleasantly indolent. The blood’s flowing so peacefully and calmly in my veins, which feel sluiced, cleansed of some sludge. ‘Pooh!’ I say mentally to Anna once more. ‘So that’s how it was. The roots didn’t go down very deep after all!’ I say it aloud: I want to hear how it sounds. And actually there’s no reservation in my voice.

So be satisfied! That’s how life is! Accept it as it’s given to you!

And lying there on my back between clean sheets freshly changed for Christmas, I sketch coldly, calmly and with a mixture of irony and disdain, an equitable picture of my future. It’s a colourless, arid image, drawn with straight lines, as if by a ruler – like my present state of mind.

There’s a bachelor flat, containing a large desk, which holds papers in good order, and a bookcase filled with books. There’s a leather sofa with a worn cushion in one corner for the bachelor’s post-prandial snooze. An iron bed. Cigarette smoke in the room. At school one wears well-brushed clothes. At home there’s a low-dragging dressing-gown and some slippers. An elderly woman does the housework. Most evenings one is at a restaurant, where one seriously discusses questions of the day and inclines towards conservatism. It’s safest, after all. At a certain hour of the clock one goes homewards. One reads some book before going to bed. On the wall near the bed there’s a yellowed laurel wreath, a memento of one’s master’s degree. But without a picture of a woman-friend who might have woven the celebratory wreath for the graduate, à la tradition. In the summer one lives on a lonely island and fishes.

There it is, there’s no more than that to it. And not a single dream stirs to transcend it, or offer any hope. My life’s horizon seems to be both brightening and growing more chilly. I myself am icing up, shrinking. Total desolation envelops me, bells of hollow loneliness are ringing in my ears. And I suppose myself ready to accept the non-existence life is offering me. And I turn to the wall to sleep.

But then I start sensing in my sheets a whiff of the bed I left this morning, her hair, her skin, and her room. She wants to draw nearer me, she strives to caress, kiss and embrace me.

And in a flash my recent mood is overturned and the perspective it brought. Disgust fills my heart with nausea and sickens my mind, and I shiver all over. I love her again – Anna: I love her still more madly, still more hopelessly than ever. From the depths of my being I’m calling out for her, wanting her to come through that door, to throw herself down beside me, to cleanse me with kisses, renew me with embraces. I’d tell her everything all this, as if it were a bad nightmare. She’d forgive me and I’d start my life all over again.

But she’s not coming. Those footsteps on the stairway, they’re not hers. It’s a person like myself, who stops at his door and whose key I hear turning in the lock.

Why can’t she let me have peace even in the grave? Why can’t I rid myself of her, forget her, brush her aside like many other disappointed hopes? Why can’t I deliver myself from her through pleasure and the independence isolation brings? Why can’t I chill off into nonchalance?

But it’s vain to ask. I feel I mustn’t, and that I can’t. Maybe she’ll fade from my mind for a moment or two, perhaps even for a whole evening and night. But these remorselessly actual and indisputable unyielding morning moments, they’ll always be there. The same feelings will recur, the same wretched longing, the same consuming, lacerating yearning. Wherever I live, wherever I look for comfort and forgetfulness, no matter – I shall always be groping to find Anna at my side, where she won’t be. I did try to extinguish her image, efface her face… always, through the watermark, I’ll be seeing a pure profile and a curl over an ear.

Translated by Herbert Lomas. First published in Books from Finland 1/2006

A storm blows up during the night. As he lies in bed, not yet asleep, just lingering on the brink of falling, in that soft yet sensitive state where sounds seem to grow and get bigger, he can hear the clattering, hissing sound of the wind coming up out there and sweeping up everything not fastened down, capable of being put in motion. It scrapes against the roof and window, loosens leaves and pine needles which scud across the ground, and it whistles and whines round the chimney and the windows, and it even beats against the shed door, which Dad must have forgotten to shut properly before he came in. Before he stamped the mud off his boots in the front hall. Before he had a chance to pull the front door shut firmly as well, because Joakim can hear how he brings the storm into the hall with him, and it sweeps through the kitchen faster than he ever could have imagined. Joakim shuts his eyes tighter, even though he is no longer really awake, and he hears the powerful gust flap past Dad, who is still standing with his hand on the door handle, and then Mum starts shouting because the wind is slamming into the furniture and making dishes crash to the floor and making pots and pans do the same. When Dad starts shouting as well, Joakim lets go of the last little bit of wakefulness and lets himself sink down into the cradle of dreams to be carried along until the morning. It is the sun that wakes him, or maybe the sound of the telephone, because he wakes up just as it rings, but in any case it has stopped blowing, and the branches of the big lilac bush outside the window are completely still.

Today has got ants in its pants. He can hear his mum’s low telephone mumbling in the living room and the sound when the receiver is hung up. Then he hears some hurried steps coming along the soft rug in the hall, and he dives down under the quilt. He breathes in his own air, and it starts to get sweaty in the pale blue fabric landscape before the door opens and he feels the two big hands on his body on top of the quilt. They pat and burrow and turn him over until his head is visible, and then the whole quilt slips off him and he sees Mum in her lilac sweater, her brown hair in waves. She smiles, but it’s not the sort of smile she would smile if she were in as good a mood as Joakim. He laughs and kicks his legs out, and she holds him still and says that he has to get up because Grandad is coming. Joakim is going to go with Grandad, but she doesn’t say where they will be going.

‘It’s a secret,’ she says, pressing her lips together as she tries to loosen his grip on the quilt.

It goes better once she has given him a smack on the fingers. Not so hard that it hurts, but hard enough to show that she means it. Joakim gets out of bed, and Mum leaves the room. He can wear what he wants, but nothing too warm. That’s what she said. Because it’s a proper Finnish summer’s day with clusters of sunshine in the lilac bush and glinting reflections in the window panes. He finds a pair of green shorts and a yellow t-shirt with a blue whale on the front. He doesn’t need any socks. Dad says only city folk wear socks in the summertime, and he’s not one of them. When he goes out into the kitchen, the table has been laid for him, and he finds a note Mum has written on pink paper. ‘Eat your breakfast. Grandad will be here later.’

He eats cold cuts with cucumber slices on bread and has a glass of milk. As he chews on his sandwich, he thinks about the house that flew away in The Wizard of Oz. There are storms that can pick up entire houses. He’s seen that on TV, and not just in Oz. They’re called hurricanes. He continues chewing as he thinks, and soon he’s eaten his fill, and just then there is a knock at the door – a brisk, hard knock – and he knows that it is the sound of Grandad’s knuckles, because he’s the only person who can knock in a way that forces you to go over and open the door. Joakim doesn’t need to go to the door, because Grandad lets himself in, and soon enough he comes in looking like Mark Twain with his white moustache. Once Mum showed Joakim a picture of Mark Twain, and Joakim thought it was Grandad. That’s why Mum showed him the picture. She said the resemblance was striking. That was true. When Mum explained that it wasn’t Grandad in the picture but an author who made up stories about adventures on rivers, it felt like the room was turned over on its end and was pouring its contents over him because Grandad tells stories about adventures, too. Not on rivers, but on the sea. The open sea, where the waves are wolves and men smuggle alcohol across the Gulf of Finland. Grandad comes from the islands out in the archipelago. His clothes always used to smell of fish, but he’s stopped fishing now. Except for sometimes, like today. Mum didn’t say where Joakim would be going with Grandad, but he knows anyway. That’s why Joakim is not surprised when Grandad, having patted Joakim’s head and ruffled his hair, lifts him up onto his shoulders and carries him out to the car, where the fishing rods and reels are piled up on the floor, and lifts him over the door into the front seat. Grandad drives an open-topped American-style jeep. One like the Phantom drives when he leaves his wife and children in Skull Cave and heads out to take command of the Jungle Patrol. That happens quite a lot – him leaving his children, that is – but it’s understandable that he has to do that because there is so much evil to fight. Joakim’s feet do not reach all the way to the floor when he sits in the tall front seat, and he feels light and bouncy when the wheels go up and down in the ruts of the gravel road. Grandad doesn’t drive so roughly. He’s a safe driver, he says. Better to arrive a bit late than not at all, right? They stop at a petrol station that is also a shop, and Joakim sits tight while Grandad goes in. It smells of petrol on the forecourt, and he can imagine that it would be pretty serious if someone happened to drop a burning match onto the asphalt.

When Grandad comes back, he is carrying two ice creams, and they drive a bit further on to park at the side of the road where the smell is not so overpowering. Joakim watches his Grandad when he eats ice cream. He eats it without getting any of it stuck in his moustache. Except when he’s eating an ice lolly. Then the edge of his moustache turns red, or green or whatever colour the ice lolly is. Now Grandad is eating slowly and neatly and smacks his lips a little after every bite to taste it better. He’s looking out at the road ahead and thinking about something, because sometimes he stops eating and just looks. Then Joakim stops eating too, to listen to what Grandad has to say, but Grandad doesn’t say anything and just carries on licking his ice cream and looking straight ahead. At one point he also sighs, but that doesn’t mean anything in particular. It feels nice to let out a sigh sometimes for no reason at all. When they have finished eating, Grandad takes Joakim’s wrapper and starts the engine. He doesn’t want Joakim to let it flap in the breeze for a while and then let it go so it flies off in a spiral behind the jeep. You shouldn’t drop litter outdoors. All the grown-ups agree about that. Grandad’s hands are secure on the steering wheel. They are just a little wrinkly, and there are white hairs growing on his fingers. Grandma’s hands were plump and happy. Her fingers were like sausages. Grandad doesn’t usually talk about her. Sometimes he’ll say something about her and then everyone will go quiet and smile and nod for a bit, while their eyes disappear up towards the ceiling until someone else remembers something else about her, and then everyone talks about her for a bit. Her name was Fredrika. But it’s not her Grandad is thinking about today as he takes the turning down towards the bay, where the motor boat stands hidden in the reeds and can remain undisturbed, even though there are loads of thieves who steal petrol and boat motors in the area during the summer. It’s probably because everybody knows Grandad and know the boat is his. Åke in the shop further out towards the sea can even recognise the sound of the motor, and he’s always got Grandad’s pipe tobacco ready and waiting before he’s even opened the door and said hello.

As Grandad brakes and the Jeep comes to a stop on the soft grass close to the water’s edge, Joakim thinks that it feels as if he were sitting on a swing hanging from long ropes and was pushed up and then back down again. His feet get caught in the seat belt as he climbs over the door, and he falls down and bangs his knee. It hurts a little, but the skin is not broken, so he rubs the spot for a bit and then he is on his way again. Grandad takes all the fishing rods out of the jeep and gives him the shortest one. That’s Joakim’s own fishing rod. He already used it to fish with last summer. He didn’t catch anything besides a few catfish then, but even so, Dad said that he was a real master fisherman. Dad doesn’t know that Joakim has been practising over the winter. He’s read everything about fishing, and even though he didn’t understand everything, there were details like times and temperatures and depths, and loads of pictures. He could understand the pictures, no problem. Those were the very first things he’d learnt to read. This summer there will be more than just a few catfish. Cackfish, Grandad says. But you’re not supposed to say that.

They find the boat in the exact same spot where it had been left – red and a bit rough and slivered, but just as Grandad takes hold of the bow to shift it out, he suddenly stops. He stares at a spot in front of him for some time, and Joakim thinks he’s got lost in his thoughts again, but then he turns round and the expression on his face is serious.

‘Come and look, Joakim,’ he says, and Joakim moves closer.

He leans forward against the boat and grasps the edge to pull himself up a bit further, and it feels as if somebody else took a big breath inside of him when he catches sight of the fluffy mass lying in the boat and moving about on a bed of yellow straw.

‘Well, would you look at that,’ Grandad says, shaking his head.

Joakim looks up at him.

‘Have they just hatched out?’

‘How in the world should I know?’ Grandad asks.

‘Has their mother abandoned them?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Grandad says, looking around. ‘I bet she’s sitting somewhere in the reeds, lying in wait. Probably got scared by the Jeep and flew out. I reckon it takes a lot to make a duck leave her young like that.’

‘So what should we do?’ Joakim asks. Grandad rubs his chin, but he doesn’t need to say anything, because there is a stirring within the dense wall of yellow and green reeds and they can see something brown approaching. There is an abrupt quacking sound, and the ducklings peep and begin to move about more. When the duck calls again, the ducklings get up and stretch and flap. They are golden brown and dark, with yellow masks over their tiny button eyes, and they waddle on their still-unsteady feet. Then they tumble over one another to try to get to the top rail, but however high they jump, they cannot reach it.

‘It looks like they need a little help,’ Grandad says, taking hold of the boat.

With a grunt, he turns it over onto one side so that the fluffy ducklings almost roll into the water, and he keeps the boat tipped like that until all of them have made it out and are  beginning to swim away. Then he lets go and exhales with a puff.

‘Do they already know how to swim?’ Joakim asks as he watches the group eagerly paddling over towards the mother duck.

‘They can swim almost as soon as they come out of their shells.’

‘Almost like me,’ Joakim says.

He learned to swim when he was a baby. Mum took him along with her to a pool where there were other babies, and they all dived beneath the surface and could stay under water for a really long time. He doesn’t remember any of it, but he’s always had a feeling for the water. Especially the silent, pale blue world beneath the surface.

Grandad lifts him into the boat, even though he can climb in himself. His old arms are strong and do not shake. The motor starts up with a deep gurgle, and soon the bow is cutting through the calm, green water as Grandad steers a course out towards the sea and turns in towards the stifling channel where the swans and the big fish live. Where a heavy smell hangs in the air from the muddy seabed and the small fish leap above the surface with their silver-glinting tails.

‘It may be that it’s too hot here today,’ Grandad says.

He shuts off the motor, and there is silence. Not even the birds are singing in the heat. The boat drifts onward for a while and then stops, as if it has come up against something thick and gluey.

‘Well then. Shall we try our fisherman’s luck here?’ Grandad asks as he stands up.

He hands Joakim his fishing rod and takes the bucket of worms out from underneath the seat. Joakim is allowed to choose his own worm and he chooses a nice, big one, because he doesn’t want to get any little fish. The mud gets stuck under his fingernails. They turn into black half-moons, which Mum will have to scrub away with the nail brush later on. She always sighs as she does that. When he gets hold of the worm, he pinches it hard. It wriggles because it knows what’s about to happen, but if it held still, it would feel exactly like the chewy gummy worms he likes to hold between his teeth and stretch until they break. You mustn’t do that with real worms. They have got a nervous system that’s like a ladder. But you can put them on hooks and chuck them into the water until they drown or get eaten by a fish. That’s for a good purpose.

They sit silently for a long time, staring sluggishly at the bobbing floats. Sometimes a float gives a jolt when a little fish nibbles at a worm, and then Joakim will pull it up, but mostly he does it just to break the silence. Fishing expeditions with Grandad usually last several hours. This time is no exception. Now and then Grandad casts a few times with his casting rod, and his neck has turned red from the sun, which sinks its teeth into your skin. Joakim’s face is burning, and he turns his back to the dazzling rays. Sometimes Grandad gives a little groan, and after a while he puts down his fishing pole and searches for his pipe in his shirt pocket. When he has lit it, he sits there and looks at Joakim through the puffs of grey smoke. His white eyebrows are furrowed and his moustache is drooping. Joakim turns his cheek towards this gaze because he does not want to meet it. Not when it is as wordless as this.

‘They don’t seem to be biting very much,’ Grandad says, and Joakim fixes his gaze on the fishing float.

‘Maybe it’s getting close to time to head home,’ Grandad continues.

Joakim does not reply, and Grandad sighs.

‘It wasn’t a good day for fishing today. That’s what I told Kristina, but she insisted that we should go out.’

‘That’s because she wanted to be alone with Dad,’ Joakim says, and just then there’s a tug on the line. First one, and then another, and this time it’s no little fishy’s mouth nibbling at the worm. Joakim can see its dark back just beneath the surface, and then the float disappears, drawn through the glassy water. Joakim gets up and pulls his pole in towards him, and Grandad rises to his feet as well.

‘Ruddy hell, look at that,’ he says, forgetting that he shouldn’t swear.

There is a tug on the fishing pole when the line is pulled taut, and Joakim holds on so tightly it hurts. He leans to one side and feels the living, struggling energy vibrating through the hollow plastic tube. Grandad takes one large stride over to him and takes hold of his hands. As they pull together, the hefty body moves towards them and soon the grey-black, glistening head comes to the surface. The fish beats its tail and stirs up the water in angry swirls. The fishing pole bends into a bow, and Joakim’s arms tremble under the swaying weight.

‘Let’s just hope the line holds,’ Grandad says, lifting the fish as high as he can.

The tail brushes against the side of the boat as they bring in their catch, and soon everything is as completely silent as it ever was. The surface of the bay is smooth once again, and the birds resume their silent observation, out of sight on far-off branches. The fish, called a tench, is now lying in the bottom of the boat, gasping for water. Joakim touches the fish with his finger, and it is just as slippery and wet as it looks. He feels more confused than proud of his unexpected fisherman’s luck, but Grandad is standing with his hands on his hips and says that it’s a beauty. Joakim looks up at him but cannot see his face in the strong sunlight. He looks at the fish again. It slaps its tail in the little puddle in the bottom of the boat and longs to return to the coolness and have water in its gills. You’re a beauty, he thinks as he lets his finger glide along the soft, scale-free body.

They eat their packed lunches on the grass next to the boat, and then they lie on their backs for a long while, just gazing up at the sky while Grandad smokes his pipe and puffs out grey clouds. The air has already begun to cool down by the time they pack up their things and start the drive home. Grandad has slit the fish’s neck and cleaned it. Now it is in a plastic bag on Joakim’s lap and feels sticky and cold against his bare legs. The chill spreads from the fish to Joakim, and he shivers. Soon he grows drowsy and sinks further into his seat. The next time he opens his eyes, the sky has exploded into a fiery display of pink and orange. There are soft, white skid marks where the clouds have stopped for the day, and an aeroplane carries the last of the evening’s sunbeams like a campfire in its metal covering. Grandad has already turned into the driveway and shut off the engine, and the smell of petrol disappears in the gentle evening breeze, which carries the scent of honeysuckle. Mum planted the white flowers by the patio. Sometimes the strong odour gives him a headache. Now it strokes his eyelids and cheeks like a cooling hand, and he turns his head.

‘Grandad,’ he says. ‘Grandad. I want to show Dad the fish.’

Grandad stands looking up towards the house, where the kitchen light is on, and then he goes round to the other side of the Jeep and opens Joakim’s door.

‘We’ll leave the fishing rods in the jeep,’ he says and takes Joakim by the hand.

Together they walk slowly up to the house. The bag with the fish in it bumps against his leg, and he blinks away the sleep that accumulated under his eyelids.

‘Are you going to stay here tonight?’ he asks as Grandad opens the door.

‘I think that will be the best thing,’ he replies, letting Joakim go in first.

Joakim kicks off his shoes and goes into the hall. Mum is sitting at the kitchen table in her dressing gown with a cup of tea in front of her. Her hair is untidy and she looks as if she has just woken up, but she has not been sleeping. She turns her head when Joakim comes in and stays seated there, with her cup in front of her on the table and that paralysed look in her red-rimmed eyes. Then she looks at Grandad, and her eyebrows knit together before she turns her face away.

‘Where’s Dad?’ Joakim asks, but his mum does not answer.

He crosses the hall and goes into the bedroom.

‘Dad?’ he says, very quietly, because he doesn’t want to wake him if he has already gone to sleep. The bed is empty, but Joakim still switches the light on to make sure. The sudden brightness makes his eyes screw up into smarting slits, and he stands there blinking for a while to adjust to it. There is a smell of fresh sheets, and Mum has put a freshly laundered bedspread on the bed. The book she is in the middle of reading is on the bedside table. It has got a fat naked woman on the cover. There is nothing at all on Dad’s side. His reading glasses, the water glass that is usually there – everything is gone. Joakim lets out a deep breath and tiptoes over to the wardrobe. He looks out of the window, to the driveway where Grandad’s jeep is parked, and then opens the wardrobe door. The white walls seem to draw him towards them. The emptiness of the shelves, a vacuum that sucks the air out of the entire room. Joakim lets the fish drop to the floor with a thud. In the kitchen he can hear the murmur of voices, and he sits down as his thoughts slither round something slippery and wet he cannot get a grip on. He sits for a while with his head in his hands and his eyes shut as he thinks, and it feels better not to have to see that everything that is Dad is missing. Even the photos on the walls have vanished, and he cannot remember whether the big brown boots or the grey umbrella were in the front hall when he and Grandad left that morning. Joakim opens his eyes and feels that his body has grown tired and heavy again. The fish is still on the floor in its bag, but he leaves it, gets up and leaves the room.

Translated by Ruth Urbom

Extracts from Urheilukirja (‘The book about sports’, WSOY, 2011; see also Mielensäpahoittaja [‘Taking offence’])

The whole idea of Finland has been sold to us based on Hannes Kolehmainen ‘running Finland onto the world map’. [c. 1912–1922; four Olympic gold medals]. Our existence has been defined by how we are known abroad. Sport, [the Nobel Prize -winning author] F. E. Sillanpää, forestry, [Ms Universe] Armi Kuusela, [another runner] Lasse Viren, Nokia, [rock bands] HIM and Lordi, Martti Ahtisaari.

The purpose of sport at the grass-roots level has been to tend to the health of the nation and at a higher level to take our boys out into the world to beat all the other countries’ boys. We may not know how to talk, but our running endurance is all the better for it. However, the most important message was directed inwards, at our self image: we are the best even though we’re poor; we can endure more than the rest. Finnish success during the interwar period projected an image of a healthy, tenacious and competitive nation; political division meant division into good and bad, the right-minded and traitors to the fatherland.

And although the times are completely different, even though ideologies, religions and economic systems have been turned on their heads, we still head off to the Olympics with the same attitude.

The number of high-performance athletes we field becomes smaller by the year, the importance of sport in the life of the individual and society lessens, but the leagues and their leaders live in a bygone era. Before the competitions, official medal goals are set for the youth competing. Great anxiety is experienced in the sport reports when the goals are not met, and in the end, heads are demanded on platters and the best are awarded ceremonial knives [puukko] in honor of their true Finnish grit, their sisu. What other democratic nation honors their athletes with sheath knives? Maybe the Taliban’s Association for Sport and Gymnastics to their most steely-willed headsmen who shoot adulterers at the Kabul football stadium during the Saturday executions.

More and more often the sisu knives are left undistributed and we’re left to wonder where they’re all being collected. Is there a container full of sisu knives down at the harbour? Is there a sisu knife room at the Vierumäki College of Physical Education? Are they going to show up someday in the Bargain Barn discount bin for one-euro-fifty next to the cheap Swedish Mora brand knives?

These days making it into the semi-finals of the European Athletics Championships is regarded as peak performance. After returning home, the coaching staff holds a briefing and a task force outlines changes to the systems and airs their concerns about the misguided attitudes of the younger generation. What the hell is eating kids these days? Why aren’t they spending their childhoods and youths running gravel roads in bad shoes? Development, progress, increasing standards of living – the same things we aim for at the government level in the international growth competition.

Sport is indispensable for the preservation of nation states. Even though the world of snowboarders is a far cry from Hannes Kolehmainen, cross-country skiing and athletics require nationalism in order to retain their interest.

A poor country aching in the wake of civil war [1917], an urgent need to prove to the world that it exists. This is it: to prove to yourself you’re alive. And what better forum for national self-expression than the recently launched Olympic movement and quadrennial Olympic Games?

The boy who ran back and forth to school was recognized in the village games, then in the county games, the civil guard games, the workers’ games. The runner runs because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, or because he wants to get away, to somewhere better, and suddenly finds himself suffering from seasickness on a ship crossing the ocean, on his way to the Olympic 5 and 10. The winner acquires reputation, honour, and brown envelopes. The county thanks him with a building lot, the president invites him to the palace, those who envy him wag their tongues in front of the co-operative store, behind a bottle of Pilsner.

Low population density, long distances, an underdeveloped road network, limited means of transportation. On a rutted dirt road through the forest in bad shoes or bare-footed, in big brother’s breeches. It produces dull-mindedness, bitterness towards the unfairness of life, but at the same time it gives rise unnoticed to terrific underlying physical fitness. A tenacious people with a tendency towards muteness is practically tailor-made for endurance running, where the most important thing isn’t speed but pain tolerance, the acceptance of suffering and growing above it.

Endurance running lacks the celebrating and brashness of the milers, the joking and bellicosity of ball games. Endurance running is just hanging on. Of course that fitted us. A country one of whose strongest folk hero brands is Paavo of Saarijärvi, the man who scraped by the most miserably in Runeberg the national poet’s poem of the same name: Paavo certainly was tough, tenacious – he lived on tree bark! He must have looked like a 10,000 metre runner too.

We are drudges, not epicureans. We endure, we hammer away with ancient weapons; we don’t bound and jump lightly like our western neighbours.

Hannes Kolehmainen created the hype that the others followed and to which Finnish endurance sports are still compared. From the First World War until the next worldwide conflagration, Finland’s 10 000 metre championship race was the year’s stiffest competition at that distance. Back then the Finns were the world’s Kenyans.

An increase in the standard of living always means a decrease in the significance of a nation-state. The better the state discharges its function, the more it deserves respect and recognition, the less we feel we are a part of it. The more the individual has of the material, the less significance is given to all that is immaterial. What do you do with religion, political ideology, or a tradition of endurance running, when your wallet is full, when your 1.7 children have their own rooms, when you have a utility room and a summer cottage? Nothing. Maybe when you’re drinking beer by yourself in your underpants you can check in on them on YouTube. You don’t need vicarious experiences or people to live them through: not runners, not authors, not painters.

Of course they do still have some significance, as entertainment. Just like Abba or Donald Duck, theatre directors have their place to try to create their syntheses, to startle and be significant, remaining, however, within their own spheres, shocking their own middle-class audiences. The national football squad and the national hockey team still have significance, but only enough for the moment they are playing and the next day’s tabloid headlines.

Our own self-respect drives right on by national self-respect. Independence means a sufficient amount of money, not some misanthrope running bloody fast on a cinder track. It isn’t a matter of things having been better or worse before – it’s a matter of prevailing conditions. It will change again when times get worse.

A bearded skier crosses the finish line on the television. Two results are displayed on the screen. I don’t understand the difference between the numbers, which look the same; I’m in kindergarten; six is nine is six. Two voices are commenting on what is happening—one voice explaining the events, the other shouting in the background: ‘AI AI AI AI…’ I understand that something is badly amiss. Then the other in a calm voice: ‘First they ski 15 kilometres and one is one one-hundredth better. This is truly depressing.’

Sports commentator Pentti Salmi’s cry was the cry of a person who had lost everything. It expressed a concentrated mixture of injustice and pure beastly wrongness. It contained an accusation: there has been the cold, the hunger, the wars and the impossible geopolitical location, but still you had to lay this on us? Nothing will make things worse than this, or if it does get worse then the grasshoppers will have to be the size of seagulls and the floods such oceans that the cities are turned to dust. It was a cry of terror. It was Colonel Kurtz’s whisper: ‘The horror… the horror…’

Juha Mieto had lost the Olympic gold to Thomas Wassberg by one one-hundredth of a second in the 15 km cross-country ski race at the Lake Placid Olympics. My childhood had officially ended. I was six years old and my head had been clobbered with a sledgehammer with the fact that no matter how well you do, even if you might be or really are just as good as the best in the world, you’re a loser. A pointless, no-account waste of space. They might extend the brightest crown, but behind their back is one of thorns.

In my mind Juha Mieto was comparable to the gods wielding their hammers and lightnings. His skiing suit had been manufactured in the same factory as the super heroes’ tights. Juha Mielto was the god of the Old Testament, Thor, Zeus and Superman all in the same package. When Mieto was let loose, the very earth trembled, the gravel sparked and the frozen ground around him melted. Juha Mieto was a bear. Juha Mieto was as beautiful as such an ugly man can be. Juha Mieto was a unflinching hero who, yes, had lost before, but before the beginning of my own chronology. My memory more or less covered a year backwards and my understanding one year forwards.

Juha Mieto was supposed to return from these games a victor, and I would be sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders at the airport receiving the hero with hundreds and thousands of other shoulder sitters.

At first the man who had lost the skiing competition by one hundredth of a second felt like a traitor. No one misses by a blink like that other than on purpose. Either he’s stupid or lazy, or both. To a six year old, Olympic gold was the highest glorification of human performance, achievement, esteem and nobility, and Olympic gold was lost generously or won narrowly, but not like this. Why didn’t Mieto pump one stroke harder? Why didn’t he crouch lower down the hills? Why didn’t he climb the climbs harder? Why didn’t he grow his beard longer and push it out over the finish line? Why didn’t he cut his beard shorter and thereby reduce his wind resistance? And who did Juha Mieto lose to? A Swedish clone of himself. If a six year old knew something about international politics and about sport as its sub-branch, it was that you always lose to Russia and you are never allowed to lose to Sweden. Regardless of that, the western big brother did to his little brother what he would come to do year after year: chastise him good naturedly, without bitterness, without distress and without the binding legacy of the dead war heroes riding on his shoulders. With a smile on his lips, he wiped the medal table with his little brother, taking pleasure in his accomplishment, in the moment, in the competition, without fear of defeat.

Why? In order to make the smaller one walk over him one day. But it won’t work, we don’t know how, and more than anything we don’t dare. Give us the smallest possible margin, and we will use it. To lose.

Accusations were followed by guilt. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t care about the Duckburg sociodrama. The invasion of Normandy the other little boys and I carried out from the ditch into the Virtanens’ back yard felt like work, not play. Six-year-old me seriously considered how the bear god, who had held up the world with his poles, would endure his defeat. The higher you fall from, the worse it hurts, and there wasn’t anywhere farther to fall from than that.

In this the child feared for the weakness of his elder, wanting to carry the burden himself so the strong would not become weak, so that he himself could still be weak. So Juha Mieto would not give up competition and succumb to drink or hang himself. So Juha Mieto would not become a TV host, a singer, or a member of parliament and spoil everything that had made him great. [He became a member of parliament in 2007.]

I tried denial. The next Olympics would be in four years – this was sport, no more serious than children’s play. But goddamn it, play was my work and my life, so nothing was more serious than that! Four years would be a lifetime; then Juha Mieto would be too old, a retired superbear. The world’s oldest teddy bear.

I tried the form of active therapy preferred by the Finnish people: forgetting. But that which is denied during the day must be seen to at night. In my dreams I was Juha Mieto. The clock ticked, I couldn’t move forward, the clock ticked, my beard wouldn’t grow, the clock ticked, a bushy-bearded, child Wassberg my size and my age skied past me in yellow and blue.

If the baskets were removed from a basketball game, if the movements of one single player  were left behind, if the stadium went silent and the lights were focused differently, if a symphony orchestra or contemporary electronic music were introduced in the background, we would be witnessing dance instead of a sporting event. If we were to forget that the players come from slums and college sports programs and not from a St Petersburg ballet academy, if we were to forget that they are fighting for the NBA championship, we would be looking at a human interpretation of… something. We would interpret the meaning content, we would invent meaning for it, and the players would be hailed as artists.

If the goals were removed from a hockey match, the puck and the movements of the five players and their meetings on the ice were left, what would it be? What is a body check without a purpose? An act of violence or a game? Jackass’s and the Dudesons’s stock and trade? Successful feints, a goal and a goal celebration? A dance? If a recording of a footballer is removed from its context, if a healthy young man is left gyrating alone on the pitch, what would it be? Performance art? What is a free kick wall of genital shielding without the free kick, the turning of their backs, the jumping up? Mimicry or comedy? Benny Hill or Monty Python? If we take the hammer and the national emblems away from the hammer thrower, if we look at a great naked man spinning in a cage without a hammer, what would we think? A lunatic? A dancer? A clown? A human drill?

If the goal-orientation and competition were to be removed from sport, would it be dance or comedy? Is it the goal-orientation that makes it serious? Is it keeping score that removes the artistic dimension? Does measurability give rise to unidimensionality? Is dance more developed than sport or its primitive form? Which came first, sport or art? Which gave birth to which, and what is the place of play? Is dance foreplay? Is sport intercourse?

I don’t know. But there is a guess, a belief: competition, dance, theatre, visual art, motor sport, literature, ball games, individual events, video installations. They are play. Immaterial and illogical action, very close to nonsense. But to those who do them perfectly significant, to the viewers faith and meaning, as well as doubt and wonder. The viewer gets to decide if the game has any influence, if some team feels like his own or if he wants to understand modern art or if he choose Jokers vs. HIFK.

Completely pointless, bloody damn important.

Translated by Owen Witesman

[Tallinn, summer] The past will not go away

and the present is insurmountable. Summer vacation has begun, the newspaper hasn’t come; it doesn’t get delivered here anyway. Can you remember the Isabelline yellow house? Remember the alley with the name that means hurry? Surely you remember the home with all the maps on the shelves, the important papers and the brass objects bought from nearby antique dealers? Also the rugs from North Africa and the obligatory cedar camel figurines on the windowsill. And so many glasses and plates and empty lighters in a cardboard box on the shelf on the left hand side of the kitchen.

Tallinn, June 7th. The floors creak. One step has split in half; some of the lights have burned out. This is a lovely home. A small window upstairs is ajar to the courtyard. Tuomas had latched it behind the Virginia creepers. The fountain in the courtyard is dry. On cold nights the smoke from the fireplace grows like a statue for the crows until it wraps around over the layered rooftops like a snake eating its tail. Russian men are repairing the attic of the house across the street for wealthy people to live in; they laugh in front of the window and smoke. Tuomas waves at them, and they wave back. The courtyard is creepy when it’s empty. Soon the neighbours would go about their day and quietly close their doors behind them, and two nearby churches would divide the hours into quarters, Russians and their gossip would make their way to the Alexander Nevski Cathedral, and the Estonians and their gossip would go to their own churches where a wise and peculiar, almost human scent would rise from between the headstones. Tuomas wouldn’t smell it, Aino would and would move to stand beneath the the center tower.

In the alley a man wearing a jacket one size too small hides by the wall until the sun starts to slowly sweep up the city and the nascent day; imperceptible, the light sweeps away the shadows, moving them over to await the night. The dust takes wing. Ships shout near and far and people stop rubbing their sides along the stone walls. Houses so tall, people so small. Tirelessly, without ceasing,without waiting they rush forward across the alleys to work, to see relatives, some on stolen bicycles. People as far as the eye can see.

Tuomas watches them through a window of forty panes, eating bread and fruit while listening to Aino’s snoring.

Aino lies coiled up like a comma.

Aino wakes up looking at him as if he were a stranger. Tuomas goes over and strokes her long hair. Aino is remembering her dreams now as well. They negotiate about breakfast. There’s not much to negotiate about as the fridge is empty. They would go out to a café and then go to the grocery store. Tuomas would make tea. Aino wants to go to Stockmann, the fancy department store she remembers from a previous trip, and Tuomas can guess why she wants to go there in particular.

So part of the morning goes by, and their dreams leave them in peace for the day so they can return as something different. They brush their teeth and get dressed. They see the alley behind the window of forty panes and go out. People are walking around as they always do in the morning, shy, busy, and clumsy. Only the ballerinas tiptoeing elegantly in their high heels. Tuomas digs in his pockets. He finds his cigarettes and matches and lights up. It’s been six years; it’s been over thirty years. Aino hops on the cobblestones. Aino’s hair is flowing in the air and her low-cut socks are flashing in her shoes. It’s July, and things feel incredibly painless.

The sounds of a song can be heard through the working-class-blue door of a bar. They reach Venekuja Alley, pass the market stalls, pop into a courtyard off the alley, and step into a café. Aino knows what she wants; she always wants the same thing in this same café. They order and head to a table to wait. The day goes slowly; another spell of rain is coming. They’re in no rush; they chat about this and that. They’re usually in no rush; they often share the same views. And just as often they can burst into a sudden argument that quiets down just as quickly. Maybe Aino has understood that she is Tuomas’s daughter and just as happily Tuomas has understood that he is Aino’s father.

Joy, sometimes happiness.

With joy and memory

….The day passes like a ringing of heavy bells. Aino would be coming after two. They would go to the swimming pool or a cafe. Saara might come later, toward evening. The girls would play and Tuomas would make hot cocoa. He should come up with something fun and sensible for the evening. Tuomas hasn’t always been listless; once he radiated strength. Tuomas, house cat, roof tiger. They say people who know how to live don’t fear. Tuomas must have lost that skill, and he has to get it back. I’m not sure if I should tell, if you should know Tuomas better for me to be able to reveal it. That when Aino was still a baby there was a car accident, when Tuomas still had a car. Aino’s mother was in the front, on the passenger side. Aino was whining in her car seat. Tuomas was driving too fast on a rainy road, and a lorry turned in front of them from a side road. Aino’s milk bottle had fallen to the floor, and Tuomas’s wife took off her safety belt to reach back and pick it up. And at that moment the rain’  ’ ’ ’  ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’’ ’’’  ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’  ’’’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’’ ’’  ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’’ ’’’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’  ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’ ’’ ’’’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’’’ ’ ’ ’’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’ ’’’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’’’’’’’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’’ ’ ’ ’’ ’Tuomas braked, but the car hydroplaned toward the other, and Aino’s mother catapulted side-first through the windscreen, and it wasn’t long before Tuomas was standing in the hospital hallway scalded by the bad news.

A little later a nurse arrives with a social worker. They study the navel and neck folds with a fine-toothed comb, study the kitchen, the boiled baby bottles, the bathroom nappy shelf, the linens and the contents of the refrigerator, asking about baby care and inquiring after Aino’s routine. Tuomas is so pissed off that he almost vomits.

‘I know how to take care of her’, he says in a gruff voice.

From then on Tuomas began to speak literary language, from then on Tuomas’ face began to twitch when he spoke about the things that were most important to him.

Tuomas goes to smoke half a fag, remembering the drunk Slavic philology professor who fell into a plumbing repair excavation in the middle of Fabianinkatu Street after his student’s graduation celebration. He was found, taken to jail for the night and then home in the morning. He crawled on the hall floor to the landline phone to call an ambulance. Was it already too late then? Tuomas wondered. When Tuomas tried to visit his teacher later, he had already fled the hospital and disappeared without a trace. Tuomas had gone down in the elevator, stepped out of the lobby and stood for a moment on the pavement, on that Sunday, on that morning, in that moment when the bell of a church or some chapel had sounded once, and Tuomas again wondered whether it was too late to operate on the man’s shattered hip.

Tuomas hears worse stories too; he tries to forget them just as quickly, for once.

One of man’s greatest insights

is to realise that he is not alone although he often imagines so. A person becomes stained when he speaks of how lonely he is. A person who feels alone pushes others away. He lets no one draw close to him. He pushes them away with excuses. He is unable to see people; he is unable to keep them around himself. He has given up. Words turn inward instead of passing out into the world. Realising that one is not alone is both a spiritual and physical insight. It is a return to the land of the living.

Loneliness is reminiscent of sorrow, but like sorrow, loneliness must also be worked through. It happens in a hospital bed, in a stairwell or at home. It happens constantly, and the question is: how long can you bear it? The second question is: what, loneliness or suffering?

Tuomas, our stand-in Thomas Aquinas, is about to realise that loneliness is a romantic image. Before this he wanders the shoreline, consumed by self pity. The shore tells nothing. It only roars. A ship cuts through the water toward the West Terminal alongside a thousand-fold glistening reflected from the porthole windows. The rocks grow beards, the gastropods stuck to them their shells. Life is what you hear here, dead silence. Tuomas, swinging between extremes, turns and returns home. It is 4 PM. Tuomas calls his former workplace, gets his boss on the line, and says he would like to return to work. They chat for a moment. The tone is friendly. Tuomas does not carry a grudge. He has never been capable of that. That is a rare quality. And Tuomas is a rare case. There are not many like him. One could even say that certain characteristics which do not advance the survival of the species make him a good person.

Tuomas drinks a beer and considers whether to go downtown in the evening. His former workmates have asked him out many times, tonight too….

The late autumn night is frigid, dark and silent. No one is visible at the end of this street, not even any taxis. Tuomas’s footsteps are clearly audible. Their rhythm is the same as that of his thoughts, and those thoughts churn in Tuomas’ head, sometimes falling silent, sometimes surging like waves. The first snow is falling. The flakes are big, light and fragile. As they hit the ground they rustle briefly and their unique structure begins to crumble. Look at a flake. Find two alike; find two stones alike. Win the lottery. Meet your doppelganger. Find the right one. Be healed by a miracle. Be the one person left alive after the plane crash. Listen to expressions of finality. Tuomas thinks of the Muscovite saying that the winter corpses are like snowdrops that peek out from under the drifts in the spring. He turns onto Vilhonkatu Street, which leads to the railway station square, and quickens his pace. He wants to get home. He does not hear a man walking behind him. Only when the man is right on his heals does Tuomas hear him and wait for him to pass. But the man shoves Tuomas roughly toward the stone steps next to the casino’s gatepost. Tuomas’s temple hits the steps first and here his memories cease. The man continues on his way. At 2:11 and 2:34 AM he will assault two women. The first he meets on Kalevankatu Street and hits her in the face with his fist. Later, on Ludviginkatu Street, he puts his fist in the mouth of a woman walking in the opposite direction. After the woman falls to the ground, he kicks her in the temple and the back of the head. The women file police reports later, and the police realise that the man was one and the same. The police also figure out that Tuomas’s injuries were caused by the man. They do not catch him immediately. He continues on his way. I don’t know whom he is walking behind now.

And I don’t know how many more minutes will pass before Tuomas recovers. Maybe two, maybe three, maybe it doesn’t matter. Tuomas gets up and finds he is bleeding. One of the lenses of his glasses is in pieces on the asphalt. Tuomas begins the long march toward home. The skin under his eyebrows and eye is torn. Blood is flowing down his jacket and pants. The few passersby avoid him. No one comes to talk to him. No one offers help. Tuomas pulls his hood over his head, walking and just wishing he were home. He cries in rage. Not about his injuries but that he had no possibility to flee or defend himself. He considers the method of the crime to be worse than the crime itself. All the streets and all the buildings and all the parks pass on the borders of delirium, dream, and an inhuman clarity. What is good? What is evil? Full stop Full stop. And on top of that, balance and being, for you. And beyond it anxiety and darkness. And behind it the grinding of the angels’ teeth. Full stop Full stop. And on top of that you can go one infinitely or nothing else will ever be again. At some moments Tuomas realises where the border lies. He recognises the streets and basement shops. All of these scenes are distorted because of his broken spectacles. They resemble dreams, some nightmares, streets that narrow and narrow, buildings that lean toward you, the feeble orange glimmering of the sewage-coloured sky or maybe the ink black of Rothko’s later period. Tuomas has tendencies toward unrealism, as I do; I live on the moon too. For some reason Tuomas thinks of Bakhtin’s final words: ‘I come to thee.’ Or the last words crafted by Capote for the murderer Perry Smith to utter, which Smith was never actually willing to utter: ‘I apologise.’ Tuomas’s favourite in this blood-stained blaze of snow is Plotinus: ‘Try to unite the divinity in yourself with the divine in all things.’

‘Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls,’ Mother Teresa said; Tuomas considers that sometimes people are born famous and die anonymous. Sometimes people are just born to the wrong family, and sometimes the opposite. Often we do not see things as themselves, perhaps we never do, as we never see the stars, just their light. Habit is a terrible power, like the golden mean, Tuomas laughs out loud, he marches in shock, walks down Malminkatu Street, he marches and knows that he must get somewhere to have his face cared for. He also knows what it is like in hospital on Friday night: a wino woman’s sweatpants slip down to her knees and a piece of a free newspaper peeks from between her buttocks. A college boy rocks back and forth holding his bloody head. An old man sits quietly, another old man doesn’t. A handful of young men argue amongst themselves. Soon they will be driven outside and a fistfight will ensue. Thankfully children aren’t brought here. A young woman sits silently. Her wrist is broken because she fell from her bicycle on Kluuvikatu Street at 11:46 PM. A young man sits quietly. An aged drunk sits next to him who fell and hit his head in Hakaniemi at 12:12 AM, a result of vertigo and visual disturbances. Thanks to his padded jacket the bottle didn’t break, but he has to sit, his eyes glassed over. Next to him sits Tuomas. The doctor is not taking patients in order. Tuomas doesn’t understand why. He waits for half an hour until he is called in. The doctor is an Iranian and speaks perfect Finnish. He has a Greek last name, Kouros. Kouros cleans Tuomas’s wounds, plasters and binds them. He prescribes pain killers, but doesn’t see any need for an X-ray at the moment. Kouros shakes his hand, and Tuomas is let out.

On a cold, gray bridge being covered by snow the right side of his face starts to pulse and ache. The heat of the hospital didn’t do it any good. Tuomas doesn’t know how he will get to sleep. He would be home in twenty minutes. The city’s thin first snowfall outlines Tuomas’s footprints and the stray drops of blood that begin at Vuorikatu Street and end at Maria Hospital. Say that I said there would be much more snow this winter. The lights conduct Tuomas on his way. The street lights friendly and regular of course, but the office and apartment lights capricious. In their order lies their fault. Tuomas feels light and heavy. His feet are heavy, his head light. Here the blade and butt of an axe. The head splits the crisp air, the feet crush the fresh snow. Hands swing rhythmically like the street lamps. The wind blows, blows, the snowfall stops. There is still time until morning, even more until the oncoming night. He can already hear the sea. The sea is sounding in Tuomas’s head. Sounding brass, sounding brass. Saturday is beginning and good will abounds.

Monday morning at nine o’clock

the police call Tuomas and tell him the attacker has been caught. The pot moves toward the shore until it breaks. The woman with the black dog, Gunilla, Eeva, the others, the big man who pushed Tuomas against the stairs, the random, turbid loves, they all break up.

But now the morning is shining and bright.

‘I don’t have any demands,’ Tuomas responds.

‘Even though you don’t, I would still like to have a chat.’

‘Do I have to?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I had already forgotten it.’

‘I understand. It’s just that this half-Russian man seems to know or at least know of you.’

They chat for a few minutes. They hang up at the same time. Tuomas scratches his chin, and police sergeant Koskinen on the other side goes to get some coffee.

At least something connects people. They are connected by an infinitely stretchable rubber band or inflexible piano string. They are connected by rope or cord, both delicate in different ways. Sometimes good comes of it, sometimes mornings of worry.

Tuomas has arrived at work and now he is listening to his manager, or more precisely manageress’, briefing. The job description is the same, but the pay system has changed, verging on insanity. Tuomas gets his old office back. It has a view onto the courtyard. The courtyard is a parking lot. There are cars in the parking lot, in the sky the last seagulls. Look, they’re milking the clouds. The computer screen is more significant dark than turned on: it shows you, an empty vessel, honestly. Tuomas turns the machine on and enters a new password. There are fewer people in the halls than before. The others greet him, surprised, excited, expectant. A familiar clomping in the hall – some footsteps you recognise. Tuomas feels remarkably empty, or worse, unremarkably hollow.

Work and life, those islands, oh, those worn-out words contain a treacherous string of repeated affectations, Tuomas thinks, or someone else in him thinks.

So this is how morning begins, day comes, afternoon comes. Work ends. For Tuomas it didn’t begin at all; he returns home empty, but when he sees Aino he feels full again….

[Tallinn, winter] A dark, north-eastern sky

over the distant gray towers of the city and St Olav’s painfully beautiful, heart-piercing tower began to darken, approaching night, and the sheen of the sun setting behind the rain made the approaching towers shine against the puffy-clouded sky.

‘Spierdalai, kurwa!’ one tourist hisses to another as Aino and Tuomas are walking along the cobblestones of Pikk Street. Tuomas laughs and thinks: It’s been a while since I’ve heard such bright, clear Polish. A crush of people approaches. God’s zoo is motley. Aino is babbling on. She was so looking forward to this trip. At the arch Pikk becomes Pikk Jalg. Once Tuomas called this small street the Alley of Affliction because it’s such a pain to carry firewood uphill from the Kolmijalg market up to Rutu. The Alexander Nevsky’s bells, and then the Dome Church. Three old men wave from the other side of the alley; they arrived here on an earlier ferry and have already been for coffee in Kadriorg. A mangy dog walks by. A woman is selling watercolours in the alley. She has hung them on the wall: flowers, an elephant, stone houses, Sandstene, Clodt and Luhr, Fat Margaret tower. Aino and Tuomas pass a shuttered pub, turn to onto Piiskopi and from there to Rutu. Do you remember this Isabelline yellow house? Do you remember this alley, whose name means hurry? It is as pious as a secret; the noise fades when you come to it….

It’s late, night arrives. Aino is sleeping in the small room. The heater is running on full. The ants on the floor are besotted. Tuomas turns the heater down, closes the door and returns downstairs. He dresses, ties his shoes, cuts a Tuscan cigar in half, takes matches, a jacket, a woollen cap and gloves….

Tuomas steps out into the courtyard and walks out the gate. Snow falls gently. A mangy dog saunters up and says ‘Elu on ilus’ [‘Life is beautiful’]. Both churches’ bells ring once. Tuomas sees a white charter limousine pass the Alexander Nevsky and continue on to Piiskopi. Long-limbed Russian women pass him and turn in the same direction. Kiriku Square is full of limousines, SUVs, party-goers and glistening parties into which they are all forcing their way with our without invitations. The Russian women who have arrived at the Dome Church berate a fat man eating roasted almonds and then leave him alone. The man sees Tuomas, lights a cigarette and then stares at him thoughtfully. Tuomas stares back. Suddenly the man says in Russian:

‘Good evening.’

‘Good evening.’

‘So you’re not a Russian, then.’

‘I’m from Finland.’

‘You look Finnish.’

‘But you don’t look Russian.’

‘Well, no, I’m not Russian. Have a good evening, Tuomas.’

‘You too, Timo.’

Tuomas continues on to the overlook. He is delighted by that coincidence, an old fellow student who will certainly come to join him soon. Tuomas looks out over the wall. Even though the people are sleeping, the cars are awake. Even though there is a new room beyond the door of life, there is an even newer door at the back of the room, and behind it a new room and its unknown wares. Timo arrives and shakes his hand warmly. The grip is like Tuomas remembers. They smoke, exchange phone numbers and stay to chat for a while. The evening is not as cold as one would imagine. ‘Sometimes you just have to resist the enticements of humanity,’ Timo had said at the end and then bid goodbye to Tuomas.

Tuomas arrives back at Rutu, opens the gate and enters the courtyard. He spins on his heels for a moment more before walking inside. The lighted windows next to the darkened windows invite him, welcome him. He gets a glass from the kitchen, and a wine bottle, and sits down on the sofa. He pours wine into the glass, puts the glass on the table, adds wood to the fire and returns to his chair. There is no word for the scene that is now outside the window of forty panes, for the roofs buried in snow, for the downspouts, the eaves, the walls covered in pomade and powder, there are no names for the people who live in these apartments made of stone squeezing pillows between their legs….

Translated by Owen Witesman, Setti Mulari

‘Where will you be spending Eternity?’ a roadside poster demanded as Leevi Sytky sped by in his car.

‘Hadn’t really thought about it,’ Leevi muttered , as if in reply, and lit a cigarette.

But at the next level crossing, a kilometre or so further on, he was run down by a train, whose approach he had failed to notice. His attention had been distracted by the sight of a young woman who was picking black currants by the side of the track, and who happened to be bending forward in his direction. Intent on obtaining a better view of her ample bosom by peering over the top of her blouse, Leevi neglected to look both ways, and death ensued. Damned annoying, to say the least.

In due course he secured an interview with God, who turned out to be a biggish chap, about a hundred metres tall, wearing thigh-boots and sitting behind a large desk.

‘Well, and how’s Leevi Sytky getting along?’ God asked, lighting his pipe.

‘Mustn’t grumble,’ said Leevi politely.

‘And how are you thinking of spending Eternity?’ God inquired, sucking at his pipe and puffing out his cheeks.

‘Well, I thought of trying transmigration, if that would be all right.’

‘Very good idea,’ said God. ‘Have you decided what kind of creature you’d like to migrate into?’ .

‘I thought perhaps a crow, to begin with,’ said Leevi.

‘Splendid, splendid,’ said God, putting on his hat. ‘Let’s go and look for a nice crow.’

And off they went, with God leading the way and Leevi doing his best to keep up with him.

The crow

The soul of a young crow was neatly prised out, and Leevi Sytky slid himself into the space thus vacated.

He found himself perched on a branch of a tall pine, overlooking a lake. Around him a dozen crows were cawing noisily. He tried out a few experimental sounds, at first producing only a sort of hoarse whisper, but soon achieving a magnificent rasping croak: my word, how grand it sounded! He wanted to laugh! He flapped his wings a few times and then felt himself rising gently into the air. He opened his big beak and uttered a loud, throaty, gargling sound which pleased him very much.

The members of the crow colony were not fooled by the transmigration ploy, but were quite happy to welcome Leevi Sytky into their midst. One young crow flew on to the same branch and introduced himself; his name, he said, was Hyvönen. Hyvönen was a lively, friendly bird: the avian equivalent, perhaps of one of those jolly, blue-eyed, blond-haired lumberjacks they have up in the North.

That day there was a high wind blowing. Foam-crested wavelets covered the blue lake, the trees along the shore swayed and soughed in the wind. Leevi Sytky and Hyvönen amused themselves by perching at the very top of a pine, flapping their wings and cawing. Hyvönen, who had a particularly raucous voice, kept shouting ‘I am the Lord thy God, what ho there!’

To which Leevi Sytky would reply with a cackle of croaky laughter. They kept up this game for at least an hour, until the older crows got tired of the racket and told them to belt up.

Shortly before dusk the colony took wing to the edge of a rubbish-tip, where the carcass of a pig had been dumped. Here they partook of an evening meal, after which they flew to an island and took up quarters for the nig’ht in some elderly fir-trees. At daybreak they all zoomed off to the edge of a polluted pond, where they breakfasted among the reeds on the rotting corpses of roach and carp. Leevi Sytky found life as a crow highly enjoyable. It was a thrill to be flying over the misty lake, straight into the sunrise. He had, moreover, perfected a splendidly cacophonous croak, and now, on the wing, he let it rip.

One morning Leevi Sytky and Hyvönen woke before the others and quietly flew off together. It was market day in Kajaani, and thither they winged their way, cleaving the air with bony beaks. They took the easy route, along the misty Tenetti river and across the open waters of Lake Nuas, pale in the morning sunlight. Reaching Kajaani, they ensconced themselves in a copse of firs on the Teppana shore, and took a short rest. Then, at nine o’clock or thereabouts, Operation Crowflight, as planned by Leevi, was set in motion.

The two crows flew first to Sniper’s Tower. From there they set off down Market Street, flying side by side at a height of about three metres. An essential part of the plan was that they should both keep up a continuous cawing, using all the power of which a crow’s lungs are capable. Having flown to the far end of Market Street, they settled for a few minutes on the roof of the Kajaani Company’s clubhouse, to get their breath back.

Naturally the apparition of two crows, flying very low and uttering corvine cries, did not escape the attention of the people in the street, especially since the birds were flying only a metre or so above the shoppers’ heads and the cawing was extremely loud.

Soon the two friends returned by the same route, and more and more pedestrians halted in their tracks to gaze and laugh at them. What amused them most was the way the birds kept looking sideways, as though inspecting the goods in the shop windows or searching for acquaintances among the crowd. Actually, the only person Leevi Sytky recognised was an assistant magistrate called Salmenkivi.

Once more, for the third time, the crows flew along Market Street, and then they veered off towards the Kajaani river and flew over the castle ruins to Kuurha, whence they glided out over Lake Nuas. As they flew, they talked over the morning’s events, and had a good laugh over the game they had played. By about midday they were back with their own familiar colony.

As autumn drew on, they moved into the fields to feast on the grain. But at Tuhkakylä some ass of a farmer shot Hyvönen with a rook-rifle. This upset Leevi Sytky, who thereupon left the colony and went to live alone in the forest. But when an owl began to make his nights a misery, and the weather to get colder, Leevi Sytky decided that it was time for a change of habitat. Better, he thought, to spend the winter as a burbot, paddling around beneath the ice!

The burbot

Leevi Sytky’s crinkly, goose-pimply soul stood shivering in a snowstorm on the edge of a hole in the ice. It was early morning, and still dark. Punctually at 5.15 am there was a noisy commotion in the slushy water of the ice-hole, and a seventeen-pound burbot came to the surface as per arrangement. Leevi Sytky slid himself neatly in behind a gill-flap, and coolly bundled the burbot’s old soul out by the same route.

The huge, ferocious-Iooking fish lingered for a little while in the hole, taking a last look at the faint light shed by the snow and the sky, before descending into the depths.

Leevi Sytky became conscious of feelings and perceptions he had never experienced before. His new body, if one can put it like that seemed to be a damned powerful one, and incredibly supple. The feel of the cold water, as it swished over his slimy skin and mitten-sized tail-fin, was most agreeable. He could sense, or scent, other fish as they approached or moved away, even though it was pitch-dark. The lake water tasted a bit silty and smelt like mud.

The burbot’s own mouth had an oily, fishy taste which Leevi Sytky found somewhat disagreeable. He tried opening and shutting his mouth a few times, and began to realise what a hell of a big mouth it was. There was room in it for a football, at least.

When morning came, Leevi Sytky realised that he was now a predator. A burbot’s entire stream of consciousness, evidently, was dominated by a ferocious hunger, an insatiable lust for fish. The corners of his mouth twisted into a smile as he told himself that he would now have to get used to swallowing living creatures whole. Exulting in his strength, he set off in hot pursuit of a shoal of whitefish: what he actually caught was a five-pound bass that had had the idea of harrying the same shoal. It took him half an hour to swallow the spiny, heavily armoured monster: after which, his stomach feeling sufficiently full for the time being, he descended to a rock cranny for half a week’s rest.

But he was plagued by parasites. A tapeworm had evidently set up house in his stomach, and flukes were grubbing around in his liver. It was all very tiresome.

Leevi Sytky felt drowsy and dispirited. The constant darkness was getting him down. No sound penetrated the black silence of the water, no wave disturbed its stillness. To crown everything, he discovered to his disgust that he was carrying a cargo of roe. The idea of a spawning session with some stupid male burbot was hardly appealing.

Above the ice, the weather was mild. The snow on the surface melted, and then there was another slight frost. Leevi Sytky swam up close to the shore of the bay and penetrated into waters so shallow that he almost swept the ice with the back of his neck as he swam along. With his little burbot eyes he could see the brightness of the frosty sky and the red glow of the sunshine on the lakeside trees. Moreover, a small incident now occurred which cheered him up considerably.

Not far away some skaters, including a group of girls, were disporting themselves on the ice. The local Ice Queen, detaching herself from the others, started to walk along the shore, apparently in search of something. Eventually a large rock, which happened to be the very one beneath which Leevi Sytky was lurking, offered her the concea1ment she needed. The young lady crouched down behind it, rewarding Sytky with a glorious view of the eternally unattainable. With two hefty swishes of the tail, which clouded the water for some distance in every direction, he turned on his fin and sped off into the depths.

As Christmas approached, he began to find life beneath the ice unbearable. The sheer weight of the water and ice were smothering him. Under a bridge, where the ice had thawed, he left the burbot to die. The soul of Leevi Sytky, forlorn as a condor chick, perched for a while on the railing of the bridge, and then flew off to a garage yard where an ancient, windowless bus stood abandoned. From this vantage point he could watch out for a new host.

The dawg

Towards daybreak a big black-and-tan mongrel, with floppy ears and a scimitar tail, came scuttling into the yard. It looked reasonably well-fed. Assiduously it raised its leg, leaving brief communiqués on car wheels, petrol pumps, jack levers and other appropriate objects.

Leevi Sytky was thrilled. Here was a creature it would be a real pleasure to get inside the skin of. With a fur coat to keep him warm too! He entered the dog through one ear, and the dog’s former, rather phlegmatic soul went out at the other and was sucked into the air filter of a car’s carburettor, thus impairing the efficiency of the engine.

Leevi Sytky, having uttered a few powerful barks and scuffed a pile of snow with his hind legs, trotted off in search of new experiences. What particularly pleased him was the acuteness of his sense of smell. From a person’s footprint in the snow he could ascertain all kinds of facts about that person’s home, the smell of his rooms, the make of his shoes and the characteristic odour of his feet. The fragrances that floated in the air around the hamburger stall added up to sheer ecstasy. Saliva dribbled from the corners of Leevi Sytky’s mouth, and with a vociferous bark he addressed an appeal to the hamburger man, who was kind enough to fling him a piece of oldish sausage.

The first exchange of credentials (the other dog was a beagle) proved less tricky than he had expected, and passed off without incident. Indeed, it seemed a very natural and necessary procedure, providing vital information about one’s fellow-creature, such as his character and temperament, his immediate intentions, and the details of his diet.

In the course of the day, guided by instinct and his knowledge of human language, he found his way to what was, presumably, his home. Here an enamel dish, containing milk, some pieces of bread, and the remains of some potatoes and gravy, was thrust beneath his nose. It was a bit humiliating, but Leevi Sytky, steeling himself to the task, lapped up his dinner noisily and even licked the floor clean around the dish. The bloke who seemed to own him scratched his back and tickled his belly for an hour or two, and Leevi Sytky licked the bloke’s hand.

During the following week Leevi Sytky took an active part in the hectic social life of the canine community. Chasing around the village with a pack of ten or more other dogs was tremendous fun. He chummed up with a beagle called Hemppa, who was, in effect, the leading light and spiritual leader of the whole gang. It was Hemppa who had all the good ideas.

One frosty morning Hemppa barked out the word of command: ‘Come on, lads, let’s go over to the cart track, where it crosses the ice, and eat horse dung!’

Emerging from the shade of the frost-clad trees on the shore, the pack swarmed out on to the frozen lake. Yelping merrily, they headed for the track. Leevi Sytky loved the way they grouped and regrouped, running now side by side, now in single file, now making a detour to chase a twig or paper bag blown by the wind across the ice. And many a leg was gracefully lifted, many a communiqué issued, leaving yellow patches in the snow. The frozen horse dung, by the way, tasted superb: the equivalent on a human menu might be ‘West Coast salad’, or something of that kind.

All things considered, Leevi Sytky quite enjoyed being a dog. The life was brisk, sociable, eventful and stimulating. He was able to keep up with the latest news by reading the placards on the news kiosks or, when at home, by watching television. Thus he was not entirely out of touch with event in the world of human beings. He was a bit bothered by the problem of East-West relations.

But by the end of April he felt that had been leading a dog’s life for long enough. He applied for a transfer into a crane, but was informed by God’s office that the migrant cranes were not due until May 4th. Accordingly he applied for temporary accommodation in a human being, just to cover the bridging period. This was granted.

The local Alko manager

In a railway carriage, perched on the handle of the emergency brake, the soul of Leevi Sytky watched and waited. Having finally decided which of the passengers was the new manager of the alcohol store in a certain village, he effected the transmigration with practised ease, and settled in.

It was a Friday morning when the new local manager, carrying his suitcase, walked into the Alko store and introduced himself to the staff, suggesting straight away that it would be better for everybody to be on Christian-name terms. The staff formed a favourable view of their new manager, especially since he seemed to be a man of strong character, for he began at once go through the books and ask questions about the stock.

In the evening the new manager said he would be staying on after hours. He wanted to learn to find his way around, and to decide what fresh stocks needed ordering. The Chateau Bourgeois seemed to be running a bit low, and the previous manager had evidently had a preference for Alko’s own locally bottled brands.

But no sooner had the rest of the staff departed for the week-end than the new manager took a bottle of Hennessy from the cognac shelf and retired to his office, where he carefully drew the curtains and sat down. Leevi Sytky had decided that the lingering bouquet of dog and burbot must be rinsed from his mouth once and for all.

He drank well and copiously all Friday night, all day Saturday, and most of Sunday morning. At midday on Sunday, after putting on a pair of Wellingtons he had found in the broom cupboard, he packed into his suitcase a dozen bottles of cognac, for which there was only just enough room along with the sausages and other provisions that were there already.

On his desk he left a message: ‘Gone on tour with the circus folk. Tell Messrs. Alko to sell their own bloody booze, this boy’s off and AWAY.’

Leevi Sytky went to the shore of the lake and waded over the thawing ice to a small island. There he remained with his store of food and drink, and spent several delightful spring days listening to the hiss and crackle of the melting icefield around him.

To Lapland with the cranes

The moment of departure was remarkable for a number of phenomena which occurred simultaneously. Firstly, Leevi Sytky was down to his last bottle. Secondly, the police were approaching and were now only half a kilometre away from the island.

And thirdly: the joyous cries of the cranes rang out in the heavens, up among the white, fleecy clouds. As they flew on, in ploughshare formation, one crane veered away and landed on the rocky shore of the island. Leevi Sytky did not hesitate: it took him no more than a moment to effect an entry. The great wings unfolded, and the noble bird flew up to rejoin its companions.

From that day to this, there has been no word of Leevi Sytky. Is he still a crane in Lapland, or could he by now be a puffin, perched on a rock-ledge where the sea-birds wheel and cry?

Translated by David Barrett (1914–1998); first published in Books from Finland 3/1987.

Dear readers,

to celebrate the change of the year we publish an extract from Aleksis Kivi’s 1870 classic novel, Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers), translated by David Barrett, and a bit of a classic of our own too: it’s a nostalgic glimpse of a Finnish Christmas spent in a humble cottage inhabited, in addition to the eponymous seven brothers, a horse, cat, cockerel and two dogs (at least). Enjoy!

Soila Lehtonen & Hildi Hawkins & Leena Lahti

On a festive night

It is Christmas Eve. The weather has been mild, grey clouds fill the sky, hills and valleys are covered with the snow that has only recently begun to fall. The forest gives out a gentle murmur, the grouse goes to roost in the catkined birch, a flock of waxwings descends on the reddening rowan, while the magpie, daughter of the pine-wood, carries twigs for her future nest.

Alike in lowly cottage and stately manor-house, joy and peace prevail: not least in the log-cabin in the Impivaara clearing, where the brothers have made their home. Outside the door you can see the load of straw that Valko has hauled all the way from Viertola manor, to be spread on the cabin floor in honour of Christmas. Even here, it seems, the brothers have not forgotten the rustle of the Christmas straw, the most dearly cherished of their childhood memories.

But from within the dwelling comes the hiss of steam, as water is thrown on the hot stones, and the swish of the soft, leafy birch-twigs. For the brothers are giving themselves a rigorous Christmas bath. And when at last the stones have ceased to give off their searing heat, they climb down, put on some clothes, and sit down to rest on the planks that, for lack of benches, have been set along the walls. There they sit, huffing and puffing and streaming with sweat.

The room is lit by a flaring strip of shingle; Valko, at his feed-box, champs a meal of oats, for they have not forgotten that it is Christmas for him too; the cockerel, perched on his beam above them, dozes and yawns; Killi and Kiiski are lying by the stove with their chins on their paws, while the old grey cat from Jukola purrs contentedly on Juhani’s knee.

At length Timo and Simeon set about preparing the table for supper, while the others carry in the bundles from outside. Undoing the cords, they spread the straw over the floor to a depth of about a foot, but more thickly over the raised platform where they spend their evenings and sleep at night.

Now at last the meal is ready; the table is set with seven ring-loaves, two oaken tubs of steaming bear-meat, and a pailful of beer. They have brewed the beer themselves, mindful of the method their mother always followed, but making it stronger than the usual farmhouse beer. Reddish-black in hue, and foaming in the pail: if you drank a canful of this, you certainly felt your brain beginning to swim!

And now they are all seated at the table, beginning to enjoy the meat and the bread, and the foaming beer from the pail.

Aapo: Well, this is an ample repast we have before us, and no mistake!

Juhani: Eat and drink, boys, it’s Christmas! Christmas for us, and Christmas for all, people and animals too. Timo, my boy, pour a drop of beer on to poor old Valko’s heap of oats! That’s it, go on, make it a whole mugful! We mustn’t be stingy to-night: let everyone have some, the horse, the dog, and the cat, as well as the seven jolly brothers from Jukola!

An extract from the novel Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers, 1870), by Aleksis Kivi

Translated by David Barrett

It was a lagoon. The water was not like out at sea, not a turquoise dream with white vacation trimming on the crests of the waves. This water was completely still and strange, brown yet clear, sepia and umber, perhaps cinnamon, possibly cigar with the finest flakes of finest wrapper. Clean. This water of meetings was clear and clean in a non-platonic, remarkably earthbound way.

Sediment and humus, humus floating about in the morning sun.

It felt comforting, as if the water didn’t repel the foreign bodies as a matter of course, didn’t immediately suppress the other particles and sanctimoniously hasten to force anything that wasn’t water, anything that could be interpreted as pollution and encroachment, down to the bottom and let it dissolve and die all by itself. This water sang its earth-brown song of unity without thereby becoming any less water than water-water was.

Helena felt cold.

So far the morning sun was more light than heat, and Helena felt dawn-cold, but her eyes had already added her body to the waiting water, her pupils communicated to her tensed limbs and knotted stomach that this was a permissive water.

And believed it, as one believes a miracle – less out of faith than of hope.

Perhaps faith is activated hope, Helena thought as she undressed.

She hadn’t slept.

The Russians were getting restless. They had got into the minibus outside the most expensive hotel, and if they weren’t nouveau riche they were old riche. A silver-haired patriarch and his lively young appendages. Helena realised that she was pleased with her Italian bathing suit, a bit on the small side certainly, but bought in Verona.

Black and white.

Elegant.

More elegant than she.

The female tour guide was sullen and sleepy, would probably rather have stayed in bed. She stood warming herself in long sleeves on the jetty, wanted coffee and order in the ranks. The Russians had no sense of discipline at all, they joked and jostled as if they were on a high school outing, and when the tour guide asked the small, disparate group – the five Russians, Helena and a girl from a mountaintop somewhere in northern Norway – to put on their life jackets, they made an extra effort to be even sillier.

What do I know of them, Helena thought. Perhaps it’s nerves?

Of course, she did just as the nameless tour guide said.

Lifejackets had not been a part of Helena’s internal image of what lay ahead, but if they were the important thing, so be it. She obediently set a good example by struggling into a lifejacket, though she didn’t want one between herself and the water. All the jackets were garish orange.

She managed to grab one that was not too unwieldy and sat fairly tight, and now she was ready.

Ready?

If anyone knew, they would laugh at her, but she didn’t care.

And anyway, no one knew.

That Helena had prepared herself, carefully and almost trembling she had prepared herself and tried to make herself look as good as possible. She didn’t want to offend. She wanted to meld in with them as well as she could – and she couldn’t, but what the hell – she wanted to make it as easy as possible for her sleek hosts. Therefore she had shaved herself in the hotel room the night before. Like the woman who thinks of everything before a party, she now displayed a brand new bikini line.

Far up in her groin.

The area where the shaved-off silky hair had been was slightly red.

Previously such a thing had never bothered her, not among people, she hadn’t cared if so-called ‘embarrassing hair’ peeked out from a bikini bottom. But the night before she had suddenly been seized by a need to honour and cherish her future partners by leaving no effort unspared. She was a bit like the girl in the Song of Solomon, anxiously yet expectantly adorning herself for her lovers’ tryst.

Would she do?

Would they think she was beautiful?

No, that was going too far. They certainly didn’t need to think she was beautiful, all that was needed was that she wasn’t seen as so instinctively repulsive that she couldn’t join be part of the proceedings. And the razor probably made no difference one way or the other, but was simply a way to get close.

Of tuning into a wavelength, with a practical form of respect.

Helena was convinced that the deciding vote would be cast not by her outer appearance but by her inner nimbus, but while the former might have some minor effect, the latter was beyond the reach of her efforts and will.

Hence the evening’s fumbling razor prayer.

Now the Russians were also equipped with lifejackets, and the group received orders to sit on the edge of the jetty with their legs in the water. In English. Helena had a feeling that at least some of the Slavs understood no English – the patriarch seemed quite bewildered – but perhaps it didn’t really matter. Anyway, this sort of thing was best done in a completely foreign language.

And suddenly they were there.

They were suddenly there, saying hello as they somersaulted in the water, bobbing up and bobbing up again precisely next to the participants’ suddenly small and stick-thin shins. The dimensions of the central figures took them all by surprise – the patriarch rose with studied indifference, gave a massive yawn and departed with dignity almost intact – and many gasped involuntarily for breath, heaving their toes quickly back onto land again. These were no disarmed toy creatures, no cute, harmless symbols meekly and passively flouncing from a string on the ceiling of the minibus in time to the windings of the road and the driver’s gas pedal humour. These creatures were large and strikingly real and had no strings, they could do as they liked, and just when the shivering group on the edge of the jetty had realised this, the tour guide ordered them all brusquely into the water.

No one moved.

No one moved, and then someone did move, and to her own unbounded amazement it was Helena. She who was so timid and cautious. She who harboured so many strange and overwrought fears, morbid scenarios, healthy strategies for self-preservation, forgot everything and became a daring pioneer for the first time in her mollusc-like, closed and careful, divided life. First and complete, she flopped heavily in, and after that there was nothing but floating and happiness.

Helena laughed, laughed harder and more freely than she had since she was a child, and that was what she was, she was a wide-open child surrounded by unconditional kindness and exuberant primordial play. No secret motives lurked under slimy stones gathering strength for a disuniting leap. She hardly noticed that some of the others in the group didn’t dare let go of the edge of the jetty at all and that the tour guide – with strained patience, and soon increasingly irritated because of the photographing, the business – was still trying to force the reluctant swimmers to pose with the creatures and allow themselves to be kissed by them.

Click-click, went the camera, and the tour guide probably got a commission on the pictures.

It was business.

The whole event had a commercial basis, but Helena was beyond the sordid. For once she didn’t even mind that she came out badly in photos.

The nagging, alienating and exhausting self-examination was gone.

She was at home.

As a creature among creatures Helena was more at home than she had ever been as a person among people. She was equal. Her hosts accepted her. She was so much present that not even her gratitude spoiled the moment and the immediacy by weighing it down with a conscious humility. No thought. The gratitude welled up in her later, afterwards, but now everything was simply organic, a togetherness of living beings in freedom, equality and fraternity.

She could ride, ride and fall, she could surf, she could coast by holding onto the dorsal fins, be towed and yet not be a burden. The creatures smiled. They were neither diffuse nor definable, they were not blue and they were not grey, they were neither mauve nor shimmering green, they were much more, they were all the colours and firm and soft at the same wonderful time.

They just were, as she just was and was allowed to be.

A recall whistle sounded.

That was divine, Helena bubbled with uncharacteristic garullity to the Norwegian girl when their water assignment was over. She saw that the Russians, too, were bubbling weightlessly, the patriarch, with quizzical indulgence but firmness of hand, already in the process of applying circular rubbing motions to the members of his family as he towelled them dry.

I don’t want to profane this with religion, was the mountaintop girl’s curt reply.

Helena said nothing.

She got dressed, went to the photo shop and there without blinking she bought a fantastically expensive photograph of her laughing self. Never before had she seen herself like that, and wide-eyed she looked into this new image of Helena. With teeth stained by coffee and tobacco she was humus-laughing openly, straight into the camera.

Straight. In.

Now she knew why she had been given her hitherto concealed, amazingly deep dimples, they were for the dolphins to burrow their long, blunt snouts in. The creatures had laid bare her happiness.

And perhaps, just perhaps she would never be as heavy again. As lonely. As inexplicably wrong and out of place. Perhaps the dolphins had opened up a life, a fellowship where  human beings, too, had a part.

In the theology of hospitality.

Translated by David McDuff

It’s a small day in spring. Another name for the lark is the skylark. You can only see them sometimes, and even then they’re so high up in the sky that they swoop like fast-moving dots.

The kitchen windowpane is rippling with stripes. The window has a bottom, and at the bottom there is some cotton wool and two opened matchboxes, a blue Sampo and a picture of an army chaplain in his uniform and insignia. As spring has progressed the cotton wool at the bottom has turned into wet blobs and the matches will never light again, as they’ve sucked up the winter frost from the glass.

Most children are made at home but not us, says Eini during walking practice. Outi shoves her, tells her to be quiet and walk in rhythm. I’m behind the table reading the Children’s Encyclopaedia, but I watch them. With every second step, their bottoms swing to the right and then to the left.

Mum comes into th the kitchen and asks what they’re doing; Anna-Liisa responds on the twins’ behalf, says they’re practising walking like in the movies and that’s why they’re wiggling their hips.

I have four girl sisters. Anna-Liisa and the twins are older than me, Teeny is a year younger than me. Teeny is the closest to me.

Teeny’s not in the kitchen. Mum starts showing them how women in the movies are supposed to walk properly and how to make your bottom swing and wiggle, if for some crazy reason you want to walk like that. Mum gets her high-heel shoes from the closet and starts walking back and forth along the striped rug. The twins try to copy her but keep tripping over themselves as they walk side by side, always looking to one side to see whether the other one can do it or not.

Anna-Liisa almost learns how to do proper walking. It’s much easier to do proper walking, because it’s just like walking but a bit more daintily.

I stop reading halfway through and start walking along the edge of the rug like Mum and Anna-Liisa, behind Mum and next to Anna-Liisa. Best not follow the twins’ example.

Halfway along, there’s a wide blueberry-coloured stripe running through the rug. At that point Mum takes me by the hand, stops me and says I don’t need to practice because I’m a boy. Eini starts giggling in that silly way she always does. Outi yanks her by the hand because she’s older, and because there’s nothing funny about it.

I stop straight away and walk away from the edge of the rug. For a while I don’t even look at them, I just turn to the window and read. I learned to read last winter and my first word was SARCOPHAGUS. It doesn’t mean anything;  it’s just stick letters one after the other, but I can always find that word because at that point in the encyclopaedia everything is written in big letters  beneath the pictures.

Marconi is trying out a new wireless telegraph.

The adjustment machine used to set watches and alarm clocks has letters on it that tell you which way to turn the pointer to make the clock tick more quickly or slowly. Pendulum clocks have an adjustable screw just beneath the metal disc hanging below the pendulum.

Teach young people to see and wonder at the ingenious inventions and admirable deeds of the great figures of history.

The Danish and Norwegian languages are not significantly different from each other.

I turn just enough to see them.

At first they practise properly, but then Mum shows them how not to walk.

Not like that, she says, and teaches them how to shift their weight to the side with each step so that walking seems light and easy and it looks like your bottom is swinging with each step all by itself. Mum can’t do it quite as lightly as in the movies – she says so herself – not even Anna-Liisa can get the hang of it, and the twins wobble, stumbling pathetically from side to side.

In turn Mother shows them how to walk and how not to walk, showing them the second version because it’s good to know how to walk badly so that you don’t do it. The girls agree and all three of them say they understand it properly when Mum asks them each individually.

Proper walking is the measure of a woman, but when you’re grown up you can sometimes wiggle your bottom when you feel like it and it’s the right time, that’s why I’m showing you how, so that you won’t have to learn it badly somewhere else, says Mum.

Then she undoes the ankle straps on her shoes and won’t let the twins try them on so as not to ruin the white leather by walking improperly.

This is how I first learned that a girl shouldn’t wiggle her bottom. This is how I first learned that a girl may wiggle her bottom if she wishes.

I am me. The table is it. The dog is he or it, your own dog is he, somebody else’s dog is it, you haven’t got a dog of your own, the dog is it.

It was in school that I first learned about God.

GOD IS GREAT.

GOD IS GOOD.

He created the heavens. He created the seas. He created the earth. He created you. God is your Heavenly Father. You are God’s child. Praise be to God! Love God with all your heart! Obey His commandments!

Children’s storyteller Zacharias Topelius teaches you like this. Remember to obey at all times!

I learned the words Mother and Father from the primer.

MOT-HER

I am still small and helpless. I won’t get along in this world without care.

Mother is with me every day. She’ll never leave me, because she loves me.

Mother knows exactly what I need. She gives me clean, mended clothes and food. My bed is fresh, clean and warm. Mother airs the sheets and makes the bed every morning.

Mother looks me in the eyes when she’s talking to me. She teaches me about honesty and telling the truth. Mother’s voice is quiet when she is giving me advice or telling me off.

If something nasty happens in the yard, I run home crying.

Mother takes me in her arms, asks me what’s wrong and comforts me. But she doesn’t want to hear a single bad word about my friends.

When I feel poorly, Mother takes good care of me. I can hear Mother’s familiar footsteps. I sense that she’s running to be with me. I feel her cool hand against my feverish forehead. I feel so safe with my dear Mother.

Mother has taught me to pray every morning and every evening.

She thanks the Heavenly Father because I want to be a good boy. Then she asks God to send an angel to protect me.

FAT-HER

I have a good father too. He and I are good friends.

I wait for Father to come home from work. Because he finds time to draw and build things with me.

Father is at home on Sundays. He tells me funny stories. Lots of things have happened during the week that he likes telling me about. Sometimes I talk so much that Father can’t get a word in.

Sometimes Father tells me off. That’s when I haven’t been a good boy. At least I’m not dishonest. Father is pleased with that.

I love my father. I want to be his very own good little boy.

Father once told me that home, a mother and a father are God’s gifts to children.

Thank you, God, for your gifts!
Your child, I will be kind,
Happy to do your work
So joy I’ll always find.

This is how I first learned that most of the time I’m a bad boy and nobody’s child.

In August, just before starting second grade, when it gets dark and the stars return to the night sky, I start to cry to myself and wish for a great darkness to descend before September comes.

Halfway through August the evenings are already so blue and black that it feels as though everything will end when summer ends, but the worst of it is knowing that nothing ends, that September will come and everything important will be gone. There are sharp boundaries between the months, just like a dotted line in a diary.

When, one Saturday afternoon towards the end of August, Dad tells his buddy Pena that he could move back to Helsinki right away, I jump up from where I’ve been sitting on the floor and make my way round to the other side of the armchair to look at Dad’s face and try to see whether he’s serious.

I can hardly remember anything about Helsinki, except just barely the things that people have told me, but one big fire I remember so vividly that it can’t be just what people have told me.

Beneath the window, piles of logs are burning at the edge of Hakaniemi Square. A burning wall rises up towards us. Down below you can see a bonfire swirling in yellow and orange, and on top of that tongues of black smoke licking the air.

The trams screech along their tracks. I remember only that one sound. I can’t remember where or when, or much else ever, except when Dad tells me things, and I don’t want to move back there, away from here, and yet now I would like to move there, but Dad’s not even serious and Mum tells him to stop dreaming of the impossible.

On the second last evening in August I gather up sawdust from the attic floor and stuff it in the old oil burner in the garage and set it alight in the middle of the yard. The twists of wood shavings are the first to catch fire, then the black slime at the bottom of the burner starts to smoke.

Other than that it’s dark all around. And when there’s a huge flame in the burner in the middle of it all, it’s even darker elsewhere.

For God’s sake child, what the hell are you doing? Mum shouts from the window and comes running outside straight towards me. From the clomping of her footsteps, I can hear that she’s wearing her grey boots.

I start crying out loud, and I’m not able to stop. I’m not crying because of the burner and not because the fire has now burnt its way through the sides, not because I’m scared, not because of the burnt laundry, not because of any of those things, but because everything is going to end at the dotted line in the diary.

When it’s time to say something, I try and speak through the tears, with difficulty, first about good and bad and that I can’t do everything, and then about what’s going to happen at school again, it’s all just falling, lunch breaks and teachers and Jesus, but I try to explain to Mum that it’s mostly because the darkness is coming, summer is coming to an end, something else is starting again, and already something has been snapped off altogether.

Now now, child, don’t take things so seriously, life isn’t bad at all, there there, child, says Mum, that and lots of other things. For God’s sake child, what the hell are you doing, she shouted in her ugly voice, but now she says, there there, child don’t take things so.

She manages to help me enough that I stop snivelling, and at the same time, or almost immediately, I feel ashamed because all the others are staring and not saying anything, but the twitching in my throat and chest has stopped, and even if they all stare at me and sit in the kitchen in silence, it still feels like something else, something better.

This is how I first learned 1) that there are two kinds of good, 2) to be careful about the spaces between times because there are dotted lines and 3) that learning is enough, nothing in school means any more than that.

The following Saturday when I’m in the sauna with Dad, he decides he wants to show me that he can put his legs behind his neck. First he lifts his left leg. It’s a strange position, all folded up like a penknife. Once he’s sat there hunched up for a while, he helps his left leg back down from around his neck with his hands.

Dad is red in the face and gasping for breath on the upper bench, and not just because of the heat of the sauna, as we haven’t even thrown any water on the stove yet.

An old test of suppleness, he says and warns me not to try it myself unless I’m absolutely sure I can get my foot down again.

I give it a little try but don’t really get anywhere near even though I’m pushing my foot as hard as possible, it’s still a good twenty centimetres short. I can’t even touch my face with my toes.

We have all sorts of skills, all different ones. We have to remember to keep some of them hidden. Take me, I’m by no means the best at these suppleness tests. Some people are so supple they can throw both their legs behind their necks and sit like that at the edge of the bench with their backs against the wall. I once saw a man like that in the sauna in Helsinki, an old man, like a monkey and a snake at the same time, he had a bald, slippery head and he managed to slip his legs behind his neck just like that, Dad recalls from his time in the city.

You shouldn’t worry about fusspots and all their fussing. When you know you can do something, then you can do it. In that way it’s enough and there’s a trace of everything left. That’s the way life works, he says as if by way of consolation.

I grunt in response, just enough as though I actually agreed with him, though I don’t really.

Then Dad continues his demonstration. First he throws half a ladle of water on the stove then, in one continuous movement, lifts his right leg and places it behind his neck. The right leg doesn’t move as easily as the left, and Dad has to use his hands to help him, has to puff and blow far more, but still the movement doesn’t stop halfway through and his ankle slips over the most difficult part of his head and rests behind his neck.

Once his leg is in place, Dad lets out a fart.

In this position there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s the rule, not the exception, even though we’re in the sauna. It’s just like in Greco-Roman wrestling, it’s perfectly natural, Dad says, but in his hunched-up position his voice sounds strained and his S’s are more like SH’s.

When he tries to take his leg back down again, he can’t do it. He groans and strains and takes deep breaths and starts to turn red in the face. It doesn’t look good. Mustn’t panic, he says to himself and gives it another go after a moment’s rest.

Get me a piece of soap from the basket, he says, and straight away I hop down from the middle bench and quickly go and fetch a piece of soap cut from the block. Dad instructs me to lather up his neck and the edge of his shin, then he gives another good tug and his slippery leg glides over the top of his head.

Dad remains sitting there, bent over catching his breath and shaking his head. First he thanks me for fetching the soap, then he warns me once again not to try this myself unless I’m absolutely sure I’ll be able to unpick my own lock.

This is how I first learned about suppleness. This is how I learned I should never try it myself.

Once we’re in the washroom and we’re sitting on the bench next to each other and Dad is scrubbing the bottom of his feet with a vegetable brush, in the middle of all this he starts talking about the girls and asks me if I’ve ever heard anything about them. I haven’t, I say. Dad’s voice makes me a bit uneasy, but I don’t know why.

That’s good. But if you hear anything in school or anywhere else, people saying anything about our girls or gossiping, don’t get involved, don’t listen, it’s all lies, says Dad and from his voice I can tell that’s not the end of the story.

I daren’t ask any more and I can’t look at him. I just lather up my armpits and try to look like I’m concentrating on washing myself.

Dad doesn’t say anything else, but fills a bucket with rinsing water that’s not too hot and eventually pours it over me so that the soap disappears and the water runs over my hair and face on to my shoulders and along my stomach right the way down to my feet. I imagine that’s what it must be like to have a shower, like a sudden waterfall, grey and bubbling so close to your eyes that you have to clench them tightly shut and you can’t open your mouth in case you breath in water.

Up in the attic I try to listen more carefully to what the twins are saying, but they’ve started talking less and know to check whether I’m upstairs or not, so that I can’t hear.

That evening they don’t go out anywhere – not even Anna-Liisa goes out. After sauna, we eat dinner an hour later than usual. There is a pot of boiled sausages on the stove and pancakes made from mashed potato in the frying pan. Mum has bought mustard in a tube. It tastes better than mustard in a jar, though you can collect the jars and uses them as drinking glasses.

Because it’s somehow quiet, Dad tries to keep the conversation going and tells us stories about the things people have tried to sell at the shop that week. Dad says he’s learnt over the years to see very quickly what is rubbish and what is vendible in this part of the country. Vendible is a completely new word to me, it’s crisp, sounds a bit like vegetable. I don’t ask about it yet, but I remember the word, because I don’t want to ask while the others are listening, because if the twins heard me ask they’d say everybody knows what that means, it’s a perfectly normal word.

Anna-Liisa is just a bit older, so she won’t start arguing with me or teasing me, though she considers the twins smaller than her and lets them know it every now and then.

I consider Teeny smaller than me but the twins stupider than me. Nobody could think Teeny’s stupid, because she’s sharp as a razor. I’ve heard people say that about her, but never about me.

There’s the one big difference between us: Teeny learns things without having to learn them and almost always at the very first attempt, while I have to learn things, often off by heart, repeating them over and over and wasting my attempts.

Teeny should be in school by now but she isn’t allowed to go because her head is sharp as a razor and we have to wait a few years until she’s past all the lower grades. She stays at home reading to herself if she feels like it, but mostly she amuses herself by staring out through the blinds and into the road, all the while adjusting the blinds so that the road and the yard open up then disappear, open up then disappear again.

I like Teeny so much that I won’t let anyone say bad things about her or wonder at her. People I know don’t dare say anything any more because I set upon the first people that said anything and punched them in the face, and even though I lost I punched from the ground and dug my teeth into the hand holding me through the mitten.

You don’t have to do that many times before you get a reputation, then no one will really dare try, or want to.

It’s a long and strange-shaped Saturday evening, and I’m confused as to how it’s turned out like that.

Translated by David Hackston

‘Quite the country gentleman, eh, what, hey?’ says Aapeli Muttinen the bookseller. ‘Like the poet Horace – if I may humbly make the comparison, eh, dash it? With his villa at Tusculum, or whatever the place was called, given to him by Maecenas, in the Sabine hills, wasn’t it? – dashed if I remember. Anyway, he served Maecenas, and I serve  – the public, don’t I? Selling them books at fifty pence a copy.’

Muttinen’s Tusculum is his little plot of land in the country. A delightful place, comforting to contemplate when the first signs of summer are beginning to appear, after a winter spent in town in the busy pursuit of Mammon, under skies so grey that the wrinkles on Muttinen’s forehead must have doubled in number. A summer paradise of idleness…

It lies a fair distance from the town, in the region where he was born: a villa set on a hill, where the shores of Lake Saimaa break up into a labyrinth of capes and inlets. Through the leafy birches his balcony peeps out over the water.

There Aapeli is happy, especially during those first days of summer when he is still so weary and worn after his exertions in town, and once again the idea of idling in the country has all the charm of something fresh and inexhaustible.

So tiring has he found it, perched up there behind his counter, raking in his beloved money, that by springtime his poor brain is no longer capable of thoughts, or even of memories. He longs only to escape into the bosom of Mother Nature, to laze, to do no more than exist. Not as Muttinen, not as anything at all: not as a philosopher, not even as a fat pig. To be nothing, to be no kind of creature at all.

Happiness for him, as summer begins, is an absence of all thoughts and memories, an existence in the present, an indefinable peace.

The most beautiful days, the ones with the fewest thoughts and memories, are those very first days of summer: and the nights of clear golden light, enfolding him in a warm and wordless happiness.

On a morning in earliest summer, after a night spent neither sleeping nor waking, neither reading nor thinking, but lying back quietly, his yellowing eyelids half closed in a pleasant drowse, he gets lazily to his feet and opens the door to his balcony, which he can reach directly from his room. Straight in front of him, just below the railing, into which designs have been cut in the old country fashion, there are bird-cherry trees, white with blossom, the spreading branches exhaling a sweet fragrance. Untouched by grubs, the blossoms are fresh and sound; the trees seem sprinkled allover with rice-grains, or to have snow piled on their branches, for there are buds in plenty, and blossoms just beginning to open. The scent of them steals right into the room.

Each side of the cherry trees, the summer morning sparkles in the bright warm light. It is still early. Lygia – for just as Horace in his day had his eight slaves, the gift of Maecenas, and many ‘Lydias’, so Aapeli has his ‘Lygia’ (he would think it impertinent to give his own beloved exactly the same name as Horace gave to his) – Lygia sleeps elsewhere. The shadows of the trees over there in the hollow are still elongated and cool. A light mist, rising gently from the water and its marshy edges, hovers over the inlet’s verdant shore. Each blade of grass, even the tiniest, bears on its tip a glistening droplet, sparkling with many colours. A cuckoo calls. A tremulous beauty shimmers everywhere. Muttinen chuckles at the sight of those blades of grass with dewdrops on their noses. For a while he still idles; then, suddenly impatient, wakes Lygia  – in true Horatian style, for his great paunch is demanding tea, and he would like to enjoy it out there on the balcony, with a dozen cuckoos in attendance to provide a joyful chorus.

For breakfast there are grilled perch, with potatoes: large, freshly caught perch, of which Aapeli consumes a prodigious number, as well as six boiled eggs and half a dish-full of jam, swilling it all down with a jug-full of soured milk; after which he leans back contentedly, with a full stomach.

And now he is setting out with Lygia, who is wearing a loose dress with a swinging skirt, and carries in her hand a large bunch of spirea and purple lilac blossom, which she holds up to hide her bright, mischievous eyes: they are going to take a walk, to look about them, to pass the time, as is their custom on these pleasant summer days. In her other hand Lygia has a little luncheon basket, but Muttinen has not omitted to stuff his pocket with dried figs.

Or sometimes they will go on rowing expeditions, out on to the open waters of Lake Saimaa, and dawdle across to the mainland opposite, which shows as a pale bluish smudge in the distance. The birches on the shore have just come into leaf; their long drooping branches are soft in outline, like green ostrich feathers. From the mouth of the bay more distant landscapes can be seen: in the summer haze no details or colours are distinguishable, all is indefinite, bluish, and misty-like a dream.

The sun grows warmer and warmer. The clouds reflected in the deep water of the open lake are of many colours. When the mood takes him, Muttinen rows on, sweating and silent…

Ah, the water! Here and there on the surface are glittering patches like clusters of emeralds: they are ladybirds, every one of their green shards flashing a piercing ray. ‘Look, Lygia,’ Muttinen says, ‘some jewels for you.’ Ladybirds that have set out to swarm above the broad expanse of the sound, and have fallen into the warm water and been drowned, most of them in pairs. Some are still alive. Often they are close together, floating like strips of embroidery on the water: thousands of bright green shards, the whole sound is full of them.

On the further shore they climb gently up the slope, leaving below them the lakeside meadow, which is ablaze with globeflowers, balls of brightest yellow. They reach the ridge leading to the village. Here and there bird-cherries bloom and leafy rowans spread their branches. Sometimes, from the winding road, they glimpse the old manor house with its screen of aspen; or some humble grey farmstead set among bright fields of sprouting corn.

Anon they descend again, leaving the hilltop for the cool shade of the hollows.

Dazed by the early summer sunshine into a deep contentment, intoxicated by the scent of the birches and of the whole burgeoning forest, they become more and more silent: the further they go, the less they need to speak. On their way down they find a place to sit, in the shade of a tall and spreading birch. Taking off their shoes and stockings, they remain there a long time, Aapeli enjoying memories of his childhood, bareheaded, the wisps of hair round his bald pate blowing gently about in the breeze. He knows every stone along this path. From time to time Lygia turns and looks at him, delighting in the summer.

Then they walk on, along a track shaded by alders. Streamlets from above burble gently across it, then plunge into the dark shadow of the trees. Lygia bends down to drink from one of them, taking water into her cupped hands from between the moss-covered stones: bright, fresh, happy, sparkling water. Resting on her hands, she looks up mischievously at Muttinen, who gives her an absent-minded smile and makes some playful remark, but thinks merely ‘Lygia!’ And when they come to some spot known to Aapeli in his childhood and he mutters, half to himself, ‘I used to come along here when I was only so high’, Lygia presses close to his side and murmurs something kind and tender, as if to a child, picturing fat old Muttinen as that little boy, only so high, trotting along at her side. And she sighs, dreaming of something else…

They walk along the shore of a reedy inlet. The small, rocky islets have the sheen of slightly blackened tin. Here and there people in their shirtsleeves are fishing from rowing-boats: the sound of their quiet, happy conversation carries far across the water.

Over on the other side, shouting and squealing, some girls are swimming, some in their vests, others naked.

Muttinen and Lygia pass on, and settle down to picnic by the shore, installing themselves on a shiny, heat-drenched boulder, where they light their fire and put the pot on to boil. There they lie to await their meal, Muttinen happy, without a thought in his head, just enjoying the summer and that is all…

The sun is hot, they close their eyes, not looking into the boundless blue depths of the kindly sky. The warmth is all around them: everywhere in the woods there is the clink of many cowbells, merging into a continuous murmur, and the loud sigh of the wind in the trees is lulling and delightful. Let it pass, let the time pass, it is summer, it is warm! There is a strange melancholy in the sound of those clinking bells, like a hesitant reminder of something half forgotten…

Short is man’s life, still shorter a happy day. The afternoon is already well advanced when they begin to make their way homewards, to the spot on the shore where they have left the boat, both of them feeling on their skin the enervating heat of the insistent sun, bodies and souls drenched in an ecstasy of light. In silence across the meadows, up slopes and down the other side, to the music of the cowbells and the cuckoo’s call.

Now and then they pause on the hot granite of the capes, where the reflection from the water dazzles the eye, to linger idly for a while and take a rest. And they fall into a yet deeper silence, engulfed in a contentment vaster and vaguer than before. The sprigs of lilac on Lygia’s warm bosom have withered, but under the brim of her soft hat her smiling eyes are full of kindness.

Low down yonder on the shore of the bay stands an old cruciform church, half concealed by the luxuriant foliage of the graveyard trees. The presence of this graveyard serves somehow to intensify their happiness, reminding them how short these moments are, as they pause in the shade of a tall sallow, its leafy branches quivering as though in grief.

It is evening; the ending of a day that has filled their veins almost to bursting-point with its glowing heat, dazed their heads with the warm forest scents of summer. Coolness descends, and a deeper peace. They row, with gentle strokes, in the direction of home.

The smoky sun has veiled everything in a strange half-light, making the world mountainous, and concealing every last detail from view; it has made the shore remote, merged hills and forests in a misty unity – this evening haze of early summer, which never comes nearer or decreases or clears away, as when the sun sets in midsummer or autumn. In silence they glide over the warm water, passing many islands on either side. Lygia has put aside the paddle; she leans forward, her hands gripping the sides of the boat, as if in excitement, or in expectation of something even more wonderful to come. Sometimes a little exclamation escapes her, a short, low, tender cry of delight in the world’s beauty, or a shout of pleasure at the thrush’s song; for evening has fallen and night is near  – a night that will hardly get dark at all – and the voice of the thrush rings out over the woods. But Muttinen silences her with a jocular word or two: so deep and indefinable is this inner joy of his, that it craves silence.

The boat glides on through a deep, narrow channel leading out into more open water. Lygia feels a sudden fright: before them, like a bastion guarding the entrance to the lake beyond, rises a great wall of rock, an island that towers (or so it seems to them at this moment) many hundreds of feet straight up out of the water, so oddly does the evening haze exaggerate the shape of the high rocky edge. ‘Look, Böcklin’s Island of the Dead,’ Muttinen whispers. ‘I’m frightened,’ Lygia replies in a low voice, and the closer they come to the great wall of stone, the more she shivers in a strange ecstasy, fearful at the sight yet awed by its beauty. And now, as they pass below, it thrusts out great boulders and masses of rock which seem to be poised immediately above their heads. The hawks cry shrilly from their nests on the topmost crag. Here and there, growing from cracks in the rock wall, small green saplings of rowan catch the fading light. The boulders on the cliff appear so precariously loose that one would expect the slightest movement to dislodge them. They frighten even Muttinen. Beneath them is the water, black and immeasurably deep. Lygia’s voice becomes quieter, more tender: ‘Oh look, how pink the moss is, look at that rowan high up there on the cliffside, how tiny it looks!’ Muttinen smiles back: ‘Shh, not a sound, not a whisper, or you’ll bring down one of those loose rocks…’

The expanse of Saimaa has lost its true dimensions, so vast does it appear in the dim brief twilight of the summer night. Perhaps it is already as dark as it is going to be. Even now, the sun has not quite set. Out there a tugboat moves across the open water: its red light twinkles prettily through the haze, the chug of its engine has a mysterious sound. On board, someone is playing a concertina.

After the tug has passed, its wash fans out in swelling waves which catch the last rays of the setting sun. The waves are so big that the boat is tossed this way and that, lifted up into the air and dropped into the glinting trough as each wave rolls past. They are so smooth and rounded that they shine like mirrors, reflecting a dazzling, gleaming light, now red, now dark and metallic, from the glowing sunset.

Tusculum… an indefinable happiness, lasting for that brief moment that constitutes a summer night.

But when the twilight has lifted and Lygia has left him, wearing over her shoulders a yellow shawl embroidered with flowers; and when the sun, having closed its eyes for a moment, opens them once again, shining in through Aapeli’s windows, sending its flashing rays across the wooded hills, and peeping through the blossom-laden bird-cherry trees which he can see from his bed through the open door  – and the small birds’ morning chorus all but drowns the cuckoo’s call, Muttinen is aware of a sound from Lygia’s room: a muffled sobbing, which she tries in vain to control. Muttinen understands its meaning.

And his fat body tosses and turns in anguish.

‘A happy day,’ he murmurs to himself. ‘Yes, a happy day gone! Only one, but one is enough for me. I don’t believe in lasting happiness… I wish I could give you what you long for, my dear  – you believe in happiness. I could, if I believed in it myself. Happiness does not stay, Lygia, it slips away: love always fades, even the tenderest, as I know too well, fat old lump that I am. The days of deepest bliss pass like a day of early summer. Ripeness, decay….’

Muttinen, whose moments of happiness are so few, feels that he has no right to pass on to others, to another generation, the burden of life, which after all is mostly evil, mostly pain.

Translated by David Barrett (1914–1998); first published in Books from Finland 4/1981)

On the first day we played getting-to-know-you games. On the second day we played real Finnish baseball out behind the university. On the third day we travelled to the countryside. Classes started sometime at the end of the second week. We watched the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The professor slurped Coke, chain smoked, and rewound the video back and forth: Nurse Ratched’s plump face filled the screen and then in the next image where her face had been there was a basketball Jack Nicholson was squeezing.

It was the autumn of 1992, and I was studying film and communications theory in Copenhagen.

The excursion to the country frightened me, a shy bacteriophobic neurotic. The Danes thought the camping centre’s shared mattresses and group cooking were hygge – cozy. There is no way a dictionary translation could ever cover all the forms of cosiness the Danes achieve together. I fled the camping centre on the first morning. On the train to Copenhagen I recognised all the usual post-escape feelings: shame, fear, guilt, loneliness and overwhelming euphoria.

I did not learn Danish. I only knew one phrase fluently: ‘En hotdog med sennep, ketchup og ristet løk.’ I used it daily. After a few weeks I stopped attending lectures at all. Instead I sat in the Finnish language department’s small library room and ate pretzels and wrote short stories, long laments about loneliness and homesickness. I didn’t even bother to read them myself.

On one rainy afternoon late in October, I was once again sitting in the Finnish language department’s library idly flipping through the Copenhagen phone book. I noticed that there were five hundred Erik Hansens living in the city. I started thinking about what these Hansens think of each other. Did they feel a sense of solidarity? Did the more outgoing among them want to meet other Erik Hansens?

I wrote a new short story about loneliness and homesickness, this time such that the first person character suffering from loneliness had ended up on a summer outing with sixty Erik Hansens. I was completely saved from having to describe the loneliness because it was otherwise clear from the story that the others had a strong, obvious connection that my protagonist was condemned to be excluded from. I found that this was how I had always felt among people.

The short story about the Hansens’ summer outing finally ended up in my first book. Since I had become acquainted with the Hansens in such pleasant circumstances, I continued to think of them often. I felt like we had a lot in common. I imagined the Hansens as workaday Danes, cheerful and scrupulous. I did note the special cases – the Olympic canoeing champion Erik Hansen and the actor Erik Hansen and the artist Erik Hansen – but as I understood it, most of the Hansens lived perfectly ordinary lives somewhere in the suburbs of Copenhagen.

A couple of years passed. I was studying in Tampere and didn’t hear anything about the Hansens. That is until one day I read in the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper column ‘People of the world’ that Interpol had issued a warrant for Erik Hansen. He had committed some crimes abroad, stirring up trouble for the other Hansens, too: according to the report, an innocent Erik Hansen had been detained in Mexico because he had been confused with the Hansen the police were after. The Mexico Hansen had sat locked up in the airport jail for a day and then had been flown to London and locked up in a cell there. Around the same time, a third Erik Hansen had tried to go on a wine tasting trip to Chile – he had ended up locked up at the Santiago airport.

At the end of the news report it told how the Danish police were now considering outfitting all of the innocent Erik Hansens’ passports with a special stamp to demonstrate their innocence.

I sat in my studio apartment in Tampere’s Pispala neighbourhood thinking about all the Hansens that were travelling around the world committing crimes and tasting wine and vacationing. I also thought about the innocence stamp that the Hansens would soon receive: I imagined how they would go to the police station, and the police would applaud their innocence and give them the stamp, and how afterwards they would sit around with the policemen in the break room and chat about this and that and everything would be hygge. These thoughts made me melancholy. I would have liked an innocence stamp too. I would know how to appreciate it. It would have been nice to look at it on sleepless autumn nights.

I also thought about the constitutional principle that a person shouldn’t be forced to testify to his own innocence, but rather that others should testify of his guilt, and about how this principle of justice had always sounded somehow rotten, since it would be most pleasant if no one had to be involved in this business of testifying about people’s guilt at all. I also reflected on how unjust it was to force all of the Hansens to go to the police station to get an innocence stamp when the vast majority of them lived peacefully in their homes and certainly weren’t being driven to any old Chile by their wine addiction.

That one visual narrative detail from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the cut from Nurse Ratched’s face to the basketball, ended up being the only new thing I learned at the film school in Copenhagen. My other memories from that autumn are of city streets, of endless bicycle treks around windy Copenhagen. I still don’t know where I was going. I just rode. Cycling enthusiasts are always delighted to remind us how on a bicycle you can get close to the landscape, to the centre of life, but I just rode by. I rode by homes and parks and cafes; I rode by containers and cranes at the harbour; I rode by office buildings, empty lots, and demolition sites, past castles and red brick factory buildings.

When I returned to my digs in the evening, I left my bicycle in the dim cellar of the apartment building where dozens of reflector cat eyes glittered in the light falling from the streetlamps. Then I went up the stairs to the fourth floor, tiptoing past the landlord’s closed door and shutting myself in my room. I sat there eating cookies of the Kammerjunkker brand and reading the books I’d borrowed from the Finnish language department.

In November I wrote to Finland to ask a friend for a pulla coffee bread recipe. My intention was to bake in my sublet apartment kitchen the same kinds of long loaves as my grandmother in the 1970s. The rising phase failed. A couple of weeks later I got excited when I found a familiar pre-packaged liver casserole at the corner market. I bought a one kilo carton in a fit of homesickness. Back at the apartment when I ladled the casserole into the frying pan, it looked strangely smooth. It was Danish liver pâté.

My autumn as an exchange student should have ended at Christmas, but I fled for home on Independence Day, December 6. It was raining in Helsinki. The empty streets looked desolate. I was happy.

Since then I’ve visited Copenhagen three times and always found that it isn’t like before, that the enigmatic, inexplicable melancholy of my youth has disappeared completely from the city. Instead of the wastelands of the outer city and a dim bicycle cellar, I now notice the pedestrian street cafes and the whipped cream caps on the tall cups of cocoa. Drinking cocoa in those cafes, I’ve thought that I wouldn’t like to live my youth over again, that I would want to live someone else’s youth.

I’ve never met a single Erik Hansen, not on my trips to Denmark or otherwise. One or more Hansens may of course have happened to walk by on the bustling streets of Copenhagen, but they have melted into the anonymous, unfamiliar Danes.

Translated by Owen Witesman

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