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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I read again:

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

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

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

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

I read to myself, trying to pronounce well:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortunately the views never last long.

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

He keeps my by him even as he sits down.

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

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

‘One of those men wants to buy you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I listened my surface off.

… as I changed…

No, it didn’t happen until later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Hildi Hawkins &  Soila Lehtonen

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

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

I decided to go to the Museum of Fine Arts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mother’s marriage lasted for one hundred days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why’s that?’

Gustav laughs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Sunday Gustav knocks at my door.

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

‘I have no methodology,’ he adds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Didn’t he come by car?’ asks Sini.

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

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

‘No. He lives in Kronohagen.’

‘Is he rich?’

‘Why do you ask?’

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by David Hackston

Graphic design: M-L Muukka

Extracts from the novel Puupää (‘Blockhead’, Teos, 2009)

In these ‘shavings’ hewn from the block in constructing the storyline of his new novel, Juha Hurme offers us four unique glimpses into the Finnish psyche

The rune singer of Nokia

Three years ago I purchased a used mobile phone when its predecessor took an overdose of sea water and went mute on a rowing trip in a broken-down loaner of a fibreglass boat in a gale-force nor’wester. This three-year-old phone has been a thoroughly satisfactory implement and indispensable contact link. The power button got stuck a year ago, but the gadget is still fully operational with the aid of a match stick or something similar. It is my belief and hope that it will continue to fulfil the role of telephone for seven more years, because I prefer not to own, let alone purchase, anything that withstands fewer than ten years of use.

Last week when I turned on my phone with a matchstick, I accidentally flipped on the menu. I’ve never popped in there before, because I know that there is nothing for me there. But now curiosity got the better of me. I found a section called Message Templates. It contained ten text message templates, which the company that designed the machine had programmed into the phone via subcontractors. Like this:

Please call
I’m at home. Please call
I’m at work. Please call
I’m in a meeting, call me later at
Meeting is cancelled.
I am late. I will be there at
See you at
See you in
Sorry, I can’t help you on this.
I will be arriving at

I’ve read a lot of satirical contemporary poetry that is worse than the Ten Commandments of this rune singer from Nokia. This ten-line message template poem draws a precise picture of the person for whom this telephonic crutch was designed.

He is a curt issuer of commands. He has a home, and he has a job, but he is never where you think he will be. This fact indicates rapid, unpredictable movement, perhaps even intentional feints.

Meetings are the central substance of his life. However, he can afford to arrive late to them. He also has the authority to cancel previously-scheduled conferences. He is a great man, but there is one above him: the clock. When the clock issues an order, even he runs. Or he speeds late at night in the fog on slushy roads, on the verge of falling asleep, indifferent to the safety of anyone else about on the roads.

This daily upstream battle with time has made him sweaty and coarse. The ninth line of the poem, the ninth message template, is telling: sorry, I can’t help you on this. Period.

I calmly exit the menu. Now I’ve been there too; I’ve seen it and explored it. I look at my phone with new eyes; I poke the power button more gently with the matchstick. This isn’t any old telephone.

I know now that this machine was designed for a monster, a non-human, an unbending taskmaster, a corporate climber consumed by haste. If the manufacturer has any complaints about this criticism, call me or send a text. Let me have it. I have the answer ready in my device, the legendary message template number nine, the message of messages for this age: sorry, I can’t help you on this.

Dominant perspective

My tit my milk my mother my nappies my teddy my lego my yard my friend my willy my game my dad my ball my clothes my braces my instrument my cd-roms my ice cream my joystick my homework my report card my pimples my grades my idols my dreams my enemies my race my faith my doubt my summer job my free time my nerves my prejudice my dog my pirouette my woody my period my condom my chlamydia my antibiotics my studies my fantasies my beer my realities my major my flat my exams my women my men my room my blues my car my problems my graduation my unemployment my career my skin my job my pay my benefits my orgasm my loan my vitamins my stress my feelings my score my health my duty my software my viruses my family my politics my husband my wife my dog my kids my fights my long johns my cottage my company flat my briefcase my monitor my interest rates my income my desk my boss my curve my pressure my appendix my insurance my prospects my elf hat my position my retirement my ass my relatives my golf my flex time my furlough my retraining my placement my visa my tonsils my credit information my firm my idea my liver my climax my fiftieth my picture my phone bill my affair my stress leave my separation my lawsuit my stepfamily my pain my cognac my blood pressure my diet my soul my nordic walking my nightmares my early retirement my depression my memory my pill box my banana my haemorrhoids my urinary incontinence my prayer my terror my cynicism my property my hate my jealousy my bitterness my resentment my estate my consumption my pyjamas my sheet my rattle my

An introductory course in Fennomania

The Finns are father Noah’s grandson’s progeny and the original inhabitants of the North, from whom the Swedes, Norwegians and Danes are descended.

Rostiophus was the first king of Finland. He was so intelligent that there was no riddle in the world for which he could not find a solution. His speciality was the prediction of future events, which proceeded in such a fashion that all of his predictions turned out to be correct after the fact. So Rostiophus ruled without any assistants; who would have been able to help him?

Fornjótr, the second king of Finland, continued along the path set out by Rostiophus, to such a degree that foreigners queued up to become his disciples. At that time people imagined that the harder you drank at a funeral, the greater the honour to the deceased. This is precisely how Fornjótr’s funeral was conducted.

The daughter of the third king, Snio, made the mistake of marrying the king of Sweden, who eventually abandoned his newlywed bride in Finland when he did a runner back to his homeland to fight a war. The daughter of Snio was vexed and hired the witch woman Huld to kill her good-for-nothing spouse. Huld sent a curse named the Tyra to do the job, and the king of Sweden was soon a goner.

The fourth king, Atus, concentrated on domestic politics. He crafted a law according to which, for reasons of national economy, only a portion of a deceased person’s property was to be buried with him. The dead were embittered by this and rose from their graves by night, causing instability in the kingdom.

The fifth king, Gris, sailed with his brother Amund to Stockholm and burned the king of Sweden to death in his manor. The Finns were greatly pleased by this act.

Amund continued on as the sixth king after Gris and ordered the adoption of uniform top-to-toe underwear across the land.

Joculus, the seventh king of Finland, concentrated entirely on the intricacies of trade with the East.

The eighth king of Finland was named Ukko [‘Old man’]. This king had a wife name Akka [‘Old woman’, ‘hag’], after whom all greatly revered women in Finland have been called from that time on.

The treacherous king of Sweden, Agni, slew Frost, the ninth king of Finland, and made off with his daughter Skjalv to make her his bride in Stockholm. The cunning Skjalv hung her own necklace around Agni’s deceitful neck, supposedly to please him, but when night came she hung the old man by the chain from a pine tree, freed her brother Loge from prison, slew Agni’s troops, set the fleet ablaze and sailed victorious to Finland with Loge. The adventuresome siblings found each other, got married, and the brother-husband Loge ruled Finland as its tenth king.

Danish pirates were raising hell along the coast at about this time. The eleventh king of Finland, Tengil, took it upon himself to right this injustice, sailed to Denmark and KO’d the famous boxing champion of the Danish army, Arngrim. After that he pillaged and burned the entire country.

Following the death of Tengil, the man chosen as the twelfth king, Motle, was from an entirely different planet. He spent his hours in silent contemplation in his chambers and distinguished himself by giving high-quality individual instruction to Gunilla, the daughter of the king of Norway. This private lecture series led to Gunilla’s pregnancy, and she gave birth to a man child, Sumble.

Some claim that we received the name ‘suomalaiset’ [Finns] from our thirteenth king, Sumble, but this may be rightly doubted. The name is derived from the scales, ‘suomu’, of fish. This theory is supported by the matchless bounty of the yearly fish harvest in Finland [Suomi].

Unfortunately, we do not know anything about Kuso, the fourteenth king of Finland, but he was surely a good and righteous autocrat.

The fifteenth and final king of Finland, Dumber, sired a son to whom he gave the name Bard. While still in his swaddling clothes Bard could interpret dreams flawlessly. With the aid of the astute Bard, Dumber also ascended to the throne of Iceland, where he was honoured as a god.

After the reign of Dumber the history of our country has been on the skids.

The sanctity of the grave

I will die, you will die, he will die, we will die, you all will die, they will die.

A friend told me that over the last ten years several virtual burial grounds have been planned, drained and opened for business on the Internet, places where the bereaved can buy the deceased a digital grave, with letters of condolences and all. There, flowers do not wilt, shoes do not get muddy, candles do not go out and vandals do not deface.

That most basic and certain assumption of our existence, that ‘from dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return’, has been shaken.

As our Iron Age cemeteries have been excavated, it has been noted that the essential objects of the life of the deceased were placed alongside him, even though broken in pieces. The object was broken to release its spirit so that the faithful object could also serve its master in the underworld.

This was a beautiful and understandable act in an age when objects were few and never haphazardly created; instead each truly had its own purpose and substance.

Now we each have a thousand gadgets and a million virtual shadows as our bane, as we chase the jackpot, the real pay-off.

Grant us, oh Old Woman, chief goddess, this wish: that this pile of junk and its manifold reflections will not hound us in death, but that we shall be allowed to rest at last in the grave.

Translated by Owen Witesman

‘I was eating a late breakfast, without a care in the world, when it happened.’

He snaps off the recorder. He has said the same thing three times now, but he always loses his train of thought right there. Why is it so difficult to continue? In his mind, the next part feels quite clear, but the words simply won’t come out of his mouth. He ought to say that his wife left him yesterday, on the twelfth of February, at 10:48 AM, following a three-minute fifteen-second briefing.

He remembers how the clock face kept flashing over his wife’s shoulder as he listened to the precise sentences that dropped from her lips. She spoke very clearly, so slowly in fact that after the first minute it felt like watching the sign-language newscast. His wife was the main newscaster, and there ought to have been a sign language interpreter behind her shoulder, who would have made the pauses and slow tempo understandable. But all that was there was the clock with its second hand ticking inexorably onwards. It looked like a sledgehammer pounding the life out of everything in its path. After three times around, time had been so thoroughly killed that there was no chance of resuscitation.

Or so he thought. In actuality, time had simply shifted from the clock into his head.

His wife left him 27 hours, two minutes, and fourteen seconds ago.

Once when he was young, he watched a documentary on television about a world-famous author, an old man at the time, now dead. The author said that all of his stories – a considerable number – got their start in the same way: a character had come to life in his head and started to explain himself into reality, so that the author had to take hold of the explanation and write about it to make a record of the character. The author himself had always thought this method was a flimsy one, but it seemed it never failed him. He had been married three times, fathered seven children, and lived in four different countries, but the most real experience for him was the writing, that substanceless place where he might submerge himself, and create a story and characters who spoke inside his head.

From then on he, Julius, had waited for an imaginary character to start talking in his head, someone for him to listen to, who would take control and demand his attention, but nothing ever happened. For the last few years he had started to wonder if he would be able to stand such characters even if they did take up residence in his mind. He would get annoyed with them just like he got annoyed at beggars on street-corners or kids making noise under his window – he would pass them by, or tell them to go play in the park.

The same memory keeps troubling him: decades ago on a business trip in central Europe he had heard a story about a soccer player, a respected league player who was always given plenty of time on the field and lots of responsibility. For some reason, the man began nevertheless to fear that he was turning into a soccer ball, that he would end up bounced and kicked around the field just like a soccer ball. He wanted to stay close to his beloved sport, but he could no longer devote himself to the struggle on the field, so he became a lineman, then a referee, then the lead referee, but it didn’t ease his fears. He got drawn into administrative duties, first at the national level, then in the international field – although his field now consisted of meeting rooms, conferences and committees. His career went unusually smoothly, but the whole time he had a longing to touch a soccer ball. If only he didn’t have that unbearable fear!

That story had haunted him from the moment he heard it.

His thoughts jump around, scatter here and there. It’s from lack of sleep. After his wife’s monologue, he still couldn’t sleep. Of course he tried, but just when the jumble of images in his head would start to darken into a dream, he would be conscious that his life depended upon staying awake. His system would be on alert, his heart would pound, he would be in complete self-defence mode, as if he were trapped at the edge of a cliff, and would fall if he lost consciousness. And the human will to survive is so deep that Julius stays awake.

Just one small suitcase. ‘I can get the rest later,’ his wife said, walking calmly to the door, and slipping out, like she had thousands of times before. For a few minutes he didn’t really put together what was happening – whether his wife was going to the theatre with some friend, or on a business trip, or popping out for a walk as she took out the garbage. She was leaving him? Every piece of furniture was still in its place, the dishes were there where they had been put down, the pictures and mirrors were there on the wall, the arm of the sofa still had a little red wine stain faded to nothingness from the wash. But everything looked empty, emptied by his wife’s departure.

The telephone beeps a warning, he attaches the battery to the charger but leaves the receiver on, just in case, a little package that slips into your hand that you can use to get in touch with the rest of the world – but he doesn’t want to. Though a few hours later he did go to the store to buy a bit of bread, cheese, and coffee, and ran into Leo, and they even chatted for a moment. He didn’t mention his wife leaving – its not the kind of thing that you talk about with acquaintances like him. Leo said he watched a sporting event over the weekend – ski jumping, to be exact – and according to the commentator, one competitor ‘finished his round with a fall from his upper torso.’ Leo was still amused by this, and once it would have got at least a smile out of him, too, but now his answer stuck in his throat. He claimed he was coming down with something and went quickly home before Leo could ask him to play chess – it was already several weeks since the last time they played. Playing chess would have betrayed his sleep deprivation, and then he would have had to explain.

No one has called since his wife left. They aren’t expecting him at work because it’s his winter vacation. He doesn’t keep in touch with his relatives regularly, and they don’t keep in touch with him. They have no children. The dog died a year ago, and they didn’t get another one. There is nothing to disturb his life now that his wife is gone.

Sometimes the phone has a life of its own. He didn’t always remember to lock his mobile as he slipped it into his pocket. One time he turned the ring-tone off while he was playing chess and when he came home from Leo’s house and took it out of his pocket, there were 24 messages on it. There are many things that I would have understood, if only they hadn’t been explained to me, the display said. The phone had ordered 24 aphorisms from the bottom of his pocket, and more kept coming, although he kept pressing buttons trying to get it to stop. An aphorism service, 1.50 euros a piece. Who knew there was such a thing?

He had, however, also had a positive experience when a phone decided to make its own calls. Gunilla. She was a colleague who had gone with him to a seminar in Oslo. At the end of an intense week of work, they had the last evening free, and Gunilla wasn’t flying out until morning. They ended up in a night club where they lingered for a long time. Gunilla drank only one glass of wine, and he drank about as temperately as usual. Conversation, dancing. At the end of the evening, they exchanged their personal phone numbers. And that was all. Two months went by and they didn’t call each other. They didn’t even meet by accident, because Gunilla worked in a field office on the other side of town. He waited for the woman to make the next move, and maybe she was doing the same thing, waiting for him. Of course she was. But he was content.

Then finally one evening, the phone rang. He was at home alone, listening to Schubert. His wife was out shopping – Christmas was coming, and he himself was trying to escape all of the hubbub.

Caller: Gunilla. He turned down the music. Blood hummed through his head as he answered the phone. What was going to happen now? At first all he heard was a rustling, then a strange squeaking noise. Little by little he constructed an image from the noises. Gunilla was walking down a snowy street, quite secluded, because there was no traffic noise in the background – but then, she did live in the suburbs. The snow was squeaking under her feet, she coughed suddenly – maybe the cold took her breath away. He thought about the objects around him: a wallet, of course, full of money and credit cards, maybe children’s pictures, a make-up bag for sure, with lipstick and powder, nail clippers, maybe a paperback to read in transit, feminine hygiene products, keys, tissues, a silky lining…. Gunilla had kept his number on her phone for more than two months, and for a brief moment he found himself in her purse, witnessing her breathing, her footsteps, her cough.

It was pleasant. Gunilla must certainly have noticed later what had happened – noticed who her phone had accidently called – but she didn’t get in touch with him, didn’t explain. He didn’t bring it up, either, ever. At the seminar the following year, in Copenhagen this time, he heard that Gunilla was on maternity leave. It was only on his way home that he realised that Gunilla must have already been pregnant that evening they spent together. The pregnancy would have been so far along that she had to have known about it, even though it didn’t yet show enough that he would have noticed it when they were dancing.

To his own wonder, he was grateful, somehow, for that evening. There had already been a child growing in Gunilla’s womb, and he couldn’t get any closer to that trio of woman, man, and child – not then, and not now. And he never would get into that trio, because his wife was already beyond her childbearing years, and nothing had happened. And from the bottom of Gunilla’s purse, he, Julius, had followed the rhythm of her steps for a moment, rocked along with her like the unfinished child in her womb, sitting in his own living room, on his own sofa, with a cognac in his hand, safe from fatherhood.

He washes the laundry but doesn’t feel like hanging it to dry. Maybe he’ll do it eventually. The bread is gone again, coffee scorches his stomach. His sister calls to invite them to their god-daughter’s birthday party Sunday after next. He says sure, although he can’t fathom an event so far in the future. Days and weeks don’t fit on a clock face, only seconds, minutes, and hours, and now that they’re in his head, he follows their progress like a formula-one driver follows his route. The cross-country journeys of days and weeks aren’t for the sleepless, their future doesn’t penetrate beyond the next curve in the road.

His wife hasn’t gone to stay in a hotel – he understands that much, at least – and she hasn’t gone to any of her friends’ houses, or her mother’s or her sister’s. When a woman starts to weave a web of secrets with another man, you can see it in everything she does – her posture, her way of walking, the way she turns her head in the middle of a sentence. If you know how to look for it. But he didn’t know how. He probably didn’t even want to know. Why would he want to, if knowing felt like this?

He remembers training the dog years ago. If they were in the park and the dog ran in an undesired direction, it didn’t do any good to just yell no, because the concept was too abstract, it wasn’t connected with anything. You had to call the dog, giving the command with a clear gesture: ‘Come!’ Then you might give it a treat for obeying and the other objects of the dog’s attention would lose their interest.

An easy thing to do, but Julius didn’t know how to adapt it to his wife.

He counts with pen and paper; he’s been awake for 46 and a half hours. About three and a half hours less time has passed since his wife left. The phone rang twice after his sister called, both times from an unfamiliar number – he didn’t answer. Snow is falling softly – large flakes. It’s been 51 days since Christmas Eve, more than seven weeks. There are 29 days in this month, because it’s a leap year.

The evening passes slowly, night falls, then come the wee hours, then morning. People take showers, eat breakfast, get dressed to go out. Ordinary sounds that he never noticed until they were missing from his own house. He sits and listens to other people’s lives. Time passes, full daylight comes. Suddenly he is very very small, maybe five years old, lying under a blanket with a fever, his temperature is still rising, he is shivering. He tries to remember his name, but he can’t get it into his mind, and a terror grows, and time passes, and he still can’t remember, and now he’s yelling at the top of his lungs, and his mother snatches him from under the blanket, she has to get the fever down, she’s in a panic, it’s delirium! The word delirium starts to make him laugh. He confuses it with Siberia, a word he knows, used when the frost cakes the edges of the windows and outside your breath makes thick clouds in the air. Cold as Siberia. His mother’s cool fingers press against his forehead and suddenly, whether he’s in a delirium or in Siberia, he remembers his name: He’s Julius. He’s Julius even when he can’t remember, even when he doesn’t remember to hold on tight to his name.

And now he has the same insight again, and laughs at it so he forgets to watch out for the cliff, falls over the edge, floats slowly like a snowflake, falls asleep, sleeps, the light darkens and comes to an end and is kindled again, and he doesn’t hear it, and he doesn’t hear when the telephone rings, and then a message beeps, and it rings again, doesn’t hear when the key turns in the lock, when his wife comes inside and puts her suitcase down, walks across the room, and covers him with a blanket, opens the windows, and goes into the shower, puts on comfortable clothes and unpacks her suitcase, brushes her hair and makes coffee. His wife looks around and spreads back out into her home, and the dishes are once again her dishes, the rugs are her rugs, the furniture her furniture. He doesn’t hear any of this, he just sleeps, sleeps for fifteen hours, and when he wakes up, he is the same man and his wife says calmly that she will give him one last chance.

Julius yawns. Maybe the other man didn’t really want her all to himself, or maybe his wife simply noticed that she does better when she’s yearning to be somewhere else than she does when she actually moves there. The main thing is that everything is just as it was before.

Julius feels refreshed enough that he calls Leo and suggests a game of chess.

Translated by Lola Rogers

The congregation sits in the church pews and the jackdaws caw in the belfry.
We smell of wet dog, the rain made us wet and it is cold but the singing warms us, the hymn rises to the roof and above the roof dwells God, Amen.
We saw Thomas Davies on the hill, he is working in Mr Darwin’s garden,
the atheist and lunatic, he stood in the field alone and the water lashed his face
an irreligious pit pony wandering in the darkness he is from Wales
does the godless man think he can stand in the rain without getting wet did he get an umbrella or bat wings from the devil
perhaps Thomas imagines that he can hold back the rain and the rain not hold him back, he thinks he is more exalted than God with his head in the clouds
The church’s hard pews press into posteriors, the poor man will not grow fatter, for there are no fat and lean years but only lean ones, and thin are the poor man’s sheep and cows and children too, but the rich man cultivates weeds for his amusement as Mr Darwin did and earns money and fame!
Weeds are an allegory, as the Bible says, and God had the devil of a time pruning the rushes the thistles the couch grass and the groves of Asherah which the pagans planted in honour of their heathen gods
Now the name of atheism is science
The Lord destroyed the groves of Asherah, and we believe that He walks in the kitchen gardens of the misbelievers and cuts the weeds with a burning sickle before they can scatter their seeds to all the world
calling them Knowledge & Wisdom, when they are blurring what has been clear since the Day of Creation
light on the waters, His is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.
When I pray I place my hands in a cross, I join the left and right sides of myself together and between the palms of my hands is a roof for God even though I am not in church
I pity Thomas Davies, for he may very well catch a mortal chill out there in the rain
pity is a strand of the mercy of Heaven in man,
for all God’s creations have their heart on the left side of their breast, though I do not know how it is with the fish and the serpents and the lizards, Thomas’s wife died and his eleven-year-old daughter has been feeble-minded since birth, and his six-year-old son is small and frail and strange and cannot hold his own in fights
We took Thomas soup and bread and comfort when Gwyneth died three years ago, but Thomas had smashed his wife’s bed to splinters with an axe and was burning the wood and bedclothes on a pyre in the garden which was spitting sparks and acrid smoke, the children’s faces were black with soot and the little boy was poking the fire with a stick
When a man sets up false gods for himself like the theory of Science and Evolution he mocks our Lord the Creator of all things and punishment will follow
therefore we must warn our fellow human beings off the rocks of sin and shine more brightly than the lamps of the wise virgins

like the Eddystone Lighthouse

Thomas refused our help, grimaced and laughed, the smoke made him cough and we ran on our way, and the freshly baked wheat loaf fell out of the cloth and rolled into the ditch, and when we had tea and spoke of the word of the Bible and the bread of life, we found many verses about this subject, for Christ is the bread of life
truly we began to laugh when we saw such a big loaf rolling into the ditch like a wheel that had fallen off a cart
Jesus’ light warns Christians off the rocks of sin
but Davies’ fire was a blasphemous pyre from Satan, we have heard that in India a wife is burned alive together with the body of her husband,
and on many coasts like Rhossil and Port Eynon unrighteous fires are lit to lead vessels astray in the darkness which is an allegory of the case of Davies
yet I wonder for according to the women of the village the bed was made of solid oak and fashioned with the finest handicraft goodness knows how many guineas it must have cost and burning in the open air like that the fire did not even warm the room

It is not good for a person to fawn on his superiors, though we want to be on good terms with everyone and keep life in the village harmonious,
and Mr Darwin himself is a sweet and pleasant gentleman who has travelled round the world and written big books and knows lords and Londoners and even foreign celebrities though I forget their names,
and in his house he has a shower from which water pours as from a watering-can just at the turn of a tap,
there are also many children in the family, though Mary Eleanor died in infancy and Charles Waring at the age of two and Anne Elizabeth at ten, for Darwin the deaths of his children were surely a great sorrow, one which many of us have also experienced
He is on good terms with our vicar the Reverend Innes,
but those who want to repudiate God invoke his books and Thomas Davies is surely one of them, Amen.

The most beautiful thing about plants is their silence. The second most beautiful thing is their motionlessness, I wrote when Gwyn died, am reading now, it is evening,
I wrote unscientifically,
when even sympathy boomed and good will would not leave me in peace
grief weighs heavy but it is a rock I bear myself,
in my view the victims of revenge and mercy are in the same situation because other people take up their case as their own.
I have decided to study the static electricity of plants on the basis of what Gustav Theodor Fechner and Edward Solly have written, I am going to try to adapt the use of electricity to the growth of plants, perhaps the plants’ sharp apices function as a kind of lightning conductor and collect electricity from the atmosphere, facilitating the alternation of electrical charges between the air and the soil, if I could connect the plants in metal pots to a static generator by hanging wire netting over them and earthing it in the soil with a rod, the plants would grow well, but I have no generator.
My benefactors understand illness and death also, but not the fact that I want to be alone, because being alone is what they themselves fear most of all.
When I lost my mind and the children were asleep, I wrote
The silence of plants calms the mind, and I rejoice because plants do not run away like animals or fly away like birds, they stay where they are sometimes for hundreds of years like the oaks, or they vanish in winter and like the oriental squill rise from the ground or they spread out joyfully like the balsam that hurls its seeds far and wide.
When Gwyn was dying I did not think about where she was going but what she was leaving behind for she rejected Catherine and John. She did not leave by a single opening of the door, instead death held the door ajar for many months. I wrote that
a plant dies easily, an annual withers when the seeds are ready.

The lights of the village gleam in the darkness like blurred dots as Thomas Davies pulls the curtains over his windows, the children are asleep, Cathy sleeps wrapped in the quilt and radiates warm breathing, John sleeps on his back with his head bent backwards, I lean over to look at John’s eyes
“One should pay attention to how the eyes look during sleep,” Hippocrates wrote. “If when the eyelids are half open a part of the whites become visible… this is a bad sign, which presages certain and early death.”
Old theories,
the space in the house grows when the sleepers leave their places to the one who keeps vigil
can one do anything but love.
I write things down to remember them, as if memory didn’t work by itself, a warm jacket for Cathy and those new shoes for John

When I stood alone on the hill and the rain struck my face I cursed heaven for not caring about me or my children,
the wolf’s prayer is a howl.
The vicar said to mother that in bad times one should think of good times, when father died in the mining accident with his legs and torso crushed, because good times would come. Father’s head rested on the pillow and stubble grew on his chin even after death, at the funeral I thought of the worms that were wriggling into his nose and ears, mother was thrilled by the new black shoes and my younger brothers and sisters by the iced chocolate cake, my school attendance was paid for by the mining company.

The lamp’s light is reflected in the window, the anguish presses my lungs together. I intended, I did not want what I intended, in other people’s talk my intention became truth and deed, my fame runs before me like a wild shadow.

After Gwyn’s death the vicar said that the parish helps its members to bear their sorrow, what does that mean?
The rain is pounding holes in the surface of the water, the circles widen and vanish and I cannot show my grief to anyone.
The vicar said that sophistry in matters of faith is a sickness of the soul and that irony has no place where God is concerned. I replied that nature does not know any irony either, nor do the animals, the plants and the stones, it is only man who is capable of it because he is able to think two contrary things at once. What then is human nature, when a volcanic eruption can be predicted but one cannot predict that a man will dig an axe out of his rucksack and on a train split the skull of a man he does not know at all. Cause and effect change places at random.
If there is no soul there is only the body, which you must carry yourself, when you’re dead it weighs more, six people are needed to carry it.
The vicar tried to console me, thank you thank you,
for grief is a muddy pool in which one cannot see one’s own reflection nor one’s children nor one’s neighbours but everything presses one into the mire and sorrow begets new sorrows.

I pray in rancour and in unbelief,
I pray to a God who does not exist
I pray against my better judgement, I pray to God out of coercion,
without trust,
my prayer is a cold drop of water on a bare branch,
I ask for strength for the children’s sake and for my own.

At nightfall the reflected light of the snow remains in the landscape when Thomas Davies and Cathy and John walk to the field, Thomas wants to make a drawing of the area whose dimensions are 55 x 22 yards as in the diagram:

Thomas leads the way and counts his paces, Cathy and John follow behind, they all
stamp their feet, treading a straight and narrow path through the snow, that way is north, that way is south. Thomas puts branches in the corners as markers, and later, when the wooden poles are hammered into the ground and the wire is stretched they will have to use a compass for accuracy because the ground circuits travel from east to west and the wire that is carried through the air by the poles must be
precisely positioned in a north-south direction,
they will have to carve poles and pins of the right dimensions, in the spring the task will be to turn the earth and dig ditches for the underground wires. That is the plan. In Scotland the harvest of a field was increased threefold by the use of electricity.
When back at home they are eating stew in the hot kitchen, Thomas says that the wires will be particularly effective at conducting electricity in thunderstorms, and that the electricity will stimulate the production of nitric acid which is good for the roots of the plants, and when they have finished eating and the plates have been cleared from the table John draws a house-shaped quadrangle on Cathy’s paper and a circle for a cabbage that is bigger than the house.

On the second Sunday in Advent it is snowing when Thomas Davies stands at the front door of his house viewing the measured area whose size is 55 x 22 yards, his footprints and the footprints of his children are visible in the old dry snow, large flakes are floating down on the field, the church bells are ringing, their echo carries on the cold air, recedes and disappears,
when the pealing of the bells and people’s voices die away, a snow-white silence dominates the landscape,
I no longer shout my cold prayers towards heaven,
although my despair is stretched by force of hand, my soul is nevertheless a strong, four-strand rope whose core is hemp or jute, when reason and hope rise up after a long season of despair, it is time to think and make plans and banish the God who has possessed me since childhood and whose voice has been planted in our heads and will not give us the chance to speak, now
God falls silent, but the sun rises and sets,
he departed, was silent at last, he
watched over Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise, punished women with pain and condemned the earth to grow thorns and thistles, he drove human beings to the east of Eden and placed watchmen at the gates, he wanted to wipe human beings from the face of the earth, to destroy the cattle, the reptiles and the birds of the air, he wanted the Flood to destroy all flesh, all that contains the spirit of life, though he did make a pact with Noah and put a rainbow in the sky as a sign of it yet he did not cease to torment human beings and tempted Job, Lot and Isaac, he punished Egypt with frogs and gnats and gadflies and cattle plague and boils and hailstones and locusts and darkness, he did not let Moses go to the promised land, he made laws and when they were imposed he rushed among the heathens to destroy their groves of Asherah and stoned the worshippers of false gods, he threatened to strike them with eczema, abscesses and madness, he cut off their thumbs and big toes, put them to the sword and set fire to their cities, he cried like a madman “You did not listen to my voice, What have you done?” and whenever his wrath was kindled he gave the people around him into the hands of their enemies,
he humiliated, killed and ordered to be killed, he interfered in the lives of nations, tribes, families and villages, his shouting split their ears and his thirst for revenge was insatiable, in my head was planted a cry which gave me no rest by day or by night, nor did he leave in peace those people who in the Lord’s name wished one another ill, that pious din nearly pierced my eardrums,
until the evening before last I saw God, he was short, thickset, swarthy, hirsute, with long hair, I saw him walking past the house with his head bowed, he said something just before he walked to the edge of the forest and vanished from sight,
he is silent, and the parish is silent, and I hear what silence sounds like when the wind does not even blow in the bare boughs of the trees and the snowflakes float to the ground, he has gone but has left me my daughter and my son who are the tender reinforcement of a four-strand rope

When the sun goes down, the coolness of the spring evening rises from the shadows.
A blackbird flies to the top of the bell-tower and sings a clear wandering melody that carries far across the treetops and the roofs of the houses.
In the garden of Down House Thomas cleans the soil from his spade, his manure fork, his rake and his harrow, hangs the tools in their places in the shed and closes the door. He washes his hands in the metal basin, takes his jacket from the nail on the wall of the shed and puts it on. Thomas goes out by the back gate and strides across the meadows up the hill. His haste resembles joy, for today he is going to set up the poles in the experimental plot where the wires are to be laid. On the kitchen table is the improved design and in the shed the poles and pins that were made during the winter. In the new design there are eight long poles, and in place of one above-ground wire there are so many that they make a network all over the surface area.
John is running downhill. He is wearing shoes that were made by a cobbler in London, and he can run fast in them. Because the bones in his right foot are half an inch shorter than those of his left foot, he got his own special shoes, and he surely suffers from no illness, for he can run from the church to the Gorringes crossroad and back again, faster than the Other Baileys’ boy. Cathy runs after John.
Thomas fetches an iron rod and a spade from the shed. He and the children carry the poles and the pins to the edge of the area that is marked out with sticks and branches.

If the red-cheeked young woman who is travelling in the carriage with a plump baby in her arms were now, at the bend in the road, to look out of the window, she would see against the sunset two children standing with hanging heads and a tall, slightly stooping man holding a spade and would perhaps suppose that someone was being buried on the hillside, but she would be wrong because the moment is not sorrowful but full of hope and excitement.
What does Thomas Davies plant in the electrified kitchen garden?
He plants barley, sugar beet and strawberries.
What did God say to Thomas Davies? That is something of which I know nothing.

Translated by David McDuff

I’m a chimney sweep’s daughter, born October 1962 as a gift, a light to a darkened world. I’ve had lots of mothers, but none of them ever stuck around for good. One of them gave birth to me, so she’s Mother, not mother. Her name is Dewdrop, because water has spilled over the only photograph of My Mother and now her face has dissolved into a single translucent droplet; her nose, cheeks and chin are now a fat, shiny blob that looks like it’s about to fall out of the bottom of the picture.

Once upon a time there was my father, eleven years of age. He was a little chimney sweep standing on the roof of a four-storey house, right on the edge of the chimney. My father was only an apprentice back then; the master’s name was Asell, and one of them was going to have to climb down that big chimney stack.

Master Asell couldn’t do it. His stomach was like a blood-red, full moon slowly rising above the horizon. This puzzled people back during the Depression. People on the streets wondered what on earth Asell filled his stomach with. Did he eat wallpaper or newspapers? The animal glue in the furniture? The bark from the old pines in Toukolanmäki? The fragments of bone china that littered the ground on the deserted plot next to the old coffee-roasting house? The melted lumps the size of dogs that used to be glass windows in the same? Leaves from the trees? The leaves of the maple trees on Vallilantie road were a particular delicacy; they were real chromosome monsters, they were so big. Somehow Asell was getting more grub than anyone else. Rumour had it that he knew one of the guards at the jail in Sörnäinen who handed over naughty children for him to gobble up.

Asell rubbed his belly and ordered the little chimney sweep down the chimney; all the other apprentices were serving at the front line. All except one, a young man called Korpela, who had come back after nine months away reborn – a nervous wreck, that is – and afraid of nothing quite as much as he was afraid of darkness and confined spaces. During his breaks Korpela would often disappear behind the incinerator and wrap his arms around his body as if he were trying to tie himself into an overhand knot. He never smoked a cigarette again, always said he could see the flares of the artillery in their glowing embers. In blackness Korpela could sense the presence of death; nowadays he always came to work in white clothing. He was like an able seaman afraid of a paddling pool.

During the war years, flues were often badly swept, many of them so blocked up that you couldn’t make out the unique smells of individual apartments any more. All you could smell was the reek of different kinds of soot, nubbly soot, shining soot, tar soot, oily soot. Korpela shouted from the apartment below, so that those up on the roof would know which flue to come down.

The little chimney sweep lowered himself down into the large chimney stack to listen; the flues only split off inside the shaft. Ahoy! shouted Korpela from down below. The chimney sweep pricked up his ears and lowered his brush with the cane handle down into the flue from which the cry had echoed.

Just then there came an air-raid warning.

Asell shouted, ‘Out of the shaft, boy!’ He headed straight for the ladder and clambered along the rooftop as nimbly as a hippo on a trapeze. He used wooden clogs and stepped so that the rooftop ridge fitted into the groove between the sole and the heel. His toes all jutted in different directions, you know, just like Chaplin. He knew how to skate along the tin rooftop. Korpela and the other apprentices already used rubber-soled shoes, the better with which to feel the contours of the roof. Master Asell belonged to the Old School; he made all his tools in his own workshop and didn’t order them in from Ekström’s brush and broom factory at Albertinkatu street 12….

Bombs began pummelling the city; the little chimney sweep could feel the blasts through the layers of bricks around the pipe. They sent tremors running through the veins of the rocks and along the pavements, along the paths that only a moment ago were filled with busy little ants in their smart neckties. The chimney sweep held his ear against the shaft: the explosions were more powerful on the side facing the sea. The blasts circled around the shaft and the chimney sweep circled with them.

He was safe in the shaft. He couldn’t see anyone and because of that nobody would be able to find him.

All of a sudden bricks began raining in from the sides of the shaft, as though a ladder had suddenly appeared beneath the little chimney sweep. He could feel the chimney stack rocking back and forth, like sitting in a swing made of bricks.

After one violent swing to the side, the chimney stack didn’t right itself again and the chimney sweep toppled onto his back. The whole building’s spine snapped with a crash and one of the stairwells fell around him like a blanket. The daylight at the top of the chimney stack disappeared and the little chimney sweep lay in darkness, covered with a thick layer of bricks. The chimney stack had become much smaller; he was lying in a coffin. The boy tried to edge his way forward through what was left of the shaft but couldn’t get his right leg to move. A brick that had flown out of the wall had smashed into his shin.

The little chimney sweep managed to remove the shoe from his other foot and felt his trapped leg with his toes. He couldn’t tell which splinters were from the brick wall and which from his own bones.

He lay there quietly. The ground around him had stopped trembling. The sirens fell silent. The world was soundless, dark, dusty. Some of the flues led to other places; he could make out the sound of a cat mewing, a child crying. He caught the smell of lye. A washbasin had been toppled over on the stove and now a sliver of lye was trickling its way through the crooked mesh of flues like a slow-worm. After a while the little chimney sweep was certain he could feel a burning sensation as the lye ate away at the soles of his shoes before starting on his trapped foot, one toe at a time.

There was some other creature caught in the flue with him. The chimney sweep decided it must have been an angel that had come to collect him. The angel’s wings fluttered against his forehead and its claws scratched his neck. The chimney sweep couldn’t move his hand to protect himself, so he pressed his face tight against the brick wall. The boy breathed soot deep into his lungs and felt as though he were cradled in his mother’s arms, though in fact he didn’t have a mother.

The boy slept in fits and woke again, many times; his mouth was dry. He realised that he was changing; the chimney stack was slowly cementing him into itself, then it would hollow him full of flues. Through his slowly emptying blood vessels and disappearing bone marrow he would send smoke signals into the sky. Strangely enough, it was a rather pleasant feeling, becoming part of a system of flues. Every young chimney sweep should be buried in a chimney stack. Humans are just shells covering a network of flues; wet and hollow like reeds washed up in the laundry bay. If only the pain would ease.

The flue angel interrupted the boy as he was becoming part of the stack; it kept tapping and scratching his neck and cheeks. Get out of my kingdom, go to hell, the angel bluntly informed him.

The chimney sweep bit into chunks of brick in an attempt to quench his thirst. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that every last drop of water evaporated from bricks when they were fired. There must surely be a few drops left. You just needed to crunch hard enough with your teeth.

Before long he began praying to the flue angel to take all the spilt pots of lye throughout the crumbled house and make their contents run along the pipes like a scented river. He would drink from that river, anything at all, anything liquid. His tongue had swollen like dough; with that in his mouth it was almost impossible to breathe. Only the tip of his tongue had been able to pop out between his cracked lips, and even that had split in two. With his forked tongue the boy lapped at the air.

Continuous night. So long, longer than a deep sleep. For a while the little chimney sweep drifted off to a hilly land where the houses grew upside down in green hills, their roofs pointing to the ground and their cellars rising up towards the sky. The houses were able to rise into the air using the power of the flames spurting from their chimneys. Many of the houses had two chimneys, they were rudders; you could steer the houses with a helm. The little chimney sweep knew that he had reached a place where chimney sweeps come when they die. He watched with admiration as the houses floated in the air and swapped plots with one another. These houses could have taught butterflies a thing or two about suppleness of movement. One house shunned direct sunlight and lived in a secluded spot by the riverbank, shaded by the alders, sunlight sparkling gently through the leaves. This house was never too cold, never too hot. The house moved from one side of the riverbank to the other as the sun moved across the sky, and from the kitchen window came a hand with a gleaming fishing rod which the house’s hungry inhabitant used to collect brown trout from the swirling water. With a bucket he collected drinking water. The little chimney sweep knew that the hand was his own; he could see his own house and knew that this was where he was heading.

However, it was inside the pipe that the little chimney sweep came to and not in the land of green hills. His tears were short-lived; they dried before they reached the end of his tongue, hissing as they evaporated on his cheeks. Again he slipped away, this time through many layers of gauze and iron plates. But he didn’t return to the land of flying houses; this time his new home was deep at the bottom of a hill in the graveyard, a trench where the bones from the top of the hill rolled down and gathered, slippery with muddy soil. People visiting the graves at the top of the hill didn’t know that the graves of their deceased loved ones were devoid of bones. Their skulls and shoulder blades were on the move. The trench at the bottom of the hillside, a kingdom filled with bones, was ruled by a single monarch; it was controlled by a throbbing heart of bone, whose beats resounded like explosions. And though the little chimney sweep tried to shut out the sound by pressing his ears tightly against the bricks, the explosions travelled through his teeth and into the rest of his body.

The boy gave a squeal and awoke to a sensation of pain, this time in his arm instead of his leg. Something was holding on to his arm, yanking it. His leg was still stuck and the rest of his body wouldn’t move. The chimney sweep glimpsed the face of a strange man. Gradually the face turned into that of Master Asell, with the frightened doe-eyed Korpela standing behind him. The men were talking; someone handed him a bottle of water. The boy was unable to hold it, there was no sensation in his arms, so someone lowered a cane with a battered tin mug attached to the end down into the pipe. It dangled up and down in front of the chimney sweep’s face as with his stiff tongue he tried to catch trickles of water that ran into his eyes and down his cheeks, out of reach.

Master Asell’s voice boomed from the mouth of the pipe: ‘We can’t get your leg free, Jussi. The third-storey flooring beams have collapsed around the base of the shaft. We can clear things away up to your shoulders, but after that the decision is yours.’ Once Asell had informed him of this, a black creature started flapping and clambering across the boy’s face. It vanished into the evening sky with a squawk.

The chimney sweep knew that it was a real angel, his Angel. Asell swiped at the air with his hand; bloody jackdaw.

The chimney sweep waited as a group of men worked on the bricks above him with hammers and iron chisels. He managed to free his arms from inside the collapsed shaft. Asell grabbed his arms, tapped and massaged them, rubbed his fingers with stinging ointment. The little chimney sweep opened his fingers one at a time and mumbled: ‘the ten wonders of the world’. Asell: ‘Jussi is frozen stiff. He’s just babbling, I can’t make him out.’ Asell helped him drink two mugfuls of vodka, and said he could have a third once the job was done.

The master gave the boy a belt that he was to slip around his leg and pull tight. Then Asell handed him a thin saw, gleaming sky-blue and with adjustable wooden handles at both ends. The chimney sweep took hold of the handles and held the saw as far down as he could reach, while the men supported his back in an arch. ‘Is the blade above the knee or beneath?’ asked Asell. The chimney sweep began sawing at his leg in jerky motions. Asell took off his thick belt and stuffed it into the chimney sweep’s mouth. ‘Bite this so you don’t lose your tongue.’ The boy fainted every now and then and Asell would bring him to by slapping his face and yanking his hair. The sirens began to wail, and once again the chimney sweep was left all by himself as his rescuers rushed for their shelter. ‘Is it off yet?’ asked Asell upon his return. It wasn’t. ‘Well, get on with it, then.’

As morning broke Asell and Korpela managed to pull Dad free from the remains of the chimney stack. He was carried across the mass of brick and debris to the hospital, where the doctor counted five different saw marks on what was left of his leg. The wounds were all black and the doctors were sure the young chimney sweep would die of wound fever or an infection.

But he didn’t know what Dad knew: that of all the elements in this world soot is the purest and healthiest.

So Dad became a one-legged chimney sweep. He had sawn off his right leg above the knee and was given a clonking, birch-green prosthetic leg a few centimetres shorter than the real thing.

The day before my eleventh birthday, in October, Dad made me climb up the fire escape to the roof of a six-storey building in Vaasankatu street, even though there was a hatch leading up to the roof. That night the temperature had dropped below freezing and the ladder was covered in a thin icing-sugar layer of frost; the faint, margarine glow of the sun hadn’t shone on it yet. Some of the rungs were dotted with rust. Dad ran his finger along the rusted bars and tasted the rust with the tip of his tongue. ‘They’ll be fine,’ he nodded.

He, on the other hand, was heading for the stairs and was going to use the hatch, complaining about his dodgy knee, the one without the false leg. ‘See you in Heaven,’ he said….

I’d got half way up the wall when a woman with a tiny little nose poked her head out of a small ventilation window beside the fire escape: ‘Getdownoffthatladder, girl, youllfalloff.’ She grabbed the leg of my trousers; she was a thousand kilos heavier than her nose. With her free hand the woman shook the ladder so much that my teeth started chattering in time with the beads of her amber necklace. Rust flew up from the rungs of the fire escape and both of us had to squint.

‘She’s working for me,’ Dad shouted from the rooftop. The woman replied scornfully, ‘Wevenothingtosweep.’ As she spoke she yanked at my trouser leg like it was a disobedient dog’s leash.

Dad: ‘Let her go. She’ll fall.’ Woman: ‘Weveonlyanelectriccooker. Illcallthepolice!’ Dad: ‘Let the girl go first. Then call the police.’

The woman pulled at my trouser leg one more time and tried to sever my arm with her laser eyes. ‘Getinsidebeforeyoufalloffthatthing – betweentheladderandthewall! Thatshowgirlsclimb!’

Dad was waiting up in the eaves; he tousled my curls and told me to follow him to the end of the gable. I supported myself on the chimney and peered inside. The flue was blocked off with a tin cover.

‘What are we going to do? That woman was right; there’s nothing to sweep up here.’

‘Were you afraid?’ Dad answered.

‘Like fuck was I afraid.’

Dad beckoned me over to the wonkiest of all the gables and dangled his legs over the edge. I tapped the eave with the heel of my shoe. A layer of fallen leaves rustled as Himalaya the Mouse ran back and forth along his very own path home. Dad scratched the dried leaves and spoke slowly. ‘Pipey, I don’t understand what makes people that love each other want to sit together cooing at the sunset. They squeeze each other’s hands so tightly on the beach that they’ll end up with gangrene in their wrists as they babble about undying love before the blood-red sky. The fading light is an omen that everything will come to an end one day. It’s the sunrise they should come and watch.’

‘People don’t get up early enough,’ I said.

The October sun hung behind a veil of clouds yet still managed to warm the rooftop, and the sheen of frost that covered the frozen roof hissed as it melted and bubbled, as if the roof were gargling with mouthwash. Behind the railway forecourt a jet plane cut through the air, leaving a puffy trail like whipped cream across the sky. The nearest antenna crackled, blue sparks flashing at its tip. With my finger I started writing my name into the frosted tin plating.

Dad: ‘When I came up on to this roof with your mother in January (in the year 78 B.C.), there were still dozens of stoves, ovens and flues in this house that needed sweeping. Asell didn’t like people bringing their girls on to the roof, but roofs were the only places you could have a moment’s peace. Apartments and streets, workshops and alleyways were always filled with nosey parkers, but up on the roofs there was always space, a bit of calm amidst the crowd. A town above the town. People that only live on the ground, wading about at the bottom of a muddy lake, surrounded by leeches, they don’t realise that twenty-five metres above their heads is another world with a horizon in every direction – Vladivostok over that way, Madagascar down to the side, and over that way the fjords of Norway. They’d be able to see this if their eyes weren’t dazzled with sunspots. Each cloud has its own handwriting. You see, the sky is filled with poems. And I brought Haapala up here to read some them.’

‘What’s a poem?’

Dad continued: I’d brought a blanket in case it got too chilly. And it was cold up here, freezing after a snowstorm. We huddled together, wrapped in that blanket, and waited for the sun to rise – between those two chimneys it came up. Our breath rattled, as if sheets of ice had formed in front of our mouths between every breath and you had to break them with your tongue. Islands hung in the sky across the horizon. And then it happened. What happened? You were made. What?? We had a blanket, remember, there was plenty of room for both of us. There, beside the chimney stack, sheltered from the wind. We put our clothes down over there; we were in a bit of a hurry, didn’t have time to fold them, and it didn’t occur to us that it gets pretty windy up here. Very windy. We didn’t give it a second thought, because we were so warm. How come you were so warm? The wind swirled around us, your mother’s hair billowed in my eyes, and when we peeped out from beneath the blanket there was nothing left but our shoes. And socks, we’d stuffed them into the shoes. Three shoes, three socks.

‘The wind had strewn the rest of our clothes across the slanted rooftops and I’d to go scrambling along the ridges after our shirts and trousers, naked as the day I was born, in the freezing cold. I left the blanket for your mother. That was chivalrous of you. Not much, I soon had to take it back. I realised that only some of our clothes were still on the roof; the rest had been blown down into the yard and on to the street. I looked down and saw a lorry driving over my moleskin trousers – good job you couldn’t see the tyre marks on the black material. Your mother’s bra was dangling from a balcony on the fourth floor. I couldn’t reach it, not even when I tried to hook it up with a radio antenna I’d unscrewed for a minute. I found her skirt between the chimney stacks, and her jacket. I took the blanket for myself and made myself a kilt out of it. A gust of wind had slammed the roof hatch shut, and with my fingers stiff from the cold I couldn’t get it open. I had to take the ladder and halfway down the same gust of wind whipped away the blanket from around my waist. I can tie better knots than you can. Haapala taught me how. I can tie myself in a knot. There I was, hanging on to the ladder without a stitch, between the third and fourth floors, shivering, my skin covered in goosebumps, your mother, your mother-to-be, who’d just been made your mother, waiting up on the roof, blue with the cold, because I’d been using our only source of warmth as a skirt – and now it was gone too – and just then Päivi, the same woman that shouted at you and pulled at your trousers just now, opened the window and saw me hanging there. I figured you knew that mini-nosed busybody. Is she my mother too? She’s got nothing against you, Pipey. Nothing personal. Why doesn’t Päivi visit us? None of your business, girl.’

Avoiding the cables attached to the radio antennae, we made our way across the roof to the hatch. Every few steps I asked what piece of clothing had ended up in which spot. Is that where you made me? Dad gave a sigh. He took hold of my head and spun me around almost by force. ‘Don’t ever stand around staring at the roof plates,’ he said.

‘Pipey, this place is even more special to you than it is to me,’ Dad continued. ‘This is the centre of your world. This place is your birthday present; from me to you.’

In 1962 my father gave me the name Katariina. He picked this name out of a saints’ calendar he’d found in a chimney belonging to the vicar’s boss, a minister called Aho. People throw the funniest things down chimney stacks; they think of them as rubbish bins – people that happen to be walking along the rooftops, that is.

Thieves, police officers, people installing antennae, postmen late on their rounds, tired angels that haven’t got the strength to fly all the time. Their wings start to ache in the headwind; every now and then they’ve got to rest.

Translated by David Hackston

The lion’s name was Muthul. He was an old Berber lion from the Atlas Mountains. He had a black mane, a black tail with a bushy tip and the scars of many battles on his hide.

He had grown up as a lion cub in the royal palace at Carthage at the time when the Romans, led by Scipio the younger, destroyed the city with fire and sword. The palace was set ablaze, a bloody battle ensued in the gardens, Romans impaled on arrows lay strewn in the rose bushes, Carthaginian blood dyed the water in the fountains. Someone had let all the palace animals, wild and tame alike, out of their cages; they were running around wildly, killing each other in the grip of panic, then disappeared inexplicably.

As the battle continued, an exhausted Ligurian mountain soldier leaned against a statue of Astarte, and he saw a lion cub hiding its head behind its paws between the goddess’ legs. The mountain soldier stroked the cub’s back and placed it in his cowhide pouch so he could sell it to the Roman circus. A moment later the crown of a cedar tree crushed the Ligurian’s head as he tried to ransack the burning palace.

The cub was rescued from the flames by a Numidian fighting for the Romans. He threw the Ligurian’s pouch over his shoulder and retreated spluttering through the smoke and out into the courtyard. Once outside, the pouch began to growl. The Numidian dropped it on the ground and kicked it. The pouch then began to whimper pitifully. The soldier opened the pouch and saw the furry muzzle and pair of slanted eyes inside.

Have I saved the devil from the lick of the flames, wondered the Numidian and prepared to stab the beast to death. The lion cub then crawled out of the pouch and began to lick itself. The Numidian remembered the kitten he’d had as a child and decided to spare the cub. ‘Let your name be Muthul,’ said the Numidian. ‘It means “little devil”.’

The Numidian sold the cub to his chief. The chief then bequeathed it to the court of King Masinissa. Masinissa trained lions for his own sporting events in the gardens of his palace in the city of Thirmida. There Muthul grew into a powerful lion with a long, black mane and whiskers the length of a cubit. At the age of five Muthul tired of practicing exhausting, meaningless tricks. He knocked his tamer unconscious with a skilful blow of his paw, jumped over the ten-foot fence and sprinted roaring along the city alleyways, dashed through the city gates into freedom and did not stop running until he reached the Tell Atlas mountains.

Once in the mountains he joined a small pride of Atlas lions. By roaring and fighting and scheming he rose up the pride’s hierarchy. By using all the devious tricks his trainers had taught him, he eventually reached the position of chief lion. As leader of the pack he could keep all the females for himself. He didn’t allow the other males a single female.

Muthul reigned over his harem until the age of sixteen. Then a younger male appeared, an ugly, one-eared giant from far away, perhaps from as far away as Mauretania. The ugly lion challenged Muthul to a fight. Muthul responded by roaring and his opponent attacked him furiously. Muthul’s old tricks were of no use; as the autocratic leader of the pack he had become proud and lazy. The Mauretanian almost tore him to shreds.

Muthul fled in disgrace. After that he hunted by himself, ate by himself and slept by himself. He became a hermit.

At that time, Jugurtha, the new king of Numidia, was beginning to wage war against the Romans. In the lowlands an army was on the move again, Numidian mounted cavalry, Roman legions and their Moorish allies on camelback.

Muthul remembered the fire of Carthage, his time in prison and his narrow escape. Soon fires would be lit, the din of weapons and terrible war cries would fill his ears, great war-elephants would hurtle towards him and the ground would shudder. Neither would Muthul be safe in the mountains; the soldiers would come up there too with their whistling arrows and torches and battle cries.

Muthul decided to travel as far as he could. He had heard that beyond the great desert lay green land and forest with plenty of grass and lots of animals of different sizes eating the trees’ leaves, animals he had never seen or tasted before. Muthul set off across the Libyan Desert towards a brave new world.

After he had walked for three days and was dying of thirst, he heard a soft rhythmic patter in the sand and saw a handsome camel wobbling past, so close that only a narrow sand dune separated them. The camel was travelling south; it was carrying a small load and there was no rider on its back, all that covered its saddle was a blanket. Muthul gathered all his power and rage, ran up to the camel, jumped on its back and dug his teeth into the animal’s neck, but didn’t snap it. The camel stopped, trembling, and stood perfectly still listening to an immemorial proverb that kept beating at the back of his small mind: don’t try to shake a lion from your back, it will bite your neck in two. It will do this anyway, but not always.

‘Where are you travelling, humpback?’ asked Muthul.

‘To the Jarman Oasis,’ replied the camel, his yellow teeth chattering.

The camel had been born at the oasis. Now that his rider, a young Moor, had been killed by a Numidian arrow, he was a free camel once again and was returning to the place of his birth.

‘What a coincidence. That’s where I’m going too,’ said Muthul. ‘Unfortunately I’m going to have to kill you and drink every drop of your blood to quench my thirst.’

‘That would be very short-sighted,’ said the camel. ‘And it would be the end of both of us. Beneath my blanket you’ll find flasks of water which my Moor filled before his death.’

Muthul found the flasks, bit a hole in the side of one with his fangs and sucked out the water, emptied the second, and allowed the camel to drink from the third.

‘March, long-legs,’ commanded Muthul and made himself comfortable lying against the came’s hump.

After a day’s trek, the camel dropped to his knees to rest. Muthul jumped from his back, ran around the camel a few times to stretch his limbs, then lay down to rest next to the camel, right up against his side to make sure he didn’t run off in the middle of the night.

When the camel stood up the next morning, Muthul jumped on his back, ready to continue their journey. The camel, however, refused to move. That night he had thought things through.

‘What will be a camel’s reward for carrying a lion on his back?’ he asked.

‘You have my word that I will not eat you,’ said Muthul.

‘That’s easy for you to promise, but still you’ll bite my neck in two before we get to our destination,’ said the camel.

‘Why would I do that?’ asked Muthul. ‘If I did that, I’d die out here in the desert.’

‘You can’t do anything about your nature,’ said the camel, who had heard the story of the frog and the scorpion.

‘What do you know about my nature?’ said Muthul. ‘I am in control of my fearsome nature, I can control my wild instincts whenever it is necessary. I’ve had a royal upbringing.’

The camel was unconvinced by Muthul’s words and stood stubbornly on the spot. At this, Muthul promised, in return for his troubles, to protect the camel from any dangers, such as lions, wolves, hyenas and leopards.

‘Those animals don’t live out in the desert,’ said the camel.

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ said Muthul. ‘And I, a Berber lion, promise to protect you against the Tuaregs, so that they won’t capture and enslave you again.’

This promise the camel took seriously and began walking. At resting places he ate leaves and shoots, even filling his hungry mouth with the thorny branches of the acacia bush. Muthul hunted small animals. He ate ferrets, land crocodiles, several lizards and a small hoomet which tasted like a lizard.

Some people considered them to be unclean animals, but Muthul didn’t care. He probably didn’t even know this.

Thus Muthul’s journey with the camel across the Libyan Desert continued, towards the Sudan and Darfur. He dreamed about the savannahs, even further off, where the grass was high and green and the flesh of the animals was juicy.

Finally they arrived at the Jarman Oasis. There didn’t seem to be a single Tuareg caravan in sight. There were plenty of animals by the water’s edge, in the shadow of the palm trees, in amongst the bushes, and further off in the shelter of the dunes; all kinds of animals, familiar and strange.

Muthul bid the camel farewell and thanked him for the ride and the water. The camel was moved to tears and decided not to believe in fables in the future. Greatly relieved, he left the lion and walked towards a group of three camels and a female zebra, lying close together, half-asleep, chewing lazily in the shade of a date palm.

‘Brothers, sisters! You won’t believe all that has happened to me in the last few days…’ began the camel.

The female zebra listened to the camel’s story, glancing every now and then at Muthul, who had lain down and rested his weary head on his paws, shaded by the bush some way away from the others.

‘He could have bitten my neck in two in an instant, but he didn’t,’ the camel continued fervently.

‘He made a promise and stood by his word. I had no need to fear that he might still have… But this lion has complete control over his wild nature, this noble and stately animal, brought up in a royal court, thoroughly trustworthy…’

The female zebra’s name was Punda Milia. She lived alone and wasn’t part of a herd. She was the only zebra at the oasis. In fact, she was probably the only zebra ever to have found her way to the oasis, thought the camels, who had all wandered far and wide across the world. Someone had heard that Punda Milia had become withdrawn at a young age, as she had been bullied in the herd. Her mother was a quagga, half zebra and half wild horse, with only partial stripes that looked unfinished, while her father was half plains zebra, half Grévy’s zebra, and that is why her head looked more like that of a donkey than a zebra and her ears were large, dark-brown, round and conical. When she was born, she only had stripes on her head, neck and chest. Her legs, hind body and stomach were still stripeless when, as a foal, she first stood up and waddled behind her mother. Her lack of stripes meant that the others began to shun her, particularly the younger members of the herd. Only her mother stood up for her. As she grew older, to everyone’s surprise and against her nature, she began to develop stripes on the grey-andwhite areas of her body. Even her large ears had two stripes each: one in the middle and another at the tapering tip.

Punda was unaware that her late development of stripes was unnatural. She was completely unaware of the changes in her hide, as the behaviour of the rest of the herd remained unchanged; the discrimination continued as usual, only now it was out of envy.

One day she had finally had enough of it and decided to leave the herd and go off by herself. She wandered across the mountains of Ethiopia and from there down into the Sudan and the steppes of Kurdufan. From there she was chased on her way by jackals and nasty servals. After wandering for six months she finally arrived at the Jarma Oasis, barely alive, nothing but skin and bones.

By the time she met Muthul, she had regained the soft curves of her figure. Her eyes were filled with the glow of life once again, and with those eyes she looked at Muthul.

Before night fell, as the sun sunk behind the Atlas Mountains and the animals retreated to their burrows or climbed into the protection of trees or huddled close together, Punda Milia moved away from the camels and closer to the resting lion lying beneath the Carob tree.

Muthul watched the zebra through half-closed eyes, and his mouth watered and his tail quivered; hunger wrenched at his stomach. He crept closer to the animal that resembled a horse, and in a flash his sensory memory brought the strong, sweet taste of horsemeat to his tongue. When he was close enough, he knelt down low, raised his head so that he could see the creature properly, her stripes, her powerful head, her funny fringe, her white teeth munching the grass, her tail as it skilfully flicked flies from the moist areas around her buttocks. But Muthul didn’t attack her.

Punda Milia was the most beautiful female creature Muthul had ever seen. Punda turned slowly, a brown Carob pod in her mouth, and looked at Muthul softly, then turned away again, briskly shook her neck and continued ruminating. The muscles in her hips quivered wildly beneath her tight skin.

Muthul and Punda Milia began a passionate love affair. This was the first erotic encounter for the zebra, made all the more wonderful as the pleasure was mixed with moments of fear and terror. For the old lion, it was as though he were reliving his youth.

On the third night, Punda Milia signalled to Muthul that she would not mind if he made violent love to her. She had never considered herself particularly attractive. Now she wanted to feel dominated, possessed and forced.

Once, just once, Muthul’s lovemaking became too violent. He pulled hard at Punda Milia’s neck, his teeth sunk deep into her skin, blood spattered into his mouth, the taste of blood forced his jaw to clamp shut and snap the Atlas vertebra in his striped beloved’s neck just as she cried out with pleasure.

Punda Milia’s heart burst with overwhelming joy. It beat for a moment, warm with love, then broke of sheer happiness.

Muthul was inconsolable. He wept for his dead, striped love for two days. On the third day, he ate her.

Translated by David Hackston

(First published in Books from Finland 4/2008.)