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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And his fat body tosses and turns in anguish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Owen Witesman

Past pushing up daisies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS: The leaves have come in on the trees.

Mexican Eskimos

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

Thirteen.

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

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

Those light bulbs.

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

Not a bit of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adidas or sneakers

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

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

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

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

They aren’t.

Food doesn’t cost too much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Palms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Owen Witesman

Tiina Raevaara. Photo: Heini Lehväslaiho

Themes enriched by the natural sciences set in a kind of naturalised literary fantasy make Tiina Raevaara an interesting young prose-writer. She is a doctor of genetics and a science writer whose collection of fourteen short stories, En tunne sinua vierelläni (‘I don’t feel you beside me’, Teos, 2010), is her second literary work.

Fantasy and a sombre dystopia combine in her debut novel, Eräänä päivänä tyhjä taivas (‘One day an empty sky’, 2008), which took its readers to the centre of ecological catastrophes and struggles for power taking the form of family relationships. The novel was seen as a morality tale examining the issue of human responsibility, and Leena Krohn, Johanna Sinisalo, Maarit Verronen and Jyrki Vainonen were identified as its literary godparents.

What unites these Finnish writers working at the borders of fact, fiction and fantasy? They are distinguished from realist prose by the way they pose a certain type of ethical question: the complex relationship between humankind and what is called nature, and the inexplicable fuzzy area between the two, which the hard sciences are unable to grasp. In these writers’ work, fantasy often layers into philosophical allegories which examine the limits of what can be experienced as human.

In her new collection of short stories, Raevaara (born 1979) succeeds in developing the thematic lines described above. This is important, because she always appears to be writing in order to say something serious. Short forms suit her concentrated style and the condensed atmosphere she strives for.

It is no wonder that her short story ‘Sääkset’ (‘Ospreys’) won the prestigious Martti Joenpolvi Prize. Here Raevaara’s strongly nature-centred understanding of life is revealed at its most uncompromising. At the edge of the osprey swamp everything is the same: ‘The bog grows on the surface and dies inside, at the same time, for thousands upon thousands of years.’ Her riddling description of the fate of a walker examining birds and their nesting habits in the motionless landscape of the swamp poses a spectacular challenge to the central role of man assumed by humanism.

The idea of juxtaposing perceptions and judgements of people and animals recurs in many short stories. Raevaara gives a point of view to animals, creatures and things that people fear, admire, consider strange. A certain Mr Gordon feels himself to be a stranger in the birds’ hospital: ‘I’ve never known a bird,’ he finds himself confessing to a black-throated diver. The short story develops into an allegory that personifies the entire bird kingdom; all that remains for man is the role of a disappearing part of nature.

Alongside nature and the animal kingdom, the hidden fears and traumas of the human mind, and the dregs that only come to the surface in dreams, are the area that Raevaara’s short stories examine. ‘Kaivo’ (‘The well’) is a depiction of a nightmarishly strange landscape that is revealed as a living painting. From it grows the force-field of a maternal woman who bears life and children who rise from the well. In the end the painting, which could be interpreted as the nightmare of every mother, fades and releases its grip on the viewer.

The world of the short story ‘Luojani, luomani’ is similarly strongly gendered. Its narrator is an artifical female intelligence, who is always switched off at night, a kind of gynoid whose self resides within a hard case. The man is her creator and her owner, and men rule the technical world which the literate machine dazzles with her achievements. But for the man she is merely a saleable, unfeeling object, devoid of any tangible selfhood.

This story, lent wings by its quotations from Dante’s Divina Commedia, remains intriguingly open at the end, as Raevaara’s short stories generally do. Their atmospheres are a call to empathy, so strongly do they depict the power of the unconscious to give voice to that which has been silenced.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

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

This comment on new fiction could have been presented by anyone who’s been reading new Finnish novels or short stories. The commentator was, however, the 2010 British Orange Prize judge Daisy Goodwin, who in March complained about the miserabilist tendencies in new English-language women’s writing.

Jouni Avelin, editor of Kulttuurivihkot (‘Cultural notes’) magazine, said in this year’s first issue: ‘There are two themes in new Finnish fiction: men’s mid-life crises and young women’s erotic adventures – all Finnish literature is the literature of anxiety…. Sex is never nice, life stinks, shoes pinch….

‘The main character hates himself and his mother, who loathes her husband, who can’t stand his children or his parents, who hate everybody who enters the house, either through the door or the TV set. All suffer save suffering itself…. The novel is always the main character’s confessional: life is the same as life in other novels.’

It has to be admitted that playful, happy and sunlit fiction is slightly on the rare side, as we have cause to note, year after year, at the Books from Finland offices. Not surprisingly, as virtues are so much more boring than vices.

And the grimmest genre of all, crime literature, very popular in the Scandinavian countries – as well as in Finland – has been very exportable, as is proved by the best-selling lists of translated fiction all over the world. Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund, Håkan Nesser…. Leena Lehtolainen and Matti Rönkä are two Finnish writers of crime literature who have recently become popular in Germany, in particular.

(It is somewhat puzzling why crime fiction, entertaiments dealing with death, murder and violence, is so abundant in these ‘welfare societies’ in the North. Can anyone explain? Has anyone tried?)

In the first issue of 2006 of Books from Finland the literary scholar Michel Ekman wrote under the title ‘Life is too short’, expressing a personal (and unusual) view: ‘What literary genre is more slavishly bound by the compulsion of plot than the detective and the thriller? (And consequently, more stereotyped in its particulars and its structure.) Opera, of course, and one can just imagine the joy of watching Tosca without music.’

In contemporary Finnish drama, the nuclear family is definitely a huge favourite; skeletons rattle in the cupboards as grim primary relationships are taken out for an airing, the traumas of the Winter War are omnipresent, lovelessness continues unto the third and fourth generation and the fear of a global ecological disaster paralyses the young.

The grim stories occasionally bring to mind those dark 19th-century fables of those German fabulists, the Grimm brothers: in them people are burnt alive, chopped to pieces and tortured: early crime literatur – for children!

It’s not that life isn’t sometimes grim and that fiction shouldn’t be written about it – it’s just that the weighty realism of fiction often falls on to the reader’s neck like a ton of bricks, as do the repeated patterns of this modern miserability. (Thanks, Mr Chekhov, for your philosophy – to quote you freely, art should depict life as we see it in our dreams, not only just as it is or as it should be.)

Coming up soon on this site is a fantastic story for you to read, set in a (sc-fi-ish) future, about the similarities between silicone and human flesh, by Tiina Raevaara; it may not be a very sunny story, rather a grim(m) fable, but we think it’s exciting, and not without humour. We’ll be introducing some new drama, too – Finnish drama has been enjoying renewed success at home in recent years and is now also getting exported – with themes other than devastating family life.

You’ll find samples of fiction on this page in which life is not ‘the same as life in other novels’, so stay with us!

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

Zinaida Lindén. Photo: Johan Lindén

A new collection of short stories by the Leningrad-born author Zinaida Lindén explores the ambiguities of life between three cultures: her native Russia, her adopted Finland, and Japan, where she has also lived. In this introduction to Lindén’s short story Shards from the empire, Janna Kantola appreciates Lindén’s capricious, recalcitrant prose, and the positive, generous spirit that lies behind her work

Seen from a distance, Finns and Russians seem very like one another.

Zinaida Lindén has written her books from a cultural no-man’s-land in which she may have been forced to ponder the central questions of national identity. After studying Swedish in her native Russia, Lindén (born 1963) settled in Finland with her Finland-Swedish husband, and has written all of her works in Swedish. A recurring theme is that of encounters with the foreign, the other.

Lindén’s novel I väntan på en jordbävning (‘Waiting for an earthquake’), extracts of which were published in Books from Finland 4/2004) takes place between Russia and Japan; the Russian sumo wrestler-cum-fireman Ivan Demidov talks about his life to a Russian writer who has moved to Finland. The novel was awarded the 2004 Runeberg Prize for Literature. In the novel Takakirves – Tokyo (‘Takakirves – Tokyo’, 2007), the same Mr Demidov writes a series of letters to Finland.

Demidov does not appear in the collection of short stories, Lindanserskan (‘The tightrope-walker’, Söderströms, 2009; Finnish translation, Nuorallatanssija, Gummerus), but Finns, Russians and the Japanese encounter one another all the same. The writer’s own history – she has also spent a year in Japan – may explain this somewhat exotic combination.

The collection is a veritable balancing act between cultures, right down to its title. Can it be a coincidence that the metaphor of the tightrope walker was one used in literature to describe Finland’s balancing act between the pressures of east and west? As the motto of his thriller The Tightrope Men (1973), set partially in Finland, Desmond Bagley even went as far as to quote Bertrand Russell’s words about the fate of the tightrope walker. Russell makes the point that it is reasonable to assume that the tightrope walker may stay on the rope for ten minutes, but unreasonable to think he might continue without falling off for another two hundred years.

In the title story, the narrator claims that children make excellent acrobats because they do not experience fear due to their lack of life experience. Although these stories do not seem to uphold the myth of the Finns’ wild reputation, they might lead readers to think of our young nation in the light of that same fearlessness. For Lindén, however, this quality is linked to those balancing between two cultures; to the young Russian woman in the title story, who cannot but notice how stubborn Finns can be. Lindén has commented that she is often compared to the female characters in her works, to their thoughts and opinions, but says that she is in no way trying to depict herself.

Those who lump Finns and Russians together – or the author and her characters, for that matter – would be advised to think again: one thing the narrators in these stories have in common is their refusal to accept generalisations, which, on the other hand, does not prevent them from coming up with generalisations of their own. It is claimed in one of the stories that what Finnish and Japanese men have in common is their inability to flirt with women. (Having said that, the story also notes that, whereas a Japanese man will not dance even if you hold a gun to his head, many Finnish men go dancing voluntarily.)

The attraction of these ten stories lies in their sympathetic but capricious narrators, for whom growing up in the Soviet Union has provided perspective and a feel for the absurd. They always surprise us. That same temperament is reflected in the structure of the stories too: though these stories often end abruptly, they still end well. In their closing observations, everyday matters are elevated, sometimes to the point of aphorism.

When, over sixty years ago, the literary researcher V. Kiparsky attempted to document ‘The notions of the Russian people regarding Finland and the Finns’ as represented in literature, the results were not altogether flattering. Even Dostoyevsky has a Finnish character, the ‘unfriendly, crooked-nosed cook’, who with her continued silence drives her mistress to distraction.

Although Finnish taciturnity is a subject dealt with in Lindén’s short stories, Finnishness is generally viewed in a rather positive light. You would have trouble finding Finnish men as docile as the ones Lindén depicts. Part of the reason for this lies in the narrators’ positive outlook on the world in general, something that, in a moment of poetic fervour, one might call a quality of the Russian soul.

Translated by David Hackston

Camera Obscura

This short story collection is Johanna Holmström’s fourth book since her debut in 2003. Camera Obscura is a fabric of narratives and personal destinies which create a dense, novel-like whole. The preamble is a young environmental activist’s suicide. The form is interwoven with the content, so that the stories in the book can be read as separate narratives, but to understand them fully we must read them all. Each person’s destiny is shaped in part by the choices and actions of others; to what extent is the individual responsible for the whole? Holmström (born 1981) writes fiction that is unpredictable but stylistically assured. She seamlessly weaves with classic fairytale motifs and also has a keen eye for detail and psychology. Camera Obscura is at once eerie, suspense-filled and socially aware.

Sari Malkamäki. - Photo: Irmeli Jung

Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters in Sari Malkamäki’s new short stories

The relationship between parents and children is the central theme of Sari Malkamäki’s fifteen new short stories. She published her first collection in 1994; in Jälkikasvu (‘Offspring’, Otava, 2009), her tenth book, the few stories in which children don’t appear nevertheless allude to childhood experiences or to a child who sets the narrative in motion.

The point of view may be that of the child or of the parent, the focus of description some moment that forms a turning point in the characters’ circumstances, or even in their lives. Malkamäki’s children are often touchingly resourceful and brave, even when their adults fail them.

Families are a perennial favorite of fiction writers (not rarely to the point of reader fatigue…). Childhood experiences stay with one for life, whether for good or ill. Primary relationships are of course a reliable, inexhaustible source of drama, capable of running the gamut from the sublime to the melodramatic.In Malkamäki’s prose, the pasts that characters or those around them think they know thoroughly are revealed, often half by accident, in a completely new light: a classic short story method perhaps sometimes considered old-fashioned, now that a piece of ‘short prose’ could be practically anything. But when it works, it works.

Julius, in the short story ‘A long dream’, is a middle-aged man whose wife, after a short formal briefing, leaves him. Astonished by this and unable to sleep, he counts the days, hours and minutes. ‘There is nothing to disturb his life now that his wife is gone.’ He finally falls into a deep sleep, returning to a childhood dream of losing his own name, and as he wakes, his wife is back. With a gentle irony, Malkamäki charts Julius’s thoughts about his life, lived and unlived.

‘Offspring’, a long story of 47 pages, portrays a retired woman, Vuokko, whose son barricades himself menacingly in his ex-wife’s house with his little twin girls following their divorce. Vuokko’s assistance is needed in the police response; she is forced to review her own past quickly, assess all the love and lovelessness in her life, while talking her son (successfully) out of the dangerous situation.

Malkamäki favours dramatic turns in her stories that arise from contemporary people’s ordinary lives. The world may be cruel, and human relationships may betray, disappoint and frighten us, but by no means does she point at tragedy only. Nor does she ever verge on the melodramatic.