Jouni Tossavainen. Photo: Like

Poet and writer Jouni Tossavainen has directed his verbal curiosity towards blog writing in his eighth prose work, entitled Sivullisia (‘Outsiders’, Like, 2011); it consists of a collection of (fictional) blog posts, which seem to contain plenty of junk as well as treasures.

The book is a dizzying linguistic playground; it includes posts, around a page in length, from 157 ‘outsiders’. Escaping the familiar structures of language usage gives rise to snapshots of estrangement.

The narrator of the book claims to have assembled his material from a collection of blog posts received from the greater Helsinki region. Individual fragments of views and facts are like codes that have lost what they were meant to unlock. Mocking, satirical jibes emerge from the texts, accompanied by a sneaking suspicion of understanding and solace, as there ought to be in a true carnival.

Tossavainen’s humour adds a gentle, perhaps more rural shade to the urban cultural landscape. He writes these experienced and less-experienced contributors with rather capricious voices: the result is a discordant yet collective mixed choir. Sivullisia portrays people in terms of their professions, jobs or free time that get muddled up with work or unemployment. The fragmentary stream of consciousness gallops back and forth in an arena from which the voices of the outsiders are thrown into the chaos of the world, mirroring it.

This collection of flowing, torrenting yet brief texts shows that people can – and do – say anything they want at their computers. Tossavainen (born 1958) provides an acrobatic exemplar of this phenomenon. Each blog post starts with a word or job title that describes its writer’s current occupation, from A to Z. The uncensored nature of the Internet reveals something about what links people’s regular jobs to often pointless actions and activities in order to demonstrate the relationship of alienation and outsiderness to all of life.

The narrative, bordering on the absurd and the surreal, is linked to sharp cultural criticism and contemporary satire between the lines. Convoluted slapstick stories develop into tragicomedy, something more serious and even sentimental. These outsiders give us a unique reading of our blogging era.

Translated by Ruth Urbom

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

Policeman

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

Paper deliverer

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

Presenter

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

School pupils

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

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

Translated by Ruth Urbom

Johanna Holmström. Photo: Irmeli Jung

‘In my writing I try to give as many angles as possible, and my agenda is to show that there’s not just one truth, that there are always several ways of seeing what one perceives at first sight. So I often have more than one main narrator. I constantly aim to question accepted truths. My stories always begin with indignation about something I feel I must write about. Fiction is a way of distancing oneself. After all, books are literary, invented things. When you work on the subject of a literary text it becomes less personal.’

This is how Johanna Holmström (born 1981) describes her approach to writing. Since her first collection of short stories published in 2003 she has produced a book every two years: three short story collections and one novel. Her books have been variously described as imaginative, committed and uncomfortable. Her short story ‘Stormen’ (‘The storm’) is a precisely observed account of a day when everything changes for its young protagonist.

TS: You’ve written three books of short stories. Did you deliberately choose short fiction as your genre?

JH: I’ve written a novel, too, but even as I was writing it I noticed that I was using the same techniques that I do when I write short fiction, and that didn’t really work. In a short story you can focus on every small detail, whereas in a novel you have to employ a style that’s more sweeping. The short story is stylistically compact, it often describes brief moments and yet it should also say as much as a whole novel. When I’m writing I am very precise, I do a lot of work on the language and spend an endless amount of time polishing details.

TS: What do you think the short story of the future will look like?

JH: The short story is going to increase in popularity. It’s already making progress in Europe – and Africa – for example. There is so much room for the form to develop. Anything can happen with that form, it’s able to use all the components of literature. I’m constantly preoccupied with trying to develop it, to see what can be done with it.

Before I started out as a writer I had read so many bad short story collections. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write short fiction – I wanted to write the kind of thing I had wanted to read myself. And I knew what I was going to write, and how. I think a good short story collection can’t consist of disconnected narratives, it has to hang together in some way. That is what I’ve wanted to work towards, and it’s what I did in Camera Obscura. The publisher asked me if I would write it as a novel, but I wanted the words ‘short stories’ on the book’s cover.

TS: But now you’re working on a novel?

JH: Yes, it wasn’t that I thought I had to write one, but the topic I wanted to write about needed that kind of scope. The novel is about a Finland-Swedish Muslim family. It’s a book about fundamentalism, Islam, culture and the rebellion of children against the ideologies of their parents. I did a lot of background work – I borrowed over 200 books from the library, and I also had to make a break with short story thinking. And I was pleased to notice that I’d been wrong in my own assumptions – how much I had really been influenced by the media and the public debate on the subject the book is about, much more than I’d thought, but I was able to revise that picture. A novel takes more time to mature than short stories do, and this one is no exception. I’ve been thinking about the topic and working on the book for nearly five years.

TS: You’re a trained journalist. Has that affected your writing?

JH: I’ve learnt an enormous amount from my profession: the ability to try to remain objective, to do a lot of research if it’s necessary, to write in a pared-down way when required, the disciplined ability to edit and the interest in finding out about things. I read newspapers a lot and I react to external stimuli that I have to get to grips with and write about. I don’t think I could write a historical novel – I want to write about topical issues.

I write a lot all the time, and I’m disciplined about my writing.  I also welcome comments and feedback from others, because I can’t always know what will work for every reader. If someone points out that something I’ve written just doesn’t work, I take it out.

I’ve never suffered from writer’s block. When I was nineteen I took part in a creative writing course where we visited the author Monika Fagerholm and she gave us a useful tip, though I’m not sure that she knows she did: always stop when you know how to go on. Never write everything out of yourself – and that has worked for me all these years.

TS: I read in an interview that you think you have a moral responsibility as an author, that you can’t just write in an aesthetic, literary way? Some of your stories also have a socio-political agenda.

JH: For me it it’s not clear-cut who is good and who is bad. It’s a person’s actions that decide that. My characters’ actions decide what happens to them. I’ve been criticised for making my characters unsympathetic – but for me the characters are less important than what they do. I don’t feel sympathy for them, and sometimes they have to suffer so that the story can go the way I want it to.

I also think about my responsibility as an author, what it is I’m giving to the world and what is the best way to do it. Maybe not everything is material for literature – sometimes it’s better to write a column, and sometimes it’s better to write a diary.

TS: Where is your literary home? How would you place yourself in Finland-Swedish literature, a minority literature that has rather broad and fuzzy outlines, a tolerant one, perhaps, but still relatively traditional?

JH: I would say that I’m slightly outside ‘typical’ Finland-Swedish literature. I wrote my master’s dissertation on the typical Finland-Swedish novel. Statistically that’s a book about a middle-aged man in a midlife crisis written by a middle-aged man. The action is set in Helsinki. Or it’s about Finland-Swedishness, what it means to be a Swedish-speaking Finn. Now there’s a new generation of young writing women who write about things other than themselves. Perhaps I see myself as a bit of an underdog. Not that I’m outside the literary establishment, but I like to adopt the perspective of those who are weaker.

Translated by David McDuff

Johanna Holmström’s works: Inlåst och andra noveller (‘Locked up and other stories’, Söderströms, 2003), Tvåsamhet (‘Twosomeness’, short stories, 2005), Ut ur din längtan (‘Get out of your longing’, novel, 2007), Camera Obscura (short stories, 2009; it will be published in Finnish by Teos in September)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joakim looks up at him.

‘Have they just hatched out?’

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

‘Has their mother abandoned them?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Almost like me,’ Joakim says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joakim does not reply, and Grandad sighs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He crosses the hall and goes into the bedroom.

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

Translated by Ruth Urbom

Her En tunne sinua vierelläni (‘I don’t feel you beside me’, Teos, 2010) mixes fantasy and realism, dealing with, for example, animal kingdom, human mind and artificial intelligence. See the introduction and translation of a story which we ran here on the Books from Finland website.

Raevaara (born 1979) holds a doctorate in genetics; the prizewinner is her second work of fiction. The prize, worth €10,000, was awarded on 5 February – the birthday of the poet J.L Runeberg (1804–1877) – in the southern Finnish city of Porvoo.

The jury – representing the prize’s founders, the Uusimaa newspaper, the city of Porvoo, both the Finnish and Finland-Swedish writers’ associations and the Finnish Critics’ Association – chose the winner from a shortlist of eight books: a collection of poetry, Vagga liten vagabond (‘Swing, little wanderer’, Söderströms) by Eva-Stina Byggmästar, the novel Poikakirja (‘Boys’ Own Book’, Otava) by Olli Jalonen, the novel Kiimakangas (WSOY) by Pekka Manninen, two collections of essays, Kuka nauttii eniten (‘Who enjoys most’) by Tommi Melender and Halun ja epäluulon esseet (‘The essays of desire and suspicion’) by Antti Nylén (both publlished by Savukeidas), a collection of poetry, Texas, sakset (‘Texas, scissors’, Otava) by Harry Salmenniemi and another collection of short stories, Apatosauruksen maa (‘The land of the apatosaurus’, WSOY) by Miina Supinen.

Veikko Huovinen. Photo: Irmeli Jung

‘Where will you be spending your eternity?’ ‘A spot of transmigration’, a short story by Veikko Huovinen (1927–2009), immediately confronts its main character, a man named Leevi Sytky, with this ultimate question.

Behind it is the sense of sin and fear of damnation typical of the religious life of northern Finland. Anyone who has made it as far as this final short story of Huovinen’s 1973 collection, Rasvamaksa (‘Fatty liver’) will, however, not make the mistake of taking the question too seriously; something diverting is clearly once again on offer.

Soon Leevi Sytky takes his leave of life in slightly sinful circumstances, but in the hereafter it turns out that these are not looked upon with disapproval.

Huovinen, living in Sotkamo in north-eastern Finland, was a forester before becoming a full-time writer, and in his depictions of the ordinary people of northern Finland he makes God, too, into a kind of lumber-camp caption, with the broad world-view of the lumberjack. All sorts of ways of spending eternity are on offer, and Leevi Sytky decides to try transmigration.

Like his popular novels about the highly original wilderness philosopher Konsta Pylkkänen and his novel Hamsterit (‘Hamsters’, 1957), ‘A spot of transmigration’ represents the warm satire of Huovinen’s work, in which people dedicate themselves to indulging their instincts for collecting and enjoyment. These much-loved characters have also found themselves on the movie screen. But Huovinen’s extensive oeuvre also includes sharper tones. A particular butt of Huovinen’s satire was militarism, as in his novels Rauhanpiippu (‘Peace pipe’, 1956) and Veitikka (‘Rascal’, 1971), of which the latter is a parodic biography of Adolf Hitler. In the name of equality, Joseph Stalin also received his ‘biography’, Joe-setä (‘Uncle Joe’), in 1988.

Leevi Sytky experiences the joys and sorrows of existence as many different animals: crow, burbot, ‘dawg’. The human soul in an animal’s body is a traditional subject of satire, generally used to demonstrate how harshly human beings treat those weaker than themselves. Huovinen, however, has more positive aims. Dominant among them is the experience of the power and freedom of the body, which can be enjoyed without the responsibility implied by human life.

The longing for irresponsibility is also expressed by a short visit to the body of the  director of the local Alko liquor store, and the theme reaches its climax when, at the end, Leevi Sytky becomes a crane. As a migratory bird that can, when autumn comes, set out for warmer countries while humans stay behind to await the coming of winter, the crane has often been used in Finnish poetry to represent freedom.

Huovinen was also an early embracer of environmental questions in his work, for example Ympäristöministeri ‘Minister for the environment’, 1982) – although his satire is directed equally at idealistic environmentalists and destroyers of nature. Indeed, Huovinen’s satire is extremely ambiguous and challenging. He often plays with highly sensitive subjects; his Hitler becomes a rascal, who implements genocide and destroys Europe on a whim, laughing at human stupidity. In this respect Huovinen’s Hitler is, indeed, a kind of alter ego of his creator.

The question of political correctness in Huovinen’s work is bestide the point; the central element of his philosophy as a writer is to be able to laugh at everything. Huovinen is, indeed, hilariously funny, but at the same time he is a lyrical and intelligent writer whose themes are not wearied by age.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Veikko Huovinen’s books have been translated into 12 languages. (For details, see the database here.)

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

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

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

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

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

‘Mustn’t grumble,’ said Leevi politely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The burbot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dawg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The local Alko manager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Lapland with the cranes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helena felt cold.

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

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

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

She hadn’t slept.

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

Black and white.

Elegant.

More elegant than she.

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

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

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

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

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

Ready?

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

And anyway, no one knew.

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

Far up in her groin.

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

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

Would she do?

Would they think she was beautiful?

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

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

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

Hence the evening’s fumbling razor prayer.

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

And suddenly they were there.

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

No one moved.

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

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

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

It was business.

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

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

She was at home.

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

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

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

A recall whistle sounded.

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

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

Helena said nothing.

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

Straight. In.

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

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

In the theology of hospitality.

Translated by David McDuff

Susanne Ringell. Photo: Anders Larsson

First about the form: the wavy, turquoise cover of Vattnen (‘Waters’), Susanne Ringell’s third collection of short stories, is protected by a layer of waxed paper that looks like a thin film of ice.

Inside the book, water flows everywhere: the twelve stories are set in it or near it, or mimic it in form. The water symbolises a fundamental force, a consolation, but also an elusivity. The characters in the stories exist in a kind of volatile, intermediate state – they are heading for a crisis or are in the moment immediately after one.

Since 1993 Ringell (born 1955) has produced short story collections, poetry, prose poetry, mini-stories and a novel. In them, as in Vattnen (Söderströms, 2010), Ringell’s  language is her own: beautiful, robust and fragile, vivid, subtle and at the same time practical.

Ringell has remained faithful to the expressive brevity of her chosen format. Av blygsel blev Adele fet (‘Embarrassment made Adele fat’, 2001) consists of very short narratives (the whole book runs to only 62 pages) describing a series of people whose names are ordered according to the letters of the alphabet. From Adele to Walter, the author presents a human being with his or her miniature life story or situation.

One theme of Vattnen is travel, conceived as a place, a goal or an escape. Another,  familiar from Ringell’s earlier work, is the child – the child who does not come, the condition of childlessness, the child who is dead. The opening story ‘Intrigen’ (‘The plot’) is a macabre, strange but humorous variant of this motif. An embryo lies in the amniotic fluid of a potential future mother’s womb, wondering if she (like all the main characters in the stories, the embryo is female) should allow herself to be born or not.

Although the water in the story ‘Gästabudet’ (‘The guest event’) is neither perfect nor clear and transparent, it is accepting and inclusive. The woman in the story has shaved her bikini line, she has bought a new bathing suit, prepared herself, as if she were to meet a lover, in order to descend into a pool – with dolphins. She becomes supple and right: at last she feels she is an inherent part of something.

There is always something lyrical and magical in the world of Ringell’s writing. This world is described in aesthetic terms, but it’s also fun, with an undercurrent of humour and self-mockery.

The narratives avoid the conventional structure of a short story, with a triumphal surprise at the end, presenting themselves rather as complex texts in which the refractory element dominates. The film of ‘ice’ around the book’s jacket illustrates the mood that lingers in the reader afterwards: there is something brittle covering the characters in the book, a thin layer that prevents them from flowing freely into carefree life, a transparency they themselves are not able to see through.

Translated by David McDuff

A Finnish tale set in Egypt: Mika Waltari's post-war novel has been translated into 30 languages, English in 1949

a about after again against all also always an and another any are around as at away back be because been before being between both but by came can children come could course day did didn’t do does don’t down each end er even every fact far few find first for from get go going good got great had has have he her here him his home house how i i’m if in into is it its it’s just kind know last left life like little long look looked made make man many may me mean me might more most mr much must my never new no not nothing now of off oh old on once one only or other our out over own part people perhaps place put quite rather really right said same say says see she should so some something sort still such take than that that’s the their them there these they thing things think this those though thought three through time to too two under up us used very want was way we well went were what when where which while who why will with without work world would year years yes you your

Doesn’t this just run like a poem? An extract from somebody’s stream of conscience? ‘…again against all also always… quite rather really right said’? Actually it’s a list of the 200 most used words of the English language in alphabetical order.

This remarkable list is among the references* in a new doctoral thesis from the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki, Englanniksiko maailmanmaineeseen? Suomalaisen proosakaunokirjallisuuden kääntäminen englanniksi Isossa-Britanniassa vuosina 1945–2003 (‘To world fame in English? The translating of Finnish prose fiction into English in Great Britain between 1945 and 2003’).

Instead of textual analysis, the author, Raila Hekkanen, approaches the subject by placing translation activities into a sociological context – in what sort of circumstances translations were produced, which factors were influential in the process – and employs descriptive translation and language research.

In England between the years 1949 and 2003 only 28 prose works by Finnish authors were published; of these, only the 1950s translations of 12 historical novels by Mika Waltari (1908–1979) gained any notable popularity. However, Waltari’s most famous novel, Sinuhe egyptiläinen (The Egyptian), was not translated from Finnish but via Swedish, and it was heavily edited and cut. More than the translators, it was the publishers who were to blame. This kind of ‘translation’ is no longer practised, as norms of translating and editing have changed greatly over the past couple of decades.

Hekkanen aims at addressing wider theoretical questions concerning the roles of different factors of the translation process and the placement of the translation in both its original and target cultures as well as in the ‘interculture’ between them (people who live in a dominant English-language culture, but with contacts with Finland). The impact and significance of public funding in commissioning and publishing literary translations, as well as recent changes brought about by the expansion of the European Union, have hardly been researched so far. In Finland, the role of FILI (formerly the Finnish Literature Information Centre, now the Finnish Literature Exchange) has become essential in the role of establishing contacts with (and between) translators of various languages and and providing opportunities for training.

Raila Hekkanen also interviews several translators and editors involved with an English-language literature journal featuring samples of Finnish literature  – namely  Books from Finland; the translation and editing processes of the journal since the early 1980s are also illustrated in this academic work.

And that’s nice: we do indeed been try to delight a big-language culture, i.e. English-language readers (be they native speakers, genuine foreigners or Finns who read English), with interesting stuff from a small-language culture, provided by a) Finnish authors, b) translators who are willing to work more or less for a song. As the Finns know very well, it takes two to tango (we’re collectively addicted to our Northern, melancholy version of the fiery Argentine dance). As long as you’re prepared to go on reading, we’ll go on writing, editing and translating. We get a kick out of what we do, and we hope you do, too.

*) source: Sara Laviosa-Braithwaite: The English Comparable Corpus (ECC): A Resource and a Methodology for the Empirical Study of Translation (University of Manchester, 1996)

‘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