The Beggar and the Hare Page 10

  After a scree, a hillock and another scree, before their eyes stretched a marsh the size of four football pitches, bordered by hills and bursting with orange-yellow berries just waiting to be picked.

  I’m… rich…

  Served on Lapland cheese, as the base for a liqueur, made into jam, as a flavouring – the further the process of refinement was taken, the greater the profit. Vatanescu thrust both of his hands into the berries and dug, showering a handful all over himself. He chewed them, soft as raspberry on the outside, on the inside a grainy sensation, the seeds.

  Sour.

  Unpleasant.

  Never mind.

  They’re scarce.

  So they’re expensive.

  His mood brightening, Vatanescu began to fill the buckets.

  I’ll be the owner of the team my son plays for. He’ll have the best football boots that money can buy, I’ll teach him how to tie double knots and I’ll stand at the edge of the pitch.

  I won’t shout like a madman. I won’t yell abuse at the other team. I won’t need to.

  Miklos will be the best. The son of a newly rich berry-picker.

  Vatanescu picked berries late into the evening and on into early morning, without missing a single one, and when dawn broke he had filled all of the Pykströms’ buckets. He made the tent that Mrs Pykström had given him into a large bag some five feet wide, and soon it too was full. Leaving the now denuded marsh behind him, Vatanescu lugged the tent back to his base camp, put it beside the buckets and felt his pockets.

  Harri Pykström will take me and the berries to a place where I can sell them.

  The phone?

  The phone!

  On the way Vatanescu’s phone had fallen into the depths of the marsh, where it mouldered away and oxidised. If anyone ever found it again it would probably be an archaeologist who was studying the toils and troubles of humanity in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in the age of accumulation.

  Don’t panic.

  Vatanescu looked at his compass. He would easily find the direction from which he had come.

  Two steps forward, one step back.

  A road.

  A car and a road.

  A main road. That way.

  I can carry eight buckets at once.

  Vatanescu found a long, strong tree branch to make a carrying device. He lifted the branch onto his shoulders like the slaves in Egypt and the women in Häme. He asked the rabbit to go on ahead, to lead the way, to help them avoid getting wet.

  Where there’s a road, there’s a man. Someone will surely come. A rescuer. A German camping trailer. A local lad in his drag car.

  After the third heavy step there was an explosion.

  Gravel, stones and moss flew above him.

  Now I died.

  Vatanescu had lost his hearing. He could hear nothing outside his body, but the beating of his heart thumped inside his head as if the neighbours were playing Rammstein on their stereo.

  I didn’t die?

  Did the rabbit die?

  The rabbit sat trembling on a lump of stone that had fallen beside it. Vatanescu approached the rabbit very quietly, took it in his cupped hands and hid it in the shelter of his armpit. Then he gathered the remaining buckets of berries.

  A military exercise?

  A war?

  A nuclear explosion?

  The end of the world?

  Vatanescu set off through the marsh in a random direction, guided now not by the compass or by reason but by the fear of death and the state of panic from which he was only a moment away. Suddenly under his feet the ground was firmer, more even, a path trodden by people or reindeer.

  If there’s a path…

  …at its end there’ll be a road…

  If there’s a road…

  …at its end there’ll be…

  …a human being.

  The path continued towards some dwarf birches and on to somewhere beyond his field of vision.

  For an explosion you need a human being. The author of the explosion will have a car. The car will have a tow bar. It can be used to attach a trailer. The berries will go in the trailer.

  Vatanescu felt his body shake, and wondered whether it was simply the beating of his heart. Probably not, as the shaking seemed to begin in the soles of his feet.

  It was an accelerating rhythm, tuh-toom, muh-toom, buh-boom!

  Perhaps I really did die.

  Perhaps I’m in hell.

  The decision to build the largest shopping mall, hotel complex, entertainment and golf centre in the Nordic countries had been easy to make by drawing a circle on the map with a pair of compasses. A radius of a hundred and ninety miles with a customer catchment area that included four countries. In addition, a retirement home with an exotic view. The decision made, the construction company began to receive reservations from the United States, Canada and dictators in Central America. In the municipality of Raattama, an ice rink where the Finnish ice hockey team would play in the intercontinental championships. Clothes shops, car dealerships, supermarkets, an equipment rental company.

  Commercial activity would give birth to a town.

  The town would need public services, healthcare, a library, schools. Its construction would be partially financed by public funding.

  It would be like a modern Helsinki–Stockholm car ferry combined with the building sites of Kostomuksha and the gold-mining towns of Russian Karelia. It would be a new Las Vegas, as the developers Taive Sikari and Kerkko Kolmonen had said in their inaugural speeches. Then the ribbon had been cut, the foundation stone laid, and smiles provided for the photographers.

  With the contract signed, a workforce was needed for the construction project. Kolmonen and Sikari did not intend to conform to Finnish legislation on wage levels and working hours, never mind the demands of the trade unions and their shop stewards. Workers from other parts of the world – slaves, migrants or indigenous peoples – have always built mankind’s most remarkable edifices. Finns, American Indians, Chinese. The workforce would not be exploited, but the pay would be based on the men’s initial pay grade and status in their home country. Six euros would not get an unemployed Finn off the sofa except to go and buy his lottery ticket. An Estonian would leave his family, live in a caravan and work fourteen hours a day.

  The work on the project was now nearly halfway complete. Trucks drove in and out of the gates, cranes blocked the sky as they moved the prefabricated units into place.

  Vatanescu crawled out of the bushes onto the muddy main road. In front of him towered a large sign: NSDAC IS BUILDING THE NATIONAL IDEA PARK ON THE SITE OF THE NATIONAL PARK. PROJECT COMPLETION IS SCHEDULED FOR SPRING 2013.

  Vatanescu shook the mud from his clothes and made sure that the rabbit was all right. The rabbit quivered and put its ears back.

  There’s no hurry.

  Calm down.

  Don’t panic. I’m going to stop this truck.

  Vatanescu walked into the middle of the road and stretched out his arms. The Scania truck braked and stopped an elbow’s length away from him. The driver’s name was Õunap. In his former existence he had been a petty Estonian crook – smuggling cigarettes and alcohol into Finland, running offbeat chauffeuring jobs and paying hardly any tax.

  After the East European states and their peoples settled down he had fallen in love, married, reproduced and vowed to support his family by honest means. There were enough building sites in Finland to keep him in work until the year 2000 and even a little beyond. Õunap saved enough capital to start his own business back home.

  In Estonia Õunap’s company, Sheet Metal and Concrete, prospered at first. Soon it all went belly-up. Economic fluctuations + the international financial crisis = bankruptcy of Sheet Metal and Concrete. He had to return to Finland and take the first low-paid job he could find. Which was better by half than the crumpled banknotes of his homeland.

  Now Õunap seethed in the cabin of his truck, hammered on the window and sounded the horn.
He wound the window down and swore in all the languages he knew. Vatanescu’s hearing was still non-existent.

  Let’s get my berries. I’ll give you thirty per cent.

  The driver leaned his torso out of the window of the truck, grabbed Vatanescu by the ears and shook him. Out of his ears fell gravel, moss and little stones. As his hearing returned, a soundscape of the end of the world – that post-modernist radio feature – invaded Vatanescu’s consciousness.

  Forty per cent?

  The driver opened the door on the passenger side and told Vatanescu to get in. He had to combine four badly spoken languages in order to obtain some kind of comprehension. Õunap demanded to know why the man wasn’t at Kittilä Airport at the right time. He had wasted three hours for nothing, and without pay. Was the man stupid or just slow? Why was it only dickheads that came from Poland?

  I’m not from Poland.

  I’m Vatanescu.

  I have berries.

  You can have forty-five per cent.

  Õunap told him to forget the berries and listen. All that mattered was laying the concrete for the multi-storey car park’s D wing. The work could not go forward because the pump was in the back of the truck that Õunap was driving. At his feet the Pole would find a helmet, a reflective jacket, steel-tipped boots and a tool belt.

  I’m not a concrete-layer. I’m an everyman.

  I’m a berry-picker. I really am.

  ‘Stick your berries up your arse. You’re a concrete layer. A nozzleman.’

  In protective boots and helmet, cement gun in hand, in a group of three. The team was made up of Vatanescu and Õunap and the third member, Goodluck Jeffersson, a Ghanaian-Norwegian giant who had arrived at the National Idea Park site after working on oilrigs and fish processing plants. In Ghana he had earned a doctorate, but the role of committed and cool intellectual had evaporated on a boat where Goodluck Jeffersson and 2,456 other subsistence-challenged people had crossed the Mediterranean and reached Italy.

  Vatanescu stuck it for one day and then for another, and then halfway through that second day for the first time he remembered the berries. As he moved around, the rabbit sat inside his work overall, and from time to time it peeped out of the collar to see if anything had changed, if it would dare to leave, but nonetheless preferred to remain in the thoroughly reassuring smell of Vatanescu’s sweat. One by one, all Vatanescu’s thoughts and feelings vanished from his consciousness, and all that remained was the cement gun, of which he was now a part.

  After the third day a forty-eight-hour break began.

  Jeffersson and Õunap carried Vatanescu by his arms and legs to an abandoned shack which the men had taken over to live in, fed up with their caravan existence. In the shack it was always either too cold or too hot, and mice ran about on the floor and in the food cupboards, and they were even joined by a rat.

  Jeffersson had installed electricity in the shack’s twelve square yards, and there was a fire in the wood stove. It was as homely as two heterosexual males living together could make it. On the walls there were photos of the men’s children and of the person who Jeffersson claimed was the world’s most beautiful woman, the javelin thrower Trine Hattestad, who he thought was both warm and easy-going. Jeffersson thought he could spend the rest of his life with a woman like her with relatively little conflict, in contrast to his experiences with his previous four women.

  Vatanescu was already asleep when the men carried him in, and on an upper bunk he subsided into an even deeper slumber. Shyly the rabbit emerged from the overall. It jumped straight into Õunap’s lap.

  Õunap was stirring a big saucepan of soup. Vatanescu asked how long he had slept.

  ‘Eighteen hours.’

  The microwave beeped and Õunap took out a vegetarian pizza for the rabbit. He remarked that the rabbit had really cheered the place up; it was almost as though they had female company. Nothing to do with copulation of course, but something to keep them on their toes, for male farting and blathering became tedious after a while. Since the rabbit’s arrival they had had to pay more attention to where they threw their dirty socks and empty beercans.

  Vatanescu tried to turn round, but every muscle and tendon in his body hurt. Õunap noticed his groans of pain and said that his muscles would eventually realise that it was no good complaining, as the work never stopped, not ever.

  Vatanescu forced himself onto his stomach and pulled himself to the edge of the bunk. He observed the log walls, the greasy window and Jeffersson fiddling with the joystick of a Playstation.

  The berries. Let’s distribute them. Thirty-three, thirtythree, thirty-three.

  Õunap stopped stirring the saucepan with his screwdriver and poured Vatanescu a large bowlful of steaming reindeer tail soup. When Vatanescu had swallowed a dozen spoonfuls and was properly awake, Õunap asked him to listen.

  ‘Berry-picking is on the way out. Like reindeer herding.’

  Õunap said that in the modern world you needed to be a capital investor, not a berry-picker. You had to be a retailer or an entertainment provider. You had to establish a trade name, preferably a general partnership or a limited company, so you would pay less tax.

  ‘Dividends, expenses allowances and that sort of thing,’ Goodluck Jeffersson chimed in, without raising his head from his 110-metre hurdle race.

  ‘Look out of the window,’ Õunap said.

  Nothing was visible through the grease and the passage of decades, but Õunap asked him to imagine.

  ‘That used to be the Pallas Fells. Tomorrow there will be a hotel there. The old hills have been put out to grass; they’re going to make a giant slope out of them. Ski-lifts, a ski-jump, a downhill ski-slope.’

  Listen! Really… there are masses… of yellow berries… They’re safe there, I’ve hidden them.

  ‘Vatanescu,’ Õunap said, looking him in the eye.

  Well?

  ‘That cloudberry marsh.’

  Yes?

  ‘They’ve made it into a car park.’

  Water mingled with cement. The concrete bubbled. There were so many glass structures that the finished building would look unfinished. The floors, the walls and ceilings would be put in place, and there they would stay for another two decades until the building was demolished to make way for something new. Cables, sewers, joist frames, panel walls, tiling, drains, a backup generator, security systems.

  One small piece of a larger whole, surrounded by machines, people and explosive substances, our hero resigned himself to his fate, which was better than it looked at first sight. Piece by piece a new world was being born – a world of shopping – and being a part of its construction felt satisfying to Vatanescu. Each working day had a meaning. In one corner Jeffersson had made a miniature shack for the rabbit, and the three men lived in their home like brothers, or pupils at a school for boys.

  Vatanescu pumped concrete, carried joists, learned the skills of carpentry from Jeffersson, was soon handy with the spirit level and the keyhole saw, mastered the mitre box and the laminate cutter. From Õunap he learned how to spend the evenings productively, too: playing poker with the few Finns who were present on the site. On payday he could sometimes increase his wages fivefold.

  Six hundred… seven hundred… seven hundred and forty euros.

  We’re getting there.

  Õunap took Vatanescu to Muonio in his truck. At a grocer’s they bought cigarette papers, tinned tuna, cutprice meat that was near its sell-by date, a large pack of Finnish light beer in a suitcase-shaped cardboard box and three liver sausages, Jeffersson’s favourite snack.

  Then to the sports shop.

  I’m familiar with Adidas, Nike and Reebok. Is there a brand that’s even better? Money is no object.

  It was the wrong time of year, the wrong season, the sales clerk said. Now they were waiting for the start of the winter and the stockrooms were bursting with traditional skis, cross-country skis, downhill skis. Did they want those? Or maybe fishing tackle or hunting gloves? Snowshoes? Football bo
ots would not be coming in until next April, as football was not the favourite leisure pastime of young people in Lapland.

  ‘They’re more into motor sledging, skiing, fishing, you know. Wilderness sports.’

  Jeffersson patted Vatanescu on the shoulder and told him not to lose heart. They could order the boots over the Internet on Jeffersson’s laptop.

  From the infinite selection they clicked on the boots advertised by the world’s most highly paid footballer. This gel-haired twenty-something street urchin was paid tens of thousands for every minute he lived and breathed and fumed. The price of one of Vatanescu’s, Õunap’s and Jeffersson’s minutes was about a million times lower.

  Vatanescu’s order was made; now all he had to do was enter his Internet banking details.

  Bank code? Credit card number? Address? Name?

  Right.

  I’m off to bed.

  Vatanescu’s anger made him pour his concrete so well that he was promoted to the rank of truck driver. Now the Romanian beggar who had no driver’s licence took his turn in fetching new arrivals from the airport and the train station. No one knew who he was, few were interested in someone else’s past, and the future was the same for them all: hopefully better. He was called Ivan the Bulgarian Bar Bender or Miroslaw the Pole, Son of Bronislaw or the Albanian Fox.

  Yegor Kugar had had to make certain adjustments to his choices for copulation. The sudden and surprising reduction in his market value was showing in the quality of his partners. In his previous life he had been able to pick up anyone at all, and that anyone had come running. He attached the bait, cast the line in the water and always got a bite. But now the value of his stock was in free fall.

  ‘I had to take what I could get, and it was surplus crap. Outside the social security office in Tikkurila I found an ugly bitch from Koivukylä and held onto her, because Yegor doesn’t sleep alone. Disgusting tits like potholders and a butt like a beanbag, cellulite as thick as the palm of your hand. But she was warm and she was a woman.