The Beggar and the Hare Page 11

  ‘The lady from Koivukylä was of the opinion that as Yegor had such a nice car it was best not to upset him; she was prepared to take the rough with the smooth as long as my 7 Series BMW with rear propulsion purred under her flabby ass. It had an electric roof window, roof-mounted DVD, refrigerator, turbos, the lot. All you could wish for, in cash, just name your currency.’

  But Yegor Kugar’s employer took his company car away. One morning instead of the BMW there was a 1985 Lada Niva with cardboard and duct tape in one of its side windows and hardly a drop of petrol in the tank. The car was exactly the same model that Yegor’s mother had queued for in the land of the Soviets but never got. A message was pinned to the steering wheel with a knife, advising Yegor to keep a sense of proportion. He ought to count himself lucky he still had a car at all. Yegor walked to the nearest service station and with a crumpled five-euro note bought some 98 octane in empty lemonade bottles.

  ‘No one else offered to employ me. I called all the numbers that used to say cheerily that they had a job here, a job there, go and collect plasma TVs from Kerava and sell them on in Malmi. Pick up three Czech broads and put them on sale for a week in the flat in Kamppi.

  ‘At first I got angry replies. Then I got no replies at all.

  ‘Nice, to be blackballed. Thanks, Vatanescu.

  ‘A fucking awful winter set in, one that froze balls and cars and trains. I ordered Kamagra off the Web, the poor man’s Viagra, so I could screw again and at least have something in my life that worked. I downed all the pills at once and a moment later got an erection like a red-hot poker. I asked the broad to forget about getting dressed that day. But she had other ideas.

  ‘She confided that she found it humiliating to sit in the front of an unheated Lada. She couldn’t have warm feelings for the owner of a cold Lada. She explained that she’d be happy to go out with a rich Russian, but there were plenty of poor Finns at home too.

  ‘Fuck, it’s hard to listen to that kind of thing when your cock is XL size. The broad started talking about how her parents had a Lada when she was a little girl, something about traumas and class conflicts. They’d taken her to Mänttä every summer with the radio playing Sinikka Sokka and those bearded guys from Agitprop. It didn’t mean anything to me; all I know is that a sokka is a pin you get in hand grenades.’

  And Yegor Kugar was left sitting naked on a kitchen stool, with a futile erection in his groin. His girlfriend, his other half, his lady, call her what you will, Kaarina, got her things together, put them in a plastic bag and left the building. Yegor was unable to act, unable to stop her, unable to keep her by force, or even throw a beercan after her, which was his usual way of resolving conjugal crises. He rose from his stool and looked out of the window. Kaarina was getting into a car that was waiting by the front door.

  ‘It was some ex-ice hockey player. I lost my broad to some guy named Niko from Hyvinkää.

  ‘On my first night alone I cracked up. After that I could only sleep with the help of pills, and I took them in the daytime too. I paid a last visit to my former employees Pirita and Marketta on Vaasankatu Street, who gave me enough cash to last a week, and from the four beggars who were left I took everything they had. Then I retired to my pad.

  ‘My body was used to screwing at least once a day. If it’s any less frequent than that, my dick juice goes up to my head. I lose my concentration, my nerves go to pieces, I make the wrong decisions or I don’t make any decisions at all.

  ‘I lay on my mattress covered in sweat, trembling all over; it was the same kind of shaking and fear of death and longing for death I experienced when I came off opium in Yobistan. And the same lack of interest in my own fate.’

  The only friend Yegor Kugar had left was an Indian gentleman named Naseem Hasapatilalati, who ran the convenience store downstairs. If they had anything in common, it was loneliness, melancholy, and a seething bitterness that had become the most powerful fuel of their lives.

  A week after the Organisation had relieved Yegor of his duties, the landlord rang his doorbell. When Yegor failed to open up, the landlord went away and returned with the police.

  ‘Do you think I have a clean credit history, with banking IDs and a savings account? Do you think the rental agreement was in my own name? It was in the name of Kostomuksha Pipe Systems PLC, and now the rent had not been paid. After the palace in Moscow I had only lived in places that the Organisation had arranged or dictated. Sometimes they were basements, sometimes they were luxury penthouses you got to by taking a lift from the basement straight to the thirty-eighth floor.

  ‘I looked inside my leather jacket and found my last banknotes, the currency of four different countries, pushed them through the door slot, and got a few weeks of peace. I phoned down to Naseem at the convenience store to bring me grub.’

  One very ordinary Thursday, as Vatanescu ate grandma’s meatballs from the microwave, the first snow began to float down from the sky. Back in his homeland it only snowed on the loftiest, sharpest mountain peaks. Here it was all over the place; the cotton wool covered everything. It settled in a smooth, even mass, and it was cold but bright. It covered the earth-moving equipment and the unfinished buildings, and it blotted out all human traces.

  Vatanescu walked in the snow in his long johns and bare feet. Õunap slammed the door to keep the heat in, and called to the madman to come inside before he caught pneumonia. Vatanescu spread his hands and turned round. He fell on his back. He opened his mouth and tasted snowflakes on the tip of his tongue.

  Life is a fairytale.

  The developer Kerkko Kolmonen knocked at the door of the shack at five in the morning. He promised to double the wages of his best construction team for all the days they managed to knock off the original schedule. They knew, however, that if the weather got any colder or it started to snow in earnest, the pumping of concrete would be impossible. The cement guns would freeze.

  ‘Five hundred euros in advance for each guy,’ Kolmonen said.

  Now I’m the richest man in my village.

  Let’s get to work.

  At the same moment, seven hundred miles to the south, Iina Rautee was studying the satellite photographs of the national park site. She had found her vocation. Her job was to save the world. She must save it from machines, human beings and the all-destructive greed of capital. She regarded herself as free from the fetters of money and material goods. The world also had to be saved from the thoughtlessness of her parents. Her mother used makeup that was tested on animals. Her father ate health yoghurts manufactured by a multinational company and refused to give them up in favour of organic products.

  The only poster in Iina Rautee’s room was one of Ulrike Meinhof. As part of the literature course she had taken at school she had read an autofictional novel about a German terrorist group and wanted to be part of something similar, in the same way that the boys in the class dreamed of a professional career in ice hockey or rock music.

  Terrorism was exciting. It took a lot more balls to be Ulrike Meinhof than it did to be Andy McCoy of Hanoi Rocks. With bombs and assault rifles towards a better world, sacrificing one’s own life and those of the capitalist pigs.

  Chaining oneself to a bulldozer: it was eighty per cent nature conservation, twenty per cent S&M.

  Iina had left a note on the kitchen table to say that when reading week was over she would come back for the final exams, but that just as probably she would join the ranks of the revolution.

  The revolution demands, the revolution sets free, she wrote, quoting the South American singer and songwriter Alfonso Padilla.

  During the same two months that Õunap, Jeffersson and Vatanescu were pulling out all the stops to get the work finished, the environmental organisation Nature-Mili was preparing an expedition. As Vatanescu put his head on the pillow again after another cold day that had turned sweaty, a group from Nature-Mili set off for Lapland. They had bought their truck from a dubious, one-eared Russian in Helsinki’s suburb of Kalasatama.

&n
bsp; And one day at sunrise Vatanescu did what he always did. He washed his face in the brook, splashed his stubbly cheeks a couple of times and was ready to build a world of shopping. For company he had the reindeer, who like him were revving themselves out of their morning stiffness.

  Vatanescu urinated on the snow as he whistled the song he had sung with Harri Pykström. He had just finished shaking himself dry when he suddenly stopped whistling.

  In front of him stood three rows of people who were chained to the bulldozers with handcuffs and cable clamps. They began to chant in rhythm:

  ‘Sa-ave the nation-al pa-rk!’

  And then something totally baffling:

  ‘Sa-ave Vata-nes-cu!’

  Vatanescu pinched the skin of his stomach. Yes, he was awake. Iina Rautee shouted to him to stop, to come and join the group of demonstrators.

  ‘We’re here to save you!’ Iina cried. ‘Vii seiv ju!’

  Thanks.

  But no thanks.

  I’ve been saved once already.

  I demanded and believed.

  I cut the emblem of the dictatorship out of my country’s flag with a knife.

  That should have been freedom, too.

  Buzzing overhead was a helicopter, with a cameraman leaning out of it. Vatanescu raised his eyes. More helicopters were coming; it was like Apocalypse Now. The helicopters were from the public and private television channels.

  We didn’t get freedom.

  We got the flesh trade.

  We got vodka bars.

  We got hamburger bars and investment banks.

  We had to leave and go somewhere, among you – whoever you are.

  Iina Rautee purred with satisfaction; the pictures would be on CNN and all over the world. Activism now! Now! And at their centre was Vatanescu, filmed by all eight cameras. One camera zoomed in on his eyes, on the depths of his brown pupils that were filled with weary bewilderment.

  You don’t know what you’re doing.

  You’re spoiling everything.

  Vatanescu turned round and tried to continue onwards.

  Go away.

  Go away, will you.

  I’m shutting my ears, go away, I’m shutting my eyes, get lost. I’m leaving.

  Vatanescu collided with a group of cameramen who had just landed, and a sports reporter who had been covering the skiing championships nearby. Apparently the Finns could have been among the eight best teams, but they hadn’t made it. The reporter had a question ready for Vatanescu.

  ‘How does it feel?’

  Won’t I ever be allowed to do anything in peace?

  Vatanescu tried to move the sports reporter out of the way. When that didn’t work, he stepped off the path.

  This step took him straight into the arms of Iina Rautee, who pulled him towards her. Our hero was in the wrong place at the wrong time, like Charlie Chaplin when the plank a big man is carrying hits him on the back of the head, and that plank is the world.

  Hands took hold of Vatanescu’s arms and tried to bind them with cables; the sports reporter thrust a microphone in front of his mouth; a group of cameramen from Finnish TV arrived, then one from Sámi Radio, then another from Sixty Minutes. Even Hannu Karpo’s fur hat could be glimpsed among the crowd.

  I wish you would all calm down.

  That would be more businesslike.

  One of the demonstrators pulled a rain cape with the Nature-Mili logo over Vatanescu’s overalls. On the back a slogan demanded an end to ecological violence and the assassination or at least immediate re-education of the leaders of the G8. Vatanescu tore himself free.

  Rabbit!

  Run!

  Yegor Kugar was walking along Helsinki’s Hämeentie Road, where the wind blew from six directions at once. It was eight o’clock, but Yegor had no idea if it was am or pm. Anyway, it didn’t matter.

  ‘I never complained about the climate in Penisstan, and I didn’t complain in Bluesland either, but in front of Naseem’s store I did. The wind stung and whipped. I would have preferred to stay under the covers with the curtains shut and my head empty. I tried to light a smoke, but the wind had other ideas. I stuck my hands in my pockets as deep as they would go – and they went right to the bottom, for there wasn’t a single rouble or dollar there. I put my collar up and wondered if I looked like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

  ‘Hell, no, I looked like what I was, a total loser.

  ‘I opened the door and left the wind outside. I asked for a pack of Red North State and a cup of black coffee. That’s what I lived on. The red and the black. Naseem’s coffee was like oil; my life was like sump oil.

  ‘Naseem was pleased that I’d managed to poke my nose out of doors and thought I ought to do more of that. Take my life in a new direction.’

  But Yegor’s life did have a direction, and it was down. What had brought him to Naseem Hasapatilalati’s store was a disconnected phone line. Yegor Kugar could no longer deliver his orders as he was accustomed to. He had lost interest in everything, his morning erection had abandoned him, his evenings were without passion, at night he had no desire to go out looking for action and fooling around.

  Yegor tried to find a crumb of comfort in his local newspaper, which Naseem Hasapatilalati ordered for him at his own expense. Such friendliness touched Yegor but also made him suspicious. He did not believe in altruism or disinterested motives. No one had ever done anything for him for nothing, and vice versa.

  ‘Maybe Naseem wasn’t from Calcutta at all, but Nazareth.

  ‘I read the ice hockey results and the match report for Avangard Omsk – things weren’t going too well for that team, and the start of the season determines what will happen later on. It was like what happened to me after Vatanescu’s pig-feast. Now the team had gone and recruited a Finnish coach plus some third-line eager beavers from Hämeenlinna and Lahti, and that didn’t look good.

  ‘I lit a cigarette. Naseem said that smoking wasn’t allowed indoors, but he always said that. It was our private joke, because in St Petersburg and Calcutta you can set fire to accounts, and to people, any time you want; the officials from the EU are hardly likely to come and bother you with their directives.

  ‘I had a fit of coughing, hawked up some red muck on the floor, wheezing, rattling; I didn’t know if it was blood or morning phlegm. In some ways I couldn’t have cared if it was lung cancer and the last days of Kugar.’

  The doorbell in the entrance rang, and the evening newspapers were brought into the store. Naseem cut the ties on the bundles and lifted the papers onto the counter. He took the placard and fitted it into the holder.

  Yegor had moved on from the sports pages to the comics, which failed to make him laugh. He found it especially irritating that there were people in the world who were able to draw pictures as their job, who got respect for it, even fame in some cases. Yegor thought bitterly of the two whole decades he had sacrificed to the Organisation, without a pension or healthcare benefits. Always available, taking all the risks of a small businessman, and all the thanks he got had been the boot.

  Yegor crushed his cigarette beneath his shoe and finished his coffee. In the bottom of the cardboard cup there was a black residue that resembled what was left of Yegor’s vitality and powers. What had once been strong, steaming coffee, now reduced to a crumpled cup that missed the rubbish bin when you threw it.

  Yegor looked out of the window. The short walk back to his front door seemed like miles. He said goodbye to Naseem and stepped outside. Sleet was falling. A bus was skidding at the bus stop; some alcoholics were singing a march tune.

  Yegor thought what he had known ever since he was a child. That human beings were animals. Both physically and metaphorically. All without exception, us, you and them.

  Naseem Hasapatilalati carried his placard holder out to the street.

  Yegor Kugar glanced at the placard, though he didn’t understand what it said.

  He didn’t need to, as the picture spoke for itself.

  ‘My legs gave wa
y under me. That idiot Vatanescu was looking me in the eye.’

  VATANESCU FROM ROMANIA WORKS FOR LESS THAN THE MINIMUM WAGE AND LIVES IN INHUMAN CONDITIONS. ARE THE LARGE COMPANIES NEGLECTING MAN AND THE ENVIRONMENT, IS THIS THE PRICE OF GLOBALISATION?

  Evening Gazette

  ALL CONSTRUCTION WORK ON THE NATIONAL PARK SITE HAS BEEN HALTED UNTIL ISSUES RELATING TO LEGISLATION, NATURE CONSERVATION AND WORKING CONDITIONS HAVE BEEN RESOLVED.

  Evening Gazette

  A RARE SPECIES OF RABBIT HAS BEEN SPOTTED IN THE AREA.

  Evening Gazette

  SUSPECTED IRREGULARITIES IN FINANCING OF NATIONAL IDEA PARK. LABOURERS’ PAY CLAIMED AS MILEAGE ALLOWANCES, DAILY EXPENSES AND EQUIPMENT HIRE.

  Evening Gazette

  KERKKO KOLMONEN MISSING. LAST SEEN IN PATTAYA.

  Evening Gazette

  Chapter Eight

  In which Vatanescu becomes a magician’s assistant and lover, and in which Yegor is himself again

  ‘Sorry lads,’ said the only developer’s representative who had dared to remain on the site. He had been obliged to sack Vatanescu, Urmas Õunap, Goodluck Jeffersson and eighty-seven other construction workers – Poles, Russians, Finns and Ghanaians – without pay.

  The coffers were empty. All further work was banned. The project would be frozen for decades, and environmental organisations were breathing down its neck. The only possible future activity would be the restoration of the devastated fells.

  ‘We’ll call you,’ the developer’s representative said. ‘There’s no point in you calling us.’

  Three thousand euros in unpaid back wages.

  ‘Do I look as though I have any money on me?’

  I’m three thousand euros short.

  I’m short of a pair of football boots.

  ‘Did we have a contract? Not as far as I recall. If there was, you can claim what’s owed to you from wage security.’