The Beggar and the Hare Read online

  With this the man tried to flee, but ran straight into the arms of the police, who handcuffed him and asked him politely to get into the back of a Ford Mondeo. The guardians of the law promised to come back and fetch the rest of the gang when the ringleaders were all in custody. Work permits and identity documents would be checked, and those workmen whose papers were not in order would get a nice warm cell.

  Better get moving.

  Follow your own path, wherever it takes you.

  To the end.

  Vatanescu ran with Jeffersson and Õunap to the shack. Then, with the rabbit under his arm, and his belongings flung into an overnight bag, he set off with them on the trek out of the National Park.

  After they had trudged five or six miles through the snow they stopped at a shelter to eat. With his strong, gleaming white teeth Goodluck Jeffersson tore open a pack of sausages. Õunap manufactured some barbecue sticks with a carpet knife and Vatanescu made a fire. In the course of these months in the National Idea Park he had learned the right way to handle bark, woodchips and twigs, knew how to determine the wind’s direction with his finger, and how to save matches.

  There was silence, the firelight glimmered on the men’s faces, the sausage skins popped, fat hissed on the embers. On the sausages the men spread mustard from a yellow tube. They had acquired a taste for it during their work on the site. The rabbit passed from lap to lap. They all took turns at giving it a scratch, and thanks to its presence the silence lost its tone of gloom, and a gleam of hope remained.

  In the morning they continued their silent journey and split up when the snowy expanses ended at the side of Route 79. There they exchanged a few embarrassed jokes – jokes that were needed, because they had reached the end of their common journey and they felt a sense of respect and esteem for one another. It was a spirit of comradeship, something that had welded them together in the shack they had shared, and in the freezing days they had worked side by side. Now they all wanted to be off before a tear flowed down a cheek, or a voice trembled and failed. So they resorted to the method men have employed since the dawn of world history – humour.

  Õunap suggested they could form a male striptease troupe, like the unemployed men in that movie. Goodluck Jeffersson thought that would be against his religion, and in any case Vatanescu’s physique and Õunap’s sense of rhythm militated against it.

  Take care.

  We’ll meet again if we’re meant to.

  And so Goodluck Jeffersson took off in a westward direction, because there he thought he would find a skiing centre, a wife and a family, though his route might just as easily take him to Vittumainen Ghyll and Läähkimä Gorge. Urmas Õunap went to the east in order to implement his Plan B. His schooldays had left him only with bad memories and a knowledge of Russian he had never needed and had tried to forget. But up here in Lapland, Russian seemed to be a real advantage in the labour market, especially if you were looking for a job as a trail guide or second-home estate agent. From over the border flowed an endless stream of Russia’s ever-growing middle class, with an equally growing urge to spend its money.

  Where shall I go?

  Guided by instinct, Vatanescu set off on foot southward, to Kolari. He reckoned that Lapland had nothing more to offer him, not even football boots. The berry-picking season was still six months away, and the reinvigoration of the reindeer business would take a generation or two.

  Vatanescu walked up hill and down dale, he waded along motor sledge tracks, avoided the hotels and restaurants of Äkäslompolo and gave a wide berth to the unfinished holiday villages where in back yards prefabricated concrete slabs, polystyrene panels and piles of crushed stone – currently covered in snow – awaited the spring.

  Then he found himself directly in front of a car that he recognised: Thomas Weissbier’s Volvo XC90, rusting in the same place he had left it. Its owner had preferred to claim on his insurance and had bought a shiny new one. Such is the way of the world: goods have a purchase value, a sales value, an insurance value, a resale value, a sentimental value, a theft value, a scrap value and an exchange value.

  What do I have that anyone would pay money for?

  What do I have to give in exchange?

  What guarantee can I offer?

  Am I worth anything?

  Vatanescu heaved open the door on the driver’s side and attempted to start the engine. Not a sound, only silence and the steam of his breath in front of his face.

  The rabbit jumped up to the windscreen, and its tiny warmth gradually thawed the frozen glass. It looked out of the opening, and then Vatanescu leaned right up next to it, so close that they could feel each other’s insignificant and unique breathing, and gradually the hole in the ice became large enough for them to see the whole of the snowy, moonlit world.

  Yegor Kugar needed a computer and an Internet connection. He had no money and Naseem Hasapatilalati did not want to mess up their friendship with loan agreements. Yegor remembered that his former employees had searched for their own clients on the Web, and he dragged his arse off to Vaasankatu Street to ring the intercom. Or rather, he climbed the fire escape to the balcony and entered the apartment that way. The former employee’s name was Natasha. She had a client in bed with her, and there was a Toshiba laptop on the bedside table. Yegor told her to maintain her posture and look of boredom, and the client his red face, astonishment and erection. He put the Toshiba under his arm and scuttled back down to the street like a rat.

  ‘The slut shouted from the balcony that things would go badly for me. That everyone knew I had no power any more.’

  Yegor was perfectly aware of his situation. He knew that right from the outset he had been a social outcast, but in a very privileged position compared to others like him. Now he was in free fall towards a safety net that had a hole in it, a hole that grew bigger by the day. Yegor Kugar’s entire career had been built on inspiring fear that inspired respect. Yegor was the wolf, others were the lambs.

  Such is the fate of the crook, from the first day to the last. Few people begin with a desire to be a crook while they are still in the maternity ward. That point is reached through a series of chance events, great or small. In the case of Yegor Kugar, history’s conveyor belt had once made a sharp turn, transporting him from the shores of the Arctic Sea to Vaasankatu Street.

  No one would become a crook if they could obtain the same standard of living and pension by legal means. And even if one day they had enough money to be able to retire, at what point in their life would they jump off the train of criminality? A train that hurtles along at full steam, charged with electricity, through tunnels and into a brick wall. A bullet train. In two weeks of work a crook makes as much as a drive-in waiter earns in three years. The crook doesn’t need to cringe before the system, to fill in forms or beg for a mortgage. True, the crook’s world also has its systems and hierarchy, but, in his initial enthusiasm, the crook who is new to the game doesn’t see that immediately. The crook finds himself in a family of other crooks, the drugs never run out, the jobs remain interesting. You make your own laws; the women are there for the taking, and you take them.

  ‘Danger is hot, and it attracts the ladies; it’s no good trying to explain it or turn it into something else. I even managed to screw a lot of female post-grad research students because they thought my animal nature, my violence and unpredictability made good subjects for research. Just like my penis, which is a lot longer than average.’

  But now the wolf had been stripped of his fangs and his virility, his bankroll taken away, and the lambs had become wolves. Yegor Kugar was familiar with the practice, but he had never thought he would end up as a lamb. However, those were the facts. If that was how it looked, that was how it was, as an elder statesman would have said – and Yegor knew it too.

  ‘I was going to end up as two lines in the local newspaper’s crime bulletin: “Russian killed in pedestrian underpass. Missed by creditors, and Natasha wants her laptop back.”’

  His forebodings
were confirmed on the stairs outside his apartment. There Yegor Kugar saw three large leather-jacketed men. One of them bore an angle grinder and the other two had sledgehammers. They must have been there to retrieve Natasha’s laptop, and that meant he had to beat a hasty retreat to the storeroom of Naseem Hasapatilalati’s premises. Naseem said he was certainly willing to protect his only friend, but not at the risk of his own life. Yegor Kugar accepted the conditions.

  Naseem Hasapatilalati brought Yegor Kugar meals and newspapers in his hiding place with a special coded knock. Otherwise the storeroom remained locked, and Yegor put shelves against the door. He knew what the Organisation’s contract said; he had signed it in his own blood. You never left the Organisation on good terms, and even on bad terms there were only two options. Really bad or fucking bad. The first option meant surrendering all your worldly goods, and your little finger or your arm to the Organisation. The second option meant surrendering your life, and all that was needed for that to happen was for the Room Upstairs to find you dispensable. When the Organisation no longer had any use for a man like Yegor, a man like Yegor became a threat to it. He knew too much; he would start singing. The Organisation preferred to put an end to the singer’s career before it even got started.

  So Yegor Kugar’s days were spent on his mattress in front of the open laptop. He did not search for porn or the ice hockey scores. Instead he searched for his erstwhile employee, his present arch-enemy, the Romanian beggar. And indeed he found him, in moving pictures, in material both free and paid for. The evening paper’s placard had been only the start, for the search engine revealed the scale of the situation, producing more than a hundred thousand hits for the name ‘Vatanescu’.

  ‘With the help of Google Translate I managed to read the captions, though the photos themselves said enough. The guy kept popping up here and there with a face like a bag of spanners, but people were crazy about him. I really couldn’t stomach the definitions of “Vatanescu” that were being thrown about:

  ‘A symbol of downshifting.

  ‘The saviour of a national treasure.

  ‘Whaaaat?’

  When Yegor Kugar noticed that Vatanascu had a lot of followers in social media, he joined Facebook himself. He wanted to test his own market value.

  ‘I made one friend. Mama. She asked when I was coming home, because she’d run out of vodka. I clicked on LIKE. Then I replied, all right, Mamochka, I’ll come, I’ll come, just as soon as you reimburse me for a few things you forgot to give me in my childhood: love, security, warmth and food.’

  After this experience Yegor Kugar found it hard to stomach the sight of Vatanescu’s face when it appeared on YouTube, in the light topics at the end of the MTV3 news or on talk shows.

  ‘Why did none of the news items ever call things by their name? He was a thief and a contract breaker. A Romanian swindler.

  ‘And he was still carrying that fucking rat around with him, but it made them even crazier about him. He used it as a tearjerker, that thing. Plain über-dirty calculation. In the chat forums they thought he was something an advertising agency had come up with, the guy who always happened to be in the right place. For the tree-huggers Vatanescu was a living statement of what a homeless vagabond ought to be.”

  But from Yegor’s point of view the worst was still to come. He found it in the Russian newspaper where he checked the scores of his favourite ice hockey team.

  Sanna Pommakka did not want to look after horses or be a nurse like the other girls in the first year at Puistola junior comprehensive. She wanted to deceive people, to take them in. She wanted to perform magic tricks. Sanna Pommakka wanted to make audiences rub their eyes and wonder how she did them, those tricks. That one? And especially that one?

  In her local public library, in 1981, at the age of seven, Sanna Pommakka found a copy of The Big Book of Magic by Finland’s best-known magician, Solmu Mäkelä, and at that moment she was certain that her future lay in the field of conjuring.

  Sanna closed her fist on a handkerchief and when she opened it there were eight handkerchiefs there. She made coins disappear. She knew the number and suit of the cards her father thought of. She received the applause, the surprise and the wonderment for which she hoped. When on top of this Santa Claus brought her a Junior Magic Set, her happiness was almost complete.

  But the approval and praise a child receives at home are deceptions, especially when compared with what takes place among their peers. Parents want their child to be happy, but by wanting it so much they make them unhappy later on. When Sanna showed off her talent at school, none of the other members of the class had any doubt about how the tricks were done. When the hidden coins fell out of Sanna’s sleeve, Pertti in the back row burst into gleeful laughter. Pertti was given detention, but what was that compared to Sanna’s sense of humiliation? The mere buzz of a fly in his ear.

  Such is childhood: one wrong word, someone’s laughter, one teacher’s bad morning and the cruel assessment that follows, not even deliberate, but able to change the whole direction of a small person’s life, removing hope and replacing it with despair.

  Sanna Pommakka had been raised to have grand ideas about herself, but now she chose a path that was more assured. She had no ideas about herself at all. She would have no aspirations; she was going to stay a small, quiet person in the middle row, from the age of seven until she died.

  Instead of magic tricks, Sanna Pommakka made ordinary existence, or rather survival, the focus of her life. She lost her virginity to Pertti in the back row, neither too early nor too late. Pertti was still laughing, not because he was cruel but because he was a sincerely stupid sixteen-year-old who had only three tools in his emotional toolkit: laughter, sarcasm and his fists. No magic at all in their shared moment.

  Sanna’s study supervisor thought her dream of college was unrealistic, so she went straight from junior comprehensive to work in a furniture store.

  A year passed.

  A fourth year passed.

  The other employees continued their lives in further education or training, but Sanna remained where she was, and her fortnightly pay was enough for her to live on. She occasionally went out with Pertti from the back row, because he was always available and had a car with lowering springs. Though she didn’t know what those were, they meant so much to Pertti that she respected them too.

  When Pertti cheated on Sanna, Sanna thought it was her own fault. She wasn’t good enough. Her looks, intelligence and character weren’t good enough. She kept quiet about her own hopes and dreams because she was afraid that people would laugh at them, and as a result she would be rejected. So gradually her hopes and dreams died. Now her relationship with Pertti was over, and she had not seen him for three years.

  Sanna Pommakka still delivered sofas and coffee tables and bunk beds to customers. The bigger the sofa, the more life there was in the house. Cots for infants, desks for schoolchildren, on rare occasions a rocking chair for an older person whose walls were decorated with photos of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  One day Sanna Pommakka and her workmate delivered a corner sofa to a house in a residential area. The little boy who opened the door looked just like Pertti and laughed like Pertti – because he was Pertti’s son. Pertti wasn’t laughing any more, because he had a child in one arm and a wife in the other, and was now a good husband. Sanna Pommakka presented the delivery form, looked him in the eye and froze. The worst thing was that Pertti had obviously failed to recognise her, she reflected as she took his signature and returned to the furniture delivery van without a word.

  It took six hours for the tears to come, and Sanna Pommakka herself didn’t know why she was crying, alone on her own sofa, as a red-haired talk-show host made his live audience laugh with his introductory monologue.

  The sofa store went bust. Because Sanna Pommakka had consistently put off joining the union, she was entitled only to the basic unemployment allowance. As severance pay she had received a sectional sofa tha
t was far too big for her small apartment. She split it in two and gave half to her neighbours. Soon she had to split the remaining half, too, as her unemployment money was not enough to pay the rent, and she had to look for a place that was smaller and less expensive.

  Sanna Pommakka’s social exclusion did not happen suddenly or instantly; it was a gradual process that spread over time. In fact, it took place while she was asleep, because life was easier in dreams. There things happened, unlike in her waking life. Sanna had dreams of children jumping on their parents’ double bed on a Sunday morning; she saw them in a large living room with a pine floor and wall-mounted bookshelves and toys on the floor, and in the corner a large TV set, and on the sofa a man whom she could love and who returned her love.

  Sanna slept. When she woke she went out and bought frankfurters and fries at a 24-hour service station and ate dinner at three in the morning. Then she slept some more. When she finally woke up the day was far advanced. She watched soaps, dream garden shows, summer home property shows and drama series, and saw the full lives other people led. She also saw them on the news – in the kind of news where a woman had killed her husband, for the woman had a husband and they had children who would now have to be looked after. All these people’s problems were connected with relationships. They had relationships in all directions, the world pulled them and pushed them and moved them about. Sanna’s problems were exclusively her own. Chief among them was loneliness. Everything else flowed from that. Sanna Pommakka felt that she had been born into the world alone; alone she lived in it and alone she would leave it. And so what did anything matter?

  Sanna lay on her one-third of a sofa and watched the renovation of the Nielikäinen family’s three-room apartment. The children’s bedroom was being given more space and painted white and the wardrobe cleverly expanded; the kitchen was being redesigned with the harmony of stainless steel and imitation marble tiles.