The Beggar and the Hare Read online

  When the children noticed the magician, the yellow Repa-Rent helmet and the rabbit jumping out of the hat, popularity was assured. It was limitless. The show was a sell-out.

  ‘You’re good with children,’ Sanna said to Vatanescu.

  Yes. Why wouldn’t I be? It’s easy.

  The children gathered at the feet of the trio. This meant that their parents’ wallets and purses were open; all one had to do was help oneself. The children climbed onto Vatanescu’s lap; they wanted to try his helmet on and play with the tools that still hung from the belt round his waist.

  Keep them.

  You have more use for them.

  The children asked if Vatanescu had met Tractor Tom, and asked what kind of houses he built and if he was able to mend the plumbing without swearing. Because their dads weren’t. Vatanescu didn’t understand what the children were saying, but he got the meaning and the tone all the same. He sang them a song he had learned from his grandma Klara and the children put their own words to it. Sanna joined in too.

  In the course of the evening Vatanescu noticed that the children’s parents took just as many photographs with their mobile phones of him as they did of the rabbit. One or two passengers came to ask him for his autograph.

  ‘It’s really you,’ they said.

  Who or what do you think I am? Who do they think I am?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sanna said, and indeed she didn’t. During all the time that Vatanescu had been growing into a media personality, Sanna had done nothing but practise her magic.

  You think I’m someone else.

  Someone important.

  I’m not.

  I’m Vatanescu, from Romania.

  At midnight the working day was over and the passengers immersed themselves in sleep, their books or the music and movies on their laptops. Vatanescu and Sanna Pommakka divided the money and Vatanescu went off to ask the ticket collector for two sleeping compartments. After checking the reservations on his reading device, the ticket collector said there was only one sleeping compartment left.

  ‘But it has three berths.’

  I’m used to roughing it. I can sleep anywhere, as long as it’s safe.

  The rabbit and I will just sit up in an ordinary seat.

  Sanna Pommakka told him not to indulge in selfpity or play the martyr. She was in the process of eliminating that sort of behaviour from her own life and from the layers of her mind, and she would do the same for the man from Repa-Rent. She ordered him into the compartment. Then she used the magic money to pay for tickets and sleeping berths all the way to the terminus. They still had eight hours to sleep before they reached Helsinki.

  ‘We’re partners.’

  Partners?

  ‘Business partners.’

  Well, if you say so, then at least…

  You take the lower berth.

  As soon as the pair had gone into the sleeping compartment, the ticket collector gave the insatiable private and public media an update on their destination.

  Vatanescu kicked off his overalls and hoped that the smell of his sweaty feet wouldn’t carry excessively to Sanna Pommakka’s nostrils. The rabbit wrinkled its nose and curled up on Vatanescu’s pillow, under the night-light.

  How long is it since I slept with a woman?

  In the same room?

  Sanna Pommakka removed her tailcoat, her bow tie and all her magician’s accoutrements, and hoped that the odour of her underarm sweat would not carry excessively to Vatanescu’s nostrils. She reckoned that she had earned almost the same amount as she had been promised for the opening show at the mall, a fat wad of banknotes of various colours. She would be able to pay the next month’s rent and also the arrears. She was an artiste who had done her work and was sharing her sleeping compartment with a good man. The first man in her life with whom she felt at ease. With whom she didn’t have to pretend, didn’t have to make herself more or less than what she was. What was more, from a professional point of view the Rabbit-Vatanescu-Pommakka trio worked brilliantly, and one way or the other they would have to make it permanent.

  ‘Perhaps we ought to perform in the street,’ she said. ‘Or on the trams, maybe. Gradually make a name for ourselves, like Birds of Lapinlahti?’

  Birds of Lapinlahti?

  ‘An intelligent rabbit, an intelligent woman and an assistant dressed like a building worker. A suitably strange combination.’

  Do you have any children, Sanna Pommakka?

  ‘No.’

  I have a son, Miklos.

  ‘It would be nice to meet him,’ Sanna let out.

  I’d like to meet him, too.

  I don’t know when that will be possible. I don’t know anything about tomorrow.

  Miklos has no reason to thank me for bringing him into the world if I’m not capable of giving him something.

  An education. A future. Football boots.

  ‘I wish there was someone I could have those sorts of thoughts about,’ Sanna said in her own language, so that Vatanescu didn’t hear it or understand it.

  Are you asleep already?

  Magician.

  Her pyjamas in her arms, Sanna Pommakka looked at her reflection in the glass. This body, her private property, was no good; it excited no desire. Her breasts really didn’t defy the force of gravity or form the kind of regular half-moons that would make a teenage lad lock himself in the train toilet in order to keep his hopes up on a paper towel. An appendix scar on her stomach, solid thighs that enabled the rest of her to stay upright. Her mind was more tricky: if it faltered, one day it would break. Into it came tomorrow, Helsinki’s icy railway station, an unknown future, an east wind. Again to try alone, to foist herself on the magic market, to test her value. Trying to cope was all this life was about. The visit to the employment agency, the filling-in of the start-up application. The VAT accounts.

  ‘I never want to spend another day alone.’

  The ticket inspectors ordered the ticketless people smuggler off the train at Kisahalli, the Olympic Sports Stadium. Yegor walked under Paavo Nurmi’s statue, looked at the stadium tower and the people passing by and the morning drunks staggering out of the local cells. The laptop’s screen showed a map of Finland and a blinking red dot that indicated Vatanescu’s movements. At present the dot was somewhere on the outskirts of Hämeenlinna. In the latest pictures that had been added to the Web page, a woman named Sanna Pommakka was pulling a rabbit out of a hat held by Vatanescu.

  ‘How is that any different from all the bunnies I’ve sold successfully around Europe? Someone ought to work out how many men a little Hungarian bunny cheers up during her twelve-hour working day. How her earnings compare to living at home in a slum with her parents on social security. Which doesn’t exist anyway. Not to mention the effect of prostitution on the employment situation and the soft values it spreads. Getting your rocks off means less violence. There’s no use denying it; it’s been proved.

  ‘The tastiest morsels are from Hungary. Their language is related to Finnish, but they come from a different gene bank from those Finnish cows with their legs like posts and their sagging breasts. The Hungarian whores have long legs, small but round buttocks – and the same goes for their tits. Sizzling hot and they know how to twitch their asses at the right time. And when they give blowjobs they don’t mess about with condoms – that’s quite a selling point in a country where people don’t even dare to shake hands because one person caught bird flu. In Switzerland. Eighteen months ago. Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, did you wash them?

  ‘And when I thought about all that I felt the old me coming back. Started getting it up again. Felt like screwing again. Began wanting things. Money and women and respect. They’d all been taken from me.

  ‘I’m no victim.

  ‘I make victims.

  ‘I’m going to be a legend!’

  Vatanescu’s red dot was blinking somewhere around Kerava when Yegor’s laptop battery ran out. He gave the laptop to a gentleman who had just been let out of
the cells in a genial mood on account of his still being plastered. Then he tossed a coin to determine whether the beggar’s journey had ended at Pasila or at Helsinki Central Station.

  What are you doing?

  Sanna.

  Are you going to lie under the same blanket with me?

  Pommakka.

  We can’t.

  Yet you are.

  Why shouldn’t we? What am I pretending to be? I’m not a saint; I’m a human being.

  I’m Vatanescu.

  Yes, I’m lonely too.

  Of course we can.

  Come on.

  You’re…

  …very…

  …warm.

  The rabbit hopped out from under the blanket of the lower berth onto Vatanescu’s chest to be stroked. Sanna Pommakka snored beside him, and our hero was not embarrassed or ashamed in the slightest. Better to be two than on one’s own. And three were even better. There weren’t many Romanian beggars who had done it with a magician on a Finnish night train.

  From the corridor there were footsteps and announcements. The stop at Tampere lasted a long time. Cars were being unloaded, tired-looking people walked in the lighted railway yard, torn from their sleep to begin their work, and a little boy ran about in such a lively way that he seemed not to know or care what time it was. Now was always a good time to be skipping around, and it was never too late to laugh or cry.

  An empty mind.

  A clear mind.

  I know what I’m going to do.

  What the task is.

  Get shaved, put on my overalls and go to a sports shop like any other man.

  Choose the football boots.

  Pay for the football boots with the money the rabbit got for me by magic.

  Pack up the football boots.

  Post the football boots.

  Buy a phone.

  Call home.

  Life is an opportunity.

  I feel that now.

  I’m going to manage.

  I’m going to buy an apartment, rent an apartment, two rooms, tiling, constant hot water, bright lighting.

  I’m going to buy a car, an old banger that costs a thousand euros, which I will drive wherever I choose. I will phone this woman who’s sleeping beside me, and I’ll invite her to the cinema. I will tell her about me, and she will tell me about her. We’ll get to know each other and eventually I’ll introduce her to Miklos, and even to my family.

  Could that be possible?

  Vatanescu searched in his overalls and found what he was looking for: a piece of chocolate wrapped in foil. He was in the process of unwrapping it when Sanna Pommakka woke up. She looked at Vatanescu tenderly, without anxiety or forlornness, or the sense of emptiness she usually felt in the mornings.

  ‘Good morning.’

  Would you like some chocolate?

  ‘Mmm… where are we? Shall we go and eat somewhere when we get to Helsinki? We still have money.’

  Almost there.

  ‘Are we going to stay… I mean, are we going to travel together?’

  Where?

  ‘Somewhere. Where are you going?’

  To a sports shop.

  ‘I’ll come with you… Vata. I’ll come to the sports shop with you.’

  Vatanescu sucked his chocolate, for if it got into the hole in his right molar, the pain would only go away if he took a handful of painkillers.

  Sanna Pommakka drew Vatanescu towards her and put her head on his chest.

  It would be even better if there were someone who would buy the football boots for me.

  Someone with a loyalty card. Do you have a loyalty card?

  ‘Yes.’

  With points on it?

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  A social security ID, a phone number, a fixed address?

  ‘Of course I do, dear sir.’

  And then Vatanescu and Sanna Pommakka packed up their things, but drew the curtains of the sleeping berth again for the journey between Järvenpää and Helsinki. If Vatanescu had a dominant feeling, it was one of languor. For Sanna Pommakka, it was self-confidence. Their paths had crossed when they were poor, unemployed and disrespected, but now they had a future ahead of them. The group would not be complete without the rabbit – and its dominant feeling was one of secret jealousy.

  Vatanescu and Sanna Pommakka could now hold their heads up as they entered society – a part of it anyway, or at least its fringes. They joined the ranks of those whose lives were in order, who could pay their monthly debts, afford a new car every three years, afford to let their children go riding, play the drums or do messy finger-painting, and praise them again and again, even though a mess was really just a mess.

  Sanna Pommakka wondered if she could enter that world with this man. Vatanescu’s mind was mainly on the football boots, but he also enjoyed the scent of Sanna Pommakka’s hair.

  They stood by the door in single file, the train slowed down before it stopped, and even though they might never be a couple, they would always share the magic of the Kolari–Helsinki night train.

  A film star’s reception awaited Vatanescu. Cameras, mobile phones, autograph books, the media and production companies. One woman wanted his signature on her breasts, another on the side of her baby, a man on his 1 Percent waistcoat.

  The crowd forced its way between Sanna Pommakka and Vatanescu. First they lost each other’s hands, then they could no longer see each other. Sanna shouted her address, which Vatanescu failed to store in his memory.

  We’ll meet again if we’re meant to.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ asked a sports correspondent.

  Is this how they celebrate when a man meets a woman and gives up being alone in order to be together?

  Are you all crazy?

  Little girls plucked hairs from Vatanescu’s head, little boys admired his workman’s overalls. He saw T-shirts covered with pictures of himself and the rabbit. On the quayside there were hastily improvised stalls selling Vatanescu-themed spin-offs. There were people dressed as rabbits and people dressed as beggars.

  Madness.

  Step aside, please…

  …would you let me through…

  …I need to find a sports shop.

  Then Vatanescu sensed a figure in the human ocean. He sensed it without seeing it yet, sensed it on his skin, like electricity. The figure was pushing its way determinedly through the mass of people; it was heading straight for him, like the blocks of ice careering down the River Kyrö in the spring.

  I must

  run

  away.

  I must

  protect

  the rabbit.

  The event has been recorded by numerous witness statements and on lots of CCTV footage, but there was only one perpetrator and one victim.

  ‘I pushed the crowd of people in front of me apart with two hands as if they were sliding doors. Layer by layer, eight inches at a time. They were all in a crazy state of mass hysteria, but my task was to restore order. I kept the blade behind my arm and knew that the surest way would be to make a quick stab to the throat the way it’s done by the mujahedin, or whatever those skirt-wearing Jedi warriors are called. It was just a question of whether I could get close enough to Vatanescu to step behind him.

  ‘I, Yegor Kugar, was back.

  ‘I was on the warpath, I was going to become a legend.

  ‘We’ll see which one of us will be written about after this!’

  Now I died.

  Chapter Nine

  In which we make the acquaintance of Finland’s prime minister, and in which Vatanescu awakes from the dead

  Finland’s prime minister Simo Pahvi sat in the café of the Neste service station near Eläintarha Park with his driver Esko Sirpale. They were waiting for a third man.

  ‘These chairs are no good,’ Pahvi said. ‘They’re designed for backsides. I have an arse.’

  Today was the day that Simo Pahvi’s party was to define its future. Its values, strategies and direction.

&nbs
p; It had all begun forty years earlier with the founding of the Ordinary Smallholders’ Party by Simo Pahvi’s predecessor and mentor, Heikki Hamutta. The party had been his life’s work. Depending on one’s point of view, and which political correspondent one read, Hamutta had been either a dissident, an enemy of the state, a troublemaker, a loudmouth or a saviour. In his own opinion Heikki Hamutta knew the people, trusted the people and wanted to help the people. He had grown up among the people, was a product of the Karelia that had been abandoned to the Russians. The door of the lift to the upper echelons had been open, but Hamutta preferred to go by the stairs and the gravel roads.

  Heikki Hamutta had made it his mission in life to fight for the big issues of the little man. In a big world he took the little man’s side against big enemies. Against the bosses, the communists, big domestic capital, big foreign capital; all the forces that tried from all directions to encroach on the land of the rural smallholders and take away what little they had. The threats did not have to be real – it was enough that they appeared real in the smallholders’ minds, and that they were updated at regular intervals. Heikki Hamutta wanted to breathe new life into a section of the population that had been thought to be either dead or asleep.

  Little by little, he had turned the small party into a big one, and talk had become more important than deeds. Words. Figures of speech. A lively and ready wit. Clear-cut sentences, tinged with humour. There had to be bite, but no irony. No detours, no circumlocutions, nothing too off-topic or airy-fairy. Then the audience wanted to hear more.

  ‘The man people want to hear gains a voice,’ Hamutta had said. ‘The man people want to hear gains a face. The man who acquires a face gains visibility. He’s in demand in the newspapers, on radio and TV. He gains votes in their hundreds of thousands.’