The Beggar and the Hare Page 15
Simo Pahvi had heard the voice of Heikki Hamutta in a shopping mall in a remote suburb of the capital during the years when brown and yellow were fashionable and colour TV was in its infancy. Pahvi sat on the saddle of his bicycle eating a vanilla Eskimo ice cream and thinking a boy’s thoughts: the maximum speeds of cars and Superman’s chances in a fight with Lex Luthor.
Then a portable amplifier crackled into life and the deep voice of the little man was heard. Heikki Hamutta was explaining what was wrong with the world and how to put it right.
Simo Pahvi had immediately joined the party and told his parents about his new plans for a future career. Gone were his dreams of being an engine driver or a fireman; he wanted to be a politician. A minister. Prime minister.
Pahvi was struck by Hamutta’s power with words, his sense of rhythm, his timing, his ability to communicate with the public and instinctively grasp its mood. Hamutta’s policies were a side issue – important, it was true, but if they had been presented to Pahvi in a different form, in stammering phrases or academic language, their effect would have been nil.
This was Simo Pahvi’s first illumination.
He had found his path and his life’s purpose at the age of nine. He had bought an ill-fitting suit at a cheap department store, and still did so – a new suit every ten years. He bought large non-prescription glasses and gave up playing football because he wanted to look more imposing. That meant a more generous waistline and a double chin, the kind one has to have if one intends to be a politician on radio and TV.
Simo Pahvi earned Hamutta’s trust by arriving at meetings with telephone directories, which he sat on in order to make himself the same height as everyone else. He did the same on the speakers’ platform, and got the most applause after Hamutta. Such strength of will in a boy not yet ten promised him a great future in the Ordinary Smallholders’ Party. What was more, Heikki Hamutta recognised the need for a mascot: with the help of a small boy one could gain extra points for warmth and humanity.
Pahvi absorbed all the characteristics of his role model, both outer and inner – his skill as a public performer, his pithy rhetoric, his benevolence towards his own, his steadfastness in the face of opponents and injustices.
So it continued for twenty years. Pahvi gained a reputation among his peers and rose to be number two in the party organisation. That was all anyone knew about him. He stood for parliament, but did not get in. Not discouraged, he went on being Heikki Hamutta’s trusted companion.
He toured the countryside with Hamutta, now on a tractor, now on a moped, sometimes on a bus invariably driven by another man who enjoyed Hamutta’s confidence: his driver Esko Sirpale.
The party’s supporters opened their homes for evening meetings, where the business of the Ordinary Smallholders’ Party was discussed late into the night, with never an eye on the clock. Improvements were promised. Householders offered guests refreshments and a place to stay for the night. At the end of one such evening Simo Pahvi was preparing to bed down when the daughter of the house brought him something for his heartburn.
There she was. His wife and mother of his children. Simo Pahvi was a plain-talking man of conservative tastes, so he lost no time in proposing to Marjatta. In the morning he asked her father for permission to marry her, and a month later they were husband and wife. Two months later Marjatta was expecting their first child.
Just as a new life was growing inside Marjatta, Heikki Hamutta’s life came to an end. Cancer of the prostate, old age, all the miles he had driven and walked and struggled finally claimed their own. For this, Pahvi had not been ready. No one is ever ready for such a thing – when the head of an establishment, an ice hockey team or a company grows too powerful. When such a leader passes away, all that remains of him are his boots, which don’t fit any of his successors. They are not able to walk in them, those boots; they don’t know where they let in or what to do about the leaky soles.
It was also around this time that the smallholdings and their owners finally disappeared from the land. There was nobody left, and no causes to defend any more. Heikki Hamutta died. The party went bankrupt. Many thought its ideals had died, too.
At the age of thirty-three, Simo Pahvi realised that he was an unemployed political hopeful. He realised it as he was filling his car at the Weathervane service station in Häme. Without enough money to fill the tank, he didn’t know what direction to take. He had forgotten where he had come from and had no idea where he was going, either in terms of his journey or of his life as a whole. Now that he was out of work, the glasses he had bought to give himself political credibility, the ill-fitting suit and the extra inches round his waist merely made him look like a drifter. He had put Heikki Hamutta’s boots in a crate in the basement of his apartment building, but had not even dared to look at them.
Simo Pahvi wondered what his unborn child would think of a father who after doing the football pools fills out an unemployment benefit form. As he got back into his car after paying for his petrol he was close to a crippling dose of self-pity. But on the slip road into Route 4, Simo Pahvi had the second illumination of his life.
At the side of the road stood a hitchhiker. As a rule he did not give lifts to hitchhikers, but for once there was room in the car and he had the time to spare. He reached over and opened the door on the passenger side.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘I might ask you the same question,’ the man replied.
‘Lahti.’
‘You booked me,’ the man said.
‘Not to my knowledge…’
‘I’m Jesus.’
‘Jesus?’
‘Jesus Mähönen, hi. Tell me now, what’s up, friend? Where is your road taking you?’
Pahvi put the car into first gear and accelerated.
‘Nowhere in particular. I thought I’d take a drive somewhere. Maybe to Mikkeli.’
‘Wrong. You’re going home, they need you there.’
Pahvi looked at the road ahead of him. He looked at the crushed squirrels that lay at its edges, the carcases of raccoon dogs, and a man who was pushing a bicycle, its pannier full of empty bottles. He saw the radio masts and ski-jumps of Lahti, and asked Jesus to repeat what he had said.
‘They need you at home.’
It was true, if he knew what home was. Home was Marjatta and home was the party.
‘You’ll make a U-turn at the next intersection and you’ll head for home.’
And Simo made a U-turn and headed for home.
‘In the next few days a child will be born to you,’ said Jesus Mähönen. ‘Take care of it. And after it, everything else. You will show people the way. You are life’s traffic cop. The traffic cop of domestic politics. You must know whom to stop at the red light, whom to let through at the green. Which route is clear, which route may have delays. And which route has a wide transport truck that can’t be overtaken for twenty miles.’
Pahvi said that he often didn’t understand his own metaphors, and so Jesus must explain himself more clearly.
‘Have faith in your own abilities, Pahvi. Only then will you become a figure in Finnish politics who is greater and more legendary than Heikki Hamutta. Do you understand?’
Simo Pahvi thought about it.
‘Think, man. Think, but don’t get hung up in your thoughts. Make a decision. Good or bad, a decision is always better than being in limbo. You can let me out here, at Keimolanportti.’
Pahvi left Jesus at the local service station, and although I am the omniscient narrator, I cannot say if this really was the Saviour, or simply Jesse Mähönen who had recently escaped from the mental hospital at Kellokoski. In any case it does not matter, as by their very definition questions of faith involve a consonance not with reality, but with faith.
On his way home Pahvi dropped in at the supermarket. He served celebratory coffee, accompanied by a litre of vanilla ice cream with instant chocolate sauce. His wife asked him what they were celebrating, as only yesterday he had
been in the depths of misery and despair.
‘Procreation,’ Pahvi replied, and in his voice for the first time there was that tone of vigour that would make him famous in times to come. ‘A piece of me is growing inside you, Marjatta. Tomorrow I’m going to order five thousand cards for the party’s members.’
‘Which party?’
‘My party. The Ordinary People’s Party. Will you take cream?’
Support for the party began at zero. Now it had reached thirty-three per cent. Gradually, with the help of mannerisms he had learned from Hamutta, methods he himself had devised and the tips he received from Jesus, Simo Pahvi’s laid-back assertiveness found its way into the consciousness of the entire nation. After Ozzy Osbourne, Simo Pahvi was the second person in the world to prove the truth of the maxim ‘being yourself is enough’. Most of us have to make a real effort to be more than ourselves if we want to achieve more than making our morning porridge. To be oneself is often to be a repulsive pariah, an obnoxious chatterer, a complacent bastard, a sneering idiot, a bimbo, a cretin, an irresponsible Don Juan, a timorous creep, a sneaky abortion – at any rate something that elicits no answering echo anywhere.
Simo Pahvi’s answering echo came from the markets, the farms, the pubs and the pedestrian underpasses. It came as a full-throated shout. Simo Pahvi’s identity was that of Uncle Veijo. The man who says, enough of all this talk, let’s get on with the job. Who dares to stand up and leave the table saying that if that guy utters another word of crap we’ll all down tools. When Simo Pahvi took the lead you were ready to follow him, to go to the village dance, to work in Sweden, to brawl in bars, fight the Winter War, the Continuation War and the Civil War, and attend church at Christmas.
You had to be close to the voters. To touch them, get under their skin. Within reach of a stained cup of coffee or a can of beer brought back from Tallinn. In summer around the barbecue, passing the packet of sausages, in the thirty square feet of the garden of a rented urban terraced house. That was where Pahvi had come from, that was where he went, and that was where he derived the rationale for his policies and his life.
It was in being himself that he had suffered defeats and scored his victories. That he had worked the turf and got to know his voters. Although one didn’t get to know people just by shaking their hand, Pahvi was able to draw conclusions and generalise, but in such a way that each person felt they were being individually addressed. The points that mattered were: what did someone lack? What could fill the gap? Should one promise what was really lacking, or something else? Put the blame on what was wrong or transfer it onto some quite different, externalised problem? Who was to be held responsible for the faults and omissions?
Simo Pahvi gave himself the image of someone who could diagnose the problem and would come back next summer to put it right. A broken gutter. Squeaky brakes. A firm’s relocation abroad. Unemployment. Pensions that were too small. Immigrants.
In those who voted for him, the figure of Simo Pahvi kindled the hope of being like Simo Pahvi. The distance from Pahvi to the people was so short that the ballot box was only a step away, and the right number was invariably chosen on the ballot paper.
Pahvi added slight deviations to his ordinariness. He wore an ordinary quilted jacket that smelled of tobacco smoke, motor oil and kebab sauce, but also a green scarf that was quite out of the ordinary: Simo Pahvi was a supporter of the Swedish football team Bemböle FIS. His enthusiasm was genuine, dating from his honeymoon in Uppsala, but the scarf was a deliberate test of the flexibility of his political support. If people accepted his unusual choice of football team, then in difficult situations they might also accept any other unusual choices and directions he might take. He was careful not to define his political leanings too narrowly. If one kept a certain freedom of action, one could go on drawing support from new sections of the public. And, just as he had calculated, the scarf put the finishing touches to the caricature.
The other touchstone was Jesus Mähönen. In an interview for Smile magazine, Pahvi said that he knew Jesus personally and often consulted him when making decisions that affected his private and political life. This, too, the public and the media had accepted, because the statement was interpreted as metaphorical. When Pahvi was unable or unwilling to answer some question related to the budget, for example, he would say:
‘I’ll have to ask Jesus first.’
His supporters would burst into laughter. His political rivals were surprised at the way he always landed on his feet. If they said the same things, they would be viewed as symptoms of mental illness.
‘Three words are enough to change the world. The thing is to know what those three words are.’
This precept of Heikki Hamutta’s was one that Pahvi always remembered.
In the third round of the parliamentary elections the Ordinary People’s Party had won a so-called ‘tsunami’ victory. In their use of this term, the political correspondents wanted to emphasise that the landslide had gone far into the depths of the country, overturning and upsetting everything, but would also come crashing back, returning some of the ordinary people who had risen to become members of parliament to their original status of sawyers, postmen, unemployed paper mill workers, students, border guards, policemen and checkout assistants.
The party was aware of the risk, and for the next election campaign a group led by Pike Salomaa, a world arm wrestling champion, even wanted the Ordinary People’s Party to try an independent PR agency.
Simo Pahvi often said in public that he listened to and trusted all who were wiser than himself. But Pike Salomaa was not one of them. Even though he had brought in the votes of the women and arm wrestlers of south-west Finland. In reality Pahvi thought that no one was wiser than himself, and that only Jesus and his driver Esko Sirpale were on his level.
But he knew that no leader should ever become too powerful or irreplaceable. If you took all the power for yourself, you began to find enemies in your own kitchen.
The reason for Simo Pahvi’s success was Simo Pahvi. The reason for Simo Pahvi’s problems was Simo Pahvi.
Simo Pahvi went to the counter and got himself a refill of coffee.
Simo Pahvi took a bite of his doughnut, the fifth of the day, and slurped down some coffee after it. He told Esko Sirpale that he could see no one among the ranks of the Finnish people who would be capable of stepping up to stand before them as leader. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Esko Sirpale did the same. They threw the cigarettes into the rubbish bin and opened out the cardboard packs. A cigarette pack was Simo Pahvi’s laptop and drawing board. This was how he had designed his summer cottage, his career, his wedding, his campaign budget and his EU policy. Everything was planned according to the same principles. Foundations that were damp-proof. A solid structure and a well-aired loft. Proper sheet iron on the roof, no aluminium foil.
‘What are we designing?’ Esko Sirpale asked.
‘A strategy.’
‘We’re not going to use a PR agency?’ Sirpale asked. ‘We’re going to do it ourselves?’
‘It’s not the work that hurts your back, but the bending.’
Then Pahvi stirred his cup of coffee with his spoon, not saying a word.
‘Is there a problem?’ Sirpale asked.
‘A big one,’ Simo Pahvi sighed. ‘The problem is that I’ve got all I ever wanted.’
‘Yes, you have. Thumbs up, and congratulations.’
‘I’ve been made a minister,’ Pahvi said. ‘All my aims have been fulfilled.’
Simo Pahvi’s gaze wandered along the enclosure of the Eläintarha sports stadium and past a woman in blue overalls who was filling a Ford Transit van.
‘Exactly,’ Esko Sirpale said. ‘Bloody hell. Let’s not mope about it.’
‘I’m empty.’
It took Jesus Mähönen three minutes to cycle from his apartment to the service station. As he didn’t drink coffee, he asked for a cup of hot water.
‘Please speak,’ Jesus asked.
Jesus and Esko Sirpale nodded and asked him to continue.
‘I’ve lost faith. In the future.’
‘Has something happened?’
‘No. I’m going to win the presidential election.’
Jesus and Esko Sirpale nodded.
‘But when I get to the president’s office, someone will have to take orders. Who, damn it?’
They were silent. Behind them old Irma got three watermelons on the fruit machine and won a hundred euros.
‘I’m the Ordinary People’s Party.’ Pahvi said. ‘But this morning on the john I realised that an ordinary person can’t lead the Ordinary People. I thought that he could, but he can’t. An ordinary person wants power, not responsibility.’
‘It’s good that you’ve realised it,’ Sirpale said. ‘Like Hamutta.’
‘That’s what people are like,’ said Pahvi. ‘But if you give power to someone who covets it, you’re going to end up a very long way from the original idea of the Ordinary People’s Party. My successor must be the One, with a capital O.’
Simo Pahvi finished his coffee, and thought. He got another refill and drank that, too. He went on thinking, looked at his trusted men and listened to his innermost self.
‘I’ve never had any doubts. Now I do. I don’t want to lose my life’s work.’
‘But you want to be president?’
‘If I don’t run, I will always regret it. But the party needs a good man to lead it. Someone who won’t let us down. Who won’t fire guns when he’s drunk. Who won’t line his own pockets. Who won’t come out with stupid statements on TV. Who won’t say openly what he thinks about blacks, homosexuals and abortion. Who won’t support the death penalty until the time is ripe. Who can talk about the bosses, the waste-water reform and the EU. He must be a new man, a man who is wise. Yet close to ordinary folk. Able to understand them. Aware of current trends. Not out for his own success.’