The Beggar and the Hare Read online

‘No one can learn politics in a day.’

  Not that. The instructions for this grill.

  As housewarming presents Simo Pahvi had bought Vatanescu a large Calor gas barbecue grill, and a trampoline for Miklos.

  ‘And what about everything else? My son, what about the rest of your life? Within you? In your heart?’

  I’m not afraid of death any more.

  I have life around me.

  The magician hasn’t got in touch with me. Perhaps she doesn’t dare to?

  Perhaps some time I’ll call her again. One day I may have time for love. Pahvi thinks that politics come first.

  Pahvi’s housewarming gift package also contained a people carrier, an espresso machine and a hedgetrimmer. You had to know the habits, activities and aspirations of the electorate, he had said. You had to be able to speak their language. If the Ordinary People’s Party wanted to reach upper-middle-class voters it had to understand what made the target group tick. That was why this evening Vatanescu was to grill a whole bucketful of ready-made honey-marinated chicken fillets.

  Simo Pahvi climbed the steps to the veranda, his knees cracking. He took off his shirt and used it to wipe the back of his neck, the top of his head and the folds of his belly. Then he threw the shirt about his shoulders and approached Vatanescu.

  ‘Problems, old chap? Feeling nervous about tonight?’

  How do you turn on the gas?

  ‘There are these little buttons. Look, you turn them like this…’

  Then Simo Pahvi clicked the electric switch and held his hand over the grill tray for a moment. He spat on it and when the spittle began to boil he asked Vatanescu to open the packs of honey-marinated chicken.

  ‘I can get them started.’

  Vatanescu sat down beside his mother on the bench they had bought at the retail park along with the rest of the garden furniture. She took his hand in hers. They saw Miklos running about on the lawn, and the rabbit bouncing around at his feet. Boy and rabbit were passing the ball to each other, and now and then Miklos would shoot the ball towards a tree, a wall or his mother, who was resting in the hammock. The rabbit also had a hutch of its own on the edge of the forest, with a small carrot patch beside it.

  The boy got them.

  Football boots.

  ‘This is how you do it,’ Pahvi said, leaning over the grill. ‘You don’t want too many pieces next to one another, so they have room to be turned and the tray doesn’t go cold. When the liquid comes to the surface you turn them. Actually it doesn’t really matter how you turn pieces of chicken. A bit like political rivals. Some folk like their meat juicy, others like it dry. Same goes for women.’

  Pahvi burst into his contagious, quaking laughter. His belly heaved and the veranda shook.

  ‘I think we’ll use cardboard plates so the ladies don’t have to do the washing up. Choose cardboard – pahvi. Makes things easier.’

  I’ve been successful, Mama. For once.

  ‘You’ll succeed at anything you put your mind to,’ said Mama Vatanescu.

  I’ve never been successful before.

  ‘But after this you always will. Believe me. I believe in you. I brought you into the world.’

  In Mother Russia, behind bogs and coniferous forests, permafrost and tumbledown cabins, was the penal colony where Yegor Kugar was shut up in a cell. Though he no longer had a typewriter, he stubbornly continued to tell his story with a pencil in the margins of a hymnbook or any piece of white paper that fell into his hands. Like Papillon, Yegor Kugar kept all his writings in an aluminium tube, carefully concealed in a place where the solarium did not shine.

  But let Yegor Kugar tell it as he did in his book Crooks Have Thick Skins, which was a worldwide success.

  ‘I was a political prisoner. I’ve talked to Khodorkovsky and I can tell you that I wasn’t sent down for stabbing Vatanescu, but for giving the Tsar a bad name. The Tsar alone has the exclusive right to bring shame on Russia beyond the country’s borders. So there I was, living in this syphilis and gonorrhoea centre up the Volga Bend. Nothing to write home about, really shitty. Each morning when I woke up I felt as though I was on the movie set of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Not as the hero but as some average guy who had been picked up off the street and then left in a real labour camp, even though he was only supposed to do one day’s filming.

  ‘Then one day I got a letter.

  ‘I don’t get letters. I thought it must be from my mother – her money had run out or she needed an advance for her funeral.

  ‘It wasn’t Mama, it was Vatanescu.

  ‘On the envelope there was some kind of fan photo or ministerial portrait. A rather kitschy photo, Vatanescu in the middle of a row of old guys in dark suits, with the rabbit. At first I thought it was some kind of cruel joke, turning the knife in the wound, but there really was a letter inside.

  ‘Vatanescu wrote that he’d heard about my memoir project and was willing to find me a publisher for it, maybe Johnny Kniga or Bonniers, or straight into the US market.

  ‘Whaaaat???!!!

  ‘I admit that it fazed me a bit, but it was only the beginning. Vatanescu also said he had negotiated my release. He was such a big shot at the UN, at Greenpeace, Amnesty and in US foreign policy that saving me had been easy. The envelope contained instructions for the journey, and to start with a helicopter would take me to St Petersburg. There I would be given clean clothes, a clean passport and a train ticket.

  ‘Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat???!!!’

  And that was where Yegor Kugar went, back to Finland, to his first real job. He was given a tax deduction card, a taxi card and an identity card. He was destined for an important role in Vatanescu’s first government.

  ‘Of course I know the ways and customs of the Russian people, I speak the language and I know the social code. Like the man from Del Monte, I said yes! I accepted a post as an expert on East–West relations.’

  The Million Merc took our hero, replete with ready-made honey-marinated chicken, to the city’s stony centre. From now on his meals would be prepared by head chef Ming Po, who used the finest raw ingredients in the land to create an infinite combination of wonders and specialities from the seven great gastronomies of the world. When Ming made marinades, he used only the finest natural honey from Mäntsälä, soy sauce from Okinawa and maple syrup from Canada.

  Esko Sirpale drove, and Jesus Mähönen sat beside him. Vatanescu, Miklos and Pahvi were in the back seat. In its search for a suitable lap the rabbit stopped on Miklos to be scratched.

  Simo Pahvi wrote on the back of a cigarette pack with his carpenter’s pencil, and smiled. His deeds were going to make populist history; this was going to alter the ship’s course entirely; it would open the North–East passage. It wasn’t a U-turn; it was a rebirth. Simo Pahvi would be remembered as the party leader who in place of narrow-mindedness, factionalism and racist populism chose Vatanescu. Without losing anything of the original idea of the Ordinary People’s Party, because Vatanescu was more ordinary than ordinary. The concept of positive populism had already spread from the small country of Finland to the world, and new sectors were being won over all the time. The Italian prime minister was interested in the new format, as were several parties in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Faxes had arrived from both the Democrats and the Republicans in the United States. The party’s support base had evolved from shell-suited chavs to consumers of soy sausage. With Vatanescu’s help, Simo Pahvi had solved the problem of his own future and that of his party, while making all other parties unnecessary.

  ‘Everything circulates,’ Pahvi suggested as the title for that evening’s television address.

  Good circulates.

  ‘Too flat,’ Esko Sirpale said. ‘We need something with a bit more edge.’

  ‘We need one more word,’ Jesus Mähönen said.

  ‘Three words are enough. We just need to know what they are.’

  ‘Ball,’ said Miklos, who was looking out of the window at the football stadium.
‘Have we got the ball with us?’

  Good balls circulate.

  ‘Hell’s bells, Vatanescu, that’s it!’ Pahvi shouted, and wrote the phrase down on his cigarette pack. ‘You’ll be rolling that ball for the whole of your term in office! We’ve put a good ball into circulation. Let’s play ball.’

  A man is a ball.

  Sometimes an empty one that needs to be pumped up again.

  ‘Just so. Go on.’

  A ball hits a wall, but bounces back again? A ball is always faster than a man?

  ‘Exactly.’

  What does it mean?

  ‘Don’t worry about that, Vatanescu. The public will fill in the gaps. And the ballot papers.’

  Vatanescu nodded.

  ‘Use your own life as an example. For everything. When they ask you for a solution to the beggar problem, tell them how it was for you.’

  I wanted boots.

  I also got a ball.

  ‘And remember who you are.’

  Vatanescu?

  ‘You’re the future. You’re me. Remember your own value.’

  What’s that?

  ‘Salary class: A1, competency class: A1, irreplaceability factor: A1.’

  And the Million Merc rolled along Route 3 at forty miles an hour, for Esko Sirpale did not dare to drive the car any faster. But the slow speed was more imposing, more dignified and old-worldly than stepping on the gas would have been. Miklos Vatanescu scratched the rabbit under its chin, one eye on his football boots. Pahvi fished some neckties out of the Siwa bag and tried them on Vatanescu.

  ‘Damn. That tie looks even worse on you than it does on me. We might as well just go around in tracksuits if we want to.’

  Or snowsuits.

  ‘I’m president. As of this evening you’re prime minister. There was a Paasikivi Line and a Kekkonen Line. We lads are going to introduce the Tracksuit Line.’

  Then Vatanescu’s phone rang. He didn’t know how to answer it, and handed it to his son. Miklos pressed the green button, listened for a moment and said to his father:

  ‘It’s someone called Sanna.’

  Miklos was delivered at birth by his grandmother.

  Anneli, in her turn, was delivered by the midwife. Exactly nine months after our train journey.

  I cut the umbilical cord.

  A tiny little girl, the strangest and most peculiar creature in the world, full of demands and displeasure. And yet the most familiar and self-evident one, too.

  She will have everything right from the start.

  A birth is not a miracle. It will be the same until the end of time, until the last human being. The need for life, and also its meaning.

  What was miraculous about the event of childbirth was how much attention both Sanna and the newborn child received, how important it was that everyone stayed alive. The attention that was given to making sure that the readings on the measuring devices were correct, that the blood tests were precise. That the baby’s breathing was normal, that her appetite was growing, that her weight was increasing. That her life would continue. That another taxpayer was on the way.

  Now I have a son and I have a daughter and they have all the vaccinations and toys and playsuits and football boots they need. I have a house, a mortgage and a family car. I have many more things, and stranger ones than I ever wished for. One can’t wish for what one doesn’t know exists.

  The Last Chapter

  In which a good rabbit circulates

  This is not the end, for nothing in this life has an end except life itself. And even after decomposition it continues as a beautiful display of flowers or an intolerable growth of weeds, which people try to control with the help of lawnmowers and yellow gardening gloves. But poor humans can’t control nature, because man is a part of it, and viewed from far enough away each one of us is a beautiful display of flowers or an intolerable growth of weeds.

  In all this, after all this, what is the place of the animal, the rabbit? Does it have a place? Does it have a role and a value?

  The rabbit did not enjoy the photo sessions, the official visits and the finely laid tables. The rabbit hopped away down the long tables to hide in a cupboard when the presidents, monarchs and dictators expressed a desire to stroke and pat it. When the animal liberationists wanted to liberate it, it fled into the darkest corner. Its pulse raced, it slept badly, it put its ears back and stopped eating. When an attempt was made to take sentimental pictures of the rabbit and Anneli Vatanescu-Pommakka for the lead story in a women’s magazine, the rabbit disappeared for several days and was eventually found in an air-conditioning duct, badly dehydrated.

  Above all, the rabbit did not like Vatanescu’s new duties as a father, a politician and a member of civilisation. In the hierarchy of the needs of someone living under normal conditions, a rabbit becomes a domestic pet, a cherished one to be sure, but no longer a brother, a comrade or a travelling companion.

  ‘An animal can’t live the life of a human being,’ Vatanescu’s mother said. ‘It doesn’t care for luxury any more than I do.’

  ‘You can’t get rid of the rabbit,’ Simo Pahvi said for his part. ‘It secured you half your votes. We can’t afford to get rid of it.’

  It won’t survive one more foreign trip.

  ‘We’ll get some doubles. Who’ll notice the difference?’

  I wouldn’t exchange my children if they were frightened of the new.

  But the worst was still to come. At her half-yearly medical examination it was discovered that Anneli Vatanescu-Pommakka was allergic to milk and animals. It was at once clear what caused her spots, shortness of breath and red eyes. She had been born in a world where hair was something dirty and superfluous, unlike her big brother Miklos, whose body was used to animal fur, human leavings and the significant damage caused to floors by dampness.

  ‘We can’t keep it,’ said Sanna. ‘You know that. We just can’t.’

  It’s true.

  It’s impossible.

  For seven days and nights Vatanescu said not a word.

  ‘Talk to me,’ Sanna demanded. ‘Please don’t bottle it all up, dear. How can you have become… such a… so… Finnish?’

  I can’t keep bustling around all the time; the world goes on nevertheless.

  I don’t like talking.

  I like pottering in the garage. I have a beer, maybe even another beer, sometimes Pykström calls me when he’s doing the same. I have a few tipples.

  And even though I rack my brains about the rabbit, I can’t come up with a solution.

  The rabbit will just have to take what it has to take. That’s what I did.

  Soon the rabbit also began to show symptoms. It sneezed, its eyes became red and it didn’t like being outside any more. Vatanescu took it to the vet, who quickly produced a diagnosis. The animal was allergic to infant humans. Its respiratory organs would not tolerate air conditioning, let alone transcontinental flights. Moreover, it clearly didn’t get enough sleep and exercise.

  ‘It’s a psychosomatic syndrome,’ said the vet. ‘If it were human I’d give it a course of Cipramil. But for an animal I won’t prescribe anything. I’d encourage you to find a natural solution.’

  Vatanescu returned from the vet’s more perplexed than ever, without a solution, at a dead end.

  I’ve found a home and a family. Each night I get into my own bed, in my own home, because a person needs a home to leave and come back to. One can’t be on a journey all the time; a journey is something that’s temporary.

  Money from one’s job, food from the supermarket, children from the kindergarten, berries from the bushes, fish from the lake, insurance from the insurance company, a loan from the bank, the wife from her dancing, treatment from the hospital.

  Then home.

  To one’s family circle.

  Until one has it one doesn’t realise what it’s worth.

  Vatanescu stroked the rabbit’s side.

  He noticed that his hand was trembling, his chin unsteady.


  We’ve shared our journey.

  But my house can’t be your house.

  Sirpale stopped the car in front of the mailbox, where a letter for Vatanescu was waiting.

  Dear Prime Minister,

  You won’t remember, but I’m Pentti Körmylä. We dined at the same table on the Stockholm ferry. You looked at us and we wondered who that dark chap sitting there was. It all came back to me when you started appearing on TV and radio. I noticed how you weighed your words. That’s a good thing. But the fact that you are also able to choose those few words correctly is more rare. My wife and I read in a ladies’ magazine that you originally came here in order to buy a pair of football boots for your son. We have a pair for which we have no use.

  Ulla Körmylä here, good evening, Mr Prime Minister. It feels a bit embarrassing to write to you about a thing like this, but Pentti and I decided that it was now or never. The fact is that back in 1956 we were due to have a child. We even thought of a name for it. Violet.

  Martti.

  Pentti is talking nonsense. The name was Violet. But in the end we never had the child, and I don’t want to bore you with the details. Although you look after the welfare of people in general, one can’t expect you to be interested in the bygone troubles of a couple who are as old as Methuselah. Yet the details are painful, and for me they awaken many memories I would prefer to forget forever. Because in life it’s important to look forward to tomorrow. Pentti doesn’t believe in divine dispensation. But I have always let him keep his opinions, even the wrong ones, because someone much wiser than us has decided that we are to live our lives together. Not that anyone has ever asked Pentti and me for our opinion. But I digress. If you would like them, the football boots are yours. Pentti wants to write a few words again.

  Real leather. Just like the ones that the legendary Aulis Rytkönen wore that year.

  You can come and fetch the boots from us at our address: 597 Forest Close. I would put them in the post, but we have no post office in our village any more. Perhaps you could see if it’s possible for them to give us our post office back, and also our village shop. You will recognise our garden by its tall oak tree. It was planted in 1956, that tree, and its name is Violet.