The Beggar and the Hare Page 4

  Hertta Mäntylä saw before her an English-speaking vagabond, but that was no problem as long as he had a health insurance card. From Hertta’s point of view Vatanescu looked tired, possibly depressed, and perhaps he was suffering from seasonal influenza. Years of experience told her that for most of the patients sleep was a better remedy than treatment, institutionalisation, pills and injections. Sleep, unbroken and secure, that began under clean sheets in a well-aired room. A process of waking that took place in one’s own time, to the smell of coffee, with a newspaper. In a house of kindly women, uncles with a sense of humour, small children playing sweetly and quietly, full of life. If only one could give that to people, instead of always being in a hurry, busy earning one’s living, with a fear of death and a constant sense of fatigue. The circles under one’s eyes, the tyres under the leased car, the fire under one’s arse, the flame under the spoon, here under the North Star. People needed to be taken by the hand. People needed to be taken to Linnanmäki Amusement Park, to the fells of Lapland, where they could let the wind caress their pockmarked skin and scarred souls and blocked emotions. There were so many places where they could find the life they silenced in themselves.

  ‘Änt wot is joo proplem?’

  Vatanescu said something about broken bones, a bleeding hind-leg and a gang of boys who were in pursuit. Hertta looked at him – he didn’t seem to have any broken bones. The one thing that Hertta could not abide was people who made unnecessary visits to the emergency clinic, wasting the taxpayers’ money on imaginary complaints. The world could not take any more malingerers. She asked Vatanescu if he had a health insurance card. No, he didn’t. A passport? No. An identity card? No. A social security ID? A fixed address? No.

  Hertta rose from her ergonomic chair. If the trouble was serious, Vatanescu would receive treatment, but if this were some kind of fraud, it had to be exposed. Hertta told him to show her the injured limb. Vatanescu pulled the rabbit out of his sleeve.

  But how could he have known that Hertta Mäntylä detested animals? She was allergic to all living beings except human ones; animals caused her to swell up, they covered her in spots and made her sneeze. In Hertta’s view of the world mammals had a clearly defined place, and the South Helsinki Health Clinic was quite the wrong place for rabbits. They belonged in nature; they spread disease, put their paws on you, licked you with their revolting tongues, panted, growled, nibbled. Through her increasing panic she whispered that this was not a vet’s surgery. Vatanescu tried to explain that the rabbit had very probably been born in Finland, somewhere in the area between the Botanic Gardens and the big blue hospital. So perhaps it could be given a social security number and thereby the right to medical treatment.

  Hertta Mäntylä screamed as though Vatanescu had put a machete to her throat or threatened to blow up the hospital. Hertta Mäntylä pressed the panic button and announced through the loudspeaker that the police were already on their way. Hertta Mäntylä covered her face with a surgical mask, closed the window of the reception desk and refused to work any more.

  Vatanescu made quietly for the exit; he must leave this place, avoid the handcuffs. The rabbit’s paw hung limply. From its mouth came a pitiful whimpering. And although the use of a fluffy animal and a little girl in the same scene would be pathetically melodramatic, it really did happen that the girl ran after Vatanescu. She held out the stick that was all that remained of her ice cream, and undid the laces of her little red shoes.

  You wise little person.

  Opposite the hospital was a cemetery, where in the stillness Vatanescu used the stick from the little girl’s ice cream to make a splint, which he fixed to the rabbit’s paw with one of the shoelaces. Raking the gravel paths between the dark gravestones was an old man who raised his hat. When Vatanescu nodded, the old man mounted the steps that led to the rear door of the chapel and soon returned with a thermos flask.

  The man’s face was fluted by the winds of the north, and his handshake was firm.

  Why do I want to cry?

  Suddenly I have a sense of complete security.

  When the man poured him a cup of hot coffee, a tear ran down Vatanescu’s cheek. The man nodded and wiped the tear away. Vatanescu looked the man in the face.

  You accept me. You let me be myself.

  Thank you.

  You’re a human being.

  The man had a ham sandwich, which he divided in three, and a cupful of milk for the rabbit. It drank eagerly. The old man gave Vatanescu a handkerchief. They had no common language, but it is easy to express gratitude without words, by taking someone’s hand in one’s own. They were able to exchange names: the old man’s was Keijo.

  The verger led Vatanescu and the rabbit into the chapel so they could warm themselves and gather their strength. They would be able to rest there until the daily work of the chapel began and the space was needed for the mourners. The organist was practising in the organ loft, a warming sun shone through the high windows. Now and then it vanished behind clouds. Vatanescu fell asleep feeling better, as the top end of the hierarchy of his basic needs had been satisfied: he had obtained food and warmth, and the rabbit had received first aid.

  The prosaist Helinä Halme lived until she died. In literary circles Helinä was known as an author of highly charged autofiction, a shameless scrutiniser of private pain spots and an original interpreter of her own generation. In the real world of her children Heikki and Kaija, Helinä Halme was known as a self-centred and manic-depressive mother for whom family life meant demands and victimisation. It was true that as an author she had the right to make use of material from her own everyday life in her books, but the more that Helinä Halme revealed in her writings, and the greater the interest of the media, the greater the discomfiture of Heikki and Kaija. In her books Helinä Halme understood the world and man; she understood society and the individual; she engaged boldly in polemics, possessed a virtuoso mastery of language and could be both hard-hitting and tender. At home, however, she had no sense of proportion. Through the pain that mother and children experienced, their relationship could have grown more mutually influential, in an adult and balanced way, but the Grim Reaper had made Helinä Halme collapse onto the picture of the apple on the lid of her laptop. From her mother she had inherited a latent heart defect.

  Heikki and Kaija’s father did not come to the funeral. He had severed relations with his former spouse when she published her final, breakthrough work The Fist Talks, the Man Doesn’t. ‘Each punch unforgivable, even the ones that were never delivered, but which I saw in his eyes.’

  Heikki had not wanted any of his mother’s belongings. Kaija did not refuse the art deco furniture, the shares and the savings account. The books they donated to the second-hand bookshop on the ground floor. For the apartment they asked a price that meant it sold within a week.

  At last, was Kaija’s first thought on the death of her mother. Heikki had burst into tears, and after a day spent sobbing had called the undertaker’s office. No big funeral, no Karelian hotpot. A simple urn. An obituary notice in the newspaper; as epitaph a line from one of Helinä’s own poems from her collection The Apple Tree Has the Colours of Chile.

  The children’s Uncle Pertti attended the chapel. A childhood shared in common generally makes people cry at funerals, even though as adults they may have ploughed very different furrows. Heikki, Kaija and Uncle Pertti were seated in the second row. When the organ began to play, a man whom no one knew emerged from the front row. A tramp.

  Vatanescu nodded to Helinä Halme’s family and walked out of the chapel.

  From the point of view of Vatanescu’s story the Halme family is not important. More important is the tabloid journalist who secretly photographed the mourners from the front seat of his car. Vatanescu did not notice the journalist, and of course the journalist did not recognise Vatanescu, but the picture he took began to circulate on the Internet. Vatanescu was identified in the background of the funeral photo; someone enlarged it and realised that the sam
e homeless individual could be seen in a video that had been taken with a mobile phone at the Maria Hospital. An ill-dressed but sympathetic looking man was glimpsed showing the duty nurse what looked like a hamster or some other pitifully wriggling creature.

  The football boots.

  Vatanescu found the tram stop and travelled to the city centre.

  He looked for a sports shop.

  He looked for the footwear section.

  He looked in his pocket for the piece of paper on which he had traced the sole of his son’s foot on the day of his departure.

  How long is it since I left? Is there a table that would show how much the foot of a boy of that age would have grown?

  Studs, laces, Velcro, glitter, stripes, oak leaf, riders, spinners, joggers, runners, there was no mode of human progression that would not have required its own footwear. Vatanescu compared the various items of footwear with the foot he had drawn on the paper.

  Nike?

  Adidas?

  The most expensive ones would take all Yegor’s money; those are the ones I need. A parent’s job is to guarantee his child a better life than his own.

  A girl wearing a T-shirt with the shop’s logo approached Vatanescu. Vatanescu selected the most expensive boots and asked her to wrap them up. Just to make sure, he showed his banknotes.

  Where is the post office? Where can I send them from? My son is going to be a striker. A goalscorer. He’s going to be admired, like the car I’ll take him to practices in.

  The salesgirl took the boots from Vatanescu.

  She made a sign to the assistant who was in charge of the dietary supplements counter, a mountain of muscle who looked like Lex Luthor and began his day by shaving his entire body, after which he drank a pitcher of protein milkshake and deposited a bloody stool in the john. Steroids will do that, but a price must be paid in order to make your veins and muscles stand out and your neck swell like a nuclear-power station about to explode on the coast of Japan. By this time Lex’s penis was tiny, his testicles the size of raisins, he could no longer get an erection, but who cared when he could lift five hundred pounds of cast iron from the weights bench? Lex’s real name was Rahikainen. A Lion of Finland pendant hung round his neck and he was a good and warm-hearted man, but had always hated gypsies. He had been frightened of them ever since he was a child; in the shopping mall they tried to sell you watches or drugs or steal your tram season ticket and your pocket money, threatened you with a knife, or with their brothers. He should not be seeing one of them here in the shop, because as far as he knew not many gypsies ever bought sports items for their own use.

  Without a word Rahikainen walked up to Vatanescu. He lifted him by the scruff of his neck, so that the rabbit started to fall out of his armpit. Vatanescu managed to seize the rabbit by the ears and thrust it back inside his jacket. Rahikainen carried Vatanescu outside. He threw him on the pavement, under the feet of the passers-by, back to his origins.

  ‘We choose our customers.’

  The boots don’t only have a price, they also have a customer’s face.

  How can I get a face like that?

  One mustn’t be wretched, one mustn’t be a beggar, the lowest of the low. One mustn’t be a leech sucking the excess from the well-to-do.

  One must be one of them.

  I don’t know their language; how can I be part of the group? They don’t like music, they don’t like barbecues, they don’t like cheerfulness and they don’t like apathy.

  Work.

  Work is what they like. The Finns like someone who works.

  One day Yegor had said to Vatanescu: ‘Dole money would get us a much more predictable and easier cash flow than begging. All that you men and women of the sixth European division need is a social security ID. It’s a secret passage straight into the cash tills of the job agencies, into income support, pensions, the lot, study grants, housing grants, all of it earnings-related. Stipends from the Cultural Fund and the Kordelin Foundation. When a person is just a number on a computer, that number can go on raking in money forever. Seventy-five per cent to me, twenty-five to you.’

  Usko Rautee steered the spoon to his mouth, spun his revolving chair round and looked out of the morning window at his home town. It was at once beautiful and ugly, like life or Yoko Ono. Or like Usko’s clients. The flavour of the yoghurt was nothing-with-the-addition-of-something-slightly-unpleasant.

  Church towers and factory chimneys stood silhouetted against the sky, between them a mass of buildings, from the beautiful constructions of the nineteenth century through the monstrous creations of the 1970s to the insipid vanities of the 2000s. Though their original meaning had been lost, the church towers and factory smokestacks were still there. The production work of the factories had been moved to countries where costs were lower, the industrial halls converted into floorball courts or television studios. While people still got married in the churches, God had left the building, left the whole planet, and had moved on to the next galaxy.

  Usko Rautee scraped the last spoonful from the bottom of the yoghurt carton and felt the absence of God. Yoghurt promised today’s stressed individual the same benefits the Church had earlier. Eternal life, mental equilibrium, more energy for one’s work and, after repentance, heaven. In order to get there one did not even have to die, merely get on with one’s life.

  The yoghurt had a nasty taste, but there was no such thing as a free lunch. Saints had always endured privations and suffering.

  Usko had grouped his clients into three main categories. The first category were the coasters. The coasters, and the world, were like mercury and Teflon. The only things that stuck were the pizza crumbs on their shirtfronts and their hands on Mum and Dad’s wallet.

  Usko opened another yoghurt and wondered when the world had got like this. Nowadays every kid who dropped out of suburban high school had the rights of a prince and the living standard of an earl. It was the result of progress, comfort and low prices; it was splendid and totally monstrous. It had begun with the invention of the axe, continued with the concept of the wheel, and moved on through the mass production of cars to this world where there was a gaming console in every room. Sliced bread in the kitchen. A helmet on one’s head and reverse parking radar in one’s car.

  What can one demand of a person who is born into this world? Nothing, because one is born into it as a customer, and one cannot demand anything of a customer; customers have to be served. The coaster knows exactly the level he wants to coast towards – a celebrity, a poker star or a mogul – without having the slightest idea of how he is going to get there. The coaster wears slip-ons until he dies because he never learns to tie his shoelaces.

  Usko felt sorry for them, and had a sense of being different. He felt sorry for himself, too, he who had to eat health food yoghurt so he could live his life to the end. In the 1970s, in the same kind of problem environment, one was allowed to drink vodka. But now those years had to be paid for with these yoghurts.

  Cleaning work – the cleaning and hygiene sector – was a gauge of social progress, just as the prison industry once had been. Office cleaning jobs did not suit the coasters. The starting pay was too low, the status of heavy manual labour insufficient. The few coasters who did accept the jobs that were offered to them fell asleep in a corner of the printing works they were supposed to be cleaning.

  But coasting is always relative to the degree of responsibility. With enough debts, children and alimony payments, even the coasters reach for the spray bottle.

  The baldies were a more tragic group. Their jobs had disappeared at the same time as the electric typewriters had vanished from government offices. In their day the baldies had been machine draughtsmen and system administrators at the spearhead of progress, but six years on they were now on the scrapheap or needed only for children’s games. Unlike the electric typewriters, the baldies had neither the outer casing nor the inner padding to be able to sit on the living-room floor and be hammered by a three-year-old. At some point
they began to feel they could do with a beer, even if they didn’t like beer. A Big Number 4, no, make that two, and a shot of vodka. Their work was now being done by computers, and there was no way out of that.

  If you offered the baldies an office-cleaning job, their livers or knees were in such a fragile state that they had no hope of being able to manage the floor polisher. The baldies weren’t lazy in the same way as the coasters, but they had an over-developed sense of self-esteem, which could certainly tolerate decades of hard drinking – from earnings-related income support all the way to unemployment pay – but not a promising career in the cleaning sector.

  As Usko spooned down his yoghurt, he felt his thoughts quicken. The jobs didn’t go to China because some arrogant capitalist took them there, but because the consumer wanted to buy cheap stuff. The customer wanted to save money. So why not let him, and sell everything cheap? Nowadays everyone had the chance or the wealth or the credit or the short-term loan to buy everything. It was there – in the cutting of prices – that democracy functioned most indisputably.

  The third group that Usko encountered on a daily basis were the highly educated arts graduates, who would only take jobs in their own field. If their own field was ethnology, and their specialist subject the development of Judinsalo distaffs and their influence on the metrosexual dandies of the freehold estates in 1780s Finland, Usko was powerless to do anything about it. When he offered this highly educated group that vacant office-cleaning job, they asked if it was a classical paradox, a metaphor or a stigmatisation. The arts graduates lounged off with their shoulder bags to the vegetarian restaurant across the street to wait for a grant that would never come. Bitterness arrived instead.