The Beggar and the Hare Read online

  Act. Act now.

  The train stopped.

  What am I going to do?

  The rabbit slipped out of his sleeve onto the seat and then to the floor. From there it climbed up beside the teenagers.

  It sat on Ökö’s lap, and encountered no resistance. In a flash their astonishment turned into affection. The rabbit looked at the teenagers and by its demeanour permitted them to stroke it.

  Jonttu took photos with his camera phone and they asked why the head of an investment company was travelling with a rabbit.

  ‘Are you a magician?’

  It’s like a… canary. In a mine. Life insurance. It detects danger. Sniffs out precious metals. Only eight rabbits in the world are specially trained like it.

  Vatanescu lay on one of the upper berths in the four-berth sleeping compartment. The berth had been intended for Oili Tymäkkä, who had not received her parents’ permission to go and work in a mine for a year because they had already paid for her to take a cramming course in legal studies.

  Vatanescu looked at the ceiling and listened to the delight of the teenagers as they fondled and fed the rabbit.

  Just before the train arrived in Seinäjoki, Jonttu dug from his wallet a brown lump, which he crumbled onto cigarette paper with some powdered tobacco.

  ‘Feel like a smoke?’

  I don’t smoke.

  ‘Just a puff or two.’

  I must be worthy of their trust. They mean well.

  I mustn’t be arrogant.

  At first the joint made Vatanescu smile. Then he felt as though he had floated in through the door, along the corridors into the sleeping compartment and lain down on a bed. Then he felt terribly hungry. Then Jonttu went off to the restaurant car to buy something that would stave off the hunger. Then Vatanescu’s tongue began to loosen.

  The biggest problems in the labour market are caused by management structure and working conditions. There’s a need for the workforce to feel that they are wanted and secure. That’s how a spirit of solidarity is built. There must be barbecues now and then. We need to feel that we’re important, that’s all. That we can have an influence on the way things are run, and that we’re taken notice of and listened to. These are things that don’t have much to do with the world of finance, but the problem is that no one ever asks any questions. Think. We need to think about things and not just chase the money. Yet that is what I do, and what you do. I don’t know. It’s something that needs to be given thought.

  Minttu, who was taking notes with her Stabilo pen, underlined the word ‘barbecue’ in three different colours.

  Profit-sharing is essential, twenty-five per cent is not enough. Those who make the greatest physical effort must receive adequate remuneration for putting the strength of their bodies at the company’s disposal. Prostitution and human trafficking are combated, but no one objects to the fact that building workers also sell their bodies. The management swindles its subordinates, lines its own pockets and cuts back on toilet breaks. Think about it.

  Jonttu returned with eight bags of potato crisps, which they mixed with the delicacies Vatanescu had brought from Ming’s restaurant. They ate like pigs and played the board game ‘Star of Africa’ like children. Vatanescu amassed the biggest fortune in emeralds and rubies, but lost it to a robber in Madagascar.

  How can one person take from another the money he has earned with his labour and then enjoy an untroubled night’s sleep?

  They drank Coca-Cola and the cider the teenagers had brought with them, and in the next game Vatanescu made do with being the banker.

  In this game all the players start off with three hundred pounds. In real life many people start off with little more than hunger and a pair of leaky shoes. Should it be like that? Must think about it. Could it be different? Is money the solution?

  I’m going to lie here and think.

  Vatanescu’s mind and body were mellow, gentle, floating. He looked out of the window; the view out there was still the same, little stations, housing estates and industrial parks shortly before and after the main stops. Forest and more forest, becoming less and less tall the further north they went.

  With a start, on the border between sleeping and waking, Vatanescu once again saw the eve of his departure from Romania. His son had dozed off between the wall and his grandmother, whose lungs were as ravaged by damp as the wallpaper. He could still save his son; an eight-year-old boy could recover from almost anything as long as he had fruit juice and football boots. His son’s joy in life was still strong, despite the attempts of older boys to get him to sniff glue with them. Vatanescu had lit the stove, fetched more firewood from the outside wall. He had noticed his mother watching him and asked what the matter was. His mother had said she knew that tomorrow her son would be leaving.

  ‘Will you be able to endure what will come?’

  ‘What will come?’ Vatanescu had asked.

  ‘Anything can come.’

  ‘I’m doing it for you.’

  Vatanescu then went off to bed, but could not sleep, and waited for the morning. The new day was waiting there, too.

  That’s how days are. They arrive and we don’t know what they will bring. Or what we are allowed to take from them.

  Have Yegor’s men come to the village? Will they be looking for my son? Am I that valuable to them?

  These young people have left their parents in order to live their own lives.

  I left my son.

  How would one describe Finnish Lapland to a foreign reader, to one from Germany, for example? Would one describe the shaman drums? The noise of building work? The Sami costumes? The Russian four-by-fours, the drunken British tourists and the Finnish screen actors? The Dutch motor sledge safari groups, cheeks red with the cold, smiling broad smiles after extreme experiences? The Crazy Reindeer Hotel, with its concerts by entertainers like Popeda or Paula Koivuniemi and the business travellers copulating in the cheapest rooms? The reindeer, both the live ones and those that have been turned into steaks and processed meat? One might describe all of those things, but now the train is clanking into its destination, drawn by proper old Soviet locomotives with diesel engines handed down from grandfathers to grandsons.

  Vatanescu stood on the platform of the last station in this small country, more than six hundred miles to the north of the point where the train had begun its journey. The teenagers gave him the winter clothes that had been intended for the fourth passenger, as well as a pointed woollen cap and sling for the rabbit, both knitted by Jonttu.

  Vatanescu pulled the quilted jacket over his suit and put on the thermal boots. He promised to reimburse the teenagers for all the help they had given him, took down the numbers of their bank accounts and wished them all the best for their future lives. From the sling the rabbit showed a paw, which the teenagers shook one by one.

  Children, appreciate all that you have the chance to acquire.

  The teenagers continued their journey by taxi. From his inside pocket Vatanescu took the guide that Ming had given him and found the section on berries.

  Third-generation railwayman Mikko Maukas was unloading cars from the night express. Each year they increased in size, enormous SUVs with tiny female drivers who wore immaculate makeup. Number plates from every country in Europe. Professional builders who had gone south to Estonia to buy cheaper ceiling panels. Maukas was used to tourists from Finland and abroad, their automatic gearboxes, their questions. Were there reindeer here? Could one use pounds and dollars? Could one take reindeer on board trains or planes? Was it all right to shoot them? Why didn’t anyone speak French? His reply was the smile that men in Lapland are given at birth, a smile that can mean anything from vitriolic abuse to falling in love. Up from the station trudged yet another tourist or businessman dressed in arctic gear, carrying two plastic bags. Sometimes they even tried to look poor, especially the wealthiest ones, like that furniture magnate Kamppari or whatever his name was, Maukas thought.

  Vatanescu asked where he could find
lingonberries and bilberries. Mikko Maukas looked at the investor, who did not fit his idea of a berry-picker. Why was the fellow talking in metaphors, why should an unloader of cars have to know all the features of different cultures? Berry-pickers were either Flips or Russkies. That wasn’t racism, Mikko said to himself; those words were just easier to say than Filipinos and Ukrainians; the guys who arrived in minivans wearing the same kind of tracksuits that Mikko wore in summer. On the other hand, investor types like the man who was standing in front of him were usually picked up at Kittilä Airport by his taxi-driver brother who then drove them around the mining zones past, present and future. If you wanted a decent tip you had to supply them with an Internet connection, a teardrop-shaped bottle of mineral water and a phone charger with a bunch of different USB connectors.

  Mikko Maukas asked Vatanescu which car on the car transporter was his. Was it the Volvo XC90, the thing that looked like a heffalump, quite unsuitable for city driving, with a ride height far too low to be a real off-roader? But then, if he had the money to boost his ego with something like that, why not?

  No, berries. So I can buy football boots.

  Mikko Maukas drove the silver-coloured SUV into the car park, left the engine running and got Vatanescu to sign the delivery form. Vatanescu said nothing. He got into the driver’s seat.

  Under the seat were settings for lumbar, posterior and soul. The radio played gentle noonday classical music, and the logbook of the vehicle’s real owner was in the glove compartment. Thomas Weissbier of Gothenburg. This meant that Vatanescu would soon have international crime, the Finnish police and the Swedish upper middle class on his heels.

  For a moment he studied the automatic gearbox, then found D and drove the vehicle out of the car park. It would be more than an hour before Thomas Weissbier was woken in his sleeping compartment on the train.

  Vatanescu drove along the quiet road in the big vehicle, surveying the low houses, the sparsely inhabited neighbourhoods. Absolutely everywhere in this country – in the cities, the medium-sized towns, the villages – grocery stores faced you in twos, one on each side of the street. The name of one began with an S, the other with a K, the difference in prices visible in the way the customers were dressed. Fur coats for the K, windcheaters and rubber boots for the S. The only exceptions were the agricultural workers, who patronised the K, for which they supplied most of the produce. The service stations were marked by towers as tall as minarets, and the cars that stopped at the petrol pumps were, surprisingly, tough old Japanese ones. However, just at that moment Vatanescu’s Swedish Volvo passed a queue of German luxury cars that were being tested in these northern conditions. When the Swedish satnav told him he had travelled åttiosju kilometer (eighty-seven kilometres) a police car came along in the opposite direction. It didn’t stop, but Vatanescu had the impression that it at least slowed down, and heads turned round.

  I’m not a thief.

  I’m a berry-picker.

  Chapter Six

  In which Vatanescu takes a sauna and drinks with Harri Pykström

  Vatanescu’s example had encouraged the remaining beggars to defend their rights, or rather develop them for themselves. Under Balthazar’s leadership they rose up in revolt against the low pay and poor working conditions. Yegor Kugar knew how to put down a revolt in a crisis zone or in fledgling democracies, but in a Nordic state where the rule of law prevailed it was impossible to use weapons, hooded men or even waterboarding.

  The balance of power was reversed. That always comes as a happy surprise to the subordinates and as a shock to whoever has been giving the orders and doing the subordinating. Yegor’s astonishment is expressed very well in his own words:

  ‘A) How can people be so ugly? B) How can people be so unpleasant? C) How can people be so stupid? D) How the devil can I be even more stupid?

  ‘Begging. A major flop. I’d have made more money if I’d stood on a street corner strumming “Smoke on the Water” on a balalaika.

  ‘The gypsy campers grumbled, played tricks, failed to declare their earnings, started claiming mileage allowances. Some of them went back home, and each of those quite definitely left their debts unpaid. To the bunch that remained Vatanescu had become a kind of Che Guevara. The same guys who previously hadn’t dared to look me in the eye were playing the game of October Revolution.’

  It was a change of authority, but above all it was an evaporation of authority. Vatanescu’s surprise attack had knocked Yegor Kugar to the floor and the referee had counted to ten. A technical knockout, nose out of joint, four years’ sick leave, if he was entitled to it.

  The banknotes Vatanescu had taken from Yegor Kugar were fakes, but what really mattered was that, with them, he had taken the man’s authority. When Yegor Kugar’s authority evaporated, his genuine banknotes evaporated too. He wanted to go and get Vatanescu back, but the Organisation refused its support. While Yegor felt that he had been let down, the Organisation felt that he had let them down. He had failed at his job; the structural change had gone in the wrong direction.

  ‘Vatanescu had vanished like a fart down Station Tunnel in October. And I didn’t think I’d be able to find one of the lowliest losers in this world on my own.’

  The reindeer fixed Vatanescu with a placid, cow-like stare, but this new arrival made no more impression on them than all the previous arrivals who for centuries had come to Lapland to assert their everyman’s right. He was just another of them, the academics on skis, the Dutch motor sledge safari groups, the military patrollers and the pop stars on the slalom slopes.

  Vatanescu set off on foot through the marshy terrain until he sank up to his knees and had to climb to drier ground. He did not stop until he reached the summit of a fell, facing a cairn to which every previous backpacker had added a stone, large or small. He put a small stone on top of the others.

  Then he sat down on a flat rock and scooped the rabbit out of its sling and onto his lap. Together they surveyed the world that stretched away for dozens of miles.

  Have you ever known such silence? Have you ever been away from people, away from the fear of their reactions?

  Three hundred and sixty degrees of fells, lakes and bogs. True, here and there the landscape was broken by the hotels of the skiing centres, by lifts, cranes and 3G network sites.

  I’m not afraid.

  It’s strange.

  But I’m not afraid.

  That lemming there couldn’t care less where I’m from, or how I earn my money, as long as I don’t step between him and his young. Or on him. Round hills, old reindeer enclosures, this is all like the cottage of Komar Tudos back home. It never changes, even though everything else does.

  Some part of us is always the same, no matter who we are. Fate, chance, the sperm of our fathers and the ova of our mothers determine the course of our lives. In a way that is senseless, unanswerable, ineluctable. One person’s place is in Finland, another’s in Romania, yet another’s in Hollywood.

  On a foreign, unknown soil I‘m free.

  Penury is not a prison. Nor are hunger or poverty. It’s people. The haves in relation to the have-nots. The owners protecting their property. Of course.

  I protect you, my rabbit, but I don’t own you.

  We are brothers.

  Vatanescu and the rabbit continued their journey along the chain of fells, down, up, down, up. After hours of walking his legs began to find the right footholds by themselves, without looking. The tiredness helped; as he no longer had the strength to correct his mistakes, it was better not to make them. As a result he was able to look several yards ahead instead of focusing solely on his toes.

  On the evening of the second day Vatanescu set the rabbit free.

  One day I will have to let my son go into the world, too.

  To fail.

  To succeed.

  The rabbit had the cautious, clumsy and haughty step of a city-dweller, incapable of being instantly intoxicated by the wild rabbit it felt itself becoming. It adjusted the disp
roportionate muscles of its hind-legs to its own weight, tested its co-ordination, hopped like a claudicating drunkard on Hakaniemi Market Square. Time after time Vatanescu had to put it back on its paws again by lifting it up under its soft middle.

  A step.

  Another step.

  Follow me, walk as I walk. Carefully, but blindly trusting in something.

  There is only this moment. Yesterday we don’t remember, tomorrow we don’t know.

  They reached a gorge between the fells, arriving at the edge of a marsh – and the edge was bursting with red and blue berries. Vatanescu picked them, putting the blue ones in the plastic bag with the S on it, and the red ones in the bag that was marked with a K. And before the onset of darkness, which here came late – or was it early? – he gathered wood to make a fire. On the scree of a fellside he found a level area bordered by three large rocks, and there he set up camp. A few unneeded pages of the nature guide lit the campfire; the book of matches bore the words ‘Ming’s Palace’. Then Vatanescu used his winter clothes to make a mattress, and his jacket to cover him.

  The fire crackled, warming the stones beneath it and heating the last of the food he had brought from Ming’s. Vatanescu put the white rice and the vegetables aside for the rabbit and let it drink milk from a carton. In the inside pocket of the suit jacket he found the sachets of instant coffee and sugar from the train, and when the rabbit had drained the milk carton he made the carton into a mug. Fresh water from the brook.

  Before he fell asleep, Vatanescu looked up the section in the guide about the ‘yellow gold’ that Ming had mentioned. He showed the picture of the berry to the rabbit and told the rabbit to tug the legs of his trousers with its teeth if it saw any.

  The beggar and the rabbit fell asleep under the starry sky on a bed of moss, content with themselves, their deeds and the reality that surrounded them.