The Beggar and the Hare Page 8

  In the basement of his home Harri Pykström was examining his video collection. Six shelves of Olympics, nature documentaries, Second World War documentaries, Clint Eastwood movies, Matti Ijäs movies, Edvin Laine movies, Westerns, the 1994 European Basketball Championships qualifying match between Finland and Ukraine and, the latest addition to his collection, the 2000 Four Hills Tournament between Germany and Austria. Rauni Mollberg’s Blessed Madness and Mikko Niskanen’s Gotta Run! were present on four different cassettes, because Harri Pykström taped those movies every time they were on TV.

  Friday was Harri Pykström’s video day, as were Monday, Wednesday and Sunday. On this occasion he hesitated between Inspection, The Wrestler and A Charming Mass Suicide. Could one watch Ere Kokkonen’s work while sober, or should the experience be left until the small hours, when drunkenness would give it the something extra it required? The films of Kokkonen, with their aggressive clarity and grinding narration, reminded Pykström of the training videos of his former employer, the Finnish army. Risto Jarva had a better understanding of the essence of humour. It wasn’t jokes, but sorrow. Life was a tragic affair, where every minute took us closer to death. So one might as well laugh. Pykström was pleased with this idea, which had come to him, unprompted and unasked, after his heart attack. He had asked his wife Maija if she thought it a sign of psychological maturity or merely the result of upset mental equilibrium, a jolt, brain chemistry. All of those things, was Maija’s reply. Just as his hand was reaching out for an Ijäs film, Dolly and Her Lover, Maija shouted that dinner was ready.

  Pykström climbed the stairs, his knees cracking under the weight of his two hundred and seventy pounds of conviviality. He panted and puffed; they really should have had a lift put in when the house was renovated. Everything else had been done on his wife’s initiative, which of course later became his own initiative as well.

  Pykström raised the lid of the pan. Nothing could beat the aroma of a reindeer fry, except that of pipe tobacco or a freshly opened bottle of Calvados. Perhaps also salmon grilled on an open fire or, even better, trout. Pykström asked where the lingonberry jam was.

  ‘Can’t you see I’m doing my Zumba workout?’

  Mrs Pykström wobbled on the living-room floor as the female dance instructors wiggled on the television screen. Pykström looked at his wife, shovelled some reindeer fry and mashed potato onto a plate and then into his mouth. He thought of the nature documentaries in which the growth of plants is accelerated so that one can see the cycle of the seasons in thirty seconds. What would it be like, a speeded-up documentary that showed the onset of the fat on Mrs Pykström’s back over all these twenty-three years? When they first met there had been a supple layer of flesh, where now her back and buttocks trembled like aspic. But Harri Pykström’s back had a layer of flab that was just the same; indeed many couples who have lived together for a long time come to resemble one another in all sorts of respects. On the basis of the latest photos from Australia the same thing was also happening to their eldest son Jorma, who even in the maternity clinic had been called chubby first, and cheerful only second. Mrs Pykström attempted to get rid of her aspic by means of Zumba, Harri Pykström by means of oblivion.

  He scraped the bottom of the pot of lingonberry jam and went to fetch a jar of pickled cucumbers from the pantry. A bright, tranquil evening. That was what was so wonderful here in Perä-Kompio: the quiet – no neighbours, no relatives, no music from the ice cream van, no surprise visitors. One’s own bit of land, one’s own peace, no damned berry-pickers talking about their pesky everyman’s right.

  Pykström ate three platefuls of dinner, belched and said thank you.

  He switched on the coffeemaker. He sat down on the sofa, behind his wife. He said that the enthusiasm of the man who was jerking about on TV was due to the fact that he knew that fat old women all over the world were ordering his DVD. Why? Because they couldn’t accept that they were getting old. In Harri Pykström’s view all that wiggling would do no good when there were too many miles on the clock.

  ‘Said the broken-down truck at the side of the road. You’re just jealous.’

  ‘True.’

  Pykström finished his bottle of beer, got up and went to kiss Mrs Pykström on the neck. Of all the world’s millions of Zumba dancers, this was the only one he loved. The aspic was the same resilient skin he had got to know and made his own in the early 1970s.

  ‘Sweet-ass,’ Pykström said, slapping his wife on the bottom.

  Harri Pykström found it hard to talk about many things, but he expressed his loving feelings with the ease and swiftness of a child. They were sincere and true, and they had saved him many times. Pykström knew well that a man must have someone by his side, otherwise he would lose his place in the world. Otherwise he was done for.

  Pykström poured himself a cup of coffee, adding some whole milk and four lumps of sugar, plus two which he put in his mouth. He took his camouflage jacket from the back of the door, checked that his cigarettes were in the front pocket and told his wife that he was going to heat the sauna, because he didn’t feel in the mood this evening. As had been the case for years. Ever since his heart attack his interest had died, and Harri Pykström said he had moved from a focus on intercourse to the next phase of love. Banter.

  Pykström put some logs in the basket, looked through the window and saw his wife wiping her forehead on her sponge bracelet. He wondered why he did not feel free, though he had arranged everything to that end. He had early retirement, a cabin in Lapland, logs in his basket, a small-bore rifle just in case.

  Once at the sauna Pykström made sure that his wife could not see him, and fetched a bottle from under the stone base. A little drop would be OK, a snort, a quick one, after all it was Friday night and there was a nice sunset. After the heart attack his doctor had forbidden him to drink, but they couldn’t forbid you to live. On weekdays Pykström bought light beer on the Swedish side of the border more or less as a soft drink that didn’t even give you a hangover. It made you slightly tipsy, and that would do.

  He put some birch logs in the stove, tearing off some bark to act as kindling. His son had brought thirty-two cubic yards of dry birchwood in the truck and asked for the umpteenth time why he didn’t have electricity installed. An electric sauna in a Lapland cabin? True, he felt a bit bad about using imported logs, but if he didn’t have the strength to chop the firewood himself, then that was that. It was always the same story, thought Harri Pykström. There were too many things to make one’s life easier, even though their original plan had been to live surrounded by nature on nature’s terms, in the grip of wild beasts and the merciless elements. This reality had slapped him in the face like a wet rag, for nothing would prevent one from getting older, not even the realisation of a youthful dream.

  Pykström sat down on the top bench of the sauna, listening to the crackle of the fire and the roar of the furnace. Perhaps just one more mouthful, perhaps just another swig, how could another little drop do him any harm?

  That autumn it would be two years since the heart attack.

  Harri Pykström had been applying for bail for a soldier who had gone AWOL, when his chest had exploded. On waking up in the recovery room, Harri Pykström knew that his new life was located in Perä-Kompio – where for several years now the Finnish army had had a cabin for sale, but he had lacked the courage, or the time, to buy it.

  It was there that Pykström went. There that Pykström would die. At the end of a quad track, no mod cons, eighteen thousand euros, easy to look after.

  ‘And what about me?’ Mrs Pykström inquired with a cautious squawk.

  ‘I won’t go anywhere without you,’ Pykström said.

  ‘If you’re planning to go somewhere in Lapland, you can go alone.’

  Pykström packed his clothes, signed the deed of sale and flew to Kittilä. At a sports shop in Muonio he bought a quad bike, rode to the cabin and began to put it in order with an axe, a handsaw and a lot of motivation. But what cou
ld he hope to do, a man who weighed two hundred and seventy pounds and was recovering from a heart operation? He had had to use his satellite phone to call the emergency medical services helicopter, and resume his convalescence at Rovaniemi District Hospital.

  Mrs Pykström had sworn at his hospital bedside that she would never again leave her fat, crazy husband alone, not even for an instant. Even Jorma, from Australia, expressed the modest hope that he would not immediately have to fly back again for the funeral. With his hand on the complete works of Arto Paasilinna, Harri Pykström promised to take things more easily.

  Outside labour was hired to complete the repairs on the house, and workmen came to the site all the way from Helsinki, Estonia and Norway. Pykström was looking for new ways to make money, and one of them was a plan to write short stories of the kind he had read as a young student in a flatshare, and had later liked to read while sitting on the toilet. As adjutant of a logistics company he had had to pound a typewriter every day, so even a whole novel might not have been out of his range. A wilderness novel for readers all over the Arctic region. He had told his wife that once the fibre optic cables had been installed on their property she ought to take a telecommuting job.

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  Mrs Pykström had a degree in cultural anthropology and was working on a dissertation called The World of Woman: Research Diaries from the World’s Beginning to its Hypothetical End. She promised to wait until the repairs were finished and then review the situation – perhaps here she would at last be able to complete her dissertation. Or at any rate she would have to wait until her crazy husband had recovered his senses.

  Harri Pykström had attached a lifting apparatus to the trailer of his quad and helped the building workers to hoist the materials from the foot of the hill. He always did this stripped naked. When his wife asked him why, he replied that he was master in his own home and could do as he liked. This was nothing new to Mrs Pykström, for she had always treated her husband as an object of research: he possessed something in common with the men of the Huchu tribe studied by Bronislaw Malinowski, a tribe that cultivated a penis display ritual. Sincerity, bragging, a zest for life. Worship of wooden idols, self-elevation and self-abasement. How could one leave such a man? Leave him alone even for a few minutes?

  When a man and a woman are fused together as a couple, they stay closer to each other than any pair of animals. An osmosis takes place in which one becomes a part of the other, no matter how different they are. Or even, in the view of outsiders, incompatible. Pykström and his wife loathed each other’s respective hobbies of shooting and dancing in front of the television set; they loathed each other’s favourite films. Harri Pykström had been sick only once in his life, when he saw his wife putting Cocktail on the video player. But this was precisely the basis of their love. When Harri Pykström called his wife a goddamn meatball, only Mrs Pykström knew what it really meant. My dear, my treasure. Come and warm the bed, let’s make more children even though we’re fifty, even though I have prostate trouble and you no longer have a uterus or ovaries. Mrs Pykström and Harri Pykström were aware of all these things; they had even discussed the matter and agreed about its old-fashioned sanctity. It was the sort of relationship that the young no longer understood at all, as they were too busy searching for themselves. The young were in quest of their own ego, their innermost being, and the best place to hold a rave-up. Instead they ought to be looking for someone. Someone to understand. Someone to support. Someone to love. Someone to make nice meals for, no matter how numbingly dreadful it was to share the same roof with them.

  For telecommuting Mrs Pykström needed a broadband connection and more room for a study. Little by little the Pykström’s cabin had become a modern private residence, which just happened to be situated in the middle of nowhere. Except that it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere at all, for six miles away there was a skiing centre with more cultural, entertainment and sporting events than there had been in their old neighbourhood of Vantaa, next to Helsinki.

  One morning Harri Pykström noticed he was living in a house that was identical in every respect to the one he had left, and again felt a stab in his chest. He had planned to spend his time fishing, hunting, living in harmony with nature, yet here he was riding to the village on his quad bike, buying the same Euro Shopper products as he could anywhere in Finland or Europe and sitting in the local pub to watch Premier League football. Pykström was not hermit material.

  Pykström lit a fresh cigarette on the embers of the last one and opened another can of beer. The sauna thermometer read fifty-five degrees Celsius. He went outside to fetch more logs.

  Vatanescu stopped by the edge of a narrow brook. He had already filled six plastic bags with berries and had taken them back to base camp. He was now on the last two, and found himself faced with a logistical problem. How were the bags to reach the customers?

  The sweat trickled, the brook babbled, and Vatanescu wondered if it was all right to drink the water. When Panos Milos had drunk the water of the river in his home village he had grown a third arm, according to the story Panos’s mother had told, at least. The rabbit jumped onto a stone in the middle of the brook and lapped some water with its tongue.

  Then Vatanescu drank, too, and the water tasted better than his first bottle of Coca-Cola in the summer of 1990, with Maria on the bridge of the ancient ruined city of Stenea. Vatanescu splashed water on his face and dried his hands on the hem of his shirt. The white collared shirt had turned black with the juice of the berries, as had his hands. When he raised his eyes, on the other side of the brook he saw a small building. Bending down in front of it was a naked man built like a barrel.

  Are there people here? What should I say to him?

  What do people like? Be honest.

  Vatanescu waved his hand, and shouted that he was an everyman.

  Harri Pykström had just finished putting the logs in the basket when he saw someone gesturing to him from the other side of the brook. On his land, on one of his sauna evenings, it was hardly likely to be a surveyor. A man with black hair, wearing a quilted jacket. The man looked like a Sicilian, or maybe even a terrorist. At the stage of intoxication that Pykström had reached any kind of emotional reaction was possible, and he chose fear. It took the outward form of anger. Filthy invaders, he thought. He also reflected that if they were on one’s own private land it was all right to shoot them, and went to get his small-bore rifle from the sauna changing room. The rifle was meant for shooting willow grouse and other small game, but could also be used to repel attacks by foreign invaders.

  The man was still waving on the other side of the brook when Pykström got down on one knee and took aim. The man was holding something white, and some creature was jumping around at his feet. Pykström pulled the trigger.

  Vatanescu threw himself flat on his face at the edge of the brook. The water zipped around him four more times, and then there was silence. He kept his head underwater, like a small child who hides his eyes and thinks no one can see him.

  Pykström stampeded across the rocky ground towards the brook and told Vatanescu to get up.

  Though Vatanescu did not understand what Pykström said, he did understand the gestures. He got up, dripping with water, and put his hands in the air. In both of them there were plastic bags full of berries. His chest was red.

  I died. I would have liked to live.

  The red was from the lingonberries.

  ‘What man?!’ Pykström shouted in English. Then, in a mixture of English and Russian, ‘You mafia kriminal. Me finski soldat!’

  Berry-picker, Vatanescu explained in his own language and in a foreign one, showing him the bags.

  Everyman.

  Rights.

  He’s lying, Pykström thought, the Sicilian is lying. Even if he was telling the truth, what could be worse than these people who pick berries on other people’s land, enriching themselves at their expense? Why the hell was it necessary to have a permit in order to dig a well
, build a sewer or an annexe, but not to pick berries? Certainly no Sicilian had the right to pick those berries, though Harri Pykström had no intention of ever picking them himself. Even the kids from those Helsinki families made him nervous, getting lost on holiday weekends and filling their plastic cups with berries to make homemade pies.

  Pykström and Vatanescu stood face to face. One was starting to feel cold because he was naked, the other because he was wet. But Pykström refused to give in, and Vatanescu did not dare to do or say anything.

  The situation was resolved by Mrs Pykström, who ran down the slope and jumped on her husband’s back. It was like a scene from a pantomime, or Laurel and Hardy with two Hardies. One of whom had a serious heart defect, and so was soon out of the running. Mrs Pykström managed to slacken her husband’s grip on his rifle, and it fell to the ground.

  Harri Pykström sagged and collapsed on the stony bank. Vatanescu grabbed the weapon and threw it far into the brook.

  Power belongs to the man who is strong.

  Berries to the man with the rifle.

  What was the likelihood that this trio would ever meet? Harri Pykström, born in Kirkkonummi, 1954, Mrs Pykström, born in Tapanila, Helsinki, 1958, and Vatanescu, supposedly born in three different places and three different years? Yet here they all sat now, out of breath beside a babbling brook. One scared, one craving his light beer and chaser, and one furious with her husband because of his baffling ability to bring about crises involving his heart or Sicilian berry-pickers.

  Mrs Pykström asked Vatanescu who he was.

  Who I am?

  He took off the wet trousers, wrung them out and offered to make his grandmother Klara’s berry pie as a token of good will.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Pykström asked his wife, who translated.