The Beggar and the Hare Read online

  Pykström dragged himself upright and told Vatanescu to be on his way, either back to where he had come from, or where he was going. He was perfectly able to sort out a Sicilian, even without a rifle. He took a step towards Vatanescu, raised his arm and tried to seize him by the throat.

  The rabbit jumped up on the rock it had hidden behind.

  And in an instant the bad gave way to the good.

  A man who does what Vatanen did in the book and the film, Pykström kept saying. Takes to the forest, finds the true life. Forgets the conventionalities, the customs and the rules. Does what is necessary, demonstrates his civilised nature by going beyond civilisation. Pykström poured out his disillusionment with life to Vatanescu: what difference was there between town and country when you could have underfloor heating and a satellite dish in either? Harri Pykström’s life would be the same wherever he was. There was no escaping destiny, no matter how much you tried.

  I didn’t know that an easy life is a hard life.

  Vatanescu sat on the leather sofa that was moulded in the shape of Harri Pykström’s backside, a can of light beer in his hand.

  ‘You’re a good man, Sicilian.’

  Pykström rummaged in his video collection and, with boyish glee, shouted hurrah.

  ‘Grrrr-eat!’ Mrs Pykström heard from the baby monitor on the table in the video room on the floor above, which enabled her to hear the two men talking and provide a simultaneous translation of what they were saying. The monitor had been used as an intercom ever since Harri Pykström’s heart attack, so he could be in permanent voice contact with the rest of the house. Now he told his wife to translate the statement that Antti Litja’s performance in the film version of The Year of the Hare was the finest achievement in the history of Finnish cinema. The way in which he expressed a constant state of annoyance, irritation and dissatisfaction, a kind of cumulative inward pressure. Yet at the same time a warmth of feeling towards the hare. This man did not complain, didn’t pour out his feelings, but set about doing what was demanded of him.

  ‘That’s what’s so wonderful about Vatanen, and that’s what’s so wonderful about you!’

  The film’s music had a melancholy beauty, and to his astonishment Vatanescu realised that he knew this story.

  I know where the bridge engineers and millers in my dream came from.

  Books.

  I found the first one in a rubbish bin in Bucharest railway station when I was looking for food.

  Vatanescu had sat down on the spot and read the book from cover to cover, forgetting about food.

  This country is in it. It’s not really this country; nothing here is the same as it is in those books, but this is the country that Paasilinna wrote about.

  ‘Sicilian, you’re doing exactly what Vatanen did. Telling them all to go to blazes.’

  Vatanen had choices. Do you think, naked fat man, that I came to this house, to this sofa of my own free will? You tried to kill me.

  Pykström described his own aspirations and said he was a man who had been emasculated. An incomplete man, wounded in the worst place, the heart. He had to live in civilisation, whether he wanted to or not, and what was worst of all, he did want to, because he wanted to live, quite simply. Not many people were willing to put their whole existence at stake.

  I wish I had a quad bike, underfloor heating and a baby monitor like Pykström. I wish I had a smiling wife with a kind heart who exercised. I don’t ask much, but I won’t get anything. I’d be content with the football boots.

  Pykström said that by setting out on his own journey Vatanescu had fulfilled a dream that thousands of other men had. They would be witnessing someone doing what they would not be able to do.

  ‘You want the most primitive way of life, in which thoughts no longer matter and one concentrates solely on survival.’

  I didn’t want to go anywhere; I’ve just ended up all over the place. I’d willingly change places with you. I’m picking berries in a country I don’t know: think about that. It’s not any kind of statement. It’s my life. I’m being hunted by international crime and the Finnish police.

  ‘And now, Sicilian and hare, we are going to the sauna.’

  Beggar and rabbit.

  ‘Rabbits belong in little girls’ bedrooms, in cages. If that’s a rabbit, I’m a vegetarian!’

  It’s a rabbit.

  ‘The Sicilian really is a stubborn fellow. But we won’t quarrel about it. Let’s compromise.’

  Beggar and…

  ‘…hare.’

  And they agreed on this version, for the person with the power also has the power to define the one who lacks the power. Either that, or it was simply Pykström’s characteristic way of expressing himself, in drunken chatter.

  Meanwhile, the rabbit jumped up on Mrs Pykström’s lap to watch a game show on TV, and the men went off to the sauna.

  Pykström got three tubs of water ready and poured a can of beer on the stones in the sauna heater. The heat spread with the smell of grain, forcing its way into Vatanescu’s lungs and under his skin. He bowed his head and held his breath. Pykström produced a whip made of twigs and told Vatanescu to turn his back to him.

  Don’t hit me. You’re crazy. No one hits me.

  ‘It’s a form of massage,’ Pykström said in Finnglish: ‘Finnis masaas spesiali foor juu. From mii, Pysrömi.’

  The curtains open with a remote control, but the massage is done by whipping. Who is the modern man, who the barbarian?

  When Vatanescu was thoroughly red all over, Pykström asked him to do the same to him.

  I won’t do it.

  Not to anyone.

  Not even out of revenge.

  Pykström leaned forward, sticking out his buttocks, and signalled with his finger that he wanted it all the way down to his toes, not forgetting his posterior. He explained that in Finland it was perfectly legal and respectable, that the men whipped their women with bunches of twigs and the women whipped their men. It was a kind of service that one needed in order to be able to resume one’s endless workload the following morning.

  If I perform this service, what service will I receive in exchange?

  ‘Anything you want. Vot juu niid?’

  Football boots.

  Vatanescu picked up the sauna whisk with a mixture of tiredness, disappointment and bitterness. And even a slight sense of being pissed off – which made it easier for him to strike Harri Pykström as the tennis heroes of his childhood had struck the ball: forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand, forehand, smash, drop shot, forehand, forehand, passing shot to the sideline, hard cannonball.

  ‘Thenk juu, Sicilian!’ Harri Pykström shouted before running out to the ice-cold brook.

  Vatanescu watched him through the steamed-up window. In the moonlight he looked like a beached walrus.

  And then our hero also walked out into the cold air, lowered himself on his back into the icy current, put his head under the water and laughed, there under the world, there under the stars, beside a big baby; in the cradle of the Lapland fells Vatanescu laughed at everything and nothing.

  Did the woman who gave birth to me know that at some stage in his life her only son would share a bottle of hooch with Harri Pykström? Freezing his balls off in the Arctic Circle?

  ‘Up you get,’ Pykström said, pulling Vatanescu out of the water, just as the latter had begun to feel an improvement. ‘My pals don’t drown.’

  From the baby monitor came snoring. The men’s interpreter had fallen asleep.

  Pykström sat down on the wooden bench in the sauna porch, and nodded to Vatanescu to sit beside him. He opened two cans of beer and lit his cigarette with a yellow Colt lighter. Vatanescu tried to adopt the same straightforward approach to the nudity, to the heat of the sauna room, to the coldness of the air outside and the brightness of the starry sky, but could not manage it.

  You can’t learn this.

  It’s something you have to grow up with.

  Vatanescu interpreted Pykströ
m to Pykström, but in his own language.

  You people are remote, and yet you get to the heart of things.

  You are completely mad, but you’re masters of water isolation.

  ‘Yes, yes, Sicilian. Let’s have a little sing-song.’

  To judge by the rhythm, Pykström’s songs were military marches. Vatanescu preferred cheerful accordion music that bounced in all directions, and love songs performed by pulsating women, but he who pays for the light beers calls the tune.

  ‘“Finland’s poor are rising…” Come on, Sicilian, sing, damn you “…broken chains despising, their suffering’s cup now overflows, onward goes their army…”’

  Vatanescu hummed along, but one cannot really do that to a tune one does not know. It doesn’t catch – it comes from outside, not from within. Pykström went and fetched another beer from the changing room and opened it. He patted Vatanescu on the back.

  ‘You’re a good man and so is your hare. Damn it, a real bucko. The old league. The real thing. A noble comrade. Bloody hell! A berry-picker! Out to get football boots! Bloody h-e-e-e-e-lll!’

  One gulp the size of the can, and then for a moment or two his foot tapped out the rhythm on the floorboards of the porch.

  ‘“Our blows are deep, our anger will prevail, no mercy or motherland have we…” No, wait. My great-uncle was interned in the prison camp at Hennala during the Civil War, so I know how that goes, too…’

  Pykström smacked his lips as he tried to remember the words. Vatanescu felt his skin: was he now so cold that he was hot? In this country his body was never at the right temperature. Everyone had to go from a sauna at a hundred degrees Celsius to water at freezing point, children and old folk included!

  ‘“Arise, ye workers from your slumbers…”’

  Vatanescu knew this one.

  ‘“… arise, ye citizens of want…”’

  At school, in neat rows, they all had to sing and they all did. The words didn’t matter at all, because it was all about feeling. Music pierces the armour, it penetrates deeper than reason.

  ‘“And the last fight let us face!”’

  The echo spread through the sauna in two languages, and through the universe, too. It spread up the hill, in through the triple-glazed windows of Harri Pykström’s pine log villa to the windowsill where the rabbit was asleep.

  ‘“The Interna-a-a-a-t-iona-a-a-al-e uni-i-i-i-i-tes the hu-u-u-uman race!”’

  Yegor Kugar’s life was starting to go downhill. The number of contracts he got began to dwindle, because his rights to extortion and torture had been removed. Then he was told he would have to pay rent for the place he was living in. Yegor Kugar’s mental balance was affected, and that was quite new to him.

  ‘I admit it. My head just couldn’t take it. My nerves have been in a mess ever since I got my ear cut off in St Petersburg, but do I look like the kind of guy who would go to the mental health centre? When you blow a gasket, the engine goes haywire. The moped does a hundred and twenty miles an hour and I’m standing upright on the saddle with a bandage over my eyes. I had dreams about Vatanescu in which I killed him. By drowning him, strangling him, smothering him with a pillow, watching him pass away. After that I had some really moronic dreams where Vatanescu and I were out fishing together or playing tennis in polo shirts and giving each other high fives. In the morning I’d wake soaked in sweat beside whatever broad I was with, and it would be quite a few minutes before I could get it up again.’

  That is indeed how it is sometimes, and all of us who have ever worked know the theory of shit. The steak flambé that is eaten on the top storey may end up pouring down as diarrhoea on the employees on the floors below. For that reason, or perhaps because of his misanthropy and anthropophobia, Yegor Kugar now covered his eyes with large sunglasses even when the sky was overcast; he now wore a cap, and a hood on top of it. The logo on the cap said The Bear, and yesterday’s truth had now become a post-modern irony, or rather, a cruel game.

  ‘The guys from the krysha, the international protection racket, asked me what was up in the Grand Duchy. Who’s responsible? The accounts are drying up, the tramps are charging deductions and daily expenses. Hello? Every zero day is ten grand lost and I would have to find that dough somewhere.

  ‘I’m responsible. I come up with the explanations.

  ‘Except I didn’t have one. For example, how was it that Balthazar, who had been earning several hundred euros a week, now made no more than two euros a month? Well, perhaps the real fucking reason was that he’d last been seen playing the accordion in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden.’

  Chapter Seven

  In which we find Eldorado, Goodluck Jeffersson and Urmas Õunap, and in which Vatanescu appears to Yegor

  Vatanescu awoke to the smell of herbs, tomato, feta cheese, smoked ham and onion. His gaze travelled along the ceiling and the walls.

  Did I die?

  But few are the graves that come with a television screen on which a bearded Finnish runner has just won an Olympic gold medal, in spite of a fall, while Anssi Kukkonen commentates by shouting in the background. Vatanescu turned his head and saw a naked Harri Pykström dozing in an armchair with his feet on a footstool, the remote control in his right hand.

  Vatanescu got up, put his blanket over his host and removed the extinguished cigarette from between his fingers, then, blinking, returned upstairs to the ground floor.

  The rabbit was nibbling grated carrot on the kitchen table. Mrs Pykström said good morning and invited Vatanescu to try her Mediterranean omelette.

  Vatanescu drank a glass of water. Then a second, and a third. A hangover in a strange house is an existential crisis, because instead of concrete beneath one’s feet one has a shifting marsh. One doesn’t know who one is, what one remembers, what one ought to remember. Mrs Pykström said that when Vatanescu had finished eating it would be time for him to leave.

  Sorry, did I do something wrong?

  ‘Harri will be in no state to drive until this evening. I’ve got some buckets ready. In the cold pack there are berries, salad and a carton of goat’s milk for the rabbit.’

  Vatanescu changed into an arctic snowsuit that was several sizes too large for him. By tightening the cords and rolling up the sleeves and trouser bottoms he managed to make it fit. Mrs Pykström gave the rabbit a pair of bootees and a baby bonnet that had belonged to her children.

  On the van’s radio the announcer was listing the temperatures for the coast and archipelago from the various weather stations. The rabbit lay in an empty bucket on Vatanescu’s lap, and Vatanescu gazed at the red and brown tints of the forests, he gazed ahead at the gently rising contours of the landscape, he gazed at the stretches of water and lines of fells that glittered in the distance. Between the dwarf birches a man or a reindeer would trot into view for a moment. Unexpected words suddenly issued from Mrs Pykström’s mouth.

  ‘Harri has some boyish dreams. Harri is an old man who is dying. How can I make him see that?’

  Yes.

  ‘He’ll listen to you, but not to anyone else. He’s never listened to what anyone else says.’

  I didn’t say anything to him. I don’t know him. You mustn’t mix me up in anything.

  ‘That’s just it. You didn’t say anything to Harri.’

  I want to go home. I want a home.

  I want football boots for my son.

  ‘Do you think I’m really interested in Zumba? Under normal conditions I’d be studying the cultural significance of that craze, but here I have to be a part of it.’

  Mrs Pykström turned the van off the main road and onto a forest track. She got out to move the Forestry Commission barrier aside and drove deep into the forest.

  Mrs Pykström unloaded the buckets from the back of the van and pointed in the direction of where Vatanescu would find the yellow berries. She rummaged in the pockets of her windcheater, found a mobile phone and gave it to him. There was a pre-paid SIM card in it, with one phone number in its memory. Harri Pykström’
s number, which he was to call as soon as he had found the berries. They would come and collect him.

  The trees creaked as if they were talking to one another. While Vatanescu studied the map, the rabbit caught sight of a lemming. The creatures looked at each other, perhaps wondering what fellow member of their species had arrived, or what rival was trying to usurp their territory. Vatanescu chased away the last effects of his hangover with a handful of pungent lingonberries. Mrs Pykström had marked the best places for berries with a red circle, the slightly less good areas with a blue one, and on the least important areas she had put a cross.

  Bilberries.

  Lingonberries.

  Bilberries. Lingonberries. Bilberries lingonberries bilberries lingonberries.

  The rabbit grew tired, came to sit at Vatanescu’s feet, and from there returned to the sling.

  Let’s look until we find something.

  According to the map we’re only a mile or two from our destination.

  Now and then Vatanescu lost his bearings, now and then the compass needle whirled unsteadily and several times he felt like giving up. But he trusted in what his fat Finnish friend and his wife had told him, and so he decided to make one last search. If he didn’t find anything he would have to look in the mirror and admit his own failure. He would have to go home empty-handed, blisters on his heels, his spirits shattered.

  Exactly on the edge of the circle that Mrs Pykström had drawn he saw the first glimmer of gold.

  From tussock to tussock, with duckboards in between, then churning knee-deep through marshes, the beggar and the hare went on side by side.

  Eldorado.

  Football boots.

  Cloudberries.

  Vatanescu pulled himself through the marsh like some legendary Finnish skiing champion of former days.

  Come to daddy.

  No sacrifice will have been in vain.