‘Hold on. It’s you who is leaving this family. You will not be taking Eero.’ I almost bit the words off.
Marja-Terttu laughed in a tone that was nearly haughty.
‘Do you know how many children of divorces in this country remain with their fathers?’ she said.
I pointed out that just moments ago she had, quite correctly, used a very apologetic tone in explaining the situation. That she had just said that she was the one who wanted to make this so-called break and start a new marriage with Jani because she still had a few years left to have more children. That she might be planning to have more children, but I wasn’t. Eero was mine.
‘Of course, a child belongs with his mother,’ she said.
I asked her to explain that, to defend it.
She laughed wearily and said, ‘Under the circumstances, I don’t see any way that we could each have him for a week at a time.’
It was only then that she told me that she and Jani were planning to leave the country. To go to Australia. To the other side of the Earth.
They’d already arranged their immigration visas, without my knowledge, months earlier. Both had the kind of education that suited the immigration authorities. Once the divorce was final and the property was divided, converted to money, they would get on a plane, and all of those small personal items that you don’t want to be without even if you are starting a new life would be stuffed in a container and put on a freighter.
Small personal items.
Suddenly all of it, the car and the apartment and Port of Departure, even the land, didn’t matter any more. They were money, possessions. Yes, they were an accumulation, a distillation of years of work, honey in the honeycomb, but that was the law of life. One day the roof comes off, the honeycomb’s pulled out and put in the centrifuge, and the hand that pulls it out is so large that there’s no point in fighting it. You just have to start over.
‘By God, you’re not taking Eero to live with a bunch of kangaroos,’ I said, my voice almost a growl.
‘We’ll see about that,’ she said, sure as a mountain.
I don’t know whether she was waiting with bated breath for that primitive man to finally come out of me now that I was up against the wall, for me to start pounding my chest and baring my teeth and protecting my territory and my woman and my offspring like a crazed Neanderthal. But of course nothing like that happened. After that one snarl I was completely paralysed. I became even more of a limp, soggy mitten.
But after Ari heard about it he sat me down at the table in the cottage and let rip.
Under no circumstances was I to sign any forms that Marja-Terttu could use to get a child’s passport. She should not be allowed to take the child out of the country until the custody was clear.
Ari advised me to find the most reliable lawyer I could. No more day care and no allowing Marja-Terttu to take care of Eero by herself. I remembered that one of my employees had a sister who had a child she took care of at home. When I asked she said she didn’t mind taking care of Eero a few days a week. Ari stressed that she ought to be paid well for her work, enough to keep her loyal, and he told me to impress upon her that Eero could never be given to Marja-Terttu without first checking with me over the phone.
Marja-Terttu could be with her son as much as she liked, so long as I was there, too.
I wondered what the point of it was. The situation was impossible. Mothers always get custody provided they aren’t completely down and out, and sometimes even then.
Ari smiled his broad smile, although his nerves were stretched tight, too, I could sense that. ‘You don’t always have to go in with the infantry. You can send in the special forces. You never know when some alert scout might get a whiff of something sweet or sour from surprising places.’
Once we’d played this strange chess game with the child for a couple of weeks I noticed Marja-Terttu becoming more hesitant, more serious, sometimes even hostile.
Then, when she was coming over to spend another evening with Eero in what was still our apartment, she said she would give up her share of Port of Departure and settle for half of the small value of the Hopevale property if she could have the car and the Tampere apartment.
I saw something in her eye that I interpreted as greed, hurry, an eagerness to end these stupid delay tactics. And if the boy was taken away from her she wanted it to be for a very good price. I guessed that the supporting beams of her new life were weighing more on her scales than one skinny little kid.
‘So, she came to her senses,’ was all Ari had to say about it, when I wondered at the turn things had taken. ‘It never hurts to make your demands. It’s not stupid to ask. It’s stupid to pay.’
So I got custody of Eero.
*
I thought at the time that I understood Merja-Terttu’s decision, perhaps better than she understood it herself.
In a bee colony, the females take three forms.
The virgin queen, the eventual queen, is worshipped for her potential – a condensation of the purpose of life, the one that every drone wants to sink his penis into.
The queen is the birth-giver and is thus above all the others, the one around whom hordes of lackeys swarm; she is the reproducer and thus the maintainer of the colony and sanctified for that reason.
And the worker bee, physically female but in actuality neuter, the one whom no one thinks of as a sexual being, but who nevertheless keeps the society going, does all the work there is to do and is treated merely as a useful part of the machine who has lost her individuality for good.
Marja-Terttu was, it seemed to me, shifting from the status of queen to that of worker (a development that doesn’t occur in a bee hive, but the analogy is still apt). She had transformed from a desirable virgin queen to a respected, life-giving queen bee to a middle-aged woman invisible to men as a sexual being, whose duties are nevertheless endless. A woman who has become neuter has to do poorly paid work as a teacher, a cleaner, a caregiver, a social worker, sitting behind a counter, turning old people over in their beds, maintaining the culture by providing audiences for the theatre and diligently reading literary fiction, buying useless goods at charity sales or making useless goods for charity sales. She’s the one who picks up the litter and collects the compost, who always votes, uses public transport, buys local, remembers her grandchildren’s birthdays and offers to babysit so that a single mother (who doesn’t yet want to give up her queen-bee status) can get out and buzz around a bit.
Marja-Terttu had in her hands her last moments to be a queen. That’s why she did what she did. She obviously treated her larva with only slightly greater commitment than a queen bee, who couldn’t care less about her offspring (it’s reproducing that’s important not its result), but above all she had to have one more virgin-queen flight, the one across the ocean.
That’s what I thought at the time.
I should have known that Ari had his finger in that, too.
I only got word of it later, more greetings from the Other Side.
*
For me, loving a child didn’t mean cooing nonsense and baby talk over the crib or losing myself in the softness of the down on his cheek. To this day I don’t know what that mysterious baby smell is that women are smelling when they press their noses against the top of an infant’s head. Maybe only women can smell it. Maybe it’s a biological phenomenon like a bee’s unerring ability to always return to the same nest, loyal to the pheromones of its own colony. My love for Eero was like finding a steel beam that went straight from my heart into his defenceless body. It was invisible but hard, unbending, an axis of inseparability that I could feel all the way to my kidneys. Here was a part of me. A metastasis of me. My phantom limb, whose pain and pleasure I felt in my own cells. When he lay curled up against my chest like a baby monkey I could almost feel him growing tiny hair roots into me.
‘Orvo’s a good father,’ I sometimes heard Marja-Terttu say. ‘He changes nappies, takes Eero out for walks without being asked. He doesn’t only talk ab
out how once his son has grown a little he’ll take him to the ice-hockey.’
True. I never bought Eero age-inappropriate toys, wasn’t the kind of father who gives his three-month old a set of slot cars and eagerly sets it up under the Christmas tree. Eero was a part of me, but he wasn’t a mini Orvo who had to have everything that the big Orvo hadn’t had in his legendarily grim childhood. Eero was Eero, sitting in his baby seat with a knowing twinkle in his eye, observant, amused. While Marja-Terttu weighed and measured him and analysed the colour and consistency of his poop like a cool-headed lab assistant, graphing the curve of his development, filling out forms, I treated him like a somewhat undersized but nevertheless self-respecting, entire person. I spoke to him in complete sentences, using real, grown-up words. When I changed his nappy I sometimes politely apologized for my embarrassing behaviour. I could see in his eyes that he appreciated it and thought of himself as blameless in the matter. Eero never peed on me when he was on the changing table, although he did it over and over to Marja-Terttu. ‘How does he always get me?’ she would screech when once again she’d peeled a nappy off him and a clear, happy stream of pee at just the right moment shot into the air and over the changing table, with its pattern of little cars, on to her just-pressed blouse.
I would wink at him then behind her back.
*
The dagger strikes with such force that I brake too quickly and swerve the car sharply at the broad intersection I happen to have come to, steer the car on to the shoulder with the last of my strength and turn off the engine. Then I let the shout come out.
*
Flickering blue lights and the memory of a loud noise, and I’m running towards Hopevale Meats in the darkening evening, already night, dewy, fragrant, taking breath into my lungs as I run harder than my legs have ever run, and then I’m in front of the meat plant, and a confused scene is in front of me – the police car flashing its spastic light, the ambulance, Ari speechless but defiant, and a uniformed policeman lying half on top of someone who struggles and curses, and from somewhere far away muffled crashes in the woods and other distant, confused noises, and then there’s a break in the noise, and after what seems like a long time, although I haven’t even had time to ask anybody anything yet, another policeman comes out from behind the building with two young people in front of him who don’t show any sign of resistance, and I recognize one of them. I’ve often seen her with Eero, a girl whose nickname is Tirsu, I don’t know her real name, but she’s not Eero’s girlfriend, ‘just friends’, as Eero said when I asked him once, and then the policeman gets up off the grunting, spitting person, has put handcuffs on him, and I see that there’s a gun on the ground, somebody’s gun, I don’t recognize the make, but the sight of it makes my knees buckle. ‘Are there any more of you?’ the other policeman asks Tirsu and the boy with her, but they both smile calmly, silently, their faces saying politely ‘no comment’, and the person on the ground, a man the size of a wardrobe, struggles to his knees and spits out ‘I got one of them, and I’ll get the rest of them’. And then, then everything comes together in my head and …
*
Someone taps on the car window, and it’s like a disturbing continuation of my memory as I see a police car stopped behind me in the rear-view mirror. A cop is standing at the car door. I press the button to open the window.
‘Good afternoon. Is everything all right?’ the policeman says. It’s not Rimpiläinen, it’s someone I don’t know, some kind of highway patrolman. Maybe there was a radar check somewhere over the past five kilometres. I look up at him, and he’s startled when he sees my red eyes and wet cheeks.
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘I’ve just come from my son’s funeral.’
The policeman goes silent, although I’m sure he’s been trained for encounters with human grief and anguish. ‘I just need to breathe a little,’ I continue, much too helpful; it would have been better to let him wallow in his own helplessness for at least a moment as a sort of revenge, but my undertaker’s empathy reflex has engaged of its own accord again.
‘Are you all right to drive?’ he asks. ‘Because you can’t really stop here. If you like I can drop you off somewhere and you can arrange to get your car later.’
‘No, that’s not necessary. I was just leaving.’
He looks me in the eye again, assessing me, and I notice him sniffing the air and looking at my pupils.
‘Be careful, sir.’
He walks back to his car and his partner behind the wheel pulls back out on to the road.
I lean my head against the steering wheel for a moment, because I know from a glance at the clock that Eero has been cremated.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
JUST FOR A CHANGE, LET’S TALK ABOUT SOME PERSONAL MATTERS
Our esteemed reader Boo hoo! had a pithy comment on the previous post. Thanks for your penetrating and totally germane question! I’ve decided to answer it in a separate post, because my response seems to be a longish one.
Yes, my mother was taken from me when I was just a baby. And I do mean taken. Since my story is perhaps not very typical I will tell it here, although it’s not directly related to the theme of this blog.
My mother lives on the other side of the world and is remarried. Our connection is a very superficial one.
When I was very little and asked my father about why she left, he skirted the issue and mentioned that she’d ‘just decided to do it’. I was never given any more detailed answer about whether she was an unfit mother, or what, and was never told the details in spite of my questions. I suspected that my father was protecting me from something unpleasant. I never asked her about it because our relationship was so distant that I never would have thought to ask her. Since then I’ve learned that even my father didn’t know everything.
Some time ago I did some detective work. I consulted a few sources and asked some questions about my mother’s circle of acquaintances. I wanted to know if her new husband was somehow an unfit parent. But I didn’t find anything, not even a parking ticket.
After digging through various records, I found some of my mother’s former friends from university and approached them on social media through a slightly altered profile, pretending to be a distant cousin of hers. One of my contacts had been quite a good friend of hers, and they had kept in touch after graduating. Let’s call her Sari.
I learned that while they were at university Sari’s boyfriend at the time – let’s call him Ripa – had a habit of bringing cannabis to their occasional soirées. My mother would sometimes pass the pipe around. I should point out that while such behaviour is nowadays fairly ordinary it was at the time a much more serious matter, legally speaking. The police back then might take an interest in even casual pot use.
Ripa bought his cannabis from a young amateur dealer who one day, through his amateurishness, got into a scrape with the police. The frightened dealer when interrogated, assuming that he could lighten his sentence by cooperating, had mentioned the names of some of his customers. Soon thereafter Sari faced a moment of horror and humiliation when the police staged a dramatic invasion of her home complete with the requisite dogs and other necessaries and took with them Ripa and Sari’s used pipe and a couple of grams of incriminating evidence. Sari ended up in jail, and in her panic she in turn sang like a canary, giving the names of every person who had enjoyed Ripa’s generosity. Everybody who’d taken a puff of Ripa’s weed was hauled into court and given a small fine for drug use.
So at the time I was born my mother, a woman who on the surface seemed a blameless, respectable parent, long since graduated from college and supporting herself as a civil servant for many years, had a drug offence on her record from years before.
Sari said that long after she had forgotten about the whole thing my mother suddenly laid a guilt trip on her about this ancient snitching. Because, according to my mother, it was the reason that she had lost c
ustody of her son.
Because some person X had dug the matter up. Such an insignificant crime isn’t even recorded in the criminal registry, but someone who knew how to look for such things found the records of the court case.
And this person X knew what he was doing.
Person X also knew how much my mother and her husband-to-be had done to prepare for their move to another country. He must have also learned of the very strict immigration policies of the country they were moving to.
And person X came to talk to my mother and coldly announced that he intended to inform the immigration authorities in said country about her criminal record. However, he would keep his mouth shut if the custody dispute was abandoned and I was given to my father.
I must admit, person X played his role in this game superbly. Had my mother given up her plans to move and chosen to stay in Finland my father would at least have been assured regular access. It was a win-win scenario.
Why didn’t my mother call his bluff? After all, it was a very insignificant offence and revealing it wouldn’t necessarily have made any difference. Perhaps she would have, but because person X was a well-spoken, determined, cosmopolitan who knew how to work the system and had international contacts she knew it was a fight she was going to lose sooner or later.
I want to stress that my father was a wonderful parent, and I have no cause for complaint about my upbringing. But there is some part of me that’s a bit peeved that he didn’t do anything to fight all this and let somebody else do his dirty work.
And that the person who did his dirty work is for various other reasons a person that I can’t in any way respect or think very highly of.
And so, esteemed commenter, I hope this answers your probing question. And now you can understand in the depths of your heart why the separation of mothers from their young is in my opinion inhumane and why I will, from this point onwards, fight anyone who does it.
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USER NAME: Keijo Ernest
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