Little Siberia

by Antti Tuomainen

  ‘“I fear no evil”. Yes, it’s very atmospheric.’

  ‘Then there’s the one with a brook trickling between the rocks. “He lets me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside quiet waters…”’

  ‘“He restores my soul”,’ I continue. ‘Yes, but right now I’m—’

  ‘Leather,’ says Pirkko. ‘Black leather.’

  I peer between the logs and into the courtyard. Was that movement? I wait a while longer. Then…

  Krista.

  Approaching.

  ‘Black leather is very stylish,’ I whisper into the phone after a long pause. ‘But I’m in the—’

  ‘Soft and yet … strong,’ Pirkko whispers in return.

  I don’t know what’s going on in the church office, but that whisper has the distinct tone of misunderstanding. Then I realise things all at once: the way Pirkko has started sitting closer to me with every meeting, bringing home-made pastries into the staffroom more and more often, visiting me in my office when she could have asked something by email.

  ‘I really must…’ I whisper again.

  ‘Must what?’ Pirkko whispers.

  Krista is approaching fast; I must put my phone away. She stops in the middle of the courtyard and looks around.

  My mind is a blur. This is all I need. What kind of signals have I been giving Pirkko? I realise I’ve indulged in jokes with her – risqué jokes – and now we finish one another’s sentences without a second thought. People can easily misconstrue things like that. Everyone construes everything in their own way. At times the two come close together and produce … something like this. I sigh.

  It is a few minutes past our agreed meeting time. Krista takes a couple of steps towards the main building, pushes her hands into the pockets of her down jacket. Her breath steams up in the air. I feel horrific. Surely I can’t get lower than this; surely this day can’t get any worse…

  Krista raises a hand to her ear. It’s astonishing how little thought I give this before the phone rings in my pocket. Naturally, I have both phones with me, and the one that rings belongs to the mystery texter. I was supposed to switch it to silent, but just then Pirkko called my work phone and distracted me. I reach into my pocket and peer between the slats of the fence.

  Krista has heard the phone.

  I look up at the blue sky and curse.

  I run.

  The spruce forest in front of me draws nearer with every step. The snow is deep, crisp and even.

  ‘Hello?’ I hear from the courtyard, which is now beyond the fence. Krista is shouting out: ‘Hello?’

  I run, pushing forwards, one foot after the other.

  ‘Hello?’ I hear again. Each utterance of the word sounds more puzzled than the previous one.

  The fence will shelter me for a while, I know that. But will I reach the cover of the spruces before Krista appears at the other side?

  The thick sea of spruce seems to be waiting for me, ready to take me in its arms. I dive into it as if it were water. Branches scratch at my coat as I press deeper inside. I hold my gloves in front of my face.

  ‘Hello?’ I hear, closer now.

  Krista has walked round the fence, and now she is approaching, moving much quicker than me because she can walk in my footsteps. For some reason I assumed she wouldn’t follow me into the forest, but she does. And now she’s asking why I won’t stop, why I don’t want to talk about it.

  The forest is spread across a sloping hill. The angle of the slope begins to steepen. I know where the ridge comes to an end. At the foot of the ridge is a road, a very straight road, and it’s a long way to either end.

  I stumble downhill, keeping close to the tree trunks. From further up the ridge I hear questions that are, by and large, perfectly understandable. Why can’t I face her? What am I afraid of? Where’s the sense in tricking someone into suggesting a meeting, then running away? Now Krista’s determination is working against me. Of course, I fully understand her. You don’t have to have an Olympic gold in empathy to realise what it must feel like to turn up for a rendezvous only to find the other party legging it in the opposite direction.

  Everything that then takes place is horrible, grotesque. We were happy only a moment ago. Now we are both fleeing, chasing each other through the forest.

  By the time I arrive at the road, my thighs are stiff with lactic acid. There are no other pedestrians on the road – thank God. I don’t know what I’d say if I ran into any of the villagers, especially seeing as my wife is shouting for me through the trees. At its western end the road intersects with a smaller lane that leads back to the village; the eastern end might lead all the way to Siberia for all I know. On the other side of the road another steep ridge awaits; at the foot of the embankment is a stream and beyond that a field. I’ll reach hiding quicker if I head west. I am about to spring into a run when I hear Krista scream out.

  After the scream, silence.

  2

  Our relationship is based on trust, on mutual respect, on the natural balance of give and take. We have a shared direction, shared objectives. We are spouses, lovers, best friends. We know each other, comfort each other, we experience happiness and elation on each other’s behalf. In a word, we are wedded.

  But…

  Perhaps all this is being measured on this bright, chilled afternoon in a remote Finnish forest into which I have deceitfully driven my wife, who is carrying another man’s child. My wife, to whom something terrible has clearly happened. But what can I do? I cannot return to the spruce forest and reveal my plot. I ponder this for a moment until I think I’ve come up with a solution. I begin running again. Once I am far enough away, I take my own phone from my pocket. Eventually Krista answers.

  ‘Hi,’ she says.

  ‘Hello, my love,’ I begin. ‘I was just calling to ask if you want me to pick anything up at the shop on my way home. I can’t remember if we’re out of anything, but we definitely need more bread, yoghurt and eggs.’

  Silence.

  ‘Fish,’ she says eventually. ‘Salmon, maybe.’

  ‘Right. Salmon soup might be nice. We’ll be needing some potatoes then, too. What else?’

  ‘Salad,’ she says, and from the tone of her voice I can tell her heart isn’t in putting together this evening’s shopping list. ‘A few tomatoes.’

  I remain silent for the length of time it would take me to write these things down. It works.

  ‘Joel … I think I’ve sprained my ankle.’

  I need to sound surprised. I try my best: ‘Where? I mean … how?’ Perhaps there’s more interrogation in my voice than pure surprise.

  ‘I don’t know whether I’ve broken it or just sprained it,’ Krista says, and I can hear that she’s truly in pain. ‘I can’t step on it, can’t really walk.’

  ‘Are you at home?’

  A short pause.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the woods.’

  ‘The woods?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘There’s a spruce forest behind the Teerilä Outdoor Museum. I’m on the hillside. The place with the stream running below it. You remember? The place we watched together back in the autumn because it was flowing so strongly.’

  ‘Like a little river,’ I say. ‘I remember.’

  And how could I forget? It was a beautiful day. We were walking together, hand in hand. The trees were resplendent, their colours glowing for perhaps the last time that autumn – there was already a faint sense of frost in the air. I know the next question is unavoidable.

  ‘What are you doing out there?’

  Krista is ready for the question. She too knew it was coming. ‘I was having a walk.’

  ‘A walk?’

  ‘I needed some fresh air.’

  ‘In thick snow in the middle of the forest?’

  Am I doing this on purpose? Asking her questions, though I know the answers. And her answers are irrelevant; the questions themselves are enough – enough to
show my superiority. The situation reminds me of the rare occasions when we’ve had an argument. Krista is silent. Eventually she speaks.

  ‘It’s cold out here.’

  Krista is sitting in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. I am driving. We are lying to each other. It is shocking, but it’s surprisingly easy. It feels neither good nor right, but my mouth moves as though it were attached to someone else’s face. It’s a forty-minute drive to the doctor’s surgery.

  And lying isn’t even the worst of it. Every time Krista lets out a yelp or a moan, it feels like someone clutches my stomach in an enormous fist and squeezes. This is all my fault. There’s no point trying to deny it or wriggle my way round it. I don’t know if we’ve looked each other in the eye once throughout the journey.

  On top of that, I get the sense that Krista sees I’m not as shocked or worried as I probably should be. Of course, in one way I am very shocked and worried, very much so indeed. But my shock and worry have nothing to do with her accident.

  I know the question I should be asking myself and everyone around me. Krista is pregnant, so what would have happened if she’d knocked herself unconscious; would she have frozen to death in the woods? I have to carry on asking myself these things. I try to find a suitable way of looking at this, an angle that might provide surprising answers. Eventually I come up with one.

  ‘I couldn’t help noticing…’ I begin, ‘…there was another set of footprints in the snow, along the embankment.’

  I don’t quite glance to the side, but I focus on what I see out of the corner of my eye. Krista seems to turn her face towards the passenger window.

  ‘My leg was so sore I didn’t really look around.’

  ‘What about before that? Did you see anyone out there in the forest?’

  ‘Did I see anyone?’

  ‘It’s just … if there was someone there you could have called for help. Was there someone else around? The prints looked quite fresh.’

  ‘I didn’t see anybody,’ she says, and I can tell from her voice that she’s thought about this. ‘Not a soul on my walk. Well, I mean while I was in the woods. It was spur-of-the-moment, the whole thing. I thought I could take a shortcut through the forest down to the road, then from there I’d make my way back to the village. Something like that. But then my foot got caught in something and I fell.’

  ‘Right – down to the road.’

  I see movement in the corner of my eye. Krista turns to look at me. ‘To the stream. Our stream.’

  Our stream, I think to myself. The thought was sullied the moment it was born. The stream flows with black water. Krista is silent. Maybe she’s expecting me to say something.

  ‘Well, you’re here now; that’s the main thing,’ I say. ‘And thank goodness nothing worse happened.’

  Krista lays a hand on mine. ‘When I’m with you, only good things happen.’

  Krista’s ankle is badly sprained. The good news is she won’t need an operation. She is given a strong bandage and a plastic brace around her ankle, and a set of crutches, which help her get around.

  We drive home again.

  We lie to each other even more.

  The afternoon darkens, shades of golden brown, violet and blood red slowly shift across the sky. Then the day finally loses its power altogether. It slumps behind the trees along the side of the road, leaving me behind just as it has done around thirteen thousand times before, to be replaced with a growing darkness that soon engulfs everything.

  Suddenly I find myself living the worst time of my life. But I guess that’s what happens; surely nobody decides that on a Wednesday afternoon in a month’s time they’re going to screw everything up. It just happens, then you’re right in the middle of it, regardless of what you do or don’t believe.

  I remember that happy spring afternoon when we packed up the van and left Helsinki for Hurmevaara. We told each other this would be the beginning of another shared adventure. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s take the sofa, the lamps, the books, the tables and drive straight to Hell.’

  But that’s exactly what we’ve done.

  The studded tyres grind against the road, and the very presence of the woman I love breaks my heart in two.

  3

  Krista sits down on the living-room sofa. I put on the kettle, bring her a blanket and something to eat, make sure everything she wants and needs is within easy reach. I sense that she wants to be alone, that for one reason or another she doesn’t feel like socialising. It doesn’t feel particularly nice or homely, but right now it suits me fine. I pack a bag, pull on my outdoor clothes and leave the house. The temperature has dropped even further. The centre of the village is deserted, and I head north along the empty high street. There’s a loneliness I haven’t felt in years.

  It makes me think of where this all began.

  Afghanistan.

  One sweltering day I stepped on a mine.

  Our convoy left the old base at sunrise. We had reserved all the hours of daylight to undertake the journey. The sun was glowing, the journey was slow. The road network in Afghanistan was in terrible condition and much of the journey took us across unpaved roads. We were on a stretch of uninhabited territory between two villages when we noticed a problem with the personnel truck. The steering wheel kept veering to the right, and the problem was getting worse. We were forced to stop and disembark.

  It was midday, the air hot and still. We tried to sit in the shadow cast by the truck but it was futile. The sun looked larger than I’d ever seen it. It was directly above us like a round, yellow inferno. The heat started as an unbearable itch, then in the space of a few minutes started to tighten our skin and singe it. Eventually it felt as if the heat was enough to tear the skin from our bodies.

  Bringing the convoy to a halt was extremely dangerous. Roadside bombs, mines, snipers and ambushes were a risk even while we were moving quickly. But if we were forced or decided to stop, spontaneous attacks could be added to the list of dangers. Often these were combinations of various forms of attack – by one individual, maybe a few – and they were almost impossible to prevent, either with normal intelligence or by carefully planning the route in advance. These were crude attacks, born solely of opportunity.

  As we disembarked from the vehicle, we tried to position ourselves to maximise our view of the surrounding area. We knew we were sitting ducks. We were surrounded by mountains and boulders, but they didn’t provide us with any cover.

  The commander of our convoy made a quick decision: the rest of the convoy would continue on its way; the broken transporter would remain there along with its crew. We agreed, of course, though it meant we were left alone. Keeping the entire company there for hours would be far too dangerous.

  Repairing the vehicle took a long time. The mechanics were working under extreme pressure. I kept my eyes on the shadowy blackspots between the mountains.

  The first bullet split the chief mechanic’s skull. The shot came from almost directly in front of us – the direction in which we were heading. It came from high on one of the mountain ridges.

  We returned fire. The mountain didn’t care for our bullets. But there was another purpose to our firing: we had to protect the remaining mechanic and allow him to work. That was our only hope. Our other hope was that this was a lone gunman. The shots came at fairly regular intervals, all from the same direction; and they were precise.

  One soldier was hit in the arm. The wound wasn’t life-threatening. But it affected another of the soldiers in what was to be a fateful way.

  He jumped out from behind the truck and began running towards the mountainside. Perhaps he wanted to reach a narrow gulley in the rock face; perhaps he saw a possible escape route.

  The shooter picked up the pace. Bullets rained into the ground around the running soldier. I hurtled after him. It was an instinctive reaction. Or rather, as I came to think later on, it was a matter of faith. I had set off to Afghanistan to provide others with the support, comfort and security that I h
ad to offer.

  I was running fast and managed to catch up with the soldier. He wasn’t running in a straight line so his forward momentum wasn’t the most effective. I knocked him to the ground, said I’d take him back to safety. The soldier put up a fight. He tried to punch me, but his hands were just flailing in the air. Angry but imprecise. I hit him very precisely and with a rush of adrenalin.

  I began carrying the unconscious soldier back to the truck. He was like an ungainly sack round my shoulders. The others were all firing at the mountainside as though they were trying to reduce it to rubble. The sustained barrage of bullets affected the sniper. He wasn’t as accurate now as before. But bullets still hit the ground ahead of me and, presumably, behind me too.

  The embankment was steep, so I threw the soldier further up the verge. Another soldier darted out from beside the truck, snuck towards us, grabbed the unconscious man’s hands and began pulling him to safety. I was on all fours. A bullet struck the ground only a few centimetres from my right flank. I stood up, propelled myself forwards.

  I don’t remember anything about the explosion.

  My next memory is from inside the truck. I can’t hear anything, all I can see is a blur. I’m soaked in blood. Someone is tying something round my left leg. Then I lose consciousness again.

  I was given a bravery award for saving the soldier’s life. He came to thank me in person at the field hospital. I was ambivalent about this; everything about my situation seemed temporary, transient – the kind of thing we can quickly get over and forget about.

  The soldier I saved was considerably younger than me, and he was about to be sent home. I noticed he found it hard to look me in the eye. He couldn’t sit still. I guessed it had something to do with what had happened. He had panicked, done something stupid, and somebody else ended up paying the price. I told him I only did what he would have done if things had been the other way round. He stared at a spot next to the bed and asked if all the medications on the table were mine.