The path sloped downwards, turned a slight corner, and a long straight section opened out in from of him. After this flat stretch, the path twisted and turned in a gentle uphill section. Emil liked such places. They would be perfect for his purposes. Only twenty metres’ visibility in any direction, forest and rocks on all sides. No people around. Dog walkers never came this deep into the woods, at least not in the early morning. The only people out and about were dedicated athletes.
Through the tangle of spruce and birch trees, Emil could just make out the figure of a lone runner. He looked at his watch. The first kilometre had taken him five minutes. When the man turned on to the same short stretch of pathway lilting into the hillside, Emil recognised him instantly. In his fifties, one hundred and eighty-five centimetres tall, stern jawline, a sharp nose, the bluest eyes that Emil had seen for a long time.
Emil glanced over his shoulder. Not a soul in sight. He lightened his step, shifted his bodyweight to the balls of his feet, relaxed his arms.
The man’s progress was smooth and purposeful. He came closer. Emil heard the man’s steps, the tautness of his breath.
When there were only a few metres between them, Emil focussed all his energy into a single motion. He took one step to the side, slid over to the man’s side of the path and raised his arm just as the man was about to push himself into another powerful stride.
Emil grabbed him. Two opposing forces collided.
Emil’s movements – his bodyweight, the power of his arms, the grip of his fingers – culminated in a single, precise twist. Both of the man’s legs were in the air. There came a crack. His neck snapped. His body fell to the ground, slumping like an empty sack.
Emil continued his run.
15
He didn’t want to sleep. More than that, he couldn’t. The nightmares had made sleeping every bit as exhausting as lying awake. He was impatient. Meeting his son had opened a door, at least that’s how he thought of it. A door that had been closed for thirty years had opened a fraction, and the brightness that waited on the other side not only brought him warmth but made him restless. How should he proceed? He had to admit to himself that he had no experience of situations like this. A long time ago he had decided not to allow himself to become attached to people or things. For years the person closest to him had been the person whose death he was planning. If that isn’t loneliness, what is?
Meeting his son had pushed something into motion, something that, almost unbeknown to himself, he had dreamed of. It had given him a chance.
After he’d left his wife and son, he’d loathed himself profoundly. Then, as the years passed, he had begun to see those events in a more reasonable light: they were young people who had behaved in what they understood to be the best way. And he had done what he’d had to do, striven for that which everyone strives for: survival.
He sat down at the dining table in his furnished, one-bedroom apartment and stared at the sun slowly creeping up behind the window. How small it was to begin with, how inexorable the light and beginning of a new day always was. The trees stepped forward from the darkness, acquired new branches, grew and twisted. At first all he could see were the thickest branches, the ones that looked like arms as thick as girders, but soon he could see the thinner ones too, until even the tiniest twig came into focus against the pale fabric of the morning.
How many mornings did he have left? Did it make any difference? All that mattered was what those days contained and how he approached them.
He sat, drinking his coffee and eating some rye bread with peppered ham. The same happened to the Töölö library as to the trees around it: it was gradually dressed and undressed by the approaching morning. First, the darkness and the dusk were lifted from above it, then it took on form and shape, and it was filled with light, with new angles and dimensions, width and depth.
Perhaps something similar could happen to him. At first the thought seemed too big, too heavy. Impossible. But then it did what thoughts often do. It planted itself and began to grow. If only his life could take on a new morning’s worth of light, if the darkness and dusk could, at least in part, be lifted from above him.
He had returned to Helsinki and he had met his son. Perhaps this was a sign that life could change. He had to leave his work, find something else. At first he wasn’t sure what that would be. Then he realised with absolute certainty.
16
Ella and Pauliina came into the kitchen together. I put my papers in one pile so there would be room for us to have breakfast at the table. Our three-person family. Sometimes, fleetingly, our happy family. Pauliina immediately noticed the swelling on my cheek and at the corner of my eye. She clearly also noticed that I’d spent the night in the kitchen, that something had happened.
Pauliina made breakfast for Ella and herself. I offered to make some coffee. We sat at the table and ate. Pauliina leafed through the morning paper, said she would take Ella to nursery and told me to pick her up. Ella nattered away to herself. We both answered her, admiring her bandaged hand every time she proudly showed it off. I wondered whether Ella was able to pick up on the tension between her mother and father.
Once she had eaten, Ella wandered into the living room by herself for a moment. As soon as she had disappeared round the corner, Pauliina looked at me across the table.
‘What on earth?’
‘I had to go and fetch some papers,’ I said and indicated the pile of paperwork, which seemed to have grown in the last few minutes.
Pauliina didn’t so much as look at them.
‘I meant that,’ she said and nodded at my face.
I touched my check. It still hurt.
‘I’m not sure what happened either.’
Pauliina looked at me. ‘I assume this is something to do with whatever it is you’re investigating?’
I didn’t want to talk about it. For some reason it felt wrong. Perhaps not wrong, but as though I was doing something I shouldn’t. Besides, there was something else I wanted to say.
‘I met my father yesterday.’
The newspaper dropped from Pauliina’s hand. The business section curtsied gently on to the table.
‘What?’
‘We bumped into each other in the supermarket. We went for a drink.’
‘You and your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘The man that left you and your mum before you were two?’
‘One. Before I was one.’
‘Okay, one. Where did…?’
‘We sat in a pub for a little while. He’s about to retire and he’s moving back to Helsinki. He’s been living in Berlin. He looks just like all the photographs – only older and more rugged.’
‘Did you ask him why he—’
‘Why he left, why he came back? Yes. He didn’t answer the first question, but he did answer the second. He said he wants to come back because I’m thirty.’
‘What’s that got—’
‘That’s the age he was when he aban— … when he left Helsinki.’
Pauliina was about to say something but instead turned in her chair and stood up. She took her coffee cup to the sink, cleared up Ella’s plate and glass, and wiped the table.
It was nine o’clock. Pauliina and Ella had already left. I looked at the papers I’d once again separated into piles placed across the table. In addition to the stacks I’d created, there was still one group: miscellaneous items. I picked up a bubble-pack envelope. Inside was a CD case. On the cover it read in felt-tip pen, DIR.MEETING/DATE? There were no other annotations. From the living room I fetched the external CD drive and connected it to the laptop. A few clicks. I fetched my headphones. The beginning of the sound file wasn’t very promising: endless silence. Then I made out the sound of footsteps, talking, people in an enclosed space. Perhaps chairs were being pulled across the floor, people sitting at a table. The sounds and voices came from different directions. The microphone picking all this up was clearly placed to one side of the room. The clink of spoon
s and coffee cups jingled above the conversation like church bells in a landscape.
MAN 1: … if there’s no decent coffee, forget it.
MAN 2: There’s tea.
MAN 1: I don’t drink tea.
MAN 2: Tap water, then.
MAN 1: You taking the piss?
MAN 3: Clean water.
MAN 1: What the…?
MAN 3: Let’s get down to business. If things are like you said, then how serious a situation are we looking at?
MAN 1: Pretty fucking serious. We’ve got a few months. At most.
MAN 4: If that’s the case, we won’t have time to drum up any extra funding without it drawing the wrong kind of attention.
MAN 2: The wrong kind of attention? You don’t think it’ll attract the wrong kind of attention if we announce that we’ve got a problem like this? What’s going on up there?
MAN 1: The system isn’t working the way it should. It just won’t do its job. It works in theory, but not at Suomalahti. The mine’s spewing sulphates – mercury, lead, everything except nickel, which it’s fucking supposed to be producing. The vats are full of heavy metals, and when you look at it, the future’s anything but bright. There’s rain and snow across the whole country and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon. And how fucking stupid are we going to look if we admit we hadn’t thought you might get snow and rain in northern Finland? The press will rip us to shreds.
MAN 2: First, they build you up, then they tear you down. It would be like giving them a gun and telling them to aim right at our heads.
MAN 1: Well, I’m sure we’re all agreed on reporters and the way they work. But if we could just come back to the—
MAN 4: We can’t ask the government for more.
MAN 2: Why not?
MAN 4: We’d have to tell them how things are going.
MAN 2: Never bothered them before.
MAN 1: Things are different these days. Everybody wants good news, no matter whether there’s any truth to it. We were supposed to save the whole of fucking Lapland. Now we’ve got ourselves nuclear fallout.
MAN 2: A nuclear warhead is the only thing that could sort this mess out.
MAN 3: I think it’s perfectly clear the methods we’re using up there are far too expensive.
MAN 4: I’m not a technical expert, but I know that changing the refinery operations at this stage would take years and would require the kind of investment we just can’t afford. From a financial point of view, I’d look at keeping on as we are and trying to find a way round it for the next two or three years.
MAN 2: Two or three years?!
MAN 4: It could be less than that. But by that point Europe will be at war again and the demand for nickel will mean we can sell as much as we can possibly produce, and we can set our own price. It’ll be our boom era. But, as things are at the moment, it’s unsustainable, unbearable. It’s a fact and we’ve got to accept it.
MAN 2: You think there’s anyone in this room that doesn’t accept it?
MAN 1: Changing the operating model isn’t an option. And going public is not fucking on. But…
MAN 2: I’m listening.
MAN 3: I’m listening.
MAN 4: Me too.
MAN 1: … it’s not the means of extraction that’s too expensive. It’s maintaining the means of extraction. We could explore a different tactic. How much would we have to tweak the refinery expenses to make this thing work? I’m talking percentages.
MAN 4: At a rough estimate, fifteen to twenty per cent.
MAN 2: That’s a lot. That’s not just tweaking. That’s a cut. That would require—
MAN 1: Action.
[silence]
MAN 3: I’m for it.
MAN 1: Thank you.
MAN 2: If I understand you right—
MAN 1: We simply take advantage of the mine’s location. If we can make that fifteen-to-twenty per cent disappear from our expenses, as it were, we can be a profitable business again. Everyone will thank us and nobody will notice a thing.
MAN 2: We’ve never discussed this, we never came to any kind of decision and we know nothing of the factors that made this meeting necessary.
MEN 1, 3 & 4: Of course not.
The tape ended. I realised I was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor. I sat down at the computer. It was time to kick the hornets’ nest.
PART TWO
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Janne Vuori, HT
[email protected]
Twitter: @vuorijanneht
Where can we dig? What can we say?
All that glitters is not gold. The mining industry may not save Finland after all.
As regular readers of this blog will know, the articles here are by their very nature unofficial. In addition to thinking out loud, this means that, unlike in my journalistic pieces, I also present claims, counterclaims and conjecture. In other words, anything goes.
There are currently fifty mines in operation in Finland. Several new projects are in the offing, and the promises made by those lobbying for these projects – about using renewable resources and the projected increases in employment in the local areas – grow bigger by the year. This, despite the fact that the world around us and the earth beneath our feet cannot support such promises. The enthusiasm for the mining industry is partly understandable. The country’s economy is stalling, there is no new Nokia in sight, and northern Finland is fast becoming an uninhabited wasteland. This is precisely the gap in the market that mining investments seek to fill. They are expected to bring prosperity and – due to the location of the mines themselves – much-needed jobs to those areas of the country where unemployment is most acute. But are the mines really the saviours they claim to be?
The facts are brutal. Finland’s soil is famously ore-deficient. Most mines currently in operation are unprofitable. The majority of those mines are owned by foreign companies, which naturally has a direct impact on how much they can benefit the Finnish economy. Many of the projects currently pending may, according to some estimates, actually have a negative impact on their surroundings. This is largely to do with the sheer size of the initial capital required and any subsequent environmental effects. Mines require an infrastructure of roads, electricity cables, train tracks and numerous other structures, which will all be built with taxpayers’ money. Any potential profits, however, will be siphoned off into the bank accounts of the international mining companies, most of which are run from offshore tax havens.
And if this doesn’t sound bad enough, let’s just say that mines put considerable strain on the local environment. Every mine. Everywhere.
How heavy the environmental strain is depends on a variety of factors. Every mine currently in operation pollutes its immediate environment to some degree, often quite significantly. This is a fact. Another fact is that cleaning up a mining complex is an expensive business, and it’s generally the taxpayer and not the mining company that ends up having to foot the bill.
What’s more, the effect of the mining industry on employment figures isn’t all that impressive either. The fifty mines in Finland employ only a few thousand people in total. That’s the same number that Stockmann’s department store employs in Helsinki alone. If politicians are truly interested in creating jobs for people, they would naturally look to places where new jobs might realistically appear. But this is about politics, about what looks good and sensible, although it is neither. Of course, every newly created job in remote areas of the country is something to be celebrated, but if the cost of that job runs into the millions, it no longer looks like such an attractive investment.
The factors outlined above raise larger questions about the overall feasibility of the mining industry in our country. Why should Finland – a country with some of the cleanest countryside in the world – wilfully destroy and pollute its own environment when it gets nothing in return? Is it possible that, if there is to be a global shortage of something, it won’t be gold, chrom
e or nickel – and it certainly won’t be industrial sewage? As things currently stand, it seems that clean soil, water and air are commodities that may soon be in short supply. All the evidence points to this being the case in a matter of decades.
There are pollutants and ruined natural environments the world over. Recent environmental predictions indicate that there are areas of the planet where breathing will soon become difficult, if not impossible. In a situation like this, a country that already has plenty of clean drinking water, vast areas of land not yet made uninhabitable by sulphates, and lakes as yet undestroyed by metallic slurry, might have a lot to give. For that reason alone we must talk about the implications of continued mining in Finland.
In the next few weeks I will be digging deeper into the nickel mine at Suomalahti. Partly thanks to a contact on the inside, I predict that the mine – both the project and the mine currently operating – will embody the problems of the Finnish mining industry, which at best can offer only a brief spell of employment for a few dozen people. But which means significant profits for a very few people, at extortionate cost both to the environment and the Finnish taxpayer. Our taxes are disappearing like smoke into the air. Most of the areas affected by the mines’ pollutants will be lost for generations to come.
It’s time to ask why.
1
The front door of the house across the street opened and closed like the gills of a large, grey fish; people walked in and out, mostly in – they were sucked inside the building and disappeared. He stood beneath the shelter though the snow had stopped. It was almost nine o’clock.
At last he saw the woman he would have recognised anywhere, any time. He began walking.
The woman looked in his direction, but her eyes didn’t settle on him. How could that be? he wondered. Time had passed, he had to admit; it had started when he did something he could never undo. He strode across the road and caught up with the woman just before she reached the door.
The Mine Page 9