The Mine

by Antti Tuomainen

  ‘I’m not the one that stopped trying,’ I said eventually.

  ‘Trying for what? For some action? You’ve certainly stopped that.’

  ‘For good reason,’ I said, all too quickly. The words slapped on the table and remained there, ugly and irreversible.

  ‘Good to know,’ said Pauliina. ‘You’re hardly spectacular yourself.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Pauliina shrugged her shoulders. ‘You mean apart from the fact that you’re at most mediocre in bed? I can think of a few things. Your breath smells of old cabbage and rotten fish. I can’t have a conversation with you for more than a minute without the topic turning to you and your achievements, which, by the way, aren’t nearly as impressive as you seem to think. Shall I continue?’

  ‘Then why the hell are we together?’

  ‘The real question is, why are you here? You’re not interested in anybody but yourself. Your daughter hurts her hand; your partner has the most important interview of her career; we need to agree who takes Ella to day care and who picks her up – practical, everyday things. But you’re just not interested in any of it.’

  ‘I am interested, but it’s just—’

  ‘But this, but the next thing. Yes, but. I would do, but. If only, but. But, but, but.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said, shoving the glass back and forth across the tabletop. Blueberry juice spilled from the glass and threw bloody stains across the table. ‘Enough’s enough.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Pauliina. ‘You’re sleeping in the living room.’

  *

  There was no way I was sleeping in the living room. I went into the hallway, pulled on my coat, slung my bag over my shoulder and left. I walked to the bus stop, looked at the timetable, then walked on to the next stop. The snow had relented, the snowflakes were large and solitary; frost sparkled on the surface of the road. The bus arrived and I rode all the way to Hakaniemi.

  Hannikainen was still sitting at his desk. He raised his head, but I couldn’t tell whether he noticed me or not.

  I booted up my computer, though I knew it was pointless. I couldn’t be bothered to think, far less write anything. I switched the computer off again, walked outside and instinctively headed towards the city centre. Just before Long Bridge I asked myself where I was going. I couldn’t answer. What was most important was to walk, to breathe. I turned towards the shore. Snow floated down to the surface of the sea and disappeared. On the deserted street running along the shore, the leafless trees looked as though they had been turned to stone. Across the black bay was the darkness of Kaisaniemi Park, the glimmer of the downtown lights hanging above it. The night air was cold and pure. I could just make out the end of the peninsula about thirty or so metres ahead.

  This was one of my favourite places, a strange deserted spot right in the middle of Helsinki. If you stood with your back to the hundred-year-old stone buildings behind you and stared out across the bay to Töölö, shining in the distance, you could almost imagine being on an island. I crossed the road and walked down to the shore, where the trees leaned out across the water. The sounds of the city were far away – behind me and ahead of me. I looked up to the sky. The snowflakes felt like tiny, freezing pinpricks on my face, disappearing almost as soon as they touched me. I stood still until the cold forced me to move again.

  I walked back up the verge to the road, turned at the corner and saw a broad-shouldered man approaching from the opposite direction. The movements were familiar. I turned and headed back the way I had come. There were two paths leading away from the end of the peninsula. I took the other one, and when I turned at the corner and saw the lights of Hakaniemi ahead of me, reassured that I was not alone in the world, I thought I might have been a little paranoid.

  I continued towards the lights, away from the darkened bay and the loneliness of the peninsula. Then, further away, on the road curving round towards the metro station, I spied the outline of the man, the figure that looked so familiar. Still I couldn’t seem to place him. I arrived at the corner of Saariniemenkatu.

  The street bisected the peninsula horizontally, each end leading to the bay. At the other end of the street stood the same man. A gust of cold air struck me in the stomach, making me gasp for breath. Another man, whose frame I also recognised, began walking down the street towards me. I was in no doubt where I’d seen him before: Suomalahti, at the gates of the mining complex, opening the door of the command tower, crumbs of fast food still hanging in his beard. I adjusted my own trajectory, crossed the street, my heart thumping, and bounded up the two steps into the Juttutupa bar.

  Juttutupa was swathed in a comforting, inebriated warmth. The bar was almost full. I went to the counter, downed a beer and a cut brandy and tried to explain to myself what had just happened. Either I was losing my sanity or there were people following me. And if I was being followed, where were the men now? Was I losing my mind…? The second beer tasted better than the first. It often does.

  I found a seat on the other side of the bar, opposite the stage. Two men with guitars were performing a mournful, unplugged ballad. One of them was singing a story in English about a woman who had cheated on him, left him and taken his favourite frying pan. All this in country-and-western style. I finished off my drink and fetched another, plus a chaser. The beer tasted better the more – and the more quickly – I drank it. I knew that thirst like this had its repercussions, but what of it? I was being followed and I was on the brink of separating from my partner. To hell with everything. I took another swig of beer and heard a voice behind me.

  ‘Come here for the music, did you?’

  4

  The book’s name was Human Monsters. It was supposed to calm his anxiety. Emil had found it in a charity shop opposite the old sports hall in Töölö. Flicking through the book he found some instructive stories:

  Apparently, the Roman empress, Livia poisoned anyone who might rival her sons, then eventually poisoned her husband, Emperor Augustus, too. Livia’s sons did not attend her funeral.

  Basil II’s soldiers put out the eyes of fifteen thousand Bulgarian prisoners. The prisoners were sent home in groups of one hundred, each group led by a man with one eye.

  Andronikos I Komnenos had the ruling king strangled with a bowstring and then married the king’s eleven-year-old widow. He was sixty-five years old. When Andronikos himself was deposed, a raging mob tied him to a pole; his beard and hair were pulled out, his hands chopped off, his teeth yanked from his gums, and one of his eyes dug out.

  Gilles de Rais tortured, raped and murdered two hundred young boys and girls. He hung his victims from the ceiling of his torture chamber and tied them to the floor. He raped them and tore out their innards. The most beautiful of their severed heads he preserved so that he could admire them later.

  Tomás de Torquemada, the first grand inquisitor, declared that all heretics – and Jews in particular – posed an imminent threat to the soul of Spain. He ordered over two thousand people to be burned at the stake and confiscated the homes and possessions of all those he deemed to be a heretic. Confessions were brought about through torture. The heretic’s fork, which had prongs that dug into the skin, caused sleep deprivation that brought victims to the brink of insanity. The choke pear crushed the teeth and jaws as it opened up, and the rack pulled the bones from their joints with a crack. As the procedure continued and the winch tightened, the limbs were torn from the body, starting with the arms.

  Vladimir Lenin’s hanging order of 1918: ‘1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers; 2. Publish their names; 3. Seize all their grain from them. Do it in such a fashion that, for hundreds of kilometres around, the people might see, tremble, know, shout: “They are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks”. Yours, Lenin.’

  The troops of the Croatian fascist dictator, Ante Pavelić, gave two options to those who had survived the mass
executions and extermination camps: death or Catholicism. Some were allowed to experience both. In 1941, in the village of Glina, hundreds of Serbs were crammed into a small church to be converted to Roman Catholicism. The doors were bolted and the church burned to the ground.

  Mao Zedong: ‘We must kill. We believe it is good to kill.’ While the Chinese were facing the worst famine in their history, Mao was selling grain abroad in order to buy weapons. Thirty-eight million people died. Mao never washed. Legend has it that larvae hatched on his body.

  Lavrentiy Beria loved torture. Stalin loved Beria. Beria said: ‘Give him to me for one night and he will admit to being the king of England.’ Beria enjoyed rape. He skinned people, stuffed snakes into their mouths, tore off their tongues, their eyes, their ears. What he first did to his victims, he then did to their families.

  Heinrich Himmler was a slender child, who played chess and collected stamps. He was a chinless man, whose attic was filled with books and furniture made from the skin and bones of Jewish prisoners. Heinrich Himmler was a fastidious and effective bureaucrat: in only a few years he organised the massacre of six million people.

  Pol Pot created a communist utopia in Cambodia, a place where even the counting of the years was started again from zero. Everything non-communist had to be erased. Newspapers were closed down, the intelligentsia was executed. The definition of this was broad; people with spectacles were killed as ‘bourgeois intellectuals’. Eventually a third of the population was killed, most of them with iron rods, axes and hammers. Soldiers were ordered to use bullets sparingly.

  Idi Amin had a taste for human flesh. He visited morgues and asked to be left alone with the bodies. He hanged his victims from trees. Amin had his servants carry him around in a chair.

  Saddam Hussein wanted to personally oversee the execution of his enemies. He used Sarin gas on Kurdish children. His sons were psychopaths. They all enjoyed torture.

  Türkmenbaşy erected a forty-metre-tall golden statue of himself opposite his palace in the middle of the capital of Turkmenistan. He renamed the days of the week and invented some highly imaginative methods of torture. For instance, he would put a gas mask on his victim’s face, close off the air vents, then put a set of headphones on the victim’s ears so that the victim could hear family members being tortured. The statue rotated on an axis once a day.

  Emil stood up and looked out of the window. The knowledge that, at some point in history, someone somewhere had maimed and enslaved people, pulled teeth from another’s mouth, flogged people, eaten human flesh and continued to do so didn’t diminish his own sins. It didn’t place him in a better light, didn’t offer the chance of favourable comparison with others, didn’t give him permission to forget, to downplay things. It placed him on a bloody continuum of evil beings who tore limbs from innocent people, making history repeat itself in such a mindless, idiotic way that thinking about it for even a moment was enough to drive anyone crazy and lose all hope.

  Something had changed. Even the night felt different. It no longer protected him. It was as though he was standing next to a great curtain and couldn’t find a chink through which to slip back into the darkness.

  5

  A full glass of gin-and-grapefruit in her right hand, a grey packet of Belmonts in the other: Maarit Lehtinen.

  ‘What?’ I asked, genuinely confused.

  ‘The music,’ said Maarit and waved her left hand towards the performers.

  I’d forgotten all about the country-and-western duo. I hadn’t even been listening to them.

  ‘No. Yes. Sit down. Sorry, you don’t have to, if you’ve got company somewhere. But anyway. Please.’

  The words came out of my mouth every bit as angular and disjointed as they sounded in my mind. Maarit seemed to hesitate before taking a seat. She sat near me on the sofa but looked slightly past me. Perhaps she wanted to maintain eye contact with the duo, which had now changed tempo for a more upbeat drinking song.

  The self-confidence in Maarit’s posture; the piercing brightness of her blue eyes; the exotic curve of her cheeks and nose; her bare shoulders.

  ‘Drinking here all by yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘With any luck,’ I said.

  Maarit looked at me quizzically.

  ‘It’s nothing, forget it. What are you up to?’

  ‘I came to listen to the music. The guys are friends of mine. Is everything all right?’

  I took a thirsty gulp of beer. ‘Everything’s fine and dandy.’

  ‘I read your blog. It was very short.’

  ‘A longer piece needs … It’ll be longer.’

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for in my father’s papers?’

  I looked at her. ‘There’s lots of interesting material.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  The tone of her question communicated more than the words themselves. It made me sit up straight.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ I asked.

  Maarit nodded towards her glass. It was still full. ‘I’ll drink one at a time, thanks.’

  Quite. I knocked back my glass of brandy.

  ‘And when are you going to be writing a follow-up piece?’ Maarit enquired.

  ‘Just a minute,’ I said. I went to the counter and ordered another beer and another chaser.

  When I came back, the level of Maarit’s drink had remained stubbornly high.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Maarit. ‘I can always refuse to answer.’

  ‘Were you and your father close?’

  I realised I was pissed, realised I was talking to Maarit as though we were old acquaintances, as though we’d crossed the all-important boundary of friendship. As I picked up my glass, Maarit glanced past me and almost imperceptibly shook her head. It must have been because of my question. I was about to take it back when she spoke.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t really know. I can’t compare our relationship to anyone else’s. All I have is my own experience. We were civil to one another, told each other how things were going – with certain reservations, of course. There are things a father doesn’t want to hear about his daughter, and things a daughter doesn’t want to hear about her father, though they were things that at least to some degree we were both well aware of.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We were interested in some of the same things. We spoke about them quite regularly. Does that make us close?’

  I took a slurp of brandy. It no longer burned my throat but tasted soft and pleasant. I looked at Maarit.

  ‘Maybe it does,’ I said at first, then added: ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  The sofa was soft, the alcohol warmed me, Maarit’s features seemed heightened in the mellow light of the bar.

  ‘I just met my father for the first time in thirty years. You could say we’re not exactly close.’

  Maarit sipped her drink. I noticed she was looking at me closely; very closely.

  ‘I recognised him instantly,’ I said. ‘I recognised him, but I didn’t know him. We chatted for a while, talked about what we do for a living, where we live, my family. I’m not sure what I think about it all.’

  ‘My father didn’t stay away for that long, though he was away a lot. It’s a common trait for fathers. Being absent.’

  A cold wind gusted through me.

  Ella. Forgive me.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

  ‘Well, nobody is perfect.’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone who is.’

  Maarit smiled. For the first time, the smile contained something directed at me, only me, something emanating from those blue eyes. I also noticed she’d almost finished her drink.

  ‘What would you say if I fetched us something to drink?’ I asked.

  As the evening progressed I fetched more drinks many times. We clicked. Better and better all the time.

  We talked about everything, we opened our hearts. When the lights were flicked for final orders,
we stepped out into the frost hand in hand. I said I’d walk her home. My mind was light, and my legs too. My inebriation was fresh and strong, not numbing or fatigued. I felt that everything would work out after all. Big things were happening. I was closing in on the crux of the case. I could build a relationship with my father. Pauliina would eventually relent, given time and space to understand. If I was being followed, it must have been because I was on to something. Everything was for sale and everything had a price. Maarit. Maarit, round whose shoulders I wrapped a warming arm to protect her from the cold. Maarit was becoming a good friend. A very good friend. A very close friend.

  We stood for a moment opposite each other, our breath steaming into the renewed snowfall. It was so quiet that I thought I could hear Maarit’s heartbeat. We followed the curls of our breath, our lips moved towards one another. A hot, sweet-tasting kiss so at odds with the surrounding cold and the snowflakes melting on our cheeks that we couldn’t pull apart for fear of having to catch our breath. When our lips finally did part, for some reason I could taste blood in my mouth.

  We unzipped our trousers in the lift. The dark wooden walls and black floor clacked and cracked, and the mechanism gave a faint shriek with every passing floor.

  The sixth floor. As I yanked the old folding door to one side, it almost crushed my hand.

  We collapsed on to the hallway floor.

  6

  The text message contained twenty-four words. Not even one word for all the years that had passed. Still, he felt time becoming so light and meaningless that, for a moment, a day and a year felt almost interchangeable. Dull thuds beat against his chest, his body was pierced with a joy and strength that felt like youth itself.

  Hello Emil. I’ve thought about what you said. Perhaps we should meet. Morning or evening is fine, I’m at work during the day. Leena.