Like most of the men, Akka’s father made his living from the sea. During the warmer months, he went in the fishing boats, while in winter he would head out with the other men to hunt seals upon the ice.
One day, shortly before his daughter’s fourth birthday, he ventured onto the ice with his fellows and never returned. They were told a pathfinding whale had become trapped beneath the ice and in its efforts to surface had tilted the sheet on which Akka’s father and some of the others were fashioning a rudimentary harpoon. The men tumbled into the cold, black sea. Iku-Turso’s jaws snapped closed with a thunderous crash.
The silence of snow, the silence of stars.
Akka often accompanied her mother to the kitchens and it is here she reckons she first came on, as Magda puts it, meaning had an infectious spell, because shortly after her seventh birthday there was an outbreak of a “shivering fever” that laid low many of the able-bodied population.
There was some talk of doctors coming, but then events overtook them.
She was shaking in her sleep. She was shaking in her wakefulness. The bed, the walls, the whole house was shaking.
Then everything collapsed.
Akka woke in a black space, a pocket of safety beneath a pile of masonry. She called out, but there was no answer. She tried to free herself, but it was no good. And now she could hear the sound of the others—injured, trapped like herself. Screaming, moaning, calling for help.
But the screams became whimpers, the whimpers drifted into silence interrupted only by terrifying aftershocks. When after a day and a night she heard someone picking their way across the rubble, she still had her voice, she shouted hard, loud, “HERE! I’M HERE!”
The steps stopped. She heard debris being cleared. A glimpse of clear blue sky. Blocked out by a face.
Only the lepers had survived the earthquake unscathed, removed as they were from the main community. The old couple were too infirm to do much so it was left to Khalid to try and help those he could.
There were remarkably few survivors. The cries Akka had heard when she regained consciousness had largely come from people trapped in burning buildings—wood being the main construction material on Oosterholma—and many had burned or suffocated. Because her mother worked in the kitchens of the commissary, Akka was billeted in a building of brick, which had saved her from the worst of the heat and smoke.
Khalid managed to lift up the masonry long enough for Akka to slip from underneath it, emerge hungry, bruised, but otherwise unscathed. The pair stood back from each other upon the uneven rubble.
“Have you seen my mama?” Akka asked. The leper pointed towards the ground and she followed him back over the rubble. She had never seen a leper up close before. Only the older people served them, and then with the greatest caution. The children had always been told terrible tales of the ill that afflicted the people over the hill, as they were known, but at first Akka could see little wrong with the man. All his bits seemed to be in place, count them: his fingers, nose, lips, eyes. But there was that dressing around his neck, now black with dust; the dark tangle of shoulder-length hair, the bruise that stretched beneath it.
Khalid steadied himself against a piece of masonry and his curly jet hair swung back to reveal a hole where his left ear should have been; like a bite out of a rotten apple, it looked.
Akka’s mother was among a number of corpses laid outside the building, a rug thrown over her face, her legs as bare and grey as cement. At least she was all together, thought Akka, which was more than could be said for the young assistant commissioner, newly arrived from Helsinki, whose upper torso now lay beside her, his entrails buzzing with flies. At least Mamma would be able to walk in Heaven, she thought, at least she would be able to dance.
Between them, Khalid and Akka constructed a pyre and burned the dead, tended the injured, and waited for relief.
Eventually a German trawler docked and provided them with some victuals. It took another week for the Finnish navy to turn up, and when they did they declared the community “untenable” and proceeded with an evacuation. Khalid however was not evacuated. As the launch carrying the landing party approached, he took off, back over the hill.
Like Vladimir, Akka must have instinctively sought obscurity. Taken to Turku, after she left the orphanage she settled into a succession of menial jobs, like cleaning and taking in washing, that discouraged association. Her chief pleasure was the library, where she worked her way through the shelves. Ultimately, she managed to be hired as caretaker and spent long, happy winter evenings with her books and periodicals.
As for men, she had no interest in a relationship. But every three months or so, when the Russian trawlers would dock, she would wait until it was dark and nip down to the docks, where she would sell herself for twenty marrka between the pallets. It provided for her needs and gave her a little extra to keep the wolf from the door.
Despite rudimentary precautions, she fell pregnant on three occasions. Her initial instinct was to kill the bug, as she saw it, the germ wriggling around her insides, and she went as far as seeking out a woman that did those things. All the way up to the door she had intended to be rid of it but when she arrived she just couldn’t ring the bell.
Then she was walking away, heading home.
Instead she paid another woman to help her deliver each of her bugs, the spewing, mawing jumbles of life that made her so heavy and uncomfortable, that rode in on a wave of juices onto the kitchen floor.
She paid the woman to take them away too.
She never once regretted it—let them be grateful for having a life—though she did sometimes wonder, when she saw someone their age.
It was only after she retired that she came to the attention of the authorities.
The car hit her as she was stepping off the tram. She could never have seen it—it was making an illegal turn. The Lada dealt her a blow to the side and she was pitched against a tram, smashing her shoulder and cracking her skull. The next thing she knew she was waking up in hospital.
As soon as she was able to take in her circumstances she knew she was in trouble. Her thing that had lain dormant all those years fully possessed her. She remembered swinging her legs out of bed, pulling on her cardigan, and then she was back in her tiny apartment above the library, trying to gather some things together.
She was at the door, in her coat with a suitcase packed when she collapsed. The morphine had long since worn off and although the thing had had her mostly in its thrall, the damage done was too great for it to sustain in such an old lady, and she slipped out of its hands, onto the floor.
Akka lay there overnight, suffering feverish bouts of wakefulness, parched yet unable to move.
Loviator fumbled towards her, her skeletal fingers tore her flesh, began to drag her down.
You are ours now, she said. You thought you could leave us behind, but instead your very neglect was enough to let us in.
Akka was released from her paralysis with the dawn. She dragged herself to the bathroom, where she shed her clothes and considered her scrawny, smashed body. Her shoulder was as black as a leper’s, the side of her face inky blue. There was a blossom of blood beginning to appear through the bandage around her forehead. She knew she needed to run, yes, but she also needed to rest.
She drew herself a bath, let the water soak into her wounds.
It was true, she thought: she had deserted the gods, but they had not deserted her, and now here she was, perhaps a thousand miles from her own.
She would have to return to fulfil her obligations if she wanted any chance of salvation; un-tormented mortality.
After drying herself off, Akka realised she was hungry. Unsurprising—she hadn’t eaten for two days. She began to boil some water and think about her next steps.
Although all her identity documents were still in her handbag, she had to presume the authorities knew who she was and where she lived, so it was just a matter of time before they came looking for her. It’s not every day a 76-ye
ar-old road accident victim gets up and leaves.
She chopped some cabbage and began dropping it in the saucepan. She would eat, drink, then get moving. No one would ever think of tracing her to Oosterholma. And in any case, the spirits would protect their own.
The doorbell rang. It was 7:25 am.
They broke the door down when they received no answer but spied the bubbling saucepan through the letterbox.
They found Akka in the bedroom, trying, with some difficulty, to put her coat on. It was clearly the old lady they were looking for, they could tell just by a look at the terrible bruise on her face, the bandage. How her left arm hung limply by her side.
“Madam,” said the female officer. “Didn’t you hear us?”
“I’m sorry, dear,” said Akka loudly. “A bit deaf, see? It’s my ears. Did you want something?”
“We came to find out how you were,” said the officer. “You were admitted to hospital but disappeared. People are worried.”
“Oh,” said Akka. “Worried, yes.” She looked preoccupied, then her face brightened. “How about something to eat?”
The officers looked at each other. “You should be taking it easy, dear,” said one of the men as they followed her through to the kitchen. “You’re ill, you know. Concussed.” He rapped upon his own forehead. “Concussed!”
“Concussed, you said,” said Akka. “Now why don’t you all just sit down, make yourself at home?”
“Madam,” said the woman, “we’ve come to take you to the hospital. You’re the one that needs to sit down.”
“I’ll have plenty of time for that later, dear,” she said, eyeing the door. “Did you break it?” she asked.
“We had to,” said the woman. “You didn’t answer.”
“Ah,” said Akka. “Yes. I see.” She was standing by the cooker now. “I was just making some cabbage soup,” she said to the woman. “Would you like some?”
“You can get plenty to eat in the hospital, madam,” said the woman. “Really, if you will just come with us.”
As she laid her hand on her good shoulder, Akka swung around, emptying the contents of the saucepan down the woman’s chest.
The woman screamed. Her colleagues rushed to help her. As the first tried to pull the scalding clothes away from her, Akka pressed the base of the saucepan against his cheek.
The third police officer, turned towards the sink and running the cold water, missed this. Even as his male colleague was screaming, “Stop her,” he began furiously sponging the female officer’s front while Akka darted around them, slipping out of the gaping front door, but not forgetting to pick up her packed suitcase on the way.
She made it to her island. Kobro caught up with her the day she was cremating Khalid. She had found his part-mummified body in the bed that had once belonged to the elderly couple, now buried out back.
Khalid had obviously spent many of the intervening years knocking together the two seedy shacks and salvaging masonry and timber from the main settlement to make a proud house here, hidden away from the coastline.
To die, she thought, in your own bed. Not so bad. She watched his body blacken then break. She booted a smouldering foot back into the ash.
Kobro came across her largely by accident. He had been following up some cold cases in northern Europe, including Akka’s, which had made it to his desk via a discreet international blood screening programme, and while in Finland decided to check out Oosterholma, not for its connection with her, of which he was unaware, but because of a broader interest in the history of leprosy.
It was spring and the boat dropped him at the harbour, now mostly returned to nature, although the rubble of the old brick commissary was still visible through the long grass.
“Here we have it,” he kept saying to himself as he walked along the path that had once constituted the main street. “Here we have it.” He imagined the once-thriving community, the work the doctors must have done back then. Real pioneers, he thought, at the frontiers of medicine. He would have liked to have been around back then, he thought, before things became so complicated.
He could smell the smoke before he saw it, that whiff of burning pine and barbecue. He followed his nose away from the old town and up, over the hill. There, in a kind of natural basin, the pyre stood in front of a large red wood house. He trotted down the hill, noticed as he went the figure stumbling the other way.
Akka’s foot caught in a rabbit hole and let out an audible snap. Kobro recognised her as he was bending down to attend to her ankle, and jumped right back. Lucky too, because even as she was lying there she had gotten hold of a rock and was about to brain him.
“It was such a big head,” said Akka. “Such an easy target!”
24
It was true what he was saying, though: they were more innocent times.
“The Al Qaeda of the Nineties, the fucking Al Qaeda . . . ” Kobro leaned over for some more vodka while the others grinned, goggle-eyed. People were always goggle-eyed when they heard about the antics of the Swami and the so-called sex cult that grew around him. There was some truth to it too: the Swami loved sex, or rather celebrated it. He said our Abrahamic traditions had made life so paralysed, so crippled, so damn depressing, that our entire religious tradition relied on repressing sexual energy which, though he saw it as the lowest form of seven, constituted our base energy.
So if you repressed sex, you repressed everything, barring access to your other, higher energies, and therefore any possibility of enlightenment. It was natural, therefore, that he should encourage his followers to shag their way towards Nirvana.
“And this is what made the old man so subversive,” explained Kobro. “Among other things, eh, Vereesh?” The group looked at me with the usual titillated fascination. I wanted to say, but there is so much more to it than just that, so much more to him. He said: shake off your so-called sins, raise up your heads, you have my permission to be free and in being so, to be your true self. But they just focus on the sex.
“Such a secret smile, baby,” said Magda. “You have a good time in your commune?” She poured herself another glass of Georgian wine, bought especially for Vladimir’s wake. Along with blinny, caviar, pickled vegetables, other East European delicacies. And vodka.
“People . . . people like him.” I nodded at Kobro, sitting back, looking pleased with himself. “The press always talk about the scandals, but it’s not what it was really like. The reality was very different.”
“It’s true,” said Kobro. “When I got down to Oklahoma I couldn’t get laid, that was damn sure.”
“Things went wrong in America,” I said. “But that was down to others, the people running things. A paranoia took over.”
“You’ve gotta admit it though, my friend,” said Kobro, “he didn’t seem to mind all those caddys.”
“Mercedes,” I said, getting louder. “Try getting your facts right. He was laughing—laughing, don’t you get it? At the whole thing. The whole consumption culture—anything to shake us out of our fucking torpor.”
“And how do you explain all those guns?” said Kobro. “There was some pretty hardcore stuff going down, man, you can’t deny it. Some pretty crazy stories from the neighbours, trying to scare them off their land. Mucho loco . . . ”
“Do you honestly think the Swami had anything to do with that?” I said. “That he would demean himself? You know, sometimes,” I turned to the others, “I do wonder though. I wonder what happened. I wonder who the people really were who were closest to him in those last days, how they could let him become the parody, the monster that the media liked to portray him as.”
“Well, my little man,” said Kobro. “My true believer. I was there, but barely caught sight of him among the dust and blossoms. You were too young, of course, a glint in the eye, or a tiny bean in the belly of one of his handmaidens, maybe?” I stared back. He grinned. “It wouldn’t be the first time. That strange things have happened around a holy man, I mean.
“They alwa
ys try and shut ’em up. They chased Mohammed halfway across the desert before he turned and fought, didn’t they? And even then, even when the ideas survive, it always seems mysterious forces—like those camp followers of the Swami, maybe?—put their spin, their polish on things. So you’ve got your Sunnis and your Shias and your Sufis; your Catholics, Prods, Quakers, for fuck’s sake. You always get some self-appointed fucker interpreting shit . . .
“Who knows what Jesus really said? Official Christianity grew out of Roman politics hundreds of years after they’d pinned him to a cross. The losers—the Arians, those damn hippy Gnostics—were hunted down, wiped out, and with it, all their versions. Not because of God, my boy, because of man. Because man is only comfortable with God when he can fit him in a cage of his making. And woe betide any fucker—any guru, right?—who tells it like it really is, who gives the people a genuine glimpse of the unmediated, non-manmade divine. Gotta fuck that shit—gotta fuck that shit that might give folk ideas of their own, right? Gotta fuck that shit, man, gotta stamp it out!” He slammed his fist down on the table. Akka, who had been dropping off, woke with a start. “Because we really don’t need that shit, do we?”
“What shit?” I asked, tiring of his bollocks.
“That God shit,” he said. “All God ever does is get in the way.”
We left Kobro snoring on the sofa, headed off to bed. Magda eased in beside me, her body radiating through her t-shirt. She turned off the light. I rolled over and felt her arm drape over me, her body mould itself to mine. We lay there in the darkness.
“Night,” I said.
“Goodnight,” she said.
I was just beginning to drift off when she said, “So, does the Swampy teach lovemaking, baby? The Karma Sutra, maybe?”
The Poison People Page 11