The Howling Miller

by Arto Paasilinna

  When the miller woke up early the next morning and consulted his pocket watch, it said four o’clock. It was a superb watch. He had bought it between the wars from a penniless German sergeant passing through Riihimäki, who had sworn it was as waterproof as it was accurate. Over the years, this claim had been proved correct. Huttunen had once bet a group of forestry workers that his timepiece could take anything. He had put it in his mouth, settled down in a sauna for over an hour, and then dived into a lake twice. He had swum to the bottom and lain there not moving, listening to the ticking of the second hand that, thanks to the water pressure, echoed through his skull as clear as a bell. When he spat out the watch after the experiment and dried it, it was working as well as if it had remained snug in his pocket all along. The parts hadn’t suffered in the slightest. So. It was definitely four o’clock.

  After winding up the watch, Huttunen thought about the horticulture adviser. He remembered her saying that if he had the slightest problem with his vegetable patch, he shouldn’t hesitate to go and talk to her about it.

  What if he went to see her now to discuss the garden? Huttunen felt he had reason enough to pay her a visit: it was six days since he’d planted the seeds she’d given him and they’d shown absolutely no signs of life. He could find out whether the seeds were last year’s or, if it came to that, ask her if she had any better ones. Turning the matter over in his mind, Huttunen came to the conclusion that he clearly had no shortage of important – official, virtually – matters to discuss with the adviser. No one could possibly criticise him if he went and paid her a visit now.

  He drank half a ladle of cold water and set off on his bicycle for the Siponens’ farm.

  The village was strangely deserted: no cattle in the pastures, no one working in the fields. Only the birds were singing, already woken by the summer dawn, and a few sleepy dogs barked lazily as the miller rode past. No smoke rose from any of the chimneys; everyone was still in bed.

  The Siponens’ dog began barking ferociously as Huttunen rode his bicycle into the farmyard. The front door was off the latch and Huttunen walked into the parlour where the curtains were drawn and everyone was asleep.

  ‘Morning.’

  The farmhand Launola was the first member of the household to wake up; drowsy and amazed, he returned the miller’s greeting from his bunk on the other side of the stove. Then the head of the house emerged from his room, a small, short-sighted old man who looked like an elephant. He walked over to Huttunen, peered up at his face, realised who it was and invited him to sit down. Mrs Siponen came shuffling out behind her husband, a stumpy-legged, extremely fat woman – so fat, in fact, that her Wellington boots wouldn’t fit over her calves; each pair of boots had to be slit to halfway before she could get them on. The mistress of the house wished the miller good morning, looked up at the clock and asked, ‘What’s going on at the mill to send our Kunnari out on the roads at this time of night?’

  Huttunen sat down at the parlour table, lit a cigarette and offered one to Siponen who was putting on a pair of trousers.

  ‘Oh, nothing, thanks for asking,’ Huttunen replied. ‘No, I just thought I’d drop by. It’s a long time since I’ve come round.’

  The farmer sat down opposite Huttunen, smoking his cigarette with a cardboard filter. He peered into the miller’s eyes in silence, leaning forward short-sightedly. Launola went out behind the house, came back in and, as nobody said anything to him, got back into his bunk, turned his face to the wall and soon began snoring.

  ‘Is the adviser home?’ Huttunen eventually asked.

  ‘I think she’s upstairs, asleep,’ Siponen said, pointing to the attic.

  Huttunen put out his cigarette and started up the stairs. The farmer and his wife remained sitting at the table, looking at one another in bewilderment. They heard the miller’s heavy tread on the stairs, a thud as he banged his head on the ceiling at the top, then a knock, a woman’s voice, and a door closing. Mrs Siponen hurried over to the foot of the stairs to listen to what was being said upstairs, but she couldn’t hear a thing.

  ‘Go up further, you’ll be able to hear better,’ her husband told her, ‘but don’t make the stairs squeak. Go on, up you go, and tell me what you can hear. But don’t make them squeak! For God’s sake! I can’t believe I’m married to a woman who makes the whole house shake.’

  In a daze of sleep and surprise, the horticulture adviser invited Huttunen into her little room in her nightgown. The miller stooped forward under the sloping ceiling, his cap in one hand, the other held out in greeting.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Adviser … Sorry to come and see you at a time like this, but I thought I’d be sure to find you at home. I’ve heard that you’re out travelling all over the canton from morning till night giving your advice.’

  ‘I’m definitely at home at this time of day. What is it, actually? Ah, not yet five.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ Huttunen said anxiously.

  ‘It’s all right … Please sit down, Mr Huttunen, don’t stay standing bent over double like that. This room has such a low ceiling. The bigger ones with higher ceilings were too expensive.’

  ‘It’s a pretty room …’ Huttunen commented. ‘I don’t even have curtains at the mill – I mean, not in my bedroom. You don’t really need them in the mill itself.’

  He sat down on a little stool next to the stove. He wanted to light a cigarette but thought better of it; it didn’t seem appropriate to smoke in a woman’s room. The adviser sat on the edge of the bed and pushed her tangled curls off her forehead. She looked lovely with the traces of sleep still clinging to her. Her full breasts swelled under her nightgown; the neckline revealed the shadowy beginnings of her cleavage. Huttunen had trouble tearing his eyes away.

  ‘I’ve been waiting every day thinking you’d come to the mill, Miss. I planted the garden immediately, like we said. I thought you’d come and see me.’

  ‘I was planning to next week,’ Sanelma Käyrämö laughed nervously.

  ‘It seemed such a long time,’ Huttunen went on, ‘and the seeds haven’t come up yet.’

  The adviser quickly explained that they couldn’t have come up because they’d only been planted a few days before; that Mr Huttunen shouldn’t be too impatient and that he could return to the mill quite secure in the knowledge that the vegetables would be up in their own good time.

  ‘Should I be going then?’ he asked piteously, not wanting to go anywhere.

  ‘I’ll come and see your garden at the beginning of next week,’ the horticulture adviser promised. ‘This is an unusual time for a visit and I am a lodger here. Even though she is such a large person, Mrs Siponen is very strict.’

  ‘What if I sat here for just half an hour?’ Huttunen ventured, trying to delay the moment of departure.

  ‘Please try to understand, Mr Huttunen.’

  ‘But I only came, Miss,’ the miller protested, ‘because you said that if I had any problems I could come and see you.’

  Sanelma Käyrämö was at a loss as to what to do. She would gladly have let this strange, handsome man stay sitting next to the stove, but it was out of the question. She thought it was funny she wasn’t afraid of this curious fellow, who so many people thought of as mentally ill. But anyway, for the moment she had to get him to leave; his visit couldn’t go on and on. What would they think downstairs if he stayed any longer?

  ‘Let’s see each other during my working hours … at the shop or the café. Or out and about, in the woods – anywhere, except here, at this hour.’

  ‘I suppose I should go then.’

  Huttunen sighed heavily, put on his cap and shook the adviser’s hand. Sanelma Käyrämö was certain the poor man was in love with her, he looked so wretched at having to leave.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Huttunen. We’ll see each other again soon under more favourable circumstances.’

  The burden of Huttunen’s sorrow eased slightly. He gripped the door handle resolutely and, with a polite bow to the horticu
lture adviser, gave the door a firm push. It struck something soft and heavy. There was a terrible scream, followed by a tremendous crash. Mrs Siponen had heaved herself up to the top of the stairs to listen to their conversation and when the miller opened the door, it hit her smack behind the ear and sent her flying down the steep stairs. Luckily she was as round as a barrel and she rolled softly all the way to the bottom of the stairs where the farmer found her. However, blood was trickling from her ear and she was screaming so loudly the windowpanes rattled.

  The farmhand Launola ran out from the parlour. Huttunen came down the stairs, followed by the horticulture adviser. The farmer’s wife lay groaning on the floor. Mr Siponen gave Huttunen a savage look and yelled, ‘What in hell’s name do you think you’re doing, barging in on honest people in the middle of the night and trying to kill the mistress of the house?’

  ‘She’s not dead yet. Let’s get her to bed,’ Launola said.

  They lugged the farmer’s wife to the back room and lifted her onto the bed. Then Huttunen left the house, jumped on his bike and shot out of the farmyard, pedalling furiously. The farmer followed him out onto the porch, shouting, ‘If my wife is paralysed, Kunnari, you’ll have to pay for her care! I’ll take you to court!’

  The Siponens’ dog barked uninterruptedly until dawn.

  CHAPTER 6

  Huttunen contemplated his vegetable patch all the following week without daring to show his face in the village. Then suddenly his sad and lonely vigil came to an end. The horticulture adviser pedalled gaily up the mill, greeted him amiably and got straight down to discussing vegetables. The lettuces were already sprouting and the carrot shoots would soon be up, she said. She collected the money for the seeds she had given Huttunen on her previous visit and showed him how to thin the plants and loosen the soil.

  ‘Everything is in the detail,’ she insisted.

  Huttunen merrily made coffee and got out biscuits.

  When every angle of the vegetable patch had been covered, Sanelma Käyrämö broached the subject of the miller’s visit.

  ‘Actually, I came to talk to you about the other night,’ she began.

  ‘I won’t come and see you again,’ Huttunen promised, shamefaced.

  Once was more than enough, the horticulture adviser pointed out. Mrs Siponen was still in bed and refusing to get up, even to look after the cows. Siponen had sent for the village doctor to examine his wife.

  ‘Dr Ervinen listened to her chest and turned her this way and that – well, he had help for the turning bit, you know how much she weighs. He bandaged her ear and said it should be bathed; I suppose there’s something wrong internally, that’s where the door handle hit her. But the doctor shouted in her ear and said her hearing wasn’t damaged, she was just pretending to be deaf. He shone a very powerful torch in her eyes, so close it was almost touching, and then suddenly yelled into the bad ear. He said her crystalline lens moved, which meant she could still hear. But the farmer didn’t believe him. So then we all bellowed into Mrs Siponen’s ear and stared into her eyes, but she remained completely expressionless. Siponen said it was going to cost Kunnari: his wife was stone deaf.’

  Huttunen gave the adviser a beseeching look, hoping that that would be the end of the bad news, but Sanelma Käyrämö pressed on: ‘Dr Ervinen thought Mrs Siponen should get out of bed and get back to work. But she claims she can’t move any of her limbs and has to stay where she is. She’s decided she’s paralysed and will never be able to leave her bed again. She’s adamant and there was nothing Ervinen could do. On his way out, he simply said that as far as he was concerned, she could stay in bed until the Last Judgement. Siponen is threatening to send for a better doctor who will certify his wife disabled, and keeps swearing that Kunnari will have to pay.’

  So that’s where matters stood, Huttunen thought sadly. Everyone knew that Mrs Siponen was the fattest, laziest woman for miles around. Now she had the perfect excuse to lounge about all day. Naturally Launola, the two-faced farmhand, would swear to any story his master and mistress wanted him to.

  The horticulture adviser said she’d wanted to tell the miller because she knew he was innocent, and also because she liked him. She proposed that she and Huttunen start calling each other by their first names.

  ‘But let’s only do it when we’re on our own, when no one can hear us,’ she added.

  This made the miller – Gunnar, as the adviser called him from then on – deliriously happy.

  They helped themselves to some more coffee. Then the adviser turned to another, even more delicate, subject.

  ‘Gunnar … can I ask you an extremely personal question? It’s a sensitive matter that there’s been a lot of talk of in the village.’

  ‘Ask whatever you want, I won’t mind.’

  The horticulture adviser didn’t know where to start. She took a sip of coffee, crumbled a biscuit into her cup, looked out of the mill window, and almost started talking about the vegetable garden again, before finally resolving to get straight to the point.

  ‘A lot of people in the village say you’re not quite normal.’

  Huttunen nodded awkwardly.

  ‘I know … They say I’m mad.’

  ‘Yes. Yesterday I went to have coffee with the schoolteacher’s wife and she said you were insane … And dangerous, apparently, and who knows what else. The schoolteacher’s wife said that when you were in the shop, you suddenly dragged the scales outside and put them down the well. That can’t be true: people don’t do things like that.’

  Huttunen was forced to admit that he had put Tervola’s scales down the shop’s well.

  ‘He can get them out, he only has to pull up the bucket.’

  ‘People talk of bombs as well and howling … Is it true that you howl in the winter?’

  Huttunen felt ashamed. He had to confess that he did howl.

  ‘I have whined a bit now and then, but nothing nasty.’

  ‘Apparently you imitate different animals … and you make fun of the villagers, of Siponen, Vittavaara, the teacher and the shopkeeper. Is that true too?’

  Huttunen explained that sometimes he just felt the need to do something special.

  ‘It’s like a jolt in the brain. But I’m not a danger to anyone.’

  The horticulture adviser remained silent for a long time. Deeply touched, she looked sadly at the miller sitting opposite her with his coffee.

  ‘If only I could do something to help,’ she said finally, taking Huttunen’s hand in hers. ‘I think that’s awful, someone howling all on their own.’

  The miller coughed and blushed. Thanking him for the coffee, the adviser stood up to leave.

  ‘Don’t go yet,’ Huttunen blurted out. ‘Don’t you like it here?’

  ‘If people find out I’m spending a lot of time here, I’ll lose my job,’ Sanelma explained. ‘I really have to go.’

  ‘If I stop howling, will you come back?’ Huttunen asked, and then hurriedly suggested that if Sanelma didn’t dare come and see him at the mill, why didn’t they meet somewhere else, in the woods, for instance? He promised to find a place where they could see each other from time to time without being disturbed.

  The horticulture adviser hesitated.

  ‘It has to be somewhere safe and not too far away so I won’t get lost,’ she said. ‘I can only come to the mill twice a month. If I come more often, people will start talking, and the 4H Association could lose patience.’

  Huttunen took the adviser in his arms. She didn’t object. The miller murmured in her ear that he wasn’t so mad that a person couldn’t hit it off with him. Then he thought of a suitable meeting place. There was a little stream that ran under the church road; if Sanelma followed this for half a mile on the north bank, she’d get to a point where the stream bent sharply and split into two branches around an islet covered with a dense grove of alders. No one ever went onto Leppäsaari Island, Huttunen said. It was a lovely, peaceful place, not too far.

  ‘I’ll fell a couple of trunk
s to make a bridge so you’ll be able to get across without gumboots.’

  The horticulture adviser agreed to come to the island the following Sunday, provided that Huttunen did not get into any more trouble.

  Huttunen meekly promised to behave.

  ‘I’ll stay quietly in the mill and I won’t howl, however much I want to.’

  The horticulture adviser urged Huttunen to water his vegetable patch every evening – they were having such a dry, hot summer – and then she rode off. Left on his own, the radiantly happy Huttunen looked at the mill’s grey wooden walls and thought that they could do with a bit of sprucing up. He decided to paint his mill red.

  CHAPTER 7

  Huttunen rigged up a twenty-gallon drum in front of the mill, lit a fire underneath it and set a mixture of water, red ochre, rye flour and other ingredients of house paint to boil, stirring them continuously and keeping the heat steady. He was in buoyant spirits, full of optimism and energy; the day after tomorrow would be Sunday and he would be seeing the horticulture adviser on Leppäsaari Island.

  With plenty of time to spare, the miller had made a bridge over the stream out of a couple of logs. He had put up a tent and a mosquito net in the copse on the edge of a small clearing like a sort of garden, and covered the ground with hay. There wouldn’t be any insects disturbing the adviser in that cool shelter. It drives women crazy, being bitten by mosquitoes; Sanelma is bound to like what I’ve done, Huttunen thought happily.

  Mixing with the yellowy brown rye flour, the red ochre began to produce a beautiful oxblood colour. The paint would be ready that evening, and he could finish the whole mill by Sunday. It wouldn’t have cost much. The flour came from his own supplies; all he’d had to buy was the red ochre and some iron sulphate.

  At that moment, his neighbour Vittavaara reined in his horse in front of the mill. Huttunen saw the portly farmer was perched on one of half a dozen sacks of grain stacked in his cart. Delighted that he had brought him last year’s harvest to mill, the miller put some more wood on the fire under the drum and went over to help the farmer hitch his horse to the post on the mill wall.