The Year of the Hare
Page 15
The document indicated that, because of the diverse criminal charges against him, Vatanen would be brought before the Finnish courts for trial and sentence. His extradition was requested. It was also requested that the pelt of the bear he had killed be returned to Finland, and that the wild hare in Vatanen’s possession be returned to Finland.
“Quite a record!” chuckled the interrogator in Petrozavodsk. “All I can do now is hand you over to the government in Leningrad. Let them figure out what to do with you.”
In Leningrad, Vatanen was given a room in the Astoria Hotel while the Soviet Union was clarifying the situation from their point of view. The Soviet authorities relinquished any further claims on Vatanen and, at last, on June 13, he was escorted to the station to be put on the train to Finland. The major who accompanied him to the station hugged him fiercely, kissed him on both cheeks, and said: “Comrade, when you getting free—well!—you come back Astoria. We drink together!”
24
Afterword
This is how it went with Vatanen. Once over the border, he was arrested at the border town of Vainikkala, locked in a cell pod in an armored prisoner-conveyance van, and transported to Helsinki. The hare was also delivered there, in a plywood box with round holes in the sides and the word Animal on the lid.
In remand, Vatanen gave some thought to his situation but showed no remorse. On the contrary, he hardened under detention, so that even the mild-eyed prison chaplain shook his head, swallowing hard.
The hare constituted a problem for the authorities: it was undoubtedly Vatanen’s property and could not be slaughtered or eaten. Through his lawyer, Vatanen appealed for the hare to face charges as an accomplice in all the crimes, hoping thus to get the beloved creature to share his cell and comfort him during his imprisonment.
The director of prison administration studied the legalities and came to this conclusion: if Vatanen were a woman and the hare his baby, the baby could indeed share the cell with the mother till it was weaned and viable without her; but in Finland an animal did not come into this category. A wild hare could not, in any strict meaning of the term, be regarded as Vatanen’s pet; but the director of prison administration had to point out that, in any case, the companionship of pets, or comparable animals, was forbidden to prisoners. In addition, the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act made the incarceration of a hare with Vatanen unlawful, because a prison cell was judged an unwholesome environment for a wild animal, which, juridically, Vatanen’s hare could still be considered. This being the case, the director of prison administration disallowed admission of the hare to the cell, and indeed the animal would be at risk of perishing there.
“You see, this cell of yours is too gloomy for an innocent animal,” the chaplain explained when he brought Vatanen the official decision.
The matter was set right only when Vatanen wrote a letter to the president of the republic. To smuggle the letter outside the prison walls, he stuck it to the bottom of a food bowl on its way to the galvanizing plant, where one of the staff swallowed the letter and, after evacuating it in his studio apartment the same evening, dried the document, smoothed it, put it into a clean envelope, and slipped it in the presidential palace mailbox in the middle of a moonlit night. It was removed at precisely six o’clock the following morning and placed on the presidential desk in the secretariat.
Hardly an hour and ten minutes after the unsealing of the envelope, the hare was delivered to Vatanen’s cell in a basket.
When I, the author of the present book, tried to quiz Vatanen about how he had managed to effect this, he said he didn’t want to go into further detail: the letter had been intended as confidential from the start.
For me, it was an exceptional privilege to contact Vatanen during the custodial police inquiries. We had extensive exchanges, on which I took the most detailed possible minutes, and it is on the basis of these that I have written the present book.
The image that has impressed itself on my mind is of a man, in many respects, profound in reflection, benevolent in disposition. Never shall I forget his final words at the conclusion of our last interview: “Such is life.”
As I see it, Vatanen’s personal history and manner of conduct reveal him to be a revolutionary, a true subversive, and therein lies the secret of his greatness. Watching Vatanen tenderly stroking the hare’s fur in his dismal cell, as if he were its mother, I was aware of what human solidarity may entail. I remember certain moments when, as the moist-eyed prisoner looked at his stone wall, a vague intuition disturbed me: that nothing on earth could prevent this afflicted man from once more demonstrating the full force of his whole being.
The present volume was already going to press when an express telegram, expedited by messenger, arrived on my desk from the prison: Vatanen and the hare had escaped from jail!
I rushed to the prison and ascertained how the break-out had occurred. It is one of the more remarkable events in our criminal history. Vatanen’s longing for freedom was such that, one agonizing day, with the hare in his arms, he stepped through his cell wall into the exercise yard, crossed the open space to the exterior wall, and walked through that, too, into the freedom beyond; and neither he nor the hare have been seen since. During these moments of flight, the prison warders were as if paralyzed behind their machine guns and harpoons—incapable of impeding his flight in any way.
Moreover, Vatanen’s lawyer, L. Heikkinen, was not available the day after the escape, and there is still no information as to her whereabouts.
This last news alone shows that Vatanen is a man to be reckoned with.