The Human Part

by Kari Hotakainen

  And it did come softly from Maija’s mouth. I asked her to translate that Paavo and I would have to get used to the new situation and that getting used to something can take a while. Biko opened his mouth and out came who-knows-what for a long time. I asked Maija to translate as honestly as possible. Biko wanted to say that he was fully aware of the influence of the color of a black man on his surroundings, but that he had not been able to choose the color; if he had, he would have rather chosen red, the color of love. Biko also said that he intended to love Maija no matter what, in every condition, before anyone and everyone, even in the middle of Finland. Wood can be chopped and tears can be shed, but his love was and would remain.

  I made up an excuse to go into the kitchen and then came back with new eyes and said that we haven’t had much chance to practice diversity in this country, since the youth of one generation was taken up with wars and that of the next with coping with the aftermath, that because of this we had to proceed with slow steps, but looking each other in the eye the whole way.

  The most important thing to me was and is that he loved and loves my daughter. I said to him, and Maija translated, that this country isn’t finished yet, even though it has been built up a lot. It isn’t ready for a person of your color, since it’s only just suitable for us grays. You’ll have to get used to all sorts of things. If you’re the touchy sort, you’ll be offended the whole time. Grow a thick skin. But not so thick that you can’t feel a person’s hand through it.

  Biko nodded and told how he came from a country that won’t be finished for a long time, where a person’s life costs as much as a chicken drumstick does here. He also said that it was best to think of one person at a time, not whole nations.

  Out of a whole nation he had chosen our Maija, and I had to live with that fact. In this world I’ve never had a shed I could run to away from my troubles.

  It was a big job to get Paavo to speak that time. I forced myself to speak to him constantly. Even though he didn’t respond for a long time. I didn’t give up. I was a peace negotiator just like our President Ahtisaari.

  One evening Paavo came out of the shed and said, “Well, show me the picture then.”

  I took the picture I had taken myself out of my handbag. In it, Maija and Biko sat side-by-side, and they had that glow in their eyes. Paavo knows that glow—it comes from love. Normal eyes glisten with tears and exhaustion, but the eyes of love have a unique luster, similar to sautéed onions. Paavo said, “Maija has her own life.”

  The dictaphone was spinning, but my head had stopped.

  The author noticed the silence and turned the device off. He suggested taking a break. I realized I was dreadfully hungry. The life I had been telling had eaten up my energy. The author fetched me a big glass of fresh juice and a ham sandwich. I felt like bolting it down like at home, but I paced myself under unfamiliar eyes.

  It felt strange to talk about my life and to think that it could fit into the belly of the small dictaphone. Around the author’s neck was hanging the same kind of memory stick I’d seen on Helena. Apparently it could fit so many words that no one would have the time to write that much in his entire life. Helena said once that there should always be at least two backup copies of work things. The technical wonders of this world are completely incomprehensible to me, but this I know: they don’t change the fundamentals of a person one bit. There aren’t backup copies of sorrows and joys.

  The author was already tapping the dictaphone with his finger. I ignored his impatient gestures. I had to digest the sandwich and juice before I could go on. A hungry person can say anything. I wanted to talk turkey.

  I thought about what I had said and what I had left unsaid. I realized that I didn’t remember my life in order—everything was a gloop in my head, a little like that frozen reindeer haunch Paavo’s friend carved pieces off to fry up that time. I tried to remember now what I had already carved off and what was still attached, still frozen.

  I nodded to the author. He nimbly moved his finger to the button, and the dictaphone started recording.

  My husband Paavo and I had a button shop. We called it that even though the sign outside said “Malmikunnas Yarn Shop.” The sign was made of thick, white plywood, and the name was written on it in calligraphy by the display designer Alfred Supinen, who we had hired from the city and who was endowed with artistic gifts. Paavo and I were able to watch while Supinen wrote slowly and then moved back a few meters and squinted, checking the writing. Supinen said that writing four letter “A”s the same required exactness from the artist, because the letters also had to become living human creations. And indeed, as we watched we understood that there are two worlds: this visible one and the other one, which only a few ever get to peek into. Paavo was absolutely certain that if Alfred had been born in a warm southern European land, he would have become a world-famous painter whose works would have been discussed in hushed tones in well-lit galleries by people holding tapered glasses. But in this cold land the brushes stiffen and the paint freezes.

  But it wasn’t exactly like that. Perhaps Alfred didn’t have a burning need to paint on canvases after all. Or maybe he did, but didn’t know how. We’ll never know for sure, since he cut everything short.

  Alfred hanged himself in a cellar with a thick piece of cord. To the frayed end of it clung a yellow piece of tape that said “Saastamoinen Wholesale.” It looked bad, the piece of tape. Alfred said two weeks before his suicide to Paavo, “It’s all the same no matter what paint pot I put my brush into—it always comes out gray.” He was depressed about a world that had changed without consulting him. The wholesaler had given notice that due to technical innovations the need for display designers was declining. Alfred didn’t stay around to see the change.

  Display designer. That name leaves out the most important part: beauty. A display designer makes the world more beautiful, or, if not the world, at least he makes shops more beautiful, so it’s easier for people to come inside. I’m sure that some of our first customers came inside thanks to the beautiful sign.

  Yarn, buttons, needles, pins, postcards, lace, ribbon and zippers. We might have had other things too. I don’t remember. But that was mainly what we sold to people—useful things. We provided something that people needed. This may sound like belaboring the point, but in the ’60s and ’70s we each had to fight against the idea that every merchant was a thief and a predator. We took the money left over between the wholesaler and the customers. Is that a dirty trick? What do you say, Author? Nothing. Exactly. It shuts you up. No? Paavo and I could withstand the barrage, but it was hard for the children. When you get made fun of as a child, when the other children call you the spawn of a butcher or a robber baron, it leaves a mark. An invisible mark, and that’s the worst kind of all. You can’t see it, but you can feel it. I could sense it in my children then, and I still do now.

  And Paavo and I didn’t always stay calm either. It happened like this: by this time Helena was starting to think she knew a little something about how the world worked, and she brought a friend over to visit. Her friend was a little older and had already been to visit the big cities. She was one of those more aware young people. She put a record on the player called “A Plate of Guatemalan Blood.” On it they sang about oppression and fighting, and especially about opposing evil exploiters from foreign lands, as well as homegrown ones too. It was tough for Paavo when he realized that the singers on the record were the same ones he had seen on television specifically disparaging all business people, praising the communist movement with all hearts. And there was his own daughter humming along with her eyes closed to the melodies of the spoiled brats of the urban upper class. I tried to intervene, but Paavo already had that look. His eyes narrow, he clears his throat and his hands shake. He was in the zone, as some theater director said once on the T.V. Paavo went and tore the record from the player with such force that the needle scratched a streak across it. He went to the window, threw the record into the snow and said, “I threw it�
�I’ll pay for it.”

  This led to crying, and a good while went by before Helena agreed to come out of her room. Paavo spoke to Helena about it later. He sort of tried to put his words in a row like delicate stones, saying, “Dear, we need to make our living from the shop, and it isn’t like we start exploiting the working class first thing in the morning. Your parents work a pretty hard day and if you look at it from a certain perspective, you could say that we are in the working class, more or less, but there isn’t anything to be gained by getting the communist movement mixed up in this, and there isn’t any point in writing lamentations about it—the fruit of that movement is a country full of prisons and Siberias—I just mean how about we live our life selling yarn and buttons and then once we get close to the grave look at what the bottom line is, whether your mother and father are exploiters and blood-suckers and bourgeois devils or just the plain old salt of the earth that you sprinkle on your porridge and apparently on wounds too, and if that friend of yours wants to talk more about it, that’s fine, since there are other colors in life besides black and white: there’s socialism and its everyday version, the one the social democrats like Koivisto and Sorsa and the labor movement are pushing—that’s a perfectly sensible operation that a small-business man like me can understand, and you don’t need any Guatemalan blood for it—a plate of soup from blueberries you picked and boiled yourself will do just fine.”

  He had to be quiet for a long time after that, and of course Helena didn’t know how to even begin responding. Every now and then Paavo’s cork pops out, but this time he was making perfect sense.

  Money is one of those things people in this country don’t know how to relate to. You shouldn’t seek it, and you shouldn’t have it, but at the same time everyone should get some, preferably the same amount. Ideologies and religions probably get scraped together just so people won’t have to talk about money all the time. We didn’t get any more of it in this life than anyone else. You have to practically wave the evidence from the taxman in front of people’s faces for them to believe. They’ve come up with enough forms in this country for small-business people to fill out that you’re lucky to make it to work between filling them out. I respect money, because I know how tight it is. You have to look for it under rocks. First you lift the rock out of the way, and then you start scraping at the rocky ground with your bare hands. With bloody fingertips. And scabbed knees. The moon glowing in the sky would find Paavo and me still bent over scrabbling for our treasure. And out it would come, wretched and dirty, but when we would polish it, it would start to shine. We would schlep the lump over to the taxman, who would whack off his piece with a golden billhook, and then we would carry it home and hit it with a forge hammer until it split it into four pieces. With the first we would pay for our house, with the second for the electricity and water, with the third for food and clothing, and the fourth part, that we would be really strict with. If we put it toward a car, then what kind? Not a Mercedes, because people would start to whisper. If we put it toward dressing ourselves up, the same thing. You have to be gray in a gray country. So it is that one quarter of all money isn’t fit for anyone, not for yourself, not for others. It just gets stuffed in a sock, away from the sun and prying eyes. It irks a bit that, as a yarn seller, in a certain way I was helping to create those socks, at least indirectly. Money is supposed to circulate, just like all good things. It has to be in movement so everyone can catch a glimpse of it. But how can it get out of that sock all by itself? Everything is based on circulation. Gypsies, the sun, laughter, luck. They all move around, and rightly so. The poor money molders in corners and sock drawers so no one can be jealous of anyone else.

  Paavo and I were very amused by the first rich person in the world who showed it. He had been selling things to people door to door for his whole life, putting everything in a sock. But one day he dumped the paper out of the sock, put the sock on his foot and went to the big city to buy an American car.

  The rich man’s name was Toivo. I won’t say the family name so you won’t be able to go spreading these tidings of joy, which would inevitably turn to tears along the way. If people were to find out where he lives, someone would go around and slash his tires even though it has been twenty years.

  Toivo drove about the countryside in a wide-brimmed hat and a white suit, smiling broadly. He parked in front of our shop and got out slowly, like plump people do, but he was deliberately calling attention to the idleness and unhurriedness he had worked and slaved to achieve. He came inside, looked over the merchandise and said he didn’t need anything but had to have something beautiful, just like himself.

  Toivo fingered the laces and the roll of velvet we had ordered for the gypsy-king’s wife. I said we could only sell one yard of the velvet, but more of the lace. Toivo said that a yard of velvet would do. It was going in the car, on the passenger seat, for him to rest his free hand on nicely as the automatic transmission saw to the forward motion. I wrapped the velvet up as Toivo wandered around the shop in his white three-piece suit, the fobs of his pocket watch jingling. When he walked out the door, Paavo and I looked at each other and then out through the display window as the car swung onto the road and disappeared over the horizon as a white dot.

  Now, I don’t mean that Toivo was an especially dignified person, that he was better than anyone else, but he was like a breath of fresh air from some other world, a little like Alfred Supinen. At the time they were showing “The Amazing World” on the television, or was it “Wide”? It was the only program where you could see anything even a little bit fascinating or colorful. Toivo evoked images of a peacock or penguin. I thought it was good they existed in their own way, and Paavo agreed. There was something self-satisfied and gaudy about them, but not in a way that takes away from anyone else. Or it does, of course, in the sense that it is a hard thing for nature’s other creatures, the rhinoceroses and crocodiles and all the other animals made with the Creator’s other hand, to watch such good-humored types saunter about.

  I was ashamed.

  I told the author to turn the dictaphone off for a moment. I said I was going to the restroom. I looked in the mirror and asked myself why I had started talking about money. I’ve seen that it doesn’t pay to talk about that. The ones who talk about it the most have the least, and I don’t blame them. And the ones who talk the least have the most, but I wouldn’t encourage them to be more open either.

  Talking about money makes you feel dirty, even though there’s nothing wrong with the instrument itself. In this country you can only speak freely about the weather, which is the same for everyone—bad.

  I decided to wash my face of the matter, since my hands weren’t an option. I had sold my life, and I was paying for it now with shame. I took some soap from the pump bottle, rubbed it over my face until it was white and then tried to massage the shame out. Washing your face always helps. It’s a strange thing. It probably comes from the fact that life happens in a person’s head, and the face is the windscreen of the head.

  I walked back over to the author and nodded. “Roll tape.”

  You can never tell what a child will turn out to be. I mean their profession, not their final character. We have a clear system: make your life your own—we will love you. The children went out into the world and got on. That was the time in the world when there was work for everyone who wanted to do it. Then came the time when Paavo and I didn’t understand anything anymore. I don’t know if the children understood it either, but they had to live in it.

  What I know of life, I write down on postcards and send it to my children. They believe in the written word, and even if they didn’t, they could never claim afterward that they hadn’t heard or understood what I was saying. There are four kinds of cards: one has a lake, the second has winter, the third has fall and the fourth has our village high street. The lake picture was taken from the sky, up where Paavo and I went in a small plane in 1970. The same sky is still here, but with modern cameras it has become too sharp
. The human eye works in generalities—it isn’t meant to pick out every wisp of cloud. Modern pictures make my head hurt.

  The children expect the cards. If one doesn’t come for two months in a row, the youngest will ask why on the corded phone. I always say that I will send a card as soon as I know what to write on it. You have to think carefully. Figuring things out isn’t always easy. The state of understanding I’m living in now has taken more than seventy years to develop. People ripen slowly.

  I’m not running out of cards, even though the shop closed. I took the cards from there, but nothing else. The yarn, the ribbons, the buttons, the snaps, the elastic, the scissors, the needles and everything else I left, bidding it a fond farewell, but I emptied out the whole shelf of cards from beside the door into a big bag.

  One night I counted the cards. I have a total of 657 lakes, winters, autumns and high streets. I’ll run out of things to say before I run out of cards.

  I’ve noticed that children’s heads are so shiny and slippery that nothing seems to want to stick in them. Perfectly clear instructions and advice are forgotten in a matter of months. How many times do I have to write on the back of each of the four landscapes that it isn’t a good idea to talk to yourself in the city or at work? People clearly draw conclusions immediately about those who mumble to themselves. Of course, geniuses and artists are another matter, but Paavo and I didn’t raise our children to be that incoherent. If you absolutely have to talk to yourself, you can do it at home or in a public restroom stall, but I would consider the general rule to be: talk to each other or with people.

  It was bad when all the children moved away from home. People should be given one more child to last them to the end. To be able to watch something grow again. No one is going to feel like growing flowers forever—it’s all the same: sprouting, leafing out and flowering. But a person is such a strange, wonderful thing that you can easily put fifty years into it. A child gives you a sense of scale and time. When our youngest was confirmed, we knew we would have to leave soon ourselves. The greatest injustice is that you only get to be face-to-face with them for twenty years, if that. Then they visit you with their boyfriends and girlfriends and have turned into people. A child and a person are completely different things.