The mourners began to sing an old hymn that spoke of the coming endless journey and the inexpressible brilliance that awaits the traveler at its end. They sang off-key, as was appropriate. If the bereaved sing flawlessly, the ceremony loses all credibility.
Pekka walked closer and took cover behind a large gravestone. Now he was within earshot. The eldest of the pall-bearers began to speak. He let out one phrase at a time, without faltering. He spoke of his father, who had been a taciturn man by nature. Pekka wondered whether there was any other kind of man. He spoke about everyday events from the life of the deceased. Pekka made mental notes about the details. It was easy, since the deceased had lived a life nearly identical to Pekka’s father’s. Lives don’t differ that much from each other, whatever we may think as we are living them.
The man stressed that although his father had been a bit of a peevish lout, he had also had his sensitive side. Dad had gone out to the shed three times to cry. Pekka believed him. The few times something like this occurs become events about which you remember every detail, down to the time of day.
The man ended his speech and announced that during the memorial everyone who wished could talk about Erkki informally. The procession straightened their clothes, waiting for the next-of-kin to give everyone else permission by leaving themselves.
Pekka followed the group from a short distance, going over the details of his plan. He decided it was workable. Everything depended now on what it always did: his ability to concentrate. Pekka went over the imminent performance in his mind: the dialect, the body language, the manner of being in the midst of sorrow, yet still detached from it.
Through the great windows of the chapel, he could see the mourners taking their seats at their tables. No one had approached the bounteous buffet table yet. Apparently everyone was waiting for the family to start. Pekka walked into the chapel and found the lavatory in the foyer. He combed his hair, washed his face and inspected the details of his clothing. The suit was cheap, but appropriate. The expression was dry, but sad. He sighed deeply, opened the door and walked into the banquet room, becoming someone else, as he had who-knew-how-many times before in his life.
He walked up to the man who had spoken at the graveside, shaking his hand and saying, “Please accept my condolences. Erkki was … Erkki. A fisherman of the highest caliber.”
“Thank you. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Juha-Matti. I knew your father through my hobby. I wanted to bring greetings and flowers on behalf of the fishing club. Erkki. Yes. A good man lost.”
“Thank you. Can you stay to eat?”
“Thank you, I would be delighted. And I would like to extend our condolences through you to the entire family.”
“Of course.”
Pekka squeezed the man’s hand firmly and said in a quiet voice, “Hang in there.”
Then he walked to the buffet table, stopping and looking at the steaming dishes. They began to speak to him. The pork fillets lounged invitingly in a thick, brown gravy. A creamy, buttery aroma rose from the oven-poached salmon, as if the tank-raised rainbow trout were murmuring to Pekka, “Grab, eat, devour, burp, enjoy.” The call of the salad bowls was even more soulful. Grape halves, pieces of red bell pepper and slices of cucumber cooed and whispered from the depths of the chopped iceberg-lettuce salad, “We are light. Eat us first. We will prepare a bed in your empty stomach for the meat and fish to lie upon.” The frosty pitchers of home-brew and milk proclaimed in masculine tones, “Drink us last. We will soak everything you eat into a mass to glide through the folds of your organs, slipping into every crevice and nourishing you, you hungry, tortured soul!”
Pekka had to stop and take a deep breath. He glanced around to make sure as many guests as possible were on the same errand. He couldn’t be greedy now or push in front of others, in any way giving the impression that the food had become more important than the memory of the deceased.
Pekka concentrated all of his strength on hiding his enormous hunger. He put a little green on a salad plate, added a piece of bread and then looked for an appropriate place in the hall. Unfortunately, there were no isolated seats, so he had to go to a table where a couple was already sitting. He sat next to the middle-aged man and nodded politely.
“Erkki wasn’t a salad person, but the rest of us who have been left behind have to try,” the man said and smiled. He said Erkki had made an agreement with the rabbits that if Erkki didn’t eat the rabbits’ food, the rabbits wouldn’t ride on Erkki’s moped.
Pekka smiled at the story, thinking back to when he had really begun to hate humor. He didn’t remember the exact day, but it had been during the time when the local radio stations were just starting up, and had begun calling humor any activity that was meant to lighten a mood.
The woman of the couple was taking small bites of her salad and reminiscing about the August evenings she and her husband had spent with the deceased and his wife. They had never had any quarrels. If Erkki had a different opinion about something, he didn’t raise his voice, he just went along gracefully.
According to the man, Erkki was one of the men who had built Finland with their own hands. Pekka said the country needed men like that. The man extended his hand and introduced himself as Kalervo Nygren. Pekka didn’t remember his own name immediately due to his hunger, but after a second’s pause he said he was Juha-Matti. Nygren wanted to know how Juha-Matti had come to know Erkki and what he thought of Erkki’s most recent work.
Pekka squeezed his hands together under the table, pleading with the Almighty for answers. He didn’t know anything about Erkki’s profession or his latest work, but latched on to what he had heard at the graveside. He said he only knew Erkki superficially from a couple of fishing trips and that he was sad the friendship had not been allowed to continue. Nygren nodded, downcast, but reckoned that Erkki’s legacy would live on because his talented children had recorded all of Erkki’s burl art in digital form. Pekka latched on to this and told about being especially inspired by the burl chairs that had a place carved in the armrest for a remote control. Nygren didn’t remember any chairs. As far as he understood, Erkki had done mainly birds, ashtrays and cruets. Pekka said that the chair was sort of a secret, one-of-a-kind specimen that Erkki had shown him a picture of on a fishing trip in Ahvenkoski. Nygren was surprised that he hadn’t known about the chair, or that Erkki had ever gone fishing in Ahvenkoski. Pekka admitted that he might be remembering the place wrong. He had been under a lot of pressure with an intense series of meetings at work, and things tended to get jumbled up in his head. Pekka indicated the buffet table with his hand and said he was going to get a little warm food before he had to rush off to his youngest’s violin recital.
At the buffet table, Pekka began to feel faint and accidentally leaned against the edge of a hot dish of fish for support. The pain was immense, but by strength of will he contained his yelp. He loaded a big plate with so much fish and pork fillet that some sauce ran off onto another serving dish. He attempted to wipe up the spillage, but in so doing soiled his fingers and the lapel of his jacket. He didn’t notice Nygren, who had appeared behind him, and who said in a gruff voice that Pekka’s helping did honor to the renowned appetite of the deceased. Pekka was startled and dropped his fork into the oven-poached salmon. Nygren gave a laugh and said that the pace of modern life was wearing the young men of Finland out before their time.
Pekka remembered that he had never struck anyone, even though he had wanted to several times. In his fantasies and daydreams, he had done bodily harm to a number of people, but in real life he had endured and gone along with each and every tasteless ignoramus because he had always kept a clear vision in his mind of his goal, which this time was the undisturbed journey of this lovely, heaped, steaming dish of food from his mouth to his stomach. He was prepared to humble himself in the service of this cause, to kowtow, to endure and to conciliate. He remembered what his father had said: “The customer is always right, even when he is wrong.” And fo
r Pekka, all people were now customers.
He carried his plate carefully toward the table, repeating in his mind these instructions: don’t show your hunger; eat like a person, savoring; don’t gulp it down—this will expose you; praise the food, but don’t use folksy expressions (the girls in the kitchen sure have put their best foot forward; I’d rather eat this than get a kick in the teeth) to lighten the mood. You don’t lighten the mood at a funeral, you respect it.
A young woman had appeared at the table, joining the Nygrens. She introduced herself as Sinikka, daughter of the deceased. She said she had wanted to come and meet this person she had never met before and whom she didn’t know was Erkki’s friend.
As Pekka said he was Juha-Matti, he shoved his hand into the pocket of his jacket, feeling for the buttons of his mobile phone and repeating the movements he had practiced dozens of times for emergency situations. Just as Sinikka was starting the conversation, Pekka’s mobile rang. Pekka rose, begged their pardon, lifted the phone to his ear and walked over into the lower lobby. He spoke into the mute phone, glancing at the table where Sinikka had remained to talk with the Nygrens. Pekka paced his speech with pauses, throwing in a “yes,” “exactly” or “we’ll see” every now and then, and said he would be there well before 1:30 p.m. As he gave the mute handset a chance to speak, he noticed that Sinikka had left the table. He ended his call, walked to the table and expressed his regrets to the Nygrens for the unfortunate interruption. A family man doesn’t get to have boundaries between everyday life and solemn occasions. It was all one and the same life. Pekka apologized that he would unfortunately have to eat rather quickly, even though stuffing oneself was so inappropriate at moments like this. The Nygrens said they understood Pekka’s predicament.
Pekka turned his chair sideways a little so he could have some semblance of privacy during this sacred moment. He piled mashed potatoes and pork fillet together on his fork and carefully guided the heap in front of his mouth. He glanced around one last time, closed his eyes, opened his mouth and dumped the forkful into his mouth. It was savory and sweet. A hint of prune oozed from the pork fillet, and the butter that had been beaten into the mashed potatoes melted in his hungry mouth. Pekka would not by any means have wished to swallow the mouthful. He would have liked to wall it up in the hollows of his mouth. He would have liked to ruminate the food, to surrender it to fuel his body bit by bit, rationing it.
Pekka drank thirty milliliters of cold milk in one pull on top of his first two forkfuls. A burp signaled its arrival, but he held it in his trachea with a special swallowing technique he had learned from his father, Paavo.
Nygren leaned over his plate and asked when Juha-Matti had fished with the deceased in Ahvenkoski. Pekka had a full fork on the way to his mouth. He had to return it to the rim of his plate. Pekka said that he didn’t remember the date exactly, because fishing was constantly taking him to different parts of Finland. Nygren said that Sinikka, the daughter, had just mentioned that Erkki had never, at least according to his family, ever gone fishing in Ahvenkoski.
Pekka realized he had made a big, possibly crucial mistake: he had succumbed to hunger instead of learning enough about the life and habits of the deceased, having the patience to proceed more slowly. He had not humbled himself in the face of death, and now he had to pay the dearest price of all: an interrupted meal.
He wiped his mouth, rising from the table and saying, “Perhaps we’ll see each other again at another family gathering in the near future. I’ll bring a few pictures from Ahvenkoski. Erkki was in his element when he lifted up his catch in that picturesque backlighting. I thank you.”
Pekka walked to the cloakroom, feeling their gazes on his back. He flung a black overcoat over himself, only remembering once he reached the yard that he hadn’t had an overcoat when he came. Stealing clothing had not been part of the plan under any circumstances, but in this situation he could not return the coat.
He climbed the ridge to the large rock and looked down over the darkening churchyard. He could not see through the large glass windows into the dining area, but he knew without seeing: a server was carrying a nearly full plate into the kitchen and dumping it into a black garbage sack which tomorrow would be carried along with all the other waste to a dump where it would become indistinguishable from all the other black garbage sacks. No one would be able to guess that particular sack contained a plate two forkfuls shy of a bountiful funeral luncheon, a gigantic helping of meat and fish ladled by a greedy hand. In contemplating this loss, Pekka found himself bereft of strength, unable to think coherently for a moment. He felt faint because thirty-five hours had passed since his last hot meal, but even his dizziness was swept away by sorrow at the fact that as a result of his hubris someone’s carefully prepared meal was going to waste and that no one like him would be able to enjoy its irreplaceable nutrients.
Pekka climbed down from the rock and set off walking toward his apartment, knowing that he would again have to resort to boiled macaroni, frankfurters and ketchup.
Pekka played for time, pushing off the hunger by drinking two and a half liters of water on top of the macaroni mess. He tottered to the balcony, taking hold of the railing and looking down. It was about a ten-meter drop. Just three years ago he had been sitting in an office that was located twenty-four meters from the ground. Drunken with his power, he had demanded that the maintenance man determine the precise height.
The water washed the shreds of macaroni and pieces of frankfurter around in his half-empty stomach, and when they touched the gossamer membranes of his gut, there was a wheezing sound like a rat squealing in a stinking sewer. Vomit rioted in his esophagus, trying to rise to his larynx, but he forced it back down by swallowing. He was forced to crane his neck like an ostrich, but finally he couldn’t do anything about the vomit. A big mass comprised mostly of stomach vapors and colorless liquid gushed from his mouth onto the floor, spreading over an area of nearly a meter. Pekka could pick out a piece of pork fillet and a hint of oven-poached salmon in the mess.
He first began to clean the vomit by hand, because he calculated he could only use ten squares of toilet paper for the job. The slippery goo flowed through his fingers, but he did not give in, scooping the escaping mess back into the protection of his hands. He was disgusted, but he did not fear vomiting again, because his stomach was empty to the last drop. He dabbed the last glob away, and now the linoleum looked like there had never been anything on it of human origin.
Everything leading up to this could have been avoided if Pekka had been patient enough to do his work properly and familiarize himself thoroughly with the deceased and his background. Now, clinging to a few flimsy facts and driven mad by hunger, he had screwed up a perfectly good memorial service.
Pekka pulled himself together and began browsing through the obituaries he had cut from the newspapers. The situation was made more difficult by the fact that almost everyone who died was significantly older than him. It would have been easier to find topics of conversation, familiar milieus and common habits to use during his infiltration in the life of a contemporary. Politics, taste in music, nature, sports, women. Everything that connects people to each other, what differentiates people. If the deceased was thirty years older, it was harder to find common milieus. Ahvenkoski would teach him.
In the end, Pekka chose a fifty-nine-year-old man whose obituary came in two parts: he was missed both by his family and his company. The deceased had spent his life working as a conductor on the state railways. Pekka wrote out a bulleted list of the details he had to find out. The funeral would be held two weeks later. In that time, Pekka would be able to do his work so conscientiously, so precisely and so humbly that the events of the past day would never be repeated.
Evening darkened to night. That morning Pekka had unscrewed the lightbulb in the dustbin shed. He opened the door to the shed and clicked on his flashlight. He aimed the light at the rearmost bin, where the widow Hakulinen usually put her rubbish. He lifted the lid ag
ainst the wall, folded his arms and muttered a prayer. “Give me this day my daily markdowns.”
Hakulinen had a habit of buying all of the prepared foods marked with a red sticker, even if she wouldn’t end up eating them. Pekka had been blessed to enjoy the fruits of the widow’s careless consumerism so often that he had earmarked Hakulinen’s products for himself.
Pekka looked for a K-Market plastic bag—Hakulinen did not patronize any other grocery. There it glimmered, almost on the bottom. Pekka leaned over the container and stretched toward the bag. His fingers brushed the bag’s knot, but he couldn’t get a grip on it, and as he edged himself into a better position, he tumbled in.
He had never been in a dustbin before, but had heard of their ability to store heat. Apparently it had to do with the scraps of food still being warm at the moment they were thrown out. Pekka knew he was sitting on Hakulinen’s bag, but did not rush to adjust his position. He wanted to experience with all of his senses what those who had fallen before him had reported. A dustbin was its own world, sufficiently small, relatively peaceful and in a good location. You are separated from the human world, but are still right in the middle of it. By opening the lid you can see the stars, and by closing it you can see inside yourself.
Pekka sniffed the container and found people’s eating habits to be largely similar. The smells of chicken, liver casserole, trout temptation and pasta sauces forced their way through the plastic bags. He hoped there was something special in Hakulinen’s plastic bag that would raise his spirits and his energy level.
He opened the lid, rose to standing position and grabbed Hakulinen’s bag. The widow had tied the bag with an overhand knot, as if to bait him. If I don’t eat it, neither will the rest of you. Pekka poked his finger forcefully into the knot and strained to open the bag. This time the smell was a scent. He carefully placed his hand in the bag and felt two food cartons. He guessed. He hoped. He dreamed. He climbed out of the trash bin with the cartons, picked up his flashlight and focused it on his quarry. Yes. It was true. Reindeer sauté with mashed potatoes. Two boxes of reindeer sauté with mashed potatoes.
The Human Part Page 6