The Human Part

by Kari Hotakainen

  Niittymäki rummaged around in his drawer, taking out a C.D., pushing it into a player and asking Maija to sit. There were scratchy, reedy sounds and then after a few seconds the interrogation room was filled with a grandiloquent piano introduction, after which Elton John began to sing about a candle that flickers in a strong wind without going out. Maija remembered hearing the piece on the recording of Diana’s memorial concert, but she hadn’t been able to empathize with it then either. The skillful singer’s nostalgic chorus stung her, but in the opposite way than the singer intended. Maija realized that she was not able to mourn Princess Diana along with the rest of the western world now—nor had she been able to at the time of her death. To her, Diana was just a well-to-do Englishwoman who died when her luxury car crashed into a cement pillar.

  Maija wanted out of the room at once. Niittymäki sat in his chair, eyes closed, rocking himself into the chorus with the experienced motions of one who had listened to it hundreds of times. At exactly the same second as Elton, Niittymäki ascended from this reality to the other, lilac-colored, good, caring world, away from the coarseness of everyday life that assaults us from every side.

  Maija availed herself of the opportunity and slipped out of the room. The woman at the duty desk looked at Maija questioningly. Maija waved the ticket at her and said goodbye.

  After getting outside, Maija went to a park and looked for a bench that would be as far as possible away from the gravel path that traversed the park.

  She was overcome by a sick, guilty feeling, not so much for the poor children of the world, but for the fact that she had never felt anything about the princess. Maija remembered as a child being confused by the attitudes of adults toward the famous people in magazines and on the television. How could they say they loved people they didn’t know, who spoke, sang, danced, played sports and wrote well?

  The lady next door claimed that it was utterly impossible for her to imagine life without Eino Grön. Maija didn’t know anything about Grön except for the newspaper picture with him standing on a rocky outcropping with his mouth open and the Viking Mariella cruise ship in the background. Grön looked like a pockmarked seal who was shouting for help, even though the caption claimed he was interpreting Argentinian tango.

  Maija also remembered how her high school P.E. teacher had quoted javelin thrower Seppo Räty’s four-word meditations during a morning assembly and said that he lived according to Seppo’s cycle.

  The auditorium went silent. The P.E. teacher told how between the most important competitions there were always two long years during which Räty lifted weights and didn’t say a single word. The teacher said that during those two years he felt an inexpressible powerlessness and wistfulness, but as the games approached, he awoke from his elegiac melancholy like a bear, feeling a strong solidarity with the Bear of Tohmajärvi.

  Maija had never experienced any connection with the people on television and in the magazines. To her they were just jabbering frogs, and the kisses of journalists weren’t going to turn them into princes. On the contrary—by flattering them and building them up, their frogginess only grew. They jumped, slimy, from magazine to magazine croaking the same thing, their eyes wet with their own excellence.

  Maija was pissed off, retrospectively. She would have wished that a moment ago Niittymäki had been paying attention to her, not a far-off princess. Maija thought stealing a meat pie and a hoodie demonstrated unique boldness because there were security guards on duty in both the grocery and clothing departments. Niittymäki also could have asked in a bit more detail about Maija’s profession and its unique challenges. Niittymäki didn’t understand what it was like to work under difficult conditions without Elton John’s heartening piano, what it was like to search for an appropriate thing to steal in a country dominated by two central retail franchises whose selections were almost identical, what it was like to live when you can’t share the progress of the day with your co-workers and what it was like to slog away day after day without a single word of encouragement.

  Niittymäki’s picture of the world had been exposed as altogether too well-defined and rigid, as if it were built out of black and white and their synthesis, gray.

  Maija felt like returning to the police station and telling Niittymäki the following: shoplifting is taking something that isn’t anyone’s. A store’s merchandise is just on its way to being someone’s. If you take something from your neighbor that he has bought with his own money, that is wrong, but the goods in stores are everyone’s, that is, no one’s, property. For this reason I don’t consider the fine I received for stealing to be a punishment, but rather an unpleasant reminder of my carelessness. Doesn’t the other word say it all: “petty theft”? Lawmakers went to great trouble to invent a word that sounds like an insignificant offense. I nicked a splinter of rock from a mountain. I took a grain of sand from a desert. I scooped a bucket of water from the ocean. I’m sorry, how can I make this up to you. To sum up: your words, Niittymäki, have a moralizing, didactic tone, and that is why they are tired, predictable and bland.

  Maija realized she had regressed to ranting and remembered the card her mother had sent warning against talking to herself. It was fine for her to give advice from the sidelines, living with a man who frequently stopped talking altogether. There wasn’t any point talking to her mother much about the things of this world. She understood things in her own way and wasn’t shy about dispensing advice.

  Maija rose from the bench and walked to the nursery. There were thirty meter-tall people dressed in almost identical snowsuits romping in the yard. The black and white one was Maija’s. She waved to Saara, who jumped in the air and ran into Maija’s arms. For a moment, Maija felt as if she was in the child’s arms, not the child in hers.

  POSTCARD, AUTUMN SCENE

  Pekka, my only son!

  I hear love has brought you one of those new, blended families. I’m happy for you and hope you’ll be able to form a good relationship with the kids. It won’t be easy since they already have a father. But I’m sure you’ll get along if you really concentrate, if you really try. You can become a father that way too. But don’t try to force yourself on them too much—they might be frightened and start to shy away. You father made sea-buckthorn juice. It’s bitter, but it has all the most potent vitamins in it. There’s a bottle waiting here for you.

  Your mother

  THE IMITATOR

  Pekka Malmikunnas stood in front of the mirror. He smoothed the bronzing cream on his face. He pressed the mustache on tight, and thanked the late Peruvian composer Daniel Alomía Robles for a new opportunity.

  Pekka turned sideways and checked his outfit one more time. Outwardly everything was in order. The rest depended on him.

  Pekka had bought the black felt hat from a flea market, where in a junk box he had also found the mustache. He had borrowed the poncho from a friend from school, Pasi, who had a hippie past. Pasi had asked what he was going to use it for, to which Pekka had answered that his company was organizing a fancy dress party. Pasi had been curious to know about Pekka’s current life and job, but Pekka’s battery had suddenly run out in the middle of the call.

  Pekka put the finishing touch on his outfit, a fringed shoulder bag he had filched from a corner in his big sister Helena’s hallway. He had been forced to remove the Ruisrock stickers and the peace symbol, a relic of the domestic Finnish hippie period he remembered irritating his father Paavo so much. In Paavo’s opinion, peace had been purchased in blood on a battlefield conspicuously lacking in hippies.

  Pekka put a flute in the bag, looked one last time in the mirror and opened the door. The wind went under the poncho and fanned it up like a skirt. With his right hand he held the poncho down, and with his left he held the felt hat on his head. It was hard being a Peruvian.

  There weren’t many people around the Three Smiths Statue, even though the department store next door was having its Crazy Days sale. Pekka remembered the long passageway that went from the warrens of
the Makkaratalo straight to the high street. Tens of thousands of people walked along the passageway over the course of a day. Pekka went close to the exit of the passageway and set down his mother Salme’s small wooden basket, on the side of which he had written in small letters, I am musiccian from Peru and nw homelss.

  Pekka raised the pan flute to his lips and blew. The thin, clear sound echoed in the mouth of the passageway, telling of the refugee’s longing for the slopes of the Andes, away from this cold land. Pekka attempted to communicate through his playing that this was serious, that if you didn’t drop some money in that wooden basket right now, the condor in the song would fall out of the sky and land on its face, terminally, that the bird had already fallen from its perch of earnings-linked unemployment payments, floundering somewhere up there in the heavens, beyond the reach of the social safety net, not over the Andes, but over goddamn Merihaka, and soon, if your conscience isn’t pricked, that bird is going to come over and bang on your head with his sharp beak and ask, “Anybody home? Any humans in there? You know, the kind who are always supposed to understand a neighbor in need, even if that neighbor is from somewhere far away and doesn’t wear the same kind of hat as you. This time he’s exotic, an Indian with a feather in his cap, flat broke, without even a reservation to go back to.”

  A man dressed in a long winter coat and tracksuit bottoms, wearing a beanie with the logo of a bank stitched into it, stopped in front of Pekka, gawking with red eyes. He looked Pekka up and down and then came right up in front of Pekka.

  “The fuck you’re an Indian.”

  Pekka had prepared himself for all sorts of reactions and insults the prejudiced Finns might throw at him. That was the life of an immigrant. However, the claim made by the man in the stocking cap was sufficiently radical that it could not go unanswered. Pekka lowered the flute from his lips and sang, “I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail. Mmmm mmmm. Mmmm mmmm.”

  Pekka could only remember one line from the American version, but he loaded that one phrase with so much feeling that the phrase nearly came to pieces at the end. He remembered from his childhood what the display designer Alfred Supinen had said as he watched Pekka and his friend’s circus show. “When you imitate a lion or a rabbit, it isn’t enough to look like them. You have to become them. The audience has to believe that Pekka is a lion and Jussi is a rabbit.” Pekka had understood Alfred’s words immediately and become a lion so well that Jussi had fled all the way out into the yard. And since then Pekka had treasured up Alfred’s words in his heart, remembering them now in his moment of need as the beanie man glared at him malevolently, questioning his identity.

  Pekka sang the phrase three times, lifted the flute, played the nostalgic melody as expressively as he could, lowered the flute from his lips and said to the man, “Nachos buenos povertias.”

  The man was silent for a moment and then said, “Sorry. I mean, never mind. I don’t have anything on me right now. Otherwise I would give you something.”

  Pekka smiled sympathetically and took a map of Peru out of his pocket. On the upper part of it he had made a dot with a red felt-tip pen. He pointed at the dot with his finger, thumped his chest over the heart with his right hand and said, “Houm.”

  The man nodded, patted Pekka on the shoulder and took a bottle of eau de cologne out of his pocket, offering it to Pekka, who shook his head. The man took a swig from the bottle, grimaced and said, “Los Kondor Paassa. Simon and Telefunken. Classic.”

  Then the man tottered on his way.

  Pekka sighed and started from the beginning.

  The previous unfortunate encounter gave Pekka’s playing additional depth and made him feel even more Peruvian. He longed for the Andes, for gentle autumn rains, for his work as a herdsman, for his goat and for his beloved, who at this very moment might be selling her colorful handwork in the alleyways of Lima in order to travel to this northern land to be in the arms of her flautist.

  A middle-aged, well-dressed man stopped in front of Pekka. He listened intently and then took a wallet out of his breast pocket and placed a twenty-euro note in the wooden basket. Pekka had fantasized about perhaps collecting such a sum by evening. As he stared at the note, Pekka played a couple of wrong notes, after which the man dug another ten euros out of his pocket.

  “Sometimes playing off key is irritating, but sometimes it increases the believability of the distress. This was a case of the latter. The piece is good, but I’ve heard it approximately six hundred times now. My route to work goes right by here. The additional payment obliges you and your countrymen to diversify the repertoire. I have already become sufficiently familiar with the flight path of that particular bird,” the man said, smiling and walking on.

  Pekka attempted to keep his spirits up, despite his first two listeners having commented on his identity and repertoire. Pekka knew he was a pacesetter, a pioneer who would be forced to blaze his own path through the unbroken snow. He considered himself to be the first native Finnish immigrant, and in this sense his lot was even harder than that of regular newcomers, most of whom received a sympathetic reception from the authorities because of the civil wars raging in their native lands.

  Pekka had discussed this issue with Maija and Biko, who had not understood Pekka’s perspective at first, but after listening for a moment, Biko had been forced to acknowledge the logic of Pekka’s position. In Pekka’s opinion, Finland had become so different and strange in the last ten years that even a Finn could feel like an immigrant. We had been producing our own refugees for decades. Most Northern and Eastern Finns had been forced to move from their birthplaces toward the El Dorado of the South, not to mention the wartime evacuees.

  Whenever he spoke of these things, Pekka had to emphasize that he was in no way anti-immigrant—he just felt that his fate was similar to theirs. Minus the exoticness bonus. Pekka was as Finnish-looking as anyone could be, and for that reason he could not appeal to the maternal or paternal instincts of empathetic people in his work. Next to Biko’s pitch-blackness, Pekka’s whiter-than-whiteness seemed insignificant.

  An immigrant had to adjust to constant changes and the wishes of unfamiliar people. Because of this, Pekka made a concession to the previous passer-by and conjured “Guardian Angel” out of his flute, hoping it would bring the amount he had earmarked for a new mustache. The one he had now itched, and he had to constantly press it more firmly onto his skin, sometimes even in the middle of a song.

  “Through the wilds of the world the lamb doth roam, a lovely angel guiding her home. The journey is long, no home is in sight, but the lovely angel walks at her right.” Pekka wanted to show the Finns Peruvian hospitality by playing them a hymn that had been used to put hundreds of thousands of Finnish children to sleep, regardless of whether they or their parents belonged to the church. Pekka had last heard the piece at his big sister’s house, when Helena had hummed it to Sini as she was falling asleep. Pekka had been shocked by how gloomy the piece was, because the only thing that protected the child in it was an invisible, imaginary being. Pekka had felt a seething rage toward the author of the song. If several generations had been lulled to sleep by whispering such a dark nursery rhyme, then was it any wonder there was no comfort or reconciliation to be found in the jungles of divorce and labor contract negotiations when the subconscious was pealing, “Wild is the wood and rocky the road, slippery the footing and heavy the load”?

  Pekka tried to interpret the piece in such a way that the listener would have to fear for the child in the pitch-black forest. He made his voice break on purpose and gave the impression that the flute was weeping for the child.

  An older woman stopped in front of the wooden basket and lowered her bag to the ground. She concentrated, listening with her eyes closed. When Pekka blew the last breath of the angel, the woman took a one-hundred-euro note from her bag. She flashed it at Pekka and asked quietly in English if the young musician could come to her apartment and shepherd her into her final sleep with his flute. Pekka answered that h
e did not have the necessary professional proficiency. He was just a poor street musician from far-off Peru. The woman said that death does not concern itself with birthplace or professional proficiency. It simply comes and collects its due. But it would be nice to leave here with a pleasant flute accompaniment and the features of a beautiful man as the last thing reflected in her eyes.

  Pekka hesitated. But not for long. One hundred euros was an appalling amount of money. He couldn’t turn it down, even though the new task was daunting, especially given his repertoire. In addition to the condor and angel songs, all he knew was Jaakko Teppo’s “Hilma and Onni,” to which he didn’t think he could do justice on the pan flute.

  Pekka agreed.

  The apartment was in a fashionable part of the city. The living room opened onto a view of the sea. Somewhere out there on the horizon was Estonia and all of Old Europe. The woman stamped out of the kitchen carrying a serving dish with savory hors d’oeuvres and confections. She sat down on a velvet divan and invited Pekka to go ahead and remove his outerwear. Pekka could not take the poncho off, because he remembered that under it was a Päijät-Häme Banking Cooperative T-shirt. Pekka said he was fine the way he was.

  He was trying to control himself, even though he would have liked to stuff all of the delicacies into his mouth, recognizing them as the creations of expensive bakeries. He contained himself, taking only a cream puff and a meringue confection. The woman watched Pekka eat and poured a red drink into two delicate glasses. She said that before death it was good to take a glass of vodka and lingonberry juice. Pekka declined, saying that he hadn’t had any alcohol since he left his homeland, because he feared it would return his thoughts to the Andes and make him lose his grip on the challenges of his new homeland.

  The woman moved both glasses in front of herself, drank each dry at a single gulp and sighed. Then she lay down on the divan and told how she had been sober for the first seventy years or her life, but now, when all of her contemporaries had died, she had decided to give alcohol a chance.