His business associate Nyström had been born at the right time. At barely thirty years of age he had been blessed with a new life: in 1988 the financial markets opened up, spread their legs, and out popped cheeky little Nyström, who from his very first cry seized hold of the new world, sped on his way by the virgin forests he had inherited, which soughed in the breezes for only a moment and then fell headlong at the feet of Nyström’s fancy. Nyström put his fortune into residential properties and the rest he used to disport himself, but he used another term entirely: he invested in “quality of life.” There was no technical gadget or gizmo invented anywhere in the world that couldn’t be found in Nyström’s pocket, car or home, and he generously and unstintingly gave Kimmo advice on how to splurge and squander, terms which he did not prefer to use because they had an unpleasant, plebeian ring to them. When Nyström’s money supply dwindled, he got more from the bank as fast as they could print it. At his worst or his best—the tone depended on the person doing the telling—Nyström owned three education centers, an empty nursing home and one manufacturing plant. Nyström didn’t know what industry the manufacturing plant was in, but it was located in Loimaa. Kimmo hated Nyström. Not because he had money, but because he shuffled the deck. In the olden days, the rabble knew their place, as did the gentry. Then came a time when they got all jumbled together. The rabble could borrow as much as they wanted from the bank. And oh how they wanted. The rabble began to resemble the gentry outwardly, so much so that the gentry were discomfited and began to stagnate. They had become too used to walking birch-lined lanes whistling “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.” Luckily for the gentry, interest rates rose and the homes the rabble had managed to buy lost their value, and the rabble returned to their starting point, i.e. zero. But then the ground thawed again, and the nouveau-riche tribe crawled out of some gutter and reshuffled the deck again, and no one could tell a knave from a king anymore.
Kimmo rose from his chair and walked over to his enormous window. The sea roiled, dark and uncaring. On the other side of the bay he could just see the enormous high-rise apartment buildings where thousands of people lived one atop another. None of them was visible from this far away. Income disparity is distance.
He dressed himself in clothing that bore the name of no designer. He didn’t like the clothes, but he didn’t want to have anything on that would attract attention on this journey. He said farewell to his house and glanced at his car in the driveway, cold and quiet, looking strangely melancholy. He looked at the plantings that the landscape architect had chosen and which the Estonian men had planted. Kimmo had paid them eight euros an hour under the table, and after the work was done he had given the men two bottles of vodka, which they hadn’t wanted. Instead they asked Kimmo for a euro an hour more. Vodka was no good; they begged for more money. He knew the world had changed.
Kimmo didn’t know how to act on a bus. Were you supposed to buy a ticket in advance? How much did it cost? Where is the button you push to get out immediately?
The blue bus curtsied, and the doors hissed open. Kimmo stood before the driver. He was black, and the identification card that hung at his breast said Biko Malmikunnas. Kimmo looked questioningly at the driver, who said the price in bad Finnish, “Two twenty.” Kimmo only had hundred-euro notes, the crispest of which he extended to the driver. The driver sighed and shook his head. Kimmo thought that he could just as easily shake his head with a sigh and tell the driver in his good Finnish what he thought about globalization, which he used to support but didn’t anymore. If I had known that in practice it would mean freedom for everything and everyone, I would have opposed it.
The driver set a stack of change in Kimmo’s hand. He shoved the whole wad into his trouser pocket and swayed his way along the aisle, looking for an appropriate seat. There was one person sitting on each double bench. Kimmo was forced to sit next to a drowsy, middle-aged man.
He was dressed. There was nothing else Kimmo could say about his clothing. He stank of sweat, liver casserole and mustard. Kimmo tried to at least turn a little to the side, but it was impossible because the pudgy, formless man flowed against Kimmo’s side. The man reminded him of a ringed seal who had strayed onto dry land and whose birthplace was revealed by the blue algae that had dried on his skin.
The negro took a curve so fast that the seal rocked toward Kimmo and they both fell into the aisle. Kimmo felt like kicking him, but he noticed that there was already one bruise on his temple. Kimmo extracted himself from the man, leaving him lying in the aisle. The negro said something in the microphone, but Kimmo couldn’t understand. Apparently his job description also included pointing out the more important sights in the city. A youngish man got out of his seat, gave Kimmo a nasty look and lifted the lifeless seal onto a seat. Kimmo held on to a pipe and swayed with the motion of the bus. The trip felt endless, even though the bus was already approaching one of the main roads into the city center.
Suddenly Kimmo had a strange panic attack. He was sure that at any moment the negro would push a button to close the doors of the bus and that no one would ever be able to get out again. That the world would come to a stop in the bus, and the bus would be the whole world. It would be led by the negro, its prime minister would be the moldy seal and the other passengers would serve them. The negro would announce into the microphone that all of Kimmo’s property had been confiscated on the same grounds as the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s once upon a time. The moldy seal would stand up and slap Kimmo on the cheek with its slimy tail. The negro and the seal would force Kimmo and the other passengers to scour the center aisle clean and start to dance the tango cheek to cheek. The dance would never end, because there is always land across the open sea, as its lyrics claim.
Kimmo came to his senses when someone pushed the stop button. Kimmo slipped out when the doors opened.
Now he was in the middle of a bad part of town, and he didn’t have a steel-shelled car to protect him. His distance had been crumpled in on itself. It was time to get to know the world of the rabble. The gentry could disappear from the world, but the rabble never would. In the animal kingdom the rabble could be compared to rats and the gentry to geese. Rats leave sinking ships, scurrying to dry land and reproducing. Geese honk for a moment in the oil pond and then drop to the ground with their beaks blackened.
The rabble had something that Kimmo didn’t: others like themselves. Every member of the rabble knew that just around the corner there were a hundred people just like him. Kimmo didn’t have anything in common with other wealthy people. He had come from the dairy to the drawing room, but a bit of manure had fallen on the floor from the soles of his shoes and he had been found out.
The rabble wandered about carrying plastic bags, footloose and fancy free, completely ignorant of the cares of the wealthy. They strung up their social safety net and rocked themselves to sleep in the afternoon sun after a few beers. Society had built them a complicated but functional system which made it possible for them to give up at any moment and fall, back first, arms spread-eagled, off the roof of their rented apartment building, sure that below a net woven of unemployment compensation and income supports awaited the next person who wanted a turn in the hammock. The state existed for them—it was for them it had been established.
My job is to pay taxes so that every strand of their safety hammock will bear all of their weight. Kimmo was working himself into a rage. That was a bad thing. Rage takes away your judgment and lowers a person to the level of the target of the rage. But inside my own head I can do whatever I want. I can’t do anything anywhere else. I have to bear all of this because I am wealthy. Or fortunate, as that vilest of terms goes. What does fortune have to do with this, you cretins? I’ve made everything by taking risks, and I bore those risks myself. I bore the risk and now I bear the cross. Jesus bore a cross in the fairy tale, but I bore my risks literally. It could just as easily have been that my speeches wouldn’t have hit the mark and that I wouldn’t have been able to s
end anyone an invoice. Then I would have fallen straight on my head, from plenty high up. And they don’t set up safety nets for wealthy people like me.
Kimmo felt like talking. He walked through a small, littered park and noticed a being sleeping on a bench. He couldn’t say at once if it was a man or a woman. The being wore a large, wide-brimmed hat concealing the face beneath. Kimmo sat down on the next bench over to be on the safe side, since he wasn’t sure what contagious diseases the being might possibly be carrying.
A straggly German Shepherd slept at the being’s feet. The dog opened its left eye, established that Kimmo was harmless and continued sleeping.
Kimmo was bothered by the being’s androgyny, so he cleared his throat loudly. The being took the wide-brimmed hat off and was revealed as an old man. Gray stubble extended down onto his neck. Black hairs sprouted from his ears. Neck hair protruded from beneath his purple collared shirt.
“Moses. We have a visitor.”
The dog became alert, looking questioningly at his master. The man scratched his dog, which then returned to its slumber.
“Was that a cough or a comment?” the man asked.
“Neither really. I’m not from here and was thinking I might converse a bit with the locals.”
“So that’s how it is. Are you some sort of researcher?”
“No.”
“I only ask because nowadays it’s difficult to tell who is who. Everything is guesswork. Everyone pretends to be something else or turns into something else. Only the heavenly bodies abide. What do you say, Moses?”
The dog pricked up one of its ears for a moment, but didn’t open its eyes.
“I’m from the coast, and I’m wealthy,” Kimmo said quickly, but in the same moment realized the statement was flawed. It was missing a gentle introduction to the meat of the message and a cushioning follow-up.
“Showing all your cards up front. Good. But being wealthy isn’t a profession, is it?”
“I’m a C.E.O. The main shareholder of a company. Or I was. I sold my company, and now I’m looking at what I could do next.”
“Do you have a first name, or did that go along with the company?”
“Kimmo.”
“Armas,” the man said, extending his hand. Kimmo hesitated to take the hand. Armas noticed. “I don’t have any diseases, and my shower works,” Armas said. Kimmo blushed and took the hand. Armas squeezed so hard and so long that for a moment Kimmo was afraid he would be attached to the old man forever.
“To begin with, Kimmo, I’ll say that I’m not jealous of anyone’s money. I used to have it. I’ve sniffed as many notes as Moses here has people’s shoes. But now things are slightly different.”
“You mean you live at the mercy of society.”
“This boy is hot. Did you hear what he said, Moses? I would phrase it a little differently myself. I’m resting on the arm of society. The same arms that have borne you up as well. By the way, do you know how to stand on your head?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. I’ll show you.”
Armas stood up straight, stretched for a moment, sprang into a handstand and then slowly lowered himself so his head touched the ground. He shook, but he stayed upright. He stayed up for ten seconds and then flipped back onto his feet.
“Like that! You know the saying: it wouldn’t matter if I stood on my head! And now I showed you one of the great truisms of life in honor of a beautiful night and all the gymnasts of Helsinki. I admit there was an element of trying to stand out from the crowd, but the heart of the matter is that sometimes you can’t do anything about the way the world works no matter what you do.”
“But some people don’t even try,” Kimmo said.
“Sure enough. And then there are those who skim off the icing even though they’ve never even seen the cake. Did you hit the lottery, or are you just messed up otherwise?”
“I’m not messed up. And I’ve earned everything I have by the sweat of my brow.”
“So they all say. Now you have time to learn to stand on your head. You can show the routine to the next generation after all of your stocks have disappeared.”
“My wealth isn’t in stocks.”
“It has to be somewhere, since it isn’t in your head. Sorry. But remember that you started this brinksmanship. Moses and I were sleeping and waiting for summer when you came.”
“Fair enough. But I’ll say this much that all I got from home was my mother’s homemade berry juice and advice from my dad. Whatever was on the bottom line I made. This whole thing has spun around on its axis now. My father thought the bourgeoisie were exploiting the working class, but I think the working class are exploiting the bourgeoisie.”
“Father and son are both right and wrong at the same time. There isn’t one truth anymore. And because of that I ran off the road for a while too. Since there wasn’t anyone to blame. It’s best to look carefully at the flag you go waving out there. You should choose a flag big enough that in an pinch you can make a tent out of it.”
Armas looked under the bench and look out a large bottle of water and a bag of meat pies.
“Are you hungry, Mr. Wealthy Man? Hydration and blood sugar. Those are the same for everybody.”
Kimmo’s hunger faded immediately when he saw the familiar, smashed meat pie, the kind he had eaten so often to stave off his horrible hunger as he toiled for his second studio apartment. His appetite was ruined completely by the way Armas mashed the pie in the front of his mouth and smacked his lips cheerily. Kimmo was reminded of his father from the old Finland, the one built amidst a hellish stink of sweat and pine resin. His father had a habit of eating standing up, quickly, as if food were just about to run out in the world.
Armas strained with his tongue at the bits of pie that had got stuck between his teeth and then rinsed it all down with water. And at the end of the ceremony came what Kimmo predicted, overcome with disgust: a burp, which came from so deep and with such a resounding noise that Kimmo was afraid it was going to bring the food back up with it.
“Unfortunately I don’t have any alcohol to offer since I gave up drinking two years ago. I started feeling terribly dizzy, and I saw all sorts of things in the mornings. Once a boa constrictor came out from under the rug. They don’t exactly thrive in these latitudes, but it turned up there anyway. I don’t mean under the rug—I mean in my head. I had to upend my cup so I could see other things. I came into this world sober, and I’m going to leave it sober. The same with tobacco. I smoked for thirty-seven years, and one morning I started to cough. The worst piece of phlegm was forty-seven centimeters long. I stopped cold turkey. For two weeks I tossed and turned and shivered under my sheets, but I didn’t chew any nicotine gum. I don’t chew anything I’m not going to swallow, on principle. Well, what do you say? How are we going to sit out the rest of the evening? Should we talk about politics or something real? I know one thing. Nothing is certain. That’s why I’m sitting here in this slightly shabby clothing with this scruffy dog. Sorry, Moses. There never has been any certainty. And there never will be. No one knows anything perfectly. Except that he’s going to die. That’s why I’m going to be sitting here until it comes.”
“Death?”
“No, summer.”
“Summer?”
“Yeah. I decided in ’92 when my firm went under. I didn’t have a clue what happened. And neither did anyone else. Not the bank manager, not the government ministers, no one. The experts stood with microphones at their mouths stiff as boards and gacked something incoherent. The country sank like a sheet of ice, so deep that no one could see that far down. You were probably in high school then. I decided then that there would be one more time in my life when I was in the right place at the right time and knew something with perfect certainty. Today is the seventh of May, and it will be here soon. Perhaps tomorrow night. And Moses and I will be on duty. We will see it. We will witness it.”
“What?”
“When the trees leaf ou
t. We will be able to say that we were there, and we saw it with our own eyes. Actually, I won’t promise anything about Moses’ eyes, since he’s old enough that he’s always falling asleep. If you happen by this corner again within the next couple of weeks, I’ll be able to tell you precisely when summer came to Finland. Isn’t it somehow comforting to be perfectly certain about one thing? What do you say, Kimmo?”
Kimmo didn’t know what to say. He was reminded of a similar situation years ago in a conference room when he was supposed to present a sales strategy to a client. Kimmo opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His mouth hung open. His left arm went numb. The outlines of the people and the bluish screens of the laptops lurched in his field of vision. He had to sit down. His assistant managed to get a chair pushed under him at the last second. The attack lasted only a minute, but it was enough. He had lost face, and it took half a year to create a new one. Later, when meeting with the same clients, he told them he had experienced a panic attack because he had sensed so much resistance to change around him.
“I should probably be going now,” Kimmo said.
“Don’t go disappearing after the appetizer.”
“I really have to. It was nice to chat with you.”
“Yeah. Remember to learn to stand on your head. It’s a matter of balance. Like everything.”
Armas waved. The dog opened one eye, looking at Kimmo for a moment and then continuing its drowsing.
Kimmo walked from the park to the road and sat down on the steps of a shuttered chemist’s. A decal on the display window flapped in the wind. It said “Take time for yourself.” Kimmo tried to assemble his thoughts, but it felt like trying to collect the twigs that fell from the birch trees in the windy yard of the home he had left decades before. There was no end to the twigs, and they were impossible to tell apart.
The Human Part Page 15