The Human Part

by Kari Hotakainen

  The light one folded the paper and put it in his pocket, and then nodded to the dark one. The dark one grabbed the person and led him into the kitchen. In the middle of it was a round, wooden table. The kind they used to have in the back rooms of stores in the days when the store’s own butcher carved up pig and cow carcasses fresh.

  The person began to scream. He screamed so hard that he lost the very last shred of his humanity and became an animal. He began to bite and kick. The light one hit him once on the cheek and ordered the dark one to give him the thick, silver tape. The light one said that he would now be placing Jesus tape over the person’s mouth, tape which had been developed for precisely these situations. The name came from the fact that Jesus succeeded at almost everything he ever tried until his Father intervened. You tried to play Jesus and his Father, God. As your reward and as a memento of a good effort, we will now put this tape over your mouth for a moment. When we get everything ready, we will remove the tape, but I can promise that afterward the screaming will stop as if it had hit a brick wall.

  The dark one held him. The light one bound him.

  Then the dark one took two freezer containers and a bottle of spirits out of a bag. One of the containers was empty. The other had some sort of liquid in it. He poured the alcohol into the empty freezer container and sterilized the fish scissors in the container.

  The light one held the trembling person in place.

  The dark one took a pair of forceps and a drop cloth out of the bag and spread the cloth over the butcher block. He set the container on the edge of the butcher block and nodded to the light one, who kicked the person on the back of his knees, making him collapse into a kneeling position. The light one moved the person against the butcher block so that his whole head was on the block. Then he tore the tape off his mouth. First there was no sound, as if the person had lost his voice, but then one long, shrill sound came out of his mouth. It resembled the scream the light one had heard in his childhood coming from a broken fish trap. A curious seagull had got stuck in the trap and was screaming in such a thin, metallic voice that the distress had infected the light one, and he had run to his father.

  The light one took the person by the neck and squeezed, extinguishing the sound.

  The dark one nodded, giving the signal. The light one repositioned the person’s head and ordered him to open his mouth. The person opened it enough that the light one managed to push his right hand in against the upper teeth. He rammed his left hand against the lower teeth and lifted the mouth open, and lightning-quick the dark one pushed a piece of wood about five centimeters long in as a brace to keep the mouth open. The light one held the person’s head in place and warned him not to struggle, which would only result in unnecessary injury. He stressed that the operation would be over soon and that the person would then be able to continue his normal life.

  The dark one put thin protective gloves on his hands, took the scissors, shoved his right hand into the mouth and drew the tongue out as far as he could. The person gagged. The dark one took the fish scissors and clipped off the part that the person had used up and no longer needed.

  The light one released the thrashing person. The person fell onto the kitchen floor and lost consciousness. The dark one placed the removed part in the freezer container. It would be perfectly preserved in the special liquid for the necessary period of time. The light one cleaned up the mess and called the emergency number. He reported the address and the nature of the emergency. The dark one placed a towel under the unconscious person’s head. Blood flowed out of his mouth onto it.

  They left the house and walked to the car. The dark one placed the freezer container in a cooler. They looked at each other and knew that they had done both right and wrong. They also knew that the thing they had done would bind them to each other irreversibly. They drove the first kilometers in silence. As they traded residential areas for motorway, the dark one suggested some calming music. The light one flipped through radio stations until he found a classical one. The announcer said that Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata Number Eight” is also called the “Sonata Pathétique,” and that it was now being played for them by a Hungarian pianist, András Schiff, who now lived in England.

  The dark one asked the light one what pathétique meant. The light one said that if there was a tremendous amount of emotion that included a touch of self-pity and that the whole thing was on the verge of overflowing its banks, then you could call the surge of emotion pathetic. The dark one said that in that case he had been in a pathetic state a couple of times, but that he had never felt self-pity. He said that pathetic situations came along quite often as a bus driver. The light one said that he might not have succeeded in explaining the term properly, because it was French.

  They listened to the beautiful, plangent, fast piece of music. The light one felt that at the beginning of the piece something shocking happened that forced someone to run away, and that it was this racing the composer had clearly painted in the piece. Then the running stopped and the fugitive put up his feet under an oak tree and listened to the warbling of the birds. The light one thought it was amazing that someone could play his life that way.

  The piece ended, and the car was silent.

  Then the dark one said that he wanted to meet this Beethoven. The light one said that he had died a long time ago. The dark one said that he didn’t think a person like that could die easily, and if he did die, the notes would force their way out of the grave and float up to the tops of the trees.

  The light one said that the person there on the floor of the house was losing blood at a tremendous rate. The dark one ordered the light one not to worry about it—the ambulance would come quickly there in the city. The person would surely survive. The light one said that was precisely what he hoped.

  He thought a person should live with his actions in this world. That was every person’s duty and lot in life. Even if there weren’t friends or family, there were always actions. They followed a person through life. They were faithful. The light one thought that this is sometimes forgotten in all of the rush and bustle of work. This person would come to see this if he survived. The light one hoped that the person would have his actions and their consequences with him every day for the rest of his life.

  The dark one said that the light one’s actions in the world of work had been somewhat lacking as of late. The light one looked at him sternly and said that he was still searching for his permanent place in the commercial world and reminded the dark one that none of it had been for lack of effort. The dark one asked why the light one had not stayed at the computer company. The light one said that he didn’t have the patience to correct simple problems and answer simple authors’ questions about whether backup copies should be stored on a memory stick or a separate hard drive. He said that there had been one author in particular who had irritated him by pressing him about the origins of his unique last name. The dark one thought the author had just been doing his job. If they weren’t interested in details, they wouldn’t be authors at all. He thought that the light one could become an author and in that way make use of all of his recent experiences. The light one thought it was not a good idea. He did not believe that the feeling you get when you turn into a Peruvian street musician could be captured on paper. The dark one thought that it would be worth trying, because the perspective of an immigrant is always valuable.

  The dark one said that his future was in taxis. In a taxi you can serve people and drive them from place to place and lift their bags and open doors. He thought he had been born to be a servant. It is a natural trait. It doesn’t have anything to do with servility, though. I want to serve, to create energy. A taxi driver’s job is the best in the world. A small, enclosed space, a couple of people to serve at a time—you can concentrate on them. You can demonstrate your skill. You get to act a little better than you are. And then as a last resort there were dustman jobs. Even if the end of the world comes, the dustmen will still have two more weeks of work after
ward. Someone has to clean everything up.

  The light one said that he still hadn’t found his place in the world. He said he had been driven by the wind and carried by cars. And there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with that. Strength of will is overrated. The light one said he was nevertheless hopeful for the future, because entrepreneurship is mostly a way of life. Bumps in the economy would always bring certain things to a head and make everything look hopeless from time to time, but as the son of a small businessman, he believed everything would make a turn for the better in the end.

  The dark one agreed. Everything will work out if you can stay on the sun’s side, even if everyone is singing about the moon and wanting to admire it, just the two of you. But without the sun there is nothing.

  Then they were quiet again and listened to the hum of the road.

  THE SHARER

  Paavo Malmikunnas stood in the line at the post office looking at his parcel slip. His name and address were written in block letters, and the pen had been pressed against the slip so hard it had almost ripped through. Paavo snorted. The sender’s emotional state had been strong and purposeful. Paavo gave the slip to the worker, who disappeared into the back room.

  The worker came back and extended a cardboard box to Paavo. On the side of the box was written “Fragile—Handle with Care.” Paavo transported the box home carefully, placed it on the floor of the closet and threw a coat over it. Then he walked to the sewing room and made sure it was empty. Salme had gone out walking with her girlfriend. Paavo got the box and carried it to the kitchen table.

  The box was filled with paper. At first Paavo thought there wasn’t anything else in it, but after moving the crumpled paper out of the way, he found a freezer container on the bottom of the box packed in with pieces of styrofoam. Paavo lifted the container carefully out of the box and set it down next to the sink.

  There it floated lifeless in the freezer container’s liquid. With it a person could express love, hate, longing and sorrow. It was often taken up just in the nick of time when all other means had been exhausted. There it rested, retired from service, separated from the whole, orphaned. A piece of flesh a few centimeters long, which could be tremendously expressive when need be.

  Paavo sat down on a chair and took his time examining the piece. He had not asked them to mail it, but he now felt gratitude toward the senders. Paavo knew that he would not be able to thank them officially for the package for some time, but if the opportunity were to someday come, he would speak eloquently and at length.

  Paavo looked at the piece and suddenly felt a strong desire to speak. He did not even remember when he had last spoken. He had either been splitting wood in the shed or looking out the bedroom window. At the birch tree he had planted, the stump that remained of the spruce tree, and the small field he had been digging potatoes out of for fifty years. The birch, the stump, and the potato field had looked foreign, as if someone had moved them there from somewhere. His gaze had not fixed on anything—it had roamed across the landscape like the wind, indifferent and foreign. His eyes had become dry cavities when the water had stopped flowing from them.

  When did I last speak to Salme? Paavo thought as he looked at the piece. It has been quite a while, he thought, but how long I can’t say. I do not know where my speech went. It disappeared like a bird from a feeder. Or the speech didn’t disappear, just the words. I couldn’t find them anymore. Or I couldn’t find the right ones. I think words are important. They are tools. I learned that as a shopkeeper. Place them carefully if you want to make sales. People didn’t just come to buy the yarn and buttons and needles—they also come to chat. If you just stood there silently in front of the balls of yarn, they could easily take you for a capitalist. But if you place your words nicely in a row like stones next to a path, then they even start looking at yarn they didn’t originally have any intention of buying. Speech is good, but now it has left me, and I don’t know when it will come back.

  Paavo was afraid that the unspoken material would sour and soon rot the entire skull. People were made to say something. Not necessarily a lot, but something. Otherwise the connection is broken and all that keeps it hanging on to humanity is breathing. Paavo thought of Salme, who had become used to their shared moments of conversation. Salme is creeping around out there, withering away with every step, and could easily show up lying at the end of the flowerbed at any moment. She did still have the energy to have gone on two outings with her weaving group to another county, even though she did come back quiet.

  Paavo walked to the door of the sewing room and was about to say something, but then remembered that Salme was out walking. Paavo went back into the kitchen and crouched in front of the freezer container. The piece, which had turned bluish, floated in the liquid. Paavo felt like saying to it what he couldn’t to Salme.

  If only you knew how much the secret weighs—at least five kilos. I can’t tell Salme that I ordered you. I just can’t. I would like to show you to Salme, but instead I have to hide you, or if worst comes to worst, destroy you. I can talk to Salme about the other thing, the thing that caused you to be floating in this liquid. And I should talk about it, because it is my and Salme’s common business, the sorrow I mean. They’ve written and talked about it a lot in the papers, but not once have I heard it talked about in the way I have experienced it. Sorrow is a bad, ugly feeling. Right after the longing comes a violent urge—you feel like breaking and killing. Sorrow is a round, spiky steel ball swinging uncontrollably in the air, and then they talk about working through sorrow, as if you could even think about work like that when the sorrow falls on you and slices everything to ribbons. Sorrow made me so loud that I ended up mute. I didn’t dare open my mouth, the things coming out of it the whole time were so inappropriate. Then the steel ball disappeared, and it was replaced with a pillow. Not a normal one, but a huge, shapeless, unnaturally soft one. When I laid my head on it, I didn’t feel anything anywhere. The anger disappeared in that softness. And everything else, because I didn’t know or feel anything. An unfeeling person, an unknowing person, an unknown person, that’s what I was.

  But now when I look at you, I feel like at least some kind of person for the first time in a long time. Is this where recovery starts, who knows? but at least I may be able to get a handle on speech again. Everyone should have a part of another person, if not the whole thing. And I wouldn’t have wanted the one who you belonged to in my kitchen. A sample specimen is enough.

  Paavo heard the front door rattle. He grabbed the freezer container, took a chair, climbed up on it and jammed the container into the top cupboard. Salme came into the hall, sitting down with a sigh and taking off her shoes. Paavo slipped into the bedroom and sat in front of the window. Salme came to the bedroom door to make sure her husband was in his place and then went into the sewing room. Paavo waited a moment and then walked to Salme’s door.

  Salme was sitting hunched over next to her sewing machine. Paavo tried to find appropriate words, but all that came to mind were inappropriate ones—those Paavo returned to his throat. The sewing machine knocked a seam together. Salme didn’t hear Paavo come in.

  “Is that the table cloth?”

  “Yes.”

  “For Helena?”

  “Yes. You’re talking.”

  “Yeah. I thought I had to. That it was time.”

  “No more chopping?”

  “No. It’s full.”

  “What?”

  “The shed.”

  “Are you going to talk all the time now or just this once?”

  “I don’t know. If I start talking, anything might come out.”

  “That’s not a problem. What was the parcel slip about?”

  “Hobby Hall sent the shawl.”

  “You got it for me?”

  “Yes, for you.”

  “Show me.”

  “There will be time enough for that later. How is Ritva?”

  “She booked a trip. To the Canaries. She wants to see the volc
ano. I don’t remember the name.”

  “Teide. That’s the name. It hasn’t been active for years, but you can at least get the smell of it there, the sulfur or whatever,” Paavo explained, noticing that he had got hold of speech and fearing that he would lose it if he didn’t continue immediately. The feeling was the same as when as a child he had tried to pull a worm out of thick, muddy soil with his thumb and forefinger. If you gave the worm even a millimeter of slack, it retreated into its hole and disappeared into the darkness.

  “Listen, Salme. I’ve been thinking lately what if we went on a trip? We’ve never been anywhere other than twice in the capital. Let’s go and see what the world is like. And I also meant to say I’m sorry. Sorry that I’ve been like this, or rather like I have been. We have enough wood for five winters now. Being in my own head for months on end it occurred to me that a lot has been taken from us. Without permission. We’ve been robbed. Do you remember that word from the old world, ‘robber baron’? They had the nerve to call button merchants names like that, even though with all the work we did our hourly wages weren’t even as much as the men at the paper mill were getting. I’ve been thinking about how much has to be taken away for nothing to be left. And what is that nothing? We’ve been shown life and death—at least those experiences can’t be taken away from us. But have we seen too much? That was what kept me thinking out there in the shed. This is that relativity stuff we talked about once. What is enough for a person? What was enough for us is too little for many entrepreneurs these days. What we understood as affluence is just scraping by for someone else. Did they build a new kind of human without us noticing? Did they secretly develop a completely new creature? I almost went crazy a couple of weeks ago when I started thinking about the children and you and everyone we know. I got a strange sort of feeling that everything was disappearing. You were off traveling with the weaving group then. I had to run over to Kallio’s house. I knocked on the door, and Kallio answered, and when I had made sure he was alive and still in this world, I turned away and ran to make sure the Esso station was still in the same place as before and hadn’t been borne away on the wind. If I could see Kallio, that that meant I wasn’t crazy. Because I’m not. But that day I visited the place that Alfred Supinen talked about once. Do you remember? He said that humans had been fixed up with such big heads that you could get lost in them—inside the head, I mean. No other living thing has an imagination like this, one that can spread life out in so many directions sometimes that everything gets blurry. This is partially why I never cared about traveling, since my thoughts took me wherever I wanted to go for nothing. I meant to ask where Helena got the money for her therapy. I hear she’s getting the full treatment with all the best listeners in the country with her around the clock. At least we don’t have money like that. Maybe Pekka or Maija loaned it to her, although I doubt it was Pekka. Has Helena said anything to you about it? I just mean I hope there isn’t any monkey business going on. Malmikunnases have never gone in for that sort of thing. We’ve never been in so much trouble that we haven’t been able to take care of our taxes and bills ourselves. Isn’t that right, Salme?”