The Human Part

by Kari Hotakainen

  Paavo went silent. Salme looked at her husband and wondered if anything more was going to come out or if she could say something now. Paavo was out of breath, waiting for Salme’s reaction.

  “Yes. Well. There you have it. Was I supposed to answer something?”

  “About where Helena got money like that.”

  “Maybe she sold her car.”

  “She doesn’t have a car.”

  “Perhaps she sold her sofa set.”

  “You can’t get money like that selling furniture.”

  “A grown woman can always come up with something. Since you haven’t been talking, let me ask, do you know what Pekka has been up to?”

  “A general manager doesn’t have time to call home.”

  “But a service man would.”

  “What do you mean by that, Salme?”

  “Nothing. Would you like some juice? Your throat must be dry after talking so much.”

  Salme went into the kitchen and then yelled back, “Why is the chair dragged over here? Have you been in the top cupboard?”

  Paavo rushed after Salme into the kitchen.

  “I was just organizing things a bit … the parts for the juicer and … then the dustpans and …”

  “What are you putting those up there for? They belong in the cleaning closet. I’ll get them down.”

  “You don’t need to go rummaging around up there. I’ll put them away later,” Paavo said and moved the chair over to the table. “Let’s have that juice. I feel dizzy.”

  “Sit down for goodness sake.”

  Paavo sat, and Salme gave him a glass of sea-buckthorn berry juice. Paavo drank it in two gulps and sighed. Then they sank into their own thoughts.

  Salme thought that Paavo was now Paavo again. Or at least almost. Something in him had been knocked into a new position, but that wasn’t any wonder. We don’t end up at the finish line the same as we were when we left. Once when we drove the Simca over a pothole, afterward all of the things in the boot were in a completely different order from before we hit the hole. How is that for a metaphor? But the truth is that life doesn’t spare anyone, not even the ones that think it does and use plastic surgery to try to add on more years. The reaper man doesn’t show you your wrinkles in a mirror—he cuts us all down like grass with his long, curved knife. But what am I going on about? It is clearly a sign of recovery that Paavo has started asking about things that aren’t his business. Isn’t the main thing that Helena gets treatment? It’s all the same where the money came from for it. We’ve been like sheep before the law and the taxman and everything for decades. It isn’t anyone’s business how I send my daughter to that place by the seashore to get patched up.

  Paavo was thinking that Salme was beautiful, even though she did try to get into the top cupboard. We’re private people here, even though we live together. I have always given Salme space to do her own things, and she has always given me the same bit of freedom. So for the moment, the top cupboard will stay shut. I took this part of him, because he took everything from my daughter. And I will go to the grave with this, and if God shows up on the scene unexpectedly and actually exists, I’ll tell him just how things are. And if he sees fit to stone me and throw me over on the hot steam side, I’ll say to him that I had worse times down there on Earth than you could ever create here in Hell! And if God turns out to be a reasonable type, he will overlook the whole thing and let me take the freezer container along with me as a memento.

  Then Paavo and Salme looked at each other and smiled a little.

  THE CONSUMER

  My name is Salme Sinikka Malmikunnas, and everything I have said has been twisted. It doesn’t go word for word the way I told it, just in the same general direction. This was clear to me from the moment I talked with the author the first time.

  I have now read this whole stack of paper the author sent the week before last. I had to explain to Paavo that a woman from the raanu group had sent a little larger pile of patterns all at once.

  I had to set the papers aside when that part came.

  I guessed that he wouldn’t keep his word not to write about it.

  I sold him life, not death.

  I couldn’t stand to read it with these eyes.

  But now that it has been a while since I read it, I don’t think of the author with anger. I can’t afford feelings that big anymore—I don’t have the energy for them. Everyone does his work as well as he can and sells it on. The consumer is the one who makes the final decision with his wallet, whether he will pay for the truth or contortions of it.

  That’s the trick if he wants to get a book out of these papers and then get the book sold. If a book does come out of all this, he will have to go to the book fair. We did make an agreement that he won’t tell the idea behind the book or the story of where it came from, but instead just say like all the others that it all came from his own head and it is all a lie from start to finish.

  I don’t envy this profession either. We poor humans have to try to sell everything. Helena has said some ugly words about this now that she’s in better shape. She said that people have to submit to everything here in this world. That you have to sell the work of your hands, your ass, your speech, your knowledge and your skills. And Finns have even learned how to sell silence. We won’t be running out of that anytime soon. The soughing forests will sooner disappear. She said that somewhere between Kuopio and Iisalmi there was a sort of silence center where you can pay to sit on a bed with your mouth closed. As a former shopkeeper I didn’t comment or start poking fun at the silence entrepreneurs, especially since I’ve paid at least the recommended retail price for muteness here in my very own home.

  Given the circumstances, things are going well for us. Especially if you compare it to the state we were in at the beginning when I first met the author. “It pays to compare,” Alfred Supinen always said. If Alfred’s finances were in a slump, he said, “What’s this compared to the position of the Romanian Gypsies?”

  Evil has now received its reward, as we read in the paper, but in my opinion it was paid to that man in an unreasonably large lump sum. Just reading about it was hard enough, at least for me. Paavo was just in a good mood and said that everyone had to start by learning his letters. In the paper it said that if they had recovered the tongue immediately and the surgeons had connected it back up to the stump, the man would have been able to speak to the end of his days almost flawlessly. But since the part wasn’t returned, his speech will remain a sort of gurgling forever, even though you will be able to make out some of it. I will say that it must have taken rough men to be able to go and do a job like that.

  I was able to use the seven thousand euros to buy Helena such good treatment that a completely different person walked out of the doors of the hospital than went in. I didn’t get my whole first-born back, but my first-born nonetheless. The money went to a good cause. And hopefully everything I told the author did too.

  KARI HOTAKAINEN was born in 1957 in Pori, Finland. His breakthrough came in 1997 when he was nominated for the Finlandia Prize, which he later won in 2002. Hotakainen has also written children’s plays, radio dramas, newspaper columns and television scripts.

  OWEN F. WITESMAN’S translations from Finnish include Juhani Aho’s classic The Railroad, Petri Tamminen’s Hiding Places, Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise (co-translator) and several forthcoming crime novels and thrillers.