It Came from the North

by Carita Forsgren

  There was a torrent of laughter, then silence.

  “Oh well,” Sami said and emptied his wine glass in one swig. “Should us men go and get some fresh air?”

  “Why not,” Karri responded and started to think of matters to discuss. Work, women.

  Sami was probably not drunk enough in order to talk about the Thai whore who got sperm in her eye and asked for additional charge. That at least led to a proper conversation last time. Loyalty, guilt, the difference between men and women.

  Sami cut two Cohibas. Milla and Alisa started talking about their old teacher, whom Karri also remembered. He and Sami had been at the same school as their present wives, two years senior. Alisa and Milla had been best friends since upper elementary school. Karri and Sami had affirmed the existence of one another while at school, nothing more. They remained hopeless outsiders during these evening get-togethers, for which Karri was not too keen on driving all the way from Helsinki. The whole suburb had changed. It was beyond Karri how Milla and Sami could continue living amongst the ruins of their childhood.

  “No need for a coat,” said Sami and handed over a cigar.

  It was a dark night in August. Sami sat with a quilt over his shoulders, smoking his cigar and staring at the woods. The sound of the sea came from behind the trees. In the daylight it was visible amidst the fallen lime trees. Now, one could only hear the hissing of the surf, smell the scent of the ocean.

  “How’s things at work?” said Karri.

  Sami paused, inhaling the smoke. “Nothing much,” he replied. “Got sacked.” Karri gave a laugh, but Sami remained drunkenly serious. Some ash had fallen over the quilt.

  “Really?” asked Karri. Sami sucked on his cigar, until the fire end looked like a warning light, then he let the smoke rise up from his mouth.

  “Yep.”

  The silence was awkward. The wind was humming, as if a great wave was approaching from a distance. Next to them was a house, money was needed in order to keep it. A crumbling castle.

  “Are you sure?” asked Karri. Sami’s nose produced a cloud of grey smoke. “Yes, I’m sure.” Silence.

  “Oh shit. Does Milla know?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she—?”

  Sami shrugged his shoulders. “Laughed,” he said. “It’s always been like that, although she gets to go shopping in Shanghai every December.”

  Karri regretted the fact that he had asked about the job. Instead, they could have just listened to the sighing of the reeds and lazy waves, the darkness that was no more summer, not yet autumn. Now there was restlessness in the air. A need for consoling words.

  “The world’s nastiest weapon,” said Sami. “Women’s laughter.”

  He put his hand on his crotch. “Paralyzing.” Karri nodded. He looked at the darkness of the trees and thought of Sami on his way to work. A part of life in the past as well.

  When they returned inside, Milla looked over her shoulder with a routine smile. Her eyes were somewhere else.

  “Cigar men,” noted Alisa and started to giggle.

  Milla whispered something that made the ladies laugh with tears in their eyes.

  By dawn, Karri was too drunk. He was afraid he might say aloud that he was truly sorry. Sorry about the decaying castle, the excesses of life. And about what happened between him and Milla in the end of a night out last year, when Alisa had gone to bed and Sami had passed out on the couch. How could Karri have known that all Alisa wanted was to laugh at Sami. To paralyze.

  That night Sami had sat there all the time like a gorilla absorbed in thoughts. Or like a little boy fallen asleep in the backseat of a car, trusting that the parents knew where to go.

  “Did Milla tell you?” asked Karri as he searched his bag for his toothbrush. “That Sami got sacked?”

  Alisa sat near the mirror table of the guest room and rubbed her arms with lotion.

  “No.”

  She did not stop. The lotion made the skin on her arms shiny everywhere she touched.

  “Sami said that Milla thought it despicable.”

  Alisa sighed. “No, she didn’t. She was worried. For the kids’ sake.”

  “I’m also a little worried.”

  The lubricating hand stopped. “Don’t you worry about Milla,” said Alisa and looked at Karri in the mirror. Karri looked back and realized that they always talked

  about Milla this way. Through the mirror. Karri brushed his teeth and left the toilet unflushed, in order not to wake Milla and Sami’s kids. When he returned to the dark guest room, Alisa stood in the center of the room and stared outside the window, her shoulders crouched and her fingers crossed over her bosom.

  “There’s someone out there,” she said. Karri closed the door and looked at the window.

  “Where?”

  “Look. There’s someone standing out there.” Karri walked over and looked out at the dark yard.

  He could see only the reflection of himself and Alisa, the shapes of the shrubbery in the glow of the streetlights.

  “There’s nothing out there.”

  “Yes, there is.” Alisa stood next to him and pointed at the black tree trunk in the back of the yard. “Next to the ash. I saw it moving just now.” Karri got closer to the window. He could see the bumps that might be interpreted as human, if so desired.

  “You’re seeing things,” whispered Karri.

  “No, I’m bloody not. It moved.”

  “Some of Sami’s garden project. The wind moves it.” Karri kept his eyes on the black shapes, waited for a movement. “It’s not moving,” he said. Then it moved.

  “Look,” Alisa hissed and backed away from the window. The thing, which had just seemed like the outline of a tree, was now moving across the yard with jerking steps as if it was dragging something behind.

  “Goddamn,” muttered Karri and followed the movement of the shape until his forehead touched the cool glass of the window. The coolness passed through him, all the way to his fingertips. The shape disappeared somewhere behind the house.

  “Go tell Sami,” said Alisa and squeezed Karri’s shoulder.

  “Maybe it left.”

  “Just go.”

  Karri looked at the streetlights outside the yard. The black walls of concrete houses in the distance. A few lights were still on, like the flames of candles. The small, suburban tragedies, the plastic carpets coming apart at the seams and the dirt-yellow lights.

  “Or I will,” said Alisa.

  “All right.” Karri walked out of the guest room and closed the door behind him. He heard the door lock; Alisa making herself safe with her mirror and lotions. The darkness of the hallway made it impossible to move with determination. Karri felt about the white of the walls and tried to imagine the paintings in broad daylight. It was the same place where they had entered and kissed each other on the cheeks to show they were no longer kids, that they knew how adults would behave. Karri took the first step on the stairs and climbed with his hand on the rail. He could see the after-image of a loping figure in his mind and recalled the women’s laughter.

  As he reached the top of the stairs Karri stopped. There was a sound coming from the bedroom. A grunt, coughing. Milla’s voice.

  Karri looked around and saw someone sitting at the table. His skin tightened, belly turned into rock. The creature had been there the whole time. As if it was attached to a tree.

  “Howdy,” the voice uttered.

  Karri froze, too terrified to explain why he was creeping around and listening to Milla’s grunting.

  “Feel free to put the lights on.” Karri felt for the switch. The light’s yellow gleam revealed Sami like a lump of dough on the chair. Exhaustion and intoxication pressed his right eyelid down. The other eye stared at Karri.

  “There’s someone in the yard,” whispered Karri.

  Sami sighed heavily. “Sit yourself down,” he said. “Let’s drink ourselves silly.” Karri looked at the bedroom door, then Sami. His chin was moist from red wine. There were wine
stains on his shirt.

  “Really. There’s someone lurking around.”

  “Why don’t you sit down.” Karri let go of the stair rail and walked to the table.

  Sami started filling a glass before he even had time to sit down. It was Milla’s, but what did it matter anymore?

  “It’s probably some junkie from the flats,” said Karri. Sami gave a laugh. “You should get motion detectors or—”

  “The fucking Laughing Doll,” Sami interrupted. The silence that followed the words was rustling, like there was a fireball trapped inside it. “You wanna hear?” asked Sami.

  Karri was not sure. When he touched the glass of wine, there was a brief fragmentary recollection of Milla’s lips, her hand wandering under the table touching his knee.

  “It was no fucking Laughing Doll to begin with. And it wasn’t a psycho or anything . . . ”

  Sami waved his hand in the air. His fingers were numb.

  “It was a fucking weakling. They used to call it a Laughing Mask. That is what it was called originally.”

  Karri glanced at the bedroom door. He would be partly to blame, if Milla and the kids woke up.

  “It tried to be everybody’s pal, but nobody wanted to be with it. They sliced the tires of its bike and in the springtime they left it alone on an ice raft. Everyone was waving at it from the shore. But it just kept laughing.” Sami emptied the glass with one gulp and poured some more. “Then we decided to put an end to its laughing. We went to one of those deserted buildings on the shore and took the Laughing Mask with us. We told it that it wasn’t brave enough to go down to the cellar of one of those buildings, that people had got killed there. Of course it dared.”

  Karri tried to interrupt, but couldn’t get his mind off the figure moving outside. In his imagination, it ran to the woods, lifted into the air and flew over the fallen tree, touching the reeds.

  “We . . . ”

  Sami interrupted and stared in front of him. Karri stared at the rubbery skin of Sami’s face; underneath, the muscles were twitching. The reflexes of distant memories. “They bolted the basement door. They said that now you stay down there with the dead. Let’s see if you’ll keep laughing.”

  Sami drank some more, stirred the glass so that he could get the last sip.

  “It remained locked up the whole night,” he mumbled. “And the next day when they arrived, it had stopped laughing. After that it never did. People started to fear it. Respect.”

  Karri did not want to touch the wine glass anymore. On its surface the microbes of him and Milla intermingled. For a brief moment he was sure that Sami would realize it during some inebriated moment of sensory clarity. But he kept looking at his hand resting on the table like an alien being.

  “That’s the source of those legends, the fables old wives can’t shut up about. Blah, blah.”

  Karri fixated on Sami’s hand. The fractals of the red stains at the curve of his thumb. On the refrigerator door handle there was also a stain. And on the floor. The footprints leading from the bedroom. They would look dismal in the morning, when the sunlight entered through the wooden blind. Milla’s moan was again audible. Now it echoed at the walls longer. Karri felt a cold vibration in his spine.

  “Milla and . . . ” he began, but could not finish.

  “They won’t wake up,” said Sami and suddenly he sounded completely sober.

  Karri’s drunkenness was also gone. Just like that. He could see the kitchen, the yellow light and Sami’s hand in a stunning state of clarity. There was ringing in his ear canals like he was under water. The tingling of drowning, a warning signal. He slowly stood up from the chair. His hand searched for the wine glass. Like the hand of a blind man. The hand of someone used to darkness.

  Karri turned away slowly and walked down the stairs. Sami’s shadow did not follow. The stairs felt like they would give in any second.

  He opened the guest room door, forced Alisa to pack. He shook her by the shoulders when words did not help. They clattered with their bags to the back door, walked by the shrubbery, the ash, and the cherry tree to the gate, then to the car parked in the street. Alisa cried and threw accusations all the way, so that the sound of the reeds and the waves was inaudible.

  In the car Alisa banged against Karri’s shoulder and arm, which was pushed stiff against the wheel. They didn’t even say goodbye to the kids. Blah, blah.

  When Karri started the engine, he could see from the rearview mirror the crumbling castle and its only lit window. There, he could see a figure of a lonely man. When he squinted, he could see his shoulders shaking. Spasmodically, unnaturally, as if he was a mechanical toy in the circus. It was a mysterious movement. Perhaps he was crying, perhaps laughing.

  When Alisa was finally convinced that they had to leave, she called the police, screaming hysterically. Karri drove on. He pressed the gas pedal, looked at the rearview mirror, and thought that in the glow of the rear lights he could see someone following them. A figure behind the car, moving along the dashed line on the street. Lightly, determinedly, as if looking for an embrace. The weightless shadow of a boy woken up from the ruins of childhood.

  Delina

  Maarit Verronen

  Translated by Hildi Hawkins

  Maarit Verronen has been publishing since the 1980s and writing full time since 1994; she is the author of novels, short stories, collections, and travel books, and has received many literary awards and nominations. In 2011, her book Bright Clear (Kirkkaan selkeää) won the Tähtivaeltaja Award for best science fiction novel published in Finnish. In “Delina,” a traveler returns to a place visited in his youth, where he encounters a woman he once thought he knew . . .

  The stranger met Delina at a development organization’s work camp, but Delina was not a volunteer. Delina lived in the country permanently.

  The stranger did not spend very much time in Delina’s company. His evenings were spent with fellow volunteers in the village cafe, where Delina’s parents did not allow her to go. During the day, both of them worked in their separate ways: Delina at home and the stranger in the work camp’s fields.

  The stranger did, however, get to know the girl well enough to hear that she was in love with a soldier called Zmiri from the nearest garrison. This soldier was arrested once when he and his comrades drunkenly molested volunteers—but Delina knew nothing of the case.

  Once the stranger went on a trip to the mountains with Delina and her friends. There, on the shore of a beautiful little lake, Delina asked the stranger to find her a place at a foreign university. He promised to do his best, but warned her that he could probably not be of very much help.

  In reality, the stranger did nothing. He was, after all, not so very interested in development work; he had joined the camp above all to have fun a long way from home. And he did not wish to become anyone’s personal guardian. That is, after all, what he would have become if Delina had moved to a country where she knew no one but him.

  The stranger wrote to Delina twice, but to his relief he received no answer to his second letter. And so contact was broken.

  When, twenty years later, the stranger returned, now as a reporter on a newsgathering trip, he was shocked. He was overcome by an unpleasant feeling. At first sight, Delina’s village had not changed at all.

  On closer inspection, the better-kept houses in the village looked a little more dilapidated than before, and some of the less well-kept shacks were new. In any case, the village was a sad exception in comparison with what the stranger had seen in the other parts of the country. The country had at last begun to prosper, but apparently in some unfortunate areas a better future was still awaited.

  The stranger remembered the right turnings and the right house. As he walked along the road and stepped into the garden, he was stared at almost as curiously as the volunteers had once been stared at, but now the neighbor’s children came to beg money and chewing gum, and an old woman asked across the fence whether he would like to live in her house cheaply.

/>   In response to the stranger’s knock, the door was opened by a large-boned, middle-aged woman. She was wearing a droopy frock, a stained apron, nylon stockings with holes in them, and trodden-down slippers. Her dark, curly hair was struggling to break free of an elastic band.

  “Delina?” the stranger asked, hesitantly.

  The woman looked at him for a second with empty eyes, as if the name said nothing to her. Then she nodded, and the relieved expression that had risen on the stranger’s face died away.

  The stranger said his name and asked whether Delina still remembered him. The woman looked at him uncertainly, and for a moment it looked as if she was about to shake her head. In the end, however, she left the question unanswered, and asked the stranger to come in.

  They asked after each other’s families, and Delina wanted to know how long the stranger was saying, where he lived and whether he was on holiday or perhaps on a business trip. He heard that Delina had three children and that her husband had a job in the capital.

  “What is your husband’s name?” the stranger asked.

  “Arun,” Delina said.

  “You didn’t marry Zmiri, then?”

  An astonished expression appeared on Delina’s face: “Zmiri? What Zmiri?”

  The stranger did not ask any more questions. He changed the subject and tried to keep up the conversation. Delina looked as if she was listening, but on closer inspection—particularly if the stranger made a reference to something he had said earlier—it occasionally became obvious that she had not heard a word.

  At one point she herself seemed to realize how absent-minded her behavior was. She said that in her village nothing much happened and no one was really interested in much beyond how to survive from one day to the next. Even with tourists, no one chatted so much as before; they just sold things to foreigners. Delina also said that she no longer read books or newspapers; the television was now her source of information.

  Delina did not ask the stranger to stay that night: the house was so full of visiting relatives that there was no room that could be reserved as hotel accommodation. He understood that it would be best to leave after his cup of coffee.