The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

by Sjón

  He was eight, understood a great deal. Had stopped asking about Papa, knew that was best. Don’t think about what he’s going through now. Above all, don’t think about what he’s thinking and feeling. Think instead about how adaptable children are, how they manage to adjust to every new situation. Remember how they’re able to find pleasure even in small, irrelevant things. Don’t forget for a moment that they can so easily grow attached to new people, that they forget. Don’t forget that they forget.

  Don’t think about the fact that seven years have passed, half his life. That he is now a difficult teenager, nearly an adult. All further contact impossible, grandparents unreachable, evacuated during the war, gone. Broken diplomatic relations during the war made all efforts impossible. But now that there’s peace, there’s hope. The Red Cross, new personnel at the legation, sooner than you might think.

  Yes. But Papa Gyllen is old, retired, so too are his contacts. The new people look at them with suspicion. You have to hurry slowly, arm yourself with patience. If the boy made it through the war, he’ll make it now, in peacetime. Become an independent person. Do what he likes. May not want to have anything to do with her. Entirely understandable. But there must be some way to find out where he is.

  But what if he is not? A helpless child dying alone in an epidemic hospital, frozen, starving, not even thinking “Mama”. Then she takes a pill. It’s quiet on the island, everyone is friendly, the women giving birth are brave and capable, she likes her work. It was a piece of luck that someone told her about this job. Nice that Mama and Papa, who’ve grown so old during the war, like it so much out here and rent a place every summer. Everything has worked out much better than she might have feared.

  She saved her own skin. An odd expression. It makes her think of skin and bones, which is all she is—tall and gaunt and stiff. Her skin and her bones are the crutches that keep her going, and it’s going well, it’s all going very well. The main thing is that you have something to keep you busy. Of course, she gets called out as a doctor sometimes, though she’s always careful to point out that she has no medical licence and no right to treat patients or make decisions that should only be taken by a licensed physician. Yes, yes, they say, we know, but, Doctor, if you would just please come, it’s impossible to get to the hospital in Åbo. Well, all right, she supposes she can come and have a look, maybe give some advice, a bit of help, as long as it’s understood that it’s unofficial, the way old women through the ages have helped those who sought them out.

  That’s an argument they understand. Yes! That’s the way it’s always been. The previous midwife, who’d never been to medical school, was a thousand times better than the nearest doctor! Suddenly she’s swamped with effusive stories about the previous midwife’s miraculous cures. And she herself? She does indeed answer their calls, and soon the stories about her own deeds begin to make the rounds. They are seldom difficult things—cuts and wounds that need stitches, broken bones that need to be set and splinted, simple remedies for pneumonia and catarrh, medicines for pain. She sends thrombosis to the mainland, and when she finds cancer, she persuades them to take the boat to Åbo. They have an operation, come home and eventually die. Good practical experience for Irina Gyllen, who plans to be a general practitioner. She gets daily practice in diagnostics, and the stories they tell in the villages confirm that she is always right.

  She treats a relatively rugged population, sheltered from epidemics by the islands’ winter isolation, surprisingly well nourished during the war years thanks to their healthy diet of Baltic herring, their mental state robust. When she sometimes commends them for eating sensibly and not coddling themselves, they are as pleased as punch.

  But they cannot understand why she has such a strong Russian accent and often has trouble finding the right Swedish words, although General Gyllen speaks fluent Finland Swedish and even her Russian-born mother manages well enough. Why does Russian cling to her speech although she wants to forget it? Why can’t she find her way back to the language that was her father’s native tongue? Why does she have such a frightful accent, even though she spoke Swedish as a child? Why do the Russian words come more quickly than the Swedish ones, even though she lives in a completely Swedish environment? As soon as she opens her mouth, Russian jumps to her lips and renders her monosyllabic and abrupt.

  Of course, people speculate. For example, that maybe she’s not Irina Gyllen at all but a completely different Russian, a famous spy smuggled into the country perhaps, or a defector, a female scientist that Russian agents are looking for, a person whose head is full of Russian state secrets! Someone who’s taken Irina Gyllen’s identity, with General Gyllen and his wife standing surety. Because does she really resemble them? No, not a bit. Papa Gyllen is a head shorter and stout, Mother Gyllen is taller and thinner, but not like her in any other way. There is definitely something fishy, because “Irina Gyllen” speaks Swedish like a Russian.

  Undeniably. But whoever she is, she has a good name on the islands, and whoever she is, the Bolsheviks have been outsmarted and taken it in the chops. Which is excellent and makes people proud and protective. Not that she can’t take care of herself, if it comes to that.

  Yes, she can and does take care of herself, and she works hard at being normal, although it doesn’t come naturally. Out here you’re supposed to be full of fun and jokes, and that’s the hardest part for her. The loss of her sense of humour is perhaps the most striking evidence of everything she has left behind. Large parts of her are missing as she moves among the people and tries to generate interest in the local chatter, at the moment all about the newly arrived pastor and his wife. Eyewitnesses have seen him at the Co-op and shaken hands, and the coastguard has seen her on Church Isle—a woman with get-up-and-go. They also mention that there is a one-year-old among the household goods and give her a meaningful look, warning her in good time that she may have another expectant mother to attend to. Now every last one of them will be going to church on Sunday to hear him and have a look at her. There will be several boats going from the village, and Dr Gyllen is heartily welcome to ride along!

  A difficult point, this. She who’s been saved from the godless Soviet Union is supposed to throw herself into the arms of the Church. Of course, she’s thankful to be in a country with freedom of religion. And if she really was a stranger who’d taken on Irina Gyllen’s identity, she would be a devout member of the congregation. But Irina Gyllen doesn’t believe in God. On the contrary, she sees what has happened to Russia as proof that a benign Divine power does not exist. Truth to tell, the very young Irina Gyllen was a freethinker even before the Revolution, and what has happened since has not given her any reason to reconsider her views.

  Religion is an opium of the people. The Örlanders go to church. Irina Gyllen takes a pill. Opium is what all of us need. So in essence, perhaps, she’s a friend of the church. Here, where she lives very visibly among the people, she will stand out less if she occasionally goes to church on the major holidays or, like now, when the new priest is going to be closely examined right down to his buttonholes. She’s going to have a lot to do with him, for the pastor is usually the chairman of the Public Health Association. And the priest’s little daughter will be coming to have her regular check-ups with her mother. So why not, yes, of course, she’ll go. There will be a lot of people, and she likes that better than when the pews are nearly empty and everyone looks around at her to see if she sings along and reads the general confession and how she reacts to passages that they imagine will be painful to her.

  “Yes, thank you,” she says. “I think if you have room in the boat, I’ll come.”

  Her Russian accent thickens whenever she’s conflicted. That doesn’t escape them, but they look at her sunnily and say there’s always room for the doctor, and she’s heartily welcome to ride along.

  TRANSLATED BY THOMAS TEAL

  “DON’T KILL ME, I BEG YOU. THIS IS MY TREE”

  HASSAN BLASIM

  HE WOKE UP AND, before
the last vestiges of the nightmare faded, made up his mind. He’d take him out to the forest and finish the matter off. Fifteen years ago, before he’d shot him, he’d heard him say, “Don’t kill me, I beg you. This is my tree.” Those words had stayed with him all that time and would maybe stay with him forever.

  Karima made breakfast for him. She had a black scarf on her head and eyes as still as a tree by night in spring. Absent-mindedly, the Tiger slowly drank water from his glass. He took his time setting the glass down on the table and then stared at it.

  “Now the water’s inside me,” he said, “and you’re empty, you fucking empty glass!”

  The Tiger spoke to everything around him in this way, as if he were acting in a play. These conversations took place internally. No one else heard them—or else the Tiger couldn’t have kept his job as a bus driver, his source of income and the way he helped himself forget. The Tiger would often glare at the television screen and, regardless of what was on, give it a piece of his mind: “You whore, selling and buying your mother’s arse!”

  Karima would go and sit in the living room with her fingers on the buttons of the remote control, switching channels as if she were playing a nonsensical tune on it. She settled on an Iraqi station: an announcer in garish make-up smiled as she introduced a traditional Iraqi song about maternal devotion. Karima shed a tear at the first Ah from the well-known rustic singer. The Tiger walked past and, without turning towards her, went into his room. He opened the wardrobe and put on his bus-driver’s uniform. From the shelf he pulled out a pistol wrapped in a piece of cloth and tucked it under his belt. He left without even saying goodbye to Karima, his wife and companion of twenty-four years. Many years ago he had given up looking into those eyes, which had enchanted him and wrenched his soul in his youth. In those days, the Tiger’s claws dripped with blood from the brutal water wars, and Karima’s radiant eyes suggested deep reserves of love.

  The Tiger worked the night shift, but today he left home early. His eyes were severe, as if he were on a serious mission. He went into the Hemingway café, ordered a coffee and sat down at the fruit machine. He played and won. He lost and played again. In the end he lost forty euros. He threw a contemptuous glance at the fruit machine and left the café. It had started to snow heavily. The Tiger gazed at the snow.

  “You know if you were in your right mind, you wouldn’t shit in the bowl you eat from,” he told it—in just the kind of tone you’d expect of a kid from a neighbourhood run by pill poppers and brutal police. The Tiger called it the “Cowards’ District”; he’d had the energy and callousness to commit any crime he wanted to without falling into the hands of the police. That’s why they had awarded the crown of “Tiger” to young Said Radwan. They gave him the title and cheered him off to the water wars.

  The Tiger headed to the public library and spent some time there before work. He seethed with anger as he looked for a new crime novel, and addressed the row of books on the shelf. “I know you’ve jumped out at me from nowhere, but I know how to fix you up good and proper, you fat, rotten bastard. You lousy novel,” he said.

  He pulled a novel from the shelf and sat down to read.

  His passion for crime stories had begun when he started living in Finland. That was before he joined the bus-driving course. The Tiger felt an overwhelming desire to write, but he didn’t dare, and deep down inside he still thought it impossible to turn the images of horror in his mind into words. Sometimes he would spit out the names of the writers on the covers of the books in one of his inner dialogues: “You geniuses, sisters of whores, authors of blood and violence everywhere in the Cowards’ District, in the water wars and on paper. My God, curse the father of the world you live in.” The Tiger left the library to smoke a cigarette outside. He watched the snow falling but didn’t talk to it. He went back to the reading room, set sail with the crime novel and drowned in it. The time soon passed. The Tiger’s skin suddenly shivered and he looked at his watch. He put the crime novel back in its place, borrowed another one and left.

  The Tiger’s fingers gripped the steering wheel tight as he drove the number 55 bus through Helsinki’s icy streets. A stream of images and memories ran like a trail of ants through his blood, down from his head and ended up, crowded and swarming, in the tips of his fingers. He looked at his face in the rear-view mirror. His skin was as dark as rye bread, flecked with a sparse white beard. Who would have thought the Tiger would ever become so frail and wizened?

  The bus halted at a stop close to the Opera House. He turned to the building and gave it a sigh: “Sing, sing. Farid al-Atrash used to sing, and say that life was beautiful if only we could understand it. Well, you can lick my arse.”

  The Tiger looked for his quarry, the fat man, in the mirror above his head. No sign of him among the passengers. The fat man hadn’t appeared for more than two days. But he’s bound to turn up at the last stop, the Tiger thought to himself as he fingered the pistol in his belt. He closed the bus doors and stepped on the gas, cutting a path though the continuing blizzard.

  It was more than a month ago now since this new passenger had started riding the bus: a fat man with Iraqi features. The Tiger had never managed to work out how he got on the bus. Passengers were supposed to board through the front door, but the fat man didn’t. The Tiger kept his eyes on his mirror—a constant vigil for the fat man sneaking on via the rear doors—which was a strain on his nerves. The fat man was like a ghost: he would appear on the bus and then disappear, until eventually they came face to face and the strange man revealed his identity.

  Apart from the fat man appearing on his bus, the Tiger’s life went on at the same depressing rhythm, as he struggled with his family and himself. For the last three years his son Mustafa, who was now twenty, hadn’t been in touch with him or his mother. The kid had rebelled early against the Tiger’s cruel treatment, and now sold marijuana and lived in a small flat with his Russian girlfriend.

  His wife Karima—“the woman with the stunning eyes”, as those around her used to call her in the old days—was lost in her own world, mentally and physically detached from her husband. The Tiger felt she was punishing him for the years of bitterness she’d spent with him. Karima spoke for hours on Skype with her brothers in Baghdad, sharing their joys and their sorrows. She would laugh and cry on Skype, yearning for the past and bemoaning her luck. There was nothing left of Karima, the young cheerful English teacher: with the old Finnish woman next door, her only friend, she’d go through photographs from when she was an elegant young woman with stunning eyes. When the old woman died, Karima’s pictures died too, because there were no longer eyes to grieve over the shadows of the past with her.

  The Tiger showed no interest in Karima’s isolation, because he too had turned in on himself, focusing on his bus, and his conversations and the fruit machine. His only remaining consolation after work was to meet up with a hard-drinking Moroccan friend in some bar. His friend would always talk about the difference between Finnish and French women, or between Spanish and Arab women. He knew the stories of all the regulars in the bar and gave each one a nickname. When the Moroccan had his own business to attend to, the Tiger would sit in front of the fruit machine and throw away his money.

  As far as the Tiger was concerned, it was obvious from the start that the strange man was targeting him with his appearances and disappearances on the bus, even before he managed to confront him about it. On that occasion the fat man was sitting in the back seats. The Tiger went up to him and told him in Finnish that this was the last stop. The fat man smiled and stared at the Tiger’s face.

  Switching to Arabic, the Tiger asked him, “Are you Iraqi?”

  The fat man took some chewing gum out of his pocket and began to chew as he answered: “Don’t kill me, I beg you. This is my tree.”

  The words struck a powerful chord in the Tiger’s mind. He stepped back a few paces, then took one confused step forward towards the man. They were the same words he’d heard years ago in the pomegranate o
rchard.

  “What is it you want?” the Tiger asked.

  “Nothing,” the fat man replied.

  The Tiger had a good look at the man’s face.

  “Did you used to work with the water gangs?” he asked.

  “No, but you killed me.”

  “I killed you! But you’re not dead!”

  “How are you so sure I’m not dead?”

  His wife Karima didn’t know what kind of work he’d been doing in those years. He’d excused his absences by saying he had to travel to other cities to buy and sell used cars. When the police got on his trail, the Tiger and his family fled to Iran, and from there to Turkey, where he applied to the United Nations for refugee status after forging some documents and claiming that he was an opponent of the dictatorial regime then in power. Finally, through the United Nations, he reached Finland.

  That night, the night of the pomegranate orchard, the Tiger was driving the car, accompanied by another killer. The mission was to go to a posh house in the pomegranate orchards on the outskirts of Baghdad. The owner of the house was a boss in a gang that controlled a small river that flowed in from a neighbouring country. The gang owned special tankers for carrying water, which they would sell in areas hit by drought. The government had lost control, overwhelmed by problems: rebels, groups of religious extremists and then the drought, which disrupted a bureaucracy that was already corrupt. The government started bartering oil for water from neighbouring countries. Most of the gangs that had been dealing in arms and counterfeit banknotes expanded their operations and started trading water. Some of them controlled wells and began to impose taxes on the farmers. The mission of the Tiger and his companion was clear: to eliminate everyone in the posh house in the pomegranate orchards. There was intense rivalry between the gangs to win control of the water market. The Tiger and his companion crept through the fence into the grounds of the posh house. They burst into the building, where there were five men sitting at a table, eating and talking. The Tiger and his companion killed everyone in the room. Then he rushed into the kitchen while his companion started looking for some documents in another room. The Tiger found a servant girl cowering in the corner of the kitchen. At the far side of the room, there was an open window. He realized that someone else had been in the kitchen and had escaped. He caught sight of the man’s shadow heading deep into the orchards. The Tiger killed the servant girl, jumped out of the window and started running after the man who had escaped. The Tiger was soon out of breath; he couldn’t see the man, but could hear him stepping on dry twigs somewhere. There wasn’t much time. After running some distance further in the pitch black, the Tiger pulled back some branches and found a man kneeling close to the base of a pomegranate tree. The Tiger couldn’t make out the man’s features. He heard him saying that it was his tree and begging him not to kill him. The Tiger aimed his pistol and fired several shots.