When Time Runs Out

by Elina Hirvonen

  The air is heavy with thunder, but as I walk towards home my steps are light. Not much time to go now. Reading week, the exams, the certificate which will allow me later to apply to university here or elsewhere, to find new people and new ideas, a new place for myself. One last effort, and I will be free.

  At my front door the smell greets me like a quilt thrown in my face. I know immediately where it is coming from. Even before I go into my bedroom, still wearing my shoes, my backpack on my back and my T-shirt, damp with rain, like a cold bandage against my stomach, I know where it is coming from. Even before I see my mother on the bedspread wearing a lace nightdress and dramatic make-up (who did she think would find her?), I know where it is coming from. I also know, before I lift the receiver, that the phone bill has not been paid. I open the window, brush my tousled hair, rinse the faint traces of tears from my eyes and ring the neighbours’ doorbells, first our floor and then the next, and when the old man on the top floor finally opens his door, I explain the situation calmly and without my voice trembling; I am equally steady when I explain it to the emergency operator and to the doctor in the ambulance that takes my mother to the hospital.

  When my home is finally empty, I wash the bedspread and the sheets, pack pencils, rubbers, rulers and food for the next day, carry my mattress out to the balcony because I cannot sleep inside and there are too many people at the squat, gaze at the stars and try to get to sleep. The following day I go to school in good time, put on my headphones in the language class and concentrate on listening to the Swedish oral test. When, in the middle of the exam, I begin to feel faint, the invigilator takes me out into the corridor and asks me how I am feeling. ‘Fine,’ I reply, smiling so radiantly, so sincerely and for such a long time that there is no way she can ask more.

  I open my eyes.

  ‘I can,’ I say to the policewoman. ‘Go ahead.’

  Aslak walks closer to the camera. The lens distorts his face. For a moment he comes so close that his eyes look too far apart, his mouth too wide and thin. He takes a step backwards, brushes his hair from his eyes, takes from his pocket with a dramatic gesture a letter written on transparent paper and begins.

  ‘To the world,’ he reads. ‘ “Do you believe that a good intention sanctifies even war? I say to you: a good war sanctifies everything.” ’ Aslak pauses and looks straight at the camera. I grip the sides of the chair.

  ‘Thus proclaimed the philosopher Nietzsche almost 150 years ago. His words are repeated by those of us who have begun the war against humanity.’ Aslak pauses again. He has washed his hair and combed it back. The scars left by spots are visible on his forehead; his pale face is narrower than before.

  ‘Have you heard a cuckoo singing on the shore of a quiet lake? Have you skied in a snowy forest and seen the trees bending with the weight of snow? Have you seen a giraffe spreading its legs and bending its long neck to drink?’

  I press my hands against my chin. I think about my heart, its valves, its arteries and chambers, an organ the size of a clenched fist, pumping blood until it stops. ‘Do you know it? The beauty which is so pure that it is impossible for us to understand it. The beauty which is almost impossible to find because we are everywhere met by our own traces.’

  Aslak’s voice is trembling. As if he were moved by his own words.

  ‘In June this year the population of the globe exceeded eight billion. There are more people than ever before, even though we have long known that there are too many of us. We are a parasite which is trampling beneath it the living space of all other species. Homo consumericus, man, whose only goal in life is to consume and take pictures of itself consuming, has become a monster. It is necessary to destroy the monster.’

  Aslak raises his hands and places the tips of his fingers together, as if he were giving a political speech. He could just as well throw boiling water in my face.

  ‘As long ago as the end of the last millennium the philosopher Michel Serres demanded that we should make a contract with nature – at the risk of our own survival. We did not—’

  The image paused. I paused it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asks the policewoman.

  I shake my head. I rewind and listen again.

  ‘As long ago as the end of the last millennium the philosopher Michel Serres demanded that we should make a contract with nature – at the risk of our own survival. We did not make a contract. We multiplied and peopled the globe. We are a heavy slab that crushes everything else beneath it. We must yield.’

  The room in front of me becomes fragmented. I attempt to turn my head. It will not turn. The policewoman places her hand on mine.

  ‘Shall we pause it?’

  ‘No.’ I say that. My mouth functions. My hand can move again.

  ‘Until now, those people who have the most money have prospered.’ Aslak pauses. From the screen, he looks me straight in the eye. He has the face of a child.

  ‘The only equitable way of choosing who may live is chance. Do not choose your victims. Get weapons and kill those who cross your path. Do it quickly and effectively, avoiding unnecessary suffering. We are not cruel. We do not derive enjoyment from violence. We do not do this to cause destruction, but to save Planet Earth. We invite every responsible individual to join us. When time runs out, all that remains is a burden that no one can carry.’

  Aslak walks out of the picture. The camera shows an empty, ascetically tidy room. From somewhere comes music, gradually becoming louder: ‘Nobody Home’.

  29

  Aava

  Madam, is everything OK?’

  The guard has walked up behind me quietly. He is young, almost just a boy; the sleeves of his uniform are too short and a rusty Kalashnikov hangs from his shoulder. I set my porcelain cup down on the ground and smile at him.

  The man’s name is Bahdoon, he who keeps care of the clan. When Bahdoon is on evening shift, we talk from time to time. He has taught me some Somali and asked me to teach him English.

  ‘I want to follow the international news,’ Bahdoon explained, ‘so that I know what people are thinking elsewhere. I want to at least imagine that I have some connection to a world that is quite unlike this.’ In the evenings I have seen him standing by the wall, his rifle at his hip, looking at the mould-decorated wall as if he could see through it.

  I have learned Somali to be able to chat with the guards and the cooks and, on field trips, to be able to talk to the children who look at me as if I had come down to earth from a fairy tale. There may be perils in the villages, but when I work there, I generally feel at ease, able to be of at least some help to others. Here, I constantly feel uncomfortable. It is difficult to have natural conversations with local people when you live on a small island guarded by watchtowers and go to work wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet. Every encounter is charged with the unspoken knowledge that while we are in principle equal, as all people are in principle, nothing in our lives will even distantly resemble this.

  Now I want to run away. I wonder how to say so without insulting Bahdoon. He is looking at me as if my skin were transparent.

  ‘You look sad, sister.’

  I smile. A bone-hard, forced smile: I can do this well. I have always loathed crying in public. The fact that someone makes themselves the focus of a sad situation and demands that other people react to it. When I was younger, I looked down on my sixth-form classmates who sobbed that they were ugly and fat (and went from one boy to the next to hear that they were really thin and beautiful) and on my student friend who fainted during an exam after her boyfriend had left her and whose well-being was a general cause of concern long afterwards, as if heartbreak was something exceptional that happens only to extraordinary people. At that time Aslak kept to his room, taking medicines that made his fingers swell and his speech thick. My entire social life was based on hiding the pain associated with Aslak. It is for that reason that I hate crying in public. Public expressions of sorrow are possible only if the grief that gives rise to them is sufficient
ly insignificant and ordinary, something that can be told to everyone without any isolating shame.

  ‘Everything is just fine,’ I say. The corner of my hut is visible through the branches of the trees. The room is cold at night and hot by day, and all the sounds of the garden can be heard. But the doors and windows can be closed, the lights can be switched off and the covers can be pulled up; under the covers you can turn on the bright light of an e-reader. Bahdoon walks quietly beside me, the barrel of the rifle swaying against his hip. He hangs his head as if he need a pat; the neck that rises from beneath his shirt could belong to an old man.

  ‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘Is everything OK with you?’ Bahdoon looks at me as if he has been expecting the question for a long time.

  ‘Did you hear about the attack?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Al-Shabaab, the hotel. Thirty dead journalists.’

  ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’

  ‘My best childhood friend died in it.’

  Bahdoon stops so suddenly that I nearly bump into him. He looks fragile and delicate; the wind could blow him away.

  ‘I am terribly sorry.’

  Bahdoon rocks on his heels, fiddling with a dry blade of grass. His fingers are long and beautiful. I imagine what they would look like fingering a violin in a European concert hall, in warm light, in front of a perfumed audience dressed in rustling clothes.

  ‘Did he work in that hotel?’ I ask. I regret it immediately.

  ‘He killed the workers.’

  ‘Oh. I’m—’

  ‘He was a member of al-Shabaab.’

  ‘. . . sorry.’

  We walk past my quarters and continue to the other side of the yard. The noise from the bar, the chirping of crickets, the pounding of the waves and the gunshots from the town sound soft, as if someone had wrapped everything in gauze.

  ‘When we were children, we used play pirates and al-Shabaab fighters,’ Bahdoon says. ‘There were a lot of us – me, him, his brothers and the neighbours’ children.’ I imagined what the town must have been like then. How the smell of food cooked on charcoal would have mixed with the reek of burning car tyres and the voices of ibises, pigeons and storks with exploding car bombs and Kalashnikov shots.

  ‘At that time the whole country was full of the same game,’ says Bahdoon. For a moment he looks as if he is holding back tears.

  ‘It still is.’

  I thought about the thirteen-year-old boy playing war games, on his shoulder an old Russian rifle, in his trembling hand a grenade. The game is real for those whose rifles are sticks and whose grenades are stones, a game for those whose weapons really can kill.

  ‘I was always the leader,’ Bahdoon said. ‘He wanted to be a prisoner. He sat quietly with his head on his knees and his arms around his legs, and sometimes, when we fed him grasshoppers or made him crawl round the yard, he looked at us as if he’d just woken up from a dream.’

  My stomach aches. I see Aslak in the yard in a pale green skirt borrowed from me, fairy wings on his back, looking longingly at the sky as if he might catch a glimpse of the hand of God through the clouds.

  ‘He was so proud,’ Bahdoon says. For a moment I imagine that he sees the same picture: little Aslak in a fluttering tulle skirt, his gaze turned towards the darkening sky.

  ‘When he told us he had got into the istishhad.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The suicide brigade. Everyone wants to get into it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What else is there here?’ He wipes the corners of his eye rapidly, is silent for a moment before continuing. ‘You can be part of a group everyone’s afraid of. You can feel you’re doing something important. You can go to paradise.’

  A gunshot sounds, so close that both Bahdoon and I are startled. The branches of the bushes flutter; the birds take to their wings.

  ‘He asked me to join too. He hated it that I worked for you.’

  ‘Foreigners?’

  ‘Yes. According to him, the only acceptable way of having contact with foreigners was to kill them. I mean . . . you.’

  The Kalashnikov rests against Bahdoon’s narrow hips as casually as a handbag. He notices what I am looking at and smiles a little, for the first time in the entire conversation.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. I don’t agree with him.’

  ‘I’m not in the habit of being afraid,’ I say. Bahdoon’s eyes are gentle and his posture calm; for a moment I want to tell him everything. ‘Except for one thing,’ I say softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something bad is happening to my brother.’

  30

  The steps up to my quarters are still warm from the sun. Bahdoon sits as far away from me as I think is possible on the narrow staircase, his cheek against his hand and his long, slim legs crossed. I would like a beer, but for Bahdoon’s sake I make us some tea. He never speaks of religion, but I have seen him washing in the corner of the yard, bowing in prayer five times a day. The tea is sweet and pale with milk, crumbs of cinnamon on its surface. When I look for my cigarettes in their hiding place under the steps, Bahdoon, to my surprise, asks if he can have one.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  The tip of Bahdoon’s cigarette glows like a firefly in the darkness; the smoke curling up before his face recalls black-and-white movies and old-fashioned theatres, high ceilings and heavy curtains in front of the screen. In Europe cigarettes are rarely sold at all; here, more than ever. Beside the bomb-ravaged streets rise buildings painted with the logos of tobacco companies; after the bombings they are always the first to be repaired.

  I look for news. I try to get hold of Mum, Dad or Aslak. Time passes. The internet is down. This is one of the few places in the world where it is still possible to be isolated for a long time.

  Bahdoon’s posture is relaxed and his breathing calm. My cheeks are warm and my throat dry. I seek the right words to keep the conversation going, to be interested and polite, not too intrusive, to get Bahdoon to stay and time to pass, to keep him with me until something becomes clear.

  ‘Why did your friend do it?’ Wrong question. Hot ash falls onto Bahdoon’s thigh. To his eyes I must be incomprehensibly old, unconscionably powerful.

  ‘That is, if you don’t mind talking about him?’ I continue cautiously, apologetically. I breathe smoke into my lungs, coughing like I did as a twelve-year-old when, with Aslak, I smoked my first and for a long time my last cigarette. In my circle of friends smoking has always been embarrassing, along with getting drunk and casual sex. My school friends were, at fifteen, already like young women, behaving with restraint and dressing in fine clothes, wanting to get married, to have children and to work in business and knowing where to get a stylish rug and the right kind of curtains. For a little while I tried to be like them, to learn the smile deemed appropriate for a woman, the kind that my mother would never learn. When I left, I also wanted to escape from my friends, weekend brunches and the charmingly lit photographs they took of themselves and of me.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Bahdoon asks, draining his glass of tea quickly. Everything I offer is probably luxurious to him.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I say, and go inside. I slice watermelon and mango onto a tray, setting nuts and chocolate brought from Finland down in cups beside the fruit. I turn back and take two bottles of Coca-Cola from the fridge, the old-fashioned, feminine bottles; outside, Bahdoon’s eyes are riveted on them as if they were treasure. In the villages the chiefs always offer three drinks: warm Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta in narrow glass bottles that you no longer see elsewhere. In some villages the wells have dried up, but there is always lemonade for visitors. I am certain that on the day when life ends on Earth, the last thing left will be a bottle of Coca-Cola, and that the sticky, dark-brown liquid will give rise to new life.

  ‘Everything you want to tell me,’ I say, opening the bottles. ‘About the two of yo
u. Him. The suicide brigade.’

  ‘Why?’ Bahdoon asks, in his voice a metallic tone of doubt. In this country people talk about fear in the same way as Finns discuss the weather. You always have to be looking around you: every empty bottle may explode, anyone can be different from who he says he is, even a small mistake can be fatal. Football and death, news and famine, weddings, hide-and-seek and street bombs belong to the same texture of everyday life whose weight I notice only when I leave, when the plane takes off and lands somewhere where constant caution makes people laugh.

  I don’t want to scare Bahdoon. It would be dishonest to imagine that we are just chatting here, two equal people. I do not wish to misuse the power that I unavoidably have. I want him to be as comfortable as possible in my presence.

  ‘I know what it’s like to love someone who disappears,’ I say. I have never said this to anyone else.

  He nods.

  ‘He was the best friend I have ever had. Even though he, like you say, disappeared. And did it, that awful thing. I can’t talk about him to anyone any more. When I think about him, I always see the face of a child.’

  ‘I have a brother; he disappeared too. I love him. But I don’t talk to anyone about him. At school he was a loner. And I avoided him too.’ I close my eyes and see the face of the small, shy Aslak. ‘Did you know that in some countries they torture people by tying their hands and feet to four different horses and making the horses run in different directions?’

  Bahdoon looks at me in astonishment.

  ‘I think they do that here too,’ he says.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I just meant that all of it . . . I felt that I was being torn to shreds. I did everything to be the right sort of person, to fit in with the group. And at the same time there was Aslak, my little brother, who was more important than anyone, and it was him I pushed away.’