When Time Runs Out

by Elina Hirvonen

  There was something enticingly threatening about her words.

  ‘What are you planning? he asked, feeling in his belly the buzzing of small flies.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  ‘It’s about the only thing I can do.’

  ‘I like you.’

  His finger paused above the keyboard. His breathing stopped. The fly crawling up the wall, the curtain fluttering in the breeze, the tram going by beneath the window, for a moment all of them stopped. He looked at his unmade bed, the dust in the corners of the room, the pale skin of his hand, the coffee stain on his trouser leg. He was alive and awake and that enchanting girl had said she liked him.

  This is enough, he thought. Whatever happens, I have experienced this moment. Life is not pointless.

  A sob rising to his throat made his breathing heavy; he wanted to write what he felt to the girl, how all-consumingly important her words were to him, but he realised that he could not do so, that it would reveal him completely, everything sad and pitiable about him, so he wrote quickly: ‘Same here.’

  Saharaflower told him about her family. Her father had died in battle against the country’s former dictator and her brother in the civil war that had continued for more than a generation.

  ‘People here have been waiting for something big ever since we got rid of G. The only big thing we got was massive chaos.’

  ‘What’s the cause of that?’

  ‘Everything. Lust for power. Despair. Water. No one remembers anything else any more.’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Drought. The groundwater has all been pumped away.’

  ‘That’s bad.’

  ‘But not a surprise.’

  ‘They never are.’

  ‘Do you think what I think?’

  ‘?’

  ‘That everything has to change.’

  ‘Of course. But how can it happen?’

  ‘People must be awakened.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With weapons.’

  The buzzing flies in his belly turned into galloping horses. He had not been thinking of anything in particular. His mind had been filled with images of himself and Saharaflower hand in hand on the world’s railways, sleeping outside beside a Finnish lake and in a tent in the Libyan Desert, organising demonstrations and living a nomadic life with plenty of lovemaking and talking, but nothing like ordinary life, family or money worries. In these images Saharaflower was the girl he had dreamed about since he was a child, a soulmate like a spirit being who would not demand anything and whose presence would create a place in the world for him too, a space in which he could look around him instead of staring in horror at his own violently detached and imperfect self.

  As a child and a young man, images like these had been his refuge. When he had stood at break time beside the school wall wishing he could merge with the rough surface of the bricks, he had told himself a story about himself in unfamiliar countries with a girl, a soft-skinned, angel-like creature, who would grasp his hand and take him away from the gazes of other people. When, as he grew up, his body became awkward and smelled of medicines and when his future changed from an agonisingly endless place into a closed space, the power of the story vanished. There was only one reality, the joyless world in which he walked with the heavy steps of an outsider without the slightest interest in life, who had either to dare to put an end to himself or to continue to the end.

  Now Saharaflower’s bright eyes and sharp words returned the possibility of an alternative world to his mind with such force that it felt as if she were grabbing and shoving him towards the unknown with her slim, strong hand. He was ready to follow her anywhere; to do whatever it occurred to her to ask him.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he wrote, his fingertips flickering flames. ‘I want to hear everything!’

  ‘My cousin found two hundred bodies in the desert yesterday,’ the girl wrote. ‘Young men, women and children, a few babies bound to their mothers’ backs. They had been lying in the sun for so long that they smelled. Some of them were almost completely covered in sand.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘It happens all the time. Hundreds of bodies are found in the desert or at the bottom of the sea. Before, everyone was horrified, but now no one takes any notice. It’s enough that we ourselves survive. Do they end up on the news in your country?’

  ‘The European refugees do.’

  ‘The Africans don’t?’

  ‘Sometimes. If there’s something special, a lot of children or something.’

  ‘Well, of course. Guess what we think here?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The same as there.’

  ‘In other words?’

  ‘That Africans don’t matter. That they’re retarded idiots and that all they know how to do is reproduce.’

  ‘But you are Africans.’

  ‘If you say that here you will have your throat cut.’

  ‘That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.’

  ‘There’s no unrest there?’

  ‘Depends how you look at it. A bit of a spat in Greece and Spain. A few little incidents here, a few spats between Nazis and anarchists and some shootings.’

  ‘And people who weren’t there carry on as if nothing has happened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And from time to time there is some demonstration or civil action?’

  ‘Or performance. A while ago there was an environmentalist street-theatre performance.’

  ‘Street theatre?’

  ‘A group of actors went round the streets of Helsinki dressed as Africans who had fled the drought.’

  ‘And everyone realised that this is a really terrible thing and something has to be done?’

  ‘Naturally. Sometimes of course there are attempts at something else. There are sit-ins at the airport and coal-fired power stations. A couple of politicians have been killed. And a little while ago the boss of an oil company was killed.’

  ‘Do those things work?’

  ‘No. People concentrate on grieving. And begin to go on about freedom, resistance to terrorism, how we won’t be bullied. That shit.’

  ‘Would you be prepared to do something bigger?

  I would, he wanted to say. I would be ready to blow up the whole world if you asked me to. But he knew he should not sound enthusiastic. He had learned this from observing boys who had succeeded in getting close to girls. You can’t be enthusiastic. You have to be cool.

  ‘Depends what the aim is. Like I said yesterday, violence is the strongest political tool. It can only be used if your aims are such that they can be achieved by violence. Your aims have to be justified, and violence the only, or at least the most effective, way of achieving them. But what is justified is, of course, endlessly debatable. So in the end the decision is always with the perpetrator of violence.’

  ‘I knew you would understand.’

  Through the night they pondered the possibilities of violence. What could you achieve by killing as many well-off people as possible? They debated this theoret-ically and intellectually, as if they were talking about politics or economics. Nevertheless typing made his forehead sweat. He tried to imagine what it would feel like to see people falling and dying on the street, what it would feel like to do something like that. What it would feel like to do something like that together and at the same time as this unknown and amazingly familiar girl, what it would be like to prepare for the right moment alone and know that on the other side of the world the girl would be preparing for her own act at the same time. What that kind of connection with another person would be like.

  The darkness of night deepened on the other side of the window. He had left the curtains open and now he saw his reflection in the glass, his slack posture and the body which could be beautiful if it were not covered in pale, lifeless skin, the result of endlessly changing medication and years in which he had built in the darkened room a nest which he did not wish to leave. He drew the curtains and covere
d all the reflective surfaces in the flat; the horrible ruin of his body should not be revealed, should not reveal him even to himself.

  ‘I don’t approve of the idea that killing should be some kind of statement. We need to have a concrete aim.’

  ‘The culling of the human race.’

  ‘?’

  ‘We need to kill so many people that what we’ve done is visible and tangible. Nothing can continue as before.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ll recruit enough people. This needs to happen at the same time all over the world. It needs to be a kind of . . . global genocide. We need to start a movement that will continue after us. The aim is the culling of the human race until man can live in harmony with nature.’

  39

  Now he is a little boy who wants to sit on someone’s lap. His hand is clenched around the butt of the rifle; the cold chews at his bones and hunger at his belly. He longs for food so much that it hurts; something to warm his mouth and fill his stomach, something that tastes familiar.

  ‘Do you want something?’ asks the policeman sitting in the car below in a practised, calm voice.

  ‘Could I have some food?’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘I’m terribly hungry.’

  ‘If you put your weapon down.’

  He releases his grip on the rifle again. Relief. The responsibility no longer rests with him. He presses his hand against his head, which is heavier than before; his whole body is heavy, a sodden sack, impossible to lift.

  ‘Good. There’s no need to panic,’ the man below continues, and his voice is so ordinary and warm that he would like to climb down right now, to put his gun down and sit in the warm car next to the friendly policeman, to look at the empty city and talk about all sorts of things, as if there were endless time and no one had any need to panic.

  ‘What would you like to eat?’

  ‘Anything, as long as there’s no meat.’

  ‘Are you a vegetarian?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t accept that animals should be reduced to products.’

  ‘You value animals?’

  ‘I don’t value anything.’

  ‘Why, then?’

  ‘Animals have an intrinsic value. Their value does not depend on what I or you think of them. Animals are living, sentient beings. It is sick for an intelligent, sentient being to be made into some kind of thinner-than-thin sliced ham.’

  ‘What about people?’

  ‘Are you trying to be clever?’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You’re going to ask how I can think that animals have an intrinsic value but people don’t. Or if people have intrinsic value, how can I want to shoot them.’

  ‘Yes, I probably did think of asking that. Could you tell me what it is you do think?’

  ‘I think that all living beings have an intrinsic value. But the well-off elite that holds economic and cultural power at the moment has, through its own actions, called its own intrinsic value into question.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘In just the same way as one can believe that individual freedom does not confer the right to limit the freedom of others, one can believe that the intrinsic value of living beings does not confer the right to exploit the value of other beings.’

  ‘Do you mean the exploitation of animals by humans?’

  ‘Not only that. I mean all the ways in which well-off people throughout the world exploit the possibility of a life of value not only of animals but of less well-off people and of the whole of creation.’

  ‘How do they, or I am sure we, do that?’

  ‘For a couple of generations we have indulged in a lifestyle in which it is normal both to treat animals as products and to consume natural resources at such a rate that it reduces the capacity of other people to live lives worthy of human beings all over the globe. Not to speak of the capacity of future generations to live here at all.’

  ‘A vegetarian pizza’s arrived,’ says the policeman. ‘Shall we go on talking once your stomach is full?’

  ‘Fine. Thanks.’

  ‘Will you come here to eat?’

  He would like to say yes. He would like to leave it all, to leave his weapon on the roof and climb down, to look at the city through the window of the police car and hope that the world will always stay behind the glass running with raindrops.

  ‘I can’t . . .’ he begins, and he can also see Saharaflower standing on the roof of her white-painted town, on a narrow ridge where you fall if you put a foot wrong and where, decades ago, only women were allowed. He sees Saharaflower, cool and confident, a scarf on her head and the diamond-decorated sunglasses shading her eyes, in the crosshairs of her Russian-made rifle, which has seen many civil wars, a bus from which Italian tourists are alighting.

  ‘Could I have it here?’

  40

  Aava

  Darling, are you OK?’

  I am sitting on the steps, my face against my knees, my arms around my legs. Gerard crouches in front of me. His breath smells of beer and marijuana and in his voice is the trace of an evening of impassioned conversations and black humour appreciated only by people living in the same situation. Behind Gerard the talk still bubbles.

  ‘Come with us, G.?’ Eva’s voice asks from the midst of the darkness.

  ‘Go on,’ I whisper, my face still against my legs. ‘As long as you get them away from me!’

  Gerard strokes my arms. His hands are dry and warm.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Go away. Please leave me alone.’

  ‘I’m staying here,’ Gerard says to the people standing a small distance away. ‘Thanks for the company, it was a good evening.’

  ‘Is there something wrong with Aava?’ asks Eva.

  ‘Just not feeling too good.’

  ‘I hope no one she knows is—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I do anything?’

  ‘Good night.’

  As their footsteps recede, Gerard strokes my neck and my back with strong caresses.

  ‘You go too,’ I whisper. ‘Please go.’

  Gerard continues with his caresses as if he has not heard me. He sits on the steps behind me and takes me in his arms with a force he has not used before.

  Gerard takes me by the hand, pulls me up, takes me inside and turns on the light, pressing down on my shoulders to sit on the bed, takes the phone and reads the news and the message from Aslak that is visible beside it. He sits down next to me and does not ask anything, holding me close and caressing me more surely and decisively than before. I squeeze his wrist. At last my breathing resumes, the air flows through my nose to my diaphragm and out; my lungs, my belly, everything inside fills with air, grows lighter and returns to its correct place. Warm tears flow down my cheeks. Quietly, I stroke Gerard’s hand.

  ‘Let me be alone tonight,’ I say again.

  ‘I won’t.’

  41

  Laura

  He was, or is, my favourite philosopher.’

  ‘Nietzsche?’

  ‘No. Serres. The one who he . . . who Aslak refers to in his video.’

  The police officers are sitting opposite me. The wounds in my hands burn; I wrap new cold towels around them and return to the table. I do not want anything to change. As long as the police are here, as long as their tape recorder is on the table, as long as their dark-blue uniforms make the whole room darker, I will be all right.

  ‘How much do you know about your son’s ideology?’

  I press my face into my hands for a second. The cold towels cool my eyes and my forehead. In my lectures Aslak’s face was always serious, his posture more relaxed than elsewhere, as if he had found himself in the right place for a moment. He came orienteering with me in the forest, and we slept in the tent and looked at the stars in the evenings. In the forest we were silent for long periods together; it was a light and easy silence, and we walked at the same pace close to each ot
her.

  ‘At one point, while he was a schoolboy, he was very interested in what I did.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I work for an environmental organisation. I specialise in climate politics.’

  The police officers glance quickly at each other.

  ‘The things he talked about in the video. Are they familiar to you too?’

  The ice melts at the bottom of my stomach.

  ‘I have never believed in violence.’ My voice breaks. Of course. I am being accused. Every single moment, from this moment on, for the rest of my life, I will blame myself for what my son is doing now.

  ‘I have always opposed violence. That is something I wanted to teach my children too. That violence can never, in any circumstances, be the solution.’

  Almost twenty years ago a Norwegian man killed dozens of young people on an island where they had gathered to talk about politics.

  ‘It was a political, rational act. Without question. It was unexpected, but perhaps not unexpected after all,’ said the man’s mother later. I read the book about the man’s life as soon as it was published and was upset by it in a way I could not share with anyone. I thought about his mother – a woman who had died of cancer by the time the book appeared; the girl who had grown up in a poverty-stricken home fleeing her brother’s blows and her sick mother, who hated her daughter. I had dreams in which the face of the gunman’s mother turned into my face, his mother into a mother who walked behind me with her hand raised to strike me. Sometimes, as I got dressed to go to work, when I pulled on my neat clothes and the appearance of a confident person, I thought about that man’s mother. The woman who wore clothes she could not afford and carefully coiffed her hair, and who was desperate to learn to behave as if she were one of them.

  The policewoman takes a mouthful of water. She swallows and I can almost feel the cool water in her throat and her guts, behind her professional impassiveness a growing irritation as she waits for me to continue, the thoughts that force their way into her tired mind, the pansies growing in the garden, the smell of a sauna on the lake shore as it warms up, the nimble fingers of a random lover.