There was no answer. The footprints stopped where the desk now stood, bird droppings and a few flies on its worktop, the evening sun warming its side, the sound of the water and the rumble of a far away truck deep within its boards. It leant over, took a long, carefully considered step and stopped at the water’s edge. Was it thinking of going for a dip, of wading out into the water, or did it realise that it would sink straight away because it was heavy and unsealed? Nonetheless, it stopped at the water’s edge and did not take another step.
As dusk began to fall the desk was still standing put. It seemed to have frozen to the spot, as if it were listening to something. It was surrounded by the scuffing of running shoes, first coming closer then disappearing again, and the sniffing of roaming dogs. The dogs would always mark their territory before leaving. ‘Look, that’s a nice looking desk,’ exclaimed one female voice to another. The other answered – something.
Evening gradually darkened into night. Invisible laughter and the clinking of bottles, accompanied by loud swearing, could be heard approaching. A while later the voices burst through the hedgerow and on to the illuminated pathway along the shore.
‘Fucking hell! Check this out!’ A young man left the group and bounded down to the water’s edge. He leant his head to one side, raised his leg up high as if he were aiming at something in the sky, kicked the air in front of him, turned, gave a shout and kicked out behind him. There was a thump and the desk crashed into the water.
The splash had frightened the ducks snoozing in amongst the rushes and they quacked in annoyance for a moment. They shortly calmed down, the clink of bottles faded away and all that was left was the lapping of the water and the distant growl of cars speeding along.
But, surprised at the weight of the desk, the young man had stumbled and fallen into the water and got his trousers wet. Even after a few drinks things didn’t always go as smoothly as they did in films, and the guffaws of his friends were merciless. If only he had been able to, he would have taken his kick back, he thought as, shivering, he trudged home where a light still glowed in the window.
Blueberries
The Explorer
Jyrki Vainonen
Jyrki Vainonen (born 1963) is a writer, translator and teacher of creative writing. He has published fiction, radio plays and numerous articles. His work as a translator includes A Tale of a Tub, a selection of Irish pamphlets by Jonathan Swift and four anthologies of contemporary Irish poetry (including the works of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Thomas Kinsella). In Vainonen’s prose there is a vibrant sense of the strange and the dream-like, often resulting in decidedly kafkaesque visions, though surrealism is perhaps the most prominent feature of his writing. The short story ‘The Explorer’ is from the collection Tutkimusmatkailija ja muita tarinoita (‘The Explorer and other stories’, 1999), whilst ‘Blueberries’ is from the collection Luutarha (‘Bone Garden’, 2001).
Blueberries
August emptied his sixth pail of blueberries into a large vat by the sauna steps. Less than a kilometre from the house he had discovered a copse teeming with blueberries. Tucked in between the rocks surrounding the lake, the spot’s entrance was guarded by two enormous boulders, sitting blankly on the rock, staring ahead like the blind eyes of a giant frog. Blueberry bushes spread evenly across the ground like a thick carpet, and the stalks growing at the sunny southern end of the patch sagged under the weight of their indigo fruit. August had spent the last two days there on his haunches, and as soon as his pail was full he made his way back up to the cottage to empty the berries into the battered tin vat. After only a few pails the base of the vat had all but disappeared from view, and after the fourth load it was almost half full.
August put the sauna door on the latch, picked up his bucket and began to make his way back into the forest. Once he had reached the hill he sat down in the shadow of the giant boulders for a rest. He took off his frayed cap, which by now was rimmed with sweat, wiped his brow on his shirt sleeve and licked his dry lips. The calm of a summer’s afternoon lazed around him. Sunlight filtered through the trees, here and there revealing the cobwebs which laced the plants and trees. He looked out between the treetrunks, out across the open lake, the glint of the sun almost dazzling his eyes. Suddenly his thoughts turned to winter, to its short, cold, dark days. He could see the frozen, snow-covered lake in front of him and relished the thought of what those blueberries would taste like on winter mornings, how they would bring summer flooding back into his mouth. And what about the taste of the lingonberries, which he was to pick next? Or the mushrooms, which he would pick after the lingonberries? He cast his eyes over the abundant nature surrounding him, brimming with joy and thankful that it would provide for him amply through the winter, as it had done the previous four winters.
August put his cap back on and picked up his bucket by the handle. As he straightened his back he felt a nasty twinge between his shoulder blades. Perhaps he had overdone things the last couple of days … less crouching down than this would have been enough to make his muscles ache. The previous evening, after a hard day, he had collapsed exhausted on his bed, his back and arms aching, and fallen asleep like a stone dropped into a well.
He took a few steps and looked around. Once he had placed the bucket securely between two tussocks he carefully lowered himself on to his haunches. His back gave another twinge. August grimaced, grabbed a handful of blueberries from the nearest clump and popped them in his mouth. As he was chewing the berries he noticed that there was something odd about the tussock on which they grew. He bent down for a closer look: something white could be seen amongst the moss. His jaws stopped. He rested carefully on his left knee and poked at the earth around the root of the clump.
It took a moment before he realised that the shoot, from which he had just grabbed the blueberries in his mouth, was sprouting from the left eye socket of a skull buried in the ground.
August stuck his fingers down his throat. No matter how much he spluttered and coughed, despite the churning in his stomach and the sweat on his brow, he could not vomit; only the bitter taste of stomach acid rose to his mouth. He stood up, took a deep breath and instinctively looked around himself. He then knelt down on the tussock again and began frantically scraping away the rest of the moss streaming out through cracks in the bone. Through the skull’s right eye socket grew another blueberry sprig, and a whole clump of berries was protruding from its mouth, just beneath two brown upper teeth. August could feel his mouth drying out and the hill seemed suddenly to be spinning around him, but he clenched his teeth and carried on digging. After much exertion he had managed to excavate a yellowed human skeleton from amongst the moss and plants. Its ribs and thigh bones were shrouded in the tattered remains of clothes.
August lifted the skull with both hands and carefully raised it up to his eyes. Using his fingers he wiped away damp grains of sand stuck to the bone. Sunlight shone through the skull; in its cranium there was a hole the size of a bottle top, through which the blueberries had stretched their roots. He placed the skull on the ground and wiped his brow. From the shore he could hear the squawk of a sandpiper skimming the water and suddenly, for a fleeting moment, August could see himself from the bird’s perspective: lying on his back, his limbs outstretched in the shallow waters along the shore, his eyes and mouth wide open, and at regular intervals a blueberry appearing from his mouth like a blue air bubble.
When four years ago August had left his wife after fifteen years of childless marriage, resigned from his teaching position and moved to the old house in the middle of the forest, a cottage he had inherited from his uncle, his friends thought he had taken leave of his senses. The divorce had not come as a surprise, certainly not to August’s close friends, but how would a shot gun, some fishing net and a hectare of land be enough to keep alive a man who had spent his entire life in the city? And how would someone who had worked as a teacher for decades grow accustomed to life in the wilderness, kilometres away from his nearest neighbour? Would
the solitude not be too much?
August could no longer remember the anguish he had felt in the beginning, how he would sit on the steps up to the cottage for hours, battling with his feelings of guilt, surrounded by nothing but the calm of the wilderness. At first he had been unable to hear a thing, not even the silence, but gradually his ears had become a part of the forest and the surrounding nature had begun to speak to him. Even his guilt had eased over time. Nowadays he would spend his evenings sitting in a rocking chair in front of the tall old hearth, with his feet on a stool, staring at the blazing fire through the grate. With a single blow he had severed all ties with his former life; in four years, no one had set foot in the house but him, no friends or neighbours, no random passers-by. Not a single eye had observed August inside the house, watched him mending his fishing net, reading, washing the dishes or playing patience in the evenings by the light of an oil lamp. He had no siblings and both his parents were dead. August had never seen his father, who had died in the war only a few months before his son’s birth. August’s mother had often recounted how handsome his father had looked standing at the altar in his soldier’s uniform. At this, tears had always welled in her eyes. August soon learned which subjects he was not allowed to bring up: the funeral, his father’s body shot to pieces.
After his mother’s death August had looked for a place on the bookshelf for his parents’ wedding photograph. He had wanted to show his respect for the dark-eyed young man with the earnest expression, who had valiantly held his own against the enemy in the battle which was to be his last. At least this is what, one morning years later, in a grave and consolatory voice, an envoy from the army had informed his mother, with August clutching at her skirt.
August visited his parents’ grave a few times a month, as he drove his old van the ten kilometres into the village to stock up on food and other supplies. He would often exchange a few words with whoever happened to be passing by, so as not to become completely isolated, but he never enjoyed being around other people for more than a couple of hours at a time.
It was shortly after moving to the woods that August had begun collecting bones. He could not remember how or when this hobby had started or where his interest in bones had originated, and by now he had stopped thinking there was anything remotely odd about it.
The first bones in his collection he had found deep in the forest only a few weeks after the move. A dead, half decomposed hazelhen had been lying on the ground at the foot of a spruce tree. August had poked at the corpse with a stick until the last feathers and lumps of flesh had loosened from around the bones, then placed the skeleton in his backpack, which had fortunately contained a plastic carrier bag. Upon returning home he had sat cleaning the bones for hours by the light of the oil lamp, painstakingly trying not to break the most fragile bones, the bird’s needle-thin and breath-takingly beautiful wing bones. As dusk approached on that late summer’s evening he finally succeeded in piecing together the delicate lattice of bones. August could still remember the joy which had blazed inside him as he had looked at his creation. He had dabbed a small, gleaming drop of glue at some of the skeleton’s most important structural joins. He was particularly taken with the hazelhen’s delicate skull, which tapered out into a delicate beak in front of its eye sockets.
That very night he had cleared a space for the bone-bird on a wooden shelf in the cellar. Later on, as he had begun amassing more bones from the surrounding forest, he had put up more shelves, until finally they covered every wall in the cellar. Nowadays the cellar walls were lined from floor to ceiling in bones: entire skeletons and individual bones, the skulls of various animals, fragments of bone. There were birds, foxes, squirrels, hares; there were elk bones and bear bones, a deer’s torso; a long, flat bream.
Until now there had not been a single human bone to complete August’s collection. As he carried the bag full of the bones of the unknown deceased, August knew there would not be room in the cellar for such a large skeleton. He decided to take his discovery and put it in the woodshed. He cleared a space along the wall just inside the door and piled the bones like logs on top of some empty sacks of fertilizer. At first he had thought of leaving the skull on the top of the pile, but after running his fingers over it for a moment, he could not bring himself to leave it in the woodshed and decided to take it inside. He placed the skull on one of the bookshelves between Sophocles’ Oedipus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
All evening August thought about the body; who it had been, how they had died and why. Every now and then he glanced over at the skull and wondered whether he should report his discovery to the local police. He sat down in his armchair, lost deep in thought, and battled with his conscience. Finally he decided to keep quiet about it. It was clear that many years had passed since the death; there was probably no one even looking for the deceased any longer. What point was there in digging up the past?
After coming to this decision August calmed down considerably. He browsed through his library and found a dusty old book on bone discoveries. Judging by the size of the skull he concluded that the body must have belonged to a man. The skull’s empty eye sockets and its gaping mouth unnerved August, and he found himself wondering what colour eyes the unknown man had had, what kind of eyebrows, what sort of face. Several times through the course of the evening he felt a strange presence staring at his back and wondered whether he should have left the skull on top of the other bones in the woodshed after all. Perhaps even after death people still have the right to their own bones.
The following morning August continued with his blueberry picking, as he wanted something to take his mind off his discovery. Once he had filled the barrel, he packed the blueberries into containers and stacked them in flawless piles in the freezer. He left himself a bowlful of them to eat. The previous year August had bought three freezers at an auction: one for berries, one for mushrooms and one for other foodstuffs. He needed to keep a stock of food, because he did not own a tractor or a snow plough to keep the narrow lane leading up to the cottage clear. During the winter the only way he could get to the village shop was on skis.
Two days after discovering the skeleton August had once again sat down in his rocking chair, when he was suddenly consumed by the feeling that he was not alone in the house. He lowered his feet to the ground and listened, but could not hear a sound. He stood up, wandered around the room pretending to tidy things up, watered the flowers, walked from window to window. He finally plucked up the courage to inspect the entire house, checking upstairs, downstairs and in the cellar. Don’t be ridiculous, he chided himself as he climbed down the stairs to the cellar. No one has found their way out here to the back of beyond in years. Once in the cellar he lit an oil lamp and stood in the middle of the room. There in the lamp’s flickering light he looked over his collection and filled his lungs with the faint, lingering smell of the bones, a scent to which his nose had grown accustomed. How beautiful they were! He held his lamp up higher and walked from shelf to shelf, looking at them, touching them. He fingered the bones, held them in his hands, ran his fingers over their knots and indentations, along their smooth surfaces and jagged corners, and felt his body relax completely. It was as if the timelessness of the bones had flowed into him, stopped him in his tracks and calmed him. But as he climbed back up the stairs the restlessness returned. Eventually he grabbed the skull from the bookshelf and took it out to the woodshed, placed it on top of the pile of bones and turned its stark face towards the wall. That’ll teach you, he thought as he closed the door to the shed and fastened the latch.
That night August dreamt for the first time in four years. Immediately after his divorce he had stopped dreaming altogether and had come to accept the idea that his subconscious was dead, that it was as calm and still as a summer lake and that never again would anything disturb its deep, dark waters.
The following morning he was still consumed by the dream. He woke up in a cold sweat, a strange metallic taste in his mouth. He thought it must have been
the blueberries he had eaten just before going to bed and gulped down the glass of water he had placed by the bed. The man in his dream had had a familiar face – so familiar that August felt he ought to have recognised him. No doubt he had met this stranger back in the days when he had still lived around other people. What an odd sight the man had been: he had been wearing heavy, old-fashioned clothes and he was standing by himself on the platform of an unfamiliar railway station, which had been painted red, with an old cardboard suitcase at his feet, staring indifferently in the direction from which the train was to arrive. There was no one else on the platform and the station house looked deserted; not a soul peered out at the platform through its empty windows.
To put the dream behind him August first opened the window. The light and fragrance of summer flooded in. Birds busied themselves in the apple trees in the garden and a gentle breeze fanned the thin white curtains. After a breakfast of bread, porridge and blueberries August hurried down to the shore and into his boat, with its strong smell of tar, where he had left his fishing equipment the night before. He swiftly pushed the boat out on to the water and headed off towards the open lake, as calm as a mirror and draped with floating wisps of mist. The gleaming sun had already risen above the treetops on the nearby island. After rowing for a while August removed his jacket and rolled his shirt sleeves up to his elbows. He steered the bow of the boat into a patch of rushes where he had set two fish traps. The first was empty, but as August lifted the second one, he could feel by its weight that here was a catch. He balanced a lever on the edge of the boat and wrenched at it, but the trap was so heavy that he was afraid the boat might start taking on water. He stood up, assumed a sturdy haunched position and grabbed the lever with both hands. The trap bounced and finally rose out of the water in a shower of sparkling droplets. August saw two sturdy, thrashing pikes; two broad, shining backs.
The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy Page 31