by Diego Marani
‘Now look what you’ve done, you animal!’ shrieked the Laplander, beside himself as he lunged around the room, trying to locate the Vostyach in the pitch-darkness and pushing pointlessly against the bed, which was now jammed between the wall and the bedside table. Fumbling around on the floor in the sodden chaos, Ivan picked up his sack and his drum. He sat there, squatting in the shadows, muscles tensed, then flung himself upon the figure he could dimly see coming towards him, knocking it to the ground so that he could make his getaway. He slipped into the corridor, crossed the empty barroom, heaved the street door open and ran off into the snow.
II
‘The Ice Age is back: the Gulf of Finland freezes over for the first time in fifty years,’ shrieked the headlines. Margareeta leafed through the first few pages of the paper, her mind elsewhere. Reading was the last thing she felt like doing. She pushed aside her coffee cup and asked the waiter for a sheet of paper.
Dear Jarmo,
I’m sitting in a dismal bar, drinking a cup of coffee before bringing Hurmo back to you, and I don’t know why I’m writing you this letter. Perhaps because my desire to insult you is so strong that I can’t contain myself, I can’t wait until I see you face to face. Or perhaps because, by writing, I cherish the fond hope that I shall find the perfect words to rid my mind of you for ever. It’s incredible how something new always comes up, even though I think I’ve said all that’s to be said, and everything has been done to death by repetition. It’s true, words between the two of us are meaningless. You’ve killed them stone-dead with your falsehoods, with fifteen years of indifference, silence, betrayal. You’ve saved whole languages from extinction, but caused the one we spoke between ourselves to die. Now all I want to do is harm you, and my only regret is that I shall never manage to do as much hurt to you as you’ve done to me. It’s too late, you got away before I could land my punches. What’s left of you for me is Hurmo. I could take it out on him. I’m not ashamed to tell you that sometimes I’ve thought of lashing out at him, with you in mind. Perhaps I would have felt a certain satisfaction from hearing him squeal, seeing your face in his panic-stricken snout. I found myself wondering what sort of look would come on to your face if I suddenly started kicking you. Amazement? Outrage? Fear? I’d be willing to pay someone good money to find out. Those are the depths to which I’ve sunk! No court could ever compensate me for such humiliation. But today I’m bringing Hurmo back to you, returning the last hostage of our life together. I realised too late that you only married me because you needed someone to link arms with at faculty cocktail parties, because only couples would be invited to attend the burgomaster’s ball. Unwittingly, like everyone else around you, I too served your ambitions; the only people you’ve ever wanted to have around you are those who can be of use to you in some way. The same goes for your masters. If you began to be unfaithful, it was because that too served your purposes. Your heart wasn’t really in your philandering: new entanglements just meant one more birthday, one more phone number, one more make of perfume and a bunch of flowers to be remembered. When I first discovered that you had a lover, I was surprised: you’d chosen a woman who greatly resembled me. Leena Isotalo might have been my double – an uglier version, if you don’t mind my saying so. Idiot that I was, perhaps that was why I forgave you. Unconsciously, I tried to tell myself that you just couldn’t get enough of me, that you had to surround yourself with women who were like me. They were just poor copies, idols serving to glorify me without diminishing your adoration. I was the Virgin, they were the statues. Such are the contortions the mind is capable of when it wishes to blind itself to the truth! I now see that you chose lovers who looked like me purely for practical reasons: because black underwear suits all blondes, and one more fair hair on your jacket would escape my notice. I never had the guts to check on it, but I bet they didn’t live far from us. That way you could pay them a quick visit of an evening with the excuse of taking Hurmo for a walk. You were never one to do more than the strictly necessary, you weren’t one to put yourself out. There’s not a moment of your time that isn’t put to good purpose. By the time you die, you’ll have squeezed every drop out of life. It will spit you out in disgust, it will be sick of you, will shuffle you off like some revolting worm. I, on the other hand, devoted fifteen years of my life to you. My only regret is that there is nothing to show for it. My women friends say we should have had a child. Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps a son would have made you less self-centred. Or would he just have been one more person to compete against? At least I wouldn’t be alone, I wouldn’t be getting up at dawn like a lost soul, wondering how to spend my empty day. Whereas the only living thing to have come out of those fifteen years is this wretched dog, a gift from your friend Pekka, architect and faggot. That must be why he passed it off as male, when in fact it was a bitch. But in your mind even Hurmo was to serve a purpose. He was to add to the picture of the modern young couple with a four-wheel drive and a bouncy, tail-wagging dog. Perhaps it was he who brought us bad luck. Today I’m returning him to you. He is our marriage: ugly, besmirched and past his prime.
Margareeta.
Margareeta left the letter inside the newspaper, counted out the change for the coffee and marched off, dragging Hurmo unceremoniously by the lead. The waiter picked up the cup and wiped under the chair, removing the puddle the dog had made. Before throwing the paper into the waste-paper bin, he cast an inattentive eye over the headlines.
Outside, the city was coming to life. Despite the snow, in the town centre the avenues were full of cars, making their way slowly forwards with their headlights on. Nothing was going to come between them and their Saturday shopping spree, and the shopping centres were filling up, windows ablaze, the whole snow-covered city was abuzz. Christmas had come and gone, but the apartment blocks in the centre were once more glittering with festive lights. Today was a special day. Nature had firmly reasserted herself, and for once could not be kept at bay by central heating systems, neon signs, the smoke from factory chimneys and the mighty icebreakers moored alongside the quays, awaiting orders to rid the sea-lanes of ice. In the port, sirens were breaking a fifty-year silence, and the weather centre was giving hourly reports on the advance of the ice floes in the gulf. Murmansk, Saint Petersburg, Petrozavodsk and Vaalimo were registering polar temperatures. Radio messages were continually arriving from Tallinn. On the other side of the gulf you could walk on the sea and reach the island of Prangli by car. On such a day, a thousand years ago, hordes of wild men had arrived by sea to sack the Finnish villages, burn down the houses, ravish the women and carry off the children. In defiance of that distant memory, the whole city was now on the alert. It was making as much noise as it possibly could, putting on all its lights, turning the heating systems up to maximum, making a show of all its wealth and strength, as though in a bid to fend off the wild hordes of yesteryear. Let them try attacking Finland now!
Margareeta tried calling Jarmo from every phone box she came upon, to see whether he’d returned home so that she could pay a surprise visit. But all she succeeded in doing was spending her change for nothing, because the phone in the flat in Liisankatuno was never answered by anyone except the answer-phone. She even went back to ring the bell, invented an excuse to have the main door opened by a neighbour and walked up to his landing to shout and bang at his door until the other occupants forcefully expressed their disapproval. She had then waited in the street, keeping a close eye on his windows. But the snow fell silently on windowsills and balconies without any sign of life becoming visible behind the curtains. Yet Margareeta was sure that her ex-husband was at home, probably enjoying the company of some little whore he’d picked up the previous evening. Walking around Liisankatu, she found that she was talking to herself, railing against the dog. The few passers-by shuffling along the icy pavements looked at her as though she were a madwoman, or a drunk. When the cold became unbearable, and the whole street turned into a pit of whirling snow, Margareeta, now exhausted and frozen to the marrow
, resigned herself to going home. But she had lost nothing of her determination and, all in all, felt somewhat reassured. She knew where she would certainly be able to find him later. On Saturday evenings Jarmo would unfailingly pay a visit to the Café Engel before dinner. Just to get himself noticed, shake a few hands, arrange a meeting, offer an aperitif to an attractive woman, or indeed to anyone who might be of use to him. All in all, Margareeta thought, there was no hurry. Indeed, it might be even more amusing to hand the dog over in a public place, to embarrass Jarmo in front of his friends, maybe even spoil his evening.
On entering her flat she was met by a stale bedroom smell, mingled with that of cold coffee and the muddy stench of Hurmo. The flat looked charmless and messy in the half-light, and Margareeta felt a wave of sadness. The place smelt like an old people’s home. She went to throw open the windows, heedless of the snow which blew in and melted on the floor, the furniture, the old wedding photos she hadn’t had the heart to throw away. She waited until the room was truly freezing before closing them again. Then she retreated into the bathroom to have a good cry. She undressed, letting her clothes fall in a heap in a corner. She turned on the taps and crouched beside the bath, waiting for it to fill. She watched her white body pucker and then vanish into the mirror as it misted over, as she had done when she was a child. Then, suddenly, she sensed it was too late: to extract her revenge, to mourn, to start afresh, find happiness again. Her life was over, there would be no new beginnings: it had been a catalogue of words and gestures she no longer had the courage to repeat. Behind the door, Hurmo was pressing his nose against the chink of light, pointlessly expectant, scratching at the parquet and whimpering in the darkness, as though he too was eager to make his escape from that ghost-infested flat. When Margareeta emerged from the bath, locks of damp hair were falling over her tear-stained eyes; she was no longer crying, and although her lips were trembling, her jaw was set. She stood barefoot in front of the fridge and had a bite to eat, tossing a scrap to Hurmo as she did so. Then she drank a cup of cold coffee and went back to bed. She set the alarm for five, put in her ear-plugs and pulled the covers over her head. Hurmo had the good sense to wait until his mistress was asleep before returning to his little armchair in the bedroom.
While he was dressing Katia’s corpse, the Laplander cursed the day he had left the woods of Airisselka and gone to seek his fortune in the big city. He had left because he had had enough of being drenched to the marrow ferrying tree trunks down the Miekojärvi and sleeping in the open air like an animal. He had had enough of scratching a living by working for those bandits at the sawmill at Pessalompolo. He too wanted to live in a modern flat, to drink Australian wine and womanise to his heart’s content, like the lorry drivers who came to load up the timber and would give him bottles of foreign liquor and pornographic magazines. This was what had decided him to move to Helsinki. He had spent his entire savings on the purchase of a bar in a dismal working-class area; but his outgoings were considerable, and his earnings meagre. The licence to sell alcoholic drinks alone cost an arm and a leg. Things didn’t look up much even after he had installed various video games. Then he had had that bright idea of smuggling a couple of prostitutes over the border from Saint Petersburg, and two soon became four. At first he had them working in turns in the one-room flat he rented above the bar. Then he decided to close down the gaming room and turn it into four smaller rooms, and it was these that were now his most profitable line of business. He had made a name for himself: the Laplander, they called him. Things had improved, admittedly, but at a price: clients who failed to pay and had to be roughed up, squabbles among the girls for the best room, drug addicts arranging to meet on his premises and locking themselves in the toilets to do business, and the ever-present fear of the police. Four years into that life, there was still no sign of the modern flat of his dreams, he was still drinking shoddy Finnish beer rather than Australian wine, and the only women he could afford to hire were those four wrecks. At times, he even thought back to his tree trunks with something approaching nostalgia. At least they couldn’t speak; they never complained, the most resistance they put up was when they ran aground in the mud, and even then they could be easily dislodged. All in all, he thought, life was much easier in a wooden hut on the banks of a lake than on the fourth floor of a dismal council block, and the dainty little creatures in his pornographic magazines were much more biddable than the four rowdy Caucasian troublemakers he’d so unwisely imported into his living quarters.
Seated on the pink sheets, legs a-straddle, completely dressed apart from her shoes, Katia looked like a wax doll. It was a shame that her head, beneath the jauntily-positioned fake fur cap, persisted in drooping in a way that was undoubtedly somewhat sinister. Clad in their fishnet tights, her legs, too, had lost their beauty; they were now so much inert flesh, and the effect was monstrous. The Laplander had put the red room carefully to rights. He had picked up the dead fish, the broken lamp, the bottle of koskenkorva, the torn-off lock and the bits of glass and put the lot into a rubbish bag, together with Katia’s wet underwear and the bed linen. He’d straightened out the bedside table, remade the bed with fresh linen and done what he could to mend the door. The water, and Katia’s blood, had left a dark stain on the carpet. Luckily, at that hour the bar was closed. At least he had had the idea of sending the other three to ply their trade in a hotel room for that one night. He’d make less out of it himself, of course, but he calculated that the business with the wild man would amply compensate for that. Who could ever have dreamt that he’d end up killing her? And of course it would have to be Katia, the best of the lot, the one who could bring in as much as fifty marks a night! It was the first time anyone had died on him, though he’d heard that this could happen. The best thing would be to dump her body in a stolen car with a syringe stuck in her arm. But the others would take fright when they heard what had happened. They might even run away, and the Laplander couldn’t afford to lose the lot of them in one fell swoop. Another solution was called for. Seated on the bed beside the dead woman, the erstwhile lumberjack from Airisselka put on his thinking cap. It was only ten in the morning, but some bright idea had to hit him pretty fast.
Aurtova hung up and eased his neck backwards with a sigh. Another thing achieved: now he had managed to book a double room in the Torni under the name of Boris Juknov. He put his gloves on again and wiped a hand over the misty glass of the phone box to check that no policeman had removed his car from the no-parking area where he’d left it. He looked at the clock on the television tower. He had plenty of time, but he would have to proceed with care. Now the second half of his plan would come into play. The first thing to do was to call in at his flat. Here he collected two bathrobes, two silver candlesticks, a box of scented candles, an elegant suit (but not the one he would wear at the conference), a pair of silk pyjamas, sheets and blankets; perhaps more importantly, he also remembered the little bottle of green tablets he kept in the medicine cupboard. He had to stifle a shudder as he picked up a packet of contraceptives. Then he went into the garage to patch up the car window as best he could, stuffing a plastic-covered sleeping bag into the gap. Into the boot he put a jerrycan of petrol, some anti-freeze spray for locks, a shovel, three bottles of champagne, a compass, a gas cylinder, matches, a torch, some jute sacks, an axe and the snow chains. He took a rope and a clasp knife out of the box of fishing-tackle. Just to be on the safe side, he did his shopping out of town, in the shopping centre at Itäkeskus. There he purchased smoked salmon, some ready-made piirakka, reindeer pâté, a packet of savoury biscuits, a frozen wood grouse, some butter, a jar of gherkins, a bag of ready-cooked potatoes, a tub of lemon sorbet, four bottles of Bulgarian cabernet and one of Polish vodka. By midday he was ready to leave. He went down to the tourist harbour and stopped on the Merisatama Quay to fit the snow chains. Other cars were venturing along the track that linked Helsinki to the islands of the archipelago by way of a sea that had frozen over for the first time in half a century. Voices a
nd shadows passed nearby, then were engulfed once more by the soft, clean-smelling silence. There had been a heavy snowfall, and now a chill wind was blowing down from the woods, locking the world under a hard glassy breast-plate. The red pickets were scarcely visible above the sweep of sea, but the bed of the track was sound, made level by the passing of a recent snowplough. Along the shore Aurtova could still see the lights of the occasional vehicle headed for Suomenlinna, briefly glimpsed the lights of Harakka, then nothing. Now the white wall was opening up a metre at a time before the yellow beam of the headlights. It was a good half-hour before the island of Vasikkasaari came into view. Approaching the quay, he turned the lights off, left the main track and reached the waterline. He wanted to get to his cottage avoiding the main road. In all probability, the weather being what it was, there was no one on the island, and both the Kuusinen and the Lehtinen were tucked safely away in their cosy flats in Helsinki. But you could never be too careful. On the north shoreline the wind had swept the snow away. The sea was a bare crust; the odd mound of hardened snow lay under the trees along the shore.