by Diego Marani
‘Here we are!’ said Margareeta when they arrived at the quayside in Vasikkasaari. Hyttynen switched on the driving beam. The track across the sea met up with the road beside the landing stage, where the ferry to the islands moored in summer. Now, though, it was trapped in a mass of ice shaped like some monstrous creature. Roosting on the wooden piers, it cast a black shadow over the stiffly curled waves. There was no sign of life on the island. The car tyres crunched loudly in the muffled silence of the woods. On the southern slope the trees were laden with snow, but as soon as the road started to run towards the promontory, and the coast, the car lights revealed mere skeletons of trees, like totem poles, which vicious winds had whipped bare of any remaining snow. The rocks on the shoreline were white and bare, like the stones of a lunar landscape. A huge snowdrift had piled up at the entrance to the lane leading to Villa Suvetar.
‘Is Suvetar your name?’ asked Hyttynen, reading out the words on the wooden nameplate on the gate in an attempt to appear pleasant, and thereby lessen her mulishness.
‘No, it’s the name of the goddess of summer,’ snapped back Margareeta.
‘Oh, excuse my ignorance,’ said Hyttynen apologetically. He got out of the car and took a shovel and a torch out of the boot.
‘The house is at the end of the lane,’ Margareeta informed him, getting out after him.
Hyttynen huffed and puffed as he dug away beyond the gate, sinking into the snow step after step as he approached the house. He shone the torch on Margareeta and Hurmo, who were floundering along behind him.
‘There’s no one here, no footsteps, nothing,’ he said, still vainly hoping that she might be persuaded to abandon their pointless search.
‘Maybe not, but we’ve got to go inside,’ shouted Margareeta breathlessly, stabbing her finger in the direction of the cottage door.
‘The lock has frozen up. I’ll have to go and get the antifreeze,’ said Hyttynen in irritation, letting the shovel fall to the ground. He came back a few minutes later, followed by Hurmo, who regarded him as one of the family by now, and sniffed confidingly at his every footstep in the snow.
On entering the cottage, Margareeta stiffened. Taking the torch from Hyttynen, she shone it into every corner, engaging on a search every bit as professional as his own.
‘There’s a smell of woman in here,’ she muttered, nostrils flaring. Hyttynen looked at her in alarm: her eyes seemed positively to glitter in the darkness. Now not only would he miss the match, but the whole night might be wasted.
‘Nonsense! It smells to me like lavender, the kind you put in drawers. People always put lavender in amongst the linen in cottages like this when they leave them locked up for the winter,’ he added hopefully.
‘No, that’s the smell of a woman. A whore, in all likelihood,’ insisted Margareeta, moving towards the sauna. She felt the boards and brazier, drew a hand along the bench and porthole in the door.
‘Not a sign of dust!’ she exclaimed triumphantly, then, turning to Hyttynen:
‘Officer, call the criminal laboratory – now!’
‘Madam, you surely can’t be thinking of opening an inquiry just because your husband has a cleaner who makes a proper job of things? This is the limit, I’ve got to get back to the station, I’ve been patient quite long enough!’ he protested, thrusting Margareeta unceremoniously out of the door, locking up in a somewhat slipshod fashion and setting off towards the car, noting with irritation that Hurmo was close on his heels, tail wagging furiously.
‘I’m quite certain that someone has been here, and that they’ll be back again before dawn!’ Margareeta shouted, but Hyttynen had now vanished into the darkness. She waited for the torchlight to disappear among the trees, then walked around the house and down to the shore where, not so much earlier, a naked Olga had run to meet her fate. She stopped at the puckered sea, surprised at not hearing the sound of the undertow. Distant summer afternoons now came into her mind, Hurmo running in the sand and hurling himself into the water to swim up to the boat, Jarmo jokingly scolding him because he’d driven off the fish. It seemed impossible that this could be the same place: looking at the surrounding landscape, Margareeta suddenly felt that no summer would ever come to melt that ice again, that Villa Suvetar and all her memories would lie fossilised beneath it for all eternity. In the smudged grey sky above Helsinki a few pale greenish stars could just be seen; in the other direction, though, towards the open sea, they shone out more strongly in the total darkness. Straining her ears, beyond the sound of the fitful wind she heard a faint creaking spreading over the gauzy mass of ice: it was as though the whole sea had become an immense meadow peopled by insects which had congregated to launch a dawn attack on Helsinki. Swept northwards to those bleak latitudes by some natural disaster, they would cover the streets and houses of the city with a swarm of green snow. Made sluggish by the cold, they would soon die, flitting around clumsily before freezing to death and floating down to earth. Car wheels would reduce their sticky multitude to a pulp, leaving a stinking black mush on the asphalt. Margareeta imagined the headlines: ‘After the big freeze, Helsinki is overrun by locusts.’ She shook herself to clear her head of these mad imaginings, did up the top button of her windcheater and was about to make her way back to the cottage, when a dark shape bobbed up out of the sea and came to a halt in front of her. Margareeta drew back in alarm, but nonetheless peered in fascination at the shapeless mass which was coming towards her. Then she ran off towards the wood, slipping and falling in the snow as she did so. She was about to cry out, when two horn blasts rang out in the frozen air. Then the four guanacos pricked up their ears and flared their nostrils, looked in four different directions and galloped off in fear, their little hooves ticking away on the ice until they receded into the distance, and silence fell again.
Aurtova swept grandly up the steps to the cathedral, then paused outside the main door to take in the length and breadth of the square. His mission was accomplished. Finland was safe once more. He thought back to every detail of that day, reviewed it again from start to finish to reassure himself that there was no possibility of any oversight. He had cleared everything up scrupulously, thrown the jute sacks over the railway bridge. He had gone to collect Olga’s case from reception at Torni and put it in a locker in the left luggage office at the station, throwing away the key. He’d burned the tapes with the recordings of the Vostyach in the middle of the wood. He’d put Olga’s jewels through some letterbox. He’d called by at his office to collect the paperwork for the conference, and the text of his own speech. He’d taken the hired car back to the airport and asked the taxi-driver to leave him in front of the cathedral, because he was in such a state of excitement that he couldn’t even think of sleep. He needed to walk, to wear himself out in order to forget that endless night. Perhaps he still had a fever, but he was no longer aware of it. He felt thoroughly euphoric, but also nervous, and his blood was coursing wildly through his veins.
The silent square lay stretched before him like a deserted drawing room. He cast an affectionate glance in the direction of his office window, at the crisp architecture of the university colonnade, with the flight of steps leading up to the dark wooden main door, and the lighted windows of the Café Engel on the corner opposite, site of his many rendezvous and amorous conquests. At the end of the Unioninkatu, towards the sea, the chandeliers in the fashionable restaurant where he took all his meals were still ablaze. A little further on, beyond the silent barracks, was his modest, simple bedroom in the villa in Liisankatu. It was not there that he took his women, but to the grand hotels on the Esplanadi, where a suite, his favourite champagne and pairs of silken sheets, embroidered with his monogram, were permanently at his beck and call. For Professor Jarmo Aurtova, Helsinki was not just the capital of Finland, it was above all his personal apartment, its sumptuous rooms strewn among the city’s streets and squares. That memorable January night Aurtova was simply strolling through his own home, checking that all was in order before going to bed.
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br /> Now the last trams were heading for their sheds, casting their fire-fly glimmer on the snow. The odd drunkard was weaving his way home, keeping a cautious hand against the wall. The last of the Vostyachs would be in Sweden by now, lost for ever in the streets of an unknown city or perhaps already dead, and the only person who knew of his existence was lying frozen on the shore of an island in the middle of the Baltic. All Finland was lying curled up in its granite nest, unaware that it had just been plucked from danger. Aurtova walked towards the sea, then went along the Esplanadi, skirted the station and went up the avenue leading to the parliament building. He crossed the road and stood to attention in front of the equestrian statue of Marshal Mannerheim. The hero of Finland could rest easy in his bed. Now the Finnish language would never be linked to that of the wild Red Indians. Indeed, it would spread ever further eastward, wresting the former lands of the Proto-Uralian fatherland from the Slavs. The Algonquins would never put up their filthy teepees on the banks of the Pyhäjärvi. They would stay put, selling feather head-dresses to tourists and getting drunk on their dismal reservations, gloomily waiting to become extinct. Aurtova looked tenderly at the austere figure of the old soldier, clicked his heels and performed a military salute. Then he put one hand on his chest and began to sing the national anthem. He saw the Pecheneg horsemen fleeing for their lives, vanishing into the misty steppe, throwing down their arms, retreating in terror as they did so, stumbling over the corpses of their fellows. Then they leapt on to their horses and unbuckled their breastplates in order to beat an even hastier retreat, pursued by the Finnish cavalry, swords drawn and unfurled banners billowing in the wind. Over the days which followed, the awestruck soldiers on guard in the Finnish army barracks told their incredulous superiors of how, in the depths of that polar night, the portraits of Marshal Mannerheim on the walls of the company offices, dormitories and corridors had lit up with the ghost of a smile. This was attributed to the extreme cold, the lateness of the hour and the excessive amount of cordial the recruits themselves admitted they had imbibed.
Still too agitated to think of sleep, Aurtova felt a sudden urge to pass by the Grand Marina Palace, where the XXIst Congress of Finno-Ugric languages was to open the next day. He walked down to the quay at Katajanokka, pausing to cast a respectful eye over the flags of the Finno-Ugric nations fluttering at the bottom of the steps. The wind was sending the ropes clattering against the flagpoles, causing the coloured cloth to snap sharply in the cold air. The whole of Katajanokka reminded him of a great ship, its sails unfurled so as to release it from the ice in which it was currently trapped. The professor practised climbing the flight of steps in a debonair fashion, as he would the next day. Reaching the entrance, he pretended to greet various dignitaries. He shook hands with ambassadors, paid his respects to their lady wives, kissing the hands of the lovelier among them. Then, fearing he might be seen by some night watchman, he hurried down again towards the quay. At last he was beginning to feel tired, and thought it might be wise now to go home. Thrusting his numb hands into his pockets, he came upon the little bone pipe Ivan had given him. He twisted it in his fingers, suddenly amused. He held it to his mouth, blew into it a couple of times, producing a thin, high-pitched sound, then threw it angrily into the snow, crushing it under his foot and setting off homewards, yawning. But all the animals in the Helsinki Zoo had heard it: from the shores of Suomenlinna, from the empty streets of Kruununhaka, from the observatory, perched on its hill, from as far away as the park at Korkeasaari. They pricked up their ears and craned their necks to listen. Blue foxes, zebras, guanacos, wolves, lynxes, owls, pandas, skunks, squirrels, Siberian tigers, deer, wild goats, reindeer, vultures and even the majestic arctic falcon moved off in the direction of the conference centre, summoned by the pipe of a man of the woods who knew how to talk to animals. The only ones who didn’t answer the call were the lazy walruses, the hibernating bear, the wolverine and the baboons; their house had cooled down now that the glass had been smashed in, so they clambered up to the highest branch and formed a huddle, trying to keep warm. This time, none of the little ones dared to venture down on to the tractor wheel that hung there from its chain.
Ivan screwed up his courage and, following Urgel, proceeded guardedly in the direction of the city. He had no idea how he would get through that flickering inferno, but somehow it had to be got through, because all other ways to the sea were blocked. There in the open, far from Korkeasaari, the wind, encountering no obstacles, raised whirlwinds of snow which became tinged with yellow as they drifted citywards. The whole surface of the sea was crossed by its glancing breath, as though the ice were boiling magma on the point of exploding. The reindeer were advancing tentatively over the powdery terrain, but suddenly they pulled up short, pricked up their ears and dug their hooves firmly into the ice, refusing to go any further, sniffing the air, nostrils aquiver. Ivan looked around him, saw furtive shadows ahead. It was the wolves. Then he climbed off the sledge and gave eight long beats on his drum. Yellow eyes glinting, the dark shapes began to circle round him: tails between their legs, ready to leap, they followed one another closely. The last of the Vostyachs knelt down in front of them and beat out the slow compelling rhythm with which he had once called his people in the Byrranga Mountains. Little by little, he added his own voice to the drum’s sombre roll, until it drove out the sound of the instrument altogether. Now it was just Ivan singing: his voice rang out like a drumbeat, a steady measure which, as it left his mouth, turned into words. ‘Kyäyölöngkö!’ he thundered, pronouncing each letter clearly before he sent it forth into the air. This was the word uttered by Ululutoïon, the shaman with three shadows, who rises from the earth and disappears back into it. Ivan had learned it from his father, but this was the first time he had ever used it. On hearing it, the wolves lowered their heads and scattered, whimpering, dragging their snouts in the snow. Ivan walked towards the circle of footprints and saw a body lying on the ground, encased in ice. He went closer, touched the stiff limbs, which gave out a wooden sound as he moved them. In the dim starlight Ivan could not make out the face of the corpse that lay before him; the smell, however, was all too familiar. The Vostyach had smelt the sweetish, sweaty smell of a prostitute only once in his life – a few hours earlier, in a rundown room in Kallio; and it was a smell that would be with him always. He thought uneasily of the smooth skin which had made his blood run backwards through his veins, of the embrace in which his spirit had forsaken him. There must be something evil in this creature if she’d been capable of causing a Vostyach to take leave of his senses, dragging him into a world peopled only by empty images like those in dreams. But she could not be completely dead if she continued to follow him: perhaps any number of coloured fish were swimming beneath the ice, ready to shed their scales in order to bewitch him, the last of the Vostyachs. Even the wolves had given her a wide berth, a sure sign that evil spirits remained trapped within her flesh, nestling in her liver, ready to unleash disease and death in order to free themselves. She should be cooked, boiled until the flesh fell from her bones. Only that way would the spirits evaporate, get caught up again in the great breath which made the world go round.
But there was no time for that. They would have to be assuaged by the woman’s burial; they would have to be plucked from the ice and driven skywards so that the breath of the universe could take them to itself again. Ivan loaded the body on to the sledge and set off for the beach at Tahvonlahti. He was thinking of cutting down a birch tree to make a catafalque on which to lay the body, but when he had almost reached the sea another dark shape caused the reindeer to stiffen. The Vostyach seized the axe and moved steadily towards it. This time too he recognised it by the smell. He knelt down and wept, inhaling the cheap scent of the only being in the world who had ever truly wished him well. Crouching beside the corpse, he drew it to his chest, as he had done so many years ago with his father. Twice, in the course of his harsh life, Ivan had cradled the lifeless body of the person who was dearest to him in his
arms. He recognised the wave of grief which swept over him, as it had done all those years ago. He felt almost happy, because it was a familiar form of suffering and Ivan knew where it would strike hardest, where in his body it would lodge itself, sapping the strength from his legs, trapping his breath down in the pit of his stomach. Suddenly, he felt an age-old solitude descend upon him: that of his whole extinct people, of every Vostyach who had ever lost himself in the Siberian forests, who had ceased to speak and had gone to earth with the wolves, forgetting how to be a man. Now he himself no longer had anyone to speak to, no one with whom he could use the word describing something grey glimpsed vaguely running in the snow, or the colour of the birch trees when they are coming into leaf, or the smell of the lake as it unfreezes and gives off the fossil breath of hundred-year-old fish, the whistle of the wind as it blows in from the sea, dashing mountainous blocks of ice against the rocks.