Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  She shook her head, gave him a smile that was equal parts discomfort and rejection, and again tried to flag down the bartender.

  The guy standing on the other side of her new friend whistled shrilly at the far end of the bar. “This girl here needs something.”

  “Maybe some clothes?” someone shouted.

  “Maybe a drink,” laughed another. “Who’s buying? You never know what you’ll find under that towel.”

  Sanna tried to join in the laughter. Her ears were ringing.

  The bartender meandered over, pausing to serve those in line in front of her. It was the hotel owner, an older guy with a moustache.

  The man next to her patted her again. “Don’t look so scared.”

  A faint cry escaped Sanna’s lips and she shook her head.

  The owner finally decided to make his way over. He lowered a hand to the counter and looked at Sanna.

  “And what can I do for you?”

  Sanna felt warm discharge run down the inside of her thighs; this couldn’t be happening. She stammered something about her keys.

  “You lose them?”

  “No, they’re in my room.”

  “Good. I’ll be up in a minute to open the door.”

  “Now, please.”

  “It’s going to be a minute.”

  Sanna left the bar and waited outside her room. The door to the neighboring room had been kicked in; the jambs framed a portrait of destruction.

  It was ages before the owner clomped up the stairs; Sanna could feel the sweat on her neck. She lowered her eyes when she sensed him sizing her up. He flipped through his keys and stepped up to the door; Sanna tried to slip out of the way, but he told her to stay put. He tested the key he found but the lock just clunked.

  Sanna concentrated on exhaling, that’s what she’d learned in therapy. The lungs will take care of the inhaling. Just blow out.

  The owner lowered a shoulder, steeled himself, and threw his weight into the door. Sanna squealed.

  The door boards creaked but the lock didn’t budge.

  The owner wiped his moustache and mouth. He looked at Sanna, who tried to melt into the wall. She was still looking at her feet; avoiding his eyes was the only way she could maintain her distance.

  “Wait here.”

  The owner ambled off. Sanna shut her eyes tight. He had disappeared into the next room through the broken door. When she didn’t hear anything, Sanna peered in. The floor was covered in splintered particleboard; the balcony door was open.

  Sanna shrieked when she felt someone touch her hair.

  The owner handed her the room key; he had climbed in through the balcony and circled back around to the hallway.

  “You won’t be able to lock that balcony door anymore. You might want to keep your valuables out of sight, like that computer in there.”

  Sanna clenched the key. Every heartbeat hurt.

  Back in her room, she closed the door and leaned against it until she heard the lock click. The owner’s smell lingered in the air, sheep grease and malt. Her dirty panties were still on the chair, where she had tossed them after taking them off.

  There was a pale-yellow paste between her legs. She roughly smeared it off onto the corner of her towel and put on clean clothes. She cracked open a ginger beer; she felt like she needed something to dispel all the nastiness, but the warm beverage was like syrup.

  Sanna pulled a hoodie and ball cap out of her backpack. She wanted to go for a walk. Although where was there to walk to in Kalgoorlie on a Friday night besides a bar? Nowhere.

  She slunk past the hotel bar without looking in, heard the clack of billiard balls and crude shouting.

  The main street was a long straight with two lanes of traffic in both directions and lined by two-story buildings on either side, casting the sidewalks in shadow. Dust had collected on the display windows. “Closed, closed, closed,” the doors read. The mannequins had stiff wigs and chipped bodies, the steel tubing was visible, like bones poking through flesh. Angled parking edged the road, bumpers nudged the curb. Cars glared at pedestrians like watchdogs.

  Sanna tried to inhale deeply.

  A little way up, a car pulled over; Sanna had the impulse to turn and make for the other direction. The headlights stayed on and a man climbed out and waited in the shadow that fell between the twin beams of light.

  The men here weren’t street vendors; she couldn’t tell them she wasn’t interested in what they were hawking. She had to tell them she didn’t want them, she didn’t even want to get to know them. But what right did she have to do that?

  Who did she think she was?

  The man nodded, stepping closer to Sanna. “Hello, how ya doing tonight?”

  She backed up against the building and shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

  “Where ya off to in such a hurry? Come on now, I just want to talk. Come back!”

  Sanna ran, although she was afraid it would provoke him, and stepped into the first bar she came across. At least in there she wouldn’t be as alone as she had been on the street.

  The place was like some outlaw saloon: rough-hewn wood, cast-iron lamps, snakes and skulls on the labels of big glass bottles.

  The blonde behind the bar was wearing a string bikini top and a thong, her buttocks two halves of a single naked sphere. Her skin was soft and downy, in sharp contrast to the plucked eyebrows and long green fingernails. She gave Sanna an unfriendly look.

  “What do you want?”

  Sanna tried to see what was in the coolers behind the counter: maybe a soda, something nonalcoholic. The girl impatiently batted her oversized fake lashes. You couldn’t see her eyes for all the black fly-legs; it was as if a child had scribbled on a doll’s face with a marker.

  Stop staring, Sanna ordered herself, even though staring was exactly what these girls were hoping for. She regained enough presence of mind to order a beer and moved away from the counter, took a seat near the wall at a table that only had one chair. She fiddled with her brown bottle; it reminded her of an old-fashioned medicine jar. Cacophony enveloped her. She couldn’t tell what song was playing; she glanced around at the booths where men competed at electronic bar games, at the bare-skinned girls circling them, hoping for tips.

  You could slip money under their bikini strings; the bikini tops didn’t even cover their areolae. Sanna shivered at the thought of all those strange hands on her. Her shy skin felt like a primed explosive; it reacted uncontrollably to touch. Maybe that’s the way it was for all lonely people.

  She shook her head, as if that would stir up fresh thoughts from the depths of her mind. This was where she had ended up: in a loud bar in the middle of the desert, while just a year ago she and Janne had been going to his favorite restaurants, quiet little spots muffled in intimacy. Footfalls disappeared in carpets; white-gloved waiters carried one plate at a time; the music was programmed through dozens of invisible speakers; and the murmur of speech died in heavy tablecloths and velvet-upholstered chairs.

  For Sanna, wealth had always been manifested through cleanliness and polite restraint, the way it did at those restaurants, in Janne’s habit of going to the barber once a week and having his clothes dry-cleaned, in Dad’s and Sari’s glass-walled house.

  It was difficult to believe that these men with their scrubby jeans, uninhibited ogling, and brown teeth took home over fifteen thousand euros a month. The female dumper driver was still at the pit’s lowest pay grade.

  “Hey, didn’t think I’d find you here.”

  Sanna turned in the direction of the voice. It was Cooper, the redhead who was her on-site contact at the mine. He was holding a pool cue in one hand.

  “You play?”

  “Not very well,” Sanna said, rising from her stool.

  Sanna liked playing because when she was eyeing the ball and thinking about the angle of her shot, she didn’t think about the kinds of things she didn’t want to think about. She noticed that Cooper didn’t play any bet
ter than she did, so she prolonged the game. She didn’t want to win and have it be over, have to sit there chatting, no sir, even though he had shown her the tattooed portraits of his kids on his arms and Sanna had spied a wedding ring.

  “You know Martin?” Cooper asked.

  Sanna shook her head but made a note of the name. She could ask about him on Monday. “What does he do?”

  “He’s the in-house safety inspector; he’s out here visiting the mine,” Cooper answered. “But he’s from the same place you are, Finland.”

  Sanna realized she’d misheard Cooper: it was Martti, not Martin. It still didn’t mean anything to her, and she wasn’t interested in meeting another Finn. Martti sounded middle-aged or even older, one of the fatuous middle managers Sanna had seen at the company’s offices in Perth. A windbag who inevitably waited too long to buy a new suit.

  Why was she putting him down before she even met him, as if he were some loser from a dating website? You may as well ask to interview him, Sanna scolded herself. And yet she couldn’t get past the feeling that her condition and her anxiety would be more obvious to a Finn.

  “And here he is.” Cooper laughed and waved. Sanna saw two men at the doorway, both over forty, but they weren’t wearing dress shirts or dumpy trousers—of course not, not here.

  “Martti, let me introduce you to Sanna,” Cooper said.

  Martti’s face instantly revealed that he had already heard about her. They shook hands. He dressed youthfully but tried a little too hard, was in good enough shape to get away with a T-shirt and jeans, but the surfing brand emblazoned across his chest was too much. Sanna was sure he had never even snowboarded, much less surfed.

  “You’re the graduate student. Antero said I might run into you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Sanna replied politely in Finnish. Then she ran out of things to say. Small talk had always been a challenge for her, but she generally made a better show of it.

  “So how’re you liking Kalgoorlie?”

  “It’s an awful, godforsaken rat’s ass.”

  Martti had a visible physical reaction to her swearing.

  Sanna tried to explain. “I don’t get how anyone could choose to live here. I mean, there are thousands of other places to live in this world. Why would you come here?”

  “I’ve always been fascinated by this place. Because of the gold. And for other reasons, too. It’s atmospheric.”

  Who did this guy think he was, some sort of explorer?

  “But I get what you mean,” Martti said. He scanned the room, surveying the clientele.

  “Tell me what’s so amazing about it, then.”

  Martti looked back at her, startled.

  “About what? Gold? This place? You’re the one conducting the study.”

  Sanna rolled her eyes. Study was a pretty big stretch for describing her thesis.

  “It’s an HR thing. I’m trying to find out how effective the mining company’s gender-integration program is, how well gender equality is realized from the employees’ perspective.”

  “I gotta say, your enthusiasm’s contagious.”

  What was he expecting? Were Sanna’s eyes supposed to blaze when she talked about her research? Hadn’t this guy ever heard of someone just doing a thesis? Wait. She was defending herself using the logic of Dad and Ville and Janne: Just do your thesis, don’t even expect to get excited about anything. That described all three of them, and apparently their attitude had spread to Sanna.

  “So you’re not interested in mines per se?” he asked.

  “I’m glad I had the chance to come to Australia.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “This place is Canada with skin cancer. A cultural wasteland where the only good things are superb beef and wine. And you look like—”

  Sanna’s voice rose. “It’s far from a cultural wasteland. It’s home to the world’s oldest living civilization.”

  Martti looked amused. “So you’re here for the Abos? The Sami weren’t good enough?”

  “Lapland is too close to Helsinki, plus it’s in the same time zone,” Sanna snapped.

  “Who exactly is it you’re running from?”

  “My mother.”

  Which was true.

  Martti laughed. “I hear you. Yeah, well, I’m from Lapland, Sodankylä. This is a better alternative.”

  “I happened to get an internship here,” Sanna said, wanting to make it clear that she hadn’t chosen Kalgoorlie.

  “Yeah, I heard your old man wanted you to come here.”

  Martti intentionally stressed the old man. That one phrase swept Sanna up in a torrent of assumptions: a spoiled daddy’s girl with an adorable interest in Aboriginal cultures doing pointless research in a sunny country. If she has the time, she’ll get tattoos of feathers and inspirational phrases and burn incense in a room lit by salt lamps.

  “My dad wants me to graduate. I wanted to come here.”

  Sanna looked away. She felt a pang of conscience about the beer she was drinking.

  “Got it.”

  Martti moved over to the pool table. Sanna wished she could do exactly what Martti was expecting her to: sit cross-legged on a floor anywhere besides this place, and breathe deeply, remind herself what it was she hoped to find in Australia. Something so much more important than gold.

  The din in the bar intensified, giving her a headache. A waitress hunting for tips walked up to the pool players, and they all slipped money under her bikini strings. She laughed raucously; Martti clearly knew her. Sanna felt an unpleasant twinge when she saw him touch the skimpy girl.

  The girl stalked past Sanna without smiling. She smelled like a florist’s shop and fry oil. Sanna saw her step behind the counter, sigh, and stretch as she counted her money. Her slender neck and ponytail reminded Sanna of a child’s.

  Sanna announced she was leaving; the men protested. Martti looked concerned, maybe it was some quintessential Finnish expression. He asked if she was sure she’d be all right on her own. Of course she’d make it home just fine, Sanna said confidently before stepping out.

  Now she found herself wishing she were drunk and the braver for it. Above all, she wished that one of the men had insisted on escorting her.

  Sanna hated herself when she was afraid, and she hated that the very thought of a man walking at her side instantly made her feel safer. The fear and the hatred made no sense: she was afraid of being assaulted by men, and she wanted men to protect her.

  Sanna gritted her teeth. She refused to be so weak and stupid.

  The only light illuminating the sidewalks came from the bluish streetlamps, and half of them were burnt out or broken. A beggar was sitting in the street, feebly beating a tree branch against the ground. Sanna slowed as she approached him, but he didn’t turn toward her. There was nothing in front of him for her to toss a few coins in and pass in peace. The beggar’s beard made Sanna think about the story of the three billy goats and the troll who lived under the bridge. She tried to remember what bit of wisdom had been contained within the children’s story, and what the trick to passing safely was, but the only thing that came to mind was to circle around and sneak past the long way.

  The beggar was an old Aboriginal man, his eyes cloudy with blindness. The wooden stick in his hand was a dowsing rod, and he was tapping the ground in monotonous rhythm, like the repetitive whack of a halyard against a mast. Sanna wondered if he could see enough to seat himself squarely in the shaft of light, or if he had just noticed that if he sat there people didn’t trip over him.

  The beggar laughed, and Sanna thought he must be drunk on some odorless substance. She gathered up the courage to warily pass. He didn’t react, which struck her as odd. Was he really there?

  Cars were driving past; Sanna glanced at their bright lights, and when she looked back at the beggar he lingered in her blind spot for an instant and then vanished. All that remained was a floating shadow-image, a black hole in human form. But Sanna heard his laughter and
the tapping rhythm of the stick, and he was still sitting there, utterly unaware, locked in perfect darkness by the coarse cement. He kept laughing and Sanna wondered what sort of visions he must be having. As she looked at him, Sanna no longer feared the night surrounding her. She felt the sadness and coolness enter her; they found the familiar old spots inside her and settled in.

  3

  After the breakup, Sanna had taken her things to her mother’s, sent in her official change of address, and made an appointment at the maternity clinic. Her pulse had been racing the whole time, and she had a hard time understanding what people were saying.

  At Mom’s the television was blaring; Mom chattered at it and the free paper she was browsing through as she devoured potato salad straight from the container. Cheeks smeared with mayonnaise, she offered a forkful to Sanna, who shook her head. Mom hadn’t mentioned anything about her broken teeth; the sight made Sanna nauseated. The corn-kernel stubs and the ragged edge of her tongue, which was covered in white fuzz that looked exactly like mold.

  “Go on, have some, I’m not making anything fancy for dinner,” Mom said, dragging the fork against the plastic, scraping up every last bit from the corners.

  Mom’s apartment smelled like unbeaten rugs and wet newspaper, and the washing machine left a whiff of sewer in your clothes. The implements used for Mom’s yearly changing of the potting soil were strewn across the table, the ceramic pots giving off an odor. Sanna was suddenly overcome by panic and she jumped up, called out from the doorway that she was going for a walk.

  Tire swings hung from rusty chains next to the burnt bench. She remembered sitting on it as a teenager, when the wooden slats were still in place.

  Sanna didn’t linger; she walked past the cars and into the woods. How had it come to this? How had she ended up moving back in with Mom? Her breath pounded in time with her footfalls, the roots punched at the balls of her feet, and she stumbled on, the sharp, dry needles painfully pricking her ears.

  For eleven years she had been free, and now she was back here at ground zero, where she was nothing, where she might as well disappear. She had never been anyone, after all.