Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  “And to you, that’s the same as being stupid. I see.”

  Irritated, Sanna settled in to watch Martti’s little show. She’d realized she was intrigued by what he could teach her about gold. The whole mining operation felt so insane that she wanted to at least try to understand it. The curiosity had been a healthy impulse, a fresh breeze to air out the cellar of her stale thoughts.

  Now she sulked as she watched Martti pull on gargantuan pot holders that appeared to be made out of aluminum foil.

  “In most cultures, gold is somehow related to the sun. The Egyptians believed it was made from the sun’s rays. For the Incas, it was the sun’s tears. I think that’s pretty wild, because back then people didn’t see the sun the same way we do. There was no way they could know what the sun looked like up close, its lava-storm surface.”

  As Martti spoke, he pulled out a conical vessel with a flat bottom. He opened the hatch of the smelter behind him; it was like a top-loading washing machine. The orange glow inside reminded Sanna of the coils of an electric sauna. Martti’s mask reflected the ruddy light. He picked up the crucible in a pair of tongs and lowered it into the smelter. Then he took off the gloves and helmet.

  “And now we wait.”

  “How long is it going to take?”

  “About an hour.”

  “An hour?”

  “Are you in a hurry to get somewhere?”

  “I have to make the employee bus. I didn’t realize this was going to take so long,” Sanna said, infuriated by the thought of spending an hour with this smug prick.

  “No worries. I’ll drop you off in town. Where are you staying?”

  “The Shire.”

  “Didn’t anyone warn you?”

  “About what?”

  “It doesn’t exactly have the best reputation.”

  “What hotel around here does?”

  Martti laughed, and Sanna couldn’t help being amused, too, in spite of her irritation.

  The auditorium popped and hummed. Sanna had a hard time looking at Martti.

  “So tell me what makes gold so amazing. Why have people always been so crazy about it?” she asked, chewing on her thumbnail.

  “It’s the way it gleams.” Martti smiled. “When I was a boy, Dad would take me to the Lemmenjoki River to pan for gold, and when we sifted those shimmering flakes out of that stream, I couldn’t believe it. It doesn’t sparkle like, say, dewdrops or moonlight on the sea, the kind of light you’re used to. It has a color to it. Warm. And you can hold it in your hand, unlike the stars or fire. You can touch it.”

  “I always used to want to touch everything when I was little,” Sanna said.

  She had completely forgotten the sensation. How the emergency stop button on buses and trains and elevators hypnotized her, how badly she wanted to know what it would feel like to press it. The red was right out of a cartoon or a neon sign, vivid and intense. Why couldn’t Mom understand that she couldn’t help herself?

  “That urge to touch never leaves us, it stays with us forever,” Martti said. “I think if you don’t feel it anymore, the end is near. And with gold you might think seeing it is the important thing, but later you get hooked on the heft, how it warms in the hand. When I saw those flakes in the water, they really were like shavings of the sun, cheery and bright, but when I held them in my hand, I understood the contradiction between that and their weight. How something so slight could feel so heavy.”

  Sanna shifted in her seat; the air in the room felt like it had turned dense and close.

  “You said you wanted to come to Australia specifically. Why?” Martti asked.

  “Isn’t being fascinated by Aboriginals enough of a reason?”

  Martti shook his head.

  “The distance was important. But I’m also planning on doing a trek in the desert, after I finish my thesis.”

  “It’s incredibly hot out there this time of year. Won’t you burn to bits?”

  “I’ll have to make sure I’m covered up. Most Australians have light hair and fair skin, too.”

  “Which is why they all have skin cancer, and they’re not wandering around in the desert. It is beautiful. I’ve seen my share of it. For some reason mines are always in the middle of nowhere. That’s where I’m headed next, too, up north to Pilbara. Really gorgeous terrain.”

  Sanna nodded as Martti continued.

  “In any case, aside from the unearthly gleam and the light, gold seems to be eternal. It never loses its luster the way silver or copper does. It can take endless reshaping without losing mass or strength. That’s why people used to think that gold contained the secret to eternal life.”

  Martti said that according to the theory of alchemy, metals were created deep under the mountains, where air, water, fire, and earth came together. Depending on the proportions, you ended up with iron, lead, copper, or silver, or if everything went perfectly, gold. The alchemists decided that when nature had left things halfway done they could complete the gold-formation process by adding what was missing to less valuable metals. And if it were possible to repair metals, why not mankind? The same tincture that would perfect lead into gold could surely be used to heal any ailments that troubled humans.

  Sanna couldn’t believe her ears. “But why did they think gold was perfect?”

  “It was rare and beautiful.”

  “So are pink diamonds!”

  “You can’t do with diamonds what you can do with gold. You’ll see in a minute. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think much of diamonds, there’s so much speculation in the market.”

  Sanna looked interested, so Martti explained how the majority of mined diamonds were kept off the markets to inflate the price.

  “I get that their sparkle is beautiful, but I don’t think they feel as real as gold. Besides, when I was in Botswana I saw how many of them there really are.”

  “Botswana?”

  “I worked there for a few years.”

  He took off the gloves and helmet and seated himself next to Sanna. He put on his protective gear. Sanna watched him intently.

  “Come closer,” Martti said.

  He raised the hatch to the furnace, reached in with the tongs, and lowered the crucible to the table. The orange glow took Sanna’s breath away. Next, Martti set out an ingot mold and started pouring the molten gold into it.

  “It’s unreal,” Sanna said. The color of the gold flickered in her eyes. The molten metal looked just like lava. “It’s like mercury, but more, somehow, richer.”

  The gold rippled in the mold and quickly cooled off.

  “It’s like liquid fire,” Sanna said.

  Martti dipped the mold into a tub of water; there was no hiss. Sanna looked surprised, and Martti said this wasn’t like melting tin on New Year’s Eve. The gold had already cooled. He pulled the ingot out of the mold, and the gold gleamed as if it had been polished.

  “Can I touch it?” Sanna asked.

  Martti’s smile broadened, and Sanna blushed. She couldn’t hide her curiosity.

  “This here is an unstamped ingot. It’s like it doesn’t exist.”

  Sanna stroked the ingot’s surface.

  “It was so beautiful when it was molten, much more beautiful than it is in this state. Those people from ancient times must have melted it, that’s why they fell in love with it. How hot is that oven?”

  “Twelve hundred degrees Celsius.”

  Sanna examined the ingot closely. “When it was liquid, it was alive.”

  “Does it seem dead to you now?”

  The gold gleamed brightly; Martti reminded her that it wouldn’t dim. Gold didn’t rust.

  “My eyes are drawn to it, but I think after a while the spell would fade. It would become one of those old souvenirs you dust for a while but toss at some point because you don’t really want it anymore.”

  Martti cleared his throat. “You could live off this ingot for the rest of your life.”

  The thought was disconcerting, that here in their hands
they held a sum that would free them from work forever. It gleamed silently, as if concealing all those years within.

  “Is that why people keep searching for gold, in hopes that eventually they can stop searching altogether?”

  Martti laughed and said that his Dad had looked for gold his entire life.

  “I have no idea what he would have done if he’d found it. I guess he would have paid Mom to let him sit on the stream bank, not doing anything.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do once you retire?”

  “Not on the banks of the Lemmenjoki.”

  Martti spoke so brusquely Sanna was startled.

  She wordlessly passed the ingot back to Martti and used her now-free hands to fix her ponytail.

  “In Lapland, panning for gold is pretty hopeless, because the meltwater from the Ice Age has spread it over large areas, and just because you find a nugget doesn’t mean you’ll find any more gold in the vicinity. But you might. That flicker of hope drives people crazy. Just the rumor of gold somewhere would make Dad foam at the mouth. Any time he had a vacation he’d go off looking for it.”

  “So it runs in the family, having a father who’s always off digging for gold.”

  Martti flinched.

  Sanna felt like telling him she hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings. She thanked him and said it was so nice of him to show her all this, but he just collected his things and said no problem.

  “No, seriously, I’ve never seen gold this way before, I’ll never forget it.”

  Martti nodded. That could be true.

  6

  The Kalgoorlie supermarket resembled a concrete parking garage, its display-window ads faded and discolored. Women wandered down endless aisles, shopping carts overflowing, lost in thought. Now and again a child would pop out from behind a pyramid of cans, thrust or throw something into the mother’s shopping cart. Sanna stopped in her tracks to watch, amazed. So this was where the women and children were hiding.

  The women were the polar opposites of the bar girls. They were big boned, without a lick of makeup, hair straggling from under ball caps or scraped back with hair clips. Most were wearing plastic shoes or sandals, many with socks. Masculine hoodies and capri pants were paired with frilly, floral T-shirts and small puff sleeves. Fine gold chains vanished beneath jowl flaps; fingers were fatter than rings. The baggy clothes formed a jarring contrast to the jewelry.

  The cashier was spilling over her chair and sucking in her lower lip as if it might come loose and drop off at any moment. Sanna wondered if the extra pounds were insulation against sexuality. Could girth make a woman invisible in this town?

  She returned to the Shire with her purchases, walked out onto her balcony, and called her mother. Mom immediately asked when Sanna was coming home, said she had found the liverwurst Sanna liked when she was little on sale and had put it in the freezer until Sanna returned. Sanna was touched by the thought of her mother at the store, her joy in finding a product marked with the neon-orange Sale sticker. Mom confessed that she did eat half of one. She also said she’d taken a cruise to Tallinn and managed to carry back four cases of beer, all on her own.

  Sanna massaged her temples. “I didn’t know you go through so much of it.”

  “It was on sale.”

  “What’s the expiration date?”

  “Beer doesn’t go bad, does it?” Mom sounded stunned. “Hold on, I’ll go check.”

  Sanna could hear boxes being moved, cardboard ripping open, Mom’s accelerated breathing by the time she came back to the phone.

  “It goes bad next month. They shouldn’t be selling it!”

  “It probably said somewhere to note the expiration date.”

  Sanna could see Mom in her mind’s eye, noticing the price and going bonkers, ignoring the rest of the information. Was there something called sale blindness? If so, Mom had it.

  “Well, beer doesn’t go bad,” Mom declared.

  Sanna didn’t argue. What good was it going to do?

  “Come home. I’ve got liverwurst and beer for you.”

  Sanna thought, Wow, what a hand for a pregnant woman. The only things missing were unpasteurized cheese and vacuum-packed fish, but there was no way you’d ever find either in Mom’s fridge.

  Sanna didn’t dare say anything about the pregnancy; Mom’s reactions were unpredictable. She’d told Sanna that when she heard about the breakup she’d felt so bad she’d taken ibuprofen for days. But whatever her initial reaction, Mom would insist Sanna return to Finland so she could keep an eye on her stomach, as though her baby were a casserole cooking in the oven.

  “You and Janne haven’t made up? You’re not getting back together?”

  “I don’t think so, Mom, no.”

  “Hmm. You’re no spring chicken, but you still have time. Just start going places where there are lots of men.”

  Like mines, Sanna thought.

  There had been stretches when random men would visit Mom, but Sanna couldn’t recall their faces. She remembered them as shoes in the entryway, a tinkling in the bathroom, the sound of cupboards opening in the middle of the night. The faucet ran and their big sweaty feet stuck to the plastic kitchen rug and dragged it around.

  Sanna remembered Mom in front of the tall mirror in the entryway; it had been hung too low, but neither she nor Mom could muster the energy to bang a new nail into the wall. Mom would tilt her head to see herself full length. Lipstick and lots of dusky eye shadow. What do you think? How do I look? she’d ask, and Sanna would come up with something nice to say. Her nails were gorgeous. The skin under her arms was so smooth.

  Mom would stand at the window, worried, until the man arrived. Was he going to find it? Was he at the right building? Sometimes Mom would go down to the parking lot to serve as a landmark, and Sanna would take her place at the window and watch Mom pace back and forth anxiously outside the door.

  It was there in front of the entryway mirror that Mom would cry on the occasions she had waited in the parking lot in vain.

  “Call again soon,” Mom said. “No one ever visits me, and the only ones who call are telemarketers.”

  Sanna bit her tongue so she wouldn’t start lecturing Mom about buying things over the phone. The ensuing argument would cost just as much as one of Mom’s magazine orders.

  She remembered the moment she had realized that Mom’s small salary wasn’t the sole reason for her perpetual lack of cash. They were at the flea market at the ice rink, looking for skates for Sanna, and Mom didn’t have a clue how to bargain. If the price was too high, she just walked away from the table. In the end they found a pair that would work with inserts, and the asking price was forty marks. Mom stared at the seller. Did she hear that right? Sanna elbowed her. “Mom, Mom, just give her the money,” she said, and Mom pulled out her coin purse and handed over the smooth hundred-mark bill she had withdrawn from the ATM.

  The seller apologized that she had to make change in coins. She scratched at her forehead with her fingerless gloves and said, “Check now to make sure I got it right.” Mom’s lips moved like a child learning how to read as she counted the coins and dropped them in her coin purse. “Yes, it’s all there, thanks,” she said, and they even got a plastic bag—normally you had to remember to bring your own.

  Back at the apartment, Sanna took the coins and stacked them into towers on the kitchen table. Money was missing.

  “There are only forty marks here,” Sanna said.

  Mom looked at her in surprise. “That’s how much there’s supposed to be.”

  “No, there’re supposed to be sixty; they cost forty.”

  Mom blinked and a flush rose to her cheeks. “Of course, that’s right,” she said, but Sanna had the feeling that the numbers still hadn’t clicked for Mom.

  “They’re too expensive now,” Sanna said, panic rising within her.

  “Still cheaper than at the store,” Mom said, but she looked anxious.

  The skates were not a one-off mistake. It didn’t take l
ong for Sanna to figure out that Mom didn’t have the faintest idea how to count. Mom always gave clerks at the register a big bill, and with sale flyers she only understood the colors, not the prices. Orange and yellow meant cheap; explosion stickers meant really cheap. She also understood bulk discounts—three for the price of two, ten for the price of eight—which made her feel like she had gotten a good deal. They might as well buy six doughnuts; they cost the same as four. Up until Sanna started being scared they would actually run out of money, she of course agreed.

  But by that time Sanna was asking about every purchase. Didn’t it cost too much, did they really need it? Mom would get angry when Sanna surreptitiously removed items from the shopping cart that she’d put in. “Mom, we don’t need chips, they’re not even healthy, they cut the roof of my mouth.” Mom submitted, but sometime later Sanna found candy bars stashed in her coat pockets when she was rifling through them for cigarettes. Colorful fistfuls of Pätkis, Jim, Da Capo, and Geisha. Mom didn’t get mad at Sanna for smoking, but she did get mad when Sanna told her she had to stop shoplifting candy. Mom tugged at her ear, saying, “What are you so ashamed of?”

  The spring Sanna graduated from high school Mom was working, so Sanna wasn’t that worried about how her mom would get by after Sanna moved out. After all, Mom’s expenses would go down since she wouldn’t be paying for Sanna’s food and clothes anymore—although by the time she was in high school, Sanna paid the lion’s share with what she made at her summer jobs. But no more than six months had passed before Sanna could tell something was wrong. She went to see Mom in Kannelmäki and saw mail from a collection agency on the table in the entryway.

  “What’s this from?” Sanna asked.

  Mom looked annoyed. “Well, either from that magazine or the stuff I bought at Ellos.”

  “You bought something on credit? Why?”

  “It could be the magazine. A telemarketer called and I couldn’t get rid of him, so I ordered it. I just didn’t remember to pay.”

  “They don’t send them to collections that fast. Mom, do you need money?”