Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  The backpacks were packed into a Jeep parked in front of the hotel. Across the road, a ditch ran through palm-dotted scrub. The surface of the road was cracked. Denzel asked if they were sure they had enough water.

  Sanna climbed into the backseat and leaned against the door. Ralda turned around to look at her, smiled and squeezed her knee.

  “Here we go.”

  Sanna responded with a faint smile and hoped she would fall asleep.

  Denzel was curious as to the route they were taking. Sanna surreptitiously looked up and saw Ralda watching her in the rearview mirror. Like a woman in a niqab, Sanna thought, all you can see are the eyes. Denzel was asking how long it had been since Ralda had done this.

  “It’s been a few years,” she said calmly. “It feels wonderful to be going back.”

  The low buildings rapidly fell by the wayside. They turned onto the Great Northern Highway. She remembered driving out of Kalgoorlie with Martti. The day dawned and the sun’s fingers reached for the distant hills. The shadows were long in the desolate landscape.

  The Jeep stopped. Sanna glanced at Ralda, who nodded. This was where they were getting out. Sanna rubbed her face and clumsily climbed down. She heard chirping from the side of the road. They stepped off the shoulder and watched Denzel make a U-turn and head back.

  “He and I spent our childhoods at the same research station,” Ralda said before the car disappeared. “We’re both half-breeds, not white, but not black, either. It’s been hard at times, finding a way to live in between.”

  Sanna’s hand gently touched Ralda’s. Ralda took hold of it.

  “We’re going to leave all that unhappiness behind, Sanna. You can let go of it now.”

  PART TWO

  DISTANCE

  17

  MARTTI

  The airplane gleamed metallic white—smoldering ice amid the scorching desert. Hazy mirages shimmered beneath its wings. The runway was like a fenced-in tennis court cleared in the heart of the kettle-top hills beyond which spread an uninhabited Wild West.

  Martti searched for his sunglasses as he stood at the top of the airplane’s stairs and gazed at the line of acid-yellow shirts in front of him. You could tell the line of arriving employees from the line of departees by their paler skin. The faces of the latter were a deep rust, and Martti knew the eyes behind the dark glasses were bloodshot.

  They had celebrated the end of their time at the mine in spite of the incident. Martti coughed; his lungs rumbled nastily. The call had come at the airport, and he had spent the flight planning the employee information session. He was going to have to tell the psychologist to prepare for overtime.

  How well had she adjusted to life at the camp? Martti thought back to the weepy, gray-skinned woman he had met at headquarters. She had whispered to him that she didn’t want to be transferred to Pilbara. She couldn’t stand being apart from her family.

  For a moment, the lines of arrivals and departees stood side by side. Martti smelled sweat and booze. A bottleneck formed at the doors as everyone dug out their cigarettes after the flight. Martti patted his pocket; nothing there but a loose rectangular patch of fabric. He had promised not to smoke.

  There was no cell-phone coverage. That meant no text messages, in or out.

  He scanned the yellow shirts for Jake, the excavator operator he’d met a couple of years back. Kind of an odd guy, but Martti wanted to talk to someone, think about something else, if even for a moment.

  The camp was some distance from the mine and the airfield. As he stepped out onto the parking lot, Martti noted the unnatural silence. He could sense a palpable tension in the brightly lit camp, like a stadium holding its breath before a championship game. The beams of the spotlights surrounding the camp were powerful, but they didn’t penetrate a single yard into the desert beyond, where the dense, unbroken darkness fell early.

  The temporary ops manager, whose name was Timothy according to the tag on his left breast pocket, was on hand to welcome Martti.

  “You wanna take your things first?” he asked, blond, scrawny, unsure of himself.

  Martti showed that all he had was his backpack.

  “You headed back for the weekend?”

  “In eight weeks,” Martti said. “I’m assuming no one called an ambulance, right? Are the police here yet?”

  Timothy shook his head. “The doc came out.”

  “Good.”

  Timothy looked uneasy.

  “Because of the loved ones,” Martti explained.

  “Yeah, so they can’t demand compensation.”

  “So they don’t have to wonder if anything could have been done,” Martti said.

  “Oh yeah, sure, right,” Timothy said, trying to keep pace with Martti.

  Martti strode down the concrete walkway toward the canteen. He glanced at Timothy to verify he was headed in the right direction. Timothy nodded.

  “She was already in cold storage, right?”

  Martti thrust open the swinging door; the warm, wet smell of the canteen wafted out. The food line stood directly ahead, employees in white bustling around behind it. The vestibule had shelves for helmets and bags. There was no eating with helmets on; that was a written rule, some attempt to maintain normal-world manners in this place.

  Timothy dove out in front of Martti like an otter. He was wearing tan socks and strapped sandals; his feet slid across the linoleum floor, as if he were gathering up speed for a figure-skating jump. What were those twirls called that Minttu used to do when she was little?

  They walked past the steaming serving line. Timothy flung open the swinging doors to the kitchen. Out of the corner of his eye, Martti caught a wave from the dining room. He turned and saw the psychologist sitting at one of the tables, shoulders slumped. She looked exhausted.

  “Don’t go anywhere. We need to talk,” Martti called to her.

  The psychologist nodded.

  Martti followed Timothy through the kitchen. People turned around, gave them curious looks. A woman Martti didn’t recognize was standing in front of the heavy hasped door to the walk-in; she introduced herself as the nurse.

  “I’m kind of acting as watchdog here.” As she spoke, she rubbed her palms together and glanced around at the canteen staff.

  “I wouldn’t have touched her even when she was alive,” muttered a voice behind Martti.

  There was stifled laughter and Martti glared at the employees. They looked at the floor like a class of school kids sticking together.

  Timothy opened the door to the walk-in and Martti stepped in. A pink hoodie and black leggings were visible between the massive wheeled shelves of milk and cheese. The soles of the feet were bare; the sandals had dropped off. Martti stared at the toes, which were like frostbitten new potatoes, purple and wrinkled. The girl’s hands were in the front pocket of her hoodie, and saliva had gathered at the corners of her mouth. She could just as easily be a teenager sleeping off a hangover. The reek of vomit mingled with damp cardboard.

  The beauty queen of a closed community: someone was inevitably assigned the role. In a big city, no one would have noticed this pudgy girl with bad skin, but among the handful of females at the mining camp, she was a miracle—young, high spirited, full of hope. Martti remembered how, not long after arriving at the site, she had realized her new status and started flirting good-naturedly. It had seemed harmless. But she’d been found frozen and gray, with spit and vomit crusted to her top.

  Martti looked at the girl and the boxes around her. Why had she sought out this specific place? She had taken the medicine from the first-aid room, which was, if Martti remembered correctly, at the far end of the camp. A bottle of Mountain Dew had rolled over to the edge of the walk-in and lay there, glowing green. So she had come in here to take the pills?

  Minttu had been wearing the same sort of hoodie the last time Martti saw her, at the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. His daughter’s outfit had been light blue, which matched her eyes. Martti had complimented her on it, a nice change fr
om the endless black. Minttu’s hair and nails and eyebrows, black, black, black, even though her skin was whiter than cream. Lutzes! Those jumps Minttu used to do. Martti congratulated himself for remembering.

  He forced himself to examine the dead girl’s face. He could see trails of dried tears running across the makeup. She’d had an infectious smile and clumsily told off-color stories. Her white kitchen uniform and generous bust had made her look older than her years. In death, she was a little girl who’d fallen asleep in the car, her daddy carrying her up to bed to continue sleeping. Martti had a vision of Minttu, tender and smelling of child, her hair curled from perspiration. He remembered thinking there was no way he could ever leave his daughter, and yet he’d done it. Sanna was right: there hadn’t been room for a daughter in his life.

  Martti stood up; his knees wouldn’t let him squat for long periods anymore. Careful not to touch or move anything, he scanned the walk-in once more to make sure there was nothing else of interest. Timothy watched him, looking nervous.

  “So I guess the thing with the door is pretty bad?”

  It took Martti a minute to decipher this. “There’s no way of opening it from the inside? It couldn’t have been installed that way.”

  “It’s been broken for a while, that’s what I was told. They usually just prop it open with a box while they’re in here.”

  Martti sighed. The kitchen manager would be fired, even though the girl had clearly made no attempt to get out of the walk-in. She had known about the door. That’s why she’d come in there: if she’d had second thoughts, they wouldn’t have made a difference.

  Martti found the psychologist in the same place. Her posture was the same, too.

  Martti didn’t sit. “Should we go somewhere else?”

  “I don’t suppose you’re hungry after that,” the psychologist said, standing and looking around as if she’d spread her belongings about a wide area. “How was your flight?”

  “Fine.”

  “It makes me so jumpy, that plane. It feels like you’re landing in some random spot in the middle of the hills. You can’t even see the landing strip until the wheels touch down. It always makes me think of that movie where they crashed in the Andes. The one where they eat each other at the end.”

  What? Martti tried to pay closer attention as the psychologist kept talking, but her headshaking and lowered face made it difficult to hear. Martti had spoken in favor of having a psychologist at the camp. In the past, the church had sent them a priest, a much cheaper option for the company. But Martti figured the era when you had to involve religion if someone wasn’t doing well had passed.

  The residential dongas were blue and stacked double, forming two figure eights. Martti didn’t remember the logic by which the letters were sequenced; sometimes they ran clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise.

  He showed his number on the map to the psychologist, who shook her head.

  “I always get lost here.”

  In Africa, the miners’ quarters had been wooden bungalows, the kind you saw in travel brochures for tropical islands. But in Botswana, there wasn’t a view of an emerald-green sea; you looked out on reddish-brown clay dotted with the white tatters of plastic bags and soda bottles as thin as soap bubbles. The locals hadn’t been allowed to gather up the trash, either, because someone would have had to guard them while they did it. Martti remembered what it looked like: men armed like soldiers shepherding scampering, nimble-fingered children off the site.

  It was sweltering outside, and Martti realized he was thirsty. He pulled his water bottle out of his backpack and asked the psychologist to remind him of her name.

  “Sarah.”

  “Could you get us some water? Do you know where the water station is?”

  “But how will I find you?”

  Martti showed her the map again. “This donga has to be somewhere around here. We can plan the next steps there. We’ll have to make an announcement to the employees.”

  In the past, suicides were hushed up, the fear being that death would be contagious, but the decision had been made to test a more transparent policy. Martti was cautiously optimistic about its utility, but the mining community’s reactions to the girl’s demise could range from indifference to fury, and anything in between. Social norms didn’t apply at the camp. If a memorial service were held for the girl, those present would be equally likely to giggle, yawn, or cry.

  Martti studied the map: the residential dongas, the canteen, the gym, the swimming pool, the bar with its patio, and at the edges, the parking lot, the bus stop, and the miniscule store run by the mining company.

  During his evening shifts, Jake, the kid who operated the extractor, liked to make up stories about the adventures of people and animals in outer space. The only thing that the stories had in common with the surrounding reality was the omnipresent distance. Jake had said as much, wiping snot on his palm.

  “Think about what happens to us, isolated the way we are out here. Then imagine astronauts, how far away they are, what happens to them.”

  Martti gazed into the dry, endless darkness. Martti gazed at the dry, endless vista. Maybe this was what it was like being on the surface of the moon, in that foreign, isolated reality.

  Airplanes made it possible to run operations on a fly-in, fly-out basis, with the mine employees flown in from town for two weeks at a time. When your two weeks were up, you had a week off. During well-being trainings, Martti presented the men with a stark figure: they would spend the majority of the year at the mine. Taken from the perspective of a lifetime, that meant they should live a healthy lifestyle while at camp. Their time here was real life, not the time they had off. The law of accrual. Time passing marked the lives of these men.

  Many of them never grasped this; for them, during their workweeks they were in an arrested state, counting down days and hours. But from time to time you’d hear about an employee who fed loved ones lies about his return because he didn’t want to see anyone when he was in town. This was particularly prevalent among the men without families, who came to discover that townie life had slipped out of reach, and meeting old friends had become a burden. These men ended up in a state of perpetual ambiguity, halfway to the moon, whether they were at home or at the mine.

  Jake was one such loner. He smirked when Martti had asked him what he did during his time off.

  “During all those years I was in school I only had four close friends. Now I don’t have any. But that’s all right. I used to get their girlfriends’ and wives’ and kids’ names so mixed up, and we didn’t have much to talk about anymore. Do you know what the best thing is about being home? You can take a shit in your own bathroom and not have to close the door.”

  Martti walked past the swimming pool; it tempted with its shimmering chlorine-scented turquoise light. If you pricked up your ears, you could hear the croak of the black-and-brown frogs. You’d find them clustered along the lane lines, slack-eyed, sinewy creatures, hateful to run into while you were swimming.

  Not exactly the Mermaids’ Lagoon.

  At last Martti spotted his door. The cleaner had left the geothermal pump running so his room was cold as an icebox. Martti adjusted the temperature before he even turned on the lights. The place looked like a cruise-ship cabin: the television and bed were bolted to the walls, the floor was linoleum, the bathroom and shower were hosed down with a pressure washer. He could sense the damp in the walls.

  Martti carried a chair outside, took a seat, and waited for the psychologist to appear. He felt the fatigue in his arms and legs; he hadn’t gotten more than a couple of solid hours of sleep the previous night. He had wanted to spend his waking time with Sanna while he still could.

  There was still no mobile signal.

  That evening, Jake came to hang out at Martti’s donga. The look on his baby face was serious, impenetrable.

  “What are you doing here?” Martti asked.

  “I’m doing two shifts back to back.”

  Jake pursed h
is mouth and scrunched his upper lip to his nostrils to indicate the topic was closed. Martti noticed the kid had gotten bulkier around the shoulders. The muscles looked comical in contrast to the smooth, boyish cheeks and big eyes.

  “I made up this planet where there’s a real samurai court. The palace is full of tigers, like cats, you know, they’re everywhere, and when the emperor stands to cross the throne room, he walks through the mass of tigers like they’re a herd of sheep. Their scat is everywhere, the silk hangings are covered in tiger piss. Have you seen how they spray? It’s like it gives off heat, and the stench is indescribable. But there’s nothing they can do about it, because tigers are sacred.”

  “Like cows in India?”

  Jake shook his head—the interruption was throwing him off.

  “Tigers are sacred and that’s why a war breaks out, because the emperor thinks tigers are being killed and skinned somewhere and people are treading on their pelts with unwashed feet. He immediately sends an army of a thousand samurai to kill those people.”

  “Normal people, you mean?”

  “No, listen, the tiger killers are Mongol guerillas who don’t fight in formation, according to samurai rules. The samurais can’t do anything about it and thousands of them die, their rotting flesh is left inside the armor, because their pages are speared, too, and so there’s no one to strip the bodies.

  “What can the emperor do? All the tigers are looking at him like loyal dogs, but they’re licking their whiskers. No one has fed them. The emperor throws them hunks of samurai, and the tigers work the meat out of the chest plates, and then the emperor comes up with the answer. He calls all the tiger tamers in the world together and creates an army out of the big cats, soundless and utterly cruel. The tigers have no inhibitions, and in the jungle—”