Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  “Let me guess: all the Mongols die at the end.”

  Jake scratched his throat. “Yup. I was thinking it would make a good movie. Tigers mauling people—it would be beautiful and savage. Battles between people are so predictable.”

  Were they? Maybe in Jake’s life they had been.

  “You knew that girl, didn’t you?” Martti asked.

  “Everyone knew Stacey.” Jake stretched out his arms, cracked his joints. “Did the police find anything?”

  “They won’t get here till morning, since it’s obvious it wasn’t a crime.”

  Jake looked surprised for a moment. Then he shrugged. “I’d still blame that Sydney fella.”

  Martti looked at him quizzically.

  “Didn’t they tell you at the canteen?” Jake said, his legs jittering. “Same old story. The long and the short of it is that she thought they were together, and that’s what it looked like to everyone else, too, but he went and got hitched on one of his weeks off. She drank herself blind and shacked up with a couple of older guys. And well, all kinds of stories were going around about her. She kept drinking, blokes would come by and knock on her door, and in the end her workmates marked a toilet for her so they wouldn’t catch her cunt critters and diseases. It was a joke, but she took it hard.”

  Jake calmed his legs. Martti turned away. He remembered how, back in his hometown, girls of fifteen often had boyfriends twice their age; riding around in the boyfriends’ cars or on the backs of their snowmobiles was a rite of passage. No one gave it a second thought. The men were often considered losers and the girls emerged from those relationships the victors. But not always. And even though he knew he should ask Minttu if that was still the way things were, he knew the words would catch in his throat halfway out. The thought of Minttu’s stammering silence on the phone disgusted him. Of course that’s still the way things were, you just didn’t want to hear about it from your own child.

  “Does this happen often?” the psychologist asked, once they had drawn up a timetable and assigned responsibilities for the next few days.

  Martti nodded. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. The isolation and the extreme weather rapidly scraped away the shell of polite accommodation, leaving nothing but the explosive core. Offering therapy was supposed to have made a positive impact, but help hadn’t arrived in time.

  Martti followed her retreating back with his eyes until he could no longer distinguish it from the courtyard’s shadows. The sky was black, but the enormous, brilliant moon stood out clearly. The temperature had cooled; Martti could feel his bare legs shivering. He thought about the girl in the walk-in. She was still there.

  Sanna, you’re needed here. Not just at my side, but to talk to these people, to ask your questions about men and women.

  18

  SANNA

  The orange land was a petrified sea; the sky crackled blue against it. The sand had risen into sharp crests like a city of tents, the wind scraping at their broad sides. Low, dry bushes grew in the distance like crowns of thorns.

  According to Ralda, Sanna’s angst was caused by the city, people, unfulfilled promises.

  “The silence of the desert is your peace,” she said.

  Sanna watched dunes cluster first to the right and then to the left. Deep shadows stained the landscape, and the cold night contrasted sharply with the burning brightness. In the city, times of day and temperatures melted into each other; heating systems and artificial lighting dissolved all differences.

  “Always the same anesthetizing comfort,” Ralda declared. “Our bodies are made to sniff the air for rain and game and ripe berries, but we cover our skin and darken our rooms so we can view an artificial world through an electronic screen. This is all our minds can comprehend as reality: fresh air, animals. Only this is real.”

  Sanna didn’t know what this meant. But she tried to read the landscape, understand it. She quickly learned the signs that marked the time of day. The sounds of morning were rustling, scratching, and whispering, a lone raven flying into the sunrise, swaying branches rocked by unseen animals, the unzipping of Ralda’s backpack pockets, the brushing of the tent’s door flap against Sanna’s back as she crawled out, her limbs stiff. The early hours were smoke blue, fading to pale green before the sky turned to furnace-tempered glass once more.

  At midday, the outback was a blank canvas. The animals hid from the searing rays of light. She and Ralda also spent those hours in the shadows, sitting and waiting for the hottest moment to evaporate. When they stopped, Sanna saw lizards: the inky eyes; the gulping, scaled dewlaps; the feet like a dragon’s talons; the tails that lived a separate serpentine life, like an animal inside an animal.

  Night was foreshadowed by the cicadas’ frenzied songs, shrieking in Sanna’s ears, louder and louder, rising to a climax that couldn’t last forever and was followed by utter silence. It happened every evening, and every evening the shrieking was like a vise tightening around Sanna’s head, but she couldn’t take it off. It wasn’t music—it was a vivid reminder that she was not in control of her environment, she couldn’t ask the cicadas to stop, and earplugs were useless against the noise. Ralda laughed at her headaches. Ralda knew of course that the singing always stopped, but when surrounded by the cacophony Sanna feared the sound would drive her mad.

  But as if on a timer, the cicadas would stop shrieking when night dropped across the desert like a faulty curtain, and it grew ominously still. The sky had turned from peach to strawberry, and if there were clouds they were dark bruises; soon the red would turn to black.

  The ferry of the moon appeared with the stars, and then Sanna would breathe more easily; she’d feel herself filling with the soft air of early evening, admiring the Southern Cross and thinking about Martti. Before long sleep would arrive; it meant that another day had been ushered into night, and there couldn’t be an infinite number of days.

  Sanna started off, following Ralda’s footprints like a trail. Ralda’s walking stick left regular tiny impressions next to her footprints, like needle pricks.

  Sanna asked about the animals she saw.

  “That bird is a babbler, there are different varieties.”

  “That creature is a thorny devil. It drinks with its feet, as if roots grew from its heels.”

  “Those lizards are goannas.”

  At night they saw the enormous yellow eyes of an owl, its wings like sails in the air.

  Sanna thought about simple things: Where would they stop next, what would they eat, how much water was left? She felt her feet: Were they swelling, was it time to tape her blisters? One step, another, the next. That’s what trekking was, counting steps, and losing those calculations to the wind. Sanna never made it past a hundred, and then she had to start over again. It seemed like an eternity since they had left the Great Northern Highway and headed southeast. The repetitiveness of the days made it difficult to tell them apart. Ralda told Sanna she was not permitted to keep a log.

  “Don’t try to interpret what’s happening, don’t chop it up into sentences you can understand. The whole is so big that your thoughts will distort it, make it too small.”

  One step, another, a third. I knew this would be hard, Sanna thought, staring at the toes of her hiking boots. They were scuffed by rocks and looked like a wildcat had clawed at the leather. She remembered having been sad when she’d left Broome, but she no longer identified that sorrow as her own. It had been replaced by a numbing clarity. She could see clearly in all directions but could only move along the route Ralda had chosen. Her sole responsibility was to follow Ralda. Without her, Sanna wouldn’t last a single day in this heat.

  She felt the trek digging into her skin, drying out her eyes, sanding down her joints, chapping her lips to scabs. Sanna pictured the desert seeping through her belly to her womb, how her child now carried the desert wind, its sounds and silence.

  The next morning, Sanna stretched outside the tent. The cool, damp air felt nourishing; it caressed
the ravaged skin on her face. A perfect dawn moment. A tree spread its ragged shadows across the tent, over her. She saw a line of pink hills to the east, the sun’s molten gold shimmering beyond. The sky was the same stuffed-animal color as the hills. As a child, she had imagined this was what it would be like after you died: pastel colors, never too hot or too cold.

  She remembered a fight with Ville when they were little. They’d been talking in Sunday school about heaven, and about how all your dreams came true there. “You’re not in my heaven,” Ville had said. Sanna had panicked and cried, said Ville was going to be in her heaven, and because all your dreams were supposed to come true, Ville would have to be there, he couldn’t go off to his own heaven without her. “Maybe you just think you see me but I’m not really there,” Ville had said, and Sanna’s head had ached. “No, I’m serious,” she’d said. “You have to be there so I can touch you and my hand doesn’t go through you like a ghost. You have to be.” Sanna had scratched Ville to force him into a fight; she was irritated by her brother’s ability to torment her without getting agitated himself. She could win a fight if she sat on Ville’s back—he wouldn’t be able to get up.

  Skinny, stork-like Ville. She missed her brother now. She didn’t remember ever having missed him as an adult.

  Then she felt it—a sharp prod in her belly. Sanna squealed with joy and pressed her palms to her stomach. Good morning, my little angel! Do that again.

  Ralda walked up with the water bag. They packed up the food, the tent, and the water. Sanna was grinning as she listened for the child. She noticed Ralda watching her, felt a strange, cool sensation wash over her.

  “Did you ever want children?”

  “On the reserve, the children called all the women mother or sister. I never felt the need to have my own. Later it turned out that I couldn’t conceive. It felt like a gift because I didn’t have to think about it. I’m very happy for you, that you’re having a child. But even relationships have always been difficult for me.”

  Sanna bit her lower lip. The other woman exuded such self-reliance Sanna couldn’t picture a spouse at her side.

  “Are we headed for those hills?”

  Ralda seemed to nod, or was it just the way she tossed her head as she knotted the scarf around it?

  Sanna hoisted her pack onto her back. One more campsite behind them. Would they find cave paintings in the hills, like the ones she had heard about? Was that their goal? Was that where someone would come pick them up? She looked at Ralda expectantly. Sanna was frustrated that Ralda wouldn’t tell her anything about their route.

  “It crosses through sacred lands, it’s secret” was what Ralda had told her. “Almost no humans, living or dead, have ever been where we are going. You will see something unique. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Sanna didn’t know what to say; she hadn’t been expecting anything so out of the ordinary. She had come out here to find peace, but maybe that was unusual, too. But she didn’t demand further information. It seemed that something unfamiliar, something she needed to respect, had come over Ralda in the outback. Sanna’s queries shattered the mood, and she noticed they irritated her guide. She longed for that all-embracing joy that had existed between them at the beginning.

  They stopped at high noon and sought out shade. Sanna was drowsy. She could see the shadows of her eyelashes on her cheekbones. The heat felt like a lead quilt; she didn’t have the energy to lift her limbs. The cuticle on her ring finger was inflamed, throbbing and festering.

  Sanna thought about varieties of cold: the wet, black winters that made your nose run; the slush that soaked your shoes; hands sweating in mittens that were too warm; crystal-clear icy cold where everything stopped, frozen in place, the branches so beautiful. But how little life was contained in that white brilliance.

  She realized she only knew how to read the cold; the burn of the desert was foreign to her. She hadn’t known that the climate of her homeland had been inscribed in her, that it was in her body. She was starting to access what she was looking for: she felt a connection, but it wasn’t with the desert—it was with Finland, with home.

  Home? Where was home? It wasn’t the downtown apartment she’d shared with Janne. Was it the one-bedroom apartment in the suburbs where she’d lived between the ages of ten and twenty? The townhouse that preceded her parents’ divorce? Sanna noticed that she’d lived in every one of her homes for ten years. What silly symmetry. Maybe she’d been divided into three, too, had grown into three different people. And now, this Sanna of the desert, where was her home?

  There was only one place she wanted to be.

  Sanna glanced at Ralda and felt like she’d been caught doing something naughty, thinking a forbidden thought. She lay down on her side, feeling the stickiness between her elbow and cheek through her top. Shadows of birds flitted across the ground.

  Ralda had said that her longing would vanish like her footsteps in the sand. Sanna fingered the fake diamonds on the lighter and defiantly mused, But what if my footsteps don’t vanish? What if they’re fossilized for millions of years?

  Her path would take the shape of longing.

  She had spied them in the distance and couldn’t figure out what they were. She had seen the white blocks set precisely like gigantic sugar cubes in the middle of nowhere. Viewed up close, they had gouged, dingy walls and missing doors, and the roofs had collapsed in. Sand streamed in through the windows, and it wouldn’t be long before the houses were covered over without a trace, like graves. The desert had already washed away the road that once led here.

  “Gold was discovered nearby and people came here with high hopes, but the gold is gone. All the construction and hope proved to be in vain,” Ralda said, coughing. A day without talking had knit her throat shut.

  Sanna thought about Kalgoorlie and the expiration date hanging over it, ticking away.

  All that was left of this wrecked village were a dry well, a dilapidated windmill, and cawing ravens. Sanna looked up at the pitiless sun. She thought she caught human voices coming from the houses in whispers and moans. Some dreams die painfully and slowly, Sanna reflected, thinking about Martti and what he had said about miners’ dreams, lifelong dreams they never got around to realizing. The hard life wore on the young men, made them middle-aged, and when they reached middle age they died.

  Sanna waited for Ralda to put her pack back on; she had stopped to switch out an empty water bottle for a full one. But Ralda started pulling out the cooking gear. Sanna stood still. She didn’t want to stay here, surrounded by these dead dreams.

  She wondered what it was she herself had hoped for. She remembered Dad and Janne pressuring her to apply to the School of Economics and her muteness in the face of their onslaught. She’d had some vague desire to go somewhere she’d be happy, but the dream didn’t have a name or a shape. She tried to be a good partner: pleasant to her boyfriend’s parents, fine with sleeping out in the outbuilding or the sauna, fine with sausage or perch, fine with beer or white wine or buttermilk.

  “What’s Sanna’s favorite dish?” Janne’s mother had asked once.

  “Food,” Janne had answered for her.

  Sanna had blushed, afraid that she ate the way her mother did. But even then she had been proud of the couple she and Janne made. Telling her mother that she and Janne were headed to the cabin, that she had a boyfriend and they had plans for the summer, was life changing.

  Ralda squatted by the camp stove as it hissed. Sanna saw a tire swing hanging from a tree by a metal chain. The rubber had disintegrated into hairy fibers. It made her sick thinking about the children who had swung there.

  That had been the extent of her dreams: a family, a home, nothing more ambitious. She had known it back then, perhaps, the summer after high school, but Janne would have cringed at her dreams, as any nineteen-year-old boy should have. But the years had passed, and she hadn’t found a new dream.

  Sanna turned her back on the houses and saw nothing before her but an expanse o
f desert, the dark hills faintly looming in the distance. The shadows climbed toward the horizon, as if the houses were preceded by their ghosts.

  “How do you see spirituality and balance fitting into your life when you return to Finland?”

  Sanna was startled. She’s gotten used to the silence, and wordlessness had formed a web between her lips. She cleared her throat to open her voice, but she didn’t know what to say. She shook her head.

  “Sanna, other people throw you off balance. You sense their needs and wishes, and their presence drains you. But in an environment like this, you’re filled with the beauty of nature and you can hear your own thoughts.”

  Sanna didn’t understand what Ralda was getting at.

  Ralda sighed. “Look around you. You can be free here.”

  “I don’t think it’d be long before I’d miss having people around,” Sanna said, laughing awkwardly.

  Ralda sat down next to her. “I wasn’t implying you’d have to be alone.”

  Was Ralda being serious? Sanna looked intently at the other woman.

  “Besides, I can’t just decide my child is going to grow up out in some desert where there aren’t any schools.”

  “Do you think your child will be happy with you in Finland? In the place where you’re so unhappy?”

  “I was thinking I wouldn’t be so unhappy anymore,” Sanna said.

  “What if you realize you have to stay here to remain balanced?”

  “That would be sad, because I have to go back to the city.”

  Ralda turned her head; there was that robin-like look again.

  Sanna thought back to snowy Helsinki and the never-ending night. How lovely that one winter evening she and Janne had gone out to eat with friends had been. They’d talked about how they had to keep this place in mind, how they’d be back. It had been a fantastic evening, the conversation straight out of a sitcom, and Sanna felt swells of near-inexplicable gratitude, like in the wave pool at the spa. Someone praised the chanterelle risotto, the same dish Sanna had ordered. She tasted the cream and the salt, and the shaved Parmesan cracked and melted, but all she could think was, I want to die. I’m going to put an end to this. I’ll kill myself and it will be over.