Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  “I don’t want to talk to you when you’re like this.”

  “Why don’t you ever answer my calls or text messages? Where are you all day and all night? Your mom says you’re never home.”

  “Call me when you’re sober. Bye.”

  Martti let his phone drop. Minttu’s voice had been dripping with disdain. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, as if he’d been speared through the ribs. He bent over, propped himself up against his thighs, took a deep breath. He reached for his phone. He was too ashamed to go back to the mess, even though no one knew who he’d been talking to.

  The hills looked like spreading ink, blacking out the light of the stars. It had been a consolation of sorts to imagine Sanna somewhere out there, but she must have come back by now. Had she just lost interest in him? How was it possible in this day and age that he wouldn’t know? He had dreamed of disappearing himself, ending his enslavement to the phone, and now he wanted to force Sanna to let him know she was all right. Any message would do.

  Silence is the message, Martti reflected.

  Only a few days later Marja called to let him know Minttu had started smoking pot. Martti knew how common it was in Australia, but in Lapland? Was it cause for concern, or did it just seem like it? Where was his daughter even getting money for drugs?

  “Not from me, that’s for sure,” Marja said.

  Martti wrote Minttu, If you get hooked, you can end up pretty brain dead.

  Minttu’s response: Don’t worry, Martti.

  He found himself despising his daughter’s apathetic insolence, her new habit of referring to him by name.

  He had meant to arrange a longer leave, but a few weeks ago he didn’t think he would have to make good on his proposal. His boss was open to the idea, but the timing was just bad right now. This is an emergency, Martti thought, although he wasn’t sure if it was.

  He kept hoping he’d hear the old spark in Minttu’s voice, proving to him that his concern was pointless, a tempest in a teapot. But his daughter’s behavior grew increasingly erratic, her communication more garbled. She didn’t stick to any commitments or obligations, until one day, Marja threw her out. Martti managed to talk both of them into Minttu returning back home, but Marja refused to put up with any more shenanigans. No one was going to be tramping in and out of her front door after midnight, and if her daughter wasn’t home by then, she could go ahead and stay wherever she happened to be.

  “When are you going to show up and start taking responsibility?” Marja asked him.

  “Soon,” Martti promised, even though his negotiations with his boss were at a standstill.

  Martti considered quitting. He’d always find work, he figured, but the idea of returning to Lapland without a job was impossible. He had to have a way out, an escape plan, and work had always been it. But did it have to be this specific job? He had started having doubts. But what else could it be?

  Martti looked at the empty classroom in front of him, heard the thuds of the men’s footsteps as they climbed the stairs to the donga. As happened more frequently everywhere, humans here were being replaced by robots; driverless dumpers traversed the roads, cabs empty, moving earth without complaining or tiring. Redundancy was the future for all of them. There were fewer and fewer opportunities for lonely boys who didn’t fit in. Martti pictured Jake in his excavator. You could never make out the operator’s face from the outside, but you could recognize him from a distance when you saw how the machine moved. They even spoke of man and machine as one, talked about Jake extending or digging or dropping rocks, and how skilled he was at it.

  Was there a job for Minttu, something that would ground her? Martti tried to concentrate on his lecture. He could tell the men were paying close attention—his message was getting through. When was the last time he’d felt that way with Minttu? It was as if the understanding the two of them had shared, which had excluded Marja, was lost. He wondered if he’d imagined the connection he’d shared with his daughter. Had it been nothing but wishful thinking? He remembered what Sanna had said about her father and about what a daughter can be so quick to hide: that she’s alone, that she needs help.

  Martti eventually arranged permission to travel to Finland once he finished his current set of trainings in Pilbara. In a final attempt to reach Sanna and tell her he was leaving, Martti called Antero, the guy who had arranged Sanna’s internship at the gold mine.

  Antero was happy to hear from him and peppered him with questions. Martti couldn’t get a word in edgewise when Antero started talking about himself. Shop talk and news from home. Antero had become a grandfather. Martti wondered if this was the time to tell Antero that he was in love with his friend’s daughter. Probably not.

  “Were they happy with the intern?” Martti asked.

  “Who? Oh, her. The work was never finished. As a matter of fact, Perth called because they were having trouble getting in touch with her. She was late for some meeting, didn’t let anyone know. As if she were my responsibility.”

  “Did she eventually show up?”

  “I guess, I never heard back from them.” Antero laughed. “I wonder if the men spooked her? She was working on some gender equality thing, wasn’t she?”

  Martti gulped. She seemed to be getting along with men just fine.

  The rest of the call was a blur.

  Martti tried calling Sanna one last time and sent her a final message: I get (but not really) that you might not want to see me anymore, but let me know you’re OK. Please give me that, at least.

  The silence had lasted so long Martti hadn’t expected it to end. He noticed that his concern for Minttu had helped him tolerate his fears about the significance of Sanna’s absence.

  He couldn’t believe it when he saw Sanna’s reply the next morning: I’m OK. No more messages.

  Martti stared at the words. This couldn’t be happening. Sanna was crazy. He tried to call right back, but it didn’t go through.

  They had shared something. Nothing in this world had meant more. What were you looking for out there in the desert? What did you find? Martti felt a slicing pain in his throat, the cough’s sharp cut. You fall in love like this once every forty years. Don’t do this. Please. Just let me see you. Not like this.

  He felt like he had a blunt bit of metal blocking his windpipe. Martti coughed his way through it, then realized he’d been hoping this whole time that there was some other reason for the delay, some explanation Sanna would tell him, and he’d just be relieved and grateful for her return, and nothing else, including this horrible loneliness, would matter.

  Martti stared at his backpack on the chair. The book Sanna had given him was inside it. Had it really all been a hallucination—the park, the stargazing, everything they’d dared to confide to each other? The things about each other they had truly accepted?

  Dad had been forty-nine when he died. He probably hadn’t spent a single happy day with the woman he married. Maybe all Dad had were flakes of gold along a stream bank, burbling solitude. Martti should have been grateful for his time with Sanna, but living would be easier without knowing a love like that existed.

  That night he gave himself permission to drink himself into a stupor and pick a fight with a Polish guy, Kamil, over religion. Sarah intervened, looking as weepy as ever. Martti couldn’t stand her well-meaning whispers, the lisp when she spoke.

  “Stop spitting in my ear,” Martti said.

  “I’m sorry. Please just calm down. There’s actually something I’d like to talk to you about.” Sarah tried to steer him to a table set aside from the rest.

  Not now. Not tonight. No, thank you. Sarah’s advances repulsed Martti. He couldn’t tell if she was trying to look after him or hit on him; in either case the attention was unwelcome. He had no interest in confiding in her.

  He remembered the social worker who’d joined him on the garden swing when he was a child, squeezed his hand and said what should we do now, as if some we existed when a twelve-year-old boy and the forty-year-old wo
man whose job it was to check in on the family were sitting on a swing’s deeply grooved planks. The grass was tall, and the woman had a sharp smell, like white pepper, and all things being equal he would have let himself lean against her, but the smell stopped him, and he painfully jammed his forefinger between the wooden slats until it bruised.

  22

  SANNA

  When they stopped to rest, Ralda pulled out the map. Sanna stepped behind her and tried to follow her eyes. Without being asked, Ralda showed Sanna where they were: smack in the middle of the desert. Sanna gulped. She could feel heat emanating from Ralda. This woman shimmered with an inexplicable, powerful current. It made Sanna nauseated to stand so close to her.

  Sanna looked around. The contour lines indicating rising elevation didn’t match the terrain.

  “Can I look again?” she asked, but Ralda had already folded up the map.

  Ralda was clearly familiar with the route, because every time they were running out of water, they had come upon a spring or a stream. Sanna had been worried about water, and Ralda had replied there were so many ways of acquiring it, they wouldn’t have time to try them all. “We could always spear a baobab, they contain thousands of liters of water, but I don’t like mutilating trees.”

  Then Ralda told her about the Aboriginals’ tree rituals, how they believed that the bridge between sky and earth was a tree growing upside down: roots in the heavens and crown in the sand. Normal trees were also gateways between the sky and the earth, and that’s why the bodies of the dead were left in branches or propped standing in hollow trunks, like coffins stood on end.

  Ralda rose and stepped away. She assumed the lotus position with her face toward the sun. Sanna considered asking, not for the first time, when someone would be coming to pick them up. Where would their path cross the highway again?

  Sanna imagined what it would be like to ride in that car and be a passenger without any obligation to move a muscle. The velvety surface of the seat, the smooth movement and hum, the mingling odors of dust, air conditioning, and gas, the candy aroma of the service station shops, the foaming hand soap. Sanna found herself missing the clattering din of the city’s cafés—the grinding of the beans and the whack of the espresso grounds being knocked out of the portafilter. That world of sliding doors and tiled bathrooms was from another planet; there was no trace of it here, and Sanna was awed by how surreal that felt.

  Maybe everything in existence was formed of sand and wind and dried lips, of breathing in a dragging, broken melody. Sanna had become acutely aware of it all, could hear it inside her ears. Ralda’s footsteps didn’t produce any sound, the colors of her garments shimmered, and her entire body floated out there where the sand glinted like the surface of the water, like melted tin.

  Sanna saw the coppery glow of the desert. The hills were closer now, their hue bloodred, the shadows they cast a black lake. She inhaled the desert’s beauty but yearned for what lay beyond, longed to be back to the world of water faucets, cereal boxes, chest freezers, and airplanes. She remembered Ralda’s words, knew that world was all based on a lie. The whole obscene system of urban life was built on those pits she had seen and would never be able to forget.

  “We’ve dug the earth out from under our feet, our own mass graves, and we’re playing at the brink,” Ralda had said about the gold mine at Kalgoorlie.

  And that’s where I fell in love, amid all that ugliness and selfishness, Sanna thought. Was that a lie, too? She knew it wasn’t. If she didn’t know anything else, she knew that.

  Sanna stared at Ralda defiantly. My questions aren’t difficult, she thought. I want to know how much longer. When will we arrive? I want answers I can understand, not enigmas.

  But when Ralda finally stretched after her meditations, refreshed and limber, as if she hadn’t been frozen in place, she looked at Sanna in such a way that Sanna didn’t dare say anything. She swallowed her questions and accepted the food Ralda had prepared. Sanna burnt her tongue. Ralda chuckled. Sanna set the plate aside and covered it with her scarf. That much she had learned—you had to do that unless you wanted to eat sand and insects. As she waited, she eyed the tree they were camping under. The tree had an ominous name, desert bloodwood. Sanna had shivered when Ralda said it. When had she asked about it?

  She was going to have to start marking the days somehow. For a split second she considered cutting marks into her skin, because ballpoint pen instantly melted into her sweat. What exactly was she thinking? Lumberjack record-keeping with notches? Sanna kicked at the tree’s roots. She was ravenous. Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion were her constant companions. It was true that there was no room for neurotic thoughts here. When had she last had any?

  A raven croaked from one of the branches, dismayed by her kick. Sanna looked up and immediately felt dizzy. Was this the same tree she has asked about several days ago?

  Sanna looked around, but the dunes, the shadows and light, had shifted. She would never learn to read this landscape. Maybe she was too estranged. She only knew how to read people, although Ralda remained as much of a mystery as the mute landscape.

  Sanna would mark the tree when Ralda wasn’t looking. She felt around in her pocket for her knife. She walked back over to her plate and ate, her heart fluttering anxiously. After they finished, Ralda closed her eyes for her nap. Sanna wiped her mouth. For once she wasn’t desperate for more food; she was too nervous. She didn’t take her eyes off Ralda as she edged closer to the tree.

  Her shadow fell across the trunk as she etched a mark into the bark at chest height, then looked at it in despair. How was she ever going to recognize that? She carved deeper, wondered if the tree’s namesake bloodred sap would ooze out. But before she could get that far, Ralda was standing at her side.

  “Sanna, what are you doing?”

  But Sanna was done beating around the bush. “Have we been here already?” She was holding her knife, realized she was gripping it so hard it hurt.

  Ralda looked at her in disbelief.

  “I’m getting worried about you,” she said, gathering up their belongings.

  Sanna stared at the hole she had gouged in the tree. Was it a sign of her insanity or of Ralda’s? Either way, it was inscribed there now.

  23

  MARTTI

  Eva’s body was dotted with tattoos of edible delicacies: a pineapple between the breasts; a red-and-white-striped lollipop on one arm; different pieces of cake on either calf; dozens of strawberries on the back; a cherry-topped milkshake on one thigh. They were like Minttu’s temporary tattoos when she was a little girl, but skillfully done, the colors bright, the lines crisp.

  She brought a cup of coffee and a bun to him on the patio. Her apartment was on the ground floor. All you saw out the front door was outback, though there was still no privacy. The door of the next apartment was about six feet away.

  “Why do you have those tattoos?” Martti asked.

  “No guy has ever taken that long to ask,” Eva said.

  Of course everyone asked about them, but Martti couldn’t claim to be all that interested. Why had Minttu wanted her stickers? They were cool, colorful, exciting. That’s why.

  “You finally ask and now you’re not even listening,” Eva complained.

  The sounds of a kid’s TV program could be heard coming from the apartment.

  “I’m sorry,” Martti said and squinted. The sun was shining right into his eyes.

  Eva went in to get his sunglasses.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

  The previous night, he had hung around, leaning on Eva’s door. She’d had whiskey. Later, he had looked at the tomato-red hair on the pillow as she slept on her stomach, hands under her chest, her elbows jutted out like a crane’s legs.

  Sitting here with a coffee and a bun was better than waking up in a cold sweat in his donga, no idea what time he had come home, how he had swayed on the stairs. One day he’d be sprawling at the bottom with a split skull. But now he’d spoiled that bit
of beauty that was left of Sanna with his drinking.

  His regret was exacerbated by the child stepping into the doorway, announcing that the show had ended. The girl’s face was grave and the light made her frown. For an instant the hollows of her eyes looked empty.

  Eva asked if she wanted more breakfast, but the girl shook her head.

  “What does Lily do all day long?”

  Eva looked at the girl. “She’s with me in the kitchen. She likes watching all the hustle and bustle, don’t you, Lily?”

  Lily didn’t move, just repeated that the show had ended.

  Eva rolled her eyes. “She’s a little shy.”

  “That’s OK.”

  “Where’s Daddy?” Lily asked.

  Eva reached out an arm and wrapped it around the girl. “We already talked about that, remember?”

  “And he’s never, ever coming back,” Lily recited, as if it were some nursery rhyme she had memorized.

  “That’s right.” Eva kept the girl close and gave Martti an apologetic look.

  Martti’s nausea intensified.

  “This is Martti. He comes from a country that has lots and lots of snow.”

  Lily didn’t understand. She turned her unsmiling face to Martti.

  “Hi, Lily.”

  “I want to watch more TV,” she said.

  Eva rose and went inside with the girl. The donga had two rooms: an open-plan kitchen and a bedroom. Martti followed them in. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He checked to make sure that he hadn’t left anything next to the bed.

  Lily had curled up into a ball on the floor, picking at her belly button with one hand. Her left fist was in her mouth.

  “Um—”

  “I’m sure we’ll bump into each other,” Eva said.

  “Right.”

  “After all, you have to eat sometime,” Eva said with a tense smile. She hugged him; her hair smelled like cigarettes. “You’re a sweet guy.”

  Martti didn’t feel like it as he walked across the camp.