Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  “Great,” Minttu said when Martti gave her the date of his arrival in Sodankylä. He remembered having heard the same word, in the same indifferent tone, when she’d been chewing her hair, reading a magazine on the couch, and Marja carried the vacuum into the living room and said, “Here, I brought you this.” Martti had held back his laughter at the time, but now his stomach was in knots.

  How could his own child be such a stranger, so recalcitrant?

  When Minttu was little, Martti had hopped in place to keep warm at the hockey rink that smelled of ice and cement, the black carpeting springing under his shoes. Minttu skated over to him, eyes shining, her hair gathered up in a bun, her one-piece outfit covered in sequins. The girl loved sparkles—until she moved on to middle school, where she fell in love with the color black and singers in kohl eyeliner and leather jackets. That had been it for figure skating.

  What about since then? Martti had sent her markers when she was into drawing Japanese anime, but that had probably come to an end, too.

  “How do you spend your time these days?” he asked.

  “There’s nothing to do here.”

  “Sure there is. Like going to school.”

  “Yeah. For people who like stuff like that. Did you?”

  Martti wondered what his daughter had heard. The truth was that he had liked school, the predictability of it. Later he’d thought it was a good thing there was school—it was the one place he could go no matter how things were at home. A river ran behind the building, and he could go down to its banks no matter what the school day had been like.

  “I still finished it,” he said in a conciliatory tone.

  “Life’s pretty short for shit like that.”

  “School isn’t shit!” Martti snapped.

  “Great. Was there anything else?”

  “Minttu, I’m serious. What are you planning on doing?”

  “Something I want to do! It’s not your problem!”

  But it was. It wasn’t until now that Martti realized how his life depended on Minttu’s happiness. His daughter waited silently on the line until she abruptly said, “Sounds like this conversation’s over” and hung up.

  Martti’s heart dropped.

  He noticed that all his hopes regarding Minttu came down to her staying sober and being able to support herself. He was afraid she would take up with a sketchy crowd and call him one day, from some random corner of some random city, broke and hungry. Martti remembered his classmates who’d dropped out. He gave them money from time to time, even though they openly admitted they’d drink it away. He didn’t want his little black-haired figure skater living like that.

  For the first time in his life, Martti yearned for complete control, the power to prohibit that life, to decide for his child that her life would be different. He remembered having been afraid at some point that Minttu would lose herself in religion, end up in some sect of singing automatons. But that didn’t sound so bad now. Stay alive, stay healthy, be happy, Martti hoped. But his advice, his orders, his pleas meant nothing to his daughter.

  For some reason, Jake had stopped talking to Martti. If he showed up at the gym at the same time Jake was there, the kid made a big show of finishing his set and doing chin-ups until his veins popped, then slammed the door on his way out.

  Sarah’s words came back to Martti: Out here boys don’t grow up to be men, they stay kids on the inside. They have no mechanisms for dealing with loss.

  Thoughts aren’t going to get you anywhere, Martti wanted to tell Jake. You have to take action. You have to express what you’re feeling. And you might end up falling in love with someone who rejects you, and never looks back.

  24

  SANNA

  The bonfire crackled. Sanna felt the heat-agitated air move and dance across her face, but her back was cold. She was crouched over, trying not to show that she sensed the baby kicking. Ralda always got a peculiar, fixed look in her eye when she noticed the baby was moving.

  Ralda sang words Sanna didn’t understand in a deep, low voice. The atonal, repetitive tune was otherworldly and alienating, and called to mind the sound of the gongs. Sanna tried to dispel the eerie mood created by the music, but Ralda kept singing. She wished Ralda would stop, say something normal. She asked about a bird she’d seen with a turquoise-and-green body and black-and-orange wings.

  “Rainbow bee-eater,” Ralda said impatiently.

  “Rainbow bee-eater,” Sanna repeated.

  The bird was adorable. It was impossible to imagine it eating anything but nectarines, although, as its name indicated, it tore apart beehives for the honeycomb and devoured the insects.

  Ralda said nothing else, nothing alarming or comforting. She just took out her backpack and dug around until she pulled out red powder that looked like paprika. She added a drop of water to form a clay-like paste.

  “You’re going to paint me,” Sanna said, feeling relieved and exhilarated. It would be nothing but face paint, and yet it felt like more. At least Ralda wouldn’t be cutting her open.

  The wind skimmed across the sides of the tent as though it were the surface of a lake. Ralda mixed white paint in a second dish and black in a third. Sanna remembered the smell of clay and watercolors and wet paper from art class, and the metal sink that was brown with splattered paint. Sanna had often asked for permission to spend lunchtime inside the classroom, painting. She listened to the sounds of running and the yelling, the crashes as the boys playing floorball tackled each other against the walls, the clack of their sticks, the girls’ jump-rope rhymes. For once she got to be someone other than the one holding the rope; in art class she could just be.

  She remembered what it was like to take out the colors, dip her brush in the water, and press that first line into the paper. The contact of the color transformed the paper, made it two-dimensional. When it was white, you could imagine a three-dimensional world in it, but the touch of the paintbrush erected a wall in the image, and then she had to try and bring back the depth with color. Most of the time her skills didn’t suffice; she couldn’t get the perspective right, and the image remained a wall without an entrance, even though she tried. She drew houses and rooms one after the other, kitchen tables and windows overlooking the garden, party guests arriving after receiving invitations.

  Ralda took out a fourth small dish and filled it with yellow powder. Black, red, yellow, white—the colors of the paintings in Ralda’s home.

  “Take off your shirt,” Ralda said.

  Sanna obeyed. The air was warm but Sanna’s skin still came to life when it was bared. It awakened, anticipated touch.

  “Everything,” Ralda said.

  Sanna felt prudish as she removed her sports bra. The pregnancy had made her breasts swell and they felt heavy and full. Her nipples stiffened. Sanna stripped off her underwear; she felt the air on her butt and in her pubic hair, and her clitoris stirred. She was aware of her own scent and she was ashamed. She tried to think about something else, as if this were some sort of medical procedure, but Ralda looked her in the eye: Be present. Pay attention.

  Ralda’s fingertips were cool on Sanna’s skin. How was that possible in this heat? Sanna flinched at her touch. Ralda hummed as she painted Sanna’s skin. The song came from her throat, dark and low. Sanna noticed the rhythm entering her lungs; she was breathing more deeply.

  Ralda circled her breasts with white paint and colored inside the circles with red. She drew a long red line from the middle of Sanna’s forehead down her nose and across her lips, then continued down her throat, between her breasts, to the navel. She tinted her eyelids; white gauze appeared at the edge of Sanna’s field of vision, like snowflakes caught in her lashes.

  Ralda pressed her hands to Sanna’s ears. “So you can hear your innermost self,” she said.

  Sanna remembered the unrealized kiss that had hung between her and Martti the night they were stargazing, how it had danced back and forth between them like unspoken words. They hadn’t dared to kiss, but afterward
it was difficult to remember that they hadn’t. “I thought about it every second,” she told Martti. Or had Martti said that to her?

  I don’t remember what I said anymore, but I thought, Can I kiss you? I was nervous but at the same time I thought I have a whole lifetime to do this.

  Sanna felt a kiss welling up now, too, struggling out from the condensed air, but it would be a different kind of kiss. Ralda would touch her a different way, and painting the skin was a ritual. It would be impossible to wake up from this tomorrow the same person she had woken up as today; the ritual would have marked them more deeply than making love.

  She listened to herself. Did she want Ralda to touch her? Did she want them to be open to each other that way? That was something she would remember forever, how they had shared this moment.

  “What rituals have you participated in?” Sanna’s voice was dry, and her eyes were shut as Ralda painted her skin.

  “Shh,” Ralda said, her finger pressed against Sanna’s lips. The chapped surface dotted her front teeth with blood. “During one ritual, I saw a snake slithering past my feet, like a friend.”

  “What kind of snake was it?”

  “A gwardar.”

  Ralda daubed white paint on Sanna’s lips.

  “Is it poisonous?”

  “Yes, but not necessarily deadly, especially if you get help in time. But you don’t always notice the bite, and you can’t see the puncture wounds with the naked eye because its fangs are so tiny and sharp. That’s why it’s so dangerous.”

  It already could have bitten me, and I wouldn’t know.

  “Am I going to wear these colors for the rest of the trek?” Sanna asked.

  Black meant burnt land; red meant blood and fire; yellow meant water and light; white was air, smoke, and stars.

  “Can’t you smell the rain?” Ralda asked. “The birds have been flying toward it since morning. They’ve traveled thousands of miles.”

  Sanna instinctively looked skyward, but she didn’t see a single bird, didn’t even hear any ravens. The utter silence felt strange. But when she stared at the silhouettes of the trees, she noticed hundreds of birds perched in the branches. They were wholly still, motionless.

  “Were you thinking about soundlessness, that when there’s no echo it’s like death?” Ralda asked. “Sanna, senses are life, the world. The more intensely you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste, the more intensely you live. The more you exist.”

  Sanna nodded. Perhaps she had known this once upon a time, but she had forgotten. Now she looked carefully. The earth was dry and barren the way it had been earlier. The sand had formed into the rib bones of whales, like the movement of waves trapped at the bottom of the sea. The aroma of the colors filled her nose and mouth: turmeric and saffron, root cellars and sun-dried bricks; she heard the smacking, sticky scrape of them being spread across her skin.

  Ralda turned her knees into yellow circles and brushed red paint onto her legs. Sanna felt Ralda’s hands on the insides of her thighs, and it made her wary, but Ralda’s hands were precise, smearing the paint without erring or trembling.

  Make me a different color all over, Sanna said, although she wasn’t sure if she said it out loud. Ralda painted her back, her arms, and her hair. The white filaments still appeared in Sanna’s field of vision, but now she could make out the rain on the horizon. Far away, above the desert, dark-gray streaks fell like fabric streaming from the sky. But the rain didn’t reach the earth; it evaporated in the hot air.

  When the evening cools, the rain will fall to the ground, Ralda said, or Sanna read her thoughts or just knew it would happen. It felt as if Ralda’s hands, which were painting her from every angle, were joining their thoughts, so she could hear Ralda’s words even though no words were spoken. Sanna felt like she were growing more visible: the colors weren’t covering her, they were drawing her out.

  When Ralda finished she placed Sanna’s hand at the bowls of paint and told Sanna to paint her.

  “Then you can look at me, and you’ll know what you look like. Paint me exactly the same way I’ve painted you. Circles around my breasts and a line splitting me down the middle. White eyes and white lips, yellow knees, black palms, and red legs. Black earlobes and black hair.”

  Your hair is already black, Sanna thought. Ralda’s skin was warm and so dark that white stood out best. Ralda’s skin absorbed the other colors, and Sanna knew the paint didn’t look the same on Ralda as it did on her. Sanna’s blonde hair looked as if it were covered in ash; Ralda looked exactly like herself even when she was painted. But she felt a happy concentration as she painted Ralda’s skin, noticed that her own hands were as precise as Ralda’s.

  Last of all, Sanna pressed her palms to Ralda’s ears, So you can hear your own voice, and then the rain started drumming. The water fell bullet-straight from the heavens, and the dry earth seethed as if it were boiling. It couldn’t take in the water; the earth was shut with dryness and the sand turned to silt and rained back up toward the sky. The gritty liquid licked at their painted legs. They would be painted one more color yet, the color of the earth, which was red, orange, and brown, and on their legs it became a clay gray.

  They stood still in the warm rain. Sanna held Ralda’s ears in her palms, and Ralda held hers, So you can hear your own voice, and when it had rained for a long time and Sanna thought they had turned into a gray statue in the desert, she opened her eyes and there was no longer any whiteness in her eyelashes, just transparent raindrops. She saw Ralda’s face, the other woman’s smile, and she felt like laughing, too, like during the thunderstorms from childhood summers when she could run through the rain and wasn’t cold.

  The desert around them was popping. Where are those noises coming from? It’s rain hitting rock. All the answers already existed inside her or inside Ralda. Sanna was able to hear them. I’m happy, she thought. Are you? I was hoping that would happen. They smiled at each other. It rained and kept raining, washing all the colors from them. And then Ralda pulled out scissors, and Sanna wasn’t afraid. They weren’t there to split her open. She offered her hair to the blades. Ralda wrapped Sanna’s hair around her fist; Sanna heard the scissors, once when they opened and again when the weight of the hair was gone. Now she could feel the rain on the back of her head and on her neck, on the new skin that had emerged. Ralda let Sanna’s hair drop to the ground.

  The birds were still perched in the branches, like children shivering in a cold shower. Sanna closed her eyes and felt the rain on her cheekbones, heard it fade into fingertips grazing her skin, a tiny tap here and there, the droplets skittering as lightly as butterflies.

  In the morning Sanna ran a hand across her plucked scalp. The distant sky was violet and yellow, bruised by the storm. The sunlight was still hazy, but beneath the light, a sullen, bone-chilling breeze blew.

  Sanna drank her morning tea and eyed Ralda. The woman’s movements were fluid, like an animal’s. Ralda looked at her and smiled warmly.

  “I think you’re ready now.”

  Ralda’s smile was so lovely, Sanna wanted to bask in its light, like the mild sun.

  “I do, too,” Sanna said.

  The painting ritual still shimmered inside her, as if she had swallowed light. She sensed that she would never be any closer to complete freedom than this. She was ashamed of the abandonment she had shown during the ritual, but she recognized her reserved nature, her urban self-consciousness, and it no longer made her anxious. Now she wanted to go home; now she was ready for that life.

  “I think you’re ready to know we’re never going back.”

  25

  MARTTI

  Martti plunged into the pool headfirst. He could still execute a clean dive, even though he felt as heavy as a body bag. He would hurl every single frog he touched into the desert.

  He had to swim lap after lap furiously, whipping himself, before the snarl of tangled thoughts unraveled and eased. The frogs moved out of his way.

  Marja had called. She didn’t need hi
s help with Minttu after all. She and Osla had decided that the three of them would go on a road trip to Norway.

  “But I’ve already made arrangements. I promised Minttu, too. Can’t you guys wait a couple of weeks?”

  “How about you wait here until we get back? Or is that too much to ask?”

  Sun-filled family vacations. That was what Martti had thought Minttu would get once he excused himself from raising her. Just the better moments, like he and Dad used to have the times Dad took him along.

  The scorching Sunday spread out ominously before Martti. The empty afternoon hours made him anxious, but the thought of joining Eva in the canteen brought his abated irritation back to the surface.

  What if Marja and Osla had another falling-out? Where would Minttu escape to? What if Minttu’s agreeing to go on the trip were a ploy and she ran away? Marja laughed at him. Maybe she knew their daughter better than he did. She could run off all she wanted. How far was she going to get without any money?

  Martti reminded her about Minttu’s erratic behavior, but Marja didn’t listen. He heard the rising irritation in his wife’s voice.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve telling me what to do. You were supposed to be here.”

  “It turned out to be harder than I thought—”

  “So what else is new?”

  Martti didn’t know how to formulate his need to see Minttu as a request. He wanted confirmation that that part of his life was in order, or at least still enough a part of him that he could start working on rebuilding the relationship.

  Martti saw Sarah lying on one of the loungers. She was sunbathing, but grew alert the instant she heard Martti’s wet footsteps on the cement. She was wearing a bikini, and her bushy brunette hair was down, framing her face like the fur lining of a hood.

  “Day off.” Sarah squinted as she lifted her sunglasses. “I’m trying to even out this miner’s tan,” she said, showing her dark-brown hands and the nearly black collar at her neck.

  The whole time she’d been at the pit, Sarah had been trying to get Martti to act as her confidant, trying to get closer to him than a polite collegial relationship required. Martti had done his best to tolerate it, especially when he heard complaints about her from the team leaders. According to them, Sarah made her female patients hysterical and thought all men under the age of fifty were day care children who needed a nap every day and a call to Mommy every night. The workers had permission to go see her whenever they wanted, which meant the others had to step in and pick up the slack. “Do we really need her here?” they’d asked Martti.