by Mikael Niemi
For one brief moment everything stood still. Every eye in the kitchen homed in on the brothers like rays of the sun through a magnifying glass. It was like when a film gets stuck in a projector, blackens over, goes crinkly, and then turns white. I could feel the hatred even though I couldn’t understand it. The brothers lashed out and grabbed each other’s shirt front. Biceps bulging, they exerted the force of industrial magnets and the gap between them closed inexorably. All the time they stared at each other, coal-black pupils, two mirrors face to face with the distance between them expanding to infinity.
Then their mum threw the dishtowel. It flew across the kitchen trailing a thin wisp of flour behind it, a comet with a tail that squelched into the elder son’s forehead and stuck there. She eyed them threateningly, slowly wiping the dough from her hands. She had no desire to spend the whole evening sewing on shirt buttons. Reluctantly, the brothers let go. Then they stood up and left through the kitchen door.
Mum retrieved the dishtowel that had fallen to the floor, rinsed her hands, and went back to her kneading. Niila picked up all the nuts and bolts, put them in the plastic box, and stuck the box in his pocket with a self-satisfied expression on his face. Then he glanced furtively out of the kitchen window.
The two brothers were standing in the middle of the path. Trading punches in rapid succession. Heavy punches jerking their crew-cut skulls around like turnips in a hopper. But no shouting, no taunts. Biff after biff on those low foreheads, on those potato noses, bash after bash on those red cabbage ears. The elder brother had a longer reach, the younger one had to slot in his blows. Blood poured from both their noses. It dripped down, splashed about, their knuckles were red. But still they kept going. Biff. Bash. Biff. Bash.
We were given juice and cinnamon buns straight out of the oven, so hot that we had to keep what we bit off between our teeth for a while before we could chew it. Then Niila started playing with the nuts and bolts. He emptied them out onto the sofa, his fingers were trembling, and I realized he’d been longing to do this for ages. He sorted them out into the various compartments in the plastic box, then tipped them out, mixed them up and started all over again. I tried to help him but I could see he was annoyed, so after a while I left to go home. He didn’t even look up.
The brothers were still at it outside. The gravel had been kicked around by their feet to form a circular rampart. Still the same frenzied punches, the same silent hatred, but their movements were slower now, weariness was creeping in. Their shirts were soaked in sweat. Their faces were grey behind all the blood, powdered lightly with dust.
Then I noticed they had changed. They weren’t really boys any more. Their jaws had swollen up, their canines were sticking out from between their swollen lips. Their legs were shorter and more massive, like the thighs of a bear, and so big their trousers were splitting at the seams. Their fingernails had turned black and grown into claws. And then I realized it wasn’t dust on their faces, it was hair. They were growing a pelt, dark hair spreading over their fresh, boyish faces, down over their necks and inside their shirts.
I wanted to shout a warning. Rashly took a step toward them.
They stopped immediately. Turned to face me. Crouched slightly, sniffed my scent. And then I saw their hunger. They were starving. They were desperate to eat, craved meat.
I stepped back. An icy chill ran down my spine. They growled. Started advancing shoulder to shoulder, two vigilant beasts of prey. They sped up. Stepped outside their gravel circle. Dug in their claws then pounced.
A dark cloud loomed over me.
My scream was stifled. Terror, whimpering, the squeaking of a stuck piglet.
Ding. Ding dong.
Church bells.
The holy church bells. Ding dong. Ding dong. A white-clad being cycled into the courtyard, a shimmering figure ringing his bell in a cloud of floury light. He braked without a word. Grasped the beasts with his enormous fists, lifted them by the scruff of their necks, and banged their turnip-heads together so hard that sparks flew.
“Dad,” they gasped, “Dad, Dad …”
The bright light faded, the father flung his sons to the ground, grabbed them by their ankles, one son in each hand, and dragged them backward and forward over the gravel, smoothing out the surface with their front teeth until everything was nice and tidy again. And by the time he had finished, both brothers were crying their eyes out, sobbing, and they’d turned back into boys again. I raced home, galloping as fast as I could. In my pocket I had a bolt.
* * *
Niila’s dad was called Isak and came from a big Laestadian family. Even as a little boy he’d been dragged along to prayer meetings in the smoke-filled hut where dark-suited smallholders and their wives in knotted headscarves sat bottom to bottom on the wooden benches. It was so cramped that their foreheads hit against the backs of those in front whenever they were possessed by the Holy Spirit and started rocking back and forth as they intoned prayers. Isak had sat there, hemmed in on every side, a delicate little boy among all those men and women being transformed before his very eyes. They started breathing more deeply, the air grew damp and fetid, their faces turned crimson, their glasses misted over, their noses started dripping as the two preachers sang louder and louder. Their words, those living words weaving the Truth thread by thread, images of evil, of perfidy, of sins that attempted to hide underground but were torn up by their hideous roots and shaken like worm-eaten turnips before the congregation. In the row in front was a little girl with braids, fair golden hair gleaming in the darkness, squashed in by grown-up bodies riddled with dread. She was motionless, pressing a doll to her heart as the storm raged over her head. It was horrific to see her mother and father weeping. Watching her grown-up relatives being transformed, crushed. Sitting there hunched up, feeling the fall-out dripping all over her and thinking: it’s all my fault. It’s my fault. If only I’d been a bit better behaved. Isak had clenched his boyish hands tightly together, and inside them it felt as if a swarm of insects were creeping around. And he thought: if I open my hands we’ll all die. If I let them escape we’re all finished.
And then one day, one Sunday after a few years had passed, he crawled out onto the thin nocturnal ice. Everything crumbled away, his defenses collapsed. He was thirteen and could feel Satan beginning to grow deep inside him. Filled with a fear that was greater than the fear of being beaten, greater than the urge for self-preservation, he’d stood up in the middle of the prayer meeting and, holding onto people’s backs, he’d swayed back and forth before collapsing nose-first into the lap of Christ. Callused hands had been placed on his brow and his chest, it was a second baptism, that’s the way it was done. He had unbuttoned his heart and been drenched by the flood of his sins.
There was not a single dry eye in the congregation. They had witnessed a great event. The Almighty had issued a summons. The Lord had taken the boy with His very own hand, and then given him back.
Afterward, when he learned to walk for the second time, as he stood there on trembling legs, they had propped him up. His corpulent mother had hugged him in the name and blood of Jesus, and her tears flowed down over his own face.
Obviously, he was destined to become a preacher.
* * *
Like most Laestadians Isak became a diligent worker. Felled trees and piled the trunks up on the frozen river during the winter, accompanied the logs down to the sawmills in the estuary when the ice melted in the spring, clearing jams on the way, and looked after the cows and potato fields on his parents’ smallholding during the summer. Worked hard and made few demands, steered well clear of strong drink, gambling and Communism. That sometimes caused him a few problems with his lumberjack colleagues, but he took their mockery as a challenge to be overcome, and didn’t say a word during the working week, merely read books of sermons.
But on Sundays he would cleanse himself with saunas and prayers, and put on his white shirt and dark suit. During the prayer meetings he could cut loose at last, sail forth to atta
ck filth and the Devil, brandish the Good Lord’s two-edged sword, aim His law and gospel truth at all the world’s sinners, the liars, lechers, hypocrites, the foulmouthed, boozers, wife-beaters, and Communists who flourished in the accursed valley of the River Torne like lice in a blanket.
His face was young, energetic, and smooth-shaven. Eyes deep-set. With consummate skill he grabbed the attention of his congregation, and was soon engaged to a fellow believer, a shy and well-polished Finnish girl from the Pello district, smelling of soap.
But when the children started to come, he was forsaken by God. One day there was nothing but silence. Nobody answered his pleas.
He was left with nothing but confusion, tottering on the edge of the abyss. Filled with sorrow. And festering malice. He started to sin, just to discover what it felt like. Minor little wicked acts, aimed at his nearest and dearest. When it dawned on him that he quite enjoyed it, he kept going. Worried members of his church tried to engage him in serious conversations, but he put the Devil’s curse on them. They turned their backs on him, and did not return.
But despite being abandoned, despite feeling hollow, he still regarded himself as a believer. He maintained the rituals, and brought up his children in accordance with the Scriptures. But he replaced the Good Lord with himself. And that was the worst form of Laestadianism, the nastiest, the most ruthless. Laestadianism without God.
* * *
This was the frosty landscape in which Niila grew up. Like many children in a hostile environment, he learned how to survive by not being noticed. That was one of the things I observed the very first time we met in the playground: his ability to move without making a sound. The chameleon-like way in which he seemed to take on the background color, making him practically invisible. He was typical of the self-effacing inhabitants of Tornedalen. You hunch yourself up in order to keep warm. Your flesh hardens, you get stiff shoulder muscles that start to ache when you reach middle age. You take shorter steps when you walk, you breathe less deeply and your skin turns slightly gray through lack of oxygen. The meek of Tornedalen never run away when attacked, because there’s no point. They just huddle up and hope it will pass. In public assemblies they always sit at the back, something you can often observe at cultural events in Tornedalen: between the spotlights on stage and the audience in the stalls are ten or more rows of empty seats, while the back rows are crammed full.
Niila had lots of little wounds on his forearms that never healed. I eventually realized that he used to scratch himself. It was unconscious, his filthy fingernails just made their own way there and dug themselves in. As soon as a scab formed, he would pick at it, prize it up, and break it loose, then flick it away with a snapping noise. Sometimes they would land on me, sometimes he just ate them with a faraway look on his face. I’m not sure which I found more disgusting. When we were at my place I tried to tell him off about it, but he just gaped at me with a look of uncomprehending surprise. And before long he was at it again.
Nevertheless, the oddest thing of all about Niila was that he never spoke. He was five years old after all. Sometimes he opened his mouth and seemed to be about to come out with something, you could hear the lump of phlegm inside his throat starting to move. There would be a sort of throat-clearing, a gob that seemed to be breaking loose. But then he would change his mind and look scared. He could understand what I said, that was obvious: there was nothing wrong with his head. But something had got stuck.
No doubt it was significant that his mother was from Finland. She had never been a talkative woman and came from a country that had been torn to shreds by civil war, the Winter War, and the Continuation War, while her well-fed neighbor to the west had been busy selling iron ore to the Germans and growing rich. She felt inferior. She wanted to give her children what she had never had. They would be real Swedes, and hence she wanted to teach them Swedish rather than her native Finnish. But as she knew practically no Swedish, she kept quiet.
When Niila came around to our place we often sat in the kitchen because he liked the radio. My mum used to have the radio mumbling away in the background all day, something unknown in his house. It didn’t much matter what was on, so we had a potpourri of pop music, Woman’s Hour, Down Your Way, bell-ringing from Stockholm, language courses, and church services. I never used to listen, it all went in one ear and out the other. But Niila seemed to be thrilled to bits just by the sound, the fact that it was never really quiet.
One afternoon I made a decision. I would teach Niila to talk. I caught his eye, pointed to myself and said:
“Matti.”
Then I pointed at him and waited. He also waited. I reached out and stuck my finger between his lips. He opened his mouth, but still didn’t say anything. I started stroking his throat. It tickled, and he pushed my hand away.
“Niila!” I said, and tried to make him say it after me. “Niila, say Niila!”
He stared at me as if I were an idiot. I pointed at my crotch and said:
“Willy!”
He grinned, thought I was being rude. I pointed at my backside.
“Bum! Willy and bum!”
He nodded, then turned his attention back to the radio again. I pointed at his own backside and made a gesture to show something coming out of it. Then I looked at him questioningly. He cleared his throat. I went tense, waiting impatiently. But nothing happened. I was annoyed and wrestled him down to the floor.
“It’s called poop! Say poop!”
He slowly extricated himself from my grip. Coughed and sort of bent his tongue around inside his mouth to loosen it up.
Then he said: “Solfa.”
I held my breath. That was the first time I’d ever heard his voice. It was deep for a boy, hoarse. Not very attractive.
“What did you say?”
“Donu al mi akvon.”
There it was again. I was flabbergasted. Niila spoke! He’d started talking, but I couldn’t understand what he said.
He rose to his feet with great dignity, walked over to the sink and drank a glass of water. Then he went home.
Something very remarkable had taken place. In his state of dumbness, in his isolated fear, Niila had created a language of his own. Without conversing, he had invented words, begun to string them together and form sentences. Or wasn’t it just him alone, perhaps? Could there be something deeper to it, embedded in the deepest peat layer at the back of his mind? An ancient language? An ancient memory, deep frozen but slowly starting to melt?
And before I knew where I was, our roles had been reversed. Instead of me teaching him how to talk, it was him teaching me. We would sit in the kitchen, Mum pottering around in the garden, the radio buzzing in the background.
“Ĉi tio estas seĝo,” he said, pointing at a chair.
“Ĉi tio estas seĝo,” I repeated after him.
“Vi nomiĝas Matti,” he said, pointing at me.
“Vi nomiĝas Matti,” I repeated, good as gold.
He shook his head.
“Mi nomiĝas!”
I corrected myself.
“Mi nomiĝas Matti. Vi nomiĝas Niila.”
He clicked his tongue enthusiastically. There were rules in this language of his, it was ordered. You couldn’t just babble on in any way you liked.
We began using it as our secret language, it grew into a space of our own where we could be all to ourselves. The kids from round about grew jealous and suspicious, but that only increased our pleasure. Mum and Dad got a bit worried and thought I was losing my powers of speech, but when they phoned the doctor he said that children often invented fantasy languages, and it would soon pass.
But as far as Niila was concerned, the blockage in his throat had been cleared once and for all. Our make-believe language overcame his fear of talking, and it wasn’t long before he started speaking Swedish and Finnish as well. He understood quite a lot already, of course, and had a big passive vocabulary. It just needed translating into sounds, and his mouth movements had to be practiced. But it proved to be m
ore difficult than one might have thought. He sounded odd for ages, his palate had trouble with all the Swedish vowels and the Finnish diphthongs, and he was constantly dribbling. Eventually it became possible to understand more or less what he was saying, although he still preferred to stick to our secret language. That was where he felt most at home. When we spoke it he would relax, and his body movements were less awkward, more natural.
* * *
One Sunday something unusual happened in Pajala. The church was full. It was a routine service, the clergyman taking it was Wilhelm Tawe as usual, and in normal circumstances there would have been plenty of room. But on this particular day it was full to overflowing.