Popular Music from Vittula

by Mikael Niemi

  Our teacher was a matron in her sixties with round, steel-framed glasses, her hair in a bun contained by a net and pierced with pins, and she had a long, hooked nose that made her look like an owl. She always wore a woolen skirt and a blouse, often a cardigan buttoned halfway up, and soft, black shoes like slippers. She approached her duties gently but firmly, intent on carving out of the roughly sawed planks confronting her something neat and presentable, and capable of coping with Swedish society.

  To begin with, we all had to go to the blackboard and write our names. Some could, others couldn’t. On the basis of that scientific test, our teacher divided the class into two groups, called Group One and Group Two. Group One comprised all those who had passed the test—most of the girls and a few sons of civil service clerks. The rest were in Group Two, including Niila and me. We were only seven, but correctly classified right from the start.

  Hanging from the wall in front of the class were the Letters of the Alphabet. A scary army of sticks and half-moons stretching all the way across. Those were the things we were required to wrestle with, one after another: force them down on their backs in our notebooks and make them do as they were told. We were given pencils as well, and chalks in a cardboard box, a reading book about Li and Lo, and a stiff sheet of cardboard with blocks of water-color paints that looked like brightly colored sweets. Then we had to get down to work. The inside of the desk had to be lined with paper, and the books as well: there was a deafening crackling and rustling from the rolls of wax paper we’d brought from home, and some eager snipping with blunt school scissors. Finally we stuck a timetable onto the inside of our desk lids with tape. Nobody had the slightest inkling what all those mysterious squares actually meant, but the timetable was an essential part of things, part of being Neat and Orderly, and it meant our childhood was over. Now we were faced with a six-day week with school from Monday to Saturday, and on the seventh day there was Sunday School for those who hadn’t had enough of it.

  Neat and Orderly. Stand in a line outside the hall when the bell rang for lessons. Walk in a line to the canteen, with the teacher at the front. Raise your hand whenever you wanted to speak. Raise your hand whenever you wanted to leave the room for a pee. Turn the punched holes in your paper toward the windows on your left. Go out into the playground the moment the bell rang for break. Go back in the moment the bell rang for lessons. Everything done in that typically calm, Swedish manner, and only rarely was it necessary for some cheeky oaf in Group Two to have his hair tweaked by pincer-like magisterial talons. We liked our teacher. She really knew how to turn you into an adult.

  Right at the front, next to teacher’s desk, was the harmonium. It was used every morning when she took attendance and we sang hymns. She’d sit down on the stool and start pedalling away. Her fat calves bulged inside her beige knee-length stockings, her glasses misted over, she spread her gnarled fingers over the keyboard, and gave us a chord. Then a quivering dowager-soprano, with stern glances to left and right, making sure we were all joining in. Sunlight seeping in through the window panes, yellow and warm over the nearest desks. The smell of chalk. The map of Sweden. Mikael, who suffered from nosebleeds and sat with his head leaned back, clutching a roll of paper towels. Kennet, who could never sit still. Annika, who always spoke in a whisper, and with whom all the boys were in love. Stefan, who was brilliant at football but would ski into a tree on the Yllästunturi slalom slope three years later and kill himself. And Tore and Anders and Eva and Åsa and Anna-Karin and Bengt, and all the rest of us.

  As a citizen of Pajala, you were inferior—that was clear from the very beginning. Skåne, in the far south, came first in the atlas, printed on an extra-large scale, completely covered in red lines denoting main roads and black dots representing towns and villages. Then came the other provinces on a normal scale, moving farther north page by page. Last of all was Northern Norrland, on an extra-small scale in order to fit onto the page, but even so there were hardly any dots at all. Almost at the very top of the map was Pajala, surrounded by brown-colored tundra, and that was where we lived. If you turned back to the front you could see that Skåne was in fact the same size as Northern Norrland, but colored green by all that confoundedly fertile farming land. It was many years before the penny dropped and I realized that Skåne, the whole of our most southerly province, would fit comfortably between Haparanda and Boden.

  We had to learn that Kinnekulle was 1,004 feet above sea level. But not a word about Käymävaara, 1,145 feet high. We had to be able to ramble on about the Viska, the Ätra, the Vomit, and the Bile (or whatever they were called), four colossal rivers that flowed from the southern Swedish highlands. Many years later I saw them with my own eyes. I felt obliged to stop the car, get out, and give my eyes a good rub. Ditches. Tiny little brooks barely deep enough to paddle in. No bigger than Kaunisjoki or Liviöjoki.

  I felt similarly alienated when it came to culture.

  “Have you seen Mr. Chantarelle?” our reader asked us.

  I could answer that question with an outright “no.” Nor Mrs. Chantarelle, nor any other members of the family, come to that. Chantarelles didn’t grow in our part of the world.

  We sometimes used to receive Treasure Trove, the savings bank magazine, with a picture of the bank’s oak tree logo. If we saved our money, it would grow and grow until it was as big as that majestic old oak, we were told. But there were no oak trees around Pajala, and so we realized there was something fishy about the ad. The same sort of things applied to the Treasure Trove crossword, where one of the clues that kept cropping up was a tall tree similar to a cypress, seven letters. Answer: juniper. But where we lived the juniper was a straggly little bush about knee-high.

  Music lessons were a fascinating ritual. Our teacher would produce a big, clumsy tape recorder and put it on her desk—a gigantic chest dotted with spikes and knobs. She would slowly thread in and set up a tape, then hand out song books. Peer at the class with her owlish eyes, and switch the recorder on. The reels would start turning, then a bright and breezy signature tune would blare out from the loudspeakers. A brisk female voice spouting something or other in a Stockholm accent. The voice would go on to give us a perfect music lesson, peppered with sighs and squeals of enthusiasm. The pupils on the tape were from the Nacka School of Music in Stockholm, and to this very day I wonder why we were forced to listen to these southerners with angelic voices singing about bluebells and cowslips and other tropical vegetation. Sometimes one of the Nacka pupils would sing a solo, and the worst thing was that one of the boys had the same name as me.

  “Now, repeat that tune for me, Matthias,” the lady would chirrup, and a girlish boy soprano would ring out as clear as a bell. At which point the whole of our class would turn around to stare at me, grinning and giggling. I wished I could have gone up in smoke.

  After several pedagogical repetitions, we were expected to sing along with the tape—the Kermit the Frog Ensemble joins the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Our teacher’s eyes took on a glint of steel, and the girls started to sing softly like the soughing of zephyrs through tufts of grass. But we boys stayed as silent as fish, moving our lips when our teacher glared at us, but that was all. Singing was unmanly. Knapsu. And so we kept quiet.

  We gradually caught on to the fact that where we lived wasn’t really a part of Sweden. We’d just been sort of tagged on by accident. A northern appendage, a few barren bogs where a few people happened to live, but could only partly be Swedes. We were different, a bit inferior, a bit uneducated, a bit simple-minded. We didn’t have any deer or hedgehogs or nightingales. We didn’t have any celebrities. We didn’t have any theme parks. No traffic lights, no mansions, no country squires. All we had was masses and masses of mosquitoes, Tornedalen-Finnish swearwords, and Communists.

  Ours was a childhood of deprivation. Not material deprivation—we had enough to get by on—but a lack of identity. We were nobody. Our parents were nobody. Our forefathers had made no mark whatsoever on Swedish history. Our last names were
unspellable, not to mention being unpronounceable for the few substitute teachers who found their way up north from the real Sweden. None of us dared write in to Children’s Family Favorites because Swedish Radio would think we were Finns. Our home villages were too small to appear on maps. We could barely support ourselves, but had to depend on state handouts. We watched family farms die, and fields give way to undergrowth. We watched the last logs floating down the River Torne when the ice melted, before it was banned; we saw forty muscular lumberjacks replaced by one diesel-oozing snowmobile; we watched our fathers hang up their heavy-duty gloves and go off to spend their working week in the far-distant Kiruna mines. Our school exam results were the worst in the whole country. We had no table manners. We wore woolly hats indoors. We never picked mushrooms, avoided vegetables, never held crayfish parties. We were useless at conversation, reciting poems, wrapping presents, and giving speeches. We walked with our toes turned out. We spoke with a Finnish accent without being Finnish, and we spoke with a Swedish accent without being Swedish.

  We were nothing.

  There was only one way out. Only one possibility if you wanted to be something, no matter how insignificant. You had to live somewhere else. We learned to look forward to moving, convinced it was our only chance in life, and so we moved. In Västerås you could be a person at last. In Lund. In Södertälje. In Arvika. In Borås. There was an enormous evacuation. A flood of refugees that emptied our village, but strangely enough it felt voluntary. A phoney war.

  The only ones who ever returned from the south were those who died. Car crash victims. Suicides. And eventually also those killed off by AIDS. Heavy coffins dug down into the frozen earth among the birch trees in Pajala cemetery. Home at last. Kotimaassa.

  * * *

  Niila’s house had a view over the river and was in one of the oldest parts of Pajala. It was a spacious, well-built house from the end of the previous century, with large, small-paned windows along the long walls. If you examined the façade closely, you could see traces of where it had been extended. There were still two chimneys from two separate hearths: the house had been too big to be heated by just one fire. When Laestadianism was at its peak, the house had been a natural grey color; but at some point in the 1940s it had been painted the traditional Swedish red, with white window trim. The rough corners had been sawed and planed in accordance with the new fashion, to make sure the house couldn’t be mistaken for an overgrown barn—much to the distress of national archivists and other persons of good taste. On the river side were grassy meadows that had been fertilized for thousands of years with river silt every time the thaw came, and they produced abundant and rich hay, perfect for boosting milk production. At this very spot several hundred years ago, one of the earliest settlers had taken off his birch-bark backpack and created a smallholding for himself. But the grass in the meadows had not been harvested for years. Creeping bushes and undergrowth had thrust up their sauna twigs here, there, and everywhere. The place stank of gloom and decline. Visitors did not feel welcome there. There was a chill about the spot, like that of someone browbeaten so relentlessly as a child that all the bitterness had been directed inward.

  The cowshed was still standing, and over the years it had been turned into a shed and a garage. School was out, and I’d gone home with Niila. We’d exchanged bikes for the day. He’d borrowed mine, which was rather flashy with a racing saddle and drop handlebars. I was riding his Hercules—“just the thing for knobbly knees,” as the nastier element in class three used to shout at him when he rode past. As soon as we got to his house, Niila dragged me with him to the cowshed.

  We sneaked up into the loft, up the steep, axe-hewn stairs that had been polished by a century’s feet. It was semi-dark up there, with only one small, glazed window to admit the afternoon sun. There were piles of junk everywhere—damaged furniture, a rusty scythe, enamel buckets, rolled-up carpets smelling of mold. We paused by one of the walls. It was dominated by a huge bookcase full of volumes with worn, brown leather spines. Religious tracts, collections of sermons, books on ecclesiastical history in both Swedish and Finnish, row after row of them. I’d never before seen so many books at the same time, apart from in the library on the top floor of the Old School. There was something unnatural about it, something decidedly unpleasant. Far too many books. Who could possibly ever manage to read them all? And why were they there, hidden away in a cowshed, as if there were something shameful about them?

  Niila opened his satchel and took out his reader starring Li and Lo. We’d been given an extract to prepare for homework, and he found his way to the place, turning the pages over with his clumsy, boyish fingers. Concentrating hard, he started mouthing the letters one after another, spending an enormous effort connecting them up to form words. Then he grew tired of it and slammed the book shut with a bang. Before I’d caught on to what was happening, he hurled it down the stairs with tremendous force. It landed awkwardly and the spine broke against the rough floorboards.

  I looked doubtfully at Niila. He was smiling, with red patches on each cheek, reminiscent of a fox with long canines. Then he plucked a tract from the enormous bookcase, quite a small volume with soft covers. Defiantly, he flung that downstairs as well. The thin, silky pages rustled like leaves before it crashed to the ground. Then followed in quick succession a few volumes of collected works, heavy brown tomes that disintegrated with a crack as they landed.

  Niila looked encouragingly in my direction. I could feel my heart starting to pound with excitement as I reached for a book. Flung it down the stairs and watched several pages flutter out before it thumped down into a rusty wheelbarrow. It looked outrageously funny. Growing more and more ecstatic, we hurled down more and more books, egging each other on, spinning them up in the air, kicking them like footballs, laughing until we choked as the shelves were emptied one after another.

  All of a sudden Isak was standing there. Broad-shouldered like a wrestler, black and silent. Not a single word, just big, fleshy fingers trembling as he unfastened the buckle of his belt. He ordered me away with one brief gesture. I crept down the stairs like a rat then bolted for the door. But Niila stayed behind. As the cowshed door closed behind me, I could hear Isak starting to beat him.

  * * *

  Just for a moment I look up from the notepad I started filling in Nepal. The commuter train is approaching Sundbyberg. The morning rush hour, the smell of damp clothing. In my briefcase is a file with twenty-five corrected school essays. February slush, and over four months to go before the Pajala Fair. I sneak a look out of the train window. High over Huvudsta is a flock of jackdaws, circling excitedly round and round.

  I switch my attention back to Tornedalen. Chapter five.

  CHAPTER 5

  About two hesitant winter warriors, chain thrashings, and the art of stomping out a ski slope

  Every day when lessons were over at the Purly-Girly School, hordes of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls would come swarming past our house. Pretty young things. This was the sixties after all, with lots of mascara, false eyelashes, miniskirts, and tight plastic boots. Me and Niila used to perch on the snowdrift outside our house and check them out. They would saunter past in bunches, chatting away, bare-headed no matter how cold it was, so as not to disturb their hairdos. They smoked like chimneys, and left behind a sickly-sweet smell of ashtrays and perfume that I associate to this day with desire. Occasionally they might say hello to us. We’d be incredibly embarrassed, and pretend we were building a snow fortress. Even though we were only seven, we were certainly interested in them, in a way. You couldn’t really say we were horny, it was more of a vague longing. I’d have loved to have kissed them, to get close to them. Snuggle up to them like a little kitten.

  Anyway, we started throwing snowballs at them. Mainly so they’d regard us as manly, I think. And believe it or not, it worked. These lanky sixteen-year-old Valkyries would scamper off like reindeer, screaming and shrieking, holding up their makeup bags as shields. They really made
a meal of it. We were only throwing loosely packed little bundles of snow that rarely hit them, after all—fluffy lumps of snow that came floating down like woolly Lapp mittens. But it was enough to impress them. We were a force to be reckoned with.

  It went on like this for a few days. We made a store of snowballs as soon as we got home from school. By now we felt like soldiers from Vittulajänkkä fighting in the Winter War, two battle-scarred veterans in action on a foreign continent. We bristled in expectation. Fighting brought us closer and closer to pleasures we could only dream of. Our cockscombs grew with every battle fought.

  There came the flock of girls. Several bunches with irregular intervals between them. As they approached, we crouched down behind the ramparts of snow piled up at the side of the road by the snow plow. The plan was worked out in great detail. We used to let the first group pass by unscathed, then throw the snowballs at their backs while the other groups came to a halt in front of us. Create disarray and panic. And admiration, of course, of our manly deeds.

  We crouched down in wait. Heard the girls’ voices approaching, the smokers’ coughs, the giggles. We stood up at exactly the right moment. Each of us with a snowball in our right hand. Like two fearsome Vikings we watched the girls scamper away, screaming. We were just about to heave our missiles into their midst when we realized that one of the girls was standing her ground. Only a couple of yards in front of us. Long, blond hair, neatly made-up eyes. She was staring straight at us.

  “Just you dare throw one more snowball, and I’ll kill you,” she snarled. “I’ll hit you so hard, you’ll never walk again. I’ll make such a mess of your faces that your mothers will burst into tears the moment they clap eyes on you …”

  Niila and I slowly lowered our snowballs. The girl gave us one last, terrifying look, then turned on her heel and strolled after her friends.