by Mikael Niemi
Niila and I didn’t move. We didn’t even look at each other. We just felt we’d been terribly misunderstood, in spades.
* * *
As a boy in Pajala, one’s life was dominated by chain thrashings. They were a means of adjusting the balance of power between the male citizens of the village. You were drawn into them as a young lad of five or six, and didn’t escape until you were fourteen or fifteen.
Chain thrashings took something like the following form: a few little lads would start arguing. Anders punched Nisse, who started crying. I won’t go into the cause of the argument, whether there was a history of animosity or some kind of family feud hovering in the background. A young lad simply hit another one, and then they went home.
That’s when the chain reaction starts.
The one on the receiving end, Nisse, immediately tells his two-years-older brother about it. Big brother goes out into the village and keeps his eyes peeled: the next time he comes across Anders he gives him a good hiding and extracts revenge. Anders goes home crying his eyes out and tells his own four-years-older brother, who goes out into the village and keeps his eyes peeled. The next time he comes across Nisse or Nisse’s elder brother, he gives them a good hiding and issues a series of threats into the bargain. (Are you still with me?) Nisse’s five-years-older, burly first cousin hears an abridged version of what has happened and beats up Anders’s brother, Anders himself, and a few friends who tagged along as bodyguards. Both Anders’s two friends’ six-years-older brothers go out into the village and keep their eyes peeled. The rest of Nisse’s brothers, cousins, and other relatives hear an abridged version of what has happened, who has beaten up whom, and in what order; the same thing happens on Anders’s side. Exaggerations in the interests of propaganda are common. Eighteen-year-old second cousins twice removed and even fathers receive urgent requests for assistance, but claim they couldn’t care less about the petty squabbles of little kids.
That gives some idea of how things developed. The most elaborate of chain thrashings would involve classmates, neighbors, and an entire range of friends, especially if the two original combatants came from different parts of the village. In that case it was Vittulajänkkä versus Paskajänkkä, or Strandvägen versus Texas, and war was declared.
The duration of a chain thrashing could be anything from a few days to several months. The norm was a few weeks, following the pattern described above. The first stage was scuffling and an exchange of blows with little kids crying. Then came the threat stage, with the strongest ones involved roaming the village with their eyes peeled while the little kids stayed in hiding at home. If any of the little brats got caught, it was no laughing matter, believe you me. I used to think that was the worst stage, that non-stop terror between school and the relative safety of home. Last of all came the disarmament stage, when nobody could remember or be bothered to remember all those complicated patterns of punishment with all the subtle variations, and the whole thing ran out of steam.
But before that happened, life was dominated by the balance of terror. It’s winter and you’re on your own on your kick-sled, gliding over the tightly packed snow to the corner shop where you’re going to buy a bag of mixed candy. It’s mid-afternoon, but it’s already quite dark, and scattered snowflakes are drifting down from the endless lead-grey sky, sparkling under the street lamps like stars. You’re standing with one foot on the runner of your sled, clinging on to the handlebar and kicking with your other foot, skimming your way between the mountains of snow piled up on each side of the road by the plows. Your runners are being held back a bit by the newly fallen snow, and from the nearby main road to Kiruna you can hear the booming of a snow plow bludgeoning its way through the winter. And then, just ahead at the crossroads, one of the big boys materializes. The black silhouette of a pupil from the senior school. He comes toward you, you slow down and try to make out who it is. You consider turning back, but you see there’s another big lad closing in from behind. Hard to make out who it is in the gloom, but he’s certainly big. You’re surrounded, a little boy on a kick-sled. All you can do is hope. Square your shoulders and advance toward the first of the big boys, who eyes you up and down. The street lamps are snowing, his face is in the shadows, and now he steps forward and your heart stands still. You try to prepare yourself for what’s coming, snow down the back of your neck and all down your back and into your trousers, your ears boxed so hard you can feel your skull coming loose, your woolly hat thrown up into a birch tree, sobs and snot and humiliation. You stiffen up like a calf as the slaughterer approaches. And now he’s right in front of you and you have to stop. He’s as big as an adult, but you don’t recognize him. He asks you whose boy you are, and you recall that there are at least three chain thrashings going on at the moment, your mind is working overtime, then you tell him who you claim to be, and hope you’ve hit upon the right answer. And the bloke puckers up his eyebrows and knocks your hat off into the snow. Then he says:
“Lucky for you!”
And you brush the snow off your hat, set off again, and wish to God you were a grown-up.
* * *
The end of winter was in sight, the worst of the cold was over. The days were still short, but in the lunch break you could occasionally catch a glimpse of the sun over the frosty rooftops, looking like a blood orange. We drank in the light in greedy gulps, and the fiery deep orange juice filled us with renewed lust for life. It was like crawling out of a burrow, waking up from hibernation.
One day Niila and I made up our minds to test Laestadius Hill. Straight after school we strapped on our wooden skis with cable bindings and took a short cut through the children’s playground. It was getting dark. The skis sunk about a foot into the loose, deep top covering of snow. Niila led the way, and I followed in his tracks, two blurred figures in the murky gloom. Over by the Laestadius House loomed two rows of sky-high giant spruce firs like church steeples. Silent, ancient, holy trees, preoccupied with greater thoughts than ours.
We crossed over the ice-covered Laestadiusvägen, our skis clattering on the road surface; the street lamps were on already. We clambered over the piled-up snow by the side of the road and slunk into the darkness that sloped steeper and steeper down toward the river. We skied in silence past the statue of Lars Levi: he was staring out into the birch trees, his head covered by a cap of snow. Soon the streetlights had faded away behind us, but it wasn’t completely dark even so. Light was reflected by millions of ice crystals, and grew until it seemed to be hovering over the ground. Our eyes slowly became used to it. The slope stretched out in front of us, swishing away down to the river. But it was impossible to ski on as yet, covered knee-deep in soft snow. We turned our skis at right angles to the slope, and started stomping. Ski-width by ski-width we worked our way down the hill. Compressing the snow, pounding it down with all the weight our young bodies could bring to bear, making a furrow between the masses of snow on either side, all the way down the long slope to the ice-covered river. We worked side by side, sweat pouring off us under our clothes. And when we finally got to the river, we turned back again. Stomped our way back over our own tracks, with bull-like obstinacy. Compressed the snow still more, made it as hard and smooth as we possibly could.
And finally we’re standing there. Back where we started, after all that strenuous effort. Our legs are shaking, our lungs heaving; but stretching out below us is the tightly packed slope. A broad, smooth path, the result of thousand upon thousand stomps with our skis. We stand side by side, Niila and me. Gaze down into the darkness. The slope points us down into a blurred, murky dream world, disappears like a fishing line dropped through a hole in the ice. Vague shadows, silent movements down in the depths. A thin thread plunging down into our dreams. We glance at each other. Then we crouch forward, dig in our bamboo poles. At exactly the same moment we thrust ourselves forward.
We’re off. Glide away. Surge faster and faster through the night. Swishing. The cold burning our cheeks. Two steaming young boys, two ne
wly cooked black puddings thrown into the freezer. Faster and faster, wilder and wilder. Side by side, mouths open wide, warm holes sucking in the winter. Perfectly stomped, couldn’t be better! Knees flexible, feet firm in tightly laced boots. A roar penetrates our flesh, our speed approaches the impossible, snow flashing, wind howling, everything swirling.
And then it happens. A thunderous explosion rolls over the ice down Tornedalen as far as Peräjävaara and the air is smashed like a mirror. We break through the sound barrier. The sky is as hard and sharp as gravel as we hurtle down through it, side by side, each in our twirling cloud of snow, whirling round and round in powdery bounces, arms outstretched, our ski poles pointing to the sky, at outer space, at our shining stars.
CHAPTER 6
How an old biddy takes her place at the right hand of God, and on the hazards involved in distributing worldly goods
One bleak day in spring Niila’s grandma took her leave of this earthly life. Still mentally alert, she had lain on her deathbed and confessed her sins in a barely audible whisper before licking the bread with the tip of her liver-brown tongue and having her shriveled lips sprinkled with wine. Then she said she could see a bright light, and angels drinking curdled milk from ladles, and when she drew her last breath her body became half an ounce lighter, that being the weight of her eternal soul.
Close relatives were summoned to the ulosveisu the same day as she died. Her sons carried her coffin around all the rooms in the house, with the foot end first and the lid open so that she could take farewell of her home; hymns were sung, coffee was drunk, and the corpse was eventually driven off to the freezer at the mortuary.
Then the funeral arrangements were made. The Pajala telephone exchange glowed red hot, and the post office started distributing invitations all over Norrbotten, Finland, south Sweden, Europe, and the rest of the world. After all, Grandma had filled as much of the world as she could manage and had had time for. She had borne twelve children, the same number as the apostles, and like the apostles the children had gone off in all possible directions. Some lived in Kiruna and Luleå, others in the suburbs of Stockholm, and others yet in Växjö and Kristianstad and Frankfurt and Missouri and New Zealand. Only one still lived in Pajala, and that was Niila’s father. All of them came to the funeral, including the two deceased sons—the ladies of the parish in touch with the other side had seen them. They had wondered who the two boys were, standing with heads bowed by the coffin during the introductory hymn, but then had realized that they were rather bright around the edges and that their feet were hovering a finger’s breadth over the ground.
Also present were grandchildren and great-grandchildren from all over the globe, strange, elegantly dressed creatures speaking every Swedish dialect you could think of. The grandchildren from Frankfurt had German accents, while the Americans and New Zealanders chattered away in Swenglish. The only ones from the younger generation who could still speak Tornedalen Finnish were Niila and his brothers and sisters, but they didn’t say very much anyway. There was a whole host of languages and cultures assembled in the Pajala church, a very tangible tribute to what a single fertile Tornedalen womb could give rise to.
Valedictory homilies delivered by the side of the coffin were numerous and lengthy. Tribute was paid to the deceased’s life of honest toil, in a spirit of devoted prayer and self-denial. She had lugged and heaved, heaved and lugged, fed cattle and children, raked more hay than three horse-drawn harvesters, woven five hundred yards of rag carpet, picked three thousand buckets of berries, drawn forty thousand buckets of water from the well in the yard, chopped firewood equivalent to a major clear-felling in the Käymäjärvi forests, washed a mountain of dirty linen as high as Mount Jupukka, and shoveled acres of shit from the outhouse without so much as a word of complaint, and when she lifted potatoes the clatter of them dropping into the tin bucket had frequently been mistaken for a salvo from a Finnish machine gun. To mention but a few of her achievements.
In her last years, when she had been bed-ridden, she had read the Bible from cover to cover eighteen times—the old Finnish version, of course, uncontaminated by the modernizers and atheists who work for the Bible Commissions. Naturally, the written Word was nothing compared to the Living one, the two-edged sword wielded with such fervor at prayer meetings; but it might as well be read as she had nothing else to do.
As usual at Tornedalen heroic burials, the preachers spoke mostly about Hell. They described in minute detail the endlessly burning charcoal stack where sinners and heretics were fried like pork in tar in the Devil’s red-hot skillet, while he prodded them with his trident to bring out the juices. The congregation cowered in their pews, and the old lady’s daughters, especially, shed many a crocodile tear into their permanent waves and fashionable dresses, while the men who had married into the family shuffled uneasily with hardened hearts. But here was an opportunity to sow the seeds of penitence and mercy over almost all the globe, and it would have been unpardonable not to try. Besides, Grandmother had filled a whole notebook with instructions on how the funeral was to be conducted, and there was to be much Holy Writ and a modicum of the Gospel in the service. None of your forgiveness scattered glibly hither and thither on an occasion like this.
But when the heavenly gates finally opened at the end of the ceremony, when the angels breathed sweet-smelling Grace into the Pajala church and the earth trembled and Grandma was delivered unto the Heavenly Father, the women sniffled into their handkerchiefs and wept and quivered and hugged one another in the name and blood of Jesus Christ amen, the pews and aisles were filled with the scent of freshly mown hay, and the whole church rose half an inch from its foundations before crashing back in place with a resounding, deafening thud. And the faithful saw the light, the light of Paradise, as when you open your eyes briefly while sound asleep in a silent summer’s night, when you open your eyes toward a window and see the gentle glow of the midsummer sun gleaming in the night sky, a brief interlude in a dream, then close them again. And the next morning when you wake up there is only a faint memory left of something great and mysterious. Love, perhaps.
* * *
After the funeral everyone was invited back to the house for coffee and cakes. The mood was suddenly relaxed, almost exhilarated. Grandma was with Jesus. Time to breathe again.
The only one not to thaw out was Isak. He prowled around in his old preacher suit, and although it was a long time since he’d left the straight and narrow, a few words over the coffin in praise of God had been expected from him. A testimony from the prodigal son. Some thought he might even have seen the light once again—greater things than that had been witnessed at the funeral of a parent after all, a time when one’s own transience and mortality crept one generation closer to home. The forefinger of God plunging like an iron rod into a hardened heart and breaking the ice, messages from the Holy Ghost, confessions of sins draining the penitent soul like the emptying of a brim-full chamber pot, then forgiveness transforming it into a highly polished Heavenly Chalice into which the Grace of God can fall like a summer shower. But Isak had merely mumbled over the bier, softly, to himself. Not even those in the front row had heard what he said.
Juice and buns were served up at the children’s table. We had to eat in shifts as there were so many of us. Niila looked uncomfortable in his tightly buttoned Sunday shirt. While the old folk, clad in black, sat around cackling away like crows, we youngsters wandered off outside. The boys from Missouri followed us out. They were twins, aged about eight, dressed in smart suits and ties. They spoke English to each other while Niila and I conversed in Tornedalen Finnish; they kept yawning because of jet lag, and were shivering noticeably. They both had crew cuts and looked like miniature marines with ginger hair, like their Irish-American father. You could see they were bewildered by being transplanted to the Old World and their mother’s roots. It was May, the snow was melting after the long winter, but the river was still covered in ice. The birches were naked, and the previous year’s grass was fl
at and yellow in the meadows where the snow had barely finished thawing away. They trod cautiously in their patent leather shoes, peering around uneasily on the lookout for Arctic predators.
I was curious and started chatting to them. They told us in sing-song Swedish-American that on their way to Sweden they’d broken their journey in London and seen the Beatles. I told them to cut out the fairytales. But they both swore blind the Beatles had driven past their hotel in a long, open Cadillac through rows of girls screeching and shrieking. It had all been filmed from a truck following close behind.
The twins had bought something as well. They produced a paper bag and took out a record with an English price tag.
“Beatles,” I spelled out slowly. “Roskn roll musis.”
“ ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music,’ ” they chorused, correcting my pronunciation with a grin. Then they handed the single over to Niila.
“It’s a present. To our cousin.”
Niila took hold of the record in both hands. Fascinated, he slowly slid out the circular piece of vinyl and stared at the hair-thin grooves. He held it so gingerly, as if afraid it would crack, like a wafer-thin disc of ice from a frozen waterbucket. Although this disc was black. Like sin.
“Kiitos,” he mumbled. “Tack. Fenk yoo.”
He sniffed at the plastic, then held it up toward the spring sun and watched the grooves glittering. The twins glanced at each other and smiled. They were already composing the story about their meeting with the natives that they’d recount for their buddies back home in Missouri as they all sat around chewing hamburgers and slurping colas.
Niila undid a few shirt buttons and hid the record under his clothes, next to his skin. He hesitated for a moment. Then he beckoned the twins, inviting them to follow him toward the road. Wondering what he had in mind, I accompanied them over the meadow, through the remains of the last, dirty snowdrifts.