by Mikael Niemi
I started working my way through the throng, wondering how I could get more drunk without the old man noticing. I eventually saw a bottle with a few drops left in the bottom, picked it up together with several empties, and pretended to help the serving ladies clear away. Then I sneaked into the entrance hall. In the semi-darkness I nipped my nose and started to swill it down.
As I did so a pair of strong arms wrapped themselves round my chest. I dropped the bottle. Somebody was standing behind me, breathing down my neck. I was scared, twisted and turned, but couldn’t break loose.
“Let me go,” I gasped, “päästä minut!”
The nearest I got to an answer was to be picked up and shaken like a puppy. I felt something tickling my face. Hair. Long, dark hair. Then a giggle and I was dropped with a thud.
It was her. Soft as fur as near as this. Like a cat. I waited for the teeth biting my neck. She was breathing heavily, smiling with luminous lips. Then she tore open my shirt and stuck her hand inside. It happened so quickly I had no time to defend myself. I felt her warmth. Her caresses, the soft tips of her fingers stroking my nipples.
“Do you get horny when you’re drunk?” she asked in Finnish, and kissed me before I could reply. She smelled of perfume and fresh underarm sweat, and her tongue tasted sausagey, of lenkkimakkara. Moaning softly she pressed herself up against me, it was amazing that a woman could be as strong as this.
“I’ll give you a good hiding!” she whispered. “I’ll kill you if you so much as mention a word of this!”
Then she opened my trousers and whipped out my erection before I could draw breath. Just as rapidly she lifted her skirt and pulled down her pants. I helped her, her pants were wet. Her skin was shimmering white, her thighs as long as a moose cow’s, with a black tousled bush between. I knew that if I touched it, it would bite me. She stroked me and was just about to guide me in when the dam burst, the world split open and collapsed in a cascade of wet rags and became red and sore, and she swore and pulled down her skirt and disappeared into the kitchen.
I was still too young to produce sperm. My dick went limp and all that remained was a pounding memory, like when you’ve peed against an electric fence. I buttoned up my trousers and thought I didn’t dare go back into the kitchen ever again.
The next moment the door burst open, and the entrance hall filled with men jostling and butting like a herd of reindeer. They were all drunk, staggering about and leaning against the walls. Last to arrive were Einari and Ismo, who had reluctantly agreed to a tie; their arms had been so closely intertwined that they had to be prized apart. The old man instructed me to come along, as the sauna hero was about to be selected. The front door was flung open and everybody surged expectantly down the steps. Within seconds the yard was inundated with dozens of serious streams of pee. Grandad kept going longest of all and was pilloried by his sons, who wondered if he was pissing snot, considering the rate at which it was emerging; or if the old bloke had caught foot and mouth disease after screwing the heifer; or if his last shot had got stuck in the barrel of his rifle, in which case they maybe ought to pierce it with a knitting needle. Grandad muttered bitterly something about it being all right to make fun of the old, but not of invalids, then declared that he would have done better to tar and feather his prick than to sire a generation of bastards like this one.
The sauna was made of wood, and was the old-fashioned type, a so-called “smoke sauna.” As was the custom it was some way away from the main building, in case it ever caught fire. The wall over the door was black with soot. There was no chimney, the smoke from the stone-box had to find its way out through the smoke-holes in the walls. The men started to hang their clothes on nails, or put them on the wooden benches outside while the mosquitoes ran riot all over them. As head of the house and the sauna host, Grandad went in first and shoveled the remains of the embers into a tin bucket. Then he threw several scoops of water into the stone-box in order to clean the air. Steam bellowed forth, attached itself to the smoke particles and continued out through the door and the three smoke-holes. Finally he removed the sacks that had been protecting the benches from soot, and stuffed rags into the smoke-holes.
I slunk in with the bunch of men and was squeezed into the top corner. There was a pleasant smell of tarred wood, and whenever I brushed against the wall I got black marks. The benches, both the upper and lower ones, were filled to overflowing with heavy, white male bottoms. Some failed to find a seat and had to sit on the floor, complaining that it was a fate worse than being denied entry into Paradise. The mosquitoes hovered in the doorway like a gray curtain, but didn’t dare come in. The last man in closed the door on the summer evening, and suddenly everything went black. And everyone fell silent, as if overcome by reverence.
Slowly our eyes grew used to the dark. The stove was glowing like an altar. The heat felt as if it were coming from a big, curled-up animal. Grandad took hold of the wooden scoop and started muttering to himself. The men settled themselves down, arching their backs as if preparing for whiplashes. The wooden benches creaked under the weight. Slowly Grandad dipped the scoop into the cold water from the well, then rapidly poured nine scoopfuls with uncanny accuracy into the stone-box, one in the center, one in every corner and one in the middle of each long and short side. A ferocious hissing noise climbed up toward us, followed by stinging heat. The men moaned with pleasure. Sweat broke out on shoulders, thighs, genitals, and bald heads, oozing salt and setting us itching. The bunch of birch twigs was taken out of the bucket where it had been in water, and used on the glowing stones. A smell of sun and summer filled the sauna, and the men started smiling inwardly and sighing longingly. The bridegroom grabbed the birch twigs and began beating himself all over his body, moaning ecstatically all the while. In a quivering voice he announced that it was better than sex, which made the rest start squirming impatiently. Grandad poured nine more scoops onto the stones, hitting precisely the places that hadn’t been wet the first time around. The heat filled the sauna like an enjoyable good thrashing. The moaning and panting increased in volume, and there were several whimpering pleas for the bunch of birch twigs before all the itching made their skins burst open. The bridegroom reluctantly passed it on, saying that they ought to have the kitchen ladies there to whip their backs as nobody could handle a vihta with such ecstatic ruthlessness as an old harridan. The twigs pitter-pattered and showers of sweat rained down. Grandad kept scooping on more water, mumbling away, and clouds of steam floated around like spirits. Some voices were heard complaining about the cold, claiming they’d rarely had such a cold löylyä, which everybody knew meant that the sauna was approaching its maximum temperature. The steam was as merciless as a Laestadian sermon. The men crouched and grappled with the heat, pure pleasure. Their gums were starting to taste of blood. Ear lobes were stinging, pulses thundered like drums. Somebody gasped that you couldn’t get closer to Eden than this, not this side of the grave.
Once the first sensual storms had died down, a discussion started on the various types of sauna. Everybody agreed that the “smoke sauna” was far and away the best, much better than the wood-burning type and the electric version. The last-mentioned was singled out for special scorn and dismissed as a toaster or a car heater. Some recalled with a shudder the dry, dusty airing cupboards they’d had to sit in on various visits to southern Sweden. Someone remembered a sauna he’d taken at the Mountain Hotel in Jormlien where the electric stove was Norwegian and looked like an old-fashioned spin-dryer. The stone-box was about the size of a teacup with only enough room for two pebbles, provided one of them was stood on end. Another had horror in his voice as he told us about a building contract he’d been involved in on the island of Gotland. It lasted three months, but not once had he been able to attend to his personal hygiene because sauna culture had not penetrated that far south. Instead, people there would lie and splash about in the filth they washed off themselves in something they called a bathtub.
Grandad left off scooping water onto
the stones in order to point out that several of his sons had in fact installed electrically driven saunas in the houses they’d had built for themselves, thereby condemning Tornedalen culture to an early death. The sons concerned protested that their saunas had been made in Finland and hence were of unbeatable quality, just as good as the wood-burning variety, and that the Finnish sauna magazine Saunalehti had awarded them five out of five bundles of birch twigs in their ratings. Grandad maintained tetchily that electricity was the most ridiculous invention ever to come from southern Sweden, it pampered and spoiled man and beast alike, decreased the mass of muscle in working men and women as well, reduced your tolerance of the cold, spoiled people’s night eyes, ruined the hearing of teenagers and made them incapable of eating rotten food, and was well on the way to eradicating the endurance and patience that were virtues of the Tornedalen people, since everything was done nowadays at breakneck speed by engines. Before long sexual intercourse would be replaced by electricity as it was a strenuous exercise and a sweaty one as well, and that kind of thing was regarded as old-fashioned now, as we all know.
Grandad started scooping water onto the stones again, ignoring his sons’ protestations that they were still made of traditional Finnish hardwood. Instead he declared that they had all become idle layabouts, that Tornedalen had been conquered by knapsut and ummikot and that what he regretted most of all was not smacking them more often when they were little. But it was too late now. Nobody understood any more the feeling of sitting in a sauna where you’d been born, where your father had been born and his father before him, where the family’s corpses had been washed and shrouded, where kuppari, the medicine men, had bled the sick, where children had been conceived and where generation after generation of the family had cleansed themselves after a week’s work.
His voice broke and, with tears in his eyes, he announced that life, my boys, is cold and pain and lies and rubbish. Take just one example: the revolution he’d been waiting for ever since the Pajala transport workers came out on strike for the first time in 1931, where the hell was it, had anybody seen any sign of it around here lately, well, had they? Only once had a spark of hope been lit, one day when he’d gone to Kolari to buy some provisions, and among the crowd of customers in Valinta Firberg’s he’d caught a glimpse of Josef Stalin with a cart full of meat. But Uncle Joe had obviously decided it was a waste of time coming to Pajala.
A bottle was handed to Grandad as a crumb of comfort amidst all the heat, and he splashed a drop on the stones as well. A whiff of fusel oil drifted toward us. Grandad passed on the bottle, wiped his nose on his arm and said that life was a load of shit anyway and death wasn’t far away. But he was still a Communist, he wanted to make that clear once and for all, and if on his deathbed he started rambling about seeking forgiveness for his sins and asking for Jesus, it would be no more than confusion and senility and they should stick a plaster over his cakehole. He wanted everybody to promise they’d do that, here and now, in the presence of his family and other witnesses. The fear of death was nothing compared to the fear of going gaga and talking twaddle at Pajala Cottage Hospital for anybody to hear.
Then he threw nine more scoops onto the stones and some of the lads started whimpering and climbed down saying they needed a pee, and only the very hardest remained behind, with blisters the size of one-krona coins on their shoulders. Grandad couldn’t believe he was the father of all these milksops. Then he handed over the scoop and said they could sort out the final stages for themselves because he was fed up with tormenting them and having to smell their glands. He climbed down with dignity and started to wash himself in a bowl of hot water. He only soaped the three most important parts of the body, the way old men do: his bald head, his stomach, and his scrotum.
And so the grim final round was under way. This would be the ultimate test of strength for the two families. Einari took over the scooping of the water while the others complained of the cold. As always the struggle was largely psychological. Everybody used exaggerated body language to demonstrate how unaffected they were, how little the heat troubled them, how long they’d be able to put up with it, no problem. Einari emptied the bucket over the sizzling stones and had it filled again immediately. Another round of scooping, fiercer than ever. The first batch of the finalists staggered down and fell on the floor, panting. Grandad threw a bucket of cold water over them. The steam was whipping everyone’s back, burning their lungs. Another one gave up. The others sat there like tree stumps, eyes glazed over. Somebody started swaying, nearly fell, and was helped down. More steam, more pain. Now Dad gave up, coughing as if he were about to choke. Only Einari was left, still scooping, and bald-headed Ismo, head dangling. The vanquished huddled together on the floor, determined to stay and see the outcome. Ismo looked near to passing out, but stayed on the bench even so, remarkably enough. With each new scoop he jerked back, like a defenseless boxer slowly being knocked out. Einari was gasping for breath, and his right arm shook as he poured on fresh scoops of water. His face was purple, his upper body swayed alarmingly. One more scoop. And another. Ismo started coughing, ready to choke, he was dribbling down his chin. Both of them were swaying violently now, and put their arms around each other to support themselves. Suddenly Einari shuddered and toppled stiffly toward Ismo, who also fell. They collapsed like slaughtered beasts, thudded down onto the lower bench, and stayed lying down, arms round each other.
“A draw!” shouted somebody.
Only now did I slither out of my dark corner on the upper bench, looking like a skinned rabbit. Everybody stared in amazement. Without a word I raised my fist in a victory salute.
As their applause and cheering rose to the soot-caked ceiling, I fell to my knees on the floor and vomited.
CHAPTER 12
About a stomach-turning summer job, a poker that went astray, and the perils that ensue from failing to do one’s duty