To Cook a Bear

by Mikael Niemi

  The pastor chewed it and pulled a face.

  “You need young teeth to gnaw at dried fish,” he said.

  “But it gives you all the strength you need for long days journeying on foot.”

  “Yes. Now tell us, dear Erkki Antti, how goes the work in the Norwegian vineyards?”

  As they sat talking, a sweet, uncommonly spicy scent rose from the pot Brita Kajsa was warming over the hot stove. Applying force, she ground the contents and then added them to a pan of water and let it boil. After that, she served it in the china cups brought out only for the most cherished guests. Even I received a drop in my wooden cup.

  “I’ve tasted the brew,” she said, unable to suppress an excited smile. “Sometimes it comes to the shop with the deliveries, and then I seize the opportunity to buy some.”

  The beverage was black, almost oily. The taste made me think of the pine stump used for tar, heavy and burned, and the smell reminded me of wild rosemary.

  “Coffee,” Erkki Antti said, sighing with pleasure. “Praise the Lord!”

  Brita Kajsa cast a glance at her husband and smiled.

  “The pastor doesn’t seem as fond of the drink as we are,” she said. “But he for his part has his tobacco, and the women have to have their little vice too.”

  While we sipped the coffee in the growing conviviality, Erkki Antti reported on the progress of the religious revival on the Norwegian side of the border. Unfortunately, he had troubling news from Kautokeino.

  “The awakened members of the Sami community there are still spreading unrest,” he said. “A number of them disrupted the service Andreas Qvale was holding in Skjervøy.”

  The pastor nodded. “Yes, I’ve received a letter about it.”

  “Bishop Juell has sent a new reverend, one who has a command of Lappish, Nils Stockfleth.”

  “Quite right,” the pastor said. “If the priest speaks Lappish, he’ll get much closer to the people.”

  “Regrettably, it doesn’t seem to have helped in this instance,” Erkki Antti said. “Haetta, Somby, Spein, and a few of the others went to the parsonage to question the new reverend. They wanted him to say he shared their faith in the revival. But Stockfleth refused. Then the Sami yelled at him, saying that he belonged to the devil.”

  “This happened at the parsonage?”

  “Yes, in the reverend’s home. The Sami kept shouting curses at him and he was obliged to call for the new sheriff, Lars Johan Bucht. Together they managed to force the visitors out.”

  “And these Sami claim to be members of the revival movement?”

  “Yes, the same movement Pastor and I belong to. Later, Stockfleth was shouted at during a service by a number of awakened women. As a result, he refused to give them Communion because he thought they were renouncing Christ. In response, people started yelling and making a racket in church, both men and women. They shouted down the vicar’s sermonizing, so he couldn’t be heard.”

  The pastor silently gave this some thought. Brita Kajsa sipped her hot coffee and shook her head.

  “How can the revival movement go so wrong?” she asked.

  “It’s not the revival,” the pastor said.

  “No, of course not. But where does all this stem from? The commotion and uproar and disorder?”

  Even Erkki Antti looked down at the table uneasily.

  “And what do the people up there say?” Brita Kajsa went on. “What are people’s views on the revival?”

  “I don’t know if I . . .”

  “Yes, tell us,” she urged him. “Tell us exactly what you’ve heard.”

  Erkki Antti wiped his blind eye again, as if it had begun to weep by itself.

  “Many of them accuse us of heresy,” he said with embarrassment. “They think we run the devil’s errands. That we are false prophets whose purpose is to destroy the church.”

  “Nonsense like that comes from our enemies,” the pastor exclaimed.

  “I know, I know . . .”

  “We have nothing to fear,” he said.

  “But if the enemy is in our midst?” Brita Kajsa said. “If the devil sits down among us? How can we defend ourselves then?”

  * * *

  —

  Erkki Antti left for his long walk home to Juhonpieti, as modestly as he had arrived. That night Brita Kajsa became aware of the pastor anxiously tossing and turning. She rested her hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat, faint and irregular.

  “I should go to Kautokeino,” he said.

  “When winter comes, everything will calm down,” she whispered back.

  “The whole world seems to be against the revival.”

  “But there are thousands of friends by your side.”

  “It doesn’t feel like that. In my mind, I’m fighting the dragon alone.”

  “And even so, we will win.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Don’t you?”

  The pastor drew a deep breath, expanding his chest. But inside he was empty and desolate. He felt like a house with broken windows and dry leaves swirling on the floor.

  “Everything will get better,” Brita Kajsa said. “Now even poor people can have hope and confidence.”

  “But in what?”

  “Just look at Jussi. He already reads and writes better than the rich countrymen of Pajala.”

  “We lit the fire,” the pastor replied. “And our intention was that it would give warmth and do good. But fire can bring destruction as well.”

  “Sleep now, dear husband.”

  He took her hand, more earnestly than he had done since they were sweethearts, and squeezed it long into the night.

  PART TWO

  The sun is setting

  The dogs start to howl

  Alone I am waiting

  For nighttime to fall

  Before she speaks out

  Her mouth will I seal

  And she the poor sinner

  A-hanging will feel

  18.

  A wife, the pastor had said. I had already found her. From the first moment I saw her, I knew she was the one. But how could I get close to her, melt the frostiness she displayed toward me?

  From the farmhands’ conversations in the marketplace I learned that a dance was being organized. It was only for servants and simple folk, far away from the eyes of the powers that be. It would be held at a kenttä, a forest glade, in an isolated summer shed where no one would interfere. After the Saturday chores were done, people took a sauna, changed their clothes, and made their way there.

  I didn’t want to go. And yet I did want to. The young people of the district would be meeting there, but beside them I felt old. Or maybe it was fear. I didn’t know, I was bewildered and my clothes were dirty and smelled of forest fire.

  “Jussi?”

  The pastor entered the sauna. He could move as quietly as a cat. I had just washed and was drying myself with a rag. I shyly turned away to hide my private parts and tried to flatten the hair on the top of my head.

  “I hear there’s going to be a dance this evening.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “So you’re not intending to go?”

  I blushed, for he could see right through me. He had detected my very first lie.

  “Dancing is to the devil as carrion is to the blowfly,” I muttered.

  The pastor looked away discreetly while I dried my crotch and hurriedly pulled on my trousers.

  “The girl was murdered,” he said grimly. “And only you and I will acknowledge the truth. A monster is prowling about out there.”

  “He could be far from here by now.”

  “I fear that he is not. If it’s someone we think we know, someone in our midst—then he’ll be at the dance this evening.”

  “But, the
pastor . . . the pastor could have the event stopped.”

  “I could. Doubtless I could. . . . But I was thinking, what if you were to go?”

  “I won’t do that, Pastor.”

  “But if you did. You could keep a lookout for the killer. In all likelihood he is big and strong. The hands that strangled her are bigger than mine. He has been in the mountains—you remember the Arctic heather we found. He has a great lust for women.”

  I stared at the pastor. He laid his hand on my bare shoulder and I felt the warmth.

  “Maybe I’ll go after all,” I mumbled.

  “Be careful, Jussi. In the name of God.”

  At the door to the sauna he turned.

  “And if anyone asks, I didn’t know anything about this event. The dance, I mean. I was completely unaware that it was going to be held.”

  * * *

  —

  Low voices could be heard along the forest path to Kenttä. Crofters and servants came from near and far, full of impatient excitement. Farmhands and maids usually under close supervision looked over their shoulder, fearful lest the master call them back for some evening task. Around the shed the pine forest thinned out and opened to the grasslands, so the summer light could stream down unimpeded from the evening sky. Faint smoke floated over the meadows from a pine-tar fire, which would hardly have been lit for warmth, but for the agreeable atmosphere it would foster. Farmhands and maids stood in small groups here and there. Lowing was heard from the barn into which the cows had been taken for the night. But it was the shed on which everyone had their eye. From inside soft thuds could be heard, just like the sound of threshing. Every now and then someone raised a cry, let out a laugh. I felt a keen embarrassment when girls cast me a glance to see if they knew me, a sensation like needles pricking my skin. One girl pointed at me scornfully, whispering something that provoked hilarity. I wanted to turn and dart back into the forest, but I forced myself to stay. When a couple of fellows who had just arrived started walking toward the shed, I joined them as they trod a path through the tittle-tattle. I could smell brandy and saw one of them lift up his jacket and dig out a bottle from his waistband. Both of them took a substantial gulp and I froze when I recognized the larger of the two. It was Roope, the ginger-haired foundry worker who had shouted at me on the village road and threatened to hit me with his belt. He was glassy-eyed when he turned to look at me.

  “What the deuce? If it isn’t the pastor’s little noaidi! Is it true he found you under a stone? You were lying under a stone, a troll who couldn’t even speak.”

  His friend was impatient and opened the ramshackle gray door to the shed. I avoided Roope’s fumbling grasp, bent down through the low doorway, and elbowed my way in.

  Inside, in the twirling semidarkness, the air was thick and damp and considerably warmer. There was an acrid smell of sweat—and something else, something dangerous, something that came from deep inside the young bodies. When my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw people moving side by side in a long chain, or, to be more precise, a circle; it was a ring dance. The women were on the inside, moving in one direction, and the men were on the outside, moving in the opposite direction, so that each man would face a new woman, then another, and so on. I found the closeness so threatening that I felt sick. I took cover by one of the walls and noticed several others standing there, shy youths who also didn’t dare to enter the sweaty circle. The singer was standing in the corner, on a potato bin. He was a fine-boned youngster with a boyish face, strikingly short in stature, and his voice was very high, between a man’s and a woman’s. His singing was quite remarkable and unlike anything I had ever heard. He seemed to be laughing, it was hard to find a likeness to anything else. His voice went up, it trilled, and then dipped into a long descent down a steep staircase. You scarcely noticed him breathe, before the voice went up again and filled the room with a steady beat. “La-di-li-di, la-di-li-di, dum-dadi dum-da,” he sang, his tongue seeming to go faster than humanly possible. There were no instruments here; I knew no one in the region who could afford a fiddle. I had heard cow-girls playing homemade flutes in the forest, the sound keeping them company and frightening off beasts of prey. But your own voice is still the best instrument; you have it with you all the time. The delicately formed singer held the whole gathering captive, warbling out round after round, as all the while the rocking motion brought the dancers closer and closer together.

  And then the singer stopped. It happened so abruptly that people felt awkward. They found themselves standing far too close to one another and the silence was unnerving. The girls looked down at the floor, at their curled-toe shoes or their own wrists. One or two whispered to one another and there was a little jostling. The singer ceremoniously cleared his throat, getting rid of the spittle and phlegm, and took a gulp from a bottle. I watched him with utter fascination, this insignificant, puny man, to whom no one would have paid attention on the village road. But here he undeniably was the focal point. The people on the dance floor looked at him pleadingly, impatiently, everyone wanting to be back in the beating, warming heart of the music. The man gave a rather bashful smile as he searched through his musical treasures, shimmering there like hundreds of colors, until he caught the end of a new melody and tested it with his voice. Now came the words. It was a Finnish waltz, one of the mournful variety, about loneliness beneath a starry sky when your beloved has left you for another. A handful of couples formed and began to turn in the crowded room. But most withdrew sheepishly to the walls and just listened. Two girls happened to stand beside me and one of them accidentally knocked me with her hip. Noticing it, she stepped back, but for me there was a measure of secret happiness. She was so close that if I pretended to stumble, I could lean on her shoulder. Here in the hot shed, it was as though we were in a different world. No servants ruling the roost, no old folk sitting in the corner with watchful eyes. For some, there was a freedom here that working people never experienced anywhere else. The muggy air smelled sweet. It made you want to have more. Drink yourself as heavy and giddy as a bee.

  And then, without any warning, a bottle was being poked at my mouth. It was Roope, his teeth looking sharp under his ginger mustache.

  “Now the little noaidi is going to have some brandy. . . .”

  I took the bottle without a word. It was sticky from his sweaty hand and his saliva and I thought about cracking it hard against his temple and making him drop to the floor. The scene unrolled so clearly before me. There was trampling and scuffling and screaming and blood. It was so satisfying to hit him, to let him have it, to give it to him until he caved in. But I stopped myself a second before his eyes widened with fear. And instead of hitting him, I drank. I put the top of the bottle to my lips and let the snake poison pour in. I took two big gulps, or was it three, and then I handed the bottle back. Roope’s grin got broader and he walloped my shoulder as if we had instantly become friends. He leaned toward me unsteadily and wanted to talk—leaned far too close, as drunks are wont to do, something I usually found so uncomfortable. But suddenly I didn’t mind. I watched Roope in the half dark, his shining forehead and wet lips, the stiff ginger hairs in his mustache that shook whenever he coughed as though about to vomit. Then he grabbed the nearest girl and went spinning around the room.

  Never before had alcohol passed my lips. It was like swallowing fire, but only for a moment. The sensation was replaced by an aching egg in my stomach. It lay there swelling into a poisonous heart, beating and lashing. And then the egg broke, and the black shell burst, and out pushed taloned feet with scaly skin, and savage jaws, tearing and biting. The dragon was loose. I, myself, became a dragon.

  I left Roope’s friend, who tried to hang at my side but remained there swaying as I made my way along the wall. Quick glances came in my direction, but they were no longer spiteful, and now people averted their gaze. The woman who had mocked me earlier was tense now; she saw me approach and turned her back, ra
ised her shoulders like a bulwark. My chest stretched and grew new ribs, my neck lengthened with two more vertebrae. My blood grew hotter, it started to roar and churn and seemed to course outside my body now, rather than inside; it was a thoroughly peculiar experience. Above all, I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know I had been afraid, but now I was aware how much easier my movements were, as if my shell had fallen off. I walked once around the whole room, and then again. After that I went outside. And then in again. I didn’t need to ask permission. The world had opened up to me. The old Jussi was left in a corner, just a phantom. He watched what was happening and thought, Jussi is drunk now, Jussi has tasted alcohol now. He spied around like a bird, but I didn’t listen to his carping anymore. I stood right next to the singer, raised my eyes, and gazed at the dancers without fear. I knew many of them from the village, most I knew by name, but some were completely unknown to me. Perhaps they came from Finland, or the mountains or the sea. There was an urgency in the air, as if everything had to happen this evening. In a few hours the fair celebrations would be over and it would be Sunday. And the daily struggle would commence. Everything had to happen now, in a fever.

  I knew it was the dragon. This was how he lured people. He walked about among us and blew darkness into our eyes, lovely, warm darkness. He was everywhere, in the fumbling hand, in the knowing look, in the stretch of the ankle, in the collar that opened to reveal the skin. I could feel the threat. Something bad was going to happen, a danger was approaching. I turned to the door and saw it open. I screwed up my eyes against the bright evening light outside.

  And there she was. My beloved. My Maria.

  She had removed her headscarf, uncovering her hair; she must have been warm after the walk, of course. With the evening light behind her, it looked as though there were a golden haze around her head, like in an altarpiece. A halo. She stopped in the doorway and looked searchingly into the dancing throng. She hastily exchanged words with the girl beside her. And then she entered. She still hadn’t noticed me. A knife cut through my drunkenness, rending my flesh. Sheer rifts inside me split open, until, with a gentle swish, the blood gushed out of the rocky sides and filled the empty ravines. In a farmyard an old woman was whisking the surging blood, another adding flour, they whisked so hard that red spots splashed their wrinkled faces and made them laugh with their toothless gums. Their mouths were like the reindeer cow’s quim when a bull hangs on her back, flaccid holes with female mustaches; and I wanted to go deep inside, into the darkness. Damnation! How I wanted to touch her! Hold her shoulders, lay my hand against the flimsy cloth, feel the warmth of her beneath it.