by Mikael Niemi
I approached, keeping close to the wall. My feet floated above the quagmire, scarcely touching the moss, gliding like sledge runners over the uppermost covering of snow crystals. Nothing could stop me now. And I laid my fingers so gently on her shoulder, and she turned, and I thought, Now it is going to happen, now we will float into the music, into Satan’s sweaty throng. But it was one of the others she had turned to, one of the maidservants from Kenttä. They tripped out onto the floor together and the women’s circle parted and let them in. The men’s circle was moving in the opposite direction and without pausing I pushed my way in. I pried the men’s wrists apart and joined the circle, a body among bodies. The singer was in the middle of a lengthy song cycle, tapping on a block of wood to mark the rhythm, the same beat as the stamping feet—two steps sideways, one step back—and it was surprisingly easy to find the rhythm. Everything was transformed into a heart. Bo-boom-bo-boom-bo-boom. First the men turned outward and the women inward, their backs to one another. And then, the most exciting part, we turned to face each other. And with every further move there was a different woman, young and on fire. When I glanced to the side I saw Maria coming closer. She took one step away, then two steps nearer in the same rocking pulse. Then we turned outward again. Back to back, fellows’ sweaty paws in my hands. Inward, one more time. And there she was. Standing right in front of me. When she saw it was me, she looked down, first at the floor and next at the front of my shirt. We took a step in the same direction. For a second she was very close, just an arm’s length from me.
“Maria,” I said.
She looked up and met my eyes and she could see that I wished her only good. But the moment was too brief. Immediately we each took a step to the side and the rings slid apart, stretching out into a chain.
The singer reached the last verse and the slow circling came to a stop. It felt as though my insides were shaking. Maria hadn’t been angry with me. She must have been nonplussed to find me in the ring of men, in this wall of muscles and chests, of powerful arms and thighs. I was one of many. I was a man. Not a troll.
I saw her talking with a girlfriend. They tilted their heads together and laughed. I hoped that I was in her thoughts, and that maybe she would throw me a quick glance. I carefully wiped my hands on my trouser legs to make them dry and comfortable to hold. The singer, who had taken another swig, broke into a new melody, a brisk, rousing tune; the crowd grew visibly excited and the entire building seemed to take a deep breath. A fellow stepped forward unsteadily and tugged at Maria. It was Roope. She turned aside to dodge him but he wouldn’t let go of her wrist and tried to pull her toward him.
At the same moment the door was flung open. A large figure filled the opening and a smoky iridescent mist hugged his silhouette. In no time at all a sweet fragrance had spread throughout the shed, an aroma I instantly recognized. It came from the stub he held in his hand, the thing that was called a siggar. Nils Gustaf stood for a moment, taking in the pulse of the music. Then he poked the smoking implement between his teeth and started to clap the beat extremely loudly. He seemed to form a hollow with one hand and apply force with the other, making the noise rebound like a hard ball. Meanwhile, he stamped the heel of his leather boot on the floorboards, not in time with his clapping, but in the intervals between, making each sound like an echo of the other. And in a strange way the sounds were in keeping with the song. They reinforced the rhythm and gave the music body.
Nils Gustaf strode forward for all to see. The whirling couples slightly drew aside to allow him into the middle. He shoved Roope away from Maria, pushed his hat farther down on his forehead, and performed a sudden little leap in front of her; surprisingly nimble for so large a gentleman. With startling alacrity, he clicked his heels together and slapped his hands against the leg of his boot with a rat-a-tat-tat; it was all done so quickly, you could barely see him move. It was as if the man were levitating, hanging freely in the air. As he spun round in a complete turn he managed to survey from beneath the brim of his hat not just Maria, but every single one of the womenfolk in the shed. And they looked back. Indeed, in truth, they stared. They had never witnessed anything like it. Nor had I. Who could have imagined a fellow could move in that fashion? It was undignified, it was provocative and sinful, it was quite clearly knapsu, the northern Finnish word for “unmanly,” something only women do. But how it impressed the women! Not one of them could keep her eyes off him. They licked their lips and chewed their knuckles, as if they might start shrieking at any moment. It was the power of the music. All the clapping and stamping and high kicking got inside us and it heightened the music, made it almost sacred. It delighted the singer, who increased the tempo, and the ever-quickening tune made his tongue swell up, a shiny red glimpse visible in his mouth, as if he were bleeding while he sang, with a broad smile at the newcomer. Suddenly they were making music together, and the music expanded beyond the low roof, through the cracks between the shingles, and out into the falling night, toward the creatures of the forest.
With a flouncing swing of his leg, Nils Gustaf landed, bang, on the floor, at exactly the same second that the singer stopped, as if they were one and the same person. And the artist still had his smoking contraption between his teeth.
There was silence. Nils Gustaf walked up to the singer and ruffled his hair as if he were a little boy.
“In Hälsingland, that’s where your legs can really spin!” he shouted in his foreign Swedish.
The singer gave a hesitant laugh and merriment spread through the audience. At the same time people felt inhibited. The visitor came from afar. What did the man want? Was he a government official?
“Have you danced the quadrille? Do you know this one? Up you come, everyone. The ladies here, like this. And the men on the other side. I’ll give you the tune.”
He hustled me out onto the floor with the other men. It was like being washed there by a wave. Then he began to sing a cheerful, snappy song in a strange dialect. The singer listened and was soon able to join in. Verse and refrain, verse and refrain. The artist in front of everyone, showing them the steps. The men into the center first, then the women. It was a little like the ring dance, and yet it wasn’t. This felt more ceremonial, more genteel.
“Now you form pairs and turn clockwise.”
Not many people understood his Swedish, so he grabbed the nearest person, who happened to be me. And then he found a woman and pulled her away from a truculent man. Laughing, Nils Gustaf planted a kiss on her cheek and led her to my side. It was Maria. He made us stand there, in view of everyone, and showed how I should hold her, and how she, this sweetness in human form, should put her arms round me.
“Now turn, and don’t take such long steps. Yes, like that.”
I was dancing with my beloved. Maria was holding me. She laid her hands against my body. And now she had no qualms about meeting my gaze. She was no longer afraid. And when we spun around it was so natural, as if we were in the same body. The couple next to us stumbled and had to start again, while we just seemed to fly. We soared along on the crest of a wave, on the very brink of the frothing spume. I had never known that dancing was like this.
“And then back again,” he said, demonstrating.
As the couples rearranged themselves into new formations, he stepped forward and issued instructions on the execution of a two-step followed by a shuffle. And I could see that I would soon be next to her again. I felt a tingle of intense joy. A surging explosion of heat. My body seemed to have become too small for me.
* * *
—
The artist stayed at the dance all evening. I saw him trying to talk to the girls in his Swedish, with grand gestures of explanation, to which they shyly responded in their rural Finnish. When he went out later, I followed him at a distance. I saw him seek out a spot at the edge of the forest, where he opened his fly.
A ginger-haired man approached from behind with long strides. It was
Roope. He was going in the artist’s direction and at first I thought he needed to pee as well. But then I saw that he was carrying a wooden stick. He made no noise as he padded purposefully forward. Then I saw him lift the stick, raising it swiftly as if it were an ax. Before I could shout out a warning he aimed a terrifying blow at Nils Gustaf’s head.
The artist could not possibly have foreseen the danger. And yet, somehow, he took what was almost a dance step to the side, just as the stick thudded against the ground. In a backward motion I had never seen before, he snapped his hand round Roope’s wrist and twisted his arm so that it was pointing back and up. The stick fell out of Roope’s fingers and onto the grass. The artist let go and snatched Roope’s belt. Unceremoniously he opened the buckle and removed the knife and its sheath. I saw Nils Gustaf hold it to Roope’s face and say something, but the sounds from the dance drowned out his words. With a powerful movement he threw the scabbard and knife far out into the trees. He unhurriedly buttoned up his fly and slowly began walking back to the shed.
The entire episode had been like a strange quadrille. Pulling a face and rubbing his sore arm, Roope got to his feet and, cursing, made his way into the forest to find his knife.
I tried to make sense of what I had witnessed. The artist had eyes in the back of his head. He could see behind him, while he was having a piss. He was scarcely human.
19.
The letters were so small, and yet so full of force. These slender, modest lines. With their tiny curlicues in the birth registers, newborn souls were transformed from soggy little bundles into baptized Christian parishioners.
By itself, each letter was frail. But when the pastor taught the young Sami boy to place them next to one another, something happened. It was like lighting a fire; one single piece of wood was of little use, but if you added another, it instantly grew hotter. The letters derived life from each other; in the company of others they began to speak. I and s and ä made isä, the Finnish word for father. But it could also mean God, our Father in heaven. The letters could do both a waltz and a ring dance; they could take each other by the hand in ever longer rows, and it was hard to understand how. You looked at lines and curves and saw only lines and curves. The letters by themselves were silent. But your lips could blow life into them. Turn them into objects, animals, names of people. And equally curious was the fact that they continued speaking even when you had closed your mouth. When you looked at the letters, they were converted into words inside your head. No, not words—bodies. My eyes look at “Maria,” at the five letters, the five consecutive shapes, but in my heart and mind I see my beloved. Her cheeks, her shining eyes, her hands holding mine.
It was the pastor who taught the boy. The pastor who sat beside the boy and delightedly clapped him on the back and made him try again.
“I . . . sssss . . . ääää . . . issäää . . . Isä!”
“Now you can read.” The pastor laughed.
“No, I can’t.”
“Look at this!”
“J . . . u . . . Jussi . . .”
“You see,” he said. “The door’s open, Jussi.”
The door. Which door? I thought of all the parables I had heard in church.
“To heaven?”
The pastor’s smile broadened.
“You’ll see, Jussi. But you have to practice, you have to read as much as you can find.”
And from that moment the world was full of letters. A kick-sledge seen from the front formed an H. A rake with all its tines was an E over and over again, just as a round-pole fence consisted of a row of Ns. A piece of string could be an O or an S, depending on the way it curled. Even people could resemble letters. A thin fellow with a large head was like a P. A stout woman with a wide skirt was an A. When you were digging in a ditch, the spade made the movement of a J. And when you cleaned the window, you made a Z. In the end I could be standing before an autumn birch that had lost its leaves and see letters everywhere among the black branches. Novvu filit umnu . . . I was reading the tree’s language, the birch’s language. All the gnarled branches in its crown were shouting at me. I was fearful and I wanted to forget it all, go back to my ignorance, when a birch was simply a birch. But it was impossible. One door had opened and at the same time another one had closed. I could never turn back.
I tried to express my disquiet to the pastor, but instead he brought out a book. His children had read it many times over and the pages were thumbed and worn. I seized it as if it were a piece of treasure. The cover was made of slightly heavier paper, a light brown cardboard on the point of coming off.
“Sit down and read. The text is in Swedish. If any of the words are difficult, you can ask me.”
I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall. Then I leaned forward and crossed my legs to form a little table on which I carefully propped the book. When I opened the cover there was a much thinner white sheet under it, which I also turned. And now the introduction. A picture of a man lying on the ground with his eyes closed. Another crouching beside him. Had he struck the one who was prone? No, now I could see the pitcher. He was holding out water so the man could drink.
S-a-m-a-ri-tan. It was hard to read. Sam-ari-tan.
“‘Samaritan’ means someone who is kind,” the pastor said. “The Good Samaritan. It’s a fine story. It’s about helping others.”
With painstaking effort, I plowed my way through the text. I hardly dared to turn the pages, I was so scared of dirtying them, even though I had been careful to wash my hands. I pulled a stalk out of the sennegrass and pointed at each letter, one after the other; I said it aloud and repeated it again and again until it sounded like a word. But the book was in Swedish and I had to ask the children what it meant. They laughed at my pronunciation and made fun of me until Brita Kajsa said something to them. It was a long time before I was ready to turn the first page. There were large pictures in the book that moved me profoundly. I studied the robbers at length, saw how they took everything the man had, even his clothes. And, what’s more, they gave him a severe beating. On several occasions I had seen such things myself on the roads, the wickedness and malice, seen how the strong taunted and wounded the weak. I had seen old nags whipped to a pulp, dogs left with their ribs kicked in, paupers receiving into their outstretched hands not bread but gobs of spittle from those who passed.
But into the misery stepped this hero from Samaria. He stopped, even though he didn’t need to. He helped the unknown man for no other reason than kindness. I could see him in front of me. He was like the pastor. And the victim, lying in the dust and about to perish, was me. What if the pastor hadn’t taken me with him that day? Just passed by and left me by the side of the road? I would never have become a person.
For several days, I read in all the spare moments I had. I took the book out of the cloth I had wrapped it in and my finger slowly traced the words, one after the other. It was like walking through a vast forest. After a long hike I reached the last page, and as the trees came to an end, the cover closed. I took a good look at the book, held it up, felt its weight in my hand. The paper was frayed, the spine had a crack in it and was damaged. If you placed the palm of your hand on top of the white sheets of paper, the book felt strangely cool, chillier than wood. It reminded me of birch bark with its silvery smoothness. Now that I had finished reading, the pages were once again completely silent. I inspected the book from different angles, laid my ear to it, and listened. But now it was keeping quiet. And yet I knew what was inside, what would happen if I opened it and started reading again. It was incredible. Was the book alive? And if the book wasn’t doing this, then where were the pictures and voices coming from? While I had been reading I had seen Palestine, I had been there. And the man from Samaria, now I believed I had met him myself. But where was all of this when the covers were closed? Perhaps the book was reading by itself in there? On the inside the words and letters were buzzing around like bees. Or perhaps
they were more like seeds? Seedlings that needed earth to grow, wanting to put down roots in the moist loam that filled a person’s head.
Shelves of books stood tall in the pastor’s study. Black and brown spines full of tiny letters, books with many more pages than my childish book. When I looked at them, I felt my heart race feverishly. Could the pastor really have read all this? Did he carry this weight inside him, in the same way I now carried my one little story? Was there so much space in a human mind? Sometimes, when he was writing his sermons, he reached out, grabbed a spine from this compact wall, and leafed through the thin, silky pages until he found the right place. I could see a voice beginning to speak within him, see his lips trembling as if in conversation. Imagine having company like that! If you owned books, you would never be alone.
“I want to read,” I pleaded. “To read more.”
The pastor’s daughter Selma found me another book. I tucked it into my shirt and held it next to my heart, as if I were carrying a baby. Even when it was closed, I could feel an occasional kick.
20.
On Sunday the church pews were only sparsely filled. We young people who had been at the dance tried to conceal our yawns while our elders muttered to one another about sin and immorality. The pastor warned of the temptations of summertime, that we should all constantly take care to avoid the demons that lured us onto the primrose path. Once again he cited use of alcohol as the root of greatest evil, and he condemned all the illegal liquor dealers operating their business in the area with no regard for the ruin they caused. I was listening with half an ear, as I had realized that Maria wasn’t there. Until the very last moment, I hoped that she was just delayed, and every time I heard steps in the aisle, I turned to look. But she didn’t appear. At the end of the Mass, the church door opened, but it was an elderly fellow, large and thickset, who sat down right at the back. When it was time for the announcements, I saw him rise, walk quietly up to the pastor, and whisper something to him. The man gave the impression of being nervous, he kept twisting his hat round and round and wiping his hands on the front of his shirt while his curled-toe shoes were tapping as if he were still out walking. The pastor listened and then gravely surveyed the congregation. He was silent for several moments, as his eyes traveled along the rows of pews, giving the impression he was looking deep into our eyes. Then he coughed and drew a deep breath.