To Cook a Bear

by Mikael Niemi

  But it doesn’t work. My knees give way and I slump facedown in the berry thicket. I lie there for I don’t know how long. The sun begins to set and I see a silhouette against the evening sky. And then I hear his voice.

  “Jussi? Jussi, is it really you?”

  It is the pastor, ye Good Samaritan.

  49.

  I woke between white sheets. At first everything was unfamiliar, but then I saw the bookshelves. I had been put to bed in the pastor’s study. My was head full of confused recollections, of a jolting stretcher, a bottle of water held to my lips, careful hands taking off my tattered clothes and washing the blood, vinegar on my wounds burning like fire.

  “Jussi?”

  The pastor fetched a basin and a rag and proceeded to gently bathe my gaping flaps of skin, to lay on clean strips of linen and tie them up.

  “Ooh . . . aah . . .”

  A throbbing drum was beating in my body, banging until I almost burst.

  “Are you hungry, Jussi? Wait, I’ll get you something.”

  No, I felt no hunger. But the pastor hurried out to the kitchen, found a bowl, mashed something up, and mixed in some butter.

  “Eat, Jussi. It’s fresh potato. Can you manage to chew?”

  Sharp twinges shot through the open root of my tooth. It was like being stabbed with horseshoe tacks, nailed with heavy hammer blows. But when I waited awhile the softness came, of the butter, the holy butter, and the sweetness called potato. I sucked it in and made a space for it at the back of my mouth, where the pain was less severe, where my mouth was warmer and my tongue at its widest. Moaning, I made it into a paste, flattened out the mush, and kneaded it again and again, and with every heartbeat there came light. My mutilated cheeks were flaming red from inside, veins and teeth were showing, and I tried to make time stop. But my body wanted to swallow, my body sucked down the blessed mash and made me want to sing. My chest heaved, my belly tightened round this little pearl of nourishment. Then the second spoonful joined the first. It still hurt, but at the same time I wanted to cry with relief. And with the third mouthful my body knew it would live, once again it would rise from the dead.

  They sat around my bed and prayed. I saw Brita Kajsa, Nora, Selma, and I felt a cool hand placed on my forehead. They said I had a fever. I felt sweat seeping through my skin, or maybe it was pus. When I needed to pee they lifted my hip and slid a bowl underneath, and I passed my water and screamed. It hurt so much I wanted to die. I knew what devastation was down there, but I ignored it. Didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think. . . . I rocked and moaned. I must have reeked of putrefaction. They changed my sodden nightshirt, a thing I had never worn before, and carefully eased on a fresh one. Then they let me be and I turned my head and shut my eyes and what was left of me rose up into the blood-drenched sky, into the light of blood.

  * * *

  —

  The following day I woke unnaturally early, before the day had even got its name. My stomach was churning and I struggled up. My legs couldn’t carry me, but I had to go. Bent like an old man, I shuffled across to the privy. It came out of me in a violent spurt. Tjalmo was scared and backed away on stiff paws, terrified by my stench. I filled a bucket from the well and staggered into the cold sauna. I sat there shivering as I washed my bruises and wounds, the ribs in my chest hurting almost unbearably every time I breathed. I crouched with my legs apart and shuddered, my whole body shaking. I dried myself with my bare hands, shook off the drips, brushed them from my hair and loins. I didn’t dare to feel between my legs. I raised my arms to form a V, an invocation, and for a long time I stood like that, trembling. Come thou and take me, I thought. Come, I am ready. Like a child. A sacrificial lamb.

  When the village awoke I was sitting outside on the steps. Cows were lowing, wanting to be milked. A dog gave tongue and others answered. A fox ran across the meadow, slipping like a red pearl through the grass. Chimneys smoked, doors creaked, tin pails clattered in milkmaids’ hands. Soon I heard voices from inside the parsonage and Brita Kajsa emerged onto the step, brushing her hair and throwing away a gray clump when she had finished.

  “Another day . . .” she said.

  “Mm . . .”

  She laid her hand on me to see if I had a fever.

  “Does Jussi feel better?”

  “It’s my stomach. . . .”

  “We have some of yesterday’s soup left. Cold broth. Will you manage that?”

  I followed her in and was given a cup. Solid rings of fat floated on the surface and I drank with my upper lip, sipping it drop by drop. The pain in the root of my tooth still made me reel. Brita Kajsa gave me a piece of bread that I dipped in the liquid and sucked on inside my cheek, which was better. Dipped and sucked, trying not to make such a disagreeable noise. The daughters averted their eyes from me, from my face that didn’t look human. Yet they wanted to show compassion, asked if I wanted more, if they could fill my water cup. I drank from the corner of my mouth, clamping it tightly, and the water spilled over my nightshirt. The pastor was next to me and noticed, rescuing the ladle before it thudded onto the floor.

  “Who hit you, Jussi?”

  I could feel the nausea mounting as he took hold of my arm.

  “I could kill the monster!” he said. “Rip him to shreds. Was it one of the farmhands? You recognized him, didn’t you?”

  “I . . . I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you do, Jussi. Just say who it was!”

  I pointed silently to my mouth, to the bloody shard of front tooth.

  “May I look?” he asked.

  We went out into the morning light in the yard, where he steered me into a beam of sunlight and asked me to open my mouth. With a blade of grass, he picked away the clots of blood until the tooth was free. He brushed the bare nerve and I cried out.

  “We must go to the doctor,” he said.

  Shaking my head, I stumbled over to the woodshed. Hanging on the wall over the workbench in the corner were some iron pliers with narrow jaws, which I handed to the pastor, pressing them into his hands. But he refused.

  “I can’t do it,” the pastor said.

  He had to. I wouldn’t give in. When he walked toward the parsonage, I followed him. Finally, he sighed and grasped the pliers. I sat on the ground and opened my mouth, then I changed my mind and lay down. The pastor sighed again and knelt astride me.

  “Is Jussi absolutely sure?”

  I nodded and squeezed my eyes shut, opened my mouth wide, and raised my chin to the sky. Felt the steel take a crunching grip. The contact made me shake and arch my back. He tried to pull, but he couldn’t. The stump of the tooth wouldn’t budge, his hand slipped, and he banged my lip.

  “I’m sorry, Jussi. It won’t work.”

  I screwed my eyes shut, opened my mouth wider. The blood was running down my throat. I coughed, it spattered everywhere. The pastor changed his method. Instead of pulling, he started to wiggle it, prizing the tooth back and forth. Each time it was like a church bell clapper, a heavy pendulum finishing me off. Metal, blood, and rusty iron. I felt something drip onto my face. It was the pastor’s tears. He was weeping and levering, and with a wet crack the long roots finally came free. I lost consciousness and for a moment everything turned black. Then I turned on my side and coughed and coughed and watched the grass become speckled with red. The pastor put something sharp in my hand. Then he hurried away, wiping his face with his shirtsleeve. I heard splashing by the well as he washed the pliers. Then a thud from the woodshed as he replaced them. I held up my tooth. It was white in the sunshine and I ran my fingers over the edges of the enamel. My mouth felt as empty as a shoe, empty and shrunken. As if everything had dwindled away. All that was left was a deafening release, as if inside a church bell. I was drawn up into it, and I faded away.

  * * *

  —

  And an immense building towered
up. The door opened and a large throng of people came streaming out. They made their way to a nearby cottage, where a figure with horns on its knees was dancing. He made them all join the dance. It suddenly stopped and they made a long chain. He pulled them toward an abyss of fire and smoke. And there the people plunged down into the deep, fathers and mothers with children in their arms. I was dragged by the figure to the very edge. And a handsome youth came by and asked my name.

  “Jussi,” I answered.

  “I am Jehovah,” he said.

  The youth picked up a book.

  “I will write your name in here. And then you will eat this.”

  He held out a little box of food.

  “Now tell people how dangerous it is in a stormy sea,” he said. “For otherwise they will land down there where the agony never ends.”

  50.

  I came to my senses on the hay in the barn. My mouth was a snout of hardened blood. I made a hole in the crust and tried to spit and I cautiously touched the gap where the tooth had been. It stung but wasn’t quite so unbearable now.

  Taking small steps, I walked down to the riverbank. As long as I didn’t drive my heels in too hard, I could manage. I crouched down by a stone, dipped my hands in the flowing water, and kept rinsing my mouth until the water stopped turning red. The streaks of blood curled away, growing thinner and thinner, until soon there was only water to see. I sat there for a long time, listening to the waterfall intone, its sound filling my ears. It was like the murmur of countless voices and I thought they were prayers. All humanity’s laments and powerlessness. Perhaps this was what it sounded like to God, a cacophony that never ended. Sometimes our Lord stuck his finger into the flowing currents and plucked a drop from farthest away, and examined it closely before placing it on the tip of his tongue. And that was the moment a miracle happened somewhere on our earth, and a person received solace.

  With my legs wide apart, I staggered back to the parsonage. A little crofter girl was walking toward me along the path and shut her eyes in horror when she saw my battered face. Openmouthed, she turned tail and scampered back, her bare feet drumming on the ground. In the yard I went up to Tjalmo, who cowered and backed away with a warning bark.

  “It’s only me . . . it’s Jussi . . .”

  For the moment the cabin was empty. On the kitchen table was the writing box with sand that one of the daughters had been busy with. I sat down next to the flattened sand and was filled with a strange disquiet. With an unsteady hand I took hold of the pointed wooden stick and bent forward. Then I wrote the first thing that came to me. Piru. The devil’s name in Finnish. I brushed it out and wrote saatana. I swept that away, too, and then wrote vittu. And then kulli. Cunt and cock. Perkele. Helvetti. Demon. Hell. All the words you must never use, I wrote them and then wiped them out, writing and flattening, writing and flattening. And then I looked at the sand. It was smooth and golden and like sunshine. No dirt to be seen. No wickedness, no ugliness, just light-colored writing sand.

  Imagine if life could be like that too. You crawled in your mire, your mouth cursed and vilified, your heart filled up with lies, your backside shat and farted, your prick ejected its whore-spunk into wet crotches. Then God passed his leveling board across the earth, ironing out all the scratches and indentations until there was only smooth sand. What did that say about the world? That at heart, deep down under all the wars and atrocities, it was still, in spite of everything, fundamentally good?

  I gazed at the smooth sand for a long time and I could sense the apprehension inside me, as if a feeling of nausea were mounting. What was the point, if in time everything was erased? If my life was forgotten the moment my body was lowered into the earth? And the same for all the people I had around me, all the hardworking villagers, the wonderful woman I loved, and even my revered pastor. If we were all to be swept away and disappear, what was the point of sitting here on a rough-hewn stool with an aching mouth and the taste of blood? Why not go straight down to Kengis waterfall and be washed away?

  I picked up the writing stick and took a deep breath. The point dug into the uppermost grains, formed a little dip, a furrow.

  I. And then am. I had to think long about the third word, but finally I wrote human.

  I am human.

  And several more words instantly followed.

  I am from the mountains.

  I have a sister.

  Her name is Anne Maaret.

  The writing box was full of sentences. There wasn’t room for any more. For a moment I stared at the letters, shut my eyes, and realized they remained inside me. I brushed them away and started again.

  Our mother did not want us.

  It was dreadful to write it, but I knew it was true. She never wanted to have us. Not the runt hare. Not the devil-boy.

  I wrote and then I smoothed it over. But the words were still inside me, remained in me even though they had been rubbed out. Letters were so strange. So I carried on. Page by page. The introduction to the story of my life, the life I lived in my body. Life as it was and how it felt. And I thought that what I was doing, these words, would one day be a book.

  * * *

  —

  The curious thing about writing is the way it gets inside your soul. You see a turbid stew, dip a wooden spoon in, and start to stir, go in circles, dig around. Rising up out of the murk something lighter appears, perhaps a turnip. Or a chewy piece of meat with the bone still in, sharp and scraggy. Or maybe a leaf, like the ones Brita Kajsa grows and calls lovage, with the taste of tanned hide and resin. Where does all the food come from? Who has put it there? Is it me?

  Writing brings anxiety, makes you feel almost sick. And yet you keep on searching through the dregs. There, a child’s face with black lips where small teeth have chewed deep notches. And there a little Arctic dog, dark all over apart from the white patches on its forehead as if it had an extra pair of eyes. It is thin and almost lifeless, as happens with the smallest in the litter. But if you do as the witch usually does and spit things into its mouth, it will swallow everything, scraps of food, sooty sinews, pan fat from the hearth. And as it swallows, it perks up. Its little tail wags to and fro with pleasure when you come back to the spruce-twig basket where it sleeps. You make a bed on moss, to make it warm and soft. You let it lie snuggling in your armpit at night when the witch isn’t looking.

  But one day when you return, its hind leg is crooked. It drags strangely, and when you try to put it straight, the puppy squeals like a mouse. Something has happened. Anne Maaret says it was the witch. It was something she threw, maybe a log. You hope it will heal and you bandage the little leg, but then you see there is something wrong with its ribs as well. It takes several days for the puppy to die, nearly a week. On the last night the fever gets worse and its breathing is so fast, but by dawn it becomes only slower and slower. Why didn’t I take the puppy with me? Why did I leave her there alone? I had called her Lihkku. It means Lucky.

  Now I write the puppy’s name in the sand. It is the first time her name is in letters; no one has ever told Lihkku’s story before and of how she died. But now she exists. In just the same way as I do in the pastor’s parish register. When you are written down, you can never be forgotten.

  And then I brush the sand smooth and clean until it looks like a fresh sheet of paper. The writing has gone. Perhaps the pastor’s register will be gone one day too, just as all texts will be eaten away in the end, crumble to nothing and vanish. But what is written down will still exist. I know it, I feel it. Everything that has ever been written will last forever. So extraordinary is the power of the letters of the alphabet.

  * * *

  —

  The door slammed and the pastor’s daughter Selma returned. She asked what I was doing but I pretended not to hear. Then she leaned over and took the wooden stick, which must still have been warm from my hand. With her plaits dangling in front of he
r, she scratched a playful message to her father. A comment about how slowly he was walking, that she had been at home for ages.

  “No peeping,” she said, and nudged me away.

  But it wasn’t her words I was trying to read, it was my own, the ones I had just written in the same sand. And I could see they were still there, all of them.

  51.

  Brita Kajsa lowered her head to the table while I opened my mouth. She placed the cooking pot next to her and stirred it with a wooden spoon.

  “Open wider,” she said.

  I opened so wide it felt as though my head would split in two. She put a wooden needle into my mouth with a wad on the tip and pressed it into the hole left by the tooth. It stung and I felt sick with the strong scent of resin mixed with lovage and camphor, plantain leaf, rust, bistort, and whatever other indescribable things she had found on her shelves.

  “Keep still,” she said, as I convulsively bit on the pin.

  She dipped the wad into the pot and repeated the procedure. The wound had to be cleaned three times. I was aware of blind patches crossing my vision. The daughters thought it so disgusting that they left. They knew I screamed sometimes, I couldn’t help it, and my scream was the worst of the worst, like the sound of vomiting into a church bell.