by Mikael Niemi
Then she pulled my trousers down. I looked away. She tried to be careful, soaking off the dried-on bandages with lukewarm water. I bit my arm to take away the pain.
“Imagine you’re a fish,” she said soothingly. “A fish at the bottom of the river and you’re quite still as the water flows around you . . . hold still, now . . . there. . . .”
My gums turned black, maybe because of the tar. Between my legs it felt as though someone had carved a cunt. A deep, bloody mouth-hole. I collapsed in the corner and lay motionless, as if my spine were balancing on a razor-sharp edge. I was hovering just above the floor like someone crucified. The edge had to remain exactly on my middle vertebra, the hardest place of all in a human body. Only at that precise point was I able to withstand it.
52.
The next morning the sun was streaming down on Kengis Village. I had chosen to sleep in one of the outhouses so as not to disturb any of the household with my groans. The pain made it impossible to lie still and all through the night I writhed like a worm on my straw-filled mattress. In the middle of the morning I forced myself to get up, giddy after not a wink of sleep. With short, shuffling steps I made my way to the parsonage cabin and hobbled inside. I could tell there was a visitor by the strong smell of man’s sweat and tar that met me, and a rough, familiar voice.
Sheriff Brahe was at the kitchen table, sitting astraddle, shoveling in the soup Brita Kajsa had warmed up. Michelsson kept him company at the end of the table. The men looked at me, without a greeting, and then resumed eating. The pastor seemed uncomfortable, pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back, now and then casting a glance out of the window.
“What sum . . . had you paid?” the sheriff managed to utter, between bites.
“Unfortunately, it concerns a considerable sum,” the pastor conceded with visible hesitancy.
“Was it your own personal money?”
“Yes. I paid a commission fee and at a later date a larger sum while the painting was in progress. The final payment I made sometime before the artist’s death.”
The policemen exchanged doubtful glances and Brahe cleared his throat.
“Just to be clear, was church money involved?”
“It concerns my own savings,” the pastor said, with an unsteady voice.
Brita Kajsa’s jaws were clenched, and her hands looked as though they were about to strike something. When she realized that I had come padding in, she hurriedly turned and pretended to rearrange the kitchen shelf. She picked things up and put them back, until she found something that needed wiping.
“It wasn’t only the pastor who put up money. The artist must have received appreciable sums for all the commissioned paintings he was working on.”
“Yes, presumably.”
“But where’s the money? We searched his home but we didn’t find it.”
“He must have hidden it, mustn’t he?”
“Yes, but where?”
The pastor gave me a quick sideways look and hesitated.
“In the trunk,” he then said. “The one where he also kept his chemicals for the daguerreotype apparatus. As Sheriff Brahe will doubtless have discovered, there was also a secret compartment.”
“A secret compartment?”
“It was probably where he kept his money. But when we entered the cottage, the compartment had been opened and emptied.”
“Why did the pastor not report this before?”
“You kicked us out before I had time to show you.”
Brahe held his breath for a moment, his color rising.
“So, the pastor is the first to arrive at the cottage, takes himself inside, and spends a good while in there. What were you actually doing?”
“I was praying for the soul of the deceased.”
“And then you dug around. Eh? Suppose you examined the trunk and happened to find the secret compartment with the artist’s savings?”
“Is the sheriff suggesting . . . ?”
Brahe didn’t reply at once. He poked out a sinew from between his teeth with his fingernail and smacked his lips. His eyes were black, like fish eyes.
“I’m not suggesting anything at this stage, I’m just thinking aloud. The pastor was with . . . him over there?”
The sheriff rose to his feet and walked slowly toward me. Michelsson immediately stood up too, and followed two steps behind. I was seized by involuntary fear, a feeling like an icy pike swimming in my stomach.
“In the devil’s name! Have you had a beating?” he asked, grabbing me with his large hand. “Did you meet the killer bear?”
I could feel Michelsson wrap his arm tightly round my neck from behind. With a violent tug he ripped open my shirt to reveal my shoulders. Then he leaned forward and pressed his finger onto an infected red wound on my left shoulder.
“But take a look, Pastor. The boy’s got a wound just here. Didn’t you say that Jolina Eliasdotter Ylivainio had stabbed her attacker in the left shoulder?”
“Yes, with a hairpin. This wound looks wider.”
“Hairpins come in many different widths.”
“Of course. But this wound is fresh. It must have been inflicted very recently.”
“So, you’re defending him? You’re defending the little devil?”
The sheriff pushed me just as Michelsson let go his grip. In my weakened state I couldn’t keep my balance or prevent myself from stumbling and falling to the floor. My crotch exploded, and I rolled onto my side, coughing saliva across the floorboards. The men watched my pitiful crawling and the sheriff made as if to kick me.
“Where have you hidden the money?”
The pastor tried to stand between us, but the men unceremoniously shoved him aside.
“Well, we’ll have to search the house,” Brahe decided. “Where does the youth keep his things?”
“Leave the boy alone!” Brita Kajsa screamed.
The pastor made an effort to keep the peace and gave the sheriff a hard look.
“We will of course assist you. Jussi’s knapsack is here. But I want to have a written search warrant.”
When Brahe dug a pencil out of his inside pocket, the pastor handed him his pocketknife and Brahe proceeded to sharpen the point with it. Meanwhile, Michelsson had taken a piece of paper out of his constable’s portfolio and the sheriff rapidly scrawled a few lines. While the pastor was taking the paper from Michelsson, the sheriff emptied my knapsack onto the floor, scattering my few belongings. It was easy to establish there was no money. Moving on, he began a rough-handed search of me, going through all my pockets and feeling to see if any notes could have been sewn into the lining. When he found nothing there either, he looked around the cabin with suspicion.
“You are not to touch my study,” the pastor said firmly.
Almost in passing, he picked up his walking stick and held it in front of him. The policemen could easily have overpowered this undersized man, but something in his expression made them desist. Instead they went across the yard over to the outbuildings. I could hear them rummaging about in the barn, rattling containers and buckets and traipsing up a ladder to get to the hayloft. Brita Kajsa and the pastor supported me over to the settle to sit down. My legs wouldn’t hold me up, and I blacked out for a moment.
“I haven’t . . . stolen . . .” I managed to say.
“I know, Jussi.”
“When they attacked me, they stabbed me . . . they stabbed me with a nail . . .”
“We’ll let them get on with it,” the pastor muttered. “They won’t find anything.”
Brita Kajsa gave her husband a skeptical look. She made a start on clearing the table, but the pastor stopped her. Astonished, we watched him study the china they had been eating from, and the leftover food. He carefully put his fingers into the two glasses Brahe and Michelsson had been drinking from and lifted them up in this awkward mann
er, without needing to touch the outsides. He carried them over to the stove, where he put them down. Then he swept up some of the finest ash into his palm, raised his hand up to his lips, and blew very gently. The ashy powder floated toward the glasses and on into the hearth. The pastor lifted the glasses in the same clumsy way as before and showed them to me.
“Can you see, Jussi?”
He held the curved glass surfaces up to me. The ashy powder had stuck to the greasy fingerprints so they could be seen very clearly.
“You can see their fingers.”
“Look carefully, Jussi.”
“There are lines in the fingertips. Round patterns.”
“Exactly. And when you study them, all the patterns are different. You can tell them apart. The sheriff’s thumbprint is completely different in appearance from the constable’s. Can you see?”
“Yes . . . yes, I can see.”
The pastor reflected for a moment, before tearing off two slips of paper, on one of which he wrote Brahe and on the other Michelsson. He put each in its respective glass. Then he fetched two more glasses from his study, which were protected by handkerchiefs, and placed them next to the first. I recognized them.
“They’re the glasses from Nils Gustaf’s cottage, aren’t they?”
“Quite correct.”
“But one of them has gone blue!”
The pastor nodded. An astonishing bright blue color gleamed from the dregs of brandy in one of the glasses.
“Prussian blue, it’s called,” he said. “I’ve carried out a little test, but it’s too soon to say more.”
Brita Kajsa opened the kitchen cupboard and began searching among her herbs.
“Try to rest now, Jussi. I’m brewing alder-bark tea. It’s bitter, but it will help.”
While she busied herself with the tea, I heard strange puffing noises from the floor. With some difficulty I turned onto my side to see better. The pastor was back and had fallen to his knees in the middle of the kitchen. At first I thought he was praying, but then I saw he was picking something up with small, pincer movements, as though he were gathering rare flowers down on the floorboards. Then I realized: what he was gathering in the palm of his hand were the shavings from the sheriff’s newly sharpened pencil.
53.
The body heals slowly. Wounds close. Scabs gradually fall off and leave white scars. When I run my fingers over them, the skin is harder and almost without feeling. My ribs take a long time to mend. Night after night I am woken by sharp stabbing pains whenever I turn over carelessly in my sleep. But eventually I can draw cautious breaths without it hurting. The worst is my mouth, where the craters close up, but their edges remain black. The taste of blood goes, leaving the taste of something bitter.
The pastor turns his face aside whenever I breathe on him, so I know I stink and I try to keep my mouth shut. In the shop I place my hand in front of my mouth when I ask for something. I think I look like an old man without my front tooth. Women turn away when I forget myself and open my mouth, and I know I will never get close to them. I am forced to chew the hard pieces of bread on one side, with my back teeth, gnawing them like a cat. The s-sound is almost impossible to pronounce; it comes out like “fff,” until I discover that I need to move my tongue nearer to my eyeteeth. It sounds sharper that way, but still not good. I will never be like Raattamaa and stand by the pastor’s side in church and read his sermon, the congregation would mock me. I practice doggedly, to make my speech more distinct, so that I can at least make myself understood. I try talking with my lips nearly closed, that way I don’t have to hold my hand in front of my mouth.
I often have the thought that I want to remain in the world even after my death and I don’t know where this desire comes from. Maybe it has to do with the letters of the alphabet. My forefathers couldn’t write. They lived out their lives working, and then they disappeared. I know my grandmother was called Anne Maaret, the same name given to my sister. And that my grandmother’s mother was called Stina Inghilda. But that is all. I have a vague memory of my grandmother, of meeting her in Kvikkjokk. We slept outside, it was summer, I remember a smoking fire to get rid of the mosquitoes. She was so wrinkled she looked like a chopping board that has been much used for cutting meat. Her hands were cold and dry, like pieces of wood. I must have been four. She ate something, chewed it for a long time with her empty gums, and then leaned forward. I opened my mouth and she spat a gristly slime into it. It tasted slightly sweet from her spittle, and of something brown as well, like bark. I knew it wasn’t edible, it was dead. Long strands stuck in my throat and however much I swallowed they just got longer. In the end I wanted to die. They bent double with laughter, all of them sitting there on the reindeer skin, laughed while they drank and drank until they lay like bits of offal in their dirty leather clothes.
I think she died after that. My mother never told me, but we never went to see her again. So I think the old woman died. My grandmother Anne Maaret. And now nothing at all remains of her in this world. Well, yes, maybe something she sewed, maybe there are still some of her traditional fur boots tramping around out there. Or a fine shoe band woven by her. But no one knows now that the band was once hers. That she was the one who wove it with her cold, wooden fingers. And it didn’t worry her, she felt no need to stay. Nor did her forefathers, not one of all those shadows wandering away in the darkness. They lived and disappeared, lived and disappeared, like waves on a breezy mountain lake breaking onto the beach and washing over the pebbles. For a moment, you see the film of water, smooth and formless, reflecting the sky, before it all disappears beneath the next foamy wave.
I feel uneasy when I think about this: that I too will be washed away like water, leaving not the slightest trace. Am I the first of my people to feel like this? Is this thought new for us? To want to remain? Not in heaven, but to leave something of yourself for posterity? To be immortalized, like the pastor, in an oil painting at the Salon de Paris. To start a revivalist movement that changes the way people think. To give your name to a newly discovered plant. To write a book.
My master has achieved all of this, whereas I have accomplished nothing. I have lived like my forefathers, that is all. I have walked in their footsteps. Like a reindeer I have trotted after the reindeer in front of me in the snow. But now I think that this won’t be enough for me. Something has happened with the world and it isn’t the way it was before. From this day on man must live, not through others, but through himself.
* * *
—
My thoughts flowed along these lines and they tormented me, so clearly did I see my worthlessness. I couldn’t even get close to the woman I loved. How then could I touch the mind of an unknown person with my words?
I tried to speak to the pastor about it.
“Does this longing of mine to be remembered come from the devil?” I asked.
He looked at me gravely.
“You are forgiven for your sins, Jussi. In the name and blood of Jesus Christ.”
“That’s not enough,” I said.
For a second I thought he was going to give me a clip round the ear.
“Or is it necessary to be like everyone else?”
“What do you believe yourself, Jussi?”
I didn’t reply.
“Who actually beat you, Jussi?” the pastor asked. “Who beat you so badly that you were more dead than alive?”
“Roope,” I said. “Roope and another man.”
“So there were two of them?”
“And a third came, wearing a mask. He didn’t want me to recognize him. He was the one who stabbed me in the shoulder.”
“Sheriff Brahe and Constable Michelsson seemed to know you had an injury there.”
“Yes,” I said. “That occurred to me as well.”
“We have to report Roope!”
“That can wait.”
�
�You mustn’t be afraid of him.”
“I’ll be going soon anyway.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing, it was nothing, Pastor. It was nothing.”
54.
Now that the harvest was finished, it was time to overhaul the tools. Since I was capable of only light tasks, I was assigned to repairing the hay rakes. The pain meant I couldn’t sit in the normal fashion, but had to kneel and cautiously support my behind on my heels. With a knife I whittled tines to fit the holes exactly and then I knocked off the old, broken ones. It was a job for an old man, someone for whom everyday manual labor was too much, and I could see how the farm maid and the pastor’s daughters felt sorry for me. Even though I was young, I had become an old man, with a bent back, bad on my feet, and no balance. I was like the pastor. While he could look back on an outstanding life of battles and victories and fame, my life was over before it had begun. I had achieved nothing of value. I thought about my sister, who had stayed in the north to look after the old folk. Time after time I begged Anne Maaret to come with me, to flee from the stinking garbage inside the tent, escape their spluttering wrath when the effects of drink wore off. But even though she was so young, barely more than a child, she had already become like a mother. She knew that without her the old people would perish. I refused to sleep inside with her when I visited, I made my bed outside by the fire. It reeked of fox piss out there, but that was better than inside the tent with the fleas and the rags.
I was so deep in thought I didn’t notice the visitors until the dog barked. Two figures were approaching, dressed in black as if on their way to a funeral. They were walking up to the parsonage, two women, and something about them made my heart pound. I hurriedly took cover between the pastor’s crops, behind the lush, green wall he called potatoes. The rake was still on the grass; they might stop and cast a curious eye around. No, it was quite clear there was something else on their minds. The woman in front was stockily built and advanced in years. She was wearing layer upon layer of cloth, one jersey over another, one skirt over another skirt, headscarf and coat, and a black shawl around her shoulders so thickly woven it looked more like a blanket. The only thing protruding was a hand, clutching a gleaming white handkerchief. It wasn’t clear what purpose the handkerchief served, sometimes it dabbed the corner of her eyes, as if there were tears to wipe away, sometimes it fluttered around like a signal of some kind. It was writing in the air, forming letters, a U and an N and a Z, white script in the woolly gray damp of autumn.