Popular Music from Vittula (20 page)

Greger himself just laughed whenever the subject was broached. They’re like that, people from Skåne. They laugh a lot.

* * *

On the very first day of term Greger took stock of the music cupboard, with its class set of birch drumsticks; two tamborines, of which one was split; two triangles; a wooden xylophone with F sharp and A out of action; a maraca leaking seeds; a guitar with three strings; and a broken felt-tipped mallet. There was also a class set of
Let’s Sing, Book I
, and a few copies of
Patriotic Songs
by Olof Söderhjelm.

“Bloody hell, what a disaster!” muttered Greger.

And before we knew where we were he’d gripped the powers that be and squeezed money out of the school budget that nobody’d even suspected was there, and bought a set of drums, an electric bass, an electric guitar, and an amplifier. Plus a state-of-the-art record player. The next lesson, he demonstrated that he was an unexpectedly good guitar player. His enormous (and whole) left hand scuttled up and down the fret-board like a hairy South American bird spider, while his lonely right thumb strummed diminished and augmented chords, not to mention flageolet imitations, as easy as pie. Then he went over to blues, and pretended to sing like a black man—which was easy for him as he came from Skåne. He played us a sorrowful guitar solo using his thumb nail as a pick. The class gaped in astonishment.

When the bell rang, Niila and I stayed behind.

“I’ll never be able to play like that,” said Niila gloomily.

Greger put the guitar down.

“Hold your hands up!” he said.

Niila did as he was told. Greger did the same, and looked hard at his fingers.

“Count ’em,” he said.

And Niila did so. Six fingers.

“And how many have you got?”

“Ten.”

Well, no need to say any more.

Now that Greger had realized we were interested, we were given permission to have jam sessions during the breaks. Niila stroked the electric guitar, wide-eyed, and was amazed how easy it was to press down the strings. I went for the bass. It felt surprisingly heavy, hanging from its shoulder strap like a Mauser. Then I switched on the two amplifiers. Niila was a bit worried in case he got an electric shock in his fingers. I told him there was no need to flap as the strings were insulated.

Then we started playing. It felt nerve-wracking but wonderful, and it sounded awful. But from then on our playing was somehow more real. We’d started off with a home-made piece of hardboard, via a discordant acoustic guitar in the cellar, and here we were now with the real McCoy. Shiny lacquer, chrome pegs, and buttons, a loudspeaker membrane humming softly. This was serious stuff. This was big time.

Our first problem was to keep time. Individually, to start with, which was bad enough. Then together, which was much worse. The next problem was changing chords. At the same time. Still keeping in step. And then changing back again.

Those of you who play yourselves will understand what it was like. It was some time before we produced anything that could be called music.

Greger listened to us sometimes and gave us some friendly advice. His biggest asset was his enormous patience. Like that lunchtime when he taught us how to start off at the same time. He counted us in over and over again, but I would always start on three and Niila on four. For a while it was the other way round. In the end, when we were both starting on four, Greger told us we ought to start on one. The second one. The one that’s never spoken out loud.

“One, two, three, fourrr—(now!).”

Niila said he’d never been what you might call a math genius. Greger then held up his deformed hand and asked Niila to count his stumps.

“Fourrr fingers are missing, and that’s when you are quiet,” Greger explained helpfully. “And then the music starts with the thumb!”

Strangely enough, it worked. For the first time we started correctly.
Even today when I count in a tune, I can still see Greger’s finger stumps in my mind’s eye.

We had jam sessions the whole autumn. Made the most of every free minute. Breaks, free periods, and after school. And at last, one lunch break, we managed to complete a blues number reasonably well.

Greger was listening, and nodded in approval.

“Keep it up,” he urged.

Then he opened the hall door. In came a shy-looking lad with a cherubic face and a long fringe hanging over his forehead. He didn’t look at us. Just opened up the oblong case he had with him. The inside was lined with red plush. With his long fingers he took out a red and white electric guitar, plugged it into one of the amplifiers and turned up the volume. Then he played a solo over our backing that almost tore our hearts from our chests, a screaming solo full of harrowing sorrow. The window panes rattled in sympathy. The sound was quite different from anything we were used to, fractured, heartrending, wailing. Like a heartbroken woman. He adjusted a little box on the guitar and the lament became even worse. Then he played another solo. A crunching, bellowing guitar solo, manly in a beastly way, inconceivable coming from this delicate thirteen-year-old. His fingers flew from string to string, the pick plucked out violent cascades of notes, your ear couldn’t keep up with it, only your heart, your body, your skin. In the end he did something I’d never seen before. He released his grip on the guitar and held it against the loudspeaker: soon it started to play all by itself, tragic whistles, wolf howls, and flutes simultaneously.

Then he smiled. Gently, almost girlishly. He stroked back his bangs and switched off. His face looked very Finnish, with ice-blue eyes.

“Jimi Hendrix,” he said abruptly.

We opened up the curtains. A dozen or so pupils had their noses pressed against the window, tightly packed, shoulder to shoulder. The sound had been audible all over the school.

Greger gave us a faraway look.

“Now you’rrre getting somewhere, lads! This is Holgerrri.”

I turned to Niila and muttered a gruesome premonition:

“By God, but he’s going to get beaten up.”

“What?” said Greger.

“Oh, nothing.”

* * *

It was in the senior school that the bullying started to get serious. Pajala Central School was an awful place to be at that time, if you stood out from the crowd in the wrong way. You wouldn’t have expected it if you were from somewhere else in Sweden—a country school in a quiet village, only a couple of hundred pupils. The atmosphere in the corridors was calm, almost shy, you might think.

The fact was that some of the pupils were dangerous. They had started causing trouble before, but it was only now that things really came to a head. Perhaps it had to do with puberty. Too much horniness, too much angst.

Some of them found it amusing to inflict bruises on their fellow-pupils in dark corners of the corridors, ramming bony knees into thighs or buttocks. Tender parts. When you turned around, in agony from the pain, they would be grinning at you. Sometimes they had sewing needles hidden in their hands, and would stick them through your clothes and into your skin as you passed. It was also common to punch the muscles in other pupils’ upper arms, which hurt for hours afterward.

The bullies could sniff out the vulnerable. They knew right away when somebody was different, and they would pick on loners, artistic boys or girls, anybody who was too intelligent. One of their victims was a quiet little lad called Hans, who liked going around with girls. His persecutors succeeded in controlling the whole of his life, making him so scared that he no longer dared to walk alone in the corridors. He always tried to be with friends, hiding himself in the herd like a weak
antelope. It wasn’t until several years later that he was able to move to Stockholm and come out as a homosexual.

Another of the victims was Mikael. He was also shy and introverted, incapable of hitting back. He was different, that was obvious; he thought deep down that he was something special. On one occasion the gang surrounded him in the metalwork shop while the teacher was out of the room. With the class’s sadist, Uffe, in the lead, they tried out various strangleholds on Mikael. Uffe slowly squeezed harder and harder with his snuff-stained fingers round Mikael’s slender throat until he started croaking like a frog. His classmates stood by watching, but nobody protested. Instead they watched it all with something approaching curiosity. Is that how you strangle somebody? Just look how swollen his eyes are! Before long several of the other lads were so intrigued, they wanted a go as well. They didn’t even need to hold their victim down, he just sat there, paralyzed with fear. Oh look, he’s going to be sick, better let go now. Anybody else want a try? Come on, have a go! Just look at the idiot, he’s scared to death! Squeeze there, a bit further down, it’s more effective there. Cough, cough, uuuhhhuuurhhh … You have a try, he’ll never dare to tell anybody! There’s his throat, bloody hell, it’s amazing how thin it is!

The teachers had a good idea of what was going on in the corridors, but they didn’t dare to intervene. Several of them were badly treated themselves. One woman teacher from the south of Sweden was taunted systematically, and time and time again she’d go running out of the classroom in tears. The pupils just sneered at her no matter what she said, refused to fill in her stencils, hid her books, made sexual allusions because she was unmarried, put pornographic pictures in her bag, and things like that. More and more pupils joined in when they saw the opportunity. Perfectly normal boys and girls. Classmates. So frenzied they were trembling inside. There were times when the air in the classroom was unbreathable.

* * *

The moment I heard Holgeri’s solo, I knew he was vulnerable. He was precisely the sort the bullies picked on, delicate little boys who drew too much attention to themselves. I’d seen him before in the corridors, but had never taken any notice of him. He was evasive but not unfriendly. One of those quiet lads from the outlying villages who prefer to keep to themselves, who stand around in corners in little groups, mumbling to each other in Finnish. They never felt at home in Pajala itself. Holgeri told me how difficult it was for the first few weeks every autumn term. He’d been speaking Finnish for the whole of the long summer holidays, and all of a sudden his brain needed to readjust to Swedish. It took several weeks, he couldn’t think of the right word and made linguistic mistakes, and so it was safest to keep quiet.

Holgeri came from Kihlanki, and we used to chat while he was waiting for the school bus. We usually talked about music. I wondered how he’d learned to play the guitar, and he said it was his dad who’d taught him. His dad had been dead for several years, and Holgeri never wanted to say exactly what had happened. What he remembered best from his childhood was sitting on his dad’s knee while he played traditional Liikavaara tunes, singing quietly in the euphoric stage of intoxication; how he would wipe the spit from his moustache, which he used to trim with nail scissors, and then slip his son a throat pastille. When his father died, his guitar was left hanging from its hook. Holgeri had taken it down, started fingering the strings, and imagined he could hear his father’s voice, coming from somewhere in the depths of the forests where he now was.

His mother retired early on account of her nervous state, and her son was all she had left. And when Holgeri asked for an electric guitar with amplifiers, that’s what he got, even though she could scarcely afford to buy shoes and clothes.

Just like me, he’d sat by the radio. He made up the fingering himself and played solos to the background accompaniment, and in his fantasy
world he had been the big star, the genius, the one who dumbfounded his audience single-handedly. This caused quite a few problems for the band. Niila was working hard on rhythm guitar, but he still found it difficult to change chords. Holgeri was much more skillful from a purely technical point of view, but there again, he seemed to be deaf to what the rest of us were doing. His contributions came too soon or too late, and seldom fit in with the tunes we were playing. I tried to tell him this in a friendly way, but he either didn’t listen or just smiled distantly. Holgeri was one of those people who find it hard to be simple. He sort of made lace frills for the music. If you wanted a note he would come out with a chord, if you went along with the chord he would come up with a riff, if you liked the riff it would be transformed into a solo or into variations in another key. It was impossible to pin him down. Niila hated Holgeri at first, largely because he was jealous of course, but at the same time he recognized that we couldn’t do without him.

In the evenings Holgeri would sometimes sit on the sofabed back home in Kihlanki and get out his father’s old guitar. His teenager’s fingers caressed the strings to produce chords like large butterflies. They fluttered off over wooden chairs and rag carpets, rose up over the stove where the potatoes were cooking, swerved past the wall calendar, the clock, the woven Norwegian wall hanging, dived down over the potty and the broom, brushed past the school satchel and the Wellington boots, up again toward Mum in the rocking chair, circled around her clicking knitting needles and the Lapp mittens and the ball of wool, then off toward the potted plants, the begonias and sanchezias, up inside the window panes, a brief glimpse of grassy meadows, birches, and nipple-warm evening sunshine, past the treadle sewing machine, the teak-veneered radio, the wardrobe with the door that wouldn’t close, then back into the guitar, into the murky sound hole where other butterflies were clamoring to get out.

His mum never used to say anything, never praised him but never disturbed him either. Just sat there in body, providing body warmth.

On a mind-blowing contest in the Pajala sewage treatment works, and how we unexpectedly acquired another band member

Despite the admonitions of Laestadius, despite the warnings issued by medical science and despite many frightening examples among family and friends, several of my schoolmates started drinking themselves silly on the weekends. Tornedalen is part of the vodka belt stretching all the way across Finland and deep into Russia, and in the senior school one of the most popular spare-time activities was getting drunk. There were many tyro alcoholics who had seen the light and at every break preached the gospel according to 40-percent proof; where one had trodden, others were keen to follow in his footsteps.