The Beggar and the Hare (10 page)

Have Yegor’s men come to the village? Will they be looking for my son? Am I that valuable to them?

These young people have left their parents in order to live their own lives.

I left my son.

H
ow would one describe Finnish Lapland to a foreign reader, to one from Germany, for example? Would one describe the shaman drums? The noise of building work? The Sami costumes? The Russian four-by-fours, the drunken British tourists and the Finnish screen actors? The Dutch motor sledge safari groups, cheeks red with the cold, smiling broad smiles after extreme experiences? The Crazy Reindeer Hotel, with its concerts by entertainers like Popeda or Paula Koivuniemi and the business travellers copulating in the cheapest rooms? The reindeer, both the live ones and those that have been turned into steaks and processed meat? One might describe all of those things, but now the train is clanking into its destination, drawn by proper old Soviet locomotives with diesel engines handed down from grandfathers to grandsons.

Vatanescu stood on the platform of the last station in this small country, more than six hundred miles to the north of the point where the train had begun its journey. The teenagers gave him the winter clothes that had been intended for the fourth passenger, as well as a pointed woollen cap and sling for the rabbit, both knitted by Jonttu.

Vatanescu pulled the quilted jacket over his suit and put on the thermal boots. He promised to reimburse the teenagers for all the help they had given him, took down the numbers of their bank accounts and wished
them all the best for their future lives. From the sling the rabbit showed a paw, which the teenagers shook one by one.

Children, appreciate all that you have the chance to acquire.

The teenagers continued their journey by taxi. From his inside pocket Vatanescu took the guide that Ming had given him and found the section on berries.

T
hird-generation railwayman Mikko Maukas was unloading cars from the night express. Each year they increased in size, enormous SUVs with tiny female drivers who wore immaculate makeup. Number plates from every country in Europe. Professional builders who had gone south to Estonia to buy cheaper ceiling panels. Maukas was used to tourists from Finland and abroad, their automatic gearboxes, their questions. Were there reindeer here? Could one use pounds and dollars? Could one take reindeer on board trains or planes? Was it all right to shoot them? Why didn’t anyone speak French? His reply was the smile that men in Lapland are given at birth, a smile that can mean anything from vitriolic abuse to falling in love. Up from the station trudged yet another tourist or businessman dressed in arctic gear, carrying two plastic bags. Sometimes they even tried to look poor, especially the wealthiest ones, like that furniture magnate Kamppari or whatever his name was, Maukas thought.

Vatanescu asked where he could find lingonberries and bilberries. Mikko Maukas looked at the investor, who did not fit his idea of a berry-picker. Why was the fellow talking in metaphors, why should an unloader of cars have to know all the features of different cultures?
Berry-pickers were either Flips or Russkies. That wasn’t racism, Mikko said to himself; those words were just easier to say than Filipinos and Ukrainians; the guys who arrived in minivans wearing the same kind of tracksuits that Mikko wore in summer. On the other hand, investor types like the man who was standing in front of him were usually picked up at Kittilä Airport by his taxi-driver brother who then drove them around the mining zones past, present and future. If you wanted a decent tip you had to supply them with an Internet connection, a teardrop-shaped bottle of mineral water and a phone charger with a bunch of different USB connectors.

Mikko Maukas asked Vatanescu which car on the car transporter was his. Was it the Volvo XC90, the thing that looked like a heffalump, quite unsuitable for city driving, with a ride height far too low to be a real
off-roader
? But then, if he had the money to boost his ego with something like that, why not?

No, berries. So I can buy football boots.

Mikko Maukas drove the silver-coloured SUV into the car park, left the engine running and got Vatanescu to sign the delivery form. Vatanescu said nothing. He got into the driver’s seat.

Under the seat were settings for lumbar, posterior and soul. The radio played gentle noonday classical music, and the logbook of the vehicle’s real owner was in the glove compartment. Thomas Weissbier of Gothenburg. This meant that Vatanescu would soon have international crime, the Finnish police and the Swedish upper middle class on his heels.

For a moment he studied the automatic gearbox, then found D and drove the vehicle out of the car park. It would be more than an hour before Thomas Weissbier was woken in his sleeping compartment on the train.

V
atanescu drove along the quiet road in the big vehicle, surveying the low houses, the sparsely inhabited neighbourhoods. Absolutely everywhere in this country – in the cities, the medium-sized towns, the villages – grocery stores faced you in twos, one on each side of the street. The name of one began with an S, the other with a K, the difference in prices visible in the way the customers were dressed. Fur coats for the K, windcheaters and rubber boots for the S. The only exceptions were the agricultural workers, who patronised the K, for which they supplied most of the produce. The service stations were marked by towers as tall as minarets, and the cars that stopped at the petrol pumps were, surprisingly, tough old Japanese ones. However, just at that moment Vatanescu’s Swedish Volvo passed a queue of German luxury cars that were being tested in these northern conditions. When the Swedish satnav told him he had travelled
åttiosju kilometer
(eighty-seven kilometres) a police car came along in the opposite direction. It didn’t stop, but Vatanescu had the impression that it at least slowed down, and heads turned round.

I’m not a thief.

I’m a berry-picker.

V
atanescu’s example had encouraged the remaining beggars to defend their rights, or rather develop them for themselves. Under Balthazar’s leadership they rose up in revolt against the low pay and poor working conditions. Yegor Kugar knew how to put down a revolt in a crisis zone or in fledgling democracies, but in a Nordic state where the rule of law prevailed it was impossible to use weapons, hooded men or even waterboarding.

The balance of power was reversed. That always comes as a happy surprise to the subordinates and as a shock to whoever has been giving the orders and doing the subordinating. Yegor’s astonishment is expressed very well in his own words:

It was a change of authority, but above all it was an evaporation of authority. Vatanescu’s surprise attack had knocked Yegor Kugar to the floor and the referee had counted to ten. A technical knockout, nose out of joint, four years’ sick leave, if he was entitled to it.

The banknotes Vatanescu had taken from Yegor Kugar were fakes, but what really mattered was that, with them, he had taken the man’s authority. When Yegor Kugar’s authority evaporated, his genuine banknotes evaporated too. He wanted to go and get Vatanescu back, but the Organisation refused its support. While Yegor felt that he had been let down, the Organisation felt that he had let them down. He had failed at his job; the structural change had gone in the wrong direction.

T
he reindeer fixed Vatanescu with a placid, cow-like stare, but this new arrival made no more impression on them than all the previous arrivals who for centuries had come to Lapland to assert their everyman’s right. He was just another of them, the academics on skis, the Dutch motor sledge safari groups, the military patrollers and the pop stars on the slalom slopes.

Vatanescu set off on foot through the marshy terrain until he sank up to his knees and had to climb to drier
ground. He did not stop until he reached the summit of a fell, facing a cairn to which every previous backpacker had added a stone, large or small. He put a small stone on top of the others.

Then he sat down on a flat rock and scooped the rabbit out of its sling and onto his lap. Together they surveyed the world that stretched away for dozens of miles.

Have you ever known such silence? Have you ever been away from people, away from the fear of their reactions?

Three hundred and sixty degrees of fells, lakes and bogs. True, here and there the landscape was broken by the hotels of the skiing centres, by lifts, cranes and 3G network sites.

I’m not afraid.

It’s strange.

But I’m not afraid.

That lemming there couldn’t care less where I’m from, or how I earn my money, as long as I don’t step between him and his young. Or on him. Round hills, old reindeer enclosures, this is all like the cottage of Komar Tudos back home. It never changes, even though everything else does.

Some part of us is always the same, no matter who we are. Fate, chance, the sperm of our fathers and the ova of our mothers determine the course of our lives. In a way that is senseless, unanswerable, ineluctable. One person’s place is in Finland, another’s in Romania, yet another’s in Hollywood.

On a foreign, unknown soil I‘m free.

Penury is not a prison. Nor are hunger or poverty. It’s people. The haves in relation to the have-nots. The owners protecting their property. Of course.

I protect you, my rabbit, but I don’t own you.

We are brothers.

Vatanescu and the rabbit continued their journey along the chain of fells, down, up, down, up. After hours
of walking his legs began to find the right footholds by themselves, without looking. The tiredness helped; as he no longer had the strength to correct his mistakes, it was better not to make them. As a result he was able to look several yards ahead instead of focusing solely on his toes.

On the evening of the second day Vatanescu set the rabbit free.

One day I will have to let my son go into the world, too.

To fail.

To succeed.

The rabbit had the cautious, clumsy and haughty step of a city-dweller, incapable of being instantly intoxicated by the wild rabbit it felt itself becoming. It adjusted the disproportionate muscles of its hind-legs to its own weight, tested its co-ordination, hopped like a claudicating drunkard on Hakaniemi Market Square. Time after time Vatanescu had to put it back on its paws again by lifting it up under its soft middle.

A step.

Another step.

Follow me, walk as I walk. Carefully, but blindly trusting in something.

There is only this moment. Yesterday we don’t remember, tomorrow we don’t know.

They reached a gorge between the fells, arriving at the edge of a marsh – and the edge was bursting with red and blue berries. Vatanescu picked them, putting the blue ones in the plastic bag with the S on it, and the red ones in the bag that was marked with a K. And before the onset of darkness, which here came late – or was it early? – he gathered wood to make a fire. On the scree of a fellside he found a level area bordered by three large rocks, and there he set up camp. A few unneeded pages of the nature guide lit the campfire; the book of matches
bore the words ‘Ming’s Palace’. Then Vatanescu used his winter clothes to make a mattress, and his jacket to cover him.

The fire crackled, warming the stones beneath it and heating the last of the food he had brought from Ming’s. Vatanescu put the white rice and the vegetables aside for the rabbit and let it drink milk from a carton. In the inside pocket of the suit jacket he found the sachets of instant coffee and sugar from the train, and when the rabbit had drained the milk carton he made the carton into a mug. Fresh water from the brook.

Before he fell asleep, Vatanescu looked up the section in the guide about the ‘yellow gold’ that Ming had mentioned. He showed the picture of the berry to the rabbit and told the rabbit to tug the legs of his trousers with its teeth if it saw any.

The beggar and the rabbit fell asleep under the starry sky on a bed of moss, content with themselves, their deeds and the reality that surrounded them.

I
n the basement of his home Harri Pykström was examining his video collection. Six shelves of Olympics, nature documentaries, Second World War documentaries, Clint Eastwood movies, Matti Ijäs movies, Edvin Laine movies, Westerns, the 1994 European Basketball Championships qualifying match between Finland and Ukraine and, the latest addition to his collection, the 2000 Four Hills Tournament between Germany and Austria. Rauni Mollberg’s
Blessed Madness
and Mikko Niskanen’s
Gotta Run!
were present on four different cassettes, because Harri Pykström taped those movies every time they were on TV.

Friday was Harri Pykström’s video day, as were
Monday, Wednesday and Sunday. On this occasion he hesitated between
Inspection, The Wrestler
and
A Charming Mass Suicide
. Could one watch Ere Kokkonen’s work while sober, or should the experience be left until the small hours, when drunkenness would give it the something extra it required? The films of Kokkonen, with their aggressive clarity and grinding narration, reminded Pykström of the training videos of his former employer, the Finnish army. Risto Jarva had a better understanding of the essence of humour. It wasn’t jokes, but sorrow. Life was a tragic affair, where every minute took us closer to death. So one might as well laugh. Pykström was pleased with this idea, which had come to him, unprompted and unasked, after his heart attack. He had asked his wife Maija if she thought it a sign of psychological maturity or merely the result of upset mental equilibrium, a jolt, brain chemistry. All of those things, was Maija’s reply. Just as his hand was reaching out for an Ijäs film,
Dolly and Her Lover
, Maija shouted that dinner was ready.

Pykström climbed the stairs, his knees cracking under the weight of his two hundred and seventy pounds of conviviality. He panted and puffed; they really should have had a lift put in when the house was renovated. Everything else had been done on his wife’s initiative, which of course later became his own initiative as well.

Pykström raised the lid of the pan. Nothing could beat the aroma of a reindeer fry, except that of pipe tobacco or a freshly opened bottle of Calvados. Perhaps also salmon grilled on an open fire or, even better, trout. Pykström asked where the lingonberry jam was.

‘Can’t you see I’m doing my Zumba workout?’

Mrs Pykström wobbled on the living-room floor as
the female dance instructors wiggled on the television screen. Pykström looked at his wife, shovelled some reindeer fry and mashed potato onto a plate and then into his mouth. He thought of the nature documentaries in which the growth of plants is accelerated so that one can see the cycle of the seasons in thirty seconds. What would it be like, a speeded-up documentary that showed the onset of the fat on Mrs Pykström’s back over all these twenty-three years? When they first met there had been a supple layer of flesh, where now her back and buttocks trembled like aspic. But Harri Pykström’s back had a layer of flab that was just the same; indeed many couples who have lived together for a long time come to resemble one another in all sorts of respects. On the basis of the latest photos from Australia the same thing was also happening to their eldest son Jorma, who even in the maternity clinic had been called chubby first, and cheerful only second. Mrs Pykström attempted to get rid of her aspic by means of Zumba, Harri Pykström by means of oblivion.

He scraped the bottom of the pot of lingonberry jam and went to fetch a jar of pickled cucumbers from the pantry. A bright, tranquil evening. That was what was so wonderful here in Perä-Kompio: the quiet – no neighbours, no relatives, no music from the ice cream van, no surprise visitors. One’s own bit of land, one’s own peace, no damned berry-pickers talking about their pesky everyman’s right.

Pykström ate three platefuls of dinner, belched and said thank you.

He switched on the coffeemaker. He sat down on the sofa, behind his wife. He said that the enthusiasm of the man who was jerking about on TV was due to the fact that he knew that fat old women all over the world were ordering his DVD. Why? Because they couldn’t accept
that they were getting old. In Harri Pykström’s view all that wiggling would do no good when there were too many miles on the clock.

‘Said the broken-down truck at the side of the road. You’re just jealous.’

‘True.’

Pykström finished his bottle of beer, got up and went to kiss Mrs Pykström on the neck. Of all the world’s millions of Zumba dancers, this was the only one he loved. The aspic was the same resilient skin he had got to know and made his own in the early 1970s.

‘Sweet-ass,’ Pykström said, slapping his wife on the bottom.

Harri Pykström found it hard to talk about many things, but he expressed his loving feelings with the ease and swiftness of a child. They were sincere and true, and they had saved him many times. Pykström knew well that a man must have someone by his side, otherwise he would lose his place in the world. Otherwise he was done for.