The Beggar and the Hare (12 page)

The situation was resolved by Mrs Pykström, who ran down the slope and jumped on her husband’s back. It was like a scene from a pantomime, or Laurel and
Hardy with two Hardies. One of whom had a serious heart defect, and so was soon out of the running. Mrs Pykström managed to slacken her husband’s grip on his rifle, and it fell to the ground.

Harri Pykström sagged and collapsed on the stony bank. Vatanescu grabbed the weapon and threw it far into the brook.

Power belongs to the man who is strong.

Berries to the man with the rifle.

What was the likelihood that this trio would ever meet? Harri Pykström, born in Kirkkonummi, 1954, Mrs Pykström, born in Tapanila, Helsinki, 1958, and Vatanescu, supposedly born in three different places and three different years? Yet here they all sat now, out of breath beside a babbling brook. One scared, one craving his light beer and chaser, and one furious with her husband because of his baffling ability to bring about crises involving his heart or Sicilian berry-pickers.

Mrs Pykström asked Vatanescu who he was.

Who I am?

He took off the wet trousers, wrung them out and offered to make his grandmother Klara’s berry pie as a token of good will.

‘What’s he saying?’ Pykström asked his wife, who translated.

Pykström dragged himself upright and told Vatanescu to be on his way, either back to where he had come from, or where he was going. He was perfectly able to sort out a Sicilian, even without a rifle. He took a step towards Vatanescu, raised his arm and tried to seize him by the throat.

The rabbit jumped up on the rock it had hidden behind.

And in an instant the bad gave way to the good.

A
man who does what Vatanen did in the book and the film, Pykström kept saying. Takes to the forest, finds the true life. Forgets the conventionalities, the customs and the rules. Does what is necessary, demonstrates his civilised nature by going beyond civilisation. Pykström poured out his disillusionment with life to Vatanescu: what difference was there between town and country when you could have underfloor heating and a satellite dish in either? Harri Pykström’s life would be the same wherever he was. There was no escaping destiny, no matter how much you tried.

I didn’t know that an easy life is a hard life.

Vatanescu sat on the leather sofa that was moulded in the shape of Harri Pykström’s backside, a can of light beer in his hand.

‘You’re a good man, Sicilian.’

Pykström rummaged in his video collection and, with boyish glee, shouted hurrah.

‘Grrrr-eat!’ Mrs Pykström heard from the baby monitor on the table in the video room on the floor above, which enabled her to hear the two men talking and provide a simultaneous translation of what they were saying. The monitor had been used as an intercom ever since Harri Pykström’s heart attack, so he could be in permanent voice contact with the rest of the house. Now he told his wife to translate the statement that Antti Litja’s performance in the film version of
The Year of the Hare
was the finest achievement in the history of Finnish cinema. The way in which he expressed a constant state of annoyance, irritation and dissatisfaction, a kind of cumulative inward pressure. Yet at the same time a warmth of feeling towards the hare. This
man did not complain, didn’t pour out his feelings, but set about doing what was demanded of him.

‘That’s what’s so wonderful about Vatanen, and that’s what’s so wonderful about you!’

The film’s music had a melancholy beauty, and to his astonishment Vatanescu realised that he knew this story.

I know where the bridge engineers and millers in my dream came from.

Books.

I found the first one in a rubbish bin in Bucharest railway station when I was looking for food.

Vatanescu had sat down on the spot and read the book from cover to cover, forgetting about food.

This country is in it. It’s not really this country; nothing here is the same as it is in those books, but this is the country that Paasilinna wrote about.

‘Sicilian, you’re doing exactly what Vatanen did. Telling them all to go to blazes.’

Vatanen had choices. Do you think, naked fat man, that I came to this house, to this sofa of my own free will? You tried to kill me.

Pykström described his own aspirations and said he was a man who had been emasculated. An incomplete man, wounded in the worst place, the heart. He had to live in civilisation, whether he wanted to or not, and what was worst of all, he did want to, because he wanted to live, quite simply. Not many people were willing to put their whole existence at stake.

I wish I had a quad bike, underfloor heating and a baby monitor like Pykström. I wish I had a smiling wife with a kind heart who exercised. I don’t ask much, but I won’t get anything. I’d be content with the football boots.

Pykström said that by setting out on his own journey Vatanescu had fulfilled a dream that thousands of other
men had. They would be witnessing someone doing what they would not be able to do.

‘You want the most primitive way of life, in which thoughts no longer matter and one concentrates solely on survival.’

I didn’t want to go anywhere; I’ve just ended up all over the place. I’d willingly change places with you. I’m picking berries in a country I don’t know: think about that. It’s not any kind of statement. It’s my life. I’m being hunted by international crime and the Finnish police.

‘And now, Sicilian and hare, we are going to the sauna.’

Beggar and rabbit.

‘Rabbits belong in little girls’ bedrooms, in cages. If that’s a rabbit, I’m a vegetarian!’

It’s a rabbit.

‘The Sicilian really is a stubborn fellow. But we won’t quarrel about it. Let’s compromise.’

Beggar and…

‘…hare.’

And they agreed on this version, for the person with the power also has the power to define the one who lacks the power. Either that, or it was simply Pykström’s characteristic way of expressing himself, in drunken chatter.

Meanwhile, the rabbit jumped up on Mrs Pykström’s lap to watch a game show on TV, and the men went off to the sauna.

P
ykström got three tubs of water ready and poured a can of beer on the stones in the sauna heater. The heat spread with the smell of grain, forcing its way into Vatanescu’s lungs and under his skin. He bowed his head
and held his breath. Pykström produced a whip made of twigs and told Vatanescu to turn his back to him.

Don’t hit me. You’re crazy. No one hits me.

‘It’s a form of massage,’ Pykström said in Finnglish: ‘Finnis masaas spesiali foor juu. From mii, Pysrömi.’

The curtains open with a remote control, but the massage is done by whipping. Who is the modern man, who the barbarian?

When Vatanescu was thoroughly red all over, Pykström asked him to do the same to him.

I won’t do it.

Not to anyone.

Not even out of revenge.

Pykström leaned forward, sticking out his buttocks, and signalled with his finger that he wanted it all the way down to his toes, not forgetting his posterior. He explained that in Finland it was perfectly legal and respectable, that the men whipped their women with bunches of twigs and the women whipped their men. It was a kind of service that one needed in order to be able to resume one’s endless workload the following morning.

If I perform this service, what service will I receive in exchange?

‘Anything you want. Vot juu niid?’

Football boots.

Vatanescu picked up the sauna whisk with a mixture of tiredness, disappointment and bitterness. And even a slight sense of being pissed off – which made it easier for him to strike Harri Pykström as the tennis heroes of his childhood had struck the ball: forehand,
backhand
, forehand, backhand, forehand, smash, drop shot, forehand, forehand, passing shot to the sideline, hard cannonball.

‘Thenk juu, Sicilian!’ Harri Pykström shouted before running out to the ice-cold brook.

Vatanescu watched him through the steamed-up window. In the moonlight he looked like a beached walrus.

And then our hero also walked out into the cold air, lowered himself on his back into the icy current, put his head under the water and laughed, there under the world, there under the stars, beside a big baby; in the cradle of the Lapland fells Vatanescu laughed at everything and nothing.

Did the woman who gave birth to me know that at some stage in his life her only son would share a bottle of hooch with Harri Pykström? Freezing his balls off in the Arctic Circle?

‘Up you get,’ Pykström said, pulling Vatanescu out of the water, just as the latter had begun to feel an improvement. ‘My pals don’t drown.’

From the baby monitor came snoring. The men’s interpreter had fallen asleep.

Pykström sat down on the wooden bench in the sauna porch, and nodded to Vatanescu to sit beside him. He opened two cans of beer and lit his cigarette with a yellow Colt lighter. Vatanescu tried to adopt the same straightforward approach to the nudity, to the heat of the sauna room, to the coldness of the air outside and the brightness of the starry sky, but could not manage it.

You can’t learn this.

It’s something you have to grow up with.

Vatanescu interpreted Pykström to Pykström, but in his own language.

You people are remote, and yet you get to the heart of things.

You are completely mad, but you’re masters of water isolation.

‘Yes, yes, Sicilian. Let’s have a little sing-song.’

To judge by the rhythm, Pykström’s songs were military marches. Vatanescu preferred cheerful accordion music that bounced in all directions, and love songs performed by pulsating women, but he who pays for the light beers calls the tune.

‘“Finland’s poor are rising…” Come on, Sicilian, sing, damn you “…broken chains despising, their suffering’s cup now overflows, onward goes their army…”’

Vatanescu hummed along, but one cannot really do that to a tune one does not know. It doesn’t catch – it comes from outside, not from within. Pykström went and fetched another beer from the changing room and opened it. He patted Vatanescu on the back.

‘You’re a good man and so is your hare. Damn it, a real bucko. The old league. The real thing. A noble comrade. Bloody hell! A berry-picker! Out to get football boots! Bloody h-e-e-e-e-lll!’

One gulp the size of the can, and then for a moment or two his foot tapped out the rhythm on the floorboards of the porch.

‘“Our blows are deep, our anger will prevail, no mercy or motherland have we…” No, wait. My great-uncle was interned in the prison camp at Hennala during the Civil War, so I know how that goes, too…’

Pykström smacked his lips as he tried to remember the words. Vatanescu felt his skin: was he now so cold that he was hot? In this country his body was never at the right temperature. Everyone had to go from a sauna at a hundred degrees Celsius to water at freezing point, children and old folk included!

‘“Arise, ye workers from your slumbers…”’

Vatanescu knew this one.

‘“… arise, ye citizens of want…”’

At school, in neat rows, they all had to sing and they
all did. The words didn’t matter at all, because it was all about feeling. Music pierces the armour, it penetrates deeper than reason.

‘“And the last fight let us face!”’

The echo spread through the sauna in two languages, and through the universe, too. It spread up the hill, in through the triple-glazed windows of Harri Pykström’s pine log villa to the windowsill where the rabbit was asleep.

‘“The Interna-a-a-a-t-iona-a-a-al-e uni-i-i-i-i-tes the hu-u-u-uman race!”’