The Beggar and the Hare (17 page)

S
anna Pommakka did not want to look after horses or be a nurse like the other girls in the first year at Puistola junior comprehensive. She wanted to deceive people, to take them in. She wanted to perform magic tricks. Sanna Pommakka wanted to make audiences rub their eyes and wonder how she did them, those tricks. That one? And especially that one?

In her local public library, in 1981, at the age of seven, Sanna Pommakka found a copy of
The Big Book of Magic
by Finland’s best-known magician, Solmu Mäkelä, and at that moment she was certain that her future lay in the field of conjuring.

Sanna closed her fist on a handkerchief and when she opened it there were eight handkerchiefs there. She made coins disappear. She knew the number and suit of the cards her father thought of. She received the applause, the surprise and the wonderment for which she hoped. When on top of this Santa Claus brought her a Junior Magic Set, her happiness was almost complete.

But the approval and praise a child receives at home are deceptions, especially when compared with what takes place among their peers. Parents want their child to be happy, but by wanting it so much they make them unhappy later on. When Sanna showed off her talent at
school, none of the other members of the class had any doubt about how the tricks were done. When the hidden coins fell out of Sanna’s sleeve, Pertti in the back row burst into gleeful laughter. Pertti was given detention, but what was that compared to Sanna’s sense of humiliation? The mere buzz of a fly in his ear.

Such is childhood: one wrong word, someone’s laughter, one teacher’s bad morning and the cruel assessment that follows, not even deliberate, but able to change the whole direction of a small person’s life, removing hope and replacing it with despair.

Sanna Pommakka had been raised to have grand ideas about herself, but now she chose a path that was more assured. She had no ideas about herself at all. She would have no aspirations; she was going to stay a small, quiet person in the middle row, from the age of seven until she died.

Instead of magic tricks, Sanna Pommakka made ordinary existence, or rather survival, the focus of her life. She lost her virginity to Pertti in the back row, neither too early nor too late. Pertti was still laughing, not because he was cruel but because he was a sincerely stupid sixteen-year-old who had only three tools in his emotional toolkit: laughter, sarcasm and his fists. No magic at all in their shared moment.

Sanna’s study supervisor thought her dream of college was unrealistic, so she went straight from junior comprehensive to work in a furniture store.

A year passed.

A fourth year passed.

The other employees continued their lives in further education or training, but Sanna remained where she was, and her fortnightly pay was enough for her to live on. She occasionally went out with Pertti from the back row, because he was always available and had a car with
lowering springs. Though she didn’t know what those were, they meant so much to Pertti that she respected them too.

When Pertti cheated on Sanna, Sanna thought it was her own fault. She wasn’t good enough. Her looks, intelligence and character weren’t good enough. She kept quiet about her own hopes and dreams because she was afraid that people would laugh at them, and as a result she would be rejected. So gradually her hopes and dreams died. Now her relationship with Pertti was over, and she had not seen him for three years.

Sanna Pommakka still delivered sofas and coffee tables and bunk beds to customers. The bigger the sofa, the more life there was in the house. Cots for infants, desks for schoolchildren, on rare occasions a rocking chair for an older person whose walls were decorated with photos of children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren
.

One day Sanna Pommakka and her workmate delivered a corner sofa to a house in a residential area. The little boy who opened the door looked just like Pertti and laughed like Pertti – because he was Pertti’s son. Pertti wasn’t laughing any more, because he had a child in one arm and a wife in the other, and was now a good husband. Sanna Pommakka presented the delivery form, looked him in the eye and froze. The worst thing was that Pertti had obviously failed to recognise her, she reflected as she took his signature and returned to the furniture delivery van without a word.

It took six hours for the tears to come, and Sanna Pommakka herself didn’t know why she was crying, alone on her own sofa, as a red-haired talk-show host made his live audience laugh with his introductory monologue.

The sofa store went bust. Because Sanna Pommakka had consistently put off joining the union, she was entitled only to the basic unemployment allowance. As severance pay she had received a sectional sofa that was far too big for her small apartment. She split it in two and gave half to her neighbours. Soon she had to split the remaining half, too, as her unemployment money was not enough to pay the rent, and she had to look for a place that was smaller and less expensive.

Sanna Pommakka’s social exclusion did not happen suddenly or instantly; it was a gradual process that spread over time. In fact, it took place while she was asleep, because life was easier in dreams. There things happened, unlike in her waking life. Sanna had dreams of children jumping on their parents’ double bed on a Sunday morning; she saw them in a large living room with a pine floor and wall-mounted bookshelves and toys on the floor, and in the corner a large TV set, and on the sofa a man whom she could love and who returned her love.

Sanna slept. When she woke she went out and bought frankfurters and fries at a 24-hour service station and ate dinner at three in the morning. Then she slept some more. When she finally woke up the day was far advanced. She watched soaps, dream garden shows, summer home property shows and drama series, and saw the full lives other people led. She also saw them on the news – in the kind of news where a woman had killed her husband, for the woman had a husband and they had children who would now have to be looked after. All these people’s problems were connected with relationships. They had relationships in all directions, the world pulled them and pushed them and moved them about. Sanna’s problems were exclusively her own. Chief among them was loneliness. Everything
else flowed from that. Sanna Pommakka felt that she had been born into the world alone; alone she lived in it and alone she would leave it. And so what did anything matter?

Sanna lay on her one-third of a sofa and watched the renovation of the Nielikäinen family’s three-room apartment. The children’s bedroom was being given more space and painted white and the wardrobe cleverly expanded; the kitchen was being redesigned with the harmony of stainless steel and imitation marble tiles.

Sanna Pommakka ate cold sausage, and pined. Pining was wanting to be where one belonged without necessarily knowing where that was. It was where other people were. Where another person was, but how could she conjure that person up?

Only food made her feel better. The food had once been alive and it went inside her. In the course of a night Sanna could easily get through a kilo of fries and a couple of packs of frankfurters. The shelves of a German discount grocery store were her friends, her security, her source of surprise and understanding. For twenty euros she could fill a shopping bag with a wonderfully nurturing assortment of carbohydrates, proteins, sodium glutamate, sugar and salt. Sixty cents, it said on the red label of the pack of frankfurters that had passed their sell-by date.

Sanna changed the channel.

On the TV channel designed for men, a performing magician was being dropped into a deep, icy lake, bound with chains, locked in a box. Sanna picked up a fry. Sanna looked at the magician.

He believed in himself. He knew what he was doing, but no one else knew how he did it. He made people believe in him. His trickery worked.

Sanna Pommakka googled the man and checked up on his life. Wife a top model, two children, Mandus and Skylah. Sanna Pommakka suddenly had an awakening. Unlikely as it might seem, her energy had been returned to her by an illusionist named Germano Bully.

Sanna Pommakka travelled from the edge of town by metro, bus and train to the central library. In the library’s entrance hall a miracle, a divine dispensation, a cinematic twist took place. Sanna Pommakka’s eyes fell on a row of books that were being sold off cheaply, and the fourth one from the right was Solmu Mäkelä’s
The Big Book of Magic
, one euro.

Such can be the price of one’s future.

Sanna practised at home until she could do Solmu’s tricks with her eyes shut, in the dark, suffering from serious sleep deprivation. At night school she enrolled in a magic class and also learned to take criticism as something that was aimed at her conjuring tricks rather than at her personally. In the follow-up class she received lessons in illusionism of a more sophisticated kind, as well as in how to manipulate one’s audience.

The teacher claimed to have earned his own diploma in Las Vegas. He complimented Sanna on her swift hands and powers of concentration, but reproached her for her earnest expression, her over-sensitive peripheral circulation and her excessive weight. The magician was an entertainer, and for a woman that meant fake blonde hair and a wasp waist. She had to be at once practical and fuckable, the teacher explained.

Sanna Pommakka registered herself as a company and applied for a start-up grant. She made herself a website and applied for a pension. She got herself on the books of a small theatrical agency and accepted all the gigs she was offered, which at first only paid her
expenses. She tested her tricks on her father and mother and asked them for once to be as honest as they could be with their only daughter.

‘That one doesn’t work,’ said her father.

‘Yes, it does,’ said her mother.

‘You’re just saying that because you’re my mum,’ said Sanna.

‘I saw the card up your sleeve,’ said her father.

‘You know, in the old days magicians used to lift rabbits out of hats,’ said her mother.

I
n the People section of the weekend supplement of
Absolut Gazeta
there was an interview with a man named Harri Pykström. The photos had been taken from a helicopter, over the Lapland fells.

So what did Yegor Kugar do about it? Did he lose his rag, did he drink a hundred cans of Sandels beer, did he start injecting drugs? Did he take a cab to Lapland to look for Vatanescu? Did he do what Yegor Kugar usually did in problem situations? Perceive the problem. Get rid of the problem. No, nothing like that. Yegor Kugar had lost his self-confidence. The neurotransmitters in his brain had gone on strike; he would have needed the help of a therapist, and third-generation antidepressants.

Naseem Hasapatilalati suggested that Yegor should draw up a list of his problems, which would make them easier to deal with. Then perhaps he would be able to get rid of them, one at a time. Yegor picked up a sheet of graph paper and a pencil. Everything he wrote was about Vatanescu.

The list only made it all worse. Vatanescu was penetrating ever more deeply into the convolutions of Yegor Kugar’s brain, into his sweat glands and fear centre. In Vatanescu’s case it was not a simple matter of a debt that had to be repaid or compensated with a little finger or a larger limb, or an apartment, a car or a wife if necessary. It was not just business, as 99.99 per cent of things in Yegor Kugar’s life were.

Yegor Kugar understood his situation, and his problem concerning Vatanescu, when he saw a shaky video on the Web that had been taken with the camera of a mobile phone, showing the night emergency clinic at Maria Hospital. It zoomed in on Vatanescu and the rabbit that was sitting on his lap. The clip was hosted on an Israeli server.