The Beggar and the Hare (20 page)

From the corridor there were footsteps and announcements. The stop at Tampere lasted a long time. Cars were being unloaded, tired-looking people walked in the lighted railway yard, torn from their sleep to begin their work, and a little boy ran about in such a lively way that he seemed not to know or care what time it was. Now was always a good time to be skipping around, and it was never too late to laugh or cry.

An empty mind.

A clear mind.

I know what I’m going to do.

What the task is.

Get shaved, put on my overalls and go to a sports shop like any other man.

Choose the football boots.

Pay for the football boots with the money the rabbit got for me by magic.

Pack up the football boots.

Post the football boots.

Buy a phone.

Call home.

Life is an opportunity.

I feel that now.

I’m going to manage.

I’m going to buy an apartment, rent an apartment, two rooms, tiling, constant hot water, bright lighting.

I’m going to buy a car, an old banger that costs a thousand euros, which I will drive wherever I choose. I will phone this woman who’s sleeping beside me, and I’ll invite her to the cinema. I will tell her about me, and she will tell me about her. We’ll get to know each other and eventually I’ll introduce her to Miklos, and even to my family.

Could that be possible?

Vatanescu searched in his overalls and found what he was looking for: a piece of chocolate wrapped in foil. He was in the process of unwrapping it when Sanna Pommakka woke up. She looked at Vatanescu tenderly, without anxiety or forlornness, or the sense of emptiness she usually felt in the mornings.

‘Good morning.’

Would you like some chocolate?

‘Mmm… where are we? Shall we go and eat somewhere when we get to Helsinki? We still have money.’

Almost there.

‘Are we going to stay… I mean, are we going to travel together?’

Where?

‘Somewhere. Where are you going?’

To a sports shop.

‘I’ll come with you… Vata. I’ll come to the sports shop with you.’

Vatanescu sucked his chocolate, for if it got into the hole in his right molar, the pain would only go away if he took a handful of painkillers.

Sanna Pommakka drew Vatanescu towards her and put her head on his chest.

It would be even better if there were someone who would buy the football boots for me.

Someone with a loyalty card. Do you have a loyalty card?

‘Yes.’

With points on it?

‘Yes, I do.’

A social security ID, a phone number, a fixed address?

‘Of course I do, dear sir.’

And then Vatanescu and Sanna Pommakka packed up their things, but drew the curtains of the sleeping berth again for the journey between Järvenpää and Helsinki. If Vatanescu had a dominant feeling, it was one of languor. For Sanna Pommakka, it was self-confidence. Their paths had crossed when they were poor, unemployed and disrespected, but now they had a future ahead of them. The group would not be complete without the rabbit – and its dominant feeling was one of secret jealousy.

Vatanescu and Sanna Pommakka could now hold their heads up as they entered society – a part of it anyway, or at least its fringes. They joined the ranks of those whose lives were in order, who could pay their monthly debts, afford a new car every three years, afford to let their children go riding, play the drums or do messy
finger-painting
, and praise them again and again, even though a mess was really just a mess.

Sanna Pommakka wondered if she could enter that world with this man. Vatanescu’s mind was mainly on the football boots, but he also enjoyed the scent of Sanna Pommakka’s hair.

They stood by the door in single file, the train slowed down before it stopped, and even though they might never be a couple, they would always share the magic of the Kolari–Helsinki night train.

A
film star’s reception awaited Vatanescu. Cameras, mobile phones, autograph books, the media and production companies. One woman wanted his signature on her breasts, another on the side of her baby, a man on his 1 Percent waistcoat.

The crowd forced its way between Sanna Pommakka and Vatanescu. First they lost each other’s hands, then they could no longer see each other. Sanna shouted her address, which Vatanescu failed to store in his memory.

We’ll meet again if we’re meant to.

‘How do you feel now?’ asked a sports correspondent.

Is this how they celebrate when a man meets a woman and gives up being alone in order to be together?

Are you all crazy?

Little girls plucked hairs from Vatanescu’s head, little boys admired his workman’s overalls. He saw T-shirts covered with pictures of himself and the rabbit. On the quayside there were hastily improvised stalls selling Vatanescu-themed spin-offs. There were people dressed as rabbits and people dressed as beggars.

Madness.

Step aside, please…

…would you let me through…

…I need to find a sports shop.

Then Vatanescu sensed a figure in the human ocean. He sensed it without seeing it yet, sensed it on his skin, like electricity. The figure was pushing its way determinedly through the mass of people; it was heading straight for him, like the blocks of ice careering down the River Kyrö in the spring.

I must

run

away.

I must

protect

the rabbit.

T
he event has been recorded by numerous witness statements and on lots of CCTV footage, but there was only one perpetrator and one victim.

N
ow I died.

F
inland’s prime minister Simo Pahvi sat in the café of the Neste service station near Eläintarha Park with his driver Esko Sirpale. They were waiting for a third man.

‘These chairs are no good,’ Pahvi said. ‘They’re designed for backsides. I have an arse.’

Today was the day that Simo Pahvi’s party was to define its future. Its values, strategies and direction.

It had all begun forty years earlier with the founding of the Ordinary Smallholders’ Party by Simo Pahvi’s predecessor and mentor, Heikki Hamutta. The party had been his life’s work. Depending on one’s point of view, and which political correspondent one read, Hamutta had been either a dissident, an enemy of the state, a troublemaker, a loudmouth or a saviour. In his own opinion Heikki Hamutta knew the people, trusted the people and wanted to help the people. He had grown up among the people, was a product of the Karelia that had been abandoned to the Russians. The door of the lift to the upper echelons had been open, but Hamutta preferred to go by the stairs and the gravel roads.

Heikki Hamutta had made it his mission in life to fight for the big issues of the little man. In a big world he took the little man’s side against big enemies. Against the bosses, the communists, big domestic capital, big foreign capital; all the forces that tried from all directions
to encroach on the land of the rural smallholders and take away what little they had. The threats did not have to be real – it was enough that they appeared real in the smallholders’ minds, and that they were updated at regular intervals. Heikki Hamutta wanted to breathe new life into a section of the population that had been thought to be either dead or asleep.

Little by little, he had turned the small party into a big one, and talk had become more important than deeds. Words. Figures of speech. A lively and ready wit. Clear-cut sentences, tinged with humour. There had to be bite, but no irony. No detours, no circumlocutions, nothing too off-topic or airy-fairy. Then the audience wanted to hear more.

‘The man people want to hear gains a voice,’ Hamutta had said. ‘The man people want to hear gains a face. The man who acquires a face gains visibility. He’s in demand in the newspapers, on radio and TV. He gains votes in their hundreds of thousands.’

Simo Pahvi had heard the voice of Heikki Hamutta in a shopping mall in a remote suburb of the capital during the years when brown and yellow were fashionable and colour TV was in its infancy. Pahvi sat on the saddle of his bicycle eating a vanilla Eskimo ice cream and thinking a boy’s thoughts: the maximum speeds of cars and Superman’s chances in a fight with Lex Luthor.

Then a portable amplifier crackled into life and the deep voice of the little man was heard. Heikki Hamutta was explaining what was wrong with the world and how to put it right.

Simo Pahvi had immediately joined the party and told his parents about his new plans for a future career. Gone were his dreams of being an engine driver or a fireman; he wanted to be a politician. A minister. Prime minister.

Pahvi was struck by Hamutta’s power with words, his sense of rhythm, his timing, his ability to communicate with the public and instinctively grasp its mood. Hamutta’s policies were a side issue – important, it was true, but if they had been presented to Pahvi in a different form, in stammering phrases or academic language, their effect would have been nil.

This was Simo Pahvi’s first illumination.

He had found his path and his life’s purpose at the age of nine. He had bought an ill-fitting suit at a cheap department store, and still did so – a new suit every ten years. He bought large non-prescription glasses and gave up playing football because he wanted to look more imposing. That meant a more generous waistline and a double chin, the kind one has to have if one intends to be a politician on radio and TV.

Simo Pahvi earned Hamutta’s trust by arriving at meetings with telephone directories, which he sat on in order to make himself the same height as everyone else. He did the same on the speakers’ platform, and got the most applause after Hamutta. Such strength of will in a boy not yet ten promised him a great future in the Ordinary Smallholders’ Party. What was more, Heikki Hamutta recognised the need for a mascot: with the help of a small boy one could gain extra points for warmth and humanity.

Pahvi absorbed all the characteristics of his role model, both outer and inner – his skill as a public performer, his pithy rhetoric, his benevolence towards his own, his steadfastness in the face of opponents and injustices.

So it continued for twenty years. Pahvi gained a reputation among his peers and rose to be number two in the party organisation. That was all anyone knew
about him. He stood for parliament, but did not get in. Not discouraged, he went on being Heikki Hamutta’s trusted companion.

He toured the countryside with Hamutta, now on a tractor, now on a moped, sometimes on a bus invariably driven by another man who enjoyed Hamutta’s confidence: his driver Esko Sirpale.

The party’s supporters opened their homes for evening meetings, where the business of the Ordinary Smallholders’ Party was discussed late into the night, with never an eye on the clock. Improvements were promised. Householders offered guests refreshments and a place to stay for the night. At the end of one such evening Simo Pahvi was preparing to bed down when the daughter of the house brought him something for his heartburn.

There she was. His wife and mother of his children. Simo Pahvi was a plain-talking man of conservative tastes, so he lost no time in proposing to Marjatta. In the morning he asked her father for permission to marry her, and a month later they were husband and wife. Two months later Marjatta was expecting their first child.

Just as a new life was growing inside Marjatta, Heikki Hamutta’s life came to an end. Cancer of the prostate, old age, all the miles he had driven and walked and struggled finally claimed their own. For this, Pahvi had not been ready. No one is ever ready for such a thing – when the head of an establishment, an ice hockey team or a company grows too powerful. When such a leader passes away, all that remains of him are his boots, which don’t fit any of his successors. They are not able to walk in them, those boots; they don’t know where they let in or what to do about the leaky soles.

It was also around this time that the smallholdings and their owners finally disappeared from the land.
There was nobody left, and no causes to defend any more. Heikki Hamutta died. The party went bankrupt. Many thought its ideals had died, too.

At the age of thirty-three, Simo Pahvi realised that he was an unemployed political hopeful. He realised it as he was filling his car at the Weathervane service station in Häme. Without enough money to fill the tank, he didn’t know what direction to take. He had forgotten where he had come from and had no idea where he was going, either in terms of his journey or of his life as a whole. Now that he was out of work, the glasses he had bought to give himself political credibility, the ill-fitting suit and the extra inches round his waist merely made him look like a drifter. He had put Heikki Hamutta’s boots in a crate in the basement of his apartment building, but had not even dared to look at them.

Simo Pahvi wondered what his unborn child would think of a father who after doing the football pools fills out an unemployment benefit form. As he got back into his car after paying for his petrol he was close to a crippling dose of self-pity. But on the slip road into Route 4, Simo Pahvi had the second illumination of his life.

At the side of the road stood a hitchhiker. As a rule he did not give lifts to hitchhikers, but for once there was room in the car and he had the time to spare. He reached over and opened the door on the passenger side.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘I might ask you the same question,’ the man replied.

‘Lahti.’

‘You booked me,’ the man said.

‘Not to my knowledge…’

‘I’m Jesus.’

‘Jesus?’

‘Jesus Mähönen, hi. Tell me now, what’s up, friend? Where is your road taking you?’

Pahvi put the car into first gear and accelerated.

‘Nowhere in particular. I thought I’d take a drive somewhere. Maybe to Mikkeli.’

‘Wrong. You’re going home, they need you there.’

Pahvi looked at the road ahead of him. He looked at the crushed squirrels that lay at its edges, the carcases of raccoon dogs, and a man who was pushing a bicycle, its pannier full of empty bottles. He saw the radio masts and ski-jumps of Lahti, and asked Jesus to repeat what he had said.

‘They need you at home.’

It was true, if he knew what home was. Home was Marjatta and home was the party.

‘You’ll make a U-turn at the next intersection and you’ll head for home.’

And Simo made a U-turn and headed for home.

‘In the next few days a child will be born to you,’ said Jesus Mähönen. ‘Take care of it. And after it, everything else. You will show people the way. You are life’s traffic cop. The traffic cop of domestic politics. You must know whom to stop at the red light, whom to let through at the green. Which route is clear, which route may have delays. And which route has a wide transport truck that can’t be overtaken for twenty miles.’

Pahvi said that he often didn’t understand his own metaphors, and so Jesus must explain himself more clearly.

‘Have faith in your own abilities, Pahvi. Only then will you become a figure in Finnish politics who is greater and more legendary than Heikki Hamutta. Do you understand?’

Simo Pahvi thought about it.

‘Think, man. Think, but don’t get hung up in your thoughts. Make a decision. Good or bad, a decision is always better than being in limbo. You can let me out here, at Keimolanportti.’

Pahvi left Jesus at the local service station, and although I am the omniscient narrator, I cannot say if this really was the Saviour, or simply Jesse Mähönen who had recently escaped from the mental hospital at Kellokoski. In any case it does not matter, as by their very definition questions of faith involve a consonance not with reality, but with faith.

On his way home Pahvi dropped in at the supermarket. He served celebratory coffee, accompanied by a litre of vanilla ice cream with instant chocolate sauce. His wife asked him what they were celebrating, as only yesterday he had been in the depths of misery and despair.

‘Procreation,’ Pahvi replied, and in his voice for the first time there was that tone of vigour that would make him famous in times to come. ‘A piece of me is growing inside you, Marjatta. Tomorrow I’m going to order five thousand cards for the party’s members.’

‘Which party?’

‘My party. The Ordinary People’s Party. Will you take cream?’

Support for the party began at zero. Now it had reached thirty-three per cent. Gradually, with the help of mannerisms he had learned from Hamutta, methods he himself had devised and the tips he received from Jesus, Simo Pahvi’s laid-back assertiveness found its way into the consciousness of the entire nation. After Ozzy Osbourne, Simo Pahvi was the second person in the world to prove the truth of the maxim ‘being yourself is enough’. Most of us have to make a real effort to be more than ourselves if we want to achieve more than
making our morning porridge. To be oneself is often to be a repulsive pariah, an obnoxious chatterer, a complacent bastard, a sneering idiot, a bimbo, a cretin, an irresponsible Don Juan, a timorous creep, a sneaky abortion – at any rate something that elicits no answering echo anywhere.

Simo Pahvi’s answering echo came from the markets, the farms, the pubs and the pedestrian underpasses. It came as a full-throated shout. Simo Pahvi’s identity was that of Uncle Veijo. The man who says, enough of all this talk, let’s get on with the job. Who dares to stand up and leave the table saying that if that guy utters another word of crap we’ll all down tools. When Simo Pahvi took the lead you were ready to follow him, to go to the village dance, to work in Sweden, to brawl in bars, fight the Winter War, the Continuation War and the Civil War, and attend church at Christmas.

You had to be close to the voters. To touch them, get under their skin. Within reach of a stained cup of coffee or a can of beer brought back from Tallinn. In summer around the barbecue, passing the packet of sausages, in the thirty square feet of the garden of a rented urban terraced house. That was where Pahvi had come from, that was where he went, and that was where he derived the rationale for his policies and his life.

It was in being himself that he had suffered defeats and scored his victories. That he had worked the turf and got to know his voters. Although one didn’t get to know people just by shaking their hand, Pahvi was able to draw conclusions and generalise, but in such a way that each person felt they were being individually addressed. The points that mattered were: what did someone lack? What could fill the gap? Should one promise what was really lacking, or something else? Put the blame on what was wrong or transfer it onto some
quite different, externalised problem? Who was to be held responsible for the faults and omissions?

Simo Pahvi gave himself the image of someone who could diagnose the problem and would come back next summer to put it right. A broken gutter. Squeaky brakes. A firm’s relocation abroad. Unemployment. Pensions that were too small. Immigrants.

In those who voted for him, the figure of Simo Pahvi kindled the hope of being like Simo Pahvi. The distance from Pahvi to the people was so short that the ballot box was only a step away, and the right number was invariably chosen on the ballot paper.

Pahvi added slight deviations to his ordinariness. He wore an ordinary quilted jacket that smelled of tobacco smoke, motor oil and kebab sauce, but also a green scarf that was quite out of the ordinary: Simo Pahvi was a supporter of the Swedish football team Bemböle FIS. His enthusiasm was genuine, dating from his honeymoon in Uppsala, but the scarf was a deliberate test of the flexibility of his political support. If people accepted his unusual choice of football team, then in difficult situations they might also accept any other unusual choices and directions he might take. He was careful not to define his political leanings too narrowly. If one kept a certain freedom of action, one could go on drawing support from new sections of the public. And, just as he had calculated, the scarf put the finishing touches to the caricature.