The Beggar and the Hare (23 page)

V
atanescu sat in the back seat of the Mercedes. The car was new to him, but every Finn knew it as the ‘Million Merc’. It had been bought new at a time when support for the Ordinary Smallholders’ Party stood at more than fifteen per cent. The Merc had seen the party’s rise and fall and ruin; it had seen its revival and present success, as had the driver, Esko Sirpale. The ‘million’ referred to the number of miles the car had done. In the Merc they had planned election campaigns, mourned the defeats of ice hockey teams and discussed the growing pains of children. Simo Pahvi called it his office.

The Million Merc suited Pahvi’s style perfectly. It was available to the general public; the average price of that year’s model was around a thousand euros, six hundred and fifty if you haggled. To buy an Audi A8, in which government ministers normally travelled, an ordinary citizen would have to buy and sell companies, win the lottery or rob a bank. A Million Merc, on the other hand, was something you could save for out of your salary.

‘The sills are rusted,’ Simo Pahvi said to Vatanescu.
‘Rust is a sign of life. It’s the bosses who protect their sills. Cars like to be used.’

Inside the Merc there was a fusty odour of cigarette smoke, which covered any other smells. This was a vehicle in which Vatanescu felt at home; it was the kind in which he had made the journeys of his life whenever he had managed to travel by car. The Million Merc consumed as much oil as petrol, but that was not a problem for Simo Pahvi.

‘This country was built with greasy hands,’ he would say, as he had also said during the last prime minister’s question time.

Pahvi rummaged in the Siwa bag for a suit for Vatanescu. The suit was deliberately ill-fitting and shabby.

‘What football team do you support?’

The one that my son will play in.

Pahvi rummaged in the bag and hesitated between the scarves of Real Madrid, Helsinki Football Club and Steaua Bucuresti. He opted for the Finnish national team. There was a miniature scarf for the rabbit.

‘Let’s wait for the right moment. There’s no point in putting it on and going there straight away.’

Where?

‘Sorry for my bad English, but you don’t seem to have an Oxford accent either.’

We understand each other.

In a language.

But I don’t understand what I’m doing here.

‘They can’t deport you. It would start a national uprising. Good grief. The Church has promised to give you sanctuary.’

Me, Vatanescu?

‘You’ve been discussed at the UN. The boot of the Merc is full of online petitions, soft toys and ladies’
undergarments. A couple of men’s too. All sent to you.’

Don’t make fun of me. Please.

‘You’ll know when I’m making fun of you. Listen. Do you know what’s most important in the politics of today, Vatanescu?’

The basic issues?

‘The basic issues can be addressed by those who are interested in them. What interests me is influence. Influencing people. Persuading them. Having an effect. That’s what politics is. Always has been.’

I don’t know anything about politics.

I’ve never voted.

I don’t know if I have the right to vote.

‘Of course you bloody have. Everyone has. In a democracy every vote counts. Every vote is decisive. Do you know what my success is founded on?’

Vatanescu gazed at the corpulent, out-of-breath man who sat next to him. At first sight he didn’t look like someone who had succeeded in the way that rappers and business moguls do.

‘My success is founded on who I am.’

On corpulence and geniality?

‘I know the masses; I can make them follow me. I’m a shepherd. People want to look down as well as up.’

What does that have to do with me?

What are you getting at?

‘Human interest.’

Eh?

‘The big issues need the face of the little man.’

You can’t get much littler than me.

‘But one shouldn’t start being miserable, either. Look, I used to be the face of the little man. Now I’m taking a step forward and I’m no longer so little any more. No prime minister ever is, and a president even less. But there’s a new face.’

I don’t understand.

‘It’s yours, Vatanescu.’

S
imo Pahvi asked Esko Sirpale to stop the car outside his favourite restaurant. This was the place where, at the most heated point of his election campaign, he had announced that immigrants had nothing to worry about. As long as they worked, like Ming Po.

After that, Ming’s Palace had grown into a chain of restaurants that were in direct competition with the two biggest hamburger chains. One important reason was Simo Pahvi, and another that the new government brought in tax concessions for all the restaurants that had Karelian hotpot on their menus. From the Night Menu Pahvi ordered Number 18, the Finland Maiden. This pizza was blue and white, because of the cheese on it, and its principal ingredient was Finland Sausage.

‘I’ll take three. To go. Yes. And three milks.’

They ate in the back seat of the car.

‘If you like, I’ll tell you all about it while we eat.’

You don’t need my permission.

‘No, I don’t! But, look. Perhaps you don’t know how big you are.’

Five foot nine, a hundred and forty-seven pounds on the hospital scales.

‘I mean figuratively. Listen, for several months now, Vatanescu, you’ve been bigger in the media… than… well, The Beatles. I’m not a young man any more. But you’re still under forty. A man in his prime.’

‘Keep it simple so he can understand it,’ Esko Sirpale asked. ‘Try to be clear.’

‘Yes. Well. Vatanescu. I followed your journey all along, but I didn’t realise your true worth until Jesus showed me.’

Christ?

‘Mähönen. At first I wondered what to make of you… a global phenomenon and a ragamuffin. But then I got sort of hooked. Damn it, Vatanescu. You kept going straight ahead. With a straight back. A straight mind. Along a straight road. Didn’t you?’

I was forced to.

I kept going so I wouldn’t stop.

My journey had no other aim.

‘Wherever you went, you did the job one hundred per cent, with style.’

I tried to manage.

I wanted the football boots.

‘You never gave in to laziness or egoism. You saved the national park. You exposed corruption.’

I didn’t set out to.

I’m sorry.

‘You exposed the inflexible labour market and the ossified social security system. It really is true that here in the Last Outpost of the North we can’t take the truth about ourselves unless it’s expressed sort of stealthily, and by foreigners. Like the author Neil Hardwick, for example.’

A man I don’t know.

Simo Pahvi ate his pizza starting from the edges, making a constant effort to attain the final climax, the centre where the Finland Sausage had fled its devourer. The cold milk flowed wonderfully down his gullet to his stomach.

‘I’m going to bag you before my imitators do. Fortunately they need a PR agency for their plans. All I need is a pack of cigarettes.’

Simo Pahvi sprinkled his pizza with tabasco sauce and parmesan, and smiled a big, doggy smile.

‘The socialists, the centre right, the Christians, the
tree-huggers. They always lag behind me.’

A broad face that looked as if it had been thrashed with a frying pan without suffering much damage apart from getting an even broader smile. Greasy hair, a pug nose, an ordinary carefree man who didn’t try to stand out from the rest, but instead mixed in with the crowd.

‘I had to give the whole of myself, because the others had nothing in them.’

I don’t understand.

‘Yes, you do! Behind me I drag a bunch of losers who can’t even put the oars in the rowlocks!’

You’re speaking figuratively?

‘I’d like to. It’s full. Stomach. There’s food left. I stretch out my hand. The others eat out of it. I close my fist. They remain hungry. Do you understand that, too?’

You’re speaking concretely?

‘I’m speaking figuratively.’

Forgive me, Mr Simo, but what does this have to do with me?

‘Vatanescu, I don’t want my work to go to waste. You have to help me. I need you.’

You need a driver?

‘Wait, I’ve got some notes about this.’

Simo Pahvi dug some cigarette packs out of his inside jacket pocket. They were covered with scribbles. Then he found the right one in the rear pocket of his trousers.

‘Here. You come from elsewhere, like our former president, Martti Ahtisaari. You’re soft, like our Orthodox clergyman MEP Father Mitro. And what about the rabbit?’

The rabbit was sitting on the pizza box eating a piece of sausage. Vatanescu put his hand on its back and scratched the hollow in the back of its neck.

‘On your own you’d be a scary tramp. And on its own the rabbit would be a suspect bundle of germs.’

Now for the first time Simo Pahvi looked Vatanescu straight in the eye. Now for the first time Vatanescu began to understand what Pahvi was saying. The diamond-hard logic of his senseless talk.

‘But together you’re cuter than dear Father Mitro! Hell’s bells, you’re like Charlie Chaplin and the Kid. Even a grown man like me has a tear in his eye… and that’s the great thing, Vatanescu. You can make people laugh and cry. You’re a survivor and a man of resource. An everyman. You’re not a trickster and you’re not a coward. You’re not a thief, even if you did borrow that Swede’s car for a while.’

Esko Sirpale looked at Vatanescu in the rear mirror and nodded. This was clearly a plan that they shared, had devised together, were implementing together, like Simo Pahvi’s election campaigns.

‘If you know how to make people laugh and cry, the door of the safe is open to you,’ Pahvi said. ‘You’ve a landslide of votes at your disposal. The combination of laughter and tears makes people believe and hope. That’s what life is about. Dreams, beliefs, hopes. Politics is the art of identifying those, and promising that they’ll be fulfilled.’

M
iklos Vatanescu pedalled his three-speed bicycle back to the house from the mailbox. In the pile on the back carrier was a copy of the main national daily, the newspaper of the Ordinary People’s Party, a mobile phone bill and a postcard sent from Lapland. The back of the card said:

Miklos took the mail up to the study on the first floor of the house, as he always did during the weeks when he stayed with his father. Right now the only person in the study was Uncle Simo, who invited him to sit in Vatanescu’s
chair. With brown eyes, a serious expression, gentle and calm, his father’s son, Miklos Vatanescu sat down. In the Siwa bag Uncle Simo had a present for him.

The Siwa bag was a classic, in which Simo Pahvi carried work papers, contracts and several empty cigarette packs for taking notes on. The bag had also become the world’s first pirated product, and the original, at twenty cents, cost less than a copy, at fifty-six euros. Simo rummaged in the bottom of the bag and produced a pair of football boots, which he placed on Vatanescu’s desk.

‘Do you know how to tie the laces?’

The boy shook his head. He smiled to himself. He had never owned shoes with laces. He was crying and shouting inwardly. His father had kept his word, Miklos now had football boots – and he also had his father back.

‘Sometimes a foot grows too big, just as a political party can grow too big. The solution is to take the next size up.’

They tried the boots on him. They fitted perfectly.

‘A party needs to have a growth margin,’ Pahvi said, savouring his own words. ‘Football boots don’t. That could start an opening speech, couldn’t it?’

Simo Pahvi tied the laces with double knots and told the boy to take a few running steps. He crushed the day’s newspaper into a ball and threw it on the floor. Miklos flicked the ball in the air with the tip of one foot and onto the heel of the other, bouncing it several hundred times.

‘Pick a jersey for yourself from the other bag.’

Miklos Vatanescu kicked the paper ball into the wastepaper basket and then sat down as children do, with his backside on the floor and his legs folded at his sides. He examined the different coloured jerseys and
decided on Brazil Number 10. Pahvi thought this a farsighted choice.

‘A quality team, impartial. Multicoloured. Like Sweden, but further away. No historical trouble with Finland.’

Miklos found the jersey a bit tight against his skin at first, but when he saw himself in the mirror he forgot the tickling. Boots and a jersey, the happiest day of his life in Nurmijärvi.

‘We’ll keep the Finnish jersey for more important events,’ Pahvi said. ‘Let’s go down and see how the chicken’s cooking.’

V
atanescu’s mother stood on a freshly cut lawn in a residential district of Nurmijärvi. She looked to the right and saw a row of identical houses with large gardens. She looked to the left and saw a row of identical houses with large gardens. She was outside because of her suspicions towards underfloor heating. It was like hellfire burning down below. Vatanescu had tried to explain to his mother that underfloor heating was not only energy-efficient but also a symbol of gentrification. Onwards we go, as a Finnish ice hockey player had said during Vatanescu’s election campaign. The order of progress was: campfire, chimneyless hut, heat-storing fireplace, oil burner. And now the underfloor heating – combined with an air-source heat pump and a wood pellet burner, which Vatanescu had in his house. But his mother took some convincing, and she preferred to have earth and soil beneath her feet.

Vatanescu had solved his mother’s housing problem by buying the cottage of Komar Tudos in his home village back in Romania. It had been dismantled timber
by timber and taken to Nurmijärvi, to a shaded place in the north-west corner of the site, in the lee of three tall pine trees. And there Jeffersson and Õunap were already at work on the reassembly. Their hammers thudded, the numbered beams were snapped into place and those that had rotted most were replaced with new ones. In exchange Komar Tudos received half of a duplex built by the Finnish embassy and its trade mission. Komar moved into one side, and all the ghosts he knew moved into the other. The embassy threw a housewarming party at which his plum brandy and several whole pigs were consumed.

But not even this was good enough for Vatanescu’s mother, as the house still had Komar’s smell, and his restless ghosts.

Vatanescu’s mother turned on her heel; the sun was dazzling her but it didn’t warm the air in the way that it did back home. Here a person felt hot and cold at the same time.

On the steps of the house next door Mama Vatanescu saw her son’s ex-wife Maria, who had no objections to underfloor heating at all. It had been the only efficient way to organise joint custody. Every second week Miklos Vatanescu stayed with his father in the main building or accompanied him on official visits. The rest of the time he spent with his mother in the guesthouse.

Maria greeted Mama Vatanescu, who growled in response, spat three times over her left shoulder, then over her right shoulder, then on the ground straight in front of her, with three snaps of the fingers of her right hand. The former mother-in-law was keeping her distance, so to speak, by putting a curse on her former daughter-in-law. Maria shrugged, put on her sunglasses and settled down in a hammock.

Mama Vatanescu turned round again and tried to detect which way the wind was blowing. Now she saw her son’s house, a prefabricated dwelling with straight walls and an area of three hundred square metres. To Mama Vatanescu the house contained every modern convenience, but lacked character and history. However, each generation had its own aspirations and habits, which were always a source of bewilderment to the previous generation. Vatanescu was still her son, even though the world had moved on and changed. He still had the same curly hair, and in the mother’s memory her son’s tears and laughter were still preserved.

Leaning on her walking stick, she took a few short steps. Instead of being carved from knotted wood, as it would be back home, this stick bore the words ‘Public Health Centre’, and its tip could be fitted with a fine spike if required. She had also been offered a rollator and visits by Meals on Wheels, but turned them down and got out of the situation by resorting to her spitting ritual.

From round the corner in front of her Miklos arrived at a run. In his new jersey, dribbling a football in front of him with gleaming boots. The ball was like an extension of him, like a hand or a head; it always had been – he was ‘a nifty lad’, as they said in Vatanescu’s family. His speciality involved placing the ball on the tip of his foot and performing a kind of somersault with a kinetic energy that sent the ball flying into the top corner at terrifying speed.

Miklos swung the ball between his grandmother’s legs and then kicked it far away towards the shore. Simo Pahvi ran panting after, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his glasses misted over. He greeted Mama Vatanescu, who gave him an imperceptible nod. She found the warts on his neck suspicious, and she also thought that he looked too much like a walrus.

Mama Vatanescu climbed the steps to the veranda.

She asked her son what he was thinking, as his gloom could be felt halfway down the garden.

So much that’s new. So many things to learn.

‘No one can learn politics in a day.’

Not that. The instructions for this grill.

As housewarming presents Simo Pahvi had bought Vatanescu a large Calor gas barbecue grill, and a
trampoline
for Miklos.

‘And what about everything else? My son, what about the rest of your life? Within you? In your heart?’

I’m not afraid of death any more.

I have life around me.

The magician hasn’t got in touch with me. Perhaps she doesn’t dare to?

Perhaps some time I’ll call her again. One day I may have time for love. Pahvi thinks that politics come first.

Pahvi’s housewarming gift package also contained a people carrier, an espresso machine and a hedgetrimmer. You had to know the habits, activities and aspirations of the electorate, he had said. You had to be able to speak their language. If the Ordinary People’s Party wanted to reach upper-middle-class voters it had to understand what made the target group tick. That was why this evening Vatanescu was to grill a whole bucketful of ready-made honey-marinated chicken fillets.

Simo Pahvi climbed the steps to the veranda, his knees cracking. He took off his shirt and used it to wipe the back of his neck, the top of his head and the folds of his belly. Then he threw the shirt about his shoulders and approached Vatanescu.

‘Problems, old chap? Feeling nervous about tonight?’

How do you turn on the gas?

‘There are these little buttons. Look, you turn them like this…’

Then Simo Pahvi clicked the electric switch and held his hand over the grill tray for a moment. He spat on it and when the spittle began to boil he asked Vatanescu to open the packs of honey-marinated chicken.

‘I can get them started.’

Vatanescu sat down beside his mother on the bench they had bought at the retail park along with the rest of the garden furniture. She took his hand in hers. They saw Miklos running about on the lawn, and the rabbit bouncing around at his feet. Boy and rabbit were passing the ball to each other, and now and then Miklos would shoot the ball towards a tree, a wall or his mother, who was resting in the hammock. The rabbit also had a hutch of its own on the edge of the forest, with a small carrot patch beside it.

The boy got them.

Football boots.

‘This is how you do it,’ Pahvi said, leaning over the grill. ‘You don’t want too many pieces next to one another, so they have room to be turned and the tray doesn’t go cold. When the liquid comes to the surface you turn them. Actually it doesn’t really matter how you turn pieces of chicken. A bit like political rivals. Some folk like their meat juicy, others like it dry. Same goes for women.’

Pahvi burst into his contagious, quaking laughter. His belly heaved and the veranda shook.

‘I think we’ll use cardboard plates so the ladies don’t have to do the washing up. Choose cardboard – pahvi. Makes things easier.’

I’ve been successful, Mama. For once.

‘You’ll succeed at anything you put your mind to,’ said Mama Vatanescu.

I’ve never been successful before.

‘But after this you always will. Believe me. I believe in you. I brought you into the world.’

I
n Mother Russia, behind bogs and coniferous forests, permafrost and tumbledown cabins, was the penal colony where Yegor Kugar was shut up in a cell. Though he no longer had a typewriter, he stubbornly continued to tell his story with a pencil in the margins of a
hymnbook
or any piece of white paper that fell into his hands. Like Papillon, Yegor Kugar kept all his writings in an aluminium tube, carefully concealed in a place where the solarium did not shine.

But let Yegor Kugar tell it as he did in his book
Crooks Have Thick Skins
, which was a worldwide success.