The Year of the Hare (2 page)

T
wo harassed men were driving down a lane. The setting sun was hurting their eyes through the dusty windshield. It was midsummer, but the landscape on this sandy byroad was slipping past their weary eyes unnoticed; the beauty of the Finnish evening was lost on them both.

They were a journalist and a photographer, out on assignment: two dissatisfied, cynical men, approaching middle age. The hopes of their youth had not been realized, far from it. They were husbands, deceiving and deceived; stomach ulcers were on the way for both of them; and many other worries filled their days.

They’d just been arguing. Should they drive back to Helsinki or spend the night in Heinola? Now they weren’t speaking.

They drove through the lovely summer evening hunched, as self-absorbed as two mindless crustaceans, not even noticing how wretched their cantankerousness was. It was a stubborn, wearying drag of a journey.

On the crest of a hillock, an immature hare was trying its leaps in the middle of the road. Tipsy with summer, it perched on its hind legs, framed by the red sun.

The photographer, who was driving, saw the little creature, but his dull brain reacted too slowly: a dusty city shoe slammed hard on the brake, too late. The shocked animal leaped up in front of the car, there was a muffled thump as it hit the corner of the windshield, and it hurtled off into the forest.

“God! That was a hare,” the journalist said.

“Damn animal—good thing it didn’t bust the windshield.” The photographer pulled up and backed to the spot. The journalist got out and ran into the forest.

“Well, can you see anything?” the photographer called, listlessly. He had cranked down the window, but the engine was still running.

“What?” shouted the journalist.

The photographer lit a cigarette and drew on it, with eyes closed. He revived when the cigarette burned his fingers.

“Come on out! I can’t hang around here forever because of some stupid hare!”

The journalist went distractedly through the thinly treed forest, came to a small clearing, hopped a ditch, and looked hard at a patch of dark-green grass. He could see the young hare there in the grass.

Its left hind leg was broken. The cracked shin hung pitifully, too painful for the animal to run, though it saw a human being approaching.

The journalist picked up the young hare and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little fore-paws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.

Back on the road there was an irritable revving, two impatient blasts on the horn, and a shout: “Come on out! We’ll never make Helsinki if you hang around in this wilderness! Out of there—now!—or you’ll have to find your own way back!”

There was no reply. The journalist was nursing the little animal in his arms. Apparently, it was hurt only in the leg. It was gradually calming down.

The photographer got out. He looked furiously into the forest but could see nothing of his companion. He swore, lit another cigarette, and stamped back to the road. Still no sound from the forest. He stubbed out his cigarette on the road and yelled: “Stay there, then! Good-bye, nutcase!”

He listened for another moment but, getting no reply, stormed into the car, revved up, engaged the clutch, and shot off. Gravel spat under the wheels. In a moment the car was out of sight.

The journalist sat on the edge of the ditch, holding the hare in his lap, like an old woman with her knitting on her knees, lost in thought. The sound of the car engine faded away. The sun set.

The journalist put down the hare on the grass. For a moment he was afraid it would try to escape; but it huddled in the grass, and when he picked it up again, it showed no sign of fear at all.

“So here we are,” he said to the hare. “Left.”

That was the situation: he was sitting alone in the forest, in his jacket, on a summer evening. No disputing it—he’d been abandoned.

What does one usually do in such a situation? Perhaps he should have responded to the photographer’s shouts, he thought. Now maybe he ought to find his way back to the road, wait for the next car, hitch a ride, and think about getting to Heinola, or Helsinki, under his own steam.

The idea was immensely unappealing.

The journalist looked in his briefcase. There were a few banknotes, his press card, his health insurance card, a photograph of his wife, a few coins, a couple of condoms, a bunch of keys, an old May Day celebration badge. And also some pens, a notepad, a ring. The management had printed on the pad
Kaarlo Vatanen, journalist
. His health insurance card indicated that Kaarlo Vatanen had been born in 1942.

Vatanen got to his feet, gazed at the sunset’s last redness through the trees, nodded to the hare. He looked toward the road but made no move that way. He picked up the hare off the grass, put it tenderly in the side pocket of his jacket, and left the clearing for the darkening forest.

The photographer drove to Heinola, raging. There he filled up the tank and decided to check into the hotel the journalist had suggested.

He claimed a double room, threw off his dusty clothes, and took a shower. Refreshed, he went down to the hotel restaurant. Vatanen would certainly appear there soon, he thought. Then they could talk the whole thing through, sort it out. He consumed several bottles of beer, had a meal, and moved on to stronger drinks.

But there was still no sign of the journalist.

Late into the night, he was still sitting in the hotel bar. He contemplated the black surface of the bar counter in a mood of angry regret. As the evening went by he had been mulling over what had happened. It had dawned on him that abandoning his companion in the forest, in an almost deserted neighborhood, had been a mistake. Suppose the journalist had broken his leg in the forest? Could he have gotten lost? Or stuck in a bog? Otherwise, surely, he’d have found his way back to Heinola by now, even on foot?

The photographer thought he’d better call the journalist’s wife in Helsinki.

She muttered sleepily that there’d been no sign of Vatanen and, when she realized the caller was drunk, banged the receiver down. The photographer tried the same number again, but there was no reply. Clearly, Vatanen’s wife had unplugged the telephone.

In the early hours, the photographer called for a taxi. He’d decided to go back to the site and see if Vatanen was still there. The taxi driver asked his drunken passenger where he wanted to go.

“Just drive along this road, nowhere in particular. I’ll tell you where to stop.”

The driver glanced back. They were heading out of town through the night forest and not going anywhere in particular, apparently. Furtively, the driver transferred a pistol from the glove compartment to the seat, between his legs. Uneasily, he studied his passenger.

At the top of a rise, the passenger said: “Stop here.”

The driver eased the pistol into his hand. The drunk, however, got out of the car peacefully and began shouting at the forest: “Vatanen! Vatanen!”

The night forest didn’t return even an echo.

“Vatanen! Hey, Vatanen! Are you there?”

He took off his shoes, rolled his trousers up to his knees, and set off into the forest, barefoot. Soon he’d vanished in the darkness. He could be heard yelling for Vatanen among the trees.

You get them all! the driver thought.

After about half an hour in the dark forest, the passenger returned to the road and asked for a rag. He wiped his muddy shanks and put his shoes on his bare feet; the socks seemed to be in his jacket pocket. They drove back to Heinola.

“You’ve lost this guy Vatanen, have you?”

“Right. Left him there on the hill this evening. No sign of him there now.”

“Didn’t see anything myself, either,” the driver said sympathetically.

The next morning, the photographer woke up in the hotel at about eleven. A nasty hangover was splitting his head, and he felt sick. He remembered Vatanen’s disappearance. Must get in touch with Vatanen’s wife at her job, he thought.

“He went off after a hare,” he told her. “On this hill. Then never came back. Of course I kept shouting, but not a squeak from him. So I left him there. Probably he wanted to stay there.”

To this, the wife said: “Was he drunk?”

“No.”

“So where is he, then? The man can’t just disappear like that.”

“He did just disappear like that. Hasn’t turned up there yet, I suppose?”

“No, definitely not. God, that man’ll drive me crazy. Let him figure this out on his own. The thing is, he’s got to get back home right away. Tell him that.”

“How can I tell him anything? I don’t even know where he is.”

“Well, ferret him out. Get him to call me at work, right away. And tell him this is the last time he takes off this way. Listen, I’ve got a customer, I have to go. Tell him to call me. Bye.”

The photographer called in to the magazine.

“Yes ... and one other thing: Vatanen’s disappeared.”

“Oh. Where’s he off to this time?” the editor asked.

The photographer told him the story.

“He’ll turn up in his own good time, won’t he? Anyway, this story of yours isn’t so drastic we can’t shelve it a day or two. We’ll run it when he gets back.”

“But what if he’s had an accident?”

The editor calmed him down: “Just get back here yourself. What d’you suppose
could
have happened to him? And, anyway, it’s
his
business.”

“Should I tell the police?”

“Tell his wife, if you want. Does she know?”

“She knows, but it sounds like she can’t be bothered.”

“Well, it’s not really our problem, either.”

E
arly the next morning, Vatanen woke up to birdsong in a sweet-smelling hayloft. The hare was lying in his armpit, apparently following the flitting of the swallows under the barn’s rafters—perhaps still building their nest there, or maybe feeding chicks already, judging by their busy dipping into the barn and out again.

The sun was gleaming through the gaps in the barn’s warped old beams, and the piled-up hay was a warm bed. Lost in thought, Vatanen lolled in the hay for an hour or so before he got up and went out with the hare in his arms.

There was an old meadow, full of wildflowers, and a brook murmuring beyond it. Vatanen put the hare down by the brook, stripped, and took a cold dip. A tight shoal of tiny fish, swimming upstream, took fright at the slightest movement, invariably forgetting their fear the next moment.

Vatanen’s thoughts turned to his wife in Helsinki. He began to feel depressed.

He didn’t like his wife. There was something not very nice about her: she’d been unpleasant, or at any rate totally focused on number one, all their married life. His wife had the habit of buying hideous clothes, out of style and uncomfortable; she never wore them for very long, because they soon lost their allure for her, too. She’d certainly have discarded Vatanen as well, if someone new were as easy to find as the clothes.

Early in the marriage his wife had single-mindedly set out to assemble a common domicile, a home. Their apartment had become an extravagant farrago of shallow and meretricious interior-decoration tips from women’s magazines. A pseudo-radicalism governed the design, with huge posters and clumsy modular furniture. It was difficult to inhabit the rooms without injury; all the items were at odds. The home was distinctly reminiscent of Vatanen’s marriage.

One spring, his wife became pregnant but quickly procured an abortion: a crib would have disturbed the harmony of the furnishings. But the real explanation came to Vatanen’s notice after the abortion: the baby wasn’t Vatanen’s.

“Jealous of a dead fetus?” his wife spluttered when he brought up the subject. “You can’t be!”

Vatanen settled the young hare at the edge of the brook, so it could reach down for a drink. Its little hare-lip began lapping up fresh water; it was astonishingly thirsty for such a small creature. When it had drunk, it began tucking into the leafage on the bank. Its hind leg was obviously still painful.

Maybe I should head back to Helsinki? Vatanen was wondering. What would they be saying in the office?

But what an office, what a job! A weekly magazine, everlastingly creating a stir about supposed abuses, while craftily keeping mum on any fundamental ills of society. Week after week the rag’s cover displayed the faces of no-goods—minxes, models, some rock singer’s latest offspring. When he was younger, Vatanen was pleased to have a reporter’s job on a major journal, particularly so when he had the chance to interview some misrepresented person, ideally someone oppressed by the state. That way he felt he was doing some good: such-and-such a defect, at least, was getting an airing. But now, with the years, he no longer supposed he was achieving anything: he was merely doing the absolutely necessary, satisfied if he personally was not contributing any misconceptions. His colleagues were in the same mold: frustrated at work, cynical in consequence. No need for marketing experts to tell journalists like these what stories the publisher expected. The stories were churned out. The magazine succeeded, but not by transmitting information—by diluting it, muffling its significance, cooking it into chatty entertainment. What a profession!