Popular Music from Vittula (10 page)

Breathing in. Melted snow. The crow turns one more time, inexplicable.

Then it happens. Two terse crackling sounds. And then the snow-white surface splits asunder, cracking and splintering. A torrent of black water. A rumbling, new cracks, shattering axe-blows all over the mass of ice. Swelling blisters split open. Movement everywhere, everything starts moving. The whole of this incredible marble floor.

A minute later, and the river’s risen more than two feet. Banks are flooded, black fingers of water probe their way forward. Enormous floes, a hundred tons, split wide open as everything round about forces its way in. They’re thrust up on end, like glittering whales leaping then plunging back down into the sparkling deep. They’re forced one over the other, like continents in the age of drift. They break up, low and bellow. Beat their foreheads on the bridge parapet, are crunched down
to clinking icicles. Noises you never hear otherwise, crashing and banging, creaking, sizzling, rustling, clanging, squeaking, it’s non-stop music. And we’re in the midst of it.

Then the locals arrive. Park at the end of the bridge and come running out to join us, lining up along the iron railings; old men and old women, young lads and young lasses and little girls and tiny tots held tightly onto. Cousins and neighbors and old pals and even solitaries, as if the river had gone around the village and bade them all to attend, as if they’d all gotten the urge at the same time.

We just stand there. There’s not much to add. We simply watch and listen and feel the brittle concrete shuddering under our feet. Ice floes hurtling past, one after another, there’s no end to them, an endless crashing, broken and chipped. And then we feel the bridge getting dragged away from its foundations, it’s melting away, it starts to swing around upstream like a colossal icebreaker, we stand forward as it batters its way though the pack-ice, enormously powerful, at the start of a long and adventurous journey.

“Rock ’n’ roll music!”
I yell to Niila.

He knows what I mean.

* * *

Once you’ve discovered the power the music has, there’s no going back. It’s like the first time you tried wanking. You can’t stop. You’ve opened the bottle and the foam comes spurting out with such force that it rips the door off its hinges and leaves a gaping hole behind. We all remember those films about submarines where the depth charges hit their target and men covered in oil rush up to the watertight steel doors in the bulkhead and try to close them, but they’re thrown about like bits of bark by the surging mass of water.

The College of Music at Nacka, on the other hand, was like practicing swimming on dry ground.

A bit like a spindly old schoolteacher teaching in primary school with
wall charts and hands covered in chalk, trying to teach young lads how to masturbate. And to round it all off she sits at the harmonium and sings pedagogical wanking songs.

Niila started coming over much more often than he used to, and he always brought the record with him. As a result Sis suddenly turned into a human being and let us play it on her gramophone, as long as she could listen as well. Somehow or other, music brought us closer together, and it dawned on her that I wouldn’t be a snotty-nosed kid for the rest of my life. Sometimes her friends were there as well. They sat on her bed, or on cushions on the floor: good-looking senior school girls who smelled nice of hair spray, chewing gum noisily. They wore tight jumpers, and had breasts. Mascara eyes. They got the measure of Niila and me—little brats—and tried to tease us and make us blush. Asked if we had girlfriends. If we’d ever kissed anybody. Described what to do with your tongue—it was pretty disgusting, enough to turn you on, although we were in our latency period and didn’t really understand the point of the other sex.

One weekend night, when Mum and Dad had gone off to play car bingo at the local football ground, we marched into Sis’s room without knocking. The girls screamed. There was a crate of beer in the middle of the floor. We backed out, but Sis dragged us in and locked the door. Then she threatened to thump us so hard if we squealed on her that our milk teeth would puncture what little brain we had, and she’d pull out so much of our hair that we’d go bald before we had a full mane, and then she’d scratch out our guts with her red-painted nails and slowly roast us with Dad’s blowlamp that he used to wax our skis, and a lot more on the same theme.

I played the idiot in order to save my life—a good tactic in the Torne Valley context—and muttered something about how they were free to drink as much Tizer as they liked. Then the girls all burst out laughing and one of them said we had to taste a drop as well so that we were just as guilty as they were, that was the only way to seal our lips. She opened
a bottle and came up close, and I felt her permanent wave on my cheek and her hair spray in my nostrils and her warm breath all over my face. She took hold of me by the cheeks, quite firmly, while another girl held the bottle over my mouth, and I opened it wide. She came so close that I could feel the softness of her tits, I leaned over backward like a suckling child waiting for its bottle, and I sucked and I drank and I sucked again, like at a woman’s breast.

The beer tasted of straw. It stung my throat, bubbled and foamed. I lay back and gazed up into the girl’s beautifully painted eyes: they were as blue as the river. She must have been at least fourteen, and she looked down at me so warmly, so tenderly. I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life, fall asleep in her embrace. Tears welled up in my eyes. She noticed, and took away the bottle. I’d drunk at least half of it. She zoomed in on me with her lipstick lips, and then she kissed me.

The girls all cheered. Sis smiled, her benevolence was unprecedented. I felt dizzy, and propped myself up against the wall. Niila was forced to drink the rest of the bottle. He did his best and was rewarded with applause. Panting for breath, he struggled for ages to unbutton his shirt, then produced the record. Then he sat down next to me, and Sis started the gramophone.

The girls went mad.

We must have played it at least twenty times.

I leaned against Niila and felt so happy, I thought I’d burst.

* * *

Afterward we found ourselves standing in the yard, shivering. The chill came tumbling down from the clear sky, it would be a bitterly cold night. Niila hung around, wanted to ask something, but didn’t really dare. In the end he dragged me into the garage. Closed the door as quietly as he could, and then crept up close to my ear.

“What did she do?” he whispered.

I grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Stick out your tongue,” I said. “No, not as much as that.”

He pulled it back in so that just the tip was sticking out, round and wet and pink. I stuck mine out as well. We stood there without moving for a while. Then I leaned forward and kissed his salty, boyish mouth.

In which a piece of hardboard is carved, a mouth is opened, and the stage is trodden for the first time

The sixties were coming to an end, and in the big, wide world pop music was coming into its own. The Beatles went to India and learned to play the sitar, California was overwhelmed by Flower Power and psychedelic rock, and England bubbled over with bands like the Kinks, Procol Harum, The Who, Small Faces, and The Hollies.

Very little of all that reached as far out as Pajala. Sis did her best to keep up: she hung up a copper wire between a pair of pine trees in the garden as an antenna, and tuned in to Radio Luxembourg on our ancient steam radio. We occasionally went to Kiruna to see The Shanes from Tuolluvaara, who had appeared with the Beatles in 1966, or the Hep Stars when they happened to be passing through—but only after long, cautionary conversations with Mum behind closed doors.

It was a long way from Pajala to the rest of the world. And when Swedish Television eventually got around to broadcasting one of its rare pop concerts, it was a recording of an event several years earlier with Elvis Presley. You simply had to take whatever was on offer.

I sat down with great expectations. Sis opened the wood veneer doors
shielding the screen from view, and switched it on quickly, in order to give the tube plenty of time to warm up. It matured like a loaf in the oven, and eventually produced a picture. The electrical signals were routed via the Kaknäs Tower in Stockholm and set off on their long, meandering journey over Sweden. The relay stations received the signals, and passed them on to the next, and the next, and eventually, just like one of those gigantic trains with neverending wagons laden with iron ore, they staggered as far as the Pajala TV mast on the top of Mount Jupukka, were duly transformed, and tumbled down like shelled peas into our black-and-white box.

And there he was. Elvis. Before he’d been sent to Germany as a GI, at the height of his career, a slim, virile young man with a wry smile, greasy hair, and legs as pliable as pipe-cleaners. Dad groaned and made a point of marching out to the garage. Mum pretended to knit, but she couldn’t take her eyes off this sweaty stud in his black leather jacket. Sis bit her nails down to the quick, and wept into her pillow all night long. I wanted a guitar.

The next day, when school was over, I went down to the woodwork shop in the basement and made something looking like a guitar from a piece of hardboard. Nailed on a bit of wood to make a bridge. Stretched a few elastic bands to make strings. Attached a piece of string so that I could hang the thing over my shoulder.

The only place where I could count on having a bit of peace was the garage. I sneaked in when nobody was looking, spread my legs wide apart on the concrete floor, and looked out over the packed audience. I could hear the shrieks, and imagined the thousands and thousands of teenyboppers surging forward toward the stage. Then I launched into
Jailhouse Rock
, which I knew by heart, thanks to Sis’s record. I tried wiggling my bottom. Felt the music pulsing through me, powerful and spicy. Then I grasped the toilet roll I was using as a microphone and opened my mouth. And started singing. But it was a song without words—I was only moving my lips, just as in the music lessons at
school. I was miming to the music from deep down in my soul, wiggling my hips, bouncing about and belting out chords until the lump of hardboard trembled.

There was a sudden noise, and I froze in terror. Just for a moment I was convinced the roar of approval could be heard as far away as the church. But I was alone in the garage, and soon I was back into the make-believe. Absorbed by the acclaim, surrounded by lights and clamor. My hips were quivering, the stage was quaking, my body arched backward.

Then Niila materialized. He’d crept in as quietly as a lynx, and been studying me in silence, for God only knows how long. I stiffened in shame. Waited for the scornful smile, the splatter as I was squashed against the wall with a flyswatter.

Only once afterward have I ever felt as naked. That was on the train from Boden to Älvsbyn, in the toilet. I’d just had a crap, stood up, and was wiping my bottom with my trousers around my ankles when the door opened and the female conductor asked to see my ticket. She claimed she’d knocked first, but the hell she had.

Niila sat down on an upturned enamel bucket and scratched away thoughtfully at a scab. Eventually he asked me in a low voice what I was doing.

“Playing,” I muttered, deeply embarrassed.

He sat in silence for what seemed an age, staring at my badly carved lump of hardboard.

“Can I have a go?” he asked at length.

At first I thought he was teasing me. But then I realized to my surprise that he was serious. Feeling increasingly relieved, I hung the board over his shoulder and showed him how to hold it. He started copying me, who’d in turn been copying Elvis. He swayed tentatively from side to side.

“You’ve got to get your legs working as well,” I told him.

“Why?”

“For the girls, of course.”

He suddenly looked shy.

“In that case you’ll have to sing.”

I nonchalantly raised the toilet roll to my lips and mimed silently, tossing my head from side to side. Niila looked disapprovingly at me.

“You must sing properly!”

“Bugger that!”

“Yes, you must.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes, for the girls!” said Niila in Finnish. I burst out laughing, and a wave of warmth flowed between us.

That was how it all began, at home in the garage surrounded by skis and snow shovels and winter tyres. Niila played, and I opened my mouth and let my voice do its thing. Hoarse and shrill and bellowing. I crowed, I whined, it sounded worse than the dog, but for the first time in my life I dared to sing.

* * *

A few weeks later I happened to mention during recess that Niila and I had started a pop band. That’s certainly how it felt. After all, we’d stood in the garage every day after school, and blown up each other’s dream world into enormous, brightly colored balloons. And as I’ve always had far too low a sense of self-preservation, not to mention a tongue loose at both ends, it just slipped out.

The sensation spread like wildfire. This was Pajala in the sixties, remember: an earth-shattering piece of world news wasn’t necessary. Niila and I were surrounded, it was the lunch break, and we were subjected to scorn and accusations of lying. The ring closed in on us, and in the end there was only one way out. We were forced to perform at the next Happy Hour.

Unfortunately our teacher agreed. She got the caretaker to dig out an old record player, and I borrowed Sis’s record of
Jailhouse Rock
when she
wasn’t looking. We were going to mime, and I borrowed a girl’s skipping rope to use as a microphone. I was going to sing into the handle.

As early as the rehearsal at break, it was obvious it would be a disaster. The gramophone wouldn’t work at 45 revs, it would only play at 33 or 78. The record sounded like either funeral bassoons in Tibet, or Donald Duck at the circus. We chose the latter.

The bell rang, and the class sat down at their desks. Niila was holding on to the hardboard guitar with a grip of iron, looking panic-stricken. The boys started throwing erasers at us even before we’d started. I picked up the skipping rope and thought about imminent death. Teacher was just about to introduce us, but I reckoned we might just as well get it over with, and slammed down the needle.