Popular Music from Vittula (17 page)

One evening in the first week of the summer holidays I was spying on Heinz as he sat out on his porch, bashing away at his typewriter. The noise was like that of an old-fashioned motor-bike. I crept along the house wall and got as far as the corner, carefully peered around it. I could see him in profile. A long, slightly curved and pointed nose, steel-framed glasses, and a few newly awakened mosquitoes swarming around his head, like a halo of old memories.

“
Tule tänne sinä!
Come here, my lad,” he shouted in standard Finnish without pausing in his typing.

I stiffened, scared stiff.

“
Tule tänne!”
he shouted once more, and that was an order. He stopped typing, took off his glasses and turned his ice-gray eyes to focus on me.

I stepped forward, my knees trembling. Stood there like a conscript, ashamed, out-maneuvered.

“I’ll give you fifty öre per tail,” he said.

I didn’t know what he was talking about. Felt stupid and afraid.

“There are too many mice in this house,” he went on. “Not easy to get to sleep with all that row at night.”

He scrutinized me in order to gauge my reaction, got up from his creaking chair and came over to me. I didn’t move a muscle, and it felt quite solemn despite my terror. He was the sort of man boys like to be praised by. With a flourish, he produced a brown wallet smelling of leather, and picked out a ten-kronor note. He dangled it in front of my nose, without a word, as if it had been a giant butterfly. The note was new and uncreased, something you didn’t often see. How had it managed to find its way up here through the whole of Sweden without being damaged? The old king was contemplating me in profile. Silvery gray in color, fine and delicate lines, high-quality paper with a watermark that looked like a bruise when seen against the light. And behind it I suddenly noticed something else. An electric guitar. A real one, my very own electric guitar.

I accepted the note. I didn’t crumple it up and put it in my pocket. I carried it home carefully between my finger and thumb, still without a single crease.

Like all village kids I was familiar with the technique for killing mice. You put a piece of raw potato peel at the side of the house wall, then stood nearby with a stick. You waited patiently without a sound until the mouse came creeping up. Then you battered it to death. If you found a fresh mouse hole in the ground you could pour in a few buckets of water. As the mouse started to drown it would come racing out of the hole and all you had to do was to bash it one.

The first day I killed three mice in this way, and two more the following day. Heinz duly paid up out of his leather wallet, but didn’t seem happy. The methods seemed to him old-fashioned and inefficient. That same afternoon he bought eight spring traps at the ironmonger’s in Pajala, with steel springs that broke the backs of the little creatures.
I learned how to bait them without cutting off my own fingers, using bits of bacon rind, crusts of cheese, and whatever else was at hand.

The next morning I found six dead bodies. The seventh trap was untouched and the eighth had gone off but the mouse had got away. I threw the woolly corpses away at the edge of the forest and reset the traps. When I went to check that evening, I found four more dead bodies. Heinz checked the cut-off tails and was pleased with my efforts, paid up on the spot, and encouraged me to keep it up.

The rest of the week I checked both morning and evening, and the daily catch amounted to about ten. I kept moving the traps, putting them in the pantry, in the food cellar, in the attic, but also outdoors under the porch steps or round at the back near the wood pile. The bodies were strangely flaccid, soft little fur bags with a snapped spine and crushed ribs. Sometimes the sharp steel spring ripped open the skin so that their intestines spilled out over the trap like violet-colored algae. That meant I had to grit my teeth and clean up the mess. The job had to be done, even if it was nauseating.

And sure enough, things quieted down in the house at night. But it was never completely silent. No matter how many mice were killed, more and more kept coming, new litters were born, new guests moved in the moment the old ones had disappeared.

Moreover the dead bodies started to be a problem. The fox ate as many as he could, but the remainder soon started to smell. Before long the edge of the forest was swarming with crows. They would come especially at dawn, screaming and croaking as they asserted their pecking order, and disturbing Heinz’s sleep even more than the mice had done. He gave me a spade from out of the shed and got me to dig a hole out of earshot in the forest into which I was to start emptying the bodies.

It was high summer by now. Skylarks hovered up in the air like frayed propellers, starlings whistled and told tall tales in the aspens, pied wagtails pulled juicy worms out of the potato beds, and house martins sat
on the overhead wires plucking lice from their wing feathers. And under the ground, the mice multiplied at a mind-boggling rate.

As time went by I became more and more of an expert on mouse behavior. Many people think mice are chaotic little furry creatures who scamper around at random and frightened to death. But as I messed about with the traps outside the house I’d noticed all kinds of mouse paths. They were often difficult to see, meandering like little tunnels through the dry grass from the last year, closest to the ground. Mice have their own paths just as ants do, and I soon discovered that placing traps along these routes nearly always produced results. The best way of preventing new mice from colonizing the house, therefore, was to mine their approach roads.

The tactic was only partially successful, however. Conventional mouse traps have a basic constructional fault in that once they have gone off, they are harmless until they’ve been re-set. Meanwhile, there is nothing to stop mice proceeding past unhindered. I thought about this problem for a while, then submitted a plan to Heinz. He approved wholeheartedly.

We borrowed a few dented zinc-plated buckets from a neighbor. I dug them down at strategic points in the middle of the mice paths, so that the edge was level with the ground. Then I poured in water until they were half full. I placed a thin layer of grass and leaves over the top, and tried to make everything seem as natural as possible.

The next morning I went to check. Six mice had fallen into the first bucket. They’d swum round and round without being able to either touch the bottom or scramble up the sides, grown weaker and weaker, and eventually drowned. There were five dead bodies in the second bucket. Another seven in the third. The last bucket had a hole in it and the water had leaked out: two terrified souls were running round at the bottom, and I trampled them to death with my heel. Twenty dead mice! A fantastic score! There were four more in the spring traps, so when I snipped off the tails and presented them to Heinz, he was most
impressed and handed over twelve whole kronor. His narrow mouth showed signs of a smile, a most unusual sight, like a wolf trying to laugh. I threw the dead bodies into the hole in the forest, changed the leaking bucket, and dug down some more buckets and tubs in suitable places.

The next few weeks produced very satisfactory profits. The mice fell into the traps in hordes, scratched desperately at the sides of the bucket until they were exhausted, then drowned. The bodies were much more attractive than those from the spring traps. At first the sheer numbers made the job repulsive, several pounds of them to cart away every day. But you got used to it. And it helped to think about the coins dropping into the tin back at home, money that was growing rapidly into an electric guitar.

Now at last Heinz could see that the war was being won. Only occasionally could he hear the soft pitter-patter of some valiant little warrior who had managed to thread his way through the minefield. But generally speaking the poor chap found himself caught in a spring trap soon afterward. Heinz was sleeping soundly now, his typewriter clattered away like an old-fashioned machine gun and the whole of the porch smelled of insect spray as the mosquito plague had started in earnest. Sometimes he would pull a sheet of paper out of the typewriter and read it aloud in his high Wagnerian voice, to test the rhythm of the language. Austere, powerful prose describing hardships and troop movements, vivid pictures of war during the Finnish winter, frost and sharp pine needles inside the blankets, here and there some crude military humor, sexual deprivation in foul-smelling camps, and now and then romantic sections with nubile Finnish beauties feeding bandaged war heroes, or caressing a German military cheek in the evening in a blacked-out canteen.

In the meantime I continued to rationalize the business. For instance, I noticed it wasn’t necessary to cover the buckets with grass. The mice fell in even so. They didn’t seem to have time to slow down as they hurtled along the paths, but they just dropped down even though the chasm
was in full view. But on the other hand, the mice paths stopped being used as the mice died off. New ones were inaugurated elsewhere, so I had to keep my eyes peeled and keep moving the buckets.

The grave in the forest filled up before one could blink. I topped it up with soil and dug a new one. That was also full before we knew where we were. The foxes kept digging up the rotting carcasses and dragging them off in all directions. Before long their dead bellies were full of maggots burrowing under their skin. The heat made things worse, and whenever the wind was blowing in from the forest there was no mistaking—despite the distance—the disgusting sweet-and-sour stench.

Heinz had an idea. He found an old petrol can and filled it up. At regular intervals I had to lug it out into the forest and empty it into the hole. Then I threw a lit match after it. With a deep sigh the heap of corpses caught fire and kept on burning with a barely visible glow. There was a damp crackling noise as fur charred, whiskers drooped then melted, ants came scuttling out of the eye sockets and shriveled up, legs flailing, maggots wriggled their way up but were fried and liquified, pupae burst and half-formed, blind bluebottles squirmed helplessly. The smoke was black and greasy, stinking of wool and burned blood, and clung to my clothes if I stood too close. It spread out among the treetops like a menacing specter, a war god, a swelling harbinger of death that slowly moved away and then dispersed, leaving nothing behind but the taste of fatty ash in my mouth. When the pyre had burned itself out I filled in the hole with soil and moss and piled heavy stones on top of it until not even the foxes would think it was worth the trouble.

Think of the money. If I did that, it became more bearable. Count up the tails, collect them in a bundle and then cash them in with the dapper gentleman who was spending the evening on his porch, sipping coffee. It was a summer job, that’s all. No worse than scrubbing clean the outdoor toilets at Pajala camping site.

After the evening check I generally sat in my room and played the
old open-reel tape recorder on which I’d saved some of the best tunes from the Top Ten program on the radio. With a series of sensual shudders I would listen to the remarkable, fantastic sounds an electric guitar could produce, spiky meows, wolf-like howls, dentist’s drills or the roar of a souped-up moped careering through the village. I imitated them inadequately on my old acoustic guitar. At the same time, back at the cottage, the first mouse was tumbling into the water. Starting to swim. And swim. And swim.

* * *

One morning in mid-July I stumbled upon a mouse-path that was wider than any I’d ever seen before. It ran from the forest to the potato bed alongside a green ditch, well hidden by straggly brushwood. Here and there it was joined by paths from the house and the outdoor toilet, becoming even wider, an impressive main road. A well-trampled mouse run, a major road for mice. I followed it in a state of increasing excitement. Past the old barn that was half-full of old hay. I paused here. A new path led from the barn. Almost as wide. I was certain it hadn’t been there before. And there, a few feet short of the potato plot, the two paths joined. Came together to form a multilane highway.

I realized it was the potatoes they were after. The tops were tall and green, the widow’s relatives had continued growing them there even after she’d been put away, and underneath, inside the mounds, the tubers were growing fat, nicely tender and yellow. The mice were flocking over to binge on potatoes all night long. Gnawing and munching, then staggering back home to their hideaways, choc-a-bloc.

There was no time to lose. Before half an hour had passed I’d got hold of a rusty gasoline drum, and then spent a large part of the afternoon sawing it in two with a hack-saw. Then it was just a matter of digging it down. In the middle of the autobahn. I loaded the earth into a wheelbarrow and tipped it out in the forest. After a lot of sweat and toil, I was ready to sink the drum into the ground and fill in the gaps
round the rim. Then I lugged bucket after bucket of water from the well until it was more or less half full.

It was evening by now. The typewriter had fallen silent. The porch steps were deserted. I knocked on the door with the day’s collection of mouse-tails in my hand, and found Heinz busy packing. His rucksack was in the middle of the floor, and clothes were draped over chair backs and on the table. Heinz dug out the money he owed me while darting around, and explained that he was going to Finland for about a week to dig out some information from various archives. He needed to establish the precise location of some houses in a village before they were burned down, and to scour the lists of local residents. As a writer he was very meticulous about details, like every true author ought to be—although in his view a lot of them were very cavalier on this point, especially the new wave of prose writers. Meanwhile, perhaps, I might be so kind as to keep an eye on the house?

I promised I would, and was told where to find the key. It was about then that I started to feel queasy. I had a bit of a headache, and there was a feeling of stiffness in my armholes. Perhaps a thunderstorm was on the way. I went out onto the porch, and sure enough, an ominous bank of clouds was approaching from Finland. It looked like the mushroom of smoke from the cremation pit, but it was bigger, more ominous. There was a dull rumble, as if from Russian tanks. Heinz came out and stood beside me. I was surprised when he put his arm round my shoulders, almost like a father. The air became more oppressive, harder to breathe. Beads of sweat broke out on my brow. In the darkness under the mass of clouds there were flashes of lightning, like darting fish.