The Beggar and the Hare (11 page)

Pykström poured himself a cup of coffee, adding some whole milk and four lumps of sugar, plus two which he put in his mouth. He took his camouflage jacket from the back of the door, checked that his cigarettes were in the front pocket and told his wife that he was going to heat the sauna, because he didn’t feel in the mood this evening. As had been the case for years. Ever since his heart attack his interest had died, and Harri Pykström said he had moved from a focus on intercourse to the next phase of love. Banter.

Pykström put some logs in the basket, looked through the window and saw his wife wiping her forehead on her sponge bracelet. He wondered why he did not feel free, though he had arranged everything to that end.
He had early retirement, a cabin in Lapland, logs in his basket, a small-bore rifle just in case.

Once at the sauna Pykström made sure that his wife could not see him, and fetched a bottle from under the stone base. A little drop would be OK, a snort, a quick one, after all it was Friday night and there was a nice sunset. After the heart attack his doctor had forbidden him to drink, but they couldn’t forbid you to live. On weekdays Pykström bought light beer on the Swedish side of the border more or less as a soft drink that didn’t even give you a hangover. It made you slightly tipsy, and that would do.

He put some birch logs in the stove, tearing off some bark to act as kindling. His son had brought thirty-two cubic yards of dry birchwood in the truck and asked for the umpteenth time why he didn’t have electricity installed. An electric sauna in a Lapland cabin? True, he felt a bit bad about using imported logs, but if he didn’t have the strength to chop the firewood himself, then that was that. It was always the same story, thought Harri Pykström. There were too many things to make one’s life easier, even though their original plan had been to live surrounded by nature on nature’s terms, in the grip of wild beasts and the merciless elements. This reality had slapped him in the face like a wet rag, for nothing would prevent one from getting older, not even the realisation of a youthful dream.

Pykström sat down on the top bench of the sauna, listening to the crackle of the fire and the roar of the furnace. Perhaps just one more mouthful, perhaps just another swig, how could another little drop do him any harm?

T
hat autumn it would be two years since the heart attack.

Harri Pykström had been applying for bail for a soldier who had gone AWOL, when his chest had exploded. On waking up in the recovery room, Harri Pykström knew that his new life was located in Perä-Kompio – where for several years now the Finnish army had had a cabin for sale, but he had lacked the courage, or the time, to buy it.

It was there that Pykström went. There that Pykström would die. At the end of a quad track, no mod cons, eighteen thousand euros, easy to look after.

‘And what about me?’ Mrs Pykström inquired with a cautious squawk.

‘I won’t go anywhere without you,’ Pykström said.

‘If you’re planning to go somewhere in Lapland, you can go alone.’

Pykström packed his clothes, signed the deed of sale and flew to Kittilä. At a sports shop in Muonio he bought a quad bike, rode to the cabin and began to put it in order with an axe, a handsaw and a lot of motivation. But what could he hope to do, a man who weighed two hundred and seventy pounds and was recovering from a heart operation? He had had to use his satellite phone to call the emergency medical services helicopter, and resume his convalescence at Rovaniemi District Hospital.

Mrs Pykström had sworn at his hospital bedside that she would never again leave her fat, crazy husband alone, not even for an instant. Even Jorma, from Australia, expressed the modest hope that he would not immediately have to fly back again for the funeral. With his hand on the complete works of Arto Paasilinna, Harri Pykström promised to take things more easily.

Outside labour was hired to complete the repairs on
the house, and workmen came to the site all the way from Helsinki, Estonia and Norway. Pykström was looking for new ways to make money, and one of them was a plan to write short stories of the kind he had read as a young student in a flatshare, and had later liked to read while sitting on the toilet. As adjutant of a logistics company he had had to pound a typewriter every day, so even a whole novel might not have been out of his range. A wilderness novel for readers all over the Arctic region. He had told his wife that once the fibre optic cables had been installed on their property she ought to take a telecommuting job.

‘You’re crazy.’

Mrs Pykström had a degree in cultural anthropology and was working on a dissertation called
The World of Woman: Research Diaries from the World’s Beginning to its Hypothetical End
. She promised to wait until the repairs were finished and then review the situation – perhaps here she would at last be able to complete her dissertation. Or at any rate she would have to wait until her crazy husband had recovered his senses.

Harri Pykström had attached a lifting apparatus to the trailer of his quad and helped the building workers to hoist the materials from the foot of the hill. He always did this stripped naked. When his wife asked him why, he replied that he was master in his own home and could do as he liked. This was nothing new to Mrs Pykström, for she had always treated her husband as an object of research: he possessed something in common with the men of the Huchu tribe studied by Bronislaw Malinowski, a tribe that cultivated a penis display ritual. Sincerity, bragging, a zest for life. Worship of wooden idols, self-elevation and self-abasement. How could one leave such a man? Leave him alone even for a few minutes?

When a man and a woman are fused together as a couple, they stay closer to each other than any pair of animals. An osmosis takes place in which one becomes a part of the other, no matter how different they are. Or even, in the view of outsiders, incompatible. Pykström and his wife loathed each other’s respective hobbies of shooting and dancing in front of the television set; they loathed each other’s favourite films. Harri Pykström had been sick only once in his life, when he saw his wife putting
Cocktail
on the video player. But this was precisely the basis of their love. When Harri Pykström called his wife a goddamn meatball, only Mrs Pykström knew what it really meant. My dear, my treasure. Come and warm the bed, let’s make more children even though we’re fifty, even though I have prostate trouble and you no longer have a uterus or ovaries. Mrs Pykström and Harri Pykström were aware of all these things; they had even discussed the matter and agreed about its old-fashioned sanctity. It was the sort of relationship that the young no longer understood at all, as they were too busy searching for themselves. The young were in quest of their own ego, their innermost being, and the best place to hold a rave-up. Instead they ought to be looking for someone. Someone to understand. Someone to support. Someone to love. Someone to make nice meals for, no matter how numbingly dreadful it was to share the same roof with them.

For telecommuting Mrs Pykström needed a broadband connection and more room for a study. Little by little the Pykström’s cabin had become a modern private residence, which just happened to be situated in the middle of nowhere. Except that it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere at all, for six miles away there was a skiing centre with more cultural, entertainment and sporting
events than there had been in their old neighbourhood of Vantaa, next to Helsinki.

One morning Harri Pykström noticed he was living in a house that was identical in every respect to the one he had left, and again felt a stab in his chest. He had planned to spend his time fishing, hunting, living in harmony with nature, yet here he was riding to the village on his quad bike, buying the same Euro Shopper products as he could anywhere in Finland or Europe and sitting in the local pub to watch Premier League football. Pykström was not hermit material.

Pykström lit a fresh cigarette on the embers of the last one and opened another can of beer. The sauna thermometer read fifty-five degrees Celsius. He went outside to fetch more logs.

V
atanescu stopped by the edge of a narrow brook. He had already filled six plastic bags with berries and had taken them back to base camp. He was now on the last two, and found himself faced with a logistical problem. How were the bags to reach the customers?

The sweat trickled, the brook babbled, and Vatanescu wondered if it was all right to drink the water. When Panos Milos had drunk the water of the river in his home village he had grown a third arm, according to the story Panos’s mother had told, at least. The rabbit jumped onto a stone in the middle of the brook and lapped some water with its tongue.

Then Vatanescu drank, too, and the water tasted better than his first bottle of Coca-Cola in the summer of 1990, with Maria on the bridge of the ancient ruined city of Stenea. Vatanescu splashed water on his face and dried his hands on the hem of his shirt. The white
collared shirt had turned black with the juice of the berries, as had his hands. When he raised his eyes, on the other side of the brook he saw a small building. Bending down in front of it was a naked man built like a barrel.

Are there people here? What should I say to him?

What do people like? Be honest.

Vatanescu waved his hand, and shouted that he was an everyman.

Harri Pykström had just finished putting the logs in the basket when he saw someone gesturing to him from the other side of the brook. On his land, on one of his sauna evenings, it was hardly likely to be a surveyor. A man with black hair, wearing a quilted jacket. The man looked like a Sicilian, or maybe even a terrorist. At the stage of intoxication that Pykström had reached any kind of emotional reaction was possible, and he chose fear. It took the outward form of anger. Filthy invaders, he thought. He also reflected that if they were on one’s own private land it was all right to shoot them, and went to get his small-bore rifle from the sauna changing room. The rifle was meant for shooting willow grouse and other small game, but could also be used to repel attacks by foreign invaders.

The man was still waving on the other side of the brook when Pykström got down on one knee and took aim. The man was holding something white, and some creature was jumping around at his feet. Pykström pulled the trigger.

Vatanescu threw himself flat on his face at the edge of the brook. The water zipped around him four more times, and then there was silence. He kept his head underwater, like a small child who hides his eyes and thinks no one can see him.

Pykström stampeded across the rocky ground towards the brook and told Vatanescu to get up.

Though Vatanescu did not understand what Pykström said, he did understand the gestures. He got up, dripping with water, and put his hands in the air. In both of them there were plastic bags full of berries. His chest was red.

I died. I would have liked to live.

The red was from the lingonberries.

‘What man?!’ Pykström shouted in English. Then, in a mixture of English and Russian, ‘You mafia kriminal. Me finski soldat!’

Berry-picker,
Vatanescu explained in his own language and in a foreign one, showing him the bags.

Everyman.

Rights.

He’s lying, Pykström thought, the Sicilian is lying. Even if he was telling the truth, what could be worse than these people who pick berries on other people’s land, enriching themselves at their expense? Why the hell was it necessary to have a permit in order to dig a well, build a sewer or an annexe, but not to pick berries? Certainly no Sicilian had the right to pick those berries, though Harri Pykström had no intention of ever picking them himself. Even the kids from those Helsinki families made him nervous, getting lost on holiday weekends and filling their plastic cups with berries to make homemade pies.

Pykström and Vatanescu stood face to face. One was starting to feel cold because he was naked, the other because he was wet. But Pykström refused to give in, and Vatanescu did not dare to do or say anything.