The Hummingbird (27 page)

At the weekend there was a disco down by the shore that attracted youngsters from the neighbouring cities and villages, and brawls were a regular occurrence. Ákos had a Mohican haircut, and back then that was enough to start a fight. It was thanks to their father that the policemen from Kanizsa never gave Ákos a beating, but if things at the Strand disco got really out of hand and the police from the neighbouring town were called, Ákos was always their favourite victim. Sometimes he would come home covered from head to toe in dried blood and their mother would weep and cry that the boy would never come to any good. By this time their father was already dead.

Anna woke and realised that the CD had stopped. Silence tingled in her ears. She had dozed off on the sofa. She got up and went out to the balcony for a cigarette. The chilled, moist air bit her bare legs. She leaned against the wet railing. The sleeves of her nightgown were soaked.

She felt a strong urge to call Ákos, to ask if he too remembered, to ask him about their father’s death. Anna had been so young at the time, in her last year at nursery school. In the photograph on her bedside table, their father looked just like Ákos.

She couldn’t recall his voice. All she could remember was the distant cry of
vigyáz, vigyáz.
She had a vague recollection of her father reading her a bedtime story. Mazsola. It must have been Mazsola.

Ákos didn’t answer the telephone.
The number you have dialled is currently unavailable,
the familiar female voice informed her. Anna went to bed. She couldn’t get to

We lived in the reception centre for two years,
wallahi.
Imagine, two years. Mum seemed to wake up when we finally got something more permanent, residence permits and an apartment. I don’t know what took so long. Not to mention the naturalisation applications. I always imagine that the Department of Immigration as this enormous building, each floor full of cabinets, and when your papers arrive they’re filed away in the lowest drawer of the first cabinet on the first floor. Sometimes someone comes along and moves them to the next drawer, then after a while someone else moves them on to the next drawer. So your papers are moving from one drawer to the next, slowly making their way up to the top floor where, in the room at the far end of the floor, there’s a huge desk full of more drawers, surprise surprise. All this happens really slowly, because the few members of staff that work there have better things to do than move applications from one drawer to the next – they have to sit at their computers, for instance, and go to loads of meetings all the time – so it’s only very rarely that they’re assigned to moving paperwork around, once a week at most, and there are millions of drawers. Thankfully the applications never go missing. They don’t shout, don’t rattle around and they don’t get hungry. They never get depressed, frightened or pissed off, and they never complain. It’s so much easier to encounter a piece of paper than a real human being. But it takes an age for the papers to make their way to the lowest drawer of the final cabinet, and from there they’ll one day make it up on to the desk itself, where, of course, there’s another pile of paperwork waiting to be dealt with.

And one day, the person whose job it is to sign and stamp applications (between 9.30 a.m. and 9.45 a.m.) is on duty and your papers are on the top of the pile and abracadabra you have a residence permit. After that you don’t have to worry about little things like being deported, being taken in a police car to a holding cell at the airport and from there herded on to a flight back to where you fucking well came from, because here in Finland we know better than you about whether it’s safe to go
back there, whether your rights will be upheld or whether you and your children will be able to live a life of dignity like the lives of the Eastern European gypsies, because I’m sure they love living in landfill sites. I’m sure no Finn would ever want to leave a life like that if they happened to be born there. No, no.

Sometimes people even get their hands on the big prize: citizenship. But the desk that deals with citizenship applications is in the President’s office and that’s why it takes even longer. Just thought I’d mention that.

Once we finally had our residence permits, permanent ones no less, the council agreed to rent us an apartment in Rajapuro. We moved into the ghetto and Mum was thrilled. She never looked out of the windows to see what it was like out there: graffitied concrete walls and half-empty car parks, kids with their heads in bags of glue round the back of the houses. She probably walked to the supermarket with her eyes closed, so as not to break the illusion of the start of our wonderful new life. Still, she must have heard all the drunks. The whole place was a forest built of dirty concrete, a thicket of trees as far as the eye could see, a place with trolls grunting on the pathways and creatures lurking in the corners, a place where the glimmer of a fairy tale shone only in the glazed eyes of the drug addicts.

Mum decorated the bookshelves with junk from Kurdistan, cooked
kubba
and
birinc
and listened to old Ciwan Haco cassettes all day long. Dad stapled a green-white-and-red flag to the wall so that the sun would shine even in the middle of winter. He set up a satellite dish on the balcony, and after that the TV was on all the time, belching out news from across the mountains, or at least from Denmark, and our living room had become a vacuum-sealed jar where Mum and Dad were petrified of the slightest leak, because then their new life might start to go off
.

23

‘
HEY
!
I
’
VE
GOT
IT
!’
cried Rauno as he rushed into the staffroom where Esko, Anna and Sari were quietly sipping their morning coffee. It was eight o’clock. Sari’s youngest had been up all night with a temperature; he’d complained of a sore ear and eventually they’d taken him to hospital. Sari looked pale and exhausted. Esko looked hung-over again. As he raised his cup, black coffee spilled on to the table. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair a mess. Anna didn’t look much sprightlier. She had woken up repeatedly, sleeping in fits, without dreaming, without feeling invigorated.

‘I’ve got it! You could at least pretend to be interested,’ exclaimed Rauno, dispelling the sullen atmosphere in the room.

‘What time do you get to work?’ Esko asked sourly.

‘Well, tell us what you’ve found,’ said Sari, almost as sourly.

‘Guess,’ Rauno teased them.

‘Just tell us,’ Esko thundered.

‘The pendant. Look. It didn’t even take very long in the age of the internet. I scanned an image of the pendant on to my computer, ran it through a search engine and here you have it!’

Rauno waved a sheet of A4 paper with a small dark square in the corner.

‘What the hell is this?’ Esko snapped.

‘Take a closer look. This is it.’

The fatigued atmosphere of a moment ago was gone. Everyone crowded around the sheet of paper and saw in the dark square the same figure as that in the pendant found in the pockets of both murdered joggers. It was like something drawn by a child. The figure had clumsily jutting limbs and was wearing a feather hat. It looked harmless, almost amusing.

‘What on earth is this?’ asked Anna.

‘Huitzilopochtli.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Huitzilopochtli,’ Rauno repeated. ‘I don’t know how you pronounce it. But this is how you spell it.’ Rauno wrote out the word beneath the image. The others looked on, speechless.

‘What a ridiculous word,’ said Esko.

‘And quite a terrible man by all accounts,’ Rauno added. ‘I’ve been reading up on him. Huitzilopochtli was the Aztec god of war and the sun, the most important of all their gods. A bloodthirsty man, a real beast. He craved human sacrifices and human blood; the Aztecs were required to sacrifice lots of people every day to appease him. Imagine, they used to kill hundreds, even thousands of people every single day. And it wasn’t a tidy affair; it was all blood and guts and religious fervour. Our killer is an amateur compared to this. And necklaces like this have never been handed out in any sports shop – I’ve already checked. So it certainly looks like the killer put them in the victims’ pockets.’

Rauno had printed off a selection of different images of the ruthless god and the group leafed through them in silence. The black-and-white image on the pendant was a simplified version. The colour photographs showed the figure more clearly, complete with headdress and clothes adorned with numerous feathers, a staff fashioned like a snake in his hand and something that looked like a drum. In some of the images, the god’s face was black.

The Aztecs were a warfaring people, who enslaved the weaker Indian tribes and sacrificed people to appease the gods. Huitzilopochtli, in particular, craved bloodshed. In some cases, live sacrifices had their hearts cut out. Victims were also routinely burned and drowned. Sometimes the Aztecs even ate their victims.

‘Pretty sick, if you ask me,’ Esko exclaimed after reading through Rauno’s print-offs.

‘And why does he need to have such a difficult name?’ Sari wondered. ‘It’s impossible to say it properly. And there are no instructions on how to pronounce it.’

‘No wonder they had to keep him happy; imagine how pissed off you’d be if you were the greatest of all the gods but nobody could pronounce your name,’ said Esko.

‘Does the name mean something?’ asked Anna.

‘Just a minute, it’s here somewhere,’ said Rauno and began flicking through his papers. ‘Here it is. It seems to have several meanings. Here’s one: “the one with the hummingbird in his left hand”.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Should we be looking for a birdwatcher? Someone hunting for hummingbirds?’

‘I don’t think people hunt hummingbirds,’ Rauno mused. ‘Not round these parts, that’s for sure.’

‘Hunting, running and a bloodthirsty Aztec god whose name refers to the hummingbird. Christ! Can they all be linked to one another?’ Sari sighed.

‘They must be linked somehow,’ said Anna. ‘What does the hummingbird make you think of?’

‘Certainly not human sacrifices.’

‘A small, decorative bird whose wings beat so fast that you can’t see them move at all.’

‘I think of the hummingbird as somehow feminine. It’s delicate and graceful.’

‘Right, not exactly a grizzly Aztec god.’

‘It’s colourful. Tropical. Feeds on large flowers.’

‘Hummingbirds are endearing, ethereal. They’re not cold-blooded killers.’

‘Huitzilopochtli,’ Rauno repeated.

‘The killer hummingbird.’

‘Do such things even exist?’

‘Seriously, how come you know fancy words like “ethereal”? I’d probably never use a word like that – and it’s my native language,’ said Rauno.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Anna replied. ‘It was probably by accident.’

‘You’re got a natural flair for this. How many languages do you
speak?’ Rauno asked and looked at Anna in admiration. Anna almost started blushing.

‘Come on,’ Sari chipped in. ‘We all want to know something about you.’

‘Well, Hungarian, of course; that’s my native language.’

‘Oh, so you’re not Serbian?’ Sari asked, surprised.

‘Absolutely not,’ Anna laughed. ‘But I can speak a bit of Serbian and Croatian and Bosnian, all fairly similar languages. During the Yugoslav years they were all called Serbo-Croat, though they’re not exactly identical. Serbian was the national language, and everybody had to learn it from the time they went to nursery school, though the village we were from, Magyarkanizsa, is entirely Hungarian.’

‘What language did you speak at school?’

‘Hungarians spoke Hungarian and Serbs Serbian. We were always allowed to maintain our own language and culture, to a certain degree, which is more than you can say for the Hungarian minority in Romania. But anyway, my Serbian is fairly rusty these days. Thankfully I’ve got a couple of friends who help me keep it up,’ said Anna and found herself thinking of Zoran.

‘Wow, with your help we could infiltrate the Yugoslav mafia,’ Rauno suggested.

Anna suddenly felt Zoran’s hairy chest against hers, the sound of his gasping breath in her ear.

‘No thanks,’ she said.

‘What other languages do you speak?’ Sari asked, fascinated.

‘Well, English, of course, like everybody else. And German. And Finnish and Swedish.’

‘That’s six languages,’ said Rauno. ‘Impressive.’

‘Your Finnish is really flawless,’ Sari enthused. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard you make a single mistake.’

‘Thanks,’ said Anna, embarrassed. She never got used to people’s compliments, though she knew they were justified. ‘It’s because I was only a child when we arrived here. I’ve lived in Finland most of my life, gone to school here. It would be weird if I still had a foreign accent.’