Troll: A Love Story (10 page)

The interviewer’s just asking what the effect of tetrachloride whatchermecallit might be, and the environmentalist is beginning to speak about mutations, when I realize that Pessi is suspiciously quiet and he must be up to mischief. I look around for him. He’s sitting crouched up as always, his thin black back and brush to-wards me, his ears trembling as they register the noises around, and his tail swaying as a sign of extreme concentration. I get up from my chair, and now I see, even though the room’s almost dark, that Pessi has taken the building blocks and, with his prehensile long-nailed fingers, is at this very moment putting one on the summit of an almost faultless pyramid.

HARTO LINDÉN, “THE EFFECTS OF HUNTING ON THE GAME STOCK,”

Hunting—Nature—Society
, Petri Nummi (ed.), 1995

To some degree, large size always threatens the future of an animal breed. The stock of the large breeds is on the whole small, making accidental factors, perhaps associated with splitting up of stock, drive a breed into a cycle of attenuation. The large-sized breeds are endangered by any increase, for whatever reason, in the mortality of mature animals. At present, the large animals, with their small populations, are experiencing genetic difficulties in a rapidly changing environment. Their size is adapted to a predictable and/or unchanging environment; the current environmental instability, therefore, constitutes a serious threat to them. An allied consideration is that a weakening in the quality of the environment can often diminish a large animal’s opportunities for daily nourishment.

The increase in mature mortality can be too small-scale easily to facilitate scientific measurement. The effect can nevertheless be dramatic.

ANGEL

Again and again Pessi takes the top bricks off the pyramid and replaces them in slightly different positions. I hear an extremely low, almost inaudible sound. He’s purring. He’s enjoying himself.

My mouth’s dry as dust. Something in the shape of the pyramid bothers me, some memory teases me. I take a couple of quick strides over to the bookshelf. The books my brother left are all together in a corner of the bookshelf, tucked away almost out of sight behind various new and second-hand books about beasts of prey that I’ve picked up. There are about ten books of his, hardly glanced at, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to get rid of them.

That’s it. Eero Ojanen’s
Prehistoric Remains in Finland.
I turn to the list of illustrations, and there it is: a cairn, a pyramid of cobblestones. “The crowned territorial marker at Salo,” the caption says, but I know what it is all right, regardless of the misleading nomenclature.

A devil’s stove.

Of Finland’s three thousand devil’s stoves, most have been proved to be bronze-age cremation sites, but there are also piles of cobblestones the function of which is not exactly known, “Lapp ruins”
and “giants’ churches.” According to one study they were territorial markers, and the cairn of stones was their “crown.”

They’re also referred to as “racketstoves” or noisy stoves, and some folk tales relate that the ancient woods were inhabited by a “noisy race.” According to these stories the goblins or other wood-sprites played about on the racketstoves, and that’s why weird sounds came from there.

The Lapp ruins may also be places of sacrifice, because the bones of game animals are often found both in and around them.

The shape of the cairns and the caches of bones also suggest some Lapland stone idols, which were in ancient times considered the idols of a creature called the staalo.

Animal bones?

Tell me, books. On the cairns and in their surroundings were there bones of reindeer, elk, fox, wolverine? Wolf bones, bear bones, the slender skeletons of lynxes?

Or did the archaeologists—tell me, books, and you don’t tell—happen on surprising numbers of bones from those animals whose carcasses are otherwise so rarely encountered in the wild . . . troll bones?

ANNI SWAN,
THE MOUNTAIN TROLL AND THE SHEPHERD GIRL
, 1933

The whole mountain shook and boomed, boulders rumbled down, and the girl only just managed to jump out of the cave mouth before the whole gorge sank thundering into a heap of rocks, and nothing was left of the mountain troll’s hand-some halls but gray boulders and moss.

The mountain troll no one has heard of or seen since. Has he perhaps been buried there under the stones of his cave? But the shepherd girl hurried off back home, to her green forest, her pastures, and the shore of the blue sea.

PART III
Who Cares If Brightness Makes Me Blind

ANGEL

Pessi’s coat is molting in tufts, so my whole pad is a mass of coal-black balls of fluff, and all the slipcovers and curtains and carpets are grayish with hair. I try to vacuum it clean and, while the vacuum’s going, Pessi invariably does a lightning dash to the coat-rack, crawls up my trench-coat sleeve, ripping it to shreds, and squats demonstratively above, the very image of a saturnine gargoyle on one of Notre Dame’s flying buttresses. He hates the noise of the vacuum, though luckily he’s gradually getting a little used to it.

He doesn’t seem ill at all, though the shreds of his coat are a dismal sight in the Electrolux.

I phone a vet under an assumed name and describe Pessi’s molting. I say it’s a dog and inquire if the recently administered parasite medicine might be partially to blame. The vet says no, it shouldn’t have that sort of effect, and asks the breed. My fib is that he’s a mongrel with a lot of husky in him.

“He’s otherwise completely playful and normal.”

The vet reflects a moment.

“It would sound like a quite normal shedding of a winter coat, if this were the late spring, but . . .”

I breathe deeply. Shedding a winter coat. Naturally.

Normally at this time of year a troll would be deep asleep under the snow, in a hole in the rock, or, exceptionally, he’d be shivering on the outskirts of Kuopio, still in his thick coat, scaring the locals. But my warm flat, an even twenty degrees centigrade, is a new springtime for Pessi, a spring ahead of schedule.

The vet recommends bringing the dog to the clinic, and I eagerly promise to call as soon as I’ve checked my calendar. Pessi’s asleep on the sofa, and my heart’s so full of joy and relief that I go to plant a kiss between his pointy ears as they tremble in sleep.

PALOMITA

It’s so dark.

We have a proverb: in the house the man’s the mainstay, his wife a light.

They told me it meant you can manage without a light, but without a mainstay everything tumbles down.

In the morning when Pentti wakes up it’s dark. When he comes home from work it’s dark. In the middle of the day there’s a small gray moment.

Here we get along with no light. Without a wife. For I am no wife, even though I’m married. I’m a concubine, querida. What man wants a wife but no children?

When I came here and Pentti still only scared me a little, he took me to the doctor and spoke right past me. I knew he was saying I couldn’t understand what they were talking about, because the doctor never asked me anything, only Pentti, and I was put on a sort of rack, where the doctor looked at me and felt me, so tears came into my eyes, and then he pushed something in me that Pentti told me later would stop me having children.

I wept because I’d done so great a sin. I wept for days and only stopped when I got a punishment for it, but now I’m not so very sad any more. Not about that, though it must be a small sin, at least, even to think that way. There are places where it’s not good for children to be.

Here it’s so cold.

ANGEL

He wakes up in the evening and climbs onto the window sill to see the Christmas lights glowing in Pirkankatu Street. He seeks out the quails’ eggs I’ve hidden, and when he finds them bounces about like a colt let out to pasture. He jumps onto the sofa and sits beside me as I watch the TV, so that his juniper smell drifts into my nostrils like a waft of perfume.

The short fur now showing from under his former long sleek coat is so exiguous, so tight to his skin, it’s almost as though it weren’t fur at all but a glossy black cuticle. The mane around his head has not molted, though, and so Pessi’s slim two-legged form, seen from a distance, resembles quite confusingly a slightly stylized boy, human-looking, like some of the animal stars in children’s cartoons. His small firm muscles function with extreme precision and contained energy.

His movements have an unselfconscious seductiveness.

For minutes on end, with his head on one side, he follows the movements of my hand as I operate the mouse of my computer.

I’m churning over and on fire.

“CALVIN KLEIN STIMULATES OCELOTS,”

Finnish Morning Post
(August 5, 1999); Reuters, Dallas

Researchers at the Dallas Zoological Gardens have made a promising discovery in their attempts to encourage ocelots to multiply. A smell that stimulates the males of this rare breed of the cat family has at last been discovered—and it appears to be Calvin Klein’s eau-de-cologne, Obsession for Men.

Four caged ocelot females reacted more strongly to the Calvin Klein fragrance than to natural aromas being tested with the aim of encouraging ocelots to breed in the wild, says zoo researcher Dr. Cynthia Bennett.

“Among other substances, we experimented with rat excrement and the ocelots’ own aromas. Then an assistant produced the cologne, because many animals appreciate it, and the smell drove the ocelots wild,” Bennett said.

This feline breed began to roll and writhe on the spots where the cologne had been sprinkled. The reaction resembled displays of affection by domestic cats.

In the wild, there are only about 100–120 individuals of this Texas subspecies of the ocelot, and undirected by smells the animals have difficulty in locating one other.

ANGEL

Just now I want something so badly it hurts, and so I don’t care whom I harm or how much.

ECKE

Angel’s so gorgeous it makes me ache. It’s as if a Finland-Film stud—a lumberjack, balanced on a log in his turned-up boots—were maneuvering the log-jam away with his boat-hook, his curly fair forelock flopping over his stern eyes and his upper torso shining with sweat. I slip into the seat beside him and put my mug on the table. Angel gives a sideways glance but no glimmer of interest.

“I’m Ecke. And they call you Angel. As a matter of fact, I’m not a bit surprised.”

Angel’s lip curls. “My real name’s Mikael.”

I pretend I’ve only just realized. “Oh that’s where it comes from, of course. The Archangel.”

Angel looks as if he’s heard that before, but I charge ahead on my chosen path.

“So, of course, you must know that you’re the patron of Sunday. According to the astrologers, each day has its angel: Saturday Cassiel, Sunday Mikael, Monday Gabriel, Tuesday Camael, Wednesday Raphael, Thursday Sachiel.”

“That’s inconceivably interesting,” Angel states in a voice full of sarcasm, but at the same time I can see he’s falling into the trap. “Especially since you forgot Friday.”

“I’m not a bit surprised you want to know that. Friday’s angel is, of course, dear old Anael.”

Angel almost spits a mouthful of ale on to the table. “You made that up.”

I smile with the maximum of ambiguity. “Actually, different books give slightly different accounts. You can come up and consult my source books whenever you fancy it.”

Angel laughs again, and his look shows that I now exist for him, and I congratulate myself quickly: Ecke, you’ve done it again.

JUKKA KOSKIMIES, “HIERARCHY IN THE ANIMAL WORLD”

Science for the Young, Volume 5
, 1965

In the world of aquarium fish, in the nesting communities and wintering flocks of wild birds, as well as in the communities of rats, dogs, wolves, trolls, many kinds of elks, apes, and—of course—human beings, certain individuals have a strong aspiration to dominate, while others prefer to serve.

What then is the foundation of such a hierarchical principle in the animal kingdom? Apparently, each individual obtains his status in the community on the basis of some first impression. When two individuals meet it appears instantly clear which is the dominant one and which the subservient. Nor, in general, are any physical clashes necessary. The one who makes the more powerful and competent impression, from its external appearance and above all the confidence of its behavior, will see submission in the other. And the relationship thus established endures for a very long time, unchanged, until, some day perhaps, for whatever reason, it is reconsidered. In this way each individual makes clear its relationship to every other individual, and the end result is soon settled and—what is more astonishing—understood by all. Unerringly, each individual assesses every other member of the group and knows how to relate to it.

ECKE