Troll: A Love Story (12 page)

My footsteps on the path creak comfortlessly. Suddenly they’re joined by another sound, a furious scratching of nails, and before I can even turn something hits my right thigh like a tiger.

Pessi’s clinging on to my leg with all four limbs and looking up, straight into my face, so intensely it’s like a blow. He lets a little mewing sound out of his throat. He’s trembling so violently it makes me sway.

He’ll not get by in the winter. He’s naked, and I’ve made him naked.

MIKAEL AGRICOLA, PREFACE TO
THE FINNISH TRANSLATION OF THE PSALMS
, 1551

Victims to the trolls were led,

Widows did they take and wed.

Are the people not gone mad,

Trusting trolls, a tribe gone bad.

Steered by Satan to sinful stem,

They worship trolls and pray to them.

ANGEL

The mirror’s lying on the hall carpet. I’m not lifting it. I’m just crouched there beside it, panting. I can’t function, can’t coordinate.

The blanket’s back on the sofa. Pessi’s still trembling a little, but clearly he’s beginning to calm down. He’s resting his back against the radiator, his tail twitching very slightly like the needle of some delicate instrument.

And then he comes into the hall, cautiously, wondering at my immobility and my bowed head. The mirror’s a small round pond in the fluffy carpet.

I lean over the mirror, and my face is reflected there. Next to my own, a smaller, dark face appears, with pointed ears, a twinkle of curiosity in its orange eyes.

Pessi tests the mirror with his paw. He looks at me and then back at the reflection. He shows his teeth but recoils a little when the troll in the mirror returns his grimace; but then he edges back to the mirror and again tests the cold glass surface with his paw.

We look at each other, me and the troll. The lamplight’s casting a pale halo around my head, and at my side Pessi is a dark silhouette. We look at each other and then at the mirror and then back at each other.

Päivänsäde Ja Menninkäinen (“Goldwing and Troll”; words and music, Reino Helismaa, 1949)

Aurinko kun päätti retken, siskoistaan jäi jälkeen hetken

Päivänsäde viimeinen.

Hämärä jo metsään hiipi; Päivänsäde kultasiipi

juuri aikoi lentää eestä sen,

kun Menninkäisen pienen näki vastaan tulevan;

se juuri oli noussut luolostaan.

Kas: Menninkäinen ennen päivän laskua ei voi

milloinkaan olla päällä maan.

Katselivat toisiansa. Menninkäinen rinnassansa

tunsi kuumaa leiskuntaa.

Sanoi: “Poltat silmiäni, mutt’ en ole eläissäni

nähnyt mitään yhtä ihanaa!

Ei haittaa, vaikka loisteesi mut sokeaksi saa:

on pimeässä hyvä asustaa.

Käy kanssani, niin kotiluolaan näytän sulle tien,

ja sinut armaakseni vien.”

Säde vastas: “Peikko kulta, pimeys vie hengen multa,

enkä toivo kuolemaa.

Pois mun täytyy heti mennä: ellen kohta valoon lennä,

niin en hetkeäkään elää saa!”

Niin lähti kaunis Päivänsäde, mutta vieläkin,

kun Menninkäinen öisin tallustaa,

hän miettii: “Miksi toinen täällä valon lapsi on,

ja toinen yötä rakastaa?”

Goldwing and Troll

When the sun had done his run, one sister sunray,

Goldwing, lingered on.

Dusk crept through the greenwood. Goldwing

flared her wings to flee away,

when up woke Troll and came to meet her—

creeping from his hidden cave:

not before sundown dare he greet the

earth from out his daytime grave.

She stared, and he stared. In his heart there flared

a wondrous glow of light.

“You burn my eyes,” he said, “and yet you bless:

I’ve never seen such loveliness!

Who cares if brightness makes me blind?

Dark to me is always kind.

Come see my cave, my wildwood life,

and live with me and be my wife.”

But Goldwing said: “O darling Troll, darkness takes my

soul away. I’ll die.

I must wing away to day at once—must fly

to light, or fade and chill.”

So his lovely Goldwing left, but still when Troll

goes plodding on through the night

he thinks and thinks: “Why is one the child of light,

while the other loves the night?”

ANGEL

Martti’s vanished from my mind completely. Seems inconceivable. But, now, hearing his voice on the phone turns my legs to jelly.

His voice is soft and a bit husky as always, but I don’t want to believe his words, not those words.

He’s wondering why I haven’t reported how I’m getting on with the Stalker project. Or am I really spending all my time running after some horse-doctor in the city night, as the whole town seems to know?

I try to blurt out an explanation: there’s still time before the deadline, I’ve certainly come up with ideas, but just now there’s been a tiny bottleneck . . . But a poisonous sarcasm is drizzling into Martes’s words: obviously I’m not approaching his brief with the slightest seriousness, obviously I’m not taking this whole cooperative enterprise of ours seriously enough. The Stalker campaign’s crucial for him, one of the biggest challenges of his career. I’m not thinking of letting him down, am I . . . in this, too?

I hear everything that’s hidden between the lines.

There are tears in my eyes as the line goes silent.

EXCERPT FROM THE TELEVISION PROGRAM
IS A PREDATORY ANIMAL CRUEL?
(OCTOBER 19, 1999)

Professor Martti Soikkeli of Turku University reports: “Cruelty is knowingly—consciously—causing another being mental or physical pain, agony, and doing it regardless of the knowledge that the other is suffering anguish. So now, asked if predatory animals kill and rend their prey with the knowledge they are causing pain and agony, then the answer is categorically no: they do not know. In the animal kingdom there is no such thing as what is called morality—in other words, knowledge of good and evil. We human beings are moral beings: we know the difference between good and evil; but animals do not.”

ANGEL

In the studio I take Pessi in my arms then whisk the Stalkers on to his back legs with a single pull—knowing I’d not manage it at a second shot. If Pessi had thought of spreading his hind claws, the jeans wouldn’t have slipped on: the legs would have been torn to shreds. A size to fit a three-foot-six-inch child suits him stunningly. I’ve got the zip and metal button fastened and have twitched his tail through the hole I’ve made in the Stalker backside before he realizes he’s been diddled. Then I throw Pessi—now a hissing, whirling ball bristling with razor-sharp claws—in front of the backdrop, and I start the automatic camera rolling.

Pessi hates the Stalkers—so fiercely he doesn’t take a jump at the walls but stays put, right there where he should be, against the backdrop, illuminated by the lamps, in my viewfinder. He’s somersaulting, pirouetting, doing his damnedest to get rid of this indigo-blue straitjacket imprisoning his back legs. The lights must be causing his night-vision eyes intense pain, but it’s the struggle with the Stalkers that takes priority in Pessi’s mind. He leaps a meter high with his amazing springs of muscles, twists and turns like a grotesque boy go-go dancer, does a break-dance roll on his back, and tries to rip the jeans with his foreclaws. But the denim’s holding, it’s holding for the time being, and Pessi stretches upright, stands on his two legs, nails ripping at the belt loops, and I almost
shut my eyes—it’s such a perfect frame. Then he presses his black mane into the backdrop’s white floor, raises his backside, crowned of course with an impotently flourishing frenzied tail, and screams through his legs at the camera. And the shutter’s whirring. And a tightly coiled coal-black and indigo-blue spring is hissing and wriggling and hurtling and jerking and circling and squirming, and it’s all being shot, two frames a second, almost as if Pessi’s own scintillating energy was blazing the shots onto the silver.

When the denim does finally rip, it’s a relief for me, too. When the first rent comes at the hip, where Pessi can reach most easily with his claws, it’s as if I’m drawing my first breath in ages. And after that I see a whirlwind of indigo denim-shreds, with Pessi panting in the middle and then springing with a single leap out of the glare of the spotlights. He leaps at me with a snarl, his eyes burning, his nails bared, but when I raise my hand he remembers the threat, remembers the rolled-up newspaper and dashes into a corner to curl up. I reel the diapositive onto its cassette, drop it in my hand, and squeeze it. And there in the dark corner I can make out Pessi’s tail, switching, switching, and lashing like an angry whip.

TROLL TALES
, EDITED BY THE FINNISH LITERATURE SOCIETY, 1990

Told by Roope Hollman, a Hired Hand from the Village of Haukivuori, 1884

Once some foemen came to a house in the evening, claiming to be traveling men, and asked a lodging for the night. But the man of the house said, “So few sheds we have here, we can give thee no lodging for the night. By the wood, though, we have an outhouse. If that will serve thy turn, then lay thee down there for the night.”

The foemen went to the outhouse. But, lo and behold, the morning brought a troll that had set up home in the out-house. The troll began to ransack the foemen’s backpacks and stuff the meat it found there in its mouth. When the foemen woke to this, they began to shout to the farmer, “Hey, man, call off this black tufted-tailed cat of thine!” The farmer made as if he didn’t hear the foemen’s jabbering and just lay there, at his rest. Again a foeman bellowed, “Hey, thee there, an end to this tufted-tailed cat of thine, or I’ll do the thing myself!”

The farmer said not a word. Two or three more times the foeman bellowed “An end to it, an end to it!” and then made to seize the troll. But the troll was no ordinary cat, and in two
shakes of its tail the foemen had taken to their heels through the window and away in the field.

Seven years later came a foeman again to the same village. He asked the children at the field-end, “Hast thou still that black tufted-tailed cat here with thee?”

“Yes,” the children said. “That we do!”

At that the foeman never dared return to the house again.

MARTES

I look at the screen again, zoom closer, and find myself taking a deep breath. “Fucking brilliant,” I mouth to myself, silently and with emphasis.

God, it was worth it, it was worth it.

Mikael’s beaming away somewhere behind my back, so close I feel the glowing warmth of his thighs, and it makes me uncomfortable. I swing around on my revolving chair, perhaps too swiftly.

“You did this with Photoshop?”

“That’s right.”

I shake my head, smile against my will, and see my smile’s instantly reflected on Mikael’s face—I’ve flicked it on as if with a switch.

“You’re an actual wizard. Not a wipe or intercut in sight anywhere, even when I’m looking for them. Well, maybe where you’ve linked the tail to the trousers there’s a faint blur, but you’d certainly need my professional eagle eye to spot that.”

Mikael grimaces, embarrassed.

“Mind you, we’ve seen this sort of stuff before. Take a bunch of good animal pics, then get a model with jeans on to take up the same postures as the beast, scan the stuff, and the job’s done. Still, impressive work you’ve done, anyway.”

“Didn’t take so very long.”

“Always the modest violet. And the troll pictures—from the Ähtäri Animal Park archives or what?”

Mikael laughs nervously. He knows the joke, and it’s an old one. In the office whenever we have an ad idea with any sort of animal in it—a bear, a mole, a penguin, or whatever—and someone starts headaching about where we’ll get the rushes, someone else always says “from the Ähtäri Animal Park archives,” even if what we’re looking for is a white rhinoceros.

“There won’t be any trouble over the rights for these pictures, will there? Presumably you scanned the source pictures from some international nature-picture archive . . . You can’t have done these takes crouching in some hide near a reindeer carcass. Where did you download them?”