Troll: A Love Story (3 page)

ANGEL

On the bed a lusterless black flank is heaving feverishly. Wild-cat digestion.

I dash to the fridge and poke about frantically. Orange marmalade, kalamata olives, fresh but already somewhat wilted arugula, imported blue cheese.

A cat. A cat. What do cats eat?

Cat food.

And in a flash I recollect something: what’s the guy’s name downstairs? Kaikkonen? Korhonen? Koistinen? The man with the young foreign wife. They’ve got some sort of a pet. Once I saw the man opening the front door, about to go in, and he was carrying a red-leather harness.

So they’ve got a cat, for I’ve seen neither of them walking a dog.

PALOMITA

Sleep’s a well—I float up from it like a bubble. The water’s black honey. My arms and legs are trying to stir in the syrupy night. I drag my lids open, so my eyes smart.

I’m damp with sweat and my heart’s starting to race. For a moment I think the sound I hear is the bell on the bar counter back at Ermita. The bell that orders me out of the back room. But luckily my hand touches something, my eyes open, and I’m surrounded by the gray-blue of the room’s make-believe night.

I’ve been in a very deep sleep, as I always am when Pentti’s away. When I’m alone, as soon as I drop off I feel I’m spinning downward. I don’t need to tense every bit of my body, like when Pentti’s beside me. No need to wake up at every sound. Pentti, when he’s asleep, sounds like someone suffocating.

The ringing isn’t at all like the horrible silvery bar-bell at Ermita. It’s tinnier and rougher and makes you jump. Ring-ring-ring it goes in the empty hall that Pentti’s removed all the coats from and locked them up in the closet for the time he’s off on his trip. I slip my slippers on and get my bathrobe off the chair. The bell rings again and again, as if someone’s in a terrible state. I get the footstool out of the cupboard and climb on it to peep through the peephole.

It’s the man from upstairs who’s ringing the bell. He’s fair
and tall and curly-haired. I’ve seen him once before on the staircase outside.

I’ve learned always to look through the peephole. Pentti doesn’t want me to open the door to anyone except those he’s told me to. The peephole’s a well, where little crooked people live. Many times a day I get on to the stool and look out at the staircase. There aren’t often people there, but whenever I see one it’s a reward. The man rings the bell once more, and then he tosses his head. He’s giving up.

I’ve no idea why I do. But cautiously I open the door.

He’s speaking Finnish fast, and I can only pick up a word here and there. The words are twisty and misty, and they’ve long bits that ought to be said with your mouth open right to the back. Lucky for me I don’t have to depend much on Finnish, as Pentti hardly says anything and I don’t go anywhere.

The man says, “Excuse me.” He says his name, which I can’t hear properly, but it sounds like Miguel. He says he’s from the floor above, and he keeps on asking for some sort of food and repeating some word I simply don’t know.

It seems to be dawning on him that I don’t understand. Up to now he’s only been able to see his own problem, but now he’s beginning to see me. He begins speaking English, which I understand better, though not very well either, because at home we spoke Chabacano and Tagalog in the village, and they had to cut school short for me.

“Cat food?” he asks. “Do you have any cat food you could lend me?”

In spite of myself, a smile crosses my face. We haven’t got a cat. Pentti wouldn’t put up with anything like that. Once, when he was drunk again, he took a lucky doll I’d been given by Conchita at the bar and flushed it down the toilet. He’d noticed I used to
nurse it in my arms sometimes, before going to bed. The doll clogged the drain, and Pentti had to pump away with a plunger for ages before it flushed clear again.

I shake my head and say no, no cat food. I ask if he speaks Spanish, but he signals no, with troubled eyes. I grope for some English words, trying to help. Just around the corner there’s a small store that sells almost everything. One evening Pentti sent me to get some beer there, gave me some money and a piece of paper with the order scribbled on. I handed them over to the shop keeper, and he handed me back six cold brown bottles. I didn’t know I was supposed to get a receipt, and when I got back Pentti said I’d kept some of the change. Myself, I did think they were a bit expensive. I haven’t been back to the little shop since, but I do remember it was stocked with almost as much stuff as the market.

Miguel wrinkles his forehead. I feel sorry for him. I can’t understand why he can’t run those two blocks to the deli/newsstand, which is almost a little department store, but I’m eager to think of some way to help him. I think about cats, I think about what they eat. Cats swarm in the harbor. They love fish.

I leave the door open and rush into the kitchen. I open the freezer and take out a packet from a big bag of frozen fish Pentti bought on sale. The packets rattle like firewood. I go back to the door and push a frosty packet into Miguel’s hand.

“The microwave. Put it in the microwave,” I say, clearly. Those are words I’ve often heard, and I know them well. Miguel stares at the packet of fish and shifts it from hand to hand because it’s so cold.

He squeezes the packet. Thanks flow from his lips in a mixture of English and Finnish. And then he’s off, hopping up the stairs, a man with an angelically beautiful face and hair like a wheatfield in sunshine. I hear the door slam shut on the floor above.

ANGEL

I must try to pay this back in some way, I reflect, as I push the fish into the microwave. She must be a Filipina, for she speaks a little English and Spanish; she looks Asian. Is she more than sixteen years old? A bought bride, she must be, purchased for the old geezer down below at some marriage market.

And they have no cat. My face glows: I ought to have been quicker on the uptake about that pretty, soft, red-leather harness.

I set the microwave on “defrost” and start it. When the humming begins, the troll’s ears perk up. It gives a jerk but, as nothing’s threatening it, it calms down again. The smell of fish spreads through the room. I take the dish out of the microwave and test the fish with my finger. It’s warm around the edges and has begun to turn pale; it’s frozen in the middle, but most of it is at room temperature and a gelatinous gray. I slice some pieces off the defrosted bits, put them on aluminum foil, and take them into the living room. The troll’s nostrils tremble, but it shows no interest in what it smells. I take some fish in my hand and sit on the edge of the bed. The troll opens its eyes slightly and regards me with its vertical pupils. I hold a piece of fish close to its nostrils, its mouth. It sniffs at the fish faintly, wearily, then closes its eyes again and turns its head away almost humanly. It curls its black slender bony back towards me, and its belly gives out a very, very small but recognizable sound: the rumble of hunger.

AKI BÄRMAN,
THE BEAST IN MAN:

An Enquiry Concerning the Kinship Between Man and Wild Animal in Myth and Fantasy,
1986

The transformation of a human being into an animal, or an otherwise close metamorphic kinship of human and animal, is an almost universal feature of world mythology, a mythical stratum evidently based on the “animal roles” of shamanism and totemism. In general, the animal metamorphoses and animal kinships manifested in various cultures are connected to some fearful beast of prey endemic to the cultural area in question (in Asia the tiger, in South America the jaguar, in Europe the wolf, and in Scandinavia the bear, as well as, and in particular, the troll). The essences of the human and the animal are intermingled, and a complex narrative tradition develops around the animal, involving—as in werewolf stories, for example—definite regularities, such as the effect of the full moon, the slaughter of the werewolf with a silver bullet, methods of becoming a werewolf, and so on. In the case of Finland, perhaps a larger proportion of this type of recurrent narrative material is associated with the troll.

Owing to the pseudo-humanoid external characteristics of the troll, the Finnish narratives concerning the origin of the troll have acquired a Christian coloring. According to one
version, the trolls came into being when Adam and Eve had given birth to so many children they began to feel shame about it, and they hid some of their children in caves, intending to keep them from God’s notice. The children ended up by living so long beneath the ground they changed into trolls. Iceland harbors a similar story. Another Finnish version relates that the trolls were born during the Deluge. People were lazy and could not be bothered to follow Noah’s example and build arks; instead they ascended the hills in order to escape the flood. The time spent in the caves brought its own punishment: when the waters abated, the people had turned into trolls. These narratives clearly indicate that trolls were considered representatives of a degenerate species of the human race. Similar conceptions pertain to, among other creatures, anthropoid apes in many primitive cultures.

According to the Scandinavian notions above, therefore, trolls were created by God and were indeed members of the divine creation—not supernatural beings—but humans who, in one way or another, had acted against God’s will. The priests tried to dismiss the pagan imagery associated with these creatures, but certain of the original beliefs survived even into the period when the trolls had been verified as an animal species like any other. An interesting feature of the topic is that, owing to the effect of Christian belief, many troll-narratives based on folk tradition have been transformed into tales about demons. In Finland, for instance, hundreds of narratives are recorded that show how cunning individuals discomfit and dupe simple-minded fiends—which, in the more venerable versions, are almost exclusively trolls. Thus, on the evidence of these narratives, our ancestors had a particular need to emphasize their own superiority
and pre-eminence in comparison with this somewhat anthropomorphic animal.

The typical attributes of the mythical trolls were ugliness, hirsuteness, and habitation inside mountains and rocks. They were agents of the dark powers, and they turned into stone in the light of day. Often the trolls were held to be servants of Satan, lying in wait for people at night and snatching them off to their caves. The phrase for these abductions was: “They were carried off to the mountain.” The trolls either killed their victims or held them as prisoners until insanity ensued.

Malign trolls of this sort also appear in the Scandinavian Viking tradition. Odin and his brothers killed the giant Ymir, after which the giant’s rotting body began to be infested with maggots, some black and some white. The gods called the maggots forth and gave them form and intelligence, and from the black maggots, which were by nature cunning and treacherous, the gods created the trolls; and since the trolls were in this manner born from the flesh of Ymir, out of which the earth was also created, the gods decided that the trolls should continue their existence as part of the earth and rock. In consequence, the trolls came to live beneath the earth, and if they erred by penetrating up into the daylight they were punished for their crime with petrifaction, becoming rocks themselves. On the other hand, the poem “The Seeress’s Prophecy” in the poetic
Edda
states the lineage of the trolls to be that of the tribe of the wolf Fenrir. The trinity of the wolf, the troll, and man is indeed a fascinating and illuminating aspect of the werewolf myth.

Finnish tradition also hands down stories of benign and harmless trolls who have lived with human beings on such good terms of mutual understanding that they have even
married into named families. There are also numerous stories of girls having given birth to children sired by trolls and of youths seeking troll brides; and these are altogether in the class of the ancient myths about animal consorts.

Tales of trolls adopting human babies as their own cubs have been recorded everywhere from China to North America and its Indian tribes. Though, as a species, the troll never spread beyond the Bering Strait, it is conceivable that ancestors of the Indians migrating to Alaska via the Chukotskiy peninsula may have transported this narrative tradition with them (cf. e.g. the Alaskan monster, the alascattalo, a hybrid of the moose and the walrus, whose name is etymologically reminiscent of the Lapland creature, the staalo, whose legend is clearly a variation of the troll legend). It can in fact be asserted that the troll has played a very special symbolic role among the northern peoples for thousands of years.

ANGEL

It looks at me like a puppy-dog, but there are live coals in its orange eyes.

It’s lying curled up into a ball. I go to the bedside gingerly and hold my breath as I sit down on the edge of the bed beside it and observe its slender, heaving black sides, its helpless but sinewy being. Suddenly its paw straightens out. Its long supple fingers and fierce nails come toward me, and I almost snatch my hand away but don’t, I don’t, and its fingers wrap around my wrist for a moment; its hot slender paw touches me for a fleeting moment, and my eyes fill with tears.

Three days have gone by, and it simply isn’t eating.

ANCIENT POEMS OF THE FINNISH PEOPLE

II. 3. 3410, 1933 Village of Kitee: “Repo-Matti Väkeväinen’s Powerful Spell”