Popular Music from Vittula (24 page)

For the next few days they were expecting revenge at any minute. They locked their bedroom door at night in order to avoid being surprised in their sleep, they hid the bolt of the moose gun and they made sure no knives were left lying around. Their mother tended her husband when he was in bed, feeding him with sour milk and blueberry soup and changing his plasters. She questioned her sons with her eyes but not with her voice, and noticed how they avoided entering the room. Isak himself said nothing. He stared at the cracks in the white-painted ceiling, a confusion of thin, black lines meandering along, branching off, coming to a sudden stop. They formed roads through remote, unknown landscapes. In his torment he started walking down those roads. He passed by houses and farms, got to know the local population and the names of villages. He wandered alongside rivers and tried his luck at fishing, trekked through forests teeming with game and berries, climbed low mountains and admired the views. Eventually he came across a spot where he’d like to live, and made himself a house out of fir logs he chopped down himself. He moved in to lead a solitary life. There was plenty of meat and fish, lots of wood to make fires with. The winters were long but he was used to that, the summers shimmeringly light. Only two things were different from the old world. First, there were no mosquitoes here. Not even around the enormous swamps where cloudberries hung down like yellow fists, not a single mosquito, no gnats, no gadflies, no clegs, no horseflies: a strange forest world completely devoid of bites or stings.

Second, there were no sins here.

Isak was shaken deep down in his soul when he realized that. He had
found Paradise at last. No matter how hard he searched, he could find no evil. Nature gave birth and nourished, ate and was eaten in a neverending round of hunger and death. But it was an innocent struggle, uncorrupted. Nature breathed all around him, inside him, through him. He could abandon despair. Stop his desperate fight to keep his head above water. Just open himself up like a cavity and let the good, verdant air blow through him.

And in this unexpected way, for the second time in his life, Isak found God.

* * *

As time passed he recovered, and turned nasty again. Anything else would have been too much to expect. But he stopped talking about suicide. And he stopped beating everybody, as he took the threats from his sons seriously. Instead he now started to see some point in growing old. Years later, when the sons had flown the nest, he tried to revive the tradition of beating his wife, but discovered that she had changed so much, she hit him back.

Instead, he devoted his time to harassing the garbage collectors, telling off the mechanics running the official car roadworthiness tests, and adjusting the borders of his plot, not to mention protests and various claims for damages to every authority in sight. But he was never much good as an agitator, and officials took no notice of his ranting.

There was a continental shift that affected the whole family. The landscape crumpled and assumed new contours. Niila’s mother had devoted her whole life to diversionary maneuvers, but suddenly found herself with breathing space. Unused to this, she became depressed. She felt isolated and undervalued. Her children could manage for themselves, without needing her as a punching bag or go-between. Now that the war was over, how was she going to get by?

With time to think about her own welfare, she was suddenly overwhelmed by aches and pains. Her voice was nowadays heard in the
house, unpracticed and hesitant, monotonously squeaky like an old wheel. The moment she opened her mouth, the house was filled with big, tired lumps of fluff that piled up to waist height and made it difficult to move around. The younger children, the girls and baby brother, became unruly. At last they dared to start growing up, and distanced themselves more and more from the stifling atmosphere of home. Their mother breathed her grey membranes over her children, but they thrust them aside and stuck their tongues out at life. She changed tactics and told them they were making her ill, that it was their fault that she was suffering. She kept on saying it over and over again, day in and day out, until they couldn’t fight it any longer. The spider’s web wrapped itself round them strand by strand, until every move they made was strenuous and treacly. They struggled and bit with their milk teeth, but they couldn’t break loose.

Johan was now something of a head of household, but he couldn’t understand what was happening. Isak refused to have anything to do with the hysterical little brats, claiming that people get like that if they are not properly punished for original sin. The whole house seemed to be decaying and falling to pieces. The lust for life trickled down between the floorboards and gradually rotted away. Things had gotten so bad, everybody wanted to be beaten again. First a beating, then God’s grace.

In the end Johan marched up to his mother.

“It’s time you got yourself a job,” he said.

She turned white, and wondered why he wanted to send her to her death, given her agonized and exhausted state.

“It’s time you got yourself a job!” he said again.

She refused, she’d become a laughing stock, who would want to employ an old woman with no qualifications?

“Meals on wheels,” he said. “School dinners, old folks’ homes.”

She didn’t reply, just slumped down onto the kitchen sofa, panting and wheezing from an attack of asthma. The children stopped squabbling
on the floor, Isak froze in the rocking chair. Mum squirmed and wriggled, unable to breathe. Niila ran to phone for an ambulance, but Johan stopped him. Without saying a word he fetched a bottle of milk from the fridge. Walked over to his mother and emptied it all over her. A white flood flowed down her face, over her bust, down her skirt and her wrinkled stockings. A copious milky mess. And cold.

His mother flailed around like a suckling, then suddenly recovered her strength and got to her feet, furious. Then she hit Johan for the first time in her life, a fierce, resounding box on the ear.

“It’s time you got yourself a job,” he said for the third time.

She could feel the violent blow pulsating through her hand, could still feel the force flowing through her arm and her shoulder, and into the muscles of her back. She twisted her body back and forth in astonishment, and looked around, red in the face. The pain had gone.

In which May bonfires are lit, weapons are acquired, and a bounty is placed on the heads of two young forest guerrillas

They older we grew, the more we understood the way Pajala worked. It transpired that the village was made up of several districts, each with its own unofficial name—such as Naurisaho, Strandvägen, or Centrum. A new housing estate was dubbed Texas, appropriately for a wild west settlement; the area around the old sewage treatment works was called Paskajänkkä, which translates from Finnish as “Shitmire,” and, as mentioned before, the block where I lived was known as Vittulajänkkä, “Cuntsmire.”

In every district the boys formed their own gang, each with its leader. Relations between the gangs could be anything from friendly cooperation to competition, from saber rattling to open warfare, depending on when you looked. A delicate balance of power, if you like. Sometimes two gangs combined to fight a third party. Sometimes it was a free-for-all.

Having been born into one of the districts where there were most children, you soon got used to challenges between the various gangs. You just weighed in and did your bit. It might be prestigious ice hockey matches in the road some winter evening. You stuck to the brightest
parts, under a street lamp. Heaps of snow as goal posts, piles of snow, produced by the plows, at the sides of the road as touch lines, left- or right-handed sticks you bought in the hardware shop or borrowed from your elder brother, a tennis ball or an ancient puck, no protective clothing, no referee, but ten to fifteen snotty-nosed kids inspired by a prodigious determination to win.

Everything went fairly smoothly as far as 2–2. Energetic forechecking, hair-raising solo dashes, a gesture in the direction of passing but more often than not a rocket of a shot, then ages spent searching for the puck in the snowdrifts. We all played our heroes in the national icehockey team—Uffe Sterner, or Stisse, or Lillprosten. Or maybe Phil Esposito, who’d hit the puck so hard on Canadian television that it pierced a sheet of iron.

It’s about now we see the first kid get his lips split. A center forward with a stick so long that the handle sticks out a few feet behind him manages to smash somebody in the face. Milk teeth still there, but oceans of blood. A dramatic vote is taken: send him off.

Then a foul tackle with no attempt to hide it. A dive into the snow. Shortly afterward, another one to get his own back. Excited discussions. A goal that’s disallowed because somebody’s shifted the goalposts. Protests. Counter-protests. A puck blasted into somebody’s crotch. Tears. Penalty, another blast. Misses somebody’s face by a hair’s breadth. Elbowing. Shoulder-charge into a snowdrift. Trip. Punch on the nose.

Then before you know where you are, ten boys sprawled half-hidden in the piles made by the plows, mouths crammed full of snow, and one lonely kid at the far goal tapping the puck to and fro over the goal line: his team wins a hundred to three and he trudges home all alone through the glittering galaxy of snow.

* * *

Another thing the gangs did was to gather firewood and stuff for the traditional bonfires lit on the last day of April, and kept burning into May.
This task started immediately after New Year when the Christmas trees were thrown out. The village was suddenly full of little boys with enormous piles of fir needles on their kick-sleds. The main competition was between Paskajänkkä and Strandvägen as both districts were alongside the river, and so the bonfires could be as big as you liked. That was the aim, in fact—to make the biggest fire.

On top of the dead Christmas trees went practically anything that would burn: empty cardboard boxes from the shops, wood from buildings that had been demolished, car tires, plastic buckets, furniture, empty milk cartons, broken skis, sheets of hardboard, shoes, and even school books. Now and then a spy would be sent to the neighboring fire to compare and report on progress.

Stuff was occasionally pinched from somebody else’s fire.

Violence also occurred, but not as often as in the hockey matches. The preferred methods of intimidation were implied threats, pigheadedness, or cunning.

For instance, you could make your bonfire look bigger than it really was by piling the material up high. In extreme cases this could lead to murder-fires that could collapse like swaying skyscrapers and burn to death twenty of the nearest spectators. Uncomprehending adults used to pull the tower down before it was lit, however, and pile it up more sensibly.

On one occasion some boys who were hopelessly far behind their rivals set fire to the opposition’s superior effort a few days in advance. But that was regarded as being so dastardly nobody admired the winning fires.

Then everybody would stand in the snow around these burning rubbish heaps throwing firecrackers, and watching several months’ work go up in smoke. That was the reward. Plus the two rockets the gang had managed to save up for, which were let off toward the end when the sky had become as dark as possible. They soared up like glowing flower stems, then each blossomed forth with its own glittering blooms. And then it was spring. Spring had come at last.

* * *

When you were a bit older, the macho thing to do was to acquire an air rifle. I nagged at my old man for months until he bought me one, second hand and a bit battered. It leaked, so that your hair would blow about whenever you shot, and there was hardly enough power for the pellet to exit from the muzzle. Results improved after the application of some electrical insulation tape and tightening of the spring, but it never became what you might call a killer gun. After school I used to practice shooting at a target on the garage wall. The sight couldn’t be adjusted, so you always had to aim above and to the left. My old man had a go once, but he got cross when he could never hit the target and muttered something about being long-sighted.

Air rifles made the gangs both wilder and noisier. Boys would wander about in hordes: sweaty, excited teenagers with dirty trouser-knees. They would have peeing competitions, draw willies on shed walls, learn new swearwords and cause as much trouble as possible. It was fun to be in a group. You felt strong. And when you finally bumped into another gang, just as excited and also armed to the teeth, there could only be one outcome: air rifle war.

In order to prevent adults from intervening, the wars would be conducted in the extensive forests on the other side of the river. I badly wanted to join in, but wasn’t sure if I was up to it. I’d just started class seven and was called a rabbit by the older pupils: I didn’t have a moped, and my air rifle was nothing to shout about. On the other hand, Niila had managed to borrow from one of his cousins an East German pump-action rifle that was frighteningly powerful. It could shoot a hole straight through a sheet of hardboard, whereas my rifle barely made a mark.

One afternoon we decided to visit the front line. We got on our bikes with our guns slung over our shoulders, and set off over the old bridge. The river and village had soon disappeared behind us, and we entered
a pine forest with thick undergrowth on all sides. We passed the saw mill, turned off onto a rough forest track and hid our bikes in a thicket. The forest was spookily silent. War was being waged not far away, but everything seemed to be calm and still. There was a smell of autumn. Sticky mushrooms were wearing their big, brown hats, weighed down by maggots. I picked a few overripe blueberries and sucked at the watery juice.

Suddenly there was a sharp crack, and Niila’s cap fell off his head. Before the sniper had time to reload, I yelled out that we’d come to join up, for Christ’s sake. A boy came scrambling down from a tree muttering something about being sorry that his finger had slipped, and that the main force was a bit further on. We followed him along a narrow path and soon came to a camp fire where a group of about ten boys were drinking coffee and taking snuff. Most of them were a year or two older than us, some were wearing camouflage clothing and legionnaire hats. They spat out a brown mess, and scrutinized us critically. The General, a burly fellow from Paskajänkkä with a fluffy moustache, pointed at a cone-laden pine branch about thirty feet away. I aimed above and to the left. The cone fell down first go. Niila hadn’t had time to practice, and missed with his first attempt. And his second. And his third. The lads grinned and told him to go to hell. Niila missed with his fourth shot as well. Started sweating. The General was annoyed by this time and told him to run along back home to Mummy. Niila didn’t say a word, but re-loaded. Pumped away. Pumped still more, ignoring all the jeers. Then he shot into the fire. There was a clang. Two jets of brown liquid spurted out from the pierced coffee kettle.