Popular Music from Vittula (28 page)

“I’m coming with you!” I yelled in desperation.

She accelerated, the door flew out of my grasp. With tires spinning she skidded away under the streetlights in a cloud of whirling snow. The sound of the engine grew fainter then died away into silence.

I stood motionless for a long time, and then the penny dropped. She hadn’t had an ignition key. The engine had been hot-wired. And as the pain grew, sinking its cold roots deep inside me, I realized I would never see her again.

Regarding a birthday party at which the Tornedalen national anthem is sung, how the moose hunters turn up, and how four young men shoot for the stars

As the years went by, my grandad became more and more of a hermit. He enjoyed being on his own, and when Grandma passed on he got it into his head that other people were a nuisance. He lived on his own, looked after himself, and his final wish was to die in his own home. Whenever we went to visit him, he was friendly but reserved. As far as he was concerned, the bottom line was that he wanted nothing to do with an assisted living facility: just let us get that into our thick skulls. Some people might think his house was a mess, but he liked it that way.

But he couldn’t do anything about the passage of time, and eventually his seventieth birthday approached. His family had a guilty conscience, because they hadn’t been to see him as often as they might have; they all agreed that they should make up for this by giving him a birthday party nobody would ever forget. It would be an opportunity to add a few celebratory photos to the family album before the old man was too senile.

It took a great deal of persuasion before the object of the celebration agreed to take part, not for his own sake, but for the family’s. Looking on the bright side, he watched the preparations being made. The week before, his house was full of relatives scouring the foot sweat off the floorboards, scrubbing the rag carpets with soft soap, polishing the old windows with methylated spirits in the freezing winter cold, airing his black funeral suit to get rid of the smell of mothballs, washing congealed fat off the lamp shades, changing the wax table cloths, dusting every nook and cranny and discovering an incredible number of spiders’ webs and dead flies, carrying junk out into the barn, standing shoes in unnatural rows and patterns, and moving things in cupboards and drawers until everything was in the wrong place and impossible to find. Grandad managed to lose his temper several times, moaned and cursed and threatened to throw out all these intruders, but it was like a D-Day operation: impossible to stop once it had started.

* * *

The birthday fell on a Friday. Sis and I had been given the day off school, and we accompanied Mum and Dad to Grandad’s house quite early in the morning. It was fine weather and minus four degrees, a dry, windless chill that poured hoarfrost over car windscreens and covered trees with stiff ice needles. The last of the morning stars were fading away in the sky. The light lay blue over the forests. Dad parked the car in the courtyard where the snow plow had already been; we crunched our way over the frozen flakes and stamped our feet on the porch. The old dog began growling behind the door. He was half-blind and had started biting, so I picked up the sweeping brush and was prepared when Grandad opened up.

“
Tekkös sieltä tuletta?
Is it you, then?” he said in Finnish, pretending to be surprised. Mum handed him the flowers she’d had inside her coat to protect them from the cold, Dad shook his hands and wished him
many happy returns, and I swept the attacking Finnish spitz down the steps. It fell over and started howling.

We sat down at the kitchen table and listened to the clock ticking. The whole place looked unnaturally tidy. Grandad sat in the rocking chair, his wrinkled neck rubbing against his stiff shirt collar, and he fiddled nervously with his tie. Everything was artificial and stiff, which is how it should be on ceremonial occasions.

At lunchtime my uncles and their wives started turning up, and big cream cakes were produced. Some of the ladies started making coffee and filling the thermos flasks, while Sis and I helped to butter the local rieska bread and make open-face sandwiches with juicy slices of oven-baked moose steak. Others filled trays with newly baked biscuits and buns, and the house was filled with a lovely smell of cinnamon, cocoa, and vanilla.

Outside, a pale February sun had fought its way up out of the snowdrifts and made the wintry day start glistening. A few reindeer were kicking at the crust of snow in the meadow, licking at the faded wisps of grass they uncovered. Some were lying on folded legs in hollows in the snow, preserving body heat, with only their dark antlers visible. The old dog hadn’t the strength to bother about them, and instead nosed around by the house, sniffing at the holes made in the snow where Grandad had gone out for a pee, and a bunch of great tits clung onto a piece of bacon rind nailed to the wall. The whole countryside was bathing in the white tundra-light under an ice-cold sun.

As the afternoon wore on, more and more visitors put in an appearance. The parking area in front of the house soon filled up, and cars packed the road outside. The closest neighbors came on kick sleds, and a couple of them made their way on skis. It was now time to start getting serious with regard to the formalities. Guests sat down at the long tables that had been prepared: thin men with runny eyes and frozen eyebrows starting to melt, and portly ladies with arms like loaves from the local baker’s, compressed into flowery Sunday-best dresses. Coffee
was duly slurped from saucers, and salmon sandwiches and biscuits were passed around. The ancient wood-fired oven was lit for old times’ sake, and the old ladies started going on about the old days and how nice it would be to bake some genuine crispbread instead of the rubbish you found in the supermarkets nowadays.

After a second cup it seemed appropriate to bring out the brandy. A bottle bought at the monopoly store was uncorked and carried around by Dad. Schnapps glasses were filled to the accompaniment of silent nods, while those condemned to driving home placed their hands over their glasses. The atmosphere became noticeably livelier. Mum sliced up a couple of cakes and put them on plates. A few toasts were proposed, but Grandad remained anchored in his rocking chair, sweating. Dad filled up his glass with brandy, to make things look better in the photographs. Then followed a rendering of the traditional birthday song in broken Swedish, accompanied by admiring expressions. The old man was embarrassed by all the fuss and tried to hide behind all the bunches of flowers. Then he was instructed to open his presents. He’d left them untouched in case it occured to anybody that they were the only reason he’d agreed to the party in the first place—a sensible move given the usual Tornedalen assumptions. All thumbs, he struggled with the parcels until one of my uncles took pity on him and produced a
puukko
. A few assured slashes and the old boy made short work of the fancy wrapping paper, as easily as slitting open the belly of a pike. He produced a glass relief of a bull moose, a carved kitchen clock driven by batteries, a cake slice made of Tornedalen silver, a fancy pewter tankard, some lace tablecloths, a wall-hanging complete with hanging chain, a fancy pack of shaving luxuries, a guest book with a genuine reindeer-skin cover, a bed-hanging made of shells from somebody who’d been on holiday in Thailand, a poker-work doorplate with the motif “Welcome,” and various other useless gifts. Grandad commented in Swedish that this was pure overkill—another way of saying that all this expensive bric-a-brac was quite unnecessary. Nobody had dared to give him really
useful things such as a chopper or a new exhaust system for his car, since that could have been interpreted as suggesting that he was incapable of seeing to mundane, everyday things.

Early in the evening the local folklore society turned up to pay their respects, twenty or so mild-mannered ladies and gents who shook hands politely like southern Swedes. Several had brought bunches of flowers with neatly written cards. After a sandwich and a piece of cake, they produced song sheets and sang with tremulous, slightly shrill voices. Swedish folk songs from Grandad’s school days, well-known sing-alongs, tributes to the landscapes and climes of their motherland. Dad served brandy, tactfully avoiding the Laestadians. To end, we all joined in the Tornedalen national anthem, slowly and reverently:

Some of the elderly were deeply moved and started wiping away tears. Grandad was surprisingly touched, his eyes grew red-rimmed and his hand shook so much that Mum had to take away his glass. The whole house was on the point of bursting into tears. Especially when the Finnish verses were sung last of all, everyone’s heart fluttered and felt hot and wet.

Everybody sat in melancholy silence for a while. Let themselves fill up with Finnish suffering, and pondered all the catastrophes that had befallen the family: all the merciless blows of destiny that had been suffered, all the backward children born, all the teenagers who’d become deranged, all the starvation, all the poverty, all the horses that had to be put down, all the TB and polio, all the failed harvests, all the failed attempts at smuggling, all the beatings suffered and all the scorn from the authorities, all the suicides, all the traitors and blacklegs, all the occasions they’d been cheated, all the cruel teachers and greedy company
directors, all the times they’d been blacklisted, all the laborers who’d gone to Russia to help Stalin but been shot for their pains, all the damn “efficiency consultants” at work, all the sadists at the hostels they’d stayed in as school kids, all those who’d drunk themselves to death, all those who’d drowned while floating timber or been killed down in the mine, all the tears, all the wounds, all the pains and humiliations that had afflicted our long-suffering family on their arduous trek through this vale of tears.

Outside, the long, steel-blue winter dusk had turned into darkness. The pole star hung down like an icicle from the winter ceiling, encircled by thousands of glittering sparks while the temperature fell a few more degrees. The forest was stiff and frozen, not a single twig moved. The whole taiga was draped in grisly silence, the endless forest extending through sparsely populated Finland, on over the vast Russian land mass, through the even more vast Siberia, and on to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, a motionless tree-desert weighed down with snow and sub-zero temperatures. Deep down in the forks of enormous fir boughs crouched tomtits like tiny, fluffy orbs. And there, only there, deep down inside, was there a warm little flutter.

Suddenly a mumbling spread through the kitchen. The moose hunters! The moose hunters were approaching! The chairman of the folklore society rose to his feet and delivered a polite but brief thank-you speech, and Grandad promised to present an old and illegal fish spear to the local folklore museum, as he couldn’t see well enough in the dark now to use it himself. They turned their coffee cups upside down on their saucers, flung on their outer clothing and were gone in a blink. The only ones left now were a few neighbors and retirees, plus Dad’s brothers, who now dared to start swearing again and ask for more to drink.

Soon there was a stamping on the porch steps, then the front door was kicked open. In boomed about twenty silent men. The spokesman for the moose hunters said:

“Hello.”

The others sat down at the long table without a word, and stared straight ahead. The youngest was just over twenty, the eldest was already over eighty. Many of them were related to us.

Rieska bread, cake, and coffee, and then a toast with brandy from the last of the bottles, and everybody wondered why on earth the French insisted on coloring their spirits brown and making them taste like paint.

The spokesman for the sharpshooters got to his feet and started to deliver his ceremonial speech before the old men forgot where they were. He insisted that Grandad had been an effective member of the team; he wasn’t quite gaga yet, but as soon as he was he should stay at home and concentrate on the washing up and count on his former colleagues to look after his meat supplies. They couldn’t see any signs of senility just yet, repeated the spokesman, and the old boy seemed to be thinking straight, but by God, once he started rambling and talking nonsense, then he had better stay at home! Let’s face it, even a doddering old devil needed to be able to distinguish between a moose and a motor car, for instance, before he could be let loose in the woods with a gun in his hand—that was the difference between this particular group of sharpshooters and certain others he could name in this area.

The hunters all nodded grimly, and the spokesman took a swig before continuing. And so, the old boy could still manage to carry a rifle and put up with the rain and the cold and do his duty, but for hell’s sake, if he were to become senile! He’d be better occupied wearing out the sofa with the force of his farts. Because even if nobody could see any signs just yet, it was only a matter of time before his brain became addled, and that would be it, the old bastard ought to be quite clear about that!

After this heartfelt ceremonial speech, they handed over a pewter goblet with all the names of the hunters, including the dogs, engraved on it. A few of them had been spelled wrongly, as they’d made the mistake of having the engraving done in Luleå, where they weren’t
familiar with Finnish names, but for the discount received they’d been able to buy a bottle, complete with contents.

Grandad responded by claiming that the wrong spelling was no doubt due to the awful handwriting of the sharpshooters, that his physique was equal in all respects to that of an eighteen-year-old, that he could see like an eagle and hear a moose cow fart at a distance of several hundred feet, and that if they took into account the number of brain cells destroyed by all the boozing among the hunters, he was highly unlikely to be the first one to go doddery. He then thanked them for the bottle, and more especially for what was in it, as this was the last remaining drop of strong drink left in the house, and once it was finished they’d be offered coffee for the rest of the night.