Troll: A Love Story (11 page)

Angel’s flank next to mine is like a furnace. We’re in that when-the-sweat’s-already-dried state, when it’s toughest of all to find something to say.

Earlier in the evening it was easier. Angel nattered away about his childhood in the north, his adolescence, and after the third pint he mentioned his kid brother—two years younger than himself, an archeologist and an extremely gifted devotee of nature photography. His brother died a year ago. A stray shot in the forest, and it wasn’t even the elk-hunting season. He was missing for several weeks, and then someone picking berries stumbled on the body. Bullet-hole in the neck. No one knows who fired it, and the bullet wasn’t found. I remember putting my hand on his hand and squeezing it unabashedly and Angel raising his eyes to mine, and at that point my heart started to dance the cha-cha-cha.

Angel’s lying on his stomach, and I run my hand along his back and his behind.

He gives the faintest of shivers, and then it goes just as I’ve feared. With a careless, oh-how-artificially-casual-seeming movement, as if on the spur of the moment, he’s sitting up, groping for his jeans and sweeping the blond locks from his forehead, and my pulse goes off at a gallop, because his lips are just about to formulate the sentence I don’t want to hear.

ANGEL

Ecke is small and dark, what you might call nerdy. Bad haircut, thick glasses, and he’s narrow-shouldered, short-legged, with a rather wide bottom. Not at all my type.

His apartment’s encrusted with books. They grow up the walls, proliferating over everything like a polychromatic invasion of moss. They aspire to places outside their own reserve, they push four-cornered tentacles onto windowsills, tables, chairs, and the floor. You can’t take a step without tripping over a book. Even the hall, the bathroom, and the rather diminutive bedroom are lined with books. The paperbacks stand two rows deep on the shelves. In the midst of this jungle of books, however, there looms the monitor of Ecke’s computer. Ecke’s a PC man and I’ve got a Macintosh, and in the course of the evening we moved on to comparing their respective merits. It turned into a hilarious mad debate. I told all my Bill Gates jokes, claimed Microsoft had lifted all its best ideas from Apple, and finally we went into a hugely rewarding nitpicking. I threw in that people had to wait until Windows 98 for the chance to have several monitors on the same machine, whereas for years Mac had been providing this absolutely indispensable facility for creatives like me. The whole session was half-rumpus, half-flirtation, a love song composed of gags and disparaging cracks, the sort of thing I had some years ago with an
absolutely irresistible photographer boy about the respective merits of Nikon and Canon.

I wander into Ecke’s living room, stroll around, and examine the backs of the books. I ought to go, but I can’t. I’m not finding the right words to shake Ecke’s hot-glue look off the back of my neck.

Pessi’s never been alone for a whole night before.

“It’s not all that tidy here,” Ecke goes on when I run my finger along the bindings and loosen a quantity of dust. “But I have tried, a bit, to keep some sort of order, because I once had a really traumatic experience . . .”

I smirk a little and stand looking at a glass case with some really old books in. Ecke runs a combination secondhand book and computer-component shop, but, from what he says, most of the books finally end up in his own home. The young computer freaks only go for the odd comic book.

“I was living in Pispala at that time, in the stone basement of somebody’s house. A poor student’s cheap room. Wood-burning stove and all. No proper storage space, just a couple of ridiculous cupboards. Nowhere decent for coffee mugs, glasses, and so on. And then I came across a couple of bits of particle board in the shed, and with those and a few bricks I knocked together a sort of a shelf-extension to the zinc countertop.”

I open the glass case carefully. The books give off an overpowering smell of old paper—the smell’s somewhat like an outdoor wood-saw after rain—and it’s a good special effect in Ecke’s story.

“Came summer, a long hot summer, and those boards by the sink must have been drenched countless times when I was doing the dishes. One morning, after spending too long in a beer garden the night before, I got up with a bit of a hangover, went into the kitchen for a drink of water and simply let out a yell.”

Tickled, I turn and look at Ecke. He’s raising his hands, a sheepish look on his face.

“The particle board’s growing mushrooms about six inches high. Pale violet-gray and revolting. Broad caps, gills, the lot.”

I give a snort of incredulous laughter.

“Mushrooms. On your counters.”

“Mushrooms. A . . . a type who was there with me at the time lewdly suggested I make a mushroom omelette for breakfast. But, retching away, I chucked out the whole contraption. Underneath it had become pure compost.”

I pull a face. “Straight out of a surrealist film.”

“Peter Greenaway, of course. New masterpiece:
Nature Strikes Back.
A tale of the wild wood stealthily insinuating itself into the hygienic life of urban dwellers who suspect no evil. Scene Two: a mother’s tampon box grows a fir-tree cone.”

My laugh’s a bit false as I turn to examine the books again. Straight away, my fingers light on an antiquated-looking volume, and I pull it out.

I take a deep breath.

Gustaf Eurén,
The Wild Beasts of Finland, Illustrated in Color.

“That’s from 1854,” Ecke says. He’s suddenly behind me.

I turn to him: “Lend me this.”

ECKE

Angel looks shockingly beautiful standing there with the Eurén book in his hand, so beautiful my hand pauses, my hand that was just about to go to his shoulders and draw him down toward me, with his blond shock of hair. He’s pressing the Gustaf Eurén, a rare antiquarian piece, a pearl of great price, against his naked chest.

“It’s terribly old. And terribly expensive.” I can’t help feeling how sordid I’m sounding. Suddenly I’m a miserly, penny-pinching old skinflint hanging on to his merchandise, who can’t let a single dusty item slip through his claws.

“I’d really like to read this, an awful lot.”

I look at Angel desperately. I can see from the look in his eye how he’s sizing me up. How far am I willing to go because he’s gifted and successful and beautiful and hellishly sexy, and as far above me as a free-running lynx above a soon-to-be-skinned mink crouching in its cage with no weapons but its slipperiness and small but sharp teeth.

“And I’d really like an awful lot for nothing to happen to this. There are very few of them around in Finland.”

“Well, bound to be so.”

“I don’t normally lend my books. But, well, here, at my place . . . you can read them as much as you like.”

I know at once how it sounds. Why not come into my lair, young man? Come, and let me entangle you in my web, so you’ll never find your way out again.

Angel has a very serious look. He thrusts the Eurén towards me like a goodbye letter.

“Okay. No, then. I understand. This must be a thing you really value.”

And his tone of voice throws down the glove: if this book’s valuable, then how valuable am I then?

“You’d not believe its list price.”

Angel turns, sighs, and pretends to put the book back in the case. And I know just as well as he does that it’s an act, that he’s giving me an opportunity. And I pick up the cue: I seize Angel’s wrist—the golden swell of those wrist bones, that finely dewed skin—and stop him.

“Take it.”

Angel’s laugh has a low note of triumph in it. He slides the hands holding the book around my back and kisses me on the lips quickly and hard. A bony kiss, I think. A bone to a good dog. And his eyes glow.

“And don’t go using a slice of salami as a bookmark” is my parting shot, and Angel smirks with just the right delight, just the right casualness, to show me my Angelic visitation’s over, the magical moment has passed, and what’s left is just a cramp in my stomach and a floorful of rubber relics of joy.

ANGEL

I’m sitting in a chair in my bathrobe, and I open the book. I’ve just had my evening shower, and I’m waiting for Pessi to finish his breakfast before I clean the bathroom.

“The number of wild animals in Finland is very large, and all of these beasts are destructive,” Eurén begins. He scrupulously records the animals’ distinguishing characteristics and physical structure. I hear thumpings from the bathroom and nails scratching the floor. Pessi’s hunting a panting guinea pig around the floor tiles and hurling the creature at the walls from time to time; so once again I’ll have to spend quite some time cleaning the splatterings off with Lemon Power Fantastik.

And since different weapons are needed for the mastication of different substances, the shape of the teeth alone may well enable us to determine what each animal’s sustenance is. Again, the pabulum helps us to determine the means of motion each particular animal will need for obtaining the particular nourishment its teeth are adapted to, and also the strength and other physical characteristics required for winning each kind of food, carrying it, and so forth; and thus we may almost always, simply from the teeth, determine the configuration of the whole animal.

I hear a squeak and crunch, because I’ve been too late in gauging when to put my hands over my ears. Pessi has crunched through the guinea pig’s backbone. Appropriately, Eurén is just coming to the cat family.

The largest creatures of this family are formidable predators. Such are the lion, the tiger, the leopard, and the lynx. Hunters also have tales of, on occasion, sighting a troll or forest demon and also the creature called, because of its nimbleness, the thicket demon, an animal which many of them consider a species of cat or large ape. Nevertheless, those who claim to have seen troll-type creatures are extremely rare, even more so those who might have obtained them as booty; so we may be permitted to consider the “forest demon” as pure fabrication and fancy.

I take my hands cautiously off my ears. It’s quiet. Evidently Pessi’s now eating. Eurén continues about cats.

These animals also resemble snakes in their mottled or spotted appearance, the slyness of their nature, the circularity of their reclining posture, and the foul stench they emit when enraged.

I grin. The door creaks and Pessi comes out of the bathroom, looking at peace and satisfied, his small red tongue licking around his mouth like a flame. He bounces straight on to my lap on the sofa and wraps himself into a ball on my knees. His juniper-berry smell pungently overpowers my nostrils, and on my thighs his warm weight, glowing with the excitement of the hunt, is a burden. He’s lazily cleaning the blood from the corners of his mouth, when, hardly knowing what I’m doing, I draw him a little closer to me,
just a little and ever so cautiously—and the moment his hot back touches my belly I ejaculate like a volcano.

My heart’s hammering and thumping, like a rock-drill. The sperm has spattered Pessi’s back and my thighs, and I’m doing my level best not to think about what’s just happened. I’ve instinctively put the faded fragile book aside, and Pessi’s just moving away a little, not provoked but to make himself more comfortable, for he’s in the process of cleaning himself, and I thrust him out of my lap—so abruptly, violently almost, that he takes fright, bolts into the hall, and tries to scramble up on to the hat-rack. His powerful, clambering hind legs hit the hall mirror, and the heavy frame bangs down on the thick carpet, while I’m dashing into the bathroom to wash away my shameful stain.

ANCIENT POEMS OF THE FINNISH PEOPLE
, VII. 1. 375, 1929, “THE MARRIAGE PROPOSAL TO THE TROLLS”

collected from Trofim Sosonov, the Village of Uomaa, Impilahti

“What do folk then call you men?”

“Fishermen with seines be we.”

“Where to do you fare for brides?”

“Fare we to the Devil’s daughters,

Children of the mountain tribes.”

ANGEL

I don’t want to do what I’m doing, but I must.

I’m putting Pessi in a child’s stroller I’ve borrowed from the stairwell: no one’ll be needing it, now it’s night. I’ve wrapped him up in a blanket so that no one coming along will start wondering. Pessi’s ears stir, and his nostrils are trembling at the mass of city smells.

Below Pyynikki ridge, on the outskirts of the forest leading to Pirkkala, I peel the blanket off him. I take off his collar and lead, which I’ve been using to fasten him to the stroller. He crouches in the chair, black and naked and trembling, while a single snowflake flutters down onto his black mane and soon melts into a tear.

“Go,” I whisper. “Go.”

Pessi’s shivering gets worse. My hands feel his trembling as I lift him to stand up in the snow. I point the stroller the other way and set off for the town again, trying not to look back.