Troll: A Love Story (20 page)

Could be I’ll have to cope in the forest a long time, but time’s short. I throw into a small backpack, a Swiss army knife, water dashed from the tap into an empty Evian bottle, a plastic cigarette lighter, a woolen sweater and a spare pair of socks. Nothing much in the fridge except some vacuum-packed reduced-fat salami. Can’t take a lot of clothes, but the spring’s been amazingly warm, about twenty degrees centigrade since mid-April. Pessi’s bouncing about impatiently. He smells my cold bitter sweat, my fear and panic.

It’s night but not dark—blast the April light! I grab a blanket off the sofa, wrap it around Pessi, and lift him up in my arms. Oh, how bird-boned my little troll still is, how light and slender—grown a lot but still much the same as six months ago, when my life was changed and I let a changeling into my home.

PALOMITA

The bruise on my cheek’s burning, through pressing it against the door, trying to catch just a glimpse of Mikael in the peephole. He goes leaping down the stairs, two at a time, wearing funny clothes and clasping a long round bundle. He’s running so fast I’d have no time to open the door and shout, so that Pentti’s double-locking the door doesn’t seem as bad as it might.

Then the police come, just a couple of minutes after Mikael’s gone. I’m sure now that Pentti’s done what he said he’d do—he’s called the police to take me away. In Finland, he said, women who deceive their husbands are sent to prison. I’ll be there all my life long, and my family’ll have to pay back all the money Pentti’s spent on me, and my name’ll be dragged through the mud. But it’s not our door they’re coming to, and then I realize I wished they were—that they’d get here before Pentti’s back from the pub.

The police come up the stairs with a big net and a big muzzled dog whose claws scratch and slip on the stone steps, and one of them has a funny-looking long-barreled gun. I hear Mikael’s doorbell, hear someone shouting through the mail slot, and then the noises as they break the door open. For a while it’s quite quiet, then one of the men comes back down with his heavy feet; he’s got a sad doggy-looking face and a long yellowish jacket,
not a uniform. He sits on the stairs and presses his head in his hands, and a moment later two men come up carrying a stretcher.

It makes my hands ache horribly, but I begin banging on the door and shouting, so they’re bound to hear.

ALEKSIS KIVI,
THE SEVEN BROTHERS
, 1870

Juhani: We’ve been harrying a bear, we have, a dangerous brute that pretty soon would be snuffing out both you and your oxen. A vicious Bruin it was we slaughtered, and thus did we a great public service for our homeland. Is that not a public service—to winkle out wild beasts, trolls, and devils from the world?

ANGEL

Nobody pays any attention to me. I suppose people in hiking gear, with large mohair bundles in their arms, are leaping into taxis all the time. The driver’s eyebrows go up, but he asks no questions. Pessi, thank God, is perfectly still in my lap, listening to the odd sounds through the thin woolen fabric and sniffing the strange smells.

The drive to Kauppi takes no more than a few minutes. The driver says little. Occasionally he looks at me in the mirror, musing at my sweaty brow. I dig a bill out of my pocket and thrust it into his hand. I don’t even look to see what it is, but it must be enough, and I start lurching off from the roadside to the forest. I’m deep in the thicket before I hear the taxi irritably accelerating off. Now, if memory serves me, we should be able, keeping the setting sun behind us, to get through the Kauppi forest and reach the outskirts of the Lake Halimasjärvi nature reserve. It’s the only route for avoiding too much human habitation, and that way we’ll get into the Teisko forests.

I’ve been on the point of falling over several times, and Pessi’s annoyed. He wriggles and frets under the blanket. I decide we’re far enough from the road, put him down and peel him out of the bundle. His eyes are bright with excitement, his ears trembling, and his nostrils twitch at the pungent riot of forest smells—his tail’s a tensely whipping antenna, registering everything.

Just then I hear a sound, a sound too early for the time of the year, but an unmistakable sign that spring is here, and I know that Pessi can now—for ever and irreversibly—leave me. The sound’s as sadly monotonous and repetitive as a funeral bell.

A cuckoo’s calling.

ANNI SWAN,
SILKY AND THE TROLLS
, 1933

“You never get out of a troll’s cave once you’ve drunk a mug of trolls’ honey.”

Willow cried out with fear when she saw the two big hulking brutes. “Don’t be afraid,” the young troll whispered. “Nothing bad will happen to you.” He looked at the girl pleadingly: “Stay here. I’m the only one of the troll people who longs and yearns like human beings. When I was little, my mother exchanged me for a human child. She wanted me to grow up like a human in skill and cleverness. But my father couldn’t stand people. He brought me back and put the child there in my place. But anyway, I was lying for seven days and seven nights in the human child’s cradle, and I heard the human mother singing her lullabies. Since then I’ve only been half-troll, the other half longs to be back with people.”

DR. SPIDERMAN

It feels really great to be drunk.

All the most agonizing and sick and stressful things feel, in a certain phase, quite—well, possibly—bearable.

You can analyze them as if through a befogged glass wall—study them without needing actually to touch them. Drunk, you can think about things as if you were observing poisonous insects inside tightly lidded jars of thick glass, while a sober view would be a walk through thickets of the same swarming crawlies, which can land on your unprotected neck or leg if you’re not on the alert every second.

I don’t think about the young man’s body.

I don’t think about where Angel is now.

I think about a story of forest maidens, vivid, whispering shadows who lure young men into the deep forest and snare them with their spells, so the men never return.

What was it, ultimately, that lured them there? Not the flutter of a lovely shapely arm in a wild-spruce copse, no, nor a lock of hair tossing behind a rock, but the waft of a fierce erotic charge in the air, a trail of pheromones.

Smell must be somehow connected to the cohesion of the microphyle. Could be, for instance, that a smell only affects the males: it might be the way the troop’s younger members signal to
the alpha male their readiness to work with him and their subordinate position. For instance, that would explain why Angel’s troll didn’t attack him, didn’t try to kill him but, on the contrary, protected Angel’s territory whenever he could. Obedience. Didn’t chew through the computer wiring, didn’t rip the sofa covers when he got on to them. Angel was his alpha male.

That would explain a great deal more.

A pheromone that cuts across the boundaries of species? By no means an impossibility. Musk, for example, it sets off both the arctic ox and the sultan in his harem.

A pheromone that only affects males? Axiomatic. But what about a pheromone that only affects certain kinds of males? Males for whom it’s particularly important to have an effect on other males?

Why not?

But is there in all this—and it’s a question I put to myself with a fearful relish, as if I were venturing out on to crackling new-formed ice—something altogether different from the sum of the molecular events?

Why are they here?

Why were they—and, judging from the legends and tales, very much so—associating with human beings just at the time when human habitation began in earnest to encroach on the forest lands? After that, with the onset of a new age, they shrank back into myth and legend. Even after they’d officially been discovered they went on lying low. But now there’s some new upheaval occurring, similar to the one when man first began trying to push the trolls out of their own territories.

It’s happening.

They’re on their way back and beginning to aspire to how things were in the age the tales tell about: stories of trolls dwelling
quite close to human habitation, entering into commerce with human beings, taking an interest in cultural exchange by infiltrating their own offspring into human households . . .

They’re coming back, and the dumpsters and garbage dumps are their new sacrificial stones.

They’re coming because they have to. Large-scale forest industry, pollution, and the diminution of game have cornered them.

Global warming.

I laugh out loud and go for some more drink. I’m out of whisky, so I scrunch the cap off a gin bottle, pour myself a glass, raise it, and at once the Finnish forest’s flooding around me.

Pessi. I almost look at the floor by me—what’s he doing here—is he about to jump into my arms? And then I realize, and my cheeks go red. Gin. The smell of the forest. Juniper berry and Calvin Klein. How powerful and associative it is, man’s olfactory memory!

I’m pushing the glass away, but then I tighten my cheek muscles and annul the flavor. I control a shudder, though first my mouth’s full of cold and then my belly full of hot ignis fatuus.

They’re on their way back and doing what the sparrows and pigeons and rats do—living alongside us, whether we like it or not. They’re eating our leftovers, they’re even stealing a little, and sleeping in our abandoned buildings and barns, as in the tales. They’re pushing out their own territory into ours, little by little, so we’ll not even notice until they’re already in our midst.

I hope they’ll be satisfied with that.

SAMULI PAULAHARJU:
REMINISCENCES OF LAPLAND
, 1922

But the surest and most indisputable evidence of the earth sprites’ existence is that many people of our day have seen them with their own eyes, even spoken with them and kept company with them. And we have to believe these people, for they are elderly Christian folk, who do not reminisce about vanities.

ANGEL

All of a sudden Pessi goes rigid.

We’re fairly close to the Lake Halimasjärvi district already, and nobody has disturbed us. Fortunately, the sun’s rays are slanting more and more, and little by little dusk is beginning to shroud us.

I’ve drunk from brooks, and I’ve been happy to know that, whenever I want, I can fall asleep under a forest spruce, tented by branches that reach the ground and resting on a copper-colored bed of needles.

Pessi has walked along with me, diverging into bushes certainly and at times disappearing completely—God, how quietly he moves in the forest! But, despite my fear, he hasn’t vanished among the firs, taking paths of his own, where I know I could never follow him.

But now he freezes, and his tail moves in a way I’ve never seen until now. It slashes in a semicircle, electrically tense, expressing, I think, both excitement and slight fear and . . .

. . . great and deep love.

I’ve no sooner taken in Pessi’s reaction than a black shadow darkens my field of vision.

It has loomed from behind a tree, like a ghost in a nightmare. It wasn’t there a moment ago; now it is, and my whole body goes
rigid: suddenly I’m a fast-breathing, not particularly delicious prey, a piece of meat wrapped in Gore-tex.

Pessi’s going berserk with joy.

He leaps up at a huge male troll—conceivably a muscular, magnificently glossy big brother of the specimen I saw in the museum—and he’s like a puppy making up to his mother: he fawns and paws and bounces and licks the male troll—his father perhaps but an alpha male all right—until the troll half casually sweeps him behind its back with its left forepaw.

And what this troll has in its right forepaw stands out cruelly clear. Somehow I did semi-consciously guess: the guns missing from the Parola armory and all those other strange stories . . . So my terrified mind whispers, as the ogre raises its other hand, swings the military rifle on to its haunch, and clicks off the safety-catch.

“MAN WANTED FOR HOMICIDE”

Finnish Morning Post
(April 22, 2000)

The police want 33-year-old Tampere photographer Mikael Kalervo Hartikainen for questioning on suspicion of homicide. Called out to Hartikainen’s apartment on Tuesday, the police found a young man’s body there. While investigations are under way, the police are withholding information as to the mode of killing.

Hartikainen is known to have fled his apartment after the event and taken a taxi to the suburb of Kauppi, after which his movements are unknown.

Hartikainen is five foot ten inches tall and of athletic build. His eyes are blue, his hair strikingly blond. He was wearing a green Halti trekking suit, decorated in red at the collar and cuffs. Hartikainen may be armed and, according to the police, is extremely dangerous.

Any sightings of Hartikainen should be reported directly to the police 24-hour helpline, 219-5013.

ANGEL

It waves the gun barrel with a movement that’s idiotically well known from the movies and yet chillingly strange when performed by—