The children had almost reached the garden when Arttu caught up with them and began shouting and ranting. A few of the children woke up from being knocked to the ground and started screaming in terror. The others carried on walking and seemed not to see or hear a thing. At the foot of the sculpture they laid down their buckets, though Arttu continued to run about pulling at their pyjamas. They sat down on the grass, and Arttu succeeded in waking up a few more. He pulled the hair of one of the older girls and she started shrieking. The lights in the house went on.
Rea was curled up on the ground. She was shaking and moaning quietly and was unable to do anything. She could hear Arttu bellowing.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
The woods were some distance away. Here there was not even the slightest strip of trees; only a few fruit trees and the odd birch in people’s gardens. Afterwards Rea could not say where exactly the bear had come from. It had just appeared from behind her, crawled past her on all fours, then stood up on its hind legs.
Arttu was standing with his back to the bear and was dragging a little boy by the shirt. The blow must have come as a complete surprise. He did not have time to be startled or fear for his life as the giant paw struck him in the back and seemed to split him in two.
Even the children who had woken up now stopped shouting. They all watched in silence as the bear mauled its victim. Not one of them screamed or even cried out in fear. Rea noticed that a man had appeared at the door of the house, but even he did not shout or run into the garden; he simply watched what was happening, then went back inside. The lights went out. One by one the children stood up and set off on their way home.
Rea was sure that the next morning the garden would be as it had always been. No little plastic buckets, no piles of berries. No male body ripped to pieces.
It started snowing. Soon the ground was covered in a thin, white sheet. Tuisku had wrapped a scarf round the neck of their very own bear. It looked very gaudy against the bear’s wooden surface, but still it seemed just right.
Rea knew that the children would be wide awake the next morning, and every morning from then until spring.
Desk
Jouko Sirola
Jouko Sirola (born 1963) is a writer of short fiction and essays. In his writing elements of the mundane and the surreal collide in a fascinating and highly idiosyncratic way, all the while heightened by a style at once economical and objective, and yet always powerfully expressive. The short story featured here, ‘Desk’, is from the collection Käveltävä takaperin (‘Walking Backwards’, 2003).
For a long time it had stood still. At times it had changed position in the room, but even then someone else had moved it. There it stood on four legs, expressionless, as if there were no life left in it whatsoever. No external impulses could penetrate its indifference, something which with time had become its essential characteristic.
However, the step which it now took was indisputable. No one saw it stir and start moving, but that was because of the time of day. Morning light filtered through three panes of glass on to its surface as it arched its back and awkwardly stretched its front and back legs; it was no more or less difficult to walk in either direction. The wood creaked and rasped, groaning as if a hard frost were wreaking untold damage to its brown, rectangular form, but there was no one to hear this, and the people downstairs – an elderly couple who otherwise paid particular attention to any noise reaching their ears – had popped out to the shops.
The desk raised its front leg – some papers and an alarm clock fell to the floor – and, trembling slightly, slowly inched it forwards. After this it moved the other leg at the same end, putting the worktop under considerable strain. With a creak it flexed like a cat stretching its back, and its hind legs screeched across the floor. It had been a long time since it had last moved of its own accord.
It stopped for a moment, as if to gather its thoughts, leant slightly towards the radiator (probably trying to prevent its doors from swinging open) and shunted both legs on its longer side forward at once. This made walking far easier. Two feet at a time, waddling along like an overweight human being, it stepped up to the living room door. Scratches appeared in the door jamb as it dragged itself over the threshold. It continued out into the hallway.
Perhaps it had never seen people opening doors. Perhaps its knowledge of locks was limited to the inner sensation of a key turning in its own locks. Either way it now stopped and stood still for a long time.
It felt as if dusk was descending, as if upon a moment suspended in time, air thickening around anything motionless. The metre and a half long, nut-brown, waist-high desk stood behind the door darkening and darkening. Only once a click came from the stairwell – a door was pulled shut – did the desk rise up, lean over, shuffle briskly backwards and stop. It then carefully rose on to its hind legs, propelled itself forwards with surprising vigour and crashed into the door. The door gave a crack, wood splintered and the desk staggered and dropped down against its front edge like a bull falling to its knees. The computer monitor with its enormous cranium slid off the worktop and came crashing to the floor.
The lock held, the hinges did not give way, but as far as wood was concerned, the desk now knew it was the stronger of the two. Only a small piece from the rim of the worktop, overhanging each end like a thin eave, had been chipped away in the collision.
Had the couple downstairs really been at the shops this long? Or could their ears no longer distinguish the banging coming from above from the everyday family noises, the shouting and sounds of objects being thrown around, noises which they had suffered for years to the point of almost moving out? In any case, no one was standing there watching when the front door finally gave way and the desk came crashing through and collided with the railings at the top of the stairs. It was a good job the railings didn’t break, or the desk would have plummeted down the stairwell and smashed. To pieces, to its constituent parts, blocks of wood and scatterings of nails, the darkness of its drawers suddenly illuminated and united with the air of the corridor.
It took a moment for the desk to get back on its feet, one end leaning against the metal grille of the railings and the surging depths beyond, rising majestically like a pillar up to the roof. An angular floor leading downwards stretched out in front of the desk with three or even four more landings before it would be at the bottom. But did it think of stopping? No, not any more. Like a bovid bred to malformation it gingerly placed a foot on the top stair and began its descent. It fell over on to its chest and slid down along the edges of the stairs, but stood upright again, as if it had felt some kind of pain, something quite different to what it had felt breaking down the door, which was also made of wood. It knocked against a number of letter boxes, but no one appeared from behind them to observe its dogged progress. All the adults were at work, the children in daycare, the house was empty and listened in silence. And even if a lonely eye had happened to glance out through a peephole, its impatient companion across the nose momentarily shut, at that moment the desk may have been standing perfectly still, as if the people carrying it had tired halfway down the stairs.
Finally the desk lowered its hind leg from the last step to the ground and stared at the front door through which it could see a thick green bush swaying in the wind. Perhaps in some way it understood that it was akin to the bush, though they belonged to different worlds. It tiptoed across a rough fibred mat and out towards the light.
The desk’s legs had become suppler in the stairwell and its progress now seemed far less cumbersome as it approached the door and tried to ram its way through the glass. As it pushed with all its might at the hard, invisible air the door gave way and opened as if to show it the way. Soon the desk was standing on the tarmac outside letting the breeze soothe its back, now free of all other objects. The bush caressed its side first with one branch, then another. All around there was grass; insects and cars behind which there stood a row of enormous trees. Otherwise the yard was empty.
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br /> Empty of people and yet not empty after all. But because people are the only beings who may lend an ear to this story, we should say: empty. An old man standing on his balcony in the opposite house saw the desk. He saw it by the bushes, then at the corner of the house, and later on the lawn behind the cars. Every time he looked down the desk was standing motionless, as if someone had moved it from one side of the yard to the other, moving house most likely. And time went by, it went by so quickly nowadays that the man had years ago given up paying it any attention. Changes could only be discerned once they had already taken place. That’s the way of the world.
Nor did the man on his balcony see the desk skipping around the lawn behind the house, throwing its front legs in the air, creaking and twisting like a kitten chasing its tail, until it returned to the path which at this point was covered in gravel. The small stones scratched its legs as it hobbled towards the bins and stopped at the base of a tall tree. Its hind legs knelt backwards and it crouched there, its front legs straight, as if trying to gaze up into the treetop swaying freely.
But was the treetop truly free? It was part of the trunk, rooted fast in the ground, though it could sway with the wind without severing its roots or losing its connection to the past, building up layer upon layer around the trunk in different sized rings according to how well the year had gone.
Perhaps the desk felt a certain melancholy. For it, however, there was no return to being a simple tree. It was now fundamentally different, it had evolved to be like this and all it could do was simply carry on.
The desk straightened its legs and staggered past the tree. It clambered on top of a pile of sand in the middle of a field opening up at the side of the lawn and turned around, as if to look back at the house it had just left. It then came down the other side of the sand pile and walked across the field towards a small wood with a path running through it. The path had been tarmacked, which suited the desk’s legs very well. Sand scratched the wood, and on the damp lawn its legs sunk in too deep, almost up to its base. After all, its legs were only ten centimetres long. It was not a particularly modern desk.
Long cracks ran through the tarmac, a testament to the power of the earth. If for a few years the town remained as quiet and deserted as at this moment, in this small wood, weeds would soon take over the streets. Hawks would return to church towers as if they had never left. But the woods were quiet only for a moment. From far off the whine of an underground train could be heard as it braked. Cars accelerated away from the traffic lights and drove along a street which looked into the woods, though from the street things inside the woods always looked mysterious. That is the nature of the forest. The desk stopped beside a park bench painted a mud brown colour, leant to one side and waved one of its front legs in the air.
Years of motionlessness had not prepared it for journeys like this. It leant against the bench for a moment. Painted wood touched varnished wood, both of them brown, yet still so different. The bench was anchored to the ground. Heavy concrete blocks had been placed underneath the soil, now covered in thick grass. The bench could not follow the desk, wherever it was travelling. But perhaps the desk revealed its destination to the bench. Even the thought, the mere possibility of it brightened the moment and the desk turned to face the direction it had come and rested its other pair of legs.
Who could have dumped a desk like that all the way out here? There’s all sorts goes on after dark, an old woman sighed. There was barely a sound as the woman shuffled along on her zimmer frame to the other side of the woods, where a luxurious old folks’ home gently purred in the sunlight. Walking past you could make out its sound, like a giant conveyor belt humming deep within.
Beside the bench there stood a green, metal rubbish bin on one leg: rubbish strewn at its foot, a black bin liner inside. The desk straightened itself and carried on walking. The ground gradually began to slope downwards, but a cyclist battling against the wind at the bottom of the hill didn’t so much as turn his head and didn’t see the dark rectangular figure through the tunnel of trees slowly growing bigger and bigger, which now, if seen from the front, all but blocked the path and eventually turned on to the pavement.
As it sauntered down the pavement the desk passed a window covered in garish stickers behind which pizzas were made to order. The shadow which passed across the window was nonetheless faint and barely discernible, and insignificant compared to the shadows cast over the mind of the pizzeria’s Moroccan owner. His curiosity was not aroused in the slightest. He turned his eyes back to the comics in the evening paper. Reading them in a strange language was a nuisance and did little to alleviate the other, unknown troubles gnawing at his mind. What had once happened to him was something that couldn’t be divined from his pizzas and didn’t show through the foreign colour on his face.
The desk wobbled across the street and turned to follow a low hedge bordering the car park. It stopped for a moment and before long a sparrow landed on top of it. A red bicycle was visible through the hedge. All sorts really did go on at night. Who had left the bicycle there after stealing it on a whim? The bicycle had no owner, no next of kin. It had no history of its own, it didn’t belong to anyone, and a stranger picking it up, riding it through the suburbs and casting it aside into the hedge, had not really changed a thing.
The desk preferred not to think of the bicycle’s owner. It hardly noticed the bicycle. After all, it didn’t have eyes, it was only a desk. If it had been able to look around, what would it have thought? Would the darkness of its drawers have thought on its behalf, interpreted the light seeping in between the worktop and the sides, single-mindedly and matter-of-fact, without even the most basic sensory faculties?
The sparrow fluttered into the air and the desk was on the move once again. A buggy and a young mother with a revealing slit in her skirt came careering round the corner from behind the hedge. Nothing’s lost yet, that’s what the slit was trying to say. A cyclist, an elderly man, who very nearly collided with the desk, seemed for a moment to be chasing the woman. As he approached her he slowed down, as if the sudden incline in the road had appeared simply to help them fulfil their desires; so that for a single, ecstatic moment life could be nothing but the flesh disappearing beneath that skirt, the thrill of revealing it and being the lonely object of its revelation. The cyclist made his way past the buggy, slowly, reluctantly.
The sight of bare flesh didn’t excite the desk. It crossed the road again and walked past a building with a kiosk on the ground floor, an old shopping centre that looked more like a bunker, its windows decorated in short combinations of letters and numbers, exclamation marks, colourful advertising slogans and several grey plastic lumps with glass screens covering their front. The desk made its way over the crossing and disappeared into the park. At the edges of the path around the suburb the park was wild and covered in thicket, but nearer the shore the lawn had been mown neatly.
Square footprints zigzagged their way along the sand path to a sign forbidding dogs on the shore. At the foot of the signpost the desk leant over so its doors flew open and its drawer slid out, vomiting out its contents. It shook its body, then turned sharply on its other side. The doors slammed shut. It continued walking with its drawer open, but only as far as the rubbish bin, then leant against the bin to push the drawer back inside. Now it was completely empty and much lighter, so much so that its footprints could barely be seen in the sand. Why hadn’t it emptied itself earlier?
A messy sight was left behind it. Papers, envelopes, staplers, discs, invoices, a camera, an old computer mouse and a few magazines lay scattered around the pole. It was the sort of pile that those passing by later wouldn’t dare bend down and rummage through – certainly not if anyone was watching – not even to pick up the camera which looked quite new. Not that they were in any way bound by an inner respect for other people’s property, but simply because going through rubbish aroused other suspicions. Everyone with an ounce of self-respect already owned a camera like that, and what would
someone want with two?
Without a care in the world for humans’ everyday worries the desk stared out to sea, its corners blunt, the smell of the ocean between its boards. It was a clear day, a ferry with flocks of passengers on its deck bobbed past on the waves. One of the passengers seemed to be waving at the desk, though this was hardly possible. Why would anyone have been waving at it? Only the people living in the house and perhaps the nearest pieces of furniture – if, that is, they knew anything at all – were aware of its existence. And its former owners of course, who had already passed away, and their other possessions, sold off or left rotting at the dump. The desk was no longer new, it had a past of its own, even though its drawers were now empty.
Wearily the desk dragged itself on to the lawn. The ground led down towards the sea and became rockier towards the shore. Four inquisitive ducks appeared from behind the rushes. They swam ashore, stood up, argued angrily amongst themselves, crossed their legs beneath them and lay down to rest. The dark, wooden figure crept up behind them obscuring the park bench from view. The birds hardly paid it any attention.
Was the desk thinking about its creator, the seed, the tree from which it had grown, its early years deep in the nut grove, the logger, the sawyer, the carpenter, all those who had been involved, who had gradually made it squarer and squarer, more practical for human use, so much so that there was barely a glimmer of its former nature left? Be that as it may, the nearby trees, which had grown in a tight clump at the edge of the lawn, gave a deep sigh, pressed their branches together and rustled against one another.
Was the desk still a tree, an untamed piece of nature blowing in the breeze; could it sense the sigh of the leaves shimmering through its non-existent boughs like a ghost pain? Or was it ultimately humanised, a civilised onlooker; an object at which people could not help but sit and jot down a few numbers, memoes, or lazily open up the day’s papers and stare out across the centrefold at the house opposite and the clouds appearing from behind the house, lilting in the sky and finally disappearing into the blue yonder behind the window frame?