Sat. 7.11.1981: During the night I look at the carcass several times to see if there is anything—there is not. I have been hoping to get my lens on a troll female with her young. No one has yet taken a picture like that. But yesterday’s male sighting has been my only prize.
Sun. 7.12.1981: Still nothing. I readily understand that the sharp-eared male scared off by the sound of my shutter will not return, but I thought some other troll might stray this way.
Mon. 7.13.1981: I draw a blank. Just two cuckoos near the cabin, and at 21.00 hours three ravens came to feed. They flew off Hartikkalampi way at 21.45.
Tues. 7.14.1981: I arrive at the cabin at 19.30. At first there is altogether too much light for trolls, but a bear is soon at the carcass. Above the bear’s left eye there is a hairless patch about 4 centimeters square, and that spot is swollen, almost closing the eye. White tissue showing on the edge of the eye, on the right cheek the slash of a claw. The bear feeds and departs at about 20.20. At 23.00 comes bear 2. Perhaps the trolls dare not come to the carcass now the bears have found it.
ANGEL
But when I get home, drunk with happiness, the door’s ajar and Pessi’s gone.
PALOMITA
My bag’s weighed down with joy and clinking with defiance. I’ve bought some more cat food, a different brand this time. I want to know how the troll’s getting on. And Mikael. I got the money back on bottles and collected little coins and asked for a separate receipt for the cat food so that Pentti—
A scratching noise on the stairs.
A black flicker, a patch of night hurtles into the shadow behind the banister, and I know what it is.
I’ve seen it before. It’s somehow managed to escape from his apartment.
I put my bag down and quickly pull the ring on the cat food can, push my finger into the light brown paste, and crouch, beckoning with my hand in the air. I hiss a soft invitation. The animal smells the food straight away. Its ears perk up from the shadow of the banister, then it comes closer, sidling up, ready to bounce off, its tail’s trembling, but finally it crouches in front of me, nostrils twitching in its little slender face. It stretches its muzzle out uncertainly, then licks my finger, as if it remembered—perhaps it does remember—the moment when it was sick and weak and I was its mama.
And footsteps, footsteps! From above. I look up. The troll starts and gets as tense as a bow and arrow but doesn’t fly off. Mikael.
“Thank God, thank God, thank God!” he keeps saying. “Oh heavens. Hell. Thank you.”
He comes and takes the animal in his arms as devotedly as a child. It doesn’t resist but grips his shirt with its paws like a baby ape. Mikael says nothing more but goes back up the steps, running, taking them two at a time, and I follow, because I can’t do anything else. The bag and open cat food are left on the stairs. I don’t care.
ANGEL
Palomita follows me through the door. I close it, go into the sitting room, and put Pessi on the floor.
I’m at a loss whether to get the rolled-up newspaper or give him as many quails’ eggs as he could ever want.
“How the hell did he do it?” I ask aloud, and I don’t care whether she understands or not. I’ve gone cold, yet sweat’s flowing from every pore. Supposing that old gossip, that nosy old cow of a caretaker, had seen Pessi on the stairs?
I sit down heavily on the sofa. Palomita sits next to me. I start rattling away in a hurried, almost hysterical English.
“I beg you, let me hope you won’t mention, ever, won’t tell about this darling pet, not to anyone? Maybe animals aren’t even allowed in the building—I’ll lose him if anyone finds out. He’s no trouble. He’s terribly intelligent, he always obeys me, but he wouldn’t necessarily obey others. Something might happen.”
She keeps nodding, smiling in a way that makes her narrow face with its big eyes almost beautiful. This is the second time she’s saved Pessi for me. I ought somehow to be able to thank her, but I don’t know how. She looks at me like a cocker spaniel.
There comes a rattle from the hall.
I leap up, and both Palomita and I see the same thing: Pessi has stretched up as tall as he possibly can, the middle of his body looks weirdly elongated like a cat that’s trying to grope for something high up, and, concentrating hard, with his long-nailed fingers, he’s turning the knob on the doorlock.
Click.
The door opens.
Pessi looks at us with a perky curl in his tail. His whole being speaks pride.
Pride. Joy that he can imitate me, who always opens the door like that, before I go out there into the world that doesn’t belong to him.
“He’s opened it himself,” Palomita breathes.
In one leap I’m in the hall, and Pessi backs off from me. I shut the door, dig the keys from my pocket, turn one in the keyhole, and click: double-locked.
Then I start laughing, laughing, and laughing quite irrepressibly. At first Palomita’s puzzled, but then she begins shyly tittering, and I slap my thighs, hooting. Pessi’s ears tremble with amazement.
MARTES
When I see the layout I know this is it. This is the Tops, the year’s Gold Standard, the Clio, or whatever. It’s just fab. The image left nothing else to think about but the title—and that had to be fucking perfect, too. That’s it now. In tiny type—and nothing but the title. For nothing can be allowed to detract from the force of that image.
Against a pale neutral background there’s the troll. It’s snarling and furious—God knows what Michelangelo had to do with Photoshop to get its eyes blazing like that. In the pictures it looks monstrously tall, two meters at least, and, in spite of that, it’s got a slender and whiplike suppleness and its muzzle isn’t protruding, as in those rare troll pictures I’ve seen. No, it’s confusingly like a human face. Its mane is wavy. Its coal-black coat shines. The long hooked claws on its forelimbs and back legs are sort of clutching the air. And it’s in the middle of a wild skip-and-a-hop routine that’s something between ballet and break-dancing. The crackling energy in the image makes you tense your every muscle instinctively, poised to jump back. And this punk-god of the animal world has Stalkers on its legs, which look as if they were made to measure.
Above the picture, in an extremely modest, almost whispering font, is the title: STALKER, THE MARK OF THE BEAST.
PALOMITA
When Pentti dresses me in the split hot pants and wants to stuff me with two penises at once, I bite my lips and moan as I’ve been taught to and think about him.
When Pentti decides the food I’ve made has too much white pepper in and throws it in my face, when Pentti counts the shopping money again and again to prove I’ve pocketed fifty cents, when Pentti takes all my clothes off for the whole day just because I’ve spilled some tea on the blouse he’s bought me, I think of him. It’s as if I’m hitting back, and I’ve no feeling of remorse.
I think of when I was helping him with his pet. When I left the open cat food and shopping bag on the stairs, and when I came back, the lady with the quilted jacket and the big dangling earrings was staring at them. Why had I left cat food on the stairs? Had I got a cat? And I told a lie and said I’d found a lost cat in the yard and given it food, and the woman was rude and angry. In this building no one brings in all the world’s stray animals. And she grabbed the can and took it away.
But I get into no bad mood because of what the lady says, no; for then, too, I think about Mikael, who has been laughing his relief and his pride out with me in the hall. When he stopped laughing I knew I had to go, and suddenly there was a strange, empty, disappointed feeling in my stomach. But when I was almost outside the door, stealing away from the one place where even if just for a moment I feel some warmth, he suddenly held out his arms to me, pulled me to his breast and squeezed me until I nearly burst. “Thank you, thank you, again, Palomita,” he said. Then he let me go and looked at me embarrassed, as if he was amazed himself. He tried to say something, “I’m so happy . . . you do understand, don’t you . . .,
” but in my dizzy joy I just touched his lips with my fingers as a sign that he should be silent, and I ran away from the joy that was flowing over me.
For no one can be so grateful just because someone has brought back a runaway pet . . . and so I’m waiting. And I’m thinking.
ANGEL
Pessi’s sitting in my lap, sleek and black and warm. The root of his tail stirs a little against my lower belly. I stroke Pessi’s arm, which has a small, firm bicep, I raise the book I’m holding higher and continue reading. Pessi’s pointed ears tremble as he follows the rhythm of my voice.
I glance through the window. Outside there’s a soft snowfall, dense enough to make vision nil. White death, I think.
I continue reading aloud:
Illusia never ever forgot this evening. The previous day she had lost her wings and realized that from now on she had to live on the earth. Life here for her was no longer like a picture book for children, which you look at and then throw away. She knew she had to live this book, and now she had a feeling that there was something fearfully compelling in the book, that the tints of its pictures glowed on even in the night, when the dusk of the north came down to flatten them out.
I swallow. Pessi looks in my face as if wondering why I’ve stopped reading, why the words have dried up in my throat. He stretches up and sees a drop of sweat on my upper lip, his little rough tongue brushes the corner of my mouth, and an inarticulate sob flashes to my throat. And outside it’s snowing, snowing endlessly.
ECKE
Outside it’s snowing, snowing endlessly.
And I’ve left sixteen messages on Angel’s voice mail.
ANGEL
“Pessi,” I whisper, and I stretch my hand out and slide it around his sweet, narrow, smooth, burning-hot waist. Pessi’s ears tremble. I have a massive erection, as if part of my stomach and thighs were rock-hard aching flesh.
I’ve locked him in here. I’ve tried to capture part of the forest, and now the forest has captured me.
ECKE
Mikael, be at home.
You’ve been as slippery as a ferret, O thou golden-haired Adjutant of Heaven’s Commander-in-Chief. You do definitely check your incoming calls, glance at your caller ID and see the number there, my number, which you don’t want to answer.
You haven’t come to see my source books, though I’ve learned by heart everything I could amuse an archangel with. Did you know that, as Mikael, you hold the Bookkeeper’s office on high: you note down all our debits and credits in the Book of Life. And on Judgment Day you’ll initiate the Resurrection of the Dead with your trumpet call, you’ll take military command of your angel host, and you’ll overpower Satan and his henchmen in the last decisive battle. In the Book of Daniel you struggle against the Dragon. In the Western world you’re usually garbed as a knight, and you carry a sword and a long spear.
The spring sleet’s piling up in sheets on my head and shoulders and clouding my glasses, and I want you to pierce me with your burning sword, Mikael, and, damn jejune though this will sound, I’m longing for your glowing spear.
ANGEL
Thank heaven, the doorbell rings.
The piercing buzz clears my head like a bolt of cold lightning, and Pessi jumps at the sudden sound and flashes under the sofa.
I open the door a little way, grateful for the interruption and simultaneously cursing myself. A peephole for the door, why in hell haven’t I got myself a peephole?
“Angel,” Ecke says, almost with a sob, and melting sleet’s running down his shoulders and hair.
ECKE
While I’m trying to drop some casual and breezy word about the Gustaf Eurén book, and returning it, Angel’s already out on the stairway.
He pushes the door almost shut behind him and simultaneously hugs me to him—so killingly lustful and hungry that my head rocks and my legs go weak under me. Angel’s mouth is on my mouth, greedy and hard, and his tongue’s wrestling with mine. He stops the kiss as if suddenly forced to pull away, gasps, and his eyes are burning with such an alarming blaze it hits me below the belt, and from solar plexus to balls I’m all fire, with an incredible lava flow of success.
“Let’s go to your place,” Angel says, shoving his hand in the doorway, grabbing his coat off the hook and checking the keys in his pocket with a jingle. “We’ll grab a taxi in the square.” He carefully presses the door to and leans on it, breathing heavily and looking down at me under his brows, as if I were his prey. And though I can’t for the life of me think why we’re going all the way to my Kaleva suburb instead of his place, I know there are moments when there’s really no point in opening your mouth.
VÄINO LINNA, THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER, 1954
Hietanen tripped on an alder stump and flopped down. There he stayed, out like a light, too canned to get up. Vanhala made a handsome curve, his moonshine-fueled plane engine shrieking, and yelled: “Take to your parachute. Plane’s crashing, he he hee . . . !”
“Plane’s going down . . . it’s all going round . . . everything’s going round,” Hietanen spluttered, clutching at the grass.
Vanhala roared in his ear: “You’re in a spin . . . Jump for it . . . not going to straighten out now . . .”
But Hietanen’s plane was fast out of control, turning and spinning down. No hope of a jump now: he just pressed on with his plane, first into a fog, and then blank darkness. Vanhala left him where he was, annoyed that the struggle was over too soon.
To one side, sitting around a largish boulder, were Määttä, Salo, and Sihvonen. Salo was telling the tale very earnestly, with his hair in his eyes: “Back home, in our parish, fires burn over buried-treasure pits . . .”
Sihvonen turned his head aside and flicked with his hand as if fending off mosquitoes: “Come on, come off it . . . You’re lying . . .”
“Oh yes, they do burn all right. The old ’uns have seen ’em. And, like this, they’ve got crossed swords over ’em.”
“Oh, come off it . . . These old wives’ tales, Lapland witches’ tales. All sorts of shit you hear. About the Russkis, for instance, they say that when they run out of men, they catch a troll, put a uniform on the beast, and send it off to the western front. Watch out when you see one of those crashing through the forest at you . . . there you have it, one of the wonders of the north.”
“But who is from the north, then?” Määttä said. “I’m from far enough up north myself, and I know of folks who keep trolls as domestic animals.”
Määttä had had very little to say the whole time, and the powerful moonshine didn’t seem to have got to him all that much. But now he looked at the stone and said: “So what do you say? There it is, the stone. Why don’t we lift it?”
MARTES
“Now it’s sold.”
“It’s sold?!” I watch a smile slowly spreading across his face like a wash of watercolor.
“Want to see the layout?” Not waiting for a reply, I go into my office, with Mikael the Pageboy trailing after me, ready to lick up any drops of honey I might deign to drip.
I pull a print out of the pile. Mikael goes starry-eyed when he looks at the stylistic purity, economy, and sheer cool pull—explosive madness, too—of our joint work, and I’d swear his eyes have gone moist as he looks up at me again.
“So stylish,” I say. “It drips with chic.”
“It does.”
“You can invoice us.”
“What did the client say?”
“A hit, right at the core of our fragmented postmodern age.”
Mikael gives a snort of laughter. “No, he didn’t.”
“He did, that he did.”
Mikael can’t take his eyes off the layout, the black mane, the nails clawing the air, the snarling expression, the break-dance–ballet-leap frozen into a still.
“It’s beautiful,” he sighs, and his ecstasy wounds me: it’s an invisible slash—like a paper cut. I don’t happen to have mentioned to the client that the image and the conception have come from a subcontractor. And
no point in enlightening him so that he could go to the subcontractor direct and get for a few thousand euros a picture we’re asking fifty-odd thousand for. And so the honor’s mine, the layout’s mine, and Mikael’s got no right to look at it so lovingly.
Hey, I’m here, too, I’m just about to snap, but then Mikael’s already taking his hand off the print and putting it down carefully on the table, and his smile’s like extra light flooding into the room.
“I’ll send Helvi an invoice for the amount we discussed.”
“What about a beer now? Isn’t this the moment?” I ask, before I even notice I’ve said it, and I bite my lip—hell, I’m not getting into all that any more. But Mikael’s standoffishness is a challenge: it’s as if he didn’t see, didn’t hear, damn it, that I’m here—me, me, Martes—Martes, whose company used to be so sought after. Why isn’t he hanging back, looking for any reason to stay? Why’s he not chatting aimlessly just so he doesn’t have to step outside the door?
“Oh. It would have been . . .” Mikael’s sigh is genuine and gentle. “But, dammit, I’ve gone and booked myself up for this evening.”
“Surely you can spare a few minutes?” I get a grip on myself. “Or, well, yes, in fact I’ve got all sorts of stuff on myself.”
“Another time.”
“Yep.”
I stand watching him go, and, I don’t know why, in some deep me there smolders a slight smudge of disappointment, smolders and spits a thin gray smoke.