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. H
ow 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—
An animal.
An animal?
But the signal’s clear. We’re on our way now, and I’m a prisoner.
YRJÖ KOKKO, PESSI AND ILLUSIA, 1944
“Have you ever seen a human being?” Illusia asked Pessi one day.
“Once, yes, I did once see a human being,” Pessi replied.
“What was he like?” Illusia went on.
“He was very much like you and me,” Pessi said. “But I didn’t stay looking at him long.”
“Why not?” Illusia inquired.
“He was so big. I saw him over there on the heath, by a sandpit where the birds were having a bath. The heather was just coming into flower, the blue-winged butterflies were peacefully sucking its nectar, when, all at once, I was standing face to face with a human being. Then I took fright.”
“Why did you take fright?”
“He looked me straight in the eye, and fear poured out of his eyes into mine.”
ANGEL
The sky ahead’s growing lighter. It’s five A.M.
We’re deep in the forest, in the midst of the kind of untouched treeland you can’t even imagine if, all your life, you’ve been confined to the fake woods adjoining cities—the so-called nature reserves that, in reality, are more like parks: embroidered with paths, cleared of undergrowth, illuminated, provided with benches and full of trees almost all exactly the same age. But this forest’s another thing. It’s gloomy and tangled, it cascades violently upward from its mossy floor to the sky, as if the earth were thrusting it out of its breast and bursting with the effort. It’s full of struggle. Species fights against species, a creeper’s suffocating a tree, a twig’s thrusting moss aside, for everything’s in short supply: light, air, food.
In the midst of all this green-and-brown chaos we advance quickly and almost silently. Nothing but my panting breath and the crunching of my hopelessly clumsy trekking boots trouble the dawn twilight, as Pessi and the big male lead me along indistinguishable pathways. They’re troll paths, imperceptible to the eye. But what seems an impenetrable-looking thicket or an unclimbable cloven rock is, on closer look, a shortcut. We go forwards as if the trees, rocks and thickets are a mist we’re melting through, as quiet, capable shadows.
No human being can catch us, not on foot anyway.
MARTES
A man’s wanted for homicide.
Wow.
That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I did want to damage him, of course, have criminal charges brought against him—the info was pure self-defense. But now it looks as if some other party’s driven the whole thing off the road.
I’ve no idea what’s happened, but what of that? Wherever Mikael is now, or soon will be, he’ll not be ringing clients or disputing rights about the pictures I’ve so carefully made inaccessible to others on my hard disk and my backup CD. Stalker’s already commissioned outdoor advertising. Every Finnish city’ll soon be showing on all three sides of every triangular hoarding three different pics of a lasciviously grimacing dancing troll, rampaging in a leap, dance-step, or position of impossible flexibility—nursed in his tightly fitting Stalkers and looking like black lightning frozen into a still.
UNO HARVA, ANCIENT BELIEFS OF THE FINNS, 1933
Like domestic animals, human beings can be lost in the forest, especially if they happen to tread on a “forest-elf path,” or a “sprite’s field.” The folk of Rukajärvi tell that a person who has walked across a “forest sprite’s tracks” will never find his way home again. In Estonia a belief has existed that when külmking—“coldshoe”—who “mostly wanders the forests” has “been on the face of the earth,” someone may step on his tracks, whereupon the person, even though his own home be in sight, will not find his way back again. The same belief has prevailed among the Finland Swedes: “he has trespassed on the forest sprite’s ground” or “stepped on a troll track”; nor is this fancy, which has prevailed with the Russians amo
ng others, unknown in Sweden.
Many examples show that in those times, especially since such happenings could occur on your own doorstep, what was in question was not going astray in the great forest but falling into a weird condition where everything was otherwise than in our world.
ANGEL
In the shade of a fir tree between blocks of mossy rock, the cave looks like a narrow black mouth.
The sun has risen beyond the forest. Slanting rays are filtering misty golden streaks through the spruce twigs and dappling the moss with glowing spots.
Two shadows emerge from the rock, so imperceptibly they seem to have precipitated themselves from darkness to light. They come quite close, nostrils twitching, and their strong animal smell is like Pessi’s but wilder, more pungent, muskier. And one of them reaches out with his nailed paw, making me freeze, for those daggers could rip my stomach open with a single swipe. But the paw doesn’t maul me. It goes into my jacket pocket, and the prehensile, skillful, sensitive fingers seize the lilac-colored plastic lighter.
When the troll lights it, I see it’s not handling one of these for the first time.
Sunrays are beginning to flow into the cave entrance like a warm fluid. The trolls’ pupils narrow so much that they almost disappear completely, and the sprites turn and withdraw into the cavity. The big troll swings the barrel of his gun with the tiniest of economic gestures, and I understand.
Pessi has come to my side; his tail’s trembling and twitching, and he looks up at me expectantly.
Far off somewhere a cuckoo calls.
I take his hand and step inside.
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