Popular Music from Vittula (12 page)

This was before sex had really entered the scene, after all. The initial stages of puberty when the old pecking order and groups of chums began to be replaced by a new order, based on attractiveness. Nervous, hunchbacked little girls could suddenly turn into slim beauties with high cheekbones. Little boys with dimples and curly locks could turn into big-nosed baboons with prominent teeth. A morose young lad from Erkheikki could suddenly start talking and develop an understated but irresistible charm while a talkative lass from Pajala could sink into fits of inexplicable depression and gradually become somebody you no longer wanted anything to do with.

I was one of those children who grew uglier as I got older, but my charisma grew stronger. Niila became uglier to look at and less pleasant to be with as well, and music was probably his only lifeline.

I tried to teach him the trick of thinking about death whenever you came up against a girl. It’s a trick I’ve used myself many times over the years, and it is surprisingly effective. Before so very many years have passed, I’m going to die. My body will decay and disappear for ever. The same will happen to the girl, we’ll all be no more. In a thousand years our lives and all our sweetest dreams and worst fears will be nothing but dust and ashes. So what difference does it make if she turns you down or is snooty or laughs in your face? Thanks to that cynical attitude I’ve occasionally managed to achieve remarkable results when it comes to love—dared to be with lethally beautiful women, for instance, and sometimes even been allowed to play with them.

This was the only piece of advice Niila ever listened to. He started to think about death more than he did about girls. To be blunt, the kid became insufferable. He was going to need my help shortly, but neither of us knew anything about that as yet.

On an unwelcome nocturnal visit, an old skeleton bearing gifts, and how to get out of tight corners

A switch was thrown somewhere in my body, and the journey started in earnest. Puberty. It was the spring term in class six, and nothing dramatic happened: I just became intensely aware that a change was taking place. It wasn’t anything in my body, no visible signs as yet, but it was in my mind. Something was happening there, somebody was taking up residence in there. Somebody reminiscent of me, but somebody else even so. A certain whimsicality entered my life and I couldn’t always handle it. An impatience that I didn’t understand. And an unexpected, a really astonishingly intense interest in sex.

One afternoon at the end of the spring term when I was still in class six, I was lying on my bed leafing through a copy of
Cute Chicks
. I’d bought it furtively while on a visit to Luleå where nobody knew me and so couldn’t start badgering me. There was nothing worse than getting knowing looks from middle-aged ladies with perms in the local Co-op, who knew my mum and dad and whose pretty daughters went to the same school as I did. Buying
Cute Chicks
was an admission that you were horny. That meant that you were exposed, you’d
put yourself at a disadvantage, and you might start blushing and stammering.

Suddenly, there he was in my room. I gave a start, dropped the magazine and raised my knees to conceal the bulge in my trousers.

“Bloody hell! I thought it was Mum!”

Niila didn’t say a word. He had slipped into the room in his usual soundless way, and he was standing as motionless as a wall. I tried to cover up my embarrassment, and decided that attack was the best form of defense. Smirking loutishly I opened up the week’s centerfold. Black lace bra, come-hither look, and red high-heeled boots.

“Why don’t you stick her up on the wall at home?” I suggested crudely.

Niila recoiled at the impossible thought. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. He made no attempt to take the magazine, so I went through it for him, showing him picture after picture.

“How about that, she’s tied him down! And look at that, rubber underwear! And I bet it was you who wrote this letter:
I lost my virginity at the Confirmation camp.”

I could see Niila was trembling deep down. But at the same time he was stiff, negative, determined to maintain his dignity. His head was vibrating slightly, as if he were tensing his neck muscles as hard as he could. The more scared he became, the more my own shame died away, he could feel it instead of me. I pressed the rubbishy rag into his hands.

“Come on, choose a chick, Niila! One of these in the magazine, which one do you like?”

It was as if all the air went out of him. He flopped down onto a chair and sighed, leaned forward as if he felt ill—quite common behavior among shy residents of Tornedalen when they feel obliged to say something. He cleared his throat and swallowed in order to make room in his mouth for his voice.

“Grandma …,” he said. Silence.

“Well, what about her?” I asked, trying to help him.

“She … she’s dead …”

“Yes, I know. That was ages ago.”

“But she’s come back!”

And now that the blockage had cleared all the rest came rushing out, jerkily, one wheezy sentence after another. I listened to Niila baring his soul with a growing feeling of horror.

Grandma had started haunting them. Almost three years after her decease she’d returned to her old home. Although she’d been given a heroic burial in true Laestadian style she’d not found peace.

The first time he’d seen her she was just a blurred stain, a bit like the spots of light you can see in the outer edges of your eye. Then he started feeling a gentle breeze as well, as if somebody was breathing over him. As time passed she’d become more and more solid, filled out, and even started making noises. She gradually took back her old place in the family. She waddled stiff-hipped down the attic staircase, frail but substantial. Several nights she’d sat at the kitchen table, mixing mashed potatoes and carrots into what remained of the meat stew, then ladling the resulting gray goo into her mouth with loud sucking noises. She smelled something awful. Sweet old-woman’s sweat mixed with odors from a fusty, subterranean world.

The odd thing was that only Niila seemed to notice her. Once, she’d sat down on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, catching flies then stirring them into the bowl of hash on the table. Everybody apart from Niila had gone on eating with undiminished appetite.

Niila shared an upstairs bedroom with his elder brother Johan. His brother had growing pains and therefore needed lots and lots of sleep. He slept like men do, deep and to the accompaniment of snores. Niila, on the other hand, was a very light sleeper.

One night quite recently Niila had been in the middle of a vivid dream. An extremely vivid dream, he repeated with a slight blush that made it clear what he was talking about. But his pleasure had been interrupted by an alarm bell, and he’d opened his eyes with a start.

Grandma was leaning over him. She was furious, her cheeks deeply
wrinkled, her toothless mouth wide open and struggling to produce inaudible words, and a bitter liquid was dripping down onto his face. Niila had screamed so loudly that Johan had stopped snoring and turned over. But the ghost had disappeared by then.

And now, last night, he’d been woken up again. This time the old woman had wrapped her talons around his neck. They had felt as cold as iron. She’d started squeezing, but didn’t have enough strength, and he’d managed, though panic-stricken, to kick himself free. He’d spent the rest of the night locked in the bathroom with the light on and armed with a sheath knife. He’d heard clicking noises coming from the bolt and seen luminous gas drifting in under the door, but it had disappeared when he’d splashed hot water on it.

Niila pulled back his shirt collar and I could see a purplish line across his neck, as if somebody had pulled a rope over it. It was reminiscent of frostbite, a fading furrow in his skin.

I’d grown increasingly horrified as Niila told his story. When he’d finished, I wanted to say something, try to console him a little, maybe cheer him up. But I couldn’t. His expression was vacant, drained; he looked like an old man.

“This is too big,” I mumbled.

Niila’s head quivered even more. Then he produced the old Beatles EP and handed it to me. He wanted me to have it after he’d gone, he said curtly: he didn’t own anything else of value.

I told him to shut up, but I could feel the repugnance rising inside me. Fear was running up my legs, and I stood up.

“You can sleep here with me.”

“Sleep?” he whispered, as if the word had no meaning.

I told him it was the only chance he had. As soon as everybody had gone to bed, Niila should sneak out of the window, climb down the fire escape and spend the night in my room. He could go back at dawn, when the danger had passed. No need to tell any of our parents, as long as we were careful.

Then a couple of spades would be acquired, a grave in Pajala cemetery opened up, and a sharpened fir branch would be thrust with great force through a twisted old biddy’s heart.

Niila didn’t have TV at home and therefore didn’t have access to the most basic of educational enlightenment, and couldn’t agree. I could see the problem, especially as spring nights were far too light.

That meant there was only one possible alternative. Both Niila and I recognized that it had to be faced up to. One of us would be forced to propose it sooner or later. I drew the short straw.

“We’ll have to go to Russi-Jussi.”

Niila turned pale. Closed his eyes. Grabbed hold of his neck as if he’d placed it in a noose.

Russi-Jussi was one of Tornedalen’s last itinerant peddlers of the old school, and one of the most scary people for miles around. Crow-like, hunched, as wrinkled as a seed potato, his old-man’s cheeks were covered in moles. His nose was beak-like, his eyebrows joined, and his lips were bloated and girlish, red and damp. He was aloof and sardonic, malevolent and vindictive. Somebody to avoid if at all possible.

This scarecrow of a man would pedal his way round the forest villages on a lady’s bicycle with a suitcase made of stiffened cardboard on the luggage carrier. He would march into people’s kitchens with the audacity of a council official and pile on their tables shoelaces, zips, hair lotion, linen handkerchiefs, razor blades, cotton reels, and mouse traps. But concealed in the back of his case, in a special pocket, were the items that made him welcome—one might even say sought after. Little jars containing a gooey brown concoction called
nopat
in Tornedalen Finnish. The substance was renowned for being able to arouse the sexual urge of the most decrepit old biddy and the most impotent of drooping drips. They say the vital ingredients came from a mushroom that Russi-Jussi harvested in the north of Finland, and, according to witnesses, it must have contained the most remarkable of hallucinogenic substances.

Jussi was born an illegitimate child at the end of the last century, in what was then the Russian province of Finland. His mother was a maid and had inculcated in him a hatred of the landed gentry and the rest of the upper classes, who had the privilege of taking advantage of their serving women with no threat of consequences, and in 1918 he had entered the Finnish civil war as a soldier for the reds. When they were defeated, like so many of his comrades he had moved to the workers’ paradise in the newly created Soviet Union. But before long Stalin came to power, and since he was a foreigner and hence a spy, Jussi had been arrested and sent to a labor camp in Siberia. It became a center for Finnish and Tornedalen comrades who tried hard to convince themselves that they had been victims of a terrible mistake, and that in his infinite wisdom Uncle Joe would shortly realize this, and at any moment now release them, amid celebrations and rejoicings and an acknowledgement of mistakes made plus gratitude for heroic contributions to the new world order.

One of his fellow prisoners was an old Lapp from the Kola peninsula. Even when first captured he had been emaciated through lack of food as the old Sami villages had been replaced by kolkhozes, and no disrespect to Stalin, but at that time he was not a great fan of breeding reindeer. The old skeleton could feel that his end was nigh, and as he shared a bunk with Jussi he opened his heart to him. In a mixture of Sami, Finnish, and Russian, he mumbled on about mysterious powers and happenings. About abscesses healed, madnesses cured, herds of reindeer driven unharmed through wolf-infested country at dead of night. There were words. There were eyes that traveled through the air like a pair of testicles while their owner lay under a reindeer skin. There was blood that ran backward into a wound until there was nothing to be seen but a white mark. There was, in short, a possibility of escaping from the labor camp.

During the long, cold nights the old Lapp instructed Jussi on how he should get away, and how he could take the ancient wisdom with him into the unknown future, where it would doubtless be needed.

“When I die,” wheezed the old man, “carry me out into a snowdrift. Wait until I’m frozen stiff, that won’t take long, just wait until I’m stiff and hard. Then break off the little finger of my left hand. That’s where I’ve collected all my powers. Break it off and swallow it before the guards see you.”

The old man died shortly afterward. He was so thin that he rattled when Jussi shook him. Jussi did as he’d been told and put the body out in the Siberian deep freeze. He snapped off the dirty little finger at the knuckle, popped it into his mouth and swallowed it. And he was never the same again.

Jussi waited until an early spring night at the end of April. The snow had acquired a firm crust strong enough to walk on, so the time had come. The guards were in the middle of one of their gloomy, maudlin vodka parties, and Jussi went to the outhouse. There, he turned himself into a woman. She emerged and stood outside, dirty and in rags, but beautiful. She knocked discreetly on the door of the guards’ hut. With coquettish charm she encouraged them to set upon one another until blood poured from mouths and fists, and the way of escape was open. Taking with her two dry crusts of bread and a broken-off knife blade, she started her long trek to Finland.