Popular Music from Vittula (16 page)

I slunk in with the bunch of men and was squeezed into the top corner. There was a pleasant smell of tarred wood, and whenever I brushed against the wall I got black marks. The benches, both the upper and lower ones, were filled to overflowing with heavy, white male bottoms. Some failed to find a seat and had to sit on the floor, complaining that it was a fate worse than being denied entry into Paradise. The mosquitoes hovered in the doorway like a gray curtain, but didn’t dare come in. The last man in closed the door on the summer evening, and suddenly everything went black. And everyone fell silent, as if overcome by reverence.

Slowly our eyes grew used to the dark. The stove was glowing like an altar. The heat felt as if it were coming from a big, curled-up animal. Grandad took hold of the wooden scoop and started muttering to himself. The men settled themselves down, arching their backs as if preparing for whiplashes. The wooden benches creaked under the weight. Slowly Grandad dipped the scoop into the cold water from the well, then rapidly poured nine scoopfuls with uncanny accuracy into the stone-box, one in the center, one in every corner and one in the middle of each long and short side. A ferocious hissing noise climbed up toward us, followed by stinging heat. The men moaned with pleasure. Sweat broke out on shoulders, thighs, genitals, and bald heads, oozing salt and setting us itching. The bunch of birch twigs was taken out of the bucket where it had been in water, and used on the glowing stones. A smell of sun and summer filled the sauna, and the men started smiling inwardly and sighing longingly. The bridegroom grabbed the birch twigs and began beating himself all over his body, moaning ecstatically all the while. In a quivering voice he announced that it was better than sex, which made the rest start squirming impatiently. Grandad poured nine more scoops onto the stones, hitting precisely the places that hadn’t been wet the first time around. The
heat filled the sauna like an enjoyable good thrashing. The moaning and panting increased in volume, and there were several whimpering pleas for the bunch of birch twigs before all the itching made their skins burst open. The bridegroom reluctantly passed it on, saying that they ought to have the kitchen ladies there to whip their backs as nobody could handle a
vihta
with such ecstatic ruthlessness as an old harridan. The twigs pitter-pattered and showers of sweat rained down. Grandad kept scooping on more water, mumbling away, and clouds of steam floated around like spirits. Some voices were heard complaining about the cold, claiming they’d rarely had such a cold
löylyä
, which everybody knew meant that the sauna was approaching its maximum temperature. The steam was as merciless as a Laestadian sermon. The men crouched and grappled with the heat, pure pleasure. Their gums were starting to taste of blood. Ear lobes were stinging, pulses thundered like drums. Somebody gasped that you couldn’t get closer to Eden than this, not this side of the grave.

Once the first sensual storms had died down, a discussion started on the various types of sauna. Everybody agreed that the “smoke sauna” was far and away the best, much better than the wood-burning type and the electric version. The last-mentioned was singled out for special scorn and dismissed as a toaster or a car heater. Some recalled with a shudder the dry, dusty airing cupboards they’d had to sit in on various visits to southern Sweden. Someone remembered a sauna he’d taken at the Mountain Hotel in Jormlien where the electric stove was Norwegian and looked like an old-fashioned spin-dryer. The stone-box was about the size of a teacup with only enough room for two pebbles, provided one of them was stood on end. Another had horror in his voice as he told us about a building contract he’d been involved in on the island of Gotland. It lasted three months, but not once had he been able to attend to his personal hygiene because sauna culture had not penetrated that far south. Instead, people there would lie and splash about in the filth they washed off themselves in something they called a bathtub.

Grandad left off scooping water onto the stones in order to point out that several of his sons had in fact installed electrically driven saunas in the houses they’d had built for themselves, thereby condemning Tornedalen culture to an early death. The sons concerned protested that their saunas had been made in Finland and hence were of unbeatable quality, just as good as the wood-burning variety, and that the Finnish sauna magazine
Saunalehti
had awarded them five out of five bundles of birch twigs in their ratings. Grandad maintained tetchily that electricity was the most ridiculous invention ever to come from southern Sweden, it pampered and spoiled man and beast alike, decreased the mass of muscle in working men and women as well, reduced your tolerance of the cold, spoiled people’s night eyes, ruined the hearing of teenagers and made them incapable of eating rotten food, and was well on the way to eradicating the endurance and patience that were virtues of the Tornedalen people, since everything was done nowadays at breakneck speed by engines. Before long sexual intercourse would be replaced by electricity as it was a strenuous exercise and a sweaty one as well, and that kind of thing was regarded as old-fashioned now, as we all know.

Grandad started scooping water onto the stones again, ignoring his sons’ protestations that they were still made of traditional Finnish hardwood. Instead he declared that they had all become idle layabouts, that Tornedalen had been conquered by
knapsut
and
ummikot
and that what he regretted most of all was not smacking them more often when they were little. But it was too late now. Nobody understood any more the feeling of sitting in a sauna where you’d been born, where your father had been born and his father before him, where the family’s corpses had been washed and shrouded, where
kuppari
, the medicine men, had bled the sick, where children had been conceived and where generation after generation of the family had cleansed themselves after a week’s work.

His voice broke and, with tears in his eyes, he announced that life, my boys, is cold and pain and lies and rubbish. Take just one example:
the revolution he’d been waiting for ever since the Pajala transport workers came out on strike for the first time in 1931, where the hell was it, had anybody seen any sign of it around here lately, well, had they? Only once had a spark of hope been lit, one day when he’d gone to Kolari to buy some provisions, and among the crowd of customers in Valinta Firberg’s he’d caught a glimpse of Josef Stalin with a cart full of meat. But Uncle Joe had obviously decided it was a waste of time coming to Pajala.

A bottle was handed to Grandad as a crumb of comfort amidst all the heat, and he splashed a drop on the stones as well. A whiff of fusel oil drifted toward us. Grandad passed on the bottle, wiped his nose on his arm and said that life was a load of shit anyway and death wasn’t far away. But he was still a Communist, he wanted to make that clear once and for all, and if on his deathbed he started rambling about seeking forgiveness for his sins and asking for Jesus, it would be no more than confusion and senility and they should stick a plaster over his cakehole. He wanted everybody to promise they’d do that, here and now, in the presence of his family and other witnesses. The fear of death was nothing compared to the fear of going gaga and talking twaddle at Pajala Cottage Hospital for anybody to hear.

Then he threw nine more scoops onto the stones and some of the lads started whimpering and climbed down saying they needed a pee, and only the very hardest remained behind, with blisters the size of one-krona coins on their shoulders. Grandad couldn’t believe he was the father of all these milksops. Then he handed over the scoop and said they could sort out the final stages for themselves because he was fed up with tormenting them and having to smell their glands. He climbed down with dignity and started to wash himself in a bowl of hot water. He only soaped the three most important parts of the body, the way old men do: his bald head, his stomach, and his scrotum.

And so the grim final round was under way. This would be the ultimate test of strength for the two families. Einari took over the scooping of
the water while the others complained of the cold. As always the struggle was largely psychological. Everybody used exaggerated body language to demonstrate how unaffected they were, how little the heat troubled them, how long they’d be able to put up with it, no problem. Einari emptied the bucket over the sizzling stones and had it filled again immediately. Another round of scooping, fiercer than ever. The first batch of the finalists staggered down and fell on the floor, panting. Grandad threw a bucket of cold water over them. The steam was whipping everyone’s back, burning their lungs. Another one gave up. The others sat there like tree stumps, eyes glazed over. Somebody started swaying, nearly fell, and was helped down. More steam, more pain. Now Dad gave up, coughing as if he were about to choke. Only Einari was left, still scooping, and bald-headed Ismo, head dangling. The vanquished huddled together on the floor, determined to stay and see the outcome. Ismo looked near to passing out, but stayed on the bench even so, remarkably enough. With each new scoop he jerked back, like a defenseless boxer slowly being knocked out. Einari was gasping for breath, and his right arm shook as he poured on fresh scoops of water. His face was purple, his upper body swayed alarmingly. One more scoop. And another. Ismo started coughing, ready to choke, he was dribbling down his chin. Both of them were swaying violently now, and put their arms around each other to support themselves. Suddenly Einari shuddered and toppled stiffly toward Ismo, who also fell. They collapsed like slaughtered beasts, thudded down onto the lower bench, and stayed lying down, arms round each other.

“A draw!” shouted somebody.

Only now did I slither out of my dark corner on the upper bench, looking like a skinned rabbit. Everybody stared in amazement. Without a word I raised my fist in a victory salute.

As their applause and cheering rose to the soot-caked ceiling, I fell to my knees on the floor and vomited.

About a stomach-turning summer job, a poker that went astray, and the perils that ensue from failing to do one’s duty

One gray and overcast day in May a slim, spry man came striding into Pajala from the Korpilombolo direction. He was carrying an old-fashioned military rucksack, his head was weather-beaten and as worn as a rune stone, topped by short, silvery gray hair. He stopped in Naurisaho, gazed disapprovingly up at the leaden sky and took several deep draughts from a water-bottle. Then he knocked on the door of the nearest house. When the door opened he bade the stranger good day in broken standard Finnish with an exotic accent. The man introduced himself as Heinz, a German citizen, and he wondered if there might be an empty cottage in the area available for renting over the summer.

A few telephone calls were made, and by that evening Heinz had found a badly insulated little wooden cottage just outside the village. The widow who used to live there had become feeble-minded over the last few years, and had covered the whole of the floor with topsoil and hay, so everything had to be scrubbed with soap and boiling water before the German accepted it. He was provided with a mattress and some china, some basic provisions were placed in the larder, curtains
were put up, and a truckload of firewood was dumped outside the front door. The electricity could be reconnected, although that would mean an increased rent. Heinz declined on the grounds that it was May already and electric lights would not be needed—after all, it wouldn’t get dark again until well into August.

On the other hand he was keen to take a look at the sauna. It was on the edge of the forest, gray with age and covered in soot around the door. Heinz opened it. Breathed deeply. A melancholy smile spread over his face as he breathed in the scent of the smoke sauna.

“Sauna!” he whispered in his exotic foreign accent. “I haven’t taken a sauna for over twenty years!”

That very night Niila and I lay concealed in our look-out post and watched him running naked down to the RiverTorne, saw him hurl himself into the water among the last of the lumps of ice drifting down-river and swim half-way across before turning back. Then he stood on the bank, blue with cold, leaping around with his shriveled penis wavering in the cold night air, before jogging back into the warmth of the cottage.

The next day he acquired an abandoned typewriter from the Customs’ store of confiscated items, an ancient Halda made of cast iron. He set it up on the porch and sat there bashing away for hours on end, occasionally gazing over the meadows flush with shoots of fresh, green grass, listening to the curdling flute cadenzas of the curlew.

Who was this man, in fact? What was he doing here? Before long rumors were circulating to the effect that this mysterious stranger had been an SS officer in Finland during the war. That was where he had picked up his Finnish and learned about the sauna culture. In the later stages of the war his company had been forced to retreat as the Finnish army advanced, and they had withdrawn northward through Finnish Tornedalen, where the wild beauty of the landscape had made an indelible impression on him.

They had burned everything that stood in their path. Those were their orders, a scorched earth policy. Every single house and barn in village
after village; even the churches had been drenched in gasoline and the whole area had become one vast, flaming ocean of fire. The whole of the north of Finland had been reduced to ashes. Heinz had been partly responsible. And now he had returned to record his memoirs.

That’s what they said about him. Heinz kept his own council. Went for brisk walks in knee-length running shorts, followed a program of jerky military gymnastics outside the cottage every morning while the kids lay in the bushes and sniggered. Then filled page after page during his strictly regimented writing sessions.

The only thing that disturbed him was the mice.

The house was full of them. The widow had owned several cats, to be sure, but once she’d been taken away, the mice had run riot. They’d made themselves at home in all the mess, burrowed into the mattresses to make nests, made runs under the floorboards, and given birth to new generations. Heinz complained to his landlords, and was lent an old farm cat—but it ran back home at the first opportunity. Heinz rejected the offer of poison, on the grounds that lots of them would die under the floorboards and then stink the house out.