The Beggar and the Hare (14 page)

T
he decision to build the largest shopping mall, hotel complex, entertainment and golf centre in the Nordic countries had been easy to make by drawing a circle on the map with a pair of compasses. A radius of a hundred and ninety miles with a customer catchment area that included four countries. In addition, a retirement home with an exotic view. The decision made, the construction company began to receive reservations from the United States, Canada and dictators in Central America. In the municipality of Raattama, an ice rink where the
Finnish ice hockey team would play in the intercontinental championships. Clothes shops, car dealerships, supermarkets, an equipment rental company.

Commercial activity would give birth to a town.

The town would need public services, healthcare, a library, schools. Its construction would be partially financed by public funding.

It would be like a modern Helsinki–Stockholm car ferry combined with the building sites of Kostomuksha and the gold-mining towns of Russian Karelia. It would be a new Las Vegas, as the developers Taive Sikari and Kerkko Kolmonen had said in their inaugural speeches. Then the ribbon had been cut, the foundation stone laid, and smiles provided for the photographers.

With the contract signed, a workforce was needed for the construction project. Kolmonen and Sikari did not intend to conform to Finnish legislation on wage levels and working hours, never mind the demands of the trade unions and their shop stewards. Workers from other parts of the world – slaves, migrants or indigenous peoples – have always built mankind’s most remarkable edifices. Finns, American Indians, Chinese. The workforce would not be exploited, but the pay would be based on the men’s initial pay grade and status in their home country. Six euros would not get an unemployed Finn off the sofa except to go and buy his lottery ticket. An Estonian would leave his family, live in a caravan and work fourteen hours a day.

The work on the project was now nearly halfway complete. Trucks drove in and out of the gates, cranes blocked the sky as they moved the prefabricated units into place.

V
atanescu crawled out of the bushes onto the muddy main road. In front of him towered a large sign: NSDAC
IS BUILDING THE
N
ATIONAL
I
DEA
P
ARK ON THE SITE OF THE NATIONAL PARK
. P
ROJECT COMPLETION IS SCHEDULED FOR
S
PRING
2013.

Vatanescu shook the mud from his clothes and made sure that the rabbit was all right. The rabbit quivered and put its ears back.

There’s no hurry.

Calm down.

Don’t panic. I’m going to stop this truck.

Vatanescu walked into the middle of the road and stretched out his arms. The Scania truck braked and stopped an elbow’s length away from him. The driver’s name was Õunap. In his former existence he had been a petty Estonian crook – smuggling cigarettes and alcohol into Finland, running offbeat chauffeuring jobs and paying hardly any tax.

After the East European states and their peoples settled down he had fallen in love, married, reproduced and vowed to support his family by honest means. There were enough building sites in Finland to keep him in work until the year 2000 and even a little beyond. Õunap saved enough capital to start his own business back home.

In Estonia Õunap’s company, Sheet Metal and Concrete, prospered at first. Soon it all went belly-up. Economic fluctuations + the international financial crisis = bankruptcy of Sheet Metal and Concrete. He had to return to Finland and take the first low-paid job he could find. Which was better by half than the crumpled banknotes of his homeland.

Now Õunap seethed in the cabin of his truck, hammered on the window and sounded the horn. He wound the window down and swore in all the languages
he knew. Vatanescu’s hearing was still non-existent.

Let’s get my berries. I’ll give you thirty per cent.

The driver leaned his torso out of the window of the truck, grabbed Vatanescu by the ears and shook him. Out of his ears fell gravel, moss and little stones. As his hearing returned, a soundscape of the end of the world – that post-modernist radio feature – invaded Vatanescu’s consciousness.

Forty per cent?

The driver opened the door on the passenger side and told Vatanescu to get in. He had to combine four badly spoken languages in order to obtain some kind of comprehension. Õunap demanded to know why the man wasn’t at Kittilä Airport at the right time. He had wasted three hours for nothing, and without pay. Was the man stupid or just slow? Why was it only dickheads that came from Poland?

I’m not from Poland.

I’m Vatanescu.

I have berries.

You can have forty-five per cent.

Õunap told him to forget the berries and listen. All that mattered was laying the concrete for the
multi-storey
car park’s D wing. The work could not go forward because the pump was in the back of the truck that Õunap was driving. At his feet the Pole would find a helmet, a reflective jacket, steel-tipped boots and a tool belt.

I’m not a concrete-layer. I’m an everyman.

I’m a berry-picker. I really am.

‘Stick your berries up your arse. You’re a concrete layer. A nozzleman.’

I
n protective boots and helmet, cement gun in hand, in a group of three. The team was made up of Vatanescu and Õunap and the third member, Goodluck Jeffersson, a Ghanaian-Norwegian giant who had arrived at the National Idea Park site after working on oilrigs and fish processing plants. In Ghana he had earned a doctorate, but the role of committed and cool intellectual had evaporated on a boat where Goodluck Jeffersson and 2,456 other subsistence-challenged people had crossed the Mediterranean and reached Italy.

Vatanescu stuck it for one day and then for another, and then halfway through that second day for the first time he remembered the berries. As he moved around, the rabbit sat inside his work overall, and from time to time it peeped out of the collar to see if anything had changed, if it would dare to leave, but nonetheless preferred to remain in the thoroughly reassuring smell of Vatanescu’s sweat. One by one, all Vatanescu’s thoughts and feelings vanished from his consciousness, and all that remained was the cement gun, of which he was now a part.

After the third day a forty-eight-hour break began.

Jeffersson and Õunap carried Vatanescu by his arms and legs to an abandoned shack which the men had taken over to live in, fed up with their caravan existence. In the shack it was always either too cold or too hot, and mice ran about on the floor and in the food cupboards, and they were even joined by a rat.

Jeffersson had installed electricity in the shack’s twelve square yards, and there was a fire in the wood stove. It was as homely as two heterosexual males living together could make it. On the walls there were photos of the men’s children and of the person who Jeffersson claimed was the world’s most beautiful woman, the javelin thrower Trine Hattestad, who he thought was
both warm and easy-going. Jeffersson thought he could spend the rest of his life with a woman like her with relatively little conflict, in contrast to his experiences with his previous four women.

Vatanescu was already asleep when the men carried him in, and on an upper bunk he subsided into an even deeper slumber. Shyly the rabbit emerged from the overall. It jumped straight into Õunap’s lap.

Õ
unap was stirring a big saucepan of soup. Vatanescu asked how long he had slept.

‘Eighteen hours.’

The microwave beeped and Õunap took out a vegetarian pizza for the rabbit. He remarked that the rabbit had really cheered the place up; it was almost as though they had female company. Nothing to do with copulation of course, but something to keep them on their toes, for male farting and blathering became tedious after a while. Since the rabbit’s arrival they had had to pay more attention to where they threw their dirty socks and empty beercans.

Vatanescu tried to turn round, but every muscle and tendon in his body hurt. Õunap noticed his groans of pain and said that his muscles would eventually realise that it was no good complaining, as the work never stopped, not ever.

Vatanescu forced himself onto his stomach and pulled himself to the edge of the bunk. He observed the log walls, the greasy window and Jeffersson fiddling with the joystick of a Playstation.

The berries. Let’s distribute them. Thirty-three, thirtythree, thirty-three.

Õunap stopped stirring the saucepan with his
screwdriver and poured Vatanescu a large bowlful of steaming reindeer tail soup. When Vatanescu had swallowed a dozen spoonfuls and was properly awake, Õunap asked him to listen.

‘Berry-picking is on the way out. Like reindeer herding.’

Õunap said that in the modern world you needed to be a capital investor, not a berry-picker. You had to be a retailer or an entertainment provider. You had to establish a trade name, preferably a general partnership or a limited company, so you would pay less tax.

‘Dividends, expenses allowances and that sort of thing,’ Goodluck Jeffersson chimed in, without raising his head from his 110-metre hurdle race.

‘Look out of the window,’ Õunap said.

Nothing was visible through the grease and the passage of decades, but Õunap asked him to imagine.

‘That used to be the Pallas Fells. Tomorrow there will be a hotel there. The old hills have been put out to grass; they’re going to make a giant slope out of them. Ski-lifts, a ski-jump, a downhill ski-slope.’

Listen! Really… there are masses… of yellow berries… They’re safe there, I’ve hidden them.

‘Vatanescu,’ Õunap said, looking him in the eye.

Well?

‘That cloudberry marsh.’

Yes?

‘They’ve made it into a car park.’

W
ater mingled with cement. The concrete bubbled. There were so many glass structures that the finished building would look unfinished. The floors, the walls and ceilings would be put in place, and there they
would stay for another two decades until the building was demolished to make way for something new. Cables, sewers, joist frames, panel walls, tiling, drains, a backup generator, security systems.