The Beggar and the Hare (5 page)

I must save you. Then I will save myself, too.

I have no one here. I have no one in the world but my son Miklos. We are going to help each other, we are going to manage. Let’s start with you.

With the rabbit in his pocket, Vatanescu set off for the city’s main thoroughfare. A red cross on the street signs guided him to the nearest emergency clinic.

The name above the hospital entrance was that of Miklos’s mother, Vatanescu’s ex-wife.

T
he sliding doors of Maria Hospital’s first-aid clinic opened at regular intervals. At the reception desk sat Hertta Mäntylä, a woman of strong personality praised for her skill in showing sympathy, someone who was able to give silent support to others in sorrow, pain and uncertainty, without being alarmed or frightened by the situation. During the night she had admitted Valdemar Kiminkinen, born 05.06.64, who had struck his head on the pavement as a result of drunkenness. It was also possible that Kiminkinen had been involved in a dispute with his partner, but the partner’s name escaped him for the moment. What he did remember was a race that had been run at Turku athletics stadium in the 1960s, and a life that had gone wrong. Kiminkinen was not bitter, but he kept saying that he wanted to start from the beginning again.

Hertta helped Kiminkinen to lie down and advised him to stop drinking. She even whispered in his ear that love would be the best remedy. But the possibility of that was vanishingly small.

Ticket Number 106 belonged to Liisi Tunder, born 12.12.20, Sagittarius, an old lady who had preserved her beauty in age. Currently she sat on the other side of the glass partition of Hertta’s reception desk, but her mind travelled the roads of her childhood in a hired
car driven by her chauffeur Alzheimer. Mrs Tunder had been found almost naked in the street, wearing surgical stockings and holding a coffeepot. She was asking passers-by if the air raid was over, and why she could not find her best friend, Ulrika. Mrs Tunder was accompanied by a man of the same age, anxious and perplexed – her husband. Hertta had booked a room for him at a nearby hotel. A needle was inserted into Mrs Tunder’s birdlike arm, she fell asleep and Hertta thought how many people there were in the world who needed to be limitlessly stroked.

The next customer approached the reception desk without a ticket, blood streaming from his nose. Flägä. Unable to remember his date of birth. Did remember taking Temgesic tablets and also injecting some as yet unnamed liquid narcotic. Had a strong sense of split personality and wanted to escape from the world of Lord of the Weasels, wanted out of Manacles of the Sixth Neuron. As Flägä could not be hugged, he was tied down with hand restraints, something that had had to be done the previous week, and would be done again and again, until he attained prison, death or Salvation.

Oh the dear children, oh the life and the longing, oh the bullied ones, Hertta thought. Oh the lack of love, the cold atmosphere at the breakfast table, the lonely journeys to school, a world where only chemistry helps, not money or a neighbour. Oh your need to forget things that will probably never happen to you. Oh why don’t you leave chemistry for school lessons, why don’t you quit cutting classes and get your qualifications for working life?

Vatanescu was sitting some ten yards from Hertta. He kept the rabbit hidden inside his jacket, not daring to look at anyone but the pigtailed little girl who smiled opposite him with life and joy in her maybe six-year-old
eyes. The sticking plaster on her arm said that she had had a blood sample taken, and the heroic deed had been rewarded with an ice cream on a stick. Her tiny teeth nibbled at the chocolate and her tongue licked the vanilla that appeared underneath.

The rabbit tried to abandon the sleeve for freedom, but Vatanescu stopped it. The rabbit tried to leave by way of his collar, but Vatanescu put his hand in the way. The little girl spotted the rabbit and continued to lick her ice cream. Children are less surprised by unusual things than they are by ordinary, conventional ones.

The girl’s mother wondered who her daughter was making faces and smiling at – was it that foreign tramp who smelled of sewers? The rabbit retreated back into the sleeve. Vatanescu looked away, and as they continued to play their game the queue numbers changed; there were still twenty to go until it was Vatanescu’s turn. The girl fell asleep in her mother’s arms. Vatanescu felt tired as he looked at the weary, flu-ridden people, the stooping and the stooped. Behind the Venetian blinds one could hear the city waking up to the morning; the streetlights were going out. In their place the sun tried to break through the veil of cloud, and Vatanescu sank into slumber.

He woke up when the little girl tapped his knee with her finger. She was pointing to the number on the board and the number on Vatanescu’s ticket.

The dictatorship under which he had grown as a child had given Vatanescu a knowledge of languages. At school in 1984, before the Los Angeles Olympics, he had distributed official brochures sponsored by a
soft-drinks
company, for Romania was the only country in the socialist bloc apart from China that took part in those Games. The heroes of Vatanescu’s childhood were athletes with names like Nadia, Ilie and Cojocaru.
He read the brochures in their original language, deciphering them syllable by syllable until he began to understand what he was reading.

Hertta Mäntylä saw before her an English-speaking vagabond, but that was no problem as long as he had a health insurance card. From Hertta’s point of view Vatanescu looked tired, possibly depressed, and perhaps he was suffering from seasonal influenza. Years of experience told her that for most of the patients sleep was a better remedy than treatment, institutionalisation, pills and injections. Sleep, unbroken and secure, that began under clean sheets in a well-aired room. A process of waking that took place in one’s own time, to the smell of coffee, with a newspaper. In a house of kindly women, uncles with a sense of humour, small children playing sweetly and quietly, full of life. If only one could give that to people, instead of always being in a hurry, busy earning one’s living, with a fear of death and a constant sense of fatigue. The circles under one’s eyes, the tyres under the leased car, the fire under one’s arse, the flame under the spoon, here under the North Star. People needed to be taken by the hand. People needed to be taken to Linnanmäki Amusement Park, to the fells of Lapland, where they could let the wind caress their pockmarked skin and scarred souls and blocked emotions. There were so many places where they could find the life they silenced in themselves.

‘Änt wot is joo proplem?’

Vatanescu said something about broken bones, a bleeding hind-leg and a gang of boys who were in pursuit. Hertta looked at him – he didn’t seem to have any broken bones. The one thing that Hertta could not abide was people who made unnecessary visits to the emergency clinic, wasting the taxpayers’ money on imaginary complaints. The world could not take any
more malingerers. She asked Vatanescu if he had a health insurance card. No, he didn’t. A passport? No. An identity card? No. A social security ID? A fixed address? No.

Hertta rose from her ergonomic chair. If the trouble was serious, Vatanescu would receive treatment, but if this were some kind of fraud, it had to be exposed. Hertta told him to show her the injured limb. Vatanescu pulled the rabbit out of his sleeve.

But how could he have known that Hertta Mäntylä detested animals? She was allergic to all living beings except human ones; animals caused her to swell up, they covered her in spots and made her sneeze. In Hertta’s view of the world mammals had a clearly defined place, and the South Helsinki Health Clinic was quite the wrong place for rabbits. They belonged in nature; they spread disease, put their paws on you, licked you with their revolting tongues, panted, growled, nibbled. Through her increasing panic she whispered that this was not a vet’s surgery. Vatanescu tried to explain that the rabbit had very probably been born in Finland, somewhere in the area between the Botanic Gardens and the big blue hospital. So perhaps it could be given a social security number and thereby the right to medical treatment.

Hertta Mäntylä screamed as though Vatanescu had put a machete to her throat or threatened to blow up the hospital. Hertta Mäntylä pressed the panic button and announced through the loudspeaker that the police were already on their way. Hertta Mäntylä covered her face with a surgical mask, closed the window of the reception desk and refused to work any more.

Vatanescu made quietly for the exit; he must leave this place, avoid the handcuffs. The rabbit’s paw hung limply. From its mouth came a pitiful whimpering. And
although the use of a fluffy animal and a little girl in the same scene would be pathetically melodramatic, it really did happen that the girl ran after Vatanescu. She held out the stick that was all that remained of her ice cream, and undid the laces of her little red shoes.

You wise little person.

Opposite the hospital was a cemetery, where in the stillness Vatanescu used the stick from the little girl’s ice cream to make a splint, which he fixed to the rabbit’s paw with one of the shoelaces. Raking the gravel paths between the dark gravestones was an old man who raised his hat. When Vatanescu nodded, the old man mounted the steps that led to the rear door of the chapel and soon returned with a thermos flask.

The man’s face was fluted by the winds of the north, and his handshake was firm.

Why do I want to cry?

Suddenly I have a sense of complete security.

When the man poured him a cup of hot coffee, a tear ran down Vatanescu’s cheek. The man nodded and wiped the tear away. Vatanescu looked the man in the face.

You accept me. You let me be myself.

Thank you.

You’re a human being.

The man had a ham sandwich, which he divided in three, and a cupful of milk for the rabbit. It drank eagerly. The old man gave Vatanescu a handkerchief. They had no common language, but it is easy to express gratitude without words, by taking someone’s hand in one’s own. They were able to exchange names: the old man’s was Keijo.

The verger led Vatanescu and the rabbit into the chapel so they could warm themselves and gather their
strength. They would be able to rest there until the daily work of the chapel began and the space was needed for the mourners. The organist was practising in the organ loft, a warming sun shone through the high windows. Now and then it vanished behind clouds. Vatanescu fell asleep feeling better, as the top end of the hierarchy of his basic needs had been satisfied: he had obtained food and warmth, and the rabbit had received first aid.

T
he prosaist Helinä Halme lived until she died. In literary circles Helinä was known as an author of highly charged autofiction, a shameless scrutiniser of private pain spots and an original interpreter of her own generation. In the real world of her children Heikki and Kaija, Helinä Halme was known as a
self-centred
and manic-depressive mother for whom family life meant demands and victimisation. It was true that as an author she had the right to make use of material from her own everyday life in her books, but the more that Helinä Halme revealed in her writings, and the greater the interest of the media, the greater the discomfiture of Heikki and Kaija. In her books Helinä Halme understood the world and man; she understood society and the individual; she engaged boldly in polemics, possessed a virtuoso mastery of language and could be both hard-hitting and tender. At home, however, she had no sense of proportion. Through the pain that mother and children experienced, their relationship could have grown more mutually influential, in an adult and balanced way, but the Grim Reaper had made Helinä Halme collapse onto the picture of the apple on the lid of her laptop. From her mother she had inherited a latent heart defect.

Heikki and Kaija’s father did not come to the funeral. He had severed relations with his former spouse when she published her final, breakthrough work
The Fist Talks, the Man Doesn’t
. ‘Each punch unforgivable, even the ones that were never delivered, but which I saw in his eyes.’

Heikki had not wanted any of his mother’s belongings. Kaija did not refuse the art deco furniture, the shares and the savings account. The books they donated to the second-hand bookshop on the ground floor. For the apartment they asked a price that meant it sold within a week.

At last
, was Kaija’s first thought on the death of her mother. Heikki had burst into tears, and after a day spent sobbing had called the undertaker’s office. No big funeral, no Karelian hotpot. A simple urn. An obituary notice in the newspaper; as epitaph a line from one of Helinä’s own poems from her collection
The Apple Tree Has the Colours of Chile.

The children’s Uncle Pertti attended the chapel. A childhood shared in common generally makes people cry at funerals, even though as adults they may have ploughed very different furrows. Heikki, Kaija and Uncle Pertti were seated in the second row. When the organ began to play, a man whom no one knew emerged from the front row. A tramp.

Vatanescu nodded to Helinä Halme’s family and walked out of the chapel.

From the point of view of Vatanescu’s story the Halme family is not important. More important is the tabloid journalist who secretly photographed the mourners from the front seat of his car. Vatanescu did not notice the journalist, and of course the journalist did not recognise Vatanescu, but the picture he took began to
circulate on the Internet. Vatanescu was identified in the background of the funeral photo; someone enlarged it and realised that the same homeless individual could be seen in a video that had been taken with a mobile phone at the Maria Hospital. An ill-dressed but sympathetic looking man was glimpsed showing the duty nurse what looked like a hamster or some other pitifully wriggling creature.