I swallow. Pessi looks in my face as if wondering why I’ve stopped reading, why the words have dried up in my throat. He stretches up and sees a drop of sweat on my upper lip, his little rough tongue brushes the corner of my mouth, and an inarticulate sob flashes to my throat. And outside it’s snowing, snowing endlessly.
ECKE
Outside it’s snowing, snowing endlessly.
And I’ve left sixteen messages on Angel’s voice mail.
ANGEL
“Pessi,” I whisper, and I stretch my hand out and slide it around his sweet, narrow, smooth, burning-hot waist. Pessi’s ears tremble. I have a massive erection, as if part of my stomach and thighs were rock-hard aching flesh.
I’ve locked him in here. I’ve tried to capture part of the forest, and now the forest has captured me.
ECKE
Mikael, be at home.
You’ve been as slippery as a ferret, O thou golden-haired Adjutant of Heaven’s Commander-in-Chief. You do definitely check your incoming calls, glance at your caller ID and see the number there, my number, which you don’t want to answer.
You haven’t come to see my source books, though I’ve learned by heart everything I could amuse an archangel with. Did you know that, as Mikael, you hold the Bookkeeper’s office on high: you note down all our debits and credits in the Book of Life. And on Judgment Day you’ll initiate the Resurrection of the Dead with your trumpet call, you’ll take military command of your angel host, and you’ll overpower Satan and his henchmen in the last decisive battle. In the Book of Daniel you struggle against the Dragon. In the Western world you’re usually garbed as a knight, and you carry a sword and a long spear.
The spring sleet’s piling up in sheets on my head and shoulders and clouding my glasses, and I want you to pierce me with your burning sword, Mikael, and, damn jejune though this will sound, I’m longing for your glowing spear.
ANGEL
Thank heaven, the doorbell rings.
The piercing buzz clears my head like a bolt of cold lightning, and Pessi jumps at the sudden sound and flashes under the sofa.
I open the door a little way, grateful for the interruption and simultaneously cursing myself. A peephole for the door, why in hell haven’t I got myself a peephole?
“Angel,” Ecke says, almost with a sob, and melting sleet’s running down his shoulders and hair.
ECKE
While I’m trying to drop some casual and breezy word about the Gustaf Eurén book, and returning it, Angel’s already out on the stairway.
He pushes the door almost shut behind him and simultaneously hugs me to him—so killingly lustful and hungry that my head rocks and my legs go weak under me. Angel’s mouth is on my mouth, greedy and hard, and his tongue’s wrestling with mine. He stops the kiss as if suddenly forced to pull away, gasps, and his eyes are burning with such an alarming blaze it hits me below the belt, and from solar plexus to balls I’m all fire, with an incredible lava flow of success.
“Let’s go to your place,” Angel says, shoving his hand in the doorway, grabbing his coat off the hook and checking the keys in his pocket with a jingle. “We’ll grab a taxi in the square.” He carefully presses the door to and leans on it, breathing heavily and looking down at me under his brows, as if I were his prey. And though I can’t for the life of me think why we’re going all the way to my Kaleva suburb instead of his place, I know there are moments when there’s really no point in opening your mouth.
VÄINO LINNA,
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
, 1954
Hietanen tripped on an alder stump and flopped down. There he stayed, out like a light, too canned to get up. Vanhala made a handsome curve, his moonshine-fueled plane engine shrieking, and yelled: “Take to your parachute. Plane’s crashing, he he hee . . . !”
“Plane’s going down . . . it’s all going round . . . everything’s going round,” Hietanen spluttered, clutching at the grass.
Vanhala roared in his ear: “You’re in a spin . . . Jump for it . . . not going to straighten out now . . .”
But Hietanen’s plane was fast out of control, turning and spinning down. No hope of a jump now: he just pressed on with his plane, first into a fog, and then blank darkness. Vanhala left him where he was, annoyed that the struggle was over too soon.
To one side, sitting around a largish boulder, were Määttä, Salo, and Sihvonen. Salo was telling the tale very earnestly, with his hair in his eyes: “Back home, in our parish, fires burn over buried-treasure pits . . .”
Sihvonen turned his head aside and flicked with his hand as if fending off mosquitoes: “Come on, come off it . . . You’re lying . . .”
“Oh yes, they do burn all right. The old ’uns have seen ’em. And, like this, they’ve got crossed swords over ’em.”
“Oh, come off it . . . These old wives’ tales, Lapland witches’ tales. All sorts of shit you hear. About the Russkis, for instance, they say that when they run out of men, they catch a troll, put a uniform on the beast, and send it off to the western front. Watch out when you see one of those crashing through the forest at you . . . there you have it, one of the wonders of the north.”
“But who is from the north, then?” Määttä said. “I’m from far enough up north myself, and I know of folks who keep trolls as domestic animals.”
Määttä had had very little to say the whole time, and the powerful moonshine didn’t seem to have got to him all that much. But now he looked at the stone and said: “So what do you say? There it is, the stone. Why don’t we lift it?”
MARTES
“Now it’s sold.”
“It’s sold?!” I watch a smile slowly spreading across his face like a wash of watercolor.
“Want to see the layout?” Not waiting for a reply, I go into my office, with Mikael the Pageboy trailing after me, ready to lick up any drops of honey I might deign to drip.
I pull a print out of the pile. Mikael goes starry-eyed when he looks at the stylistic purity, economy, and sheer cool pull—explosive madness, too—of our joint work, and I’d swear his eyes have gone moist as he looks up at me again.
“So stylish,” I say. “It drips with chic.”
“It does.”
“You can invoice us.”
“What did the client say?”
“A hit, right at the core of our fragmented postmodern age.”
Mikael gives a snort of laughter. “No, he didn’t.”
“He did, that he did.”
Mikael can’t take his eyes off the layout, the black mane, the nails clawing the air, the snarling expression, the break-dance–ballet-leap frozen into a still.
“It’s beautiful,” he sighs, and his ecstasy wounds me: it’s an invisible slash—like a paper cut. I don’t happen to have mentioned
to the client that the image and the conception have come from a subcontractor. And no point in enlightening him so that he could go to the subcontractor direct and get for a few thousand euros a picture we’re asking fifty-odd thousand for. And so the honor’s mine, the layout’s mine, and Mikael’s got no right to look at it so lovingly.
Hey, I’m here, too, I’m just about to snap, but then Mikael’s already taking his hand off the print and putting it down carefully on the table, and his smile’s like extra light flooding into the room.
“I’ll send Helvi an invoice for the amount we discussed.”
“What about a beer now? Isn’t this the moment?” I ask, before I even notice I’ve said it, and I bite my lip—hell, I’m not getting into all that any more. But Mikael’s standoffishness is a challenge: it’s as if he didn’t see, didn’t hear, damn it, that I’m here—me, me, Martes—Martes, whose company used to be so sought after. Why isn’t he hanging back, looking for any reason to stay? Why’s he not chatting aimlessly just so he doesn’t have to step outside the door?
“Oh. It would have been . . .” Mikael’s sigh is genuine and gentle. “But, dammit, I’ve gone and booked myself up for this evening.”
“Surely you can spare a few minutes?” I get a grip on myself. “Or, well, yes, in fact I’ve got all sorts of stuff on myself.”
“Another time.”
“Yep.”
I stand watching him go, and, I don’t know why, in some deep me there smolders a slight smudge of disappointment, smolders and spits a thin gray smoke.
PALOMITA
Strange things are happening in the peephole.
Pentti has stopped there, talking with the staircase woman. The woman keeps nodding and waving her hands about. She puts her face up to Pentti’s ear and says something with a serious look. Then she draws back, folds her arms and shakes her head.
Pentti takes his wallet from his inside pocket and gives her a business card. He seems to be stressing something, and the woman nods as if she means it. Then Pentti fishes a banknote out of his wallet. He squeezes it into her palm with two hands.
I hardly have time to take the stool away and get into the kitchen before Pentti’s in the apartment. His face glows bright red as he shouts out what on earth have I been doing. He says he knows everything now. I’ve rung neighbors’ doorbells. I’ve tried to bring stray cats into the building. I’ve brought shame on Pentti in everyone’s eyes.
He hits me twice, and then he’s had enough. He says that if I like cat food that much perhaps I’d like to eat nothing else all next week.
He doesn’t say where he’s learned all this. But I know now.
ANGEL
I’ve been having a shower in Ecke’s matchbox of a bathroom, where you have to wriggle down on to the toilet seat with the sink pressing on your lap. The shower curtain’s nurturing a rank and multifarious ecosystem.
I slide down next to Ecke under a gray military blanket. Ecke has taken his glasses back from the bedside table and is reading something. I pull the cover my way for a moment. Aleksis Kivi’s classic novel,
Seven Brothers.
“You’re not serious!”
“Yes, yes. You’re in here, too.”
“Ah ha! No doubt I’m Jussi of Jukola, the hemp-haired mope.”
“No, a much more angelic figure. Remember the wan maiden?”
“Huh huh.”
Ecke ignores my scornful snort and begins declaiming in the style of some juvenile youth-club performer:
Once upon a time there dwelt in a certain mountain cavern a dreadful troll, the terror and scourge of mankind. He had the art of changing his form into anything he wished; and around the neighborhood he was seen abroad, sometimes walking as a handsome youth, sometimes as a beautiful
maiden, depending on whether he thirsted for man’s or woman’s blood.
“What is this, some hint about transvestism?”
“Stop it. This is cordon-bleu tripe.” He skips a few pages and then lowers his voice meaningfully, dramatizing his tale by leaning my way and half whispering. Then he straightens up and booms, making my eardrums tingle, and I groan, pressing my hands on my ears, only half in joke. And that, too, tickles him.
And there the hapless maiden was, shrieking, struggling, and pulling away in her agony, but in vain. With a wicked howl the troll dragged her into the depths of his cavern and decided he would keep her forever beside him in the dark bowels of the earth. For long, long years the wan maiden stands on the mountainside every night, in storm, rain, and biting frost, beseeching forgiveness for her sins, and no complaint is ever heard from her lips. Thus she spends the gloomy night, but with the dawn the merciless troll drags her back into his caverns.
I feel vaguely disturbed but not because of Ecke. When he’s being sincere, free from the barricades of affectation, the Café Bongo smoke, and the compulsion to pull, Ecke is in fact boyishly attractive—yet fucking intelligent with it: the starry-eyed innocent and yet, hell, how streetwise, how titillatingly cynical. Rather like the mousy heroine of an American film who, once the senior prom comes around, leaves her glasses on the bedside table, gets her braces off, and bowls over all the guys who’ve been giving her the brush-off.
“What about this then?”
Ecke flicks over some more pages, strikes his breast theatrically, and then flourishes broad arcs in the air with his arm.
Looking at her lovingly, the young man took her in his arms, kissed her, and soon the wan maiden felt a delicate stream of blood sweetly cascading through her drained veins, her cheeks flushed like a cloud at sunrise, and her clear brow gleamed with joy. But now the raging troll, bristling with fury, crept up the hill to drag the maiden back again into his dungeons.
I snatch the book from Ecke with fond determination—this is obviously what he’s been working up to the whole time—thrust him down into the mattress and listen to him letting out little whimperings as I pinch his susceptible spots. And I think about the troll.
ECKE
O heavenly being.
In the swish of his wings, in the glow of his halo I sink into the mattress. And I let out a cry.
I’ve never been so happy in my life.
And I’ve never in my life been so crushingly sure that the one who’s holding me so voluptuously is thinking of someone else.