Sinikka Tirkkonen. Photo: Otava.

Short short prose from Sinikka Tirkkonen

This week, a short story by Sinikka Tirkkonen (born 1954), which we published in 1988 – a piece of confessional prose, ‘comfortless and depressed’, as Tero Liukkonen’s introduction has it, about life in a bleakly solipsistic world; the kind of writing, one’s inclined to say with hindsight, that only the young, or at least the not very old, have the leisure to produce.

‘Things are only right for me,’ says the unnamed narrator, ‘when they bring grief and distress in their train, when they pile up guilt feelings, harsh self-criticism and self-denial… All my life I’ll be deprived of something, always – full of cares, fears, terrible agonies. I’ve no right to live.’ There’s a train journey north, two women in a car on a long drive across Lapland, work, a husband’s unfaithfulness, pointlessness….

It’s beautifully done, though, with an appealing poetic minimalism. Enjoy!

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 388 articles and book extracts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Runar Schildt

It’s a period that seems sometimes to have disappeared from view – Helsinki in the final years of Russian rule – but Runar Schildt’s short story brings it vividly to life. The characters – Sahlberg the baker and his mortal enemy, Johansson from the customs service; the restaurant-owner Durdin and Elsa, daughter of a commissionaire at the Senate, around whom the story revolves – spend a lazy but sexually charged summer Sunday in their villas just outside Helsinki, their hidden emotions all too familiar to those of a later age…

As the story’s translator, the formidably erudite George C. Schoolfield, remarks in his introduction, Runar Schildt (1888-1925) has often been hailed as a Finland-Swedish classic. There’s a quality of aesthetic decadence in his work that makes him very much a product of his time. There’s nothing, in Raketen, with its solid, belle epoque atmosphere, to foreshadow the change that was so soon to engulf Finland, with the granting of independence in 1917 and the bitter civil war that followed. Schildt was in Helsinki during the months when it was ruled by the Red side in the civil war; afterwards, he served as a clerk in the terrible detention camp for Red prisoners of war on Suomenlinna island. It was a new world, in which all the old certainties were questioned. Timid, conservative and something of a dandy (his friend Hans Ruin said he always looked as if he had stepped out of a bandbox), Schildt may well have felt out of tune with the times. By 1920 he had ceased to write the prose at which he excelled, and had turned to drama, with which he had much less success.

Schildt shot himself, in 1925, in the courtyard of the old university clinic in Helsinki. He was not yet 40.

Read the short story

Martti Joenpolvi.
Photo: Janne Aaltonen.

We first published this short story by Martti Joenpolvi, an acknowledged master of the genre, in 1989; it comes from the collection Pronssikausi (‘The bronze age’, 1988), which was nominated for the Finlandia Prize.

The subject – the story is about a man taking his mistress on a secret visit to his summer-house – provides plenty of opportunity for sly humour. But it’s a more unsettling read in 2015 than we’re guessing it was twenty-five years ago – not so much for the plot itself, which makes ironic fun of the idea of woman-as-chattel, as for the characterisation, which subtly places the woman exactly where the story does.

Enjoy!

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues, with a total of 375 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Hannu Väisänen. Photo: Jouni Harala

Just because you’re a Finnish author, you don’t have to write about Finland – do you?

Here’s a deliciously closely observed short story set in New York: Hannu Väisänen’s Eli Zebbahin voikeksit (‘Eli Zebbah’s shortbread biscuits’) from his new collection, Piisamiturkki (‘The musquash coat’, Otava, 2015).

Best known as a painter, Väisänen (born 1951) has also won large readerships and critical recognition for his series of autobiographical novels Vanikan palat (‘The pieces of crispbread’, 2004, Toiset kengät (‘The other shoes’, 2007, winner of that year’s Finlandia Prize) and Kuperat ja koverat (‘Convex and concave’, 2010). Here he launches into pure fiction with a tale that wouldn’t be out of place in Italo Calvino’s 1973 classic The Castle of Crossed Destinies…

Eli Zebbah’s shortbread biscuits

Eli Zebbah’s small but well-stocked grocery store is located on Amsterdam Avenue in New York, between two enormous florist’s shops. The shop is only a block and a half from the apartment that I had rented for the summer to write there.

The store is literally the breadth of its front door and it is not particularly easy to make out between the two-storey flower stands. The shop space is narrow but long, or maybe I should say deep. It recalls a tunnel or gullet whose walls are lined from floor to ceiling. In addition, hanging from the ceiling using a system of winches, is everything that hasn’t yet found a space on the shelves. In the shop movement is equally possible in a vertical and a horizontal direction. Rails run along both walls, two of them in fact, carrying ladders attached with rings up which the shop assistant scurries with astonishing agility, up and down. Before I have time to mention which particular kind of pasta I wanted, he climbs up, stuffs three packets in to his apron pocket, presents me with them and asks: ‘Will you take the eight-minute or the ten-minute penne?’ I never hear the brusque ‘we’re out of them’ response I’m used to at home. If I’m feeling nostalgic for home food, for example Balkan sausage, it is found for me, always of course under a couple of boxes. You can challenge the shop assistant with something you think is impossible, but I have never heard of anyone being successful. If I don’t fancy Ukrainian pickled cucumbers, I’m bound to find the Belorussian ones I prefer.

In the doorway stands another shop assistant. He is, if possible, even busier than his colleague. Clamping the telephone receiver between his shoulder and his chin, he uses his pencil to make frantic scratches on little slips of paper of different colours which he threads on to a spike which already holds dozens of them. He seems to know only two words: of and course. Sometimes he adds the customer’s name: ‘Of course, Miss Reynolds!’

There’s a third person in the shop. You don’t notice him immediately; he seems somehow transparent, as if he had taken on the colours, images and typography of the cardboard boxes behind him. He moves very little, if at all. He examines things, seems to be pondering something, looks at his shoes and smiles to himself. He doesn’t leap back and forth or really even notice the customers. A useless bottom-feeder, you could say. He is Eli Zebbah.

It is hard to guess his age, he bears such a close resemblance in manner and appearance to his cardboard boxes. Eyebrows thick but of colour unknown. Eyes brown or grey-green, indeterminate. And as already noted, he seems always to be somewhere else. With his crepe-soled shoes the colour of milky coffee he continues the long story of his kin.

He does not wear an apron, but a garment which would probably be called a store-coat. It is a front-buttoning garment of no particular colour whose long sleeves nevertheless reveal Eli Zebbah’s hirsute arms. In the breast of the coat is a pocket stuffed with about a dozen pencils of different kinds. The coat is always clean, folded or pressed so that it recalls some geometric thesis. As you pass him on your way to the deeper recesses of the store, he may nod and smile. If someone makes the mistake of asking him about the location or availability of some item, he raises his thumb, points it at the shop assistant and for some reason congratulates the questioner: ‘Mazel tov!’

I often wonder what he is really doing in his store. Why does he tire himself out by standing around among his busy customers as they rush here and there without paying them any attention? Does he believe that there should be some idler to smile in every food shop? He could spend the same time more comfortably elsewhere, playing chess in some park with other old men. Or dash off to rehearse new pieces with his male-voice choir. But the mysteries of entrepreneurship are closed to me.

I visited Zebbah’s store every day. I have always hated the complexities of home delivery and the different methods of calculating tips. I am also always suspicious of products that I haven’t been able to touch for myself. But in addition to lethargy, the heat of New York gives rise to other bad habits. One day I gave in, picked up the receiver and called Eli Zebbah’s grocery store.

As I picked up the phone I leafed through the store’s free catalogue, thinking idly about what I might eat. Cold cucumber soup or something more substantial – maybe cold cuts; something cold, anyway. I thought out my order, but when the familiar shop assistant answered, all the phrases I had prepared were washed away somewhere and I just stammered: ‘I wish, I would, or actually…’. I expected to be met with questions but in fact all I heard was the familiar word-pair: ‘Of course…’. I realised that I was still far from being the genuine city consumer who grandly stabs at the pictures in the catalogue with his finger, simultaneously shouting his order into the receiver. I felt like a toothless beaver.

My order was accepted, however, whatever it may have consisted of. I was toldit would be at my door in about a quarter of an hour. Great, I thought, that went all right. Despite my inhibitions, I had succeeded in ordering my dinner by phone, just like that. I whistled and snapped my fingers in the American way, putting on my dressing gown in order to look relaxed when the doorbell rang.

But the doorbell did not ring. Not after a quarter of an hour, or even three-quarters. I went out to the corridor, sniffed at the neighbours’ doors, checked that my own doorbell was working, went downstairs to ask the doorman whether he had seen a delivery man. No one had been seen and no one had come.

In the end I phoned the store. No one answered. See, I said to myself. You imagined you were clever enough to order your dinner by yourself, as if you didn’t know it was impossible. Get your trainers on and go to a shop, some quite ordinary shop, pick up a basket, pick up the ingredients for your dinner and then join the queue for the till, just like you ought to.

Just as I had reached the front door, my temples beating because I could not find my keys, the phone rang. I answered, but at first I could hear nothing but fizzing and rustling, a kind of enormous sound that you would imagine you would hear only in the stomach of a whale. Then I could make out a few gentle words: ‘Sorry for the Diegos.’ It was Eli Zebbah himself.

‘Both the Diegos are on the wing,’ he said, uttering the words strangely, referring to his Spanish assistants who, no doubt for reasons of convenience, had the same first name. Not understanding anything, I answered, parrot-like, ‘Of course.’

‘Yes, in these heat waves we sell a lot of drinks,’ Eli Zebbah continued. ‘And I have to keep my staff on the run to get even some of them delivered. There is no two-footed being here any more who could bring them to you and so on. So is it OK if I make the delivery myself, as soon as I can,’ asked Zebbah, and I said again, obediently, ‘Of course,’ even though it felt a bit conceited to be pressing the store owner into action on account of such a small order. I managed to utter some involved objection – ‘but of course you don’t have to’ – which Zebbah quashed:

‘I have to make a delivery to your building anyway. Miss Reynolds, you know, and her lame dog…’.

And soon, really very soon indeed, my doorbell rang, perhaps more cheerfully than it ever had before. I went to open the door, and there was Eli Zebbah. He seemed somehow more vivid than in his store. Was it because of the two large plastic bags he was carrying? Or because of his billowing summer shirt, or the smile which had conquered half of his face? On either side of his smile I saw two red discs. Before that broad smile I had to retreat and make way. Without asking where the kitchen was, Eli Zebbah stepped into it as if he knew all the kitchens in the building, which indeed he probably did. But he did ask whether he should sort the things and put them in the fridge, or whether I wanted to do it myself.

I probably replied, ‘Of course.’ I no longer remember, for at the same moment I heard an enormously long yelp, the kind of thing you can hear from the mouth of a terrier left tethered outside a shop. Eli Zebbah had dropped his plastic bags on the floor; he was holding his temples and howling. At the same time he spun round. I did not know what to do. I would have liked to run away. Why was he howling? What had he seen? Was he suffering a migraine attack?

‘That soup tureen,’ he said tearfully, having at last gained control of his voice and pointing at a porcelain dish on the shelf of my rented one-bedroom apartment. ‘That soup tureen! It is from 1941!’

I had rented my apartment furnished and equipped without paying much attention to the plump soup tureen that lived between books and cassettes. When I looked more closely, it appeared tasteless and deliberately old-fashioned. Along its sides ran a slightly abstract swarm of ants carrying on their necks round objects or onions, ingredients for who knows what soup. The tureen’s four feet recalled some animal that liked to live in water. Why had it caused Eli Zebbah to become so distraught?

‘But it’s… it is the Pfaltzgraff Soup Tureen, the 1941 model!’ Eli Zebbah seemed about to fall over under the weight of his words.

‘I’m sure it is, if you say so. So what?’

‘Sell it to me, sell it at once,’ begged Eli Zebbah.

‘It’s not mine. I can’t sell it. You see, nothing here belongs to me. Everything here belongs to Miss Forrest,’ I assured him. ‘I’m living here temporarily. Just temporarily, do you understand?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Eli Zebbah, and seemed already to be calming down. ‘No one can get back that which is lost. I broke that soup tureen. Mother died and can never forgive me. Soup Tureen 1941,’ he continued. His voice sank to a whisper, his movements slowed. He sat down on my sofa, probably not even realizing.

This is going to be a long session, I thought. I went into the kitchen, poured a galss of white wine, placed it in front of Eli Zebbah and said:

‘Here you are. Drink. It’s so damned hot, too. I think I’ll pour a glass for myself too.’

Eli Zebbah grabbed the glass and drank the wine down in one gulp. Having emptied the glass, he gazed deep into my eyes and began to speak in a calm, unusually even voice:

‘I’m not deranged, as you no doubt think. That soup tureen really is the work of Pfaltzgraff. A model from the early years of the war. It was one just like it that broke in my hands when I was trying – even though I wasn’t supposed to – to help my mother in serving lunch. Of course I dropped it. The soup spilled on to the carpet, which absorbed the liquid but left everything more solid unfortunately visible. There was my future. In that mush. I was about eleven. I remember how everyone screamed, mother most of all. I loved my mother and her scream hurt me immensely. ‘I will resurrect myself two or three times if you can make it whole,’ my mother shouted, and I promised. I promised. Although at the same time I knew that there is no glue that can mend a Pfaltzgraff that has been broken into a thousand crumbs.’

‘Would you like another glass of wine?’ I asked. At the same time I wondered where the story would lead, marvelling at how spontaneously New Yorkers sit down on other people’s sofas to complain.

‘I am sorry to bother you. But this has to come out now. I see that you are sensitive and receptive, artist that you are. A composer, isn’t it? That soup tureen did it again. It made me naked. I can’t help it. Thank you, yes, I will, it helps. Really, to speak the truth, I hated my mother.’

‘I, on the other hand, lost mine very early on. I didn’t have time to hate her or to love her,’ I said.

‘That is another road. A miserable one too. I am sorry. But my mother did not love me. Or she loved me in her own way, somehow cruelly. As some people treat their toys. Sometimes cuddling them, sometimes tearing them and spitting on them. Guess what she said when I announced that I wanted to go to Yeshiva University to read something or other. I wanted to go to Yeshiva because it wasn’t far from home. No Harvard, but.’

‘I can’t guess,’ I said, rubbing my lips in the hope of bringing forth more words.

‘This is what she said: “Eli, believe me, you will not be going to any university. We all know that you have dough where you should have a brain. I don’t mean any harm, Eli. It’s good dough. It’s dough that you can make this or that out of.” And when I asked what, she answered, with a sweep of her hand: “Those shortbread biscuits of mine. I have the recipe, you have the head. You will make shortbread biscuits and get rich. You won’t be going to any university. You have a dough head, Eli, believe your mother.” That’s exactly what she said…. But look, I don’t have any wine.’

‘Do have some, apologies for my negligence,’ I said, pouring his glass right up to the top. There went my dinner wine.

‘Of course people even get used to mothers who love gambling or betting, but all the same. When you have a mother who tears your future to pieces and offers you shortbread instead, you have to think about it. I decided to change. I had already felt for a long time’ – at this point Eli Zebbah tried to hide behind his glass – ‘don’t be shocked, but this too must come out, that I am more a woman than a man. Of course I’ve noticed these forearms, this premature stoutness, these peeling temples, all the things that don’t go to make up a fine woman. But after I had consulted a couple of quacks and a couple of competent surgeons, I became convinced that a long operation whose Latin name I have glued to the inside of my forehead would open the double doors to my independent future…. May I continue, or will you tell me to go? Can you bear the word “vaginoplasty”,’ said Eli Zebbah, almost pleadingly, pressing his white wine glass against his nose.

What was I supposed to say? In a way I’d had enough. I had had today’s share of New York idiosyncrasy and was a little tired. A sex-change operation was something I didn’t have an opinion on. At least, not now. I nodded and gazed at the two plastic bags, the food they contained.

‘Tell me, in your opinion, am I sufficiently feminine, just tell me. I’m used to it,’ said Eli Zebbah, fluttering his summer shirt and slowly massaging his forearms.

‘I’m sure you know that better yourself,’ I said, and began instinctively to massage my own forearms, as if it were part of the conversation.

‘You won’t. You can’t. OK. I’m used to it. And that’s what happened. Just when it would have been my turn to be born as a woman, just when the preparations had been made, just as I was ready to lie down on the operating table, mother came between me and the doctor. Symbolically, of course, as this happened at home. We were dining together, the two of us, and I finally dared to confess my plans to my mother. I thought she would scream and break something. But no. She sat where she was calmly, holding the cheese knife in her hand, and looked at me acidly if not frankly disparagingly. And then said, beating the air with the knife: “No you won’t, Eli. You will not have that operation. Even an operation will not make you into a woman. Look at yourself. What kind of a woman do you think you would make? A female hippopotamus. I don’t think I’d want to dine with you any more, Eli.”

‘She didn’t accuse me of being gay. Or curse the fact that she wouldn’t be having grandchildren. She just found my plan hopelessly ugly. She did not see in me the woman I wanted to be. She said: “Squeeze your own father into high-heeled shoes and a corset and see your miserable future. You are so similar. Ineffectual hippos. And if you were ever to become a woman, my boy, you would be an abomination to the human race. You would live mostly in a cupboard and would not even be able to knead dough. If, that is, you were to have the operation that you are not going to have. You will not become a woman and Goofy will not become Venus. This is an order. Go and live as a man!’ said my mother, hitting her plate with the cheese knife.

‘I moved out. I took over my uncle’s shop, which was on the skids. I put it on its feet, extended it and – my mother was right – began to be successful. The shortbread biscuits – how funny it all seems now – my mother’s shortbread biscuits and their supposedly secret recipe. Both the Diegos and all their Hispano friends know the recipe. It’s as simple as a traffic sign. Mother died without ever seeing the unbroken Soup Tureen. And now I’m too old to change sex. I weep when I see, on the television, hospitals, clinics, I weep when I see any operation equipment or the greenish hem of an anaesthetist’s coat. Even at the dentist’s I weep, and when the dentist asks, “Does it hurt?”, I say it hurts. Well, now I must go. Would you give me a piece of kitchen roll. I forgot my handkerchief. That Miss Reynolds’ lame dog…. But, all the same, won’t you sell me the Soup Tureen?’

Eli Zebbah rose to his feet and seemed extraordinarily sensible and calm.

‘You can see, that soup tureen is no longer in use. You can see from how it’s been pushed back there to keep those VHS cassettes standing up, do you understand? And who watches cassettes nowadays? And on what machine? I know Miss Forrest well. I will pay well, and you can pay her.’

‘I’d be happy to agree. But I would need Miss Forrest’s permission. Shall we call her? Why haven’t you asked her yourself, since you know her? Would she have said no? And do you really believe in resurrection?’

‘Let it be. I don’t really know whether seeing this thing has done me any good. So, shall I sort the groceries into the fridge, or will you do it yourself?’ asked Eli Zebbah, as if he had suddenly recovered from his life’s worst fever and at once forgotten it.

‘Thank you, I’ll do it myself.’ I didn’t really know what I should have done. Should I have comforted him, saying that a sex-change operation doesn’t always make a person happier? Some people regret them, in the same way as they regret their tattoos. But I remained silent. Or maybe I gazed at the soup tureen. And all at once Eli Zebbah was gone.

There was still one bag at the kitchen door. One bag. I had imagined that both bags were for me. I was mistaken. I went, took the bag and began to unpack its contents. Very quickly I realised that it was not my order. Even in error, I could not have ordered such an enormous quantity of Organic Pet canned dog food. I turned and gazed at the walls. Eli Zebbah would soon be back, I guessed.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Hannu Väisänen: ‘Green and yellow in March’ (work in progress, oil, 2010)

After initially qualifying as an analytical chemist, Brotherus was then at the beginning of her career as a photographer. Everything lay before her, and she charted her French experience in a series of characteristically melancholy, subjective images.

Twelve years on, she revisited the same places, photographing them, and herself, again. The images in the resulting book, 12 ans après / 12 vuotta myöhemmin / 12 years later (Sémiosquare, 2015) are accompanied by a short story by the writer Riikka Ala-Harja, who moved to France a little later than Brotherus.

In the event, neither woman’s life took root in France. The book represents a personal coming-to-terms with the evaporation of youthful dreams, a mourning for lost time and broken relationships, a level and unselfpitying gaze at the passage of time: ‘Life has not been what I hoped for. Soon it will be time to accept it and mourn for the dreams that will never come true. Mourn for the lost time, my young self, who no longer exists.’

1999 Mr Cheval’s nose

10 years later

When I am seven I get a head.

I sit as a model for many weeks. The sculptor lives at school; I sit for my portrait at her house. Sometimes I am allowed to fetch books from the school library and leaf through them. The sculptor has a big, light-filled home. She does not have a husband or children; she has time for my head.

I sit opposite the sculptor, swinging my legs.

Three hours later my dad picks me up in our rust-red Saab 96. We sit alongside each other; we don’t talk.

Dad never locks his car.

A month later, the sculptor says the head is ready.

We go to see it, the whole family.

The concrete sculpture is exactly the size of my head.

The expression is serious but not sorrowful.

The sculptor wraps the head in towels. She says we can keep the towels.

Dad puts the head carefully into the Saab’s boot.

I am grey. I am seven.

At home, the head is placed on top of the dresser.

When I tell her I am moving to France, my mother gives the sculpture to me.

The concrete head weighs ten kilos. I am thirty-seven years old; my head is thirty.

I recline the back seat of my Saab 900 and stuff the luggage space full of clothes and dishes. I shove books and plates under the front seat. I wrap the concrete head in a towel and put it in a basket my mother has given me. I pack the Saab I have inherited from my dead father full of all the stuff that will fit into it. I fill the last spaces with knickers and socks.

I transport the concrete head across Europe. My right foot goes dead on the gas pedal, every now and then I have to wiggle it. Fields and intersections flash by. I have stockpiled nuts in the glove compartment, it is the beginning of September, schoolchildren have been kidnapped in Beslan, Europe is hot. I gulp water from a bottle. I stop at petrol stations for the toilet and to fill up. I wolf down the kilometres, push through the dark. I do not want to leave the Saab outside a -hotel. If someone were to steal the car now, I would lose all of my carefully chosen possessions.

In the dark, I cross the French border and by midnight I am in Normandy.

The streets are deserted.

My man meets me in front of a high cedar hedge.

We unload the car straight away. We laugh.

I lift the concrete head from its basket and place it in an empty space on the bookshelf.

GAME

I try to hit the shuttlecock so that the other player can’t return it. Some can’t. I have become a member of the badminton society and am permitted to play with any of its members. I know my numbers from the Eurovision Song Contest. My feet move swiftly over the hall floor, I am in rhythm. I leap high, hitting to the very left of the court. The city police chief tries to return the ball, but he can’t reach. The point is mine. I smile. We don’t need to speak.

I bump into the police chief on the town hall hill. I greet him. A chance badminton club’s opponent has given me the first person I can say hello to. I am delighted. I have come to the town hall to apply for a social security card. I need it. I am expecting a child.

STRAWBERRY

I am standing among people. I have been invited to a party, even though the only guest I know is my husband. I understand nothing of the rapid talk. I try to nod in the right places.
During the night, strange words circulate in my head. I get up and write them down on a piece of paper. I go to the bathroom to drink water. I knock a cough medicine bottle off the shelf under the mirror and into the toilet. The glass bottle shatters and a brown liquid spreads on the white porcelain. I do not have the energy to clear it up; I will deal with the mess in the morning. I lie on my bed. My head weighs a ton.

In the morning I look at the words I have written down on the piece of paper. There are not many of them. I need more words, I need them badly, only then can I open my mouth.

How can I learn to pronounce the words right?

How can I learn to speak fast enough for anyone to want to listen to me?

I tidy up the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror. I pronounce words with exaggerated expression. No one hears how superbly I can speak a foreign language.

Some mornings speaking is more difficult, sometimes it is easier.

The strawberries rot in the bowl. In the morning I cycle over to the market. I tell the stall-holder that she has sold me strawberries that only lasted two hours before they rotted. I say that I am not a tourist. Maybe the woman will understand that after this it is not worth selling me old strawberries or give me the wrong change as she does to those she suspects are English, the ones who will leave the harbour by ship the same evening.

I live here.

2012 Room Nr 10 (yellow door)

CHILD

As soon as I take the baby in my arms, my mother tongue shoots out of my mouth like a bullet. I begin to speak my own language to my child.
The child cries a lot, she is red and wrinkly and I do not know how to look after a baby. I stay awake. The concrete head gazes down from the bookshelf. With the child in my arms, I walk in the living room, beside the cedar hedge, on the sandy beach.

TOILET

The toilet gets blocked. I ring the handyman. He says that the roots of the cedar hedge have penetrated the pipes and blocked them. I know the handyman. A month earlier I asked him to change the bathroom mirror. I had thrown my sneaker at the mirror. I was aiming at my husband. The fragments clinked to the floor.

The handyman suggests I claim the toilet repairs on the insurance.

The handyman says that insurance is for crises.

A month later we get the money from the insurance.

But the crisis goes on. The child speaks and walks, you can already explain a lot of things to her, but not this. I can’t explain it even to myself, not in any language.

The mirror is unbroken and the pipes unblocked.

I stand in front of the mirror.

For the first time I notice that I have some grey hairs.

1999 Reflection

RETURN

I wrap the concrete head in two towels and set it -carefully in its basket. Dad’s old Saab is full to the gunwales. I stuff naked Barbies into the last spaces. The bottom of the car has rusted in the rain and the damp wind. I fear that the Saab will not make it to Finland. The man from the garage next door inspects the car, but does not promise anything.
The pear tree I received as a fortieth birthday present stays in the green fields of Normandy.

On Whitsunday I set off, driving to the north-east.

I fetch the child later, most precious of all.

I drive the same route back, but the road looks different, as if it had changed in seven years. From time to time there is fog on the road, but I only take a wrong turning once. I sleep in a motel, I don’t care any more if someone breaks into the car.

Just before the German harbour I take a turning into the forest and drive to a sandy beach. I unwrap one of the towels from the concrete head and go for a swim. The towel is soft, it wipes the salty sea water from my skin.

In the car-ferry cabin I look at my temples.

I decide to start colouring the grey away.

When I drive off the ferry at Vuosaari, a mangy fox runs along the hard shoulder.

CEDAR HEDGE

I walk toward my former home. The linden trees of the Boulevard de France have not grown since I last saw them. They have been well disciplined, branches have been trimmed every year so that they will not block the car-drivers’ line of vision.
I have not been to the house for three years. I have not been invited.

Now I have been.

I have reached the cedar hedge.

I ring the doorbell.

The door opens.

My child stands, smiling, between her father and her grandfather.

I kiss grandfather on the cheeks. He fought in Algeria. At our last Christmas, he showed me his army cap. He still has a soldier’s bearing. He is smiling. He was smiling ten years ago when we were introduced.

Grandmother comes from the kitchen, her apron round her waist, and greets me.

She is just as beautiful as before.

The living-room rugs look the same as they did, as if no one had walked on them since the child and I left.

The painting I nailed to the wall still hangs behind the sofa.

Everything looks the same as before.

I sit next to grandmother and eagerly tuck in to scallops fried in butter. We talk about the rainy weather and the unusual cold. The scallops are excellent. Grandmother has two ways of frying scallops; today she has chosen the one I like better.

The pear tree has grown at least half a metre.

We laugh about it together.

We laugh when the child says she supports France in football and Finland in ice hockey.

Outside, the wind blows.

We talk about pleasant things. The apple cake is soft.

It is time to go. Grandfather helps me on with my coat. The child waves from the door between her father and her grandmother. She will sleep one more night in her French home and return to Finland with me tomorrow.

We have got used to travelling.

I walk. The pavement’s asphalt is completely fractured; it’s bumpier than it was. The linden trees’ roots push at the surface and break the asphalt, and a new layer of asphalt lasts no more than a moment.

It begins to rain.

The rain washes the road clean.

This is my path, this is the way I go.

Before bedtime I brush my teeth in front of the hotel mirror.

My expression is serious, but it is not sorrowful.

I am grey, I am concrete, I am forty-seven.

2012 Emotional exercises V

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Rosa Liksom. Kuva: Pekka Mustonen

When the pseudonymous Rosa Liksom (born 1958; real name Anni Ylävaara) burst on the Finnish literary scene in 1985 with her first book, Yhden yön pysäkki (‘One night stand’), excitement was intense. For a start, she managed to keep her real identity secret, even when she appeared at public events and book-signings; then, she wrote generally in her native northern Finnish dialect, which hadn’t previously been heard very much in literary circles. Her very short short prose charted landscapes also not much represented in literature – the far north, the uneducated, the dispossessed.

This group of seven stories, from her second book, Tyhjän tien paratiisit (‘Paradises of the open road’, 1989), cover territory which has become familiar in her work: a woman who marries a layabout, a bellicose butcher’s son, a cleanliness fanatic for whom hygiene is more important than human relationships….

Rosa Liksom won the Finlandia Prize in 2011 for Hytti nro 6, which was published by Serpent’s Tail, London, in a translation by Lola Rogers last year.

*
The digitisation of Books from Finland continues apace, with a total of 360 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Illustration: Hannu Konttinen

For 41 years, from 1967 to 2008, Books from Finland was a printed journal. In 1976, after a decade of existence as not much more than a pamphlet, it began to expand: with more editorial staff and more pages, hundreds of Finnish books and authors were featured in the following decades.

Those texts remain archive treasures.

In 1998 Books from Finland went online, partially: we set up a website of our own, offering a few samples of text from each printed issue. In January 2009 Books from Finland became an online journal in its entirety, now accessible to everyone.

We then decided that we would digitise material from the printed volumes of 1976 to 2008: samples of fiction and related interviews, reviews, and articles should become part of the new website.

The process took a couple of years – thank you, diligent Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) interns (and Johanna Sillanpää) : Claire Saint-Germain, Bruna di Pastena, Merethe Kristiansen, Franziska Fiebig, Saara Wille and Claire Dickenson! – and now it’s time to start publishing the results. We’re going to do so volume by volume, going backwards.

The first to go online was the fiction published in 2008: among the authors are the poets Tomi Kontio and Rakel Liehu and prose writers Helvi Hämäläinen (1907–1998), Sirpa Kähkönen, Maritta Lintunen, Arne Nevanlinna, Hagar Olsson (1893–1979), Juhani Peltonen (1941–1998) and Mika Waltari (1908–1979).

To introduce these new texts, we will feature a box on our website, entitled New from the archives, where links will take you to the new material. The digitised texts work in the same way as the rest of the posts, using the website’s search engine (although for technical reasons we have been unable to include all the original pictures).

By the time we reach the year 1976, there will be texts by more than 400 fiction authors on our website. We are proud and delighted that the printed treasures of past decades – the best of the Finnish literature published over the period – will be available to all readers of Books from Finland.

The small world of Finnish fiction will be even more accessible to the great English-speaking universe. Read on!

He’s there in the living room. We’ve gotta be very quiet. I left the computer on, and the reading lamp. I’ll go in and turn them off, quietly. Or the computer at least. I can watch Emmerdale on the little tv in the kitchen. You wait here. OK, I turned off the computer but I left the lamp on so I wouldn’t wake him up. I put his nap blanket over him. He’s laying on his left side now. That’s good. Whenever he wakes up on his right side he gets awfully grumpy. Let’s go in the kitchen so we don’t disturb him. The poor guy. It’s been hours since he’s had a good sleep. You know, I think it’s the depression again. It started on Monday when he was supposed to go to his guide’s job.He didn’t taste his breakfast, even though I brought it to him in bed. I had to go to the hospital, my shift was starting, and he just laid there in the bedroom with his eyes open… I don’t know how long it’s gonna last this time. Last month he was depressed for three days. I think it’ll pass more quickly this time because he’s napping a little bit, and licking his paw now and again.

I decided to have a perfect summer wedding, kind of like Jemina’s was last summer, but different. Jemina started doing her wedding arrangements a year and a half beforehand. It wasn’t enough time. Her schedule was so crammed for the last couple of months that she had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a mental hospital. I decided I wasn’t going to get caught in that trap, so I started planning my wedding three years before the deadline. A Midsummer wedding was a must – otherwise what’s the point – and it had to be in a big church – the cathedral, of course. They have the best decor.

The minute I told my friends there was a wedding in the works I immediately had five volunteers: Kelly, Ann, Jenna, Melina, Sara and Tiia. I chose Kelly, Sara and Melina to be bridesmaids because they’re uglier than me. The show was on the road. I called Dad in Brussels and he promised me ten grand right away, but that’ll hardly pay for anything. So I called my grandpa in Madeira and he was totally excited and said he would send me twelve grand. He always tries to show Dad up. The rest of the money came from Mom (who whined about always being the moneybags), and my godmother, who’s a make-up artist, and loves a party, plus my aunt, who sent me five thousand. She thinks Mom, who’s her sister, is a stingy, deadly bore. So – excellent! I had forty thousand in the wedding kitty.

I spent a few weeks browsing the web, looking at a gazillion wedding planning sites, and I found a US company that’ll handle all the little details and the swag – napkins, origami, bows, that sort of thing…. All that little stuff was ten thousand for two hundred guests. Then there was the wedding gown. I checked out every bridal shop in town but they were all truly horrible. So me and the girls took three trips to Stockholm, then I found exactly what I wanted in Paris. And it was as cheap as the average price here in Helsinki, just five thou. Plus the shoes, bag, gloves, underwear and stockings of course. I got all those on the Champs Èlysèes for less than seven thousand.

So I had the dress, the swag, and the church. Dad helped me get into Halikko Manor for the reception. All this took two years. Then I had to put together a menu, and a program, and a guest list. And the gift registry, of course. I planned the menu with the chef at Halikko. He was super cool from the very first moment we met. I spent five wonderful weekends with him.

So on Midsummer Eve eve Dad arrived from Brussels and I showed him everything me and the girls had put together. He just sighed, he was so proud of me. That evening while he was tasting the wine and admiring me, he asked who the groom was. I was like, the groom? And Dad was like, didn’t Jemina have some hairy dude at the altar to say I do? And I was like, yeah. So I called the girls and I was like, what’re we going to do? Sara said I should ask Jasu to be the groom. He goes to Tech. Just the sort of thing a techie’s good at. I told her I can’t ask Jasu, he’s a head shorter than me. Then I thought of something. I called the chef at Halikko and asked if he would walk down the aisle with me and do all the stuff a groom does at a wedding. He said he didn’t see why not, except that he was already married. I told him that was no problem, and he showed up and handled all the groom’s choreography very professionally. He was perfect.

Before I left for work I told Rosie I wanted the floors spic and span before I got home. Mack’s job was to wash and dry a week’s worth of laundry. I didn’t have to say anything to Betsy. Just a glance and Betsy knows the bread should be baked and ready by five o’clock.

I got home about five minutes to five. Rosie was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, hardly even started before she got stuck on the fringe of the rug. A quick kick and a squeal and she was on the job again. All that was waiting for me in the kitchen was a guilty silence. I said what now. Betsy was sitting helpless, full of flour and yeast, and nothing to show for it. I looked at the plug. She was plugged in like she should be. Oh for God’s sake. I forgot to turn her on when I left. I apologized and she gave a cheerful whistle and got to work. I went to the laundry room. Mack had all his chores done. His bright eye shining cheered me up and I started ironing the undies. Before I knew it Betsy gave a shout from the kitchen to let me know there was oat bread with flax seeds ready to eat.

My girl came to see me from Bucharest on my ninety-first birthday and she threw me a party and invited everybody in town. Five of us altogether. Drinking good coffee, sopping it up with some nice sweetrolls, shooting the breeze. Then when everybody’d left my daughter looked at me with her head cocked for a minute and then she says, how about we make you a ‘profile’ on Facebook. I said those skypes we been doing once a week was plenty enough for me. But she wouldn’t give it up. She ordered me to sit down at the machine. I said there aint nothing in my life I want to write about on there. So she thinks for a long time and then she fairly jumps in her chair and gets an idea and says let’s not make a page for you, let’s make one for Pekka, and she takes a close-up of Pekka’s face and then a full-length one with him sitting there in his lazyboy, all ears.

So then she goes back out to Europe and I’m here looking at Pekka’s page. There were two messages. One was from her in Bucharest and the other one was from Laura in Kallio, down in Helsinki. So I write a message to this Laura saying Pekka’s outside right now looking at the birds. And Laura answers that she just finished eating and now she’s going to go loaf around. That’s how it started. Three years ago. Now Pekka’s got three thousand two hundred and three followers, all over the world, from Brisbane to Petsamo. The ones he’s friended the deepest are this hairless fellow named Petro in Brazil and this one Cantonese guy named Shuin. That Shuin is awful smart, always thinking up all kinds of stuff to do. Seems like half the world is amazed at the stuff Shuin thinks up. Now I’m a monolingual person, I only speak the normal language. Cause when I was little there was just the two-week traveling school. Rest of the time I was working in the barn with the cows. But Mr Google’s there for us linguistically challenged people. I copy the messages and posts that Pekka gets in that chopstick Chinese and paste them in for Mr Google to translate and just like that I’ve got the thing back in my normal language. Then I write Pekka’s posts in my own language and there’s Mr Google to translate it into any language I like.

Used to be I felt so lonely was afraid I might turn into an artist. Now any time I have a hankering for company I just go to Pekka’s Facebook and there’s somebody there wanting to chew the fat. I tell them how the hunting went in the shed this morning and how I got myself a nice fat mouse under the old bread table again.

Translated by Lola Rogers

‘Emmi, hey, get up, don’t you hear the bell, the lady wants you! Emmi! Bless the girl, will nothing wake her? Emmi, Emmi!’

At last, Silja got her to show some signs of life. Emmi sat up, mumbled something, and rubbed her eyes. She still felt dreadfully sleepy.

‘What time is it?’

‘Getting on for five.’

Five? She had had three hours in bed. It had been half-past one before she finished the washing-up: there had been visitors that evening, as usual, and for two nights before that she had had to stay up because of the child; the lady had gone off to a wedding, and baby Lilli had refused to content herself with her sugar-dummy. Was it any wonder that Emmi wanted to sleep?

She was only thirteen. And in the mornings her legs always ached so badly that for a while it was very hard to stand up. Silja, who slept in the same bed, said it was because she was growing. She ought to have them bled, in Silja’s opinion, but Emmi was afraid it might hurt. They were thin enough already, without having blood taken from them. They never ached while she was asleep, but the moment she woke up they started again. If she managed to get to sleep again, the aching stopped at once.

Now, as she sat up in bed, they were painful all over, from her knees right down to her heels. She felt the weight of her head pulling her down towards the bed again: try as she might, she could not lift it. Would she ever, in this life, be granted a single morning when she could sleep happily as long as she needed?

Emmi rubbed her legs. Her head had fallen forward, her chin touching her chest; her eyes would not stay open. In next to no time, she was asleep again.

The bell rang a second time. Silja dug her in the ribs with her elbow.

‘For pity’s sake, why can’t the little hussy do as she’s told? Up with you!’

She gave Emmi another shove with her sharp elbow, and it hurt so much that the girl cried out.

‘How many more times do you have to be chivvied, before you’ll get up?’

Emmi clambered out of bed. She felt dizzy, and almost fell.

‘Splash some cold water over your eyes, it’ll help to clear your head’, was Silja’s advice.

But Emmi had no time to do this, for the bell was ringing yet again. She quickly pulled on her petticoat and skirt, smoothed back her hair with both hands, and hurried in.

‘I have rung three times’, said the lady.

Emmi said nothing, but simply lifted Lilli from the lady’s side and held her in her arms.

‘Change her wet things and then put her in the cradle. She won’t go to sleep again anyway, if she comes back beside me.’

The lady turned on to her other side and closed her eyes. The cradle was in the adjoining room, into which Emmi now carried the baby. She changed its napkin, and then began to rock the cradle and sing. Every now and then some thought or other would come to her. Not a very big or complicated thought, but it was enough to interrupt her singing.

‘Sh, sh, sh. Ah, ah, ah. Sleep little one sleep. Rock-a-bye-baby, on the tree top. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. Oh, lord, how sleepy I feel. Bye, baby bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting. Silja’s still in bed, asleep, lucky devil. Daddy’s gone a-hunting. Sh, sh, ah, ah…’

Lilli dozed off. Emmi lay down on the floor beside the cradle, put one arm under her head, and was soon fast asleep. Unknown to her, Lilli had woken again almost at once, and was now rubbing her nose and gazing round her in puzzlement, as there seemed to be no-one with her. The child tried to sit up, but could not manage it; instead, she turned over on her side and got her head over the edge of the cradle. Seeing Emmi, she chuckled delightedly and reached out to touch her. Over went the cradle, and out tumbled Lilli, striking her forehead on the base of the cradle as she fell.

A piercing yell had everyone awake in seconds.

‘Jesus bless us!’

Emmi, finding the baby on the floor beside her, went as white as a sheet. She snatched her up, cuddled her, showed her the fire, and rocked her in her arms, all the time horrified by the thought that the lady must have heard. And in her panic she did not think of looking to see whether the child had been injured, or was just crying from shock.

The lady opened the door. Emmi felt faint, the whole world went black before her eyes.

‘What’s happened to her?’

‘Nothing.’

Emmi did not know what answer she was giving. Instinctively she stammered out words, any words that might save her.

‘Why is she crying like that, then? There must be some reason.’

Emmi made desperate attempts to quieten the baby.

‘Give her to me’, said the lady. ‘Oh, my poor baby, my darling one, what’s the matter? Good heavens, there’s a great bruise on her forehead.’

She looked at Emmi, who just stood there helplessly.

‘How did that bruise get there? Tell me, I want to know. Are you dumb?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘You dropped her, that’s obvious. Out of the cradle, was it?’

Emmi said nothing, and stared down at the floor.

‘You see, you can’t deny it any longer. What a useless, careless creature you are. First you drop the baby and then you lie to me. I’m sorry I ever took you on. Well, I’m telling you now, you’re not staying on here next year. Get yourself another job, if anyone will have you. I’ve had enough of you, I’d rather do without a nursemaid altogether… Sh, sh, my darling, mamma’s own sweet one, yes… Mamma will get you a better nurse next year, don’t cry, don’t cry.’

Lilli stopped crying, as she found the nipple and began to suck; and after a little while she was smiling contentedly, though teardrops still sparkled in her eyes.

‘There, there, my precious, are you giving Mamma a lovely smile, then? My own dear child, how sweet she is. What a nasty horrid bruise on her forehead!’

Lilli did not cry again that day; she was just as happy as before, perhaps even a little happier: smiled at Emmi, put her finger into Emmi’s mouth and pulled at her hair. Emmi let the child’s delicate little hand wipe her own wet cheeks, down which teardrops as big as cranberries kept trickling all day long. And when she thought that in six weeks’ time she would no longer be able to hold this soft, delightful child in her arms, or even to see her, except perhaps for an occasional glimpse through the window as she passed down the street, a rejected outcast – when she had these thoughts, or rather these feelings, the tears flowed so fast that they became a stream, and made a little puddle on the table.

‘Oh dear, just look at that’, she said to Lilli, who at once began to mop it up with the palm of her hand.

Later that morning the lady had visitors. Fru Vinter the doctor’s wife and Fru Siven, whose husband was the headmaster: very grand and elegant, both of them, though not nearly so grand as our own lady, said Silja, and Emmi was inclined to agree.

When Silja took in the coffee, the lady sent her with a message to Emmi, to bring Lilli in to be shown to the visitors. Emmi dressed her in her prettiest bonnet, and a brand-new hand-embroidered bib. The child looked so beautiful in these that Emmi had to call Silja to have a look, before she carried her in.

How those ladies cooed with admiration, the moment they appeared at the door!

‘O, så söt!’ ¹

And eagerly they took turns to hold Lilli in their arms, kissing her and squeezing her, and laughing delightedly.

‘Så söt, så söt!’

Emmi stood in the background, smiling quietly. She did not really know the meaning of all this ‘så söt, så söt’, but evidently it was high praise indeed.

But suddenly they became very serious. The lady was telling the visitors about something, Emmi did not know what, as it was all in Swedish. But she guessed what it was when she saw the horror on their faces.

‘Herre gud, herre gud, nej, men tänk, stackars barn.’²

Three pairs of eyes, full of pity and concern, turned simultaneously to look at the bruise on Lilli’s forehead, and then, with shocked disapproval, at Emmi.

‘Ett sadant stycke!’³

Emmi stared at the carpet on the floor, and wished that something would fall from the ceiling on to her head, crushing her to pieces and at the same time burying her deep beneath the earth. Surely she was the wickedest, wretchedest person who had ever lived. She did not dare to look up, but she knew, and felt in every toe and fingertip, that their eyes were still upon her. Those grand, elegant ladies, who never, never, did anything wrong themselves. How could they, when they were so wise and clever, and so far above other, ordinary people?

‘You may take Lilli away,’ she heard her employer say.

Emmi’s arms had suddenly become so limp that she feared she might drop the child if she picked her up.

‘Did you hear?’

‘Där ser ni nu, hurudan hon är.’⁴

Emmi lurched forward and somehow managed the few steps to where the lady was sitting. The desire to get out of sight and back into the nursery gave her just sufficient strength to go through with her task. Or was it just out of long habit that her arms now obeyed her and fulfilled their function as before?

She lowered Lilli into the cradle and sat down on a stool close by to show her a toy. But Lilli had raised both legs in the air and was holding on to them with her hands. This game she found so amusing that she laughed out loud. Emmi would have laughed too, but for the distress that gripped her throat and made laughter impossible.

Sitting there, she thought with surprise that she had not, that morning, remembered the trick she had so often used in the past to combat sleepiness: pricking and scraping herself with a needle. And just because of that, all this had happened; this great, irremediable calamity, that had now ruined her life.

Late in the evening, when everyone else had gone to bed, Emmi went out into the yard. All was grey in the fading light, but overhead the stars were shining. She sat down on the bottom step to think about her present and future situation. Not that thinking about it made it any clearer: it remained as dim and grey as the evening itself.

Casting her own cares to one side for the moment, she looked up into the blue-grey sky, where heaven’s candles were burning so brightly. What happy souls, she wondered, were up there with the stars? And of the people now living, who would go there? Would there be any nursemaids there? she asked herself doubtfully. But the gentry – they would be there, of course, all of them. Obviously, since they were so immeasurably better, even here. She wondered, too, who had to light those candles each evening, the angels or the people? Or did the people all turn into angels when they got there? And what about little children who died young? Who nursed them and looked after them? But perhaps they didn’t need looking after any longer, once they were in heaven.

Silja opened the door and hustled her inside.

‘What the devil are you sitting out here for, in the cold?’

As she undressed, Emmi turned to Silja and said: ‘Why is it we’re so wicked, we servant-girls?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll tell you, then: it’s because we have to stay awake so much of the time. We have time to commit more sins, half as many again as other folk. Look, the gentry can sleep on in the morning, till nine or ten o’clock; there’s not so much time left for them to do bad things in.’

Well, perhaps that was it. If she had been able to sleep a little longer that morning, Lilli would have not fallen out of her cradle, all because of her.

The following Sunday was the third Hiring Day. Emmi was given her employment­ book and sent down to the church.

Outside the church there were lots of people: would-be employers and would-be employees. They stood about in large groups; all of them seemed to have friends and acquaintances everywhere, and to be in league with each other.

Emmi felt forlorn and lonely. Who would want to employ a frail little creature like herself?

She stood by the churchyard wall with her employment-book, and waited. Ladies and gentlemen walked past her, to and fro, but none of them ever glanced at her.

There was a group of youths sitting by the church steps.

‘Come over here, girl,’ one of them called. The others laughed and whispered together.

‘Come on, come on, what are you waiting for? Come and sit here with us.’

Emmi blushed and moved further off. Just then a lady and gentleman came up to where she was. Well, not exactly gentlefolk, perhaps: the lady was wearing a headscarf and the gentleman’s clothes were very shabby.

‘What about this one?’ said the gentleman, pointing at Emmi with his stick. ‘At least she doesn’t look as if she’ll demand much in the way of wages. Eh?’

‘Whatever you like to pay me’, said Emmi quietly. ‘I’d be content with that.’

A shy hope sprang up within her.

‘What good would she be? She could hardly manage to carry a tubful of water.’

‘Oh, I could.’

‘And could you do the washing?’

‘I’ve done that too.’

‘Let’s have her, she seems quiet and clean,’ said the gentleman.

But the lady still had her doubts.

‘She looks sickly to me. See how thin she is.’

Emmi thought of her legs, but dared not mention them. If she did, they would certainly turn her down.

‘Are you sickly?’ enquired the gentleman, glancing through Emmi’s employment ­book, which he had snatched from her hand.

‘No’, Emmi whispered.

She made up her mind that, however much her legs ached, she would never complain.

Putting the book in his pocket, the gentleman gave her two marks as hiring-money, and the matter was settled.

‘Come to the Karvonen farm on All Saints’ Day, in the evening, and ask for Mr and Mrs Hartonen’, said the lady. ‘On All Saints’ Day, remember.’

Emmi went home.

‘That’s a bad place you’re going to’, said Silja, who knew the Hartonens: living conditions mean and squalid, and the lady such a shrew that no servant ever stayed a full year. And the food, she had heard, strictly rationed and pretty small rations at that.

Emmi flushed, but quickly recovered and replied: ‘Well, those good jobs are hard to come by, there aren’t enough of them for everybody to have one. Some people have to be content with the worse ones, and thank their good fortune that they’re not out on the street.’

She took Lilli into her arms and pressed her face against the child’s warm body. Lilli seized hold of her hair with both hands and chuckled ‘Ta, ta, ta.’

Translated by David Barrett

This translation was first published in Books from Finland 2/1994

A four-litre saucepan should last the whole holiday, Honkkila calculates, throwing a bay leaf into the borscht.

Borscht is excellent at Christmas, as it blends the traditional Finnish dishes – beetroot salad, baked roots, ham.

At the same time Honkkila remembers the tree. He’s always had a tree, for forty years. When he was a child his dad brought it in from the back forest. Since then Honkkila has fetched his tree from various places, from the market and last Christmas from the shopping centre parking lot, but for this Christmas he has no tree.

Honkkila looks at the clock. The shopping centre is open for another hour. Honkkila takes the soup off the hob and goes out.

The shopping centre loudspeakers are beeping out electronic Christmas tunes; there are patches of spruce needles on the empty parking lot.

‘Is there anything left?’ Honkkila asks the assistant.

‘Just that one,’ the woman grimaces, pointing to the wall beside her. ‘I’d be willing to bet it’s the last Christmas tree in town. If you can call it a tree.’

‘I’ll take it. How much?’

‘I can’t take anything for it,’ the woman says, pushing the tree towards Honkkila.

Honkkila grasps the slender trunk, it’s easy, as there are few branches. He puts the tree under his arm and walks towards the boat club.

Honkkila leaves the tree propped up against Irja’s side. Lund’s Irja is bigger than my Helmi, Honkkila frets, and begins to walk round Helmi.

No water has gathered on the tarp, the ropes are steady, the boat is fine. Just four more months and the ice will begin to melt. Just five more months and he will be able to launch Helmi. Just five more months, and he will be able to raise the sails and go and visit the skerries, skirt the shoals, be free to sheet and reef. Suddenly from the ice comes a cry, someone is shouting for help. Honkkila runs to the shore: a green woolly hat is bobbing amid the ice.

Honkkila thinks for a second, runs back to Irja, grabs the Christmas tree and rushes across the ice toward the shouter.

Honkkila throws himself on to the ice, throws the tree toward the hole in the ice, green hat grabs the top of the tree, the top of the tree doesn’t snap. Honkkila holds on tight to the tree, Honkkila pulls.

Gradually green hat begins to rise. Honkkila pulls and notices that it’s Lund who is rising out of the hole in the ice. Lund inches his way slowly on to the ice.

By the time Lund reaches Honkkila, he dares to stand up. The men say nothing, just looking gravely at each other. They begin to run toward the boat club.

Suddenly Lund stops and turns. Honkkila remains standing in his place, grasping the Christmas tree tightly in his hand. Lund grabs a bucket and returns, and so the men continue on their way towards Lund’s block of flats.

Honkkila leaves the tree at the main door. The men call the lift, Lund takes the hat off his head, the lift arrives, the men step into the lift, Lund first, Honkkila second. The lift floor gets wet.

Lund holds out his door key, which Honkkila uses to open the top storey door. Honkkila begins to run warm water into the bath.

Lund takes his clothes up and jumps into the water.

‘What a coincidence you were there,’ Lund shouts through to the living room. ‘On Christmas Eve.’

Honkkila sits on Lund’s sofa, is silent, unspeaking. Red stars twinkle in the window. Soon the ice will hold, then it will melt, soon Helmi and Irja will be put to sea, soon they will be sailing in deep waters.

Lund returns from the bathroom wearing a dressing gown. Water drips on to the floor at every step. Before, the water was icy; now it’s warm.

‘I must go,’ Honkkila says, taking his coat from the coatstand.

Lund nods and goes into the kitchen. He lifts something out of a red bucket and drops it into a supermarket plastic bag.

‘Take this,’ Lund says. ‘Gut it, throw some sea salt into it and you’ll have cured fish on Christmas Day.’

Honkkila glances at the fish. The handsome whitefish swam in open waters until it was captured by the ice and entered Lund’s trap.

In the yard Honkkila picks up his Christmas tree. In one hand he has the plastic bag and in the other the green tree. Nothing much in the way of needles, but plenty of trunk. The whitefish kicks in the bag.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Mum didn’t want to travel abroad. Mum wanted to tend her rose garden and her pea beds, which sloped down the hill towards the lake. In mum’s opinion, the view from the porch was the best view in the world.

Dad wanted to travel. He never got very far, because Mum wouldn’t go. Dad got as far as the neighbouring forest. In Mum’s opinion, there was no better long-haul destination than the lake at the bottom of the slope and the grove around the house, which was full of blueberries and raspberries and, in the spring, morel mushrooms.

In Dad’s opinion, the forest was full of mosquitoes and flies and ants and mites.

On the lake, the loons dived and called on late summer evenings, Mum thought it was the best sound in the world. Beautiful and harrowing, at the same time. The lamentations of the loon demonstrated that a living creature can be so completely happy that its cry is full of grief. Her children’s crying and whingeing and desire to go to the Linnanmäki funfair in Helsinki were, to Mum, a sign that they are ecstatically happy at home.

Little loons, Mum said to us.

Mum was sure that we would learn to value the best place in the world’s if we breathed enough of its unpolluted air into our lungs.

When I wanted to travel, I rowed on the lake. Or pushed the lawnmower up and down the slope.

Now I just have a failed marriage and what’s left of it: debts and three girl children.

One of my brothers became an airline pilot, the other a sailor. My airline-pilot brother says that he would never have travelled so much if he hadn’t had to live in the best place in the world.

I would like to travel as much as he does. If I had the money. Or the education. I still live close to the best landscape in the world.

I visit Mum and Dad every week. Mum is amazed at how the world has swallowed my brothers up. They don’t understand, they don’t understand; you, Virpi, do understand.

Mum has a glass bowl full of sweets.

My girls run around on the lawn, the world hasn’t spoiled them yet. They find joy in the beat of a butterfly’s wing, in a blade of grass.

Dad has a whole squared exercise book full of places. The Arc de Triomphe and the Empire State Building and the Taj Mahal. The Colosseum and the Suez Canal and the Egyptian pyramids and the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen.

He keeps his exercise book in the shed under the wasps’ nest, so that Mum won’t notice. Other people keep a bottle of vodka among the logs, Dad keeps his dream trips.

In the middle of the summer Dad picked blueberries and Arctic brambles and heated the sauna every other night. The Arctic bramble is the best berry in the world. It took time to heat the sauna. Dad used his knife to cut pictures out of dolphins and churches and mountains and castles from travel brochures, and stuck them in his exercise book with a glue stick.

It was Dad’s loon book.

When a travel progamme came on television, Mum changed channel. We watched explosions on the news or repeats of Strictly Come Dancing. In Mum’s opinion, even the second time round, the dancers looked like whores or pimps. Foreign countries made people like that.

Mum has the best potatoes in the world.

And cucumbers. And tomatoes.

Dad liked to learn languages. In the end, he spoke Swedish and German and Russian and English and Italian and Hungarian. He even knew a bit of Arabic. Dad kept his language courses in the shed, so that he could listen to his tapes while he was heating the sauna. Sometimes he took his tape recorder into the woods and sat on a lichen-coverd tree trunk, muttering, with a longhorn beetle in his lap.

One day a van appeared in our drive. Small, dark-haired people emerged from the back door and ran, buckets in hand, into the forest. Dad spoke to the driver for a moment and the driver blew into a shiny whistle. The small, dark-haired people clambered back from the forest and into the van. The van curved onto the highway.

They were Thai berry-pickers. Dad knew their language, as well. They were looking for marshland to pick cloudberries by the hectolitre. Dad directed them to the golden hunting grounds in a neighbouring parish.

Dad hadn’t been to the parts he directed them to since he was in the army. But he was able to guide the pickers far from his own home stumps.

Mum was proud that he daughter and her granddaughters lived in the best municipality in the world. The roots of the land are in women, Mum said.

My parents were thrifty. Dry bread was not wasted, or old household appliances, or odd socks. An old, battered paint can could be made into a birdhouse. Rusty wire could be twisted into a fishing lure or a Christmas decoration.

Once my airline-pilot brother gave Mum and Dad round-the-world air tickets as a Christmas present. They would be valid for a year, allowing ten stopovers.

He thought that if Mum and Dad got the tickets, they would have to go. Their conscience would not allow them to waste the tickets.

They didn’t go.

Dad did pack. For both of them. He had been given a suitcase by his colleagues at work when he retired. Mum followed the packing silently, Dad asking her which dresses she’d like to take with her. Fine, fine, Mum nodded. The day before their departure Mum clutched her chest and had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital, she lay there all spring and the doctor told Dad that travel and changes of scene would be very dangerous for Mum’s pinched nerves. Your wife has a tender but delicate heart, which will not bear unexpected changes.

Dad stuck the tickets on the shed wall. They grew old and curly, like woodchips.

I would have loved to go round the world. I could have left the girls with Mum and Dad. I dreamed that when I came back the girls had changed into copies of my Mum.

I would have three more mums. In my dream I could bear it.

What scared me more was that if I once got outside my own country, I wouldn’t want to come back. The girls would just have to spin round the garden among the autumn leaves.

I would become a traveloholic on my first trip.

My airline-pilot brother got angry on the phone when it became clear that the tickets were no longer usable. Mum held her heart. My brother didn’t see her ventricular fibrillation at the other end of the phone network, but shouted and swore some more. Mum said that the world had finally spoiled Oskar. Luckily, Virpi, there’s always you. My golden girl. My little loon. Have I remembered to say it to you often enough?

Mum got dementia.

Dad didn’t want to put her in an institution; he looked after her at home. Mum often woke up during the night, sometimes she got the door open and went out. Dad had to go and fetch her from the grove. He put a GPS collar on her, using it to find her among the rustling aspens.

Love until death, the local priest was moved to say when he heard about Dad’s nightly expeditions.

My sailor brother said that an old man shouldn’t be burdened with continual guard-duties. Put Mum in a home. She’ll be fine when she can live behind locked doors. That’s how she’s lived all her life.

I disagreed. I thought dad wasn’t burdened.

He liked fetching Mum. He perked up as he followed the GPS app on his smartphone and proceeded through the undergrowth. Unknowingly, Mum took Dad on new expeditions. A little bit like Columbus locating the American shore in the misty horizon, again and again.

In the end Mum didn’t recognise Dad any more. She startled when Dad came in from the room next door, or then she stared at Dad with her mouth open, as if she were watching snow falling endlessly. That was when I decided that it was time for Dad to go, alone, on his first foreign trip.

We bought our old dad an air ticket. I mean my airline-pilot brother got it.

I promised to look after Mum. I would move into my childhood home, with the girls, while Dad was away.

My airline-pilot brother said that Dad could choose whatever destination he wanted, Alles in Ordnung. What about Australia, for example? Dad had always liked kangaroos, after all; he called them rabbits on growth hormones.

Dad retrieved his rolled-up notebook from the logpile and leafed back and forth through its brittle pages.

He announced that he wanted to see Vesuvius and Pompeii, which had been buried in volcanic ash

From the loft Dad fetched the suitcase, which he had not unpacked for fifteen years.. That was how long it was since he and Mum had tried to travel over sea, mountain and valley. The suitcase still contained Mum’s dresses and knickers and her bikini, which was so reminiscent of a baseball mitt. The creases in his Hawaii shirt were so sharp that Dad got a cut on his finger.

The collar of his white shirt was lemon-yellow.

One foggy November morning, my airline-pilot brother drove Dad the three hundred kilometres to Helsinki-Vantaa airport. My brother sent a text message to say that, together with a little boy, Dad had ogled the jets, nose to the glass, as they took off and landed. If my brother hadn’t taken Dad by the arm, he would have missed the flight.

Mum forgot my name a hundred times a day. I counted. She thought my youngest daughter was me. She thought my two older daughters were my brothers. Me she mistook for the hairdresser. As the hairdryer purred she exclaimed in wonder at the fact that a moment ago she had wet hair and one daughter and two sons, and now she had dry hair and three daughters.

Boy-girls, I said. Wild creatures.

Mum no longer knew she was at home. She thought she was away on holiday with her daughters. As a young woman. She was on her first foreign trip, in her own home.

My mum thought I was a hotel worker. When I wasn’t her hairdresser.

Dad arrived in Naples on 21 November. In Naples there was an electric blue sky and it was sunny, and a thin line of smoke rose from the crater as if the volcano were smoking a cigarette.

Dad himself didn’t see Vesuvius. He didn’t even get properly out of the terminal before he had a heart attack.

I suppose it was too big a shock to him, finally to be free.

A zinc coffin and transport were arranged for Dad in Naples. We waited for him to come home.

I thought, my head on the pillow, about how much abroad Dad had been able to see, apart from the patch of sky he had stared at from the rye-cracker-sized window of the plane.

Maybe Dad had been able to see the shadow of a Neapolitan palm tree on the tarmac at the same time as his legs gave way. A stork in the sky as he was already lying on his back on the asphalt. Maybe, as he drew his last breaths, he could hear the invitation of the horns of hundreds of motor bikes and Vespas: Come come come with us!

My airline-pilot brother went to meet the coffin at Helsinki-Vantaa. He rang at midnight to say no coffin had arrived. Instead of the coffin, Dad’s unopened suitcase arrived on the carousel. The zinc coffin had disappeared on the journey from Naples to Helsinki.

My brother brought the suitcase home and went to phone the airline.

I unpacked Dad’s suitcase. I found his much-listened-to Italian language cassettes. The tapes were so stretched that buongiorno sounded like the bellowing of a hare-lipped bull.

My brother kept his mobile’s speaker on and demanded immediate action; the Italian airport worker at the other end disappeared on a cigarette break and all that could be heard on the speaker was the clinking of espresso cups.

I felt like a coffee.

My brother kept getting new numbers from the Italian officials, immediate action was to be taken up. By evening he had rung sixteen different numbers. In the morning he had to go and fly himself.

It didn’t bother Mum that Dad was out of sight. She no longer recognised him even in a photograph.

My airline-pilot brother came back after a week. By then I had got, from Naples, Dad’s coffin’s baggage check number. I was able to follow Dad’s movements on the Internet on World Tracker. You can follow lost luggage, or your dead father, for a hundred days. Along with 26 million other lost pieces of luggage. If the luggage doesn’t return home within a year, it is left to circle the troposphere between international airports forever.

During the space of a week, Dad had already visited Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, the Easter Islands, Delhi, Beijing and Singapore.

I sat with my brother by the computer in the evening. Using the World Tracker finder, we followed Dad’s coffin’s arrival in Tokyo.

Did Dad speak Japanese? my brother asked.

Enough to get by, I said. And he’s practiced the Japanese tea ceremony with the logs in the shed.

My sailor brother came home for Christmas. He had promised to be Santa. After the blueberry cake he disappeared outside, pretending he was going to light the outdoor candles. He lingered a long time in the dark garden; he couldn’t bear to be in the same room as Mum.

Mum insisted she wanted to go to the swimming pool. I didn’t know what the hell swimming pool she was talking about. She squeezed the girls by the hand; the girls bit their lips.

As we waited, in the eternal ticking of the clock, for the knock on the door, me and my airline-pilot brother opened his work laptop. I entered Dad’s coffin’s tracking number. AZ661748. Dad had visited Rome yesterday, and today he was already in Istanbul. In his coffin, he had already been round the world once, and on Christmas Eve he was setting out on a new tour, in the direction of the rising sun.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Hirmuinen humoristi. Veikko Huovisen satiirit ja savotat

Author Veikko Huovinen (1927–2009) became widely popular with the publication of his novel Havukka-ahon ajattelija (‘The backwoods philosopher’, 1952). Huovinen, who trained as a forest ranger, spent his life mainly in north-eastern Finland and did not like publicity; the author and theatre scholar Panu Rajala deals with Huovinen’s biography relatively briefly, focusing on a thematic analysis of Huovinen’s extensive and thematically rich output of novels and short stories. He places the the books in the context of Finnish literature, and also examines their film and television adaptations. Huovinen was an intellectually conservative, a highly original humorist; among his books are satirical biographies of Hitler and Stalin. His prose fiction, set in the natural wilds of the North, has not always won the appreciation of pro-modernist critics. Huovinen’s lively and original language is not easy to translate – for example, his only work published in English is a beautiful documentary novel Puukansan tarina (‘Tale of the forest folk’), which received a Finlandia Prize nomination in 1984.
Translated by David McDuff

Straining the vocal cords was a job for skilled professionals. Claucus and Trube were the only ones still able to tune the old humaphone of Dordrecht, and the fees they were paid reflected this.

Unlike his predecessor, party leader Gigotin appreciated a restrained Scandinavian style. He used to receive delegations sitting in Jacobsen’s Egg chair.

In Malebolge, the eighth circle of Hell, design consultants were tormented with knotty pine half-wallpanelling.

In Jerry and Marjorie’s wonderful new loft apartment even the house elf had his own integrated nook in the wall.

In the early stages of his career, the artist Malevich often spent time in the parks of Moscow. There, he perfected his drawing skills by sketching trees, plants and basic forms having picnics.

Thank you Mandy and Jake for a wonderful wedding! And apart from that incident at the altar, Gollum handled the best man role perfectly.

Mikko Metsähonkala
Toisaalta / (P)å andra sidan / In Other Wor(l)ds
(Texts in Finnish, Swedish, English)
Helsingfors: Schildts & Söderströms, 2013. 134 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-52-3080-5

The first try

A reader doesn’t have to understand anything on the first try. You can always put a book aside and see if the second read will help. If the second, third, fourth, or even fifth read doesn’t help, that’s still all right. What is this constant compulsion to understand everything? There’s nothing wrong with not understanding – on the contrary, it is precisely the state of baffled befuddlement that hides the hope of light within it. I can’t understand any of this! I’m having fun! the reader happily exclaims, and goes on with his life, eyes overflowing with light.

The same applies to everything else that we hope in vain to handle quickly and easily. For instance, nobody needs to get well in a hurry. The wish to ‘Get well soon’ does nothing but put pressure on the sick person, just like the compulsion to understand does the reader. That’s why it makes sense to tilt the world slightly and whisper gently, Get well in your own time. Get well from top to bottom. Pick up the book, put it down, close your eyes, and when at last you’re ready to open them, let them shine with a clear light. Now pick up the book again, take another moment to recover, smile, and have faith: your eyes will light up the sentences that were but a moment ago shrouded in obscurity.

Otherworldliness

The world is an expensive place, and it’s a rare person who can afford to remain in it. Luckily you can always go to other worlds. In other worlds it’s no problem if your transit pass is five cents short and you end up pottering around your own block instead of going to the movies.

You can widen the world of your own block – you can, for instance, lift up your eyes and take delight in finding you have a roof over your head. You may see a miracle: an Indian Flour Moth, walking across the ceiling, plain as day! There’s another caterpillar making its way to the light!

The moment of enlightenment comes quite easily, and it’s never boring on your own block. There’s always something happening. You could call an intrepid exterminator right now to come to the rescue like a movie superhero. There’s no reason to be jealous of the drivers in rush hour traffic, suffering their carbon dioxide emissions all by themselves, just trying to get away from their own blocks.

While the exterminator’s at work your travels in other worlds can continue in the back room, a place where pistachios ripen on tough little trees and strange species of caterpillar join forces with movie superheroes to start a world revolution. A place were the ocean touches the sky and the crashing waves wash away the last remaining thoughts of a non-existent five cents.

Off-kilter self-image

There are those among us who are over-exposed, under-exposed, unfocussed, or a bit smudged, and then there are those with a self-image that’s out of kilter. The possessor of an off-kilter self-image is usually the victim of long-term exposure to binders, label-makers, and hole-punchers. Their off-kilterness is due to the evasive action that the person has constantly been taking for fear of becoming bound, labelled, and punched through with holes. A life that is out of kilter in the self-image is blurry: it’s hard to find the right door or sit down to coffee with gusto because you feel that a) someone’s going to pull the chair out from under you, or b) you yourself are going to miss the chair and pratfall to the floor. You may completely bypass happiness in the fog. When a passer by looks you in the eye and smiles, you may think they’re aiming right past you. There’s a simple solution to this problem: take a new picture. A self-image that stays put is best made using a long exposure time. The easiest way to do this is to get a cardboard box from your local grocery – anything will do, a pineapple box, whatever – and build your own pinhole camera, or camera obscura. This technique is sure to work. Just seat the off-kilter person in a chair and aim the pinhole camera at them. With long exposure time, the spine of the out-of-kilter person will seem to straighten of its own accord, since you can’t flinch or slouch. The image inside the camera will look upside down, and that is precisely the point. The person portrayed on the paper will glow with light and become translucent – the bones, the spreading wings. You will see yourself for the first time. There I am, you’ll laugh, born from the light! Then you’ll open the right door, meet someone’s gaze and return it, like a child or some other equally wondrous thing.

Calendar cleansing

We’re cleansing practically anything, so why not our calendars? Calendar cleansing happens like this: Take out your desk or pocket calendar. The calendar hanging on the kitchen wall works, too. Now pick up an eraser (assuming the marks on the calendar were made in pencil – if they were made in ballpoint or felt marker, get some correction fluid.)

Choose a week and begin. Erase or white out every so-called obligation. White out the name days, too. Choose another week and continue. Leave nothing but a dental appointment and children’s birthdays. Move on to the next week and wipe it clean. Eightieth anniversaries can stay.

Move to the next week and cleanse it. Rub it with the eraser until you rub right through. Let the concerts, movies, cruises, half-marathons, cat christenings and other shindigs fall to the floor in little grey pieces. Keep the funeral. A baptism. The so-called obligations cease to exist. Sweep the crumbs into the trash. Glance over your whitened calendar: a nice blanco, just the essentials.

Spring I

Spring will come when it gets around to it.

Spring can’t be hurried.

Spring has lots of friends and has to stop to visit all of them before it gets here.

You can’t say it’s not spring.

It is spring, it just isn’t here yet.

Spring II

One day spring suddenly shows up at your door. In less than no time it makes quite a mess: the pictures on the walls are switched around, the clothes closet empties as three bags leave for the collection bin and two head to the flea market. The woollens are washed, the mud room cleaned out. Those battered little well-wintered muck boots get thrown in the trash. The garbage sack full of empty cans that’s been residing on the balcony is consigned to the recycling bin, along with the vacuum that broke last fall. The balcony gets a washing, daffodils appear out of nowhere, you get an idea to change the drapes, a sudden urge to wash the rug, you spring into action, and before you know it diaphanous linen is fluttering in the bright windows, the rug is rolled up under your arm, you’re walking your bike out for an overhaul, pumping up the tires, getting out your pea-shooter, goggles, rubber gloves, cap guns, sneakers, baseballs, dust, all swirling in the light. As day turns to evening you sit down on the sofa in honour of spring with a duster in hand, lift your coffee cup to your lips, and utter a quiet thank you.

Illustrations: Virpi Talvitie

Translated by Lola Rogers

A well-meaning bookseller’s idealism, inspired by Tolstoyan ideology, is brought crashing down by the laziness and ingratitude of the man hired to look after his estate: conflicts between the bourgeoisie and the ‘ordinary folk’ are played out in heart of the Finnish lakeside summer idyll in Savo province.

Taking place within a single day, the novel Putkinotko (an invented, onomatopoetic place name: ‘Hogweed Hollow’) is one of the most important classics of Finnish literature. Putkinotko was also the title of a series (1917–1920) of three prose works  – two novels and a collection of short stories  – sharing many of the same characters [here, a translation of ‘A happy day’ from Kuolleet omenapuut, ‘Dead apple trees’, 1918] .

In 1905 Joel Lehtonen bought a farmstead in Savo which he named Putkinotko: it became the place of inspiration for his writing. With an output that is both extensive and somewhat uneven, the reputation of Joel Lehtonen (1881–1934) rests largely on the merits of his Putkinotko, written between 1917 and 1920.

Originally published in two volumes, this massive novel is, on the one hand, a chronicle of the tense relationship between Lehtonen (who had himself risen from the ranks of the ‘ordinary folk’) and his half brother and, in more general terms, an exploration of the question of land ownership, which was the subject of heated social debate at the time the novel was written.

Joel Lehtonen, 1931. Photo: Otava

Combining elements of naturalist, humorist and lyrical narrative, Putkinotko reinvented the image of ‘the people’ which had dominated Finnish prose since the 1880s – and which re-emerged in the 1950s and 1960s with Väinö Linna’s expansive novels (Täällä Pohjantähden alla, I-III, ‘Here under the North Star’) on national themes.

The sheer modernity of Putkinotko was something new in Finland, and at first the novel was received with confusion and scepticism – in contrast to the work’s reception in Finland’s neighbouring countries when the novel appeared in translation.

The journalist, critic and writer Pekka Tarkka has undertaken the arduous task of researching the life and works of Joel Lehtonen. His doctoral thesis (published in 1977) examined the cast of characters in Putkinotko.

In 2009 Tarkka published the first part of his biography of Joel Lehtonen, concentrating on the first 36 years of the author’s life and on the literary output from the earlier part of his career. The second part of the biography (2012) continues from the Finnish Civil War of 1918 until 1934, when Lehtonen tragically took his own life.

The author’s life was filled with illness, bouts of depression and unhappy relationships. Indeed, Lehtonen’s life got off to a rather traumatic start: he had no knowledge of his father’s identity; his mother was a homeless woman who abandoned her six-month-old son by the side of a road. The boy who was eventually to become an author spent his first years in an orphanage and between numerous squalid foster homes. But his last foster mother was the wife of a priest, and it was from the Wallenius’s bourgeois household that Lehtonen was able to begin his education and undertake his entrance into ‘society’.

Even in Tarkka’s biography, it is the Putkinotko trilogy that receives the most attention. Generally considered of lesser artistic value, Lehtonen’s earlier works, displaying the influence of Nietzsche and foreshadowing the advent of existentialism, are described by Tarkka in traditional manner as written in a neo-romantic vein, and he takes pains to link them to more general trends in the Nordic artistic life of the day. In this way he challenges the notion, common to much previous research into Lehtonen’s work, that the primary context for Lehtonen’s earlier works was that of European decadence.

Farewell with a kantele: the author sold his Putkinotko farmstead in 1922. Photo: Aleksander Sihvonen, 1921 (Otava archive)

In the satirical novels that follow Putkinotko, Lehtonen’s laughter turns increasingly bitter as social conditions and the author’s health continued to worsen. Rakastunut rampa (‘The infatuated cripple’, 1922) is a grotesquely exaggerated self-portrait set against the social background of the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Henkien taistelu (‘The battle of souls’, 1933) is a critical take on the violent rise of the radical right wing in Finland and throughout Europe.

Lehtonen also published poetry; his final work was the poetry collection Hyvästijättö Lintukodolle (‘Farewell, the Haven’, 1934) in which Lehtonen explores the idea of approaching death and gives a melancholy appraisal of the life he has lived, a life filled with much hardship and much chasing after the wind.

As a researcher and biographer, Tarkka does not rigorously follow any particular method but writes rather freely following his own train of thoughts. Lehtonen’s friendships, relationships with women, financial affairs, his working relationship with publishers, his ever-changing apartments and summer cottages, trips abroad and illnesses are comprehensively outlined. Typically of the biographical genre, the author’s output is contextualised in terms of his own life, while the role of the Western literary tradition remains secondary. Influences and points of comparison are sought in paintings and music, and the relation of Lehtonen’s works to the contemporary social climate and literary works of the day is examined to a certain extent.

Tarkka is particularly interested in Lehtonen’s gallery of colourful characters, and much of his research concentrates on pinpointing their real-life inspirations. Tarkka’s extensive biography references Lehtonen’s works in fine detail; almost without our noticing, he imbues his commentary with observations that can be interpreted in numerous ways.

Translated by David Hackston