The Hummingbird

by Kati Hiekkapelto

  It was too complicated.

  It was almost eight o’clock. Rauno filed the reports neatly in their folders and switched off his computer. He would get home just in time to read the girls their bedtime story. At least he still enjoyed that. He didn’t want to jeopardise his relationship with his daughters. The fact that it was already beginning to happen was too painful to admit.

  When the girls were in their beds and he was reading their story, Nina switched on the television and disappeared into a blue haze of TV entertainment until the early hours. Once the girls were asleep, Rauno went to bed; he was utterly exhausted. Nina spent the night on the sofa, yet again.

  When night had given way to morning and the paperboys had finished their morning rounds, Rauno awoke to the sound of his telephone ringing. The call was from the station.

  ‘Do you remember when me and Áron found that body in the Tisza?’ asked Ákos out of the blue over dinner.

  After a moment’s deliberation, Anna hadn’t gone into town to eat by herself but had gone to the supermarket, then home to cook Ákos’s favourite dish – bableves, bean soup – and invited her brother for dinner. She had walked to the other side of the suburb, where blocks of flats identical to her own reached up towards the sky. If I hadn’t spent my childhood here, I would never be able to find my way around, she pondered. Everything looks the same, apartment blocks like grotesque skyscrapers as far as the eye can see. The sound of children playing didn’t echo from inside the courtyards. The place seemed deserted.

  As Ákos opened the door to his messy bedsit, the stench of dejected loneliness had hit her in the face and Anna had found it hard to breathe. My brother, she’d thought. This is my own brother, thrown away and forgotten.

  I’ve done this to him, but this is my chance to fix things. I promise you that. I’ve been selfish, thinking only about my own success without sparing a thought for you. All she managed to say aloud was: Gyere enni. Ákos seemed excited at this surprise invitation and, as Anna had predicted, he was delighted with the bableves.

  ‘No, I don’t remember. Remind me,’ she answered.

  They had never talked about Áron, their eldest brother who had died soon after the Croatian war broke out in Osijek and whose memory was beginning to fade. Áron had been only two years older than Ákos, and as children the boys were inseparable. Always together, always getting up to something.

  ‘We’d been drinking down at the taverna and started walking home in the early hours, both a bit tipsy. It was a beautiful morning; there was mist hanging above the river and it was warm and quiet. That’s why we thought we’d walk back along the shore, though it would take longer. There was a fisherman out on the river in his boat. Do you remember Béla Nagy, the grumpy old man?’

  ‘Yes, vaguely. Réka and I were out there swimming once, and we climbed into the boats along the shore and jumped from their bows back into the water. We hadn’t noticed Old Nagy sitting further up on the quayside watching to see when we’d touch his boat. He went crazy when we tried to climb inside his boat, ran all the way down to the shore, shouting until he was red in the face. Don’t you touch my boat! A short man with a big moustache.’

  ‘That’s the one. He was crazy. Anyway, he was already out fishing that morning, and when he saw us he started hollering at us to come and help him, there was something really heavy in his net. Áron was a good swimmer and a bit less drunk, so he swam up to the boat to have a look. A fene egye meg.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Tibor Rekecski. Their family lived quite close, in Kőrös. Do you remember? The guy that drowned after coming down that big slide outside Békavár. He went into the water feet first and hit his head on the rocks on the way down.’

  ‘A kurva életbe!’

  ‘His mates tried to dive down and find him; the fire brigade was called and everything, but the river’s so muddy and the current is too strong. They couldn’t find anything. He’d got caught up in Béla Nagy’s fishing net. Áron pulled him ashore. I called the police.’

  ‘I never heard about this.’

  ‘Nobody told you. You were too little.’

  ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘In ’89.’

  ‘So you were 15?’

  ‘Yeah, and you were seven.’

  ‘And out drinking at the Taverna, Úr Isten! You were still kids; Áron was only 17.’

  ‘Nobody ever asked for ID,’ said Ákos and tried to avoid Anna’s eyes by flicking through the newspaper on the table.

  When their brother had died and their mother had decided to try and save her other brother from a similar fate, what was left of the family packed a suitcase full of things and fled to Finland. They no longer talked about Áron. Nobody spoke about the conflict, though their mother followed the news carefully. They had stopped talking about their father years ago, so they already knew that it was best to keep quiet about difficult matters.

  They had to try and protect their mother. And themselves.

  Anna had learned the technique well, and she was perfectly happy not talking about Áron. As far as she was concerned there was no point going over painful things again and again. It was so much easier to let things go and forget about them. That’s another reason why the headmaster had been so concerned about her. You have to open up, Anna, let it all out. But Anna didn’t know what ‘it all’ was or how she was supposed to ‘let it out’. She had no words for it.

  ‘Have you ever thought of going back?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Only about a hundred times a day.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t want to.’

  ‘Mum would be pleased.’

  ‘I’d have to move in with her. Jesus, I couldn’t deal with that.’

  ‘You could rent your own place.’

  ‘And then what would I do?’

  ‘What do you do here? Live on the dole? You’re the worst example of what these swivel-eyed lunatics are always raving on about. They think we’re all like that.’

  ‘Someone’s got to prove them right.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been away for so long. And there’s no work there either. Most of my friends have moved to Hungary.’

  ‘Then why don’t you go to Hungary?’

  ‘Jebiga, I’m not going there. Do you want to get rid of me? We’ve only just—’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘That’s not what it seems like.’

  ‘Bocs.’

  ‘So, are you going to Skype Mum?’

  ‘What about you?’ Anna asked, puzzled.

  ‘I thought I’d just listen. I don’t want to talk to her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’ll just start complaining, saying I should come home. Go on, call her. But don’t tell her I’m here.’

  ‘She’ll want me to tell her how you’re doing.’

  ‘Tell her everything’s fine.’

  ‘Hát igen.’

  But their mother wasn’t at home. Anna hung up once the answering machine began playing her recorded message. Shame. She was convinced her brother would have wanted to talk to her, after all, if only he’d heard her voice.

  ‘The guys are out in town this evening, said they want to see you again after all these years. They were really excited when I told them you’d moved back to town. They’re waiting for you,’ said Ákos.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Bar Amarillo.’

  In addition to his punk friends, Ákos hung out with a gang of young men in their twenties who had escaped the disintegrating former Yugoslavia. For reasons that nobody talked about, they hadn’t gone to Sweden, like most people fleeing the conflict. They had found one another here in this suburb; they were wild and handsome, like reincarnations of her missing elder brother Áron, and they had thought of young Anna as an equal member of the gang, considered her something of a mascot, a protector. In this neighbourhood, Anna had never had to worry about anything. Not even the skinheads h
ad dared to harass her. Of course, their mother didn’t like these boys any more than she liked the punks; to her mind, everything Ákos did was ruinous. And it was. Anna was the loner, the strange one, the one whose assimilation worried the professionals. Ákos, on the other hand, was always busy; he had friends and plenty to do. Apparently keeping the wrong company is worse than keeping no company at all, Anna thought.

  It was through the Yugoslav boys that Anna had preserved a fragile connection to her former homeland. Only rarely did they meet other Hungarians; perhaps they were the only ones in the city. Anna was certain that, despite her protestations to the contrary, their mother had enjoyed the noise that so regularly filled their kitchen, though the language spoken wasn’t her own. Their mother had made the boys burek. An Albanian, a Serb, a Croatian and a Vojvodina Hungarian – it was like the most ludicrously patriotic propaganda about Yugoslav brotherhood from the Tito era. Anna sensed how they had clung to one another like shipwrecked people holding on to a drifting log, trying to find something familiar amongst all the mindlessness that had brought their childhoods to an end.

  Anna’s Serbo-Croat was still in working order; it had been preserved just like the men’s friendship. Only Ivan, a Croat, had returned home. The infamous gang of immigrants had grown into a club of middle-aged men who smoked and drank a lot, who dwelled on the past too much, who complained about Finland, its football team in particular. All except Ákos now had families, temporary jobs, and their lives were stable after a fashion.

  Anna hadn’t seen them in years.

  A sense of nervous excitement tingled pleasantly in her stomach.

  ‘Zoran is ott van?’ she asked, trying to sound indifferent.

  ‘Of course, he’ll be first in line,’ Ákos laughed and gave his sister a teasing look.

  ‘Are you coming too?’

  ‘I’m not in the mood,’ said Ákos, but Anna saw how much he wanted to join them.

  I spent a year in a preparatory class. At first they thought I should have been there longer – learning to read was really hard – but then they decided to move me to the normal first grade after only a year in preparatory, though I was actually the same age as the kids in second grade. They thought it would be best for me to start at the beginning, while it was still possible given my age – you can’t very well put someone who’s the age of a sixth-grader back in first grade even if they needed it. In that one year they would have to catch up on the whole of primary school and learn Finnish well enough to be able to survive in middle school, to finish their final exams, go to high school and end up studying medicine. Yeah right. As if it’s that simple. Nothing’s that simple, especially not the language. Without a language we’re nothing. Language is everything, wallahi. You can get by knowing a language on the surface, you can cope surprisingly well, but study is a different thing altogether, much more demanding than understanding or thinking or pretending you know what’s going on.

  Right through primary school I was a year older than everyone in my class, but you don’t notice it on the outside, even though some time in the eighth grade I started to feel like a real adult and much older than everyone else. I learned to read in first grade and I picked up this language pretty quick too. I can read Kurdish too, but not as well. I’ve never read a novel in Kurdish. I read quite a lot in Finnish. There are no books in Kurdish in the library. The teachers kept saying how lucky I was that I was only six when we arrived. Apparently that’s the best age to arrive, six or seven, with regard to learning a language, many languages. Mehvan got left behind. He was so little. He lost too much of his own language, and that’s why he never learned the new one properly. Or maybe he just can’t spell: ‘Mehvan’s good at skaiting. Mehvan runs in the gardne.’

  So there you have it; that was the official part about the system and the language, all neat and businesslike.

  Of course, I could always tell what goes on behind the carefully constructed public façade, but I don’t want to disturb the hornets’ nest. I’ve decided I’m not going to let bitterness get the better of me. I don’t want to end up like Mum and Dad.

  But I’ll tell you this much: sometimes I found shit in my shoes, quite literally. Wog. My jacket would disappear from the cloakroom. There was a clump of hair caught in a Finnish girl’s fist. Name-calling. Whore. Bruises. Nigger. My bag ripped, its contents strewn across the sports field. Cruel fucking laughter. Silent staring. I’d try and blend into the wall, so grey that nobody would notice me, try and do my homework well but keep my mouth shut about it, then people think you’re the perfect example of the well-integrated immigrant. And if you’ve had enough of putting up with all the shit and decide to step out from the wall, you’re sent to the special-needs class. Then teachers sit down at meetings and seminars and wonder why there are so damn many immigrant kids in remedial classes. As if they ended up there by themselves, as if nobody put them there in the first place.

  And the endless chanting: nigger, nigger, nigger. I’ve heard it so many times it might as well be my name.

  So there are a few examples for you. Thank God I got into high school. That’s where my life in Finland really started, my OWN life, that is. And that’s where it stopped again almost as quickly.

  18

  ANNA WOKE to a distant sound. It was pitch dark. The bed was swaying. It took a moment for her heavy head to realise that the sound was coming from her work phone. It was playing an annoying melody somewhere far away.

  Anna dragged herself into the hallway. Her leather jacket was lying in a heap on the floor, and the sound of the ringtone in her pocket was growing louder. She pulled out her phone and stared with bleary eyes at the screaming, flashing, trembling screen. It was Esko.

  It was 5.30 in the morning. I’m still completely drunk, she thought, even the hall seems to be swaying. Her head was throbbing. She pressed the reject button and put the phone on silent. It was her day off, the first day off she’d had during the week, the day when she was supposed to clean the house and go shopping.

  Shit.

  ‘Anna, vrati se.’

  ‘Da, da.’

  ‘Ko je bio?’

  ‘It was from work. Don’t talk Serbian to me, I can’t speak it any more.’

  Zoran burst into laughter.

  ‘There’s plenty of work for you here,’ he replied in Serbian and lifted the duvet.

  Anna eventually got up after one o’clock. Zoran had kept her awake for a while, after which they had both fallen asleep again. Three cups of coffee, two ibuprofens and Zoran’s bacon omelette weren’t enough to make her nausea go away. Anna’s temples ached and she felt sick. She looked at the screen on her work phone and saw that Esko had tried to call her a further three times. Sari, Rauno and Virkkunen had all called her too. Twelve missed calls in total. Virkkunen had sent her an SMS: Come in ASAP, it commanded her.

  ‘I have to go to work,’ Anna told Zoran as he stepped out of the shower dripping with water and hugged her as she started to get dressed.

  ‘Weren’t you supposed to have the day off?’

  ‘Something serious has happened. Everyone’s been trying to call me.’

  ‘Šteta.’

  ‘Šta ćeš.’

  Anna had to take the bus into town. She didn’t dare take the car, what with her throbbing headache and woozy condition; cycling was also out of the question for the same reason. Zoran wanted to stay in bed with her; he was almost purring around her, trying to stop her getting dressed. Anna wondered what Zoran’s wife Nataša would think when her husband finally returned from his night out the day after.

  When she arrived at the station, Anna could find neither Esko nor any of the other members of the team. She remembered that her phone was still on silent. She had missed another three calls, and the screen was flashing again.

  ‘Jesus, where the hell have you been?’ Esko bellowed down the phone so loudly that she had to pull her mobile away further from her ear.

  ‘I’m in my office.’

  She wa
s, in fact, in the toilet. Her stomach had started to churn and her headache had taken a turn for the worse.

  ‘Then get your exotic arse down here. We’ve got another John Doe.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On the running track near Häyrysenniemi, near the village of Asemakylä. You’ll never guess how he was killed.’

  Anna looked in the mirror. She hadn’t had time to blow-dry her hair after the shower, and now it was tangled and messy. Large bags hung beneath her reddened eyes. Her stomach was churning and beads of sweat glinted on her upper lip. She felt dizzy.

  Why today, of all days, she thought.

  ‘Shot? With a rifle?’

  ‘Dead right. So get a move on. We’ve been here all morning and Forensics are just finishing up. Virkkunen’s furious.’

  ‘There’s just one problem.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘I’m not fit to drive.’

  After managing to say this, Anna vomited. The phone fell from her hand, pieces of omelette spilled into the toilet bowl, flushed down with coffee and other stomach fluids, in a stream of yellow-brown porridge.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ came a voice from the floor beside the toilet.

  Anna asked a patrol car at the station to drive her to the scene of the murder.

  It was a bright day. The light seemed to ram the pain further into her skull. She should have brought her sunglasses.

  She tried to relax as she sat in the back seat of the patrol car. She closed her eyes and focused on the pain pulsing through her temples and tried to wish it away; she’d read about this method in a women’s magazine. It wasn’t working. Her head continued to thump as the car turned on to a remote dirt track.

  This is déjà vu, thought Anna as birch trees, thicket and every now and then a resilient juniper bush flashed past the window. It was as though she was revisiting the scene of Riikka’s murder.

  ‘Are we near the sea?’ she asked the boys in uniform in the front seat.