I know why they’re here, of course. The criminal investigation is still ongoing.
I really don’t feel up to this.
I start to walk heavily towards them, a pale white ghost with a black, veiled face.
*
Before they get started they ask if I ought to use the smoker. I correct them good-naturedly – the purpose of the smoker isn’t to frighten the bees away from attacking people; it simulates the threat of fire and puts them in a state where a bee-keeper can handle and examine the frames without harming the bees. I add a little tartly that anybody would probably prefer to think about something else if somebody came and tore the roof off their house.
We sit on the garden furniture pretending to be relaxed. I don’t ask them inside. As far as I’m concerned they can sit on the narrow wooden seats, shifting their weight from one arse cheek to the other, glancing doubtfully at the beehives every few seconds. I don’t even offer to make some coffee. Why should I? They haven’t done – aren’t going to do – anything particularly nice for me.
But on the other hand, they’re not blaming me for anything. I’m just an eyewitness.
And an interested party.
I don’t see any reason to change my clothes, although I do show some mercy and take off the veiled hat. I balance on the edge of my seat and go over everything for what must be the sixth time. I was in the cottage, I heard the alarm, saw the police lights, ran over there.
Eero’s group of friends particularly interests them. I tell them I don’t know any more than I did before. Although we had a warm relationship, a normal father-and-son relationship, Eero didn’t talk about his activities at all. Like any kid in his late teens he didn’t go over everything he was doing in detail with his father. He behaved the way young people always do with their parents. We didn’t have open, honest father-son conversations with detailed accounts of which bands he first heard in a friend’s garage, what careless convenience-store cashier he bought beer from, what girl he met at a party and got down to her bra or all the way to her underwear.
‘Did you know about his contacts with the Singers, sir?’ One cop asks, throwing in the ‘sir’ just to be on the safe side. I tell him that Eero was an animal-rights activist, that’s all I know about it. He participated in demonstrations and put up online petitions.
‘Read his blogs; they’re still on the web,’ I tell Rimpiläinen, although it was the other cop who asked the question. They already have his phone and laptop. They can find the addresses and the rest of his network there. Friends and fellow enthusiasts.
‘And enemies?’
I stiffen. Eero didn’t have enemies. The whole terrible series of events was a product of unfortunate accidents, grotesque, blind fate, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They only meant to warn him. That’s what happened.
The policemen look at each other. That’s not a good sign. Then they shake their heads. Very faintly. And one of them puts a hand up to his mouth, just for a brief moment.
An even worse sign.
Rimpiläinen starts to talk, mentions Eero’s other blog, written under a pseudonym, updated through an anonymous server. They didn’t know about it either until they got a tip-off after the incident.
I ask how they know that some blog on an anonymous server belonged to Eero.
‘It seems pretty clear to us. Careless hints here and there in the text. We were also able to trace the connection to your son’s computer.’
I wrinkle my brow and mutter that I don’t know what that has to do with anything.
‘The comments on his blog sometimes got very rough.’
‘And if you don’t mind my saying so, with a certain amount of provocation,’ the other cop adds.
They can see from my expression that I didn’t know anything about this. And, haltingly, they tell me more.
*
By the time they leave the evening has already grown dark.
I’ve been dragged back into the world again, a world I don’t want to think about. And I’ve been given new things to think about, a thousand nagging, buzzing, stinging associations, among them the fact that I should have known, I should have known, for God’s sake, and maybe in a way I did know, but it would have been just one more unpleasant truth.
Festering thoughts: the guy who called once and started to describe in detail what he was going to do to me as soon as he ‘got his hands on me’ (mostly extremely violent acts, but also enough sexual ones that I thought he was just some pervert) and when I managed to get a word in and say something like ‘Have fun, wanker’, he was embarrassed and stopped.
‘Wrong number,’ he said, as if he’d suddenly realized that he was talking to the wrong Mr Hopevale.
Or those camping trips that Eero had every now and then. ‘We’re going to be out in the woods for three nights, Dad. It’ll be educational. We’ll build fires, sleep in a lean-to, be one with the forest.’ That’s what he told me. And he refused to let me spend any money on silly things like a down sleeping-bag or portable gas stove. Supposedly wanted to camp the natural way with borrowed gear.
A hell of a thoughtful son not making me waste my money on provisions even though I was making money like a pirate. And that artificial thoughtfulness wasn’t necessarily even about my bank account. It was probably about my carbon footprint.
Eero was never on any overnight camping trips at Kintulampi. He was up to something entirely different.
And I had sensed all this, of course, like any parent does. You smell something rotten, but you hope that time will take care of it if you put off interfering long enough.
Eero was …
Just say it. A terrorist. Putting an eco prefix on it won’t justify anything.
*
I won’t think about it, won’t think about it, wipe it from my mind with an angry stroke of an invisible hand. Too early to go inside, too early to have a whisky, way too early for bed. I have to focus on something, find something for my body to do, otherwise a sickly sweet agony will rise from my stomach towards my consciousness like vomit.
The brick! The brick to go under the hive, that’s what I was going to do before the police came, before I noticed that the other hive was empty. I have to put a brick there, and even if it’s too late for that hive maybe the others will notice that I’m taking care of them, that I’m diligent, trying to help. Oh my dear, beautiful bees, don’t let this be colony collapse!
I run and get a head-torch from the house just in case, since there’s no electricity in the loft. I climb the ladder like the hounds are after me. I don’t even turn on the torch, like it would take too much time, like I must get this done even though the attic is quite dark. I stumble into the junk room. I know where the bricks are. I lift the paint can from the top of the pile with half-fumbling hands and choose two bricks. They’re soothingly heavy in my hands. I go into the outer room and don’t even try to climb down the ladder with the bricks, instead dropping them through the trapdoor down into the barn. I know they won’t break because there’s a thick mat of chips, bark and other wood debris on the floor.
Something flashes at the edge of my vision as I turn to step through the hole and down the ladder. A little extra light, almost like a glimpse of one of those annoying motes you see on the membrane of your eye when your eyelids are closed.
I turn on the head-torch. I turn my head. The beam of light sweeps over the dusty loft, the cardboard boxes, grey timbers with the chinking peeping out between them, the ancient tools, the pitchfork again, the timbers. The whole aspect of the room is different. The torch is too glaring, too penetrating. It’s no help.
I turn it off. I blink and try to let my eyes adjust to the darkness.
A star is twinkling. Flashing in that darkness.
From such a deep black, the deepest black I’ve ever seen.
That blackness is on the wall.
There’s an opening in the wall.
Again.
I just didn’t see it when I climbed up in th
e thick darkness.
Now my eyes are adjusting.
I go to the opening. It’s both strange and familiar to me at the same time. I still don’t believe in its existence, but I have to go to it.
And I think that if this is an illusion then why don’t I see the same meadow and forest, warm and colourful, untouched, soothing, flooded with sunshine? Why did I not notice the hole until I saw a star twinkling in an otherwise impenetrable darkness? Is my brain that clever? Clever enough that my hallucinations obey the times of day, so that … over there, on the Other Side … it’s also night? A night filled with stars.
I grab the log wall with one hand, as if the opening to the Other Side were a hole in the ice, with flowing current under it, and the wall were the sturdy edge of the ice, and my tight grip were the only thing preventing me from being sucked under and freezing to death. But when I lean out into the Other Side I can’t help but notice how oxygen-rich, how pure, how coolingly fragrant my personal illusion is.
Adrenalin surges through my veins, and I can’t help stepping back, turning and lifting the ladder with both hands and dragging the bloody heavy thing up through the trapdoor, grunting and groaning. I stagger under its weight as I turn it in the cramped outer room, shove it out through the hole in the wall and let it fall with a lurch to the ground a couple of metres below. It touches the earth with a soft thud, although I might have imagined that it would be sucked away into nothingness, into the hallucinatory depths of pure imagination.
The top of the ladder is leaning against the edge of the opening. The steps lead down to a sort of netherworld. I take a breath, turn around and reach a foot out and on to the ladder. I climb down clumsily. I look up and feel dizzy. From here I can’t see anything that the ladder is resting on, it just slants up into emptiness.
When my foot touches the ground I look around.
The ladder is in front of me, and all around me is fragrant night. There is no sign of buildings or people, but up above me, at the top of a ladder leaning on nothing, is the opening, an opening in the air, an opening into an even darker night, which I know is the dusty darkness of the hayloft, a vague spot hovering against the sky.
I fall involuntarily back two steps, because now I’m looking at the sky, and I have to gulp when I see it. No, not just gulp. From somewhere in the deepest cavities of my mind, salt water wells up. My face is wet, and the hand that’s holding on to the ladder, on to reality, shakes in spasms. Because above me I see something that I shouldn’t be seeing.
The sky as God intended it.
This pitiful northern sky doesn’t face the centre of the Milky Way like the sky in the southern hemisphere, but a branch of the galaxy does spread across it in a glittering band, deep, multicoloured, in a breathtaking mist like sugar crystals scattered on black velvet. The Great Bear is so close that I could reach out and touch it. I can see the Pleiades as if my fingers were reading them in deep, deliberate braille.
I can’t stop the tears, because this world has no lights from cities or habitations. I’m looking at a sky like I’m in the Finnish version of an ancient Neanderthal valley.
The silence is indescribable.
No – it’s not completely silent.
I can hear, or can almost hear, things that I’m not ready to hear. I don’t know what they are. Maybe just normal sounds of wild nature that I usually never hear, large animals perhaps, moving through the night, and I twitch with fear, my organs filling with adrenalin, and grab the ladder. I climb up like a squirrel, almost fall back into the hayloft. I turn, panting.
I expect the opening to be gone, silently closed up, my brain finally returned to normality after this repeated, achingly beautiful illusion. But the opening is there still, the door to the Other Side, a route to a place so untouched that it reaches out to touch you. And all around me and behind me, just slightly muffled by the walls, is the outer world; I can hear the neighbour’s teenage son revving his new ATV somewhere on the forest road. But when I put my head out through the opening, no sound from my own familiar reality resonates on the Other Side. Absolute silence.
There’s something familiar about this experience. It comes to me in a flash. Once I went running in a tracksuit made of rustling fabric. There was a shower, and I tugged the hood of the jacket over my head. The fabric rubbed against my ears with every step, its hissing, rustling sound echoing into my ears, annoying and irksome at first, but I soon got used to it and hardly noticed it any more. Then it stopped raining, and I pushed the hood down, and suddenly the whole landscape of sound around me grew clear, calm, quiet, as if I’d slipped out of a roaring waterfall into still water.
The silence of the Other Side is just as big and pure and dazzling compared with my own world. I want to climb down the ladder again and investigate the Other Side a bit more closely, but I hesitate. I’m sure that the strange sounds wouldn’t startle me again, because I’m very curious and I trust that warm darkness somehow. But the opening could close off at any moment at the whim of some power over which I have no influence (just as I have no influence over my temper amental brain – if the opening is some kind of imaginary hallucination my mischievous brain might very well decide to trap me for all time outside of the world I know).
But even as I’m having that thought about the opening appearing and going up to the loft again to verify its non-existence after I first found it, something keeps niggling, like a hair in my eye.
There’s something about both occasions that’s the same.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
Welcome to my blog. If your search engine has brought you here thinking that you’ll find some information on eugenics or instructions for achieving racial purity you’ve been lusting after, I apologize deeply.
The name of this blog is a comment on how humans have tried to ‘perfect’ animals, foods and nature and in the process have cultivated the barbarity, lust for oppression, greed and other imperfections in themselves.
The phrase ‘perfecting the human species’ actually has its roots in Finnish philosopher J.V. Snellman’s writings (bet you didn’t expect that, you skinhead Finnish patriots with your lion pendants). Snellman saw the protection of animals as a way to improve humanity, human goodness and the advancement of empathy.
The purpose of this blog is to present the activities of the Animalist Revolutionary Army, or ARA, from the point of view of its grass roots, to create a forum for the discussion of animal rights and to activate those interested in issues related to animal rights.
LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 44)
USER NAME: Terrorism is no solution
You pitiful clowns think you’re helping animals with this inflammatory garbage, but you’re just hurting the whole animal-rights cause. In the 90s when we were about to get a ban on fur farming in Finland it was the so-called fox girls who went and freed animals from their cages and caused so much bad will that every decision-maker in the negotiations was infected with it. These things should be accomplished through discussion. What use is it to anyone for animals used to domestication to suddenly be objects of fear and cause car accidents and who knows what? Minks released into the wild are simply destructive, eating grouse chicks and eggs.
MODERATOR: E.H.
Thanks for your opinion, which includes some facts, in itself a rare thing. It’s quite true that in the 1990s SPAY and ALF as well as the Rights for Animals organization undertook some actions at fur farms and other places such as butcher’s shops that caused an overreaction among fur producers. (Some regular readers of my blogs might remember the term ‘fox girls’.) It’s also true that there is a mink population living in Finland now that doesn’t belong here, but through careless farming many minks had already escaped from captivity on their own before the freeings you speak of.
We in ARA, however, are fed up with negotiations. When we let politicians publicly state that the starting point for the animal-rights deb
ate is that ‘Animals have a right to be slaughtered in the way in which they are accustomed’ do you think their position can be influenced through negotiations? How well I remember the statement Sirke Peltokorpi, a True Finn in parliament, gave ten years ago in Me Naiset magazine when they asked her to name Finland’s worst environmental problem. ‘Definitely the wolf. Why are we all fussing about melting ice sheets when we have something to worry about right here in Finland?’ (MN 10/2007). I’m not an avid reader of women’s magazines, but that statement made the rounds of the social media and with good reason.
If all we do is stare at our own navels and think about our own wallets and the whole debate presupposes keeping an outdated, unethical enterprise like the fur industry on artificial respiration then the debate has no purpose. When the US spent decades trying to create some kind of general, affordable healthcare system on the Scandinavian model one of the reasons for opposition was that it would put the staff of health-insurance companies out of a job. Is that ethical? Did people oppose the spread of computers when it put huge numbers of printers out of business? No, because computers made life easier and better. When ships started running on engines was anybody upset at the disappearance of the sail-making trade? Probably not very many people, because motorized water transport was a step forward. Crying over fur farms or factory egg production is about as smart as decrying the end of the slave trade because it would diminish the poor slave traders’ standard of living. (I’m sure people did just that, but now it’s considered an impossible position to take.) The question of animal rights is just as great, just as important, as the question of slavery was at one time. It’s a question of the obscene exploitation of living, feeling creatures, of inhumane treatment and unbelievably cruel conditions in the name of maximizing profits. If hampering and sabotaging these indefensible ways of living is the only way to have an influence then that’s what we’ll do.
The Blood of Angels Page 7
