Little Siberia

by Antti Tuomainen

  Little Siberia

  ANTTI TUOMAINEN

  translated by David Hackston

  Dedicated with warmth and gratitude to Aino Järvinen, my high-school Finnish teacher.

  Thank you for the fails as well as the passes, and particularly the time thirty years ago when you said writing might be my thing.

  I promise I’ll try my best.

  Midway upon the journey of our life

  I found myself within a forest dark,

  For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

  (Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. H. W. Longfellow, 1867)

  LITTLE SIBERIA

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: THE SKY CAVES IN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART TWO: THE SKY’S THE LIMIT

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  PART THREE: THE SKIES OPEN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  TEN MONTHS LATER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  Warm Koskenkorva vodka scours the inside of his mouth, sets his throat ablaze. But he controls the sideways swerve, and the car comes out of the bend at almost the same speed as it went in.

  He takes his right hand from the steering wheel, changes gear, glances at the speedometer. A shade over 130. For winter driving, this speed is excellent, especially in freezing conditions along a winding road across the eastern side of Hurmevaara. You also have to factor in that visibility is limited at this time of night – despite the brightness of the stars.

  His left foot touches the clutch and his right presses down on the accelerator. He raises his left hand again and swallows a sliver from the bottle.

  This is how you should drink Koskenkorva. First a big gulp to fill the mouth, so strong it lights up like a ball of fire and feels as though it could knock your teeth out. Then a smaller sip, a thin gauze of liquor that barely wets the lips but that’s enough to extinguish the fire and helps you to swallow the first proper mouthful.

  And this is how you drive a car.

  He arrives at a long, gentle downward slope, which slowly veers to the right, but so slowly and smoothly that the curve is deceptive. At first it looks as though all you need to do is keep the car straight and your foot on the gas, pedal to the metal. But no. The road then slopes slightly to the left, and the faster you drive the more it feels as though the road wants to buck the car from its back. He grips the steering wheel; he knows he’s going about 165 kilometres an hour. It’s the speed of champions. He knows that too, and the knowledge hurts.

  On his right he catches a brief glimpse of the ice stretching across Lake Hurmevaara. Fishermen’s flags jut out from the surface, marking their fishing holes and nets. He sometimes looks at these flags when he takes this route, because glanced at quickly they almost seem like rows of cheering crowds. But tonight he doesn’t need applause.

  He keeps the steering wheel angled a fraction to the right to correct the slope of the road surface. As another bend comes into view up ahead, he begins an engine brake. This requires the utmost coordination of hands and feet, the seamless collaboration of clutch and gearstick. He sets the bottle firmly between his thighs, casts his left hand up to the steering wheel, moves the right down to the gearstick, presses down on the clutch and with the accelerator gives just enough gas. He controls the car by harnessing its own power. The brake pedal is for amateurs – guys like the one who’d lent him this car.

  After a short, even stretch of road, the car arrives at the foot of a hill with two ridges. He can feel the burning at the bottom of his stomach.

  This isn’t the Koskenkorva. This is fate.

  He uses all the power the car can muster. It requires the utmost control of both the Audi and the situation. You can’t just put your foot on the gas. If you do that, the vehicle will be impossible to steer. And at a speed of over 180 km/h, that means careering into the heaps of snow along the road’s verges and after that the car would spin on its roof a couple of times – if you’re lucky. If you’re not and you hesitate even slightly, the car will plough right into the thick spruce forest, where it would twist itself like a gift wrapper round a frosted, metre-thick tree trunk.

  He doesn’t believe in luck. He believes in speed, sufficient speed.

  Especially now, as everything is approaching its conclusion. A conclusion that suits him fine.

  The Audi reaches the top of the hill travelling at around 200 km/h. And when it gets there the car launches into flight. As it takes off, he raises the bottle to his lips. This requires as much precision as driving. His left hand is firm but relaxed. Cold Koskenkorva floods his mouth as the car flies through the frozen night. Sweet flames tingle across his lips as one and a half tonnes of steel, aluminium, roaring engine and new studded tyres obey his command.

  The Audi flies far and long. It touches down at the very moment the bottle returns to its rightful place between the driver’s thighs.

  He slips down to a lower gear, accelerates, changes gear again. A downhill slope, a tiny stretch of flat ground, then another hill. And another flight. He catches a glimpse of the flashing red dials on the dashboard and the glinting bottle. The speedometer shows 200, the bottle contains only a few more gulps. When the studs of his tyres once again strike the surface of the road like machine-gun fire, he smiles – as much as a face gnawed with booze possibly can.

  He is in his element. Those who turned their backs on him will live to regret it. He’s been shunned, ostracised, taken for a fool. He might die, but by dying on his own terms he will rise above everything and everybody. He will achieve something, pass them by, waving to the slower cars as he goes. The thought is a potent one, strong and warm. It burns his mind like the liquor in his mouth.

  He slurps from the bottle until it is empty.

  The last stretch. The Audi howls.

  He opens the window. His face freezes, his eyes stream. He throws the bottle out into the snow.

  An open stretch of road. At the end of it, a T-junction. He is not turning either way. He is heading right for the rockface in front of him.

  Maximum speed always depends on the driver. People never talk about this. They just say, such-and-such a car’s top speed is this or that. Nonsense.

  He checks the dial: 240 – in a car that is supposed to stall at 225.

  He looks at the road ahead. The last kilometre. Ever.

  This is how it’s all going to end, he thinks as the car explodes.

  He can feel the explosion around him.

  What he sees in that split second: the world is engulfed by a huge flash of light, followed by a shadow just as immense; light and shadow both arriving vertically from above. His heart stops and starts again, now throbbing in heavy, hollow beats, like hammer blows against metal. His senses, all five of them, seem to sharpen and come into focus in a way he has never experienced before. He can smell the tear in the car roof, taste the strange, pliable material inside the seat, feel the pressure wave push against his hands. At first
he can hear everything, then, as his ears become blocked, he hears the explosion continue inside his head.

  He acts instinctively. He shifts to a lower gear, slams his foot on the clutch, the accelerator and the brake. Engine brake, hand brake – a controlled spin. The car slides into the intersection and comes to a stop.

  He isn’t quite sure how long the moment of stasis lasts. Maybe a minute, maybe two. He cannot move. When his faculties finally return and he manages to release his grip on the steering wheel and focus his eyes on what is around him, he has no idea what he is looking at.

  Of course, he understands the fact that right above the passenger seat there is now a gaping hole in the car’s roof. But there’s a hole in the seat too. The diameter of the hole in the roof is slightly smaller. He congratulates himself on the liquor. Without that in his system, it would be impossible to remain this calm.

  He manages to unclip his seatbelt, then stops for a moment. It seems necessary to go through the facts again. The hole in the roof, the hole in the seat, himself. The holes are right next to him.

  He steps out of the car and looks up and down a few times. Endless banks of snow, the frozen night lit only by the bright light of the moon and stars. The snow crunches beneath his driving boots as he paces around the car. The hole in the roof is like a pair of lips set in an inside-out pout. He opens the passenger door. Yes, the pouting lips are kissing the inside of the car. The hole in the seat opens inwards; it looks almost lewd. He peers into the hole. It is black. He deduces two things. There can’t be a hole in the bottom of the car; if there were, he’d be able to see snow. Whatever made that hole passed first through the roof, then the seat – then stopped.

  He backs away from the car. The snow crackles. His heart is racing.

  He was preparing himself to die. Then something happened, and he’s still alive.

  It’s the Monte Carlo rally today. People all around. Alpine liquor. Holes don’t just appear in cars. Things don’t fall through their roofs from…

  The sky.

  He looks up like a shot. Of course, he can’t see anything. You can rarely see anything in the sky. With the exception of stars and the moon, and, in a few months’ time, the sun. Clouds. Aeroplanes. But not…

  He’s a common-sense kind of guy. There’s no such thing as UFOs.

  Then he remembers. It was a TV show. The documentary said it’s only a matter of time before a comet will strike the Earth. When that happens, it will cause a new Ice Age, because the dust that will be thrown up into the atmosphere will be enough to block out the sun. Everything will die.

  Except for him, it seems.

  Even so, it’s hard to imagine that someone sitting only half a metre west of the impact might survive while everybody further away perishes. Though there are no immediate signs of life, he is convinced that, somewhere in the village of Hurmevaara, someone is tucking in to a cold-meat sandwich right this minute.

  So it can’t be a comet.

  But it has to be something along those lines. He can’t remember the word. And it’s cold now. Neither the liquor nor the thought of death seem to warm him any longer.

  His phone should be in the zipped breast pocket of his jumpsuit, but it isn’t there. He set out to die, not to make telephone calls. All of a sudden the full force of his inebriation hits him.

  Where is the nearest house?

  He remembers.

  It’s three kilometres away. But that’s one house to which he will never return. The next one is a kilometre further.

  He sets off on foot. After walking a few hundred metres, he comes to a halt. He digs his hands into the snow, washes his face. It feels necessary. The snow-rinse aches, freezes his fingers, numbs his face. But it cleanses him, purifies him in some important way. He takes another few steps, then stops again.

  He turns, looks first at the car, then up at the sky.

  What was that?

  PART ONE

  THE SKY CAVES IN

  1

  ‘And do you know what happens then?’

  Throughout my time as pastor in the small parish of Hurmevaara – a year and seven months today – this same man has reserved every conversation slot that has become available. On the reservation slip he even writes that he specifically wants to talk to me, Pastor Joel Huhta. The reason for this is still unclear.

  The nature of these pastoral conversations remains the same, however. Only the angle changes.

  The man scratches his chin. The stubble is spread unevenly across his cheeks, and in some places is so thick that his fingers come to a halt. His eyes are blue and bright, but with no hint of joy. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the nature of the topics he raises, session after session.

  ‘I’m not a very good fortune-teller,’ I tell him.

  The man nods.

  ‘But the UN is,’ he says. ‘I’ve looked at their most recent report on population growth. The human population of the Earth is around 7.6 billion. By 2030 – so basically in no time at all – it’ll be 8.5 billion. In the middle of the century it will already have grown to 9.7 billion. And by the end of the century – what do you know? – there will be 11.2 billion of us. And this is only what they call a medium variant. “So what?” you might say…’

  I don’t say anything. Silence sighs through the parish building. We are in the south-eastern corner of the building, in a room with Venetian blinds drawn across the windows. Without looking outside I know that the late afternoon beyond the blinds is dark, and that there’s finally plenty of snow. The late arrival of winter and the as-yet-unfrozen waters of Lake Hurmevaara made me only a moment ago doubt my ability to read my diary. The room’s interior is austere, its low tables and thick rugs lending it an almost Japanese feel. Naturally we are sitting on chairs and not rugs, but there are only two of them and the room is about twenty square metres in size.

  ‘And what happens then?’ the man continues, his voice as bright and joyless as his eyes. ‘In Finland there might still be five and a half million of us, but what if there isn’t? The population of Africa is set to quadruple by the end of the century. Right now there are just over a billion people in Africa, and by the end of the century there will be four point five billion. That’s four times as many as now. At the same time there’s less water and not enough food to go round. Are people going to wait around until their hunger and thirst get even worse? The average African woman gives birth to about five children. Let’s imagine that by the end of the century one in five of them decides they’ve had enough of hunger, poverty, war and drought. One in five decides to up sticks or is sent away to make a living in better conditions. Let’s assume there’s an element of natural depletion and only one in ten leaves, then let’s assume only one in twenty makes it all the way. That’s a modest estimate. But still. If we take a slightly longer timeframe, let’s say until the end of the century, to bring in new generations, then we drop the number that make it all the way to Europe, by this point we’re only talking about two and a half percent of the four point five billion. How many people do you think that makes? One hundred and twelve and a half million. Where are we going to put them? Where will they settle? In what kind of conditions? And who’s going to agree to it all? That’s the equivalent of the 2015 immigrant crisis times a hundred and twelve. And that’s a low estimate, because it doesn’t factor in the millions and billions of people who will be born and die during that timeframe. It’s just a figure at a random point in the future, four point five billion. Plenty of things will happen along the way, as history tells us and as the future will show. People are always being born, dying, moving on, having children. Gifts from God.’

  The man looks me in the eye. He couldn’t possibly know. Of course he couldn’t. I haven’t told anybody. Anybody at all.

  ‘The Lord alone knows,’ he continues, ‘I’ve done my bit – before my divorce, mind. But that’s another story. I’m an engineer and I’ve got a thing for mathematics. I don’t daydream; I don’t make things up – I couldn’
t. I make calculations. Every one of them shows that the world is going to end.’

  Yes, apparently at the same time almost every afternoon, I think.

  ‘And,’ he continues, ‘if we live in a world that, according to all the demonstrable facts, is going to end – and pretty soon – then, well, there’s no hope.’

  I don’t know why the man visits me. One possibility is that he simply wants to bring me over to his point of view. It’s understandable; it’s human nature. Surrendering to the certain destruction awaiting us must be more pleasant in good company. By yourself everything seems bleaker and more difficult, and it appears the same applies to the end of the world. And when no one else will listen to you, the local pastor has a duty of care.

  ‘You can learn to hope,’ I say.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘One answer might be that we can use hope to help us do our best for others and ourselves.’

  ‘One answer?’

  ‘I don’t have all the answers.’

  ‘Soon I guess you’ll tell me God has all the answers.’

  ‘That depends a lot on how you see things. Our time here is almost up.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

  ‘I mean our session. It’s almost four o’clock.’

  ‘I was only just getting started.’

  ‘Everybody has the same amount of time,’ I say. ‘At these sessions,’ I add, to avoid confusion.

  The minute hand of the clock above the door edges across the number twelve, shudders, seems almost to flinch at the straightness of its own back. The hour hand is pointing to four. The man doesn’t move. There’s a question on his lips. I can see it before he opens his mouth.

  ‘What do you think about the meteorite?’ he asks.

  Six days. Six meteorite-filled days. Six days and nights during which the people in the village have spoken of nothing else. Meteorite this, meteorite that.