Little Siberia

by Antti Tuomainen

  ‘Maybe,’ the man answers eventually.

  His expression is impossible to read. We sit in silence for a moment.

  ‘If someone murdered your father, what would you do?’ he asks.

  ‘My father drowned,’ I say, deliberately ducking the question, trying to steer the conversation back to more neutral ground. ‘It happened years ago.’

  ‘Was he a sailor?’

  ‘He was a pastor.’

  The man thinks about this. ‘In the Orthodox church, priests don’t get married,’ he says. ‘And they don’t have children.’

  ‘I know that. Our practices are slightly different.’

  ‘It’s peculiar,’ he says. ‘But indeed, I see that’s a ring on your finger. So priests here can get married and have children?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As many as you like?’

  ‘There’s no strict limit.’

  ‘So you have a wife. Any children?’

  ‘No … I mean, we’re in the process of…’

  ‘Ah,’ the man sighs as though he has tasted something delicious. ‘You’re working on it. That’s the fun part. The final result, not so much – unless you like children. And if you like them, you naturally wouldn’t want anything bad to happen, either to them or to yourself. Or to the children’s mother.’

  From murder to infertility, and from there to a veiled threat. My attempts to steer the conversation haven’t turned out quite as I imagined. Not to mention that I’m sitting opposite a man who wants to take revenge on me for the death of his friend.

  ‘I wish to confess to something,’ he says. ‘I have killed three men.’

  The man’s expression is like cold, grey steel. I have no intention of telling him my duty of confidentiality doesn’t cover homicide.

  ‘Before now,’ he continues.

  The Redeemer shines on the wall. His right flank reflects the light streaming in from outside, angling the brightness towards me. I can’t hear a single sound.

  ‘You understand me,’ he says. ‘When I catch up with Grigori’s killer, I’ll … you know.’

  ‘I think I understand.’

  ‘I want to apologise.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For what I am about to do.’

  ‘In advance?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says and looks up at the ceiling. ‘From up there. From Him.’

  ‘I’m not sure it works like that,’ I reply.

  ‘Why not? If we feel remorse and ask for forgiveness of our sins, then we are forgiven. What difference does it make, the order we do things in? If sin is my lot and forgiveness is His, who am I to tell Him what to do?’

  I don’t know the answer to this, so I remain silent and wait. My heart is racing, like a sledgehammer pummelling a wall, almost breaking my ribs in the process.

  ‘Thank you for this,’ the man says suddenly.

  Our time is almost up. I struggle to retain my composure.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I say.

  ‘This was a good conversation. I think we understand each other.’

  The man stands up from the chair, careful not to bash his elbow in its sling. With his other hand he places the strap round his neck.

  ‘I hurt my arm,’ he explains. ‘Well, I should say I was assaulted. In a most egregious manner.’

  ‘That’s not … very nice.’

  A small, almost imperceptible smile creeps across the corner of his mouth. ‘He was lucky,’ says the man. ‘I hadn’t got serious yet.’

  You weren’t serious, I think to myself, but you hunted me with a knife, bellowing at the top of your voice. I wait for him to take a step towards the door, allowing the distance between us to grow. The man is almost at the door when he suddenly stops. He turns his head to face the wardrobe, the door of which is standing ajar.

  Can he see what I can see? The black sleeve of my coat, the flash of my red scarf sticking out of the cuff?

  I act quickly. The man is still standing with his back to me. I take a few sideways steps towards the wall and reach for the copper and brass cross hanging there. It is heavy, sharp at the edges. My fingers clench round the base of the cross, and it rests in my hands like a baseball bat. The man begins to turn; I pull the cross from behind my back.

  He is standing by the door, looking at me from across the room. The light is coming from behind me.

  ‘I almost forgot,’ he says.

  I wait.

  ‘My name is Leonid.’

  13

  Day slowly wanes behind the trees, eventually freezing on the horizon. The room, which only a moment ago was so bright, has become dim. Nothing looks as focussed, as sharply defined as it did a few hours ago. The gradually descending darkness softens the contours, deepens the shadows.

  The Redeemer is on the wall again. He’s not glowing now; his flank no longer reflects the fading beams. He looks tired. His face is angled downwards, cast in shadow.

  Over the course of the day I have led two pastoral sessions and one meeting, the latter on the telephone. My superior in Joensuu reminded me of our upcoming professional-development seminar – his words, not mine – and encouraged me to consider whether there were any particular challenges or factors in my work that have taken me by surprise. I promised to give it some thought and he asked me to make a list that, with regard to our limited resource dynamics, would help us prioritise our strategy focus. So far I haven’t put pen to paper.

  My pastoral sessions were fairly routine. People’s problems are often very similar, with some small variations; life is hard and sometimes feels senseless. But as I have observed over the years, listening is a privilege. For the duration of our conversations I don’t have time to think about my own problems. But after each session I realise I’ve learned more about myself, and I feel more grateful, either for my life in general or for something specific.

  But I mean this in the most general sense.

  Today things feel completely different, or, rather, I feel different from how I felt this morning.

  The church office is empty. Pirkko has gone home, locking the front door behind her. I sit in an armchair and try to put the jigsaw together.

  I can’t help looking back at the cross on the wall. When under threat, I’d grabbed it. I wasn’t afraid, I was ready – for what, I don’t know. Perhaps for anything. I remember my emotions upon returning home early this morning: hope, something clear, bright. Then everything went black, very quickly. I try to make things out, to differentiate things from one another, when I hear a surprising voice in my mind. Leonid’s voice.

  He was my father, though he was not.

  There is Krista and there is the meteorite.

  I can’t begin to think that Krista is involved with the latter. It’s simply not possible. Krista is … just pregnant, that’s all. Saying it to myself is perhaps all I can manage right now, and that too feels like a lot. It is a lot. She is carrying a child inside her; she calls me the child’s father. And no matter how bleak or paranoid my perspective on the matter is, from Krista’s point of view she is giving me the greatest gift imaginable. As I’ve thought before, ‘conflicted’ seems the smallest, most inadequate of words. I glance again at the phone from which I sent her a message. No answer.

  The room darkens further as the sun finally disappears behind the trees. As though the spruces have grown metres in a matter of minutes. Beneath the cross, the brick wall loses its contours, becomes an even, light surface.

  Then there’s the meteorite.

  The meteorite will be in the War Museum for a further two nights.

  The list of people keen to get their hands on it seems to grow as time runs out. As for Leonid, I am in no doubt. He wants the meteorite. Karoliina wants the meteorite and is apparently willing to collaborate with me – the guard on the night shift – to get it. Leonid is in love with Karoliina, a matter that raises a number of questions.

  Is Karoliina employing Leonid’s help in order to achieve her goal? If she is, why does she want to
involve me in her plans? And if she isn’t, why has she started a relationship with a man for whom she feels no attraction? I well remember Karoliina trying to avoid his touch, how she quickly and very thoroughly wiped her face after Leonid’s kisses. Be that as it may, there’s something between them, and both are interested in the heavenly body currently residing in the War Museum.

  As for the compiler – or compilers – of the threatening letter, I don’t know. I think of the quartet of Jokinen, Turunmaa, Räystäinen and Himanka, and I can imagine each one of them in the museum that night, but I can’t get a closer grip on them, and even after reading the letter several times I can’t find anything in the writing or the manner of delivery that points directly to any of them. I feel as though I know them too well to think of them as my pursuers, and too little to know what really moves and motivates them. Of course, the same applies to everyone I know, including my own wife. I don’t even know the people I know.

  Two more nights.

  I have been threatened, asked to stay away from the museum. In so many words, I have been guaranteed that the meteorite will be stolen, one way or another. Everything will happen either tonight or tomorrow night. And right there and then a thought enters my mind for the first time: I am about to be a father; I could be in danger. Strictly speaking that was two thoughts, but they are linked, they are one.

  I feel something unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Perhaps it is mercy. Perhaps it is the gift that Krista is about to give me, to give us. Perhaps they too are one and the same.

  The room is almost dark by now. I look up at the cross on the wall. It’s almost as though the Son of God has raised his head slightly.

  I stand up and I know what it is I have to do.

  Hurmevaara.

  One main road, a few smaller roads leading off it and dozens of twisting pathways that all lead deeper into the endless forests and stop either at a dead-end or a wall of spruce trees, or become narrower and narrower as they wind their way to the garden of an abandoned cottage somewhere. Inhabitants: just over a thousand. The first snowfall is in November and the snow melts for good in May. Summer always takes people by surprise – almost blinding the eyes, burning the skin, it gleams for a month or two, then disappears. And we return to the darkness. On a dark winter’s evening, it can sometimes feel as though summer is an instance of faith. Nothing around us indicates that something like that could ever come into being or has ever existed.

  And still we carry on. In the dark, often far away from where we began.

  I walk along one of these narrow lanes, and I’m not sure why I’ve started thinking things like this. Maybe part of the reason is that I’ve been thinking – perhaps subconsciously, without putting it into words – for the last few days that something like this couldn’t possibly happen anywhere else. But it isn’t true. We carry ourselves wherever we go, and wherever we end up we carry our deeds – and the consequences of those deeds.

  The television is on in the living room. Krista is in the kitchen. In an American legal drama, lawyers are talking to an empty sofa. I take the remote control from the coffee table and switch the TV off. A moment later I hear Krista’s voice.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she calls through.

  ‘Hello,’ I say to my reflection in the living-room window.

  Krista has raised her sore leg up and is sitting diagonally at the kitchen table. She is making a lingonberry pie, her fingers gleaming as if they’ve been dipped in blood. She smiles and, in that way she has, looks up as if about to give a trusting kiss, a warm embrace. Her lips are soft and familiar.

  ‘Good day?’ she asks as I walk round the table and pull out a chair.

  ‘Up and down,’ I say and sit down. At the other end of the table is a box of Belgian chocolates. ‘But I’m still alive. What about you, how’s your day been?’

  ‘I translated ten pages,’ she says, placing lingonberries evenly at the bottom of a cake tin. ‘And went through the editor’s comments on another manuscript. I don’t envy their work. I can hardly imagine anything worse than having to read the same manuscript – not even a book, but a manuscript with all its flaws and mistakes – four or five times. Whose brain could cope with that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘We’re all different.’

  ‘And when I talk to editors, they say they get sent hundreds of new manuscripts, thousands, and you’re supposed to read them all while going through the fifth round of editing with another twenty authors. If I were a publishing editor, I’d end up going through phases of hating all writing, books, literature in general.’

  ‘Maybe sometimes we all hate the things we love the most.’

  Krista stops, her hands in the air, lingonberry juice dripping gruesomely from her fingers. Maybe it was the way I spoke, maybe my tone of voice. We look each other in the eyes. It has taken seven years to reach this point, I think, to confront my wife here and now and do what I have to do.

  Because this isn’t about me. Not even this time.

  Despite what some people seem to imagine these days, life and the world don’t owe me anything. Quite the opposite; it’s my duty to give both of them what I can, to do my best.

  ‘Krista, I need to apologise to you.’

  This isn’t about feelings; it’s about deeds. Feelings don’t always tell us how things really are, about what we should do or what would be wisest. Not to mention that we all feel something at any given moment. If Beethoven, Henry Ford and Josephine Cochrane had spent all day thinking about their feelings, we wouldn’t have symphonies, cars or dishwashers.

  It doesn’t matter how jealous I am, how hurt, how angry, how vengeful, how desperate.

  This is how I will be judged.

  Krista is quiet as I start telling my story from the beginning. Some of it she has already heard, some she has not, but now I am going to tell her everything exactly the way it happened. I begin in the baking heat of Afghanistan. I am admitted to the field hospital and am flown home. On arrival back home I have to spend more time in hospital. I explain that each subsequent operation is both a success and a failure. A success in that they keep me alive and fully mobile. A failure in that…

  ‘Krista, the fact is I cannot have children.’

  Those green eyes whose gleam I once fell in love with – they look at me in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. For some reason I had prepared myself for a more stereotypical scenario, in which Krista’s mouth dropped open, she gasped for breath and her eyes widened to the size of saucers.

  But none of that happens.

  Krista looks at me steadily, sharply. Instead of her eyes widening, she in fact slightly squints, presumably to see better. Her mouth remains shut, the neutral expression on her face tightens. She leans forwards, tilts her head slightly to one side, looks at me more intensely from beneath her eyelashes. I can’t read her expression. It might be one I’ve never seen before.

  The moment is both long and short.

  Long if you consider everything that flashes through my mind, though in reality it probably lasts only a few seconds. I have time to think that I have said what I came to say and that now I am free of my burden. I think of the future, which of course is wholly absurd. I don’t know what is going to happen, but I imagine I will survive, one way or another – Krista packing her bags and leaving or telling me to pack my bags and move out. I will survive Krista flying into a rage or falling silent or not wanting to believe me. I can easily produce reams of doctor’s reports; to me they read more like prison sentences than health assessments.

  I think about what I’ll do in the event that nothing happens, in a scenario in which Krista just carries on making her lingonberry pie, and we talk about doing the shopping, watching a movie, going skiing or visiting relatives.

  Krista’s expression darkens further. She looks at me with such weight, such presence, that I have to look away. Her hands have moved slightly, her fingers groping for the edge of the cake tin, holding it in place on the surface of the table.
Either that or the tin is keeping her hands steady. The small diamonds in her engagement ring sparkle. Outside it’s twenty-three degrees below freezing and already completely dark; I know without looking. The lamp hanging above the kitchen table is reflected in the window.

  It seems that the turning points in our lives are always associated with a strange combination of the banal and the extraordinary, like watching a spaceship land in a perfectly everyday landscape. Like this moment right now: a January evening, a lingonberry pie, chit-chat about everyday things and the small matter of a confession that changes everything.

  Krista leans slightly forwards. I assume she wants to talk, and I take the movement as a signal, an invitation. I lean towards her, our faces are at most a metre apart. Still she says nothing. On the other hand, only a few seconds have passed since my revelation, my confession that will change the course of our lives. Perhaps she’s choosing her words, forming a question. She must have at least one of them.

  But she has no questions.

  She has an answer.

  Krista promptly vomits over the lingonberry pie, quickly, in bubbles, almost like letting a small animal out of a cage. She tries to stand up from the table, but her sore leg thuds against the floor. She winces with pain and another mouthful of sick bubbles up, this time onto the floor. She supports herself against the table. By now I am on my feet, walking round the table. I lift her beneath the arms, tell her I will carry her to the bathroom.

  ‘The pregnancy…’ she stammers. ‘The pregnancy…’

  Of course, I think as I haul us both towards the toilet. Morning sickness. We reach the bathroom door. I open it, and help her to kneel in front of the toilet. From there onwards she’s on her own, and that is how she wants it. She gestures me out of the room, letting out a series of deep moans and groans. I back away and watch to make sure she really is fine, the vomiting notwithstanding.

  Eventually I close the bathroom door and stand in the hallway for a moment. That’s no use to anybody. I return to the kitchen and start cleaning up. In a few minutes the rubbish bin is full, the liner tied up and ready to be taken away. I hear the sound of Krista retching in the bathroom. The sound tears my heart from my breast.