The Mine

by Antti Tuomainen

  Opposite the main door of the apartment block was one of the entrances to the shopping mall; judging by the direction the woman was taking, by her opened jacket and the shopping bag in her hand, Emil could see that she was on her way home from the supermarket. As she approached the door of the apartment block, pulled the key out of her bag and pressed it into the lock, Emil walked up from the side and decisively gripped the door’s long handle.

  ‘Let me help you,’ he said in a warm, polite voice.

  The woman looked up and for no more than a second let go of the key ring. Emil opened the door and handed her a bunch of keys, a different one. The woman didn’t notice the switch – who would expect a thing like that from a polite, elderly gentleman on a normal evening? She pushed the keys Emil had given her into her pocket and hurried towards the lift. Emil followed her, showed the magnetic card he’d just acquired to the reader and activated the panel of buttons, all the while making sure the keys were hidden in his fist.

  ‘And you were going to…?’ he asked the woman.

  ‘Eight, thanks,’ she replied.

  ‘I’m going up to twelve,’ he said and pressed both buttons.

  They didn’t speak on the way up.

  The woman got out on the eighth floor. Emil continued up to the twelfth. When the lift came to a halt, Emil immediately pressed the button to close the doors and took the lift up to the top floor. He glanced at his watch. A quarter past eight. Perfect timing. The man would be having his first soak.

  He stepped out of the lift and listened intently. The sauna was on his left. He walked up to the grey, metallic door and held the magnetic card up to the reader. The lock opened with a pleasantly soft click. He pushed the door ajar and listened again. The sounds of water being thrown on the stove.

  He took off his shoes in the doorway. He did this quickly, but there was nothing panicked about his movements. He knew how much time he had. He knew that, right about now, the woman would realise she had the wrong keys and that she couldn’t get into her apartment. If she lived with someone else, she would ring the doorbell and get in that way, after which it would take her a few minutes more to realise quite what had happened and draw conclusions. If she lived by herself or there was nobody at home, it would take her the same amount of time to call the caretaker and have somebody with the master key meet her at the door.

  Emil had heard right: sauna, shower, steam room, behind the door to the right. To the left a panoramic terrace running the length of the building. By searching under the name of the housing association he’d acquired floor plans of the different storeys, long explanations of the building work, complete with structural information, wind calculations and locking systems, and – more importantly – the housing association’s own website with a list of sauna slots, which residents could conveniently book online.

  He opened the balcony door. A cold wind blew in from the south, perhaps all the way from Tallinn. The foyer was filled with perfect, almost enticingly cool air. Emil turned the handle of the door into the showers, and the door swung open by itself. He moved out to the balcony, hid among the shadows and waited.

  He heard the sound of the steam-room door opening. The slap of wet footsteps making their way across the tiled floor in the shower. Then the footsteps stopped. Emil waited. The footsteps slapped across the entrance hall and made their way out to the balcony. Even from behind the man was easily recognisable. A towel wrapped round his waist, his skin steaming in the chill of the air, the man stepped towards the balcony railing.

  Emil moved quickly. His thick, soft socks with non-slip rubber patches were silent and gave him a firm grip.

  In any profession it is possible to reach a level at which any possible eventuality can be used to your advantage. Everything can be turned into energy, a forward motion. Every movement, whatever its original direction, can be put to use. It is this quality that differentiates the professional from even the most ambitious amateur. A professional sees energy everywhere, allows it to flow, makes use of it.

  The man was about to lower his hands to the railing. Emil registered even the smallest movement. The man’s final step was firm, its direction was right: his body already slightly hunched forward over the railing, his weight moving to the front. All Emil had to do was continue the motion, to give that shift of bodyweight added impetus and lift. Emil’s right hand took a firm grip of the towel, while he pushed his left hand beneath the man’s arm to lift him and, of course, prevent him turning round.

  Their movements were identical and simultaneous, like a dance in which the bodies of two experienced performers become one, and in which one plus one is more than two. The movement was full of power and synchronised rhythm – Emil’s lift and shove so perfectly timed that the man’s feet were off the ground before his brain registered what had happened. By that point it was too late.

  The man crossed the railing gracefully, his left foot striking the steel before he disappeared into the starry winter’s night. Emil returned indoors, pulled on his shoes, took the lift down to the basement, found the front door almost immediately and stepped outside.

  He dropped the woman’s set of keys into a nearby rubbish bin.

  Only once he was in the metro did he take off his gloves.

  15

  Emil had already been awake for several hours. He had done his exercise routine – a combination of yoga, old-school circuit training and T’ai chi – eaten breakfast and was sitting, reading a book by the time his son called.

  ‘I hope I can help,’ said Emil, realising he was injecting a note of caution in his voice. ‘I don’t want to give you advice, but I’m happy to talk about my views and experiences, if I have any.’

  ‘Like I said yesterday,’ his son began, ‘I think you are sufficiently neutral and, on the other hand…’

  Sufficiently neutral?

  ‘Anyway,’ said his son, seeming to change the subject, ‘I’m in a bit of an awkward situation. I thought you might have some thoughts on the subject, given your age and the fact that you’ve made decisions in your life that have had certain ramifications.’

  ‘Has something happened?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ his son replied, then in a quieter voice. ‘Not yet.’

  Emil waited.

  ‘And I get the impression you’re quite a work-oriented person too,’ said his son.

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Work is important to you.’

  ‘Very important indeed.’

  ‘Looking back, have you ever regretted the amount of time you’ve spent working – the sacrifices you’ve had to make for your work?’

  ‘There was no alternative.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Can I ask you what this is all about?’

  ‘It’s about the story I’m following.’

  Just as work makes us something, it takes us away from other things. The thought appeared by itself.

  ‘What would you do without it?’ asked Emil.

  ‘Without what?’

  ‘Your work.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never even considered it. I can’t imagine life without it … without this.’

  His throat suddenly felt rough. Emil tried to swallow, make it go away.

  ‘One decision leads to another,’ he said. ‘And options are eliminated one by one. In the end we all do what we have chosen, and we do it as well as we can for as long as we can.’

  Who is he talking to?

  His son was silent for a moment.

  ‘I guess that kind of makes sense,’ said his son. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  Emil didn’t have a chance to respond.

  16

  Did I really call him to ask for advice? No, surely not. Perhaps I already knew what to do. I took the escalator from the metro platform up to ground level and walked the couple of hundred metres to the paper’s editorial office. The sun was shining, the city rose victorious from the snow, ploughs rattled across the square, the cobblestones dru
mming frantically beneath them.

  I said hello to Pohjanheimo and the others but didn’t go to my desk. Hutrila was in his office. I asked if he had a moment.

  ‘A moment is all you’re going to get,’ he said.

  ‘The story needs a lot of work,’ I said. ‘But it’s getting there.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘And there’s something else.’

  Hutrila leaned back slightly, placed his fingers on the edge of the desk.

  ‘I thought I could transfer to the culture section or the food pages.’

  Hutrila stared at me, holding the edge of the desk to keep from tipping backwards.

  ‘Have you had threats?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘People at home getting frightened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Comes with the territory,’ he said bluntly.

  ‘I’m sure it does,’ I said. ‘It might be perfectly normal – par for the course. But right now I can’t deal with it. I need to find something else.’

  ‘You’ve thought this through, have you?’

  ‘All the way through,’ I said.

  ‘You know how complicated these internal transfers are,’ said Hutrila. ‘If I organise a transfer, there’s no changing your mind. You’ll go where I put you; you’ll stay there, do your job as well as you can and never bother me about this again.’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘Everybody wants to do film reviews,’ said Hutrila. ‘Everybody except the people who have to do it for a living.’

  ‘I don’t want to barge my way on to the film team.’

  ‘There are no positions available there anyway,’ said Hutrila and ran his fingers along the edge of the desk. ‘I was thinking more of the celebrity pages.’

  ‘The gossip columns,’ I sighed.

  ‘They are very newsworthy columns.’

  ‘They’re pointless.’

  ‘They are some of our most popular pages.’

  ‘Because people are idiots.’

  ‘You came into my office.’

  That at least was true. And people weren’t idiots. I was. I had been. Not any longer.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘You start tomorrow. I’ll let Tanja know to expect company. Are you working on anything apart from the mining story?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Finish it, send it to me. I’ll assign a reporter and you can hand over the material.’

  I was about to walk out of the office when Hutrila spoke again. ‘About the mining story…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you really want to give it up? You’ve got insider information, a source; you’ve visited the site; you’ve got Lehtinen’s paperwork and God knows what else.’

  This was the very question I’d feared.

  At that moment I realised with the utmost clarity why I’d called my father: to hear the voice of a man who had lost everything.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ I said.

  Hutrila pursed his lips, shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know about the best,’ he said. ‘But it’s your decision.’

  17

  At first Pauliina wouldn’t believe me. When I finally managed to convince her, her voice changed. It wasn’t exactly warm or loving, but at least it was polite.

  We agreed I would pick up Ella from nursery. Pauliina could work late at the office, try to catch up on outstanding work. I put the phone down and saw the box containing Lehtinen’s papers. A twinge ran the length of my body. I tried to convince myself I’d made the right decision. Who would Hutrila assign to the case? As my eyes scanned the open-plan office, I realised what I was doing. The matter didn’t concern me any longer. But the hope that this thought would bring me a sense of relief was futile. In only a few seconds I had lost the certainty I’d had when I’d stepped into Hutrila’s office.

  For want of something to do, I stood up and walked from one end of the room to the other. Tanja Korhonen was sitting at her computer with headphones in her ears. I tapped her golden-brown shoulder.

  ‘Hutrila already mailed me,’ she said once she’d spun round. ‘Great to have someone else on the team. You wouldn’t believe how much work there is here.’

  ‘I could do something,’ I said. ‘While I’m waiting to see who Hutrila is going to put on the mining story. I’ll brief the new reporter, then I’ll be done with it.’

  ‘You know what twerking is, right?’

  Tanja pointed at her screen and clicked open a video. The music video showed curvaceous black women shaking their behinds, together and individually. Shaking, writhing, gyrating. Close-ups of round, oiled buttocks. Four and a half minutes of quivering, wiggling, jiggling, bottoms.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘For the online edition we need to come up with something interactive, something like “Finland’s best twerkers”, or just, “Can you twerk”.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll write up the actual piece. You can do the online poll.’

  ‘“Can you twerk”? Really?’

  ‘Something like that. And something about how to do it properly. You know, actual instructions. You’ll probably find the basics online – like dance steps, but for twerking.’

  ‘The ABC of Twerking?’

  ‘Excellent,’ Tanja giggled. ‘It’s going to be great doing this together.’

  I went back to my desk and sat down. My foot knocked against the box of Lehtinen’s papers. It was all I could do not to look at it.

  I fetched Ella at four-thirty. The snow crunched beneath our feet as we walked home. The pavement had been recently ploughed. The pure-white verge of snow to our right was twice as tall as Ella in her red woolly hat. Once we got back home I made some food and we sat down to eat. Ella ate quickly, slid down from her chair and disappeared into the living room. I didn’t open the newspaper, didn’t so much as glance at the news applications on my phone.

  I’d made my decision quickly and in a whirl of guilt. I’d made the decision the way people do when they want to move on to life after their decision, whatever the cost. If you’re feeling like that, it doesn’t matter whether the choice you make is a good or a bad one. And so I tried to avoid anything that might cause me to regret what I had done and focussed only on things that made it feel right.

  One of those things was playing in the living room. I escaped in there after her and understood perfectly well what I was doing: taking cover behind a two-year-old.

  At some point in the evening I called my mother. We asked each other how things were going. As I did every time she asked, I told her we were all fine, that Ella was playing right here and sends Grandma a big kiss. For a moment the line was silent.

  ‘I read your blog,’ she said eventually. And then, almost without a pause: ‘And it seems you’ve met your father.’

  My mother’s tone was straightforward; all it suggested was that she was interested. I was taken aback. I hadn’t imagined that the matter of my father could be uncomplicated to her. Having said that, neither of us had mentioned the subject in years.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ I said. ‘A few times. We went for a beer and had lunch together.’

  ‘How did you feel about it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. There was something about my mother’s voice and her way of approaching the matter that took me completely by surprise. ‘I suppose that’s why I called, to ask whether you’d met him too.’

  ‘Yes, of course. He contacted me and we met up.’

  Of course?

  ‘He seems quite…’ I began and fumbled for the right words. ‘He seems like quite an average man.’

  My mother said nothing.

  I went through what I knew so far: my father had lived in Berlin for a long time, where he worked as a consultant for numerous human resources companies. Now he wanted to retire and settle down in Helsinki. I didn’t ask her what it felt like to see her former husband after a thirty-year gap. Some subjects were so enormous that they wer
e nobody else’s business. But there was one question I still wanted to ask.

  ‘When he left Helsinki all those years ago, did it happen out of the blue?’

  For a moment my mother remained silent.

  ‘Ultimately I wasn’t very surprised.’

  Pauliina came home at eight-fifteen that evening. She got Ella ready for bed and read her a story until she fell asleep. I heard Pauliina shutting Ella’s bedroom door and going into the kitchen. I found her opening up her laptop at the kitchen table.

  ‘I’ll cook on Saturday evening,’ I said.

  Pauliina looked up. ‘Great. The Ruusuvuoris are coming at seven.’

  I leaned against the draining board.

  ‘I wrote a piece about twerking today,’ I said.

  ‘But you were able to spend all evening with your daughter. It’s called being an adult. You give something up, you get something new.’

  What have you ever given up? And to get what exactly?

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ I said and thought how this encapsulated the age in which we lived: wiggle your arse, or churn out column inches about those who do.

  The kitchen was quiet. Upstairs someone was tenderising a steak or something else that required a heavy fist. Pauliina tossed her hair, as though she was washing it in the air. The warmth I’d felt towards her that afternoon was gone.

  ‘What’s more,’ she began and pointed to a cupboard to my left, ‘when I go looking for the mixing bowl I use for cooking, now I’ll actually find it and not a box of papers.’

  Pauliina had gone to bed. At least, she’d gone into the bedroom, which was essentially the same thing. Ella’s birth had meant crossing a line into a reality in which the bedroom was only somewhere that we slept. Sex was a thing of the past; so too the long, night-time conversations; and we could only dream of lying in bed reading. Once our heads touched the pillow, the game was over. The object of our passions was no longer the other’s naked body but the chance to lose consciousness for as long as possible.