The Howling Miller

by Arto Paasilinna

  ‘No. I really do have to go. I shouldn’t have come at all. Who knows if somebody hasn’t see me, anyway.’

  Huttunen put his hand on the horticulture adviser’s shoulder. She stayed in the tent.

  * * *

  What was it that was so calm and reassuring about this man that you couldn’t tear yourself away from him? Sanelma Käyrämö had no desire to leave. She would gladly have stayed all day in that cool, white shelter, even all night. She thought to herself that as a rule she was terrified of mad people, but not this one. Gunnar had powers of seduction for which there was no rational explanation.

  ‘It would be awful if they came and took you off to Oulu.’

  ‘I am not as mad as all that.’

  The horticulture adviser said nothing. In her opinion, Gunnar Huttunen was easily mad enough to be committed to Oulu. She had heard enough conversations about ‘that lunatic Kunnari’. If only they could be completely alone, and no one ever see them! Gunnar Huttunen’s fits of madness struck a chord with the horticulture adviser; she almost found them funny; she certainly didn’t blame him for them. What can you do about the way your brain works? The villagers just didn’t understand him, that was all.

  Sanelma Käyrämö began imagining them getting married. Gunnar would lead her to the altar: they’d have the ceremony in the canton’s old church: the new one was too big and gloomy. Saint Michael’s Day would be a good date for the wedding. She didn’t have enough time to make a dress for Midsummer. Gunnar would have to get a dark suit made as well; it could do for funerals afterwards. So. A Midsummer wedding, and then the baby born next spring, which would be perfect timing. Spring babies are adorable, and vegetable juice in summer is an ideal supplement to their milk. By this point, the horticulture adviser was thinking of her baby as a sweet little pink-cheeked girl.

  All three of them would live in the tiny mill house. The baby would fall asleep at night, lulled by the murmuring of the stream. She would never cry, and Gunnar would sometimes put her to bed himself. Her little cot, made by the miller, would be a shiny, bright blue. Sanelma could bring the curtains and the grained birch dresser from the Siponens’ attic room to start off with. They’d have to put up a flower-shaped wall light in the parlour and arrange wicker armchairs for four beneath it. Or for two, at least. They’d put the radio on the windowsill so that people could see it from outside. The bedroom had to have a double bed with bedside tables either side. One with a mirror. As the young lady of the house, she would sweep the floors and beat the carpets every week. They would buy a rattle from Tervola’s. Sometimes the whole family would go shopping; Gunnar would push the pram on the way there, and if he stayed to have a pilsner and talk business afterwards, that would be fine. She could walk back some of the way with the schoolteacher’s wife.

  No, it was all impossible. If she didn’t leave this tent soon, she’d have a baby, the mad child of a mad man. And yet still the horticulture adviser couldn’t bring herself to go. She lay in the sweet-smelling tent with the miller all Sunday until evening. They were happy, talking about this and that, holding hands; Huttunen stroked her calves. It was only when the evening grew cooler that the miller walked the adviser back to the main road, from where she rode off on her bicycle to the Siponens. Deep in thought, he walked off in the opposite direction towards the Suukoski rapids.

  That was a good day. Oh, how I love the adviser!

  The setting sun bathed the mill in such a beautiful blaze of light that the miller wanted to howl with all his might, giving voice to all the joy and love in his heart. But then he remembered Sanelma had insisted he go and see Dr Ervinen. He pumped up the back tyre of his bike and hopped on. It was almost eleven, but the miller was not sleepy.

  CHAPTER 10

  Ervinen lived in an old wooden house opposite the churchyard at the end of a long avenue of birch trees. He had his medical practice and bachelor flat under the one roof. When Huttunen knocked on his front door, the doctor opened in person. He was a thin, vigorous man in his fifties. As befitted the late hour, he was wearing a smoking jacket and slippers.

  ‘Hello, Doctor. I’ve come for a consultation,’ said Huttunen.

  Ervinen showed his patient in. The miller looked around the room, the walls of which were hung with numerous hunting scenes. Above the mantelpiece, there were stuffed animal heads, and animal skins covered the walls and floor. The predominant smell was of pipe smoke. Soberly masculine, the room served as lounge, library and dining room simultaneously. The housework clearly hadn’t been done for a long time, but Huttunen found it an inviting set-up.

  Stroking an elk skin spread out in front of the armchair in which he had sat down, the miller asked the doctor if he’d shot all the animals whose hides were displayed in such profusion.

  ‘I killed the better part of them myself, but there are some trophies that have come down to me from my late father. This lynx here, for example, and that pine marten on the mantelpiece. Hard to find them these days, they’re fairly rare now. I’ve mainly shot birds up here in the north. And of course I’ve shot foxes and a few elk with the council secretary.’

  His voice catching with passion, Ervinen described how once during the war he had bagged almost thirty elk with his major in East Karelia. Ervinen was a battalion doctor at the time, so could move around pretty much at will. He had done plenty of fishing too, with prolific results.

  ‘On the Äänättijoki, Major Kaarakka and I once caught sixteen salmon!’

  Huttunen said that, speaking for himself, he’d caught a fair few trout and grayling in the millstream last autumn. Did the doctor know how well stocked the streams were, especially the upper reaches?

  Ervinen began pacing up and down the room with excitement. He rarely had the chance to talk about hunting and fishing with someone who knew anything about it, and all the signs were that the miller was a master of these arts. Ervinen exclaimed that it was a damn shame that the Isohaara dam had been built across the mouth of the Kemijoki so you didn’t get salmon swimming upstream to spawn anymore. It would be extremely agreeable landing a salmon in one’s net and grilling it over a fire on the riverbank. But the nation needed electricity. And when a choice had to be made between a lesser evil and a greater good, it was the latter that necessarily prevailed.

  Ervinen took two stemmed glasses out of the corner sideboard and filled them with a transparent liquid. Bringing his glass to his lips, Huttunen realised the concoction was rectified spirit. It burned every inch of the way down his long throat, boring a path to the pit of his stomach where it gently lapped back and forth, a pool of fire. He was instantly suffused with a feeling of profound wellbeing and respectful camaraderie for the doctor, who was now talking about hare coursing and the ideal dogs for that sport. After this he showed Huttunen his collection of hunting rifles that covered an entire wall: a Japanese army rifle converted into a heavy hunting rifle; a Sako rifle; what’s known as a parlour rifle; and two shotguns.

  ‘I’ve only got a single-barrelled Russian shotgun myself,’ Huttunen said modestly. ‘But I’m thinking of getting a rifle this autumn. I’ve already been to the chief to ask for a permit, in fact, last winter, but he turned me down. He said he should’ve already come and collected my shotgun as it was, whatever that meant. But I’m more of a fisherman really.’

  Ervinen hung his weapons back on the wall. Then he drained his glass and, in a more official tone of voice, inquired, ‘So what seems to be our miller’s problem?’

  ‘The thing is, people say I’m a bit d-disturbed … Who knows really.’

  Ervinen sat in a rocking chair covered with a bearskin and studied Huttunen awhile. Then he nodded benevolently and said, ‘There is something in what they say. I’m only a GP but I don’t think I’d be too far off the mark if I diagnosed you as depressive.’

  Huttunen felt ill at ease. He found it acutely embarrassing talking about these things. He knew that he wasn’t completely normal, and he was happy to admit it; he’d always known. But he was damned
if it had anything to do with anyone else. Depressive … maybe that’s what he was. Depressive. Then what?

  ‘Are there pills for this sort of illness? Can the doctor prescribe me some so everyone in the village will calm down?’

  This was a very affecting case he had here, Ervinen thought. A man of the people afflicted by a congenital nervous illness, benign, certainly, but pronounced. What could he do for him? Nothing. A man like that should marry and forget the whole thing. But where was a madman going to find a wife? Women were scared enough of a man that tall as it was.

  ‘I’d like to ask as a doctor … Is it true that you’re in the habit of howling at night, especially in winter?’

  ‘I did have to whine a bit last winter, yes,’ Huttunen admitted, ashamed.

  ‘And what is it that makes our miller groan like that? Is it an obsession, such that you can’t do anything else except howl?’

  Huttunen wished he were somewhere else, but when Ervinen repeated the question, he had to give an answer.

  ‘It … it comes out automatically. First I have a sort of need to shout. My head feels tight, and then it has to come out, very loud. It’s not completely out of control, it’s just something that comes over me when I’m on my own. It’s always a relief afterwards. A few howls are enough.’

  Ervinen turned the conversation to Huttunen’s propensity to imitate animals and people. Where did this come from? What did this behaviour mean to the miller?

  ‘I just feel so perky sometimes that I want to lark around, but it often gets out of hand, I’m sure. Most of the time I’m quite gloomy. I don’t do those imitations very often.’

  ‘And when you’re in a black mood, you have the urge to howl,’ Ervinen put in incisively.

  ‘Yes, at those times, it helps.’

  ‘Do you ever talk to yourself?’

  ‘When I’m in a good mood, sometimes I chat away about this and that,’ Huttunen admitted.

  Ervinen went to the corner cupboard and took out a little bottle, which he handed to the miller. He said it contained pills, which Huttunen could take when he felt very depressed, but he had to be careful not to take too many. One a day was enough.

  ‘They’re from the war. It’s not actually legal to make them anymore. They’ll definitely do the trick, but you must only take them if you feel really bad. Only if you really feel you’re on the brink of howling.’

  Huttunen put the bottle in his pocket and stood up to leave. But Ervinen said he had no plans to go to bed yet; his guest could have another drink if he liked. He poured the miller a hefty shot of rectified spirit, and then refilled his own glass.

  The men drank in silence. Then Ervinen resumed talking about hunting. He described going to Turtola with two keeshonds late one winter before the wars. They had gone to hunt bear, which still spent the winter in Turtola in those days. Ervinen had hired a local man as a guide. The fellow had taken him with his horse along a forest track to a circle drawn in the snow around the bear’s lair. They’d left the horse half a mile away and skied back with the dogs on the leash.

  ‘It’s incredible how exciting one’s first bear hunt can be. It’s more exhilarating than going into battle.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Huttunen, drinking a mouthful of spirits.

  Ervinen topped up their glasses before continuing.

  ‘I had really fantastic dogs. The minute they caught the scent of the bear’s lair, they flew at it! Snow went flying as they charged in, like this!’

  Ervinen went down on all fours on the carpet to imitate the hunting dogs attacking the bear asleep in its den.

  ‘At that point, the damn bear came dashing out. It didn’t have a choice. The dogs immediately leapt on its haunches, like this!’

  Growling furiously, Ervinen sunk his teeth into the hindquarters of the bearskin draped over the rocking chair, sending it flying. He dragged the hide across the floor, his mouth full of fur.

  ‘Couldn’t shoot, might hit the dogs.’

  With mounting excitement, the doctor spat out some bear fur, refilled their glasses in a blink of an eye and went on with his story. He imitated the dogs and the bear at bay by turns, throwing himself into his performance with such ardour that he was soon bathed in sweat. When he finally managed to kill the bear, he reached down into its throat and symbolically cut out its tongue at the base and flung it to the dogs – so brutally that the ashtray spilled over on the table, but the hunter didn’t care. He plunged his knife into the bear’s chest, staining the snow with the king of the forests’ blood, and bent down over the imaginary carcass to drink the beast’s warm blood, but as there wasn’t any in reality, he tossed a glass of rectified spirit down the hatch instead. Finally he got to his feet and, purple in the face, went and sat in the rocking chair.

  The scene had made such a strong impression on Huttunen that he couldn’t control himself any longer and leapt out of his chair to imitate a crane.

  ‘The other summer at Posio I saw a crane in the marshes. It was strutting about and trumpeting, like this, and skewering frogs in a waterhole, which it would gulp down like this, whoops!’

  Huttunen demonstrated how the crane pinned the marsh frogs with its bill, how it stretched out its big neck and lifted its feet, as it screeched its shrill cries.

  The doctor watched the performance in stunned silence. He couldn’t understand what had got into his patient. Was the miller making fun of him or was the man really mad enough to suddenly start imitating a crane he hadn’t even shot? Huttunen’s piercing trumpeting infuriated Ervinen. Deciding that the unstable miller must have taken it into his deranged mind to make fun of his host, the doctor got up from his seat and said in a strained voice, ‘Stop, my good man. I will not tolerate such clowning in my house.’

  Huttunen stopped screeching. He calmed down immediately, saying he hadn’t meant to annoy the doctor in the slightest. He was just showing how the forest’s animals behaved in their natural habitat.

  ‘The doctor imitated a bear. It was a fine sight!’

  Ervinen lost his temper. He had simply illustrated a hunting incident; that didn’t mean that one immediately had to follow suit in such a ridiculous and tasteless fashion. No one had the right to play the fool under his roof.

  ‘Get out!’

  Huttunen was dumbfounded. Was that all it took to upset the doctor? Strange how highly strung people turned out to be when it came down to it. The miller tried to apologise, but Ervinen wouldn’t hear another word on the subject. He stiffly showed him the door, refused to take any money for the pills and moved the half-finished glass out of his reach.

  Huttunen hurried out, his ears ringing. Shocked and embarrassed, he ran across the garden to the avenue of birch trees, forgetting his bicycle. Coming out onto the doorstep to watch his patient leave, the doctor saw his tall silhouette dash off towards the graveyard. ‘Now lunatics think they can make fun of you. And that man doesn’t know a thing about hunting either. What a peasant!’

  CHAPTER 11

  Huttunen stopped at the corner of the churchyard. His heart and stomach ached: Ervinen’s rotgut in his stomach and Ervinen’s contempt eating away at his heart. How could the doctor have got so annoyed? First he fills you with drink, then he flies off the handle; an unpredictable sort, Huttunen thought.

  The miller wanted to let out all his pain, but how could he dare howl?

  He suddenly remembered the tablets Ervinen had given him. He took the bottle out of his pocket, unscrewed the top and poured a heap of little yellow pills into the crook of his palm. How many were you meant to take again? Could such ridiculously small tablets have any effect at all?

  Huttunen tossed half a handful of tablets into his mouth. They tasted awful, but he chewed away regardless and swallowed them dry.

  ‘Yeuuch! What a nightmare.’

  Ervinen’s pills were so bitter that Huttunen had to rush to the churchyard pump to drink some water. He leant against the gravestone of a certain Raasakka who’d been dead for centuries whi
le he waited for them to start working.

  The miller’s brain began humming almost instantaneously. The powerful neuroleptics flooded into his alcohol-saturated bloodstream. His feeling of malaise dissipated. His heart began to beat fast and hard. Thick swarms of ideas buzzed through his mind. His forehead felt hot, his tongue dry, and he wanted to get stuck into something, anything … All around him, the gravestones suddenly looked like roughly hewn blocks of stone, unfinished and, what was more, just dotted about at random, with no method. It would be good to get them lined up neatly. The old trees in the graveyard had been left to grow all over the place as well. The best thing would be to cut them all down and plant new ones, properly laid out this time. Now the old wooden church with red walls struck Huttunen as funny and the big new church with its yellow boards, frankly ridiculous.

  The miller burst into uproarious laughter about everything in sight: the graves; the trees; the churches; even the churchyard fence.

  A brutal compulsion to act suddenly drove him out of the church gate. He remembered he’d left his bicycle at Ervinen’s and ran off to the doctor’s house at such speed that tears came to his eyes and his cap flew off; he left deep ruts in the sandy path as he skidded round the corner to pick up his bicycle. There she was!

  Ervinen was sipping spirits by the fire and mulling over Huttunen’s case. He rather regretted having lost his patience with a simple man of the people. Perhaps the miller hadn’t intended anything disrespectful by his clowning? Perhaps the poor man had such an unrefined sense of humour that he couldn’t help but express it in such inappropriate ways? A doctor should never lose his temper with a patient. Oh but, God, vets had it so easy! In a case like this, a vet could simply diagnose the animal as mad, or that its nerves had gone, and have it put down. And that would be that: the farmer would kill his cow or horse, and the representative of the animal kingdom would never cause its physician a problem again.