The Howling Miller

by Arto Paasilinna

  Huttunen told him he had been a perfectly ordinary miller until a few days before. He had tried to talk to the hospital doctor about getting back to his mill, he said, but the man wouldn’t discharge him.

  ‘I’m in property myself,’ Happola replied. ‘But the war messed up my business when I had to come in here. It is pretty complicated taking care of your affairs from this place. Everything would be much easier if I was free to come and go. But when I’ve done my ten years in here, I’ll stop pretending to be mad. I’ve got a property in Heinäpää, maybe I’ll open a shop or a business.’

  His building was rented out for the moment, he said, so his bank account was in pretty good shape. You didn’t have any expenses in a hospital.

  He had built the property in the Heinäpää district of Oulu in 1938, and had taken on half a dozen tenant families before it was finished. Then the war had broken out and he had been sent to the front. He had skied around Suomussalmi all through the Winter War.

  ‘It was a dangerous time. Many of the men in my company were killed. And that’s when I decided that if the fighting ever stopped, I would never go to the front again.’

  Between the wars, Happola had brought in new tenants to replace those who had been killed. Business had gone well; Happola had even thought of taking a wife. But with the onset of spring, German soldiers became a common sight on the streets of Oulu, and as spring gave way to summer, the world assumed a more martial air. Happola began thinking of ways to avoid the army if war were to break out again.

  ‘I started limping and complaining of short sight. But the doctor wouldn’t sign a medical certificate. Someone had reported I was fit as a fiddle. Of course I didn’t always hobble everywhere I went or screw up my eyes every minute of the day.’

  Happola wasn’t assigned to the softer option of the Territorial Army. Things were looking bad. The businessman’s keen nose had scented war.

  ‘That’s when I had the idea of pretending to be mad. At first, people laughed and made fun of me. But I didn’t give up. I knew one thing for sure: I wasn’t going to fight. It was tough. Not just anybody can pretend to be mad. You have to think it through and be single-minded for people to believe you.’

  Interested, Huttunen asked, ‘What sort of madness did you fake? Did you start howling?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, mad people don’t howl … I started talking nonsense. I wanted people to think I was paranoid. I said that someone had tried to asphyxiate me in my garage. I suspected doctors of trying to poison me if they gave me medicine. I even wrote to the newspapers. It was mayhem! I reported people left, right and centre to the police, including my bank manager who I said had tried to bankrupt me. That did it. They brought me in here like a shot. And not a moment too soon either: a week later Hitler attacked Russia and a few days after that the Finns followed. But my mess tin wasn’t rattling about with all my other kit on my back!’

  Having put the building in his sister’s name, since he was scared the state would confiscate his assets while he was in its care, Happola had spent the whole war in the asylum. He was soon considered a desperate case. During the war he had put on six pounds.

  ‘In that sense, I was well off here, but time dragged terribly surrounded by the la-las.’

  When Finland had pulled out of the war and signed the armistice, Happola had shown signs of recovery. But then the Lapland war had broken out and he had had a relapse. It was only when Germany fell that Happola had fully recovered his faculties. He had asked to return to civilian life just like everyone else.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me out, damn it! The doctors patted me on the shoulder: Happola, Happola, let’s calm down, shall we?’

  The man was resentful. He had always been a perfectly sane native of Oulu, but now no one believed him.

  ‘Why don’t you escape?’ asked Huttunen.

  ‘Where would I go? You can’t hide if you work in property. I have to live in Oulu, since that’s where my building is. But you just wait till ten years have passed since the truce. Then this fellow is going straight to the head doctor and telling him the whole story.’

  ‘Why don’t you go and tell him now that you have been pretending to be mad all this time?’

  ‘I’ve often thought about it in the last few years. But it is not that simple. Of course I’d be let out of here, but what would be the good, because I’d just be thrown in jail instead. Pretending to be ill is a crime in wartime, you see, and it only lapses after ten years.’

  Huttunen agreed it made sense to wait until he couldn’t be prosecuted. It would be tough to go straight from the hospital to prison.

  ‘But how have you run your business from here?’ Huttunen asked. ‘There are bars on the windows and the doors are locked.’

  ‘I’ve got my own keys; I bought them a few years ago from an orderly. Still, it’s tricky only being able to go in to town in the middle of the night. It is not often I can slip off in the daytime without someone seeing. Once or twice a year, I have to go to collect rent arrears in the day but otherwise I do all my paperwork and stuff at night. It’s difficult maintaining a building, especially when people think you’re off your trolley.’

  ‘Don’t worry. They think I’m off my trolley too,’ Huttunen sympathised.

  ‘Well, you must be a bit unhinged. Whereas I’ve had to pretend to be mad for almost ten years. Everybody else had five years at war, but I’ve had almost double. It’s been hard.’

  Happola considered his misfortunes for a moment, but quickly moved on to the more enviable aspects of his situation.

  ‘There is one silver cloud, and that’s the money that’s been piling up in the bank. You’re looked after for free here, you see. I’m going to be pretty well set up when I get out.’

  Happola discreetly offered Huttunen a cigarette. He explained that he brought tobacco from town and that sometimes, when time really seemed to drag, he drank a bottle of alcohol under the covers.

  ‘It’s not worth trying to get women in here: you get caught immediately. And the ones here are too mad to risk getting them excited.’

  They smoked in silence. Huttunen considered Happola’s fate. It seemed impossible to escape from this establishment, whether you entered it of your own free will or under duress.

  Happola made Huttunen swear that he wouldn’t tell anyone his secret. Wouldn’t his tenants denounce their landlord when he came to collect his money, Huttunen wondered.

  ‘It’s not in their interests to shop me,’ Happola replied. ‘If they open their mouths, I’ll put them out on the street. Luckily there’s such a shortage of accommodation in Oulu that that scruffy bunch aren’t in a position to say anything anyway. The rent has to be paid on time whether the landlord is mad or not.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Midsummer at Oulu mental hospital bore little resemblance to the joyous festival of light with which the rest of Finland marked the middle of summer. Admittedly the agitated patients didn’t sleep a wink, shouting and rampaging all night, but that wasn’t in celebration of the solstice, that was just daily routine. Happola said that the asylum never took much notice of feast days. Only at Christmas did it unbend itself sufficiently to let a small group of Pentecostalists into its innermost recesses where they chanted their saddest dirges. The atmosphere was always pretty oppressive, according to Happola, because the choir were so afraid of the inmates on the locked wards that they shot through their psalms at top speed and, just to be on the safe side, in menacing tones.

  ‘Still, we’re not here to have a party,’ Happola added sarcastically.

  During the week after Midsummer, Huttunen was called to the hospital secretary’s office. Two orderlies led him in to see the doctor.

  The doctor was immersed in Huttunen’s file. Pawing his glasses with his usual ineffectuality, he motioned to the patient to sit down.

  ‘Stand by the door, just in case,’ he told the orderlies.

  The doctor informed Huttunen that he had studied his file as well as the report sub
mitted by Dr Ervinen from his local medical practice.

  ‘The picture’s none too rosy. As I established last time, you appear to have been afflicted by a chronic form of war neurosis. I was a major in the medical corps during the war, so I know this type of complaint very well.’

  Huttunen protested. He said there was nothing wrong with him, and asked to leave the hospital. The doctor did not deign to respond, preferring to leaf through a copy of Military Medicine Review. Huttunen saw the issue was from 1941. The doctor opened it at the article, ‘Some war psychoses and neuroses in wartime and their aftermath’.

  ‘Don’t stare. This does not concern you,’ the doctor grumbled, cleaning his spectacles. ‘These problems have been scientifically studied. It says here that between 1916 and 1918, a third of the English army that fought in the quagmires of Flanders were clinically unfit to fight at the front because of psychoses and neuroses. War psychoses and neuroses have the particularity that they develop very easily among people who suffer from a constitutional infirmity and, having appeared once, they have a propensity to return under the influence of increasingly trifling external events. They also note that in the classes of 1920 to 1939 in the Finnish army, there were between 13,000 and 16,000 people of feeble mind, of which, I presume, the majority took part in the war.’

  The doctor looked up, and stared Huttunen in the eye across the table.

  ‘You admitted last time that you took part in both our wars.’

  Huttunen nodded but said he didn’t see how that proved he was mentally ill.

  ‘I wasn’t the only one there.’

  The doctor produced further snippets of information from the article for his patient’s benefit. The orderlies lit cigarettes to pass the time. Huttunen would have liked to smoke too, but he knew that inmates weren’t entitled to even a single drag.

  ‘The mentally subnormal are driven by a primitive instinct of survival in war … The impulse to surpass oneself and the spirit of sacrifice which were such hallmarks of our army have no hold on them; quite the opposite, they try by every means possible to avoid danger and unpleasant experiences. The case of Sven Dufva in Runeberg* is clearly an extremely rare exception.’

  The doctor gave Huttunen a disgusted look. Then he returned to the article and read a few underlined passages under his breath, before continuing out loud: ‘The mentally subnormal react with a state of confusion that is characterised by infantile babbling and problems of perception. The mentally subnormal, in these cases, often soil themselves, smear the walls of their room with their excrement, which they eat, and display other behaviour of this kind …’

  The doctor turned to the orderlies who were chatting in the doorway to ask if the patient had displayed any of the symptoms in question. The older of the orderlies stubbed out his cigarette in the flowerpot on the windowsill and said, ‘As far as I know, he hasn’t eaten any shit yet, at any rate.’

  Huttunen protested vehemently. It was disgraceful accusing him of such revolting behaviour. He leapt up from his chair in indignation but the two orderlies instantly stood up as well and Huttunen, swallowing his fury, sat back down. The younger of the nurses said casually, ‘If you start kicking up a fuss, we’d be better off locking you up, don’t you think, Doctor?’

  The doctor nodded. He looked sternly at Huttunen.

  ‘Do try and calm down. I can see your nerves are in a bad state.’

  If he were free, Huttunen thought to himself, he’d pound these three idiots into the sort of mush they served in the canteen. The doctor carried on quoting from the article, more for his own benefit than that of the orderlies or the patient: ‘The shock reactions that appear in the context of violent psychological experiences – bomb and heavy grenade explosions, burial in ruins, hand-to-hand combat – where physical effort is combined with the danger of immediate death, often combine physical and mental symptoms in equal proportion. Among the physical symptoms, one finds problems with sight or hearing, adynamia, and forms of psychogenic paralysis … the mental symptoms are distraction, mental block and amnesia, which have the potential to induce a state of total mental confusion. The shock psychosis abates rapidly in most cases, leaving a period of extreme exhaustion, insomnia and a propensity to night terrors. But for many it precipitates a form of nervous reaction that subsequently occurs in stressful circumstances.’

  The doctor stopped reading. He studied Huttunen attentively and murmured, half to himself, ‘Doesn’t a mill roar a little like a bomber?’

  ‘It doesn’t make that much noise,’ Huttunen retorted, exasperated. ‘And I wasn’t buried under ruins, Doctor, if that’s what you’re driving at.’

  ‘Shock psychoses are often connected to a cerebral disturbance caused by atmospheric pressure that requires a remarkably long recovery period,’ the doctor countered ponderously. ‘There can even be permanent after-effects. Whoever has suffered such a reaction is generally incapable of serving at the front, or occupying positions of responsibility. Doesn’t the miller’s trade involve heavy responsibilities? I imagine one has to deal with everything from the grain to the working of the whole plant.’

  Huttunen muttered that the miller’s trade was no more demanding than any other line of work. Paying him no particular attention, the doctor read another underlined passage from the article: ‘It is relatively common for a person who has fully recovered from a shock reaction to experience a further neurotic reaction on encountering economic difficulties or other setbacks after his release from the army. This fresh neurotic attack must be considered the result of constitutional weakness and circumstances discrete from his military service.’

  The doctor put the journal to one side.

  ‘My diagnosis is unequivocal. You are mentally ill: a manic-depressive whose clinical profile includes nervous fragility and neurasthenia. All the result of a war neurosis.’

  The doctor paused to clean his spectacles.

  ‘But I do understand. You have clearly had some very gruelling experiences. It says in this report that you had a habit of howling, especially in winter and at night. And that you used to impersonate animals … We still have to get to the bottom of all this, particularly this tendency to howl. I have not come across many patients in my career who have been strongly inclined to howl. Most have simply whimpered and moaned.’

  The doctor asked the orderlies if the patient had howled since he had been in the hospital.

  ‘Not that we’ve heard. But we’ll come and tell you if he starts.’

  ‘Let him howl. It’s not as if there isn’t any noise in here already.’

  Turning to Huttunen, the doctor remarked, ‘As you’ve just heard, you have special permission to howl in this hospital. I would prefer it, however, if you refrain from doing so at night. It could agitate the other patients.’

  ‘I won’t howl here,’ Huttunen said bitterly.

  ‘You can bay absolutely as you please. I am of the school that thinks one can learn a great deal about a patient’s condition by the types of sounds he makes.’

  ‘I’m not howling. I don’t want to.’

  The doctor tried to sway him.

  ‘Couldn’t you emit a little howl now, just so I can see? It would be interesting to hear how you howl when the mood takes you.’

  Huttunen calmly said that he wasn’t insane; he was just a bit odd at most. In any case, the way things were nowadays, you came across much stranger people than him the whole time. The doctor had resumed polishing his glasses. Vexed, Huttuned added, ‘I think those goggles must be clean by now. Do you really have to rub them the whole time?’

  The doctor hurriedly put his glasses back on.

  ‘It’s a harmless habit, a form of repetitive behaviour. You wouldn’t understand.’

  He motioned to the orderlies to remove the patient. They grabbed Huttunen by both arms and dragged him into the corridor, kicking him in the small of the back to make him hurry up. In the ward, they forced him to lie down on his bed. Then the door slammed and the key turned fu
riously in the lock.

  * Dufva is one of the heroes of the epic poem The Tales of Ensign Stål by Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–77), Finland’s foremost nineteenth-century poet. Written in Swedish, it details Finnish bravery in the Russo-Swedish war of 1808–09; the first of its tales was adapted to form the Finnish national anthem, ‘Maame’ (‘Our Land’).

  CHAPTER 15

  Over the next few days, Huttunen realised that he was not going to be let out of the asylum immediately, or perhaps even ever. He tried to talk to the doctor again but the man refused to see him, instead prescribing drugs that the brawny orderly forced Huttunen to take.

  Huttunen thought of his red mill on the Suukoski rapids, and of Sanelma Käyrämö, and of the beautiful summer that he could now only glimpse through the bars on the window now. He felt excruciatingly bad. He tried to talk to his companions but, in their confusions, they couldn’t understand a word he was saying; Happola was the only one he could have a whispered conversation with from time to time.

  Days passed. Huttunen’s anguish intensified. He stayed lying on his bed all day, turned in on himself, meditating on the wretched turn his life had taken. He stared at the bars on the window: they cut him off from the rest of the world, with cold, inescapable finality. They were too strong to bend and the door was permanently locked. Huttunen tried to see if there was any way to get out from the dining room but there were always muscular orderlies on duty. Not a hope. Huttunen imagined that, if the worst came to the worst, he wouldn’t walk out of this establishment on his own two feet; he’d just be shipped off to the morgue where a pathologist would chop up his body with an axe into suitably sized pieces for medical research.

  Sometimes at night Huttunen was overcome by an anguish and horror so intense that he had to get up and walk about the twilit room for hours, pacing back and forth like an animal in a zoo. Huttunen felt like a prisoner who hadn’t committed a crime and had been sentenced without trial. He had nothing: no rights, no obligations, no choices. All he had were his thoughts and his wild craving for freedom that he had no way of appeasing. Huttunen felt he was going mad in that room surrounded by apathetic, suffering inmates.