The Howling Miller

by Arto Paasilinna

  Sanelma Käyrämö didn’t understand why Huhtamoinen was giving her a lecture on bank confidentiality. She asked whether the bank manager intended to give her Huttunen’s savings or not.

  ‘But everyone knows that the miller Gunnar Huttunen has escaped from Oulu asylum,’ Huhtamoinen exclaimed. ‘I’ve got good grounds to think that you, Miss Käyrämö, are in charge of his affairs, now that he is prevented for a variety of reasons from attending to them himself.’

  The bank manager locked Huttunen’s savings book and mandate away in his safe.

  ‘I must inform you, Miss Käyrämö, that this bank is unable to allow you to withdraw Mr Huttunen’s savings. He has been put under guardianship. Furthermore, he is on the run. You will certainly understand that we in the banking profession cannot transfer any funds when the man in question cannot, by virtue of his dementia, come and collect the money in person. In any case, Huttunen has no address. You may know where he is hiding. But I am not asking you where that is; I am not the police. I am a banker and the criminal aspect of this matter does not concern me. No doubt you understand what I am driving at?’

  ‘But it’s Huttunen’s money,’ the adviser tried to argue.

  ‘In theory it does, of course, belong to Huttunen. I do not deny that. But I will not pay it out to anyone, as I have told you, without official authorisation. In this particular case, the money would quite literally vanish into thin air. What would happen, my dear girl, if all banks were to behave in this manner and transfer their clients’ capital and interest to some unknown spot in a marsh or up a hill?’

  The horticulture adviser choked back a sob. How was she going to explain this to Huttunen? Huhtamoinen wrote a note on a sheet of paper.

  The Cooperative Bank regrets to inform you that it can only pay out your savings and accumulated interest to you in person, and then only on condition the authorities give their express authorisation.

  Respectfully yours,

  A. Huhtamoinen, Manager

  ‘But, as I’ve told you, I revere bank confidentiality,’ Huhtamoinen continued. ‘Should anyone – let’s say, for example, Police Chief Jaatila – ask me what brought you here today, I would simply shake my head and remain as silent as the grave. If the police demanded I tell them where Mr Huttunen is hiding, I would keep my counsel, even if I knew where he was. This is how I perceive bank confidentiality, as nothing less than a sacred duty. I would tell the police that you came to ask, ah, for a loan … let’s say for a sewing machine?’

  ‘I’ve already got a sewing machine,’ sniffed Sanelma Käyrämö.

  ‘Then let’s say you came here, ah, to ask my advice … for instance, as to whether it makes sense at present for an individual to put his or her savings in bonds. And quite frankly I’d say no, it doesn’t. With the situation in Korea, anyone who has any money would be well advised to invest it in property. The price of land is soon going to rise appreciably, unlike the revenue from State bonds. Everything depends of course on how long the Korean War lasts, but it doesn’t seem as if peace will return to Asia in the near future, at least not before next summer. Tell them that’s what I said. But now I’ve moved onto more general matters, I do beg your pardon, Miss Käyrämö.’

  The horticulture adviser had to leave the bank manager’s office with nothing more than this financial prognosis to sustain her. She wanted to cry, but swallowed her tears long enough to walk past the bank staff who were agog with curiosity. It was only when she had cycled out of the village that Sanelma Käyrämö stopped her bicycle and burst into endless, despairing sobs. The bank had taken Gunnar’s money and she wouldn’t be paid for at least another two weeks.

  CHAPTER 22

  Reutu Marsh was a vast expanse of wetland, a giant bog of forming peat that stretched for miles over a maze of shallow, blackwater ponds. A little river, the Sivakka, wound along its western edge at the foot of a modest hill that was known as Mount Reutu.

  This was the inviolate spot Huttunen made for, over six miles from the village with more than a league of forest on all sides separating it from the nearest road. He lugged his rucksack to the edge of the marsh, to a gentle bend in the Sivakka where the hill sloped down to the river. The ground was dry and covered in lichen, even though the unstable expanse of bog lay just across the water. It was an ideal place for a camp: beautiful, sheltered and tranquil. A few cranes trumpeted in the distance in the bog. At his back, on the slopes of the hill, pines rustled and, every now and then, trout and grayling could be heard jumping in the languid river.

  Huttunen was entranced. He set down his heavy load and, in his mind, christened the spit of land curving out into the river ‘Home Point’.

  In the days that followed, the miller established a substantial camp on the point. He felled several tall, dead pines, rolling them down the hill to his camp and splitting them into seven-foot logs that he could burn slowly if the nights turned cold and misty.

  As shelter, he built a rudimentary hut which he covered with thick fir branches, arranging the butts pointing downwards. He interwove the tips of the branches like scales to form a sturdy roof. From a young birch the diameter of a thigh, he cut a log the length of the hut, and set it down as a windbreak. Abutting this threshold, he laid a soft bed of moss an inch thick, which he spread with small, supple sprigs of fir, stripping out the larger branches so that they wouldn’t prick him in the back while he was sleeping.

  Huttunen unrolled the saw blade, cut handles for it and strung a length of washing line between them. With his new tool, he sawed off a sturdy pine behind the hut at head height. Using it as a base, he built a store cupboard out of light, dry branches, and left an opening the size of his rucksack on one side. His food, kitchen utensils and rucksack all went into his new larder.

  A little way off, at the water’s edge, the hermit arranged round rocks the size of a head into a circle. Over this hearth, he made an adjustable frame that automatically kept its position by bending one of the birches on the riverbank. Fifty yards above the camp, at a point where Mount Reutu’s slopes grew steeper and one could take in the entire sweep of the marsh, Huttunen nailed a couple of stout planks to two pines, one for a seat and the other for a backrest, and dug a hole almost three foot deep beneath them. This was where, once or twice a day, the hermit’s excrement would fall from now on. It became a habit of Huttunen’s to stay sitting on the plank longer than he needed, looking at the vast expanse of marsh spread out before him: the cranes striding along in their dignified way; the ducks hurriedly flapping their wings; the groups of five or ten reindeers that would sometimes suddenly come galloping over the banks of earth, fleeing the swarms of mosquitoes in the undergrowth. One day, Huttunen thought he saw a bear at the very edge of the bog. A grey shadow that now and again seemed to rear up on its hind legs. But when he trained his one-eyed binoculars on the horizon, trembling in the summer heat haze, all he saw were cranes. No sign of a bear. Had it left the marsh? Had it ever existed?

  Huttunen set up a row of stakes in the long grass on the bank to dry his nets. He cobbled together a precarious raft of dry branches for crossing the river and tethered it, with a pole by the hearth like a sort of pontoon. Finally, the hermit carved a calendar into a dead tree outside the hut. With his axe, he levelled off a rough square of the trunk, one foot wide by two high, planed it smooth and then etched the vertical and horizontal lines of an almanac into the polished surface with a knife. Every morning, he would score the passage of his days into the wood. He did not know the exact date when he finished the camp, but thought it must be near the middle of July. Taking a guess at how much time had passed since Midsummer in the hospital, he chiselled 12, VII into the tree. The blueberries were ripening; that seemed about right.

  July was beautiful and hot. The fishing wasn’t as good as it had been at the start of spring, or as it would be again in August. The best fish were well fed and mistrustful. The nights were still too bright and the rivers too warm, so the cold-blooded salmonids were drowsy. Huttunen tried
his flies, but the trout scorned them. He caught a few pike with spinners, which, if you took the trouble to bake them in the fire, were perfectly fine to eat.

  For the fattier fish, Huttunen used nets: he strung them across the river and went downstream to scare the fish into the trap. There were sometimes so many little trout and grayling struggling in the meshes that the hermit would have had plenty left over to salt if he’d had the right container to store them in. He congratulated himself on deciding to bring his plane out here to the back of beyond after all. It would be good to cut and plane some wood for barrel staves in autumn. A few casks of salted fish and all his food problems for the winter would be solved. If it’s well salted, trout keeps for more than a season no matter how fatty it is.

  Huttunen also thought he’d build a sauna and a little cabin for winter. He didn’t fancy staying cooped up in his hut when the cold set in.

  That’s a sure-fire recipe for rheumatism.

  He pictured the little log cabin, ten foot by ten at the most. A bed and a table would do for furniture, perhaps with a cupboard in the corner and reindeer antlers for coat hooks. In the rear wall, he’d build a corner fireplace out of flat stones, and he’d leave an opening for the window by the door.

  I’ll have to get a sheet of glass and a few feet of lead piping for the chimney. I don’t need asphalted felt; birch bark should last a few years on a cabin roof.

  Huttunen went on long hikes from his new camp. He often went up to the top of Mount Reutu with his binoculars to study the village with its little houses and two churches, old and new, big and small. In clear weather, at fixed times on the horizon to the west he could see a plume of smoke rising up into the summer sky from an express. He couldn’t hear the engine or see the wagons or the track, but he could tell from the direction of the smoke whether the train was coming from Kemi or Rovaniemi, whether the passengers were heading north or had already seen Lapland.

  On the moors around Reutu Marsh, Huttunen picked succulent cranberries from the previous autumn. The yellow brambles in the bog were starting to bud; soon the first berries would appear. It looked as if it would be a bumper crop. There were plenty of ripe blueberries as well. The hermit collected three or four pounds a day in a basket he had plaited out of birch bark. They were delicious in the evening after coffee.

  Huttunen made the most of the summer and the peace and quiet. When the weather was fine, sometimes he took his clothes off and sunbathed on top of the hill. He lay down with his trousers folded under his head, and let the sun give him a tan. For hours on end he watched the little clouds passing overhead, constantly changing shape, and saw the most extraordinary animals in them. A mild midday breeze kept the mosquitoes on the other side of the river, in the marsh. Everything was perfectly still. The hermit could almost hear his thoughts colliding in his skull; there were hordes of them, reasonable and unreasonable alike, chasing one another in an endless procession through his mind.

  If it rained, Huttunen remained lying in his shelter, listening to heavy raindrops run along the pine needle roof and fall onto the floor. The fire would hiss when they hit the blazing embers, and the hut was lovely and warm. When the rain stopped, the fish would bite. Huttunen didn’t even need a net; the trout would hurl themselves at flies right next to the bank.

  At night, Huttunen would wake to study the pale, starlit summer sky and start humming. The rumble soon turned into a muffled groaning, and then a savage howl would burst from the hermit’s mouth, just like the old days. He felt calmer after it. Howling made him feel less alone. He heard his own voice and it was strange to him, like an animal’s.

  Sometimes on hot days when he was walking across the endless, treeless expanse of Reutu Marsh, Huttunen would suddenly take to imitating an animal, one of the ones he saw every day, whose behaviour and habits he studied through his binoculars. He would set off at a trot over the sphagnum moss, running in circles with the swaying gait of a male reindeer trying to flee a cloud of insects, and then stop, snorting and grunting and pawing the ground with his hooves. Or else he would spread his wings and furiously take off like a wild goose, gain height, disappear behind the forest and then reappear on the other side of Mount Reutu, another goose now, bracing his webbed feet and coming in to land amid the reeds of a pond, where he’d throw up sheets of muddy water. Or else, becoming a crane, he would stretch his neck, trumpet and, with a keen eye, set about hunting the frogs and shrimps and black-backed pikes that had been washed into the marsh by the spring floods and left captives of the stagnant pools when the waters receded.

  When the cranes saw the long-legged man calling in their language in the marsh, they would stop what they were doing, raise their long necks very high and, tilting their heads forward, watch the hermit wandering among their flock, oblivious to the fact that he was imitating a crane for an audience of cranes. The head of the flock sometimes raised its bill to the heavens and let out a long trumpet, a mighty response. Then the hermit would suddenly regain consciousness, become himself again and leave the marsh for his camp. He would smoke a cigarette in his shady hut and think that everything would be fine if his life carried on like this.

  If only Sanelma were here.

  CHAPTER 23

  The week flashed past and suddenly the evening beckoned when the horticulture adviser Sanelma Käyrämö had said she would meet Huttunen at the Reutu Marsh crossroads. In his impatience, the hermit was at the meeting point well before the appointed time. He imagined the young woman’s fresh face, her curvaceous figure, her blue eyes and golden hair, her soft, clear voice. He lay down among the trees by the road. Time passed, the mosquitoes bit, but he didn’t even notice, such was his sense of expectancy.

  About six in the evening, he saw a woman bicycling down the narrow road towards the meeting point. The adviser Sanelma Käyrämö was coming! Huttunen leapt joyfully to his feet and almost ran to meet her, but he restrained himself and didn’t go out on the road. They had agreed to meet in the forest, so, keeping his promise, the hermit stayed under the fir trees.

  The adviser reached the crossroads. She left her bicycle in the ditch and walked into the forest. Looking nervously around her, she ventured about twenty yards from the road and then stopped uncertainly. Just as Huttunen was about to step forward and take her in his arms, he heard a branch snap in the wood. An elk, a reindeer? No, Vittavaara and Portimo! The two men were stealing furtively through the trees, breathless, their faces bathed in sweat. They crouched down behind a bush without showing themselves to Sanelma Käyrämö. They had clearly been following the adviser all the way from the village through the woods, tracking the hermit and planning to set him a sly trap.

  Huttunen moved back and lay down at the foot of a thickly covered fir from where he could see and hear what was happening by the roadside. Although he was trembling with desire, the hermit could not go to Sanelma Käyrämö. The spies were only yards away, wiping the sweat from their foreheads, swatting mosquitoes. It couldn’t have been a picnic for them in the woods, trying to keep up with the adviser as she pedalled along a perfectly smooth road.

  Did the adviser know she had been followed? Had she stooped to collaborate with the farmers and the police? Was she knowingly the bait? Did she want Huttunen to be sent back to Oulu too, back to that nuthouse sunk in the grimmest apathy and the most morbid inertia?

  ‘Gunnar! Gunnar darling! It’s me, I’m here!’

  Huttunen did not dare show himself. He hardly dared breathe. He saw Vittavaara was holding a rifle. Did they take him for a murderer? Constable Portimo had sat down on a tree stump to get his breath, but he was keeping a lookout at the same time. Huttunen lay stock-still at the foot of the fir, gritting his teeth. It broke his heart to hear the horticulture adviser calling, ‘Gunnar … where are you, my poor darling?’

  The woman waited for a long time, but as the sombre, silent forest vouchsafed no reply to her persistent appeals, in the end she set down her basket on a tuft of grass, covered it with her scarf and walked sadly
back to the road. Vittavaara looked disappointed. He whispered something feverishly to Constable Portimo, which Huttunen could not hear.

  With tears in her eyes, the horticulture adviser got back on her bicycle. Huttunen wanted to howl from the depths of his soul, to let out a wilder cry than the biggest wolf, the cruellest pack leader. But he kept silent. The adviser rode off in the direction of the village and soon disappeared round a bend, out of reach.

  Since Vittavaara and Portimo hadn’t revealed themselves to Sanelma Käyrämö, Huttunen concluded that she wasn’t working with them. So, she hadn’t betrayed him. Quite the opposite, in fact; she had done just as she had promised the week before and brought him food. Huttunen gazed through bloodshot eyes at the basket of supplies she had left.

  As soon as the adviser was out of sight, Vittavaara rushed forward to examine the contents of the hamper. Portimo followed, giving the basket a circumspect glance.

  ‘Shit! Bread and bacon!’ Vittavaara exclaimed sourly, tipping the food out onto the grass. Huttunen saw a bottle of milk and a number of packages wrapped in greaseproof paper. A smell of freshly baked coffee bread wafted into his nostrils.

  ‘And coffee bread too! God almighty!’

  Vittavaara ripped open the packages to reveal smoked bacon, saveloy, a packet of coffee and a loaf of bread. At the bottom of the basket were also several pounds of fresh vegetables: turnips, carrots and beetroots. A bunch of marigolds, carefully arranged by Sanelma Käyrämö, rolled onto the ground. Vittavaara grabbed it and waved in the direction of the forest.