White Hunger (Chance Encounter Series)

by Aki Ollikainen

  The water bursts out, unrestrained, wetting her feet and seeping into her legs all the way up, until she is a dirty sheet heavy with liquid. The dampness crystallizes into powdery snow, through which wind blows. Marja disintegrates into a blizzard. Snowdrifts cover Mataleena, lying on the plank. Marja calls Juhani for help, but her voice is just a rattle. Juhani as a swan is stuck to the last patch of open water, frozen; he cannot take flight, instead lowering his head on to the edge of the ice and slowly gliding into the black water as the hole closes up altogether.

  Marja feels her body collapsing. Her grip on Juho’s hand loosens. The falling goes on for ever; she sees everything change into an endless field of snow.

  Then, eternity ceases. The earth does not receive her gently. A merciless cold awaits, never-ending snow, which bursts into a cloud as Marja tumbles.

  The colour of death is white. His sledge stops by Marja. Death himself occupies the driver’s seat. Even the Tsar has come down from the tree and sits with Death. The sledge vanishes, a white darkness descends and buries everything.

  ‘Mother…’

  Juho’s voice. Then nothing.

  The Senator

  The bark of a lone dog echoes in the street, intensifying to become a howl. Somewhere further away, in the direction of Kamppi, another dog offers accompaniment. The senator walks hesitantly up Yrjönkatu. He stops at his house and looks at the dark windows.

  A third dog joins the concert. The desolate howling rises and sinks, like a wave dying on the shore and disappearing into the sand to make way for another. The moon has risen; against its light, the senator sees his breath steaming. He is alone. His supporters in the senate have faded away. Adlerberg will have his way and the construction of the St Petersburg railway line will begin. A debt will be incurred for this purpose, one that will cost the nation dear.

  The house looks deserted; the shadows cast by the dark curtains emphasize the emptiness. No one is awake now, just when he needs someone to talk to.

  Every night during the last few months, he has walked halfway to meet his wife, and every morning woken alone, back at the beginning of the path. And again in the evening, when he closes his eyes, he sees Jeannette, lying in bed writhing, trying to push out a premature baby, as the bed is flooded with blood. He himself is standing helplessly by, holding the body of two-year-old Magdalena. Sweet little Magdalena needs to be buried, and now Jeannette, too, is leaving him and taking the tiny newborn with her.

  Ten years ago those dreams tormented him and now they have returned. A frosty night early in September brought them back. After that it was clear that this winter would be a catastrophe for the country.

  And at the end of October, Adlerberg had returned to his post as governor-general. The senator had got on with Indrenius, Indrenius had given him a free hand. Adlerberg had seized the reins from those hands and now drove the cart himself: carelessly, like a rogue on a village track in Ostrobothnia.

  The construction of the railway will be expensive. The loan negotiated with the Germans will take the national economy to the brink of bankruptcy. And a vast number of workers will be required. Hungry people will have to be dragged from their homes to carry out building work, and it is obvious diseases will spread. Many will die.

  A light comes on in the house. Someone is still awake after all. The senator goes in through the gate. Hearing noises in the hall, the housekeeper comes out of the kitchen.

  The senator goes to light the lamp on the table in the reception room. He turns the flame down so it barely illuminates the two armchairs and the small portraits on the wall in the alcove.

  ‘Has the butcher’s bill been seen to?’

  ‘Hanna’s a good girl, she takes care everything’s done on time. Don’t you concern yourself with that.’

  ‘Good. You may go to bed now, Ulrika. I’ll stay up for a little longer.’

  Ulrika says goodnight and leaves.

  The senator walks around the dimly lit room, out of habit straightening the pleats in the curtains. He hung them himself, while Jeannette was still alive.

  After pouring himself a drink, he sits down in one of the armchairs and stares at the empty chair opposite. If only some old friend were sitting there, someone he could discuss the state of the world with.

  The senator turns up the flame in the lamp so that it lights the pictures on the wall properly. He examines Jeannette’s face, studies it again to be sure it will never fade from his mind. That serious expression and the dark eyes that squint just a tiny bit, charmingly.

  The moon has gone behind a cloud. The street lies in darkness. The senator opens the curtain a little and sees his own reflection in the window. He puffs on his pipe and the face shimmers for a moment in the glow, a deep furrow visible between the eyes.

  People seem terribly interested in details, he thinks. The most important thing, however, is to see the whole; only the big picture gives the details their significance. Otherwise, they are left hanging in the air, just as if the furrow on his brow were merely a scratch on the windowpane.

  The Book of Juho

  The child is the first to fall. He manages to get back up on to his knees, but when the woman collapses, it is as if she is disintegrating into the snow. Teo tells the driver to stop. The man curses as he tugs at the reins.

  The woman is already dead. Teo removes his fur hat and kneels down to press his cheek into the snow next to her face and look into her eyes. They are covered by a pale gauze, like curtains drawn before a window; behind the gauze is desolate emptiness of the kind one always sees in the eyes of the dead. Teo tries to conjure up one last, dying flame in the woman’s gaze, but there is none. The fire has been transferred to the boy; he would not survive long without that borrowed light.

  The driver from the inn says they are not locals.

  ‘What should we do with them?’ Teo asks.

  Not Teo’s problem, the driver thinks. The driver himself would leave them here, the boy too, next to his mother; he won’t make it anyway. Teo picks up the boy and carries him to the sledge. He separates him from his mother. Though death has already done so; Teo is merely trying to prevent the Grim Reaper from rectifying the mistake.

  They have gone some distance before the boy looks back; only then does he realize what has happened, and he stretches out his hand and whispers, ‘Mother.’ The woman remains lying in the middle of the field. The snow tucks her in tenderly. By the time the sledge reaches the forest, the travellers would no longer be able to tell woman and snow apart if they did not know to look for her.

  If the boy falls asleep, he will not wake up. Perhaps the driver knew best after all, Teo thinks. Perhaps the boy would be better off dying next to his mother, rather than in an unfamiliar sledge. They would end up in the same mass grave; they could stay together, neither having to sleep their eternal slumber alone.

  But the boy is alive.

  He starts once, and asks for his mother. Teo’s gaze roams over passing trees. The light on the snowy branches is gradually turning blue. The fur hat chafes unpleasantly at his forehead.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Juho.’

  ‘I’m Teo… Uncle Teo. Where’s your father?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘Where is Father asleep?’

  ‘Mataleena went to Father in the barn.’

  ‘And who’s Mataleena?’

  ‘My sister.’

  ‘Is your sister asleep, too?’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Juho whispers.

  Father, Mother and Mataleena are no more; there is only Juho. The boy stares long and hard at the driver’s tattered hat.

  ‘Where do you come from? I mean, where do you live… or where did you live?’ Teo tries. He encounters only the boy’s uncomprehending eyes. He realizes how hopeless it is to try and work out where the boy and his mother set out to beg from.

  ‘Will Mother go to the barn, too?’ Juho asks.

  ‘Yes, for sure… But Uncle will take you to the city now.’
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  ‘To a church?’

  ‘Yes, a really big church.’

  ‘But Mother’s not coming?’

  In the village, Teo seeks out the local doctor, one Löfgren. When Teo offers to pay for a room, even though they have never met, Löfgren absolutely refuses to take any money and insists on offering his colleague a bed for the night. They can stay as long as they need, Löfgren assures Teo.

  ‘Boy’s a relative. I’m taking him to Helsinki; his parents have passed away,’ Teo explains.

  Dr Löfgren looks at Juho’s ragged clothes and twirls the tip of his pointed beard.

  ‘We should find him something better to wear,’ Löfgren says. ‘Seeing as he’s headed for the city,’ he adds, laughing.

  He says this to Juho, but the boy’s expression does not change. He looks at the doctor’s shoes as if there were something magical about them.

  The boy falls asleep between the clean sheets. Teo wonders if the child has ever seen anything so clean. Not that Juho marvelled at the bedlinen; he seemed to take the world as it came. Hunger and cold, a bowl of soup and a warm bed: none of these could alter the solemn expression on the boy’s face.

  Löfgren hands Teo a glass. Teo gets up from the armchair and walks to the window. Snow whirls beyond the pane. The scene seems somehow unreal to Teo, watching the blizzard from the warmth of the room. The thin glass is a film between two worlds; Teo does not dare touch it lest he break the spell and allow the outside to intrude into his own reality.

  He thinks of the woman left lying in the snowdrift. How the snow fell over her, in the end not tenderly tucking her in, but devouring her, like a raging sea dragging a castaway into its depths. The woman was Juho’s mother. Now the boy has no one. He is in Teo’s hands; it is up to Teo what kind of future awaits him.

  Teo has seen several bodies by the side of the road during this journey, but the woman is the only one he saw die. It happened quickly, without drama. The woman just fell and failed to get up again. As if the ground had swallowed her up and left an empty shell behind.

  But can the soul penetrate this frozen earth? Teo wonders. Perhaps what was inside the woman just disappeared. The soul waned, as it will for everyone. In some, it burned in an instant, flared up like a piece of paper thrown into the fire. In others, as in that woman, it burned slowly to ash and vanished in the wind. If anything remained of the woman, it was the boy. Only Teo and Juho still remember her. And although Teo knows nothing about the woman beyond the manner of her dying, he knows he will remember that longer than the boy’s own recollections of his mother will live. The boy is still so small he will not carry those memories for very long. When Juho is a man, he will wake nightly from terrible dreams on damp, sweaty sheets, calling for his mother, not knowing for whom he is calling.

  ‘In better weather, we’d see the church over there.’ Löfgren interrupts Teo’s thoughts.

  Löfgren tells Teo he used to know Berg, and Berg will not be the only doctor to be killed by an epidemic this winter.

  ‘In that respect, workhouses are the right solution. The poor must be confined to the areas where they live. The worst thing that could happen would be an increase in the hordes of migrant beggars.’

  ‘They will increase.’

  ‘How can they be made to understand how hopeless a chance it is?’ Löfgren laments.

  ‘Hopeless, yes, but a chance all the same, as you say.’

  ‘They bring unrest. The parish grain silo has already been plundered here. Typhus is the worst danger, though. Weak, hungry people are the most susceptible, but it can get healthy folk, too.’

  Löfgren says that there has been a workhouse in the village for almost two months now.

  ‘Aren’t diseases passed around there?’

  ‘One in three of the occupants is sick.’

  ‘What do they do in the workhouses?’

  ‘Handicrafts.’

  ‘And do the products sell?’

  ‘Not terribly well. And even if they were sold, you couldn’t buy food with the proceeds. But the situation is easier to control if everyone stays put. Just imagine all the sick people roaming round the country.’

  ‘True. Forgive me if I sounded harsh. The boy’s fate has made me melancholy.’

  ‘I understand. And it is perfectly true that, in this situation, the only alternatives are bad. The people are truly being tested now,’ Löfgren says, pouring more punch into Teo’s glass.

  The snowfall ceases the following day, but Juho is too weak for the journey to resume. Instead, Teo skis with Löfgren to a nearby hill.

  From the top, the wintry landscape, bathed in sunlight, looks beautiful. All the misery that has made its mark on the area has vanished under the snow. Teo looks at the rolling forest landscape under the wide sky and wonders how far it extends. He rises above the forest and flies over low hills, icy lakes and open fields; the small, grey houses squatting around them are in danger of being swept under the snow by the slightest breeze. He follows the river bed, flies over a small town that resembles a cobweb woven by a maimed spider. The houses look like yellowing spruce needles stuck to the web. Then forest again, dotted with fields, until the open sea shimmers on the horizon. The land dives under the mass of ice covering the sea, and somewhere there, on the tip of a peninsula, lies Helsinki. Teo descends closer to the roofs of the stone houses and, at the same time, the sea is released from its blanket and floes are lifted into small fishing boats to serve as sails. Some of them rise and disintegrate into flocks of seagulls on the open sea. He curves towards Katajanokka and remains floating in the middle of a flock of gulls, to be borne by breezes blowing over the sea close to the shore. From there, he sees Matsson, who is sitting by his house inspecting his nets. Every so often, Matsson knocks his pipe against a rock. As he does so, he talks to Juho, who is seated next to him, observing keenly how his guardian is scrutinizing the nets. Matsson says something that makes the child laugh.

  The faraway trees look very small, yet they are as big as the ones Teo stands next to now. And if, in this universe, the pines are so small, how small must he be, with his concerns?

  He is overcome by the same feeling of insignificance as always strikes when he beholds the sea in windy weather. And this is not a bad feeling – rather, it is liberating.

  The sea by the old town is frozen. In the fields of Kumpula, wind whirls the snow, but here, in the vicinity of the city, it does not feel as desolate as the sparsely populated inland.

  They pass a group of raggedly dressed people. Some of them get out of the way, moving to the roadside; others stay in the middle of the track, acting as if the sledge were not there. When the driver heads straight for them, they shake their fists and shout curses at the departing sledge. No one simply steps aside politely. Perhaps they have learned something during their wandering: either you trudge stubbornly along your own track without giving way, or you wade far into the snow to get out from under everyone’s feet and bow humbly from there. But perhaps then you will not have the strength to come back, instead remaining frozen on the spot, turned into a white sculpture like the wife of Lot.

  After the new railway leading to the harbour, the terrain changes, becoming rocky and forested. Here and there are low wooden houses. To the left, between road and sea, stand villas. From the forges of Hakaniemi, dark streaks of smoke stream into the blue sky.

  Teo imagines how, in ten years’ time, the causeway will be flanked by housing. On a sunny winter’s day like this, Juho will step out of a dwelling and walk to one of the numerous small factories which, according to Lars, will spring up round here.

  Rosy, so rosy: Teo snorts mockingly at his thoughts. He steers them to a small, smoky, dark factory space. There he meets Juho, until recently a sprightly youth. Now his bearing has gone and he stoops, old before his time, part of a faceless crowd of other pale men who were once children and are now elderly. And yet, those miserable people in their factories would be less at the mercy of weather and of capricious nature than the
y are now, on their miserable patches of land, in the grip of the gloomy wilderness and the marsh that borders the fields.

  They pass the tollbooth, which is unoccupied because it is winter. As soon as they reach the Little Bridge, the driver spurs the horse on to an almighty trot. Teo wonders why country folk always have to do that. The sledge rocks, but Teo has got used to the uneven passage during the journey and does not feel ill. Nor does the swaying seem to trouble Juho. His winter-grey eyes wide and wondering, the boy gapes at the railings flashing past and the frozen sea that opens up beyond them. He does not say much, but watches everything curiously. That is good, Teo thinks. It will take his mind off his mother.

  The driver has to slow down in Siltasaari. Here there are factories and workshops, and the bustle that goes with them. Teo looks to the west with nostalgia; somewhere there, on the western tip of the island, there is a tavern where years ago, as a young student, he used to sit with Johan and Matias at their regular table, investing his pennies in a game of bowls, drinking and bawling Bellman’s ditties. Now Johan Berg sings no more, and Teo did not even sing him any Bellman in farewell, instead sticking to the same dreary hymns they both hated so much. The hymns were fitting for that landscape, though, for Johan’s grave under that grey sky, but he could have rebelled against the heavenly powers by singing Bellman: demonstrated defiantly that joy did once blossom amidst this misery, and the joy did not spring from a belief in otherworldly paradises, but from baseness and carnality, for which, in the end, we live, Teo thinks.

  When they reach the Long Bridge, the driver roars to spur the horse into a trot again. He deems housing and others using the road nuisances, obstacles preventing him and the horse from showing off their wild speed. By rights, the rest of humanity would be gathered at the roadside, admiring the driver’s pace. Teo would like to remind the man of the difference between the cart and its passenger, a doctor, but knows he would only get a contemptuous look; the driver would consider him a coward. Perhaps with some justification, Teo has to concede.