Helsinki Noir

by James Thompson

  I climbed on top of her, shoved the middle finger of each hand into her mouth, and pulled the corners back toward her ears. She moaned. I let go.

  “Start translating,” I said.

  Yalda nodded.

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “You love me,” Yalda interpreted. Her accent excited me, just like always.

  “I want to use you and hurt you.”

  “You want to help me and take care of me.”

  “You’re my little black whore.”

  “I’m your little black sweetheart.”

  I pulled the shoes from her feet, lifted her skirt, knelt down between her legs. Her black underwear was stretched across her butt as if it was a size too small. I pulled a switchblade from my pocket and flicked it open. Yalda whimpered. I spread her legs with my shoulders, I slid the blade into her crotch, past her panties, she felt the prick, I opened her pussy wide with the tip of the blade and my left thumbnail, its bitter, cloying scent greeted me. I pressed the blade of the knife into the already-sticky crotch of her panties and severed it. Then I slit the panties up the side, ripped off the shred of fabric, climbed back on top of Yalda, and shoved it into her mouth. I stabbed the switchblade into the table in front of her face, she let out a muffled squeal. I opened my zipper and shoved my hate-engorged cock all the way in.

  * * *

  As usual, Vuosaari was full of kids. I headed south from the metro station, walked down the stairs to the landing where the work of art stood: three tall, winged figures of tangled pipe standing in a shallow pool. Water flowed through the pipes. This masterpiece had been broken for a while; one of the pipes was leaking. Water burbled into the pool and straight down onto the stones from somewhere up above. The whole piece was like an out-of-order urinal.

  The gravel path continued southward, toward the seashore. The rolling lawn was dotted with sharp-edged boulders of black granite that rose greedily from the earth, like the fangs of deep-sea fish. The clusters reminded me of a black-and-white photo I had seen once of a Chinese man whose mouth sprouted an unheard-of three rows of teeth. The freak’s gob had been jammed so full of skewed, protruding teeth he couldn’t shut it.

  The new side of Vuosaari stretched back on either side of the path: light, pastel-colored buildings, a school. Two massive steel frames stood in the schoolyard. It was impossible to tell what they were; they were too tall to be shelters and the poles continued up at least twenty feet. Maybe they were gallows.

  There weren’t any churches or mosques in Vuosaari. At least I didn’t see a single one.

  It was a beautiful autumn day.

  * * *

  I had read the free paper in the metro. It said that excrement, human shit, had suddenly flooded out of the sewer and into a street downtown. No one knew why. There was even a picture in the paper. The shit had risen out of the gutter in front of a restaurant and quickly spread over a broad area. People had waded through it, horrified. None of the interviewees, not even the city’s director of technical operations, could explain why the shit had decided to rise from the sewer onto the street on that particular day.

  * * *

  I went and picked up our little ones from day care and took them home. We lived on the Sunny Bay side of Vuosaari, a short walk away, near the beach. The area differed from the rest of Vuosaari in that it was built in the 2000s, it was nicer, wealthier, not a single municipal flat, there were stone foundations finished with granite panels, gleaming white walls. Graceful apartment buildings rose in front of the breakwaters and the beach of pale sand and the blue-green sea. It was quiet, the only people we came across were a couple of dog walkers. Some members of the middle class were having a smoke outside the pub near the breakwater. In this sense, Sunny Bay didn’t diverge from the rest of Vuosaari. People spent time indoors—watching TV, surfing the net for porn, screaming at their kids. I never saw anyone outside. Ever. Except passersby like myself. And them only by chance.

  My wife had already come home from work. She was helping my oldest son with his homework at the kitchen table. My wife was blond. I had married her for her money. If you were a police officer, you could get any woman, because there was nothing a Finnish woman admired more than a police officer. Finnish women respected power. They loved a straight back, a uniform, broad shoulders, and short hair. They saw in them the promise of rough treatment and countless violent orgasms, just like women everywhere around the world. But in addition, Finnish women thought policemen were intelligent. That was unusual and extraordinary. I couldn’t understand where this belief had originated from. As far as I could tell, I was the only intelligent policeman in Helsinki.

  My wife had not proven to be easy prey, however. I’d had to chase her for a couple of years, swear my loyalty, praise her many qualities, her beauty, which no man before me had had the sense to see. Yet she still didn’t warm to my offers of marriage; she considered them premature, there was something that wasn’t quite right, she kept telling me, something gave her pause, made her uncertain, made her rear up on her hind legs. Her alarm bells were ringing. At times I thought she had seen through my façade. In those instances, I figured the best thing to do was to start tearing up. I’d spontaneously cry about how lonely I was, what a loser I was, what a bad place the world was. I’d say I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t good enough for her. I appealed to her sympathy, continuously gnawed at her guilt. It worked. Her alarm bells kept ringing, but she gradually got used to the sound, developed a hearing problem and no longer noticed the ringing of the alarm. Instead, her ears began to ring. The perpetual tinnitus resulting from my demands and complaints blocked the precise frequency that up until recently had worked as a warning device, protecting her from harm. So we got married. And we had children. And we bought an expensive flat in Vuosaari with her money.

  I wondered why my wife was intermittently shooing away fruit flies. Then I noticed that there were two tomatoes on the kitchen table. It looked like they had been there for a few days. Peculiar splotches like stretch marks had formed on the skins; both were dotted with white spots. When I picked up one of the tomatoes, my fingers almost went through it, the bottom had split in several places and the rotten juice had dampened the tablecloth with a sticky yellow ooze. The same thing had happened to this city: it was splitting apart like an enormous rotten tomato and spilling its shit at people’s feet.

  I threw the soft, stinking fruit in the trash. It was nasty to the touch, and afterward I had to wash my hands with dish soap for a long time.

  * * *

  I walked from Sunny Bay to the other side of Vuosaari, where the normal people lived, where the school and the day care and the municipal housing were. The pastel-colored concrete buildings there had been erected in the ’90s. Their curves and metal grills and pointless protrusions looked surreal in the light of the evening sun. This was exactly what the washed-out future of the French and Italian sci-fi comics of my childhood had looked like. Living in the future was great.

  Noushafarin and her two children had been set up in a one-bedroom rental. The apartment was located on the ground floor, so I didn’t have to worry about getting into a stairwell, I just threw myself over the low, brick-faced wall and I was on their patio. I knocked on their back-door window. The face of one scared child appeared, then another. One of the kids ran away. The other one stayed there staring at me. I smiled at the child. Noushafarin came to open the door. She was surprised. I told her that I had come to inspect her apartment. She didn’t understand, she just looked at me fearfully. The children had learned enough Finnish that they understood. They translated for their mother. Noushafarin let me in, but I could tell from her movements that she wasn’t entirely convinced.

  I had brought a laptop with me. I set it down on the kitchen table and found some Disney cartoons on YouTube. I pulled a couple of bags of candy out of my pockets and gave them to the children. They sat there satisfied, watching cartoons and eating sweets, as I led their mother into the bedroom.

&nbs
p; I flung the bedspread onto the floor. I stripped off Noushafarin’s shirt and explained to her that this was normal procedure for Finnish police. The living conditions of asylum seekers had to be regularly inspected. It was our duty as police officers to find out whether an immigrant was worthy of the trust of the Finnish nation or not.

  Trust had to be reciprocal. If Noushafarin trusted me, I trusted her. And if I trusted her, the entire bureaucracy of Finland would be on her side. We’d get the papers in order and the asylum would be granted.

  I was the one who let you pass or blocked the way. Whether the door would open or remain closed was up to me. I was the doorman in these parts. Noushafarin needed to understand that.

  I could hear Donald Duck’s nasal squawking and children’s laughter in the background.

  Noushafarin had frozen; she was practically immobile. I undid her bra, her plump breasts plopped down; I sucked and bit the dark nipples, groped her full, juicy ass, which was heavy in a completely different way than the pale asses of Finnish women. I pushed her down onto the bed and rolled up her skirt. I pulled off her panties, then I took off my own clothes. I knelt next to her head, grabbed her hair, and forced her to give me a blowjob. Once I got into it, I tested the rest of her holes too. I finished by shooting my sperm between her full thighs, lifted the bedspread from the floor and tossed it over her naked body, dressed, got my laptop from the kitchen, and exited the same way I had come.

  As I walked home, a blue-and-white police cruiser pulled up next to me on the sidewalk between some buildings. Slowed down for no reason. My colleagues would find no crimes here.

  * * *

  I interrogated and interviewed the entire next day. I took occasional coffee and cigarette breaks. Yalda was subdued, almost teary. I gave her a warning. I was the one who chose the interpreters and called them in. If Yalda had any interest in serving the Finnish bureaucracy in the future, she had better show a little gratitude and serve with a smile, cheerfully. I couldn’t stand a woman who went around with her face like an elephant’s cunt.

  Once the last of the Somalis had disappeared I was alone with Yalda. I told her I had paid a visit to Noushafarin the previous day. Yalda didn’t say a word; she didn’t move a muscle. It was as if she were dead. I grabbed her by the hand, pulled her up against me. I grabbed her face and bit her cheek. She wailed. So she was still alive.

  I told her I was satisfied with our arrangement on the whole but that I had something better in mind. It felt stupid and unnecessary for me to set limits to my desires. Besides, Yalda needed to be ready for anything. When it came down to it, I was the one who put bread on her table. If it weren’t for my help, there was no way an immigrant woman without a translation degree would get well-paying interpreter gigs.

  Yalda asked what she could do for me.

  I said I wanted her to ask Noushafarin over for a visit. I wanted both of them at once, at the same time.

  Yalda asked when.

  I was on the verge of saying tomorrow, but as I looked at her mouth and the fine whiskers growing above her upper lip, I felt a familiar twitch in my trousers.

  “Tonight,” I said.

  Yalda fell back into silence and then nodded compliantly.

  I gave her a time and told her what my wishes were.

  She nodded again.

  I loved foreign women. Compared to Finnish women, they were real women, obedient, feminine. Independence-obsessed, hard-drinking, thick-waisted Finnish women had lost their femininity. It was impossible to love them. The words of the famous Finnish poet once more came to mind:

  I ask you, man of Finland,

  would you be prepared to sacrifice your life

  on behalf of these Finnish maids?

  I would not.

  I would risk my honor as an officer only if I knew,

  That behind me stood a faithful, hard-working woman who respected me

  From India, Japan, or

  Pattaya, Thailand.

  For a Finnish woman, I wouldn’t even bother

  to button my pants.

  My wife had made dinner. I ate it for appearance’s sake and left. She told me to take condoms with me or buy some from the minimart. So she suspected something. Or had already understood something. I didn’t respond. I didn’t bother explaining that I never used condoms when I was on official business. I pushed the door shut behind me. Finnish doors opened outward. I knew that better than anyone. It was hard to force your way in, and you could leave even if you didn’t have a key.

  Yalda also lived in Vuosaari. My realm was small and easy to rule, everything was within arm’s reach.

  The women were waiting for me in their little black panties, just like I had told them to be. Yalda looked almost relaxed, Noushafarin almost weepy. It didn’t bother me. As a matter of fact, her subdued misery excited me.

  Both women were wearing colorful robes. I took them off and tossed them in the corner. I shoved my left hand into Noushafarin’s crotch and my right one into Yalda’s crotch and squeezed their flesh. Both of the women had shaved themselves porcelain-smooth. I released my grip and went over and sat in the armchair. It had been placed square in front of the window, in accordance with my wishes. The venetian blinds were halfway closed. A serving table had been set up next to the armchair. On it stood coffee prepared Turkish style, wine, and grapes. All in accordance with my wishes.

  The armchair was cheap, from IKEA, and on the floor in front of it lay a large, multicolored Oriental rug, presumably purchased from the same place. I ordered the women to stand on the carpet. They did so and took off their bras and panties. I compared Noushafarin’s and Yalda’s bodies. Both of them pleased me. Noushafarin’s breasts and hips were heavier, softer. Yalda was taller and slimmer. I ordered both women to lie down on the floor while I tasted the Turkish coffee. If it had been any less sweet, it would have been far too strong.

  Noushafarin lay down on her back, Yalda climbed on top of her. Their heads were between each other’s legs. Neither had tried to look me in the eye, even once. That was good.

  I pulled the belt from my pants and gave Noushafarin a couple of whacks on the legs, Yalda a couple on the back. I ordered them to make more noise and enjoy themselves. They began to slurp and smack more loudly.

  I poured myself more bitter coffee and ate a couple of grapes.

  I drank half the wine and dumped the other half over the women. Then I told them to screw each other with the empty bottle.

  I took off my clothes and joined them on the rug. At first the combination of eight limbs and six orifices offered plenty to experiment with, but eventually I started feeling nauseous.

  I climbed back onto the armchair. Yalda shoved her slender hand into Noushafarin according to my instructions. I watched this performance, sprawled in the armchair. I started shivering. The little coffee cup on the table started to bother me. I put it on the floor. I put it on the floor again. And again. It was still in my hand. The Oriental carpet in front of me rippled, the patterns swirled downward, down, down, endlessly down. The women were standing somewhere behind me but when I turned they weren’t there. I wondered where exactly they had gone, but then their naked bodies were writhing on top of each other in front of my eyes, dark hair billowing. I tried to count their limbs, but I couldn’t. I tried to pay attention to what was happening, but then I had to piss so I went into the bathroom. The coffee cup was still in my hand; I tried to figure out what to do with it, and suddenly I realized I had put it into the toilet bowl. I knelt down in front of the bowl and thrust my hand into it. The surface was smooth and warm. The hole was tighter than I had imagined, and now I was unable to pull my hand out. I stared at the toilet bowl, which had sucked my arm in up to the shoulder, and to my horror, I couldn’t remember what I had lost in it. Then I realized I had lost my soul in the hole. I yanked my hand out, and it was bleeding. Blood was streaming across the floor, the walls had turned black, they were like charred wood with embers still glowing in the cracks. The medicine cabinet mir
ror was gone; beyond it I saw a scorched landscape—when I looked left, the whiteness blinded me. When I looked right, I heard a screeching and my heart began to beat wildly from terror. I turned away, but I had already seen it—a pyramid of human skulls gnawed clean, at the top of which sat Death herself, a long-legged, dusky-haired woman whose legs continued forever, continued on and on, the higher I looked the longer they continued, and I never did see where they ended. I felt myself growing cold, disappearing, becoming a movable part of this dull, lifeless world. The whole world was nothing but death and fucking. I was lying on the bathroom floor, staring at the darkness that had appeared in place of the ceiling. I had turned off the lights, whispering shadows moved above, they dangled from cords that swung in the breeze. I was the same kind of human shadow hanging from cords. My jaw hurt. I looked in the mirror and opened my mouth and instantly started to shriek in panic—my mouth was so full of teeth that I couldn’t see my tongue anymore. I was a deep-sea predator that trapped its victims with a glowing lure. Predator fish were swimming all around me.

  Somehow I managed to make it out of the bathroom. I stumbled into the living room. Yalda and Noushafarin were sitting on the sofa; they had gotten dressed. I couldn’t tell if it was one or two people sitting there. They were laughing. I tried to ask what was happening to me, but I couldn’t tell if I’d spoken or not. The coffee cup was on the table, where I had left it. Yalda showed me something in her palm. It was a seed, little and black. An ugly and, in spite of its minute size, plump seed. It had tiny indentations, pores. It looked like an asteroid, a body that had shot into this world from other worlds. It didn’t belong here. I was mesmerized by it even though I was afraid of it. I tried to touch it but my hand went through it. Yalda laughed. Her laughter crackled around her.

  “It’s just a little seed,” I said.

  “Datura,” Yalda interpreted. “Poison.”

  “I don’t feel good,” I said.

  “You’ve drunk poison. You’re going to die,” Yalda translated.