“I do,” Vesa said, the sincere expression on his face winning her sympathies all over again.
“Here.” She settled herself upon the bed and patted the fraying coverlet. “Let me tell you a story.”
As the boy poured himself another nip of vodka and drew himself up next to her on the mattress, she cleared her throat and began.
“Mastered by desire impulsive,
By a mighty inward urging,
I am ready now for singing,
Ready to begin the chanting
Of our nation’s ancient folk song
Handed down from bygone ages...”
**
Kaija closed the book.
She had been reading for an hour or more, taking sips from her glass to soothe her voice, grown rough from lack of practice. At first she’d been self-conscious, speeding through each line with little variation or tone, but gradually she’d lost herself in the tales. As though called to life by each yellowed page, a great smith forged magic from iron, a wise bard shaped the world with his song, maidens wove on rainbows and swam the gloomy depths as fishes. Throughout it all was the song and rhythm of the forest, a paean to the natural world. Time had flowed honey-slow as she and Vesa had lived the stories, drifting together in an alcohol glow until they nestled close under a threadbare blanket wrapped around their shoulders.
Kaija let her hands drop into her lap and closed her eyes, taking a moment to savor the peace. She began to hum softly, recalling a tune that had stuck in her memory from the last time she’d felt such a calm. It brought her back to the old farm--the ceramic stove chasing the night chills away, everyone whole and together once more. She lulled herself to the edge of sleep with the song and the sweet embrace of the blanket.
Only after a few minutes had gone by did she realize that she’d begun to twine her fingers into the soft locks of Vesa’s hair. She pulled back her hand, suddenly embarrassed.
“Wh-which story was your favorite?” she blurted, trying to distract herself from her strange transgression. “I...I like the ones with Väinämöinen and the Sampo. What about you?”
Receiving no reply, Kaija looked sideways at Vesa, who had thoroughly bundled himself in the covers of her bed.
He was asleep. She watched him, hardly believing how near he was, fascinated by his long, pale eyelashes that fluttered slightly in dreaming. The last few teaspoons of vodka neared the lip of his tumbler as it lolled in his relaxed hand.
She could feel his body’s warmth seeping through her sweater, and the rise and fall of his chest against her arm. With each exhalation, his soft breath swept across her collarbone and sent thrills racing down her spine.
She had an inkling that this was an odd way for two young men to befriend each other. Had he guessed her secret? Or perhaps he’d found something in her masculine guise that he desired--she’d heard there were boys like that. She thought back on the look of adoration on his face and tried to analyze it, wondering if his heart beat faster for Kai or whether he was just an innocent, with no designs upon her other than simple camaraderie. How had they ended up like this? What did it mean?
Vesa shifted in his sleep, and the smell of pine soap and shampoo wafted up on the heat of his neck. Kaija fought a powerful urge to bury her face under his chin. She wanted to press herself to him and drink in the smell of his clean skin, lips searching, finding...
No. As long as she was Kai, the runner--Kai of the Forest Clan--this path was barred to her. She needed to be strong now, not give in. If they wanted to get to someone, they went for the heart--they took away children, lovers, parents. How much better to be a tough boy all alone in the world than a maiden nursing a fragile romance with another human being.
This is something you can never have, she told herself. Not until Kalevia is free.
She needed to cool her head. Burning with regret, she realized it was time to send her new friend home.
“Hey,” she said, roughly shaking his shoulder. “Hey, wake up!”
He gave a soft groan and burrowed further into the warmth of her shoulder, drawing the blanket up around his face.
“Aren’t you gonna head home?”
“Nah, I’mma sleep here,” he murmured, radiating contentment.
She shook him off and stood up, tearing the blanket from his shoulders. He opened his eyes and stared up at her in bleary befuddlement.
“You...” He sighed happily, his eyes drifting closed, “are the best friend ever.”
As she stared down at him with growing exasperation, she became newly conscious of the fact that they were roughly the same height. His shy demeanor made him seem smaller, but now that he’d decided he was an immovable object, he’d grown into a well-developed portion of muscle and bone fully dedicated to maintaining its position in her bed.
“Oh, come on, you can’t be that drunk. Get up!”
He laughed, then--a low, rolling chuckle.
“Make me.”
Annoyed, Kaija decided to take this request literally. She grabbed the front of Vesa’s shirt and hauled him to his feet--even as he went limp in her arms--and began dragging him toward his boots. He laughed and struggled the whole way, acting as though she did it for his entertainment.
“What, you wanna fight?” she asked breathlessly, pulling him across the threadbare rug.
“Let’s!” Vesa said, pulling her into a headlock.
They tumbled onto the floor, rolling over each other in the combat of adolescent boys. Kaija felt a rush of elation as she held her own against Vesa, laughing as she played her strength against his. Finally Kaija gained the upper hand and found herself astride his chest. Panting, she stared down, victorious.
“I win. I’ll count to ten, and then you hit the road.”
“Not yet!” he protested, struggling under her weight. With a sudden burst of energy he wrenched himself sideways, unseating her, and for a brief moment their positions were reversed. She managed a partial escape; as he grappled for a hold, his hand slid under her sweater. She felt it grasp, connect...
She saw the moment the realization came over him, his smile draining from his face. All movement ceased. Blue eyes stared into hers, all traces of sleepiness gone.
The game was over. She threw a jab that sent him sprawling across the rug.
Vesa lay still for an instant, and then slowly drew himself up, holding his bruised jaw. Kaija glared at him with her arms across her chest.
“I’m sorry. I...I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t. You weren’t supposed to,” she replied fiercely.
“I should leave.”
“You probably should.”
He struggled with his boots, his fingers still clumsy with the lingering effects of the vodka.
“I just want you to know that it doesn’t make any difference to me. Boy, girl...I don’t care.” He paused, his face a mask of contrition. “We can still be friends, right?”
“I don’t know.”
He sat there, staring at his feet for a long while. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft and terribly sad.
“When I was asleep, I dreamed you were singing to me.”
She felt the blood creep into her cheeks. So he had heard her.
“My mother used to sing that lullaby,” she said quietly.
She exhaled slowly, letting the flush fade away with her breath, and exhaustion crept in to take its place. Suddenly she was dog-tired, longing for nothing more than a return to the warmth of a few minutes before.
Perhaps she’d already gone too far. She would die for her brothers, and there were secrets she would never even tell them--sides of her that she could never allow them to see. She had let this boy in closer than anyone else, and it hadn’t been entirely accidental. When Vesa had wandered across her path, he’d given her the human contact that she’d craved for so long. She’d jumped at the chance to escape her solitude.
Now, as he stared at her, and the moment stretched between them, need overwhelmed caution.
There was no going back.
“Listen,” she said with a sigh. “You don’t need to break curfew. You can stay if you want.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
“Let’s go back to bed.”
**
As he drifted into the first thin light of morning, Vesa refused to open his eyes. He began to perceive the ache of his body and the way his head felt like it was over-stuffed with poisoned sawdust, but he drew the sheets more tightly around himself and pretended these sensations were part of a lingering dream. He knew that if he acknowledged his return to consciousness, he would be forced to leave the warm bed and face whatever consequences waited for him in the day ahead.
He found he remembered the night before. He had heard people joke about drink erasing memories, but it was all there--slightly soft around the edges, rosy and perfect as though viewed through a bright window on a winter’s evening.
He had stepped out of the life he knew, and into a place so outside the scope of his experiences that even while it was happening it had felt like a dream. As the night wore on and he had drained his glass, everything had become a surreal escape orchestrated by his friend Kai. Vesa had enjoyed the newness of his mellow buzz, the unfamiliar stories, and then, as they sat side by side on the bed, a peculiar stirring within himself that he had never experienced around another boy.
It was enormously disconcerting. He found the girls at school exciting yet terrifying, and even the boys he tried to impress had never provoked any adolescent urges. What had come over him? For a while he had tried to justify it as a response to the rarity of platonic physical contact, and then he was concerned when it seemed to be more than that, and then he was so happy and drowsy with liquor that he had decided he didn’t care anymore.
It wasn’t merely a question of boys and girls. Kai was a new kind of person altogether, one who didn’t fit cleanly into the human sorting boxes he was accustomed to. Alto-voiced Kai, with slender, ink-stained fingers--stronger than him, and a source of confusing arousal. When Vesa had discovered her secret, one part of his mind had been genuinely shocked, while another part answered of course you knew. Looking anew at this person, he felt the same mix of respect, affection, and confusion as before.
Under the circumstances, he had been amazed that she’d allowed him to stay. They had fallen asleep talking in whispers, back to back on the thin mattress. He'd felt her body curled up next to him, humming with life like a little dynamo, magnetic in the dark.
Vesa sat up in bed and looked down at Kai’s sleeping face. He knew that his disappearance would have been discovered by now. He’d only planned on staying out a few hours, and had pushed the realities of the situation to the back of his mind. If he didn’t force himself to go now, things would become more difficult, and he couldn’t allow Kai to weather the fallout from his own transgressions.
He gently placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Bye,” he whispered.
She mumbled something and turned over in her sleep. He went to get his coat.
Vesa left the apartment building, and wandered out onto the avenue, his shins covered in snow. There was a bus stop on the corner; he looked at the line map, wondering if it would take him close to home.
For all he knew, the whole country was on red alert--calls placed on diplomatic hotlines, the Chairman’s residence in an uproar. He tried to imagine it as he stood waiting for the bus in a street quiet except for the scrape of a shovel on a stoop down the way. He found that he couldn’t. Did they really care that much?
It was then that he noticed the car. It was long and black, and it slid around the corner with the unhurried grace of a predator. As it began to crawl toward him, he knew what it was hunting for.
Vesa walked in the opposite direction, refusing to acknowledge the car’s pursuit--but it soon drew up alongside him. The driver rolled down the window.
Vesa had known a lot of government men in his life; the one who stared at him from the front seat was a remarkably perfect specimen.
“Vesa Uusitalo?” asked the officer.
“Aww, you came all this way to pick me up?”
“Get in the car.”
Vesa turned and ran.
Behind him, a guard whose dimensions put Mika to shame jumped out of the passenger side door. Before Vesa had gotten a hundred meters, he felt iron arms grab him from behind and crush him in a bear hug.
“Let me go, goddammit! Let me be!”
The colossus said nothing--he merely stowed Vesa under his arm and walked back toward the car. With his arms pinioned to his sides, Vesa was forced to endure the ignominy of being dragged along, scuffling and growling curses as his kicks bounced impotently off the guard’s tall boots.
Vesa knew he was being an idiot, and that this was just delaying the inevitable. He just didn’t want it to be over. Not yet. Worse than the pain of his head or his constricted ribs was the sinking feeling that once he got in that car, he would never see Kai again. He looked up and caught a brief glimpse of her window down the street. He wanted to yell out to her as he was unceremoniously tossed into the backseat.
Goodbye! I think I love you!
With that, the car door slammed in his face, cutting off his view. Even in the midst of his despair, something stood out to him as odd as they accelerated down the avenue.
There were no door handles on the inside.
**
Kaija woke to the boy leaving. The soft touch of his hand on her shoulder left her with a tightness in her heart, but she knew he couldn’t stay. Dozing, she let him go, since trying to delay his departure would make it more painful.
“See you soon,” she murmured, surfacing long enough to bid him farewell.
She lingered at the edge of sleep for a while, nuzzling into the comforting soapy scent of his pillow, until she was jarred fully awake by noises from outside.
She wrapped a blanket around herself and peered out of her one tiny window. There seemed to be an altercation down at the corner. She thought she recognized the uniforms of State Security; she wiped the condensation from the glass to try and get a better view. What she saw next made her gasp in horror.
It was Vesa, being manhandled by a State Security officer. She couldn’t hear what he was shouting, but she didn’t have to. It was over for him; that much was clear.
As his voice faded away, she didn’t feel sad or angry--just overwhelmed by the certitude of failure. This was the way life was, and she had been foolish to think otherwise, even for a short while. She had warned herself over and over not to care, not to get involved with other people, and she had slipped up. Just this one time, she had thought. Just once.
How wrong she had been.
Kaija knew that she had to leave now. She had liked this apartment, and her comrades at the print shop--but from the looks of it, that part of her life had just been put to a messy end on the street, as the boy who could have been her lover was dragged into an unmarked car. Once they had kept him awake for a few days in the interrogation room, they’d know every detail of the previous night, and there would be a knock on her door and a black car waiting outside.
She began to search for a bag, taking only the necessities. She didn’t really own much, anyway.
Goodbye, desk where she wrote all night. Goodbye, door that locked. Goodbye maiden-heart, doomed never to beat again.
It was time to join her brothers.
Goodbye. Goodbye.
**
Chairman Uusitalo’s son was missing. Although the Chairman’s outward manner was calm as they went through their morning briefing session, Demyan could feel the anxiety hovering around the man like a thundercloud, lightning firing out of every nerve. Demyan alone knew that the Chairman was a hairsbreadth away from tears and the assured political destruction that would bring; the man strained to pretend that “Find My Son” was just a simple item on his agenda.
Demyan watched Chairman Uusitalo’s impassive face. Behind it was a looping mem
ory, repeating over and over like a skipping record.
He’d last seen Vesa yesterday morning. The boy had tried to ask him something, and he had ignored him. Now he would never see his son again.
Ugh, thought Demyan.
He hoped the kid would turn up soon, partly because the Chairman seemed like a decent man, but mostly because this unfortunate incident had put a damper on Demyan’s own plans. The bulk of State Security was out looking for the boy, and he was forced to wait indefinitely for them to bring in someone much more important. It was all immensely frustrating.
When the meeting adjourned, the Chairman asked to speak with Kuoppala privately; Demyan, as he was wont, took advantage of his privileged position and invited himself along.
“Have you found anything?” the Chairman asked once they were alone in his office.
“Nothing so far, but I’ve mobilized agents in every district.” Kuoppala answered, his face furrowed with genuine concern.
Hello, what’s this? wondered Demyan. Why the hell does Kuoppala care? The man seemed completely out of sorts and nearly as worried as the president. It merited investigation, since it wasn’t like Kuoppala to trouble himself over the fate of another human being. Just as Demyan prepared to make the dive, someone knocked at the door.
A guard entered and whispered something in the Chairman’s ear. The Chairman looked shocked, then relieved, and then angry, his face cycling through emotions until he finally got the words out.
“They’ve found him.”
Vesa was waiting in an antechamber, his chair flanked by two stone-faced guards. He rose as his father approached, and Demyan was struck by the brazen fire in his eyes.
Was this the same dogged boy he’d seen a few days ago, kicked around by life and accepting it? What had caused this sudden rebellion to flare up in him?
“Hei, Chairman,” Vesa said.
Chairman Uusitalo slapped him hard across the face. It rang like a thunderclap.
“You stupid, stupid boy! What were you thinking?”
“I wanted to get out for a while. Take a walk.”
“All night? Of all the impudent...!” The Chairman caught himself and lowered his voice. “Right now, rebel forces are threatening the safety of our citizens. For all I knew you were dead.”
Dusk in Kalevia Page 9
