The Human Part

by Kari Hotakainen

  She put four one-hundred-euro notes on the round smoking table and said, “The first is for playing, the second is for being here, the third is for falsehood and the fate of the fourth will be made clear later.”

  The woman introduced herself as Mirjam and extended her hand. Pekka, startled, said his name was Pablo.

  “Well, now, Pablo,” Mirjam said suddenly in Finnish. “You aren’t Pablo, and I’m not Mirjam. I’m Mirja. The M at the end I got from the county, but the rest I got from Kontiola, my late husband. He was so rich that he didn’t really know how rich he was. I am the daughter of a small farmer from Suomusalmi, who lives in her ex-husband’s flat waiting to die. You are what you are. I’m not going to judge you or torment you. You’re beautiful and you play well. That’s enough for me. Could you play me something popular?”

  “I don’t know. My repertoire is rather slim. I think all I know is one piece by Jaakko Teppo.”

  “Is it popular?”

  “Not really. Although it is a catchy tune.”

  “I’ll pour more booze. Well now. Lay it on me.”

  “By the way, my name is Pekka.”

  “Is that so? Go ahead.”

  Pekka felt strange playing under his own name, but after getting past the opening theme of “Hilma and Onni” and on to the chorus, he felt himself relaxing. The flute interpreted their story with a Peruvian flavor, but maintained the pining feeling of the piece.

  Mirja was swilling down big shots of the red drink and would occasionally close her eyes. When the flute belted out the melody, underscoring Onni’s ultimate fate, Mirja opened her eyes and pushed three of the notes in front of Pekka.

  “That wasn’t exactly a pop song. It was some sort of Latin American or Spanish-flavored love song, but that’s fine. Would you like to earn the fourth hundred?”

  Pekka nodded. Mirja filled her glass. The neck of the bottle clinked against the edge of the delicate glass.

  “I want proof that I shouldn’t die yet. I want a reason to live. Do you understand? I am a poor girl who got rich by accident. I didn’t know what all Gunnar owned. This apartment and the cash in his second account and all sorts of stocks. We lived in the suburbs in a little two-bedroom apartment when Gunnar tripped on that young people’s board with the wheels under it. It spun the old man upside down and landed him on his head. I’m so poor I have a hard time being rich. Well now. Listen to Mirjam going on again. Well, will you give me a reason to live? I want to see a young man naked and draw my conclusion from that. If it moves me in some way, it’s worth living. If it doesn’t, I’ll get another bottle like this from the cupboard and Gunnar’s sleeping pills. Would you do me this service for one hundred euros?”

  Pekka didn’t know what to say. Saliva dripped from the mouthpiece of the flute into his palm. He stood up from the chair and walked to the window. Seagulls were making wide, sweeping arcs, ending at a large rock where they stood screeching. Then one shot back into the sky, tossed about this way and that like a directionless, sharp-angled piece of rubbish and then tucked in its wings and fell like a big white bullet back to the same rock it had left from. Pekka didn’t know what he should do. For money a person will make rubber boots, dig ditches, build mobile phones, sell snowboards, care for children, drive a taxi, play a flute. We do things for money, and then we leave our money behind. That’s how things go, if they go right. Some people even take their clothes off for money. That’s nothing special, but when he woke up that morning, Pekka hadn’t prepared himself for a task of this kind.

  Pekka closed his eyes and decided. If the seagulls are still on the rock when I open my eyes, I’ll take off my clothes for Mirja and give her a reason to live. If the seagulls are gone, I’ll walk out with my clothes on, and Mirja can sleep.

  Pekka opened his eyes. The seagulls stood on the rock, screeching.

  Pekka walked in front of Mirja and took his poncho off. The bank T-shirt looked stupid now—in the morning it had just felt practical. He took it off with effort, not making the gyrating motions common to these situations. Now he was bare above the waist, the tan line from the bronzing cream was clearly visible. He took off his trousers and kicked them into a pile on the floor.

  A person isn’t even close to naked with his socks on. But when Pekka took off his socks, he was as naked as he had ever been. You don’t even notice being naked with a person close to you, but when Mirja looked Pekka up and down and down and up, Pekka felt like every part of him had been suddenly touched without permission.

  “Will you turn around a couple of times and then walk like a cockerel around the room?” Mirja said.

  Pekka turned around. He thought for a moment about cockerels and the way they walk. He had imitated any number of people and animals in his life, but he had never played a cockerel. He extended his neck as far up as he could, pushed his backside out, bent over slightly and began to walk a little jerkily, at the same time rocking his head from side to side as crisply as he could.

  When the rooster had completed its circuit, Mirja raised her hand. The rooster stopped and straightened up into Pekka. Mirja gave Pekka the hundred euros.

  “Pablo, Pekka and cockerel. I thank you for life.”

  THE SECOND PART

  THE DONOR

  I made breakfast for my mute husband, but he wasn’t hungry. It made me feel anger and pity at the same time. Feelings had been mixing together often lately. Of course the best way is to have only one emotion turned on at a time, but my mind is seldom quite that orderly. My mood was also probably being influenced by the fact that I was leaving to meet the author.

  I reminded Paavo that I was going to be leaving the village to look at raanu wall hangings again. He nodded like a whipped dog. He hasn’t even been having opinions anymore. It felt all the same whether I told him where I was going or not.

  I put clingfilm over the plate and patted Paavo on the shoulder. He shuffled off into the bedroom. He spent his days sitting there in front of the chest of drawers squinting at photographs, even though I had said that staring at pictures wasn’t going to change it.

  I began weeping on the bus. It was difficult with people all around. I concealed the crying with fake sneezes and complained to the person sitting next to me about my cold.

  I arrived at the service station ten minutes early. The author was already sitting at the same table as the first time. He stood up, delighted, and asked if anything was new.

  I said something inconsequential, because I couldn’t tell the truth. He set the dictaphone on the table, took a stack of notes out of his breast pocket, gave a meaningful look and put the stack under the afternoon paper.

  I felt dirty, even though I was doing this for a good cause. I had sent the first installment to Helena, but I hadn’t told her where it had come from. I had sent a card with the money explaining what it was for. Helena called me later and thanked me, but cried about me having sent cash. Apparently I should have sent it to her account, since cash makes you feel so dirty. I almost started shouting.

  The author’s finger was already on the button. You don’t even have time to get your coat off before the machine turns on. I said that the first thing I was going to do after such a long trip was to have a coffee and a juice.

  As I slurped these down, the author indicated a pile of paper and expressed a desire for me to familiarize myself on my trip home with the text he had written based on our first meeting and to comment on it later. I shook my head. I knew what kind of life I had lived. I was more interested in what was left ahead of me.

  The author said that he had written a lot about my children’s lives based on what I had told him, but that he had added things out of his own head related to the present day and the current social situation. This galled me, because I had already stressed repeatedly that the truth was enough. There wasn’t any need to make anything up.

  The author asked my forgiveness and said that he didn’t want to annoy me unnecessarily. He said he had sold his records and his mountain bike and that
this had allowed him to scrounge up an additional two thousand euros. He began to dig in his side pocket, but I told him to leave it well enough alone.

  I suddenly felt faint. I grabbed the corner of a chair for support. I went completely limp. The author leaned closer and asked how I was feeling. I said something incoherent. The author put his hand on my shoulder. His hand felt like an oar I was grabbing from deep beneath the surface of the water.

  I still don’t know exactly what happened then, but suddenly I started telling about everything that had been happening recently, even though that was precisely what I had intended to stay silent about. Thankfully the dictaphone wasn’t turned on. It might be that I had been carrying my burden for so long that I had to set it down now and then, at the feet of a stranger.

  I gushed like a bottle of sparkling mineral water that’s been rolling around in the footwell of a warm car for hours and then gets opened in a single pop.

  I held the author by the hand and started to tell him everything that had made our good life so impossible that I had to go and sell it.

  I made the author swear that everything I was telling him would stay between us and that he would under no circumstances put it in the book. He promised.

  I started from the morning when I received word of what had happened.

  The phone rang a little after 10:00, and there was Helena’s number. Helena never called at that hour. And she shouldn’t have been calling then either. I shouldn’t have answered. I listened to the first words and dropped the phone on the floor. Paavo came and picked it up and listened some more and then hung up and threw the phone against the wall and walked into the kitchen and threw dishes and I heard a crash and went into the kitchen and there he was lying on the floor curled up like a big worm whimpering and then he went quiet for so long that I had to go and check if he was breathing and then I realized what my part would be—I would have to carry this thing for both of us and I became sure when Paavo got up off the floor and looked at me like a wrinkled little 72-year-old child who has had his beloved teddy bear or shovel or something else very important to him taken away and he fell against me and I was only barely able to stay upright and then we went to the couch and I tucked him in under a blanket and looked out the window at the apple trees and the grass and the potato patch and they didn’t look like anything. I looked at the sky and it looked insignificant and pointless too and all of the birds I usually looked at happily looked more revolting than anything else a human eye might see and I went from the couch to the kitchen and set the coffee percolating even though it wasn’t any time to be drinking coffee and I accidentally put in enough for at least eight people even though no one was coming over and even if they were I would have thrown them out because there wasn’t any point in anything and then the phone rang again even though it didn’t have a cover anymore after Paavo threw it but I could still pick out Maija’s number on the broken screen but why would I have answered it? I already had one crying child on the couch—I didn’t want to deal with another one through the receiver and I thought about the camel they always talk about with its back breaking and I was sure I was that camel now and that our house and yard and lawn and everything I could see was the camel’s dry desert sand and I was thirsty but no one was giving me water and my back was breaking but no one was helping me carry my burden and I sat on the kitchen floor and I called on that God they talk about so much but he didn’t come to me, because he probably had other things to do in the Middle East or in Russia or in Afghanistan or somewhere the newspapers write about so much—he doesn’t have time to come to Salme’s kitchen in the middle of everything else he has to do and I had to stand up because I remembered I was supposed to make enough Karelian stew to last for several days and I took the meat out of the refrigerator and they looked like pieces of an animal that had been killed and I couldn’t touch them and so we didn’t have any food all day even though we should have because in the evening Paavo fainted when he got up off the couch to go to the toilet; I caught him so he didn’t hurt his head and then the doorbell rang; I couldn’t go opening it with these eyes, but the door wasn’t locked and our neighbor, an electrician named Kallio, a sensible man in every way, came in and before he had time to take his shoes off I told him the thing and he let out a big damn it to hell and said he was going to make porridge and sandwiches since he was a widower and he wasn’t in any rush and so he did and when he was puttering around in the kitchen just like any other day I was sort of able to give myself permission to collapse and I lay down on the couch and curled up next to Paavo and Kallio carried a stool over in front of us and on it were porridge and bread arranged so nicely that I slipped even further down because he was being so kind but I was still able to eat a little porridge and Paavo took a little piece of bread and then Kallio said he was going to take care of our household chores until this thing worked itself out and of course I sat up startled and said that we weren’t about to start bothering our neighbors with our business any more than we already had, but he said it wasn’t any bother and reminded us that his wife Katri had always bought yarn and needles and who-knew-what from us on credit and that apparently after Katri’s death we hadn’t come asking after the money and that this was just settling the account and that this thing was big enough that Kallio said from now on he was going to do what he knew how and what he didn’t too, which reminded him that in situations like this you were supposed to do something that would take your mind off things for a while, and he told about how when his wife Katri collapsed on the floor in the hall with a brain hemorrhage and took her one-way trip out of here, Kallio had bought a karaoke machine and started to sing without being able to carry a tune and that was how he had got a little distance from the Katri thing but he didn’t recommend singing equipment for us, instead coaxing us to go to the big city for the weekend with him for the trotting races, but we could see from Paavo’s expression that there wasn’t any point in saying anything more about horse racing—it would have served me just as well as anything except the thing that was in the front of my mind, right behind my forehead.

  Well.

  Then Kallio sat down next to us and started to sing some song—it wasn’t clear what song it was—he sang so off key that he even noticed it himself and asked if we wanted him to leave, but we weren’t able to want anything—the wheels in our heads were spinning—I just stroked Paavo’s head wanting our old life back, the one I had before that call and when Kallio couldn’t come up with anything else he went into the kitchen and I could hear chopping and he called out that he was going to make Karelian stew since it looked like the lady of the house had been interrupted and I couldn’t say no and he went on cutting up rutabagas and carrots and onions and turned on the kitchen’s portable radio and there was that nature program on where those calm men answer all sorts of phone questions and there came this part where there was a question about species of birds that know how to come back to exactly the same nesting box even though they may have flown six thousand kilometers away for the winter and I stroked Paavo’s head and thought about the birds and the terrible height and breadth of the sky they flew through and that there isn’t anything marking the way, but they just know where to go and have the energy to flap their wings all that way and in that sense they’re faithful like the bird they were talking about on the radio that comes back to that one certain tree on Lake Ylöjärvi even though there are bird boxes and nesting spots in other places too, and I thought about whether for the rest of my life I would always be returning to this day and this feeling even though there would be other days and other feelings, and whether Paavo and I would be stuck here, birds of this dark day always and forever, with this as our bird box.

  Yes.

  And time passed without me noticing and then soon familiar smells started to come from the kitchen when Kallio opened the oven door, apparently not trusting that Karelian stew if anything is one of those foods that you don’t really prepare, it just gets ready on its own if you don’t bother
it, but the smell was so lovely now that it must have been ten seconds I didn’t think of that horrible thing, but we weren’t really hungry that night or afterward for many weeks and Paavo and I shrank up into little raisin-shaped old people and over our eyes—I saw first when I looked at Paavo and then in the mirror—was a sort of film with a lot of water behind and it was all the same whether we cried or not; the water just stayed there waiting for the dried raisin to turn the tap on again, and it didn’t care about time or place—our eyes could just tear up anywhere, and oh, how it hurt my soul when on a normal trip to the store, there at the till, it started to come and of course people couldn’t know what had come over me and just figured I was crazy and thought that well she sure earned her comeuppance by taking people’s money with yarn and needles and lace, and I started thinking evil of people and imagining all sorts of things, but I forgave myself for everything, and Paavo too the day he had an attack in the post office when we were sending Helena a parcel and for the address Paavo had just written Helena Malmikunnas, Helsinki, and then of course the worker asked Paavo to write a more precise address on it and Paavo said that they must know where his daughter lives down there—of course his head didn’t have room for anything but our daughter and this thing, and he started shouting at the innocent worker that for fifty years he had been paying his small-business taxes and state taxes and local taxes and sales taxes and national insurance taxes and all the other stinking taxes and in the home stretch they start demanding that we write down redundant addresses, and I had to say to Paavo shut your mouth now so we can get the parcel to our girl, and after that he didn’t say anything—he just froze over like a path in winter.

  Mmm.