Marmot’s father carries on explaining how people’s jerky movements were probably the result of a different diet. Back then no one had invented vitamins or even bananas. So because there wasn’t enough normal food people often ate tree bark and lingonberries (which of course were more grey than red, and this made them very hard to find on the forest floor) and they made coffee from dandelions.
‘So how did they make hot chocolate?’ asks Marmot in bewilderment.
His father thinks for a moment. ‘Generally by boiling potato peelings, or sometimes from dried beetroot. Of course, there was no sugar back then, so the hot chocolate was very bitter, but it wasn’t all that bad once you got used to the taste.’
Marmot thinks this over for a moment then returns to Grandpa’s homecoming. ‘So what was Grandpa doing all alone in his workroom?’
‘I wondered about that myself. Sometimes you could hear muttering and swearing coming from inside, so I decided he must have been concentrating on being angry. I would have gone in to see him, but the door was always locked. Grandma wasn’t allowed in there either, though sometimes she would knock on the door and try to coax Grandpa to open up. And that door was as dark and thick and heavy as midnight in December. It was so thick and strong that the knocking never reached the other side. And so I finally gave up and decided to let him hide there in his workroom and forget all about him and get on with my own chores.
‘I would help Grandma with the housework, I collected water from the well and logs from the woodshed and took out the dish-water, and during that time Grandma taught me to read. Sometimes Grandpa would come out of his workroom, but I would pretend I hadn’t seen him. He didn’t want people to see him either. I tried not to think about him and I tried to be happy, even though Grandpa couldn’t smile any more; after all, I was a child and children are supposed to be happy. Nowadays there’s even a law about it, or at least a parliamentary act, from 1962 if I remember correctly, but even back then people generally agreed that children should always be happy. But how should I put it – it’s hard to be a carefree little butterfly when the saddest elephant in the world is sitting nearby.’
Marmot is astonished. ‘An elephant? In your garden?’
Father looks at Marmot for a long time.
They are still sitting on the steps. A cigarette is burning away in Father’s fingers; invisible insects hover, poking inquisitively at the thin trail of smoke rising up to the sky. A pair of dragonflies buzzes low across the garden as if they are looking for something in the grass. They dart out from behind the sauna towards the garden swing, then onwards circling through the currant bushes to the drinking water pump. (That morning, when they had gone to collect water for the coffee, Father had allowed Marmot to operate the green iron pump by himself.)
Through the sun-spotted foliage in the forest the frantic twittering of birds comes rolling in towards the house – a swell of sounds, whistling, chattering, squawking, warbling and chirping, almost drowning out the gallant buzzing of the crickets in the garden. Marmot rubs his eyebrows and strives to imagine a great grey elephant walking through the spruce trees and into the garden, its tusks outstretched and its trunk swaying lazily from side to side. Was Father really talking about a real elephant?
‘What did you say?’ asks Father, dazed, as if he has just woken up. His face brightens and he chuckles and shakes his head and slips back into that state of sleeping awake that means it’s not a good idea to disturb him.
Listening to his father’s stories, Marmot has always imagined that these ancient events happened far, far away, in another country even. But now in a flash it dawns on him that things took place in this very house, on these same steps – and here they are now, sitting in peace.
Marmot leaves his father and runs round the house excitedly to take a look at the thick, heavy door of Grandpa’s workroom, something he realises he has never paid any attention to before.
But to his great disappointment he sees that instead of the old thick door that Father has been talking about there is a flimsy, modern door, which is not black in the slightest but white, and all in all very plain and boring. He recalls that Grandpa’s workroom has not even been a workroom for a long time; now it is only a dusty old storage room full of cardboard boxes and newspapers and stuffy old clothes. Grandma put things in there when she still lived here, as she couldn’t take them up the stairs to the attic because of her bad legs. In fact Marmot often helped her carry heavy things into the workroom and not once had he thought of the tiny little room as in any way special or noteworthy.
Father shuffles behind Marmot into the workroom. Marmot asks him pointedly why the door has been changed.
Father still looks like he is half asleep, his eyes glancing up and down the room. ‘We had to break down the old door with an axe,’ he says in a strange voice.
‘Why?’
‘Grandpa brought a Russian pistol with him when he came back from the war and he kept it in his workroom. He showed it to me once and told me to keep well away from the pistol and the workroom so that nothing terrible would happen.
‘I smelt the pistol, it gave off the iron smell of war, it went in through my nostrils and lingered heavy in my sinuses. I hated that pistol and decided not to think about it, to forget it existed. And so for a long time I shut the pistol and Grandpa and his constant anger and nervousness out of my mind, just like he had shut me and Grandma on the other side of the workroom door.
‘But one winter’s day, when Grandma had gone to the doctor’s about her sore hand and I was sitting in the kitchen reading Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Ståhl, I heard a loud bang from the workroom. And that’s when I remembered Grandpa and the pistol that smelt of war. I ran out here, stood behind the locked door and started battering it with my fists and shouting for Grandpa so much that my throat hurt.
‘But now there wasn’t a sound from the workroom, and that same smell was hanging in the air, the smell of hunters who have just shot an elk or a hare. And I smelt the smell of that pistol and I knew that something terrible had happened after all.
‘Shouting at the top of my lungs I ran to the woodshed to fetch an axe and started breaking down the door. I wasn’t very old, in fact I wasn’t much older that you, and I was scrawny and had thin little hands, and normally I wouldn’t even have been able to lift the axe, but I battered that door with a terrible strength and force. Splinters of wood flew from the door until finally it gave way and I knocked a hole in the middle, I threw the axe to one side and looked inside and there I saw …’
Father blinks and seems to notice Marmot’s presence again. For a moment Marmot has the silly feeling that he has been caught eavesdropping.
‘So what did you see?’ Marmot demands to know, whilst at the same time dreading the answer.
Father looks pale and tired and a little frightened.
Everything is perfectly still, like in winter after a heavy snowfall when nothing moves. Marmot realises that now is not the right time to chivvy Father along, but finally plucks up the courage to ask him whether the sad elephant in the garden might possibly have had something to do with it.
Father takes a deep breath, nods his head and says yes, yes, the elephant had rather a lot to do with it. He sits down on Grandma’s old sofa, one of those old-fashioned ones that looks like it’s made of pug skin, with curved sides like the thighs of an animal that can run very fast. He thinks for a moment and then begins to tell Marmot the story of the zoo that fell from the heavens.
After the war things were a bit topsy-turvy, Father explains, and it so happened that one day an enormous Soviet cargo plane came crashing out of the sky and landed right next to Grandpa’s house.
The plane’s mission was to carry a large collection of animals from a Soviet zoo to some other destination. No one knew for sure where exactly it had come from or where it was going or, indeed, why those animals had been herded on to the plane in the first place. In any case it somehow strayed from its course and one Sunday afternoon,
a few weeks after the war had ended and the men had started returning to their homes, the plane appeared in the sky above the forest and plummeted to the ground with smoke billowing out of its choking engines.
The plane most probably landed on the enormous swamp at Warren’s Marsh, several dozen kilometres from Grandma’s house, right in the middle of the tangled woodlands of Warren’s Wood, a forest so thick that to this day no path has been cleared through it. If the pilot had survived he must have escaped through the forest and found his way home, because nobody ever reported seeing him. (However he most probably died in the crash and sank with the plane deep into the swamp – the aircraft was never found either, though some people did go and look for it after the first snowfall that year.)
As if by a miracle some of the animals had survived the crash and managed to make their way out of the plane in time. Most of them soon disappeared and went their separate ways. But some of them wandered the area for a while trying to get their bearings; some ended up very close to Marmot’s father’s childhood home and sometimes, he says, you could even catch a glimpse of them from the garden.
‘It must have been a big story in the newspapers,’ says Marmot, but Father shakes his head.
‘On the contrary. The authorities covered up the whole incident. They claimed that there had never been an aircraft carrying animals, and so no one was allowed to write about it in the papers. You see, whenever something strange like that happens, it’s the authorities’ job to tell everyone that it’s just a rumour or a simple misunderstanding. And of course back then it was perfectly understandable: the war had just finished and the political situation was very strained, because a lot of people were still very angry.’
‘Grandpa was angry too. And then the elephant appeared in the garden,’ Marmot sighed in amazement.
‘The greyest, largest, saddest elephant in the world,’ says Father. ‘It was such a sorry sight. You could tell straight away that it had lost something very important.
‘Perhaps it had lost its wife and child in the crash. Or perhaps it was sad because it really didn’t have a home any more. Imagine: elephants belong in Africa, but because this one was probably born in a Soviet zoo it had never even visited its homeland and didn’t know how to be an African elephant properly. And it was only in the Soviet zoo because it had never had any other choice.
‘It certainly didn’t feel at home round our way. Autumn was getting colder day by day and the African elephant probably caught a chill as the temperature reached zero. Maybe in the aeroplane it thought it was finally on its way home, wherever that happened to be, but instead its journey came to an end here in our barren lands. The elephant must have been terribly disappointed. And there was nothing else it could do but stand at the edge of the forest, its grey hide soaking in the grey autumn rain, and its mournful eyes would stare at our white house.
‘Perhaps it was comforted by the presence of other living creatures. Nobody dared shoo it away, because sad or not it was still an enormous, frightening animal, and when they get angry elephants can do a lot of damage.’
Marmot takes a breath, spellbound. ‘And the big grey elephant was staring at your house!’
His father fidgets nervously with his trousers. ‘For many days and nights it stood there looking at us. You couldn’t see it all the time, but I knew it was there somewhere.
‘After a time I found I could no longer enjoy life because of that elephant. It was as if I had become ill and would not recover, even though Grandma would make me beetroot hot chocolate and bake an entire batch of bark cakes just for me. I felt so sorry for the elephant that my stomach hurt. I kept thinking what I could do to help it, but I was so small and it was so big that there was nothing I could have done. All I could do was watch it suffer, and let me tell you, of all the animals in the world none of them suffers quite like an elephant.
‘Did you know that the word ‘suffering’ comes originally from the African word for an elephant’s trunk? Some missionaries began using the word at the end of the last century, when they saw an elephant that had lost its son; its trunk was drooping in grief. No one can remember what the word for ‘suffering’ was before that. Well, at night I used to hear the elephant plodding back and forth across the lawn, and how sad it looked as it dragged its legs along like great pillars. Thump, thump, thump, scuff. You can’t understand it unless you’ve heard it for yourself.’
‘Poor elephant! What about the other animals in the aeroplane? Did you see them too?’
‘Once, one autumn day when it was far warmer than usual, a flock of weird and wonderful birds flew overhead; they were clearly from a far off, exotic land. Another reason I remember that day is because Grandpa came out of his workroom whilst Grandma and I were having breakfast. He drank a cup of dandelion coffee and said how nice it was and patted me on the head, something he hadn’t done for years. I was so surprised that I couldn’t finish my porridge and instead ran out into the garden.
‘And that’s when I saw the birds. One of them had a very big beak indeed, I think it was a toucan. And there were parrots too, and then I saw one of those birds with long pink legs flashing past. But the very next night there came a frost and after that we never saw them again. They probably never survived the cold weather.’
‘I know! The pink bird must have been a flamingo!’ Marmot shouts out in excitement, whilst at the same time feeling a great sense of sorrow at the birds’ tragic death in the freezing cold. Father agrees on the flamingosity of the pink bird and continues his story, this time in a far more serious tone. ‘Of course there were other strange creatures in the forest too, but for the most part they remained well hidden. Shortly after the arrival of the elephant a large predator appeared. It was probably a lion. I never actually saw it, but I could sense its presence. It was there, pacing around our house, enraged by the cold autumn rain. Did you know we used to have a dog back then, a hunting dog called Mannerheim. After the beast arrived, the dog chewed its way through its leash and ran away and we never saw it again.
‘Perhaps the animals from the zoo ate it. The heavy odour of a large, wet wild cat hung in the air, and so did the threat of that great predator. The elephant had made me very sad indeed, but the knowledge that the beast was so close frightened me so much that I couldn’t concentrate on a thing. You could say I was on my guard, a bit like Grandpa, and that in itself is quite tiring.’
Marmot gives his father a puzzled look. ‘But couldn’t Grandpa have shot the lion with his pistol?’ he asks.
Father stares at his shoes and frowns. ‘I suppose so, but he never came out of his workroom, and I don’t think he even knew about the zoo animals at that point, I don’t suppose anyone had told him about the plane crash. Even Grandma didn’t do anything about it, though I knew she had noticed the animals too. She went from day to day pretending they weren’t there; she must have imagined that this would make them go away. But I could still see that she was just as frightened and worried about them as I was.
‘All I could do was wait for something terrible to happen and finally something did happen, as always when you wait so intensely for something awful like that. One cold, rainy night the lion came into the house and attacked Grandma.’
Marmot takes a loud gasp. Father looks at him and for a moment he too looks like a frightened little boy, not at all like a grown man. Marmot starts to shiver, even though the hot and humid weather has finally made its way into the room, like a bygone age clinging fast to the old furniture.
‘The lion came in here? Into this house, your house?’ Marmot asks in a faint voice.
‘That’s right. It must have been too hungry and cold and angry to wait out in the forest any longer. Back then I used to sleep in the attic. I thought it was the safest place in the house, even though it could get quite chilly sometimes and there was a wasps’ nest in the far corner. Grandma used to sleep on the bed in the kitchen and Grandpa slept out in his workroom, though I don’t know whether he actually ever slept a wink afte
r returning from the war. Anyway, one night I awoke to a terrible noise, it was November, if I remember correctly. Loud banging could be heard coming from downstairs, things falling over, doors slamming and Grandma screaming, the whole house was shaking as the lion snarled and bellowed and roared. At once I realised that the beast from the forest was now inside the house.’
Marmot gives a small, terrified peep. ‘Of course I wanted to go and help Grandma, but I simply couldn’t move – a weakling like me wouldn’t have been much use against the lion, it would have gobbled me up like a potato chip.
‘Finally, when it seemed like the noise would never stop, everything went very quiet and little by little I began to feel my cold legs again. Shivering, I tiptoed downstairs. The kitchen had been turned upside down. Things thrown all over the place, the curtains had been torn down, chairs smashed to pieces, and in the middle of all this devastation was Grandma lying on the floor crying.
‘The lion had ripped her clothes to shreds and mauled her badly. She was still alive, which made me very happy, though I was somewhat surprised – I had been convinced that the lion would eat her. Of course, all this time Grandpa had been in his workroom. He seemed to be blissfully unaware that a lion from a Soviet zoo had just sneaked into his house and tried to eat his wife.
‘I wanted to go and fetch him – after all, the lion attack was quite an exceptional situation, something which I felt required his presence too, but Grandma screamed and grabbed hold of my leg and told me not to disturb him under any circumstances.
‘And then I understood why: Grandpa was already very angry and on his guard, and if he had to be on his guard because of the lion and all the other animals which had escaped from the wreck of the plane, his condition would get worse and worse and he would never be able to work again and we would all end up begging.
The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy Page 24
