The doctor stashed his rucksack under the bed. After this he sat down to read and contentedly waited for his wife’s return. He knew that, after returning home, his wife would say: ‘What a tough programme, I’m absolutely exhausted’, and that later on she would hint: ‘Gosh I’m tired, I’m sure I’ll fall asleep the minute my head touches the pillow’. And this is precisely what happened: Marianne dozed off whilst her husband was reading about the adventures of polar explorers; as he trekked across the expanses of snow, his breath in clouds around his head, picking icicles from his moustache. If it had only been on Wednesdays that the doctor had had to console himself with the company of polar bears and seals, the problem would not have been quite as serious, but sadly the temperature in their bedroom had been dropping evening upon evening, night upon night.
On this occasion Dr. Nagel wanted to ensure that his wife slept soundly. He dissolved a few sleeping pills in the canister of juice from which he knew his wife would drink when she got home. He wrote his wife a succinct note which he would place on the dressing table before his departure.
Once Marianne had curled up beneath the blankets Dr. Nagel lay next to her perfectly still and listened closely to her steady breathing. Silence hissed in the corners of the bedroom. The doctor waited. Shortly after four o’clock it started to rain. Dr. Nagel went into the kitchen and washed up the juice canister and the glass, so as not to leave any evidence behind him. He listened to the raindrops pattering against the window ledge and was afraid that his wife might wake up. This fear was however futile: his wife was wondering through the valley of sleep. It was time to get to work.
As he stepped inside the thigh the doctor noticed his hands sweating and his heart racing. Inside it was dark, moist and warm. There was an echo. He felt constant pressure in his ears and the rush of blood through the veins was like the distant hum of a motorway or the quiet purring of power cables above a field.
The doctor dug a torch out of his rucksack. He was standing up to his ankles in red water. It must have been the outlet of a lake, bringing blood from the heart to the furthest outreaches of the circulatory system. He turned and walked against the current. He was no longer Dr. Nagel but Dr. Livingstone. The source of the river was waiting to be discovered. In the quiet tunnel of the vein he could hear the squealing of monkeys, the squawking of parrots, the roar of lions and the clatter of delicate hooves as a group of antelopes galloped for cover. He looked at the world around him with the eyes of a true scientist, alert and his senses heightened. He was thrilled by the thought that he was stepping where no man had stepped before, he was seeing and hearing what no eye had seen and what no ear had heard.
He made notes, took readings and checked his position with a compass. Using these observations he would be able to tell others about his voyage. Walking against the current was hard work and breathing was rather difficult. Dr. Nagel realised that his clothes were far too warm. When he came to the first narrow tributary in the river he stopped for a moment to catch his breath and checked his position. He sat down on the river bank and removed his cotton shirt which was soaked in sweat on the back and around the armpits.
After folding the shirt into his rucksack the doctor set off once again. He noticed that his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. He switched off the torch by whose beams he had been guided until now. The current in the river was becoming stronger. At that same moment, in another world, in a house on the hillside, in the half-light of the bedroom, Marianne was waking up to the sound of the telephone ringing.
While the police turned over the house in search of clues, and while Marianne and the police constable were exchanging glances in the kitchen wondering what the doctor meant in his note, Dr. Nagel was wading through the red torrent inside his wife’s thigh. Walking was now even more of a challenge, because since Marianne had awoken the current was stronger and pushed hard against the doctor’s bare calves. Save for the makeshift loin cloth he had made out of his trousers Dr. Nagel was now naked.
For the first time in his life he felt that he was alive – not merely as a theoretical entity but as real tendons, veins and layers of skin. He was drenched in sweat and could feel his muscles, unaccustomed to such physical exertion, shrinking and relaxing, contracting and slackening again. He felt his lungs gasping for breath, his joints cracking and booming, yet still moving to the will of his muscles. The beauty of it all was how much he was enjoying it. It was as though the body, which for so long he had considered a necessary evil, put together simply to support the head, was in this new environment finally coming into its own. He thought how the joy he was experiencing was the same as an adder wriggling along the ground in the sunshine, dust and pine needles catching against its body, moist after shedding its skin. Or perhaps he was an ancient Celtic sorcerer, who winding an eel skin around his arm can feel the electricity pulsing through his limb.
In the evening of April 7th the exhausted Dr. Nagel finally arrived at his destination. During those long sleepness nights at the weather station he had selected the precise spot to set up camp, a place where for the first time he would be able to set eyes upon two dim stars. He knew they would be dangling in the dark sky like a pair of copper coins. In the world which he had left behind, they were not stars but vaccination scars on Marianne’s thigh. The sight of them reminded the doctor of their first night together. He had caressed them, kissed them, pressed his groin against them. Touching those scars Dr. Nagel had felt the years dropping from around him and had placed the palms of his hands on Marianne’s warm breasts.
When the stars came into view, his scientist’s nature overpowered the vagrant within him. The time had come to set up base. Over the next few days the doctor did anything but save his strength. First of all he dug out a cave in the thickest part of his wife’s thigh bone (throughout that time Marianne experienced such an agonising pain in her right thigh that she was forced to seek comfort in the arms of the young police constable) and kitted it out with the few items he had brought. After this he explored the area immediately surrounding the cave. It seemed safe and was well-suited to his research. The region was dominated with high plains covered in rocks and patches of grass. No trees grew there, but the rocky terrain was dotted here and there with miniature red-leaved bushes.
The river cut right through the area. There was no need for the doctor to fear starving to death. During his trek he had noticed that the river was seething with fish eager to bite into the worms squirming on the end of the doctor’s line. There were two species of fish: small red ones and large white ones. Dr. Nagel recorded them in his notebook as simply reds and whites. The flesh of the red fish was very nutritious, though it left a strong aftertaste of iron. The white fish did not have an aftertaste, but had no other taste either. In no way did the two species live in the river in peace and harmony. The whites were constantly attacking the reds. The doctor was astonished at the fury with which they sunk their razor sharp teeth into the scaly sides of the reds. After conflicts like these the surface of the river was awash with the reds’ mauled bodies or heads from which the body had been gnawed off.
Gradually Dr. Nagel’s life began to settle down. He began his scientific work, transferring the surrounding world on to paper. Before his departure he had written out his motto on the first page of his notebook: ‘Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognise the light.’ In the quiet darkness of the thigh his pen brought light and order to the world. Page after page the world began to form a story. He was like a blind rune singer from whose lips tales of the beginning of time poured forth, of the light and the darkness, of the first human being.
His tale was nonetheless based on results. Three times each day the doctor picked up the equipment he had brought, measured the weather conditions and recorded the results in his notebook. Aside from his work he spent his time fishing, reading the family medicine book and hiking across the nearby rocks, between which there lay mist in the mornings. In the ev
enings he gazed at the sky in search of new stars.
The more he learnt about the world around him, the more the doctor noticed a change in himself. He was no longer the same Dr. Nagel as at the outset of his expedition. The muscles in his arms and legs had strengthened. The skin on the soles of his feet had toughened with clambering around the rocks. His hair, beard and nails had grown. A month after his arrival he had happened to catch a glimpse of his reflection in the river and could hardly believe his eyes: who was that dirty, dishevelled, wild man floating on his back watching him from the water?
His research became rather monotonous, because the weather conditions hardly ever changed. It never rained, leading the doctor to take a greater interest in changes of temperature. Once he knew the effect, he had to search for the cause. Of particular interest to him was a series of repeated heatwaves during which moisture would stream down the walls of the cave and the river’s current became so strong that it almost flooded over the banks. If during one of these heatwaves he stood at the mouth of the cave, he often saw the air shimmering above the ledges. The air was electric. He would always get a headache. After the third week he finally worked out the logic behind these sudden changes in temperature.
There were two types of heatwave. At times the temperature would rise slowly and steadily whilst at others the air seemed to become charged in a matter of minutes. The doctor’s notes revealed that the slow heatwaves always occurred on Wednesdays and it was this which eventually put him on the right track. The explanation came from the other world. It was on Wednesday evenings that Marianne stood with her legs apart waving her arms in the air listening to the instructor’s rhythmical interjections at her aerobic’s class. The more frantically Marianne waved her arms, the faster she brought her knees up and down and stamped her feet on the floor, the warmer conditions became for her husband hiding inside her thigh.
As the doctor searched for shelter from the heat, as he lay on the pile of clothes forming his makeshift bed, as he fanned his face with the branch of a red-leaved bush, the memory of Marianne began to disturb him. He thought back to the world he had left behind. As clearly as if he had peered out of a hole in the thigh, he saw the aerobic’s hall and a few dozen women clad in leotards. The thought excited him. He tried to look up at the ceiling, count floor planks, analyse the pictures hanging on the wall, but his eyes always returned to the spots where yearning and absence turn into flesh: the buttocks, the thighs and the breasts.
When the class was over and Marianne stopped jumping up and down, stretching and dancing, the doctor sighed with relief. But he knew it was merely the calm before the storm. He would still have to suffer once more before the temperature would drop again: Marianne rushed into the shower. As the mirrors in the bathroom steamed up, the cave walls began to drip with moisture. The doctor’s fingertips tingled as if he had scalded them in the water pouring over Marianne’s body, flowing to the floor and running down the drain. Eyes appeared on the doctor’s fingertips, eyes with which he devoured Marianne’s body.
Dr. Nagel disliked these Wednesday heatwaves. As he sat in the loneliness of his cave, bathing in sweat, he imagined himself searching for a light blue flower growing at the edge of the spring which touched him with its resplendent leaves. Within the broad ring of blue petals was the spectre of Marianne’s face. It disturbed his concentration on the absolute truth of numbers, on that which can be measured, that which is permanent and sure.
Even more of a trial, however, were the sudden heatwaves. In unlocking their mystery Dr. Nagel relied on logic and numbers and their incorruptible truth. He counted, added and subtracted, multiplied to the power of x. Yet time after time he found himself at a dead end. By far the most difficult matter to explain was why these heatwaves only occurred at night. The doctor was on the verge of accepting this as an inexplicable factor in the equation, when the answer finally dawned on him. He was sitting on the riverbank fishing and he became so excited that he dropped his fishing rod into the water and the fish got away.The explanation was all too obvious, if unpleasant: the doctor realised that Marianne had a lover. Nothing else could explain the sudden heatwaves at night. His joy at finding the solution to the conundrum was bittersweet due to the uncertainty of who this unknown lover could be. Who was arousing Marianne so much that the doctor all but roasted alive in his cave?
The doctor had to be content with using his imagination. Drawing on the depths of his jealousy he composed a story about Marianne’s lover. There were two characters in his story: Romeo and Juliet. Romeo was a young, broad-shouldered police constable, who was investigating the disappearance of Juliet’s husband and fell head over heels in love with her beautiful brown eyes. Every evening he would drive his car to the gates of Juliet’s castle. Swarms of mosquitoes danced by the light of the lanterns in the garden and further off the currant bushes looked like people crouching in the darkness. The drawbridge, which Romeo had to cross to reach the castle door, strongly resembled a slab of concrete. The door which he knocked greatly resembled the door of Dr. Nagel’s house. Juliet, clasped in Romeo’s arms, was clearly Marianne’s twin sister. Juliet was thrilled by her lover’s kisses. She could feel inquisitive fingers lifting the hem of her skirt, caressing her bare thigh. She surrendered to her lover on the thick pile rug in the hallway. They made love twice in the wide double bed. Three times the air inside her thigh boiled, blood rushed in hot waves against the walls of her veins. Three times the heat woke Dr. Nagel as he lay sticky with sweat.
Life could have gone on like this indefinitely: in two worlds and in two stories. The doctor could have spent the rest of his life in his cave with the knowledge that not even death could separate him from his unfaithful wife. He could have taken comfort in the thought that they would share the same coffin, just as they had once shared the same bed. Marianne could have married her young constable, borne him a son and a daughter and later found herself another young lover once her bald, middle-aged husband no longer interested her. And no one would have remembered Dr. Klaus Nagel, the director of a remote meteorological station, who one day had disappeared without trace.
But the two stories were to cross each other one last time. It was exactly two years since Dr. Nagel had gone missing. Marianne had spent the weekend at her mother’s house and was sitting in her car driving home. She was driving very fast along the dark motorway. She was tired and her eyelids kept drooping shut as she stared at the empty road ahead.
By the time Marianne saw the elk it was already too late. Its eyes shone like diamonds in the glare of the headlights. Marianne should have tried to swerve on to the verge and go around the animal, but she wrenched the steering wheel in the wrong direction and slammed on the brakes. Everything happened in a second. The car hit the elk and the windscreen smashed into thousands of shards, slashing open the animal’s side. Marianne had forgotten to fasten her seat belt. She flew head first through the windscreen. The car went off the road and the elk’s body was hurled from the bonnet into the bushes at the side of the road. Then a great silence descended upon the empty road. The car was lying on its side, two of its wheels still spinning. Steam rose from beneath the crushed bonnet. Shards of glass were strewn across the road, they shone in the light of the street lamps. A black skid mark could be seen across the tarmac.
Three minutes later a lorry happened along the road and the driver found three bodies at the crash site. The woman driving had been crushed beneath her car. Broken glass had cut up her face. Her right thigh had been severed at the knee. Next to the car lay the body of the dead elk. Its stomach had spilled out on to the road. Its innards steamed. The third body was lying in front of the car. Only once he came closer did the lorry driver notice that the man was naked. His skin was covered in a thick layer of dirt and his face with a bushy beard. His tangled hair reached down to his shoulder blades. His nails were ten centimetres long. The lorry driver recoiled and hurried back to his vehicle. He called for help on his car phone.
By the time he put down th
e telephone, more people had arrived at the spot. They parked their cars behind the lorry and peered down the bank to see what had happened. The lorry driver stood warning signs at both sides of the road.
The police arrived along with an ambulance, although the lorry driver had already told them that there were no survivors. Everyone was perplexed by the naked man. Had he been in the woman’s car? Why was he naked? Paramedics carried the bodies into the ambulance on stretchers. The accident even made headline news. Identifying the woman did not present any problems: the police found a handbag in the car containing a driving licence in the name of Marianne Nagel. But who was the mysterious naked man?
The police went back to their missing persons’ files. They found a folder boasting the name Klaus Nagel on the spine. This aroused some suspicion, but a final identification could only be made once the deceased’s beard had been shaved and his hair cut. The man’s identity was then confirmed when his shaved face was compared to a photograph of Klaus Nagel several weeks before his disappearance. The director of the meteorological station had finally been found.
Black Train
Basement, Man and Wife
Maarit Verronen
Maarit Verronen (born 1965) began her career as a writer of short fiction and her early work is very clearly rooted in science fiction. Although her more recent output has come closer to the realist tradition, the strange and the mysterious, the mythical and the inexplicable are all still central themes. Her novels have twice been shortlisted for the Finlandia Prize. She has also written a number of radio plays. Both of Verronen’s short stories in the present volume were first published in the collection Kulkureita ja unohtajia (‘Tramps and Forgettors’, 1996).
The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy Page 33
