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The Black Tongue

Page 16

by Marko Hautala


  Maisa thought about Sagal’s recording. She imagined the damp smells of the villa’s cellar instead of the bomb shelter. And beyond that smell, another stronger stench. The darkness. She had to focus. She had to take her thoughts back further, to the summers decades ago, to children jumping from rock to rock. To distant memories.

  “Did anyone write these stories down?” she asked.

  “Bah! Who’d want to write nonsense like this? Besides, it all came to an end. You see, Regina went a little too far. She had this idea that the creature underneath the island was actually her soul. And that’s why the creature wouldn’t leave. She kept on repeating this to us as if she were in a trance. Then one time . . .”

  Mrs. Saarikivi lowered her voice again to a whisper.

  “One time, when we all arrived, she was wearing nothing but a nightgown. Her mumbling made no sense, and one of her breasts was hanging out. There, in the middle of the day. She was touching herself. ‘Masturbating,’ if you want to use more sophisticated terminology. Her lips and teeth were all black. Her skin seemed to have aged rapidly. Then came the last time we ever saw her . . .”

  Her eyes glazed over. She was looking through Maisa. Then she pulled her feet off the table again and pushed herself up.

  “Please wait a moment while I look something up.”

  She walked to the hallway and opened a door to another room. Maisa could see the foot of a bed and burgundy curtains. There was some clattering, and suddenly she saw Mrs. Saarikivi standing on a chair that creaked dangerously, reaching up and going through boxes that had been put away on shelves out of everyday reach. She heard cardboard boxes shuffling around, accompanied by annoyed muttering and hissing, which Maisa was evidently not supposed to hear.

  “That damned bastard shit.”

  Maisa looked around. No dust on any surface. Even the floorboards were shiny. The bookshelf was not full: the MacLean books nestled together with a row of Kalle Päätalo novels, with Papillon at the end of the row like a crown jewel. All most likely left behind by Mrs. Saarikivi’s lover.

  “My goodness,” Maisa heard her say as she stepped off the chair. “It’s in the basement. Now I remember.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  Mrs. Saarikivi walked to the foyer. Maisa heard keys jangling.

  “Come with me. You’ll see.”

  The apartment door creaked. Maisa grabbed her coat and bag just in case and rushed to the door. Mrs. Saarikivi was already walking down the stairs. Her footsteps echoed in the stairwell. Maisa followed her after she closed the apartment door behind her.

  “Did you say you worked for a newspaper?” Mrs. Saarikivi asked over her shoulder as they descended.

  “No, I’m a researcher. I’m writing a dissertation.”

  “I see. What is your field?”

  “Religious studies.”

  The woman stopped and turned to Maisa. She covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Oh, dear me,” she whispered. “And I’ve been saying all sorts of rude things to you. To a priest!”

  “I’m not . . .” Maisa began, then decided not to get into explaining the difference between religious studies and theology. “You have not said anything rude to me.”

  “Well. I suppose people aren’t quite as inflexible as when I was younger. After all, I didn’t even imagine that a young lady like you could be a priest.”

  “I am not going to become a priest.” Maisa decided to clarify. She didn’t want Mrs. Saarikivi to start mincing words with her.

  “I see.” She was visibly calmer. “Why would a priest be interested in the Bondorffs, anyway?”

  “Probably wouldn’t be.”

  They kept walking down in silence. Maisa hoped that mentioning religion hadn’t turned Mrs. Saarikivi completely mute. Her skin began to tingle as they reached the ground floor and continued past it belowground. Maisa forced her thoughts back to her research.

  The light in the basement hallway turned on with stuttering flashes, accompanying Mrs. Saarikivi’s hasty steps down the hallway. Maisa had to catch up with her. The woman stopped in front of the last of the five identical-looking doors. She looked for the right key.

  “Mind your step,” she said over her shoulder as she opened the door.

  Maisa followed. The smell inside the storage area was sweet, as if it were used to store vegetables instead of belongings. The little lamps on the wall buzzed and flashed, about to go off. Flies had managed to wiggle inside the yellowed, stained lampshades, where they lay dead. No one had bothered to clean here. The woman unlocked an exaggeratedly large combination lock to enter her personal storage unit and began to shift boxes until she found what she was looking for.

  “Here we are.”

  She was holding something. Maisa stepped closer. The buzzing noise from the lights annoyed her. She couldn’t shut it out of her mind.

  Mrs. Saarikivi held a small, red wooden box in her palm. A sailing boat in a storm had been painted on the lid, but the paint had begun to crack. It was covered in dark stains.

  “What is it?”

  “Open it.” Her face jerked into a smile.

  Maisa lifted the box between her thumb and forefinger, then placed it on her palm. She opened the lid carefully.

  Nausea hit her immediately.

  “What is this . . . ?”

  Buzzing. A sudden feeling that they weren’t alone in the basement. That they’d forgotten about someone who had been with them all this time.

  “This is what she sent me,” Mrs. Saarikivi said. “To a small child. Her own tooth.”

  Maisa thought about the letter she’d received and the picture of the teeth. Her first thought was that she was on Candid Camera. That was the only way life’s little surprises would remain amusing.

  “That was so long ago, too,” Mrs. Saarikivi said and picked the tooth up.

  Maisa thought about bacteria and their lifespan. Mrs. Saarikivi held the tooth between her thumb and forefinger, rotating it as if she were observing a precious jewel. The root of the tooth was yellow. The gum line was still visible. Above it the tooth was dark gray. It was clearly a front tooth. A wide tooth, chipped at one corner. The root didn’t branch out. Maisa wanted to ask her to put the tooth away. It belonged to someone else.

  “I’m glad I didn’t attend the very last Fairy-Tale Cellar,” Mrs. Saarikivi said, rolling the tooth between her fingers. The sweet smell of root vegetables grew stronger. Maisa looked at a daddy longlegs stretching his legs behind Mrs. Saarikivi. The spider seemed to be looking for warmth from the lamps.

  “I had come down with a fever—apparently I was even delirious. Regina von Bondorff had sent a little wooden box to all the children, even those who couldn’t attend. She had collected beautiful boxes from all over the world. I’m sure she got them from her husband, his being a shipbuilder. Eini from next door brought me mine. She told me; I don’t remember it myself. I found the box in my hand the next morning. I opened it and even in my feverish state I knew what had happened. It didn’t feel so out of place then. I just knew immediately.”

  “You knew what?”

  She shrugged. “Iida and the other girls told me later that Regina had told them her very last fairy tale and then announced that she won’t be a human much longer. Then she had brought out a pair of pliers, and . . .”

  Maisa felt a shiver between her shoulder blades.

  “The girls told me she had pulled them all out, right in front of them. And she hadn’t made a peep. Just yanked them out one by one, then placed each in a wooden box. Then she handed every child a box and smiled. She had cried and explained that she didn’t need teeth anymore, now that she was going to grow a beak.”

  “What?”

  Mrs. Saarikivi giggled. It reminded Maisa of the smiling girl next to her severe man in the photo. The girl Anni Saarikivi had once been.
r />   “A beak,” she said. “Like a parrot’s. Just think about it. That’s how mad her stories had become.”

  Maisa stared at the tooth, not knowing what to say.

  Mrs. Saarikivi stopped her giggling and suddenly spoke as if she’d never found the story amusing at all.

  “Honestly, you can’t judge people when you reach my age. We don’t get to choose our destiny. Regina was . . . Regina. We all will face the Lord’s judgment the way we are.”

  “What happened to Regina?” Maisa asked.

  “Devil only knows,” Mrs. Saarikivi said. “Our parents finally found out about all that nonsense and came to the conclusion that she was not quite right in the head, but by that time we all had more important things to think about: all goods were rationed, and men returned from the front with horror stories of their own. But whenever someone went missing in these parts, Regina’s name came up. At least when we children talked about the disappearances.”

  She laid the tooth back on the black pillow in the box, gently, like a memory.

  “It’s yours now,” she said and snapped the lid shut. She wasn’t holding back her smile this time. “I don’t want it anymore. Can you imagine what people would say if they found this box after I’ve passed on? They’ll think I’m the Boston Strangler or who knows what monstrosity, although I’ve only killed a few chickens and a litter of kittens.”

  Maisa looked at the storm-ravaged ship painted on the lid. The ancient fingerprints smeared across the lid in black.

  “Thank you,” she said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  In the corner of her eye, she saw the daddy longlegs settling in the lampshade, his legs still. To Maisa it looked like he’d given in to the restless buzzing of the light and realized that he’d never achieve a more profound peace than this.

  The red box weighed more than Maisa would have expected, and she could feel it moving in her coat pocket when she left the building. She sat on a bench outside. She chuckled, then looked for a pack of cigarettes in her pockets, although she hadn’t smoked in two years. There was no one else in the yard. The box was heavy in her pocket. It pressed against her thigh and felt hot.

  Maisa called Pasi, but reached only his voice mail. She immediately regretted calling him. She just wanted reassurance. What had just happened was amusing in some twisted way, right? It was hard to tell when she was alone.

  Maisa drew a long breath and blew it out as if she were smoking. She imagined how the cigarette’s calming effect would spread into her limbs until it became reality. She relaxed. She took out her notepad and flipped it open.

  The one who went missing. Julia had disappeared. In her teens Maisa had always wished that the cocky American Julia would go away and never come back. The same Julia Samuel was in love with. And now there was Sagal. Maisa wasn’t responsible or liable for either. Not at all.

  She turned her eyes to the large rock in the middle of the yard. It had been there before there were buildings, and it would still be there when people fled in the wake of a catastrophe. The cold, barren buildings would begin to crumble, like all structures people thought were built to last forever, but the rock would remain.

  Maisa had intended to ask Mrs. Saarikivi about Samuel, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She hadn’t talked to anyone about him, and she’d been especially careful not to mention him to Pasi. She couldn’t mention the faded newspaper clipping from two years ago, with a picture of a man. That man had once controlled Maisa’s every thought. That information belonged to no one else. People had to have amulets, objects containing a secret. People needed tangible benchmarks to organize the random events of life into a meaningful story and clear the way to a recognizable goal.

  Maisa realized she was squeezing the box in her pocket. She released her grip and wiped her palm on her pants.

  The stairwell door to the neighboring building opened. As soon as he set foot outside, the skinny man began to light his cigarette, not bothering to look around. Maisa was already walking away when she took note of the building. The man hadn’t walked out of any old stairwell. Her eyes counted the windows up to the third floor.

  That’s where Samuel used to live as a teenager. Maisa had looked up at the building’s windows thousands of times. Sometimes she had even gone for an evening walk to watch shadows moving inside the apartments—thinking that one of them could be Samuel.

  Where are you, shadow? she asked.

  It was melodramatic of her, but certainly no one else had asked that question as seriously as Maisa had during the two years Samuel had been missing. Or so she told herself. Samuel’s wife wouldn’t have asked, nor his faceless children. Maisa could have given birth to them and they’d still be the same little humans. Life took unexpected turns, but there was always that one point marking the beginning of a life when everything else could be possible. Samuel’s shadow in the window. That had been her future. Their future.

  Maisa forced herself off the bench. When she reached the street she saw the woods surrounding the buildings, and when she looked right, she could see the deck of Julia’s house. Behind the house again just woods, like all around the edge of Suvikylä. Then there was the townhome where Maisa had lived, watching Julia’s house with smoldering eyes. Her dad had always admired Julia’s dad—a success story, a man from Hollywood, an entrepreneurial spirit, a great noncommunist. And there was Maisa, hating even Julia’s shadow.

  She had never met Julia’s dad. She’d only seen him as a face in a taxi flying by, or as a distant figure smoking on the upper balcony of their opulent home. In her imagination Julia’s dad lived somewhere beyond the lives of everyday folks and their everyday chores.

  A complete drunkard these days.

  Maisa took off toward the house with determined steps, but slowed down soon. The air seemed to have become too heavy to breathe, almost liquid. She thought about Julia. The Julia she hated, the Julia who had gone missing. Julia may well be lying somewhere six feet under right now. She’d been disintegrating there for decades. When Maisa had helped carry her couch into a moving van heading to Turku, bacteria may have been eating at the green color of Julia’s eyes. When Maisa had opened the blinds at her Turku studio for the first time, Julia’s smooth skin had been flaking off her cheekbones like charred paper. And somehow Maisa felt like it was her fault. The fault of her envy and anger.

  Typical magical thinking, Maisa tried to convince herself. But what can you do?

  Her shoe stopped with a crunch on the asphalt.

  Her lungs jerked like a wounded baby bird.

  Julia was gone, yet she was everywhere.

  That night Maisa couldn’t sleep. As soon as she closed her eyes, she saw decomposing skin, vitreous humor oozing out of eyes with shreds of membrane sticking to it. The soil swallowed it all without a single witness.

  At three in the morning she got up and drank a glass of juice. The wind made the windows creak. The fall had been surprisingly warm, and the trees struggled in the wind, furious for having to wait for winter this long. The horizon flashed. Maisa drank her juice and thought about the last time she’d seen lightning this time of year.

  She tried falling asleep twice more, but failed. She got up again, walked to her coat in the foyer, and took Anni Saarikivi’s wooden box out of the pocket. She placed it under her pillow.

  The flashes continued behind Maisa’s closed eyes.

  She thought about Samuel. She squeezed her thighs together, then moved them apart as an afterthought. She allowed her fore- and middle fingers to help her. Her other hand squeezed harder around the box under her pillow.

  Once her body relaxed she was finally able to fall asleep.

  Samuel dug a grave for Arvid. The soil was mixed with small stones, and it took him three attempts to find a spot where he could dig a deep enough hole. They lifted the dog into it together. Samuel threw a shovelful of soil over Arvi
d, but it somehow felt wrong. Julia fetched a sheet and placed it gently over him, then nodded. The falling soil began to cover the shining white sheet.

  When they came back into the house, they saw Helge at the table, looking out the window. He had collected the papers off the floor into a large pile and held his hand on them, like a paperweight.

  Julia went to the sofa and collapsed on it with her dirty shoes on. Samuel sat across from Helge. It was getting brighter outside, and the wet lawn glittered through the wavy glass of the old windows.

  “You should never drive a man to the point where he has nothing left to lose,” Helge said, still looking out. Maybe he was expecting to see Arvid running in the woods.

  “It’s not a wise thing to do. Is it, Samuel?”

  “I guess not.”

  “It is not.”

  Helge grabbed the half-empty bottle of vodka off the table, but then changed his mind.

  “Did you know that I always thought I’d kill myself when Arvid died? Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Yes,” Samuel said, avoiding his eyes. “It’s just a dog, anyway. Was.”

  “But I had no one else. Just a dog.”

  There was nothing Samuel could add to that. He hoped everyone would find out about Arvid’s death. Then they would leave Helge alone, or at least they’d become friendly enough to not bully him or show up in the middle of the night to demand booze.

  A painfully awkward silence followed, interrupted only by the calm ticking of the grandfather clock.

  “The Bondorffs hate me. I always knew it.”

  “Why would they hate you?” Samuel asked.

  “Because they know I’m the last one.”

  “The last one?”

  “There won’t be any children. I’m the last in the family. Since my great-grandfather, we’ve been entwined, us and the Bondorffs. When my father died they started to worry, but my mother convinced them everything was all right. She told them Helge would find his lady eventually, as soon as the right one would come along. Then my mother passed away and I moved in. The final guardian.”

 

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