Suddenly I panicked: I could lose my body for good if I didn’t find out where it was being taken. It was probably best to follow the ambulance, which had driven off along Unioninkatu in the direction of Hakaniemi. I dashed off in pursuit and noticed at once that I could move at the speed of thought. In a flash I was in Hakaniemi, the Zoo and finally Alppila, where I caught up with the ambulance, which was travelling far slower than I was.
Through the ambulance’s darkened windows I saw a body lying inside, its face covered with a sheet. I recognised myself from the suit I was wearing and the briefcase which had been placed on my stomach. I was wearing a light brown summer suit and new brown shoes that I had only bought two days ago. Now buying those shoes felt rather pointless, because they had been expensive and my old shoes would have done perfectly well for the last two days of my life. But how is a person supposed to know? Still, when I thought about buying the shoes a little longer I began to feel a certain satisfation – after all, I was wearing a nicely fitted suit and had a sharp pair of new shoes on my feet. Thankfully I had washed my hair in the morning, making me all in all a rather stylish corpse indeed.
The ambulance drove to the hospital in Meilahti. My body was stretchered inside. On arrival the duty surgeon gave me a quick examination. He pronounced me dead. They opened up my briefcase. There was nothing out of the ordinary inside: some newspapers, notes for forthcoming articles, a few books, a jar of pickled onions.
I had always liked pickled onions. My wife never bought them, so I was in the habit of getting hold of them myself. I began to think about how we – my wife and I – had never really had much in common throughout our married life. We shared a bed, an address, but nothing much else. That is something, of course. Now I had made my wife a widow. She was finally free of me and my pickled onions.
The surgeon confirmed that I had died of serious head injuries. I thought as much when the car struck me. You could hear the impact on the skull. The surgeon rolled me on to my side. A small amount of blood dribbled out of my mouth on to the stretcher. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.
My wallet was inspected. I was ashamed to be present whilst they were counting out my money; there was so little of it, just short of eighty marks. In all respects I was quite a diminutive body. If I’d known that I was going to be run over this very day I would have handed in my notice at the newspaper first thing in the morning. My wallet would have been bulging with my enormous pay-off and at least then nobody would have been able to call me poor. Perhaps the caretaker or the surgeon might even have pinched a few notes from my pocket. Things like that have happened before: pathologists have been known to take rings, watches and even gold teeth from their patients. As crimes go, stealing from the dead is a fairly safe bet, as the victim is very unlikely to file a complaint.
My details were taken from my passport and logged in the usual hospital paperwork. I read the form over the secretary’s shoulder. It occurred to me that people can’t even die nowadays without someone filling out forms about them.
Once she had filled in the form with my particulars, the receptionist walked over to the surgeon and asked him whether to inform the deceased’s next of kin, in this case my wife, about what had happened. We didn’t have any children – thankfully.
The surgeon told her not to call anyone for the time being. He said that the body would have to be cleaned up first before informing my wife.
‘We’ll get him dolled up a bit first, then take him down to the refrigerator. Call his wife in about half an hour,’ he instructed her.
I had to hurry. I would have to leave straight away so that I could be at home when the news of my death was announced. On my way home I wondered how my wife would take the shocking news. Would she burst into tears? Tear her clothes to shreds in a fit of agony? Or would she be too shocked and slip into a desperate state of apathy?
Hardly … but that would all soon become clear. Perhaps she might cry just a little bit. I had been her husband after all. Surely that meant something.
Chapter Three
The first few days after my death were filled with ever stranger surprises. Even the fact that I could move unhindered and at the speed of thought continually managed to astound me. More than once I was forced to accept that even after death you still learn something new every day.
Had I been sent to heaven or hell, or was I stuck in purgatory? Matters like this didn’t particularly bother me. The main thing was that I could carry on living – or existing, whatever that meant.
I was nonetheless somewhat puzzled by the question of where I actually was. Why hadn’t I just died once and for all? Why had I been allowed to hang around as some sort of spirit? For the time being these questions simply remained unanswered.
I sometimes wondered who ran things on this side. Who or what was the top dog round here? What was my place in the new hierarchy, or was existence beyond death not ordered in the slightest?
When a person is born into the world they appear as a small child, a helpless baby. Newborn babies don’t understand anything of the world around them, they don’t ask questions, they’re not afraid of their new lives and they don’t find it strange in the least. All that matters to them is that they get to suck on their mother’s tits and sleep all day long. Only years later do children gradually begin to understand their environment and ask questions about things going on in the world.
Birth and death are actually very similar events in that death is the beginning of a new life too – I’d just experienced it for myself. Still, death is rather more of a trauma than birth, because when people die they generally have all their wits about them and they are forced to face this new world completely cold and unprepared. There are an enormous number of questions buzzing through the minds of the newly dead. It takes a lot less than that to make a dead man’s head spin.
If people were born into the world as fully grown adults, instead of as babies as is normally the way, the world would be fairly chaotic, what with all the new arrivals immediately having to acquire the skills and knowledge of other adults. Maternity wards would be overrun with clumsy newborn adults lining the corridors, wailing impatiently at the reasons for their incomprehensible entry into the world. If people were born as adults, mothers would have to be far bigger than they are nowadays. A woman about to give birth to a full-sized human being would weigh at least three hundred kilos and would be over four metres tall. Her waist-line would have to measure at least a metre and a half. At the sight of a woman like that an average sized man would quake in his boots, for better or for worse.
A few days after my death I went down to the reading room at the city library to see what kind of announcement my colleagues had placed about my death in the newspaper. I had to go to the reading room because I could no longer just buy the newspaper at the kiosk, the penniless, bodiless man that I was, and I couldn’t flick through it either. At the reading room people turn pages for the dead too. All I had to do was hang around behind one of the living people using the room and read the paper along with them. I’ve never liked people reading the newspaper over my shoulder, but now I too was forced to lower myself to such a faux pas.
There were twenty or so people sitting around the room reading their papers. But something took me quite by surprise: behind each and every one of them stood one or more other persons reading the same paper with them. I realised that all in all there were about a hundred people in the room. In perfect silence all of them were going through the day’s papers, some sitting, most of them standing.
I noticed that the majority of those standing reading over someone’s shoulder were dressed in slightly old-fashioned clothes. Their attire seemed to stem from many different eras: most people were dressed in clothes from the 1950s, but there were some whose style dated from before the war, right back to the turn of the century. To my surprise I saw amongst their number two poor soldiers, who had both clearly served at the front during the last war. One was a sergeant, the other a private. Both of them loo
ked as if they had walked into the reading room straight from the battlefield.
This mixed bunch stood silently reading the day’s news along with those sitting at the tables.
A shocking thought suddenly occurred to me: what if these people were all dead just like me? What if there were other beings in this afterlife and I wasn’t alone after all?
This was indeed the case. How could I not have thought of such a possibility before? Even the dead want to know what’s going on in the world and the library was the obvious place to come and follow the news. I realised that the role of the city libraries as sources of information was not limited merely to providing a service for the living, but that it was used daily by crowds of dead people too. In this respect it was only right that library funding be significantly increased, as providing the dead with a way of keeping up their reading skills was by no means without its value. If only the political powers that be knew how many people actually used these libraries every day the funding bodies would soon find some extra cash and libraries everywhere would be able to order far more newspapers than at present.
I could feel myself blushing. I had leisurely strolled into the reading room in the belief that I would be alone, only to discover that we spirits far outnumbered the living in the room! I tried to concentrate on reading the paper, whilst out of the corner of my eye shiftily looking around at the other dead folk standing about, who didn’t seem to pay me the least bit of attention.
I didn’t know quite what to do. Should I say hello to all of these strange beings, or would it be better to keep away from them and try to look as if coming to the library was an everyday activity? It all felt slightly awkward: it’s always a pain to end up with a group of strangers when you’re not quite sure how to behave.
Reading the paper with me – over the shoulder of a living person sitting at the table – was a fat, ruddy, oldish looking man. He was a short, unkempt, burly man with swollen cheeks. His clothes were dirty, his hair tangled, strands sticking up here and there, and a few day’s worth of stubble had grown across his face, which had clearly seen better days. The man glanced over at me and said in a low voice:
‘Are you new then?’
I was so taken aback by this man’s none too subtle question that I hurriedly shook my head. Ignoring me, the man didn’t give in and said:
‘No use making a fuss, I saw your picture in the paper this morning. Aren’t you the same bloke that got himself run over on Kaisaniemenkatu the other day?’
I admitted that he was right. Our conversation caused some consternation amongst the other dead people, it must have disturbed their reading. Most of them knitted their brows and looked over at us disapprovingly. Even the dead have to be quiet in the library, I learnt.
The scruffy man whispered to me, suggesting we go outside and have a chat, and as he did so he stepped through the window on to the street and beckoned for me to follow him.
Again I learnt something new: people like us could walk through a pane of glass without smashing the window. Stepping through the glass I did have difficulty breathing for a moment, but the effects weren’t lasting. My eyes didn’t even sting, though the glass shimmered as I walked through it.
Once we were out on the street the bloke and I walked off down the Esplanade. My new acquaintance began to explain how things worked round here. He told me that both the living and the dead walk about the streets in one big crowd. I would have to take a close look at people in order to learn to distinguish us from them. The man started pointing at people walking past:
‘Living, living, dead, living, dead, dead, living … you see how easily I can tell one from the other?’
I noticed that dead people’s dress sense was drearier and less fashionable than that of the living. You could tell Finland was going through the boom years. But even the expressions of people walking past said a lot about whether they were alive or ‘one of us’. Living Finns often have a distressed, tense expression on their faces; they are agitated and nervous. The dead on the other hand were, with a few exceptions, calm and looked very content. They don’t rush anywhere, they have time to look around, take in the sights in the park and listen to the chirping of the birds.
The man greeted a few dead people as they walked past, and they gave him a muffled reply: you could tell my new acquaintance didn’t have many close friends.
‘Your eyes will learn how to tell the difference soon enough. See that man standing by the old ministry of education building?’
I looked in the direction he was pointing. There stood a stylish old gentleman in a bowler hat, a silver-plated stick in his hand, shining patent leather shoes on his feet and a pair of gaiters.
‘That’s Cajander. He used to be the prime minister, you know.’
He was right, it was indeed Cajander strolling about over there. He walked past without paying us the slightest attention; we lowered our voices as he approached us. It appeared that even in this world the haves and the have-nots were clearly in different classes. I mentioned this to my companion and he retorted:
‘Well, Cajander is just the way he is.’
The man began to tell me about himself. He explained that he had died many years ago.
‘My miserable body has long since rotted away to dust … I was a business man whilst I was alive, a speculator, a swindler, a smuggler, the lot – you name it. I lived quite a colourful, wicked life, you can tell just by looking at me.’
I had to agree that he did look a bit the worse for wear.
‘I was a hardened man, a real bruiser. I amassed a fortune through a succession of bad deeds, I swindled people, drank a lot, got into fights, did all kinds of nasty things. I suppose it was in my nature, even as a child I was a right little devil, to put it mildly. The drink finally finished me off and it served me right.’
I pointed out that whether he’d died of the demon drink or not he wasn’t doing too badly nowadays, sauntering down the Esplanade with the likes of Cajander himself. Neither of them seemed to be the least bit distressed.
‘You haven’t got a clue how hard life is for me here. I’m in hiding most of the time. Every now and then somebody else that I cheated out of money dies and for the life of me – if you’ll pardon the expression – I’m in no hurry to bump into them. It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs trying to make amends for all your petty crimes with everyone listening in. I’ve gone to the ends of the earth to try and escape people who have just died, but as I imagine you’ve noticed we can all move at the speed of thought round here, so it’s impossible to escape … The only thing you can do is hide out in a cave somewhere, go into voluntary imprisonment, that’s what my life here is like.’
I asked him what exactly he had been doing in the library.
‘I’m not fussed about the news. Never did whilst I was alive either, if you don’t count the stock exchange. Nowadays all I read are the obituaries to see if anyone I knew has just snuffed it. Last spring I read that an upstanding bloke had taken ill – I’d managed to con him out of an entire estate! I’m worried he’s about to kick the bucket too, then there’ll be hell to pay.’
The man sighed. He was having a rough time, I could see that now. Was this the way justice worked after death?
With a heavy heart the sinful man waved and went upon his way. As he was leaving he added:
‘Welcome to the club … if you haven’t got much on your conscience it can be fun round here. It all depends how you take things: how you take them here and how you took them in your former life.’
When he had almost reached the end of the street he turned and shouted:
‘I almost forgot, that obituary of yours was in today’s Demari on page 10! It could well be in some of the other papers too.’
I waved him goodbye and returned to the reading room. I was eager to see what they had said about me in the paper. I wondered whether they had put a photo with it …
The Slave Breeder
Juhani Peltonen
Juhani Pelt
onen (1941–1998) has said: “Life is full of disparate details arbitrarily joined together by dreams, pain and yearning. I do not long for sense, but I call for emotion and imagination amidst this chaos.” In many ways this sums up the main thrust of Peltonen’s entire output. In his poetry, plays, radio plays and novels alike the absurd is linked to melancholy, and humour to pain and sorrow. Surrealism and a sense of estrangement are always present in Peltonen’s works, whether comic or tragic – indeed, often both are present at once. His works have been translated into 16 languages and have received numerous prizes. The short story here is from the collection Vedenalainen melodia (‘Underwater Melody’, 1965).
Werner Reiss gave speeches at board meetings, sat reading the daily paper in parks and on café terraces, rode horses during his summer break and was given every now and then to a spot of philately. But when – by something of a twist of fate – he began breeding slaves, his life changed completely: familiar daily routines suddenly seemed strange to him and he rapidly became distanced from them and withdrawn beyond reach. He was purely the slave breeder.
As the rays of evening sunlight turned red and cool, he would whip his slaves and sing out loud. He slept peacefully at night, though he had previously suffered from insomnia (the heart of winter had always been the worst time in this respect; as often as once a week he might remain awake for several days at a stretch), he did not wake to the moans of his slaves, to the riots which erupted every once in a while, nor even to the death cries of the weakest and most worthless of his slaves; cries which lashed through the darkness. And in the mornings he was fresh, resolute and cheerful as he went to greet them with his whip. He relished reading their one unshakeable thought: they wanted to kill him. This knowledge was sweet, it was like stepping into a cold bath on a lazy morning to wash the fatigue from his limbs. And with this Werner Reiss knew that the unabating sense of rebellion which surrounded him was the only blessing he needed.
The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy Page 13
