After the devastation, the zone wouldn’t even have existed for the rest of the State without me and The Truth Show. There would have been nothing but emptiness. The wind would have howled behind the border, but there would have been no one there; there are never people on the other side, just disturbance and problems. As long as people continue talking about something, at least it exists. But when people don’t talk about it, the wind just howls and the north-eastern sky is aglow day and night with aurora borealis, and even that is explained away as protuberances of the sun, and the power cuts and the lack of heating are what they are: nothing but terrorism or the work of the enemy. Without State publicity the north-eastern zone would have disappeared altogether.
I didn’t allow the zone to be forgotten. Something removed from the mind doesn’t exist. In my reports I etched out an image of the zone so many times that it stayed put. Without The Truth Show the people living in the zone would have had nothing. There was no point in Eeva and Aspi sending me their letters, first to me personally, then to the channel and finally to the Secretary General’s office when I was promoted; keeping such contact caused me a lot of trouble.
When I first visited the zone everything was well and good. Eeva and Aspi were farming their land, Taira and Ireina were little. I was filming my report and interviewing people. At night you could see a glow burning in the sky above the reactor silos, like seven bright moons in a line.
Once the silos’ several metre thick outer walls had collapsed in the explosions, the reactors became little suns. The protective structures around the silos fell to pieces and the ceramic mass melted. Everything in the vicinity was burnt to a crisp and the light could be seen for hundreds of kilometres, filtered into radiant beams. When the light had gone, all that was left was the heat. When the heat began to disperse, the sky was left striped with soot and smog. Light is colder when there are parts of it missing. Under this constant shadow the zone was plunged into a grey twilight, which at first was contained and limited to the zone itself, but then began to spread its chill to the rest of the State. First the weather changed, then the climate. From my panoramic windows at the Secretary General’s office I had to acknowledge it as it moved closer week by week. There was nothing anyone could do about something like that advancing.
In The History of K, I included an extract from the prophecy of the Ash Crosses, because after all these years it seemed to encapsulate something very true about those times.
‘And the sky disappeared, like a parchment rolled up, and all the mountains and the islands and the plains were uprooted and moved towards the north, from which night was cast upon the earth; from which the rapist of the earth arises, sent by God. The end of ends is nearer than near, no verdant plants shall grow on earth, bushes shall stand barren, fruit shall fall to the ground unripe, the ground shall be covered with hoar frost, frost shall be covered with ice, ice shall be covered with snow.’
Back then these words spread a message of fear, and there was no need to increase fear throughout the State. There need only be appropriate level of fear, then humility will flourish. If there is too much, there is only paralysis or anger and cornered rage. These are dangerous matters – all anger and activity must be turned as swiftly as possible against either the external or the internal enemy, thus reaping benefit from them too. All tumult which reigns within the human soul can be used to govern.
I was good as Secretary General, skilled, but at a time like that nothing is quite sufficient. A cold era had arrived. The sun was striped with sheets of radiation and soot belching from the collapsed reactors and could no longer warm us.
Like a crooked Venetian blind it covered the State halfway across the sky, from the horizon up at a forty-five degree angle. Hundreds of thousands of square kilometres had been caught in a dry, snowless winter, and every month when I received new readings and results, winter had indeed come closer. Statistics no longer spoke of winter but of winters at varying definable stages. The coldest was the dead zone at the middle of winter, on either side of this were autumnal winters and before them vernal winters or dead summers; month by month they approached like a great beast.
As Secretary General I ought to have been able to prevent such a thing from advancing, but nobody had that kind of power – no amount of knowledge or technology can regulate the weather or the climate. Nobody mentioned the A.C. Hahl Mountains any more, raised to protect the State; in fact, they had been deleted from most newer maps.
Even despite the fact that all State information right down to the thoughts of our citizens was brought up to my office carefully collected and screened, I still couldn’t prevent it. I couldn’t make out the whole, just disconnected pieces, like sailing through rocky rapids, all you can see is what you can make out through the spray and the boulders as you rush forward headlong.
One of my mistakes was that I became too caught up with the details, when what I should have done was simply concentrate and try simply to see. I didn’t trust other people, after the first few months I no longer trusted anyone at all, and so I tried to make as many decisions as possible myself, and it was this which eventually ruined what was left of my ability to see. Those who opposed me were isolated from society, unity was the priority – my priority, everybody’s common priority. Thus unified, the State was to grow to a new level of greatness, until it was true to its name, the State of K, but by then it had already outgrown itself. A cancer had grown within it, born of itself, fanning its own flames.
I restructured the voluntary security service organisations, as both around me and directly below me I needed easily manoeuverable forces. There’s nothing on my conscience about what happened back then. If unity is the democratically accepted goal of the majority, then it is everyone’s common aim. There is no acceptible justification for working against the State.
Those who opposed this were convicted of treason. I wasn’t the one who made these decisions, but I did give the State courts clear instructions. Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.
The office research department kept a close eye on changes in public opinion and in people’s reactions. Very often I gave speeches on all channels directly to the people. I had to try and convince our citizens that perhaps this cold era would never come, or that it would never reach us, or that it would be so far in the future – and not during our lifetimes – that we would never have to prepare ourselves for all those winters. Autumns would not become winters, but every year winter would blossom into spring and June would not be merely the beginning of the dead summer.
My position required me to speak with an air of hope: that everything would change for the better as long as the State had the strength of character necessary and remained unified. Given the situation I either had to increase trust and faith amongst the people or frighten and threaten them with the internal or the external enemy. This was my job, but no matter how much fear or hope the leaders of a mighty State can compress into their words, no matter how much they tell people to turn a blind eye, they can never purge the mind of every single citizen. Of course I knew that the State would never become a single pure block of steel, not even if you melt it down and forge it again, for inside there will always be unmelted grains of sand and grit.
People swimming through those rapids haven’t made the river flow. There’s nothing on my conscience about what happened back then, because all power had to be concentrated on what was good for the State. No one can prevent the future from coming. I tried hard, but my time in the rapids was wearing thin.
When I began to uncover conspiracies and resistance, at first I tried to deal with it gently. The final six months alone were a very dark time indeed. The security service organisations were faithful to the last and I had to use them like a stone in my hand.
At first you try to swim, just swim, then you try to stay afloat and dodge the rocks. Then you stop caring. If you t
ook a knock, then so be it. In a tight spot people always have to cut their losses. Ultimately all you can do is look out for yourself.
There’s nothing on my conscience whatsoever about what happened back then. Things simply happened the way they did. Of course there were some small matters I could have dealt with differently. When it was time to leave, I moved to the nearest neighbouring country. Here I have never had to lie or deny my name.
Here I can live in peace. No one comes up nosily asking who I am. Here I am nameless. Or rather, not nameless, but the nameless person who wrote The History of K. That is my name here and the previous one I have given up.
A Zoo from the Heavens
Pasi Jääskeläinen
Pasi Jääskeläinen (born 1966) has three times been awarded the Atorox Prize for the best science fiction or fantasy short story of the year and has won a number of prizes for his writings in different genres. One of the principal characteristics of his writing is the exploration of children’s worlds and his ability to fuse together the everyday and the fantastical in an elegant, almost imperceptible way. In 2000 Jääskeläinen published the collection of short fiction Missä junat kääntyvät (‘Where the Trains Turn’), which was awarded a prize by Star Rover magazine for the year’s best work of Finnish science fiction. The present text ‘A Zoo from the Heavens’ is from this collection.
Marmot’s father has never been a particularly talkative father, at least he never is in front of Marmot. Indeed, there is a very good reason for this: there is a peculiar problem with his father’s mouth. Marmot once heard his mother telling Aunt Violet that Father finds it very hard to talk about painful subjects, or about anything at all, in fact, and that to get him to express an opinion about something you have to pull the words out of his mouth with tongs.
Because Father is so quiet, it’s easy to forget he is there at all. Rather like an old leather armchair. He often looks like he is sleeping or daydreaming, even though his eyes could hardly be more open and his body is doing all sorts of things: flicking through the newspaper at the breakfast table, sitting on the sofa playing with the television remote control, rolling cigarettes or repairing the car engine.
Marmot’s father is very good indeed at repairing engines. He says he enjoys tinkering with them because at least you can understand machines, and even when there is something wrong with them, fixing them and putting them back together again is relatively simple.
Father never ever reads books. Whenever Marmot asks him to read him a story, The Moomins or Paddington Bear, Father closes his eyes and shivers as if an invisible flurry of snow has blown through him, shakes his head and says that reading books is far too nerve-wracking.
Marmot will sometimes go up to his father when he’s like this, at once awake and asleep, and say something to him. Father will turn around and stare at him silently and strangely, and for a moment Marmot will feel as if this is not Father at all, but someone else, Father’s double. And that double is very cheerless and frightening, almost nothing but a shell, hollow and hardened, just like those horrid stuffed animals hunched in the museum, and this is why Marmot doesn’t often like disturbing him when he is dreaming with his eyes open.
Father has always been a very quiet father indeed, but for some reason over the last few days he has been chatting to Marmot far more than usual, in fact probably more than every time before put together. This may be because they have come out to the country to the house where Father grew up. Or maybe his mouth is getting better at last.
It is a warm afternoon and Marmot and his father have been sitting in the sun on the steps outside Grandma’s old house, when Father suddenly starts talking again, telling Marmot what it used to be like a long time ago when he was a little boy. This feels very strange to Marmot, as he is not at all used to the sound of his father’s voice. It sounds rather hoarse, as if he had a sore throat, and a bit gruff, the way fathers’ voices often sound, but not nearly as gruff as Father Christmas.
Marmot hesitantly asks Father when exactly he was a little boy – the thought seems very odd and to be honest Marmot slightly suspects Father may be pulling his leg.
Father says that, at a rough estimate, it is about three thousand years and five long days since he was a little boy. Marmot thinks that sounds about right, in three thousand years all sorts of things can happen.
As a child Father lived here at Warren’s End in this very same white house which Marmot knows as Grandma’s and where he and his mother and father have been for the last three days. Grandma isn’t here any longer though, because last year she got that thing called ‘death’ that most old people get.
When a person has ‘death’ they split into two parts: the body and the soul. Then their body stops working and they look as if they are sleeping, not moving a muscle and holding their breath, except that once the soul has left the body you can’t wake them up any more, no matter how hard you try.
After ‘death’ the empty body is placed in a very narrow bed with a lid which is then carried up to the church in Warren’s End and lowered into a deep hole called a ‘grave’. Then people throw lots of flowers into the hole. This is all so that no one will try to wake up the empty body, which might very well happen if it was left sleeping in a normal bed.
Once freed from the body the soul then flies up to heaven where Marmot’s Grandpa and a man called Jesus are waiting for it.
(All this was revealed to Marmot by a minister who performed at Grandma’s funeral; he also assured Marmot that even though it was very windy on the day of the funeral, Grandma’s soul was in no danger of being blown off course and ending up in Warren’s Marsh or Portugal or the big ferris wheel at the amusement park instead of heaven and that Jesus man.)
Marmot remembered all this very well, the minister’s explanations, the death and the funeral, but still he was half expecting Grandma to be waiting for them when they arrived at the house; fretting, straightening out her dress with the flower patterns and a bag of peppermints in the pocket, the way she had always been.
With a very serious expression on his face Father begins to tell Marmot that when he was a little boy (three thousand years ago) the men in the Soviet Union and the men in Finland became very angry with each other and went to war. Like all the other fathers, Marmot’s father’s father had been sent to war too.
The rules of war go something like this: the men are all given rifles and cannons and ordered to shoot one another. If they want they can also throw little bombs at each other. Some of them fly up in aeroplanes and drop bigger bombs on the houses and the people down below, smashing their houses to smithereens and starting fires and blowing off people’s arms and legs if they got in the way (and of course the tails and floppy ears of any dogs that happened to be there too, Father explains, confirming Marmot’s worst fears).
Wars can last for a very long time, for many years even, and for all that time the men have to live in dugouts in the forest and eat rations. And sometimes one of the men would be shot by a rifle or a cannon or hit by a bomb and his body would be broken so that his soul would leave the body and fly off to heaven.
Still, sometimes only a part of their bodies would be lost, a hand or a leg or an eye, and this often meant that their soul would still be attached to their bodies. After that the man would be able to come home, after he’d been to the hospital where he would be given a glass eye or a wooden leg and a pair of crutches and any sleeves or trouser legs left dangling loose would be snipped off.
The war carries on until everyone has been shot or until the leader of one of the sides gets bored and orders his side to stop shooting so that everyone can go home and do something else for a change. No one ever managed to shoot Grandpa though, so when the war finished he was allowed to come home to Grandma and Marmot’s father.
Marmot says that Father must have been very glad when Grandpa finally came home in one piece, still with all his hands and legs and eyes and his soul still firmly inside his body.
Father nods, but at the
same time he looks as if he is thinking about something else entirely. Then he says: ‘It just so happened that he wasn’t the same when he came back from the war. You could say that, although his body was still in one piece, something was still out of order.’
Marmot asks how this is possible and his father explains: ‘You see, at war all the men have to be very angry at the men from the other country, so they can aim their rifles at each other better. At the same time they have to be on their guard so they can dodge all the bullets and cannon balls and bombs fired at them. And so when someone has been angry and on their guard like that for so long, they sometimes don’t know how to stop being angry and on their guard.’ (This is the same as pulling a face: if you keep your face screwed up for even a second too long it won’t straighten out again without very complicated surgery.)
And this is precisely what happened to Father’s father. When he came home he was still angry and constantly on his guard, even though he didn’t have to shoot at the Soviet men any more or dodge the bullets flying around in the air. He would try to smile but nothing ever came of it because he was so angry that even a smile looked like a grimace. He tried to sleep but he was too nervous to drift off. He didn’t like having to be with women and children either, because at war he was used to spending time solely in the company of other angry men.
And so after coming home Marmot’s father’s father began to spend more and more time alone in his workroom, and his wife and little son were expressly forbidden from ever going in there.
A little worried, Marmot asks his father if someone could start a war now where all the fathers would have to take part.
The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy Page 23
