The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy

by Johanna Sinisalo

  The man had been swiftly forced out of the woodwork room, when his wife had set up her loom in there and started weaving rugs, wall tapestries and tablecloths to be used around the house. At the same time she had also moved a freezer and a mangle into the room, because anywhere else they would have got in the way of her other chores. The vast majority of the man’s tools had been placed in a cardboard box in the corner of the room, whilst making one’s way to the carpenter’s bench was now all but impossible.

  Learning from his mistakes, the man had never mentioned that the boiler room was in any way important to him, though his visits there were steadily becoming all the more frequent. He had in fact offered her the use of the room for some of her dirtier jobs, if they were such that she could choose freely where to perform them. This tactic had worked a treat: after a while his wife barely went to the boiler room at all. However she had clearly sensed that she had been tricked and jealously began keeping tabs on her husband’s visits to the basement.

  Over the years the man had developed a routine for his visits downstairs and always remembered to explain precisely what he was doing beforehand. Sometimes his wife would ask him accusingly what exactly he was up to when the man didn’t have a particularly good explanation. At times like this the man felt as though his mother had caught him with his hands beneath the blankets.

  He often thought of his wife in much the same way as he thought of his mother and didn’t see anything strange about this. He had accepted the fact that there were a lot of similarities between them. His mother had always been at home and so was his wife. His wife had given up working whilst she was expecting their first child and had never gone back to work, because her husband’s wage had been large enough to support the entire family.

  Money had never been a problem in their family, the way it is for so many families. They were neither rich nor poor; things were far more complicated than that.

  Particularly when it came to her own needs and wants his wife always wanted to spend as little money as possible. She felt uncomfortable if she or her husband had to use large amounts at once or if he spent something, however little, on something she felt was unnecessary. If the previous day they had decided to buy a new appliance, the man would generally buy the first one that he saw. The following week his wife would then find an offer in the newspaper for a similar machine – one not quite as well equipped but perfectly adequate nonetheless – which would have cost less. After this she would suddenly become helpless with the new appliance: so expensive and complicated; I don’t know how to use it; come and push these dials, you’re the one that bought the wretched thing.

  Scenes like this made the man seem like a squanderer and his wife a penny-pincher, but this impression was largely false. The man was in fact very frugal: he greatly enjoyed thinking up new, clever ways of saving money on, say, the car or the heating bills. His wife had noticed this tendency at the beginning of their marriage and had made a subconscious decision to be every bit as virtuous and thrifty as her husband. In this she had certainly succeeded. Now she alternated between reproaching her husband for excessive spending and telling him he was too much of a skinflint.

  Their battle over money took many forms, one of which was that his wife didn’t want a bank card or a credit card. Her normal argument was that then she would start wasting money, if she could no longer see how much actual money she had to give away for what she was buying. At other times she would turn the argument around: she didn’t dare use the card for fear of overdrawing on her account.

  She also never drew cash out of their joint account, where her husband’s wages were credited, and she never asked him to do it for her or told him how much money she needed. Her husband therefore had to withdraw the money and guess how much his wife required. She would get offended if he openly handed her a bundle of notes, so they had to slip the money from hand to hand like a microfilm in old detective movies – even when they were alone in their own house.

  Neither of them had any hobbies to speak of outside the house – or inside, for that matter. From time to time they would spend a few days travelling around the countryside, though neither of them particularly enjoyed it. Because his wife didn’t have a driver’s licence, the man had to do all the driving every day so that in the evenings he was always tired. Their day trips were always very long, so as not to waste any time, and they would trail around churches, war memorials and other sights that were all rather sombre and plain.

  Normally however they would sit at home watching television and taking care of the house and the garden. They rarely had any visitors, and went even more rarely to visit other people, because they had no close friends whatsoever and only a few acquaintances.

  Every other week the man would go on domestic business trips for a day and a half at a time. Although these trips had over the years become more and more routine, he still enjoyed them as much as he had at the beginning of his career. Perhaps even more so, because now everything was familiar to him, he could relax more and shine with confidence in front of his younger colleagues. He would watch as his colleagues got drunk and tried to chat up some company for themselves. The man had never indulged in either of these activities. He was normally driving and certainly wasn’t looking for the sort of change or excitement a strange woman would have brought him. His bosses’ secretaries described him as a pleasantly calm, polite gentleman, and privately he was very proud of this.

  The man was not ambitious to the extent that he might want a showier position or a higher wage. He had nonetheless been promoted several times. Every now and then a position would become vacant within the company for which he was more than qualified, as he had already been taking care of these other responsibilities to cover holiday leave without extra pay, in addition to his own work.

  His wife always expressed at length her concerns that something embarrassing might happen to her husband, either at work or somewhere else, if she, the omnicompetent wife who never forgot a thing, were not there to take care of matters. She didn’t trust her husband to keep himself or the space he used presentable for other people. This is why he didn’t have a space of his own in their house and why his wife bought all his clothes for him.

  His wife had never left him at home by himself for as much as a day, unless it had been absolutely necessary due to giving birth or a bout of illness. She never allowed him to do any of the housework. She was afraid – though she didn’t dare admit this even to herself – that her husband wasn’t quite as helpless around the house as she wanted to believe. If that were the case, all her sacrifices would have been for nothing and she would have wasted her life, spending it as a useless parasite.

  The man knew very well that this is what his wife was thinking, but didn’t know what could be done about it. She was sceptical, almost hostile, in her rejection of any shows of courtesy and thanks.

  They didn’t have very much to say to one another and certainly nothing new. In the evenings his wife would recount the events of her shopping trip and the man would talk briefly about what had happened at work. Normally his wife would interrupt him several times to comment on how silly she thought he had been. Sometimes she would interrupt to remind him of something which needed to be done around the house. At times like this the man knew he had somehow offended her: perhaps he had made it sound ever so slightly as though his work and the people at work were more important to him than his wife and his home.

  Sometimes they would talk about their children, but even on this subject they didn’t have much to say if they wanted to avoid an argument – and this they most certainly did. His wife was of the opinion that their children had all chosen the wrong university, home, job or partner and that they were incapable of looking after their finances or indeed any other matter. Her husband disagreed. He believed he was able to substantiate his arguments far better than his wife did hers, but never had the opportunity to present them fully. In any case the man was proud of their children and wished whole-heartedly that his
wife could be too.

  He wished that his wife didn’t feel the need to justify her usefulness to herself so desperately that it made her break and quash everyone who otherwise might have wanted to love her.

  The man arrived home from work.

  The time was a quarter to five as he walked through the door. He knew exactly what he could expect to see and hear: plates and part of a meal on the table, the rest on the stove or in the oven and his wife explaining that the food was not quite ready; hopefully he wasn’t too hungry yet. She always said this, even though throughout their married life they had always eaten dinner at the same time – five o’clock – and the man had always come home from work a quarter of an hour before that unless they had agreed otherwise.

  But now there was no one in the kitchen; no wife, no half-finished meal, not even the smell of food.

  The man put his small suitcase and his satchel on a chair in the hall, took off his shoes and walked into the kitchen, looked round the bedroom, came back, checked the living room and began to smile. Whatever this was, his wife had certainly surprised him – something which had never happened before, not since the early years of their relationship. He called for his wife again, shouting out her name, searched upstairs, in the basement and the garden, but eventually decided to heat the stove in the sauna and unpack his suitcase.

  Never before had the man enjoyed sitting in the warmth of the sauna as much as he did that afternoon. A liberated silence hung around the house, and in that small, humid room he had the freedom simply to be – without having to pretend anything or watch his step. The odd, mundane thought occurred to him from time to time, but his mind easily slipped back to the place where the boundaries between oneself and the outer world disappeared. Even time no longer existed.

  The man lost count of the number of times he replenished the logs in the sauna stove. When the large wood basket was finally empty he leisurely got down from the sauna bench, picked up the basket and walked out to the woodshed. It was an old habit, because you weren’t supposed to leave the basket empty; he had learnt that, at least.

  On his way he stopped at the boiler room. That too was an old habit he had, but one so voluntary and instinctive that the man didn’t even noticed he had stopped walking. He listened to the hum of the water tank, and he could feel his eyes heavy as he slowly turned letting his eyes rest upon the various details in the room. The space was warm, clean, soporific; everything was just as it had been.

  Except for one thing.

  The drain was now situated at the lowest point in the floor. It was still in the same place, but the floor had changed shape. The man got down on all fours to examine the floor’s painted concrete surface and the small grille above the drain. There was nothing out of the ordinary about them. Both of them fitted perfectly into the space and served their everyday function.

  The man felt a slight chill; he noticed he was somewhat dusty after kneeling on the floor and thought it was probably best to go and have a warm shower. He stood up and took hold of the door handle, glanced around once again and shrugged his shoulders. For a moment it felt as if something were insisting that he consider that room in some way exceptional or noteworthy. After all, it was a boiler room just like any other, nothing special.

  With that he returned to the bathroom, stepped under the shower and reached out his hand to turn on the tap.

  But the taps were no longer there. In their place was a smooth, modern handle. The man remembered suggesting that they get one of these and a thermostat, because the taps had been in very bad condition and someone had even burnt their hands on them. He had finally relented once he had been assured that such a thing would be a waste of money. Nonetheless the new handle and the thermostat were now in place. The water flowed evenly and at just the right temperature, just like in a good hotel.

  Just then the man noticed the array of shampoos and soaps. He had been expecting to see the supermarket’s usual sharp-smelling economy brands which irritated the eyes and the skin, especially of those who were allergic to these products, but instead there was a selection of beautiful, good quality, fragrant, allergy-tested products. The man tried them and found them most pleasant.

  He turned off the shower and stood for a moment on the spot, water dripping to the floor.

  The shower floor was tiled, not covered with peeling linoleum. The washing basket was different to what he had expected, so were the stools, the washing machine, the cupboards and the mirrors. He couldn’t remember whether there were supposed to be mirrors here at all. Indeed, he wasn’t sure about many of the fixings. Most of them were things he had never consciously paid a second thought.

  Wearing a soft dressing gown and a pair of slippers he walked right round the basement and noted more and more small changes. Inside the sauna everything looked slightly different. In the corridor the colour of the walls caught his attention, and so did the rug on the floor. In place of the dark, stuffy food cellar there was now a practical cold storage room. The woodshed looked familiar, even though there were a few strange items there too. Everything was suddenly far more beautiful, more coordinated and of a much higher quality, though not necessarily newer or more expensive than what the man thought he could remember.

  The woodwork room was entirely different from before.

  The room was in a state of joyous disorder. One corner had been reserved for weaving rugs, the other for carpentry. Competing for the rest of the floor space was an amateur painter’s set of tools, folders full of stamps, hiking equipment and items of clothing which looked like they were part of a fancy dress costume – a medieval knight and his damsel in the castle tower.

  The man quietly switched off the lights, closed the door and turned towards the staircase.

  He opened the door into the kitchen: a pleasant, practical room, cosily cluttered, softly lit; a room which invited one to stop for a moment and not simply dash through into the bedroom to get dressed. He did everything very slowly: strolled, looked around, undressed, put on a set of clothes he had forgotten that he even owned, combed his hair and ran his fingers across the large double bed, feeling how its soft sheets caressed his skin and how the firm mattress pleasantly supported his body. The room was like new and the bathroom was barely recognisable. He was astonished at the sight of the living room: neither stiff, uncomfortable pieces of furniture nor fragile ornaments to be avoided. The bookshelf was not how he remembered it either; now it was full of different books, some old and battered, the ones he vaguely recalled someone ordering him take up to the attic to make room for the chintzy items they had received as gifts.

  Upstairs were the children’s old rooms. The children’s belongings were still more or less in place, just as the man remembered, but still in some way the rooms looked new. Long ago the children had decorated their rooms, and now there was not a trace of adults having the final say, as they might once have done. The man opened the door to a little room which might have been one of the cupboards in the attic, but after a while he realised he had come into the bathroom. The final door upstairs led into a storage room, which was neither small nor cramped, but was filled with all the items the man had expected to find there, and a freezer and a mangle too.

  The man opened the freezer and saw a bottle of champagne chilling at the top of the basket. It was something of a surprise to see it there – to see champagne in the house was a surprise in itself – but he picked it up and closed the freezer lid. When he stepped downstairs he noticed that a car had pulled up outside and he thought to himself that the timing was perfect.

  His wife stepped inside full of energy and good humour, a bag slung across her shoulder. They met in the hallway and kissed. She explained that she had got stuck in traffic, but that on the radio she had heard a wonderful recording from the same music festival they would be visiting the following summer. The man told her how he felt divine after his sauna and his wife commented on how lovely he smelt.

  They went into the kitchen and poured some champagne, pu
t together a light supper on a tray and after short deliberation decided to take it into the living room. There they dimmed the lights and put on a record that the woman had bought earlier that day.

  They told each other about their day at work and wondered whether they should go and give their eldest child a hand doing up the garden in her new house; what would be the best way to help their middle child with his sick daughter and when they would get the time to travel to another continent to visit their youngest and meet her husband to be. They had plenty to talk about: the upcoming summer festivals, books they had recently read and what their friends were getting up to. They chatted merrily and poured themselves some more champagne.

  Late that evening, when they had both gone up to the bedroom, the man thought how much the world offered him that he had yet to discover, even though he had already lived half of his life. In the mirror he saw his reflection next to that of his wife, and for a short moment he felt that in different circumstances he might have become someone who thought rather differently about things and who perhaps even looked a bit different. It was a curious thought: almost lost and something of a misunderstanding.

  COPYRIGHT

  Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

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  ISBN printed book 978 1 903517 29 1

  ISBN e-book 978 1 909232 06 8

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