The town is quiet and warm. I drive along Mannerheimintie and for the first time I notice the park that spreads out on both sides of the road. On the left it slopes down through the shade of the trees towards a pretty little pond, and to the right its green undulates across what is left of the town’s old fortifications.
Eventually I turn onto Teollisuuskatu, but I don’t pull up outside our premises. I can hear Taina’s voice. There’s a certain castigating tone to it, like when she told me that I never see things through, that
I give in too easily. That voice merges with the sight I witnessed only a moment ago. I feel livid.
I drive on about seven hundred metres until Teollisuuskatu makes a ninety-degree turn to the left and changes name. I pass a dark-blue building.
The Hamina Mushroom Company. Three men who, six months ago, appeared out of thin air.
They’ve been in contact with our Japanese clients. I know for a fact they’ve promised our clients more competitive rates and higher quality. Of course, it’s an empty promise because such a combination is completely impossible. But as a salesman I know a pitch like that is music to the ears of any importer. I don’t know how they’re planning to attract good pickers or how they’re going to organise the harvest. It can’t be a question of money, as the Hamina Mushroom Company doesn’t have a client anywhere near the size of ours.
The forecourt is empty. There’s generally a van decorated with garish signs parked outside. Sometimes one of the building’s large lever-gear doors is open, through which I can hear the strains of the latest Finnish pop songs and see at least one of the company’s owners having a cigarette on a couch carried out into the yard. This time, though, everything’s quiet and the building looks deserted.
I drive on for a while and make a U-turn. I approach the blue building again and try to focus my eyes. Nobody. Nothing. I pull into the side of the road before driving onto the forecourt.
It’s only midday, and I’m already here. The morning’s events seem to have happened longer ago than is feasible. I take my foot off the clutch, steer the car round in an arc in front of the building, stop and step out.
In addition to the lever-gear doors, the building’s long wall also features a standard door. Beside it is a buzzer; I press it. A moment later I press it again. Nobody opens the door, and I can’t hear steps from inside. I give the door a try. I turn the handle and the door opens. I step inside and call out. No answer.
Immediately in front of me is some kind of office; I’ll have to walk through it to reach the other areas of the building. I stop in the office, though. The tables and shelves are empty. A solitary laptop computer and an office chair facing the door suggest that someone might have been working here and has left in a hurry. The entire room is dominated by a portrait – a photograph blown up many times and then framed. President Kekkonen’s eyes fix on my forehead and won’t relax their grip, even though I turn and continue further into the building.
They’ve certainly made an effort with the kitchen and staff room. That is, they’ve made an effort in the way that men make an effort if they’re given free rein over interior design. A tall bar counter and a large drinks cabinet with glass doors show that these men certainly like their beer. The selection is mostly Estonian, and there’s plenty of it.
The kitchen is tidy. To the left of it is the staff room, complete with a couch, an enormous television and an impressive sound system. I look through the neatly organised shelf of CDs and DVDs. Soft rock and action thrillers; Arttu Wiskari and Vin Diesel. A punching bag hangs from the ceiling, a pair of red boxing gloves dangle on the wall, and beneath them is a selection of hand-held weights.
When I turn around, though, what I see on the opposite wall is something altogether different.
I walk over to take a closer look. I’ve seen Samurai films, and these swords are the same as the ones I’ve seen in the hands of those stern-faced warriors. I reach up and carefully lift one of the swords from its mount. I pull it from its sheath. The blade is long. The steel glints, the sharpness of its edge gives me shivers – cold, unpleasant shivers. I press the sword back into its sheath and replace it on the wall.
I still haven’t seen anything remotely related to mushrooms. If I were to judge purely on what I’ve seen, I’d guess this was a cross between a sword-fighting club and an Urho Kaleva Kekkonen appreciation society. Still, the office, kitchen and staff room only cover a small amount of the warehouse’s total area. I open another door and step onto the factory floor.
In less than thirty seconds I am both more envious and more taken aback than I have been in a long time. Or I would have been, if I hadn’t already been taken aback twice today.
The equipment and machinery are better and more modern than ours. It all glows and gleams, and clearly hasn’t once been used. There isn’t a single scratch, a single speck of rust. I walk around the facility and swallow back my surprise. I wasn’t expecting this.
It seems clear that
a) our competitors are serious;
b) they are something altogether different from what I’d imagined;
c) for the third time today I’ve been caught with my trousers down.
I take back that last metaphor. I haven’t once been caught with my trousers down. Maybe that was my mistake.
We have a very real competitor.
I still think of the company in the plural – as ‘ours’. It’s hardly surprising. Taina and I own the company together, we founded it together, and together we have built up our little success story. It feels important; it is important. The business might just be the most important thing in my life right now. At the very least, it has remained constant and unchanged all morning, something that at this point can be considered a minor miracle.
Sunlight streams into the operations room through the only window in the wall with the doors. The air in here is cool. I’ve probably seen everything I came to see. I stand on the spot for a moment, then walk back the way I came. Kekkonen can vouch that I walk all the way out of the building.
I jump into the car, accelerate out of the forecourt and turn onto Teollisuuskatu, which runs straight along the back of the building.
It’s a stroke of luck. The Hamina Mushroom Company van is coming in the opposite direction. All three men are sitting in the cab. They each look at me in turn as I pass them.
4
‘A week,’ says Olli as he spreads mushroom pâté on a slice of fresh rye bread. The pâté is a centimetre thick, the slice of bread is like an antique ski. ‘Then the first batch will be ready to leave, if you ask me.’
Olli is a veteran mushroom professional, an expert on mushrooms and all aspects of their quality, packaging, drying, preserving, freezing and shipping. He is a fifty-one-year-old grandfather. He is someone I might be able to talk to, at least about some of my problems.
‘So I can promise the Japanese a shipment next Wednesday?’ I ask.
‘You can promise anything you like,’ says Olli. ‘But the forest will decide.’
‘Of course.’ You have to interpret Olli a little, sometimes even translate him into plain Finnish.
‘We won’t know until we know.’
We are sitting on the patio outside the office. Olli begins tucking into a bowl of puréed meat-and-potato soup. Coffee slowly drips through the filter. I’m still full of ice cream. I have no appetite. Perhaps I can manage a biscuit. I take one from the bowl on the table, break it and put a piece in my mouth.
‘Olli,’ I say, ‘can I ask you something?’
‘You’re the one that pays the wages.’
‘This isn’t to do with work. It’s a … personal matter … and quite pressing. It’s actually very pressing. From now on everything is pressing. It’s best you know that.’
Olli looks at me with his brown eyes. He has thick, dark hair, combed back with gel, and an angular, friendly face. This is what George Clooney would have looked like if he’d been born in Hamina, eaten plenty of carbohydrates and spent his
life working with mushrooms.
‘My question is … well, it’s to do with the opposite sex. Women.’
Good job I made that clear, I scoff to myself, in case he didn’t realise I’m a man. Olli doesn’t seem perturbed. He nods. I turn my head and look over towards the neighbouring plot. The grey industrial building is at a slight angle.
‘I mean, you’ve got experience,’ I say.
‘Five decades.’
I’m about to say something but do a quick calculation and turn back to look at Olli. ‘I guess, sometimes, you’ve been … how should I put it … disappointed…?’
Olli sighs. ‘Five decades, mate. That’s how long I’ve been disappointed.’
I can’t conceal my bewilderment. ‘I thought that…’
‘That’s right,’ says Olli and leans a tanned elbow against the table. He too turns to look at the grey warehouse. In the sunshine it looks almost white. ‘I’ve got plenty of experience. With women. I was nineteen the first time I got married. She left me five years later. The next one left after we’d been married for three years. The latest one left after only a year.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ says Olli, looking wistfully into the distance.
This isn’t going quite the way I’d planned. I imagined I’d be able to tell him, if not directly or in much detail, about my own disappointments. I can still see Taina’s bouncing buttocks pounding against Petri’s virile hips. But now I feel as though I ought to console him instead.
Olli turns his head. ‘You were saying something?
‘Yes. I have a suspicion that … my wife has someone else.’
Olli slowly sucks air into his lungs. I might just be witnessing the longest inhalation of breath in the history of the universe.
‘No,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I reply.
‘Are you sure?’ he asks.
The slapping of sweaty flesh, the taste of vomit in my mouth. I nod.
‘Bloody women,’ says Olli.
‘That just about covers it.’
For a moment neither of us says anything.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’
Olli’s question takes me by surprise. I’d imagined he would give me the answers, not make me more uncertain than I was to start with. Surely that’s the point of confiding in someone – a problem shared and all that.
‘I don’t know,’ I answer honestly. ‘I’ve never been in a situation like this before. I don’t know what to think.’
‘It’s tough. Someone’s been dangling his oar in your pond.’
‘I haven’t thought of it like—’
‘He’s been mowing your turf, mate, punting up your stream.’
‘Right.’
‘You know what I do to get over the worst of it?’
Come up with new metaphors, perhaps? I think, but decide not to suggest that, and shake my head instead.
‘I lower the bar.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I lower my standards,’ Olli explains. ‘I don’t expect as much from the next one as I did from the last. If the last one was just about house-trained, I’ll settle for one a bit rougher round the edges next time.’
‘You just told me each of your marriages was shorter than the last, so I don’t think you’re onto a winning strategy.’
Olli looks at me as though I haven’t understood what he’s said; as though I haven’t understood anything about anything.
‘No plan is a hundred per cent foolproof.’
My stomach begins to cramp and I double over. A searing pain races through my temples, as though someone is pulling at my skull with a pair of pliers. The seizure lasts only a few seconds, and once it’s passed the sun seems brighter than a moment ago. I glance at Olli. He looks worried, or at the very least somewhat startled.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
‘Never been better.’ I straighten myself and sit squarely on my chair.
‘What about the business?’
This is a much easier question to deal with. That said, there are still lots of unresolved issues regarding the business, mostly due to my impending death. For the moment, however, I’m not going to breathe a word about that to Olli. I don’t think I could deal with another mixed metaphor.
‘This won’t affect the business at all,’ I say, and I know it’s the truth. ‘Business as usual, that’s the main thing.’
Olli seems to accept this.
‘But about our new competitor,’ I say. ‘Do you know the men over there?’
‘More or less.’
‘Have they got a history?’
‘A history?’
I look at Olli. He was clearly thinking about a different kind of history. ‘With mushrooms,’ I say. ‘The mushroom business.’
‘None whatsoever.’
I think about this for a moment. I’m not about to tell Olli I’ve just visited the premises of the Hamina Mushroom Company either.
Visited? Wouldn’t it be more truthful to say I was breaking and entering? I don’t know. Something happened to me outside the police station. I can’t exactly say I came to my senses, because I’ve subsequently broken into our competitors’ premises and asked for advice from a man whose recipe for dealing with woman trouble is a steely determination to make things worse for himself every time.
I think about our competitors’ shiny new equipment, their fantastic set-up.
‘What do you know about them?’ I ask.
Olli sighs, puts down his soup spoon and stares at me.
‘Local lads.’
I say nothing.
Olli takes my silence as a sign to continue. ‘Asko is the blond one – the older bloke who’s always driving their van. The guys in the passenger seats are Sami and Tomi. Asko has done all sorts: he’s worked at the paper factory and at the harbour, processing and canning fish. Sami used to play baseball. Tomi’s just got out of prison, killed his mother. Sami was the Hamina baseball club’s best switch-hitter of all time, as well as playing thirteen seasons at second base.’
I look at Olli. He sees my confusion.
‘Baseball’s big in Hamina,’ he begins. ‘Besides…’
‘Tomi killed his own mother?’
Olli nods. ‘Over some herring. He used to live with his mother. She fried a lot of herring. The fat really stinks. The smell, the grease, it sticks to everything – curtains, clothes, you name it. When you go to bed in the evening, your pillow smells of herring. But she liked them.’
‘So how did these guys decide to become … mushroom entrepreneurs?’
Olli shrugs at me. ‘They probably saw how well things are going for us.’
5
I’m sitting alone in my manager’s office, a computer and piles of papers in front of me. To the right of the computer is a picture of me and my wife, tanned and happy on a beach holiday in Phuket. I was still in pretty good shape back then, though you can tell I was pulling my stomach in. Not quite our honeymoon, but almost. The blue-green waters of the Strait of Malacca wash across our feet as we stand arm in arm. We’re both wearing red swimsuits. I recall how they reminded Taina of Baywatch, but I can’t remember whether she thought that was a good or a bad thing.
The moment captured in that photograph seems as distant in years as it does in kilometres. The Taina I saw today isn’t the Taina in this photograph – the Taina who pressed herself so tightly against me that our suntan lotion all but glued us together.
A marital affair.
Taina’s affair.
One or the other. I don’t know what it was that made me back away from the top of the steps this morning, what power made me shut the door behind me. But I know I did the right thing. I would have looked like a pathetic cuckold if I’d rushed into the garden, feebly brandishing the iron bar.
I click the computer on.
Its low murmur is familiar and oddly comforting. Perhaps this is the voice of the earth, its ambient soundtrack.
I sear
ch online for information about the Hamina Mushroom Company. There’s nothing to be found. Naturally there’s an entry in the Register of Companies, but because their operations have only just begun, there is no financial statement or other information. Asko Mäkitupa is listed as the CEO, and the capital stock is given as the paltry sum of two thousand euros. When I think of their flashy equipment and facilities, I’m all the more baffled as to how a docker, a mother-killer and a switch-hitter have managed to secure such a flying start to their business venture.
A sudden wincing pain in my chest, and for a moment I see everything double. A cold sweat breaks out across my neck, my throat tingles. Again the turn seems to be over in seconds.
I google some information on poisoning and simply confirm what the doctor has already told me: sustained poisoning initially causes a rise in tolerance levels before ultimately leading to organ failure and total collapse – which will happen … when the time comes.
Olli walks past the open door. He looks pensive. It seems we all have our problems. Mine appear to be twofold: those affecting my life and those affecting my death. Until now I haven’t realised how closely the two are intertwined. When it comes to the crunch, death is really a distillation of life: everything is condensed into the single, colossal question of how best to live it. Or how we should have lived it.
If you had only a day left, what would you do? And what if you had a week? A month?
I haven’t thought about things like this. It seems I haven’t thought about very much at all.
Something has woken me up.
Which is just as well, given what is about to happen next.
The van belonging to the Hamina Mushroom Company swerves onto our forecourt. I look out of the window and watch as the van bounces across the unpaved yard. The three men sitting in the small cab are so tightly packed together that they don’t seem to move at all.
Olli puts his head round the door to my office and says something. I tell him I’ll take care of it. He looks at me without answering and walks off.
The Man Who Died Page 3
