The Man Who Died

by Antti Tuomainen

Olli is having his morning coffee and tucking into a long, sticky Danish pastry.

  ‘You’re early,’ he comments.

  With his brown eyes, his angular jaw and the greying hair round his temples he really would look unmistakably like George Clooney, if only he wouldn’t talk with his mouth full of sugary pastry. And if there wasn’t a large globule of raspberry jam stuck in the corner of his mouth. And if he didn’t look like he enjoyed jam so much, raspberry or any other flavour. Still, he doesn’t have a paunch like me. I don’t know why I’ve suddenly started feeling so uneasy about the life buoy around my waist. I imagine the answer to the question would be hard to bear.

  ‘The machines are up and running,’ I say, stating the obvious.

  ‘I know,’ Olli nods, his mouth still full.

  ‘Well, I don’t doubt that,’ I say. ‘I just wondered why they’re switched on. To my knowledge we haven’t got any mushrooms yet. We’re still waiting for the rain to come, hopefully by the weekend, and after that we’ll have mushrooms to dry. We follow nature’s own cycles, or we try to at least.’

  ‘I know that.’

  I say nothing and look at Olli. He notices this, takes a sheet of kitchen paper from the roll on the patio table and wipes the corner of his mouth. He swallows so loudly I can hear it.

  ‘I’m trying out a new technique,’ he says. ‘A method of drying them more quickly. I don’t know if it’s possible yet, but I think I’ve come up with something.’

  ‘A new drying method,’ I say and hear how surprised I sound.

  ‘That’s right. You were talking about doubling our production, and that means we’ll have twice as much to dry, which means that…’ He’s talking as if he’s apologising, his delivery hesitant and cautious.

  ‘Olli,’ I interrupt him, ‘it sounds good. Great, actually.’

  I can see the relief in his eyes, and the hand holding the half-eaten Danish pastry returns to its resting position.

  ‘I just thought … you looked so…’

  I take a few steps forward, from the shade into the sunshine, stand in the middle of the patio and feel the sun on the top of my head. There are a few irritating quirks to Olli’s personality, but he always makes up for them with these positive little surprises. I want him to know that.

  ‘I’m sorry. Maybe I’m a bit tense at the moment. I’m glad you’re using your initiative like this. That’s exactly the kind of positive spirit we need round here. Have you been here by yourself all morning?’

  Olli looks at me and seems to be wondering how to answer the question.

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘That’s why I got here so early. So I could check things out in peace and…’

  I give a short nod of the head, take a step closer.

  ‘Do you remember what I told you before? About my wife? And you told me how you’ve had similar experiences yourself – with women in general, if I understood you right?’

  The raspberry pastry in Olli’s hand is like an object he has just discovered and that he now wants to present to me. It doesn’t move at all, and he has stopped eating it.

  ‘I remember it well,’ he says, and now there’s something more self-assured in his voice, something assertive. ‘And I’ve been giving the matter some thought.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, surprised.

  Olli nods.

  ‘You can’t take it lying down, mate.’

  ‘That’s what I was going to ask you about,’ I say and quickly glance up at the sky. The sun is climbing rapidly. Now it’s whiter and has lost the yellow hue it had this morning. ‘I was talking about my wife. Now I think I might be infatuated.’

  ‘With your wife?’ Olli asks, clearly bewildered.

  ‘No,’ I say with a shake of the head. ‘Not with my wife.’

  Olli gives a more decisive nod, a gesture that says more than a simple ‘yes’, something more along the lines of, Aha, well indeed, I think I get the picture.

  ‘That’s the spirit; chin up,’ he says. ‘Always on hand when the pipes need a good seeing to.’

  I look at Olli. I recall our previous conversation with all its metaphors about ponds and turf and other such things. This plumber’s romanticism is…

  ‘Look, my wife isn’t dying,’ I say. I decide not to mention that she’s made certain I’m the one who’s dying.

  ‘Of course not,’ he replies quickly.

  ‘Have you ever had another woman on the go?’ I ask.

  ‘Have you got another woman on the go?’

  Olli’s question comes out of the blue. I think about it. There’s only one answer.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There’s no … other woman. I mean theoretically. At the moment the most we’re talking about is an infatuation.’

  ‘In that case,’ Olli begins and seems to remember the remnants of the pastry in his hand. He bites off a large chunk and washes it down with a glug of coffee. I can only imagine what two decilitres of pastry-and-coffee dough must feel like in his cheeks. I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. He notices me looking at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘“In that case”, you said. People generally follow that with some sort of clarification.’

  ‘Right,’ he concedes. ‘Infatuation. That’s the right direction. But I wouldn’t pay it too much attention if I were you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Olli places his coffee mug on the table. The mug’s rim is smeared with pink and light-brown smudges.

  ‘When I go to the shops, I feel a bit of a thrill. When I drive a car, I get a thrill. When I watch TV, I get a thrill. When I walk across the square, I get a thrill. I feel infatuated about a thousand times a day, but by evening I couldn’t tell you any of the reasons why.’

  ‘People are different,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe, but the important thing is you’re getting over the bloke who’s drilling your wife.’

  ‘I prefer not to think of it as drilling.’

  ‘That’s what it is though. Drilling, banging, pummelling…’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ I say, stopping him in his tracks.

  I stand on the patio, the sun beats down on my skin. I’m about to say something that I suddenly remember; the thought is already in my mind, the question forming, it’s of the utmost importance – but I don’t have time to say it out loud, because Suvi appears in the doorway. She’s so tall that the glasses propped on her head almost touch the top of the doorframe, and she has to hunch her shoulders.

  In her right hand Suvi is holding a bunch of papers that she lifts up to show me. The quick movement of her head, the stretch of her long arm, the graceful sideways movement of her thin, slender figure, look like a very short stage performance.

  ‘Could you take a look at these right now?’ she asks.

  I show Suvi to the chair on the other side of my desk, close the office door behind me and wonder how normal it is for everybody to arrive at work so early. It can’t be very normal, not at all. Suvi sits down in the chair and crosses her left leg over her right. Her thigh is long and shiny, and about halfway up it there’s a bruise, blue and violet around the edges and almost black in the middle.

  The papers are still in her hand.

  Suvi’s brown hair is tied in a bun, her face is serious and narrow, as it so often is, and as usual her blue eyes are at once neutral and alert. She’s wearing a green-and-blue summer dress and a pair of white sandals, and for the first time she looks every bit as young as she really is: twenty-seven years old. In terms of the quality-price ratio, Suvi is probably the best recruitment I’ve ever made: last year, using only her own initiative and common sense, she’d already saved us more than her entire annual salary by the early spring – the time when we tally up the wages for the pickers in our last-minute scramble to gather the false-morel harvest.

  If anyone has earned a pay rise, it is Suvi, and besides, if what I know about her past is true, Suvi might have much more to offer the business than her attenti
on to detail. She already has the kind of experience some people never achieve in their lives – or deaths, however you wish to look at it. The two concepts are increasingly mingling and overlapping in my mind: I’m inhabiting two worlds at once, and, oddly enough, it all seems perfectly natural.

  Suvi brings me back to earth as she hands me the papers. I hold out a hand to stop her. She lays the papers in her lap and continues to look at me fixedly.

  ‘Just a moment,’ I say. ‘Before we get to that, there’s something I want to talk to you about. If that’s okay with you.’

  Suvi says nothing.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes. Just say if I go too far. This is a personal matter. And I want to stress this is entirely voluntary. You can leave whenever you wish.’

  ‘Do you want the long or the short version?’ She shifts position in her chair, uncrosses her legs and crosses them again the other way. There’s no bruise on her other thigh.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I stammer. ‘If I’m being—’

  ‘My past.’ Suvi interrupts me. ‘It always comes out. Sooner or later.’

  ‘Would you like to talk about it?’ I ask, and even I can hear how unnatural and downright stupid it sounds.

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘But I can.’

  Suvi places the bunch of papers between her thigh and the arm of the chair, frees up her arms and folds them across her chest.

  ‘Esa was a promising rally driver; in the junior league he was one of the best in the country. Always conscientious and enthusiastic. We started dating when I was fifteen and Esa was sixteen. He liked to drive fast. Every evening we would career up and down the local dust tracks. It made a real stir, especially as neither of us was legally old enough to have a driver’s licence. At the same time he was taking part in more and more competitions. And that’s when he got a taste for the booze. It was then that I realised there was one thing he loved more than me: lager. Lager and rally driving is a tough combination. Naturally, at first nobody noticed anything. Esa would drive with a hangover, throw up between the stages of the race, jump back behind the wheel and drive like there’s no tomorrow. Then, every evening he would drink himself under the table, drink himself to oblivion. He loved that lager. One crate a day was nothing – that was just to quench his thirst. I became pregnant. Sometimes we joked that our stomachs were growing at the same rate. But I didn’t find it particularly funny. Esa drove his rally cars, his face ruddy and bloated, and we had our first child. He celebrated by wrapping his car round a tree for the first time. We got married once he’d remained sober for three days. It felt like an eternity. He was always on the road. Each time he came home his face was chubbier and redder, his driver’s jump suit was so tight round the waist that I had to yank the zip up as he held the sides together. Then he started drinking while he was behind the wheel. His map reader was a substance abuser too – popping Diapam like throat sweets – so he was unlikely to tell anyone what Esa was getting up to. God knows how they managed to win any races. Cheap lager and Diapam, the breakfast of champions, they joked. By this time I was pregnant again. They kitted out the car with a ten-litre tank for Esa’s lager and fitted it with some kind of cooling system. For the map reader they drilled a hole into the door big enough to fit a tube, and at the bottom of the hole was a spring that pushed out a new tablet each time he finished sucking the last one. They even showed me the drawings they’d put together. On a long, hot, sunny day of competition, Esa would easily empty the entire tank. He would barely be able to stand up and someone would have to lift him out of the car and carry him to the hotel. Then the next morning he’d be back behind the wheel. His face was so red and swollen that he looked like a traffic light. I don’t know how he could see anything, as I certainly couldn’t see his eyes. He found himself driving for a small-league European championship title. Winning would have meant a transfer to the world championships and a substantial contract, and finally our family would have been able to afford a home of our own. It was the day of the final race. Esa and his map reader decided to leave nothing to chance: they doubled the size of the beer tank and the pill popper. The first four stages went brilliantly, and they were leading the race. And it was then that they were overcome with hubris: they decided to try one another’s provisions. During the fifth stage Esa munched his way through the rest of the sedatives and the map reader gulped down what little Esa had left in the beer tank. The result was that, during the sixth stage, the car stalled on a long, straight road in the middle of the plains. A technical car drove out there and found the two of them. Esa was snoring like a languid walrus and the map reader was sitting next to him, his trousers soaked. Needless to say, there was no contract and Esa was sent home. His rally-car days were over. He tried all kinds of things, but ended up in a garage painting car bodywork. It’s a job that involves a lot of solvents. He never sniffed anything, but he was always so drunk – and because of that so short-sighted – that he had to paint the cars with his nose right up against the body. One day he keeled over and died. People said he must have been sniffing something, but he never did. He just died.’

  The story has come to an end, I realise that, but something is missing. I feel certain of it. I don’t know what. What’s more I’m unable to show as much empathy or interest as I would have hoped, as a wave of faintness washes over me.

  This time I don’t see any of the familiar bolts of lightning, but it’s as though there’s a problem with the signals in my brain: the screen goes blank, flickers on and off, remains out of focus for a moment, colours flashing, whirling on top of one another, bright and garish. My stomach muscles start to cramp, my chest heaves, I bend over double and hit my head against the desk. First my heart misses a beat, then shudders painfully, emptying itself as though it is full to the brim. I don’t know how much longer I can take it. When I can see again and manage to sit up straight, Suvi is still sitting in front of me.

  ‘Not to worry,’ I stammer. ‘It’s not to do with you or your story.’

  ‘Are you ill?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ I reply, because I feel perfectly healthy.

  As contradictory as it seems, it hasn’t for one moment occurred to me that I might be ill. I’m merely dying, that’s all. There’s a difference.

  ‘I’m just … Let’s look at these papers, shall we?’

  Suvi hands over the bunch of papers. Receipts, bills, order forms. I skim through them and hurriedly sign them.

  Then I stop in my tracks.

  A non-refundable booking, to be paid in advance. Six rooms at the Seurahuone Hotel in Hamina.

  I stare at the booking dates. I look up to check the date – first in the upper right-hand corner of my computer screen then with Suvi, who gives the same answer as the computer. I ask her what day of the week it is too, just to be certain.

  ‘Thursday,’ she says. ‘It’s 2016, in case you’re wondering.’

  ‘Thank you, Suvi.’

  The two-page booking confirmation doesn’t tell me who made the reservation. It simply lists our business and gives my mobile phone as the primary contact number. And that’s not the only thing that chills me about this reservation. The booking is for this coming weekend. Tomorrow is Friday. Six rooms, check-in tomorrow. The confirmation slip doesn’t give the names of the occupants. I show Suvi the document.

  ‘Did you make this booking?’

  Suvi shakes her head. ‘I found it this morning.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  Suvi looks at me. ‘The Seurahuone Hotel.’

  ‘I know that. I meant how did it come to be on your desk?’

  ‘It didn’t, that’s what I’m trying to say. I found it in the company’s email account, the general one that nobody checks anymore. Someone must have given it as the contact email. It’s there on the reservation form, on the second page. Do you want me to check—?’

  I stop her with my hand while I look at the second page.

  Stranger still.

  The reservation isn’t just
for the six hotel rooms. There are tables reserved at the restaurant too: dinner for a total of eight people on Saturday and Sunday. All at once I can see the connections I’ve been looking for. Now that I seem to have found them, I feel a mixture of fear and disappointment. In the blink of an eye the two combine, blend together, then erupt in a burst of rage.

  ‘There’s no need. You can forget this now. I’ll take care of it myself.’

  I leaf through the rest of the papers. Routine stuff. I hand the bunch back to Suvi and thank her. She stands up. She’s a serious young woman, which is hardly surprising. Her story is an extraordinary tale of survival. I firmly believe I understand that better today than I would have only a week ago. I also firmly believe that I can appreciate at least some of what Suvi has had to go through.

  ‘Suvi,’ I say as she’s almost at the door.

  ‘Yes?’ she asks and turns.

  ‘The things you told me…’

  ‘That was the short version.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, but thank you for confiding in me. About the other thing – don’t mention this reservation to anyone.’

  Suvi’s face is open, her blue eyes too. ‘You’re the first person to hear that story who hasn’t asked me how it made me feel or what I feel about it now. Thank you. As for the reservation, I’ve never seen it.’

  The Seurahuone Hotel has recently been renovated. Not a moment too soon, some might say. The hotel dates from the late nineteenth century – a handsome stone building with wide, grandiose staircases and hallways. The hotel’s reception is on the first floor, the same floor as the restaurant. Light streams in through the tall, churchlike windows. The silence reminds me of church too, that and the stone floor that oddly seems to count my steps.

  I’m out of breath after walking up the stairs. Only this morning I’d been as fit as a young foal, or at the very least a good workhorse. I hope this worsening in my condition is only temporary, as these spells have been until now.

  The hotel reception looks empty. The breakfast rush is over, the dining room cleared and tidied. I look on the reception desk for a bell or some other way of getting the staff’s attention. There is nothing. As I can’t think of anything better, I call a ‘hello’ into the air. The word has an unexpected effect. A man jumps up from behind the desk. His oval face is dark red and desperate.