by Mikael Niemi
“Hendrix!” Niila yelled into my ear.
“Better!” I yelled back at him.
Then it dawned on me what he was playing. The Soviet national anthem, echoing around the old wooden walls of the Community Hall.
Afterward several of the audience came up on the stage to ask where we stood politically. Holgeri sat there with a faint smile on his face, as if he’d just woken up out of a dream, while two girls tried to sit on his knee. I found myself face to face with a girl with strange, Indian-inked, Arab eyebrows. Her hair was so shiny black, it seemed she must have just dunked it in an inkwell. But her face was powdery white. There was something doll-like about her, a thin outer layer of cellophane. Her body was hidden behind the regulation voluminous uniform Red Youth fashion dictated, but her supple gestures gave her away. She wiggled her pelvis as she crept toward me, slight, careful movements. But I knew there was a woman in there, a hunger. Without a word she held out her hand to be shaken, like a grown-up, and she smiled, displaying her small, sharp teeth. She shook firmly, like a man. It hurt.
Afterward we packed up our instruments and the amplifiers. The old guy with the cap wandered around, an innocent grin on his face, as he checked on how the girls’ titties were coming on. The treasurer presented us with liver-sausage sandwiches and fifty kronor from the club’s funds.
“Are you going to Pajala?”
It was the black-haired girl. We were standing at the top of the steps. She pulled her leather jacket more tightly around her.
“Can I offer you a lift?” she asked.
She nodded toward the road. I followed her hesitantly. She stopped beside a black Volvo.
“My dad’s car.”
“I like it,” I said.
We were on our way before I knew where I was. The seat felt chilly under my bottom, and my breath was misting over the windscreen. I switched on the heater and turned up the heat to combat the wintry cold. An approaching car sounded its horn loudly, and flashed its headlights. The girl fumbled around with the controls until she found the right switch, then dimmed the headlights.
“Surely you’re not eighteen yet?”
She didn’t answer. Leaned back in her seat, her hand on the gear shift. She hugged the middle of the road, the icy surface sped away underneath us, the mountains of snow piled up on each side of the road sparkled in our headlights. The ice on the marshy swamps beyond glowed blue and unyielding.
“Is it cool to be a Communist?” I asked.
She tried to find the knob to turn on the radio. The car edged toward the ditch at the side of the road. I whimpered and she jerked the wheel and straightened us out again.
“You don’t need to be scared,” she said. “I’ve been driving for years.”
She took the old road from Autio to Pajala. When we got to the long, straight section at the beginning, she plunged the accelerator pedal right down to the floor. The engine raced and whined, and the speedometer registered a fever. The cold air outside licked a layer of ice all over the car and not least the windows, and the inside temperature dropped.
“There are often reindeer on the road here,” I said.
She laughed and increased the speed even more. I realized she enjoyed scaring other people. If I were to fasten my safety belt now, she’d have won. Instead I tensed my body and prepared to adopt the crash position while staring hard at the side of the road, and pretended to be relaxed.
After fiddling around for ages she managed to find Finland Radio. Tango in a minor key, a woman singing about love and sorrow. The car bounced its way over hill and dale, around endless curves, leaving behind a melancholy-looking cloud of smoke. A heart emptying itself into the vacant landscape, a trail of blood. I glanced surreptitiously at the girl. Examined her profile in the darkness, her round chin, her fleshy lips, her cheeky upturned nose, so typically Finnish. I felt the urge to explore. Kiss.
“What’s there to do in Pajala?” she asked.
“God only knows,” I said.
We were already at Manganiemi and were soon swishing over the old bridge. The lights from the village flickered through the trees, and there was a glittering white sheen on the river. She slammed her foot down on the accelerator despite the Scania Vabis truck coming toward us over the narrow bridge. We somehow squeezed past, but you couldn’t have slid a single copy of the Haparanda Daily News between us. The truck driver played a fanfare on his horn, but the girl’s face was expressionless.
“Is there a film on tonight?”
I didn’t think so. What else was there to do? I remembered a classmate who kept rabbits in his boiler room. He used to feed them on half-rotten vegetables from the Co-op that they’d only have thrown away otherwise. You could sometimes catch the bunnies going at it, but I supposed that was a bit childish.
“We can take in the Pajala Sporting ice hockey practice. They have a match this weekend against Ötå-Kuiva.”
I explained how she should continue straight on then turn right at Arthur’s general store, which looked a bit like a shoe box, then keep going toward the center of town past all the shops, including the Harjuhahto shoe shop, the office supplies store and Larsson’s gentleman’s hairdressers, Wennberg’s bakery, Mikaelsson’s corner shop and Lindqvist’s café. We turned at the school and came to the ice hockey rink. We parked the car, which had warmed up at last, and followed a well-trod snow path down to the rink.
It was all go there. Padded giants in yellow and black shirts were practicing skating backward in a circle around the whole pitch. The coach was called Stenberg, a bearded police constable who’d moved into the area from the south. He blew his whistle and urged them on.
“Any pansy who cuts a corner gets a sack of shit dropped on his littlegirl curls from a great height! Get those skates moving, you idle bastards!”
Then they warmed up the goalie with a salvo of cannon balls, whamming and blasting with their fancy Koho sticks while the ghoul behind his death-mask was bruised black and blue through every inch of his padding. Some of the pucks whizzed over the sideboards and disappeared into the fields beyond, where some kid would be ecstatic to find them when the snow melted.
“Thwack that puck into the top corner like you were belting the devil and his grandmother and all the choirboys of hell!” Stenberg yelled. He was brilliant with youngsters and on his own initiative had started training programs for young lads in every village and hamlet for miles around.
Then they had a practice match. A crude, all-farting performance characterized more by good intentions than clever tactics. They crashed into the sideboards, slid over the ice on their bottoms, and pelted the goals with shots until their sticks started smoking. The long-haired forward on one of the teams had a gum shield of the old type that made him look like a German shepherd with a muzzle on. One big mass of muscle, he put his head down and charged forward, scattering the defense like a train barging through a reindeer herd. His puck control was not of the best, but he did manage, with a bit of luck, to deliver a back pass so that his own defense could shoot straight through the clear-felled tunnel he’d created. His opposite pole on the team was a skinny blond guy with incredible reflexes. He’d stand still as a statue when the puck was dropped, then his stick was transformed into a lightning flash and the puck would shoot off like a rubber thunderbolt.
We stood on a pile of snow behind the sideboards and watched for a while. I snuggled a bit closer to her, as if by accident, so that our jackets were touching. She had a mouthful of bubble gum, and there was a smell of liquorice every time a bubble burst. I noticed she was shivering, and pulled her Palestine shawl tighter around her neck.
“Are you cold?”
“A bit.”
“We could … I’ve got a friend who keeps rabbits …”
“How childish,” she said, wrapping her bubble gum round her index finger.
I ought to have put my arm around her instead. Too late now. I felt stupid. Had an urge to go home and practice riffs in front of the mirror. She noticed I was
backing off. Softened up, watched the match for a while, and pretended to be interested.
“They ought to practice precision passing,” I said. “Like the Russians. This is more Canadian. Brute force, you know. Lumberjack ice hockey.”
I branched off into an in-depth analysis of the game and elaborated on how the Russians had such brilliant technique because they used to remove the blades of their sticks and practice with the handles alone. Then I noticed she was bored stiff. And I started to feel cold as well.
“Why don’t we call in on the ladies’ aerobics?”
She nodded, and looked into my eyes for longer than she needed to. Then averted her gaze as if she’d realized she’d given herself away. I felt my heart starting to thud, and led the way to the gym just a few hundred feet away.
The door to the ladies’ changing rooms wasn’t locked. We sneaked in. Jazz music blared from the school tape recorder. There was a smell of fish and varnish, as there always is in old PE halls, a sort of fetid smell of torture by ropes and vaulting horses and flying rings. Plus an acid stench of female sweat and sex. The housewives’ clothes were hanging from hooks all around the changing room. Wrinkled woolen trousers, tent-like underskirts, flowery dresses, surgical stockings, bra cups bigger than my woolly hat. The floor was covered in shopping bags and PVC handbags and worn-down ladies’ boots, Wellingtons, and Lapp shoes, marooned in pools of melted snow.
I tip-toed toward the hall. It was dazzlingly bright in there. A sudden earthquake hit the building, the floor shuddered. The ladies were jumping on the spot. My God, but the flesh quivered! Tits jiggled like flour sacks, spare tires swelled like rising dough. It was lucky they had no sense of rhythm—if they’d all jumped in time with the music, they’d have gone through the floor. Then they started prancing around the room with giant strides. Colossal legs clomping around like elephants. Sweat poured in torrents over the double chins and into the canyons of their cleavage, varicose veins glowed blood-red. “Stretch and streeetch!” yelled the instructor from behind the tape recorder, and forty powerful housewives swayed like birches in a storm. “Now, forward stretch and touch your toes,” and twenty gigantic bottoms from which had sprung a hundred children waggled in the air. Bum sweat cascaded over blubbery backs, the air was alive with a whiff of pussy. “Up again, then left and right,” sideways thrusts with ample hips. There were collisions of course, producing amazing mass energy. Women fell like two-ton bombs, lay slithering in the pools of sweat on the varnished floorboards before scrambling up on their feet again, indomitable. The room stank of marshy swamps and menopause. Death and birth in an ancient mix, female excitement.
The girl grabbed me by the hair on the back of my neck. Interlaced her frozen female fingers. A shudder ran down my back and into my hips. I went weak at the knees, was forced to sit down. She slid down onto my knee and spat out her bubble gum. Her pupils dilated, became black water holes. I started stroking her chin with my thumb, light as a feather along her jaw-line, up toward her curvy little ear. Snuggled my face up to hers. Closed my eyes and searched for her skin. Her cheeks melted, heated up. She started breathing more eagerly. I could feel her smiling under my lips. We opened our jackets. Body against body. Her breasts were young and pointed. I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed till tears came to my eyes, felt a happy glow flow through me. Get together. Get a girlfriend.
Suddenly her hand was under my sweater. Freezing cold but gentle and loving. She caressed my sensitive back muscles, made them twitch. Moved faster, more impatiently. Pinched a little. Scratched.
“Would you like to … be my girl?” I stammered.
By way of response she slid her hand inside my pants. Turned her hand into a little mouse scuttling over my buttocks, my hip bone, darting into my groin. I flinched.
“It won’t hurt,” she giggled, showing her white teeth.
I wanted to tell her I’d hardly got any pubic hair, warn her she’d be disappointed, but she was already there. Deftly stroked my scrotum, like a spider trussing up a fly. Fingered my little erection. Now I was caught, impossible to run away. She kissed me, thrusting her long, blood-tasting tongue into my mouth. I felt dizzy, stroked her breasts, but roughly, clumsily. She forced me backward, down onto the wooden bench. Pulled down her jeans. I wanted to feel her but she knocked my hand away.
“You’re too slow,” she said harshly, holding me down.
My shoulder blades were pressed down against the bench. She sat on me like a bouncer subduing a drunk. I could hear the women stamping away in the background.
“You’re so … nice,” I mumbled shyly.
Eyes closed, she steered me inside her, greedily. Deep down into the darkest, dampest depths. It felt warm and soft, like a pillow. She started wiggling with snake-like movements, rocking back and forth, a slow and tender dance making something grow, getting bigger all the time. A picture being painted redder and redder until the whole canvas became a damp membrane. I thrust into her again and again, felt my head swimming. She stepped up the pace and started emitting shrill shrieks. Grew more eager, more abandoned, like a dog screwing a sofa. I put my hand over her mouth, but she shrieked right through it. Catlike screams.
“Hush, they’ll hear us!” I gasped and could feel my skin growing tauter. Bulging outward. Pressure, bleeding. I tried to wriggle out but she clung on to me. It grew ever bigger and stronger. Pricking with the point of a knife until it made a hole. Her hair hung down thickly all around me. Dark clouds. Full of flesh.
And now. Now, yes now now now the whole world burst and the rain came cascading down from the black clouds above.
* * *
When I opened my eyes a woman was standing there. One of the flesh-laden matrons from Vittulajänkkä. Eyes staring from under her sweaty permed hair, beads dripping from her nose and chin. I knew she would start shouting. Call in the other harridans, create a lynching atmosphere. They’d squash us against the floor with their hundred-pound bottoms and check to see if we were pickpockets. One of them would say: Kulli pois! Out with your prick! and then one of the Lappish women from the Arctic forests would chew my balls to mincemeat like they do when they castrate screaming, white-eyed reindeer stags.
Scared stiff, I withdrew, pulled on my pants while the woman stared critically at my shrinking erection. The stamping from the gym was deafening, horrendous.
“Much ado about nothing,” she said with a grin.
Then she took a drink of water straight from the tap, farted loudly, and went back into the hall. A strong smell of stables followed us all the way out.
* * *
The girl got into the Volvo and said: “Ta-ta.” I stopped her from closing the door.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” I wondered.
She stared straight ahead, her lips tense but indifferent.
“Can’t you tell me your name at least?”
She tinkered with something and started the engine. Engaged first gear and started moving. I ran alongside, clinging on to the door. She looked at me with her big, dark eyes. And suddenly her mask fell. It cracked, collapsed, and underneath was nothing but a big, fleshy wound.
“I’m coming with you!” I yelled in desperation.
She accelerated, the door flew out of my grasp. With tires spinning she skidded away under the streetlights in a cloud of whirling snow. The sound of the engine grew fainter then died away into silence.
I stood motionless for a long time, and then the penny dropped. She hadn’t had an ignition key. The engine had been hot-wired. And as the pain grew, sinking its cold roots deep inside me, I realized I would never see her again.
CHAPTER 20
Regarding a birthday party at which the Tornedalen national anthem is sung, how the moose hunters turn up, and how four young men shoot for the stars
As the years went by, my grandad became more and more of a hermit. He enjoyed being on his own, and when Grandma passed on he got it into his head that other people were a nuisance. He lived on his own, looked after himself, and hi
s final wish was to die in his own home. Whenever we went to visit him, he was friendly but reserved. As far as he was concerned, the bottom line was that he wanted nothing to do with an assisted living facility: just let us get that into our thick skulls. Some people might think his house was a mess, but he liked it that way.
But he couldn’t do anything about the passage of time, and eventually his seventieth birthday approached. His family had a guilty conscience, because they hadn’t been to see him as often as they might have; they all agreed that they should make up for this by giving him a birthday party nobody would ever forget. It would be an opportunity to add a few celebratory photos to the family album before the old man was too senile.
It took a great deal of persuasion before the object of the celebration agreed to take part, not for his own sake, but for the family’s. Looking on the bright side, he watched the preparations being made. The week before, his house was full of relatives scouring the foot sweat off the floorboards, scrubbing the rag carpets with soft soap, polishing the old windows with methylated spirits in the freezing winter cold, airing his black funeral suit to get rid of the smell of mothballs, washing congealed fat off the lamp shades, changing the wax table cloths, dusting every nook and cranny and discovering an incredible number of spiders’ webs and dead flies, carrying junk out into the barn, standing shoes in unnatural rows and patterns, and moving things in cupboards and drawers until everything was in the wrong place and impossible to find. Grandad managed to lose his temper several times, moaned and cursed and threatened to throw out all these intruders, but it was like a D-Day operation: impossible to stop once it had started.
* * *
The birthday fell on a Friday. Sis and I had been given the day off school, and we accompanied Mum and Dad to Grandad’s house quite early in the morning. It was fine weather and minus four degrees, a dry, windless chill that poured hoarfrost over car windscreens and covered trees with stiff ice needles. The last of the morning stars were fading away in the sky. The light lay blue over the forests. Dad parked the car in the courtyard where the snow plow had already been; we crunched our way over the frozen flakes and stamped our feet on the porch. The old dog began growling behind the door. He was half-blind and had started biting, so I picked up the sweeping brush and was prepared when Grandad opened up.
