by Mikael Niemi
“No, Pastor.”
“Indeed you are, Jussi. But wait. Listen. Does that make you a good person?”
“I don’t think so.”
“No. Maybe all you can do is follow your nature. Fundamentally you and I have very different ways. And that’s why I compare the two of us so often. Which of us walks the right path? How should we live, essentially? My accomplishments are significant, it’s true, but so too is the hurt I inflict. I make enemies, I wound my opponents and trample upon them. Whilst you turn the other cheek.”
He could see that I wanted to protest and he raised his hand.
“Wait, Jussi. Is that what makes you good? Is that what the Creator meant?”
For several moments I gazed at a horsefly traveling up and down his trouser leg, its shimmering green eyes shining brightly as it tried in vain to bite through the cloth.
“I taught you to read, Jussi. You borrow my books, you’re improving yourself. I can see that you think, but what do you do with your thoughts? If someone picks a fight with you, you turn aside, you simply pick up your knapsack and walk away. You flee to the north, to the mountains. Is that how we should confront the world’s foolishness? Think about it, Jussi. Are you right never to fight back?”
“Wretched worm and wanderer that I am.”
The pastor couldn’t help but smile when I recited from his favorite hymn.
“You’re an observer, Jussi. I’ve noticed it. You study the world around you, don’t you?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“You want to understand what the world and human beings are made of. But are you putting your pound to work, Jussi, as the parable teaches? That’s my question to you, Jussi. What are you doing to combat the world’s evil?”
There was nothing I could say. My throat tightened. I felt wrongfully accused and I wanted to run away and leave him there; I am so quick that I would be out of reach in the blink of an eye. He saw my anguish, leaned forward, and laid his hand upon my arm. That was how he held on to me: he fastened a string to my wing, as though I were a sparrow, frantically flapping.
* * *
—
It was the pastor who taught me to see. To learn that the world around you can be transformed entirely through your gaze. All my childhood I wandered through mountain valleys and birch forests, crossed pine moorlands, and splashed over swaying bogs. This countryside was mine. I knew it inside out, this barren northern land of stony riversides and twisting animal trails.
And yet I had seen almost nothing at all.
I remember when the pastor took me on one of his “excursions.” My birch-bark haversack was filled with food and drawing materials and sheaves of thick gray paper, and we covered a considerable distance. As evening approached we made camp in a lehto, a grove of trees surrounded by a waterlogged mosaic of marshland. We were both tired. I built a fire and started to prepare our camp for the night. He broke up loaves of bread and cut dried meat into thin strips, as we settled down on the spruce twigs to regain our strength. The air was full of buzzing, biting mosquitoes. The pastor offered me some tar, but instead I pulled a handful of needles off a stalk beside me, crushed them, and rubbed them on my wrists. The pungent smell they exuded repelled the mosquitoes.
“Wild rosemary,” he said.
“What?”
“The plant you rubbed on your skin. Ledum palustre.”
“Ledum . . . ?” I mumbled.
With an eager look on his face, he leaped to his feet.
“Follow me!”
We left our knapsacks at the camp. The pine moorland sloped down and soon the dry ground gave way to wet, undulating bog. I could sense his enthusiasm as he quickened his pace, his head bent, his eyes searching in all directions.
“I’ve wanted to visit this garden of herbs for so long,” he said. “And at last I’m here, standing before these riches.”
I looked. It was a bog. It was wide and it was wet.
“What do you see, Jussi?”
“Nothing.”
He half turned and smiled.
“Nothing? What about all this?”
“Grass.”
“No, Jussi. It’s not grass. It’s sedge.”
“Oh yes, sedge. I see sedge.”
He took a deep breath and turned toward the marshland. I realized that out there was our destination. It was the beginning of July, and the water was still high. We were wearing clothes that covered us completely and had scarves wrapped round our necks as a shield against the clouds of flesh-eating insects hatching in every pool.
“From this point I can see more than ten species, Jussi. And I’m only talking about the sedges. And then there’s the osier, that mysterious genus. Have you noticed how many different kinds there are here? Can you make them out?”
“No.”
“And look over there! We’ll examine them more closely tomorrow. See how bright they are!”
“Does the pastor mean the flowers?”
“Orchids, Jussi. Orchids in our barren northland. Look! Right in front of you!”
I looked down and saw, protruding by my foot, the tiny stalk I had almost trodden on.
“Look carefully, Jussi. Bend down. An orchis. The flower is irregular, with six tepals and a labellum.”
The stem was covered with deep-pink blossoms. He held the stalk gently, and I had to kneel down in the wet to take a proper look.
“Closer, Jussi, closer. And then sniff.”
With my nostrils right up to it, I breathed in. The hint of a faint, almost imperceptible sweetness, and then it was gone.
“Did you smell anything? Did you?”
“Yes . . .”
“I say to myself, that is what God smells like.”
* * *
—
Where previously I had seen merely trees, grass, and moss, now I faced a cornucopia of treasures. Wherever I turned my gaze, new discoveries lay in wait. And everything could be identified and allotted its own page in God’s mighty lexicon. It was a marvel to observe how diverse all the little plants could be. To discover in a magnifying glass that the stem was covered in small, silvery hairs, that a leaf edge could be serrated or wavy or notched, and that these characteristics were not accidental, but each and every one pertaining to its own species.
The pastor explained how all plants were classified into genus and family. How monocots had parallel leaf veins, in the same way as grasses and lilies, while dicots had a midrib from which smaller veins branched off, as in birch leaves. Why some plants were showy with flamboyant flower heads, such as the crown of the water lily or the tall, spiky flowers of the fireweed, in order to be fertilized by insects. Whereas others, such as the gray-greenish elder or grass flowers, were barely visible, scattering clouds of pollen in the wind. The flowers with four petals were named Cruciferae, the ones like brushes were called Umbelliferae; there were blooms shaped like cups, there were legumes with blossoms resembling a butterfly. The pastor could stand in reverence at the sight of a richly flowering marsh and with a sigh lament that life was too short, far too brief to embrace all of this. Then he would drop to his knees and hold his magnifying glass to the stem he had just discovered down there, scarcely the height of a finger.
It was the pastor who taught me the secret of memory. Knowledge was best retained when acquired through the eyes. When you happened upon a plant you had never seen before, this is what you should do: first walk around it and observe it from all angles; next bend down and inspect every tiny detail of the leaves, their point of growth, the shape of the stem, the sepals, the color of the pollen. Absolutely everything had to be appraised. In this way a mental image would be preserved. And the next time you came across it, albeit ten years later, the joy of recognition would be awakened. It was more difficult with names—all that Latin; there I had to resort to tedious repetition. When I heard
that the frothy white meadowsweet was called Filipendula ulmaria, though I tried to repeat it twenty times, a hundred times even, it had deserted me an hour or two later.
After numerous excursions with the pastor, my way of seeing altered. Shrubs and trees assumed the form of friends, of individuals I came to know as living beings. “Well, there you are, soaking up the sun. And with your brother and sister too.” When summer arrived I experienced the pleasure of reunion. I looked forward to seeing every plant and worked out when it would bloom. The very fact that the plants became familiar meant that I had a keen eye for any anomaly. Deep in a waterlogged forest of spruce I might encounter something new and unknown. In the past I would have trampled on it without another thought. But now I stopped to point it out. The pastor smiled with glee.
“Corallorhiza trifida,” he said. “Coralroot. Not entirely common here in the north. Well done, Jussi. Well done.”
His encouragement brought color to my cheeks and I hurriedly bent down. I recognized the typical orchid shape, the six tepals, and the labellum’s distinctive appearance, and I began to recite: Corallorhiza trifida, Corallorhiza trifida . . .
Soon she too would be my friend.
4.
One evening the pastor and I were in his study, pressing our latest finds. We had discovered them in a marsh not far from Kengis. Some insignificant stalks of sedge in particular had caused the pastor to quiver like a gun dog. With great care I carried the specimens home in his vasculum, the roots gently laid bare and wrapped in a soft cloth, and now I was helping him exchange the damp gray paper for dry, in order to best preserve the plants. Together we tightened the plant press, pulling the cord until it creaked and then securing it with the wooden pins.
We were interrupted by the sound of the front door opening and a stranger’s voice asking for the pastor. This was immediately followed by a knock and the pastor’s daughter Selma peeping in through the crack in the door.
“Father?”
The pastor wiped his hands on a rag and gathered up the wad of tobacco I had just cut for him from the twist.
“I’m coming.”
At the same moment the study door was thrown wide open and a rawboned youth barged in. There was something disturbing about him, a preoccupied look in his eye, something uneasy. The man was afraid.
“Reverend,” he stammered in Finnish, “the reverend must come.”
The pastor looked calmly at the visitor. His expression betrayed no displeasure at being disturbed. Yet I knew that he jealously guarded his time in this writing chamber. The man was standing there with sweat dripping from the end of his nose, his shirt soaked as if he had been running for hours. His arms were flailing in an effort to stress the urgency, as though he were striking at something.
“What’s happened?”
“She’s . . . we don’t know . . . she was in the woods with the cows.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Our maid, Hilda . . . Hilda Fredriksdotter Alatalo.”
I looked up when I heard the name. I knew the woman. She had been hired on one of the farms nearby, and I had often seen her in church with the rest of the servants. She was a pale, chubby girl with an upturned nose, a little slow in her movements. She always held a handkerchief in her hand, in the manner of an old lady. Whenever her spirit was moved, she used it to dry her eyes and nose.
“Yes?”
“The girl’s . . . gone. Reverend must come at once.”
The pastor gave me a look. The hour was already late and we were both tired after a long day’s trekking. But it was summer, and some light would remain throughout the night. The youth detected our hesitation and stamped his feet, giving the impression that he wanted to grab hold of the pastor and forcibly drag him away.
“We’re coming,” the pastor said. “Jussi, will you give him something to drink?”
I hurried out into the cabin and handed a ladle of water to our sweat-drenched visitor, who drank it like a horse.
* * *
—
It was the early hours when we reached their farm. The man who had come to fetch us was called Albin and was the eldest son of the house. All the way there, he ran thirty meters ahead of us, stopped to wait for us to catch up, then ran on again. The pastor and I kept an even, steady pace, accustomed as we were to journeying on foot. Everyone inside the farmhouse must have been watching through the window, for as we drew near they rushed out to meet us. There was the master, his wife, and behind them a swarm of sleepy children with tousled hair. The master and his son didn’t pause to offer us anything, but started at once down a path into the forest, where we followed. The sun was nearing the horizon in the north, as we struggled through the tangled undergrowth. The master was called Heikki Alalehto, and in confused and incoherent bursts he told us how the maid Hilda had gone out into the woods with the cows as normal that morning, but hadn’t returned for evening milking. Most of the herd had plodded back to the farmyard by themselves, but there was no sign of the maid.
“Perhaps the girl has gone looking for a missing cow?” the pastor suggested.
Heikki agreed that it was a possibility. But she had never been away so long before.
Every now and then they shouted her name. The echo of their voices rebounded off a distant ridge. The pastor and I walked in silence; I saw his eye rest on a Gramineae that appeared to be unfamiliar to him and I noticed how he hastily picked the sample and placed it in his knapsack.
Deep into the forest, we came across a place where someone had set up a modest camp. A few sticks remained in a burned-out fire.
“She usually takes a rest here.”
Heikki was just about to trample down the campfire when the pastor took hold of his arm. For several moments he stood without speaking, studying the scene. His gaze moved from the firepit to the broken spruce twigs she had been sitting on. A small milk pail lay overturned; its lid had come off and milk had splashed onto the moss, so white it seemed luminescent. The pastor inclined his head to mine.
“What do you see, Jussi?” he said in a low voice.
“Well, that . . . Hilda had been sitting here, having a rest. She made a fire. And then she knocked over the milk canister.”
“Do you know it was Hilda who knocked it over?”
“No-o-o . . . I don’t.”
“Use your eyes. Tell me what happened, Jussi.”
He spoke in an undertone, but his voice was filled with intensity. With an impatient hand he brushed away the hank of hair constantly falling in front of his eyes. I made an effort to register every detail, trying hard to summon up the girl’s image.
“Hilda was sitting by the fire having a rest. It would have been in the middle of the day, when the sun was at its highest. That’s when a person usually feels hungry. But all of a sudden something happens that makes her run away. Although . . . for all I know she doesn’t run, but she does, I think. That’s what it seems like. And then maybe . . . maybe she gets lost. Can’t find her way back. That’s what might have happened. At least, I think so.”
“Proceed only on the basis of what you can see,” the master said, pinching his lower lip with his thumb and index finger. “Stick to the facts. What do we have before us?”
I realized he was disappointed in me. I spent several moments struggling to deduce more from the scene.
“Her headscarf is still hanging on a bush. So she didn’t have time to take it when she ran away. And therefore she must have been in a hurry.”
“Good, Jussi.”
Heikki was shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, noticeably on edge. He wanted us to stop talking and start searching, but the pastor was determined we should wait. He half closed his eyes, squinting in a strange kind of way.
“Her headscarf is hanging on the bush to dry,” he said. “In which case it must have been midday and warm enough to make her pers
pire. Despite the temperature, she lit a fire so the smoke would disperse the mosquitoes. The fire was still burning when she ran off, but it’s out now. We can see that the wood in the middle has burned down and a dusting of ash has blown in an easterly direction over the lingonberry twigs. There isn’t a breath of air at the moment, but it was blowing in an easterly direction this afternoon. Hence it must be several hours since she disappeared. Was she alone?”
“Er . . . I think she was. Or rather, I’m sure she was.”
“How so?”
“If there had been someone with her, she would have been wearing her headscarf, as befitting the respectable girl she was.”
“That’s possible. At any rate, she was sitting here eating a piece of bread when something happened. The milk canister was tipped over and she dropped the bread on the moss.”
“Dropped . . . But there’s no bread here, is there?”
The pastor pointed to the snag of a pine tree standing right next to us.
“Do you see what’s on the branch? Thin white flakes. It’s milk that’s dried. Some little birds must have been hopping around in the milk and kept returning to the branch. Something edible, probably a piece of bread, must have ended up in the spilled milk.”
“Of course!” I exclaimed, impressed.
“So the girl rushes away. You can see footprints in the moss. Strides the length of someone who’s running.”
Only now did I notice the scarcely visible indentations he was indicating.
“But there are . . . there are bigger tracks as well?”
“Good, Jussi. From someone larger than her. And heavier. You can see the prints are pressed deeper.”
Heikki, who had been standing there listening to us, suddenly let out a groan. Before the pastor could stop him he ran over to the trunk of a pine tree and pointed. There was evidence of fresh damage to the bark. Heikki ran his fingers over the deep gouges.
“Karhu!” he said, a look of horror on his face.
