And I knew what I was going to do with the money.
VANNA/VERA
February 2017
There are some customs in the country that I’d forgotten. Of course people who live around Neulapää are going to drop in to say hello to the new “man and lady of the house.”
Having guests is always difficult and uncomfortable. I have to pull myself together, put on the engagement ring Jare’s mother left—or rather lent—to me, put an eloi’s lilt in my voice, bustle around in the kitchen with herbal tea and quiche or soda bread sweetened with beet sugar. I rarely make sweet rolls or other yeast breads because using a yeast ration card too often can raise suspicions that you’re keeping a still.
Yet another knock at the door—a local farmer who used to buy Aulikki’s vegetables, come to pay his respects. Jare asks him into the living room and shoos me into the kitchen. Naturally there are no baked goods in the house, so I dig some cinnamon rolls and slices of apple pie out of the freezer and warm them up in a covered skillet. The different pastries thaw at different rates, of course, and the burners on the old stove are hard to regulate. When I bring my offering to the table, the slices of pie are nearly charred on the bottom and I’m not sure if the rolls are even warmed through.
I apologize to Jare and the guest for the poor offering. The farmer has decided to be broad-minded. “You’ll learn as you get older. The sleigh teaches the filly, you know, that’s what the old folks say. A house ought to smell like fresh-baked rolls is what I say.” He turns the cinnamon roll over in his hands. “Have you folks heard that down south some people are getting television from Estonia? Those stations aren’t allowed, but I suppose you can’t help it if you’re flipping through the channels and you happen to come across it.”
There are exactly two Finnish television channels. There is no way to accidentally stumble on any others.
“They’re going to hell in a handbasket,” Jare chimes in. “Of course, in the Food Bureau, we are well aware of the downward trend in the decadent democracies even without watching their television programs. Grocery counters heaped with red meat, refined sugar everywhere, pastries and candies dripping with fat. It’s a wonder the whole country hasn’t gone extinct.”
The farmer wolfs down his cinnamon roll and I hear a soft crunch. It’s still frozen in the middle. He gives the roll a pained look.
“You know, I just thought of something . . . they have those microwave ovens there. A demonic device is what that is.”
“I guess they just don’t care if the entire population’s brains rot,” Jare says.
“There’s no need for the little lady to apologize,” the farmer says, taking another bite of the frozen roll. “Better a frozen roll than a radioactive one.”
The constant visits are exhausting. I serve blackcurrant leaf tea or juice, hand out pitiful offerings on tiny plates. I stand at the table behind Jare’s chair until everyone else has been served. Then I have permission to sit down.
If the guests are a couple, I converse only with the eloi. This bores me to death. We talk about the weather, the local gossip, and the newest clothes and makeup, and it isn’t seemly to listen or pay any attention to what the mascos are talking about. If it’s evening and there’s a show for elois on television, we watch it: ten-minute romantic minidramas, homemaking shows, and the especially popular wedding montages.
Luckily the visits seem to be coming to an end. No one has made a repeat visit.
The most annoying thing about playing house is the way complete strangers talk about our newlywed status. They congratulate me. “You’ve got yourself a fine husband there, Mrs. Valkinen.” “You have lucked out in the mating market, little lady.” “Mrs. Valkinen, do you have any idea what a polite, well-mannered fellow this man is?”
I nod and smile and curtsy and look up at Jare adoringly and cling to his arm as we show our visitors out, and Jare is almost too convincing in this theater of devotion, stroking my hair and patting me on the butt with a proprietary air.
“It’s such a good thing that no deserving person has to be alone anymore,” one of the older mascos says as he gazes upon our youthful happiness. He’s between marriages at the moment, but from his talk it seems a third marriage is not far off. A farmer not yet sixty and he’s already sent two wives into state guardianship. One was disobedient, the other lazy. “I’ll pay child support, of course. I’m an honorable man,” he says. “I’ve got two little elois and one masco in diapers, and once the boy’s grown it may be that I’ll take him on to keep the farm going. But that’s not for some time yet. Right now I need some fresh meat.”
Before the door closed behind him I’d already gone to get a fix.
Will the Gaians never come? I liked it better when Jare and I saw each other only now and then, like a dating couple. The air at Neulapää feels thick and heavy. The two of us circle each other like nervous cats.
“OUR LAND”
Finland’s National Anthem
Lyrics by Johan Ludvig Runeberg
Our land is poor, and so shall be,
to those who seek for gold.
Those who are strangers would cast it aside,
but in our precious land we will abide,
its wildlands, islands, and its shore
golden forevermore.
The feeling is beyond compare,
all here is as it should be,
no matter what fortune may to us bring
this is our land, our fatherland, we sing.
In all the world no greater grace,
and no more precious place.
Were we e’en up to glory led,
brought to the clouds of gold,
where never falls a single tear,
and joy untold unfolds from year to year,
yet to our land however poor
our hearts would yearn once more.
VANNA/VERA
March 2017
The shed smells like fresh sawdust. Jare and I have spent all winter there putting together the wooden components for the greenhouses. We’ve also scouted the woods for a good place to put the secret greenhouses. There’s no snow on the ground. The carbon output from Finland’s eusistocracy is unusually small, but the effects of the warming of the global climate caused by the loose morals of the hedonistic countries can be seen and felt here, too. Sometimes the winters are unusually long and cold and snowy because of the accelerated melting of the arctic ice, but now we’re having another one of those winters when it’s really only rained and the temperature has started to hold at springlike levels quite early.
Jare became a believer just in time for our wedding. He let it be known at work that he’d experienced Gaian enlightenment, and he was seen publicly with members of the sect. It didn’t matter much as long as it didn’t affect his work—at most it caused a few raised eyebrows and a twirl of a finger at the temple when he wasn’t looking.
The Gaians arrive in two large old trucks. When they drive up and get out of the trucks the only one I recognize is the dark and dramatic-looking Mirko. The other two are strangers to me. Valtteri, who jumps down from the driver’s seat, is the absolute physical opposite of Mirko: he’s short, slightly chubby, with sandy-blond hair and a persistent, good-natured smile. I don’t know if it occurs to me because of his soft looks, but there might be a bit of minus man in him. But I don’t doubt his intelligence for a moment. His gaze is clear and alert.
The slight figure getting out of the passenger side of the truck is a surprise to me. At first glance I think that it’s an almost stunted-looking minus man, but then I notice barely perceptible breasts under the heavy sweater.
A morlock.
The first one I’ve ever met.
She might be about forty. It’s hard to tell her age, because I don’t know what to make of her appearance. In the few years I’ve spent in Tampere I’ve learned to
recognize the signs of aging in an eloi, things that makeup can’t hide—the deepening wrinkles around the eyes and brow and the corners of the mouth, the loosening neck, the prominent veins on the backs of the hands. No one is quicker to notice an eloi’s mating marketability than another eloi. It’s become a learned reflex. But this person is impossible to measure on the eloi scale. She’s suntanned, with visible freckles. She’s not wearing any makeup to cover them. But her skin looks healthier and fresher than mine. And even more amazingly, she’s obviously not wearing a corset under her clothing.
As if to stand out even more starkly, she’s had her dark hair cut short—or perhaps even cut it herself, from the look of it. It just touches the tops of her ears. The Gaian mascos have longer hair than she does. She’s also dressed like a masco, in blue pants made of thick fabric and a loose sweater. Her relaxed, unrestricted way of moving in her long pants and flat shoes is almost obscene. She walks right up to Jare and offers him her hand. “Hi. I’m Terhi.”
She approaches him without any shyness, as if there were no question that she has a right to. And her name is Terhi! With an R in it! That’s a letter that’s always been reserved for mascos, though I’ve never known why.
We were once Mira and Vera, Manna and I, a long time ago, in a country where there was nothing strange about those names.
Terhi hardly glances at me, and I understand why. I walk over to her with the same long, swaggering strides that she’s just displayed and put out my hand, just like she did, briskly, unabashed, looking her in the eye.
Defiant.
“I’m Vera, but you should use my eloi name, Vanna, just to be safe. I’m the owner of Neulapää.”
Terhi’s eyebrows shoot up. She looks at the mascos in surprise. Jare and Mirko grin at each other. Terhi looks at me again, a hint of a smile on her lips, and gives me a firm, muscular handshake.
“All right, Vanna. You really don’t look like a morlock, but I believe you. Nice to meet you.”
As we unload the trucks I hear Terhi and Valtteri talking. Valtteri says, “A morlock in an eloi phenotype body. It’s a bit like the bitter almonds that sometimes sprout on long-domesticated almond trees . . .” Mirko has obviously prepared Valtteri for my peculiarity, but they decided to let Terhi have a little surprise. I’m pleased to learn that Gaians have a sense of humor.
There’s a carefully constructed hiding place in the covered beds of both trucks that is completely unnoticeable at a glance—the only way to detect it is by comparing the inner and outer measurements of the cargo space. The hiding spaces are crammed with flats full of little seedlings and a few mature plants trimmed short. There are little packages of seeds in cloth sacks, dozens of varieties. Just the names written on the packages start me trembling and make my mouth water. Inferno. Tears of Fire. Thai Dragon. Fatalii. Malagueta. Naga Morich. Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. Deep Impact. Hell’s Angel. Harrisburg. The Gaians tell us that some of them are varieties they’ve crossed and bred and named themselves.
They want to see the proposed site for the secret greenhouses before they’ve even unpacked. We take them into the woods a good kilometer from the house. We’ve already brought the wooden pieces for the frames, well concealed by the thick spruce canopy. Mirko gives his approval and we assemble them.
They won’t let us pour any foundation “on the skin of the forest,” as they put it. We dig holes for strong corner posts, drive them in as deep as we can, and tamp them firmly in place. Then we screw the main ribs to them with suspension brackets. To those we attach clever rope-and-dowel constructions that the Gaians brought with them to form a horizontal framework. The floors are made from loose squares of board that Jare and I made using instructions they sent to us. The whole thing fits together like a puzzle that can be quickly assembled and disassembled. The walls and roofs are covered in strong plastic from a large roll that Jare bought. We attach it to the frames with a nail gun.
We install battery-powered lights to keep the spaces warm as well as to provide extra light. The lights are necessary, since this is actually a ridiculous place for a greenhouse, dense and shady. But that’s the point. This way it will be hard to notice them even from the air. You could walk past them just a few meters away and have no idea they were there. Valtteri gets some blinds made of black plastic from the truck and puts them up inside the frames. As long as there are dark nights and dim evenings the artificial lights will have to be hidden. He says that later in the summer, when it’s light nearly round the clock, the blinds can be taken down and the lights dimmed, left on just bright enough to make up for the shade of the trees.
We shovel soil and peat into the planting beds. We’ve brought a wheelbarrow heaped with dirt from Neulapää’s fallow fields and from the shores of the swamp, which is rich with humus.
Valtteri says that it’s the new moon—apparently the best time to plant. I don’t know what they base that belief on, maybe some Gaian theory of the reaction of liquids to the moon’s gravitational pull. There’s something endearing about the Gaians. Valtteri knows everything about his subject of expertise and is very matter-of-fact about it, and in the next sentence he might say something about “the wisdom of the soil” or “the lower powers,” and I can’t help smiling to myself.
We sow several kinds of seed in some of the beds and in others we gently, carefully transplant the seedlings they’ve brought.
I’m starting to feel hungry, but the Gaians don’t want to take a break or eat anything until this most important task is finished.
I ask where they got the chili seed. Valtteri says they used to have many correspondents abroad who sent them different kinds of seeds hidden in the spines of books or other innocent-looking packages. But nowadays they produce all the seed themselves because all the mail from hedonistic countries is more and more closely inspected.
The entire time that we’re planting the seeds and seedlings, Mirko, Valtteri, and Terhi chant the Transcendental Capsaicinophilic Society’s “Litany Against Pain.” This prayer, or spell, or whatever it is, is something I’ve read before, in English, on the side of a bottle of chili sauce, and I already know it by heart:
Teach me, chile, and I shall Learn.
Take me, chile, and I shall Escape.
Focus my eyes, chile, and I shall See.
Consume more chiles.
I feel no pain, for the chile is my teacher.
I feel no pain, for the chile takes me beyond myself.
I feel no pain, for the chile gives me sight.
Ugly old, ugly old morlock hag,
Stuck her head in a burlap bag,
Tried to screw a masco, took him for a stroll,
The joke’s on her, ’cause there ain’t no hole!
One, two, three and you are it.
—Popular eloi hopscotch rhyme (circa 1980s)
VANNA/VERA
March 2017
Every dent and spot on the white enamel electric stove in the kitchen at Neulapää is familiar to me. Remodeling the kitchen wasn’t a high priority for Manna or Harri Nissilä. Manna wouldn’t care because guests rarely come into the kitchen, and Harri probably couldn’t have cared less what kind of facilities his wife had for her household chores.
Although Harri Nissilä did, in fact, show an interest in some of the kitchen items. There wasn’t a single piece of good china left in the cabinet. It had been Aulikki’s parents’ set, and no doubt valuable.
Oh, Harri. You must have been in a pinch for some quick cash again.
The Gaians don’t eat any animal products, not even the kind you don’t have to kill the animal for. Nothing made with milk, or eggs, or even honey. I make roasted root vegetables, mashed potatoes—with no butter or milk, so they taste like an old shoe—and thick green sauce from onions and dried peas. Jare and I can eat what we like, of course, but it would be too much trouble to cook two separate meals. Besides, the inexpensive diet hel
ps Jare save more for his travel fund.
I’m the only one here who went to eloi school, so the meals are always my job. The Gaians know how to cook vegetables, of course, but how the food tastes means nothing to them, so I’ve learned that it’s best to offer to do the cooking myself. The mascos and Terhi do help sometimes with peeling or chopping, and they help wash up. And there is a good side to kitchen duty—I can get a little fix every now and then without anyone noticing.
The mascos are coming in from washing off the day’s dirt in the sauna. Terhi sets the table. The door is closed against the chilly early spring, the evening growing dark outside the windows. It’s so idyllic and homey that it’s as if all of our calm, deliberate movements and relaxed conversation were a carefully polished performance for some hidden camera. Look, this group of the faithful is preparing a tasty vegetarian meal and talking about next summer’s bioaura-grown squash.
This makes Mirko’s question all the more jarring.
“So you’re a capso.”
It’s as if one of the actors reciting his lines had without warning asked another member of the cast if she’d like to go have a juice after the play—it shatters the carefully constructed illusion and violently thrusts the audience into reality, which is complicated, not preordained, and more dangerous than the safe and familiar script.
I’m speechless, which isn’t like me. I glare at Jare. He stares back, unflinching.
“Yes. Hi, my name is Vanna and I’m a capsaicin addict.”
“I told him, V,” Jare says calmly.
“Do you suspect me of stealing your stuff?” I ask as coldly as I can.
Valtteri’s smiling, pleasant expression parries my iciness. “No! It’s nothing like that. We want you to work with us.”
“We had a capso who was our taster and estimated the scoville levels,” Mirko says, “and I thought about asking him here when we start to harvest. I mentioned it to Jare, and he told us about you.”
The Core of the Sun Page 15
