Troll: A Love Story (6 page)

ANGEL

This biologist I’m consulting over the phone has swallowed my story, that I’m a journalist working on a story about trained animals. He supposes my topic touches on circus ethics—a brilliant notion I’d never have hit on as a cover myself—and he’s already been through elephants, bears, and sea-lions.

“You often see trained lions and tigers,” I say, leading him on. “What about the indigenous animals of Finland? Do you consider one could systematically train a bear, for instance, or even . . . a troll?” I ask lightly, in passing.

The Prof. delivers a long lecture, from which I gather chiefly that wolves, for instance, are extremely trainable, because they’re pack animals, a subject on which the cursed Grzimek, whose name the old fart spells out for me with excruciating care, letter by letter, has carried out extensive research. Wolves obey the individual who has authority, even if it’s a man. Feline animals, such as lions and tigers, are different: cats are usually extremely independent and won’t do anything without immediate reward. The bottom line is that everything depends on the animals’ social norms.

“Social norms?” My tone of voice is emphatically enquiring, like a second-rate actor’s.

“Well, we do have very little information on the subject of trolls. One theory suggests that they possibly live in a sort of
micro-troop, like a pride of lions, and in such troops a certain hierarchical behavior pattern operates. On the other hand, the tiger, for example, is a territorial animal: it hunts alone and is intolerant of other individuals in its territory. There remains, of course, a possibility, too, that trolls maintain an alpha-male order, like that of chimpanzees, making for a comparatively disorganized-seeming troop dominated by a large male. This means the alpha has primary sexual rights over the troop’s females, and so on. At present, the entire basis for this hypothesis rests on the speculation that the convergence of the trolls’ evolution with that of the primates may have operated on other dimensions besides outward appearance . . .”

I’m not much the wiser, but then the old boy’s voice seems to perk up.

“But the best results are always achieved when the animal’s trained at the cub stage. Rewards and punishments in suitable proportions . . . I remember talk of a trained troll that was sometimes seen in the market, a little before the war, obviously the same one that’s now stuffed in the Tampere Biological Museum . . .”

I shiver as I remember the faded animal in the glass display-cabinet and its total degradation. A trained troll.

“Large predators are currently an unusually popular subject, in the wake of the happenings in Joensuu and Kuopio . . .”

Joensuu and Kuopio? I ask myself, without knowing what he’s talking about.

“Which journal are you writing for?” he asks, but I’m already putting the phone down.

“WILD BEASTS HAUNT OUR CITIES,”

Finnish Evening News
(November 30, 1999)

The people of Kuopio and Joensuu have become anxious about large predators being seen near the towns, and they are not alone. In recent weeks there have even been sightings outside certain central and southern Finnish towns. Following many sightings of bears and wolves, urban areas are now being approached by trolls.

Trolls are rarely spotted in Finland, but recently, over a short period, half-a-dozen very reliable sightings have occurred near the eastern border, some very close to houses.

The troll, usually an extremely shy animal, has been extending its habitat from the uninhabited forests and fields and moving closer to towns. Some attribute this to food shortages. People living near large forests have been advised to keep their garbage cans tightly closed and their small pets indoors. Trolls rarely attack human beings, so there is no cause for alarm; and, being night creatures, they are likely to be encountered only very late at night or in the early hours of the morning.

Pets are disturbed

“My Alsatian started a terrible howling,” says Risto Huttula of Kuopio. “I’ve never heard it howl before. I went out into
the yard and tried to calm the dog down, but it wouldn’t be calmed.” Then Huttula noticed two coal-black, two-legged creatures running along the edge of a field. Obviously the dog had caught the scent on the wind before the creatures were visible. Foresters went to investigate the traces, but on the almost snowless ground they found no hard evidence. Were the figures trolls that had postponed their hibernation or clandestine intruders in the forest?

The neighbor’s Bernese mountain dog had whined and padded restlessly back and forth throughout the previous night. In the morning the dog refused to follow the tracks, rejecting all incentives.

Pulliainen’s yes to “urban animals”

Biologist Professor Erkki Pulliainen considers the situation transitory and no cause for alarm.

“The situation does occur sporadically with the first snows and the onset of the hibernation season for bears and trolls. The only disturbances for city-dwellers at such times,” Pulliainen emphasizes, “are likely to be from wolves, wolverines, and lynxes, and these haunt the neighboring terrain only in search of food, with no intention of deliberately intruding on people.” The food-shortage theory is not accepted by Pulliainen personally.

“On the contrary, the reason for the animals’ resort to city outskirts is clearly that certain small parasitical animals are likely to be plentiful in precisely these areas. And the lynx, for example, has shown itself over the course of time to be, as a species, highly culturally adaptable.” Lynxes have long been present on the outskirts of Helsinki, Turku, and Tampere, Pulliainen reports, where plentiful food is available, such as
hares and white-tailed reindeer, and the terrain is suitable: marshland coppices, dense mixed woodland, and coniferous forest.

The locals are in fear

Riikka Vesaisto, a Joensuu farmer’s wife, totally disagrees with Professor Pulliainen. In her view, large wild beasts are a concrete threat, not only to her sheep but to her family.

“Two weeks ago my son was off to school—he’s in the first grade—and he said he’d seen an ‘old black man’ staring at him from behind a fir tree. The boy ran for it and managed to get to the school playground without being hurt. Together we checked an animal book and found out what he’d seen: it was a troll. How long will it have to be before we wake up and realize a full-grown troll is a wild beast two meters tall and that a little child’s just a snack for it?”

Riikka Vesaisto’s husband, Antti, shares her view.

“They ought to bring the bounty money back. Of course they’re all going on about conservation now, but I’d like to see that tree hugger’s face if some wolf or bugaboo snapped up
his
brat on the way to school.”

ANGEL

Monday. Tomorrow’s Monday.

He could have been calling others. I’ve no idea how much I can hope for any more. Myself, I daren’t make a move; but call he damn well did.

Pessi’s learned to be wary of newspapers. I’ve never actually hit him, only gestured that I’d slap him, but he clearly knows that a rolled-up newspaper symbolizes the authority of the alpha. Now that he’s quietly begun to grasp that I don’t like trollshit under the doormat, he’s been resorting to the box in the corner of the bathroom, where I’ve been putting cut-up flyers and other junk mail. I’ve got to change the contents every day, otherwise he won’t use it again. I tried scented cat litter, but that, for some reason, he absolutely detests.

As carrots to the rolled-up newspaper I’ve been manipulating Pessi with gerbils and white mice. I’ve been giving him snacks like these when he’s been a well-behaved little trollboy—and gerbils are not nearly as expensive or poo-generating as guinea pigs or hamsters.

Though he eats now and then, and can even be bothered to play at hunting the animals, he’s not in good health. I’ve wondered whether those budding juvenile offenders hurt him in some way.
Has he got fractures somewhere or even internal bleeding? But I’d have noticed something in the way he moves if he had muscle or leg pains. Yet he’s languid and subdued most of the time, like a fluttering candle flame.

When he does make one of his rare moves, he’s supple, like quicksilver. He seems to be reversing gravity. His total muscular capacity is enormous, considering his size. He moves about like oil, as if made of silk.

His eyes are full of nocturnal wildfire.

PART II
There Flared a Wondrous Glow of Light

MARTES

“Calvin Klein?” I ask and lean towards Mikael, my nose almost touching his hair. His pale cheeks flush. He’s not been sleeping.

“What?”

“Aftershave. You’ve changed your brand.”

Mikael smells a little of Klein One—spruce, lemon, spices—and something inside me stirs. But when he gives me that puppy-dog look, searching my eyes for something that’s not there, he gets on my nerves. I thought I’d made it clear after those two nights out drinking that he was barking up the wrong tree. But now I need Mikael, and so I bend toward him and sniff as softly as a horse sensing a shy filly. He’s got to remember how much he wants to please me.

“Yes, it’s a brand new thing—they were handing out samples at Stockmann’s. Whatever. A test run I believe—not sure whether it’ll ever come on to the market properly . . .”

He’s so on edge it makes me sick.

“Hey, I didn’t ask you here to find out what aftershave you’re using. I’ve got a job for you.”

I make it short. It’s a jeans designer. We’re competing against three other advertising agencies for a new campaign. The name of their line is Stalker, and they of course want to be an instant fashion icon. It’s got to brand itself into the consciousness of the
fashionistas in one single lightning flash. The firm’s looking for something about as original and urgent as Diesel and yet socking the unconscious as subliminally as the old MicMac campaigns. But dead new. Of course.

“You’ve always been one of our best photographers. And recently you’ve shown what you can do with computerized graphics. Find us an idea.”

“Idea?”

“Naturally I and a couple of other art directors and copy-writers are putting our noses to the grindstone, and smoke’s rising from our cerebral lobes. But right now we need every single right and left hemisphere going. Okay, among other things, ‘Stalker’ is about stalking celebrities, but we’re not after any stupid Madonna theme; we want a brand-new perspective. We want you to come up with some image, something fucking lurid. Along the lines of pouring gasoline over the Stalkers in the Jan Palach square in Prague, setting light to them and making the smoke form a slogan like ‘C’mon, baby, light my fire’—you know the sort of thing. No limit.”

ANGEL

“I want something strong,” Martes says, and I can’t take my eyes off his hands: they’re clenching sexily, as if grasping two iron bars. “Something never seen before. Violent.”

When I look up he’s noticed I’ve been staring at his hands, and his eyes narrow as he smiles.

“You’ve got the sickest imagination I’ve ever come across. Let loose. Free your mind and send it flying.”

MARTES

Mikael nods slowly, and I grab a large gym bag out of the corner.

“Eight pairs of Stalkers here for you, all possible sizes, and you can have more if you need them. There’s loads of time. A couple of months. The deadline’s the end of March. And if the idea sees the light of day, it’ll mean loads of cash for you. We’re talking thousands.”

And if the idea sees the light of day, and if we get the campaign, it’ll mean at least a quarter of a million euros for us. But that I don’t say. I toss the bag to Mikael, he almost collapses under its weight, but with a couple of steps backward he remains standing. “Our rock and standby. Suppose you know your nickname here?”

Mikael’s hanging on to the bag with both hands. He looks up inquiringly.

I lower my voice almost to a whisper: “Michelangelo.”

ANGEL

Michelangelo.

I wasn’t Michelangelo when we first met, I was Studio Hartikainen.

And I still am Studio Hartikainen, the advertising photographer, graphic designer and computer artist. And he’s Martti, Martes, the hardest art director in the city’s toughest advertising office.

I remember.

I come into the office and introduce myself. I show my portfolio and worm my way into the talk about diffusers and image data banks. Immediately an easy, streamlined trust springs up between Martes and me.

Trust, yes, and of course mutual admiration: the way a competent professional can admire another whose field is close enough for him to have the requisite understanding for admiration but distant enough to eliminate competition for the same clients.

I remember, Martes.

I remember how, during a presentation, our eyes met behind our shared client’s back and you made a face in just the way we both understand, and I nearly burst out laughing.

I remember that once, planning a photo shoot together, it was breathtaking how we saw totally eye to eye, how one of us had only to say half a word and the other’s face lit up, and he said, “Yes!—
I was just about to say that myself!” And we high five’d each other, and I remember your face and your look and your denim shirt’s top button undone.