Troll: A Love Story (9 page)

She began preparing food in the kitchen and, for a moment, forgot to check on the baby. Then the sound of her child crying came into the kitchen, but it stopped abruptly, and the mother carried on peeling potatoes. When the soup was on the stove, she went out to bring her child inside.

She nearly fainted when she saw the baby was gone. Instead, there was an almost newborn troll youngling, wrapped up in the baby carriage’s blanket. A neighbor had seen a dark shadow slinking out of the garden. The child was never found.

ANGEL

Oh, this amazing anthelmintic.

Just over a week’s flown by, and there haven’t even been any bad side-effects from the toxic reaction. He’s a whirlwind now—all energy and vigor—bright-eyed, bounding about here and there like quicksilver. He doesn’t seem to be suffering from being indoors—perhaps because he’s a natural cave-dweller.

Ever since Palomita fed him that cat food he’s consented to eat it occasionally, but only the same brand and not always that. Fortunately, he’s now consented to have quails’ eggs in his diet, provided I hide them around the apartment—in a large Iittala glass ashtray, or four of them making a nice little four-leaf clover-shape in a sofa cushion, or on the window sills behind the curtains. Sometimes, when I get carried away, I make little hiding places out of gloves, cardboard boxes, and coffee-pot tops and secrete them around the flat. He goes after the items, smells them, digs into them, and goes into unbounded rejoicing when he finds the treasure. And then he sits down to slurp the eggs, first cracking them neatly into two halves with his fingernails and then lapping up the contents without spilling a drop.

Of course he still has a need to hunt, but I live in hope that I won’t have to find any new pet shops. The ones I’ve been to already I can’t imagine visiting for months.

Actually, his coat’s not shiny yet—in fact it’s looking very matted and distempered. I do hope the reason isn’t the Program tablets or the anthelmintic. But I can really tell: he’s healthy and happy.

PALOMITA

Pentti’s in a hurry. Grabbing something from the bathroom, he kicks the clothes hamper over, and the lid rolls away with a clatter. I freeze, seeing the cover of the magazine Mikael gave me gleaming through gaps in the laundry.

But he doesn’t notice, he just rushes out through the door, and I sink down on the floor, my heart in my mouth. I’ll have to find a new place for the magazine. I don’t want to throw it away, for I’ve so little that’s my own. Every page is a letter, every picture a little colored doorway out of this apartment.

I have a long think. I’ve no cupboard or drawer of my own. Though Pentti never takes a towel or sheet out of the cupboard himself, he once pulled all the things down and ordered me to put them back more neatly. Then it comes back to me how, when I was playing hiding the stone with Seppa and Miranda once, no one found the stone, because I’d taken it outside and put it with the other stones. Pentti’s got hundreds of magazines piled on the floor of the closet, and he regularly buys new ones without ever looking at the old ones. If I hide mine among them, right at the bottom, he’ll surely never find it. And if he does, he may think he bought it himself. Pentti doesn’t always remember everything he’s done.

I go to the closet and start carefully lifting one of the stacks of magazines. I’m taking care to keep them in the same order. All
the covers have women on them. My hand falls on one that has a little yellow sticker on the cover, where Pentti’s written something. The cover also shows two dark-skinned women. Filipino women. They’re hugging each other like sisters, but they aren’t looking at each other; they’re looking out of the magazine and pouting their lips. Another sticker is poking out between the pages. I open there. There’s a lot of print, and the pictures are totally different from the usual ones, small, some black and white and a little unclear. They all show a woman. Beside the pictures, there are words I know, and Manila comes up often.

Three of the pictures have been encircled with blue ink. In one of them there’s me.

I recognize myself, though the photo’s poor, and I smile though it doesn’t amuse me at all. Enteng took the photo in the bar at Ermita soon after it had become clear to me I would not become a nurse.

I close the magazine and put it carefully back in its own place then stack the rest on top of mine.

ANGEL

I wake in the night.

He’s sitting on the sofa-back looking at me.

He’s a silhouette, black as night against the slightly lighter background, and I’m seared by a tense and excruciating awareness that I’m completely at his mercy.

His eyes. The eyes of a night creature.

He sees me clearly and keenly regardless of the dark, perceives every eye-blink, every swallow of my mouth, while all I can take in are his black, black outlines.

ECKE

Odd how there can be cities and cities. Cities within cities. The dogs’ city is built up of smells. For dogs, the limits of a city block are drawn by different aromas of piss, and each smell’s like a cloth fluttering in the wind or a block-long cartoon balloon: “Fido was here about a day and night ago.” Or it shouts out loud: “A YOUNGISH MALE HUMAN JUST WENT BY HERE CARRYING SOME SMOKED HAM.” The air’s thick with these signals, but the dog reads them as fluently and extemporaneously as a human processing the cacophony of photons from all the colors and shapes and shifts of light.

Then there are different people’s cities. There’s the city of a certain kind of woman, who judges a street by the kinds of shops there are, the classiness of the fashion shops, the perfumeries, jewelers, shoe stores. An alcoholic’s city, on the other hand, consists of pubs, sausage stands, liquor stores, alleys where you can piss without being picked up for indecent behavior, other drunks’ pads where you can scrounge the price of a drink or a bed for the night. And he doesn’t even notice the designer boutique because it’s got no function for him, just as the fashionable lady doesn’t see that sleazy dive—it doesn’t exist for her. She knows a certain street corner well because of a coffee shop she sometimes drops into, for a cappuccino and a fancy cake. The bus driver’s city is a mass of
routes, stops, traffic lights, hills, and of corners that look completely insignificant, except that their dark magic lies in their trickiness under certain winter conditions. There are terminuses every inch of which are familiar and meaningful because he’s loafed about there, cigarette in mouth, waiting for his time to go back. He even knows every squirrel in the trees, too, though the casual passerby sees nothing but a bit of broader road worn down by heavy wheels.

Our city’s unique, but with a slightly different nuance for each of us. In a little town like this, we don’t have our own streets, shops or galleries, but we do have our individual hidden topography, our own street corners. A man’s smoking a cigarette on a bridge, and we see him quite differently from everyone else: we take in a hand movement, a furtive glance, which, for others, are just visual bric-a-brac. We know holes and corners and lanes and gateways that have a significance entirely their own. There are parking lots and certain theaters, perfectly unremarkable to the rest of the community but charged with invisible magnetism for us. There are public lavatories you go to with more excited expectations than someone else brings to a blind date. And then there are dives like this Café Bongo, where every Tom, Dick, or Harriet can drop in for a drink, put two or three away, or get completely smashed and leave as if it were any other faceless corner bar, not noticing anything special. Our radar alone picks up the out-of-sight idiosyncrasies.

The atmosphere in the Café Bongo is perpetually crisscrossed by so many silent messages that, were they visible, the whole dive would be rainbow-colored spiders’ webs from floor to ceiling: red strands of lust, blue longings, waitings, and hopings, tingling yellow signals that it’s time to take the first step—permission’s been covertly asked and covertly granted—and, naturally, there has also to be some coal-black thread of contempt and disappointment and outright hatred.

There are the moments when certain figures set themselves up to be taken. As the evening advances, they leave their companions’ tables and put themselves on display. But only for those who see.

It’s as if most people had a layer of gauze over their senses. It doesn’t stop them seeing, so they think they’re noticing everything; but the gauze stops the operation of certain other senses. And they don’t even notice how it muffles those brushes, touchings, and scents.

Like that breeder-woman sitting at the bar, who gets a buzz from going to a gay bar and has no doubt heard somewhere that this is one. Her lurid get-up’s a joke, ludicrous. She’s the type who dons camouflage-green cargo pants, wraps a bandanna around her head, and paints herself with black lipstick, imagining all the lesbians in the joint’ll have the hots for her. Not so much imagining as secretly hoping.

Naturally, no one goes and sits with her. She’s been here before, and everyone gives her the ice-cold shoulder, yet still she turns up again and again. Someone might argue we’re zoo animals for her. But I’ve another theory. For her, we’re noble savages, a kind of gray area outside the respectable, minutely organized community, an untamed wilderness it takes a lot of guts to step into. But if you do dare, there’s a glorious smell of freedom floating around your trousers and giving the finger to society, making everyone an instant anarchist. Certainly, for her, coming here is like putting a temporary tattoo on your shoulder: there’s the thrill of deviance with none of the dull commitment—and she’ll never have to wonder whether she’s too weird to be seen out before dark.

BARTON WILLMAN,
THE BLACK AND THE INVISIBLE: A FANTASY ROMANCE
, 1985

It is said—it was a wise man from the far North who first told me—that, in certain parts of Scandinavia, there are cities within cities, just as there are circles within circles, existent yet invisible. And those cities are inhabited by creatures more terrible than imagination can create: man-shaped but man-devouring, as black and silent as the night they prowl in.

ANGEL

I tip the lettered building blocks out under the lights and go to the viewfinder to check the shadows are falling correctly. I arrange the bricks to form the name of my client firm, set them up nicely at impressive angles and begin to photograph a series, building up the enterprise’s name from the bricks, letter by letter. I start with the whole word, of course, and then reduce the bricks one by one, as then it’s easier for me to control the shadows, and I don’t have to shift well-placed pieces around. I take my Polaroid, and it looks good.

The work’s sheer routine, and so I’ve left the door between my studio and the apartment open. It’s eight o’clock at night, and I can hear that Pessi’s woken up and is eating his first meal.

I take all the photos, it’s peanuts, a bread-and-butter job not to be compared with Martes’s project. I switch the studio lights off, gather up the building blocks, and chuck them in their boxes. The firm’s absurd name has so many of the same letters in it I needed two boxes. Pity I can’t return them, but the cellophane wrapping’s all torn. Well, the client’ll have that little extra on his bill as well.

I go into my pad and open a beer, sit in an armchair, and turn the television on. Soon Pessi comes to pester me to do things. He plays just like a cat, trying to catch any old object, for as long as I can be bothered to wave it about.

The news begins, and I’m idly dangling his toy about during the first headlines—the exchange news, crisis in Pakistan, a Parola arms depot’s been broken into, quite a haul of firearms, doubtless stolen by the Russian mafia . . . But the next item makes me sit up and forget the little game with Pessi.

“Possibly because of the mildness of the early winter, the large animals that would normally be hibernating are still very active.

“In the late autumn there were many sightings of bears and trolls near the eastern border, but now the sightings have increased in the interior of Finland as well. In the rural commune of Jyväskylä, as many as three sightings of trolls are alleged to have taken place during the last week. That equals the whole count during the last forty years. These large animals habitually withdraw and hibernate during November, at the latest, but now traces of them have frequently been encountered at favored summer-cottage sites on the shores of Lake Päijänne and elsewhere. In addition, there have been almost certain sightings of trolls as far south as Heinola, Janakkala, and Pälkäne, in the neighborhood of Tampere.”

They interview a granny who’s seen strange things on the path to her shed, and then some Oulu game-researcher called Ilpo Kojola appears on the screen. He emphasizes that the troll is in principle unadapted to winter activity, but he adds that in mild winters bears, too, may withdraw to their dens much later than usual. He points out that if the trolls have not accumulated enough food reserves in the autumn they may now be hastily trying to supplement their supplies before constructing their dens and have thus moved from their normal hunting grounds and closer to towns.

An opposing view is presented by an environmentalist, who doubts the food-shortage story but reminds us that poisoning of the environment may cause exceptional behavior in animals.
“Fledglings and birds’ nests form a significant part of the troll’s diet in many areas, and, notoriously, all residues in the environment find their way into birds’ eggs. It’s conceivable that because of the fire at the Karasjoki transformer in Lapland, for example, trolls which have eaten birds’ eggs may have their systems saturated with tetrachloride dibenzoic-p-dioxin.”