The Beggar and the Hare (19 page)

You’re a good magician and you get paid for your work.

You and the rabbit, you make a good couple.

Vatanescu put the coins into cups. There were now ten full cups, and two full of notes.

Over three hundred.

I can get football boots for my son.

Vatanescu and Sanna Pommakka left the buffet car and moved to the children’s play area, where the little people were whizzing down a slide, making Lego, colouring pictures, scribbling, and hugging one another. And once again, as she did when delivering sofas to families with children, Sanna Pommakka felt at once moved and irritated. Not by the children, but by their parents. All kinds of emotionally crippled amateurs had spouses, former or present, and the sperm had fertilised the ovum without anyone asking questions. These people didn’t know how to appreciate what they had, and instead of looking at their children they flicked through women’s magazines with bored expressions, snapped at their spouses, stared out of the train window and thought about the life they should have chosen in
place of their present one. Sanna Pommakka wondered the same thing as she was pulling the rabbit out of her top hat.

When the children noticed the magician, the yellow Repa-Rent helmet and the rabbit jumping out of the hat, popularity was assured. It was limitless. The show was a sell-out.

‘You’re good with children,’ Sanna said to Vatanescu.

Yes. Why wouldn’t I be? It’s easy.

The children gathered at the feet of the trio. This meant that their parents’ wallets and purses were open; all one had to do was help oneself. The children climbed onto Vatanescu’s lap; they wanted to try his helmet on and play with the tools that still hung from the belt round his waist.

Keep them.

You have more use for them.

The children asked if Vatanescu had met Tractor Tom, and asked what kind of houses he built and if he was able to mend the plumbing without swearing. Because their dads weren’t. Vatanescu didn’t understand what the children were saying, but he got the meaning and the tone all the same. He sang them a song he had learned from his grandma Klara and the children put their own words to it. Sanna joined in too.

In the course of the evening Vatanescu noticed that the children’s parents took just as many photographs with their mobile phones of him as they did of the rabbit. One or two passengers came to ask him for his autograph.

‘It’s really you,’ they said.

Who or what do you think I am? Who do they think I am?

‘I don’t know,’ Sanna said, and indeed she didn’t. During all the time that Vatanescu had been growing
into a media personality, Sanna had done nothing but practise her magic.

You think I’m someone else.

Someone important.

I’m not.

I’m Vatanescu, from Romania.

A
t midnight the working day was over and the passengers immersed themselves in sleep, their books or the music and movies on their laptops. Vatanescu and Sanna Pommakka divided the money and Vatanescu went off to ask the ticket collector for two sleeping compartments. After checking the reservations on his reading device, the ticket collector said there was only one sleeping compartment left.

‘But it has three berths.’

I’m used to roughing it. I can sleep anywhere, as long as it’s safe.

The rabbit and I will just sit up in an ordinary seat.

Sanna Pommakka told him not to indulge in selfpity or play the martyr. She was in the process of eliminating that sort of behaviour from her own life and from the layers of her mind, and she would do the same for the man from Repa-Rent. She ordered him into the compartment. Then she used the magic money to pay for tickets and sleeping berths all the way to the terminus. They still had eight hours to sleep before they reached Helsinki.

‘We’re partners.’

Partners?

‘Business partners.’

Well, if you say so, then at least…

You take the lower berth.

Vatanescu kicked off his overalls and hoped that the smell of his sweaty feet wouldn’t carry excessively to Sanna Pommakka’s nostrils. The rabbit wrinkled its nose and curled up on Vatanescu’s pillow, under the night-light.

How long is it since I slept with a woman?

In the same room?

Sanna Pommakka removed her tailcoat, her bow tie and all her magician’s accoutrements, and hoped that the odour of her underarm sweat would not carry excessively to Vatanescu’s nostrils. She reckoned that she had earned almost the same amount as she had been promised for the opening show at the mall, a fat wad of banknotes of various colours. She would be able to pay the next month’s rent and also the arrears. She was an artiste who had done her work and was sharing her sleeping compartment with a good man. The first man in her life with whom she felt at ease. With whom she didn’t have to pretend, didn’t have to make herself more or less than what she was. What was more, from a professional point of view the Rabbit-Vatanescu-Pommakka trio worked brilliantly, and one way or the other they would have to make it permanent.

‘Perhaps we ought to perform in the street,’ she said. ‘Or on the trams, maybe. Gradually make a name for ourselves, like Birds of Lapinlahti?’

Birds of Lapinlahti?

‘An intelligent rabbit, an intelligent woman and an assistant dressed like a building worker. A suitably strange combination.’

Do you have any children, Sanna Pommakka?

‘No.’

I have a son, Miklos.

‘It would be nice to meet him,’ Sanna let out.

I’d like to meet him, too.

I don’t know when that will be possible. I don’t know anything about tomorrow.

Miklos has no reason to thank me for bringing him into the world if I’m not capable of giving him something.

An education. A future. Football boots.

‘I wish there was someone I could have those sorts of thoughts about,’ Sanna said in her own language, so that Vatanescu didn’t hear it or understand it.

Are you asleep already?

Magician.

Her pyjamas in her arms, Sanna Pommakka looked at her reflection in the glass. This body, her private property, was no good; it excited no desire. Her breasts really didn’t defy the force of gravity or form the kind of regular half-moons that would make a teenage lad lock himself in the train toilet in order to keep his hopes up on a paper towel. An appendix scar on her stomach, solid thighs that enabled the rest of her to stay upright. Her mind was more tricky: if it faltered, one day it would break. Into it came tomorrow, Helsinki’s icy railway station, an unknown future, an east wind. Again to try alone, to foist herself on the magic market, to test her value. Trying to cope was all this life was about. The visit to the employment agency, the filling-in of the start-up application. The VAT accounts.

‘I never want to spend another day alone.’

T
he ticket inspectors ordered the ticketless people smuggler off the train at Kisahalli, the Olympic
Sports Stadium. Yegor walked under Paavo Nurmi’s statue, looked at the stadium tower and the people passing by and the morning drunks staggering out of the local cells. The laptop’s screen showed a map of Finland and a blinking red dot that indicated Vatanescu’s movements. At present the dot was somewhere on the outskirts of Hämeenlinna. In the latest pictures that had been added to the Web page, a woman named Sanna Pommakka was pulling a rabbit out of a hat held by Vatanescu.

Vatanescu’s red dot was blinking somewhere around Kerava when Yegor’s laptop battery ran out. He gave the laptop to a gentleman who had just been let out of the cells in a genial mood on account of his still being plastered. Then he tossed a coin to determine whether the beggar’s journey had ended at Pasila or at Helsinki Central Station.

W
hat are you doing?

Sanna.

Are you going to lie under the same blanket with me?

Pommakka.

We can’t.

Yet you are.

Why shouldn’t we? What am I pretending to be? I’m not a saint; I’m a human being.

I’m Vatanescu.

Yes, I’m lonely too.

Of course we can.

Come on.

You’re…

…very…

…warm.

T
he rabbit hopped out from under the blanket of the lower berth onto Vatanescu’s chest to be stroked. Sanna Pommakka snored beside him, and our hero was not embarrassed or ashamed in the slightest. Better to be two than on one’s own. And three were even better. There weren’t many Romanian beggars who had done it with a magician on a Finnish night train.