White Hunger (Chance Encounter Series)

The rowlocks screech, like a bird.

Two skinny pikes lie at the bottom of the boat. They look more like snakes than fish. They no longer twitch; the cold has made them stiff. Their jaws gape, still trickling blood, which blends in slender swirls with the water around Mataleena’s feet.

Mataleena dips her hand in the cold lake, lets it glide lazily alongside the boat until the chill makes her joints ache. The wind tugs waves out of the water. The sky reflected there is patchy, fragmentary, as if smashed.

Juhani stretches out his sinewy neck like a crane, looking up. Mataleena takes in her father’s face, the thin bridge of his nose, and then the sky, an immense silver spoon over the lake.

‘They’re already heading south.’ Juhani sighs.

‘What are?’

‘The swans.’

‘I can’t see any birds.’

‘That’s because they’ve already gone.’

Juhani looks down, to Mataleena.

‘Anyway, we got some fish.’

Juhani pulls the boat up between some bushes. Marja has come to meet them, carrying Juho. She lowers the boy to the ground, and Mataleena takes her little brother by the hand. Marja looks into the boat.

‘What skinny fish.’

The trees on the opposite shore are reflected blackly in the water. Somewhere, a loon cries. Soon, it too will fly south.

They walk through the forest, along a narrow path. When Marja bends down to look for lingonberries, she hears a quick, angry hiss, as if a glowing firebrand were being dropped into water. She screams, leaps back. Landing, she loses her footing and falls among the shrubs. First, she sees blurry dots: the pale lingonberries, whipped by the frosty night. Then she looks in the direction of the hiss and, slowly, a black coil assumes the shape of a snake. Its eyes are the colour of frozen berries, its twin teeth like icicles. But the adder does not lash out, merely hissing instead.

Juhani steps forward, a rock in his raised hand. Then he strikes. The snake is pinned down by the rock.

With one breath, Marja releases the air that terror had locked in her stomach. Juhani reaches out and helps her get up.

‘Poor devil. Already dazed with cold. Couldn’t escape.’

Marja looks at the rock; it is as if she can see the snake through the grey stone.

‘Is it still alive?’

‘No,’ Juhani replies, bending down to pick up the rock.

‘Don’t, for God’s sake! Leave it be. I don’t want to see a dead snake.’

‘All right.’

A soft, sizzling sound, as the burning spill hits the water in the pail. The dim light succeeds in tracing Juhani’s shadow on the wall as he rises from his bed, lifts Marja’s dress, places his hands on her knees and pushes her legs apart. Marja takes hold of Juhani’s erect penis. She wants it, too, but her fear is even greater than her burning desire. What if she were to fall pregnant? Another mouth to feed, in this misery. Marja pushes Juhani back on to the mattress. He sighs, trying to hide his disappointment.

Marja moves her hand slowly back and forth, squeezing his member. A subdued groan escapes Juhani. She places her free hand between her legs. He comes first. Marja bites the collar of her nightdress, waves pass through her body. After, she feels empty again. She strokes Juhani’s limp member and thinks of the skinny pikes.

He should sacrifice the pawn. Otherwise, the white queen will drive the king into a corner and the bishop, a few moves away, will not have time to come to the rescue.

Lars Renqvist has to admit that the situation on the board looks hopeless. Teo taps the edge of the table irritably.

‘Just give up, why don’t you?’ he says to his brother. ‘Or let’s stop for now and carry on another time.’

‘All right. We’ll finish the game when we next meet,’ Lars replies.

Teo watches his brother’s face with amusement; Lars is still examining the pieces on the board. He notices that Lars has taken to wrinkling his forehead like his revered superior in the senate.

‘In my opinion, that senator of yours is mistaken,’ Teo says.

‘You don’t understand the essence of this nation.’ Lars sighs and gets up to ladle punch into small glasses. Passing one to Teo, he goes on: ‘We need to provide people with work. If you start pouring grain into their silos for nothing, you’ll end up with a bottomless pit. Our most pressing duty is to secure work for the unemployed.’

‘Work’s fruitless when there’s no food to be had. What’s the point?’

Lars is getting agitated. The senator arranged a loan without guarantees from Rothschild’s. He was only able to do so because of the country’s good name. Skittishness at the first hurdle must not be allowed to jeopardize that trust.

‘I can’t see why you don’t understand,’ Lars snaps.

At that moment, the salon doors open and Raakel comes in with a tea tray, which she places on the small table. Good timing. Lars takes a deep breath, calmed by his wife’s tender glance.

Raakel is wiser than her husband, Teo thinks. She would have solved the begging problem by now, if only someone had had the wit to ask her. She would have encouraged everyone to go back home, told them: just be patient and wait, there’ll be food once we find a big enough saucepan.

‘The idea was that businessmen were to arrange supplies of grain. That was the senator’s proposal and he was quite right. It’s not his fault the merchants didn’t get their act together.’ Lars sounds like a long-suffering father, explaining something to his child for the seventh time.

‘No one ordered that grain. After all, you might just as well urge a minister to give one of his fellow men the shirt off his back as ask a merchant to feed the poor,’ Teo says.

The mention of ministers silences Lars for a moment, and Teo supposes his brother still feels guilty that neither of them fulfilled Father’s wish and devoted himself to theology.

‘I know someone willing to give up his shirt for the whores of Punavuori,’ Raakel says.

‘I am a doctor of the poor, like the great Paracelsus,’ Teo says, spreading his arms.

‘The whores of Helsinki have nothing to worry about, with our Paracelsus looking after them.’

Lars bursts out laughing. Raakel slams the door shut triumphantly as she leaves. Teo, too, is amused as he pictures the victorious smile playing on Raakel’s lips because she has had the last word. What a good mother Raakel would make, if only she were not barren. Although the problem could be with Lars, Teo thinks; their family may be condemned to die out with the two of them.

Perhaps that is the crux of the matter. Hunger eliminates the weakest citizens, just as a gardener prunes bad branches off his apple tree.

After Teo has gone, Lars turns his attention back to the situation on the board. With the pawn he could buy himself time for a few more moves, but even to achieve a draw, Teo would need to make a cardinal mistake. The game is lost and Lars has the feeling that Teo interrupted it on purpose. Perhaps he just wanted Lars to have time to analyse the situation, to realize the hopelessness of his position.

In his mind’s eye, Lars sees the senator’s expression, painfully cruel, as the latter snarled: ‘Has the assistant
accountant anything else to say? I’ve dictated my message, go and deliver it!’

A month has gone by since then. Lars had stood at the senator’s door, clutching a telegram from Governor Alftan. He was, however, careful not to scrunch it up, as the senator has reserved for himself the right to crumple up telegrams and throw them across the room in a rage. In the north, the grain had run out, and Alftan wanted speedy emergency aid. Lars was a mere messenger, but the senator directed his anger at him. Perhaps the situation up there was truly terrible, Lars was bold enough to say. Bound to be, at least on the housekeeping front, the senator replied. And Lars had left the room to the accompaniment of cursing. At first he hated himself, his vacillating disposition, and then all the Alftans of this world, bureaucrats who displayed weakness in a tight spot, yielding at the first gust of wind and leaving a great man like the senator standing alone in the storm. Finally, he cursed the stupid farmers in the country’s interior – fat, lazy landowners who threw out their workers so they would have more for themselves, even though by rights they should have fed their poor, whether farmhands or beggars.

‘It’s had it for the autumn,’ Raakel says.

Lars starts and looks at his wife enquiringly. She is standing by the China rose, stroking the green leaves gently.

‘Not a single flower in over a week.’

‘Oh, really? In the past, it’s flowered beyond All Saints’ Day, isn’t that so?’

Lars forces himself to stand up, goes to his wife. The same melancholy strikes Raakel every time the China rose begins its hibernation and she is once again bereft of an object for her warmth and love. What if it doesn’t flower again? The same fear over winter, the same phrase every time, every year, when Lars comes back from work to find his wife caressing the leaves of the rose shrub.

‘There’ll be more in spring.’

‘Maybe, maybe. It’s just that these days everything beautiful seems to wither.’

A turbaned man rides across a desert, a veiled maiden in his arms; in the background, a palace is gilded by the rays of the setting sun.

Cecilia crouches naked over the basin and washes between her legs. Water runs through her dark pubic hair, straightening the tiny curls; drops fall from their tips into the bowl. She straightens up and places her hands on her knees as she squats and spreads her legs a little wider. The vulva is still open after coitus.

‘Looks stupid, your jaw hanging like that,’ Cecilia comments.

Teo passes the woman a linen cloth for her to dry herself with.

‘What’s your name? I mean your real name?’

‘Isn’t Cecilia good enough for you? It’s Elin. But Madame wanted to call me Cecilia. Or actually, Cecile.’

‘And you’re really Swedish, from Dalarna?’

‘Yes.’

An hour later, she can be Ulrika from Poland, if that is required. She shoves the basin under the table, showing Teo her bottom at the same time, lifting it rather higher than necessary. Her performance has the desired effect. Teo tries to turn his back on her but he is nailed to the spot, his eyes are glued to the bare buttocks, the pale skin that still shows pinkish indents from the mattress. She knows I have to go, Teo thinks. He becomes short of breath. Cecilia takes out a china chamber pot, next to the basin, and crouches over it in turn. The pissing woman arouses Teo, but he resolves not to let her win this game. At the very least, he will not reveal his defeat.

‘You’re a country girl, no getting away from it.’

‘This place is hardly St Petersburg. Your hometown’s a miserable village on a wretched little island.’

‘I didn’t mean to offend. I just meant, you are what you are.’

‘What’s that? A country girl? Why would I want to be that? Maybe that’s what you want; I don’t.’

Teo helps Cecilia into her corset. As he tightens the laces, he sees the woman’s bosom rising like warm bread.

Cecilia sits down before the dressing table and puts her hair back up into a bun. A bare branch scrapes against the window in the wind; grey clouds thicken slowly in the sky. The first drops hit the pane and trickle down.

‘You don’t really approve of what I do. That’s why you
want to make-believe I’m just an innocent country girl. Why do you think I’m here? If you love me, you love a whore. Are you ready for that?’

Teo does not reply. He focuses on two rivulets formed by raindrops, to see if they will catch up with each other before the window frame stops them dead.

Cecilia kisses Teo lightly on the cheek.

‘You pay good money to sleep with me, though you could pick me up, take me home and have me for free.’

‘I couldn’t be seen walking around in public with a woman from the demi-monde on my arm.’

‘But I’m just an innocent country girl from Dalarna,’ Cecilia replies, her tone suddenly icy and mocking.

‘Don’t. You know what people would say. A scandal like that would mean I couldn’t practise medicine in this town again.’

‘Do you think they don’t know already? Whoever they are.’

‘And I am not paying for this,’ Teo says.

Cecilia is now fully dressed. She sits down in the room’s only armchair and lifts one leg over the other with ease. It is appropriate for a gentleman to address his servants in that position, but in Teo’s view the pose does not befit a woman. And yet, it comes naturally to Cecilia. Teo shoves his hands into his pockets so he does not have to dangle them before the proud harlot like a lowly coachman. He rocks on his feet, as he remembers Matsson and other dockers doing sometimes.

‘Yes, you provide a service for Madame. You protect her reputation; she can present the medical inspector with clean girls. And in return, I sleep with you. That, darling Teo, is known as trade.’

‘I’m doing it for you. And because I care – about you and the others.’

‘I believe you. You’re doing all this for me. It’s just that you spend so little time in my world. And I none in yours.’

She’s too sharp for a country girl, Teo thinks. That cleverness takes away from her innocence. And he can never be sure when Elin is talking and when Cecilia, and whether that makes any difference.

‘Who are you, Elin or Cecilia?’

‘Here I’m always Cecilia.’

‘Should I go and look for Elin in Dalarna?’

‘Elin is dead.’

‘Can’t she be resurrected?’

‘Only you would have the potential, but you haven’t got what it takes. You’re no Jesus. You lack the courage.’

The room around Teo shrinks, becoming cramped. The smile on the Bedouin princess’s face is vacuous: imposed by the demands of her role. That is why the rider is not laughing either. His seriousness is not the consequence of lofty serenity. The artist has drawn himself, having grasped that the scene was frozen for all eternity and the palace at the edge of the desert a mere mirage.

‘The postman’s skull was smashed in with a single blow. His back was slashed open, like he was going to be skinned. There was blood streaming down Gypsy Hill. Janne Halli did it – that dark, handsome brute of a man. As bad as those Ostrobothnian thugs, almost. Not quite, though – you don’t find types like that anywhere else. And that’s where I come from,’ the squat old codger concludes his tale about the killing and robbery in Kuorevesi.

Teo finds it hard to determine the man’s age. His voice and speech belong to a youngster, but his face is as creased as that of an ancient retainer. Teo remembers reading about the murder of a postman in the
Dagbladet
; the crime had been a sensation in the whole of the Grand Duchy. The victim was, after all, a public servant.

‘Janne Halli’s sorrel trots on the ice of Kuorevesi…’
the Ostrobothnian begins to belt out.

The ditty is cut short when a large Pole slumps on to the bench next to the old man, throws one arm around him and starts singing something in his own language. The old man tries to shake off the Pole, who is so drunk he does not even notice the smaller man squirming.

‘Doktor, doktor, doktor,
’ babbles the Pole, staring vacantly at Teo.

Teo knows that the best way to get rid of the man is to supply him with drink. He beckons the landlady over and asks for some spirits. Hearing this, the old fellow calling himself an Ostrobothnian cranes his neck and turns his head anxiously this way and that, eyes seeking the landlady.

‘Nothing for you,’ she says tartly.

All the same, Teo asks her to serve him some too, and the old man stretches out his tankard, ecstatic.

Having got his spirits, the Pole notices a woman seated at a corner table, stands up and staggers over to her. The woman wastes no time in putting her arm round the man’s neck; she laughs loudly as he kneads her breasts. The man accompanying the woman is not bothered, merely smiling and leaning against the wall. He has a knife tucked into his boot. Teo stares at it for a moment too long.

The man glances at Teo, rubs his chin, tugs at the woman’s sleeve discreetly and nods in Teo’s direction. The woman starts staring at Teo fervidly, slowly licking her front teeth. The gesture is probably meant to be seductive. She frees herself from the Pole’s grasp.

The landlady pretends not to notice Teo’s plight. The old fellow is no use to him either; he murmurs something about Janne Halli to the remaining drop of spirits in his tankard.

When the woman stands up, the Pole flops forward on to the table.

At that moment, Matsson enters the tavern and crosses the small room in a couple of strides. The woman looks at Matsson, disappointed, then at her companion, who merely waves his hand, resigned. The woman starts waking up the Pole coquettishly.

‘Well,’ Matsson grunts, grinning wolf-like.

He shoves the old man to the end of the bench. The Ostrobothnian pushes back but then recognizes Matsson.
He lowers his head, hunching his narrow shoulders in the manner of a dog caught by his master up to no good. Matsson is the type of person whose gentle nature is not apparent.

‘I didn’t really have any business with you,’ Teo admits, almost ashamed.

After leaving Cecilia and the Alhambra, he had stood for a moment on the market square. A strong wind blew in from the sea. Teo watched the large, foam-crested waves hit the rocks of Katajanokka. It seemed to him that the miserable shacks of the district would not withstand the storm if he failed to stand by their side, spreading his arms to protect them and calming the merciless sea. He did not feel like going home, walking around the empty rooms and lusting after Cecilia, who seemed just as unobtainable after every visit.