Хьелль Аскильдсен - The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

Religion is an opium of the people. The Örlanders go to church. Irina Gyllen takes a pill. Opium is what all of us need. So in essence, perhaps, she’s a friend of the church. Here, where she lives very visibly among the people, she will stand out less if she occasionally goes to church on the major holidays or, like now, when the new priest is going to be closely examined right down to his buttonholes. She’s going to have a lot to do with him, for the pastor is usually the chairman of the Public Health Association. And the priest’s little daughter will be coming to have her regular check-ups with her mother. So why not, yes, of course, she’ll go. There will be a lot of people, and she likes that better than when the pews are nearly empty and everyone looks around at her to see if she sings along and reads the general confession and how she reacts to passages that they imagine will be painful to her.

“Yes, thank you,” she says. “I think if you have room in the boat, I’ll come.”

Her Russian accent thickens whenever she’s conflicted. That doesn’t escape them, but they look at her sunnily and say there’s always room for the doctor, and she’s heartily welcome to ride along.

HE WOKE UP AND, before the last vestiges of the nightmare faded, made up his mind. He’d take him out to the forest and finish the matter off. Fifteen years ago, before he’d shot him, he’d heard him say, “Don’t kill me, I beg you. This is my tree.” Those words had stayed with him all that time and would maybe stay with him forever.

Karima made breakfast for him. She had a black scarf on her head and eyes as still as a tree by night in spring. Absent-mindedly, the Tiger slowly drank water from his glass. He took his time setting the glass down on the table and then stared at it.

“Now the water’s inside me,” he said, “and you’re empty, you fucking empty glass!”

The Tiger spoke to everything around him in this way, as if he were acting in a play. These conversations took place internally. No one else heard them—or else the Tiger couldn’t have kept his job as a bus driver, his source of income and the way he helped himself forget. The Tiger would often glare at the television screen and, regardless of what was on, give it a piece of his mind: “You whore, selling and buying your mother’s arse!”

Karima would go and sit in the living room with her fingers on the buttons of the remote control, switching channels as if she were playing a nonsensical tune on it. She settled on an Iraqi station: an announcer in garish make-up smiled as she introduced a traditional Iraqi song about maternal devotion. Karima shed a tear at the first Ah from the well-known rustic singer. The Tiger walked past and, without turning towards her, went into his room. He opened the wardrobe and put on his bus-driver’s uniform. From the shelf he pulled out a pistol wrapped in a piece of cloth and tucked it under his belt. He left without even saying goodbye to Karima, his wife and companion of twenty-four years. Many years ago he had given up looking into those eyes, which had enchanted him and wrenched his soul in his youth. In those days, the Tiger’s claws dripped with blood from the brutal water wars, and Karima’s radiant eyes suggested deep reserves of love.

The Tiger worked the night shift, but today he left home early. His eyes were severe, as if he were on a serious mission. He went into the Hemingway café, ordered a coffee and sat down at the fruit machine. He played and won. He lost and played again. In the end he lost forty euros. He threw a contemptuous glance at the fruit machine and left the café. It had started to snow heavily. The Tiger gazed at the snow.

“You know if you were in your right mind, you wouldn’t shit in the bowl you eat from,” he told it—in just the kind of tone you’d expect of a kid from a neighbourhood run by pill poppers and brutal police. The Tiger called it the “Cowards’ District”; he’d had the energy and callousness to commit any crime he wanted to without falling into the hands of the police. That’s why they had awarded the crown of “Tiger” to young Said Radwan. They gave him the title and cheered him off to the water wars.

The Tiger headed to the public library and spent some time there before work. He seethed with anger as he looked for a new crime novel, and addressed the row of books on the shelf. “I know you’ve jumped out at me from nowhere, but I know how to fix you up good and proper, you fat, rotten bastard. You lousy novel,” he said.

He pulled a novel from the shelf and sat down to read.

His passion for crime stories had begun when he started living in Finland. That was before he joined the bus-driving course. The Tiger felt an overwhelming desire to write, but he didn’t dare, and deep down inside he still thought it impossible to turn the images of horror in his mind into words. Sometimes he would spit out the names of the writers on the covers of the books in one of his inner dialogues: “You geniuses, sisters of whores, authors of blood and violence everywhere in the Cowards’ District, in the water wars and on paper. My God, curse the father of the world you live in.” The Tiger left the library to smoke a cigarette outside. He watched the snow falling but didn’t talk to it. He went back to the reading room, set sail with the crime novel and drowned in it. The time soon passed. The Tiger’s skin suddenly shivered and he looked at his watch. He put the crime novel back in its place, borrowed another one and left.

The Tiger’s fingers gripped the steering wheel tight as he drove the number 55 bus through Helsinki’s icy streets. A stream of images and memories ran like a trail of ants through his blood, down from his head and ended up, crowded and swarming, in the tips of his fingers. He looked at his face in the rear-view mirror. His skin was as dark as rye bread, flecked with a sparse white beard. Who would have thought the Tiger would ever become so frail and wizened?

The bus halted at a stop close to the Opera House. He turned to the building and gave it a sigh: “Sing, sing. Farid al-Atrash used to sing, and say that life was beautiful if only we could understand it. Well, you can lick my arse.”

The Tiger looked for his quarry, the fat man, in the mirror above his head. No sign of him among the passengers. The fat man hadn’t appeared for more than two days. But he’s bound to turn up at the last stop, the Tiger thought to himself as he fingered the pistol in his belt. He closed the bus doors and stepped on the gas, cutting a path though the continuing blizzard.

It was more than a month ago now since this new passenger had started riding the bus: a fat man with Iraqi features. The Tiger had never managed to work out how he got on the bus. Passengers were supposed to board through the front door, but the fat man didn’t. The Tiger kept his eyes on his mirror—a constant vigil for the fat man sneaking on via the rear doors—which was a strain on his nerves. The fat man was like a ghost: he would appear on the bus and then disappear, until eventually they came face to face and the strange man revealed his identity.

Apart from the fat man appearing on his bus, the Tiger’s life went on at the same depressing rhythm, as he struggled with his family and himself. For the last three years his son Mustafa, who was now twenty, hadn’t been in touch with him or his mother. The kid had rebelled early against the Tiger’s cruel treatment, and now sold marijuana and lived in a small flat with his Russian girlfriend.

His wife Karima—“the woman with the stunning eyes”, as those around her used to call her in the old days—was lost in her own world, mentally and physically detached from her husband. The Tiger felt she was punishing him for the years of bitterness she’d spent with him. Karima spoke for hours on Skype with her brothers in Baghdad, sharing their joys and their sorrows. She would laugh and cry on Skype, yearning for the past and bemoaning her luck. There was nothing left of Karima, the young cheerful English teacher: with the old Finnish woman next door, her only friend, she’d go through photographs from when she was an elegant young woman with stunning eyes. When the old woman died, Karima’s pictures died too, because there were no longer eyes to grieve over the shadows of the past with her.