Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

Margareeta.

Margareeta left the letter inside the newspaper, counted out the change for the coffee and marched off, dragging Hurmo unceremoniously by the lead. The waiter picked up the cup and wiped under the chair, removing the puddle the dog had made. Before throwing the paper into the waste-paper bin, he cast an inattentive eye over the headlines.

Outside, the city was coming to life. Despite the snow, in the town centre the avenues were full of cars, making their way slowly forwards with their headlights on. Nothing was going to come between them and their Saturday shopping spree, and the shopping centres were filling up, windows ablaze, the whole snow-covered city was abuzz. Christmas had come and gone, but the apartment blocks in the centre were once more glittering with festive lights. Today was a special day. Nature had firmly reasserted herself, and for once could not be kept at bay by central heating systems, neon signs, the smoke from factory chimneys and the mighty icebreakers moored alongside the quays, awaiting orders to rid the sea-lanes of ice. In the port, sirens were breaking a fifty-year silence, and the weather centre was giving hourly reports on the advance of the ice floes in the gulf. Murmansk, Saint Petersburg, Petrozavodsk and Vaalimo were registering polar temperatures. Radio messages were continually arriving from Tallinn. On the other side of the gulf you could walk on the sea and reach the island of Prangli by car. On such a day, a thousand years ago, hordes of wild men had arrived by sea to sack the Finnish villages, burn down the houses, ravish the women and carry off the children. In defiance of that distant memory, the whole city was now on the alert. It was making as much noise as it possibly could, putting on all its lights, turning the heating systems up to maximum, making a show of all its wealth and strength, as though in a bid to fend off the wild hordes of yesteryear. Let them try attacking Finland now!

Margareeta tried calling Jarmo from every phone box she came upon, to see whether he’d returned home so that she could pay a surprise visit. But all she succeeded in doing was spending her change for nothing, because the phone in the flat in Liisankatuno was never answered by anyone except the answer-phone. She even went back to ring the bell, invented an excuse to have the main door opened by a neighbour and walked up to his landing to shout and bang at his door until the other occupants forcefully expressed their disapproval. She had then waited in the street, keeping a close eye on his windows. But the snow fell silently on windowsills and balconies without any sign of life becoming visible behind the curtains. Yet Margareeta was sure that her ex-husband was at home, probably enjoying the company of some little whore he’d picked up the previous evening. Walking around Liisankatu, she found that she was talking to herself, railing against the dog. The few passers-by shuffling along the icy pavements looked at her as though she were a madwoman, or a drunk. When the cold became unbearable, and the whole street turned into a pit of whirling snow, Margareeta, now exhausted and frozen to the marrow, resigned herself to going home. But she had lost nothing of her determination and, all in all, felt somewhat reassured. She knew where she would certainly be able to find him later. On Saturday evenings Jarmo would unfailingly pay a visit to the Café Engel before dinner. Just to get himself noticed, shake a few hands, arrange a meeting, offer an aperitif to an attractive woman, or indeed to anyone who might be of use to him. All in all, Margareeta thought, there was no hurry. Indeed, it might be even more amusing to hand the dog over in a public place, to embarrass Jarmo in front of his friends, maybe even spoil his evening.

On entering her flat she was met by a stale bedroom smell, mingled with that of cold coffee and the muddy stench of Hurmo. The flat looked charmless and messy in the half-light, and Margareeta felt a wave of sadness. The place smelt like an old people’s home. She went to throw open the windows, heedless of the snow which blew in and melted on the floor, the furniture, the old wedding photos she hadn’t had the heart to throw away. She waited until the room was truly freezing before closing them again. Then she retreated into the bathroom to have a good cry. She undressed, letting her clothes fall in a heap in a corner. She turned on the taps and crouched beside the bath, waiting for it to fill. She watched her white body pucker and then vanish into the mirror as it misted over, as she had done when she was a child. Then, suddenly, she sensed it was too late: to extract her revenge, to mourn, to start afresh, find happiness again. Her life was over, there would be no new beginnings: it had been a catalogue of words and gestures she no longer had the courage to repeat. Behind the door, Hurmo was pressing his nose against the chink of light, pointlessly expectant, scratching at the parquet and whimpering in the darkness, as though he too was eager to make his escape from that ghost-infested flat. When Margareeta emerged from the bath, locks of damp hair were falling over her tear-stained eyes; she was no longer crying, and although her lips were trembling, her jaw was set. She stood barefoot in front of the fridge and had a bite to eat, tossing a scrap to Hurmo as she did so. Then she drank a cup of cold coffee and went back to bed. She set the alarm for five, put in her ear-plugs and pulled the covers over her head. Hurmo had the good sense to wait until his mistress was asleep before returning to his little armchair in the bedroom.

While he was dressing Katia’s corpse, the Laplander cursed the day he had left the woods of Airisselka and gone to seek his fortune in the big city. He had left because he had had enough of being drenched to the marrow ferrying tree trunks down the Miekojärvi and sleeping in the open air like an animal. He had had enough of scratching a living by working for those bandits at the sawmill at Pessalompolo. He too wanted to live in a modern flat, to drink Australian wine and womanise to his heart’s content, like the lorry drivers who came to load up the timber and would give him bottles of foreign liquor and pornographic magazines. This was what had decided him to move to Helsinki. He had spent his entire savings on the purchase of a bar in a dismal working-class area; but his outgoings were considerable, and his earnings meagre. The licence to sell alcoholic drinks alone cost an arm and a leg. Things didn’t look up much even after he had installed various video games. Then he had had that bright idea of smuggling a couple of prostitutes over the border from Saint Petersburg, and two soon became four. At first he had them working in turns in the one-room flat he rented above the bar. Then he decided to close down the gaming room and turn it into four smaller rooms, and it was these that were now his most profitable line of business. He had made a name for himself: the Laplander, they called him. Things had improved, admittedly, but at a price: clients who failed to pay and had to be roughed up, squabbles among the girls for the best room, drug addicts arranging to meet on his premises and locking themselves in the toilets to do business, and the ever-present fear of the police. Four years into that life, there was still no sign of the modern flat of his dreams, he was still drinking shoddy Finnish beer rather than Australian wine, and the only women he could afford to hire were those four wrecks. At times, he even thought back to his tree trunks with something approaching nostalgia. At least they couldn’t speak; they never complained, the most resistance they put up was when they ran aground in the mud, and even then they could be easily dislodged. All in all, he thought, life was much easier in a wooden hut on the banks of a lake than on the fourth floor of a dismal council block, and the dainty little creatures in his pornographic magazines were much more biddable than the four rowdy Caucasian troublemakers he’d so unwisely imported into his living quarters.