Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

Listening to the hockey match on the radio was not the same thing as watching it on television, of that he was assured. Hyttynen tried vainly to picture the scrum at the second face off, and the powerful shot from the neutral zone which had again given the advantage to the Lokerit team. The commentator’s excited voice reported every detail of the action, rattled off the names of the players as the ball passed from one to the other. But without being able to see the puck, and the sticks embroiled in hand-to-hand encounters, for Rauno Hyttynen, a fan of the Helsingfors Idrottsföreningen Kamraterna, the winter’s most eagerly anticipated hockey match lost all appeal, as did the hundred marks he’d bet on the outcome with Lieutenant Lampinen. Disavowing the ethical stance to be adopted by any fan worthy of the name, Hyttynen even began to hope that there might be a draw, leading to extra time. With a bit of luck, he would at least manage to see that. But Vasikkasaari was still a long way off, and the minutes were ticking by on the dashboard clock. They had only just been through Suomenlinna, and the icy track was hardly conducive to fast driving. This woman must be really worried, thought Hyttynen, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. He’d seen a lot of such rapidly ageing female intellectuals who were now at last waking up to the fact that it wasn’t their brains that made them interesting. Their husbands soon got tired of them, dumping them as people did with dogs before going on holiday: slightly ashamed of themselves, but resolute. Talking of dogs, that shapeless creature which the woman dragged along with her smelt quite abominable. It had settled itself comfortably on the back seat and was panting, its tongue hanging out. It must be one of those indoor dogs, which have never seen a wood and eaten nothing but tinned food all their lives. Hyttynen was still not sure what it was that linked the animal to her ex-husband, but he was certainly not going to ask for further explanations of the woman seated beside him, who was fiddling with her rings and looking impatiently towards the sea. Of all the police stations in Helsinki, what dastardly stroke of ill luck had led her unerringly to his own? Rauno Hyttynen had been studying the work rota for weeks in order to ensure that he would be on duty in the station on the evening of the match. Leave was out of the question, Palolampi had broken his foot and would be off all month. So Hyttynen had exchanged his February shift with Vennamo, so as not to be on evening patrol in January, and had come to an agreement with Donner that all evening calls would be diverted directly to the patrol car radio. That way he would be able to watch the match all on his own, in suitable peace and quiet. And all that manoeuvring had been for nothing. The most important match in the whole championship was now on, and he would miss every single minute of it.

‘Here we are!’ said Margareeta when they arrived at the quayside in Vasikkasaari. Hyttynen switched on the driving beam. The track across the sea met up with the road beside the landing stage, where the ferry to the islands moored in summer. Now, though, it was trapped in a mass of ice shaped like some monstrous creature. Roosting on the wooden piers, it cast a black shadow over the stiffly curled waves. There was no sign of life on the island. The car tyres crunched loudly in the muffled silence of the woods. On the southern slope the trees were laden with snow, but as soon as the road started to run towards the promontory, and the coast, the car lights revealed mere skeletons of trees, like totem poles, which vicious winds had whipped bare of any remaining snow. The rocks on the shoreline were white and bare, like the stones of a lunar landscape. A huge snowdrift had piled up at the entrance to the lane leading to Villa Suvetar.

‘Is Suvetar your name?’ asked Hyttynen, reading out the words on the wooden nameplate on the gate in an attempt to appear pleasant, and thereby lessen her mulishness.

‘No, it’s the name of the goddess of summer,’ snapped back Margareeta.

‘Oh, excuse my ignorance,’ said Hyttynen apologetically. He got out of the car and took a shovel and a torch out of the boot.

‘The house is at the end of the lane,’ Margareeta informed him, getting out after him.

Hyttynen huffed and puffed as he dug away beyond the gate, sinking into the snow step after step as he approached the house. He shone the torch on Margareeta and Hurmo, who were floundering along behind him.

‘There’s no one here, no footsteps, nothing,’ he said, still vainly hoping that she might be persuaded to abandon their pointless search.

‘Maybe not, but we’ve got to go inside,’ shouted Margareeta breathlessly, stabbing her finger in the direction of the cottage door.

‘The lock has frozen up. I’ll have to go and get the antifreeze,’ said Hyttynen in irritation, letting the shovel fall to the ground. He came back a few minutes later, followed by Hurmo, who regarded him as one of the family by now, and sniffed confidingly at his every footstep in the snow.

On entering the cottage, Margareeta stiffened. Taking the torch from Hyttynen, she shone it into every corner, engaging on a search every bit as professional as his own.

‘There’s a smell of woman in here,’ she muttered, nostrils flaring. Hyttynen looked at her in alarm: her eyes seemed positively to glitter in the darkness. Now not only would he miss the match, but the whole night might be wasted.

‘Nonsense! It smells to me like lavender, the kind you put in drawers. People always put lavender in amongst the linen in cottages like this when they leave them locked up for the winter,’ he added hopefully.

‘No, that’s the smell of a woman. A whore, in all likelihood,’ insisted Margareeta, moving towards the sauna. She felt the boards and brazier, drew a hand along the bench and porthole in the door.

‘Not a sign of dust!’ she exclaimed triumphantly, then, turning to Hyttynen:

‘Officer, call the criminal laboratory — now!’

‘Madam, you surely can’t be thinking of opening an inquiry just because your husband has a cleaner who makes a proper job of things? This is the limit, I’ve got to get back to the station, I’ve been patient quite long enough!’ he protested, thrusting Margareeta unceremoniously out of the door, locking up in a somewhat slipshod fashion and setting off towards the car, noting with irritation that Hurmo was close on his heels, tail wagging furiously.

‘I’m quite certain that someone has been here, and that they’ll be back again before dawn!’ Margareeta shouted, but Hyttynen had now vanished into the darkness. She waited for the torchlight to disappear among the trees, then walked around the house and down to the shore where, not so much earlier, a naked Olga had run to meet her fate. She stopped at the puckered sea, surprised at not hearing the sound of the undertow. Distant summer afternoons now came into her mind, Hurmo running in the sand and hurling himself into the water to swim up to the boat, Jarmo jokingly scolding him because he’d driven off the fish. It seemed impossible that this could be the same place: looking at the surrounding landscape, Margareeta suddenly felt that no summer would ever come to melt that ice again, that Villa Suvetar and all her memories would lie fossilised beneath it for all eternity. In the smudged grey sky above Helsinki a few pale greenish stars could just be seen; in the other direction, though, towards the open sea, they shone out more strongly in the total darkness. Straining her ears, beyond the sound of the fitful wind she heard a faint creaking spreading over the gauzy mass of ice: it was as though the whole sea had become an immense meadow peopled by insects which had congregated to launch a dawn attack on Helsinki. Swept northwards to those bleak latitudes by some natural disaster, they would cover the streets and houses of the city with a swarm of green snow. Made sluggish by the cold, they would soon die, flitting around clumsily before freezing to death and floating down to earth. Car wheels would reduce their sticky multitude to a pulp, leaving a stinking black mush on the asphalt. Margareeta imagined the headlines: ‘After the big freeze, Helsinki is overrun by locusts.’ She shook herself to clear her head of these mad imaginings, did up the top button of her windcheater and was about to make her way back to the cottage, when a dark shape bobbed up out of the sea and came to a halt in front of her. Margareeta drew back in alarm, but nonetheless peered in fascination at the shapeless mass which was coming towards her. Then she ran off towards the wood, slipping and falling in the snow as she did so. She was about to cry out, when two horn blasts rang out in the frozen air. Then the four guanacos pricked up their ears and flared their nostrils, looked in four different directions and galloped off in fear, their little hooves ticking away on the ice until they receded into the distance, and silence fell again.