Aki Ollikainen: White Hunger

The ghost of a supercilious smile forces the corners of his mouth up. The senator detects a similar smile flickering on Renqvist’s face, before quickly vanishing. At that moment, the senator, too, thinks of the thousands of dead bodies. Hunger and epidemics are at their most efficient in large crowds.

And yet a faint but emphatic voice in his head points out that the railway still represents a step forward for this country, with its frost-ravaged scraps of land: something permanent, a base on which can be founded progress towards industry and capitalism. Something bigger than the workshops he himself promoted. But the old schoolmaster within him thumps the table with his fist, silences such talk and sends the voice into the corner covered in shame.

‘It is indeed too costly in human terms.’ Renqvist goes along with him.

‘And not merely in human terms. We cannot prioritize the happiness of an individual over the future of the nation. But those conditions — the national economy can’t take them. We’ll be paying off those debts for a long time.’

The senator closes his eyes and sighs deeply. ‘Tell me, Renqvist, do you think of me as a cold man?’

‘No, absolutely not. You are far-sighted. Leadership demands strength of character; you were the only one in the senate to show that.’

‘Yes. I don’t know whether I’ve been surrounded by wolves or sheep. There were no real alternative ways to manage the budget. No one could have foreseen devastation like this. If I were in the same situation now as I was a year ago, I wouldn’t do anything differently,’ the senator says.

And yet he feels guilty. Guilt enters his dreams every night. He fears he will be pursued to the grave. Every night, the same faceless figure in rags trudges along a snowy road, and he knows it to be the past year.

The drawing-room door opens and Raakel comes in, leading a little boy by the hand. The May sunshine, falling in through the window, lights up half of the senator’s lined face as he turns towards them. His expression becomes gentler.

‘Aha, so this is my namesake.’

‘Yes, our Johan.’

The boy is wearing a sailor suit that would suit a child with angelic curls perfectly. This boy has thin, straight hair, and the clothes cannot disguise his peasant features. He has learned to carry his outfit, though. The dark circles the boy had round his eyes when he first came to the Renqvists are still visible, but only as pale shadows of themselves. His naturally pallid skin has acquired a hint of colour, and his small eyes possess a new warmth in addition to the old melancholy gravity.

The table has been laid. A china bowl is placed before Johan. He says thank you and picks up his spoon nicely, to take soup from the bowl. And suddenly his eyes glaze and he seems oblivious to everything else around him. He spoons the food solemnly into his mouth, as if he were enacting a sacred mystery.

‘Well, now he can neither hear nor see anything,’ Lars says with a sigh, ashamed of the boy’s behaviour.

‘Quite right, too.’ The senator chuckles and strokes one of his side whiskers. ‘He’s got to eat so he’ll have the strength to study and build the nation’s future.’

The senator seizes his glass and wine spills on to the tablecloth. The old man flushes. Raakel gets up briskly, flashes a forgiving smile at her embarrassed guest and spoons salt over the patch. White crystals cover the red-wine stain and gradually begin to darken.

The side of the boat has given in. It did not survive the winter; the planks could not withstand the weight of the snow. A goldeneye darts out of its nest and flies over the damaged boat, the flapping sound of the bird’s wing-beats spreading over the lake until the wind blends all the sounds into a silence that remains unbroken. But then the mating call of a lonely loon sounds.

A tall, lean man stands at the water’s edge. He allows his gaze to wander over the waves and as far as the opposite shore. His body, ravaged by hunger and disease, sways in the wind; the man can only stand upright with the help of his stick. Then the long, thin fingers let go of the stick, which falls over just as a pike splashes in the reeds. The man lowers himself cautiously into a sitting position on a stone near the water. He takes off his shoes, removes his ragged jacket, shirt and trousers, and steps naked into the lake. The water is still chilly, but the man barely notices, for he has experienced a cold so incomprehensibly vast that in the end it amounted to nothing but emptiness.

Summer has come. The man clings to this thought, hoping it will fill the emptiness of his mind so there will be room for nothing else. The loon cries again. The man wades deeper, and when the water reaches above his knees, he spreads his arms and falls forward. The lake receives him. Submerged, he slowly plummets towards the bottom. For a moment, the man thinks he will never surface again.

Then he begins to swim.

AUTHOR

Aki Ollikainen, born in 1973, has taken the Finnish literary scene by storm with his extraordinarily accomplished debut novel White Hunger , which has won the most prestigious literary prizes in Finland. A professional photographer and reporter for a local newspaper, the author lives in Kolari in northern Finland. His second novel will be published in spring 2015.

TRANSLATORS

Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah form a multilingual mother-and-daughter translation team. Emily has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in German Studies. Fleur, her mother, is Finnish and has translated both fiction and nonfiction for many years. Emily and Fleur have co-translated works by numerous Finnish poets and novelists. They are also the translators of The Brothers , Peirene № 7, and Mr Darwin’s Gardener , Peirene № 11.