Aki Ollikainen: White Hunger

‘If you fall out, I’m not stopping for you,’ the hired hand states over his shoulder.

Marja stops eating snow, but after a moment Mataleena reaches out over the side again — further than she needs to, defiantly. Marja grabs the hem of the girl’s coat.

The journey is as long as the hired hand’s stare at the snowdrift that opens out in front of them. Finally they arrive at an inn. No other houses in sight. The hired hand turns round on his box seat, tears Marja’s winter coat open and snatches the loaves Viklund gave her from her breast.

‘There are other starving people, for whom no masters buy bread. They’ve got more of a right to these loaves than you.’

He breaks one of the loaves in two, flings one half into Marja’s lap, jumps down from his seat and goes into the inn.

When Marja and the children enter, the hired hand is having a chat with the landlord about a cargo of grain. He glances over his shoulder and looks at them as if he had never seen them before.

‘Vagabonds, not from these parts.’

‘Let them go to the waiting room,’ the landlord says to the hired hand.

When Marja and Mataleena wake up, Viklund’s man has disappeared. Marja carries the sleeping Juho outside.

‘If only we had the skis with us, at least,’ Marja laments.

There are another two sledges in the yard. The night before, a young boy brought a clergyman to the inn in one of them. The boy is still asleep in the waiting room. The inn driver is harnessing a horse to the other sledge.

‘Where are you going?’ Marja asks.

The driver does not respond, does not listen; he merely looks at the copse opposite from beneath the horse’s head. Marja stares at the man’s back for a long time. When she finally gives up staring, the man turns.

‘North. I can’t give beggars a lift because of that clergyman. And the landlord wouldn’t approve.’

Pity and guilt flit over the driver’s face in turn.

‘We’re not going north, that’s where we came from,’ Marja replies.

‘You should head in the other direction. I’ll go and give that boy a kick, wake him up. He can pick you up further down the road. So the landlord won’t see. You should manage to get out of sight before the boy sets off.’

Just then the door opens and the vicar comes out into the yard, dressed in a thick fur coat and accompanied by the landlord. Mataleena feels like laughing: the vicar’s fur hat looks like a fluffy dandelion clock, but brown instead of white. If you blew on it, bits of fluff would fly off and float over the snowdrifts, and only a stump would remain on the clergyman’s head. The fluff would fall outside the inn, and in summer, yellow, flower-headed clergymen would grow all over the yard and sway in the breeze.

But Mataleena does not dare to blow, and the wind whistling round the corner also fails to snatch the down from the vicar’s hat.

‘Well!’ the landlord roars at Marja.

That is an order to leave. Marja lowers Juho to the ground, takes her children by the hand and begins walking along the snowy track.

‘Oh, such times, and such a people. How the Lord is testing their faith now,’ the vicar laments.

They walk for a long time. The short period of daylight is drawing to an end. No sign of the boy or the sledge. Mataleena walks behind her mother, treading in the footprints, holding her coat more tightly to protect herself from the blizzard. She does not hear the rumbling of her stomach, but she feels it.

Hunger is the kitten Willow-Lauri put in a sack, which scratches away with its small claws, causing searing pain; then more scratching, then more, until the kitten is exhausted and falls to the bottom of the sack, weighing heavily there, before gathering its strength and starting a fresh struggle. You want to lift the animal out, but it scratches so hard you dare not reach inside. You have no option but to carry the bundle to the lake and throw it into the hole in the ice.

Mataleena bumps into Marja’s back; Mother has stopped. All around, heavy snow makes the shoulders of spruces hunched.

‘This is the end,’ Marja says faintly, but Mataleena hears the whinnying of a horse on the road behind her and tugs at her mother’s sleeve. Marja lowers Juho and waves, but the boy driving the sledge looks past her, straight ahead, and fails to stop. Marja sinks on to her knees and falls into the snowdrift. Her body shakes slowly, her sobs come out jaggedly, in time with her breathing.

Mataleena tries to pull her mother up.

‘He stopped at the turning over there,’ Mataleena says.

Marja gets up and sees the sledge. The boy continues staring ahead in the direction of travel. Marja lifts up Juho and, summoning all her strength, begins striding towards the sledge.

Once they have climbed in, the boy gives them a single glance over his shoulder. One of his eyes is identical to the old farmer’s at Viklund. He says nothing, merely smacks his lips to get the horse moving.

The motion soon makes Juho go to sleep. The blizzard has ceased. It is as if the flurry had originally risen up off the field, which has now dragged the snow back down to use as a blanket. The first stars light up, and a grey shawl covers the fragment of moon.

They wake up in the abandoned cabin where the lad from the inn left them the night before. There is a lake half an hour’s walk away, he told them, and beyond it a house.

An ice road leads across the lake, but snow has fallen here, too. At every step, Mataleena sinks into the snow, which nearly reaches her waist, though she tries to tread in her mother’s footprints. Wading through the snowdrifts is hard work. Mataleena shuts her eyes and thinks of Father, their last shared boat trip on the local lake.

Father was calm. He looked solemn, just as when he rowed Willow-Lauri’s coffin to the church. Mataleena thought Father was handsome as he moved the heavy boat across the lake with long, steady strokes, but then a strong wind rose up, almost taking off Father’s hat, and he pulled it back down so low that his ears bent under the brim. The wind tried to turn the boat, and Father had to struggle to keep it on course and his expression dignified.

Lauri’s coffin was small. How did they manage to stuff the big man inside? Was he lying there curled up, the way Mataleena herself slept on cold nights? Mother explained that people shrink in death. Something leaves them, but even Mother did not know if it was the soul; or whether, if so, the soul floated away like steam from boiling water in a saucepan, or instead flowed downwards, a sticky, black liquid.

Perhaps different people have different souls.

Mataleena thinks of Charcoal-Kalle, who was found dead in his cabin. No one ever went there except Mother, who was related to Kalle, and Roope the cobbler. It was he who found Kalle’s body and fetched Mother. She took Mataleena along, and Mataleena still shudders when she remembers the smell of death. There was a black puddle underneath Kalle. It was not blood, but water seeping from the body, Roope said.

Lauri did not leave a puddle, though they said his mouth was black. From the poison, according to Father, but Mataleena wondered if the soul can escape through the mouth and leave the colour behind.

Roope said there is no soul inside a human being, only blood and black water, flowing around before they just run out; then he shrivels up. Two kinds of wetness go into the making of a human being: man’s water and woman’s water. Mataleena asked how that happens, and Roope explained that a man ejects his own liquid into a woman’s liquids, and that is how a new person is created. But Mother forbade Roope to say such things in the presence of a child. She asked a question herself, though: who provides the blood and who the black liquid.