Aki Ollikainen: White Hunger

The rowlocks screech, like a bird.

Two skinny pikes lie at the bottom of the boat. They look more like snakes than fish. They no longer twitch; the cold has made them stiff. Their jaws gape, still trickling blood, which blends in slender swirls with the water around Mataleena’s feet.

Mataleena dips her hand in the cold lake, lets it glide lazily alongside the boat until the chill makes her joints ache. The wind tugs waves out of the water. The sky reflected there is patchy, fragmentary, as if smashed.

Juhani stretches out his sinewy neck like a crane, looking up. Mataleena takes in her father’s face, the thin bridge of his nose, and then the sky, an immense silver spoon over the lake.

‘They’re already heading south.’ Juhani sighs.

‘What are?’

‘The swans.’

‘I can’t see any birds.’

‘That’s because they’ve already gone.’

Juhani looks down, to Mataleena.

‘Anyway, we got some fish.’

*

Juhani pulls the boat up between some bushes. Marja has come to meet them, carrying Juho. She lowers the boy to the ground, and Mataleena takes her little brother by the hand. Marja looks into the boat.

‘What skinny fish.’

The trees on the opposite shore are reflected blackly in the water. Somewhere, a loon cries. Soon, it too will fly south.

They walk through the forest, along a narrow path. When Marja bends down to look for lingonberries, she hears a quick, angry hiss, as if a glowing firebrand were being dropped into water. She screams, leaps back. Landing, she loses her footing and falls among the shrubs. First, she sees blurry dots: the pale lingonberries, whipped by the frosty night. Then she looks in the direction of the hiss and, slowly, a black coil assumes the shape of a snake. Its eyes are the colour of frozen berries, its twin teeth like icicles. But the adder does not lash out, merely hissing instead.

Juhani steps forward, a rock in his raised hand. Then he strikes. The snake is pinned down by the rock.

With one breath, Marja releases the air that terror had locked in her stomach. Juhani reaches out and helps her get up.

‘Poor devil. Already dazed with cold. Couldn’t escape.’

Marja looks at the rock; it is as if she can see the snake through the grey stone.

‘Is it still alive?’

‘No,’ Juhani replies, bending down to pick up the rock.

‘Don’t, for God’s sake! Leave it be. I don’t want to see a dead snake.’

‘All right.’

A soft, sizzling sound, as the burning spill hits the water in the pail. The dim light succeeds in tracing Juhani’s shadow on the wall as he rises from his bed, lifts Marja’s dress, places his hands on her knees and pushes her legs apart. Marja takes hold of Juhani’s erect penis. She wants it, too, but her fear is even greater than her burning desire. What if she were to fall pregnant? Another mouth to feed, in this misery. Marja pushes Juhani back on to the mattress. He sighs, trying to hide his disappointment.

Marja moves her hand slowly back and forth, squeezing his member. A subdued groan escapes Juhani. She places her free hand between her legs. He comes first. Marja bites the collar of her nightdress, waves pass through her body. After, she feels empty again. She strokes Juhani’s limp member and thinks of the skinny pikes.

He should sacrifice the pawn. Otherwise, the white queen will drive the king into a corner and the bishop, a few moves away, will not have time to come to the rescue.

Lars Renqvist has to admit that the situation on the board looks hopeless. Teo taps the edge of the table irritably.

‘Just give up, why don’t you?’ he says to his brother. ‘Or let’s stop for now and carry on another time.’

‘All right. We’ll finish the game when we next meet,’ Lars replies.

Teo watches his brother’s face with amusement; Lars is still examining the pieces on the board. He notices that Lars has taken to wrinkling his forehead like his revered superior in the senate.

‘In my opinion, that senator of yours is mistaken,’ Teo says.

‘You don’t understand the essence of this nation.’ Lars sighs and gets up to ladle punch into small glasses. Passing one to Teo, he goes on: ‘We need to provide people with work. If you start pouring grain into their silos for nothing, you’ll end up with a bottomless pit. Our most pressing duty is to secure work for the unemployed.’

‘Work’s fruitless when there’s no food to be had. What’s the point?’

Lars is getting agitated. The senator arranged a loan without guarantees from Rothschild’s. He was only able to do so because of the country’s good name. Skittishness at the first hurdle must not be allowed to jeopardize that trust.

‘I can’t see why you don’t understand,’ Lars snaps.

At that moment, the salon doors open and Raakel comes in with a tea tray, which she places on the small table. Good timing. Lars takes a deep breath, calmed by his wife’s tender glance.

Raakel is wiser than her husband, Teo thinks. She would have solved the begging problem by now, if only someone had had the wit to ask her. She would have encouraged everyone to go back home, told them: just be patient and wait, there’ll be food once we find a big enough saucepan.

‘The idea was that businessmen were to arrange supplies of grain. That was the senator’s proposal and he was quite right. It’s not his fault the merchants didn’t get their act together.’ Lars sounds like a long-suffering father, explaining something to his child for the seventh time.

‘No one ordered that grain. After all, you might just as well urge a minister to give one of his fellow men the shirt off his back as ask a merchant to feed the poor,’ Teo says.

The mention of ministers silences Lars for a moment, and Teo supposes his brother still feels guilty that neither of them fulfilled Father’s wish and devoted himself to theology.

‘I know someone willing to give up his shirt for the whores of Punavuori,’ Raakel says.

‘I am a doctor of the poor, like the great Paracelsus,’ Teo says, spreading his arms.

‘The whores of Helsinki have nothing to worry about, with our Paracelsus looking after them.’

Lars bursts out laughing. Raakel slams the door shut triumphantly as she leaves. Teo, too, is amused as he pictures the victorious smile playing on Raakel’s lips because she has had the last word. What a good mother Raakel would make, if only she were not barren. Although the problem could be with Lars, Teo thinks; their family may be condemned to die out with the two of them.

Perhaps that is the crux of the matter. Hunger eliminates the weakest citizens, just as a gardener prunes bad branches off his apple tree.

After Teo has gone, Lars turns his attention back to the situation on the board. With the pawn he could buy himself time for a few more moves, but even to achieve a draw, Teo would need to make a cardinal mistake. The game is lost and Lars has the feeling that Teo interrupted it on purpose. Perhaps he just wanted Lars to have time to analyse the situation, to realize the hopelessness of his position.

In his mind’s eye, Lars sees the senator’s expression, painfully cruel, as the latter snarled: ‘Has the assistant accountant anything else to say? I’ve dictated my message, go and deliver it!’

A month has gone by since then. Lars had stood at the senator’s door, clutching a telegram from Governor Alftan. He was, however, careful not to scrunch it up, as the senator has reserved for himself the right to crumple up telegrams and throw them across the room in a rage. In the north, the grain had run out, and Alftan wanted speedy emergency aid. Lars was a mere messenger, but the senator directed his anger at him. Perhaps the situation up there was truly terrible, Lars was bold enough to say. Bound to be, at least on the housekeeping front, the senator replied. And Lars had left the room to the accompaniment of cursing. At first he hated himself, his vacillating disposition, and then all the Alftans of this world, bureaucrats who displayed weakness in a tight spot, yielding at the first gust of wind and leaving a great man like the senator standing alone in the storm. Finally, he cursed the stupid farmers in the country’s interior — fat, lazy landowners who threw out their workers so they would have more for themselves, even though by rights they should have fed their poor, whether farmhands or beggars.