Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi

Author:Mikael Niemi [Niemi, Mikael; Thompson, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-288-2
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

About a stomach-turning summer job, a poker that went astray, and the perils that ensue from failing to do one’s duty

One gray and overcast day in May a slim, spry man came striding into Pajala from the Korpilombolo direction. He was carrying an old-fashioned military rucksack, his head was weather-beaten and as worn as a rune stone, topped by short, silvery gray hair. He stopped in Naurisaho, gazed disapprovingly up at the leaden sky and took several deep draughts from a water-bottle. Then he knocked on the door of the nearest house. When the door opened he bade the stranger good day in broken standard Finnish with an exotic accent. The man introduced himself as Heinz, a German citizen, and he wondered if there might be an empty cottage in the area available for renting over the summer.

A few telephone calls were made, and by that evening Heinz had found a badly insulated little wooden cottage just outside the village. The widow who used to live there had become feeble-minded over the last few years, and had covered the whole of the floor with topsoil and hay, so everything had to be scrubbed with soap and boiling water before the German accepted it. He was provided with a mattress and some china, some basic provisions were placed in the larder, curtains were put up, and a truckload of firewood was dumped outside the front door. The electricity could be reconnected, although that would mean an increased rent. Heinz declined on the grounds that it was May already and electric lights would not be needed—after all, it wouldn’t get dark again until well into August.

On the other hand he was keen to take a look at the sauna. It was on the edge of the forest, gray with age and covered in soot around the door. Heinz opened it. Breathed deeply. A melancholy smile spread over his face as he breathed in the scent of the smoke sauna.

“Sauna!” he whispered in his exotic foreign accent. “I haven’t taken a sauna for over twenty years!”

That very night Niila and I lay concealed in our look-out post and watched him running naked down to the RiverTorne, saw him hurl himself into the water among the last of the lumps of ice drifting down-river and swim half-way across before turning back. Then he stood on the bank, blue with cold, leaping around with his shriveled penis wavering in the cold night air, before jogging back into the warmth of the cottage.

The next day he acquired an abandoned typewriter from the Customs’ store of confiscated items, an ancient Halda made of cast iron. He set it up on the porch and sat there bashing away for hours on end, occasionally gazing over the meadows flush with shoots of fresh, green grass, listening to the curdling flute cadenzas of the curlew.

Who was this man, in fact? What was he doing here? Before long rumors were circulating to the effect that this mysterious stranger had been an SS officer in Finland during the war.

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