Little Siberia Read online

  ‘The hunting season stops at the end of December. This thing walked into the yard the night before last, in the middle of January. At the same time, the village shop is right there, and it’s touch and go whether we’ll be able to pay off our debts. And the market for organic meats is growing all the time. And as long as I can get my hands on appropriate meat and have the time to make the stuff, my handmade sausages fly off the shelf. I looked at that elk standing there in the yard, I worked out the weight of the meat and thought this might just be the answer to all my problems. And it stood there at the bottom of the steps snorting. It was like a gift from on high.’

  The elk lets out a bellow, something between a yawn and someone clearing his throat.

  ‘I enticed him in here,’ Jokinen continues. ‘And managed to get him in the pen over there.’

  I realise Jokinen still thinks I’m here because of the elk. It’s the elk he’s worried about, not my wife.

  ‘I was just about to butcher it,’ he continues. ‘I glanced out the window and saw the pastor heading up here at full pelt. I think I got a bit rattled. Sorry about that.’

  Jokinen shakes his hand and goggles at the point where we were wrestling a moment ago. I remember something he said just before the attack.

  ‘You mentioned my know-it-all wife, and said I’m always handing out advice. I can’t remember ever giving you advice.’

  Jokinen’s posture shifts, he looks awkward – more awkward than before. ‘I just lost it … I … couldn’t think. The elk, the sausage, everything…’

  ‘We can talk about that later,’ I say. ‘I mean, what made you say something like that?’

  Jokinen looks at me. For a long time. Eventually he leans forwards in his plastic chair, props his elbows on his knees.

  ‘Minna and I have had a difficult winter. She wants to call it quits, head back south. It’s been a hard time in general. Minna and Krista are best friends. Minna said Krista had given her lots of good advice about things. I suppose I was so upset that I thought Krista had caused all this … whatever it is that’s going on. So I tried to come round yesterday to talk to Krista, thought I might find out what’s going through Minna’s mind these days, if I could work out where we’re going. But then I…’

  ‘Then I came back from the museum earlier than expected.’

  Jokinen lowers his gaze to the floor.

  ‘You drove me away.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, but…’

  ‘Then you turn up here trying to save the elk.’

  I turn and look at the elk. The beast and I look each other in the eye – maybe. Then I turn back to Jokinen.

  ‘You just told me hunting season is over.’

  ‘The animal doesn’t know the difference between December and January,’ he says.

  ‘We don’t normally ask the elk for his opinion.’

  ‘Just think, that’s another elk-related car crash that won’t happen now.’

  ‘Is Minna at home?’

  ‘She’s gone to her sister’s place in Helsinki,’ Jokinen says, shaking his head. ‘She’s back and forth there all the time these days. Maybe it’s for the best.’

  The elk makes a sound, a yawn-like splutter. I see the clock on the wall.

  ‘I have to go,’ I say. ‘But I have a favour to ask you.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Tell nobody I was here, nobody at all. Not even … Just, nobody.’

  Jokinen stands up. ‘I won’t breathe a word.’

  I believe him. Five hundred kilos of organic meat says he’ll keep his word.

  4

  Between Heaven and Earth a slender strip of blue thread lingers, the last vestiges of the day. I drive back to the village, take out my phone and check I haven’t received any text messages or calls without my noticing. I haven’t. I slip the phone back into my pocket.

  The trembling in my hands continues. It’s faint – other people probably wouldn’t notice it at all – but I sense it all the same. It’s a mixture of exhaustion and agitation, low self-esteem, guilt and panic. I talk to Krista out loud, tell her I’m on my way, wherever she is. I tell her she can trust me. I mean what I say, I just don’t know how I’m going to make it happen.

  There is nobody driving in the opposite direction, the empty road seems to hum, the soft snow puffing up behind the car. Again I think of all the people who might have taken Krista hostage. At the same time I warn myself not to leap to hasty conclusions. Jokinen might have a secret, yes, but it isn’t one I need to investigate or even one I need to know about. I have to be more careful, more precise. The meteorite will be heading to Helsinki in less than twenty-four hours. The van that will carry it will pull up outside the museum at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Before that happens, I have to get Krista back. There are simply no other options.

  I recall the evening we managed to lose each other in Jerusalem. We had spent all day wandering the city in the parched July heat. Evening fell just as we were resting our legs, filling our stomachs at a restaurant and talking about everything we’d seen. Or maybe I did most of the talking that evening. I wanted to see the Dead Sea Scrolls; I’d written my thesis about them. Perhaps the fact that I’d chosen an archaeological as opposed to a purely theological topic was a sign of what was to come.

  We had spent the morning in museums, wandering around the old city. Eventually we headed towards the city’s new downtown area and ended up walking far beyond that too.

  We stepped out of the restaurant. The darkness was striking – there was something almost physical about it, enveloping you completely, wholly. Krista said she fancied a Coca-Cola. She went back inside the restaurant. I waited in the street but she didn’t come back out again. I imagined we’d take a taxi back to the hotel, because we were both tired, worn out by the walking, the heat. And so I thought that, while waiting for her, I might still use the bathroom at the restaurant. I quickly took care of my business, went back out to the street and waited. But she didn’t appear.

  I went back inside, but she wasn’t in the small dining room. I asked the waiter if he’d seen my wife, the woman with whom I’d been enjoying dinner only a moment ago. Your wife just came in to buy some pop, the waiter replied, then rushed outside again. I returned to the street but couldn’t see Krista anywhere. I pulled my phone from my backpack, only to remember that Krista’s phone and wallet were inside my bag. While out walking we’d decided it was most sensible for me to carry everything in my bag. It didn’t seem so sensible now.

  The long street was dark, deserted in both directions. Suddenly I wasn’t sure which direction we’d arrived from. I tried to think what Krista had done, which direction she might have chosen. I made a decision and set off. I picked up my pace and arrived at a crossroads. I called out her name. I could hear laughter from the darkness beneath the trees across the street. The walls of the buildings were covered in slogans and graffiti. I continued on my way.

  The streets became narrower. Just one more corner, I thought many times, before ultimately returning the way I had come. I quickly noticed this wasn’t what I had done at all. I lost my way along the narrow pathways. Again I took out my phone, this time only to notice that the battery was dead. The map application, which I’d been using all day, had sucked the battery dry.

  I did everything I could to find my way back to the restaurant, but it was futile. We’d been warned about this part of the city, told that after dark it was best to keep away from here. I tried to convince myself that Krista was probably on her way to the hotel – if she wasn’t lost too. And I was walking along a dark, narrow residential street when I saw it.

  Golgotha.

  A small, run-down hotel with an ancient neon sign outside.

  I walked up to the hotel, stepped inside. Krista was sitting on the only chair in the lobby.

  Later, once I’d managed to suppress the sense of stress and growing panic somewhere deep inside, we took to saying it was at Golgotha that we found each other again. Though I doubt
either of us found the anecdote especially amusing, the memory remotely pleasant. I believe we both experienced an immediate, genuine panic about each other’s wellbeing, and the specific place where we were reunited was more than just a trifling detail.

  The centre of Hurmevaara looks different. But it hasn’t changed; I just look at it from a somewhat different perspective from a few days ago. Everywhere I go I look for signs of Krista and try to see dangers before they can pose me a threat. I arrive at the church hall.

  I turn the car round before switching off the motor so the bonnet is facing towards the village. I’ve parked in the space nearest the door. Although how can you define a parking space in winter? Who’s going to sweep the snow away, reveal the painted lines on the asphalt and check whether the car is properly parked? I give a sigh. It seems I’ll latch on to any passing thoughts to avoid thinking about my wife and the fact that I’m the one who put her in this predicament in the first place.

  I get out of the car, walk up the steps and open the door. Many things remind me of everything I have forgotten since I became so paranoid: the familiar environment, the silent building, my own echoing footsteps, the plaster sculpture of Christ in the lobby, and beside it the former rally driver, his face almost as white as the Lord’s. I remember what Pirkko said just before I left.

  Tarvainen.

  The three-thirty appointment.

  The situation is surprising, unexpected, though I’ve always known there was a possibility it could happen. I say a stiff hello and he responds. Dark floodwaters surge and a storm rages between my ears. The lobby is perfectly silent.

  ‘Pirkko said you had a slot at three-thirty,’ says Tarvainen. He sounds different from when we met at the kiosk; now he doesn’t sound remotely like the drunken idiot in whose car I flew through the air and raced along the snow-covered streets of Hurmevaara. His voice is neither harsh nor rough; he sounds like a man who has come to meet his shepherd.

  Which, to put it mildly, feels ever so slightly conflicting.

  5

  A few minutes later Tarvainen is sitting in my office, his sponsor jacket round his shoulders, sunglasses over his eyes. I think the glasses are a bit of an exaggeration; the lighting in the room is dim in a way I might once have called soft, but now I think it disturbing, threatening even. Perhaps the threat I sense has more to do with my own thoughts and as yet unspoken questions – such as: how dare you sit there after getting my wife pregnant and kidnapping her? And where the hell are you keeping her now?

  ‘I don’t really know how this works,’ he says.

  That rather depends what we’re doing, I think. I put myself in work mode; that seems the surest option.

  ‘You talk; I listen,’ I say.

  But Tarvainen doesn’t talk, for a very long time. I’m almost certain I caught the smell of alcohol in the lobby. Yes, it’s here in the office too, filling the air in the room like liberally applied aftershave. An aftershave made from garlic and toilet cleaner. My mind immediately casts back to Krista’s account of the terrific flight, the resulting euphoria and the momentary loss of control. Without his car, Tarvainen could hardly have waltzed into our family, and certainly couldn’t have had quite the same effect. And I sense something else, too. Tarvainen isn’t behaving like a man who’s been playing around with another man’s wife. I recall what Krista eventually said after I had pressed her on the matter: He was extremely drunk. He called me Leena and probably didn’t even realise what happened in those thirty seconds.

  Tarvainen doesn’t know what he’s done.

  Regarding that, at least.

  ‘I don’t even believe in God,’ he says suddenly. ‘And you’ve got a scratch on your forehead.’

  I’m not sure which statement to comment on first.

  ‘I fell over,’ I say. ‘And these pastoral sessions are for the general public; there are no admissions criteria.’

  Even kidnappers are allowed to pour their heart out – before I sort out my differences with them. But would the kidnapper behave like this, I ask myself? Would he be so hesitant? Would he sit there so meekly, stammering over his words?

  ‘How about I just say what I came to say?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s best,’ I nod. ‘Everything you tell me stays within this room. I have a duty of confidentiality.’

  Tarvainen shifts position in his chair, once, twice, and on the third attempt returns to the position in which he started.

  ‘I used to be a rally driver,’ he begins, but pauses instantly. ‘This will take forever if I start there.’

  ‘Start with what is worrying you the most,’ I suggest. ‘It might sound strange, but that’s often the easiest place to start.’

  ‘Sulevi.’ Tarvainen lets out the word so quickly that it sounds as much like a yelp as it does a man’s name.

  It seems the mention of this name takes us both by surprise. I wait for him to continue, but he remains silent.

  ‘Sulevi?’ I ask.

  Tarvainen sighs. ‘He was from the village, just like me – from a house out in the sticks.’

  He turns his head towards the window and looks outside at what must be the day’s final glimmers of light. I get the distinct impression that behind those sunglasses the lights went out long ago. He turns his head. Maybe he looks at me.

  ‘I used to be a rally driver,’ he tries again. ‘I’ll have to start there. I always have been a rally driver, still am. Even though they’ve shut me out of competitions. For now.’ He stresses these last words. ‘I will drive again. Once I sort things out. Once … New car, new team. New … map-reader. Sulevi was my map-reader. From day one.’

  I don’t tell him that I already know this. And I don’t mention that Sulevi is lying interred beneath earth and snow, in the graveyard at most 120 metres from where we are now sitting, forever liberated from the maps and drunken, unreliable driving companions of this world. I notice too that my stance towards Tarvainen is far from neutral. On the wall, slightly to the right of Tarvainen’s sunglasses and sponsor jacket, the Saviour looks as though he wants to turn away from us. But this may be nothing but my own interpretation, the result of a slow-burning rage and a desire for revenge.

  ‘We were driving a mountain rally course in France, a short trip. Sulevi was taking notes. He made one mistake. What he thought was a gentle right-hand turn was in fact a sharp right-hand turn, we went into the bend a bit too fast, I almost oversteered into the bend; if I had, we would have plummeted half a kilometre and come crashing right into the Sunday market in the village below. I shouted at Sulevi. He shouted at me. It turned into a … an argument. You have a duty of confidentiality, right?’

  ‘Yes, I still do,’ I nod.

  Tarvainen straightens his jacket, pulling the sides together across his stomach, which sits like a gym ball above his belt. The room is filled with the bouquet of windscreen fluid. Of the companies whose logos adorn his jacket, half have gone bust or been devoured by large conglomerates.

  ‘We were yelling at each other,’ he continues eventually. ‘And we were a second and a half from the lead. All I could do was put my foot on the gas. We got down from the mountain. I thought I could … It ended in a bit of fisticuffs.’

  Tarvainen is silent.

  ‘You stopped the car and started to—?’

  Tarvainen shakes his head, interrupts me before I get to the end of the question. ‘I drive,’ he says. ‘I’ll drive for as long as the clock’s running.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I was steering with my left hand and punching him with my right.’ Tarvainen demonstrates this with his hands.

  I say nothing. Tarvainen lowers his hands. For a while we sit in silence.

  ‘It was a mistake. I didn’t mean it, but I knocked him unconscious. Then, because I didn’t have a map-reader – or because my map-reader was unconscious – I was driving as fast as the car would go and eventually I overshot a damn bend. The car flew into a river. Sulevi didn’t wake up. They breathalysed me, took me for blood te
sts, sent me home.’

  He lowers his hands, places them in his lap. From the angle of his sunglasses, I guess he must be looking at the small table or at the floor in front of us.

  ‘Sulevi gave me direction,’ he says. ‘He showed me the way. I need to say it. That’s what … I came to tell you.’

  The Saviour on the wall seems to turn towards us again. Of course, I am simply imagining the movement, but still…

  ‘And what was it all for?’ Tarvainen asks.

  Before I can answer, before I can say anything at all, Tarvainen is speaking again, his voice more agitated now, angry even.

  ‘What was the use of it? I went and did it again. I might not have knocked anyone unconscious first, but the other night I was driving so quickly that the guy in the passenger seat had a heart attack. There are other mitigating circumstances too, but still. This is hell on Earth. All I want to do is drive.’

  Tarvainen grips the armrests of his chair. He looks as though he’s trying to wrench himself free. As long as Krista is missing, I can’t tell anyone anything that might endanger her further or jeopardise my attempts to get her back. I can’t tell Tarvainen that the man in his passenger seat was already dead by the time Tarvainen started showing him some tricks. And even if I could tell him that, I don’t know how I could tell him I was in the car too, in the footwell in the back, my hand operating Grigori’s scarf.

  My former mentor – an old pastor, now deceased, and a man whose guidance I have missed these last few days – always encouraged me to remove myself from the picture so as to see what’s really there. And so I try to see through the bitterness, the thirst for revenge, and understand what this is really about. Is Tarvainen the kidnapper? Is he aware that he has got a woman in the village pregnant – a woman who just happens to be the pastor’s wife? Does he realise he has just revealed his secret – knocking the map-reader unconscious and thereby causing his death – to that same woman’s husband?