Little Siberia Read online

‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ I say.

  It’s true, even though I am a member of the village committee, which will take responsibility for security at the War Museum while the meteorite is stored there for a few more days. The rock will then travel to Helsinki and from there onwards to London, where it will be taken to a laboratory to be examined. Security at the museum is being overseen by a group of volunteers, because the village cannot afford to hire a private security company and the nearest police station is ninety kilometres away in Joensuu. I have spent one night on watch at the museum, but even then I didn’t really think about the meteorite. I spent half an hour reading the Bible, and the rest of the night with James Ellroy.

  ‘It fell out of the sky,’ the man says.

  ‘That’s where they normally come from.’

  ‘The sky.’

  ‘Up there.’

  ‘From God.’

  ‘I’m guessing it’s more from outer space.’

  ‘I can’t make you out.’

  Evolution made me like this, I think, but I don’t say it aloud. I don’t want to prolong the situation.

  ‘It’s four o’clock.’

  ‘Tarvainen says the meteorite belongs to him.’

  Half the village thinks the meteorite belongs to them. Tarvainen was driving a car that technically belongs to Jokinen, on land that definitely belongs to Koskiranta, with petrol bought at Eskola’s garage, then headed to Liesmaa’s house where he made a call to Ojanperä, who arrived at the scene with Vihinen, whose delivery company, Vihinen & Laitakari, is in fact run by Mr Laitakari but half owned by Mr Paavola. And so on and so forth.

  ‘Well, it really is already four, so…’

  ‘They say it’s worth a million.’

  ‘It might be,’ I say. ‘If it turns out to be as rare as people have been speculating.’

  The man stands up. His steps towards the door are so hesitant that I find myself holding my breath. He reaches the doorway, manages to pull down the handle.

  ‘I didn’t even get round to talking about second-stage Ebola.’

  ‘Godspeed,’ I say.

  Once I am alone, I open the blinds. The darkness behind the window looks almost like water, so thick that you could dive into it. I’ve been listening to people all day, and every one of them has mentioned their children. For a while – until today – I’ve managed to forget about the subject, and find a bit of peace and quiet.

  My big secret.

  ‘Conflicted emotions’ doesn’t seem to cover it.

  I listen to other people’s secrets as part of my work, but all the while I’m carrying the greatest secret I can imagine. And still I haven’t been able to tell Krista the true nature of the situation. It’s not as if either of us has forgotten that I stepped on a mine, a homemade nail bomb, during my deployment to Afghanistan. What I haven’t told Krista is that by doing so, I lost the ability to have children. That while everything looks and works the way it should, while the surgeons successfully put everything back together, I was left with a blackspot. One that is permanent, incurable, unfixable.

  Krista.

  Seven shared years.

  Right from the beginning, Krista took, and continues to take, such good care of me in so many different ways.

  And Krista’s most solemn wish? To start a family with me as soon as I returned from my secondment as a military chaplain.

  At first I avoided telling her, because it felt like yet another explosion. I’d already survived one, but I didn’t know if I’d be so lucky second time round. And now time has passed, and the longer I leave it, the more difficult setting off another bombshell seems. My wounds from the previous one were superficial – I’ve largely forgotten about them in my day-to-day life. Another explosion would send us back to square one. And probably further still – perhaps to a situation I thought I’d put behind me: a life without Krista.

  I don’t want to think about a life like that.

  And, of course, I’m carrying another secret too. Doubt. For what kind of God thinks this is good and acceptable, yet allows all the evils I have seen? I have asked God these questions, and I realise the paradoxical nature of my actions.

  God, meanwhile, has remained silent.

  I swap my trainers for a pair of winter boots, shrug on my eiderdown jacket, a thick red scarf, pull on my woolly hat and gloves, and leave. The crisp snow crunches beneath my feet as I walk through the centre of the village: Pipsa’s Motel, Mini-Mart, the Teboil garage, the Golden Moon Night Club, Mega-Mart, Hurme Gear, Lasse’s Bar, the Co-op Bank, Hirvonen’s Auto Repairs, and the Pleasure Island Thai massage parlour. Then, at the end of the perpetually deserted main street, the Town Hall and the War Museum. In the museum car park, cars with their motors running, red rear lights gleaming like pairs of sleep-deprived eyes. Villagers filled with meteor-mania. And, of course, members of the village committee.

  I am about to turn onto the street where we live when I recall the confusion regarding yesterday’s security shifts.

  I walk towards the museum. A large SUV with two men sitting inside is driving towards me. The driver is short and not wearing a hat. In the passenger seat is a man who can only be described as a giant. He fills half of the vehicle. The car has Russian plates. This afternoon’s fresh snow billows up and dampens my right cheek.

  Four men are having a meeting in the car park. I recognise each of them even from this distance. Jokinen: a storekeeper whose acquisition methods remain unclear. Sometimes I get the sense that his yoghurts come from somewhere other than the wholesalers, and the meat he sells tastes fresher than anything I’ve ever bought at the meat counter in the local supermarket. Turunmaa: a farmer who deals mostly in potatoes and swedes, who dabbles in a bit of sprat fishing, and who owns so much forest he could form his own country. Räystäinen: mechanic and owner of the village gym, a man with a passion for bodybuilding, who insists that I too should take out membership of his gym and start working out properly. I have natural shoulders, apparently, and almost no fat to burn off. Then there’s Himanka: a pensioner, a man who looks so old and fragile that I wonder whether he should be out in temperatures this cold.

  The four men notice my arrival. The conversation instantly dies down.

  ‘Joel,’ says Turunmaa by way of a greeting. He is wearing a furry cap and a leather jacket. The others are wrapped in quilted jackets and woolly hats.

  As usual, Turunmaa seems to be leading the conversation. ‘We’re having a bit of a pow-wow.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Tonight’s guard duty,’ says Räystäinen.

  They fall silent. I look first at Jokinen.

  ‘I have to Skype my daughter in America,’ he says.

  ‘What?’ asks Himanka, shivering with cold.

  I look at Turunmaa.

  ‘I want to watch the match,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a tenner on it.’

  ‘That time of the month, I’m afraid,’ says Räystäinen. He has a frankly astonishingly young wife, and they are doing exactly what Krista wishes we were doing: making vigorous attempts to start a family. I know this because Räystäinen has regaled me with the fine details.

  I don’t even consider Himanka an option.

  ‘I’ll stand guard tonight,’ I say.

  Houses line the street at irregular intervals, and the lights are on in almost all of them. Round here people go home early. In Helsinki the lights go on around six o’clock in the evening; here they flicker into life after three. Another car drives past, and this time I recognise the driver. The dark-haired lady often sings at the Golden Moon. She gives me the same look she always does. It’s not especially warm. In fact, it seems to say more than simply, you’re in my way. She is smoking a cigarette and talking to the man sitting next to her. They pass me and continue driving towards the museum.

  I turn at the junction, and I can already see the lights. I walk for another four minutes or so, then step into the garden.

  I knock the snow from my shoes against the concrete
steps of our rented detached house. Opening the front door, I can already smell the cabbage rolls. I slip off my shoes, take off my outdoor clothes and walk inside.

  Krista is in the kitchen, standing with her back to me, cooking dinner, just as she has done innumerable times before. The love of my life, I think automatically. What would I have if I didn’t have you? The familiar thought echoes through my mind, curling and swirling; it’s done that a lot recently.

  I give her a hug, press my nose into her thick chestnut hair and draw the smell deep into my lungs. I see her long, thin fingers on the chopping board, in her left hand a plump red tomato, in her right a shining kitchen knife.

  ‘I’m going to be on guard duty tonight,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she says.

  2

  Perhaps the nocturnal War Museum, devoid of people, is the right place for me right now. Old weapons, uniforms, recoilless rifles, helmets, grenades, a cannon. Historical maps and demarcation lines. Images of famous local battles.

  I’m not in the best spiritual place, as they say. I’m about halfway through the night’s guard duty.

  I walk around because I simply can’t sit still, and I can’t concentrate enough to read. The Bible seems to be accusing me of something, and in some inexplicable way I feel it should be the other way round. And the stifling heat of Ellroy’s Los Angeles seems too far removed from where I find myself right now: Eastern Finland, in the centre of the remote village of Hurmevaara. Only twenty or so kilometres from the Russian border. It’s –23°C outside and it’s the middle of the night, the time approaching 2:30 a.m. I realise I’m thinking that if God had a back, he turned it on me some time ago.

  I arrive at what’s called the Long Hall and come to a halt by the meteorite – a chunk of black rock that has come hurtling through space, and that’s exactly what it looks like.

  I remember the facts listed in the local paper. Initial tests suggest that it might be an example of the extremely rare iron meteorite; and the thing weighs about four kilos. It contains large amounts of platinum metals. Only a handful of similar meteorites have ever been found. Of those, one – a lump of rock that came crashing through the roof of a sports hall in the United States – was auctioned off in small pieces. The price per gram of meteoric rock can reach 250 euros. The fact box at the bottom of the article calculated that, if the Hurmevaara meteorite were to be sold off by the gram, it could be worth up to a million euros.

  Only a few more nights in Hurmevaara, I think as I stare at the black lump.

  As for me…

  I left the house as soon as was feasible. I absorbed Krista’s news, hugged her, gave her a kiss. I listened as she told me a thousand times how much she loved me and gushed that finally we would be a family together. When I finally regained my composure, and when Krista specifically asked me, I assured her I was so very, very happy.

  Krista is pregnant. She is sure, she tells me, because she’s taken three separate pregnancy tests. I’m sure too. I’ve been through dozens of clinical tests with numerous specialist surgeons, and I cannot have children. And because I find it hard to believe in the virgin birth, the only option left on the table is that someone else has put the bun in her proverbial oven. And that someone must be a person capable of producing viable sperm.

  A man.

  This fact is even harder to understand than the pregnancy itself. When was Krista ever anything but good to me? When had she ever told or showed me she was unsatisfied? When was the last time even half a day went by without her saying (and, through the little details of her behaviour, demonstrating) that she loved me and me alone? And had a single night gone by without us falling asleep in each other’s arms, she curled in the crook of my arm, her left leg over my legs and her left arm across my chest?

  A man.

  My throat feels tight. There’s a gnawing feeling at the bottom of my stomach. Black electricity courses through my head.

  Of course, I could hardly say congratulations, then ask who’s the father. I couldn’t. I simply … couldn’t. If I did that, what would happen? Would Krista run off with said man? Raise the child alone? On top of that, I would have to admit that for two years and four months I’ve been keeping a secret that would have had an inevitable and irreparable effect on our relationship.

  Whatever the outcome, I would lose her.

  And life without Krista – I still don’t want to imagine such a thing.

  The meteorite is displayed at waist height in a glass cabinet. It has been travelling for billions of years and crossed billions of miles – and here it is.

  I look up. Identical glass cabinets run the length of the long, rectangular space. The faint night-time light casts a dim glow across the room; it seems the museum is saving electricity as well as security costs. Movement makes me feel slightly better, remaining on the spot is stifling, so I walk along the row of cabinets and stare into the vitrines without really registering what is inside them. Of course, I know without looking; my military background means I feel an almost personal attachment to each of these items.

  At the end of the row I come to a halt; I’m not sure what I’ve just heard.

  It’s hard to say anything specific about the sound, or whether I really heard it in the first place. It is very faint – vague and distant, bringing with it echoes of a distant thud, the sound of something smashing. I wait for a moment and try to make out what it might have been. I can hear nothing.

  I move to the doorway of the Long Hall, switch off the lights and listen closely. It’s as though some sort of sound is coming from the other end of the museum. Two or three rapid steps, perhaps. The other end of the museum is kept dark all night. I move quietly, slowly, and arrive in the lobby. The lobby is set slightly higher than the exhibition rooms, and in the middle of the ceiling sits a glass pyramid skylight, which lets in water and isn’t strong enough to hold the weight of the snow. As I try to listen more closely, I smell something.

  A scent, new and powerful, surrounds me. Here in the museum at this time of night the sensation is so unexpected that it takes me a moment to understand what it is.

  Perfume.

  A woman’s perfume. In the middle of the nocturnal lobby. It seems impossible.

  I look towards the entrance. The table and chair set out for the security guard are in their rightful places, as are the Bible and Ellroy, there on the table. Next to them is my phone. The floor lamp, which I’ve moved near the table, makes the surface of the table gleam and casts a golden semi-circle on the laminate flooring. Again I hear a sound at the other end of the museum.

  This time I can clearly make out footsteps. Then I sigh. Of course. The cleaner.

  We’ve been having problems with the museum’s cleanliness and we’ve hired someone who cleans in addition to her own shifts at a paper factory near Joensuu. She cleans at the museum whenever she gets a chance, so it seems she’s made it here in the early hours. But there’s still something surprising about the perfume. That, and the fact that she is working in the dark.

  I hear the footsteps again and walk towards her. I arrive at the doorway, and I am about to enter the room when something heavy strikes the side of my head just above the ear. I stumble, almost fall over, but it’s only after the second blow that I lose consciousness. I collapse on the floor.

  I hear the sound of smashing glass, running feet. More glass smashing. I was only fully unconscious for a brief moment. Someone runs past me. It’s not the first time in my life I’ve experienced something like this. It feels much like being caught in an ambush. And it’s not hard to guess what the intruders are after; the museum is currently home to a meteorite worth a million euros.

  It sounds like the running feet are making their way to the far end of the museum. I stagger to my feet and run after them. I can see a beam of torchlight up ahead. My head hurts; I can feel blood trickling past my ear.

  I see someone clambering through a broken window and out into the starlit night. Arriving at the window, I
see two figures dressed in black trudging through the snow under the gleam of the stars. I jump after them and immediately fall to my knees in the cold snow. My head is still reeling from the blow. The two make their way through the snow. Again the smell of perfume.

  I am already running through the snow when I become aware of two things: my own inadequate attire and the direction of the pair of intruders. They are heading towards the edge of the woods, and behind the half-kilometre strip of woodland runs a highway. There’s no way the pair are going to hide away in the small woodland; they must have left their get-away car near the highway. I turn and run towards the car park, pulling the keys from my pocket. If I turn back now, the thieves will almost certainly get away. The only option is to catch up with them, see what they look like. Perhaps even more. I’ve been in worse situations. I can’t help but think that this had to happen on my watch.

  Their plan is a shrewd one. In order to reach the section of the highway, where I assume their car is waiting, I’ll have to drive the long way round. I’m going well over the speed limit. Our small, economical Škoda isn’t used to this kind of speed. I let out a frustrated roar as I realise my phone is back at the museum, next to my books, illuminated by the lamp.

  It’s now even more vital I catch up with this pair of crooks.

  I turn onto the highway and put my foot down on the accelerator. Almost nothing happens. The Škoda’s acceleration is slow at the best of times, so perhaps it’s too much to expect a record-breaking performance at this precise moment. I arrive at the spot where I guess their car must be parked. This is the most probable location: from here, there’s a path leading through the woods directly to the museum. I see damage in the snow verges, footprints. I continue driving. So far they haven’t come towards me, so the only option is to continue straight ahead. I can’t remember how far this road stretches before the next turn off. Far enough.

  I take a tissue and wipe the blood from around my ear, and as I do I see a set of red lights ahead of me. I keep the accelerator pressed to the floor and catch up with the car in front one metre at a time. It disappears round a bend, but soon comes back into view. The car appears to be travelling at quite a speed – and why wouldn’t it? There are no police round here. The only risk is encountering an elk on the road, but if an elk crashes across your windscreen it doesn’t matter whether you’re driving at eighty km/h or at 130; the effect is the same.