The Blood of Angels Page 14

  Ari stands in front of me and reaches out his shovel hands. ‘Son, son!’ he sighs dramatically, preparing to enclose us both in a consoling patriarchal embrace.

  I push him away with such violent contempt that his wall of a body staggers backwards, and he no doubt reads the rest from my face.

  I wrench myself away from Marja-Terttu’s grip, turn and go to sit as far away as possible from Ari. I can hear the nervous tapping of heels as Marja-Terttu follows me. Perhaps she’s sensed that there’s no use trying to sort it out with Ari.

  Through forest land, a travelling child, an angel his heavenly guide.

  His journey is long, his home out of sight, but an angel is there by his side.

  I chose the song almost blind. Hellén and Hannikainen’s simple classic. It’s a song composed specifically for a child’s funeral, and this is a child, my child, in spite of his actual age. There’s nothing in the song about God, just a wise, able, winged protector.

  The song is being played on the organ, wordless. Hearing the sentimental lyrics echoing in my head is hard enough.

  When the organ music ends – Oh, little child, don’t ever let go of the hand of that angel who cares for you so – I’m supposed to get up and carry our joint flower arrangement up to the coffin, but there’s a lump the size of a shoe-box in my throat.

  I can’t do it. It’s too final. I’ve already given my message to Eero, a last message, a token, a guide. An angel to lead him home.

  A stupid, insane, glimmer of hope.

  Marja-Terttu is sitting beside me in a too-new, too-stiff suit, too tanned for a Finn, too made-up for a funeral, a handkerchief clutched tightly in her hand. I touch her shoulder, and when she lifts her redrimmed eyes, surprised, I almost shove the too-large, too-sweet flowers at her, get up, stumble out of the chapel, my vision blurred by a wavering film that’s building up, and I find my car, get in and speed away with a loud screech, leaving tyre marks on the asphalt.

  *

  Marja-Terttu left me the same way she had come into my life – determined, without bending to expectations or listening to dissenting opinions, without a glance at what she left behind or cast aside, like a seventy-kilogram force of nature. She had found me, bizarrely enough, at Port of Departure where she’d come to support a friend who was buying a coffin for her deceased father (I still remember that her friend Raakel’s father had died of an intestinal obstruction, the kind of insignificant detail that my mind preserves in spite of the fact that the greater part of our marriage is oddly hazy to me). Marja-Terttu said later that she had read me wrong, that the calm, manly way I treated Raakel’s grief, with the right combination of intimacy and distance, seemed to her to be a sign of inner harmony and integrity (she used words like that – she was an English-language teacher, after all), to show the tranquillity of my mind, the beauty of my psyche – but she had been wrong about all of it. She hadn’t realized how carefully controlled an undertaker’s persona has to be, how practised and refined it is, how it’s just a surface. Sniffing out death like a bomb-disposal dog.

  Didn’t it ever occur to her that there must be something wrong with me? After all, I was over thirty and still unmarried. Maybe her own biological clock was ticking so loud that it drowned out the time bomb ticking inside of me – or what she imagined was a time bomb; she never found anything destructive or explosive in me. Just one disappointment after another. One more harsh, faded and ugly matryoshka doll inside the next.

  One disappointment, one of the first, was in bed. Maybe some whiskered analyst could have dug up childhood memories and their possible resultant traumas, with a knowing glint of self-satisfaction in his eyes when I talked about the bridal flight of bees, the new queen’s departure from the hive, the swarm of greedy drones behind her, all of them wanting to erupt inside that mysterious giver of life and become the progenitor of a new colony, and Pupa calmly telling me how it didn’t end well. Once they fertilize the queen their penises break off inside her – snap! – and the males lie dead on the ground. The wages of sex is death.

  Even I don’t know what to think about it. I did have girlfriends, experiments, panting and fumbling, damp and bewildered under a blanket, body parts that had been just pictures and fantasies suddenly under my fingers, sometimes a feeling almost of satisfaction, the zing of pleasure as the girl let out a sound at the right moment. Those moments were like a movie or a book and so they felt right.

  Marja-Terttu thought for a long time that she could peel away my awkwardness, my shyness, probably thought at first that they were endearing qualities, a skin that I would eventually shed, the outer shell of the matryoshka doll, a chrysalis I would soon discard, roaring and tossing her from one end of the couch to the other like a wild gorilla, howling with joy, an insatiable mate, a virgin who’d finally realized his inner carnality.

  But that never happened. No matter how she tried.

  I didn’t love her – that was the other big disappointment. She probably thought it was love when I let everything happen. A man wouldn’t let someone lead him to the altar if he didn’t feel something for her, would he? But it was just that I never found the words to respond to her step-by-step progression of logical suggestions. Why don’t we get engaged? My mother’s turning seventy this summer. That would be a good place for a wedding! Hey, I got my promotion – let’s have a baby! It wasn’t in me to say no. I couldn’t have looked her in the eye, imagining her eyes filling with tears and defiance if I refused. And it was so easy to think that now was the time, that it was, in fact, the last possible moment that I could start a family, be normal, ordinary, put to rest for good the things that people I knew might be thinking about my sexuality.

  And sometimes, when we were lying together in bed, it felt like Marja-Terttu’s round, pale side rising and falling was an immovable mountain range between myself and an endless desert of loneliness.

  *

  Now I’m running away from her, my ex-wife, the mother of my child, and from my own father, a murderer, and from the shell of my son.

  PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES

  A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES

  SOULLESSNESS AND SPECIFICITY

  It used to seem self-evident that there was a vast divide between people and animals. That humans were without question the most advanced, intelligent and developed creatures on Earth. Period.

  This claim was based on the large size of the human brain in relation to the rest of the body.

  Then we were forced to admit that a shrew has an even greater brain-to-body ratio.

  But never mind that. Suddenly what was important was the number of folds in the brain. This made humans once again the most intelligent, momentarily, but then a species of whale was found that surpassed humans in this regard as well.

  We were starting to have some trouble with our rationale. Whether it was language, ability to count, empathy, altruism, expression of grief, abstract thought, the use of tools, creativity – pretty much as soon as something was held up as a measure of humanity some pesky scientist would go and do some tests or observations and one species or another would prove to have mastered that as well.

  Organized religion is almost the only characteristic that still separates humans and animals – at least for the time being. We haven’t yet observed animals having any rites of worship or behaviours that could be interpreted as such. It’s funny when you realize that it was religion – the one area of human behaviour that is the last straw we cling to to justify our superiority – that created the soul. You see, the soul is invisible, imperceptible, so it’s reeeeeally handy and airtight to claim that humans have one and animals don’t.

  At some point the world picked up on the fact that at the moment of death the human body loses 20 to 30 grams of weight. It was claimed that this was because of the soul leaving the body. Although today we assume that the change in weight is caused by the cessation of breathing and the drying of the body, it would be interesting to know whether
tests have ever been done on a single animal.

  And even if they were, what then? What if scientists one day locate the soul – if, for instance, it’s shown to be a magnetic field that can perhaps be photographed? I’ll bet you anything that if animals are found to have a similar ‘soul’ then it will be the wrong size, the wrong colour or in some other sense clearly not as good.

  *

  The soul, whether it exists or not, is also not the same thing as emotion or the ability to feel it. Animals are products of evolution, just like people are, and they’re born with various pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings, just like people. Such feelings are often connected with the preservation of the species and are thus among the most basic impulses. It’s nice to get food when you’re hungry. It’s good to protect your offspring. It’s easier to live when you follow society’s basic rules.

  Many of these emotions are based on biology – just as they are for humans – and for that very reason one of the most important rights of animals is their right to live a life appropriate to their species. In fact, the less ability for abstract thought an animal has, the more it probably suffers when made to live in the wrong conditions. People can easily rationalize their suffering as a punishment from God or try various thought projections to help themselves to endure inhumane conditions (like making up mathematical exercises in a concentration camp). People are also capable of killing themselves and for all we know are also better at motivating themselves to do it than other animals are. If you think about it, an animal doesn’t have an awful lot of ways to grasp a situation and is thus all the more to be pitied.

  If an animal is a herd animal, for instance, it should be allowed to exercise herd behaviour. That is its basic way of life. Because humans are also herd animals we understand that being separated from others and having families forcibly broken up is just about the shittiest punishment we can think of. If the bond between an animal and its young is also clearly a caring one (what I don’t hesitate to call an emotional bond) then separating an animal and its parent is also an extremely cruel act.

  Calves, which are normally very close to their mothers for as much as a year after birth, are often taken from their mothers at the age of one or two days, in Finland as elsewhere. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry says in a report that the early transfer of calves reduces dairy expenses, shortens growing times and can increase slaughter weights.

  Both the calf and the mother attempt to call to each other for days after separation. The lactating cow is difficult to milk because she’s reserving her milk for her calf. The calf may compulsively suck on the walls of its stall. Neither will eat. They move about restlessly and actively try to get to each other.

  It vividly brings to mind the primate studies done since the 1950s on maternal conflict and studies that simulate maternal rejection. These systematic torture methods drove young primates into deep psychoses.

  Can psychosis exist without emotions?

  LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 38)

  USER NAME: Siru

  How horrible! I think apes are so cute.

  USER NAME: Boo hoo!

  What the hell kind of personal mother trauma have you got that makes you get all worked up about protecting some supposed cow-calf bond? Did you get the teat pulled out of your mouth too young or what?

  SHOW ALL 36 COMMENTS

  DAY FIFTEEN

  I drive well over the speed limit towards Hopevale. I know that my phone would be ringing if it were on, but it’s not on. Funerals might be the only place nowadays where personal-data devices are turned off. I’m unwilling and unable to talk. I can see Marja-Terttu, she would have first taken the flowers up to the coffin alone, read the text on the ribbon aloud (‘Endlessly missing you, Mum and Dad’) and then perhaps gone outside to call me while the other guests presented their flowers.

  Not that there was a long line of mourners. Marja-Terttu’s parents, who barely nodded at me, a couple of distant relatives, some of Eero’s schoolmates, a few of the Singers, one them a girl I’d met before. I saw their burning looks when their eyes fell on Ari, and a man from the security company – apparently there at Ari’s request – gave them the once-over as they came in. Maybe the Singers had planned a demonstration at the funeral. That would have been the only good reason for me to stay – to see what the Singers could make of the situation. A martyr’s death.

  There they are now, next to the coffin, their heads bent but their spirits uprightly defiant. Eero is more than Eero to them.

  *

  The name Eero was also Marja-Terttu’s wish; her grandfather’s name. Someone once made a joke about Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers, said, ‘Didn’t you start at the wrong end? Eero’s the youngest in the book.’ But a more sharp-eyed person would have been able to read our faces like a book that said, ‘No, there’ll be no more ties binding us together. This one is already one too many.’

  It’s often said that the first great crisis in a marriage is the birth of the first child. Two people become three, a line becomes a triangle, the relationship between mother and child sucks all the energy and tenderness out of the marriage, sleeplessness and fatigue is added to the mix and jealousy of the little bundle of vampire.

  Some men claim that when their wives become mothers they can no longer see them as sexual beings. A whiff of incest creeps into their relationship; somewhere deep within them motherhood means their own mother.

  Other men are just drones who become worthless once they’ve done their reproductive duty. Their penises break off. Snap! Although we don’t die after our task of fertilization is completed, something inside us dies. We’re ghosts of drones, living castrati.

  *

  In any case, the feelings in our relationship were probably so small and so wrong from the outset, on both sides, that Eero’s birth could wipe them away as easily as the wind blows the new snow from a boulder, revealing the hardness and coldness under that deceptive softness. Marja-Terttu started to realize her own miscalculation. I wasn’t a clay tablet, a tabula rasa that you could press your dreams into with a stylus or carve like a memorial plaque with your own happy history.

  Eero’s birth made it easy to turn on the cooler for good. My own straightforward, democratic attitude towards Eero’s care brought out the dirt we had been hiding in our relationship. It seemed obvious to me that I could leave Port of Departure in the capable hands of my employees at any time to stay home and take care of Eero if Marja-Terttu needed some time to herself. And, of course, she took advantage of the situation and went scenting around more and more openly, more than is normal for a new mother, while I mixed baby cereal, mashed potatoes and let my daily rhythm slide into the routine of Eero’s needs.

  I should have noticed that Marja-Terttu’s visits to the gym, her power walks, the considerable weight she was losing on these outings, the clothes she bought and her new, youngish, often high-maintenance hair-dos were more than a new mother’s need to let off steam.

  *

  Jani came into the picture with the same brazen, bulldozerish straight forwardness that Marja-Terttu had when she came into my life. Eero was less than a year old when she introduced him to me. Brought him home like a teenage girl bringing him to meet her father. There wasn’t a bit of fear about it, no electricity, because the few years we’d been together had shown her that I wasn’t a predator who protected his territory and his female with bared teeth, I wasn’t going to suddenly become a roaring berserker brandishing fists and bread knives, not even when my wife brought home a man and announced he was her lover and she was going to marry him.

  It would have been easy to imagine such a man would be a scheming Don Juan, a ladies’ man who’d easily wrapped a woman approaching middle age around his little finger, but Jani was an ordinary-looking fellow with a visible paunch and a visibly receding hairline. He was wearing a light-brown, zippered leather jacket and tan topsiders. He sat on the edge of a chair and leaned forwards, his arms twisted around each other between his knees
, and nodded when Marja-Terttu explained that everything was decided and settled.

  I didn’t even have to try to understand the reasons for the decision, since Jani was so clearly right for her, so ordinary and trustworthy that he must have been that way since early childhood. An honest Finnish man. An electrical engineer. Not involved in something weird and morbid like I was.

  We two men nodded at each other while Marja-Terttu planned, explained, pointed out. She said that half of everything – the apartment, the car, the Hopevale cottage and, of course, Port of Departure, a place she’d never worked in for even one day, whose door she hadn’t entered since we were dating – belonged to her.

  Her demands were completely unreasonable. She had only paid for part of the apartment, not even a full half. The Hopevale land Pupa had left to me, and although it may have been half hers according to the letter of the law, spiritually it belonged to me. And Port of Departure was mine. Mine alone. But I understood that if I had to buy her out of the house and the business I would have to sell them. Both of them. Although I was successful and reasonably well-off I couldn’t scrape up even half of the market value of Port of Departure.

  No, we didn’t have a prenuptial agreement. I’m sure Marja-Terttu had never even heard of such a thing, and if she had she had been wisely silent, and I was about to say just that when there was a noise from the bedroom.

  Eero was waking up from his nap.

  The three of us – Marja-Terttu, Jani and I – stiffened. This was no longer about bank accounts or whose name was on the car registration. The fact struck us all simultaneously, even Jani. This situation was by no means a simple one for him.

  ‘Of course, you’ll have complete visiting rights to Eero,’ Marja-Terttu said, and Jani nodded.

  All I could do was stare, her words were so black, so dark.