The Blood of Angels Page 5

  Just to be sure I look into the junk room: there in the untouched, petrified stillness are the old supply of clay pots, the pitchfork with the missing handle and the bent fish-trap and the empty nail on the wall. The bricks are in the corner, peaceful and quiet, with the can of leftover white paint sitting on top of them, no doubt completely dried up by now.

  I bend over and pick the overalls up from the floor, go to put them on the nail in the junk room. That’s why I came up here, right?

  *

  When I get back to the house I have a third whisky, because if I don’t I won’t be able to bear the darkening evening.

  I know that the human brain when it encounters a great crisis can develop all kinds of defence mechanisms. The brain can create perceptions that feel real, the feeling that everything’s all right again, that the bad thing didn’t really happen and you’re not really buried under the ruins of an earthquake but safe at home, drinking fresh cold water. Or you can have hallucinations the purpose of which are simply to divert your thoughts from the source of your distress, to diminish the stress experienced by the body by redirecting your attention, if only for a moment, to something else, something wondrous and strange.

  That night.

  The noises. The flashes.

  I don’t even know why I took off at a run towards Hopevale Meats. Maybe it was a kind of intuition. An unconscious knowledge. Maybe a lot of little clues came together in my head all at once, things that I had seen, the meanings of which I hadn’t yet perceived.

  Or hadn’t wanted to perceive.

  I ran to my father’s property, drawn to the flashing blue lights of the police cars like a moth to a flame.

  EERO THE ANIMAL’S BLOG

  PONDERINGS ON OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ANIMALS

  THE INSECT WITHIN US

  Our esteemed commenter Seppo Kuusinen was trying to make some kind of joke when he commented on my previous post that pretty soon we would be classifying bees as mammals. For his information, Johannes Mehring classified bees as vertebrates way back in the 19th century.

  Huh? Insects as vertebrates?

  That’s right. Mehring felt that a bee colony is one creature, an organism comparable to the vertebrates. The various ‘individuals’ are parts of the body performing the functions of organs. After all, we don’t give our pancreas or larynx the status of living beings. Although perhaps we do sometimes with the penis, from what the big boys tell me. :-)

  But mere vertebrate status isn’t enough once you really start to split hairs.

  What group of animals has females who produce nourishment for their offspring while they’re in a helpless state?

  What group of animals offers their young a carefully designed and regulated environment, protected from the outside world, climate-controlled to a steady temperature of about 36 degrees Celsius until they’re ready to go out into the world?

  What group of animals uses survival strategies that include continuous, efficient learning and a highly developed system of communication?

  In short, a bee colony, when examined according to biological criteria, is, in fact, a mammal. (The idea isn’t my own. The first to say so may have been a man named Jürgen Tautz.)

  A vertebrate. A mammal. But still much, much lower than humans, right?

  Well, let’s see. Bees are a species that has an advanced ability to control many variables in their environment and succeeding regardless of fluctuations in living conditions.

  It’s a species that produces its own food, stores it in a very efficient form and is thus able to survive for long periods no matter what happens in their environment.

  A species that protects itself through defensive organization and closed, sheltered architectonic structures.

  A species that regulates the temperature of its dwelling.

  A species that is capable of forming concepts. Bees have been taught to react to symbols in mazes such as crosses and circles. A cross and a circle mean a turn to the right, while two identical marks mean a turn to the left. They’ll go in the right direction even if the crosses and circles are replaced with other symbols or even colours.

  A species that won’t shit in its own nest. Bees wait all winter metaphorically crossing their legs and don’t defecate until the spring, because shitting in their own nest would destroy the entire colony. This is something humans could do well to learn.

  Apis sapiens, I would call them.

  They are entirely comparable to humans in many ways, but the thing that distinguishes us from them is that bee colonies are, in principle, immortal.

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  DAY TEN

  The new, mended bee suit looks good, like it never had anything wrong with it. I complain in my head about the way the world is: the most rational thing to do would have been to return an apparently defective suit, but since the damage was small and easily fixed I just didn’t bother. Sending it in and waiting for a new one would have been too difficult and complicated. Right now, anyway. For me, anyway.

  I would rather put it on and go out to the hives. For some reason I think of my bees as my real work even though they give me nothing but worry. My paying work is, well, paying work.

  *

  I went to business school like Ari wanted – it wasn’t as if I had any consuming interests anyway if I couldn’t make bee-keeping my profession. Ari counted on me becoming the managing director of Hopevale Meats after him. He would retire, go part-time and continue as chairman of the board.

  It was like a movie. Of all the American movie clichés the biggest one, aside from the tart with a heart of gold, is the overbearing father, forcing his offspring into a mould, destroying a promising career as an artist – or some other endeavour the audience finds com mendable – an evil force single-mindedly channelling his children into the pattern of his own values, a character whom the audience thirsts to kill, whether symbolically or actually.

  Ari wasn’t like that.

  Ari had nothing but the best of intentions. Even when he went to America and left me in the care of my grandparents, thus pretty much abandoning his only son, it was the proud, simple gesture of a philanthropist. Ari was always striving to learn, searching for new models, training himself to think bigger and create a better future for me in the process. True, it was a model that turned out to benefit him as well, but he was thinking of me. He didn’t want me to end up scraping by as a small farmer pottering around with my bees like Pupa. I ought to have cars, women, my own house and a couple of generations of pure-bred hounds.

  I understand Ari’s concern, his need to bequeath me an established, thriving business. But in the same way that Ari was planning what he thought of as a wise and correct course, I was, like all boys with any spine, having none of it. Hadn’t Ari himself built an empire out of almost nothing? Gone off to another country, towards the unknown, to prove his initiative and ability to everyone? And what boy who craved his father’s respect and acceptance would do what he was expecting me to do? No, respect has to be earned through what you do yourself, a solo race, not just humbly accepting the relay baton when it’s passed to you.

  Or maybe I just made my decision because as an adolescent I’d had no father to throw tantrums for, and now I did.

  *

  I have an uncle named Tero, born about ten years before my mother. After my mother died we didn’t really have anything to do with that side of the family – we only kept in contact through Christmas cards.

  Tero inherited a business from an uncle in another branch of the family, and he didn’t want to run it. I don’t know what made him think of me. Maybe Ari’s business was so successful that it made Tero think we had some kind of genetic aptitude for running companies. When I read his email it made me smile, but I called him on the number he’d sent, and we arranged to meet.

  He took me to where the business was, and I could see right away that there was something about the look of the place that worked. If there ever was a visual representation of the
smell of death, they’d captured it.

  The display windows were entirely covered in a black plastic film. The dreariness of the rain-spattered shop front lit by slanting spring sunlight, the rain-streaked dirt on the large front window spoke the inexorable language of the way of all dust. The window said ARWIDSSON’S FUNERAL SERVICES in stick-on letters peeling at the edges. But the location wasn’t bad, I sensed that almost automatically.

  My uncle took a bundle of jangling keys out of his anorak pocket, and we stepped inside. Although it was a beautiful March day the blacked-out window meant we had to turn on all the lights. They came on with a fluttering sound, as if the dead flies that dotted the glass of the fluorescent tubes had suddenly been resurrected.

  The gloomy front room of the shop was dominated by coffins on raised, bunkbed-like platforms. As my uncle walked past them I noticed that the breeze of his passing stirred the pale gold tassels that hung at the corners of each platform, sending motes of dust drifting into the air. The coffins were decorated with kitschy, cheap-looking crosses. Plywood peeped out from under the poorly made, yellowed drapery covering the platforms.

  I caught myself thinking, I’d die before I’d be buried in a coffin like that.

  Uncle Tero showed me the coffins then blew the dust off a red plastic folder that he took from a shelf on the wall.

  ‘This is the stone catalogue.’ He turned pages of floppy plastic pockets filled with what looked like snapshots of graves taken with a cheap camera, some blurred, all of them indifferently lit. Most of the stones were grim, upright, polished rectangles with two options for lettering – carved or gilded. Then there were a few deluxe models, basically curved-edged rectangles with a choice of two carved figures – an angel or praying hands.

  ‘My uncle had a good contract with this stonecutter. You present these to the customer, sell them a little, get a good commission. When they’re in that situation they don’t usually want to start shopping and comparing prices.’

  I tried to clear my thoughts and adapt my marketing education to this unaccustomed, somewhat macabre world.

  This was an essential product and service. That was undeniable. There would always be a place for it. The target market never changed. It wasn’t a business that fluctuated with the trends. Or did it? I would just have to find out.

  But how would you control demand? How would you develop your service? This wasn’t a day-to-day product or an impulse purchase to make life a little easier. When it comes to food, it’s a simple matter to develop time-saving convenience foods, ready-to-heat servings of pasta for people who can’t wait ten minutes for water to boil, pre-cut frozen potatoes and onions for people who don’t know which end of a knife to hold. Those things sold. But for a product like this you couldn’t use some slogan like ‘From morgue to mausoleum in less than six hours’.

  Then it occurred to me: a negative need. Like toilet paper when there isn’t any. The truisms don’t apply. A situation that comes up totally unexpectedly, maybe for the first time. Something has changed in an unpleasant way, and it has to be taken care of, placed out of sight.

  If the customer’s condition is stripped of all its emotion, it’s basically just like the demand that’s created when you hit an elk with your car and you’re shocked to the core and gratefully ready to pay someone to handle it, someone whose job is to clear animal carcasses off the highway and tow cars to the breaker’s yard, someone who can tell you how the insurance works in these situations.

  ‘It isn’t rocket science,’ my uncle says. ‘You put on a suit, say the right things. The customers will usually tell you what they want. Whether they’re hoping for an oak coffin – for some reason older men always want it made out of oak. Then you ask if the family has a burial plot and so on.’

  Say the right things?

  ‘You know, don’t say die or death or body. Talk about the departed or passing into eternity or maybe just be simple and say the deceased. It’s hard to avoid talking about it when you’re arranging the transport, for instance, so deceased is a good choice. And then you sell the coffin and the headstone. Good commissions. You make a deal with a caterer, and you get something from that, too, since you’re steering business their way. A customer in that situation doesn’t necessarily want to think about what to put in the sandwiches or whether to serve shortbread with the coffee.’

  I flipped through the pictures of headstones. What if I were a newly widowed wife who had significant liquidity collecting in a drawer somewhere and was faced with this negative need? In that situation wouldn’t it be awful to be forced to buy something ugly just because I had no alternative? Once they’ve walked into a funeral director’s would anyone dare to start quibbling about the headstone design or complaining that the deceased was a Japanophile so why couldn’t they serve sushi at the wake?

  *

  I thought there must be people who, even in a time of negative need, would still only buy a certain kind of patterned and embossed toilet paper. It may be a negative need, but it’s important to them that even if a thing is unavoidable you are paying for it after all, and it would be nice if it at least didn’t look crappy.

  Crappy. I just about managed to stifle a laugh. But wasn’t it true, for heaven’s sake? Wasn’t it just the circle of life made visible at both the macro and micro level? There was dead matter that needed to be removed from the system. Sometimes you sent it on its way in shame and secrecy with a flush down the toilet, at other times you gave it a flyover and a 21-gun salute. In both cases you’re talking about biomass removed from its connection to consciousness.

  I realized that you could approach this thing with the same kind of premium pride that you had with any other unavoidable thing that we avoid in life. You could think about it in the same biologically neutral, antiseptic, coldly economic terms as toilet paper. Toilet paper could still be soft, pleasingly designed, beautifully packaged and expensive.

  *

  We aren’t grim reapers ourselves, we’re merely Charon’s ferrymen.

  We aren’t surrounded by the stench of death. We aren’t the police, doctors, firemen, ambulance crews or hospice workers. We don’t dive into smoke, scorch ourselves in a sea of flames. We don’t fight to the very last with defibrillators, shots of adrenaline or CPR. We don’t stare at the EEG or ECG monitor with a desperate look in our eyes or sigh with desolation when all hope is lost. We’re the ones you call when the truth has already come crashing down, when nothing can be done. We aren’t to blame for anything.

  Well, actually, that’s not quite true. If something goes wrong in the ceremony, if the urn falls over and the casual summer staff pretend not to notice, if the Karelian pies on the coffee service dry out or the whipped cream turns yellow, if the photographer’s hungover and doesn’t get a record of all the mourners, then we’re the ones they complain to, the shoulder that all the tears of frustration are cried on, along with the tears for the fact that Dad never paid any attention to Mum’s drinking, that the aunt who just rolled into eternity in her wheelchair promised them the silver candlesticks, but their brother’s sneaky son took them. You’re there for them, a service professional, a person, a shoulder, and you hand them a moisturized tissue from the shelf in the reception room (those special Kleenexes that Salme recommended).

  Salme. She was a chapter unto herself. She had professional experience, I don’t deny that. But when I took charge of the business I changed all the rules.

  I remodelled the shop from top to bottom, gave it soft light, almost like a living-room. A sofa set, silk cushions, modern Scandinavian furniture. Soft classical music playing in the background.

  We’re a full-service establishment. Our coffin, headstone and urn selection is unparalleled in quality and style. We even order items from abroad.

  I thought about the name of the business for a long time. Eventually I got the idea from a headstone design referred to as the suitcase model. If the stone was the deceased person’s suitcase, then we were their Port of Departure.


  Salme no longer suited the style of Port of Departure. She was somewhere between forty and sixty – it hardly mattered. She dressed in pearl-grey blazers over a rotating selection of pale-blue and lavender-pink blouses, and she knew the stoneworks sales rep and the coffin wholesaler by their first names.

  Salme was just the kind of pious ‘Olga Golgatha’ people might unconsciously want to meet when they went to a funeral director’s. That was part of what made me want to get rid of her – her liturgical tone when speaking, the flood of euphemisms she used, just as Tero recommended, about ‘passing’ and going to a ‘final resting place’. What’s wrong with straightforward, neutral words such as body, death or grave?

  Of course, you need to know how to honour grief, too, and not go overboard with overly casual language.

  That’s why Teemu was let go. Teemu was the hearse driver and handyman. His national service had been in non-military capacity – a lanky fellow with a bad complexion whose hair was always a bit untidy (although this was hardly anything to do with not having served in the military; he was just lazy). Teemu’s problem was that he tried to be casual about death. He called the hearse the ‘carcass cart’, the burial the ‘big dig’ and the crematorium the ‘grill’. ‘Shall we toss this meat on the grill?’ he might say, ‘Pop these ashes in a jar?’ In addition to jar, he sometimes called the urn the ‘jug’; the coffin he referred to as the ‘crate’ and the flower arrangements as the ‘veg’. He didn’t talk that way in front of the customers, of course, but I would get a ringing in my ears when he came in for a coffee break and said, stony-faced, ‘How many stiffs we putting in the dirt this week?’

  I hired a well-built, quiet army veteran to replace him. I think being pleasant to look at is not at all a bad thing for a person working in a funeral director’s. And I never would have guessed that a young man who’d been in the army would be so much better at the job than one who hadn’t. Maybe it was his military training – but there was something paradoxical in that. A man trained as a dispenser of death had an unmistakably stronger respect for death.