The Blood of Angels Read online

  *

  Once Eero came with me to pick up a body from the hospital. He was four or five years old. He was curious and focused, as always. The human body we were putting in the coffin interested him just a little.

  He asked why the man wasn’t moving, and I told him that the man was dead. The word clearly interested him; he’d heard it so many times on television.

  He followed up – although at that age he was considerably more inter ested in the tassels on the coffin and the mysterious-looking embroidery on the burial robe – by asking whether dying was like sleeping, and I said not really, because when you die you don’t wake up. And every one of us will die when our time comes, but that usually doesn’t happen until we’re very, very old or very, very ill.

  He asked the inevitable question, ‘Why?’

  I said that if people didn’t eventually die there wouldn’t be enough room in the world for new children.

  That answer suited him fine – he was a child himself, and as a member of the children’s party and thus clearly one of that organization’s beneficiaries (at least for the time being) the idea seemed only natural and fitting.

  *

  A couple of years later, when I was picking him up from a weekend spent at Hopevale (I was busy with multiple funerals, and Reija, Salme’s replacement, was off sick), I found him and Ari in a surprising place: the yards at Hopevale Meats. Ari nonchalantly mentioned ‘showing Eero around’.

  I took a deep breath and had a sudden sense of what Eero had just experienced.

  The permeating, coppery smell of blood. The spattered tile walls, the rusty patina on the concrete floor, the vats full of slimy organs like grotesque deep-sea creatures. The whine of the bone saws. The carcasses on hooks, their chest cavities ripped open to the spine, moving past on an indifferent conveyor towards the door behind which began – noisily – the decisive, crashing, dismantling of the bodies.

  I looked at Eero. There was a little tight line around his mouth that I had learned to recognize, and his eyes avoided mine. His hand was still in Ari’s like a loose, forgotten tether.

  He wanted to be a big boy, to be brave, worthy of the gift of his grandpa’s attention, but he’d seen too much.

  And he didn’t know what words to use to talk to someone about it.

  I know I looked just the same when I lost my innocence. I was looking for an atlas on Pupa’s bookshelf, came across a book on the Second World War and opened it at random to the chapter on Auschwitz and Birkenau.

  *

  A few weeks after Eero’s tour of Hopevale he and I were at a large supermarket.

  The glass cases were stuffed with beef, pork, lamb. Elk, reindeer, antelope. Pile after red pile, great heaps of it, almost overflowing the meat counter, lavish mountains of meat as far as the eye could see with blood and defrosting fluids flowing out in puddles that meekly reflected their own final destruction. Boneless, bone in, chops, fillets, steaks and shanks, all on display.

  Even in death they draw our eyes to them, enticingly, provocatively posed. The tempting, dark red of marbled, well-aged sirloin; the sensuous, lard-layered curve of ham set at just the right angle. Minced beef illumined in bordello-red. Even the meat that was a bit past its prime was swathed in orange marinade like make-up to hide its age.

  Eero stopped in front of the display case.

  ‘Pieces of dead animals.’

  His voice was hard, almost defiant.

  Before I could say anything a woman standing next to us, taking her white paper package from the meat-seller, turned towards us.

  ‘Ugh. Don’t say it like that.’

  Eero looked at her with bright, innocent eyes.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  She didn’t look at Eero, she looked at me.

  ‘You might try teaching your child how to talk about food.’

  *

  Death is my profession. My approach to it is calm and composed. Just like Ari.

  If you compare Ari’s business with mine he would be the knife wielder off his meds, the drunk driver, the bacterial infection contracted in the hospital – the thing that sends my customers to me. He’s on the production side of death. I’m more like the capable chef who, once the job of killing is done, arranges the deceased as presentably as possible on the plate so it can be transferred aesthetically, with due respect for its ingredients, into the great circle of life, a delicacy for the grave’s open mouth, a tasty tit-bit for the always-hungry maw of the crematorium.

  *

  I slam my rubber boots on to the floor. One slaps against the tile floor of the centrifuge room, the other falls toe first and bounces half a metre into the air, almost comically, coming back up at me so hard that I jump to get out of the way. I stare at the boots, innocent in all of this. If you’d just stop thinking about Ari … I try to tell myself almost politely. Remain calm and composed, like I always say you are. Put your boots on like a good boy and go out among your buzzing livestock who are also blameless, although they’re at least alive unlike this inanimate rubber that you’re glaring at, grinding your teeth.

  I sit down on the bench, pick up the boots and pull them purposefully on like I’m going off to war.

  EERO THE ANIMAL’S BLOG

  PONDERINGS ON OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ANIMALS

  WHAT IS VALUABLE?

  William Longgood has said that we are at war with nature, even if we do use pretty euphemisms to describe that war, words like advancement, economic development, progress. And in a war, of course, there has to be a winner. Or to put it in economic terms, there are winnings – what we wrest out of our environment and distil into money.

  When I was little the concept of money was strange to me. Like many children I thought that money came from a slot in a wall or from the internet, but how it got there was mysterious, something only adults understood. Naturally I had a right to ask the nearest adult for as much of it as I dared, usually without having to do anything to earn it.

  Once, when my father refused to buy me some gadget of the moment, saying that he didn’t have the money for it, I asked that crucial question: what is money exactly? Of course, I knew that certain printed pieces of paper, metal discs and plastic cards had mysterious properties that made it possible to obtain things from the shop. But what was the magic? Where did it come from? Who decided its value?

  My father took me to his beehives.

  He told me about honey.

  He told me how honey was a concentration of the energy of the sun. Bees need food for themselves and their babies, and they also have to keep their nests warm in the winter. They use the energy that the sun gives, which is basically free – the sun shines even if the bees do nothing. But a bee can’t live directly off the sun’s energy. It has to gather nectar. Nectar is what honey is made from. And bees have to build a safe place to store the honey. All of this requires work. A whole lot of work. A kilogram of honey requires seven million separate visits to blossoms, and for that the bees have to fly as far as it takes to circle the Earth four times. The work of bees also helps flowering plants to reproduce, so the bees are, in a way, constantly creating more employment for their species.

  Honey is a distillation of work. The diligent flying and nectar-gathering of bees is transformed into the golden-yellow substance that makes a secure life – and steady job – possible for them and their offspring. The members of the hive who don’t gather nectar themselves but instead do other work such as building honeycombs or taking care of the larvae receive pay in the form of honey, which provides both food and warmth, in return for their work.

  Money is also a distillation of work. In order to get money a person has to work. Money is humans’ honey, even if you can’t eat it and shouldn’t use it directly to heat your house. Instead you can exchange it for the results of another person’s work, like food production or electricity.

  ‘Or sweets or toys,’ I said. ‘Right, like sweets and toys,’ my father sighed.

  What my father didn’t say Long
good did (I believe my father pinched his description directly from Longgood’s writing), that there’s more true wealth in a kilogram of honey than in all the world’s currencies combined.

  It’s real work, the proceeds of measurable toil. We humans, on the other hand, destroy nature’s true riches to make money, to create the illusion of wealth, confusing symbol with substance.

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  DAY TEN

  Bee-keeping always has its routines, things in which you can become absorbed; a contained, orderly world. It’s not really necessary to visit the hives frequently, but I do. I’m like dear departed Pupa, telling his worries to the bees, feeling like a member of a flock or perhaps leader of a pack.

  I pull the gloves on my hands. Where was I? The new frames. The hive I bumped into. Have to stabilize it with bricks.

  I go to look at the hive, to see if one brick will be enough or if I’m going to need two – and for a moment I feel a twinge at the thought of having to go back to the junk room, but I stifle the feeling. I’m a grown man. Sensible.

  I march briskly to the row of green boxes.

  I shudder involuntarily.

  The hive next to the one that needs fixing seems quiet. Too quiet. Since I don’t see any movement at the entrance I pull the lid off the box and lift out a frame to look at it. I take out another. A third. It’s just as I feared: not a single full-grown worker bee. Just a few apathetic juveniles. Abandoned larvae.

  A dead queen.

  A flame of fear goes through me.

  Another colony collapsed. This nest is abandoned. CCC. It has to be.

  It can’t be anything else. All the signs are there.

  Nevertheless, I make a hopeless attempt to find some other logical reason, some combination of factors to explain it. I bumped into the box next to this one. The brick under it was broken. Could some kind of mysterious panic have spread to the neighbouring hive? Could the whole thing have been caused by that?

  No. It couldn’t.

  The whole thing began many years ago.

  *

  There were several first-hand accounts of Colony Collapse Disorder written by Dave Hackenberg in 2006. He’d gone out to his hives in Florida and lit his smoker and found to his surprise that the bees didn’t come out of their nests. Hackenberg – who had been a leader in the American Bee-keeping Federation and was thus not some crackpot – opened the hive boxes, and the bees were simply gone. He crawled all around the hives and didn’t find a single dead bee. The frames were full of honey. And for some chilling reason there was no sign of marauders in the hive, as there usually would be in cases of abandoned nests, no other bees, no honey-eating insects of any kind.

  Hackenberg had brought four hundred healthy beehives from Pennsylvania to Florida in the autumn of 2006. Two weeks later he had only forty left.

  ‘There was nobody home,’ he said. ‘It was like somebody came from outer space and swept them away.’

  *

  Now, here, nobody is home.

  I have to report this. I may have to destroy all my hives to prevent the destruction from spreading. But how the hell could this happen here, to me? Although varroa mites have already been found everywhere I’ve kept their numbers in check with formic acid and thorough cleaning. There’s a mobile-phone mast on the other side of the woods, but it’s been there for years – why would it start to affect the bees now, especially since a connection between the missing bees and mobile phones has never been established? And I saw the hives just yesterday, alive and healthy and filled with bees. If they’d contracted some new exotic fungal infection it couldn’t have destroyed a whole colony in a single day. With parasites or mites or viruses the hive goes through a slow gradual death.

  And if it was a pesticide there would be dead bees by the shovelful around the hive entrance.

  But, like Hackenberg’s, my bees have simply gone, leaving behind a few half-grown individuals and the queen, plus their eggs and larvae, sentenced to death.

  In the wake of Hackenberg’s discovery news of other similar occurrences began to pour in. In January 2007 there were reports of the colony disappearance phenomenon in twenty-two states, and some bee-keepers had lost as many as 95 per cent of their hives.

  By March 2008 there were thirty-six states in the USA in which colonies had been abandoned.

  In Europe disappearances were reported in Poland, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Germany and Croatia.

  *

  I think feverishly.

  Ari. Can Ari have started using something new for pest control in his fields – maybe neonicotinoids?

  Ari has several hectares of clover, clover that my own bees make a lot of use of, but even though I think Ari’s capable of practically anything I’m sure he wouldn’t use expensive pesticides on his marginal fodder. I don’t know a lot about farming, but using pesticides to protect your clover sounds idiotic. Giving clover to feed-lot animals isn’t even cost-effective – soy, malt mash and other high-energy fodder fattens them up to slaughtering weight much faster. Ari’s clover field is just a gimmick to make the company look idyllic and close to nature. All of the photographs on the Hopevale Meats website are taken with the beautiful field of red clover in the foreground. The Hopevale Meats logo is a clover blossom and a clover leaf. Ari told me that he feeds a couple of head a year on clover and sells the meat to restaurants. ‘Certified Hopevale Clover-Fed Beef’ it says on the menu.

  No, Ari wouldn’t spoil the reputation of his clover-fed beef with pesticides.

  But if hive collapse is here then Ari will be in dire straits soon, too. The price of feed will probably skyrocket, and quickly. And there are already rumours that the US demand is bottomless for any kind of animal feed, even Finnish silage fodder. High freight charges are the only thing that’s kept the price low up to this point.

  I put the dead queen in a catcher clip and slip it in my pocket. I have to make a couple of phone calls right away. I curse myself for not investigating the larvae and queen from the missing colony I found before, but I had … other things to think about.

  I hear a small noise behind me. Steps approaching.

  I turn around and see two men in police uniforms.

  EERO THE ANIMAL’S BLOG

  PONDERINGS ON OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ANIMALS

  DEAR READERS

  It’s time for action, not blather.

  I want to thank all of my readers and participants in this discussion. I might still be dropping in here now and then for harmless philosophizing, but from now on you can find me in a completely different place on the net. I hope you will find me, if you care about the following issues:

  Crushing the life out of ‘surplus’ male chicks / chicks smothered to death in plastic bags / chickens’ beaks clipped with unsterilized instruments / chickens dying of starvation after botched beak clipping / crowding that doesn’t allow chickens even to spread their wings / withholding of treatment for sick individuals in order to save money / dead or dying individuals left lying for days or weeks among the living / lung disease caused by urine-saturated air / osteoporosis caused by excessive egg production / feet injured by wire cage floors / dehorning of calves without anaesthesia / pig castration without anaesthesia or other medication / infections caused by skin rubbed bare against wire cage walls / failure to treat sick individuals / individuals dying of thirst, heat or cold on the way to slaughter / live dousing in boiling water / unsuccessful stunning before slaughter / hobbling of animals / nose rings / stalls that force animals to remain immobile / pigs kept pregnant for the entirety of their sexual maturity / baby animals separated from their mothers so that they can become pregnant again as soon as possible / animals fed growth-inducing blood plasma taken from abattoirs / pigs’ tails trimmed due to lack of space / animals standing in their own faeces / cows lowing for their missing calves for several days.

  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

  LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 2)

&
nbsp; USER NAME: Gnoth seauton

  In my opinion the paradox in talking about animal rights is that the discourse on animal rights is based on so-called liberal political morality and social philosophy – the individual and his rights are the starting point for everything. Talk of animal rights, in other words, is based on an ideology that created the bourgeois way of life and capitalistic hegemony but was also the cause of the present-day exploitation, suffering and factory production of animals – seeing animals as nothing more than a commodity. Animal rights (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) are closely tied to the logic of the capitalist system. Thus it follows that if you really want animal rights taken care of you need to question the overriding economic and social structure. Mere immanent-capitalist post-political ‘green’ consumer politics isn’t enough. What’s the address of your new blog?

  USER NAME: Eero

  Not telling.

  DAY TEN

  The police stand a respectful distance away. I recognize one of them, the one who’s waving. It’s Rimpiläinen, the local Hopevale police chief – although I don’t even know what his official title is; his actual station is around a hundred kilometres away, but Hopevale has been in his jurisdiction since they rationalized the police districts.

  He was here when …

  I nip the thought in the bud, grind it in my fist and try to see the funny side of the situation. Two burly policemen standing around shifting their feet, pretending to be relaxed, but I can see that they don’t dare come any closer because quite a lot of feisty bees are buzzing around the hives. That tells me that most of my colonies seem to be perfectly lively, doing fine. But for how long?

  Two hives lost in less than two weeks.

  In the eyes of the policemen I no doubt look like an alien in my white bee suit with a veil over my head, and they’re on guard, as if at any moment I might command my army of insects to attack them.