October is resplendent. The autumnal sunlight is at its most melancholic, its most beautiful. It sets the windows alight, magnificently warms the dark wooden pews, making the space seem taller – and taller still, as though the white panelled ceiling were slowly rising, up and up, until it was very close to the sky, almost touching.
The old wooden Hurmevaara church is full again. It’s taken some getting used to. Not least because the pews began to fill up again after I came back from sick leave. I began to realise that the swollen congregation was here because of me.
I climb up to the pulpit. The steps creak – the wooden boards are uneven, worn and smooth. I gaze out into the church. I recognise many of these people by name, but every Sunday there are new faces too. I don’t know what to think about the fact that they all know what happened to me. But precisely because they know, I speak.
I always speak of how hard it is to do good, how so often when we have good intentions we end up making mistakes, how life is really a complicated affair and never offers easy answers to what we might call the larger questions. I speak from experience.
And that’s what I talk about today too. About how we can never know how life will turn out, and why that’s a good thing. I have to admit that many of my experiences sound more like thrillers, and that perhaps that is one of the reasons my sermons are so popular, but still … the stories I tell are only a part of what actually happened. When giving my sermon, I always stress that people are free to give their own meaning to what they hear, just as everyone can believe that their own life is guided either by chance or divine intervention. Or neither. That’s what I do too. God and the universe will cope, I think.
But how should I know?
I say that too.
And I end today’s sermon with a thought with which I am particularly occupied at present.
Do not worry, do not be sad.
It surprises me too that I’ve started worrying about the future. I have survived stepping on a mine, being stabbed, shot, and lived through countless other unexpected events, and still … But this time I am not worried about myself or my own future.
Once the service has ended, I shake hands with the congregation, listen to their joys and concerns, the ins and outs of their lives, then help Pirkko and Matias Ihantola to lock up the church. I remind myself that this little episode was all an egocentric misunderstanding on my part. I imagined Pirkko was interested in me while all the time she was trying to get close to Ihantola. I thank them for helping with this Sunday’s service, which once again was excellent.
And then I walk home.
Krista and Samuel are at the kitchen table. Samuel is eating. At least, he’s trying to, and Krista does her best to make sure they get there in the end. I give her a kiss on the cheek, on the lips, and Samuel on the top of his head, otherwise my face would be covered in regurgitated sweet-potato purée. I sit down at the table with a cup of coffee.
‘You can take a nap, if you want,’ I say to Krista.
‘And what will you two get up to?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, though I have my suspicions.
Krista looks at me the way she sometimes does. Sometimes she calls me the jigsaw man when we’re lying naked next to each other in bed. It’s an apt description, a very appropriate name for me. My body is etched in scars from head to toe. Whenever I visit a public sauna, people ask what it’s like to wrestle with a bear.
‘How did the service go?’ she asks.
‘Full house again today.’
‘And what did you tell them?’
‘How hard it is to do the right thing, and that’s precisely why we should strive to do just that.’
‘I love you, Joel,’ she says.
I look at her.
‘I love you too.’
Krista stands up, takes me and Samuel in her arms, kisses us both. Then she walks upstairs. Samuel is waving his arms around, flailing in his high chair. Samuel is a miracle – our miracle – and blissfully unaware of it. I continue feeding him, trying to drink my coffee. The coffee grows colder; Samuel eventually finishes eating. I wipe him and his surroundings clean. I’m not sure whether there’s more food on the table, my son or the wooden floorboards.
I lift him from his chair, take him in my arms and pick up a blanket from the living room. We walk out into the yard.
It’s high noon, calm and sunlit, perhaps the last warm day of the year. Tomorrow’s forecast promises wind and rain, and a thunderstorm in the evening. There’s a hint of the coming storm in the air – everything is still, like being at the foot of a giant wave. From down here, everything feels fine, but above you a white-crested disaster is brewing.
I don’t know why I think things like this today. Perhaps it’s because of the news I heard this morning. Karoliina’s appeal to the high court might be successful. She could be out of prison in a year, if she really can prove she acted in self-defence. It’s entirely possible. She has convinced everybody that she was acting under duress from Leonid, that she was unaware of what he was planning, and she still maintains she doesn’t know what happened to the meteorite or what the robbery was all about. She has even managed to convince people that it was only once she was in hospital that she heard the meteorite might be that valuable. And all the while she has claimed that her life was being threatened, that she was in danger and that everything she did was merely to save her own life. In this light, Leonid’s death becomes involuntary manslaughter and my shooting her is common assault. I can live with that.
Far more difficult might be the matter that Karoliina whispered to me when we met during the trial. She passed me in the corridor, accompanied by a police officer. Her head turned a fraction, just enough for me to smell her perfume. I doubt anyone else noticed the comment, let alone heard it. Karoliina said she would be back to pick up the meteorite.
Which is at the bottom of Lake Hurmevaara.
I put Samuel down, and he lies wriggling on his blanket, waving his hands, rolling over, trying to crawl. The sun warms the blanket, like a large oven glove just taken from the side of a pot.
Karoliina knows that I know the whereabouts of the meteorite. Nobody else does. When Tarvainen’s remains were found on the opposite shore in the spring, the rucksack was no longer on his back. Although he had lost so much, people were far more interested in the location of the rucksack than in the rally legend whose best days were firmly behind him.
Why didn’t I tell anyone which fishing hole Tarvainen had fallen into, indicating the rough location of the meteorite? I think it must have more than a little to do with everything that lump of rock caused: greed and death. But it won’t be at the bottom of the lake forever. One day it will fly again, perhaps once the sun has finally been snuffed out and gravity no longer exerts its force on the Earth, when the planet collides with other planets and smashes into infinitesimal boulders of different sizes or is sucked into a black hole and turns into a point the size of a pinhead, a spot that will simply sleep for billions of years until something else unexpected happens.
Because things always happen.
Like now.
Samuel is doing it again. He never does this when Krista is around. He is on his stomach on his blanket. He raises his head, and suddenly he seems completely focussed. He looks forwards, his eyes unflinching, and—
He flies.
He makes surprisingly recognisable sounds: the ignition, the howl of wheels. Then the acceleration, the changing of gears. The motor – my son – pushing himself to the limit. The car reaches its top velocity. Samuel cruises along at full pelt, right ahead.
He looks as happy as a human being just under six months old can look.
Driving his race car.