Paavo Malmikunnas stood in the line at the post office looking at his parcel slip. His name and address were written in block letters, and the pen had been pressed against the slip so hard it had almost ripped through. Paavo snorted. The sender’s emotional state had been strong and purposeful. Paavo gave the slip to the worker, who disappeared into the back room.
The worker came back and extended a cardboard box to Paavo. On the side of the box was written “Fragile—Handle with Care.” Paavo transported the box home carefully, placed it on the floor of the closet and threw a coat over it. Then he walked to the sewing room and made sure it was empty. Salme had gone out walking with her girlfriend. Paavo got the box and carried it to the kitchen table.
The box was filled with paper. At first Paavo thought there wasn’t anything else in it, but after moving the crumpled paper out of the way, he found a freezer container on the bottom of the box packed in with pieces of styrofoam. Paavo lifted the container carefully out of the box and set it down next to the sink.
There it floated lifeless in the freezer container’s liquid. With it a person could express love, hate, longing and sorrow. It was often taken up just in the nick of time when all other means had been exhausted. There it rested, retired from service, separated from the whole, orphaned. A piece of flesh a few centimeters long, which could be tremendously expressive when need be.
Paavo sat down on a chair and took his time examining the piece. He had not asked them to mail it, but he now felt gratitude toward the senders. Paavo knew that he would not be able to thank them officially for the package for some time, but if the opportunity were to someday come, he would speak eloquently and at length.
Paavo looked at the piece and suddenly felt a strong desire to speak. He did not even remember when he had last spoken. He had either been splitting wood in the shed or looking out the bedroom window. At the birch tree he had planted, the stump that remained of the spruce tree, and the small field he had been digging potatoes out of for fifty years. The birch, the stump, and the potato field had looked foreign, as if someone had moved them there from somewhere. His gaze had not fixed on anything—it had roamed across the landscape like the wind, indifferent and foreign. His eyes had become dry cavities when the water had stopped flowing from them.
When did I last speak to Salme? Paavo thought as he looked at the piece. It has been quite a while, he thought, but how long I can’t say. I do not know where my speech went. It disappeared like a bird from a feeder. Or the speech didn’t disappear, just the words. I couldn’t find them anymore. Or I couldn’t find the right ones. I think words are important. They are tools. I learned that as a shopkeeper. Place them carefully if you want to make sales. People didn’t just come to buy the yarn and buttons and needles—they also come to chat. If you just stood there silently in front of the balls of yarn, they could easily take you for a capitalist. But if you place your words nicely in a row like stones next to a path, then they even start looking at yarn they didn’t originally have any intention of buying. Speech is good, but now it has left me, and I don’t know when it will come back.
Paavo was afraid that the unspoken material would sour and soon rot the entire skull. People were made to say something. Not necessarily a lot, but something. Otherwise the connection is broken and all that keeps it hanging on to humanity is breathing. Paavo thought of Salme, who had become used to their shared moments of conversation. Salme is creeping around out there, withering away with every step, and could easily show up lying at the end of the flowerbed at any moment. She did still have the energy to have gone on two outings with her weaving group to another county, even though she did come back quiet.
Paavo walked to the door of the sewing room and was about to say something, but then remembered that Salme was out walking. Paavo went back into the kitchen and crouched in front of the freezer container. The piece, which had turned bluish, floated in the liquid. Paavo felt like saying to it what he couldn’t to Salme.
If only you knew how much the secret weighs—at least five kilos. I can’t tell Salme that I ordered you. I just can’t. I would like to show you to Salme, but instead I have to hide you, or if worst comes to worst, destroy you. I can talk to Salme about the other thing, the thing that caused you to be floating in this liquid. And I should talk about it, because it is my and Salme’s common business, the sorrow I mean. They’ve written and talked about it a lot in the papers, but not once have I heard it talked about in the way I have experienced it. Sorrow is a bad, ugly feeling. Right after the longing comes a violent urge—you feel like breaking and killing. Sorrow is a round, spiky steel ball swinging uncontrollably in the air, and then they talk about working through sorrow, as if you could even think about work like that when the sorrow falls on you and slices everything to ribbons. Sorrow made me so loud that I ended up mute. I didn’t dare open my mouth, the things coming out of it the whole time were so inappropriate. Then the steel ball disappeared, and it was replaced with a pillow. Not a normal one, but a huge, shapeless, unnaturally soft one. When I laid my head on it, I didn’t feel anything anywhere. The anger disappeared in that softness. And everything else, because I didn’t know or feel anything. An unfeeling person, an unknowing person, an unknown person, that’s what I was.
But now when I look at you, I feel like at least some kind of person for the first time in a long time. Is this where recovery starts, who knows? but at least I may be able to get a handle on speech again. Everyone should have a part of another person, if not the whole thing. And I wouldn’t have wanted the one who you belonged to in my kitchen. A sample specimen is enough.
Paavo heard the front door rattle. He grabbed the freezer container, took a chair, climbed up on it and jammed the container into the top cupboard. Salme came into the hall, sitting down with a sigh and taking off her shoes. Paavo slipped into the bedroom and sat in front of the window. Salme came to the bedroom door to make sure her husband was in his place and then went into the sewing room. Paavo waited a moment and then walked to Salme’s door.
Salme was sitting hunched over next to her sewing machine. Paavo tried to find appropriate words, but all that came to mind were inappropriate ones—those Paavo returned to his throat. The sewing machine knocked a seam together. Salme didn’t hear Paavo come in.
“Is that the table cloth?”
“Yes.”
“For Helena?”
“Yes. You’re talking.”
“Yeah. I thought I had to. That it was time.”
“No more chopping?”
“No. It’s full.”
“What?”
“The shed.”
“Are you going to talk all the time now or just this once?”
“I don’t know. If I start talking, anything might come out.”
“That’s not a problem. What was the parcel slip about?”
“Hobby Hall sent the shawl.”
“Yes, for you.”
“Show me.”
“There will be time enough for that later. How is Ritva?”
“She booked a trip. To the Canaries. She wants to see the volcano. I don’t remember the name.”
“Teide. That’s the name. It hasn’t been active for years, but you can at least get the smell of it there, the sulfur or whatever,” Paavo explained, noticing that he had got hold of speech and fearing that he would lose it if he didn’t continue immediately. The feeling was the same as when as a child he had tried to pull a worm out of thick, muddy soil with his thumb and forefinger. If you gave the worm even a millimeter of slack, it retreated into its hole and disappeared into the darkness.
“Listen, Salme. I’ve been thinking lately what if we went on a trip? We’ve never been anywhere other than twice in the capital. Let’s go and see what the world is like. And I also meant to say I’m sorry. Sorry that I’ve been like this, or rather like I have been. We have enough wood for five winters now. Being in my own head for months on end it occurred to me that a lot has been taken from us. Without permission. We’ve been robbed. Do you remember that word from the old world, ‘robber baron’? They had the nerve to call button merchants names like that, even though with all the work we did our hourly wages weren’t even as much as the men at the paper mill were getting. I’ve been thinking about how much has to be taken away for nothing to be left. And what is that nothing? We’ve been shown life and death—at least those experiences can’t be taken away from us. But have we seen too much? That was what kept me thinking out there in the shed. This is that relativity stuff we talked about once. What is enough for a person? What was enough for us is too little for many entrepreneurs these days. What we understood as affluence is just scraping by for someone else. Did they build a new kind of human without us noticing? Did they secretly develop a completely new creature? I almost went crazy a couple of weeks ago when I started thinking about the children and you and everyone we know. I got a strange sort of feeling that everything was disappearing. You were off traveling with the weaving group then. I had to run over to Kallio’s house. I knocked on the door, and Kallio answered, and when I had made sure he was alive and still in this world, I turned away and ran to make sure the Esso station was still in the same place as before and hadn’t been borne away on the wind. If I could see Kallio, that that meant I wasn’t crazy. Because I’m not. But that day I visited the place that Alfred Supinen talked about once. Do you remember? He said that humans had been fixed up with such big heads that you could get lost in them—inside the head, I mean. No other living thing has an imagination like this, one that can spread life out in so many directions sometimes that everything gets blurry. This is partially why I never cared about traveling, since my thoughts took me wherever I wanted to go for nothing. I meant to ask where Helena got the money for her therapy. I hear she’s getting the full treatment with all the best listeners in the country with her around the clock. At least we don’t have money like that. Maybe Pekka or Maija loaned it to her, although I doubt it was Pekka. Has Helena said anything to you about it? I just mean I hope there isn’t any monkey business going on. Malmikunnases have never gone in for that sort of thing. We’ve never been in so much trouble that we haven’t been able to take care of our taxes and bills ourselves. Isn’t that right, Salme?”
Paavo went silent. Salme looked at her husband and wondered if anything more was going to come out or if she could say something now. Paavo was out of breath, waiting for Salme’s reaction.
“Yes. Well. There you have it. Was I supposed to answer something?”
“About where Helena got money like that.”
“Maybe she sold her car.”
“She doesn’t have a car.”
“Perhaps she sold her sofa set.”
“You can’t get money like that selling furniture.”
“A grown woman can always come up with something. Since you haven’t been talking, let me ask, do you know what Pekka has been up to?”
“A general manager doesn’t have time to call home.”
“But a service man would.”
“What do you mean by that, Salme?”
“Nothing. Would you like some juice? Your throat must be dry after talking so much.”
Salme went into the kitchen and then yelled back, “Why is the chair dragged over here? Have you been in the top cupboard?”
Paavo rushed after Salme into the kitchen.
“I was just organizing things a bit … the parts for the juicer and … then the dustpans and …”
“What are you putting those up there for? They belong in the cleaning closet. I’ll get them down.”
“You don’t need to go rummaging around up there. I’ll put them away later,” Paavo said and moved the chair over to the table. “Let’s have that juice. I feel dizzy.”
“Sit down for goodness sake.”
Paavo sat, and Salme gave him a glass of sea-buckthorn berry juice. Paavo drank it in two gulps and sighed. Then they sank into their own thoughts.
Salme thought that Paavo was now Paavo again. Or at least almost. Something in him had been knocked into a new position, but that wasn’t any wonder. We don’t end up at the finish line the same as we were when we left. Once when we drove the Simca over a pothole, afterward all of the things in the boot were in a completely different order from before we hit the hole. How is that for a metaphor? But the truth is that life doesn’t spare anyone, not even the ones that think it does and use plastic surgery to try to add on more years. The reaper man doesn’t show you your wrinkles in a mirror—he cuts us all down like grass with his long, curved knife. But what am I going on about? It is clearly a sign of recovery that Paavo has started asking about things that aren’t his business. Isn’t the main thing that Helena gets treatment? It’s all the same where the money came from for it. We’ve been like sheep before the law and the taxman and everything for decades. It isn’t anyone’s business how I send my daughter to that place by the seashore to get patched up.
Paavo was thinking that Salme was beautiful, even though she did try to get into the top cupboard. We’re private people here, even though we live together. I have always given Salme space to do her own things, and she has always given me the same bit of freedom. So for the moment, the top cupboard will stay shut. I took this part of him, because he took everything from my daughter. And I will go to the grave with this, and if God shows up on the scene unexpectedly and actually exists, I’ll tell him just how things are. And if he sees fit to stone me and throw me over on the hot steam side, I’ll say to him that I had worse times down there on Earth than you could ever create here in Hell! And if God turns out to be a reasonable type, he will overlook the whole thing and let me take the freezer container along with me as a memento.
Then Paavo and Salme looked at each other and smiled a little.