My name is Salme Sinikka Malmikunnas, and everything I have said has been twisted. It doesn’t go word for word the way I told it, just in the same general direction. This was clear to me from the moment I talked with the author the first time.
I have now read this whole stack of paper the author sent the week before last. I had to explain to Paavo that a woman from the raanu group had sent a little larger pile of patterns all at once.
I had to set the papers aside when that part came.
I guessed that he wouldn’t keep his word not to write about it.
I sold him life, not death.
I couldn’t stand to read it with these eyes.
But now that it has been a while since I read it, I don’t think of the author with anger. I can’t afford feelings that big anymore—I don’t have the energy for them. Everyone does his work as well as he can and sells it on. The consumer is the one who makes the final decision with his wallet, whether he will pay for the truth or contortions of it.
That’s the trick if he wants to get a book out of these papers and then get the book sold. If a book does come out of all this, he will have to go to the book fair. We did make an agreement that he won’t tell the idea behind the book or the story of where it came from, but instead just say like all the others that it all came from his own head and it is all a lie from start to finish.
I don’t envy this profession either. We poor humans have to try to sell everything. Helena has said some ugly words about this now that she’s in better shape. She said that people have to submit to everything here in this world. That you have to sell the work of your hands, your ass, your speech, your knowledge and your skills. And Finns have even learned how to sell silence. We won’t be running out of that anytime soon. The soughing forests will sooner disappear. She said that somewhere between Kuopio and Iisalmi there was a sort of silence center where you can pay to sit on a bed with your mouth closed. As a former shopkeeper I didn’t comment or start poking fun at the silence entrepreneurs, especially since I’ve paid at least the recommended retail price for muteness here in my very own home.
Given the circumstances, things are going well for us. Especially if you compare it to the state we were in at the beginning when I first met the author. “It pays to compare,” Alfred Supinen always said. If Alfred’s finances were in a slump, he said, “What’s this compared to the position of the Romanian Gypsies?”
Evil has now received its reward, as we read in the paper, but in my opinion it was paid to that man in an unreasonably large lump sum. Just reading about it was hard enough, at least for me. Paavo was just in a good mood and said that everyone had to start by learning his letters. In the paper it said that if they had recovered the tongue immediately and the surgeons had connected it back up to the stump, the man would have been able to speak to the end of his days almost flawlessly. But since the part wasn’t returned, his speech will remain a sort of gurgling forever, even though you will be able to make out some of it. I will say that it must have taken rough men to be able to go and do a job like that.
I was able to use the seven thousand euros to buy Helena such good treatment that a completely different person walked out of the doors of the hospital than went in. I didn’t get my whole first-born back, but my first-born nonetheless. The money went to a good cause. And hopefully everything I told the author did too.