Timo Hännikäinen: Without – Essays

Posted under Timo Hännikäinen

Sex is as obligatory as death and taxes. Society is thoroughly eroticized, and the mating games of Western cultures have left the rejected on the sidelines.

Timo Hännikäinen’s tract on sexual politics examines the present day as heir to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. That revolution established a ruthless sexual competition where some make love every day, some just a few times in their lives, and others not at all. Those who don’t have sex are the displaced persons of sexual liberalism, unable to achieve the sensual pleasure pushed by the media.

“The sexually displaced, even more completely than the unemployed, lack any means of resistance. Sex can only be used as an object of power by those who are sexually desirable, like the Athenian women in Lysistrata. What form would civil disobedience or terrorism by those deprived of sex take? Would they threaten to castrate themselves publicly  if government funded bordellos weren’t created?”

Timo Hannikäinen (born 1979) is a Helsinki writer and editor. In this collection of essays, he places himself in the middle of an examination of deprivation and sexual frustration in the 21st century.

Hännikäinen’s previous essay collection Taantumuksellisen uskontunnustus (Reactionary Credo) provoked discussion with its insistence on the torpedoing of consumer society and  the responsibility of people from all walks of life to put an end to consumerism. Hännikäinen has also published two collections of poems, Kilpailevan lajin muistomerkki (A Monument of a Competing Type, Savukeidas 2005) and Istun vastapäätä (I Sit Opposite, WSOY 2002). He edits the cultural journal Kerberos.

Excerpt from Without

Translated by Lola Rogers, through a translation grant from FILI: Finnish Literature Exchange

by Timo Hännikäinen

Days of Hell

The psycho-physical effects of long periods of forced celibacy are rarely discussed in the literature. This is no doubt due to the painful and shameful nature of the subject. Ascetics, Roman Catholic priests, and other voluntary or professional celibates can always ennoble their suffering and ease their longing with the thought of what they are striving for. Those who are celibate against their wishes have nothing to give lustre to their fate. Worst of all, they don’t even dare to complain, because – particularly for men – not getting any provokes derision and contempt from people of both sexes.

A sexual drought that lasts for years can be manifest in an anxiety that gradually becomes a tortured feeling in the area of the chest and stomach. This can lead to tenseness in the whole body. The posture often sinks compulsively into a bent posture when walking.

Masturbation can take on a ritualistic quality. For years, I haven’ t been able to go to sleep at night or get up in the morning without jacking off first. Porno videos can become a large expense, because after a little while one tires of using one’s own distant sexual experiences as masturbation material and has need of an industry whose purpose is to continuously produce new fantasies, or rather to continuously equip old fantasies with new faces, bodies, and genitals.

At least as awful as the lack of sex is the lack of simple physical affection and intimacy. Like the sexual deprivation, it feels worst when going to bed or getting up in the morning. Those who live under this hardship are inordinately delighted by the touch of a member of the opposite sex. A while back I went to see my dentist – an attractive woman slightly over thirty. As she scraped the tartar from my teeth, her warm body pressed against my side whenever she bent over me. I’ve always hated having my teeth scraped and poked – I don’t know anyone who enjoys it – but I remember that visit to the dentist as a relaxing, almost euphoric experience.

On hearing of the torment of living in involuntary celibacy, those who have no understanding will say “For God’s sake, just get yourself a woman”. What they don’t realize is that celibacy feeds on itself – it is a vicious cycle. The longer a dry period lasts, the harder it gets to find a partner. A man living without sex is clenched and tense, both physically and psychologically – women can sense it a mile off – and a man in dire need of a woman doesn’t exactly turn them on. Then there’s the fact that he may be overcome by glum discouragement and be unable to even try to find companionship. If the period of celibacy is cut off, the tension can be discharged and the sense of defeat diminished, at which point the new feeling of relaxation can help in finding more copulation partners. But the cycle of deprivation is difficult to break as it continues to lengthen.

Those living in a cycle of deprivation are like people living under a supernatural curse, and many of them become superstitious during this time. I have noticed in myself a tendency to magical thinking during periods of celibacy. When I moved into my present apartment, I bought a new bed, because the old one exacerbated my back pain. When the package arrived from Ikea and I opened it, I noticed that there were two box springs, although I had only ordered one. The clerk had sold me two beds for the price of one. I could have sold one of the beds, but I decided to set it up as a double bed. Some part of my mind thought that owning a double bed would improve my chances of getting a woman guest for the night. I always put clean sheets on the other bed, and before I go out for the evening I usually clear away the books and papers lying on the bedspread. In some odd way I believe that this ritual will improve my luck with women.

When I go out to the pub, I always dither about whether or not to put some condoms in my coat pocket. On the one hand, having condoms with me might make me try too hard to pick someone up, when my chances are generally miserable. On the other hand, leaving them at home would be admitting defeat from the outset. Then again, it might help me to behave in a more relaxed manner if I left the contraceptives at home. Which would be more likely to attract a woman?

These are the typical ponderings of those living through this torment of uncertainty. They are the primitivism of an intelligent person, which can be distinguished from ordinary primitivism by the fact that those who practice it are always trying to provide a rational basis for their behavior. The are one furtive leap from the world of fantasy, where the little details of their decisions can change their whole situation.

One result of a long period of habitual celibacy is that every woman is perceived as a potential companion or sex partner. Even a complete stranger, if she talks to me in a friendly manner, can get me sizing up the possibilities for seduction. The thought of a natural exchange with a woman has gradually become impossible for me. I can only behave in a relaxed, unrestrained manner with women who don’t correspond to my own preferences, or my friends’ wives and girlfriends. With others I either try to make passes at them or treat them with sour indifference because I consider my chances non-existent from the outset. When I see a couple walking hand in hand or making sweet talk, I turn my gaze elsewhere, with just one thought: there’s another woman who didn’t fall in love with me.

Another result that is common but difficult to admit is a pure, raw hatred of women. Rare is the male author of the past few decades who has expressed hatred of women in his work, or analysed it. Finnish poet Pentti Holappa tried something like it in his novel Ystävän muotokuvassa (Portrait of a Friend). William S. Burroughs said in one of his last interviews that he pitied boy children because they would be raised by women and he wished there was some other method. But both of these writers are exceptions because of their homosexuality. Gays nowadays have an unofficial right to chauvinism and sexism by virtue of their official status as the oppressed, like women. The rules of political correctness are loosened in their case.

The longer one lives in forced celibacy, the more the censor of political correctness breaks down. In the end it begins to leak like a sieve, and day by day you notice yourself having ever more murderous thoughts toward the female sex. Every woman begins to seem small-minded, devious, and intellectually deficient.

For the greater part of my sexless student days I wondered why they allowed women in the university at all. How could a single one of those creatures understand anything about essential philosophy, history, theology, or natural science? Women’s only contribution to western thought has been “the woman question”, which has over the centuries become disgusting, an apparatus spinning its wheels that every empty-headed beauty who stumbles into academia starts confusedly fiddling with. Maybe it’s good, I thought, that they’ve established semi-scientific sewing circles like the Women Studies departments to keep the girls from getting underfoot among the serious researchers.

I know that I’ve reached the depths of the distress of celibacy when I start to purposely think up ways to annoy women, anger and offend them. Sometimes it’s surprisingly easy. By cultivating an indifference, a chilly cynicism, I’ve succeeded many times in giving the impression that I am a dreadful man. Alcohol and boredom have made me seek out ever more extreme methods.

I noticed that racism is such a strict taboo for many women that the mere rational appraisal of immigration will often cause them to end a conversation. So I started collecting a wide variety of racist jokes that I found on American neo-nazi websites. Other inflammatory subjects were also easy to find. On my more alcohol-fogged evenings I’ve happened to hint to newly-met,  stand-offish women that I’m a rapist just released from prison, or a pedophile who regrets nothing.

All of this grotesque behavior springs from hopelessness, of course. It’s like a curse from the mouth of a dying man, an attack on a dream that I no longer believe I’ll ever achieve. But it’s well known that hopelessness is not the absence of hope but rather its last spasm. Women sometimes have a surprising, blessed way of answering a harsh, cynical provocation with gentle mercy. I don’t believe there are a lot of men who could do it – I know I couldn’t, anyway. But that’s what I secretly hope for from women. If a woman responds to my offensiveness with friendliness and tenderness, it’s as if the anger is immediately squeezed out of me, and I want nothing more than to cry on her shoulder.

But in the main I am treated with an understandable hostility, which can bring me a momentary satisfaction, or with indifference, which is worst of all. It may also be that I invite that very rejection: it indicates that my preconceived ideas about the impossibility of finding a companion are correct, and though the world doesn’t seem any less cruel, it does at least seem comprehensible and controllable. That’s how it goes – afterwards I always feel awful, and my self-hatred often prevents me from getting out of bed before seven in the evening. The loneliness seems more deadly than before when I know that I’m pushing myself deeper into it, driving people away with my grotesque antics.

The side effects I’m describing invariably deepen into a melancholy induced by lack of companionship, and can cause a breakout of depression, particularly if accompanied by heavy drinking. Those who have worked with the clinically depressed know that erotic loneliness and depression often go hand in hand.

My own periods of depression usually start at the end of summer and reach their peak in the autumn. They have recurred over so many years that nowadays I start to fear the coming of autumn as early as July. This is probably unique to the Nordic peoples. With the darkening and cooling of the evenings, the need for a woman becomes frantic, a torment, and the chances of satisfying it seem to grow ever more remote. The company of married or romantically involved friends is no consolation, it is simply a continual reminder of something that you yourself lack.

The worst episode to date occurred in autumn of 2007. It started with insomnia, which I at first attributed to the long periods of summer daylight. I’ve always slept well, more often too much than too little, and during the worst times of my life, sleep has functioned as the last place of refuge from the world. Suddenly this place of safety was lost. I fell asleep quickly when I went to bed, but I would wake up after at most four hours and be unable to fall asleep again as a continual rush of thoughts went through my head.

At the end of July, a gloom descended on me. I was spending a week alone in the countryside at Padasjoki, and as I looked at the dark green of the birch trees and maples and the view of the fields in the summer heat, I felt that the summer, like my life, would soon be past. My life would be ever more narrowly constricted, the desolation of my surroundings would become ever more absolute. There was no rational reason for this feeling: my finances were sound, I had a lively social life and important literary projects in the offing, my essay collection Taantumuksellinen uskontunnustus (Reactionary Credo) was appearing in a couple of months. My network, however, was slowly but inevitably shrinking. I did my translation work mechanically and without any pleasure. I was constantly tired, but I couldn’t get any sleep.

In the fall, I finally went to a doctor for my insomnia. I got a prescription for Zopinox, which improved my sleep to a certain extent. But I was also drinking hard, which disturbed my sleep rhythms so severely that the medication couldn’t bring it back into balance. My anxiety attacks worsened, on some nights almost constituting a panic, and I was afraid that I was losing my mind. There were moments when I felt a need to break my nose, break a finger or slice deeply into my own flesh so that the physical pain could free me from my unbearable psychological distress. I contented myself, however, by seeking temporary relief in alcohol. During the weekend of the Helsinki Book Fair I was drunk nearly every waking hour, sprawling on my bed for a few hours in the early morning in a half-asleep torpor.

That Saturday, when I met R, a colleague of mine from Turku, at a bar on Uudenmaankatu in Helsinki, he asked me straightforwardly, “Are you OK?” “There’s something wrong with my head,” I answered, and almost immediately started to cry. My weeping was accompanied by a violent trembling that I couldn’t  control. R said that he had seen this happen before. He said to go to the doctor, that it wasn’t something to play around with. The crying attack cleared the beer and shots of vodka I’d drunk during the day out of my head, and I decided to take his advice. On Sunday morning, my brother drove me to the psychiatric department at Aurora hospital, where the doctor gave me an emergency sedative and a referral to the Itäkeskus psychiatric clinic.

The recovery happened quite quickly. Serotonin medication, weekly therapy discussions, and not drinking liquor lifted my mood to a bearable level within a couple of months. When the gift of sleep was finally returned to me, I started to feel healthy again. The positive-thinker Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote somewhere that if you’re able to sleep, you have no cause for complaint.

But sleep and the doctors couldn’t give me what I really needed: a good lay – long nights between the thighs of some attractive, tender woman. Nothing relieved the tautness of my nerves better than making love – after making love this temple of clay would feel lighter than it had in weeks. I completely understand Pentti Linkola’s demand that there should be a bordello in every health clinic. And since men in Finland are still required to give military or civilian service, why couldn’t all 18 to 30-year old women provide compulsory sexual services in pleasure houses maintained by the government?

But even that would hardly do me any good. I’ve paid for it twice in my life, and both times I’ve ended up finding that it didn’t suit me. I was very nervous both times, and couldn’t keep an erection long enough to get inside. I know that some men get off on the grim, impersonal quality of payed sex, but I’m not one of them. Knowing that it’s all pretend, and the concealed disgust that I feel behind it, bothers me. The most disagreeable thing about it, however, was the complete lack of warmth or tenderness. The whore didn’t even kiss me.

Some people have no use for western prostitution and instead place their hopes in the sex paradise of Thailand or the Caribbean, where they take a more natural attitude toward love for sale. I’ve heard that those living through the end days of communism in Cuba are running rampant with a kind of fin de siècle spirit that includes open sexuality. Supposedly, Cuban women are happy to make love to tourists for a small fee, or even for free. Maybe looking out at the sunset over the Caribbean Sea, sipping a mojito while a coffee-colored girl performs first-rate fellatio on you would be a kind of paradise regained for a Western man.

But I am quite feminine in my sexual habits. The thought of intercourse without any kind of attachment is disagreeable to me. I believe that most people feel this deep down, and that’s why the beautiful dream of sexual liberation remains just a dream. It really only exists in porno movies. Liberation will come only when we break free of love, attachment, dependence, the need for security and commitment. Maybe some parts of humanity, particularly some young people, have already broken free. I myself belong to the old world, and I know that I always will.

I was once in a relationship with a young “free-thinking” woman. For her, sex was a pastime, a form of amusement. She said she really liked sex, in the same tone that some people say they really like chocolate or dancing. She was interested in both men and women and she openly admitted that it made no difference to her who she made love with. She was an outstanding lover, active and experienced. She could be easily aroused by caressing her breasts, kissing her neck, or even just scratching her back, and she was dynamite when she took you in her mouth. She didn’t like to kiss – apparently it was too intimate.

She was not, however, cold or cynical – she often treated me with tenderness and understanding. It was the humane kind of warmth one gives to anyone, just as our lovemaking was lust without infatuation or commitment. Going out with her was nothing more than a friendship that happened to include sex. She didn’t let herself be stung by passion. She was free.

The erotic abundance I had with this woman foundered when I realized that I was falling for her. When she told me she wasn’t interested in me in any serious way, I was so depressed that for a long time I didn’t dare to even approach a woman.

I’ve been in the opposite situation as well. One summer I met a 19-year-old woman and we occasionally slept together or went to a movie. She never interested me in the sense of a courtship, but at the same time she had that childishness and vulgarity that makes all teenage girls so exciting. She wasn’t stingy with the sex, either, which is unusual in itself, and is a noble trait in a woman. I had recently experienced some painful disappointments in my attempts to build a serious, lasting relationship, and, as if by design, circumstances made it suddenly possible to have a purely erotic relationship with her, relaxing intercourse without any commitments. But the enjoyment was ruined when I started to fear that the girl was falling for me. I never found out if she was, but the thought bothered me so much that I stopped calling her, and felt relieved when she didn’t keep in touch, either, disappearing from my life without asking any annoying questions.

I would really like to be able to separate sex from emotion. If I could also conquer my fear of rejection, the gates of paradise would be open to me. I’d jump head first into a world of seduction and casual pleasure. I would gladly take back the demoralization of shyness and a youth consecrated to literature and get myself as many sex partners as I possibly could and reminisce about them later: the budding breasts of silk-skinned Lolitas, middle-aged earth mothers, statuesque Nubians and dark-eyed Asians, sweet blondes and warmly erotic brunettes, all ages, sizes, and breeds. But I’m stuck in the old idea that sex – even casual sex – is bound up with at least some level of emotional attachment.

Would extinguishing the sex drive solve the problem? It’s well-known that a man’s sex drive diminishes hopelessly slowly. Some chemical means for accelerating the diminishment have already been created. In Finland a method known in the United States has been suggested whereby hardened sex offenders – multiple rapists and child molesters – are recommended for chemical castration. A capsule similar to antabuse is placed in the fatty tissue under the skin containing medication that dampens aggressive sexual impulses. Men with prostate cancer are likewise treated with another type of anti-androgen medication.

Maybe the method could be adapted for so-called normal people, as well. An effective “brake” on sexual impulses could be developed and made readily available at the drug store without prescription. With it would come liberation from the torment, resentment, and forced sublimation, and I could voluntarily focus on eating and sleeping, on some simple task like stamp-collecting or catalogue design. I would gradually become lazy and relaxed, like a neutered tomcat. In my case, something like that might be closer to happiness.

Sexually successful men have the gift of youth until death in the form of Viagra, so it would be hardly asking too much to give those left behind the gift of inner peace. Since men like me who have been sexually displaced constitute a serious problem for the health of society, our social and health ministries, the cornerstone of a humanistic society, have good cause to at least investigate the matter.

Kreetta Onkeli: Housewife – Novel

Posted under Kreetta Onkeli

Kreetta Onkeli:  Kotirouva (Housewife),  Sammakko, 2007, 224 pp.

David McDuff

The author describes her book as a rakkausromaani, or romance novel, but it is really a sardonic and realistic portrayal of an artificial relationship that eventually breaks down under  the psychological pressure and need for authenticity that are experienced by the central character. It is Kreetta Onkeli’s third novel, and it represents a significant evolution of her earlier style.

Sirre Määttänen is a 30-year-old hospital cleaner who lives alone in a one-roomed apartment. in Helsinki. Behind her she has a career as an artist and painter, but has given it up, just as she has given up her dreams of finding a suitable partner and starting a family. At this low point in her life she encounters a lost child who turns out to be the daughter of a businessman, Assar Elo, who is looking for a woman to run the domestic side of his life for him. Sirre exchanges her hospital job for a new one as a housewife – she sees the relationship in practical terms, as a form of employment and a way to realize her dreams of a family.

The new “job” is not without its complexities, however. Sirre, who has now acquired financial security but is also financially dependent on her husband, settles down to the task of creating a family home in the expensive and spacious apartment Assar has bought. She immerses herself in glossy interior design magazines and becomes an expert on the latest consumer fashions, organizing the redecoration.  At the same time she has to live with Assar and Vita – something of a challenge, as Assar is a dominating and aggressive male chauvinist who spends most of his time at the office but expects his home and wife to be ready for him when he returns, and Vita  an uncertain and selfish pre-teen with a growing array of needs and problems that require constant attention.  Quarrels are a regular occurrence, yet Sirre wants to make a success of Vita, seeing her as the daughter she never had, and wants to give her everything—too much, in fact.

Sirre’s old watercolour paintings are stored in a furniture warehouse, and Assar has the idea that they can be used to make money, by creating a series of postcards. But the paintings turn out not to be suitable for the postcard project, and so they are destroyed, in order to save money on the storage costs. Sirre’s life develops into a kind of nightmare, as physical demands  are compounded with emotional ones to create a prison-like net of limitations and constraints which prevent her from living her own life as an individual. Yet even though she has possibilities, she doesn’t make use of them. Years earlier, she painted a watercolour on the theme of cancer which became nationally known, and the city’s cancer relief foundation wants her to deliver a talk about her painting. Yet she turns the offer down,  and  when eventually she tries to break out of the net by returning to work as a cleaner at the foundation’s office, the director recognizes her – her painting is hanging there in a special ceremonial spot.

Sirre does everything to close off the avenues that might bring her the opportunity of fulfilment, yet the new life she has chosen is even more restrictive. Assar and Vita are completely absorbed in the problems of their own personal development, and Sirre gives her life to two people who are incapable of valuing it. In the end, as Assar is openly unfaithful with other women and Vita becomes increasingly sulky and withdrawn, Sirre is returned to herself, alone.

The style of the book is laconic, and the sentences are either short in themselves or built from short phrases which give an impression of breathlessness and stress. Although the description is vividly realistic, reproducing many facets of the visual and tactile reality of life in a big city, it is also characterized by an element of otherness and alienation: familiar scenes and places are presented in terms that make them seem strange and almost other-worldly. This effect is linked to Sirre’s growing sense of estrangement from herself, as she grapples with the  impossible task of living the life of a traditional “housewife” – a role which in contemporary society has become obsolete and no longer offers a viable route for women who seek identity and self-esteem. At the end of the novel, Sirre remains an enigma, both to herself and to the reader.

Kreetta Onkeli does not judge her characters, but presents them as they are, with their conflicts and personal flaws and problems: her criticism is reserved for a social environment that is perceived as being hostile to individual aspirations and genuine human development. This portrayal of life in a big city will be understood and recognized anywhere in modern Europe or North America today.

Excerpt from Kotirouva

Translated by David McDuff, through a translation grant from FILI: Finnish Literature Exchange

[pp. 69-74]

11.

How long have they lived there? One and a half years? Two? Her contractual employment as a housewife is the longest one she has ever had. They have adapted. They live in a spacious apartment. The ceilings in the stone building are up to four metres high. There are so many rooms that they haven’t enough furniture for them all. Assar bought the apartment with shares. Sirre doesn’t know what kind of shares they were, and has never even asked him, because she was more interested in the bathroom tiles than the source of the money. She couldn’t choose between dark blue tiles and dark green tiles. At any rate the bathroom needed a complete renovation. Assar could see nothing wrong with white tiling and cute oval-shaped wash basins with two faucets. The bathroom is very important for a woman, and Sirre didn’t  want to wash, scrub and oil herself in an ordinary bathroom of the kind you might find in Hakaniemi. Only Italian or Spanish tiles would do, and a pure-style wash basin with automatic faucets. As she thought about the bathroom next to a three-foot high pile of product catalogues, it occurred to her that a single brown-coloured painting would be an original choice for the door of the WC. She remembered seeing a painting that would be suitable.  She didn’t think she had painted it herself. Assar would hardly object. He had handed their home over to Sirre. Sirre’s home was her office. That was how she thought of it. Sirre was responsible for all of the choices in the home that affected interior decoration and the feeding and clothing of the family. In the kitchen she made a cup of cappuccino.

She found a quiet life satisfying. Every woman needs a family. Assar and Vita had made her complete. She caressed the Kitchen-Aid blender and sat down on the broad ledge below the window. What was missing was a view of the sea. One and a half meters away  was the wall of the office employees. It looked like something out of a social realist East German Advent calendar. It had little square compartments with dangling blinds, and poor-postured females in fluffy knitted cardigans stuck bright yellow post-it notes on the wall’s free surface area. The office workers’ slavishness emphasized Sirre’s privileged lot. Sirre turned her back on them. Fortunately the apartment had lots of space. Through the living room another living room opened up on the horizon, behind it were Vita’s room, the office where Sirre sorted her interior design magazines and cookbooks, the utility room, the bedroom, the library and the guest room, as well as some other silly little rooms that were full of nooks and crannies and were all that people could think of building a hundred years ago. They were exceedingly ingenious places for storing  rowing machines, exercycles and steppers, she thought, dressing her phrases up like Louis XII.

Sirre was a happy woman. She put her cup back in its saucer on the window ledge,  got out the yoga mat and began to do stretching exercises in the living room, which in its half-furnished state looked like Maya Plisetskaya’s dance class.  Sirre saw himself in a black tights and a black gym top, straight-necked and upright, a smile on her lips even though the stretching was making her muscles ache. .
Half past eleven. Sirre fetched a microfibre cloth from the utility room and wiped the dust from the small bronze sculptures she had bought from Galleria Sculptor. She did not know who the young Finnish sculptor was who had made them, but as abstracts they went well with the broad and simple window ledges, and they induced one to imagine what they represented. They were surprisingly heavy. For some reason Sirre had initially avoided art galleries, in her memory there was some trauma connected with art, and in her new life she did not feel like thinking about it. Now she experienced art the way it was supposed to be experienced: superficially. She wasn’t interested in the person who had made it, just as she didn’t give a damn about who had designed the dining room furniture or the ceiling lamp. She decided to go and have lunch at the Nepalese place. It was a small and cosy restaurant.  Its lunchtime clientele included civil servants, graphic designers, people in the film industry, architects. The calm buzz of voices reminded her of a wasps’ nest at night. These people, too, could sting several times in succession. No one ate in a hurry. Their hour-long lunch break was a different affair from the one at the hospital, where the staff ate film-wrapped sandwiches as they ran from one ward to the other. A jangling, discordant tape of string music droned away behind the Finnish consensus. As she picked at the rice with her fork Sirre felt lonely. Which group did she belong to? Housewives didn’t have a union. Assar was hardly ever away from his job. Vita was in first grade at school. Dear Vita! Sirre would give her a surprise and fetch her straight from school. Vita wouldn’t have to go to the after-school group. It was wonderful – she was so lucky to have a child. At the same time she remembered that Assar was still unwilling to sign the adoption papers that would make Vita her own. Sirre drank two glasses of water. She had a moral responsibility to take care of Vita. She was Vita’s mother in a practical and ethical sense, and she must not think about side issues. Sirre left the  rice uneaten, as was nowadays advised. She left the restaurant, went to the school, quick quick, before Vita had time to start playing in the playground with the other children.

Behind the old prison the children’s shouts rose in the air like the snowballs. The junior school was in red-brick building that also housed the kindergarten and the sports hall. Inside, the premises which had been reconditioned from an old turbine factory were white and high-ceilinged, enlivened on the outside by the original dark red brick wall. The old decommissioned chimneystack rose from the schoolyard like a tower erected in honour of learning. In this part of town the children were red-cheeked and warmly dressed. She did not see a child left out of games, or kicking the ice alone in a corner. The girls were prettily dressed, their long tresses plaited. The plaits reached far down their backs. Vita’s jacket was covered in black and wine-red squares.

Sirre stood outside the school to wait. She expected that Vita would come running to her as soon as she saw her. Vita said goodbye to her friends and ran to hug her.

“Mummy’s here! My Mummy’s here!” she cried.

Sirre was the object of anticipation. To the others the news of a mother’s arrival was not significant, but to Sirre it was: that someone called her Mummy. They both called her that: Vita and Assar. Sometimes she thought she was a mother to them both, but then she wanted quickly to forget about that idea, searched for the rouge and concealer pen in the make-up bag and compared himself to the other South Helsinki mothers. She could almost keep up with them.

Sirre tried hard. She did gym exercises, yoga. She took courses in Japanese flower arrangement and studied critical thinking at the Institute. She didn’t talk about her private life and didn’t ask other people about theirs. She tried to attain peace of mind and did concentration exercises when she was alone. She controlled her moods and hid her disappointments.  The only matters she ever interfered in were connected with  the activities of the maintenance man, and she often checked the time he began to sweep the courtyard in the morning. The noise woke Vita up  too early, and Sirre went down to tell the man not to start work in their block before seven.

Clear-eyed, trusting Vita. She was straight as a pole, and taller than the other  children of her age. She had her father’s strong bones and thick reddish hair. She was still a little unsure, in search of herself, but Sirre hoped that later on she would become conscious of her strength.

Mummy looked like a cartoon clown. Mummy stood on the edge of the playground looking spare. Mummy was useless. Mummy made Vita laugh. Her friends,  too, some of them. Mummy was embarrassing.  She really did look embarrassing as she stood there under the guttering. Water was dripping on Mummy’s head. Mummy didn’t notice it. Mummy had a fur hat on. Mummy looked like a new girl. Yes. She looked like a new girl and no one wanted to play with her. Embarrassing. Mummy probably had a bar of chocolate in her pocket. Or chewing gum at least. Vita wanted something sweet. Mummy gave her sweets.

A child’s life ought to be secure and clearly marked out. Sirre hugged Vita, that children’s world with all its details, in which she was involved: the winter coat that smelt of frost, the addition and subtraction sums, the school class sizes, the pencils with horses on them, the magnetic pencil box, the baggy rucksack, the gym shoes, the bedtimes, the mini-cartons of fruit juice, the Japanese children’s movies, the playtimes. Vita put her  hand in Sirre’s coat pocket. Sirre said no.  Vita found a stick of chewing gum.

[pp. 77-80]

They do their food shopping in Stockmann’s. As always, it’s crowded there, people are queuing up for individual pies and portions of fish roe, the large number of people completely wears Vita out, Sirre advises her to sit down and wait on one of the seats behind the checkouts where the ladies wait for their taxis. Vita still wonders at the ladies, whom she never sees anywhere else but Töölö and Stockmann’s, the women are accustomed to coming here just as Sirre has accustomed Vita and herself to coming here, the department store is centrally located, but it has nothing that can’t be got at S-Market,  it smells of stale, unaired women’s clothes, not of fine cheeses like at the Market Hall, everyone needs a centre for their lives to revolve around and for true Helsinkians that centre is Stockmann’s, there the pace is relaxed, you can’t queue up at the bank or the health centre, but here you can, in the queue at the meat counter you meet acquaintances and are one of the gang, here there are dark blue duffel coats, red scarves, easy-going middle-aged men who are so self-confident that they think nothing of telling one another dirty stories at the fish counter, which doesn’t make them lewd but intellectually arrogant; porcelain-faced family matrons whose heads are so well-groomed that they wouldn’t be out of place at a gala dinner if they exchanged their canvas coats for evening dress; Sirre doesn’t feel she is one of them, she observes them from the side, and suddenly the world withdraws from her, she will never fit into the same bubble as the others, if she wasn’t there Assar would find a new woman within the week, Vita would call her by her first name but in time would come to regard her as her mother, Sirre would no longer be there in the clothes that Assar paid for, and no one would notice, the queue is a whirlpool that is drilling her into the interior of the earth, Sirre thinks about the tiles, concentrates on them, the tiles are the realest thing she has, they must be green, her number is being called, she asks for five pike-perch fillets, one each for herself and Vita, and three for Assar, a beefy male needs a dinner fit for a man, she also buys sourdough bread, and butter, a mini-carton of fruit juice with a straw for Vita as first aid and in the queue for the checkout she scribbles the words dark green on the flat of her hand, it’s the colour for the bathroom.

Vita is waiting for her obediently at the seats, a sweet broad-minded child, how lucky Sirre is to be allowed to be her mother, be allowed to look after her, Vita’s expression is harsh and uncommunicative, the child is thinking about unpleasant things, Sirre is worried but knows that Vita won’t open up to her, Sirre tears the straw off the plastic and pokes it into the carton, Vita says that she could have done it herself, Sirre says it’s Mummy’s job to do the looking after, that’s what mummies are for, outside they start to feel  cold because inside the store  they sweated in their winter clothes, they walk quickly through Esplanade Park to Kauppatori and back to their home in Katajanokka, that’s the island near the centre, on Kauppatori the tourists are gazing around them in the dreary windy weather, they search for things worth seeing and discover that the main sight in Helsinki is emptiness, the capital in which there isn’t anything, that is brilliant, that is wonderful, supernatural, the Suomenlinna ferry is coming up against the quay, the fish-seller speaks more foreign languages than the civil servant who is selecting a fatty, smoked hunk of sea salmon, the Tallinn and Stockholm ferries leave their sewage in the Baltic and turn in the harbour like queen bees, Sirre tightens her grip on Vita’s hand and says how nice it is to be walking out in the cold knowing that soon they will be in the warm at home, in the safety of their own home, where each person has their own place, their own room, where they can switch on different lights, make cosy shadows, put woollen socks on their feet and make dinner for the family, fry the fish in butter and eat mash potatoes, perhaps Vita would like to peel the potatoes, they will wait for Dad to come home, she will check Vita’s homework, time won’t move forward but stand still, and  tomorrow morning will begin with the smell of coffee, the newspaper, while the windy, demanding weather stays behind the window, Dad will go to work willing and fresh, Sirre will take Vita to school, all the days will be like one another, she loves certainty but then Vita says: “What’s so special about that?”

“Certainty?”

“Yes.”

“It’s good when things don’t change. We can be safe.”

“It sounds stupid.”

[pp. 83-89]

Sirre cleared the table. She liked housework. It was so easy. You didn’t have to think.  In the shadow of routine chores she thought in terror of how they were going to spend the next two and a half hours before supper and bedtime. Before her job as a housewife Sirre had spent her free time sitting down. That would have been enough for her now too, but the mother of a family could not sit. A housewife had to be a model of bustling energy, a powerhouse with a sense of humour.

Children like their mothers to be busy. If Sirre had stretched out on the sofa and taken a snooze, Vita would very quickly have organized some activity. The child would not tolerate a resting mother. While Sirre performed her tasks in the kitchen, Vita played in her room. She said the Barbie dolls’ words for them. Sometimes the Barbies sang, sometimes they were cheerful, sometimes angry. When Sirre had finished tidying the table and putting the  leftovers into airtight boxes, Assar arrived.

“I’m home?” he shouted good-humouredly from the hallway. He took off his coat and washed his hands. Vita ran to hug her father. Sirre smiled behind her. In the family, Sirre took the bronze medal. Work, Vita and Sirre, in that order. She wasn’t the competitive sort, third place would do for her, it was fine.

“Hey,” Assar said as he put Vita down and looked askance. “Awfully hungry.”

Sirre took from the refrigerator the containers she had just crammed into it,  emptied the mashed potatoes onto a baking sheet and fried in butter the three fillets that were intended for Assar. They didn’t use a microwave. They didn’t live that kind of hurried existence. To them, a microwave meant fast food, convenience stuff, everything disposable and easy. They were more serious people than that.

Assar clinked ice cubes into a bowl. Vita finished her game. She carried the pile of Donald Duck comics into the living room and began to read them. Sirre portioned out some salad on s plate, retrieved the  butter and cheese from the refrigerator, cut the bread. The fish was fried, the mashed potatoes warmed, Sirre put the food on the plate and set it down in front of Assar. Assar asked for Tabasco. Sirre got the sauce from the refrigerator and put it on the table. After that, she didn’t really know what to do. She stood in front of the sink unit like a head-waiter. She waited for Assar’s requests in order to carry them out. Assar scanned tthe pages of the dailies, spread one of them out on the table, and began to read. Sirre glanced into the living room where Vita was sitting, went over to stroke her head,  looked out of the window at the street and drew the blinds because Assar went about at home in boxer shorts and didn’t want to be seen like that. At home Sirre wore a velour tracksuit and house shoes, she was always ready to open the door even though Assar had told her not to, as he was suspicious of unexpected visitor. Once the man from the phone book company had rung the doorbell and before Sirre had managed to open the door, Assar sneaked about the rooms turning all off all the lights, and the man put a note through the letterbox to say where the books could be obtained.  Assar had cursed the extra trip, though it was he who had told her not to open the door. Vita had picked up her father’s way, she stiffened at the sound of a voice on the staircase. On the other hand  the neighbours didn’t open their doors either. They only stepped outside their apartments when the phone book man had gone.

Sirre returned to the kitchen. Assar was still eating. He was practically lying on the newspaper, totally focused on the news. Assar looked like a horse or a dog with its muzzle  almost fixed to the plate. Sirre felt stupid standing there waiting to see how she could serve him. She picked up a paper and went to sit down in one of the larger armchairs in the bigger living room.  Sirre’s reading session was not to Vita’s taste. She forgot her comic instantly, ran to her mother’s arms and started to jump and thump.

“What shall we do? What shall we do? “ she asked.

“I’d like to read for a bit, too,” Sirre replied. “Please stop jumping.”

“Reading is boring. Let’s do something else. Play with me!”

“No.”

“Play!”

“I had enough of playing when I was a child. Now I can’t do it any more.”

“Nobody plays with me.”

“Ask your father.”

“ He never plays.”

“Then you’ll have to play on your own, or else read.”

“Stupid!”

“People who call people names need to look in the mirror.”

“Stupid! “

“Why don’t you call your father stupid? Why is it only me who’s stupid?

“He gets angry.”

“It’s not fair to call me names.”

There was a belch from the kitchen. Assar pushed back his chair. The chair-legs scratched the floor. He stumped through the living room, dragging his feet.

“Daddy!” Vita said.

“The one day I come home early there’s a quarrel going on here,” Assar said, trailing the newspaper in his hand as he made his way through to the bedroom. “Why can’t you play with Vita for a little? Play with her now, when she’s asking?” Vita lowered her eyes. She tightened Sirre’s collar and tugged it. Assar switched on the bedside lamp and burrowed under the blankets in the sweat of the day. He would have needed a shovel to dig deep enough into the mattresses. His colleagues and clients saw him fresh from the shower and smelling of aftershave. What Sirre got was a man who was tired and sweaty. Sirre did not mind his sweat. Other men’s she did. But there was something very right about Assar’s smell.  Of course Sirre hoped her husband was aware of how he was giving himself. There was nothing Sirre did not approve of. Therefore she did not matter, nor did her desires or dislikes.

Vita stuck out her lower lip. She was sulking. She never reproached her father and never contradicted him. After saying hello Assar did not look at his daughter or at Sirre. They met Assar for one or two  minutes each day. Sirre and Vita were the apartment’s staff, whom Assar walked past after greeting them. He saw the supper, the newspapers, and his established route from the kitchen to the bedroom. Not until the early hours of the morning would he get out of bed and walk the same way to the kitchen and switch on the espresso machine to warm. I’m a housewife, Sirre reminded herself of her function. I’ll do my work, she thought, and so he left the newspaper on the chair, summoned up her strength and let Vita haul her off to her room to play with the Barbies. At the same time Sirre was devising increasingly complicated explanations to give Vita about her father, so that Vita wouldn’t feel rejected by him. Invisible.

Sirre chose interior decoration as the subject of the game. She took the Barbies shopping in a pink plastic miniature shop which Vita had got as a birthday present, put on a little, high voice and made the Barbies repeat her own thoughts about the bathroom, the ones she had had that morning. Vita was happy. She was really enthusiastic. From the bedroom, Assar took the opportunity of telling them to make less noise. He had not yet completed the process of falling asleep.

At nine o’clock, when Vita had finished her supper and Sirre had read to her, supervised her evening wash and tucked her up in bed, Sirre returned to her solitude. She sat alone and listened. When Vita fell asleep, Assar woke up. That often happened. His presences and absences, his intervals of feeding and sleeping were always scheduled at  times of the day that were not the same as Vita’s. Sirre calculated that during the past year father and daughter had only spent a few hours together. Together meant meeting in the hallway, passing each other, being in the car at the same time. Assar was not a man who would put his own life aside and allow a  child to fill the space.

In the evenings Sirre wanted to be alone. She was dependent on solitude. She turned off the lights and sat in the large living room. Assar came in to ask if she would  watch television with him. Siire did not need him now, not now, when she had got Vita off to sleep and was able to be alone.  Sirre did not need Assar in her life. In that she was self-sufficient. Assar was limp and obese. He never stretched his muscles. His tension consisted of sweating and nervous irritation, getting his words mixed up and looking furtively about him, but his muscles never stiffened. Assar shuffled off. Perhaps he sighed. Sirre didn’t care. She was inside her thoughts. Selfishness was a room the door of which she kept shut. She had to visit that room every day. Otherwise she began to fume with rage as she did when she was left without shower, soap and moisturizing cream. She had a right to exist as a normal woman, a housewife and the mother of a family. Why was the world made like this, so that one had to secure one’s place, surpass oneself, make something of oneself? This was enough for her. Sirre was still enjoying her moment in darkness and silence. Assar had asked if she found the present hard to endure, because by turning out the lights and switching off the radio and television she was getting rid of all the stimuli around her. Was this how she spent the daytime, too?  Women were not quiet, Assar had said. Women were silly geese.

Sirre came to bed. Behind her back, Assar went on reading. He read for a long time in silence, almost without breathing, and Sirre thought he had fallen asleep when he suddenly turned the newspaper with a violent rustling and changed his position so that the bed shook,  though the separate mattresses were chosen to be independent of the movements of either of them.

Assar let the newspaper fall to the floor. They turned to face each other. There was intimacy, understanding there. Sirre forgot about the evening that had just passed, her vague dissatisfaction with her husband. They were starting from the beginning. Their lives and their situations complemented each other. It was good to live in this family.

Burning Bridge 2009 catalogue, now in Swedish!

Posted under Catalogue SWE (pdf)

The Burning Bridge catalogue in Swedish contains 60 pages of texts from Turku writers.

Read Riku Korhonen, Markku Into, Milla Paloniemi (and The Swearing Hedgehog), Ville Hytönen, Henry Lehtonen, Juha Kulmala, Antti Nylén, Timo Hännikäinen, Harri Kumpulainen, Boris Hurtta and Hannu Hirvonen in their other national language, Swedish.

Download Burning Bridge Swedish catalogue (pdf).