Birdbrain by Johanna Sinisalo Page A

Finland.
    ‘We shouldn’t bother with soap. You won’t be able to rinse it off properly, and it’ll just lie in the soil.’
    The door was draughty. Although it was already cold inside the cabin, the sudden gust of chill air was a reminder of the not-so-distant Antarctic.
    ‘Well?’
    I followed Jyrki to the door. He had placed his opened towel on the railing and was now crouching down filling his mug with water from the tank. I almost shrieked as he poured the water over his head, scrubbed himself using his hands and repeated this with another mugful of water.
    ‘Pouring it slowly like this, you can make a little bit of water go a long way. Gets the sweat off the skin. This is basic stuff. If you don’t wash the film of sweat off your skin, you can bet you’ll catch a chill at night.’
    The shock had me speechless. Wasn’t it part of the life of a macho hiker-man to be unashamedly dirty and smelly? I’d much rather be dirty and smelly and blokier than thou than pour cold water over myself at a time when my teeth were already chattering from the cold.
    ‘Sometimes it's easier if someone else does it,’ said Jyrki, and before I’d had time to say anything he had poured a mugful of water down the back of my neck.
    I screamed so loudly that the sound echoed around the woods and the mountainside. It was as if a vat of molten metal had suddenly been tipped over me, but Jyrki continued unhurriedly pouring water over my back, sides and buttocks, scrubbing me with his big hands, and, as if by a miracle, I suddenly found myself in a Zen-like state of tranquillity. I stood there silently as he returned with another mugful, and together his hands and the water removed the sweat from my breasts, my stomach and thighs.
    ‘Face,’ said Jyrki and poured water into my cupped hands. I rinsed my face and felt beneath my fingers the coat of dried sweat across my forehead and around the sides of my jaws; it came away in my hands like a layer of fine sand.
    ‘Now dry off,’ he told me.
    I didn’t have a special travel towel, but I did have a thin cotton sarong. It was much larger and heavier, of course, but it had already been put to plenty of different uses, everything from a picnic tablecloth to an improvised dressing-gown in hostels with the shower in the corridor.
    I wrapped the sarong around myself and towelled myself off, and suddenly everything seemed to make perfect sense. My toes and the area between my shoulder blades ached, but I wasn’t cold any more, not one bit.
    Just then something hit my arm so hard that it smarted. The impact was almost electric — sharp and painful. Another blow to my shoulders; a third on my forehead. And only then did I notice that a cloud of black dots had gathered around us.
    ‘Damn it. Sand flies,’ said Jyrki and swiped at the cloud of insects to make it disperse, opened the door as little as possible and pulled me inside. A few black dots followed us inside but thankfully not very many.
    ‘We’ll be able to swat them. From now on we need to be careful opening the door. Maybe we should go to the toilet via the lounge, so we don’t need to open any doors directly outside.’
    I nodded, sat down on the edge of a bunk and started pulling on dry, warm clothes. I felt so wonderful that I could have burst into tears.
     
Jyrki
    There was a rattle from the veranda. I was setting up our cooker on the metal- plated work surface in the kitchen. I decided that if the newcomer was a ranger I’d say I’d forgotten to put the tickets in the box.
    She heard the sound, too, as she brought in the bag of food, looked first at the door then at me and commented that the timing of our little naked escapade had been exceptionally good. Even I tried to smile.
    The new arrival was a tall, thin, bearded bloke. A short exchange with him made it clear we didn’t need to worry about the hut tickets. The guy introduced himself as Fabian from Austria, your typical hippie hiker. He said he’d come from Lake