sunset. After the heart attack his doctor had forbidden him to drink, but they couldn’t forbid you to live. On weekdays Pykström bought light beer on the Swedish side of the border more or less as a soft drink that didn’t even give you a hangover. It made you slightly tipsy, and that would do.
He put some birch logs in the stove, tearing off some bark to act as kindling. His son had brought thirty-two cubic yards of dry birchwood in the truck and asked for the umpteenth time why he didn’t have electricity installed. An electric sauna in a Lapland cabin? True, he felt a bit bad about using imported logs, but if he didn’t have the strength to chop the firewood himself, then that was that. It was always the same story, thought Harri Pykström. There were too many things to make one’s life easier, even though their original plan had been to live surrounded by nature on nature’s terms, in the grip of wild beasts and the merciless elements. This reality had slapped him in the face like a wet rag, for nothing would prevent one from getting older, not even the realisation of a youthful dream.
Pykström sat down on the top bench of the sauna, listening to the crackle of the fire and the roar of the furnace. Perhaps just one more mouthful, perhaps just another swig, how could another little drop do him any harm?
T hat autumn it would be two years since the heart attack.
Harri Pykström had been applying for bail for a soldier who had gone AWOL, when his chest had exploded. On waking up in the recovery room, Harri Pykström knew that his new life was located in Perä-Kompio – where for several years now the Finnish army had had a cabin for sale, but he had lacked the courage, or the time, to buy it.
It was there that Pykström went. There that Pykström would die. At the end of a quad track, no mod cons, eighteen thousand euros, easy to look after.
‘And what about me?’ Mrs Pykström inquired with a cautious squawk.
‘I won’t go anywhere without you,’ Pykström said.
‘If you’re planning to go somewhere in Lapland, you can go alone.’
Pykström packed his clothes, signed the deed of sale and flew to Kittilä. At a sports shop in Muonio he bought a quad bike, rode to the cabin and began to put it in order with an axe, a handsaw and a lot of motivation. But what could he hope to do, a man who weighed two hundred and seventy pounds and was recovering from a heart operation? He had had to use his satellite phone to call the emergency medical services helicopter, and resume his convalescence at Rovaniemi District Hospital.
Mrs Pykström had sworn at his hospital bedside that she would never again leave her fat, crazy husband alone, not even for an instant. Even Jorma, from Australia, expressed the modest hope that he would not immediately have to fly back again for the funeral. With his hand on the complete works of Arto Paasilinna, Harri Pykström promised to take things more easily.
Outside labour was hired to complete the repairs onthe house, and workmen came to the site all the way from Helsinki, Estonia and Norway. Pykström was looking for new ways to make money, and one of them was a plan to write short stories of the kind he had read as a young student in a flatshare, and had later liked to read while sitting on the toilet. As adjutant of a logistics company he had had to pound a typewriter every day, so even a whole novel might not have been out of his range. A wilderness novel for readers all over the Arctic region. He had told his wife that once the fibre optic cables had been installed on their property she ought to take a telecommuting job.
‘You’re crazy.’
Mrs Pykström had a degree in cultural anthropology and was working on a dissertation called
The World of Woman: Research Diaries from the World’s Beginning to its Hypothetical End
. She promised to wait until the repairs were finished and then review the situation – perhaps here she would at last be able to complete her
He put some birch logs in the stove, tearing off some bark to act as kindling. His son had brought thirty-two cubic yards of dry birchwood in the truck and asked for the umpteenth time why he didn’t have electricity installed. An electric sauna in a Lapland cabin? True, he felt a bit bad about using imported logs, but if he didn’t have the strength to chop the firewood himself, then that was that. It was always the same story, thought Harri Pykström. There were too many things to make one’s life easier, even though their original plan had been to live surrounded by nature on nature’s terms, in the grip of wild beasts and the merciless elements. This reality had slapped him in the face like a wet rag, for nothing would prevent one from getting older, not even the realisation of a youthful dream.
Pykström sat down on the top bench of the sauna, listening to the crackle of the fire and the roar of the furnace. Perhaps just one more mouthful, perhaps just another swig, how could another little drop do him any harm?
T hat autumn it would be two years since the heart attack.
Harri Pykström had been applying for bail for a soldier who had gone AWOL, when his chest had exploded. On waking up in the recovery room, Harri Pykström knew that his new life was located in Perä-Kompio – where for several years now the Finnish army had had a cabin for sale, but he had lacked the courage, or the time, to buy it.
It was there that Pykström went. There that Pykström would die. At the end of a quad track, no mod cons, eighteen thousand euros, easy to look after.
‘And what about me?’ Mrs Pykström inquired with a cautious squawk.
‘I won’t go anywhere without you,’ Pykström said.
‘If you’re planning to go somewhere in Lapland, you can go alone.’
Pykström packed his clothes, signed the deed of sale and flew to Kittilä. At a sports shop in Muonio he bought a quad bike, rode to the cabin and began to put it in order with an axe, a handsaw and a lot of motivation. But what could he hope to do, a man who weighed two hundred and seventy pounds and was recovering from a heart operation? He had had to use his satellite phone to call the emergency medical services helicopter, and resume his convalescence at Rovaniemi District Hospital.
Mrs Pykström had sworn at his hospital bedside that she would never again leave her fat, crazy husband alone, not even for an instant. Even Jorma, from Australia, expressed the modest hope that he would not immediately have to fly back again for the funeral. With his hand on the complete works of Arto Paasilinna, Harri Pykström promised to take things more easily.
Outside labour was hired to complete the repairs onthe house, and workmen came to the site all the way from Helsinki, Estonia and Norway. Pykström was looking for new ways to make money, and one of them was a plan to write short stories of the kind he had read as a young student in a flatshare, and had later liked to read while sitting on the toilet. As adjutant of a logistics company he had had to pound a typewriter every day, so even a whole novel might not have been out of his range. A wilderness novel for readers all over the Arctic region. He had told his wife that once the fibre optic cables had been installed on their property she ought to take a telecommuting job.
‘You’re crazy.’
Mrs Pykström had a degree in cultural anthropology and was working on a dissertation called
The World of Woman: Research Diaries from the World’s Beginning to its Hypothetical End
. She promised to wait until the repairs were finished and then review the situation – perhaps here she would at last be able to complete her
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