dissertation. Or at any rate she would have to wait until her crazy husband had recovered his senses.
Harri Pykström had attached a lifting apparatus to the trailer of his quad and helped the building workers to hoist the materials from the foot of the hill. He always did this stripped naked. When his wife asked him why, he replied that he was master in his own home and could do as he liked. This was nothing new to Mrs Pykström, for she had always treated her husband as an object of research: he possessed something in common with the men of the Huchu tribe studied by Bronislaw Malinowski, a tribe that cultivated a penis display ritual. Sincerity, bragging, a zest for life. Worship of wooden idols, self-elevation and self-abasement. How could one leave such a man? Leave him alone even for a few minutes?
When a man and a woman are fused together as a couple, they stay closer to each other than any pair of animals. An osmosis takes place in which one becomes a part of the other, no matter how different they are. Or even, in the view of outsiders, incompatible. Pykström and his wife loathed each other’s respective hobbies of shooting and dancing in front of the television set; they loathed each other’s favourite films. Harri Pykström had been sick only once in his life, when he saw his wife putting
Cocktail
on the video player. But this was precisely the basis of their love. When Harri Pykström called his wife a goddamn meatball, only Mrs Pykström knew what it really meant. My dear, my treasure. Come and warm the bed, let’s make more children even though we’re fifty, even though I have prostate trouble and you no longer have a uterus or ovaries. Mrs Pykström and Harri Pykström were aware of all these things; they had even discussed the matter and agreed about its old-fashioned sanctity. It was the sort of relationship that the young no longer understood at all, as they were too busy searching for themselves. The young were in quest of their own ego, their innermost being, and the best place to hold a rave-up. Instead they ought to be looking for someone. Someone to understand. Someone to support. Someone to love. Someone to make nice meals for, no matter how numbingly dreadful it was to share the same roof with them.
For telecommuting Mrs Pykström needed a broadband connection and more room for a study. Little by little the Pykström’s cabin had become a modern private residence, which just happened to be situated in the middle of nowhere. Except that it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere at all, for six miles away there was a skiing centre with more cultural, entertainment and sportingevents than there had been in their old neighbourhood of Vantaa, next to Helsinki.
One morning Harri Pykström noticed he was living in a house that was identical in every respect to the one he had left, and again felt a stab in his chest. He had planned to spend his time fishing, hunting, living in harmony with nature, yet here he was riding to the village on his quad bike, buying the same Euro Shopper products as he could anywhere in Finland or Europe and sitting in the local pub to watch Premier League football. Pykström was not hermit material.
Pykström lit a fresh cigarette on the embers of the last one and opened another can of beer. The sauna thermometer read fifty-five degrees Celsius. He went outside to fetch more logs.
V atanescu stopped by the edge of a narrow brook. He had already filled six plastic bags with berries and had taken them back to base camp. He was now on the last two, and found himself faced with a logistical problem. How were the bags to reach the customers?
The sweat trickled, the brook babbled, and Vatanescu wondered if it was all right to drink the water. When Panos Milos had drunk the water of the river in his home village he had grown a third arm, according to the story Panos’s mother had told, at least. The rabbit jumped onto a stone in the middle of the brook and lapped some water
Harri Pykström had attached a lifting apparatus to the trailer of his quad and helped the building workers to hoist the materials from the foot of the hill. He always did this stripped naked. When his wife asked him why, he replied that he was master in his own home and could do as he liked. This was nothing new to Mrs Pykström, for she had always treated her husband as an object of research: he possessed something in common with the men of the Huchu tribe studied by Bronislaw Malinowski, a tribe that cultivated a penis display ritual. Sincerity, bragging, a zest for life. Worship of wooden idols, self-elevation and self-abasement. How could one leave such a man? Leave him alone even for a few minutes?
When a man and a woman are fused together as a couple, they stay closer to each other than any pair of animals. An osmosis takes place in which one becomes a part of the other, no matter how different they are. Or even, in the view of outsiders, incompatible. Pykström and his wife loathed each other’s respective hobbies of shooting and dancing in front of the television set; they loathed each other’s favourite films. Harri Pykström had been sick only once in his life, when he saw his wife putting
Cocktail
on the video player. But this was precisely the basis of their love. When Harri Pykström called his wife a goddamn meatball, only Mrs Pykström knew what it really meant. My dear, my treasure. Come and warm the bed, let’s make more children even though we’re fifty, even though I have prostate trouble and you no longer have a uterus or ovaries. Mrs Pykström and Harri Pykström were aware of all these things; they had even discussed the matter and agreed about its old-fashioned sanctity. It was the sort of relationship that the young no longer understood at all, as they were too busy searching for themselves. The young were in quest of their own ego, their innermost being, and the best place to hold a rave-up. Instead they ought to be looking for someone. Someone to understand. Someone to support. Someone to love. Someone to make nice meals for, no matter how numbingly dreadful it was to share the same roof with them.
For telecommuting Mrs Pykström needed a broadband connection and more room for a study. Little by little the Pykström’s cabin had become a modern private residence, which just happened to be situated in the middle of nowhere. Except that it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere at all, for six miles away there was a skiing centre with more cultural, entertainment and sportingevents than there had been in their old neighbourhood of Vantaa, next to Helsinki.
One morning Harri Pykström noticed he was living in a house that was identical in every respect to the one he had left, and again felt a stab in his chest. He had planned to spend his time fishing, hunting, living in harmony with nature, yet here he was riding to the village on his quad bike, buying the same Euro Shopper products as he could anywhere in Finland or Europe and sitting in the local pub to watch Premier League football. Pykström was not hermit material.
Pykström lit a fresh cigarette on the embers of the last one and opened another can of beer. The sauna thermometer read fifty-five degrees Celsius. He went outside to fetch more logs.
V atanescu stopped by the edge of a narrow brook. He had already filled six plastic bags with berries and had taken them back to base camp. He was now on the last two, and found himself faced with a logistical problem. How were the bags to reach the customers?
The sweat trickled, the brook babbled, and Vatanescu wondered if it was all right to drink the water. When Panos Milos had drunk the water of the river in his home village he had grown a third arm, according to the story Panos’s mother had told, at least. The rabbit jumped onto a stone in the middle of the brook and lapped some water
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