The Beggar and the Hare by Tuomas Kyrö Page A

more firewood from the outside wall. He had noticed his mother watching him and asked what the matter was. His mother had said she knew that tomorrow her son would be leaving.
    ‘Will you be able to endure what will come?’
    ‘What will come?’ Vatanescu had asked.
    ‘Anything can come.’
    ‘I’m doing it for you.’
    Vatanescu then went off to bed, but could not sleep, and waited for the morning. The new day was waiting there, too.
    That’s how days are. They arrive and we don’t know what they will bring. Or what we are allowed to take from them.
    Have Yegor’s men come to the village? Will they be looking for my son? Am I that valuable to them?
    These young people have left their parents in order to live their own lives.
    I left my son.

    H ow would one describe Finnish Lapland to a foreign reader, to one from Germany, for example? Would one describe the shaman drums? The noise of building work? The Sami costumes? The Russian four-by-fours, the drunken British tourists and the Finnish screen actors? The Dutch motor sledge safari groups, cheeks red with the cold, smiling broad smiles after extreme experiences? The Crazy Reindeer Hotel, with its concerts by entertainers like Popeda or Paula Koivuniemi and the business travellers copulating in the cheapest rooms? The reindeer, both the live ones and those that have been turned into steaks and processed meat? One might describe all of those things, but now the train is clanking into its destination, drawn by proper old Soviet locomotives with diesel engines handed down from grandfathers to grandsons.
    Vatanescu stood on the platform of the last station in this small country, more than six hundred miles to the north of the point where the train had begun its journey. The teenagers gave him the winter clothes that had been intended for the fourth passenger, as well as a pointed woollen cap and sling for the rabbit, both knitted by Jonttu.
    Vatanescu pulled the quilted jacket over his suit and put on the thermal boots. He promised to reimburse the teenagers for all the help they had given him, took down the numbers of their bank accounts and wishedthem all the best for their future lives. From the sling the rabbit showed a paw, which the teenagers shook one by one.
    Children, appreciate all that you have the chance to acquire.
    The teenagers continued their journey by taxi. From his inside pocket Vatanescu took the guide that Ming had given him and found the section on berries.

    T hird-generation railwayman Mikko Maukas was unloading cars from the night express. Each year they increased in size, enormous SUVs with tiny female drivers who wore immaculate makeup. Number plates from every country in Europe. Professional builders who had gone south to Estonia to buy cheaper ceiling panels. Maukas was used to tourists from Finland and abroad, their automatic gearboxes, their questions. Were there reindeer here? Could one use pounds and dollars? Could one take reindeer on board trains or planes? Was it all right to shoot them? Why didn’t anyone speak French? His reply was the smile that men in Lapland are given at birth, a smile that can mean anything from vitriolic abuse to falling in love. Up from the station trudged yet another tourist or businessman dressed in arctic gear, carrying two plastic bags. Sometimes they even tried to look poor, especially the wealthiest ones, like that furniture magnate Kamppari or whatever his name was, Maukas thought.
    Vatanescu asked where he could find lingonberries and bilberries. Mikko Maukas looked at the investor, who did not fit his idea of a berry-picker. Why was the fellow talking in metaphors, why should an unloader of cars have to know all the features of different cultures?Berry-pickers were either Flips or Russkies. That wasn’t racism, Mikko said to himself; those words were just easier to say than Filipinos and Ukrainians; the guys who arrived in minivans wearing the same kind of tracksuits that Mikko wore in summer. On the