whole of your life walking uphill. It’s not easy to imagine that. You’re ambling casually along a narrow, winding country road in Tornedalen, like the one from Pajala to Muodoslompolo. It’s early summer and everything is fresh and green. The road passes through a forest of weather-beaten pines, and there’s a smell of mud and sun from the bog pools. Capercaillies are eating gravel in the ditches, then take off with wings flapping loudly and disappear into the undergrowth.
Soon you come to the first hill. You notice that you’re starting to climb and you can feel your calf muscles getting tense. But you don’t give it a second thought, it’s only a gentle slope after all. When you reach the top, quite soon, the road will level out again and the forest will be flat and dry on each side, with fluffy white reindeer moss in among the soaring tree trunks.
But you keep on climbing. The hill is longer than you thought. Your legs grow tired, you slow down and you look more and more impatiently for the crest which has to come at any moment now, surely.
But it never does come. The road just keeps on going up and up. The forest is the same as before, with stretches of bog and brushwood and here and there an ugly clear-felled patch. But it’s still uphill. It’s as if somebody has broken off the whole landscape and propped it up on one edge. Lifted up the far end and stuck something underneath it, just to annoy you. And you start to suspect that it will keep on going uphill for all the rest of the day. And the next day as well.
You keep on climbing stubbornly. The days gradually turn into weeks. Your legs start to feel like lead, and you keep wondering who it was that thought he’d be smart and chock up the landscape. It’s been pretty skilfully done, you have to admit that, grudgingly. But surely it will level out once you get past Parkajoki, there are limits after all. And you come to Parkajoki, but the road is still going uphill and so you think it will be Kitkiöjoki.
And the weeks turn into months. You work your way through them one stride at a time. And the snow starts falling. And it melts, and falls again. And between Kitkiöjoki and Kitkiöjärvi you’re pretty close to giving up. Your legs are like jelly, your hip joints ache, and your last reserves of energy are practically used up.
But you stop for a while to get your breath back, then keep battling on. Muodoslompolo can’t be far away now. Occasionally you come across somebody going in the other direction, that’s inevitable. Somebody skipping along merrily downhill on the way to Pajala. Some of them even have bikes. Sitting on the saddle without needing to pedal, free-wheeling all the way down. That does raise your doubts, you have to admit that. You have to fight a few inner battles.
Your strides get shorter and shorter. And the years pass. And now you must be nearly there, very nearly there. And it snows again, that’s how it should be. You peer through the snow flurries, and you think you might be able to see something. You think it might be getting a bit lighter just over there. The forest thins out, opens up. You can make out houses among the trees. It’s the village! It’s Muodoslompolo! And in mid-stride, one last short and shaky stride…
At the funeral the preacher bellows on about how you died in the living faith. No doubt about it. You died in the living faith, sie kuolit elävässä uskossa. You got to Muodoslompolo, we all witnessed it, and now at long last you are sitting on God the Father’s golden luggage carrier free-wheeling down the eternal slope accompanied by fanfares of angels.
The lad turned out to have a name: his mother called him Niila. Both his parents were strict Christians. Although their house was teeming with kids, there was a dreary, church-like silence wherever you went. Niila had two elder brothers and two younger sisters, and there was another child kicking away in his mother’s stomach. And as every child was a gift from God, there would be even more as time went by.
It was unreal for so many young children to be so quiet. They didn’t have many toys – most of what they did have were made of rough wood by their elder brothers, and unpainted. The kids just sat there playing with them, as silent as fish. It wasn’t only because they had been brought up in a religious way. It was something you found in other Tornedalen families: they’d simply stopped talking. Possibly because they were shy, possibly because they were angry. Possibly because they found talking unnecessary. The parents only opened their mouths when they were eating; at other times they would nod or point when they wanted something, and the children took after them.
I also kept quiet whenever I went to visit Niila. Children have an instinctive feel for that sort of thing. I took my shoes off and left them on the mat in the hall and tip-toed into the kitchen with head bowed and shoulders slightly hunched. I was greeted by a mass of silent eyes, from a rocking chair, from under the table, from by the pot cupboard. Looks that stared, then turned away, sneaked off round the kitchen walls and over the wooden floor but kept coming back to me. I stared back as hard as I could. The face of the youngest girl puckered up with fear, you could see her milk teeth gleaming in her gaping mouth and tears started to flow. She was sobbing, but even her sobs were silent. Her cheek muscles trembled and she clung on to her mother’s beskirted leg with her chubby little hands. Mum was wearing a headscarf even though she was indoors, and had her arms plunged up to the elbows in a mixing bowl. She was kneading vigorously, flour swirled up and was turned into gold dust by a sunbeam. She pretended not to notice that I was there, and Niila took that as a sign of approval. He led me over to a settee where his two elder brothers were exchanging nuts and bolts. Or perhaps it was some sort of game, involving a complicated pattern of shifting nuts and bolts around various compartments in a box. The brothers were growing increasingly annoyed with each other, and without speaking tried to wrench bolts from the other’s hands. A nut fell onto the floor and Niila snapped it up. Quick as a flash the eldest brother grabbed him by the hand and squeezed until Niila was in so much pain he could hardly breathe, and was forced to drop the nut into the transparent plastic box. Whereupon the younger brother turned it upside down. A clatter of steel as the contents rolled all over the wooden floor.
For one brief moment everything stood still. Every eye in the kitchen homed in on the brothers like rays of the sun through a magnifying glass. It was like when a film gets stuck in a projector, blackens over, goes crinkly and then turns white. I could feel the hatred even though I couldn’t understand it. The brothers lashed out and grabbed each other’s shirt front. Biceps bulging, they exerted the force of industrial magnets and the gap between them closed inexorably. All the time they stared at each other, coal-black pupils, two mirrors face to face with the distance between them expanding to infinity.
Then their mum threw the dish cloth. It flew across the kitchen trailing a thin wisp of flour behind it, a comet with a tail that squelched into the elder son’s forehead and stuck there. She eyed them threateningly, slowly wiping the dough from her hands. She had no desire to spend the whole evening sewing on shirt buttons. Reluctantly, the brothers let go. Then they stood up and left through the kitchen door.
Mum retrieved the dish cloth that had fallen to the floor, rinsed her hands, and went back to her kneading. Niila picked up all the nuts and bolts, put them in the plastic box and stuck the box in his pocket with a self-satisfied expression on his face. Then he glanced furtively out of the kitchen window.
The two brothers were standing in the middle of the path. Trading punches in rapid succession. Heavy punches jerking their crew-cut skulls around like turnips in a hopper. But no shouting, no taunts. Biff after biff on those low foreheads, on those potato noses, bash after bash on those red cabbage ears. The elder brother had a longer reach, the younger one had to slot in his blows. Blood poured from both their noses. It dripped down, splashed about, their knuckles were red. But still they kept going. Biff. Bash. Biff. Bash.
We were given juice and cinnamon buns straight out of the oven, so hot that we had to keep what we bit off between our teeth for a while before we could chew it. Then Niila started playing with the nuts and bolts. He emptied them out onto the settee, his fingers were trembling, and I realised he’d been longing
