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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A delightfully witty and mordant modern classic from Finland: the story of a journalist who befriends an injured hare and embarks into the Finnish wildernessKaarlo Vatanen is fed up with his life. He's sick of his job, his wife, his urban lifestyle in Helsinki. But all this changes one warm summer's evening, when he encounters an injured hare on a deserted country road.On an impulse he can't fully explain, Vatanen abruptly abandons his car, his home, his wife and his job to chase the hare into the forest. A year of comic misadventures ensues, where Vatanen and his unlikely companion battle through forest fires, pagan sacrifices, military war games and encounters with murderous bears, kept afloat by the help and understanding of other sympathetic free spirits.A much-loved classic in Finland, The Year of the Hare is a freewheeling adventure through the Finnish countryside, and a witty portrayal of one man's long detour from conventional living.
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Seitenzahl: 229
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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‘A change-your-life novel’
NEW YORK MAGAZINE
‘Escapism at its best’
NPR
‘[Paasilinna] concocts situational comedy highlighted by deadpan, sometimes black, humour’
NEW YORK TIMES
‘All Finn – a sly sense of humour, a simplicity, a moral compass that points firmly north and out of doors’
LOS ANGELES TIMES
THE YEAR OF THE HARE
ARTO PAASILINNA
TRANSLATED FROM THE FINNISH BY HERBERT LOMAS
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
THE YEAR OF THE HARE
Contents
Translator’s Note
I have made an exception in this translation of using English rather than Finnish currency. The slight loss of flavour seems negligible compared with the disadvantage of not knowing the cost of the interesting money transactions, and footnotes would interfere with the reader’s pace and pleasure. Money values have been updated to the equivalents in 1994. British weights and measurements have also been used, except in certain appropriate instances.
1
The Hare
Two harassed men were driving down a lane. The setting sun was paining their eyes through the dusty windscreen. It was midsummer, but the landscape on this sandy by-road was slipping past their weary eyes unnoticed; the beauty of the Finnish evening was lost on them both.
They were a journalist and a photographer, out on an assignment: two dissatisfied, cynical men, getting on for middle age. The hopes of their youth had not been realized, far from it. They were husbands, deceiving and deceived; stomach ulcers were on the way for both of them; and many other worries filled their days.
They’d just been wrangling. Should they drive back to Helsinki or spend the night in Heinola? Now they weren’t speaking.
They drove through the lovely summer evening hunched, self-absorbed as two mindless crustaceans, not even noticing how wretched their cantankerousness was. It was a stubborn, wearying drag of a journey.
On the crest of a hillock, an immature hare was trying its leaps in the middle of the road. Tipsy with summer, it perched on its hind legs, framed by the red sun.
The photographer, who was driving, saw the little creature, but his dull brain reacted too slowly: a dusty city shoe slammed hard on the brake, too late. The shocked animal leaped up in front of the car, there was a muffled thump as it hit the corner of the windscreen, and it hurtled off into the forest.
‘God! That was a hare,’ the journalist said.
‘Bloody animal – good thing it didn’t bust the windscreen.’ The photographer pulled up and backed to the spot. The journalist got out and ran into the forest.
‘Well, can you see anything?’ the photographer called, listlessly. He had wound down the window, but the engine was still running.
‘What?’ shouted the journalist.
The photographer lit a cigarette and drew on it, with eyes closed. He revived when the cigarette burned his fingers.
‘Come on out! I can’t hang about here for ever because of some stupid hare!’
The journalist went distractedly through the thinly treed forest, came to a small allotment, hopped a ditch and looked hard at a patch of dark-green grass. He could see the leveret there in the grass.
Its left hind leg was broken. The cracked shin hung pitifully, too painful for the animal to run, though it saw a human being approaching.
The journalist picked the leveret up and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little forepaws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.
Back on the road there was an irritable revving, two tetchy blasts on the horn, and a shout: ‘Come on out! We’ll never make Helsinki if you hang around in this wilderness! Out of there, sharp, or you’ll find your own way back!’
There was no reply. The journalist was nursing the little animal in his arms. Apparently, it was hurt only in the leg. It was gradually calming down.
The photographer got out. He looked furiously into the forest but could see nothing of his companion. He swore, lit a cigarette and stamped back on to the road. Still no sound from the forest: he stubbed his cigarette out on the road and yelled: ‘Stay there, then! Goodbye, nutcase!’
He listened for another moment but, getting no reply, stormed into the car, revved up, put the clutch in and shot off. Gravel spat under the wheels. In a moment the car was out of sight.
The journalist sat on the edge of the ditch, holding the hare in his lap: he resembled an old woman with her knitting on her knees and lost in thought. The sound of the motor-car engine faded away. The sun set.
The journalist put the hare down on the grass patch. For a moment he was afraid the leveret would try to escape; but it huddled in the grass, and when he picked it up again, it showed no sign of fear at all.
‘So here we are,’ he said to the hare. ‘Left.’
That was the situation: he was sitting alone in the forest, in his jacket, on a summer evening. He’d been well and truly abandoned.
What does one usually do in such a situation? Perhaps he should have responded to the photographer’s shouts, he thought. Now maybe he ought to find his way back to the road, wait for the next car, hitch a lift, and think about getting to Heinola, or Helsinki, under his own steam.
The idea was very unalluring.
The journalist looked in his wallet. There were a few banknotes, his press-card, his health-insurance card, a photograph of his wife, a few coins, a couple of condoms, a bunch of keys, an old May Day celebration badge. And also some pens, a notepad, a ring. The management had printed on the pad Kaarlo Vatanen, journalist. His health-insurance card indicated that Kaarlo Vatanen was born in 1942.
Vatanen got to his feet, gazed at the sunset’s last redness through the forest trees, nodded to the hare. He looked towards the road but made no move that way. He picked the hare up off the grass, put it tenderly in the side-pocket of his jacket, and left the allotment for the darkening forest.
The photographer drove to Heinola, raging. There he filled up the tank and decided to book into the hotel the journalist had suggested.
He took a double room, threw off his dusty clothes and had a shower. Refreshed, he went down to the hotel restaurant. Vatanen would certainly appear there soon, he considered. Then they could talk the whole thing through, sort it out. He consumed several bottles of beer and, after a meal, moved on to stronger drinks.
But there was still no sign of the journalist.
Late into the night he was still sitting in the hotel bar. He contemplated the black surface of the bar counter in a mood of angry regret. As the evening had gone by he had been mulling over what had happened. It had dawned on him that abandoning his companion in the forest, in an almost deserted neighbourhood, had been an error. Supposing the journalist had broken his leg in the forest? Might he have got lost? Or stuck in a bog? Otherwise, surely, he’d have found his way back to Heinola by now, even on foot?
The photographer thought he’d better ring the journalist’s wife in Helsinki.
She muttered sleepily that there’d been no sign of Vatanen and, when she realized the caller was drunk, banged the receiver down. When the photographer tried the same number again, there was no reply. Clearly, Vatanen’s wife had unplugged the telephone.
In the early hours, the photographer called for a taxi. He’d decided to go back to the site and see if Vatanen was still there. The taxi-driver asked his drunken client where it was he wished to go.
‘Just drive along this road, nowhere in particular. I’ll tell you where to stop.’
The driver glanced back. They were driving out of town through the night forest and not going anywhere in particular apparently. Furtively, he transferred a pistol from the glove compartment onto the seat between his legs. Uneasily, he studied the client.
At the top of a rise, the client said: ‘Stop here.’
The driver eased the pistol into his hand. The drunk, however, got out of the car pacifically, and began shouting at the forest: ‘Vatanen! Vatanen!’
The night forest didn’t return even an echo.
‘Vatanen! Hey, Vatanen! Are you there?’
He took off his shoes, rolled his trousers up to his knees, and set off into the forest, barefoot. Soon he’d vanished in the darkness. He could be heard yelling for Vatanen among the trees.
You get them all! the driver thought.
After about half an hour’s shindy in the dark forest, the client returned to the road. Asking for a rag, he wiped his muddy shanks and put his shoes on his bare feet; the socks seemed to be in his jacket pocket. They drove back to Heinola.
‘You’ve lost some Vatanen, have you?’
‘Right. Left him there on the hill, in the evening. Not a whiff of him there now.’
‘Didn’t see anything myself, either,’ the driver said sympathetically.
Next morning, the photographer woke up in the hotel at about eleven. A nasty hangover was splitting his head, and he felt sick. He remembered Vatanen’s disappearance. Must get on to Vatanen’s wife at her job… he thought.
‘He went off after a hare,’ he told her. ‘On this hill. Then never came back. Of course I kept shouting, but not a squeak from him. So I left him there. Probably he wanted to stay there.’
To this, the wife said: ‘Was he drunk?’
‘No.’
‘So where is he, then? The man can’t just disappear like that.’
‘He did just disappear like that. Not turned up there yet, I suppose?’
‘No, definitely not. God, that man’ll drive me round the bend. Let him sort this out on his own. The thing is, he’s got to get back home straight away. Tell him that.’
‘How can I tell him anything? I don’t even know where he is.’
‘Well, ferret him out. Get him to ring me at work, straight away. And tell him this is the last time he goes on the loose. Listen, I’ve a customer, I’ve got to go. Tell him to ring me. Bye.’
The photographer rang the newspaper office.
‘Yes… and one other thing: Vatanen’s disappeared.’
‘Oh. Where’s he off to this time?’ the editor asked.
The photographer told him the story.
‘He’ll turn up in his own good time, won’t he? Anyway, this story of yours isn’t so drastic we can’t shelve it a day or two. We’ll run it when he gets back.’
‘But what if he’s had an accident?’
The editor soothed him down: ‘Just get back here yourself. What d’you suppose could have happened to him? And, anyway, it’s his business.’
‘Should I tell the police?’
‘Tell his wife, if you like. Does she know?’
‘She knows, but she’s not bothering much.’
‘Well, it’s not particularly our problem either.’
2
Statement of Account
Early next morning Vatanen woke up to birdsong in a sweet-smelling hayloft. The hare was lying in his armpit, apparently following the flitting of the swallows under the barn’s ridgepiece – perhaps still building their nest there, or maybe feeding chicks already, judging by their busy dipping into the barn and out again.
The sun was gleaming through the gaps in the barn’s warped old beams, and the piled-up hay was a warm bed. Lost in thought, Vatanen lolled in the hay for an hour or so before he got up and went out with the hare in his arms.
There was an old meadow, full of wild flowers, and a brook murmuring beyond it. Vatanen put the hare down by the brook, stripped off and took a cold dip. A tight shoal of tiny fish, swimming upstream, took fright at the slightest movement, invariably forgetting their fear the next moment.
Vatanen’s thoughts turned to his wife in Helsinki. He began to feel depressed.
He didn’t like his wife. There was something not very nice about her: she’d been unpleasant, or at any rate totally bound up with number one, all their married life. His wife had the habit of buying hideous clothes, naff and inconvenient: she never wore them for more than a while, because, once on, they soon lost their allure for her too. She’d certainly have discarded Vatanen as well, if she could have found someone new as easily as the clothes.
Early in the marriage his wife had single-mindedly set out to assemble a common domicile, a home. Their flat had become an extravagant farrago of shallow and meretricious interior-decoration tips from women’s magazines. A pseudo-radicalism governed the design, with huge posters and clumsy modularized furniture. It was difficult to inhabit the rooms without injury; all the items were at odds. The home was distinctly reminiscent of Vatanen’s marriage.
One spring, his wife became pregnant but quickly procured an abortion: a cot would have disturbed the harmony of the furnishings. But the real explanation came to Vatanen’s notice after the abortion: the baby wasn’t Vatanen’s.
‘Jealous of a dead foetus?’ his wife spluttered when he brought the subject up. ‘You can’t be!’
Vatanen settled the leveret at the edge of the brook, so it could reach down for a drink. Its little hare-lip began lapping up fresh water: it was astonishingly thirsty for such a small creature. When it had drunk, it began tucking into the leafage on the bank. Its hind leg was obviously still painful.
Maybe I should head back to Helsinki? Vatanen was wondering. What would they be saying in the office?
But what an office, what a job! A weekly magazine, everlastingly creating a stir about supposed abuses, while craftily keeping mum on any fundamental ills of society. Week after week the rag’s cover displayed the faces of no-goods – minxes, models, some rock-yodeller’s latest offspring. When he was younger, Vatanen was pleased to have a reporter’s job on a major journal, particularly so when he had the chance to interview some misrepresented person, ideally someone oppressed by the state. That way he felt he was doing some good: such and such a defect, at least, was getting an airing. But now, with the years, he no longer supposed he was achieving anything: he was merely doing the absolutely necessary, satisfied if he personally was not contributing any misconceptions. His colleagues were in the same mould: frustrated at work, cynical in consequence. No need for marketing experts to tell journalists like these what stories the publisher expected. The stories were churned out. The magazine succeeded, but not by transmitting information – by diluting it, muffling its significance, cooking it into chatty entertainment. What a profession!
Vatanen was on a reasonably good salary, but even so he was always in financial difficulties. His flat cost hundreds a month: rents in Helsinki were so high. Because of the rent, he’d never be in a position to buy his own place. He had managed to get himself a boat, but for that too he was in debt. Apart from sailing, Vatanen had no particular pastimes. His wife sometimes suggested going to the theatre, but he’d no wish to go out with her: he’d had enough of her voice at home.
Vatanen sighed.
The summer morning was getting brighter and brighter, but his gloomy thoughts were getting darker and darker. Not till the hare had eaten and Vatanen had put it in his pocket did the wretched thoughts leave him. Purposefully, he set off west, the direction he’d taken the evening before, shunning the road. The forest murmur gladdened him. He hummed a couple of snatches. The hare’s ears poked out of his jacket pocket.
After an hour or two Vatanen came to a village. Walking along the main street, he found a red kiosk. A girl was bustling round it, just about to open her little business, apparently.
He went over to the kiosk, said a good-morning and sat down on the bench. The girl opened the shutters, went in the kiosk, slid aside a glass partition, and said: ‘We’re open now. Can I help you?’
Vatanen bought some cigarettes and a bottle of lemonade. The girl studied him carefully and then said: ‘You’re not a criminal, are you?’
‘No… do I scare you?’
‘No, that’s not it. You came out of the forest, you see.’
Vatanen took the hare out of his pocket and let it bumble around on the kiosk bench.
‘Hey, a bunny!’ the girl whooped.
‘Not a bunny, it’s a hare. I found it.’
‘Aw, poor thing! It’s got a sore leg. I’ll get it some carrots.’
She left her kiosk and ran into a house nearby. Soon she was back with a bunch of last season’s carrots. She washed the soil off with a dash of lemonade and eagerly offered them to the hare, but it didn’t eat. That made her a little disappointed.
‘He doesn’t seem to take to them.’
‘He’s a bit sick. You don’t have a vet in the village, do you?’
‘Oh, yes, there’s Mattila. He’s not from round here, of course – from Helsinki. Always here in the summers, off in the winters. His villa’s over there, by the lake-shore. Climb on the roof, and I’ll show you which it is.’
Vatanen climbed on the kiosk roof, and from down below the girl told him which way to look, and what colour the villa was. Vatanen looked towards where she said and spotted the villa. Then he climbed down with the girl’s hands supporting his bottom.
The vet gave the hare a small injection and carefully bandaged its hind leg.
‘It’s had a shock. The paw will heal all right. If you take it to town, get it some fresh lettuce. It’ll eat that. Don’t forget to rinse the lettuce well, or it might get the squitters. For drinking, nothing but fresh water.’
When Vatanen got back to the kiosk, several men were sitting there with time on their hands. The girl introduced Vatanen: ‘Here he is, the man with the hare.’
The men were drinking lager. They were fascinated by the hare and asked a lot of questions. They tried to reckon how old it might be. One of them related how, whenever he was going haymaking, he first went round the hayfields shouting, so any leverets hidden there would run away.
‘Otherwise the blades’ll get ’em. One summer there were three. One had its ears cut off, another lost its back legs, another was cut in two. The summers I’ve chased ’em off first, not one got caught in the machine.’
The village was so agreeable, Vatanen stayed on there several days, occupying an attic in one of the houses.
3
Arrangements
Vatanen took the bus for Heinola: even in an agreeable village, one can’t hang around doing nothing for ever.
He sat on the back seat of the bus, with the hare in a basket. Several countrymen were sitting at the back, so they could smoke. When they spotted the hare, they started building a conversation round it. There were, it was soon established, more leverets than usual this summer. They tried to guess: was it a doe or a buck? Did he intend to slaughter and eat the hare when it was fully grown? No, he had no such intention, he said. That led to a general consensus: no one would kill his own dog; and it was sometimes easier to get attached to an animal than a person.
Vatanen took a room in a hotel, washed and went downstairs to eat. It was midday, the restaurant completely deserted. Vatanen sat the hare on the chair next to him.
The head waiter observed it, menu in hand: ‘Strictly speaking, animals are not allowed in the restaurant.’
‘It’s not dangerous.’
Vatanen ordered lunch for himself, and for the hare a fresh lettuce, grated carrot and pure water. The head waiter gave a long look when Vatanen put the hare on the table to eat the lettuce out of the dish, but he didn’t go so far as to forbid it.
After the meal Vatanen rang his wife on the hall telephone.
‘So it’s you, is it?’ she cried in a fury. ‘Where on earth are you? Get back here at once!’
‘I’ve been thinking, I may not come back at all.’
‘Oh, that’s what you’ve been thinking, is it? You’ve gone completely round the bend. Now you have to come home. This lark’ll get you fired too, that’s for certain. And besides, Antero and Kerttu are coming round tonight. What am I going to say to them?’
‘Say I’ve scarpered. Then at least you won’t have to lie.’
‘How can I tell them something like that! What’ll they think? If this is looking for a divorce, it won’t work, I can tell you! I’m not letting you off that way when you’ve ruined my life – eight years down the drain because of you! Daft I was to take you!’
She began to cry.
‘Cry quicker, or the call’ll get too expensive.’
‘If you don’t come back here at once I’ll get the police. That’ll teach you to stay at home!’
‘It’s hardly a case for the police.’
‘Believe me, I’ll phone up Antti Ruuhonen straight away. That’ll show you I’ve got company.’
Vatanen put the receiver down.
Then he rang his friend Yrjö.
‘Listen, Yrjö. I’m willing to sell you the boat.’
‘You don’t mean it! Where are you ringing from?’
‘I’m in the country, Heinola. I’m not planning to come back to Helsinki for the moment, and I need some dosh. Do you still want it?’
‘Definitely. How much? Seven grand was it?’
‘OK, let’s say that. You can get the keys from the office. Bottom left-hand drawer of my desk – two keys on a blue plastic ring. Ask Leena. You know her, she can give you them. Say I said so. Do you have the ready?’
‘Yes, I do. Are you including the berth?’
‘Yes, that’s included. Do it this way: go straight to my bank and pay off the rest of my loan.’ Vatanen gave him his account number. ‘Then go to my wife. Give her two and a half thousand. Then send the remaining three thousand two hundred express to the bank in Heinola – same bank. Is that all right?’
‘And your charts come in the deal as well?’
‘They do. They’re at home, you’ll get them off my wife. Listen. Don’t land that boat on a rock? Take it easy for starters and you’ll not get in a twist.’
‘Tell me, how do you have the heart to sell it? Have you lost your nerve?’
‘You could say that.’
The following day Vatanen was off to the Heinola bank, carrying his hare. His step was light, his manner carefree, as might be expected.
Much has been said about the sixth sense, and the closer he got to the bank, the more distinctly he began to feel that matters weren’t quite as they should be. He was already on his guard when he got to the bank, though he had no idea what was awaiting him. He supposed that even a few days of freedom had sharpened his senses, an amusing thought that made him smile as he entered the bank.
His intuition had been right.
In the entrance hall, back to the door, sat his wife. His heart leaped, anger and fear flooded his body. Even the hare jumped.
He dashed out again. He ran along the street as fast as his legs would carry him. Oncomers stopped in astonishment to see a man bolting out of a bank with a basket and two small hare’s ears poking out of it. He tore to the end of the block, nipped down a side-street, found a little tavern door, and slipped straight into the restaurant. He was out of breath.
‘If I’m not mistaken, sir, you’re Mr Vatanen,’ the head waiter said, looking at the hare as if he recognized it. ‘You’re expected.’
At the other end of the restaurant sat the photographer and the chief editor. They were drinking beer together and hadn’t noticed Vatanen. The head waiter explained that the gentlemen had asked him to direct a person looking like Mr Vatanen to their table, and that he might have a hare with him.
Again Vatanen had been trapped.
He slipped out again, sneaked back to his hotel and tried to think. What had gone wrong with his arrangements? Of course, bloody Yrjö was at the back of it.
He rang Yrjö, Yrjö, the nitwit, had told Vatanen’s wife where he was sending the remainder of the money. The rest could be imagined: his wife had ganged up with the office, and they’d come to Heinola to grab him. She was sitting in the bank now, waiting for him to collect his cash.
The money had been sent to the bank, but how could he get hold of it without a scene? It needed thinking out.
He hit on it. He rang down to the receptionist and asked her to make out his bill, but adding that three people would soon be coming to meet him in his room, a woman and two men. Then he wrote a few words on the hotel writing-paper, and left the note on the table. This done, he looked up the number of the restaurant where he’d just been dancing like a cat on hot bricks, grabbed the telephone and rang; the head waiter replied.
‘Vatanen speaking. Could you get me one or other of the two men who’re expecting me?’
‘Is that Vatanen?’ came a voice shortly. It was the editor.
‘Speaking. Morning.’
‘You’ve had it. Guess what: your old woman’s sitting in the bank, and we’re right here. Get round here fast, and then we can all be off back to Helsinki. Time this stopped.’
‘Listen, I can’t get there this minute. Come here, all three of you, to my hotel room. It’s 312. I’ve got to make these two long-distance calls. Pick my wife up from the bank, and we’ll sort the whole thing out together, the four of us.’
‘Right, OK. We’ll be round. Stay where you are, though!’
‘Of course. Bye.’
This said, Vatanen rushed out into the lift with the hare and paid the receptionist for the room and his calls. He told her, though, that he’d like her to let in three people who were coming to meet him. Still on the trot, he slipped out into the street.
