The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [17]
“What you’re saying is that Kekkonen’s head changed shape some time in the vicinity of 1968?”
“I mean much more than that! What I’ve established is that around 1968 ‘The Old Kekkonen’ either died or was murdered—or withdrew from government for some other reason—and his place was taken by someone else, almost exactly like the former Kekkonen, down to the voice.”
“But supposing Kekkonen became ill about that time, or had an accident that remolded his skull?”
“Skull changes of this order would, if sickness were in question, or an accident, involve months of recuperation. My studies indicate that President Kekkonen was invariably too busy, all his life, to be absent from public exposure for longer than two uninterrupted weeks. And, in addition, I’ve been unable to find, in a single photograph, any evidence of scarring on the scalp. Warts, yes, but nothing indicating surgery in 1968.”
Hannikainen replaced the cranium pictures in the suitcase and displayed a large chart: a spreading curve annotated with numbers.
“This is the chart Kekkonen’s physical height. The numbers record his height since childhood.... The figures from adolescence are not absolutely precise, but since Kekkonen’s service as a sergeant they’re completely watertight. Here is a photocopy of his ID card. See? Since his sergeant days Kekkonen has been one hundred seventy-nine centimeters tall ... he’s the same height here, at the time of President Paasikivi’s funeral . . . and now look again! We come to the year 1968: the curve suddenly leaps a couple of centimeters. Kekkonen is in fact, all at once, nearly a hundred eighty-one centimeters. From then on the curve continues unchanged till this point, 1975, with no change in sight. A sudden increase in height in his latter days—something rather remarkable there, don’t you think?”
Hannikainen thrust the chart of the president’s height aside. Somewhat frenziedly, he sought out a new chart. It was a careful record of Kekkonen’s weight.
“Of course, these figures are nowhere near as conclusive, but they do add certain indices. Kekkonen’s weight has changed very little since middle age. He has persisted in a certain annual cycle. In the autumn Kekkonen’s weight goes up. He’s sometimes as much as ten pounds heavier than in the spring. At the beginning of summer he’s without exception at his lightest, returning again in the autumn to his maximum weight. I obtained these figures from the Occupational Health Institute in Helsinki, and so they’re guaranteed accurate. But to follow the pattern decade by decade and compare the years with each other, I had to calculate Kekkonen’s average weights for each year, and those are what this chart shows. Now, you see, from 1956 right up to 1968, Kekkonen’s average annual weight is one hundred seventy-five pounds. After 1968, it is one hundred eighty-five pounds. The ten-pound increase continues from 1968 to this day, absolutely steadily, apart from the seasonal cycle I referred to. All in all, only the first two presidential election years show an exception on the curve, a couple of pounds, and such a weight loss, even though diminishing the whole year’s average, is quite natural and doesn’t disturb the curve substantially.”
Hannikainen turned to additional evidence.
“I’ve drawn up a lexicon of Urho Kekkonen’s vocabulary. Here, too, we see the same divergence after 1968. Before 1968, Kekkonen’s vocabulary was notably more limited than later. There’s an increase of, by my reckoning, twelve hundred words in active use. The reason could of course be that after 1968 ‘The New Kekkonen,’ as I call him, was employing new speechwriters, but even so, an increase in vocabulary