The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [23]
The driver was lifted ashore, where Vatanen continued his artificial respiration.
Perhaps five minutes elapsed before the drowned man showed any signs of revival. Then the man’s body stiffened and his hands began to tremble, and finally Vatanen heard the driver’s teeth grating together. Vatanen was thankful his own tongue hadn’t been caught between the other’s teeth.
As soon as the driver came to, he grabbed Vatanen and started in on him; for a moment Vatanen had to tussle with him on his own before the others realized they ought to him give a hand. With the help of several men, Vatanen finally forced the driver to give in and tied him to a stump sticking up on the shore. There they left him, sitting with his back to the stump.
“A feisty one,” they said.
“Let me go! I’ll yank this stump up with me!” he threatened, but nevertheless he didn’t try to carry out his threat. Instead, he fell into a subdued muttering: “Damn people! Leave a man out there who can’t swim, all night long, in the middle of a lake. I’ll set the damn police on them.”
Several soldiers came to fetch him, and he was taken off into the forest, strapped to a stretcher.
A terrible wailing came from the forest, not dying out until much later, when the stretcher was a mile or two off.
9
In the Marsh
A new morning dawned. Vatanen was woken by the racket of motor vehicles: three Land Rovers had plowed their way through the forest and gotten to the lake. The men in them included the two superintendents, Hannikainen and Savolainen. Hannikainen had a knapsack on his back; a hare’s head peeped out from under the flap.
Vatanen rushed over to them, grabbed the knapsack from Hannikainen’s back, undid the cord, and welcomed the hare into his arms. What a happy reunion!
The hare sniffed Vatanen excitedly. When he put it on the ground, it ran happily around his legs like a little dog.
Savolainen took charge on the shore; his orders were to oversee evacuation of personnel and animals.
Hannikainen was there out of curiosity; time had probably been dragging a little, with his friends away firefighting.
“I got such a haul of pike, I had to go around the villages selling it off. I took the hare along. I laid off my research for a bit,” he added. Taking Vatanen aside, he whispered: “I made a few more calculations back there, though. They show that President Kekkonen—the new one, that is—will still be there in 1995. By my reckoning, ‘The New Kekkonen’ will then be only about seventy-five, whereas the old one would have been ninety. I fear it’ll cause a lot of unfortunate speculation abroad. They won’t know what’s going on, really.” He added: “Theoretically, it’s perfectly possible for Kekkonen to be still governing the country after the year 2000. By then he’ll be eighty-five. In my opinion, though, he won’t dare offer himself as president in the next millennium.”
Tents were erected on the bank of the lake; soup canteens were heated up; blankets were distributed. A large winch was unloaded from the back of a Land Rover and set up onshore. Its purpose was to haul the bulldozer out of the lake.
Since he hadn’t been assigned any other task, Vatanen went into the meadow to help the women with the milking. One young woman, Irja, had already milked three plastic pails-full of milk, and Vatanen helped her carry them over to a spring of water, for cooling. Soon the hare came hopping over as well. Irja fell for the hare at once.
“Oh, what a darling!”
“Would you like to take it to bed with you?”
Irja certainly would.
“You can, if you like. Provided you take me as well. Are you game?”
In the evening, the three of them—Vatanen, Irja Lankinen, and the hare—retired to a barn in the meadow for the night. Vatanen had taken some blankets there. Irja brought some soup from the tents. She made up beds by the rear wall of the barn, Vatanen closed the barn door, the sun went down, and then there was