The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [5]
“Tell his wife, if you want. Does she know?”
“She knows, but it sounds like she can’t be bothered.”
“Well, it’s not really our problem, either.”
2
Statement of Account
Early the 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 rafters—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 wildflowers, and a brook murmuring beyond it. Vatanen put the hare down by the brook, stripped, 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 focused on number one, all their married life. His wife had the habit of buying hideous clothes, out of style and uncomfortable; she never wore them for very long, because they soon lost their allure for her, too. She’d certainly have discarded Vatanen as well, if someone new were as easy to find as the clothes.
Early in the marriage his wife had single-mindedly set out to assemble a common domicile, a home. Their apartment 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 modular 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 crib 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 fetus?” his wife spluttered when he brought up the subject. “You can’t be!”
Vatanen settled the young hare 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 singer’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 mold: 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 got a reasonably good salary, but even so he was always in financial difficulties. His apartment cost hundreds a month: rents in Helsinki were so high. Because of the rent, he’d never be in a position to buy his