The Land of Sad Songs – Stories From Protect and Survive Finland
- Thread starter DrakonFin
- Start date
Finally, I have to add my Applause to this dark, atmospheric and very Elaborate Scenario about a Country I know Little about.
I still have to visit Finland in the future, but I got to know Sweden during the last summer. I can really imagine that country, if only hit lightly, to go through WW3 and its aftermath with comparative ease. I even have the Impression that its economy is still rather autark.
So....what the world needs now is a P&S Sverige....to explain how the country of Pippi and Emil became such a strict overlord over Finland for decades...
I guess you have reasons coming from the dark spots of Baltic pasts we don't learn about here in Central Europe.
I still have to visit Finland in the future, but I got to know Sweden during the last summer. I can really imagine that country, if only hit lightly, to go through WW3 and its aftermath with comparative ease. I even have the Impression that its economy is still rather autark.
So....what the world needs now is a P&S Sverige....to explain how the country of Pippi and Emil became such a strict overlord over Finland for decades...
I guess you have reasons coming from the dark spots of Baltic pasts we don't learn about here in Central Europe.
And I have to thank you for being one of the loyal readers of my rambling updates.
It seems I can't really let go of the world of P&S Finland, and keep coming back to. Give the little finger to the Devil...I still have to visit Finland in the future, but I got to know Sweden during the last summer. I can really imagine that country, if only hit lightly, to go through WW3 and its aftermath with comparative ease. I even have the Impression that its economy is still rather autark.
So....what the world needs now is a P&S Sverige....to explain how the country of Pippi and Emil became such a strict overlord over Finland for decades...
I guess you have reasons coming from the dark spots of Baltic pasts we don't learn about here in Central Europe.
I would be happy to help if someone started P&S Sweden, if only to keep the writer on the map about what I have established about Sweden here, on top of the canon references in the original timeline. One could explore many themes through the Swedish experience, especially the tough road to recovery and the leading role Sweden (and Switzerland) come to play in it in Europe. The changes in the Swedish society, the economics of survival and recovery in a nation with strong continuity from the pre-war, the necessary militarisation clashing with the Palmean principles of leadership, and of course Sweden as a combination of a doctor and an enforcer in aiding and policing the Nordic and Baltic areas post-Exchange would be some of the interesting thngs to look at.
Sweden is very interesting in the P&S setting, because I have always understood that the nation has had a great potential for both good and bad, and only for a quirk of fate is only known for good things IOTL. IMHO the OTL has been, since the early 19th century, a wank for a Sweden that is (officially at least) predominately seen in terms of progress, industry, pretty blondes and benevolent Social Democracy. In a TL such as P&S, we would necessarily see some of the darker shades of the Swedish nation and society. The Land of Sad Songs has in a way been an attempt to show what I think is a culmination of Finnish latent militarism and authoritarian, undemocratic tendencies, but also of a history of working together and surviving in a harsh environment. (I am a bit surprised nobody has really taken affront and called it an indictment or unfair criticism of Finnishness, as a matter of fact...) I would really like to see Sweden put under similar scrutiny, too.
In my depiction of the relationship of Sweden and Finland post-Exchange, I have tried to bring out the ambivalence that would color the relations between a devastated Finland and a Sweden that was hurt but still got off more lightly. ITTL, Sweden has helped Finland significantly since 1984, and is rather conscious of it. West Finland, the "Provisional Province of Ostrobothnia" is a de facto Swedish protectorate and as such enjoys a reasonably good standard of living (in a European comparison). Even East Finland, or the FNA, is constantly being supported by Swedish aid. The problem, as Gothenburg sees it, is that Mikkeli is ungrateful - the Finnish military leadership keeps grimly holding on to independence, in a stubborn-bordering-on-self-destructive way I think many Finns may find familiar. The fact that the FNA is somewhat authoritarian, militarist and not very representative (that is, a survivalist garrison state) does not help in endearing the Swedes to the East Finnish leadership. And so the relations remain chilly for long.
On the other hand, the FNA could not survive without some Swedish support, and for Sweden there are good reasons to prop up the military government - at least East Finland is orderly, more or less stable and (slowly) recovering, which is a lot more than they can say about the former Soviet areas east of it, as well as a lot of other places in East-Central Europe. Only in the 2010s this precarious status quo will break, due to new generations bringing political changes in Finland (and Sweden) - the opposition to the Finnish National Committee grows in the underground, while younger officers raised by the Finnish system (such as Varis and maybe Koivu, too) now threaten to turn a vanilla authoritarian state into something like full-blown Fascism if they ascend to leadership after the old guard of war-time officers.
The Swedish probably think ITTL that they have been strict but fair with Finland. What ever military action or intelligence work Sweden does in Finland it is understated and often done under the radar. The handling of the power change in Finland is a case in point - Sweden supports the democratisation of Finland, while maintaining some plausible deniability about its role in it all. Everyone wins, as the Swedish see it, and Gothenburg is again presented as a skilled actor in its judicious use of the carrot and the stick.
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Well, I find it too accurate description of the local ethos and values in good and bad. "It's not the mirror's fault if your face looks bad", as they say.
And if you feel the need to keep writing this TL, I for one will certainly keep following it!
Friday is the 13th to 24th
It's not so long to go
Though my face don't show
My temperature it's gettin' too low
I've seen it all in a dream
I know just how it's gonna feel
Like not to be alive anymore
I'll be dead by Xmas now anyway
Tell me, will you remember me that day
When you've found a new one
Who's better than I ever was?
I'll be dead by Xmas now anyway
Please give all my things away
They'll make great Xmas presents for you
And for all my friends
...
Hanoi Rocks: Dead by X-Mas (1981)
Addendum VIII. Dead by X-Mas (Part Two)
[ Here is the rest of the Fagerholm interview from early June 2014. It is mostly in his own words. Must consult Eva as to the format this will be published in. ]
It was an up-and-coming band we had – in early 1983 it really looked like we were going on to good things. We published Back to Mystery City in the spring, our fourth studio album, and already in January we had gigs in Britain and Finland, and even in Amsterdam, that being the first time we got to play outside the Nordics and Britain. We were very enthusiastic that we seemed to be big in Japan, too – you remember that a band called Alphaville released a song by that name just before the Exchange? No? Don't worry, very few people know about it these days. We had a riot of an Asian tour early that year – literally, as in India for example the police came to break down our gig because of wide-scale disturbances. We even went to Israel, another happy trip of raising merry hell, and managed to get officially banished from the Jewish state, all of us.
Good days.
We had moved the band's headquarters, as it were, to London in late 1982 and I had decided to change my lifestyle – out with speed and other drugs, more clean living and exercise. The other guys in the band, apart from Razzle, our new drummer, stayed true to the rockstar lifestyle. It was not all fun and games for me personally, though – my life was all tangled up with a relationship I had with Stacy Maisoneuve, Stiv Bators' wife. I had looked up to Stiv, and considered him something like a holy man after I had a religious experience listening to Disconnected while on acid in Stockholm back in 1981. And now, now I was cheating him with his wife... I was really down, you know, when I found out that Stacy had essentially just used me and didn't really care for me at all. And then Stiv found out about the affair and we fell out of touch. For months, I lived like a hermit and dressed only in black and white. I was so down Razzle started to call me ”The Face of Grief”.
We did not know it yet when we made the deal with CBS Records in the summer, our big score, but late 1983 would be when it all turned to shit for us as well as for the world. Somehow, the plan to record a live album we would have called All Those Wasted Years fell through in November, and then it turned out we would not be going to New York to record our next studio album with Bob Ezrin, a big man in the business back then. All of a sudden, everyone was scared like hell and promises were being broken all across the board. You started seeing armed police and military trucks on the streets in London – London, the place I had started to think as an easy-going, liberal place. Every newspaper was talking about Soviet aggression, passenger planes being shot down, and the TV went on an on about it all.
In January 1984 it had gone downright strange. The club scene in London turned apocalyptic – all gigs, all parties were like the last night on earth. Booze, drugs, sex – orgies really, orgies fueled by desperation. To me it all came to a head one night when I was at a small club with Andy, Nasse, Sam and Razzle, the night after we had a chaotic live gig at the Marquee Club. We were meant to chill out but it was all schizophrenic, with some new punk band playing this faux-cheery music they called ”apocalypso” and projecting slides of nuclear explosions on the walls. All the recent setbacks had broken my commitment to clean living, and together with everyone else I was smoking way too much weed and taking acid. Sometime in the night it all got to a point where it was too much for me, and I had to step outside.
It was surprisingly quiet out there in Soho as I started walking slowly towards Leicester Square. Not going anywhere, just to clear my head a bit. Still the heavy mood bearing down on me would not go away, in fact it got worse. I looked up and saw stars in the sky, dark, oppressive stars looking down at me radiating cold, steely doom. On some level I knew you could not really see stars in central London, but there they were nonetheless and they whispered death and annihilation to my ears.
I think I could see a military convoy moving down a nearby street, then – dark green trucks without lights like some ghostly procession in the night – but that barely registered because suddenly I felt detached from the world, all alone in a floating bubble set apart from the living, breathing city around me. On a perhaps higher but definitely not better plane. Singled out – not in a good way, but to be a unique target for some cosmic horror. I was being crushed by the future, and now as I arrived on a small square I could see the escalation of it – big, plump nuclear missiles, all sickeningly black and shiny, bearing down on me from the sky above. At speeds exceeding the speed of sound, maybe the speed of light, too. It did not matter whose missiles they were – the only thing that mattered was the surety of destruction, the total and utter lack of hope those slick black ghosts represented.
I fell to the ground and tried to shelter myself with my hands – useless as it would be.
Just then, I could feel a hand on my shoulder. A hoarse voice uttered my name.
It was Razzle, who had followed me from the club, worried about me. His touch on my shoulder broke the spell. The missiles disappeared, and so did the stars. I was back in reality, however tenuous that reality might be. Made of thin, willowy threads. As I explained to Razzle what I had just seen, his head bobbed in agreement. He said he could understand me. He had had a similar experience just days before, and he was scared. He said he was obsessing about the British government calling him up to the military – I don't know if there was any realism in it, though.
” - We need to get out of here, now, as far as we can”, Nicholas Dingley said to me and I could see the fear in his eyes.
The next day, we sold the plan to the rest of the band. Andy was against it, originally, but somehow we convinced him. I think even he was scared, no matter how happy-go-lucky and all rockstar he was acting back then. Our plan was simple – take a small vacation in Finland and wait for it all to blow over. Both me and Andy knew we had been released from military duty for medical grounds – there is another story there, about yours truly going to a Stockholm doctor's office dressed like a clown and all hopped up on acid to dodge going to the army – and certainly the British government could not reach Razzle there. Naive as we were, we thought Finland, that crudely painted hillbilly backwoods of a nation we had escaped to make our way in the big wide world, would be far and obscure enough to avoid any escalation in the international situation.
It is astounding to think of it now. What idiots we were.
That day in early February 1984, we marched to a travel agent with big wads of cash in our pockets and bought ourselves seriously over-priced plane tickets from London Heathrow to Helsinki-Vantaa. Looking back now, I think it might have been one of the very last Finnair flights to reach Finland from London before the service was suspended. If I remember the atmosphere at the airport and on the plane correctly, it at least felt like it. The plane was packed and the stewardesses had their work cut out for them to keep the adult passengers in a constant drunken stupor. I think there were Finnish embassy personnel sharing the first class with us, from the words that were exchanged between sweating, harried men in severe dark suits, downing their third Koskenkorvas with mineral water while we were still over the North Sea. So rattled, so immersed they were in their unique depths of geopolitical funk that they barely even registered our ludicrous rockstar get-ups and hairdos.
When we reached Helsinki-Vantaa , I saw military aircraft next to the terminal, being serviced by men in green overalls. It was the very first time the airport officials seemed to be oblivious to the threat of us possibly smuggling illegal substances to Finland. It was surprisingly scary to realize they now had more important things to think about.
My mum was waiting us at the airport. She told me I had got a letter from the Defence Forces, calling me to service. I was to arrive at the Lahti Hennala garrison by February 25th to join the ranks of what was called a Separate Supply Regiment. Andy and Nasse had received similar letters- for some reason, Sam had not. Surely it was a bureaucratic oversight.
It all came as something of a shock to the three of us.
We stayed with our parents for a while, thinking about what to do. My mum put up Razzle in the spare room upstairs. Every day, it started to look more like we had made a mistake coming to Finland. This country was preparing for war too. Maybe we should have flown to the United States instead? To Japan? To the Antarctica? It was too late to wonder about it, though – in some days after our arrival, all civilian flights in and out of Helsinki would be suspended, and any and all planes still airborne in the Finnish airspace would now have military insignia on them.
My father was working for the YLE and was attached to a mobile broadcast unit covering the war preparations in Eastern Finland. Grasping at straws, I decided that we should journey to him to enlist his help in order to, well, get us out of being enlisted. Personally, I was convinced that due to his position at the YLE he had such pull with the authorities that he could really help us.
We all see of our fathers as heroes and think they have more power and influence than they really do, don't we? That was the case with me, too. I was wrong – had fate not intervened, my father probably could not have bailed me, Andy and Nasse out of being sent to the military. It really was a shot in the dark, and a rather dimwitted one at that. But I would not realize that until much later down the line.
With a barely road-worthy Scania tour bus acquired from old friends (someone had written ”RATSIA” on its side in big jagged letters) as our ride and supplies and whatnot for a week's trip at the most, me, Andy, Nasse and Razzle took off from Helsinki for Eastern Finland. Sam had decided to stay in Helsinki, even after I tried to goad him into going with us. I still want to kick myself, sometimes, for not trying harder to turn his head.
It was 17th February, 1984.
…
The fake Säpo agent was startled to see movement in the corner of his eye. Glancing to the right, he saw three young boys with backpacks passing the car on the other side of the street, probably coming home from school. They did not even spare a look towards the everyday Saab he sat in. After the boys had passed, the man resumed his reading – but not before making a mental note to remind the bald man that Fagerholm, too, should be... persuaded... to keep his information about the Winter Games as much to himself as possible.
…
Stay tuned for the conclusion of Dead by X-Mas, Part Three, in a few days' time!
(filler)
It's not so long to go
Though my face don't show
My temperature it's gettin' too low
I've seen it all in a dream
I know just how it's gonna feel
Like not to be alive anymore
I'll be dead by Xmas now anyway
Tell me, will you remember me that day
When you've found a new one
Who's better than I ever was?
I'll be dead by Xmas now anyway
Please give all my things away
They'll make great Xmas presents for you
And for all my friends
...
Hanoi Rocks: Dead by X-Mas (1981)
Addendum VIII. Dead by X-Mas (Part Two)
[ Here is the rest of the Fagerholm interview from early June 2014. It is mostly in his own words. Must consult Eva as to the format this will be published in. ]
It was an up-and-coming band we had – in early 1983 it really looked like we were going on to good things. We published Back to Mystery City in the spring, our fourth studio album, and already in January we had gigs in Britain and Finland, and even in Amsterdam, that being the first time we got to play outside the Nordics and Britain. We were very enthusiastic that we seemed to be big in Japan, too – you remember that a band called Alphaville released a song by that name just before the Exchange? No? Don't worry, very few people know about it these days. We had a riot of an Asian tour early that year – literally, as in India for example the police came to break down our gig because of wide-scale disturbances. We even went to Israel, another happy trip of raising merry hell, and managed to get officially banished from the Jewish state, all of us.
Good days.
We had moved the band's headquarters, as it were, to London in late 1982 and I had decided to change my lifestyle – out with speed and other drugs, more clean living and exercise. The other guys in the band, apart from Razzle, our new drummer, stayed true to the rockstar lifestyle. It was not all fun and games for me personally, though – my life was all tangled up with a relationship I had with Stacy Maisoneuve, Stiv Bators' wife. I had looked up to Stiv, and considered him something like a holy man after I had a religious experience listening to Disconnected while on acid in Stockholm back in 1981. And now, now I was cheating him with his wife... I was really down, you know, when I found out that Stacy had essentially just used me and didn't really care for me at all. And then Stiv found out about the affair and we fell out of touch. For months, I lived like a hermit and dressed only in black and white. I was so down Razzle started to call me ”The Face of Grief”.
We did not know it yet when we made the deal with CBS Records in the summer, our big score, but late 1983 would be when it all turned to shit for us as well as for the world. Somehow, the plan to record a live album we would have called All Those Wasted Years fell through in November, and then it turned out we would not be going to New York to record our next studio album with Bob Ezrin, a big man in the business back then. All of a sudden, everyone was scared like hell and promises were being broken all across the board. You started seeing armed police and military trucks on the streets in London – London, the place I had started to think as an easy-going, liberal place. Every newspaper was talking about Soviet aggression, passenger planes being shot down, and the TV went on an on about it all.
In January 1984 it had gone downright strange. The club scene in London turned apocalyptic – all gigs, all parties were like the last night on earth. Booze, drugs, sex – orgies really, orgies fueled by desperation. To me it all came to a head one night when I was at a small club with Andy, Nasse, Sam and Razzle, the night after we had a chaotic live gig at the Marquee Club. We were meant to chill out but it was all schizophrenic, with some new punk band playing this faux-cheery music they called ”apocalypso” and projecting slides of nuclear explosions on the walls. All the recent setbacks had broken my commitment to clean living, and together with everyone else I was smoking way too much weed and taking acid. Sometime in the night it all got to a point where it was too much for me, and I had to step outside.
It was surprisingly quiet out there in Soho as I started walking slowly towards Leicester Square. Not going anywhere, just to clear my head a bit. Still the heavy mood bearing down on me would not go away, in fact it got worse. I looked up and saw stars in the sky, dark, oppressive stars looking down at me radiating cold, steely doom. On some level I knew you could not really see stars in central London, but there they were nonetheless and they whispered death and annihilation to my ears.
I think I could see a military convoy moving down a nearby street, then – dark green trucks without lights like some ghostly procession in the night – but that barely registered because suddenly I felt detached from the world, all alone in a floating bubble set apart from the living, breathing city around me. On a perhaps higher but definitely not better plane. Singled out – not in a good way, but to be a unique target for some cosmic horror. I was being crushed by the future, and now as I arrived on a small square I could see the escalation of it – big, plump nuclear missiles, all sickeningly black and shiny, bearing down on me from the sky above. At speeds exceeding the speed of sound, maybe the speed of light, too. It did not matter whose missiles they were – the only thing that mattered was the surety of destruction, the total and utter lack of hope those slick black ghosts represented.
I fell to the ground and tried to shelter myself with my hands – useless as it would be.
Just then, I could feel a hand on my shoulder. A hoarse voice uttered my name.
It was Razzle, who had followed me from the club, worried about me. His touch on my shoulder broke the spell. The missiles disappeared, and so did the stars. I was back in reality, however tenuous that reality might be. Made of thin, willowy threads. As I explained to Razzle what I had just seen, his head bobbed in agreement. He said he could understand me. He had had a similar experience just days before, and he was scared. He said he was obsessing about the British government calling him up to the military – I don't know if there was any realism in it, though.
” - We need to get out of here, now, as far as we can”, Nicholas Dingley said to me and I could see the fear in his eyes.
The next day, we sold the plan to the rest of the band. Andy was against it, originally, but somehow we convinced him. I think even he was scared, no matter how happy-go-lucky and all rockstar he was acting back then. Our plan was simple – take a small vacation in Finland and wait for it all to blow over. Both me and Andy knew we had been released from military duty for medical grounds – there is another story there, about yours truly going to a Stockholm doctor's office dressed like a clown and all hopped up on acid to dodge going to the army – and certainly the British government could not reach Razzle there. Naive as we were, we thought Finland, that crudely painted hillbilly backwoods of a nation we had escaped to make our way in the big wide world, would be far and obscure enough to avoid any escalation in the international situation.
It is astounding to think of it now. What idiots we were.
That day in early February 1984, we marched to a travel agent with big wads of cash in our pockets and bought ourselves seriously over-priced plane tickets from London Heathrow to Helsinki-Vantaa. Looking back now, I think it might have been one of the very last Finnair flights to reach Finland from London before the service was suspended. If I remember the atmosphere at the airport and on the plane correctly, it at least felt like it. The plane was packed and the stewardesses had their work cut out for them to keep the adult passengers in a constant drunken stupor. I think there were Finnish embassy personnel sharing the first class with us, from the words that were exchanged between sweating, harried men in severe dark suits, downing their third Koskenkorvas with mineral water while we were still over the North Sea. So rattled, so immersed they were in their unique depths of geopolitical funk that they barely even registered our ludicrous rockstar get-ups and hairdos.
When we reached Helsinki-Vantaa , I saw military aircraft next to the terminal, being serviced by men in green overalls. It was the very first time the airport officials seemed to be oblivious to the threat of us possibly smuggling illegal substances to Finland. It was surprisingly scary to realize they now had more important things to think about.
My mum was waiting us at the airport. She told me I had got a letter from the Defence Forces, calling me to service. I was to arrive at the Lahti Hennala garrison by February 25th to join the ranks of what was called a Separate Supply Regiment. Andy and Nasse had received similar letters- for some reason, Sam had not. Surely it was a bureaucratic oversight.
It all came as something of a shock to the three of us.
We stayed with our parents for a while, thinking about what to do. My mum put up Razzle in the spare room upstairs. Every day, it started to look more like we had made a mistake coming to Finland. This country was preparing for war too. Maybe we should have flown to the United States instead? To Japan? To the Antarctica? It was too late to wonder about it, though – in some days after our arrival, all civilian flights in and out of Helsinki would be suspended, and any and all planes still airborne in the Finnish airspace would now have military insignia on them.
My father was working for the YLE and was attached to a mobile broadcast unit covering the war preparations in Eastern Finland. Grasping at straws, I decided that we should journey to him to enlist his help in order to, well, get us out of being enlisted. Personally, I was convinced that due to his position at the YLE he had such pull with the authorities that he could really help us.
We all see of our fathers as heroes and think they have more power and influence than they really do, don't we? That was the case with me, too. I was wrong – had fate not intervened, my father probably could not have bailed me, Andy and Nasse out of being sent to the military. It really was a shot in the dark, and a rather dimwitted one at that. But I would not realize that until much later down the line.
With a barely road-worthy Scania tour bus acquired from old friends (someone had written ”RATSIA” on its side in big jagged letters) as our ride and supplies and whatnot for a week's trip at the most, me, Andy, Nasse and Razzle took off from Helsinki for Eastern Finland. Sam had decided to stay in Helsinki, even after I tried to goad him into going with us. I still want to kick myself, sometimes, for not trying harder to turn his head.
It was 17th February, 1984.
…
The fake Säpo agent was startled to see movement in the corner of his eye. Glancing to the right, he saw three young boys with backpacks passing the car on the other side of the street, probably coming home from school. They did not even spare a look towards the everyday Saab he sat in. After the boys had passed, the man resumed his reading – but not before making a mental note to remind the bald man that Fagerholm, too, should be... persuaded... to keep his information about the Winter Games as much to himself as possible.
…
Stay tuned for the conclusion of Dead by X-Mas, Part Three, in a few days' time!
(filler)
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John Farson
Banned
Finally, I have to add my Applause to this dark, atmospheric and very Elaborate Scenario about a Country I know Little about.
I still have to visit Finland in the future, but I got to know Sweden during the last summer. I can really imagine that country, if only hit lightly, to go through WW3 and its aftermath with comparative ease. I even have the Impression that its economy is still rather autark.
So....what the world needs now is a P&S Sverige....to explain how the country of Pippi and Emil became such a strict overlord over Finland for decades...
I guess you have reasons coming from the dark spots of Baltic pasts we don't learn about here in Central Europe.
And I have to thank you for being one of the loyal readers of my rambling updates.
Of course, as I (and others) have repeatedly said, if a thermonuclear war had broken out in the 1980s IRL, it's likely that Sweden would have been hit considerably harder by the Soviets than it was in P&S... it's just because of the (few) things that Macragge wrote about Sweden in the original work that Sweden ends up as a powerhouse in P&S. Sort of like how France - somehow - ends up lightly hit in the nuclear war as described in Twilight 2000 and ends up as the most powerful nation in the post-war world.
Well, them's the breaks. Sweden got lucky in P&S essentially by authorial fiat. It was lucky also for Finland and the rest of the Nordic and Baltic areas, though, as without a surviving and functional Swedish state and nation out there to help them, things would have been much more worse for those in the surroundings as well. Had Sweden been hit with 30-40 (say) nukes instead of the just under ten it received ITTL, things would have certainly looked different. For example the (necessarily fewer) Finnish survivors in that scenario would have to get very lucky indeed to enjoy even the the same comparative order, stability and standard of living they have under the FNA (for all its shortcomings) ITTL.
We could have the events on the Finnish side stay virtually the same to somewhere around the Battle of Porvoo, but from there on it would have been comparatively downhill for the Mikkeli regime. Perhaps if no Swedish aid was forthcoming, the Emergency Cabinet would have decided against the Porvoo operation entirely, which would leave the Soviet remnant in control of Porvoo and the oil reserves and the refinery there. Assuming the Mikkeli regime started out the same way, this TL might see the FNA's domains fall into a quasi-civil war after Leppänen dies and end up broken into several smaller enclaves, with military officers or local leaders becoming something like warlords of rival factions. It would all make for an interesting counter-counterfactual, but definitely it would mean more instability and slower recovery for the Finnish areas even in the short run.
John Farson
Banned
Well, sadly, such a scenario wouldn't at all be out of place in the aftermath of World War III and would be very, very likely, IMHO. I mean, here we have a war that was a total exchange, where everything but the kitchen sink was thrown against the other side, and where many countries have been effectively depopulated, like Germany for instance. Hörnla's posts on it were harrowing, reading about how the two Germanies, with a total population of close to 80 million and whose western part was already an advanced nation with one of the world's largest economies, have been reduced to a blasted wasteland with only a few million left or so.
And when you consider that the USSR was willing to lob nukes at Australia and New Zealand, two countries on the other side of the planet as far as they were concerned (and likely also nuking places in South America, as well), they would have no qualms about devastating Northern Europe. Three of its countries are NATO members (with one being a major oil producer), one borders the USSR, has a history of warfare against the Soviets (YYA Treaty and all the liturgies of "friendly relations" notwithstanding) and is still uncomfortably close to Leningrad even after the border "correction", and the biggest Nordic state is also the richest and most militarily powerful, and hence also a threat to the Soviets (in their minds, at least). As someone said up-thread, neutrality would be no shield here, and the whole of Northern Europe would be in a world of hurt, like everyone else, really.
Mind you, I'm not ragging on the story, here. It's suspenseful and gripping stuff.
I see your point and I am not arguing with it, in fact, as to realism in itself. The thing is, though, that this TL has been essentially a P&S spinoff (I have conceptualized it as heavily derivative, in many other ways too, including the copious use of Finnish music and pop culture characters) and in the original TL (and Jack's comments to questions, etc) it was well established that Finland was hit hard and Sweden very lightly.
Now, my TL as a matter of fact includes some divergences from a what we could call a diplomatic reading of the original TL. I for example mention several nukes apart from the Stockholm blast being used against Sweden, mainly almost purely military targets such as the Karlskrona naval base and the Boden fortress area, etc - taking the canon suggestion that Stockholm was the only target hit as meaning that Stockholm was the only major population centre hit. This is something I ran through Jack at the time and got his approval. I have also skirted around the P&S inference that Finland was totally destroyed by making the apparent silence in Finland post-Exchange to be due to the destruction of the capital area and the cessation of organized government activities, as well as the fact that the south and the southwest were heavily hit and it took some time before even the Swedish learned that major Finnish centres claiming national authority (Seinäjoki and Mikkeli) in fact survived the Exchange in the interior.
The thing with these "adjustments" is, though, that they can be IMHO plausibly explained by minor tweaks to the canon information about Finland and Sweden, maybe as oversights by Jack's narrator, maybe caused by the fog of war and post-War confusion and limited intelligence, perhaps also by Swedish deception. So while I have aimed to adjust the canon information in both to make the situation up north seem somewhat more realistic as well as to (selfishly) create the conditions in which to base a TL such as this in the first place, I have tried my best to stick to canon at least in spirit. Making Sweden as heavily hit as Finland, or Britain, in my TL would have been a radical divergence from P&S canon, and very hard to reconcile with Jack's writing.
As the P&S spinoffs taken together have also been an attempt to build a consistent shared universe, taking that direction away from canon information would have set my TL apart from all the other P&S timelines as at base a standalone story, and that was something I was not ready to do - a commitment to more realism, perhaps, would have in that case subtracted from my own work as well as possibly in some ways from the larger P&S-verse. I consider myself as something of a purist when it comes to Jack's original vision, atmosphere and tone (as I see it), and have attempted follow it if at all possible. Of course I accept the possibility that some see I have taken too many liberties with it all, but at least I like to think I did put in the effort. Honest, guv.
And I have to thank you for being one of the loyal readers of my rambling updates.
You are welcome.
Well, as we know, even OTL-Sweden has its dark spots during the 20th century. It would be very interesting how specifically this Social Democratic Welfare State would act in an authoritarian way (for a time).
I agree on Swedish hegemony in Scandinavia. Though, given the way the P&S-canon lets France and even Britain off the hook with relative administrative continuity and a post-war-population each still outnumbering the Swedish or Swiss, they will not be as massively influential as some would imagine. But I also assume that Sweden would regard the Baltic as their MARE NOSTRUM quickly. (My "Report on Germany" noted Swedish presence and aid in the North of the GDR.)
Sweden however, due to its large agricultural base and its mining, will be even better off when compared to Switzerland. The Swiss will be highly dependant on finding out how to make global trade running again....before the (extensive) reserves run out.
Yes, I have always pointed out that countries with at least some democratic tradition would revert (or their governments forced to revert) to democracy, step-by-step restore civil rights and hold elections after a few years. That is, IF there is still a nation to re-construct. Basically, I assume this for Northwestern Europe and (most of) Northern America.
I am certain this is questionable in some Warsaw Pact nations. I also doubt that the Germany I described will have a central government, but will be rather create a loose confederation (if alone because nobody wants to live tied to such a strong Bavaria).
From an author's point of view, we are just thankful (and motivated) that we have something to work with. I chose Switzerland although I have no connection to the place beyond co-workers exactly for that reason. A purely German point of view would be endlessly depressing.
I agree with your general point of view. The P&S-world is an optimistic outlook of malfunctioned devices and chaos and fog of war having spared important cities and...in some cases...even whole tracts of important countries.
Even Germany gets off lightly. Realistically, German could be just a memory. Given the method on how to "place the dots", I found out that it contained surprisingly large pockets of survival.
I took the artistic license to limit the number of ground zeros in Germany to something like 500, IIRC. I had to stop at some point, with 750 or 1000 detonations it would have been a lot of work with a result I could have worked out within a minute.
I also assumed that deception would be pivotal ESPECIALLY if you found out that your own country is still in some sort of order and has major cities surviving. I have put down a note that "Fernsehtag" (television day) would in the decades after the exchange be some sort of unofficial national holiday, marking the anniversary of when the television channels were allowed back on air.
It was a day of collectively holding the breath if that would provoke aggression, but then marked the point of time when the immediate wardays were (for Switzerland) over and the road to recovery was to be taken.
Today they caught me
They thought they had won
All their gods unsure
They wanted me to be afraid
Steps in an empty corridor
Put up against the wall, 'cause I hate war
Guns on their belts to make them feel secure
Mocking laugh from behind the truncheons
Even if I was unsure, even afraid
Crazy with all this hate
You said: see the truth
'Cause there are no angels at all
At all
At all
You listened, with courage in your smile
Nothing has been lost yet
Your eyes told me you do understand
Full of quiet strength
We're just snowballs in hell
If they'll drown the world in hate
We might have to walk with our hands chained
But they can't steal our hearts
…
Ratsia: Ei enkeleitä (1980)
Addendum VIII. Dead by X-Mas (Part Three)
[This notebook includes the third part of the interview of Matti Fagerholm. Mikkeli, June 2014]
All Those Wasted Years [working title]
What Matti Fagerholm and his bandmates did in February 1984 is of course familiar to those who have read or listened the stories of survivors and refugees of the War. Striking out for survival, taking to the road in a car or even on foot, in a group or alone, to find a place of safety, no matter how unlikely that would be, is the basic narrative most of us have heard and even grown up with. Just ask the experts – Feodor Ljubov, a Professor of History at Uppsala University and an expert on the stories of survivors (and a War-time refugee himself) told me that Fagerholm's story indeed conforms to the general experience as he has come to understand it through various sources on the Exchange and the aftermath.
Ljubov has been one of the masterminds behind Minne 1984, a government-supported oral history project that during the last years has been recording War-time recollections in Finland. Even if the seemingly quite extensive project's report is yet to be published and Ljubov himself is somewhat mysterious of the project's results, at least ostensibly partly because much of its material falls within the purview of the Security of the Realm Act, he says that he can well place Fagerholm's experience within the larger framework and oral tradition of the stories of survival. Such stories emphasize individual decisions and diverging from the mainstream, says the professor. The bravery or possibly rashness of escaping a rapidly deteriorating status quo, by design or by a lucky accident (or a series of such). Such stories are of course more commonplace in places like Finland or, say, Norway or the Baltic area, than they are among native Swedes, Ljubov reminded me in our brief telephone conversation. But still we have to remember that survivors will put their stories and narratives in words in many different ways, or then keep silent about them in part or entirely, due to various reasons. They are, necessarily, unreliable narrators. But many of them do talk to us. The dead, Ljubov wanted to remind me, are all silent.
Back in his big, messy office, Matti Fagerholm old me that he now knows how lucky he was to leave the Finnish pre-War capital in the very last of moments, and that he is sure that the fact that he is today very much alive has been a result of a fantastically unlikely chain of events.
” - We would find my father with the mobile broadcast unit just a day before the Exchange, in Savonlinna. The road there was an adventure on its own right. You probably don't believe me when I tell this, but somewhere along the road we had a flat tire and while we were fixing it, our breaths fuming in the icy air, Andy cursing all the while with that muttering voice of his, we were actually buzzed by Soviet aircraft... They might have mistaken our bus for a troop transport from the distance, I don't know. And closer to Savonlinna we actually speeded through a police checkpoint and I guess we were damn lucky the coppers had, again, more on their plate than a bunch of idiot rockers.”
Shaking his head, Fagerholm reaches into one of the wooden boxes on the floor, and after rummaging around produces a photo album. Turning some pages, he shows me a picture of a young man with a long, voluminous blonde hair, at a first glance easily mistakable for a young woman instead, standing next to a man with dark-rimmed glasses and a suit jacket that has seen better days.
” - This is me and dad in the summer of 1984. Photos from back then are of course very rare, and I am very lucky to have this one, in truth.”
The boys of Hanoi Rocks, or at least the bigger part of them, rode out the Exchange in the same shelter with the YLE mobile unit.
” - I remember how surprised my dad was to see us in Savonlinna when we arived there. Surprised and happy, I know. When we went to the shelter and he demanded we would be allowed in, too, when a local Civil Defence guy tried to stand in our way... People didn't know him by looks, but when he opened his mouth they immediately realized it was a voice all knew. Inside, as we waited what would happen, he hugged me, which was not a very common occurrence and told me with tears in his eyes how happy he was I was there...
My mom, of course, was still in Helsinki, and my siblings too were in the capital area...”
Fagerholm's own voice cracks a little when he tells me this, too.
” - After the bombs, well, nobody really minded about where we had been ordered by the military... But of course we would be subject to work duty, at the very least, and that was where our mad dash to Savonia again proved the right choice after all. Without blinking an eye, my father would tell the officials we encountered that me, Andy and Nasse were actually YLE staff and would fulfill our duties to the nation in that capacity. It was a longshot, of course, as even he had no chance to know what use to the radio personnel cowering in the Savonlinna shelter for town officials there would be after a nuclear war. Of course he could guess, better than most, but still it was a time of chaos all around us. We even managed to get special papers for Razzle as a foreign refugee – to stay on the safe side we claimed he was Irish, from a neutral nation like Finland, which he found somewhat comical despite the circumstances. What he did not find funny at all was the fact that we all had to go cold turkey because any and all drugs, and the chances to get more, were now out of our reach. I think of us all, Razzle was hurting the most because of that those days.
To live through the end of the world, without even mind-altering substances there to break the fall... It was not easy for anyone, and even for us who got lucky there were things we could have really lived without. The military types tended to hate me and the guys on sight. Multiple times when dad introduced me as his son, some officer or another would mutter ”daughter, more like it” or something to that effect. The soldiers, the people in the provinces in general... I grew to hate them in the post-Exchange months and years. Without our affiliation with the radio unit, which became the basis for rebuilding the YLE in the spring-summer of 1984, we could have ended in a really bad way. And I am not exaggarating a bit. After the ”reclamation” of Lahti, when the military put down the so-called Free Area there, guys like us were likely to be lined up against a wall and summarily shot. It happened in Lahti, sure, but I know of other occurrences, too. Fear, paranoia, hunger, disease, unravelling chains of command, too many guns to go around... I have no illusions of surviving if we in fact had made it to Lahti before the War and joined the Separate Supply Regiment there as soldiers. Even if we wouldn't have taken part in the mutiny of the Free Area, we would have most likely seen the end of our days in the fires of Porvoo...
So you see, Mr. Blomqvist, I see myself as a very lucky man, and one who has a debt to pay to help my fellow Finns after what happened to this nation in 1984 and after it.”
Fagerholm takes another look at the photo album and closes it carefully.
” - This is not to say I understood this at the time. It would dawn on me only later, after many things happened in my life, in Finland as well as in Sweden...”
Indeed. There are many people in Gothenburg who remember Matti Fagerholm as Michael Monroe, a rock singer who appeared in many clubs in the city in the post-War years. He was a fixture in the Swedish capital's music life after the mid-80s, and his 1988 solo album Stars of Destruction and Hope is among the most well regarded post-War rock recordings in Sweden.
But we are not here to talk about his years in Sweden, Fagerholm reminds me. He still has his story to tell me. He looks at me with a sudden faint smile and suggests we take a break for lunch first.
” - I fear my story might cause you to lose appetite”, he says, much more earnestly than one might expect.
We walk to the broadcast centre's cafeteria, an eating establishment that like everything else in Mikkeli seems like a throwback to the early 80's, with its bare wooden walls and furniture that is partly covered in worn brown fabric. Today there's chicken soup on the menu, a young blonde woman in an austere grey uniform behind the counter tells us with a smile. She is a member of the Lotta Svärd organization, a Finnish idiosyncracy that like numerous other parts of the Eastern Finnish reality seems very much like an anachronism to a foreigner like me.
The Lotta Svärd was originally founded a few years after Finland gained independence in 1917, as as women's auxiliary organization for national defence. During the Second World War Finnish Lottas would take part in important work among the military, in almost all unarmed tasks of defence men did in most nations. In 1944, after Finland made peace with the USSR, the Lotta Svärd was banned as a Fascist organization, due to Finnish cooperation with Nazi Germany and on Soviet demand.
The organization would be given new life in 1986 by the Finnish military and the Emergency Cabinet, as a way of bringing order and structure to the work done by women in work duty tasks. The cause was simple – after the War, the surviving military units became very important in Eastern Finland, due to various reasons (but mainly for being armed and organized) making the officers and NCOs a new elite in the post-War reality, the people in control of resources, especially the food supply. For women, there was only the white TV armbands of those in work duty – the rank and file of those who would do the heaviest, most dangerous work. The Lotta Svärd was thus rekindled as a volunteer elite for the women – a source of more prestige, more food and more rewarding tasks.
That someone might see it as Fascist had suddenly become a moot point – what was a connection to the Nazis, monsters who killed millions, as opposed to the great powers that had just killed hundreds of millions in a nuclear war, almost destroyed the world and human civilization itself? Finland has nothing to feel ashamed for in surviving the horror started by the Soviet Union, said General Halonen, then just the acting commander of the Finnish military, when the first new Lottas donned their severe uniforms and gave their pledges to the nation in the spring of 1986. And the post-War Finnish state and nation, such as they were, certainly abandoned all the restrictions the USSR had ever placed on Finland in the years following WWII, the FCMA Treaty and the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty chief amongst them. In contrast to the hardships the Finnish people now faced this all was of course highly superficial and some could say petty – but to the powers-that-be in Mikkeli then, the symbolism there was powerful, even necessary, when the Emergency Cabinet made it known through the radio waves that such limitations had now been declared null and void.
” - Thank you, Kiira”, Fagerholm says to the pretty young paramilitarian with a smile – he seems determined to remember all the names of the staff here – and holding our trays with bowls of steaming chicken soup and bits of rye bread we walk to take seats in one of the wooden tables.
On the main wall of the cafeteria there is a large YLE logo – a blue-and-white disc with the caption RADIO in all caps, surrounded by two spruces in the lower right and a broadcast tower sending out a single stylized radio wave over the text and the trees. Next to the logo is a memorial wall – like in so many places – with a tablet of names of the YLE employees that were lost in the war and the immediate aftermath. Next to the tablet one can see, predicably, the brooding official portrait of Urpo Leppänen, the leader of the Finnish Emergencency Cabinet, known simply as ”the Acting”. He is a legend, a martyr, a national hero of sorts, to post-War Finland something like Marshal Mannerheim was before the war – in importance, if not in meaning. Below him, are two smaller photos – Kari Kairamo, the post-War Minister of Communications, the man who built the new YLE, and General Halonen, the late Chairman of the soon-defunct National Committee of the Continuation of Government. In some other places the photo of Halonen has already been taken down, to leave only an empty square on the wall, perhaps to wait for a photo of whoever will lead Finland after the power change has run its course. But here the murdered general still seems to keep up the struggle against fading into history and insignificance.
Below the official photos, there is a quote of something (it seems) Leppänen has ostensibly said after the war:
Radio broadcasts.... Right now, they are a friend's hand reaching for your own in the dark, a reassuring voice next to you, telling you that no matter how black the night is, no matter how cold the wind, the morning will eventually come. The morning will come with relief and help. What you do here is a promise to the survivors, made out of invisible electric waves piercing the darkness. It is up to us to keep the nation together – the radio will be one of our main tools to achieve that.
Acting President Urpo Leppänen, 1984.
As I turn my eyes back to my rapidly cooling soup from the solemn quote full of desperate hope and pathos, so typical of the FNA's traditional representation of Urpo Leppänen, I find Fagerholm looking me and smiling.
” - This is the reality we are building on here”, he tells me indicating the cafeteria in general, between spoonfulls of soup.
” - It is different from Sweden, I am very aware of that, and I am glad I have the perspective I gained from my years abroad – it has helped me to maintain some detachment from this reality, even while being the official voice of the FNA for many years. This is what we have to build on – and it will not change overnight, let me tell you that.”
After finishing our dessert – a small bowl of what can be understood as lingonberry-flavoured porridge – we walk back to Fagerholm's office and get another cups of coffee. It seems Finland (or at least those who can afford it) is now filling itself with caffeine as trade with Sweden has opened up since the events of the spring.
And finally Fagerholm starts to tell me the story he has had on his mind all along.
To be concluded...
[filler]
They thought they had won
All their gods unsure
They wanted me to be afraid
Steps in an empty corridor
Put up against the wall, 'cause I hate war
Guns on their belts to make them feel secure
Mocking laugh from behind the truncheons
Even if I was unsure, even afraid
Crazy with all this hate
You said: see the truth
'Cause there are no angels at all
At all
At all
You listened, with courage in your smile
Nothing has been lost yet
Your eyes told me you do understand
Full of quiet strength
We're just snowballs in hell
If they'll drown the world in hate
We might have to walk with our hands chained
But they can't steal our hearts
…
Ratsia: Ei enkeleitä (1980)
Addendum VIII. Dead by X-Mas (Part Three)
[This notebook includes the third part of the interview of Matti Fagerholm. Mikkeli, June 2014]
All Those Wasted Years [working title]
What Matti Fagerholm and his bandmates did in February 1984 is of course familiar to those who have read or listened the stories of survivors and refugees of the War. Striking out for survival, taking to the road in a car or even on foot, in a group or alone, to find a place of safety, no matter how unlikely that would be, is the basic narrative most of us have heard and even grown up with. Just ask the experts – Feodor Ljubov, a Professor of History at Uppsala University and an expert on the stories of survivors (and a War-time refugee himself) told me that Fagerholm's story indeed conforms to the general experience as he has come to understand it through various sources on the Exchange and the aftermath.
Ljubov has been one of the masterminds behind Minne 1984, a government-supported oral history project that during the last years has been recording War-time recollections in Finland. Even if the seemingly quite extensive project's report is yet to be published and Ljubov himself is somewhat mysterious of the project's results, at least ostensibly partly because much of its material falls within the purview of the Security of the Realm Act, he says that he can well place Fagerholm's experience within the larger framework and oral tradition of the stories of survival. Such stories emphasize individual decisions and diverging from the mainstream, says the professor. The bravery or possibly rashness of escaping a rapidly deteriorating status quo, by design or by a lucky accident (or a series of such). Such stories are of course more commonplace in places like Finland or, say, Norway or the Baltic area, than they are among native Swedes, Ljubov reminded me in our brief telephone conversation. But still we have to remember that survivors will put their stories and narratives in words in many different ways, or then keep silent about them in part or entirely, due to various reasons. They are, necessarily, unreliable narrators. But many of them do talk to us. The dead, Ljubov wanted to remind me, are all silent.
Back in his big, messy office, Matti Fagerholm old me that he now knows how lucky he was to leave the Finnish pre-War capital in the very last of moments, and that he is sure that the fact that he is today very much alive has been a result of a fantastically unlikely chain of events.
” - We would find my father with the mobile broadcast unit just a day before the Exchange, in Savonlinna. The road there was an adventure on its own right. You probably don't believe me when I tell this, but somewhere along the road we had a flat tire and while we were fixing it, our breaths fuming in the icy air, Andy cursing all the while with that muttering voice of his, we were actually buzzed by Soviet aircraft... They might have mistaken our bus for a troop transport from the distance, I don't know. And closer to Savonlinna we actually speeded through a police checkpoint and I guess we were damn lucky the coppers had, again, more on their plate than a bunch of idiot rockers.”
Shaking his head, Fagerholm reaches into one of the wooden boxes on the floor, and after rummaging around produces a photo album. Turning some pages, he shows me a picture of a young man with a long, voluminous blonde hair, at a first glance easily mistakable for a young woman instead, standing next to a man with dark-rimmed glasses and a suit jacket that has seen better days.
” - This is me and dad in the summer of 1984. Photos from back then are of course very rare, and I am very lucky to have this one, in truth.”
The boys of Hanoi Rocks, or at least the bigger part of them, rode out the Exchange in the same shelter with the YLE mobile unit.
” - I remember how surprised my dad was to see us in Savonlinna when we arived there. Surprised and happy, I know. When we went to the shelter and he demanded we would be allowed in, too, when a local Civil Defence guy tried to stand in our way... People didn't know him by looks, but when he opened his mouth they immediately realized it was a voice all knew. Inside, as we waited what would happen, he hugged me, which was not a very common occurrence and told me with tears in his eyes how happy he was I was there...
My mom, of course, was still in Helsinki, and my siblings too were in the capital area...”
Fagerholm's own voice cracks a little when he tells me this, too.
” - After the bombs, well, nobody really minded about where we had been ordered by the military... But of course we would be subject to work duty, at the very least, and that was where our mad dash to Savonia again proved the right choice after all. Without blinking an eye, my father would tell the officials we encountered that me, Andy and Nasse were actually YLE staff and would fulfill our duties to the nation in that capacity. It was a longshot, of course, as even he had no chance to know what use to the radio personnel cowering in the Savonlinna shelter for town officials there would be after a nuclear war. Of course he could guess, better than most, but still it was a time of chaos all around us. We even managed to get special papers for Razzle as a foreign refugee – to stay on the safe side we claimed he was Irish, from a neutral nation like Finland, which he found somewhat comical despite the circumstances. What he did not find funny at all was the fact that we all had to go cold turkey because any and all drugs, and the chances to get more, were now out of our reach. I think of us all, Razzle was hurting the most because of that those days.
To live through the end of the world, without even mind-altering substances there to break the fall... It was not easy for anyone, and even for us who got lucky there were things we could have really lived without. The military types tended to hate me and the guys on sight. Multiple times when dad introduced me as his son, some officer or another would mutter ”daughter, more like it” or something to that effect. The soldiers, the people in the provinces in general... I grew to hate them in the post-Exchange months and years. Without our affiliation with the radio unit, which became the basis for rebuilding the YLE in the spring-summer of 1984, we could have ended in a really bad way. And I am not exaggarating a bit. After the ”reclamation” of Lahti, when the military put down the so-called Free Area there, guys like us were likely to be lined up against a wall and summarily shot. It happened in Lahti, sure, but I know of other occurrences, too. Fear, paranoia, hunger, disease, unravelling chains of command, too many guns to go around... I have no illusions of surviving if we in fact had made it to Lahti before the War and joined the Separate Supply Regiment there as soldiers. Even if we wouldn't have taken part in the mutiny of the Free Area, we would have most likely seen the end of our days in the fires of Porvoo...
So you see, Mr. Blomqvist, I see myself as a very lucky man, and one who has a debt to pay to help my fellow Finns after what happened to this nation in 1984 and after it.”
Fagerholm takes another look at the photo album and closes it carefully.
” - This is not to say I understood this at the time. It would dawn on me only later, after many things happened in my life, in Finland as well as in Sweden...”
Indeed. There are many people in Gothenburg who remember Matti Fagerholm as Michael Monroe, a rock singer who appeared in many clubs in the city in the post-War years. He was a fixture in the Swedish capital's music life after the mid-80s, and his 1988 solo album Stars of Destruction and Hope is among the most well regarded post-War rock recordings in Sweden.
But we are not here to talk about his years in Sweden, Fagerholm reminds me. He still has his story to tell me. He looks at me with a sudden faint smile and suggests we take a break for lunch first.
” - I fear my story might cause you to lose appetite”, he says, much more earnestly than one might expect.
We walk to the broadcast centre's cafeteria, an eating establishment that like everything else in Mikkeli seems like a throwback to the early 80's, with its bare wooden walls and furniture that is partly covered in worn brown fabric. Today there's chicken soup on the menu, a young blonde woman in an austere grey uniform behind the counter tells us with a smile. She is a member of the Lotta Svärd organization, a Finnish idiosyncracy that like numerous other parts of the Eastern Finnish reality seems very much like an anachronism to a foreigner like me.
The Lotta Svärd was originally founded a few years after Finland gained independence in 1917, as as women's auxiliary organization for national defence. During the Second World War Finnish Lottas would take part in important work among the military, in almost all unarmed tasks of defence men did in most nations. In 1944, after Finland made peace with the USSR, the Lotta Svärd was banned as a Fascist organization, due to Finnish cooperation with Nazi Germany and on Soviet demand.
The organization would be given new life in 1986 by the Finnish military and the Emergency Cabinet, as a way of bringing order and structure to the work done by women in work duty tasks. The cause was simple – after the War, the surviving military units became very important in Eastern Finland, due to various reasons (but mainly for being armed and organized) making the officers and NCOs a new elite in the post-War reality, the people in control of resources, especially the food supply. For women, there was only the white TV armbands of those in work duty – the rank and file of those who would do the heaviest, most dangerous work. The Lotta Svärd was thus rekindled as a volunteer elite for the women – a source of more prestige, more food and more rewarding tasks.
That someone might see it as Fascist had suddenly become a moot point – what was a connection to the Nazis, monsters who killed millions, as opposed to the great powers that had just killed hundreds of millions in a nuclear war, almost destroyed the world and human civilization itself? Finland has nothing to feel ashamed for in surviving the horror started by the Soviet Union, said General Halonen, then just the acting commander of the Finnish military, when the first new Lottas donned their severe uniforms and gave their pledges to the nation in the spring of 1986. And the post-War Finnish state and nation, such as they were, certainly abandoned all the restrictions the USSR had ever placed on Finland in the years following WWII, the FCMA Treaty and the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty chief amongst them. In contrast to the hardships the Finnish people now faced this all was of course highly superficial and some could say petty – but to the powers-that-be in Mikkeli then, the symbolism there was powerful, even necessary, when the Emergency Cabinet made it known through the radio waves that such limitations had now been declared null and void.
” - Thank you, Kiira”, Fagerholm says to the pretty young paramilitarian with a smile – he seems determined to remember all the names of the staff here – and holding our trays with bowls of steaming chicken soup and bits of rye bread we walk to take seats in one of the wooden tables.
On the main wall of the cafeteria there is a large YLE logo – a blue-and-white disc with the caption RADIO in all caps, surrounded by two spruces in the lower right and a broadcast tower sending out a single stylized radio wave over the text and the trees. Next to the logo is a memorial wall – like in so many places – with a tablet of names of the YLE employees that were lost in the war and the immediate aftermath. Next to the tablet one can see, predicably, the brooding official portrait of Urpo Leppänen, the leader of the Finnish Emergencency Cabinet, known simply as ”the Acting”. He is a legend, a martyr, a national hero of sorts, to post-War Finland something like Marshal Mannerheim was before the war – in importance, if not in meaning. Below him, are two smaller photos – Kari Kairamo, the post-War Minister of Communications, the man who built the new YLE, and General Halonen, the late Chairman of the soon-defunct National Committee of the Continuation of Government. In some other places the photo of Halonen has already been taken down, to leave only an empty square on the wall, perhaps to wait for a photo of whoever will lead Finland after the power change has run its course. But here the murdered general still seems to keep up the struggle against fading into history and insignificance.
Below the official photos, there is a quote of something (it seems) Leppänen has ostensibly said after the war:
Radio broadcasts.... Right now, they are a friend's hand reaching for your own in the dark, a reassuring voice next to you, telling you that no matter how black the night is, no matter how cold the wind, the morning will eventually come. The morning will come with relief and help. What you do here is a promise to the survivors, made out of invisible electric waves piercing the darkness. It is up to us to keep the nation together – the radio will be one of our main tools to achieve that.
Acting President Urpo Leppänen, 1984.
As I turn my eyes back to my rapidly cooling soup from the solemn quote full of desperate hope and pathos, so typical of the FNA's traditional representation of Urpo Leppänen, I find Fagerholm looking me and smiling.
” - This is the reality we are building on here”, he tells me indicating the cafeteria in general, between spoonfulls of soup.
” - It is different from Sweden, I am very aware of that, and I am glad I have the perspective I gained from my years abroad – it has helped me to maintain some detachment from this reality, even while being the official voice of the FNA for many years. This is what we have to build on – and it will not change overnight, let me tell you that.”
After finishing our dessert – a small bowl of what can be understood as lingonberry-flavoured porridge – we walk back to Fagerholm's office and get another cups of coffee. It seems Finland (or at least those who can afford it) is now filling itself with caffeine as trade with Sweden has opened up since the events of the spring.
And finally Fagerholm starts to tell me the story he has had on his mind all along.
To be concluded...
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Addendum VIII. Dead by X-Mas (Part Four)
[This notebook includes the last part of the interview of Matti Fagerholm. Mikkeli, June 2014]
The summer of 1984 was as short as it was bitter-sweet. After what was the longest and most destructive winter this nation, this world has ever seen, it seemed like there would be some hope left in the world. All the living souls in the areas controlled by Mikkeli, and Seinäjoki, too, I presume, were harnessed to the effort of survival and recovery, for preparing to the next winter to come above all. People were still dying, of a combination of radiation sickness, disease, dismal hygiene, hunger and outright famine, mental breakdowns, hopelessness. And the dying would not stop for some time.
All needed to do their bit. And the bit they came up for us – don't laugh, now – was to do with upholding morale. People don't live off their daily bread alone, they need something to believe in, something to hope for, something to live for. Someone has said that a little hope is a dangerous thing – even a man who has been sentenced to death will do astonishing things if you give him just a little reason to believe he can avoid this impending fate. And this is where the YLE and we, as parts of it now, came in. We would work to keep the others working – all the military officers that saw me or Andy seemed to agree that it would be pointless to give us a hammer or a shovel to wield, anyway. ”You little girls stay away as men do men's work”, one such man said to us one of those days. I don't remember what that man's work was, that time, but he seemed to have a lot of conviction as to how useless we would be in it.
And so, we would be sent to do what we could – to entertain the people, if we only could. Packed up in our old tour bus that had somehow reached Mikkeli with us, too, with another band playing traditional dance music, a local one the name of which I keep forgetting, in the format This Man & His Podunk Band – as I remember technically adept if uninspired, and a small squad of soldiers who came with us as a something like a protective detail, too. We were a double act, you see, something traditional for the adults, something for the younger people, too. A moment of distraction after another day of backbreaking work, to forget how little you again ate today, and how short your night in the refugee camp would be before trudging out to work the fields again in the morning. We played unplugged, most times, and I think very often the people in smaller rural places were not very, ah, receptive towards our brand of music, even if we tried to steer it towards older rock songs, like CCR's Up Around the Bend. A couple of times we were basically chased out of the village, called ”lazy faggots” and worse, by people who wished us to be sent to sawing down trees by hand or clearing radioactive debris without protective gear instead.
It was an ironic sight to be sure – the ragged punk-band bus, plying the side roads of Eastern Finland in search of living souls to entertain, in the villages and the refugee camps, flying a Finnish state flag to show we were doing the Emergency Cabinet's good work. Fun and games it was not, barely even a living with the food rations we managed to scrounge for ourselves, but it is something that I tend to revisit in my dreams on many nights these days. A sort of half-life in a deep dark valley, or life underwater, like a cruel, petty parody of a real rock tour in somewhere like Japan or the United States. Because that's where we could have, would have been without the war. I can remember some songs I wrote back then, as I again was laying on my back, sleepless in the dead quiet summer night. Hopeful they are not. There was a heavy shadow over me, all that time, and there were nights I would have just wanted to lay down and never wake up again. I remember actually considering suicide on more than one occasion, earnestly, and I'd be surprised if the thought of taking one's life and escaping it all hadn't crosses the other guys' mind too those days.
But slowly the days rolled on, and finally it was August, the time of harvest. At the end of the month we were playing in Iisalmi, at the Runni spa which was made into the location of a better sort of a refugee camp, if I remember correctly, and then in the next afternoon we turned the nose of the bus back towards the south to return to Mikkeli. The highway south through the Kuopio area was still unpassable and closed off, despite all the efforts that had been made to rebuild it, and so we had to take a detour through smaller roads around the Western shore of Lake Kallavesi to reach our destination. We got unlucky, though – the whole year was full of freaky weather, as were several post-War years everywhere it seems, and just that night there had been a big storm in those areas. A storm called Tauno, because of the name day.
Along the way, we kept taking wrong turns and had to turn back when we came across trees fallen on the road. We were all frustrated as hell, and it would get worse. When we finally thought we had found a road south through the municipality of Lapinlahti, and the mood in the bus was getting better, we come to the centre of this small village, a shop (closed) and a gas station (closed per orders of municipal council) and a few other buildings, we suddenly see a roadblock across the way and a man in a Civil Defence get-up holding up his hand to us in front of the bus. We get out, to find a mournful middle-aged man who introduces himself as the local Civil Defence chief looking at us, somewhat astonished.
” - I don't know what in the Devil's name you folks are doing here”, he says to us eyeing us somewhat suspiciously, with a hunting rifle slung on his back, ”but you can't get south along this road today.”
The man, Hyvärinen by name, then goes on to explain us that the storm has cut the cable of the ferry going across the Akkalansalmi strait, which won't be fixed until the next day at the very earliest, and that the roads further west are cut by a mass of trees the wind has felled on them, requiring a squad or three of TeeVees to be sent there to clear them out – and it would take at least as long as with the ferry.
” - Mikkeli? Sorry, boys, if that's what you are, you can't get there from here, not today.”
He then smiles to us, somewhat surprisingly.
” - Why don't you stay here tonight? We're having a harvest do at the village hall. We've got food, real food, and you seem to be a band... Whole two bands, maybe? It occurs to me our little party could use a band – unless you help us, I am again down to old man Hartikainen telling me dirty jokes all evening.”
His grimace makes me understand that any music we might play will not be that bad.
Me, Andy and This Man look at each other, and then confer with Sergeant Rönkkö who is there with his three men to protect us. What else can we do – take another detour to end up driving through the night, putting us to the mercy of desperate bandits and what ever irradiated whackos roam these little roads in the dead of night? Not likely. And besides, says Rönkkö, we would not have the fuel for it anyway – we were dependent on our Ministry of Communications fuel allowance back in Mikkeli, and we would not likely get juice from anyone else, not with our papers and bona fides. So we take Hyvärinen up on his offer, we'll play at the party, we get something to eat, and a place to spend the night. It is a square deal, given the time and the circumstances.
It is as far in the countryside as it comes. Farms with fields and cows and pigs all around us, and forests, of course, between them. Or at least this was the picture before the war. Now, Hyvärinen tells us, most farms have lost their livestock in the emergency slaughters and military requisitioning parties keep taking away more at the behest of both Kajaani and Leppävirta, the centres of state authority north and south of here. It has been the same with the grain, and anything else that they grow here – as soon as they were ready with the harvest, lo and behold, there was a convoy of trucks with a military officer ordering them to load up most of what they had to be sent to Kajaani.
” - Everyone needs to eat”, Hyvärinen says, ”but surely we who did all the work should be able to keep some of the food?”
It is not for me to say, I tell him. I just play music.
Back at the village hall, the festivities are starting as we get there. The Civil Defence chief presides over the events, and as we look around us we see surpringly many people around the old building dating to the 1920s, built for the local Youth Association they say. Apparently there is a lot of Kuopio-area refugees in the municipality, as well as people from Southern Finland. Most have been put up in private farms, in various buildings, barns included, but next to the village hall on what must be a sports field, there are also several rows of tents for latecomers. Nearly all seem to be in use. Many people have died during the winter here, too, but still the municipality now has more people than it used to have before the War.
The people are thin and sorry-looking, but they seem sort of tough, and many have taken the effort to scrub themselves clean for the occasion. Some look like farmers, most look just out of place. The clothes may be worn and ill-fitting, scrounged from somewhere, but the women have flowers in their hair and the men have combed theirs. Many try to smile, to get into a festive mood. I don't know whether to smile or cry when I look at them. It seems to me these people so yearn for normality, conformity, ordinary life, three square meals a day, a house and a dog – but they are not getting these thing, will not get them, not since the Exchange. Most of such things, for most of the people, are now well out of reach.
This time, we receive a friendly welcome. Some of the younger people seem downright ecstatic to see and listen to us play and sing for them, strictly acoustically. And the local Civil Defence man, who started the whole event with a small speech about what a great job everyone have done with the harvest, the locals and the evacuees both, and how the village will soon be well-prepared for the coming winter, comes and thanks us and says we have earned our food. Not so well as most here, it strikes me as I look at the thin people queing for the potato-and-meat stew, along with some bread and apple juice. With rationing, there will be enough for everybody, and then there will be dancing. As soon as This Man and his band start, that is.
It is a pretty evening outside, warm even. People mill around the building, and I see men and women walk hand in hand. It would take more than the end of the world as we know it to stop people from seeking warmth and solace from each other, I am sure of that. When we lose all else, we do have just each other – why not make the best of it now?
You might well die by tomorrow after all.
I eat a bowl of the stew. The Civil Defence chief says that it is all local produce – local potatoes, local onion, local beetroot, local pork from a pig farm just a couple of kilometers down the road. The farmer is an adept butcher, too, he says, and has been delivering meat to feed the refugees all summer.
” - We have a lot of good people here, you see”, Hyvärinen says, ”we'll weather this thing yet”.
After seeing what I have seen across Eastern Finland, I am not so sure. But I keep eating the stew to avoid saying anything to cross the local bossman.
I have lost the sight of Andy and the rest for a while, and then I think I hear their voice somewhere to my left. There, behind the trees, I find them with some local men. They have bottles in their hands.
” - Well fuck me, another of you rockstars!”, one of the men says, cheerily and slurring his words a little, ”I can't say if you are a girl or a boy, but you sure have the lungs for singing! Now, you, come and have some of the good stuff!”
He thrusts a bottle filled with clear liquid in my hand. My bandmates look at me expectantly, nodding their heads.
” - Well, rockstar, says Andy, what are you waiting for?”
Without knowing what the hell it is, I take a mouthful of the stuff. It tastes revolting, and burns like hell going down.
” - What the fuck is this?”, I ask the group of locals and my bandmates, all laughing to the comical expression on my face. It still burns in my throat, and now in my stomach, too, but the warmth is not that bad, I guess.
” - Local produce”, says the man who gave me the bottle. He looks like he is in his late thirties, I only now see he has a Civil Defence armband just like Hyvärinen. He holds out his hand.
” - Karhunen. Good to meet you, rockstar. You may look like a girl but it seems like you do drink like a man, so you are all right in my book.”
It turns out all my friends have already downed some of the hideous moonshine, and are well on their way to getting plastered. With the limited possibilities available to us to get our heads scrambled as of late, I can't blame them. I take another mouthful from Karhunen's bottle, thinking the stuff must be 100 proof and then some.
” - We have an old tradition for making moonshine 'round these parts”, the man says with a wink, ”and now when the state monopoly company seems to be, how shall I put it, pretty short of fine foreign liquers as it were, or even crappy domestic ones, we have brought back some of that tradition. In this, we have mainly rye – and berries, for vitamins you see.”
This man clearly savours the vile stuff, I understand. Maybe he is even proud of it.
I wonder if the harvest has really been so good that the village can afford to use its food for distilling home-made booze from it – and if not, who will go hungry next winter because of us getting drunk here in the woods behind the Youth Association Hall? Not this man Karhunen, surely, with his portly frame and his Civil Defence armband. He is, like such men now are, certainly among the local elite.
Later, we play a drunken second set, to a smaller but more dedicated crowd this time. Karhunen is among the audience, clapping his two meaty hands together and singing along. The booze in my system has started to make everything seem skewed, surreal and twisted. Rarely I have got such an effect from mere alcohol. The people's smiles look feral, beastly, and I.m suddenly feeling a wave of nausea washing over me. Andy nearly falls on the floor and is saved by a couple of the locals at the last minute. When we stop playing, after an encore, it is already getting dark outside. I must get out, now, to breathe some fresh air.
Out on the yard, a bonfire has been started, and benches put around it. People are sitting there, looking at the fire in near-silence. The flames climb high in the quiet, still night and there are only the sounds of conversation, now somehow muted, and the crackling of the burning wood to be heard. I just stand there, now not even wanting to chat up the local girls as I had planned before, while seeing some of them smiling meaningfully to me during our first set. Slowly, my head is starting to clear. The nausea, though, is not abating.
After staring at the fire for a good while I find myself sitting with Karhunen and a couple of younger locals, a boy and a girl, Karhunen's relatives I recall and Razzle, somewhat more drunk than me, swaying from side to side with a goofy smile on his face. Karhunen has reached a blue phase in his drinking, and he has started recounting the ways things are wrong around the village, ticking things of with his fingers.
” - Bandits are preying on the refugees on the roads. People get raided and killed for little bits of food and anything of... value they might be carrying. We suspect it is former convicts – there was a big breakout from the Sukeva prison during the confusion after the Exchange, and it must be those damn murderers and thieves working out there. The military seems to be unwilling to do anything about it, and so we are stepping up patrols and bolstering our numbers...”
I am momentarily distracted by bunch of kids singing what seems like an Eppu Normaali song, surprisingly well, and then I try to focus my attention back to Karhunen's melancholy voice.
” - ...keep getting sick, let me tell you. We have had to expand the quarantine camp two times because of that. It is ten kilometers to the west from here, in a secluded place. You would not want to see it, no sir. A horrible place for dying people. Well, horrible for any people, really... But with no medicine and no doctors or even qualified nurses to speak of, what the fuck are we to do?”
He takes another gulp from his bottle. It seems to be getting surprisingly empty.
” - And then the goddamned wolves or the bears or what have you, taking those kids away...”
I ask him what he means. He gives me a drunken look, and now I can see something like fear, briefly, in his eyes. And here I was thinking there are very few things this man would be afraid of.
” - Children keep getting lost. From the refugee camps, even from some of the farms. Always aged under ten, and always gone without a trace. Must be over ten kids already...”
” - Fifteen, that we know of”, corrects the girl of maybe seventeen next to me. Karhunen only looks at her mournfully.
” - We are suspecting it is a pack of wolves, or some other predators, who have possibly wandered here from the Soviet side, well, the former Soviet side, so to speak, during the spring and the summer. We have had hunters tracking them in the area, but nothing has come up yet.”
Suddenly, he smacks his big hand down on the bench.
” - I'll put a stop to it, by God. My neighbour's little girl went missing, just three days ago, and I promised him to do what I can to help him find her.”
People have now started to drift away from the fire, which is slowly dying. It seems the party is almost over. Karhunen gloomily bids us good night and walks off, unsteadily. I can well understand his mood – tomorrow he will have a hangover, and none of the things that trouble him will have got any better in the meantime. The girl has started asking Razzle things about Britain, and they seem to be getting along rather well, her halting English notwithstanding. I think our drummer is, perhaps happily, too drunk to remember that many of the things he now speaks about, of London and of his family, most decidedly don't exist anymore. Me, I am half a mind of walking to the bus and trying to get some sleep on one of the seats – I have already spied This Man and his band doing that very thing and Hyvärinen is nowhere to be seen. He has not yet given us any indication about where our promised beds might be, and I am suspecting they might well be non-existent now he has what he wanted out of us.
As I look at the fire, slowly turning into glowing, dying embers in front of me I wonder if the same will happen to the people here – these good people for the while cooperating with each other, slowly dying away and disappearing, falling apart just to leave packs of bandits, thieves and murderers roaming a deserted countryside? The shadow I have felt over me for the better part of the year weighs heavily on me, and I am sick to my stomach. Obviously, drinking any of the booze was a sore mistake, despite the nice warmth and the buzz I got from it at first.
Nasse appears there, then, obviously drunk, and starts asking me with burning eyes if I know where Andy is.
” - I am afraid he has wandered off and got lost, or something – he was more drunk back there than I am and almost came to punches with a guy twice his size... Let's go look for him, OK?”
I get up and collect Razzle – who doesn't really want to leave the pretty girl he's getting along with like a house on fire, but you know how it is – and together we wander off, asking around has anyone seen bloody McCoy, perhaps passed out under some tree or drunkenly hitting on a girl behind the hall. Finally, we find a young woman who points us down the road. Apparently, Andy has walked off some time ago with a young boy, in search of something or someone.
As we leave the slowly diminishing circle of light and head into the darkness, I suddenly have on my mind a very vivid image of a pack wolves feasting on my friend Andy McCoy. Strong jaws tearing him apart, quivering muzzles glistening with fresh, red blood. The sickening sound of sharp teeth ripping into human flesh in the chilly night... I try to shake the image off my mind, but it is much too strong for that.
We walk on the sand and gravel road, there is no immediate sign of Andy of anyone else in sight. Nasse keeps up a rambling, drunken monologue about how weird this all is, playing and getting drunk on moonshine in some redneck party in the middle of nowhere and Razzle seems to be still sulking about me dragging him away from the buxom farmer's daughter back there. Only now it occurs to me that maybe we should have told Sgt. Rönkkö about where we are going.
Well, too late now.
We must have gone for about a kilometer, and now Nasse was starting to say we should turn back, when we finally come across Andy. He seems perfectly fine, slowly walking away from the Hall, with a boy of maybe seven or eight by his side.
” - What are you doing here, then, Hulkko? And don't you think you should take the kid back to his parents, what?”, Nasse asks Andy confrontationally before I have the chance to say anything.
Andy McCoy gives us a great big smile.
” - We're off to see Father Christmas, me and Tero here. And don't worry, I'll take Tero back to the Hall after we're done. Scout's honor! And then the rest of us can take off for Gothenburg”, he said in his mumbling voice.
I was pretty sure my friend never was a scout. But I was well aware that he wanted us to strike out for Sweden. He had started talking about it during the summer, at every turn. Everyone said that Sweden was better off than Finland was, and now he was campaigning for Gothenburg. He had even said that if it had been up to him, we would have gone to Sweden in the first place. I thought it was a low blow, though – I remembered no such thing, just an aversion for leaving London at all.
” - Father Christmas, really?”, Jan-Markus Stenfors asks his old friend. The two have known each other since age 13.
Now it is young Tero's turn to speak.
” - It's true, it is. I've seen him, red clothes and all, and a big white beard, just up the road. I'll find him, and he'll take me to his workshop at Korvatunturi!”, declares the boy with absolute conviction, his voice trembling a bit.
Even with the darkness, I can see the triumphant smile on Andy's inebriated face. And I knew that if his mind was set, we would not be talking him out of it.
Why the hell not, I thought then. Lets see this through. There is no Father Christmas here, surely. And if there is... Well, then I will finally know all this is just a massively bad dream and I just have to wake up.
And so we walked on. After a while, we could see a road turning to the left through a rather thick forest. The boy pointed towards the road.
” - That is where I seen him!”
OK, I thought, that is where we'll go.
Slowly, I was warming up to the quest at hand. So was Razzle, apparently, because he had started humming a drunken version of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Behind the trees, we could finally see a biggish farm, looming to the left of us. We could see lights in the windows of the farm house. In the dark, it looked like a perfectly ordinary farm, a little run-down, perhaps, but then – what do I know about farms or farm animals? What I knew for certain, though, when we closed up to the farm was that the air smelled definitely funky.
The others had noticed that, too.
” - I never remembered Father Christmas smelled like shit”, Nasse said to Andy, who looked at him and in the light coming from the farmhouse's windows, I could see him roll his eyes.
” - It's the reindeer, man, the reindeer. Obviously they have eaten something that did not agree with them”, he said, chuckling.
It was Tero who picked up on the obvious proof we all had neglected to notice so far.
” - I told ya, I told ya!”, he said, pointing to one of the farmhouse's ground-floor windows.
And there, in a flickering light from candles or probably from an oil lamp, we saw a fully decked-out christmas tree. In the end of August. Tero was beaming. As we walked towards the house, we could not only see it but to hear it, too – the sound of Rudof the Red-Nosed Reindeer floating in the air, from somewhere inside the house. Had Razzle heard it from ways back, or was it a concidence?
I was a bit spooked now for how weird it all felt, but Andy, good old drunken Andy, he was still on the quest.
” - What are we standing here for, then? Let's find out if the jolly old man is home!”, he said, walked up to the door and raised his hand.
I jumped.
” - No, don't...”
Knock, knock, knock!
The sound was loud as all hell in the chilly night.
We all froze to place. Or I did, anyway.
After a while, it appeared certain nobody would come open the door. I was now ready to turn around and leave, go back to the bus and try to get some sleep. The bad smell in the air was not helping with my nausea. But Andy would not be deterred. He had caught the boy's enthusiasm for tracking down Father Christmas, and he would not give up the quest just now. Trying the door handle, and finding out it was locked, he went to walk around the house to look into the other windows.
Meanwhile, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer had been replaced with Jingle Bells.
” - Well”, my friend Antti Hulkko said, ”there seems to be nobody in the house! Let us look to the other building then!”
Determinedly, if a little unsteadily, he strode towards the bigger building, which I thought might hold animals of some sort. Cows, perhaps. Nasse tried to grab Andy's coattail, to stop him, but Andy gave him the slip. It seemed my apprehension was more catching than Andy's enthusiasm, after all.
I remember trying to say something to him, too, but it had no effect. He found a door and went in. And the rest of us followed.
The bad smell got worse here. It was getting sickening, not just shit either. This was something else.
There was a short corridor, and through we went. Andy opened the door to another room, a smallish one. Inside there was somewhat more light that I had expected, reflecting from steel surfaces on the walls.
In the half-light, it looked a bit like a kitchen, but larger. There was steel everywhere, some of it rusted. And hooks hanging from the ceiling. The metal surfaces had dark stains and some kind of spatter on them.
I suddenly remembed what Hyvärinen had said back at the Hall. About the local pig farmer being an adept butcher – and him providing meat for the village... This was the pig farm he had spoken about! And this is where the farmer slaughtered the pigs.
It sent chills down my spine. I wanted to tell the others but somehow I was tongue-tied. I saw a glimpse of something in the corner that didn't quite fit the picture and promptly blocked it out of my mind.
” - Nobody here either!”, said Andy, ”onwards, Christian soldiers!”
He walked briskly across the room and opened the next, bigger door to a much larger room. There was some light there.
The bad smell hit us like a sickening tsunami.
It was the main part of the pigsty. Only, and this is the thing that I noticed perhaps before anyone else, the few pigs that were there were dead – and had been for some while. It was them that caused the smell. Not pig shit, well, not just pig shit, but dead, rotting pigs.
The first time during this nocturnal quest of ours, I could see the smile draining from Andy's face. The boy Tero, too, suddenly seemed horrified. Right then, we were all redy to turn around and get out from there.
But then I heard the noise. A very human noise, from somewhere in the other end of the big room.
It sounded like a girl crying.
And now I took a step forward, and now Andy tried to stop me. The roles had changed, for now I could also remember something else I had heard at the local Youth Association Hall. I walked past the pig carcasses, holding my hand in front of my nose, and towards the sound. To the right at the end of the hall, there was another door.
I opened it and stepped inside, to see eight small children staring at me with wide eyes from a cage made of chicken wire. They were dirty and looked ill, but they were definitely alive. My bandmates filed in to the room after me, and even young Tero followed them.
The little girl that had been crying stopped suddenly, took a hold of the chicken wire and looked at us. She could not be more than four or five.
” - Please let us out of here. We want to go back to our parents”, she said, now perfectly calm and coherent.
We said nothing, just stared at the children, dumbstruck. I felt gears were whirring in my head, and now I remembered what I seen in the slaughter room.
A pile of children's clothes and shoes.
Inside my mind, I could hear a faint scream, and it started getting louder by the second.
Oh God no.
” - Shut up, Minna, you're ruining everything, one of the older children, a boy, said to the girl who had spoken first.”
I looked at him and somehow managed to open my mouth.
”- What?” I asked the boy behind the chicken fence. He looked six or perhaps seven.
” - If we go away now, we will never get to go to Korvatunturi!”
He almosts stamped his feet.
” - Matti and Jukka got to go to Korvatunturi with Father Christmas! They left with him and never came back! I want to go to Korvatunturi, too!”
I could see two of the other kids nodding and making agreeing noises.
” - Minna is just scared, that's all, and she would ruin it for all of us, too!”
Suddenly I felt stone sober, and I guess the feeling was shared by my friends, too. It was no longer a funny drunken quest to find a fairytale figure, oh no. Now it was a bad dream like of which I had rarely seen. And it seemed all too real.
Andy had quickly grasped what was happening here, too. He fixed his eyes to the boy that had spoken.
” - The man that took you here is not Father Christmas", he said, with surprisingly clear diction.
” - And he will not take you to Korvatunturi, you understand? He will only do very bad things to you, like he did to those other kids he took away and never brought back.
The little girl looked at the boy, turning her head of brown curls towards him.
” - I told you so, I told you!”
We were all turned to the children in the cage now. Andy started looking for a way to open the cage, talking to the kids all the time.
” - Come on now, let's get you out of here and back to your parents, right? We need to be quick about it, because...”
He stopped suddenly and his eyes went wide. An axe appeared like out of nowhere, cleaving his head in two. We all screamed in horror.
Behind Andy McCoy, a man dressed as Father Christmas held a big axe he used to split his head effortlessly, like a dry birch log into kindling.
” - Nobody leaves”, he said in a pleasant voice.
We all tried, anyway. Apart from Andy, who collapsed to the floor with a surprised look on his face.
The man did not try to stop us from getting out of the room. I ran towards the door leading to the slaughter room and hopefully out, with young Tero at my heels, and when I reached it, I realized the man in the big red coat had locked it with a padlock. He had really surprised us, and I felt stupid now as I tried to scope a way out of the building.
” - There is no other way out”, the man said in his pleasant voice somewhat louder now.
Looking at Nasse and Razzle next to me, and little Tero, I was more scared than I had never been, even more than I had been back in London, seeing my vision of missiles in Soho. But I also tried to think of a way out of this.
We needed time.
” - Why are you doing this?” I asked the man, my voice cracking.
He had walked out of the room where the kids were, and was now looking at us across the room. From his vantage point he could see all of us except Razzle, who was behind the corner to my right. The man in the red coat could find him there easy after he had gone through me, though, I thought with a chill. I looked at Nicholas and tried to signal him with my eyes to keep hidden.
Father Christmas raised his bloody axe and started walking towards me.
” - People need to eat. You know that. The government took most of my pigs, and the rest of the pigs, well, they needed to eat too. The government took my feed, too. So what was I to do? The village, the evacuees, they needed that food to survive... So I needed other sources for fresh meat. It stands to reason.”
I looked at the madman, his white beard spattered with my dead friend's blood.
” - But... kids? Why the kids?”
The man came closer all the time. I looked at Nasse, who had started to look very nauseous indeed. Maybe he, too, now understood what he had eaten at the village festival.
” - This new world is not for kids”, the madman said in his pleasant voice, ”they would die soon anyway. Overworked, irradiated, starved... No child should have it like that.”
He shrugged his shoulders and actually smiled. It was a very nice smile.
” - It was only fair to give them their very last Christmas. A Christmas tree, some food, Christmas songs, maybe a present. The promise of going to the workshop up in Korvatunturi. And something to put them to sleep mixed in a warm drink. Not a bad way to go. And they never felt a thing, I can assure you. I could not think of a nicer, more pleasant way to shuffle off this mortal coil, do you? I bet you don't, either.”
I looked to my left and saw a pitchfork next to the pigs' pens. Its spikes looked sharp and dangerous.
The man with a pleasant voice must have thought he could read my mind.
” - You will never get to that pitchfork, and you know it as well as I do. So don't even think about it.”
Just a little more, I thought, as the madman walked forward. And that very minute, Nasse finally could not help himself and puked out the contents of his stomach on the pigsty's floor. The man dressed as Father Christmas looked at him and grinned. Even his grin was pleasant enough.
Now.
I flicked my eyes towards Razzle, and thank God he understood what I meant. As the man with the white beard brough his axe to bear, to strike me, emerging from behind the corner Razzle tackled him.
The man only really lost his balance, but that was enough. He stumbled to his side, his axe piercing empty air – and fell on the pitchfork, skewering himself on the sharp instrument. His axe dropped to the floor and he looked at us accusingly. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out but a drop of blood that stuck on his lip for a moment and then fell on the floor like in slow motion.
After I was sure that the man was dead, I went through his coat pockets but there was no key there. He must have hidden it. And so I took his axe and started hacking away at the door around the lock. But first, we noticed an open window up on the wall. It was too small for a grown man, but just big enough for Tero. We boosted him up and told him that when he gets down, he should run to the Hall and get to our bus and wake up Rönkkö and This Man and take them here. Only whe he disappeared from the window I thought about the height of the wall and the possibility of the madman having an accomplice in the outside. Stupid. I hoped Tero would be all right.
I finally managed to get the door open, while my friends sprung the kids out from the cage. The little girl called Minna ran to me and grabbed my trouser leg. Instinctively, I picked the kid up. It seemed she had chosen me as her personal saviour.
We walked out of the building, to the yard, with the kids crowding. I have rarely been that relieved when I could get a breath of fresh air like I was then. I breathed deep, finally managing to get some of the nausea in me to dissipate.
We stood there for what must have been only ten minutes or so, when I saw car headlights on the road leading to the farm house. It was not our bus, but a newish Renault with Civil Defence insignia on it. It stopped, and out climbed Hyvärinen, one of his men and our Sergeant Rönkkö with Private Ahvo.
Hyvärinen looked at the kids, and then I could see a spark of recognition in his eyes. Nasse started explaining the whole thing to the arrivees, now that he had grasped it all, and now it was their time to be ill – though Hyvärinen's colleague was the only one of them that actually vomited.
Right then, I felt I had to get away from it all. I told Hyvärinen I would take the kids to the Hall, and we started walking down the road the same way we had arrived. The night was quiet, apart from the sound of gagging I heard behind me as we entered the small woods before the village road.
The little girl I held in my arms closed her eyes and it seemed she had fallen asleep. In a few minutes, though, I looked down and saw her eyes open, looking at me from her dirty face, with a mixture of curiousity and sleepiness I have only later seen on my own kids' faces. The girl reached out, took a handful of my long, blonde hair and held it inquisitively. I could see her bite her lip as she looked back into my eyes.
” - Are you an angel?”, she asked me.
I will probably never forget it. What do you answer to such a question, anyway? Say yes, and you would be lying, even if it was a benevolent lie, under the circumstances. Say no, and you might disappoint a child and wreck her belief into things existing beyond the humdrum and the ordinary.
Finally, after looking away for a while, I thought I had an answer.
I opened my mouth and looked down, only to see she had fallen asleep again, and quite probably would not remember a word of what was said anyway. I decided not to wake her up again.
It was the same kind of detachment I felt then as I had felt in London back in January – being separate from the rest of the world, like an invisible cotton padding enveloping me, looking down at everything from a different plane. I walked on through the chilly August night, with the little girl sleeping in my arms and the rest of the children following me in silence, barefoot on the road of sand and gravel.
The stars were out in the sky now, a wide panorama of bright celestial eyes looking down on us from the dark velvet of the late summer sky. That gaze, to me, was much less hostile now than it had been back in Britain. These were not the same stars I had seen then. These were merciful stars, they radiated sympathy and compassion. Somehow, I felt I was finally on the other side of it all now, out of the abyss and climbing, ever climbing on to better things. I felt sad, too, for the dead kids and for my friend Andy, but righ then it was for some reason a somewhat distant sadness to me. It would only hit me with its full force later on.
I could see the headlights slowly closing in on the road in the distance across the fields, piercing the dark in front of them. As they reached us, I could discern the makeshift vehicle behind them – an agricultural tractor armored with steel plates against bandits and other threats, towing a trailer made into a battlewagon of sorts. It had large orange triangles painted on its sides. An ”auxiliary armored civil defence vehicle” like they were officially called, the kind of thing local Civil Defence organisations were encouraged to build for themselves for protection and force projection. From the tractor and the trailer, local farmers and evacuees, some in fireman's helmets, others in hunters' camouflage jackets, with hunting rifles and other assorted weapons in their hands looked at us with wide eyes, saying nothing.
I just walked on, past the stationary vehicle, past the local forces of law and order, forward along the road, with just the stars to guide me. Wordlessly, the children followed me.
I guess, in a way, I have been walking that road ever since.
It was a road that first made me disappear from myself and from others, when I fled for Sweden in late 1985, and then it was a road that doubled back on itself and made me return to Finland and to my father, here in Mikkeli. You can make a difference, he told me back in 1991. That was four years before his death. And he was right, was my old man. I can now accept that, and I am happy that a followed him in his footsteps.
A road from tragedy to acceptance, a road from rebellion to responsibility, some might say.
Big words I don't know I have fully earned.
And as to the rest of the motley crew that left from London with me in February 1984? Sam, Sami, as you know, probably died in the capital area on the Day. I would have come across him by now if he still lived after the War. Andy, he was buried in the end of August 1984 at the Lapinlahti cemetery where his mortal remains still lay. I can't say about his soul. Nasse and Razzle – they followed me to Sweden, and Nasse, Jan-Markus, worked there as a musician for many years. He called me crazy to return to Finland when I did. He died of natural causes – cancer, that is to say – in the fall of '09 and so never followed his band handle in death. In fact none of us did. Razzle – Nicholas – he moved back to his native Britain in ´95. He lives somewhere north of Portsmouth, now, with a small family. I got a letter from him last Chrismas, with a photo of him, his wife and their two kids. He looks nothing like a rock star these days.
Which is all good, I guess. We all do change, don't we?
...
Tell me something new today, say that we don't exist at all
Say that everything will end anyway, even though they would not believe it
Let's go where the town changes into dark, endless forests
I have wandered through this night, too, and you are tired as well
Sleep little one, sleep, star, at the hem of sunshine
Sleep little one, sleep, leaf, at the hem of the shadows of the valley
Sleep little one, sleep, stream, at the hem of the waves of the sea
Sleep little one, sleep, winter, at the hem of the summer flowers
Tell me something soothing, something that will banish the ghosts
Tell me they can not make me fall into their traps, to believe in false gods
I know I can't own you, just to touch you for a moment, standing still
The winds won't stay put even if you scream and put them in a bottle
...
Olavi Uusivirta: Hautalaulu ["The Grave Song"](2006)
(filler)
Addendum VIII. Dead by X-Mas (Part Four)
[This notebook includes the last part of the interview of Matti Fagerholm. Mikkeli, June 2014]
The summer of 1984 was as short as it was bitter-sweet. After what was the longest and most destructive winter this nation, this world has ever seen, it seemed like there would be some hope left in the world. All the living souls in the areas controlled by Mikkeli, and Seinäjoki, too, I presume, were harnessed to the effort of survival and recovery, for preparing to the next winter to come above all. People were still dying, of a combination of radiation sickness, disease, dismal hygiene, hunger and outright famine, mental breakdowns, hopelessness. And the dying would not stop for some time.
All needed to do their bit. And the bit they came up for us – don't laugh, now – was to do with upholding morale. People don't live off their daily bread alone, they need something to believe in, something to hope for, something to live for. Someone has said that a little hope is a dangerous thing – even a man who has been sentenced to death will do astonishing things if you give him just a little reason to believe he can avoid this impending fate. And this is where the YLE and we, as parts of it now, came in. We would work to keep the others working – all the military officers that saw me or Andy seemed to agree that it would be pointless to give us a hammer or a shovel to wield, anyway. ”You little girls stay away as men do men's work”, one such man said to us one of those days. I don't remember what that man's work was, that time, but he seemed to have a lot of conviction as to how useless we would be in it.
And so, we would be sent to do what we could – to entertain the people, if we only could. Packed up in our old tour bus that had somehow reached Mikkeli with us, too, with another band playing traditional dance music, a local one the name of which I keep forgetting, in the format This Man & His Podunk Band – as I remember technically adept if uninspired, and a small squad of soldiers who came with us as a something like a protective detail, too. We were a double act, you see, something traditional for the adults, something for the younger people, too. A moment of distraction after another day of backbreaking work, to forget how little you again ate today, and how short your night in the refugee camp would be before trudging out to work the fields again in the morning. We played unplugged, most times, and I think very often the people in smaller rural places were not very, ah, receptive towards our brand of music, even if we tried to steer it towards older rock songs, like CCR's Up Around the Bend. A couple of times we were basically chased out of the village, called ”lazy faggots” and worse, by people who wished us to be sent to sawing down trees by hand or clearing radioactive debris without protective gear instead.
It was an ironic sight to be sure – the ragged punk-band bus, plying the side roads of Eastern Finland in search of living souls to entertain, in the villages and the refugee camps, flying a Finnish state flag to show we were doing the Emergency Cabinet's good work. Fun and games it was not, barely even a living with the food rations we managed to scrounge for ourselves, but it is something that I tend to revisit in my dreams on many nights these days. A sort of half-life in a deep dark valley, or life underwater, like a cruel, petty parody of a real rock tour in somewhere like Japan or the United States. Because that's where we could have, would have been without the war. I can remember some songs I wrote back then, as I again was laying on my back, sleepless in the dead quiet summer night. Hopeful they are not. There was a heavy shadow over me, all that time, and there were nights I would have just wanted to lay down and never wake up again. I remember actually considering suicide on more than one occasion, earnestly, and I'd be surprised if the thought of taking one's life and escaping it all hadn't crosses the other guys' mind too those days.
But slowly the days rolled on, and finally it was August, the time of harvest. At the end of the month we were playing in Iisalmi, at the Runni spa which was made into the location of a better sort of a refugee camp, if I remember correctly, and then in the next afternoon we turned the nose of the bus back towards the south to return to Mikkeli. The highway south through the Kuopio area was still unpassable and closed off, despite all the efforts that had been made to rebuild it, and so we had to take a detour through smaller roads around the Western shore of Lake Kallavesi to reach our destination. We got unlucky, though – the whole year was full of freaky weather, as were several post-War years everywhere it seems, and just that night there had been a big storm in those areas. A storm called Tauno, because of the name day.
Along the way, we kept taking wrong turns and had to turn back when we came across trees fallen on the road. We were all frustrated as hell, and it would get worse. When we finally thought we had found a road south through the municipality of Lapinlahti, and the mood in the bus was getting better, we come to the centre of this small village, a shop (closed) and a gas station (closed per orders of municipal council) and a few other buildings, we suddenly see a roadblock across the way and a man in a Civil Defence get-up holding up his hand to us in front of the bus. We get out, to find a mournful middle-aged man who introduces himself as the local Civil Defence chief looking at us, somewhat astonished.
” - I don't know what in the Devil's name you folks are doing here”, he says to us eyeing us somewhat suspiciously, with a hunting rifle slung on his back, ”but you can't get south along this road today.”
The man, Hyvärinen by name, then goes on to explain us that the storm has cut the cable of the ferry going across the Akkalansalmi strait, which won't be fixed until the next day at the very earliest, and that the roads further west are cut by a mass of trees the wind has felled on them, requiring a squad or three of TeeVees to be sent there to clear them out – and it would take at least as long as with the ferry.
” - Mikkeli? Sorry, boys, if that's what you are, you can't get there from here, not today.”
He then smiles to us, somewhat surprisingly.
” - Why don't you stay here tonight? We're having a harvest do at the village hall. We've got food, real food, and you seem to be a band... Whole two bands, maybe? It occurs to me our little party could use a band – unless you help us, I am again down to old man Hartikainen telling me dirty jokes all evening.”
His grimace makes me understand that any music we might play will not be that bad.
Me, Andy and This Man look at each other, and then confer with Sergeant Rönkkö who is there with his three men to protect us. What else can we do – take another detour to end up driving through the night, putting us to the mercy of desperate bandits and what ever irradiated whackos roam these little roads in the dead of night? Not likely. And besides, says Rönkkö, we would not have the fuel for it anyway – we were dependent on our Ministry of Communications fuel allowance back in Mikkeli, and we would not likely get juice from anyone else, not with our papers and bona fides. So we take Hyvärinen up on his offer, we'll play at the party, we get something to eat, and a place to spend the night. It is a square deal, given the time and the circumstances.
It is as far in the countryside as it comes. Farms with fields and cows and pigs all around us, and forests, of course, between them. Or at least this was the picture before the war. Now, Hyvärinen tells us, most farms have lost their livestock in the emergency slaughters and military requisitioning parties keep taking away more at the behest of both Kajaani and Leppävirta, the centres of state authority north and south of here. It has been the same with the grain, and anything else that they grow here – as soon as they were ready with the harvest, lo and behold, there was a convoy of trucks with a military officer ordering them to load up most of what they had to be sent to Kajaani.
” - Everyone needs to eat”, Hyvärinen says, ”but surely we who did all the work should be able to keep some of the food?”
It is not for me to say, I tell him. I just play music.
Back at the village hall, the festivities are starting as we get there. The Civil Defence chief presides over the events, and as we look around us we see surpringly many people around the old building dating to the 1920s, built for the local Youth Association they say. Apparently there is a lot of Kuopio-area refugees in the municipality, as well as people from Southern Finland. Most have been put up in private farms, in various buildings, barns included, but next to the village hall on what must be a sports field, there are also several rows of tents for latecomers. Nearly all seem to be in use. Many people have died during the winter here, too, but still the municipality now has more people than it used to have before the War.
The people are thin and sorry-looking, but they seem sort of tough, and many have taken the effort to scrub themselves clean for the occasion. Some look like farmers, most look just out of place. The clothes may be worn and ill-fitting, scrounged from somewhere, but the women have flowers in their hair and the men have combed theirs. Many try to smile, to get into a festive mood. I don't know whether to smile or cry when I look at them. It seems to me these people so yearn for normality, conformity, ordinary life, three square meals a day, a house and a dog – but they are not getting these thing, will not get them, not since the Exchange. Most of such things, for most of the people, are now well out of reach.
This time, we receive a friendly welcome. Some of the younger people seem downright ecstatic to see and listen to us play and sing for them, strictly acoustically. And the local Civil Defence man, who started the whole event with a small speech about what a great job everyone have done with the harvest, the locals and the evacuees both, and how the village will soon be well-prepared for the coming winter, comes and thanks us and says we have earned our food. Not so well as most here, it strikes me as I look at the thin people queing for the potato-and-meat stew, along with some bread and apple juice. With rationing, there will be enough for everybody, and then there will be dancing. As soon as This Man and his band start, that is.
It is a pretty evening outside, warm even. People mill around the building, and I see men and women walk hand in hand. It would take more than the end of the world as we know it to stop people from seeking warmth and solace from each other, I am sure of that. When we lose all else, we do have just each other – why not make the best of it now?
You might well die by tomorrow after all.
I eat a bowl of the stew. The Civil Defence chief says that it is all local produce – local potatoes, local onion, local beetroot, local pork from a pig farm just a couple of kilometers down the road. The farmer is an adept butcher, too, he says, and has been delivering meat to feed the refugees all summer.
” - We have a lot of good people here, you see”, Hyvärinen says, ”we'll weather this thing yet”.
After seeing what I have seen across Eastern Finland, I am not so sure. But I keep eating the stew to avoid saying anything to cross the local bossman.
I have lost the sight of Andy and the rest for a while, and then I think I hear their voice somewhere to my left. There, behind the trees, I find them with some local men. They have bottles in their hands.
” - Well fuck me, another of you rockstars!”, one of the men says, cheerily and slurring his words a little, ”I can't say if you are a girl or a boy, but you sure have the lungs for singing! Now, you, come and have some of the good stuff!”
He thrusts a bottle filled with clear liquid in my hand. My bandmates look at me expectantly, nodding their heads.
” - Well, rockstar, says Andy, what are you waiting for?”
Without knowing what the hell it is, I take a mouthful of the stuff. It tastes revolting, and burns like hell going down.
” - What the fuck is this?”, I ask the group of locals and my bandmates, all laughing to the comical expression on my face. It still burns in my throat, and now in my stomach, too, but the warmth is not that bad, I guess.
” - Local produce”, says the man who gave me the bottle. He looks like he is in his late thirties, I only now see he has a Civil Defence armband just like Hyvärinen. He holds out his hand.
” - Karhunen. Good to meet you, rockstar. You may look like a girl but it seems like you do drink like a man, so you are all right in my book.”
It turns out all my friends have already downed some of the hideous moonshine, and are well on their way to getting plastered. With the limited possibilities available to us to get our heads scrambled as of late, I can't blame them. I take another mouthful from Karhunen's bottle, thinking the stuff must be 100 proof and then some.
” - We have an old tradition for making moonshine 'round these parts”, the man says with a wink, ”and now when the state monopoly company seems to be, how shall I put it, pretty short of fine foreign liquers as it were, or even crappy domestic ones, we have brought back some of that tradition. In this, we have mainly rye – and berries, for vitamins you see.”
This man clearly savours the vile stuff, I understand. Maybe he is even proud of it.
I wonder if the harvest has really been so good that the village can afford to use its food for distilling home-made booze from it – and if not, who will go hungry next winter because of us getting drunk here in the woods behind the Youth Association Hall? Not this man Karhunen, surely, with his portly frame and his Civil Defence armband. He is, like such men now are, certainly among the local elite.
Later, we play a drunken second set, to a smaller but more dedicated crowd this time. Karhunen is among the audience, clapping his two meaty hands together and singing along. The booze in my system has started to make everything seem skewed, surreal and twisted. Rarely I have got such an effect from mere alcohol. The people's smiles look feral, beastly, and I.m suddenly feeling a wave of nausea washing over me. Andy nearly falls on the floor and is saved by a couple of the locals at the last minute. When we stop playing, after an encore, it is already getting dark outside. I must get out, now, to breathe some fresh air.
Out on the yard, a bonfire has been started, and benches put around it. People are sitting there, looking at the fire in near-silence. The flames climb high in the quiet, still night and there are only the sounds of conversation, now somehow muted, and the crackling of the burning wood to be heard. I just stand there, now not even wanting to chat up the local girls as I had planned before, while seeing some of them smiling meaningfully to me during our first set. Slowly, my head is starting to clear. The nausea, though, is not abating.
After staring at the fire for a good while I find myself sitting with Karhunen and a couple of younger locals, a boy and a girl, Karhunen's relatives I recall and Razzle, somewhat more drunk than me, swaying from side to side with a goofy smile on his face. Karhunen has reached a blue phase in his drinking, and he has started recounting the ways things are wrong around the village, ticking things of with his fingers.
” - Bandits are preying on the refugees on the roads. People get raided and killed for little bits of food and anything of... value they might be carrying. We suspect it is former convicts – there was a big breakout from the Sukeva prison during the confusion after the Exchange, and it must be those damn murderers and thieves working out there. The military seems to be unwilling to do anything about it, and so we are stepping up patrols and bolstering our numbers...”
I am momentarily distracted by bunch of kids singing what seems like an Eppu Normaali song, surprisingly well, and then I try to focus my attention back to Karhunen's melancholy voice.
” - ...keep getting sick, let me tell you. We have had to expand the quarantine camp two times because of that. It is ten kilometers to the west from here, in a secluded place. You would not want to see it, no sir. A horrible place for dying people. Well, horrible for any people, really... But with no medicine and no doctors or even qualified nurses to speak of, what the fuck are we to do?”
He takes another gulp from his bottle. It seems to be getting surprisingly empty.
” - And then the goddamned wolves or the bears or what have you, taking those kids away...”
I ask him what he means. He gives me a drunken look, and now I can see something like fear, briefly, in his eyes. And here I was thinking there are very few things this man would be afraid of.
” - Children keep getting lost. From the refugee camps, even from some of the farms. Always aged under ten, and always gone without a trace. Must be over ten kids already...”
” - Fifteen, that we know of”, corrects the girl of maybe seventeen next to me. Karhunen only looks at her mournfully.
” - We are suspecting it is a pack of wolves, or some other predators, who have possibly wandered here from the Soviet side, well, the former Soviet side, so to speak, during the spring and the summer. We have had hunters tracking them in the area, but nothing has come up yet.”
Suddenly, he smacks his big hand down on the bench.
” - I'll put a stop to it, by God. My neighbour's little girl went missing, just three days ago, and I promised him to do what I can to help him find her.”
People have now started to drift away from the fire, which is slowly dying. It seems the party is almost over. Karhunen gloomily bids us good night and walks off, unsteadily. I can well understand his mood – tomorrow he will have a hangover, and none of the things that trouble him will have got any better in the meantime. The girl has started asking Razzle things about Britain, and they seem to be getting along rather well, her halting English notwithstanding. I think our drummer is, perhaps happily, too drunk to remember that many of the things he now speaks about, of London and of his family, most decidedly don't exist anymore. Me, I am half a mind of walking to the bus and trying to get some sleep on one of the seats – I have already spied This Man and his band doing that very thing and Hyvärinen is nowhere to be seen. He has not yet given us any indication about where our promised beds might be, and I am suspecting they might well be non-existent now he has what he wanted out of us.
As I look at the fire, slowly turning into glowing, dying embers in front of me I wonder if the same will happen to the people here – these good people for the while cooperating with each other, slowly dying away and disappearing, falling apart just to leave packs of bandits, thieves and murderers roaming a deserted countryside? The shadow I have felt over me for the better part of the year weighs heavily on me, and I am sick to my stomach. Obviously, drinking any of the booze was a sore mistake, despite the nice warmth and the buzz I got from it at first.
Nasse appears there, then, obviously drunk, and starts asking me with burning eyes if I know where Andy is.
” - I am afraid he has wandered off and got lost, or something – he was more drunk back there than I am and almost came to punches with a guy twice his size... Let's go look for him, OK?”
I get up and collect Razzle – who doesn't really want to leave the pretty girl he's getting along with like a house on fire, but you know how it is – and together we wander off, asking around has anyone seen bloody McCoy, perhaps passed out under some tree or drunkenly hitting on a girl behind the hall. Finally, we find a young woman who points us down the road. Apparently, Andy has walked off some time ago with a young boy, in search of something or someone.
As we leave the slowly diminishing circle of light and head into the darkness, I suddenly have on my mind a very vivid image of a pack wolves feasting on my friend Andy McCoy. Strong jaws tearing him apart, quivering muzzles glistening with fresh, red blood. The sickening sound of sharp teeth ripping into human flesh in the chilly night... I try to shake the image off my mind, but it is much too strong for that.
We walk on the sand and gravel road, there is no immediate sign of Andy of anyone else in sight. Nasse keeps up a rambling, drunken monologue about how weird this all is, playing and getting drunk on moonshine in some redneck party in the middle of nowhere and Razzle seems to be still sulking about me dragging him away from the buxom farmer's daughter back there. Only now it occurs to me that maybe we should have told Sgt. Rönkkö about where we are going.
Well, too late now.
We must have gone for about a kilometer, and now Nasse was starting to say we should turn back, when we finally come across Andy. He seems perfectly fine, slowly walking away from the Hall, with a boy of maybe seven or eight by his side.
” - What are you doing here, then, Hulkko? And don't you think you should take the kid back to his parents, what?”, Nasse asks Andy confrontationally before I have the chance to say anything.
Andy McCoy gives us a great big smile.
” - We're off to see Father Christmas, me and Tero here. And don't worry, I'll take Tero back to the Hall after we're done. Scout's honor! And then the rest of us can take off for Gothenburg”, he said in his mumbling voice.
I was pretty sure my friend never was a scout. But I was well aware that he wanted us to strike out for Sweden. He had started talking about it during the summer, at every turn. Everyone said that Sweden was better off than Finland was, and now he was campaigning for Gothenburg. He had even said that if it had been up to him, we would have gone to Sweden in the first place. I thought it was a low blow, though – I remembered no such thing, just an aversion for leaving London at all.
” - Father Christmas, really?”, Jan-Markus Stenfors asks his old friend. The two have known each other since age 13.
Now it is young Tero's turn to speak.
” - It's true, it is. I've seen him, red clothes and all, and a big white beard, just up the road. I'll find him, and he'll take me to his workshop at Korvatunturi!”, declares the boy with absolute conviction, his voice trembling a bit.
Even with the darkness, I can see the triumphant smile on Andy's inebriated face. And I knew that if his mind was set, we would not be talking him out of it.
Why the hell not, I thought then. Lets see this through. There is no Father Christmas here, surely. And if there is... Well, then I will finally know all this is just a massively bad dream and I just have to wake up.
And so we walked on. After a while, we could see a road turning to the left through a rather thick forest. The boy pointed towards the road.
” - That is where I seen him!”
OK, I thought, that is where we'll go.
Slowly, I was warming up to the quest at hand. So was Razzle, apparently, because he had started humming a drunken version of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Behind the trees, we could finally see a biggish farm, looming to the left of us. We could see lights in the windows of the farm house. In the dark, it looked like a perfectly ordinary farm, a little run-down, perhaps, but then – what do I know about farms or farm animals? What I knew for certain, though, when we closed up to the farm was that the air smelled definitely funky.
The others had noticed that, too.
” - I never remembered Father Christmas smelled like shit”, Nasse said to Andy, who looked at him and in the light coming from the farmhouse's windows, I could see him roll his eyes.
” - It's the reindeer, man, the reindeer. Obviously they have eaten something that did not agree with them”, he said, chuckling.
It was Tero who picked up on the obvious proof we all had neglected to notice so far.
” - I told ya, I told ya!”, he said, pointing to one of the farmhouse's ground-floor windows.
And there, in a flickering light from candles or probably from an oil lamp, we saw a fully decked-out christmas tree. In the end of August. Tero was beaming. As we walked towards the house, we could not only see it but to hear it, too – the sound of Rudof the Red-Nosed Reindeer floating in the air, from somewhere inside the house. Had Razzle heard it from ways back, or was it a concidence?
I was a bit spooked now for how weird it all felt, but Andy, good old drunken Andy, he was still on the quest.
” - What are we standing here for, then? Let's find out if the jolly old man is home!”, he said, walked up to the door and raised his hand.
I jumped.
” - No, don't...”
Knock, knock, knock!
The sound was loud as all hell in the chilly night.
We all froze to place. Or I did, anyway.
After a while, it appeared certain nobody would come open the door. I was now ready to turn around and leave, go back to the bus and try to get some sleep. The bad smell in the air was not helping with my nausea. But Andy would not be deterred. He had caught the boy's enthusiasm for tracking down Father Christmas, and he would not give up the quest just now. Trying the door handle, and finding out it was locked, he went to walk around the house to look into the other windows.
Meanwhile, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer had been replaced with Jingle Bells.
” - Well”, my friend Antti Hulkko said, ”there seems to be nobody in the house! Let us look to the other building then!”
Determinedly, if a little unsteadily, he strode towards the bigger building, which I thought might hold animals of some sort. Cows, perhaps. Nasse tried to grab Andy's coattail, to stop him, but Andy gave him the slip. It seemed my apprehension was more catching than Andy's enthusiasm, after all.
I remember trying to say something to him, too, but it had no effect. He found a door and went in. And the rest of us followed.
The bad smell got worse here. It was getting sickening, not just shit either. This was something else.
There was a short corridor, and through we went. Andy opened the door to another room, a smallish one. Inside there was somewhat more light that I had expected, reflecting from steel surfaces on the walls.
In the half-light, it looked a bit like a kitchen, but larger. There was steel everywhere, some of it rusted. And hooks hanging from the ceiling. The metal surfaces had dark stains and some kind of spatter on them.
I suddenly remembed what Hyvärinen had said back at the Hall. About the local pig farmer being an adept butcher – and him providing meat for the village... This was the pig farm he had spoken about! And this is where the farmer slaughtered the pigs.
It sent chills down my spine. I wanted to tell the others but somehow I was tongue-tied. I saw a glimpse of something in the corner that didn't quite fit the picture and promptly blocked it out of my mind.
” - Nobody here either!”, said Andy, ”onwards, Christian soldiers!”
He walked briskly across the room and opened the next, bigger door to a much larger room. There was some light there.
The bad smell hit us like a sickening tsunami.
It was the main part of the pigsty. Only, and this is the thing that I noticed perhaps before anyone else, the few pigs that were there were dead – and had been for some while. It was them that caused the smell. Not pig shit, well, not just pig shit, but dead, rotting pigs.
The first time during this nocturnal quest of ours, I could see the smile draining from Andy's face. The boy Tero, too, suddenly seemed horrified. Right then, we were all redy to turn around and get out from there.
But then I heard the noise. A very human noise, from somewhere in the other end of the big room.
It sounded like a girl crying.
And now I took a step forward, and now Andy tried to stop me. The roles had changed, for now I could also remember something else I had heard at the local Youth Association Hall. I walked past the pig carcasses, holding my hand in front of my nose, and towards the sound. To the right at the end of the hall, there was another door.
I opened it and stepped inside, to see eight small children staring at me with wide eyes from a cage made of chicken wire. They were dirty and looked ill, but they were definitely alive. My bandmates filed in to the room after me, and even young Tero followed them.
The little girl that had been crying stopped suddenly, took a hold of the chicken wire and looked at us. She could not be more than four or five.
” - Please let us out of here. We want to go back to our parents”, she said, now perfectly calm and coherent.
We said nothing, just stared at the children, dumbstruck. I felt gears were whirring in my head, and now I remembered what I seen in the slaughter room.
A pile of children's clothes and shoes.
Inside my mind, I could hear a faint scream, and it started getting louder by the second.
Oh God no.
” - Shut up, Minna, you're ruining everything, one of the older children, a boy, said to the girl who had spoken first.”
I looked at him and somehow managed to open my mouth.
”- What?” I asked the boy behind the chicken fence. He looked six or perhaps seven.
” - If we go away now, we will never get to go to Korvatunturi!”
He almosts stamped his feet.
” - Matti and Jukka got to go to Korvatunturi with Father Christmas! They left with him and never came back! I want to go to Korvatunturi, too!”
I could see two of the other kids nodding and making agreeing noises.
” - Minna is just scared, that's all, and she would ruin it for all of us, too!”
Suddenly I felt stone sober, and I guess the feeling was shared by my friends, too. It was no longer a funny drunken quest to find a fairytale figure, oh no. Now it was a bad dream like of which I had rarely seen. And it seemed all too real.
Andy had quickly grasped what was happening here, too. He fixed his eyes to the boy that had spoken.
” - The man that took you here is not Father Christmas", he said, with surprisingly clear diction.
” - And he will not take you to Korvatunturi, you understand? He will only do very bad things to you, like he did to those other kids he took away and never brought back.
The little girl looked at the boy, turning her head of brown curls towards him.
” - I told you so, I told you!”
We were all turned to the children in the cage now. Andy started looking for a way to open the cage, talking to the kids all the time.
” - Come on now, let's get you out of here and back to your parents, right? We need to be quick about it, because...”
He stopped suddenly and his eyes went wide. An axe appeared like out of nowhere, cleaving his head in two. We all screamed in horror.
Behind Andy McCoy, a man dressed as Father Christmas held a big axe he used to split his head effortlessly, like a dry birch log into kindling.
” - Nobody leaves”, he said in a pleasant voice.
We all tried, anyway. Apart from Andy, who collapsed to the floor with a surprised look on his face.
The man did not try to stop us from getting out of the room. I ran towards the door leading to the slaughter room and hopefully out, with young Tero at my heels, and when I reached it, I realized the man in the big red coat had locked it with a padlock. He had really surprised us, and I felt stupid now as I tried to scope a way out of the building.
” - There is no other way out”, the man said in his pleasant voice somewhat louder now.
Looking at Nasse and Razzle next to me, and little Tero, I was more scared than I had never been, even more than I had been back in London, seeing my vision of missiles in Soho. But I also tried to think of a way out of this.
We needed time.
” - Why are you doing this?” I asked the man, my voice cracking.
He had walked out of the room where the kids were, and was now looking at us across the room. From his vantage point he could see all of us except Razzle, who was behind the corner to my right. The man in the red coat could find him there easy after he had gone through me, though, I thought with a chill. I looked at Nicholas and tried to signal him with my eyes to keep hidden.
Father Christmas raised his bloody axe and started walking towards me.
” - People need to eat. You know that. The government took most of my pigs, and the rest of the pigs, well, they needed to eat too. The government took my feed, too. So what was I to do? The village, the evacuees, they needed that food to survive... So I needed other sources for fresh meat. It stands to reason.”
I looked at the madman, his white beard spattered with my dead friend's blood.
” - But... kids? Why the kids?”
The man came closer all the time. I looked at Nasse, who had started to look very nauseous indeed. Maybe he, too, now understood what he had eaten at the village festival.
” - This new world is not for kids”, the madman said in his pleasant voice, ”they would die soon anyway. Overworked, irradiated, starved... No child should have it like that.”
He shrugged his shoulders and actually smiled. It was a very nice smile.
” - It was only fair to give them their very last Christmas. A Christmas tree, some food, Christmas songs, maybe a present. The promise of going to the workshop up in Korvatunturi. And something to put them to sleep mixed in a warm drink. Not a bad way to go. And they never felt a thing, I can assure you. I could not think of a nicer, more pleasant way to shuffle off this mortal coil, do you? I bet you don't, either.”
I looked to my left and saw a pitchfork next to the pigs' pens. Its spikes looked sharp and dangerous.
The man with a pleasant voice must have thought he could read my mind.
” - You will never get to that pitchfork, and you know it as well as I do. So don't even think about it.”
Just a little more, I thought, as the madman walked forward. And that very minute, Nasse finally could not help himself and puked out the contents of his stomach on the pigsty's floor. The man dressed as Father Christmas looked at him and grinned. Even his grin was pleasant enough.
Now.
I flicked my eyes towards Razzle, and thank God he understood what I meant. As the man with the white beard brough his axe to bear, to strike me, emerging from behind the corner Razzle tackled him.
The man only really lost his balance, but that was enough. He stumbled to his side, his axe piercing empty air – and fell on the pitchfork, skewering himself on the sharp instrument. His axe dropped to the floor and he looked at us accusingly. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out but a drop of blood that stuck on his lip for a moment and then fell on the floor like in slow motion.
After I was sure that the man was dead, I went through his coat pockets but there was no key there. He must have hidden it. And so I took his axe and started hacking away at the door around the lock. But first, we noticed an open window up on the wall. It was too small for a grown man, but just big enough for Tero. We boosted him up and told him that when he gets down, he should run to the Hall and get to our bus and wake up Rönkkö and This Man and take them here. Only whe he disappeared from the window I thought about the height of the wall and the possibility of the madman having an accomplice in the outside. Stupid. I hoped Tero would be all right.
I finally managed to get the door open, while my friends sprung the kids out from the cage. The little girl called Minna ran to me and grabbed my trouser leg. Instinctively, I picked the kid up. It seemed she had chosen me as her personal saviour.
We walked out of the building, to the yard, with the kids crowding. I have rarely been that relieved when I could get a breath of fresh air like I was then. I breathed deep, finally managing to get some of the nausea in me to dissipate.
We stood there for what must have been only ten minutes or so, when I saw car headlights on the road leading to the farm house. It was not our bus, but a newish Renault with Civil Defence insignia on it. It stopped, and out climbed Hyvärinen, one of his men and our Sergeant Rönkkö with Private Ahvo.
Hyvärinen looked at the kids, and then I could see a spark of recognition in his eyes. Nasse started explaining the whole thing to the arrivees, now that he had grasped it all, and now it was their time to be ill – though Hyvärinen's colleague was the only one of them that actually vomited.
Right then, I felt I had to get away from it all. I told Hyvärinen I would take the kids to the Hall, and we started walking down the road the same way we had arrived. The night was quiet, apart from the sound of gagging I heard behind me as we entered the small woods before the village road.
The little girl I held in my arms closed her eyes and it seemed she had fallen asleep. In a few minutes, though, I looked down and saw her eyes open, looking at me from her dirty face, with a mixture of curiousity and sleepiness I have only later seen on my own kids' faces. The girl reached out, took a handful of my long, blonde hair and held it inquisitively. I could see her bite her lip as she looked back into my eyes.
” - Are you an angel?”, she asked me.
I will probably never forget it. What do you answer to such a question, anyway? Say yes, and you would be lying, even if it was a benevolent lie, under the circumstances. Say no, and you might disappoint a child and wreck her belief into things existing beyond the humdrum and the ordinary.
Finally, after looking away for a while, I thought I had an answer.
I opened my mouth and looked down, only to see she had fallen asleep again, and quite probably would not remember a word of what was said anyway. I decided not to wake her up again.
It was the same kind of detachment I felt then as I had felt in London back in January – being separate from the rest of the world, like an invisible cotton padding enveloping me, looking down at everything from a different plane. I walked on through the chilly August night, with the little girl sleeping in my arms and the rest of the children following me in silence, barefoot on the road of sand and gravel.
The stars were out in the sky now, a wide panorama of bright celestial eyes looking down on us from the dark velvet of the late summer sky. That gaze, to me, was much less hostile now than it had been back in Britain. These were not the same stars I had seen then. These were merciful stars, they radiated sympathy and compassion. Somehow, I felt I was finally on the other side of it all now, out of the abyss and climbing, ever climbing on to better things. I felt sad, too, for the dead kids and for my friend Andy, but righ then it was for some reason a somewhat distant sadness to me. It would only hit me with its full force later on.
I could see the headlights slowly closing in on the road in the distance across the fields, piercing the dark in front of them. As they reached us, I could discern the makeshift vehicle behind them – an agricultural tractor armored with steel plates against bandits and other threats, towing a trailer made into a battlewagon of sorts. It had large orange triangles painted on its sides. An ”auxiliary armored civil defence vehicle” like they were officially called, the kind of thing local Civil Defence organisations were encouraged to build for themselves for protection and force projection. From the tractor and the trailer, local farmers and evacuees, some in fireman's helmets, others in hunters' camouflage jackets, with hunting rifles and other assorted weapons in their hands looked at us with wide eyes, saying nothing.
I just walked on, past the stationary vehicle, past the local forces of law and order, forward along the road, with just the stars to guide me. Wordlessly, the children followed me.
I guess, in a way, I have been walking that road ever since.
It was a road that first made me disappear from myself and from others, when I fled for Sweden in late 1985, and then it was a road that doubled back on itself and made me return to Finland and to my father, here in Mikkeli. You can make a difference, he told me back in 1991. That was four years before his death. And he was right, was my old man. I can now accept that, and I am happy that a followed him in his footsteps.
A road from tragedy to acceptance, a road from rebellion to responsibility, some might say.
Big words I don't know I have fully earned.
And as to the rest of the motley crew that left from London with me in February 1984? Sam, Sami, as you know, probably died in the capital area on the Day. I would have come across him by now if he still lived after the War. Andy, he was buried in the end of August 1984 at the Lapinlahti cemetery where his mortal remains still lay. I can't say about his soul. Nasse and Razzle – they followed me to Sweden, and Nasse, Jan-Markus, worked there as a musician for many years. He called me crazy to return to Finland when I did. He died of natural causes – cancer, that is to say – in the fall of '09 and so never followed his band handle in death. In fact none of us did. Razzle – Nicholas – he moved back to his native Britain in ´95. He lives somewhere north of Portsmouth, now, with a small family. I got a letter from him last Chrismas, with a photo of him, his wife and their two kids. He looks nothing like a rock star these days.
Which is all good, I guess. We all do change, don't we?
...
Tell me something new today, say that we don't exist at all
Say that everything will end anyway, even though they would not believe it
Let's go where the town changes into dark, endless forests
I have wandered through this night, too, and you are tired as well
Sleep little one, sleep, star, at the hem of sunshine
Sleep little one, sleep, leaf, at the hem of the shadows of the valley
Sleep little one, sleep, stream, at the hem of the waves of the sea
Sleep little one, sleep, winter, at the hem of the summer flowers
Tell me something soothing, something that will banish the ghosts
Tell me they can not make me fall into their traps, to believe in false gods
I know I can't own you, just to touch you for a moment, standing still
The winds won't stay put even if you scream and put them in a bottle
...
Olavi Uusivirta: Hautalaulu ["The Grave Song"](2006)
(filler)
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I have tried to steer away from establishing a lot of things about Russia, in case others want to write things specifically about the USSR's fate in the war and since. It might be fair to assume that Russia is still in a very bad way, though, with only enclaves of order and stability here and there. In 2014 there is an organization called "the All-Russian Council" that in some regards is, ostensibly, considered a Russian government - it managed to send a few athletes to the St. Moritz Winter Olympics, for example. But it is very hard to say whether the Council really controls any parts of Russia in truth.
Like we have discussed before, Mikkeli is in control of some parts of pre-War Soviet Karelia close to the OTL border, under the rubric of its Special Administrative Districts, and given the poverty of the FNA, it says something that the people in the Districts consider their conditions superior to how things are in the "Zones" to the east (like the Finns call most of the European parts of the former USSR, borrowing from Swedish nomenclature).
Archangel said:
Most of the refugees would not really have other places to go. I would think some, like the parents of the dead children, if they are alive, might want to go somewhere else to try to forget what happened to the kids. Otherwise, people are pretty much stuck there - no matter how bad things are here (and they are still pretty good, all things considered), they might be even worse somewhere else.
Like IOTL, though, post-War Finland ITTL will see people drifting towards the bigger centres. The general direction of internal movement is to the West rather than to the South. So Kajaani and Mikkeli will grow, but first of all the areas on the Western coast will benefit in terms of population, especially later when the Swedish support there has made for better living conditions and possibly the chance to emigrate to Sweden, too.
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