Nerve Endings and Dreamscapes: Unknown Men’s Labors

The way the autumn sun casts its rays and shadows of the houseplants on the wall above the writing desk, where the pictures of family and friends are sitting in vintage frames or pinned to the wallpaper with ancient pins from father’s old stack that has survived all the way to the seventeenth apartment of this adulthood, from this childhood, and even from father’s days as a young, beardless man, standing in front of his first car, a Trabant. He is standing next to his girl, a beautiful redheaded vision in white cotton shirt and shorts. That picture is not here, but at home, in a photo album, and it is black-and-white, but knowing she is a redhead is secret family knowledge. For a long time now, mother likes to dye her hair blond, but when the picture was taken, she still had her natural golden, strawberry blond hair.

Hanging laundry to dry, underpants, the dozens and dozens of them, because this is the time of plenty. Hanging them neatly in rows, while being philosophical about the passage of time, brought to mind from seeing some old ones, faded but not yet worn-out, back from when there was a different city, a different life. Yet here they hang, next to the fresh, new ones.

Feeling like someone is sawing wood, somewhere in the background, a not unpleasant sound. Like the way gas stations and body shops smell, not a bad smell, but a smell of doing something, working for a living. Like how the work attire smells like the smells of the workplace. But the sawing is coming from memory, when the bedroom window was ajar and the neighbor was making firewood. Except perhaps it was father, sawing in our own yard. He always liked sawing. His giant saw had a purple handle frame, and, like most of his yard tools, it dated back to the Sixties. When he brought home a new cutting edge he ordered everyone to be extra careful around the loose, sharp, long object, before he attached it to the frame.

In the swing, many a time, many a book. Concentrating is so much harder now. The mind split into shards that echo and mirror each other and the outside world. Concentration splintered because of the myriad household chores and restless spirits roaming the house and sadness and not having any eggs in the fridge. That, and the world events, to a lesser extent, because one has to exclude something, and money, and not connecting, and revising said words, even if grandfather is telling it is alright, the thing is to think calmly and have a little nip of something, it is going to be alright.

But he was in the war. He has miraculous aptness for calm, and falling asleep instantaneously, and sitting quietly, thinking. He has seen true horror. Not like any of us. He would sit at the table by the window, his nip in a clear milk glass in front of him, but only one, never more, and his handkerchief folded neatly next to it, and look at the birds. When he died, mother found powerful sedatives inside the medical cabinet, prescribed to him some years after the war. To help calm the nerves. A fifty-year-old prescription. There were a few pills in the jar, still.

Yarn balls. During the monumental winter reorganizing around the house, the yarn balls fill up five large tote bags. Never accusatory, but hopeful, that one day the lady will overcome her silly upheaval and calm the hell down long enough to pick up some needles again. It used to make her happy. Manual labor.

The thought of it makes our petty little unease seem shallow and self-fabricated. Why are things so much harder for her than they are for everyone else? And why would it matter? The true age of ego-centrism is right now. Get on with it. Stop wasting everybody’s time. You don’t have breast cancer. You don’t have a brain tumor. Your thighs are fine, there is no infarction brewing. All you have is a restless, neurotic, selfish, slightly hypochondriac mind. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a great mind. He would be the first to say so. Even if the struggle to be a decent and worthy woman, to earn grandfather’s respect, is doomed to fail, because to measure against a phantom of a good man is futile.

The small fir tree behind the house, next to the stone and the gutter. Grandfather is present in four different pictures on the wall.

A dream. The large trailer-tent is open, the light is orange and smells like a long time in the garage and pea soup and meatballs in a can and linen left inside the trailer-tent for the winter: a stingy, a bit moldy, but not an unkind smell. Once, when she was sure a huge bug crawled beneath the thin mattress, father went inside the sleeping department himself and turned the whole department inside out to let her know he had checked absolutely everything and it was safe to enter. She had never loved him more than at that moment. The trailer-tent is something she identifies with father, even more than the sight of him ploughing snow in winter, or the ancient saw.

Grandfather suffered from terrible heartburns, this is an ailment the granddaughter has come to know well in the midpoint of her life, and he would do spontaneous situps in bed during the night, throwing his hands high in the air while doing them, if the burn was bad. He had been told a little workout, a little movement, might help ease the pain. Grandmother, waking up to her husband ferociously sitting up and lying back down, had no choice but to join his efforts. Mother would say it was the funniest thing, to see them both do situps in bed in the wee small hours of the morning.

After the war, grandfather lived in Tampere his whole life. Worked in a factory. Raised two daughters. Quit smoking in his forties. Died in what was supposed to be a routine surgery, one in a string of operations, to try and cure the esophageal cancer. No more nips. The death, cancer or not, left the family devastated. He had already had two procedures, both times he was fine. Then he wasn’t.

Of course, no one is perfect. To try and live up to some bygone idea of man, is crazy. But when she saw the actor onstage, wearing a smoking jersey the exact same shade of green grandfather had, she felt goosebumps all over her body.

Lives, after the war. Another unknown soldier, another family raised in the aftermath of horror, another chapter in the book.

Once, at Stockmann, during the Christmas rush, the granddaughter was waiting in line to pay for her groceries, when she noticed a whiff of aftershave, the perfume reacting to the skin the exact same way it had reacted to grandfather’s skin. She never knew what brand he wore. But she recognized it now. A clean smell, a manly scent. It was hours later that she realized why the old man standing in front of her in line had brought tears in her eyes. She was barely able to get through paying for her boxes of chocolate. Emotional memory, it is called.

Sometimes, she swears she can still see him in the yard, in his lumberjack flannel shirt and the smoking jersey, watching birds.

(Panu Rajala’s play Päämäärä Tuntematon in Komediateatteri, directed by Panu Raipia, Tuukka Huttunen as Väinö Linna, as well as all the characters of The Unknown Soldier, the co-workers at the factory, and all the writers and benefactors and other participants at the Mäkelä salon.)