The lake a powdery gray extension of the powdery gray sky.
In the marshy field near a deserted road, two brothers arguing about the fate of a wounded angel.
They could be rich, Jarmo is saying. Think about it, Sami. This young, and flush for life. All they have to do is carry her back to their farm, lock her in the potato cellar outside the barn, and prepare the wagon and horses for the long ride to Helsinki. Their parents would never need to work again. And, when the capital grew tired of their present, they could move her to Turku, then Tampere, then Oulu. And, when Finland finally grew tired of it, they could meander south through Europe — Estonia to Latvia, Latvia to Lithuania, Lithuania to Poland, and so on, ending up on the white coasts of Greece. There every day would be the same day. Sleep late, display their angel to the townspeople, eat slick mollusks and sip red wine beneath colorful umbrellas on verandas overlooking the bloody sea while the sun turned the sky the color of salmon meat. Sami shaking his head side to side. Sami not meeting his older brother's eyes. Sami saying no.
No, Sami is saying. That isn't right. The angel isn't theirs to use like some wooden spoon. She is beautiful and pure and wounded and she needs their assistance just like any traveler hurt along the side of the road. If you were lost and injured, Sami is saying, quietly, understated but firm, black hat crumpled to his chest in his grimy knuckled fists, wouldn't you want someone to come to your aid, Jarmo, give you a hand so you could find your way back to where you knew you belonged? Nothing could be simpler. All the boys would have to do is detour from their present course a single hour, two at most, in order to bring her to the crest of that hill over there. Surely it would take God only a matter of seconds to notice her, remember what He had forgotten, and in His infinite goodness commence to dream her once again. After that, everything would return to how it should be. All the bits of their world would settle back into place the way all the numbers in a complicated math problem resolve into its sum. While it is true their parents would never be rich, they would also never know that they might have avoided poverty, and thus they would never find themselves dispirited. They would ask the boys a few questions when the brothers returned late. This is to be expected. But it would be easy enough to fabricate an excuse or two. And then? That night, and on all future nights, the boys would be able to sleep profoundly, unimpeded by fears of visitations from their grandfather's skeleton. Equally important, they would always carry within them the knowledge of death's scent, and therefore would always be in a position to stay on guard against her cacophonous arrival.
Two brothers silently staring at each other, figuring.
No more talk after that, no more thoughts of fish soup or ham, no more rocks kicked along the road or lobbed far into the meadow. Only this: only two boys moving slowly and heavily along their barren route, improvised stretcher between them. A wounded angel hunching forward on the seat in the middle, head lowered, limp lilies of the valley clutched in her right hand. The hem of her white gown sweeps the packed dirt below her, yet somehow remains faultless.
Jarmo turning his solemn face toward the viewer — toward you, me. Accusing. Because he is exhausted. Because he is exhausted and frightened and angry.
Because he and his brother have been at this for years now.
It all seemed effortless in the beginning. They helped their charge onto the stretcher, carefully lifted the stretcher into the air. The wounded angel weighed virtually nothing. The sole mass the boys felt between them was that of the branches forming their litter. Sami and Jarmo strode rapidly for the first hour, the former contemplating the relationship and moral implications of the angel's weight to his own, the latter imagining the heat radiating from twinkling sand on southern beaches. Only gradually did it dawn on them they were making no progress. When the younger raised his head to check their bearings, he realized the landscape around them, their position with respect to it, hadn't changed in the least. Everything was precisely where it had been earlier: meadow to the right, hills across the lake, dirt road slicing their perspective in two. Startled, he shot an anxious look back at his brother, only to discover Jarmo surveying their environs grimly, deep into the task of absorbing the same dismal facts about their circumstances. They were suddenly lost without being lost, in need of assistance without there seeming to be anything whatsoever out of the ordinary.
It becomes night becomes day becomes night, each time they blink.
Sometimes they wake to find it is snowing heavily. The lake vanishes in a boil of flakes. Sometimes they wake to find the mid-summer sun brutalizing the arid countryside all the way to the dusty apricot horizon. Without warning, the voluminous bluegreen clouds of northern lights churn above them. Without warning, the boys are freezing. Their skin is oily with perspiration. It is raining. They discover themselves slipping and stumbling with their precious cargo through the mud. No. Autumnal reds and yellows rust the low foliage around them. No. It is a perfect spring dawn, only there are no birds anywhere, no signs of life far as the eye can see.
It never crosses their minds to stop, however, backtrack, diverge from their current route. Such ideas do not exist in this world. There is a word their father taught them as soon as they could understand language: sisu, Finnish for what must be done will be done. The boys are convinced that if they just push on a little farther, work a little harder, they will reach the lake, the hills, locate themselves in the midst of a cool breeze as they overlook the valley through which they are now advancing. Now seeming to advance.
The angel remains perfectly still, head lowered.
Silent as polar night.
Which is where we must leave her. Which is where we must leave them all.
Because, regrettably, this is all you or I know of these things. Because we simply do not have access to any further information concerning these characters' fate.
I am sorry.
Except, perhaps, for a few final observations. The wounded angel is mute, for example, because she understands that she is on an almost infinite path that will culminate in her death. She wears the thick kerchief over her eyes because if the boys were to gaze directly into them they would catch a brief glimpse of heaven and this would annihilate them before their feet allowed them to take a single step more. The angel cannot let this happen. The boys must survive long enough to help bring about her dissolution. She has thus made certain they have misunderstood every word she has thought. The brothers must believe they are assisting her on her return to the ravishing universe of nouns, when in reality the only reason she has harmed herself is to gain entrance into the even more ravishing one of melting ice.
When they reach the crest of one of those almost immeasurably distant hills, the boys must believe the wounded angel will ascend into the absolutely blue sky on those gigantic feathery parentheses. They do.
But the angel will not ascend at all. She will plunge into the lake several hundred meters below, into an agitated drowning.
And so, finally, we fathom what that look on her countenance signifies — not angelic calm, nor despair, nor fatalism, nor nostalgia for what she has had to leave behind. That look signifies happiness.
Perhaps it is the same slightly out-of-focus afternoon. Perhaps it is a different one. A second, in any case, and it might be otherwise. A second, and it might not.
May