I was idiotic enough to believe I ought not yield the battleground to the Finns without a fight, so I was the first to go back inside and stretch out on the upper bench, leaving them to crowd together on the lower one. In the course of the next half hour I thought I could observe the other two brownnosing the guy with a blond mustache and a back sprinkled with moles. They held the door open for him and closed it behind him, let him be the first under the shower, the first to select a seat — and everything he said was met with a twofold echo.
Returning to the Epos Room, I immediately noticed something was up. I looked at Tanya — and she was already in mid-explosion. Our arguments always follow the same pattern. They begin with my failure to notice or notice too late what should be the appropriate response. In this case, since I had chosen not to take on those three louts directly, I ought to have at least followed Tanya out. But I was a man who could never forgo his pleasures, and by my behavior I had, whether intentionally or not, sided with them.
It is truly remarkable. Although I earn my daily bread by observing and describing situations and emotions, compared with Tanya I see myself as utterly tone deaf and dull witted.
The situation escalated when shortly thereafter the guy with the blond mustache sat down at the dining-room table to disassemble and clean two guns. While he worked he loudly whistled random melodies. I had to do something.
My suggestion that he could in fact tend to his weapons in his room was ignored with a grin. When I insisted, he cried, “Arne! Arne!” as if Arne had assigned him to his task. But when I picked up the barrel of one of the guns, he shouted in English, “Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!” and snatched it away from me. The upshot was that we spread our evening meal over one half of the table — the lyric poetess from the Novella Chamber was impervious to our request that she join us in defending the dining room. The other half was occupied by the Finn, who was still busy oiling his weapons. For a while he kept up his mindless whistling, but much to our gratification was the first to beat a retreat.
We were already in bed when there was a knock at our door.
After apologizing for the disturbance, Arne begged for our help. “You’re from the East too, after all,” he said. One of the group, we learned from his explanation, was Mika’s boss, and Mika was in some kind of trouble. He didn’t know anything more than that himself, Arne said. He would be truly grateful if, once back in Tallinn, we wouldn’t mention the fact that the boss had been quartered in the union’s guesthouse. If everything went well, they would all be gone the day after tomorrow anyway.
“Day after tomorrow?” Tanya said, “That’s when we’re leaving too.”
“But you’ll be here tomorrow?” Arne asked. He needed us because the Finns had come from Tallinn in a taxi. Could we drive two of them to the hunt?
“Only if they sit in the backseat,” Tanya decreed.
Arne stepped closer and extended a hand to each of us. “Wake-up call at three thirty, breakfast at my place, departure at four thirty,” he said, and hurried off.
It was a long time before we fell asleep. Around three o’clock our sleep was interrupted by what we first took to be a barking seal — a sound evidently emanating from the boss Finn under the shower.
It’s a strange feeling to sit at a table with people you’ve first come to know in the buff. Their expensive outfits, which brought to mind an imminent polar expedition, looked to me like a crude attempt to conceal their true natures.
They politely offered us hard-boiled eggs and pickled herring — I bought something similar in Berlin a few days ago, where it’s marketed as “Swedish Snax.” Arne and the boss rode in the Barkas. Mika and the other fellow came with us. Both of them had small eyes and stringy hair — Mika’s was dark blond, the other guy was a towhead. They both fell asleep immediately. The alcohol on their breath was tolerable only with a window down.
After the turnoff we rolled the windows down all the way and inhaled the forest air. It was moist and piney and somehow swallowed up the exhaust of the Barkas ahead of us. Any second I expected to see Seryosha pop up in the narrow beam of our headlights. “Let’s hope, let’s hope he’s taken off!” Tanya whispered.
We halted just before the clearing and left it to the boss to shake his countrymen awake. Dawn was breaking by now, fog lay over the blanket of heather.
Arne assigned the hunters places every fifty meters. The boss was given a post on a low rise. Mika took a spot very close to us, the towhead stood farthest off. Arne passed out blankets. We could drive back home and get some sleep, he said, evidently worried about us, we didn’t need to be back here for another four or five hours. But we didn’t do Arne the favor.
How lovely it would be if I could describe what comes next in the style of a Leskov or Turgenev. But I know neither the names of the birds striking up their songs, nor of the beetles crawling under our collars or up our sleeves, nor can I make a name for myself by offering some observation that testifies to my dendrological expertise.
Freezing, we jogged up and down under the firs and dreamed of the sauna, which surely ought to await us — at a minimum — in reward for our cooperation. But we never moved too far away from the car. Once fired upon, even Seryosha might turn cranky.
Between seven and eight — the sun had now risen above the treetops — I noticed some movement. Evidently the hunters had spotted something. Everyone except us had binoculars, which is why I’m dependent here on Arne’s account. He would tell us later that it all began well enough, actually conditions were ideal, since Seryosha had been meandering along the opposite edge of the forest. For hunters who are good shots a distance of 200 to 250 meters is no problem, but Seryosha kept vanishing behind tree stumps and bushes. It makes sense that Arne advised against taking a shot, since he assumed that Seryosha could be lured closer.
In the real world, spectacular events always occur at great speed and usually almost coincidentally. And how can you be in the right place at the right time? To give truth its due, I ought to describe the finale with the brevity and speed with which in fact we experienced it.
Seryosha, then, had been spotted and was in the Finns’ crosshairs. I’m certain the argument that broke out among the hunters at that point — in which Arne somehow managed to get involved as well — would have sent any other bear packing for good and all. According to Arne’s subsequent report, the issue was who should fire first, the boss or the towhead, who was considered the better shot. The towhead had evidently lodged a protest, implying that his boss wouldn’t have much luck at that distance. At any rate the ensuing rhubarb was worthy of a soccer field — then suddenly, a shot. Followed at once by another. Silence. Tanya pressed her fists together and whispered, “Beat it, Seryosha, beat it!”
The next sound we heard was a screeching female voice. Which is to say, at first I took it to be the wail of an animal so accustomed to the company of humans that it mimics them in its pain. So it was with real relief that we saw a woman rise up amid the heather, a woman in a black headscarf, throwing her arms into the air and spinning in place. She evidently didn’t know what direction the shots had come from. We were standing next to Mika on the low rise, the towhead and the boss were a few steps to our right, with Arne behind them. Rooted to the spot, they stared through their binoculars. But even with the naked eye it was obvious the woman, whose screams now rose to savage yowls, was pointing to the far edge of the forest.