We jumped into the lake together. He was drunk as usual. I dived underneath him, grabbed the end of his trouser leg and dragged him under until he stopped breathing.
Marko had brought me on a trip with some artist friends to the outskirts of a beautiful town in the centre of Finland. At first I didn’t believe he would ever free the two of us from the cruel seclusion he had imposed on us. For a year and a half I had been living in the prison of his sad life. He had torn my soul with his loneliness and opened old wounds with his rude behaviour. He violated my body and destroyed the fragile peace of mind where I hoped I might take refuge in this land of snow and ice.
There was a large isolated house in the forest, a house that was far from electricity, the internet and gas cookers. When they cooked, he and his friends made a wood fire in an old stove. They chopped the wood themselves. At night they lit a fire, drank and sang and chatted. There was a lake where they went fishing. It’s a real life there. They write poems, draw and plan theatre and film projects. Yes, the place was like a little paradise and as my owner put it, the ideal place to die. If we could look inside his mind, we’d find him imagining a grave in the middle of the forest, in a place where the sound of the forest stirs the vegetation into forms of great beauty. Indeed! Because the sound of insects and birds, the wind playing in the branches and the crackle of burning wood in the fire pit all combined to create a symphony of sounds; perhaps the voice of God reaches us in that sound, directly, without the mediation of prophets. God exists in the forest. God is the forest. But the burial ground must also be in the forest, so that the trees can draw their life from our decomposing bodies. I’m still a romantic, Beto, but yes, now I’ve fallen into the trap of hatred.
There were four of them and I was the fifth. They were trying to draw up a schedule for the next day, if there was anything worth doing communally, such as fishing, riding bicycles through the forest, or walking to the lake and coming home at sunset. There was a tall young man called Miko Lahm, a hunter who had come with his dog to catch birds. I spent some time with his dog. He was full of himself, like most hunting dogs. He was one of those creatures in whom the delusion of intelligence casts a shadow over their thoughts. He was proud of his muscles and of his ability to track down and retrieve wounded birds, and his master, Miko, was a real expert in all kinds of hunting and fishing, including rabbits; he cooked all kinds of meat in a way that everyone said was amazingly professional. Although most of the friends were vegetarians, and others only ate fish. So you might say that Miko Lahm was hunting for himself. Sometimes he was happy that I would share the meat with him. Of course he didn’t let his own dog eat the meat he hunted. He gave him dog food from cans.
Paulina spent the time lying in the sun on an orange towel. She was reading a book about plants. Timo, her partner, was sitting nearby, just smoking and gazing at the trees. He would dig into the soil with his feet, then examine the soil carefully as if it were a human corpse, then smoke another joint and stare at the sky. When he’d put out his fourth joint he would go back to the trees, then start the cycle again by scratching at the soil once more, like a dog but this time more slowly. He would light another joint, and never once speak to Paulina. The staring and smoking and all that deliberate idleness continued for four hours, broken only when he stood up and fetched a bottle of beer from the house. My master, Marko, would draw occasionally, while Miko Lahm played with his dog. At first sight I must have looked like I was the happiest of them all, because the slow pace of life in the forest really cheered me up. I had almost forgotten my recent sufferings with Marko. Time there passes at an amazingly glacial pace. You would laugh, Beto, and show your terrible teeth, if I told you that the first task I undertook there was to practise emptying out my mind and spreading its contents out in the sun to dry. I wanted to be alone with myself with a mind that wasn’t soaked in doubts. I would hide away by myself among the trees, stand there like a dwarf with a broken heart among the giants of the forest. How can I describe to you the taste of the light wind as it makes the leaves ripple like the flags of happy nations? Just as they would sit in the sauna to make their bodies sweat and reinvigorate themselves, I would sit there alone for hours so that the salt of my body would find its way out and dissolve, so that I could say to the creatures of the forest: ‘I am your sister in this existence’, so that I might plant my kisses upon it. I leaped around the trees shouting and addressing the green silence around me, but I felt that my words were vanishing like smoke, and neither the trees nor even the birds were listening to me. There was a husky sadness in my voice, a scratch in the innocence of what I wanted to express, because my voice was not in tune with the sounds of the forest. Perhaps my years of hanging around in the city had tainted the purity of my powers of expression. My voice was reminiscent of the city’s own symphony of mediocrity, the soulless, broken music produced by the machine of life: those sounds they have spattered us with shamelessly since childhood; their symphony that starts squeaking in the early morning, in shopping centres, banks, universities, hospitals, parliament buildings, bars and restaurants. The sounds of human ignominy. They’re incapable of loving each other so how can they understand our love for them? I felt that my mind was packed with sounds — the voices on buses and trains, the noises in planes and ships, the sound of domestic disputes, insults, abuse, the whistle of bullets, shouting, screaming, weeping, the chants of environmental protesters. Applause at the Peace Prize award ceremony at a time when new wars are breaking out in new hotspots, the sound of cars crashing, car bombs exploding, the cars of thieves, an ambulance, a bank truck loaded with bundles of banknotes, a fire engine. The sounds of mosques and churches, of Friday sermons and homilies, of group sex and glass breaking, sounds coming in the right ear and sounds going out the left ear. If we were deaf creatures — us and those humans — perhaps the world would be less painful. There are only two kinds of sound that are good for bringing about peace: the songs of the forest and music. Yes, Beto, the forest is a sound. An ancient sound that renews itself like a river that never stops flowing. They have polluted the river. They have cut down the trees. They have flown into space looking for more sounds and sources of energy. They have destroyed their own humanity. They have cooked and baked and killed like mass murderers. They have given prizes and bravery awards to madmen and killers. They really are heroes. Don’t they deserve hanging at the end of the film, like heroes? The audience will cry because they can’t save the hero who’s being hanged in the middle of the square. They have cut their humanity’s throat from ear to ear and sat down weeping at its feet. They have created poems for the dignity of humanity, while others created long wars that have yet to end, and perhaps never will. Their poems are awash with shame and loss, and they still smile like clowns. Pessimistic as usual, you’ll say, ‘I know that’. I want to borrow your tone of wisdom, which is comical much of the time, and say, ‘Humanity is in two parts, humanity has two voices. The majority talk incessantly and the minority are silent and plant-like, communicating with gestures. Every painting, Beto, is a voice. Every novel, every story, every work of art is a voice that communicates by gestures.’ They are creative innovators, but they are corrupt to the core. You know, in the forest, thoughts of suicide recurred. I imagined the sharp blade of a knife against my throat. Only the forest stood between me and what I was thinking. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. I imagine you nosing up to me as usual and whispering, ‘There you are, jumping from one subject to another like a kangaroo.’