Popular Music. Mikael Niemi

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      ‘Have you seen Mr Chantarelle?’ our reader asked us.

      I could answer that question with an outright ‘no’. Nor Mrs Chantarelle, nor any other strange members of this mushroom family, come to that. Chantarelles didn’t grow in our part of the world.

      We sometimes used to receive Treasure Trove, the Savings Bank magazine, with a picture of the bank’s oak tree logo. If we saved our money, it would grow and grow until it was as big as that majestic old oak, we were told. But there were no oak trees around Pajala, and so we realised there was something fishy about the advert. The same sort of things applied to the Treasure Trove crossword, where one of the clues that kept cropping up was a tall tree similar to a cypress, seven letters. Answer: juniper. But where we lived the juniper was a straggly little bush about knee-high.

      Music lessons were a fascinating ritual. Our teacher would produce a big, clumsy tape recorder and put it on her desk – a gigantic chest dotted with spikes and knobs. She would slowly thread in and set up a tape, then hand round song books. Peer at the class with her owlish eyes, and switch on. The reels would start turning, then a bright and breezy signature tune would blare out from the loudspeakers. A brisk female voice spouting something or other in a Stockholm accent. She would go on to give us a perfect music lesson, peppered with sighs and squeals of enthusiasm. The pupils were from the Nacka School of Music in Stockholm, and to this very day I wonder why we were forced to listen to these southerners with angelic voices singing about bluebells and cowslips and other tropical vegetation. Sometimes one of the Nacka pupils would sing a solo, and the worst thing was that one of the boys had the same name as me.

      ‘Now, repeat that tune for me, Matthias,’ the lady would chirrup, and a girlish boy soprano would ring out as clear as a bell. At which point the whole of our class turned round to stare at me, grinning and giggling. I wished I could have gone up in smoke.

      After several pedagogical repetitions, we were expected to sing along with the tape – the Kermit the Frog Ensemble joins the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Our teacher’s eyes took on a glint of steel, and the girls started to sing softly like the soughing of zephyrs through tufts of grass. But we boys stayed as silent as fish, moving our lips when teacher glared at us, but that’s all. Singing was unmanly. Knapsu. And so we kept quiet.

      We gradually caught on to the fact that where we lived wasn’t really a part of Sweden. We’d just been sort of tagged on by accident. A northern appendage, a few barren bogs where a few people happened to live, but could only partly be Swedes. We were different, a bit inferior, a bit uneducated, a bit simple-minded. We didn’t have any deer or hedgehogs or nightingales. We didn’t have any celebrities. We didn’t have any theme parks, no traffic lights, no mansions, no country squires. All we had was masses and masses of mosquitoes, Tornedalen-Finnish swearwords and Communists.

      Ours was a childhood of deprivation. Not material deprivation – we had enough to get by on – but a lack of identity. We were nobody. Our parents were nobody. Our forefathers had made no mark whatsoever on Swedish history. Our surnames were unspellable, not to mention being unpronounceable for the few supply teachers who found their way up north from the real Sweden. None of us dare write in to Children’s Family Favourites because Swedish Radio would think we were Finns. Our home villages were too small to appear on maps. We could barely support ourselves, but had to depend on state hand-outs. We watched family farms die, and fields give way to undergrowth. We watched the last logs floating down the River Torne when the ice melted, before it was banned; we saw forty muscular lumberjacks replaced by one diesel-oozing snow-mobile; we watched our fathers hang up their heavy-duty gloves and go off to spend their working week in the far-distant Kiruna mines. Our school exam results were the worst in the whole country. We had no table manners. We wore woolly hats indoors. We never picked mushrooms, avoided vegetables, never held crayfish parties. We were useless at conversation, reciting poems, wrapping up presents and giving speeches. We walked with our toes turned out. We spoke with a Finnish accent without being Finnish, and we spoke with a Swedish accent without being Swedish.

      We were nothing.

      There was only one way out. Only one possibility if you wanted to be something, no matter how insignificant. You had to live somewhere else. We learnt to look forward to moving, convinced it was our only chance in life, and so we moved. In Västerås you could be a person at last. In Lund. In Södertälje. In Arvika. In Borås. There was an enormous evacuation. A flood of refugees that emptied our village, but strangely enough it felt voluntary. A phoney war.

      The only ones who ever returned from the south were those who died. Car crash victims. Suicides. And eventually also those killed off by AIDS. Heavy coffins dug down into the frozen earth among the birch trees in Pajala cemetery. Home at last. Kotimaassa.

      Niila’s house had a view over the river and was in one of the oldest parts of Pajala. It was a spacious, well-built house from the end of the previous century, with large, small-paned windows along the long walls. If you examined the façade closely, you could see traces of where it had been extended. There were still two chimneys from two separate hearths: the house had been too big to be heated by just one fire. When Laestadianism was at its peak, the house had been a natural grey colour; but at some point in the 1940s it had been painted the traditional Swedish red, with white window surrounds. The rough corners had been sawn and planed in accordance with the new fashion, to make sure the house couldn’t be mistaken for an overgrown barn – much to the distress of national archivists and other persons of good taste. On the river side were grassy meadows that had been fertilised for thousands of years with river silt every time the thaw came, and they produced abundant and rich hay, perfect for boosting milk production. At this very spot several hundred years ago, one of the earliest settlers had taken off his birch-bark rucksack and created a smallholding for himself. But the grass in the meadows had not been harvested for years. Creeping bushes and undergrowth had thrust up their sauna twigs here, there and everywhere. The place stank of gloom and decline. Visitors did not feel welcome there. There was a chill about the spot, like that of someone browbeaten so relentlessly as a child that all the bitterness had been directed inwards.

      The cowshed was still standing, and over the years it had been turned into a shed and a garage. We’d just finished school, and I’d gone home with Niila. We’d exchanged bikes for the day. He’d borrowed mine, which was rather flashy with a racing saddle and drop handlebars. I was riding his Hercules – ‘just the thing for knobbly knees’, as the nastier element in class three used to shout at him when he rode past. As soon as we got to his house, Niila dragged me with him to the cowshed.

      We sneaked up into the loft, up the steep, axe-hewn stairs that had been polished by a century’s feet. It was semi-dark up there, with only one small glazed window to admit the afternoon sun. There were piles of junk everywhere – damaged furniture, a rusty scythe, enamel buckets, rolled-up carpets smelling of mould. We paused by one of the side-walls. It was dominated by a huge bookcase full of volumes with worn, brown leather spines. Religious tracts, collections of sermons, books on ecclesiastical history in both Swedish and Finnish, row after row of them. I’d never seen so many books at the same time before, apart from in the library on the top floor of the Old School. There was something unnatural about it, something decidedly unpleasant. Far too many books. Who could possibly ever manage to read them all? And why were they there, hidden away in a cowshed, as if there was something shameful about them?

      Niila opened his satchel and took out his reader starring Li and Lo. We’d been given an extract to prepare for homework, and he found his way to the page, turning them over with his clumsy, boyish fingers. Concentrating hard, he started mouthing the letters one after another, spending an enormous effort on connecting them up to form words. Then he grew tired of it and slammed the book shut СКАЧАТЬ