From An Endlessly Long Spring

I walked the last few metres down the long, narrow street lined with poplars and two-storey wooden homes, looked down at my shoes pounding the dusty sidewalk, and thought about how it was probably the first time in my life I was walking on dry asphalt in the month of March. Punch-drunk from piercing sun and sleeplessness, I felt that at any moment I could fall into that kind of exhaustion when your brain is forced to tap into its hidden resources. You become exhilarated, then alert, then overly perceptive and finally paranoid. My shoes were brand-spanking new, in the colors of chocolate and latte, made of artificial leather and some kind of impregnated fabric, bought at half the sale price six months ago for the money I received for an article. Now they were finally getting to take their first walk, but I felt no joy as a result. Everything was so odd: the March slush had failed to appear, I couldn’t sleep, and now this thing with Teo on top of everything.

At home I lay down on my bed without pulling off the spread first, and the rough yellow synthetic material squeaked almost inaudibly like construction dust between my teeth. I didn’t even need to light a fire, it wasn’t cold – which was practical, actually, but at this time of year I’d rather drag the wood basket across the wet snow in the yard, past the black craters made when the roof drips and it smells like melting snowcrust and overwintered decay.

A couple hours previously I made a first visit to a part of town I’d never seen before, so far away that none of the public transportation lines reached it. Maybe it was a conscious choice on the part of the city planners – to make sure that those patients who, despite everything, were successful in escaping wouldn’t be able to hop on a bus and make their way home. Or wherever they wanted to get to, if you even want to go anywhere when you’ve been pumped full of psychiatric drugs whose characteristics and effects the developer has not yet succeeded in determining in full.

I would’ve never had enough money to take a taxi there – it was a friend of Teo’s who arranged it. He’d introduced himself as Valery, but I had a vague feeling that it wasn’t his real name. And that it wasn’t his real face, either. It wasn’t like a mask. It was more as if one hundred faces had been melted together and then been divided by one hundred. A pair of eyes that could illustrate the concept ‘eyes’. A mouth so anonymous that the sharpest of memories wouldn’t be able to reconstruct its contours in retrospect. It was only his right ear that distinguished itself with a notch, as if someone had figured out that a man without any physical description whatsoever would sooner or later arouse suspicion.

This Valery had called my mobile a few hours earlier, explained that he was Teo’s friend and told me he’d been admitted to the psych ward and wanted to see me. Then this Valery came and picked me up in a taxi that seemed expensive: no shiny-worn throws in the back seat, just artificial leather in beige. Valery sat in the front seat, I settled myself behind him and during the entire trip I studied the notch in his ear, then the dusty sidewalks and house façades, now the garages, the tin sheets of the storage buildings, and then fir trees fir trees fir trees, then we were there.

The hospital was a somewhat worn three-storey building with peeling, light-yellow paint, the visitor’s room on the first floor. A guard-babushka copied down our personal information in a ledger and I wondered if it could possibly be true that there weren’t any other guards there. What if someone like Teo, with a barrel chest the size of an entire orchestra pit, wanted to escape? How was she supposed to stop him?

But Teo didn’t want to go anywhere. He entered the visitor’s room and looked like he always does except for his upper lip, which was rather swollen, and a couple of missing teeth. What had I expected, really: that he’d be a ghost in a hospital gown, that he’d have lost weight in 48 hours, that he’d look wildly at imaginary visitors or stare ahead empty-eyed? I hoped that the missing teeth weren’t the implants his wife Tatiana had spent an entire month’s salary on.

‘Well, you ended up here after all,’ I said.

Teo’s tea-yellow eyes locked with mine.

‘You can’t hold the hand of a rock’n’roll man very long,’ he answered in a drawl, nasally, as if the words were taken from a Bob Dylan song and not Joni Mitchell. He stared at me as if he expected me to smile in recognition or something, but I looked away at a door jamb, and when I went to look at Teo again, my eyes ended up somewhere between his chest and his belly.

He was wearing dark-blue sweatpants and a huge shirt with a gaudy pattern. When he noticed me studying its different geometric shapes in yellow, black, green and red, he flung his arms wide so that his plastic chair began to rock and I was afraid he was going to fall backwards.

‘I traded for this!’ he said after regaining his balance, pointing at his shirt.        

‘Traded what?’

‘The T-shirt Tatiana gave me when she was here. Yesterday. These too.’ He gestured boastingly with his hand at the black rubber slippers he was wearing on his feet. Then his arms stopped in place, hanging in a way, defiant and at the same time listless. Or rather, the listless expression belonged to Teo while all his defiance had wandered to his extremities, which didn’t really seem to be obeying his central control.

That’s when I realized that the drawling, nasal timbre of his voice must be the result of a lot of tranquilizers. And then I thought that no sedatives in the world could rob Teo of his ability to become friends with anybody at all, at any time or place, to charm people in a few short minutes – those who weren’t frightened by him, that is, and ran – so that they happily gave him their belongings, their money, their smiles and their time. I recalled that babushka in a shop queue when we were going to buy a carton of milk that Teo then guzzled, the entire carton, just outside the shop. She was as angry as a hornet because they’d raised the price of ryazhanka, and Teo began to joke with her about the silver content in her coins and told her a yarn that if you had to you could make your own ryazhanka at home on the stove by letting old curdled milk simmer on low heat for at least three hours. The anger in her face smoothed and after a little while she looked at him maternally and at the same time a little embarrassed by the strange, husky man in an old-fashioned lady’s hat adorned with black feathers.

I looked at the gaudy triangles and quadrangles on Teo’s shirt and wanted to ask him why he’d asked me to come, but instead I said, ‘Teo. What happened? How did you get here?’

He stared at me and began to give his report calmly, the way he always did when he was about to tell me yet another bizarre event from his life: in every word a kind of nonchalance towards how what had happened related to everything we know as normal and reasonable.

He and the man who’d introduced himself as Valery had gone to Girvas to eat solyanka. Afterwards, when I was recalling the whole thing, I wondered if that right there didn’t indicate that something was wrong: Teo hated the solyanka they served at Girvas and claimed that they were always stingy with the boiled beef and compensated with too much smoked sausage, and besides you never got extra lemon if you asked for it even though the neatly clad student waiters always nodded and made a careful notation. In any event, they had gone to Girvas and naturally there were already some people there who Teo knew. They ordered the soup; others drank, but not Teo, because he had got the idea that he would keep the promise he’d given Tatiana a week or so before. They talked about a new folk-rock festival that could possibly get some funding from EU money earmarked for cross-border co-operation if you could formulate your culture-promotion goals well enough.

The bit about the money was something Valery filled in. His voice was neither light nor dark, neither sonorous nor hoarse, and every line he said gave me a vague feeling that he had both stated it and not.

So they had discussed venues, bands that didn’t actually fit the classification of folk-rock: either too much ‘rock’ or too much ‘folk’. And which folk, besides? Someone said that this mattered as well. If it was a Fenno-Ugric festival, the contents shouldn’t be diluted with something Russian or other shit from the big cities… Teo was supposed to have objected: Who were they to sit there and decide who was Finn or Karelian enough, and who wasn’t? It’s been a long time since anyone was either one thing or another, if they ever were, well, maybe during the Bronze Age then… and who were the Karelians, anyway? ‘Not you, in any case,’ Teo’s opponent was supposed to have answered, pointing out that neither Teo’s first nor last name was Karelian. ‘And if you want to hoodwink people and Fennicize the name Fyodor then you ought to know that it’s ‘Teuvo’ in Finnish and ‘Huodari’ in Karelian! The great Karelian folk-rock singer Teo Malets, yeah, maybe you can fool a few five-year-olds when you’re gigging at a birthday party,’ is what he allegedly said, at which point Teo took his guitar and cracked the fellow over the head with it.

Teo’s mother was Karelian. Teo’s father was Karelian. They never married, and when Teo’s mother found a husband when the boy was still quite small, Teo got his stepfather’s Belorussian surname. So his new birth certificate said ‘Fyodor Malets’ and everyone called him Fedya except for his grandmother, who called him Huodari. But there had never been any talk of turning it into a stage name. Nobody knew why, and when anyone asked, Teo – if he was in the mood to answer – would say that before he learned to play the kantele, he practiced on an egg slicer. It sounded cryptic, especially to those who knew that Teo didn’t really like the kantele: when he needed to add an extra ethnic touch to his performances, he brought his Swedish keyed fiddle. He’d been given this instrument at a festival in Turku by a Swede who’d become enchanted with Teo’s famous growling, which the man had mistaken for Tuvan throat-singing. Teo’s biological father also married eventually, a Ukrainian woman, and their son got the father’s Russian-Karelian surname Lembojev and was christened Alexander, which was easy to remake into the Finnish-Karelian ‘Santeri’ if desired. So Teo had a half-brother somewhere in his home village – which he hadn’t visited since he left school – one who walked around with the name Santeri Lembojev, which sounded unimpeachably Karelian. This is what Teo told me at one time, and then he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Apparently he had a difficult time handling the conflicting feelings he had for this half-brother he’d never met and in particular his surname – a birthright the two should have shared but of which Teo had been robbed. It didn’t help to point out that lemboj, the word the surname is derived from, means ‘little devil’ in Karelian. That was when Teo responded with eyes that were no longer rust-yellow like the iron-rich water of Lake Onega, but dark brown like Karelian herbal bitters.

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