The Hummingbird (21 page)

‘Where?’

‘In Bar Amarillo.’

In addition to his punk friends, Ákos hung out with a gang of young men in their twenties who had escaped the disintegrating
former Yugoslavia. For reasons that nobody talked about, they hadn’t gone to Sweden, like most people fleeing the conflict. They had found one another here in this suburb; they were wild and handsome, like reincarnations of her missing elder brother Áron, and they had thought of young Anna as an equal member of the gang, considered her something of a mascot, a protector. In this neighbourhood, Anna had never had to worry about anything. Not even the skinheads had dared to harass her. Of course, their mother didn’t like these boys any more than she liked the punks; to her mind, everything Ákos did was ruinous. And it was. Anna was the loner, the strange one, the one whose assimilation worried the professionals. Ákos, on the other hand, was always busy; he had friends and plenty to do. Apparently keeping the wrong company is worse than keeping no company at all, Anna thought.

It was through the Yugoslav boys that Anna had preserved a fragile connection to her former homeland. Only rarely did they meet other Hungarians; perhaps they were the only ones in the city. Anna was certain that, despite her protestations to the contrary, their mother had enjoyed the noise that so regularly filled their kitchen, though the language spoken wasn’t her own. Their mother had made the boys
burek
. An Albanian, a Serb, a Croatian and a Vojvodina Hungarian – it was like the most ludicrously patriotic propaganda about Yugoslav brotherhood from the Tito era. Anna sensed how they had clung to one another like shipwrecked people holding on to a drifting log, trying to find something familiar amongst all the mindlessness that had brought their childhoods to an end.

Anna’s Serbo-Croat was still in working order; it had been preserved just like the men’s friendship. Only Ivan, a Croat, had returned home. The infamous gang of immigrants had grown into a club of middle-aged men who smoked and drank a lot, who dwelled on the past too much, who complained about Finland, its football team in particular. All except Ákos now had families, temporary jobs, and their lives were stable after a fashion.

Anna hadn’t seen them in years.

A sense of nervous excitement tingled pleasantly in her stomach.

‘
Zoran is ott van?
’ she asked, trying to sound indifferent.

‘Of course, he’ll be first in line,’ Ákos laughed and gave his sister a teasing look.

‘Are you coming too?’

‘I’m not in the mood,’ said Ákos, but Anna saw how much he wanted to join them.

I spent a year in a preparatory class. At first they thought I should have been there longer – learning to read was really hard – but then they decided to move me to the normal first grade after only a year in preparatory, though I was actually the same age as the kids in second grade. They thought it would be best for me to start at the beginning, while it was still possible given my age – you can’t very well put someone who’s the age of a sixth-grader back in first grade even if they needed it. In that one year they would have to catch up on the whole of primary school and learn Finnish well enough to be able to survive in middle school, to finish their final exams, go to high school and end up studying medicine. Yeah right. As if it’s that simple. Nothing’s that simple, especially not the language. Without a language we’re nothing. Language is everything,
wallahi.
You can get by knowing a language on the surface, you can cope surprisingly well, but study is a different thing altogether, much more demanding than understanding or thinking or pretending you know what’s going on.

Right through primary school I was a year older than everyone in my class, but you don’t notice it on the outside, even though some time in the eighth grade I started to feel like a real adult and much older than everyone else. I learned to read in first grade and I picked up this language pretty quick too. I can read Kurdish too, but not as well. I’ve never read a novel in Kurdish. I read quite a lot in Finnish. There are no books in Kurdish in the library. The teachers kept saying how lucky I was that I was only six when we arrived. Apparently that’s the best age to arrive, six or seven, with regard to learning a language, many languages. Mehvan got left behind. He was so little. He lost too much of his own language, and that’s why he never learned the new one properly. Or maybe he just can’t spell: ‘Mehvan’s good at skaiting. Mehvan runs in the gardne.’

So there you have it; that was the official part about the system and the language, all neat and businesslike.

Of course, I could always tell what goes on behind the carefully constructed public façade, but I don’t want to disturb the hornets’ nest. I’ve decided I’m not going to let bitterness get the better of me. I don’t want to end up like Mum and Dad.

But I’ll tell you this much: sometimes I found shit in my shoes, quite literally. Wog. My jacket would disappear from the cloakroom. There was a clump of hair caught in a Finnish girl’s fist. Name-calling. Whore. Bruises. Nigger. My bag ripped, its contents strewn across the sports field. Cruel fucking laughter. Silent staring. I’d try and blend into the wall, so grey that nobody would notice me, try and do my homework well but keep my mouth shut about it, then people think you’re the perfect example of the well-integrated immigrant. And if you’ve had enough of putting up with all the shit and decide to step out from the wall, you’re sent to the special-needs class. Then teachers sit down at meetings and seminars and wonder why there are so damn many immigrant kids in remedial classes. As if they ended up there by themselves, as if nobody put them there in the first place.

And the endless chanting: nigger, nigger, nigger. I’ve heard it so many times it might as well be my name.

So there are a few examples for you. Thank God I got into high school. That’s where my life in Finland really started, my OWN life, that is. And that’s where it stopped again almost as quickly.

18

ANNA
WOKE
to a distant sound. It was pitch dark. The bed was swaying. It took a moment for her heavy head to realise that the sound was coming from her work phone. It was playing an annoying melody somewhere far away.

Anna dragged herself into the hallway. Her leather jacket was lying in a heap on the floor, and the sound of the ringtone in her pocket was growing louder. She pulled out her phone and stared with bleary eyes at the screaming, flashing, trembling screen. It was Esko.

It was 5.30 in the morning. I’m still completely drunk, she thought, even the hall seems to be swaying. Her head was throbbing. She pressed the reject button and put the phone on silent. It was her day off, the first day off she’d had during the week, the day when she was supposed to clean the house and go shopping.

Shit.

‘Anna,
vrati se
.’

‘
Da, da
.’

‘
Ko je bio?
’

‘It was from work. Don’t talk Serbian to me, I can’t speak it any more.’

Zoran burst into laughter.

‘There’s plenty of work for you here,’ he replied in Serbian and lifted the duvet.

Anna eventually got up after one o’clock. Zoran had kept her awake for a while, after which they had both fallen asleep again. Three cups of coffee, two ibuprofens and Zoran’s bacon omelette weren’t
enough to make her nausea go away. Anna’s temples ached and she felt sick. She looked at the screen on her work phone and saw that Esko had tried to call her a further three times. Sari, Rauno and Virkkunen had all called her too. Twelve missed calls in total. Virkkunen had sent her an SMS:
Come in ASAP,
it commanded her.

‘I have to go to work,’ Anna told Zoran as he stepped out of the shower dripping with water and hugged her as she started to get dressed.

‘Weren’t you supposed to have the day off?’

‘Something serious has happened. Everyone’s been trying to call me.’

‘
Šteta
.’

‘
Šta ćeš
.’

Anna had to take the bus into town. She didn’t dare take the car, what with her throbbing headache and woozy condition; cycling was also out of the question for the same reason. Zoran wanted to stay in bed with her; he was almost purring around her, trying to stop her getting dressed. Anna wondered what Zoran’s wife Nataša would think when her husband finally returned from his night out the day after.

When she arrived at the station, Anna could find neither Esko nor any of the other members of the team. She remembered that her phone was still on silent. She had missed another three calls, and the screen was flashing again.

‘Jesus, where the hell have you been?’ Esko bellowed down the phone so loudly that she had to pull her mobile away further from her ear.

‘I’m in my office.’

She was, in fact, in the toilet. Her stomach had started to churn and her headache had taken a turn for the worse.

‘Then get your exotic arse down here. We’ve got another John Doe.’

‘Where are you?’

‘On the running track near Häyrysenniemi, near the village of Asemakylä. You’ll never guess how he was killed.’

Anna looked in the mirror. She hadn’t had time to blow-dry her hair after the shower, and now it was tangled and messy. Large bags hung beneath her reddened eyes. Her stomach was churning and beads of sweat glinted on her upper lip. She felt dizzy.

Why today, of all days, she thought.

‘Shot? With a rifle?’

‘Dead right. So get a move on. We’ve been here all morning and Forensics are just finishing up. Virkkunen’s furious.’

‘There’s just one problem.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘I’m not fit to drive.’

After managing to say this, Anna vomited. The phone fell from her hand, pieces of omelette spilled into the toilet bowl, flushed down with coffee and other stomach fluids, in a stream of yellow-brown porridge.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ came a voice from the floor beside the toilet.

Anna asked a patrol car at the station to drive her to the scene of the murder.

It was a bright day. The light seemed to ram the pain further into her skull. She should have brought her sunglasses.

She tried to relax as she sat in the back seat of the patrol car. She closed her eyes and focused on the pain pulsing through her temples and tried to wish it away; she’d read about this method in a women’s magazine. It wasn’t working. Her head continued to thump as the car turned on to a remote dirt track.

This is déjà vu, thought Anna as birch trees, thicket and every now and then a resilient juniper bush flashed past the window. It was as though she was revisiting the scene of Riikka’s murder.

‘Are we near the sea?’ she asked the boys in uniform in the front seat.

‘Yes. This track leads right the way down to the shore, but the
running track where the body was found is about half a kilometre before the shore.’

‘Quite a coincidence,’ she thought out loud. Asemakylä was twenty or so kilometres north of the city, while Saloinen was located the same distance to the south.

Anna was hopelessly late. The forensics officer Linnea Markkula was bent over the body finishing up her work while the forensics team was scouring the surrounding area like a swarm of ants. Esko was standing to one side puffing on a cigarette.

‘Look at the sight of you…’ he scoffed as Anna appeared on the scene. His voice betrayed a note of satisfaction, of smugness and disgust.

‘If I were you, I’d keep my mouth shut about other people’s appearance. So, what have I missed?’

‘A patrol car came out here at about five this morning after the guy’s wife called. She was hysterical, first reported him missing last night.’

Esko pointed to the figure lying on the track. ‘The victim is one Ville Pollari. Seems he’s been lying there since about the time of the wife’s first call.’

‘Why does all this seem so familiar?’ said Anna and felt a wave of nausea in her stomach.

‘Pretty much. Except this time the head’s still intact. Killer aimed for the chest, the heart. And this guy was shot at the start of his run. Riikka had almost finished hers.’

‘Look at these woods. This is just like at Selkämaa.’

‘Yep. The rest of us have been here for hours, so we’ve noted the similarities.’

‘And I’ll bet this shoreline is another hunting spot,’ she replied, paying no attention to Esko’s sarcasm.

‘It is.’

Rauno approached them, clearly anxious.

‘Guess what they found in this guy’s pocket?’ he said and nodded
at the figure of a man lying on the running track, his chest ripped open.