Free White Hunger (Chance Encounter Series) by Aki Ollikainen Page A

hand before their maligned masters, as if being tested on the catechism by the vicar, and are reproached for how poorly they harnessed a horse or sharpened a scythe.
    Juho is still giggling. The child’s laughter ploughs a path through grey despair. And it leads not to white death but to yellow-green, vernal St Petersburg. In the hungry, hollow emptiness in Marja’s stomach, clutched by a cold, bony fist, the Tsar’s city seems to rise. Now the fist yields and a cobbled street emerges. Beautiful green birches line the street, along which Marja walks, holding Juho’s hand. They go into a shop and buy a loaf. The fatshopkeeper smiles and praises Juho, calling him a bonny lad. The smiling face of the shopkeeper’s wife appears from the back room. She agrees he’s bonny and the man hands Juho a pastry.
    ‘Give me your name, all the same. I can put in a good word for you at the pearly gates – I’ll get there before you.’ Ruuni interrupts Marja’s thoughts.
    ‘My name’s Marja. You’re not heading for Heaven. But I can speak to the Tsar on your behalf when I get to St Petersburg.’
    ‘Aha. God’s nothing, then. Let’s carry on together. I could come to St Petersburg, too, and be a soldier. Hang on a second, I’ve got to see to something,’ Ruuni says, and vanishes behind the silo.
     
    Outside town, they get a lift in an old man’s sledge. The journey progresses in silence; the only sound is that of snow crunching sadly under the runners. The farmer stops the sledge by a field.
    ‘This is where you get off. Go along the track across the field; there are some dwellings there,’ the man says.
    Marja realizes he does not want to put them up for the night. She tries to catch the old man’s eye, but he looks either across the field or at the snow, never straight at her.
    The brief period of daylight has not yet run its course. In the middle of the field stands a barn and Ruuni suggests they rest there a short while and eat.
    ‘What have we got to eat, then?’ Marja wonders.
    Ruuni pulls out a loaf from inside his coat.
    ‘Did you steal it?’ Marja is horrified.
    ‘I did indeed.’
    The barn walls are gappy, but there is some hay inside. Marja wonders whether they could spend the night here.
    Ruuni divides the bread in three and hands the smallest piece to Juho.
    ‘How did you end up a beggar?’ Marja asks.
    ‘Vaasko threw me out the minute his belly began to rumble. A fat, greedy old man. If he so much as glimpses hunger out the corner of his eye, he’s got to get food down him right away. He worked out that if he didn’t throw out the hired hands, he’d have less to chomp on. Wouldn’t have done the fatty any harm, mind you.’
    ‘You’re an orphan?’
    ‘Mother died of typhus in the workhouse. That was in spring. I’ve been on the move ever since. No good standing still. I’m not a kid any more, all big eyes. I’ve had to learn to thieve. Nobody’s going to take pity on someone like me, and I haven’t got round to having a little one yet. If I had, I could put it on show when I’m out begging. You could lend me that Juho of yours – I could live like a lord. I bet you only have to turn up at people’s doors and they go all misty-eyed and hand over their bread.’
    ‘It’s not that easy,’ Marja says, and thinks of Mataleena.
    Ruuni sees from Marja’s expression that she is swallowing tears along with the bread. He places his hand onher shoulder. Marja puts her own hand on top of Ruuni’s and squeezes it tenderly. For a moment, she feels as if all the beggars in the world were one family, as if they felt the same pain and were grieving over Mataleena, sharing her burden.
    Juho, Marja and Ruuni curl up to sleep in the scant hay, as close to each other as baby mice in their nest. Marja strokes Ruuni’s ears, which stick out like the wings of a fledgling learning to fly. It is hard to imagine the boy with the protruding ears as a skeleton, though his face is wizened with hunger and his