Free The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani Page A

body pucker and then vanish into the mirror as it misted over, as she had done when she was a child. Then, suddenly, she sensed it was too late: to extract her revenge, to mourn, to start afresh, find happiness again. Her life was over, there would be no new beginnings: it had been a catalogue of words and gestures she no longer had the courage to repeat. Behind the door, Hurmo was pressing his nose against the chink of light, pointlessly expectant, scratching at the parquet and whimpering in the darkness, as though he too was eager to make his escape from that ghost-infested flat. When Margareeta emerged from the bath, locks of damp hair were falling over her tear-stained eyes; she was no longer crying, and although her lips were trembling, her jaw was set. She stood barefoot in front of the fridge and had a bite to eat, tossing a scrap to Hurmo as she did so. Then she drank a cup of cold coffee and went back to bed. She set the alarm for five, put in her ear-plugs and pulled the covers over her head. Hurmo had the good sense to wait until his mistress was asleep before returning to his little armchair in the bedroom.
    While he was dressing Katia’s corpse, the Laplander cursed the day he had left the woods of Airisselka and gone to seek his fortune in the big city. He had left because he had had enough of being drenched to the marrow ferrying tree trunks down the Miekojärvi and sleeping in the open air like an animal. He had had enough of scratching a living by working for those bandits at the sawmill at Pessalompolo. He too wanted to live in a modern flat, to drink Australian wine and womanise to his heart’s content, like the lorry drivers who came to load up the timber and would give him bottles of foreign liquor and pornographic magazines. This was what had decided him to move to Helsinki. He had spent his entire savings on the purchase of a bar in a dismal working-class area; but his outgoings were considerable, and his earnings meagre. The licence to sell alcoholic drinks alone cost an arm and a leg. Things didn’t look up much even after he had installed various video games. Then he had had that bright idea of smuggling a couple of prostitutes over the border from Saint Petersburg, and two soon became four. At first he had them working in turns in the one-room flat he rented above the bar. Then he decided to close down the gaming room and turn it into four smaller rooms, and it was these that were now his most profitable line of business. He had made a name for himself: the Laplander, they called him. Things had improved, admittedly, but at a price: clients who failed to pay and had to be roughed up, squabbles among the girls for the best room, drug addicts arranging to meet on his premises and locking themselves in the toilets to do business, and the ever-present fear of the police. Four years into that life, there was still no sign of the modern flat of his dreams, he was still drinking shoddy Finnish beer rather than Australian wine, and the only women he could afford to hire were those four wrecks. At times, he even thought back to his tree trunks with something approaching nostalgia. At least they couldn’t speak; they never complained, the most resistance they put up was when they ran aground in the mud, and even then they could be easily dislodged. All in all, he thought, life was much easier in a wooden hut on the banks of a lake than on the fourth floor of a dismal council block, and the dainty little creatures in his pornographic magazines were much more biddable than the four rowdy Caucasian troublemakers he’d so unwisely imported into his living quarters.
    Seated on the pink sheets, legs a-straddle, completely dressed apart from her shoes, Katia looked like a wax doll. It was a shame that her head, beneath the jauntily-positioned fake fur cap, persisted in drooping in a way that was undoubtedly somewhat sinister. Clad in their fishnet tights, her legs, too, had lost their beauty;