Tuomas Kyro - Beggar & the Hare

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Marble Arch Press

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Tuomas Kyr

English language translation copyright 2014 by David McDuff

Originally published in Finland as Kerjlinen ja jnis in 2011 by Siltala Publishing

Previously published in English in Great Britain in 2014 by Short Books.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Marble Arch Press trade paperback edition August 2014

Marble Arch Press is a publishing collaboration between Short Books, UK, and Atria Books, US. Marble Arch Press and colophon are trademarks of Short Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-4767-7536-4

ISBN 978-1-4767-7537-1 (ebook)

Tuomas Kyr is one of the new voices in Finnish literature whose authorial talents were first showcased in his debut novel, Leather Jacket ( Nahkatakki ). Kyr draws on the long tradition of Finnish prose to tell compelling, even tragic stories with great authority. He is also a prolific cartoonist and columnist.

The Beggar & the Hare ( Kerjlinen ja jnis ) is a modern retelling of the Finnish classic The Year of the Hare ( Jniksen vuosi ) by Arto Paasilinna.

In which we learn how Vatanescu goes off to be a migrant worker, says goodbye to his sister and enjoys a barbecue

T here would certainly have been other alternatives; our hero could have stolen cars, salvaged the copper from telephone cables or sold his kidneys. But of all the bad offers, the one from Yegor Kugar was the best. It guaranteed him a years employment, transport to the scene of operations and even a job for his sister, with new teeth and breast implants as a bonus.

Vatanescu left a note for his ex-wife, promising to send her child support when he had built up some income. After the divorce, his relations with the mother of his son Miklos had grown somewhat envenomed to the point where the pus came, though both he and his ex-wife were people of good will. But when love departs, the empty place is filled by many new arrivals: envy, bitterness, revenge, shrillness, arseholery.

Vatanescu sat down on the edge of the bed where Miklos was sleeping in his grandmothers folded arms. Vatanescu removed the sock from his sons right foot and with a crayon traced the outline of the sole on a piece of paper.

Youll get your football boots.

Dad is going to fix you up with football boots.

T he rust-flecked VW Transporter left the South for the North. On the hills the gearbox groaned, on the dales the brakes threw sparks, and the passengers in the rear seats were tossed about. The terrorist van was of the same generation as Vatanescu, the same generation as Total Football in the Netherlands, and to be exact the vehicle had been made in the same year that Vatanescu had seen the first gleam of freedom. For although each night the only television channel in his native land had showed the same speech by the same dictator, on one occasion the pompous spectacle was suddenly interrupted by a brief flash of Monty Python. What was happening, where had it come from, the hilarious joke about the Ministry of Silly Walks?

There had been a nipple in Vatanescus mouth that night. Mama Vatanescu had stared at the television, and along with her milk a drop of the free world, free from reason, had flowed into her son.

Vatanescu held his sisters hand as she slept in the back of the van.

If I could, I would protect you.

First I must provide for myself.

You have always protected me.

Klara Vatanescu had taken after her grandmother Murda. Brusque and efficient, in other circumstances she might have been a sturdy nomad or a foreign minister, but in the unique reality that was hers she was now joining the poorest of the poor, a woman who would have to rely on her only marketable goods. Unable to sleep, Vatanescu peered out of the rear window at the foreign church towers and remote villages inhabited by unknown people with their Teflon saucepans and digibox recorders, people who had special times earmarked for meals, for school, for sex, who had plans for the future, mortgages, visits to the orthodontist for their children, pensions, burial plots, obituaries, flowers on their graves, the whole package.

Vatanescu opened a tin. The transportation contract he had signed with Yegor Kugar included full board, which meant hammocks and corned beef. The year on the tins was 1974, and the country of origin stamped on their undersides was SWE. They had originally been intended for survival in the aftermath of a nuclear war, but to their purchasers dismay that war had never arrived. In the nuclear-weapons-free North they grew old, so the Swedish army sold them back to the supplier it had bought them from. Who then sold them on to an international crime syndicate that used them to feed its hired workforce. The corned beef slid down Vatanescus oesophagus, fermenting in his stomach for a while. It caused cramps that were followed by flatulence.

When Klara stepped out of the van at sunrise the following morning aeroplanes were taking off and landing somewhere far in the distance. Through the vehicles thin walls Vatanescu could hear the engine of a luxury car idling, and he crept over to the window. Pudas, one of his fellow travellers, was complaining about the smell that floated in the van, so thick you could cut it with the tin-opener they used for the corned beef.

You cant stand the smell of a fart?

My sister is being taken from me.

They were on a stretch of derelict land. Beside the car stood some young men who, if one were to be perfectly frank, could only be called morons. Dark glasses, shell-suits of the kind worn by 1990s lager louts, their hair plastered with too much gel. The morons were trying to look like movie gangsters in vain, for their true nature, their identity and their problems crossed all state borders. Petty dope smugglers from Poland, finger-breakers dismissed from the ranks of the Ukrainian army, playground bullies from Turkmenistan. Bullied Albanians, whom life had broken down into bastards.

Vatanescu saw one of the morons opening the door of the Mercedes. Klara leaned over to get into the back seat, and Vatanescu remembered the day he had learned to swim.

I cant swim, dont let go of me. Im scared of water! Except I can do it. I can swim!!!