Eye of the Red Tsar

33

LATER THAT EVENING, PEKKALA SAT IN THE FRONT ROOM, WITH HIS back against the wall, legs stretched out across the bare floorboards. The Kalevala lay on his lap.

Kirov came in, carrying a pile of wood for the fire. He dumped it with a clatter on the hearth.

“No sign of Anton?” asked Pekkala.

“No sign,” replied Kirov, slapping the wood dust off his palms. He nodded towards the Kalevala. “Why don’t you read me some of your book?”

“Unless you speak Finnish, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Read some anyway.”

“I doubt you will find this on your list of texts approved by the Communist Party.”

“If you won’t tell, then I promise that neither will I.”

Pekkala shrugged. “Very well.” He opened the book and began to read, the Finnish words rolling like thunder in his throat and cracking off the roof of his mouth like the snap of lightning in the air. Although he read from this book all the time, he rarely spoke its text out loud, and it had been years since he’d had the chance to speak his native tongue. Even his brother had abandoned it. As he read now, it sounded both distant and familiar, like a memory borrowed from another person’s life.

After a minute, he stopped and looked up at Kirov.

“Your language,” Kirov said, “sounds like someone prying nails out of wood.”

“I’ll try to find some way to take that as a compliment.”

“What did it mean?”

Pekkala’s gaze returned to the book. He stared at the words and slowly they began to change, speaking to him in the language Kirov could understand. He told Kirov the story of the wanderer Väinämöinen and his attempts to persuade the goddess Pohjola to come down from the rainbow where she lived and join him in his travels. Before she would agree, Pohjola gave Väinämöinen impossible tasks to perform, such as tying an egg into a knot, splitting a horsehair with a dull knife, and scraping birch bark from a stone. While performing the final task, which was to make a ship out of wood shavings, Väinämöinen gashed his knee with an axe. The only thing which would stop the bleeding was a spell called the Source of Iron, and Väinämöinen set out to find someone who knew the magic words.

“Are they all as strange as that?”

“They are strange until you understand them,” replied Pekkala, “and then it is as if you’ve known them all your life.”

“Did you ever read that story to Alexei?” asked Kirov.

“I read him some, but not that one. To hear of a spell like that would have given him hope where there was none.” As he spoke these words, Pekkala could not help wondering if his own hopes for finding Alexei alive were as hollow as a spell to stop the boy’s bleeding.