THE VILLAGE

When a man reaches his old age, it is the height of time to look back and see the whole path of life and what he has done, what his mouth has uttered, and what his hands could have achieved during that long, long trail of life.

I was born at the end of the war when hundreds of thousands of people roamed the eastern region of Finland with the status of war refugees, leaving their former homeland behind.

According to the register of the protestant church, my parents had registered my birth in a small town in the middle of Finland. Later, I came to know that the place was just a temporary stop on that isthmus journey.

I don't know which way or how they came, but I remember a small cottage on the west coast near Turku.

My memories go back to that red-painted cottage home, standing at the foot of a sandhill with pinewood around it. There was a single room, and besides the tiny house, there was also a piece of land. It has given compensation for the soldiers who have been forced to move away from their former region.

Down there was the village, just a mile away along the sand road. The magnificent stone church stood at the center of that village. The most notable estate in the village was known as "the Palace of Kancaste," and it was owned by a family of Finnish-Swedish nobles. There was also another castle named Cruella, a whitewashed house with lots of horse hirelings. A little apart, at the foot of the hill, another side of the road, had the home of a saddle-maker, and near our cottage was the blacksmith, a man who had shot to death a man, the previous dweller of the cottage in which we now lived.

I had a pretty ordinary childhood; I didn't get abused, beaten, or even mistreated; being hungry all the time was the only feeling that followed me everywhere.

I must have been six, or so, and I could remember a lot of young men walking and roaming along the road seeking jobs from the local farmhouses and fields, most of them freed soldiers, who were homeless and jobless, wandering from village to village and from town to town.

My father had a temporary job as a docker in Turku's port, and he spent half of his time planting potatoes in the land beyond the sand-hill.

That way, life went, and there was the move again. I'm not sure what year the transit occurred.Maybe it was 1951, because I attended primary school in that new village.

The village we arrived in, was called ' Haven's Forest." It was a lovely place to live, close to the sea. The house we settled on stood uphill and was an uncompleted building, a little part of the road.

A curving sandy lane ran past the house and then curved by a rocky cliff, which offered a lovely view down over the landscape, showing a green field with grass and woods. I remember myself running along the road wearing my new rubber boots and running with those light boots.

The slope from the upper road descends over the lower path, which runs to the archipelago and the sea.

The nearest neighbor on the other side of the lower road was a white farmhouse, and a little apart from that was another red-painted farmhouse. The lower road ran through the archipelagos directly. It was the road on which I often walked, carrying my fishing rod.

From my early childhood, I have loved the sea.

The circumstances after the war were complex; even though there was a lot of work to be done, poverty existed all over the country among the working class in towns and the countryside.

Because of the enormous war reparations, there was very little payment for ordinary workers. The bread was hard to come by. My father did what he did; being an average worker, he earned his meagre wages by doing this. What about the mum? She was the primus motor of the family. She was a very hard-working hawker; she hawked and did all the household work at home; she hawked by walking around the village and to the town, sometimes travelling; on a bus and sometimes just by walking.

I didn't know when I realised that I had been born into a gipsy family, isolated from the other ones, and I could remember being called the "state ones." It means that there was quite a little business with the relatives or anyone else; I just knew we were different. We were black-haired- except my father, - who had grey eyes), while all the others were brown-eyed, as all the villagers mainly were blond.

One day in springtime, a man and a woman appeared in the doorway ( that time, the outer door of the house was always open). This couple entered the room, and after taking a glance around, the man's sight discovered the picture of Jesus Christ hanging on the wall. Speaking with a soft tone, the man was delighted to see the picture, and he said he had come to the right house because the picture of Jesus Christ hanging on the wall is specific proof of a friendly spirit. The image was there for my mum, since she was a pious woman.

The man, whose name was Ant, had a chair and a guitar with him.

He took out his songbook and began singing and playing his guitar; he sang hymns, and because there were only two chairs available, he asked to leave his chair in the room. He then took his guitar and continued playing and singing. On one occasion, he kneeled and prayed to God. He seemed to be a very earnest man with a great spirit. I heard the man was called an Adventist, and his virgin, a pale-faced older woman named Tyne.

Do not think I was very much impressed by such singing and speaking, for I was too young to care about anything like that. Anyway, that couple was a welcome change in our monotonous lives. After that visit, they became very close friends with us. Ant, the preacher, invited any of us - anytime to pay a visit to his humble home at the seaside.

In the same summer, I went with Ant, first down to the rocky seafront, then into the water,

I followed the preacher at his heels; the preacher went ahead, wading through the water. There was a shallow area between the rock and the main shore, and I recall how the small loose rocks on the seafloor made our wading difficult.Ant was a skinny man of God; I could remember him looking undernourished like almost everybody else looking out of a flannel shirt and loose pants. The pants's legs were rolled up to his knees so that the water couldn't reach them'. I was seven years old, with brown skin and black hair.

There was a cottage on the rock, close to the mainland; it was just a couple hundred yards out of the water. We were making our way along the seabed to home, to the rocky island. I could remember the seagulls wheeling and screaming above our heads. It was the end of spring and the beginning of summer.

The broken coastline ran far out in many directions, with many small isles. It was an archipelago with its cliff and bed of reeds, scarcely inhabited; there could be some of that red-painted croft of a fishing family, living in their isolated poverty.

There was just a single cramped room in this little hut, and the sauna was behind the wall; a single weathered pine stood on a small patch of earth on the rocky island.

I was called Hare, and I was hungry; I was always hungry, Ant had a bag of apples with him, and he beckoned me to sit down and eat the apple. It was a sunny day, and the sea around us was like a mirror with no wind.

Getting complete with the apples and oatmeal, Ant said. We knelt on the ground and prayed for five minutes; I didn't know the words, so I just repeated the few words from Anton's interrogation,

There was a wooden bridge sticking out of the rocky waterfront, it was a short stump of the pier, and there was a flat-bottomed rowboat tied at the end of the pier.

One day, we set out with the boat. It was a lovely day in midsummer; Ant pulled the boat with slow strokes, getting the boat to move carefully through the smooth water. He pulled the boat across the small offing and we landed on the opposite shore. Ant told me we could find good stones there. Then, picking up a rock, he showed it to me. It was a white stone, with a porous surface," It's a marl-stone,", Ant said, " When you find such a stone, pick it up, and carry it to the boat. They are suitable for the Sauna. We will find someone's in the village to pay them".

We picked up the stones and loaded the boat with rocks deep down so that there was hardly a free-board when we started for the mainland.

Because Ant was a well-known holy man all over the coastal region, he managed to borrow a wheelbarrow, and after loading it full of stones, we started for the village.

Ant didn't say any price for the stones; he wanted the villagers to have the rocks; he just knew that he and I were hungry. Ant needed money for just oatmeal and bread. The apples were free. According to his religion, he couldn't eat anything made by living creatures.

Every morning we bulled the boat to the mainland and made it to the village, working there on the field and in the ray.

When the weekend came, Ant could play his guitar, and in the assembly room, people were singing, and a preacher was speaking about God in heaven.

Then came autumn, and there were the tripped trees, the chilly wind blowing, and the ice and snow. The hunger still hung over the sterile environment.

Once again, Ant took his guitar and the Bible under his arm, and we landed on the mainland. The ice on the sea was firm enough to walk on, and we went to the village to have warmth and something to eat. Ant wanted to spread the word of the Lord, and he did so by singing and playing his guitar.

The manse was in the village; the rectory was a large yellow building beyond that giant oak tree.

The priest was a short and fat stump of a man who opened the door. The priest looked at Ant, then left and returned with an apple in his hand. The priest said, "For the poor boy," and handed the apple to me.

After the door slammed in front of us, we turned away and continued our journey. I tried to eat the apple but found it was soft and rotten.

On the road, we came across Mom; she was hawking and dug up a piece of white bread for us.

We wandered in the name of God; Ant carried his guitar and his Bible along the road. .Ant wasn't a usual man -he wasn't mad nor crazy either; he had been, -before God caught him- a high-ranking air engineer. Then he discovered the God who put him on the road and guided him to a simple life.

The winter got more challenging and more complicated; it was snowing, and the northeast was blowing with a blizzard. The fireplace kept warming up, and we had to go look for firewood. There was driftwood to be found under the snow, but when a plank was found, the honest-minded Ant glanced at the blank and refused to take it, saying the plank had been jettisoned and belonged now to the owner of the sawmill on the opposite shore.

One day, Lydia, Ant's wife, came down to see Ant; she was a mouse-grey-fashioned woman and was walking with a bicycle, saying that she could not bicycle in the snow and wished Ant would take care of the bike.

When the winter turned to spring, a gipsy man appeared onshore, waving his hand and jelling over the water, calling for a boat to carry him over. Ant responded to the man's call, shouting back that the water between the island and the shore is shallow enough to come on foot, so with no problem, "it's wade-able, a man could easily cross water with no problem!"!

Despite this wisdom, the man demands a boat because he is afraid of the water. When the gipsy man, who was a swarthy individual, neither old nor young, and wore boots and a hat and spoke with loud words, carried over, he, still keeping his loud speaking, announced that he - didn't know what kind of brute could be lurking him under the surface of the water. What kind of creature is hiding there beneath to get me? "! He announced. Then he said:

"I have heard, here is living a good man, I have heard very much of a man living on this island, of a man afraid of God, so I will come and see you!"! An ant

provides the visitor with an ability.

Where did you hear about me?

"In the village".

When the man had completed his apple, he looked around and said, 'Me too, believe God, and how hard is my life in this valley of shadows,'

Anti nodded and filled the gipsy with good-hearted pleasing,

Then the man said, "I have walked a long way." You are my brother in God, and you have a bike on the opposing strand. Can you lend me your bike because I have a long way to go, and I am tired of walking? "Anti pleased the man again and promised to give him the bicycle?

When autumn came, I went to a prime school; I was seven. The school offered regular meals; even the children in that school were mainly blond. The other pupils didn't bully or mock me. Children's poor everyday clothes are of American aid and mostly golf trousers or something else that fits poorly in the northern climax. The following summer, my parents paid for another house. Soon we moved, travelling on the stake of a truck with a few pieces of furniture loaded on the lory, and we all, except mum, who sat in the cabin, - were seated among the furniture on the stage. Dad sat with his felt hat on his head; he didn't know where we were hearing because Mum had arranged all the business for the new house.

That home wasn't very far from the previous one - just an hour or two to drive along the coast, situated in the Holy Land's region. The village is on the west coast of Finland and was a small 'pueblo'. I remember the inhabitants of the area having a usage of their own, which sounded strange to outsiders and was the typical habitual behaviorism of the coastal people.

The house was L-shaped, built in the so-called "old skipper house" style, with a yard behind it. The road ran past the house. The house had been built long ago, the kitchen's ceiling was curving like the ceiling of a ship's cabin. The nearest neighbor's house belonged to an ancient sailor, a huge older man called Lainio, living with his small old woman. With his watery eyes and an earnest expression on his face, this huge, skinny old-timer was sitting daily outside his home, making spar buoys for his son, who worked as a pilot.

The houses stood along with the road and along the shoreline, all of the traditional wooden houses. Not far from us was a little farmhouse with one cow and some chickens, occupied by a widow, and her new man, who was bent double by his bad back, and close to that house lived another widow who had lost her husband in the minesweeping operation.

Then there was the most prominent and wealthy farmhouse, and it belonged to the captain and the sawmill owner.

The captain was a tiny, skinny man with a daunting tone. I could remember his voice booming over the field as he called in his son.

There was a good deal of suspicion in the air as we settled into the village. I understand; perhaps they were afraid of the plague of gipsies. Upon discovering that there would be no risk of that kind, they calmed down and stared at us with great curiosity.

I could remember seeing tractors and a few automobiles in that village, primarily horses and carts, and the horses ran all the time, and the men stood on the coaches as they speeded past by the house.

I went to the second glas of the school, and they accepted me into the community; I have no remembrance of that time, when young boys used to throw stones, aiming at the birds and everything else in sight.

One day, I was walking from the school with a dark-eyed and haired fellow who wasn't a gipsy, although he was so dark that he was called Black Peter. Then and now, we were throwing stones, Black Peter, who was much taller than myself, was throwing tones all around us.

The next day, came an angry mum, saying that we had thrown a stone on her son.

The stones were the worst thing in my youth. Sometimes I could throw a rock through the window of some house, and I stoned the birds all the time.

Mum was a small but strong-willed woman with a deep sense of religion. Mom's days were always full of tasks and toiling for the household, seeking the hay for the cow from which we had milk, and she constantly pressed us, children, to collect firewood for cooking.

The village was named 'sanction', a strange Hispanic name; I don't know the name's origin, but it sounded foreign. One might ask if the village was some Spaniards' village. I don't know where the name came from; I only know that almost every older man in that village had been a sailor on some seagoing ships.

An old-timer was living in a small farmhouse with his furious wife and with his two daughters. The man used some time to drop in to talk with my father. They sat in our tiny kitchen, and I could overhear as the man said he was sailing to New Caledonia and had jumped off in Australia, as many others did in those years. He jumped and ran away, was found and returned to the ship. The second time," the man said, "I avoided the police and got so far that they didn't get me."

The closeness of the sea was everywhere. Across the sea's arm, on the opposite shore, was situated another village. There was also an ancient wooden chapel on the hill; it was called among the local people, "the chapel for seafarers."

These strips of land were named after the Holy Land and Holy Land strand, which have adopted such names in the far north; it didn't dawn on me until late that I came to know a legend of the region. Inhabitants of coastal areas have lived isolated for a hundred and a hundred years, and there have been reports of pirates. Somehow, I could still feel the suspension as an inheritance for strangers.

The medieval shipping lanes had pulled near the coast, through the rocky archipelagos. This part of the coastal region was hazardous for the navigation of ships along the rocky shore. The legend says many merchantmen were posted missing, and not a trace was found of the disappeared vessels or of the crew.

A rumor of pirates ran over to Stockholm; the Bishop of Uppsala had sent a crusade to the penetrated wild coast known as the "Evil Land'.

The Bishop Erik of Uppsala stranded the Evil Land and killed all the males of the island, and after that christening, built a wooden chapel on the hill. After completing his task for Christians, he renamed the region the Holy Land.Before leaving the area- the Bishop appointed a saint to be a village priest. The sole male among the female folk became the grandfather to the oncoming generations. One could say that from those past years and days, there is still a trace of the initial kinship.

I made acquaintances and friendships with some boys. I got to know too many of them. One was Garl, who lived with his many brothers and sisters near the excellent harbour; the great wharf was the customary place for young people to gather on the great wharf between the two storehouses of salted herring. Sometimes, boys could be fishing with their rods and swimming around.

Down by the waterfront was the popular holiday and pleasure centre for the village's people. We could gather down to the harbour to repair nets or set off for fishing. A short, fat wicker man, a native of the village in the same manner as all the other villagers, made smoked herring. Sometimes outer fishers could bring a cascade of seals as the fisherman needed just the lower jaw for the kill bounty; they then gave us the other part of the seal's body. We took the seal's skin and nailed it on the outer wall of the net's store. Then we boiled up the grease, and when it was turning into black oil, we sold it to the oil for a house painter.

A sailing ship was reading in the bay; it was a small schooner that had been commissioned to transport firewood to Turku.Once a year, she made her trip, under the command of her owner, a man we knew named Aku.

The coast was dotted with rock and small islands, and the water was only three meters deep.Such an environment offered the right setting for the lads to go fishing, boating, and exploring the islands.

I soon settled into the life of the village and adopted the local usage.

The number of inhabitants of the village was less than two hundred. There were houses on either side of the road, over low hills and with many curves cutting the village into two, called the seaside and the forest sider.

Among us, the lads, there were many nicknames. The captain's son was called 'Ponso' because he was well-fed, I was called 'Jumabaroo', and they lived on the waterfront. The village was called "the dwellers of the strand'.

Boating at sea and wandering among the isles was popular among the lads.

School was compulsory. I was in the second class of the primary school when, one morning, two new pupils emerged. They were a boy and a girl, both of them at my age. They sat behind me, and the boy asked, in an unusual manner, "if eating at school is compulsory?"

I wondered the question because the regular meal in school was the most important thing. Even if the meal wasn't much more than potatoes and a brown sauce, it was free, and for many of the pupils, it was just one of the days. The girl and the boy were newcomers to the village; they came from inland, invited by a retired carpenter with a big house in the middle of the village. I made a best friend with a boy named Taps. Maybe we all had the same mutual sense of being an outsider in these interrelated villages.

There are no villages without their village fools. There was the Protestant Church standing in the middle of the village, and there was also the organ, which needed to be press air; the church was a high stone building with a bell tower, and there were every Sunday those ceremonies and services for God. Sometimes I could see an older man bicycling on the paths leading to the church. The fellow lived alone in some kind of hut nearby the graveyard. He was called Topi, and since there was no electricity available in the church, his job was to stamp air for the organ. It was said that he liked homemade wino and often got drunk. On one Sunday, when the church service was going on, the priest spoke, Topi had fallen asleep, and the cantor as well. Maybe not so long because he awakened in the middle of the priest's speech, believing it was too late to deliver the air. He started stamping the petals. The hustle caused the cantor to wake up as well and start to play the liturgic. In his stool, the priest at once knew who was guilty of this commotion and addressed his blame upwards to Topi," What the hell you have done, Topi".

The red-painted farmhouse was an average place to play corona and cards. The master of this house was a man called Kain. He was quite a calm character; he could sit in his palace immobile like a stone, smoking his cigarette to the end without jolting the ash away, so that when his cigarette was smoked to the end, the ash was still hanging at full length like an unbroken stick.

Many types of men could be seen as the fools of a village. One of em' was a robust man who lived alone, little apart from the village plating onion. He had the vision to go up to the Atlantic to fish for Atlantic herring, and one morning the people of the village could find a vessel anchored in the cove. The boys visited aboard. It was a small craft, about sixty tons, with no engine, and she stank of old oil and rotten wood, and there was nothing to bind her. She lay there for two weeks, then she sank. One morning, I saw just half of the hull above the water. The deck tilted, and another side of the vessel was underwater. It was a sad sight. All the village volunteer firefighters set off with the boat, pumps, and buckets to pump her up. I was in one of those small boats tied on the upper side of the submerged hull; my task was to standby on the sloping side and be ready to cut the ties off of the boats if the vessel capsized. It was my first rescue task, and I was fourteen. When the craft gets bailed out and pumped empty. She was up again. The owner of the vessel began weighting the anchors. The chains were badly crossed and as the fool screwed the windlass with impressive strength, the bar broke. The owner burst into great joy, showing everybody the broken bar, he yelled: "Look at what my hand has done." The iron is hard, but harder is my arm."

A well-known retired seaman was pulling his rowboat past the sunken hulk; he paused his pulling and looked up at the vessel, " You fool cannot perform anything!" I heard him shouting out his opinion. The owner now spat his rage over the side down to the boat puller, "You, you, small bug, I come over and smash your head with my wrist."

"You will have your madman hat on your head and I will send you to the mental hospital! "They come and take you away." was the reply from the boat.

So went life in that village.

At that time, there was little or nothing real sexy available among the villagers. The older men talked about sexy things when they worked together; among the womenfolk, sexy things were not a topic.

The boys were in two groups; the' big boys' and the 'tiny boys," by local usage. When the big boys walked in a group on the road, sharing their girls' experiences, the tiny boys followed the big boys, listening to their talk.

The boys could catch a girl in the school bath trying to touch her, and the boy would get nothing.

Some boys, even if they had reached their full age and joined the army, did not get the sexy; I, like a stranger, did not touch a girl; these were the mob's darlings.

At fifteen, I had given a hand in backing the hay, working with the wife of the silent man. She was a vigorous woman at the age of twenty-seven. She wanted to play cat and mouse; I touched her breast; the touch was just a light. The woman fell on the haystack, laying there and making out a slight whine from her half-opened slips.

I was full of lust yet couldn't do anything, and the very moment went by. With a bewildered mind and kicking in my pants, I continued working with the hay.

Every lad of pauper from the coastal region wanted to go to sea as soon as they fulfilled the request to be fifteen years old, which was an adequate age to sign aboard a vessel.

Tapas went to the sea; he got on board a ship named Arla, a boat which made a voyage far out to the south, and I got a postcard from Canaries Island. "Here swinging the palms and me,", it read.

I went to the ship's yard to work as a tank cleaner. It was a dirty job, and several young people belonged there.We cleaned the new-build tankers' tanks by scratching off the rusted oil from the tanks' inside bulkheads; by evening, we looked like a brotherhood of chimney sweepers.

It was annoying to me that people used to take me for a good boy. I hated that good boy; I didn't possess virtues. Instead, I have an indifferent disposition.

At the beginning of the oncoming winter, when sleet wiped down with the stiff wind, I got my passport, a sailor- passport. I had walked forty miles to get it.

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