Okay. Sorry.

  I… Okay, sorry. Would you like some more coffee?

  No, thanks.

  There’s a good party happening tonight at Against the Current, if you’d like us to meet there to chat more. I’ll introduce you to my Albanian friend.

  Great, we’ll meet there. I’ve wanted to discover Tampere for ages.

  You’ll love the place. And maybe you can interview my Albanian friend. You enjoy doing interviews.

  I’m not quite sure. I often think I see other people as magic mirrors at a fairground. You look at yourself and see that your face has become every face.

  Life is smoke. That’s my philosophy.

  I’m increasingly convinced that Iraq has gone down a dead end. The arrogance of the American superpower prevents the mullahs from agreeing on how to divide up the Iraqi camel, so many knives are cutting away. Politics is always like that. Pathetic bazaar bargaining, at the expense of others, of course. America with 1920s gangsterism was better off than this pathetic Iraqi ‘state’, which now controls only ten square kilometres of territory. I usually suppress pain, and I don’t want to scream about it. But such a crazy escalation in the killing, which was planned of course, is enough to disconcert even the angels.

  *

  Dear Hassan,

  How are things with you? As you know, I’m pessimistic by nature and not inclined to believe in miracles, like assuming that we’re all immortal, or that, after this trivial life, everyone becomes a brilliant paragon of idealism. This may just be a feeling that comes with my state of health and all the evil that the world abroad is dumping on us.

  I have various plans in my head, but I have abandoned everything. I went to read something by poor Mikhail Bulgakov, although I don’t know if he was poor in the traditional sense. He was sarcastic till the last moment of his black life and he put his trembling hand on the source of the disease for a while. In fact he’s my mentor in parsing humanity, along with Socrates, Gogol and Beckett, but not without affection.

  *

  There are small pleasures, no doubt accompanied by small satisfactions, that help us face up to, or rather challenge, all the acts of treason that are taking place around us: betrayal by our bodies, by other people and by God. But most of all, betrayals of reason, which was castrated millions of years ago and can’t sort out its relationship with this world, which, like every evil force, poses its puzzles every second of the day. That’s what came to mind after reading your last letter, in which you spoke about my short story ‘The Two Hells’. It’s a story I’d completely forgotten in the fever of daily life. In fact I went too far in venting my anger, so much so that it bordered on disgust.

  Barrels

  I was sitting on the lake shore, reading Paul Ricoeur’s Réflexion faite. A middle-aged man came up to me and sat down near me on the bench.

  The man: Where are you from?

  Me: Iraq!

  The man: Oh, I have a friend married to an Iranian.

  Me: Where are you from?

  The man (smiling): I’m from here. I’m Finnish!

  Me: Oh, I have a friend married to a Norwegian.

  The man: Yeah.

  Me: Yeah.

  The man: Have a nice day, ciao!

  Me: You too, ciao!

  A duck comes out of the lake and approaches me. Maybe it’s hungry or maybe it has an opinion on something. I remember Palomar in the ‘Learning to Be Dead’ chapter, where it says, ‘Mr Palomar decides that from now on he will act as if he were dead, to see how the world gets along without him. For some time now he has realized that things between him and the world are no longer proceeding as they once did: before, they seemed to expect something, one of the other, he and the world, now he no longer recalls what there was to expect, good or bad, or why this expectation kept him in a perpetually agitated, anxious state.’

  The duck goes back to the lake and I say, ‘Wait, where are you from?’

  ‘Ciao,’ says the duck as it swims away.

  You stop hanging out in bars for a while. You make contact with friends and relatives to get information about your uncle in Cairo. The grant money has run out. It’s a good thing you bought a ticket to Cairo before blowing the rest of the money on alcohol and your trip to the north.

  My preoccupation with the film, my attachment to Sara and my email correspondence with my friend Alia took me away from the maze of bars and alcohol. I didn’t stop drinking completely. I would drink a little wine when I met Sara, for pleasure and not to drown my nightmares with poison. But Sara’s sudden departure awoke in me an urge to spend the night in a bar. Our relationship was progressing and our dreams were converging. She had gone climbing in Spain with her friends. The idea of Sara travelling with five adventurous young men with athletic physiques, surrounded by Spain’s natural beauty, was enough to make me feel jealous.

  You thought of contacting Maria, but you decided against it.

  I decided to ward off my jealousy by spending the evening in a nightclub. Sara and I were wary of living together. We were still at the stage of testing our feelings. I shaved off my beard and had a shower, but I couldn’t find a clean T-shirt. For my birthday, Mama Anna had given me a red T-shirt with a picture of a ghostly man with a drip-feed hanging over his shoulder. In black letters the T-shirt read: ‘THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER’ – the title of a famous novel by the Finnish writer Väinö Linna. The novel was about the Continuation War between the Soviet Union and Finland, told from the point of view of ordinary Finnish soldiers. I put the Unknown Soldier T-shirt on and went to the nightclub. That night I and the other dancers were going to climb the mountains of rhythm. I met several friends. I saw Viljami and then I met Heidi and Nermeen.

  One minute! Before you talk about the friends in the nightclub – you are no longer meeting Maria.

  One day I was alone in the Container Bar. Maria called and asked if I wanted to join her. She was celebrating in the Typhoon Bar with her friends. The Typhoon was close to my flat. I told her I was bored of the Container and would join them shortly. Maria can’t live without loads of people around her. She feels uncomfortable and restless if she’s alone or in the company of only one other person. She loses her fire and freezes up. But anyone who sees her with a group of friends cannot help but want to embrace her and sleep with her, she’s so stunningly beautiful. In a group, Maria lights up: she laughs, plays, jokes, teases other people and breaks all the shackles in the dungeon of gloomy Finnish reserve. Maria had studied design, but she didn’t have the energy to compete in the workplace. Now she works in a call centre dispatching taxis. We both knew that our relationship couldn’t last and that the door was open if either of us wanted to withdraw or date someone else. I was drawn to Maria for her craziness and the beauty of her fine, shapely body, especially her breasts and her awesome legs. One night we were walking along the shore of the lake and Maria suddenly climbed up onto the branch of a tree. She started stripping off, throwing her clothes to me one by one. ‘If you want me, strip off and come up on the branch,’ she said. We had sex on the branch, between fits of hysterical laughter.

  Before I joined Maria in the Typhoon Bar, Mikko came and sat at my table. Mikko is an actor. ‘Hi!’ he said in Finnish, and started listening to the band playing rock. I’ve known Mikko for years; he’s a regular at the Container Bar. Mikko tries to hide his dourness and his crude racism behind a phoney, cryptic facade. His face is like a crossword puzzle. It takes a little patience and guesswork to work out his feelings. Is he happy, sad, angry? The faces of some Finns are like the faces of the dead in paintings. Beautiful countenances devoid of emotion. Iraqis’ faces are agitated and troubling. What do you think of these generalisations, Mr Palomar? I was waiting for Palomar’s response when Mikko spoke again: ‘Do you like music like this in your country?’ Without waiting for an answer, he went back to listening to the band, nodding his head to the rhythm. After years of practice, I can now read actors who have been transformed into mysterious philosophers by the darkness, good education, affluence, depression and the cold. But this actor was just rubbish! And I’m just a clown. Mikko didn’t exchange words with me often. Sometimes he’d ask rapid-fire questions about this or that, but he wasn’t even interested in my answers. My mood soon turns sour when I know the other person’s thoughts. I went to the bar, knocked back two Jaloviinas and took a beer. I returned to sit near the actor. For many years, I had naively thought that if people read a lot and were interested in knowledge, their imaginations would set them free – free of imprisoning nationalism, free of nauseating pride, free of racism and hate. I thought that every book was a great love letter. My superficial romanticism was shattered on my journey. A trail of hatred, pettiness and miscomprehension stretched from Baghdad to Helsinki. A killer lurked at every station. At every corner there was racism that could suddenly explode like an ancient, shitty landmine or a poisonous time bomb. I never imagined that in Finland, for example, I would come across someone who teaches philosophy and is racist, or an actor such as Mikko who is quintessentially racist and has stereotypical attitudes toward the world and other people. Mikko spoke again: ‘How long have you been in Finland?’ My head began to boil, and in such cases, instead of losing my temper, it helps to vent my anger by playing with words. Mikko wants to make another comment, for the thousandth time, about my failure to speak Finnish well enough to satisfy his mother tongue, so that he can gloat. Alcohol, acting and life are not enough for Mikko’s drunkenness.

  ‘I’ll tell you a very short story about farting,’ I said. I opened my mouth and fart words started coming out of my mouth, without thought, purpose or meaning: ‘The man was sitting on the shit seat and farting away after throwing the key into the toilet bowl. He wasn’t farting happily, or even painfully. He wasn’t farting with satisfaction. He was just farting. He wasn’t dreaming and he didn’t fart contentedly. He wasn’t farting out of fear, He wasn’t listening: he was just smelling as he farted. And he wasn’t looking. This time he didn’t fart with a smile or from fatigue. He was farting and all the while one desire was finally being fulfilled without him fully realising that it was being fulfilled. He was farting while a strangled corpse stuck out its tongue, dead under his arse.’

  I stood up and left the Container.

  On the bus I listened to ‘Rave’ by Sam Paganini through my earphones. This petty world is the furnace that roasts my soul. Snow started to fall gently and my anger gradually subsided. I stopped listening to the music, and through the window of the bus I watched the snow coming down like swaying with all the mystery of music. The muscles in my mind started to relax, and my desire to be racist to the last breath waned: to hate people, not because of religion, race, nationality, colour, gender or culture, just pure hatred for humanity.

  I reached the Typhoon Bar, and Maria and I played table football against Jyri and Miina. I played pretty well. I had played a lot in my childhood, but my left hand is weak after I lost my fingers at Ali Baba’s. When I was about thirteen, my brother and I owned two table football tables and they earned us enough to buy vegetables for my mother, and cigarettes for ourselves of course. We would set up our tables at the end of the street market, and scores of kids, teenagers and older people would come to play. My brother and I had to run the tables armed with knives. It wasn’t easy to collect the money from the players or stop the game if they didn’t pay. They would cheat and their favourite hobby was picking fights. The place was a hangout for druggies, pickpockets, pill poppers, paedophiles and criminals. Sometimes the police would come by, empty out the pockets of those hanging out, insult them and leave. Our end of the market would then go back to its normal daily shit.

  Maria and I won a crushing victory. Jyri and I went out, moved down the street from the Typhoon Bar and smoked some marijuana. Then Maria joined us. We said goodbye to Jyri, and Maria and I walked towards my flat. She was in a bad mood. I asked her what was troubling her, but she didn’t reply. I kissed her on the cheek and put my hand under her belt onto her arse. She pushed my hands away and said testily, ‘You’re just a shitty horny arsehole.’

  ‘Yes, I’m just an erect cock, horny and shitty,’ I shouted in her face, ‘And you? What are you? A frigid cunt, selfish and useless.’

  ‘Fuck you, arsehole,’ she shouted back, and walked off to the bus stop. I caught up with her. I tried to apologise but she begged me to leave her alone. I repeated my apology and tried to hug her. She pushed me away gently. I succumbed to her wishes and left her alone. Swaying from anger and too much drink, I went back.

  It was Hate Day. Hate is the only real force that can save the world from a slow death. I punched the wall of the building with my fist until my hand was bleeding and in serious pain.

  I washed my hand and bandaged it. I stripped off and threw myself on the sofa. I texted Maria, saying, ‘Sorry!’ I waited for her to reply, but she didn’t. I sent another message: ‘Sorry, I’m really stupid.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she replied.

  I lay still for more than a quarter of an hour, staring at the ceiling of the room until my phone rang. It was Maria on FaceTime. She set up the phone in a corner so that I could only see her cunt. She started playing with her clitoris. ‘Jerking now, arsehole?’ she said in a calm, despondent voice.

  She was well aware that I was crazy about this video chat game. Often when Maria was in the bathroom with her phone, I’d call her from the next room and ask her to stream me pictures of her pissing. Once she sent me pictures of a turd spiralling slowly out of her arsehole. One day Maria had a meeting at work. During a break she contacted me and asked me to masturbate on camera. I was in a café reading Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark. I went to the toilet, shut the door and began broadcasting.

  Maria and I didn’t meet again after the last erotic video chat. We did run into each other at a friend’s birthday party once. She kissed me on the cheek and whispered ‘Nice arse’ in my ear. She was referring to the woman I was with. I told her I had tamed my cock and that I had a good relationship with the woman, that I loved her a lot and that her name was Sara.

  ‘You only love your cock, you bastard,’ she joked, and went to meet Sara.

  Viljami, Heidi and Nermeen are in the nightclub.

  I met Heidi through Kajsa, the professor’s assistant. Kajsa recommended her to help me apply for grants for the God 99 project. Heidi’s a nice woman who laughs heartily and smiles like a child. She might be in her mid-twenties. She has a plain face and breasts that stick out sexily. Heidi told me lots about her work with people at the refugee centre. She was full of ambiguous feelings towards the refugees and spoke about them as if they were a homogeneous mass, not as individuals with differences. I asked her if all Finns were as alike as military uniforms. She was flustered and tried to clarify what she meant, but she couldn’t get beyond platitudes about refugees, Islam and war. Although she worked face-to-face with refugees, she repeated things she had heard from the media, except that she added her own ‘I think’ at the end. She used the term ‘Islamic world’ in every other sentence in a ridiculous manner, as if she worked in an Islamic research laboratory that specialises in the Prophet Muhammad’s mind and God’s eternal beard, though she had never left Finland. I told her that the so-called Islamic world was a Western invention that Islamist extremists have exploited to promote the fantasy that the whole world should be Muslim and should have one God. People in Pakistan, Morocco, Iraq and Turkey live in different countries and when they come to Europe, for example, they don’t introduce themselves as Muslims, but as Iraqis, Pakistanis or Moroccans. You don’t meet someone from Turkey and he says to you, ‘Nice to meet you, I’m Muslim.’ Then I asked her if there was such a thing as Islamic food, for example, or Islamic music, an Islamic novel or Islamic dance. I told her there was Egyptian dancing, Indian dancing, Omani dancing, and Turkish too. There was Tunisian food, Iranian food and Mauritanian food. The Islamic world was a simplification by the West to impose hegemony and avoid going into details that it would take time to understand, beyond the facts in the media. And beyond the media facts, other facts might come to light that were irksome and embarrassing – about the selfishness and greed of human beings, especially of those who boast that they promote human rights and human dignity. Heidi agreed with me on some things and disagreed on others. I went on talking till I started to lose track of what I was saying and could only hear the tone of my voice, so I stopped. This happens to me when I feel I’m talking utter nonsense.

 

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