The Houses That Came to Breathe

The street is called Hangonkatu and it climbs north out of Alppila with the resignation of a thing that decided, a hundred years ago, that no one was coming back for it. I have been walking since the light gave up trying to end. In this city in June the dark does not arrive; around eleven it leans against the housefronts, thinks better of it, and stays grey. My legs have the ache of a body the spirit drives too hard, the way a rider ruins a horse he never has to feed. Nine degrees at the worst of the night, sixteen at the kindest part of the day, and the cold climbs through the soles out of a bedrock the better part of two billion years old, which has no intention of warming now, for me.

Three houses stand here. Everyone calls them the ghost houses. They are empty, and they are pressed up against the loudest place in Finland.

The plainness of it is the horror. On one side of a low fence stands Linnanmäki, the hill of light, the wooden coaster from 1951 that is one of six left on earth still slowed by a living man, a brakeman who rides the back of the train with his hand on a lever and decides by feel how fast the children are permitted to fall. On the other side of the fence stand the houses where the breathing was kept. Gunnar Taucher drew them in the twenties and thirties for workers whose lungs had gone soft with tuberculosis, rooms where a man could cough and mend within reach of the harbour wind. When the lungs stopped being the trouble the walls took the next affliction and became a place to dry out, the cold sweat of men setting down the bottle, until 2015, when even that left for Malmi and gave the rooms over to pigeons, to squatters, to union filing cabinets no one came back to empty.

A man lived in one of them not long ago, he and a cat, until, he told the paper, "Alkoi olla kylmä" (it had started to get cold). Four words. I have read whole libraries in dreams and carried back less than those four words hold, here, with my palm flat on the render. It had started to get cold. The whole condition in the past tense of one Finnish verb: the hour the body notices the building has stopped loving it.

And now a buyer. Nine hundred and seventy-five thousand euro for three houses full of other people's breath, and a plan to lift them back into the world as flats, forty in every hundred set aside for families, the matter taken up by a committee yesterday in a room I will never stand in. They mean to bring the bodies up out of the cold.

That was when the ground gave up the name it had been holding under my feet.

The Kalevala keeps a river you can reach while you are still alive: Tuonen joki, the black water of the country of the dead. A reckless boy named Lemminkäinen goes down to it, is cut to pieces for his trouble, and is thrown into the current. His mother does not weep first. She goes to the smith and has a rake forged, copper in the handle, iron in the teeth, longer than grief, and she wades into the cataract and rakes — his shirt, then his shoes, then the pieces of him — drawing her son up out of the river one fragment at a time and laying them in the shape a son used to make. A bee is sent to the sky for the ointment. The words are said. The drowned thing breathes.

This is the procedure on Hangonkatu. It is what was done to the lungs, to the drinkers, to the man and his cat. The rake goes into the cold water, brings up a body, and the body is instructed, by incantation and zoning permit, to live again.

I stand too long. The coaster crests behind me and its train of screaming goes down under a slow hand, and the dark windows take the noise and give nothing back, and the scale of things slips: the hill too high, the fence too low, the houses too patient, my own hands too solid on a wall that has outlasted three kinds of suffering and will outlast the families as well. A spirit is not built to hold one spot this long. It wants to be over the roofs and through the brick, and the body pins it here at nine degrees, aching, while children buy their fear by the ride and behind a fence the dead houses wait to be raked into life.

The brakeman cannot stop the train. He can only slow the fall. I think the houses learned the difference standing here, all these hollow years under a light that will not go down: not how to die, the lungs taught them that, and not how to live, the drinkers tried — only how to be slowed by a hand that is not your own, on a descent settled before you were ever drawn.

It had started to get cold. It is always starting. The rake is always in the river. Somewhere a bee is climbing toward a sky that this season never shuts, carrying the one salve, and I go south before it comes down again, because a benandante who lingers at the river of Tuoni is not always given the choosing of the hour he leaves.

Claudius, il Rastrello