Burnt Land Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 Tua Harno & Otava Publishing Company, Ltd.

  Translation copyright © 2017 Kristian London

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Oranssi Maa by Otava Publishing Company, Ltd. in Finland in 2015. Translated from Finnish by Kristian London. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017. Published in the English language by arrangement with Otava Group Agency, Helsinki, Finland.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503943995

  ISBN-10: 1503943992

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  For my sister and brother

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  PART TWO

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  PART THREE

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  EPILOGUE

  One of seven . . .

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Girls from Western lands would come to me; they had been for quite some time. Most just wanted to cry. But then the woman with white hair walked into my home. She was covered in jagged ashy marks, as if her insides had been consumed by fire and shattered, the shards branding shadows onto her skin.

  I noticed she was receptive to touch, and I stroked her face. I told her, “Don’t worry. I know where I need to take you.”

  PART ONE

  LOVE ENDS

  LOVE BEGINS

  1

  The woman at the gold mine was straight out of a Tarantino movie. She smelled like mandarin oranges and cigarettes, handled the dumper like it was an agile little city car, sang along to her country-music playlist, called Sanna love and darling.

  She snorted at Sanna’s questions about gender equality at the mine, but shared her life story without being asked. She started driving a dumper because she’d been married to a miner. He earned thousands of dollars at the pit; she took home minimum wage bartending in town. It hadn’t been a difficult decision to change careers.

  “How much do you make now?” Sanna asked.

  “Ten thousand dollars a month.” That was almost seven thousand euros. “It only takes three weeks of training,” she continued, as if Sanna could use the tip.

  She missed working at the bar; it suited her. “I liked the nights and the music, you know, but once you get used to this kind of money, there’s no way you can live on what you can make in town. Especially after your marriage falls apart.”

  The woman laughed. Marriage!

  “You know what I think? Marriage wasn’t meant for these times. We live too long. You have someone waiting at home, love?”

  Sanna shook her head, focused on unraveling her snarled headphones and plugging them into her phone. She checked to make sure the recording was audible through the racket. At first she couldn’t hear anything but the crackle and scratchy sounds, the squawking radio that lunged from wistful songs to warnings from the pit, but then she heard the woman’s voice, calm and clear.

  They’re always listening to music here, Sanna reflected. She’d been riding along with mining-company employees all week, and she could hear the drivers’ favorite songs in the background of every interview recording. Couldn’t they stand a moment’s peace and quiet? Were they so accustomed to the thump and rhythm that silence blared through their heads in a migraine-crystalline agony they were desperate to turn off? Douse the shrieking stillness in booze—that was one way to lower the volume. That’s what she would do.

  The dumper lurched as boulders tumbled from the excavator into the bed. Riding in it felt like floating; the engine rumbled steadily, and the rock rasped. It was several miles from the excavator to the dump site. Sanna hadn’t realized the mine was so enormous: it was crisscrossed by a network of roads controlled by traffic lights. Dropping a load took half an hour each way, and drivers had to haul rock for the full twelve-hour shift.

  Traffic was heavy, so the driver decided to take a smoke break. Sanna climbed out of the cab with her. The platform was diamond-patterned metal with yellow railings. Everywhere she looked Sanna saw rust-red soil, rough roads, heaped stone. Water-tank trucks drove back and forth, spraying the roadbeds to keep the dust down. The wet, pitted sand looked like burnt flesh.

  The dumpers were sluggish yellow metal pachyderms; they pushed on, swayed and groaned when they needed to stop, turn, or brake. The excavators teetered atop their heaps, scooping up rock in shovels the size of dumpsters. Sanna was reminded of black spiders tortured by having all but one of their legs yanked out. The Jeeps were white and, from Sanna’s perspective on the dumper platform, as puny and pitiful as smart cars.

  When Sanna first arrived at the mine, she’d been taken to the viewing platform that overlooked the entire pit, a hole around two thousand feet deep. “You can see it from the moon,” the operations manager had bragged. Sanna had tried to appear enthusiastic.

  Now they were near the bottom. Sanna could spot old mining-tunnel entrances in its banked sides. A hundred years ago, before the era of big mining companies, men used to stake claims and mine them solo. They had crawled through dark, claustrophobic shafts by light of oil lamp, carrying sticks of homemade dynamite. The dumper driver followed Sanna’s gaze up the sides of the pit.

  “Those old mine shafts are graves. No one noticed if a man vanished from town, or if they did, they more than likely snuck into his claim and robbed it. Those tunnels are thick with miners who suffocated to death or blew themselves up. Now and again you’ll see bones among the rubble.”

  The woman’s sunglasses reflected the landscape in duplicate; the gold heart on her canine tooth glittered. Were some women born this way, or did life make them like that?

  “Are you ever afraid?” Sanna asked.

  “Of explosions and all, you mean? No.”

  Sanna nodded, although that wasn’t what she had meant. Are you afraid in general, almost all the time? Are you afraid someone’s going to rape you and at the same time afraid no one’s ever going to want to touch you again?

  They climbed back in to continue driving; Sanna gripped the handle above the door and went down her battery of questions: Did men and women attend trainings together? Did she find it useful?

  The woman recited the company’s gender-equality mantra: “We all have to be able to work together.” She explained how men got most of the training. They had to be taught to see women as equals. This was Australia, after all: men here weren’t used to women yet. “Back in the days of the penal colony,
women were few and far between.”

  Sanna made a note; she remembered there had been mention of the Australians’ low tolerance for women in the company’s gender-equality policy. She had wondered whether it was the same sort of cultural myth as the Finns’ love of liquor: a myth that turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  “I mean normal women, now. There were prostitutes here from the get-go, from the day gold was discovered. They travel hand in hand, gold mines and whores.

  “These days the men at the mines tolerate the presence of women, but we aren’t allowed to have the same jobs. It’s important we don’t earn more than them. Having the financial upper hand means wiggle room. It gives men the freedom to do what they want, before they get married and especially after, once the woman’s tied down to the house and the kids.”

  The driver sounded like she was talking about her ex-husband.

  She asked Sanna if the attention she had received made her uncomfortable. She was the new girl in town; it was inevitable. And then she told Sanna she needed to watch out.

  “It’s safe at the pit—”

  “Is it?” Sanna broke in. “Hasn’t anything ever happened?”

  The woman answered that there were always all kinds of little stuff going on.

  “Such as?”

  “Most of it’s just talk. At first they’re mooning over you, then it’s jokes, and then comes the straightforward proposition, and when you say no, the tone changes, the silent glares, the ugly laughter and the ridicule, then one day you find a pile of shit in your cab, and the next your car coughs when you try to start it up at the end of your shift and you wonder who’s been fooling with it, who’s going to come by and offer you a ride since your car won’t start, and whether or not you dare accept.”

  “Does it make you paranoid?”

  “It better,” the driver said. “But in town, anything at all can happen with no warning. Go into a bar where there’s skimpy girls and you’ll see these men’s opinion of women.”

  The skimpy girls were Kalgoorlie’s biggest draw, waitresses and bartenders dressed in the scantest underclothes. When Sanna had visited the mining company’s headquarters in Perth, the man who arranged her site access had burst into a broad smile, equal parts yearning and glee, when he mentioned Kalgoorlie’s girls. You could drink vodka from their belly buttons!

  Sanna wondered whether her father had enjoyed himself when he was in Kalgoorlie.

  They hit a patch of road that hadn’t seen a water tanker for a while; the sand rose in a dense cloud, swallowing the dumper in a red paintball mist. Sanna squinted, but the world was copper-colored smoke.

  The driver continued musing. “Maybe it was easier before. Men worked here and women worked someplace else, completely separate worlds. The Abos still do it that way, sort of.”

  Sanna was eager to hear more, but the driver turned up her country music as they jostled along a stretch of road where there was some visibility again. Everywhere Sanna turned there was the same rust-colored moonscape, the sloped banks lining the pits like vineyards in mountainous regions. But nothing grew here. Sanna looked at the abandoned mine shafts and tried to imagine the fearlessness of the men who had braved them.

  She knew the stories about canaries carried into the tunnels: if they fainted in the cage it meant there was carbon monoxide in the air. When your bright-yellow bird had gone limp and the flame of your lantern had died, how could you tell which way to go in the darkness? Randomly fumbling your way down a shaft, not knowing whether or not it was the right direction. Hearing faint voices from other passages, knowing that someone might ignite dynamite at their own site, burying the exit. Enveloped in such blackness, how could you tell you hadn’t gone blind or mad?

  How could you ever tell you hadn’t gone blind or mad? Sanna wondered, feeling nauseated, the sun-glare, the reek of cigarettes snaking through the cab, the driver’s voice half singing along with the choruses, the endless pounding. She was exhausted.

  For now Sanna would have to endure the heat of Kalgoorlie, the long days in the pit, and the even longer nights in her room at the Shire, but her time here would run out, and Sanna would leave this place. Ralda was waiting for her, and the knowledge was as exhilarating as scorching your back in the highest, hottest spot in the sauna, then plunging into a frigid springtime lake in a puff of steam.

  2

  Walking the streets of Kalgoorlie alone was defying fate. Paint peeled from the buildings and doorjambs, bulging chain-link fences nipped at the clothes of passersby, catching shreds of fabric and wisps of thread, like confetti forgotten at the entrance to a birthday party held years ago.

  There weren’t any children left in this town.

  Sanna was instinctively on guard; she felt the same terror she’d experienced walking through Helsinki’s underpasses surrounded by the hostile marker-scrawls and graffiti, hearing the echo of her own panicked footfalls. Those times when she’d longed for and dreaded the sound of someone else’s footsteps.

  Kalgoorlie didn’t have any old people, either. Or dog-walkers.

  There were ten men to every woman.

  Sanna didn’t know how to walk so as not to call attention to herself. She usually dressed in modest, loose-fitting clothing and didn’t wear makeup. But should she keep her head down and stride briskly or look bold and self-confident, march head held high, own her space? She did her best to decipher the dynamics while walking through town, but it was like a subterranean wildfire smoldering in the soil: impossible to predict.

  Men stopped her on the street and tried to chat her up; they immediately touched her, patted her eagerly on the shoulder or clumsily pecked at her cheek, their stubble scratching her skin. She drew back and hurried past and felt arrogant in her repulsion.

  They’re twenty or thirty years older than I am. Why don’t they hit on women their own age?

  She hadn’t been at the mines long enough to realize the men probably were her age.

  Walking along, palms sweating, she wondered why she was so afraid. Did it have something to do with Janne? She hadn’t dared disappoint a single man in her life; pleasing them had been her only way of combatting the threat they posed. Was it because of all Mom’s men? How hard it was, keeping men satisfied.

  Dad knew what he was doing, sending her here. This is what men are like. This is how the world works. She could imagine Dad saying the words out loud. You’re expecting too much from both.

  Later, it occurred to Sanna that Ralda had seemed safe simply by being a woman.

  The Shire, which was located on the town’s main drag, had been built during colonial times, a beauty compared to her moldering sisters. She was dim inside and smelled acrid, like overfermented sourdough starter. The carpeting was damp and bald, and the walls echoed hollowly. Shreds of wallpaper hung in long, still-attached strips; the mirrors were stippled with black streaks.

  When she got to her room, Sanna fell onto her bed and curled up on her left side. Her heart formed a knot and inched toward her throat with every lurching beat. She pinched her lips, opened her eyes wide. I’m safe here, safe now, Sanna repeated to herself, focusing on the flowers on the bedspread. She shifted her hands, felt the rough spot in the coverlet; it was a cigarette burn, one of many. Splatters and stains dotted the bedspread, too; they made a clicking sound when she tapped her nails against them.

  In movies, rooms like this were where the most gruesome rape scenes were always set. People would hear the woman’s screams out in the corridor and just shout back to keep it down. Was it really true that, when the worst happened, a woman floated up from her body, left it behind like the wreckage of a car, didn’t feel a thing, watched as men took turns drilling away at and crushing the person the woman had once been?

  Sanna suddenly sat up. She didn’t want to take the thought any further, but it was faster: she had felt equally disconnected from Janne. She had been lying in bed, but inside she had floated off, she was nowhere near what was happening—Janne making love to her—an
d then a voice had suddenly called her back to the bedroom. She had to answer a question. She arbitrarily answered yes, and Janne stopped. She had given the wrong answer. Now she fished for the question; it was still lurking at the cusp of her ear. Do you want me to stop? Does it hurt? No, she meant no. She didn’t feel anything.

  She wanted to wash away her thoughts, the day at the mine. She stripped off the mining-company uniform in her room; the showers were at the end of the hall, and there wasn’t anywhere in the shower stall to leave her clothes.

  Walking through the stench of mold and stale booze that was the Shire while wrapped in nothing more than a towel made her feel even grubbier.

  She had to adjust the temperature from the separate hot and cold taps, and it alternated between scorching and icy. Sanna gasped, her hair a mat of algae across her face. Goddamn motherfucker, goddamn moldy pile of shit! Her cursing targeted all of it. Water dyed orange streamed down her face and throat. The sand from the pit clung to her skin, a miner’s tan, and the streaks of color raced down her body toward the drain like bloody roots.

  Sanna slapped down the hallway in her flip-flops and realized she didn’t have the key in her hand. She went back to the shower stall, but she knew she wouldn’t find it there; she remembered having seen it on the bed.

  She wrapped her towel around herself as tightly as she could, as if the tautness meant it covered more, and headed downstairs. There was a single counter that served as both reception desk and bar, and she didn’t see anyone behind it. At the far end of the bar, men were waiting to be served. Sanna’s appearance elicited whistles.

  “Nice dress,” someone said.

  Sanna tried to pretend she didn’t notice. Did it have to be Friday, the bar packed? The bartender came back out, didn’t even look at Sanna, and started taking the men’s orders.

  Sanna cleared her throat. “Excuse me.”

  The bartender was pouring a beer, tilting it so it wouldn’t foam.

  “Can I help you?” the man closest to Sanna asked. He touched her arm; the hairs on her skin stood up, and Sanna edged away. She could feel the water from her hair slithering down her back; she clenched the towel in a spasmodic, single-handed grip.