A short story by Kulta Koira
“It’s no laughing matter,” he said. (A Berlitz instructor, now
openly drunk and knocking back another Finlandia.)
“It’s no laughing matter when you meet a vampire”
(This was Helsinki, a good vodka town.)
I was a visiting folklore scholar and new to the city. I’d gone to “Cosmos” reputedly the best bohemian bistro in the Baltic.
The waiter put more vodka on our table. They served it with pepper and wormwood.
“I mean,” my companion said, “how was I to know she really meant it?”
(He closed one eye and scrutinized his glass.)
“I thought the problem would be her husband—she said he was out of town but you know how that is.”
“Anyway I went home with her. I was stinking drunk and then we were in a taxi going to her place. I didn’t have any money so she asked the driver to come up and said she’d pay him in the apartment.”
“We’re waiting, standing in her living room, me and the cabbie– one of those Finns who never says a thing. And then she’s back and sweet Christ on a fuckin’ crutch she’s got blood all over her face and its dripping down her blouse.”
“I’m backing up but the driver gets in my way. It turns out he’s part of her act and he shouts in English, ‘You were going to fuck her!’ But it’s more a query—like stage dialogue if you know what I mean, and then he hits me with a karsh.”
The waiter returned with a basket of fried smelt.
“I’m from Dublin,” said Berlitz, staring at the waiter. “I can drink and I can bloody well take a bash to the noggin—but these Finns, they’re hardnosed—look—I eat my fish with a fuckin’ fork! (He turns to the waiter.) “Hey, Sibelius, show him how you eat a fish!”
The waiter, who, if he had to be compared with someone looked like James Dean with peroxide—the waiter picked up a fish by the tail and dropped it in his mouth. And then he swallowed it, bones and all.
“Next to the Finns I’m the Queen Mother!” said Berlitz, who was in point of fact eating his smelt with a fork.
“Anyway, I woke up in a closet. I crawled out and I was in her living room and the sun was coming up. I was feeling my head when I noticed that they’d taken my clothes. So I start looking. I’m still good and drunk. Crapacious. Embalmed. I had these insect eyes, you know? I could see everything at once. Newspapers on the coffee table…a view of factories through a window. Fifties era Alvar Aalto furniture but dingy. Rubber boots by the door. A black and white poster of Prague with a castle in silhouette…But I didn’t see my clothes. Just my shoes by the couch. And then I looked at my arms. They’d drawn these frigging Egyptian hieroglyphs on my arms with a magic marker. I mean Ptah, and Anubis, and these snake-like things. And then I saw they’d drawn them across my belly and down my legs.”
“Well for Christ’s sake, I thought, now I’m an art project for vampires. I went through the apartment then and sure enough they’d split. And then I realized there weren’t any clothes in the place. Not a shred of clothing. Every closet was empty. The dresser was empty. I even looked under the kitchen sink in case they’d stuffed some clothes in the trash. Nothing. Shit! I was buck naked and painted all over like the Rosetta stone—and you know—right about then I wondered what day of the week it was and I really couldn’t remember—I thought I could walk home in the nude if it wasn’t rush hour.”
“At last I found some towels. One was bloodstained. But the others were okay. They were from the “Hotel Alpina” in Obergurgul, Switzerland. I fit one around my waist and tried the apartment door. Of course it was locked from the outside.”
“What to do? I checked the phone. Thank God it was working! I thought maybe I’d call an ambulance. Why not? I was a naked foreigner having a heart attack. I thought that would be a good story. I’d tell the operator I was staying at the apartment of friends who were in the country and I would say I couldn’t remember the address and she’d have to trace the call. I’d say I needed an ambulance. They’d come and get me, break down the door. They wouldn’t care about the towel.”
“So that’s what I did. The ambulance got there in about 15 minutes. And there was a policeman who managed to get the door open with some kind of gizmo—so they didn’t have to chop it open. They were quick and what’s more they didn’t seem to notice anything unusual about a foreigner locked in an apartment and girthed in a towel with hieroglyphs all over his body. They thought I might be having a heart attack and they strapped me to a stretcher and hustled me out and slid me into the ambulance and that was it.”
”At the hospital they performed all kinds of tests. I didn’t mind. I was in a clean and curtained place. They kept me for observation. They gave me aspirin. The next morning they brought me to a young doctor. He must have been about 30 and he was thin and fair and I guessed that he’d never have to shave. He had John Lennon glasses and he looked serious. His eyes were extremely blue. ‘You haven’t had a heart attack,’ he said. ‘Your tests appear normal. There is nothing wrong with you. You can go home.’
“I started to get up and he said ‘there’s one more thing. The police would like to talk to you.’ Then he left and two detectives came in. They looked like members of the Finnish national skiing team—really tall and Nordic. ‘You have been to Egypt?’ said the first one. ‘Or maybe San Francisco?’ Then the other one said: ‘you are the fifth foreigner with hieroglyphs admitted to this hospital in the past three months.’ It was funny. Foreigners painted by the vampire woman and winding up in the hospital… Alright… But I didn’t laugh. Sometimes I try to look smart. I
didn’t know what was up. I
’m just sharp enough to know that all our falsehoods are divided—ergo, when they find out how stupid we are we’ve got nothing to fall back on. I think that’s why Mark Twain said: ‘when in doubt tell the truth.’”
“So I told them the truth. I got drunk at Urho’s Pub and went home with a woman who said her husband was out of town. I told them about the blood on her face and how I woke up in a closet and the missing clothes and Anubis all over my arms and legs.
“And then I went on. I told them I didn’t have a wife, so there was no scandal beyond having made an ass of myself. I said I didn’t feel the need to pursue matters and, well, I told them I was a man of limited imagination, didn’t like things kinky, couldn’t care less about the hieroglyphs…And then there was silence for quite awhile. I had run out of things to say. I wanted to ask them if they could loan me some clothes since I was wearing paper slippers and a hospital gown and still had to get home. Then I wondered what do they know that I don’t know?”
“The detectives spoke after a minute of silence. The woman was a self-proclaimed vampire. Her other victims were German businessmen. They too had been conked on the skull and painted with Egyptian grammar. The Germans had also seen blood on the woman’s face. I wanted to ask how they had arrived at the hospital but I knew the cops wouldn’t tell me. I had enjoyed believing I was original with my phone call and heart attack.”
“’The hieroglyphs are not known to have any semantic meaning, they are random drawings,’ said Cop Number One. “’We have to tell you that in the other cases the drawings were produced to cover the needle marks,’”
“’We will ask the doctor to come back and remove your hieroglyphs,’ said Number Two. ‘We must tell you that it’s likely that you are the victim of a crime.’”
“Blood theft! I was a victim of blood theft! In Scandinavia no less!
I was thinking what are the odds against that when the doctor came back in.”
“He scrubbed and the markings came away on his sponge: sure enough, there were needle marks all over. And I think my mouth was open. The doctor said that blood had been removed from my body in small increments—that is, they took more with each stab.”
“The doctor took off his John Lennon glasses and wiped them with a cloth. ’They took 10 ounces from you in calibrated bloodlettings,’ he said. ‘We found a high dose of Valium in your body. It appears they took the most blood from the skin around your navel—the needle mark is perforated there—the syringe was in that spot for quite some time.’”
“’It was the same with the Germans,’ said Number One. ‘We don’t know why this woman steals blood.’”
“Number Two leaned forward and said, “We’re chief detectives. The Finnish government takes a dim view of blood theft. Since Helsinki is at present the cultural capital of Europe there is also the issue of tourist confidence. This case has been given priority from the Interior Ministry.’”
“They introduced themselves. Number One was Chief Inspector Arvo Koski and his partner was Inspector Jussi Makela. They looked like brothers. Six feet plus and blond as platinum. ‘Here’s what we’d like,’ said Arvo, ‘we’d like to follow you in what the Americans call a “sting” operation.’”
“They played on my vanity. Said I was good looking, and unlike the Germans I spoke Finnish. ‘We want you to find her again,’ they said. ‘We don’t know the woman’s identity. The apartment she took you to is owned by a textile company. The company has no record of a man or woman matching the descriptions we’ve been able to obtain. She attacked her other victims in their hotel rooms.’”
“And so it came to pass that I, one James O Connell, Berlitz instructor, student of Finno-Ugrian languages, found myself in a sting. The plan was for me to hit the Helsinki nightlife with a bankroll and I’d be tailed. Koski and and Makela would never be far behind. And of course the entire country is crazy over cell phones—they’ll tell you they invented the cell phone—Nokia is a Finnish company. It’s the damndest thing, all these Scandinavians talking like mad on their cell phones—I mean it’s a nation of people who formerly never spoke more than ten words in their lives. Now they’re all fookin walkin’ around free associating to each other. It’s a fookin’ technological Haight-Ashbury around here for Christ Sake!
Every now and then Berlitz had to come up for air and a deep pull on the vodka. Then he’d signal James Dean with a snap of his fingers ending with a thumb and forefinger circle to signify mutual agreement. Then another tall vodka would appear with a dish of pickled onions.
“Vampires and spies…it’s some town for night life! Did you know there are more spies in Helsinki than in any other city in the world? It’s a hold over from the Cold War when the Soviets and the Americans each had an embassy with hundreds of employees. The Russkies and Yanks still drive around at night with their head lights off.
“On my first night out with Koski and Makela following me, I figured I’d go to “The American Bar” in the Hotel Torni—you know, a historic place. So I went there and drank Chivas and smoked a Cubano and watched the joint fill up.”
“I know 8 languages. My Da said I was destined to be a fook up , and he’s mostly right—but I can at the very least be called an international fuck up—I’m the guy you want if you need to find a lady’s dentures in a dumpster in Istanbul after a night of carousing—I can explain anything.”
“So there I was eavesdropping on two Danish secret service guys who were talking about blood. “
“It’s a race,” said Dane One. (Who looked like he was all dried out—you know, like an over the hill movie star.”
“Yes, But we’re going to find the vampire girl first,” said Da
ne Two. “I’ve got the blood right here.” He patted his suit jacket and I could see a bulge.
“Honest to God! There was a chubby Dane with a bag of bloodright there in the Hotel Torni.”
“I got up and moved to another table. I didn’t want them to think I was listening.
There were some Russians—probably agents sitting around a chess board.
Well wouldn’t you know, now it was the Russian’s turn to talk about the “blood girl”—they were vowing rather loudly to beat the Americans to the prize. I couldn’t believe it. They were just sitting there and talking so anyone could hear—assuming you spoke Russian. They said the whole thing was some kind of plot to smuggle Ebola virus into St. Petersburg.”
“I went to the Men’s Room and took a leak. There were two Finnish poets by the wash basins. I recognized them from a festival at the National Theater. They were talking about the vampire as metaphor: the theft of blood standing for class warfare and one of them said any “vampire girl” had to be working class.”
“Well, Deep Fried Jesus!” I thought. “The whole blasted city knows about this damned thing.”
“I went outside and hailed a cab. I didn’t have a plan in mind.”
“Alright,” I thought, “So it’s a small town. East meets West though inexactly, Finnish Capitalism is oddly aggressive but like all Western systems it absorbs strangers, even though that whole business is grudging. And so I was thinking like that, and thinking who really wants to drink blood, not as a metaphor for the Industrial Revolution, but for real—Christ Almighty talk about the Eucharist! Then toss in Gnostic pre-Christian, neo-Egyptian hieroglyphs—literal meaning, no jerking around with French post-structuralism—who would want to be that person?
Berlitz was eyeing a stain on the table cloth. He was far away—whether from vodka or the little cinema in his head I couldn’t tell. I knew I wouldn’t tell him I was a folklorist. I wanted him to keep going. We were the only customers left in the old Czarist restaurant. He looked up and plunged ahead.
“I told the cab driver to take me to the amusement park. Helsinki’s version of “Coney Island”—even though it was winter and the “off season”—even sensing that metaphor and semiotics were of limited use—I just thought, well what’s the closest thing to Kairos? Where would you live if you wanted to live forever in the frozen north? Where could you drink blood alone?”
“I wasn’t much of a school boy but I remembered that the Egyptians didn’t think the body was real—I mean for them the flesh was only real in the afterlife which meant you always wanted to be in a place where your blood could be close to the stars. Maybe I was just blowing it out my ass. But that’s how I remembered it.”
“Why would a blood drinker want only foreign blood? Why would she live in a universe of Egyptian grammar?”
“Because, “ I thought, for this vampire woman blood and hieroglyphs are both the same. Each is a kind of translation. Don’t ask me to explain it. I just knew somehow that I was “on to something” as the Americans say.”
“I imagined that the blood of foreigners had something to do with language. I couldn’t figure it beyond that level—it was like a math problem or something.”
“ I could see the Olympic Stadium and the rows of shops bravely lit against the winter night. I told the driver to stop at a liquor store. I knew I’d need some Koskenkorva—that precious Finn vodka that they don’t export. The vodka that beat Stalin.”
“An abandoned amusement park at night in winter in the far north is not a difficult place to break into. The stumble bums manage to find their ways under fences. Some of the poor bastards are under the roller coaster drinking anti-freeze through hollowed out loaves of bread—it’s a hard town.”
Well you can see that any man, woman, boy or girl, or any Grecian hermaphrodite would be hauled along by a story like the one that Berlitz was telling. And while I’ve been known to tell a few stretchers myself, I’ve never lied when I felt the ghost of my mother stirring my fate so I’ll come out with it. Berlitz had just finished telling me about the drunkards who strain Prestone through French bread when he up and died. I mean dead.
He snapped off like an appliance—eyes wide as saucers, with no sign of pain—he simply fell over into his smelt.
At first I thought he had merely passed out but soon enough the waiter and I saw that he was ardently dead.
Then the ambulance came and the emergency guys confirmed that he was richly, starkly, widely, crookedly done for. I mean they socked him with the paddles and injected him with a big syringe that actually looked like a “play” syringe from when you were a kid and you used to play doctor. But Berlitz was now a case for requiem and I said truthfully that I didn’t know the man.
I looked in the paper the next day for news. There was a small article in the “City” section about the death by heart attack of an Irish Berlitz instructor named James O’Connell and the paper said he was from Dublin and that he apparently had no family.
I like to think of him wandering under the frozen roller coaster deep in the arctic night searching for his blood thief under the fat northern stars.
Kairos indeed.
Not everyone gets to die the way they lived.
I was trying to decide whether O’Connell’s demise meant that he was truly Irish or Finnish when there was a knock at my door.
I didn’t answer it.
The last part of a requiem is the “Libera me Domine”—God has risen; which means of course he’ll come again.
By the way I looked it up: Arvo Koski and Jussi Makela actually exist They are genuine detectives.
It’s also true that Helsinki is still full of spies even though the city isn’t as important as it was during the Cold War. .
As for the vampire girl and her partner—I figure they’ve moved on. Helsinki has changed so much in the past couple of years. They’ve got the Hard Rock Café now and California pizza. It’s got to be very difficult to steal blood in a well lit, commercial town unless you’re in Washington or L.A.
Still, I’m glad I didn’t answer the door when it was almost spring in the far north.
Kulta Koira lives in the far north.
Planet of the Blind 