Geography of Fear by Anja Snellman

Translated from the Finnish by Maija Mäkinen

There was a game we used to play on Sheep Island, at the Camp.

I call it a game now. The whole Geography of Fear seminar seemed, especially in the beginning, like a fanatical pastime for grownups, akin to the leadership training seminars with their retreats, or the latest staff-recruitment stratagem – a paint-ball battle in a suburban forest, a canoe expedition, or a wilderness tour in the northern mountains.

We were all sitting in the stone labyrinth, in the front yard of the House of Weary Women, eating mushrooms, drinking them, chewing them, climbing inside our chosen folktales, taking the human and animal forms we knew from Finnish folktales.

The first time, I grew a pair of long ears and twitchy feet. My nose began to quiver so briskly that my glasses fell to the ground.

I was a hare.

“Transmogrification – to animal, plant, or even mineral – must be the most radical of seductions?” Maaru said, her eyes burning.

“The shape-shifting makes us traitors to our own species, susceptible to the experience of another. It’s like the seduction of love. In love, it’s the strangeness of the other gender we seek, and the chance to be initiated into it as if to a different species of animal or plant. Seduction is the art of disappearing from the self!”

Once upon a time there was a Parson’s Wife With No Shadow, whose name and fate both stemmed from the fact that she had no desire to bear children.

Once there was also a Soulless Shrew, whose name and fate came from the fact that she had bundled and drowned all twelve of her sons – she had not wanted to birth boys, only girls.

Maaru is talking, talking, talking.

She has her palms over my face. My eyes are open, and with her small pale hands there, it is as though I’m looking at an open book.

The book tears in two as she spreads her hands and bends down to kiss me on the mouth with her chapped, bleeding lips. She slides the tip of her tongue over the surface of my teeth. That’s the part of the dream where I always wake up.

The Walkman has tumbled to the floor, the earphones have popped out of my ears. I hear the thin, distant voice of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Ruhe, ruhe, meine Seele, und vergiss, was dich bedroht.

Under the stonewashed sky, the field on our tiny island is so barren and cold, growing bulrush and sparse spikelets of oat – wild oat, ergot.

Maaru sings the words, they come out of her mouth.

Maaru and I, moments before our final supper, standing in the middle of Sheep Island’s sole, marshy field (the turnip patch that, according to the Archive of Happiness, Alma Vartiainen tilled productively in 1909–1914 for an annual rent of 350 Finnish marks).

Darkness has fallen. Through the trees, the sea glints silver and grey, the waves welling away from the island like in the Tennyson poem my mother used to quote and that I never fully understood.

The soggy silt and black earth squelch under our feet. We are standing where the men lie; I know we are just about on top of them.

No woman has ever kissed me like that. Has anyone? It is like a brand or a mark, a direct blow and a coming apart at the same time. It could be a blow, but it is a kiss.

Maaru strikes me with her broken lips.

This is how it happens.

“Look,” Maaru whispers and points at the sky with her finger. “The casual flick of God’s wrist across the August sky.

“From the Equator to the Antarctic, He scatters the stars, flings them high enough so people don’t slip over all that miasma.” Maaru parts her lips and grimaces.

When I look up, craning my neck so that it crunches, Maaru grips my shoulders and without warning kisses me on the mouth, roughly. Our teeth clash and I immediately taste blood. Maaru’s breasts butt against mine, and I touch her neck and feel soft skin and coarse stubble.

As she watches my face, Maaru says in a whisper that she has shocked many men by fucking them with her clitoris, “right inside that little orifice they have at the tip of their organ.”

“Miniature sex,” Maaru whispers hoarsely. “So you see, I’ve jammed other things in there besides knitting needles.”

With that she bursts out laughing, her face twisting, sliding downward. She leans into me, her cheekbone against my collarbone; we are both so thin our bones are conversing.

The mushrooms flash in front of my eyes – flat convex shaped, bell shaped, conical, scaped, umbilicate, funnel shaped and flat – all the mushrooms we have consumed over the last several weeks. The urge to vomit rises, as always after our meals, and the violent convulsions knock me down as I struggle to overcome them. I don’t want to reveal to her the shape I’m in; I don’t want Maaru to see inside me.

As much as she knows about guts, she will never know the secret of mine.

Shaking, I try to focus on a single detail. Often it works. This time I fix my gaze on Maaru’s neck and throat.

Her cameo pendant hangs from its smudged, yellowed velvet ribbon. “Glyptic art,” Maaru has often said, “stone engraving – an undervalued field of research; these cameos were originally used as seals, customized for each individual.”

Maaru’s face close to mine; she’s wiping the corners of her eyes with her arms and hands, like a child, her eye patch pulled up to her forehead like a hair band, the way she liked to wear it; her puckered mouth, her perpetually alert hazel eyes and black eyebrows, her dry lips, chapped to a dim grey; the resplendent scent of earth after rainfall, the efflorescence of stars in the sky, our muddy boots firmly in the boggy soil, in water that neither flows nor is replenished.

I knew that time was running out. We had no radio, read no papers, and none of the people who occasionally tramped through the island brought messages of any kind. Yet I could see it on Maaru that the end was near. She had been restless and keyed up for days, behaving much like a person in the acute throes of infatuation.

The time had come to pledge that other allegiance.

I sensed that Maaru was prepared to do almost anything that anyone thought to suggest; she stayed awake around the clock and roamed the island’s shorelines, looking out toward the city. Sometimes, instead of sleeping in my reversible “bum’s jacket,” I wanted to lie down beside Maaru in her down sleeping bag, the way Johanna did; suddenly I realized I’d always wanted that. I wanted to sleep next to Maaru, my arm around her.

We never made a decision.

Or at least I never heard of one. To this day I cannot say for certain whether what happened to the women was only an accident.

Anja Snellman (Kauranen until 1997), born in 1954, is one of the leading figures in Finnish literature and rose to fame with her debut novel Sonja O. Was Here. She has published more than 20 novels and several collections of poetry, and her works have been translated into more than 20 languages. In addition to writing, Snellman also works as a therapist for young people in a Helsinki detox program.

Maija Mäkinen is a Finnish-born writer and translator with an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. Her writings and translations have been featured or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Transnational Literature, and Best New Writing, among others. She is the winner of the University of Cambridge Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize.