Then he would let the rat out of the trap and say, ‘Ga home! But make sure I don’t ever catch you round here again.’
Once in a while, just as the summer night was giving way to morning, he would sit outside, looking as if he were day-dreaming. This wasn’t precisely the case, however. His attentive eyes would be following the early morning birds, and if one of the guards happened to pass by, Koskela might say, ‘Folks talk about those carefree birds up in the sky, but I’ve never seen a man work that hard for his bread.’
The men wrote letters, took turns standing guard, and made rings. Rokka and Rahikainen set up a business: Rokka did the making and Rahikainen did the selling. It was worth it for Rokka, even if he knew Rahikainen cheated a bit in the accounting. He didn’t say anything, because the amount of money wasn’t really worth it, and because he knew that, for Rahikainen, the whole appeal of doing business lay precisely in these little ruses.
Rokka had a vast supply of ring-making materials. Once, while they were watching some air combat, a Russian fighter plane had been shot down. It had fallen a little way away from their bunker, prompting Rokka to stick some pliers in his pocket, toss a hacksaw and a submachine gun over his shoulder, and take off after it.
Lucky for him, the fighter plane had fallen in no-man’s-land, and the Russians had managed to get a security squad to the site to guard the wreck. Otherwise things would have been all cleaned up before Rokka could have got there. As it was, teams of scavengers were walking away disappointed when Rokka arrived. He was certainly not planning to return empty-handed, however. He managed to talk the braver of his men into joining him, and the rest tagged along behind. The Russian patrol squad vanished when Rokka shot their leader and let loose one of his terrible howls, which frightened even his own comrades so much that the less hearty among them took to their heels.
The wreck was surrounded by a terrific hubbub. One guy was lusting after the measuring gauges, somebody else wanted the parachute silk, and a third guy was after the pilot’s mangled, blood-stained leather jacket. Most of them wanted the light metal alloy to make rings with, though.
Their time was cut short, as the Russians sent out a sturdier squad, compelling the ‘freebooters’ to make a hasty exit. By rights of leadership, Rokka was permitted to take his pick of the loot. With the triple-blade, fighter-plane propeller over his shoulder, he returned to the bunker crowing far and wide, ‘Don’t think those wartime shortages are gonna pose much threat to my raw material supply! But goollord, how we ran! What with those Russkis on our tail, we had’da press our tongues to the bit like a team a sled hounds. I wouldn’na managed to git this fella out if he hadn’na already come loose on his way down.’
As a result of the excursion, all of the men from the neighboring battalion who had gone with Rokka ended up assigned to the next patrol. The ‘patrol volunteers’, as the command put it.
Hietanen and Määttä were the most avid card-players in the group. Hietanen routinely lost his entire daily allowance, and when it ran out, he would explode into a long, post-game fury. ‘Jesus! Why am I so goddamn stupid? What was I thinking pulling that last card? I’m sticking to fifteen from now on.’
Then he did an extra round of guard duty for fifty marks, and when he’d managed to lose those, he scratched his head and said, ‘No. Goddamn it, I’m pulling nineteen. Might shoot it all to hell but I’m sick of being stingy.’
And so the others always knew where they could find Hietanen at any given time, and that evening Hietanen wrote in his stiff handwriting, his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth and following his flourishes, ‘…send meat, bread and butter. And send a little cash, too, so I can pay for my cigarettes. Sincerely, Urho.’
He never played with the money he got from home. ‘But it’s not worth trying to save this petty cash. It’s not like I’m out here for the money.’
Rokka rubbed a darning needle along the ring’s surface, polishing it up with a few final touches. He raised the ring up to the window, checking it in the light, and then said to Koskela, lying on the bed, ‘Lammio’s clear forgotten’na come git that propeller a mine. He says it belongs to the government. Gaddamn it, if I go fetch the booty fair and square, it belongs to me. You think he knows what kind a whippin’ he’d git if he came ’n’ took that piece a metal from me?’
‘He won’t take anything,’ Koskela said, rather awkwardly. He found all of the squabbling between the men and the officers bothersome.
‘I don’t believe it. Lissen, you don’t hear how that fella bangs on and on about discipline. The sharper fellas can’t stand goin’na war themselves, so they send fellas like him out to do it. And they start returnin’ everythin’na discipline. ’Fyask me this whole business’s gone to hell. Nothin’ssa way it oughdda be any more. The men don’t know what’s comin’ and they start seein’ everythin’ like it was a joke. Pretty soon they ain’t even gonna care who wins any more. And those clowns think they’re makin’ things better by keepin’ everbody in lock step. I can’t even figger out if they believe it themselves or not. It’s hard’da imagine grown men actin’ that unreasonable… Keep the men in lock step! Gaddamn it! They spend all their time buildin’ fancy chimneys for their command post and makin’ a contest outta whose’s the best. Ain’t nothin’ gonna come outta that. I’ve started’da wonder ’bout some a that stuff those fellas do.’
Rokka polished the ring quietly for a little while and then said suddenly to Koskela, ‘You think we’re gonna lose this war?’
Koskela stared at the ceiling for a long time and finally said, ‘They’re pressing on pretty well down south.’
‘Ain’t that that worries me. They’re actin’na way a bumblebee does when he’s caught in a spiderweb. More he tears in, more tangled up he gits. Last year I thought they was gonna make it all right, but come fall I already guessed there wasn’t a chance in hell a that. Don’t take a whole lotta wits to figger out what’s goin’ on. If they’d a struck then maybe, but come winter ain’t nothin’ gonna be possible anymore.’
‘Yeah, you might be right.’ You could tell from the tone of Koskela’s voice that he’d given the matter some thought and didn’t think Rokka’s conclusion at all implausible.
Rokka, for his part, cast the matter aside and said, returning to his former carefree self, ‘Well, anyhow, this ain’t the time to worry ’bout none a that here. Would you believe I sent six thousand marks to the missus, all from these here rings?’
‘Why not?’
‘Hey, all you heroes out there! Mess tins’s boilin’.’
They had built a grate to set atop the stove to make coffee. There were a few mess tins full of boiling water on it now, and the men wandered inside to stir in packets of coffee substitute.
‘Million’s still takin’ it hard from those six-inchers,’ Rahikainen announced, sitting on his bed, which was pasted with a series of pictures cut out of Signal magazine: ‘Sabine before her bath’, ‘Sabine bathing’ and ‘Sabine after her bath’.
‘Must not get much sun down there,’ Hietanen said.
‘We ain’t gonna git much round here, neither, if you all don’t quit stirrin’ up a ruckus out there on guard duty. Sankia Priha the Great, you better quit hollerin’ at them the whole time, hear?’