‘I’ll be fine!’ Hauhia burst out, and then he left a few minutes early, as opposed to the old guys who always tried to shave a few minutes off their turns in the changeover.
‘Remember what I told you, now!’ Rokka called after him.
‘Can’t do more than that,’ Koskela said. ‘Guy’s been given all the advice there is.’
Hauhia went to relieve Vanhala from his post. He bounded eagerly over to his station and gave a Rokka-like shout, knowingly using Vanhala’s nickname: ‘All right, Sankia Priha, off with you!’
‘I hereby hand over responsibility for the front. There’s some infantry guy’s rifle in the shelter, but don’t use it unless you have to. Bastards’ll make you into a hero real quick. You just stay here real quiet and grow into one of Finland’s terrifying deep-forest warriors.’
Hauhia turned the mirror. He looked at the outlines of the gun-nests set against the smoky afternoon sky. All was calm, drowsy and still. Even the faint, far-off rumble of cannon fire over toward Bulaeva didn’t seem to disrupt the sleepy atmosphere of the front. An unbroken silence reigned. Even the dark bodies lying out in front of their positions seemed to have hardened into place ages ago, melting into the general stillness.
When he’d had his fill of looking around, Hauhia dug out some paper from his shirt pocket and started writing on top of a cigarette crate. He felt slightly guilty doing so, but tried to mitigate his guilt by glancing up at the mirror every time he’d written two or three words.
Each time he checked the bodies and counted them, afraid there would be too many. Some living guy might have crawled in amongst them and might be lying in wait, ready to pounce. Hauhia had heard of things like that happening.
Suddenly a shell went off on Mount Million, and Hauhia dropped for cover, then remembered the previous evening and straightened himself up right away. A dozen or so shells went off in the space of half a minute.
Hauhia stopped writing and started looking at the machine gun. It, too, was mute and still. But to Hauhia, the dead object seemed mute precisely because in his mind, it was capable of speech. It was like a story locked in steel. Hauhia imagined this story in his head, mostly false and unfounded, like the stories the Information Bureau fed to people who couldn’t tell the difference. He hadn’t seen the faces unnaturally distorted with anxiety behind it, nor heard the hoarse, panicked screams and commands, the nervous swearing and cursing, nor Kaukonen’s moan as he died with his face pressed into these handles. He knew nothing of the dark, rainy autumn night when it had lain beside the muddy path, the night that Lehto and Riitaoja had died.
‘Good-looking gun. I wonder if there’s water in the jacket? Be nice to rattle off a few rounds.’ Hauhia looked through the periscope and gave an exclamation of surprise. A helmet was moving in one of the nests. Now it was still. Hauhia seized the rifle from the shelter, repeating to himself in justification, ‘I won’t shoot it, but just in case.’
He looked out again. The helmet was still there. For a while the urge to hunt and the fear of disobedience battled it out in his mind. Then he stepped into one of the machine-gunners’ nests and carefully raised his head. ‘Immediately… before he has a chance… I’ll stick these twigs in front… they won’t be able to see from way over there…’
He set a juniper branch in the nest’s open slit, stuck in the gun and, hands trembling with excitement, tried to focus the helmet in the sight. He retained consciousness just long enough to feel the sharp blow strike his head and see stars fade into view before he thudded to the trench floor and blacked out.
Vanhala’s gramophone was now equipped with a new spring and some Finnish records its owner had brought back with him from his leave. Their favorite, ‘Life in the Trenches’, was spinning round at the moment and Rahikainen was lying on his bunk singing along.
Rahikainen had a good voice, and he could even hit the high notes with no greater strain than a slightly furrowed brow. Vanhala was cracking up at the song’s wistful, naïve lyrics, and at the sight of wily Rahikainen crooning with such heartfelt devotion.
Rahikainen suddenly interrupted his song. Revealing that it occupied his thoughts only marginally, and that he was in fact preoccupied with more important questions, he said, ‘No, I gotta start exportin’ over to the neighbors’ sectors. This market’s gettin’ too saturated. How many you got finished over there?’
‘This fella here makes eight. Whadda I engrave on here? “1942”? “Svir, 1942”? Lissen, Rahikainen, we can cook up a new model. Then they’ll keep sellin’ here in our sector. Fellas’ll buy more if it’s sumpin’ new.’
‘How about the Coat of Arms with the Lion of Finland?’
‘Picture from the five-mark coin? Price’s gotta go up five marks then.’
‘They’ll go for it. Long as you do a nice job.’
Rokka was just hurrying to get down to work, when the cow bell hanging from the ceiling began to ring. The wire coming from the guard post was moving.
Koskela rose. ‘What’s that boy up to?’
‘Alarm.’
Chaos set in. They yanked their boots onto their feet, grabbed their weapons from the rack and, thus equipped, ran for the trench. Honkajoki seized his bow and arrow, but he did at least take along a real gun as well. Vanhala remembered Rahikainen’s song and giggled as he climbed the stairs, ‘To the bullets’ refrain! Heehee. As chaos rages, heehee!’
The bunker was empty. In their hurry, no one had thought to stop the gramophone, so ‘Life in the Trenches’, having played to the end, was now scraping out, ‘eeeyaow, eeeyaow, eeeyaow’.
As soon as the men were outside, they quickly gathered that there was no attack underway, since the infantry platoon hadn’t been called to alert. So it was just something concerning their guard. As they advanced toward the guard post, they suspected that the inexperienced Hauhia had panicked, and so sounded the alarm. Things became more complicated, however, when they saw that the guard post was empty.
‘Something’s up over there,’ Koskela said, dreading what it might be.
The face of the guard approaching them in the trench told all. The man looked earnest and rather pale, though his voice was brusque as he said, ‘Better send up a new guard and cross the old one off the ration list.’
‘Sniper?’
‘Yeah. That gun was over there on the parapet. I guess he meant to shoot it, but the bullet never left the barrel. A helmet popped up across the way, but it was so absurdly high it must have just been bait. Then there came a bang and I suspected he’d raised his head up to peek so I came over. Then I sounded your guys’ alarm.’