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Kevin Frazier | The Black Wool Ski MaskThe car bomb exploded outside Minttu’s office.
Minttu owned a small digital software company in the Helsinki city center and she had just started reading her e-mails when she heard the explosion. The blast wasn’t loud. It sounded like a sheet of canvas flapped by a gust of wind. What brought her out of her chair wasn’t the explosion but the sound of breaking glass. She had never heard so much glass crashing and tinkling at once.
She went to the balcony. Her company was on the seventh floor and she looked down at the street.
A mass of flames burned behind a black van. The van was stopped at a crosswalk, in front of a green light. The fire formed a rough rectangle, filled with flames, surrounded by chunks of burning metal and burning rubber and burning strips of vinyl. The blast had blown out all the lobby windows of the corner hotel and the street was covered with bits of glass.
One of the burning chunks was much larger than the others. It was long and charred and seemed to be swaying, rocking back and forth on the broken glass. Then the chunk twisted as it swayed and Minttu realized that it was a person, legless, using a pair of blackened arms to crawl away from the car.
. . .
Pekka, who was Minttu’s partner in the software company, tried to reassure her that the explosion was a fluke. The news reports said the man in the car had been a Finnish drug dealer who had failed to pay off his Russian suppliers.
“It’s not terrorism,” Pekka said. “It’s just a drug thing.”
He insisted that Helsinki was still one of the safest cities in the world and always would be. But Minttu was unconvinced. Drugs had never been popular in Finland. Alcohol was the addiction of choice here. Yet things could change. Some of her friends said that teenagers were experimenting with acid and speed these days and that the number of heroin users was growing.
Every day Minttu walked along the street of the car bombing. The road had been cleared and re-paved. There was no sign of the explosion, only a fresh black patch of asphalt, vivid against the faded gray of the surrounding lanes.
. . .
On Saturday Minttu took her seven-year-old daughter, Hanna, to the summer flea market.
The flea market overflowed the two warehouses next to the art museum and the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper offices. Hundreds of visitors milled around the racks of old clothes, the boxes of chipped china, the stacks of records and magazines and books.
Minttu held Hanna’s hand. They wandered outdoors, across the warehouse loading platforms, along the rows of tables in the sun.
“How come you don’t wear hats?” Hanna asked.
“I don’t like hats,” Minttu said.
“Why?”
“They don’t look good on me.”
“I want a hat, Mom. Can I have a hat?”
“We’ll see.”
“I think you’re wrong about hats,” Hanna said. “I think a hat would look good on you.”
“All hats,” Minttu said, “look terrible on me.”
“I’ll find a hat you’ll like. Will you wear a hat if I find a good one for you?”
“Maybe,” Minttu said.
They paused at a table covered with plates and silverware. Minttu wanted to buy a present for Hanna’s father. Next week he would celebrate the first anniversary of his latest marriage. Minttu had discovered that he was more reliable with his child support payments if she remembered to buy him gifts now and then.
While Minttu picked through a set of silver spoons Hanna strayed towards another table.
“Look, Mom,” Hanna said. “Bombs.”
Minttu glanced up from the spoons. At the other table Hanna was running her fingers across the cap of an old-fashioned Soviet hand grenade.
“You shouldn’t touch that,” Minttu said.
Hanna took her hand away from the grenade and yawned. “Is it dangerous?”
“I don’t know.”
The table was loaded with Soviet military surplus: machinegun clips, rifle cartridges, gun belts, gas masks, hundreds of medals and insignias.
Behind the table was a man in a camouflage jacket. He fixed Minttu with a lazy self-satisfied look. Then he took a long drink of beer from the bottle in his hand.
“It’s empty,” he said. He spoke with a Russian accent.
“What’s empty?” Minttu asked.
He put down the bottle and lifted the hand grenade. Its bottom had been removed: Minttu could see that it was hollow inside.
“Dummy weapons,” the Russian said. “No danger.”
Then he set his hand on top of a black wool ski mask. The mask was mounted, rolled down over a Styrofoam mannequin head. The Russian grinned as he drummed his fingers on the mask’s wool dome. Minttu felt the Styrofoam eyes staring at her: they were blank, white, flat.
“Lovely, yes?” the Russian said. Then he bent down so he could talk to Hanna. “Are you wanting a mask like this to be playing with, my little flower? Are you wanting to be wearing it so perhaps you can be scaring your friends?”
Hanna, a bit frightened, leaned into Minttu’s skirt.
“Maybe not,” Minttu said, putting her arm around Hanna’s shoulders.
The Russian raised the brim of his hunting cap. “No? Truly?”
Minttu noticed that almost all the ammunition on the table was hollowed-out, like the grenade. The machinegun clips were empty, and the bullets in most of the gun belts were used casings, harmless and spent.
But one of the gun belts was different. It was filled with enormous steel-tipped bullets that looked like small rockets. Each bullet had a solid back: a metal button with a round indentation at the center. Minttu knew nothing about weapons, but she was sure it was illegal to sell live ammunition at a public flea market.
“Are you having interest in this?” the Russian asked, fingering the belt with obvious admiration.
“Not really,” Minttu said.
. . .
She reported the belt to the man who worked at the market’s registration desk.
“I don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” she said, “but I think you should check the table where all the old Soviet military things are being sold. I believe there might be some live ammunition there.”
The administrator, sunburned, good-humored despite being harassed all day by the crowds, wrote down a few lines in his notebook and promised to look into the situation. Then Hanna picked a hideous purple hat for Minttu to buy and they went to the art museum for the rest of the afternoon. At least a dozen of Minttu’s friends saw her at the museum—saw her wearing the purple hat. But Hanna found the hat so bewitching that Minttu couldn’t bring herself to take it off.
. . .
In August the newspapers said that a number of bomb threats had been sent to the Israeli embassy. The threats had apparently come from an anonymous Finn and no one knew how seriously to take them.
Minttu was selectively political: she followed environmental issues but almost nothing else, and she had no strong opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At work Pekka sometimes went off on tirades against the Israeli government, but Minttu had always thought Pekka’s judgments were too black-and-white, and she hated it when he lectured her.
“Why would anyone in Finland send a bomb threat to the Israeli embassy here?” Minttu asked, having coffee with Pekka in the break room.
“That’s the whole point,” Pekka said. He made a little chopping motion with his hand. “Israel’s mass murder policy isn’t just the Palestinians’ problem. It’s the world’s problem.”
“Well, I don’t see why Finland should make itself part of this endless and incredibly stupid cycle of killing.”
“We’re already part of it.” Pekka chopped the air again, a clumsy gesture that made him look more awkward each time he did it. “We’re part of it whenever an Israeli tank rolls into Palestinian territory and we allow it to happen.”
“You think bomb threats against the local embassy are a better line of action?” Minttu asked.
“Violence and threats are the only thing the Israelis understand,” Pekka said.
Minttu put an aspirin on her tongue, took a sip of water. “I just want Finland to stay safe—safe for me and safe for Hanna. Is that so wrong?”
“Everyone who thinks like you,” he said, “is guilty of killing innocent Palestinians.”
“And everyone who thinks like you,” Hanna said, “is guilty of grotesque self-righteousness.”
Pekka scowled while Minttu finished her coffee. As usual, Pekka’s smugness infuriated her, but she couldn’t help feeling she would like to be as sure of all her opinions as he was. It would be quite a relief.
. . .
Minttu went back to the flea market at the end of the month. The Russian and his table of military surplus were gone, but their absence disturbed Minttu more than they reassured her. She imagined the black wool ski mask watching her, following her with its empty eyes as she pressed through the crowd.
. . .
Walking home from work a few weeks later, she saw a police car in front of Café Schumann. Inside the car was Café Schumann’s owner, a Jewish woman who nodded to Minttu while the police officer took notes. Finland had an unusually small Jewish population—perhaps the smallest in Europe—but Café Schumann was known as a gathering place for Russian Jews and other foreigners, as well as for writers and artists and classical musicians. Minttu drank coffee there once or twice a week.
She went into the café, bought a slice of cheesecake, asked the waitress why the owner was talking to the police.
“There was a fight,” the waitress said. She was a young Armenian woman with a Finnish husband and fraying dyed-blond hair. Working, she was always grim and efficient: her mouth formed a thin straight line as she rang up Minttu’s tab at the cash register.
“What sort of fight was it?” Minttu asked, taking her change.
“A couple of customers.” The Armenian woman drew a ceramic mug from the dishwasher behind the counter and began buffing the mug with a washcloth. “One of our regulars: this Jewish painter from Murmansk. And some other man, a Palestinian, here to visit his ex-wife. They started arguing about Israel. Then we made them go outside. Supposedly they both pulled knives on each other.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Minttu asked.
“No.” The woman buffed the mug impatiently, as if it annoyed her. “Men like these two—they make it harder for all the foreigners here.”
She put the mug up on its shelf and shook her washcloth at Minttu for emphasis.
“Everyone who fights,” she said, “should be shot.”
. . .
In the fall Minttu quit walking home every day and started taking the tram. Then on a windy October afternoon she got off at her tram stop and noticed the Russian from the flea market standing on the street corner.
He had already seen her: he waved to her as she came up the street. He still wore his camouflage jacket and hunting cap, and carried a tattered backpack, slung over one of his big shoulders.
“It is good to be in position of seeing you again,” he said. “It is good to be running into you, yes?”
Minttu thought about pretending not to recognize him, but was sure it wouldn’t work. “What are you doing these days?” she asked.
“It is odd you should be bringing it up.” The wind blew his crow-black hair across his chunky face and stubby nose. His lips nested wetly in a tangled beard. “It is topic of no small interest to me. You must have seen how I am no longer welcome in flea market. It is reason why I am so happy to be meeting you. Helsinki is small city, yes? It is very easy to be meeting people here.”
“Have you been following me?” Minttu asked.
“Is it following someone to have seen her on the tram one day and simply remember where she was getting off? Surely in free country like Finland I am allowed to see what I see and notice what I notice, am I not? Or is this a privilege allowed only to Finns, and not to Russians?” He grinned, smacked his wet lips together as if he were tasting something delicious. “You must be pleased, knowing your complaint got me thrown out of flea market. Knowing you’ve been taking away money from jobless Russian man and his family. I have been learning how important it is for you Finns to be hurting Russians. You are not liking us, are you? You are not liking us coming to your country.”
“I never tried to get you thrown out of the market,” Minttu said.
“Are you pretending it was not you who complained about the gun belt?” He flashed her the same bored insolent expression that he had flashed her at the market. “Are you making such pretension to me? They told me at the market that some woman had been complaining, some woman with her little girl. I am remembering you. I am remembering your little girl. There is no denying my memory.”
Minttu tried to be reasonable. “I’m sorry if I got you into trouble. I didn’t mean to. I was just worried you were selling something dangerous.”
“Everyone was selling something dangerous.” The Russian chopped the air with his hand. It was similar to the chopping motion that Pekka used, though the Russian made it seem less awkward, more intimidating. “The market was being full of knives, was it not?”
“Silverware,” Minttu said.
“Still knives. Still as dangerous as old bullets in a gun belt.”
Minttu decided it was useless to disagree. “I should be going,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
She started to step away from him, to walk the opposite direction from her apartment. She didn’t want him to know that her building was visible from the tram stop, or that he might be able to see into the second-floor windows and figure out which home was hers.
He laughed. “You are going wrong way, yes? Don’t you know where your own apartment is? Perhaps you would like me to be guiding you. I would be happy to assist.”
Minttu paused as he came towards her again.
“You Finns,” he said, “you are not treating us right. I am not big nationalist. I am not big extremist. But how you are treating us, it is not good. You are all having some more money now. You are all having better times than us now. But it will not always be this way. We used to control you. We might control you again. You should be thinking about that. You should be acting less arrogant to us, yes?”
“I have nothing against Russians,” Minttu said. “I just want things to be safe.”
The Russian wiped his lips—which only seemed to make them look wetter and stickier—and opened his backpack. “I am having something to show you.”
He removed the black wool ski mask from his bag and pressed it into Minttu’s hand.
“A gift,” he said. “For your daughter.”
Then he closed the backpack and walked away.
. . .
Minttu felt like dropping the mask on the sidewalk, but she put it in her purse. She thought she might need it as evidence, proof that the Russian was stalking her. The more she thought about it, however, the less obvious it seemed that the mask was meant as a threat.
“Don’t be stupid,” Pekka said the next day at work. “He obviously wanted to intimidate you.”
Minttu placed the mask on her desk, beside her computer. “I don’t know. When I first met him at the market, he seemed to think Hanna was interested in having the mask for herself. Maybe giving it to me was his way of trying to bridge the gap between us.”
Pekka twisted his mouth disdainfully. “It was his way of keeping you awake at night. You should report him to the police.”
Minttu opened the bottom drawer of her desk and stuffed the mask inside with some of her old papers. Then she slid the drawer shut again.
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