11. Jon-Ante
JON-ANTE
1985
Jon-Ante hoped that he would be the first to reach the utility chamber that served as their break room down in the mine, but when he opened the door Einar was already sitting there. No one was quite sure when he actually worked, a teasing gibe that went around among the men. Rumor had it that Einar was the type to nap wherever he could find a spot, making a cozy nest of cotton sacks beneath him. It’s not as though there was any lack of nooks and crannies where you could sneak off and grab a few winks.
Einar wasn’t one for small talk and that was just fine with Jon-Ante, who grabbed a cup of coffee and sank into his thoughts at the table. They yawned in tandem. Yesterday, the men had given him a rough time in the utility chamber, teasing him about a new woman who had started working in the cafeteria, saying it was about time he got laid. So this was better, sitting in silence with Einar and slowly sipping pitch-black coffee.
Jon-Ante considered this whole not-having-a-girlfriend thing, how it had started in his teen years. He’d never expected to be overlooked, that there wouldn’t be enough girls in the village to go around. But that’s what happened: one by one the girls paired off, getting together with his friends and cousins, and nothing changed for him when he left the village to attend Kiruna Practical School, KPU. After graduating, he came home to be with Isá and the reindeer, and that was when he truly realized he would, in fact, end up the odd one out. That clinched it—he couldn’t stay in the village. He supposed there were other reasons he wanted to leave, too, but he could hardly admit them to himself, much less talk about them.
So his homecoming was temporary, but he didn’t let Isá know that he was merely waiting for his younger brothers to grow up enough to replace him. Once he moved, he didn’t want to blame the fact that the village ran out of girls—in fact, he gave no reason at all, just went back to town and did what many of his friends from KPU did: got a job in the mine. Then he found an apartment of his own in ?n, the old residential neighborhood right up next to the massive mining mountain. You reached it by going under the railroad viaduct, the tracks that sent iron ore out into the world. Sometimes when he took a walk along the tracks, he found tiny pellets that had fallen from the hopper cars and took them home to Isak. His unna viellja, who was around twelve at the time, was always amazed at the weight of the grayish black pellets, which were no larger than the glass marbles he used to play with in the schoolyard.
When Enná finally asked why he didn’t want to be at home, Jon-Ante said he had gone to Giron—as Kiruna was called in Sámi—to become something, to have a career, and he’d assured her he would come back eventually although he knew he never would.
“You already are something, Jon-Ante,” she said.
“Isn’t this life good enough for you?” his áddjá asked, and that was what hurt the most, this was a memory he only seldom touched upon. To have disappointed his parents was one thing, but áddjá, that was heavy. His grandfather, who had filled him with stories from the past, who had told him about the land, who always had patience, who had taught him everything and said that Jon-Ante belonged among the reindeer. “Just wait, you’ll see, he’s special, my Jon-Ante,” he used to say. áddjá was a great storyteller, probably could have become an author if he had known how to write, but telling him so always made him chuckle. “Write? Why write when you can talk?”
Jon-Ante didn’t live up to any of áddjá’s predictions and felt that he’d betrayed him. But the stories remained, every last one; áddjá’s voice lived inside him. He wanted to tell áddjá that nothing had been in vain, he’d held on to all of that knowledge, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So many times he sat at áddjá’s kitchen table, meaning to say it, but the words wouldn’t come out.
He’d been nervous to move into town on his own at the age of fifteen for school, but he’d boarded with an older cousin who lived just a stone’s throw from Hotell Standard. Per-Johan had told him what it had been like to come to Giron when he was younger and be refused lodging at the hotel. Lapps had no business there, he’d been told, and was directed to the Lapp Hostel instead.
“So there I was in the hotel lobby, with people waiting behind me, being informed that they didn’t allow Lapps. Yeah, so watch out. You’ll find people like that in town, especially at the school.”
Jon-Ante dressed in ordinary clothes and started using snus to blend in with the guys at KPU. He met Classe, who wore a leather jacket and combed his hair like Elvis Presley. He was always talking about the American cars he would drive as soon as he could afford them. Jon-Ante started growing his hair out so he could style it the same way.
Isá thought KPU was pointless, but Jon-Ante pointed out that it was a good thing, being able to repair snowmobiles, cars, and machines. His own first car had been a gray Volvo PV, and it always needed tuning up. It felt nice to be able to fix it himself, to get things working, to puzzle over a tricky starter and succeed in the end. Isá was definitely grateful when Jon-Ante could start a snowmobile that had died in the middle of nowhere, but he probably would have preferred no snowmobiles at all.
Jon-Ante liked living in town and was perfectly willing to admit it. Sure, the darkness of the mine got to him occasionally, but then there were whole weeks off—hard to find another job with the same perks. Those breaks gave him time to restore his Lincoln, but he could also head home for a bit, hunt moose with Isá, go fishing, help with the separation and slaughter. He often got to fix his brothers’ cars and snowmobiles too; they had a knack for driving everything to pieces.
But sometimes it was annoying to be home. áddjá and énna kept at him, as if they’d joined forces to convince him to come back.
“You’re not the same anymore,” énna would say, without explaining what she meant.
“So, you’re leaving again,” said áddjá.
Isá had given up, you could see it in his eyes, he wouldn’t even try. Maybe he was the wisest among them, unwilling to spend their brief time together making Jon-Ante feel guilty. As a result, anytime he was home Jon-Ante would wake up at five each morning to join Isá in the forest or in the moose-hunting stand.
J ON -A NTE TOPPED OFF HIS mug with bitter coffee and looked at the clock on the wall—soon it would be time to head back into the light aboveground. He glanced at the new pinup of a nude woman, who had long blond hair and was arching her head and back, so the ends of her hair nearly brushed her ass. So practical, the way it was tacked up right next to the clock so you could pretend you were only checking the time. Someone had ripped the picture out of Lektyr and picked out the staples, leaving tiny holes in the glossy paper—one of them had punctured her left breast.
His face used to go beet red when he walked into the chamber for some coffee and found nude women gazing at him with that intense longing in their eyes. The guys had teased him about it. Now it’d been ages since his heart was set racing by what hung on the walls.
“Well, time for the off week,” he remarked to Einar, who slurped coffee through the sugar cube between his lips.
Einar couldn’t stop gaping at the new picture, but he nodded.
“Heading to Tr?sket, then?”
“Yup,” said Einar.
It was tough, heading down into the mine when the sun never set. But on the other hand, the midnight sun meant it would always be light out when you surfaced. In the winter, though, it was pitch black instead, and you never quite felt awake if you missed the few hours of daylight. Black as sin, as Einar was in the habit of sighing. In the spring, too, it was hard to head 775 meters belowground when the snow was melting from the roofs and everyone was out ice fishing with their faces turned up to the sun. Actually, it was tough all year round.
“Are you going to be there all week?” Jon-Ante asked.
“Yes, we’re taking the new boat.” Einar spent all of his free time at Tornetr?sk. Last spring he had bragged about the new ice-fishing shelter he’d towed out to the very best spot on the frozen lake. “You know, Jonne, now we can be there whatever the weather. You’re always welcome if you happen to be in the neighborhood.”
Sometimes he was surprisingly chatty, and Jon-Ante had actually considered taking him at his word and driving out from town on his snowmobile.
Einar and Jon-Ante had worked together since the late sixties, going back to the days when there weren’t even break-room chambers. Back then they would duck behind two-meter-tall tool chests with a smuggled spirit stove that they had to light with a welding torch. All for a cup of coffee. Hell, Jon-Ante thought, they’d sure had it rough over the years, so no wonder Einar liked to pile up some cotton sacks and snooze when he could.
The break room started to fill up and it grew crowded around the table. Most of them spoke Finnish, but one new boss said using Finnish over the two-way radio was a security risk. Everyone had to understand, no one must be excluded. He sure did use some fancy words, but he wasn’t from town and got no respect whatsoever. They’d kept right on speaking Finnish, Jon-Ante as casually and easily as anyone else.
Sune, one of the veterans on their team, entered rattling mugs and cursing over the fact that no one had put on a fresh pot of coffee. “Haven’t you been sitting here the longest, Jonne? Why didn’t you make some fresh?”
“How am I supposed to keep track of how much everyone is taking? Whoever takes the last cup is in charge of refilling it,” he snapped back.
“Get a haircut, kid.”
Sune was nearing retirement, and it had been years since Jon-Ante stopped being scared of him, but the old man never got used to Jon-Ante’s retorts. If he was in a really bad mood, he might start to spout something about Lapps. Not about Jon-Ante personally, he wasn’t that dumb, but something about the reindeer that ate up his whole garden at the cabin, or the snowmobile ban the Lapps bribed their way into, claiming it was to protect the reindeer when everyone knew it was really to make sure no one else got to fish in the best waters.
The foreman had made the mistake of introducing Jon-Ante with his full name on his first day, and Sune’s eyes had narrowed. After that it was hard to convince his colleagues to call him Jonne, the nickname Classe had given him back at KPU. Eventually the nickname stuck, but the damage was done.
Jon-Ante had switched over to a different shift team for a while, and it had been better there, but now he was back where he’d started.
Sune was on a roll, ranting about how their union, Gruvtolvan, had gotten too soft over the years. “Time to fight fire with fire now.”
He liked to tell tales about how ruthless he’d been during the strike of ’69. The younger members of their working team were impressed to hear how he’d stood on the front lines. Jon-Ante had been part of those strike meetings too, but he had no recollection of Sune playing a prominent role. He did remember, though, how powerful it had felt when they gathered in the main hall of the sports arena. He’d been following Kiruna’s handball team closely since he moved to town, and it was special to see the hall fill up with miners called to action instead of handball players.
He’d marched in the demonstrations, too, holding a sign: “We are not machines.”
No one in his family had been particularly impressed. Working in the mine was nothing to strive for or brag about.
“When I told the strike leaders that we had to—” Sune was really cooking now.
Jon-Ante stood up and rinsed out his mug. He thought of Enná and her distaste for all of this. Although he’d worked in the mine for so long, she still worried every time he went down.
“That gas accident, Jon-Ante. That could have been you.”
It hadn’t been. He wasn’t a loader who went into the drift right after blasting. All these years, and she still didn’t understand what he did at work. But that incident, which killed two men, had been the first time he felt seriously hesitant before heading down. People had been hurt and killed in collapses, but that didn’t scare him as much as the poisonous gas after a detonation—that was an invisible enemy. He also feared fire. If something started burning, the passages would rapidly fill with deadly smoke. During his first year, he had worried about getting lost in the miles of paths; it felt eerie to be underground and not always know exactly how to find your way out. These days, he knew every bend of every level.
He placed his hand on the grubby door handle and looked at Sune. That man would have a hard time once he retired from the mine at sixty, left without purpose in his life like so many others. As soon as his body got the chance to slow down and feel the toll his hard work belowground had taken, he would probably die of a heart attack or lung cancer.
Jon-Ante left the chamber and closed the door behind him. That’s why you need to have something out there, waiting for you , he thought.
Not that he would go back to the reindeer. He recalled Enná’s nagging and his habit of evading her questions with a maybe. No, there was no maybe. And what would he even do out there? Compete to have a large enough herd for financial survival? No thank you. He was well aware who made the most noise in the reindeer collective, bragged about their large voting shares, and drove through decisions that benefited themselves above all.
He climbed into the pickup and his helmet touched the roof. As he started the engine, the headlights illuminated walls of black rock. Signaling with the right-hand blinker, he pulled onto the road. He’d never been claustrophobic, but on certain days it was harder to breathe. Like when he thought about how he should be outside, getting some fresh air and taking Isá’s dog along on the snowmobile. She’d learned to lie flat as a puppy, distributing her weight so she wouldn’t fall off the seat. He missed her often, that good dog. If only life in the village had been all about the animals, the mine and Giron wouldn’t have been so tempting. But there was so much else he couldn’t deal with back home.
He thought of his Lincoln, which prompted him to whistle a Jerry Williams song. He had something outside of work, that was the important thing. His nose was running, and he fished a tissue from the pack next to the gear shift. Black snot came out. Soon he would be on vacation, he wouldn’t have to use more than three weeks of saved time but would be away for almost seven thanks to the off weeks. And he would be on vacation for real, not like his brothers, who were never truly free. Last time they got together, and Jon-Ante was needling them about his seven weeks, Mikkel had gazed at him nonchalantly and said that he never worked, just lived. Jon-Ante still hadn’t thought of a cutting retort. He stopped whistling; the melody in his head had vanished.