Strays

The old man had been a killer in a previous life, the nurses knew, and for this he had been made a national hero. That was over half a century ago. When admitted to the home, he had expressed a willingness to accept visitors. People would travel the world over for the opportunity to sit bedside or next to him at one of the large tables in the community room. Not a few were retired military, many of whom had seen combat. This the nurses gathered from overhearing their conversations with Pär, the translator the old man’s family had hired and kept on retainer for just these sorts of visits. The old man, who had a name, one which was famous among circles who still valued and nurtured a knowledge of history, famous or infamous the nurses couldn’t decide, it depended on who they asked, he would sit crumpled in his wheelchair, oxygen tubes inserted into his nostrils, listening to the foreigners talk. Pär, who’d spent a few years of his youth in compulsory service and found a future there, picking up a knack for languages during that time, would watch the foreigners with his antifreeze blue eyes and listen. Occasionally he would brush the table with the palm of his hand, clearing it of imaginary crumbs. After the foreigner had finished explaining the reason for their visit, he would watch them smilelessly for a moment, as if waiting for more. Once the foreigner confirmed that, yes, this was the end of their turn in the conversation, Pär would pat the tabletop with his hand, lightly, soundless except for his wedding ring’s tap against wood. The nurses were unsure Pär was aware of his habit but it was one they derived some shared amusement noticing. 
After this little pat of the tabletop, he would then turn to the old man to translate. Not all the nurses knew English, a couple knew German, one or two were moderately conversant in French, so both halves of the conversation were not always understandable to them. They would hear the original and watch the foreigner talk and Pär listen nodlessly, smilelessly, then wait to hear Pär’s version. He was shy by nature it seemed, soft-spoken during their greetings to him at the front door, in the community room, in the hallways. A half inch from the bottom right-hand corner of his left eye was a growth of some sort, a skin tag or mole or wart. During their earliest interactions he had caught them noticing the growth and lowered his eyes to the floor. In the months and years since his eyes fell to the floor and stayed there as they passed and greeted him. 
Pär’s translation voice was calm and slow-spoken and loud but not too loud, firm. The old man had many health concerns, faulty hearing one of the more benign among them. He wore hearing aids in both ears and spoke with more volume than was necessary, but usually only to the nurses or visiting family. When taking audience with these non-native-speakers, he seemed to luxuriate in a lowered voice, relieved of having to be heard for his own sake. Having worked with the old man for a while now, Pär had become skilled at decoding the exact phrasing of wheezes and whispers and mumbles. The old man spoke his own language of a sort, in the dialect of old age, and Pär appeared fluent in this tongue also. Discussions between the old man and his visitors might have been wholly obscure to them, lost beyond the reach of nurses’ gossip, but for Pär’s clear enunciation and careful repetition of each utterance the old man presented for translation. The old man, having heard Pär’s translation of a visitor’s comment or question, would pause, often a long while, perhaps considering whether the comment or question required or deserved a response or was worthy of a portion of his increasingly valuable breath, then would speak in a dry, crackly proto-croak to Pär; listening with fixed concentration, the translator would pause, tap table with a hand, then repeat the old man’s response back not to the visitor but to the old man, in the language they were birthed by and raised within. If the old man was pleased, he would weakly nod, granting his consent. If he was dissatisfied for some reason, vexed by the absence of a certain explicitly expressed detail, he would say so, pointing out the flaw in Pär’s version before describing how the phrasing should be corrected. This painstaking process, which the translator appeared to take in stride, annoyed and exhausted the nurses, testing the limits of their abilities at eavesdropping. Easygoing almost always with the details of his care, in conversation with strangers the old man insisted on strict meticulousness. The nurses knew him as a resident and an old man, and it could be these versions of him held little value. These strangers brought a different version of him through the doors, checked in with it at the front desk, sat down with it in the community room, at the usual table in the quietest corner set aside for such conversations, then when the nurses rolled him to the table, these strangers rose with effusive smiles, eager to shake his hand and in doing so, would gift it to him. He was no longer an old man, but a rarity, a hero, a glamorous killer. A sniper who had for half a century retained a record for most confirmed kills, most of which were committed in a two-month period in the wilderness borderland between Russia and Finland. 
On first learning this, the nurses viewed the old man differently. They brought the news home to husbands and brothers and friends and, if old enough to bear such knowledge, children. This old withered self of a grandfather who played cards with other such versions of himself in the community room, who preferred lingonberry jam on his toast most mornings, who watched sentimental movies and sitcoms on television without so much as a faint throat-clearing to express amusement, was a murderer, a prolific reaper of lives. In his dotage he was no less the murderer than he had been, his many intermittent visitors proof of this. There was an endless supply of old men across the world but few, the nurses imagined, commanded such pilgrimages. He attracted aspirants like a holy man, but his holiness was unwholesome. He was a dangerous figure rendered harmless by infirmity. They helped him shower, sanitized his bedthings when he soiled himself. Did their care for such a person make them complicit, they asked each other, uncertain they could do otherwise. They had considered catching the translator in the hallways, to pull him aside and ask how he felt serving the needs of such a history. Doubtlessly the translator would bashfully excuse himself and walk to the community room to take his appointed chair at his appointed table. Instead they were resolved to earn back their good consciences through careful listening and gossip. They had done so these past four years, wondering where this left them. The old man slept better than most of the home’s residents and they considered this revealing; but of what, they couldn’t tell. 
Having pleased the old man, having confirmed the message to relate, the translator would turn to the waiting visitor and switch languages. It was the subtlest of shifts to witness, the translator turning in his seat thirty degrees, hand planted in its usual spot on the tabletop, the axis it seemed on which he pivoted. Expressionless, he would change his nature, not outwardly but inwardly, the way chromatophoric cells receive directives from an octopus’ instinct for self-preservation and change color in unison almost instantly, conforming to the hue of rock or sand around it. He would become a speaker of English or German or Spanish or French, and from this new version of self would offer the old man’s reply by proxy. Monoglots among the nurses would lose the old man’s words along the way, as they were absorbed by the translator, then transformed into a different species of speaking and hearing. The visitors would sit with tempered excitement, receiving utterances, no matter how secondary, from their idol. This man was a significant figure, had accomplished extraordinary things, had been feared by his enemies and revered by his countrymen. In a short time he had buried more Russian souls than could have been birthed annually by sturdy Russian women in a large village. The Russians had hated him so specifically they had named him “The White Death”; if they’d known his actual name they would have cursed it until the name itself became infused with curse-energy. The visitors brought a great deal of romantic anticipation to the table, which the old man both appreciated and seemingly didn’t notice. He had been a deer hunter in his youth, the visitors would state, repeating facts of his own life back to him. He had preferred a glassless sight to his rifle, to avoid glints of reflected sunlight. To chill his breath so it didn’t appear as breath-puffs and so give away his hiding place, he would stuff his mouth with snow. He was a patriot and hunter of men and killed several hundred before taking an exploding bullet to the face. Jaw shattered, he had been dragged back to camp by his compatriots and judged dead. But he had lived. He had healed and lived half a century and longer with this broken face he now tendered as evidence of his greatness and his sacrifice. This news was received among the nurses as a revelation. They had been too polite to ask about his face; though they had checked his medical records for an explanation, none had been offered there. 
Exchanges between visitor and translator, translator and old man, were usually composed of two intertwining strands of inquiry, and the purpose of their conversation, as far as the nurses could tell, was to twist these against one another until they were bound together into a length of rope. The rope could then serve as a lifeline cast from the present moment into the distant past, where the old man in his younger, more heroic days might reach out a hand and, critically wounded and bleeding out on the snow, grasp it. If the young soldier held onto it tightly long enough, he might be dragged across the wastes and decades to join them in the very room where they sat talking. What had it been like, the war, laying belly-flat among snow banks, camouflaged in white and taking aim at Russian targets and popping them open like bottles of champagne, blood spurting from head-wounds after bits of skull had taken flight like corks? Versions of the first strand to be bound into a conversation all boiled down to basic curiosity, what had it been like? The second strand, its tension-bearing strength and quality, depended on the visitor’s level of knowledge regarding the sniper’s art. For some the techniques involved were objects of worship, rendered awesome by their own lack of lived familiarity with disassembling, cleaning, then reassembling a weapon, for the specific explicit purpose of taking a human life. Most who requested time with the old man were surely gun owners, but practiced the art of life-taking during carefully regulated hunting seasons. Aligning sighted crosshairs with distant targets, they saw deer or ducks or turkeys. They were self-aware enough to not assume the hunter’s art was readily comparable to the sniper’s, so posed their questions to the translator and old man with the utmost humility. These were the majority of the second-stranders, but there were a few who brought into the room and to the table an intimate familiarity with the topic. These were veterans of later, less admirable wars, wars that often did not end with a clearly identified victor or loser but which instead petered out into a protracted stalemate. For all the nurses knew these wars were still ongoing and these visitors had taken leave to consult the old man on how to perfect their craft. A few who visited the old man had been in active service and made a point of stating so at the outset. Active service members, veterans, civilians, the old man welcomed each the same. What had it been like, they asked, what are the secrets of the trade? With Pär as their intermediary, these two lines of inquiry were braided into a tight, lean tow line and could be tested with a tug. The past was sitting at the table with them but they would need to pull evenly and carefully on their end of the line to tease it fully into the present, so they might share a little of its glory. They had met the old man, they would tell their friends, their peers online, and were honored to occupy with him a few minutes at the end of his life. What had ended as an old man in a wheelchair in a nursing home’s community room had begun as a country boy with a rare skill honed during a childhood hunting deer. The call of history intervened, disrupted that life, and drew him into the wilderness as a soldier. There he had accomplished the unthinkable without conscious effort, had killed to survive and in defense of his country. The Russians had been sent to meet him but hadn’t known yet, had gained awareness only after it was too late and the boy’s bullets had flashed from nowhere and cut into them, maiming or killing them. The fools had been sent into the snow like so many deer, improperly camouflaged for the weather and landscape, brown uniforms against the white all around. Recounting their meeting with the legend, they would skip past the old-manness of his current shape and gush to their envious friends of the greatness that still resided in his right eye and right pointer finger. The very eye that was gifted with perfect vision, that peered down the stock and sight and barrel to find little figures advancing through snow; the very finger that rested snug against the trigger and skillfully applied pressure, to fell those figures before the echoes of a rifle shot reached them. Those very eyes watched as they spoke, that very hand shook their own. The afternoon they shared with the man would be recounted eagerly for the rest of their lives, even after they had become old men who pushed themselves around in wheelchairs. There still existed quality of character and greatness in the world, and they had met its acquaintance. They had met a stone-cold killer and had lived to tell of it. They would hope, for even a brief moment, he had considered them a friend. 
The translator Pär would not exaggerate the old man’s responses to flatter the ulkomaalaiset, the foreigners. Maintaining the temper and manner of an undisturbed glass of lukewarm water, he would relate the old man’s simple, direct responses in unadorned fashion, tinged around the edges with boredom. The earliest visitors had been a pleasant surprise, and perhaps the old man had derived genuine enjoyment from the conversations, but through sheer repetition and the unvarying trajectories of such exchanges, the visitations had quickly become predictable, tedious, a chore, and for a while the old man had refused requests when they arrived to the home by phone call or email. Having refused several he was soon reminded of the sheer repetition and unvarying trajectories of his days in his room and the common room and dining room, so rescinded his rejections and arranged for the translator to arrive and wait in the community room for now-welcome visitors. Given a choice between two tediums, the old man had chosen both. Similar to the visitors and their strands of inquiry, he chose to twist the two against each until they were bonded by tension into a single, stronger string. It was a way to pass the time, which never seemed to tire of arriving. 
Should the old man die, would there be a state funeral? Would these strangers travel to honor the official end of a life they admired and perhaps envied? Greatness was rare in the world, their visits seemed to suggest, so was well worth the cost and trouble. They would tell to anyone who would listen, I met him once, spent an afternoon revisiting the past with him. And now the past would be gone, leaving them to treasure it as a conversation once held in the company of other tables and other elderly residents and one or two nurses and orderlies standing by. Thanks to old men such as he, who had once been younger and more lethal, Finland had not been conquered, had resisted annexation by Russia. They became murderers so the country could live; and here lies the most prolific savior of them all. 
The conversations ended the same each time. The old man, tiring of the moment, savoring little of its occasion, would raise a hand to put a stop to the questions. Not a brusque gesture, but a feeble one, a request to be spared further translation and answering. The translator would translate the exhaustion and feebleness to the visitor, who, sensitive to already having asked more than they could have reasonably expected from the old man, would thank both old man and translator politely and profusely or politely and stoically, before shaking the hands of both and excusing themselves. The old man and translator would have a word or two afterwards and, sensing a conclusion, one of the nurses would walk over to take hold of the wheelchair’s handles, waiting for signal from the old man to roll him from the community area, down the eastern wing hallway back to his room. The translator, hands in pockets, would watch them go before lowering his eyes to the floor to walk towards the front doors. Sunlight and the parking lot would be waiting for him, a life unburdened by community rooms and visitors-in-translation. He could be his own person and raise his eyes again to the level of wherever he was walking. 
There were other witnesses to these meetings and the nurses, exquisitely attuned to passive-aggressive feuds and intrigues among the residents, watched whenever these visitors would enter, to see how they changed the room. Many would be sitting around their usual tables, often in the company of a nurse or orderly or social worker, playing Paskahousu or Ristiseiska or poker, nurse or social worker serving as dealer and, if needed, referee, should there arise a disagreement or if a certain outcome was contested. At less popular tables there would be others who preferred their own company, The Watchers as the nurses called them, playing solitaire or knitting wool scarves or crocheting. The Watchers seemed to enjoy the tempered liveliness of the room, but from a distance. They could absorb relevant news about other residents and the goings-on of the outside world, its economic vagaries and geopolitics, through stealth and curious osmosis, much the way the nurses did. In general they kept their opinions to themselves and were often thwarted by bad hearing, so the information gleaned from larger tables retained its secrecy by default. There were cliques and hierarchies and petty grudges and these the nurses both endured and half-enjoyed, laughing amongst each other at the dearth of wisdom on display among the elderly. One such loner was a gentlemen who had been admitted to the home a short while before the famous old sniper; a squat, still muscular man with an odd accent. He had arrived with his wife from Rovaniemi but the wife had fallen ill not long after; transferred to intensive care, then hospice, she had disappeared quickly into her body, which had withered without a full woman to inhabit it. For a few weeks the man’s children had attended to his grief, which he did not show except by remaining silent, then had consented to his wish to be left alone. They were two, a man and woman, and both had spouses, but neither had children; so there were no grandchildren to welcome should they visit; they were busy people, with careers and pets and lively social lives and partners; he would rather not be an imposition. There was no requirement to visit, so they didn’t, believing this was what he wanted. One or the other would email occasionally to check in with the staff about his health and his mood, and the staff would respond that, while he largely kept apart from social activities around the home, he did not seem particularly unhappy with the arrangement. He would talk with the nurses when they made conversation; but they gathered he did so for their sake, not his. He seemed content. If he grieved his wife, he did so in private. 
In one such email exchange between staffer and child, it had been mentioned that the old man had been born in Russia and spent the first half of his life in Moscow. He had slipped across the border by foot as an emigrant, hitchhiked to Lapland; there he worked first as a laborer then as a chef, and at the restaurant where he worked he had met their mother. Don’t call him a dissident, the staffers were advised, their father tended to bristle at the term. He didn’t leave for political reasons but for the opportunity to live an actual life. He was a quiet Muscovite, and preferred not to be reminded where he came from. 
Learning this, the nurses wondered whether the man was privy to the conferences held across the room from him, days when visitors would sit with the old war hero and his translator. Surely he had gathered awareness of the old man’s reputation, hearing the revisions of statement between old man and translator, in their common language. What did he make of these visitors, their fawning effusions, and of the old man who had killed so many like him? The nurses would watch the Muscovite at his table near the window, cards arranged in rows before him. Flipping over a fresh card, he would take a long pause to consider where to place it. Paced to the rhythm of a thoroughly aged nervous system, the hand seemed to move slower than the mind that directed it; at times the hand would even disconnect briefly from its mind and roam the table’s surface, card in tow, until the mind reoriented and the eyes blinked and hand was caught mid-roam and brought back to order. After which the card would be laid face-up on the table. 
Was he listening, was he thinking? The man seemed to have been born with a poker face, there was no hope he might suddenly outgrow it. None of the nurses could attest to having ever seen either share a table or conversation. One had aged into fame and the other into a manageable obscurity, but there appeared no difference between them. To a nurse’s eye they were similar because they were old, and the assistances they required were indistinguishable. The Muscovite entered and left the room with aid of a walker, whereas the old man came and went in a wheelchair. This was the sole discrepancy between them. Both entertained the nurses’ attempts at small talk politely, with an attitude of soft resistance. Both watched late night talk shows when they couldn’t sleep. Both were widowers. Both seemed accepting of bodily weakness. They both enjoyed sopping runny egg yolks with toast and, with magnanimous relish, eating it. 
During one such visit, one of the nurses, determined to take measure of the man’s awareness of the conversation and its translation about to take place several tables away, invited herself to sit with him. The man, too polite to tell her he preferred to be alone, had accepted the intrusion by allowing her to gather and reshuffle his deck of cards. She asked whether he was familiar with the game Rummy and he said no. She asked if he would mind if she taught him how to play and after a soft pause he agreed. She didn’t mean to disturb him if he would rather sit alone, she explained, but she was tired and her shift was already feeling long, so she could use for a good game to pass the time. Such was the conversational ninjutsu of nurses; how could he say no? 
Across the room a guest with an American accent spoke words beyond her understanding, not because she didn’t speak English but because her handle on what an accent could do to certain words was spotty. He appeared young, no older than forty, and sat with another guest equally young. From the translator’s rephrased introduction, she gathered they were military officers stationed in Berlin and had travelled on their weekend leave for the expressed purpose of meeting him. The conversation unfolded from there, hitched with revisions and recalibrations and pauses. The translator Pär’s hand tapped the table and tapped again, every two pats catching tabletop against wedding ring. The nurse had taken a seat that afforded a view of the Muscovite’s profile and beyond it, the conference of officers with war hero. Between offering instructions about how many cards to draw, how to discard, where and when to play threes of a kind or straights, she would ask the man what he thought the strangers at the table nearby were discussing. The old man and the translator, she said, they seemed to entertain guests quite often, and often these guests seemed to travel from faraway places. She wondered who the old man had been in his life, to warrant such attention. The Muscovite watched the cards while she spoke and, out of politeness, took up his part of the conversation, aware that leaving his part silent might be taken as rude, unaware this was just how she had intended it. I don’t know, the man replied. I have seen many of them come and go, and can’t say what it is they usually talk about. They seem to come more often during the summer, he said. They were almost always men, though on one occasion there had been a pair of women, one older than the other but both young compared to him. 
Your accent, she said, it’s interesting. Where was he from, originally? As soon as she’d asked it, she’d regretted it, thinking this might have tipped her hand too much, too quickly. The man seemed unbothered by the directness. I am from Moscow. I came here forty years ago. Really, the nurse exclaimed, feigning surprise. Have you been back since the changes to the country? No, the man told her. I was old by then and didn’t have the interest, didn’t miss it. He had married a woman from her country and had children and on the whole enjoyed his life much more here than there. Did he have family still in Russia, she asked. He did at one time, he replied, but it had been so long since he’d last spoken with them, now he wasn’t sure. Just some cousins and their children, no one close as a sibling. He’d been an only child, so leaving had been easier, and his parents had died before he left. He’d left after they’d died, freed because there was no longer anyone he would need to keep company or look after. He could leave freely, with full blessing from his conscience. A bold move, the nurse said, to which the Muscovite responded with a hum of benign disagreement deep in his throat. Not so much, he told her. Though for someone who had never been impelled to flee a country, it might seem so. 
Do you still have memories of the city, the nurse said, drawing a card from the deck, I’ve never been to Moscow. The man lifted his eyes from the cards and slowly rolled back his head to view the ceiling, as if memories of the city might be found there. Snow in the winter, sunshine in the summer, he said. Buildings and streets and buildings. And dogs. Many, many dogs. 
Dogs? The nurse asked. Yes, the man said, eyes lowering from ceiling back to cards. Dogs. 
They were everywhere, he told her, even rode the subways without much intervention. Quite a population, some thirty-thousand and feral, many descended from lineages of strays going back to the nineteenth century. He had read an article about it once in a magazine and it had reminded him of what he’d seen day-in day-out about the place without conscious awareness of what he was seeing. His youth was followed by dogs, and his early middle years. He’d abandoned the place to dogs, you could say. Good riddance. The article had told him, though, something he didn’t know and which even in old age he considered exemplary of the place. These groups of dogs, they’d remained feral for so long, they’d evolved beyond their dogness; roamed in unique pack structures, like wolves, avoided humans, no longer wagged their tails. They were a living phenomenon, evolution in reverse, there for anyone to witness, if they could look upon them and realize what they were seeing. Stray dogs cultivating a civilization of their own, surviving on scraps and trash; devolving back into the wolfishness they’d originally came from. Actual hybrids, half-dog, half-wolf, both and neither. That is what he remembered about the place when he’d lived there, and largely the reason he’d left it. It was a place where dogs were free to un-domesticate themselves and hunt in packs. No, he didn’t miss it. He was happy to sit at this table with her, playing cards, free of such cares. 
The nurse agreed this was a bizarre development and that, while she’d never heard of it, believed it was something happening still, in the city he had left behind, so he could leave behind a whole country. There were differences among their people, she said, fully aware of the banality being released from her in the moment, wincing to herself, hoping the comment didn’t sour the man’s willingness to continue talking. Finns, Russians, there was a border but the land continued between the two countries and shaped the people in ways more similar than different. This was an opinion stated for the sake of keeping the conversation going, and she hoped he wouldn’t take offense at it or challenge it. The man selected three cards from his hand, a three and four and five of diamonds, and laid them on the table. From the cards left in his hand he discarded a queen of spades. This reminded the nurse of her own hand, its gaps between straights, its twos of a kind. A jack and king of spades waited in her hand. She slipped the discarded queen from the table and dragged it to her side, laid the jack and king either side of it. These she translated into points won through the pairing. Each face card was worth ten points, so this made thirty. If he had the ten of spades, he could play off her pairing for ten points of his own. If he had the ace, he could win fifteen, since aces were fifteen, the highest amount of points for a card. He could add to her play for his own advantage, but only after she’d discarded. The man watched her hands and her face as she explained this, and while his eyes were on her she failed to notice the translator and guest rise from the table across from them. The movement at the other end of the room caught her attention, as another nurse was in the process of taking hold of the wheelchair’s handles to turn the old man in the direction of the hallway, to roll him back to his room. The translator shook hands with the guests and the guests left. He did not follow them out into the parking lot, never having once done so after a visit, but stood with hands in pockets watching the television in the upper corner of the room, nearest the windows and above their heads. At a glance it might have appeared the translator was looking at them, but knowing the man’s shyness and aversion to eye contact, she assumed otherwise. The television volume was on mute but nonetheless he was watching. What was playing there? Once the translator had turned on his heel, shuffled and left, she’d excuse herself from the table to look. Her companion was looking in the same direction; how long, she couldn’t say, because she hadn’t noticed until he’d folded the cards in his hands and laid them on the table. He was watching the translator stand with hands in his pockets, his blue eyes vivid against the unremarkable simplicity of his face. Subtly, the translator shifted weight from one foot to other, this she saw and would swear by later when telling the other nurses about it; discomfited at populating a stranger’s gaze, the translator removed hands from pockets, wiped one downwards across his beard and mouth, then rolling out of a slight sway walked to the double glass doors, pushed one open, and left. The man sitting beside her lifted the cards again off the table, apologized. He was sorry, he said, he was old, as if she needed reminding, and sometimes old things happened to him. He would drop into a daze and not realize it. When he snapped free of it, it’d often take him a minute to remember why he was sitting there, what he was doing. All of which was to say he was sorry, could she remind him who’s turn was it to discard? If it was his, and the game lasted another round, he just might have a chance at winning. She had to think about it. It was her turn. She was sorry to disappoint him, but as her hand stood, she thought they might reach another round, no problem. Not a problem, he told her. It was his first round. No expectations. He hadn’t earned the right to disappointment yet. Häviäminen on oppimista. Losing was learning.