Troll: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

unshelled one, but it wouldn’t have either of them. I went to the supermarket for some quails’ eggs, and it did show a little interest in these, but perhaps it was just their color, spottedness, and small size reminding it of something. Anyway it didn’t eat those either.
I look at the black figure on the bed, at once restless, exhausted, and—it’s obvious—painfully hungry. I can’t let it outside. Out there are the thugs in their steel-toe-capped boots, getting their thrills by drenching drunks with gasoline, throwing cats from the roofs of multi-story blocks, and mugging gays. And if I tell anyone I’ll just as certainly lose the creature.
Its juniper-berry smell plays in my nostrils. Its own species didn’t want it. It was too much—ballast, a burden. They abandoned this light, slender, supple being, worthy of being immortalized in black marble.
Back to the cursed highway of knowledge, to the electronic asphalt, stretching in all directions, with no path leading where it should: to the forest.
For the hell of it, I put the cursor on to the Kalevala link of netzoo and click there. The net Kalevala has its own index. I wait briefly while the machine scrolls up references to trolls and demons.There’s no end of them. The biggest group is in the poem called “The Demon Skis,” where Lemminkäinen, skiing along, is chasing a demon that’s scampering away from him, and the demon, as it dashes off, sends the stewpots flying in a Lapland village. I log on to the bride’s guide poem, “Instructions and a Warning.” Here the bride complains about her bridegroom, and this makes me think of the Filipino girl downstairs:
I’d be better off
in better places,
with larger lands,
and roomier rooms,
a fuller-blooded man,
better built;
I’m given to this no-good,
left with this loafer:
took his carcass from a crow,
robbed his nose from a raven,
mouthed like a famished wolf,
haired like hell’s troll,
bellied like a bear.
That’s the complete demon reference. I wasn’t expecting to find instructions for feeding trolls in the Kalevala, but, surprisingly, the falling meter sweeps you along. The following troll fragment is, very aptly, Väinämöinen’s, which he sings to the accompaniment of a kantele .
None in the forest
that loped on four legs,
that bounded and bobbed,
but lingered to listen,
suck in some ecstasy:
squirrels came switching
from leaf-spray to leaf-spray,
stoats came and stopped there,
settled on fences.
Elks hopped on the heath,
lynxes leaped about laughing.
A wolf woke in the swamp,
a troll rose on the rocks,
a bear reared on the heath
from its pen in the pines,
its den in the spruce thicket.
I’ve had my fill of the Kalevala. The SEARCH function locates links here and there—to biology, mythology, various fairy tales, and old stories in their hundreds if not thousands. But nothing concrete. I’ll have to look elsewhere.
I’ve already been out of the apartment several times, and every time I come back to find my troll in the same place on the bed, heart-rendingly in almost the same position, scarcely able to raise its head.

YRJÖ KOKKO, PESSI AND ILLUSIA , 1944
“What . . . ?” exclaimed the woodpecker, gazing down inquisitively. It saw something that looked like a span-sized human being, though the creature had thick brown fur and a squirrel’s tufty ears, as well as a hare’s funny little stumpy tail. It peeped up at the woodpecker with happy and friendly eyes. Actually, perhaps the eyes seemed too small, but that may have been because of the rather large nose, with an equally large mouth beneath it, broadening into a happy smile and revealing beautiful pearl-white rows of teeth. Also, the creature’s hands and feet were perhaps on the large side, and its fur seemed matted, with longish hair dangling from the top of its head to its neck. Obviously, this was a small forest troll, waking up from its winter sleep—not a relative of those large black predatory animals that prowled the Lapland