Pinnocha: The Wooden Boy of Lapland

Prolouge: Conception

Prologue

Lapland is a place of de-virginized snow and midnight suns to many a man.  Where reindeer and trees as long as cigars fuck and re-produce freely, and where Finland's soldiers hold their guns aloft to the glossy, red eyes of Nazi boys, shouting tulta munille and killing the man with foreign terror in his heart, saving another innocent person from their wrath, drool and blood creeping from the mouths of Nazis. 

            Somewhere the soul of Gershom was inside them, after Hitler had poisoned his dog and himself.  A soviet angel in a fur hat had found his white, emaciated body in a concentration camp, where all color had evacuated.  Gershom laid unconscious and nude, no more than eighteen, baring a bludgeoned, purple eye, atop the mummified body of a strange boy, holding a golden ring tight in his hand. 
The soviet angel, of whose face was ever changing, wiped the dirt from Gershom's face, as a true communist would.  He opened the hand of young Gershom to see he had saved the ring, those who it truly did belong to was a mystery.  "Clever Jew" the soviet angel whispered with tenderness, lifting the body of Gershom to safety, cradling him in his arms as he awoke, and the other prisoners began to collapse and die on their way to the medical trucks.  Crows flew over head, talking to them, squawking many an offensive German phrase they have learned to mimic with their mouths.  One of the crows had stolen a silver whistle from the commandant, who had hung himself in a wooden outhouse, and the bird blew into it with his beak for a song.   
         Gershom, with the power of a bull moose, awoke with a stinging fear that a Nazi machine was going to throw him into a burning pile of stick thin bodies, but what he saw was the kind, red face of the communist, and the dirty body of the mummified boy.  Gershom's eyes rolled back into his head, the image of the boy's body spinning into nothingness.  The soviet angel momentarily placed Gershom's body back onto the ground as he began to vomit yellow broth all over himself.
         The dead boy smelled like rotten eggs; its face was the face of every German Socialist man who pulled young Gershom from his mother, and suffocated his friends.  Once the vital organs go down, the body is still alive, to feel the terror.  The smell of the boy's body was the rope of drunken soldiers, tied around Gershom's arms and fastened to the tails of asses, in order to pull the young man apart for their entertainment.  The asses had failed, leaving Gershom to fall in pain in the mud, crying for his mother.    

            With the image of the dead boy hurting his heart, Gershom finally became well again, isolating himself, watching those who should be his comrades go their separate ways to America, to Palestine, to many places.  Though no one could make it home.  It was Lapland that Gershom chose, being a young man who was as beautiful and as tender as a pregnant woman.  The purple shiner over his eye had grown and matured into an everlasting, black sickle, and his hands were purple, and in a constant tremor.  Though before the war, they could make alien and sexual paintings.  But now he drew almost nothing. 

            Gershom took many trains into the frozen empire of Northern Finland, and behind him on the railroad and the wild snow was a trail of napkins he had drawn on.  Every napkin depicted an image of the dead boy, every single one.  The various inks of pens he had stolen began to run purple, like a fever, as Gershom began to walk for nine days and nights under the moon in Northern Ostrobothnia.
 He resolved to walk until he froze to death; that was until a postman on horseback had found Gershom's gentle body stiff against a tree.  Gershom recoiled under the humid breath of the black horse, name of Casey Anthony, whose mane and tail had long been burned away by an angry lover the postman had once fingered, and left.  
The soft skin of the horse's nose upon his cheek made young Gershom gasp and awaken, trembling before the mighty bearded figure of Postinkantaja.  A shadow man like death and the hero of a village lived in by of hermits, artists, and reindeer butchers.  The villagers gave their letters to the massive sausage hand of Postinkantaja to be delivered far and wide, to Helsinki and beyond, maybe.  Though none would arrive to any waiting woman if it were not for Postinkantaja, bravely parting walls of snow like Moses, the spirits of dead Finnish soldiers blessing him, and keeping him warm on his long snowy journeys on horseback to and from mailing trucks.  Sometimes, he rode from Northern Lapland down to Northern Karelia in three nights.  His horse was often tired, and so was he. 

            Postinkantaja dismounted his horse and blew warm, sour breath on the back of Gershom's head and on his hands until the ice had freed him.  Postinkantaja, unable to talk, let alone understand the young man's German pleas, cradled him like a maiden, and helped the young man onto his horse.  They rode on, bouncing, Gershom tight and speechless with fear as the huge bear man wrapped his strong arms around him, not saying a word. 

            Postinkantaja had arrived at the village in Northern Ostrobothnia, and all the deer butchers, sled runners, Winter War veterans, and prostitutes gathered around to look upon the boy that the postman had brought back with him.  Truly he was beautiful, like a woman, but frightened, and mad.  Postinkantaja knew this.  So as they rode into a patch of forest of long, branchless trees, and agreement had been communicated.  The snow gently drifted down and landed on them like rose petals, and they were alone together, atop a horse, like legend.
Postinkantaja told Gershom to look beyond the trees, to a snowy, rocky hill where white foxes often married each other, overlooking all the brown and black buildings the snowy village had to offer, like a poem. Postinkantaja had a small cabin there; a cabin with a wood stove, a tub to be filled with hot water, and an outhouse in the woods.  The postman would give the cabin to Gershom, to live in and to make art in if he wished, his mortgage being that he must agree to be Postinkantaja's wife, so be it that Gershom was a man. 

            The agreement was a beautiful, hazy thing.  Postinkantaja was almost always gone, delivering letters to various stations, coming back to only drink Lakka, receive more mail, and to visit Gershom in the gifted cabin, and kiss him once.  He would sign with his hands, enveloping Gershom in various shawls the postman had found, and stolen, "You are very beautiful.  You are the most beautiful Jewish boy in the whole world." 
            The more the months past, the more the image of the dead boy would haunt Gershom, for he often wallowed in his aloneness.  No family was left for him, and he was the last of his blood, he knew it to be so.  His mother was now ash in Poland, and his brothers, his father, his Rabbi, and his various lovers of Berlin's past were ghosts forever wandering the earth.  Dancing with the dead souls of the Nazi boys that had killed them.  They were free and left Gershom alone, on earth, to know he is and will forever be alone.  Panhandling in the village was his only relief.
 It had gotten to the point that every time the post man and his brave horse Casey Anthony climbed up the rocks to the cabin, Gershom's heart would palpitate, and a single tear would roll down his cheek, over the sickle under his eye.  Enveloped in a white sheep skin, Gershom held out his arms and embraced his husband.  "I've missed you so!"  Gershom would cry in German under the huge shoulders of Postinkantaja, who did not understand him.  But the post man still did sign with his fingers, "You are the most beautiful Jewish boy in all the world." 

            The postman had once seen the number on Gershom's arm, demanding to see it, and to wash it off with warm water and a flask of vinegar, only to find that it was tattooed.  The post man also saw the blue veins in the wrist of Gershom that ran through his body like little baby snakes, kissed them, failing to see Gershom holding his breath as not to collapse and weep as the postman touched that particular arm.

            Postinkantaja would then shortly after leave the cabin, glowing brown from the fire inside, and waved off the Jewish boy, like a soldier off to war.  The two of them never had time to make love, or anything of the sort.
 Gershom would stand, wrapped in a shawl that blew in the wind, watching him descend the rocky hill, to be alone with the ghost of the dead boy again.  It floated about him like a magpie, capering and singing without any words that a human could understand, and it terrorized Gershom.  He lay in his cot one night, wanting to think of what the touch of the post man would feel like, but instead thoughts of dead people and dogs plagued his mind, the point that he became afraid that was all he knew.
 The smell of the dead boy entered his imagination, molesting his nose and mouth, and Gershom jumped from his cot, threw the skin of a bear over his shoulders, and collapsed outside to vomit onto the icy rocks.  His bile splashed yellow onto the earth, and he looked up with one eye closed, quivering as he always does after he vomits.  A small red fox was very close, watching him, smelling his vomit and then darting into a hole in the ground as Gershom began to rise.  Snow built on his long eyelashes, and he wiped the spittle from his mouth and the wind whistled and bit at his grey neck.  He stared into a dark patch of forest where the logs, branches, and dung of animals flourished full of plenty.  Gershom watched it, as if standing off an enemy, the dead boy murmuring in his ear, though what he whispered was in the language of trees, which no man nor beast could understand.