Pinnocha: The Wooden Boy of Lapland

Birth

The wood stove was damped down, and Gershom lay on the floor like a carpet, his nose and his cheeks red with a mask of horrible, ugly coldness, as he had done it.  He had robbed the trees of their children; he had collected two logs, many a stick, and had carved them, and nailed them together.  Lying dead on the floor like a murdered wife was a wooden boy Gershom had created, like God.  It was brown, it was thin, and the splinters in its body pointed every which way with the aim to hurt and nothing else.

  He wept quietly at it, drinking rich, buttery reindeer milk from a baby's bottle he had also found, rusty, full of disease.  The dead boy with now before him, squaring him off, as Gershom had wanted.  He remembered the red faces and large noses of drawings, depicting Jewish people in the streets of his home town, drawn by drooling, jealous fascists.  Gershom began to laugh a sad, syphilis stricken laugh, and granted the wooden puppet a long nose, made of dense twig.  Afterwards the puppet bared the likeness of a mosquito.  Yes, a mosquito. 

Gershom took the wooden boy in his arms, looked it dead in the blank face, and told him:  "You are going to leave me now."  He ripped the belt from the coat of a former Saami woman, tied it around the skinny neck of the wooden puppet, and tucked a box of Swedish kitchen matched into his sheepskin.  The box depicted a black horse, much like that of Postikantaja, and Gershom tenderly kissed it. 

Down the rocky hill he descended in the night, as the wind blew in a blue, horizontal furry, the snow pouring into the collar of Gerhom's coat like dandruff.  The lights from the windows of many black wooden cottages lit the way, like stars, as the young man carried the wooden boy like a carcass over his back. 

At the foot of a thin layer of tall evergreen trees, Gershom smacked his body to the ground, the puppet flying to his left, as Gershom began to duck and cover with his hands over his neck.  Over head the engine of a fighter plane buzzed in the night.  A friendly, patrolling Soviet plane, though the Communist kind was not welcome in this land.  It circled like a vulture, hungry, and alone.  Gershom watched it and calmed with glazed eyes, snow building on his back, sinking deeper into the shame he felt for his emotional disrepair.  He rose and collected the puppet, walking along the line of tree, staring out onto a frozen lake where a massive bolder guarded it, like an old friend. 

Gershom came across the wreckage of an old school, once a thing of strong concrete, now a blacked, carbonized mass of building foundation, open to the sky.  It had been bombed, not long ago, probably whilst Gershom was somewhere in Berlin, wet with rainwater and dusted with gunpowder. 

In the center of the old school house, someone had left several crosses, as all the children inside had been burned to death, and unable to have a proper Viking funeral.  The villagers took funeral duty upon themselves, though Gershom stumbled over them.  They grew and sprouted like mushrooms, little crosses for little children.  The young man smelled the sulfur in the air, the wind dying like an old man, letting Gershom feel silence all around.  He believed this would be a good place to rest all things, himself, and the memory of this dead boy that deflowered his body and mind so.

  In a space where the crosses formed a semi-circle around an empty ash deposit, the young man laid the wooden puppet down like a sleeping dog.  He removed the red Saami belt from its neck, wrapped it around his own waist, and lit a match.  He stared at it for only a second, holding the little baby size flame very close to his face.  It dancing like a little creature, thought Gershom, like a little fairy.  The fire's small hands tried to touch him, flickering in a Spanish way, glowing warm and orange on his face.  Gershom knew the fire was only trying to be kind, as fire is like a child that wants to play, and doesn't consider those in its path. 

Gershom began to think twice as he looked down at the puppet's body.  It looked sad, knowing what was coming.  Gershom knew that feeling. 

He closed his eyes and said a pre-emptive Kaddish, and bent to light the foot of the puppet on fire.  The match died, and the wood slowly and surely began to eat away at the puppet.  Gershom sat on the ground and put his head between his legs, and began to wait for the puppet to burn away.  A freeing sadness came over him, the face of his mother faded, and charcoal before his eyes.  Gershom could smell her; the perfume she had, and the way she sang opera in a way that would offend any true opera singer, and it often embarrassed him.  But he loved it now.  The feeling of her coat, warm from her stomach, as Gershom would lay on it to sleep, often on a train, or to many another place.  Gershom thought of her and nothing else at that moment, and cried for her.