A Cow Gives Birth at Night (Lehmä synnyttää yöllä)

In 1996, the NARRATOR, an eight-year-old boy, is smuggled across borders with his siblings, hidden in the footwell of a car traveling from Finland to Albania. The journey takes them back to the country their parents fled, the place that once was home before war and displacement turned them into refugees in Finland. From the beginning, the children are instructed on how to behave and, more chillingly, how to stay alive: they are warned not to stray too far, and are coached on what to do if a Serb attempts to abduct or murder them. The NARRATOR is already known within the family as an odd, withdrawn child—too quiet, too inward-looking—and there is an unspoken hope among the adults that the strict influence of his GRANDFATHER will eventually straighten him out. His MOTHER actively encourages this belief, even urging the GRANDFATHER to raise the boy through physical force and domination, convinced that violence will mold him into a proper man.

Instead, the visit becomes the site of a defining trauma. The NARRATOR witnesses his GRANDFATHER nearly beat a cow to death after it gives birth to a calf with only three legs. When the calf is deemed defective, the GRANDFATHER kills it with an axe. The brutality of the act, and the cold logic behind it, sears itself into the child’s memory.

These events are recalled decades later, from the vantage point of adulthood, as the NARRATOR lives in Finland once again—now suicidal, isolated, and emotionally exhausted. Despite this, he is outwardly successful: a respected author who writes in Finnish, often about Albanian culture, and the only person in his large extended family to have completed higher education. He is also the only one who has maintained a close relationship with his MOTHER. She remains unconvinced that he truly passes as Finnish, and she is equally baffled by his writing—especially its bleakness. Since she does not read Finnish, she relies on translated summaries provided by his son, but still cannot understand why her child insists on writing such miserable books.