Cryptonomicon

"The weather is not too bad. Uncle Otto should be back before night," she says. She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath. Its eastern border, with Russia, no longer bears any resemblance to reality. This illusive frontier is furiously crosshatched with pencil marks, the axes of Stalin's repeated efforts to castrate Scandinavia, obsessively recorded and annotated by Julieta's uncle, who like all Finns is an expert skier, crack shot, and indomitable warrior.

Still they despise themselves. Shaftoe thinks it's because they eventually farmed out the defense of their country to the Germans. Finns excelled at an old-fashioned, personalized, retail style of Russian-killing, but when they started to run low on Finns, they had to call in the Germans, who are more numerous and who have perfected a wholesale Russian-slaughtering operation.

Julieta scoffs at this simple-minded theory: the Finns are a million times more complex than Bobby Shaftoe can ever understand. Even if the war had never happened, there would be an infinity of reasons for them to be depressed all the time. There is no point even in trying to explain it all. She can only provide him with the haziest glimpses into Finnish psychology by fucking his brains out once every couple of weeks.

He has been lying there for too long. Soon the left-over jism in his tract will harden like epoxy. This peril spurs him to action. He slides out of bed, cringes from the chill, hops across cold planks to the rug, scurries instinctively toward the warmth of the stove.

Julieta rolls over onto her back to watch this. She looks at him appraisingly. "Be a man," she says. "Make me some coffee."

Shaftoe snatches the cabin's cast-iron kettle, which could double as a ship anchor if need arose. He throws a blanket over his shoulders and runs outside. He stops at the brink of the seawall, knowing that the splintery pier will not be kind to his bare feet, and pisses down onto the beach. The yellow arc is veiled in steam, redolent of coffee. He squints across the gulf and sees a tug pulling a boom of logs down the coast, and a couple of sails, but not Uncle Otto's.

Behind the cabin is a standpipe that is fed from a spring in the hills. Shaftoe fills the kettle, snatches a couple of hunks of firewood and scampers back inside, maneuvering between stacked bricks of foil-packed java and crates of Suomi machine pistol ammunition. He sets the kettle on the iron stove and then stokes it up with the wood.

"You use too much wood," Julieta says, "Uncle Otto will be noticing."

"I'll chop more," Shaftoe says. "This whole fucking country is full of nothing but wood."

"You'll be chopping wood all day if Uncle Otto gets angry at you."

"So it's okay for me to sleep with Otto's niece, but burning a couple of sticks of wood to make her coffee is grounds for dismissal?"

"Grounds," Julieta says. "Coffee grounds."

The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation with steeped birch twigs, mordant humor, week-long drinking bouts. The only thing to save Finland now is coffee. Unfortunately the government of that country has been short-sighted enough to raise taxes and customs duties through the roof. Supposedly it is to pay for killing Russians, and for resettling the hundreds of thousands of Finns who have to pull up stakes and move whenever Stalin, in a drunken lunge, or Hitler, in a psychotic fit, attacks a map with a red Crayola. It just has the effect of making coffee harder to obtain. According to Otto, Finland is a nation of unproductive zombies, except in areas that have been penetrated by the distribution networks of coffee smugglers. Finns are generally strangers to the entire concept of good fortune, however they arelucky enough to live right across the Gulf of Bothnia from a neutral, reasonably prosperous country famous for its coffee.

With this background, the existence of a small Finnish colony in Norrsbruck becomes pretty much self-explanatory. The only thing that is missing is muscle to load the coffee onto the boat, and to unload whatever swag Otto brings back. Needed: one muscular lunkhead willing to be paid off the record in whatever specie Otto comes up with.

Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds.

Chopping wood, fucking Julieta, grinding coffee, fucking Julieta, pissing on the beach, fucking Julieta, loading and unloading Otto's ketch. This has been pretty much it for Bobby Shaftoe during the last half year. In Sweden he has found the calm, grey-green eye of the blood hurricane that is the world.