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The comb caught on a knot and Mauri made a sound like he was being murdered, wincing as he pulled away from it.
"Hold still."
"You're pulling it," Mauri whined, raising a hand to rub against his scalp. "That hurts!"
"Yeah, I'm pulling the tangle." Tiina worked the comb through from the bottom, slow, like she was trying not to tear the whole thing out by the root. "Maybe if you combed your hair yourself you wouldn't have tangles."
"I do comb it myself."
"Really?" Tiina raised one of her eyebrows. "Tell me where you last left your comb, then."
Mauri didn't answer that. He crossed his arms where he was sat on the low stool in front of the window and looked at his own shoes sitting on the floor instead of his reflection in the glass, because his reflection would have the expression that Tiina has been mimicking at him for the last ten minutes, and he'd already seen enough of it.
The shoes were lined up side by side, the points extending out nearly thirty centimeters past where his toes would be, and they were, objectively, ridiculous. His last pair had also looked ridiculous, but they hadn't been this bad. He'd been wearing these ones for four months, ever since his twelfth birthday, and he still couldn't walk in them without thinking about each step - shift weight, lift, place - like he was relearning how to walk all over again. He'd watched his older cousins walk in theirs without thinking about it at all, joking with each other, not looking down, and he couldn't tell if it was practice or just that they were built differently than him, or if they were also thinking about it and were simply better at pretending.
From somewhere in the back of the house, faint and tinny through the walls, a record was playing. It sounded like the Säkkijärven polkka. His uncle Eino had three vinyl records of various folk and polka songs and played all of them constantly, which meant Mauri had heard that particular song approximately a thousand times in his life so far and he could probably play it himself if someone handed him an accordion.
The comb caught again. He winced.
"Your hair is worse than Pimme's," Tiina said, clicking her tongue against her teeth as she wrestled with the knot.
"My hair is fine. It didn't even need to be brushed."
"It's a disaster. At least when I did Pimme's it was a nice disaster, because he doesn't complain." She worked through the knot and Mauri heard the teeth of the comb tick against each strand. "Unlike some people."
Outside the window the tundra was the same as it always was, flat and pale and stretching until it met the sky at some approximate point his eyes had stopped trying to find. A dog crossed the yard - Tuisku, who belonged to no one in particular and to all of them in the way everything here belonged to all of them - and the wind swept the plume of his tail sideways.
Tuisku had the same hair as Mauri. A small black pompadour, perched stubbornly on top of his head.
Pretty much everyone here had the same hair as Mauri.
That was Mauri's problem.
"Tiina."
"Hold still."
"Why do we have to do this?" Mauri asked, picking at his sleeve as he looked out the window at Tuisku. "Our hair, these shoes, I just... why?"
Tiina stopped. He can feel her stop, the movement of the comb stilling, the pause that meant she was deciding whether to treat his question seriously or to just tell him because we do and get on with it. He waited.
"You know why," she eventually said, and started with the comb again.
"Tell me anyway?"
She exhaled through her nose. "It's who we are. It's our family's look. We're born with it, and you wear it and people know who you belong to. It's just part of our blood. Part of being a member of this family."
"Other people think we look strange."
"No one in the village thinks we look strange, Mauri. Half the village is us." A pause, and then, in a lighter tone: "And what about that Igor boy? He's always chasing after you and your cousins. I saw him behind the barn the other day trying to style his hair into a pompadour." She made a sound that was nearly a laugh. "He might have to give it a few years."
"Yeah, right. But what about when you're going somewhere?" Mauri asked. He pushed his feet into the shoes, tapping them against the floor. "When you stay here it doesn't matter because half the village looks like us and the other half are used to us. But if you wanted to go somewhere else-" He paused."...if I wanted to go somewhere else..."
Tiina didn't say anything. The comb moved through the back of his hair, up and over, and she finally began to style it, done fighting with the tangles.
"I want to be in a band," Mauri said, not for the first time. "A real band. Me and Pimme and some of the cousins. We'll play music and tour the world. Not just play at harvest dances or birthdays."
"I know what a band is, Mauri."
"So you know that we can't be a serious band if we look like-" He gestured vaguely at himself, at the window, out at the yard and the dog and the flat pale distance of nothing but the tundra he'd known all his life. "Like this."
"Like what?"
"Like we come from here. Like we're a joke."
Tiina put down the comb, crouching in front of Mauri. He looked up to meet her gaze and she was looking at him with an expression he couldn't name, something between fond and annoyed. Her styled beehive - which looked just like their mother's - was flawless. And unlike Mauri's pajamas that he had rolled out of bed in, she was wearing her usual dress and black boots, looking completely prepared for a life that hadn't happened to her yet.
"You will look like you come from here," Tiina said, gently. "Which you did. You're from here. From this village, from this family. And people will remember you because you don't look like anyone else in the room - like nothing they've ever seen." She picked up the comb. "It'll be much easier if you work with it rather than fight it.'
"That's not-"
"It's the same as what you said. It is. You want to be memorable? This is memorable." She tapped the comb against his shoulder. "You want to start a band and tour the world and become a household name? I believe you can, Mauri. But you can't do that by looking like everyone else." She smoothed down the edges of his hair, aligning every strand into neat position. "Besides," she adds, "you know the shoes are practical in the snow."
"They are not practical," Mauri protested. "I fall down all the time."
"Everyone falls down." She stepped back and looked at him with a critical eye, and then nodded. "There. You can look. And don't touch it, or I'll smack you with this comb faster than cousin Vladimir spends his birthday money."
Mauri looked at himself in the window glass. It wasn't a mirror - he could see the tundra through himself, the pale sky through his eyes - but it was close enough.
He looked just like his brothers. Like his father. Like his cousins.
Like the dog.
"...it looks stupid," he said.
"It looks like ours," Tiina said. She checked her reflection in the glass beside him and smoothed an imperfection that he couldn't see from his angle. "It only looks stupid if you let it."
"That... doesn't make sense."
Tiina looked at him in the glass and laughed. "It does. Now, stand up."
He stood, and promptly almost sent himself flying to the ground as he tripped over his shoes.
"Nice," Tiina smirked, before pointing over at their father's rocking chair across the room. "Now walk over there and back."
"Really?"
"You're not just going to be standing on a stage, are you? Walk. If there are going to be crowds of thousands watching you-" and she said it like she believed there eventually would be, as matter-of-fact as talking about the yearly harvest- "you should practice walking."
"I know how to walk."
"Yeah? Then prove it."
He walked across the room. He stumbled once when one of his shoes got caught on a loose floorboard, but he didn't trip. From the back of the house, the polka turned over into something slower - a waltz, maybe, or some folk song he half-recognized - the accordion dropping into something that moved at a different pace, rounder, less insistent. He paused for a second at the edge of the room, listening without meaning to.
Tiina watched him listening. Then she set down her comb and took his hand and pulled him toward the center of the room.
Mauri stopped. She didn't.
"What are you doing?"
"Dancing." She moved her feet in that new go-go style she and Mari had been practicing for months - quick and deliberate, weight shifting heel to toe, arms loose at her sides, her lips curled into a grin as she motioned for Mauri to join her. "You need practice wearing those shoes. Dancing is better practice than walking, and anyways, if the music you're going to play is any good, you'll want to move to it."
"But I don't dance."
"Not yet. You will when there are crowds of thousands wanting you to." She took both his hands and pulled, and Mauri resisted for a moment before he sighed and let himself be pulled forward. He moved his feet, trying to match what Tiina was doing with hers. It wasn't very graceful and certainly nothing like her practiced style, but he was dancing.
"When we make it big," Mauri said, stepping carefully to avoid stomping on his sister's feet, shift weight, lift, place, "you and Mari should dance for us. At the concerts."
"Dancing for our little brother's band. Really?" Tiina didn't stop, humming along to the music. "Maybe we'd become the stars of the show," she teased. "And I don't know if you'd like that."
"You'd be good at it," Mauri insisted.
"I know I'd be good at it. I'm good at it now." She turned, and he turned with her, just barely managing it. "When Mari and I make it big," she said, "you can play the music for our dance performances." She tilted her head. "Deal?"
Mauri thought about it.
As he thought about it, he stepped on one of his shoe-points with his other shoe and stumbled. Tiina didn't even react, just held his hands and kept the rhythm and waited for him to find the step again.
He found it.
"Deal," he agreed.