What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleeping? 50 hours? 70? What about 200? In this week’s Translation Tuesday, the unnamed protagonist of Maisku Myllymäki‘s novel The Guard has been awake so long they have to write the day of the week on their hand to remember that it’s Sunday. Yet in spite of their insomnia, they remain almost hypnotically attentive: to the pilasters of columns and poorly-named green paint in the atrium of the museum where they work, to the remembered touch of their boyfriend, to the asinine behavior of museum-goers and to the strange effect of social media on personal identity. Translated into deft and subtle prose by Tabatha Leggett, this excerpt is sure to leave you eagerly awaiting a full translation of the novel. Read on!
It’s December 9, the final day of the exhibition. Tomorrow, the people in dark blue and sand grey coloured overalls will pack it all away. They’ll destroy the setting in which Peter and I first met eight months ago. They’ll wrap the artworks in paper and protective plastic sheeting and pack them into bespoke wooden chests. This is meticulous work. The art will be handled with the kind of deep tenderness very few living beings ever truly experience. Sometimes Peter touches me that way.
I’m sitting on a tall, black stool in the corner—the very stool on which I’ve spent countless hours sitting these past eight months and long before, supervising different artworks, different kinds of exhibition. It’s hard to remember exactly how long I’ve worked here. It’s the kind of job where nothing really gets done, no progress is made during the hours I spend in this hall. For me, a regular work day is one in which nothing extraordinary happens. In that sense, you might compare my job to that of a lifeguard.
Every now and then, I begin to wonder whether there’s anything else, a world beyond these thick walls. I often find myself scrolling through social media and checking old updates on my phone simply to reassure myself that I have been alive, done things, moved forward in some way. Although I can see that the person on the screen is me, sometimes I struggle to recognise her.
In this space, there is no morning or afternoon. No evening. It is as though the space itself becomes time. The light rarely changes and the temperature is kept stable—twenty degrees, which is optimal for the art. I wear a thick jumper under my work vest, regardless of the season. If my job didn’t require me to pay attention to the passage of time, I would lose track of it entirely. Sometimes I do. Some mornings, I write the day of the week on my hand so that I don’t forget. Today it says: Sunday.
When I opened my curtains and looked out of the window this morning, everything was white. The first snow had fallen during the night. The snow-covered cars parked on the street out front looked like plump, little animals with their backs arched; the park outside my window like an untouched winter wonderland. I watched as excited dogs darted around in the swirling snow and startled, little birds flitted from one branch to the next, ruffling their pretty feathers. The pavements hadn’t been ploughed by the time I set off on my walk to work, which explains why my trouser legs are damp.
From my stool, I can see the entire Columned Hall. The hall is so named because of the four slender columns that surround its domed ceiling. They’re not load-bearing, their function is purely aesthetic. They’re called Ionic columns; their pilasters are grooved and the spaces between those grooves have been sanded flat. Each column is topped with a decorative spiral ornament, like the curly horns of a ram. They are in conversation with the room’s frosted glass windows, which are also tall, narrow, and topped with a scroll-like pattern.
The walls are dark green. A colleague of mine once described them as forest green, but that doesn’t make any sense because a forest contains tens, if not hundreds, of shades of green. Perhaps he meant spruce green. Peter’s new coat is the same colour as these walls. It has wide shoulder straps with shiny metal buttons on them.
The front doors open at ten o’clock every morning, which is soon. These last few minutes before the doors open are precious: for just a moment, the world is silent and still. Devoid of people, the halls have an echo of their own. Some mornings, I whistle and listen to the sound that escapes my lips as it ricochets from the walls to the domed ceiling, bounces off the columns and floor, and finally reverberates around the blue stainless steel sculpture in the middle of the room—right there, beneath the domed ceiling’s highest point.
But today I don’t seem to be able to whistle. My lips are dry and the sound keeps getting stuck behind them. I’m too tired to even whistle.
I haven’t slept for eight nights straight. When I say I haven’t slept for eight nights straight, I really mean it. For eight nights, I haven’t slept a wink, not a second. I’ve been awake for almost two hundred hours. The world record for staying awake is just over two hundred and sixty four hours. It’s a record only an insane person would dream of breaking. I am filled with a thick fog, and it is terrifying. It feels like my mind is leaning out of my body—or perhaps it’s the other way round, like my body is beyond the reach of my mind. I find myself fumbling for everything, for myself.
And then there are the days, which have started to feel like nothing more than a thin gauze between the endless nights.
I can’t believe I’ve found myself in this situation again. I’d do anything to stop it, to go back to how I spent almost every other night these past eight months: sound asleep, the warmth of someone else’s skin next to mine.
*
My colleague peers through the door to the Columned Hall, says good morning, then takes his position in the White Hall. On his way out, he hits the gong and grins. The gong is an artwork, which museum visitors aren’t allowed to touch—though staff can. In theory, it’s only the museum guides who have permission to hit the gong, they put on their white protective gloves and strike it at the end of their guided tours. But no one objects when the guards hit it, especially in the morning before the front doors open. And so we do. At any given time, there are five guards working: one in each hall and one behind the information desk downstairs. We keep our rotas in our vest pockets. They detail our hourly position changes.
The Columned Hall is the largest exhibition space in the museum. I don’t know exactly how big it is, but you’ll have a sense of its magnitude if you imagine two tennis courts side-by-side. It’s the hall most visitors enter first, even though there are plenty of other routes they could take through the museum: they could turn right instead of left at the stairs; or walk across the lobby and into the hall of busts, of necks and backs of heads. Or they could do this: turn one hundred and eighty degrees immediately upon entering the lobby and walk through the door beside the stairs into the White Hall, which offers a brief history of beauty ideals in sculpture. For visitors seeking quick and easy aesthetic satisfaction, this is the option I recommend.
As well as the rota, I keep my phone in my vest pocket—though we’re not actually allowed to use our phones during work hours. The only devices we’re permitted to use are our walkie talkies, which we use to communicate with one another. I suppose it’s true that there’s nothing more depressing than the sight of a museum guard sitting in the corner of a gallery and gazing into the blue glow of her phone screen, rather than staring blankly into the distance.
But for now, I am alone and the front doors are locked. I dig out my phone and my index finger taps the social media icon. This is not a conscious decision. Even when I’m deathly tired, this is the one movement my body remembers and enacts.
Instantaneously, my lips mimic the slight pout of the woman who appears on my phone screen, the woman I’ve been following for quite some time. I don’t actually know her, but I do know a lot about her. I know she’s recently moved into her new boyfriend’s apartment. I know the exact location of their apartment, and I know they have a blue two-seater sofa in their bright living room. On occasion, I’ve walked past their building and thought to myself: she’s in there, lying on her blue sofa, sipping her green tea. I know how the apartment smells, and I know how the fabric of the sofa feels against bare thighs. I know she goes to a barre class three times a week and that she gets her reddish hair cut every few months at a salon on the same block as the bar Peter took me to on our first date.
I check Peter’s profile, but there are no updates. Of course not. His most recent post is from a few days ago, a mirror selfie taken in the elevator. It’s the kind of elevator with a mirror on each wall, so the picture contains many Peters: Peter from the front, Peter from both sides, Peter from behind. I love him and I love that scruffy little curl at the back of his head. Peter never looks in the mirror before going out in the morning, he doesn’t see himself until he takes his selfie—in the stairwell, outside his front door, on the street corner at the very latest. If I were to call Peter now—which I obviously won’t—an old Lady Gaga song would play and my real name would flash up on his phone screen.
I take a picture of the granite female torso beside me. The work is titled Female Torso II. Next to it is another female torso, titled Unnamed.
I post the picture. I caption it: Last day with this one.
*
It’s now one minute to ten. In these moments, I sometimes wish the electric lock on the front door would get stuck and there’d be nothing anyone could do about it—not even the museum caretaker, who practically keeps this whole operation running. That all the human bodies waiting on the other side of the door would have to turn around and find something else to do with their day, themselves, their social media feeds.
The queue likely extends all the way around the block; the final day of an art exhibition is usually the most crowded. People have had eight months to visit, but no, they come at the last possible moment. They come on the busiest day and then they get annoyed when they don’t get to wander around the exhibition alone. They find the idea of looking at an artwork at the same time as someone else unbearable. As though the other visitor might consume every drop of the work’s power, which would’ve been theirs if only they could’ve seen it alone. They get cranky, irate: they had so many other things to do today. Couldn’t the exhibition be extended, they ask, this all feels terribly rushed.
I hear the doors open downstairs. I think about the unstoppable wave that will soon roll over me—like Hokusai’s great white-headed wave, crashing and taking everything in its wake. On the final day of an exhibition, even sculptures can cause a great wave.
Translated from the Finnish by Tabatha Leggett
Maisku Myllymäki is a writer based in Helsinki. Her debut novel Holly (WSOY, 2021) was nominated for the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize in 2021. This is the first chapter of her second novel, The Guard (WSOY, 2024). The Hungarian translation of Holly is forthcoming with Polar Könyvek in 2026. The German translations of Holly and The Guard are forthcoming with Kampa Verlag in 2026 and 2027 respectively.
Tabatha Leggett is a writer and literary translator based in Iowa City. She is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation MFA program and she is a graduate of New York University’s Fiction MFA program, where she was an Axinn Fellow and the recipient of a Thesis Research Award. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the Community of Writers. Her debut translation, Enchantment by Riikka Pulkkinen, is forthcoming with Scribe in 2026.
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