Le poêle (Uuni)

This radio play is based on a true series of events in which a man entombed his wife in the wall of a farmhouse oven. It was only years later, on the insistence of their son, that the oven was ripped out and the corpse discovered in the wall. Using this incident as his base, Kylätasku has built a psychological thriller in which he explores the spiritual incapacity left in a man by the last war, the generation gap, and the irreconcilable rancour between father and son. Now an alcoholic, the son Tuomas remains devoted to his mother. At her request, he comes to his parents’ house. He finds his father at home alone, heating a new oven he has just finished building. Tuomas stays to wait for his mother in order to take her away with him and at long last put an end to his parents’ constant quarrelling. For the father, everything is already too late: he should have got divorced right after the war, but at that time Tuomas still needed his father. The reconstruction period had torn him apart. That was when Tuomas learned to keep silent. Tuomas can never forgive the father, who exhausted his own strength crushing the weaker ones, his mother and himself. He cannot forgive the man who scorned the son’s love for the mother, denied his own affection, and made a lonely man of Tuomas. The father would have liked his son to be a comrade — in-arms, even as a child — a friend to whom he could speak man to man. The constant stoking of the oven eventually gets it so hot that the men decide to take a sauna. While drinking together, the father begins to reminisce about the war and about a certain incident that happened there. Dark premonitions awaken in Tuomas. He knows that his mother will never come back. In the present battle between father and son, the father gains the victory, and Tuomas stays in the house to live with him.