The Healer (11 page)

“I see,” I said, and realized I was blushing.

“You're jealous,” Elina said.

I nodded reluctantly, feeling heat in my cheeks.

“This all happened a long time ago. I'm sure you have a past, too.”

“Of course I do,” I said, feeling the heat spread to my neck and wanting to change the subject. “What were these ideas of Pasi's?”

“He was a hard-line conservationist. He had contacts with the kinds of groups that were starting to shoot company owners and politicians—anyone who had caused environmental destruction or hadn't done enough to slow it down. It was the black-and-white thinking of youth: if you're not with us, you're against us, and you don't deserve to live. Johanna and I waved that flag, too. In secret, that is. But we believed it.”

“I didn't know you were so radical,” I said. “I mean, I knew that Johanna was an activist, but I didn't know that she'd been living with a terrorist.”

Elina looked for a moment like she was trying to remember how things really were. The coolness was disappearing from her gaze little by little.

“Pasi wasn't a terrorist. A passionate person, even an obsessive person, yes, but he wasn't a bad person. He hasn't done anything wrong, has he?”

I thought of the murdered families and the evidence that Tarkiainen was at the scenes of those crimes. I shrugged and let the question pass.

“Why is it so hard for you to talk about?” I asked.

Elina nodded toward the bedroom.

“Ahti doesn't really understand,” she said, then added faintly, almost involuntarily, “for a lot of reasons.”

I looked at her.

“Haven't the two of you ever talked about it?” I asked.

She looked surprised and offended for a moment, then just surprised.

“Why would we? You and Johanna didn't.”

The truth stung.

“No, we didn't. I guess there wasn't any reason to.”

“You were happy as long as you thought you knew everything you needed to know,” Elina said. “And now that you know that there were things you didn't know, you feel bad. You've got to make up your mind about how much you really want to know. Even about your own wife.”

There was something in her voice that I'd never noticed before. The coolness had returned, and with it something hard, even bitter.

“Tell me more about Pasi Tarkiainen,” I said.

“Why?”

I looked her in the eye.

“You haven't told me everything.”

She let out a puff of air and rolled her eyes. But she was a bad actor. Even she knew it.

“You're not going to find Johanna by digging up things that happened a hundred years ago.”

“You haven't told me everything,” I said again. “Ahti's asleep. You can tell me.”

She glanced toward the bedroom again. We listened to the silence for a moment. I could hear Ahti snoring.

“This is important, Elina,” I said. “Johanna has been missing for a day and a half. I don't even want to think about any other possibility but finding her alive, unhurt. I need all the help I can get. It's not easy to ask, but I have to. I have to find Johanna.”

Elina pulled her legs up even closer, brushed the hair from her face with a few quick movements of her hand, and looked straight ahead for a moment. Then she looked at me again, her head bowed a little, and said, as if she were surrendering something:

“I adored Pasi Tarkiainen.”

She was still looking at me, perhaps waiting for some reaction. Then she continued: “I don't know how to explain it now, but I adored him. And, of course, I wished that he adored me in the same way. But it was Johanna he wanted. I can admit it now—now that it's been so many years. I was in love with Pasi, and I was dying of jealousy when I saw how happy they were together.”

I wasn't surprised.

“Did you tell Johanna about it?”

“No,” Elina said quickly, shaking her head. “I didn't even tell Pasi about it. I just tried to make him notice me. And then when I heard that they weren't really that happy, at first I was pleased, but then I was just sorry, thinking, What kind of person am I that I'm happy when my friend's partner is revealed to be something other than he seems, when I learn that she's not happy?”

“What happened?”

“I don't really know,” Elina said, and she sounded sincere. “All Johanna told me was that Pasi wasn't the man she had thought he was. Sometimes if I'd had a glass of wine, or two or three, I would ask about it, but somehow we just didn't talk about it, even though we talked about everything together. Pasi just disappeared from our lives, and we forgot about him. Then Ahti came along, and you, and everything that had to do with Pasi had vanished.”

She smiled an entirely joyless smile.

“I've never talked with anyone about this. Not even Johanna. It seems like a different world now. It feels like ages ago, like I'm a different person now, and so is everyone else.”

I didn't say anything.

“Johanna's my best friend,” she said. “The best friend I've ever had or ever will have. I love Ahti. Ahti's my husband. But Johanna's my friend.”

I still didn't say anything. I leaned my elbows on my knees and looked at her, her brown eyes still shining with the anger of a moment earlier, the shadows on her face. All the coldness and hardness had gone out of her face, but something dark still lingered.

“And now here we are,” she said in the same resigned tone that she'd begun with. “Last night I started thinking, Why in the world are we going north? That won't solve anything. Nothing. We'll have even less there than we have here. I want you to find Johanna, so we can be together again. You and Johanna and Ahti are all the family I have left. My parents both died of the flu four years ago, my big sister is somewhere in America, and she's not coming back. I was sitting beside Ahti last night thinking that no matter what comes, we don't need to leave here. We shouldn't.”

She lifted her head. A delicate smile lit up her face, its warmth slowly rising to her eyes.

“Let's stick together and live as long as we can, as long as we're able to,” she said softly, then added faintly, troubled, “let's do the best we can under the circumstances.”

Ahti didn't awaken even when I was purposefully noisy putting on my coat and shoes at the door. I would have liked to talk to him, but Elina felt we should let him keep snoring. I asked her to call me if she remembered something, anything at all, about Pasi Tarkiainen.

I tried to show her Tarkiainen's picture, told her that he'd lived on Museokatu, just a little way from here, a few years before she and Ahti had moved into the neighborhood. But she didn't want to look at a photo of her former infatuation or think about how close he had once lived to where she was now.

I got a few names from her, people from her student days and even later. One of them was someone I knew: Laura Vuola, Ph.D. Her name brought to mind things that I'd imagined were settled and forgotten. It almost made me doubt my sanity: the beginnings of this whole tangled web had been so close to me, and I was blissfully ignorant of all of it. I didn't mention it to Elina.

I thanked her and embraced her longer than I meant to, pulling away when I realized what I was doing.

 

14

The incipient clarity of the morning had grown damp while I was indoors, with intermittent wind and clouds covering a sky that promised rain and darkened the world in the meantime.

I knew why I had held on to Elina for so long. I missed Johanna physically, too: her dense warmth, her distinct wool and honey scent, the feel of her small frame beside me, close to me, the way her hand fit into mine. We were affectionate with each other, all the time. That's why missing her came so quickly, so deeply, so sharply. I looked up, sighed, pushed all my thoughts of Johanna to the back of my mind, and let only one thought come front and center: I'll find you.

I walked toward Museokatu, intending to visit that same tavern. I didn't know if it would be open, but I remembered that it used to be even in the mornings. Thirsty artists and those who thought they were artists used to gather there to level out the holes and hummocks left by the night.

I descended the stone stairs from Temppelikatu to Oksasenkatu. I couldn't begin to count the times I'd walked down those stairs before. When I got to the bottom I looked behind me at the sturdy stones, the bolted steel door of the weightlifters' gym halfway up, the large moss-covered rocks resting against the railing.

I stopped at the corner of Tunturikatu. Farther down the street was the flea market. The entire space was filled with stuff. Some of it had even been carried out to the sidewalk. It was difficult to imagine why anyone would go there. What would they have bought? Clothes, which everyone had too much of already? Dishes, when there wasn't enough food? Electronics that gave only a moment's pleasure even when they were new? Books and records that no one had any time to read or listen to anymore?

A sculpture of two bears facing each other watched over the intersection of Museokatu and Oksasenkatu. Two teddy bears, really—they were so small. Their handsome gray coats of stone were covered in a green fuzz of mold.

The tavern door was open. I could hear music coming from inside. I walked up the steps, smelling the same mixture of sweat and urine that I remembered, now masked by the smell of disinfectant. Nobody was behind the bar. Some customers sat at a few tables on the left side of the room, each one alone, fiddling with their phones or staring into space.

I stood there, wondering how to proceed if I encountered the bartender with the ponytail. I waited a couple of minutes. The door to the back room opened, and a moment later a heavyset bodybuilding type came out with a clinking brown cardboard box in his arms. He put the box down on the counter and looked at me questioningly.

I ordered coffee.

He turned without nodding or saying a word, took a cup down from the upper shelf, and filled it from the coffeepot, which looked like it had been sitting there since the place opened. Or since it closed. He plunked the mug on the bar in front of me and stood waiting. He was young, maybe twenty, and seemed composed entirely of large individual and incompatible masses of muscle. His blue eyes were squeezed between his brow ridge and his cheekbones, and you could see the squeeze in his gaze.

“Are you gonna pay?” he said.

“How much would I pay if I did pay?” I answered.

He turned around slowly and pointed at the menu on the wall in a pose that gave me a good look at his arm.

“It starts with a K. Then an A. Then H and V, and one little I. That spells KAHVI. And that number after it tells you how much it costs.”

I dug a coin out of my pocket and tossed it on the counter. He didn't put it in the cash register, but instead dropped it into the glass mug next to it. Then he started taking bottles out of the cardboard box. After a while he noticed me watching him. He straightened up and turned toward me.

“Don't tell me,” he said. “You forgot to ask for milk.”

The air conditioner hummed. I didn't say anything.

“Sugar?”

He sighed and put his hands on his hips.

“So you're just a mad starer, are you?” he said. “OK. Drink your coffee and get outta here.”

“I'm not a mad starer. But I'd be happy to drink my coffee and get out of here if you'll tell me where I can find the bartender who was working here last night. Big guy with a ponytail. Is he working today?”

He took his hands off his hips and folded his arms across his chest, screwed up his lips, and looked at me like I was cluttering up his decor.

“I think you better finish your coffee—”

“And get outta here. I understand. Is he coming in to work today? Or do you have the guy's phone number?”

“What do you want with his phone number?”

I looked at him for a moment.

“I thought I might call him,” I offered.

“Why?”

“Why do people usually call each other? Maybe I'm a friend of his who lost his number.”

“You don't look like a friend of his.”

I looked at him again.

“What do you think a friend looks like?” I asked. “Do his friends look different than friends usually do? How can you tell if somebody's a friend of his?”

His eyebrows and cheekbones seemed to be squeezing his eyes right out of his head now.

“What kinda clown are you?”

“I'm not a clown.”

“You are a clown 'cause I said you're a clown.”

I took a breath. My body ached with exhaustion and frustration. I realized that there was no point in bantering with him—it would only make my task harder if I got into an argument—but I couldn't stop myself.

“That's not how it works,” I said. “Things aren't what you say they are just because you say it. Some small children believe that, but you're an adult—or you look like one, anyway.”

“Are you trying to fuck with me?”

“No, I'm just looking for the bartender that was here yesterday, the guy with the ponytail.”

He took a couple of steps toward me, leaving just the half-meter-wide glass-covered counter between us. I glanced to my left, toward the barroom. The music apparently blotted out our little exchange because the eyes of the clientele stayed glued to their telephones, the tabletops, and the empty air.

“Get lost,” he said.

“Or else what?” I asked, suddenly completely tired of the conversation and every other difficulty I was encountering. “What's the guy's name?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“OK. And where does this Go Fuck Yourself live?”

“Up your ass.”

“You must've skipped biology. Along with all your other classes, I'll bet. What classes did you go to?”

“The classes on how to cut morons like you to pieces.”