The Winter of the Lions (2 page)

An arm reaches for the man’s head and straightens it. Now she can see the face. The look of the closed eyes.

Somewhere outside her field of vision people are laughing. They are there with her, beside her, over her, under her, but she can’t see them. She only hears their laughter. She tries to laugh with them.

She feels herself laughing, looks into the face of the man with only half a leg, and is relieved that he doesn’t seem to hear her. In the moment when her laughter dies away something else also comes to an end, she doesn’t know what it is, all she senses is the end.

The people around her go on laughing, and it sounds as if they will never stop.

She closes her eyes and opens them again.

The screen is flickering.

She winds back to the place where it ends, and in her mind she goes back to the day when it began.

ARI
PEKKA
SORAJÄRVI
was spared a charge of rape. When Kimmo Joentaa made another attempt to explain the formal course of events, the woman stood up, not in any hurry, more as if she were lost in thought, and said goodbye. She walked out, slowly but with firm footsteps, and closed the door almost without a sound.

Joentaa sat where he was for a while, looking at the empty form flickering on the screen. Name, address, date of birth.

Then he got to his feet, walked down the dimly lit corridor and through the driving snow to his car.

He drove to Lenganiemi. As the ferry made the crossing, he stood by the rail in the icy wind. He felt a vague sense of relief because the ferryman was sitting morosely in his little cabin as usual, in spite of the chain of fairy lights sticking to the window.

He went down the apparently endless woodland path until suddenly the church towered up to the sky, as if out of nowhere. The sound of the sea was a soft roar, and shadowy figures passed by as he entered the graveyard. Joentaa heard them talking to each other in muted tones. Heads bent, concentrating on the graves of their loved ones lying in the dark, but everyone knew where to look. Two of the shadows murmured a greeting, and Joentaa returned it as their paths crossed.

For a while he stood beside Sanna’s grave without thinking of anything in particular. Then he took the candle out of his rucksack, lit it, and carefully placed it on the centre of the
grave. He stared at the light until it began to blur before his eyes; then he tore himself away and left. Singing and the monotonous, long-drawn-out chords of the organ came from the church.

The ferryman’s expression remained just the same on the return crossing; then Kimmo Joentaa drove home.

IN THE EVENING
she writes Christmas cards. She has printed out a photo that she likes. It shows Ilmari and Veikko in front of a wintry scene in Stockholm. They spent Christmas there with Ilmari’s sister last year. She has printed out the photo twelve times. On the back she writes, twelve times:
All good wishes for the festive season
.

Then she opens the door and goes out into the stairwell. She goes from door to door, putting a card through each letterbox.

She goes back into her apartment, lights the candles on the tree and looks at the still picture on the TV screen. A man smiling. Not an unpleasant or alarming smile, a happy, likeable smile. She doesn’t understand that smile. After she has seen it, she sees a series of pictures that are in sequence but don’t make sense, and while the pictures are running life stands still.

She hears a sound and looks away from the screen. There is a white envelope on the floor under the door. A neighbour replying to her Christmas greeting. She goes to the door, picks up the envelope and opens it. The card shows an angel. Marlies and Tuomo, the young couple on the first
floor. They write:
Happy Christmas and New Year to you too. Warm regards
. She stands in the corridor smiling, and thinks about words. How they can change, yet do the same thing. Two names missing from the salutation, two words extra at the end of the sentence. Warm regards. Her eyes rest on the words.

Later she goes back into the living room. She crushes the angel in her hand and looks at the face on the screen, the smile that she must get rid of before she can feel anything.

PASI
AND
LIISA
Laaksonen, his neighbours, waved to Kimmo Joentaa and called ‘Happy Christmas’ as he got out of the car. Each was holding one of their granddaughter Marja’s hands, and she was laughing because Pasi and Liisa were swinging her up in the air.

Kimmo Joentaa returned their greeting and hurried indoors. He stood in the corridor for a while in silence, waiting for the snow to melt and run down the back of his neck. Then he took off his jacket, cap and scarf, and went from room to room switching on all the lights.

Later he stood in the living room, looking at the frozen lake beyond the window and thinking of Kari Niemi, head of the scene-of-crime unit, who had asked if he would like to spend Christmas with him and his family. He had been very glad of the invitation, but declined it. Maybe next year. He had said the same when his mother Anita asked if he would like to spend the festive season with her in Kitee. He had also refused the annual invitation from Sanna’s parents
Merja and Jussi Silvonen, saying that unfortunately he had his hands full over Christmas and would hardly get time to stop and take breath.

He would visit Merja and Jussi tomorrow. They would be quiet, and after a while they would all talk about Sanna in their different ways. Exchanging memories that hovered in the air above them for a while. Weightless. Elusive. They would not talk about the weeks after her cancer diagnosis, the last days in hospital. There would be the clink of cups, and Merja offering a plate of home-made biscuits. In an empty house.

Tomorrow. And tomorrow he’d ring his mother too.

He went into the kitchen, feeling pleasantly silly as he took the unopened vodka bottle out of the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table. He thought of Sanna, who had seldom drunk, but when she did drink, she did it thoroughly. A quality he had liked, and after her death he was the same himself. On the rare occasions when he drank, he too did it thoroughly.

This was one of those times. Maybe. He wasn’t sure. He toyed with the thought of drinking a glass of milk and going straight to bed.

He was still thinking of various tempting alternatives when the doorbell rang.

Pasi, he thought. Pasi Laaksonen come to ask if he wouldn’t like to spend Christmas Day next door, with them and their children and grandchildren.

Or Anita. His mother had got on the train and come to visit him although he had firmly asked her not to.

He opened the door and looked at the face of the woman who had broken Ari Pekka Sorajärvi’s nose and whose name he didn’t know. She looked like a snowman, since she was wearing a snow-white coat and a snow-white cap, and both were covered with snow.

The woman said nothing. There seemed to be a quiet smile on her lips, but he could be wrong about that.

‘Oh … hello,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ she said, walking past him and into the corridor.

‘I … how did you …’

‘Kimmo Joentaa. Says so on the nameplate outside your office door. And on an envelope lying on your desk. There’s only one Kimmo Joentaa in Turku. Unusual name. Sanna and Kimmo Joentaa, it says in the phone book. Is your wife here?’

‘N … no.’

She nodded, as if she had expected that answer, and went towards the living room.

‘What … what did you want?’ asked Joentaa.

She turned and looked at him for a while.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Nothing, probably. Do you have anything to drink?’

‘Er, of course. Milk … milk or vodka?’

The woman seemed unimpressed by this selection. ‘Both,’ she said, going purposefully into the living room.

‘Er …’ said Joentaa. He went into the kitchen and filled one glass with milk and another with vodka.

The woman was sitting on the living-room sofa looking at the lake outside the window. ‘Nice view,’ she said.

Joentaa put the glasses down. ‘Can I help you? If it’s about the report you wanted to …’

The woman laughed. Laughed at him again. The last person who had been able to laugh at him so heartily and regularly was Sanna.

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘No, it’s not about the report. I really can’t remember the man’s name anyway.’

‘Ari Pekka Sorajärvi,’ said Joentaa mechanically, and the woman laughed again. Even louder, a laugh ending in a squeal. She couldn’t calm down.

‘Sorry,’ said Joentaa, and the woman laughed and laughed
as if he were the funniest comic act she had ever seen. Her slim body was convulsed by fits of laughter.

Kimmo Joentaa went into the kitchen, drank four large shots of vodka in swift succession, and felt rather better as he went back to the laughing woman sitting on his living-room sofa. He sat down in the old armchair beside the sofa.

‘There’s something I’d like to ask you, it’s important,’ he said, and against all the dictates of logic he had an idea he was babbling already. ‘Did that … did that Sorajärvi hurt you?’

The woman laughed again, but only briefly this time. ‘You talk just like senior citizens must have talked in the nineteenth century.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Oh, damn it all, can’t you ever stop saying sorry?’

‘What I mean is … I think you ought to report the man to the police, which is what you were planning to do, after all. And I could understand you better then. I simply don’t understand you yet.’

‘Ari Pekka Sorajärvi was a little rougher with me than agreed,’ she said. ‘In return I broke his nose. Get the idea?’

Joentaa thought about that for a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said, and the woman began laughing again.

‘As you say, okay.’

‘Sorry, all I meant was maybe I understand the situation a little better now.’

‘If you say sorry again for no reason I’ll be breaking another nose today.’

‘I can’t help you unless I understand what happened,’ said Joentaa.

The woman looked at him for a long time. ‘Who says I want you to help me?’

‘I thought …’

‘You’re crazy, you just don’t know it,’ she said.

‘I think I …’

‘There’s something the matter with you,’ she said.

Joentaa waited.

‘Something very much indeed the matter with you,’ said the woman.

Joentaa still waited.

‘There’s something the matter with you, and I’d really like to find out what it is,’ she said.

Then she stood up and put her arms round him. The old armchair creaked. He felt her hair against his cheek, her tongue in his mouth, and a great cry filled his brain.

KIMMO
JOENTAA LAY
awake. The snow and the night were melting away beyond the windows. He sat up carefully so as not to wake the woman lying beside him.

He looked down at her for a few minutes.

Heard her breathing quietly and regularly.

Then he let his head drop back against the sofa cushion and felt the woman whose name he didn’t know clutching his arm with her hand. She was moaning slightly, as if in pain. Probably dreaming. He wondered whether he ought to wake her and liberate her from the dream, but after a while she lay at rest, breathing regularly again, and Joentaa closed his eyes and thought, for the first time in a long while, of that last night in the hospital.

Thought of the last few hours that turned into the last few minutes, the last few seconds. Sanna too had slept. Sanna too had been breathing peacefully and regularly. Peacefully,
regularly and barely perceptibly. Then her breathing had stopped.

He had been waiting for that. Had been waiting, together with Sanna, for that moment, because he had known it would be the most important moment in his life. A never-ending moment.

When he heard a knock at the door he thought at first that he had imagined it. When the knocking came again, a little louder and more insistent, he sat up and looked at the green glow of the numbers on the DVD recorder. Two in the morning. It couldn’t be Pasi Laaksonen from next door. Nor his mother, because no trains from Kitee arrived in the middle of the night. Nor the woman who had broken Ari Pekka Sorajärvi’s nose, because she was already lying beside him.

He heard the knocking again, a little softer this time, with some slight hesitation. He got up and put on his T-shirt and trousers. He picked up the sofa throw, which was lying half on the floor, and covered up the woman, who seemed to be fast asleep.

Then, legs feeling shaky, he went to the door. His back ached. He opened the door and felt the clear, cold air on his skin. There was no one outside, but under the apple tree with its covering of white snow stood a man, just about to get back into his car.

‘Hello?’ said Joentaa.

The man stopped and seemed to hesitate briefly. ‘Kimmo. Sorry. I thought … I wasn’t going to ring the bell, only knock, because I thought you might be asleep.’

The man came towards him. It was Santa Claus.

‘Tuomas …’ said Joentaa.

Tuomas Heinonen. He couldn’t remember Tuomas Heinonen ever visiting him before. Tuomas Heinonen dressed up as Santa Claus.

‘What … come on in,’ said Joentaa.

‘Yes. Thanks.’

Tuomas Heinonen stood in the corridor, stooping and frozen, and seemed to be at a loss for words.

‘Would you like a hot drink? You look as if you’re freezing,’ said Joentaa, smiling, but Tuomas Heinonen probably wasn’t listening to him.

‘I’ve had a few problems at home. I … we had our present-giving and it went wrong, you might say. And then … then I thought of you. I’m glad you were still awake – or had you gone to sleep?’

‘Come on, let’s sit down and have something to drink first,’ said Joentaa, going into the kitchen.

Tuomas Heinonen followed. He sat down, lost in thought, and looked at the vodka bottle and the milk container standing on the table.

‘The trouble is it’s all my fault. That’s the worst of it,’ said Heinonen.

‘What’s happened?’ asked Joentaa.

Heinonen looked at him, forcing a painful smile, and hesitated. ‘Maybe we’re all washed up,’ he said at last, leaning back as if that explained everything.