True

1

A
WOMAN WAS RUNNING
toward him.

Martti had had the same dream many times. The woman was just about to say something, and he was on the verge of comprehending. He never managed to hear what she was trying to say; he always woke up before comprehension came.

He woke up again. His eye fell on the clock on the night table.

01
:
20
.

Elsa was sleeping beside him. Her breathing was slightly labored, but no more so than when she was healthy. Martti had been able to fall asleep, even though at bedtime he had felt like he didn't dare close his eyes.

This was Elsa's first night at home in more than two weeks.

At first he had opposed her coming home, not because he didn't want his wife beside him—on the contrary, Elsa belonged here. She had been here for more than fifty years. But he was afraid that he would wake up one morning and find her dead beside him, her feet gone cold.

I'm rotting, she had said to him a week ago in the hospice, like a call for help. Don't let me rot. I want to go home.

So in the end they arranged it.

IT HAD BEEN
only six months since Elsa got sick. In December Martti remarked that she had dwindled to half her previous size. She weighed herself at the spa and made an appointment with the doctor.

It's nothing, she said. Nothing at all, Martti said. Elsa wiped the worry from his face with a kiss.

Everything happened quickly—the examination, the biopsy, the diagnosis.

Martti cried on the way home from the hospital after the hardest news. Elsa was quiet, squeezing his hand the whole way, even in the elevator.

They stood in the entryway for a long time, leaning against each other. A Christmas star in the window, afternoon dusk in the room.

Let's have a really good Christmas, Elsa said. Just in case.

Eleonoora came with her family on Christmas day. Elsa hadn't had the heart to tell her yet.

But Eleonoora guessed—it was the kind of thing a doctor notices. It started right away—her worry, which to the less observant could seem like bossiness. Elsa didn't take any notice of her instructions, she just said, as she had to Martti, Let's enjoy Christmas.

It was a happy Christmas, in spite of everything. On Christmas Eve they went skating, and on Boxing Day they skied. Elsa was surprised at her strength, ate half a chocolate bar and slid down the hills as sprightly as a girl.

The treatments started at the beginning of the year. They only gave her the cytostatins for a few weeks, a month. Then they used the phrase “palliative care.” That meant hospice. This time Elsa cried.

Martti tried to be strong and keep up his hopes. He asked her what she wanted to do.

We could drive somewhere, she said. We could just drive off into the dusk, without any destination, listen to music like we always do on road trips.

They had gone driving every evening now, since the end of February. The spring was light pink and pale yellow, like every spring. Elsa often urged him to drive slower so that she could see the sky better. The clouds moved across the sky like big buildings. At the beginning of March, in a parking lot in Lauttasaari, they heard a black-bird singing.

They sat there for a long while, with the lights off, in the dark, listening to the blackbird.

It's surprising how little there is to fear, Elsa said.

No, there's nothing to be afraid of, Martti answered.

BUT THAT WAS
a lie. Martti was afraid of the nights, those nights when he would wake up alone from a dream that he couldn't get hold of. He was afraid he would wake up beside her and she wouldn't be breathing anymore.

Maybe Eleonoora feared that, too, because she had firmly opposed Elsa coming home.

Believe me, I know what to expect, she had said, when they were left alone together for a moment after a treatment consultation. I can't do it alone, and neither can you. And we can't expect the girls to look after her. It's too much to ask. They're hardly more than children.

Eleonoora's worry was certainly different than Martti's. Her sadness would be different, too, when the time came. But still, he wondered at her attitude. It was impossible to know anything about her but what he could see: meticulousness, an almost expressionless determination on her face.

More
and more Martti was seized with a thought that had troubled him ever since Eleonoora became an adult: this woman had stolen his daughter from him, she was hiding the pigtailed, smiling Ella somewhere deep within her pragmatism. If Martti could just find some magic word from her childhood years, and say it, Eleonoora would be Ella again, jumping up and down in the doorway, grinning at her own reflection in the mirror, and they would go and get some ice cream.

The final decision about home care was made when Eleonoora's daughters themselves offered to help. She questioned both of them, told them in unvarnished detail what it was like to take care of a dying person.

I'm not afraid, Maria said without hesitation. Although she was the younger of the two, she seemed more mature than Anna. Anna had a moodiness about her. Martti recognized it as his own: he had once been sensitive in the same way. But in spite of her uncertainty Anna nodded decisively when Eleonoora asked her about helping.

In the last few weeks, Elsa had been doing better. She had a new pain medication, stronger than the others. It worked, but the doctor had said that it could cause disorientation and immobility.

Martti had panicked at the possibility that she could be disoriented and asked the doctor outright: how much longer? How many weeks?

Don't focus on the weeks, the doctor answered. There will be good days and bad days. There's tremendous variation in these illnesses. She may be almost symptom free at times.

Martti contented himself with what the doctor had said. He watched Elsa, putting all his hope in those three words: almost symptom free.

THE HOSPITAL BED
and other equipment had been brought the day before.

Two taciturn men rang the doorbell, brought the metal contraption in as if they were delivering a table or a sofa, and put it together in the bedroom. Then came the IV equipment—which had been ordered just in case—and diapers, lying coyly in the corner in a cardboard box. The medications were in packets on the dresser.

“Splendid,” Elsa said from the bed. “More splendid than any hotel I've been in.”

“Glad you like it.”

“But,” she said, lowering her voice as if she thought the movers were still outside the door listening and she didn't want to offend them, “I still intend to sleep with you.”

“Yeah? If you want.”

Elsa glanced disapprovingly at the box of diapers in the corner.

“I intend to take care of my own business, of course,” she said briskly.

“They're just here in case we need them,” he heard himself say.

The role of the infirm was difficult for Elsa. She was used to being the caregiver. She had always taken care of others, to the point of exhaustion. That was a psychologist's job. Martti remembered the time when Elsa changed irrevocably from a girl to a woman: during those years when she defended her doctoral thesis and was offered a position in an international research group.

MARTTI LAY IN
bed without moving. Elsa didn't waken.

01
:
25
.

The dream hovered above him. It was a dense quilt, woven from time.

He got up and went to the window.

Some nights when he woke up from this dream, the sorrow weighed on him like a lid. He was under the lid, couldn't breathe. I'm not going to make it through this, he thought. If I feel like this now, what will I feel when Elsa's really gone?

In the end he found a way to calm himself. He would go to the window, open it, look at the sky, listen to the blackbird.

The sadness came and he let it come, felt it, as if getting to know it. He found it in the position of his hand, half reaching out. He had to make room for the sadness, to take it in his arms. Otherwise it would come as a dread, sudden and unexpected, on the corner as he was crossing the street or in the store when he was picking out mandarins or potatoes.