True (15 page)

And the house burned to the ground, didn't it? Poof, it just burned to the ground and you had to build a new one.

It didn't quite burn to the ground.

But a little bit, a little bit to the ground, right? And it left a mark on you, on your back, a magic mark that protects you forever and ever and ever from anything bad so nothing terrible can ever happen to you again?

Yes, it might be that kind of mark.

Anna draws a tender circle around the scar with the bath mitt.

“Does this ever hurt?”

“Sometimes,” her mother says in a faint voice, lost in herself and in the moment. “If I'm in the sun too long.”

“You should put lotion on it,” Anna says. “I'll put some on after the sauna, once you've dried yourself.”

How small her mother is, like a baby chick, hunched a little, with her arms wrapped around herself.

“Did I tell you about when your father and I were in Istanbul last year, and we went to the Hagia Sofia? Did I tell you about the woman who came up and talked to us?”

“No. You told me about the murals you saw there, and the church with the mosque layered over it. Dad talked about it for weeks afterward.”

Anna imitates her father's lecturer's voice, the way he pours out facts and paints broad strokes of thought whenever he gets excited. “There's no other place where Europe is such a caricature of itself as in Istanbul. The soccer match, the church, the mosque, the cafe, go anywhere and you see an inadvertent microcosm of Europe. You have to go to the fringes to see what's in the center.”

Her mother laughs. “Not bad. He was already preaching about that while we were on the trip.”

Anna sees her mother in profile. She looks just like a child when she laughs. Whenever Dad starts speechifying a tenderness comes into her eyes.

“Your father wanted to go upstairs but I had to go to the restroom so I left before him. And while I was standing in line I took off my sweater, and this woman came up and spoke to me. I think she was American, from her accent. She said, ‘You bear a cross on your shoulder. Did something horrible happen to you?'”

“Strange woman.”

Her mother is quiet, leaning her back into the sponge like a cat leaning against the person petting it.

WET FEET ON
the gray wood of the dock. Anna runs to the end of the dock, the familiar sound of the boards banging. Her mother comes after her, protective and encouraging at the same time.

“Don't go too far!”

The water's cold. It locks up her breathing for a moment. The shock bursts out in a laugh that spreads across the surface of the water. There's a bashful, early summer moon in the sky. The laugh reaches all the way to its skewed crescent. She breathes, gasps a little and feels a cool mass of water take a gentle stab at her belly.

“Is it cold?” her mother shouts excitedly.

Cold, old,
the forest echoes.

This might be the most valiant thing that Anna has ever done. Her mother on the dock and Anna here, in the arms of the water, as safe as if she were floating in a womb and yet precarious, at the mercy of the world, out of her mother's reach.

“Yes!” she shouts.

“Turn around now,” her mother coaxes.

“In a minute,” she breathes, not looking at her mother.

She turns around and notices that she's surprisingly far out. She swims in long strokes through cold and warm walls of water as if she were wandering from one underwater room to another. This is what it's like to be a fish! The thought comes to her unexpectedly, with absurd certainty. She rises up out of the water, her mother reaches out her hand and she takes it. For one small moment there's nothing else.

They stand on the dock.

The summer breathes. The torn surface of the lake heals over and goes still. The silence settles on its invisible hinges and the landscape sinks back into self-sufficient sleep.

“Good,” her mother says. “Now back to the sauna.”

The loon is already here, marking its territory with its soft call. The sauna crackles, the evening darkens outside the window. Anna squeezes thick cream onto her fingertips from a metal tube and smoothes it over her mother's back.

Her mother holds her hair up with her left hand, her head slightly bowed, her breasts humble.

“Is it red?” she asks.

“A little.”

Anna smoothes the cream, it escapes the edges of the scar, spreads pearl-like across her mother's shoulder blade. These feelings for another are born at the very beginning, maybe they're already in the bud when a mouth gropes for the breast for the first time, when one flesh first separates itself from the other. But now Anna feels it powerfully: it's from her, from Eleonoora Ahlqvist—Ella—that she knows what it is to bear the worry and fear and pride.

“Is that good?” she asks.

Ella nods. “You take care of me like you're somebody's mother.”

Anna is silent. The movements of her fingers accelerate a little. Little circles; the cream layered in transparent ramparts on the skin. She hopes her mother won't ask the question that she knows is coming. But she does ask it: “Have you seen that little girl Linda lately?”

How easily she says it.
That little girl.
Linda.

“No, I haven't.”

“Doesn't she have a birthday about now?”

“Next week.”

“How old will she be?”

Will she be, she says, not
would
she be. Linda will be blowing out candles on a cake somewhere this year, too. Her mother will smile and say, Good job, you're such a big girl. All this is true someplace else.

“Five,” Anna says. “She'll be five years old this year.”

She has to turn away. The ink flows into her as if it's filling a bottle. When Linda turned three she bought her cotton candy at the amusement park. It was as if that had happened to someone else.

She puts on her underwear, her jeans. Her mother lifts her head, looks at her for a moment.

“Would you like me to braid your hair? It'll give you curls like when you were little.”

“Sure,” she says carelessly, smiling.

She sits on the sauna stool. Her mother divides her hair into three parts.

And now she is herself again. And her mother is her mother, strong-handed, determined.

THEY ROAST THE
fish over the coals, flavoring it with olive oil and salt and pepper and letting it sizzle in its foil wrap. Her mother makes a sauce from butter and onions for the new potatoes. They take the linen tablecloth with its regular folds out of the cupboard and spread it on the table and lay the plates on it.

Her mother pours white wine into glasses and checks on the fish now and then and Anna opens the door and steps out into the early summer dark. She's going to clip a few apple blossoms for the table.

She walks down the narrow path to the shed. The stones of the path feel smooth under the bare soles of her feet. A loon somewhere on the opposite shore has tuned its call to a yet more penetrating note. A blackbird on a branch sings its yearning song with a familiar melancholy that has always sounded to Anna's ears like it was in a major key.

The shed shimmers in the murky darkness. The door creaks. The familiar smell of turpentine and sawdust and gasoline fills her nose. She sinks into the smell for a moment like stepping into water.

The garden scissors are hanging from a nail. Anna turns on the light. Old powdered pigments, empty linseed oil bottles, dried-out glue and paintbrushes. Wooden stretcher bars on the shelves.

Anna lets her gaze wander over the room, the shelves of stacked charcoal drawings, the color experiments. It's mostly sketches. Still, they shouldn't be left lying here at the mercy of the damp. Any art museum would be glad to buy them for their collection.

Rejects, canvases that look like they've been painted over many times, straggle along the rack at the back of the shed. She goes to them and flips through the pictures absentmindedly.

Anna has a half-formed, careless thought about all of this. The forest, the sky, May, the shed stubbornly standing there day after day, year after year, a squirrel perhaps creeping onto its roof sometimes, the moss pushing out its sprouts. And there were the half-finished paintings, pieces of their own reality, here amid all the activity of the world.

She closes the door a little reluctantly.

She cuts a few branches from the nearest apple tree. They snap like bones as they break.

Her mother is out on the porch when she returns.

“How'd it look in there?”

“The same. Just as chaotic as ever.”

Her mother sighs with good-natured weariness.

“Someone should organize the shed, sort through the art,” she says. “Dad doesn't value his old pieces enough to take the trouble.”

Anna shrugs.

“Maybe I can come with Matias, do a real spring cleaning.”

“That would be nice. If Grandma makes it here again, you could clean it up before she comes.”

“Agreed,” Anna says.

She puts on a smile without effort and hands the apple blossoms to her mother, who reflects the smile on her own face and says, “Well, let's eat.”

1964

K
ERTTU IS WAITING
at the corner. September, the sky a high dome, the air thin. The city doesn't yet know about winter.

Kerttu has a new style—she found it this summer when she went to visit relatives in San Francisco. A black turtleneck, jeans, eyes hazy, as if she's decided to let the unpredictability of life show through her gaze. She has combed her hair till it shines, hanging on either side of her face. It takes me a moment to get used to this Kerttu. Just this morning she had on seamed stockings and a short skirt.

“All right then,” Kerttu says. “Let's go create a world.”

She cajoles me into this—I wouldn't have the time or the desire for it, exams are pressing on me and I've only just discovered the girl and the man, my own days with them. But Kerttu doesn't give in. I quicken my steps beside her.

“Where exactly are we going?”

“To a meeting,” she says, and doesn't explain any further.

THERE ARE A
handful of young people when we get there. Thick-rimmed glasses float by, everyone smells like cigarettes, unspoken hopes condense near the ceiling, dreams that no one knows how to shout out loud yet. A girl in red beads says something about the Vietnam War, but a boy in a green shirt isn't listening because he's painting a sketch of his plans for the evening in his mind.

Isn't it exciting? Kerttu whispers in a low voice just before we step inside. She doesn't let her smile split its seams.

A girl in the corner recognizes her, takes note of her pants. Happiness goes through me and settles in my fingertips. I'm with Kerttu—me—I'm her friend, so I'm new, too.

We sit in the front row next to a boy who smells of hair oil and yesterday's red wine. I remember him from the university—his name is Tapio. He lent me a pen in the introductory lecture for social science theory, whispering, You heard it from me, Rousseau's making a comeback.

The speeches start. It's like in parliament, only the fervor and the size of the waistlines are different. A man in a corduroy jacket with hair receding from his temples talks about Mao.

“These people admire China?” I whisper in Kerttu's ear. “Don't people go hungry there?”

“That's in Africa. There's a famine there,” she whispers back. “Just listen.”

Everyone is in agreement about Vietnam. One of the boys gets up and recites a statement that sums up the whole state of affairs in the form of a poem.

He receives nods of approval. Hands are raised in support. I raise my hand, too, although I'm only half there. I don't tell anyone that part of me is still on Sammonkatu. What would Kerttu think if she knew? Suddenly I remember his hand. I think about his belly, the place where the hair begins. It's a real triumph to know those places on another person, those unexplored regions.

For one absurd moment I have the whole world within reach as I think about his belly. These people think they know. They're planning a friendship trip to Berlin, arguing about whether a singing party is an appropriate way to express their opinions. But they don't have the whole world—it's mine.

The girl reached her hand toward me yesterday, climbed into my lap, and I held her. I fed her and put her to bed. Her hair smelled like apples, her skin was slightly musty. It's her own smell. Her breath is a little sour in the morning. Her backside is sharp against my thigh and I have to adjust her a little so the two childish chisels of bone in her butt don't cut into me. Then I wrap an arm around her. She leans her head against me. Eeva, I wish you were always at our house!

Yesterday, once she had gone to sleep, I went and stood in the doorway without speaking.