True (2 page)

At those moments it was sheer panic.

Now, as he held the sadness, Martti was almost happy. The swallows had come early this year, they'd been carrying on boisterously since springtime. Up and down, up and down they flew, their voices filling the air. He stood at the window for a minute, another, letting the languor spread. The sound of the swallows was not in the sky but within him; there was no clear line between himself and the world outside.

These were the first moments in many years that Martti had thought he might be able to paint: the sky, the swallows, the light floating in the room.

He'd never grieved the end of his working days. He had been happy even without working. His studio in the garret, the building's lone tower, was still there. It was like a museum. Now and then he went up there, sat in the armchair, watched the sunset, opened the window, smoked. Last year he had given an interview to the monthly supplement of
Helsingin Sanomat
. The photos had been backlit.
A visionary in a tireless search for the perfect scene.
Actually he had regretted the interview a little afterward. He had succumbed to pomposity and then tried to make up for his grandiloquence with self-deprecation, but the humor had been lost in the final version of the interview. What was left was the true statement:
Art evades its maker just as reality evades us all.

When he thought about his career he often noticed that he considered his most esteemed works and his highest achievements banal. It was as if he had spent his whole life tinkering with a sand castle.

Maybe it was this childishness that had kept him from mixing colors or stretching canvases, or even sketching on paper, doing anything to get started working.

He went up to the attic once in a while, sat and watched the changing light, melting from minute to minute into the corners, the silence.

That was just how the need to paint used to come to him, when he had the feeling that he was pure perception. Some people called it inspiration, but it was something much plainer, much more natural than that.

He was often asked about it in interviews. Journalists and biographers and exhibit curators presented the question as if they were asking about the existence of God.

He remembered how once in the sixties, sitting at a table on a damp evening, he had told a curator, just to amuse himself, “There's nothing mystical about it. I give up myself, and get the world in return.”

Now he had that feeling on those evenings when he sat at the window looking at the sky and the swallows. He was pure perception, pure gaze.

But the dream wouldn't let go of him, and that surprised him.

At first he had pushed the thought out of his mind. But when the dream kept coming back, he started to have doubts. The feeling was just a glimmer, something like a scent, as elusive as the mental image you have of a person when you've met them a few times and don't yet know them but you start to think about them unconsciously.

When he woke from these dreams it was as if he could hear a smile, the sound of it floating above him.

Now he let the thought come. The woman in the dream wasn't Elsa.

2

E
LEONOORA WOKE UP
and saw the edge of the night table.

She closed her eyes again, and again saw her mother, the way her mother had been when she was quite young. She was swinging. It was the middle of summer, they were at the Sampo playground, her mother had kicked off her shoes and was picking up speed. Eleonoora was six years old, amazed at her mother's rambunctiousness, laughing at it. Her mother's hair was long.

It was strange how long her hair was. It had really grown, in spite of the doses of cytostatins in January. Hair growth can be a sign of remission, she thought. She should mention it to the attending physician.

Eleonoora opened her eyes again. She might slip back into the dream by wishing it, or she could wake up, make her way along the outer contours of the bedroom, guided by the edge of the night table, the digital numbers on the clock. But she wanted to see her mother again, young and healthy. She closed her eyes.

The playground returned. The stickiness of strawberries she'd just eaten returned to her hands. She was wearing red sandals that chafed one ankle. They were spending the day on Suomenlinna Island. There was a basket full of sticky dishes and one warm, uneaten chocolate pudding. She needed to pee. Her mother's pumps lay on the ground. She was laughing. Eleonoora was a little worried. She thought: mothers shouldn't be allowed to swing fast.

Now her mother had shorter hair, darker. She slowed her speed and got up from the swing, smiling.

Were you afraid I'd take off? she asked. Eleonoora nodded. My little girl, her mother said, and smiled tenderly. Don't be afraid. I'm staying here. I'm not going anywhere, and she bent over to put on her shoes.

Eleonoora could see bruises on her back. Blue marks the size of plates, yellowing at the edges.

You shouldn't swing if you have bruises like that, Eleonoora scolded. Now that she was scolding, she was an adult. Her mother must be protected, she thought. In spite of everything, she's more fragile than she lets on. When she thought this, she was six again.

She woke up. The clock read
01
:
20
. She lay for a moment without moving. Eero breathed beside her.

It was at moments like this that the terror came. Night was a well. It was the terror of childhood, the same terror that would wake her when she was twelve, struggling between childhood and adulthood. It had no name then, it was just a formless dread. Now its message was clear: I will soon be motherless. Orphaned.

The word bounced around the room. Eero's heavy breathing as he slept made it even harder to bear.

01
:
21

Eleonoora waited, breathed.

01
:
22

Eero rolled onto his side, still sleeping. She wouldn't get up yet. She was hungry, but it wasn't really hunger, more like a kind of absence—a hunger that had lasted for weeks.

She had started weighing herself to make sure she didn't get too thin. She was preparing for the grief, grieving ahead of time by forgetting to eat. Her mother's daily shrinking presence made her appetite disappear, too. Or maybe it was a way to protect those weeks, to seal this short period of time within boundaries, to pay with lack of sleep and lack of food for some of her mother's pain.

The living know nothing of death, but dying, its stealthy inevitability, comes into the lives of the living. Time slows, reality is given walls of grief within which the dying and those who accompany them perform their rituals of devotion.

Each of them developed their own role in caring for her. Eleonoora held everything together, handling communications with the doctor and home health-care workers and making sure that everyone ate, slept, and got out enough. Eero was a loyal helper when needed. Anna, for her part, watched everything from a distance as if she were writing down every feeling that hovered in the air. Eleonoora's father was sometimes crushed with sadness and sometimes overly jolly, as if they weren't even dealing with a death, but something more like a summer vacation.

Maria took care of everything fearlessly, asking frequently about her grandmother's condition.

Maria was a crisis person. She was in her first year of medical school. Sometimes Eleonoora thought Maria would be a better doctor than she was.

Eleonoora had never been more businesslike. She had always had too much worry in her. Faced with her mother's illness, she erupted in rules and instructions. When she was a child it had been a generalized feeling, in her early teens it made her look under her bed and check the stove in the kitchen again and again.

Anna, it seemed to Eleonoora, had learned to worry from her. It had been her predominant characteristic, especially in the last few years, along with her earnestness.

The previous May, Eleonoora had found Anna lying on the floor of her studio apartment. She still didn't know what exactly had happened. Had something been going on for years that no one had told her about?

Anna's friend Saara had called her, sounding worried, and Eleonoora had realized that she hadn't heard from Anna in more than a week. Anna lived in a small studio on Pengerkatu, led a busy student's life, and sometimes they wouldn't call each other for a week at a time. Eleonoora had thought that Anna was busy with tests, evening walks, glasses of wine.

She had sometimes said, out loud, that she didn't know what was happening in Anna's life.

I live a different kind of life than you do, Anna had said nonchalantly. I live in a different world. Eleonoora let the matter go and didn't ask her any more about it.

Saara's call in May and Anna's days of silence nevertheless alarmed her. She tried to call Anna again and again, but there was no answer. Finally she drove over to her building. She rang the doorbell for ten minutes. A series of sad, grisly possibilities flashed through her mind. She dug the spare key that Anna had given her out of her bag and pushed it into the lock.

The apartment door struck something soft on the floor; Anna sat up and looked at her in an indifferent daze. She looked like she'd been asleep. Her hair was unwashed and disheveled, her skin pale.

“What are you doing here?” Anna said.

“What's happened to you?” Eleonoora asked, transfixed.

Anna shrugged her shoulders, stood up, looked past her, out into the hallway.

Eleonoora looked over Anna's shoulder into the room. It looked empty. There were spaces on the bookshelf, photographs missing from the wall. Had someone been living there, someone who had taken their things away with them? Or had Anna simply rearranged? The same strange photo of Anna that looked from a distance like an oil painting, like Gallen-Kallela's Aino walking into the water, still hung between the shelf and the sofa. The photo had been taken by a man Anna was dating for a while. Eleonoora had never liked the picture; she didn't recognize the woman in the photo as her daughter. Pale, solemn, stepping into the water, a completely different person than the one she had raised, the one who had giggled over her morning porridge on dreamy Sunday mornings, the one she had soothed in the night after a bad dream.

A child is born, a mother learns to know the child, learns little by little, year by year. And then another person comes along and the child changes under their influence and turns into a stranger.

Eleonoora had never got to know the man who took the photograph. She had met him a few times, but she couldn't really say that she knew much about him. He had a child: Linda. Linda had sometimes spent time with Anna. Eleonoora remembered a summer day several years before. Anna and the little girl had been at her house. Ice cream, rhubarb pie, whooping it up in the wading pool. The child had bangs and earnest, trusting eyes. She had fallen asleep in Anna's arms, sunk into a deep sleep while a nightingale sang. Eleonoora could see her own feelings from decades before, when a child was sleeping in her arms, reflected in Anna's face—love so overwhelming that there was a touch of pain in it.

ON THAT DAY
in May, Anna stood before her with a different look on her face—defeated, humbled.

Eleonoora asked a few baffled, clarifying questions.

“How long has it been since you went out?”

“I don't know. A week or two.”

“Why didn't you call me?”

Anna shrugged her shoulders again. “I wasn't up to it. I couldn't get up.” Then she looked at her mother and, as if marveling at her own train of thought, said, “I was lying on the floor.”

She started to cry. It started with one tear and spread to the rest of her body. Eleonoora held her in her arms, not knowing what else to do. There they stood.

Eleonoora said the nursery rhyme for hurts, their own shared rhyme of consolation, the one that her mother had said to her when she was a child. Whenever Eleonoora hurt herself her mother would take her in her arms and say the rhyme in a low voice. The last time Eleonoora had whispered it in her daughter's ear was when she was less than ten years old. But still the words came, she still remembered them. Anna listened and finally relaxed a little.

“The bee rhyme. I had forgotten all about that.”

AT FIRST ELEONOORA
had been afraid that Anna's grief wouldn't pass. She had made a mental diagnosis of depression and gingerly encouraged Anna to seek help. In the end, she let the matter drop.

Now and then a young person's heart is made of lead. It accumulates weight from random experiences; anything can add to its density, slip it out of joint. But it can lighten again just as easily, forget its troubles.

And that's what happened. Anna had Matias now, with his worn-out T-shirts, his store of a hundred gentle expressions and only one angry one. She had moved in with him almost immediately, just a month after they met.

When she visited Anna and Matias's house, Eleonoora noticed a wistful tinge under the happiness. Where had the years gone? When had she become so old that her daughter had her own home with a lovely boyfriend, offered her a piece of apple pie on a plate that she herself had received as a wedding gift more than twenty years ago? She saw a hint of trying too hard in Anna's happiness, as if she wanted to impress her with its authenticity.