True (20 page)

He digs a cigarette out of his pocket but doesn't light it.

“It was all a lot of noise when you look back on those years. A crazy time. Every time I went to Paris something had happened, my old classmates had thought up something new. Finland felt like the boondocks, although we had our own circles here. But they were a little homespun and tame compared to Paris or Amsterdam. In Finland we were reinventing everything that my friends in Paris had already been through in the fifties and early sixties. There were all kinds of movements in Paris over the years. I was at some of the meetings. I kept my distance from that crowd when I was in Finland.”

“What did they do at the meetings?”

“They created guidelines for reality.”

He says this with overemphasis, as if he were talking about a party that's got out of control. The kind of party that you reminisce about, embroidering events, shaking your head but nevertheless yearning for that time—a time when we were so sweet and wild!

“You always had to be thinking up something new. It often felt like just when I'd mastered some technique or style, they'd start doing it some other way. Painting was out of style, supposedly. You were supposed to analyze the world some other way, through provocation. Or at least use mixed media. Sometimes I felt like politics was more important than art in that crowd. Not even politics, really—just spectacle for spectacle's sake. That sort of thing annoyed me generally.”

“Too modern for you?”

“Maybe. Or maybe I thought that too much attention was paid to shock value, that careful, uncompromising work was disappearing. When the ideas that had been going around in Paris came to Finland I felt like I'd already heard it all. Maybe they sounded a little childish to me. But a lot of my friends were in that group.”

They're quiet for a moment. Grandpa lets his gaze drift over the people in the cafe as if to say, why talk about the past when this is going on all the time—the world, life! Compared to this, every work of art is trivial, a sand castle.

“What about that woman?” he says, nodding toward a table in the corner. “What can we tell about her?”

“Who?”

“The one eating chocolate cake.”

Anna turns to look behind her.

“The sad one?”

The woman has the mouth of someone who's given up—creased at the corners, as if there isn't a thing in this world that can touch her. She's drinking coffee and spooning a piece of cake into her mouth with her eyes closed.

“What do you think she's sad about?”

Anna can see the woman's eyes. She takes hold of the edge of the sadness. The woman looks like she's invariably a little amused at how the world keeps going, how people come here and order a coke, take the trouble for such a trivial thing. How other people take the trouble to print the newspaper that they sell at the counter, and others do their jobs, wipe the tables and say thank you and have a nice day.

“Maybe she's lost someone,” Grandpa says. “Her father? Her mother?”

“No,” Anna says. “Someone else. A child.”

“You think so? What makes you think that?”

Anna doesn't hear his question. “It happened suddenly, last summer.”

“Was it an accident?” Grandpa asks. “A car accident?”

It happened suddenly, in the time it takes to say the carefree words “See you tomorrow.” That's how suddenly the woman's world was put in parentheses. Suddenly everything changed into this grotesque drama in which other children continue to be led across the street, carnival rides spin all summer long, and garish photographs advertise digital cameras on the sides of the bus stops. Grandpa looks at her, examines her expression. The sun beams down. Anna bends over and picks up her sunglasses and puts them on.

“It's bright,” she says.

“Well,” he says. “What now? What else shall we make up?”

The chocolate cake woman gets up, glances at them before walking to the door. As if she knows. No smile. Just a glance before she's gone.

Anna turns her head. Her grandfather tries to see what she's thinking. She sees those other faces in his face, young faces, the ones she's never seen before, the ones he's nevertheless carried with him across the decades. He raises one eyebrow, smiles, lights his cigarette, blows smoke. Gestures that belong at the edge of a soccer field or under a courtyard arch. Gestures that have charmed people, caressed them, got them to agree to things. Gestures that could make broad lines on canvas, try new techniques. They belong to youth.

On an impulse, Grandpa takes up their old game: “I met a girl,” he says, not looking at Anna.

Anna plucks the sentence from the air like a shared memory: “What kind of girl?”

“She carried sorrows around that she never told anyone about.”

Grandpa looks into Anna's eyes now. She can see that he knows.

“She had eyes like pools because they'd collected so many tears,” he says.

One tear, then another, roll down Anna's cheek, under her collar into her shirt.

“Maybe she should tell someone about her sorrows, then,” Anna hears herself say.

“That's what I told her—the girl that I met.”

“And she will, too,” Anna says. “Just as soon as she's ready.”

1965

A
S SOON AS
we're in the taxi an abyss opens up between us. The flight to Paris is leaving in two hours, we're still on the cobblestone streets of Helsinki and the driver is calling me Mrs. as if I'd always held that position. I'm shaped like an apology, quite motionless, like a statue.

He's already regretting this. What insanity! Traveling with an assistant, and this punk calling her Mrs.!

“She's not my wife. This is a business trip.”

I turn and look out the window at the stones of the street, not wanting to read the thoughts on his face. He's thinking: isn't this what he wanted? To show me the city? After all, he loves me, doesn't he? The love started at the party. It started in August, when he looked at me from across a room. It's a sickness. He still hasn't recovered. He never will.

How could he not have known that love is a fever, a drug, needing to have the other person near you. Why hadn't he felt that with Elsa? Was it because they'd always had their own separate selves? It feels to him like he'll perish if he can't be mine. He'll cease to exist if he can't be in me, inside me. If he can't see me smile in the morning, still a little sleepy, he might as well put parentheses around the world.

He tries to reach a hand out to me, but can't. An objection forms in his mind and takes Elsa's shape. He sees Elsa right after she gave birth—and he's surprised because Elsa is usually quick and compact, not giving up any of her self. She was walking down the hospital corridor a little unsteadily, porous, the belly that was just carrying their daughter still ample, like life. Elsa in the hallway, reaching out her hand: come on, let's go look at the baby, I want you to see how much her nose is like yours.

He remembers how I lied to Elsa about the trip. I told her I had a lot of studying to do, made up a story about a trip home, without looking her in the eye. That's a shame, she said.

“You shouldn't have lied,” he says when the driver has picked up our luggage and we're alone at the front door. “You didn't have to lie to her that much, anyway.”

“Just a little would've been better, you mean? Lying just a little?”

He turns away toward the rushing crowd.

We've been talking about the trip all winter. Was it possible? How much of a deception would it be? Would it be more deceit than either of us was ready for? His friend was having an exhibition in Paris, that was our cover story.

At the airport he measures the weight of the clouds with his gaze, as if sketching the possibility of escape. We sit side by side without speaking, like two strangers. I no longer dare to touch him.

“This is my first time flying,” I tell the stewardess.

Something about her comforts me, perhaps her smile, perhaps the thought that here, above the clouds, safety and comfort are concentrated in the coffeepot she's holding.

“Are you afraid?” she asks.

“I'm nervous. But the takeoff was lovely, like a carnival ride.”

She pours me some cognac. I gulp it and excitement flashes through me suddenly, unexpectedly. I don't care about him with his face turned away anymore. What luck! What joy! To be traveling toward possibilities and know nothing about them except that they exist.

WHEN WE ARRIVE,
there are plastic tubes leading up and down, like in a science fiction movie. People constantly being paged. We step into a tube. He still doesn't look at me.

An Arab woman is standing next to me, her eyes drawn in charcoal. She's swathed in meters of fabric, eyes shining like two emeralds. A curtain of incense surrounds her. I catch a glimpse of her fingernails. They're as red as her lips. There are such things! The kinds of things I've only read about in books! All those dreamy evenings in Kuhmo, up in the attic, a bee buzzing in the window and me reading about faraway countries. Now those countries are becoming real. I love the woman for that moment, her abundance and her hard, hoarse voice that doesn't ask permission.

She says to me in French that my skin is so pale it's as if a lamp were burning inside me, and she smiles. I've studied the language for six years, I can read Balzac and order coffee and orange juice and a medium-rare steak, I can talk about the weather with subtle turns of phrase and exchange opinions about welfare and economic development, but I'm still amazed that this has been going on somewhere all this time, this language. I talk with her and he looks at me, smiling for the first time.

“You speak as if you've always lived here,” he says.

I put my hand in his. He takes hold of it, but he can't shake off the feeling of strangeness. Who is this woman? He might mistake me for any Parisian. Like that girl there, with the ample bosom.

Actually all he wants to do is leave, pick out a few souvenirs for Elsa and his daughter from a department store and go, as if I don't exist. He wants to go back to Helsinki and forget that he was ever so stupid, so thoughtless and heartless as to sneak away on a trip with me.

He has no intention of introducing me to his friends, either. He'll send me out alone to see the sights, go to dinner with a few friends out of a sense of duty, get this whole absurd thing over with and buy me a return ticket on another plane.

That's what he decides to do as we hold hands and he hails a taxi.

In the taxi I force the guilt out of my mind for a moment, because Paris is coming to meet me. House after house, and houses being built and suburbs already constructed, their courtyards nursing hopes of fame, of extraordinariness. Fates formed from dreams, indifferent to conventionality, hidden within their walls. And everywhere laundry drying in the air shafts, an endless, festive flag to a trifling Tuesday.

Then come the wrought iron balconies and the
boulangeries
, the Paris I've seen in pictures. I yelp involuntarily.

HE'S THINKING ABOUT
Elsa, the times he's spent in Paris with her. When they were in their twenties Elsa studied in Helsinki and he studied in Paris. She would come to see him whenever she could get enough money together for an airline ticket. Sometimes she came on the train.

They would walk along the Seine and go to museums on Sundays. They would sit in cafes, he would read the paper or explain something in an eager voice, Elsa would read her textbooks, because she was determined to succeed and she didn't want to let up for a minute. They would walk in Luxembourg Gardens and buy crepes from a stand, stop for a while to watch a tennis match. They were young, their love was still new. They had fights, misunderstandings, doors slammed in protest. Often he was the one who got angry, got fed up with her about something. She would contradict him and he couldn't stand it. He would leave, wander the streets, stop to buy cigarettes in the Latin Quarter and take pleasure in being misunderstood.

He would walk around the Left Bank, go down to the level below the street and make the acquaintance of a passerby walking along the river shore. If there's any place where arguing can be beautiful, it's in Paris. They unconsciously struck up a ritual for making up. After the first, hours-long period of estrangement, he would get hungry and go to a small bistro on a square at the Sorbonne and order an omelet or a warm, toasted, stuffed baguette. The first time was an accident. Elsa wasn't looking for him, she just happened to be wandering along St.-Michel, saw the windows of the restaurants beckoning, and opened the door to the same bistro.

They wouldn't make a scene, wouldn't behave like people in a movie—that didn't fit their straightforward style. Elsa would just sit down across from him, smile, and order something for herself, maybe the same omelet or sandwich. Both of them would gradually give in and the fight would dissolve into the background, ridiculous.

The evening would already be turning dark when they walked to the metro station and neither of them would need to say out loud what they both were thinking: life, even a happy life, once you get used to it, is plainer than it is in dreams. And also heavier.