True (25 page)
Authors: Riikka Pulkkinen
Tags: #Cancer - Patients - Fiction., #Family secrets - Fiction.
She's explaining the game. You're not allowed to touch the chestnut tree. But you still have to go near it. You should get so close to it that you almost touch it, but if you do touch it then you have to go to the shady spot for the rest of the game and you can't come out until dinnertime. Or nighttime, she says. You can't leave until nighttime, if you come out at all. She explains the rules feverishly, as if she were reading a sealed dispatch from heavenly authorities.
“Ella!”
She doesn't hear me, or doesn't want to. Molla's jam-covered braid sticks to my shirt.
“Ella, will you come here? I want to talk to you about something.”
She turns her back to me. The back of her neck glimmers under a red scarf.
“Eeva's calling you,” Teija says.
She keeps talking, raising her voice slightly. She can definitely hear me. She just doesn't want to pay any attention.
“Ella, come inside now.”
Teija looks at Ella hesitantly. Finally Ella lowers her head as she always does when she's sulking and walks to the door.
There's a noise on the stairs, they'll be upstairs in a few moments. I take the scarf from around Molla's mouth. A wound is revealed beneath it. The stuffing is poking out of her red half circle of smile as if she were coughing up dry foam. Her face has been cut with scissors.
My hands are trembling. Ella opens the door, stands on the threshold, looks at Molla, then at me. I pull the doll closer, I don't know if I'm shielding it or it's shielding me. Teija eyes me over Ella's shoulder. I see the shocked look on her face.
Ella looks like she's been struck. Then she shouts. “Molla's supposed to be in the cupboard!”
“You've cut Molla. You've taken scissors to something you like.”
She doesn't answer.
“Why did you cut Molla and get her all dirty?”
She flies into a rage. She turns red in a second, runs at me. She wrenches Molla out of my hands hard enough to tear her, and runs into the kitchen. I hurry after her. She puts the doll on the shelf, opens up the package of grits before I can stop her, and pours them over the doll.
“Now, Ella. Stop that, now.”
I take hold of her arm. I pull her away from the cupboard. She shoves me. She's surprisingly strong, I stumble backward. I hit my hip against the corner of the table. She takes two steps toward the pantry, grabs the coffee canister forcefully off the table, opens it, and pours the grounds over Molla. I can see an almost pure triumph in her eyes.
“Ella!”
I go and grab her by the hair, take hold of the tuft of hair on the top of her head like a bunch of chives growing in the ground and pull. She screeches. I realize then that I've made a mistake. She's already crying; my apologies don't do any good.
She hits me in the stomach with her fist. It's like a sharp little hammer, closing off my breath for a second. I gulp for air like a newborn. She stops yelling and stares at me. She's bewildered by what she's done, looking at me in fascination. Then she starts to cry. She goes to the cupboard and knocks everything she can get her hands on onto the floor. The jam jar shatters, a jar of preserves rolls under the table. Molla smiles on the shelf through it all, covered in jam and flour, the stuffing foam sticking out of her mouth.
I take Ella in my arms. She yells for help, keeps saying no. It doesn't reach just to the walls, it escapes through the window. I close her tight in my arms.
“Shhh,” I say. “Calm down, everything's all right. It's all right.”
She yells, struggles, finally roars. I can't reach her anymore. When I grabbed her by the hair, it pulled her into the dark.
Snot runs into her mouth, her yells make snot bubbles that pop like muffled emergency flares.
Teija stands in the doorway looking at us in horror. Then she turns, slamming the door as she goes, and runs down the stairs. I can't be concerned about that now. I lift Ella in my arms. She's still yelling. I stumble with her across the hall. She tenses her muscles and I almost drop her.
I put her in bed. She strikes at me. Red blotches come out in her cheeks like they do when she's sick. Her feet flail at my face; one kick lands painfully on my breast. I lie down beside her and hold her tightly.
“I'm here. Don't be afraid. Everything's all right.”
“I hate you.”
“I'm sure you don't hate me.”
“Yes, I do. I want my mom.”
“You'll get your mom. But right now, I'm here.”
“Go away. I want you to go away.”
“No. I'm not going anywhere right now.”
Her voice gets louder. She's already hoarse. I hold her, not slackening my grip.
“Shhh.”
Her yells gradually diminish; she's exhausted, as if she's run around the world. She takes a breath. Her tears come in waves for nearly another hour. She varies it, like a song, as if in a little while she'll wake up humming.
The clock ticks in the living room. People are returning to their homes. We lie on the bed holding onto each other. She's bathed in sweat. She trembles. I say
shhh
.
She'll remember this later. She'll remember this moment when she's twelve and sixteen, twenty-two and forty-two. Her memory will condense into a sound. She'll wake up at night gasping for breath and not know what's weighing on her.
Shhh
, she'll say to herself and think that it calms her because it reminds her of the sea and her honeymoon in Nice.
Gradually, she starts to breath evenly. Her chest rises feverishly, her heart fluttering wildly. She wraps her arms around me. She doesn't look at me, just lies there quietly.
“Don't go away,” she says finally.
I've never wanted to mean anything as much as I want to mean this now. “I won't. I'll stay right here.”
HE AND I
have fights all through December. I don't speak to him when I come to clean up the rooms, to peel potatoes, to caress the child into sleep in the evening. He's silent, too. The little girl, on the other hand, chatters nonstop and holds onto me. She wants to be near me, as if she's made me her dwelling. I go to take out the garbage and she puts her rubber boots on the wrong feet and runs after me. I give her rides on my back and she asks me to run around the yard like a horse. I gallop, our breath steaming. We go up the stairs, she on my back like a baby monkey. I put her down at the door, open the door, step inside. She asks me to hold her.
“I can't hold you, honey. You're such a big girl now.”
“I'm still pretty small,” she says, pouting.
Her arms go around my waist, she burrows under my coat.
The small, hot cycles of her breath are little gusts against my stomach, as if she wanted to find a route through my navel to somewhere at my core, to Eeva's center point, from which there is no exit.
He watches me. He's impatient and restless, like these weeks have been. We haven't sat together in the attic in a month. The last time we did, I stared at him unflinchingly, my hands on my hips. He was trying a new technique again, painting over his last experiment, taking photos that he intended to combine with oil paints.
Why not ink? Why give up on ink so cavalierly? He'd have dozens, hundreds of prints, if he'd thought to carve my outline in wood or linoleum. Oil paints are stuffy and old-fashioned. He should have been more open to new methods.
I had no sympathy for his indecisiveness. I didn't let him see any farther than my eyebrows. It infuriated him. Go on, you don't want to stay here, he said, and I went.
Now he sees me and the girl, the girl and me, at the front door, wrapped around each other, and he can't come a step closer. I see that he wants to come to us, to come to the place inside me, into me. I know that when he asks, maybe even tonight, I won't have the strength to say no.
But he doesn't say anything to me; our fight is a stubborn one this time. It spreads into the rooms, over the thresholds, stuffs itself into every corner like a dough that's out of control.
W
ITH THE CHANGE
of the year, I shyly present Kerttu with my plan: I intend to move.
All through the autumn I've been thinking that I need my own walls around me, my own stove and table, a threshold that I can just step over and say: mine.
We sit silent for a moment at the kitchen table. Liisankatu bends over us, the walls wait for the right words.
Finally Kerttu says, “Something's beginning. Something new.”
I smile. “And all we know is that it has to be good.”
ON THE FIRST
day of January, I find a little, lattice-windowed, twenty-square-meter flat on a courtyard on Pengerkatu. It's a converted pantry room, but it's all mine. I pay the first month's rent in cash before I bring the table into the house. I see my reflection in the windowâI look like a different woman. Strange, but still the kind of person I can learn to like.
This strange woman, who's not afraid to say her name, is going to get her degree. That's why I have to plug away at my thesis all month while snow surrounds the city from east and west, the freezing weather scraping and sculpting it.
On the sixth of February my thesis is ready, and Elsa wants to take me for coffee and pastries.
“I have a gift for you,” she says as soon as we're seated.
A barrette or a powder compact, I'm expecting something like that, but she hands me a check across the table.
“I think you ought to go to Paris. To test your language skills. It's my gift to you.”
The slip of paper is lying on the table in front of me. It's a large sumâthe flight there and back, lodging in a hotel with white tablecloths in the breakfast room that hold their creases.
“Thank you,” I say.
IN MARCH I
see the rambling streets of Montmartre again. I take the metro and climb to the surface without knowing what station I'm at. I get to know people in cafes and pose as a Parisian. My gestures become more confident. I test my opinions and smoke Gauloises, although it's not a habit I have. Evá smokes, this woman they know in Paris.
I spend two nights in the hotel that I've paid for with Elsa's check. On both nights I have the same dream about her.
In the dream we're taking a sauna. Elsa is in the sauna, which is full of steam when I open the door. There's a lot of steam and it's difficult to see. I wait for her to come down from the sauna bench. She hangs back, but finally comes down. She doesn't look at me, picks up the wash bucket and pours water into it from the hot water tank. She adds three ladles of terribly cold water from a large basin and sloshes the water over herself.
Then she looks at meânot angry, not disdainful, not embarrassed, not curious. Mostly just confirming: there you are. I see her bodyâit's beautiful and full. Her breasts are heavy, drops of water from the wet hair on either side of her head flow over her nipples, which are larger than mine. It's almost impossible to look at her. I look away, then at her, then away, then at her again.
You have beautiful breasts, I say.
Elsa's lips part, she takes a slight breath and is about to say something, but then she turns back toward the sauna stove. For a moment I think that she's going to stick her hand into the stove and purposely burn herself. But she pours more water into the bucket. Then she opens the door, turns once more, and steps outside.
Watch out that you don't scatter breadcrumbs on the floor.
I'm sorry, I say. Did I? I can sweep.
Good. That's what we pay you for, Elsa says.
I WAKE FROM
the dream shaking, sweaty, and decide that I can't sleep for another night on Elsa's check. I pack my things and sit in plazas all day, walk around the city.
A WAR FAR
away in the east has become intolerable in the minds of the Parisians, as it has for many other people. It's expressed in a surprising way, with bright shirts and chants that didn't interrupt the noise of traffic two years ago. The hats and tapered skirts have disappeared, replaced by short, short hems. The men have beardsâmy mother would say beards a swallow could nest in. In June, a band of English insects appear on an album cover in bright-colored coats surrounded by faded, black-and-white celebrities. No one knows it yet, but copies of their whiskers and round glasses and careless gestures and ideas imported from India will soon flash in the doors of the pubs and out again. The flow of fashion is as easy to catch as a disease or an opinion.
I don't like beards. I don't know what I think of the idea that we should all unite in the battle of love, like the people here are saying. I just want one person. One person who's completely mine. Is that too much to ask? Has that kind of love become old-fashioned?
ON MY SECOND
day in Paris I meet Marc at the museum. I'm looking at the Rembrandt painting, the woman I had pined for like an old friend two years before, when Marc comes along and says that we look alike, the woman in the picture and me.
It all happens easily, imperceptibly. This is the way loves begin, I think, as we walk along the river and drink wine in a little restaurant. Marc looks me in the eyeâhe has brown eyes, without a single shadow!âand smiles. He says, why not trust a stranger, since there's nothing to prove he's not worth the trouble? Life begins when you throw yourself into it.
I throw myself into it in Marc's apartment in the Marais. The whole thing would have been ugly (I'm sure that's what my mother would sayâwhat ugliness!) if it weren't so beautiful. This is called pleasure, Marc says. He has two dark, flat nipples like friendly eyes. As I make my way into him I stare at them like violets. He's tenderer than anyone, a little surprised when he finds the place inside me.
Afterward he makes me coffee and sandwiches in his tiny kitchen corner and brings them to the bed. We have a picnic as if we're sailing the open sea.
Je t'aime
,
he says, and I wonder if that can be at all true, because we've only known each other for one day. For him it is.
One day changes to another and then another. Marc offers me a life, like an item on a shelf at the store that you can take or leave.
“You could love me,” he says. “Couldn't you?”
“I would be someone else. I don't know what kind of love it would be.”
“Beautiful love.”
He says it as if it's some Sunday picnic he's preserving in his mind: light and easy. And who knows, maybe it is easy for someone like him. The kind of person who keeps his money in a coffee can on the kitchen shelf, whose door is always open to friends and strangers, who tapes a picture of a beautiful rebel to his wall without asking why or what it means.
The rebel dies in October, far from here. Marc cries that day, lights a candle on the floor in front of the poster. But there will be plenty of time for that.
AFTER FIVE DAYS
in Paris, I leave. Will I see you again? Marc asks, and I say
peut-être.
Maybe I'll come again and trust him and throw myself into it, like brave people do.
Because what he says is true: everyone has to find the courage to surrender to the unknown. The world is a stranger to each of us until we have the courage to reach out to it, and then it becomes a friend.
I MARVEL AT
how easy it is to forget Marc when I get home. I have his address, promised to keep in touch. I wrote my own address on his handâmaybe he washed it off, or maybe he put it on paper. I wadded his address up at the bottom of my bag where it lay wrinkled like a plum stoneâsome day a whole tree could grow from it, in other circumstances. I don't think about the address, but I don't throw it away, either. The spring light comes with me from Paris to Pengerkatu. The sun has climbed a step higher in just five days.
On the third day after I get back to Helsinki, the man is standing at my front door when I come home from the store. He's smoking and kicking stones like he'd just as soon not be. He looks at me. My hair is downâhe likes it but it makes him uneasy. Who let it down? At that moment he can't bear the thought of Paris breezes reaching to the roots of my hair, it's an offense from the city he once lived in.
“Who are you?” he asks, a little half-grin on his face, like he often has. “There was a girl named Eeva living here. She's from a place where they make potato-berry tarts at the edge of burnt clearings. You, with your hair and your cigarette and that look on your face, seem to be a person from a big city.”
I ought to know how to turn away. I shouldn't play this game anymore.
Time after time I distance myself, and so does he. We tear ourselves away from each other just so we can take those steps toward each other again. We're never thereâalways on the way toward or away from each other.
He leans against the wall of the building like he wouldn't mind much if his weight knocked it down. The hands in the pockets and the cigarette in the corner of his mouth are familiar. I've gone to the center of the world but I don't know how to forget what it feels like to love him.
“Weather's been . . .” he says.
“What?”
“. . . picking up.”
I shrug. “Hardly. I saw some clouds fall today. Flopped down like fat geldings just down the block. I wouldn't call that picking up.”
“Where? On this block?”
“I'm not telling you. You'll just go and try to get them into a picture. You won't leave them be.”
This silences him for a moment. He doesn't look offended. He's deliberating about whether to test this game of ours. He decides he will.
“I met a woman,” he says, a familiar look on his face.
He raises his left eyebrow. I don't know how he does that, raises just one of them like an eager inchworm. I know I should turn away. Another person, years away from me and people like me, would turn their back on him and refuse to play this game. But I can't be anything but myself, and I'll never get the chance to be different.
“What's she like?” I ask.
“Angry. She picked up some anger in a strange city. She's become unrecognizable.”
“That's what really galls a man. When he can't see a woman anymore.”
The pain returns to his face. Another person, years away from me and people like me, would harden her heart when she saw that pain. But I'm me, and I haven't learned those habits. I haven't learned how to tell someone no once I've said yes. Once I fall in love, I open myself to that person forever, give myself completely. My hands say no and squeeze into fists, but he opens me again, time after time.
“Can't he?” he asks.
“Maybe once in a while. Once in a while he can see her more clearly than anyone else can.”
I smile. He plucks my smile out of the air and makes a home in it.
“Nice. Was it nice?” he asks. “At the center of the world?”
“Absolutely. Like at the circus.”
“And it is a circus in that town. I saw your Kerttu, by the way. She was on her way to Stockholm. To cause trouble, I expect.”
“What about you? Did you come here to cause trouble?”
He looks around and drops his cigarette butt on the ground, rubs it out with his foot.
“Precisely for that reason.”
Marc's address is in my suitcase, the sky is high above us. Thunder has started somewhere, that world has already begun to hatch, the world that will teach people like me, little by little, year after year, to close doors, to keep our walls up.
But now it's the end of March
1967
and I have only concessions for this man that I love. I don't have a single no for him. I open the door and say, “Come in, then.”
WE TRAVEL TOWARD
each other all that spring. We have new boundaries for our affection, because we have the walls of my apartment on Pengerkatu now. He often comes to my house. He brings things with him, some object each timeâa disposable razor, a toothbrush, a sketchpad, a bundle of pencilsâso that by March it already looks like he's divided his life in two.
Mostly we lie in bed and make lazy excursions toward each other, calm and friendly because we're already so familiar to each other that we're not surprised by what we find. I should still be plugging away, getting ready for my final exams, and he should be working, but neither of us can get started on our own tasks.
Reality can wait while we weave dreams made from each other.
AT THE END
of April, a raw wind comes off the sea as I'm taking my last test in a cool lecture hall on Senate Square. Professor Falck evaluates my pronunciation, making me say whatever occurs to him, and I say it. Heaven seems to be creaking in its joints, but the church outside the window is still standing. I pronounce
aujourd'hui
incorrectly.
After the exam I walk across the square, the sky lists, the earth rises.
Even as reality creaks, Elsa believes in pastries and home-made lemon beer for May Day, served in the back room of the city's most venerable cafe. She insists on taking me to the cafe after the exam, although it's still another month before I'll have my diploma. I agree, without knowing why. My stockings feel tight and my stomach churns. Elsa orders us coffee and lemon
sima
and three kinds of sweets.
