True (27 page)
Authors: Riikka Pulkkinen
Tags: #Cancer - Patients - Fiction., #Family secrets - Fiction.
Anna shakes off these imaginings, reminds herself of what Saara just said. She doesn't know anything about Liisa Arteva except what she can see, a small-handed, smiling woman.
“I got out a few photo albums,” Liisa says, sounding a little out of breath. “Here they are.”
She offers Anna some tea. Anna regards people who don't offer coffee to guests with some reservation.
She has a hard time thinking of a way to begin. She can't say Eeva's name. She takes refuge in the trees out in the yard, the bushes in the garden, as always.
“Gooseberry bushes.”
“I make jam from them every year,” Liisa says, seizing on the conversation opener with relief. “You wouldn't believe how good it is. Would you like a taste?”
Without waiting for an answer Liisa gets up and opens the cupboard, looking for the jam.
“The secret is cinnamon and vanilla. I've eaten it with cookies that my daughter sends me from France.”
She sighs the way people like her do. A little flat, but resigned: the world has always belonged to others.
No, Anna corrects herself. She doesn't know this about Liisa. She's putting her own ideas in, interpreting this woman's gestures according to her own wishes. Liisa Arteva isn't neurotic or docile, those are just Anna's own conclusions from this woman's interest in gardening and her jumpy gaze.
Liisa watches as Anna tastes the jam, waiting for an approving nod. Anna nods.
“It's even better with scones,” Liisa says. “First butter, then jam.”
IN CHILDHOOD PICTURES,
Eeva looks like a brown and long-legged country girl. Braids, a dress, eternal summer. Liisa is younger, it shows in the difference in height.
“We had cows for pets, and cats and dogs, too. We used to pet the calves, and even the chickens.”
Liisa laughs. “When she was a kid, Eeva always said that she wanted to stay in the country, live in the same place all her life. Then she started reading and dreaming of going to the university.”
“Did you see much of each other in the Helsinki years?”
“Eeva had her own friends and I had mine. Sometimes she invited me to parties or to dinner. We had a habit of going for walks together, often on Sundays.”
There's a picture from later years on the next page. Liisa smiles when she sees it. “I remember that one. She'd just fallen in love. I asked her about it, and she admitted it, but she wouldn't tell me who the man was.”
“Did you ever see them?”
“Of course. I thought of them as a family. I went to their house often, especially the third year. Sometimes I saw Eeva and the little girl at the park. We would sit on a bench, eat apples, that sort of thing. I think that was toward the endâthe little girl was older then, maybe six years old.”
Pictures of the last year, a school photo: Eeva sitting in the center smiling and holding a sign.
“The first time I saw this picture I thought she was happy.”
“Wasn't she? Happy?”
Liisa's smile doesn't grow stale. “Sometimes I think Eeva loved excessively, unreasonably. I even told her that. I didn't always understand her feelings. She said, âHow do you love reasonably? Why would you even want to? There's no such thing.' Maybe I thought that each person should live so that they won't lose themselves to another person, won't start living entirely other people's lives. It's something a person has to learn in order to get on in life. You can't put someone else before your own survival.”
“Did she want to learn to live like that?”
Liisa laughs. “Hardly. She said what was life for if not to lose yourself to other people and find yourself in other people. She said that after they had tried to be together and he had left. I told her that she should have been more careful, should find meaning in her life some other way.”
“They tried to be together?”
“Yes. They tried. And when it was all over, when nothing came of it, I said that she should try to learn to live differently, and she said, âWhat's the point of being a person then? We might as well live and die alone.'”
Anna lets herself think about Linda. In the beginning Linda ordered her around, and she obeyed because she didn't yet dare to say no. Later she learned to say no, to say no and love at the same time. Was it unreasonable love? Was it excessive?
Liisa picks crumbs up from her plate. Maybe she's thinking that Anna is disappointed in her story of Eeva.
Anna thinks about what Saara said. Maybe she was right, maybe I've stopped believing in love. What kind of person am I, then? A poor one.
Why can't Anna believe in all that with Matias? Why does she turn away again and again?
She can't bring herself to ask Liisa Arteva the most important question: how did it all end?
They say good-bye on the porch the way people who visit each other's lives for a moment do. They hug and say I'll see you, even though they both know that they will never meet again. Anna can almost see the relief in Liisa's eyes.
“Well?” Saara asks when she gets in the car.
“I tasted some gooseberry jam,” Anna says. “I got a phone number.”
Kerttu Palovaara is just a made-up name. Anna has the real Kerttu Palovaara's phone number in her pocket. The real Kerttu Palovaara's name is Katariina Aavamaa and she lives in Helsinki, in Eira. Anna could call her right now, but she doesn't know if she wants to. Maybe she wants to stick to her imagination.
“So,” Saara says. “Let's go home.”
1967
S
UMMER RIPENS SLOWLY.
The radio on the sauna porch is always on, pouring out the newest song by those insects from Britain over and over. It starts with the familiar strains of revolution and then changes to tidings of joy. As July quickens people start to believe in the song little by little, coming together in droves. Girls don't bother to put on undergarments anymore. Men's hair and beards are longer than before. Someone has invented the idea that there'll be no peace without love, and whispered it in someone's ear on a street corner. Everyone's consciousness expands, the heavens ascend to clear a path for new opinionsâthe earth doesn't quake but hearts beat faster.
We don't know about it.
We need the song's reassurance more than anything, because love has suddenly disappeared from our days, sunk into the cracks in the floor.
He becomes more irritable from one day to the next, complaining about the light and how it changes all the time.
“Sit still.”
“I am sitting still. Just tell me how I should be and I'll be it.”
“More to the left. Stop turning your head all the time.”
“I'm not turning my head. Maybe you are.”
“Quiet.”
There's no tenderness in him. So different from how he is at night, curled up inside me. The sky refuses to stay put and I'm like a shadow.
“Your face,” he says. “It's narrower today.”
“Same old face.”
“Are you sure you had breakfast? How am I supposed to get hold of you if you're changing all the time? Tell me that.”
There's a knife in his gaze.
“This light refuses to settle down. Goddamn light.”
“Maybe you just haven't found the right composition. It'll all start to go smoothly once you've found the right composition.”
“I'm starting to think I'll never find it,” he says gloomily.
I get up and go to look at the piece. It's unfinished, but it's not bad.
“What's wrong with it?”
“I don't know,” he says, not looking me in the eye, turning away. “I just can't get hold of it.”
“I think it looks quite good.”
“You're biased. Besides, you're not a professional. You don't acquire artistic vision by wandering around museums.”
Now I'm angry. “Well, what exactly are you trying to do? What are you driving at?”
He runs his hands through his hair the way he often does, sits down, lights a cigarette, takes a drag, looks at the lake, and sighs.
“I'd like there to be something old-fashioned about it. But something else, too. Something else. Some kind of angle.”
He spreads his arms helplessly, looks at the painting.
“This is just trivial somehow. Mediocre.”
He's already got the eyesâthey're recognizably mine. My gaze pierces through, as in those strange portraits from the
1600
s that I've seen in museums. I'm floating, like a head blossoming out of nothing.
“The eyes are good,” I say. “The expression is good.”
“Not good enough.”
SOME DAYS ARE
different. On some days we forget his work, take the boat out and have a picnic. We have veal in waxed paper, a whole bottle of fresh milk, three kinds of cake, one that I've made and two from the neighbor lady. We have strawberry juice and chocolate melting in its foil wrapper. The little girl begs me for it the whole time; she's allowed to have one piece. It won't come out of its package, she licks it and smiles with smeared lips.
There's a picture of this. In the picture she looks triumphant, with the sun behind her as if it will never set. Later she remembers this boating trip, although she remembers nothing else from the whole summer. She builds memories from the words of others, but she tells her own daughter about this trip, as if it's a precious thingâthe nicest part was Mom and Dad and I went out in the boat to the island. Mom usually rowed, but Dad did sometimes. The sun was a friendly fire in the sky, it felt like the world had always been nothing but light and water and melted Fazer chocolate in a blue wrapper and I could lick it off the foil to my heart's content.
“Why don't we stay on the island forever?” I whisper in his ear in the evening, after we've swum all day, made coffee on the campfire, roasted three fat fish that I caught with the rod, found little stones at the water's edge and made a magic circle with them on the beach.
“Yes, let's,” he says, and kisses me. “Let's imagine that there's no other world than this.”
“We can live here forever and ever,” the little girl says.
And I say, “Forever and ever.”
No one is thinking about the painting on the sauna porch; it's trivial. No one is thinking about Elsa, not even the girl falling asleep in the tent with her hand in mine.
I carefully ease my hand away once she starts to breathe evenly.
The man is someone slightly different. There are two people inside him. The cruel, ruthless one who gives commands has disappeared without a trace now.
He gently moves the blanket, patiently, as if he's removing layers worn out by the world, getting them out of the way.
He lowers himself, kisses my breasts. This is ours alone, and we can't tell anyone about it.
We become each other and remain the same and I love his sigh when I open to him and invite him in and he comes.
A
T THE END
of June he decides to try a new medium. He prints ten silkscreens of me, working in town, in the living room of a friend who has the needed materials. Clumsy attemptsâeven he can see that. The prototype screams out like an exclamation point. His friend says it to him straight, using the worst possible word: cheap. He drives back to Tammilehto in a rage and quells his anger by stopping at the lakeshore on the way. The water is like a mirror, he lets his thoughts drift into communion with it. He eats some ice cream, skips a few smooth stones across the water. He was good at it even as a childâthe stone bouncing on the surface of the lake five times, six, leaving a soothing trace of spreading circles.
As he's looking at those circles he gets another idea. He's going to give up the silkscreens, the printingâit was ridiculous of him to even try! Why not continue what he already has? He'll go back to oil painting, but he'll try a new technique. He'll paint over his previous works, layer after layer. That's what he decides to do.
Everything continues as beforeâI sit in front of him, unmoving, day after day, and I hover on the canvas, ethereal, incomplete.
ON THE EVENING
when everything ends, the little girl refuses to go to sleep. She runs to the sauna. She has woken up alone in the dark and is sleepy and a little confused.
“What are you doing here?” he asks her. He takes her in his arms.
“You're drawing Eeva,” she says.
“That's right,” he says. “Except I'm painting.”
“It doesn't look like Eeva yet,” she says emphatically.
“But it will,” he says. “If I work at it enough.”
“Then Eeva will be in the picture completely,” she says. “Then she won't have to sit anymore. She can play.”
“That's right,” he says.
“Can I draw a moon?” she asks.
“You can draw on another piece of paper,” he says, and hands her a piece. She announces that she's going to draw my nose.
“Then you can put it on your painting, Daddy. Right, Daddy? This nose? I can draw it better than you.”
“Yes, you sure can,” he says absentmindedly, no longer hearing her because his gaze has become fixed on me.
She continues drawing for just a moment, then comes over to me. She tries to get in my lap, but he tells her not to.
“Ella, come away from there.”
She doesn't obey him, and he commands her to move with one gesture. “Go,” he says, pointing at the house.
She stamps her foot, grabs his palette in one quick motion, and smears paint on the threshold.
He's severe: “Will you go inside and be good for a little while? Go play quietly. Or do I have to lead you there by the hand?”
“No, I can go by myself.”
I'm gentle: “I'll come with you, honey.”
He doesn't want me to leave. She makes the decision for me: “No. I'll go by myself.”
She goes, her head bowed, a little deflated, dangling Molla from her left hand. Molla's feet plow through the grass and the hem of the little girl's summer dress trails dejectedly through the clover.
The two of us are left alone in the sauna. Nearly an hour goes by before he can get the right angle again. He gets annoyed. His shoulders hunch a little, his lips remain expressionless. He mixes colors, thins them. He adds too much thinner and curses.
“Well,” I say. “Here we go again.”
“So what?”
He wants me to resist. I don't take up the argument. I leave it to one side, like a cardboard box full of worn-out junk. It sits between us. I look at the lake.
“Look this way,” he says.
“What if I don't? What if I look where I want to look? What if I decide I want to go for a swim?”
He exhales wearily. “I've seen it all, I know all your tricks. It's just an act now, just for show.”
I sigh. It doesn't please him.
“Now you're pouting.”
“No, I'm not.”
“Yes, you are. I can see you.”
“You're seeing wrong.”
“I'm seeing what I'm seeing.”
“You think you're seeing what you're seeing. In reality you don't see anything. Reality is something else. You don't have any concept of it.”
I use the strongest words I can think of. I want to make him feel crushed. Suddenly tenderness is just a trinket. This is a competition. I want to smash him to pieces.
“You've never known me, not really. You wouldn't recognize me if I passed you on the street.”
He throws his tools in the corner. He strides the few steps to where I am and pushes me against the wall. I can feel a bruise forming on my arm where his hand is squeezing tightly around it. It's there for three days, but it's the least of my worriesâjust a mark from a time when I didn't have worries. But I don't know this yet.
He covers my mouth with his left hand so that I can't utter a word. The wall presses another bruise into my back.
“It's your fault, this stagnation. You're never in the place where you pretend you are. You're always different, never completely here.”
He lets go of me. I run. I knock over the easel as I go and notice that he hasn't made any progressâI'm still floating on the canvas like some strange apparition.
I run to the spruce grove and up the ridge. If I stopped now I would smell smoke, but I don't stop.
I go up the path all the way to the top of the ridge, where the boulders are. I don't look behind me. I want to pretend I'm a forest, to hide under the moss. But I stand there, trembling. My arm itches, I can still feel the shadow of his hand against my lips like a gag.
I have to wait a long time before I see him coming up the path. He's full of regret. He stands next to the boulders.
“I'm sorry.”
I turn away. I won't give in that easily.
“Love.”
“What? What is it? I'm bruised. You gave me bruises. Is that your idea of love? I have a different idea of it, I can tell you.”
“I'm sorry,” he says again. “I didn't mean it. Forgive me.”
“What if I don't?”
“Love is impossible for me to depict. I don't know how to describe it, and everything gets lost when I try, everything essential about you.”
I melt a little. I look at him, still not saying anything, delaying my answer. He looks helpless. We stand silent for a minute, two minutes.
The flames are already rising below. We don't see them because the wind is blowing from south to north, carrying the smoke beyond the spruce trees. The forest is crackling. I start to relent.
“Come here,” I say finally.
He comes. He takes me in his arms.
We stand pressed against each other. Time passes, centuries twine into us. These fights are as old as the forest. A woman takes a man in her arms and pities him, with everything she has. They press against each other, they don't measure time according to the rules of this world.
I see the flames when I turn my head.
“Look,” I say. It's all I have time to say.
For a brief moment I think, almost with exhilaration, that it's surprising how like a drawing the flames are. Then there's a sound, a crackling hum rising with each second, and I realize what's actually happening.
He acts faster than I do. He runs down the hill. Then I run. Through the curtain of smoke the spruce trees in back of the house shimmer like a mirage.
He's in the yard in a moment, I stumble on a tree root and fall behind. He reaches the door before I doâit's locked. She's locked the door, either by accident or on purpose.
I could go through the wall. I could tear away the boards and the insulation, rip through the wallpaper. I run and look for the spare key under the garden table. He pushes me aside, picks up a garden chair and breaks the window with it. Before I have time to yell he's torn the broken glass from the frame and disappeared inside.
ELSA IS BENDING
to reach the lowest drawer, searching for a file. She's a little tired. She's fantasizing about soaking her feet in bath salts this evening. She's fantasizing about calling her husband and daughter on the phone. She bends down to grab a folder and sees a hairpin on the floor, a bit of dust next to it, and feels a little annoyed at the mess. And at just that moment, she's called to the phone.
She stands up, turns, and sees the secretary in the doorway. She thinks how the secretary is one of those people who conceal their worry in controlled gestures, who dress in jeans and wear their hair down in their free time, one of those people who just pretend to be secretaries during the dayâthe kind she was starting to see on the street. She has time to think this before she realizes that the news the secretary is bringing is extremely bad.
Elsa still doesn't know what she knows, but she knows she knows it.
She's shaking all the way home. The trip takes an exasperatingly long timeâthe taxi, the wait at the airport. She sits in a hall that is alternately abandoned and humming with people, drinks bitter coffee, holds the strap of her purse tight in her sweaty hand and looks at the clock, which has moved forward just one interminable minute, two minutes, finally an hour, two, three.
She's been here this whole time, in this stupid waiting room. She's been here for years. The plane finally takes off into the air, and she squeezes the armrests and bargains with God, although she's not a religious person at all. If her daughter's all right, she won't travel anymore. If her daughter's all right, if she can breathe and run and dream like other children, she promises she'll leave this all behind and be content with teaching beginning courses in a stuffy lecture hall. Heaven is quiet; no one hears her prayer. She leans toward the stewardess and asks, How much longer? Forty minutes, the stewardess says. Too long, Elsa thinks.
When she arrives she rushes to get a taxi.
The thought of her daughter sticks in her throat, she can't get the instructions to the driver out of her mouth in her panic. For a moment she thinks that that's what will keep her daughter alive. She's protecting her life by being silent.
She pays the driver hurriedly and the coins scatter around her like indulgences she's anxious to pay. She doesn't bother to pick them up.
She sees her own reflection in the glass door as she pulls on the door handle. She rushes down the hallway, runs into a nurse. She asks about Ella and the nurse directs her to the room.
When she opens the door, she thinks at first that it's the wrong family, that she's come into the wrong room, because the picture is complete and she doesn't belong in it. A woman is sitting on the edge of her daughter's bed. The little girl's fatherâthe woman's husband, Elsa thinksâputs his hand on the woman's shoulder. The woman reaches up a little. kisses him. He takes her in his arms. The kiss is not a particularly long one, but it's unmistakably the kind of kiss exchanged between people who belong to each other completely.
All of this flashes through Elsa's mind in a brief moment, half a second. Then the little girl looks at her and shouts: Mommy!
Elsa realizes that she hasn't come in the wrong door. She realizes what she already knew.
