True (29 page)

“Just a story?”

“Yes, just a story. Like a dream.”

I'm silent for a moment, not breathing. “Can I see her again? Just once? Just one more time?”

He doesn't answer right away. “I have to ask Elsa,” he says finally. “Elsa can decide.”

He gets up. I follow him. He goes to wash his face because he suddenly feels that he can't see properly. But he can see; he sees Elsa. Elsa is in his mind, more clearly delineated than ever.

While he's in the bathroom, I hide his shoes in the oven. I want him to be stuck to the floor. I get some syrup from the kitchen cupboard and pour it over his legs. He grabs the bottle out of my hand and throws it across the room. It hits the wall and spatters a senseless pattern there. I get some milk and pour that; he throws that, too. I get a bottle of red wine, pour it on his feet; the bottle shatters as it hits the wall. Too purple to look like blood; a festive splash like an exclamation mark in celebration of life. He thinks I've lost my senses. What art. Trivial, unpredictable.

We stand facing each other for a minute, five minutes, a whole hour. The sun sets, the night trails in through the window. The buildings crumble around us. I bite him on the collarbone and leave a broken line. He shakes me. The world falls away like a scrim, except that's not true: the trees are there in the yard, the sky is in its place. He pulls me quite close to him again. I don't intend to let him go. He'll have to let me go. I sink to the floor, cling to his legs. He drags me down the hallway. The trip to the door takes three years and four months, as long as this has lasted. It takes forty years because that's how long everything continues even after it's over. Decades later he'll be amazed that he's still on his way down this hallway.

I throw myself in front of the door. He opens the door and steps over me. He closes the door. It's so simple; he just closes the door behind him.

I lie on the floor, unable to get up. I listen to the silence flowing down the walls. I seep into the cracks in the floor.

21

S
HE WAS WALKING
toward him with brisk steps. Martti could see from far off that she was angry. She had said on the phone that she wanted to meet, preferably out. He had guessed why immediately, but he was still nervous when he saw her. The weather didn't match her anger. No clouds rolling across the sky like an omen. It was amazingly still and bright, as if the sun wanted to record every nuance of her angry face.

He asked her if she wanted to go to a cafe, maybe have a cinnamon roll, or why not some ice cream, although they'd been eating ice cream every day until they were sick of it. He could tell he was talking too much, but her expression was like a wall, and he finally quieted.

Her anger was freshly created. A girl who bore this kind of anger wasn't a girl anymore. It was an ancient anger, hidden away for centuries. Sometimes it would break out in dramas and demonstrations, in disguise. Now it seemed to have found an outlet in Anna's face. This wasn't a harmless threat like the ones he remembered from when she was little, insisting on putting on her own clothes to go outside, stamping her foot at the front door. This was something else.

“Guess what I'm beginning to think.”

For a moment he convinced himself that she was going to say something about the birds in the trees or the quality of the light, but he knew what was coming.

“I'm beginning to think that Eeva died because of you. You did something, or left something undone, and she died. If it weren't for you, she'd still be alive.”

Anna paused a moment before continuing. Where had she learned this rational, cold way of presenting a chain of deduction, linked together with blame to fill in the blank spots? The worst was still to come. He could see it in her face.

“And if that's the case,” she said, her words sifted through with cold anger, “if she would still be alive if not for you, we might as well say it outright. You killed her.”

She looked him right in the eye.

The words nearly knocked him down onto the park bench, but he stood fast and didn't look away. This could have been another kind of meeting, one of many—she with a Coca-Cola, he with a coffee. Making believe about strangers' fates, talking about the past. Light and harmless. But the anger made all their fantasies brittle to the point of meaninglessness.

“Don't try to deny it,” she said. “You can't get out of it so easily. Eeva's love was beautiful, as big as life, and you cheated her, used her up, crushed her. In other words you killed her, didn't you? Admit it.”

He wished they could talk about something else. Where were those passersby, the blossoming young lovers, Rebekka and Aleksi and the others they'd imagined? They had all evaporated into thin air, faint and insignificant. He decided not to flinch under her accusations. He couldn't change the subject now. The early summer day offered up an astounding brightness as if it wanted to be the subject of conversation, but the vastness of the sky had to be set aside. They had to use the heaviest of words.

“I loved her. That doesn't kill a person. It's not killing.”

Anna maintained her stony expression. “Sometimes it's the same thing. For men.”

She looked uncompromising, defiant. He sketched her expression in his mind, made a mental note of how a grudge is reflected off the one who bears it, takes on accusations stuck in other people's throats. Bitterness gives people's faces an astonished look, he thought. If you wanted to depict it you should open the eyes upward, not narrow them. A narrowed gaze to express anger is a cliché. Real anger is a kind of astonishment. It gives its bearer's cheek a cool red. If he were to try to paint it, he would give the red a milkiness, an opaque quality.

Anna gathered up her accusations.

“Your love was the kind of love that made her disappear. Don't you ever think you might bear some responsibility for that?”

“No one can take responsibility for another person's disintegration.”

Anna didn't hesitate in her answer. “Love is an immense responsibility toward another person. So don't try to deny that you killed her.”

It was a senseless argument. It shocked him. He saw the scene from the point of view of people passing by: an old man and a young woman harping on overwrought, larger-than-life matters. But all of it had been left unsaid before. Never had he spoken so openly about these things. Never had anyone demanded to know what he thought about it, and he hadn't ever really worked it out for himself, either. But now he was sure what he thought. And he was almost just as sure that it was exactly what Anna needed to know, maybe more than Eeva ever had.

“Eeva was free. She was free to do what she wanted, and she did.”

Anna refused to back down, continued to insist, as if she hadn't heard what he said. “You chained her, you locked her up, trapped her in your love, and she never got out.”

He heard himself laugh, though he knew at once that it sounded like mockery to her.

“You give me too much credit. As far as I know, I've never chained anyone up. I don't have the power, or the desire. I paint pictures, and I'm not exactly a wizard, even at that.”

He wanted to explain, come to some understanding, but what more could he say? Anna had adopted ideas and beliefs about Eeva and was testing their strength. But he still wanted to convince her that there was another way to think about it. Suddenly he felt that convincing her of this was the most important thing he would ever have the power to do.

“I don't believe that love can be a prison for anyone. Do you?”

Anna's stony expression had started to fracture. There was a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “I don't know.” She looked for a moment as if she might give in. But she found one more thing to say. “Eeva believed it could. That's all that matters.”

He had to continue: “I don't believe in a freedom so fragile that other people can put it in chains.”

Anna snorted. “People rot in jail all the time, all over the place.”

He took a step back, although he knew it communicated to her that he couldn't hold his own. He glanced at the road. Someone ran to the tram stop, leaping in one nimble stride from one stripe of the crosswalk to another, unaware that here under the oak trees they were having a serious discussion that verged on the ridiculous.

“Chains used in prisons have to be made a bit sturdier than that,” he said, speaking more slowly than he intended to.

Anna didn't hesitate. “That's easy for you to say. You're a man. You and people like you have controlled what really goes on for centuries. But that's got to change.”

Now he could answer in a firm tone: “If you base your view of women's liberation on the idea that their love for men has chained them then I don't think it's going to be a complete liberation at all.”

He didn't say right away what he thought. But finally he had to, he couldn't leave it unsaid. “Eeva was different. She belonged to a different time. Things have changed.” Did Anna even want to hear this? Who was he to give advice, a mere picture maker, keeping company with shadows. But he said it, because he wanted her to understand. “You're not Eeva. You have to remember that.”

Now she didn't look purely angry. Or maybe Martti was imagining that, believing what he wanted to believe. But what did he know? Maybe there was some other feeling arising in her, something he would never be able to grasp completely. Suddenly he realized—I'll never be able to imagine my granddaughter's reality, not in several lifetimes, no matter how hard I practice at it! This woman is such a stranger to me that everything in her is entirely hers!

He tried to achieve some weight in his words, annoyed at the huskiness in his voice: “Your love is only yours, you have to think about it that way. It's not your prison, and it isn't preventing you from being free. The fact that Eeva didn't know this made her a sad person. Maybe she was always a much sadder person than either of us. But no one can take love away from you, or take the world away. They both belong to you.”

He wasn't sure if Anna understood. She was still standing in front of him, ready to state her opposition. But no statement came out. She turned on her heel and walked away under oak branches buoyant with the green light of spring.

Martti stood where he was. In spite of Anna's eruption of anger he felt surprisingly calm. He lifted his gaze to the green leaves above him. The branches shushed a little. The sight was beloved to him. Peace returned to him as an idea strengthened in his mind.

Now everything was said. There was nothing to regret. Not with Eeva, or with Anna.

KERTTU PALOVAARA, ALIAS
Katariina Aavamaa, is very different than Anna imagined. Even her voice on the phone sounds wrong, as if she always holds back her answers, wraps them in rigid politeness.

It's Tuesday, the clock reads twelve noon. Katariina opens the door and invites Anna in. Anna is ready to be disappointed as soon as she walks in the door. Kerttu the comical, Kerttu the hilarious, living in real time. Kerttu the comical's days divided into calendar columns.

Katariina Aavamaa suggested they meet at lunchtime and made it clear that Anna should agree, because no other suggestions would be forthcoming.

Maybe Anna expected someone with a twinkle in her eye and a mouth ready to break into laughter, a door that's always open. Long hair, a skirt of Indian fabric, flowers in the window, grandchildren underfoot, an absentminded dog ambling from room to room.

Katariina Aavamaa is a meticulous woman. Her hair is frosted and cut along the line of her jaw. Her apartment is decorated in beige.

“You must be Anna,” she says.

She isn't going to offer her a Gauloise or turn up the music or throw her head back and sing Jefferson Airplane's “Somebody to Love.”

She has thick, glossy decorator's magazines on her glass coffee table—maybe she leafs through them while drinking a cup of tea. There's a Skanno light fixture on the ceiling. The chairs are covered in cashmere.

“Mineral water or regular?”

“Regular, thanks.”

It seems like Katariina Aavamaa doesn't want Anna here. A computer pours an electric gleam into the room. A paperback lies waiting on the sofa.

But still, she's a woman who fulfills her obligations and keeps her promises, so she urges Anna to sit down at the table.

They hold back, thinking about what to say. Katariina offers her some salad from the Stockmann deli. They eat, and Anna doesn't know how to begin. She doesn't dare ask anything about Eeva. On the phone she was able to say the name. Now Eeva's name is stuck in her throat like a fishbone.

Katariina stands up and sighs. She opens a cabinet and, to Anna's surprise, takes out a bottle of whiskey and gives her a questioning look. Anna shrugs and nods.

She takes two glasses out of the cabinet, fills them both with a resinous-looking liquid. If this were a movie, Katariina would be played by Jane Birkin. Jane Birkin would sigh unsteadily, close her eyes and let the air flow out of her lungs so it sounded like a muffled little roar.

Katariina doesn't close her eyes; she stands next to the table and swigs the drink down all at once. Anna has a quick thought: maybe the Kerttu she imagined wasn't completely off the mark. People strip away former selves and find new ways of being.