True (32 page)

Sadness had made its porous dwelling inside me. I walked down the streets looking for the little girl, for the man. I never saw them.

I met him in February. We walked—I was on my lunch break and only had half an hour. We went to the park, Kaivopuisto. Then he went on his way and I walked back to the school through the bright day, watching my limbs through the thin air. They felt like they were floating, like they belonged to someone else.

BUT SUDDENLY IT'S
spring again and everything is humming. The television in the teachers' room throws images of growing restlessness against the walls, the newspapers start to talk about riots. I teach words to impatient young people from the south part of the city, write the words in French on the blackboard that I could be saying to the people in the streets right now. Why don't I just go? Why am I not already there? What am I waiting for?

Aujourd'hui. Aujourd'hui.

Written there with the screeching chalk, it looks like a prayer.

On the sixteenth of April I get a letter from Marc. He writes to me now and then. He has a lot of ideas, mostly having to do with essential research into the methods of love. In this letter he suggests that I come in the summer and stay with him in Paris.

Katariina would like to go now. Any kind of travel suits her. Of course we'll end up in Paris, she says. Everybody ends up in Paris! She talks about the city as if it were an unavoidable destination for us, the way marriage was for our mothers.

We decide to go by boat because Katariina can't afford to fly. Marc telegrams persistently and says he'll come to meet us. Maybe in Stockholm, maybe even in Finland. What does it matter? He has time. He's even got some money. I telegram back: See you in Stockholm.

Can I love him? Maybe I can. I'm a woman of today, more than I've ever been before. Sometimes a person wants a change so much that she stops being afraid altogether.

KATARIINA'S FRIEND LAYLAH
can put us up in Stockholm for a few nights. Laylah's brother Piet has an apartment in Amsterdam where we can stay as long as we like. We have a plan: Laylah—Stockholm, Piet—Amsterdam, then Paris.

I think about Kuhmo, the attic there, the bright nights between cool sheets. The cuckoo calling as I lay down my head.

Kuhmo is just an idea, an idea that I reject.

“Let's do it,” I say.

AT THE BEGINNING
of June I withdraw all the money from my bank account—my pay for March, April, and May. I've saved a thousand from my years working on Sammonkatu, and another thousand since then. I withdraw that, too. Maybe I have nothing else to show for my years as a nanny, maybe it's left me feeling hollow and forlorn, but at least I have a bank account I can close out. I pay the rent for the apartment on Pengerkatu and change the rest of the money to dollars. I have a thousand francs' worth.

When I get back home, I look at the pile of money. Pieces of paper worth thousands of marks.

I pack pants and bright-colored T-shirts. I leave my skirt at home—thick fabric clumsily sewn by my mother. It doesn't belong in a place where the nightingale sings in another language. It belongs in the closet, collecting dust.

After a moment's thought, I bring along the man's drawing, the one he did at the museum before it all started. I put it between the pages of my diary.

I pack my diary among my clothes. I've let the sadness flow black onto the paper for an entire year, written the little girl's laugh and the way the man curls his toes into its lines. I won't leave that here, I'll bring our story with me to dusty corners and cafes, spill soda or tea or Armagnac on its pages, and it won't matter at all! I'll bring my story to a great city and it will change, become mere ink marks on a page. I'll write other words after these, and little by little they'll become true.
Aujourd'hui, elle va être heureuse.

WHEN WE REACH
the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia, Laylah is there to meet us. She waves to us from a long way off and runs to greet us. She's darker than any person I've ever seen. When she laughs her teeth glow. She lives in a messy flat in Söder with Agneta and Maj-Lis. Mmkemba isn't home—he's from somewhere in Africa. Mmkemba is even blacker than Laylah and I can't stop looking at him.

We're waiting for Marc, he's supposed to meet us at the park at six. He arrives at five after six with a guitar. I had forgotten his eyes—not a trace of seriousness!

He has all the requisites of a dreamer: in addition to the guitar a bright-colored shirt and a vest that looks like it came from a sheep that was only just recently gamboling through the fields.

He smiles. I'd forgotten his smile, too. My doubts, if I had any, melt away right down to my feet.

“Evá,” he says.

Yes, I think. Yes, I'll let it come if it's coming.

THAT EVENING LAYLAH
makes some kind of risotto out of corn and grains with cinnamon and pepper and spices mixed in that makes my tongue feel grilled. We eat on the floor. I get drunk from the wine, a calm hovers over us, and Mmkemba's eyes look like white pearls.

Marc talks about expanding consciousness. I listen, although I'm suddenly at the edge of a meadow, the meadow of my childhood, the one where my sister Liisa and I gathered seven kinds of flowers to put under our pillows on Midsummer.

A drop of water, plump at the end of a blade of grass, the sun flashing beyond the spruce trees. That's where I am. I've actually never been anywhere else but at the edge of this meadow. It's Midsummer Eve and Liisa and I are guessing the names of boys before we seal our lips because the magic says that you have to be silent when you pick the flowers if you want to see your future husband in your dreams. We have the meadow. The drop of water. The sky that we run through, neither letting go of the other's hand.

Marc persuades me to unbutton my jeans and pull my shirt off over my head. Yes, I remember what it was like with him. His flat nipples like the eyes of violets. I want to throw myself into it, but I've traveled all the way across northern Europe without taking a bath once and first I'd like to take off his sheepskin vest.

“You know what? I want to wash you.”

“Why not?” he answers. “The last time I had a bath was in Berlin.”

I don't ask when that was, but I lead him into the bathroom. Laylah, Agneta, and Maj-Lis sit cross-legged on the living room floor smoking and talking in low voices, Katariina and Mmkemba are nowhere to be seen. Marc and I tiptoe across the living room.

I pour pine scent into the bathtub.

“All right.”

Marc steps into the bath fervently, like he's repenting of his sins. He shows me two scars that he got from a dog bite in the riots in May.

I scrub his back with a sponge.

“You could have kids. You'd be good with kids. You take care of me like you're someone's mother.”

“I'm not.”

I wash Marc until I find the boy inside. I dry him off. He looks like something just invented as I let him approach.

I look at his nipples again, eyes of violets on his chest, as I sail into and out of him.

Maybe love begins with tender feelings like these. It begins with what the womb knows and reaches out from there to the fingertips, the ends of your toes, to my lips that smile at his words.

“
Je t'aime
,” he says.

“We haven't seen each other in years.”

“But you're so beautiful.”

WE BOARD A
train two days later. I haven't yet started to disappear.

The landscape changes, turns to more open fields and farms. Sometimes it's like in the North, then it starts to look like Europe. We go from the train to a ship in Göteborg. Thomas and Paul join the group at the harbor. They offer us a drink. Thomas looks at Katariina's breasts and Katariina looks at Thomas as if she wants to stab him with a knife.

“Finland?” he says.

“In the lap of the Soviet Union,” Paul says.

“Or perhaps you're just in its embrace,” Thomas adds.

“Neither one,” Katariina says. “A friend. It's a question of friendship. There's a difference.”

“Whatever,” one of them says with a shrug. “What about all this fuss that's going on? Has it reached as far as your latitude yet? Are your students starting a rebellion, too?”

“Even as we speak,” Katariina says.

“What about products?” Paul asks. “Do you have to bring your own ballpoint pen when you go to Finland?”

“We've got ballpoint pens coming out of our ears,” Katariina says. “And there's no shortage of television or records or orange juice. Everything's just lovely.”

“And yet you left,” Thomas says. “You're looking for something elsewhere.”

He taps his forehead knowingly. Katariina snorts. She leans toward me as the men are ordering drinks.

“What idiots,” she says. “They don't know anything about anything.”

IT'S FULL SUMMER
when we arrive in Amsterdam. We sit next to canals, at kitchen tables, in cafes. Laylah's brother Piet lives in a messy apartment much like Laylah's commune in Söder. Multicolored walls and records everywhere, dirty dishes and mattresses on the floor. I don't leave my things around the house—you never know who might come through the door. I decide to carry everything with me—clothes, the diary that I've written
aujourd'hui
in ten times now, marking off each day, the drawing pressed between its pages. I put part of my money in it, too.

A small part, and a few hundred dollars under the mattress— if it disappears, so be it.

AT NIGHT I
make my way toward Marc and he opens me again and again and I start to trust that the whole world is possible for those who say
oui.

I say it many times in Marc's arms, in a dark room with Catherine Deneuve looking down from the wall. I saw a movie last year where she played a housewife who joins a bordello. Did she learn pleasure in the arms of a stranger among the velvet drapes? I don't know and I don't care because for this moment all I have is yes and a swirling upward spiral.

KATARIINA HAS HEARD
that some people are planning to meet at Spui Square. On the third day she disappears and goes her own way for a whole day.

Marc and I can't be bothered with Spui Square until the evening. Marc says true rebellion is enjoying your existence no matter what the circumstances. So we just stroll around and get lost in the red-light district. Marc says that when he was little his mother used to buy flowers and bread from the market on Saturdays. They lived in the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris and walked past the Moulin Rouge every Saturday morning cutting across a little street on their way to the market. His mother would hold his hand when they passed by the whores. The roses were red. The same red in the roses and on the girls' lips, he says. For a long time he thought that was how it should be, that those two reds had something in common that no one had told him about.

And they did, he says. It was the color of beauty, of pleasure. Really the color of love.

Marc and I weave our way between the canals, sit together for a moment in a cafe and then another. We eat roast beef and country bread and salad. We buy wine without asking the price. I pay because Marc doesn't really have any money right now. He watches me as I open my wallet looking for money for the waitress.

“You've become so independent. I wouldn't have recognized you. You act like you own the world.”

“I don't own it, I'm just getting to know it.”

Marc smiles and kisses me and says
je t'aime.
I already believe him, and answer him. He's playing the guitar and making up a song about me.

“You can compose it while I go to the women's room,” I say.

“Maybe I'll start singing and gather a crowd of admirers,” he says.

When I get back to the table, Marc has disappeared. The guitar is gone. There's nothing but the dirty dishes on the table. My bag is gone, too. Not just the money, the whole bag. The diary, the drawing of me—gone.

I ask the waitress if she saw Marc leave. Did he say he was going out? Did he say whether he was coming back? She shakes her head.

I find a note on a corner of the table.

Don't think badly of me. I needed the cash. It was beautiful while it lasted.

Love! Peace! M.

I run into the street. Nothing. I run around the corner. I find my bag. It's been ransacked; the money—dollars and francs—was in the diary, he saw me take it out from between the pages in Copenhagen, and in Cologne when I changed crowns to deutschmarks. The book isn't in the bag. Marc has taken it. Not just the money, the whole book, the drawing, the words, everything. Every one of my words has been taken.

I sit down in a slump. The air slumps inside me. The world runs down the storm drain.

I walk up and down bridges all day, asking passersby for money for coffee and a roll. I walk several kilometers to Piet's commune thinking about how to tell Katariina. When I get there I look at Catherine Deneuve's face and ask her advice. But what advice could she give? In the film I saw she was drowning herself in pleasure! I count my money. It's enough to last a little while. I don't have to tell Katariina before Paris.