True (35 page)

Elsa whole and complete.

He looked at the water glass again. There was a faint trace of her lips on it, it was still half-full of water. If he made a move it would all slide into the past, slip into the imperfect tense.

He sits there for another moment holding it all together. Elsa's face, Eleonoor, Eeva, this day. He won't get up yet.

1968

K
UHMO, AUGUST. EVERYTHING'S
old, ripe, and heavy, like it used to be. I can't help my mother and father with the milking, but my mother ties Assi to a tether in the yard and asks me to brush her. The barn door is open, she shouts orders at the calf, throws a bucket of water down the walkway and starts scrubbing the floor. A familiar sound, a wet rasping. It's existed here for all time. I had just forgotten it for a while. Maybe I've never been anywhere else, maybe I just thought I was. The things that happened in a room high up in a building with a chestnut tree in the yard were someone else's life. It was a dream.

Assi says thank you in the way that cows do, by swinging her tail back and forth.

My mother comes out into the yard. She doesn't say that my strokes are too light, although she thinks it. She chats about all kinds of things, although she knows I won't answer.

She sighs, pats Assi's back. I see her as an old woman. Many decades will go by before she dies. She'll die between white sheets, when her skin has turned thin, but I don't know that.

She leans on her broom, her gaze trailing along the lumpy length of the cow's back, a little low-spirited but still good-natured, as if the broom is a diligently collected but cheap stamp collection whose triviality she has only just noticed. She sighs, slaps Assi's rear end.

“That's that, then. Let's go make some coffee. Your dad's probably done with his chores.”

I walk across the yard behind her. The damp grass is flattened under our feet, Riepu twitches on his chain, barking briskly. All this has been here the whole time, but I was gone, believing I was something else, and now it's turned into a museum where my mother and father wander, weary but dutiful attendants. It's a completely different country, where a dew drop condensed on the tip of a blade of grass and we ran to class when the bell rang with our braids slapping in rhythm against our backs, urging us out to take the measure of that world we heard on the radio, a world someplace far from here.

My father is sitting in front of the television, very close to the screen.

“Ahti Karjalainen's gone up to speak now.”

“Oh, what about?” my mother asks, but he doesn't answer.

My father looks nervous. The television is still on when we put the evening coffee on the table and cut thick slices of cardamom bread. My mother spreads it with her own butter and pours the coffee. The world is a rectangle flashing in the corner.

Someone with a band tied around her head is saying slogans like a student in an eagerly anticipated school play. We can't hear her, the words don't reach us here, where we sit with the oilcloth and the flowered curtains and the geraniums, because Riepu is barking in the yard, and my father opens the window and yells, “Shut up out there.”

My mother says, “Would you still like to take a sauna? You could put some tar and birch branches in the steam water, some marsh tea in the washtub. It might help get rid of your illness, if your voice came back.”

I nod.

“Do you want to go by yourself?”

I nod.

“But don't go swimming yet, or you might take a turn for the worse,” she says.

I shake my head: no.

25

M
OM LOOKED SMALL.

What had been in her, her personality or spirit, had taken up a large space, because now she looked like a doll. Eleonoora would have liked to take her in her arms again. She came closer, stroked her hand a little.

She looked at all the familiar features, the mole on her neck, the scar on her arm that she got long ago when she was reaching for a vase on the top cupboard shelf. Eleonoora remembered coming into the kitchen when she heard the crash and the tinkle of glass. Her mother had been standing there, dumbstruck, and laughed at first until she noticed the blood flowing. She'd needed ten stitches.

The scar was still there. A pale line from the wrist to the fold of the elbow.

Eleonoora had often followed the scar with her finger, taken her mother's arm onto her lap and stroked it, thinking how strong her mother was, and yet still fragile. She had realized that even her mother's skin was thin, just like her own, that her mother could easily be broken. And she had made her mother whole again with her caresses. She did it again now, drew her mother back to her with her finger. She was the same, but already a little different.

Slowly, barely touching her, Eleonoora ran her finger from her wrist to her elbow. I'll never do this again, she thought.

She had knit her mother a sweater.

Eleonoora watched Anna and Maria from the side and nodded. They could begin now. Eleonoora would have liked to wash her mother, to dry her feet, scrub her cuticles and spread lavender-scented lotion on her elbows. Her mother had washed her hundreds of times and dried her off with a rough towel. After she dried her off she would wrap her up in a quilt and call it her swuddle. It was their own word, the safest word she knew. Then she would carry Eleonoora across the yard, her skin damp from the sauna as she felt her mother's neck against her cheek. She stopped to listen to the nightingale. It was almost like in a dream, smelling the lavender on her mother's neck.

Or maybe that was Eeva. Maybe it was Eeva, after all.

Anna took the white smock in her arms and stepped closer with an uncertain look. They put the smock on her. For a moment she looked like a child at confirmation.

Next they put on her stockings. Eleonoora got out the sweater. Thin, pale blue angora, with silk ribbons to close it. They carefully lifted her head—it was as heavy as before. They put her arms in the sleeves. Eleonoora was still thinking about the scar. She would never see it again now.

There were still the wool socks to put on. Eleonoora had knit those, too, from the same yarn as the sweater. They were thin, but Mom would be all right. Anna put one on, Maria the other.

“Grandma has little feet,” Anna said.

“Yes, she does,” Eleonoora said. “She always has.”

It felt good to say it like that: she has. When they left here, went home and started to think about the flower arrangements and the cake for the memorial service, they would already be saying: she had. They would say, “Mom liked lemon cake,” they'd say, “she liked lilies, but I think she liked roses most of all.”

The three of them put the blanket over her, lifted her hands and crossed them. Her ring had been taken off. Had Dad taken it?

There was still a line from the ring pressed into her finger. Dad had seen the same thing. He had taken the ring off and seen the imprint of it.

“Do you want to be alone?” Maria asked.

“No,” Eleonoora said. “We can be here together.”

They stood quietly and let the time pass. Maria came near her and took her hand. Anna took the other hand.

“Bye, Grandma,” Anna said finally. Maria repeated it.

Eleonoora said it, too: “Bye, Mom.”

They waited another moment.

“Should we put the lid on now?” Anna asked.

“Yes.”

They put the lid on the coffin. It didn't feel bad anymore. Anna and Maria looked at their mother. She was quiet for a moment.

“We can go now,” she said finally. “Everything's done.”

There was a little wind as they stepped outside. Summer had come. Anna and Maria didn't dare to speak; Eleonoora didn't need to. Maria took her hand again.

Anna asked, “What now?”

“I'm going to go talk to Dad now,” Eleonoora said.

26

I
'M BOARDING THE
tram, riding it across town. I saw Grandma before the coffin was closed, saw her at peace, quiet on the white sheets. I cried a little.

Yesterday Mom didn't look me in the eye—not when Dad came to get us in the car and not when we were drinking tea in the garden after it was all over.

The evening darkened slowly. Pink, lavender, peach.

My dad hugged my mom, I watched them and envied the simplicity of it, the comfort they had always been to each other. Maria hugged her, too, wrapped her arms around her. Mom stroked her back distractedly.

I didn't even try to hug her. She didn't look at me all evening. It felt like I'd ruined everything. I'd ruined it by knowing, by imagining, by bringing her the message.

I spent the night at home, made my old bed in crisply folded sheets that Mom had put through the wringer.

Later that night, when I'd already gone to sleep and woken again, I lay awake, then crept down the stairs and saw her in a corner of the sofa and asked if she was crying and she finally looked at me. I was still in the doorway. I was afraid to come any closer.

“Are you crying about Grandma?”

She slowly turned toward me, and I saw that I couldn't reach her grief.

“I'm crying about my mother,” she said.

Then I went to her and hugged her. She didn't try to stop me. I comforted her the way children are comforted. I had the words and the strength for it now, and my arms went around her.

She said she was going to talk to Grandpa. I won't hear what they said, and I don't want to. The things that happen between parents and their children, the accusations and the apologies made perhaps clumsily—no one else can understand them.

My job is to be here, to ride the tram across town. This time I won't pluck anyone's story to take with me, I have other stories to tell.

Eeva stepped into the water, intending to swim, and she did swim, as if she'd always been part of the family of the fish. Grandma was put in a coffin. Mom talked with Grandpa.

I ride across town and get off the tram.

MATIAS IS HOME.
He's on his way to play tennis, his racket leaning against the door, his bag packed. He's been eating bread and reading the paper. I see the crumbs on the paper that's lying open on the kitchen table.

“Well?” he says.

He comes and gives me a hug. I let him come. He opens me like this, little by little. Over and over he opens me, even though I thought I had closed myself forever.

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL
day, my love—a beautiful day in life.

NOW I CAN
tell him what I've been keeping to myself all this time.

It all begins at the moment the man walks out the door. It all begins at the moment the child asks, Will we see each other again? and I say I'll see her tomorrow, even though I know it's not true. It all begins when I lie on the floor for eleven days.

I start in a whisper. Once I've started, the words come easily. I haven't told him this story. But I'm telling it now.