Where Have All the Young Girls Gone

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Don’t misunderstand me. The folks at the police academy are a damn fine bunch. We wouldn’t have anything to do in this country if everyone acted like them. My place is here, but yours isn’t.”

  “Why the hell are you preaching to me? I’m leaving tomorrow, and I don’t have any intention of coming back. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “So, you aren’t going to accept the police academy director’s invitation? He wanted you to stay on as a visiting lecturer.”

  Vala was drinking the whiskey like it was water, but nothing in his outward appearance indicated he was a drunk. The tan skin of his face didn’t have any broken blood vessels, his nose wasn’t red, and there was no sign of bloating in his muscular body from the booze. And someone with a drinking problem wouldn’t have been able to do his job anyway. Booze was probably just Vala’s way of dealing with setbacks.

  “I might have considered it when we left the academy. But not anymore.”

  “So, you understand that you should be afraid?”

  “Hey, soldier boy, don’t you think we learn that in the police?”

  That was exactly what we practiced: healthy fear and the ability to function regardless. I was drinking my whiskey too fast as well, even though the taste of it was like the stink of Ulrike as she burned. The strange words of a poem Uzuri had recited in Pashto during the opening ceremonies weighed on my mind. She’d written it herself. The poem said that home was like a poppy flower, the seeds of which the birds spread far and wide, and that nanawati, forgiveness, would fall upon all those who atoned for their evil deeds before the law. There was a direct translation of the poem in English in my bag. Uzuri had written it by hand with a ballpoint pen, and even her handwriting was like a little work of art. What did Vala think of nanawati?

  “You must know, Kallio, the best way to drive away the presence of death?” Vala leaned toward me and touched my shoulder. “Sex makes a person feel alive better than booze or drugs.”

  It took a second for me to realize what Vala was talking about, and I could hardly believe my ears. I managed to sputter that I was married, though Vala already must have known.

  “Faithfully married?”

  I didn’t like Vala’s smile and drew back farther from the edge of the bed.

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, that’s an excellent thing, if not terribly common. Guess how many of my subordinates’ wives have discovered they can’t stand the waiting and the constant threat of death and so go off with a more stable guy who will actually be around? I made my own sons swear to never get into this job, but the younger one is in cadet school. The older one is going to be a commercial pilot.”

  I felt like saying that even if I was going to have an affair, I wouldn’t do it with him, but I didn’t have time before he got another call. The cell phone network was unreliable, so the soldiers had two-way radios. I realized that the roadside bomb attack would soon be in the headlines around the Western world and that I should notify my family that I was uninjured. The hotel had a fax machine, but no one in my family owned one anymore. There was one at Antti’s work, but he wouldn’t get the message until morning. Sometimes e-mails went without a hitch, but other times they simply vanished.

  Vala’s conversation in English was brief, his part of it mostly negative responses. While he was talking, I emptied my whiskey glass. I wanted to sleep, even if it meant taking a sleeping pill. But more than anything, I wanted Vala out of my room. When he ended the call, I thanked him for the drink and asked him to leave. He got up slowly and looked me in the eyes in a way that made me want to turn my head away.

  “My room is number forty-six. It’s on this same floor. Don’t hesitate to knock if anything happens. Maybe we’ll see each other at breakfast. Numminen will take you to the airport. The French are leaving on the same plane to Frankfurt.” Vala shook my hand.

  To my relief, we didn’t run into each other at breakfast.

  There was an empty seat next to me on the flight to Frankfurt, which had been reserved for Ulrike. I didn’t dare drink any alcohol. I had to keep myself together, to forget . . . I didn’t want to remember anything from the past twenty-four hours, including Lauri Vala.

  We hadn’t exchanged a single word since that night in Afghanistan, but now he wanted to meet, supposedly for some reason he couldn’t reveal over e-mail. Just what I needed right now.

  Vala left my mind when Nelli Vesterinen returned my call.

  “Finally, someone is taking Ayan’s disappearance seriously! We’ve been amazed that the police haven’t done anything. Ayan’s girlfriends have had enough bad experiences with the police in their own countries, and now the Finnish police are letting them down too. Ayan never would have left Finland voluntarily. She had a job and friends here.”

  I asked Nelli who Ayan’s friends were.

  “Some people from her work. She was working part-time at the Tapiola Stockmann, in the grocery department. She came to the Girls Club straight from there all the time. I never saw anyone with her but her older brother, who came to get her sometimes. But Miina, Ayan’s best friend, is sure to know more. She was the one who got worried when Ayan stopped showing up. She went to Ayan’s house, and they told her that no one knew where Ayan was. Maybe they really don’t.”

  “What is this Miina’s last name, and how can I reach her?”

  “Miina Saraneva. She lives close, a few buildings away from the Girls Club, on Otsolahti Street. She’s in her first year at the technical college—math, I think. She should be here tonight, same as every Tuesday. She sits and waits for Ayan to come back. You can find her here.”

  3

  In the end, I went to the Girls Club alone, because I didn’t want to draw needless attention by bringing in my male colleagues. I’d been to the entrance before, when dropping off and picking up Iida, but I’d never gone into the club itself.

  Otsolahti Street was in the old part of Tapiola, an area built up in the 1950s, and in some places the snow-covered trees extended as high as the roofs. The property on the ground floor of the three-story building had originally been a grocery store. Sylvia Sandelin owned several units in the building and lived in a town house at the end of the street near the shore of a small bay. The local paper had done a full-page story when the Girls Club was founded, and I’d found more articles about Sandelin through Google. She was the rare woman who showed up in both women’s magazines and the business pages.

  I’d stopped off at home to eat before coming over to the club. Taneli was at an extra skating practice, so I’d pick him up on the way home. In a fit of belt-tightening, the Espoo Police Department had done away with personal official vehicles, except for the very highest levels of management, so I was using my own car, and I planned to stop by the supermarket while I was out. It was hard to find a parking spot at the Girls Club because of the piled-up snowbanks, but I finally got my vehicle squeezed in along the curb.

  I recognized Nelli Vesterinen from Iida’s description: she was a small, athletic-looking woman, with heavy red-and-green harlequin dreadlocks and several facial piercings. She smiled broadly at me and extended her right hand, the wrist of which was circled by Rasta-colored tribal tattoos. The handshake was firm enough that I struggled to match her grip.

  “Nelli Vesterinen. Nice to meet you. Miina hasn’t shown up yet. How about we go back into the employees’ office? At least it has a door we can close.”

  The largest space at the Girls Club was a room of about six hundred square feet. It had beanbag chairs, a television and DVD player, and a hand loom with a half-finished rag rug on it. Next to the loom was a carpentry bench shielded by a screen. In a side room was the music space where Iida played with her friends. There was a drum set in there, along with a couple of amplifiers and a 1980s vintage keyboard. The kitchen smelled of cardamom, not from pulla sweet rolls but from someone cooking basmati rice. At the end of the hall, behind the kitchen, was a closet of a room, just big enough to fit a table and a couple of chairs.
The room didn’t have any windows, but the wall sported a picture of a wintry mountain vista that could have been Afghanistan.

  “Would you like some green tea?”

  “Why not.”

  Nelli opened a thermos and poured tea into two cups. The green liquid tasted a little bitter but still beat the police station’s bags of Lipton.

  “What can you tell me about Ayan Ali Jussuf? How long had she been coming to the Girls Club?”

  “Since the beginning. A whole gaggle of Somali and Sudanese girls, who obviously had nothing to do, joined in, and Ayan was one of them. She wanted to be called Ayan Ali, without the Jussuf. Jussuf was her grandfather, and she didn’t want his name, but that was the name she had in the population register. She wanted to change it.”

  “Why?”

  “As I said, a Muslim’s family name is her grandfather’s name, and her middle name is her father’s name. She wanted a name that wouldn’t define her through any of her relatives. Ayan admired the Finnish system, where a child can be given her mother’s surname, and a woman doesn’t have to change her name when she gets married.”

  “So, was Ayan rebelling against Muslim culture?”

  “Maybe in thought but not in deed. Though we don’t know what’s happened to her now. As far as I know, she didn’t have a boyfriend, but Miina can tell you more. We don’t go prying into the girls’ private lives here; we just help the ones who need it. Ayan asked me about the possibility of changing her name, and I told her that, according to Finnish law, any adult can do that.”

  “Did she also want to leave her religion?”

  “She never talked about that, at least not with me.”

  Someone knocked on the door, and Nelli invited whoever it was to come in. The newcomer was a slight, willowy girl with short-cropped hair that was so blond it was almost white. She was dressed all in white too, and her coveralls reminded me of the protective suits used in technical crime scene investigations or the jumpsuits worn by astronauts. But these overalls were made out of cotton and didn’t have any patches on them, just small, bright-red embroidery on the collar and cuffs.

  “This is Miina Saraneva. Detective Kallio from the Espoo police would like to chat with you about Ayan, Miina.”

  The girl’s pale face flushed, and an angry heat flashed in her eyes.

  “The police! Finally! Ayan has been missing for over two weeks. We were supposed to meet on Valentine’s Day—there was a Valentine’s Day party here—but she never showed up and didn’t even send a text. I couldn’t get ahold of her. The next Tuesday I went to her apartment, but her parents said they didn’t know where she was. They didn’t let me inside, so I don’t know if they were lying. I asked Nelli to file a missing person report right after that.”

  “The police have already interviewed Ayan’s family, but with the same results. Her family doesn’t know anything. Did Ayan have a boyfriend?”

  “No.” Miina’s answer was sure and quick. “She didn’t want any man ordering her around.”

  There was another knock at the door, and the Indian-looking girl who had been working in the kitchen asked for Nelli. Nelli left the room, closing the door behind her. Miina looked at the landscape painting instead of me as she continued.

  “Ayan didn’t usually talk about these things; she was shy . . . she was from a world so different than mine. But once she said that she didn’t want a husband or children, because it would be too painful. I guess she’d been circumcised in a refugee camp in Somalia when she was nine. She called it ‘the operation.’ Once she was with me when I was buying tampons. She was really embarrassed and barely had the courage to ask me why I used them. ‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ she said. I explained how they work, and she was totally confused. I could see she wanted to ask more but didn’t have the nerve, and I didn’t want to force it. I doubt her mother even told her about periods. Ayan got all her information from the school nurse and magazines.”

  “Did Ayan fight with her family?”

  “No. She didn’t like everything that happened in her family, but she never said anything to them about it.”

  “There was a claim online that Ayan’s brothers killed her. Who might have started a rumor like that?”

  Miina’s face went white as snow, and her voice began to shake.

  “Really? Who said that?”

  “It didn’t say.”

  Miina closed her eyes. Her head rocked back and forth slowly. “Which brother?”

  I explained that I hadn’t seen the thread. She told me that Ayan had two older brothers, Gutaale and Abdullah. Both lived with their parents and worked at a cleaning company.

  Miina had never visited Ayan’s home when the men of the family were there, and the only family member she’d met was the mother. Ayan had not been willing to go over to Miina’s house, even though she lived right next to the Girls Club. The girls had met at various coffee shops in Tapiola when one or the other happened to have some extra money.

  “Ayan was proud of her job, even though it was just part-time. She would have liked to go to high school and then study nutrition. She talked about that sometimes, and she was really excited when she heard about the Finnish student financial aid and housing allowance systems. Earlier this year she went to the Adult Education Center to ask about taking night classes. Of course, I encouraged her to do it.”

  Tears had started to run down Miina’s face, but the color of her cheeks didn’t change. Her nose gradually started to redden. She took a paper napkin from the stack on the table and wiped her face with it. If I hadn’t known Miina’s real age, I would have let her travel on a child’s ticket.

  “Where do you think Ayan is?”

  “Somewhere she’ll never come back from! Maybe dead, maybe in Sudan with her grandparents, maybe sent off somewhere else where she can’t get in touch with me. She would have told me if she was going to run away on her own. We were best friends. At least that’s what she said. Sometimes she called me Adey—it means ‘light skinned.’ Sometimes we compared the skin on our faces and wrists. Such different colors, from such different worlds, but so alike . . .” Now Miina broke down completely. She buried her face in the napkin.

  Music had started to come through the door, first the thumping of a bass guitar and then the sound of drums and cymbals. The rhythm was six-eight time, which the bass couldn’t quite keep up with. Then the drums shifted to five-four, and a girl’s voice yelled, “You can count to five, can’t you, you effing blond?” The guitar stopped at that, but the drums stubbornly continued, now adding a bass drum, which played the first and fourth beats of the rhythm. My foot started to tap along. The music took me back to my teenage years of band practice in a dingy basement, where I was usually the only girl. In Arpikylä, where I grew up, the only club for girls had been at the local church, and that wasn’t my scene, even though they did do scouting.

  I let Miina cry in peace. When she finally continued, her voice was hopeful.

  “If Ayan is alive, she’ll get in touch. There isn’t any reason to think she’s dead, is there? You haven’t found anything to make you think that, have you?” Miina was like a dog whose owner had left her waiting at the door of a store. Her face had the same resigned look, mixed with just a hint of hope.

  “We’re going to do our best to figure this out, but not all cases get solved quickly.” I offered Miina my business card, which had come from the printers just that morning. I asked her to contact me immediately if she heard from Ayan or discovered anything related to her disappearance.

  “Will the police tell me things in return? I don’t want to have to read online that my best friend has been found dead.”

  “In theory our duty is to inform just the family.”

  “They’re only her family on paper! Ayan was forced to live with them. They didn’t know anything about her thoughts and dreams. I’m the only one she really talked to. They weren’t interested in what she had to say as long as she did what she was told! I told her that in Finland an
adult doesn’t have to explain herself to anyone, that women can live together and without men, that she could be a scientist or anything if she wanted to . . . Do you understand? Many of us are closer to our friends than our families. That’s what Ayan loved about Finland. She didn’t have to worry the whole time about her relatives and what they thought.”

  I promised Miina that she would hear immediately if we received more information about Ayan’s whereabouts. When we left the office and went back into the recreation room, Miina flopped down in an armchair and stared at the wall. Nelli came in through the outside door and asked if I still wanted to interview her. She was followed by a tall woman who looked about thirty, whose hair was plaited in two thick, blond braids.

  “Heini Korhonen, Girls Club executive director,” she said by way of introduction. “You must be the detective. Finally. Three of our girls have disappeared without a trace, and no one has done anything about it. It’s like the police are afraid to get involved in anything having to do with immigrants.”

  “Three? Were Sara Amir and Aziza Abdi Hasan coming to the Girls Club too?”

  “Not as often as Ayan, but once or twice anyway. You didn’t know they were all connected? We try to help girls integrate and become independent, but not all immigrant cultures see that as a good thing.” Heini Korhonen had clearly said this before, and she seemed used to speaking in public.

  I would need to leave soon to pick up Taneli. He didn’t have a cell phone, so I couldn’t warn him I’d be late. Antti didn’t think kids under ten should have phones. Taneli was counting down the days to his birthday in April when he would finally get the coveted gadget.

  “So, you know Sara and Aziza?” I asked Heini. “Who are their friends here?”

  “Aziza only came to the club once, and Sara twice, first with girls from her class at school for a tour and then once for a cooking class. But I remember them, just like I remember all the girls. They’re important to me. It’s good the police have finally woken up. I’ve been thinking about tipping off a journalist I know. I imagine the public would be interested in something like this, though I’m sure the uproar would be greater if the missing girls were native Finns.”