by Philip Teir
Finally, Eva decided to speak. She thought she might as well contribute to the discussion.
‘At first I didn’t really get it. I mean, it’s the same thing that you’ve done the last few times, Ben. Now you’ve just come up with a whole new title instead of the usual ones that have to do with sex. But then I started thinking, maybe it’s an allegory. Maybe you see Afghanistan as an image for your love life.’
Ben started fidgeting. His painting, which was a metre and a half square, was displayed on an easel at the front of the room. He made no attempt to explain anything. Silence descended over the class once again. A few people were drinking wine. Finally, Malik clapped his hands.
‘Okay, it doesn’t look as if we’re going to get any further today. We’ll continue on Monday. But that was an interesting theory, Eva,’ he said as he went to the back of the room and opened the door. Everyone stood up, a few patted Ben on the shoulder, and the room emptied.
Half an hour later, Eva was waiting for Malik outside the university district, at a café where they often met.
She was thinking about how she longed for clear, sharp insights – the kind that you couldn’t make up, the kind that you discovered, as if they had always been there, just waiting for you to find them.
When they were in the car, heading towards town, Malik began talking about the work of the other students as he lit a cigarette.
‘The problem with Ben is that he’s so emotionally blocked that all he can do is sit in front of a computer and calculate formulas, telling himself that it’s art. And then – as if to give the whole thing some sort of framework – he goes and calls the work “Afghanistan” so that he’ll seem deeper than he really is. Where’s the fucking risk-taking?’
Eva nodded. Malik went on, flicking the ash from his cigarette out of the car window. ‘To be perfectly honest, sometimes I just want to shoot myself in the head. Like when the boys start bullshitting about Bourdieu and those damned cultural assets, and they turn to look at the girls’ – here, Malik turned towards Eva – ‘and their faces are all lit up. And I think to myself what a fucking waste. Boys, there are thousands of other people all around the world right now talking about Bourdieu and thinking that they’re the only ones …’
When Malik got going like this, nothing could stop him. He loved the sound of his own voice. And Eva refused to admit it, but she actually enjoyed hearing Malik criticise the other students. Whenever he mocked Laurie, he did it with the greatest intensity – and Eva suspected this was because he was pissed off that she treated him with such indifference.
‘All her work is extremely narcissistic. Have you ever thought about that? It’s like she can only see her own point of view, and she always thinks that she’s kicking below the belt, when in reality her work has to do with inflating her own ego. But of course it doesn’t matter – she’ll do fine. People love that kind of shit. Come here,’ said Malik, and Eva leaned towards him.
When they got to Eva’s flat, Malik wanted to get high. He claimed to have an inexhaustible supply of Ritalin pills because his doctor had diagnosed him as having ADHD. He’d tried several times to offer some to Eva, but she had a mental block about taking drugs in the middle of the day. She’d tried cocaine at parties, and the first time she’d felt so hyper that she almost chewed her cheeks to shreds. But after a while she started liking the effect it had on her – she felt sharp and smart, and she enjoyed talking to people, without getting into those sorts of embarrassing conversations that often happened if she was drunk.
Malik crushed up a pill and snorted it off the cover of one of Eva’s art books, an expensive volume about the Pre-Raphaelites that she’d bought at the National Gallery. Soon afterwards, he wanted to have sex with her. And since he was high, he’d want to spend a long time at it – the drugs seemed to increase his sexual appetite. She didn’t mind. Eva thought there was something in the physical act that seemed more comprehensible and pure than the art she’d been trying to create during the past two months. When he entered her from behind, she couldn’t help feeling a certain ecstatic pride that she’d made it this far – none of her friends back home in Finland had ever moved further away than to Stockholm.
six
WHEN KATRIINA FIRST MET MAX she was already twenty-two – which seemed terribly grown-up at the time – and he was laying the foundation for his career at the department. In the afternoons, Max used to sit in student cafés, gathering a small audience around him to listen to his ideas and argue. The group included Veronica Pimenoff, Risto Repo, JP Roos, Anssi Sinnemäki, Kari Rydman and Matti Wuori. Katriina thought Max talked too much and was hopelessly self-absorbed, but he was cute, and she thought it might be possible to do something about that annoying side of his personality. Apparently he’d never met a girl who dared to challenge him.
He said as much later on, when they became a couple, and then many times after they were married. ‘You’re so cruel,’ he would say, with pride in his voice. ‘I’ve never met anyone who could put me in my place as expertly as you can. Don’t stop.’
It took a long time before she met his parents. They lived in Österbotten, and it was clear to Katriina that Max was nervous about introducing her to his father, in particular. The fact that Max was a Finland–Swede was not something to which she’d given much thought, but for him it was apparently a big deal that her first language was Finnish and not Swedish. Max’s father, Vidar, was active in local charity, as well as local politics, and Max didn’t think he’d easily accept having a Finnish-speaking daughter-in-law. When Katriina finally did meet them, she realised at once why Max had been so concerned. Ebba and Vidar were a typical post-war couple: he was a domineering alcoholic and she was his stoically submissive wife.
‘Can’t you see how badly your father treats your mother?’ Katriina asked Max after their first visit. She had witnessed how much Vidar drank and how he then verbally terrorised Ebba, accusing her of one thing after another. But Max got upset and refused to discuss the matter. Until the end of his life Vidar never fully accepted Katriina, but he was always kind to his grandchildren. When they visited, he would sit down in his chair to watch TV, hunching his portly body over another seven per cent can of beer, but he sometimes allowed one of his granddaughters to sit on his lap. Katriina always regarded Max’s father as possessed of a paradoxical mixture of petty bourgeois Finland–Swedish elitism and a provincially rooted inferiority complex. In his eyes, Katriina was not just a Finn – she was a snobbish Finn from the city.
Katriina had spent the whole autumn ploughing disconsolately through an endless series of meetings. Every day she took the bus to work, waiting at the stop on Runebergsgatan at eight o’clock in the raw cold after the rain had frozen overnight, making the roads treacherous.
Weeks had passed, months even, during which Katriina had felt not a scrap of inspiration about her recruitment job at Helsinki health service. It was strange how easy it was to go to work each morning and pretend that everything was just like it used to be. Katriina handled exactly the same duties as she had for the past five years, except that now she did them mechanically, without being fully present, as if she were a robot imitating an energetic mid-level manager at the height of her career.
At first she’d expected someone to notice – maybe one of her colleagues. Heikki, for instance, whose office was right next door. He’d never made it a secret that he coveted Katriina’s job. Or maybe Petra, who always required a huge amount of encouragement to carry out even the simplest of tasks. Katriina pictured one of them coming over to her one day and figuratively backing her into a corner.
‘Katriina, we’ve noticed that you haven’t been yourself lately. We miss your leadership and inspiration.’ ‘Katriina, how are you doing? Now be honest.’ Something along those lines.
But as it turned out, no one asked her any questions, no one noticed that she was mentally absent. So Katriina just continued on as before, and strangely enough everything seemed fine, brilliant, in fact, as she pret
ended to have it all under control. She acted as if she was giving her full attention to her job, even making some innovative changes.
The result of this situation was that she ended up despising her colleagues because they weren’t smart enough to realise what a wretched mid-level manager she was. They had basically been duped and blinded by the image of who she used to be, an image that at one time, long ago, might have had some truth to it. Consequently, she was both unhappy with her job and ashamed that she felt this way. Wasn’t it irresponsible of her to give less than a hundred per cent?
With such thoughts on her mind, Katriina went to the Tuesday meeting, which had been set up to discuss establishing increased ‘interaction’ with the patients, or ‘clients’, as certain people currently chose to call them. The word ‘patient’ was apparently thought to place an ‘unnecessary focus on disease’ and hence carried an ‘unnecessary negative charge’. (To quote Wivan.)
Wivan had been Katriina’s closest colleague for as long as she could remember. Now approaching sixty, Wivan loved words like ‘exciting’ and ‘challenging’. She was a boss who viewed change as a goal in itself. She had recently experienced a major crisis in her life, which had caused her to plant a garden and attend meetings of the Swedish book club ‘Life Energy’. Everyone at work was aware of this because Wivan’s office was filled with books bearing titles such as Losing Weight Mindfully and Discover and Protect Yourself Against Energy Thieves.
At this stage Katriina could have given an entire lecture on so-called energy thieves, since it was a subject that had exerted an enormous impact on Wivan. She talked about this phenomenon with every new person she met. Katriina had noticed that, oddly enough, the term ‘energy thief’ was never directed at herself. It was always aimed at someone else in the room.
Enhanced interaction with the patients – or clients – was supposed to occur primarily via redesigned websites, which would allow individuals to book doctors’ appointments online, and thereby shorten the phone queues. The sites would also make it possible for individuals to ask questions about various symptoms, to provide responses from health professionals and even at certain times make ‘chat sessions’ available with the family doctor.
During the previous autumn, HNS web strategies, which operated under the name HNS 2.0, had been the hot topic of conversation. Since Finland wanted to be a forerunner when it came to IT, there was plenty of seed money available to promote innovations for anyone seeking funding for that purpose. At the moment, the staff were discussing the possibility of setting up a quiz on the hospital home page. ‘It’s hugely popular right now. Everybody’s doing it,’ said Heikki who, being a male – although not an IT expert, as far as Katriina knew – had an opinion about everything.
‘What do you think, Katriina?’ asked Paula, who actually represented the doctors’ group, but also participated in the planning group that discussed web strategies.
‘Sure, I think it sounds fine,’ replied Katriina.
Everyone nodded, glancing at one another. Someone made a note of the idea. It was afternoon, and Katriina’s energy level had sunk to somewhere between that of a coma patient and a dead fish.
‘Or what about a “Question of the Day”?’ Heikki suggested.
‘What’s all of this going to cost?’ asked Katriina. She turned to look at one of the people who worked in the IT department. She could never remember the man’s name – was it Markku something? – but he seemed to take a disproportionate amount of pride in his work, as if he thought computer engineers belonged to a superhuman race. He’d been on the job for little more than two months, but he was already highly regarded by the whole staff, since he was the only one who knew how to work the projector in the meeting room.
‘Well, it shouldn’t be a major problem. But we need a new cms, because the one we have now can’t handle a quiz.’
Katriina looked at her colleagues. She had no intention of giving Markku the satisfaction of telling everyone what ‘cms’ meant, but Paula didn’t hesitate to ask. And that prompted him to clasp his hands as he looked around the room and proceeded to speak to them as if they were all children. He had a slightly Asperger’s style of explaining things, as if he were forced to translate his own mental processes into a language that normal people could understand.
‘If you want the simple definition, you could call it a web publishing tool. And we need to update the one we have.’
‘Is that difficult?’ asked Katriina.
‘Depends on how you look at it. We have to migrate the old home page to the new platform. That can take a while. But if we’re talking about redoing the entire website – which is what I’m hearing – then it’s going to be a slightly bigger operation.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Is this something that requires a call for bids from contractors?’
‘That’s up to you. There are free versions available. So that’s one possibility we could look into. But I can’t guarantee we’d get the tech support we need. If anything goes haywire, it could be hard to fix.’
‘That doesn’t sound good,’ said Katriina.
Heikki raised his hand.
‘This is just a quiz we’re talking about here. It’s not rocket science. Do we really have to revamp the whole system?’
Everyone looked at Markku.
‘I’m afraid so,’ he said, looking almost elated.
Katriina could tell that this meeting was going to go on for ever if she didn’t do something. She could already feel the strength seeping out of her body. Dark clouds were piling up in the front of her brain, dousing any spark of life until the only thing remaining was a bottomless black pit marked with the sign WEB STRATEGY. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was almost three.
‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,’ she said, turning to Markku with a nod. ‘I’d like you to draw up a rough estimate of the required man-hours and how much it’s going to cost. I’ll need to have your report before our next meeting, and then we’ll take it from there. How’s that?’
She looked at the others, who all nodded. She glanced again at her watch and concluded that the meeting was officially over. Chairs scraped the floor as everyone gathered up their papers. Markku switched off the projector and then everybody left.
Katriina smoked her first cigarette of the day on her way home from work. Normally she allowed herself three, but lately the daily number had risen to as many as eight. She was thinking that the only way to avoid completely falling apart was by plodding onward, as if nothing was wrong, by moving forward and focussing on the next goal. The fact that it was already pitch dark by four in the afternoon didn’t help matters.
When she got home she phoned Helen.
‘Hi, Mum.’
Katriina could hear the grandkids in the background.
‘I’m just calling to chat. Actually, it’s about the party for your father’s sixtieth birthday. He says he doesn’t want to celebrate the occasion, but I was thinking that … I mean, we need to come up with something. Not a big party, but maybe a few of his colleagues …’
Katriina always liked the idea of a really big celebration. The people, the sounds, all the commotion.
If there was one thing she was good at, it was making other people feel at ease, preferably against a backdrop of the sort of polished bourgeois conviviality that, to her great joy, she realised she had thoroughly mastered. It was a role for which she had subconsciously prepared all her life. Memorising all the lines.
Actually, she had often thought that she would have made an excellent set designer for the theatre. Life was about giving people the right props and the right setting in which to act.
Katriina could hear her daughter speaking to one of the kids – it must be Lukas – and in her mind she pictured how her daughters, and maybe even the grandchildren, would behave at Max’s party.
‘You know what would be fun?’ she now said.
‘What?’
‘What if you and Eva – you can say no if this doe
sn’t appeal to you – but what if the two of you sang something?’
Helen didn’t reply, but Katriina knew that she’d come through. She always did.
‘Or maybe Amanda would like to play something?’
‘I’m sure she would. We’ll see. But Mum, if Dad says that he doesn’t want to celebrate his birthday, we can’t really force him to have a party.’
A slight reproach was evident in her voice, an insinuating but unspoken rebuke: ‘Why do you always have to make things so complicated?’ It was an accusation that the whole family often directed at her. But Katriina was the only one who understood why she wanted to do this. It had to do with her special expertise; this party was one of the instances when she knew she’d be able to shine. She could just picture how she’d make the party a little bigger, a little more lavish – and above all more festive – than the ones that Tuula had hosted lately.
‘Oh, that’s what everyone says about birthdays. They pretend they don’t want anyone to go to any trouble, but in reality they’d be disappointed if nothing was arranged,’ said Katriina.
She knew this was true about most people but maybe not about Max. His need to socialise had diminished more and more the older he got, and she suspected that he was feeling a bit anxious about turning sixty. Max would never admit it, but the fact was that he admired youth tremendously, and in an entirely different way to Katriina. If anything, his Peter Pan complex seemed to get stronger as the years passed.
‘Have you heard anything from Eva?’ asked Helen.
‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to her about the party yet, but I suppose I’ll have to offer to pay for her trip home.’
‘Is Grandma coming?’
Katriina hadn’t given any thought to inviting Max’s mother. She assumed it would be too hard for Max’s sister to drive her over alone. But she also knew that it was their turn to pick up her mother-in-law in Kristinestad and bring her home for a visit. Ebba hadn’t been to Helsinki in two years. Instead, Max had gone to Österbotten whenever he had time.