The Winter War

by Philip Teir

  When he was finished, he hung the cords over the back of a chair and took out a tobacco pouch and papers. Then he sat down and rolled himself a cigarette, focussing all his attention on what he was doing.

  When Eva studied Malik more closely, she saw that he’d completely changed his style of clothing. He was wearing high boots and a green military jacket. He was also unshaven. She wondered whether Malik had tried to seduce Russ. She didn’t really want to think about that, but she couldn’t help herself, and she pictured Malik’s big arms wrapped around Russ’s slender body.

  Eva turned to Malik and asked, ‘So, have you moved out here too?’

  She couldn’t really imagine Malik living here – not this man who showered four times a day, who changed his clothes twice daily, who was dependent on full-length mirrors, who started each morning with a double espresso, who claimed that he ‘hated nature’ and thought that ‘a traffic jam is more beautiful than a fucking symphony orchestra’. Would he really choose to live in a tent?

  ‘There’s something big happening here, Eva. I don’t know what it is yet, but it’s big, and it’s fucking fantastic to be living in a time when we get to experience it.’

  He seemed manic, high on something.

  ‘There’s so much adrenaline here, you can almost touch it.’ He waved his fist in the air as if to show how he was touching the adrenaline.

  ‘Do you sleep here?’ asked Eva.

  He shrugged. ‘I still have to correct tests and shit like that. But I come over here every day. It’s electrifying, all these bloody people – anarchists, communists, hackers, environmental freaks. You should stay out here. It might all end tomorrow, but right now it’s fucking magical,’ Malik said, and then he left the tent as abruptly as he’d entered.

  Russ raised his eyebrows. ‘I think he’s high.’

  Eva was relieved to hear him say that.

  ‘Have you eaten yet?’ she asked.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Almost three.’

  Russ seemed to consider whether he was hungry or not, as if he had to remind himself about his own body and its needs. He tossed his cigarette on the ground and stamped it out. Then he lit another one.

  ‘I suppose I could eat something.’

  As they came out of the tent, Eva looked up at St Paul’s. The sky had clouded over again, and the dome seemed to disappear in the haze. She was freezing.

  Russ noticed her looking at the cathedral.

  ‘Have you ever been inside?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘If you’re not in a hurry, let’s go in,’ he said. ‘I need to use the toilet, and I prefer the one in there.’

  On the revolving mahogany door Eva noticed a Bible quote printed in big white letters: ‘This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.’

  It was warmer inside the cathedral, which was pervaded by a great sense of calm, as if they found themselves somewhere other than the centre of London in January, as if they had travelled back in time. A few tourists stood in the small corridor that led to the desk where visitors paid an entrance fee.

  Russ nodded to the cashier, and she let them slip past.

  ‘I’m just going to make a quick stop at the loo. You can go in and look around. Take as much time as you like.’

  The cathedral was enormous and so beautiful that it took her breath away. Eva walked further in and sat down in a pew. She studied the details of the dome, the dark brown space glittering with gold. She looked at all the paintings on the ceiling and the intricate patterns of the windows. She didn’t notice when Russ joined her.

  ‘Pretty impressive, isn’t it?’ he asked, as he hugged himself to warm up his hands.

  ‘How long has Malik been coming here?’ she asked.

  ‘A fortnight. He’s driving me crazy. But he has money, and if there’s one thing we need, it’s financial support. It’s expensive to keep the whole place running, especially now that people keep turning up who are hungry and have nowhere else to go. It’s become something of a refuge.’

  ‘We haven’t seen him at college in two weeks.’

  ‘I think Malik just wants to be in the thick of things. I think he sees this as a way to collect some kind of cultural capital or good karma. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t think we’re going to be here much longer. Things have got tougher since the holidays. More vandalism. A few nights ago somebody cut up a couple of tents.’

  ‘Do you think they’re going to give up?’

  ‘It’s not just that. The thing is that this anti-hierarchical model isn’t viable. Everyone’s been trying to set up a sort of horizontal democracy, with no one acting as the leader or making all the decisions, but it just doesn’t work. People still let themselves get manipulated away from their original goals. And somebody has to be the face of the Occupiers, somebody has to talk to the media and guide the movement forward. You can’t have everyone going off in different directions, because nothing gets done. I mean, it’s a little like a family. Not everyone gets to decide, and it’s not always possible to come to a consensus. It doesn’t work. Someone has to make the decisions.’

  ‘So you’re thinking of coming back to college?’

  ‘No, definitely not. If there’s one thing I’ve realised here, it’s that I need to be working. Actually, I think that everybody needs to feel that they’re doing something that has meaning. The work itself is what’s important. Doing something and having a reason to get up in the morning. The whole Occupy movement is a kind of workplace for people who can’t stand ordinary jobs. So it’s ironic that we get criticised for being lazy and not working, when in reality we’re working really hard. The problem is that so many other people don’t see it as work. But we’re trying to stir up questions and bring issues to the forefront – and that can only be useful to society. The people here are simply trying to show that there’s another way of living, based on other things than constant growth and unregulated capitalism. I’ve met people here who have spent most of their lives living in tents,’ said Russ.

  For a moment neither of them spoke. Sitting in the cathedral reminded Eva of Österbotten. She thought that if she ever got married, she would want a church ceremony. It was ridiculous to be thinking of that now, but she couldn’t help it.

  ‘Did you say something about getting food?’ asked Russ.

  Eva treated Russ to lunch in a nearby café, and afterwards they walked back to St Paul’s. That afternoon a meeting called the ‘General Assembly’ was being held. Everyone used various hand gestures to indicate what they wanted to say, so as to prevent all the participants from talking at once. If someone rolled his hands forward, it meant that he wanted the discussion to move on; if someone waved one hand in the air, it meant that he agreed with whoever was speaking. The participants included all age groups. The youngest attendees Eva saw must have been seventeen: two girls with cloth bags and close-cropped hair who held hands or rolled cigarettes as they listened.

  One of the items on the agenda had to do with stolen valuables. Someone had nicked a portable stereo. One woman repeated that everybody had to take responsibility for their own things. Then they discussed how they were getting electricity. Someone suggested they ought to get rid of the generator since it would be more environmentally friendly to rely exclusively on solar panels. The subject caused a lively discussion, but ultimately they all agreed that it was more important for people to be able to use their computers so they could tweet and blog directly from the Occupier site. It was also decided that it was ‘a lesser of two evils’ to pay for the electricity out of the general, shared account rather than force people to go to nearby capitalistic businesses in order to use their laptops.

  That evening a vicar and a professor were scheduled to give speeches, but Eva was too cold and tired to stay. She stood with Russ outside his tent, trying not to shiver as she talked to him.

  ‘Russ, if you ever have time, I’d like to see you again. Maybe someplace else. I’ve thought
a lot about you ever since you came to visit us in Finland.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you too. But I decided not to call because you didn’t seem interested before. I just don’t have the energy to compete with someone else. If nothing ever happens between us, I’ll survive.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m sorry.’

  He scratched his moustache.

  ‘I was thinking of asking you something,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Could I come over to your place and take a shower? If your flatmate wouldn’t mind, that is.’

  twenty-six

  THE LIGHTS SWITCHED OFF IN the plane. The passengers had been served food and wine and then coffee. A fat man sitting next to Katriina had already started snoring loudly as she tried to find a more comfortable position in her seat.

  She’d settled all the practical arrangements. She’d had a meeting with a local organisation that had a lot of experience in sending young women abroad to be trained as nurses. And Katriina now had some sense of the big picture regarding the logistics required if HNS was going to start importing nurses and staff on a large scale.

  Katriina opened the Helsingin Sanomat. Reading the newspaper after a long trip was a way of getting back into her daily routines, a way of coming back home. There was nothing better than sitting on a plane with a long flight ahead of her and just letting the articles sink in, reading every single paragraph. After finishing with Helsingin Sanomat, she continued on to Iltalehti.

  Every Friday one page of the evening paper was allocated to a guest columnist, and now a photo of Laura Lampela caught Katriina’s eye. There was something about Laura’s face in the picture that revealed an alarming self-confidence, something about the way she was standing with her hand on her hip. The expression and pose of someone who knew that her interpretation of the world was the prevailing view, someone who knew that she represented a generation that would soon take over, of which she was clearly the voice.

  Her column had been given the headline ‘Chance Meetings’, and it had to do with her reaction to the film Brief Encounter. From the very beginning Katriina thought the whole thing sounded familiar, for instance when Laura described the film’s subtle innocence, the fact that the heroine, who had fallen in love with another man, could not leave her husband and children because the story was set in the late 1930s in Great Britain, ‘long before the sexual revolution’. Laura wrote that morals had changed – ‘today we would laugh at the repressed emotions of the main characters’ – and then she described how the film had nevertheless become a classic because of Celia Johnson’s superb acting, her ‘desperate looks and unceasingly controlled narration’. The point of the article was that Laura was making a connection with the present era. Today the film offered the audience a ‘titillating sense of pleasure’ with its innocent and virtuous story because our moral compass regarding relationships was so very different. ‘At a time when more than half of all marriages end in divorce, an adulterous affair is as original as a litre of milk. But the dream of a great passion is as prevalent as ever.’

  For about two minutes Katriina sat there in the dimly lit aircraft with a feeling that she’d been duped, not just as a wife but also as a reader. She had an urge to get up and ask her fellow passengers how anyone could behave so shamelessly – but everyone was sitting quietly in their seats, as if nothing had happened, as if Laura’s article had not been a direct invasion of Katriina’s personal life. She glanced at the passenger to her left, across the aisle. The woman, who was close to Katriina’s age, gave her a smile, as if she were somehow involved in the whole thing, as if everybody in the world were actually involved, and they all knew about it except for Katriina.

  What time was it? She looked at her watch and saw that she still had four hours before landing. She read the column again, fixating on certain phrases – they were the exact same things that Max had said when they watched the film together, and there was also something about the entire argument that was so typical of Max. Maybe he’d thought that Katriina wasn’t really listening, but she was; she’d heard that part about the desperate looks and the dream of a great passion. She’d heard Max praise the screenplay by Noël Coward, and she’d heard Max point out that the film could be viewed as an archetype of the repressed emotions of the British middle class. It couldn’t be coincidence. There were too many things that sounded familiar.

  Katriina closed her eyes.

  She felt the plane bounce up and down, a slight turbulence. She asked for a little bottle of red wine. After she’d finished it, she asked for another.

  There were certain moments that Katriina would remember for the rest of her life. Brief moments, specific incidents – like when the girls lay on her stomach for the very first time, newborn and utterly vulnerable; or when she watched Max defend his doctoral dissertation; or when she was fourteen and won the silver medal in the regional competitions in diving at the swimming hall.

  The same was true of those last four hours on the plane from Manila, but instead of feeling like a moment, they seemed to last an eternity, as if she were in some sort of limbo state, a world in which all possibilities were still open to her. She felt like the cat in the paradox known as Schrödinger’s cat: she was both alive and dead at the same time. As long as she sat in the plane, both possibilities existed: Max had been unfaithful, and he hadn’t. Because until she got home and confronted him, she couldn’t know for sure. And as long as she was on the plane, unable to phone or ask anyone, her whole life, her whole future, was still completely open.

  It was close to four in the afternoon when Katriina opened the door to their flat. It was Monday, and Edvard came racing towards her, jumping up to greet her. Katriina called Max’s name. She could hear both the agitation and the alcohol in her voice.

  ‘In here,’ he answered from the bedroom.

  The first thing she saw was Max standing next to the bed, holding the phone in his hand. The TV was on, showing scenes from an American crime show, as if everything in life was completely normal. Katriina thought he must be talking to her – and if so, there was no longer any doubt.

  Yet she had a strange feeling that everything was the same as always. This was her old bedroom, and there stood her old bed and the TV, and on the wall hung the watercolour that she’d received as a gift on her fiftieth birthday. There was the book she’d left on the bedside table before her trip. And there stood her husband of the past thirty years, looking as if he’d just eaten a sandwich, since there was a spot of mustard on his worn-out old T-shirt.

  Max said goodbye to whoever he was talking to and set the phone on the table.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hi,’ said Katriina.

  ‘My mother had a stroke.’

  Katriina had pictured a lot of different scenes as she sat in the taxi on her way home from the airport. She’d imagined how she would throw the entire contents of the refrigerator at him – as she once had done when they were newlyweds and had a terrible fight. How she would scream shrilly and punch him in the stomach so hard that he slammed against the wall. She had pictured herself hauling all his clothes out of the wardrobe, stuffing them into a backpack, and then tossing it into the stairwell. But she had not predicted this scene. She hadn’t imagined that her mother-in-law would have had a stroke and that suddenly there was an entirely different topic to discuss. Katriina felt overcome by shock, sorrow, a feeling of helplessness in the face of death, but she tried to push those emotions aside.

  ‘It’s just by chance that I’m home. I have to go back out there tomorrow,’ said Max, taking her in his arms.

  Katriina leaned her head against his chest and saw how the whole quarrel she’d built up in her mind had now vanished. She felt Max’s hands stroking her hair in an attempt to console her, and how he pressed his face against her neck. But in an attack of fury she pushed him away. She was not going to let it go, he was not going to be allowed to have the upper hand emotionally.

  ‘Max, are you havi
ng an affair with Laura Lampela?’

  The TV show continued on as if nothing had happened. For a few seconds the only sound in the room was the dialogue, the well-oiled repartee, the stereotypical way in which the characters communicated by firing off one-liners. And Katriina knew that Max would have to say something quickly, because it was no longer possible to take anything back, now that she’d said it out loud.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said as he went over to the table, picked up the mobile, and stuck it in his pocket. He turned to the wardrobe and started taking out shirts.

  Katriina’s anger returned. She was surprised at how fast it erupted. It began almost unnoticed, like a slight pain in her stomach, but then it grew, creeping up to her chest and into her throat, to settle like a pounding heat in her temples. She was sweating, an annoying and ungovernable part of getting older.

  ‘Then how do you explain that article Laura wrote in today’s Iltalehti?’

  Max turned around. She’d caught his interest, and he almost smiled.

  ‘Laura borrowed the DVD from me, and I told her a little about the film. I took the bus out to Österbotten. Mum had a stroke yesterday when I was on my way home. They’re not sure she’s going to make it. Elisabeth is over there now, but I need to go back tomorrow. They’re probably going to move her to the big hospital in Vaasa.’

  Katriina started to cry. The tears poured out of her, and there was nothing she could do, no way she could control her feelings. Her sobs were the only sound in the room except for the TV. She wasn’t thinking about Max, and yet she was – he couldn’t very well be making up this story about his mother having a stroke.

  ‘I’m tired and I need to rest. It’s been a busy day, and I have to get up early,’ he said.

  ‘Do you love her?’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘If you love her, I want to know,’ said Katriina.

  Max paused before replying. ‘What do you want me to say? Nothing happened. I met with Laura a few times. She told me that my manuscript is good. But nothing happened. What do you want to hear?’