True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  Maria took care of everything fearlessly, asking frequently about her grandmother’s condition.

  Maria was a crisis person. She was in her first year of medical school. Sometimes Eleonoora thought Maria would be a better doctor than she was.

  Eleonoora had never been more businesslike. She had always had too much worry in her. Faced with her mother’s illness, she erupted in rules and instructions. When she was a child it had been a generalized feeling, in her early teens it made her look under her bed and check the stove in the kitchen again and again.

  Anna, it seemed to Eleonoora, had learned to worry from her. It had been her predominant characteristic, especially in the last few years, along with her earnestness.

  The previous May, Eleonoora had found Anna lying on the floor of her studio apartment. She still didn’t know what exactly had happened. Had something been going on for years that no one had told her about?

  Anna’s friend Saara had called her, sounding worried, and Eleonoora had realized that she hadn’t heard from Anna in more than a week. Anna lived in a small studio on Pengerkatu, led a busy student’s life, and sometimes they wouldn’t call each other for a week at a time. Eleonoora had thought that Anna was busy with tests, evening walks, glasses of wine.

  She had sometimes said, out loud, that she didn’t know what was happening in Anna’s life.

  I live a different kind of life than you do, Anna had said nonchalantly. I live in a different world. Eleonoora let the matter go and didn’t ask her any more about it.

  Saara’s call in May and Anna’s days of silence nevertheless alarmed her. She tried to call Anna again and again, but there was no answer. Finally she drove over to her building. She rang the doorbell for ten minutes. A series of sad, grisly possibilities flashed through her mind. She dug the spare key that Anna had given her out of her bag and pushed it into the lock.

  The apartment door struck something soft on the floor; Anna sat up and looked at her in an indifferent daze. She looked like she’d been asleep. Her hair was unwashed and disheveled, her skin pale.

  “What are you doing here?” Anna said.

  “What’s happened to you?” Eleonoora asked, transfixed.

  Anna shrugged her shoulders, stood up, looked past her, out into the hallway.

  Eleonoora looked over Anna’s shoulder into the room. It looked empty. There were spaces on the bookshelf, photographs missing from the wall. Had someone been living there, someone who had taken their things away with them? Or had Anna simply rearranged? The same strange photo of Anna that looked from a distance like an oil painting, like Gallen-Kallela’s Aino walking into the water, still hung between the shelf and the sofa. The photo had been taken by a man Anna was dating for a while. Eleonoora had never liked the picture; she didn’t recognize the woman in the photo as her daughter. Pale, solemn, stepping into the water, a completely different person than the one she had raised, the one who had giggled over her morning porridge on dreamy Sunday mornings, the one she had soothed in the night after a bad dream.

  A child is born, a mother learns to know the child, learns little by little, year by year. And then another person comes along and the child changes under their influence and turns into a stranger.

  Eleonoora had never got to know the man who took the photograph. She had met him a few times, but she couldn’t really say that she knew much about him. He had a child: Linda. Linda had sometimes spent time with Anna. Eleonoora remembered a summer day several years before. Anna and the little girl had been at her house. Ice cream, rhubarb pie, whooping it up in the wading pool. The child had bangs and earnest, trusting eyes. She had fallen asleep in Anna’s arms, sunk into a deep sleep while a nightingale sang. Eleonoora could see her own feelings from decades before, when a child was sleeping in her arms, reflected in Anna’s face—love so overwhelming that there was a touch of pain in it.

  ON THAT DAY in May, Anna stood before her with a different look on her face—defeated, humbled.

  Eleonoora asked a few baffled, clarifying questions.

  “How long has it been since you went out?”

  “I don’t know. A week or two.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  Anna shrugged her shoulders again. “I wasn’t up to it. I couldn’t get up.” Then she looked at her mother and, as if marveling at her own train of thought, said, “I was lying on the floor.”

  She started to cry. It started with one tear and spread to the rest of her body. Eleonoora held her in her arms, not knowing what else to do. There they stood.

  Eleonoora said the nursery rhyme for hurts, their own shared rhyme of consolation, the one that her mother had said to her when she was a child. Whenever Eleonoora hurt herself her mother would take her in her arms and say the rhyme in a low voice. The last time Eleonoora had whispered it in her daughter’s ear was when she was less than ten years old. But still the words came, she still remembered them. Anna listened and finally relaxed a little.

  “The bee rhyme. I had forgotten all about that.”

  AT FIRST ELEONOORA had been afraid that Anna’s grief wouldn’t pass. She had made a mental diagnosis of depression and gingerly encouraged Anna to seek help. In the end, she let the matter drop.

  Now and then a young person’s heart is made of lead. It accumulates weight from random experiences; anything can add to its density, slip it out of joint. But it can lighten again just as easily, forget its troubles.

  And that’s what happened. Anna had Matias now, with his worn-out T-shirts, his store of a hundred gentle expressions and only one angry one. She had moved in with him almost immediately, just a month after they met.

  When she visited Anna and Matias’s house, Eleonoora noticed a wistful tinge under the happiness. Where had the years gone? When had she become so old that her daughter had her own home with a lovely boyfriend, offered her a piece of apple pie on a plate that she herself had received as a wedding gift more than twenty years ago? She saw a hint of trying too hard in Anna’s happiness, as if she wanted to impress her with its authenticity.

  01:32

  Eero rolled onto his side. Eleonoora got up. She felt dizzy, her legs felt shaky.

  She took the scale out of the cabinet and weighed herself. Fifty-one kilos. She hadn’t weighed that little since she was breastfeeding. She ordered herself to eat a chocolate pudding on top of her regular breakfast. She looked at Eero, wished he would wake up, see how pitiable she was, and take her in his arms.

  She stood for a moment in the chilly darkness, her ribs sharp against the paleness of the night.

  Eero had pulled his knees up toward his chest and put his hand between his thighs as he always did. Something about his sleeping, his trusting presence, gave Eleonoora an unbearable feeling. It felt like vexation mixed with love. When her mother died Eleonoora would still have this family for whom she must necessarily survive.

  There would be evenings, nights like this one. Spring would come. Eero would be his old steadfast self. She would get through it. Gradually she would start to laugh again. That was what was unbearable. She didn’t want to. She wanted to cry, she wanted to build a cradle and put the rest of her life in it to cry, orphaned.

  Eleonoora put the scale back in the cabinet and wrapped her robe around herself again. Her head hurt, her back ached.

  She closed the bedroom door behind her, tiptoed across the hall, stopped at the door to Maria’s room, and listened for a moment. No sound. Suddenly she had to open the door, to see Maria, if only for a moment.

  The predawn moment, the dream of her mother swinging, the dread—all of it made Eleonoora feel that childhood uncertainty about what is true.

  Maria was, at least. She lay on her side with a pillow between her knees, her blanket kicked to the floor. Her thighs glowed in the dimness, her mouth was open, her hair bunched up around her face.

  S
he made a smacking sound with her mouth in her sleep.

  It seemed almost comical to Eleonoora that a couple of decades ago she had pushed Maria out into the world—this woman with her farmhand’s arms and husky laugh that filled the space around her.

  Last summer Maria and her grandma, Eleonoora’s mother, had washed rugs at the seashore. Her mother had still been strong then, there was no sign of the illness. Maybe it was already wending its way through the corridors of her organs. But she hadn’t known about it yet, had lifted the wet rugs onto the drying racks, turned the crank, laughed when the water splashed.

  That fall she gave her annual series of lectures at the university. Although she’d been retired for years, she hadn’t stopped working. She still had an office in the department. Year after year her lectures drew several hundred listeners. They all wanted to hear the esteemed psychological researcher, to share in her wisdom.

  The titles of the lectures were variations on her best-known book, Recognition and Self. The book had been a tremendous success when it was published. People had tried to make her into a lap for the whole of society to sit on, a motherly emissary of love.

  Eleonoora had gone to hear some of her lectures. Her favorite moments with her mother were when they drove home after a lecture, her mother laying her head against the window and sighing good-naturedly, but with a hint of exhaustion.

  “The science doesn’t interest anyone. People come to these things to hear tidings of joy.”

  She didn’t say it with disappointment, just a bit of resignation, gently, like a weary queen.

  “Don’t underrate yourself. They are tidings of joy. You deliver us from evil. Mothers, fathers, children—you give them permission to be happy.”

  She smiled a little.

  “Why do they always need someone else to say it?”

  Eleonoora had always been proud of her mother’s success. She remembered from her childhood the busy evenings before her mother’s trips, and when her mother came home, her own tears, a kind of frantic desire to own her, to be part of her, such unconditional love and admiration that she felt the longing even when her mother was with her.

  Last summer Elsa had thrown a seventieth-birthday party. Her research colleagues from over the years were there. An interview given at the party carried an apt headline: “Pioneer of Psychology Still Has Sharp Mind and Open Arms.”

  Now her arms were disappearing. She would never wash rugs again. She would never turn seventy-one.

  Eleonoora went downstairs. There were marks on the hall door showing the girls’ heights in years past: Anna, Maria, Anna, Maria. Suddenly Eleonoora felt jealous, almost angry at her daughters for making her always be their mother.

  She scolded herself: don’t be childish.

  She picked the newspaper up from the floor. It was the most comforting thing for her in the morning. She made an espresso, heated milk in a saucepan, and poured the milk and coffee into a large mug. She made toast and buttered it carefully, didn’t skimp on the cheese slices.

  She read the paper, ate, listened to a blackbird. Night might be a well, her shouts might echo at the bottom of the well, but there was still the blackbird.

  In the morning she would go to work, take care of a few routine tasks, keep herself together. At lunchtime she would call her father and mother to make sure everything was all right. Anna was going to spend the afternoon there so Dad could get a little free time. Eleonoora would call Anna and listen for any uncertainty, check up on her.

  No, Eleonoora chided herself. She would leave Anna in peace with her grandma and drive over after work. Or maybe she would call the home health care service, ask about a few more details.

  Everything had been arranged for her mother’s return home: the bed, the pain pump, other necessaries.

  The whole family had been together at the apartment in Töölö; her mother had wanted to have a welcome home party for her return.

  Eleonoora had watched her mother’s hand as it cut another piece of cake. The hand trembled slightly as she pressed the cake knife into the frosting. Maybe it was because of the diapers lurking on the other side of the wall; she had to prove that she still belonged with the kind of people who choose for themselves what they want to eat, who praise the flavor of the cake.

  “Have another piece. It’s not good for you, but it’s not exactly bad for you either.”

  As she sat there, Eleonoora remembered her mother’s severe expression when she was a child and had behaved badly once when they were out. It was like a wall; she thought she’d lost her approval and affection for good. But in the tram on the way home her mother had taken her onto her lap, her soft, slightly sweaty thighs against Eleonoora’s damp skin. She had felt such a great gratitude for her mother’s affection that she burst into tears.

  How recent those days seemed, when her mother was a queen whose approval she thirsted for. Now her mother whined, made demands like a child, acted stubborn, capricious. She never did it to Dad, only to Eleonoora.

  Eleonoora never would have guessed that it would feel like this, stupefyingly lonely, the role of the one in control.

  She went to sit on the living room sofa and looked at Anna across the room—her father’s portrait of Anna was hanging on the wall. She’d always felt both tender and sad when she looked at the painting. Anna sitting on a small stool, thoughtful, with the world on her shoulders. There were oranges in the background, bright as the sun. He had accentuated the shadow on the left side of her face as if he wanted to particularly mark the difference between the areas where the oranges and the shadows were.

  There was a companion picture, a darker, bleaker composition—he had planned it as some sort of diptych. Eleonoora didn’t know where the other painting had gone.

  Yesterday she had seen all of these expressions in Anna, including this seriousness, and the childhood look of concealment.

  Mom had resisted their caregiving plan, wanted to treat hospice care as visits. Just come when you want to come. We’ll have coffee. Anna had offered to take the first shift. Eleonoora searched Anna’s face for signs of dread and Anna glanced at her quickly, recognized her expression, and nodded emphatically, defying her doubts. Eleonoora remembered how when Anna was five she had burst into tears when she was told to try to do a somersault in gymnastics class. Her trembling chin, her eyes searching the corners for a place to escape. That look was still in her, somewhere behind her look of assurance. Eleonoora knew all her fears, all her sorrows, from the smallest to the largest. I’ll come tomorrow, Anna had said again.

  Eleonoora looked at Anna’s face glowing through the darkness. It seemed to be floating toward her.

  She decided that Anna would be all right with her grandmother for an afternoon. She wouldn’t worry about it.

  She needed both hands to keep the panic at a distance.

  3

  ANNA IS STANDING in the hallway in front of the apartment door. It’s like any other day at her grandma and grandpa’s house. A summer day from the past, when she was six years old. Or even yesterday, when they ate too-sweet cake and she staved off her panic and promised to come today.

  It’s the only thing she knows how to do for her mother. Day after day Anna sees her mother’s grief grow heavier, trembling behind her mask of efficiency. Sometimes she takes off her mask for a moment when she thinks no one can see her, and she looks completely helpless.

  YESTERDAY ANNA’S MOTHER was clearing away the dishes, went into the kitchen to put the plates in the dishwasher, and let her expression drop. Suddenly it was as if Anna had no hands. She would have liked to take her mother in her arms.

  She wants to comfort her mother all the time the way that you comfort a child after a bad dream, but she can’t find the words. Maria has diligence, practical gestures, and uncomplicated words. Anna is helpless in comforting, all she has are her clumsy arms, outstr
etched, stopped halfway.

  SHE’S WALKED HERE from her apartment on Albertinkatu, stopped in at Stockmann’s to buy a gift for Grandma. It is a bright day. A hot dog wrapper on the corner, a seagull, a yogurt container, the usual cars. The day is silver and there is sunshine and the garbageman’s shout across the street, the wide expanse of May.

  Anna rings the doorbell and hears footsteps. Grandpa.

  “Well, if it isn’t Anna. Nice of you to come. Just had our coffee and now Grandma’s resting a bit.”

  Grandpa uses these tossed-off sentences to cover the embarrassment of just the two of them in the entryway.

  Anna is alert. There’s a jitter of restlessness inside her.

  “Resting? Any pain?”

  “Maybe a little. A little fatigue.”

  “Is she asleep?”

  “Sleeping, dozing, you know.”

  Grandpa is familiar. This man—this visionary, as one magazine called him. To have all his success, honors, and respect, to carry his affection, his humor and melancholy, the shapeless wounds of boyhood, through the years to this moment, to go through exhibition openings and restless years in Paris and prizes and nominations and come to this, this doorway, saying hello to his daughter’s daughter and trying to think of something to say. The years have layered over him, each stage of life, each spring. Anna can see them all.

  Suddenly she remembers one of his charmer’s looks, which have always seemed strange to her but still firmly belonging to her grandfather. She was twelve years old, wearing a skirt and dress-up shoes to go see him receive one of his many awards. At the end of the ceremony he threw his bouquet into the audience, smiling at the idea just before he did it. A woman journalist caught it, and he winked at her. The woman blushed and gave a curtsy. He lifted his eyebrows as if to say, Why are you curtsying? That’s a gesture of humility. You can do better than that! The woman raised her own eyebrows questioningly. What? What should I do? He spread his arms. Anything you can think of! And the woman did an almost perfect pirouette, like a dancer, and then took a bow. He was satisfied with that, and blew a kiss to her. And then the whole play was over as quickly as it had begun.