True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  Anna’s voice portends tears, she can hear them before she tastes them in her throat. They stand quietly for a moment.

  Let’s stay here, Anna thinks. Let’s close the door and decide that the illness has been canceled. Let’s close the door.

  She smells her grandma’s familiar fragrance, the same skin cream that Anna used to spread in a thick layer over her face after her bath to make her grandma laugh. There’s a hint of something new in the scent, musty and dark. The smell of death.

  The horse chestnut trees outside the window, calm and imposing with their brand-new torches of blossom, cast a quivering shadow on the wall. Anna feels a peace which may be an echo from her early childhood. Lying in her baby carriage in the shade taking a nap, that same leafy color drawn on the awning of the carriage. Light, shadow, light.

  “Guess what I want to do?” her grandma suddenly says.

  “What?”

  “Play dress-up. Remember?”

  It was one of Anna’s favorite games. She was Bianca. She would put on a dress and they would make up a life for the character. Bianca was a fine lady from Italy. When Anna was Bianca, she knew things that she normally had no inkling of. She would find feelings within herself that she didn’t know she had.

  “Remember how when you were Bianca you liked olives, even though you usually hated them?” her grandma laughs.

  “I ate them from a plate, with a knife and fork.”

  “And you clomped around in high heels that were too big for you, talking about stock prices and airports and perfume. If you put on the Bianca dress I’ll see if I can fit into one I haven’t worn since the fifties. That’s one good thing about this cancer. I’ve gotten as thin as I was when I was twenty. Find something that suits you and I’ll make us some lunch.”

  A WALL OF dust motes floats dreamily across her grandmother’s room. Anna stands in the doorway for a moment. The sun’s rays stretch all the way across to the opposite wall. There is no time here.

  The closet is full of old coats, dresses, a couple of men’s shirts. The Bianca dress is black and white; it dangles from a hanger. She doesn’t take it. She wants something different.

  She looks through the dresses, runs her hand over each one—decades hung on hangers. She opens the other closet door. It creaks ponderously. The clothes look old, like they’ve been hanging here forever.

  She takes out one she doesn’t remember seeing before. A pale dress with a generous skirt, maybe from the 1950s. A wide waistband, a square neckline that shows the collarbones, the skirt abundant with rustling fabric.

  It’s easy to imagine the parties: the room buzzing with expectation. Smiles and small talk and an atmosphere that gradually changes from nervous to boisterous. Some people meeting for the first time, some seeing each other with new eyes, or maybe sharing secret and painful memories. A murmur of voices from the living room, but two people, a man and a woman, don’t hear it, they’re looking at each other, terror and excitement and tenderness knocking around inside them because they know something has begun, they know they can’t go back.

  She takes off her shirt and jeans; the dress slips on easily. It’s a little tight in the bust.

  She feels like someone else in this dress. Did her grandma wear it once or twice a year, to the theater with friends, drinking a pink cocktail in a bar after a play, different than she usually was for a little while, glancing at the door through the hazy curtain of smoke and walking home with long strides? Not because that was her nature, but because it was, in some mysterious way, the nature of the dress?

  “Where’d you find that?”

  Grandma is standing in the doorway.

  “It was in this closet. This isn’t your 1950s dress, is it?”

  Grandma gives the dress a long look.

  “Take it.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t need it. Take it with you. You can wear it to parties and things. What about the Bianca dress? Why didn’t you put that one on? Grab that one instead.”

  “Is it all right if I wear this one?”

  Grandma shrugs. “If you like,” she says, as if she wanted to dissociate herself from the whole thing.

  Then she goes to the closet and immediately finds what she’s looking for. She takes off her skirt and blouse. For a moment she’s standing in the middle of the room pale-skinned, looking slightly helpless. Anna looks at the path of her spine, clearly defined, and keeps her shock at arm’s length. She’s so thin! She helps with the zipper, gently, gently. The dress is ridiculously loose, at least two sizes too big. Anna considerately makes no mention of this.

  Her grandma looks satisfied.

  “Right, then. Everything’s ready. I even have onion pie,” she says proudly. “I baked it yesterday when I got tired of having cancer.”

  THEY PACK A basket with a baguette and brie and onion pie and two small bottles of mineral water, plus some grapes, fruit salad, and the olive focaccia that Anna brought. They take along a quilt and head out like parisiennes. Grandma ties a scarf over her wisp of hair and puts on her old Chanel sunglasses.

  They sit in the swing under the chestnut tree. Anna pours the wine while her grandma opens wrappers.

  “Always did like the sound of wine being poured. When I was young I was afraid that I might well become an alcoholic, I liked it so much. But then I realized that I was more fond of the anticipation of festivity than I was of the wine itself.”

  Her gaze takes in the fluffy clouds, the boundless May sky, the nightingale on a branch of the tree, on silent watch before spending its evening song.

  “I wouldn’t hold it against you if you got a little drunk,” Grandma says, sipping from her glass.

  Anna tastes her wine. Grandma pats her encouragingly on the leg.

  “So. Woman to woman, as we planned. Tell me about Matias. He’s a sharp boy—and pretty. But I can see that there’s a rub. Is it sex? Is that the trouble? Shy balls? A stiff pelvis? Or is it that the choreography’s clumsy? Sex is often better if you think of it as a dance. Men don’t always understand that, although I never would have thought Matias had poor rhythm.”

  Anna gets some wine in her nose. “Shy balls?”

  Grandma pops a grape in her mouth as if she’s talking about a rise in the price of milk. “Why sugarcoat it? Sometimes sensitive men are dull in bed.” She sighs as if this was an unfortunate fact. “Let’s just say there are men who like to turn the light out before they get going. It’s usually shy balls. It’s often associated with a high level of education and problems of attachment in childhood.”

  “I hope this isn’t one of the great insights of your career.”

  “What if it is?”

  “Then I should call Ilta Sanomat and give them a headline.”

  Grandma laughs. Anna can see her pink tongue. A person’s tongue is the same from childhood to old age, the same tongue fumbling for the breast and later on for other food, the same tongue forming words, professions of love, and commands and scientific debates and more professions of love and requests and thanks for the care and attention.

  “I’m just teasing. Besides, I gave them a good one last year.”

  “Oh, yeah. The nuclear family. That was a good headline. ‘Researcher Denounces the Nuclear Family’!”

  Grandma laughs again.

  “I didn’t even say that. I just said that the ideal of the nuclear family should be looked at critically. Has the ideal strayed too far from reality, since people nowadays are faced with every imaginable family configuration and are forced to adjust to it, and live quite happily? The world always comes between people, in every kind of family, which is how it should be. No one can deny their origins, their circumstances. Everyone has to survive their childhood and change the circumstances into something else. It’s the only way to get through it, to become happy.”

&nb
sp; She laughs, gentleness in her eyes, as if the world is a clumsy thing with flaws that she forgives out of sheer tenderheartedness.

  The interview had been purposely confrontational. The photograph was an old one, with grandma looking proudly straight into the camera. The summary insert made her sound like a radical in her day, a trailblazer in the jungles of academia. She snorted after she read it: I wasn’t a radical. They’ll believe anything. I just wanted to do research and help people in the process and keep my wits about me. If they want to call practicality and love for humanity radicalism, then fine, I guess I fit the criteria.

  The nightingale on the branch hears them but doesn’t say anything. Its eye is a shining black point in the universe. The bird is watching over them, mute and knowing, waiting until evening to disclose its counsel in a clear song.

  Grandma cuts a thick slice of brie and spreads it on a piece of bread.

  Anna can’t help but think about the growth lurking somewhere among her cells. It’s devouring her whole life, the same life that gave birth to Anna’s mother and, in a way, Anna, too. A ghoulishly rational and coherent thought pierces Anna: life gives birth to life and life gives birth to death.

  Grandma doesn’t know Anna’s thoughts. Suddenly, without warning, she says, “I’ve been thinking about you. What’s going on in your life? Or what was going on last year, the year before? We didn’t see each other much. But your mother was worried.”

  Anna turns her head. It’s easy to turn her head and look at the apple blossoms, the climbing rose on the side of the house. Soon it, too, will push out buds and everything will start at the beginning again.

  Grandma doesn’t give up. “What exactly happened? What was going on?”

  Anna reaches for the cheese too quickly. The knife falls to the ground with a clink.

  She’s spilled wine on the dress. One drop runs between her thumb and forefinger as if it knows the way. The stain begins to spread over the dress. If she doesn’t put salt on it quickly it will never come out. It will never leave, no matter how much you wash it. It’s already growing.

  “There was something going on for years, wasn’t there?” Grandma asks.

  “Now I’ve ruined this dress,” Anna says, upset.

  She’s still holding her glass. The glass is shaking. Grandma is looking closely at her.

  “What of it?” she says. “So what? It’s just a dress.”

  “But it’s yours, and I’ve gone and ruined it. Do you have any salt? Should I get some from upstairs?”

  Grandma is thoughtful, as if she were looking right through her. She opens her mouth to say something, closes it again, gazing steadily until she finally makes up her mind to say what she’s thinking.

  “Actually, it’s not mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s Eeva’s. I didn’t know it had been hanging in that closet all these years. I was surprised when I saw you wearing it.”

  She says the name dispassionately, as if she were mentioning a person long forgotten, someone she’d once spent happy days with, sworn lifelong friendship to, until, for some reason, because of a random whim or unfortunate misunderstanding, their connection was broken.

  “Whose?”

  “Eeva’s,” she says again.

  6

  THE DAY WAS warm. The moment he stepped outside the building the world flooded over him. There were some young boys at the tram stop, swaggering fifteen-year-olds. A girl stood a ways off in triumphantly careless contraposto, glancing in the direction of the coming tram: she was obviously one of the boys’ classmates.

  Yet another drama where attention must be rationed out to obtain a greater reward.

  Which of the boys did she want? Maybe the bland one, the one who looked like a good boy, who carried himself with what he thought was serious-mindedness. That’s what Martti had been like as a boy. Secretly sensitive, an easy butt of practical jokes, touchy, occasionally sinking into romantic gloom.

  He once drew a picture of Helvi, who sat in the front row, and gave it to her shyly at recess. Loudmouth Helvi, whom he had fallen in love with on some sort of whim—maybe because someone like Helvi wouldn’t even look at someone like him, which ensured that he could love her in peace.

  That’s what this boy was like. Was the girl Helvi? No. This girl was sweeter.

  The tram to Meilahti wouldn’t come for five more minutes. He would change trams at Kisahalli, go to his doctor’s appointment, where they’d put an old man’s mask on him with their tests and measurements.

  Seventy and over. It had happened without him noticing.

  A person just wakes up all of a sudden and realizes he’s old. He gets on the tram and notices someone offering him their seat. I’m not crippled, he thinks. And then he realizes—no, but I am old.

  The group of young people was getting restless. The rowdiest of the boys started to jump onto the rails, trying to get the girl’s attention.

  The boy made a strange dance move that reminded Martti of something he’d seen on TV—a slow-motion video of a bird’s leaping mating dance. They were like the leaps of a dancer with years of training. Just as polished, just as exhilarated and self-assured.

  The girl gave the boy the finger. The gesture was disarming in its obscenity. Why waste time on such a thing when she could go over and kiss him?

  The tram came; the teenagers jostled in through the rear door.

  There was a meek-looking family in the middle of the tram: a father, a mother, and two little boys. The father held one boy by the hand. The boys were touchingly faithful miniature versions of their father—a shock of blond hair, an all-encompassing gaze. Knock-knees. Chubby hands.

  Martti thought, no matter what happens to us we carry where we came from with us.

  Martti himself had his father’s nose. His father had died in the Continuation War, in December of 1943. The doorbell had rung, and he had asked if it was Santa Claus. The familiar pastor and two soldiers were at the door. His mother collapsed in the entryway, the servant girl pushed him and his sister away so they wouldn’t see the scene. He remembered the hesitant words of the young soldier and his mother’s strange anger: Out. Get out of here.

  He was never supposed to talk about that. Not about his father, or the pastor at the door, or his mother’s collapse. No one ever forbade him to talk about it, but he always knew that the whole scene, the whole memory of the pain, should be kept silent. They started leaving blank spots in the conversation where they would have mentioned his father. Reality had gradually closed over the wound, silence had bound his father’s memory like a bandage, encased it. Silence—it’s a strange grave.

  But even then, when his father was dead, Martti still had his nose. Even back then it seemed strange, almost incomprehensible.

  Those were the years when he started drawing. The worst bombing of Helsinki came in February; his mother lay on the bedroom floor and refused to get up. He hid under the table, afraid, crying for his father.

  When the bombing had stopped, he had nightmares. Their servant—Irja was the girl’s name—bought him paper and a stick of charcoal on the black market and said, Draw them, maybe it will help. And he drew them.

  THE FATHER OF the meek family took his wife’s hand. The older boy held a Spider-Man doll tight against his chest, the littler one had the same kind of toy in his clumsy hand.

  The girl who had been flirting at the tram stop affected a bored expression. Martti saw her glance at the sensitive boy. The boy looked away—clearly a crush.

  Emotion came, unhindered.

  All the aspirations people had, their unquenchable hope, their tenacious faith in the brightness watching over the resonance of the May evening, the diligence with which they wrote and published the daily free newspaper and distributed it in its plastic pockets on the trams and subways; all these thi
ngs awakened a sudden overflowing tenderness in him.

  This is where the world is, with all its strangeness and triviality. This isn’t a painting; it’s the world, naked, within even his reach.

  THE HOSPITAL WAS a familiar entity, like an organism. He walked down the corridor, stepped soundlessly through the sliding doors, and checked in at reception. He became a heart, lungs, circulation, liver, psyche.

  He sat in the waiting room. The others waiting there were detached from themselves, from their lives; a youngish mother with an obviously feverish but lively child, a bald, middle-aged woman, probably a cancer patient. And an old man, like him, with perhaps exactly the same worries.

  He sketched their poses, out of habit.

  The nurse came to tell them there was an hour wait.

  “You can wait in the cafeteria if you like.”

  He got up, walked back down the corridor. He saw a few very sick people. A woman lying in bed with an IV, serpentine veins gleaming through her skin. The sight of her didn’t upset him, although Elsa came to mind, what was coming. He made eye contact with the woman and nodded. There was still hope in her eyes.

  People are willing to endure almost any agony merely to have a few more ordinary days. Maybe just a hundred. Or ten. Or two, if that’s all they’re going to get. One day when they can get up, walk out a door, make a note of the weather and plan their lunch or who they’ll meet, or cherish the mere idea of a walk through town.

  He went to the cafeteria, bought a coffee, sat at a table and looked at the people. The people at the next table were talking about a trip to the countryside. One of them was sick—which one? He looked at both of them. There was a baby in a bassinet. Maybe they were here because of the baby.

  He found himself dreaming of taking Elsa one more time to Tammilehto. Maybe they would sleep in the sauna again, see the morning, make coffee, the way they used to.

  “May I sit here?”

  It was the bald woman from the waiting room. She smiled, pointing at the chair in front of her.