True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  “I love the end of May,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  Martti felt it silly to use such a strong word as “love” with a stranger. But it was true. Of course he loved these days, these spacious, green rooms shaped like expectation. He thought for a moment about whether to use the formal te, as she had. She was beautiful. Eyes like pools, arching lips. But obviously sick, you could see it in the sheen over her feverish eyes, her collarbones that showed beneath her skin like two conductor’s batons.

  He used te, because of her illness. Or maybe her beauty.

  “You must wish you were outside, then. It’s a beautiful day.”

  “I’m dying,” she said. “Could you tell?”

  She looked him in the eye calmly, stirring her coffee. This was a zone of true statements. For some reason, here, where a heart is a heart and a liver is a liver, and plans are plans, and titles are as weightless as rumors, you spoke only in sentences that were absolutely true.

  “My wife is dying, too,” he said, as if that were a reply.

  Suddenly saying it was easy. He had feared the grief the sentence would cause, but now it sounded simply factual.

  “How much time does she have?” the woman asked calmly.

  “They won’t tell us. But through midsummer, the end of July if all goes well.”

  The woman looked out the window. “Have the two of you been happy?”

  He didn’t have to hesitate with his answer. “Yes, we have. Lately I’ve felt that we’ve been very happy.”

  “You only realize it fully afterward,” the woman said.

  Her wrist bones were like two thin sticks. Her eyebrows were perhaps drawn on with a pencil. Her eyes were strongly delineated. Suddenly Martti felt like he was talking to a circus artist—a tightrope walker or a wise clown.

  “So,” she asked. “What’s the hardest part?”

  He thought for a moment.

  “The hardest part is to see the other person change. To learn them again. And to see in them that you’ve changed, too.”

  The woman nodded, satisfied with his answer; it was eternal and true.

  “What else?”

  He heard himself say it. For some reason it wasn’t hard to say at all: “It was hardest when I loved someone else.”

  The woman didn’t look surprised; she just nodded.

  “What was her name, this other one?”

  “Eeva.”

  There it was. He’d said the name for the first time in decades. It brought a few memories closer. They were individual images. Eeva in the sauna washing her hair. Eeva tired, her eyes swollen with sleep. Eeva angry, pale and flushed at the same time. He let the memories come, although they were painful.

  More words came. He talked, although it felt more like someone inside him was talking.

  “I’ve never loved anyone so much, although nowadays it feels like it was all a dream. Or maybe I’ve loved my wife just as much, but in a different way. It’s different when it’s true.”

  “Don’t say that,” the woman said, suddenly ferocious, spilling her coffee on the table in her excitement. “Love is always true.”

  He found himself nodding, as if taking orders.

  “My only regret is that I wasn’t braver,” the woman said. “I don’t regret what I’ve done. Unless you’ve committed an actual crime, regretting what you’ve done is the same thing as regretting your life.”

  Martti stepped out of himself for a moment to take note of the oddness of the situation. But who else could he tell? No one he knew.

  “But your wife still wants?” the woman asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What does she want?”

  “She wants to look at the sea every day. Yesterday she talked about swimming, although I doubt she’d be able to. She wants to see mornings and evenings. Maybe she wants to drive to our summer cabin one more time.”

  “Then you should take her to look at the sea, let her swim in spite of the risk, show her mornings and evenings. You should take her to the summer cabin. It will be enough.” She smiled.

  “And you? What do you want to do?”

  She didn’t pause in her answer.

  “I want to make crepes with my daughter at our lake cabin in Saimaa. Over the fire. I want to eat one with sugar and jam. Then I want to sit there and knit and look at the lake.”

  “Maybe you will, then. Go there and make crepes. Knit.”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “I will when I’m done with this.”

  They got up as if by common agreement, looked at each other like people who had by some caprice revealed everything to one another. The woman’s smile asked for forgiveness, solidarity, confidentiality. Martti answered the smile.

  THE DOCTOR PRONOUNCED him healthy, told him he had the circulatory system of a man of sixty. The doctor asked about Elsa. Martti had already poured his heart out in the cafeteria, he didn’t want to do it again.

  He let peace flow through his ardor, and peace came.

  He had promised to be away all afternoon. Should he go to Restaurant Torni, drink a cognac, look at the view? Should he go to the airport and watch the planes, their exhilarating speed at takeoff?

  He hadn’t been thinking of Tammilehto. The cabin had been left unused all winter. Normally they would have made a ski trip over the lake as early as March, skied to the island if the ice would hold them, spent the night in a lean-to, taken a sauna in April, then got out the garden tools. But this spring they’d left it. Maybe it was the change in Elsa’s condition, or maybe the idea of going to Tammilehto had been too emotional.

  But now he suddenly wanted to go there. He wanted to drive, stop at the rest stop, chat with Seljavaara, the man who took care of the house while they were away. He wanted the quiet of the shed, the rustle of the woods behind the cabin, the view of the lake from the sauna porch.

  Maybe it was because of Eeva. Saying Eeva’s name out loud.

  He wanted to be somewhere where he could think his thoughts through to the end. He couldn’t do it in the city, he was too attached to life, to Elsa.

  THE ROUTE WAS familiar. He stopped at the rest stop, as he always did. He sped up to two hundred kilometers an hour, happiness rising in him as it always did when he drove the car.

  He let the happiness radiate from him the same way it had once when he was fifteen and had gone to the Ateneum after school to look at the paintings and felt himself swoon in the presence of their beauty and precision, then stepped into the bright air outside and felt the world beating within him. A moment of clarity: he decided he would study art, be good at it, brilliant. He decided he would move to Paris. The cars had honked their horns, he had run across the street and been able to feel his every seething, fervent cell, an inexplicable peculiarity, a shift in all his cells at once, under his delicate skin. He fell in love with every woman he passed, celebrated every ragged drunk and every scrap of paper clinging to the pavement. When he got home, he stood breathless in the living room doorway. His mother looked at him with her eyebrows raised.

  “Have you fallen in love?”

  He thought about Helvi and about the artists Schjerfbeck and Edelfelt and Simberg and the woman who had just smiled at him on the street. He brought back a mental image of Helena, a girl in the class above his, her pitiless lips, which he had always seen, but never had the courage or the skill or the vision to draw. Now he would.

  No, he said. I’ve decided what I want to do. I want to be an artist. I’m going to move to Paris.

  Oho, his mother said. You better hurry into the kitchen, then. Hilja left a plate of dinner for you. An artist can’t go to Paris hungry.

  He was still that boy. A thought flashed into his mind: only Elsa saw him that way, as the same boy he used to be. Eeva had seen him that way, but he had let go of Eeva. Now ther
e was only Elsa. Maybe after Elsa there would be no one else. He took in the hopeful meadow and blue sky outside the car window, sketched it in his mind. It brought him comfort.

  WHEN HE GOT to Tammilehto, the house lay dozing in the light, the leaves still sparse in the trees.

  He took off his shoes, although the ground was still cool. He opened the door of the shed. Everything was as it should be, everything in its place. He felt a pleasant weariness in the presence of all these things, a melancholy cousin to his past hopes and enthusiasms. So much of it. Worthless attempted paintings, sketches, old tennis rackets. All kinds of junk.

  He headed for the sauna. He had to put his shoulder into opening the door—it had swollen tight in its jamb over the winter. Finally it opened with a crack. The familiar smell of soap and birch flooded over him in the washroom. He took out a bench he had built some time back and put it on the porch. He noticed that the porch floorboards were sagging. They were rotting near the wall. If the damp had spread as far as the wall they’d have to tear it out.

  He couldn’t be bothered with that now. He was going to have a peaceful day, a peaceful lake, a peaceful May.

  Finally peace came to him. He let thoughts that had been floating near him for days approach.

  Eeva at the door, the way he’d seen her the first time—smiling, a little hesitant.

  Had love begun immediately?

  When it had all been going on for a while he had learned that for Eeva love was devotion, stepping outside herself. Maybe that was her flaw—an inability to preserve herself on her journey toward another. Or it could just as well have been his flaw—something he couldn’t receive. You’re impossible. How can I love you when you lose yourself in the strength of your own love! Eeva had answered calmly, almost coldly: Don’t ever demand that I love you in moderation. You might as well demand that I turn to stone.

  Maybe it was this collision between them that had led to disaster.

  He went over Eeva’s features in his mind. He hadn’t done that in years, although he had sometimes thought of her. Now he built her bit by bit.

  Lips small but full. Bashful, girlish knees. The kind of thighs you might call spindly. He had loved those spindly legs, the unaccountable whiteness of those thighs. Restless hands, careless arms—she often dangled her wrists when she was thinking. Her breasts had been almost astonishing little buds, at least in the beginning, in the first few years, when she was only twenty-two or twenty-three.

  His cell phone rang. He had to come back to the present. He did it by taking in the spruces on the island with his eyes. They’d had those branches back then, too, when he and Eeva had spent time here.

  It was Eleonoora calling.

  “Where are you?”

  “Tammilehto.”

  “By yourself? Why? How did you get there?”

  “I drove.”

  “You can’t go there by yourself.”

  “The last time I looked, this cabin was in my name. The last time I looked, I was your father, and you weren’t my mother. So I very well can take the car and come here all by myself.”

  “Just don’t start painting. I heard from Mom that you’ve been planning to start up again. But don’t start opening bottles of turpentine up there.”

  “Just as an aside, may I remind you that I have done all my painting alone? But since you mention it, I’d rather do some building.”

  “What?”

  “Or rather demolition. Of the porch. The porch on the sauna is rotten. It needs to be replaced. We might have to tear out the wall.”

  “Don’t start demolishing anything. We can look at it together and decide what needs to be done. How’s Mom?”

  “When I left, they were going on a picnic.”

  He could hear Eleonoora sigh.

  “Right,” she said resignedly. “Hospice is just one long damned picnic for Mom.”

  7

  ANNA CROSSES THE street. She told Saara she would meet her at Esplanadi Park. She’s already late.

  She’s carrying her jeans and shirt in a shopping bag. The hem of the dress flaps against her calves. The wine stain is invisible among the pleats. She feels a little hot, or perhaps agitated, her mouth dry from the wine. One question keeps racing through her mind: does Mom know? Does she remember Eeva at all? She always remembers everything. She wouldn’t forget something like that. She might push it out of her mind, but she wouldn’t forget. There’s a difference.

  Saara is sitting on the grass eating ice cream.

  She has a turquoise silk ribbon tied in her hair. Maybe the color means something. Maybe it announces some new idea that Anna won’t learn about until the fall. Saara’s lip gloss is fuchsia. That, Anna knows, just means that summer can now arrive.

  In high school Saara never wore any makeup, but once she got into the university she decided that her face was the same as the next person’s—practical and modifiable, a certain kind of weapon.

  “New dress,” Saara says. “Pretty.”

  Anna would like to tell her right away what she’s just learned. She doesn’t tell her. She talks about ice cream. What flavor to buy—blueberry, caramel nut, or that new one with marshmallows in it?

  “Look how bright the blossoms are,” Saara says and nods her head gracefully toward the cherry trees, licking her ice cream cone. Saara is not opposed to cherry trees. There are quite a few things Saara’s not opposed to.

  “How bright,” Anna repeats, trying not to say anything about Eeva right away.

  She walks over to the cafe kiosk, the gravel crunching under her feet, her dress rustling. She is someone slightly different than herself. A different city opens up under her feet as she walks. It overlaps the spaces of this city and she can’t quite make it out clearly. She orders old-fashioned vanilla from the vendor, who seems to have been made to sell ice cream cones—sunny and smiling, strong wrists, a carefree brow. Almost no seriousness in her movements. Nothing in her gaze but the coming days of summer. Anna’s a little surprised at herself. When did she start ordering vanilla?

  THERE’S A FEELING of expectation in the air. The seagulls have already arrived, the other woman who works at the kiosk shoos them off the tables.

  A man in a suit goes by, wrapped up in his busyness, on his way somewhere from an office on Pohjoisesplanadi. It’s ridiculous to swing a briefcase on a day like today, to pretend to be important, with a telephone to your ear. He’s like a bright five-year-old playing at being a banker.

  Saara talks lazily about her summer plans, waiting for the grade on an essay, a book she’s just read.

  “I just know something’s going to happen this summer,” she says. “Something has to happen,” she adds emphatically, so that one might be misled into thinking her certainty was in fact desperation.

  “This summer the old world will be demolished and a new one built in its place,” Anna says.

  And it’s right for her to say so, although she actually fears the kinds of changes that Saara thirsts for. She would just as soon have continued those evenings when they were sixteen and stayed over at each other’s houses. They were free of adults’ demands, bought pastries and popcorn and frozen pizzas and bags of candy, watched Dirty Dancing twice, dancing along with Johnny and Baby, feeling the steps like a river flowing over a fallen log. The dancing was in fact a sort of churning after all they’d eaten, and they ended up lying on the floor giggling.

  “What’s new?” Saara asks now. “How’s the thesis going? Have you read The Feminine Mystique yet?”

  “Yeah, but I still need to find more source material. I should tie the subject to other historical events, not just second-wave feminism. I should read more. But I don’t feel like it.”

  Anna thinks about Eeva. She didn’t plan to tell Saara about Eeva. But Eeva won’t let her go. Eeva’s here already, close by.

 
No, not close by—Eeva is inside her. She put on the dress, and now she can’t shake her.

  Saara lies back and closes her eyes. She looks amazingly young. She’s still the girl who came to talk to her in the hallway her first week at school, handed her one of her iPod earpieces and said Listen to this in a cooing voice that for some reason stirred Anna’s womb, although she’d never thought she liked girls.

  Oh don’t be shy, let’s cause a scene,

  like lovers do on silver screens,

  let’s make it, yeah, we’ll cause a scene.

  After that they went everywhere together and shared the feelings a fresh friendship creates, the dazzled gratitude, a certainty that reality was exactly what they wanted it to be.

  The next year they marched with defiant certainty in a protest against the Iraq war and believed they were changing the world.

  What more do you need to change it but friendship, shameless faith, and trust?

  Anna feels simultaneously like it happened only yesterday, and like it all happened years and years ago.

  Before she moved to Pengerkatu, Anna lived with Saara for a year on Liisankatu. They had evenings that never ended, music, discussions over the kitchen table, an open door for guests. Their breakfasts stretched out, turned into debates. They played records and didn’t care if the neighbors stared at them in the hallway.

  Another friend of Saara’s lives on Liisankatu now.

  Saara smiles, still not opening her eyes. From above she looks a bit like one of Picasso’s women, disassembled, fragmented, searching for a shape.

  Sometimes Anna feels out of date around Saara, awkward, old-fashioned, always a step behind. Saara has the same fantasies she has, but not the same fears about getting there. Saara lives life in a way that Anna can’t because she’s too afraid.

  ANNA’S THOUGHTS RETURN to Eeva. What does she know about her?

  She only has a few facts. Eeva was from Kuhmo, and moved to the city to study French language and literature.

  Anna conjures up a picture in her mind.

  Eeva furrowed her brow when she was reading, which made her look a little worried. She had small hands, caught colds in the winter. Some kind of vague seriousness lodged in her eyebrows. When she buttered her bread or washed the dishes or brushed her hair, she would lose herself for a moment in the motions, look dreamy, relaxed and happy, like women in turn-of-the-century paintings. Like Schjerfbeck’s women.