True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  All of a sudden he remembered being in exactly the same situation before: Eeva taking off her clothes, stepping into the water, glancing at him, wading out deeper, then bending over to swim. Calm strokes in supreme silence. The water was cold but Eeva didn’t scream, didn’t make a sound. As if she needed to prove her valor.

  When she got out of the water, Eeva had come to where he was, and he had wrapped her in a towel, in his arms. That’s how they laid claim to their intimacy, without words. It was justified by her swim in too cold water.

  Elsa stepped calmly into the water, bent over to swim, two strokes, three. Then she stood up and came back to the beach.

  “Done already?” he asked, and held out a towel spread open.

  Elsa pressed into his arms with a smile.

  “Lovely.”

  “If you die here, I’ll never forgive myself,” he heard himself say.

  Elsa shivered, putting her clothes on slowly. He helped her. He insisted she put on an extra sweater under her coat.

  “Now let’s have a little tea,” she said.

  They walked up the hill. Elsa struggled up the slope on her own strength. They walked slowly past the fenced-off nude beach, looked at the bay opening out to their right. The water was divided by the familiar dock that extended from the foot of the stone stairs, benches at its tip for admiring the sunset.

  “That way,” Elsa said.

  They laid the blanket on a bench, poured some tea from the thermos into their mugs. Elsa opened a package of Ballerina cookies and ate one with relish.

  “Are you cold?”

  “A little.”

  He took off his coat and wrapped it around her. She let her gaze drift to the horizon.

  “I’ve been thinking we could drive out to Tammilehto,” Martti said. “Do you think you’d be up to it? The sauna floor needs to be replaced anyway—Eero and Matias could help us with it. You could keep your eye on it, act as supervisor.”

  “Supervisor, eh? I can hardly turn that down, provided the pay is commensurate with my qualifications.”

  “What pay are you asking?”

  “How about two cookies? Any less than that and my professional pride would be offended.”

  “How about three? What if I offered you three?”

  “For three cookies I’d tear up the whole floor and dance the polka on it.”

  “You’re hired.”

  Elsa put her hand on his thigh and looked at the clouds for a moment.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  She said it so suddenly that he was shaken.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No. I’m not afraid. But I don’t want to do it. I’m not ready yet.”

  Elsa closed her eyes. An image of her from the 1970s, when they’d spent a month in Dubrovnik, came into his mind. Elsa in a lounge chair, in a yellow bikini on the shore of the Adriatic, languid and mellow as she was now.

  “Anna found the dress,” Elsa said, her eyes still closed.

  “What dress?”

  “Eeva’s dress.”

  “She did?” he managed to say. “Why do we have it? Why wasn’t it given away?”

  “It’s been in the closet all these years.”

  “And?”

  Elsa was quiet for a moment. She clicked her tongue. “I told her,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I want to tell about my life. I’ve started to think I should. If I don’t tell it, it won’t be told.”

  Would Anna tell her mother? Would they discuss it? Did Eleonoora already know anyway? It was certain that Eleonoora knew something, remembered some of it, or maybe all of it. They’d just never talked about it.

  “Shouldn’t you have talked with Eleonoora about it first?”

  “Maybe,” Elsa answered.

  She looked at him, slightly at a loss. He could see she was afraid, maybe regretful.

  “Maybe we should have told her from the beginning,” she said. “We should have talked about it somehow.”

  “You thought differently back then.”

  “Back then I had seen so many suffering children, children who knew too much about the affairs of adults. I thought that a child had a right to live in a child’s world, in play and fantasy.”

  “She’s happy. Isn’t she? Maybe she became a happy person.”

  “Maybe,” Elsa said. “I do intend to bring it up. I’ll tell her when the time is right. I’ll wait for the right moment.”

  He didn’t say it but he thought, the right moment will never come.

  They sat there for a good while longer. They were waiting for the sky to turn orange, then rose, before it was finally blue. On the way back Elsa got tired and asked him to go get the car.

  9

  ANNA DOESN’T FEEL like standing in the bookstore in the murmuring afternoon. Two more hours. She and her mother have planned to meet at the door to Stockmann’s deli. What luck to get to do the shopping for a trip to the countryside, walk down the fruit aisles and the greens counter, pick up some cheese or marshmallows or zucchini, expensive cloudberry yogurt or anything that comes to mind!

  She’s looking forward to the trip to Tammilehto, although she fears it may be difficult. You never know whether there’s going to be laughter and banter or a strained atmosphere that could turn into an argument at any moment. Sometimes they just kid around, make food, giggle like sisters. At those times her mother is playful and as wild as a fifteen-year-old. Sometimes Anna can tell as soon as she sees her mother that it’s one of those other times, when she lets drop complicated, sarcastic sentences or tries to dig up information about her with questions cloaked in empathy.

  The bookstore is quiet, the air dry. Anna can hear the finicky sounds of the espresso machine from the cafe upstairs. Light collects in the skylights, books doze on the shelves. She gathers the books left on the counter into a basket.

  Taking them back to their own sections is the single pleasure of her workday. She gets to go to the foreign paperback section, then up the escalator to the second floor—politics and economics—and maybe even to the third floor—art and travel books.

  Anna invites a familiar thought that she often savors. How many beginnings of love are in the books sold here?

  Almost every novel has a love story, a description of love beginning. And there’s something the same about all of these stories—so much the same that their particular details are almost superfluous. But still, each one has its own secrets.

  When you let go of yourself and are filled with joy and dread at the same time. When you understand that there’s no turning back, that everything has fundamentally changed. When you realize that you’re not at the place you thought you were at, you’re already on your way toward the other person.

  Anna walks to the escalator with the basket on her arm and goes up to the second floor.

  Grandma and Grandpa met at a university party. Grandpa couldn’t take his eyes off Grandma, who was just a dimpled, round-faced college girl majoring in psychology. Anna can easily imagine Grandpa. The kind of young man who’s more likely to be called pretty than handsome. Elsa fell in love with his hot temper when provoked, his big plans for how he would make his living.

  Anna’s parents were sixteen years old when their love began, working on a group physics project that neither of them wanted to do. A Wednesday evening in his room, in the friendly shade of bold-patterned Marimekko curtains and a clumsy floor lamp.

  The physics project was about gravity. Mom had argued with everything he said, although she had noticed his smile. Dad claimed he could eat an orange while standing on his head. No, you can’t, she said. There’s no way. Just watch me, he said.

  And he swung into a headstand on the bed, leaned his legs against the wall, and took one bite after another from
an orange. Mom’s love started right at that moment, as he stood on his head with his skinny legs up against a Led Zeppelin poster, calm and focused, and ate the whole orange. He lowered himself and said with a smile, “Now you see that there are other forces besides gravity.”

  “Like what?” she said. “What kinds of forces do you mean?”

  “Like trust, for instance,” he said.

  “What should I trust?” said Mom, who wasn’t yet a mom but just a girl named Ella.

  “How about what I tell you, for starters,” the orange boy said with a smile.

  Anna is envious of these stories. She’d like to have similar stories of her own.

  She remembers Marc, last fall. She went to Paris four months after the breakup. A stupid idea, actually. She bought a cheap ticket. Alone in Paris! At home, the idea had seemed romantic and crazy, a symbol of freedom: her love had ended, she would shake off Helsinki and experience life as a different woman, by traveling alone in the city of love. When she got there she felt like an orphan. She wandered around, met a boy in a museum—Marc. They went to a cafe and shared a bottle of wine and their childhood fears. Marc kissed her on the banks of the Seine and suddenly asked, without any fuss, if she would move to Paris. He decided that they would fall in love and live happily ever after. But I don’t even know you, Anna said. Just throw yourself into it, Marc answered.

  And so she did: she threw herself into it in his apartment in the Marais. And it was over as quickly as it began. In the morning she gathered her things and slipped out without waking him. She never found out whether his promised love could have grown into something real or whether it was just a door to a brief and somewhat vague pleasure under a portrait of Che Guevara (how tasteless to hang a murderer’s portrait on the wall!) in Marc’s cozy but messy apartment. Maybe Marc was an impostor. Or maybe he was her great love story, and she passed it by. She’ll never know.

  OF COURSE SHE had that life, the one that ended on the floor by the front door. She would have liked to make that life completely real through love: to give her all and get the world.

  She saw black for a moment. She knocked a book from the shelf as she walked by, bent to pick it up, and straightened up again. She smiled blindly at her coworkers. The world took shape again, she picked the basket up off the floor and continued to the back of the store.

  WHEN SHE MET Matias, she didn’t feel anything special. One smile across the room at a party, a somewhat pointless conversation at a sticky kitchen table when all she was thinking was: that kind of boy.

  Matias asked her out, she agreed, since there was no one else. She noticed that she liked his smile. They drank cocoa at Succés on Korkeavuorenkatu, shared a cinnamon roll. In two weeks’ time she was thinking that maybe the easiness and comfort that was her overriding feeling with Matias was the beginning of love.

  In five weeks’ time they carried the sofa through the door.

  ANNA GOES TO the philosophy section, puts a book in its correct spot on the shelf. On an impulse she checks to see if any of her grandmother’s books are in the psychology section.

  There’s one copy of her most popular book, Recognition and Self. Anna was in high school when she finally read it for the first time, for a presentation on attachment theory for her developmental psychology class, and as she read it she felt a mixture of embarrassment and pride.

  Her teacher said, “Is Elsa Ahlqvist really your grandmother? Imagine. Would you give her my regards?”

  There was a picture of a child psychiatry clinic from the 1960s in their textbook. There were researchers in the picture who later had hypotheses and charts of emotional development named for them. And Grandma. Seeing her in a picture in her second-year psychology textbook, she felt like she was looking at a different person.

  Anna opens her grandmother’s book. The introduction has always moved her. The case study of Luna, a girl found lying in a cardboard box at a railway station who rebuilt her trust in the world little by little, has haunted her. She returns again and again to these words:

  A risk to the self is always an unreasonable one, from a child’s point of view. This is the conclusion I came to after observing Luna’s weeks of painful development in the clinic. That moment when a child experiences the reality of self for the first time is the primordial moment of loneliness. It also offers the first opportunity for happiness. Every person’s existence is a certified opportunity for great loneliness and great happiness. They are both within a child’s reach at the moment she realizes her separateness from her parents. At that moment, the child is also a stranger to herself. It is only in the continuous recognition of the self in the safe, caring gaze of an adult that a child can become recognizable to herself. Recognition consists of experiences of both participation and separation. The beginnings of the self are in that rift, in that tension between blessed participation and rending separation. The event would perhaps hold nothing but tragedy if it didn’t also bring the beginning of hope that is part of the solitary human condition.

  Imagine Luna, a girl found by a stranger, living in a cardboard box, a child who had experienced unheard-of sorrows. Imagine her groping attempts to reach out. She spent her first week of treatment rocking in a corner, apathetic, refusing to look anyone in the eye. In the following weeks she clung to her caregivers with a vise grip that seemed a cry for help. Little by little her trust grew. Imagine her first smile, from across the room, her first bold laugh in the playpen. Human life in its bare essentials is about nothing so much as trust. It’s about the love that every person, even the maimed and oppressed of the world, bears toward others.

  Anna remembers a childhood moment at the lake sauna, Grandma’s strong arms and big soft breasts as she bent to turn on the hot water tap.

  Maria was five, still shamelessly honest as small children always are, and she marveled at Grandma’s breasts.

  You’re big up there, Maria said, pointing.

  Yes, I guess I am, Grandma said with a smile.

  Will those grow on me, too? Maria asked.

  They might, Grandma said.

  Then I’ll be a mother, too, Maria said sagely.

  You can’t become a mother right off, Anna said. For that you need a man.

  She was eight, and knew a few facts.

  Yes, you can, Maria said. You never know. Some people might just turn into mothers.

  Only in fairy tales, Anna said, taking to her role as the instructive, wiser older sister with satisfaction.

  That Grandma, with the big breasts, is gone now. But there’s still the Grandma that thought those thoughts, wrote those words in the book.

  The book will be sold here after she’s dead, too. People will thumb through it, read the introduction and think Elsa Ahlqvist must have been a wise woman, a good mother, a good grandmother.

  Anna walks to the escalator. She again has the thought that she was toying with earlier. An unbelievable number of beginnings slept between the covers of all these books.

  1964

  LOVE BEGINS UNINTENTIONALLY. We’re unguarded and we take no notice of the signs we may see weeks or even months before anything actually happens.

  At first we avoid each other, exchange nervous courtesies and remarks about the weather. He sits at the kitchen table, preoccupied. He butters his bread, opens the newspaper, scratches his neck. What an abundance of private gestures, what a spectrum of fine gradations. I turn away; I don’t want to know all this about him.

  I wander from room to room as if I’ve found myself in a movie.

  The man invites friends over for two evenings and closes the door on me. I hear a storm of laughter through the door, turn on the television. The newscaster on television looks worried. I didn’t know that facts have to be told with a furrowed brow—I’ve only heard about the state of the world on the radio.

  On the third evening he paints. Also the four
th and fifth. Night after night I hear him come clumping down the stairs as the dimness phases into morning. Maybe he’s been drinking. I lie awake, listening, hearing every thud, the even sound of his breathing—it’s strange and I’m afraid that he’ll come into my room. What have I got myself into? What if he gets delirious, if he’s one of those men who drinks a whole bottle with one swing of his arm?

  He’s not drunk. He can’t see in the dark, loses track of the bounds of his body and bumps into things. I still don’t know this. I’ve only just learned his morning sleepiness, his distracted gaze as he reads the paper. There are still a thousand things I don’t know about him, and a thousand more after that. And another thousand and another, endlessly.

  I hear him open the door. I lie there without breathing and listen. Nothing. I get up, creep across the kitchen into the hall and see him in the little girl’s doorway.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shhh.”

  He has an expression on his face I’ve never seen before.

  “I’m watching her sleep,” he says, as if embarrassed by his own tenderness. “I have to see that she’s safe before I can go to sleep.”

  His affection for her is so genuine, but his art is pompous. He’s full of himself, that’s what I think. Some artist. A big deal famous artist. I think he hides himself in his work the way a bashful child hides in his play.

  ON THE FOURTH day I call Kerttu.

  “The husband paints every night,” I say. “He barely says hello.”

  “It sounds excruciating.”

  “He’s a snob. I don’t know what to do with him.”

  “Go knock on his door. Tell him the kitchen’s on fire, there’s a flood in the bathroom and the walls are falling in, the little girl’s taking a bath in the kitchen sink, and you’re leaving the country. That’ll get him downstairs.”

  “I doubt it.”

  I WORK UP my indignation as I go up the stairs. The attic absorbs the sound of my steps and smells like a sauna. I stop for a moment to listen to the creak, remember July evenings in childhood, at home in Kuhmo, in the darkness of the attic. I go to the door, lift my chin and knock. The man looks stern when I open the door without waiting for an answer.