True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  “What?”

  “I just wanted to know how much longer.”

  He looks at me like he doesn’t understand the question, like I’m a strange, talking doll.

  “I don’t know—what do you mean?”

  “The little girl’s asleep.”

  “So?”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “How should I know? You can decide for yourself—you have the whole evening free. You could go for a walk or something.”

  “I can’t, I have a hole in my shoe.”

  “Invite a friend over.”

  “They’re all at a party, or engaged, or on their way to the justice of the peace.”

  He looks at me critically.

  “Come here,” he says, pulling me inside. He takes me by the shoulders and leads me to his painting. “Look.”

  He’s eager, strangely bold—it comes from the hours of working, the surge of self-confidence. He’s never touched me before.

  “What do you think?”

  The painting is ridiculous. I don’t understand it at all, and I let him know it. “Lines and circles,” I say simply. “I see lines and circles.”

  I exaggerate my nonchalance a bit, maybe I feel I should choose a side and stick to it.

  “Maybe you don’t care for art,” he sneers.

  I pounce on his dismissive tone with sarcasm, like Kerttu in her more self-important moments: “Certainly not this kind. What is this supposed to be a picture of?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “Art doesn’t necessarily have to depict any specific thing. That’s the old kind of art.”

  “I know what you’re driving at. I saw your paintings at the Ars exhibit. I thought the same thing then. Why not paint people? Why not paint Elsa or your daughter?”

  “I don’t paint them,” he says curtly. “I’ve never painted them.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “And maybe you should come to my course at the university. I’m going to be lecturing on Jackson Pollock.”

  “Pollock makes me nauseous.”

  “Too many colors?”

  “Too much dripping paint, a mess, as if the world were a pigsty. What his paintings need is a scrub brush and some pine soap before they put them on display.”

  He laughs. I look him right in the eye for a second. Another. The moment stretches out.

  “Good,” I say finally. “So when you’re done with this . . .” I look at his paintings, let my gaze wander over the jars and paintbrushes, the bottles of turpentine and oily rags. “. . . when you’re done creating this world, you can come downstairs. Where a cupboard’s still a cupboard and an apple’s an apple. But don’t think that I’ll make you anything to eat. I’m sure a man who spends his night creating new realities knows how to butter his own bread.”

  I close the door behind me, triumphant, hotheaded—this is the first phase of love, but I don’t recognize it!—without staying to see the effect of what I’ve said.

  WE MEET ONCE by accident. I’m on my way to my last shift at the hat counter. He’s coming toward me. I see him from far off, but he doesn’t yet see me. His walk is carefree, hands in his pockets, smoking.

  There’s a conflict in him between anxiety and generosity. Mostly he’s easygoing and carefree. He’s anxious and demanding only when he’s holding his daughter in his arms or painting, or sometimes when he’s reading.

  But now he glances across the street and sees me. He smiles, strides across the tram tracks to where I am.

  He throws his half-smoked cigarette on the ground. Without acknowledging the thought or reading its message I think how beautiful he is.

  “Hello, Eeva,” he says.

  He must have looked exactly the same when he was thirteen and the neighbor boy tempted him to go around the corner and smoke a cigarette and Loviisa the beauty, a typist from across the street who all the boys were in love with, walked by. He must have looked exactly like this when he greeted her, lifting a hand to his forehead solemnly but with a twinkle in his eye, shamelessly looking her in the eye without lowering his head.

  “Hello.”

  “On your way to work? Aren’t you done working at the department store? Or have you secretly changed your mind about taking care of our enfant terrible?”

  Without realizing it I’m propping up layered selves he’s already left behind. If I knew what I would learn later, I would have known to brace myself. This is the first phase of love, when you see the other person whole, when you can pluck every fear and desire from their gaze like ripe fruit.

  I let the warning signs flit past me like house sparrows.

  “My shift doesn’t start for an hour yet.”

  “How about I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  LOOKING AT HIM across the table I can see that he’s been thinking about me. He’s been thinking about the shyness of the first week, when he surprised me in the bathroom, accidentally opening the door while I was brushing my teeth, and said something about the brightness of the early summer day to hide his embarrassment.

  He thinks about our strange encounter in the attic, in his studio. Was it an argument or just playfulness? He doesn’t know. It was a poor exchange, he wouldn’t want to repeat it. For the first time he doesn’t want to withdraw into his work. The next time I come, he’ll suggest a trip over the weekend. He’ll drive us to Tammilehto and we’ll . . . what?

  He doesn’t know. He hasn’t thought it through. He’s allowed himself to think of the beginning and of us, but he doesn’t know what to do with the thought.

  “What about your classes?” he asks. “Are you done with your exams for this year?”

  “Yes.”

  I’m defying him, unwilling to concede. It’s a strange game.

  “And are you going back to . . . to where you’re from?”

  “Kuhmo.”

  “You’re spending July there, aren’t you? What will you do there? Burn clearings, that sort of thing?”

  “Burn clearings? Where’d you get that idea?”

  “From Finnish movies. You’ll be frolicking in the fields, cavorting with golden-haired boys? Hiding in the haystacks?”

  “I’ll be frolicking, frolicking in the fields. Exactly. Skipping into the barn now and then for some kissing.”

  He stirs sugar into his coffee with a jolly look while I spoon Alexander cake into my mouth.

  “Do you think that I wouldn’t cut it there?” he demands. “That I’d fall through the ice in the winter and drop the oars in the water in the summer and have to call for help?”

  “You’d get lost in the woods. If a bear came along you’d gripe about it. A wolf would eat your leg off.”

  “But not my hands,” he says. “I could use my hands to paint the light. The lake will be a mirror, right? With just a few astonished trees rising from the pine woods?”

  I laugh. He starts to laugh, looks out the window. An old gentleman outside the window raises his hat to me.

  “You probably don’t like my work.”

  “The lines and circles? I think they’re a little affected.”

  He raises his eyebrows. I’m being cheeky again. He ponders how to respond. He doesn’t know whether to find the cheekiness infuriating or admirable. He suddenly wonders what I might look like naked. He’s flustered by the thought and looks out the window. I don’t know his thoughts. I think this is just his way, to look away when he’s thinking how to compose what he wants to say.

  “What do you like, then? What kind of art?”

  “Edelfelt. And Schjerfbeck. Gallen-Kallela. That kind of art.”

  “They are good,” he agrees. “But perhaps a bit old-fashioned. Dull. I liked them when I was fifteen.”

  “Dull?” I glance at my watch, spoon the last bite of cake into
my mouth. “Do you want to see the light, the landscape, where I come from?”

  “I do,” he says.

  When he says I do, he looks me in the eye, beyond my eyes, and I think that a person’s face is actually a kind of opening, like a clearing in the forest. When a person says what they want, every wish and request, fear and even secret joy, the joy of childhood, opens in their face like stepping from the shade into the light.

  “I still have half an hour. I think we should make a quick visit to the Ateneum and confront the dullness of the paintings there before I go to the hat counter. If you want to see the landscape of my home.”

  WE WALK UP the echoing staircase to the third floor. I go first. I glance at him. He follows me smiling as if I were leading him to a carnival ride that he’s decided he’ll not set foot on.

  I go into the hall and stand in front of the painting. For a moment I don’t want to say anything, I want to stand here silently. In my first Helsinki autumn I came here whenever homesickness started to flow from the corners of my eyes. I came to this echoing hall and stood for as much as an hour in front of this painting.

  There’s a second forest painted on the surface of the lake, the precise outline of the trees, the brow of the ridge. The sky is pale; summer’s bright, pale light. The sky spills milk over the trees, it coats the crowns of the spruce trees in sunset. In the central painting Aino is fleeing from the man’s grasp, the pale skin of her thighs reflected in the surface of the lake, melting into the water as if she had always been kin to the fish.

  “Like that,” I say, not looking at him, looking at the landscape.

  For some reason the man reaches out his hand and touches my back lightly.

  “I’d fall out of that thing,” he says, pointing at the tipping boat.

  “You’d sink to the bottom.”

  “I’d make my home with the bass and the bream,” he says.

  “And old man Kemppainen would catch you in his fish trap, but he’d throw you back. He has no use for a helpless thing like you.”

  “Maybe I’ll go there some day. You can teach me how to use a fish trap.”

  “Gladly.”

  I turn my head. He’s said too much, he knows that. He doesn’t regret it.

  “I do know how to fish,” he says. “But I’ve never had a close acquaintance with cows. You’ve beat me on that one.”

  “Oh, is this a competition? Prove it, then. Prove that you know how to lower your nets.”

  “I can take you to Tammilehto,” he says. “In August. I can show you then.”

  “Agreed.”

  The solid walls of the museum recede from me. For a moment I see only the painting, the landscape.

  I don’t know how much time goes by. Finally the man touches me lightly on the shoulder.

  “Still think it’s dull?” I ask.

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  I look at my watch and realize that I’m late. We run to the door and out into the open air. The world cleaves the silence of the museum.

  At the corner he hands me a piece of paper. He does it carelessly, as if he were handing me a cracker or a butter knife. It’s a sketch on thick, rough paper.

  “Here,” he says.

  There it is again—his smile for lovely Loviisa when he was thirteen.

  “What’s this?”

  I’m about to turn it over, but he stops me.

  “Look at it later,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Just because.”

  He takes a cigarette out of his breast pocket and lights it. He blows the smoke at a slant, takes a few steps backward and raises his arm to say good-bye.

  When he has disappeared around the corner, I turn the paper over. He’s drawn me from behind and in quarter profile. My turned-up nose, the arch of my cheekbone, the plump edge of my upper lip.

  I stand at the intersection and let the cars drive past. The warning signs flit by like sparrows, but I don’t take hold of them.

  THE BEGINNING OF love needs dreams. It needs to wake up from a dream, thoughts that you can’t quite pinpoint right away. It needs distance, remoteness that you can bring up close by giving your thoughts the other person’s details: this kind of mouth, this chin, this kind of hollow at the wrist. And those eyes! And that smile! And that remark about the trees!

  You have to row to an island, warm the sauna, and think: I want to come here with him, I want to row with him across the lake and see a fox flashing through the pines. I want to show him the spruce trees in the yard and say, Don’t they look like friendly storybook characters guarding the past?

  IN JULY I go to Kuhmo. I travel by train across the landscape. He and Elsa are in Paris with their daughter. I don’t know anything about them during those weeks, I don’t know that they have happy days together, the kinds of moments when he kisses her neck and they meet old friends. I don’t know that there are also mornings when he walks alone along the Seine, goes into a museum or a cafe and lets the thought come: Eeva. All right. Eeva in her entirety, point by point. He orders coffee and smokes, watches the waiter, the people, the cars, the dog doing its business at the corner, the woman in gloves bending over the dog doo as if it were a rare jewel. He laughs at that. He’d like to take a picture of it but he doesn’t have his camera with him. He looks at all of this, smoking calmly and building me in his mind.

  Her mouth, what’s it like?

  Nose? Hair?

  And her smile. Above all her smile.

  The longing is an empty place under his breastbone. It feels a little like heartburn, he thinks, amusing himself. He plans August. He’ll bring me to Tammilehto. He plans the winter, too, the winter days: frosty, shouts, sledding hills, me in a white knit hat with a pom-pom and ski pants—he wants to see me in a hat with a pom-pom on top. He mostly doesn’t notice that he’s planning his winter with me. Not Elsa.

  Everything’s already begun. Everything’s already in motion.

  EVERY MORNING IN Kuhmo I take up the nets with my father. A mist hovers over the lake so you can’t see the island, a loon calls somewhere. The oars clunk in the locks. My father’s rubber boots are big—sometimes as a child I would try them on and shuffle around the yard, unable to lift my feet.

  “Back up,” my father says. “Now row,” and then, “No, back up,” and again, “Row.”

  “Which is it?” I ask. “Should I row or back up?”

  “Row,” he says, and I row, but I’m not thinking about the lake.

  I’m thinking about the pines growing on the opposite shore—astonished trees.

  “What are you grinning at?”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  I think about Elsa. Her caterpillar eyebrows, her smile. It upsets me a little that I can get her into my mind so easily.

  “Back up, now, back up.”

  I turn the oars forward and back up.

  “Now row.”

  The oarlocks knock. The oars’ blades are wet, the boat plows lightly across the lake. The wake closes up behind us and the lake is again a mirror that has never seen a father and daughter.

  “Those pine trees,” I say. “Do they look astonished to you?”

  “What?”

  “The pine trees over on the other shore, do you think they’re astonished?”

  “Talking nonsense,” my father says.

  In the evening I prepare the sauna. I have to use several stovefuls of wood, and I sit on the dock while they burn. The sky spills over the trees, the lake is silent. There’s an echo from somewhere—maybe it’s old man Kemppainen gone out to check his fish traps.

  I sit and remember the man’s chin. That kind of chin. That kind of laugh, the things he said.

  Then I take a sauna. I throw steaming water in the washbasin, wash my hair, pour the whole basin over me, it
splashes on the floor, the stove hissing under the drops of water.

  I go for a swim, wade out deep, the water halfway up my thighs.

  It begins here: the astonished pine trees rise, the sky is pale, the moon climbs across the sky, and I think, If it’s coming, let it come.

  ELSA CALLS ME in August when they’ve come back to town and tells me about a party that they have every year at the end of summer. She encourages me to come, I hesitate a bit because I’m intimidated by the kind of people who’ll be there—artists and scientists and authors.

  They’ll talk about the world as if it were an object they possessed, their voices reaching up to the attic and down to the cellar. Eventually someone will get up on the table and yell, and I’ll shrink to the size of a toy, a doll, paralyzed from sheer shyness.

  “What will I tell them?” I ask Elsa. “Should I say I’m your nanny, or that I’m a student at the university?”

  “Something more,” Elsa says. “You’re more like a friend of the family. You’re one of us.”

  “I don’t have anything to wear.”

  “Sure you do,” she says. “You have my dress. The one I gave you.”

  I PUT ON Elsa’s dress. Arrive with uncertain steps.

  A storm of noise greets me at the door. There are narrow neckties and shoes, high heels, beehive hairdos and ruffled tops, false eyelashes, cigarettes. I look around the room, looking for the little girl, the man, Elsa. I finally see the child: she’s playing behind the sofa with a girl her same age.

  I see the man in front of the window, he’s talking to a friend, a glass in his hand, laughing. He glances at me and looks quickly away.

  He’s thought the same things about me, I can tell. Elsa comes over to me. She has her hair up, she’s relaxed and happy—she seems to have put her professional self away in a drawer for the evening. She hugs me and is about to say something when her attention is taken by a woman unknown to me and her sentence is left unfinished.