“What’s the matter with you?” Eleonoora huffed. “You’re like a child.”
“Out. Get out of here,” her mother yelled. “Leave me in peace.”
Eleonoora was closing the drapes, her hand halfway raised, paralyzed by the command. She looked at her mother, baffled.
“Why don’t you get crabby with Dad? Why are you never like this with anyone else? Don’t you know how hard this is?”
The question came out as an accusation. Suddenly her mother looked angry.
“So this is about your pain now? I’m the one who’s dying.”
“And you won’t let anybody help you. You just make it harder to help.”
“How are you supposed to help me?” Elsa said. She waited a moment, then said the heaviest thing: “Everyone dies alone.”
For the first time Eleonoora saw helplessness in her mother’s face. For some reason she answered it harshly, maybe because she wanted to quickly bury her mother’s words with her own: “And you can die all by yourself if you keep this up. Let me know when you’ve decided whether to accept any help or not.”
She closed the door louder than she meant to. Tears came as soon as she left the room.
She had cried in these rooms when she was five years old, shouted accusations at her mother as a teenager, slammed doors, maybe this very door. She had run out into the hallway and raged. It seemed like it had all happened just a moment ago. Sometimes she had been so vehemently angry with her mother and father that even she wondered where it came from.
She went into the kitchen, opened the dishwasher, ran water in the sink. This was an old habit, washing dishes and crying and feeling she had been mistreated. When she washed dishes she could court martyrdom, the running water and choreographed movements helped the feeling come. There were two wineglasses on the counter with a little wine in the bottom.
She opened the trash cupboard door. There was an empty Syrah bottle.
Before she had time to think she had grabbed the bottle and was on her way to the bedroom.
“What’s this? Have you been drinking wine?”
Her mother looked as if she didn’t understand the question.
“You drink some wine and then you complain that you don’t feel well, is that it? Who with, Anna?”
“With your father. I’m a grown woman. I can have one glass of wine.”
“Not when you’re in this condition you can’t.”
“You don’t know anything about this,” her mother said in a strangled voice. “You think you know about this kind of pain, but you know nothing. You know nothing.”
Eleonoora was quiet, the bottle dangling from her hand, dripping red drops on the floor.
There was anger in her mother’s eyes. The thought came to Eleonoora that she would be relieved when her mother died, secretly relieved, if not downright happy. She shoved the thought aside in the nick of time, before it had a chance to show itself.
“You wouldn’t believe how happy I would be to take some of your pain for you. If it were possible I’d even take all of it.”
Suddenly she remembered the helplessness that had surrounded her when Anna was small and experienced her first pain.
Sometimes it had felt like every one of Anna’s cries carried her farther away.
When Anna was two years old she had burned her fingers on the oven. They were making gingerbread cookies and she had been careless, letting Anna watch the light-brown stars puff up in the heat of the oven. As Eleonoora took the pan out of the oven, Anna pointed with her little finger at one of the star’s points. She’d turned her back for just a moment, a second, leaving the oven door open behind her. And while her back was turned, the little girl grabbed the oven door for support.
A stupefied look, bewildered. As if she felt betrayed. Eleonoora felt like she was the one who had betrayed her. She had made her daughter believe that baking would be fun, that life would be fun. There she stood with her gingerbread, smiling, while her daughter was experiencing horrible agony. Being betrayed, the incomprehension at being left alone, the reality of her own pain, all of it showed in the little girl’s face for a hundredth of a second.
It was the first time that Eleonoora had simply seen Anna for her own self. My daughter, who came from me, but completely her own self.
At the same time Eleonoora realized she would never be able to completely protect her from harm. Then Anna had started to cry.
They had to take her to the hospital—the burn had formed large white blisters. They had to lance the blisters every night for a week and coat her hands with thick medicated cream. And every evening Anna cried bitterly.
Anna always stopped crying once Eleonoora comforted her long enough, always. But Eleonoora could always see that stranger inside Anna, that other person developing little by little, differentiating herself with every sob.
Eleonoora looked at her mother and reached out a hand helplessly. “Tell me what I can do. Tell me.”
Her mother was quiet for a moment, then patted the edge of the bed. “Come here.”
She took Eleonoora in her arms. She gave in. They would lie side by side like this when Eleonoora was a child.
“Your father can’t bear this,” her mother said. “He pretends to be strong, but he can’t bear it, I can see that.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“You don’t know.”
“What? Hasn’t he always been here? Decade after decade. Hasn’t he always stayed close to you? That’s not a small thing.”
Her mother looked out the window, her face closed up.
“No,” she said. “It’s not a small thing.”
They lay side by side. Eleonoora lifted her legs onto the bed and stretched out.
She tried to put a different tone in her voice. “Did you get quite drunk?”
“No,” her mother answered. “Hardly drank any at all. Three glasses.”
“Three! You’re not dying, you’re hungover.”
“Well, you know what they say,” her mother said. “A hangover is a small death.”
“That’s what they say about orgasms.”
“Oh, is that what it was?”
Eleonoora finally got it out. She dropped the sentence carelessly, as if it were one of many: “I don’t want you to go.”
“I’m not going yet,” her mother said. “Not quite yet.”
They heard the front door open. Maria yoo-hooed to them, came to the bedroom doorway. Anna followed her.
“How are you feeling?” Maria immediately asked.
“Just gathering some strength here,” Elsa answered.
“More pain meds?” Maria asked Eleonoora, as if she were her assistant at the hospital.
“Something else. Medicine’s not what we need,” Elsa answered lightheartedly. “We need a song. My sedimentation rate’s over twenty and my CRP has risen to a hundred. I ought to get a song for that, ‘The Ballad of CRP.’”
Anna was finally brave enough to come into the room. She went to the foot of the bed and pinched her mother’s toes affectionately.
“We brought a song with us, just in case. How does that rhyme go?”
“The rhyme for when you’re hurt,” Maria said, pleased.
Eleonoora said the first verse.
“Uh-huh,” Elsa said, suddenly glum.
“What?” Eleonoora said. “Don’t you want us to say it?”
“Haven’t we heard it enough?” her mother said.
“What do you mean?” Maria asked, uncomprehending. “What do you mean enough?”
Eleonoora looked at Maria, then at Anna. Anna’s hand was still on her foot. Anna looked at her, then at her grandmother.
“What is it?” Eleonoora said, looking at each of the girls in turn. “What’s going on here?”
Anna smiled and Eleonoora made a note of the nervousness on her face.
ELEONOORA DIDN’T START to cry until they were walking to the car.
For some reason the car alarm went off. She quickly tried to punch in the code, but the siren shrieked, piercing, reached whining into their ears and stayed there, ringing.
Maria asked something over the noise, and then the tears finally came. Maria came around the car to where she was and took her in her arms. This was the kind of daughter she’d raised. This girl who came without question, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that mothers break down sometimes, mothers who have to worry about the groceries and the dishes and the cleaning and the medicines and the car alarm, all the while enduring their own mother’s temper and peevishness that only just manages to hide the reality underneath—the slow but inevitable journey toward oblivion.
The lights flashed, the siren howled.
“Shhh, it’s all right, it’s OK,” Maria said, as if things had always been this way, as if she’d always had her arms around her.
Eleonoora looked at Anna, recognized that same helplessness in her gaze that she’d often seen when Anna was in pain. On the day of the oven door when she was a child, on the day when she said she’d been lying on the floor for more than a week.
She saw Anna’s hesitation, then she closed her eyes and left the world alone for a moment.
11
ANNA IS SITTING on the sauna bench next to her mother.
Her mother throws some steam on the stove. Nothing bad can happen as long as the steam surrounds them. The walls of the old sauna sigh.
“It heated up all right, even though the floor’s rotten,” her mother says.
They’ve driven west in the car, stopped at the village store, exchanged the news with the shopkeeper, bought a fish twice as big as they need out of politeness. The cabin door squeaked as it always does. The mice, if there were any, ran away. Her grandfather’s paintings greeted them, carrying all the winter moments they’d spent here in empty rooms with no one looking at them.
This is where her grandfather brought his most daring experiments, the ones where the moment of creative vision stood out, left raw and half-finished like the rough knots in the floorboards.
Impasto experiments, combinations of different mediums that had proved unworkable. A strange, obsessive series of canvases where he’d practiced splatter-and-drip techniques is stacked under the old bed in the basement. Splashes like wine thrown against a wall, color after color, then scraped with a spatula or palette knife to bring out shapes, notches, scratches, outlines of figures.
There are more works from over the years in the shed, not all of them his. Sometimes an artist friend of his from Lapland would stay here for weeks and paint, drunk and feverish, covering the walls of the shed with images—a reindeer swimming across a lake, the sun shining like a ball of fire.
“I think I’ll shake off my winter coat,” Anna says.
It’s a challenge.
“You’re crazy,” her mother says laughingly.
She recognizes the tone in her mother’s voice. More goading than dissuading.
“Will you wash my back first?” her mother asks.
There’s goodwill everywhere. On the walls, in the washbasin, in the bar of soap, still doggedly mint green in spite of changing fashions.
Her mother stands in front of her. Her back is humble. You can see in it that she doesn’t make a fuss about her own worries, but she gathers up the sorrows from other people’s pathways and crossroads.
“Your back’s quite narrow,” Anna says impulsively.
She pours a ladle of hot water into the washbasin and squeezes in a mixture of marsh tea and jasmine scent. The bath mitt is stiff. She dips it in the basin and feels the water come in and wet the spaces between her fingers. She rubs clockwise in long, gentle strokes. A memory comes to her. She was sick one morning, threw up before it was time to leave for day care. Her mother told her to lie down and rubbed her back. Broad, gentle circles until the bad feeling gradually subsided.
If someone had asked her, Anna would have been able to draw all the marks on her mother’s back on white paper. Two moles down low, a scar farther up that she got as a child in the fire at Tammilehto. A flaked cross shape, like a brand.
Anna strokes the surface of the scar. As a child she wanted to hear the story over and over. It was as fascinating as the story of her birth. Her mother as a child—that alone was incomprehensible. How could her mother have been a helpless child, a child in danger?
Who rescued you? Anna would always ask.
Dad. He ran inside and found me in the smoke.
Just in time, right? Just before you were going to . . .
She couldn’t say the word, but she had to go toward it. She couldn’t conceive of it: a mother who wasn’t yet a mother, her mother as a child, in danger of dying.
Where was Grandma?
In the sauna.
But she didn’t see that the cabin was burning?
No.
What happened then?
Then they took me to the hospital. Mom and Dad sat up next to my bed, and when I woke up I saw Mom looking at me, and I’ve never seen such relief on anyone’s face.
And the house burned to the ground, didn’t it? Poof, it just burned to the ground and you had to build a new one.
It didn’t quite burn to the ground.
But a little bit, a little bit to the ground, right? And it left a mark on you, on your back, a magic mark that protects you forever and ever and ever from anything bad so nothing terrible can ever happen to you again?
Yes, it might be that kind of mark.
Anna draws a tender circle around the scar with the bath mitt.
“Does this ever hurt?”
“Sometimes,” her mother says in a faint voice, lost in herself and in the moment. “If I’m in the sun too long.”
“You should put lotion on it,” Anna says. “I’ll put some on after the sauna, once you’ve dried yourself.”
How small her mother is, like a baby chick, hunched a little, with her arms wrapped around herself.
“Did I tell you about when your father and I were in Istanbul last year, and we went to the Hagia Sofia? Did I tell you about the woman who came up and talked to us?”
“No. You told me about the murals you saw there, and the church with the mosque layered over it. Dad talked about it for weeks afterward.”
Anna imitates her father’s lecturer’s voice, the way he pours out facts and paints broad strokes of thought whenever he gets excited. “There’s no other place where Europe is such a caricature of itself as in Istanbul. The soccer match, the church, the mosque, the cafe, go anywhere and you see an inadvertent microcosm of Europe. You have to go to the fringes to see what’s in the center.”
Her mother laughs. “Not bad. He was already preaching about that while we were on the trip.”
Anna sees her mother in profile. She looks just like a child when she laughs. Whenever Dad starts speechifying a tenderness comes into her eyes.
“Your father wanted to go upstairs but I had to go to the restroom so I left before him. And while I was standing in line I took off my sweater, and this woman came up and spoke to me. I think she was American, from her accent. She said, ‘You bear a cross on your shoulder. Did something horrible happen to you?’”
“Strange woman.”
Her mother is quiet, leaning her back into the sponge like a cat leaning against the person petting it.
WET FEET ON the gray wood of the dock. Anna runs to the end of the dock, the familiar sound of the boards banging. Her mother comes after her, protective and encouraging at the same time.
“Don
’t go too far!”
The water’s cold. It locks up her breathing for a moment. The shock bursts out in a laugh that spreads across the surface of the water. There’s a bashful, early summer moon in the sky. The laugh reaches all the way to its skewed crescent. She breathes, gasps a little and feels a cool mass of water take a gentle stab at her belly.
“Is it cold?” her mother shouts excitedly.
Cold, old, the forest echoes.
This might be the most valiant thing that Anna has ever done. Her mother on the dock and Anna here, in the arms of the water, as safe as if she were floating in a womb and yet precarious, at the mercy of the world, out of her mother’s reach.
“Yes!” she shouts.
“Turn around now,” her mother coaxes.
“In a minute,” she breathes, not looking at her mother.
She turns around and notices that she’s surprisingly far out. She swims in long strokes through cold and warm walls of water as if she were wandering from one underwater room to another. This is what it’s like to be a fish! The thought comes to her unexpectedly, with absurd certainty. She rises up out of the water, her mother reaches out her hand and she takes it. For one small moment there’s nothing else.
They stand on the dock.
The summer breathes. The torn surface of the lake heals over and goes still. The silence settles on its invisible hinges and the landscape sinks back into self-sufficient sleep.
“Good,” her mother says. “Now back to the sauna.”
The loon is already here, marking its territory with its soft call. The sauna crackles, the evening darkens outside the window. Anna squeezes thick cream onto her fingertips from a metal tube and smoothes it over her mother’s back.
Her mother holds her hair up with her left hand, her head slightly bowed, her breasts humble.
“Is it red?” she asks.
“A little.”
Anna smoothes the cream, it escapes the edges of the scar, spreads pearl-like across her mother’s shoulder blade. These feelings for another are born at the very beginning, maybe they’re already in the bud when a mouth gropes for the breast for the first time, when one flesh first separates itself from the other. But now Anna feels it powerfully: it’s from her, from Eleonoora Ahlqvist—Ella—that she knows what it is to bear the worry and fear and pride.
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