Then I take my few things and go by tram to Kruununhaka, to the apartment on Liisankatu. I hold tight to my suitcase, sit on the edge of my bed, and don’t know where to begin. The evening opens up outside the window. Kerttu’s great-aunt’s bed, the wardrobe heavy in the corner, filled with superfluous clothing, the clock on the living room wall about to strike, night about to fall, the last tram screeching as it turns the corner, and I sleep with the weight of his hand a ghostly ache at the curve of my waist.
I’ll continue this other life, meet some boys now and then, have parties, pass my exams as I should, and not yet know how to wish for anything more.
“MOMMY,” THE LITTLE girl cries after I’ve left.
She’s pleased that her mother has returned. For her the world is uncomplicated: Elsa comes back, Eeva leaves.
“You like Eeva, do you?”
“Yes,” the little girl says.
She climbs into Elsa’s lap.
“I missed you, Mommy,” she suddenly sputters, hiding her tears in Elsa’s neck.
“Did you?” Elsa says, touched. “Mama’s darling,” she says, and cuddles the little girl.
In the evening before going to sleep Elsa tucks her in, reads her a story. The man kisses Elsa’s neck. He feels regret. The guilt is a black spot inside him—he uses this tenderness to hide all the things he’s done while Elsa was away. He’s thinking of me, of the way my thighs pressed against his sides.
Suddenly he’s baffled by his own strange desire for me, thinks of it as a temporary disturbance. My moans ring in his ears and cause him to tremble with both passion and horror. He looks closer.
He goes over my features, my breasts, which are small, my belly, which is perhaps a bit too white, my smile, which, now that he thinks about it, is perhaps a bit too impudent and flirtatious.
The little girl frets and whimpers because she’s missed her mother and won’t go right to sleep. And when she finally does fall asleep, he undresses his wife in the bedroom and they do what they have the strength and tenderness to do.
As they lie side by side, Elsa asks, “How did things go this time?”
“Good,” he answers, and his voice is faint.
“What about Eeva? Was she a help? Did you enjoy yourselves?”
“Yes, Eeva’s a great help. She’s a fine young woman.”
Elsa soon falls asleep. He lies beside her awake. He decides to put a stop to the whole thing.
HE CALLS ME. He’s lain awake all night next to Elsa, reproaching himself. He’s made a decision.
“This has to end,” he says as soon as I answer.
I don’t say anything.
“So,” he says, “let’s end it, all right?”
“All right,” I say.
“You’ll come . . . you’ll come the next time and it’ll be like nothing has happened. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
He hangs up the phone. He thinks that when the next time comes, if I’m still even their nanny the next time Elsa’s away—he could always make up some excuse to get a new one—he’ll treat me like he did Hilma. Businesslike. Cordial, but without affection.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK he rings my buzzer. I feel like I’m catching a cold. I’ve spent the morning at home drinking tea, bored, wearing my mother’s old wool socks. It’s afternoon now and the sun is shining brightly, one of the last times it will that year.
I open the door into the hallway. I’m not surprised to see a glimpse of him coming up the stairs.
There’s no return, it’s impossible to turn back.
He has the requisite gift with him, a paper bag full of cinnamon rolls, which he knows I like. He smells familiar, pungent and soft at the same time.
“Have you come to set the rules?”
“I came looking for a woman,” he says. “She was raised at the edge of a burned clearing.”
“There are only women of the world living here.”
“What kind of world?”
“A dream world.”
“It can’t be entirely a dream world,” he says. “The woman I’m looking for is so filled with affection that it flows out of her fingertips.”
“Oh, her. She left. Went to another city. She told me about it before she packed up.”
“What did she say?” he asks.
“She said she thought she might be in love.”
“Really?” he says. “Then what’s the problem?”
“It’s complicated. That’s what she said. The man wanted to end the whole thing before it had even begun.”
“Idiot,” he says. “A guy like that deserves to get lost in the woods.”
“A wolf’ll eat his leg off.”
“But not his hands.”
“No, not his hands.”
“What do you think this woman plans to do?” he asks. “When she gets back from this other city.”
“She’ll ask him in, offer him some coffee. They’ll talk to each other like strangers for a moment.”
“And then?”
“Then,” I say carelessly, as if I were talking about the movements of clouds. “Then it all depends on him. On what he wants to do.”
“What about her? Doesn’t she have any say?”
“Of course. But she’s one of those people who thinks that no one can afford to let love pass them by. She’s the kind of person who thinks that no one’s rich enough that they can afford to walk right by love. That’s why she keeps the door open.”
He steps over the threshold, comes inside easily, as if there were no threshold.
I measure some coffee into the pot, watch as it brews, the foam rising to the top, and then take it off the burner. We eat half a cinnamon roll and drink the coffee, though the grounds haven’t yet sunk to the bottom.
He lights a fire in the tiled stove and finds one of Kerttu’s great-aunt’s books half-burned in the grate, titled My Love. We speculate about who loved Kerttu’s cantankerous great-aunt. The wood in the stove catches fire. I change the record on Kerttu’s player. The light lingers in the corners, the old clock on the wall strikes—one hour has passed. I go to him. It seems self-evident somehow that I should lean against him a little.
Soon I ask him into my room.
THE CLOCK STRIKES four. The sun is setting. People are coming home from work. The trams are packed full of afternoon hope, and I’m not cold anymore. The burning wood, sticks of spruce, sputter in the stove.
My father always says that spruce isn’t good for heating—too much pitch. I like the popping sound, it’s like the starting gun for something, dividing time between what’s past and what’s new, not yet formed.
As he’s leaving, I sit for a moment on the windowsill. I ask him for a cigarette. Smoking makes me cough, but I smoke anyway. The pungent fall air comes into the room from the slightly opened window and gives me goosebumps. The dark hasn’t come yet. I sit at the window until it does.
I’ll take love. It’s what I want, and I’m going to take it.
There’s another feeling that takes shape as I sit here on the windowsill. It’s bound up with the melancholy that hovers behind the feeling of love. It concerns Elsa, and its name is guilt.
AFTER THAT FIRST time, we occasionally see each other even when Elsa’s in town. He comes to my house in the afternoons. He stays for two hours, sometimes three. The walls are the boundaries of our world. We rarely go out. He brings me rolls, sometimes bread. Our existence is like a long outing, we broaden the space of the day from the inside out, first by buttering the hard-crusted bread he got at the bakery and brewing strong coffee, then by closing the door to my room.
Time slides away from us, out under the bedroom door, and we slide into each other.
THE LOVE FOR him belongs to the new Eeva. Something else that develops more secretly is the love for the
little girl.
When autumn ends, I’ve already learned her. She scratches off her scabs when they start to heal. She fusses when she’s tired, hits me and kicks me. Sometimes she’s unmanageable and I have to tell her no. The first time I do she flies into a rage. I get even more angry, and afterward I cry in the bathroom.
But she accepts me in spite of my prohibitions, or maybe because of them, because when I tell her no she can test its strength and position and see that it’s a wall that’s always in the same place.
Right away, in the first few weeks, she wants me to put her to bed, wants me near her before she goes to sleep.
She always falls asleep suddenly, just the way she did the first time I was left alone with her. She wants to hear one more story, even though she’s already sleepy, insists, begs drowsily until I agree. I make up a story and watch as she slips into sleep little by little, sometimes waking for a moment, as if to make sure I’m still there, and I continue the story to assure her that I haven’t gone anywhere, I’m still right here beside her.
AT THE END of October, on an ordinary day, the little girl hurts herself. We’re playing tag while her father is busy with his work. It’s her favorite game: again and again she evades my grasp, squeals when I’m just about to catch her, giggles.
After dozens of dashes to freedom, her sock gets caught on the threshold. She falls on the floor with a smack, her hands in front of her, and bangs her head on the edge of the door.
“Uh-oh,” I say.
She’s quiet at first, for two seconds, three, then she gets up and looks embarrassed. I think for a moment that she’s not going to cry.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I ask.
She shakes her head, then opens her mouth and begins.
Her crying is quiet and hoarse at first, then it grows into a loud bellow interrupted by gasping breaths. I remember all the times I cried as a child, when I couldn’t catch my breath and snot ran into my mouth, those moments when I believed that nothing good would ever happen to me again.
She gets up, runs to the space between the cabinet and the radiator, rolls up in a little ball and bellows. I go to her, try to touch her, but she bats my hand away.
“Did you hurt yourself, sweetheart? Where does it hurt?”
I see a throbbing, shining bump on her forehead.
“Mommy,” she says. “I want my mommy.”
“Your mommy’s not here right now.”
“Where is she?”
“Mommy’s on a trip, but I’m here.”
Her crying grows stronger, the sound rising a note or two.
Something is sprained inside me—I don’t know what to do. I’m insufficient. Her crying sets off every ghost and goblin of my childhood, all the times I woke up alone in the dark and couldn’t feel my own boundaries.
I shove my own terrors aside and act. I find the words.
“Will you let me blow on it?”
I reach out my hand. She gets up, stumbles out of the corner toward me and stands beside me at first, not letting me pick her up yet.
“Come here.”
I sit on the floor. I take her in my arms. Her little body is hot, the pain has brought a sweat to her skin. The lump on her head is turning red, thin red threads under the skin like a spider’s web.
I remember the rhyme my mother said to me. The words rise from my healed wounds and hover in the air. She listens.
I blow, recite the rhyme in the little girl’s ear just like my mother did, and her mother before her.
She’s not crying anymore. The paths of her tears are shining red on her cheeks.
She’s very quiet, looking straight ahead at the corner and resting her head slightly against my chest. She’s heavy here in my lap, letting her weight press against me little by little.
If this feeling had a color, it would be yellow, and a touch of blue.
I remember my mother’s smile, those languid moments when I sat on her lap and she comforted me this way. I saw her from the outside then, I didn’t guess that the feeling was like this, so complete.
Something stirs inside me. I’m much bigger and brighter on the inside than I’ve ever been before.
12
THEY’RE DRIVING THROUGH the countryside. Now and then Matias puts his hand on Anna’s thigh.
They had a strange argument at home before they left. The words they said still linger in the air. The beginnings of the fight had been simmering in Anna’s mind for days, springing up at odd times—irritation at something Matias said, some gesture, the way he takes off his socks, tugging on the ribbing with his toes against his Achilles tendon and tossing one sock, then the other, across the living room, or how he mutters mmm, and reaches his hand to the fluff at the base of her abdomen, as if discovering the boundaries of her body hair never ceases to amaze him.
“What’s this?” he had asked as Anna was packing.
Anna looked up. He was waving a piece of paper in the air.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“It was over there on the desk,” he said. “Did you write this?”
“No,” Anna said, before she had time to think. Then she said, “Yes. Who else would have written it?”
“I read it,” Matias said.
“Why? Give it to me.”
Matias held the paper over his head and looked at her. She thought she saw sarcasm or something like sarcasm in his eyes. But it wasn’t sarcasm. He was serious. How could she never have seen him like this before—angry? She looked at the text. She recognized the writing, read the first few lines.
When I saw Linda for the first time, I wasn’t prepared. There had been a mix-up of dates and he had to go to work unexpectedly. I told him I would watch her for a few hours. They were standing in the doorway, Linda wearing a backpack. I hadn’t looked at a child up close like that in a long time. Pure was the first word that came to mind, but not in the sense of being free of dirt. It was something else, something fresh. Her eyelashes were surprisingly long, her eyelids were plump, her nose looked soft, rising from her face like a ripe berry. She already had distinctive expressions, but sorrow hadn’t yet found its way onto her face. I could see that it hadn’t. Seeing this was not like other seeing—it was seeing something that doesn’t yet exist, but that you know is coming. Give her some bread and juice, he said. Don’t let her eat candy from the table. You can play, maybe go to the park.
So we did. As we were crossing the street I wanted to run to the shelter of the arched building entrance, not put the child in any danger, not shatter that face into unrecognizability.
Linda interrupted my growing terror by taking hold of my hand. So simple: her trust made me believe. When it was all over I realized that she would survive this. I was the one in danger, the one who wouldn’t survive as well. Maybe it had been that way from the very beginning. She was the one who drew the sorrow on my face. It was her disappearance from my life that left me limp, lying on the floor for days without moving, unable to get up.
“Something I made up,” Anna said. “A story.”
Matias looked at her, not turning his head, trying to get hold of something.
“What does it say about me that you wanted to leave this out?”
“What are you, the truth police? Can’t I write what I want?”
“You left this out because you wanted me to read it, that’s what I think. Leaving something like this on the desk where I can see it can’t be an accident.”
“What kind of nonsense is that? What right do you have to go snooping in my things?”
“It was right there on the desk. The desk that we share. Don’t pretend that you didn’t think I would see it.”
“But you still shouldn’t read a person’s diary.”
Matias gave her a significant look. “A diary. You just said t
hat it was a story.”
“Same thing.”
“This is about things that happened to you. Your last relationship. The one you don’t talk about.”
“Everything has to do with my former lovers in your mind. Try to get over it.”
He laughed. “You’re the one who can’t get over it.”
“You’re the one who brought it up.”
“Because you won’t talk about it. I think that’s strange.”
“What should I say about it? What should a person tell their new lover about their old lover? Do you want to read the notes on last year’s calendar, or the year before that, so you know who I went to coffee with two years ago January? What do you want to know?”
He shrugged. “You’re the one who knows what I should know, if there is anything.”
He laid the paper back on the desk. It was between them. Anna looked away.
NOW MATIAS IS putting his hand on her thigh and not taking it away. This is their making-up ritual.
“Should we stop at the Prisma?” he asks.
He looks at her affectionately.
“Let’s.”
In the parking lot she thinks that she could easily stay here, by his side.
She sees their lives. Children skipping along ahead of them, yelling, begging for ice cream.
Ordinary moments, not sad, but not the kind of moments that you mistakenly thought represented happiness when you were a teenager dreaming about the future. Moments when you feel boredom, when a word like happiness doesn’t apply. She knows that at some point in the future, happiness will seem like an overblown, childish word, once she’s learned these other moments of . . . not happiness, but some other word—more ordinary, flat, skin-deep. Contentment.
They both secretly like the Prisma supermarket. They like the big shopping carts that you push down the aisles like steering a ship. They like the mountains of fruit and the foolish impulse buys—a hula hoop, a barbecue mitt shaped like a crayfish. They like the touching families, meekly buying ten liters of fat-free milk and two cases of yogurt, all of them wearing Crocs.
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