True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  I make my words sound like a request: “I’d like to continue working for you. I’d be happy to continue for the rest of this year.”

  Elsa nods. I see a thought in her gaze, but I can’t see what she’s thinking about. She’s thinking about last Saturday, when she told her husband she’d found my clothes in her closet. She let the words drop casually. He was just as casual, saying in a critical tone, We’ll have to tell Eeva to be tidier.

  Elsa had looked at him. She wanted to believe him, and at that moment he actually did believe it himself. She took a breath and spoke of other things, although she hadn’t shaken off her uneasiness.

  He had looked at her sitting at the kitchen table, suddenly slightly smaller, helpless. Uncertainty made her shrink, and he remembered what she’d been like as a girl. He went to her and took her in his arms.

  Love was the denseness of flesh, as self-evident as his hand reaching toward her.

  19

  SAARA IS DRIVING, Anna is sitting beside her. Saara doesn’t believe in private cars, but she loves to drive. They borrowed her father’s car. It’s not a long trip, a little more than an hour north.

  They used to drive like this when they first got their driver’s licenses. They would go to the airport and sit in a cafe and watch the planes take off, drinking cup after cup of coffee. Saara was planning to study in Berlin or New York.

  Anna still remembers the uneasiness that thudded inside her as Saara talked about her plans. She would leave, would send postcards covered in exclamation points telling about her happiness and about people Anna would never learn to know. Anna would stay home, would never be able to make big changes in her life let alone change the world. She would keep wandering in this two-block radius. From home to the store, from the store to work, from work to home, never daring to create herself someplace else.

  “Are you nervous?” Saara asks.

  “Yes.”

  The car eats up the asphalt. Anna feels as if she herself were filled up with the road. Saara hums a little.

  “How’s your grandma?”

  “She’s hanging in there. She’s planning to start a swing band.”

  “That’s so like her,” Saara says with a smile.

  Anna has to say it out loud: “The end is coming, though. It may be soon. You can already see it.”

  Years ago Grandma had said about Saara, Now there’s a girl with a strong construction of self. Saara was seventeen, and said she was planning to go into either politics or theater. I haven’t decided yet which is the best way to influence people, she said.

  “Tell me if you want to talk about it,” Saara says. “It must be tough. It’s the saddest thing that’s ever happened to you.”

  “How do you know that?” Anna asks brusquely.

  “What?”

  Saara looks at her once, then once more. Anna continues, although she doesn’t want to start a fight: “You can’t just tell someone: This is the saddest thing that’s ever happened to you.”

  “Where’s this coming from?”

  Anna is quiet for a moment, then says, “Every person’s sadness is their own. Other people can’t understand it.”

  “There’s no point in splitting hairs. Is this about last year?”

  “Splitting hairs? Is that what you think I’m doing? You’re the one who’s overgeneralizing.”

  She didn’t want to start this old argument because Saara would overpower her and she wouldn’t have room to breathe. Saara the conqueror, Saara the revolutionary. Saara the bold. Saara the brave. But now the disagreement has been announced, however accidentally, so all Anna can do is take up the challenge: “You think you know more than other people. You’re at the center of everything, you push people aside, force people up against a wall.”

  Saara is struck dumb for a moment but doesn’t take her eyes off the road. “This might be more your problem than mine.”

  “What is? What’s my problem this time?”

  Saara looks like she’s trying to decide whether to speak or not. “You divide all the women you meet into two categories.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. They either own the world or they’re martyrs. Those who’ve succeeded or those who’ve surrendered. Happy or unhappy. Rambunctious or repressed. Uncomplicated or neurotic.”

  Anna hears herself snort. She feels a woundedness between her eyes. There’s a touch of triumph in the feeling—she can throw herself into misunderstanding. “That’s really rich. And you’re one of the ones who own the world, right? You think I put you in the happy people category and myself with the unhappy ones?”

  Saara speeds up to 120 kilometers per hour, as if in answer. “That’s what I think you’re doing. I don’t believe in that. I believe that the whole world is open for people to be whatever they want to be.”

  Anna feels like opening the car door. She’d like to run away, fly over the tops of the trees in protest. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know anything about what this has been like. You knew me when I was sixteen, but I’m not sixteen anymore.”

  Fights with Saara can start from nothing. It’s the same when she fights with Maria, hurling cruel words in each other’s faces. Old friends and sisters need each other to be distorting mirrors, to look at each other and say, well, the mirror tells me time has gone by.

  Saara takes no notice of her jab and says lightly, “I can’t know if you don’t tell me.”

  They sit in silence for a moment. Saara presses on the gas, passing two cars as if she were trying to shake Anna off.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Anna hears herself say at last. “It’s best if people mind their own business. It’s best not to know too much.”

  “What do you mean ‘too much’?”

  “So you’re not disappointed.”

  “How? Disappointed how?”

  “Disappointed in love.”

  Saara looks at her in disbelief, completely baffled, as if she needs to make sure that it’s still Anna speaking. “When did you get so cynical? When did you start being opposed to love?”

  “The world changes a person,” Anna says. “Experiences change you. I’ve started to think that love doesn’t belong in this world.” She turns her head, unable to look at Saara, and continues, “The world is built according to different rules.”

  “What kind of rules?”

  Anna leans her head against the headrest and says carelessly, striving to sound casual, “Different rules. More realistic, more real.”

  Saara doesn’t hide her bafflement. “Listen to yourself. That’s not how you think. You’re the one who danced down Mannerheimintie in her bare feet to demand that they give the streets back to foot traffic. You’re the one who was kissing strangers at the demonstration against the Iraq war, the one who believed that if there were enough photos of kisses it would nullify the whole justification for the war. You were singing ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Remember? That was you.”

  “It was someone else. It wasn’t me. That girl was a child. Just a stupid child.”

  Saara is quiet. Anna looks at her in the mirror. There’s a sadness in Saara’s eyes and a cold decisiveness in her voice as she lets the words drop like stones: “You don’t believe in love anymore.”

  Anna sits in silence as the words flow into her and freeze her limbs.

  Disappointed and furious, Saara continues, “You better straighten yourself out or you’re going to become the saddest person on earth. There’s nobody who can afford to think that love is childish and believing in change is an illusion.”

  The road shoots into them and out again, the woods hum.

  “You’ve really changed,” Saara says. “It’s because of what’s happened the past couple of years. And you still won’t talk about it.”

  Saara he
sitates. Anna thinks: if she says his name, or the little girl’s, I’ll collapse, fall on the floor.

  Saara says their names.

  Anna doesn’t collapse. She doesn’t turn invisible. She sees herself fall and melt, but she’s still sitting there.

  THEY PARK AT the corner, away from the house. A yellow house in the shade of a spruce tree. In the yard are an apple tree and a doghouse. Ivy is making its leaves at the end of the house, climbing up the outside of the window.

  “What if I went in by myself?” Anna says.

  Saara looks uncertain. “Do you think?”

  “I think I should.”

  “Well, if you want to.”

  “Could you maybe wait for me? You could take a walk.”

  Why doesn’t she want Saara to come inside? Is it because of the fight they just had? Or is it because no matter what Eeva’s sister tells her, she wants to hear it alone? Eeva’s story is hers.

  “All right,” Saara says finally, and gently squeezes her shoulder. “I’m just a phone call away. I think I’ll walk down that road and see if I can find that famous view.”

  “All right,” Anna says.

  She thinks, whatever happens to us, we’ll always be friends. Saara the conqueror. Saara the brave. And me.

  LIISA ARTEVA, MAIDEN name Ronkainen, a woman Anna wasn’t able to imagine as Eeva’s sister, opens the door almost immediately, and smiles. Anna is expected.

  She quickly gleans Liisa Arteva’s features. Eyes blue, with laugh lines around them. These were Eeva’s expressions. Maybe the very same smile. Maybe the very same way of holding her wrists.

  “Well,” the woman says, as if she’s been waiting inside the door for half an hour, holding her breath. “Liisa,” she says, extending a hand.

  Anna takes her small hand. It reminds her of a bird.

  “I made tea,” Liisa Arteva says, for something to say, and gestures toward the kitchen.

  Anna takes off her coat and glances around the living room. She’s looking for pictures. There are two on the bookshelf, both of children. Grandchildren? She follows Liisa into the kitchen.

  Liisa is one of those sixty-five-year-olds who preserve a girlishness. The impression may come from something around her chin, or from her turned-up nose. Or her lively eyes. When she was a girl, Liisa was the kind who giggled in class, feared laughing fits that she could feel coming, found herself imagining her mother’s death, and nuclear war, and couldn’t keep a straight face when the teacher played the organ and sang “Give Thanks to the Lord.” She and Eeva had a secret language. They ran on their way to school, played horses in the woods, frolicked among the pine trees. They did little things that weren’t allowed together—stole the cardamom roll dough as it was rising, fed a pail of blueberries to the cow to see if the milk would turn blue. Once Liisa and Eeva drank cough medicine because they’d heard that it gave you a nice, dizzy feeling. They both threw up behind the barn and vowed never to touch strong drink again.

  All through her childhood, Liisa believed that she could cause accidents with her thoughts. In those years Eeva was still a carefree girl, putting her worries up like preserves in silent prayers. When Eeva moved to Helsinki, Liisa wanted to go with her. She studied and got accepted as a nursing student. Only later did she admit to herself that it wasn’t her dream profession; she’d done it to help her bear the worry she always carried for other people, to learn how to rescue them.

  Liisa Arteva is used to doing what is expected of her. Her pleasures are simple and her hopes reduced. Apple pie in the fall made from the apple trees in the yard—her specialty is to mix the apples with rhubarb and flavor the pie crust with Turkish yogurt, the secret to juiciness!—a grandchild laughing in the washtub on sauna night, her husband making coffee good-naturedly in the morning. One Christmas Eve after another, year after year. It’s been enough. Maybe it’s been more than she dared to hope for, because she’s always been prepared for loss, just in case.

  Anna shakes off these imaginings, reminds herself of what Saara just said. She doesn’t know anything about Liisa Arteva except what she can see, a small-handed, smiling woman.

  “I got out a few photo albums,” Liisa says, sounding a little out of breath. “Here they are.”

  She offers Anna some tea. Anna regards people who don’t offer coffee to guests with some reservation.

  She has a hard time thinking of a way to begin. She can’t say Eeva’s name. She takes refuge in the trees out in the yard, the bushes in the garden, as always.

  “Gooseberry bushes.”

  “I make jam from them every year,” Liisa says, seizing on the conversation opener with relief. “You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Would you like a taste?”

  Without waiting for an answer Liisa gets up and opens the cupboard, looking for the jam.

  “The secret is cinnamon and vanilla. I’ve eaten it with cookies that my daughter sends me from France.”

  She sighs the way people like her do. A little flat, but resigned: the world has always belonged to others.

  No, Anna corrects herself. She doesn’t know this about Liisa. She’s putting her own ideas in, interpreting this woman’s gestures according to her own wishes. Liisa Arteva isn’t neurotic or docile, those are just Anna’s own conclusions from this woman’s interest in gardening and her jumpy gaze.

  Liisa watches as Anna tastes the jam, waiting for an approving nod. Anna nods.

  “It’s even better with scones,” Liisa says. “First butter, then jam.”

  IN CHILDHOOD PICTURES, Eeva looks like a brown and long-legged country girl. Braids, a dress, eternal summer. Liisa is younger, it shows in the difference in height.

  “We had cows for pets, and cats and dogs, too. We used to pet the calves, and even the chickens.”

  Liisa laughs. “When she was a kid, Eeva always said that she wanted to stay in the country, live in the same place all her life. Then she started reading and dreaming of going to the university.”

  “Did you see much of each other in the Helsinki years?”

  “Eeva had her own friends and I had mine. Sometimes she invited me to parties or to dinner. We had a habit of going for walks together, often on Sundays.”

  There’s a picture from later years on the next page. Liisa smiles when she sees it. “I remember that one. She’d just fallen in love. I asked her about it, and she admitted it, but she wouldn’t tell me who the man was.”

  “Did you ever see them?”

  “Of course. I thought of them as a family. I went to their house often, especially the third year. Sometimes I saw Eeva and the little girl at the park. We would sit on a bench, eat apples, that sort of thing. I think that was toward the end—the little girl was older then, maybe six years old.”

  Pictures of the last year, a school photo: Eeva sitting in the center smiling and holding a sign.

  “The first time I saw this picture I thought she was happy.”

  “Wasn’t she? Happy?”

  Liisa’s smile doesn’t grow stale. “Sometimes I think Eeva loved excessively, unreasonably. I even told her that. I didn’t always understand her feelings. She said, ‘How do you love reasonably? Why would you even want to? There’s no such thing.’ Maybe I thought that each person should live so that they won’t lose themselves to another person, won’t start living entirely other people’s lives. It’s something a person has to learn in order to get on in life. You can’t put someone else before your own survival.”

  “Did she want to learn to live like that?”

  Liisa laughs. “Hardly. She said what was life for if not to lose yourself to other people and find yourself in other people. She said that after they had tried to be together and he had left. I told her that she should have been more careful, should find meaning in her life some other way.”

  “They tried to be together
?”

  “Yes. They tried. And when it was all over, when nothing came of it, I said that she should try to learn to live differently, and she said, ‘What’s the point of being a person then? We might as well live and die alone.’”

  Anna lets herself think about Linda. In the beginning Linda ordered her around, and she obeyed because she didn’t yet dare to say no. Later she learned to say no, to say no and love at the same time. Was it unreasonable love? Was it excessive?

  Liisa picks crumbs up from her plate. Maybe she’s thinking that Anna is disappointed in her story of Eeva.

  Anna thinks about what Saara said. Maybe she was right, maybe I’ve stopped believing in love. What kind of person am I, then? A poor one.

  Why can’t Anna believe in all that with Matias? Why does she turn away again and again?

  She can’t bring herself to ask Liisa Arteva the most important question: how did it all end?

  They say good-bye on the porch the way people who visit each other’s lives for a moment do. They hug and say I’ll see you, even though they both know that they will never meet again. Anna can almost see the relief in Liisa’s eyes.

  “Well?” Saara asks when she gets in the car.

  “I tasted some gooseberry jam,” Anna says. “I got a phone number.”

  Kerttu Palovaara is just a made-up name. Anna has the real Kerttu Palovaara’s phone number in her pocket. The real Kerttu Palovaara’s name is Katariina Aavamaa and she lives in Helsinki, in Eira. Anna could call her right now, but she doesn’t know if she wants to. Maybe she wants to stick to her imagination.

  “So,” Saara says. “Let’s go home.”

  1967

  SUMMER RIPENS SLOWLY. The radio on the sauna porch is always on, pouring out the newest song by those insects from Britain over and over. It starts with the familiar strains of revolution and then changes to tidings of joy. As July quickens people start to believe in the song little by little, coming together in droves. Girls don’t bother to put on undergarments anymore. Men’s hair and beards are longer than before. Someone has invented the idea that there’ll be no peace without love, and whispered it in someone’s ear on a street corner. Everyone’s consciousness expands, the heavens ascend to clear a path for new opinions—the earth doesn’t quake but hearts beat faster.