True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  She’s surprised at the feeling: it’s the same way she’s felt the few times that she’s been ill. Something has to be done, she thought this morning when she felt the fear welling up in her stomach.

  She draped her uncertainty in decisiveness and walked across the city, gathering her anger.

  And now she’s here, sure of herself, impenetrable.

  She looks at my bare legs, my nightgown, which my breasts show through. What a puny thing the girl is, Elsa thinks, and what pitiful breasts she has.

  She gets to the point before I do and says it bluntly, without further evasion: “If you think that what you have with my husband and daughter is love, you’re wrong.”

  She snorts. A mere breath, a sound tinged with scorn. It’s enough to nullify me.

  She looks insolent. I don’t know about her uncertainty. I only see that she looks crueler than I’ve ever seen her. She’s not fun anymore—three years have gone by since I first met her, she’s become more self-assured since then. She’s a tree with roots deep in the earth.

  “You don’t know anything about us,” she says. “You don’t know our family and you don’t belong in it.”

  I’m unable to speak.

  “Have you ever once in all these years thought about what this would do to that little girl?” And now her voice cracks for the first time. “Did you ever think about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What am I supposed to say to her when she asks about you? Tell me what I’m supposed to say to her if she asks for you before she’ll go to sleep, if she wants you to come and tuck her in.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  Now I start to agree, to say what I believe is right. “You should tell her that I’m not coming anymore.”

  “And when I’ve told her that and she starts to cry, what do you think I should do to comfort her?”

  “You should take her in your arms and rock her tears away.”

  “All right,” she says, and nods. “That’s what I’ll do. And I hope you understand that you have to stay away. If you won’t do it for my sake—and why would you?—then do it for hers.”

  After she says this, she gets up. She walks with sure steps over the threshold, the door closes with a slam, and she’s gone.

  20

  YOU KNOW WHAT?” Anna asks.

  “Hm?” Matias sounds languid. The sheet is rumpled under his back.

  “I met a woman,” she begins.

  He perks up, the languor is gone. Matias can get into a game if he feels like it. They haven’t played this game, although she sometimes tells him stories like this, just like bedtime stories, about strangers passing by.

  “On the tram?” he asks.

  Anna’s heart flutters. It’s like she’s traveling toward him, through his skin.

  Through, through, through.

  She just has to continue. She has to give him more clues.

  “Not on the tram,” she says.

  “Where, then?”

  “Here. Around here, on this block.”

  “Why is your heart pounding?” Matias asks.

  “I don’t know. Stop interrupting.” Her irritated words break through the dimness, climb up to the ceiling, and float there.

  “Well, go ahead,” he says encouragingly. “What kind of woman? Young or old?”

  “Young. She has the whole world on her shoulders, though. She has her troubles.”

  Matias laughs. The laugh is a friendly one, but it’s enough to nullify her. “For some reason that makes me think of manure. That fertilizer ad. Like she’s carrying her troubles on her shoulder like a bag of manure.”

  Anna springs upright.

  “What’s the matter?” Matias asks, amazed.

  “Nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing! Forget it!”

  She goes into the kitchen and runs herself a glass of water. She drinks it in quick gulps. She can hear herself swallowing. She thinks, a person who’s drowning can hear herself gulping just before. Matias comes to the door, looks at her, and comes closer.

  “I’m sorry,” he says gently, gently. “I was just kidding. Just kidding around. Tell me the story.”

  “Maybe some other time,” Anna says.

  She lets him hug her. They stand for a long time in the darkness of the kitchen. Then Matias lets go of her and walks with sleepy steps back to the bedroom.

  Anna stands in the kitchen. The minutes stretch out. The doorway glows in the darkness.

  One step. It’s so easy to step through a door. So easy to leave your whole life behind, the whole world. Step over the threshold and close the door. It’s so simple.

  1967

  HE ARRIVES TWO weeks later, at the beginning of September. The little girl is recovering—the only sign of the event is a mark that will fade as the years go by. But he’s not recovering. Everything’s broken. He doesn’t know if he’s breathing. He’s broken in two.

  He doesn’t bring much with him, just one suitcase. For the first week we lie in bed and draw familiar maps of each other. I miss the little girl and ask about her. He turns away, his desolation too heavy to dress in words. I go to work in the mornings; I’ve started a temporary job teaching French at a school on the south side of the city. I walk out the door reluctantly because I know that he’ll draw someone else in his mind while I’m away.

  And that’s what happens—the black settles into his eyes in just one day. When I come home he’s smoking at the window and won’t look at me. Finally he approaches me, moving his hand along the line of my hip. He lowers his hand onto my rear end. We lean against each other. I’m more angular than he remembers me. I have a scent that he doesn’t like, maybe from my day, or maybe it’s always been there.

  “Shall we make some dinner?” I ask. “Potatoes? Rice?”

  “Anything,” he says into the pit at the base of my neck.

  He can’t stand the thought of potatoes, grains of rice that scatter and click against the floor, the red pillowcase, the patter of the rain against the window. He just wants to be inside me, constantly. It’s the only thing that makes him forget. Just Eeva from head to toe, Eeva who takes off her skirt and takes a shower, then comes to him. Let me hold you, he says, like in Paris. I take him deep. He forgets his regret while I rock him.

  Afterward he rolls onto his back, lights a cigarette, although I’ve forbidden him to smoke in bed.

  “It’s grueling being here all day long. Like having nails driven into me. Sawed in half with a blade of acid.” He says this as if I were to blame.

  I get up from the bed. “Go, then. Why don’t you leave?” I say without looking at him. I fasten my bra and snap up my pants.

  “I want to be with you.”

  “Well, bring your daughter here.”

  “I suppose you think Elsa would let me do that.”

  “Just for a visit. Why not just for a visit?”

  THE NEXT DAY the little girl is standing in the hallway looking uncertain, her doll under her arm, the toes of her shoes shining question marks.

  I hug her for a long time. I can’t see the scar; it’s started to fade. She cries a little.

  “Molla was rescued,” she says. “She doesn’t even have any scars. Daddy saved her.”

  I whisper the words in her ear that my mother used to whisper to me. We stand there. The hallway doesn’t know about fires. The day doesn’t know about accidents.

  “Do you have any milk?” she asks.

  “We sure do,” I say.

  He pours her a glass. She looks around.

  “There’s no kids’ room here at all. Where do kids sleep?”

  “They sleep on the sofa or with the grown-ups, in the same bed,�
�� he says.

  “They won’t fit,” she says, and drinks her milk. Then she looks at her father. “Daddy, you can take me to the park now.”

  TWENTY-FIVE DAYS AND just as many nights. We have nights like cradles, and happy days as well. Sometimes the little girl comes over, other times it’s just the two of us. We have walks and meals and talks. He draws a little, it makes him feel better.

  I don’t know that he goes to see Elsa five times that month. Many of those times they make love and it feels to him amazingly familiar yet new.

  We, on the other hand, are separating from each other. To fill up the cracks and corners of longing, we make meals fervently, like communion. We sweep the helplessness from each other’s brows with a caress, weaving a trust day by day, night by night. It’s not enough.

  One night he gets out of bed, dresses as if even that were an obstacle I’ve placed in his way. He says he’s going out. I won’t let him.

  “You won’t let me love you.” I’m shouting, pouring the words over his face like a kettle of hot oil.

  He convulses under it. He pushes me against the wall. The veins of his neck tighten under his skin. I might have thought, how beautiful, like jewelry, his blood making his veins stand out, if I didn’t know that they’re gushing with the power of hate.

  “What do you want from me?” he says.

  “That you let me, allow me.”

  “Your love is the kind of love that smothers me. It doesn’t come from you. It comes from somewhere far away, another world. Who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m Eeva,” I say.

  The name is just soundless syllables shaped by my lips. If you were watching from a distance, you’d think that woman was silently mouthing a prayer, a call for help.

  “Eeva is no one,” he says. “She’s nothing but an image.”

  He lets go of me. I take a breath. He’s already at the door. The door slams. He’s gone.

  HE COMES BACK two days later. I’ve waited for him at the window one evening, another, watching the light change. He looks as if he’s crossed an ocean to see me. He has his gestures. I’ve lived in them so much these days that I’ve lost my own boundaries. It’s as if I’ve gradually flowed into him, or as if I was flowing and somewhere along the way I drained into the sewer, unnoticed.

  He sits on the bed without saying anything. I sit on his lap. He lets me hug him, but not kiss him. That’s how I know.

  “Do you hate me?” he says. “Are you going to hate me?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because everything’s ending like this.”

  He says it easily. Drops me like an object from a shelf. Neither of us speaks for a moment. I can hear his heart—it’s beating here, although it’s elsewhere.

  “Your daughter can live with us. It can work.”

  He’s silent. I continue: “We could go to the market on Saturdays. We could go to the seashore sometimes, drive right to the edge of the earth. Look at the waves, scream as they crash against the shore. On ordinary days we could have a dance. And bookshelves, and visitors. We could open jars of jam, build a fort wherever we wanted. No one would get mad if a little paint got smeared in the doorway. There’d be sand in the couch sometimes, but it would be no big deal. Pancakes, forts, jam jars. Nights when we can’t tell where one person’s skin ends and another’s begins. That kind of life.”

  “Beautiful,” he says. “A beautiful story.”

  “Just a story?”

  “Yes, just a story. Like a dream.”

  I’m silent for a moment, not breathing. “Can I see her again? Just once? Just one more time?”

  He doesn’t answer right away. “I have to ask Elsa,” he says finally. “Elsa can decide.”

  He gets up. I follow him. He goes to wash his face because he suddenly feels that he can’t see properly. But he can see; he sees Elsa. Elsa is in his mind, more clearly delineated than ever.

  While he’s in the bathroom, I hide his shoes in the oven. I want him to be stuck to the floor. I get some syrup from the kitchen cupboard and pour it over his legs. He grabs the bottle out of my hand and throws it across the room. It hits the wall and spatters a senseless pattern there. I get some milk and pour that; he throws that, too. I get a bottle of red wine, pour it on his feet; the bottle shatters as it hits the wall. Too purple to look like blood; a festive splash like an exclamation mark in celebration of life. He thinks I’ve lost my senses. What art. Trivial, unpredictable.

  We stand facing each other for a minute, five minutes, a whole hour. The sun sets, the night trails in through the window. The buildings crumble around us. I bite him on the collarbone and leave a broken line. He shakes me. The world falls away like a scrim, except that’s not true: the trees are there in the yard, the sky is in its place. He pulls me quite close to him again. I don’t intend to let him go. He’ll have to let me go. I sink to the floor, cling to his legs. He drags me down the hallway. The trip to the door takes three years and four months, as long as this has lasted. It takes forty years because that’s how long everything continues even after it’s over. Decades later he’ll be amazed that he’s still on his way down this hallway.

  I throw myself in front of the door. He opens the door and steps over me. He closes the door. It’s so simple; he just closes the door behind him.

  I lie on the floor, unable to get up. I listen to the silence flowing down the walls. I seep into the cracks in the floor.

  21

  SHE WAS WALKING toward him with brisk steps. Martti could see from far off that she was angry. She had said on the phone that she wanted to meet, preferably out. He had guessed why immediately, but he was still nervous when he saw her. The weather didn’t match her anger. No clouds rolling across the sky like an omen. It was amazingly still and bright, as if the sun wanted to record every nuance of her angry face.

  He asked her if she wanted to go to a cafe, maybe have a cinnamon roll, or why not some ice cream, although they’d been eating ice cream every day until they were sick of it. He could tell he was talking too much, but her expression was like a wall, and he finally quieted.

  Her anger was freshly created. A girl who bore this kind of anger wasn’t a girl anymore. It was an ancient anger, hidden away for centuries. Sometimes it would break out in dramas and demonstrations, in disguise. Now it seemed to have found an outlet in Anna’s face. This wasn’t a harmless threat like the ones he remembered from when she was little, insisting on putting on her own clothes to go outside, stamping her foot at the front door. This was something else.

  “Guess what I’m beginning to think.”

  For a moment he convinced himself that she was going to say something about the birds in the trees or the quality of the light, but he knew what was coming.

  “I’m beginning to think that Eeva died because of you. You did something, or left something undone, and she died. If it weren’t for you, she’d still be alive.”

  Anna paused a moment before continuing. Where had she learned this rational, cold way of presenting a chain of deduction, linked together with blame to fill in the blank spots? The worst was still to come. He could see it in her face.

  “And if that’s the case,” she said, her words sifted through with cold anger, “if she would still be alive if not for you, we might as well say it outright. You killed her.”

  She looked him right in the eye.

  The words nearly knocked him down onto the park bench, but he stood fast and didn’t look away. This could have been another kind of meeting, one of many—she with a Coca-Cola, he with a coffee. Making believe about strangers’ fates, talking about the past. Light and harmless. But the anger made all their fantasies brittle to the point of meaninglessness.

  “Don’t try to deny it,” she said. “You can’t get out of it so easily. Eeva’s love was beautiful, as big as life, and you cheated
her, used her up, crushed her. In other words you killed her, didn’t you? Admit it.”

  He wished they could talk about something else. Where were those passersby, the blossoming young lovers, Rebekka and Aleksi and the others they’d imagined? They had all evaporated into thin air, faint and insignificant. He decided not to flinch under her accusations. He couldn’t change the subject now. The early summer day offered up an astounding brightness as if it wanted to be the subject of conversation, but the vastness of the sky had to be set aside. They had to use the heaviest of words.

  “I loved her. That doesn’t kill a person. It’s not killing.”

  Anna maintained her stony expression. “Sometimes it’s the same thing. For men.”

  She looked uncompromising, defiant. He sketched her expression in his mind, made a mental note of how a grudge is reflected off the one who bears it, takes on accusations stuck in other people’s throats. Bitterness gives people’s faces an astonished look, he thought. If you wanted to depict it you should open the eyes upward, not narrow them. A narrowed gaze to express anger is a cliché. Real anger is a kind of astonishment. It gives its bearer’s cheek a cool red. If he were to try to paint it, he would give the red a milkiness, an opaque quality.

  Anna gathered up her accusations.

  “Your love was the kind of love that made her disappear. Don’t you ever think you might bear some responsibility for that?”

  “No one can take responsibility for another person’s disintegration.”

  Anna didn’t hesitate in her answer. “Love is an immense responsibility toward another person. So don’t try to deny that you killed her.”

  It was a senseless argument. It shocked him. He saw the scene from the point of view of people passing by: an old man and a young woman harping on overwrought, larger-than-life matters. But all of it had been left unsaid before. Never had he spoken so openly about these things. Never had anyone demanded to know what he thought about it, and he hadn’t ever really worked it out for himself, either. But now he was sure what he thought. And he was almost just as sure that it was exactly what Anna needed to know, maybe more than Eeva ever had.