True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  “Eeva was free. She was free to do what she wanted, and she did.”

  Anna refused to back down, continued to insist, as if she hadn’t heard what he said. “You chained her, you locked her up, trapped her in your love, and she never got out.”

  He heard himself laugh, though he knew at once that it sounded like mockery to her.

  “You give me too much credit. As far as I know, I’ve never chained anyone up. I don’t have the power, or the desire. I paint pictures, and I’m not exactly a wizard, even at that.”

  He wanted to explain, come to some understanding, but what more could he say? Anna had adopted ideas and beliefs about Eeva and was testing their strength. But he still wanted to convince her that there was another way to think about it. Suddenly he felt that convincing her of this was the most important thing he would ever have the power to do.

  “I don’t believe that love can be a prison for anyone. Do you?”

  Anna’s stony expression had started to fracture. There was a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “I don’t know.” She looked for a moment as if she might give in. But she found one more thing to say. “Eeva believed it could. That’s all that matters.”

  He had to continue: “I don’t believe in a freedom so fragile that other people can put it in chains.”

  Anna snorted. “People rot in jail all the time, all over the place.”

  He took a step back, although he knew it communicated to her that he couldn’t hold his own. He glanced at the road. Someone ran to the tram stop, leaping in one nimble stride from one stripe of the crosswalk to another, unaware that here under the oak trees they were having a serious discussion that verged on the ridiculous.

  “Chains used in prisons have to be made a bit sturdier than that,” he said, speaking more slowly than he intended to.

  Anna didn’t hesitate. “That’s easy for you to say. You’re a man. You and people like you have controlled what really goes on for centuries. But that’s got to change.”

  Now he could answer in a firm tone: “If you base your view of women’s liberation on the idea that their love for men has chained them then I don’t think it’s going to be a complete liberation at all.”

  He didn’t say right away what he thought. But finally he had to, he couldn’t leave it unsaid. “Eeva was different. She belonged to a different time. Things have changed.” Did Anna even want to hear this? Who was he to give advice, a mere picture maker, keeping company with shadows. But he said it, because he wanted her to understand. “You’re not Eeva. You have to remember that.”

  Now she didn’t look purely angry. Or maybe Martti was imagining that, believing what he wanted to believe. But what did he know? Maybe there was some other feeling arising in her, something he would never be able to grasp completely. Suddenly he realized—I’ll never be able to imagine my granddaughter’s reality, not in several lifetimes, no matter how hard I practice at it! This woman is such a stranger to me that everything in her is entirely hers!

  He tried to achieve some weight in his words, annoyed at the huskiness in his voice: “Your love is only yours, you have to think about it that way. It’s not your prison, and it isn’t preventing you from being free. The fact that Eeva didn’t know this made her a sad person. Maybe she was always a much sadder person than either of us. But no one can take love away from you, or take the world away. They both belong to you.”

  He wasn’t sure if Anna understood. She was still standing in front of him, ready to state her opposition. But no statement came out. She turned on her heel and walked away under oak branches buoyant with the green light of spring.

  Martti stood where he was. In spite of Anna’s eruption of anger he felt surprisingly calm. He lifted his gaze to the green leaves above him. The branches shushed a little. The sight was beloved to him. Peace returned to him as an idea strengthened in his mind.

  Now everything was said. There was nothing to regret. Not with Eeva, or with Anna.

  KERTTU PALOVAARA, ALIAS Katariina Aavamaa, is very different than Anna imagined. Even her voice on the phone sounds wrong, as if she always holds back her answers, wraps them in rigid politeness.

  It’s Tuesday, the clock reads twelve noon. Katariina opens the door and invites Anna in. Anna is ready to be disappointed as soon as she walks in the door. Kerttu the comical, Kerttu the hilarious, living in real time. Kerttu the comical’s days divided into calendar columns.

  Katariina Aavamaa suggested they meet at lunchtime and made it clear that Anna should agree, because no other suggestions would be forthcoming.

  Maybe Anna expected someone with a twinkle in her eye and a mouth ready to break into laughter, a door that’s always open. Long hair, a skirt of Indian fabric, flowers in the window, grandchildren underfoot, an absentminded dog ambling from room to room.

  Katariina Aavamaa is a meticulous woman. Her hair is frosted and cut along the line of her jaw. Her apartment is decorated in beige.

  “You must be Anna,” she says.

  She isn’t going to offer her a Gauloise or turn up the music or throw her head back and sing Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”

  She has thick, glossy decorator’s magazines on her glass coffee table—maybe she leafs through them while drinking a cup of tea. There’s a Skanno light fixture on the ceiling. The chairs are covered in cashmere.

  “Mineral water or regular?”

  “Regular, thanks.”

  It seems like Katariina Aavamaa doesn’t want Anna here. A computer pours an electric gleam into the room. A paperback lies waiting on the sofa.

  But still, she’s a woman who fulfills her obligations and keeps her promises, so she urges Anna to sit down at the table.

  They hold back, thinking about what to say. Katariina offers her some salad from the Stockmann deli. They eat, and Anna doesn’t know how to begin. She doesn’t dare ask anything about Eeva. On the phone she was able to say the name. Now Eeva’s name is stuck in her throat like a fishbone.

  Katariina stands up and sighs. She opens a cabinet and, to Anna’s surprise, takes out a bottle of whiskey and gives her a questioning look. Anna shrugs and nods.

  She takes two glasses out of the cabinet, fills them both with a resinous-looking liquid. If this were a movie, Katariina would be played by Jane Birkin. Jane Birkin would sigh unsteadily, close her eyes and let the air flow out of her lungs so it sounded like a muffled little roar.

  Katariina doesn’t close her eyes; she stands next to the table and swigs the drink down all at once. Anna has a quick thought: maybe the Kerttu she imagined wasn’t completely off the mark. People strip away former selves and find new ways of being.

  “Eeva died in August of 1968.”

  Katariina throws the sentence across the kitchen; it hits Anna like a dagger.

  “I know that.”

  Anna feels like a reporter for a gossip magazine.

  “There’s really nothing else to tell,” Katariina says.

  The words would be harsh if Anna didn’t notice the slight trembling on the left side of Katariina’s mouth. She sighs. She looks just like Jane Birkin again. Or Meryl Streep? Or Catherine Deneuve? There are so many women who refuse to be at the mercy of careless characterizations.

  “I’ve got a busy workday today. Maybe I’m a little tired,” she says.

  Anna is relieved at the harmless conversation, which gives her an opening. “What do you do for a living?”

  Katariina smiles a little. “I work as an agent. In the theater. That sort of thing. Ours is the only theatrical agency in Finland. It’s a fun job. I get to travel, maybe even have some influence—at the grass roots, anyway. It’s my own company. I never would have thought that I’d become a businesswoman, but I did, a real tycoon!”

  She laughs. Then she looks out the window and sighs. For a moment Anna thinks that she’s g
oing to burst into tears. She doesn’t look at Anna as she says, “You would think that I’d have a lot to tell you. Maybe Liisa thought that I would know things that I haven’t told her. But what does it matter how it happened? The only thing that matters is that she didn’t survive. That’s all.”

  She opens the window and takes a pack of cigarettes out of a small vase on the windowsill. Not Gauloises but Marlboro Lights. She lights one and blows out the smoke.

  For just a moment Anna can see Kerttu the conqueror in her. She may be wearing Dior powder on her nose, but you can be sure she has Kerttu’s freckles tattooed into her skin, the ones she got years ago in San Francisco.

  “Look, a squirrel,” she says suddenly. “He came! I always wait for him. I’ve even given him a name. Teppo. At first I thought I’d call him Jorma. We have an agreement. I tell him my troubles in exchange for cardamom rolls.”

  She gets up and looks for a piece of roll in the cupboard, then holds it out through the window for the squirrel. She looks away, turns serious.

  “We were traveling together right before Eeva died,” she says. “Something about that trip did her in. All sorts of things happened.”

  She continues to feed the squirrel.

  “It was really stupid, actually. We were just wandering. We just went wherever. She was happy. Happier than she’d been all year.”

  She takes a drag and blows out the smoke. For the first time, Anna feels like she’s without a story. She doesn’t try to imagine this woman’s regrets, or her wisdom. She was wrong when she thought Katariina Aavamaa was tense and meticulous. Maybe she was wrong about everything else, too. Katariina is one of those people who tell their own stories.

  Katariina’s gaze sharpens as if she remembers something she’d forgotten.

  “Your mother. How is she these days?”

  “She’s a doctor.”

  Then Anna thinks that she could just as well have said, she’s happy.

  “I used to see her now and then. When she was three or four, maybe five. A little button-nosed thing. A doctor. Imagine.”

  THE PHOTOS ARE mostly of Katariina. Eeva is in a few of them.

  “We certainly were childish. It was all about pleasure. Such long parties! We called it a revolution because it suited us. Later on I thought that it was the kind of revolution that’s best achieved in a place where the world doesn’t get in the way. On a stage, or in a movie.”

  She laughs.

  “But I should be forgiving with myself. If it weren’t for idealism everything would stay just the same. Change only happens if someone sees it in a dream first. But I still believe, even now, that true revolutions last a lifetime—they’re always quiet, and they happen when no one’s looking.”

  Anna doesn’t know what to say. What does she know about revolution? Only what she’s read in books and seen on television. On television there’s always a revolution going on somewhere, as sure as the latest episode of Sex in the City.

  Anna suddenly remembers a woman she sat next to on the plane on her way to Paris last fall. “I met an American woman on an airplane once who said that there was a revolution going on in the little Romanian town she was living in.”

  “Why was an American living in Romania?”

  “She was a widow and she decided to travel because she’d always stayed in Alabama to please her husband when he was alive.”

  “So when he died she left?”

  “She went to Bosnia as a U.N. election monitor, and kept traveling.”

  “What was the name of the place, the town in Romania?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  Katariina laughs. “There are revolutions happening all the time in cities with names no one can remember.”

  For a second Anna can see the woman who painted her eyelashes black and said, Let’s go create a world.

  In the next few pictures Eeva is in Stockholm. Then a change of channels, to Amsterdam. Eeva sitting at a table in a cafe next to a man—a boy, really.

  “Who’s he?” Anna asks.

  “Eeva knew him from somewhere. She thought she was in love with him for a little while. He came to meet us in Stockholm.”

  In the next pictures Eeva’s sitting at a table in a cafe in the countryside, maybe somewhere in France. She looks thin and exhausted, but she’s still smiling.

  “I didn’t know how to help her,” Katariina says.

  “Maybe you did everything you could.”

  Some of the photos are from later years, the seventies. Katariina laughing on the Ku’Damm in Berlin, wading in the sea, looking through a camera, unapologetic. Katariina in a blue shirt among the May Day crowds in Helsinki. And a few years later, judging by the hairstyle, Katariina with a baby.

  She looks different in every picture.

  She doesn’t seem like a family-oriented person, but who’s to say, sometimes people like that have the happiest family lives.

  When Anna is at the door, leaving, she gets the courage to ask about her husband.

  “The same man for thirty years, can you imagine?” Katariina says in the voice long-married people use to talk about their marriages—as if they themselves are surprised that something done on a whim could succeed so well, that they could love the other person for decades.

  “He’s a banker. I would have laughed myself silly when I was twenty to hear that I would marry the enemy! Or slapped myself silly. What about your grandparents? I’ve read about them in the paper now and then. They’ve both had prominent careers. If that’s worth anything in this world.”

  “They’ve been happy.”

  She doesn’t want to tell her about her grandmother. For some reason it’s important to her not to say a word about Elsa’s illness.

  “I believe it,” Katariina says. Then she seems to think of something. “Timisoara.”

  “What?”

  “The town in Romania. Your woman on the airplane must have lived there.”

  “The 1989 revolution. Of course. That’s what she meant. All this time I’ve been thinking she was talking about the situation in her own life. Too bad. It sort of spoils my story.”

  Katariina smiles. “Maybe not. What do we know about her? Maybe she wanted to keep the possibility of change alive by living there. I watched the ruckus that was going on there at the time. The television started the revolution in a way; people saw foreign television shows and became aware of the illusion. I wasn’t against the destruction of that regime—it was tyrannical. But there was a brief time when I believed in the idea behind it. And when it all started to fall apart I thought it was really too ironic that it all happened because of television. Maybe you should stick to your story. It’s a beautiful one. It says something beautiful about you.”

  The story. Anna wants to stick to her story. That’s why she doesn’t ask what happened to Eeva, how Eeva finally died.

  EEVA BELIEVED THAT everything could change. After he walked out the door, she still got to say good-bye to the little girl. She lied to her, told her she would see her tomorrow. She said it even though she knew that it would never happen. She couldn’t bring herself to tell the truth. The lie left a hollow in her heart for a year.

  But she still wanted to see the world, and she did see it. Then something happened—what was it?—that dashed her to her destruction. It may have been insignificant, a minor event, the kind of thing that can happen on any trip.

  Anna thinks about Ella. She even dares to think about Linda. See you tomorrow.

  Then she looks at her cell phone—accidentally, reflexively— and sees that she has a message.

  A premonition.

  22

  IT ALL STARTED with a harmless phone call.

  Eleonoora hung up her coat, closed her locker door, and slipped out of her loose pants and open-necked shirt. She thought she m
ight just be for a moment, go for a walk on the beach, look at the seagulls floating in the air as if they were hung there. Then the phone rang.

  Her first thought was: Mom.

  It was an unknown number. She answered more testily than she meant to. It was Rautalampi from the art supply store calling about a painting Anna had brought in to be framed. Eleonoora let her worry drop away.

  “The Ahlqvist that one of you brought in,” Rautalampi began.

  For some reason he always referred to both Dad and Dad’s paintings this way—Ahlqvist. She wasn’t always sure if he was talking about the man or the art. Maybe that was intentional.

  “It wasn’t me,” Eleonoora said. “It was my daughter Anna, remember? She wanted to have it framed for herself. I don’t have anything to do with it. Is it ready?”

  “Well, actually . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s the strangest thing, I’m telling you . . .”

  “Did you call Anna? The picture’s for her, so I’m sure she’d like to decide about the frame and everything.”

  “Right,” he said. “I hear you. I tried to call her, but I couldn’t get hold of her. I thought about calling your father.”

  “This has nothing to do with him. I don’t think he’s particularly interested in the picture. He said we could dispose of all the paintings at Tammilehto.”

  “This one’s a bit complicated.”

  Now she was getting annoyed. When she was stressed she unconsciously took a certain attitude toward people in certain professions—bank tellers, grocery clerks, boys who worked at gas stations and couldn’t find blades to fit her windshield wipers. She always got control of her prickliness too late, after she’d already blown up at them. Every time it happened she would remember when she was little and she threw a tantrum because she wasn’t allowed to eat a chocolate bar that Rautalampi had given her before dinner. She wondered if Rautalampi saw this as the same childish temper, which annoyed her all the more.