True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  Katariina has already packed her things. Her smile makes the air jingle. We order lemon soda from the little restaurant in the courtyard—the only one in the village. Katariina talks about everything she plans to do, all kinds of things that she isn’t yet sure about. I answer with nods. I write a few yeses on my napkin, and one no when she asks me if I still feel sick.

  Then she leaves. We hug, she kisses me on both cheeks like they do here.

  I squeeze her tight.

  “You’ve shrunk to half your size,” she says with a worried scowl. “You should go straight to Kuhmo when you get back to Finland. Go eat pancakes made with the first milk. Herrings in cream and potatoes. Your mother can make you Karelian stew, strawberry pie, the kind with whipped cream on top. Cocoa and cinnamon rolls. You’ll get your strength back. When I come see you in the fall you’ll be your old self again and we’ll go to Kosmos and order blinis and vorschmack, spend the whole evening. Everything will be like it used to be.”

  I would say yes if I could. But my voice hasn’t come back, and it never will. I smile.

  This is the moment when the future is created, the moment when the past is destroyed and a new world is created. Katariina leaves and I turn.

  SHE GETS ON the train, finally makes it to Paris, but the revolution is already somewhere else, in another city, as revolutions always are. She gets bored, wanders for a few days in Montmartre and hangs around the Sorbonne ready to rebel if the rebellion’s coming. But no rebellion comes. Tourists come, other people like her. Housewives and professors, pigeons, winos, everyone who inhabits the streets when there’s no one making a ruckus. Katariina eats croissants for breakfast and spends the day with a boy she meets named Fabien, who steals her money while she’s in the women’s room. She’s a little upset about it, but she figures these things happen. She lolls in the park behind Notre Dame without any money eating baguettes with nothing on them and writes a few fumbling thoughts in her diary. She doesn’t hear from Laylah although they had planned to meet. She sends her two telegrams. Finally she meets Lies at a metro station, holding a newspaper over her head to keep the rain off, and goes with her to West Berlin.

  Lies lets Katariina sleep on her sofa and she stays all summer. Their door is always open to anyone who wants to come. And people do come—Hans and Anne and several others. Katariina hears new ideas inside these walls, sings different songs, and memorizes conditional statements—if A then B—statements she’s never heard before. She swallows them without choking because she’s been looking for something like this. Maybe she’s been looking for certainty, the kinds of statements that close off alternatives. The excitement she feels when she recites these statements is akin to the way she felt performing in her high school play. When the lights were lowered and the play began, she felt a strange joy. She felt like anything could happen, and at the same time like she was safe, completely safe.

  And in Berlin, inside these walls, making these statements and trying out her raised fist, Katariina feels the same peace and joy.

  SHE SENDS ME six postcards. I receive the first two but I don’t have the strength to answer them. The last four cards lie on the floor under the mail slot on Pengerkatu, in the dark. Silverfish scurry over them, dust collects on these notes from the wide world until my mother and father and Liisa muster the strength to come and clean out the apartment.

  It’s at that moment, when they’ve found the cards, the last one reading, “Why don’t you answer?!” that Liisa finally sends Katariina a telegram.

  After Katariina receives the telegram, she sits on a park bench in Berlin and feels a strange lightness. There’s other news, news about an occupation, tanks headed south out of Berlin, but she doesn’t want to think about that. She only has one piece of news in her mind. The sadness hasn’t come yet. She’s able to get up like it’s any other day. She’s able to walk down the street, stop at a cafe, smoke a cigarette if she happens to have one.

  She lights a cigarette. Actually, she thinks, she knew when they were at the station, talking about pancakes and cinnamon rolls. Maybe that’s why she talked in such a carefree way. She wanted to cover up the thought.

  Endings aren’t desolate and quiet. Endings are ordinary, noisy, a boy running across the street to pick up the evening’s bottles of beer at the cafe.

  Katariina knows she’ll be on Lies’s living room floor this evening, compressed to the size of a fist. She’ll feel a hint of sadness at the moment when she notices that the labels on the beer are bright green. Amazingly green, as if they were made of acres of rain-drenched grass.

  BUT AT THIS moment, as the future is still being created, as the previous world is destroyed and a new one is made, as I’m turning and she’s leaving, Katariina still doesn’t know, and neither do I. There’s still the little village with a name that’s impossible to pronounce, still the station in the nameless village.

  Katariina gets on the train and I wave. Then I turn and go back to my little room. My train will leave in the evening. I’ll go to Hamburg and from there to the harbor to catch a boat home. I buy my boat ticket with the last of my money, writing the name of my destination on a piece of paper. I write the city and then add “home.”

  It starts again on the boat. I’m floating. The sea is rising up against me. I don’t know if I exist anymore.

  I’ve vanished, faded away to invisibility. When I arrive in Helsinki, I’m just a rumor, a story somebody told once.

  The smell of herring in the stairwell, echoes from the apartments, all of it cancels me out. I open the door. There’s a knee-high pile of mail. I set my bags down on the floor. I close the curtains. Take off my clothes. I’m ancient. I could pull up the floorboards and lie down under them, forgotten.

  I lay down my head.

  On the seventh day I take the tram to the hospital. I have to lean my head against the tram window. The trees are nodding, the city is a stage set. Is it already August?

  The tram route is familiar. I think I see the little girl. Maybe it’s not her, just someone who looks like her. She’s grown, taken on her mother’s features. She has dimples and caterpillar eyebrows. For a moment I think about going and getting her. I could bring her home with me, feed her sweet rolls and milk. Then we could leave, take a boat or a plane somewhere. She would cry for two weeks and ask for her mother and father. On the third week she wouldn’t cry anymore.

  I feel twinges of pain, a heaviness. I’m made to lie down in a quiet private room because the doctors hear that I’ve been traveling. They think that I’ve acquired an unknown infection. They prod my throat with a cardboard stick and shine a little light into the cave of my mouth.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” the doctor says. “Just an infection. It may have spread to the pharynx.”

  They bring in a specialist. He has a beard, his name is Nylander.

  “It’s in the vocal cords,” Nylander says. His beard is friendlier than the other doctor’s. “It’s not in the larynx anymore, it’s in the vocal cords.”

  The other doctor nods.

  They do more tests on me. My arms are crisscrossed like needlepoint. They weigh me and say I’m lighter than the week before. They measure me and write the figure down. My blood pressure is low, my heart sounds like it’s fluttering to the rhythm of a shadowy woman. A dream woman.

  The doctor doesn’t know about the women of the dream world.

  “There’s an echo,” he says. “A certain echo. It could be the reason for your symptoms.”

  They take me to a white room. My mother and father have been notified. They come, and so does Liisa. I think it’s some kind of interrogation, I’m confused from the medication and desolation, I answer their accusations by blinking my eyes twice for yes. It’s always good to say yes, just in case—to agree to anything.

  Yes, I say with my eyes. Yes. Yes.

  It’s good to become affirmative, when
all other means are lost.

  My mother says, “There must be something you can do. She was always such a vigorous girl. She was strong, working in the barn morning and night.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” the doctor says. “A lot depends on the way she’s been living the last few years.”

  My mother looks at me. She doesn’t know a thing about how I’ve been living. She doesn’t give up.

  “We’ll bring her home once she’s well enough. The fresh air will help her heal. Lake water, steam from the sauna stove, milk from a new-calved cow.”

  “All right,” the doctor says. “If that’s what you want.”

  THE DAYS CRAWL by, sometimes whiz by, outside the window. The linden tree casts a shadow on the wall, I can see from the light that summer is full-grown.

  I manage to walk around in the day room. I see tanks in the corner, in black and white. There’s spiderwort at the window and flower print curtains and an invasion on the television. A person is lying on the ground, being run over. He looks like he’s just stopped for a moment to look at the sky, fallen asleep, and then been changed into a bundle on some mysterious whim. Like he wanted for just a moment to be something other than skin and muscle and platelets and plans and fears. Like he wanted to be a still, quiet pile of cloth in the middle of a riot.

  That’s when it occurs to me for the first time.

  “Gone crazy,” an old man says. He has black gaps where his teeth should be. He smiles as if he were talking about doves. “This whole world is nuts,” he says.

  I nod. I would say it sure is if I had a voice to say it with. I would say, maybe we’re the ones who are crazy, the ones who don’t understand.

  The sadness comes at night. I lie awake, although the white capsules should put me in a deep sleep. The ink flows into the room from the corners toward me. I imagine a meadow, Liisa and I at the edge of the meadow. I imagine a drop of water at the tip of a blade of grass, a sky, Liisa’s hand reaching toward me. She won’t let go of my hand. She turns into Ella, reaching toward me, and I won’t let go of her hand, I won’t.

  MY SHOULDERS HUNCH over more and more each day. My hair falls out like I’m shedding dead leaves. The sadness grows dense as I grow thin. The medicine can’t take hold in me.

  They murmur among themselves at the end of the hallway, express their uncertainties about the diagnosis. After a week they decide to send me home.

  I sit in the cool room and hear their final judgment.

  “We can’t find what your illness is. We don’t know what’s wrong with you. It’s best that you go home since you aren’t getting any better here. Get outdoors, eat, add cream to all your food. Drink milk. Keep working and try to get a grip on the world.”

  I get a glimpse of my chart; it has a word on it that I once heard a gossipy neighbor use to describe the Rahikainens’ maidservant, who went around the village naked. Her daughter had died at birth, and she carried around a bag of potatoes wrapped in swaddling. They used that word for her, a word that sounded like a rare variety of plant, a whispered word, a word that counseled silence.

  Hysss.

  And I keep quiet. Absolutely silent. I don’t say a word.

  24

  MARTTI SAT NEXT to Elsa for a long time. The sadness hadn’t yet rubbed him into the cracks between the floorboards.

  Elsa still had her ring on her finger. He thought for a minute about leaving it on, but then it occurred to him that it would be good to have it that evening when he went to sleep.

  He reached out his hand and eased the ring from her finger. There was a pale stripe where the ring had been.

  In the hallway, he saw Eleonoora. She looked like she’d been crying—she’d heard the news. He didn’t dare to make a move to approach his daughter. He also could see that Eleonoora had heard about the thing they’d never spoken about. Anger, hatred, disappointment? He tried to find traces of her feelings in her eyes.

  But what was he feeling? Regret? No. He remembered what the woman like a wise clown had told him in the hospital cafeteria: you should never regret your life, none of it.

  He didn’t take a step toward Eleonoora or reach out to touch her, he just held the ring tight in his right hand.

  Eleonoora came closer. She didn’t hug him.

  “I’m too late,” she said.

  She said it with a sputter, like a child.

  “She died. She just collapsed and died.”

  “I’m going to go look at her now,” Eleonoora said.

  They decided that she would come in the morning to dress Elsa for burial. He asked her if she wanted him to come, too. She shook her head. He agreed.

  Eleonoora was shaking. It was all between them: betrayal, anger, love, all the accusations. Every memory was folded up between them so that even when they were standing face to face the decades separated them.

  “I’ll call the funeral parlor,” she said.

  “Good,” he said.

  When he got to the door he turned to her again. She looked small and frightened. He remembered how she was as a child when she was frightened or sad—her posture was somewhat like that now. Ella when she was six, her back a little bent, her head to one side, her eyes cast downward. As if she’d just discovered the existence of sadness, just sensed that she would have to bear it alone. That there was no one who could come and tell her how long it would last or what its limits were.

  Should he have asked for forgiveness?

  He wanted to ask for forgiveness for the pain he had caused his daughter, but did that mean that he regretted everything that had happened?

  Then he remembered a fight that Eleonoora and Elsa once had. He couldn’t remember the reasons for it. Eleonoora was fifteen—headstrong, ungovernable, impossible to control. Maybe Elsa had done something wrong, slapped the girl to make her come to her senses, and then apologized for her quick temper. Eleonoora would have none of it: You can’t say you’re sorry if you don’t mean that you were wrong. If you say you’re sorry, you have to admit that I’m right, that I can live the way I want to.

  Elsa had looked at her calmly, and then said what she believed in: No. An apology is a request to be seen as you are, in spite of what you’ve done. Responding to one is the deepest love a person is capable of.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Eleonoora turned to look at him. His words bounced around the empty room.

  “Please forgive me, for everything,” he said.

  Eleonoora looked at him, through him, opened the door and went inside, disappearing from view.

  HE WALKED UNDER the linden trees, heard seagulls, cars, the shrill beep of the traffic signal. The door opened just like it always had. An early summer evening. It was the time of the year when the magic hadn’t yet been shattered, when the light was limpid and time seemed to float.

  He still held Elsa’s ring in his fist.

  He was having trouble seeing objects, went straight to the bedroom without looking around. He didn’t want to see the bureau in the living room, the plate on the kitchen counter that Elsa had eaten from yesterday.

  The air in the bedroom was a little stuffy. He tried not to look at the water glass on the night table. Elsa had drunk from it this morning.

  He opened the window and sat on the bed. He looked at his own ring; should he take it off? He didn’t want to. He wouldn’t.

  And now he allowed himself to really think about Elsa for the first time. Elsa on the evening they first met. He had been so nervous that he’d felt ill.

  He had wanted to put it off, still wasn’t sure about anything. He had fiddled with his cap and walked along beside her pointing out the birds he had learned from his father as a boy. He even said, I learned that one from my father before he died.

  He had walked half a meter away from her, not daring to get any closer. He couldn’t m
ake any mistakes. He had to do everything right, he couldn’t afford to lose this girl because their love was just beginning, he knew it when he noticed himself feeling calm and terrified at the same time, clumsier than he’d ever felt, shivering like a newborn.

  Martti looked at the glass on the night table. The open window swung a bit on its hinges, a bird sang outside in the park. He didn’t dare to make a move. He still had Elsa’s face. If he made the slightest careless gesture, she would disappear.

  The water glass, the wall, the window, the package of pills on the table, the pain pump, the bird in the tree.

  He had wanted to be a gentleman and had walked her home. A bright moment at the end of spring with the city all around them, dozing quietly but nevertheless awake, as if in a daydream or a peculiar, alert sort of narcosis.

  I want to marry this girl, he had thought. When they got to her house she surprised him by inviting him in.

  She invited him into her room and showed him the collection of poems they’d been talking about. And suddenly, without fanfare, Elsa took off her dress in front of the window, in the dozing light, dropped it at her feet, and looked at him. A fluffy mound at the base of her abdomen, her breasts with their dark nipples visible under her cotton bra, heavier breasts than the ones he’d sometimes touched after slowly easing his hand under a synthetic dress at the end of a smoky evening. He stepped closer, Elsa took his hand in hers and pressed it first against her breast and then between her legs. Coarse, moist, firm; he let his forefinger linger there, too afraid to pull his hand away, too afraid to move. And then they kissed for the first time.

  Now that you’ve touched me there, you have to marry me, she had said with a smile.

  All right, he said, stupidly, besottedly, before he realized that she was teasing him.

  Well, maybe not yet, she said laughing. Maybe we should get to know each other a little better.