The Summer House

by Philip Teir

  Shortly afterwards they moved out to a house he’d found for them, a place with sheep and chickens and dog kennels, which meant they both had to work from morning to night, while Marika also had to manage Leo’s homeschooling. And then all sorts of people started turning up. Poets and authors whose work had been published by small literary houses or who had self-published their writing on blogs; musicians who travelled around Europe, living a nomadic life, but always finding new families or couples who would offer them room and board.

  Marika heard amazing stories and met some marvellous people – there was absolutely nothing wrong with most of them – but she never had any time to herself. She was always expected to offer hospitality to the steady stream of people who turned up on their doorstep and who Chris would inevitably invite in.

  Soon there were women too. The more serious Chris grew about his de-civilisation ideas, the more he insisted that monogamy was unnatural, that an exclusive relationship between two people was a modern invention. If they were going to take the movement seriously, then they ought to explore all forms of non-civilisation and break with the nuclear family norm. For him this became an obsession. He said he wanted to de-civilise himself, and that meant obeying his animal impulses.

  Soon twenty-two-year-old girls turned up from Macedonia, and thirty-year-old women from Copenhagen, and married couples who wanted to try out the swinger lifestyle of trading sexual partners and everything else in between. Chris walked around like a horny patriarch in a family of Mormons, and Marika began thinking more and more about leaving him.

  She had hoped that spending the summer in Mjölkviken would give her family some peace and quiet. She was starting to worry about Leo and how all this might be affecting him.

  She hadn’t imagined that Chris would be able to entice so many people to her old summer house in Mjölkviken. She thought it would seem too far away from the rest of the world, and the Aniara movement had no foothold in Finland.

  Yet it didn’t take long before the first visitors turned up. And one day Chris announced that he’d invited a Greek woman named Helena to their summer house. He explained that he’d also paid for her plane ticket because of the difficult economic situation in Greece. He didn’t know how long she would stay.

  It was Chris’s money. Marika had nothing to say about how it was spent. She’d never had access to his bank account, and she had no idea how much money he had, but she realised he must have a sizeable amount. It was money he had earned during his university days and afterwards when he worked in finance. Chris never talked about himself, but she’d heard about all this from some of his old friends, with whom they’d been in contact at the beginning of their relationship. Chris was no longer in touch with anyone from his former life. New people were always turning up, and this was also something he managed to explain with his home-grown psychological theories about evolution. He said that in reality human beings were hunter-gatherers and had basically always wandered. ‘How do you think humans ever managed to leave Africa if they weren’t perennially curious about nature?’ he asked Marika whenever she questioned why they couldn’t stay in one place longer than six months.

  She heard Chris and Helena getting up and going into the kitchen. Helena was in the habit of walking around the house dressed only in a T-shirt and knickers. Marika hated that. She hated the sassy, casual way Helena moved.

  She had decided to voice her objections. Things could no longer go on like this. She wanted a more normal life, a healthier and simpler life that would be better suited for Leo. She no longer wanted to have to light fires at night or smoke hash or speak in tongues down at the beach.

  She went into the kitchen and found Chris and Helena sitting at the table.

  ‘I want her to go home now,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ asked Chris.

  ‘Helena. I want her to go home. The others have already left, and I want my family back. Or else I’m going to leave and take Leo with me.’

  Chris stared at his plate with a smile on his face.

  ‘Not everybody has left. Ville is still here. And Helena.’

  ‘But I want them to leave.’

  ‘So that’s the way it is?’

  ‘That’s the way it is,’ replied Marika, though she could hear the hesitation in her voice. She thought about all the times her own mother had stood up to her father, and how frightening that had always felt. In the long run it had been pointless, leading only to screaming, hitting and crying.

  ‘Let me tell you one thing,’ said Chris. ‘In this house I make my own decisions. And I want Helena to stay. If you’re not happy with that, you’re free to leave. But you’re not taking Leo with you.’

  ‘Oh yes I am,’ she said.

  Chris stood up so abruptly that his chair scraped against the floor. Marika flinched, noticing how scared she was of him, how scared she was that he would assault her.

  But he merely left the room.

  For a long moment Helena and Marika simply stared at each other without speaking. Marika thought she saw a trace of doubt, maybe even fear, in Helena’s eyes.

  She heard Chris go into the bedroom, pause, and then start rummaging in the chest of drawers.

  When he came back, he was carrying a rope.

  11

  MARIKA DIDN’T RECOGNISE VILLE until he told her his name. She began to shiver when she realised she was naked, so she wrapped the blanket tighter around her body.

  ‘Where is Chris?’ she asked.

  ‘I left him back at the house with Helena. Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere. Maybe we should ring for an ambulance. I hit him awfully hard.’

  Now it all came back to her. Chris had threatened to tie her up with the rope. At first Marika thought he was joking. But then she provoked him by calling him a loser and saying she wanted to leave him. She said she hated him and hoped he’d have a happy life with Helena. That’s when he rushed at her and put her in a choke-hold. Marika had managed to break free from his grip, but on her way out of the kitchen she collided with the stove and got a big gash on her knee.

  Marika then ran out of the house, but she was slowed down by the wound on her knee. Chris came after her and grabbed hold of her so she fell to the sand, with him on top of her, knocking the breath out of her. He was strong and heavy and there was no way she’d be able to sit up. She got sand in her mouth and her knee stung. As he tore the clothes off her, his grip suddenly loosened. Now she realised it was because Ville had seen everything and had launched himself at Chris. Ville had saved her.

  Anton was sitting next to the wet road, looking at them.

  ‘Go get your mother,’ said Ville. ‘Hurry up.’

  The summer house in Mjölkviken stood on a foundation that was nearly a metre high. When Anton came running towards the house he noticed that water was running out from underneath the cellar door. The door was old and worn, made of rough boards and stained the same colour as the rest of the house. The water was coming out of the narrow gap between the ground and the door. There was a sewage drain right outside the cellar door, but that didn’t seem to help. The water was rising so fast that Anton could imagine it spreading across the whole yard, a pool of water that would keep getting bigger and bigger.

  He didn’t really know what to say to his mother. Maybe she wouldn’t even believe him.

  By now he’d grown accustomed to the summer house. He no longer thought it smelled strange. In fact, he actually liked how the varnished floorboards felt under his feet, a hard surface that nevertheless possessed a certain softness, so that it felt especially nice walking barefoot. And the air inside the house was no longer as raw or damp as when they’d arrived. The house had been warmed by their bodies and by the living-room fireplace, where Julia often lit a fire. And the bedroom, which was where he now headed, was a real bedroom, with Julia sitting in the bed and reading, the covers pulled over her.

  ‘Mamma, Marika got hurt and needs help.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘What?’


  ‘Down on the road. She’s naked.’

  After his mother took off running, Anton sat outside for a long time, looking at the steady stream of water running into the yard.

  12

  LEO CAME OVER AFTER Julia drove Marika to the hospital to get checked out. She hadn’t suffered any serious injuries, but when the police came to arrest Chris and interview Marika, who agreed to file charges against him, they suggested that she go into town to have a doctor look at her knee.

  Anton had listened to the grown-ups talking and understood that for some reason Chris had attacked Marika, but Ville had saved her. Anton had heard only portions of what the grown-ups were saying, but clearly nobody had died. He still couldn’t understand why Marika had not been wearing any clothes.

  When Julia came back from town, she discovered the water gushing out from under the cellar door.

  Although maybe ‘gushing’ wasn’t really the right word. The water was slowly rising and spreading across the yard, running down towards the sauna building. The water was not clear. It was brown and slightly sludgy, about the same as the stagnant water in the tarn. It smelled of sewage, and it stained the lawn and rocks brown.

  Julia put on her rubber boots and opened the cellar door. Even before she could turn on the light, she could see there was water everywhere, turning the whole floor into a shiny black pool. When the light was on, she realised the water was at least half a metre deep. It was a brownish-black colour with patches of petrol or oil lending a silvery gleam to the surface.

  The water didn’t seem to be rising quickly, but Julia did the first thing that came to mind, which was to grab a broom from a corner of the room and try to find the drain so she could sweep away any leaves that might be acting as a plug.

  The problem was that she couldn’t see anything. Even if she located the drain, which should be in the centre of the room, there was too much water for her to see whether it was blocked or not.

  ‘Everything is falling apart here. I need to ring Grandpa. Or somebody,’ she said as she came into the house.

  But then she thought about phoning Anders instead. He had helped out when Alice went missing, and he’d seemed happy to be of use. He had offered her comfort when she was feeling desperate.

  Anders was at the beach when he took the call.

  ‘Could you come over and have a look at something?’ she asked him. ‘We’ll probably have to get a plumber to come out.’

  ‘I’ll be right there.’

  Anders stood in the cellar as Julia shone a pocket torch at the pipes so he’d be able to see. Alice and Leo had also come down to the cellar to find out what was going on. Leo was pensive and subdued, and Alice felt sorry for him. Marika was supposed to come home from the hospital later in the day.

  ‘On first glance it doesn’t look as if the pipes are leaking. The water could be seeping up from the ground. The pipes might have burst during the winter,’ he said.

  ‘But why is the water brown? It doesn’t seem to be sewage water. It looks more like murky sea water.’

  ‘That puzzles me too.’

  Julia stood in the cellar thinking that the strange smell down here was almost blatantly symbolic and Freudian.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much I can do,’ said Anders.

  ‘Maybe I should phone my father,’ said Julia.

  ‘But it doesn’t seem to be getting any deeper. Or is that just my imagination?’

  Anders was right. The water now seemed to be standing still. No matter where it had come from, it seemed to have stopped rising.

  ‘Isn’t Erik back yet?’ asked Anders.

  Julia shook her head. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked.

  Later that afternoon a plumber arrived at the summer house along with Julia’s father. They spent an hour in the cellar, trying to gain access to the drain so the water could run out. They emerged from the cellar, hauling out big piles of brown sludge that had come out of the ground.

  When they finally managed to locate the problem, they were able to stop the flow of water.

  ‘I can’t explain it any other way except to tell you that somehow the water from the tarn was running out from under the house,’ said the plumber. ‘It’s not sewer water. It smells different. Not exactly pleasant, but fresher. And there’s vegetation in the water, which indicates it must have come from some water source near the house. You should probably have a thorough inspection done.’

  Julia’s father sighed.

  ‘Damn it all. I suspected something was rotting, but I thought it was because the pipes were old or the foundations had started to crumble. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded if the whole house fell apart. We never come out here any more, and it would be impossible to sell a house that can’t pass inspection.’

  13

  THERE WAS A HINT OF AUTUMN in the air as the children put their suitcases in the car. Julia was looking at the house, thinking it was a shame to leave now that the summer had wrapped itself around her shoulders and the sea was finally warm.

  The seasons of the year made her think about death. There was an inescapable melancholy linked to the end of the summer holidays.

  Erik had phoned earlier in the morning. He wanted to stay in Helsinki because he was trying to sort out his job situation. That was fine with her. They would talk when she got home. Or maybe they wouldn’t. She wasn’t yet sure.

  Anders had promised to ride with them to Helsinki.

  ‘I can’t stay here. Kati needs to go back to the city to see her kids. It wouldn’t be good for her to stay here all autumn,’ he said.

  Anders went to Kati’s to say goodbye while Julia waited in the yard. Julia had hoovered the whole house using an old vacuum cleaner she’d found in the attic. When she cleaned the front hall she’d caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and almost flinched. She found it hard to accept that she was actually that person looking back at her. A woman who would soon turn thirty-six and who had apparently gone through some sort of mild depression, or maybe it was a completely ordinary case of writer’s block.

  She thought about that as she cleaned the house, about how unnecessary it was. Nobody felt happier if she went around stewing in her own hopelessness. She needed to roll up her sleeves and pull herself out of it. She should finish writing her novel instead of wandering about like some restless ghost, with an unspecified sense of dissatisfaction.

  She raised her arms and stretched, easing the muscles in the back of her neck. This autumn would be better than last year’s.

  Anton came into the house.

  ‘Mamma?’

  ‘Yes, sweetie?’

  ‘Do you think we’ll come back here next summer?’

  Julia looked at him.

  ‘I don’t know. Would you like that?’

  Anton thought for a moment.

  ‘I could come back. It’s a nice place.’

  Julia nodded.

  ‘Sure, we can come back.’

  Julia drove the first part of the way. She preferred to take the small roads in Ostrobothnia because that was less stressful than the highway between Tammerfors and Helsinki. They listened to the radio. On the news they heard that the month of July had been the hottest since the first records were kept back in the 1800s.

  ‘They’re probably right, you know,’ said Anders. ‘Chris and the others, I mean. I have no doubt that the climate is going to hell. And just like they said, there’s not much we can do about it.’

  Anton leaned forward from the back seat.

  ‘Mamma? Do you think we’re going to see the end of the world?’

  Julia turned around to look at him.

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not the end of the world, but you may see a lot of big changes happening on earth during your lifetime. With refugees arriving from different countries. And it’s going to get warmer in Finland,’ said Julia.

  She looked out at the yellow fields, at the flat acres, and the typical barns of Ostrobothnia.

  T
hey had driven past Nykarleby, and a tractor was now moving slowly on the road ahead of them. Julia accelerated to pass it, not noticing the oncoming vehicle until it was too late. She had to swerve to avoid hitting the car.

  ‘Julia!’ shouted Anders. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, thinking they hadn’t been in any danger, even though it might have seemed as if they were. There was plenty of room on the road, and the other car had also veered to the side. It might have looked dramatic, but they’d been perfectly safe inside the car the whole time.

  Tiina Nunnally has translated more than sixty works of fiction from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. She has received numerous awards for her translations, including the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in New Mexico.

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