The author said he was going to accept the price, but that he needed extra time for the two thousand. I didn’t want to wait for the money for long, so I asked him a very personal question. “Have you really and truly sold all of your property? Isn’t there something left sitting in a corner that you could bear to give up? An old chest of drawers or a lumpy glass vase designed by some celebrity?”
The author denied owning anything anymore that he could give up for two thousand euros, but he thought his publisher might give him an advance on the upcoming book if the content seemed promising.
I agreed to the delay, and we made an oral agreement for the payment of the five thousand. I put out my hand. His handshake was firm. Just as I had extracted my hand, Helena walked up.
I felt guilty, as if I’d just committed a sin, even though I had made an agreement that would end up benefiting Helena. Helena asked why on earth I had stayed outside for more than half an hour. She had had time to start thinking all sorts of horrible things. I felt like saying I’ve just made a big sale, all for your good, but I just said my how time had flown chatting with this craftsman about the stairway renovation we’ve talked about so many times at home. I shot a glance at the author to tell him not a word now about the agreement we just made.
Helena tried to hustle me inside. I said I would be there in two minutes. Helena asked what I needed the two minutes for. I said that this carpenter here is from a village near ours, and I still have to work out the details of the remodel with him.
Helena said she would wait in front of the Mikael Agricola platform.
The whole train ride home I thought about selling my life. Did I do right or wrong? At the yarn shop I never needed to think about questions like that, because I knew that the customer would get a sweater out of the yarn, and that we were getting the difference between the wholesale price and the retail price. Everyone stayed warm.
Now all sorts of dark thoughts were running through my mind. They have a name: “moral questions.” God left them to us, since he doesn’t have time to be everywhere. I wasn’t used to thinking about such things, because Paavo and I had lived a rather straightforward, simple life. Sitting there in the window seat, I thought, now, Salme, you’ve taken what they talk about so much in the business papers, a “risk.”
But turning back wasn’t an option—it would have been against my nature. I remembered how once Paavo and I bought a big lot of violet and orange yarn at wholesale on the risk that people might not be ready for a whimsical color palette. We were selling that batch for a long time, but I never once thought about returning the yarn or selling at a loss. That would have been a mortifying concession to drab colors.
I bought a coffee and the most expensive pastry in the restaurant car. I wanted to celebrate that for the first time in my life I had sold something that could not be touched. I knew from my children and having watched this new world from the sidelines that there were many invisible goods for sale, but I could never have imagined that I would be charging for such a thing myself.
You always want to tell the people closest to you about big things that happen to you, but this time I couldn’t. After returning home, I told Paavo that given the circumstances Helena was doing well and that I had come up with a way to improve her situation. Paavo nodded and disappeared into the shed.
I felt like crying. I didn’t have the nerve to weep indoors, so I went into the back yard. Water came from my eyes, but I didn’t make any sound. In five minutes I was back in dry, working order.
I called the author from our shared mobile and we arranged a meeting for the following week at a certain out-of-the-way service station between our village and the capital. I explained to Paavo that I was going on a trip with my raanu group. He bought it. I had taken little trips to neighboring counties before with the other members of the weaving circle at the community center.
The author counseled me to be as open and talkative as possible at our upcoming meeting. Apparently a book is a sort of cross between a cow and a pig that swallows huge amounts of life, which it then ruminates, softens up and digests. As a result of this process, out the other end pops a solid, compact mass packed in natural intestine, a high-quality organic sausage ready for the reader. I didn’t like his metaphorical language, which brought to mind awkward, even embarrassing thoughts, but I promised to tell him his money’s worth.
I was afraid, sitting there at that table in that ugly service station with a small coffee and a dictaphone in front of me, but the fear was moderated by the two-and-a-half thousand euros sitting in a neat pile next to the dictaphone. The author said that it was best to take the money off the table so the service station staff wouldn’t get the wrong idea. I felt like saying that given how far things had gone already, I wasn’t interested in anyone’s wrong ideas, or even their right ideas.
The author looked me in the eyes and said, “The dictaphone is on now. Give me your life.”
And I did.
I told the dictaphone everything, exactly how things have gone. I described precisely what my life, Paavo’s life and our children’s lives have been like. There weren’t two words together in there that weren’t as true as true can be, so I would think it would be painless to write it down. No one could miss the mark writing such a clear account. No one could write it wrong.
My name is Salme Malmikunnas, and I have four children. One of them died when he was four years old, but he is still my child. I have one husband, Paavo. He always has been my husband, and he always will be, even though he doesn’t talk right now. We had two girls and two boys. We had that kind of luck. Unfortunately, one went and rode his tricycle into the septic tank. The service men had gone for a smoke and left the cover open. And he had to ride just there. I can’t speak about it, because the words lift him up and sit him right down here at this table, and I start to think about how old he would be now and what life would have had in store for him. I’m sorry, but I’m going to keep you there in that hole for now, Heikki.
Here at the beginning I was going to say what the difference is between a lie and the truth. A lie sticks in your head. It’s like a migraine. The truth, on the other hand, is like a boomerang. It hits you in the forehead, wakes you up nicely, and then continues from there off to the horizon. Truth doesn’t belong to anyone. I say this because I’ve had bad experiences with lying. I hope the author will take this seriously. If I start to lie, I disappear almost completely. It’s a sort of vanishing, lying is. The outlines disappear and before you know it you’re in a big whiteness, i.e. nowhere. The boomerang knocks you on the forehead and takes you back to the world of color.
But it isn’t possible to understand a person completely. Paavo and Alfred Supinen and I talked about this a long time ago. According to Alfred, a human being is a long, symphonic piece of music. You have to listen to the overture, the principal theme, the crescendos and the finale, and then when the piece is over, there is still the silence. You have to listen to that too. Alfred thought that a person continues on even after he dies. Alfred didn’t mean this in the Christian sense of a second life, but rather in the sense that the person remains in our memories.
It’s difficult to speak about your own children with outsiders, because you love them so impossibly much. But I feel like I can tell a dictaphone.
The oldest of my children is Helena. No, no. This isn’t going anywhere. I’m going to have to skip over Helena for right now, because of the big thing that happened. The dictaphone will have to do without that for now. I can talk about it separately. What’s the saying? Off the record.
Of the boys, Pekka was born first, and two years later came Heikki, the one who isn’t anymore. Then a few years went by, and Maija arrived.
Pekka was wild and free, and he enjoyed life because there was already one small person in the house. Our first born, Helena, was born to responsibility, and you never get over that feeling. That was why Helena moved away from home as soon as possible. Pekka embraced life as if it were a toy. He res
embled a puppy, toddling from place to place, falling on his face, blowing his nose and then continuing on. That animation only went away later, when he started listening to strange music and got caught up in those thoughts of his. Did he start thinking about his dead brother or what? It’s anyone’s guess. It’s peculiar how a person can disappear, even though he’s still in the same house. He even disappears from himself, not knowing how he should be, sad or happy, angry or gentle. Pekka was everything all at once. There wasn’t any way to tell him, though. Once Paavo did, and Pekka moved into the forest for two days. He came back out with his stuttering problem. A problem like that, and just before puberty. Stuttering separates you from others at just the age when you start looking for connections. Of course, we tried to love Pekka out of his speech defect, but according to the doctor, love isn’t always enough. It left such a deep mark on him that as an adult he still stutters when he gets into a flustering or stressful situation. He doesn’t recognize it himself, but I can hear it. When the money spigot opened up in the late ’80s, all that came out of Pekka’s mouth was broken words. And the same thing a year later when we entered the recession. Again his throat chopped everything he was explaining over the telephone into little pieces. I’m ashamed to say it, but I read his state of mind from his stuttering.
More light flooded from Maija than from the others, just like there was an incandescent bulb behind her eyes. It felt like all love flowed over Maija like liquid honey. All children should be able to be born last. Helena and Pekka surrounded Maija and kissed her so much that for a long time she must have thought the world and our living room were paradise. And sometimes they were. When the children were all asleep when they were small, Paavo and I would sit in each other’s arms on the sofa and whisper about our bliss as if using louder voices would break it.
I guess I could go ahead and say a little about Helena when she was small. When you’re really looking forward to something, some of that expectation can be transferred into the thing you were waiting for. We wanted a child so badly that when we finally got one, we didn’t quite know how to rejoice over her, having had to be so terribly afraid and anxious. That fear and anxiety are definitely visible in Helena. She was a serious, skittish child. She would sit up suddenly at night and look at us, the lamp and the nightstand clock with her big eyes. As if she were checking to make sure everything was true, that everyone was still alive. She would make mud pies, but wouldn’t chant “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man.” When any adult came to visit, she would go and hide under the table and peek out from underneath. Alfred Supinen tried to coax her out, singing, “I found my gal in Karelia, found her small and sweet, hey, hey.” But our gal stayed under the table. Helena laughed so little that for a while we thought she didn’t like this life at all. I remember when her laugh came. On the television she saw a little man who was walking, rocking back and forth, with a little hat on his head, running into door jambs and long boards that construction men were carrying on their shoulders It was that Chaplin guy. When the program ended, Helena said, “Again.” If they had films on cassette back then, we would have bought all of Chaplin’s inventions for Helena. Then later came Laurel and Hardy, but she didn’t laugh at them at all. No one in our family did. I hated those men. There wasn’t any variety in how things went wrong. It was always the little one sobbing and the fat one hitting him on the head with a newspaper. Life isn’t like that. Sometimes the roles change.
Helena grew up by accident. When you have lots of children, you don’t realize that the first one is suddenly at the door, even though she was just sucking at your breast. One day she said seriously, “I’m leaving now.” There was no rebellion or anger in her voice. It was just that serious undercurrent of hers. At the train station, Paavo and I had no idea how to be. A person isn’t prepared in any way for her child to become an adult. Nor for her child to be taken away—not completely, but piece by piece. She looked out the gray window of the blue train, newborn and young woman in the same face.
Now I’m jumping from one topic to another. The dictaphone is good, because I don’t even notice it. Paavo always says I can’t stay on one topic, that I’m always moving on to something else in the middle of everything. Paavo can stay on one topic for a long time. His record is probably four years. Now he’s going for a new record. The event this time is muteness.
So, Pekka had the speech impediment. He tried to be good at something else. There’s research about this. I read in a medical book that if a person has some physical defect, let’s say he doesn’t have a left hand, then the right hand will grow really, really strong. The strength of the left transfers into the right. Just like blind people have extremely sharp hearing. So our Pekka was a stutterer and started to make up for it by copying people, the way they walked and their postures. Whenever a visitor came over, Pekka would sit quietly and look at him. When the visitor had left, Pekka would go over and sit in his place and begin to imitate his movements. He was talented and knew it. The other children watched like it was theater. It was better than television. When the stuttering let up once he was older, I secretly thought he might become an actor. Pekka found his place in business, which we are of course proud of. There isn’t a direct need for the imitator’s skills in that field, but you do need to be able to put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
Opposites attract. This isn’t my own idea—it’s the truth. Maija is full of light, so she had to seek out darkness. She was so impossibly fascinated with people’s dark sides. It started with bottle spinning, and then came all the spiritualism nonsense, and then to top it all off, she took up with a negro. I’m using the word “negro” here, and if the dictaphone will last, I’ll get this all out of the way right now. If the author sees fit to use the official name later, something like African-American, then let him, but let’s go with “negro” for the rest of this session. And besides: from their first meeting the negro called Paavo “paleface.”
Yes. Well. Our life changed a lot twenty years ago when Maija wrote saying she had found a love and would like to come and show him to us. When Maija stepped out of the train on the arm of a black man, Paavo leaned against me for support and whispered that we should turn back.
I dragged Paavo along, and we walked toward them. Maija smiled and said that here was her love. He was as black as pitch and looked like a spirit being. His eyes burned red in the darkness of his face and he held our daughter under his arm as if she were prey he had captured. He said something in English. Maija translated that her love had never visited the Finnish countryside before. Paavo said that he would do well to remember his first impressions carefully, because he wouldn’t get a second chance.
Maija started to cry. I had to take over the situation. I felt faint, but I didn’t let myself be overcome. If I’ve learned anything, it is forgetting myself. The world is what it is. And this time it was big and black. I whispered to Paavo that whomever our daughter has chosen, we will welcome him into our home. We walked to the car, loaded the bags and set off driving. Only humans are capable of silence like that.
I looked in the rearview mirror. I saw Maija’s tears and black fingers stroking my daughter’s hair. I would have liked to break those fingers and stop time and the car, but the road just went on. It always does. You can get off if you die.
We came into the yard, and Paavo walked into the bedroom and didn’t come out all evening. The next morning he gave Maija a piece of graph paper and walked to the shed. A whacking sound started. He was chopping wood. He always split wood when his world was broken. I knew my husband, and I said to Maija and the black man that we should eat breakfast now without him. I asked Maija to tell the black man that every ingredient of a balanced human diet was represented on the table and that we could feel just as comfortable together as we wished.
The black man took everything and lots of it. I thought that was a good sign. A clear display of appetite engenders trust. Maija just sobbed, not managing to eat anything. It made me feel sorry for her and irri
tated me at the same time. She was my child of light, and she had chosen a black man from a distant continent. These two things were true, and it was also true that I had gone to a great deal of trouble over the scrambled eggs, porridge, cold cuts and fresh bread. The importance of food in easing distress is enormous. I’ve spoken about this with all of my children, both together and separately, reminding them that Paavo and I had lived in a world where there was no yogurt, no muesli, and none of those lovely croissants that leave butter and flaky chips of dough on the corners of your mouth to accompany your tears.
I said to Maija, “Now we’re going to eat well, and then we’ll have a long, hard talk. You’ll get to translate a lot of questions into that foreign language. We’ll sit in soft chairs and talk. We’re white and he’s black. We’ll start from this truth and not be afraid of anything. Dad will chop wood, and we’ll talk. Silence isn’t golden, it’s scrap iron.”
Maija didn’t say anything. She just held out the piece of graph paper her father had given her. It said, “You took a black man. Give me a call sometime.”
What galled Maija the most was that he had the nerve to write about calling even though he knew well enough that Maija didn’t have a telephone.
I took the piece of paper and said I would be back soon. I went to the shed, interrupted Paavo’s swing in midair and ordered him to set the ax aside for a moment because I had something to say. I showed him the paper, crumpled it up and said, “First come thoughts, then the alphabet. On this paper the order is backward.”
I returned to Maija and the black man and said that Paavo would be coming for breakfast in a week. Maija smiled and said that her love had a name, Biko. Pronounced with as soft a “B” as possible.
The Human Part Page 2