This Is Not Your City

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “I thought I recognized you,” he said. “Headed for home?”

  “I stopped to watch the ducks.”

  “Wait until summer. There’ll be birds worth looking at then. For two, three months, anyway.”

  “Two months longer than I’m used to.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Near Inari.”

  “That far north?”

  At home, Ursula thought, the sun would have barely made it above the horizon. The ice on the lakes was still getting thicker, pressing the fish down to the bottom where the oxygen would start to run out in April, when the thaw was still two months off. Years when the ice came early or left late, she could picture the thin crust of fish, silver and gasping.

  “Do you have people there?” Jukka asked.

  “All my people are there.”

  Jukka turned out to be from Kajaani, ten hours north instead of twenty. Two hundred years ago they had exported barrels of tar, Jukka explained, and now they exported nothing. “I came south for work. I got sidetracked. By the not-working. I’ve had a lot of that.” He paused and changed the subject. “There are a lot of refugees in this neighborhood. You should watch out.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “No.”

  “Then why should I watch out?”

  “I’m just trying to be friendly.” He smiled and Ursula thought she must look silly walking beside him, soft and squat as she was, almost a foot shorter, with heavy eyebrows so dark they made it look as if she dyed her hair, even though her hair was never lighter than wet sand, even in the long light of summer. Her grandfather had kept reindeer, and when they visited him as children her brothers had said she was like the animals, short and sullen and shaped like a pickle jar. When he died, the herd was sold, and her grandmother moved into an apartment in Ivalo, where Ursula’s aunts and uncles had found work at the ski resorts.

  “You’re a student?”

  Ursula nodded.

  “You should come out for a drink some evening. My favorite bar’s on your tram line, a couple stops short of the university. MustaLintu. Off Kaisaniemenkatu, right downtown.”

  “I’d like that. Is there a night, or a time... ?”

  “Just stop by.”

  “But when?”

  “Some evening. Any evening you want. I’m there on all of them. Afternoons, too.” He laughed then, and started a string of jokes, about Somalis, about Russians, about Estonians, about how they couldn’t make sandwiches or use toilet paper or go back to whatever countries they came from, and then Ursula couldn’t be sure he hadn’t been joking the entire time.

  A couple of weeks later Ursula worked up the courage to try and find Jukka at the bar. She wanted to wear a skirt, planned ahead and bought woolly stockings to keep her warm enough, soft white ones to wear with her tallest boots and a brown skirt that fell to her knees. After her civil engineering lecture, a survey course in geo-technology, she went to the women’s bathroom in the basement where no one would disturb her. Not that anyone ever disturbed her, in hallways or restrooms or anywhere else; the other students had been in classes together since August and had not seemed to notice the new girl who slipped in and out of seats at the back of classrooms, who took the tram away from campus in the evenings to another part of the city. In the bathroom Ursula fumbled with makeup she had bought at the same discount store as her stockings. She put on eyeliner, then tried to wipe it off. It smeared but wouldn’t fade, and in the fluorescent light she looked like someone had hit her. She pulled a long curtain of brown paper towels from the dispenser and scrubbed hard. The eyeliner came off but left her eyes looking raw and mournful, as if, Ursula thought, no one had ever cared enough about her to get around to wanting to hit her, which was close enough to true.

  MustaLintu was on a grotty side street that took Ursula several tries to find. When she pushed open the door, she could recognize Jukka from the back, from only the line of his shoulders and the fall of his white shirt, pale in the dim light of the bar. He was standing with two white-haired men, slotting coins into a lotto machine. The machine whirred and Jukka read out cherrycherry-grapefruit. The older men swore, until one turned and saw her and elbowed Jukka. At the bar he bought a beer for her and Coke for himself. He showed her to a small table near the front window and held the Coke down by his knees while he unscrewed a flask and asked about her classes. She told him about radial cable-stayed bridges, about lenticular trusses and cantilever spans, about the Howe-trussed bridge that connected Tornio and Haparanta and how since it was built Finns and Swedes from the neighboring towns had begun to marry each other and raise children whose voices were muddy with two languages. She talked until she realized she’d gone on far too long. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What about you? What do you do?”

  “I’m between jobs at the moment. I hang out a lot with Pekka and Jaakko here,” he said, twitching his hand out behind him, where Pekka and Jaakko were still spinning mismatched fruit.

  “What did you used to do?”

  “Not much of anything, really. I’ve gotten good at hanging around the Job Center applying for things.” He said this brightly, as if it were one of his jokes, and Ursula wondered if the fact that he didn’t seem to mind not working meant that she shouldn’t mind either. “Let me get you another beer.”

  Ursula watched him at the bar, where the bartender snapped the cap off her Lapin Kulta but put up a fight over Jukka’s Coke. The argument was too soft for Ursula to hear, but Jukka pivoted away from the bar so fast he tilted and put his hand on a stool to steady himself.

  “Don’t know why the bastard won’t cut me some slack. One of his best customers.”

  “Why not just order a real drink?”

  “I’m a little short at the moment.”

  “Let me,” she said, and he shook his head and laughed; this time it was at her, not at the Somalis or the Russians, and she felt bad for not knowing the rules, for offering something so ridiculous.

  They took the tram home together, and Jukka walked up the extra flight of stairs to see her to her apartment. She shuffled in her boots as long as she could, her head tilted upward, but he did not kiss her. Once the door was locked behind her, she thought of the things she wished she had known how to tell him. How she was not pretty but not unaccomplished. How her grandparents had known how to herd reindeer so they ran angled, uphill, not panicked and in a straight line for miles ahead. How to milk, and butcher, and skin. How now her parents only knew how to take tickets for the ski-lifts at Saariselkä; her aunts and uncles, how to rent snowboards in Ivalo. How she had known how to lead tourists on snowmobile safaris for reindeer, and how to fake surprise when the reindeer appeared, penned where the tourists would be sure to see them. How she had not yet learned how to dress like an elf and press the buttons that operated the indoor roller coaster at Santa’s World, as her oldest brother did, or how to sit in a bar in Rovaniemi and drink unemployment like her other brother did. How it had seemed very important to her to learn something new, things no one in her family had done, living in a city, riding a tram to college classes, calculating the load-bearing properties of an orthotropic beam.

  A week later Jukka knocked on her door and asked for 200 markka. “Groceries for the weekend,” he said. “My government money comes Monday. I’ll go to the bank and pay you back right away.”

  In their language without the word please, that was all Jukka said, but the impatience was there, and the pleading. Ursula had stayed late at the university and the state-run Alko would be closed in half an hour. The Number 12 tram came in five minutes and then not at all. “200 markka, ole hyvä,” Jukka said. Be good. Be kind. Ursula gave it to him.

  That night Jukka knocked on her door holding a bottle of Koskenkorva and two shot glasses, wearing a T-shirt and a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair damp from the sauna. Ursula had been a few times, to the large sauna in the basement of the building, and seen Jukka’s name written sprawlingly on the sign-up sheet across huge block
s of time, weekday nights and weekend afternoons.

  “You shouldn’t drink in the sauna,” she said.

  “Bad for the heart, I know,” Jukka said. “But vodka and sauna. What more could a body want?” He said it like a proverb, a slice of wisdom, and Ursula wondered if it was a saying she’d never heard. “A pretty girl, maybe.”

  “Maybe you should go home.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I just wanted to offer you a drink.”

  “I don’t drink Kossu straight.”

  “I brought you this,” Jukka said, and from the fold of the towel at his waist pulled a plastic bottle, tiny, like from an airplane or hotel minibar. The cloudberry liqueur was the same yellowy-orange of the berries that grew in the far northern swamps. He poured it into one of the shot glasses and handed it to her. He poured himself a shot of Kossu and toasted her as she stood in her doorway, Jukka barefoot in the hall. The liqueur was thick and syrupy; Ursula could feel it coat her throat, the taste of sugar and plastic and the slight hint of cloudberries, the sweetness without the crunch of seeds.

  Jukka smiled at her. “Did you like it?”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  There were other gifts, slipped through the mail slot in her door. A chocolate bar; an article torn out of the Helsingin Sanomat about a new bridge being planned for the Millau Viaduct in France that would be the tallest bridge in the world; a fashion magazine addressed to Jukka’s neighbor on the second floor. Ursula went downstairs and pushed it back into the woman’s mail slot, where the thick magazine stuck partway out. An hour later Jukka brought it back to her.

  “I wanted you to have it,” he said.

  “It’s not yours to give.”

  “If you don’t want it, you should just say,” he said, sulking. She looked forward to the gifts, jumbled with sales circulars and bills. Her letters from home were short and infrequent. In the north there was a general economy—of light, warmth, money, jobs, events of interest; only so much of any one thing. She tried not to be annoyed at her parents’ economy of language, at the letters on single sheets of paper, one-sided, in large, bubble-shaped script, variations of fine and weather and hope you’re well and see you in the summer.

  One evening a folded piece of paper whispered through the mail slot and fell onto the floor. She’d been sitting on her bed working out equations, replicating the numbers that had built the cable-stayed bridge in Heinola. She had driven over the bridge on the bus to Helsinki, and remembering it, tall and gleaming for years already, made her homework feel pointless. The delivery was folded to open like a greeting card. On the front it said, You Are Invited.... Inside it said, ... To The Booze Cruise! Join Jukka Tullinen and friends for a duty-free cruise to Tallinn on Saturday night, March 1st. Your ticket will be paid for. There were clip art pictures of a rowboat and a bottle with three Xs on the label. On the back was a handwritten note: I’m doing my mandatory hours at the Job Center. They’ve got me training on computers, so I made this invitation. I know it’s retarded. The trip’s for real, though. Let me know if you want to come.

  Ursula changed out of her slippers and flannel pants into a skirt. She couldn’t decide on shoes and so left her feet bare. She shivered in the hallway as she waited for Jukka to come to the door, her spine rigid and shoulders hunched. It was snowing again, the wet flakes sticking to the window in the stairway landing. They stained the asphalt more quickly than the metal of the tram tracks and the rails stayed dark and metallic, threading beneath her through the white streets.

  “You’re going to Estonia?” she asked Jukka when he answered his doorbell.

  “Sort of.”

  “How do you sort of go to Estonia?”

  “The ship stays in the Bay of Tallinn overnight, but you can’t go ashore or anything.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “The point’s that it’s the booze cruise. The whole deal is that the ship stays out in international waters long enough to sell stuff tax-free. You can save hundreds of markka.”

  “So you’re taking a whole cruise to buy cheap liquor?”

  Jukka blushed. He seemed brushed by shame at the oddest moments. “There are other stores, too. You can buy candy and potato chips and shirts and things. There’s a lot of perfume. If you wanted perfume. I’d really like for you to go.” Ursula had never in her life been taken for a girl who might want to shop for perfume. It was flattering, she thought, but so unexpected she wondered what she looked like to Jukka, how impossibly addled his vision of her might be.

  “Can I think about it?” Ursula asked.

  “Of course,” Jukka said, grinning. His teeth were straight and even but yellow. Ursula thought it seemed a fair balance. “You don’t really want to go to Estonia anyway. It’s all babushkas and prostitutes and unpasteurized beer. The women there, they have it in for Finns. Friend of mine left a club, woke up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing and a note in lipstick on the mirror.”

  “That’s an urban legend.”

  “I swear to God. Lipstick on the mirror.”

  “It never happened.”

  “Have it your way. But if it did, Estonia’s just the place it would. You’re better off onboard. Trust me.”

  In her apartment that night Ursula put her homework aside and wrote a letter to her parents. For the first time she mentioned her handsome neighbor, who slipped presents through her mail slot. We’ve been out a few times, she wrote, trying to sound nonchalant. He’s invited me for a cruise. We’re going to Estonia. Ursula thought of the boy from the bus ride south, his slow tongue and strange face and damaged brain, and wanted to laugh at him, to tell him that he had not been the unlucky charm she feared. She had no need now for his mindless love; already, she’d found something better.

  It took two trams and a city bus to get to the harbor and the Silja Line terminal. As they waited in line to embark, Jukka told her he had good news and bad news: bad, that his friends had bailed and it would be only the two of them; good, that he had shelled out for a cabin. The communal sleeping room was good enough for him; he’d once traveled to Latvia sleeping in a stairwell. But Ursula, he said, deserved to have a cabin. On the ship he led her down long pink and turquoise halls, low-lit and empty. There was a mirror on the back wall of their room, and two long, green upholstered benches, with latches above that held the bunks folded to the wall. In the small bathroom Ursula took off her woolly stockings and replaced her boots with heels. Her legs were pale and wobbly in the new shoes. When she folded the bathroom door along its runners, Jukka’s face stayed tired. “I thought we’d get our shopping done first,” he said. “Then we can do what we want.”

  The shopping mezzanine had long, glass windows that looked out on the Baltic Sea. Where ships passed, the ice was broken into plates, floating in dark canals that stretched through the sea like the damp-barked trunks of pine trees, the long dark legs of moose. Beyond the shipping lanes the sea was frozen white and flat and solid like tundra in every direction, west to the spray of islands of the Stockholm archipelago; and to the east, where the sea became the Neva as it swept into St. Petersburg. Ursula wanted to tell Jukka about the river she’d only read about, bound by bridges that could break their own backs, split to allow ships to pass. They were raised every night in rotation, trapping people in different quadrants of the city for hours at a time. Cars would race through the icy streets to make the last few minutes of a crossing: a city ruled by bridges.

  They went to the liquor store first, where you could buy not only bottles but cases, and little luggage carts with bungee cords to wheel the cases away. Jukka took a cart and opened the duty-free shopping pamphlet, the maximum tax-free allowances illustrated with what looked like a child’s drawings of adult sins, chunky red sketches of the possible permutations: Spirits + Wine OR Champagne + Cigarettes! Jukka put the pamphlet in his pocket and began hefting case after case, bottle after bottle, into the cart, breaking all the rules. Ursula was going to say something when he a
sked to have her boarding pass.

  “I think I left it in the cabin. What do you need it for?”

  His nose wrinkled like she was a smell he couldn’t place. “You need to show your boarding pass at the register.”

  “I wasn’t going to buy anything,” she said. Then she looked from the full cart to his face, which was almost angry, and thought of all the floors she’d known that could actually swallow people up. Lake Inari in September or June. The Karasjoki river in November or April. The northern marshes that would drink you feet first in any season. The sea surrounding them now, the shifting ice, the slits of black water. The floor of the cruise ship liquor store had not been one of them.

  “You need the boarding pass to buy my tax-free allowance. Of course. You planned on buying up two people’s allowances. Save hundreds of markka. I’m sorry. I’ll run and get the pass.”

  “It’s back in the cabin?”

  “On the bench, I think.”

  “I’ll get it. Watch the cart,” he said, and he was gone.

  Once the liquor was stowed in the cabin, roped onto two separate hand trolleys and wedged under the benches, Jukka took her by the hand and led her back to the shopping mezzanine, into the cosmetics store. “Pick something out,” he said. “Anything you want.”