Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  There are booths selling sausages and ice cream. A juggler on stilts strides by tossing not balls but dolls, and blowing into a paper kazoo.

  A warm wind blows dandelion fluff. The air is thick with the downy seeds, and now and then it’s difficult to see. When they touch the ground they take root and grow amazingly quickly. Here and there are glowing meadows of dandelions that the people walk through, shouting their delight. Olli is upset that he’s left his camera at home.

  There are crowds of people, all in nightgowns and pyjamas. There’s nothing odd about that—you should wear night clothes at night.

  The women’s nightgowns are disconcertingly thin. Their bodies are works of art meant to be looked at and commented on. Like the other people, Olli admires their varied breasts, legs and hips, runs his fingers along the curves of their buttocks, muses aloud about the various aesthetic choices, as do the women themselves.

  He laughs with joy and wonders why he so rarely goes out at night. Everything is so much freer than in the daytime, the people more open and sociable.

  Then he notices a woman with a little boy beside her on a bicycle. She’s wearing silk pyjamas with the top open. “Pardon me, ma’am, but you certainly have very sweet breasts,” Olli says.

  The woman lifts her breasts, thanks him for the compliment, says that is very kind of him but if he looks closer he’ll notice that there is in fact much lacking in her breasts—lately they even have a rubbery smell.

  Olli bends towards her and sniffs, and her breasts do indeed smell like rubber.

  He looks closely at the woman, trying to get an impression of her face. There’s something familiar about it, but the light is dim and the dandelion fluff is flying between them all the time.

  “Excuse me, but do we know each other?” he finally asks.

  The woman smiles sadly, shakes her head, and walks away, following the boy, who has already pedalled to the end of the block.

  Olli is filled with anxiety. He shouldn’t have let the woman and the little boy go.

  He leans against a railing and notices that there’s something wrong about the view from the bridge. Nothing is moving. The birds are frozen in the air. The river isn’t flowing. The trees are lifeless cardboard. The distances are flattened.

  The landscape is nothing but a big cardboard facade with a row of crows perched on the upper edge.

  He shakes his head. He can’t understand why this fake landscape hasn’t been written about in the Central Finland or Greater Jyväskylä newspapers.

  Olli is startled to see a golden-haired girl in a pear-print dress come into view from below the bridge. She looks up, waves a hand, and walks into the facade.

  Olli tries to shout a warning.

  But lines from the Christina Rossetti poem he was reading to the women at the picnic comes out of his mouth instead:

  “Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.”

  He closes his mouth, holds his breath, and manages to swallow a couple of lines. They taste like pears. Then he tries to shout again, but more poetry comes out:

  “Only remember me; you understand, It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while, And afterwards remember, do not grieve.”

  When the golden-haired girl in the pear-print dress is halfway up the hill she becomes two-dimensional and freezes, a part of the picture.

  It’s getting cold. Snow is falling and the wind is rising. Olli shivers in his pyjamas, sad at the girl’s fate. The cardboard landscape sways in the wind. He hears an ominous cracking sound, as if the structure is giving way.

  Then the landscape starts to fall.

  People are shouting.

  A rush of air sweeps over the bridge and tears at his clothes. His tie flies away with the wind.

  As Olli looks at the fallen landscape, he realizes that it isn’t a facade; it’s a huge postcard. On the back, in large letters, is Olli’s name and address and the message:

  For the love of my life, from the girl in the pear-print dress.

  14

  At the centre of all that exists sleeps our creator. We are not made from dust and ribs. We are the images of God’s dreams, lighting up his eternal night.

  The theologians are lost and the clerg y and prophets are leading us astray. The meaning of God is not to be found in laws, commandments and holy scripture, but in classic films. Open your eyes and look at the world and you will understand that God is not a moralist, but an aesthete, the final critic. And life is a movie.

  GRETA KARA,

  A Guide to the Cinematic Life

  Olli awoke to a distant alarm. He sat up and looked around. Aino lay with her legs sticking out from under the blanket, her hair in her face.

  Olli went downstairs to the lavatory and tinkled in the pot. He remembered an ad for a natural remedy for prostate trouble. His flow was still good, though. He had no cause for worry, for the time being.

  As he was washing his hands, the unofficial version of publisher and parish-council member Olli Suominen scowled from the mirror. It was a sort of rough approximation of the businesslike person most people knew. His hair needed a trim. It was getting more grey in it. Hairs poked out of his nose. Razor stubble made him look like a gangster. The lines around his eyes were spreading like cracks in a marble statue. If Grandpa Notary was any indication, Olli would at least age gracefully. Grandpa went to his grave a charmer.

  Before going back to bed he went to peek into his son’s room.

  The boy was snuffling under the covers. All that was visible was an ear. Olli bent to look more closely. The ear was beautifully shaped and flawless, a masterpiece of creation, or maybe evolution. When he looked at that ear, he believed in God, for a little while anyway.

  Olli adjusted the blanket and tiptoed out of the room. He realized he didn’t feel like sleeping, and went back downstairs. The house creaked and breathed as the night sucked the warmth out of the walls. Water murmured in the toilet. Something scratched in a corner. Did they have mice in the house?

  There are all kinds of noises at night that you don’t notice during the daytime. Olli didn’t like them; they weren’t meant to be heard. He ought to be asleep right now, like everyone else. He felt guilty, but he stayed up, sitting on the sofa.

  The afternoon before he had sent Greta a message recommending that they remove the references to the secret passages, to avoid confusing readers unnecessarily.

  An answer came half an hour later.

  The message didn’t take a position on the secret passages. Greta said she was in Jyväskylä and suggested that they meet the following day to discuss the manuscript and sign all the papers.

  *

  That Friday morning at the office passed slowly. They had agreed to meet at 2 p.m. in a restaurant downtown.

  Olli was nervous. He couldn’t concentrate on anything. He knew of course that there was nothing to be nervous about. A publisher was going to meet with a successful author who happened to be an old friend of his. They had once long ago been children and been in love, and now they were middle-aged, practical, reserved professionals. They would both behave in a way appropriate to their age and station. They might look at their shared past in amusement, with a touch of nostalgia, but the long-lost games of childhood would be kept in their proper perspective.

  Everything would no doubt go in a businesslike manner, but Olli’s mind kept coming up with alternative ways that the meeting might progress.

  It was unavoidable, in a way, that his mind would eventually settle on a classic erotic fantasy, where one thing led to another and they ended up in a hotel room tearing each other’s clothes off.

  When he imagined the famous author Greta Kara in front of him on a hotel bed, naked and lustful, he felt ill. His head started to buzz and his stomach clenched. He took an aspirin and was washing it down with coffee when Maiju strode into the room without knocking.

&nbs
p; The coffee ended up on Olli’s shirt.

  “Hang it all,” he said.

  Maiju stood in the middle of the floor.

  Maiju had once been a pleasantly restrained person. Lately, though, she had adopted a chaotic flair, like something out of a Fellini movie. She burst into rooms without warning, was rash and boisterous, started needless arguments and accused her co-workers of insulting her. One older author who came to visit the offices had found himself in the middle of one of her cinematic exercises and was so taken aback that it sent him into heart palpitations.

  The hot coffee burned. Olli expressed his displeasure at Maiju’s behaviour and Maiju laughed, throwing her head back brazenly and answering him with a quote from La Dolce Vita:

  “I am the first woman on the first day of creation. I am mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home… But OK, I’ll try to keep my life force in check, to please you. Fellini would be good for you, by the way, Olli. You ought to try it.”

  She was wearing a Fellini-style dress too showy for work. A Guide to the Cinematic Life discussed hundreds of different styles of dress categorized by director, genre and film. A couple of weeks earlier Maiju had enthused about finding a clothing shop where they sold cinematic attire for readers of the Guide.

  “So here it is,” Maiju said. “Emma Bunny’s Book about Boys and Girls. Hot off the press. But you’ve got coffee in your lap. Do you need a tissue? Or should I go buy you a new shirt? I’m on my way to lunch. I can pick one up while I’m out.”

  Olli took his umbrella off the rack and went out himself. He wasn’t going to get any work done until this meeting was over, anyway.

  The drizzle was turning to a real rain. Olli opened his umbrella and headed to Halonen, where he always bought his clothes. He held the umbrella in front of him so that the spot of coffee on his shirt wouldn’t show at a distance.

  When he got to Compass Square he stopped. There was a pair of woman’s legs in front of him, jutting out from under a skirt.

  They didn’t seem to want to go anywhere.

  Olli tried to go around the legs, but then the person attached to them took hold of his umbrella and peeked under it.

  “Is that you, Olli? It is, isn’t it?”

  Olli tried to give a logical reply, but his thoughts escaped from his mouth in every direction.

  Afterwards he remembered explaining why his shirt was dirty and blurting that unfortunately he couldn’t take Greta to dinner, urgent matters had come up, and they would have to take care of their business at the office.

  And then the meeting was over and he was sitting at his desk in befuddlement.

  Greta had just walked out of his office.

  Olli only remembered her feet, clad in red high heels.

  But at least the signatures on the contracts seemed to be in order.

  15

  GRETA CONTINUED WRITING. She sent new pages, and corrections whenever she noticed in her tour around Jyväskylä that places had changed, or disappeared altogether. The Magical City Guide was gradually growing into a complete book.

  But the meeting fiasco put a damper on their Facebook conversations. The communication from Greta’s side shrank to scant greetings.

  Notary Suominen in his portrait looked down at his grandson disapprovingly. Olli considered punishing himself by skipping the film club meeting, but then went after all, to avoid Aino, who had been bombarding him with questions about summer travel. He had a publishing house to run and a future best-seller under production. He didn’t know when he would have time for a holiday.

  The film showing was Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep. There were a lot of dead bodies. Olli couldn’t follow the plot. Apparently he wasn’t the only one. The people around him looked befuddled. He concentrated on admiring Lauren Bacall’s beauty and Humphrey Bogart’s cool confidence.

  When the film ended, the identity of the murderer was still a mystery to Olli. He was thinking about other things. He didn’t need Philip Marlowe to tell him that Greta was seriously offended and that the fault lay with her editor, Olli Suominen.

  Eventually he sent her a Facebook message explaining that he had felt ill on the day they were supposed to meet, and might have seemed “a little distant”.

  Greta didn’t respond, but Olli kept trying. He had a responsibility as a publisher, which he was very conscious of. Greta Kara was important to Book Tower’s future, an author he had to hold on to by any means necessary.

  One night Olli was reading through A Guide to the Cinematic Life and Greta’s new manuscript and pondering life. As he read, he wrote Greta a long message. It started with comments about publishing, but soon turned personal. He told her, for instance, that he suffered from slow continuum attachment and that his life was destined to stay the same to the very last:

  I envy those who can live their lives the way you describe. What would it be like to be “Homo cinematicus”, as you say in your book? But I depend on predictability. Change, new experiences, make me nervous. On the other hand, I also depend on being able to escape now and then to something new, to keep my life from becoming unbearable.

  As soon as he sent the message, he regretted it. Having ascertained that he couldn’t get it back, he made himself step away from the computer.

  He walked through the house to the kitchen. At night, Aino’s many mirrors multiplied the dark. Olli tried not to look at his reflection, but as he stopped to scratch he accidentally saw himself in the hallway mirror. A middle-aged man in pyjama bottoms looked out from the glass. In the dimness the hair on his chest made him look like a great ape. He still had some muscle, although the firm physique of his youth was history. He could stand to be a little slimmer around the tummy, too.

  His stubbly face had a confused, surprised expression, which made him look stupid. He scowled to bring his features back under control.

  He went into the kitchen and turned on the light. For a second he couldn’t see anything. The kitchen had been completely remodelled a couple of years earlier, with money Aino inherited from her father. It was the only corner of the house without measuring errors or other imperfections, only eye-pleasing elements. Pale ceiling panels. Glass cupboard doors. Wood surfaces like dark chocolate. Four chairs around the table. A booster seat covered in food stains on one chair.

  Olli opened the refrigerator. There was low-fat bologna, low-fat Gotler sausage, ground beef, tuna, meatballs, peanut butter, milk, yogurt, some strawberry compote that Aino had made, buttermilk, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, eggs, cheese and low-fat frankfurters.

  The peanut butter caught his interest.

  When was the last time he’d eaten peanut butter? He opened the lid and the kitchen was filled with the thick, sweet scent of it. Peanut butter molecules slipped over the mucous membranes of his nose and sensory impulses raced down his neural pathways and entered his cerebral cortex. Lights went on in the darkest corners of his neural network. A recollection from years past began to crystallize in his mind.

  *

  They’re lounging under an apple tree, feasting. Olli is enjoying Aunt Anna’s fresh-baked French bread spread with a layer of peanut butter as thick as his finger. At home in Koirakkala he hardly ever gets to eat peanut butter. When he does, he has to spread it thin or his mother gets nervous.

  Grass tickles the soles of his feet. The trunk of the tree feels rough against his back. Insects buzz around them. Bird sounds pierce the greenery.

  This is Olli’s seventh summer with the Tourula Five.

  Leo and Riku are talking about television shows. Riku’s favourite is The Six Million Dollar Man. Leo likes Columbo better. Anne thinks the best show is Little House on the Prairie. Riku makes a crude comment about Laura Ingalls’s bum. The boys snigger. Anne mutters that she wishes she had Laura Ingalls as a sister instead of a brother who has a personality like that brat Nellie Oleson, and looks like her, too. Leo laughs. Riku doesn’t. It makes Olli smile.

  Even in the shade, it’s hot. Silence falls. The Blom
rooses don’t feel like talking now. Olli closes his eyes, relaxes and lets his head rest against the tree.

  He hears sounds:

  The scratch of insects’ legs on apple-tree bark.

  The shush of water flowing inside the tree.

  The hollow crack of its powerful slow growth.

  There are noises coming up from the ground, too. The tree trunk magnifies them and transfers them directly to the bones of his skull and from there to his inner ear. When he lets his ears really tune in and listen, he can hear moles, grubs, beetles and earthworms moving through the soil.

  Beneath the sounds of these small creatures, if he concentrates hard, he can hear one more sound: the whisper of the secret passages.

  His eyes open and green light falls from the branches.

  Olli looks at the dozing Blomrooses.

  Karri once said that the ground below Jyväskylä was full of secret passages. There are probably some here, too, right underneath them. In his mind’s eye, Olli can see the roots of the apple tree hanging from a passageway ceiling.

  His eyes close again. A dream is pulling at him, and bit by bit he wraps himself in its darkness. His heart is beating too hard. The sound of it is ringing through his head and making its way into the tree, spreading along the roots and underground into the secret passages.

  Something deep in the earth wakes up and starts to listen.

  His lost dog Timi?

  No.

  Something darker. It can hear him, is reaching towards him.

  Olli breathes in rasping breaths, springs to his feet and throws himself away from the tree.

  The Blomrooses rub their eyes and look at him in bewilderment. “Did a wasp sting you?” Riku asks, looking around.