Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

Olli feels foolish. Startled by his own thoughts.

  “No, but it tried to,” he says.

  He stands in the middle of the yard and the ordinary sounds of Tourula surround him. Someone is chopping wood. A small child squalls. Women talk over each other and laugh. A truck rumbles past. The Blomrooses bicker about something silly. Olli smiles.

  Everything he has in Tourula makes him happy. The Blomrooses, Aunt Anna, the garden, the grass, the flowers, the butterflies, the apple tree, the warmth and colour. Summer in Tourula is eternal, because when it starts to end he always leaves.

  When he’s with the Blomroos siblings and Karri, everything feels great. And not just great, but meaningful. Time isn’t wasted on nothing, like it is in Koirakkala. In Tourula, every minute is spent in the best possible way.

  The window creaks open. Aunt Anna calls them. They run into the house.

  Aunt Anna is in the kitchen loading a picnic basket. Morning light is pouring through the windows, making her lemon-yellow dress glow. She is the Blomrooses’ father’s sister, a handsome, motherly woman. Olli can never stop looking at her breasts. The fabric of her dress is thin and the tips of her breasts show through, large and dark like the mint chocolates she sometimes gives them.

  “Well, my faithful Five,” Aunt Anna says with a smile in her voice.

  Olli is charmed by her way of speaking to them in such a friendly, mischievous tone.

  “It looks like you’re all together and ready to go, as soon as that dreamy son of mine gets himself downstairs. I wonder what else I can supply for you. Here’s your lunch. I did my best. I hope it tastes good. If you run out of food just come back for a refill. Would you please carry it, Leo? You’re probably the strongest. Or have Riku and Olli been training over the winter?”

  She puckers up her mouth and laughs until her breasts jiggle. The laugh infects the children, too.

  The kitchen is full of wondrous aromas that wind their way through the room like the serpent in paradise. They come from the jams, cardamom buns, cakes, pies, rolls, meat pasties, marmalades, cookies and pastries that she endlessly prepares and packs into their picnic lunches.

  Olli hopes and trusts that he will never forget the smell of Aunt Anna’s kitchen.

  The boys thank her for the picnic basket, nodding politely. Anne is sassy. “It seems like Aunt Anna’s trying to fatten me up till I look like a pig,” she says sulkily.

  But you can see in her eyes that she’s as excited about the picnic as the others. Her plaid skirt and short top show off the new shape of her body. She’s grown over the past year, and she has breasts now. Her bottom is a “tight little package”, as Riku said to Olli on the lake shore a couple of weeks ago when the others were out of earshot.

  Anne’s navel is showing. The skin of her belly makes Olli swallow. It’s like white chocolate.

  Then Anne makes a motion, turns her head and snaps Olli’s gaze out of the air with the precision of a raptor.

  Olli quavers. Anne’s eyes narrow. A sly smile spreads over her lips. She is a beautiful, captivating girl. But she has a mean streak—Olli learnt that last summer. He arrived one morning at Aunt Anna’s house with Timi. The door was locked. When Olli rang the bell, Anne came to open the door. She let Timi in, and then slammed the door shut in Olli’s face.

  Olli stood there confused for a second, then rang the bell again several times, and finally pounded on the door until the windows rattled. When the upstairs window opened, Olli backed off the porch onto the lawn. Anne had her hands wrapped tightly around Timi’s throat. The dog was whining and struggling to get free. He couldn’t breathe.

  “Why didn’t you let me in?” Olli asked.

  Anne sighed. “Sorry, but we decided democratically that we didn’t want to see you today. And Aunt Anna told us not to bang on the door because she has a headache. Come back tomorrow. Timi can spend the night here. We still like him. And he likes us. Don’t you, Timi?”

  The dog looked fearfully at the girl.

  Olli’s stomach clenched. “OK, I’ll go. But let Timi come out first. He’s my dog.”

  Anne thought for a moment. “Yeah, you can have him back. On one condition. Do you have any money?”

  Olli searched his pockets. “I have five marks. Why?”

  “Good,” Anne said. “Go to the store and get us a Lola bar, a bag of liquorice drops and a bottle of Jaffa. We’ll swap Timi for them. But hurry up. If we get tired of waiting for you the dog might fall out of the window.”

  The fixed smile on her face shocked him. She seemed to be completely serious. Olli felt sick to think that his best friends had turned against him and even Aunt Anna didn’t care enough to defend him.

  The dog yelped in Anne’s tight grip.

  Olli was just turning to go to the shop when the car pulled into the driveway. Aunt Anna, Karri, Leo and Riku got out carrying groceries and said hello to Olli.

  “Have you still got a headache, Anne?” Aunt Anna asked when she saw the girl in the window.

  Karri, Leo and Riku brought the bags up to the door.

  “We bought you some aspirin, if you still need it,” Aunt Anna said.

  Anne smiled at Olli and fluffed Timi’s fur as if nothing had happened.

  Olli was relieved that he didn’t have to wait to find out how long she would have kept teasing him that way. He wanted to believe that she wouldn’t have really sent him running to the store, let alone done something to hurt Timi.

  They were friends, weren’t they?

  Timi wasn’t so trusting. He started avoiding Anne, though he was happy to wander Jyväskylä with the Famous Five. Then Timi disappeared into the secret passages, and never came back.

  Sadness flickers through Olli’s mind again.

  He glances shyly at Anne, then meets Leo’s eyes.

  Leo winks at him and smiles. He knows that Olli has a crush on Anne. It’s probably easy to see. Two summers ago he brought the subject up. “Don’t worry, Olli. I won’t say anything to the others. And I can understand it. Sis is pretty. She has a lot of admirers at home in Espoo. They fight over her. She’s our sister so of course we love her, but… Well, I could tell you a couple of things sometime.”

  Olli wonders again what kinds of things he might have meant.

  There’s a creak in the hallway. Karri is standing on the stairs. He’s wearing a large hooded sweatshirt that Aunt Anna has been trying to get in the laundry for a long time. You can’t quite see his eyes under the hood. Karri has always been a watcher, a partial outsider even in his own gang of friends.

  A shy boy, that’s how Aunt Anna puts it. But lately Karri has started to seem odder than before, even hostile. Olli is worried that Karri might not want them to come and visit in the summer any more. The Blomrooses are his cousins, at least, but Olli is just a stranger they met in the park and invited for a visit. In fact Karri has never even invited him here; it was the Blomrooses, who often act as if this is their home instead of Karri’s.

  And what if Olli couldn’t come here any more?

  He has noticed Karri staring at him sometimes, as if he were about to say something unpleasant. Or wanted to hurt him. Olli hardly dares look him in the eye any more, for fear of annoying him.

  The leader of the Tourula Five is Leo. Leo has muscles, smarts and authority. He’s good-looking, and he knows what to do in all kinds of situations; even adults treat him as an equal.

  But Leo has also said that when it comes down to it Karri is the one who actually leads them—a quiet boy who seemed silly to Olli at first, and is scary to him now. One time Riku started calling Karri an oddball behind his back, and Leo grabbed him by the back of the neck and reminded him that without Karri there would be no Tourula Five, just three bored Blomrooses spending summers with Olli and his grandparents at the rifle factory.

  But it’s time for the picnic now. Olli, Anne, Leo, Riku and Karri leave the house and walk through Tourula.

  Tourula is made up of gardens, narrow dirt roads and alleys, cute little quietly de
caying houses, woodsheds, privies and other outbuildings, shops, garages, service stations. A short distance to the north is the Jyväskylä bakery, and in the right weather the smell of its biscuits drifts on the wind.

  Now and then they toss each other smiles of glee as they walk, happy in each other’s company. Olli remembers how Timi used to run up to each one of them in turn and look into their eyes to make sure everything was all right.

  Then Anne captures Olli’s attention. He can’t keep his eyes off her new body. She notices him watching her and apparently decides to allow it, because she smiles at him.

  But at the same time, she looks back at Karri to make sure that he’s noticed their little game. She’s trying to make Karri jealous, Olli thinks.

  Karri doesn’t seem to care. Anne looks upset. Olli is amused.

  The world is bathed in bright colours. Their steps are buoyed, carefree. Anything is possible, because everything exists just for them. Olli would like to run with the wind, climb trees, and shout his joy out loud. He controls himself, though, because he doesn’t want to seem childish.

  But nothing lasts forever. They’ve started talking in the dim of the evenings about how adulthood will eventually take hold of even them, and they’ll become businessmen, doctors, engineers, fathers and mothers, boring grown-ups with rules and responsibilities. But the inevitable can still be put off. You just have to keep moving. Not stay too close to adults for too long, or pretty soon you’ll start to think like them.

  Aunt Anna once said, “Listen kids, once you’re grown up, the days and the summers fly away from you, and there’s not a single thing you can do about it.” They know that, of course. Schoolchildren have summer holidays, but the shift workers at the paper mill and the plywood plant, just like the ones at the rifle factory, are always either at work or at home asleep, and they don’t have time to do anything else.

  There are railway workers here, too. One of them rides past them on a bicycle. His clothes are covered in dust. They know him as a gruff man who refuses to acknowledge anyone in Tourula except for other railway men.

  To the Famous Five, the old man raises a hand and waves. They return the greeting politely.

  Last summer at the Esso station they caught a robber who had stolen the railwayman’s bike. As a reward the old man gave them his eternal gratitude and as proof of it arranged a tour of his workplace for them. They got to go in the train engine, where he gave them pear soda and Carnival biscuits.

  Karri follows a few metres behind the rest of them, dragging his tennis shoes, raising a cloud of dust that the wind can’t blow away.

  They cross the little bridge and walk along the river upstream. The water flows quietly beside them. Leo, Anne, Riku and Olli stop when they come to a boat. Aunt Anna had a wooden boat here at one time. Last summer the Five used it to chart the river and the lake it feeds into. Then it disappeared, at the same time that Timi did—in fact it might have been on the same trip.

  They’ve tried many times to work out the details together. The only thing they all agree on is that the day started with them setting out on a boat trip to find the river’s source, and ended with them walking back to Tourula from somewhere on the other side of town. They were tired, dirty and distressed because Timi wasn’t with them. None of them knew what had happened to him.

  The next day they noticed that the boat wasn’t in its usual place. They discussed whether someone might have taken it, or whether they had forgotten it somewhere. No one remembered returning the boat. Feeling guilty, they borrowed the neighbour’s boat and searched the shores of the river and the lake, but Aunt Anna’s boat was never found.

  There are derelicts with liquor bottles sitting on the bank of the river. They’re no trouble. They just ask passers-by for small change, with exaggerated politeness, and they never bother children.

  Olli looks behind him. Karri has stopped on the bridge, staring into the water. The distance between them is growing. The others don’t seem to notice.

  Riku suggests that they eat their lunch now. Leo has more foresight and says they can eat later, when they’ve gone farther, maybe up to Taulumäki. They are on an expedition, after all, and explorers don’t eat their lunches too early. When they find a good picnic spot they can eat and then Karri can lead them to the secret passages.

  16

  THE BUSINESSLIKE RESERVE of Greta’s messages bothered Olli. He could read between the lines and he was worried that Book Tower might not be the publisher for her third book. “The furrows on your brow are getting deeper,” Maiju commented at their weekly meeting.

  Greta Kara was cool in her messages, but in his dreams the girl in the pear-print dress was still passionate and devoted, and the person Olli was in his sleep loved the girl back, with all his heart. When at the moment of waking the dream slipped back into the darkness between his synapses, the feeling of loss felt like it could tear his ribcage open.

  “What is it?” Aino gasped one morning. Olli must have sobbed as he awoke. Aino stared at him aghast, trying to see inside his head. Her sour breath wafted in his face and he turned away. He couldn’t talk to Aino until he got the dream out of his head.

  Plus he had to change his pyjama bottoms.

  Aino pushed herself closer, like a reptile, opened her mouth, touched his cheek with her fingertips, and sniffed at him, her nostrils flaring.

  Olli closed his eyes.

  A moment before, the girl in the pear-print dress had been in his arms. They had kissed, nibbled each other, cried and whispered sweet nothings. He had licked her cheek and her neck and tasted the salt on her skin. She had caressed, kissed, sucked, bit him gently, all the while gazing at him with her green eyes until Olli came on her dress and she closed her eyes and whispered that she loved him.

  Then something had changed.

  They had looked at each other with the knowledge that something bad was going to happen. No time for goodbyes—the dream was torn away like a blanket and the girl was hurled into oblivion.

  For several long minutes he was left shivering in the middle of a life he didn’t recognize as his own.

  That evening Olli decided to play with his son. It had been a while since they had last spent time together. He didn’t mean to be a distant father; he was just very busy. But maybe they could do some wrestling today.

  Olli walked from room to room, but he didn’t see his son anywhere.

  Aino was in the living room. She was sitting on the sofa, her hands in her lap, her back stiff. The television was off. Aino stared at the black screen. Olli picked the remote up off the sofa and turned the television on. There was a fun show about mongooses on the nature channel. Aino liked animals. Maybe this would cheer her up. There was still an hour before the news.

  Olli asked about the boy. Aino didn’t hear him, or didn’t want to hear. He concentrated on the television programme. The mother mongoose’s cubs were in constant danger and the show was steeped in drama. When Olli repeated his question, Aino said thinly, “Yeah, he’s at the neighbour’s playing.”

  Ten minutes later Olli was standing in the bathroom in his pyjama bottoms doing his evening wash and brush. He didn’t feel tired. He just wanted to sleep.

  A couple of days later, and Olli was in the living room standing in front of the portrait of Notary Suominen. There really was a strong resemblance between them, him and the old notary. Guests often thought it was a portrait of Olli.

  His grandfather’s example had been an inspiration and an obligation ever since that resemblance was pointed out to him. The notary’s expression in the picture was inscrutable. Olli liked to think that his grandfather was looking at him approvingly, but lately he hadn’t deserved Notary Suominen’s respect.

  At Olli’s graduation party, his mother had spread out the family photo albums for the guests to look at. Olli’s aunt the doctor, his father’s sister, whom the family hadn’t seen since her father’s funeral years before, was the one who compared the two photos and said that Olli and the notary rese
mbled each other.

  Everyone had nodded. It was thought to be a good omen for the graduate’s future. As she left, Olli’s aunt gave him a kiss on the cheek, hugged him and whispered, “Thank the Lord, Olli, I can see you have some of the Suominens’ no-nonsense rectitude, which my brother, your poor father, doesn’t seem to have inherited at all, for some reason.”

  Olli’s father wasn’t a particularly encouraging role model. Diabetes was eating away his feet and making him old before his time. In his final years he huddled in a wheelchair, sighing and constructing monologues that oozed with bitterness and injecting himself with insulin whenever he happened to remember to.

  But at his graduation party, with the help of those two photographs, Olli broke free of his grim inheritance and turned his gaze towards his grandfather. Things became clearer. He would take his notary grandpa as his model and handle his affairs in such a way that no one ever need pity him or be ashamed of him.

  And life had indeed gone smoothly, until that autumn when the girl in the pear-print dress appeared in his dreams. Olli touched his grandfather’s portrait, took a breath and straightened his back until it cracked. He made a decision. He had built his life through a series of firm decisions up to this point, and that was how he would put things right. He fetched pen and paper, sat at the table and started to make notes. Solving a problem always starts with a thorough outline of what the problem is.

  So. He had become estranged from his wife, his family and his life. Why? Because he was in love with someone else. Not any real person, but a succubus that had sprung from his memories.

  That made things easier, in a way. There was no lover or illicit relationship to hold him. The problem was contained inside his head.

  That meant that he had a psychological problem.

  This realization made him feel faint. Olli turned on his computer and typed a search into Google: psychological problem. After correcting the spelling a couple of times, he hit enter.

  One result was a text about the effect of mental-health problems on relationships.