Olli leant against the railing and watched the footpath that passed under the bridge. Raindrops pattered on his umbrella. He was nervous and anxious. He tried to shake off the feeling the Guide called slow continuum attachment—he had a task to accomplish. It was hard not to think about where his family might be right now and what Aino was thinking and feeling about all this.
Olli lit a cigarette. Over the past few days he had started smoking. Not a lot—usually just two or three cigarettes a day—but he hadn’t smoked at all before. He had stopped in at the publishing house and, on a whim, pinched a cigarette from the pack on Maiju’s desk and lit up when he got outside. It tasted awful and made him cough, but it also calmed his nerves. According to the Guide, smoking could help free you of attachment to the continuum.
A cinematic way of life always has a certain fatalism, and what could be more fatalistic than allowing yourself to enjoy the aesthetics of cigarette smoke?
He focused on smoking.
Olli is playing with the smoke, losing himself in the glowing tip of his cigarette.
That fiery dot is the only thing real in all the grey; everything else is a dream. The smoke mixing with the wind is like a wordless poem. According to A Guide to the Cinematic Life, smoking is, at its core, a lyrical, metaphorical and meditative activity that can deepen the sense of meaningfulness and dispel the sensation of ordinariness. A cinematic life can’t take away pain, but it can make it more aesthetic, make of it a kind of wine of emotion, a music of feeling.
The walking path is between the river and a steep bluff. The ravine is lined with trees and bushes and along the top are houses surrounded by wooden fences. The place is cinematically beautiful. It also has drama—with enough heavy rain the bluff could collapse and send the houses tumbling into the river.
The path is still empty; the only movement is on the bridge. A bicycle whizzes past behind Olli’s back. Pedestrians come and go. Each pair of shoes has its own sound, each set of steps its own rhythm. Gazing over the valley, Olli listens and tries to guess what kind of person each one passing might be. A long-legged man in no hurry. An old person in pain with a walker. A young couple intertwined. A mother with her children, in a rush. A woman in high heels, swinging her hips.
The smell of floral perfume makes Olli turn around. A Veronica Lake copy is coming onto the bridge, headed into town. Maiju?
No. She’s shorter and stockier than Maiju, and she has an angry look on her face.
He sees another woman at the opposite end of the bridge in a beret and trench coat, carrying binoculars. She’s pretending to use them to watch the birds in the trees along the shore, but they’re actually aimed at Olli. He’s been trying not to think about it, but it’s obvious that the Blomrooses have been watching him and Greta.
In any case they’ve been watching Greta closely, no doubt through hired henchmen. Anne Blomroos has virtually unlimited resources. There could be a hundred people in Jyväskylä hired to monitor the progress of the Blomrooses’ mission of atonement. Their reconnaissance must also include analysts collecting kernels of information and formulating predictions of Greta’s behaviour. They have to be getting information somewhere to be able to know where Olli needs to go to run into her.
Olli pretends not to notice the woman. And who knows, she might be an innocent birdwatcher; the spies might be somewhere else, out of sight. He needs to focus on Greta anyway, and forget about other things.
Just as he’s starting to suspect that the Blomrooses’ information was wrong and Greta is somewhere else today, an umbrella with pears printed all over it comes into view from beneath the bridge.
Olli walks towards the downtown end of the bridge and the stairs that lead to the river. He can see the woman better now. It’s Greta, in a dark suit. Olli readies himself. It’s time to enact the Blomrooses’ kissing scene, and finally set this romance in motion.
He’s terrified. Not so much because he is acting against his morals, but because of how much he’s enjoying it. Maybe it’s the influence of M-particles, he thinks, not sure whether he’s serious.
He braces himself to run down the wooden steps. He feels light on his feet.
She’s walking down the path, taking no notice of him. Olli waves and is about to shout her name when someone grabs him by the arm.
“Suominen!…”
Olli turned around and saw three gentlemen from the Jyväskylä Club with suits and umbrellas which he recognized immediately as high-quality merchandise. They were obviously on their way to some occasion, or perhaps coming from one. One of the men coughed and said, “So, Mr Suominen, I assume you’ve paid your club membership?”
The other men chuckled.
Olli was surrounded, the men prodding at him as if he were a horse for sale.
“Well,” a man in a hat with a moustache and a red nose said with a sigh, “we’re all very busy, we all have to make a living—and luckily, for the present company at least, it’s a decent living—but when a man’s been elected to the parish council, he ought to have a place where he can take some time out of his day-to-day grind and spend an evening sitting and talking among equals without the riff-raff jumping on his every word, wouldn’t you agree? So I’m going ask you straight out, right here before the eyes of God and these humble representatives of the Jyväskylä elite: how long do you plan to keep us waiting for you to join us and take your rightful place in the club? Or do we have to call your wife and ask permission for you to come out and play with the other boys?”
The men laughed.
Olli mumbled something about being in a hurry and smiled apologetically. When he tried to leave, they scolded him for being in such a rush and one of them laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Too much hurry’s bad for the blood pressure. Isn’t that right, boys?”
The others agreed.
Now Olli could smell the cognac on their breath. He said a firm goodbye and moved off so quickly that they made way for him.
The moustached man stumbled and would have fallen if the others hadn’t grabbed him. His hat and umbrella fell on the ground and he stared after Olli in shock.
“Did he hit me?” the man asked, panting and red-faced.
“He didn’t hit you,” the others said, patting him. “Mr Suominen’s just in a hurry and didn’t feel like chatting with us, nice as we were to him.”
Olli mumbled his apologies and ran down the steps. He stopped under the bridge. His temples were throbbing.
Greta was nowhere to be seen.
The gentlemen from the Jyväskylä Club watched him from above, grumbling. Olli wondered if he should go back and offer a proper apology and exchange a few pleasantries with Jyväskylä’s movers and shakers.
Then he changed his mind, and started running upriver.
Still no sign of Greta. When he got to the cemetery he sat down on a bench to rest. The rain was stopping. It was warm, but Olli was shivering. He lit a cigarette, then immediately tossed it away.
Eventually he got up and headed towards home. As he started across Puistokatu he noticed that he no longer had his umbrella with him. He went back to the bench. It was empty.
A little farther down the river shore stood a scruffy-looking cocker spaniel. Unless Olli’s eyes deceived him, it had his umbrella in its mouth.
He tried to approach the dog, but it turned and ran off.
It took Olli fifteen minutes to walk the two kilometres home. When he got there, he climbed to the second floor, winded, and sat down at the computer to look at Greta’s Facebook status.
She had just updated it:
Greta Kara has just come from a walk through the postcard landscape along the shores of Tourujoki, continuing to get to know the old places. A pleasant walk, which nevertheless felt somehow lacking. I guess this cinematic pilgrim was hoping that since she was in the old places she might see an old friend…
Olli wrote a comment on her post, directed more at the Blomrooses than at Greta:
I saw you from the bridge and tried to run
after you, but I was held up and lost sight of you. If not for that, you would indeed have seen an old friend…
A moment later Greta’s answer appeared:
Olli! Were you really there? I know it sounds silly, but I was actually hoping the whole time that I would run into you. Maybe I sensed you were nearby. Judging by the past few days, it seems Jyväskylä is a surprisingly small town.
Olli thought long about his response, feverishly wondering if he dared suggest they meet that evening. Would that make up for his mistake, or would the Blomrooses be angry that he took the initiative?
While he was thinking these thoughts, a red number one appeared in the notifications slot at the top of the page. It said: Anne Blomroos posted something on your wall.
Olli went to his own profile.
Anne had posted a picture on his wall, a scanned image of a crayon drawing, by his son. It showed the boy himself and Aino, on the beach. They were both waving happily. At the top of the picture it said, in wobbly letters, HI DADDY.
Along the edges of the picture were dark, threatening-looking shapes. The post was accompanied by a message:
Hello, Olli. Your son asked his mother today when they were going to go home. She answered (beautifully!) that they would go “when these lovely holidays are over”. Then he asked when the lovely holidays would be over. And she patiently explained that it would be as soon as Daddy got all his work completely done at home in Jyväskylä. The dear child (he is the sweetest thing!) thought for a moment and then started to cry a little and asked with his little chin trembling, what would happen if Daddy didn’t get all his work done? What an adorable child!
Your boy really enjoys drawing! (Here’s his latest for you.)
Olli stared at the screen. The hours passed. Sometimes he got up to get a drink of water or take an aspirin. He wrote several messages to Anne and Leo begging, threatening, negotiating, pleading and enquiring in many different ways what Anne meant exactly.
He didn’t send any of them. It was wisest not to annoy the Blomrooses now that he’d already made his first mistake. He was sure he would receive another message if he just waited, and maybe it would offer some clarity.
He tried to pass the time by reading the Facebook profiles of his acquaintances, but at some point he let himself fall asleep.
In the dream he finds a video link on his profile and opens it with a sense of foreboding. The video was taken in a small room. The grainy, blurry image jerks. His son is sitting at a table, drawing. Aino is sitting beside him, her eyes blurred.
When the picture is finished, Aino shows it to the camera. “Here’s his last picture for you,” she says in a crackly voice that sounds like an old gramophone.
She smooths the boy’s hair, then takes hold of his wrists. “I’m so sorry, but I don’t think Daddy got his work done.”
The boy nods in resignation, his eyes downcast.
A girl of about ten years old with blonde hair walks into the picture holding a large pair of scissors. Anne Blomroos. A cute girl, Olli notices. Like a postcard angel. No wonder he had a crush on her as a boy.
Anne looks into the camera, nods to Aino, who obediently holds down the little boy’s arms, and begins to snip his fingers off.
29
OLLI’S EYES SHOT OPEN.
As he jerked his head up a series of cracks ran down his spine and he gasped for breath until it felt as if his ribcage was about to burst. It took him a moment to realize he had been dreaming. There was no video from Anne Blomroos on his Facebook profile.
But he did have a message from her in his inbox.
Olli’s heart stumbled into an arrhythmic series of thumps. He took a breath and prepared for the worst.
Just as he clicked on the message, the doorbell rang. He ran downstairs. It was a delivery. “Will you sign for this?”
The parcel was about the size of a box of margarine, addressed to Aino Suominen. He carried it to the kitchen table, sat down in a chair a couple of metres away and stared at it in disbelief.
What would the Blomrooses send to him after what had happened? What could be in that package? He tried not to think of his dream. Instead he thought of Schrödinger’s cat.
Finally he started to open the box, feeling like an executioner.
There were no child’s fingers in the box, just a silk handkerchief with the embroidered monogram OS. His initials.
With his legs shaking beneath him, covered in a cold sweat, he returned to the computer and read the message.
Olli my friend, your family sends their greetings. They’re both well. Be on Puistokatu, at the wall of the old cemetery, tomorrow at 7 p.m. Wipe your tears away and take care that your heroine gets her kiss this time. Show some passion. She’s expecting it, although she’s too afraid to show it.
The message ended with a quote from A Guide to the Cinematic Life, the chapter titled ‘Stolen Kisses’:
Of all the crimes one can commit, stealing a kiss may be the most forgivable. Truffaut even named a whole film after it.
Stealing a kiss doesn’t mean forcing a kiss on anyone, but rather that the recipient of the kiss is surprised and has not given any verbal or nonverbal permission. When done right, however, the victim allows the kiss to happen, even if she has done nothing to initiate it, and may even reciprocate if she is not moved to resist. In either case, the kiss stealer should expect to receive a talking-to from her. If a womanly slap on the face seems too high a price to pay, he should forget the whole thing. Ideally, however, the victim’s resistance quickly melts, and a kiss that was stolen to begin with quickly becomes a classic kiss of passion.
Of course, a woman can also steal a kiss from a man. In that case the situation becomes more complicated. While a man who steals a kiss and is rebuffed is a somewhat comical but at the same time romantic (and by no means ridiculous) hero, a woman thief whose kiss is refused becomes a tragically fearsome, desperate and sometimes even contemptible creature—familiar from film noir—and is condemned to ruination for her unrequited passion. On the other hand a woman whose stolen kiss is not refused is likely to succeed in wrapping her male victim around her little finger, thus becoming a femme fatale, and can then use her power over him in whatever way she wishes. (More on the rules of the femme fatale in the next chapter.)
The riskiest stolen kisses, of course, occur when both parties are of the same sex. With the exception of certain specific settings (such as a gay bar), the probability of the kiss being rejected is increased exponentially. In the best cases, the rejected homosexual kiss leads to comic embarrassment, but in many situations it is likely to end in tragedy. As a cinematic character, the male homo-sexual thirsting for love is one of the most tragic, at least when it comes to traditional cinema (a tradition for which the character of Jack Twist in the film Brokeback Mountain represents a breaking point of sorts). Films with more modern values—such as Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, which normalizes homosexuality—are more merciful to him.
As with all cinematic acts, stealing kisses demands a sense of space and rhythm and an ability to influence the mood so that every aspect of the situation points to the kiss like a road sign. I hardly need add that the M-particles in magical places invariably facilitate the success of the endeavour by decreasing the slow continuum attachment of both parties.
(See next page for stills of cinema’s most famous stolen kisses.)
Greta Kara opens the iron gate in front of the chapel. She hasn’t yet noticed Olli and doesn’t know he’s watching her, but she moves with careful grace, like an actress who can hear the hum of cameras and feel the heat of the spotlight wherever she goes. Greta is radiant, but the day is cold and grey. The air holds a hint of coming rain.
Olli has a small red umbrella. It belongs to Aino. It was the only one he could find. He’s smoking a cigarette. The smoke strengthens his deep cinematic self and dispels his insecurity.
Her pale figure moves from the cemetery to the other side of the wall, the world of the living. The banging
of the gate interrupts the pastor’s flow of words, carried across the graveyard. From dust you came, to dust you shall return.
A group dressed in black is crowded around an open grave like a flock of crows. As she walks past them, Greta stands out like a protest against the transience of it all, in a conical white hat, a white dress that leaves her arms bare and a handbag of the same colour. Felliniesque. “A combination of tastelessness, sensuality and exuberant colour,” as the Guide to the Cinematic Life put it.
Olli steps out from the shade of a maple tree, drops his cigarette and rubs it out with his foot.
Greta’s face brightens. “Well hello, Olli. I suppose I should be surprised. But I’m not. I had a hunch I would see you somewhere today. This lovely hillside town is apparently so small that we can’t go a day without running into each other, although I seem to have accidentally averted that fate yesterday… You aren’t stalking me, are you, Mr Suominen? Following me around?… Ha. As if a busy man like you didn’t have more important things to do. Conspiracy theories aside, though, I didn’t mention anything about this on Facebook. It’s weird and stimulating this way, don’t you think? In a good way. I went out for a walk, my feet brought me here, and on a whim I thought for once that I would put some flowers on Anna’s grave, since I am in Jyväskylä.”
“Anna’s grave?”
Greta’s brow furrowed and her nose scrunched up, making her look like a cross little animal. “Olli, if you don’t remember Aunt Anna, I’m going to be upset. But I refuse to believe that you are one of those horrible people who treat the past like some trivial movie they remember watching long ago, or at least partway through, but they can’t recall the names of the actors or the plot, and they don’t care to… The love interest was the blonde one. Or was it the other girl?… No, it was definitely the one with the golden hair. And they met at a dance or on the beach or maybe on a carousel, I can’t remember, but anyway, then something bad happened to them… or did they get to be together in the end?”
Secret Passages in a Hillside Town Page 18