Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  Greta’s stream of words starts light-heartedly but turns bitter at the end. Her eyes grow wet. Black streaks run down her cheeks.

  She raises a hand in front of her face. “Oh no. Olli, be the gentleman I know you are and don’t look at me,” she sighs.

  Olli hands her the handkerchief the Blomrooses sent him. She takes it, thanks him and turns half away from him.

  “I can’t bear it that you, of all the people in the world, should see me like this. I’m dreadful. Pitiful. Ugly. Make-up down my cheeks… You’ll think I look like a dressed-up raccoon—No, don’t deny it, you’re absolutely right. I’m a catastrophe. I ought to pull my Donna Vinci right down over my eyes and run home, on the side streets so no one will see me. I would call a taxi but I left my phone at home. Do you have a phone with you, Olli? Please call a cab right now to take the aesthetic catastrophe known as Greta Kara where no one can look at her…”

  She returns his handkerchief, stained with mascara, takes out a mother-of-pearl compact, lets out a little cry of alarm and begins to repair her make-up. Her hands are shaking. “I can’t get in a taxi looking like this,” she whispers, shaking her head.

  Olli senses that she’s teetering on the edge of some kind of breaking point. “Of course I remember Aunt Anna,” he says. “I just didn’t know she was buried here.”

  Greta isn’t listening. She’s concentrated on tidying her appearance.

  Olli tries not to look at her too directly so as not to distress her any more. It’s obvious that his gaze is painful to her. After what happened thirty years ago—the way that their last meeting ended—it’s understandable that she would want to be well groomed and cinematically beautiful when she’s with him.

  That’s fine with Olli. He wants to see her as beautiful and as perfect as she can be, too, out of respect and fondness, and at this moment—identified as he is with the character that his deep cinematic self has created—out of a kind of love for her, because it’s so terribly important to her.

  “I didn’t even know that Aunt Anna was dead. Though I didn’t really think she was alive, either. I suppose I imagined she was still baking cookies in her kitchen in old Tourula, but those cookies were eaten up and the crumbs brushed away years ago. That place doesn’t even exist any more, but that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about it every night.”

  Olli lights another cigarette to cover the embarrassment he feels at what he’s just tacitly revealed.

  Greta looks past her mirror to somewhere far away, years away. “She died five years ago. Her body gave out. Drink did her in.”

  “How sad. I wouldn’t have guessed…”

  “Yeah.”

  Greta manoeuvres her lip-liner with frenzied motions. The funeral party in the distance has come to the part where each person takes a turn dropping sand onto the coffin. Greta gives her lips a final check, packs her make-up into her hand-bag and starts across the car park towards town. She walks ahead of him, her high heels clicking over the asphalt, and Olli follows in unhurried steps.

  The sound of traffic on Puistokatu rises and falls like ocean waves.

  The City Guide manuscript describes the street thus:

  Puistokatu is like a lost fragment of Paris. The old cemetery is reminiscent of Paris’s Cimetière du Père Lachaise, and in other ways the street has the feeling of one of Paris’s side streets. In fact, viewed from certain points, there is a street near Père Lachaise that is almost identical to Jyväskylä’s Puistokatu (see map).

  A car arrives with another funeral party made up of five stocky men and a skinny little girl in pigtails and a black mourning dress. She curtsies to Greta as they walk past.

  “Hello, child,” Greta says, striving for kindness. There is a choked sound in her voice. As they move away she takes Olli’s arm and whispers breathily, “Do you think her mother has died? I can’t bear it…”

  She looks at Olli wide-eyed, demandingly, waiting for his reply.

  “I don’t think so,” Olli says. “Perhaps her grandmother. Or some old relative who’s been sick for a long time. After a long illness, death is a relief.”

  “But where is her mother, then?” Greta insists, looking back at the group and grabbing hold of his coat as if to reproach him. “Surely no woman would send her little girl alone to a funeral and stay home to wash the dishes or watch television. Oh yes, I know where her mother is. She’s lying dead in her casket. That girl is about to watch as her mother is lowered into the ground in a wooden box and covered with dirt. Oh Lord. The mother of a girl that young can’t be very old herself…”

  Olli removes Greta’s hands from his lapels and squeezes them so tightly for a moment that her eyes moisten. “These things happen,” he says coldly. “Bad things happen. People die. Even children. No one can grieve for every dead person. We each have our own dead to cry over. If not today, then maybe tomorrow, if we haven’t wound up under the dirt ourselves for somebody else to grieve.”

  He thinks of Aino and the boy, on a beach somewhere far away, waiting for him to complete his task and earn them a safe return home. 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.

  Greta’s make-up starts to run again and Olli loosens his grip. He takes out his handkerchief and uses it to wipe her eyes, as if she were a little child.

  “Maybe she died of some illness,” Greta whispers, unresisting, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Or maybe she was in a car accident, or was run over. I hope she had time to say goodbye to her husband and daughter. Oh Olli! It’s so terribly sad when people are torn from their loved ones and don’t even have a chance for a proper goodbye! What point is there in anything when everything that’s beautiful can end at any moment, with no warning?”

  Olli puts his handkerchief in his pocket. The worst damage is repaired now. Greta stands looking at him, sad and petulant, as if the impermanence of everything were somehow his fault, or at least his to explain.

  There’s nothing he can do about her fear. Words are useless. Greta has plenty of words of her own. The entire Guide to the Cinematic Life is an attempt to use words to answer a question that torments the author herself.

  And the book’s answer is that lasting happiness may be impossible and joy impermanent, but life can at least be made aesthetically beautiful.

  A beautiful story has a beautiful beginning and a beautiful ending. The illusion of happiness makes the beginning beautiful, but the ending draws its beauty from pain.

  Olli dispenses with words, pulls Greta close to him, looks into her eyes, lays the fingers of his left hand along the back of her slender neck and kisses her.

  The red umbrella falls to the ground with a clunk. A warm wind takes hold of Greta’s hat and throws it into the Puistokatu traffic.

  At first she’s cold and stiff in his arms, as if in the sudden grip of death. Gradually the stiffness melts. Olli feels her lips arch into a smile. She answers his kiss, shyly at first, then devouring his mouth like a hungry predator.

  Her delicate frame presses tightly against him and trembles uncontrollably. It’s the same greedy desire Olli remembers discovering in her years ago.

  When they finally break away from each other, hot and breathless, Greta sighs and lays her head against his chest. “I can hear your heartbeat,” she whispers. “It’s pounding so fast. Because of me? For my sake? Silly thing. It still remembers me, after all this time. How many times will it beat before you’re taken away from me again…”

  Olli breathes in the gold of her hair. He is too roiled with emotion to speak. Contradictory thoughts chase and tear at each other in his mind.

  His gaze falls on a pale white wall on the other side of the street. On it is a painted Goodyear tyre ad, blue letters and a tyre with wings. That sign has followed him through all these years. He points it out to Greta and they look first at the ad, then at each other, smiling in amazement. A moment from thirty years ago rises from the sec
ret passages of memory, its colours deepening until it’s all too easy to fall into.

  It was when the Five were breaking up and Olli was walking down Puistokatu with Greta, and they stopped to look at this ad and kissed under the umbrella, hidden from the adults walking by. Olli remembers now that it was an unusual, domed umbrella that Aunt Anna had brought home from France. It was the same kind that Maura at the umbrella shop ordered for him.

  And now here they are in the same spot, holding on to each other, Olli and his pear-print girl from Tourula. Olli touches Greta’s cheek and looks into the green of her eyes, amazed, as if he has only just now understood who is in his arms.

  The warm wind wraps itself around them.

  For a few short breaths everything that has happened since that summer they shared fades away and drops into meaninglessness.

  Then Olli remembers again that somewhere in the world, right now, a woman and child are on a beach waiting for the day when they can return home.

  30

  The deep cinematic self is an artist that sees life above all as an aesthetic construct. It is like the voice of the conscience but instead of moralizing it leads us to make cinematic choices and interpret our roles as well as we possibly can. It also silences the stage fright of slow continuum attachment so that stories can be set in motion and cinematicness can be achieved.

  GRETA KARA,

  A Guide to the Cinematic Life

  As Olli begins to relive a story that started and ended thirty years before, he feels guilty because at times it is frighteningly easy to let himself get caught up in it. Every time he meets Greta in Jyväskylä’s magical places he feels the M-particles affecting his mood, feels parts of his life slowly but surely shifting into new positions within his consciousness. His whole way of thinking is gradually changing, and it terrifies him.

  But he has to surrender to the change and let his deep cinematic self take over, for his family’s sake. He has to throw himself into the love story with Greta Kara; any superficiality or pretending would only lead to failure, and he has never learnt to act.

  Of course the thought of his wife and son at the mercy of the Blomroos siblings casts a shadow over every moment with Greta, but the whole thing is steeped in a cinematic aesthetic, turning all his conflicting feelings into an emotional work of art.

  Every time he comes home from one of their meetings, his deep self falls asleep. That’s when the seriousness of the situation hits him: his wife and child are being held hostage by psychopaths in some foreign country; he himself is holed up in his house, afraid to tell anyone about his predicament and having daily trysts with a woman he knew for one summer as a child.

  While he waits for new instructions, Olli searches Facebook for signs that Aino and the boy are all right. And he finds new photos on Aino’s profile every day. They show mother and son in various travel destinations.

  Apparently they are being flown to a new location every couple of days.

  The photos come from beautiful, exotic, picture-perfect places around the world. In the newest one Aino is smiling into the camera, and the boy doesn’t look particularly sad, either.

  They’re getting used to this, too.

  31

  ON THE CORNER OPPOSITE the university library is the Puistokatu cafe kiosk. Greta is sitting on the terrace. On the table are two glasses of raspberry soda. In the glasses are two straws.

  Olli walks up, sits down across from her, leans his umbrella against his chair and smiles.

  Today Greta looks like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. The same pink dress with the white patterns, sleeveless, her golden hair pulled back. The look becomes her.

  Olli’s dark-grey coat and trousers are enough like Cary Grant’s that they complement each other’s cinematicness.

  In the park below, children run squealing towards the carousel with the boy’s head on top, in the same spot as it was decades before. That was where Olli befriended the Blomrooses and Karri and touched Anne for the first time. Greta searches his face and says nothing for a long time. An unspoken greeting hangs in the air between them. Olli continues to smile, purposely teasing her.

  Finally Greta speaks. “I had strange, disturbing dreams all night. I woke up after noon, ate breakfast, put on my make-up, played the piano and went out half an hour ago. I was walking downtown and on a whim I sat down here on the terrace. I bought a bottle of soda, the same kind we used to drink, in the same place. We used to come here because we thought the Blomrooses might not come to this part of town. We even kissed. We let people see that we were lovers. You said that it was like we were in some other country, so we could behave as we wished.”

  Olli says he can almost remember.

  Greta purses her lips reproachfully. “The park has changed a little over the years, but the spirit of it is the same. There are still M-particles here. Not as many as there were then, but enough. So, today I came here and asked for two glasses and poured soda in both of them. I thought that if I just believed hard enough, you would appear somehow, like in a dream. I waited five minutes. Just as I thought I was being a silly, stupid girl, you did appear, and here you are. So have some soda, my darling.”

  Greta is smoking a cigarette. Olli feels like one, too. He takes a pack of menthols out of his jacket pocket and starts searching his pockets for a lighter. He’s left it at home.

  Greta rummages in her black handbag, takes out a gold-coloured, old-looking lighter and says, “You know, this Barlow lighter was a gift from Frank Sinatra.”

  “Really?”

  Olli sucks the flame into his cigarette.

  “Or so I was told,” Greta says. “He didn’t give the lighter to me, of course. It was a gift to Judy Garland. I was in Paris and feeling lonely and rich, and I wanted to treat myself. I went to an auction. I saw the lighter there and heard its story. I paid three thousand euros for it, so if they tricked me, I don’t want to know about it. You see darling, once a thing is done and there’s nothing I can do about it any more, if I’m offered a pleasant lie about it or a depressing truth, I’ll take the lie.”

  She smiles and Olli secretly trembles at her exquisiteness.

  Olli has been to Paris six times as an adult, every time to represent the publishing house at the March book fair. Two years ago he happened upon an exhibition at the Pompidou and stood for an entire hour looking at one painting.

  It was Gustav Klimt’s Judith I.

  Olli wanted the painting for himself, although he knew he couldn’t have it. Perhaps precisely because he knew he couldn’t have it. There were poster reproductions of the painting at the museum shop, but they weren’t what he wanted. He wanted the original. It wasn’t the most beautiful painting he had ever seen, but it felt as if it belonged to him. He stood admiring it and felt an almost sexual desire for the sensuous woman in the picture.

  Finally he had to make himself leave so that he wouldn’t grab the painting and try to take it out of the museum before anyone could stop him.

  As he gazes now at Greta transformed into Grace Kelly, he’s overcome with the same need to possess her that he felt for that Klimt painting.

  He finds himself writing in his mind the same description of Greta that he wrote on lined paper once when he was sixteen:

  She walks quickly, her body tense, yet supple as a cat’s tail, her head held high, self-assured, dropping words sometimes casually, sometimes excitedly, wrapped in mysterious scents, so that her whole way of being reaches out to the senses of the men who turn to look, and says, “Keep up with me and you just might catch me.”

  Greta seems to sense his thoughts or at least the feelings behind them. Her sea-green eyes flash. Her slender hand takes hold of his shovel-like one and squeezes tight and she glows as if she’s just been given a gift.

  32

  Lounais Park is one of Jyväskylä’s oldest parks. It was established in the 1860s and is known throughout Finland for the music festivals that have been held there since the 1880s. Over the course of its history th
e park has had many different more or less temporary bandstands and amphitheatres, including the vaulted festival stage designed by Alvar Aalto for the upper part of the park in 1924. The present outdoor stage was designed by Olavi Kivimaa in 1954. On the upper edge of the park is a kiosk cafe which was refurbished at the turn of the millennium. The park also has a children’s play area, with its peculiar old boy’s head carousel, preserved through many decades up to the present.

  Lounais Park has its own distinct atmosphere and its meaning fulness particle radiation levels are powerful. It also sits above numerous secret passages which rest close to the surface and intersect right below the carousel.

  GRETA KARA,

  Magical City Guide Number One: Jyväskylä

  On the kiosk cafe terrace, people come and go. Olli and Greta remain. Their eyes plumb each other’s dark depths across the table.

  Olli plays with his smoke.

  Greta sucks raspberry soda through her straw, thirsty and agitated, her green irises sparkling with girlish joy at a situation which had seemed so hopeless and now seems to be turning to triumph.

  Olli notices that he can feel their connection working again. He remembers suddenly how easy it once was for them to read each other: each knowing what the other was feeling and sometimes able to guess with frightening accuracy what thoughts were turning in the other’s head. Maybe they had been peeking into each other all this time by means of their dreams.

  The memory is attached to a bunch of emotional mycelia and Olli is moved when he realizes that he’s never managed to create the same connection with anyone else in his life, not even his wife.