Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  All right, I forgive you. Of course I do.

  That summer together was wonderful. But then came the last night, and the morning, and the Blomrooses…

  I’m sorry.

  Please hold me tighter. Otherwise I won’t be able to stop shaking. Kiss me. On the lips. And one on the forehead. OK. I can continue now. Stroke my hair. Don’t let go of me.

  I could understand Anne, in a way. The poor crazy girl had always loved Karri as hopelessly as Karri loved you. So naturally she hated me from the moment she saw me.

  One time she came into my room drunk while I was playing the piano and tried to find Karri in me. She examined me up close, exposed herself and tried to get me to touch her. She said that I still smelt like Karri under my pretty dress and my phony act. She said she wanted to show Karri all the wonderful things a girl can do for a boy.

  I gave her a cheeky answer, like furious teenagers do, said I knew very well all the wonderful things a girl can do for a boy.

  I still remember the look on her face. It was a combination of disgust, anger, jealousy, sadness and something I didn’t recognize at first. She left without saying anything more. I thought I had won, and relished the feeling. It wasn’t until later that I realized what that last look on her face was.

  An epiphany.

  I had given her a hint about you and me.

  Olli, about that last night we had in Tourula—it was wonderful, and it was awful, and if you had known how afraid I was you wouldn’t have asked me to get undressed. Because if you had recoiled in disgust, when you saw…

  But that night, in that dark room, Olli, I felt myself through your touch and for the first time in my life I was able to accept myself completely.

  I had never touched myself the way you touched me. That night, I had my first orgasm.

  Then the morning came, and the horrible, lacerating brightness that the Blomrooses brought.

  And the pain.

  I’m not talking about the rusty tools. Yes, they tore my body open, but I could have lived with the pain.

  The part that hurt the most happened before a drop of blood had fallen.

  The most horrible part was when they dragged me into the light and made you look at me and see me the way they saw me, reading those awful papers out loud, words that destroyed all the beauty you had given me.

  I didn’t even know how to hate them back then. I hated myself. The Blomrooses just took away the mercy of darkness and the illusions, the beautiful lies we’d made up, and they forced me into the light of the truth. And their truth made me a freak.

  No, don’t try to console me… Don’t touch me.

  Just listen.

  The last thing I remember about that house was Anne showing me the drill bit.

  You were lying on the floor, quiet. I wondered if they had killed you. I hoped that you were dead. I was terrified of the thought that you would live and remember what kind of freak your girl in the pear-print dress had turned out to be. I prayed to God that both of us would die.

  Then Anne made me look at that red drill bit, and everything turned dark. And I was happy.

  You see, I thought it was death.

  43

  W hen I woke up, my body was bandaged and there were tubes and cords coming out of it. Pain medication pumping into me. I realized I was in the hospital. Anna sat beside my bed and cried for several days. Then she stopped and just stared at me. She kept saying, “My child,” as if she were trying to reassure herself. “Karri, Greta, what does it matter? It’s still my child.”

  She looked like a ghost. I didn’t know how to think of her as my mother any more. She was Karri’s mother—to me she was Anna. My aunt. She had even introduced me to the neighbours as her sister’s daughter.

  They told me I had been found bloody and nearly dead at the old cemetery. I must have come from the railwayman’s house to the other side of the river through the secret passages, although I didn’t remember it at all.

  The police came to question me. Eventually I made up a story about a drunken drifter down by the river, said he had started following me and dragged me into the house, knocked me unconscious and done terrible things to me.

  The police searched our room by the river. They asked if I had been there. I told them I had been there many times to play the piano and think about things, when I wanted to be alone. And I told them that other people besides me went there, too. It was obvious that the police had examined the bed and found evidence of our games. You weren’t mentioned, of course.

  I couldn’t go to high school as planned, so it was decided that I would take a year off to recover, physically and mentally.

  The doctors started examining me again, like a fascinating specimen. They prodded, measured, took pictures, peered at me, felt around my most private parts. Sometimes when the doctors were between my legs arguing over whether I was more boy or girl, I felt like I was in the hands of Anne and her brothers again. I had to break a water glass over a doctor’s head before it occurred to them that I might not be that interested in listening to their medical attempts to define me.

  I asked them if they could fix me and make me a real woman.

  They said, in theory, yes. But Anna had already assured them that regardless of my special genitalia, I had always clearly been a boy, a boy who had simply been very mixed up and confused lately. So the doctors didn’t want to rush into anything under those circumstances, and some of them thought that physically I was more a boy than a girl. I would have to see a psychiatrist and a psychologist for at least a couple of years before thinking of surgery.

  Every moment that I was in the hospital I hoped and feared that you would walk through the door. I didn’t really want to have anything to do with you if I couldn’t show myself to you as what I was meant to be in your eyes, in bright light, without shame. But when you didn’t come, I was crestfallen. I made up excuses for you, Olli; sometimes I hated you. What kind of thing is that, to know that I hated the very person I was fated to love for the rest of my life?

  You sent me a letter?… I never got it. That might have been when I’d already left home. If it came earlier, Anna probably destroyed it. She sensed that Karri’s change into Greta had something to do with you, so she was quite bitter towards you.

  My life was unbearable. To pass time in the hospital I watched old movies on the little television in my room and planned how to kill myself.

  I gave up on the idea, though, when I realized that death was easy, when you thought about it—I could kill myself later, any time I wanted. I understood that even if I did keep living I didn’t have to accept the flat ordinariness that everyone was trying to drag me into—with their diagnoses and reports and measurements. That didn’t have to be my reality. To their way of thinking I was nothing but a curiosity, a freak of nature, a walking developmental irregularity, Mother Nature’s defective goods.

  So I learnt to think cinematically.

  I started to see my life as an adventure and myself as its tragic but glorious heroine, who would eventually triumph over her hard fate if she only learnt to live fearlessly. I was Natalie Wood, Kim Novak, Vivien Leigh, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Anita Ekberg and Audrey Hepburn all rolled into one. You only have one life, so why settle for a small part?

  It was winter when I got out of the hospital. Anna had saved Karri’s clothes, and she offered them to me. It was like being offered the clothes of a dead person. I asked where the pear-print dress was. Anna said she couldn’t find it anywhere. I cried for several days. She eventually got tired of listening to me and sewed me a new one.

  As soon as I put the dress on, my mood improved and I started to think about my life going forward.

  I’ve never been able to actually remember the things that Karri experienced. His memories are like stories someone told me, or pictures in a stranger’s photo album. But I found all the information that had accumulated over the course of Karri’s life within myself.

  The pre
vious autumn—the first autumn of the girl in the pear-print dress, I mean—I had gone back to school. For understandable reasons, I went to a different school from the one Karri went to. I noticed that I was a good student, better than Karri had been. All the information that had made Karri yawn was there in my mind, accessible, as if my mind were an entire library. I was, in fact, first in my class, and got a scholarship, although some of the teachers gave me some odd looks when they heard about my past.

  I was thrilled when I realized I could play the piano, even though Karri had been a hopeless music student. The school music teacher encouraged me to get a proper piano teacher—she thought I might even have the talent to be a concert pianist.

  Tourula started to feel oppressive; Anna thought I was an interloper. I found a job in Helsinki as a nanny. I packed my bags, left a short note for Anna telling her I’d got a job in domestic service, and hitchhiked to Helsinki. From there I went straight to Sweden, then to Amsterdam. I guess you could say that the little girl in the pear-print dress decided to go out into the wide world to find herself.

  You can smile now, darling…

  For a while I was working in a coffee house in the Jordaan district in Amsterdam. I shared an apartment with two Indian Hijra. We had a lot in common, and I ended up going with them to Bombay.

  But before that I hired a boy prostitute. You see, I missed you terribly. I chose someone who looked and smelt a little like you. I wanted to experience the same feeling I had on that last summer night. I paid him, and then we went into a dark room. I did the same things to him that I had done to you. I explained in detail how he should touch me, and I called him Olli. I had my second orgasm.

  I’m sorry, Olli. I can see that you don’t want to hear this. But it’s all a part of the history of my flesh, my skin, and I want you to know all of it.

  Have you ever been to India? They have a book fair there, too, you know. It’s in Mumbai. Although when I was there it was called Bombay.

  I spent three years in the heat of that city. It smells bad and there are too many people, too many rats, too much noise, but I felt extremely at peace there. Because there they recognize a third gender, the hijras, who aren’t men or women. My new Hijra friends welcomed me into their community.

  The hijras have their own caste. A long time ago they were considered sacred and were respected, but then the English colonists gave India the gift of slow continuum attachment and showed them the hijras in the light of ordinariness, in other words as contemptible deviations from the norm.

  We were hated and feared and honoured, depending on the situation. We got badly beaten up a few times, sometimes by gangs of men, sometimes the police. But we showed up at ordinary people’s weddings, made a lot of noise and sang naughty songs until they paid us to leave. It was a custom there.

  When I’d been living in Bombay for almost three years, I learnt that a hijra friend of mine named Heena was in love with me. We had sought human happiness and warmth from each other and agreed that that was all it would be. And I ended up chasing her out of my bed. She was beautiful in her orange dress, and she was a sensitive person. There was something like you about her, so I enjoyed being near her.

  The next evening we went out to some bars and I told her all about you. I also told her that for me she had mostly been a shadow of you. It was cruel, but at the time I thought it was necessary.

  She cried but said she understood.

  On the way home, three men ambushed us and dragged us into an alley. One held a knife to my throat while the other two violently attacked Heena. I was silent. She screamed like an animal being slaughtered. I knew it would be my turn next.

  But a large, drunken tourist happened to walk by. He yelled something in German, waved a pistol and scared the rapists away.

  The tourist and I helped the bloodied Heena to her feet and set off to take her home.

  We hadn’t walked very far when a police car pulled up beside us. Two policemen in grey uniforms and caps got out. They asked us in a very intimidating tone what we were doing. I suspected that they had been watching the whole incident from a distance. The German explained that we had been the victims of an attack, but he was reluctant to get involved in the incident any further. The police ordered him to leave and threw Heena and me into their car.

  In the back room of the police station, I was handcuffed to a chair and Heena was hung by her hands from a window grate. We were beaten and insulted. I still remember the words they said, although I didn’t understand them. Khoja! Gandu! Ninna ammane kevya!

  The police continued to defile Heena. They treated me more warily because I was a Westerner, but I got a few good thumps from them and was unconscious part of the time. It was no longer morning when the German reappeared, cleaned up and wearing a crisp white suit. He must have bribed the police because they took off our handcuffs.

  But Heena slumped to the floor.

  The German, who said he was a doctor, pronounced her dead. He pointed out her wounds, explaining with dry professionalism what the cause of death was. It seemed to me like he was trying to establish his authority in the eyes of the police. They listened to him blank-faced. The atmosphere was tense.

  I was crying with rage and sadness. I just wanted the police to be held responsible for what they had done to Heena. The German whispered to me in English that we had better be leaving. He understood enough Marathi to know that the police would kill me as soon as he wasn’t there to witness it. And he himself wasn’t completely safe now that he had been a witness to the police committing a murder.

  We went outside and got into a taxi. The German introduced himself as Hans Engel, a plastic surgeon with a practice in Rio de Janeiro. I told him I was Finnish. He was delighted and suggested that I pick up my passport from my rooms and fly with him to Brazil. He wanted to give me a job as a receptionist, said that he thought Finns were reliable employees.

  Heena was dead, so I couldn’t think of any reason not to accept his offer. And besides, I knew that I needed plastic surgery, so my chance meeting with Hans Engel felt like divine providence.

  Olli, do you feel like hearing some more?

  Good.

  Tonight I’m going to tell you everything you need to know. After this we’ll never talk of these things again.

  I spent the next seven years of my life with Hans Engel.

  He turned out to be an agreeable person. I had my own room in a lovely house where he kept his practice. It was in a prominent place on Saquarema, on the Rua Maximino Fidelis, near the beautiful beaches. I was living in a picture postcard. I quickly mastered my job as a medical receptionist. In the meantime I studied the language and served as a sort of part-time substitute daughter to Hans.

  Sometimes in the evenings I would play the piano and Hans would listen. He wasn’t the least bit musical, but he had an expensive piano because he thought it was a beautiful object. His younger daughter was also a promising pianist, and my playing lightened his gloom. Hans had to leave his wife and two daughters behind in East Germany several years earlier. Apparently it was due to some sort of tax difficulties. As time went by he told me more about himself, but his reason for leaving East Germany was always left unclear. I had the impression that there was something about it that even he didn’t want to remember.

  At some point things started to change. I became the object of Dr Engel’s aesthetic ambition, a human work of art; he thought he could do what he wanted with me—and for all practical purposes, he could.

  Hans was forty-one when we met. He seemed trustworthy. He was tall, and in his own way handsome. When he volunteered to be a father figure to me, of course I was more than ready to step into the daughter’s role.

  When we had known each other for about six months, he came into my room one night. I was sleeping in the nude. When I woke up I saw him sitting on the edge of my bed with a little light in his hand, looking at my body.

  There was nothing sexual about the situation. I wasn’t afraid or angry. I knew th
at I had invited him there myself by means of various subtle cues.

  I didn’t say anything. The light wandered over my hips and breasts and I spread my legs for him. I knew that he was looking at me with the eyes of a plastic surgeon, and not as a man does, and I trusted him. And he had also mentioned that he’d been impotent ever since he left East Germany.

  After examining me for a time, he stroked my hair and apologized for intruding. He just wanted to confirm that he had been correct in his assessment of my situation. It would have been embarrassing for us both if he had been wrong.

  I said I understood.

  He told me he had guessed back in Bombay what my background was—I had been going around with the hijras, after all. But he hadn’t confirmed it, and that had been worrying him. And because I reminded him of his daughters, he felt a need to help. He said he was well aware that he was a sentimental fool, but helping me made him feel closer to his daughters.

  He asked me if I was content with my body.

  I shook my head.

  He asked how I would like it to be.

  The blood started rushing in my ears and my skin tingled. I was afraid I would faint.

  I thought, I want to be the kind of woman you could love, Olli.

  What I said out loud was that I just wanted to be entirely a woman. An attractive woman. Like in a movie. He smiled broadly and said that if I simply trusted him and was ready to undergo some pain, a few changes could make me another Audrey Hepburn, if that was what I wanted.

  44

  GRETA GOES THROUGH the history of her body surgery by surgery and scar by scar.

  Olli starts to feel cold. Eventually he pulls the blanket up over himself. It’s painful to listen to such detailed descriptions. He would like to ask her to stop. But he can see that compared to the telling, the listening is easy.