The police asked her if they could continue asking me questions. The woman asked me if I was getting tired.
I said I wasn’t. I wanted my mother back.
All of the questions were about her.
What had our life been like recently?
Had she met anyone?
Did she have a boyfriend?
She hadn’t been threatened by anyone?
Had I seen any men around her?
Did I know anything about the men?
Had my mother been happy? Normal? Cheerful? Sad?
What had she been wearing that morning? What did she say before she left for work? How did she say what she said? Did she ever talk about people she was going to see? If so, did I remember anyone in particular?
And so on.
Weeks went by. The policemen changed but the questions were the same.
Months went by, and although the questions were the same, they came less frequently. Then they stopped altogether.
I was thirteen years old.
I knew that the police would never figure out where my mother had gone.
I still knew it.
Kalmela Manor stood on the seashore ninety-four kilometres west of Helsinki, in a spot that had been thought desirable in 1850. The estate covered a hundred and sixteen hectares, less than half of it farmland. The rest was forest, both wild and cultivated. The shoreline was a kilometre long, with a little more than a tenth of it, about a hundred and twenty metres of the eastern half, clear cut. From the long dock to the west you could see hundreds of metres of rocks and thickets broken up by at least two steep, red-grey stone cliffs.
The manor was built on a spot where the ground rose above the surrounding landscape. The house at the top of the hill dominated its surroundings and looked as large and yellow as the sun on a cloudless day. The other buildings included the outbuilding with its garage, the guest house, a boat shed, and a seaside sauna.
The farm fields were rented to locals. In September they lay bare and stubbled and, depending on the clearness of the day and the position of the sun, could appear golden-yellow, tired brown, or grey as wool felt. In the spring they would again sprout rye, oats, sugar beets, and potatoes.
There was plentiful forest in every direction, surprisingly dark and dense even in autumn.
The main building had been renovated at the turn of the millennium. It was an assortment of pale yellows beautifully complemented by the white of window frames and pillars as thick as punchbags flanking the entrance. There were two floors, eight rooms, and a professional kitchen. Downstairs was the common space. It was dominated by the large, bright hall where visitors, such as myself, were directed upon arrival. Behind the hall was a dining room and behind that, hidden from sight, was the kitchen. The kitchen pantry took up a significant amount of the ground floor.
There was also a library furnished with imposing English leather armchairs, a bar, and dark, glass-doored bookshelves on both of the long facing walls. There were a lot of books, most of them old.
All of the bedrooms were upstairs. The largest of these was made up of three of the previous bedrooms combined. It had a bathroom designed to the same scale. In the middle of the upper storey was a common room similar to the downstairs hall, though smaller, with double doors leading to a balcony.
The balcony looked out on a view of the sea. From there you could see the entire level, well-tended lawn with its standing rows of junipers, old red and gold maples, on the right the boat shed and dock, where a white, fifteen-metre yacht was moored, and on the left the brown-planked sauna with its terrace and next to it a narrow swimming dock designed for quick dashes into the water.
Standing on the balcony you might make other observations. There were no neighbours. The wind was a constant presence. It whirled over the estate, blowing my hair around, making the woods sigh, and carrying the salty, inviting smell of the sea wherever it went, including indoors. When now and then the wind calmed a little or quieted completely, an extraordinary silence fell, broken only by human sounds.
There were two permanent residents: the cook Enni Salkola, and me. There reigned between us a sort of understanding, a camaraderie. Maybe it was something instinctive, the unspoken thought that we were there to work, unlike those who lived or visited there. There was an us and them, and that difference placed Enni and me on the same side.
On my second evening there, after spending the whole day working outside in the cool wind, as I was making my way across the dark yard to my apartment, Enni had called after me and invited me into the kitchen for an evening snack. Long, thin slices of fresh rye bread with butter and pickled whitefish, black-label Emmental cheese, and tart apples from the orchard. I was hungry. We talked a bit about our work and nearly as much about the weather, but mostly we ate. And the silence didn’t feel bad. When I glanced at Enni while I was eating, she just smiled and asked if I wanted some more. I did.
Standing on the balcony I looked out at the sea. It spread blue and flat before me, as if you could walk on it. I felt the autumn wind on my arms. I checked the floorboards I’d been working on again to make sure they didn’t wobble or squeak when you stepped on them. I’d wedged the loose places with small shims and sanded the floor to make everything level. It felt good. I didn’t expect anyone to be spending time outside on an autumn weekend, but this small success nevertheless pleased me.
I closed the balcony doors as I went in, swung my toolbag into my right hand, and went downstairs. I walked across the yard to the toolshed first, left my bag there, and then went to the other end of the building, where I was living.
I had my own stairs to the first-floor apartment. I didn’t keep the door locked. I didn’t see any reason to. I had very few possessions, and the only valuables were valuable only to me. I left my heavy work boots in the doorway, brewed some dark-roasted coffee, and made two sandwiches – Enni’s rabbit pâté spread on crusty rye.
I sat by the window and looked at the weak, grey light of the afternoon multiplied in the simple lines and rough, irregular surface of the thick vase I’d placed on the windowsill.
DECEMBER 1993 – JULY 2003
I HADN’T NOTICED it before.
I could feel the social worker’s gaze on my back as I walked across the small, quiet apartment to the living-room window.
The home my mother and I shared was going to be sold. I’d been told at various times and in various ways that I couldn’t live there alone. I was told that I was only thirteen, that I needed adults around me, to intermediate for me. I didn’t argue. I had a different opinion, but I understood that it was useless to resist. After my mother’s disappearance it was all inevitable, inexorable, as if a strong, heavy hand had drawn a line between the past and the present, and there was nothing one boy could do about it.
The social worker went into the kitchen. I picked up the vase and I could feel that my mother had once held it in her hand. Maybe she got it from her own mother, a person I knew no more about than I did about anything else. Or maybe she’d found it somewhere and brought it home. In any case, her hands had held it. I went to get a T-shirt from my room to wrap the vase in.
I asked the social worker if I could stay in the apartment one night.
No, that wasn’t possible.
I looked the social worker in the eye for a moment. I could tell she felt sorry for me. Everybody did. It didn’t bring my mother back or explain what had happened to her.
I went into my room. It was the smallest room in the small apartment, a room of my own. I remembered how my mother had said, Now you have something I never had. I could see tears in her eyes. That happened every now and then. Especially when she talked about her life before me. She said it brought her so much happiness to be able to give this to me. I thought at the time that she was just talking about my room.
I opened the drawers of my scratched, second-hand desk. They were full of stuff. Toys, drawings, scrapbooks, pencils, rubbers, magazines, all kinds of things I’d found and brough
t home. That heavy hand between past and present had reached here, too. I knew I was no longer the boy who had drawn those pictures, read those magazines, played those games. I was someone else. The old me had gone wherever my mother had gone.
In my mother’s room, I sat on the edge of the bed. The room smelled like her and every object looked as if she might come and pick it up at any moment. Her things were already in motion – disappearing from the desk, leaping off the hangers, rising from the floor. I didn’t know what to do. The idea that my mother’s things would be taken somewhere felt like another disappearance, but at the same time I knew that there was no way I could bring it all with me. I couldn’t even bring very much of it.
I looked around.
Two white ribbons as wide as a finger were attached to the top of the decorative black frame of the mirror. I remembered her attaching them there with a twist of wire. I remembered that each of the bows had a story. The first one, the one nearer the centre, at the top of the twist of wire, my mother had tied herself. I recognised it easily. Strong, happy loops. Looking at it, I could see my mother’s hands and fingers at work.
I managed to slide the ribbon loose from the wire without untying the knot. The other bow, according to my mother, was from a box of chocolate pastries. Not just any pastries, she said, but homemade pastries for her name day, given to her by an important person at an important moment. It made the bow special. That ribbon had always looked to me as if it didn’t match, although it was tied with generous loops like the one my mother had made. It was thicker than hers and there were four loops in it. Looking at it more closely I saw that it wasn’t a simple bow knot. It was pulled tight and the knot in the middle was hard as rock. There was someone else’s touch in it. I tugged it loose from the mirror frame, closed it in my fist, and walked with both of the bows in my hand back to the windowsill. I dropped the ribbons into the vase and put it under my arm.
I asked the social worker where my mother’s things were going.
To a good home, I’m sure, she said.
If it was a good home, could I go there, too?
The social worker tried her best, but her smile wasn’t genuine.
That’s not quite what I meant, she said.
I didn’t say anything. I knew that was not quite what she meant. She backed out of the doorway.
My mother wasn’t these objects, and she wouldn’t be angry that I didn’t take them with me. I was only thirteen, but I understood some things. Taking a journey was easier without a lot to carry.
Over the next few years I learned other things, too.
I stopped referring to my mother as missing. Nobody’s missing for years and comes back alive. That doesn’t happen. My mother was murdered.
When I got out of the army, I rented a tiny studio apartment in the Sörnäinen neighbourhood, and got a position as a carpenter’s helper. I liked the job and I liked the carpenter, whose name was Kauko Ranne. He was a head shorter than me, worked from early in the morning until late at night, and encouraged me.
‘My work will be done when you can do it better than me,’ he said. ‘No one wants to be an assistant; they want to be the boss.’
We did subcontracting as well as our own renovations. Ranne demanded a lot and paid well.
One hot, still summer day, I turned on the television. Moments earlier I had been in the shower, rinsing off the dust of the day. I had eaten some beef soup and sat down on the sofa for a cup of coffee.
On a current affairs show they were saying that it had been almost exactly ten years since the country hit the lowest point of the recession of the nineties. They were remembering those who had fallen to the recession and interviewing those who had come through it. One of the survivors was an investor named Henrik Saarinen.
The reporter’s jacket flapped in a high wind and his short, thin hair stood up in every direction as he stood with his back to the door that led to the offices of Saarinen’s investment firm on Etelä Esplanadi. The reporter outlined Saarinen’s portfolio: one-fifth of a media company, almost 5 per cent of a grocery giant, and various holdings in ten different medium-sized Finnish companies.
The programme moved indoors and Saarinen was interviewed in a comfortable conference room that looked more like a gentlemen’s salon of a hundred years ago than a modern place of business. On the wall behind Saarinen was a well-known Finnish painting, women on their way to their country cottages at sunset, after a day’s work, the sun glowing red and violet on the horizon. The women in the painting looked stricken, worn out, their faces thin and dirty, their clothes ragged. Henrik Saarinen leaned his right elbow on the plump arm of a leather sofa and smiled.
How can a person look friendly and at the same time completely unscrupulous?
That was a question they should have asked Henrik Saarinen, investor. He was nearing sixty and seemed to enjoy being just the age and size that he was. He was a big man, in every way. His grey-blue pinstriped suit, white shirt, and golden yellow necktie seemed stretched tight, although they were undoubtedly custom tailored. His hair was salt and pepper in just that sleek way that speaks of wealth and power. His slightly bloated face either had a hint of sun or was naturally yellowish. His round glasses softened his cool blue eyes, which was no doubt why he wore them. Every time the reporter asked a question, a hint of something like scorn showed in Saarinen’s eyes, but since his answers were polite, intelligent, and insightful, he gave the impression of a man who had always been misunderstood, a man who really wanted what was best and did what was best – and what’s more, without being asked.
The reporter was taken with his charisma. An interview that had begun combatively was, after four questions, becoming like a visit from a fan. Saarinen told his own version of the recession, of how it was that he had succeeded, had come through splendidly, in fact, and had, according to him, found wise solutions to the problems of Finland’s entire economy, just by relying on himself and on that oft-praised invisible hand.
I had always known of Henrik Saarinen’s existence. Everybody did. Especially my mother. She had worked for a company that Saarinen owned.
It felt as if I was seeing more than just the interview. The first thing I noticed was his hands – one lying on the arm of the sofa and the other discreetly underscoring his words, eliciting understanding and trust. There was something about his hands. I didn’t know what it was, but there was something. His lips, too, which I watched closely, no longer hearing what he was saying. When I didn’t listen to the individual words, I could hear the voice, and it sounded as if someone was sitting beside me, turning towards me as he spoke.
I put my cup down on the wood floor and looked at Saarinen’s face. It filled my twenty-one-inch television. I tried to understand what it was about the creases in his cheeks and the dark circles under his eyes, obscured for the moment by the almost imperceptible make-up, that I hadn’t noticed before, what it was about the shape of his face, the thin, tight lips as they opened and closed that made me feel as if I’d stepped into a dark room that I had to get out of to reach the air and sunlight.
The camera zoomed out and I saw the hands again. The left hand. The one that was sometimes in his lap, sometimes in the air, opening up meanings, inviting you to listen. His fingers rose one by one as he tallied his achievements. I could almost feel his thick fingers, meant for something other than clean, indoor work, touching my hair, the top of my head, my shoulder.
The interview ended.
The reporter continued talking about Henrik Saarinen, who was now shown in a full-length shot, walking and discussing something with three other people in the same art-graced conference room. For a large man of sixty he had a light, springy step. There was no hint of a heavy man’s ungainliness or any sign of knee or hip trouble or even the stiffness you would expect in a man of his age.
And when he turned, just as the reporter finished the story with an account of his hobbies (fine art, cuisine, and hunting) – I stepped again into the dark room I’d sensed a mo
ment before. There wasn’t anything sharp or quick or in any way remarkable in his movement. It was simply familiar. So familiar that in the darkness I couldn’t see anything but his tanned, salt-and-pepper head. The head was talking. The voice came from close by, right next to me, but I still couldn’t hear what it was saying.
I turned off the television, sat down, and wrestled my way out of the dark room and back into the sunny summer evening.
I knew something had happened. I’d experienced something unique. I’d been shown something that I already knew, or something I should have known.
SEPTEMBER 2013
I CLOSED THE door of the manor house and stood on the veranda. Two plump-breasted crows sat on the roof, utterly still. Against the grey sky they were like those black silhouettes cut from cardboard that people used to buy at amusement parks and hang on the wall to show others something that they already knew – what the person memorialised looked like in profile. Autumn wrapped the land in its groping embrace. I listened to the movement of the gusting wind through the tall spruce trees and the birches that bordered the yard. The air was thin and fresh, with a hint of sap in it, a sweet smell.
I still felt as if I’d stepped into another time, another world. I’d never lived outside Helsinki, though I’d moved all around within the city. First I lived with my mother in Pihlajanmäki, a green, northern suburb of apartment houses, then, after her disappearance, came foster homes in other northern neighbourhoods, and finally a move to the more far-flung Laajasalo, with Reijo and Sinikka. They were an older couple whose children had already left home and they wanted to help the less fortunate. That was the place I learned to call home. For their sake, if for no other reason. When they both died within four years – Sinikka from cancer, Reijo from grief a year later – I felt as if I’d lost my family a second time.
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