At a moment like that I wished I could produce some file, some written document that would have justified me, strengthened my theories, something I could have examined for some compelling detail, some important insight. There was no such document. It was all between my ears. It was all in what I believed, what I knew, what I had been able to find out, deduced, pondered. Now and then I would get hold of that certainty that I’d felt twelve years earlier. Now and then I would know what that conviction felt like.
I knew that Henrik Saarinen liked women who looked like my mother. I’d seen pictures of him in the papers. After his marriage ended he had appeared publicly with at least ten different women, and half of them reminded me of my mother in some way. I knew that Saarinen had owned Simola, the mid-sized shipping company where my mother had worked. I knew that my mother had sat in on meetings led by Saarinen. I knew that my mother had met someone who had wanted to keep his identity secret. I knew one or two things about Saarinen’s life and habits. I knew that he had a dark side, but I had no concrete evidence of anything.
Henrik Saarinen had also disappeared from the public eye.
His transformation from social lion to low-profile investor and man behind the scenes had happened in two phases. The first shift occurred when a young woman brought charges against him for assault. The woman, a star of reality television, had left a nightclub with two other women and gone to Saarinen’s apartment in Eira to continue their night’s revels. When they arrived at his building on Tehtaankatu something happened. The two other women went home, leaving the young woman alone with Saarinen and, according to her, Saarinen’s behaviour then changed completely. He tore off her clothes and began whipping her with a belt, forcing her to kneel in front of him and ordering her to lick his shoes. She tore herself from his grasp, struck him with a lamp from the bedside table, and escaped to the street. She immediately told her story to a tabloid and later withdrew the charges. The incident nevertheless had its effect on Saarinen. A photo was taken of him with one eye swollen and a bandage over his injured cheek, through which could be seen a dark row of stitches that indicated more than a minor scratch.
The second change occurred a little later, just before Tanja Metsäpuro’s disappearance. Saarinen’s longtime trustee, the CEO of one of his holdings and an old friend of his, resigned his post and moved to Germany. Neither man would give any comment on the matter and the reason for the break was never made public. Following these events, Saarinen withdrew from the headlines completely.
I looked out into the night and thought about Henrik Saarinen sleeping just a hundred metres away while I sat awake. After twenty years I was a stone’s throw from the man who had the answers to my questions. All I needed to do was find a way to ask, and do whatever was required to get an answer.
I wanted to find my mother. I wanted to say goodbye. I wanted to know what happened on that October evening twenty years ago, and why. I wanted answers.
An ache crept up my shoulders and neck to my temples. I gently massaged them. I decided to get up and take an aspirin and have a snack and try to get some sleep, even if it meant nightmares. I rubbed the sides of my head with my fingertips, and didn’t hear the creak of footsteps on the stairway until they were just outside my apartment door. I heard a knock, short and polite, and looked at the clock on the microwave. The red display said 00:51. I got up from the chair and walked to the door. Without turning on the light or asking who was there, I opened it. I knew who it was.
Amanda stood in the starlight, her face in shadow, and said, ‘Guess how I knew you weren’t asleep.’
‘I have no idea.’
‘You met my father.’
I stepped aside.
‘Would you like a cup of tea? I don’t have anything stronger.’
‘A cup of tea would be good.’
She came inside and stood in the middle of the room. I went to the little kitchen, filled the kettle, and flipped the switch. I pointed to the wooden chair on the other side of the table. Amanda sat down. She was dressed in white sneakers, straight-legged jeans, and a black leather jacket.
‘Is this what you do?’ she asked. ‘Sit in the dark all night?’
‘The light switch is behind you.’
‘This is fine.’
The sound of the kettle was like a dozen wheezing radiators. I took a mug from one cupboard and a teabag in its packet from another and set them on the table in front of her. She looked around the room. Her eyes were obviously adjusted to the darkness and she could see what I saw: one room with a kitchen, simple furnishings, a pile of books, and few possessions. She looked at me again.
‘Pretty stripped down.’
‘It’s not exactly House and Garden.’
Her eyes shone bright in the starlight. She laid her right hand on the table and pressed her fingers against the tea packet as if she were checking to be sure there was a teabag inside. I was still standing in the kitchen doorway, waiting for the kettle to boil.
‘I go too far when I’m drinking sometimes … All those stories. Drunken nonsense. I gave you completely the wrong idea about myself.’
The water started to boil. I picked up the kettle and poured two mugs full. The rising steam was blue in the starlight and looked solid somehow, as if you could grab it and open your fist to see what it was made of.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to think about it.’
‘This probably doesn’t look too smart, either. Coming here in the middle of the night.’
She dipped the teabag into her mug, then picked it up with the spoon I slid across the table. She moved the mug and the steam followed it like a dog.
‘You must think my life is pretty pitiful,’ she said.
‘I don’t know anything about your life.’
‘Except everything. I told you everything. It’s been weighing on me all day. But not just that. There’s something else, too.’
‘I noticed you went out early this morning.’
Amanda’s blue-grey eyes peered out from dark mascara. It was the middle of the night and her make-up was perfect, her hair sleek and shining. As I looked at her I understood what had happened on the shore. Why I had stood on the dock in the cold wind and rain, looking out to sea. For the same reason that I’d just opened the door and invited her in.
‘I drove to Helsinki and thought I would spend the weekend there. Or what’s left of it. Then I changed my mind.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I haven’t had anything to drink today.’
‘OK.’
‘Not that I need to explain anything to you.’
She leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms on her chest, and turned towards the window. It was so quiet that I could hear the earthquake rumble of the refrigerator.
‘Do you believe in coincidences?’ she asked.
‘It depends.’
She smiled and looked at me again. She put her hands down on the table.
‘I’ve always thought that was an either-or question.’
‘If I have to choose, I’d say no. I don’t believe in coincidences.’
‘Neither do I.’
She got up from her chair, and so did I. We met in the middle of the room. Her lips tasted like salt, lipstick, and the mint aftertaste of chewing gum. Her breath was heavy and trembling. She felt heavenly, and absolutely wrong.
AUGUST 1993
OUTSIDE IT’S A clear day, the sun high in a blue, cloudless sky. It must be Saturday because on any other day we would have gone to the library in the evening, after my mother got home from work. The only other person in the library is the librarian, sitting at her desk staring motionless at the library door. When you pull a book from the shelf a cloud of dust motes hangs in the air for a second, twinkling like stars, then immediately disappears somewhere.
My mother has books large and small and magazines in front of her. She’s sitting in the middle of a puddle of brilliant light, and she looks upset. I’ve never seen her like that. The library is quiet as a mouse, so her fr
antic flipping through the pages of each book and magazine one after another sounds loud. She tucks her thick, auburn hair behind her ear and looks completely absorbed in what she’s doing. She moves the middle and index finger of her right hand from a magazine page to a book’s page and back as if she were marking them with an invisible pencil.
I watch her first from a distance, among the shelves, and then walk over to her. She’s wearing a light-blue shirt that almost glows in the dazzling light. Her eyes are wide open, questioning – she’s found what she was looking for.
What are you doing? I ask.
She doesn’t answer, continues reading, making her invisible marks. I ask again. Now she looks up at me, but her mind is still on her reading. She notices this, too, blinks a few times, and smiles.
I’m looking for something.
What?
The magazines on the table are filled with boring charts and black and white diagrams that look as if they were drawn with badly shaking hands. I can tell that they’re statistics. They have to do with my mother’s work. One of the magazines is different. It’s illustrated and has large photographs of people. Some of the people have drinks in their hands. They’re all smiling. Some have white teeth that make it look as if there’s a hole in the paper where their mouths are and underneath is the whitest white paper.
It’s something my mother’s interested in.
My mother’s voice is different in the library. Quiet but very clear. I look at the photo spread again.
Do you know them? I ask, meaning the people with the drinks in their hands, who seem to be laughing and smiling about something I can’t grasp.
At first she doesn’t seem to have understood my question. Then she looks at the picture in front of her.
God, no, she says, and closes the magazine, and I see the picture on the cover. It’s a picture of a man in a dark suit and red necktie, with a well-groomed face and round glasses. He’s looking at the camera like he knows what the photographer is thinking.
My mother stares at the picture. It’s as if she’s expecting the man to say something. He doesn’t say anything. The light falls on her like rain.
I have a copy of that magazine. Not the same copy she was reading, of course, but that’s not important. What’s important is the August 1993 issue, and the man on the cover is Henrik Saarinen.
SEPTEMBER 2013
THE PILLOW SMELLED like Amanda, and it still had the imprint of her head, and a few black hairs. I got up and opened the window a crack. The tart, cool air of an autumn Sunday morning rushed in as if it was blown through a nozzle. The sun was up and the part of the sky I could see through the window was glowing blue. I put the coffee on to brew and went back to bed. Fresh air flooded into the room. It was quiet, and I was alone.
Sunday was officially my day off, a day I could use as I saw fit. Not that anyone outside work had been waiting somewhere for me on any of the other days. My phone rang very rarely and when it did it was usually about the care and upkeep of the estate. I didn’t really have any friends, and certainly not any I would see or talk to on the phone regularly.
I was thinking about Amanda. About how I had itched for her without admitting it to myself, how I’d acted on my desire at the worst possible time with the worst possible person.
Twelve years of diligent work deliberately, knowingly and utterly mucked up. Twelve years living with one goal absolutely firm in my mind, denying myself a lot of things, taking risks, watching my back. And then, on one starry night, I’d gone and done something that could send the whole thing toppling.
Amanda excited me, attracted me. It was the same irrational attraction that I’d suffered for in the past – the wrong women, wrong decisions, rotten results. Amanda was one of those blind spots where my brain stopped working, where the rush and tumult of the body blocked out everything that rationality and instinct was telling me.
I got up and poured myself some coffee.
My meeting with Henrik Saarinen the evening before replayed in my mind. I tried to put it into a clear form, to go through the conversation in the order that it happened, what was left unsaid, what was clearly stated.
But memory doesn’t work that way. Events don’t arrange themselves in a logical chain, like a scene in a movie. The kind of movie I would have liked to watch again and again, finding new meanings, new possibilities, logical connections. Even if I did manage to see the events as they actually happened, without adding anything or leaving anything out, it would only work one time. The very next time I thought about it my memory would light up with new connections, with other memories of other times, and the puzzle would be in pieces again.
But I had seen something. Something that confirmed that I was on the right track, that my instinct twelve years before had been right, in some measure, at least. Henrik Saarinen’s hands, his voice, his body language. His past, my mother’s interest in him. An interest that I had reason to believe was broad and deep. And my mother’s past, of course. It all led to the thought that was always with me, that I rarely wanted to put into words, even though it was what was behind my decision to come: the thought that I might find my mother here, on the grounds of this estate, buried in the woods or at the bottom of the sea.
The thought was both horrifying and comforting. I closed the window and poured the last bit of cold coffee into the sink, watching as the thick, black liquid formed its own dark whirlpool in the clear water from the tap, tenaciously clinging to its colour before vanishing.
I found a sheltered spot on the shore. The sea sparkled so brightly that I could only look at it for a few seconds at a time. I closed my eyes, turned towards the sun, and tried my best to relax. The warmth and light fell on my face softly, slowly, as if poured with a sure, steady hand. The nearby woods were humming and little waves were splashing on the beach, but if I’d imagined that my dark thoughts would be left in my small apartment, I was wrong.
My mind kept returning to recent events, searching for something significant, for explanations, possible reasons for what had happened over the past couple of days. In spite of the fact that I was sitting under a vaulting sky next to a boundless sea basking in gentle sunlight, I was in a dark, cramped space. That was nothing new. I’d spent years in that space, wanting to break out. I breathed in, opened my eyes, and saw a man I recognised on the dock.
The chauffeur, Markus Harmala, was bringing something down to the motorboat, apparently planning to go for a pleasant autumn outing. He had a wheelbarrow filled with supplies and was unloading its contents into the cabin and onto the deck of the boat. I watched him and recognised his movements. Because I had been following Henrik Saarinen for some years, I had of course also been following Markus Harmala. In fact you could say it was really Harmala who was being followed, since he was driving.
Watching him now after such a long time, he wasn’t necessarily Saarinen’s evil and annoying appendage. He looked like a man who had been sitting for hundreds of hours in his boss’s company, shut up in the same car. He looked like a man who knew Henrik Saarinen.
I got up and walked to the dock. Harmala didn’t notice me coming. He lifted a black plastic box out of the wheelbarrow, jumped onto the boat, and looked into the cabin. I waited. After a moment he climbed back onto the dock.
‘Good morning,’ I said, stretching out my hand. ‘Aleksi Kivi, the caretaker.’
Harmala looked like a rich man’s driver. He was colourless and neat. Blue eyes, blond hair parted on the side and combed, a small chin. He was thin and of medium height, and I had noticed that his neutral-toned, fashionable clothing sat on him as if he had chosen an age and finally grown to fit it. He was about five years older than me.
‘Markus Harmala,’ he said. His handshake was quick and polite. He didn’t say that he was the chauffeur. Maybe he had the day off, too.
‘Planning a long trip?’ I asked.
Harmala glanced at the boat. He had a light-brown mole on his right cheek the size and shape of the head of a screw. It
underlined the neutrality, the invisibility of the rest of his features.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve got a lot of provisions. Are you waiting for Henrik?’
‘My boss?’ he said, and sounded genuinely bewildered. The bewilderment didn’t last long. ‘No, I’m waiting for Amanda.’
‘The two of you going?’ I heard myself ask, then realised immediately that I’d given in to an impulse, like I had the night before. That was all I needed, to be jealous of Amanda and not even be aware of it.
‘That’s what it looks like,’ Harmala said. Something happened. Something changed in his eyes. Maybe his face froze for a split second. ‘Unless we have unexpected guests.’
The wheelbarrow still contained some cardboard boxes filled with an assortment of wine, both white and red. Harmala didn’t say anything for a moment. His blue eyes were opaque, no depth.
‘You’re the new caretaker. Of course. I guess I wasn’t listening, didn’t put it together. Slow on the uptake. Glitch in the ignition. Sorry. Must have been lost in my thoughts.’
He said this in a voice that wasn’t quite convincing to the listener. He nodded towards the shore.
‘What do you think? Of the place.’
Why does everyone here ask the same question?
‘I’ve only been here a week. Seems like an interesting place in many ways.’
‘A week?’ Harmala said, looking at me as if calculating something. ‘I thought … OK. Welcome. I’ve been here for more than ten years, since 2002.’
‘So you know the place well.’
He lifted a box from the wheelbarrow, the bottles clinking together.
‘Like the inside of my own pocket,’ he said.
‘Great. I might ask your advice sometime, or get your help with something.’
‘Sure,’ he said, his voice noncommittal, then turned, stepped into the boat, and disappeared into the cabin. The trees all along the shore bent their tops in the wind. Aside from the splashing of the waves it was completely quiet. I looked at the boat. The cabin windows reflected myself and the dock and the water. But more importantly, a feeling.
Dark As My Heart Page 7