‘I’m talking about the thing itself. It’s a sort of memento. Do you have any of those? Objects that just look like objects, cheap, worthless, out of fashion, not fit for any decor, but they have a value to you because they remind you of some time or some person and they have a sort of feeling around them, a sort of energy field that makes them more than what they are – a broken toy truck, an old coin purse, or a chair that you can’t sit in any more?’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
‘I’m asking you.’
A seagull screeched somewhere nearby, but unseen. I thought of the bows, one tied by my mother, the other by some other person. The vase I’d put the two ribbons in, and of course the book that had called to me from the library shelf.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then you know what I’m talking about.’
The seagull cawed again.
‘Are those things still in the car?’ Saarinen asked, as if he’d already forgotten what we were just talking about.
‘Still there,’ I said with a nod.
‘Good. And are the keys in the box by the door?’
‘Yes.’
‘So everything’s ready.’
I didn’t know what he meant. He was still facing me directly. The arc of blue sky and the multilayered brightness of the water behind him made it impossible to see his eyes. He moved his right hand in front of him slowly, lifted it to chest height, as if to support it. Then he lowered it and lifted his head and must have been looking at me.
‘Do you ever have the feeling that some thing or some idea has imprisoned you? As if in the middle of this beautiful place on this bright day there’s a dark cloud over you and a dark, bottomless vacuum beneath you? That no matter how deeply you breathe in the fresh air, or look at the beautiful landscape, you’ll never feel a part of that beauty, a part of the world?’
‘I guess everybody has …’
‘I’m asking you.’
I knew the feeling he was talking about, but saying so felt like a defeat somehow, repugnant.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘I knew you would understand,’ he said and turned his head just enough that he must have been looking not at me but at something across the yard, the maple tree or the woods. ‘I’ve actually always felt that way. Except in certain short moments. It’s like drowning on dry land. Or like being shut up in such a small space that the key in your hand is no use because you can’t move to use it. Like a dream where you’re running from something but your feet won’t obey you and you try to yell but nothing comes out because your mouth won’t open and your tongue doesn’t work and you can’t make a sound.’
Saarinen moved his bandaged hand in a small, sideways motion, as if testing to see if he still had the pain, if it was still waiting there. Clearly it still hurt as much as it had a moment before.
‘Which brings up the only real question: are you ready to do whatever it takes to get free? Ready to act – even though you might endanger everything, might lose everything – in order to be able even for just a moment, just a few breaths, to breathe freely, to look around you and see what’s in front of you as if for the first time?’
I didn’t speak. Saarinen’s large head nodded slowly.
‘Sure you are. I know you are just by looking at you. These aren’t the sort of things that are written on a resumé, summed up in a few words for people who won’t understand it anyway. You either recognise it or you don’t. I fought for a long time against my natural desires. I tried to make myself over into something I’m not, something that I thought I should be, should become. It didn’t work. It just made the prison smaller, more stifling. Struggling just tightened the chains, pulled the net closer around me. Am I talking too much?’
He moved away from the sea side of the terrace, took a few steps towards me, and stood a couple of metres away. The smell of the air, the damp fragrance of the forest, and some aroma of burnt wood that clung to the sauna combined with his aftershave, a smell that drew my thoughts away from the seashore and into gleaming steel elevators and glass-walled conference rooms and made the situation feel even more contradictory.
‘Not at all,’ I said, honestly.
Saarinen looked at me for a moment in silence, wiped something from his cheek with his uninjured hand, maybe some nonexistent bit of dirt or rain drop that had dried yesterday. There was in his eyes in addition to the curiosity, something soft and open, which in a different situation I would have interpreted as a need for help.
‘Everyone wants to be free, Aleksi. Everyone wants to get out of their prison. It won’t happen until we understand where the prison is. It’s in the same place for everyone. Between your ears. We blame our pasts, things that were done to us, or some thing or some person that has prevented us from doing what we really want to do. We’d rather be prisoners than take responsibility for freeing ourselves.’
This two-metre-tall man, speaking in a level voice, expressionless, sounded like Paulo Coelho’s psychopath brother, but he was apparently in earnest, and I needed every crumb of knowledge I could get, every shred of a clue that would lead me forward. I was trying to think of a natural way to answer or add something to these meditations, when Saarinen became interested in something else and took a few steps forward and to the right. With amazing nimbleness he picked up the knife out of Amanda’s fish bucket and straightened up again. Then he turned away, walked over the squeaking floorboards back to the railing, stopped, and stood standing with his back to me.
‘And yet we’re willing to do so little,’ he said, putting the knife down on the top of the railing. The movement was a careful one. He stepped away, leaving about half a metre between himself and the knife. The arrangement seemed as carefully constructed as a pose for a painting: an unidentified, broad-shouldered man standing with his back to the viewer, a railing, a knife, and in the background the wide, open sea. It was an effort to hear his voice. He was facing the water.
‘It’s more than twenty years since I first understood what I had to do to free myself. Afterwards I measured my life according to that: I made plans, waited, and finally acted, and for moments was able to feel the warmth of the sun on my face, my thoughts flying and grateful, like I meant them to be. Free for a moment, no longer locked in a prison, drowning in a cramped, airless, dark little barrel.’
I was silent.
‘You see this knife, Aleksi?’
I said I did. The blade shone in the sun and the yellow handle was like a slice of fresh lemon.
‘What would you like to do with it? If you could do whatever you wanted, what would you do? Would you use it to free yourself? Would you be ready to do that?’
I looked at the knife, its graceful shape, its sharp point. The longer, the more closely I looked at it, the more inviting it seemed. Something in its presence, the thing it was made for – stabbing, cutting, slicing, dividing, opening – was compelling my hand towards it, and somewhere in my mind was an urge, a growing image, or series of images, fragments of myself lunging at Saarinen, picking up the knife in my hand, gripping the handle so hard my knuckles were white, my fingers hurt, like a series of moving photographs, hacking at him swiftly, not caring where I struck, just to get out of the situation, to speed up the thing that was going to happen anyway.
I made myself remain calm. For what I was here for. Saarinen turned slowly. The sun bathed his large face, turned it golden, soft and round.
‘Aleksi, what do you want to be?’
Those were my mother’s words.
AUGUST 1993
MY MOTHER’S LIPSTICK is as red as movie blood. She’s sitting on a chair by the door wearing her best clothes. Her high-heeled shoes shine like black pearls. They don’t stay still for more than a second or two. Her fingernails are the same red as her lips. She brushes her clean white sleeve as if she wished there were something on it – a hair, a tiny speck of dust – and looks at the clock.
We’re both waiting: my mother’s waiting for someone she’s excited to see, a
nd I’m waiting for a lift to a football match. My sports bag is in the doorway, like a dog waiting to go for its walk.
My mother radiates a nervousness she’s trying to conceal. I’m not used to seeing her like this. It makes me nervous, too, and reinforces the peculiar feeling that’s been growing all day.
It’s pouring with rain outside, coming down in sheets and lashing against the windows when the wind gusts. I’ve spent the whole day indoors because of it. So has my mother, who is on her last week of holiday. Somehow today feels like the end of the holiday, although the week’s only half over and school won’t start for another week and a half. Not just the end of the break, though. I feel as if something else were ending, too. I don’t know what.
She gets up from the chair and stands in front of the mirror again. I see her eyes in it. They shine through her dark make-up like stars. Her eyes find mine. She doesn’t turn around, just looks at me in the mirror. She tries to smile.
Who are you playing against?
It’s just the sort of behaviour that makes me nervous. She’s been like this all day. Asked me the same question three times. I’m sure she doesn’t hear me when I say again: Gnistan.
Her next question shows that she did hear me after all.
In Oulunkylä?
Yep.
Even though it’s raining?
Yep.
I know what the coach and the fathers who show up will say. Just a few sprinkles. Get on the field. We’re playing. That’s fine with me. At the moment a rainy, muddy football pitch sounds more appealing than anywhere else, near or far. I’m stuck indoors. I need to get out under the sky. At the same time I realise that not all my restlessness is because of the rainy day. I look at my mother and my nervousness immediately increases.
Where are you going?
Her gaze bounces off the mirror like a puck from the wall of an ice hockey rink.
I’m going out.
Who with?
An acquaintance. I’ll be home about the same time you are. We can eat then.
Why won’t you tell me your acquaintance’s name?
She stops combing her hair, lowers her hand to her side, turns around and looks at me. She isn’t smiling. She looks determined.
I will tell you. This evening, for sure. I think I might have another thing to tell you then, too.
I’m thirteen years old and I understand something about human relationships. I know, for instance, that everything is not always what it seems, not by a long shot, and that sometimes things can get complicated and people can reveal things that are usually kept hidden.
What sort of thing?
Her face turns more serious.
You know what’s most important to me. You. And our home. You’ll remember that, won’t you?
I nod.
I’ve wanted to protect you, and this home.
She comes and stands in front of me and puts her hand on my shoulder, next to my neck. The perfume she’s rubbed on her wrist smells like oranges and the lilacs in the yard. She looks so deep into my eyes that everything else disappears.
And I would never bring anyone here if I didn’t feel they were important. That’s why I haven’t told you this person’s name. Only important people can have a name. But even if they do end up having a name or visiting here, none of them will ever come before you.
Then she does something she hasn’t done in a while. She presses her hands over my ears and kisses me on the top of the head. I think that my head will have red lipstick marks that someone taller than me will see. The rain feels even more inviting now. She straightens up, looks at her watch again, and goes to the mirror to fix her lipstick and take her thin, black coat off the hook. She ties a red scarf around her neck and picks up her umbrella. She still hasn’t answered my question. I still feel a tremendous uneasiness inside.
Don’t go, I say, surprising even myself. Words that I didn’t expect, that sum up all the nervous tension of the day. They’re the right words, I realise.
She turns around. She smiles. A warm smile.
We’ll see each other in a few hours. Have a good game.
Wait, I say, quickly pulling my shoes on and heaving my bag over my shoulder.
What’s the rush?
I don’t say anything. I don’t know the answer, don’t know what the rush is, or if there is one. I just need to go out of the door when she does. We walk down the four flights of stairs. We have a rule, or actually not a rule but a game – we only use the elevator if we have something heavy to carry and we’re going up. We follow the rule that’s not a rule this time, too.
The asphalt courtyard is like a lake. We stand in the foyer.
Aleksi, is everything all right?
Suddenly I know what I should say, but just then Vesa’s father’s Saab 900 honks its horn and I have to run.
I get soaked on the way to the car and forget for ever what it was that I was going to say to my mother. But not quite for ever.
Just for twenty years.
SEPTEMBER 2013
NOT EVERYTHING IS what it seems to be.
The words that were left unsaid. The words that could hardly have meant anything to anyone, that could hardly have prevented what happened later, what had to happen.
I could smell autumn in the air. The sea shimmered and rippled like a rug woven from silver. Henrik Saarinen was waiting for my answer.
‘I prefer to be what I am,’ I said. ‘A maintenance man. I don’t want to be anything else. I don’t want to become anything else.’
Saarinen tilted his head. He was a man in love with his own ideas, his own voice and thoughts, having someone nearby to hear them and see them. He loved playing this game. One way or another he was going to beat me. The game would go on for as long as I refused to give in.
‘You refuse to evolve,’ he said. ‘Even though you don’t know what it is that I’m offering.’
‘Even if I did know, I would still be what I am.’
Saarinen smiled. A smile like rotten fruit.
‘Shall we make a bet?’
‘I don’t think I can afford –’
‘Not for money,’ he said.
‘For what then?’
The seagull, which I’d thought gone, screeched again. Who was it screeching at? It was alone in the sky.
‘Today’s Tuesday. On Friday evening I’ll take you somewhere. If what you see then, what you experience, doesn’t change your opinion, then I lose. If after that evening you still want to be a caretaker and nothing more, I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
The terrace we were standing on started to rock underneath me. It felt as if it would come off its supports and move across the water, where it would tip and try to knock us off. I was sure that the sky would change colour, go dark, turn completely black and drown us both in darkness. The vertigo lasted for half a second and I was standing firm again on the broad wood floor, looking at Henrik Saarinen. He had a curious, expectant look on his face.
‘How do you know there’s anything I want to know?’ I asked.
‘There is.’
‘Then why not tell me now?’
‘That wouldn’t suit either one of us. As I said before, I see something in you that’s more than just a maintenance man. I see something you can’t see yourself. Do you believe in coincidences?’
Amanda’s question.
‘No,’ I said.
‘It just so happens that I don’t either. Friday night at nine. Don’t make any other plans.’
The curiosity and interest had disappeared from his face, replaced by insistence.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Friday night. Do I need to –’
‘You don’t need to worry about anything except being here. It’s an evening I’ve been planning for ten years.’
Having said this, he took his phone out of his pocket and looked at it. I hadn’t heard it ring, or even vibrate, but he saw something there that made him raise his eyebrows.
‘Friday, then,’ he said, walkin
g past me and leaving me on the terrace.
His aftershave lingered in the air for a moment with its sweet-sour smell. I heard his steps recede the same way they’d come. The sky was blue except for random shreds of cotton fluff and scattered curls of cloud. The seagull screamed again. It flew directly above me and glided between shore and water. The pale grey bird couldn’t decide whether to trust its wings and head out to sea or stay safely close to the land.
I did the rest of my day’s work: cleaned the rain gutters, cut some more firewood, oiled the dry, squeaking hinges and took down a painting scaffold left on the west end of the toolshed that had been standing there for several winters and wasn’t good for anything now but being broken up and burned.
From the outside I’m sure I looked like someone diligently absorbed in his work. But the physical work was secondary.
I was waiting.
SEPTEMBER 2013
I WAS WAITING, even though my whole being felt as if it was coming apart at the seams. How could years of uncertainty be made certain? Did I need an earth-shattering, sudden revelation of absolute truth, or was the picture emerging piece by piece enough?
I couldn’t reach Ketomaa by phone any more. Amanda wasn’t answering my calls.
It had been a long night full of fragmented, confusing dreams. I woke up feeling hungover, although I hadn’t drunk a drop.
I turned over Saarinen’s words and manner from the day before in my mind. I kept hearing his voice, seeing his bandaged hand. Everything seemed to add up to one thing: his talk about waiting for ten years, telling me to leave the tools in the back of the SUV, his attitude towards me – fatherly, as if he was talking to a pupil, wanting to show me something that he thought would change the direction of my life – and the fact that he clearly knew more about me than I wanted him to know.
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