Dark As My Heart

by Antti Tuomainen

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Are you going to tell him?’

  Mansikka-aho didn’t answer.

  ‘When did you last see Ketomaa here?’ he asked.

  I told him briefly and as honestly as I could about our recent meeting in front of the house. When I’d finished he said, ‘Be careful about that dizziness. If it catches you in the wrong place you could seriously injure yourself.’

  I followed him outside, where the autumn morning was waiting, so crisp, so dazzlingly bright and bracingly clear that it made you want to walk into it like walking into someone’s arms. The trees stood peaceful in the still air, steady, as if they believed that they could keep their beautiful red and yellow leaves for ever.

  Mansikka-aho looked around as we approached his car. He was clearly able to completely ignore the beautiful day. He looked gloomy. Before he got in the car he said that if I saw Ketomaa I should let him know as soon as possible.

  I promised I would. He started the car and pulled out of the yard.

  I watched him drive away and wondered how I had managed to appear so calm, inside the house when he’d found me and peppered me with questions, and above all now, in front of the house, bathed in the pure light of the rising sun as his white Ford receded into the distance.

  I found the pen I’d taken from Saarinen’s room in my pocket. Whoever it was who gave me a push, at least he hadn’t gone through my pockets. I turned on my phone. Seven text messages received.

  Something happened. Call me.

  I know that Harmala came to see you.

  My father was here.

  He’s done something sick.

  Where the fuck are you?

  Good night you fucking piece of shit.

  I get it. You’re a prick, just like all the others.

  To make love to a woman who had a black eye and a fat lip wasn’t what I had planned, but that’s what happened.

  After I read the texts I drove to Helsinki, jammed the car into a restricted zone and walked with firm steps to Amanda’s apartment. This time she’d left the door open. I found her in the bedroom and immediately took my clothes off.

  Our lovemaking was sticky and grasping. As if we were afraid that the other person would escape. I didn’t want to look at Amanda’s purplish, swollen eye or her split lower lip. I kissed her neck and her breasts and kept my eyes closed.

  ‘He came late yesterday evening,’ she said when I’d finally wrenched myself away from her. ‘Around eleven or so. I wondered why he was here. He never comes here. Especially not late at night. He said we absolutely had to talk. I said OK. And at first we just talked. Like a father and daughter. How have you been, what are you going to do with your life. He asked me that, I mean. He always asks me that. I don’t want to know what he has in mind. Then he started telling me what I ought to be doing. Again. And I can’t stand that, I hate it. No one tells me what to do.’

  She was quiet for a moment. I turned my head. The swollen eye made it hard to look at her. In some strange way she seemed proud of her injuries, even seemed to be enjoying the situation. Or maybe I was misinterpreting everything, maybe I was still more off balance than I realised.

  ‘I told him he could take his advice and shove it up his ass. Then I said it was no wonder my mother left him, left the country entirely so she wouldn’t have to look at him and listen to him, he’s such a pig. He got angry. He started accusing me of all sorts of things. Explaining how he had done all he could for me. I said is that why you fucked every woman in town and spread your seed everywhere, for the good of the family? I didn’t know it was such a sore spot, but I guess it was, because then he hit me.’

  My gaze wandered over the walls. Over their broad, white surfaces, straight and simple in a way that was starting to feel more enviable the longer I looked at them. The yellow light from the bedside table gave the high-ceilinged room a softness that made you want to touch it.

  ‘He hit me several times,’ I heard Amanda saying. ‘Yelling, barking at me.’

  Her chest rose and fell. The muscles of her thin frame were tense, in spite of the fact that she was lying on her back.

  ‘This is the last straw. Do you understand, Aleksi?’

  The blinds hid whatever sky I might have seen. The frames of the windows looked sad and useless, without day or night.

  ‘Aleksi? Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ I said, not turning my head.

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘The last straw,’ I said. It sounded like my own voice on a recording, irritatingly familiar and startlingly strange.

  Amanda rolled onto her side. I knew she was looking at me.

  ‘This isn’t the first time. I know that’s why my mother left him. She was afraid. Of course she was, living with a monster.’

  I didn’t look at Amanda. I asked, ‘What do you remember about 1993?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What do you remember about it? 1993? Your mother left nineteen years ago, in ’94. What do you remember about the time before that?’

  ‘You really are crazy, aren’t you? Look at me. Look at my eye and my lip.’

  I turned my head. Amanda Saarinen, the millionaire heiress, with a shiner and a swollen lip like a street scrapper. Henrik Saarinen, my mother, 1993. It was all coming together. I was so close I felt dizzy. Tomorrow Henrik would be mine.

  ‘Did your mother ever say what she was afraid of? What particularly she feared?’

  ‘I just told you. She was afraid of my father. I was afraid of my father. I still am.’

  ‘This has to do with your eye,’ I said, putting a hand on her cheek. Up close I could see something in her left nostril. A tiny white spot. ‘And your lip. Tell me what you remember.’

  ‘My father’s a pig. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘I believe you. But what about 1993?’

  She turned her back to me.

  ‘They had their own lives. I didn’t understand anything back then, but I do now. I know they had their own lovers, for instance. Then something happened that finally made the old witch say good riddance. She was afraid, even though she was nearly as frightening herself. To a little girl, I mean. But that was then. I’m not a frightened little girl any more.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ I said. ‘What do you think happened that made your mother finally leave?’

  Amanda took a deep breath in, then out. I watched her chest rise and fall.

  ‘Aleksi, remember when I asked you if you believed in coincidences?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You came into my life for a reason. I believe that my father at one time did something really shocking. Something really horrible. He can’t … he has to stop …’

  She stopped speaking and pulled the covers over herself. The room was cool. I hadn’t noticed before. The white walls looked pure and pleasing, but as soon as you noticed the temperature they seemed hard and impenetrable. Amanda’s talk excited me, tempted me to ask more questions. I tried to keep myself in check.

  ‘Horrible how?’ I asked, sounding as unconcerned as I could.

  She looked as if she expected the question.

  ‘I’m certain he hurt someone, maybe even killed someone.’

  The room went quiet. The normal sounds of an apartment house – a flushing toilet, a couple arguing, a child’s footsteps across the floor above, the heavy beats from a bachelor’s boom box – were missing. Nothing was moving or living. Is this how it would all come together, this easily?

  ‘When?’ I asked. ‘In 1993?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘But I am sure. I mean, I’m sure about 2003.’

  Her face was turned away from me towards the window. That was good. I braced myself on an elbow.

  ‘You may not remember it,’ she said, ‘but it was in all the newspapers. A woman named Tanja Metsäpuro. My father dated her. Then she was killed. It was never talked about in our house. And I remember once when we were at K
almela and we were sitting in the hall and there was some tabloid on the table with a big picture of her. When my father saw me looking at it he turned the paper over with the photo facing down and he looked at me in this scary way and we didn’t say a word about it.’

  Amanda still had her back to me. I couldn’t see her face.

  ‘Did you ever ask about it?’

  ‘Of course not. Because he could do the same thing to me.’ She turned and looked at me. ‘I’ve never told this to anyone.’

  ‘Why are you telling me now?’

  She pressed up against my side and whispered, her lips nearly touching my ear.

  ‘Because you can fix it.’

  The white walls receded. Her bare skin felt hot.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll ask you straight,’ she said, so quietly that it was like a part of her breathing. ‘Will you kill him?’

  SEPTEMBER 1993

  MY MOTHER CALLS them our home nights, although we’re at home a lot of nights, almost every night in fact. Home nights include a movie, which we choose together or draw straws to decide who will choose. She gets the long straw this time.

  It’s Friday night; she’s taken a sauna. She has curlers in her hair and is wearing her bathrobe. I’ve already eaten, a gut bomb I made myself with four frankfurters seasoned with mustard and pickle relish and a dash of ketchup. I can still taste it in my mouth hours later.

  My mother puts her slice of toast on her plate and tops it with Turunmaa cheese, pours herself a glass of wine, and sets the plate and glass on the table. She sits in the armchair and I start the video.

  She says this is her favourite movie.

  I fear the worst.

  She likes old movies and a lot of them are the kind of thing I find boring: black and white with crackly sound or colour with endless dialogue, tense close-ups of tense conversations.

  This one is different from anything I’ve ever seen.

  It’s like watching a bad dream that you want to see all the way to the end.

  The movie starts with a chase scene. The police are chasing a thief across the rooftops of tall buildings. One of the policemen slips and hangs from the rain gutter, his life on the line. A cop in a suit tries to help and falls to his death. The man who was hanging there survives, but he quits the police department. An old schoolmate gets in touch with him. He gets a job following the old schoolmate’s wife. The schoolmate, who is now a rich businessman, asks if the dead can take control of the living.

  I glance at my mother. Her glass of wine stops on its way to her lips.

  The man follows the woman around San Francisco.

  For an excruciatingly long time.

  At the part where the woman suddenly jumps into the ocean, my mother’s face doesn’t register a thing.

  She watches me for a few seconds, smiles, lifts her eyebrows, and we continue watching.

  He goes after her, saves her from drowning, they get to know each other, and they kiss. But the woman isn’t OK. He tries to help her, takes her to different places – to a forest where giant trees grow, to a Spanish monastery, to a riding stable. They kiss all the time, over and over. The woman pulls herself away, climbs up a bell tower, throws herself off it, and dies. The man runs away.

  I check the clock on the video player to see how long the movie’s been playing and the cover of the video to see how much more there is. Still an hour to go.

  There’s more, I hear my mother say. Her face is inscrutable. She said this was her favourite movie.

  There is indeed more.

  The bad dream deepens.

  I can’t stop watching.

  The man is a patient in some kind of mental hospital and he won’t answer when his old girlfriend talks to him. The old girlfriend loves him, but he doesn’t love her. He gets out of the hospital and sees the dead woman everywhere. He meets a woman on the street and starts to dress her to look like the dead woman.

  My mother’s face tenses. She pulls her feet up into the chair and wraps her arms around her legs, curling up in a tight ball. There’s still a drop of red wine in her glass.

  The woman writes a letter confessing everything. She’s a con artist. Her husband killed his previous wife. She tears up the letter. She doesn’t tell the man the truth, doesn’t tell him anything.

  The movie keeps going.

  Keeps going?

  Even though the riddle is solved!

  Finally the woman looks like the dead woman. The man seems to have gone completely crazy, or maybe he’s cured. It’s hard to say.

  My mother watches from under her eyelids, as if she’s terribly afraid and is forcing herself to watch.

  Why is she so tense if she’s seen the movie before and knows what’s going to happen? I ask.

  This is a different kind of suspense.

  What kind?

  This movie is about more than just what happens.

  Right.

  Hush, she says.

  The woman in the movie is in front of a mirror trying to put on a necklace. She asks the man to help her. He comes up behind her and looks in the mirror. He recognises the necklace. The man and the woman drive to the Spanish monastery, the same place where the woman jumped off the bell tower. The man drags her to the top of the tower. The woman confesses. Someone comes into the tower – a nun. The woman is so afraid that she dives out of the window, hits the roof tiles below, and dies.

  The man is left standing on the top of the tower.

  The end.

  The end?

  I look at my mother.

  There may be tears in her eyes.

  I feel cheated. I say so. I say that a story should have an ending, a proper ending.

  Proper in what way? she asks.

  I don’t know.

  I can’t explain.

  But not like that.

  Why not?

  Just not, I say quietly, testily. The criminal was never caught.

  Sometimes that’s the way it is. Sometimes the criminal doesn’t get caught.

  SEPTEMBER 2013

  THE EDGE OF the sky glowed like a hot coal and the sun was just a thin sliver of boiling molten metal on the horizon as I came out onto Liisankatu and walked to my car. A darkening evening, long shadows, lots of places to hide. All these things should have warned me of the possibility of a surprise. Nevertheless, I was startled when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

  ‘Where are you headed, Aleksi? Or more to the point, where are you coming from?’

  Henrik Saarinen had parked his Land Cruiser behind a delivery van. That was why I hadn’t noticed it. Now I could see its nose over his shoulder, glaringly familiar. Saarinen’s face showed no trace of his usual smile or haughtiness. His expression was serious, a darkness in his eyes that I hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘I was bringing Amanda some things she forgot at Kalmela,’ I said.

  Saarinen came closer and stopped a metre from me.

  ‘Is that all?’

  He looked at me a little more openly, his head high. He still had a white bandage on his right hand. It showed bright against his black leather jacket, like a rolled-up white flag. The kind I didn’t expect him to wave, ever. Not even if it was his last option.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Amanda got what she wanted. That’s what’s important.’

  He lifted his bandaged hand. Maybe it hurt and he needed to move it.

  ‘We’ve had a little change in plans,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It can’t wait. Leave your car here.’

  It didn’t sound like a suggestion. The last rays of sun gilded his grey hair. His black jacket shone. Had my mother followed him as easily as this? Received an invitation and gone with him, without asking any questions?

  That’s how everything in life happens. Without our noticing, or thinking, while we’re doing something else. Always in good faith.

  Whenever I thought about my mother’s fate – and when didn’t I? – I’d always ignored the moment when she phy
sically died, what that was like, how long it lasted. For some reason my thoughts had never reached that point. I could imagine the brutality, like everyone can imagine such things. I was capable of understanding the sorts of things that must have been done to her. But the moment of death escaped me, like a magnet repelling another, turning aside every time you try to push it closer.

  Now that moment felt closer than ever before. The moment when a person leaves the world. One minute she exists, the next minute she doesn’t.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘When we get there.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘When we get there.’

  Saarinen turned around, threw me the keys. I snatched them from the air. He went around the car as I clicked the doors open. I looked behind me one last time. The highest windows of the apartment house reflected the sky – purple, pink, and a stronger, more vivid blood and fire of red. The shadows had grown as long as they could grow and begun to mingle, forming lakes of black on the cobblestone street and asphalt pavement.

  As I got in I glanced into the back of the car. The tools I’d bought at the hardware store were gone.

  Henrik Saarinen fastened his seatbelt and hung onto the grab handle with his right hand as if preparing for a bumpy ride. He seemed remarkably calm considering that he’d beaten up his daughter the night before.

  He gave directions but didn’t reveal our destination. The streetlights came on and made haloes in the darkening evening around us. First Mannerheimintie, then Vihdintie – we were headed out of town. I reminded myself again why I was here, why I had agreed to this. I wanted revenge, a balanced account. I didn’t want anyone else meddling any more. This was my vengeance, my task to perform. I wanted to get clarity, to get Henrik Saarinen for what he’d done, whatever it was. I wanted to stop him from doing what he was planning to do, what I sensed was about to happen.

  ‘Aleksi.’

  I glanced at him. He looked as if he’d been painfully struck somewhere on his body. His breathing was shallow, his body tense, his face expectant.