When Time Runs Out

by Elina Hirvonen

  ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  Oraison du soir

  (‘Evening Prayer’)

  24

  The city

  It is a foggy, damp night. Mist softens the outlines of the buildings; the light of the shops and the street lamps pierce the darkness like white, yellow and red stars. Trams, buses and trains appear as if from another world; there is the gleam of lights and a moment when people move from cold to warm, warm to cold, avoiding one another’s eyes. The fog condenses into droplets on the steps of the parliament building; before them a group of Egyptian refugees set their phones to silent and bow towards Mecca. The smell of cooking aubergines rises from a portable grill and a sheet fluttering in the wind bears the legend, We Too Are People, in Arabic and Finnish.

  A young member of parliament runs past the refugees, umbrella in hand; the wind catches his bobble hat, which lands in the midst of the prayerful group. Bareheaded, the member of parliament steps into a taxi.

  Close to the refugees, under an unemptied rubbish bin, two ducks sleep side by side, like brindled stones. The Egyptians have kept camp in the same place for three weeks, and every evening after prayer the ducks get up and ruffle their feathers, the people stretch their limbs and finish making their supper, offering the leftovers to the ducks. The wind ruffles hair and feathers and they eat together in silence, people and ducks, in a tight ring in which the close contact gives warmth to everyone. But tonight this does not happen.

  On a quiet train a young woman reads a collection by a poet who stuck her head in an oven a long time ago and thinks about the moment when she will step under a train, her coat open and in her pocket a book that was written for her.

  But soon the trains stop running, and the woman ends up far from the deserted platform, on a rock damp with rime. She is gazing at the empty Ferris wheel when a young man sits down next to her. In his bag is a saxophone and in his mind the same poems. The woman and the man sit on the rock until the sky grows light, listening to the sleep-silent city in which everything is different for a moment. When they make love, it is on the cold rock and with their clothes on, and only later in the man’s studio flat, on the bed and the floor in a warm room, and many times in many places inside and outside, until they no longer make love but talk to each other until the man gets married and the woman moves to another country and the connection is broken.

  The woman lives to be older than any member of her family before her, reads new poems in new places and, on happy mornings, thanks the man who sat on the rock beside her, and the other on whose account the city grew silent.

  The couple, who have spent three decades together, leave their coats at the theatre cloakroom. The woman helps the man to take off his coat, as has been their habit ever since their first date. What began as a protest against gender stereotyping continued as a tender act after the man fell from a ladder while mending the summer house roof and hit his shoulder on a rock; after the operation his arm no longer moved in the same way as before. They were going to watch a play about the battle of the generations and the sexes, power, loneliness and the need for intimacy. They saw the play together for the first time more than ten years ago when the children were going through a calm phase and the whole of life was so full and peaceful that it felt as if they were on a long holiday. The man’s mother looked after the children, and after the theatre they went to the park to drink champagne, watch the trains and dream of how, in retirement, they would tour the world.

  Now new cancer cells have been found in the woman’s lungs and she has decided to cease treatment and live, as long as she has life, enjoying the thoughts of the people she loves, reading books and listening to music, gazing at beloved landscapes, spending relaxed days with the man whose touch, even after three decades together, is still an adventure.

  They are going to the theatre because the woman wants to see a new version of the play which, the first time she saw it, troubled her for months. She wants to breathe in the smell of the old theatre and think how many people breathed it before she was born, how many will breathe it after she has died.

  When the performance is interrupted, people leave the theatre fearfully in a horde, seeking news, asking each other for information. The man and woman take a detour home and follow the news on the sofa on which they kissed and made love and got their children to sleep. They imagine the empty centre of the city and the man standing alone on the roof of the white building, and neither of them thinks about how many months the woman still has to live.

  A man, who as a child dreamed of a career as a turtle researcher, pulls a wheeled cart towards a building whose cellar exhales warm air and along whose walls homeless people sleep on cold nights. There is a laceration on the man’s nose and blood flows from the corner of one eye; there are crumbs from a hamburger he found at the tram stop in his beard, and in the supermarket trolley a floral quilt which a young women threw onto a skip after her mother’s death. The man is waiting for the moment when he can pull the quilt over him and close his eyes, feel the warm air blowing on his back and sink for a moment into a sleep as quiet as death. But the man is directed away like everyone else, and far away from the centre someone gives him a disposable cup and some hot coffee; it warms his insides in a way no one who sleeps indoors can understand and, for a moment, as he tastes the coffee and listens to the shocked, horrified, disorientated people, the man feels himself to be one of them.

  A mother and daughter, both of them adults, come out of the cinema together. The evening was the daughter’s idea. She is forty and her mother seventy. The daughter is weary of the fact that when they talk together they both regress to childhood, so their conversations have become short and rapid, and after them they both feel uncomfortable.

  The daughter was divorced two years ago from a man who was, according to her mother, too good for her, and now she goes to therapy twice a week. She talks to the therapist much more about her mother than about her husband. The previous winter the mother fell and broke her hip, and since then the daughter has felt that the mother may die at any time. The daughter suggested the evening at the cinema because she wishes to learn to talk rationally with her mother before she loses her.

  For many years the daughter hoped that one day they would have a big, cathartic conversation. That they would talk about the things that come between them whenever they meet. About why the daughter, who at work stands in front of hundreds of people making complicated things clear and understandable, becomes an anxious child when she is with her mother. She hoped that they could talk, listen and understand one another so that they could leave childhood behind. Now all she hopes is that they can meet every now and then and talk about something ordinary and unimportant without every sentence containing an insult. They do not have to understand one another. They do not have to talk about anything important. Nothing needs to be cleansed. But she hopes that before her mother dies she might be able to meet her without being distressed for days afterwards. That is why they are now walking out of the cinema, and the daughter is suggesting that they should go somewhere for a glass of wine.

  ‘I saw a programme where they said that women your age drink too much wine . . .’ the mother begins, but the sentence is never finished.

  The mother presses her hands to her ears and the daughter falls to the ground clutching her shoulder, which is welling up with blood.

  25

  It is quiet. If the police sirens are sounding, he cannot hear them. The blue flashing lights look like indistinct pictures, soft-edged images from videos shot in unknown cities which make the city more a state of consciousness than a place, a sea of lights dancing in the darkness. The atmosphere is recognisable, even if the place is not.

  The damp air is easy to breathe. He squeezes the cool butt of the rifle and feels himself slipping into his own place in the world. This is the place he has always been looking for. It is sad that he can enjoy it only for a moment, but good that he has found it now.

  He closes his eyes, stroking the r
ifle like a cat curled up in his lap, presses the weapon against his shoulder, puts his forefinger on the trigger and aims again.

  26

  Laura

  The policemen wait silently as I walk towards then. In the high entrance hall of the university they look out of place in their uniforms, a tall, bald man and a woman with a bob, perhaps my own age, on their faces carefully practised neutral expressions.

  ‘Laura Anttila,’ I say, reaching out my hand.

  ‘Lauri Aslak Anttila’s mother?’

  ‘A young man has shot four people from the roof of the Glass Palace.’

  ‘The police suspect that the gunman is your son.’

  ‘We would like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘You have the right not to answer them.’

  ‘We can go to the police station or to your home.’

  I raise my fist to my mouth and bite the knuckles hard so that my teeth leave marks.

  ‘Home. My husband will soon be back from a business trip. Supper is in the oven.’

  I gaze at the street through the police car window as if from inside an aquarium. The policewoman drives and the tall man sits beside her in silence. The silence is broken by the sirens of approaching police cars.

  As a child I stood on the side of this street with my grandmother waiting for the Christmas lights to go on. As an adult I wanted to bring Aava and Aslak here every year to see the Christmas lights being switched on. Even as a grown-up, there was a fairy-tale magic about the lights being switched on above the street in the midst of the end-of-year darkness, as if the lights shone from somewhere where it was always light. We stood in the crowd, Aava on Eerik’s shoulders and Aslak on mine, the children holding warm roasted chestnuts in paper bags, Eerik’s arm around my waist. When the lights were switched on and the procession of elves, angels and snowmen went past us as the music played, there rose to my eyes tears of joy, sorrow and longing which I was unable to explain to Eerik.

  For the rest of my life, as I remember this evening, the first thing I remember is something that I tell no one. It is the feeling that something that has long been in disarray has been put in order. A lost jigsaw puzzle piece has been found, a bottle stopper that fits perfectly, an artist whom the public has been expecting to flourish for years suddenly succeeds.

  I never speak of this feeling to anyone, not even Eerik. The reason is shame. The certainty that this feeling is unquestionably and irrevocably wrong. Parents have a generally accepted right to be concerned for their children only when the child plays the role of victim. Every parent recognises the constant fear that something bad will happen to their own child. The tightening of a band around the heart when you see your child standing in the playground apart from the others and the weight in your stomach when it is late and your child has not come home.

  When a quiet pupil comes to school with a weapon under his long coat and shoots ten of his classmates, everyone is supposed to think about the victims’ parents. How awful it would be to be one of them. How awful it would be if that happened to a child of mine. You can talk about fear and anxiety to others because everyone recognises this. Parents who forget to breathe when reading such news because they know that the shooter could be their child bear their horror alone.

  27

  In their uniforms, the police officers look amazingly large; their presence fills the entire room. The smell of long-braised swede wafts through the kitchen. If you were to slash the skin open, you could sink a spoon into the interior as if it were baby food. I open the oven door and mistakenly grab the roasting tin with my bare hands; the hot pan burns suppurating, blistered lines into the palms of my hands.

  I wet two towels with cold water and wrap them around my hands. The floor sways and vomit forces its way up my throat. It must not come now, not when there are others here.

  If only Eerik were behind me, not the police officers. If only Aslak were coming round for supper. If, in a few moments, he were to be standing at the door, looking around him as if he had been followed, and we were to conduct, in the hall, our complicated, embarrassed ritual: Welcome, sweetie, how nice to see you, switching places to hang Aslak’s coat on the hook. If only we were to hide the wine bottle and offer him juice, slip the kitchen knives quickly into the corner of a high cupboard and put the beautifully arranged starters on the table; if only I were to exchange glances with Eerik, uncertain when would be a suitable moment to say what we intended to say this evening.

  ‘Sweetie, there are people who can help you,’ I would say.

  ‘That’s what you always say,’ Aslak would reply without raising his eyes from his food, which he would be cutting clumsily and decisively, as if executing a motor-skills test. ‘But no one can.’

  ‘Care methods are developing,’ I would say. ‘There are various therapies, various methods, various projects, which are designed to help young people just like you.’

  ‘I’m not young,’ Aslak would say. ‘And I don’t want help. There’s no need.’

  I would spit my food into my napkin and get up to clear the table in order to avoid his gaze.

  I would turn on the tap, sink my hands into the warm water and start washing the dishes by hand instead of putting them into the dishwasher. I would be angry with Eerik, Why the hell don’t you say anything? I would imagine the moment after Aslak’s departure, how I would throw a plate on the floor and shout at Eerik, this was supposed to be a joint project; Eerik would slam his fists onto the table, his neck red with fury, How could I say anything when you were spewing those idiotic clichés the whole time that make Aslak angry, what could I have said?

  ‘You have nearly the whole of your life ahead of you,’ I would say to Aslak. ‘You have the opportunity to do all sorts of things. If you will only let us . . . if you will only accept help.’

  ‘All you want to do is get rid of me,’ Aslak would say in his grating voice, scraping his knife across his plate in a way that gives me goose pimples. ‘You just want me to be someone else’s responsibility.’

  I would cut the swede into slices and fry them in butter until they were soft and caramelised. I would carry the barley risotto to the table and burn my fingers on the rim of the saucepan, running them under cold water for so long that I no longer felt the pain. I would change the subject.

  ‘Can you go on?’

  The policewoman touches me lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘I can.’

  ‘It would be very helpful if you could answer a few questions. You also have the right to remain silent. It is possible that your answers may be used in court against your son.’

  I turn on the tap and rinse my face with cool water. The water runs beneath my collar, under my bra. Generally cold water makes me feel better; today it just makes me wet.

  ‘I will answer all your questions.’

  28

  Aslak is standing in front of me. In the wide-angle lens he is fully visible, behind him a tidy and impersonal room. Aslak is wearing a black wind cheater, black trousers and trainers that I bought him. In his hands he is squeezing a long, narrow object. When I understand what it is, I press my head into my hands even though I have decided to cope with everything I have to cope with this evening.

  My arm is too heavy to lift, my lungs are constricted, my throat feels blocked; I cannot swallow. The room is still filled with the smell of swede, even though I have just scraped the remains of the soft root vegetable into the bin. If I open my mouth, I will be sick.

  ‘Are you sure you can do this?’ asks the policewoman.

  For a moment there is another room before me.

  It is spring, and I am eighteen years old. My matriculation exams are just beginning; I’m spending my reading week in the Rikhardinkatu Library. I spend my nights sometimes on the floor of a squat, sometimes in my old room, avoiding my mother. In the library reading room, sitting at a dark wood table, among other silent people bent over their books, it is hard for me to concentrate on my studies. In front of me is a text ab
out history; my thoughts hover over future images. In these images I am far away from everything I know. I hike, rucksack on my back, in the Himalayas; I am sleeping in a hammock on a Brazilian beach; I am naked, riding a horse, into the sea. The images go with me as I pack my books into my backpack, close the library door and walk towards my childhood home, towards my mother’s kingdom, which I will soon be able to leave behind for ever. Through those images, the familiar streets, parks, buildings and tram stops change. This is a city I can leave.

  After school, I go to work in a shop that sells tourists from Japan and the United States plastic reindeer, Lapp hats and glass jars decorated with Finnish flags. They are labelled ‘Finnish Reindeer Droppings’ and contain reindeer poo arranged on tufts of moss. I buy clothes from the flea market, eat porridge, potatoes and fried herring, and save most of my wages. Sometimes, in the evenings, I leaf through my bank book in which the recorded balance rises steadily, each zero full of possibilities. After my exams I begin to sell the same things at the market; I have agreed to long days and weekends, while in the evenings I have promised to paint Father Christmases and snowflakes on the jars in which the reindeer poop is packed.

  I have calculated that eight months of long working days and thrifty living will be enough. After that I will be able to pack my rucksack and take the cheapest flight, Aeroflot via Moscow, to Delhi. If I live in the cheapest youth hostels and travel second class on the train, my savings will last for six months. I can travel through India and Nepal or change my plans and go to Thailand, Laos or Vietnam. After six months I will be able to look for work wherever I am or somewhere else. I can work and save, and when I have enough money, I can set off again.