by Tua Harno
“Fine, how about you,” Sanna managed to say before she slipped out the door.
When she made it outside she shut her eyes and took a deep breath. A flock of pink parrots was perched in the tree in front of the bordello. Scattered among the leafless branches, the birds looked like strange, soft fruit. Their heads spun soundlessly as they turned to look at Sanna.
Maybe dead prostitutes turn into birds that color.
Sanna felt nauseated. She started walking and pulled out her phone. There was a message from Martti: Call when you get a sec. She thought everything was ugly and dirty. Sanna thought about the faces of Cooper’s children on his arms, the meticulously tattooed eyes.
Martti was standing outside the Shire, smoking.
“Are you all right? You didn’t return my call.”
It was childish to be shocked by the fact that Cooper was one of the bordello’s customers, but Sanna was disgusted. She wanted to ask Martti if he also frequented the bordello, or if he had ever been to one anywhere; after all, he had spent long stretches in Africa and Asia.
Something had gone awry on her way to adulthood, and she didn’t know how to keep things like this in perspective. Her toe dug at the cement sidewalk.
“Don’t you want to go tonight?” Martti asked.
Sanna shook her head.
“That’s a shame. I was looking forward to it.”
Sanna was caught off guard by his clear disappointment.
“Cooper wasn’t really sick,” Sanna said.
“Did you see him?”
“At the bordello.”
Martti’s mouth closed and he gave her a questioning look.
“The madam wanted to recruit me. Apparently some men have a thing for frightened blondes with pregnant bellies.”
Sanna scratched a mosquito bite on her shoulder, tearing at the orange-yellow scab. She glanced at Martti. He looked lost.
“Are you saying there’s no point suggesting some other day?”
“I don’t know.”
Martti nodded, said that was fine, and turned to leave.
“How about I eat something and rest, check in a little later?” Sanna said. “Unless you’ve already made other plans.”
Martti gave her a cautious smile, and it struck Sanna how much you can enjoy someone’s eyes when they’re concerned, shy, and hopeful.
12
Is teaching someone the constellations what it means to give someone the stars from the sky? Sanna thought. She was trying to piece together an outfit, one that wouldn’t look too severe. She wondered if Martti would make an effort to look nice and if she’d be able to tell. Would his T-shirt be ironed, would she catch a whiff of shower-freshness at his neck when they hugged? Would they hug?
The only mirror in the room was the size of a sheet of typing paper, and she climbed up on the bed to evaluate her selection. The hem of her shirt billowed, reaching halfway down her thighs. She lifted it and eyed her belly, a soft, pale wall protecting a living creature, a tiny bone-white marine protozoan.
Sanna dropped the hem and stepped down from the bed.
I’m thirty years old. I can do this.
She saw Martti’s back first; he was watching rugby in the hotel bar. When she was within arm’s reach, Sanna noticed that his hair was combed a different way than it had been the other days. He turned toward Sanna, said hello, and rose lightly from his chair. No hug. Sanna gripped her purse as if someone were about to snatch it from her.
Martti stepped out first, leading the way, and opened the car door for her. The flash of the headlights roused Sanna and she wondered why she had complete faith in this man. Why was she going for a ride with him? She didn’t know him from Adam. If she disappeared, days would pass before anyone at the mine started asking about her.
Martti drove calmly; he eased off the gas when he saw a red light up ahead. He turned and looked at Sanna inquisitively. Sanna shook her head and just trusted him, and the trust filled her with a calm, comfortable feeling.
The pit blazed brightly in the dark evening, and it was a long time before they escaped its glare. Once they did, the only things they could see were insects swirling in the headlights and a couple of yards of asphalt in front of them.
“You have to drive slowly out here so you don’t hit any kangaroos. Or cockatoos,” Martti said. “That’s not going to kill you, of course, but it’s a shame seeing their pretty feathers in a bloody smear across the bumper. It’s like throwing a parrot in a blender.”
Sanna made a face and thanked him for the romantic image.
“So there’s potentially some romance here?”
“Driving into the outback to look at the stars? It’s the most romantic thing I’ve done in a long time.”
Or maybe ever, Sanna admitted to herself.
Martti didn’t respond. It was dark in the car, and the lights from the dashboard gleamed along the contours of their bodies. Sanna turned on the radio; an ad squawked out and startled her so badly she turned it off immediately. A husky-voiced nighttime radio host would have suited the moment, but now they drove in silence.
The moment simmered, fraught with tension and weighty. Sanna sensed Martti smiling but she didn’t want to look at him. What was this? Mentioning the pregnancy should have killed any notions of romance. Sanna was supposed to have called Ralda that afternoon, but she hadn’t gotten around to it.
After ages, or so it seemed, Martti parked where the truck convoys turned around.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“I wanted to show you the stars.”
“Like you wanted to show me gold.”
“I’m trying to impress you with my treasures.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Maybe I like you.”
Sanna stared straight ahead.
“Don’t ask me why. You’re a little irritating. And pregnant, to boot.” Martti undid his seatbelt. “Can we get out now?”
The car doors slammed loudly. The cicadas weren’t singing, and there weren’t any other vehicles, just a vast, blue-black stillness. The sky was an effervescent sea bubbling with light. It was so thick with shooting stars that Martti laughed when Sanna started pointing them out.
“There’s the Southern Cross, the one that’s on the Australian flag.”
Martti took hold of Sanna’s forefinger and touched the stars in the cross one by one, then drew a straight line down the central axis to the horizon.
“That’s the south pole of the night sky, south is directly below it.”
“That’ll be helpful on my trek.”
“You’re not going alone, are you?”
Sanna told him about Ralda, about how it was also going to be a spiritual retreat.
“I knew you were a weirdo, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“I’m not a weirdo.”
“You’re going off on some shaman journey with a medicine woman.”
“She’s a researcher,” Sanna said testily.
Martti looked doubtful, and also a little disappointed.
“I believe in spirituality. Or at least the possibility of it.”
“What does that mean?” Martti asked.
Sanna turned to gaze at the scrub lining the road. The stars and moon cast a silvery glow over the gnarled black branches.
“That it’s good to go off to a place like the desert and find some solitude now and again.”
She could feel Martti standing right behind her, but he didn’t touch her. Did she want him to?
“I’m not saying it’s not,” Martti said calmly. “All kinds of amazing things can happen out there. Uninhabited places are like that.”
“Is this going to be one of your Africa experiences?” Sanna asked, without turning around.
“Maybe a mining experience more than anything.”
Sanna wasn’t sure what he meant; she looked at him.
“Most mines are miles from anywhere. If you don’t drown yourself in the bottle, it can get really lonely. You have
time to take in the landscape. But sometimes that just makes you even more melancholy.”
Martti reached for her hand and started drawing the night sky again: the Centaur, right next to the Southern Cross, like a primitive elk from some cave painting. Sanna could hold the constellation for a moment before she had to blink. But when she looked again, all she saw were twinkling gems, without form or logic.
“Can you find it?”
Sanna shook her head.
Martti raised her hand again and drew the Centaur once more, saying, “These are the lines of the Southern Cross. They intersect here. Here it is, the half man, its three visible legs, and its arms spread, as if preparing for an embrace, or to loose an arrow.
“Then we have Lupus, or the Wolf, and Hydra,” Martti continued, and he picked out the brighter stars in their constellations.
It looked totally random. Sanna felt like laughing. She slowly turned her head and Martti’s face was right there. Seeing his intent expression was rewarding.
“Were the skies in Africa like this?”
“Expansive and dazzling, yes.”
“That’s where you want to go when you retire, back to that miner’s dream of yours?”
Martti had lowered her hand but he hadn’t released it, pensively admitting that he wasn’t sure that place existed anymore. “I hope it does. Or of course it exists, but maybe it won’t feel the same.”
He raised his eyes, as if he were asking Sanna for something.
“You hope it’s a place you’ll never want to leave,” Sanna said.
“Yeah.”
They didn’t see or hear any animals; there was no scrabbling of paws or soft flap of wings. Martti released her hand; chills ran up Sanna’s spine. The stars flared overhead, one after the other.
“Are you cold?” Martti asked.
Sanna nodded, and they went back to the car. Martti started up the engine, turned on the heat full blast, activated the seat warmers, and switched on the overhead light. Sanna expected him to say something, but a second later he switched off the light again and turned the car around, heading back toward Kalgoorlie.
Sanna closed her eyes. She felt something shimmering in the air, some hopefulness trying to spark something more between them. But that something more was impossible, and Sanna found herself feeling sad.
The headlights swept across a kangaroo at the side of the road; Martti stopped to wait for it to cross. The creature stood there stock still, staring at them, even though the glare seemed blinding.
“It’s too scared to move,” Sanna said. “You need to turn off the lights.”
“I’m not going to turn off the lights on a straightaway driven by convoys,” Martti said.
But he did, anyway, and for a moment they were engulfed in perfect darkness. Now it felt like something was bearing down on them, but it was more like time or the wind, or all those stars. The kangaroo turned its gaze from them and bounded past, a silhouette.
As the car rolled forward it seemed to Sanna that they were starting off from a different place than where they had stopped. She realized that, in that brief moment, Martti had tucked her hair behind her ear, and his touch sent off a trail of electric shivers.
13
“The place I want to go back to is in northern Australia. There’s an island up there where there used to be an iron mine. I’ve never been as happy as I was there.”
“Even though there wasn’t any gold?”
“Even though. There was that island and the mine, and eventually a couple of restaurants opened, and a movie theatre. The men didn’t even go home on their time off, they just went fishing in the turquoise sea.”
Martti told her about a swimming spot a ways from the mine called Mermaids’ Lagoon. When you floated on your back in the water, all you could see was the freshly scrubbed sky and the palms swaying on the beach.
The bitter-red mine was on the other side of the island. Compared to the lush beauty, it was like someone had scraped a grater across human flesh. The men grew blind to it, the way you do to an ugly mole on the face of a loved one; they only had eyes for the coral and the silver-sided fish shimmering in the water.
“The Mermaids’ Lagoon was straight out of a fairy tale. I didn’t know a place like that could exist,” Martti said. “Because of the current, the water was so bubbly it was like swimming in soda; it caressed and tickled your skin. You couldn’t help feeling happy floating in it. You didn’t need anything else, didn’t long to be anywhere else.”
“Sounds like heaven,” Sanna said.
“The bubbles also protected you from sharks, because of course there are sharks in paradise, but they avoided the lagoon since the bubbles meant poor visibility. They said if you went swimming with someone during a full moon you’d fall in love, and that’s what happened.”
“Who’d you fall in love with?”
“The island.”
“So why’d you leave?”
Martti sighed. The knowledge that time was running out had always hung over the mine, and digging ore under the surface of the sea became expensive and unnecessary for the company. The mine closed, and the village that had sprung up around it died with it.
“If I could go back, I’d like to take you with me,” Martti said. “Although I don’t think we’d find those bubbles in the water anymore.”
Martti had picked her up at the hotel that morning. They were sitting at the viewing platform for tourists visiting the gold mine, gazing down at the red crater spiraling into the bowels of the earth. The dumpers traveling the banked walls were the size of matchboxes.
They had come to the mine on their day off. Sanna couldn’t believe it. Martti had asked if she would have rather gone to the spa. Was he being serious? A golf course and a spa? The water for the mine was hauled in a distance of almost four hundred miles. This place was insane.
Last night’s good-byes outside the hotel had sent waves crashing through Sanna, even though nothing had happened, nothing she could name or put into words.
Martti had parked his car in front of the hotel. Sanna hadn’t been in any hurry to go inside. They had sat there watching the crowds walking past, whooping and carousing on their way to the saloon. Sanna told him about the beggar she had seen beating a dowsing rod against the ground. Martti explained how the Aboriginal peoples here had suffered the same things as the Indians in America. “Yes,” Sanna had said, and swallowed. The conversation died. It felt as if they were still enveloped in the stillness of the desert’s edge.
An intoxicated young man had steadied himself against the hood of the car and jerked his hand back when he realized it was warm. Startled, he peered at the windshield, slurring, “Hey, someone’s in there.” Then he whistled.
Sanna had rolled her eyes. The hotel bar would be like this all night. She imagined herself lying awake, staring at the ceiling, the sounds from the hallway making her jump. Now was her chance to ask Martti to come up and lie next to her, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t find the words, and she was afraid he would turn her down. She didn’t want to spoil this serenity, she didn’t want things to get awkward later.
“Good night. Thanks.”
Martti said he’d walk her up to the door, just to make sure she made it inside safely.
“Thanks. Good night,” Sanna said again, standing there in the teeming night, unsure how to play chipper amid the cacophony.
Martti spread his arms for a hug and Sanna gave him one. It lasted a long time. Her heart beat like some skittish animal’s. Her lips grazed Martti’s cheek and throat. She felt his stubble, but above all the warmth of his skin.
“I’m going to go now,” she’d said, looking Martti in the eye.
He’d returned the look with his caring gaze.
Others might have been capable of something frivolous and fleeting, but she wasn’t, and she knew that wasn’t what Martti was asking for. Sanna started up the stairs, fighting the urge to turn around. On the landing she finally gave herself permission. Martti nodded.
Now he could sleep peacefully, too.
“I have another, more realistic dream,” Martti said now, standing there above the mine. “Because even if the lagoon’s still there, there’s no way of surviving on the island, unless you want to live like Robinson Crusoe.”
He turned his back to the pit and sat on the ground.
Sanna walked over next to him. She tried to pinpoint Martti’s scent—August woods, cool rock—but the whiff mingled with warm sand, the pit’s metallic tang.
“I want to set up a poultry farm in Botswana.”
“A poultry farm?” Sanna’s voice rose.
Martti laughed at her surprise. “It’s something I could handle. Cattle are tricky, and a vineyard’s even trickier. But a patch of land and some chickens, enough to live off, I could do.”
“Read Hemingway in a hammock and gaze at the stars at night?”
Martti looked self-conscious. “You think it’s stupid?”
Sanna shook her head. “No, I don’t think it’s stupid. I’m just surprised. You keep surprising me, like how you knew I’m pregnant.”
Martti looked at her and squinted. “The first time we met at the saloon, you kept unconsciously touching your belly. Remember when you were playing pool with Cooper? You kept holding your cue stick at this weird angle. You didn’t want to support it against your body.”
“I could have just been a clumsy shot.”
“But you weren’t. I wouldn’t have staked my life on it, but you weren’t too eager about having a drink, and so it started seeming likely.”
“And it doesn’t bother you?”
Martti watched a tour bus pull up. Sanna felt her pulse flutter in her wrist vein.
“I don’t know what this is,” he eventually said. “I think about you and want to see you all the time.”
“Maybe you’re obsessed,” Sanna said helpfully.
“Oh, I definitely am,” Martti said, “but it’s something else, too. For instance, it doesn’t bother me. At all. Although it probably should.”
“But you never try anything,” Sanna said, raising her face.
Martti gave her a sharp look.
“I mean, we’ve never, you know, kissed.”