The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (17 page)

“Soccer?” I couldn’t help asking.

For this, more than anything, seemed to enrage them most. That every time this conference was held, the men writers played a midnight game of soccer, what Europeans and most of the world besides North America calls
football
. It was one of the things the conference was famous for, and it was always written about as if it were a great institution: “Finland Against the Rest of the World.” But, strangely enough, it always seemed to be Finnish men against men from the rest of the world.

“And if you say anything,” said the woman with the clenched hands, “they laugh at you.
But you’d get hurt
, they say.
But women don’t like to play soccer
, they say.
But we need you as an audience
, they say.
But why are you making such a big deal about nothing
, they say.”

“If nothing else, we must make sure not to be their audience,” the Danish poet Birgit said, speaking precisely. “We will organize an evening of our own, perhaps a sauna together down by the lake in the old sauna house.”

And the decision, in high good spirits, was made, the women would sauna together, while the men played soccer without an audience. Except for Luisa, who was heard to mutter as she strode off, “I
love
a game of
football
.”

But then, Luisa was an unpredictable feminist, to say the least.

Word of our animated seminar got around, and the next day when the group convened again, there were twice as many people. But the self-revelations that had been possible in a smaller group were difficult in a larger one, especially one where there was now a sizable number of men. Some of them were there out of genuine curiosity and some out of prurience. They’d heard the discussion had been about sex, and they wanted to get in on it.

It wasn’t that there hadn’t been conflict at the first session, but this was disagreement of a different order.

“We can’t write explicit sex scenes any more than you can,” a British writer called Harold humphed. “If we did, all the women would immediately jump on us for exploiting them.”

“So you acknowledge that your so-called sex scene would have to be exploitative then?” the young Dutch writer Marion demanded.

“That’s exactly the tone I’m talking about,” he said. “I’m in the wrong, aren’t I, before I’ve put pen to paper. It’s like trying to write in a police state.”

Eva from Prague snorted. “Oh, what in hell do you know about writing in a police state? But I can tell you one thing, since our particular police state ended, there has been nothing but pornography. That’s the male idea of freedom—freedom to oppress women.”

The debate raged, but as it continued, I noticed something peculiar. The foreign women were talking as much as ever, in the embattled and aggressive manner they’d adopted to defend themselves and that was taken as further evidence of their lack of humor and tolerance; and the men, both foreign and Finnish, had a lot to say (to be fair, their comments were supportive and perplexed, as well as combative). But the Finnish women, so eager to share their stories the day before, were mainly silent. I looked over at the Finnish couple who’d spoken so eloquently—Silje and Tom, I’d heard they were named, the authors and illustrators of a series of children’s books—but they didn’t add a word to the discussion. From time to time I saw them staring, Silje with nervousness and Tom with real hatred, at a man in the outer circle, Helga’s husband Pekka, a man who, as far as I could tell, had said nothing, whose eyes went from one speaker to the next in a curious, amused sort of way. They rested with particular interest on Marion, who was speaking about whores’ rights and her own past experience. He didn’t stay for the whole session, but wandered off after an hour, hardly acknowledging Helga who had been watching him as intently as he’d been watching Marion.

I caught up with Helga afterward and asked her what had happened, why all the Finnish women were silent.

She paused and said reluctantly, “I would imagine it had something to do with Pekka being there. He writes a literary column for one of the daily papers. He’s very well known for his wit. It makes…it makes some people afraid of him.”

“Are you afraid of him, Helga?” I asked quietly, but she was already moving away, almost running, with that long-legged gait I remembered from years before.

Luisa and I both skipped the afternoon session, and settled down like two asocial cats to work. “Just some memories,” she said, when I asked her what she was writing. “And you?”

“A letter to a friend. About Finland.”

My articles for Archie often began with some alluring generality about travel that had recently occurred to me. I might be struck one day by what hard work travelling was and how useless that work was. What good to me were the long hours I’d put in reading bus and train and ferry timetables? In my memory, and in the stories I told, my travels seemed composed of an endless succession of peak experiences. But in reality, most of what one calls travel is its very opposite—waiting, not moving.

When I tried to put some of my evanescent thoughts down, to capture the subtle sense of working hard and often to little apparent purpose, only to have a fleeting impression of something deliciously bizarre or magnificently ordinary, Archie reduced my carefully honed words to variations on standard clichés: “Travel is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration,” he might begin, continuing, “but don’t let that put you off! A few simple tips [I had of course not offered any tips, only bittersweet reflections] can help make your trip an easier one, and give you more time to enjoy the peak experiences that make travel such a memorable and rewarding activity.”

Sitting on my bed in front of the view of the lake (Luisa had commandeered the desk and chair), I clutched at elusive images of fire and ice, overpowering heat and frigid winds, lakes and fires and the midnight sun. All the time knowing that by the time my story appeared in the
Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner
it would probably be titled “Sauna Like It Hot” and begin: “Winter or summer Finland calls to the adventurous tourist. But whether you’re skiing, or biking, or swimming in one of Finland’s many lakes, you can relax at the end of the day in the dry heat of a pine-scented sauna.
Sauna
is, after all, a Finnish word.”

Late that night, the midnight soccer game took place on a grassy meadow near the hotel, but as promised many of the women didn’t attend, instead gathering at the old sauna house on the lake. Luisa had still been writing when I left her. It was something to do with the story she’d told the day before about her mother finding her journal. The shouts and screams of the soccer players and their audience floated across the grounds and down to the lake, but very faintly. When we went into the sauna, we couldn’t hear them at all. The group was a handful of Finnish women and six foreigners—Mayumi, Simone, Marion, Eva, Birgit, and me. All of us foreigners had to leave the hot sauna before the natives. Naked, we ran outside and plunged into the lake. Male laughter wafted down to us, and Simone shuddered as she rose out of the water and headed back to the sauna.

“It’s strange being naked like this out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “Frightening, but liberating somehow. I want to do it. Yet I keep looking over my shoulder.”

Marion said, “I made a resolve when I was young that I would never be afraid of anything, I would never let a man stop me from doing anything.”

“You sound like my daughter,” Birgit said. “I admire that. She tells me stories of travelling in foreign places, how she threatened a man who tried to rape her with a knife. I wasn’t brought up like that.”

“I hate to hear the sound of men laughing in a group,” Simone began, and then stopped. “Well, that’s all over now. I can never go back while the fundamentalists have so much power. My sister and her husband and children have left too, we all live together in Paris now, and perhaps forever.”

We spent several hours at the lake. Mayumi and Birgit managed to stay in the longest, while Eva, Marion, Simone and I opted for briefer and briefer visits to the sweltering sauna and spent increasing amounts of time chatting on the dock. The Finnish women left together, then Eva and Simone, and then Birgit. I told Mayumi and Marion that I was starting to feel like a plate of salmon mousse and would have to leave.

As I walked back across the grounds to my room in the hotel, I could hear the sounds of drunken male laughter. It sounded like the game was winding up. I thought of what Simone had said and shuddered slightly. I put a bold face on, but I never felt completely, totally safe anywhere alone at night, and I, like Simone, did not like the sound of men laughing in a group. Perhaps to humanize them again, I walked over to the lit field, just in time to see a familiar figure knock the hurtling ball away from the goal with her elegant forehead.

A cheer went up and Luisa was mobbed. The Finns had lost, the Rest of the World, Including One Woman, had triumphed. There was always this alternative to boycotting segregated pleasures, wasn’t there? To take part anyway as the spirit moved you and show them that you were as good as or better than they were.

And who was to say which way was best? Certainly at that moment my own tomboy youth came back to me and I wished I had been in the game to kick the ball past Luisa, rather than sitting in the all-girl’s clubhouse, feeling superior, envious, and just a little bit afraid.

The next morning at breakfast word flew through the room: Pekka had been found in the sauna by himself, dead of a heart attack. No one remembered seeing him go into the sauna; the last time anyone remembered seeing him was in the confusion at the end of the game.

The last people to have the key to the sauna that night were the women, including we six foreigners who had stayed latest.

“I don’t know how he could have gotten in there,” said a shaken Marion over coffee. “I know I was the last person to use the sauna, but I locked it up after I left and put the key back in the office. I didn’t give the key to anyone. It was too late. There must be another key.”

According to the hotel staff, there wasn’t, and the key that Marion said she had replaced in the office was not there. It had been found in the sauna door. Pekka could have removed it, but it was unlikely he could have locked himself in. Hearing this news, we began to understand that Pekka hadn’t just died naturally of a heart attack.

But it wasn’t until the Finnish police showed up an hour later and asked us six women who’d been in the sauna that evening to make statements that we realized they definitely thought Pekka had been murdered, and possibly murdered by one of us.

Only real murderers live their lives with a good alibi. The rest of us sound guilty as sin and have no excuses for anything. When interrogated, no one has seen us, no one has heard us. We could have been up to anything. Although Eva and Simone had left together, the rest of us had departed separately and walked back to the hotel alone. Birgit had stopped briefly to chat with a Norwegian writer, and Simone had been seen on the phone in the lobby; the rest of us had apparently been invisible. We didn’t even have the excuse that our movements had been hidden in the dark.

It’s not a pleasant thing to be suspected of a murder, and none of us felt very happy about it. True, the immediate headlines would be in Finnish, which none of us could read, but eventually they would be picked up other places: “Battle of the Sexes Turns Fatal in Finland.”

I had just come out of my session with the police, who, in spite of their cool Scandinavian politeness, were as suspicious as any cops I’d ever come across. “And where, exactly, do you live, Mrs. Reilly? Ah,
nowhere just at the moment?
Nowhere? And is that possible, Mrs. Reilly? To live
nowhere just at the moment?
”

I saw the Finnish couple, Silje and Tom, slowly crossing the lawn, and rushed after them.

“Tell me about this man Pekka,” I said. “Who was he? I should at least have an idea about someone I’m supposed to have possibly murdered.”

They looked at each other and motioned to a bench nearby. It was Silje who spoke, in careful English and without affect. Her husband Tom looked more upset than she did.

“It was about ten years ago,” she said. “I was quite young, twenty-two. I had just written my first novel. It was very graphic, sexually graphic. I thought it might be shocking, but at the time I thought I wanted to shock. I had been living in France, studying, and took French writers as my models. I wrote frankly about incest, bisexuality, a woman who is sexually used by an older man, but who also finds pleasure in it. I wrote about masochism. I believed the world needed to know all this. I was something like the Dutch woman Marion, only not so experienced and brave.”

She stopped and, tears choking her voice, couldn’t go on.

Tom took her hand. “The novel became famous. It
was
shocking. But also very strong, very beautifully written. It had no easy answers. It was only a woman’s voice, telling the truth. There were people who didn’t like to hear a woman’s voice. What I said two days ago, in the group, about ridicule. That’s the weapon they chose.”

“When you’re young, you don’t expect to be laughed at,” Silje broke in, more forceful now. “It’s really the worst insult, not to be taken seriously. This man, this Pekka, that’s what he did. He wrote about me, not my book, about me. He interviewed friends and my family, found out I’d stayed once in a mental institution, that I’d used drugs. Everything he found out he used against me, and trivialized me and made it sound like I’d made everything up. That I was just a silly little, attention-seeking fool. After that article came out, I was so ashamed.”

She swallowed. “I tried to kill myself and failed. I was committed to an institution for almost two years.”

Tom took over again. “Silje and I have tried to live a quiet life the past few years. We do our children’s books. We now have two children of our own. We live in the country and don’t participate in the writers’ debates in Helsinki. But when the invitation came to attend this reunion, we said, All right, why not? After all we too are part of Finnish literature.