True (16 page)
Authors: Riikka Pulkkinen
Tags: #Cancer - Patients - Fiction., #Family secrets - Fiction.
He came to me. He didn't need to ask anymore. We didn't turn out the lights. Before I tasted him, I looked at him up close. This world is just a thin veil, sparsely knit, compared to that.
To end the meeting a woman sings in a clear voice, an inexplicably strange song like nothing I've ever heard. She looks into my eyes for a moment and I see her longing. She looks like she really is longing for the Black Sea, though she's never set foot on its salty shores.
When the meeting's over, Kerttu is impatient.
“Let's go to a bar. I need a drink.”
I don't see him until we've taken off our coats. He's sitting with his back to me. Lauri is explaining something, making broad curves in the air with his hands. Later I learn that Lauri already knows. He's one of those people who eases over the steepest parts of the truth by accelerating his speech.
“There's your artist,” Kerttu says.
“He's not my artist.”
Months will go by before I dare to say it: mine.
Kerttu walks to their table as if she owns the world. This is a situation that will become familiar to me later. I have to ask permission to sit next to him with my eyes. He smiles. If something has begun, he doesn't show it.
Two realities penetrate each other. One reality, the reality of dreams, hovers above our heads. It's true right now if we just take hold of it. We let it be.
Kerttu isn't shy. She nods toward a wineglass.
“If you gentlemen will treat a couple of women to a glass in lieu of a meal, we can tell you the state of the world.”
He smiles. Later I learn that this is a defensive smile, reserved for situations where a woman he appreciates is challenging him. I'm never there when he gives Elsa this smile. I'm not there on the days when he and Elsa quarrel and make up by means of this gaze. When Elsa asks, What if I do go for a swim? Are you going to try to stop me? and he looks at her like this and they know, without saying anything, that they haven't needed to dream about each other for a long time.
But this smile is for Kerttu.
“Who're you?” he says.
“Hasn't Eeva told you about me?” Kerttu turns to look at me and says with genuine hurt in her voice: “You don't talk about me!”
“Eeva talks about what she wants to. She says everything she wants to say.” Now he's looking at me.
“And now we wouldn't mind having some of that wine,” Kerttu says.
He nods to the waitress.
KERTTU THINKS UP
a reason to go to the women's room and asks me to come with her.
“I see what's going on here. Don't try to deny it. But don't imagine that this is anything new. Don't imagine it's never happened before.”
“Are you angry?”
“Why would I be?”
“Because he's married.”
“Marriage is for cowards.”
Kerttu suddenly turns around and looks at me. “You ought to introduce me to his friends. He knows everyone. I'd be very happy to exchange a few words with that poet.”
“You shouldn't start up anything with him. You haven't heard him talk. Say one wrong word and you could end up in court.”
“But he's a thinker,” Kerttu says. “He knows more than other people.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has to do with
solidarity with the peoples of the world.
”
“Is that so?”
Kerttu is silent for a moment. Then she asks, “Do you love him? Are you already in love with him?”
“What if I am? Are you against that, too?”
Kerttu hugs me. “No, I'm not. I'm not against love.”
When we get back to the table, she interrogates him.
“What do you intend to do to make the world better?” she asks. “Besides those paintings of yours?”
He's used to people coming up to him in restaurants and demanding an explanation for everything in the world, demanding a position, an opinion. Kerttu knows that he moves in circles where new ideas are simmering. She wants to catch some of his spark. More than that: she wants to create the spark.
“What do you think I ought to do?” he says, looking at her across the table.
“Don't ask me. You ought to know, since you know people.”
“You mean them?” he says, pointing to a corner table across the room where the stage of drunkenness is rising to the level of falsetto. “I'm not part of the inner circle. They don't tell me their most important insights.”
I already recognize when he's being sarcastic. It settles around his mouth, and if you're not used to it you can mistake it for an ordinary smile.
“Although they do occasionally let me drink a glass or two at their table,” he adds.
“What do you think about Vietnam?” Kerttu asks eagerly.
She still has the idea that he's at the forefront of change because he knows poets and things. Vietnam is a key question.
He smiles. “You ask big questions.”
“The world's a big place.”
“All I know about Vietnam is that I oppose the war,” he says. “I oppose the Americans' activities in Vietnam.”
Kerttu nods. “And?”
“And that doesn't mean that I support everyone who opposes them.”
Kerttu sniffs, disappointed, and drinks down the rest of her wine.
She thinks for a moment. Sniffs out the quickest dig, the sharpest barb she can toss across the table. “Keeping your Schjerfbecks upside down in the corner doesn't make you any less bourgeois. It's because of middle-class people like you that this whole country's going down the toilet.”
He laughs, charmed. He glances at me. He knows I'm the one who told her about it. Then he's annoyed. “What do you suggest, then?”
“We should think up a plan. Make our voices heard. We should sing and dance, do anything, be seen. Why should you hide in your studio? Why not do something?”
“Listen,” he says. “I've seen this before. I saw it in Paris when you were still carrying your books to school. I saw that it doesn't get you anywhere. Politics and art are best kept separateâotherwise one will diminish the other. Art turns empty when it's only about one truth. That's what I think. It's best to keep art open to the struggle between different points of view.”
Kerttu has no answer to this. He looks at me, asking with his eyes, Who is this girl, this sassy friend of yours?
I'd like to try to explain. But Kerttu doesn't really need any explanation.
“Good,” he says. “Now let's have another round. Let's drink to differences of opinion.”
A
UTUMN AWAITS WINTER'S
pardon. I'm happy. My happiness is new. It comes from the strange pact I've made with the man over the weeks and months. When Elsa's away, I have a family. I'm still learning about them, but I already love them.
There are two realities.
There's the reality where I'm a student of literature and French who eats one-mark sandwiches and drinks cheap wine. In that reality I'm the same Eeva who ran across the meadows and recited spells to nourish the world, the same girl whose mother scolded her in her harsh moments, the one who fell in love with a boy in the second grade who didn't get a single Christmas card at the Christmas tree festival. His name was Heikki, and the girl named Eeva fell in love with him because she didn't yet know the difference between love and pity.
And then there's the other reality, the other woman who has the same name as the first, and who is very much like the Eeva who lives on Liisankatu. But the woman of this other reality is a little more capable than the one who ran through the meadow with a spell on her lips. In this other reality Eeva has a daughter and a husband, a house with stone walls and nights when she creeps in to lie beside him.
This other reality has strict boundaries. It closes up and stays shut away waiting for the next time she will return. This reality is a dream world, and its Eeva is a woman of the world of dreams, although I don't yet know to call myself that.
And this Eeva doesn't yet have doubts. I don't yet feel myself caught in the squeeze between these two worlds, and he hasn't yet become sick with guilt, and the little girl hasn't yet begun to ask her timid questions about what's going on.
THE DOORWAY BETWEEN
these two worlds is always the same. On the last night before Elsa comes home, he and I look at each other as if we've both just awakened. We know what's coming. We prepare for Elsa's return by not touching each other, by turning polite and guarded.
Elsa usually comes home on Mondays. I make my long good-byes all Sunday evening.
“Where do you go, when you go away?” the little girl asks as I pack my things. Blouses, skirts, and stockings.
“I go home.”
“Can't you stay here?”
“I'll come back.”
She nods and lets go of the hem of my skirt.
WHEN ELSA RETURNS,
I smile as we drink coffee at the table and tell her about the little girl's new words, how she cried a little the first night but then calmed down, how she hit a boy in the park with a shovel and I had to tell her about right and wrong.
I turn my gaze to the window, as he does, and we both take note of the flamelike leaves on the trees. He kisses Elsa. I watch, unable to turn away.
I pour Elsa some coffee, because these days I've learned to act like the lady of the house. My hand trembles.
Then I take my few things and go by tram to Kruununhaka, to the apartment on Liisankatu. I hold tight to my suitcase, sit on the edge of my bed, and don't know where to begin. The evening opens up outside the window. Kerttu's great-aunt's bed, the wardrobe heavy in the corner, filled with superfluous clothing, the clock on the living room wall about to strike, night about to fall, the last tram screeching as it turns the corner, and I sleep with the weight of his hand a ghostly ache at the curve of my waist.
I'll continue this other life, meet some boys now and then, have parties, pass my exams as I should, and not yet know how to wish for anything more.
“MOMMY,” THE LITTLE
girl cries after I've left.
She's pleased that her mother has returned. For her the world is uncomplicated: Elsa comes back, Eeva leaves.
“You like Eeva, do you?”
“Yes,” the little girl says.
She climbs into Elsa's lap.
“I missed you, Mommy,” she suddenly sputters, hiding her tears in Elsa's neck.
“Did you?” Elsa says, touched. “Mama's darling,” she says, and cuddles the little girl.
In the evening before going to sleep Elsa tucks her in, reads her a story. The man kisses Elsa's neck. He feels regret. The guilt is a black spot inside himâhe uses this tenderness to hide all the things he's done while Elsa was away. He's thinking of me, of the way my thighs pressed against his sides.
Suddenly he's baffled by his own strange desire for me, thinks of it as a temporary disturbance. My moans ring in his ears and cause him to tremble with both passion and horror. He looks closer.
He goes over my features, my breasts, which are small, my belly, which is perhaps a bit too white, my smile, which, now that he thinks about it, is perhaps a bit too impudent and flirtatious.
The little girl frets and whimpers because she's missed her mother and won't go right to sleep. And when she finally does fall asleep, he undresses his wife in the bedroom and they do what they have the strength and tenderness to do.
As they lie side by side, Elsa asks, “How did things go this time?”
“Good,” he answers, and his voice is faint.
“What about Eeva? Was she a help? Did you enjoy yourselves?”
“Yes, Eeva's a great help. She's a fine young woman.”
Elsa soon falls asleep. He lies beside her awake. He decides to put a stop to the whole thing.
HE CALLS ME.
He's lain awake all night next to Elsa, reproaching himself. He's made a decision.
“This has to end,” he says as soon as I answer.
I don't say anything.
“So,” he says, “let's end it, all right?”
“All right,” I say.
“You'll come . . . you'll come the next time and it'll be like nothing has happened. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
He hangs up the phone. He thinks that when the next time comes, if I'm still even their nanny the next time Elsa's awayâhe could always make up some excuse to get a new oneâhe'll treat me like he did Hilma. Businesslike. Cordial, but without affection.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK
he rings my buzzer. I feel like I'm catching a cold. I've spent the morning at home drinking tea, bored, wearing my mother's old wool socks. It's afternoon now and the sun is shining brightly, one of the last times it will that year.
I open the door into the hallway. I'm not surprised to see a glimpse of him coming up the stairs.
There's no return, it's impossible to turn back.
He has the requisite gift with him, a paper bag full of cinnamon rolls, which he knows I like. He smells familiar, pungent and soft at the same time.
“Have you come to set the rules?”
“I came looking for a woman,” he says. “She was raised at the edge of a burned clearing.”
“There are only women of the world living here.”
“What kind of world?”
“A dream world.”
“It can't be entirely a dream world,” he says. “The woman I'm looking for is so filled with affection that it flows out of her fingertips.”
“Oh, her. She left. Went to another city. She told me about it before she packed up.”
“What did she say?” he asks.
“She said she thought she might be in love.”
“Really?” he says. “Then what's the problem?”
“It's complicated. That's what she said. The man wanted to end the whole thing before it had even begun.”
“Idiot,” he says. “A guy like that deserves to get lost in the woods.”
“A wolf'll eat his leg off.”
“But not his hands.”
“No, not his hands.”
“What do you think this woman plans to do?” he asks. “When she gets back from this other city.”
“She'll ask him in, offer him some coffee. They'll talk to each other like strangers for a moment.”
“And then?”
“Then,” I say carelessly, as if I were talking about the movements of clouds. “Then it all depends on him. On what he wants to do.”
“What about her? Doesn't she have any say?”
“Of course. But she's one of those people who thinks that no one can afford to let love pass them by. She's the kind of person who thinks that no one's rich enough that they can afford to walk right by love. That's why she keeps the door open.”
He steps over the threshold, comes inside easily, as if there were no threshold.
I measure some coffee into the pot, watch as it brews, the foam rising to the top, and then take it off the burner. We eat half a cinnamon roll and drink the coffee, though the grounds haven't yet sunk to the bottom.
He lights a fire in the tiled stove and finds one of Kerttu's great-aunt's books half-burned in the grate, titled
My Love
. We speculate about who loved Kerttu's cantankerous great-aunt. The wood in the stove catches fire. I change the record on Kerttu's player. The light lingers in the corners, the old clock on the wall strikesâone hour has passed. I go to him. It seems self-evident somehow that I should lean against him a little.
Soon I ask him into my room.
THE CLOCK STRIKES
four. The sun is setting. People are coming home from work. The trams are packed full of afternoon hope, and I'm not cold anymore. The burning wood, sticks of spruce, sputter in the stove.
My father always says that spruce isn't good for heatingâtoo much pitch. I like the popping sound, it's like the starting gun for something, dividing time between what's past and what's new, not yet formed.
As he's leaving, I sit for a moment on the windowsill. I ask him for a cigarette. Smoking makes me cough, but I smoke anyway. The pungent fall air comes into the room from the slightly opened window and gives me goosebumps. The dark hasn't come yet. I sit at the window until it does.
I'll take love. It's what I want, and I'm going to take it.
There's another feeling that takes shape as I sit here on the windowsill. It's bound up with the melancholy that hovers behind the feeling of love. It concerns Elsa, and its name is guilt.
AFTER THAT FIRST
time, we occasionally see each other even when Elsa's in town. He comes to my house in the afternoons. He stays for two hours, sometimes three. The walls are the boundaries of our world. We rarely go out. He brings me rolls, sometimes bread. Our existence is like a long outing, we broaden the space of the day from the inside out, first by buttering the hard-crusted bread he got at the bakery and brewing strong coffee, then by closing the door to my room.
Time slides away from us, out under the bedroom door, and we slide into each other.
THE LOVE FOR
him belongs to the new Eeva. Something else that develops more secretly is the love for the little girl.
When autumn ends, I've already learned her. She scratches off her scabs when they start to heal. She fusses when she's tired, hits me and kicks me. Sometimes she's unmanageable and I have to tell her no. The first time I do she flies into a rage. I get even more angry, and afterward I cry in the bathroom.
But she accepts me in spite of my prohibitions, or maybe because of them, because when I tell her no she can test its strength and position and see that it's a wall that's always in the same place.
Right away, in the first few weeks, she wants me to put her to bed, wants me near her before she goes to sleep.
She always falls asleep suddenly, just the way she did the first time I was left alone with her. She wants to hear one more story, even though she's already sleepy, insists, begs drowsily until I agree. I make up a story and watch as she slips into sleep little by little, sometimes waking for a moment, as if to make sure I'm still there, and I continue the story to assure her that I haven't gone anywhere, I'm still right here beside her.