True (33 page)

Katariina comes back late at night. I tell her that Marc won't be coming here anymore. I don't say anything more.

“Why in the world not? You two seemed to be in love.”

“It wasn't love. It was something else.”

Katariina turns away from me for a moment. I see something in the corner of her eye, an expression I can't interpret.

I think about the diary. About the drawing. Why did I bring them with me? I should have left them at Pengerkatu. Now there's nothing at Pengerkatu but an old skirt sewn from thick fabric. It's hanging in the closet with no purpose.

WE BOARD THE
train. I have money for the ticket, maybe a sandwich, tea or juice. I calculate that I'll have to tell Katariina before we arrive in Paris.

It starts after we go through Brussels. I feel sick, nausea coming in waves. The walls press in on me and the windows lean toward me. Soon I'm lying on the floor, then bent double, heaving over the toilet in the cramped WC. I lie next to a wall. I don't know how much time passes. Katariina gives me some water to drink the way I used to give milk to the calves at home.

My mouth turns to sandpaper, my lips shrivel as if I'm crossing a desert.

We cross the French border. My head feels heavy, my limbs weigh me down. My tongue swells up. My words turn gooey. There's sawdust in my throat and I shiver under my blanket, although the day is hot. I doze and waken. Mumble in my sleep.

Katariina buys me some tea from the restaurant car, but it stings. I try to keep my eyes open but they've swollen shut. I look at my reflection in the mirror behind the counter and see red splotches all over my face. What's wrong with me?

Katariina looks at me with worry and weighs her options. She's distressed. She doesn't want to get off the train and she doesn't want to leave me alone.

“Maybe I should get off here,” I say, and every word hurts my mouth. I have to talk slowly, place each word carefully. “Maybe you should go on without me. I can stay here and try to heal up somewhere, go to a hotel, or a hostel, anywhere.”

Katariina thinks for a minute. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “Let's both get off.”

I nod. “Thanks.”

WE GET OFF
at a station whose name is difficult to pronounce. People stare at us. Some men who are playing dominos at a table that they've carried out to the street yell after us.

There's no time here. There's country bread, pork chop soup, apple pies baking, a rooster strutting around the yard and a bird jabbering in its tree, bored, with nothing to do.

The hostel is a dump. Cockroaches scuttle into cracks in the corners, a drunken man whose wife has run off with a gypsy fiddler is making a ruckus in the stairway. We're on the border of two countries. Paris is just a rumor here. The revolution is a hundred years away.

Night comes, then day. I lay my head on a pillow that smells of cigarettes and onions and hopes that disappeared into the cracks between the floorboards. I fall, spill off the side of the bed and crash into pieces on the floor. Katariina brings me yogurt that I throw up, potatoes that I can't bear to have near me, cabbage soup, whitefish, finally white bread dipped in juice and fed to me in little pieces so I can swallow it.

I drink water in small sips.

I see him standing in the doorway. I try to get up, but can't. Suddenly he's my father. He says that I left my little sister in the cradle to die, the one who died when she was three months old, when I was five, the one I've always carried with me like a silent twin or a painful wound.

I see my little sister in the corner. Suddenly she's Ella.

Ella walks across the room with Molla in her arms and leans toward me but I can't get hold of her. Then she's my baby sister again. She keeps dying in the cradle again and again and disappearing as if she was made of sugar the whole time.

The sky leans down outside the window. I try to open my eyes but the dream hasn't come to the end yet. I'm far away. A little girl comes up next to me.

“Where's Molla?” I ask.

“I've lost her,” she says.

“I'll find her for you.”

I can speak to the girl in a silent language. It doesn't hurt to talk to her.

“Who are you talking to?” Katariina asks.

“I don't know.”

ON THE FOURTH
morning after I got sick, my throat swells shut. I try to say something, but I can't. Katariina looks at me, her brow furrowed.

“I'm calling a doctor.”

She pays the doctor with enough francs for a train ticket. I stand chilled in the middle of the floor with my ribs sharp against the cool air. The doctor puts his stethoscope on my back like a stamp. Breathe in, he says and I wheeze. Now out. I wheeze again. Say aah, he says, and I try. No sound comes out.

I can't straighten my knees, I've shrunk ten centimeters.

“What is it?” Katariina asks.

The doctor shrugs. “It could be diphtheria. Or even polio. Sometimes it causes a fever. You never know.”

“What do you mean you don't know?” Katariina asks. “What do you mean? You're the expert, aren't you?”

The doctor is annoyed. He isn't going to let this little lady give him orders. He leaves without saying another word, but comes back half an hour later. He's mixed a solution for me to take. I have to take it every three hours.

On the fifth morning, I wake up. Katariina brings me some tea and a little cake. She's begged them from the strict woman who runs the hostel, who doesn't want to have anything to do with the shady things of the world, although she seems to take pity on a lot of people in the hostel who have no food. I eat one of the cakes and gulp the tea.

“Feel better?”

I try to say yes. I can't get the word out, but I nod.

Katariina sits on the edge of the bed.

I move my hand, trying to get her to bring me a pen. Finally she understands. She looks for some paper, finds a tissue.

I write with a steady hand: You can go if you want to. I'm feeling better now.

“No. I'm not going to leave,” she says decisively.

I write: You should.

“Will you be all right?” she says.

I can see that she wants to leave but she wants to stay. She's pulled in two directions. I write one more time:
Go.

Finally she nods. “Thanks,” she says.

She's relieved, although she doesn't say so. She wants to be where everything's happening, she's restless, feels like the world is someplace else.

I start to feel better. I eat a whole loaf of bread and go out for short walks. How bright it is. The sky is wailing. I think about my diary, my drawing. Where are they?

They're lying in a garbage can in some city whose name no one knows. Marc carried the book with him for a short time until he got tired of its Finnish gibberish and threw it away. That's where my words are—in a trash can. Someone comes and picks up the book and tries to read it. It's in a foreign language, they think, a language nobody speaks. Then this stranger looks at the drawing; what a happy woman in the picture!

Katariina has already packed her things. Her smile makes the air jingle. We order lemon soda from the little restaurant in the courtyard—the only one in the village. Katariina talks about everything she plans to do, all kinds of things that she isn't yet sure about. I answer with nods. I write a few yeses on my napkin, and one no when she asks me if I still feel sick.

Then she leaves. We hug, she kisses me on both cheeks like they do here.

I squeeze her tight.

“You've shrunk to half your size,” she says with a worried scowl. “You should go straight to Kuhmo when you get back to Finland. Go eat pancakes made with the first milk. Herrings in cream and potatoes. Your mother can make you Karelian stew, strawberry pie, the kind with whipped cream on top. Cocoa and cinnamon rolls. You'll get your strength back. When I come see you in the fall you'll be your old self again and we'll go to Kosmos and order blinis and vorschmack, spend the whole evening. Everything will be like it used to be.”

I would say yes if I could. But my voice hasn't come back, and it never will. I smile.

This is the moment when the future is created, the moment when the past is destroyed and a new world is created. Katariina leaves and I turn.

SHE GETS ON
the train, finally makes it to Paris, but the revolution is already somewhere else, in another city, as revolutions always are. She gets bored, wanders for a few days in Montmartre and hangs around the Sorbonne ready to rebel if the rebellion's coming. But no rebellion comes. Tourists come, other people like her. Housewives and professors, pigeons, winos, everyone who inhabits the streets when there's no one making a ruckus. Katariina eats croissants for breakfast and spends the day with a boy she meets named Fabien, who steals her money while she's in the women's room. She's a little upset about it, but she figures these things happen. She lolls in the park behind Notre Dame without any money eating baguettes with nothing on them and writes a few fumbling thoughts in her diary. She doesn't hear from Laylah although they had planned to meet. She sends her two telegrams. Finally she meets Lies at a metro station, holding a newspaper over her head to keep the rain off, and goes with her to West Berlin.

Lies lets Katariina sleep on her sofa and she stays all summer. Their door is always open to anyone who wants to come. And people do come—Hans and Anne and several others. Katariina hears new ideas inside these walls, sings different songs, and memorizes conditional statements—if A then B—statements she's never heard before. She swallows them without choking because she's been looking for something like this. Maybe she's been looking for certainty, the kinds of statements that close off alternatives. The excitement she feels when she recites these statements is akin to the way she felt performing in her high school play. When the lights were lowered and the play began, she felt a strange joy. She felt like anything could happen, and at the same time like she was safe, completely safe.

And in Berlin, inside these walls, making these statements and trying out her raised fist, Katariina feels the same peace and joy.

SHE SENDS ME
six postcards. I receive the first two but I don't have the strength to answer them. The last four cards lie on the floor under the mail slot on Pengerkatu, in the dark. Silverfish scurry over them, dust collects on these notes from the wide world until my mother and father and Liisa muster the strength to come and clean out the apartment.

It's at that moment, when they've found the cards, the last one reading, “Why don't you answer?!” that Liisa finally sends Katariina a telegram.

After Katariina receives the telegram, she sits on a park bench in Berlin and feels a strange lightness. There's other news, news about an occupation, tanks headed south out of Berlin, but she doesn't want to think about that. She only has one piece of news in her mind. The sadness hasn't come yet. She's able to get up like it's any other day. She's able to walk down the street, stop at a cafe, smoke a cigarette if she happens to have one.

She lights a cigarette. Actually, she thinks, she knew when they were at the station, talking about pancakes and cinnamon rolls. Maybe that's why she talked in such a carefree way. She wanted to cover up the thought.

Endings aren't desolate and quiet. Endings are ordinary, noisy, a boy running across the street to pick up the evening's bottles of beer at the cafe.

Katariina knows she'll be on Lies's living room floor this evening, compressed to the size of a fist. She'll feel a hint of sadness at the moment when she notices that the labels on the beer are bright green. Amazingly green, as if they were made of acres of rain-drenched grass.

BUT AT THIS
moment, as the future is still being created, as the previous world is destroyed and a new one is made, as I'm turning and she's leaving, Katariina still doesn't know, and neither do I. There's still the little village with a name that's impossible to pronounce, still the station in the nameless village.

Katariina gets on the train and I wave. Then I turn and go back to my little room. My train will leave in the evening. I'll go to Hamburg and from there to the harbor to catch a boat home. I buy my boat ticket with the last of my money, writing the name of my destination on a piece of paper. I write the city and then add “home.”

It starts again on the boat. I'm floating. The sea is rising up against me. I don't know if I exist anymore.

I've vanished, faded away to invisibility. When I arrive in Helsinki, I'm just a rumor, a story somebody told once.

The smell of herring in the stairwell, echoes from the apartments, all of it cancels me out. I open the door. There's a knee-high pile of mail. I set my bags down on the floor. I close the curtains. Take off my clothes. I'm ancient. I could pull up the floorboards and lie down under them, forgotten.

I lay down my head.

On the seventh day I take the tram to the hospital. I have to lean my head against the tram window. The trees are nodding, the city is a stage set. Is it already August?