‘All right, so he’s firing the gun. So what do you want – what’s my role?’ asked Lauri, feeling pleasure at using the correct word.
‘You’ll be a diversion,’ said Sasha, looking Lauri full in the face.
‘A diversion?’
‘I know. Not very flattering, is it? But absolutely essential.’
‘What do I do?’
‘You’ll create a disturbance. You’ll shout slogans, wave a stick, try to hurl yourself in Bobrikov’s direction. You’ll attract police attention. They’ll be taken up with trying to arrest you. But they won’t arrest you, because there’ll be our people round you making sure you get away. Most of Bobrikov’s protection won’t even try to go after you, they’re a bit too professional for that. They’ll be looking after their man. But it’ll scatter them. And it’ll distract them. If everything goes right, they’ll believe that there’s been a minor threat and they’ve got Bobrikov away to safety. And so they’ll relax. They’re only human. They’ll drop their guard.
‘I’m not going to lie to you, Lauri. You won’t be the only one. There’ll be others along Bobrikov’s route that day, doing the same job, creating diversions, rattling them, getting them on the back foot. It’ll work at the time, and it’ll work afterwards when they conduct their post-mortems. They’ll look back and they’ll know it wasn’t just one crazy Swede, it wasn’t something they can explain away like that. They’ll have to believe that our Swede was the tip of the iceberg, and that’s exactly what we want them to believe.
‘It’s a small role, and maybe it’s not what you were hoping for. But believe me, it’s vital.’
‘I understand,’ said Lauri. The words resounded inside his head, as solemn as gongs.
‘So will you do it? Are you with us?’
Lauri shrugged impatiently. ‘Don’t you see, I’ve already agreed.’
‘Good,’ said Sasha. ‘Goo-ood,’ drawing out the word not with mockery now, but with a satisfaction that drew Lauri in, welded them together. ‘He’s ours,’ he said. ‘He belongs to us.’
‘Who?’
‘Bobrikov. He’s ours. His life belongs to us, because we have already decided to end it.’
His life belongs to us, because…
But the man’s not dead yet, Lauri thought. Maybe at this very moment he’s sitting with his legs apart, sighing with relief as a turd eases its way out of him.
Why think of that, for God’s sake? They give condemned men what they want to eat, don’t they? So even when they’re about to die they’re still putting food into their bodies and chewing it and letting it go down. It’ll never be digested. But they know they’re going to die, at least they know that. They don’t have to eat if they don’t want to. Bobrikov doesn’t know This whole business is ours. He’s ours. Nash.
He’s standing up. He’s done his business. He’s got the same look on his face as everybody has then.
No. Don’t think about him any more.
Sasha put his hand on Lauri’s shoulder and gave it a friendly shake, as if to wake both of them from a dream.
‘Where’s our Eeva?’ he asked.
‘She went mushroom-picking with Magda. You remember.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sasha, without much interest. ‘They went off early, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, early.’
Lauri had wanted to go with them, biking out of the city into woods which were just beginning to smell of autumn. He’d have been able to borrow a bike from somewhere. But Magda hadn’t wanted him along. It was Eeva’s company she wanted. You wouldn’t think the girls had only known each other a few weeks.
Magda acted as if she was Eeva’s sister. There they were together in Magda’s apartment, chatting and laughing all hours of the day and night. But Magda wasn’t really a girl. She was a woman. She must be thirty, Lauri thought, and her age and air of experience made him feel that he had done nothing and gone nowhere. She talked like a man. She was serious, direct, handling ideas as confidently as a skilled man handles his tools. She could make Eeva laugh, too. When he knocked at the door and waited for one of them to open it, he always believed that he could hear them laughing.
Eeva didn’t make him wait. She came straight to the door. But not Magda; no, he even had the feeling sometimes that Magda liked keeping him waiting, liked it that she and Eeva shared a life he couldn’t enter unless she let him. Magda would give him a long, cool stare at the door, as if he had to prove himself to her.
Eeva’s return to Helsinki wasn’t working out as he’d imagined. He couldn’t remember exactly how he’d thought things would be, but certainly Magda hadn’t been part of the picture. She seemed to be there all the time, between him and Eeva, worse than a mother. She’d even found Eeva a job in a bookshop.
Sasha had raised the idea of Eeva working in a dairy shop, but Magda wasn’t having any of it. She was sharp with Sasha about it. ‘Put Eeva into a dairy? Why? What’s the point of that? She’s educated. She already speaks three languages.’
Lauri felt that Magda was taking Eeva away into a different world. For all her dedication to the workers, Magda didn’t live in the factory quarter. She wouldn’t have dreamed of getting a room in Kallio, where tenements were springing up to house all the factory workers who’d streamed in from the countryside. Helsinki was swelling, sucking in lives from farms and forests. Some of them would find work and stay, but plenty of others were only passing through the city on their way to the new world, just as timber and paper passed through the city to the harbour and out in the new steamships to the new world. The same railroads carried them all from the back country, to the lip of their new lives.
There was a part of Lauri that envied the emigrants, with their bundles containing everything they’d got. They looked dazed, some of them, as if the decision they’d made was too big for them. A string of children would traipse in the wake of parents and grandparents, each carrying a bundle suited to the child’s size. Who knew where they’d be in two or three years’ time? On their own land, building up their own farms. It was what most of them longed for, but there was more than that to America. Eeva’s father used to tell him about it, years ago. Pekka Koskinen could recite the opening of the American Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
‘People say it sounds even better in the English,’ he would always add at the end of the recitation.
Pekka was no wide-eyed idealist, not him. America wasn’t going to be perfect, no place was, he told Lauri. But the ideas they started with were better than ours.
He should have listened more to Eeva’s father. He should have sat down to those lessons Eeva had to learn. But he didn’t want to, that was the truth of it. He preferred to play in the street. And, to be honest, he still didn’t want to. The sight of a page of print made him bored, restless.
Magda was educated. She came from a bourgeois family in Berlin, Sasha had told him that. Her father was a university professor who had written several books about Schiller. Sasha had not gone on to say who Schiller was. Magda might live in a shabby old apartment building, but it wasn’t far from the city centre. Magda needed to go to concerts, lectures and exhibitions. She didn’t even think about it: it all came naturally to her.
Sasha and Magda were two of a kind in one way, he thought, even though they were so different in others. Both of them were good with words. They loved arguing and reached for the words they needed with absolute confidence that they’d know how to use them.
Magda was passionate about the rights of women. Sasha accused her of ‘bourgeois feminism’, but Magda wasn’t having that. What use was a revolution which left women exactly where they were, slaves in the workplace on half a man’s wages, and slaves at home? And as for mate
rnity provision! Why didn’t Sasha open his eyes and see the number of women whose bodies were wrecked by childbearing? Why should she fight for a revolution that didn’t concern itself with women’s lives? Perhaps he’d like to tell her? No, if Sasha thought Magda should fight alongside him, he was going to have to accept that it worked both ways, and women wanted equal rights. And if you won’t accept that, then don’t you see that your revolution becomes irrelevant to me?’ Magda’s face sparkled with challenge. You knew that she would go ahead and do what she wanted anyway.
The world had always belonged to her, really. Lauri understood that. It was in the way she talked to him, not even realizing the tone in her voice. Sasha sometimes said she was a patronizing bitch. But she wasn’t patronizing, not really. Just sure, born sure. Magda realized immediately that Lauri not only wasn’t educated, but knew nothing about the books and theatres and composers that meant so much to her. He wasn’t cultured, and probably he never would be. But Eeva, Eeva… a cold wind whispered to him that it wouldn’t be long before Eeva spoke Magda’s language fluently. Eeva had been reading novels and poetry since she was seven. Already she was going to the same concerts and lectures that Magda attended.
Maybe it’s easier for women, Lauri thought. They adapt more easily, they fit in more. And Eeva was so finely made, with her long fingers and her delicate neck. She could go anywhere. But working in the bookshop hadn’t tamed Eeva’s tongue, Lauri thought with a sudden, inward smile. She was still as sharp as a knife when she wanted to be, she wouldn’t put up with any crap from anyone.
As far as Lauri knew, Sasha had never mentioned the subject of ‘pol-it-ic-al ass-ass-in-ation’ to Magda. He was certain Eeva knew nothing about it. And that was right, he decided.
Fair enough, you couldn’t fault Magda for arguing about women’s rights. He’d never thought of things that way himself, but when you added it up it didn’t come out fair. But the thought of Eeva with a gun in her hand – let alone a poisoned umbrella – made him feel sick.
Eeva didn’t argue much. She listened. It was clear that she liked Magda, respected her. She pondered Magda’s beliefs, testing them against her own experiences. The two of them would talk, breaking into each other’s sentences, not to argue, but to take the thought farther.
‘Yes, I see –’
‘But what if –’
‘I know what you mean, it’s exactly the same for me –’
It was equally clear that Eeva didn’t have much time for Sasha, even though the four of them sometimes went about together. What she had against Sasha, he didn’t know. She never argued with him, or criticized him.
Here she was, his Eeva, in the same city as him. He could see her every day if he wanted. But she’d seemed closer when she was far away. Then, she was really his Eeva. Now, she belonged to herself.
Maybe if they had more time alone together, without the others, it would be better. But she and Magda shared a room, and he and Sasha shared a room. Lauri worked long hours, and so did Eeva. Even when they were free, how could Eeva say no if Magda wanted to go mushroom-picking, and how could Lauri not go to a meeting with Sasha?
Eeva had a new dress. Magda had given it to her. It was deep, rich green. Forest green, it was called. It had belonged to Magda’s sister, and it was the right kind of dress for Eeva to wear in the bookshop.
Eeva had nothing like it. She’d never had a dress like it, but it suited her as if it’d been made for her. It fitted her body, and made her look quite different, like a woman he barely knew at all. There was even a little lace collar. Magda said that the lace came from Holland.
Eeva had come up from the country covered in dust, the same Eeva as ever with her cloak and bundle and stout boots. She’d looked older, of course. Taller. Her face had filled out and changed. But she wasn’t a stranger.
Maybe if he’d gone to the railway station to meet her, it would have worked out differently. But he hadn’t even known she was coming that day. She found her way to the room he shared with Sasha, and as ill-luck would have it, Lauri wasn’t at home. So it was Sasha she saw first, not him. It was more than an hour before Lauri got back, and somehow the freshness and newness of Eeva’s arrival had already worn off. Maybe if Sasha hadn’t been there…
But he was. Eeva was sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the room, drinking coffee. She looked very stiff. Her bundle was at her side, and as she started up when Lauri came in, her coffee slopped onto her skirt and she almost tripped over her bundle. She recovered herself, but the moment was gone. And for some reason he just stood there like an idiot. He could have helped her wipe the coffee from her skirt. He could have done or said so many things. But he didn’t, he just stood there. Probably it was only a few seconds, but it was a few seconds too many. He ought to have – well, he didn’t know what he ought to have done. He was shy of her, that was the problem. All the thoughts he’d been thinking about her since he last saw her seemed to crowd between them. And so what did he say, with Sasha standing there watching? ‘Hello, Eeva.’
Hello, Eeva. What a fool, what a cretinous idiot. After all those months, adding up to years, she comes back, and all you can say is Hello, Eeva. He just stood there with his arms hanging down by his sides. She licked her lips as if they were dry, and said in a funny little voice, not her real voice at all, ‘Hello, Lauri.’ And that was their meeting.
And then Sasha had suggested they go over to Magda’s right away. Magda had folded herself around Eeva somehow, talking to her quietly and saying just the right things; he could tell that from the way Eeva relaxed and let go of her bundle and even smiled. She’d gone off to the sauna with Magda, and when they’d all met later that evening, Eeva was quite different. Her skin glowed, her hair was clean, shiny, and smoothly drawn back into a knot. She wore the green dress and she carried herself differently. Instead of heavy boots, she wore a pair of Magda’s shoes. Their feet were exactly the same size, Magda said, as if this was a wonderful sign of their friendship.
There was time to talk then, in the cafe that evening, but Magda and Sasha were there. And he was buggered if he was going to say Hello, Eeva, again, so he didn’t say much, and it was Magda who talked. But even so, it was getting easier, things were warming up. And then suddenly he had to go and tell her, right out in the middle of everything, that he expected she’d like to go and see her father’s grave. A shiver went all over her face, but she struggled and nothing happened. She didn’t cry. He ought to have leaned forward across the table then, and taken her hands. If he had, she’d have cried – he knows she would – and then it would have been right again. The others would have melted away. He and Eeva would have talked until they’d told each other everything about what their lives had been since the day they took her away. It would have been just like when they used to hide under the bedclothes and tell each other everything. They’d have talked to each other about her father and his, and what was left of those days. He could have comforted her. But no. He didn’t lean forward across the table. Magda and Sasha stayed, and Eeva didn’t cry
There were two hollows at the base of Eeva’s neck. He’d never noticed them before. The dress clasped her waist where it was drawn in by the narrow leather belt which Magda had also given her. He wanted to put his hands there.
He wanted to touch those hollows at the base of her neck. But not with his fingers, with his lips. He’d put his lips there, he’d close his eyes, he’d taste her.
How he wished that he’d been the one to give Eeva that dress.
22
Autumn was on its way. You could smell it, even though the sun still shone and the leaves on the birches hadn’t yet changed colour. But they were stiff and dry. They rattled when the wind blew through them, and the early mornings were chill. Mushrooms flourished, growing fat on the ripeness of summer.
Magda’s basket and her own were full of chanterelles, Eeva’s favourites: even ceps didn’t taste quite as good. Eeva was going to show Magda her way of drying them. She’d pickle some to
o, and make mushroom liquor with any that were damaged. Magda said she usually gorged on fresh mushrooms, eating everything she’d picked straight away. She did not know how to preserve them. She went to a particular stall in the railway marketplace for dried mushrooms: the market-woman knew her well.
Hard to believe that anyone could be so wasteful, in the face of the long winter. Why, even close to Helsinki the woods were full of mushrooms and berries for the picking, enough for everyone to fill a store cupboard for the months ahead. But Magda laughed, and said that she couldn’t be bothered with all those housewifely arts. She was careless, Eeva thought. Probably she had never had to look at an empty shelf.
‘It’s wrong,’ said Eeva seriously. ‘My father would’ve said you were spitting in the face of nature.’
‘Do you believe that?’
Eeva considered it. ‘Yes,’ she said at last, not wanting to offend Magda, but not wanting to lie to her, either. ‘I don’t like waste. We used to go out into the forest every chance we had, and we’d pick everything in season. Lingonberries, rowanberries, wild strawberries, raspberries. Cranberries later on, when they’d had a touch of frost on them. He knew where they all grew. He knew all the mushrooms, too; we never had to go to the chemist to identify anything.’