“Is that good?” she asks.
Ella nods. “You take care of me like you’re somebody’s mother.”
Anna is silent. The movements of her fingers accelerate a little. Little circles; the cream layered in transparent ramparts on the skin. She hopes her mother won’t ask the question that she knows is coming. But she does ask it: “Have you seen that little girl Linda lately?”
How easily she says it. That little girl. Linda.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Doesn’t she have a birthday about now?”
“Next week.”
“How old will she be?”
Will she be, she says, not would she be. Linda will be blowing out candles on a cake somewhere this year, too. Her mother will smile and say, Good job, you’re such a big girl. All this is true someplace else.
“Five,” Anna says. “She’ll be five years old this year.”
She has to turn away. The ink flows into her as if it’s filling a bottle. When Linda turned three she bought her cotton candy at the amusement park. It was as if that had happened to someone else.
She puts on her underwear, her jeans. Her mother lifts her head, looks at her for a moment.
“Would you like me to braid your hair? It’ll give you curls like when you were little.”
“Sure,” she says carelessly, smiling.
She sits on the sauna stool. Her mother divides her hair into three parts.
And now she is herself again. And her mother is her mother, strong-handed, determined.
THEY ROAST THE fish over the coals, flavoring it with olive oil and salt and pepper and letting it sizzle in its foil wrap. Her mother makes a sauce from butter and onions for the new potatoes. They take the linen tablecloth with its regular folds out of the cupboard and spread it on the table and lay the plates on it.
Her mother pours white wine into glasses and checks on the fish now and then and Anna opens the door and steps out into the early summer dark. She’s going to clip a few apple blossoms for the table.
She walks down the narrow path to the shed. The stones of the path feel smooth under the bare soles of her feet. A loon somewhere on the opposite shore has tuned its call to a yet more penetrating note. A blackbird on a branch sings its yearning song with a familiar melancholy that has always sounded to Anna’s ears like it was in a major key.
The shed shimmers in the murky darkness. The door creaks. The familiar smell of turpentine and sawdust and gasoline fills her nose. She sinks into the smell for a moment like stepping into water.
The garden scissors are hanging from a nail. Anna turns on the light. Old powdered pigments, empty linseed oil bottles, dried-out glue and paintbrushes. Wooden stretcher bars on the shelves.
Anna lets her gaze wander over the room, the shelves of stacked charcoal drawings, the color experiments. It’s mostly sketches. Still, they shouldn’t be left lying here at the mercy of the damp. Any art museum would be glad to buy them for their collection.
Rejects, canvases that look like they’ve been painted over many times, straggle along the rack at the back of the shed. She goes to them and flips through the pictures absentmindedly.
Anna has a half-formed, careless thought about all of this. The forest, the sky, May, the shed stubbornly standing there day after day, year after year, a squirrel perhaps creeping onto its roof sometimes, the moss pushing out its sprouts. And there were the half-finished paintings, pieces of their own reality, here amid all the activity of the world.
She closes the door a little reluctantly.
She cuts a few branches from the nearest apple tree. They snap like bones as they break.
Her mother is out on the porch when she returns.
“How’d it look in there?”
“The same. Just as chaotic as ever.”
Her mother sighs with good-natured weariness.
“Someone should organize the shed, sort through the art,” she says. “Dad doesn’t value his old pieces enough to take the trouble.”
Anna shrugs.
“Maybe I can come with Matias, do a real spring cleaning.”
“That would be nice. If Grandma makes it here again, you could clean it up before she comes.”
“Agreed,” Anna says.
She puts on a smile without effort and hands the apple blossoms to her mother, who reflects the smile on her own face and says, “Well, let’s eat.”
1964
KERTTU IS WAITING at the corner. September, the sky a high dome, the air thin. The city doesn’t yet know about winter.
Kerttu has a new style—she found it this summer when she went to visit relatives in San Francisco. A black turtleneck, jeans, eyes hazy, as if she’s decided to let the unpredictability of life show through her gaze. She has combed her hair till it shines, hanging on either side of her face. It takes me a moment to get used to this Kerttu. Just this morning she had on seamed stockings and a short skirt.
“All right then,” Kerttu says. “Let’s go create a world.”
She cajoles me into this—I wouldn’t have the time or the desire for it, exams are pressing on me and I’ve only just discovered the girl and the man, my own days with them. But Kerttu doesn’t give in. I quicken my steps beside her.
“Where exactly are we going?”
“To a meeting,” she says, and doesn’t explain any further.
THERE ARE A handful of young people when we get there. Thick-rimmed glasses float by, everyone smells like cigarettes, unspoken hopes condense near the ceiling, dreams that no one knows how to shout out loud yet. A girl in red beads says something about the Vietnam War, but a boy in a green shirt isn’t listening because he’s painting a sketch of his plans for the evening in his mind.
Isn’t it exciting? Kerttu whispers in a low voice just before we step inside. She doesn’t let her smile split its seams.
A girl in the corner recognizes her, takes note of her pants. Happiness goes through me and settles in my fingertips. I’m with Kerttu—me—I’m her friend, so I’m new, too.
We sit in the front row next to a boy who smells of hair oil and yesterday’s red wine. I remember him from the university—his name is Tapio. He lent me a pen in the introductory lecture for social science theory, whispering, You heard it from me, Rousseau’s making a comeback.
The speeches start. It’s like in parliament, only the fervor and the size of the waistlines are different. A man in a corduroy jacket with hair receding from his temples talks about Mao.
“These people admire China?” I whisper in Kerttu’s ear. “Don’t people go hungry there?”
“That’s in Africa. There’s a famine there,” she whispers back. “Just listen.”
Everyone is in agreement about Vietnam. One of the boys gets up and recites a statement that sums up the whole state of affairs in the form of a poem.
He receives nods of approval. Hands are raised in support. I raise my hand, too, although I’m only half there. I don’t tell anyone that part of me is still on Sammonkatu. What would Kerttu think if she knew? Suddenly I remember his hand. I think about his belly, the place where the hair begins. It’s a real triumph to know those places on another person, those unexplored regions.
For one absurd moment I have the whole world within reach as I think about his belly. These people think they know. They’re planning a friendship trip to Berlin, arguing about whether a singing party is an appropriate way to express their opinions. But they don’t have the whole world—it’s mine.
The girl reached her hand toward me yesterday, climbed into my lap, and I held her. I fed her and put her to bed. Her hair smelled like apples, her skin was slightly musty. It’s her own smell. Her breath is a little sour in the morning. Her backside is sharp against my thigh and I have to adjust her a little so the two childish chisels of bone in her butt
don’t cut into me. Then I wrap an arm around her. She leans her head against me. Eeva, I wish you were always at our house!
Yesterday, once she had gone to sleep, I went and stood in the doorway without speaking.
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 separate—otherwise 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.”
AUTUMN 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.