True

  Kuhmo is just an idea, an idea that I reject.

  “Let’s do it,” I say.

  AT THE BEGINNING of June I withdraw all the money from my bank account—my pay for March, April, and May. I’ve saved a thousand from my years working on Sammonkatu, and another thousand since then. I withdraw that, too. Maybe I have nothing else to show for my years as a nanny, maybe it’s left me feeling hollow and forlorn, but at least I have a bank account I can close out. I pay the rent for the apartment on Pengerkatu and change the rest of the money to dollars. I have a thousand francs’ worth.

  When I get back home, I look at the pile of money. Pieces of paper worth thousands of marks.

  I pack pants and bright-colored T-shirts. I leave my skirt at home—thick fabric clumsily sewn by my mother. It doesn’t belong in a place where the nightingale sings in another language. It belongs in the closet, collecting dust.

  After a moment’s thought, I bring along the man’s drawing, the one he did at the museum before it all started. I put it between the pages of my diary.

  I pack my diary among my clothes. I’ve let the sadness flow black onto the paper for an entire year, written the little girl’s laugh and the way the man curls his toes into its lines. I won’t leave that here, I’ll bring our story with me to dusty corners and cafes, spill soda or tea or Armagnac on its pages, and it won’t matter at all! I’ll bring my story to a great city and it will change, become mere ink marks on a page. I’ll write other words after these, and little by little they’ll become true. Aujourd’hui, elle va être heureuse.

  WHEN WE REACH the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia, Laylah is there to meet us. She waves to us from a long way off and runs to greet us. She’s darker than any person I’ve ever seen. When she laughs her teeth glow. She lives in a messy flat in Söder with Agneta and Maj-Lis. Mmkemba isn’t home—he’s from somewhere in Africa. Mmkemba is even blacker than Laylah and I can’t stop looking at him.

  We’re waiting for Marc, he’s supposed to meet us at the park at six. He arrives at five after six with a guitar. I had forgotten his eyes—not a trace of seriousness!

  He has all the requisites of a dreamer: in addition to the guitar a bright-colored shirt and a vest that looks like it came from a sheep that was only just recently gamboling through the fields.

  He smiles. I’d forgotten his smile, too. My doubts, if I had any, melt away right down to my feet.

  “Evá,” he says.

  Yes, I think. Yes, I’ll let it come if it’s coming.

  THAT EVENING LAYLAH makes some kind of risotto out of corn and grains with cinnamon and pepper and spices mixed in that makes my tongue feel grilled. We eat on the floor. I get drunk from the wine, a calm hovers over us, and Mmkemba’s eyes look like white pearls.

  Marc talks about expanding consciousness. I listen, although I’m suddenly at the edge of a meadow, the meadow of my childhood, the one where my sister Liisa and I gathered seven kinds of flowers to put under our pillows on Midsummer.

  A drop of water, plump at the end of a blade of grass, the sun flashing beyond the spruce trees. That’s where I am. I’ve actually never been anywhere else but at the edge of this meadow. It’s Midsummer Eve and Liisa and I are guessing the names of boys before we seal our lips because the magic says that you have to be silent when you pick the flowers if you want to see your future husband in your dreams. We have the meadow. The drop of water. The sky that we run through, neither letting go of the other’s hand.

  Marc persuades me to unbutton my jeans and pull my shirt off over my head. Yes, I remember what it was like with him. His flat nipples like the eyes of violets. I want to throw myself into it, but I’ve traveled all the way across northern Europe without taking a bath once and first I’d like to take off his sheepskin vest.

  “You know what? I want to wash you.”

  “Why not?” he answers. “The last time I had a bath was in Berlin.”

  I don’t ask when that was, but I lead him into the bathroom. Laylah, Agneta, and Maj-Lis sit cross-legged on the living room floor smoking and talking in low voices, Katariina and Mmkemba are nowhere to be seen. Marc and I tiptoe across the living room.

  I pour pine scent into the bathtub.

  “All right.”

  Marc steps into the bath fervently, like he’s repenting of his sins. He shows me two scars that he got from a dog bite in the riots in May.

  I scrub his back with a sponge.

  “You could have kids. You’d be good with kids. You take care of me like you’re someone’s mother.”

  “I’m not.”

  I wash Marc until I find the boy inside. I dry him off. He looks like something just invented as I let him approach.

  I look at his nipples again, eyes of violets on his chest, as I sail into and out of him.

  Maybe love begins with tender feelings like these. It begins with what the womb knows and reaches out from there to the fingertips, the ends of your toes, to my lips that smile at his words.

  “Je t’aime,” he says.

  “We haven’t seen each other in years.”

  “But you’re so beautiful.”

  WE BOARD A train two days later. I haven’t yet started to disappear.

  The landscape changes, turns to more open fields and farms. Sometimes it’s like in the North, then it starts to look like Europe. We go from the train to a ship in Göteborg. Thomas and Paul join the group at the harbor. They offer us a drink. Thomas looks at Katariina’s breasts and Katariina looks at Thomas as if she wants to stab him with a knife.

  “Finland?” he says.

  “In the lap of the Soviet Union,” Paul says.

  “Or perhaps you’re just in its embrace,” Thomas adds.

  “Neither one,” Katariina says. “A friend. It’s a question of friendship. There’s a difference.”

  “Whatever,” one of them says with a shrug. “What about all this fuss that’s going on? Has it reached as far as your latitude yet? Are your students starting a rebellion, too?”

  “Even as we speak,” Katariina says.

  “What about products?” Paul asks. “Do you have to bring your own ballpoint pen when you go to Finland?”

  “We’ve got ballpoint pens coming out of our ears,” Katariina says. “And there’s no shortage of television or records or orange juice. Everything’s just lovely.”

  “And yet you left,” Thomas says. “You’re looking for something elsewhere.”

  He taps his forehead knowingly. Katariina snorts. She leans toward me as the men are ordering drinks.

  “What idiots,” she says. “They don’t know anything about anything.”

  IT’S FULL SUMMER when we arrive in Amsterdam. We sit next to canals, at kitchen tables, in cafes. Laylah’s brother Piet lives in a messy apartment much like Laylah’s commune in Söder. Multicolored walls and records everywhere, dirty dishes and mattresses on the floor. I don’t leave my things around the house—you never know who might come through the door. I decide to carry everything with me—clothes, the diary that I’ve written aujourd’hui in ten times now, marking off each day, the drawing pressed between its pages. I put part of my money in it, too.

  A small part, and a few hundred dollars under the mattress— if it disappears, so be it.

  AT NIGHT I make my way toward Marc and he opens me again and again and I start to trust that the whole world is possible for those who say oui.

  I say it many times in Marc’s arms, in a dark room with Catherine Deneuve looking down from the wall. I saw a movie last year where she played a housewife who joins a bordello. Did she learn pleasure in the arms of a stranger among the velvet drapes? I don’t know and I don’t care because for this moment all I have is yes and a swirling upward spiral.

  KATARIINA HAS HEARD that some people are planning to meet at Spui Square. On the third day she disappea
rs and goes her own way for a whole day.

  Marc and I can’t be bothered with Spui Square until the evening. Marc says true rebellion is enjoying your existence no matter what the circumstances. So we just stroll around and get lost in the red-light district. Marc says that when he was little his mother used to buy flowers and bread from the market on Saturdays. They lived in the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris and walked past the Moulin Rouge every Saturday morning cutting across a little street on their way to the market. His mother would hold his hand when they passed by the whores. The roses were red. The same red in the roses and on the girls’ lips, he says. For a long time he thought that was how it should be, that those two reds had something in common that no one had told him about.

  And they did, he says. It was the color of beauty, of pleasure. Really the color of love.

  Marc and I weave our way between the canals, sit together for a moment in a cafe and then another. We eat roast beef and country bread and salad. We buy wine without asking the price. I pay because Marc doesn’t really have any money right now. He watches me as I open my wallet looking for money for the waitress.

  “You’ve become so independent. I wouldn’t have recognized you. You act like you own the world.”

  “I don’t own it, I’m just getting to know it.”

  Marc smiles and kisses me and says je t’aime. I already believe him, and answer him. He’s playing the guitar and making up a song about me.

  “You can compose it while I go to the women’s room,” I say.

  “Maybe I’ll start singing and gather a crowd of admirers,” he says.

  When I get back to the table, Marc has disappeared. The guitar is gone. There’s nothing but the dirty dishes on the table. My bag is gone, too. Not just the money, the whole bag. The diary, the drawing of me—gone.

  I ask the waitress if she saw Marc leave. Did he say he was going out? Did he say whether he was coming back? She shakes her head.

  I find a note on a corner of the table.

  Don’t think badly of me. I needed the cash. It was beautiful while it lasted.

  Love! Peace! M.

  I run into the street. Nothing. I run around the corner. I find my bag. It’s been ransacked; the money—dollars and francs—was in the diary, he saw me take it out from between the pages in Copenhagen, and in Cologne when I changed crowns to deutschmarks. The book isn’t in the bag. Marc has taken it. Not just the money, the whole book, the drawing, the words, everything. Every one of my words has been taken.

  I sit down in a slump. The air slumps inside me. The world runs down the storm drain.

  I walk up and down bridges all day, asking passersby for money for coffee and a roll. I walk several kilometers to Piet’s commune thinking about how to tell Katariina. When I get there I look at Catherine Deneuve’s face and ask her advice. But what advice could she give? In the film I saw she was drowning herself in pleasure! I count my money. It’s enough to last a little while. I don’t have to tell Katariina before Paris.

  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!