The Winter War (24 page)

‘What?'

‘Could I come over to your place and take a shower? If your flatmate wouldn't mind, that is.'

twenty-six

THE LIGHTS SWITCHED OFF IN
the plane. The passengers had been served food and wine and then coffee. A fat man sitting next to Katriina had already started snoring loudly as she tried to find a more comfortable position in her seat.

She'd settled all the practical arrangements. She'd had a meeting with a local organisation that had a lot of experience in sending young women abroad to be trained as nurses. And Katriina now had some sense of the big picture regarding the logistics required if HNS was going to start importing nurses and staff on a large scale.

Katriina opened the
Helsingin Sanomat
. Reading the newspaper after a long trip was a way of getting back into her daily routines, a way of coming back home. There was nothing better than sitting on a plane with a long flight ahead of her and just letting the articles sink in, reading every single paragraph. After finishing with
Helsingin Sanomat
, she continued on to
Iltalehti
.

Every Friday one page of the evening paper was allocated to a guest columnist, and now a photo of Laura Lampela caught Katriina's eye. There was something about Laura's face in the picture that revealed an alarming self-confidence, something about the way she was standing with her hand on her hip. The expression and pose of someone who knew that her interpretation of the world was the prevailing view, someone who knew that she represented a generation that would soon take over, of which she was clearly the voice.

Her column had been given the headline ‘Chance Meetings', and it had to do with her reaction to the film
Brief Encounter
. From the very beginning Katriina thought the whole thing sounded familiar, for instance when Laura described the film's subtle innocence, the fact that the heroine, who had fallen in love with another man, could not leave her husband and children because the story was set in the late 1930s in Great Britain, ‘long before the sexual revolution'. Laura wrote that morals had changed – ‘today we would laugh at the repressed emotions of the main characters' – and then she described how the film had nevertheless become a classic because of Celia Johnson's superb acting, her ‘desperate looks and unceasingly controlled narration'. The point of the article was that Laura was making a connection with the present era. Today the film offered the audience a ‘titillating sense of pleasure' with its innocent and virtuous story because our moral compass regarding relationships was so very different. ‘At a time when more than half of all marriages end in divorce, an adulterous affair is as original as a litre of milk. But the dream of a great passion is as prevalent as ever.'

For about two minutes Katriina sat there in the dimly lit aircraft with a feeling that she'd been duped, not just as a wife but also as a reader. She had an urge to get up and ask her fellow passengers how anyone could behave so shamelessly – but everyone was sitting quietly in their seats, as if nothing had happened, as if Laura's article had not been a direct invasion of Katriina's personal life. She glanced at the passenger to her left, across the aisle. The woman, who was close to Katriina's age, gave her a smile, as if she were somehow involved in the whole thing, as if everybody in the world were actually involved, and they all knew about it except for Katriina.

What time was it? She looked at her watch and saw that she still had four hours before landing. She read the column again, fixating on certain phrases – they were the exact same things that Max had said when they watched the film together, and there was also something about the entire argument that was so typical of Max. Maybe he'd thought that Katriina wasn't really listening, but she was; she'd heard that part about the desperate looks and the dream of a great passion. She'd heard Max praise the screenplay by Noël Coward, and she'd heard Max point out that the film could be viewed as an archetype of the repressed emotions of the British middle class. It couldn't be coincidence. There were too many things that sounded familiar.

Katriina closed her eyes.

She felt the plane bounce up and down, a slight turbulence. She asked for a little bottle of red wine. After she'd finished it, she asked for another.

There were certain moments that Katriina would remember for the rest of her life. Brief moments, specific incidents – like when the girls lay on her stomach for the very first time, newborn and utterly vulnerable; or when she watched Max defend his doctoral dissertation; or when she was fourteen and won the silver medal in the regional competitions in diving at the swimming hall.

The same was true of those last four hours on the plane from Manila, but instead of feeling like a moment, they seemed to last an eternity, as if she were in some sort of limbo state, a world in which all possibilities were still open to her. She felt like the cat in the paradox known as Schrödinger's cat: she was both alive and dead at the same time. As long as she sat in the plane, both possibilities existed: Max had been unfaithful, and he hadn't. Because until she got home and confronted him, she couldn't know for sure. And as long as she was on the plane, unable to phone or ask anyone, her whole life, her whole future, was still completely open.

It was close to four in the afternoon when Katriina opened the door to their flat. It was Monday, and Edvard came racing towards her, jumping up to greet her. Katriina called Max's name. She could hear both the agitation and the alcohol in her voice.

‘In here,' he answered from the bedroom.

The first thing she saw was Max standing next to the bed, holding the phone in his hand. The TV was on, showing scenes from an American crime show, as if everything in life was completely normal. Katriina thought he must be talking to her – and if so, there was no longer any doubt.

Yet she had a strange feeling that everything was the same as always. This was her old bedroom, and there stood her old bed and the TV, and on the wall hung the watercolour that she'd received as a gift on her fiftieth birthday. There was the book she'd left on the bedside table before her trip. And there stood her husband of the past thirty years, looking as if he'd just eaten a sandwich, since there was a spot of mustard on his worn-out old T-shirt.

Max said goodbye to whoever he was talking to and set the phone on the table.

‘Hi,' he said.

‘Hi,' said Katriina.

‘My mother had a stroke.'

Katriina had pictured a lot of different scenes as she sat in the taxi on her way home from the airport. She'd imagined how she would throw the entire contents of the refrigerator at him – as she once had done when they were newlyweds and had a terrible fight. How she would scream shrilly and punch him in the stomach so hard that he slammed against the wall. She had pictured herself hauling all his clothes out of the wardrobe, stuffing them into a backpack, and then tossing it into the stairwell. But she had not predicted this scene. She hadn't imagined that her mother-in-law would have had a stroke and that suddenly there was an entirely different topic to discuss. Katriina felt overcome by shock, sorrow, a feeling of helplessness in the face of death, but she tried to push those emotions aside.

‘It's just by chance that I'm home. I have to go back out there tomorrow,' said Max, taking her in his arms.

Katriina leaned her head against his chest and saw how the whole quarrel she'd built up in her mind had now vanished. She felt Max's hands stroking her hair in an attempt to console her, and how he pressed his face against her neck. But in an attack of fury she pushed him away. She was not going to let it go, he was not going to be allowed to have the upper hand emotionally.

‘Max, are you having an affair with Laura Lampela?'

The TV show continued on as if nothing had happened. For a few seconds the only sound in the room was the dialogue, the well-oiled repartee, the stereotypical way in which the characters communicated by firing off one-liners. And Katriina knew that Max would have to say something quickly, because it was no longer possible to take anything back, now that she'd said it out loud.

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' he said as he went over to the table, picked up the mobile, and stuck it in his pocket. He turned to the wardrobe and started taking out shirts.

Katriina's anger returned. She was surprised at how fast it erupted. It began almost unnoticed, like a slight pain in her stomach, but then it grew, creeping up to her chest and into her throat, to settle like a pounding heat in her temples. She was sweating, an annoying and ungovernable part of getting older.

‘Then how do you explain that article Laura wrote in today's
Iltalehti
?'

Max turned around. She'd caught his interest, and he almost smiled.

‘Laura borrowed the DVD from me, and I told her a little about the film. I took the bus out to Österbotten. Mum had a stroke yesterday when I was on my way home. They're not sure she's going to make it. Elisabeth is over there now, but I need to go back tomorrow. They're probably going to move her to the big hospital in Vaasa.'

Katriina started to cry. The tears poured out of her, and there was nothing she could do, no way she could control her feelings. Her sobs were the only sound in the room except for the TV. She wasn't thinking about Max, and yet she was – he couldn't very well be making up this story about his mother having a stroke.

‘I'm tired and I need to rest. It's been a busy day, and I have to get up early,' he said.

‘Do you love her?'

He sighed. ‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘If you love her, I want to know,' said Katriina.

Max paused before replying. ‘What do you want me to say? Nothing happened. I met with Laura a few times. She told me that my manuscript is good. But nothing happened. What do you want to hear?'

‘Don't ask me what I want. What do you want? Do you want to move in with her?'

Part of Katriina felt like laughing, and she almost did – but she realised that if she laughed, that would be the totally wrong response, considering Ebba.

Max touched her cheek and gave her a hug, which was what he always did when she was sad about something. She pressed her face closer to his chest, let his hands stroke her hair, let him kiss her on the head. She reached up to caress his beard.

Max reacted instinctively by hugging her harder, running his hand over her hair, and then down her back to her arse. He was tired, worn out, but paradoxically enough – as she now noticed – not too tired to get turned on. Maybe it was the only logical way of handling this situation, the only emotion that wasn't split in two and could still be understood. She responded to his caresses by tipping her head back to look up at him. She closed her eyes, leaned closer and kissed him. Then she took his hand and led him to the bed.

His hands were moving all over her body. Now he shifted his weight and began kissing her neck, then her breasts and she felt his hands trying to get under her dress. Somewhere deep inside her a titillating sensation stirred. She moved higher up on the bed and he followed, then slipped down and began pulling off her clothes.

Several seconds, or maybe several minutes later, they were lying on the bed, wrapped in each other's arms.

She felt his tongue, so soft. She moaned faintly, and he went on. Everything ran out of her, all her fear, all her anger. She felt so safe in this situation. This was her life. And yet it seemed new, as if something had changed in Max's behaviour. Maybe it was the tension, the not knowing, so that in a way she was sharing her bed with a stranger.

It was dark in the room, with Max's body on top of hers, the familiar salty taste of his skin. When he entered her, it felt thrilling in a way it hadn't done for years.

‘Oh, Max … what are you …'

In the midst of pure ecstasy she turned her head and opened her eyes.

Her reaction was so strong – and her scream so loud – that her knee rammed into Max's head before he could pull off the covers. He looked at her, confused and alarmed.

‘What's wrong? I'm sorry, I was just trying something new.'

Sitting on the bedside table right next to Katriina was one of the grandchildren's hamsters, staring her right in the eye. On the floor next to the bed, Katriina's knickers were moving about. They must have landed on the other hamster when she took them off, and now the little creature was trying in vain to get out.

twenty-seven

THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS HAPPENED
so fast that the outcome was inevitable. When Max thought about it later, he realised that nothing could have been done to save Blixten.

Max jumped out of bed, planting his right foot on the floor. When he set down his left foot he felt something soft, something moving next to Katriina's knickers. He heard a strange and awful – but also extremely brief – squeak from the floor. When he lifted his foot, he saw the squished and shocking result of what he'd done.

Katriina was still sitting on the bed, peering nervously at Skorpan, the other hamster on the bedside table who was staring back at her.

‘Have they been missing all week?' she now asked.

Max leaned down to inspect the damage.

It was bad. Blixten lay on his back with his mouth open, and the tiny paws hung lifelessly at his sides.

Katriina got up and went into the bathroom to put on her dressing gown. Max picked up his clothes and got dressed. He lifted the crushed hamster off the floor and placed it on the bed. He didn't have time for this right now, didn't have time to deal with this sort of problem.

Edvard came into the room and sniffed at Blixten.

‘We need to catch the other one before it disappears again,' said Max.

Katriina came out of the bathroom and went over to the bedside table. Skorpan was sniffing at the lamp, moving back and forth across the table. Katriina bent down and picked up the hamster in both hands. Then she went to Eva's room and put it inside the cage.

Max went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Edvard followed.

‘
Do you love her?
' Katriina had asked.

Max had never been the sort of person to take a stand. He'd never felt any desire to adopt a specific position regarding an issue simply for the sake of argument. This might be considered cowardly – a way of avoiding controversy – but he'd also seen so many people of his generation get locked into specific opinions that marked them for the rest of their lives.

Of course there were moments in everyone's personal life when he or she was forced to heed what might be called an internal compass. Was it certain actions that shaped who a person became, or did people act in accordance with who they were from the very outset?

He thought about the trip back from Kristinestad. Elisabeth had phoned just after they'd got on to the motorway. Laura and Max had had to turn around and drive back to the hospital. Once they arrived, it was clear there was very little they could do. Elisabeth was crying as she sat in the waiting room, and she didn't ask any questions when Max turned up with Laura. By then it was close to lunchtime, and they were both hungry. The snowstorm was still raging, and nobody knew how long they would need to stay in Kristinestad.

‘You drive home if you like. I can take the bus,' Max told Laura.

‘Don't worry about me. I'll stay,' she said.

Max didn't really want her there, but he couldn't very well force her to go home. He and Elisabeth went to their mother's room and had a talk with her doctors.

‘Cerebral haemorrhage,' said the female doctor in charge. ‘She's old, and she's had a blood clot before. This one was quite severe. If she manages to pull through, she'll still be at risk for more strokes. She might do fine, but I don't want to get your hopes up.'

Their mother looked peaceful as she lay in the hospital bed. Her face was only slightly distorted – something about her mouth, something about her features that was oddly unfamiliar. Elisabeth continued to weep. Max gave his sister a hug. They sat down, then got up to pace the room as they waited for the doctor to come back and tell them the results of the blood tests.

Max went out to speak to Laura again.

‘You can drive home if you want. Looks like I'm going to be here for a while.'

‘I don't need to go home.'

‘But I'm sure you have better things to do.'

‘Not really.'

They found a café on the square where they could have lunch, and afterwards they got back into Laura's car. She'd changed her mind and was going to drive home. That's when it happened. Max leaned over to kiss her, and it all happened so fast. She willingly took off her trousers and knickers and let him come inside her. It was sex of the mechanical sort, sex as a way of warding off everything that was frightening – sex because the world around them, with all of its conventions, no longer existed. The only thing left was a great white roar. Sex that was cramped and awkward, sex in the midst of a snowstorm with Radio Vega playing in the car. When they'd finished, Laura put her clothes on again, and Max said ‘thank you'. Then she drove off, and he went back to the hospital.

As he sat next to his mother's bed, he thought that maybe some sort of proviso allowed a person to be unfaithful under certain circumstances, for instance if a state of shock made the man in question not responsible for his actions. Ebba lay in bed, breathing quietly. As he looked at her, Max felt a darkness spreading through him, a feeling of loss. It was somehow incomprehensible that he should find himself in this situation right now, that he'd reached this point, a moment that he'd imagined many times over the course of the years, though it had always been something abstract and remote. It was true that Ebba had never lived nearby – visiting her required a drive of several hours – but she had been there the whole time, like an awareness in the back of his mind, a constant presence in his life. And now he would be forced to carry all their shared memories alone, his memories of his mother and father, of his childhood, and one day they would cease to exist altogether. When that happened, what would be left of the life he'd lived?

He fell asleep on the bus ride home. Now, as he stood in the kitchen, he doubted that anything at all had happened with Laura. It felt like a memory that didn't fit in.

‘Do you love her?'

When Katriina came into the kitchen, Max avoided looking her in the eye. It was like they were juggling several balls at once. He felt guilty, and yet he didn't. He couldn't muster any real regret about what he'd done. The situation had simply demanded it.

Right now Max was doing what came easiest to him. He was packing a bag with his tennis gear. It was still lousy weather outside, with the temperature around minus 20º Celsius. The icy wind bit at his cheeks, his whole body, as he ploughed his way through the world. He could have used a pair of skis.

He opened the doors to the tennis hall and breathed in the familiar smell of linoleum, sweat and sports drinks. It was Monday evening, and when he went into the locker room, he said hello to Jorma, who – from what Max understood – worked in a small theatre in Berghäll. He'd often heard Jorma talk about the difficult directors he worked with, about actors who drank and about scandals in the Finnish theatre world. Max didn't know much about that world since he rarely went to see a play unless Katriina made him go. But he liked listening to people in different professions to his own; it gave him a new perspective.

Standing at another locker was Juha. Max knew he'd been diagnosed with cancer a year ago, but he'd regained his health and had now married a young woman from Belarus. It was common practice for everyone who came to the tennis hall to gossip about anyone who didn't happen to be present. In that way, all the information circulated in an eternal loop, so that no one could ever be sure whether he might be the current subject of gossip.

Juha never talked much, but he was a hell of a tennis player. He had the unusual gift of being able to deliver a backhand shot that was nearly as perfect as his forehand. And his physique gave no clue that he could move so fast. He also had a powerful serve. Max could see why a young woman would be attracted to him; maybe his physical prowess was not limited to the tennis court.

A highly physical and aggressive game of tennis didn't always mean that the player had an aggressive personality. On the contrary, many people seemed to reserve their aggression for the tennis court. But if an individual displayed a fierce, competitive streak when he played, it was likely that he was equally competitive in his personal life. An unscrupulous attitude could carry you a long way in a tennis game, but in Max's experience, the best players had it in their blood. They played tennis as if they were performing a ballet, approaching every aspect of the game intuitively. Those kinds of people were often good at everything they did, as if they possessed a certain musicality. Max had seen it in some of the younger men with whom he occasionally played tennis, a sort of natural superiority that also managed to come across as generous.

When Max played, it was a matter of endurance. Of refusing to give up, even though the lactic acid in his legs made him want to lie down on the ground from pain and exhaustion. Of never missing a shot, but at the same time not taking any unnecessary steps. That was what had carried him through thousands of tennis games. Staying on the court in all situations, until his opponent finally gave up.

‘Do you love her?'