True (10 page)

8

S
HALL WE GO
to Seurasaari?” Elsa said suddenly.

They were on their way back from their usual drive.

“I don't want to go inside yet, I really don't,” she said coaxingly. “Maybe I could go for a swim.”

“A swim? You're not serious. I won't let you go for a swim.”

“Why not?”

“You'll freeze to death.”

Elsa gave him a meaningful look, her eyebrows raised. He realized his slip and they both burst out laughing.

“All right,” he agreed. “We can have one more outing.”

“Let's pick up some tea from home,” Elsa mused. “And a blanket.”

They brewed the tea in the thermos. Elsa packed two large swim towels, wearing an impish grin. It was already late, past ten, only a few joggers passing by. The sea borrowed its color from the sky. The power plant loomed in the distance, flaming orange in the last rays of the setting sun.

It had been a warm day, but it had rained in the afternoon. Now, as the sun sacrificed itself slowly to the night, everything seemed to float in a pink mist.

There was a swimming cove at the first curve in the road—a boulder beach, with sand closer to the water's edge. A pair of swans nodded to the rocks at the shore's edge. They were like water lilies, floating silent and still.

There were no chicks to be seen. You could hear some geese farther south, in the middle of the island's bay, thrashing around in the water, the birds' annual pageant.

The sun was a ball of orange enmeshed in graffiti gray.

“What kind of sky is this?” Elsa asked.

This was a habit of theirs. He noticed the colors. Elsa would ask for them, for the light, the sky's identifying features, and he would tell her.

“Carefree clouds,” he said. “Like they've forgotten that there ever was anything serious.”

“And the moon?” Elsa asked, pointing at the sky, where the moon was just resolving into a faded crescent.

“The moon is shy,” he said.

“You know, I love how romantic you are, even if it has gone out of style.”

Elsa stopped, looked at the sun, looked at the rippling water.

“I think I'll go in.”

“Really? You mean to do it, then?”

“Who's going to stop me?” Elsa said, looking at him defiantly. “What if this is my last chance to swim? I suppose you want to deny me that pleasure?” She said this with a smile.

“I guess not,” he said.

She walked to the shore, using a cone-covered pine for support on her way to the water. She took off her clothes—coat, shoes, pants, shirt, finally her underwear—without any shyness.

Martti glanced around instinctively. There was no one to be seen. He felt joy and terror at the same time. This seemingly muddle-headed, skeletal woman, in whom I can still see the outlines of my love, intends to go swimming, because the idea grabs her. I won't stop her—I'll go after her if it looks like she can't make it. But I won't try to stop her.

Elsa glanced back at him once more at the water's edge, as if seeking encouragement for her waywardness in his gaze. Then she stepped into the water.

A pleasurable little whimper escaped her lips: the water was cold.

All of a sudden he remembered being in exactly the same situation before: Eeva taking off her clothes, stepping into the water, glancing at him, wading out deeper, then bending over to swim. Calm strokes in supreme silence. The water was cold but Eeva didn't scream, didn't make a sound. As if she needed to prove her valor.

When she got out of the water, Eeva had come to where he was, and he had wrapped her in a towel, in his arms. That's how they laid claim to their intimacy, without words. It was justified by her swim in too cold water.

Elsa stepped calmly into the water, bent over to swim, two strokes, three. Then she stood up and came back to the beach.

“Done already?” he asked, and held out a towel spread open.

Elsa pressed into his arms with a smile.

“Lovely.”

“If you die here, I'll never forgive myself,” he heard himself say.

Elsa shivered, putting her clothes on slowly. He helped her. He insisted she put on an extra sweater under her coat.

“Now let's have a little tea,” she said.

They walked up the hill. Elsa struggled up the slope on her own strength. They walked slowly past the fenced-off nude beach, looked at the bay opening out to their right. The water was divided by the familiar dock that extended from the foot of the stone stairs, benches at its tip for admiring the sunset.

“That way,” Elsa said.

They laid the blanket on a bench, poured some tea from the thermos into their mugs. Elsa opened a package of Ballerina cookies and ate one with relish.

“Are you cold?”

“A little.”

He took off his coat and wrapped it around her. She let her gaze drift to the horizon.

“I've been thinking we could drive out to Tammilehto,” Martti said. “Do you think you'd be up to it? The sauna floor needs to be replaced anyway—Eero and Matias could help us with it. You could keep your eye on it, act as supervisor.”

“Supervisor, eh? I can hardly turn that down, provided the pay is commensurate with my qualifications.”

“What pay are you asking?”

“How about two cookies? Any less than that and my professional pride would be offended.”

“How about three? What if I offered you three?”

“For three cookies I'd tear up the whole floor and dance the polka on it.”

“You're hired.”

Elsa put her hand on his thigh and looked at the clouds for a moment.

“I don't want to die.”

She said it so suddenly that he was shaken.

“Are you afraid?”

“No. I'm not afraid. But I don't want to do it. I'm not ready yet.”

Elsa closed her eyes. An image of her from the
1970
s, when they'd spent a month in Dubrovnik, came into his mind. Elsa in a lounge chair, in a yellow bikini on the shore of the Adriatic, languid and mellow as she was now.

“Anna found the dress,” Elsa said, her eyes still closed.

“What dress?”

“Eeva's dress.”

“She did?” he managed to say. “Why do we have it? Why wasn't it given away?”

“It's been in the closet all these years.”

“And?”

Elsa was quiet for a moment. She clicked her tongue. “I told her,” she said.

“Why?”

“I want to tell about my life. I've started to think I should. If I don't tell it, it won't be told.”

Would Anna tell her mother? Would they discuss it? Did Eleonoora already know anyway? It was certain that Eleonoora knew something, remembered some of it, or maybe all of it. They'd just never talked about it.

“Shouldn't you have talked with Eleonoora about it first?”

“Maybe,” Elsa answered.

She looked at him, slightly at a loss. He could see she was afraid, maybe regretful.

“Maybe we should have told her from the beginning,” she said. “We should have talked about it somehow.”

“You thought differently back then.”

“Back then I had seen so many suffering children, children who knew too much about the affairs of adults. I thought that a child had a right to live in a child's world, in play and fantasy.”

“She's happy. Isn't she? Maybe she became a happy person.”

“Maybe,” Elsa said. “I do intend to bring it up. I'll tell her when the time is right. I'll wait for the right moment.”

He didn't say it but he thought, the right moment will never come.

They sat there for a good while longer. They were waiting for the sky to turn orange, then rose, before it was finally blue. On the way back Elsa got tired and asked him to go get the car.

9

A
NNA DOESN'T FEEL
like standing in the bookstore in the murmuring afternoon. Two more hours. She and her mother have planned to meet at the door to Stockmann's deli. What luck to get to do the shopping for a trip to the countryside, walk down the fruit aisles and the greens counter, pick up some cheese or marshmallows or zucchini, expensive cloudberry yogurt or anything that comes to mind!

She's looking forward to the trip to Tammilehto, although she fears it may be difficult. You never know whether there's going to be laughter and banter or a strained atmosphere that could turn into an argument at any moment. Sometimes they just kid around, make food, giggle like sisters. At those times her mother is playful and as wild as a fifteen-year-old. Sometimes Anna can tell as soon as she sees her mother that it's one of those other times, when she lets drop complicated, sarcastic sentences or tries to dig up information about her with questions cloaked in empathy.

The bookstore is quiet, the air dry. Anna can hear the finicky sounds of the espresso machine from the cafe upstairs. Light collects in the skylights, books doze on the shelves. She gathers the books left on the counter into a basket.

Taking them back to their own sections is the single pleasure of her workday. She gets to go to the foreign paperback section, then up the escalator to the second floor—politics and economics—and maybe even to the third floor—art and travel books.

Anna invites a familiar thought that she often savors. How many beginnings of love are in the books sold here?

Almost every novel has a love story, a description of love beginning. And there's something the same about all of these stories—so much the same that their particular details are almost superfluous. But still, each one has its own secrets.

When you let go of yourself and are filled with joy and dread at the same time. When you understand that there's no turning back, that everything has fundamentally changed. When you realize that you're not at the place you thought you were at, you're already on your way toward the other person.

Anna walks to the escalator with the basket on her arm and goes up to the second floor.

Grandma and Grandpa met at a university party. Grandpa couldn't take his eyes off Grandma, who was just a dimpled, round-faced college girl majoring in psychology. Anna can easily imagine Grandpa. The kind of young man who's more likely to be called pretty than handsome. Elsa fell in love with his hot temper when provoked, his big plans for how he would make his living.

Anna's parents were sixteen years old when their love began, working on a group physics project that neither of them wanted to do. A Wednesday evening in his room, in the friendly shade of bold-patterned Marimekko curtains and a clumsy floor lamp.

The physics project was about gravity. Mom had argued with everything he said, although she had noticed his smile. Dad claimed he could eat an orange while standing on his head. No, you can't, she said. There's no way. Just watch me, he said.

And he swung into a headstand on the bed, leaned his legs against the wall, and took one bite after another from an orange. Mom's love started right at that moment, as he stood on his head with his skinny legs up against a Led Zeppelin poster, calm and focused, and ate the whole orange. He lowered himself and said with a smile, “Now you see that there are other forces besides gravity.”

“Like what?” she said. “What kinds of forces do you mean?”

“Like trust, for instance,” he said.

“What should I trust?” said Mom, who wasn't yet a mom but just a girl named Ella.

“How about what I tell you, for starters,” the orange boy said with a smile.

Anna is envious of these stories. She'd like to have similar stories of her own.

She remembers Marc, last fall. She went to Paris four months after the breakup. A stupid idea, actually. She bought a cheap ticket. Alone in Paris! At home, the idea had seemed romantic and crazy, a symbol of freedom: her love had ended, she would shake off Helsinki and experience life as a different woman, by traveling alone in the city of love. When she got there she felt like an orphan. She wandered around, met a boy in a museum—Marc. They went to a cafe and shared a bottle of wine and their childhood fears. Marc kissed her on the banks of the Seine and suddenly asked, without any fuss, if she would move to Paris. He decided that they would fall in love and live happily ever after. But I don't even know you, Anna said. Just throw yourself into it, Marc answered.

And so she did: she threw herself into it in his apartment in the Marais. And it was over as quickly as it began. In the morning she gathered her things and slipped out without waking him. She never found out whether his promised love could have grown into something real or whether it was just a door to a brief and somewhat vague pleasure under a portrait of Che Guevara (how tasteless to hang a murderer's portrait on the wall!) in Marc's cozy but messy apartment. Maybe Marc was an impostor. Or maybe he was her great love story, and she passed it by. She'll never know.