True (30 page)

“Eeva died in August of
1968
.”

Katariina throws the sentence across the kitchen; it hits Anna like a dagger.

“I know that.”

Anna feels like a reporter for a gossip magazine.

“There's really nothing else to tell,” Katariina says.

The words would be harsh if Anna didn't notice the slight trembling on the left side of Katariina's mouth. She sighs. She looks just like Jane Birkin again. Or Meryl Streep? Or Catherine Deneuve? There are so many women who refuse to be at the mercy of careless characterizations.

“I've got a busy workday today. Maybe I'm a little tired,” she says.

Anna is relieved at the harmless conversation, which gives her an opening. “What do you do for a living?”

Katariina smiles a little. “I work as an agent. In the theater. That sort of thing. Ours is the only theatrical agency in Finland. It's a fun job. I get to travel, maybe even have some influence—at the grass roots, anyway. It's my own company. I never would have thought that I'd become a businesswoman, but I did, a real tycoon!”

She laughs. Then she looks out the window and sighs. For a moment Anna thinks that she's going to burst into tears. She doesn't look at Anna as she says, “You would think that I'd have a lot to tell you. Maybe Liisa thought that I would know things that I haven't told her. But what does it matter how it happened? The only thing that matters is that she didn't survive. That's all.”

She opens the window and takes a pack of cigarettes out of a small vase on the windowsill. Not Gauloises but Marlboro Lights. She lights one and blows out the smoke.

For just a moment Anna can see Kerttu the conqueror in her. She may be wearing Dior powder on her nose, but you can be sure she has Kerttu's freckles tattooed into her skin, the ones she got years ago in San Francisco.

“Look, a squirrel,” she says suddenly. “He came! I always wait for him. I've even given him a name. Teppo. At first I thought I'd call him Jorma. We have an agreement. I tell him my troubles in exchange for cardamom rolls.”

She gets up and looks for a piece of roll in the cupboard, then holds it out through the window for the squirrel. She looks away, turns serious.

“We were traveling together right before Eeva died,” she says. “Something about that trip did her in. All sorts of things happened.”

She continues to feed the squirrel.

“It was really stupid, actually. We were just wandering. We just went wherever. She was happy. Happier than she'd been all year.”

She takes a drag and blows out the smoke. For the first time, Anna feels like she's without a story. She doesn't try to imagine this woman's regrets, or her wisdom. She was wrong when she thought Katariina Aavamaa was tense and meticulous. Maybe she was wrong about everything else, too. Katariina is one of those people who tell their own stories.

Katariina's gaze sharpens as if she remembers something she'd forgotten.

“Your mother. How is she these days?”

“She's a doctor.”

Then Anna thinks that she could just as well have said, she's happy.

“I used to see her now and then. When she was three or four, maybe five. A little button-nosed thing. A doctor. Imagine.”

THE PHOTOS ARE
mostly of Katariina. Eeva is in a few of them.

“We certainly were childish. It was all about pleasure. Such long parties! We called it a revolution because it suited us. Later on I thought that it was the kind of revolution that's best achieved in a place where the world doesn't get in the way. On a stage, or in a movie.”

She laughs.

“But I should be forgiving with myself. If it weren't for idealism everything would stay just the same. Change only happens if someone sees it in a dream first. But I still believe, even now, that true revolutions last a lifetime—they're always quiet, and they happen when no one's looking.”

Anna doesn't know what to say. What does she know about revolution? Only what she's read in books and seen on television. On television there's always a revolution going on somewhere, as sure as the latest episode of
Sex in the City
.

Anna suddenly remembers a woman she sat next to on the plane on her way to Paris last fall. “I met an American woman on an airplane once who said that there was a revolution going on in the little Romanian town she was living in.”

“Why was an American living in Romania?”

“She was a widow and she decided to travel because she'd always stayed in Alabama to please her husband when he was alive.”

“So when he died she left?”

“She went to Bosnia as a U.N. election monitor, and kept traveling.”

“What was the name of the place, the town in Romania?”

“I can't remember.”

Katariina laughs. “There are revolutions happening all the time in cities with names no one can remember.”

For a second Anna can see the woman who painted her eyelashes black and said, Let's go create a world.

In the next few pictures Eeva is in Stockholm. Then a change of channels, to Amsterdam. Eeva sitting at a table in a cafe next to a man—a boy, really.

“Who's he?” Anna asks.

“Eeva knew him from somewhere. She thought she was in love with him for a little while. He came to meet us in Stockholm.”

In the next pictures Eeva's sitting at a table in a cafe in the countryside, maybe somewhere in France. She looks thin and exhausted, but she's still smiling.

“I didn't know how to help her,” Katariina says.

“Maybe you did everything you could.”

Some of the photos are from later years, the seventies. Katariina laughing on the Ku'Damm in Berlin, wading in the sea, looking through a camera, unapologetic. Katariina in a blue shirt among the May Day crowds in Helsinki. And a few years later, judging by the hairstyle, Katariina with a baby.

She looks different in every picture.

She doesn't seem like a family-oriented person, but who's to say, sometimes people like that have the happiest family lives.

When Anna is at the door, leaving, she gets the courage to ask about her husband.

“The same man for thirty years, can you imagine?” Katariina says in the voice long-married people use to talk about their marriages—as if they themselves are surprised that something done on a whim could succeed so well, that they could love the other person for decades.

“He's a banker. I would have laughed myself silly when I was twenty to hear that I would marry the enemy! Or slapped myself silly. What about your grandparents? I've read about them in the paper now and then. They've both had prominent careers. If that's worth anything in this world.”

“They've been happy.”

She doesn't want to tell her about her grandmother. For some reason it's important to her not to say a word about Elsa's illness.

“I believe it,” Katariina says. Then she seems to think of something. “Timisoara.”

“What?”

“The town in Romania. Your woman on the airplane must have lived there.”

“The
1989
revolution. Of course. That's what she meant. All this time I've been thinking she was talking about the situation in her own life. Too bad. It sort of spoils my story.”

Katariina smiles. “Maybe not. What do we know about her? Maybe she wanted to keep the possibility of change alive by living there. I watched the ruckus that was going on there at the time. The television started the revolution in a way; people saw foreign television shows and became aware of the illusion. I wasn't against the destruction of that regime—it was tyrannical. But there was a brief time when I believed in the idea behind it. And when it all started to fall apart I thought it was really too ironic that it all happened because of television. Maybe you should stick to your story. It's a beautiful one. It says something beautiful about you.”

The story. Anna wants to stick to her story. That's why she doesn't ask what happened to Eeva, how Eeva finally died.

EEVA BELIEVED THAT
everything could change. After he walked out the door, she still got to say good-bye to the little girl. She lied to her, told her she would see her tomorrow. She said it even though she knew that it would never happen. She couldn't bring herself to tell the truth. The lie left a hollow in her heart for a year.

But she still wanted to see the world, and she did see it. Then something happened—what was it?—that dashed her to her destruction. It may have been insignificant, a minor event, the kind of thing that can happen on any trip.

Anna thinks about Ella. She even dares to think about Linda.
See you tomorrow.

Then she looks at her cell phone—accidentally, reflexively— and sees that she has a message.

A premonition.

22

I
T ALL STARTED
with a harmless phone call.

Eleonoora hung up her coat, closed her locker door, and slipped out of her loose pants and open-necked shirt. She thought she might just
be
for a moment, go for a walk on the beach, look at the seagulls floating in the air as if they were hung there. Then the phone rang.

Her first thought was: Mom.

It was an unknown number. She answered more testily than she meant to. It was Rautalampi from the art supply store calling about a painting Anna had brought in to be framed. Eleonoora let her worry drop away.

“The Ahlqvist that one of you brought in,” Rautalampi began.

For some reason he always referred to both Dad and Dad's paintings this way—Ahlqvist. She wasn't always sure if he was talking about the man or the art. Maybe that was intentional.

“It wasn't me,” Eleonoora said. “It was my daughter Anna, remember? She wanted to have it framed for herself. I don't have anything to do with it. Is it ready?”

“Well, actually . . .”

“Yes?”

“It's the strangest thing, I'm telling you . . .”

“Did you call Anna? The picture's for her, so I'm sure she'd like to decide about the frame and everything.”

“Right,” he said. “I hear you. I tried to call her, but I couldn't get hold of her. I thought about calling your father.”

“This has nothing to do with him. I don't think he's particularly interested in the picture. He said we could dispose of all the paintings at Tammilehto.”

“This one's a bit complicated.”

Now she was getting annoyed. When she was stressed she unconsciously took a certain attitude toward people in certain professions—bank tellers, grocery clerks, boys who worked at gas stations and couldn't find blades to fit her windshield wipers. She always got control of her prickliness too late, after she'd already blown up at them. Every time it happened she would remember when she was little and she threw a tantrum because she wasn't allowed to eat a chocolate bar that Rautalampi had given her before dinner. She wondered if Rautalampi saw this as the same childish temper, which annoyed her all the more.

“Well,” she demanded. “Can you tell me what this is about? I'm in a hurry.”

Not one to be moved by an angry or accusing tone, Rautalampi said firmly, “I think you'd better come see for yourself.”

SHE DROVE DOWN
the ramp from the hospital and turned left onto the shore road.

Her annoyance was directed at her father, although it was only his painting that had interrupted her day. Sometimes in her younger years she'd been infuriated at him for the very same thing. Who do you think you are? Can't you see that everything here revolves around you? You think you're so big, so all-important, so revered. In reality you're just a joke. You just use your art as an excuse to keep to yourself.

Her father had taken these outbursts surprisingly calmly—It's good that you don't idealize your parents, I guess.

When she opened the door of the art supply store, Rautalampi looked at her over his glasses.

“So.”

“So,” she replied tersely.

“I was taking the canvas off its stretcher bars,” he said.

“I hope you haven't damaged it?”

He gave her a scathing look, a look that said,
I do not damage paintings. What do you think I am, a clumsy child?

“Just come and look at it.”

The frame shop was in the back of the store. Familiar smells of glue and wooden lath filled the room as they always had, as if there were no time.

Rautalampi moved the easel. The painting Eleonoora saw wasn't the one with the oranges.

Rautalampi, who had always eschewed drama of any kind, with his whole being, kept talking, like a grocer discussing an overshipment of coffee.

“There was a little buckle in the canvas. It happens sometimes. I took the top canvas off as well as I could. It's there on the table. It can be restretched, of course. But you'll need to decide what you want to do with this other one. It's been under here for years, so it's amazingly unscathed. That's why I wanted you to come see it. It's actually an unusual work for Ahlqvist. I don't know if he had any reason for wanting to cover it up. Maybe it was some kind of experiment. He clearly had a model. You can see it in the peculiar stylistic fumbling. It's almost like a caricature. It's undoubtedly an adaptation, but I don't know from what. He seems to be unable to choose a technique—he's combined several here, not with any great success, if you don't mind my saying so. Now you have to decide what to do with it. Shall I call your father or should we leave the painting here? You can't really call it a completed work, it's too unfinished. But it's not my place to determine the worth of the pieces that come in.”