The Winter War

by Philip Teir

  Above all, Råddon meant Kristinestad and Grandma – her clothes, her thick calves and her wooden clogs. Helen wanted Lukas and Amanda to have a relationship to all of these things. She didn’t want to lose the part of herself that was rooted in Österbotten.

  ‘But Råddon belongs to us. I want Lukas and Amanda to be able to go there.’

  ‘But you never spend more than a week out there, tops. Last year you were only there for a few days.’

  ‘I know, but that’s only because there’s not enough room for all of us. But later on, when you stop going there so often, we’ll have more space.’

  Now Max jumped into the conversation.

  ‘We’re not selling Råddon. At least not now. Not this year or the next. There are a few things that your mother and I need to talk about, but we’re not selling the cottage.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but that means the rest of you will have to buy me out. You and your sister. Or your father. However you decide to do it.’

  Helen thought Katriina sounded so businesslike.

  ‘Have you talked to Eva about this?’

  ‘We’ll talk about it after Eva comes back home.’

  Helen had always felt inferior to her mother. One of her earliest memories was of Katriina coming home one day from the hairdresser with her long hair cut short. It was like seeing a complete stranger walk in. She was wearing a knitted yellow jumper, and when she got home she kept looking at herself in the mirror and touching her hair at the nape of her neck, as if to remind herself how short it was. Helen was sitting with Eva at the kitchen table, and she must have been old enough to go to school, because she had homework spread out in front of her. But as she sat there with her sister, Helen looked with surprise at this woman who had come into their flat and claimed to know them. Not only that, she was supposedly their mother! Helen had glanced at Eva, who looked just as astonished as she was.

  It was close to three in the afternoon by the time they reached Kristinestad. A light snow was falling, or maybe it was just gusts of wind sending snowflakes against the car windows. They headed for the hospital where Ebba had been admitted and given a bed in Intensive Care. No one spoke. A melancholy mood had settled over all of them, as if they were approaching a church. Helen thought about the fact that every family experienced similar scenes that had to be endured, other hospitals with ill relatives, other small towns where a grandmother had suffered a stroke.

  Elisabeth was already there when they arrived. She hugged Helen, and then they all sat down in Ebba’s room. The whole place smelled of medicine and seemed swathed in a strained, greyish-white air. There was nothing for them to do, nothing to talk about except the formal diagnosis of Ebba’s medical condition, which was unchanged. Apparently the effects of the stroke had now lasted so long that the prognosis was very poor. Moving her to the central hospital in Vaasa would not be beneficial. At least not at the moment.

  Ebba lay in bed with her eyes open, but she was unable to speak. Helen went over and took her grandmother’s hand, which felt dry and lifeless. It was impossible to know whether she recognised Helen. Katriina stood at the end of the bed with her arms crossed. When she started to cry, Max went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder.

  An hour later, Helen and Elisabeth were sitting at a table in the small cafeteria. Max and Katriina were still with Ebba.

  It was dark outside now, pitch dark, and the hospital was very quiet. The walls in the long, deserted corridors were covered with large photographs of a winter landscape. The small windows were located high up near the ceiling and gave no hint of the world outside. A Christmas tree stood in one corner, adding a patch of light to the hallway.

  ‘You can come over to my place to spend the night,’ said Elisabeth. ‘I’ve made up a bed in the living room.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Helen. Neither of them spoke for a moment as they drank their coffee.

  ‘I wish I’d come to visit her more often. When we were kids we saw Grandma and Grandpa every summer.’

  ‘She often talks about you and Eva. She likes to keep up with what you’re both doing. She knows a lot more than you’d think.’

  ‘Mum and Dad are having a row. I don’t know why they have to carry on like that. Especially today. And Dad refuses to say anything. I have no idea what he’s thinking. He must be really upset, since it’s his mother, after all.’

  Elisabeth looked at her. ‘Your father has never been the sort to react emotionally. Who knows what he thinks? Like why did he bring that woman with him yesterday? He didn’t even introduce me. Not that it’s any of my business.’

  Helen stared at Elisabeth. ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought maybe she was a younger colleague or something. Suddenly he just turned up here with her. And then she left.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘I don’t know. Dark hair. About your age.’

  Helen didn’t say a word. A young woman. With dark hair. She refused to think about it. She didn’t want the image of her father with a young woman to make it impossible for her to focus on her dying grandmother.

  Max and Katriina came into the cafeteria.

  ‘Shall we go?’ asked Elisabeth.

  ‘Sure. It’s getting late,’ Katriina replied.

  ‘I’m staying here tonight,’ said Max.

  Elisabeth looked at him. Helen didn’t say anything, but she picked up her coat from the chair and started walking towards the door.

  The drive from Kristinestad to Närpes took a while. Helen sat in the back seat of Elisabeth’s car. Katriina sat up front. No one spoke, and Helen thought to herself: I might never say another word. Not now, and not when we get back to Helsinki.

  thirty-one

  SARAH ARRIVED AT EVA’S FLAT half an hour later. She didn’t say much, except to ask where Malik was. Then she went to find him in the bathroom, where he was sitting naked in the shower while Russ sprayed him with water. Eva had removed the bed linen, put it in a rubbish sack, and tossed the whole thing into the bin in the back courtyard. The mattress was also damp, so she rolled it up, tied a rope around it and pushed it down the stairs. That, too, ended up in the bin. By then she was sweaty and tired and hardly able to think any more. They had aired out the room, and most of the smell seemed to be gone.

  ‘Are the two of you students of his?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Yes,’ said Russ, who looked completely exhausted. ‘He phoned and I let him in. Then he collapsed on Eva’s bed.’

  ‘He hasn’t been like this in a long time. I didn’t know things were so bad. He’s on medication, you know. We’ve been going through a rough patch lately. Thanks for phoning me,’ she said.

  Eva watched as Sarah took over, getting Malik dressed in the clean clothes that she’d brought along at Eva’s request. It was like watching a mother caring for her son. Like getting a glimpse of an entirely different family, a marriage that Eva now realised she knew nothing about. Malik didn’t say a word; he still seemed mentally absent, as if he were sleepwalking. And he was shaking, maybe from the cold, maybe from something else.

  After Sarah had helped her husband put on his shoes, she sank down on a stool out in the hall.

  ‘Thanks again. I’m sorry you had to see him like this,’ she said.

  Eva wanted to say something. In some way she felt guilty about the whole situation – because she’d slept with Malik, because she hadn’t taken responsibility for what she was doing, even though she was a grown woman. She looked at Sarah and felt like a spoiled teenager in comparison. She’d never had to take care of anyone, never needed to think about anyone but herself. Malik was on his feet now, but clinging to the doorway, still looking as if he might collapse at any moment.

  Sarah looked up at Eva. ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘No. About what?’

  ‘About us.’

  Eva couldn’t look Sarah in the eye. ‘No, he just talked about how he could have been one of the three greatest artists …’

  ‘
Oh, that old subject. He’s always saying things like that. It’s the biggest trauma of his life. The fact that the world doesn’t understand him. Malik was a very talented artist. When we first got together he was the nicest guy you could ever imagine, so polite, so interested in everything. But his home situation was totally fucked up. His whole family is nuts. If I don’t look out for him, this is what happens. Or worse.’

  Eva was thinking of asking Sarah why she put up with it, why she didn’t just leave him. But she felt naive and stupid, like a simple-minded yokel who didn’t understand a thing about the real world, who had never been forced to confront anything ugly or difficult. She thought about the phone call from her mother and about her dying grandmother, and suddenly she felt such a longing for Finland – for some sort of pure, childish state that wouldn’t require her to deal with these issues, where the mere act of getting up each morning and going over to the nearby convenience shop would provide all the excitement she needed.

  Russ was still there when Sarah and Malik left.

  ‘Thanks for all your help,’ Eva told him.

  ‘It was nothing. Actually, I don’t mean that. I’m completely worn out.’

  ‘Do you want to stay here tonight?’

  ‘Where would I sleep? You don’t even have a mattress. Remember? You tossed it into the rubbish bin.’

  ‘Oh, right. I forgot about that.’

  Eva realised that her only blanket was in the washing machine, and the only place to sleep was on the hard plywood platform of her bed. Natalia’s room was locked.

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Russ. ‘Have you got any warm clothes?’

  The next day, as Eva took the bus to Gatwick Airport, she realised what she wanted to create for the class exhibition at Sarah’s gallery. She took her notebook out of her bag and began sketching the piece that had appeared in her mind. It suddenly seemed only natural that she would bring Finland to London. She would get branches from Kristinestad and snow from Helsinki and collect litter from Sibelius Park. She would construct an installation big enough to go inside, enveloping a person on all sides, a place where someone would feel safe, though it resembled the tents outside St Paul’s. The sign would say: ‘This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven’. And it would be her paradise. Visitors who went inside her artwork would get a sense of her childhood. In the very back she would display things from her old room, including the cast of her teeth made when she was a kid, that ugly plaster sculpture. Because this was how she was feeling at the moment: she wanted to crawl inside there and never come out. It occurred to her that the installation would work only if she built it with sufficiently sophisticated techniques and really thought through the aesthetic impact. Obviously it had to remind people of the Occupy movement, because what was that whole thing really about other than a protest against an evil world? A dream of a purer social order, a safe place? She also wanted to reclaim the prerogative to interpret the world, the child’s sense that she is God, that she has the right to name things.

  Eva and Russ had slept in his tent that night, huddled close together inside his sleeping bag. The cathedral bells had woken her up several times, but each time she had turned over and looked at him, feeling the nearness of his body in the dark, and felt strangely safe, even though she could hear all the sounds of London, the collective sounds of a sleeping metropolis, of the late-night carousers and the traffic outside, of the wind and the trees and the ground beneath her.

  Only now, as she sat in the plane, did she sink into a deep sleep. When the plane landed she caught a bus and rode home, to Helsinki, and opened the door to an empty flat. Helen, Katriina and Max were in Kristinestad, but it was too late for Eva to go out there now. Instead, she found a box in her parents’ wardrobe and began filling it with things from her room. Night fell outside, and soon the whole flat was in darkness. She decided not to turn on any lights, but instead lit a few candles in her room. She wanted to hold on to the feeling as she sat on the floor, arranged the objects she’d chosen and began making sketches. Several cassette tapes, the plaster teeth, papers she’d written in middle school – and now she was glad that her mother had saved everything – and a threadbare flannel shirt that she’d had as a teenager and had never wanted to throw away, since she’d worn it nearly every day in secondary school.

  As she sat there in the dark, the only sound was the rustling of the hamsters running in the wheel that spun round and round. She looked at them, wondering what drove them to do that, whether it was a need to flee from some imagined danger, or simply an innate desire to remain in constant motion.

  Eva felt like going out. She thought about the friends she’d once had in Helsinki, but she hadn’t kept in contact with any of them. She put on her jacket, then went down the stairs and left the building. She headed towards Mannerheimvägen and Hesperia Park. It was snowing. The waters of Töölö Bay swallowed the snowflakes as if in a single, deep inhalation. Eva walked along the road past the Finlandia House, on her way downtown. She took out her mobile to record the sound of the trams driving past. That was something she could use. She kept walking – past Kiasma and the post office and Sokos – with a feeling that she was carrying out a secret mission. No one looked at her, no one had any idea what she was doing. She headed along Mannerheimvägen, past the student building and the Swedish Theatre and up towards Skillnaden Square, past Stora Robertsgatan and the Design Museum and Johanneskyrkan and the hill on Högbergsgatan.

  When she came to Maxill’s, she decided to go in. This was where her family had eaten Sunday dinners when she was a child, and she wanted to capture some of the sounds, the buzz of conversation in Helsinki. She brushed the snow off her clothes and stomped her feet. The restaurant was packed this evening, with people talking and laughing, but she looked at them as if she were watching extras in a film. She went over to the bar and ordered wine. Then she hung her jacket on a hook and picked up the wine glass with frozen hands. For the first time in ages she felt as if she had some purpose, something that she could build on.

  thirty-two

  EVA STAYED IN HELSINKI FOR a week. Katriina had already started talking about making funeral arrangements – she suggested a memorial service with the immediate family in Kristinestad, followed by coffee and smörgåstårta, a savoury cake. Elisabeth would help out. But suddenly, after a week, Ebba showed signs of improvement. The doctors decided to keep her in hospital since she was much too weak to be sent back to the nursing home. Ebba had regained feeling in her body and face, so it was now possible to communicate with her. But she seemed confused about the whole situation and kept asking when she could go home.

  Max had been staying at Råddon and went into Kristinestad every day, but now he was coming back to Helsinki to fetch some more clothes and spend a few days at work.

  Eva had never seen her father cry, and he seemed to be handling everything by talking sensibly about practical matters, about medications and hospital bills, as if he could relate to what was happening only by dealing with concrete tasks.

  Helen seemed to be in some sort of emotional state that Eva found a bit disturbing. She talked about memories of their grandmother, about what a warm relationship she’d had with Ebba. Eva didn’t comment, but she thought Helen was exaggerating and for some reason trying to claim that she’d had a stronger connection to Kristinestad than her sister. She talked about their grandmother as if she were already dead. Eva loved Ebba too, but she didn’t write down improvised speeches intended for future memorial services; she didn’t speak with enthusiasm about what an amazing person her grandmother had been. She didn’t sit in the kitchen with Max’s photo album from his childhood and talk about doing genealogical research. She didn’t pretend that her grandmother was suddenly the most important person in her life.

  Eva spent the whole week working on her art piece, collecting material and trying to visualise how the whole thing was going to come together from a purely technical point of view. One day when she was in town she su
ddenly caught sight of Laura Lampela, the journalist who had interviewed Max. She was standing at the tram stop outside of Glaspalatset.

  ‘Laura?’

  She was looking at her mobile and didn’t react.

  ‘Laura?’

  At first she looked puzzled, as if she didn’t recognise Eva, or as if she’d forgotten how to respond to a greeting.

  ‘Eva? What are you doing here? I thought you were in London.’

  ‘My grandmother has been ill, so I came home to see her.’

  ‘Oh, right. I heard about that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Eva.

  For a moment neither of them spoke. Eva wanted to say something. She was happy to see someone she knew. It felt like this might be the right time to reconnect with Helsinki.

  When the tram arrived, it turned out they were both heading in the same direction, even though Eva was only going two stops.

  ‘I don’t know how much your father has told you,’ said Laura. ‘But I’ve read his book. While you’ve been away in London. I was supposed to help him with the manuscript, but I don’t know if that plan is going to work out. This whole situation with your grandmother … So how is Max?’ said Laura.

  Eva had not been allowed to read her father’s manuscript. He never talked about his writing at home. It had always been a secret part of his work that he didn’t share with the family. She’d read his other books, but only after they were published – and that was when anyone could read them, when they were available to people like Laura and no longer had any special aura about them.