True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  When she was about to laugh she first looked startled for a moment. A hundredth of a second later you could see horror in her face. Then the laughter would come bursting out.

  Anna has this picture in her mind, and the beginning of a story on her lips: a man, a child, the child’s astonishingly white neck, her trust.

  The man had been one of the most admired of his day. Not at the forefront of change, not a provocateur, but certainly the most promising and indisputably the most handsome. A charmer, one of those men you sit down with in a restaurant and you don’t get up for the rest of the evening, the kind of man you want to ask for directions to reality, to have him look across the table and tell you what it’s really all about. Everyone wanted a piece of him. His attention was accepted like a gift. When he looked at you, it felt like you had never really had a shape until that moment.

  Artists are like that—they have the power to see, they carry all the weightiest, best-shaped ideas, they make things real that would otherwise remain lurking at the threshold, at the bus stop, around the corner, in parentheses.

  Anna still needs Eeva’s voice.

  The tree holds its blossoms above them as if it invented itself only yesterday. This has happened before, the exact same thing, but it has never been so fresh and so complete as now.

  Eeva had days like these. Even this restlessness, this impatience to be somewhere else, someplace where life offered itself fully.

  And there was more: Eeva had love, just like Anna. To give her all and get the whole world, that’s what she believed in. That’s what she was doing with the little girl, just as much as with the man.

  Anna didn’t intend to tell Saara about Eeva, but Eeva’s here now, demanding that the story be told.

  Anna’s voice is a little different—softer, fuller—as she begins.

  1964

  THIS IS HOW it all begins.

  Here I am. I’m standing at the door, about to ring the doorbell.

  When it all begins, the new slogans haven’t been invented yet, but the pill has already made its first appearance. People are already asking what’s really happening, but skirt lengths are still of a sober length and cows still low in their barns.

  When it all begins, I’m twenty-two years old. I’m halfway through my studies in spite of late nights in restaurants and occasionally tough bouts of homesickness for Kuhmo, where my mother and father keep ten cows and six bulls, in a farmyard painted with red clay. Where I come from milk is drunk warm from the milking, poured into glasses straight from the pail. It leaves a thick coating in your mouth.

  When it all begins, I’m living between two worlds. I have Helsinki, glasses of wine bought with the last of my money, smiles that I toss across the room without thinking of the consequences, boys that I kiss in arched entryways, defying my mother’s horror. I have cheap shoes and share an apartment with Kerttu on Liisankatu.

  And I have Kuhmo, the meadow and the lake and the path through the woods that remembers me. I have a longing for home, nights when I lay awake in bed with the ceiling light on and cry from missing it, dream of the meadow, of swimming across the lake at night, bread cheese, starched sheets, and being nine years old, spending dreamy days at my desk at school.

  But in 1964, the real one of the two is Helsinki. This is where I live, go to classes, walk down the street, meet people, most of them people Kerttu knows because she knows all the young people in this city, all of the ones that have ever had any opinions.

  I have a tedious job at the hat counter in a department store and many different plans, not one of which has come true. Not that there’s any hurry. In those years I’m still walking around in a dream that can drain away with waiting if you’re not careful, those days when you feel that you have eternity before you.

  All through the fall and winter I’ve listened to Vieno at the hat counter giving me orders, wanting to make a lady of me. Vieno uses words like waistline and bodice, discretion, chastity. I don’t want a waistline or any of those other old words. I want to make up myself myself.

  That’s why I’m standing here at the door. It’s May, the trees are still a thicket of bare limbs, although the weather’s warmed already. I’ve just walked two blocks. There are beads of sweat on my neck from walking. I’m nervous. The flier I saw in the university lobby was simple: Family seeks affectionate nanny who knows how to cook. Interested parties may contact us evenings.

  I ring the bell at exactly six o’clock because I believe the advertisement is meant for me. I certainly am affectionate. I often feel affection so abundant that it seems to flow from the tips of my fingers like nectar. My cooking skills are respectable. I know how to make bread cheese and how to fold potato-berry tarts, and my meat stew is thick and flavorful. I don’t need board—I have a good arrangement with Kerttu on Liisankatu. We live in two rooms and a kitchen left to Kerttu by a great aunt.

  I sleep in the second room, Kerttu stays in the living room, except for the weeks when her German boyfriend—or the other one, from Stockholm—is in town. Then it’s best that I sleep on the sofa.

  But now I’m standing at a door ringing the bell.

  I realize later that my life, a completely new life, begins at this moment. Maybe the end of it is in sight, too, there at the door. But this is the beginning, and beginnings don’t like to hear about endings.

  Elsa opens the door. Then I see the little girl and the man. There he is, standing in the doorway. The girl comes from behind him, walks to her mother with a rag doll in her arms and holds on to the hem of her mother’s skirt, looking at me.

  I don’t know what to think of her, other than that she’s new, fresh. This is the moment that will always continue, later on, when everything else is over.

  Me at the door, Elsa greeting me with a smile on her lips—because I haven’t yet done anything to wipe the smile away—and the little girl beside her.

  The only thing I notice about the man in that first moment is something comfortable in his eyes, a beauty which doesn’t make a big impression at first.

  We sit on the sofa. There’s something horselike about the man, maybe it’s his legs, maybe his hair. There’s also something familiar about him which I can’t put my finger on, something that keeps drawing my gaze back to him, his arms, his slightly wandering eye.

  Elsa smiles, and I think she’s pretty. The man shakes my hand, introduces himself.

  “And this is Ella,” Elsa says, putting the girl on her lap. The doll falls to the floor, the girl reaches her hand toward me, and I have no idea that reach will extend through all the years to come, reaching toward me, no matter where I go.

  “Hello, Ella,” I say.

  Elsa tells me about their previous nanny, Hilma, who had to quit due to illness.

  “That’s too bad.”

  The man laughs.

  “Hilma was a little too strict with Ella.”

  Elsa is a gracious person—she doesn’t want to talk ill of anyone. She lays her hand on his thigh. They have that kind of affection between them. She lays her hand patiently on his thigh when he speaks too hastily.

  He gets worked up easily—I learn that later. I learn to love the quick temper that in boyhood got him into man-sized trouble on the soccer fields and stone courtyards of his neighborhood. Elsa loves it, too. She loves it in exactly the same way that I do.

  “Now,” she says placatingly, her hand still resting on the man’s thigh. “My husband,” she says to me, “had certain differences of opinion with Hilma. Hilma was old-fashioned. I can tell you that our child-rearing methods are more liberal.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask curiously.

  I’m accustomed to learning my lessons at the end of a switch. My father, who only survived the war by virtue of a Bible he kept in his breast pocket, thrashed my back with a birch switch whenever I forgot to say please or th
ank you. He’s dear to me, but strict.

  The man looks at his wife tenderly. “Elsa has principles. It’s part of her job, you might say.”

  “We want our servants to be like members of the family.”

  I tell them about my mother and about the family I lived with my first year as a student, taking care of their children. I tell them about my job at the department store hat counter. I don’t mention Vieno or that I’m applying for this job to get away from her. I tell them about Kerttu.

  I don’t tell them about our nights, our parties that sometimes last until morning. I don’t tell them about the evenings when we have people over to visit. Evenings when we open up bottles of cheap Hungarian beer and Bordeaux Blanc, which we call Porvoo Plank. We talk about everything, make plans, though we’re not sure about what. We read poetry. Often someone plays the guitar, and sometimes somebody will interrupt the song by opening all the bay windows and yelling something into the street, but a girl in the kitchen doesn’t mind the noise, she only hears the music and lets down her hair and dances in front of the old wood stove until hairpins fall on the floor like dazed grasshoppers.

  I don’t mention any of that, so the man and the woman won’t think I’m frivolous.

  They wouldn’t have minded. They, too, open wine bottles, and gather in the living room to talk. But I don’t know anything about that yet.

  “At home in Kuhmo I took care of the neighbors’ twins when I was only fifteen and everyone was out haying. And I made meat stew for the whole village.”

  Elsa nods. Suddenly I feel as if I’ve said something wrong.

  “You’ll hardly need to do any heavy catering around here. My husband comes and goes, and you’re free to go where you like in your free time.”

  I don’t let my doubt show. When did stew go out of style?

  I glance surreptitiously at the man. Do I know him from somewhere? I realize that I’ve seen him in the newspaper. With a little effort I remember strolling through an exhibition of his incomprehensible paintings, which were too modern for me. I like old things, clear lines and faces that stay where they belong without breaking into pieces.

  Elsa drinks the rest of her coffee. I’m already infatuated with her. It was Elsa who I fell in love with in the beginning.

  She has thick brown hair and eyebrows that look like little fuzzy caterpillars. Her smile is funny, like she’s constantly, tirelessly looking for someone to play with, like she might say, without thinking, to anyone she was talking to, come on, let’s go in the kitchen and get ourselves a big slice of Bundt cake and have a fairy coffee party.

  I immediately think she’s the kind of person you have just one more cup of coffee with, bake an enormous batch of rolls with on a rainy evening, or sit and cool down with on the porch of a lakeshore sauna. She would suggest one more swim, challenge you to a race across the bay. After swimming she would comb her hair in the candlelight, reflected in the cracked cabin mirror, and give you both French braids. But in those years Elsa has disguised herself in objectivity. She is making a career, standing on a dais in a lecture hall presenting her theories, writing reports and staying up late composing articles for international journals.

  In those years, Elsa isn’t extravagant. She’s more assertive, adult, impenetrable. She thinks that a woman has to hide certain things about herself to be believed. Later she’ll get her playfulness back. When she turns forty, she’ll dance on the table. At her fiftieth birthday party she’ll make a Freud and a Jung out of cardboard and sit them down at the dinner table. At her sixtieth, she’ll end the night lying on the floor giggling.

  But in those years she is businesslike. She’s a scholar above all, then a mother, then a wife. Deep inside, at some level in the negative numbers, she’s hiding a young woman who swims across lakes, a girl who at the age of fourteen celebrated winning a ski race by pouring blueberry soup on her head. I can see that woman in spite of her zealous attempts to conceal her, and I fall in love with her immediately.

  THERE’S ONE THING I don’t yet know as I sit here across from Elsa and her husband. As summer makes its entrance outside the window and my spoon clinks in my coffee cup, I don’t know that I’m becoming a person Elsa will hate. Or if not hate, then at least disdain.

  But now she’s about to decide that I am the person she’ll choose. She’s slightly hesitant, wants to discuss the matter with her husband, deliberates between me and the well-wrinkled former nanny of five they interviewed earlier. I’m less experienced but she likes me better, she can’t deny it. The wrinkly one made her think of a matron in an old movie with a rolling pin in her hand. She’d like to give me the job.

  To confirm her decision she puts the little girl on my lap.

  The girl looks bedazzled and curious and gawky, as anyone does when they’re first tossed fresh into the world.

  She’s warm, heavy, and slightly damp. She smells like milk.

  She stretches her hand out toward me and takes hold of my nose without a moment’s hesitation, looking at me in amazement. She shifts her gaze to the plate of cookies and bends over them, squirming a little so that the back seam of my dress starts to tighten. Cookie, she says. I could give her back to her mother—I’m hot and sweat is dripping down my sides. Soon she calms down in my lap. It feels as if she were about to fall asleep. She leans against me, breathing evenly.

  Her tummy is round and warm, rising and falling feverishly.

  “You seem to like her,” Elsa says.

  I nod. I’m afraid that my uncertainty shows. I exaggerated my child care experience a little. I want to get away from Vieno’s sarcastic remarks, want to be in these rooms, in this friendly, self-assured woman’s sphere of influence.

  Elsa tells me about her research group, her traveling. Here is Elsa, proud, permissive, and sure of herself, explaining her extraordinary plans as simply and modestly as other people talk about an evening bowl of oatmeal.

  I realize immediately that she is one of those people who will have it all, people compared to which others are wallowing in shiftlessness.

  Elsa asks her husband to help her in the kitchen for a minute. I know that a discussion of whether to hire me is going on in hushed voices.

  I don’t know that it’s the man who’s not sure. He later tells me about it when we’re lying silently side by side. He had an inkling of this and suggested the wrinkly one, but went along with Elsa’s wishes.

  I sit on the sofa with the little girl in my lap trying to hear a conversation about me. The little girl covers the sounds with chatter. I look around. A chest of drawers, books on a shelf. Careless housekeeping, modern furnishings. There’s a television in the corner. I don’t know if I know what to do with it.

  On the wall are paintings, some of which, I later learn, are painted by the man, others by friends. The little girl climbs off my lap to the floor and runs to her mother and father in the kitchen. She’s still shy of me.

  I go and look at a painting leaned upside down against the wall. Something sloshes inside me. It’s a Schjerfbeck. I’ve only seen them in museums.

  Elsa steps into the living room, straightens her back.

  “Why is this here in the corner?” I ask.

  Elsa flutters a hand in the air and laughs. She bends toward me and lowers her voice like she’s sharing a secret: “It’s old-fashioned. My husband wants to take all the old pictures off the walls. Do you like it?”

  The man is looking at me, smiling. I look away, then back again.

  Elsa says with eagerness in her voice, “We’d like to hire you. If the position interests you.”

  The little girl turns her head and looks at me, her eyebrows raised. I do the same, and she bursts into bright laughter.

  “I GOT A job,” I tell Kerttu that evening.

  She’s sitting at the table eating. Her expression of surprise changes in a moment to enthus
iasm.

  My Kerttu: dark, thick hair, eyes black as lumps of coal. Kerttu’s family is well-to-do. People still call her grandfather by his Swedish name, Brännare, although he changed it to Palovaara, believing that the country deserved people who said their names in their own language. Kerttu’s home is a place where fervent pronouncements are made with big words like religion and fatherland, but Kerttu hides a whole great world in her dreams, unknown countries like exotic jewels.

  I met her in the registration line for German class.

  Don’t you feel like we ought to cause some kind of scandal? she whispered to me, smiling. Take off our shirts, run across the lobby? I’ll give you one mark, all my coffee breaks at the university, and my heart, if you’ll do it with me.

  We didn’t take off our shirts, or even our socks, but we did spend all our coffee breaks together after that.

  We’ve lived together in these rooms for two years and I’ve acquired Kerttu’s habits and beliefs. She sleeps till noon one day and gets up at six the next. Sometimes she’ll live for a week on risotto. Sometimes she eats in restaurants on a gentleman’s tab, flashing her stocking seams on the way to the ladies’ room. Afterward she tells me derisive stories about these men. It’s all part of her secret plan, she says.

  In these first years, Kerttu changes her style from seamed stockings and short skirts to jeans and black turtlenecks. Later she’ll find new styles—she’s a chameleon. At the end of the decade she’ll be wearing a headband, halter tops, and white peasant blouses that lace up the front.

  In the summers she goes wherever she wants to, works as an au pair for some people she knows in America, stays in Copenhagen with a girl named Ingrid who lets her sleep on the sofa. She’ll come back from these trips with books and compacts and hats and words that I’ve never heard of, 45s that she plays in the living room so loudly that the paint shakes off the ceiling in the apartment downstairs. We’ll listen sometimes to a hoarse-voiced woman, sometimes to blaring music with a name that’s just been invented, the kind my mother calls pounding. Not yet time for Indian ragas—that comes a few years later. Kerttu hasn’t yet tossed her halter tops in the corner, though by the end of the next decade she’ll proudly wear nothing but a T-shirt and jeans, her breasts under her shirt like defiant apples.