True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  And someone else, a man, comes and introduces himself. We talk for a minute about poetry but he can’t keep my interest at the moment. I want to see the little girl, find out what she’s been doing, thinking. I want to play with her.

  “Hey, Ella. Hi,” I say, bending down to her level.

  She’s wearing a dress with a starched collar and patent leather shoes.

  “Do you want to play?” she asks. Without waiting for an answer she gets up, takes my hand, and leads me through the throng of guests, reaches for a latch and opens a door.

  The room is dark.

  “Turn on the light,” she orders excitedly.

  I fumble for the switch, finally find it and click on the lights.

  The little girl kneels in a well-practiced manner next to a cradle. Molla is sleeping in it. She covers the doll with a little blanket and rocks the cradle.

  “Sing her a song,” she says.

  “What song?”

  “A poop song!”

  “Not poop,” I say. I already know how to instruct. “A lullaby?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  I start to sing a song my mother sang to me. The little girl droops where she’s kneeling, her head to one side, listening. I’m startled to hear a noise from the door. It’s him. He smiles. I don’t know how long he’s been standing there watching us.

  The little girl runs away and we’re left alone. Him at the door, two wineglasses and a bottle in his hand. He hands me a glass, pours. He’s suddenly at a loss for something to say, and I enjoy that. I’m opening him again, layer by layer. I see him eight years old, running home after a long day of play with the boys in the neighborhood, gathered to play ten sticks, the evening a broad continent stretching out from their boundaries. I notice his arms, he looks as careless as ever with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, and it charms me. There’s something horselike in his legs, I notice it and like it more and more.

  He sees that I’m thinking about him, becomes more embarrassed, starts to look for something in his pockets. In my awkwardness I don’t say anything either, I lean against the wall and turn my head. He takes a cigarette out of his pocket. Those oval fingernails, I’ll bet he moves his finger from line to line when he reads sometimes, and rubs his temples now and then.

  He lights his cigarette. Sucks in the smoke, holds the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger as if he were in a hurry. Rebellious. I see him as he was in high school, he must have had big dreams, longed to be elsewhere, cherished all kinds of dreams, practiced smoking roll-your-owns in the park, not going home until night came. He would tiptoe past his mother’s bedroom thinking about the girl he’d kissed, too excited to notice the moment of happiness, the irretrievable perfection of the spring evening, everything within reach and nothing certain. The next day he realized it, and the next week still better.

  Now he understands it so clearly that it’s painful to think about. And still more painful to understand that he’s almost forgotten those kisses now, those restless smokes under the budding trees and all the habits he could have built for himself that were randomly rejected, because he chose others.

  “How was Kuhmo?”

  “I frolicked in the meadows.”

  “And the pine trees?”

  “Astonished.”

  He laughs.

  “You’re good with Ella,” he says. “She’s talked about you a lot since you came here.”

  He looks out the window, then at me. I see that he’s examining me.

  “What did you think of that drawing?” he asks, a little breathless, as if time were running out.

  Suddenly there is all the density and concentration and weight that both of us will later call pure happiness when we come back to this moment.

  I don’t hide my thoughts, I let them shine through my smile.

  “No one’s ever seen me that way.”

  THE EVENING CONTINUES. I look across the room, watching him chat with someone I don’t know. He’s talking about politics. The words are light compared to what he would like to say to me. He kisses Elsa beside him. The stranger comes to talk to me again, a friend of his who introduces himself as Lauri. I chat distractedly about this and that, my head turning to search for him.

  I smile. Everything is light.

  He peeks at me over shoulders, between hemlines and wineglasses. His look is quick, a mere glimpse. I see his gaze search me out, find me, turn away.

  This is where it all begins. Later I realize that it was right here, when he was getting glimpses of me. There’s a hint of dread in his gaze. Me on the sofa, sitting next to Lauri, who would later carry our secrets for years in an unspoken agreement that men sometimes make with their friends. Elbows, hands holding plates and glasses, beehives, button earrings.

  Lauri’s question: “So, you’re the new nanny?”

  “That’s me.”

  I answer absentmindedly because I’ve already begun my journey to something else.

  I pluck his gaze from among the wineglasses and Lauri’s indifferent talk. It’s careless, hardly even stopping at me before passing on.

  But I know about that.

  IN THE SECOND week of September the summer is more itself, the days warm and transparent. The evenings are windy, but the day’s warmth lingers. I come back, carrying my things in a suitcase.

  On Saturday we drive to Tammilehto. We’ve packed a lunch—sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, soda and wafers. I open the window a little in the car and let the wind come in. The little girl screams like we’re at an amusement park. She soon falls asleep on the back seat.

  The place isn’t a cabin, it’s a summer house. Where I come from, the summer cabins are gray shacks, red if you happen to have some paint. Here there’s a main building, a shed, a sauna looming on the shore. I walk to the edge of the yard and back. I can see the water.

  “So! Let’s start by making some coffee,” he says.

  We spread a blanket on the beach, the little girl sits down in my lap without a moment’s hesitation. I put a sweater on her, plus a hat and some mittens, which she pulls off immediately. The sun is still shining. I take off my shoes and socks for a minute and sink my toes in the sand, braving the autumn.

  The three of us make six sand cakes at the edge of the water and whoop with joy and disappointment when the waves wash over them.

  She wants to make them over again.

  “Where did they go?” she asks. “Did the lake eat them? Why are they there and then they’re gone?”

  “The lake eats them.”

  “But where do they go?” she says again. “Do they disappear?”

  “They just go away where we can’t see them,” I say.

  “Where do they go when they go away?” she says.

  “They go home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On Liisankatu.”

  “Are you going to Liisankatu today?”

  “Not today. I’m here today. I’m staying here.”

  The little girl falls asleep on the blanket with Molla, the man lifts her in his arms and carries her inside. He’s gentle and patient in this way. He’s tender with his daughter.

  “Shouldn’t we be going in soon, too?” I ask.

  “Not yet. We can wait a little longer. The girl’s sleeping.”

  We share the same thought. We must use the moment wisely, receive it graciously. I look at the lake. I say I might feel like a swim. He shakes his head. Don’t, he says. It’s cold, you’ll go numb.

  “Are you going to stop me?”

  “No,” he says with a smile. “I won’t stop you.”

  I take off my skirt. My blouse. I don’t look at him as I take off my bra.

  He’s thinking that he can’t take his eyes off me. Everything’s already decided—it
’s as if someone else had made the decision for us, and this is just a little drama that reflects the inevitability of it, the way we lay claim to our intimacy. I step into the water. The water’s cold. I keep going, not letting out a sound. I wade until the water’s up to my navel, then I lower myself completely and swim.

  The water’s amazingly still, the clouds in the sky the color of bruises. I swim five strokes out, five strokes back. I stand up.

  “Was it cold? Your lips are blue.”

  “Then they ought to be warmed up.”

  He picks up the towel from the blanket and opens it for me like an embrace. I come close to him without any hesitance. He lets go of the towel and I dry myself. He looks at the birthmark on my neck, forcing his thoughts there, away from everything he’s just seen.

  His breath is trembling a little. I’m trembling with cold, and perhaps also anticipation.

  “Shall we go in?” he asks.

  As we walk inside, Elsa is still between us. He’s thinking of Elsa as we walk across the yard, about what she would say. She would say something about the little girl. She might be a little tired, might rub her neck and say she’s going to go check on the little girl. Once they were inside, she might go into the kitchen absentmindedly, wonder aloud if she should make something to eat. Quite a nice day, she would say.

  I see the doubt in the slope of his shoulders.

  But Elsa is already changing into a picture. If the telephone has rung while we’ve been away, if it rings in the apartment in Töölö dozens of kilometers away, we won’t hear it. Water drips from my hair. The walls protect us, and the night. Everything’s already begun, it all began when I rang the doorbell, it began when I stepped over the threshold. Maybe everything began a long time before that, even. It’s all as old as time.

  The kiss, too, is both ancient and new. I know it’s strange, but just before the kiss, I say something about Elsa.

  Elsa is at a dinner with her colleagues, laughing. Before going to bed she stretches her neck, pulls the bedspread up and puts her glasses on her nose to read her notes for tomorrow’s presentation one more time.

  We don’t know this. Elsa is far away, but she lingers between us for a moment longer. We stand facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes.

  I think about Elsa as he comes closer to me. I think about Elsa, and I say, “Does she usually kiss you in the evening, before you go to bed?”

  That same doubt flashes in his eyes, I can see it, but then he says shhh and comes closer, and we don’t talk anymore.

  10

  INDUCTION, INTUBATION, EXTUBATION.

  They were still at the intubation phase. The patient was in a deep narcosis, Eleonoora was finishing up the suture. The surgery had been an easy, routine operation.

  Riitta, Eleonoora’s favorite anesthesiologist to have in the operating room—quick to smile, a little odd but intently focused on her work—checked the patient’s status, decreased the anesthesia and nodded approvingly. There was time to make a careful suture.

  Even after twenty years in the operating room the mystery of artificial sleep never ceased to amaze Eleonoora. She saw it every day and knew the history of its attempts and failures in detail.

  No one knew how the mechanism of sinking into sleep actually worked. All that was known was that certain substances caused sufficient unconsciousness and numbness for an operation to be performed. There was no way to measure the dose beforehand. The same amount could cause deep narcosis in one patient and leave another merely drowsy, at the edge of wakefulness. Most people didn’t remember what happened while they were under anesthesia. But there were those who remained alert during the surgery and described stepping outside themselves and watching the operation, feeling the incision.

  A patient once told her of an experience of grace that exceeded her comprehension. “It wasn’t an angel or God that I saw, but it took me in its arms and I felt like I never had to be alone. It was absolute safety, like a child in its mother’s arms.”

  Watching a patient sleep, Eleonoora often thought about where they were while they were under. Riitta had once said that patients went toward birth and death at the same time when they were anesthetized. It has its own time stratum, that’s what I think, Riitta said. All of your memories are there, all the people. Think about how it would feel to hold your whole life up, see it in its entirety, from a little distance. If all the patients remembered their mental state while they were under anesthesia, that’s what they would tell you they saw. I think it’s like the state a person is in just before they die. To know everything, see everything clearly. It’s too bad people so rarely come back to the rest of us with the information.

  Maybe it’s a blessing, Eleonoora thought. Maybe we’d be crushed by the knowledge. Maybe only God is meant to see life in its entirety, if there is a God. And the dead, if there is life after death. And writers, who put themselves outside of life and diligently follow each character’s every thought and feeling and shine a spotlight on everything that happens.

  Eleonoora finished the suture and Riitta started the extubation.

  “How’s your mother?” she asked when the operation was over and the patient had been taken to recovery.

  Eleonoora had told Riitta about her mother in early spring, when her brief cancer treatments had ended.

  “She wants to be at home. We’ve been trying to manage it for a few days.”

  Riitta touched her shoulder gently. A familiar feeling flooded over her from somewhere in the most secret, guarded part of herself: gratitude for her concern. There was a touch of surprise in it. People were endlessly good, wise, and gentle in the midst of all the hurry, the conferences, the dinner invitations, the smell of disinfectant, the meeting reminders.

  She would have liked to tell Riitta what she had tried to say to Eero every day in different ways—nagging him about going to the grocery or cleaning the wrong way, complaining that no one else in the house ever seemed to wash the dishes: I don’t know if I know how to be motherless, and I don’t know if I can learn how in the weeks we have left. It feels like it will take the end of my life away.

  “Time is growing shorter,” was all she managed to say.

  “That’s the way it always is,” Riitta said. “Talk to your mother, reminisce with her about what’s been. And when the time comes, let go.”

  There it was: let go. She hadn’t let go of anyone, not for a second. She had always clung to everything, tried to keep everything together. Where did this worry come from? Why did she think she was the one who should hold up the whole world?

  One tear, then another, rolled down her cheek.

  Riitta hugged her.

  HER FATHER ANSWERED the phone after three rings.

  “Did the home care people come over?”

  “They took some blood and brought a pain pump. The nurse showed me the dose but your mother still won’t agree to use it. Apparently there’s no need yet.”

  “Has she eaten?”

  “Not yet. She’s feeling a little poorly.”

  Eleonoora felt the floor pitch. She fixed her gaze on the bar of soap at the edge of the sink.

  “What is it?” she heard herself ask.

  “Just something,” he said. “She spent the morning resting and hasn’t really wanted to get up.”

  Eleonoora sensed other meanings behind his words.

  “I’m going to drive to Tammilehto this evening with Anna. Don’t touch the pain pump. I’ll come look at it on the way there and see how it works.”

  She knew her bossiness annoyed her father, but she couldn’t help herself. She changed clothes, opened the door, walked down the corridor. The hospital carried on with diligent industry around her. The vendor in the cafeteria was putting berliners on a tray, a nurse walked quickly by and nodded at her.

  She dialed Anna’
s number. The phone rang six times. She remembered that Anna was at work, and left a message.

  She chose Eero’s number. She let the heaviness come. She let it come two seconds before Eero answered, but for some reason, she didn’t really understand why, her tone of voice changed at the last minute to something slightly bored, demanding.

  “Where are you?”

  “At work,” Eero said. “I’m on my way home.”

  Eleonoora couldn’t say it. She always wore a mask that Eero had to come and remove, patiently, over and over.

  “We’ll be at Tammilehto. Buy something for you and Maria for dinner.”

  “OK,” he said.

  “But don’t use the grill yet. Maria said she’d wash it today, but I want to be there when we use it for the first time.”

  “OK.”

  The line was quiet, an invisible cord stretched between them.

  “Are you all right?” Eero asked.

  She didn’t answer right away. Tomorrow evening when she came home she would close the bedroom door and press herself against him and let the tears come. She would tell him what she was keeping to herself now. They would keep the door closed, let the walls shelter them, go to bed and build a fort, pretend there was no death for a brief moment.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  ELEONOORA’S MOTHER ASKED her to bring her some water. Eleonoora asked her father to leave. She wanted to examine her mother, but she didn’t want him to see it. He preferred not to see her take the doctor’s role. But what else could she do? It was easier to palpate her abdomen than bear the blunt pain of worry.

  The home care worker had come again because Mom hadn’t been feeling well. Mom was cool and polite through the whole visit. She only gave in to her petulance and annoyance after the nurse had left.

  Eleonoora poured some water into a glass. Her mother tried to drink, but the water made her feel sick and she wanted it taken away. She told her to open the drapes. That wasn’t enough—she wanted the drapes taken down so she could see the whole sky. When Eleonoora had done this, standing on the windowsill, twisting her neck wrong, reaching up till her arms ached, her mother lay for a moment enduring the rays of sunshine, then asked her to put them back up again.