True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  You have to learn the other person again all the time.

  IT WAS AS if Elsa knew his thoughts. She opened her eyes and looked at him slightly reprovingly.

  She let out a little sigh, light. For a moment he waited for words, blame, a reminder of something a long time ago. When it didn’t come, he asked, “Are you angry?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look irritated.”

  She got up from the table, walked over to him, and took him in her arms. They stood that way for a long time without saying anything. Finally she said, “I miss the days when I had time to be angry. Now it feels like death will come before I even have a chance to cuss.”

  “I’m sure you have time for one damn it. Give it a try.”

  Her breath felt hot and damp through his shirt.

  “Damn it,” she said gropingly, questioningly, like a child.

  “Look at that. See?”

  “Are you ever going to paint me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Would you like me to?”

  Lightly, as if she were talking about the end of any period of time—picking strawberries before the damp days of late summer, digging potatoes in June, while they’re still small and flavorful—she said, “I don’t know. But if you’re going to do it, you’d better hurry.”

  A HAPPY DAY, like they used to have. There was life in the cabin, Anna and Maria were bustling around upstairs, cleaning the shed and cutting the grass, coming now and then to help with the sauna. Elsa sat on the porch and seemed to be enjoying herself.

  “I’m looking at things really closely now,” she said. “It seems to me that I ought to get a good look at every tree and hollow.”

  Matias played the guitar after dinner, teased Eleonoora by playing “Eleanor Rigby,” which she didn’t like.

  “It’s such a sad song,” she said. “I don’t want a song like that for my namesake.”

  “It’s pretty,” Matias insisted.

  “Everybody in it ends up alone,” Eleonoora said. “Play something else. Play ‘Blackbird.’”

  Matias played “Blackbird” and everyone liked it. Elsa turned to look at the tops of the spruce trees and the lakeshore. Eleonoora reached out her hand and stroked her mother’s back. For a moment they had the feeling that it didn’t matter that they could never return to this moment. For this once, it was that complete.

  THEY TORE UP the entire floor of the sauna. Anna wanted to keep the newspapers. She spread the whole last part of the sixties out across the dock, weighing the pages down with rocks, and sat half the day bent over them, as if she were examining a rare plant through a microscope.

  Later she came to the door. The others had gone to eat and Martti was tossing the last of the planks into a pile.

  “That fire—did it start quickly?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” he said. “It burst into flames.”

  She swung her wrists, shifted from one foot to the other. She had on tennis shoes and jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, clothes she would have worn when she was twelve. Maybe she was smarter, more perceptive than he had realized. Children change without our noticing. First they’re one or two years old, then they’re five. They’re frolicking around the yard with an inner tube in their skinny arms, and everything’s already begun. They’ve already begun to understand about the world. The years go by, they wear different clothes, find new expressions, gather information in secret, and carry it quietly within them.

  “What about those paintings in the shed?” she asked.

  Martti bent over to pull up the last board from the corner. It cracked as it came away. The crack made him feel satisfied in a way he couldn’t name.

  “What about them?” he asked.

  “I was thinking that I might take one home and put it on the wall.”

  “Why not, if it suits you? Take whatever you like. You can take those old etchings, too. It was something I tried for a while. A lot of work, but I enjoyed it.”

  “Thanks. I looked through them yesterday,” she said. “There were a few really good ones.”

  He realized he missed her company. When was the last time they went for coffee, sat and talked?

  “Do you still play the tram game?” he asked. “The one where you make up lives for people?”

  She took hold of the shared memory, smiling. “Still do.”

  “Shall we try it?” he asked. “Like we used to?”

  “As soon as we get back to town.”

  He bent to pick up a newspaper page. It was the same year as the others. The headlines were about demonstrations.

  “Look,” he said. “A rebellion.”

  She reached out, took the page, glanced at it. “The rebellion is alive under the floorboards,” she said with a smile.

  14

  WAIT. I HAVE to get my wallet,” her grandfather says. “In case we decide to buy up the whole town.”

  Soon they’re boarding the number three tram. He gives Anna a questioning look as soon as they sit down. Who?

  Anna looks around.

  “What about that one?” he says, gesturing to the left side of the aisle.

  “Who, that girl?”

  Anna tests the girl for a moment. She has reddish brown hair and a shy half smile. Anna shakes her head. The girl has an ordinary story. Writing university papers, a fear that pounds to the beat of her heart, fear that something important is happening someplace else. The endless dreams of sunny spring days as she rides her bicycle through the woods, the shadows of spruce trees cutting across the path like tall figures bending over her in a childhood dream.

  “Not her,” Anna says.

  Grandpa nods in agreement.

  A tattered man gets on at the next stop. Not a reeking human wreck, younger than many drunks, perhaps a little over forty. Grandpa glances at her. What about him? She nods.

  They both lean forward a little. The man sits down next to the entrance and takes a cell phone out of his pocket. It’s a recent-model phone, but very used, covered in duct tape.

  Anna leans toward her grandfather and whispers, “His name is Vesa.”

  Grandpa looks at the man with interest. “A mechanic? Or maybe a construction worker?”

  Anna looks at the man for a moment. “No,” she says suddenly, with absolute certainty. “A lawyer. A former lawyer.”

  Grandpa nods, approving of her decision, and starts to sketch Vesa’s character.

  “Studied at Helsinki University and Cornell. Was married to a doctor. It took a long time for his wife to realize. She used to boast that he knew how to drink like a European.”

  Anna takes up the story: “She didn’t realize that meant not just wine with lunch and dinner but also a bottle every Friday.”

  Grandpa: “When it occurred to her that there is no country where the drinking traditions include falsifying a prescription for spirits, she left him.”

  “After the last binge, before he lost his job, his ex-wife checked him into rehab, but he escaped, claiming he was too busy at work.”

  “And he was. There was a business trip to Hamburg, and it would be his last. He woke up on Reeperbahn—he’d been robbed by a Croatian stripper and all he could remember about the evening were the tassels on her breasts.”

  “And then his boss had a talk with him.”

  They have Vesa, Vesa’s whole life. Vesa has given up fear. Being free did that. But he’s also given up hope. He no longer has dreams or fantasies, and it worries him a little because he remembers what his mother told him when he was a child: When you stop dreaming, you start dying.

  Vesa gets off at the railway station. They both turn to watch him go. Anna looks at her grandfather out of the corner of her eye. She can see the same exhilaration that she feels.

  “The best thing about the tra
m,” he says, “is that nothing ever ends.”

  “Yeah,” Anna says. “Everything is happening—nothing is beginning and nothing is ending.”

  “Want to go to Torni?” he asks. “All the way to the top, to the place with the view, like we used to. You have a Jaffa and I’ll have a coffee.”

  “I drink coffee, too, nowadays.”

  “You? Do you take snuff, too? Blithely baste your stomach with a drink in the morning to kill your hangover?”

  “Is that what pleasurable things lead to?”

  “In the end.”

  They share a smile. Anna thinks, some things never change—they’re not allowed to change.

  “Let’s,” she says.

  THE CITY STRETCHES out to their right and left, changes to woods after the Olympic Stadium, offering its southern edge to the sea. The ships look like hopeful animals on a journey abroad, ready to forget momentarily where they came from. If you look closely you might be able to see all the way to Tallinn. Coca-Cola costs four euros, even a coffee is three.

  “Did you use to come here when you were young?”

  “Sometimes. But I mostly went to Kosmos or Hansa.”

  Anna thinks about Eeva again. What if she just asked him directly? The question lurks at the back of her throat but something in her grandfather’s expression prevents her.

  “Look,” he says, drawing the landscape with a gesture from edge to edge. “Pretty as a picture.”

  “But you’ll leave it at that? You don’t intend to paint it?”

  This makes him laugh. “A landscape? No. Landscapes aren’t my thing. My work has always been more abstract.”

  “Why don’t you paint anymore?” Anna asks abruptly.

  He doesn’t seem bothered by the question.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I thought I was concentrating on life. Making art can become antithetical to life without you noticing.”

  Anna remembers one of her grandfather’s many art openings. She was sixteen and didn’t want to participate in the family celebration, staked out a protest with her eyes like one of the Fates. Grandpa was in excellent spirits, enjoying the attention, explaining to a journalist that some of his paintings were made by leaving a canvas on the floor of his studio so that when his paint dripped or spilled it would create unanticipated art. That part was apparently true. But then he continued: sometimes I might add some lunch to the mix, some pea soup, ketchup, that sort of thing. Sometimes a bit of cardamom bun at coffee time becomes part of my materials—it makes interesting raised areas in the painting. I look at my works in process like mysterious maps, throw myself into their incompleteness like getting lost in the woods. The reporter nodded uncertainly, still smiling. Grandpa glanced over his shoulder at Anna and smiled and then she knew he was joking.

  Anna realized that humor was her grandfather’s shield against nervousness. Afterward he had some cognac in the back room, looking happy and melancholy at the same time.

  The exhibition was a success. As Anna was reading a review of the show in the paper over breakfast she had one of those moments when she realized that her grandparents were out of the ordinary.

  Anna remembers the dreamy hours when Grandpa was painting her. He was familiar to her, but he was slightly different when he was painting. She sensed the difference without being able to name it. It was in his gaze. He sat her down under the window and she played with a doll or drove a toy car over the floorboards. She could tell when he had begun painting just from his gaze.

  He would whistle as he mixed thinner into the paint. Anna would watch him as he went to the window. Then he would walk back to his easel. His chin would lift a little, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He would make a stroke, look, and begin.

  “How’s your dissertation coming?” Grandpa asks. “Has your project to explain the world moved into its theological phase yet? Or are you just wallowing in the sixties?”

  “Wallowing deep in the past. My adviser says I should tie the theme more to other political movements. Just the change in the status of women isn’t enough.”

  He laughs. “Well, you’ve got a storehouse of information right here. Ask me anything and I can tell you the answer. I’ll give you eyewitness testimony.”

  “I can cite you in my source list as ‘a certain grandpa.’”

  “Information inherited from certain grandpas ought to have its own category in the citations list.”

  He digs a cigarette out of his pocket but doesn’t light it.

  “It was all a lot of noise when you look back on those years. A crazy time. Every time I went to Paris something had happened, my old classmates had thought up something new. Finland felt like the boondocks, although we had our own circles here. But they were a little homespun and tame compared to Paris or Amsterdam. In Finland we were reinventing everything that my friends in Paris had already been through in the fifties and early sixties. There were all kinds of movements in Paris over the years. I was at some of the meetings. I kept my distance from that crowd when I was in Finland.”

  “What did they do at the meetings?”

  “They created guidelines for reality.”

  He says this with overemphasis, as if he were talking about a party that’s got out of control. The kind of party that you reminisce about, embroidering events, shaking your head but nevertheless yearning for that time—a time when we were so sweet and wild!

  “You always had to be thinking up something new. It often felt like just when I’d mastered some technique or style, they’d start doing it some other way. Painting was out of style, supposedly. You were supposed to analyze the world some other way, through provocation. Or at least use mixed media. Sometimes I felt like politics was more important than art in that crowd. Not even politics, really—just spectacle for spectacle’s sake. That sort of thing annoyed me generally.”

  “Too modern for you?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I thought that too much attention was paid to shock value, that careful, uncompromising work was disappearing. When the ideas that had been going around in Paris came to Finland I felt like I’d already heard it all. Maybe they sounded a little childish to me. But a lot of my friends were in that group.”

  They’re quiet for a moment. Grandpa lets his gaze drift over the people in the cafe as if to say, why talk about the past when this is going on all the time—the world, life! Compared to this, every work of art is trivial, a sand castle.

  “What about that woman?” he says, nodding toward a table in the corner. “What can we tell about her?”

  “Who?”

  “The one eating chocolate cake.”

  Anna turns to look behind her.

  “The sad one?”

  The woman has the mouth of someone who’s given up—creased at the corners, as if there isn’t a thing in this world that can touch her. She’s drinking coffee and spooning a piece of cake into her mouth with her eyes closed.

  “What do you think she’s sad about?”

  Anna can see the woman’s eyes. She takes hold of the edge of the sadness. The woman looks like she’s invariably a little amused at how the world keeps going, how people come here and order a coke, take the trouble for such a trivial thing. How other people take the trouble to print the newspaper that they sell at the counter, and others do their jobs, wipe the tables and say thank you and have a nice day.

  “Maybe she’s lost someone,” Grandpa says. “Her father? Her mother?”

  “No,” Anna says. “Someone else. A child.”

  “You think so? What makes you think that?”

  Anna doesn’t hear his question. “It happened suddenly, last summer.”

  “Was it an accident?” Grandpa asks. “A car accident?”

  It happened suddenly, in the time it takes to say the carefree words “See you tomorrow.” That’s how sudd
enly the woman’s world was put in parentheses. Suddenly everything changed into this grotesque drama in which other children continue to be led across the street, carnival rides spin all summer long, and garish photographs advertise digital cameras on the sides of the bus stops. Grandpa looks at her, examines her expression. The sun beams down. Anna bends over and picks up her sunglasses and puts them on.

  “It’s bright,” she says.

  “Well,” he says. “What now? What else shall we make up?”

  The chocolate cake woman gets up, glances at them before walking to the door. As if she knows. No smile. Just a glance before she’s gone.

  Anna turns her head. Her grandfather tries to see what she’s thinking. She sees those other faces in his face, young faces, the ones she’s never seen before, the ones he’s nevertheless carried with him across the decades. He raises one eyebrow, smiles, lights his cigarette, blows smoke. Gestures that belong at the edge of a soccer field or under a courtyard arch. Gestures that have charmed people, caressed them, got them to agree to things. Gestures that could make broad lines on canvas, try new techniques. They belong to youth.

  On an impulse, Grandpa takes up their old game: “I met a girl,” he says, not looking at Anna.

  Anna plucks the sentence from the air like a shared memory: “What kind of girl?”

  “She carried sorrows around that she never told anyone about.”

  Grandpa looks into Anna’s eyes now. She can see that he knows.

  “She had eyes like pools because they’d collected so many tears,” he says.

  One tear, then another, roll down Anna’s cheek, under her collar into her shirt.

  “Maybe she should tell someone about her sorrows, then,” Anna hears herself say.

  “That’s what I told her—the girl that I met.”

  “And she will, too,” Anna says. “Just as soon as she’s ready.”

  1965

  AS SOON AS we’re in the taxi an abyss opens up between us. The flight to Paris is leaving in two hours, we’re still on the cobblestone streets of Helsinki and the driver is calling me Mrs. as if I’d always held that position. I’m shaped like an apology, quite motionless, like a statue.