True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  He comes to my house the next day, we close the door, and for a brief time it’s like the world doesn’t exist.

  IN MAY HE holds a book he’s found on the table in his hand like it’s a dangerous animal that he’s rendered unconscious. He’s standing in the living room door with a remarkable look on his face, testy and frightened like a little boy who’s done something wrong but doesn’t know who he’s done it to.

  I’m on the floor playing with the little girl, telling her what to do, when he asks his question.

  “Who gave you this book? Your boyfriend?”

  I look at him and smile as if I don’t understand. My smile betrays me. The book is from a boy I met at the university. He walked me home. He gave me the book and wrote a dedication on the inside cover. Why did I leave it lying on the table, right under his nose? Was it so he would pick it up and see a strange name that would taunt him? That’s exactly why. Exactly.

  “I want you out of here,” he says calmly. “Out.”

  “What? I can’t go anywhere.”

  The little girl looks at her father, frightened. Then at me. The man yells “Out!” and I get up. The little girl runs into her room. I see her looking at us from the doorway, like a bird that’s fluttered up to a branch for safety. He pushes me into the apartment foyer.

  “No. I’m not going,” I say.

  “Get out of here.”

  “I’ve never even met him.”

  “Out.”

  He pushes me out into the hallway. I laugh, flabbergasted. I realize that there’s nothing I can do or say to make this strange performance end. When he’s got me out the door and into the hallway his anger subsides and he looks surprised at what he’s done, because now I’m crying. He can’t back down now. He decides to stay angry, because the fight has to be gone through all the way to the end, each sentence hanging in the air must be plucked, every cruel word must be thrown like a little dagger.

  “Go to his house, if that’s what you want.”

  “There is no one.”

  “You’re lying. I saw the name.”

  I sit in the stairwell for half an hour. The woman who lives next door walks by and says hello. She’s heard the fight, knows exactly what’s going on. But she tells me to have a good day and walks on.

  I see the end. I sit on the steps, unable to get up and leave, not daring to ring the doorbell, and I see the end. I can’t let myself see it yet, but I know that’s it’s in exactly this kind of hollowness.

  He opens the door when the half hour is over, apologizes, and I don’t know what to do but go in and shape myself to fit his apology. He takes me in his arms. We stand in the foyer, silent. He strokes my back, I fit myself in against his neck.

  We already have the complicated rituals of fighting and making up of a man and wife. As he holds me and we construct our mutual consolation he thinks that our rituals are surprisingly similar to the ones he and Elsa have. The same role is reserved for him with both of us, first to be cruel and then, at the end of the argument, tender.

  Elsa is quicker to argue than I am. She has more complicated sarcasms and hurtful clear-sightedness. She knows every part of him and uses the knowledge ruthlessly when they fight.

  But he and I are starting to get good at it, too.

  I can see all of his weakness at these moments. The anger that will later twine itself into me in an aching knot and make me imagine the various ways I can humiliate him begins in these rituals after an argument, which in those first years still ended with no boundary between my skin and his.

  But I’ve already learned his pettiness. I make a note of his every physical and personal failing and take pleasure in their variety.

  LATER ON THE little girl comes to sit in my lap. I’m at the kitchen table, hours after the argument, but she still remembers it.

  “Are you going to go away? Out in the hallway?”

  “No, honey.”

  “Can I sit in your lap?”

  She looks at me pleadingly, and it’s at that moment that a feeling takes root in her that will later define her. Gradually, over the decades, scenes from this shadow theater of her childhood will shape her into a worrier, someone who covers her uncertainty with meticulousness and strong opinions and doesn’t know how to show her husband her need for affection except by getting sick. She’ll get a fever when her boss reprimands her at work. When her daughters confront her with unreasonable accusations, as daughters always do, she’ll get a migraine. She’ll lie in her room in the dark and the light coming in from between the drapes will make her retch.

  When she gets sick, her husband’s patient, uncomplicated tenderness will astonish her. He’ll peek in the door and ask her what she would like, what he should be, how he should help her. It will make her cry. Actually, she’ll be crying because she’s so incomprehensibly lucky to have found this man who overcame gravity by eating an orange.

  Bring some water. And stroke my hair. These are her requests; she’ll come no closer to a request in all of her adult life. And her husband will come and stroke her hair, bring her some water, sit beside her and rub her back with steady strokes. Did something happen with the girls? he’ll ask gently. A fight or something?

  Mm-hmm, she’ll say. He knows her. Her migraines, no matter how genuine and unfeigned, are clever disguises her body devises to allow her to make a request. How lucky she is that she has this husband who loves her, day after day, through the night, through dreamy Sunday afternoons and tense Tuesday evenings. Year after year he peels her patiently to find the child who stood with her doll in the kitchen doorway when she was three years old and asked to be held.

  But it’s a journey to all of this, a decades-long trek. Right now she’s still three years old. Her request is naked and I answer it, taking her in my arms without hesitation.

  THAT EVENING HE wraps his arms around me. Again it’s easy for me to believe that it’s always been like this. The day’s argument is a melancholy gap between us. He tries to close it up with words and caresses. Finally he gets up, sighs, and goes to the window. He takes a cigarette out of his pocket, sits on the windowsill, opens the window. I give in a little, sit up on the bed, and lean my head against the wall.

  “You shouldn’t put up with this,” he says suddenly. “You should go with him, whoever he is, this other man.”

  “Why do you say that? I don’t want to.”

  For the first time I see pain in his face, the pain I’ll learn later.

  “This won’t end well,” he says. “That’s why.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You should love someone else.”

  “Don’t ever say that. Don’t ever tell me to love someone else.”

  15

  THEY WERE WAITING in the glow of the apple blossoms for the guests to arrive. Eleonoora’s mother wanted to throw one last party for her friends. The apartment on Sammonkatu smelled too much of illness, so they decided to move the party to Eleonoora’s garden. Besides, Mom said, what better place for the perfect terminal party than under the apple blossoms?

  Mom and Dad had come well before the guests arrived; Mom wanted to poke her fingers in the dirt one more time, insisted they let her plant the morning glory seedlings, a variety called Thread of Life. Now the threads of life poked drooping out of the earth under the window, in shock from the light, sucking up moisture from the mulch. Tomorrow they would perk up, and in a few weeks, when the apple blossoms had fallen from the trees, they would reach as far as the windowsill.

  The two of them were in the kitchen making salad. Mom had changed into bright red high-heeled shoes and was contentedly tearing lettuce leaves into a bowl.

  “A woman needs two things in life: a sense of humor and a pair of red high heels,” she said. “A Ph.D. is good, too, but not essential.”

  Dad and Eero were priming the grill
outside the window, the girls were mowing the lawn. The door was open, swinging in the breeze. Eleonoora was in good spirits. There was nothing she needed to worry about at that moment.

  “That’s your final statement?” Eleonoora asked, laughing.

  “Yes. Write it down and see to it that it’s put into my obituary.”

  “Well, let’s not start writing eulogies quite yet.”

  “Why not? I have a fantasy of a snappy obituary. It reads: Elsa Ahlqvist, pear-shaped until very recently, adequate breasts all the way to the grave. Mother, grandmother, and professor emerita. Infallible taste in shoes. In short, never fear, she died happy, and never turned down an offer of ice cream.”

  She rippled with laughter.

  “A little less terminal irony, please.”

  “Irony suits me. I’ve noticed that. People often want me to talk about the redemptive power of love, but I’ve come to the conclusion that talk of redemption is only appropriate for men with full beards.”

  She rinsed some cherry tomatoes and started cutting them in half. Maria came inside, grabbed a piece of mozzarella from the plate, and hugged her grandmother, who kissed her on the cheek and waited for her to go back outside before saying what she’d been planning to say: “I probably won’t see those threads of life full grown.”

  Eleonoora pushed her sadness away with a sigh. Some day they would talk about her mother and sigh like this. Next year when the apple trees bloomed they would sit under the trees and eat a salad made with the same ingredients and say: Mom would have liked this.

  “Maybe not. But you’re coming over next week. By then they’ll have taken root. They’ll grow well there.”

  “I could be buried under them.”

  “Mom. You’re not going to be buried in a flower bed.”

  “I think I’d be happy in a flower bed,” she said lightly.

  She got out a box of foil and started putting together packets of vegetables for the grill. Each one got its own tomato, chunk of mozzarella, oil, and basil.

  “This is nice,” Eleonoora said. “Just like when I was a kid and we used to play together. Remember? We could spend hours playing with nothing but a pair of mittens, or your leather gloves. Those red gloves you had. I was a clam with my mitten and you were an evil, unpredictable fish that would swim inside it.”

  “Really?” Mom asked.

  “What happened to all those games?”

  “That’s how it is,” Mom said. “Things are forgotten, new things come along.”

  “Maybe they disappear when childhood ends,” Eleonoora said, suddenly feeling an overwhelming longing for those days.

  She didn’t want to be five years old. She didn’t want to be a child. But she wanted her mother to be the kind of person who would surprise you with a game, the kind of person who would invent crazy stories about cabins of the four winds and princesses and witches and magicians. She wanted her mother to be the kind of person who, on a dark path in the woods, would suddenly whisper in her ear: the bogeyman, and then run with her, slipping on fallen branches, bursting with fear and joy. She wanted her mother to be a young, giddy girl, with the years still ahead of her. Her father would walk behind them with his hands in his pockets, shush them good-naturedly, although he liked to see his two girls running and hear their squeals of joy as much as they did.

  Mom opened one of the bundles up again.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  “What?”

  She looked out the window at Dad. He had gone back to where the grill was. Judging by their expressions, he and Eero were in a heated discussion about the optimal temperature for grilling.

  “I made a mistake,” Mom said.

  “What do you mean? What mistake?”

  She sighed, searching for a shape for her words.

  “I don’t know. I feel like I haven’t told you everything that I should have. That’s what I feel.”

  “What? What should you tell me?”

  Mom shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t stop moving—new foil packets were still forming under her hands. Suddenly she poured the contents of one out onto the plate.

  “I don’t know if I’ve been a good enough mother to you. I didn’t know how to change. I didn’t know how to be more motherly, to stay at home.”

  “How should you have changed?” Eleonoora said, bewildered. “I’ve never said that you ought to have stayed home.”

  “You survived, didn’t you? You did well.”

  “Survived? What do you mean?”

  Mom got quiet and looked at her as if she wanted to say something more.

  “What is it?” Eleonoora asked.

  The lawn mower chugged, the noise covering up Dad’s and Eero’s voices. Mom turned to look.

  “My womb was torn in two when I had you. Not completely, but almost. It was torn, so that I couldn’t have any more children.”

  She said it suddenly, breathlessly.

  “I didn’t know that,” Eleonoora stammered.

  “I grieved that loss for a long time, busied myself, got involved in all kinds of distractions.”

  She looked at Eleonoora.

  “You’ve been a good mother,” Eleonoora said. “I couldn’t have wished for anything different.” At that moment, it felt important to say this directly.

  “Thank you,” her mother said.

  She turned back toward the bright evening sunlight shining through the window and closed her eyes, looking fragile and happy. Like she’s made of silk paper, Eleonoora thought.

  “You know, I love the moment when an airplane takes off,” her mother said. “When you pass through the clouds and the sun shines on your face. I always missed that terribly when I was home. I never could admit that I would have felt smothered without it. Waiting for the rush into the air and the smile of the stewardess, conversations with strangers in the next seat. Maybe that was my weakness.”

  “Why in the world would that be a weakness? You loved to fly.”

  Mom looked a little impatient.

  “I wanted to be on the move all the time. What if I didn’t want so much to change the world, to make it better, to help those children and do my part to advance science? What if I just wanted the thrill of taking off, of travel? Over and over. What if that was my reason for going?”

  The question sounded agitated, pleading.

  “What if it was?” Eleonoora felt a worry at the corners of her mouth. The sound of the lawn mower had stopped, the girls had come to join Dad and Eero. “What does it matter? What’s the matter with enjoying taking off?”

  “But what if I liked it the most? What if I wasn’t so noble, so altruistic? Maybe I just wanted to enjoy myself. I was restless and bored, I couldn’t stop. What if my own family appalled me, the motionlessness, the same thing all the time? Slushy November evenings! Always the same expressions. And I went and helped other families, so I wouldn’t have to face my own.”

  “What are you saying? You had a notable career. You weren’t afraid of your own family. You were always present whenever you could be.”

  “Well,” her mother said. “I guess I was.”

  Eleonoora felt she should say something more. Her mother needed reassurance. She needed a final view of herself, the most fundamental assessment.

  “That’s what happy people do,” Eleonoora said. “A happy person enjoys herself, has fun, and changes the world at the same time, almost as an aside. You had it all. You had a family, and the thrill of taking off, and the whole world—that’s the kind of person you were.”

  Maybe the roots of the threads of life had already started to attach themselves to the earth. The apple blossoms in the trees, their innocent glow, slightly surprised at itself, like a child barely past the age of confirmation putting on a miniskirt and realizing her powe
r of attraction. Everything in its place for a moment, just where it belonged. Everything important had been said now. Her mother’s smile reflected thanks.

  “That’s the kind of person I was, then,” she said.

  They hugged for a long time. The foil packets lay fat on the table. Soon they would be sizzling on the grill.

  “My daughter,” Mom said. “All grown up.”

  A stunning thought went right through Eleonoora: this is the moment I’ve been living for.

  “Is everything ready,” she said, “for the guests to arrive?”

  “Everything’s ready. I’m going to celebrate with my friends like it was my last day on earth, and if I get tired out, you can worry over me.”

  “Good. If you get tired out, I’ll worry over you.”

  16

  THE TELEPHONE RINGS three times before a woman’s voice answers. Anna has been putting this off for over a week.

  “Population Registry,” the woman says, somewhat demandingly.

  For some reason Anna needs to preserve her anonymity. She doesn’t introduce herself.

  “You can use an old name and address to find a new address, right?”

  “Yes. If you have the person’s name and year of birth.”

  Anna’s hand is shaking.

  “Her name is Eeva Ellen Ronkainen. She was born in 1942, from what I can tell. I don’t know where she’s been living. One of her addresses was on Sammonkatu, in Helsinki. She was born in Kuhmo. Her last name may have changed if she married. Ronkainen is her maiden name.”

  “All right,” the woman says. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  Anna can hear her typing something into a computer.

  “She’s not a relative of yours, then?”

  “Not exactly . . . In a way. In a way she is.”

  Hesitation reaches out over the phone line.

  “Why do you want information about her?”

  An awful idea occurs to Anna.

  “Am I required to give a reason?”

  “There are cases where we ask,” the woman says. “Not all information is public.”