True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  “It’s for genealogical research. Sort of.”

  “Fine.”

  Anna hears a mouse click. She imagines the arrow on the woman’s screen pointing at a group of Eeva Ronkainens, then Eeva Ellen Ronkainens. There may be two of them, or more. Anna can almost hear the system’s process of elimination, leaving just one in the end.

  “Yes,” the woman says. “We seem to have a record of the person in question. Would you like me to read you the information?”

  Anna hears herself say yes.

  “Eeva Ellen Ronkainen,” the woman says, then pauses for a moment. “Born in Kuhmo in 1942. There are some addresses here, although none of them are on Sammonkatu. Maybe it wasn’t her official residence. All of her addresses are in Helsinki, including the last one . . .”

  “The last one?”

  The woman pauses a moment, sighs, then reads, in a declaratory, emphatic tone: “Died in Kuhmo in 1968.”

  Anna hears Frida, the three-year-old who lives downstairs, crying defiantly. On rare days Frida smiles at Anna in the elevator, shows her her toys, and makes pronouncements of truth. I live downstairs and you live upstairs but that’s not the same thing as heaven.

  “How did she die?” Anna asks, bewildered.

  The woman laughs. Maybe she’s the kind of person who likes shocking people, or maybe she’s just one of those people who has no empathy. People who are embarrassed and laugh when they ought to sympathize.

  “We don’t have any of that information, of course. We have records of births, marriages, addresses, children’s births, and deaths. We don’t have the resources to record the cause of death. Or the permission, actually.”

  “What do I do, then? What should I do?”

  The woman laughs again, types on her keyboard some more. She really is someone who’s embarrassed by the role of messenger. She stops typing. Anna can’t say anything. The line doesn’t hum. Just silence.

  “Well,” the woman says, “if you don’t know her relatives, I can’t help you.” Then she says, a little surprised, “She died when she was twenty-six years old.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sometimes people die young. Accidents, illnesses that can whisk you off in a week, unexpectedly.”

  “Yeah,” Anna says. “All sorts of things.”

  The woman is quiet for a moment. Anna realizes that those people who work at the Population Registry must have a specified way of expressing condolences. Then the woman surprises her and says with a sigh: “I’ve always thought that if I die young, in a car accident or something, maybe in the summer, on a summer road, driving through farmland, I’d die happy. Maybe she died like that.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  The woman reads her the last three addresses again. Anna writes them down. She says thank you, good-bye, ready to end the call. Now the woman says it, a little strained, as if she’s speaking a foreign language: “I’m sorry.”

  She’s young. Anna didn’t realize it until now. Maybe just a little older than Anna herself. To those still living out their youth, words of condolence are a foreign language and it hurts a little to speak it. Young people think, That’s not for me, it never will be for me.

  She hangs up the phone and listens to the silence. There’s an ad for a dentist on a flyer that came in the mail. A yellow slip of paper with Matias’s grocery list from yesterday. “Coffee milk” is underlined twice. Matias can’t stand a morning without milk for his coffee.

  Anna stands in the entryway. Her strength seems to be draining out of her. The black stain that had been shrinking starts to spread again. She’s pouring ink on the floor, pouring herself into the cracks between the floorboards.

  Without knowing what she hopes to accomplish, she dials the Population Registry again. A man’s voice answers. She’s a little disappointed that she can’t present her question to the woman she just spoke to: “Eeva Ellen Ronkainen. Born in Kuhmo in 1942, died in Kuhmo in 1968. Can you tell me whether she had any siblings?”

  1966

  BRIGHT DAYS, OPEN spaces. Elsa is away for three weeks from June to July and we make a home in the country. We check the fish traps every morning. I put on his rubber boots and row. He sits at the back of the boat with the little girl and they make up stories and laugh.

  One day I get a pike from the trap, it struggles but I keep my hold on it. The pike brings greetings from the bottom of the lake, the little girl laughing as I make up words for the fish.

  “Is it cold at the bottom of the lake?” she asks, giggling.

  “Yes,” I answer in a fish voice. “It’s cool and quiet there. Nothing ever changes at the bottom of the lake.”

  He sometimes draws me while I’m rowing. More often he lets the days and the fish be, without trying to capture them. The sun rises and sets. The world is frozen in place. The oak trees in the yard grow dense with leaves from one day to the next. The blackbird has already quieted, the warblers are still singing. Now and then one of his friends drives into the yard in a car uninvited, but that doesn’t bother us. Some of them bring a bottle of wine with them, some want to make a party of it. Sometimes families come. We stay up late into the night with the wine and chocolate they’ve brought and all sorts of talk—the child often falls asleep in my lap.

  We begin to take turns speaking in big words.

  But the world . . . , someone says. This country . . . , someone else answers. This era . . . , someone adds, and once again we’re talking about humanity and where it’s going.

  No one will admit it but all of us are actually more interested in the lake and the sauna and the half of a blueberry pie on the table than we are in the fact that reality is being created at this very moment in offices and meeting rooms and on speakers’ platforms and who knows maybe underground in the kinds of groups whose names have only just been thought up.

  Kerttu spends time at these meetings. She doesn’t care at all about blueberry pie. She eats it if she finds it in front of her, but she doesn’t waste her time thinking about it. A loon is just a word to her, from a bygone time.

  But there are those of us who are content with the beginnings of sentences and the call of a loon as it rakes across the surface of the lake.

  “But the world . . . ,” someone says.

  He looks at me. The little girl is asleep on my lap with Molla under her arm and we don’t need to say it out loud: the world is right here. Somewhere else, at this very moment, the jungle is bathed in napalm and a lot of people are upset about it. So are we, as long as we can keep our blueberry pie. In Paris, an all-consuming indignation at the general state of things has already begun, now they’re trying to dress indignation in a suitable shape for the masses.

  Alongside all that—the indignation, the seas of flame and horror, solidarity and unmetered verse—somewhere a long-legged, short-haired girl is wearing a yellow dress. Her eyes are pools, but she shows them off more than before. She puts on false eyelashes and pictures are taken. I see the pictures in Hopeapeili magazine, the “Silver Mirror,” and wonder when it was that this dumbstruck expression came into fashion. That’s happening right now—new fashions are being created. But we don’t care about that because we have the spruces and the oaks, the blueberry pie, the beginnings of sentences. They’re all that we need.

  One of our summer guests pours himself some more wine and says, “Everything is going to have to be looked at from an angle of hope first. Kind of like what Martin Luther King said.”

  “Not King, Kant,” someone corrects him. “We should look at Kant again and ask ourselves what we can really hope for. Only then will we be able to ask ourselves what we can do about it.”

  The others nod. Kant is approved, but most of the gazes are aimed at the blueberry pie and the clumsy bee that’s decided it wants a piece, too.

  SUMMER HAS COME to a halt, the sky stands still, the grass
grows without making a sound, the wild strawberries grow heavy with dew and light, swelling from day to day toward the earth. The little girl picks them every morning, they patter into an enamel cup like blind, happy grubs.

  “Shall we put them on a stem of grass to make a necklace?” I ask.

  “How?” she says.

  I string her a strawberry necklace, and another for Molla. She wears it around her neck until the berries are soggy. She stains the curtains with the juice and a red drop runs down her neck and between her shoulder blades and one of the summer guests says, Child, you look like something’s pricked you.

  “It’s Eeva’s prick,” she says, pleased with her jewelry.

  “Don’t talk silly,” I scold her.

  “Eeva’s prick is silly,” she says, and I threaten to wash her mouth out with soap like my mother sometimes did to me.

  I wrap the threat in a grin and she laughs and runs away.

  THE MAN DAWDLES over his work. He prepares everything he needs to begin, but he never gets started. One of his friends brings him some canvases, which he stretches on wooden frames he’s built. He studies new techniques in the shed on rainy days, the ones they talked about in Paris last year. How about combining photographs and oils, what about that idea? Should he try it? He sets up his camera, ready for anything, but he doesn’t take any pictures.

  “What are you doing?” I ask sometimes, standing at the door after the guests have gone and before any more have arrived.

  “Practicing,” he says without turning around.

  “Practice with me. I’m bored. Ella’s taking a nap and the rain’s going to melt me soon if something doesn’t happen around here.”

  “Sit down there, then,” he says.

  He draws the outlines of my features in rough, careless strokes, starting with a soft lead pencil on paper, and it’s not bad. He doesn’t think of it as art, as a work of art, he’s just experimenting. I keep him company, sit there looking at him. He lights a cigarette and takes a drag, turns on the radio. I turn back to the book I’m reading.

  “So that’s the way it is,” he says after a moment.

  “What’s the way it is?”

  “This scribble.”

  “Are you drawing me?”

  “I’m trying.”

  An hour goes by, sometimes two. He mixes paints, makes a few strokes. Thinks maybe he should try ink after all, maybe he could bring out my features better that way. It’s a half-formed thought—mellow and careless. On porous paper, maybe. He decides he’ll try it later if he feels like it.

  The rain patters on the roof and neither of us would change anything about this moment, not even the fly making its way down the window pane on suction cups when we’re not looking.

  The rain, the sprays of blueberries in the woods, the red bucket in the sauna, the little girl in the house napping and dreaming. The two of us, completely without plans. We talk about something, but not about anything important. We talk about what we’ll do tomorrow on our way into town to pick up the mail from the apartment. Or maybe not, one or the other of us says. Maybe the day after tomorrow, the other one says.

  Dreamy, lighthearted, a cigarette in his mouth, he looks like he’s entitled to achieve immortal visions through half-careless glances.

  He doesn’t think he’ll paint me, but then he just begins.

  ON ONE OF these days, when the sun is shining warm and time doesn’t exist, when you can hear the strawberries ripening, Kerttu comes to Tammilehto. We’ve been in the country for two weeks by then. We have a week left before Elsa comes back. I haven’t thought about Elsa or Kerttu—just the sky and the blades of grass and the strawberries and evening walks to the vendor’s truck with him and the little girl. Kerttu comes unexpectedly. She’s with a man named Pennanen, an assistant sociology professor who’s taken to drink.

  I haven’t seen Kerttu since June. She’s been in Stockholm, re-creating herself. Bangs, thickly lined eyes, a skirt the size of a pot holder. Boots, even though it’s summer.

  Pennanen and the man are old friends. Kerttu was in Pennanen’s seminar in the spring and started an argument or two. Kerttu and Pennanen think they’re mortal enemies, but conflicts can sometimes give birth to strange friendships.

  They bring a gigantic pork roast, wine, and a bottle of Koskenkorva with them. Pennanen strokes the pork, brags about getting the best cut. He looks at Kerttu. She glares at him and I don’t know what’s going on between them, whether it’s anger or mere teasing or something else altogether.

  Just butchered today, Pennanen says. Let’s cook it up.

  He drinks and smokes the whole time and has a dirty mouth. Kerttu likes being able to put a man like him in his place. They fight constantly, argue about anything at all. Kerttu annoys him on purpose and he annoys her.

  We roast the pork on the shore. The little girl demands that Kerttu make herself a strawberry necklace, and Kerttu takes her up on it. They sit on the sauna porch sharing secrets not meant for me.

  The man stokes the coals under the roast and I chop potatoes into the salad while Pennanen starts to show signs of increasing drunkenness. He ticks off his points: the direction of the country, the threat of war, nuclear weapons, Vietnam, the status of women, artistic trends.

  He’s one of those people who start talking about revolution whenever they get some Koskenkorva in them. He’s also one of those who talk about good women and bad women.

  He’s trying to straighten Kerttu out.

  “Why aren’t you more like her?” he says. “Like Eeva? Accommodating.”

  “Eeva isn’t accommodating,” Kerttu says stiffly.

  Pennanen raises an eyebrow and snorts. “She’s here taking care of other people’s children.” He empties the bottle before finishing the sentence. “And other people’s husbands.”

  The man is on him in two steps, throws the bottle in the lake, pushes Pennanen up against the wall of the sauna, next to a fishnet hanging from a nail.

  “Drop it,” he says. “That’s the last mention of it.”

  He lets go and Pennanen straightens his collar, a bit bewildered, as if he doesn’t know what hit him.

  The little girl watches all of this, sitting on the sauna porch. The strawberries glow on her neck like red, forsaken eyes.

  “It was a compliment,” Pennanen mutters. “I mean a compliment to you, Kerttu. In a way.”

  “Start cultivating some other kind of compliments,” Kerttu says.

  LATE THAT NIGHT I take a sauna with Kerttu. The men are sitting on the porch and the little girl’s already asleep. I don’t ask until we’ve cooled off after the steam.

  “Am I accommodating? Is that how this seems?”

  Kerttu hugs me. “Don’t get hung up on that. He was just talking. Drunk.”

  “But do you think I should be more demanding?”

  Kerttu studies me. There’s a crease between her eyebrows. “When is Elsa coming?”

  “Next week, on Wednesday.”

  This is the first time Elsa has been mentioned at all. The little girl talks about her sometimes, but the man never does. Kerttu looks out at the lake and seems to be thinking of what to say.

  “Well,” she says finally. “When fall comes maybe you can do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like maybe focus on your studies. You’ll be starting your thesis, right? Come to the university with me. I’ve met some new people. I can’t wait for you to meet them.”

  “He loves me.”

  “That’s not a small thing,” Kerttu says.

  “And the little girl. She loves me, too.”

  “I can see that.”

  We swim across the bay and slowly back again, our voices echoing over the surface of the water. When my feet strike the bottom, just before I come up out of the
water, I think that in the fall something has to change.

  AS THE EVENINGS start to darken, I do it. He doesn’t even notice the change at first. He thinks I’m busy. Even in their apartment on Sammonkatu I go from room to room with a book in my hand.

  Maybe Eeva’s looking elsewhere, he thinks. She turns away more than she used to, but that doesn’t mean anything. He comes and kisses me. I can’t turn completely away. I answer his kiss.

  But in the weeks when I’m at home on Liisankatu, I don’t seem to hear the telephone when it rings, and if I happen to answer, I rattle off simple sentences. Yes, I say, the days are short, it’s getting darker than you’d expect. No, I say, I haven’t been to the movies. I’ve been sitting in the library. Yes. Busy.

  I hang up the phone. I walk out the door, go down the street, take routes I’ve never taken before. I go to bars I’ve never been to. I meet people, but mostly I just walk to the library or into the quiet of the lecture hall to open my books and toil away.

  I think that maybe I could be a teacher. I could easily apply for a position in the fall. Why not?

  November brings snow, December, candles in the windows. I have evenings when I don’t think about the man once, perhaps only once about the little girl. But I still carry them with me everywhere, hauling them around like a moving van looking for a home.

  I remember him even if I do walk down different streets. His smell is on me even if I am wearing new clothes. When you learn another person, you learn everything, the line of their jaw, the way they brush their teeth. Once you’ve learned the way someone mutters in their sleep as if they’re speaking some difficult ancient language, it’s hard to forget it.

  I know his sore spots and cruelties, the complicated pattern of his occasional joys and his sometimes surprising melancholy. I carry it with me all through the autumn as I try to live my own life. I carry it like a useless, awkward, heavy treasure. What can I do with it? Bury it in the park?

  I’d like to travel far away with the knowledge of how he curls his toes when he reads. I’d like to throw it off a mountain and see it bounce off the rocks below. And what about the way he sneezes? Or the little girl. The way she giggles! I could sell my memory of his sneezes or her giggles to a stranger on the street for a mark. I could trade it for a bottle of soda some Saturday in town, because I’ve started to feel like the memories are making me heavy and unwieldy. No, not heavy. They’re making me light, transparent.