17
WHAT ABOUT THAT one?” Grandpa says, pointing at a woman sitting in the lobby with a baby carriage.
He called, talked about the weather, then asked Anna on a tram ride, a little shy so that she interrupted him, answering quickly, with a smile in her voice, Let’s go.
Now they’re sitting in the last seat at the back of the tram. Anna sounds out the woman with the baby carriage in her mind for a moment, then shakes her head.
“No. She has a child. She looks happy. She should have a crack in her, but I don’t want to think of her that way. Let’s leave her happy.”
Grandpa nods. “I’d rather think about love,” he says matter-of-factly, as if he were talking about picking out some cheese.
He puts his hand on the back of the seat in front of him, taps on it like he’s practicing an étude, then looks fixedly at the door. The tram is coming to a stop. A teenage boy and two middle-aged women, one of them talking on a phone, get on. A man in a suit glances at the other passengers with something restless in his eyes, ruthless proposals for business deals on his tongue. Grandpa leans toward Anna and says jokingly, whispering, dramatizing his disappointment: “No, not love. No love of any kind, not the beginning of love or the end of it.”
“Do you want to get off?”
“I think we have to.”
They step off the tram at the next stop.
“I’ve got it,” Grandpa says. “Love begins with ice cream.”
“That’s original.”
“Prove me wrong.”
“All right. I can’t. Let it start with ice cream.”
They find an ice cream stand. Anna chooses nut chocolate. She’s trying to get him to try a new flavor, salmiakki-pear. He tells the vendor, “She could get me to eat garlic ice cream if she told me it was this summer’s flavor.”
He pays for the scoops of ice cream, taking out the bills with a flourish. They go to sit on a park bench.
“Now, then,” he says. “I’ll just bet you that something’s going to happen.” He tastes his ice cream. “Quite good.”
“See?” Anna says. “Stick with me and you’ll be as fashionable as a fifteen-year-old.”
“Then I’ll be a pretty modern old dog.”
Five minutes. Ten. People walking dogs, joggers. A father with a child on a tricycle. Finally, a couple. The boy isn’t holding the girl’s hand, the girl is smiling, the boy is explaining the laws of political economy.
Grandpa looks at Anna with raised eyebrows and says, as if giving a report, “Love begins with ice cream and inflation. What do you say to that?”
“I’ll make a note of it. I’ll also note that their names are Rebekka and Aleksi. Age: twenty-two. Third date. They’ve got as far as ideology, but not as far as kisses.”
Grandpa nods.
“There’s still time for that. The day will come when they’ll feel like they can’t go on living if they can’t see each other.”
“Then the uncertainty and jealousy begins.”
“And the fights. One of them will yell, You’re smothering me, and the other one will say, Your love is impossible to bear.”
“Who left their socks lying around? Who didn’t wash their dishes?”
“And still that feeling that you’d die, just die, if the other one ceased to be, that you’d be sick, only half an existence, if . . .”
He stops. The pair—Rebekka and Aleksi, or whoever they are—walk away. Grandpa looks at the cobblestones. The moment stretches out. A bird that Anna doesn’t recognize marks the pause in the scene with three sharp syllables. Is he thinking about Grandma or Eeva?
Grandpa looks at the sea. “You know about Eeva.”
“Yes,” Anna says quickly.
“Elsa told you.”
Anna is silent. It feels like she shouldn’t say anything. Then she says, “I tried to find out where she lives. I called the Population Registry.”
“Did you?” he says, not sounding surprised.
Anna can’t decide if she wants to say it, but she does. “Did you know that she’s dead?”
He nods. “This is a small city. Of course I heard about it. I would have liked a different ending to that story. Eeva deserved it. I would have granted her that.”
He sighs. Anna sees sadness in his face, the same sadness that lodges behind his eyes whenever Anna’s mother talks about Grandma’s medical arrangements.
“Preserve your separateness or narrow it to nothingness and melt together. That’s something that’s never stopped troubling me. Which one is it, when you’re in love? Sometimes I wanted Eeva to melt, to become a part of me. She had others, too, at least at the end. She lived a free life. She was ahead of her time in that way. Just the thought of other men made me wish we’d never be apart.”
Anna says what she believes is true: “Something new. Always wanting something new. Endlessly new, to the point of anonymity, rather than having things stay the same.”
Grandpa smiles. “That’s what Elsa says.”
“That’s who I learned it from.”
“I feel like I never knew Eeva completely. I certainly knew her as much as you can know someone close to you, I’m sure of that. I knew her well. But still, she remained a stranger to me, somehow. I don’t know where that feeling came from.”
Anna turns to look at the pale green of the park. The trees bow down. People are creating the summer by taking off their coats, throwing Frisbees and running after them. Just a few days ago Anna would have been looking for Eeva among the people in the park. She would have been thinking, that woman? Or that one?
“I think you knew her,” Anna says. “I’m sure of it.”
Grandpa stares straight ahead, his gaze downward, as if he’s looking at a very old scene, a memory from years back. Anna thinks, I’ve never seen him this serious.
“You know, sometimes Eeva was downright childish, uncompromising. I thought at the time that she was naive. I thought she was young. But later on I thought that she had a kind of conviction. She wouldn’t give an inch. She lived the way she believed.”
He smiles tenderly, as if treasuring Eeva’s stubbornness. “Love is the only way to make the world true. That’s what she used to say. She said, ‘No revolution can do it.’ Was that childish? I don’t know.”
They’d finished their ice cream. They couldn’t see Rebekka and Aleksi anymore, with their kisses yet to be kissed, their fights, their melding and separating. Grandpa leaned back, put his hand on his hip and suddenly looked as if he might whistle.
“Well, then. We’ve considered love, and may it do them good. I declare this meeting of the investigative arm of the committee on love adjourned.”
“May they find happiness.”
“And when the world comes between them, as it always does, may they traverse it patiently to be with each other—but not within each other. Let that be appended to the meeting minutes. Because it’s good enough to be within another person’s love.”
“Like how it is with you and Grandma.”
He smiled. “Yes. Like how it is with me and Elsa.”
18
WELL,” ELSA SAID, a little embarrassed. “Is this where I should sit?”
“That’d be good.”
They had prepared well, as if they were going on a trip. They had cookies, sandwiches, tea in the thermos, music.
Martti liked her embarrassment, which showed in a certain kind of smile she had. Eyes cast downward, neck bent slightly forward. My old woman, suddenly a bashful girl, he thought, and tenderness came over him so irresistibly that he had to turn and look at the colors.
“More than fifty years, and now you want to paint me.”
“Yes, now,” he said, feigning carelessness, not looking at her.
“Well, it’s about time,�
� Elsa said, with a smile.
It was as if he was drawing a person for the first time, although she was so familiar—the most familiar. He picked up a pencil and started sketching an outline. He got the line of the neck easily, the shape of the head, the nose. The years that were layered over her, he gathered them all.
“A little to the left.”
“Like this?”
“That’s good.”
He remembered how he had sometimes drawn the housekeeper, Hilja, as she washed dishes or peeled potatoes. He would sit on the kitchen stool and munch on a sandwich, drink some milk, chat with Hilja the way they usually did.
Hilja was eighteen and he was fourteen. She was a woman who perhaps had suitors, her own affairs apart from being their housekeeper. He was just a schoolboy.
He had drawn her breasts and arms, which were not delicate but vigorous, and beautiful for that reason, something almost thick around the chin, that’s what made her boyish. He had transferred her broad hips to the paper, her posture slightly bent over the sink.
Of course he was groping for a turn-of-the-century artistic expression: A Woman at Work. He had already learned that the distinctive quality of artfulness was achieved by being honest to the point of heartlessness. He couldn’t idealize, he should depict reality, with all its details, even its flaws.
You’re really good, Hilja had said. And then, more tenderly: Just look at that. I knew you had a fondness for something, that you were dreaming of something behind those beautiful eyes of yours, my boy.
He saw that Elsa was looking at him.
“Have you started yet?” she asked almost immediately.
“Have a little patience,” he said affectionately. “Or I’ll lower your modeling pay to two cookies.”
Elsa was quiet, the smile still lingering on her lips. She turned her head toward the window.
“You could have done this before,” she said. Not hurt, not complaining. Just stating it gently. “When I die, they’ll come and want to do an exhibition. They’ll buy this from you. The sketches, too. ‘Why did you want to paint a potato sack, Mr. Ahlqvist?’ someone will ask. ‘What exactly were you trying to express?’ Someone else will say that it’s a close allegory of society, the growth of the income gap. And you’ll answer, ‘No, that’s not a sack. It’s my wife, whom I managed to love for more than fifty years.’ Then they’ll go have coffee. They’ll eat cheesecake and between bites they’ll marvel aloud: ‘Imagine, for more than fifty years he loved a woman who looked like a sack.’ And someone else, some genius who’s stuck on his own ideas, will insist: ‘I don’t believe that it’s his wife, when you come down to it. I think he’s trying to depict the change in society from the agrarian to the urban. He’s depicting urbanization, no matter what he says. It’s that crisis, with all its painful aspects, that he’s trying to portray through this woman who looks like a potato sack.’ So it would have been better if you’d painted me when I still looked a little like a woman, to avoid these smart-aleck interpretations.”
“Quiet now,” he said softly.
She laughed merrily at her own train of thought. Martti plucked the familiar expression she had when she laughed. He saw it now; it had always been the same. Without commanding his hand he succeeded in transferring it to the canvas.
Now Elsa was looking at him.
“I like the way you’re looking at me,” she said. “I like the look on your face. It makes me feel like I have secrets to protect.”
He smiled. “I’m sure you do.”
1966–1967
AT THE BEGINNING of December I find Molla in the pantry. One of her eyes is torn off.
Molla is sitting on the bottom shelf next to a tin of barley flour. Her one eye stares at me in alarm. A scarf has been wrapped around her mouth. It’s tight, like a gag.
Strawberry jam has been smeared into her braids, oat flakes from the pantry shelf are stuck to the jam. There’s jam in the flour sack and the coffee canister, too, and a sticky splotch on the shelf paper. The little girl has opened a package of pearl grits and dipped Molla’s feet in the jam and then into the grits, making a pair of clever booties for her from the mess.
I pick Molla up. She’s collapsed in a slouch of pure horror, huddled in the cupboard as if it were a jail cell. The eye she has left is still smiling, her gooey braids sticking out happily in spite of her humiliation, trying to tell me that there are all kinds of wonderful things in the world, like bubble baths and lollipops, like the bright December sun just now coming across the yard, dividing it into darkness and light.
I go to the window.
The horse chestnut tree stretches out its limbs, mute and dreamy in the winter light. The little girl and her friend Teija are squealing in the yard, running to the swing, to the rug rack, then back to the swing again.
They’ve been playing the same strange game all day. The girl is good at thinking up new rules that change constantly. Now it’s become an endless tag where you cast spells and drive off spirits.
I open the window and hear her order her friend to the shady side of the yard.
She’s explaining the game. You’re not allowed to touch the chestnut tree. But you still have to go near it. You should get so close to it that you almost touch it, but if you do touch it then you have to go to the shady spot for the rest of the game and you can’t come out until dinnertime. Or nighttime, she says. You can’t leave until nighttime, if you come out at all. She explains the rules feverishly, as if she were reading a sealed dispatch from heavenly authorities.
“Ella!”
She doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t want to. Molla’s jam-covered braid sticks to my shirt.
“Ella, will you come here? I want to talk to you about something.”
She turns her back to me. The back of her neck glimmers under a red scarf.
“Eeva’s calling you,” Teija says.
She keeps talking, raising her voice slightly. She can definitely hear me. She just doesn’t want to pay any attention.
“Ella, come inside now.”
Teija looks at Ella hesitantly. Finally Ella lowers her head as she always does when she’s sulking and walks to the door.
There’s a noise on the stairs, they’ll be upstairs in a few moments. I take the scarf from around Molla’s mouth. A wound is revealed beneath it. The stuffing is poking out of her red half circle of smile as if she were coughing up dry foam. Her face has been cut with scissors.
My hands are trembling. Ella opens the door, stands on the threshold, looks at Molla, then at me. I pull the doll closer, I don’t know if I’m shielding it or it’s shielding me. Teija eyes me over Ella’s shoulder. I see the shocked look on her face.
Ella looks like she’s been struck. Then she shouts. “Molla’s supposed to be in the cupboard!”
“You’ve cut Molla. You’ve taken scissors to something you like.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Why did you cut Molla and get her all dirty?”
She flies into a rage. She turns red in a second, runs at me. She wrenches Molla out of my hands hard enough to tear her, and runs into the kitchen. I hurry after her. She puts the doll on the shelf, opens up the package of grits before I can stop her, and pours them over the doll.
“Now, Ella. Stop that, now.”
I take hold of her arm. I pull her away from the cupboard. She shoves me. She’s surprisingly strong, I stumble backward. I hit my hip against the corner of the table. She takes two steps toward the pantry, grabs the coffee canister forcefully off the table, opens it, and pours the grounds over Molla. I can see an almost pure triumph in her eyes.
“Ella!”
I go and grab her by the hair, take hold of the tuft of hair on the top of her head like a bunch of chives growing in the ground and pull. She screeches. I realize then that I’ve made a mistake. S
he’s already crying; my apologies don’t do any good.
She hits me in the stomach with her fist. It’s like a sharp little hammer, closing off my breath for a second. I gulp for air like a newborn. She stops yelling and stares at me. She’s bewildered by what she’s done, looking at me in fascination. Then she starts to cry. She goes to the cupboard and knocks everything she can get her hands on onto the floor. The jam jar shatters, a jar of preserves rolls under the table. Molla smiles on the shelf through it all, covered in jam and flour, the stuffing foam sticking out of her mouth.
I take Ella in my arms. She yells for help, keeps saying no. It doesn’t reach just to the walls, it escapes through the window. I close her tight in my arms.
“Shhh,” I say. “Calm down, everything’s all right. It’s all right.”
She yells, struggles, finally roars. I can’t reach her anymore. When I grabbed her by the hair, it pulled her into the dark.
Snot runs into her mouth, her yells make snot bubbles that pop like muffled emergency flares.
Teija stands in the doorway looking at us in horror. Then she turns, slamming the door as she goes, and runs down the stairs. I can’t be concerned about that now. I lift Ella in my arms. She’s still yelling. I stumble with her across the hall. She tenses her muscles and I almost drop her.
I put her in bed. She strikes at me. Red blotches come out in her cheeks like they do when she’s sick. Her feet flail at my face; one kick lands painfully on my breast. I lie down beside her and hold her tightly.
“I’m here. Don’t be afraid. Everything’s all right.”
“I hate you.”
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