True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  We don’t know about it.

  We need the song’s reassurance more than anything, because love has suddenly disappeared from our days, sunk into the cracks in the floor.

  He becomes more irritable from one day to the next, complaining about the light and how it changes all the time.

  “Sit still.”

  “I am sitting still. Just tell me how I should be and I’ll be it.”

  “More to the left. Stop turning your head all the time.”

  “I’m not turning my head. Maybe you are.”

  “Quiet.”

  There’s no tenderness in him. So different from how he is at night, curled up inside me. The sky refuses to stay put and I’m like a shadow.

  “Your face,” he says. “It’s narrower today.”

  “Same old face.”

  “Are you sure you had breakfast? How am I supposed to get hold of you if you’re changing all the time? Tell me that.”

  There’s a knife in his gaze.

  “This light refuses to settle down. Goddamn light.”

  “Maybe you just haven’t found the right composition. It’ll all start to go smoothly once you’ve found the right composition.”

  “I’m starting to think I’ll never find it,” he says gloomily.

  I get up and go to look at the piece. It’s unfinished, but it’s not bad.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, not looking me in the eye, turning away. “I just can’t get hold of it.”

  “I think it looks quite good.”

  “You’re biased. Besides, you’re not a professional. You don’t acquire artistic vision by wandering around museums.”

  Now I’m angry. “Well, what exactly are you trying to do? What are you driving at?”

  He runs his hands through his hair the way he often does, sits down, lights a cigarette, takes a drag, looks at the lake, and sighs.

  “I’d like there to be something old-fashioned about it. But something else, too. Something else. Some kind of angle.”

  He spreads his arms helplessly, looks at the painting.

  “This is just trivial somehow. Mediocre.”

  He’s already got the eyes—they’re recognizably mine. My gaze pierces through, as in those strange portraits from the 1600s that I’ve seen in museums. I’m floating, like a head blossoming out of nothing.

  “The eyes are good,” I say. “The expression is good.”

  “Not good enough.”

  SOME DAYS ARE different. On some days we forget his work, take the boat out and have a picnic. We have veal in waxed paper, a whole bottle of fresh milk, three kinds of cake, one that I’ve made and two from the neighbor lady. We have strawberry juice and chocolate melting in its foil wrapper. The little girl begs me for it the whole time; she’s allowed to have one piece. It won’t come out of its package, she licks it and smiles with smeared lips.

  There’s a picture of this. In the picture she looks triumphant, with the sun behind her as if it will never set. Later she remembers this boating trip, although she remembers nothing else from the whole summer. She builds memories from the words of others, but she tells her own daughter about this trip, as if it’s a precious thing—the nicest part was Mom and Dad and I went out in the boat to the island. Mom usually rowed, but Dad did sometimes. The sun was a friendly fire in the sky, it felt like the world had always been nothing but light and water and melted Fazer chocolate in a blue wrapper and I could lick it off the foil to my heart’s content.

  “Why don’t we stay on the island forever?” I whisper in his ear in the evening, after we’ve swum all day, made coffee on the campfire, roasted three fat fish that I caught with the rod, found little stones at the water’s edge and made a magic circle with them on the beach.

  “Yes, let’s,” he says, and kisses me. “Let’s imagine that there’s no other world than this.”

  “We can live here forever and ever,” the little girl says.

  And I say, “Forever and ever.”

  No one is thinking about the painting on the sauna porch; it’s trivial. No one is thinking about Elsa, not even the girl falling asleep in the tent with her hand in mine.

  I carefully ease my hand away once she starts to breathe evenly.

  The man is someone slightly different. There are two people inside him. The cruel, ruthless one who gives commands has disappeared without a trace now.

  He gently moves the blanket, patiently, as if he’s removing layers worn out by the world, getting them out of the way.

  He lowers himself, kisses my breasts. This is ours alone, and we can’t tell anyone about it.

  We become each other and remain the same and I love his sigh when I open to him and invite him in and he comes.

  AT THE END of June he decides to try a new medium. He prints ten silkscreens of me, working in town, in the living room of a friend who has the needed materials. Clumsy attempts—even he can see that. The prototype screams out like an exclamation point. His friend says it to him straight, using the worst possible word: cheap. He drives back to Tammilehto in a rage and quells his anger by stopping at the lakeshore on the way. The water is like a mirror, he lets his thoughts drift into communion with it. He eats some ice cream, skips a few smooth stones across the water. He was good at it even as a child—the stone bouncing on the surface of the lake five times, six, leaving a soothing trace of spreading circles.

  As he’s looking at those circles he gets another idea. He’s going to give up the silkscreens, the printing—it was ridiculous of him to even try! Why not continue what he already has? He’ll go back to oil painting, but he’ll try a new technique. He’ll paint over his previous works, layer after layer. That’s what he decides to do.

  Everything continues as before—I sit in front of him, unmoving, day after day, and I hover on the canvas, ethereal, incomplete.

  ON THE EVENING when everything ends, the little girl refuses to go to sleep. She runs to the sauna. She has woken up alone in the dark and is sleepy and a little confused.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks her. He takes her in his arms.

  “You’re drawing Eeva,” she says.

  “That’s right,” he says. “Except I’m painting.”

  “It doesn’t look like Eeva yet,” she says emphatically.

  “But it will,” he says. “If I work at it enough.”

  “Then Eeva will be in the picture completely,” she says. “Then she won’t have to sit anymore. She can play.”

  “That’s right,” he says.

  “Can I draw a moon?” she asks.

  “You can draw on another piece of paper,” he says, and hands her a piece. She announces that she’s going to draw my nose.

  “Then you can put it on your painting, Daddy. Right, Daddy? This nose? I can draw it better than you.”

  “Yes, you sure can,” he says absentmindedly, no longer hearing her because his gaze has become fixed on me.

  She continues drawing for just a moment, then comes over to me. She tries to get in my lap, but he tells her not to.

  “Ella, come away from there.”

  She doesn’t obey him, and he commands her to move with one gesture. “Go,” he says, pointing at the house.

  She stamps her foot, grabs his palette in one quick motion, and smears paint on the threshold.

  He’s severe: “Will you go inside and be good for a little while? Go play quietly. Or do I have to lead you there by the hand?”

  “No, I can go by myself.”

  I’m gentle: “I’ll come with you, honey.”

  He doesn’t want me to leave. She makes the decision for me: “No. I’ll go by myself.”

  She goes, her head bowed, a little deflated, dangling Molla from her left h
and. Molla’s feet plow through the grass and the hem of the little girl’s summer dress trails dejectedly through the clover.

  The two of us are left alone in the sauna. Nearly an hour goes by before he can get the right angle again. He gets annoyed. His shoulders hunch a little, his lips remain expressionless. He mixes colors, thins them. He adds too much thinner and curses.

  “Well,” I say. “Here we go again.”

  “So what?”

  He wants me to resist. I don’t take up the argument. I leave it to one side, like a cardboard box full of worn-out junk. It sits between us. I look at the lake.

  “Look this way,” he says.

  “What if I don’t? What if I look where I want to look? What if I decide I want to go for a swim?”

  He exhales wearily. “I’ve seen it all, I know all your tricks. It’s just an act now, just for show.”

  I sigh. It doesn’t please him.

  “Now you’re pouting.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. I can see you.”

  “You’re seeing wrong.”

  “I’m seeing what I’m seeing.”

  “You think you’re seeing what you’re seeing. In reality you don’t see anything. Reality is something else. You don’t have any concept of it.”

  I use the strongest words I can think of. I want to make him feel crushed. Suddenly tenderness is just a trinket. This is a competition. I want to smash him to pieces.

  “You’ve never known me, not really. You wouldn’t recognize me if I passed you on the street.”

  He throws his tools in the corner. He strides the few steps to where I am and pushes me against the wall. I can feel a bruise forming on my arm where his hand is squeezing tightly around it. It’s there for three days, but it’s the least of my worries—just a mark from a time when I didn’t have worries. But I don’t know this yet.

  He covers my mouth with his left hand so that I can’t utter a word. The wall presses another bruise into my back.

  “It’s your fault, this stagnation. You’re never in the place where you pretend you are. You’re always different, never completely here.”

  He lets go of me. I run. I knock over the easel as I go and notice that he hasn’t made any progress—I’m still floating on the canvas like some strange apparition.

  I run to the spruce grove and up the ridge. If I stopped now I would smell smoke, but I don’t stop.

  I go up the path all the way to the top of the ridge, where the boulders are. I don’t look behind me. I want to pretend I’m a forest, to hide under the moss. But I stand there, trembling. My arm itches, I can still feel the shadow of his hand against my lips like a gag.

  I have to wait a long time before I see him coming up the path. He’s full of regret. He stands next to the boulders.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I turn away. I won’t give in that easily.

  “Love.”

  “What? What is it? I’m bruised. You gave me bruises. Is that your idea of love? I have a different idea of it, I can tell you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t mean it. Forgive me.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Love is impossible for me to depict. I don’t know how to describe it, and everything gets lost when I try, everything essential about you.”

  I melt a little. I look at him, still not saying anything, delaying my answer. He looks helpless. We stand silent for a minute, two minutes.

  The flames are already rising below. We don’t see them because the wind is blowing from south to north, carrying the smoke beyond the spruce trees. The forest is crackling. I start to relent.

  “Come here,” I say finally.

  He comes. He takes me in his arms.

  We stand pressed against each other. Time passes, centuries twine into us. These fights are as old as the forest. A woman takes a man in her arms and pities him, with everything she has. They press against each other, they don’t measure time according to the rules of this world.

  I see the flames when I turn my head.

  “Look,” I say. It’s all I have time to say.

  For a brief moment I think, almost with exhilaration, that it’s surprising how like a drawing the flames are. Then there’s a sound, a crackling hum rising with each second, and I realize what’s actually happening.

  He acts faster than I do. He runs down the hill. Then I run. Through the curtain of smoke the spruce trees in back of the house shimmer like a mirage.

  He’s in the yard in a moment, I stumble on a tree root and fall behind. He reaches the door before I do—it’s locked. She’s locked the door, either by accident or on purpose.

  I could go through the wall. I could tear away the boards and the insulation, rip through the wallpaper. I run and look for the spare key under the garden table. He pushes me aside, picks up a garden chair and breaks the window with it. Before I have time to yell he’s torn the broken glass from the frame and disappeared inside.

  ELSA IS BENDING to reach the lowest drawer, searching for a file. She’s a little tired. She’s fantasizing about soaking her feet in bath salts this evening. She’s fantasizing about calling her husband and daughter on the phone. She bends down to grab a folder and sees a hairpin on the floor, a bit of dust next to it, and feels a little annoyed at the mess. And at just that moment, she’s called to the phone.

  She stands up, turns, and sees the secretary in the doorway. She thinks how the secretary is one of those people who conceal their worry in controlled gestures, who dress in jeans and wear their hair down in their free time, one of those people who just pretend to be secretaries during the day—the kind she was starting to see on the street. She has time to think this before she realizes that the news the secretary is bringing is extremely bad.

  Elsa still doesn’t know what she knows, but she knows she knows it.

  She’s shaking all the way home. The trip takes an exasperatingly long time—the taxi, the wait at the airport. She sits in a hall that is alternately abandoned and humming with people, drinks bitter coffee, holds the strap of her purse tight in her sweaty hand and looks at the clock, which has moved forward just one interminable minute, two minutes, finally an hour, two, three.

  She’s been here this whole time, in this stupid waiting room. She’s been here for years. The plane finally takes off into the air, and she squeezes the armrests and bargains with God, although she’s not a religious person at all. If her daughter’s all right, she won’t travel anymore. If her daughter’s all right, if she can breathe and run and dream like other children, she promises she’ll leave this all behind and be content with teaching beginning courses in a stuffy lecture hall. Heaven is quiet; no one hears her prayer. She leans toward the stewardess and asks, How much longer? Forty minutes, the stewardess says. Too long, Elsa thinks.

  When she arrives she rushes to get a taxi.

  The thought of her daughter sticks in her throat, she can’t get the instructions to the driver out of her mouth in her panic. For a moment she thinks that that’s what will keep her daughter alive. She’s protecting her life by being silent.

  She pays the driver hurriedly and the coins scatter around her like indulgences she’s anxious to pay. She doesn’t bother to pick them up.

  She sees her own reflection in the glass door as she pulls on the door handle. She rushes down the hallway, runs into a nurse. She asks about Ella and the nurse directs her to the room.

  When she opens the door, she thinks at first that it’s the wrong family, that she’s come into the wrong room, because the picture is complete and she doesn’t belong in it. A woman is sitting on the edge of her daughter’s bed. The little girl’s father—the woman’s husband, Elsa thinks—puts his hand on the woman’s shoulder. The woman reaches up a little. kisses him. He takes her in
his arms. The kiss is not a particularly long one, but it’s unmistakably the kind of kiss exchanged between people who belong to each other completely.

  All of this flashes through Elsa’s mind in a brief moment, half a second. Then the little girl looks at her and shouts: Mommy!

  Elsa realizes that she hasn’t come in the wrong door. She realizes what she already knew.

  ELSA STEPS ACROSS the threshold uninvited, pushes past me into my apartment, goes into the kitchen with her coat and shoes on and sits down at the table.

  “How is she?” I ask immediately. “How is Ella?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Elsa says. “As long as you stay away from her.”

  The air goes out of me. Ella’s all right. Elsa’s eyes drill through me, telling me I have no reason to be relieved.

  “Let’s straighten this thing out,” she says.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, although I know how childish it sounds.

  “We both know what’s going on. I know everything now. I know about what’s been going on here for years.”

  Like an idiot, I ask if she wants some coffee and she says she hasn’t come here to chat, so I might as well forget about the coffee. Nevertheless, so that I’ll have something to do I go to the cupboard as if I’m looking for something to eat. I don’t know how to hide my nakedness in front of her. She looks at me—there’s no chink in her. She’s beautiful, unbroken. I always thought there would be a chink. I thought that if this confrontation ever happened, this thing that I’d feared and gone over in my mind all these years, I thought that I’d find at least one little chink where I could curl up, where I could go for consolation.

  But there isn’t one, just a fearless, merciless gaze.

  I don’t see her hands trembling. I don’t see the uncertainty concealed beneath her resoluteness. She’s not feeling well; she could throw up right now. She spent the whole morning sitting, lying down. The uncertainty in her is like a disease.