“I’ll admit that the drunk drivers around here are clearly a safer alternative than chasing murderers in Helsinki.” I drained the rest of my lukewarm tea, wanting something stronger. Go away, Johnny, before I say something stupid.
“We could get together and jam some night, you and me and Jaska at least,” Johnny suggested.
“Sure, maybe. Nothing fast though. I haven’t played in a while.”
“Oh, we suck now. Jaska plays worse every year. He’s been out of work for the last few years. He’s been pretty messed up, drinking and stuff. Hopefully he can pull it together now that he has a job at the Old Mine. He never would have managed even that if Meritta hadn’t lined it up for him.”
“Meritta?”
“His sister, the artist. You must have read about her in the paper.” Johnny’s voice sounded strange. Then he changed the subject, back to his children.
It was almost midnight when Johnny left. I stood, with Mikko in my arms, staring after his rattletrap Nissan. We would see each other two days later at the Old Mine opening and talked about maybe getting together for a jam session the following week.
My mind was restless. I couldn’t calm down enough to go to bed, so I just kicked a sofa cushion around the room like it was a soccer ball. Mikko watched me for a few minutes and then decided to slip out through the open window. Eventually, I tried to reach Antti, but the Spanish-sounding woman who answered his office line said that “Doctoor Saarkiila” was lecturing. So I contented myself with brewing some super-strength chamomile tea. Still, sleep didn’t come until sunrise, which so close after Midsummer, meant around two thirty in the morning.
On Friday, I found myself looking forward to the grand opening gala that evening. I had definitely been living the quiet life for the past month and a half, during which time I had gone on only one pub crawl with Koivu in Joensuu, spent one night at Ella’s place, and celebrated Midsummer at my parents’ cabin.
In honor of the opening, I bought a new pair of lace stockings on my lunch break. As I walked past the City Kiosk, a local hot dog stand, I saw the police department’s new Saab cruiser in the parking lot. Hopponen and Lasarov sat inside the car enjoying milk and hamburgers while the engine idled cheerfully.
I couldn’t walk by as if I hadn’t noticed anything wrong. Approaching the car, I knocked on the driver’s-side window. Hopponen’s ketchup-smeared face grinned out as he rolled down the window.
“Hey guys, you know there’s that idling law now…It’s a little difficult ticketing other people if you’re breaking the law yourselves,” I said, trying not to sound irritated. I had almost gotten popped in the mouth a couple of times back in Espoo for asking polluters to turn off their engines.
At first Hopponen didn’t seem to realize what I was talking about.
“We have a right to our lunch hour!” he snapped so furiously that a piece of hamburger sailed onto my blouse.
“Of course, of course. I didn’t mean that. You just need to turn the engine off.”
“It’s idling if it’s running for more than two minutes,” Lasarov said, enlightening his junior partner.
Hopponen’s round mouth twisted as he pursed his lips. Angrily he turned the ignition key in the wrong direction, making the car give a wounded squawk. I said thanks and went on my way, wondering what names they were calling me. Nagging bitch? Tight ass? Something even juicier?
I guess I was making life difficult for myself. I knew the boys at the police station hadn’t been exactly overjoyed by my temporary appointment. There was already one female deputy sheriff in the county, and five policewomen, but a lady cop still seemed like a bigger exception here in Northern Karelia than in Helsinki. The men had tried to behave politely, but their suspicion just under the surface was obvious, and every now and then it came up for air.
Almost as soon as I arrived, they took the opportunity to let me know that I didn’t belong. The police department played Finnish-rules baseball in the spring and volleyball in the winter against the city employees to build community spirit. Since I wanted to get to know my colleagues better, I said I would love to participate. You would’ve thought I’d dropped a bomb in the break room. Finally Lasarov, the most senior officer, screwed up the courage to point out that everyone on the city team was male and in peak physical condition.
“But you should come cheer us on,” he said with a forced smile. Somehow I managed to swallow my comeback about the athletic abilities of pot-bellied pigs. But after that incident, I sensed the general impression that “the Kallio chick” didn’t really grasp her proper role as acting sheriff. And now I was confirming it by nitpicking. I just hated their apathy toward everything.
Not that I was a saint. Sure, every now and then I would have an attack of environmentalism and remember to take used grocery bags with me when I went to the supermarket. And whenever I obediently sorted my trash into tinder for the sauna stove, normal garbage, and biowaste for the compost heap, I felt glory shine down on me from above. And I knew the exhaust emissions of a few cars in Arpikylä, Finland, were insignificant compared to the smog hanging over Chicago, but I had to start somewhere.
That afternoon it felt like the boys were avoiding me. The break room emptied immediately when I went for my three o’clock caffeine hit. Since the evening’s gala was already on my mind, I didn’t pay much attention. To round off the workweek, I hung the picture of President Ahtisaari, which had come in the mail that morning, above the sofa in place of Koivisto. Should I take the old portrait to my parents as a gift? Maybe they could hang him on the wall in the outhouse at the cabin. Were there official regulations for the disposing of pictures of past presidents? Koivisto seemed to frown as I hid him temporarily in the bottom drawer of my desk.
I had biked to work that morning and planned on dropping by my parents’ house to shower and change clothes after work. I assumed I would take a taxi back to the farm from the gala. After a quick trip to the liquor store across the street, I coasted down the hill to my old house on Uncle Pena’s three-speed bicycle, which was in serious need of some chain oil.
The door was unlocked, but no one was inside. Strange, since my parents were planning on coming to the opening too. We did still have a couple of hours though. I stuck the bottle of gin I had bought in the freezer to chill and traipsed to the shower. The water running down my sweaty shoulders felt luxurious, but I avoided getting my hair wet. I had washed it in the sauna the previous night, even taking the time to massage in a pouch of henna to amp up its natural red.
By the time I made it out of the shower, the gin was nice and cold. I mixed it with lemon juice and had it on the rocks. The bite brought tears to my eyes, so I rummaged through my mom’s cupboard for a little powdered sugar to take the edge off the bitterness. The second sip tasted much better.
I emptied my makeup bag onto the bathroom counter and set down my tumbler next to my lipstick. How many Friday nights had I looked at myself in this mirror while getting ready for a party? I tried to peer through what I saw now to the old me, the round-cheeked girl of fifteen years ago with the boyish haircut. That girl didn’t have crow’s-feet or three strands of gray clearly visible in the sea of red above her forehead or such broad shoulders.
Surrounded by all these memories, that silly, bubbly Friday feeling came over me again, reminding me of a time when anything could happen at a party. Everything was possible. What if tonight was the night Johnny noticed me? That was a thought from fifteen years ago, right?
I needed music. Of course my sisters and I had taken all our music with us when we moved out, so all that remained was my parents’ classical and easy listening records. The radio saved me with some classic Hurriganes. “I’m a roadrunner, honey…” I took a third sip of my drink and started doing myself up. In fifteen years I’d learned a thing or two about that too.
My parents arrived while I was pouring myself a second glass of gin. I could tell by my father’s face that something was wrong.
“We had to go the h
ospital,” he explained. “Your uncle had another heart attack.”
“Oh God! Is he alright?”
“He’s still in pretty bad shape, but they assured us that he’d pull through. We’re supposed to call later tonight.” With a sigh, my father sat down on the living room couch, obviously lost in thought, and took a sip from my glass. My mother excused herself to start getting ready.
“Helena was there visiting and catching him up on the news when suddenly he just went blue,” Dad said.
“Does he know about the opening gala tonight?” I asked.
Uncle Pena had been the vice chairman of the town council for the previous four terms. Despite his drinking problem, he was a trusted local politician, and ten years earlier had been within spitting distance of Parliament. Reopening the mine as a tourist attraction had been an important issue for Pena for many reasons. Before taking over the family farm, he had worked in the mine himself for nearly twelve years. As the veins of ore gradually dwindled, Pena was among the first to start looking for industries to replace the jobs the mining company would no longer be able to provide. Finding a suitable entrepreneur to restore the mine had been one of the few things keeping him almost sober before his stroke.
“I’m sure he knows, but we didn’t talk about it. It would’ve gotten him too wound up.” Dad had unconsciously emptied my glass, so I took it to the kitchen and mixed fresh drinks for both of us. For my mother I poured a glass of dry sherry.
“I imagine Pena also likes Seppo Kivinen because Seppo’s father used to work in the same shaft with him,” Dad said.
“Yes, Kivinen is from around here, isn’t he? Did either of you ever have him as a student?” I asked my parents.
“I did in middle school.” Mom had come from the shower and was standing in the middle of the kitchen in her slip. I noticed she had dropped quite a few pounds since the last time I saw her undressed. The light-blue slip hung unflatteringly from her shoulders, the skin of her arms hung loosely, and new wrinkles were visible on her face. But even so, she wore the same expression as the girl laughing in the engagement picture on the mantelpiece. Her eyes, which were just as green as mine, still twinkled.
“I remember Seppo very well. He was in the first fifth grade class I taught in the fall of sixty-two when we moved here. That was such a pleasant group of children. There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about Seppo. He was just an ordinary, quiet boy. He was a good student too, good enough that I was surprised when he decided to go to trade school instead of taking the college track.”
“I understand he went to night school later to get into college and then started his MBA in his thirties,” my father added. “His family didn’t have the money to keep him in school. He didn’t let that get in the way of his ambitions though, and I’m glad he’s turned out so well.”
“Let’s start getting dressed so we can be on time,” I said.
Going into my old room, I pulled on my purple linen dress. I had bought it for Antti’s dissertation defense, and it was the most expensive piece of clothing I had ever owned. But no one had told me how easily linen wrinkles. Well, I thought, we would probably be standing for most of the gala, so I should make it through the evening relatively unrumpled.
I rolled on my new lace stockings and climbed into my four-inch heels, which I was finally learning to walk in reasonably well.
My parents were dressed in the same outfits they’d worn to Petri and Helena’s wedding: my dad in a sober, gray three-piece suit; my mom in a cyan chiffon dress. They were trying hard to create a festive atmosphere, but they were clearly concerned about Uncle Pena. So was I. I was afraid I’d never again see him sitting on the steps repairing some gadget out at the farm.
“What if I call one last time…” Dad said. The family resemblance between my dad and his brother—both short with broad shoulders—was striking, and their differences were slight. Dad might have been an inch or two taller and he still had some black left in his hair, while Pena had gone gray years before. And while Dad had lost his Savo-Karelian dialect sometime during college, Pena still spoke with the elongated vowels and exaggerated consonants of their youth.
“He’s better,” my dad said when he returned, digging his car keys out of his pocket. “He’s sleeping, and his heartbeat is regular. So I guess we can go.”
“Jesus Christ, Dad, you’ve had two glasses of gin! All of us have been drinking. We’re taking a taxi and that’s final.”
When Dad muttered something about how puny the servings of alcohol had been and about the waste of money, I promised I would pay for the cab. “I’m sure you can drive at least to the school in your sleep, but come on, Dad. I’m a cop. Am I supposed to write you up for drunk driving from the backseat?”
We had to wait a while for the cab to arrive, and by the time we made it up the hill to the Old Mine, the place was already crawling with people. The county governor was just starting his opening speech. A brass band was waiting in the wings to play a fanfare when the governor snipped the ribbon that stretched across the door of the Tower.
Quickly growing bored of listening to platitudes, I glanced around. In a stylish copper-brown suit, Kivinen was standing behind the governor. Apparently the woman in the green Marimekko number was his wife, Barbro. She seemed older than her husband, although she was clearly doing her all to conceal the fact. The blonde tint of her hair was nicely done—not too strong—and she had probably spent three times longer doing her makeup than I had. The governor’s speech seemed even less interesting to her than it did to me: she stared off toward the mine area with an empty smile on her peach-colored lips.
Ella was busy shepherding a children’s dance troupe that was scheduled to perform after the ribbon cutting and subsequent tour of the Tower. For some inexplicable reason, she was wearing the same folk costume that she had worn to our high school graudation ceremony. The blue dress with a red vest and embroidered white apron emphasized her broad shoulders and overflowing hips, and the cap, signifying that she was a married woman, appeared about to fall off. She seemed irritable, which wasn’t surprising given that she was in charge of organizing at least half of the shindig.
Ella’s husband, Matti, wore a caramel-colored corduroy suit designed by Vuokko Nurmesniemi; nowadays those wide, straight pant legs and Nehru jackets are practically the official uniform for artists in Finland. For once, Matti’s sandy-brown hair was neatly parted, his mustache was trimmed, and his round glasses were clean of smudges. He noticed me looking at him and gave a knowing grin. I grinned back.
Behind Matti glowed someone dressed in bright orange. She was in constant motion and seemed to be eagerly explaining something to a tall man standing next to her. The man was Johnny, looking just as scrumptious as always. The woman seemed familiar, but it still took me a while to realize who she was.
Meritta Flöjt, originally Merja-Riitta Korhonen before she changed her name, was the city’s most famous celebrity next to Kaisa Miettinen, the javelin thrower. Meritta specialized in figurative oil paintings. She was also a perennial topic of discussion on the pages of the women’s and culture magazines. No wonder: she painted beautifully; had hyperbolic opinions about culture, the environment, and eroticism; and possessed an almost Gypsy allure. With black hair, golden eyes, and voluptuous curves, she might not have been a classic beauty, but she was definitely sexy.
When I shifted my glance a couple of yards to the right, I saw Johnny’s wife, Tuija Miettinen. She gave me a crooked, slightly amused smile. We never liked each other. I was sure that Tuija had been jealous of my friendship with Johnny, even though I was the only one with any real reason to be jealous. Tuija had been the one who hooked him, after all.
Suddenly I wanted out of there, away from the party, away from Arpikylä, away from myself. But just then the horns blared and the governor cut the blue-and-white ribbon. The door to the Tower opened softly, invitingly, and the crowd pushed me along with them up the dark stairway.
3
The
Tower’s interior was dark and damp. Water dripped from the mortar gaps in the timeworn stone walls, and the steel-reinforced wooden staircase seemed to sag beneath the weight of the mass of people. As a child, I had been a little afraid of climbing the Tower. Was there any guarantee the stairs wouldn’t break? Could the whole building collapse? Or what if I fell off the top, right over the three-foot-high railing?
The climb went slowly because people were already making their way back down. The sweet stink of perfume mixed with a sulfuric smell emanating from the walls. Johnny and Meritta passed on their way back down, and Johnny smiled, his dark-red jacket sleeve brushing my arm. Ahead I saw Matti’s corduroy pants leg disappear through the hatch at the top of the stairs.
The view from the observation deck always gave me a euphoric feeling of freedom, even though there was nothing special about it—endless forest, here and there a lake reflecting the blue of the sky, the occasional patch of field with a black dot indicating the location of a house. In the summer, the view of the city was almost completely obscured behind the hill and all the tall birch trees that lined the streets. During my years in school, this view revealed a world beyond Arpikylä, showing me the many different roads that could lead me out.
And, crazy me, here I was back again.
I went right up to the railing, playing the old “how far down do I dare to look” game. I saw Meritta Flöjt’s splotch of orange down below, but Johnny had disappeared. Some people seemed to have glasses in their hands, so after a few more seconds of jostling around up top, I headed down to hunt for a drink.
As I made my descent, I tried to think of what I knew about Meritta—other than that she was my old bandmate Jaska Korhonen’s sister.
Two main themes dominated Meritta’s work as a painter: muscular male nudes and various phallus and vulva symbols. Meritta’s male figures decorated the office walls of nearly every modern female CEO and politician in Finland who considered herself sexually liberated. Her paintings were undeniably fantastic, and the collection of pictures of ideal men that I used to keep on my dorm room wall included a few of Meritta’s reproductions clipped from magazines.
Copper Heart Page 3
