Snow Woman

by Leena Lehtolainen

  But the school had a library kept by one of the Finnish language teachers—not my Finnish teacher, who was very religious, but another one who was about thirty years old and must have been selected for his position by mistake. Either that or he was the son of the headmaster’s best friend, but he had certainly abandoned the faith of his fathers. The library had plenty of religious children’s and young adult books, but it also had nonfiction and classics, and now and then Mr. Yli-Autio would bring in modern books too. Only the students who weren’t in the faith had the courage to check out those books.

  I remember my last year in middle school—my seventh year in school altogether—especially well. On Wednesdays school ended at two o’clock, but the library stayed open until our bus left. I would spend that blissful hour from two to three sitting and reading forbidden books. Mr. Yli-Autio had noticed my love of reading and gently led me away from the Anni Swans and Lucy M. Montgomerys, which I remember being off-limits too even though the characters were always going to church, to the modern young adult novels. Those had lots of things I couldn’t understand, like people who kissed each other without being married, and girls who had babies even though they were single. I didn’t understand how you could get a baby without a husband.

  Gradually I began to see that there were many things in the world I didn’t have a clue about yet. The hardest thing was realizing that the people everyone in my village called sinners or too worldly could be nice and interesting too. There was another girl in my class who was a bookworm. Anne’s dad was a doctor and her mother was an artist. Of course we became fast friends. She always wanted to save the world, which included shaking up all of my narrow views and luring me into sin. My parents didn’t look favorably on our friendship, but they didn’t presume to say no when a man like Anne’s father called them to ask whether I could stay after school one Friday for a sleepover at Anne’s house. We were in the ninth grade then. By that time I had developed into a woman. I was wearing a bra and had gotten my first period, both of which I was trying desperately to hide from my father and brothers. Trying to keep womanly things like that secret feels pretty crazy now since the women in the village were always walking around with big bellies and there was a birth about once a month.

  At Anne’s house I wore makeup for the first time in my life and put on a pair of Anne’s jeans when we went out on the town that night. Anne’s parents also seemed to think it would do me good to get a little distance from my community’s traditions.

  . . . He said he had noticed me years before in church and thought I would be the girl he would make his wife.

  I stopped reading and quickly flipped through the pages in my hands. Obviously one or two pages were missing. How vexing. I wanted to know what happened during Johanna’s first night on the town. Had she left the pages out on purpose or had she destroyed them entirely, maybe due to feelings of guilt or shame?

  The need to sleep was suddenly overpowering. Antti was already snoring softly next to me, a picture of a baby against his cheek. I threw the magazine to the floor and carefully set Johanna’s story on my nightstand. I only listened to the creaking of the house for a few seconds before falling deep into a snow-scented, fluffy white world in which Madman Malmberg had never existed.

  At work the next morning, I finally managed to arrange a meeting with Niina Kuusinen, and after handling a couple of routine matters, I was ready to dive back into Johanna’s autobiography. Apparently the preacher Leevi Säntti had come on the scene.

  He said he had noticed me years before in church and thought I would be the girl he would make his wife. I had dreams of going to medical school after my matriculation exams. My admiration for Anne’s father was probably part of it. My parents wouldn’t hear a word about my plans, even though I had the highest test scores in five subjects. Calculus was the only one I didn’t get a perfect grade in. My parents recommended home economics school or secretarial college, but neither interested me.

  I have to admit I was a little infatuated with Leevi too. He was eight years older than me, so twenty-six, good looking, and a stylish dresser for someone in our village. He always looked polished. His father and grandfather were famous preachers and had amassed a significant fortune. The Säntti house was one of the nicest in the county. Leevi was already off to a good start as a preacher and had plans to start a family as soon as he finished building his own house next to his parents’. He said he chose me because I was the right age and beautiful in the eyes of God. Of course that flattered me. Other than one crush in school and Anne’s father, no one had ever called me beautiful.

  We were married two weeks after my high school graduation. The whole village attended the wedding, along with Laestadian brothers from all over Northern Ostrobothnia. I was proud to become the wife of such a well-known, respected man, and I felt like a queen that day. My dress was spotless white and close-fitting, and I managed to do my hair so a few curls peeked out from under my veil. I didn’t dare wear the lipstick Anne had given me, even though I wanted to.

  I was completely unprepared for what happened that night though. As a strict believer, my health teacher had sidestepped our sex talk by saying that was only something for after marriage. My mother said it was my husband’s job to teach me. I’d read random things in books and magazines, and I had pieced some of it together, but reading is different from experiencing something personally. In retrospect, I realize Leevi was actually quite experienced sexually. He hadn’t bothered to save himself for marriage the way I had.

  I wasn’t prepared for the pain, the blood, or the shame of having someone touch the parts of my body I hadn’t dared even to let my own mother see for years. The same thing kept happening night after night, and after a few weeks I learned to tolerate my husband’s sexual needs. I must have gotten pregnant during the first week we were married. My first baby, Johannes, was born in March, one week after my nineteenth birthday. In November, I was pregnant again, and from then on my life has been mostly pregnancy, nursing, and caring for my children and the house. Leevi is away a lot preaching, and although my mother, my sister, and my mother-in-law have helped a lot in caring for the family, I haven’t had any trouble with extra free time. Usually I collapse into bed at night completely exhausted from the ruckus of the day.

  After my fifth child, Matti, was born, I made a discovery that is hard to write about. Matti was a big baby, almost ten pounds, and getting him out tore me down there pretty badly. As I was rinsing the scars, I discovered that spraying water on specific parts felt pleasurable. I discovered the sin of masturbation, which I’ve never confessed. Apparently the sin started affecting me, because I began having more and more rebellious thoughts. When I turned twenty-five, I remember wanting to run away for the first time. I daydreamed about taking the bus to Oulu, buying makeup and new clothes, eating food someone else had cooked, and sleeping in a bed someone else had made, between sheets washed by someone else. But of course I never ran away. I was too attached to my children. On the surface, I looked like an industrious, humble preacher’s wife who was raising her children to walk the paths of righteousness too. I felt horrible punishing my children for normal curiosity about their own bodies and suppressing their imaginations. I never wanted to make them as ignorant and repressed as I was.

  My eighth pregnancy was hard. I was anemic and had some dangerous bleeding. My ninth pregnancy was risky from beginning to end. My womb was worn out from the strain of so many children back to back, and I was in constant danger of uterine ruptures. In 1994, I spent more than two months in the Helsinki Women’s Hospital. It was there that a whole new world opened up for me.

  I had never been away from home for more than a week, and I missed my children terribly. Still, it was amazing to rest and have people wait on me. No one was monitoring everything I did. I could read whatever I wanted and even watch TV. During that time I broke a lot of our religion’s commandments, but I also learned the most amazing things abou
t the world, like that the wonderful feeling that came after rubbing myself down there was called an orgasm.

  Giving birth to Maria almost killed me, and the doctor at the Women’s Hospital told me my uterus couldn’t handle any more pregnancies. If I did get pregnant, the baby and I would probably both die. She was horrified when I refused to have my tubes tied and turned down an IUD and birth control pills. But she said she respected the religious convictions Leevi and I had. Leevi thought we had to submit to the will of God, but I had started to doubt that. My doubt aroused strong feelings of guilt and distress in me sometimes, but I didn’t know how to talk about it with anyone. I tried to refuse sexual intercourse with Leevi, appealing to the danger of a pregnancy, but he replied that a woman’s place was to obey her husband and that God was mindful of us.

  Last October, I discovered I was pregnant again. It was like a death sentence. Of course Leevi wouldn’t hear of terminating it. He knocked me to the ground when I suggested it, and I remember hoping that the beating would cause a miscarriage. But that didn’t happen.

  When my own doctor confirmed the extreme danger of the pregnancy, something snapped in me. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to leave my little children. I loved them too much. I found myself hating Leevi and my religion. When I was at the Women’s Hospital, I had heard about a women’s therapy center. I called their psychologist. She said I had every right to an abortion and promised to give me a place to say if I couldn’t return to the village after doing it.

  I knew that Anne’s father had a private practice in Oulu. I left my children with my sister and didn’t tell anyone where I was going. That was a first too. To my relief, Anne’s father remembered me and understood my situation. He arranged a referral to the hospital immediately. He seemed to understand that I had to act fast while I still had the courage to go through with it. I would have wanted them to sterilize me too at the same time as the abortion, but that would have required my husband’s consent.

  The abortion was an awful experience. I knew I was committing a horrible sin, murder. I was sinning against my religion and my husband. Maybe I was looking for punishment, because I went home and told Leevi, who beat me in front of the children and threw me out. I barely managed to grab a coat. Fortunately Anne’s father had promised to help, and he lent me the money to travel to the Rosberga Institute.

  The weeks here have been hard. My husband won’t let me see my children, and I miss them. I have a hard time bearing the burden of my sin, but I go on living because I know my children need me. They are the reason I’m doing this. There has to be a way I can get them back.

  After Johanna’s account ended, I sat for a while at my desk. I was so angry I felt physically ill. Although I already knew the broad outlines of Johanna’s life and was aware that there were people who still lived like this even in Finland, I was infuriated. Between the lines of Johanna’s narrative, it was so easy to read the humiliation, the emotional and physical violence, and her foreignness in her own skin. I abhorred religious fanaticism. My own relationship with God was courteous but cool. We left each other alone.

  Someone knocked at my door. I knew it was Taskinen just from the precision of his knock: three raps of identical force, evenly spaced. I told him to come in.

  “Hi, Maria. How’s your year starting out?” Taskinen said with false heartiness. I was sure this was going to be something bad.

  “I’m OK,” I said. “The Elina Rosberg death is still my top case. I’ll probably have to head up to Karhumaa north of Oulu to interview a suspect. One of the Christmas guests at the house claims her husband was in the area at the time Rosberg disappeared. I’d like to check his alibi.”

  “Couldn’t the local cops handle it? Or the National Bureau out of Oulu?”

  “I’d like to handle it myself.” Only after saying this did I realize just how curious I was to see Johanna’s village and meet the Säntti family, especially the patriarch.

  “It’s just about your security . . .” Taskinen pursed his lips and rubbed his nose, looking uncertain.

  “Do you mean Madman Malmberg? He’s not going to follow me to Oulu.”

  “We don’t have any solid intel on Malmberg’s location right now, but yesterday there were two bank robberies, one outside Hämeenlinna and another north of Tampere. Based on the camera footage, one of the perps might be Malmberg. The MO is similar to the Soukka Post Bank case. And I guess Ström told you and Palo that Malmberg killed his own father.”

  “Has that been confirmed?”

  “The eyewitness reports seem reliable, although we’re talking about winos here. Malmberg found his dad with two drinking buddies and then stabbed him ten or more times before using a saw. The other two drunks took off running. They didn’t report it to the police because they thought we’d blame them. In prison Malmberg talked about breaking out so he could settle old scores. Apparently he mostly talked about killing his father.”

  “And Palo and me, right?”

  “He did threaten you, along with the prosecutor and the judge. I think we should take this seriously. You know Malmberg. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if you and Palo were in real danger.”

  I opened the top drawer of my desk and pulled out my revolver in its shoulder holster. “I do have this. It won’t stop crossbow bolts or pipe bombs, but it’s good against knives. If there’s time.”

  “Palo is wound really tightly. He suggested that the two of you should work apart for the time being.” Taskinen’s eyes told me that he understood the reasoning behind Palo’s suggestion. As a pathological misogynist, Malmberg would probably go after me first.

  “What if I take the night train up to Oulu, assuming my witness is available?” I asked.

  “We’ll see,” Taskinen replied and asked a few more questions about the Rosberg crime scene and the progress of a couple of my other cases, but I had the feeling he was less worried about the investigations than about evaluating my mental state. As a result, I played it cooler than I actually felt. Just me here, one of the guys, no need to worry.

  Still, when I left to interview Niina Kuusinen, I took extra care adjusting my shoulder holster under my blazer and even thought briefly about grabbing a bulletproof vest. Luckily my car was safe in the garage downstairs. Even so, I kept imagining once I drove away from the station how Malmberg could have snuck a bomb under it during the night. Fortunately I made it to Tapiola to meet Niina Kuusinen in one piece.

  The Espoo Music Institute, where Niina worked as a teacher, was located in the Cultural Center, in the heart of Tapiola. The institute was still on Christmas break, but Niina had said she would be practicing on the third floor, in the Grieg room. I frequently visited the library in the building and occasionally took in a concert or a play, but the classrooms upstairs were new to me. I had to wander around for a while before I found my way—mostly by sound—to the right place. Clarinet playing came from the Mozart room, and a piano trio was practicing in the Beethoven room, but from the Grieg room flowed a gloomy Chopin polonaise, which cut off midbeat when I knocked on the door.

  A traditional upright and a full grand piano, the lid closed, had been squeezed into the tiny room.

  “So you still want to ask me about Elina’s death?” Niina blurted before I could even open my mouth. “Haven’t you solved it yet?”

  “So far all we know is that she died of exposure and that when she died she was in a state of confusion brought on by a mixture of alcohol, sleeping pills, and antibiotics. She was probably unconscious. Did you give her whiskey with Dormicum mixed in?”

  Narrow fingers with large knuckles covered her mouth in a childlike gesture as her almond-shaped eyes widened. “Whiskey? What whiskey?” Niina’s voice was hoarse, like she had a cold.

  She had stood up to let me in the door, but now she sank back onto the wide piano bench. Her dark hair fell over her shoulders onto the keyboard. For a moment her face was hidden
behind the curtain of hair until she swept it back.

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Did someone kill Elina with poisoned whiskey?” she said.

  “Not quite.” I sat down on the other piano stool across from Niina. The room was so cramped that my knees almost touched her slender thighs in their black corduroy pants. “Why did you go to Rosberga for Christmas, Niina?”

  “What does that have to do with Elina’s death?” Niina plunked a few discordant notes on the piano and then kept talking when I didn’t answer her. “Why did I go? I was lonely. My dad was in France. He spends all his winters there since Mom died of cancer three years ago. I hate Christmas, all the fake peace talk, the idyllic family crap. All it’s about is giving people stuff. That’s it. I hadn’t planned to do anything over the holiday, but the loneliness hit me. Elina once said I could always come to Rosberga. So I took a taxi over there.”

  The image I had of Elina Rosberg while she was alive was not that of a mother hen gathering the whole world into her bosom, but I could still imagine Elina sincerely inviting Niina to stay and asking Aira to set a sixth plate at the table and put clean sheets on the bed. But welcoming as she was, Elina wouldn’t have made a fuss over Niina.

  “So you knew Elina well enough to go to her house for Christmas without an invitation?”

  “Well enough . . . I’ve been to a few of her courses. A body image seminar last fall was the first one. The classes at Rosberga are very . . . very intense. You always get to know other people really fast. I was at the emotional self-defense course too, the one you came to talk at in December.”

  “Oh.” Usually I remembered faces, but apparently Niina had succeeded in hiding in the crowd well enough that she hadn’t caught my attention. “What drew you to Elina’s courses?”