This Is Not Your City

by Caitlin Horrocks

  Nika is still missing, and Daria still does not know what to do, so she heats the sauna. She strips off her clothes and lets them sit in a heap on the bathroom floor. She fills the red plastic bucket with cold water and pulls the ladle from its peg on the wall. Paavo is always saying he will buy birch, a proper bucket and scoop, but Daria doesn’t care. She heats the sauna hotter than she ever has before and dumps water on the rocks until sweat runs into her eyes and they hurt so badly it’s okay if she cries. The steam is searing. She has left her earrings in and she can feel the silver getting hotter, drawing the burn up through the hooks into her ears. They will blister if she leaves them, burn her fingers if she takes them out. She tugs them quickly from her ears and lets them drop between the pine boards to the floor.

  When she steps out into the bathroom her eyes are sore and so salted she can barely see. She wraps a towel around herself and walks to the bedroom. Paavo is sitting on the bed watching television, duvet over his legs, his chest bare. He has an old man’s body, with small, pointy breasts, white hairs curling around the nipples. Skinny legs and arms, a great melon of a belly. His hair is gray but thick, with a swoop above his forehead; he is not so very old, yet.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “No. Yes.” She mimes sweating, rubs her eyes, says “ouch.” Paavo nods, willing as ever to be lied to.

  “Sauna. Still hot. If you want,” she says.

  Paavo shakes his head. Daria wonders if her body is still hot enough to scald him, wonders what damage she could do if she reached for him now. Paavo turns the channel from Formula One highlights, looking for something he thinks she will like better. He stops at an old episode of Friends and Daria listens to the laugh track. Someday, she thinks, if she grows old in this country, she will know by herself what’s so funny. She has seen this episode already, back at home in Vyborg, the voices dubbed. Chandler is inside a box on the floor, apologizing. She recognizes this much, his apology, and she realizes it is a word that Finnish people never speak aloud. Excuse me they say easily, but never this, olen pahoillani, a sad man locked in a box. She wonders if Nika knows this word yet, pahoillani, if she could say it in their new language and be understood. Olen pahoillani. Tyttäreni. I’m sorry. My daughter, I’m sorry.

  Daria puts on her nightgown and joins Paavo in the bed, he under his comforter, she under hers. She lies on her side, facing away from her husband. She hears him turn the television off and put the remote on the nightstand. He puts his hand on her shoulder, and she is waiting for it to trail lower, down her spine or over the curve of her hip, when instead he touches her hair. He pets her head like a child’s. “It will be all right,” he says, and Daria is grateful, but somehow lonelier. Sex is a language they can pretend to have in common; he grunts, he waits for her to sigh, and they can imagine that they understand each other. She doesn’t like it when Paavo talks in bed. Her ears know he is a stranger, and if he spoke while he touched her, her skin would know it, her bones would know it, her sex would know that she has agreed to spend her life in a stranger’s bed.

  The agency promised her no better. She has not been cheated. You have a daughter, they told her. Fourteen years old. What do you expect us to find for you? A divorcée, no less, which seemed to imply to the matchmakers a lack of fortitude, fatally unrealistic expectations. Her first husband did not beat her, she had been forced to admit to them. He was drunk only on weekends when he was in Vyborg, which was only two weeks out of every sixteen. He went to the oil fields in Western Siberia, and brought home money, and how could she be so dissatisfied with someone who was not even there? You wouldn’t understand, she said to them. It is what she has been saying for nine years, and what started as reluctance to unburden herself to nosy aunts and cousins has in those nine years become something true. She has forgotten why she staked her hopes on something better, something different, why she was so sure of success. Daria knows that if she thinks about the divorce too long she will be forced to admit that she would not do it again. It is a monstrous realization that she has made a mistake of that magnitude with her life, something that cannot be mended or taken back. If she could choose again she would stay, and it seems like the worst thing she could know about herself.

  If she had stayed, she might never have had to go to work at the Vyborg market hall, the building by the bay that still has Kauppahalli inscribed in cement above the main doors. In the years after the war, her parents told her, thousands of such signs were scratched out, repainted, re-hung. The statelier ones, letters cut into granite or marble, have stayed. So she knows the Finnish for market hall, for train station, for bank. She also knows the Finnish for chocolates, and taste, and very inexpensive, the words she used behind the broad table at the back wall, plastic bins of foil-wrapped candies before her. The teenager at the next table sold bootleg CDs and taught her to recognize the Finns. Terrible clothes and stylish glasses, he told her. Jogging suits and sharp dark frames. That’s the look of money.

  Daria thinks she will not sleep this night, the sky a starless waking blue, but hours later she finds herself stirring, groggy, the early light pale and confused. When Paavo wakes she has porridge ready, homemade and heavy, a pool of black currant jam in the middle of the bowl. He manages to ask her if she wants him to stay home from work. “Go,” she tells him. Paavo works at the pulp factory, and the smell of him after a shift is the smell of the air over the town, the wind off the lake; it smells something like stewed cabbage, and the townspeople have only one joke about it. Smell that, they say, noses in the air. The scent of money. On good days the breeze comes from the other end of the lake, where the Japanese have built a new sawmill. That smell reminds Daria of the forest near Ladoga, picking at bark with her fingernails and opening a divot that bled sap and the pine scent of the tree. She told this to Nika one day when the wind was good, and Nika rolled her eyes. “It’s a sawmill, Mom. That’s the smell of dead trees. Dead trees getting chopped into little bits.”

  Not little bits, Daria thinks, not unless the grain is bad. She knows the trees she smells are being planed into boards, long and straight and someday someone’s home. But they are dead all the same. She must grant her daughter that, and to explain the rest seems like so much effort. Nika is fifteen now and does not like to listen.

  While Daria waits for the interpreter, she cleans the kitchen. She cleans the venetian blinds slat by slat because she cannot figure out how to unhook them from the window frame. The thin panels are sharper than they look, and she cuts her fingers in three places. She leaves a streak of blood on a slat close to the ceiling. She likes hiding a part of herself in the apartment, as if it is a claim to the space, a promise that she will not have to leave it, although her entire life has taught her otherwise. She was born in a city that once spoke another language. She thinks the Finns who visited came only to be angry; they kicked the dissolving sidewalks like the tires of an old car they would have taken better care of. This is not your city anymore, she wanted to tell them. It has not been your city for fifty years. Leave us alone.

  Daria scrubs the stovetop and wonders if the translator will be a Russian-speaking Finn, or the other way round. She wonders whether to make tea sweetened with jam, or the endless cups of coffee her husband drinks. The doorbell rings and Daria’s heart is frantic. Through the peephole there is only a sour-looking man, older than she is, younger than Paavo. “Daria Kikkunen?” he says when she opens the door, and she nods. She listens to his accent and makes them coffee. The interpreter asks her about Nika and Matti, about their weekend plans. Daria is embarrassed at how little she knows. Only the backpack Nika filled, the sleeping bag she borrowed from Paavo and complained smelled like an old man, smoke and aftershave. The borrowed car to drive north of Kuusamo, to celebrate the midsummer weekend.

  The interpreter asks about Matti, and Daria tells him what she knows, how one night four months ago they were all sitting in the living room when a car pulled to a stop outside and honked its horn. “Poikaystäväni,” Nika anno
unced in Finnish, “my boyfriend,” took her coat from the hallway closet and left. Nika cannot speak the language, had at that time been in the country for all of eight weeks; what kind of a boyfriend could she have? The interpreter gives Daria an ugly look, but leans closer, his hands stretching over his notepad and pen, his sleeves sweeping the table. Daria leans back without thinking, then asks herself why she is bothering to be afraid of this man, balding, his skin the white-yellow of new potatoes. Daria tells him that she has seen Matti a few times, that she remembers a boy like a great gold mastiff, giant and eager and mysteriously happy. Dogboy, Daria says to herself, although she is forced to admit he is handsome in a way that seems terribly young.

  Nika thinks they have never spoken, her boyfriend and her mother, only nodded at each other from the apartment door as she comes or goes. Nika does not know that six weeks ago they ran into each other in the Prisma parking lot. Daria remembers being surprised when she left the store that evening and there was still light in the sky. A cold wind, but a portion of sun: signs of spring. Matti and Daria recognized each other and said “hello,” cleared their throats, shifted their feet. Then Matti said, “Nika is a very nice girl.” He said it slowly and clearly, and she understood him. He said it a little loudly, too, which embarrassed her, but she could see he was trying. “I like her very much. Do you understand?” he asked, and Daria nodded. “I can take—” he said, pointing at her shopping bags, and before she could protest he’d lifted them out of her arms and begun to walk toward Paavo’s car. He waited while she unlocked the trunk and then put them down carefully. He handed her the plastic bag with the eggs, and Daria was surprised that he would think to do that. She was surprised that he seemed such a decent boy, so surprised, in fact, that she felt guilty for her astonishment. He took her hand, held it for a moment. “It is good,” he said. “That you bring her. That you bring Nika here. It is a happy thing.”

  Daria knew he was speaking like a child for her, but even so, whatever he said next slipped past her. She smiled anyway, pressed his hand between hers. It was something about “happy,” about a “good life,” about “welcome.” It was something that, standing there in the Prisma parking lot with a beautiful boy as cheerful as a golden retriever, she could convince herself would someday be true.

  “He’s a decent boy,” Daria tells the interpreter. “Truly. Better than I thought.”

  The interpreter seems impatient, a man who learned her language thinking it would be of more importance than it has turned out to be. The language of diplomacy has turned into the language of sad women in kitchens and too-sweet tea. He asks for her patronymic, and Daria doesn’t know if he wants to address her properly in Russian or simply be intrusive, make her reveal a name she no longer has any use for, a person she no longer is. Daria Fedorovna, he says, tell me about your daughter, and for a moment Nika feels like someone else’s child. The interpreter eats four slices of pulla, one after another. It isn’t homemade, but he compliments her anyway. Daria pulls more pastry from the bag and slices it finer, fans it out on the plate. She pours him another cup of coffee.

  Nika hadn’t wanted to leave, Daria confesses. There was her school, her home, her whole life. There had been a boy. He was twenty and worked in the post office. Nika was fourteen. Daria forbade her to see him, and Nika laughed at her. Now in this country Nika looks too old, eighteen instead of fifteen, but in Finnish she speaks like a child. I don’t want. I do. Yes, I like cigarette. Daria is scared that Nika, too, will end up in a stranger’s bed, and if that happens this will have been for nothing.

  “Do you think she might have tried to go back?” the interpreter asks her, and Daria doesn’t know. It seems so monumentally stupid, a kick in the teeth to her mother, to the marriage. It seems like something, on second thought, Nika might have decided to do. But when Daria looks in Paavo’s filing cabinet Nika’s passport is still there. She shows it to the interpreter. One page has Nika’s visa glued in, another is stamped Nuijamaa, where Paavo drove his new wife and daughter across the border for the first and last time in a Ford Fiesta. “It looks the same,” Nika had announced, crossing into Finland. For thirty kilometers of nothing but forest she was right. The towns, though. Even the villages. So tidy and glossy, pasteurized to the blue-white of skim milk. It was a long drive, and at the end of it was a town so small, so far from the border, it had none of the amenities the agency had suggested she look for: no language classes, no foreign social clubs, no international center where she could sit with other Russian mothers and discuss ways to save their children.

  The interpreter thanks her for her time, when it is clear that it is his own that he feels has been wasted. The pad he brought to take notes is mostly empty. She shows him out and then stands on the balcony, watching him unlock his car and drive off. The green on the trees is still pale, the birches fluffy with lightveined leaves. It was a long winter, and patches of snow stayed slumped in the shade of the pine trees until May. Now Daria has not seen stars for weeks, and she does not miss them. She has put potted plants all along the edges of the balcony, some balanced on the railing and tied precariously with twine to the rungs, and in the long summer light they are finally starting to grow. The blue nights husband the herbs, the vegetables, which they will have fresh and now not so expensively. The supermarkets here make her nervous. It is sometimes a physical pain, to pay so much for things. In the register lines she sweats and brings the groceries home with damp patches under her arms.

  Daria looks in the cupboards, plans dinner. She takes steaks from the freezer to thaw. It is too early to do anything else and the apartment is not big enough to occupy her with cleaning. She did the living room and Paavo’s bedroom only yesterday, when Nika was already missing but her mother did not even know. So Daria turns the handle of Nika’s door. Her daughter has learned at least one thing in Finnish: Pääsy Kielletty. She has written it in black marker on a piece of notebook paper and taped it to her door. No Entry.

  Nika’s room is a glorious mess, alive with her daughter’s things, the smell of her, the perfume Daria suspects she stole, the floor shining with the glitter Nika glues to her eyelids with Vaseline. The top of the dresser is littered with makeup, a dark purple lipstick worn away at a sloping angle, a black eyeliner as blunted as a crayon. Nika wears thick streaks of it every day, doesn’t wash it off at night, comes out of her bedroom in the morning looking like a sluggish raccoon. Daria wants to tell her that she must always take off her makeup, that to leave it on will someday make her look ten years older. She wants to tell Nika a thousand things, and practices speeches to her daughter in her head so often they are threadbare before she has the courage to say them aloud, as if struggling so hard in one language has made her mute in every other.

  The marriage is a gaping hush, an unraveling hole that cannot be darned. It is growing. It has swallowed the girl Daria was, who spun terrible fairy tales in her school notebooks, about princesses and white horses and the blood-pricked thorns of roses, the icy shards of hearts. It has swallowed the woman Daria was who narrated her days. Who said, this is what happened today. This is who I saw. This is what we talked about. This is who has gotten fat. It has swallowed the woman who asked, how was school today?—and worse, the silence has swallowed the daughter who sometimes answered her. Daria has sold herself for nothing, because her daughter is becoming as mute as she is. How was school today, she says in Russian, and Nika has no answer, not in any language, not in the one she was born with, or in the three she is supposed to be learning. Not in Finnish, or the English she takes three times a week, or the Swedish she is required to take for two, another language she cannot speak, another she does not need, another class she will fail. Paavo has had to put his signature on Swedish tests turned in blank, Nika’s name written on the top and every question unanswered. Can’t you try harder, Daria has asked her. How do you still know nothing? Speak, Daria has begged her. Just speak. Please.

  If Nika writes fairy tales, she has never shown them to her mother
. Math was her best subject in Vyborg, and in Outojärvi it is one of the only ones she passed. Her marks would be perfect except for the word problems lurking at the end of every exam. Sometimes she reads them well enough to solve, and those tests Daria sticks to the refrigerator. Nika is a practical child, and has never, as her mother once did secretly, rhymed storm clouds as dark as her soul, or a love that burned like fire. It is just as well, Daria thinks, because the love Daria has known has never burned like fire, and her heart has never broken into shards. It simply beats and that is a language of its own, useless and irrefutable. The heart has one word only, and however wrong or right her life might have gone it would have the one word still.

  Daria scoops clothes from Nika’s floor into a hamper, puts tissues blotted with lipstick into the wastebasket. The school year ended three weeks ago, and Nika’s schoolbooks are in a pile in the corner, where she dumped them to empty her backpack for camping. Daria stacks them neatly. Nika’s grade report recommended she repeat the year. Paavo said he’d talk to the headmaster again, meet with the teachers, see what he could do. He did not sound hopeful.

  “It’s okay,” Nika shrugged.

  “Don’t you want to keep up with your friends?” Daria asked, in Russian.

  “What friends?” Nika said, then added, because she could, “Matti’s graduating anyway.”

  “And doing what?”

  “Looking for work. Staying in town.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Why do you care? You sold candy. You don’t work at all now.”

  “I work.”

  “Being Paavo’s wife? I guess that’s work. I guess that’s some kind of work,” Nika said, and Daria blushed.

  Beneath the stack of Nika’s school things there is a folder Daria recognizes, a packet of “Helpful Hints” from the agency. Phrases for courtship, for proposals, for visa arrangements and a life together in two languages: You are very beautiful. I believe strongly in good family life. My hobbies are to bake and cook. I am sincere and passionate. I like fidelity.