And the figure wasn’t a man. It was a woman.
Clouds blocked the sun.
The wind picked up.
The woman’s black dress billowed like a rag wrapped around a scarecrow. Its tatters spread around her, twisting in the wind.
The waves and the wind drowned her cackling, but there was no use hearing it, anyway. The woman tugged the boat toward the rocks like a raft made of reeds.
Maisa woke up without a start. She had grown numb to her nightmares.
She sat up on the edge of her bed and let her comforter fall to the floor.
“What is it now?” she asked her empty apartment.
It responded with the ringing of her cell phone.
Maisa groaned and looked at her watch. Ten thirty in the evening. Her medication had turned a night owl into an early sleeper. She’d be knocked out at nine, whether she liked it or not. And it was good. She was usually the first to arrive at the office now, often even before flextime began; so she had to remember to get up from her desk and sign herself in, then record the hours she’d already been at the office on a separate timesheet.
Maisa looked at the unknown number on the screen and answered.
“Hello?”
Static.
The hollow growl of the wind on the other end, like someone tearing into damp cardboard.
“Help.”
Then silence.
Maisa waited for another phone call, but it never came. She looked at the clock and decided to go to work.
The next call came during business hours.
Maisa asked her client to wait a moment. She walked into the hallway and stood there in the air conditioner’s hum. She pressed her ear to the phone. Fluorescent lights reflected off the floor.
“Hello?”
The torn roar of the wind. Then a voice.
“When will you be home?”
Maisa said the time.
“When will you be alone?”
She wasn’t sure if the voice had been the same one that had asked for help, so she didn’t say.
The caller hung up.
On her way home Maisa saw a reflection of herself in the optician’s window. Her coat was puffed up by the wind. Her face looked like a white mask. The wind had released her hair from her hairpins, so it waved like black flames around a white core. She thought she looked like she was smiling, although her face didn’t feel like it was.
The psychiatrist had asked her to not pay any attention. Many psychosis symptoms went away if patients just carried on with their lives. You just had to choose which observations you could trust and which you couldn’t. Life made sense. But occasionally it could exhibit nonsensical things, too. Maisa should talk about the sensible things and scoff at nonsense. Only a psychiatrist should hear the latter.
The psychiatrist had asked her to describe the sensation that didn’t allow her to sleep. It had been difficult, but she always tried.
“When I close my eyes, it’s as if I start hearing voices immediately.”
“What sort of voices?”
“It’s hard to describe.”
“Do you hear words?”
“Maybe.”
“What kind of words?”
“I can’t understand them. It’s like listening to something in a foreign tongue.”
The psychiatrist had asked her to give the sensation a name. Maisa had thought about it for a good while. Or rather, she had pretended to, because the answer had come to her immediately. It just felt so stupid.
“The black tongue.”
The psychiatrist had been pleased.
“Let that language be whatever it is,” the psychiatrist had said. “An unknown mother tongue that you do not even need to understand.”
And Maisa let it be. One day it was easy. She was happy to realize that people were meant to sleep.
Maisa went to the store and bought oranges, which was unusual—she hated peeling fruit and the smell of citrus on her fingers.
As soon as she got home the phone rang. A voice on the other end said, “I’m here right now.”
She didn’t walk downstairs.
She turned the TV on and watched insects that seemed to be moving in ecstasy, although they were simply performing their everyday tasks without question. She could tell by the quick movements of their joints. They weren’t working on a dissertation. Even these insects had learned that the dissertation should be left alone. Never even start working on one.
What she should do is sleep and stamp her time card.
Maisa fell asleep early.
The doorbell rang.
She looked toward the foyer and turned the TV down. She listened. The room was suddenly alive, full of objects and lights and shadows she’d never seen before.
The mail slot clinked.
“Are you alone?”
A whisper.
Maisa slowly, deliberately, got up from the couch and silently placed the remote control onto the coffee table. The hallway leading to the front door appeared longer than normal, like a tunnel. She waited for a beat, then walked up to the peephole. She decided to look through it, although all of her nerve endings were on fire and a flame burned in her belly.
She leaned forward.
You’ll see a police officer through the peephole, but when you open the door there she’ll be—
The mail-slot flap clinked again.
Maisa yelped. She knew the person on the other side of the door wasn’t the one who had called for help. The thing standing behind the door was a psychosis and too much stress and twenty-four hours she’d mysteriously lost and a sick leave.
She backed away from the door, turned off all the lights, and did not sleep.
She went to work earlier than ever before.
What’s wrong with me? Maisa wondered.
She wanted a degree and a husband and a child and a dog to show her father she could do it, then abandon it all.
Why did it have to be so difficult?
That night Maisa woke up from a dream and uttered a name.
“Sagal.”
She wasn’t supposed to think about her dissertation, but now Sagal had popped into her mind. Her face and her broken thumbnail.
She called the number that had placed the call for help.
It was picked up immediately.
They agreed to meet.
Easy.
Maisa arrived at the restaurant early. It was attached to the boating club, appropriately tucked away and rarely full. Still, she had begun to second-guess whether the place was suitable for a teenage girl. It was too adult. She hung around the front door and looked out through the old, wavy windows. She saw sailboats waltzing in the wind and felt their loneliness.
Then finally, Sagal was there.
Maisa opened the door and let the girl in. Her blue scarf was wet, and Maisa wanted to dry it immediately. She showed her to their table, fussing over her like an overprotective mother. She ordered their food and made sure there was no pork in it. Sagal smiled and snapped a picture of Maisa with her phone. The waiter joked about the table’s condition: they’d had to put a piece of cardboard under a leg to keep it from tilting. When the waiter was gone Maisa apologized to Sagal.
“Why?” She smiled.
“Because I offended you. I wasn’t well,” Maisa said.
Sagal shrugged and smiled again.
Maisa got up and hugged Sagal, who didn’t resist. She truly felt like a mother. They hugged for a while. The waiter probably saw them and didn’t dare to bring their food out until she had returned to her seat. With the food in front of them, Sagal confessed that she’d never been to a restaurant before. Her mom had always cooked all their meals.
As they were leaving Sagal thanked Maisa outside the restaurant. She said that it had been the be
st day of her life but she had to go. Before Maisa could offer the girl a ride, Sagal was already running toward the bus stop. Maisa walked back to her car, happy. She started the car and decided to pick her up from the bus stop and give her a ride after all.
But when she drove past the bus stop, Sagal wasn’t there. No one was there.
She stopped and called for the girl through the rolled-down window.
No reply.
Maisa turned the engine off and yelled louder.
That was when she woke up.
The doorbell.
Maisa wiped tears from her eyes, sat up on the edge of the sofa, and turned the TV off. She walked to the foyer and checked herself in the mirror. She thought about her job and logical things. Then she looked through the peephole. She could only see a sliver of a figure, twisted by the convex glass. Some blue fabric that made Maisa think about the police. She opened the door.
Sagal stood in the stairwell. She wore a dark-blue scarf and a green coat.
“How . . . nice to see you,” Maisa managed to say.
She had already shaken off any drowsiness by the end of her sentence. What a surprise. Life was so set in its tracks these days.
“What time is it?”
Sagal just shrugged and smiled shyly.
“It doesn’t matter,” Maisa said. “I’ve just had a hard time and . . .”
She began to talk. She let her words flow, against her psychiatrist’s advice to be careful what she told people. She didn’t make any sense, but she didn’t care. She was telling Sagal how she knew what it was like to be her age, although of course she didn’t understand her cultural background and all the problems attached to it. She talked about responsibility and the guilt she’d been carrying, and how she never actually grew up, and how she was still the same teenage girl who in the ’80s had cried watching movies or when her favorite band broke up, but now of course movies and music were different, and oh, my, what was she babbling on about because Sagal had also had a hard time. How was she doing?
The girl remained quiet and smiled.
The stairwell echoed with sudden rustling. Like sand crushed under a shoe.
“Did you bring a friend with you?” Maisa asked.
Sagal kept on smiling silently.
Maisa cracked the door open wider. It stopped before reaching the wall. She heard a metallic clang against the wooden door. She heard fabric shuffling on the floor. Or gasps. Like someone holding back tears.
“Who’s there?” Maisa asked.
Or laughter.
Sagal shrugged.
The stairwell hummed. A familiar place. Things that made sense. Her dizziness was caused by her medication. A rocking movement, as if she were standing on a boat deck.
“Come on in,” Maisa said.
The girl stood still. Or swayed. Surrounded by waves.
Just before the lights turned off and darkness filled the stairwell and all sensible things in it, Sagal Yusuf opened her mouth.
She stuck her tongue out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2011 Mikko Lehtimäki
Marko Hautala’s unique blend of psychological thriller and realism has attracted readers of all genres, earning him a reputation as the Finnish Stephen King. His first novel, Itsevalaisevat (The Self-Illuminated Ones), received the Tiiliskivi Prize, and Käärinliinat (Shrouds) received the Kalevi Jäntti Literary Prize for young authors in 2010. Unikoira (Seeing Eyes) was nominated for the Young Aleksis Kivi Prize in 2013.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © Kochun Hu
Jenni Salmi is a translator and localizer living in Seattle. She was born and raised in eastern Finland near the Russian border, where she learned English, Swedish, German, and Russian. After mostly forgetting the other languages, she earned her master’s degree in English literature at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. She’s been putting the degree to good use ever since.
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