Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  Eventually Aino had had enough. She stamped her foot and said that Olli must have had the world’s most boring childhood to have become such an absolute square as an adult.

  Hurt, Olli replied that he had in fact gone on many more picnics as a child than Aino might imagine, and had marvellous adventures, but those days were long ago and now he was an adult and he preferred to eat his meals indoors instead of sitting in the grass with the insects.

  Sometimes mother and son went into town to look at the shops and have a hamburger and a milkshake. Once when Olli came home in the evening he didn’t recognize the boy because he’d been to the barber and bought some new clothes. He looked at the child, started polishing his glasses and said, Who do we have here? Then he sealed his fate by asking if they had any other guests in addition to this unknown child.

  Three days of silent treatment followed.

  Email whizzed back and forth between Olli and Greta’s computers, sometimes on a daily basis. A publisher naturally has to keep in touch with a new star author. Greta sent reports on Paris cafes and the pastries she’d eaten. She wrote about her work on the Jyväskylä guide and promised to send the first samples soon, asking Olli to be gentle with his criticism.

  Olli replied that he was eager to see the text and soothed her worries:

  I think that the woman who wrote A Guide to the Cinematic Life can write about any subject in an interesting way. I’m still reading your book every day—like half the population, apparently. Have you seen Amazon? Your book is constantly at the top of their list, in spite of the religious criticisms—or maybe because of them.

  Right now I’m reading the part where you talk about the “cinematic self” that is just waiting to be found and to shine, and your examples are Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Sophia Loren’s mother figure in Ettore Scola’s A Special Day (which we’re just about to watch at the film club) and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa in Curtiz’s Casablanca. A silly, polemical, frivolous, annoying film—and absolutely enchanting!

  By the way, a couple of clergymen I know criticized your book vociferously when I told them you were moving to the Book Tower list of authors. When I read what you wrote about the moral heresy of Christianity, how the cinematic aesthetic raises the personal aesthetic to a higher norm, I completely understood why they were so indignant!

  It was an ordinary Sunday. It ended with Olli and Aino watching the ten o’clock news.

  The clock ticked on the wall. The dishwasher churned and hummed in the kitchen.

  Their son was asleep in his room. Aino said she hoped that the boy’s cold didn’t get so bad that they would have to take him to hospital during the night. Olli shared her hope and asked if they still had cough syrup in the medicine cabinet. Aino said there was still half a bottle.

  The prime minister was talking. When he disappeared and the traffic report came on the screen, Aino started talking about their Sunday walk and a chance encounter they’d had. They had been walking up the Ridge when a red scooter had appeared alongside them. It was driven by the blonde woman with the scarf from the film club, who smiled at Olli, shot an odd look at Aino, and sped on her way.

  Neither of them had made any comment about it. But now Aino asked if they knew each other, Olli and this scooter woman. Olli said he had exchanged a couple of words with her at the film club.

  Aino started talking about the scooter, and finally announced that she wanted one. Olli looked at her in surprise and offered to buy her a scooter first thing tomorrow, if she liked. He asked if it mattered what colour it was. Aino asked if he was serious. Olli said he was. Aino said she was just kidding.

  They stared at each other.

  Then Aino said that they ought to buy their son a child’s bicycle, with stabilizers wheels. And a helmet, of course. Olli sighed and promised to go to the bicycle shop tomorrow.

  Aino leant into Olli’s arms. Olli looked down the front of her shirt. She had nice breasts. They smelt like a rubber eraser. Olli stroked her thigh and asked if she might like to have sex. She said she was tired, but that he could get back to her about it tomorrow evening, if he was at home. Then the news ended. Aino said goodnight and went upstairs. Olli remained sitting on the sofa. There were only boring programmes, on every channel. He turned off the television, climbed the stairs, went into his office, sat down at the computer and opened Facebook.

  He found Greta Kara in his list of friends and checked her status.

  Greta Kara loves Jyväskylä!

  10

  IN THE DREAM, Olli is walking across a lawn.

  The pale buildings of the rifle factory loom around him. Their narrow, three-storey structures look like head-stones. On the other side of the buildings there are two roads: the car road that plunges towards the harbour, and beneath it the railway. A long train is clattering past. Olli enjoys the sound of it. He feels like singing, because he knows it’s going to be a good day.

  The sky is a deep blue. The grass under his feet is growing so quickly that he can hear the small sigh of it. Birds are burbling in the trees. Merry lizards are playing on the walls of the buildings, their songs only audible from very close by. The long, endless summer holidays are beginning, and soon his playmates, whom he has missed all winter, will be here.

  But he doesn’t see them now, or anyone else. He’s alone.

  He looks up. Maybe his grandmother, or his grandfather the notary, is watching him from a window. The windows are sooty black.

  At the corner of one building is a fort made of blankets. It’s usually full of laughing girls with bows in their hair. Now it’s abandoned, and the hem of the blanket flutters in the wind, which is growing stronger and colder.

  There’s a doll lying on the lawn in front of the fort. It has a rough hole in its head with black air flowing out of it and seeping into the ground. A little distance away are other discarded things: a small red patent-leather shoe, a half-eaten sweet bun.

  The bun is covered in insects. Olli can hear their rushing feet.

  The light dims. The sun loses most of its brightness, as if someone has turned a dimmer switch. Olli feels nervous. Maybe the picnic won’t amount to anything after all.

  In the direction of town he sees a peculiar black pillar of cloud that swirls and dances, sending cars, trees and people flying through the air. He squints and for a moment he can see their mouths opened in shouts.

  The tornado comes towards him, howling and humming like his mother’s vacuum cleaner, uprooting everything in its path.

  Olli runs to the door of a building. He has to push against it with all his strength to get it open. Then he’s inside, and he starts up the stairs. His footsteps echo in the stone corridors. The roar of the cyclone still sounds close by.

  His grandparents’ apartment should be on the second floor. He can’t find it. He climbs to the third floor, then the fourth and the fifth, but all the apartments seem to have vanished.

  Olli holds on to the handrail. His chest feels tight. His lungs are wheezing so hard that the paint is coming off the walls of the stairwell.

  Something has changed.

  A moment ago he was a light, nimble boy. Now he has a large, heavy adult body that moves only with tremendous effort. Sweat seeps from his skin, soaks his clothes and trickles like a stream down the stairs. The sound of the dripping salt water echoes down the corridor.

  Of course his grandma and grandpa don’t live here any more. They’re both dead and buried long ago. How could he have forgotten that?

  He rubs his temples. Is he drunk, or having some kind of attack, so that he can’t think or remember clearly? Or maybe this is a dream. That must be it: he’s dreaming.

  In any case he has to get out of this hallway; he can’t stay here.

  It’s hard to move his feet. His bones creak and grind against each other when he tries to move. Bone dust sheds from his legs and makes him cough. The stairs are steep, but he has to go up; he can’t go back down again.

  He struggles, his kneecaps screeching, his fee
t covered in white dust from his bones. Eventually he wrenches his feet from stair to stair with his hands because it’s the only way he can get them to move.

  Finally he reaches the landing at the top. There’s only one door on this floor.

  It’s open.

  From the hallway he can see the only room in the apartment. No people. No furniture. Just a stack of newspapers in the middle of the floor. He picks up the paper on top. It’s the Jyväskylä free tabloid, an issue from more than three decades ago. On the front page is a headline in large print: LOCAL FAMOUS FIVE UNCOVER BURGLARY RING!

  There actually were a couple of stories written about them in the local paper. Olli didn’t remember the articles being so prominent.

  The other papers in the pile also have stories about the Famous Five of Tourula.

  Famous Five Rescue Little Girls

  From Assailant!

  Famous Five Expose Arsonist!

  Famous Five Find Lost Elderly Resident!

  The darkness thickens. The letters and words won’t stay in place, as often happens in dreams, but when Olli concentrates hard he can read what the articles say. They tell the heroic exploits of Tourula’s Famous Five over several years. Everything that happened to them is there. Even things that he doesn’t remember.

  In the beginning it was all fun and excitement. His teenage years, his chance misfortunes, the sheer ordinariness that came with growing up hadn’t yet spoilt it.

  The first headline had their photograph below it.

  The five of them, posed in front of the abandoned house. They were so small, adorable, innocent. In their own minds they had been big and worldly.

  The house was where they found all the things the burglars had stolen from around Tourula: silverware, outboard motors, tape decks, Heikki Ojarinne’s money stash, televisions, Aunt Anna’s jewellery. The gang of kids had even rescued the Thesleff painting that the three men had stolen from Aunt Anna’s house while she was picnicking on the lake shore with Olli, Karri and the Blomroos children.

  The article told how “this latter-day Famous Five” spent their summer holidays making their detective dreams come true:

  Taking the popular Famous Five adventure books as their model, the children gathered clues and made deductions—and just two days before school was to begin, these young defenders of justice found the burglars and their loot in an abandoned house in the old Tourula area of Jyväskylä.

  The article marvelled at their cleverness:

  Anne, the youngest of these remarkable children, is only ten years old, and Leo, the heroic senior member of the group, is twelve. Olli, Karri and Richard all turned eleven this summer.

  The author pointed out that the children had been in real danger when the criminals, taken by surprise, had attempted to defend their cache with knives:

  Things could have taken a terrible turn if not for the cool nerves of Leo Blomroos, star athlete at his school in Espoo, who told the other children to hide and made himself a decoy to lure the burglars. A furious chase ensued. When Leo judged that enough time had passed for his sister, brother, cousin and friend to reach safety, he made a dodge and managed to elude his pursuers. The other children summoned the police to the house, who arrived just in time to catch the wrongdoers red-handed and arrest them.

  Olli puts the newspaper back on the stack. He knows he’s dreaming, but he nevertheless decides to take the papers with him.

  He hears a noise from the stairway.

  A dog barking.

  He steps outside into the hallway. The dog is a couple of floors below him. A black and white cocker spaniel, shambling up the stairs with ears hanging, his fur shedding mud and dirt onto the steps.

  Timi.

  Olli holds tight to the railing.

  Timi has been in the secret passages for thirty years.

  He disappeared. He simply didn’t come back up with the rest of them.

  No one knew what had happened to him. Memories of the secret passages faded quickly when you came back to the surface. Once you left them you could only recall them in bits and pieces.

  He had waited for a long time for his dog to come back. When the summer ended he’d had to go home without Timi. For months afterwards every time the telephone rang he was sure that it was his grandma calling to say: Guess who just showed up in the yard? It’s that famous dog of yours. You and your dad had better come quick and get him.

  But Grandma didn’t call. Autumn had turned to winter and Olli’s father had come and sat down on the side of his bed and told him that it was time to give up hope and accept the truth.

  Just as Olli is about to call Timi, the dog is gone and there are three children in his place: a pretty blonde girl and two boys. The Blomrooses. Olli was supposed to meet them in the yard. Only Karri is missing. The Famous Five of Tourula must be on their way to a picnic.

  Olli faintly remembers that things haven’t been particularly good between him and the Blomrooses lately. They seem to have been avoiding each other.

  Not long ago he was on his way to meet Greta secretly, coming out of the shop with a pear soda and two Lola bars in a bag, and he ran into the Blomrooses.

  They said hello and stopped for a moment, but couldn’t think of anything to talk about.

  After a tense silence, Anne scowled and said it was obvious that Greta had managed to ruin the Famous Five of Tourula. She said she thought it was Greta’s fault that Karri was gone, and told Olli he ought to stay far away from “that crazy little bitch”.

  Olli mumbled something they could interpret as a promise if they wanted to.

  Anne nodded, kissed him on the cheek and looked at him with a strange smile on her face.

  Leo and Riku were trying to be relaxed, but they only managed to look nervous, gloomy and uncomfortable. Leo explained with his eyes downcast that they had been trying to find some secret passages on their own. “But we can’t find them without Karri, of course,” he said, digging his shoe into the dirt. “Karri’s the one who led us to the openings and managed to get into one before we even realized it was an entrance…”

  When the Blomrooses finally went into the store and Olli could be on his way, he sighed with relief.

  Being with them had felt unbelievably oppressive, and it was sad. They had been best friends for so many summers. But like the pastor said at Grandpa Notary’s funeral, there is a time for everything. The time for the Famous Five was over, and something else was beginning.

  But their summer adventures had been good times.

  Now, in his dream, Olli is upstairs at the rifle factory, and he remembers everything much better than he does when he’s awake. The memories become clearer, and they upset him. He feels like he did as a child looking through swimming goggles in cloudy water.

  The burglars were the Tourula Five’s first case. Their adventures had begun three years earlier. Olli met the Blomroos siblings and their cousin Karri at the playground at Lounais Park. It was the 1970s. Olli had just turned eight. Grandma had bought him a birthday ice cream at the ice cream stand. Then they had walked to the park, and the Blomrooses and Karri were there with their Aunt Anna.

  Olli and the Blomrooses happened to get on the carousel at the same time. They gave him a long look and asked him who he was and what he planned to do that summer. Olli told them that he lived in Koirakkala in the winter and was spending the summer with his grandparents in one of the buildings at the old rifle factory.

  Karri leant back. He seemed to be deep in thought.

  “He’s always like that,” Leo said. “Thinks his own thoughts and doesn’t know what’s going on around him. But he knows all the best places. Hey, you wanna go with us sometime and see? We actually need five members for the group…”

  Riku kicked the carousel into motion. Anne laughed with her mouth open wide and Olli’s hat flew off his head. When he grabbed hold of the carousel’s metal handrail, his arm touched the girl’s pale skin and their eyes met.

  The girl winked at him, and it was at
that moment that Olli’s years-long, mostly one-sided crush on Anne Blomroos began.

  The Blomrooses told him that their aunt Anna and cousin Karri lived in one of the wooden houses in Tourula and that they were guests there for the whole summer. They whispered among themselves for a moment, then invited Olli to come with them on a picnic the next day, and hopped off the carousel.

  Olli, the Blomrooses and Karri started playing together, going on expeditions in Tourula and more distant parts of Jyväskylä, and eating Aunt Anna’s lavish picnics. It was a small miracle that they all stayed thin.

  The second Famous Five summer Karri led them into their first secret passageway.

  They found the entrance on the side of a hill. Olli had brought his dog Timi with him to Jyväskylä, and without the dog they probably would have left it alone. The black opening didn’t tempt any of them except Karri, who stared into it, mesmerized. They were about to continue on their way when Timi scented something, growled and crawled under the ground.

  Of course they were scared. The thought of wriggling in after him was crazy. It might collapse, or they might get stuck and suffocate.

  But they had to help Timi. And so the Tourula Five began their first exploration of Jyväskylä’s secret passages in order to rescue Olli’s dog.

  That time they did find him and bring him back into the daylight.

  There are a lot more secret passages than you would think. That’s what Karri said once. But they’re hard to find. According to Karri, nature tries to hide them, and the human brain isn’t meant to notice them.

  But now Olli is standing in the hallway of the apartment house at the rifle factory, a child and an adult at the same time, watching the Blomrooses come up the stairs, searching his memories with a sense of foreboding.

  Their steps echo menacingly down the hallway. Just a moment ago they were children; now they’re teenagers. He can see on their faces that they’re not on their way to a picnic. The time for picnics is over.