Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  Olli goes inside the apartment, closes the door and gathers up the newspapers. If he leaves right now and runs down the stairs, maybe they won’t even recognize him; he’s an adult now, after all. Bigger, more muscular. If they do give him a problem, he can certainly handle the Blomrooses, even Leo.

  He gathers his courage, ready to make a dash, but then someone whispers his name.

  He turns and sees a door that wasn’t there a moment ago. It’s open. He hurries to the door and steps into a dark room. A dim figure is sitting on the edge of a bed. A candle illuminates the girl, who is wearing a dress with pears printed all over it. On the wall above the bed is a painting Olli has seen before. Thesleff’s Sleeping Girl.

  The Sleeping Girl used to be in a place of honour in Aunt Anna’s living room. Even the children understood that it was a valuable painting, although Aunt Anna didn’t make a fuss about it. Karri mentioned that he liked the painting and kept dropping hints until it was moved to his room. This amused Riku and Leo.

  Karri showing any interest in the arts pleased Aunt Anna. She had made him take piano lessons for three years and was upset when the teacher eventually refused to continue, saying that the boy unfortunately didn’t have an ounce of musicality.

  So his interest in the painting gave her new hope. As she hung the picture in its new home, she couldn’t resist teasing him a little: “You like the Sleeping Girl, do you, Karri? She is quite pretty, I must admit. Bosoms and everything…”

  Leo, Riku and Aunt Anna laughed, and Olli laughed with them. Karri’s eyes darkened. Anne didn’t laugh; she touched Karri’s arm.

  Olli, who always watched Anne closely, saw the touch. He stopped laughing as jealousy tore at his gut. The beautiful Anne was in love with her skinny cousin.

  It was only his love for Greta that freed Olli from his obsession with Anne. And there Greta sits on the bed, under the valuable painting, pleased that he has come.

  She throws herself on the bed and beckons to him. Olli hardly dares look at her. He’s ashamed. It feels criminal even to touch this tender figure in her pear dress now that he’s become so big, so clumsy and middle-aged.

  Luckily the candlelight is forgiving.

  He sits down on the bed and lowers himself onto his back. Greta climbs on top of him, smiles and touches his face with her fingertips, wondering at the traces left by the years and laughing at his rough razor stubble. Her hair falls across his face and tickles him. She feels amazingly light, almost weightless. The green of the forest glows in her eyes.

  She kisses him. Her hand presses between his legs, her lipsticked mouth smiling mischievously.

  Olli trembles.

  Then he closes his eyes and pushes his fingers into her golden hair.

  11

  OLLI SUOMINEN, publisher and member of the parish council, opened his eyes, threw off the blanket and realized he had just ejaculated into his striped pyjama bottoms.

  He also noticed that he was no longer caressing the girl in the pear-print dress; he was in his bedroom, in a double bed, with a woman beside him who had at some point in his life become his wife.

  He turned onto his side and stared at the sleeping woman’s face, which was more familiar to him than his own. It was pretty, almost beautiful. The kind of face that was easy to remember, that felt familiar even when you saw it for the first time.

  But now it was puckered up like an accordion and lying next to him.

  As he had on many other mornings, Olli had the thought that the feeling of familiarity was an illusion. When people have lived together for years, they think they know each other through and through. In reality, the longer people are together, the more they become strangers to one another. At some point, people who were once in love get used to each other and they stop being curious, stop sharing any but the most commonplace thoughts, imagine that the other person will stay the same day in and day out. So they change without realizing it, become alien to each other.

  It felt strange that the person sleeping beside him had given birth to his offspring. He remembered the hairy head, squeezed to a point, pushing out from between her legs, and the body that followed, equipped with a little weeny. He remembered the look on his wife’s face when the newborn was laid on her chest, hungry and bewildered.

  That child was asleep in the next room, his head nicely round now.

  The woman smacked her lips when a strand of hair fell into her mouth.

  Soon this person would get up and think it self-evident that the Suominen family’s life would continue unchanged in this house where they had lived for years and would continue to live until death finally did them part. She would look at Olli, but see only the unchanged image of him she had already formed, would say the same ordinary things she always said, and he would of course give her his ordinary, equally unsurprising answers. They would both carry out their usual tasks and then in the evening come to this same bed to sleep and wait for another morning.

  The thought of this horrified Olli, who at that moment felt torn loose from his life, didn’t feel it to be a part of himself. It was as if some part of his mind had fallen away during the night.

  He stared at the panels on the ceiling, which seemed to grimace at him, and finally grimaced back.

  He dimly remembered reading a newspaper in his dream. In reality the articles about the Tourula Five had been considerably more modest.

  The police were also assisted by five children who found the burglar’s hideout by chance.

  That was in the Jyväskylä Lehti. In the next issue there was a brief interview with the “junior detectives” who had helped the police. They were asked how it felt to be praised for their alertness. The grand group photo of them had gone unpublished because the space was needed for a meat market ad.

  The article was published after summer was over. Grandma had asked the lady in the next apartment for an extra copy and sent it to Olli. There was also a fifty-markka bill with a picture of President Ståhlberg on it, and a note that read Nicely done. With best wishes from Grandpa.

  Olli’s mother and father had been amazed. They didn’t know how to respond to the clipping or to Grandpa Suominen’s congratulations. To them Olli was an unhappy boy who didn’t get on with his teachers or classmates.

  Olli was confused, too. He had started Year 5 and was living a grey routine of textbooks, boring classmates and dusty schoolrooms. When he held the article about the Tourula Five in his hand it was as if a piece of a summer dream had come sailing into his reality.

  A couple of days later Leo had called him. The Blomrooses’ mother had, it seemed, nearly burst with pride. She had written a letter to Enid Blyton’s daughter Gillian Baverstock, who had had a standing request for any information about “real-life Famous Fives”. Leo wasn’t pleased about this.

  “If you ask me, this lady Baverstock probably thinks my mom’s a complete lunatic, and doesn’t care a bit about what some Finn writes to her, no matter what it was we did,” Leo said. “But anyway, see you next summer. We’ll see what happens then.”

  Olli got up with a groan, threw his pyjama bottoms in the laundry hamper, washed, dressed, drank a cup of instant coffee and went to his computer. He had an uneasy feeling that drove him to look at his Facebook profile. He had collected 659 Facebook friends: acquaintances, colleagues, contacts in the publishing world…

  As he was going through the list, which was arranged alphabetically by first name, he found three names from the past:

  Anne Blomroos

  Leo Blomroos

  Richard Blomroos

  He felt like he might be sick. There they were: the Blomrooses. Father a question mark, mother in banking and proud of her signed first edition of Enid Blyton from 1942. The names of her children were an homage to the great writer, and knowledge of Blyton’s works had fallen on them as a sacred duty.

  The Facebook photos showed middle-aged people, which shocked Olli more than finding them on his friends list. He realized that he had expected the other members o
f the Tourula Five to remain smooth-faced children.

  Leo had been a muscular, athletic type whom Olli had admired and envied for his self-confidence. In the photo he was a puffy, ruddy man with a bald head. According to his profile, he was a car salesman. Religious views: Ford forever. Olli shook his head.

  Richard, or Riku, as they always called him, was somewhat better preserved than his brother. Riku didn’t give much information about himself, but he belonged to a Facebook group called “Tits and Beer”.

  And Anne. Beautiful little Anne. According to her profile her hobbies were yoga, golf, sailing, going to the gym, swimming, movies and collecting art. The only information about her profession was that she had a “leadership position in the business field”. The photo showed a plump, bourgeois woman with blue eyes, blonde curls and freckles on her nose.

  Olli had once thought Anne was the sweetest creature in the world with nothing but the most marvellous girlish thoughts in her lovely head. He used to think about her eyes and her freckles when he masturbated—particularly the freckles. Afterwards he was always wracked with guilt for soiling his angel with his lustful thoughts.

  Then the awful things happened. When he looked at Anne’s face now, a cold wind blew through his memories and the world flickered dimmer.

  Olli didn’t want to remember the Blomrooses or have anything to do with them.

  Grandpa Notary once said, “Never poke at the past with a stick, because you never know what you’ll stir up.” Olli knew that his grandpa would have hated Facebook. Life was made up of meetings and partings. You get to know people, and then you forget most of them, often for good reasons. When you change locations, you change people, too, and that’s a hidden blessing. But Facebook shrinks the distances between people with a couple of clicks and forces them to stay in touch forever. In that sense it’s like something out of Dante’s vision of hell.

  Of course, he could remove the Blomrooses from his list with a few clicks. He could make them invisible on Facebook. Virtual world magic.

  On the other hand, doing so might only draw their attention to him.

  Olli wanted to be careful not to leave any trace on the Blomrooses’ profiles. He hoped that the silence between him and them would remain unbroken.

  At the film club they were watching F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

  Vampires were discussed in A Guide to the Cinematic Life:

  Vampire movies offer a vantage point on life no other genre can. A vampire is an ambivalent creature, both hideous in his destructiveness and tragically beautiful. When we look into a vampire’s eyes we see a person who is awakened to the emptiness of everyday life and aware that when that illusion is abandoned, all of us are alone, eternal outsiders. That is why he sees only emptiness when he looks in a mirror. It makes him a free being. He can be anyone at all.

  When we accept this outsiderness and refuse to be one with our everyday image, we can surrender to life in a deep, cinematic way. This will, of course, terrify anyone who clings to the everyday, to the face in the mirror, unaware that the light of day, far from helping them to see the truth, actually dazzles them and prevents them from seeing it.

  There had been more people than usual at the past few screenings. Maiju from the office was sitting in the front row. Olli waved at her. She didn’t see him. Olli thought he saw Mrs Valkeinen, the conservative Lutheran mother from the parish council, come in. Maybe he was wrong, but he had seen her at the bookshop buying a copy of A Guide to the Cinematic Life.

  Halfway through the movie, Olli fell asleep. In his dream, the girl in the pear-print dress was sitting in the seat next to him. She laid a hand on his thigh, bared her neck and asked him to bite her.

  Two weeks later he received the first thirty pages of the Magical City Guide by email.

  Greta wrote:

  I hope and pray that you like it, because I’ve done my best, but if you don’t then promise me you’ll be honest. We both have to be proud of the book. We’re doing this together.

  Olli printed the pages, got in a comfortable position, and started to read. June was turning to July. Sunlight flooded the office. It splashed on the floor in a hot puddle. Olli remembered wading in puddles as a little boy in his bare feet with Grandpa Notary smiling down at him fondly. Olli whistled a little tune. The portrait of Olli Suominen, Publisher looked on with approval.

  The Magical City Guides could be as big a hit as Cinematic Life. The focus on Jyväskylä would affect sales, but the concept had potential. If Greta wanted to write the first book about Jyväskylä, so what? It was her attachment to Jyväskylä that had led her to Book Tower Publishing.

  Vilho Torni called and congratulated Olli on snapping Greta Kara up. They talked about the upcoming project. Torni advised him to turn the localness of the first book to marketing advantage however he could.

  Olli suggested a collaboration with a travel agency. The Magical City Guide could be sold to tourists as a package with guided tours, and would, of course, be of interest to locals. Torni liked the idea.

  Future Magical City Guides would deal with bigger, more internationally known cities, so their potential market would be considerably larger. Thus burnished, Vilho Torni thanked Olli again for the excellent recruitment. He stressed that it was Olli’s job as publisher and Greta’s personal editor to make sure that she was kept happy, and kept publishing through Book Tower in the future.

  “I’m relying on you completely in this,” Torni said, and ended the call.

  Olli looked out the window at the old church park. He was secretly worried about the first book in the series. When he was a child, Jyväskylä was an interesting place. Not any more. There were fewer and fewer interesting places all the time. The old Reimari service station on the next block had even been torn down. And a couple of days ago when Olli was walking through the park he noticed that the old blue-bottomed fountain from his childhood was gone.

  But Greta Kara believed she could find the magical side of the city and be able to write a whole book about it.

  Olli tapped his fingers on the windowsill. Then he sighed, went to get some aspirin and told Maiju and Antero that he would be going out to read over the manuscript.

  In A Guide to the Cinematic Life I stated that some people are more naturally cinematic than others. They radiate meaning fulness particles that can momentarily elevate the cinematic level of those around them and thus enrich their experience of life.

  Places can also radiate meaning fulness particles. Some places, in other words, are cinematic, while others are marked by commonplace meaninglessness.

  There are places—rooms, buildings, streets, landscapes, neighbourhoods, towns—whose unaesthetic ordinariness numbs a person so that they can’t even imagine doing anything cinematic. But in other places it feels natural, if not unavoidable, to transcend the boundaries of the everyday self in our thoughts, speech and deeds. These are places with a particularly high concentration of meaning fulness particles.

  These particules imaginaires, which are called M-particles, work in such a way that when they permeate a person’s inner being, they activate the inner filmic self and temporarily increase one’s cinematicness. In other words, they can raise the everyday above ethical normativity in both thought and deed, construct a character for the self purpose-built for its context, and manifest their own existence through cinematically aesthetic means. (This is described in greater detail in A Guide to the Cinematic Life.)

  One example of such a magical place is Puistokatu, the Jyväskylä street lined with linden trees that borders several city parks. It has one spot with particularly high levels of meaningfulness particles. Numerous natural elements combine there in ideal relation to one another and create an experience of cinematic meaning fulness.

  You can find the right spot by following these directions:

  Start on Kankaankatu with the cemetery on your left and Taulumäki Church on your right. Turn onto Puistokatu and walk south towards the centre of town. The wall of the cemetery wil
l stay on your left. Walk on the left side of the street. Keep your gaze focused forward, but also be aware of the right side of the street. Stop when you see a building with a large Goodyear tyre advertisement painted on the side. Carefully adjust your position a couple of metres in different directions until you feel your experience of time, place and yourself begin to grow more concentrated.

  Olli did as the guidebook said. The linden trees along Puistokatu cast their dappled shadows over him. But it was still hot.

  The text of the book needed to be clarified, both in its ideas and their expression, Olli thought. And of course the whole theory of meaningfulness particles was entertaining but basically silly—though in a saleable way. Greta had, after all, introduced the idea in A Guide to the Cinematic Life and proved that her ideas could hit home with an audience.

  According to Maiju, there was clearly an existing demand for Greta Kara’s theory of meaningfulness particles and cinematic living. Maiju herself had started to adjust her life according to the teachings of the Guide, “just out of curiosity”.

  In addition to a new movie-star look, Maiju had dedicated herself to a new way of talking. She had started to communicate in film quotes meant to create an artistic effect, and developed according to surprisingly thorough instructions.

  The book covered numerous life situations:

  Cinematic Ways to Get to Know Interesting People and Find

  Unexpected Romance

  How to Part Cinematically

  How to Stay Together Cinematically

  Cinematic Dress

  Cinematic Dialogue

  Cinematic Dining

  Cinematic Travel

  Cinematic Illness

  Cinematic Revenge

  Cinematic Death

  Under these headings were discussion and analysis of movie characters, scenes and plots connected with each theme and explications of their aesthetics. The examples were followed by philosophically based methods intended to help the reader experience life as meaningful even in situations that were, on the face of it, banal.