Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  A book about cinematicness naturally had copious illustrations. At the beginning of the chapter on revenge, for instance, there was a photo of Jeanne Moreau’s character in Truffaut’s film The Bride Wore Black. They had watched it at the film club in May. The pictures on the next page were taken from Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

  The media had been enthusiastic about Greta Kara’s theories. A couple of weeks ago one of the Finnish evening tabloids had published an article about A Guide to the Cinematic Life that rated Finnish celebrities according to their cinematicness. It was illustrated with a sketch of a “Kara-particle meter”.

  Olli grew impatient with the manuscript. The text explained that he should focus on being “exactly where he was”, and let “the ambient meaningfulness particles” permeate him. He threw himself into it and followed the instructions even though it felt stupid.

  Just as he was about to give up, something happened. Almost as if he just clicked into the right spot.

  And then he wasn’t looking at a streetscape full of linden trees.

  He was looking at himself, looking through his being, deeper than he ever had, catching by surprise that formless creature that was himself, beneath his name, titles, situation, job and memories.

  It bared its teeth, shrieked and bit him.

  He fell down.

  All of his thoughts are falling away into the cracks and crevices.

  All that’s left is a floating, spinning feeling, like the one he experienced years ago at the playground, on the carousel with the boy’s head on top. The memory touches him, as cool as a beautiful girl’s hand.

  Then summer comes rolling down the street and smacks him to the ground.

  He slides back into his skull.

  The hot juice of the sun flows over the linden trees. The car tyre hums on the wall. The blue text of the advertisement burns into his retinas in capital letters.

  Goodyear!

  Brightness pours down in dappled, leafy drops. Darkness rises up from the ground; he breathes it in. He is part of a puzzle that assembles and disassembles itself again and again, thousands of times every second. And each time, the puzzle changes a little, though you can’t see it happening.

  For one second, he isn’t there.

  Then the meaningfulness particles delineate him and make him a part of the landscape.

  As consciousness pours itself into his outlines, he sits up and notices people gathered around him.

  12

  Magical places are dangerous. Meaning fulness particles can awaken us to our existence. But when that happens, a person can slip outside of the self.

  GRETA KARA,

  Magical City Guide Number One: Jyväskylä

  Greta sent pages every three days. They came as attachments through ordinary email, which Greta described as too dull, neutral and formal for personal messages. Those she sent through Facebook. So it will feel more like a real conversation.

  She didn’t want to use chat, which Olli was glad of. Its urgent quality causes you to lose the nuances of the dialogue and always leads to flat chitchat, or horrible excess.

  In her long and meandering messages, Greta recounted her work in Paris. She also said she was planning to come and update her conception of present day Jyväskylä.

  I’ve been to Jyväskylä a few times over the years to take care of my affairs, but I haven’t really had a chance to look at the place. My information is from years ago, mostly from my childhood, so I probably should renew my familiarity with my beloved hometown and correct any dated ideas I have before the book is published. Naturally I’m also terribly eager to meet with my publisher, perhaps over dinner…

  As the manuscript grew into a book, Olli’s doubts vanished. The book was going to be an event. It would be a smash hit, both in the media and with the book-buying public. There were all the readers who had loved A Guide to the Cinematic Life and would be interested in the Magical City Guide, not to mention the new audiences it would reach.

  The book mapped Jyväskylä place by place, the way a guidebook should. Some places such as the carousel at Lounais Park with the boy’s head on top, which she called a “dreamlike and even intoxicating experience”, were already more or less familiar to Olli. Others were places he had never heard of. Apparently he didn’t know his hometown as thoroughly as he had thought.

  Olli continued to explore the places presented in the book.

  As he wandered around Jyväskylä, he noticed to his amazement that some of the places really did have a particularly strong and even magical atmosphere. He also noticed that they more or less affected him in the way that the guidebook described: his thoughts quickened, his self-awareness grew stronger, his cautiousness and stiffness diminished, and in its place he felt an inclination to act spontaneously. But he didn’t have any more “awakenings” powerful enough to make him “slip outside of the self”, as the book warned. Besides which the weather had cooled, so there was no longer any danger of dehydrating and having embarrassing fainting spells in the street.

  Olli didn’t usually throw himself into conversation with random people he met in public. But in the places Greta listed as magical, it was remarkably easy to approach strangers. It was like being “at a dance where everyone is listening to the music of the M-particles and waiting for someone to invite them onto the dance floor”, as A Guide to the Cinematic Life put it.

  Many of the people he met seemed to have read the Guide. They looked like characters from a movie in one way or another, and there was something cinematically dramatic about the way they behaved.

  For instance, as he was walking along the east bank of the river, where the path wound through the river valley past old overgrown stone foundations and then opened out on a peculiar view of a steam chimney, he met two women having a picnic.

  The women are wearing pale-coloured, flounced dresses too fancy for a walk in the woods, their hair in long curls. They are sitting on a checked blanket drinking glasses of wine and eating chicken legs.

  As Olli approaches, one of the women looks up at him and beckons for him to join them.

  He accepts the invitation with a smile, sits down and lays the City Guide manuscript beside him on the blanket. One of the women, blonde and stylish, asks if he would like some wine. He answers with a line from the film This Earth Is Mine, which comes unexpectedly to mind: “The grape is the only fruit that God gave the sense to know what it was made for.”

  The women glance at each other, taken with this.

  Olli notices that they are no longer young. Both have faces covered in fine wrinkles. But they are still just as lively and beautiful.

  The dark-haired one, thinner and more angular than her friend, smiles with delight, hands Olli an old book and says, “How fun that we were right about you; you’re just as pleasant as you look! May we ask you to read some Christina Rossetti to us? We’ve been reading these poems to each other for fifteen years—in bed, at breakfast, on all our trips—and although we still love Christina as fervently as always, we’re tired of hearing each other’s voices. Perhaps a pleasant stranger can give our favourite poems new life, if it’s not too much trouble…”

  When Olli had read seven poems, it started to rain hard.

  He stood up and opened his umbrella. The women didn’t want to get wet, either. With excited shouts and laughter they packed up their things, yelled goodbye and ran to their Citroën waiting a short distance away on the road.

  As they drove off, Olli realized he was holding not only the manuscript but also the book of poetry.

  In addition to the umbrella and the manuscript, Olli had his camera with him. The book needed illustrations. He thought he might handle it himself and take at least some preliminary pictures. He tried to capture the atmosphere of the places, but failed.

  The camera seemed unable to record M-particle radiation.

  In addition to roads and streets, cities have their own footpaths, and those in Jyväskylä
should definitely be explored. The density of M-particles varies on different paths, and at different points on each path. Earlier I described the west bank of the Touru River with its nature trail, constructed in 1995, when the river valley, once considered dangerous, was tamed and made more audience-friendly. But there are also paths on the east bank of the river. One of them starts at the corner just before the bridge and ends near the fence around the paper mill.

  In summer, when the leaves on the trees obscure the uncinematic aspects of the surroundings, this path offers a couple of forest views rich in atmosphere. The view of Jyväskylä is best at a precise point, and can diminish with just a couple of steps as something banal comes into view.

  A deepening of the life experience can be found halfway along the path at a point surrounded by trees, looking down the steep bluff towards the river (see map). If you suffer from slow continuum attachment, I recommend looking for these sorts of charged places. The mental aesthetic disturbance of slow continuum attachment is discussed more thoroughly in A Guide to the Cinematic Life. It is a disorder that spoils life feeling and sensitivity to change and, if left unaddressed, can lead to complete numbness.

  Farther on, the path passes through meadows buzzing with insects. At that point memories of childhood viewings of The Wizard of Oz and its fields of poppies may come to mind as the deep self charges itself with meaning fulness particles.

  Along the path on the east bank of the river rises the steam chimney of the paper mill. It isn’t particularly romantic or pretty. But because the place combines natural and industrial elements in such a striking way, it has a certain dreamlike frisson, which I discuss in chapter 8.

  It is also worth mentioning that there is an entrance to one of Jyväskylä’s numerous secret passages in the vicinity of the steam chimney. (More information in Appendix 3.) Entering the passages should be avoided due to danger of collapse or getting lost, as well as the high levels of M-particles.

  GRETA KARA,

  Magical City Guide Number One: Jyväskylä

  After looking around for two hours Olli called his office and asked Maiju to check whether Greta Kara’s documents included an Appendix 3.

  They didn’t.

  Olli searched the woods around the steam chimney not knowing whether he thought he would really find anything or was just trying to identify with the experience of enthusiastic readers who might come to explore the area.

  The place was strange to him and at the same time puzzlingly familiar. This was where the edge of the old neighbourhood of Tourula used to be, with its wooden houses and gardens. This was where he had spent his childhood summers with the Blomrooses and Karri. Somewhere nearby was where the old house had been, the one that looked out over the river, where he and Greta used to meet.

  There was once an entire, living neighbourhood here. But the city preferred to let the old buildings of Tourula fall into decay, and then they were all torn down to make way for new ones.

  As he walked along, Olli searched for signs of the vanished neighbourhood. The rifle-factory buildings on the other side of the road had been preserved. In the north-east section, the destruction was complete. The new Tourula wasn’t a neighbourhood. It was an undefined, characterless area, like so many others in Jyväskylä. In the old Tourula’s place a road had been built, a roundabout, asphalt, bus stops, shops, apartment houses, hamburger stands and extensions of the paper mill. All that was left of the old neighbourhood was a railing between the fenced-off nature park, the factory and the asphalted shopping area next to the road. There were also a couple of the old houses still hidden among the wooded meadows.

  Olli looked up. Insects were gathering in swarms; it was going to rain soon. He walked along the path back to the bicycle trail, straightened his tie and opened his umbrella. Raindrops pattered on the taut fabric. A spike protruded from the edge of the umbrella. Olli touched it gingerly, like tending a wounded animal, and his face darkened.

  He crossed the bridge. The Touru River ran muddy beneath it. The valley looked like it belonged on one of those travel posters: the trees reflected in the river, the delightful river road, the pleasing variety of elevation.

  This view was mentioned in the guidebook. Its picturesqueness was unlike central Finland. It was easy to imagine he was in some foreign country, or even in a movie.

  As he looked out over the landscape, Olli felt a longing that was difficult to define. It was the same feeling he had after a fascinating dream or a moving film. As if he had come close to something meaningful, but hadn’t quite reached it. No doubt Greta Kara’s meaningfulness particles were at this very moment whizzing through his brain and causing his restless feeling, Olli thought with amusement.

  He walked down the wooden steps to the walking path, entering the landscape he had just seen from the bridge. In the winter wild ducks flocked near the bridge waiting to be fed. They were somewhere else now.

  The road ran along the river, then rose up past the cemetery and arrived at the intersection with Puistokatu. The nature trail branched off the road and headed upstream.

  Olli looked behind him. Someone was on the bridge looking down from where he had just been standing.

  13

  WHEN HE REACHED THE SCHOOL the rain stopped. Olli closed his umbrella. The fabric tore a little more. Then the metal parts of the contraption twisted and tangled together and the tensile strength essential to its umbrellaness vanished before his eyes. It looked more like the carcass of a mechanical bird.

  Olli glumly dropped the dead umbrella in a litter bin at the hamburger stand and continued towards the nearest umbrella shop.

  As he walked he pondered the Magical City Guide manuscript. They probably should cut the references to secret passages before it went to press. There was no point in confusing readers by bringing it up.

  He did have a faint memory of the secret passage games the Tourula Five used to play, which must have put the idea of secret passages in Greta’s head. He and Karri and the Blomrooses had pretended to find entrances to secret passages in fittingly hidden spots around town and then spent days wandering in them. They had encouraged each other to invent everything a child’s imagination could think up and had been so caught up in their game that they saw and heard non-existent things. The secret passages had been enchanted and sometimes terrifying places.

  The thought of the five of them excitedly rummaging through the bushes, ditches and hollows put a wry smile on Olli’s face. He had to admit that nothing he’d experienced in recent years, not even sex, had been as thrilling as the secret passages of his childhood.

  He decided to discuss it with Greta as soon as he could log on to Facebook. He hadn’t asked for the author’s phone number, and she hadn’t offered it, since it was going so well on Facebook and email. That way they avoided those awkward moments that former lovers and childhood friends easily feel when they meet again and realize that they no longer see anything they recognize in each other.

  Olli walked through the old church park and crossed the street at the bridal shop. The Pukkala rain-gear shop was between a sex shop and a women’s clothing store. They sold raincoats, rain ponchos, rubber boots and quality umbrellas.

  Olli went in and started to browse the umbrella selection, paying special attention to their construction. He didn’t intend to give in and buy a cheap one that broke easily. It depressed him.

  As always, there was music playing in the shop. The saleswoman played old tango records day in and day out, smoking in the back room, waiting for customers. There was a partly opened curtain hanging in the doorway. The woman was only visible in silhouette. She was surrounded by a cloud of tobacco smoke that escaped into the front of the shop. In any other place it would have been peculiar.

  The saleswoman had reached middle age years before, but still dressed as she had in her youth, which had been sometime in the 1960s. Her nut-brown hair was pulled up in a banana clip to reveal her slim neck. Her dress had a black and white geometric pattern. It followed her
slim, girlish figure and left her arms and back bare.

  She watched the shop from her hiding place; only her eyes, lined in heavy black, moved. That suited Olli. He put off talking with her as long as possible.

  In the bright light of the shop she was unambiguously ugly. Smoking had taken the natural colour from her face and far from hiding the lines in her skin her thick make-up accentuated them. From close up she was ordinary. But when she sat in the back room with her smoky silhouette falling on the curtain, the profile of her face and body had the lines of a Gustav Klimt.

  The woman had made herself into a work of art in a way that was described in A Guide to the Cinematic Life.

  Observe people in waiting rooms, on park benches, in train and bus stations. You’ll notice that some of them disappear into washed-out meaninglessness, while others draw your attention and you can’t stop looking at them and speculating about what it would be like to be a part of their lives and memories.

  Cinematic people radiate M-particles in all situations. A person doesn’t have to be young, beautiful or stylish—or even clean. Their hair and clothing are a part of the total impression, but it’s more a question of the right sort of self-awareness, a deep realization of their own character.

  That night Olli has a dream.

  He is walking over the Tourula River bridge. He’s wearing a fedora hat, a tie and nothing else but his striped pyjamas. There is a night-time festival going on in town. From one direction he hears orchestral music, from another a loudspeaker: SEE THE AMAZING HUMAN ODDITY! FOUND IN THE SECRET PASSAGEWAYS, BADLY BEATEN AND BATTERED, AND RESTORED TO HEALTH BY THE WORK OF TEN TOP SURGEONS! TODAY ONLY!