Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  “Her records,” he explains to Olli, tapping the folder. “I collected them from every place she’s ever been treated the moment I learnt she was to be my patient.”

  “Ah,” Olli says.

  When the doctor finishes his examination he asks if he can speak with Greta alone. Olli goes outside the door. Doctor and patient speak in low voices. Then the doctor comes out of the room. “She asked me to speak with you,” he says. “Let’s go downstairs.”

  He turns and says to Greta, “Miss Kara, you should avoid any stress and get some rest until you feel better. Goodbye, then. I’ll come again in a couple of days—or sooner, if the need arises.”

  Olli and the doctor sit at the table across from each other. Olli has poured them coffee and put some Domino biscuits on a little tray.

  Neither of them is drinking or eating. Olli wishes Dr Oksanen would at least take one biscuit. It would be a good sign.

  “Mr Suominen,” the doctor begins, his brow furrowed. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but the fact is that Miss Kara’s condition doesn’t look good.”

  “What’s the problem?” Olli asks, his hands cold as stone.

  “Her nervous system,” the doctor says, then pauses dramatically. “Of course, I can’t make a definitive diagnosis until I see the laboratory results, but based on today’s examination and her medical history, I can state with a fair certainty that she has a disorder of the central nervous system of a type that causes demyelination, the destruction of the myelin sheath surrounding the nerve axon. That is the reason for her difficulty in playing the piano, and it’s probably also the cause of the diminishment in her level of consciousness which she mentioned to me as well. Basically, her central nervous system is suffering from intermittent interruptions. They’re a bit like power outages in a house where mice have gnawed at the wiring, if you’ll permit a clumsy analogy. Sometimes everything works smoothly, perhaps even for a long while, but little by little her nervous system will cease functioning and her lungs, heart and other organs will be paralysed, after which death will follow. It’s not multiple sclerosis, which is more well known, but a rare and aggressive variant with a progress that is difficult to predict. I’m very sorry.”

  Olli doesn’t feel anything. His body is like a mechanical doll that someone inside him is controlling with strings.

  “How can it be treated?” he asks, noting the practised tone of sensibleness in his voice. “Surely there’s a treatment for it?”

  “Once the lab results come back, I’ll send a nurse over with pre-filled syringes. She can advise you then. Injections of glatiramer have been used to slow the progress of symptoms, and they may be effective for Miss Kara. Unfortunately I can’t predict with any certainty.”

  The doctor gets up, pats Olli on the shoulder, picks up his bag and leaves.

  The next day a nurse comes over with syringes and teaches Olli to give the injections to Greta, who, luckily, is feeling better again. As he gives her a shot, she looks at him trustingly, like a child. They feel somehow closer than they ever have before. When the nurse leaves, they don’t say a word, just take off their clothes and make love.

  Greta wraps her legs around him and squeezes so tight that it’s hard for him to move.

  Her green eyes study him gravely while her body writhes in pleasure.

  Not until the very end do her eyes close, and at that moment a sob escapes her lips. “Mon amour, la petite mort…”

  48

  AS OCTOBER ADVANCES, the shadows darken in the Wivi Lönn house, but Olli and Greta continue their lives as before, except that they have sex more often and more fiercely than before, not really making love but fucking. They smoke so feverishly that they nearly choke themselves with coughing fits, filling the house with smoke, reading Christina Rossetti over copious quantities of wine, devouring chocolate with no regard to calories and taking long night-time walks.

  They walk through the dark side streets of Jyväskylä, sometimes silent, sometimes fervently debating art and politics.

  Greta believes in socialism with a human face, while Olli thinks the whole idea is an oxymoron, and proceeds from the assumption that only free markets can ensure people an opportunity to live life as they wish. And when Greta tells him she bought a Jack Vettriano painting for a large sum and hung it on her wall in Paris, Olli says she succumbed to tasteless trash and begins to fervently defend Gustav Klimt, whose work Greta finds coarse and artificial, merely decorative. When Olli praises Ellen Thesleff, Greta says that for some reason she can’t stand Thesleff’s work, even though the Sleeping Girl hung on her bedroom wall in the Tourula days.

  They end up arguing, and then, when their talk comes to a sudden stop, they look at each other and Greta gets an impish gleam in her eye. They’ve just come to an arched courtyard entrance, and Greta pulls Olli under it, takes off her underwear, pulls up her skirt, and announces that she wants him inside her, right now.

  Olli smiles in confusion, but he’s ready to obey her until a police car cruises past and stops.

  They laugh and head back to Hämeenkatu hand in hand. They enact Greta’s wish in the colonnade at the Lönn house, oblivious to the cold wind.

  Greta is playing Chopin every day again, every piece like it was her last.

  Olli is amazed at how much he can enjoy Greta’s playing in spite of her diagnosis. It’s probably the influence of the M-particles in the house—everything seems slightly dreamy, and thus not so wounding.

  “You haven’t asked me that question in a while,” Greta says once, without a pause in the music, shooting Olli a smile.

  Olli doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want Greta to see his tears. They haven’t really talked about her nerve disorder because they don’t want to cede to its power and spoil the moments they have together by talking about it the way you talk about important, life-changing things. They recognize its existence only at the moments when Olli gives Greta her injection of glatiramer, and even then they always make love immediately after the shot, as if to wipe it away from her bodily memory.

  When they go upstairs to bed that evening, Greta takes out A Guide to the Cinematic Life and reads aloud from the chapter on cinematic death and renunciation:

  Everything that is truly awful becomes, by its very inevitability, profoundly beautiful. We have only to learn to embrace the deep shadows of life along with its bright moments, for otherwise we won’t have the courage to really live. You don’t have to like the pain. It is enough to love it.

  Afterwards, they cling to each other.

  That night Olli awakes and realizes he’s alone in bed.

  It’s raining.

  He hears Chopin from downstairs. Sonata no. 2. He clasps his hands behind his head and listens. Forces himself to comprehend that he is listening to the music of his dying lover.

  His chest begins to heave as if gripped by an earthquake. He lets the tears come, covers his face and allows himself to grieve for the first time in months. He’s crying for Greta, but also for his own suffering, and that of others. Especially the others.

  At the same time, no doubt due to the M-particles, he senses the beauty of his grief, allows himself to enjoy it, like a cigarette or a glass of wine or the music he’s listening to at that moment. The feeling comes from deep inside, from the same place as music and literature and all art, filling every corner of his consciousness the way the organ music filled Notre-Dame as he sat in the last pew and listened.

  It’s just as Greta says in Cinematic Life—sorrow, when experienced properly, is an even more beautiful and cinematic emotion than love, though difficult to endure.

  The piano plays until wrong notes creep into the composition. Olli sits up.

  Silence.

  There is a bang from downstairs and a cold draught flows through the house.

  Olli runs to the window.

  Greta is pacing back and forth in the garden, oblivious to the rain, wearing nothing but a dressing gown.

  She seems to be looking f
or something.

  Olli pulls on his pyjamas, stuffs his feet into his slippers and goes down to bring her inside.

  When he gets outside he doesn’t see Greta anywhere.

  The rain is increasing and growing colder. The plants in the garden tremble under it. Olli shouts for Greta. The large, dark garden is filled with hiding places. He checks the storage shed, peeks into the greenhouse and goes to the Apple Gate to make sure she hasn’t wandered out into the street. Then he returns to the yard and checks every inch of it, several times. He even looks in the apple trees, in case she’s taken it into her head to climb one of them.

  His wet pyjamas are clinging to his skin. He’s shivering, but he’s too worried to notice the cold. Finally he stops in the middle of the garden and stands in his striped pyjamas looking around helplessly, trying to think.

  Could she have gone back inside? No, he’s sure he would have seen her.

  Then he notices Greta’s dressing gown lying under a bush, and his heart sinks. Now she’s naked, and will surely take a bad chill.

  He walks over to the dressing gown. It is, of course, soaking wet and dirty, but looking more closely Olli notices that part of it has also been pulled down into some kind of hole.

  An animal’s burrow.

  Some dirty, diseased, yellow-toothed animal, probably oozing bacteria.

  Olli feels like he’s going to throw up. His head is buzzing. He has a tremendous desire to forget he saw the dressing gown, to look the other way and get out of there, get away from that revolting hole.

  But he makes himself stay because the feeling itself tells him what is happening. He falls on all fours and finds the narrow opening in the tall grass where Greta crawled in. He starts to tear away the grass and withered flowers and wet leaves, until the entrance to the secret passage is finally visible.

  He starts to shiver harder as he looks into the darkness that waits under the ground. No person in his right mind would even put his hand in there. There could be beetles, snakes, centipedes, rotted carcasses, rats or larger, sharp-toothed animals…

  All his instincts tell him to cover the hole up again.

  Right now.

  Before something awful happens.

  He takes a deep breath, willing his pulse to level off, his stress hormones to dissipate. He empties his mind of thought and focuses, as though preparing to dive into cold water.

  Then, without thinking, he sticks his hand into the hole in the ground.

  Then his head.

  Followed by his upper body.

  The smell of earth strikes his face and he almost pulls himself out again. What in heaven’s name is he doing? The only sensible thing to do is of course to run into the house and call the police, or the fire department, to come and get Greta.

  Olli sobs and trembles as he forces himself farther under the ground.

  Eventually his body begins to crawl, automatically, like he learnt to do as a child with the other members of the Tourula Five. He can still remember Karri’s words: Think of your body as a crawling machine. Don’t think about anything else.

  You can only go into a secret passage if you learn to eliminate your natural psychological resistance.

  Wet mud gets into his nostrils, his mouth, his eyes. The cold earth tears at his skin. His pyjamas are no protection. He coughs and snorts. He doesn’t just fear, he knows that in a moment he will suffocate and die, get stuck, have a heart attack, or bleed to death when some fierce animal—a weasel, or maybe a badger—bites his face, goes for his throat.

  But Olli’s body remembers thirty years ago, ignores his instinct for self-preservation, and crawls ahead, deeper into the cold and the dark.

  49

  OLLI CRAWLS.

  Once you manage to get inside a secret passage, moving forward becomes easier. Your mind stops struggling, opens up to the M-particles, and starts to move.

  Then the secret passages begin to lure you deeper and deeper.

  Reality becomes a Rubik’s cube played with by invisible fingers. Olli starts to remember things he’s forgotten, and at the same time to forget the parts of his life that he left above the ground a moment ago—or maybe hundreds of years ago. Time has no meaning here. In the secret passages, the past and the present are touching, as are what is and what simply could be. In the secret passages you can remember every choice you’ve ever had to make and all of those crossroads are spread out in alternative continuums. You just have to know how to listen to the music of the M-particles.

  Karri once warned them that the magical feeling in the secret passages is powerful and dangerous and can rinse your mind so clean of all human connection that there is no return.

  Even a short visit there always changes a person somehow.

  Olli crawls. He knows he’s searching for something. But what?

  A girl.

  Not a girl.

  A woman.

  The woman that the girl became.

  Greta, the girl in the pear-print dress, is here somewhere. It’s dark. Olli holds on to that name, and to the shadow of Greta; he can’t drop them, no matter how hard the M-particles shake him.

  Shadows waver in the blackness. Sometimes he thinks he sees something, but in the secret passages you can’t trust your eyes. You might see all kinds of things and become so confused that you forget to crawl. And you can’t stop crawling, not for more than a second, or something bad could happen.

  The size of the passage varies. Sometimes it’s open and he can walk in a stoop. Sometimes he can even stand up straight. Then he has to crouch again, hold his breath and wriggle forward like a snake or a lizard.

  Holding on to the name, and the thought of the pear-print dress, Olli crawls and crawls.

  At some point the darkness begins to flow around him like water and mermaids swim up to him. They smile sweetly and beckon him to come and play. He smiles back.

  Rest a while and look at us. Are we not beautiful?

  You are, he answers, not stopping, remembering the importance of crawling.

  Wouldn’t you like to touch us, caress our salty skin, kiss our breasts? Let us take away your burden and everything you’ve left behind up there. We can give you sweet forgetfulness in our arms…

  Olli shakes his head.

  You can have your little plastic boat back, too. Remember? Perhaps we won’t need it any more once we have you… At least tell us your name. What do you say—the boat for your name?

  No, Olli whispers.

  The mermaids’ playfulness vanishes.

  Then maybe we will take your son. He likes our song so much, because he can hear the M-particles in it, and he might wade too far out at some moment when his poor mother is looking the other way…

  Olli stops, flings a handful of gravel at the mermaids, and keeps crawling as they scatter into the darkness.

  Then comes a tight turn.

  It leads to the right and down.

  He gropes at the darkness, feels the walls, twists and turns his body to make his way forward. Gravel scrapes his belly bloody. His trousers come off. A root on the ceiling tears at his face.

  As he pulls himself a little farther forward a root catches at his testicles, like the cold hand of a witch, and he has to stop to keep them from being torn off.

  Then a memory begins to unwrap itself in his mind, so powerful that it makes him stop where he is, his body painfully twisted.

  In the memory he’s in a boat on the Touru River with the Blomrooses and Karri. Three days of heavy rain has just ended a couple of hours earlier. The air is still damp. A thick mist hangs over the river, hiding the shores and making the world dim and cottony.

  Leo is rowing upstream. Anne is at the rudder. Her white panties peak out from under her plaid skirt. Anne notices Olli looking at them and smiles teasingly. Karri in his hood is crouched at the bow, a grey lump, peering out at the ravine. Riku is sitting next to Olli in the middle of the boat, sourly playing with his Coca-Cola yo-yo.

  Anne eventually tells him to put the
yo-yo away so the boat won’t rock.

  The weight of the five of them makes the little boat ride dangerously low. They couldn’t fit Timi in the boat, but he follows along on the shore. They can’t see him, but they can hear him panting and barking through the fog, and they shout encouragement so he won’t give up and wander off.

  On their right, invisible on the high ridge, is the beginning of the grounds of the paper mill. On the left is thick forest. Beyond the trees the land rises up in a steep hillside with the old cemetery at the top.

  When they left the house they told each other that it was a perfect day for an expedition.

  Yesterday they looked at a map and saw that it was only two kilometres upstream to where the lake emptied into the Touru, and they decided to take the boat to the river’s source. Aunt Anna, however, told them not to go beyond the dam at the paper mill. They lamented this for a moment, then decided that they could still explore the ravine in the boat and go ashore somewhere interesting.

  Such a place seems to have just been found.

  Timi starts to bark excitedly and comes to a stop somewhere in the mist.

  Karri points towards the sound and Anne steers the boat in that direction.

  The shore comes into view through the fog. They’re headed towards it fast. Olli takes hold of the sides of the boat and prepares himself for a crash.

  But they don’t crash.

  The boat clatters and scrapes through a wall of bushes and branches and up a narrow bank of sludge. They come to a rocking stop in a cove just slightly larger than the boat.

  Timi weaves his way towards them through the trees, then leaps into the boat, barking happily, and licks Olli’s hand.

  They crouch under the encroaching branches for a moment, then start pushing the limbs aside, preparing to get out and explore the riverbank.

  Timi dashes between Riku and Olli to greet Leo and Karri, and the boat lists out of balance.