Secret Passages in a Hillside Town
Page 30
The resolute, passionate note in Karri’s voice reminds Olli of the final scene in Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart convinces Ingrid Bergman to give up their love and get on the plane with her husband.
Karri is silent for a moment, then says, “You must understand now why everything has to happen according to the script.”
Olli tries to think.
They look at each other. Karri is waiting for his approval.
Olli stubs out his cigarette and shakes his head.
Karri looks confused.
Olli has had enough of this unwelcome presence. He gets up, takes a breath, grabs the golden-haired creature and drags him to the piano. Karri resists, but Olli is stronger. “Play,” he growls, his hands pressed on slender shoulders.
Karri looks up at him angrily from under yellow curls. “Don’t be a fool, Olli. We still have things to talk about. I haven’t told you everything. We should let Greta sleep while we prepare for her last, great scene.”
Olli wraps his fingers around the slender neck, presses his thumbs against the vertebrae and squeezes. “Play Chopin for me,” he whispers. “Or else this whole thing will be over right now, and there won’t be anybody getting up when the credits roll.”
Karri starts striking the keys with a mocking grin, making no attempt at music.
Olli tightens his grip.
The lovely face reddens, the breath wheezing. Karri tries harder now.
With tears in his eyes, Olli squeezes still tighter.
“Play.”
Gradually the tinkling begins to sound like music. At first there are just a few notes that sound right. Then a few stuttering passages of notes.
When the room finally fills with one of Greta’s favourite nocturnes, Olli loosens his hold and lets his hands rest on her shoulders.
“How did I get here?” Greta says, hoarse and sputtering—but continuing to play.
“The main thing is that you are here,” Olli says, kissing her neck and picking up the telephone. “Please keep playing. More than anything right now, I want to hear Chopin. I’m going to call Dr Oksanen. He has to come over right away. Darling, I think he may be able to cure you after all.”
The End
58
THE WINDOWS BRIGHTEN. They wake at the same time, lightly make love and lie for a long time under the covers, holding each other.
Olli’s hand is on Greta’s left breast. His index finger is laid across her nipple, his thumb gently pressing the side of her breast. He feels a scar stretching under his hand and thinks that it’s there because of him. The thought floods him with an overwhelming tenderness.
His face is pressed against Greta’s neck. He breathes through her golden hair and seems to smell the scent of a warm hillside. It fills the room and carries him back to a meadow where they had a picnic a few days after they lay together in Wivi Lönn’s house for the first time. Autumn was postponed for a day and summer blazed up one last time before the coming winter.
They sat in the tall grass to eat, and ended up having sex. It was more ritual than unbridled passion. Without a word, Greta put her half-eaten tomato sandwich back in the basket, unzipped Olli’s trousers, took her panties off under her dress and sat on his lap.
As they merged, the M-particles sang to them from deep in the earth, and for one moment Olli sensed all the secret passages in Jyväskylä, their locations, their routes, as if he were viewing a map drawn on his soul.
Naturally, their meadow is mentioned in the Magical City Guide. Olli wonders if a lot of people will go there now that the book is available and the first printing is virtually sold out. Maiju at the office has told him that next summer the Jyväskylä tourist office is planning to sell guided tours to all the magical places where his love for Greta Kara was reborn.
The thought of it makes Olli sad, although it is good news for the business.
Greta sits up in bed, stretches, glows for him, wraps her arms around his neck and gives him a kiss. Then she turns on her computer and updates her Facebook status.
Greta Kara is completely happy today!
Two days earlier, Greta experienced a miraculous recovery from the neurological disease that had been pronounced terminal.
When Olli called Dr Oksanen and told him that Greta was lying in bed, not breathing, the chemist hurried over to perform the deathbed scene and help Karri rise from the dead.
The moment he walked in the door, the doctor discovered that there had been a last-minute rewrite.
Olli forced him to inject Greta with the antidote and declare that the patient would have a complete recovery. “My dear Mr Suominen, I don’t know what to say,” he mumbled as Olli shoved him out through the Apple Gate onto the rainy street.
Olli had no intention of telling Greta about Karri’s plans. If Karri came back to haunt Greta’s body, Olli was ready to do whatever the situation demanded.
Now that Greta was well again, Olli could consider what to do about his wife and son.
He felt that he had completed the task that Anne Blomroos had given him, and before the first snow, too. Karri could say what he liked, but Greta had said—on her Facebook status, no less—that she was completely happy. It was official.
That night Olli tiptoed downstairs to the computer and opened Aino’s Facebook profile. The status was a relief. But it also meant that he had a lot of explaining to do to his family.
Aino Suominen and son are on their way home.
The Blomrooses’ Facebook profiles had disappeared from Olli’s friends list. He pondered this for a while and decided that it meant he had seen the matter to its conclusion, and there was no need to continue their connection.
He also checked to make sure there were no new posts on Karri’s profile.
When he went back to the bedroom, he noticed light peeping out from Greta’s laptop. It had been left open a crack.
Greta was asleep, so he pushed the computer closed and crawled into bed.
It’s Sunday, so although Olli has to stop in at Book Tower to take care of some marketing plans for the Magical City Guide, he and Greta have the rest of the day to themselves. Greta’s legs are still a little stiff, and the weather is cold. But she announces that she wants to go out and walk hand in hand through the city.
Olli is glad.
They eat breakfast. Afterwards Olli smokes a cigarette and stares out the bay window. Greta plays Chopin. Waltz no. 7.
She gets up, comes to stand behind him, and wraps her arms around him.
“Olli,” she says hesitantly, “do you think we’ll always love each other as much as we do now?”
Olli blows smoke at the window and tries not to think of what Karri said to him. Snowflakes are starting to fall in the garden.
Greta is waiting for an answer.
“Darling, I am sure that we will be happy for the rest of our lives,” he says, suddenly filled with certainty. “And when the moment of death finally comes, we’ll go together.”
Death is justly considered the high point of a cinematic life. It is a strong ending for any story that has been lived truly, and also serves as a dramatic element, if not the critical turning point, in the lives of those who know the dying person.
Depending on the context and point of view, death can be emotional and melodramatic, coolly laconic and expressionless, courageous, happy, symbolic, senseless, terrifying, sickening, ironic, tragic, even comic, but whatever the tone, it gives ultimate meaning to everything that has come before it. If at all possible, a cinematic person should pay particular attention to his or her death, in order to make it elegant and cinematically meaningful.
(See following page, death scenes: Max Schreck in Nosferatu; Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front; Helen Hayes in A Farewell to Arms; James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces; Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun; Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal in Love Story.)
Roll Credits
59
AS THEY LEAVE THE PUBLISHING HOUSE, Greta takes his hand and tugs him
towards Harju Ridge.
“Come on! I want to climb the steps!” she whispers, and Olli follows with a smile.
They cross the street and start up the stone staircase. Frost covers the ground. The sparse snow starts to fall thicker, turning the hillsides white.
Greta glows.
“It’s winter, so we ought to go to the observation tower and drink hot cocoa with whipped cream on top. Oh, Olli, I’ve always hated the cold, but I love this snow! We’ve had two summers, but this will be our first winter. The best winter ever!”
She hangs on his arm, chattering happily.
Olli grows winded. His heart is light, but beating fast. His feet feel heavy.
Through the falling snow he sees a large, black car stop at the top of the steps. A door opens and two women and a child get out of the back seat. The first woman points at them. The other starts down the steps with the child.
“Maybe after this we can go have hot cocoa every Sunday,” Greta says. “We can do it every year after the first snow and stop when the snow is melted… What’s the matter?”
Olli has frozen. Greta lets out a laugh and teases him for being out of shape.
Aino and the boy have stopped a few steps above them. They’re both suntanned. Her face looks tired. The boy sees his father and smiles.
They stare at each other.
Greta tightens her grip on Olli’s arm.
He waits.
The other woman has started down the stairs. A pale blonde—the same woman Olli had a brief dialogue with at the film club. The one with the scooter. His feet stumble on the steps.
Anne Blomroos.
She’s dying, but she is still cinematically elegant. As she comes closer she smiles wearily, one arm hanging heavily at her side.
Aino looks at Greta unconcerned and says to Olli, “Well, we’re finally here. It was quite a trip. She’s brought us, but she seems disappointed. She said to tell you something about how you were supposed to follow a script and apparently you didn’t.”
“Daddy ate the pear and he forgot,” the child mumbles, his brow furrowed.
Olli turns cold.
Aino strokes the boy’s head. “Yes, that’s what the nice lady said,” she murmurs. “She said that the second part of some previous agreement wasn’t carried out and so that changes your agreement… But I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Whew! What a trip! We can talk about all of it later. Right now we just want to go straight home and have a shower. What do you say, Olli? Are you coming home for dinner, or do you still have work to do?”
Olli shrugs. He glances at Greta.
She looks back at him questioningly and squeezes his arm.
The falling snow fades the world around them to invisibility. Everything else is gone; all that’s left are the five of them and the massive Nero’s Steps, and even those are being covered little by little in a blanket of white.
Anne Blomroos is standing a few steps above. She raises both arms in front of her. Olli barely has time to think that the black thing she’s holding looks a bit like a pistol, when a bang closes up his ears.
His son falls face-down on the steps as if he’s been shoved, and tumbles head over heels to Olli’s feet.
“Oopsy-daisy,” Olli says.
The second bang makes Aino flinch, as if she’s just remembered that she left the stove on. She spreads her arms, bends over and throws herself at Olli’s feet, taking hold of his left shoe.
Olli looks down in surprise, first at Aino, then at his shoe. His ears are ringing. Anne’s voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere very far away.
“After the beautiful ending Karri was supposed to come and take me back into the secret passages,” Anne says. “It was my one and only wish in all this world. Oh, Olli. You should have known that you can’t take away a girl’s one and only wish.”
A third bang.
Greta sighs and falls on her side, still holding Olli’s hand. Her green eyes stare up at him, her pupils dilating, her mouth gulping for air.
Something red starts to mingle with the new-fallen snow on the stones.
Olli turns and looks at Anne.
She looks back at him, pistol raised, tears in her eyes. The snow falls thicker and thicker.
It is quite a cinematic moment.
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Pushkin Press
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London, WC2H 9JQ
Original text © 2010 Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
Secret Passages in a Hillside Town first published in Finland as Harjukaupungin
salakäytävät by Atena Kustannus.
Published by agreement with the Kontext Agency.
English translation © Lola Rogers 2017
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
This work has been published with the financial assistance of FILI–Finnish Literature Exchange
ISBN 13 978 1 78227 338 7
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