The Death of a Much Travelled Woman

by Barbara Wilson

  Whatever Gloria had, Luisa wanted, too, but she did not want to hear Gloria’s name mentioned, and it was like poison to her when Helga politely said to her in the taxi, “And do you know Gloria de los Angeles? She was here two years ago and made such a sensation. So elegant and witty and such an amazing writer. What a vivid imagination she has. I adore her books, don’t you?”

  “Her books are shit,” said Luisa briefly, running an indifferent hand through her Romaine Brooks style black hair with the white streak in it. “Pots boiling, no more.”

  Helga was taken aback, but realizing her gaffe—this was neutral Finland, after all—she said, “I certainly can agree with you about her last collection. It was so…predictable, really…it had nothing new to say. Not like your fiction, Luisa, which is so…challenging…”

  And Luisa unbent slightly to say, “I will autograph my latest book for you.” Luisa pulled out a copy of Saturn’s Children. “Whom shall I inscribe it to?”

  “To Helga…and Pekka,” Helga said, avoiding my eyes. “My husband is a literary critic and admires your work. He’ll be so pleased.”

  The next morning I woke up in the hotel room I was sharing with Luisa to find light streaming across my face. It was only four a.m., however, and I had only gone to bed, in a pearly blue light, three hours ago. I stared out the window at the lake, which was shimmering brightly. Beside it on the shore was an old-fashioned wooden sauna, like Helga’s family’s.

  At the cocktail party the night before, Helga had come in with her husband, this Pekka. He was certainly good-looking, in a sardonic way, but much shorter than she. His long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a white shirt and black jacket and black jeans. His English was pure SoHo-Manhattan. Helga kept him away from me, so I didn’t meet him, but she couldn’t keep him away from the rest of the women there, particularly if they were young or wearing décolleté. Helga had the choice of standing awkwardly by his side as he flirted, or removing herself to the other side of the room where, with some dignity, she could pretend to be involved in other conversations while watching him all the time. He didn’t care if she watched him. He smoked and he drank, quite a bit, and toward the end of the evening, he pawed. At one point I saw him stroking the round little posterior of a young Dutch writer, who was herself fairly inebriated. Her name tag said she was Marion van Gelder. She had bleached hair about a knuckle-length long and multiply-pierced ears. I thought I saw a contemptuous look in her eye, but she didn’t try to stop Pekka. Fortunately Helga seemed to have left by then.

  In the morning light, I looked out at the lake; and I looked at Luisa, who, for all her much-publicized angst, had never enjoyed anything but a very good night’s sleep (“But my dreams! Absolutely nightmares. Every night, Cassandra.”), and who was snoring peacefully. Then I rooted around in my bag and found my notebook. “Finland,” I wrote. “Saunas. Reindeer steak. Depression. Midnight sun.”

  I had another, unannounced reason for wanting to come to Finland. Luisa with her notions of high art, and her family’s wealth, would be surprised to find out that in spite of my best intentions, I occasionally thought about money, or my lack of it. The fact is that the career of literary translator into English isn’t especially lucrative. Very rarely do any of us manage a small percentage of the royalties; our fees are based on the number of words in a text. In many European countries, literary translation is a respected occupation that provides a steady income. My colleague in Germany, Marianne Schnackenbusch, for instance, constantly has work. But this isn’t true in the English-speaking world, at least as concerns literature. There is more work in technical areas, and I’d done plenty of it, but I found it mind-numbing in general.

  Thus, I hadn’t been adverse to the suggestion made by an American journalist I’d met by chance in Romania a few years ago that we collaborate on a series of travel pieces. Or, as Mr. Archie Snapp wrote when he suggested the idea: “You do the leg work, Cass, and set the scene; I’ll rewrite for the public.” Archie’s public was primarily in the Midwest, beginning with his own local paper in Ann Arbor, The Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner, but we (he) had been successful in placing some of our pieces in larger newspapers on occasion.

  In Archie’s hands, topics like “Revisiting the Paris of the Modernists” had become “Shakespeare and Co.—The Tradition Continues,” and my article on the archeological museum of Mexico City had turned into “From Olmec to Aztec, or How Hot Chocolate Was Invented.” I let Archie provide the titles and rewrite my sentences. And with no problem at all did I let him take the credit and the byline. All I did was provide him with three to five pages of notes and a few angles, and sometimes a roll of film. And I got half the check. Archie was honest as salt and very reliable. But so far I’d had more disillusion in Finland than inspiration. Every time I wrote sauna, I thought of Helga and her obvious unhappiness. I’m used to women lovers getting married; but I like them to marry nice men.

  Besides, I wanted some coffee, and breakfast wasn’t until eight. I got back in bed with my notebook and soon was fast asleep again.

  When I woke up next, it was ten o’clock and Luisa was gone. The first seminar must have already started. I rushed downstairs and ran into Helga, who was carrying a microphone and looking distracted.

  “Listen Helga,” I said, “about this husband of yours,” but she rushed on, explaining, “I told the other organizers that the ‘Writer and Gender’ group would be the biggest, but they said only a few women would want to attend that, that everyone else would want to go to the ‘Writer and History’ and the ‘Writer and the Imagination.’ But the ‘Writer and Gender’ group overflowed the little balcony they assigned them, and we have had to put them under that oak tree. There are so many we need a microphone.”

  I followed her across the lawn to a group of about thirty people, mostly women, sitting cross-legged in a circle. The discussion was in full swing:

  “You can say that because you come from a country like Holland,” a woman whose name tag said she was Simone from Algeria was saying vehemently. “I tried to write about myself as a sexual being and what happens? I sell 60,000 copies of my book, but my publisher’s life is threatened, there is a public burning, and I end up having to live in Paris.”

  “I know about notoriety and stigma,” the Dutch woman shot back. It was Marion, whom Pekka had flirted with so heavily. She was one of the youngest women there, in her late twenties, and this morning was wearing a skirt and a vest with nothing underneath. Several blue tattoos were visible. “The Dutch pride themselves on their tolerance about prostitution, but they didn’t want to hear the true story of my life as a fifteen-year-old call-girl to wealthy men. I too became famous, in the wrong way.”

  Mayumi, a Japanese woman in her fifties, with a frizzy gray permanent and a no-nonsense air, spoke up. I recognized her as one of Japan’s best known writers. “What I wrote in the sixties was regarded as pornography, in the seventies as erotica, and in the eighties as literature. We must have faith in our literary intent, and in ourselves, no matter what they say about us.”

  “The worst censorship,” Luisa said flatly, “is the censorship we perform on ourselves.” And she, normally so arrogant and convoluted when she spoke of her work, began to tell a simple and wrenching story about her mother finding her journal when she was fourteen, a journal where she’d written the story of falling in love with another girl.

  When she lost her words in English, I took over for her. “That is when I first learned that writing is dangerous. After that I wrote my diary in code. I have written my novels that way too.”

  The few men in the group had said little up to that point, but now one spoke. He was a tall Finn with little round glasses like John Lennon and floppy hair, younger than the woman he sat next to, who had been clenching her hands until they were almost white. “It is important to recognize that there are other ways to silence a woman writing about sexuality than banning her or her books, or threatening exposure or punishment. Ridicule is an effecti
ve silencer, too, and in a small country like Finland, which prides itself on equality, ridicule is perhaps the best weapon there is.”

  This unleashed a torrent of stories from the Finnish women in the group. How for all the years that this conference had been going on, they had never been invited to speak or lead a group or participate fully. How the whole thing was controlled by a male literary Mafia who just thought of it as a place to get drunk and screw around and play soccer.

  “Soccer?” I couldn’t help asking.

  For this, more than anything, seemed to enrage them most. That every time this conference was held, the men writers played a midnight game of soccer, what Europeans and most of the world besides North America calls football. It was one of the things the conference was famous for, and it was always written about as if it were a great institution: “Finland Against the Rest of the World.” But, strangely enough, it always seemed to be Finnish men against men from the rest of the world.

  “And if you say anything,” said the woman with the clenched hands, “they laugh at you. But you’d get hurt, they say. But women don’t like to play soccer, they say. But we need you as an audience, they say. But why are you making such a big deal about nothing, they say.”

  “If nothing else, we must make sure not to be their audience,” the Danish poet Birgit said, speaking precisely. “We will organize an evening of our own, perhaps a sauna together down by the lake in the old sauna house.”

  And the decision, in high good spirits, was made, the women would sauna together, while the men played soccer without an audience. Except for Luisa, who was heard to mutter as she strode off, “I love a game of football.”

  But then, Luisa was an unpredictable feminist, to say the least.

  Word of our animated seminar got around, and the next day when the group convened again, there were twice as many people. But the self-revelations that had been possible in a smaller group were difficult in a larger one, especially one where there was now a sizable number of men. Some of them were there out of genuine curiosity and some out of prurience. They’d heard the discussion had been about sex, and they wanted to get in on it.

  It wasn’t that there hadn’t been conflict at the first session, but this was disagreement of a different order.

  “We can’t write explicit sex scenes any more than you can,” a British writer called Harold humphed. “If we did, all the women would immediately jump on us for exploiting them.”

  “So you acknowledge that your so-called sex scene would have to be exploitative then?” the young Dutch writer Marion demanded.

  “That’s exactly the tone I’m talking about,” he said. “I’m in the wrong, aren’t I, before I’ve put pen to paper. It’s like trying to write in a police state.”

  Eva from Prague snorted. “Oh, what in hell do you know about writing in a police state? But I can tell you one thing, since our particular police state ended, there has been nothing but pornography. That’s the male idea of freedom—freedom to oppress women.”

  The debate raged, but as it continued, I noticed something peculiar. The foreign women were talking as much as ever, in the embattled and aggressive manner they’d adopted to defend themselves and that was taken as further evidence of their lack of humor and tolerance; and the men, both foreign and Finnish, had a lot to say (to be fair, their comments were supportive and perplexed, as well as combative). But the Finnish women, so eager to share their stories the day before, were mainly silent. I looked over at the Finnish couple who’d spoken so eloquently—Silje and Tom, I’d heard they were named, the authors and illustrators of a series of children’s books—but they didn’t add a word to the discussion. From time to time I saw them staring, Silje with nervousness and Tom with real hatred, at a man in the outer circle, Helga’s husband Pekka, a man who, as far as I could tell, had said nothing, whose eyes went from one speaker to the next in a curious, amused sort of way. They rested with particular interest on Marion, who was speaking about whores’ rights and her own past experience. He didn’t stay for the whole session, but wandered off after an hour, hardly acknowledging Helga who had been watching him as intently as he’d been watching Marion.

  I caught up with Helga afterward and asked her what had happened, why all the Finnish women were silent.

  She paused and said reluctantly, “I would imagine it had something to do with Pekka being there. He writes a literary column for one of the daily papers. He’s very well known for his wit. It makes…it makes some people afraid of him.”

  “Are you afraid of him, Helga?” I asked quietly, but she was already moving away, almost running, with that long-legged gait I remembered from years before.

  Luisa and I both skipped the afternoon session, and settled down like two asocial cats to work. “Just some memories,” she said, when I asked her what she was writing. “And you?”

  “A letter to a friend. About Finland.”

  My articles for Archie often began with some alluring generality about travel that had recently occurred to me. I might be struck one day by what hard work travelling was and how useless that work was. What good to me were the long hours I’d put in reading bus and train and ferry timetables? In my memory, and in the stories I told, my travels seemed composed of an endless succession of peak experiences. But in reality, most of what one calls travel is its very opposite—waiting, not moving.

  When I tried to put some of my evanescent thoughts down, to capture the subtle sense of working hard and often to little apparent purpose, only to have a fleeting impression of something deliciously bizarre or magnificently ordinary, Archie reduced my carefully honed words to variations on standard clichés: “Travel is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration,” he might begin, continuing, “but don’t let that put you off! A few simple tips [I had of course not offered any tips, only bittersweet reflections] can help make your trip an easier one, and give you more time to enjoy the peak experiences that make travel such a memorable and rewarding activity.”

  Sitting on my bed in front of the view of the lake (Luisa had commandeered the desk and chair), I clutched at elusive images of fire and ice, overpowering heat and frigid winds, lakes and fires and the midnight sun. All the time knowing that by the time my story appeared in the Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner it would probably be titled “Sauna Like It Hot” and begin: “Winter or summer Finland calls to the adventurous tourist. But whether you’re skiing, or biking, or swimming in one of Finland’s many lakes, you can relax at the end of the day in the dry heat of a pine-scented sauna. Sauna is, after all, a Finnish word.”

  Late that night, the midnight soccer game took place on a grassy meadow near the hotel, but as promised many of the women didn’t attend, instead gathering at the old sauna house on the lake. Luisa had still been writing when I left her. It was something to do with the story she’d told the day before about her mother finding her journal. The shouts and screams of the soccer players and their audience floated across the grounds and down to the lake, but very faintly. When we went into the sauna, we couldn’t hear them at all. The group was a handful of Finnish women and six foreigners—Mayumi, Simone, Marion, Eva, Birgit, and me. All of us foreigners had to leave the hot sauna before the natives. Naked, we ran outside and plunged into the lake. Male laughter wafted down to us, and Simone shuddered as she rose out of the water and headed back to the sauna.

  “It’s strange being naked like this out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “Frightening, but liberating somehow. I want to do it. Yet I keep looking over my shoulder.”

  Marion said, “I made a resolve when I was young that I would never be afraid of anything, I would never let a man stop me from doing anything.”

  “You sound like my daughter,” Birgit said. “I admire that. She tells me stories of travelling in foreign places, how she threatened a man who tried to rape her with a knife. I wasn’t brought up like that.”

  “I hate to hear the sound of men laughing in a group,” Simone began, and then stopped. �
��Well, that’s all over now. I can never go back while the fundamentalists have so much power. My sister and her husband and children have left too, we all live together in Paris now, and perhaps forever.”

  We spent several hours at the lake. Mayumi and Birgit managed to stay in the longest, while Eva, Marion, Simone and I opted for briefer and briefer visits to the sweltering sauna and spent increasing amounts of time chatting on the dock. The Finnish women left together, then Eva and Simone, and then Birgit. I told Mayumi and Marion that I was starting to feel like a plate of salmon mousse and would have to leave.

  As I walked back across the grounds to my room in the hotel, I could hear the sounds of drunken male laughter. It sounded like the game was winding up. I thought of what Simone had said and shuddered slightly. I put a bold face on, but I never felt completely, totally safe anywhere alone at night, and I, like Simone, did not like the sound of men laughing in a group. Perhaps to humanize them again, I walked over to the lit field, just in time to see a familiar figure knock the hurtling ball away from the goal with her elegant forehead.

  A cheer went up and Luisa was mobbed. The Finns had lost, the Rest of the World, Including One Woman, had triumphed. There was always this alternative to boycotting segregated pleasures, wasn’t there? To take part anyway as the spirit moved you and show them that you were as good as or better than they were.

  And who was to say which way was best? Certainly at that moment my own tomboy youth came back to me and I wished I had been in the game to kick the ball past Luisa, rather than sitting in the all-girl’s clubhouse, feeling superior, envious, and just a little bit afraid.

  The next morning at breakfast word flew through the room: Pekka had been found in the sauna by himself, dead of a heart attack. No one remembered seeing him go into the sauna; the last time anyone remembered seeing him was in the confusion at the end of the game.