The Healer (2 page)

“I told her it wouldn't lead anywhere,” he said, and I couldn't help noticing a slightly triumphant tone in his voice. “I told her she wouldn't find out any more than the police had. And our rapidly shrinking readership doesn't want to read about it. It's just depressing. They already know that everything's going to hell in a handbasket.”

I looked out into the rain-soaked darkness over Töölö Bay. I knew there were buildings out there, but I couldn't see them.

“Did Johanna already write the article?” I asked when we'd had sufficient time to listen to ourselves and the building breathing.

Lassi leaned back in his chair, put his head against the headrest, and looked at me through half-opened eyes, as if I were not on the other side of his narrow desk but far off on the horizon.

“Why do you ask?” he said.

“Johanna and I always keep in touch with each other,” I explained. It occurred to me that when we repeat things, it isn't always for the purpose of convincing other people. “I don't mean constantly. But if nothing else we at least send each other a text message or an e-mail every few hours. Even if we don't really have anything to tell each other. It's usually just a couple of words. Something funny, or sometimes something a little affectionate. It's a habit with us.”

This last sentence was purposely emphatic. Lassi listened to me, his face expressionless.

“Now I haven't heard from her for twenty-four hours,” I continued, and realized I was directing my words to my own reflection in the window. “This is the longest time in all the ten years we've been together that we haven't been in touch with each other.”

I waited another moment before I said something just like all the clichés, not caring a bit how it sounded.

“I'm sure that something has happened to her.”

“Something has happened to her?” he said, then paused for several seconds in a way that was becoming familiar. There could be only one purpose for these pauses: to undercut me, to make what I said sound stupid and pointless.

“Yes,” I said drily.

Lassi didn't say anything for a moment. Then he leaned forward, paused, and said, “Let's assume you're right. What do you intend to do?”

I didn't have to pretend to think about it. I immediately replied, “There's no point in reporting her disappearance to the police. All they can do is enter it in their records. Disappearance number five thousand twenty-one.”

“True,” Lassi agreed. “And twenty-four hours isn't a terribly long time, either.”

I lifted my arm as if to fend off this statement physically, as well as mentally.

“As I said, we always stay in touch. For us, twenty-four hours
is
a long time.”

Lassi didn't need to dig very deep to find his irritation. His voice rose, and at the same time a colder rigidity crept into it, as he quickly said, “We have reporters that are in the field for a week at a time. Then they come back with the story. That's the way it works.”

“Has Johanna ever been in the field for a week without contacting you?”

Lassi kept his eyes on me, drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair, and puckered his lips.

“I admit, she hasn't.”

“It's just not like her,” I said.

Lassi twisted in his chair and spoke rapidly, as if he wanted to hurry up and make sure he was right: “Tapani, we're trying to put together a newspaper here. There's basically no advertising money, and our rule of thumb is that nobody's interested in anything. Except, of course, sex and porn, and scandals and revelations connected with sex and porn. We sold more papers yesterday than we have in a long time. And I assure you we didn't do it with any in-depth reports about the thousands of missing warheads or investigative articles on how much drinking water we have left. Which, by the way, is about half an hour's worth, from what I can tell. No, our lead story was about a certain singer's bestiality video. That's what the people want. That's what they pay for.”

He took a breath and continued in a voice that was even more tense and impatient than before, if that was possible.

“Then I've got reporters, like, for instance, Johanna, who want to tell the people the truth. And I'm always asking them, what fucking truth? And they never have a good answer. All they say is that people should know. And I ask, but do they want to know? And more important, do they want to pay to know?”

When I was sure he had finished, I said, “So you tell them about a no-talent singer and her horse.”

He looked at me again, from someplace far away where clueless idiots like me aren't allowed to go.

“We're trying to stay alive.”

We sat silently for a moment. Then he opened his mouth again: “Can I ask you something?” he said.

I nodded.

“Do you still write your poetry?”

I expected this. He couldn't resist needling me. The question had the seed of the next question in it. It was meant to indicate that I was on the wrong track when it came to Johanna just like I was when it came to everything else. So what. I decided to give him a chance to continue in the vein he'd chosen. I answered honestly.

“Yes.”

“When was the last time you were published?”

Once again, I didn't need to think about my answer.

“Four years ago,” I said.

He didn't say anything more, just looked at me with red-rimmed, satisfied eyes like he'd just proven some theory of his to be correct. I didn't want to talk about it anymore. It would have been a waste of time.

“Where does Johanna sit?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I want to see her workstation.”

“Normally I wouldn't allow it,” Lassi said, looking like his last bit of interest in the whole matter had just evaporated. He glanced nonchalantly past me at the office full of cubicles, which he could see through the glass wall. “But I guess there's not much we do normally anymore, and the office is empty, so go ahead.”

I got up and thanked him, but he'd already turned toward his monitor and become absorbed in his typing, as if he'd wished he were someplace else the whole time.

Johanna's workstation was easy to find on the right side of the large, open office. A picture of me led me to it.

Something lurched inside me when I saw the old snapshot and imagined Johanna looking at it. Could she see the same difference in my eyes that I saw?

In spite of the large stacks of paper, her desk was well organized. Her closed laptop lay in the middle of the table. I sat down and looked around. There were a dozen or more workstations, which the reporters called clovers, in the open office space, with four desks at each station. Johanna's desk was on the window side and had a direct view into Lassi's office. Or rather, the upper section of his office—cardboard was stacked against the lower half of the glass walls. The view from the window wasn't much to look at. The Kiasma art museum with its frequently patched copper roof loomed like a gigantic shipwreck in the rain—black, tattered, run aground.

The top of the desk was cool to the touch but quickly grew damp under my hand. I glanced toward Lassi Uutela's office and then looked around. The place was deserted. I slid Johanna's computer into my bag.

There were dozens of sticky notes on the desk. Some of them simply had a phone number or a name and address; a few were complete notes written in Johanna's precise, delicate hand.

I looked through them one by one. There was one in the most recent batch that caught my attention: “H—West–East/ North–South” then two lists of neighborhoods—“Tapiola, Lauttasaari, Kamppi, Kulosaari” and “Tuomarinkylä, Pakila, Kumpula, Kluuvi, Punavuori”—with dates next to them.

“H” must mean the Healer. I shoved the note in my pocket.

Next I went through the piles of papers. Most of them were about pieces Johanna had already written: articles about the alleged closing of Russia's nuclear power plants, the dwindling Finnish tax base, the collapse in food quality.

One pile was entirely about the Healer. It included printed copies of all his e-mails. Johanna had written her own notes on the printouts, so many on some that they nearly obscured the original text. I crammed the whole stack into my bag without reading them, got up, and stood looking at the abandoned desk. It was like any other desk, impersonal and indistinguishable from a million others. Still, I hoped it would tell me something, reveal what had happened. I waited a moment, but the desk was still just a desk.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Johanna had sat here.

And she would still be sitting here, if something hadn't happened to her.

I couldn't explain why I was so sure of it. It was as hard to define as the connection between us. I knew that Johanna would call me, if only she could.

I took a step away from the desk, unable at first to take my eyes off her papers, her handwriting, the little objects on the table. Then I remembered something.

I went back to the door of Lassi Uutela's office. He took no notice of me, so I knocked on the door frame. The plastic cracked against the back of my hand. I was surprised at the loud, hollow sound it made. Lassi stopped his hurriedly typing fingers and left his hands waiting in the air as he turned his head. The irritation in his red-rimmed eyes didn't seem to have diminished.

I asked which photographer had been on the job with Johanna, although I had already guessed who it was.

“Gromov,” Lassi growled.

I knew him, of course. I'd even met him. Tall, dark, and handsome. Something of a ladies' man, according to Johanna, obsessive when it came to his work, and apparently in everything else as well. Johanna respected Vasili Gromov's skill at his job and liked working with him. They had spent a lot of time together on jobs in Finland and abroad. If anyone had any information about Johanna, it would be him.

I asked Lassi if he'd seen Gromov. He understood immediately what I meant. He picked up his telephone, leaned his head against the headrest on his chair, and aimed his gaze at the ceiling, either toward the air conditioner duct or toward heaven.

“This world's a fucking mess,” he said quietly.

 

4

As I made my way home, Lassi's questions about why I was still writing poetry rose up in my mind again. I hadn't told him what I was thinking. I didn't want to. Lassi wasn't a person you confided in or trusted any more than you had to. But what would I have said, what reason would I have given, for keeping at something that had no future? I would have told him the truth.

To keep writing was to keep living. And I didn't keep living or writing to find readers. People were trying to survive from one day to the next, and poetry didn't have much to do with it. My reasons for writing were completely selfish.

Writing gave my days a shape, a routine. The words, the sentences, the short lines, brought an order to my life that had disappeared all around me. Writing meant that the fragile thread between yesterday, today, and tomorrow was still unbroken.

I tried to read Johanna's papers, but I couldn't concentrate on anything because of the clatter of beer cans and other trash on the bus. They were thrown there by drunken teenagers who were no real danger to the other passengers, but it was still annoying. The late-night routes were another matter, especially the ones without security guards.

I got off the bus at the Herttoniemi metro station. I gave a wide berth to a gang of drunken skinheads—a dozen bald scalps that shone with rain and tattoos—avoided the persistent panhandlers patrolling in front of the shops, and headed toward home in the dark evening. There was a break in the rain, and the strong, gusting wind couldn't decide which direction to blow. It lunged here and there, grabbing onto everything with its strong hands, including the brightly lit security lights on the walls of the buildings, which made it look as if the houses themselves were swaying in the evening darkness. I walked briskly past the day care that had first been abandoned by children, then scrawled on by random passersby, and finally set on fire. The church at the other side of the intersection had an emergency shelter for the homeless, and it looked like it was full to the brim—the previously bright vestibule was halfdim with people. A few minutes later I turned onto the path to our apartment building.

The roof of the building opposite had been torn off in an autumn storm and still hadn't been repaired, and the top-floor apartments were dark. Soon we would be facing the same thing, like people in a thousand other buildings. They weren't designed for continuous high winds and rain for half the year, and by the time people realized that the wind and rain were here to stay it was too late. Besides, no one had the money or the interest to keep up a building where power and water outages made living unpleasant and probably eventually impossible.

The lock on the street door recognized my card, and the door opened. When the power was out we used the old cut key. Keys like that should have been unnecessary, should have been history, but like many other objects and ideas once considered relics, they managed to do what the newer ones couldn't: they worked.

I tried the lights in the stairwell, but the switch was out of order again. I climbed to the second story in the dark, using the stair railing as a guide, arrived at our door, opened both safety locks and the ordinary lock, turned off the alarm, and, instinctively, breathed in.

The smell of the place had everything in it: morning coffee, a hurried spritz of perfume, the pine soap from washing the rugs the summer before, the long Christmas holidays, the armchair we bought together, every night spent with the person you love. It was all there in that smell, and it was all connected together in my mind, although the place had been aired out a thousand times. The smell was so familiar that I was just about to announce that I was home, automatically. But there was no one there to hear me.