True (11 page)

OF COURSE SHE
had that life, the one that ended on the floor by the front door. She would have liked to make that life completely real through love: to give her all and get the world.

She saw black for a moment. She knocked a book from the shelf as she walked by, bent to pick it up, and straightened up again. She smiled blindly at her coworkers. The world took shape again, she picked the basket up off the floor and continued to the back of the store.

WHEN SHE MET
Matias, she didn't feel anything special. One smile across the room at a party, a somewhat pointless conversation at a sticky kitchen table when all she was thinking was: that kind of boy.

Matias asked her out, she agreed, since there was no one else. She noticed that she liked his smile. They drank cocoa at Succés on Korkeavuorenkatu, shared a cinnamon roll. In two weeks' time she was thinking that maybe the easiness and comfort that was her overriding feeling with Matias was the beginning of love.

In five weeks' time they carried the sofa through the door.

ANNA GOES TO
the philosophy section, puts a book in its correct spot on the shelf. On an impulse she checks to see if any of her grandmother's books are in the psychology section.

There's one copy of her most popular book,
Recognition and Self.
Anna was in high school when she finally read it for the first time, for a presentation on attachment theory for her developmental psychology class, and as she read it she felt a mixture of embarrassment and pride.

Her teacher said, “Is Elsa Ahlqvist really your grandmother? Imagine. Would you give her my regards?”

There was a picture of a child psychiatry clinic from the
1960
s in their textbook. There were researchers in the picture who later had hypotheses and charts of emotional development named for them. And Grandma. Seeing her in a picture in her second-year psychology textbook, she felt like she was looking at a different person.

Anna opens her grandmother's book. The introduction has always moved her. The case study of Luna, a girl found lying in a cardboard box at a railway station who rebuilt her trust in the world little by little, has haunted her. She returns again and again to these words:

A risk to the self is always an unreasonable one, from a child's point of view. This is the conclusion I came to after observing Luna's weeks of painful development in the clinic. That moment when a child experiences the reality of self for the first time is the primordial moment of loneliness. It also offers the first opportunity for happiness. Every person's existence is a certified opportunity for great loneliness and great happiness. They are both within a child's reach at the moment she realizes her separateness from her parents. At that moment, the child is also a stranger to herself. It is only in the continuous recognition of the self in the safe, caring gaze of an adult that a child can become recognizable to herself. Recognition consists of experiences of both participation and separation. The beginnings of the self are in that rift, in that tension between blessed participation and rending separation. The event would perhaps hold nothing but tragedy if it didn't also bring the beginning of hope that is part of the solitary human condition.

Imagine Luna, a girl found by a stranger, living in a cardboard box, a child who had experienced unheard-of sorrows. Imagine her groping attempts to reach out. She spent her first week of treatment rocking in a corner, apathetic, refusing to look anyone in the eye. In the following weeks she clung to her caregivers with a vise grip that seemed a cry for help. Little by little her trust grew. Imagine her first smile, from across the room, her first bold laugh in the playpen. Human life in its bare essentials is about nothing so much as trust. It's about the love that every person, even the maimed and oppressed of the world, bears toward others.

Anna remembers a childhood moment at the lake sauna, Grandma's strong arms and big soft breasts as she bent to turn on the hot water tap.

Maria was five, still shamelessly honest as small children always are, and she marveled at Grandma's breasts.

You're big up there, Maria said, pointing.

Yes, I guess I am, Grandma said with a smile.

Will those grow on me, too? Maria asked.

They might, Grandma said.

Then I'll be a mother, too, Maria said sagely.

You can't become a mother right off, Anna said. For that you need a man.

She was eight, and knew a few facts.

Yes, you can, Maria said. You never know. Some people might just turn into mothers.

Only in fairy tales, Anna said, taking to her role as the instructive, wiser older sister with satisfaction.

That Grandma, with the big breasts, is gone now. But there's still the Grandma that thought those thoughts, wrote those words in the book.

The book will be sold here after she's dead, too. People will thumb through it, read the introduction and think Elsa Ahlqvist must have been a wise woman, a good mother, a good grandmother.

Anna walks to the escalator. She again has the thought that she was toying with earlier. An unbelievable number of beginnings slept between the covers of all these books.

1964

L
OVE BEGINS UNINTENTIONALLY.
We're unguarded and we take no notice of the signs we may see weeks or even months before anything actually happens.

At first we avoid each other, exchange nervous courtesies and remarks about the weather. He sits at the kitchen table, preoccupied. He butters his bread, opens the newspaper, scratches his neck. What an abundance of private gestures, what a spectrum of fine gradations. I turn away; I don't want to know all this about him.

I wander from room to room as if I've found myself in a movie.

The man invites friends over for two evenings and closes the door on me. I hear a storm of laughter through the door, turn on the television. The newscaster on television looks worried. I didn't know that facts have to be told with a furrowed brow—I've only heard about the state of the world on the radio.

On the third evening he paints. Also the fourth and fifth. Night after night I hear him come clumping down the stairs as the dimness phases into morning. Maybe he's been drinking. I lie awake, listening, hearing every thud, the even sound of his breathing—it's strange and I'm afraid that he'll come into my room. What have I got myself into? What if he gets delirious, if he's one of those men who drinks a whole bottle with one swing of his arm?

He's not drunk. He can't see in the dark, loses track of the bounds of his body and bumps into things. I still don't know this. I've only just learned his morning sleepiness, his distracted gaze as he reads the paper. There are still a thousand things I don't know about him, and a thousand more after that. And another thousand and another, endlessly.

I hear him open the door. I lie there without breathing and listen. Nothing. I get up, creep across the kitchen into the hall and see him in the little girl's doorway.

“What are you doing?”

“Shhh.”

He has an expression on his face I've never seen before.

“I'm watching her sleep,” he says, as if embarrassed by his own tenderness. “I have to see that she's safe before I can go to sleep.”

His affection for her is so genuine, but his art is pompous. He's full of himself, that's what I think. Some artist. A big deal famous artist. I think he hides himself in his work the way a bashful child hides in his play.

ON THE FOURTH
day I call Kerttu.

“The husband paints every night,” I say. “He barely says hello.”

“It sounds excruciating.”

“He's a snob. I don't know what to do with him.”

“Go knock on his door. Tell him the kitchen's on fire, there's a flood in the bathroom and the walls are falling in, the little girl's taking a bath in the kitchen sink, and you're leaving the country. That'll get him downstairs.”

“I doubt it.”

I WORK UP
my indignation as I go up the stairs. The attic absorbs the sound of my steps and smells like a sauna. I stop for a moment to listen to the creak, remember July evenings in childhood, at home in Kuhmo, in the darkness of the attic. I go to the door, lift my chin and knock. The man looks stern when I open the door without waiting for an answer.

“What?”

“I just wanted to know how much longer.”

He looks at me like he doesn't understand the question, like I'm a strange, talking doll.

“I don't know—what do you mean?”

“The little girl's asleep.”

“So?”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“How should I know? You can decide for yourself—you have the whole evening free. You could go for a walk or something.”

“I can't, I have a hole in my shoe.”

“Invite a friend over.”

“They're all at a party, or engaged, or on their way to the justice of the peace.”

He looks at me critically.

“Come here,” he says, pulling me inside. He takes me by the shoulders and leads me to his painting. “Look.”

He's eager, strangely bold—it comes from the hours of working, the surge of self-confidence. He's never touched me before.

“What do you think?”

The painting is ridiculous. I don't understand it at all, and I let him know it. “Lines and circles,” I say simply. “I see lines and circles.”

I exaggerate my nonchalance a bit, maybe I feel I should choose a side and stick to it.

“Maybe you don't care for art,” he sneers.

I pounce on his dismissive tone with sarcasm, like Kerttu in her more self-important moments: “Certainly not this kind. What is this supposed to be a picture of?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Art doesn't necessarily have to depict any specific thing. That's the old kind of art.”

“I know what you're driving at. I saw your paintings at the Ars exhibit. I thought the same thing then. Why not paint people? Why not paint Elsa or your daughter?”

“I don't paint them,” he says curtly. “I've never painted them.”

“Maybe you should.”

“And maybe you should come to my course at the university. I'm going to be lecturing on Jackson Pollock.”

“Pollock makes me nauseous.”

“Too many colors?”

“Too much dripping paint, a mess, as if the world were a pigsty. What his paintings need is a scrub brush and some pine soap before they put them on display.”

He laughs. I look him right in the eye for a second. Another. The moment stretches out.

“Good,” I say finally. “So when you're done with this . . .” I look at his paintings, let my gaze wander over the jars and paintbrushes, the bottles of turpentine and oily rags. “. . . when you're done creating this world, you can come downstairs. Where a cupboard's still a cupboard and an apple's an apple. But don't think that I'll make you anything to eat. I'm sure a man who spends his night creating new realities knows how to butter his own bread.”

I close the door behind me, triumphant, hotheaded—this is the first phase of love, but I don't recognize it!—without staying to see the effect of what I've said.

WE MEET ONCE
by accident. I'm on my way to my last shift at the hat counter. He's coming toward me. I see him from far off, but he doesn't yet see me. His walk is carefree, hands in his pockets, smoking.

There's a conflict in him between anxiety and generosity. Mostly he's easygoing and carefree. He's anxious and demanding only when he's holding his daughter in his arms or painting, or sometimes when he's reading.

But now he glances across the street and sees me. He smiles, strides across the tram tracks to where I am.

He throws his half-smoked cigarette on the ground. Without acknowledging the thought or reading its message I think how beautiful he is.

“Hello, Eeva,” he says.

He must have looked exactly the same when he was thirteen and the neighbor boy tempted him to go around the corner and smoke a cigarette and Loviisa the beauty, a typist from across the street who all the boys were in love with, walked by. He must have looked exactly like this when he greeted her, lifting a hand to his forehead solemnly but with a twinkle in his eye, shamelessly looking her in the eye without lowering his head.

“Hello.”

“On your way to work? Aren't you done working at the department store? Or have you secretly changed your mind about taking care of our enfant terrible?”

Without realizing it I'm propping up layered selves he's already left behind. If I knew what I would learn later, I would have known to brace myself. This is the first phase of love, when you see the other person whole, when you can pluck every fear and desire from their gaze like ripe fruit.

I let the warning signs flit past me like house sparrows.