True (6 page)

“There was something going on for years, wasn't there?” Grandma asks.

“Now I've ruined this dress,” Anna says, upset.

She's still holding her glass. The glass is shaking. Grandma is looking closely at her.

“What of it?” she says. “So what? It's just a dress.”

“But it's yours, and I've gone and ruined it. Do you have any salt? Should I get some from upstairs?”

Grandma is thoughtful, as if she were looking right through her. She opens her mouth to say something, closes it again, gazing steadily until she finally makes up her mind to say what she's thinking.

“Actually, it's not mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's Eeva's. I didn't know it had been hanging in that closet all these years. I was surprised when I saw you wearing it.”

She says the name dispassionately, as if she were mentioning a person long forgotten, someone she'd once spent happy days with, sworn lifelong friendship to, until, for some reason, because of a random whim or unfortunate misunderstanding, their connection was broken.

“Whose?”

“Eeva's,” she says again.

6

T
HE DAY WAS
warm. The moment he stepped outside the building the world flooded over him. There were some young boys at the tram stop, swaggering fifteen-year-olds. A girl stood a ways off in triumphantly careless contraposto, glancing in the direction of the coming tram: she was obviously one of the boys' classmates.

Yet another drama where attention must be rationed out to obtain a greater reward.

Which of the boys did she want? Maybe the bland one, the one who looked like a good boy, who carried himself with what he thought was serious-mindedness. That's what Martti had been like as a boy. Secretly sensitive, an easy butt of practical jokes, touchy, occasionally sinking into romantic gloom.

He once drew a picture of Helvi, who sat in the front row, and gave it to her shyly at recess. Loudmouth Helvi, whom he had fallen in love with on some sort of whim—maybe because someone like Helvi wouldn't even look at someone like him, which ensured that he could love her in peace.

That's what this boy was like. Was the girl Helvi? No. This girl was sweeter.

The tram to Meilahti wouldn't come for five more minutes. He would change trams at Kisahalli, go to his doctor's appointment, where they'd put an old man's mask on him with their tests and measurements.

Seventy and over. It had happened without him noticing.

A person just wakes up all of a sudden and realizes he's old. He gets on the tram and notices someone offering him their seat. I'm not crippled, he thinks. And then he realizes—no, but I am old.

The group of young people was getting restless. The rowdiest of the boys started to jump onto the rails, trying to get the girl's attention.

The boy made a strange dance move that reminded Martti of something he'd seen on TV—a slow-motion video of a bird's leaping mating dance. They were like the leaps of a dancer with years of training. Just as polished, just as exhilarated and self-assured.

The girl gave the boy the finger. The gesture was disarming in its obscenity. Why waste time on such a thing when she could go over and kiss him?

The tram came; the teenagers jostled in through the rear door.

There was a meek-looking family in the middle of the tram: a father, a mother, and two little boys. The father held one boy by the hand. The boys were touchingly faithful miniature versions of their father—a shock of blond hair, an all-encompassing gaze. Knock-knees. Chubby hands.

Martti thought, no matter what happens to us we carry where we came from with us.

Martti himself had his father's nose. His father had died in the Continuation War, in December of
1943
. The doorbell had rung, and he had asked if it was Santa Claus. The familiar pastor and two soldiers were at the door. His mother collapsed in the entryway, the servant girl pushed him and his sister away so they wouldn't see the scene. He remembered the hesitant words of the young soldier and his mother's strange anger: Out. Get out of here.

He was never supposed to talk about that. Not about his father, or the pastor at the door, or his mother's collapse. No one ever forbade him to talk about it, but he always knew that the whole scene, the whole memory of the pain, should be kept silent. They started leaving blank spots in the conversation where they would have mentioned his father. Reality had gradually closed over the wound, silence had bound his father's memory like a bandage, encased it. Silence—it's a strange grave.

But even then, when his father was dead, Martti still had his nose. Even back then it seemed strange, almost incomprehensible.

Those were the years when he started drawing. The worst bombing of Helsinki came in February; his mother lay on the bedroom floor and refused to get up. He hid under the table, afraid, crying for his father.

When the bombing had stopped, he had nightmares. Their servant—Irja was the girl's name—bought him paper and a stick of charcoal on the black market and said, Draw them, maybe it will help. And he drew them.

THE FATHER OF
the meek family took his wife's hand. The older boy held a Spider-Man doll tight against his chest, the littler one had the same kind of toy in his clumsy hand.

The girl who had been flirting at the tram stop affected a bored expression. Martti saw her glance at the sensitive boy. The boy looked away—clearly a crush.

Emotion came, unhindered.

All the aspirations people had, their unquenchable hope, their tenacious faith in the brightness watching over the resonance of the May evening, the diligence with which they wrote and published the daily free newspaper and distributed it in its plastic pockets on the trams and subways; all these things awakened a sudden overflowing tenderness in him.

This is where the world is, with all its strangeness and triviality. This isn't a painting; it's the world, naked, within even his reach.

THE HOSPITAL WAS
a familiar entity, like an organism. He walked down the corridor, stepped soundlessly through the sliding doors, and checked in at reception. He became a heart, lungs, circulation, liver, psyche.

He sat in the waiting room. The others waiting there were detached from themselves, from their lives; a youngish mother with an obviously feverish but lively child, a bald, middle-aged woman, probably a cancer patient. And an old man, like him, with perhaps exactly the same worries.

He sketched their poses, out of habit.

The nurse came to tell them there was an hour wait.

“You can wait in the cafeteria if you like.”

He got up, walked back down the corridor. He saw a few very sick people. A woman lying in bed with an IV, serpentine veins gleaming through her skin. The sight of her didn't upset him, although Elsa came to mind, what was coming. He made eye contact with the woman and nodded. There was still hope in her eyes.

People are willing to endure almost any agony merely to have a few more ordinary days. Maybe just a hundred. Or ten. Or two, if that's all they're going to get. One day when they can get up, walk out a door, make a note of the weather and plan their lunch or who they'll meet, or cherish the mere idea of a walk through town.

He went to the cafeteria, bought a coffee, sat at a table and looked at the people. The people at the next table were talking about a trip to the countryside. One of them was sick—which one? He looked at both of them. There was a baby in a bassinet. Maybe they were here because of the baby.

He found himself dreaming of taking Elsa one more time to Tammilehto. Maybe they would sleep in the sauna again, see the morning, make coffee, the way they used to.

“May I sit here?”

It was the bald woman from the waiting room. She smiled, pointing at the chair in front of her.

“I love the end of May,” she said. “Don't you?”

Martti felt it silly to use such a strong word as “love” with a stranger. But it was true. Of course he loved these days, these spacious, green rooms shaped like expectation. He thought for a moment about whether to use the formal
te
,
as she had. She was beautiful. Eyes like pools, arching lips. But obviously sick, you could see it in the sheen over her feverish eyes, her collarbones that showed beneath her skin like two conductor's batons.

He used
te
,
because of her illness. Or maybe her beauty.

“You must wish you were outside, then. It's a beautiful day.”

“I'm dying,” she said. “Could you tell?”

She looked him in the eye calmly, stirring her coffee. This was a zone of true statements. For some reason, here, where a heart is a heart and a liver is a liver, and plans are plans, and titles are as weightless as rumors, you spoke only in sentences that were absolutely true.

“My wife is dying, too,” he said, as if that were a reply.

Suddenly saying it was easy. He had feared the grief the sentence would cause, but now it sounded simply factual.

“How much time does she have?” the woman asked calmly.

“They won't tell us. But through midsummer, the end of July if all goes well.”

The woman looked out the window. “Have the two of you been happy?”

He didn't have to hesitate with his answer. “Yes, we have. Lately I've felt that we've been very happy.”

“You only realize it fully afterward,” the woman said.

Her wrist bones were like two thin sticks. Her eyebrows were perhaps drawn on with a pencil. Her eyes were strongly delineated. Suddenly Martti felt like he was talking to a circus artist—a tightrope walker or a wise clown.

“So,” she asked. “What's the hardest part?”

He thought for a moment.

“The hardest part is to see the other person change. To learn them again. And to see in them that you've changed, too.”

The woman nodded, satisfied with his answer; it was eternal and true.

“What else?”

He heard himself say it. For some reason it wasn't hard to say at all: “It was hardest when I loved someone else.”

The woman didn't look surprised; she just nodded.

“What was her name, this other one?”

“Eeva.”

There it was. He'd said the name for the first time in decades. It brought a few memories closer. They were individual images. Eeva in the sauna washing her hair. Eeva tired, her eyes swollen with sleep. Eeva angry, pale and flushed at the same time. He let the memories come, although they were painful.

More words came. He talked, although it felt more like someone inside him was talking.

“I've never loved anyone so much, although nowadays it feels like it was all a dream. Or maybe I've loved my wife just as much, but in a different way. It's different when it's true.”

“Don't say that,” the woman said, suddenly ferocious, spilling her coffee on the table in her excitement. “Love is always true.”

He found himself nodding, as if taking orders.

“My only regret is that I wasn't braver,” the woman said. “I don't regret what I've done. Unless you've committed an actual crime, regretting what you've done is the same thing as regretting your life.”

Martti stepped out of himself for a moment to take note of the oddness of the situation. But who else could he tell? No one he knew.

“But your wife still wants?” the woman asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What does she want?”

“She wants to look at the sea every day. Yesterday she talked about swimming, although I doubt she'd be able to. She wants to see mornings and evenings. Maybe she wants to drive to our summer cabin one more time.”

“Then you should take her to look at the sea, let her swim in spite of the risk, show her mornings and evenings. You should take her to the summer cabin. It will be enough.” She smiled.

“And you? What do you want to do?”

She didn't pause in her answer.

“I want to make crepes with my daughter at our lake cabin in Saimaa. Over the fire. I want to eat one with sugar and jam. Then I want to sit there and knit and look at the lake.”

“Maybe you will, then. Go there and make crepes. Knit.”

“Yes,” the woman said. “I will when I'm done with this.”

They got up as if by common agreement, looked at each other like people who had by some caprice revealed everything to one another. The woman's smile asked for forgiveness, solidarity, confidentiality. Martti answered the smile.

THE DOCTOR PRONOUNCED
him healthy, told him he had the circulatory system of a man of sixty. The doctor asked about Elsa. Martti had already poured his heart out in the cafeteria, he didn't want to do it again.

He let peace flow through his ardor, and peace came.

He had promised to be away all afternoon. Should he go to Restaurant Torni, drink a cognac, look at the view? Should he go to the airport and watch the planes, their exhilarating speed at takeoff?