IN OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, at some other time, I would already have made my move.
I knew myself.
She was slim, her hair black and shining, thickly draped over her shoulders and down her back, her fringe short enough to show her sharply drawn brows. Against her pale, almost white skin, her hair was like raven’s feathers scattered over pure drifts of snow. The same impenetrable black continued in her long, languid lashes, and in the centre of it all her blue-grey eyes gazed at me unrelentingly.
Her expression was a mixture of calm, secure superiority, and something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at this first meeting. To do that would have required that I get up from the dark brown leather armchair, walk around the oval table of antique walnut, and sit down next to her on the overstuffed, pale gold sofa. That was something I didn’t intend to do, for lots of reasons.
The first reason had to do with who she was. Her name was Amanda Saarinen and she was just setting a glass of wine down on the table. On the rim of the glass was a smudge of dark red lipstick the length and width of a little finger.
‘You’re the new caretaker.’
The top three buttons of her black, wide-collared blouse were undone. I had already noticed that she was a devotee of plastic surgery. There was something in the result that matched the faux antique sofa she was sitting on. The flower arrangement on the table repeated the pale yellow and orange of the flowers and coats of arms in the wallpaper that spread behind her in both directions. She looked as if she was posed in a painting.
‘You don’t look like a caretaker,’ she said, reaching a hand over the table. ‘I forgot to introduce myself. Amanda Saarinen.’
‘That’s all right. Aleksi Kivi,’ I said, squeezing her hand and sitting down again. ‘I guessed you were Amanda. I’ve only been here for a week. Maybe I’ll eventually start to look like a caretaker.’
She almost smiled. She was thirty-one, two years younger than me. She picked up her glass of wine again. It was eleven-thirty in the morning.
‘Maintenance men are short, stocky, overgrown boys in their fifties. They wear cargo pants and belts with a hundred and fifty different keys and a Leatherman and one of those mobile phones you can use underwater. They don’t listen when you talk to them. You seem to be listening to what I’m saying. How can that be?’
‘I am listening.’
‘And your fingernails are clean. Very un-caretaker-like.’
She took a sip of wine.
‘And you really want to work here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘For a change.’
Amanda looked at me.
‘Sure, but a change to what?’
‘Well, the renovation, for one thing. I’m a carpenter by trade and I’ve worked as one for almost ten years. Mostly renovations. I wanted a change to just one project. To be able to take my time and focus, do things the way they should be done.’
That last part was true. Not the whole truth, but true all the same.
‘I’d like to find something I want to do, too.’
‘I think that time comes when it comes.’
‘I think that time’s already past.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘What else?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been a carpenter. Anything else?’
‘Not much else. I ran a second-hand bookshop for a little over a year in Kallio, near the park. It didn’t work at all. I sold the books too cheap because I wanted people to read them.’
‘Interesting,’ Amanda said, not sounding terribly sincere.
She took another sip of wine. There was just a drop left at the bottom.
‘What did they tell you about this place?’ she asked.
‘That it’s important to the family, more of a refuge than a residence.’
‘I guess you could say that. Did they tell you anything about a woman in her thirties practically living here who no longer has a single friend?’
I looked at her.
‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘Hard to believe that somebody is hiding herself away here, or hard to believe she has no friends?’
‘Both. But then, it’s none of my business.’
‘I guess not,’ she said quietly.
We were sitting in front of glass-paned double doors. The white of the door and window frames was fresh, just painted. Outside the windows a bright and cloudless, windy early September day made the oak and maple leaves jangle yellow, gold and rich red. Beyond the trees the sparkling sea spread to the horizon. Over it all lay a cobalt blue sky. It was nearly impossible to imagine the dark coldness of space beyond it, but it was there. Of course it was.
Amanda seemed to have forgotten that I existed. She stared out at the garden, or the sea, her expression fixed. I remembered Miia again, which made me think of what I’d once had, and what I’d left behind to come here and do what I had to do.
I looked around. They called this the hall. A good name for seventy square metres of space, the largest room in the manor. The understated wallpaper was bordered by waist-high grey wainscoting. From the ceiling hung two identical crystal chandeliers that hadn’t been lit once in the week I’d been at the house.
Although I hadn’t actually been in the house. I had my own small room and kitchen at one end of an outbuilding.
‘Have you met him?’ Amanda asked.
‘Who?’
‘My father, of course.’
Of course.
‘No.’
Something flashed in her eyes.
‘What about Markus?’
‘Markus …’
‘Yes, Markus Harmala, my father’s chauffeur.’
‘No. Why would he be here when Henrik isn’t?’
She didn’t bother to answer that question. She stared me straight in the eye.
‘How many times did they interview you?’ she asked.
‘Three times.’
‘Does that include those silly psychological tests?’
‘They weren’t silly. But it’s four, if you count the tests.’
‘My father just wants to be sure, I guess,’ she said, not sounding particularly convinced. She picked up her empty glass, looked at it for a moment, then raised her eyes again.
‘What were you doing when I sent for you?’
‘I was on my way downstairs to check how much water is being used, since they installed the new …’
‘Right. You’ve got to get back to work. Naturally. I was just leaving anyway. Did I leave my car outside?’
‘Yes, you did,’ I said. ‘If that black Range Rover is yours. It’s right in front of the door.’
Amanda read my thoughts.
‘One glass of wine,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’m all right to drive.’
I saw no reason to argue with her. She got up from the sofa and pulled on her coat, and I did the same. I followed her out. The wind took hold of my hair and chilled my skin, which had grown warm, almost feverish, while I was indoors. Amanda walked with purposeful steps. Somewhere nearby the last blackbird of autumn sang. We went to her car.
‘I wanted to meet you,’ Amanda said. ‘It’s no trivial matter to me who is here taking care of the place. For many reasons.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
We stood less than a metre apart. Up close, Amanda’s eyes were hard and shiny. The wind fluttered her black hair over her face. When it blew the right way I caught a whiff of alcohol in the air.
‘See you later,’ she said, and in one smooth movement was in her car.
The Range Rover skidded over the deep brown ruts in the gravel. It disappeared into the birch woods and I took a deep breath of cleansing air, literally breathing a sigh of relief.
In other circumstances, at some other time.
Maybe.
But not now.
The police had rung the doorbell as I was standing in front of the television eating Weetabix. The television was on, but I wasn’t watching it.
They’d said their names, said they were from the criminal division, and asked if they could come in. I didn’t say anything. I was thirteen years old and my mouth was full of cold skimmed milk and mushy cereal.
They didn’t wait for me to swallow. They stepped inside and walked to the living room. They asked me to sit down.
They were wearing suits and skinny ties with loosened knots. They looked at me with sad faces. They had blue and purple bags under their eyes, swollen and heavy. When we’d sat for a moment in silence they asked whether I had any close relatives they could call.
My mother, I said.
Anyone else, one of them asked. He had yellow teeth.
I shook my head.
Your father, the other one asked. He had the longest, shiniest forehead I’d ever seen.
I shook my head.
An aunt? Uncle? Grandma? Grandpa?
No. It was just my mother and me. We didn’t need anything else.
I’ll call social services, the yellow teeth said to the shiny forehead, and got up and went into the kitchen to use the phone.
I sat silently with the shiny forehead. The yellow teeth murmured on the other side of the wall. He came back and nodded to his companion. The one with the shiny forehead cleared his throat, although there was nothing in it to clear.
Your mother is missing, he said.
No, she’s not, I said.
There was a sharp taste of acid and warm milk in my mouth.
We’re going to take you with us. We need to talk.
At the police station a woman wearing a blue scarf around her neck sat beside me. Other than the scarf she was completely white. Her face, hair, and clothes were various shades of white. Now and then she put her hand on my shoulder. It felt strange. It wasn’t my mother’s hand.
The police asked her if they could continue asking me questions. The woman asked me if I was getting tired.
I said I wasn’t. I wanted my mother back.
All of the questions were about her.
What had our life been like recently?
Had she met anyone?
Did she have a boyfriend?
She hadn’t been threatened by anyone?
Had I seen any men around her?
Did I know anything about the men?
Had my mother been happy? Normal? Cheerful? Sad?
What had she been wearing that morning? What did she say before she left for work? How did she say what she said? Did she ever talk about people she was going to see? If so, did I remember anyone in particular?
And so on.
Weeks went by. The policemen changed but the questions were the same.
Months went by, and although the questions were the same, they came less frequently. Then they stopped altogether.
I was thirteen years old.
I knew that the police would never figure out where my mother had gone.
I still knew it.
Kalmela Manor stood on the seashore ninety-four kilometres west of Helsinki, in a spot that had been thought desirable in 1850. The estate covered a hundred and sixteen hectares, less than half of it farmland. The rest was forest, both wild and cultivated. The shoreline was a kilometre long, with a little more than a tenth of it, about a hundred and twenty metres of the eastern half, clear cut. From the long dock to the west you could see hundreds of metres of rocks and thickets broken up by at least two steep, red-grey stone cliffs.
The manor was built on a spot where the ground rose above the surrounding landscape. The house at the top of the hill dominated its surroundings and looked as large and yellow as the sun on a cloudless day. The other buildings included the outbuilding with its garage, the guest house, a boat shed, and a seaside sauna.
The farm fields were rented to locals. In September they lay bare and stubbled and, depending on the clearness of the day and the position of the sun, could appear golden-yellow, tired brown, or grey as wool felt. In the spring they would again sprout rye, oats, sugar beets, and potatoes.
There was plentiful forest in every direction, surprisingly dark and dense even in autumn.
The main building had been renovated at the turn of the millennium. It was an assortment of pale yellows beautifully complemented by the white of window frames and pillars as thick as punchbags flanking the entrance. There were two floors, eight rooms, and a professional kitchen. Downstairs was the common space. It was dominated by the large, bright hall where visitors, such as myself, were directed upon arrival. Behind the hall was a dining room and behind that, hidden from sight, was the kitchen. The kitchen pantry took up a significant amount of the ground floor.
There was also a library furnished with imposing English leather armchairs, a bar, and dark, glass-doored bookshelves on both of the long facing walls. There were a lot of books, most of them old.
All of the bedrooms were upstairs. The largest of these was made up of three of the previous bedrooms combined. It had a bathroom designed to the same scale. In the middle of the upper storey was a common room similar to the downstairs hall, though smaller, with double doors leading to a balcony.
The balcony looked out on a view of the sea. From there you could see the entire level, well-tended lawn with its standing rows of junipers, old red and gold maples, on the right the boat shed and dock, where a white, fifteen-metre yacht was moored, and on the left the brown-planked sauna with its terrace and next to it a narrow swimming dock designed for quick dashes into the water.
Standing on the balcony you might make other observations. There were no neighbours. The wind was a constant presence. It whirled over the estate, blowing my hair around, making the woods sigh, and carrying the salty, inviting smell of the sea wherever it went, including indoors. When now and then the wind calmed a little or quieted completely, an extraordinary silence fell, broken only by human sounds.
There were two permanent residents: the cook Enni Salkola, and me. There reigned between us a sort of understanding, a camaraderie. Maybe it was something instinctive, the unspoken thought that we were there to work, unlike those who lived or visited there. There was an us and them, and that difference placed Enni and me on the same side.
On my second evening there, after spending the whole day working outside in the cool wind, as I was making my way across the dark yard to my apartment, Enni had called after me and invited me into the kitchen for an evening snack. Long, thin slices of fresh rye bread with butter and pickled whitefish, black-label Emmental cheese, and tart apples from the orchard. I was hungry. We talked a bit about our work and nearly as much about the weather, but mostly we ate. And the silence didn’t feel bad. When I glanced at Enni while I was eating, she just smiled and asked if I wanted some more. I did.
Standing on the balcony I looked out at the sea. It spread blue and flat before me, as if you could walk on it. I felt the autumn wind on my arms. I checked the floorboards I’d been working on again to make sure they didn’t wobble or squeak when you stepped on them. I’d wedged the loose places with small shims and sanded the floor to make everything level. It felt good. I didn’t expect anyone to be spending time outside on an autumn weekend, but this small success nevertheless pleased me.
I closed the balcony doors as I went in, swung my toolbag into my right hand, and went downstairs. I walked across the yard to the toolshed first, left my bag there, and then went to the other end of the building, where I was living.
I had my own stairs to the first-floor apartment. I didn’t keep the door locked. I didn’t see any reason to. I had very few possessions, and the only valuables were valuable only to me. I left my heavy work boots in the doorway, brewed some dark-roasted coffee, and made two sandwiches – Enni’s rabbit pâté spread on crusty rye.
I sat by the window and looked at the weak, grey light of the afternoon multiplied in the simple lines and rough, irregular surface of the thick vase I’d placed on the windowsill.
I HADN’T NOTICED it before.
I could feel the social worker’s gaze on my back as I walked across the small, quiet apartment to the living-room window.
The home my mother and I shared was going to be sold. I’d been told at various times and in various ways that I couldn’t live there alone. I was told that I was only thirteen, that I needed adults around me, to intermediate for me. I didn’t argue. I had a different opinion, but I understood that it was useless to resist. After my mother’s disappearance it was all inevitable, inexorable, as if a strong, heavy hand had drawn a line between the past and the present, and there was nothing one boy could do about it.
The social worker went into the kitchen. I picked up the vase and I could feel that my mother had once held it in her hand. Maybe she got it from her own mother, a person I knew no more about than I did about anything else. Or maybe she’d found it somewhere and brought it home. In any case, her hands had held it. I went to get a T-shirt from my room to wrap the vase in.
I asked the social worker if I could stay in the apartment one night.
No, that wasn’t possible.
I looked the social worker in the eye for a moment. I could tell she felt sorry for me. Everybody did. It didn’t bring my mother back or explain what had happened to her.
I went into my room. It was the smallest room in the small apartment, a room of my own. I remembered how my mother had said, Now you have something I never had. I could see tears in her eyes. That happened every now and then. Especially when she talked about her life before me. She said it brought her so much happiness to be able to give this to me. I thought at the time that she was just talking about my room.
I opened the drawers of my scratched, second-hand desk. They were full of stuff. Toys, drawings, scrapbooks, pencils, rubbers, magazines, all kinds of things I’d found and brought home. That heavy hand between past and present had reached here, too. I knew I was no longer the boy who had drawn those pictures, read those magazines, played those games. I was someone else. The old me had gone wherever my mother had gone.
In my mother’s room, I sat on the edge of the bed. The room smelled like her and every object looked as if she might come and pick it up at any moment. Her things were already in motion – disappearing from the desk, leaping off the hangers, rising from the floor. I didn’t know what to do. The idea that my mother’s things would be taken somewhere felt like another disappearance, but at the same time I knew that there was no way I could bring it all with me. I couldn’t even bring very much of it.
I looked around.
Two white ribbons as wide as a finger were attached to the top of the decorative black frame of the mirror. I remembered her attaching them there with a twist of wire. I remembered that each of the bows had a story. The first one, the one nearer the centre, at the top of the twist of wire, my mother had tied herself. I recognised it easily. Strong, happy loops. Looking at it, I could see my mother’s hands and fingers at work.
I managed to slide the ribbon loose from the wire without untying the knot. The other bow, according to my mother, was from a box of chocolate pastries. Not just any pastries, she said, but homemade pastries for her name day, given to her by an important person at an important moment. It made the bow special. That ribbon had always looked to me as if it didn’t match, although it was tied with generous loops like the one my mother had made. It was thicker than hers and there were four loops in it. Looking at it more closely I saw that it wasn’t a simple bow knot. It was pulled tight and the knot in the middle was hard as rock. There was someone else’s touch in it. I tugged it loose from the mirror frame, closed it in my fist, and walked with both of the bows in my hand back to the windowsill. I dropped the ribbons into the vase and put it under my arm.
I asked the social worker where my mother’s things were going.
To a good home, I’m sure, she said.
If it was a good home, could I go there, too?
The social worker tried her best, but her smile wasn’t genuine.
That’s not quite what I meant, she said.
I didn’t say anything. I knew that was not quite what she meant. She backed out of the doorway.
My mother wasn’t these objects, and she wouldn’t be angry that I didn’t take them with me. I was only thirteen, but I understood some things. Taking a journey was easier without a lot to carry.
Over the next few years I learned other things, too.
I stopped referring to my mother as missing. Nobody’s missing for years and comes back alive. That doesn’t happen. My mother was murdered.
When I got out of the army, I rented a tiny studio apartment in the Sörnäinen neighbourhood, and got a position as a carpenter’s helper. I liked the job and I liked the carpenter, whose name was Kauko Ranne. He was a head shorter than me, worked from early in the morning until late at night, and encouraged me.
‘My work will be done when you can do it better than me,’ he said. ‘No one wants to be an assistant; they want to be the boss.’
We did subcontracting as well as our own renovations. Ranne demanded a lot and paid well.
One hot, still summer day, I turned on the television. Moments earlier I had been in the shower, rinsing off the dust of the day. I had eaten some beef soup and sat down on the sofa for a cup of coffee.
On a current affairs show they were saying that it had been almost exactly ten years since the country hit the lowest point of the recession of the nineties. They were remembering those who had fallen to the recession and interviewing those who had come through it. One of the survivors was an investor named Henrik Saarinen.
The reporter’s jacket flapped in a high wind and his short, thin hair stood up in every direction as he stood with his back to the door that led to the offices of Saarinen’s investment firm on Etelä Esplanadi. The reporter outlined Saarinen’s portfolio: one-fifth of a media company, almost 5 per cent of a grocery giant, and various holdings in ten different medium-sized Finnish companies.
The programme moved indoors and Saarinen was interviewed in a comfortable conference room that looked more like a gentlemen’s salon of a hundred years ago than a modern place of business. On the wall behind Saarinen was a well-known Finnish painting, women on their way to their country cottages at sunset, after a day’s work, the sun glowing red and violet on the horizon. The women in the painting looked stricken, worn out, their faces thin and dirty, their clothes ragged. Henrik Saarinen leaned his right elbow on the plump arm of a leather sofa and smiled.
How can a person look friendly and at the same time completely unscrupulous?
That was a question they should have asked Henrik Saarinen, investor. He was nearing sixty and seemed to enjoy being just the age and size that he was. He was a big man, in every way. His grey-blue pinstriped suit, white shirt, and golden yellow necktie seemed stretched tight, although they were undoubtedly custom tailored. His hair was salt and pepper in just that sleek way that speaks of wealth and power. His slightly bloated face either had a hint of sun or was naturally yellowish. His round glasses softened his cool blue eyes, which was no doubt why he wore them. Every time the reporter asked a question, a hint of something like scorn showed in Saarinen’s eyes, but since his answers were polite, intelligent, and insightful, he gave the impression of a man who had always been misunderstood, a man who really wanted what was best and did what was best – and what’s more, without being asked.
The reporter was taken with his charisma. An interview that had begun combatively was, after four questions, becoming like a visit from a fan. Saarinen told his own version of the recession, of how it was that he had succeeded, had come through splendidly, in fact, and had, according to him, found wise solutions to the problems of Finland’s entire economy, just by relying on himself and on that oft-praised invisible hand.
I had always known of Henrik Saarinen’s existence. Everybody did. Especially my mother. She had worked for a company that Saarinen owned.
It felt as if I was seeing more than just the interview. The first thing I noticed was his hands – one lying on the arm of the sofa and the other discreetly underscoring his words, eliciting understanding and trust. There was something about his hands. I didn’t know what it was, but there was something. His lips, too, which I watched closely, no longer hearing what he was saying. When I didn’t listen to the individual words, I could hear the voice, and it sounded as if someone was sitting beside me, turning towards me as he spoke.
I put my cup down on the wood floor and looked at Saarinen’s face. It filled my twenty-one-inch television. I tried to understand what it was about the creases in his cheeks and the dark circles under his eyes, obscured for the moment by the almost imperceptible make-up, that I hadn’t noticed before, what it was about the shape of his face, the thin, tight lips as they opened and closed that made me feel as if I’d stepped into a dark room that I had to get out of to reach the air and sunlight.
The camera zoomed out and I saw the hands again. The left hand. The one that was sometimes in his lap, sometimes in the air, opening up meanings, inviting you to listen. His fingers rose one by one as he tallied his achievements. I could almost feel his thick fingers, meant for something other than clean, indoor work, touching my hair, the top of my head, my shoulder.
The interview ended.
The reporter continued talking about Henrik Saarinen, who was now shown in a full-length shot, walking and discussing something with three other people in the same art-graced conference room. For a large man of sixty he had a light, springy step. There was no hint of a heavy man’s ungainliness or any sign of knee or hip trouble or even the stiffness you would expect in a man of his age.
And when he turned, just as the reporter finished the story with an account of his hobbies (fine art, cuisine, and hunting) – I stepped again into the dark room I’d sensed a moment before. There wasn’t anything sharp or quick or in any way remarkable in his movement. It was simply familiar. So familiar that in the darkness I couldn’t see anything but his tanned, salt-and-pepper head. The head was talking. The voice came from close by, right next to me, but I still couldn’t hear what it was saying.
I turned off the television, sat down, and wrestled my way out of the dark room and back into the sunny summer evening.
I knew something had happened. I’d experienced something unique. I’d been shown something that I already knew, or something I should have known.
I CLOSED THE door of the manor house and stood on the veranda. Two plump-breasted crows sat on the roof, utterly still. Against the grey sky they were like those black silhouettes cut from cardboard that people used to buy at amusement parks and hang on the wall to show others something that they already knew – what the person memorialised looked like in profile. Autumn wrapped the land in its groping embrace. I listened to the movement of the gusting wind through the tall spruce trees and the birches that bordered the yard. The air was thin and fresh, with a hint of sap in it, a sweet smell.
I still felt as if I’d stepped into another time, another world. I’d never lived outside Helsinki, though I’d moved all around within the city. First I lived with my mother in Pihlajanmäki, a green, northern suburb of apartment houses, then, after her disappearance, came foster homes in other northern neighbourhoods, and finally a move to the more far-flung Laajasalo, with Reijo and Sinikka. They were an older couple whose children had already left home and they wanted to help the less fortunate. That was the place I learned to call home. For their sake, if for no other reason. When they both died within four years – Sinikka from cancer, Reijo from grief a year later – I felt as if I’d lost my family a second time.
After I finished high school and got out of the army I moved into the city, to the bustle of Sörnäinen. At first I tried to study something, but since I wasn’t able to find anything that interested me, I apprenticed to a carpenter. From Sörnäinen I moved to Meilahti, then Alppila. I’d left my second place in Alppila to come here, and as I’d closed the door to my studio apartment for the last time, I had decided that a period of my life was coming to an end, one way or another.
But leaving Helsinki hadn’t been the clear, clean break I’d once thought it would be. Love had made my departure difficult and messy. I carried Miia with me, as present as she had been at our last meeting, our last parting.
How could I have done it better? How could I have broken only my own heart?
Expressions of bewilderment and anger took turns on her face.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘I find it hard to understand myself …’
‘That’s not what I meant, you conceited, self-centred blockhead. I understand very well what you’re doing. You’re leaving me. That’s perfectly clear. What I don’t understand is why you led me to think that I was the most important thing that had ever happened to you.’
‘You are,’ I said. ‘You’re the most important pers—’
‘Shut up,’ she said quietly. Her voice was as soft as the day outside the window. The sun was shining warm and butter yellow high over the hill at Torkkelinmäki. In the park outside Miia’s window I could see groups of drunks, people walking their dogs, lazing through the summer. They seemed to have a lot of time. ‘Shut up, Aleksi,’ she said.
The woman sitting at the table was so lovely that my heart could have broken just at the sight of her. Miia Niemelä, primary school teacher, height 159 centimetres, slightly broad hips, a round face, a laughing mouth, quick with a quip. Not a fashion model or a beauty queen, but so charming that in my eyes she was the most beautiful woman in the city. She was also the best thing that had happened to me in twenty years. But I had my past and I had my future, and one was just as hard to explain as the other.
I simply didn’t know how to tell her how it feels to lose your mother at the age of thirteen. I didn’t know how to describe how it felt to carry something like that with you for twenty years, the kinds of thoughts it makes you think, the way it affects everything. And I couldn’t tell her what I was planning to do about it. I couldn’t tell her about signing on at Kalmela Manor, and I couldn’t tell her about Henrik Saarinen. I didn’t know how.
‘Is this just what you do?’ Miia asked. Her brown eyes shone, her bare, delicate shoulders glowed tan on either side of her sleeveless shirt. ‘You tell women they’re important when they aren’t? I can’t believe I’ve been so naive. I’ve seen everything. I’m thirty-two years old. This isn’t my first time around the block. I can’t believe it but somehow, I don’t know why, I trusted you.’
I had meant everything I’d said – that she was the best thing that had ever happened to me, the first person who ever made me believe in myself and believe in someone else, believe that life with a woman could be more than just a fight, more than just a combination of sex and power games, that even I had a chance at something better.
‘I’ve been honest with you,’ I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
‘Honest?’ she said, looking at me. ‘What do you know about honesty?’
Quite a lot, I thought. At least I knew that the greatest honesty doesn’t always mean revealing your every darkest thought.
‘Miia …’
‘Forget it. I saw a different kind of man in you. A different kind of person. That’s all.’
I wanted to say that what she saw was true. That I was that kind of man. That I could be.
Miia’s apartment was a studio – one bright, high-ceilinged room and a microscopic bathroom. There was little furniture but all of it was well-chosen and beautiful. A dark brown antique peasant cabinet stood solid beside me as I tried to find a place to put my feet. I couldn’t find one. I leaned against the wall. Finding the right words was just as difficult. I’d never been in this situation before. How could I have been? To love and leave at the same time? My mother was the only person I’d ever loved, and she was taken away from me. After that I’d done nothing but lust, hate, and fight. And leave. I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know how to do it.
‘Get it over with. Tell me what all this is about. Let me know what to be angry about. Tell me you have another woman, or you’ve realised you like men, or you’re a secret agent – anything.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. No other woman, nothing.’
‘How long have we been going out?’
‘Six months and eleven days,’ I said.
Miia looked at me, her eyes filled with such a searching fury that it spilled out of the corners of her eyes and down her sun-browned cheeks, cheeks that I loved to smell and touch.
‘Why do you say it like that,’ she said quietly.
‘Like what?’
‘You can tell me down to the day how long we’ve been together, but you’re breaking up with me. Do you realise how crazy that sounds? How crazy it makes me feel?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Then you say you’re sorry. I’m sorry, Miia, you’re the best thing ever, but I have to leave. Jesus.’
The day was positively glowing outside, the sky blue from one end to the other, smooth as the cover of a book. Young men were lying in the park with their shirts off. The thought of cool grass on my back felt enticing, and utterly foreign.
‘Why do you have to do this,’ Miia suddenly asked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. I could see a tear clinging to her cheek. I was surprised by her question. Surprised that I’d said something that gave her that idea.
‘Well, I …’
I couldn’t tell her that I had to move to Kalmela within the next two weeks, that I had to do it because I planned to find out what Henrik Saarinen had done to my mother, that I had to because if I didn’t, I’d never stop thinking about it.
‘What?’
‘I just have to.’
‘If it’s not another woman and it’s not that you’re some weirdo and you’re not in the service of a foreign power, then it must be about you. And I thought I’d got to know you. I realise now that the only you I’ve got to know is how you are now, today. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’
Of course I did. I had purposely avoided, dodged and ducked any discussion of my past, especially my family. In other words, my mother. The official version – the one I’d told Miia – was that my mother was dead. That was true. And what I’d told her about my father was also true, of course – that I didn’t really know anything about him.
‘But your face doesn’t lie,’ Miia said.
I loved her for this, too. Her ability to see what I really was, who I was.
‘Miia,’ I said.
She didn’t look at me.
‘Leave.’
And that had been it – the last word that Miia had ever spoken to me.
I went down the stairs and headed for the sauna. I’d been given the use of the all-terrain quad bike and trailer, too, but I’d only needed it one time. If I didn’t have anything heavy to carry, like my tools or building supplies, I preferred to walk. I always had. Walking was best in every way. You never got anywhere too soon. Your thoughts straightened out; things fell into proportion. The restlessness left your body, the dead ends left your mind. You got where you were going step by step, both in the world and inside yourself.
The narrow gravel path wound around the manor house and sloped down to the left side of the lawn. From there it continued almost straight down to the beach. On the shore you turned left, walked a couple of dozen steps, and came to what they called the main sauna. The log building covered in board cladding was built long before present building codes and stood as close to the water as was physically possible. If you’d wanted it any closer you would have had to build it in the Venetian style. It did, in fact, have pilings in the water. A terrace for small parties was built over the sea at the front of the building. The sauna was the size of a small, one-storey house, pale yellow like the manor, with a black roof and a chimney as big as a factory’s.
I inspected the washrooms, both dressing rooms, and the large hearth room. The high windows looked out over the water. The sea and sky were full of colours and hypnotic movement. Pale rifts moved through the mass of clouds, flowing across the sky like rivers, meandering, dotted with rapids. The sea looked almost black one moment, and shone an unreal blue the next. It changed its spots like a living creature, moving first left, then right.
I went over the terrace as carefully as I had the sauna house.