Antti Tuomainen: The Healer

We drove past the hockey arena, where hundreds of people flocked, even at this hour of the night. The arena filled with transients every evening—it had become a permanent emergency shelter.

A tram stood dark at the corner of Mannerheimintie and Nordenskiöldinkatu like a great green forgotten thing, like someone had simply walked away and left it there. Hamid was quiet. He drove around the tram and continued down the street toward Töölö.

We stopped on Museokatu. Tarkiainen had lived at 24 Museokatu, and the director of a plastic packaging company and his family of five had been slain at Vänrikki Stoolin katu number 3. The distance from Tarkiainen’s former front door to the scene of the crime was about a hundred meters.

I didn’t tell Hamid why we were parked on Museokatu—I wasn’t sure myself.

I got out of the car, walked to the front of number 24, and looked toward the intersection of Vänrikki Stoolin katu. I felt the rain, first softly on my face, a moment later in swift, freezing drops that slid down into my collar. I looked at the dark, rain-soaked street and then glanced around—I didn’t see anything that screamed mass murderer or missing wife.

I walked across to Vänrikki Stoolin katu and looked back to where I’d been. Many of the apartments at Museokatu 24 had a direct view of where I was standing. The windows of the building were dark now except for the topmost floor, where I counted a row of six lighted windows.

I walked back to the cab and was about to get in when I recognized a green and yellow sign a little farther down the street. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

I asked Hamid to wait a minute and jogged the hundred meters with my shoulders hunched and my hands in my pockets, as if that could protect me from getting drenched. Memories from years back flooded my mind. They came in no particular order, with no reference to the year or the nature of the events. The one thing they all had in common was that each memory was as unwelcome as the next.

Some things never change, and some things just don’t improve with age. The bar looked basically the same as it had ten or fifteen years earlier. Four steps led up from the street and a long counter sat on one side near the door. There were three tables on the right and a dozen in the lounge on the left, and a gap in the wall at the end of the bar. You could see through it into the back room, where there were a few more tables. The place swayed and shook with the sound of music and shouting.

It took effort to make my way through the wall of people to the counter and at least as much effort to get a beer ordered. A pint of beer was slammed down in front of me; I paid for it and tried to see if there was anyone in the bar I knew. The bartenders running back and forth behind the counter weren’t familiar, nor was the thin-bearded loudmouth bumming money next to me. He looked remarkably young up close.

I had come to this bar for years, sometimes too regularly. It was on the route I walked to or from downtown back when I lived on Mechelininkatu. That was the time before Johanna. It wasn’t a good time.

Patrons at numerous tables had already passed the point where coherent conversation becomes impossible—the only point now was to manage to make a noise at all, to lean on one another and drink some more. I didn’t recognize anyone so I continued into the back room.

It was even more poorly ventilated than the front. The smell of liquor and piss intertwined and took command of the air. The people at the tables were complete strangers to me, and I was already turning back when I saw a familiar face through the narrow crack of a half-opened door at the rear of the room. A broad-shouldered bartender that I remembered from ten years before finished stacking a pile of boxes, picked up the top one, walked out of the storage room, and slammed the door shut behind him with one elbow. He noticed me. I gave him a cheerful hello and wished I could remember his name. I couldn’t, so my greeting was brief. He continued to the front room with the case of vodka in his arms.

I followed him and shouldered my way up to the counter. I put my beer down on the glass countertop and put my hand in something dark and sticky. I greeted the bartender again. He noticed me and came to stand in front of me behind the counter. He hadn’t really changed in ten years; his face was a little more angular, it was true, and there were deep lines in his cheeks on either side of his mouth. His eyes had dimmed and become more expectant, as sometimes happens with age. But his ponytail was still there, his shoulders still spread broad, and the stubble on his chin was the same dark, scruffy mat as it was long ago.

I took my phone out of my pocket.

“I used to come here,” I said.

“I remember,” he said, and added, with a certain emphasis, “vaguely.”

“My wife disappeared.”

“That I don’t remember.”

“It didn’t happen here,” I said.

He was looking at me now the way he must have looked at most of his customers. He knew very well that there was no point in trying to have a conversation with a drunk about anything more complicated than an order of beer. His face held a completely neutral, closed expression; this was the end of the discussion as far as he was concerned. As he was turning away, I raised my hand.

“Wait,” I said, and he turned back toward me. “I’m looking for my wife, and also for another person, a man.”

I clicked open the image of Pasi Tarkiainen, enlarged it, and handed the phone to the bartender. The phone shrank in his hand to the size of a matchbox.

“Have you ever seen this guy here?” I asked.

He looked up and handed the phone back to me. The edges of his mouth were curled and his eyes widened ever so slightly.

“Never,” he said. But a fleeting, non-neutral expression flashed in his face.

I looked at him for a moment, trying to grasp the hint of something that I’d just seen in his eyes.

“He lived around here,” I said. “I believe he’s been in here many times.”

The bartender waved a hand in my direction. His arm was big enough that he could have reached my nose from where he stood.

“I believe you’ve been in here many times, and all I remember is the time years ago when we had to carry you to a taxi.”

I put my glass down and managed to get my hand stuck to the counter again.

“Thanks for that,” I said, searching the length of the bar for something to wipe my hand on. I didn’t see anything that would be of service, so I left it in its natural state.

I glanced at the picture shining from my phone and turned the screen toward him once more. He didn’t look at it. But the stillness of his gaze seemed to require effort from him; he wasn’t as cool and relaxed as he’d been at the beginning of our conversation.

“What if I told you this guy was dead?”

He shrugged his shoulders. The impression was like the lifting and lowering of a fortress wall.

“Do you want something to drink? If not, I’ll go serve somebody who does.”

“He died five years ago,” I said. “In the big flu epidemic.”

“A lot of people died back then.”

“True,” I said. “But not very many came back to life.”

His hands stopped. He set the bottle of red wine he was holding in his right hand and the glass in his left hand down on the counter in front of him.

“How about I show you the door?” he said.

“I’ve only had one beer,” I said. “But maybe that was just too much trouble for you. Or are you going to show me the door because of a guy who died of the flu five years ago?”

I showed him Tarkiainen’s picture again, and once again he didn’t look at it.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “No, never mind—I can find that out myself.”