Antti Tuomainen - The Healer

“This is important, Elina,” I said. “Johanna has been missing for a day and a half. I don’t even want to think about any other possibility but finding her alive, unhurt. I need all the help I can get. It’s not easy to ask, but I have to. I have to find Johanna.”

Elina pulled her legs up even closer, brushed the hair from her face with a few quick movements of her hand, and looked straight ahead for a moment. Then she looked at me again, her head bowed a little, and said, as if she were surrendering something:

“I adored Pasi Tarkiainen.”

She was still looking at me, perhaps waiting for some reaction. Then she continued: “I don’t know how to explain it now, but I adored him. And, of course, I wished that he adored me in the same way. But it was Johanna he wanted. I can admit it now—now that it’s been so many years. I was in love with Pasi, and I was dying of jealousy when I saw how happy they were together.”

I wasn’t surprised.

“Did you tell Johanna about it?”

“No,” Elina said quickly, shaking her head. “I didn’t even tell Pasi about it. I just tried to make him notice me. And then when I heard that they weren’t really that happy, at first I was pleased, but then I was just sorry, thinking, What kind of person am I that I’m happy when my friend’s partner is revealed to be something other than he seems, when I learn that she’s not happy?”

“What happened?”

“I don’t really know,” Elina said, and she sounded sincere. “All Johanna told me was that Pasi wasn’t the man she had thought he was. Sometimes if I’d had a glass of wine, or two or three, I would ask about it, but somehow we just didn’t talk about it, even though we talked about everything together. Pasi just disappeared from our lives, and we forgot about him. Then Ahti came along, and you, and everything that had to do with Pasi had vanished.”

She smiled an entirely joyless smile.

“I’ve never talked with anyone about this. Not even Johanna. It seems like a different world now. It feels like ages ago, like I’m a different person now, and so is everyone else.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Johanna’s my best friend,” she said. “The best friend I’ve ever had or ever will have. I love Ahti. Ahti’s my husband. But Johanna’s my friend.”

I still didn’t say anything. I leaned my elbows on my knees and looked at her, her brown eyes still shining with the anger of a moment earlier, the shadows on her face. All the coldness and hardness had gone out of her face, but something dark still lingered.

“And now here we are,” she said in the same resigned tone that she’d begun with. “Last night I started thinking, Why in the world are we going north? That won’t solve anything. Nothing. We’ll have even less there than we have here. I want you to find Johanna, so we can be together again. You and Johanna and Ahti are all the family I have left. My parents both died of the flu four years ago, my big sister is somewhere in America, and she’s not coming back. I was sitting beside Ahti last night thinking that no matter what comes, we don’t need to leave here. We shouldn’t.”

She lifted her head. A delicate smile lit up her face, its warmth slowly rising to her eyes.

“Let’s stick together and live as long as we can, as long as we’re able to,” she said softly, then added faintly, troubled, “let’s do the best we can under the circumstances.”

Ahti didn’t awaken even when I was purposefully noisy putting on my coat and shoes at the door. I would have liked to talk to him, but Elina felt we should let him keep snoring. I asked her to call me if she remembered something, anything at all, about Pasi Tarkiainen.

I tried to show her Tarkiainen’s picture, told her that he’d lived on Museokatu, just a little way from here, a few years before she and Ahti had moved into the neighborhood. But she didn’t want to look at a photo of her former infatuation or think about how close he had once lived to where she was now.

I got a few names from her, people from her student days and even later. One of them was someone I knew: Laura Vuola, Ph.D. Her name brought to mind things that I’d imagined were settled and forgotten. It almost made me doubt my sanity: the beginnings of this whole tangled web had been so close to me, and I was blissfully ignorant of all of it. I didn’t mention it to Elina.

I thanked her and embraced her longer than I meant to, pulling away when I realized what I was doing.

The incipient clarity of the morning had grown damp while I was indoors, with intermittent wind and clouds covering a sky that promised rain and darkened the world in the meantime.

I knew why I had held on to Elina for so long. I missed Johanna physically, too: her dense warmth, her distinct wool and honey scent, the feel of her small frame beside me, close to me, the way her hand fit into mine. We were affectionate with each other, all the time. That’s why missing her came so quickly, so deeply, so sharply. I looked up, sighed, pushed all my thoughts of Johanna to the back of my mind, and let only one thought come front and center: I’ll find you.

I walked toward Museokatu, intending to visit that same tavern. I didn’t know if it would be open, but I remembered that it used to be even in the mornings. Thirsty artists and those who thought they were artists used to gather there to level out the holes and hummocks left by the night.

I descended the stone stairs from Temppelikatu to Oksasenkatu. I couldn’t begin to count the times I’d walked down those stairs before. When I got to the bottom I looked behind me at the sturdy stones, the bolted steel door of the weightlifters’ gym halfway up, the large moss-covered rocks resting against the railing.

I stopped at the corner of Tunturikatu. Farther down the street was the flea market. The entire space was filled with stuff. Some of it had even been carried out to the sidewalk. It was difficult to imagine why anyone would go there. What would they have bought? Clothes, which everyone had too much of already? Dishes, when there wasn’t enough food? Electronics that gave only a moment’s pleasure even when they were new? Books and records that no one had any time to read or listen to anymore?

A sculpture of two bears facing each other watched over the intersection of Museokatu and Oksasenkatu. Two teddy bears, really—they were so small. Their handsome gray coats of stone were covered in a green fuzz of mold.

The tavern door was open. I could hear music coming from inside. I walked up the steps, smelling the same mixture of sweat and urine that I remembered, now masked by the smell of disinfectant. Nobody was behind the bar. Some customers sat at a few tables on the left side of the room, each one alone, fiddling with their phones or staring into space.

I stood there, wondering how to proceed if I encountered the bartender with the ponytail. I waited a couple of minutes. The door to the back room opened, and a moment later a heavyset bodybuilding type came out with a clinking brown cardboard box in his arms. He put the box down on the counter and looked at me questioningly.

I ordered coffee.

He turned without nodding or saying a word, took a cup down from the upper shelf, and filled it from the coffeepot, which looked like it had been sitting there since the place opened. Or since it closed. He plunked the mug on the bar in front of me and stood waiting. He was young, maybe twenty, and seemed composed entirely of large individual and incompatible masses of muscle. His blue eyes were squeezed between his brow ridge and his cheekbones, and you could see the squeeze in his gaze.

“Are you gonna pay?” he said.

“How much would I pay if I did pay?” I answered.