Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

A book about cinematicness naturally had copious illustrations. At the beginning of the chapter on revenge, for instance, there was a photo of Jeanne Moreau’s character in Truffaut’s film The Bride Wore Black . They had watched it at the film club in May. The pictures on the next page were taken from Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West .

The media had been enthusiastic about Greta Kara’s theories. A couple of weeks ago one of the Finnish evening tabloids had published an article about A Guide to the Cinematic Life that rated Finnish celebrities according to their cinematicness. It was illustrated with a sketch of a “Kara-particle meter”.

Olli grew impatient with the manuscript. The text explained that he should focus on being “exactly where he was”, and let “the ambient meaningfulness particles” permeate him. He threw himself into it and followed the instructions even though it felt stupid.

Just as he was about to give up, something happened. Almost as if he just clicked into the right spot.

And then he wasn’t looking at a streetscape full of linden trees.

He was looking at himself, looking through his being, deeper than he ever had, catching by surprise that formless creature that was himself, beneath his name, titles, situation, job and memories.

It bared its teeth, shrieked and bit him.

He fell down.

All of his thoughts are falling away into the cracks and crevices.

All that’s left is a floating, spinning feeling, like the one he experienced years ago at the playground, on the carousel with the boy’s head on top. The memory touches him, as cool as a beautiful girl’s hand.

Then summer comes rolling down the street and smacks him to the ground.

He slides back into his skull.

The hot juice of the sun flows over the linden trees. The car tyre hums on the wall. The blue text of the advertisement burns into his retinas in capital letters.

Brightness pours down in dappled, leafy drops. Darkness rises up from the ground; he breathes it in. He is part of a puzzle that assembles and disassembles itself again and again, thousands of times every second. And each time, the puzzle changes a little, though you can’t see it happening.

For one second, he isn’t there.

Then the meaningfulness particles delineate him and make him a part of the landscape.

As consciousness pours itself into his outlines, he sits up and notices people gathered around him.

Greta sent pages every three days. They came as attachments through ordinary email, which Greta described as too dull, neutral and formal for personal messages. Those she sent through Facebook. So it will feel more like a real conversation .

She didn’t want to use chat, which Olli was glad of. Its urgent quality causes you to lose the nuances of the dialogue and always leads to flat chitchat, or horrible excess.

In her long and meandering messages, Greta recounted her work in Paris. She also said she was planning to come and update her conception of present day Jyväskylä.

I’ve been to Jyväskylä a few times over the years to take care of my affairs, but I haven’t really had a chance to look at the place. My information is from years ago, mostly from my childhood, so I probably should renew my familiarity with my beloved hometown and correct any dated ideas I have before the book is published. Naturally I’m also terribly eager to meet with my publisher, perhaps over dinner…

As the manuscript grew into a book, Olli’s doubts vanished. The book was going to be an event. It would be a smash hit, both in the media and with the book-buying public. There were all the readers who had loved A Guide to the Cinematic Life and would be interested in the Magical City Guide , not to mention the new audiences it would reach.

The book mapped Jyväskylä place by place, the way a guidebook should. Some places such as the carousel at Lounais Park with the boy’s head on top, which she called a “dreamlike and even intoxicating experience”, were already more or less familiar to Olli. Others were places he had never heard of. Apparently he didn’t know his hometown as thoroughly as he had thought.

Olli continued to explore the places presented in the book.

As he wandered around Jyväskylä, he noticed to his amazement that some of the places really did have a particularly strong and even magical atmosphere. He also noticed that they more or less affected him in the way that the guidebook described: his thoughts quickened, his self-awareness grew stronger, his cautiousness and stiffness diminished, and in its place he felt an inclination to act spontaneously. But he didn’t have any more “awakenings” powerful enough to make him “slip outside of the self”, as the book warned. Besides which the weather had cooled, so there was no longer any danger of dehydrating and having embarrassing fainting spells in the street.

Olli didn’t usually throw himself into conversation with random people he met in public. But in the places Greta listed as magical, it was remarkably easy to approach strangers. It was like being “at a dance where everyone is listening to the music of the M-particles and waiting for someone to invite them onto the dance floor”, as A Guide to the Cinematic Life put it.

Many of the people he met seemed to have read the Guide . They looked like characters from a movie in one way or another, and there was something cinematically dramatic about the way they behaved.

For instance, as he was walking along the east bank of the river, where the path wound through the river valley past old overgrown stone foundations and then opened out on a peculiar view of a steam chimney, he met two women having a picnic.

The women are wearing pale-coloured, flounced dresses too fancy for a walk in the woods, their hair in long curls. They are sitting on a checked blanket drinking glasses of wine and eating chicken legs.

As Olli approaches, one of the women looks up at him and beckons for him to join them.

He accepts the invitation with a smile, sits down and lays the City Guide manuscript beside him on the blanket. One of the women, blonde and stylish, asks if he would like some wine. He answers with a line from the film This Earth Is Mine , which comes unexpectedly to mind: “The grape is the only fruit that God gave the sense to know what it was made for.”

The women glance at each other, taken with this.

Olli notices that they are no longer young. Both have faces covered in fine wrinkles. But they are still just as lively and beautiful.

The dark-haired one, thinner and more angular than her friend, smiles with delight, hands Olli an old book and says, “How fun that we were right about you; you’re just as pleasant as you look! May we ask you to read some Christina Rossetti to us? We’ve been reading these poems to each other for fifteen years—in bed, at breakfast, on all our trips—and although we still love Christina as fervently as always, we’re tired of hearing each other’s voices. Perhaps a pleasant stranger can give our favourite poems new life, if it’s not too much trouble…”

When Olli had read seven poems, it started to rain hard.

He stood up and opened his umbrella. The women didn’t want to get wet, either. With excited shouts and laughter they packed up their things, yelled goodbye and ran to their Citroën waiting a short distance away on the road.