Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

Olli walked through the old church park and crossed the street at the bridal shop. The Pukkala rain-gear shop was between a sex shop and a women’s clothing store. They sold raincoats, rain ponchos, rubber boots and quality umbrellas.

Olli went in and started to browse the umbrella selection, paying special attention to their construction. He didn’t intend to give in and buy a cheap one that broke easily. It depressed him.

As always, there was music playing in the shop. The saleswoman played old tango records day in and day out, smoking in the back room, waiting for customers. There was a partly opened curtain hanging in the doorway. The woman was only visible in silhouette. She was surrounded by a cloud of tobacco smoke that escaped into the front of the shop. In any other place it would have been peculiar.

The saleswoman had reached middle age years before, but still dressed as she had in her youth, which had been sometime in the 1960s. Her nut-brown hair was pulled up in a banana clip to reveal her slim neck. Her dress had a black and white geometric pattern. It followed her slim, girlish figure and left her arms and back bare.

She watched the shop from her hiding place; only her eyes, lined in heavy black, moved. That suited Olli. He put off talking with her as long as possible.

In the bright light of the shop she was unambiguously ugly. Smoking had taken the natural colour from her face and far from hiding the lines in her skin her thick make-up accentuated them. From close up she was ordinary. But when she sat in the back room with her smoky silhouette falling on the curtain, the profile of her face and body had the lines of a Gustav Klimt.

The woman had made herself into a work of art in a way that was described in A Guide to the Cinematic Life .

Observe people in waiting rooms, on park benches, in train and bus stations. You’ll notice that some of them disappear into washed-out meaninglessness, while others draw your attention and you can’t stop looking at them and speculating about what it would be like to be a part of their lives and memories.

Cinematic people radiate M-particles in all situations. A person doesn’t have to be young, beautiful or stylish—or even clean. Their hair and clothing are a part of the total impression, but it’s more a question of the right sort of self-awareness, a deep realization of their own character.

That night Olli has a dream.

He is walking over the Tourula River bridge. He’s wearing a fedora hat, a tie and nothing else but his striped pyjamas. There is a night-time festival going on in town. From one direction he hears orchestral music, from another a loudspeaker: SEE THE AMAZING HUMAN ODDITY! FOUND IN THE SECRET PASSAGEWAYS, BADLY BEATEN AND BATTERED, AND RESTORED TO HEALTH BY THE WORK OF TEN TOP SURGEONS! TODAY ONLY!

There are booths selling sausages and ice cream. A juggler on stilts strides by tossing not balls but dolls, and blowing into a paper kazoo.

A warm wind blows dandelion fluff. The air is thick with the downy seeds, and now and then it’s difficult to see. When they touch the ground they take root and grow amazingly quickly. Here and there are glowing meadows of dandelions that the people walk through, shouting their delight. Olli is upset that he’s left his camera at home.

There are crowds of people, all in nightgowns and pyjamas. There’s nothing odd about that—you should wear night clothes at night.

The women’s nightgowns are disconcertingly thin. Their bodies are works of art meant to be looked at and commented on. Like the other people, Olli admires their varied breasts, legs and hips, runs his fingers along the curves of their buttocks, muses aloud about the various aesthetic choices, as do the women themselves.

He laughs with joy and wonders why he so rarely goes out at night. Everything is so much freer than in the daytime, the people more open and sociable.

Then he notices a woman with a little boy beside her on a bicycle. She’s wearing silk pyjamas with the top open. “Pardon me, ma’am, but you certainly have very sweet breasts,” Olli says.

The woman lifts her breasts, thanks him for the compliment, says that is very kind of him but if he looks closer he’ll notice that there is in fact much lacking in her breasts—lately they even have a rubbery smell.

Olli bends towards her and sniffs, and her breasts do indeed smell like rubber.

He looks closely at the woman, trying to get an impression of her face. There’s something familiar about it, but the light is dim and the dandelion fluff is flying between them all the time.

“Excuse me, but do we know each other?” he finally asks.

The woman smiles sadly, shakes her head, and walks away, following the boy, who has already pedalled to the end of the block.

Olli is filled with anxiety. He shouldn’t have let the woman and the little boy go.

He leans against a railing and notices that there’s something wrong about the view from the bridge. Nothing is moving. The birds are frozen in the air. The river isn’t flowing. The trees are lifeless cardboard. The distances are flattened.

The landscape is nothing but a big cardboard facade with a row of crows perched on the upper edge.

He shakes his head. He can’t understand why this fake landscape hasn’t been written about in the Central Finland or Greater Jyväskylä newspapers.

Olli is startled to see a golden-haired girl in a pear-print dress come into view from below the bridge. She looks up, waves a hand, and walks into the facade.

Olli tries to shout a warning.

But lines from the Christina Rossetti poem he was reading to the women at the picnic comes out of his mouth instead:

“Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.”

He closes his mouth, holds his breath, and manages to swallow a couple of lines. They taste like pears. Then he tries to shout again, but more poetry comes out:

“Only remember me; you understand, It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while, And afterwards remember, do not grieve.”

When the golden-haired girl in the pear-print dress is halfway up the hill she becomes two-dimensional and freezes, a part of the picture.

It’s getting cold. Snow is falling and the wind is rising. Olli shivers in his pyjamas, sad at the girl’s fate. The cardboard landscape sways in the wind. He hears an ominous cracking sound, as if the structure is giving way.

Then the landscape starts to fall.

People are shouting.

A rush of air sweeps over the bridge and tears at his clothes. His tie flies away with the wind.

As Olli looks at the fallen landscape, he realizes that it isn’t a facade; it’s a huge postcard. On the back, in large letters, is Olli’s name and address and the message:

For the love of my life, from the girl in the pear-print dress.

Olli awoke to a distant alarm. He sat up and looked around. Aino lay with her legs sticking out from under the blanket, her hair in her face.

Olli went downstairs to the lavatory and tinkled in the pot. He remembered an ad for a natural remedy for prostate trouble. His flow was still good, though. He had no cause for worry, for the time being.