Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

Karri follows a few metres behind the rest of them, dragging his tennis shoes, raising a cloud of dust that the wind can’t blow away.

They cross the little bridge and walk along the river upstream. The water flows quietly beside them. Leo, Anne, Riku and Olli stop when they come to a boat. Aunt Anna had a wooden boat here at one time. Last summer the Five used it to chart the river and the lake it feeds into. Then it disappeared, at the same time that Timi did—in fact it might have been on the same trip.

They’ve tried many times to work out the details together. The only thing they all agree on is that the day started with them setting out on a boat trip to find the river’s source, and ended with them walking back to Tourula from somewhere on the other side of town. They were tired, dirty and distressed because Timi wasn’t with them. None of them knew what had happened to him.

The next day they noticed that the boat wasn’t in its usual place. They discussed whether someone might have taken it, or whether they had forgotten it somewhere. No one remembered returning the boat. Feeling guilty, they borrowed the neighbour’s boat and searched the shores of the river and the lake, but Aunt Anna’s boat was never found.

There are derelicts with liquor bottles sitting on the bank of the river. They’re no trouble. They just ask passers-by for small change, with exaggerated politeness, and they never bother children.

Olli looks behind him. Karri has stopped on the bridge, staring into the water. The distance between them is growing. The others don’t seem to notice.

Riku suggests that they eat their lunch now. Leo has more foresight and says they can eat later, when they’ve gone farther, maybe up to Taulumäki. They are on an expedition, after all, and explorers don’t eat their lunches too early. When they find a good picnic spot they can eat and then Karri can lead them to the secret passages.

THE BUSINESSLIKE RESERVE of Greta’s messages bothered Olli. He could read between the lines and he was worried that Book Tower might not be the publisher for her third book. “The furrows on your brow are getting deeper,” Maiju commented at their weekly meeting.

Greta Kara was cool in her messages, but in his dreams the girl in the pear-print dress was still passionate and devoted, and the person Olli was in his sleep loved the girl back, with all his heart. When at the moment of waking the dream slipped back into the darkness between his synapses, the feeling of loss felt like it could tear his ribcage open.

“What is it?” Aino gasped one morning. Olli must have sobbed as he awoke. Aino stared at him aghast, trying to see inside his head. Her sour breath wafted in his face and he turned away. He couldn’t talk to Aino until he got the dream out of his head.

Plus he had to change his pyjama bottoms.

Aino pushed herself closer, like a reptile, opened her mouth, touched his cheek with her fingertips, and sniffed at him, her nostrils flaring.

Olli closed his eyes.

A moment before, the girl in the pear-print dress had been in his arms. They had kissed, nibbled each other, cried and whispered sweet nothings. He had licked her cheek and her neck and tasted the salt on her skin. She had caressed, kissed, sucked, bit him gently, all the while gazing at him with her green eyes until Olli came on her dress and she closed her eyes and whispered that she loved him.

Then something had changed.

They had looked at each other with the knowledge that something bad was going to happen. No time for goodbyes—the dream was torn away like a blanket and the girl was hurled into oblivion.

For several long minutes he was left shivering in the middle of a life he didn’t recognize as his own.

That evening Olli decided to play with his son. It had been a while since they had last spent time together. He didn’t mean to be a distant father; he was just very busy. But maybe they could do some wrestling today.

Olli walked from room to room, but he didn’t see his son anywhere.

Aino was in the living room. She was sitting on the sofa, her hands in her lap, her back stiff. The television was off. Aino stared at the black screen. Olli picked the remote up off the sofa and turned the television on. There was a fun show about mongooses on the nature channel. Aino liked animals. Maybe this would cheer her up. There was still an hour before the news.

Olli asked about the boy. Aino didn’t hear him, or didn’t want to hear. He concentrated on the television programme. The mother mongoose’s cubs were in constant danger and the show was steeped in drama. When Olli repeated his question, Aino said thinly, “Yeah, he’s at the neighbour’s playing.”

Ten minutes later Olli was standing in the bathroom in his pyjama bottoms doing his evening wash and brush. He didn’t feel tired. He just wanted to sleep.

A couple of days later, and Olli was in the living room standing in front of the portrait of Notary Suominen. There really was a strong resemblance between them, him and the old notary. Guests often thought it was a portrait of Olli.

His grandfather’s example had been an inspiration and an obligation ever since that resemblance was pointed out to him. The notary’s expression in the picture was inscrutable. Olli liked to think that his grandfather was looking at him approvingly, but lately he hadn’t deserved Notary Suominen’s respect.

At Olli’s graduation party, his mother had spread out the family photo albums for the guests to look at. Olli’s aunt the doctor, his father’s sister, whom the family hadn’t seen since her father’s funeral years before, was the one who compared the two photos and said that Olli and the notary resembled each other.

Everyone had nodded. It was thought to be a good omen for the graduate’s future. As she left, Olli’s aunt gave him a kiss on the cheek, hugged him and whispered, “Thank the Lord, Olli, I can see you have some of the Suominens’ no-nonsense rectitude, which my brother, your poor father, doesn’t seem to have inherited at all, for some reason.”

Olli’s father wasn’t a particularly encouraging role model. Diabetes was eating away his feet and making him old before his time. In his final years he huddled in a wheelchair, sighing and constructing monologues that oozed with bitterness and injecting himself with insulin whenever he happened to remember to.

But at his graduation party, with the help of those two photographs, Olli broke free of his grim inheritance and turned his gaze towards his grandfather. Things became clearer. He would take his notary grandpa as his model and handle his affairs in such a way that no one ever need pity him or be ashamed of him.

And life had indeed gone smoothly, until that autumn when the girl in the pear-print dress appeared in his dreams. Olli touched his grandfather’s portrait, took a breath and straightened his back until it cracked. He made a decision. He had built his life through a series of firm decisions up to this point, and that was how he would put things right. He fetched pen and paper, sat at the table and started to make notes. Solving a problem always starts with a thorough outline of what the problem is.

So. He had become estranged from his wife, his family and his life. Why? Because he was in love with someone else. Not any real person, but a succubus that had sprung from his memories.

That made things easier, in a way. There was no lover or illicit relationship to hold him. The problem was contained inside his head.

That meant that he had a psychological problem .

This realization made him feel faint. Olli turned on his computer and typed a search into Google: psychological problem . After correcting the spelling a couple of times, he hit enter.