Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

The sound of traffic on Puistokatu rises and falls like ocean waves.

The City Guide manuscript describes the street thus:

Puistokatu is like a lost fragment of Paris. The old cemetery is reminiscent of Paris’s Cimetière du Père Lachaise, and in other ways the street has the feeling of one of Paris’s side streets. In fact, viewed from certain points, there is a street near Père Lachaise that is almost identical to Jyväskylä’s Puistokatu (see map).

A car arrives with another funeral party made up of five stocky men and a skinny little girl in pigtails and a black mourning dress. She curtsies to Greta as they walk past.

“Hello, child,” Greta says, striving for kindness. There is a choked sound in her voice. As they move away she takes Olli’s arm and whispers breathily, “Do you think her mother has died? I can’t bear it…”

She looks at Olli wide-eyed, demandingly, waiting for his reply.

“I don’t think so,” Olli says. “Perhaps her grandmother. Or some old relative who’s been sick for a long time. After a long illness, death is a relief.”

“But where is her mother, then?” Greta insists, looking back at the group and grabbing hold of his coat as if to reproach him. “Surely no woman would send her little girl alone to a funeral and stay home to wash the dishes or watch television. Oh yes, I know where her mother is. She’s lying dead in her casket. That girl is about to watch as her mother is lowered into the ground in a wooden box and covered with dirt. Oh Lord. The mother of a girl that young can’t be very old herself…”

Olli removes Greta’s hands from his lapels and squeezes them so tightly for a moment that her eyes moisten. “These things happen,” he says coldly. “Bad things happen. People die. Even children. No one can grieve for every dead person. We each have our own dead to cry over. If not today, then maybe tomorrow, if we haven’t wound up under the dirt ourselves for somebody else to grieve.”

He thinks of Aino and the boy, on a beach somewhere far away, waiting for him to complete his task and earn them a safe return home. Wipe your tears away and take care that your heroine gets her kiss this time. Show some passion. She’s expecting it, although she’s too afraid to show it .

Greta’s make-up starts to run again and Olli loosens his grip. He takes out his handkerchief and uses it to wipe her eyes, as if she were a little child.

“Maybe she died of some illness,” Greta whispers, unresisting, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Or maybe she was in a car accident, or was run over. I hope she had time to say goodbye to her husband and daughter. Oh Olli! It’s so terribly sad when people are torn from their loved ones and don’t even have a chance for a proper goodbye! What point is there in anything when everything that’s beautiful can end at any moment, with no warning?”

Olli puts his handkerchief in his pocket. The worst damage is repaired now. Greta stands looking at him, sad and petulant, as if the impermanence of everything were somehow his fault, or at least his to explain.

There’s nothing he can do about her fear. Words are useless. Greta has plenty of words of her own. The entire Guide to the Cinematic Life is an attempt to use words to answer a question that torments the author herself.

And the book’s answer is that lasting happiness may be impossible and joy impermanent, but life can at least be made aesthetically beautiful.

A beautiful story has a beautiful beginning and a beautiful ending. The illusion of happiness makes the beginning beautiful, but the ending draws its beauty from pain.

Olli dispenses with words, pulls Greta close to him, looks into her eyes, lays the fingers of his left hand along the back of her slender neck and kisses her.

The red umbrella falls to the ground with a clunk. A warm wind takes hold of Greta’s hat and throws it into the Puistokatu traffic.

At first she’s cold and stiff in his arms, as if in the sudden grip of death. Gradually the stiffness melts. Olli feels her lips arch into a smile. She answers his kiss, shyly at first, then devouring his mouth like a hungry predator.

Her delicate frame presses tightly against him and trembles uncontrollably. It’s the same greedy desire Olli remembers discovering in her years ago.

When they finally break away from each other, hot and breathless, Greta sighs and lays her head against his chest. “I can hear your heartbeat,” she whispers. “It’s pounding so fast. Because of me? For my sake? Silly thing. It still remembers me, after all this time. How many times will it beat before you’re taken away from me again…”

Olli breathes in the gold of her hair. He is too roiled with emotion to speak. Contradictory thoughts chase and tear at each other in his mind.

His gaze falls on a pale white wall on the other side of the street. On it is a painted Goodyear tyre ad, blue letters and a tyre with wings. That sign has followed him through all these years. He points it out to Greta and they look first at the ad, then at each other, smiling in amazement. A moment from thirty years ago rises from the secret passages of memory, its colours deepening until it’s all too easy to fall into.

It was when the Five were breaking up and Olli was walking down Puistokatu with Greta, and they stopped to look at this ad and kissed under the umbrella, hidden from the adults walking by. Olli remembers now that it was an unusual, domed umbrella that Aunt Anna had brought home from France. It was the same kind that Maura at the umbrella shop ordered for him.

And now here they are in the same spot, holding on to each other, Olli and his pear-print girl from Tourula. Olli touches Greta’s cheek and looks into the green of her eyes, amazed, as if he has only just now understood who is in his arms.

The warm wind wraps itself around them.

For a few short breaths everything that has happened since that summer they shared fades away and drops into meaninglessness.

Then Olli remembers again that somewhere in the world, right now, a woman and child are on a beach waiting for the day when they can return home.

As Olli begins to relive a story that started and ended thirty years before, he feels guilty because at times it is frighteningly easy to let himself get caught up in it. Every time he meets Greta in Jyväskylä’s magical places he feels the M-particles affecting his mood, feels parts of his life slowly but surely shifting into new positions within his consciousness. His whole way of thinking is gradually changing, and it terrifies him.

But he has to surrender to the change and let his deep cinematic self take over, for his family’s sake. He has to throw himself into the love story with Greta Kara; any superficiality or pretending would only lead to failure, and he has never learnt to act.

Of course the thought of his wife and son at the mercy of the Blomroos siblings casts a shadow over every moment with Greta, but the whole thing is steeped in a cinematic aesthetic, turning all his conflicting feelings into an emotional work of art.

Every time he comes home from one of their meetings, his deep self falls asleep. That’s when the seriousness of the situation hits him: his wife and child are being held hostage by psychopaths in some foreign country; he himself is holed up in his house, afraid to tell anyone about his predicament and having daily trysts with a woman he knew for one summer as a child.