Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

While he waits for new instructions, Olli searches Facebook for signs that Aino and the boy are all right. And he finds new photos on Aino’s profile every day. They show mother and son in various travel destinations.

Apparently they are being flown to a new location every couple of days.

The photos come from beautiful, exotic, picture-perfect places around the world. In the newest one Aino is smiling into the camera, and the boy doesn’t look particularly sad, either.

They’re getting used to this, too.

ON THE CORNER OPPOSITE the university library is the Puistokatu cafe kiosk. Greta is sitting on the terrace. On the table are two glasses of raspberry soda. In the glasses are two straws.

Olli walks up, sits down across from her, leans his umbrella against his chair and smiles.

Today Greta looks like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief . The same pink dress with the white patterns, sleeveless, her golden hair pulled back. The look becomes her.

Olli’s dark-grey coat and trousers are enough like Cary Grant’s that they complement each other’s cinematicness.

In the park below, children run squealing towards the carousel with the boy’s head on top, in the same spot as it was decades before. That was where Olli befriended the Blomrooses and Karri and touched Anne for the first time. Greta searches his face and says nothing for a long time. An unspoken greeting hangs in the air between them. Olli continues to smile, purposely teasing her.

Finally Greta speaks. “I had strange, disturbing dreams all night. I woke up after noon, ate breakfast, put on my make-up, played the piano and went out half an hour ago. I was walking downtown and on a whim I sat down here on the terrace. I bought a bottle of soda, the same kind we used to drink, in the same place. We used to come here because we thought the Blomrooses might not come to this part of town. We even kissed. We let people see that we were lovers. You said that it was like we were in some other country, so we could behave as we wished.”

Olli says he can almost remember.

Greta purses her lips reproachfully. “The park has changed a little over the years, but the spirit of it is the same. There are still M-particles here. Not as many as there were then, but enough. So, today I came here and asked for two glasses and poured soda in both of them. I thought that if I just believed hard enough, you would appear somehow, like in a dream. I waited five minutes. Just as I thought I was being a silly, stupid girl, you did appear, and here you are. So have some soda, my darling.”

Greta is smoking a cigarette. Olli feels like one, too. He takes a pack of menthols out of his jacket pocket and starts searching his pockets for a lighter. He’s left it at home.

Greta rummages in her black handbag, takes out a gold-coloured, old-looking lighter and says, “You know, this Barlow lighter was a gift from Frank Sinatra.”

“Really?”

Olli sucks the flame into his cigarette.

“Or so I was told,” Greta says. “He didn’t give the lighter to me, of course. It was a gift to Judy Garland. I was in Paris and feeling lonely and rich, and I wanted to treat myself. I went to an auction. I saw the lighter there and heard its story. I paid three thousand euros for it, so if they tricked me, I don’t want to know about it. You see darling, once a thing is done and there’s nothing I can do about it any more, if I’m offered a pleasant lie about it or a depressing truth, I’ll take the lie.”

She smiles and Olli secretly trembles at her exquisiteness.

Olli has been to Paris six times as an adult, every time to represent the publishing house at the March book fair. Two years ago he happened upon an exhibition at the Pompidou and stood for an entire hour looking at one painting.

It was Gustav Klimt’s Judith I .

Olli wanted the painting for himself, although he knew he couldn’t have it. Perhaps precisely because he knew he couldn’t have it. There were poster reproductions of the painting at the museum shop, but they weren’t what he wanted. He wanted the original. It wasn’t the most beautiful painting he had ever seen, but it felt as if it belonged to him. He stood admiring it and felt an almost sexual desire for the sensuous woman in the picture.

Finally he had to make himself leave so that he wouldn’t grab the painting and try to take it out of the museum before anyone could stop him.

As he gazes now at Greta transformed into Grace Kelly, he’s overcome with the same need to possess her that he felt for that Klimt painting.

He finds himself writing in his mind the same description of Greta that he wrote on lined paper once when he was sixteen:

She walks quickly, her body tense, yet supple as a cat’s tail, her head held high, self-assured, dropping words sometimes casually, sometimes excitedly, wrapped in mysterious scents, so that her whole way of being reaches out to the senses of the men who turn to look, and says, “Keep up with me and you just might catch me.”

Greta seems to sense his thoughts or at least the feelings behind them. Her sea-green eyes flash. Her slender hand takes hold of his shovel-like one and squeezes tight and she glows as if she’s just been given a gift.

On the kiosk cafe terrace, people come and go. Olli and Greta remain. Their eyes plumb each other’s dark depths across the table.

Olli plays with his smoke.

Greta sucks raspberry soda through her straw, thirsty and agitated, her green irises sparkling with girlish joy at a situation which had seemed so hopeless and now seems to be turning to triumph.

Olli notices that he can feel their connection working again. He remembers suddenly how easy it once was for them to read each other: each knowing what the other was feeling and sometimes able to guess with frightening accuracy what thoughts were turning in the other’s head. Maybe they had been peeking into each other all this time by means of their dreams.

The memory is attached to a bunch of emotional mycelia and Olli is moved when he realizes that he’s never managed to create the same connection with anyone else in his life, not even his wife.

His deep self nods approval and makes some additional adjustments to his mental state.

They’ve been meeting almost every day for three weeks now. The fourth day was the only one when he wasn’t given any orders except to rest for a while and wait. On every other day the Blomrooses have informed Olli which magical place Greta will be visiting and when, and Olli has sought her out according to their instructions.

Their relationship has remained relatively chaste, limited to kisses exchanged under his umbrella in various places around the city. Once, however, at the front gate of the paper mill, Greta’s hand grazed the front of his trousers as if by accident, and she smiled, mischievously at first, then blushing. Every time they parted, they went their own ways without planning or promising anything, Greta to her unknown lodgings and Olli, as far as Greta knew, home to his family.