Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

I wondered what had happened to the pistol. Then, as I was getting in the car, I found it in my handbag. I guess I didn’t shoot anyone after all, I thought. I was both relieved and disappointed. Then I noticed that the pistol smelt different. When I looked in the chamber, there were only two cartridges left.

Greta wriggles into Olli’s arms, nibbles his neck and puts her hand between his legs.

“Please don’t ask what really happened there, because I don’t know and I don’t want to know. And don’t ask what answer I gave to Anne. You know the answer. It was you.”

Olli nods. They look at each other solemnly.

“Now you know the story of my body,” Greta whispers shyly. “It’s yours, if you want it.”

As Olli gently kisses her chin, something fierce flames up in her green eyes.

“It was made for you,” she says, her voice husky. “Take it. Please. Stick your cock in it. Pound it to your heart’s content. Baise-moi, mon amour … Fuck me, my love. Olli, please make love to me. I can’t wait any longer.”

AFTER THIS THEY’RE BLESSED with a few sweet, unhurried summer days.

Then Jyväskylä erupts into autumn colours and the clear though diminishing light fills the house that Wivi Lönn built for herself, where they walk from room to room, sometimes hand in hand, sometimes following each other, making love on the floor, the tables, the stairs, enjoying a cigarette, reading Christina Rossetti poems to one another.

Greta often sits at the piano playing Chopin and Olli listens, thinking uneasily of the task the Blomrooses have given him: Make her completely happy. You have until the first snow. Then your family can come home—but only if you complete your mission . Every day as he listens to Greta play, he lights a cigarette, inhales pensively and asks with a smile, as if the question were a game, “Would you say that right now you are completely happy?”

Not lifting her fingers from the keys, she answers with something like this: “Hmm. I’m happier than I ever thought I could be… The problem is that the more I love you the more I fear losing you. I have a sort of premonition… Oh, it’s so stupid, I know, but you see, Olli, the most beautiful stories always have sad endings, and our story is so beautiful. I don’t know how I can be completely happy when I’m always afraid that fate will separate us somehow and then I’ll die of sadness.”

“Greta, remember that I love you, too,” Olli assures her. “You’re my girl in the pear-print dress. No power in this world could take me away from you again.”

Greta’s eyes grow wet. Chopin’s notes welling up from the piano grow more emphatic.

“Well, you’ve done it again… I just started to love you a little more,” she says in a tone both sad and amused. “And now the thought of losing you only feels all the more unbearable… I’m sorry. I realize I’m being stupid and childish. I promise to stop being afraid and learn to be completely happy. I’ll try, anyway. Ask me again tomorrow.”

Olli takes care of the publishing business from home and only goes to the office when it’s absolutely unavoidable. Book Tower has to be kept running, but he doesn’t have time to actually be there.

October arrives. The first snow could come at any moment. Olli tries not to think about it too much. He has to surrender to the power of cinematic fatalism or he’ll go crazy. In the end all he can do to make this work is to love Greta and proclaim his love for her for as long as it takes to begin to dispel the shadows from her mind, and hope that it happens before the first snow falls.

The Magical City Guide is scheduled for publication in a few weeks and Greta will be marketing it in publishing events and television appearances. At Greta’s insistence, Olli will accompany her at all times. “I’m just afraid that if I leave you at home alone, I’ll come back and find you gone,” she says with a tense smile.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he promises. They exchange a look; Greta’s eyes are alight with faith and desire, but behind them there’s still a touch of doubt.

After a night of frost, they walk the paths in the garden over crackling leaves, eating apples and smelling the change of seasons.

“You know what I’m really looking forward to?” Greta says suddenly, turning around so quickly that her golden hair brushes Olli’s face. “Snow. And winter. And spending my first winter with you. Maybe it will be a magical winter. We can light a fire, throw our clothes in the flames and wrap ourselves up in each other. Make love and drink hot cocoa with whipped cream on top and roast sausages and marshmallows on sticks. I’ve never had roasted marshmallows, and I don’t really like sausages. Olli, when does the first snow come to Jyväskylä?”

“Sometimes in November, once in a while even in October,” Olli says, glancing at the sky.

They’ve reached the entrance to the colonnade. Olli presses Greta up against a column, kisses her lips and nibbles her neck, whispering, “I’ll never leave you.”

She wraps her arms around him. “Good. I’m happy that you say that. It’s just that what a person wants, and what they promise, doesn’t mean much if it’s on a collision course with what’s meant to be. You see, Olli, I trust you, but I fear fate.”

“Fate?” Olli says. “Silly girl! Fate has no power independent of us. We create our own fate through the big decisions we make, and the small ones. Things move in their own trajectories and everything has its own weight. My grandfather used to say that there is no act so small that it can’t have larger consequences, but if you’re careful about even small things, I think you can make your fate whatever you want it to be. Look where our choices and actions have brought us… Here, in each other’s arms. This is our fate.”

“I suppose it is,” Greta says, and presses more tightly against him.

Every night Olli wakes up in the wee hours. He looks at the woman sleeping beside him, tiptoes downstairs to the kitchen, turns on his computer and reads his Facebook messages.

He doesn’t want to mix family matters and his life with Greta, so he updates his Facebook at night. Often, though, he comes back to bed and Greta wakes up a little while later and opens her own computer, which she keeps on the bedside table. Olli hasn’t brought the matter up, but he understands that she also doesn’t want to waste the time they have together on Facebook.

There are no new messages from the Blomrooses. They haven’t really been updating their profiles. No doubt they’re just waiting for Olli to see his task through to the end.

Olli thinks about Greta’s story, how she planned to shoot the Blomrooses and instead ended up making wishes with the dying Anne Blomroos. At least now he knows what gave the Blomrooses the idea to make him a part of their insane plan for atonement and send his family on a perpetual, involuntary world tour. It’s obvious that they were watching them both over Facebook, and probably by other means as well, and once he and Greta found each other they saw to it that Olli’s attachment to the slow continuum didn’t prevent Greta’s wish from coming true. You and Greta had a beautiful love story; we understand that now. It’s time your story had a beautiful ending.

But of course Olli can’t blame Greta for what’s happened, nor does he want to. How could she have known what the wish she spoke aloud would lead to?

New photos from various parts of the world continue to appear on Aino’s profile. She and the boy are doing well, except that they look exhausted.

The most recent update is from the end of September: Aino Suominen would like to go home with her son before the first snowfall . When Olli sees it he rubs his temples and wonders anxiously if she might know about the deadline the Blomrooses have set for him, or whether the post was written by her captors, as a reminder to him. He writes in the comments: Aino Honey, I’m working as hard as I can so you can be home for the winter. You are in my thoughts. See you soon!