Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

“Her records,” he explains to Olli, tapping the folder. “I collected them from every place she’s ever been treated the moment I learnt she was to be my patient.”

“Ah,” Olli says.

When the doctor finishes his examination he asks if he can speak with Greta alone. Olli goes outside the door. Doctor and patient speak in low voices. Then the doctor comes out of the room. “She asked me to speak with you,” he says. “Let’s go downstairs.”

He turns and says to Greta, “Miss Kara, you should avoid any stress and get some rest until you feel better. Goodbye, then. I’ll come again in a couple of days—or sooner, if the need arises.”

Olli and the doctor sit at the table across from each other. Olli has poured them coffee and put some Domino biscuits on a little tray.

Neither of them is drinking or eating. Olli wishes Dr Oksanen would at least take one biscuit. It would be a good sign.

“Mr Suominen,” the doctor begins, his brow furrowed. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but the fact is that Miss Kara’s condition doesn’t look good.”

“What’s the problem?” Olli asks, his hands cold as stone.

“Her nervous system,” the doctor says, then pauses dramatically. “Of course, I can’t make a definitive diagnosis until I see the laboratory results, but based on today’s examination and her medical history, I can state with a fair certainty that she has a disorder of the central nervous system of a type that causes demyelination, the destruction of the myelin sheath surrounding the nerve axon. That is the reason for her difficulty in playing the piano, and it’s probably also the cause of the diminishment in her level of consciousness which she mentioned to me as well. Basically, her central nervous system is suffering from intermittent interruptions. They’re a bit like power outages in a house where mice have gnawed at the wiring, if you’ll permit a clumsy analogy. Sometimes everything works smoothly, perhaps even for a long while, but little by little her nervous system will cease functioning and her lungs, heart and other organs will be paralysed, after which death will follow. It’s not multiple sclerosis, which is more well known, but a rare and aggressive variant with a progress that is difficult to predict. I’m very sorry.”

Olli doesn’t feel anything. His body is like a mechanical doll that someone inside him is controlling with strings.

“How can it be treated?” he asks, noting the practised tone of sensibleness in his voice. “Surely there’s a treatment for it?”

“Once the lab results come back, I’ll send a nurse over with pre-filled syringes. She can advise you then. Injections of glatiramer have been used to slow the progress of symptoms, and they may be effective for Miss Kara. Unfortunately I can’t predict with any certainty.”

The doctor gets up, pats Olli on the shoulder, picks up his bag and leaves.

The next day a nurse comes over with syringes and teaches Olli to give the injections to Greta, who, luckily, is feeling better again. As he gives her a shot, she looks at him trustingly, like a child. They feel somehow closer than they ever have before. When the nurse leaves, they don’t say a word, just take off their clothes and make love.

Greta wraps her legs around him and squeezes so tight that it’s hard for him to move.

Her green eyes study him gravely while her body writhes in pleasure.

Not until the very end do her eyes close, and at that moment a sob escapes her lips. “ Mon amour, la petite mort …”

AS OCTOBER ADVANCES, the shadows darken in the Wivi Lönn house, but Olli and Greta continue their lives as before, except that they have sex more often and more fiercely than before, not really making love but fucking. They smoke so feverishly that they nearly choke themselves with coughing fits, filling the house with smoke, reading Christina Rossetti over copious quantities of wine, devouring chocolate with no regard to calories and taking long night-time walks.

They walk through the dark side streets of Jyväskylä, sometimes silent, sometimes fervently debating art and politics.

Greta believes in socialism with a human face, while Olli thinks the whole idea is an oxymoron, and proceeds from the assumption that only free markets can ensure people an opportunity to live life as they wish. And when Greta tells him she bought a Jack Vettriano painting for a large sum and hung it on her wall in Paris, Olli says she succumbed to tasteless trash and begins to fervently defend Gustav Klimt, whose work Greta finds coarse and artificial, merely decorative. When Olli praises Ellen Thesleff, Greta says that for some reason she can’t stand Thesleff’s work, even though the Sleeping Girl hung on her bedroom wall in the Tourula days.

They end up arguing, and then, when their talk comes to a sudden stop, they look at each other and Greta gets an impish gleam in her eye. They’ve just come to an arched courtyard entrance, and Greta pulls Olli under it, takes off her underwear, pulls up her skirt, and announces that she wants him inside her, right now.

Olli smiles in confusion, but he’s ready to obey her until a police car cruises past and stops.

They laugh and head back to Hämeenkatu hand in hand. They enact Greta’s wish in the colonnade at the Lönn house, oblivious to the cold wind.

Greta is playing Chopin every day again, every piece like it was her last.

Olli is amazed at how much he can enjoy Greta’s playing in spite of her diagnosis. It’s probably the influence of the M-particles in the house—everything seems slightly dreamy, and thus not so wounding.

“You haven’t asked me that question in a while,” Greta says once, without a pause in the music, shooting Olli a smile.

Olli doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want Greta to see his tears. They haven’t really talked about her nerve disorder because they don’t want to cede to its power and spoil the moments they have together by talking about it the way you talk about important, life-changing things. They recognize its existence only at the moments when Olli gives Greta her injection of glatiramer, and even then they always make love immediately after the shot, as if to wipe it away from her bodily memory.

When they go upstairs to bed that evening, Greta takes out A Guide to the Cinematic Life and reads aloud from the chapter on cinematic death and renunciation:

Everything that is truly awful becomes, by its very inevitability, profoundly beautiful. We have only to learn to embrace the deep shadows of life along with its bright moments, for otherwise we won’t have the courage to really live. You don’t have to like the pain. It is enough to love it.

Afterwards, they cling to each other.

That night Olli awakes and realizes he’s alone in bed.

It’s raining.

He hears Chopin from downstairs. Sonata no. 2. He clasps his hands behind his head and listens. Forces himself to comprehend that he is listening to the music of his dying lover.

His chest begins to heave as if gripped by an earthquake. He lets the tears come, covers his face and allows himself to grieve for the first time in months. He’s crying for Greta, but also for his own suffering, and that of others. Especially the others.

At the same time, no doubt due to the M-particles, he senses the beauty of his grief, allows himself to enjoy it, like a cigarette or a glass of wine or the music he’s listening to at that moment. The feeling comes from deep inside, from the same place as music and literature and all art, filling every corner of his consciousness the way the organ music filled Notre-Dame as he sat in the last pew and listened.

It’s just as Greta says in Cinematic Life —sorrow, when experienced properly, is an even more beautiful and cinematic emotion than love, though difficult to endure.