Pasi Jääskeläinen: Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

When he got back to the parish house, everyone had already left. The umbrella was locked inside. Well, he could pick it up tomorrow. Or maybe he should just buy another one. It wasn’t a very good one anyway.

Besides, as Maiju had once said, buying umbrellas was sort of a hobby of his. Some people, like Maiju, buy shoes. And Olli was constantly buying new and better umbrellas.

On Friday morning Book Tower Publishing had its all-staff meeting. Afterwards Olli started his lunch hour with an ibuprofen and a walk down Puistokatu.

The linden trees along Puistokatu were dark and bare with winter. Looking at them gave Olli a heavy feeling. The gritted snow crunched under his feet. The darkness tired him. It was hard to believe that these were the same trees that cast their heady warmth and green glow over the street all summer. Now the only green was on the advertising banners that read A Guide to the Cinematic Life .

The ad drew Olli’s thoughts to the book business. The staff had explained at the meeting that although the children’s books were selling steadily and getting good reviews and winning prizes, increasing expenses and growing competition meant that the house needed to improve its sales figures. They couldn’t leave the future of the business to what they made on Emma Bunny. Olli’s task as publisher was to shift their emphasis to the non-fiction division and acquire a best-seller, or better yet, several. Otherwise they would need to undertake an overhaul and think up some new initiatives.

After the meeting Vilho Torni, the founder and lead shareholder of the company, had put a hand on Olli’s shoulder and given him some fatherly guidance.

“Olli, you know better than I do that what sells nowadays are books in series for school-aged children. At the moment Book Tower doesn’t really have any. Harry Potter, that’s what the kids are eating up. When I was a kid I read boys’ adventure series, and my son read the Famous Five. He always made sure to get every new Famous Five book as soon as it came out and have it on his shelf. Did you read Enid Blyton’s books? No? A pity. You missed out. Unrealistic pulp quickly cranked out, but they’re the reason I founded Book Tower. I wanted to offer children more picnics and secret passages and wholesome adventure, real escapism. But maybe animals showing each other their genitals will have to do, if that’s what the people want…”

Olli knew the Famous Five books, of course. He just didn’t want to think about them.

OLLI FREQUENTED THREE different umbrella shops.

Two of his favourite shops were in the city centre, the third was halfway down Puistokatu.

He liked going to the shop on Puistokatu because it was the prettiest street in town. The name of the shop, Jyväskylä Umbrella, was painted on the glass door in small gilt letters. The shop space was more like a closet than a room and the narrow shopfront was hard to spot if you didn’t know what you were looking for. No more than three normal-sized customers could fit in the shop with the seller present “as long as everybody is careful with their hygiene and doesn’t mind being at close quarters”, as the shopkeeper put it.

The shopkeeper was a woman with golden hair and sad spaniel eyes. Her name was Maura. Her age was hard to guess; she was a confusing blend of fifteen and fifty.

Maura had a habit of telling her regular customers anecdotes that were sad and sometimes harsh. But they would turn comic when she came to the climax of the story, put on a radiant, fake smile and took a couple of dancing steps.

Olli had once said to her that she was a real charmer. She replied, “Thanks, Mr Suominen. Actually I was voted the favourite girl in the class when I was at school.”

“You must have been proud.”

“Then the teacher scolded the class and told them that they had voted wrong, that the prize shouldn’t go to me. She decided the little statue of the smiling girl should go to a kid named Kirsi who had no sense of humour but always sat in the front row with her hand in the air and got tens on every test.”

Olli stepped into Jyväskylä Umbrella. The clock ticked. Maura with the golden hair smiled from behind the counter, which was a metre and a half from the door. Her breath smelt like salmiakki liquorice. She said hello and asked if she could help him find anything. “Perhaps this reasonably priced, small, black one? They’re three for the price of two today. It won’t cost you too much money if you happen to lose it.”

Olli smiled and browsed through the merchandise hung on the walls. “I was thinking of something of a higher quality this time,” he said. “Something more special. An umbrella that can really protect you no matter what the weather. Maybe even an expensive one.”

The woman took out a thick catalogue, set it on the counter, and started flipping through it.

“This has some interesting selections that I’ve been thinking of giving a try in the shop. As you can see, they have aerodynamic umbrellas, flamenco umbrellas, a variety of art umbrellas, maps, ninjas, barometers. If you’re looking for an umbrella that’s good protection from the weather, would something like this interest you? It has to be ordered from abroad, though, and it can take months for delivery.”

She laid her finger on a dome umbrella.

Under the photo was a description: This umbrella is a classic Chantal Thomass design. A dome-shaped umbrella with a black pinstripe fabric, edged with a wide border of fine black net with a black ribbon trim, reminiscent of stocking tops and garters .

Olli stared at the photo, electrified. It was a style of umbrella quite different from what he was used to using, or seeing in the shops, but at the same time strangely familiar.

He tried to remember where he had seen one like it. In some movie? The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? Singin’ in the Rain?

He told her he wanted the Chantal Thomass design, baffled by his own excitement.

EVERY SUNDAY, if it wasn’t raining, the Suominen family would go for a walk. They would circle the Ridge, go to look at the anti-aircraft guns at the foot of the observation tower, and spend some time at the Mäki-Matti playground. The boy rode in the pram. Olli would push him up the hill and Aino would push him down the hill.

Once in a while, when Olli noticed that the light was just right, he would take pictures for the family photo album.

Sometimes Aino wanted to take the pictures, but Olli’s SLR camera was too complicated for her. Even when Olli adjusted the settings so that all she had to do was point and click, her pictures were bad. She didn’t have an eye for photography.

On their most recent walk, Olli had taken dozens of photos. He had brought the whole memory card in to be developed but only some of them ended up in the official family photo album.

When the pictures came back from the shop, Olli arranged them into two piles on the table in the living room. Successful photos were in the smaller pile, unsuccessful ones in the larger. Aino came in, picked a couple of photos out of the large pile and admired them.

Olli informed her that those were the photos he intended to throw out—the good photos were in the other stack.

Aino didn’t see any difference between the good photos and the bad photos. According to her, some of the so-called bad photos were better them many of the ones that Olli thought were the good ones.

Olli had patiently tried to explain what made a photo worthy of the album and what made for a bad photo—you had to be able to notice the lighting, the mood, the framing, the effect of the depth of field…

Aino had interrupted him and said that it was obvious he didn’t know the first thing about family photos. Then she had scooped up the larger pile of pictures and announced that she was going to start her own album.