Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

There’s space around him now.

He stops, wraps his aching arms around his bruised and bloody knees and sits naked in the dark, waiting for the light particles to begin to gather around him.

Eventually he sees something. He’s in some kind of chamber. Or cave.

In the darkness he looks at his hands, his legs, his stomach, his hairy chest, his cold-bitten penis, his sad, muddy testicles and time-battered skin, and is amazed to realize how old he is, how adult, when just a moment ago he was a smooth, slim young boy.

If he could go back to the branch of the passageway he came from maybe he could reach his childhood and stay there…

But he remembers what he has to do: find the girl in the pear-print dress, the woman pianist, and bring her back.

He’s tempted to forget the whole thing, but the task must be very important to him above the ground.

So he gets up and gropes his way forward—until astonishment stops him. There’s a tree growing from the ceiling, upside-down, with branches sagging under a weight of pears.

He reaches out and finds he can touch them. Then his eye falls on two grey boys sitting among the branches, staring at him with pitch-black eyes.

They look at each other for a long time.

Olli recognizes them. Leo and Riku Blomroos.

Then the boys smile and point at their heads. They both have a small, black hole in the middle of their forehead, and a peculiar, thick darkness is seeping out of the holes.

The lips are moving on the one who looks like Leo, and although there’s no sound, Olli understands what he’s saying.

We’re dead now.

When Olli turns to the ghost that looks like Riku, it nods grimly and points at something.

Look over there. Look familiar?

Farther away, Olli sees the remains of Aunt Anna’s boat. He’s been to this place before.

We can’t eat the pears, but you can have one. Take a bite. That’s what she’s doing.

That’s when Olli notices the naked, golden-haired woman sitting on the other side of the tree.

Greta.

She’s tasting pears, which are arranged around her, taking a bite of one and then another, as if she were deciding which one is best to eat.

Her face is filled with utter pleasure.

Olli becomes curious, picks a pear from a branch and warily takes a bite.

A soft flavour spreads through his mouth and his mind fills with living images that are like memories of things that have never happened. They are clear and enthrallingly cinematic and they show him his life as it could have been if he had only made brave, cinematic choices.

He has to see more, to finish the story. He takes another bite, and another.

When he’s eaten the first pear, he eats a second one, and a third. After that he takes just one or two bites from each fruit.

Every one shows him a different film version of his life. He bites a bitter pear that is a tragic story of survival, filled with illness and misfortune, and spits it out. The next one is sweet and filled with success, glory, riches. Almost all of them have larger-than-life love stories. Some of them are romantic comedies, others portentous melodramas. There are many different women that he’s met during his life, and others that he’s never heard or dreamt of.

He goes through hundreds of lives, forgetting each one as he tastes the next, smiling in the dark. The naked, golden-haired woman is eating pears nearby, but he doesn’t pay her any attention.

There are plenty of pears. The Blomroos brothers drop more for them. What kind of life is this? Good or bad? Sadness, fear, excitement or insane, intoxicating love?

Then, from out of the dark, a dog appears.

A cocker spaniel. It barks at him, growls and shows its teeth.

Timi, he says, testing the name.

The dog recognizes him and its tail wags joyfully, but it still approaches yapping and growling.

He realizes that the dog is looking at the bitten pear in his hand.

He throws the pear away, teeters and falls on his back. There’s something leathery beneath him, something fragile that crunches. Dead birds with delicate bones, he thinks, cringing. Or bats’ carcasses.

As the light particles gather around him, he sees that he was mistaken—he’s lying on umbrellas. There are umbrellas everywhere; the whole floor of the cave is covered with them.

He sits up and takes hold of one of them. It’s the starry-night umbrella that he lost at Sokos department store. It’s not the only one he recognizes—all the umbrellas he’s ever lost seem to be here.

He remembers now that he often saw the dog at the same time that he lost an umbrella.

He shakes his head, looks at Timi for a moment, then pushes him aside and goes back to the pear tree. There are still a lot of pears to taste, regardless of what that ghost dog thinks about it.

Riku and Leo each ply him with pears, their black eyes glittering, dark puffs of air coming out of the openings in their skulls.

Have a taste of this firm little one and tell me what you see!

No, take a bite of this one first. It’s got to be something amazing; look how juicy it is…

Olli chooses the pear Leo is offering. Timi comes back just as he takes a bite, and drops something at his feet.

Olli picks it up. It’s the dome umbrella from thirty years ago. His skin tingles.

Aunt Anna brought this umbrella home from France, and Olli and his girl in her pear-print dress kissed under it as they walked through the streets of Jyväskylä. Their very first kiss was under this umbrella, on the bridge over the Touru, on the first day of the summer they spent together.

It gleams in the dimness with the green light of distant summer.

The ghostly Blomroos brothers grimace and climb as high into the pear tree as they can, as far as the trunk that protrudes from the ceiling of the cave.

Olli and Greta look at the green dome of the umbrella, then at each other, and finally at the dog sitting under the tree with a look of contentment.

Then they look at each other again, and they recognize each other, and embrace.

HE’S CRAWLING.

He has what he came for, and now he’s crawling.

They’re both crawling, although it would be so nice to stop and forget themselves in the dark. His body hurts and his mind wants to give in to the M-particles, but the dog is following them, forcing them to keep moving.

The mermaids return and swim around them, sparkling and dancing, and the swirling dance grabs hold of him and spins him wildly. You’re not leaving, are you? Rest here awhile in our arms… We want so badly to kiss you all over… You can’t know how good we can be for you…

He smiles at them but then the dog chases them away. They recoil from the green umbrella he has in his mouth.

The darkness turns to light.

Olli’s battered, dazzled body crawls out into the bright cold, dragging Greta with it.

Gradually their minds and eyes adjust to the world above the ground. They stumble towards the house. It’s a cold morning. The ground is frozen but there’s no snow yet; the garden is still filled with autumn colours. They’re naked and filthy and covered in cuts, scrapes and gashes. They’re shaking uncontrollably. Their arms and legs jerk like clumsy marionettes; their bodies want to keep on crawling.

Olli thinks he hears something, and turns to look. At the place where they’ve come out of the ground stands a black and white cocker spaniel. It seems to have a green umbrella in its mouth. Olli rubs his eyes and looks again, and the dog is gone.

Everything that happened in the secret passage quickly fades and disappears. He knows he followed Greta into the passageway, and that they came back out together. All sorts of vague things linger at the edge of his consciousness. There’s a dog, for example, who has something to do with what happened down there.