Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

“Olli,” she says hesitantly, “do you think we’ll always love each other as much as we do now?”

Olli blows smoke at the window and tries not to think of what Karri said to him. Snowflakes are starting to fall in the garden.

Greta is waiting for an answer.

“Darling, I am sure that we will be happy for the rest of our lives,” he says, suddenly filled with certainty. “And when the moment of death finally comes, we’ll go together.”

Death is justly considered the high point of a cinematic life. It is a strong ending for any story that has been lived truly, and also serves as a dramatic element, if not the critical turning point, in the lives of those who know the dying person.

Depending on the context and point of view, death can be emotional and melodramatic, coolly laconic and expressionless, courageous, happy, symbolic, senseless, terrifying, sickening, ironic, tragic, even comic, but whatever the tone, it gives ultimate meaning to everything that has come before it. If at all possible, a cinematic person should pay particular attention to his or her death, in order to make it elegant and cinematically meaningful.

(See following page, death scenes: Max Schreck in Nosferatu ; Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front ; Helen Hayes in A Farewell to Arms ; James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces ; Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun ; Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal in Love Story .)

AS THEY LEAVE THE PUBLISHING HOUSE, Greta takes his hand and tugs him towards Harju Ridge.

“Come on! I want to climb the steps!” she whispers, and Olli follows with a smile.

They cross the street and start up the stone staircase. Frost covers the ground. The sparse snow starts to fall thicker, turning the hillsides white.

Greta glows.

“It’s winter, so we ought to go to the observation tower and drink hot cocoa with whipped cream on top. Oh, Olli, I’ve always hated the cold, but I love this snow! We’ve had two summers, but this will be our first winter. The best winter ever!”

She hangs on his arm, chattering happily.

Olli grows winded. His heart is light, but beating fast. His feet feel heavy.

Through the falling snow he sees a large, black car stop at the top of the steps. A door opens and two women and a child get out of the back seat. The first woman points at them. The other starts down the steps with the child.

“Maybe after this we can go have hot cocoa every Sunday,” Greta says. “We can do it every year after the first snow and stop when the snow is melted… What’s the matter?”

Olli has frozen. Greta lets out a laugh and teases him for being out of shape.

Aino and the boy have stopped a few steps above them. They’re both suntanned. Her face looks tired. The boy sees his father and smiles.

They stare at each other.

Greta tightens her grip on Olli’s arm.

He waits.

The other woman has started down the stairs. A pale blonde—the same woman Olli had a brief dialogue with at the film club. The one with the scooter. His feet stumble on the steps.

Anne Blomroos.

She’s dying, but she is still cinematically elegant. As she comes closer she smiles wearily, one arm hanging heavily at her side.

Aino looks at Greta unconcerned and says to Olli, “Well, we’re finally here. It was quite a trip. She’s brought us, but she seems disappointed. She said to tell you something about how you were supposed to follow a script and apparently you didn’t.”

“Daddy ate the pear and he forgot,” the child mumbles, his brow furrowed.

Olli turns cold.

Aino strokes the boy’s head. “Yes, that’s what the nice lady said,” she murmurs. “She said that the second part of some previous agreement wasn’t carried out and so that changes your agreement… But I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Whew! What a trip! We can talk about all of it later. Right now we just want to go straight home and have a shower. What do you say, Olli? Are you coming home for dinner, or do you still have work to do?”

Olli shrugs. He glances at Greta.

She looks back at him questioningly and squeezes his arm.

The falling snow fades the world around them to invisibility. Everything else is gone; all that’s left are the five of them and the massive Nero’s Steps, and even those are being covered little by little in a blanket of white.

Anne Blomroos is standing a few steps above. She raises both arms in front of her. Olli barely has time to think that the black thing she’s holding looks a bit like a pistol, when a bang closes up his ears.

His son falls face-down on the steps as if he’s been shoved, and tumbles head over heels to Olli’s feet.

“Oopsy-daisy,” Olli says.

The second bang makes Aino flinch, as if she’s just remembered that she left the stove on. She spreads her arms, bends over and throws herself at Olli’s feet, taking hold of his left shoe.

Olli looks down in surprise, first at Aino, then at his shoe. His ears are ringing. Anne’s voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere very far away.

“After the beautiful ending Karri was supposed to come and take me back into the secret passages,” Anne says. “It was my one and only wish in all this world. Oh, Olli. You should have known that you can’t take away a girl’s one and only wish.”

A third bang.

Greta sighs and falls on her side, still holding Olli’s hand. Her green eyes stare up at him, her pupils dilating, her mouth gulping for air.

Something red starts to mingle with the new-fallen snow on the stones.

Olli turns and looks at Anne.

She looks back at him, pistol raised, tears in her eyes. The snow falls thicker and thicker.

It is quite a cinematic moment.

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MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL