Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

PUBLISHER OLLI SUOMINEN spent the rainy days of autumn buying umbrellas and forgetting them all around Jyväskylä. He also accidentally joined a film club.

The club was screening twenty films that winter. In early September they showed François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim , which made an impression on Olli. After he saw it he amused himself by looking for women who reminded him of Jeanne Moreau—on the street, at his publishing house and at meetings of the parish council. In the meantime he lost umbrellas—three of them on the worst day.

In October Olli was in his office munching on an apple, fell asleep in the middle of a bite and dreamt until he was awakened by the sound of the telephone. It was a call about a book fair he was planning to attend. Outside the window he could dimly see the rain-drenched park around the old church and the people scurrying through it. After the phone call he ate the rest of the apple and tried to recapture his dream. All he could muster was a trace of melancholy, a feeling that had lingered in his mind over the past several mornings.

This mood came to a head that evening when he saw Clément’s Forbidden Games . An orphan girl and a farm boy befriend each other in wartime France and create a graveyard for animals. At the conclusion of the film they are separated. Olli tried to fight it, but in the end he let the tears come.

At home later that night, Olli’s wife, Aino Suominen, a schoolteacher and mother, wondered at his red eyes. Olli blamed it on the wind that had hit him as he came up Harju Ridge.

Joining the film club was a consequence of joining Facebook. Other consequences would follow. Later, at the point when things had gone terribly wrong, a memory popped into Olli’s mind:

He’s with his Grandpa Suominen, the notary, on the shore of Tuomiojärvi, throwing rocks into the lake. The wind is driving splashing waves over the open water towards the boats in the distance. There’s a shiver in the air, although it’s only July or August. The school holidays are dwindling and summer is curling up into a grey lump, like a spider Olli once accidentally killed in his father’s office.

Grandpa stares at the rings of ripples on the water. His tie is flapping in the wind. He’s been quiet all day. Now he smiles, points at the stones in the little boy Olli’s hand, and says: “There is no act so small that it can’t have larger consequences.”

Olli drops the stones and turns to look at his grandfather, and there the memory ends.

Olli ended up on Facebook the previous summer after receiving an email from a colleague in Berlin:

Check out my Facebook profile. I set up a Facebook profile with my pictures, videos and events and I want to add you as a friend so you can see it. First, you need to join Facebook! Once you join, you can also create your own profile. Thanks, Dieter.

In the publishing field one must be accessible, so Olli signed up for the service and spent half the workday fiddling with his profile.

He disregarded the vampire games, opinion polls, childish quizzes and virtual gardens. He had no interest in writing trivial messages on his acquaintances’ walls or sending them little pictures that were supposed to be some sort of gift. He would use Facebook to attend to business matters. As a phone book and communication tool for the Internet age it was excellent.

At the end of September Olli received a Facebook invitation from the film club. The message said that the club was meeting in the basement of a video store on Kauppakatu. He had met the man who ran the video store several times. The man had served for years as a pastor of a small district of the parish, then received an inheritance, left his job, quit the church and opened the video store.

He had told Olli that he’d lost his faith but found God again through classic movies.

Olli didn’t have any time for movies. But out of habit he marked the date and address on his calendar. Then, when the day arrived, he went to the place, thinking that it was some important meeting to do with the parish council.

The seats in the darkened room were filling up. Footsteps. Rustling. Then silence. Olli could hear the breathing of the other people in the room, and the drip of water from his umbrella on the floor. He realized his mistake and started to get up, but then a light spread over the screen and sound flooded the room.

La Dolce Vita was beginning.

On 14th February, Valentine’s Day, Olli got a new Facebook friend. The message said:

Greta added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Greta in order for you to be friends on Facebook.

The link led to a fuzzy profile photo.

Olli already had 324 Facebook friends, and a poor memory for names and faces. In addition to his activities in publishing and the parish council, he belonged to a number of committees and organizations. Theoretically, he knew hundreds, if not thousands of people, although many of them looked alike to him. He wasn’t sure if all the people he had accepted as friends were people he knew. So it was understandable that he didn’t recognize his first great love when she found him on the Internet.

He added Greta to his crowd of Facebook friends.

April was a busy month. Olli found himself doing a slapdash job with the children’s book projects. The guilt gave him indigestion, and it was worse during meetings.

The rest of the group pretended not to notice. Their Western mores of politeness demanded that they ignore everyday unlovely phenomena like pimples, rashes, natural bodily odours and the sounds associated with the digestive tract. At one point the rumbling got so loud that there was a pause in the talk and everyone turned to stare at him, then looked away, shocked at their own tactlessness, and Olli was mortified. He covered his face with his hand, pretending to massage his forehead.

He had been waking up at night with attacks of melancholy. He had been dozing off during the day. One day on his lunch hour he fell asleep at his desk. When he woke up he had a craving for pears. He got up, intending to go to the Mr Delicious fruit stand.

Then there was a knock on the door. It was Maiju Karikko, the house editor, with a stack of manuscripts in her hand. Olli sighed and lowered his bum back into his chair.

Maiju was a businesslike woman, bland and blonde and taller than Olli in her high heels, though Olli was rather tall, like all the men in his family. Maiju walked across the room, settled in the chair across from him, laid the papers on his desk and picked up the manuscript on top.

Olli looked at her hands. She wore her fingernails short, without nail polish. Her fingers were long and thin. Olli, on the other hand, had hands like shovels. “Hands like an educated lumberjack,” his mother had lamented, years ago. “The Creator must have run out of matching parts.”

But Olli liked his hands. He thought they had a delicate power. Aino had once thought so, too.

“The new Emma Bunny,” Maiju said. “Came in the mail.”

“That’s book number fifteen, isn’t it?” Olli said, touching his forehead. “Well, they have sold well since she won the Finlandia Junior Prize.”

Olli sank into his thoughts. Maiju mumbled something, then leant towards him and said, “ I have a fanny and you have a wee wee … What do you think?”

Olli started to cough.

Olli Suominen travelled extensively for his business and met women everywhere he went. Many of them offered themselves to him. But he didn’t feel a temptation to enter into any erotic adventures. In fact the thought of getting to know an unfamiliar body with all its idiosyncrasies and imperfections made him feel anxious. His sexual fantasies always focused on his wife’s body, which he had come to know inside and out, making the experience pleasantly straightforward.