Minä, sisareni
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Transcript of Minä, sisareni
Minä, sisareniby Katriina Ranne
A sample translation of parts of the novel
(published by Nemo, 2010)
Translation: Arttu Ahava
The translation has been funded by FILI
(Finnish Literature Exchange)
© Katriina Ranne 2013
Extracts from Part I
Tuuli
In the beginning was the River. The River was broad and deep, and
looked dark from the edge of Grandma’s pier, where Mother sat
dangling her legs in the water. And the spirit of God moved under the
face of the waters, and watched Mother’s toes. Her big toes were
large and shaped like potatoes, splashing water high into the air. And
God saw that they were good. So God chomped a piece off Mother’s
left big toe, and created Father from it.
Mother’s big toe was left stunted, but from the chomped piece
Mother was given a husband with whom to row; Father tilted the
boat so that Mother could bail out the last few drops of water. Mother
grabbed one oar and Father the other, and together they rowed to the
middle of the River. They let the current take them, falling asleep
side by side on the bottom of the boat. Their legs were so close that
their toes touched, and a drop of sweat from Father’s toe rolled onto
Mother’s toe. And God blew that drop of sweat like a glassblower
blows glass, and that drop became a daughter.
After God had blown me into Father and Mother’s lap, home
was no longer empty, for I crawled into every room. And Mother
said: “You are Tuuli, free to go wherever you like.” I, Tuuli, which
means wind, was free to choose the bedtime story and decide
whether I would go to Sunday School in the morning with Mother or
stay to sleep next to Father. When I was with Father, I could put on
my rain pants and jump in the puddles in the yard while Father read
the papers. But then I would climb on the bike behind Mother,
because I wanted more sheep for my Sunday School sheet, the one
with grass and a blue sky and Jesus in his freshly ironed robes. Jesus
carried a shepherd’s rod that could make water out of stone, in case
the sheep got thirsty. My sheet always had more snow white sheep
than anyone else: a whole meadow full of them. And I always took
them to the greenest of pastures. I also added some sheep from
Mother’s purse, when it lay on the bed after Sunday School – but
only because the last sheep left on the sticker sheet looked so very
lonely.
At the maternity clinic, I filled in the picture of a fuzzy sheep,
colouring it grey. And it was good. The lady at the clinic looked at it,
and said that my fine motor skills were rather undeveloped. Back
home, Father said that all it meant was that I was a little clumsy.
Mother snorted, and said that the important thing was that I was
colouring. I stopped moving my chalk, and looked at my colouring
book, where the colours ran over the lines, but Mother said that it did
not matter. It was my colouring book and I could do whatever
I wanted with it. So it was that I clutched the chalk tightly in my fist
and coloured with such passion that soon the whole sheet was full of
vibrant colours. Even the floor was stained red, so I pulled the carpet
over it. Nobody noticed.
Mother and Father often played with me, but they could not
understand all of my games. So it was that God decided that I needed
a better playmate. And God came to Claymaker Street to dance in the
rain. He took a drop of rain from the heavens onto his palm, and blew
a baby from it. I was the greater light that ruled the day, but the little
bundle snuffling in the crib was the lesser light that ruled the night,
with shrieks that pierced the darkness. It was hungry. I lay in bed
with my eyes open, and from between a crack in the door saw
a bright night light turn on in Mother’s and Father’s room the
moment the little pipsqueak started to cry.
Finally, the bundle pushed itself to its feet and started to walk,
leaning on the edge of the bookshelf in the living room, and learned
to say “Tuu-i”. God had sent me a sister; He had sent rain to the
world. For her name was Sade, which means rain. The rights of the
first-born were mine: I ate with fork and knife, while my little sister
ate with spoon, and only after I had finished did Sade climb into my
chair and eat my leftovers with shaky stabs of the fork.
When it was below freezing, Father would dress us in splash
suits and neckwarmers, letting Sade ride piggyback as he showed us
big dippers and great bears and little bears on the telescope. They had
taught us in Sunday School that God lived up in the sky and that
children were his gifts. But I was the only one who knew that when it
was cold you could look at children-to-be on the telescope. One
evening, I saw one of those future babies shoot down toward our
redbrick house. I said nothing, going to sleep happy. The next
morning Mother’s belly had grown. Every morning I listened to the
baby kick, singing lullabies to it with my mouth against Mother’s
belly-button.
Soon, Mother’s balls of yarn were packed up from the upper
bunk and stuffed into boxes under the bed. I moved from the bottom
bunk to the upper bunk, and Sade from the crib to the lower bunk.
A third sister came to the crib: Meri, which means the sea. She cried.
Meri had been sent from a star, but she was born into the world as
a tear. Mother cradled Meri in her arms, but she just cried: quietly,
but endlessly.
The next baby was sent down so quickly that I did not even
have time to look through the telescope the night she came. God
picked up a wrinkled leaf from our back yard, and from a dew drop
in the middle He created a fourth daughter, so that Meri would not be
sad anymore. The baby was baptised Usva, which means mist, but
Father called her Last-of-the-Litter. Mother did not like it when
I used that name, because she said that it was a word for pigs. Of
course, the baby did have pink skin and translucent hair. Otherwise
she was an excellent baby: never cried much, and always laughed
when you chucked her under the chin.
From then on, every second day Father would read the bedtime
story sitting on the lower bunk and every other day sitting on the
upper bunk. And so it was that I was no longer treated every night to
the story of the boy or got to sob at the part where the boy tells the
fish goodbye. But I did learn how to bribe Sade to wish for the same
story every time. And when that no longer worked and Sade no
longer wanted to hear stories about boys, I started to notice that by
letting the other person have her turn, you got many stories rather
than just one.
Sade
When Father was not yet my father and Mother was not yet my
mother, Father sat two rows behind Mother during the service, and
heard Mother sing. Mother’s voice quavered, but rose higher than the
others, so clear that it rang through the whole church and stirred the
hair of those sitting in the congregation. In order to keep their hair in
order, the clergy and some of the ladies wore hats. That Sunday,
when Father heard Mother sing for the first time, Mother’s voice
rung clearer than ever. During a mournful hymn it rose several
octaves higher than the choir, then slipped away from the lines of the
stave, and rose higher still, right up to the stained glass windows of
the church, finally piercing one of them. The other voices fell silent,
as they listened to the shards of glass tinkling onto the floor, seeing
the stained glass Virgin Mary with her neck severed and her head
gone. The others fell silent, but Mother’s voice still echoed in the
Church, spreading to the heavens through the broken window.
Mother rose from her pew and walked out, and Father, who
had never heard a voice like that and never wanted to hear anything
else, walked after her. From Turku Cathedral, Mother walked to the
bus station and took a coach for Pori. After a moment’s hesitation
Father, who had been shadowing her, got on the same coach. At Pori
Mother changed coaches and Father followed again, as they drove to
Noormarkku.
Mother disappeared into the yard of a farm house. Father
waited for a moment in the shelter of a big rock, before walking into
the yard. He saw the River as he went to greet Mother, who sat in the
yard swing with a glass of water in hand, and asked her whether he
was allowed to swim at their shore. “Of course,” Mother said. “Are
you thirsty, would you like some water?” Father did want water, and
he wanted Mother to swim with him. Mother dropped her towel onto
the pier. They swam in the River against the current until their arms
fell slack, and then floated back in the embrace of the River. They
raced each other, swimming with the current without worrying about
the way back, until one of them suddenly decided to pull on the
other’s legs, swearing that it was no big thing to swim up to the head
of the River. But the River had no head and no tail, it just went on
and on. Perhaps it turned into a loop, or perhaps they had without
noticing changed directions, because in the end they were again in
front of the pier, and the sun was shining on the shore shingles at
Grandma’s house and on the birches and hay on the opposite bank of
the river. Father and Mother swam to the opposite shore, picking
sweet-scented wild strawberries from among the hay and sliding
them onto stalks of meadow cat’s tails, swimming with stalks in
mouth to the pier and eating strawberries from the stalks and from
each others’ mouths.
The empty cat’s tail stalks fell into the shore water, taking root
in the river mud, and from the mud was born a child, who grew up
and crawled up a stalk to the surface. During the night she slithered
onto the pier, and over the grass to the house, crawling into Mother’s
belly. The River water was teeming with all sorts of living things, all
of them women, and four of them grabbed a stalk and climbed into
the world: first one, then two years later another one, then three years
later a third, and then after one year the last one. I am the second. But
every summer, after I crawl out of the water, I jump head first into
the muddy river, diving back to the beginning, and only rise back up
after I cannot tell which way is heaven and which way is bottom, and
the river water is hammering at my head.
Meri
My first real memory is suffused with a picture from a photo album.
I was after all only one year old, certainly too young to remember
that day without the photo and the stories told by my big sisters. But
that photo was not merely a photo; through it, I could jump into
flickers, a story woven from flickers. I jumped into a pair of tights,
pulled on the wrong way around; I jumped into our long, narrow hall.
My big sisters had made hurdles out of all the pillows in the house,
and there was laughter and silliness in the air. Vellamo was in a
gentle mood. Vellamo was Grandma’s friend, and better at cooking
semolina porridge than anyone else. She was the only one who was
allowed to take care of us with Father and Mother at the hospital, and
Grandma in the waiting room, pretending to knit a sock while she
waited for Father’s joyful shout. We were also headed there soon,
which was why a pair of quilted pants were being pulled over my
tights. Suddenly, we had cause for joy: Vellamo gave us permission
to wear whatever we wanted.
We three happy big sisters to-be spilled out from the back seat
of the Toyota to the yard of the hospital. In the snapshot, which
Father took, we were all sitting on Mother’s bed: Mother in the
middle with her fresh baby bundle, the rest of us around her in our
lace dreams. Our short sleeved, yellow ruffle dresses were stretched
over our waists, pulled over our green quilted pants. Mother was
laughing at lace dresses in January, but we smiled proudly. We were
the first coltsfoots of spring.
Later in spring, we no longer needed yellow clothes: the
ditches were full of yellow coltsfoot flowers, which filled all of the
bowls Mother had made and put in the kitchen, and after they were
full, yet more flowers were stuffed into jars of baby food. Every
spring, the land was yellow with new coltsfoots. In summer we
would weave garlands out of dandelions, and use dandelion stalks to
dye circles onto our shirts. With broadleaf plantain and dandelion tea
we cured all wounds and illnesses. Grandma had planted her own
tree for each of her granddaughters the day we were born. We
climbed to the tops of our fragile trees, on the lookout for new lands
to conquer. We toured the grounds of Grandma’s place, charting
distant forests and collecting medicinal plants, which we would carry
on the milk cart to our pharmacy by the cowshed. In the blink of
an eye, our medical cart became a wagon, as suddenly we were
orphaned wanderers, sent off to the barren wilderness.
Tuuli and Sade were my big sisters, who knew how the world
was made and where names came from. Usva and I were stars, but
Tuuli and Sade were the sun and moon. They told most of the stories,
which were long and meandering. Occasionally, these stories would
be interrupted for long stretches of time, and it was always part of
their charm whether they would ever be continued. Now and again,
Usva and I would create our own endings for these stories. And
anyone could always start a new one.
We knew how to tune into the frequency of each others’
imaginations: every story and every character dreamed up by one of
us was as real to all of us as Grandma’s brick house on the other side
of the field or the adults drinking coffee inside. We would run away
from potato picking, sprinting over the field and away from our
neighbor shaking his fist at us. We would run hand-in-hand, but at
the same time alone; we would run to the woods, the river, the mud,
the heavens. We ran hand in hand, but on our own two feet.
I stood with legs straight and toes bare, ignoring all danger.
I knew the land, and I was unshakable. That is what I remember
when I look at the photo of me standing behind the barn at
Grandma’s, blowing fluff away from a dandelion. My eyes are
slitted, confident, and my gaze is full of power. It is the kind of
power that countless photos have strived for, the subject gazing
defiantly at the camera, blowing cigarette smoke at the lens. And yet,
none of these cigarette photos have managed to reach even half of
that power. In the photo of me at the edge of the field, my short hair
is flying in the wind, as free as I have ever since wanted it to be. It is
at the same time a boy cut and a girl cut, both indifferent and capable
of moving in any direction. Its owner has the power of a dandelion-
blower.
Usva
Our family had so many children because Father wanted a son.
Mother and Father stopped trying only after their fourth failure. It
was clear that, lacking a boy, Meri would become their first born son.
In answer to an advert for a father/son camp, Father signed up with
Meri, apparently because she had short hair. They cancelled only
after Meri realised she would not be allowed to go to the sauna. The
others remember the father/son camp as just a plan, a joke, and none
of them remember that we four children were four attempts at a son.
Sade once admitted that she may have told me a made-up story like
that as a joke.
I have been dragged by stories this way and that ever since the
beginning. I have also been dragged everywhere by my sisters,
always the youngest and smallest. Going to the open air swimming
pool, I walked under the counter while my big sisters paid the lady
knitting behind the counter, and we used the extra money to buy
a big bag of candy. In our back yard, Tuuli put her hands under my
armpits and hoisted me high into the air, so that when Meri was
calling out the ditty “Fresh washed clean back, circle and line, who
poked that with their dirty nail”, I poked Sade between the shoulders
with my finger, and she never knew, because she was sure I could not
reach that far up. I was small, but unpredictable.
We played hide and seek in the back yard, baseball in the town
park, and field hockey on the street. I was there, either riding
piggyback or on the back of a bicycle. In winter I sat in the sled,
squeezing the handles with my thick mittens when the shoes of the
sled puller sprayed snow more violently than expected. I was a little
slower to find hiding places, so they fudged the rules for me a little.
At first I often had little idea what was going on, but always took part
– except for the time that my hiding place at Grandma’s was too
good. The others had already cycled home by the time I climbed out
of the hatch in the attic of the cowshed.
I particularly liked it in the paper waste shed at Circle Lane.
We all sat in our own cardboard boxes among the piles of paper,
while one of us held onto the end of a fishing line. The line slithered
out from between the boards of the shed to the bushes and from there
to the street. The other end of the line was tied to a nice wallet
stuffed with scraps of paper. We were entertained by many quick
stops, greedy grabbers and violent swearwords. All of us got a taste
of adrenaline, sitting there in the shed. But not everyone got to hold
the line – as the smallest, I was passed over.
Tuuli
Grandma had taken the ice cream out to thaw early that morning.
It was Christmas Eve, and we had just arrived at Grandma’s,
sung carols and decorated the Christmas tree that Father had brought
to Grandma’s living room the day before. Mother had said that this
year we would wait until we got home before eating Christmas
dinner, as Grandma was too old for all the fuss. So we were
expecting nothing when Grandma opened the fridge, and said:
“Come look, children. I took some ice cream out for you.”
Grandma took a flat dish from the refrigerator, with a slightly
soggy package of vanilla ice cream. Grandma’s hand trembled,
sending dribbles of ice cream onto the floor and onto Grandma’s
slipper. Father rushed to get a larger plate, while Mother glared at
Grandma, asking with the kind of voice you do not use with
Grandma: “When did you take it from the freezer? What were you
thinking?”
“This morning,” Grandma said. “I thought I’d take it out to thaw
for you.” Grandma’s hands shook a little.
Father took a plate and put it over the larger one so that the ice
cream no longer dripped. “The children will be happy to eat it
anyway,” Father said calmly, wiping drops of ice cream from the
floor. But he could do nothing about the smears on Grandma’s
slippers. We all got a big spoon, sitting there on the floor around the
stacked plates.
As I opened the top of the package, more ice cream sludge
spread over the plate, right up to the edges. It was yummy, like
sweet vanilla sauce, and we were allowed to eat all of the package in
one go with our big spoons. But I knew that this was serious
business, because only small children fail to realise that ice cream
must be eaten before it melts.
Mother sat by the kitchen table, staring through the hyacinths
and the window. There were frost ferns on the window, the kind that
Meri and Usva always gawked at with their fingers tracing the glass,
but Mother probably did not even see them. She now had a fifth child
to take care of.
Mother was the one who lifted the comb from the toilet after
Usva accidentally dropped it – Usva liked to brush her hair standing
on the toilet seat, because that was the only way she could reach to
see herself in the mirror. The comb slipped and Meri squealed,
bringing Mother to the toilet. Usva was on the floor, running
a second comb through her hair, while I and Meri stared aghast as
Mother calmly reached down into the toilet to pick up the wet comb.
Mother could do anything at all, but it sometimes took its toll.
Mother stared out of the window, and did not want any vanilla sauce
ice cream.
They said that Grandma had to move to an old people’s home,
because she could no longer remember how quickly ice cream
melted. At the old people’s home, she forgot other things. Almost
everything, in fact. Father said that Grandma had Parkinson’s and
perhaps something more. Mother’s voice grew quiet, as if she
regretted almost shouting at Grandma, and on Christmas Eve at that,
right after the Archbishop had declared the Peace of Christmas.
Grandma was supposed to move from the old people’s home to the
hospital, but she looked so happy. She had only grown younger, and
soon she would be a baby. So it was that she went to the hospital, to
wait for birth.
Grandma was not really Grandma anymore. She kept saying that
the cows needed taking care of, and that she lived in Hiitola, which
was lost to the Russians in the war. She had a daughter, but she
seemed to think that her grandchildren were little girls from the same
village. We still went to sing to her in the hospital, rather like you
sing to a baby, singing lullabies for someone who hardly understands
what you are saying. Lullabies make you sleep. When we sang,
Grandma usually closed her eyes, and one day Father said that she
had entered the final sleep.
It was not sad: Grandma had been sleepwalking for years, and
now she could finally sleep properly. We had grown older, while
Grandma had grown younger, becoming a baby and sleeping all the
time.
At the funeral, the priest said that Grandma had gone to heaven.
Was that not a happy thing? And yet, everyone seemed quiet and
sober, and I realised that they were not quite sure. That was why the
priest had to repeat it: she has gone to heaven. But the way he said it,
it sounded like it was something he had learned by heart. I realised
that no one was sure.
Sade and Meri cried a little, probably mostly because everyone
was so quiet and wearing black. I do not believe that my little sisters
even really remember what Grandma was like before she was already
completely different from when I was small and Grandma was really
herself.
For that matter, it was hard for me to remember all of it: I could
remember Grandma’s gentle voice, but not much of what she had
said before all she talked about were cows and Hiitola. What
I remembered were mostly things that Mother had told about
Grandma’s life when she was already in hospital. But I would always
remember that you had to eat your ice cream before it melted.
Sade
”No, let’s keep on floating for a second,” I answered every time
Mother wanted to return to the shore. Mother said that my lips had
turned bluer than the seawater, but agreed to float for just another
second.
The shore at Yyteri was so shallow that it took me and Mother
forever to wade to deep water. The waves were perfect right then. We
let them carry us, floating side by side. I floated with my eyes closed,
rocking onto the seafloor and back, drifting to distant shores; I fell
asleep lulled by a trance brought on by the wash of the waves. I was
certain I would wake on the shores of distant Brazil. My hands and
feet were so cold I could barely feel them, my fingers and toes equal
parts yellow and violet. My stomach churned. I wished that I could
suck in plankton like the fish and mermaids, so I would never have to
leave the waves.
Grandma had gone to heaven, and Mother liked to lie on the
waves with her eyes open, watching the heavens. In the end Mother
dragged me away and walked me to the blanket. She wrapped me in
a rough towel and rubbed me dry, pulling a hoodie over my head.
Mother held my chilled hands between her warm ones, while Tuuli
and Meri were my extra fingers, feeding me crisps tasting of salt and
oil, sprinkled with sand. Tuuli’s fingers were spiced with the added,
sweet flavour of the inflatable mattress. Usva sat on the blanket
playing with her blocks of wood, which could be arranged to form
a jigsaw puzzle in six different ways. She stuffed a half-eaten crisp
into my mouth, tasting of sunblock.
My mouth was full of the salt from the crisps and the sand and
the tastes of a day at the beach. As mother let me drink from
an orange carton of Brazil juice, I knew I was in heaven. It seemed so
strange that a few minutes ago I had been ready to give up my feet
and crisps for a fish tail and the ability to swim forever.
Meri’s swimsuit had been passed on first by Tuuli and then by
me. After many years of use, it was so sheer that the wearer’s nipples
showed through. Usva’s nipples were completely uncovered, because
she had forgotten her bikini top. There was nothing special about
Usva’s bare nipples, nothing that kept drawing your attention because
you could just see them. That was why we kept grinning at Meri’s
breasts, visible through her swimsuit. By turns, Mother called Meri
her merman or her mermaid, but it was true that Meri had started to
look more like a woman.
It did not matter much, in a family without boys: we could be
girls or tomboys or girlish boys or boyish girls without comment. We
had no idea what games were supposed to be boys’ games, smoothly
moving from war with inflatable mattresses to playing with pink
Barbie dolls and back as the mood would take us.
We only rarely got to go to Yyteri, and we did not go to the banks of
the River every day, but we did have a frog ditch in our back yard.
Sitting on the edge of the ditch, I found some clay. I cleaned the mud
and blades of grass from the lumps of clay I had dug up from the
ditch, shaping the clay into birds: mallards of different sizes,
swimming in a row.
My birds were delicate, with beautiful wings. Once the clay had
hardened, they won a place of honour on the windowsill of the
playhouse. Usva and Meri fought over who got to pick first, when
I told them they could have one each. The prettiest of my mallards
uncurled their necks, stretched their wings, shook the clay dust off
their feathers and took flight. I lay on my back by the ditch, watching
as my clay-grey birds turned into tiny dots in the sky, leaving me half
sad, half proud.
Tuuli did not believe in birds.
“Let’s make people instead.”
My hands were used to the shape of the mallards, so I hesitated
as I stretched the clay into long limbs and a straight back.
“Yes... Look. Make it more like a woman.”
In Tuuli’s fingers, the lump of clay instantly became a woman.
She grew hips, a belly, pert breasts and soft thighs. Tuuli had
breathed life, human life into the clay, and I wanted to as well. We
made skinny women and round women, full, expecting mothers and
delicate, budding girls. We moulded women who were embracing,
crazed with each others’ bodies, and women who demurely covered
themselves with their hands. Our Venus statues lined the bank of the
ditch, but in the end most of them were sacrificed to the frogs,
dropped into the ditch to dissolve into clay. A few were elevated to
the window of the playhouse, to watch over the back yard.
After the clay statues had hardened and started to crack, after I had
finished the bag of crisps and after Tuuli and I were done telling
about how the world was created, we had grown long legs. I could
reach the bough of the plum tree that protruded into our yard from
our neighbour’s property.
”That isn’t our tree,” Mother said, shaking her head, but
I replied that that branch had intruded into our yard. I plucked one
ripe plum for each, gathering them up in the hem of my shirt, and
brought them to the kitchen table, next to the jars of wild raspberries
and strawberries picked by Tuuli.
Mother, who had been drinking coffee at the head of the table,
called out “Mind the stone” just as I bit greedily into the plum, teeth
cracking on the middle.
“It’s not a stone, it’s a seed,” I replied. “I want to eat it so
a plum tree will grow in my tummy.”
Tuuli and Meri took a handful of strawberries, and so did I, even
though I had not swallowed the plum stone.
“Girls, too much of a sweet thing. Don’t eat it all,” Mother said
as Tuuli took a second handful of raspberries.
”But Vellamo said that we have to eat everything, or we won’t
grow up. Vellamo lets us eat anything,” Tuuli said.
“You’ll grow up soon enough anyway. All too soon,” Mother
said.
”And Vellamo lets Usva walk in her high heels up and down the
corridor,” Meri said.
“I want to know what it’s like, being grown up,” I said.
At that moment, Usva walked into the kitchen, wobbling oddly.
She had put pieces of wood from her jigsaw inside her socks, under
her heels – after all, Mother had no high heels to borrow. In answer
to our laughter, Usva gave us a broad grin.
Mother shook her head, walking outside to hang up the laundry.
We were hungry, so we ate the last of the berries.
An Extract from Part II
Sade
I could go to the swimming hall just for the jingling of the locker
keys, even without the water. I would push my arms in front and my
head under the surface, and listen to the jingling of keys from dozens
of fellow swimmers, fixed to their arms or legs by rubber bands.
When I drew my hands together and raised my nose above the
surface, the chimes went quiet. I loved to listen to that choir of keys,
but what was essential was that they also fell silent, obeying the
rhythm. Stroke, kick, slide. Up, down. Out, in. To the end of the pool,
and back. The swimming hall was a place of meditative breathing, of
rhythmic lovemaking: flood and ebb, waves washing in and sliding
past. I loved the chlorine smell of the swimming hall. I even loved
the exhaust of some of the new cars, because it smelled like the pool.
There was no swimming hall at Noormarkku. I had gone
swimming every morning ever since I moved to Pori as a high school
senior. However, I had still not figured out why the woman in the
blue dress would stand in the swimming pool every morning,
standing there in the shallow end of the first lane for at least half
an hour: silent, neither swimming nor moving.
Even though the woman never moved, my view of her changed
constantly. Every second stroke I would see her submerged half, with
broad waist and hips, pale stocky thighs and skinny calves, and every
other stroke I would see her upper half, with tightly bound dark hair
and beautiful Asian features, décolletage wrinkled with age. Even
though the parts of this picture changed in the blink of an eye, the
pieces could as well have belonged to two people: I never saw the
whole woman.
Why did the lady in blue just stand there? Perhaps her
meditation simply consisted of watching the swimmers. Perhaps
there was someone whose flexing muscles and shifting buttocks she
never tired of watching. But her gaze never revealed who it was.
I usually watched the lady in blue for a moment, before getting
so wrapped up in my swimming that I barely noticed people stopping
at the ends of the pool or the fingers of nearby swimmers brushing
me, a necessary by-product of narrow lanes and numerous swimmers
passing by. I started – this touch meant something. The back of
a man’s hand lightly but lingeringly brushed over my side, from thigh
to waist. It was not the kind of touch that happened by accident.
I stopped by the side of the lane, holding onto the rope so that
it sunk into the water, as I turned to look at the next lane. A man in
yellow trunks was swimming calmly by with breast strokes, not
glancing back. When we next passed, the man stayed on his own
lane, leaving me smiling at my fantasies. But the third time, it came
again: a long, soft brush over my thigh. I was sure it was no accident.
I decided to answer in kind. When his head next bobbed
nearby on the next lane and I thought his goggle-shrouded eyes were
fixed on me, I swam only with my legs and right hand for a moment,
stretching the bottom of my swimsuit with my left hand so that the
swimmer could almost see inside me. He swam past. As I was
adjusting my swimsuit, I felt something brush my big toe. A faint
touch, perhaps of his big toe – just a small signal. Everything was
clear. The next time, he would dive under the rope to my lane and ask
me for tea in the swimming hall canteen. Our teas would cool as we
chatted and we would fetch new cups, and only after our second teas
had cooled would he happen to ask my name and I his, and then he
would never again be just the swimmer in yellow trunks to me.
After swimming to the other end of the pool, he got out and
walked away to the showers without glancing back. Unnecessary
discretion, I thought. One smile would not have been too much,
would not have drawn attention. After all, no one walked from the
pool to the sauna without glancing back. Perhaps he wanted to make
clear how certain he was that I would follow. Where? The door of the
canteen was the safest bet. In the dressing room, I did a rush job with
the hair drier, quickly put on some mascara, and then went to the
table by the door of the canteen.
My tea did not cool even once. The canteen was empty, and
I could hear every noise the middle-aged woman leaning on the
counter made as she read her tabloid. None of the men passing by
looked like the swimmer in the yellow trunks. As I ordered a second
cup of tea, I played back my recollections from finish to start,
analysing my interpretation of the bypasser’s brushing caresses.
What emerged was a girl flashing her privates at a confused
swimmer, or perhaps a swimmer in yellow so focused on his last lap
that he had not even noticed the girl.
Perhaps there was no swimmer in yellow, or his three brushing
strokes. Perhaps it had been two different, random swimmers, two
different yellow speedos bought at a sale, the flickering of the light in
the water, a head dazzled by the beauty of rhythmically breathing in
and out and an imagination carried away by buttocks flexing, a story
spun from nothing by the rush of flexing pectorals. Perhaps even the
woman with the Asian features never glanced at my swimming body.
Perhaps there had been no woman with Asian features standing at the
end of the pool in the first place.
Extracts from Part III
Meri
I had legs that spread well. When I spread my legs and pressed my
chin to the floor, the yoga teacher would smile at me, and usually say
that I had a wonderfully open pelvis.
Sitting with my pencil skirt on the Tube, I stared at the men
sitting opposite me. Why did they sit with their legs spread? Women
sat with knees pressed together, or one leg resting on the other, but all
men sat with legs as wide as possible, as if they needed to prove that
they were men by the tightness at the crotch of their pants. Men
breathed and spoke forcefully and used more musky colognes than
women, yet they still claimed that it was women who wanted to be
noticed. Maybe women’s magazines taught people how to look
beautiful, but men’s magazines taught in their own uncomplicated
way how to draw gazes: spread your legs.
One day, when I was changing lines on the Tube at London
Bridge, a young man jostled my shoulder with his elbow as he
stepped through the doors at the last moment. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s
OK,” I answered, sitting down. I read a newspaper that had been left
on the bench. It had been left open to show a spread of messages
posted by people who had developed crushes on the Tube. “To the
beautiful girl who got on the Jubilee line train with me at London
Bridge, 6 pm Wednesday. I said: ‘Sorry’. You said ‘It’s OK.’ Let’s
meet.”
I looked around, but the man who had jostled my shoulder had
already gotten off at the previous station. A woman sitting next to me
was reading the same newspaper, face almost stuck to the pages. The
men sitting opposite stared into nothingness, legs splayed. I glanced
again at the woman reading the newspaper, and realised she was
crying.
The next day, I read every message in the newspaper, but no
one had written to the girl who got on the Tube at London Bridge.
I said “It’s OK,” but perhaps he was not listening. Perhaps he did not
even hear me when I said I was OK with him touching me.
I remembered how the woman sitting next to me had kept her
magazine pressed almost against her face. I wondered if she had been
squinting hard, looking for a message. But no one had written to her,
either.
Sade sometimes said that men might be afraid of me, because
there was an “etheric, delicate beauty” about me. And yet, it does not
work like that. Men are afraid of attics and the dark and war, just like
women, but they are not afraid of breaking others: the further a man
is from etheric and delicate, the more directly he approaches women,
no matter how beautiful they are. The man who had said “Sorry” to
me had either forgotten my words or been thinking of something else
the moment they left my mouth.
I was still wearing my yoga tights, so as I stared at the men
sitting opposite, inside seams of their pants proudly displayed,
I decided to try it. I spread my legs, as easily as at yoga class, as
easily as unrolling a yoga mat. My tights were stretched over my
skin, but no one stared. I watched the ruddy faces of the men sitting
across from me, wrinkles and creases unmasked by the harsh lights
of the Tube. It was hot, and their skin glistened. One man wore
a dress shirt, collar glued to his sweaty skin. I wondered whether
even the most handsome men would one day turn into the middle-
aged, tired commuters sitting across from me on the Tube, pouches
drooping under their eyes.
What if desire is not, after all, a tune that is so beautiful from
start to finish that tears drip onto the piano keys after eyes have
found notes and fingers keys, to bring the sheet music alive? What if
desire is like a hankie, a big white sheet covering your view before
a good sneeze, made of paper so it cannot be washed afterward.
A hankie left by accident in the pockets of pants bound for the
washing machine disintegrates into small, annoying fluff that is only
good for throwing in the bin. That would be awful. Eternal longing
can be a torment, but infinitely better than not wanting at all. Perhaps
only an imaginary man remains perfectly handsome after years of
lovemaking. But if the greatest is love, desire must be at least as
great as art.
The train wobbled, people swinging in time with its jerky
motions as if they were dancing. You could have made a music video
of it. On that video everyone would have the same empty gaze as the
men sitting with legs akimbo. Everyone would be dancing even if
they did not know it. I loved London, the Tube where no one stared
at a woman who had decided to spread her legs, London where you
never saw the same person twice on the Tube, London where –
against the odds – one man had written to the girl who said “It’s
OK”.
Sade
None of my sisters would believe that I had ever failed to ask
”What?” when I was uncertain of whether I had heard correctly. But
it did happen once, in the blue room at an indeterminate time
between Sunday and Monday.
We had gone to sleep, Johannes upstairs, I downstairs. That
night, I woke from a dream of Johannes. I was at the same time
disappointed that it had ended and glad to have woken up, able to
remember it. I lay on my back on the sofa bed, already musing on
Brazil, when suddenly I heard a small thump from the stairs.
I kept my eyes shut, even though I could hear Johannes’
creeping steps. I thought that if I pretended to sleep, he might come
to me.
Johannes did not come to bed, but he did sit on the edge. He
stroked my cheek with feather touches, whispering something that
sounded like my interrupted dream, although he spoke in a calm
tone. “I love you,” Johannes whispered so quietly that I could almost
have heard him wrong. But it was enough. I kept my eyes squeezed
shut and said nothing.
When the fire in Grandma’s old baking oven was lit, the whole
kitchen glowed with warmth. The baker had to wear light clothes:
Grandma and Vellamo always bustled around the kitchen in
sleeveless dresses and aprons. When I on Monday decided to bake
some Karelian pastries, I pulled on Tuuli’s old t-shirt.
Of course, some of my own shirts were still clean, and it is true
that I had noticed how sheer the shirt had become due to wear. But
I was hot, and Johannes was not even there. He was at the
kindergarten when I stirred the rice porridge, flattened the pastry
dough with the rolling pin, pinched the pastries into shape, placed the
pastries on the parchment paper and opened the oven door – one tin
out, another in.
But Johannes did come home, eating a big pile of pastries
dipped in melted butter. I sat at the table, watching him eat. Every
now and then Johannes would bend down to take something from the
plastic bag he had placed next to his chair. I always found it funny
how he refused to buy a bag or accept Father’s old bag when
I offered it to him. Of course, he had not bought the plastic bag
either, having found it in front of the shop. Johannes was a man of
quiet, but absolute principle.
“A plastic bag is just fine,” was what he would always say.
Johannes placed a book on the table: The Helper’s Shadow, by
Martti Lindqvist. “We don’t have an exam on this until December,
but I just wanted to crack it open already. Lindqvist was a fine
theologian and ethicist.”
I flipped through the book, but when Johannes turned on the
water for the dishes, I went to the blue room with my own book.
I read by the table, because my sheets were drying on the sofa,
spread half over the banister.
After lifting the tins on top of the oven, Johannes came to the
blue room. He caught me up in his arms and carried me to the sofa.
I did not protest, even though the sheets were still a little damp and
did not cover the whole sofa. Johannes stroked my cheek, and told
me that that day one of the teachers had accidentally fallen asleep
next to a child. He had been lying in bed to put the children to sleep,
stroking the cheek of the smallest girl. Johannes had sat on the other
edge of the bed, and suddenly noticed that the girl lying next to the
teacher had put her hand on the sleeping adult’s cheek, stroking it
with soft, careful touches.
I smiled, kissing Johannes’ cheek. He drew me to him. We
kissed, our clothed legs entwining. Johannes tasted of Karelian
pastries and butter.
That would have been it, had we not both fallen asleep. If only
I had fallen asleep, Johannes would have kissed my brow, and crept
upstairs. Had he fallen asleep, I would have covered him up with the
blanket draped over the back of the chair and watched him sleep. But
we both fell asleep, and when we woke we were in the twilight
boundary between sleep and waking. I kissed Johannes’ neck, and he
rolled on top of me. I wrapped my legs around him. Johannes had no
suspenders to keep his pants up.
I would not have unbuttoned my jeans, or his. On the other
hand, pulling a zipper did not feel like crossing a boundary; after all,
we had already made love with our jeans on.
I did not manage to get my socks or Tuuli’s T-shirt all the way
off, nor Johannes his jeans. Johannes’ penis was small and curved,
but it pierced me like a key. I squeezed it tightly inside me.
I came. He came. But where? Into love? To a story shared in
good times and in bad? Or just onto that sofa, onto the drying cotton
sheets, onto the faded fabric of the sofa cushions? Johannes came
partly inside me, but drained away. I hoped that he would come
again, and stay.
Johannes fell asleep immediately. Tuesday morning, he had
already left for the kindergarten by the time I woke up. That
evening, he came home late, sat at the kitchen table and sighed.
“I can’t get past the first page of this book,” he said, taking
The Helper’s Shadow from his plastic bag. “I tried to read the whole
bus trip, both going and coming, but always got stuck on this one
sentence in the middle of the first page. Listen. ‘No man is an
island’. The moment I read that, I heard Lauri Otonkoski’s poem in
my head: All men are islands. All men are a wanting ship’s cabin on
the open sea. All men are the cockiness of an apple. All men are an
abstract figment. All men are a millstone. All men are islands.”
I had raised my little finger into the air, even though Johannes
did not know about the signal we sisters used so the others knew we
had something to say.
“All men are the eighth evening of the week, are alone, are in
the middle of things. All men are dust on the crest of a coin,
woodworms on the anvil of god’s idea, nostalgia in a train yard in
the wee hours,” I continued. “It’s a lovely poem. Me and Meri have
read it a million times in the rowboat. Meri loves to hear the same
part over and over again: All men have been frightened once, have
been left behind, are a milk can on the edge of the field, the silence in
the laundry basket. Even though I don’t really think men are islands,
but rowers on a boat to an island with those they like so much that
they want to be with them for a while in a world without anyone but
them and the people they love. The island is an illusion of Paradise,
of the world’s beginning.”
I looked at Johannes, expecting him to recite more verses.
“I don’t really know how it is,” Johannes said. Then he sighed
again, and put the book back in the plastic bag.
The next night, I did not wake to his touches or hear those
three words. But I slept soundly, so perhaps he crept by my bed to
say those words anyway.
How can something that you have expected so long be over in an
instant? How was it that I barely had time to notice anything except
the change in Johannes’ breathing and the birth mark on his lower
abdomen?
Johannes slept upstairs, while I lay in his scent on the sofa in
the blue room, and wanted to know so much. What did the skin of his
belly feel like when you stroked it? What did his penis look, and taste
like? Had Johannes caught a glimpse of the shadow of God when
everything went dark for a moment? Were there moles on his back?
Were his shoulder blades the small wings that they had felt like
through his shirt? What did he like? How would he touch my breasts,
and how would he look at them if he saw them without the cover of
my T-shirt? I had always been a girl who wanted to know, and even if
so far the knowing part had been key, right now wanting was at least
as important. I wanted to know everything about Johannes, his skin
and his soul. I wanted to know him.
With Johannes sleeping upstairs, I played back in my mind,
over and over again, how we had fallen asleep on the sofa in the blue
room, and how we had woken up. It was all based on that one night.
I did not dream of complicated positions, roleplaying, toys, swings,
aeroplane toilets, balconies, not even the kitchen table or Grandma’s
kitchen rug. I wanted to put that one song on a loop, listening to it
over and over again. I wanted that one night to bloom into a thousand
and one nights.
Perhaps a boundary had after all been breached along with the
zippers. As we sat by the kitchen table next evening, Johannes looked
troubled.
“How has the reading been going?” I asked.
“It hasn’t,” he sighed, nudging the plastic bag lying next to the
table with his foot. “I can’t get over that one sentence.”
I wondered whether it was the sentence he had uttered by the
bed in the blue room.
I decided to ask him directly.
Johannes flushed – with rage:
“Every sixth second, a child somewhere in the world dies of
hunger, someone dies of cigarettes and someone else is raped. And
what do we do? We think of sex every damn sixth second! How can
we close our eyes and think of sex while someone somewhere is
being raped and two people are dying!”
Johannes said “damn” in a muffled voice, but he said it
anyway, so I knew this was serious. Johannes never swore. He had
only said “blast” a few times. Even though “damn” was not a proper
swearword, it was for Johannes; a little like Father saying something
else than “oh, dang” or “oh, poot”. Though Father never did say
anything worse than that.
Now it was my turn to feel troubled, waiting for a moment
before replying.
“I don’t believe in those figures, but in any case... One second
out of six still leaves five for everything else. And perhaps we won’t
have the strength to work for good things if there’s nothing to
balance it out?”
Johannes shook his head. “Sade, you’re living in Never-
Neverland. People in real life don’t strive for good things. Or perhaps
they do strive with the sweat of their brows, but nothing comes of it.”
Johannes said he needed some distance to clear his head. He
would move in with his parents for a while. He was not sure if he
wanted to go to Brazil.
Meri
Life consists of donning stockings. When we are young, we like to
think that the adult life waiting for us will be full of men with strong
hands ripping our stockings down from waist to thighs, thighs to
knees and then ankles, perhaps pulling them off our feet. Or perhaps
leaving them on, like socks flapping on the ground, as he bares our
ankles and glues his tongue to them like to a frozen flagpole. We
never think of the moments when we shall have to pull those
stockings back up again. We do not imagine the moments when we
check whether our stockings have snagged, pulling them more
carefully back on. When we are young, it fails to enter our minds that
these moments not only exist, but that they are essential.
Even when we have a man to rip off our stockings, it is we
who must pull them on every morning, and that takes far longer than
the heated moment in which they are ripped off our legs. That is why
it is important to savour every second, every thousandth of a second
where you pull nylon over the smooth skin of your legs, feeling the
roundness of your calves, the shapeliness of your thighs. The
moments when a man passionately tears the stockings off our legs
are, even with some luck, only passing flashes in a life that mostly
consists of donning stockings.
It is only our stockings that caress the whole skin of our legs
from dawn to dusk. No man will curl his arm around our waists with
every step, softly but firmly. That is why we need form-fitting coats
that clasp us around the waist like a man’s arm. Our weekday
evenings need tea ceremonies with green jasmine tea and macarons,
tokens of our love for ourselves.
Walking the streets of London in my form-fitting coat, pencil
skirt and fine stockings, I watched teenage girls dressed in tight
jeans, with thighs like the arms of middle-aged women. An old
woman who is slender is almost always bony, whereas the young are
like blades of grass, tall and thin but soft, as if they had no bones.
Perhaps our bones grow as we age, because we work too much and
laugh too little.
It was only with my sisters that I could laugh and laugh
without end. I laughed the most with Sade. When I was alone,
I sometimes thought that growing up was having your innocence and
your memories of real intimacy gradually stripped away, but listening
to Sade, I realised that whatever happened, she would always have it
all. Sade would make long phone calls, telling me about Johannes
with an overflowing passion, stopping every now and then to ask
about me and to apologise for how she just kept talking, even though
I asked her to tell more. Perhaps Sade was filled with a flood of
stories because it had been a floody spring when she was born.
Mother always smiled when Father mentioned the floods, even
though it was one of many springs when the river overflowed. I was
born in January, among the snow and ice.
Nevertheless, in Sade’s company I was more talkative than
usual. When we had not seen each other for a long time and at last
met at Claymaker Street or even talked on the phone, my words came
with such terrible speed and force that it almost hurt.
I sometimes wondered whether we sisters would have become
friends had we not been sisters, just girls from the same village. We
would have certainly played hide and seek with each other, but
would we have put up with all the arguments and the feeling that the
other person is digging at our opinions or choices just because she
wants to feel different? Or would that not have happened either, had
we not been sisters? Perhaps it was a good thing that we had wanted
to have our own way. Perhaps it had brought us to balance, like with
the ground hockey bag: Sade pulling the left handle her way and I the
right handle, the heavy bag would swing lightly between us, without
banging into either of our legs. Carrying that bag with your sisters,
you also learned to walk far from your sisters.
I think it was mostly belief that separated us: belief in
ourselves and in everything else. I believed that everything was
possible, because I was willing to do the work. Sade believed that
everything was possible, because God had made us to be wondrous
and without bounds. Tuuli and Usva of course thought that they were
realists. But I think they did not even want to know what they were
capable of, because the most frightening thing is to realise that you
can do anything and everything.
Only a year separated me and Usva, yet it was precisely Usva
who always rubbed me the wrong way. Of course, I could understand
how difficult it was to be the youngest child. When we resembled
each other, everyone always thought the younger was aping the older.
Of course, we were in the end similar because we were sisters, and
therefore the question of choosing your friends was impossible. One
of the reasons why sisterhood is such a powerful thing is that you
cannot choose your sisters. And at the same time you do, by listening
to their stories and sharing your own with them. Because you cannot
start out by choosing your sisters, you have to choose them later on,
again and again.