For the month of February: paperwhites and daffodils, imported bulbs brought earlier, during happier times, in suitcases to be grown by the Mrs. Doctors indoors. Near the grate, away from the windows and any tiny flickering possibility of draft, the bulbs are stirring and will bloom there soon. What’s for the snack? Keksi in fancy shapes—a star, a crescent moon, a fish. Cheerful shapes. Because after the death of Dr. Peter, and the unfathomable disappearance of Nurse Frida, a silent confusion has descended.
Mrs. Minder has not left after all, she roams and carries a small hankie in the collar of her blouse. Touches it to her red nose, touches it to her eyes, then slips it under her collar next to her skin, secures it under a brassiere strap so that the limp damp thing rides on her shoulder, a crumpled little ghost appearing throughout the day. Takes a cookie. Takes a bite. Puts it back down on the communal dish.
Sunny’s English-speaking staff are watchful. They are careful to count the up-patients, tracking them as they stroll toward the trees, reluctant to escort them out of sight except in staff pairs. An evening curfew is set. This doesn’t stop the Finnish nurses, though, who are tough and sensible, and who go out as much as before, maybe more than before, walking the paths or skiing to the meadows, leaving their foreign counterparts indoors. They go out together into the landscape to find peace in the trees. To shake off the miasma and fill their lungs with the clear outside air.
And maybe they are right, maybe fresh air is an answer. And so there is a final ice picnic. Coffee from a thermos is served on the swimming platform and someone takes a photograph or two with hollow enthusiasm. These photographs are less nostalgic than the others in the Radiant Room album. It’s partly knowing the date that makes them all seem strained, tired, distorted. Pearl, for example, is smiling, but there are vertical dark creases in the wrong places—forehead, chin—that pucker and reveal her age, newly. And all the lipids available in jars cannot penetrate beyond a lifetime of drawing the face together in this direction in a secret frown like the closing of pages together. And she limps. She uses Julia’s cane, with its little brass pinecone handle. She says it is because her belly aches. She holds the cane behind her skirt when the camera comes out.
But mostly no, thank you, no one cared for souvenirs anymore. Too much charm and patience have been exhausted. A look caught over the shoulder is an unwelcome look. Eyes and buttons reflect too much snowlight, and gleaming overexposures wipe out the contours of the surfaces, making the backgrounds less substantial, revealing them as sets, lunar and stark.
You would think that everything must change, suddenly and cataclysmically, after such events. But only some things change, and most of those can be made to look normal. The night nurse gives her notice, she says that she is leaving because she is getting married. When she is pressed about the wedding plans, pressed about why the hurry, she blushes. I’m not pregnant! Finally she will admit that she does not plan to marry until spring. But still, she wants to go away soon, back to her family.
For the snack: little open-faced sandwiches of katkarapu.
Some cold comfort—though that is hardly the proper word for it—comes from resolving Julia’s death, anyway: there are the results from the postmortem. You wouldn’t say it out loud, but you could say that Julia brought the end on herself. She’d eaten, obviously, and she had lied about it. When and where? A nocturnal visit to the kitchen? Something hidden in a drawer? There hadn’t been any way to catch it, to stop it, not without knowing. You don’t want to hear this, of course, but this is what happened while she was still unconscious: a solid strip of ham two inches long, thrown up from her irritated stomach into the esophagus and then quickly inhaled back down. The two ends plugging each of the trachea’s two deep branching airways as neatly, as firmly, as fatally as if they had been carefully tamped in on purpose.
The fool… it had all been explained to her, first by the doctor and then again by Sunny. Had the warning been in English? It must have been, Sunny would only have given it in English. Julia must have understood at least once when she was told not to eat, she had to have understood.
Dr. Peter should have known this, yes? He ought to have known, because it was his responsibility to know everything. To make sure that all was well.
It doesn’t matter. It’s senseless. He couldn’t possibly have known. But it’s over, and Sunny adds the report to her files.
William Weber walks the perimeter without stepping inside the building. He never stays long. He doesn’t go to the doctor villas, and he doesn’t ask to speak with his wife. They have not spoken since the parting on the train platform. He walks the paths in a sealskin coat and good boots and speaks to no one, seemingly, except for quiet Kusti, maybe to avoid acknowledging a public sympathy. He is seen in the trees, his car is noted. Where does he go, after this? William will go to Pamela, of course. In what capacity? In the capacity of uncle to the children. Shame on you for asking. Of course he goes, and when he goes and does not return it seems that the population of Suvanto exists apart from the outside world once more, until the day in March, in maaliskuu, when, out on the ice in the lengthening afternoon, a sharp and compact ship is seen moving slowly between Suvanto and the far distant other shore. It moves with a cruising determination, unhurried and unconcerned, and it takes a moment for the incongruity to register; there have been no vessels on the water here since autumn and the ice has seemed, as it does whenever it is present, permanent and indefatigable.
Sunny stands in the center of two tracks made by an anonymous skier crossing the frozen bay. The ice is solid under her feet, but there will be increasingly limited opportunities now for trusting it, now that spring is tilting closer, and there is, at no very great distance, the icebreaker crumpling the surface and leaving thick bluish slabs piled on either side of its trajectory. For half an hour she stands as the ship passes effortlessly but no doubt with a calculated back and forward fall, borrowing from gravity to cut the way. She cannot see the open water left behind, cannot see beyond the piles of ice thrown up but it must be there, the water, and it must be dark and cold. And though there may be time yet for it to scab over and be sound again, the break has been made. The icebreaker, gray and brown but seemingly much darker and so finely detailed against the whiteness, passes out of sight.
At her back, the windows of Suvanto catch the sun in places. She is too far out to see if anyone stands at the windows, watching the ice and watching her. The possibility seems monstrous, deliberately concealing. And this, as much as anything, is the sudden end of her resolve. She gives the Head of Nursing the shortest notice acceptable under her contract, and will not be dissuaded.