17

ANNA WAS SITTING in a blue-and-white patrol car parked outside Bihar Chelkin’s house. It was the early hours of the morning and the sun was somewhere behind the rainclouds. She wanted to make sure that all the local residents – and the Chelkin family in particular – noticed her presence, and for that reason she didn’t switch off the motor or the lights. The street lights were refracted in small, glittering spectrums of colour in the raindrops on the windscreen. The car’s digital thermometer showed an outdoor temperature of 5°c.

Why do I have to live so far north, she found herself wondering as she glanced up once again at the lights in the apartment on the third floor.

Back home the evening would still be lazy and warm, the last vestiges of summer; the harvest would be at its peak, the maize ripe, and the farmers would still cut the hay at least another three times. The cold and wet weather wouldn’t come until some time in December. What on earth is keeping me here? And why do I still think of somewhere I haven’t lived for twenty years as ‘home’, a place where people lost their minds twenty years ago?

Just then, one of the lights in the Chelkins’ apartment was switched off and Anna woke from her daydreams. The lights in the stairwell flickered to life, and a moment later Bihar and Mehvan stepped out through the front door of the tall apartment block. Anna flicked on the car’s blue lights and slowly drove up next to them.

‘How’s things?’ Anna called to Bihar through the window.

‘Fine.’ It was Mehvan who replied.

‘I was asking Bihar, but I’m pleased to hear you’re doing well too, Mehvan. And you’re a good boy to look after your sister like this. How about you, Bihar?’

‘I’m okay,’ the girl mumbled faintly, staring at the pavement.

Mehvan spat, loud and provocative.

‘Bihar’s bus is going to be here soon – we’d better go,’ he said with a note of insolence.

‘Yes. Mustn’t be late for school,’ said Anna.

Once the investigation had been discontinued and nobody else had wanted to observe the family unofficially, Anna had decided to do this by herself. She showed up outside the Chelkins’ house in a patrol car whenever she got the opportunity, and every now and then slowly drove past Bihar and Mehvan’s schools at break time. The family had noticed her at once but hadn’t dared to say anything. Perhaps they thought they were still on a list of suspects, still under investigation.

Nonetheless, Bihar’s situation seemed to have calmed down. Bihar appeared contented and safe; she went to school regularly and in the evenings she sometimes met up with her Kurdish and Somali friends. But the sense of calm could simply have been the result of Anna’s presence. And what if the family found out that she was working alone, against direct orders to the contrary? She knew her job could be on the line, but she didn’t care. If she turned her back on Bihar and something happened to her, she would never forgive herself.

Anna drove to the police station, parked the car in the exhaust-fumed bay beneath the building and took the lift up to the fourth floor. She had already acquired a sense of familiarity for her office with its bare walls. Perhaps I should buy a plant or something, she mused as she booted up the computer and lifted a folder full of papers on to the table. She opened the venetian blinds; grey clouds still hung heavy in the sky.

Riikka’s case had been treading water. Jere’s DNA didn’t match the sperm found in Riikka’s body. His pump-action rifle had been found in a gun cabinet at Riikka’s parents’ summer cottage, its barrel polished and shining. It was impossible to establish when the rifle had last been fired. According to Jere, this was the previous winter when he had been out hunting hares, though Esko wondered why a lad with a passion for hunting would miss the start of the duck season. He was still convinced that Jere had shot Riikka. But how could he have simultaneously been hundreds of kilometres away in Sevettijärvi? Even Esko couldn’t explain away that little detail.

Anna had visited dozens of restaurants in town and discovered many lunch menus offering fish and pine nuts. None of the staff had seen Riikka on the day of the shooting. They had called through the members list of the local hunting association – with no luck. Many people had been out hunting along the shore near the running track, and several of them had been there on the night of the murder.

Two of the hunters had been located, and Anna and Rauno had visited and talked to them. Neither had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary that night, but one of them thought he remembered there being a third person out with the hunt. There had been plenty of birds, so their concentration was elsewhere. Naturally, the .12-calibre rifles belonging to both men had recently been fired. One had seven ducks and one goose hanging in the shed protected by mosquito netting, while the other’s catch was already in the freezer, neatly bagged and labelled: mallard breast fillets (20/8); pintail breast fillets (21/8); four teals (1/9).

Both men came across as perfectly normal and sensible; there wasn’t the slightest suggestion of mental illness or a guilty conscience and neither seemed to be hiding anything or lying. These men wouldn’t even have accidentally shot a shelduck, of that Anna was sure. Still, she didn’t want to give up on this line of investigation just yet. They had nothing else to go on.

There was a third person out there somewhere. A third hunter whose prey hadn’t flown overhead, its wings rushing in the wind; it had run towards him in a brand-new, scratchy tracksuit.

Had the killer known that it would be impossible to trace a bog-standard hunting rifle? Is that why he’d used this weapon? Or was the killer just as average and nondescript a hunter as the weapon and rounds he had used?

Or she, Anna corrected herself.

For all the manly accoutrements, the killer could just as easily be a woman. Lots of women hunt around here; they also serve as the president and the prime minister. They drink a lot, swear, smoke cigarettes and jump into bed with random acquaintances. They do what they please. They can enlist in the armed forces or go to the police academy. Anna cut her flow of thoughts right there. She had touched the rope that was keeping her in Finland, and that rope burned as though she had slid down it.

And what about Riikka’s mysterious new relationship? With the exception of Virve Sarlin, none of Riikka’s friends had seen or heard anything, and they had all now been interviewed, their Facebook connections examined, revealing nothing. That being said, apart from a few phone calls and the odd coffee, Riikka hadn’t had much to do with them all summer.

On the other hand, everybody seemed to know that Riikka had separated from Jere and was now living with Virve. Every time someone had tried to coax her out to a bar or to the seaside, she had said she just wanted to be alone, but even this hadn’t unduly worried anyone. Saara Heikkilä, heavily made-up and with peroxide-blonde hair, had explained to Anna in a nasal voice that Riikka’s relationship with her old friends had cooled somewhat once she started dating Jere, the boy that everybody wanted, and when they finally broke up nobody cared to hang out with her any more.

Virve was the only one who had remained a close friend.

Could Virve have made up her story about Riikka’s secretive behaviour and her new relationship? She claimed to have stayed at home after Riikka had gone out on her run, but there was nobody to corroborate this. Her neighbours were unable to say whether Riikka, Virve or anyone else had left the apartment that evening. The police had only Virve’s word for what happened on the night of the murder. Was there any way Virve could have done this?

Anna took a deep sigh and replaced the files and case reports in their folders. She had read them all dozens of times, wracking her brains to think how best to move the case forward.

She couldn’t think of any new lines of inquiry. Nobody could. They had reached a dead end. Autumn was well on its way and the evenings were drawing in.

More and more often Anna would leave her desk and go outside for a cigarette, though it didn’t perk her up at all; more and more often she was missing her evening runs.

After losing enthusiasm for running the marathon, Anna had started running regularly four times a week without any goal other than retaining her sanity. Her weekly programme consisted of two basic runs, one longer run and an interval session. She ran without giving it a second thought. It felt natural; she couldn’t live without it.

Now, for two weeks in a row, she had skipped the long run and the intervals. Even on her normal runs she felt increasingly as though her legs were made of lead.

But she didn’t want to worry about that now. She would make it up again, when it wasn’t raining so much, when she had more time.

Anna glanced at her watch. It was already afternoon. She could use the few hours of overtime that had built up over the last few weeks, go into town for a bite to eat, get home and go to sleep. Tomorrow was her only free weekday all autumn. It made the thought of going home early seem all the more attractive. The investigation had kept her at work until well into the evening several times, and getting to sleep had become a problem. Keeping an eye on Bihar was an added cause for concern. Anna planned to sleep in until late morning; perhaps then she would tidy the flat a little and go clothes-shopping in town. Sari dressed so stylishly, she had noticed, to her embarrassment. Anna always turned up in jeans and a hoodie. How easy life in her patrol uniform had been in that respect.

It wouldn’t be until the unit meeting next week that they would decide on any new lines of investigation. Until then, she would have to go over the same old case files, documents whose contents she already knew by heart. Anna hoped that she might be assigned a new case; how nice it would be to investigate bicycle thefts or something similar. New investigations, new cases – it sounded refreshing. But there would be no bicycle thefts for her, not here in the Violent Crimes Unit.

Sari pulled up slowly in front of her house. The garden was cluttered with small plastic buckets and spades, and the yellow swings dangled empty. They hadn’t planted anything this summer either; the lawn grew in isolated, tangled clumps and they had become used to the sight of piles of rubble in the garden. Maybe next year, once the children are a bit bigger. We could dig a small vegetable patch, the kids could plant things themselves, watch as they grow. Sari opened the front door and stepped into the hallway. The children’s clothes were hanging neatly on their hooks. The sound of laughter came from the kitchen and the scent of food wafted into the hallway. Thank God we can afford a nanny, Sari thought once again. What a luxury to come home after work and have food ready, the laundry done and the kids happily playing. Sari didn’t dare imagine what a trial it must be getting them ready for nursery.

‘Knock, knock,’ she said as she stepped into the kitchen.

Siiri and Tobias jumped from their chairs and came bounding into her arms. Sari hugged them both and felt the endless love flowing within her.

‘Right, back to the table. What wonderful food has Sanna made for us today?’

‘Macaloni!’ said Tobias.

‘Oh, macaroni, yummy!’ Sari corrected him and smiled at Sanna. ‘How’s your day been?’ she asked the young nanny they had found through an agency and who initially had caused Sari great concern with her dyed blue hair, her heavy make-up, the silver bead in her lower lip and the thin ring through her left eyebrow. Teemu had talked her into it. The girl had seemed smart and confident, and the children had taken to her straight away. Don’t judge a book by its cover, her dyed-in-the-wool middle-class engineer husband had convinced her, frowning on Sari’s prejudices. Because there had been no one else on offer, Sari had eventually consented – through gritted teeth.

And thank God she had.

Sanna had proved to be worth her weight in gold. As the eldest child in a large family, she was excellent with the kids and knew how to look after the house. She was always in a good mood, had the energy to play with the children, to keep them occupied for hours – and all this without being too lenient with them. Sari felt that her children’s behaviour had taken a radical change for the better since she’d gone back to work and Sanna had entered the house. What’s more, Sari didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it. On the contrary, she was enjoying it to the full.

‘Siiri was a bit sleepy in the morning, so we didn’t go outside for a while,’ Sanna explained as she stroked the girl’s fair, angelic locks. ‘I let them play in their pyjamas until midday. What did we play?’

‘Magic forest!’ they cried in unison.

This girl’s superhuman, Sari thought.

‘In the afternoon we went out to the garden. The strap on Tobias’s dungarees broke.’

‘Don’t matter,’ he stuttered.

‘No, it doesn’t matter – we’ll mend it,’ said Sari.

‘All in all, a good day.’

‘Great. Thanks so much, Sanna. You’re amazing.’

Sanna smiled contentedly.

‘What time shall I start tomorrow?’

‘Come for nine. Teemu’s going to work a bit later tomorrow. You can lie in too.’

‘Great. See you in the morning,’ said Sanna, waving to the children.

Sari sat down at the ready-laid table, scooped a plate of macaroni gratin for herself, poured some milk and looked at the clock: 3.30 p.m. Teemu would be back in an hour. She would have a relaxed evening at home with nothing in particular to do. Because of Teemu’s business trips they had cut back their hobbies to a bare minimum. They didn’t want to let hectic timetables spoil these rare chances to focus on the children and to spend time together as a family. It was a good solution; they enjoyed being at home. The children had no idea that things like stress and time constraints existed.

Her mobile made a gurgling sound. A text message. Teemu had changed the regular ringtone to a frog’s croak, and it took a moment for Sari to realise the noise was coming from her work phone.

U R so sexy. So sexy there. Yummy yummy.

Sari automatically peered through the window out into the street. There was no sign of movement. Then she went round the house, checking all the windows and looking out into the yard.

Were the swings moving? Had the wind picked up?

Have I got some kind of perverted stalker, she thought, and double-checked that Sanna had locked the door after her.

Rauno had remained at the station, again. He enjoyed the quiet that descended on the Violent Crimes Unit after six o’clock once the majority of the investigators had clocked off. The office doors were closed, nobody was running along the corridors, the photocopier wasn’t whirring, there were fewer lights on and there was no buzz of conversation. It was easier to concentrate, to get his thoughts in order. His work wasn’t being constantly interrupted and nobody disturbed him.

Rauno laid the pile of reports on his desk with a sigh and rubbed his exhausted eyes. Explanations and excuses; at least he could admit it to himself. He didn’t feel so passionately about this job that he wanted to spend every evening in his office. Far from it.

He didn’t want to go home. He knew that his absence was only making things worse, that when they were having their difficulties they should try and come closer to one another, try and grow together instead of withdrawing. This was one way of losing his last opportunity to make things right, of making Nina despise him more and more each day. Still, he refused to be the only guilty party.

He didn’t know where it had all gone wrong. He had tried and tried, but he’d always felt as though nothing was ever good enough. He was sick of it all.

If it hadn’t been for the girls, he would have walked out long ago.

Despite everything that had happened, sometimes Rauno felt as though he still loved Nina. Perhaps the feeling was just a habit. They’d been together for seven years. Surely that should be long enough, he thought, and felt a wave of shame and failure. His own parents were still together after 35 years.

Rauno flicked through the reports one last time. There were still plenty of names on the hunting association’s member list. This is pointless, he thought, as he decided to call another few names. The killer could be anyone and could live anywhere. He might as well get hold of a list from the neighbouring hunting association and go through them too. What about the Rotary Club? The Women’s Institute? Rauno sighed again. Perhaps the bulk of the work was yet to come.

He called five numbers. One didn’t answer, and he scored through the other four with a pencil after talking to them. All of them could prove they were somewhere else on the night of the murder – one was even in Thailand. Rauno believed them; what reason did he have not to? It would be impossible to look any more closely into their alibis. He had to trust his own sense of judgement. That’s why Rauno had been assigned this task. Apparently he was a good listener. Nina would have disagreed. It was strange how a person could give such a different impression of themselves at work. Which is the real me: the Rauno from home or the Rauno at work? Is it someone else entirely? Someone waiting inside him to develop into the man he really was?

It was too complicated.

It was almost eight o’clock. Rauno filed the reports neatly in their folders and switched off his computer. He would get home just in time to read the girls their bedtime story. At least he still enjoyed that. He didn’t want to jeopardise his relationship with his daughters. The fact that it was already beginning to happen was too painful to admit.

When the girls were in their beds and he was reading their story, Nina switched on the television and disappeared into a blue haze of TV entertainment until the early hours. Once the girls were asleep, Rauno went to bed; he was utterly exhausted. Nina spent the night on the sofa, yet again.

When night had given way to morning and the paperboys had finished their morning rounds, Rauno awoke to the sound of his telephone ringing. The call was from the station.

‘Do you remember when me and Áron found that body in the Tisza?’ asked Ákos out of the blue over dinner.

After a moment’s deliberation, Anna hadn’t gone into town to eat by herself but had gone to the supermarket, then home to cook Ákos’s favourite dish – bableves, bean soup – and invited her brother for dinner. She had walked to the other side of the suburb, where blocks of flats identical to her own reached up towards the sky. If I hadn’t spent my childhood here, I would never be able to find my way around, she pondered. Everything looks the same, apartment blocks like grotesque skyscrapers as far as the eye can see. The sound of children playing didn’t echo from inside the courtyards. The place seemed deserted.

As Ákos opened the door to his messy bedsit, the stench of dejected loneliness had hit her in the face and Anna had found it hard to breathe. My brother, she’d thought. This is my own brother, thrown away and forgotten.

I’ve done this to him, but this is my chance to fix things. I promise you that. I’ve been selfish, thinking only about my own success without sparing a thought for you. All she managed to say aloud was: Gyere enni. Ákos seemed excited at this surprise invitation and, as Anna had predicted, he was delighted with the bableves.

‘No, I don’t remember. Remind me,’ she answered.

They had never talked about Áron, their eldest brother who had died soon after the Croatian war broke out in Osijek and whose memory was beginning to fade. Áron had been only two years older than Ákos, and as children the boys were inseparable. Always together, always getting up to something.

‘We’d been drinking down at the taverna and started walking home in the early hours, both a bit tipsy. It was a beautiful morning; there was mist hanging above the river and it was warm and quiet. That’s why we thought we’d walk back along the shore, though it would take longer. There was a fisherman out on the river in his boat. Do you remember Béla Nagy, the grumpy old man?’

‘Yes, vaguely. Réka and I were out there swimming once, and we climbed into the boats along the shore and jumped from their bows back into the water. We hadn’t noticed Old Nagy sitting further up on the quayside watching to see when we’d touch his boat. He went crazy when we tried to climb inside his boat, ran all the way down to the shore, shouting until he was red in the face. Don’t you touch my boat! A short man with a big moustache.’

‘That’s the one. He was crazy. Anyway, he was already out fishing that morning, and when he saw us he started hollering at us to come and help him, there was something really heavy in his net. Áron was a good swimmer and a bit less drunk, so he swam up to the boat to have a look. A fene egye meg.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Tibor Rekecski. Their family lived quite close, in Kőrös. Do you remember? The guy that drowned after coming down that big slide outside Békavár. He went into the water feet first and hit his head on the rocks on the way down.’

‘A kurva életbe!’

‘His mates tried to dive down and find him; the fire brigade was called and everything, but the river’s so muddy and the current is too strong. They couldn’t find anything. He’d got caught up in Béla Nagy’s fishing net. Áron pulled him ashore. I called the police.’

‘I never heard about this.’

‘Nobody told you. You were too little.’

‘When did all this happen?’

‘In ’89.’

‘So you were 15?’

‘Yeah, and you were seven.’

‘And out drinking at the Taverna, Úr Isten! You were still kids; Áron was only 17.’

‘Nobody ever asked for ID,’ said Ákos and tried to avoid Anna’s eyes by flicking through the newspaper on the table.

When their brother had died and their mother had decided to try and save her other brother from a similar fate, what was left of the family packed a suitcase full of things and fled to Finland. They no longer talked about Áron. Nobody spoke about the conflict, though their mother followed the news carefully. They had stopped talking about their father years ago, so they already knew that it was best to keep quiet about difficult matters.

They had to try and protect their mother. And themselves.

Anna had learned the technique well, and she was perfectly happy not talking about Áron. As far as she was concerned there was no point going over painful things again and again. It was so much easier to let things go and forget about them. That’s another reason why the headmaster had been so concerned about her. You have to open up, Anna, let it all out. But Anna didn’t know what ‘it all’ was or how she was supposed to ‘let it out’. She had no words for it.

‘Have you ever thought of going back?’ asked Anna.

‘Only about a hundred times a day.’

‘Then why don’t you?’

‘Don’t want to.’

‘Mum would be pleased.’

‘I’d have to move in with her. Jesus, I couldn’t deal with that.’

‘You could rent your own place.’

‘And then what would I do?’

‘What do you do here? Live on the dole? You’re the worst example of what these swivel-eyed lunatics are always raving on about. They think we’re all like that.’

‘Someone’s got to prove them right.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve been away for so long. And there’s no work there either. Most of my friends have moved to Hungary.’

‘Then why don’t you go to Hungary?’

‘Jebiga, I’m not going there. Do you want to get rid of me? We’ve only just—’

‘Of course not.’

‘That’s not what it seems like.’

‘So, are you going to Skype Mum?’

‘What about you?’ Anna asked, puzzled.

‘I thought I’d just listen. I don’t want to talk to her.’

‘She’ll just start complaining, saying I should come home. Go on, call her. But don’t tell her I’m here.’

‘She’ll want me to tell her how you’re doing.’

‘Tell her everything’s fine.’

‘Hát igen.’

But their mother wasn’t at home. Anna hung up once the answering machine began playing her recorded message. Shame. She was convinced her brother would have wanted to talk to her, after all, if only he’d heard her voice.

‘The guys are out in town this evening, said they want to see you again after all these years. They were really excited when I told them you’d moved back to town. They’re waiting for you,’ said Ákos.

‘In Bar Amarillo.’

In addition to his punk friends, Ákos hung out with a gang of young men in their twenties who had escaped the disintegrating former Yugoslavia. For reasons that nobody talked about, they hadn’t gone to Sweden, like most people fleeing the conflict. They had found one another here in this suburb; they were wild and handsome, like reincarnations of her missing elder brother Áron, and they had thought of young Anna as an equal member of the gang, considered her something of a mascot, a protector. In this neighbourhood, Anna had never had to worry about anything. Not even the skinheads had dared to harass her. Of course, their mother didn’t like these boys any more than she liked the punks; to her mind, everything Ákos did was ruinous. And it was. Anna was the loner, the strange one, the one whose assimilation worried the professionals. Ákos, on the other hand, was always busy; he had friends and plenty to do. Apparently keeping the wrong company is worse than keeping no company at all, Anna thought.

It was through the Yugoslav boys that Anna had preserved a fragile connection to her former homeland. Only rarely did they meet other Hungarians; perhaps they were the only ones in the city. Anna was certain that, despite her protestations to the contrary, their mother had enjoyed the noise that so regularly filled their kitchen, though the language spoken wasn’t her own. Their mother had made the boys burek. An Albanian, a Serb, a Croatian and a Vojvodina Hungarian – it was like the most ludicrously patriotic propaganda about Yugoslav brotherhood from the Tito era. Anna sensed how they had clung to one another like shipwrecked people holding on to a drifting log, trying to find something familiar amongst all the mindlessness that had brought their childhoods to an end.

Anna’s Serbo-Croat was still in working order; it had been preserved just like the men’s friendship. Only Ivan, a Croat, had returned home. The infamous gang of immigrants had grown into a club of middle-aged men who smoked and drank a lot, who dwelled on the past too much, who complained about Finland, its football team in particular. All except Ákos now had families, temporary jobs, and their lives were stable after a fashion.

Anna hadn’t seen them in years.

A sense of nervous excitement tingled pleasantly in her stomach.

‘Zoran is ott van?’ she asked, trying to sound indifferent.

‘Of course, he’ll be first in line,’ Ákos laughed and gave his sister a teasing look.

‘Are you coming too?’

‘I’m not in the mood,’ said Ákos, but Anna saw how much he wanted to join them.

I spent a year in a preparatory class. At first they thought I should have been there longer – learning to read was really hard – but then they decided to move me to the normal first grade after only a year in preparatory, though I was actually the same age as the kids in second grade. They thought it would be best for me to start at the beginning, while it was still possible given my age – you can’t very well put someone who’s the age of a sixth-grader back in first grade even if they needed it. In that one year they would have to catch up on the whole of primary school and learn Finnish well enough to be able to survive in middle school, to finish their final exams, go to high school and end up studying medicine. Yeah right. As if it’s that simple. Nothing’s that simple, especially not the language. Without a language we’re nothing. Language is everything, wallahi. You can get by knowing a language on the surface, you can cope surprisingly well, but study is a different thing altogether, much more demanding than understanding or thinking or pretending you know what’s going on.

Right through primary school I was a year older than everyone in my class, but you don’t notice it on the outside, even though some time in the eighth grade I started to feel like a real adult and much older than everyone else. I learned to read in first grade and I picked up this language pretty quick too. I can read Kurdish too, but not as well. I’ve never read a novel in Kurdish. I read quite a lot in Finnish. There are no books in Kurdish in the library. The teachers kept saying how lucky I was that I was only six when we arrived. Apparently that’s the best age to arrive, six or seven, with regard to learning a language, many languages. Mehvan got left behind. He was so little. He lost too much of his own language, and that’s why he never learned the new one properly. Or maybe he just can’t spell: ‘Mehvan’s good at skaiting. Mehvan runs in the gardne.’

So there you have it; that was the official part about the system and the language, all neat and businesslike.

Of course, I could always tell what goes on behind the carefully constructed public façade, but I don’t want to disturb the hornets’ nest. I’ve decided I’m not going to let bitterness get the better of me. I don’t want to end up like Mum and Dad.

But I’ll tell you this much: sometimes I found shit in my shoes, quite literally. Wog. My jacket would disappear from the cloakroom. There was a clump of hair caught in a Finnish girl’s fist. Name-calling. Whore. Bruises. Nigger. My bag ripped, its contents strewn across the sports field. Cruel fucking laughter. Silent staring. I’d try and blend into the wall, so grey that nobody would notice me, try and do my homework well but keep my mouth shut about it, then people think you’re the perfect example of the well-integrated immigrant. And if you’ve had enough of putting up with all the shit and decide to step out from the wall, you’re sent to the special-needs class. Then teachers sit down at meetings and seminars and wonder why there are so damn many immigrant kids in remedial classes. As if they ended up there by themselves, as if nobody put them there in the first place.

And the endless chanting: nigger, nigger, nigger. I’ve heard it so many times it might as well be my name.

So there are a few examples for you. Thank God I got into high school. That’s where my life in Finland really started, my OWN life, that is. And that’s where it stopped again almost as quickly.