“WE FINNS, WE ARE the most depressed people on earth,” said the man in the airplane seat next to me. “We are more depressed than the Scandinavians. We are more depressed than the Slavs. That is because Slav and Scandinavian blood runs in our veins together, so the depression is doubled.”
“Are you depressed about anything in particular?” I inquired. He was a mere sketch of a man, pale eyes, pale hair, outbrillianced by the cobalt blue of his soccer T-shirt.
“No,” he sighed, and looked even more morose. “Just depressed.”
“Well,” said Luisa Montiflores. She was on my other side on the FinnAir flight from London to Helsinki that was taking us to a writers’ conference. “You can’t be more depressed than the Uruguayans. We are famous all over South America for our melancholia.”
“But you at least have a reason in Uruguay,” the Finn argued. “Your politics, your economy, everything like that. While for us, so stable and well-off, it is the human condition in the morning when we wake up that hurts us.”
“It’s not just a hangover?” I asked, for I recalled that the Finns were serious drinkers. The pale man ignored me. “We’re depressed just to wake up and still be alive!” he said.
I got up to use the toilet, and when I returned Luisa had taken my middle seat and the two of them were relating stories of pathology and paralysis, phobia and frenzy, with voluptuous glee. Luisa turned to me only once during the rest of the flight. “But why have I not come to Finland before?” she demanded. “We are made for each other, me and the Finns!”
I’d once had a similar thought years ago, when I spent a weekend in Finland with a young translator I’d met at a conference in St. Petersburg. Helga, who had an arrestingly unpronounceable last name, had invited me back to her family’s cabin somewhere north of Helsinki. We ate grilled reindeer steak and potatoes with sour cream, washed down with vodka, and spent most of our time in the wood-fired sauna. Helga could stay in forever, but I was always having to dash out into the snowy drifts. Occasionally she ran out too; she had the longest legs I’d ever seen, and a jubilant laugh as she leapt into the snow. For a while afterward we’d written, but then I’d lost contact with her until a printed wedding announcement with no personal message came in the mail. That must have been eight years ago. I’d heard nothing of her until Luisa showed me the conference brochure. Helga was one of the main organizers.
It was long-legged Helga who was at the gate to meet us, tall as ever and even more beautiful, though far more subdued. She held out her hand to me, but her cool blue eyes betrayed nothing, even though she said formally, “Pleasant to see you again, Cassandra.”
“You already know each other?” asked Luisa.
“Another conference years ago,” murmured Helga. “In what was then Leningrad. We’ll have to catch up sometime. But now we have to hurry. We’ll be getting to your hotel just in time to catch a bus with the other participants for the place where your conference is being held. It’s by a lovely lake north of the city.”
This prestigious writers’ reunion had taken place every two years since the early sixties, when Finland had created it to establish dialogue between East and West. Once it had been famous for the drunken Russians speechifying about God and morality and their Western male counterparts trying to keep up with the toasts and saying that they wished someone in their country cared enough about their writing to put them in the Gulag. But with the end of the Cold War, the organizers had tried to bring in new blood. They cut back on the Bulgarians and invited the feminists, among them Luisa Montiflores and her translator (Luisa always asked for one, on principle, though her English, except in extreme moments, was quite good), Cassandra Reilly.
Luisa loved a junket, but she had another motive for wanting to attend. She knew that the Venezuelan writer Gloria de los Angeles had been invited to the conference two years before, and since then she herself had been angling for an invitation. Her rivalry with Gloria was ludicrous, given that the Venezuelan’s magic realism novels had sold in the millions in twenty languages, while Luisa had only been translated into French and English and languished on the backlists of prestigious and impecunious literary publishers. It is the contrary nature, however, of those who write hermetic texts that only postmodern scholars can fully decipher, to long for an enthusiastic public response at the same time as they take pride in their obscurity.
Whatever Gloria had, Luisa wanted, too, but she did not want to hear Gloria’s name mentioned, and it was like poison to her when Helga politely said to her in the taxi, “And do you know Gloria de los Angeles? She was here two years ago and made such a sensation. So elegant and witty and such an amazing writer. What a vivid imagination she has. I adore her books, don’t you?”
“Her books are shit,” said Luisa briefly, running an indifferent hand through her Romaine Brooks style black hair with the white streak in it. “Pots boiling, no more.”
Helga was taken aback, but realizing her gaffe—this was neutral Finland, after all—she said, “I certainly can agree with you about her last collection. It was so…predictable, really…it had nothing new to say. Not like your fiction, Luisa, which is so…challenging…”
And Luisa unbent slightly to say, “I will autograph my latest book for you.” Luisa pulled out a copy of Saturn’s Children. “Whom shall I inscribe it to?”
“To Helga…and Pekka,” Helga said, avoiding my eyes. “My husband is a literary critic and admires your work. He’ll be so pleased.”
The next morning I woke up in the hotel room I was sharing with Luisa to find light streaming across my face. It was only four a.m., however, and I had only gone to bed, in a pearly blue light, three hours ago. I stared out the window at the lake, which was shimmering brightly. Beside it on the shore was an old-fashioned wooden sauna, like Helga’s family’s.
At the cocktail party the night before, Helga had come in with her husband, this Pekka. He was certainly good-looking, in a sardonic way, but much shorter than she. His long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a white shirt and black jacket and black jeans. His English was pure SoHo-Manhattan. Helga kept him away from me, so I didn’t meet him, but she couldn’t keep him away from the rest of the women there, particularly if they were young or wearing décolleté. Helga had the choice of standing awkwardly by his side as he flirted, or removing herself to the other side of the room where, with some dignity, she could pretend to be involved in other conversations while watching him all the time. He didn’t care if she watched him. He smoked and he drank, quite a bit, and toward the end of the evening, he pawed. At one point I saw him stroking the round little posterior of a young Dutch writer, who was herself fairly inebriated. Her name tag said she was Marion van Gelder. She had bleached hair about a knuckle-length long and multiply-pierced ears. I thought I saw a contemptuous look in her eye, but she didn’t try to stop Pekka. Fortunately Helga seemed to have left by then.
In the morning light, I looked out at the lake; and I looked at Luisa, who, for all her much-publicized angst, had never enjoyed anything but a very good night’s sleep (“But my dreams! Absolutely nightmares. Every night, Cassandra.”), and who was snoring peacefully. Then I rooted around in my bag and found my notebook. “Finland,” I wrote. “Saunas. Reindeer steak. Depression. Midnight sun.”
I had another, unannounced reason for wanting to come to Finland. Luisa with her notions of high art, and her family’s wealth, would be surprised to find out that in spite of my best intentions, I occasionally thought about money, or my lack of it. The fact is that the career of literary translator into English isn’t especially lucrative. Very rarely do any of us manage a small percentage of the royalties; our fees are based on the number of words in a text. In many European countries, literary translation is a respected occupation that provides a steady income. My colleague in Germany, Marianne Schnackenbusch, for instance, constantly has work. But this isn’t true in the English-speaking world, at least as concerns literature. There is more work in technical areas, and I’d done plenty of it, but I found it mind-numbing in general.
Thus, I hadn’t been adverse to the suggestion made by an American journalist I’d met by chance in Romania a few years ago that we collaborate on a series of travel pieces. Or, as Mr. Archie Snapp wrote when he suggested the idea: “You do the leg work, Cass, and set the scene; I’ll rewrite for the public.” Archie’s public was primarily in the Midwest, beginning with his own local paper in Ann Arbor, The Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner, but we (he) had been successful in placing some of our pieces in larger newspapers on occasion.
In Archie’s hands, topics like “Revisiting the Paris of the Modernists” had become “Shakespeare and Co.—The Tradition Continues,” and my article on the archeological museum of Mexico City had turned into “From Olmec to Aztec, or How Hot Chocolate Was Invented.” I let Archie provide the titles and rewrite my sentences. And with no problem at all did I let him take the credit and the byline. All I did was provide him with three to five pages of notes and a few angles, and sometimes a roll of film. And I got half the check. Archie was honest as salt and very reliable. But so far I’d had more disillusion in Finland than inspiration. Every time I wrote sauna, I thought of Helga and her obvious unhappiness. I’m used to women lovers getting married; but I like them to marry nice men.
Besides, I wanted some coffee, and breakfast wasn’t until eight. I got back in bed with my notebook and soon was fast asleep again.
When I woke up next, it was ten o’clock and Luisa was gone. The first seminar must have already started. I rushed downstairs and ran into Helga, who was carrying a microphone and looking distracted.
“Listen Helga,” I said, “about this husband of yours,” but she rushed on, explaining, “I told the other organizers that the ‘Writer and Gender’ group would be the biggest, but they said only a few women would want to attend that, that everyone else would want to go to the ‘Writer and History’ and the ‘Writer and the Imagination.’ But the ‘Writer and Gender’ group overflowed the little balcony they assigned them, and we have had to put them under that oak tree. There are so many we need a microphone.”
I followed her across the lawn to a group of about thirty people, mostly women, sitting cross-legged in a circle. The discussion was in full swing:
“You can say that because you come from a country like Holland,” a woman whose name tag said she was Simone from Algeria was saying vehemently. “I tried to write about myself as a sexual being and what happens? I sell 60,000 copies of my book, but my publisher’s life is threatened, there is a public burning, and I end up having to live in Paris.”
“I know about notoriety and stigma,” the Dutch woman shot back. It was Marion, whom Pekka had flirted with so heavily. She was one of the youngest women there, in her late twenties, and this morning was wearing a skirt and a vest with nothing underneath. Several blue tattoos were visible. “The Dutch pride themselves on their tolerance about prostitution, but they didn’t want to hear the true story of my life as a fifteen-year-old call-girl to wealthy men. I too became famous, in the wrong way.”
Mayumi, a Japanese woman in her fifties, with a frizzy gray permanent and a no-nonsense air, spoke up. I recognized her as one of Japan’s best known writers. “What I wrote in the sixties was regarded as pornography, in the seventies as erotica, and in the eighties as literature. We must have faith in our literary intent, and in ourselves, no matter what they say about us.”
“The worst censorship,” Luisa said flatly, “is the censorship we perform on ourselves.” And she, normally so arrogant and convoluted when she spoke of her work, began to tell a simple and wrenching story about her mother finding her journal when she was fourteen, a journal where she’d written the story of falling in love with another girl.
When she lost her words in English, I took over for her. “That is when I first learned that writing is dangerous. After that I wrote my diary in code. I have written my novels that way too.”
The few men in the group had said little up to that point, but now one spoke. He was a tall Finn with little round glasses like John Lennon and floppy hair, younger than the woman he sat next to, who had been clenching her hands until they were almost white. “It is important to recognize that there are other ways to silence a woman writing about sexuality than banning her or her books, or threatening exposure or punishment. Ridicule is an effective silencer, too, and in a small country like Finland, which prides itself on equality, ridicule is perhaps the best weapon there is.”
This unleashed a torrent of stories from the Finnish women in the group. How for all the years that this conference had been going on, they had never been invited to speak or lead a group or participate fully. How the whole thing was controlled by a male literary Mafia who just thought of it as a place to get drunk and screw around and play soccer.
“Soccer?” I couldn’t help asking.
For this, more than anything, seemed to enrage them most. That every time this conference was held, the men writers played a midnight game of soccer, what Europeans and most of the world besides North America calls football. It was one of the things the conference was famous for, and it was always written about as if it were a great institution: “Finland Against the Rest of the World.” But, strangely enough, it always seemed to be Finnish men against men from the rest of the world.
“And if you say anything,” said the woman with the clenched hands, “they laugh at you. But you’d get hurt, they say. But women don’t like to play soccer, they say. But we need you as an audience, they say. But why are you making such a big deal about nothing, they say.”
“If nothing else, we must make sure not to be their audience,” the Danish poet Birgit said, speaking precisely. “We will organize an evening of our own, perhaps a sauna together down by the lake in the old sauna house.”
And the decision, in high good spirits, was made, the women would sauna together, while the men played soccer without an audience. Except for Luisa, who was heard to mutter as she strode off, “I love a game of football.”
But then, Luisa was an unpredictable feminist, to say the least.
Word of our animated seminar got around, and the next day when the group convened again, there were twice as many people. But the self-revelations that had been possible in a smaller group were difficult in a larger one, especially one where there was now a sizable number of men. Some of them were there out of genuine curiosity and some out of prurience. They’d heard the discussion had been about sex, and they wanted to get in on it.
It wasn’t that there hadn’t been conflict at the first session, but this was disagreement of a different order.
“We can’t write explicit sex scenes any more than you can,” a British writer called Harold humphed. “If we did, all the women would immediately jump on us for exploiting them.”
“So you acknowledge that your so-called sex scene would have to be exploitative then?” the young Dutch writer Marion demanded.
“That’s exactly the tone I’m talking about,” he said. “I’m in the wrong, aren’t I, before I’ve put pen to paper. It’s like trying to write in a police state.”
Eva from Prague snorted. “Oh, what in hell do you know about writing in a police state? But I can tell you one thing, since our particular police state ended, there has been nothing but pornography. That’s the male idea of freedom—freedom to oppress women.”
The debate raged, but as it continued, I noticed something peculiar. The foreign women were talking as much as ever, in the embattled and aggressive manner they’d adopted to defend themselves and that was taken as further evidence of their lack of humor and tolerance; and the men, both foreign and Finnish, had a lot to say (to be fair, their comments were supportive and perplexed, as well as combative). But the Finnish women, so eager to share their stories the day before, were mainly silent. I looked over at the Finnish couple who’d spoken so eloquently—Silje and Tom, I’d heard they were named, the authors and illustrators of a series of children’s books—but they didn’t add a word to the discussion. From time to time I saw them staring, Silje with nervousness and Tom with real hatred, at a man in the outer circle, Helga’s husband Pekka, a man who, as far as I could tell, had said nothing, whose eyes went from one speaker to the next in a curious, amused sort of way. They rested with particular interest on Marion, who was speaking about whores’ rights and her own past experience. He didn’t stay for the whole session, but wandered off after an hour, hardly acknowledging Helga who had been watching him as intently as he’d been watching Marion.
I caught up with Helga afterward and asked her what had happened, why all the Finnish women were silent.
She paused and said reluctantly, “I would imagine it had something to do with Pekka being there. He writes a literary column for one of the daily papers. He’s very well known for his wit. It makes…it makes some people afraid of him.”
“Are you afraid of him, Helga?” I asked quietly, but she was already moving away, almost running, with that long-legged gait I remembered from years before.
Luisa and I both skipped the afternoon session, and settled down like two asocial cats to work. “Just some memories,” she said, when I asked her what she was writing. “And you?”
“A letter to a friend. About Finland.”
My articles for Archie often began with some alluring generality about travel that had recently occurred to me. I might be struck one day by what hard work travelling was and how useless that work was. What good to me were the long hours I’d put in reading bus and train and ferry timetables? In my memory, and in the stories I told, my travels seemed composed of an endless succession of peak experiences. But in reality, most of what one calls travel is its very opposite—waiting, not moving.
When I tried to put some of my evanescent thoughts down, to capture the subtle sense of working hard and often to little apparent purpose, only to have a fleeting impression of something deliciously bizarre or magnificently ordinary, Archie reduced my carefully honed words to variations on standard clichés: “Travel is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration,” he might begin, continuing, “but don’t let that put you off! A few simple tips [I had of course not offered any tips, only bittersweet reflections] can help make your trip an easier one, and give you more time to enjoy the peak experiences that make travel such a memorable and rewarding activity.”
Sitting on my bed in front of the view of the lake (Luisa had commandeered the desk and chair), I clutched at elusive images of fire and ice, overpowering heat and frigid winds, lakes and fires and the midnight sun. All the time knowing that by the time my story appeared in the Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner it would probably be titled “Sauna Like It Hot” and begin: “Winter or summer Finland calls to the adventurous tourist. But whether you’re skiing, or biking, or swimming in one of Finland’s many lakes, you can relax at the end of the day in the dry heat of a pine-scented sauna. Sauna is, after all, a Finnish word.”
Late that night, the midnight soccer game took place on a grassy meadow near the hotel, but as promised many of the women didn’t attend, instead gathering at the old sauna house on the lake. Luisa had still been writing when I left her. It was something to do with the story she’d told the day before about her mother finding her journal. The shouts and screams of the soccer players and their audience floated across the grounds and down to the lake, but very faintly. When we went into the sauna, we couldn’t hear them at all. The group was a handful of Finnish women and six foreigners—Mayumi, Simone, Marion, Eva, Birgit, and me. All of us foreigners had to leave the hot sauna before the natives. Naked, we ran outside and plunged into the lake. Male laughter wafted down to us, and Simone shuddered as she rose out of the water and headed back to the sauna.
“It’s strange being naked like this out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “Frightening, but liberating somehow. I want to do it. Yet I keep looking over my shoulder.”
Marion said, “I made a resolve when I was young that I would never be afraid of anything, I would never let a man stop me from doing anything.”
“You sound like my daughter,” Birgit said. “I admire that. She tells me stories of travelling in foreign places, how she threatened a man who tried to rape her with a knife. I wasn’t brought up like that.”
“I hate to hear the sound of men laughing in a group,” Simone began, and then stopped. “Well, that’s all over now. I can never go back while the fundamentalists have so much power. My sister and her husband and children have left too, we all live together in Paris now, and perhaps forever.”
We spent several hours at the lake. Mayumi and Birgit managed to stay in the longest, while Eva, Marion, Simone and I opted for briefer and briefer visits to the sweltering sauna and spent increasing amounts of time chatting on the dock. The Finnish women left together, then Eva and Simone, and then Birgit. I told Mayumi and Marion that I was starting to feel like a plate of salmon mousse and would have to leave.
As I walked back across the grounds to my room in the hotel, I could hear the sounds of drunken male laughter. It sounded like the game was winding up. I thought of what Simone had said and shuddered slightly. I put a bold face on, but I never felt completely, totally safe anywhere alone at night, and I, like Simone, did not like the sound of men laughing in a group. Perhaps to humanize them again, I walked over to the lit field, just in time to see a familiar figure knock the hurtling ball away from the goal with her elegant forehead.
A cheer went up and Luisa was mobbed. The Finns had lost, the Rest of the World, Including One Woman, had triumphed. There was always this alternative to boycotting segregated pleasures, wasn’t there? To take part anyway as the spirit moved you and show them that you were as good as or better than they were.
And who was to say which way was best? Certainly at that moment my own tomboy youth came back to me and I wished I had been in the game to kick the ball past Luisa, rather than sitting in the all-girl’s clubhouse, feeling superior, envious, and just a little bit afraid.
The next morning at breakfast word flew through the room: Pekka had been found in the sauna by himself, dead of a heart attack. No one remembered seeing him go into the sauna; the last time anyone remembered seeing him was in the confusion at the end of the game.
The last people to have the key to the sauna that night were the women, including we six foreigners who had stayed latest.
“I don’t know how he could have gotten in there,” said a shaken Marion over coffee. “I know I was the last person to use the sauna, but I locked it up after I left and put the key back in the office. I didn’t give the key to anyone. It was too late. There must be another key.”
According to the hotel staff, there wasn’t, and the key that Marion said she had replaced in the office was not there. It had been found in the sauna door. Pekka could have removed it, but it was unlikely he could have locked himself in. Hearing this news, we began to understand that Pekka hadn’t just died naturally of a heart attack.
But it wasn’t until the Finnish police showed up an hour later and asked us six women who’d been in the sauna that evening to make statements that we realized they definitely thought Pekka had been murdered, and possibly murdered by one of us.
Only real murderers live their lives with a good alibi. The rest of us sound guilty as sin and have no excuses for anything. When interrogated, no one has seen us, no one has heard us. We could have been up to anything. Although Eva and Simone had left together, the rest of us had departed separately and walked back to the hotel alone. Birgit had stopped briefly to chat with a Norwegian writer, and Simone had been seen on the phone in the lobby; the rest of us had apparently been invisible. We didn’t even have the excuse that our movements had been hidden in the dark.
It’s not a pleasant thing to be suspected of a murder, and none of us felt very happy about it. True, the immediate headlines would be in Finnish, which none of us could read, but eventually they would be picked up other places: “Battle of the Sexes Turns Fatal in Finland.”
I had just come out of my session with the police, who, in spite of their cool Scandinavian politeness, were as suspicious as any cops I’d ever come across. “And where, exactly, do you live, Mrs. Reilly? Ah, nowhere just at the moment? Nowhere? And is that possible, Mrs. Reilly? To live nowhere just at the moment?”
I saw the Finnish couple, Silje and Tom, slowly crossing the lawn, and rushed after them.
“Tell me about this man Pekka,” I said. “Who was he? I should at least have an idea about someone I’m supposed to have possibly murdered.”
They looked at each other and motioned to a bench nearby. It was Silje who spoke, in careful English and without affect. Her husband Tom looked more upset than she did.
“It was about ten years ago,” she said. “I was quite young, twenty-two. I had just written my first novel. It was very graphic, sexually graphic. I thought it might be shocking, but at the time I thought I wanted to shock. I had been living in France, studying, and took French writers as my models. I wrote frankly about incest, bisexuality, a woman who is sexually used by an older man, but who also finds pleasure in it. I wrote about masochism. I believed the world needed to know all this. I was something like the Dutch woman Marion, only not so experienced and brave.”
She stopped and, tears choking her voice, couldn’t go on.
Tom took her hand. “The novel became famous. It was shocking. But also very strong, very beautifully written. It had no easy answers. It was only a woman’s voice, telling the truth. There were people who didn’t like to hear a woman’s voice. What I said two days ago, in the group, about ridicule. That’s the weapon they chose.”
“When you’re young, you don’t expect to be laughed at,” Silje broke in, more forceful now. “It’s really the worst insult, not to be taken seriously. This man, this Pekka, that’s what he did. He wrote about me, not my book, about me. He interviewed friends and my family, found out I’d stayed once in a mental institution, that I’d used drugs. Everything he found out he used against me, and trivialized me and made it sound like I’d made everything up. That I was just a silly little, attention-seeking fool. After that article came out, I was so ashamed.”
She swallowed. “I tried to kill myself and failed. I was committed to an institution for almost two years.”
Tom took over again. “Silje and I have tried to live a quiet life the past few years. We do our children’s books. We now have two children of our own. We live in the country and don’t participate in the writers’ debates in Helsinki. But when the invitation came to attend this reunion, we said, All right, why not? After all we too are part of Finnish literature.
“All last evening and night I thought about what the newspaper would say this morning about the discussion. How he would make fun of all the writers, the men as well as the women, but especially the women. How he would laugh at the Japanese woman for being over fifty now and well-known for her erotica, how he would turn that girl Marion into a call-girl again.
“How he would laugh at Silje and me being there,” Tom said, “—‘the two children’s writers getting an earful.’”
“We couldn’t let the article come out,” said Silje.
“But how do you know what he’d written?”
“We didn’t know,” said Tom quickly, pulling at Silje’s arm.
“We only suspected,” Silje said, but her eyes didn’t quite meet mine.
I changed the subject. “How did Helga marry a guy like that?”
Tom shook his head. “I knew her from years ago. She was a friend of my sister’s. She was very wild and free. I think she was a challenge to him. So he decided to break her. He sleeps with everyone he can. Almost right in front of her.”
I remembered how he’d touched Marion’s arm at the cocktail party, and how she’d let him. How did that fit with the fact that Marion had been the last in the sauna? She had insisted on staying while the rest of us staggered away. She was a strange combination: punk and tough with a little bit of sex kitten. Had she arranged to meet him there? I didn’t want to think that.
I wanted Luisa’s advice, but she was holed up in our room, writing away and wouldn’t open up. “It’s sad, it’s very depressing, my life,” she shouted through the keyhole in jubilation. “I have to write it. I shall not stop until I write it all down.”
“But Luisa, everything is in an uproar. A man is dead. They think he might have been murdered. You can’t just stay in there and write!”
There was a silence and then she came to the door. “Who died?”
“Pekka, the literary critic. Helga’s husband.”
“But he told me he likes my work.”
“That’s no guarantee against murder.”
“Cassandra, I hope it wasn’t you,” Luisa scolded. “Some women just aren’t cut out to be lesbians. You must accept that and not murder their husbands.”
“Of course I didn’t kill him.”
“Well, he did have a very unpleasant laugh,” Luisa remarked, before locking me out of the room again.
Out on the lawn a struggle was in progress. Two plainclothes Finnish detectives were on either side of Marion, dragging her unwillingly to their car. They had gotten her confession, the word went around the group of writers standing shocked on the grass, that Pekka had accosted her in the sauna when she’d been there alone, and that she’d escaped and locked him in to die of overheating.
“We can’t let this happen,” said Simone. “There must be more to the story. We must protest.”
“I should never have let Marion stay there alone,” said Mayumi. “I said to her, ‘Come with me, Marion, don’t stay here alone,’ and she said, ‘No, I’m fine. Just ten more minutes.’”
And then the police car was gone. Now for the first time I saw Helga. She was standing under a tree, watching the whole scene from a distance.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, going over to her.
“Don’t be. Whatever Marion did to him, he probably deserved.”
“You’re sure she did something?” I said, taken aback at Helga’s harsh tone. She looked years older this morning, her blonde hair slicked back, her skin pale and clammy.
“She came to me early this morning and told me about it. How he found her in the sauna alone after all the rest of you had left. He was drunk, she said. He tried to attack her, but she easily got away from him and locked the door. She only meant to teach him a lesson.”
“But when she went back to let him out, he was dead?”
“Exactly. It only took a short while. She didn’t realize he had a heart condition.”
“But that’s not really murder, then.” I was relieved.
“That’s what I told the police.” Helga looked at me. “That I didn’t think she meant to kill him.”
“You went to the police then?”
“Yes, I told them. I couldn’t cover it up for her.”
Her iciness puzzled me. She may no longer have loved Pekka, but could she be glad that he was dead? Perhaps it was suppressed anger that made her seem so remote and hard.
“Please excuse me. There are many things to arrange. Under the circumstances, I don’t know if the conference will be continuing,” she said, and started across the lawn to the main offices.
I watched her walk away with those long legs that had once leaped over the snowbanks. “I like the sauna to be as hot as possible,” she’d told me that weekend long ago. “As hot as would kill most people.”
The conference was declared over and hasty preparations begun to transport us all back to Helsinki. If I didn’t work fast, I might lose my opportunity. I found Silje and Tom getting into a car in the parking lot.
“May I just ask you a couple of questions before you go?”
They said nothing, so I asked anyway. “Was it generally known that Pekka had a heart condition?”
They shook their heads. “Perhaps among his friends. We didn’t know.”
Silje was already sliding into the driver’s seat when I asked, “Would you be willing to turn over the article that Pekka wrote to the police?”
“But how?” she began and Tom interrupted, “We never saw any article. We only imagined what it would have in it.” He got in the passenger seat and slammed the door.
Seconds later they were gone.
The rest of us were given two hours to pack up and meet back at the bus. In a small group, the women from the sauna huddled together. Because none of us thought that Marion had killed him on purpose, the question was complicated. Had Marion been framed, or had it merely been an impetuous response to Pekka’s unwelcome overtures? Birgit said she was bound to get off. Mayumi remembered a similar case in Japan, a murder that had been made to look like a suicide. Eva hinted at conspiracy, and Simone quickly joined her in wondering whether larger forces had not been involved. It was only on the bus, when I was sitting next to Luisa, that I thought to ask her when she’d had a chance to hear Pekka’s laugh, the laugh she said was so unpleasant.
“After the football game. He was in a group, laughing, I think with some Finns, that young pair of children’s authors. And Helga. Then the Finns walked off, looking angry. And he came by with Helga to congratulate me on heading off the goal ball. We talked about my work, and then the two of them walked away.”
“In what direction?”
“I don’t remember. The office, I think. He had some papers in his hands.”
“Was he drunk?”
“Yes, a bit. Helga was holding his arm. He was laughing.”
“What time was this?”
“Oh, quite late. Or perhaps very early.”
The conference by the lake might be over and the Finnish writers dispersed back home, but the foreign participants still had several days to wait for our return flights. Only Birgit, for family reasons, showed an interest in getting home sooner. She changed her ticket and left shortly after our bus arrived in Helsinki. The rest of us—Mayumi, Eva, Simone, and me—checked back into a central hotel. Luisa, in her inimitable way, had actually rented a flat in the city so as not to disturb her writing process. She would stay in Finland until Diary of a First Love in Montevideo was finished.
She urged me to come stay with her, but I felt too unsettled to take her up on it. I did make some cursory excursions around Helsinki, scribbling my final notes for Archie, describing with many adjectives the colorful market by the harbor, the splendid Russian orthodox church, the impressive monument to Sibelius, the fascinating outdoor museum with its authentic farm and country buildings. However mostly I spent hours with my new friends, discussing what had happened to Pekka and how we might help Marion.
Helga seemed to have vanished. I had no easy way of contacting Silje and Tom. All three of them, it seemed to me, had far greater motives—longer-standing motives certainly—for killing Pekka than Marion had. In the end, it was to Mayumi that I shared my suspicions and the little information I had, for Eva and Simone, with their experience of state repression, consistently drifted into conspiracy theories. Pekka was a journalist, wasn’t he, and in Czechoslovakia and Algeria journalists who were on to something were often threatened or kidnapped or outright murdered. Pekka could have been killed by government agents who then pinned it on Marion.
It after one of these sessions with Eva and Simone, at breakfast on the morning after we returned from the lake, that Mayumi caught up to me in the lobby as I was going out to send my Finnish observations to Archie, and suggested that after the post office we stop by the newspaper where Pekka had worked.
This was the Helgosin Sanomat, which sounded more like a particularly tidy launderette than a newspaper, but it was Helsinki’s largest daily. We asked to see Pekka’s editor and his assistant came out to the lobby to escort us up. To my surprise, the assistant was none other than the depressed young man from the FinnAir flight.
He recognized me too. “And your friend Luisa Montiflores?”
“She’s staying on in Helsinki for a while, writing,” I said. “She says Finland is like a television movie with the sound turned very low.”
The meeting with the cultural editor was brief and not very useful. He was a balding man with darting eyes in an immobile face. He shrugged away our concern that Pekka might have been murdered by someone who didn’t like what Pekka was planning to write or had written about them.
“Ladies, the late Pekka wrote many articles over many years that poked fun at many writers. If someone was going to kill him, they had ample reason before now.”
“Do you have the article he was writing at the lake, about the conference?” Mayumi asked him point blank.
“I don’t see what his article has to do with anything,” the editor blustered. “No one has asked to see it, and besides, we don’t have it. I’ve never seen it, anyway.”
“And that’s that,” said Mayumi, as we were shown out. We sat down on some modern looking chairs in the lobby, unsure what to try next.
“There are several questions I ask myself,” said Mayumi, and I recalled I had read in her biographical notes that she had an advanced degree in psychology. “First, obviously: who had a reason to kill him? Someone he had harmed, or was about to harm.
“Second, what was that reason? Was it fear, or was it revenge? The former suggests an uncalculated, perhaps hasty response. The latter a more premeditated plan.
“Then, I’m curious about two more things. Who knew that locking Pekka in a very hot sauna might kill him? That is, who knew he had a heart condition? And finally, why kill him at such a public event, where the chances of being discovered or seen were very great?”
“But where the possibilities of pinning the blame on someone completely outside Pekka’s usual circle were very great, too,” I reminded her.
We sat staring at each other for a moment. I had earlier dismissed Mayumi, I blush to say, as a grandmotherly type: gray perm, glasses, a pantsuit and scarf. Suddenly I realized that in spite of my bomber jacket and black jeans, my hair was also gray and I could only be a few years younger than she, at most.
I also remembered, with a jolt, a few tasty passages from one of her novels, a scene between two women.
Behind the glasses were curious, warm black eyes. Her skin was ivory and smooth.
“Intimacy. Humiliation. Revenge. Exquisite organizational skills. The ability to dissimulate,” Mayumi said. “All these were necessary.”
We were interrupted by the pale and breathless assistant, who came skidding to a halt in front of us. “You’re still here,” he said. “I thought I would have to track you down at your hotel.”
He was holding two sheets of paper, copied from a fax. “The editor was not quite telling the truth,” he said. “Pekka’s article came in the middle of the night. I don’t have time to translate it for you, but I can tell you what’s in it. It was never published.”
“Why didn’t the editor run it?” Mayumi asked.
“He didn’t think it came from Pekka. He didn’t think Pekka wrote it.”
“Why not?”
The assistant looked bewildered. “It’s an apology,” he said. “To all the writers he had mocked over the years.”
On my way to Helga’s apartment, I thought of what Mayumi had said: “Intimacy. Humiliation. Revenge. Exquisite organizational skills. The ability to dissimulate.”
There could be no one but Helga. All that remained was to put together some coherent time frame for the actual murder, between the last time anyone had seen them, well after midnight, and the time the fax had arrived at the newspaper office. The article of course was written by Helga. I should have left it to the police, of course, but I couldn’t bear to let her go out of my life without seeing her again.
The assistant had given me her address. It was in a quiet block of tall, nineteenth-century terraced houses, all painted white and sparkling in a sunshine so constant it was beginning almost to grate on me.
Behind her door, I felt her regarding me through the peephole. Then she let me in.
She was in a summer suit, a light blue that matched her eyes. Her hair was pale as whipped honey, and her skin quite brown. She did not look relaxed, but she didn’t look agitated either. I noticed that a cotton coat was thrown over a suitcase in the hall. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen her, in Leningrad, at a dismal gathering at one of the Intourist ballrooms. She had been only twenty-five then, gangly in an ill-fitting skirt and jacket, her idea of what a professional woman travelling abroad should wear. Actually I’d heard her before I’d seen her that evening. She was laughing. A joyous, dithery laugh that came from deep inside.
I hadn’t heard her laugh once this time.
“I know about the article you wrote in Pekka’s name. The apology.”
Without answering, Helga led me to a couch in the middle of the room. The flat had tall ceilings and was starkly furnished. Perhaps it was this starkness that gave me the feeling she was packing up and leaving permanently. The tall drapes were drawn, as if Helga too found the constant light tiring.
I noticed a pile of photographs on the wooden coffee table between us. They were turned over, and a few had words on the back. As if Helga had been sorting them or filing them when I came.
Helga clearly wasn’t talking, so I decided to get on with it. “I thought at first it might be Silje and Tom who wrote the article of apology, since they seemed somehow to know about another article, perhaps the one Pekka really wrote. But I somehow doubt that if they’d killed him, they could have been cool enough to send a fax afterward. They didn’t easily have access to the office. They didn’t know Pekka’s style of writing. Most important, they seem to lack sangfroid. It’s hard for them to hide their feelings.”
“I wanted Pekka to go out not as hated as he had been,” said Helga softly. “It’s a shame the newspaper never printed it.”
“So you admit you wrote the apology. Did you also lock him in the sauna?”
She was cool as ice. “Why don’t you think Marion did it?”
“Because Marion wouldn’t lie.”
“I think you have too high an opinion of her,” Helga said. She reached between us to the table and began to turn over the photographs. “I just had these developed. They’re a little murky, but I didn’t want to use a flash. Fortunately it was still light enough after midnight to get a decent picture. Well, perhaps decent is the wrong word.”
The snapshots showed a man and a woman in a variety of graphic sexual positions. The sauna was in the background. They were on and around a bench set slightly back in the birch trees. None of the positions looked coerced. Marion’s blond head was easy to make out; so was Pekka’s black ponytail.
“Pekka’s excuse was that he was drunk, of course,” said Helga rather tiredly. “It often was.”
“Did you confront them?”
“No. I saw him go into the sauna after Marion had left. I saw him open it with the key she’d given him. He left the key in the lock.”
She stopped, and I knew this was the nearest she’d get to admitting she had turned the key herself. She seemed flattened, dream-like, almost ghostly in the darkened room. A sliver of hot brightness outlined the windows, but inside all was dim.
“Was it the next morning you told Marion you had photographs?” I asked, as if I were just making conversation.
“We talked. She realized I knew she’d had sex with my husband.”
“She didn’t know he’d been murdered at that point, I would imagine,” I went on, as casually as before. “I suspect she tried to play on your sympathies by telling you he’d forced her to have sex with him. You pretended to believe her and then you told the police she’d confessed it all to you. She was trapped at that point.”
“I think she’ll get off if she sticks to her story,” said Helga dispassionately. She began to put the photographs back into their envelope. “I don’t plan to show the photographs to anyone unless I have to. The little slut,” she said suddenly, and her eyes flashed. “But then, he always had that effect on women. You wanted to despise him; you thought you did despise him. And yet you found him attractive and compelling all the same.”
It was eerie how calm she was again. “I still don’t understand some things,” I said. “Luisa told me she saw you and Pekka leave the playing field together, and that he was laughing.”
“Yes, he had given a copy of his article about the conference to Silje and Tom, just to torment them. Then he wanted to fax it. We went to the office together. I read it and was horrified. I persuaded Pekka to let me fix some typos and so on. I said I’d fax it. He said fine; he was really quite drunk. He wandered away. I didn’t fax his article. I ripped it up. When I went back to our room, he wasn’t there. That’s when I went looking for him.”
“And the camera?”
“I’ve had a camera in my pocket the whole conference,” she said without amusement. “For the fun, candid shots I was supposed to be taking.”
“Are you sorry?”
“That he’s dead? I don’t know the answer to that yet.”
“You’re not planning to flee the country?” I gestured to the suitcase.
“What a thought!” For the first time Helga seemed to wake up a little. “No, I’m going to that little house in the country that my grandparents built. That one you and I went to once, all those years ago. If you want to tell the police anything I’ve told you, go ahead. I’ll be there.”
She didn’t know what I’d do, I realized. And neither did I. When I told Mayumi later, I said, “Let’s wait and see what happens to Marion first. If she’s really in danger…”
“You’re loyal to your lovers, I can see,” said Mayumi.
“I used to think that feminism made us loyal to each other,” I said. “It’s still my fantasy.”
“Tell me about your fantasies.”
“Turn off the light first.”
Weeks later, I heard from Luisa, who had finally left Finland, that the charges against Marion had been dropped. The prosecutor’s office found no evidence of malicious intent. Pekka was a womanizer, it was well known. He had tried to force Marion against her will; she had responded by locking him in the sauna. She hadn’t known of his heart condition.
Luisa also sent along an article about herself written by the new literary critic at the Sanomat, our pale depressed friend from the FinnAir flight. Of course it was in Finnish, but Luisa assured me it was nothing but praise. Her favorite kind of critical review.
Both the clipping and the letter came to me in a parcel otherwise filled with Luisa’s new novel in manuscript, Diary of a First Love in Montevideo. They were delivered to me at Mayumi’s old wooden house in Kyoto, where I have been for several months, gathering travel notes for Archie’s articles and practicing positions more graphic than anything Marion and Pekka ever tried.
I will set to work translating immediately. Nothing in Luisa’s novel corresponds to the truth of her life as I know it. But it is still an extraordinarily cool and melancholy account of love thwarted, shamed and, finally, destroyed.