2016
My mother took my son’s urn to Ukraine on the day I expected to be contacted either by the police or my supervisor. Yet I still did my job as if it were any other Wednesday, moving from one address to the next. I’d stolen the money for Mom’s plane ticket the previous morning from a pensioner who kept cash at home. I was sure that if she noticed the theft, she would blame her foreign cleaning lady. However, resigning would make me look even guiltier, so I had to continue carrying my buckets from one apartment to the next, wringing out rags and organizing children’s toys, even though the cozy clutter reminded me of things I didn’t want to remember. I wondered why I didn’t feel relieved. Mom would be saved from finding my body, and she wouldn’t become an eyewitness who needed to be eliminated. She and Olezhko were safe. That was what I’d wanted, and I had succeeded. So why did I feel so empty?
At the final address of the evening, weariness overcame me, and I took a carton of Finnish kefir from the refrigerator. The company seemed to be marketing it as a new health food product. The sample representatives at the supermarket had tried to offer me some, too, claiming it came from America. As I listened to the sales pitch, I felt old, wondering whether enough time had passed for a new generation who would believe such garbage. The product demonstrator was young. She couldn’t know that kefir had been one of the few products you didn’t have to line up for in the Soviet Union. But of course Valio was right: I wouldn’t have marketed it in the West as an old Soviet classic either.
I poured myself a glass. It tasted like past summers and the okroshka the old lady next door used to make, which I would never eat again. If I was forced to leave Helsinki, I would probably never return to this seaside city. Everything felt so final, my last glass of kefir and my last swing of a mop. It was the end of an era.
Leaving my cleaning for a moment, I went into the woman’s office. No one was home, so I sat down at her desk and imagined that it was mine. I’d done that before, setting my hand on the desktop, inspecting the electrical outlets cleanly mounted in it and dreaming about checking my calendar and setting appointments. I heard a knock at the door and saw my secretary bringing refreshments. Aleksey would carry my bag to the car, and my phone and computer would give alerts for new messages. As the workday approached its close, I would spray perfume on the pulsating insides of my wrists and begin to look forward to dining with you.
I’d been sitting at that same desk when I realized that my life in Helsinki wouldn’t have made raising Oleh any less complicated, even though I’d thought so during my escape. I couldn’t have told Oleh about the past in the same carefree way as the woman who lived in this home, reminiscing about my son’s late grandfather, who had been found in a mine without a head, or about how I had ended up in Helsinki. And what would I have told him about you? How would I have explained that he wouldn’t be able to meet his father? Would I have claimed that you died on a worksite in Mykolaiv when some cables failed? Here, accidents are just accidents and poppies are just flowers in a flower bed.
The apartment, all decorated in white, had an echo as pure as a well-tuned instrument. I imagined the dog park family’s home being the same, the family portraits arranged in a row so openly that their secrets couldn’t be any more serious than a little moonshine cooking during Prohibition or the odd love child born to a maidservant chased into a grove of trees on a Midsummer’s Eve. If I’d been born here, my son would be sitting at his desk, his eyes glued to his schoolbooks, and nothing would ever happen in my life that would drive me to a foreign country to mop floors. No one would send my ex-lover to end me.