7

ANNA CROSSES THE street. She told Saara she would meet her at Esplanadi Park. She’s already late.

She’s carrying her jeans and shirt in a shopping bag. The hem of the dress flaps against her calves. The wine stain is invisible among the pleats. She feels a little hot, or perhaps agitated, her mouth dry from the wine. One question keeps racing through her mind: does Mom know? Does she remember Eeva at all? She always remembers everything. She wouldn’t forget something like that. She might push it out of her mind, but she wouldn’t forget. There’s a difference.

Saara is sitting on the grass eating ice cream.

She has a turquoise silk ribbon tied in her hair. Maybe the color means something. Maybe it announces some new idea that Anna won’t learn about until the fall. Saara’s lip gloss is fuchsia. That, Anna knows, just means that summer can now arrive.

In high school Saara never wore any makeup, but once she got into the university she decided that her face was the same as the next person’s—practical and modifiable, a certain kind of weapon.

“New dress,” Saara says. “Pretty.”

Anna would like to tell her right away what she’s just learned. She doesn’t tell her. She talks about ice cream. What flavor to buy—blueberry, caramel nut, or that new one with marshmallows in it?

“Look how bright the blossoms are,” Saara says and nods her head gracefully toward the cherry trees, licking her ice cream cone. Saara is not opposed to cherry trees. There are quite a few things Saara’s not opposed to.

“How bright,” Anna repeats, trying not to say anything about Eeva right away.

She walks over to the cafe kiosk, the gravel crunching under her feet, her dress rustling. She is someone slightly different than herself. A different city opens up under her feet as she walks. It overlaps the spaces of this city and she can’t quite make it out clearly. She orders old-fashioned vanilla from the vendor, who seems to have been made to sell ice cream cones—sunny and smiling, strong wrists, a carefree brow. Almost no seriousness in her movements. Nothing in her gaze but the coming days of summer. Anna’s a little surprised at herself. When did she start ordering vanilla?

THERE’S A FEELING of expectation in the air. The seagulls have already arrived, the other woman who works at the kiosk shoos them off the tables.

A man in a suit goes by, wrapped up in his busyness, on his way somewhere from an office on Pohjoisesplanadi. It’s ridiculous to swing a briefcase on a day like today, to pretend to be important, with a telephone to your ear. He’s like a bright five-year-old playing at being a banker.

Saara talks lazily about her summer plans, waiting for the grade on an essay, a book she’s just read.

“I just know something’s going to happen this summer,” she says. “Something has to happen,” she adds emphatically, so that one might be misled into thinking her certainty was in fact desperation.

“This summer the old world will be demolished and a new one built in its place,” Anna says.

And it’s right for her to say so, although she actually fears the kinds of changes that Saara thirsts for. She would just as soon have continued those evenings when they were sixteen and stayed over at each other’s houses. They were free of adults’ demands, bought pastries and popcorn and frozen pizzas and bags of candy, watched Dirty Dancing twice, dancing along with Johnny and Baby, feeling the steps like a river flowing over a fallen log. The dancing was in fact a sort of churning after all they’d eaten, and they ended up lying on the floor giggling.

“What’s new?” Saara asks now. “How’s the thesis going? Have you read The Feminine Mystique yet?”

“Yeah, but I still need to find more source material. I should tie the subject to other historical events, not just second-wave feminism. I should read more. But I don’t feel like it.”

Anna thinks about Eeva. She didn’t plan to tell Saara about Eeva. But Eeva won’t let her go. Eeva’s here already, close by.

No, not close by—Eeva is inside her. She put on the dress, and now she can’t shake her.

Saara lies back and closes her eyes. She looks amazingly young. She’s still the girl who came to talk to her in the hallway her first week at school, handed her one of her iPod earpieces and said Listen to this in a cooing voice that for some reason stirred Anna’s womb, although she’d never thought she liked girls.

Oh don’t be shy, let’s cause a scene,
like lovers do on silver screens,
let’s make it, yeah, we’ll cause a scene.

After that they went everywhere together and shared the feelings a fresh friendship creates, the dazzled gratitude, a certainty that reality was exactly what they wanted it to be.

The next year they marched with defiant certainty in a protest against the Iraq war and believed they were changing the world.

What more do you need to change it but friendship, shameless faith, and trust?

Anna feels simultaneously like it happened only yesterday, and like it all happened years and years ago.

Before she moved to Pengerkatu, Anna lived with Saara for a year on Liisankatu. They had evenings that never ended, music, discussions over the kitchen table, an open door for guests. Their breakfasts stretched out, turned into debates. They played records and didn’t care if the neighbors stared at them in the hallway.

Another friend of Saara’s lives on Liisankatu now.

Saara smiles, still not opening her eyes. From above she looks a bit like one of Picasso’s women, disassembled, fragmented, searching for a shape.

Sometimes Anna feels out of date around Saara, awkward, old-fashioned, always a step behind. Saara has the same fantasies she has, but not the same fears about getting there. Saara lives life in a way that Anna can’t because she’s too afraid.

ANNA’S THOUGHTS RETURN to Eeva. What does she know about her?

She only has a few facts. Eeva was from Kuhmo, and moved to the city to study French language and literature.

Anna conjures up a picture in her mind.

Eeva furrowed her brow when she was reading, which made her look a little worried. She had small hands, caught colds in the winter. Some kind of vague seriousness lodged in her eyebrows. When she buttered her bread or washed the dishes or brushed her hair, she would lose herself for a moment in the motions, look dreamy, relaxed and happy, like women in turn-of-the-century paintings. Like Schjerfbeck’s women.

When she was about to laugh she first looked startled for a moment. A hundredth of a second later you could see horror in her face. Then the laughter would come bursting out.

Anna has this picture in her mind, and the beginning of a story on her lips: a man, a child, the child’s astonishingly white neck, her trust.

The man had been one of the most admired of his day. Not at the forefront of change, not a provocateur, but certainly the most promising and indisputably the most handsome. A charmer, one of those men you sit down with in a restaurant and you don’t get up for the rest of the evening, the kind of man you want to ask for directions to reality, to have him look across the table and tell you what it’s really all about. Everyone wanted a piece of him. His attention was accepted like a gift. When he looked at you, it felt like you had never really had a shape until that moment.

Artists are like that—they have the power to see, they carry all the weightiest, best-shaped ideas, they make things real that would otherwise remain lurking at the threshold, at the bus stop, around the corner, in parentheses.

Anna still needs Eeva’s voice.

The tree holds its blossoms above them as if it invented itself only yesterday. This has happened before, the exact same thing, but it has never been so fresh and so complete as now.

Eeva had days like these. Even this restlessness, this impatience to be somewhere else, someplace where life offered itself fully.

And there was more: Eeva had love, just like Anna. To give her all and get the whole world, that’s what she believed in. That’s what she was doing with the little girl, just as much as with the man.

Anna didn’t intend to tell Saara about Eeva, but Eeva’s here now, demanding that the story be told.

Anna’s voice is a little different—softer, fuller—as she begins.