13

HE WAS TENSE. The last time they’d been here was in the fall, when Elsa was still strong.

“Should we buy some water?” he said, to have something to say.

It was strange to be tense around his own wife. He felt as if they were living some very old time, from fifty years before, all over again. He had listened to Elvis the day he met Elsa. Suddenly he remembered Elvis, how nervous he was. His hands gripped the steering wheel, fifty years melting away.

“Why?” Elsa said. “I’m sure the water there is working.”

He looked at her surreptitiously, and she turned her head. A little smile.

“Just let me know if you get tired.”

“I will, I will.”

He was pleased when he didn’t see any cars as they pulled into the yard; Anna and Matias were out shopping for groceries and Eleonoora, Eero, and Maria hadn’t yet arrived. He could have a moment alone with Elsa.

It had rained. The trees in the yard held the drops proudly, as if aware, devoted to the task. Elsa stepped carefully out of the car, felt the ground for a moment, then walked purposefully toward the sauna. Where did the illness show? Nowhere, really. Her legs were sticks under her pants, but you didn’t notice it if you didn’t look closely.

“The whole floor will probably have to go,” she shouted from the sauna porch. “And part of the wall,” this time from inside.

He opened the door of the cabin. He was pierced by his fondness for Tammilehto and their shared days here. He remembered the smell of all the breakfasts, bread and butter and ham, the smell of coffee and cucumbers and sun shining in the window.

Anna learned to walk here one summer, and so did Maria, a few years later. Eleonoora and Eero had been married in the yard. How long ago was it? Twenty-five years. He had walked down the aisle with Eleonoora. He remembered her damp hand, her slightly terrified smile. She had stopped for a moment, as if she were having second thoughts. She wants to call it off, Martti had thought. He had already seen it all in his mind—they would drive away together, go to the service station, the veil still on her head, like a meringue. He wouldn’t ask why, since it wasn’t a father’s business. They would buy cheese sandwiches and coffee, not caring if people stared.

But Eleonoora had said, Well, let’s go.

Eero had looked at her across the yard and she had smiled at him, a little dazed, as if she wanted to say, This is stupid, it’s insane! I want to embark on this crazy thing with you!

He picked up a cookie from a plate on the table—a Domino. The damp had made it leathery. He liked the way it tasted. It was right for this place.

Elsa came inside.

“Let’s make some coffee,” Martti said.

“The boy’s torn up half the sauna,” Elsa said cheerfully.

“If it’s rotten, it should be taken out.”

“What if it was rotten from the start?” she said.

He searched her face for a sign in her words, for the familiar, hurt expression, the crease between her eyebrows.

He pulled her closer.

“We were in a hurry to have a new sauna. In a hurry to rebuild.”

“You were the one who was in a hurry. We didn’t have to repair the sauna at all. It wasn’t necessary.”

“Maybe. Maybe it was me.”

He was quiet for a moment, letting his gaze wander.

“I ordered some new paints,” he heard himself saying. “I bought canvases. Paper, other materials. I got a little carried away. I could start up a little shop of my own with everything I bought. So I’ll have a lot of materials to choose from if I want to try again.”

Elsa raised her eyebrows. “That’s wonderful.”

He had gone the week before to Rautalampi’s art supply store. He didn’t actually know what he intended to do with the supplies. Did he even want to start again? The whole thing felt somewhat frivolous. Still, he’d put in an order. Rautalampi had chuckled when he saw him.

“Going to try it one more time?”

“We’ll see. I might buy something. Pigments. Maybe you could order me some of the powdered ones from France, the ones I used to use. Can you still get those?”

Rautalampi had run the same art supply store and frame shop on Uudenmaankatu for decades. A lot of people ordered things from the Internet these days, but Martti had doggedly stuck with Rautalampi—there are some things that shouldn’t change. I knew you’d come back, Rautalampi said good-naturedly. I kept telling myself, Ahlqvist will come back. I’m sure he’ll want to work again some day.

A strange, pleasant sense of shame had rushed over him, the same feeling he remembered from his younger years, the first few times he got caught drawing in his sketchbook.

They’d had a cup of coffee in the back room and smoked a pipe of good tobacco. As he was walking out of the shop he’d felt the same enthusiasm for painting that he’d had when he was young.

Elsa went into the kitchen and looked in the cabinets.

“Good. Anna and Matias bought some fresh coffee.”

She poured water in the pot, smelled the ground coffee with her eyes closed as she usually did before measuring it out. Martti picked up the gesture and drew it precisely in his mind. Elsa saw his look, flipped the switch of the coffeemaker with a smile. It made a crunching sound and then started to gurgle.

“Maybe I’ll just sit here,” Elsa said, sitting down at the table. “I’ll just sit here and you can take down all my essentials. If you’re thinking about painting, you could try painting me.”

He laughed. “I wouldn’t know how.”

“Try,” Elsa said.

She crossed her legs, leaned on her arms, closed her eyes.

Here was Elsa’s whole face. It was so rare to be able to see her whole, all of the versions of her at the same time.

He remembered one time like that. Elsa had been packing her clothes for some trip. He saw her back, which he had always looked at tenderly, always stroked as he passed if he could. He was thinking about how he’d never cared particularly what Elsa looked like from behind. No, that wasn’t it. What he had thought was: that woman could be anyone, a stranger.

The thought had suddenly taken on the strength of a horror. Elsa had evolved a series of gestures and expressions that he wasn’t a part of, that he could never make his home in, and now she was suddenly a stranger.

The realization had a weirdly triumphant flavor. As if he’d been given a reason for his vague feelings of hostility. If I feel this much hate, he thought, love must be a lie.

He remembered how he had believed that he hated the way Elsa popped a bite of sandwich in her mouth, her way of combing her hair or dishing vegetables onto a plate to cover exactly one quarter of its surface.

He also hated the way she took care of Ella when she came home. She monopolized her, invented her own rituals with her daughter so that he was left out of them. And the little girl turned to Elsa like the sun, always staying close to her, wanting to be held, cuddled.

Their bitterest fights had been in those days after Elsa returned home. When they were fighting he would make a note of her every gesture, every rise and fall of her body, like a clinician gathering observations for a report.

Often days would go by in this strange, rarified atmosphere. Elsa would gaze out the window, caress the girl but speak to her only a little, and look like she longed to be back at work, traveling, away from here.

And then, out of nowhere, a fight would start. Elsa would lash out at him with the words they always used, familiar words, finding just the right ones.

It had been one of those evenings when he stood in the doorway watching her perform some ordinary task.

He let the thought come into his mind: I don’t love you. At the moment that he let himself think that, he was able to see Elsa whole.

This woman: brown hair, glasses, her skirt a little tight around her thighs, heavy breasts that had fed one child placid under her blouse. A woman who had a whole store of the right words, many of them gentle ones, a woman who could hide her tiredness better than anyone he knew. Elsa was always careful not to show herself to strangers. This woman absorbed in some activity, ironing a shirt, folding sheets or leafing through papers. Sunk in her thoughts, starting to slump.

What is it? she had asked. Have you been standing there long?

She had looked up at him as if she were embarrassed that he was watching her without her knowing it.

You’re beautiful.

Ah, she said, flustered. She smiled, bent down to pick up another piece of clothing—she must have been ironing, not leafing through papers.

I don’t know if I love you anymore.

She looked at him, surprised, received the words like a sudden slap, not yet realizing their power.

He had thought, this is the crossroads. If he continued life the way they were used to, if he thought of her as the girl she’d been when they met, he couldn’t be close to her.

You have to learn the other person again all the time.

IT WAS AS if Elsa knew his thoughts. She opened her eyes and looked at him slightly reprovingly.

She let out a little sigh, light. For a moment he waited for words, blame, a reminder of something a long time ago. When it didn’t come, he asked, “Are you angry?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look irritated.”

She got up from the table, walked over to him, and took him in her arms. They stood that way for a long time without saying anything. Finally she said, “I miss the days when I had time to be angry. Now it feels like death will come before I even have a chance to cuss.”

“I’m sure you have time for one damn it. Give it a try.”

Her breath felt hot and damp through his shirt.

“Damn it,” she said gropingly, questioningly, like a child.

“Look at that. See?”

“Are you ever going to paint me?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Would you like me to?”

Lightly, as if she were talking about the end of any period of time—picking strawberries before the damp days of late summer, digging potatoes in June, while they’re still small and flavorful—she said, “I don’t know. But if you’re going to do it, you’d better hurry.”

A HAPPY DAY, like they used to have. There was life in the cabin, Anna and Maria were bustling around upstairs, cleaning the shed and cutting the grass, coming now and then to help with the sauna. Elsa sat on the porch and seemed to be enjoying herself.

“I’m looking at things really closely now,” she said. “It seems to me that I ought to get a good look at every tree and hollow.”

Matias played the guitar after dinner, teased Eleonoora by playing “Eleanor Rigby,” which she didn’t like.

“It’s such a sad song,” she said. “I don’t want a song like that for my namesake.”

“It’s pretty,” Matias insisted.

“Everybody in it ends up alone,” Eleonoora said. “Play something else. Play ‘Blackbird.’”

Matias played “Blackbird” and everyone liked it. Elsa turned to look at the tops of the spruce trees and the lakeshore. Eleonoora reached out her hand and stroked her mother’s back. For a moment they had the feeling that it didn’t matter that they could never return to this moment. For this once, it was that complete.

THEY TORE UP the entire floor of the sauna. Anna wanted to keep the newspapers. She spread the whole last part of the sixties out across the dock, weighing the pages down with rocks, and sat half the day bent over them, as if she were examining a rare plant through a microscope.

Later she came to the door. The others had gone to eat and Martti was tossing the last of the planks into a pile.

“That fire—did it start quickly?” she asked.

“I guess so,” he said. “It burst into flames.”

She swung her wrists, shifted from one foot to the other. She had on tennis shoes and jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, clothes she would have worn when she was twelve. Maybe she was smarter, more perceptive than he had realized. Children change without our noticing. First they’re one or two years old, then they’re five. They’re frolicking around the yard with an inner tube in their skinny arms, and everything’s already begun. They’ve already begun to understand about the world. The years go by, they wear different clothes, find new expressions, gather information in secret, and carry it quietly within them.

“What about those paintings in the shed?” she asked.

Martti bent over to pull up the last board from the corner. It cracked as it came away. The crack made him feel satisfied in a way he couldn’t name.

“What about them?” he asked.

“I was thinking that I might take one home and put it on the wall.”

“Why not, if it suits you? Take whatever you like. You can take those old etchings, too. It was something I tried for a while. A lot of work, but I enjoyed it.”

“Thanks. I looked through them yesterday,” she said. “There were a few really good ones.”

He realized he missed her company. When was the last time they went for coffee, sat and talked?

“Do you still play the tram game?” he asked. “The one where you make up lives for people?”

She took hold of the shared memory, smiling. “Still do.”

“Shall we try it?” he asked. “Like we used to?”

“As soon as we get back to town.”

He bent to pick up a newspaper page. It was the same year as the others. The headlines were about demonstrations.

“Look,” he said. “A rebellion.”

She reached out, took the page, glanced at it. “The rebellion is alive under the floorboards,” she said with a smile.