16

THE TELEPHONE RINGS three times before a woman’s voice answers. Anna has been putting this off for over a week.

“Population Registry,” the woman says, somewhat demandingly.

For some reason Anna needs to preserve her anonymity. She doesn’t introduce herself.

“You can use an old name and address to find a new address, right?”

“Yes. If you have the person’s name and year of birth.”

Anna’s hand is shaking.

“Her name is Eeva Ellen Ronkainen. She was born in 1942, from what I can tell. I don’t know where she’s been living. One of her addresses was on Sammonkatu, in Helsinki. She was born in Kuhmo. Her last name may have changed if she married. Ronkainen is her maiden name.”

“All right,” the woman says. “Let’s see what we can find.”

Anna can hear her typing something into a computer.

“She’s not a relative of yours, then?”

“Not exactly . . . In a way. In a way she is.”

Hesitation reaches out over the phone line.

“Why do you want information about her?”

An awful idea occurs to Anna.

“Am I required to give a reason?”

“There are cases where we ask,” the woman says. “Not all information is public.”

“It’s for genealogical research. Sort of.”

“Fine.”

Anna hears a mouse click. She imagines the arrow on the woman’s screen pointing at a group of Eeva Ronkainens, then Eeva Ellen Ronkainens. There may be two of them, or more. Anna can almost hear the system’s process of elimination, leaving just one in the end.

“Yes,” the woman says. “We seem to have a record of the person in question. Would you like me to read you the information?”

Anna hears herself say yes.

“Eeva Ellen Ronkainen,” the woman says, then pauses for a moment. “Born in Kuhmo in 1942. There are some addresses here, although none of them are on Sammonkatu. Maybe it wasn’t her official residence. All of her addresses are in Helsinki, including the last one . . .”

“The last one?”

The woman pauses a moment, sighs, then reads, in a declaratory, emphatic tone: “Died in Kuhmo in 1968.”

Anna hears Frida, the three-year-old who lives downstairs, crying defiantly. On rare days Frida smiles at Anna in the elevator, shows her her toys, and makes pronouncements of truth. I live downstairs and you live upstairs but that’s not the same thing as heaven.

“How did she die?” Anna asks, bewildered.

The woman laughs. Maybe she’s the kind of person who likes shocking people, or maybe she’s just one of those people who has no empathy. People who are embarrassed and laugh when they ought to sympathize.

“We don’t have any of that information, of course. We have records of births, marriages, addresses, children’s births, and deaths. We don’t have the resources to record the cause of death. Or the permission, actually.”

“What do I do, then? What should I do?”

The woman laughs again, types on her keyboard some more. She really is someone who’s embarrassed by the role of messenger. She stops typing. Anna can’t say anything. The line doesn’t hum. Just silence.

“Well,” the woman says, “if you don’t know her relatives, I can’t help you.” Then she says, a little surprised, “She died when she was twenty-six years old.”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes people die young. Accidents, illnesses that can whisk you off in a week, unexpectedly.”

“Yeah,” Anna says. “All sorts of things.”

The woman is quiet for a moment. Anna realizes that those people who work at the Population Registry must have a specified way of expressing condolences. Then the woman surprises her and says with a sigh: “I’ve always thought that if I die young, in a car accident or something, maybe in the summer, on a summer road, driving through farmland, I’d die happy. Maybe she died like that.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

The woman reads her the last three addresses again. Anna writes them down. She says thank you, good-bye, ready to end the call. Now the woman says it, a little strained, as if she’s speaking a foreign language: “I’m sorry.”

She’s young. Anna didn’t realize it until now. Maybe just a little older than Anna herself. To those still living out their youth, words of condolence are a foreign language and it hurts a little to speak it. Young people think, That’s not for me, it never will be for me.

She hangs up the phone and listens to the silence. There’s an ad for a dentist on a flyer that came in the mail. A yellow slip of paper with Matias’s grocery list from yesterday. “Coffee milk” is underlined twice. Matias can’t stand a morning without milk for his coffee.

Anna stands in the entryway. Her strength seems to be draining out of her. The black stain that had been shrinking starts to spread again. She’s pouring ink on the floor, pouring herself into the cracks between the floorboards.

Without knowing what she hopes to accomplish, she dials the Population Registry again. A man’s voice answers. She’s a little disappointed that she can’t present her question to the woman she just spoke to: “Eeva Ellen Ronkainen. Born in Kuhmo in 1942, died in Kuhmo in 1968. Can you tell me whether she had any siblings?”