ON ONE OF these days, when the sun is shining warm and time doesn’t exist, when you can hear the strawberries ripening, Kerttu comes to Tammilehto. We’ve been in the country for two weeks by then. We have a week left before Elsa comes back. I haven’t thought about Elsa or Kerttu—just the sky and the blades of grass and the strawberries and evening walks to the vendor’s truck with him and the little girl. Kerttu comes unexpectedly. She’s with a man named Pennanen, an assistant sociology professor who’s taken to drink.

I haven’t seen Kerttu since June. She’s been in Stockholm, re-creating herself. Bangs, thickly lined eyes, a skirt the size of a pot holder. Boots, even though it’s summer.

Pennanen and the man are old friends. Kerttu was in Pennanen’s seminar in the spring and started an argument or two. Kerttu and Pennanen think they’re mortal enemies, but conflicts can sometimes give birth to strange friendships.

They bring a gigantic pork roast, wine, and a bottle of Koskenkorva with them. Pennanen strokes the pork, brags about getting the best cut. He looks at Kerttu. She glares at him and I don’t know what’s going on between them, whether it’s anger or mere teasing or something else altogether.

Just butchered today, Pennanen says. Let’s cook it up.

He drinks and smokes the whole time and has a dirty mouth. Kerttu likes being able to put a man like him in his place. They fight constantly, argue about anything at all. Kerttu annoys him on purpose and he annoys her.

We roast the pork on the shore. The little girl demands that Kerttu make herself a strawberry necklace, and Kerttu takes her up on it. They sit on the sauna porch sharing secrets not meant for me.

The man stokes the coals under the roast and I chop potatoes into the salad while Pennanen starts to show signs of increasing drunkenness. He ticks off his points: the direction of the country, the threat of war, nuclear weapons, Vietnam, the status of women, artistic trends.

He’s one of those people who start talking about revolution whenever they get some Koskenkorva in them. He’s also one of those who talk about good women and bad women.

He’s trying to straighten Kerttu out.

“Why aren’t you more like her?” he says. “Like Eeva? Accommodating.”

“Eeva isn’t accommodating,” Kerttu says stiffly.

Pennanen raises an eyebrow and snorts. “She’s here taking care of other people’s children.” He empties the bottle before finishing the sentence. “And other people’s husbands.”

The man is on him in two steps, throws the bottle in the lake, pushes Pennanen up against the wall of the sauna, next to a fishnet hanging from a nail.

“Drop it,” he says. “That’s the last mention of it.”

He lets go and Pennanen straightens his collar, a bit bewildered, as if he doesn’t know what hit him.

The little girl watches all of this, sitting on the sauna porch. The strawberries glow on her neck like red, forsaken eyes.

“It was a compliment,” Pennanen mutters. “I mean a compliment to you, Kerttu. In a way.”

“Start cultivating some other kind of compliments,” Kerttu says.

LATE THAT NIGHT I take a sauna with Kerttu. The men are sitting on the porch and the little girl’s already asleep. I don’t ask until we’ve cooled off after the steam.

“Am I accommodating? Is that how this seems?”

Kerttu hugs me. “Don’t get hung up on that. He was just talking. Drunk.”

“But do you think I should be more demanding?”

Kerttu studies me. There’s a crease between her eyebrows. “When is Elsa coming?”

“Next week, on Wednesday.”

This is the first time Elsa has been mentioned at all. The little girl talks about her sometimes, but the man never does. Kerttu looks out at the lake and seems to be thinking of what to say.

“Well,” she says finally. “When fall comes maybe you can do something.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe focus on your studies. You’ll be starting your thesis, right? Come to the university with me. I’ve met some new people. I can’t wait for you to meet them.”

“He loves me.”

“That’s not a small thing,” Kerttu says.

“And the little girl. She loves me, too.”

“I can see that.”

We swim across the bay and slowly back again, our voices echoing over the surface of the water. When my feet strike the bottom, just before I come up out of the water, I think that in the fall something has to change.

AS THE EVENINGS start to darken, I do it. He doesn’t even notice the change at first. He thinks I’m busy. Even in their apartment on Sammonkatu I go from room to room with a book in my hand.

Maybe Eeva’s looking elsewhere, he thinks. She turns away more than she used to, but that doesn’t mean anything. He comes and kisses me. I can’t turn completely away. I answer his kiss.

But in the weeks when I’m at home on Liisankatu, I don’t seem to hear the telephone when it rings, and if I happen to answer, I rattle off simple sentences. Yes, I say, the days are short, it’s getting darker than you’d expect. No, I say, I haven’t been to the movies. I’ve been sitting in the library. Yes. Busy.

I hang up the phone. I walk out the door, go down the street, take routes I’ve never taken before. I go to bars I’ve never been to. I meet people, but mostly I just walk to the library or into the quiet of the lecture hall to open my books and toil away.

I think that maybe I could be a teacher. I could easily apply for a position in the fall. Why not?

November brings snow, December, candles in the windows. I have evenings when I don’t think about the man once, perhaps only once about the little girl. But I still carry them with me everywhere, hauling them around like a moving van looking for a home.

I remember him even if I do walk down different streets. His smell is on me even if I am wearing new clothes. When you learn another person, you learn everything, the line of their jaw, the way they brush their teeth. Once you’ve learned the way someone mutters in their sleep as if they’re speaking some difficult ancient language, it’s hard to forget it.

I know his sore spots and cruelties, the complicated pattern of his occasional joys and his sometimes surprising melancholy. I carry it with me all through the autumn as I try to live my own life. I carry it like a useless, awkward, heavy treasure. What can I do with it? Bury it in the park?

I’d like to travel far away with the knowledge of how he curls his toes when he reads. I’d like to throw it off a mountain and see it bounce off the rocks below. And what about the way he sneezes? Or the little girl. The way she giggles! I could sell my memory of his sneezes or her giggles to a stranger on the street for a mark. I could trade it for a bottle of soda some Saturday in town, because I’ve started to feel like the memories are making me heavy and unwieldy. No, not heavy. They’re making me light, transparent.