Verse:
A name is a strange and twisted thing.
It will outlast you.
After you’re gone, your name will go on happily without you.
Chorus:
There is no avoiding my name.
My name is Ay-no Paa-so-nen.
That’s how Aino introduced herself at our boring faculty meetings. She cut quite a figure at these. As we went around the table, most of us would just say our names and what we taught, but Aino would put on a small production.
She would pronounce her name emphatically, the syllables spaced apart, like a language instruction tape. It’s Finnish, she’d tell us. I teach literature and translation, she’d say.
Then she would proceed to recount her life story.
And I would proceed to space out. I’d look out the window, to see if anything was going on in the cemetery.
I know we spoke at these quarterly meetings and when we ran into each other in the halls, coming to and from class, but it should come as no surprise that I wasn’t particularly aware of Aino until I found out she was dying. That’s when I stopped staring out the window and began to observe her.
Aino had short brown hair that was parted on the side, dark-brown eyes, and pale skin. She wore these skirt suits that were both stylish yet outdated, démodé, like the suits Jackie Kennedy wore, without the timeless quality. Aino didn’t wear makeup except for a streak of bright-red lipstick.
There was an anachronistic aspect to her appearance. When I first caught sight of her, five or so years ago, she would have been around sixty, but her demeanor was youthful; with that schoolboy’s haircut and an androgynous face, she resembled a teenage boy playing dress-up in his mother’s clothes.
And of course there were those lengthy, otherworldly introductions: from what I could gather, Aino was born somewhere in Europe during World War II—1943, I think, though I never figured out where precisely—in the cradle of Fascism, amid the bombed-out ruins, her words. When she was a child, her family moved from country to country, from Hungary to Sweden to Italy to France, hopping around like birds, eating scraps, developing an ear for languages along the way. When her family sailed to America, she wandered the decks, from first class down to steerage, listening to other immigrants gossiping in their mother tongues.
Aino spoke fifteen or sixteen languages in all, not counting Middle High German and some arcane Finnish dialects. Her academic area of specialty was Greek antiquity—those formative years in postwar Europe gave her an affinity for ruins—along with Italian literature. I know she taught Dante and took her students to the Getty to see the Renaissance portraits, so they can behold the faces that captivated Dante, so they can look upon the face of Beatrice Portinari and be equally besotted. Aino seemed to be working on about a thousand writing projects at any given time: translations of Italian Renaissance poetry and a number of significant Finnish poets and then there was her memoir, which, from what I could gather, was a book of memories of my rootless childhood: an entire life not knowing which tongue was my mother, her words.
What struck me most about Aino, far more than her appearance or her preambles, was her . . . warmth, this feeling of boundless . . . generosity she emanated and that I didn’t return.
I first learned that Aino was unwell at a meeting, though not from her; she wasn’t there. She was meant to be, but as Herta, the chair of the BA program, explained, Aino was in Philadelphia and had been rushed to a hospital. Details were scarce: all Herta knew was Aino had lost consciousness and they had to perform emergency surgery. Apparently Aino was doing alright; her condition was stable.
Without Aino, preliminaries were short and to the point, and we moved quickly through all the tedious items of agenda.
A couple of months later, Aino was back, dressed in a skirt suit—this one was tweed, like the kind Miss Marple wears in Agatha Christie mysteries. Aino had a big white bandage wrapped around her head. When it came her turn to speak, she announced her name and told us what happened.
“Well,” she said, with her usual ardor, “I’ve been on quite an adventure lately.” She described the circumstances: She had flown to Philadelphia to look after her mother, who was in her early nineties and whose health was ailing. Her mom had a procedure and Aino was set to return to LA. But on the way to the airport, she had blacked out in the cab and had to be taken back to the same hospital her mother was in.
“It turns out I had a brain tumor,” Aino said, “the size of an orange, a small orange. They operated on me immediately.”
“So far so good,” she said, when someone asked how the operation had gone. “I’m on my first course of chemotherapy and the doctors are optimistic.”
Aino’s refined face was swollen from the drugs and the violence of the operation, but she was beaming, like she had won a prize.
“I’m learning so much about the brain. All this wonderful knowledge. When they split open my skull and removed the tumor, I felt like I’d given birth to something, like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. Afterward they showed me X-rays; where they had taken out the tumor there was a huge crater. It was as though I had landed on the surface of the moon.” She laughed.
“And I was struck by how kind people were. When I first got to the hospital, I woke up for a while. Because it was all so sudden, I hadn’t dressed properly and I was cold, and a nurse gave me her cardigan and said I could keep it. I’ve been wearing it ever since.” She opened up the flap of her jacket to show us the olive green wool. “It’s my good luck charm.”
Aino was around quite a bit after that.
She appeared to be her buoyant self, but I began to detect a . . . change in her personality.
It was a little hard to tell at first: she had always been extravagant when she talked, overexcited as she ran through her stream of enthusiasms. Initially, it was as if she had just . . . turned up the volume on her persona a notch or two, become a more heightened version of herself.
She resumed her regular opening remarks, though when she said her name, she pronounced it even more dramatically, extending each syllable, slowing her name down, as if she were trying to prolong the sound of her name.
Her intros themselves kept getting more protracted, full of digressions, sort of . . . ragged around the edges. Aino would talk of her early childhood, but she would linger in the past, weave in tiny, disjointed memories of eating a pastry on the Boulevard Haussmann or petting a goat in a village in Italy or watching the fish swim beneath a frozen lake in Sweden.
“And the fumes,” she said once, referring to the odor of the bombed European cities she and her family wandered through. “That’s the smell of my childhood. It escorted us everywhere, even to America. I can still smell those fumes.”
This reverie led Aino to another, less-distant anecdote, about an artist’s colony she had lived at in Malibu, Positano, I think it was called, a bohemian pastoral paradise, but Aino told us the colony was destroyed in a fire. “I lost everything,” she said. “And losing everything was a kind of revelation.”
There was more to it, Aino said . . . so much more, but as she rambled on, my mind wandered in and out of what she was saying. Some days I would resume my old habits and tune out completely; the magnetic pull of the cemetery was simply too strong.
There was one day when Aino had my complete focus. Do you know how rare that is?
She was telling us about a book, not one she was writing but a book she had published, about an Italian author, Alessandro Manzoni.
I have no idea how she even got onto this, but she was trying to elucidate her theory of the figura of the hourglass in his novel The Betrothed. Something about the figura of the hourglass as a metaphysical interpretation of the nature of life, which, in Catholic eschatology, must pass through death, in order to enter into another form of life, an afterlife which is . . . eternal.
I can’t say that those were her exact words. What I can tell you is that, as she talked, giving us her impromptu lecture, which, in its attempt to clarify her thesis, only served to make it more opaque, Aino pulled something out of the pocket of this big black trench coat she had taken to wearing, over her other layers, to stay warm. I couldn’t make out the object, it was so small, but then I saw it was an hourglass, the size of a hummingbird; she had brought one with her to illustrate her point, like it was show-and-tell.
She made no reference to it, but, as she kept talking, droning on and on about Manzoni and figuras and hourglasses and the symphonic, centrifugal movement between life and death, and how life is lined with time, like a coat is lined with silk, she played with the small object, which was the most exquisite thing I’ve ever seen, turning it up and down in the palm of her hand.
Not content to stop there, Aino switched gears and began discussing the translations she was working on, simultaneously, in a frenzy. She recited a poem, line by line, a verse in Finnish, then in English, though she kept correcting herself, doubting her translation, rectifying her word choice: she gave up on the poem midstanza and moved on to the subject of her memoir.
“But I use the term memoir cautiously, because the book is not strictly nonfiction,” she said, still turning the hourglass in her hand. “I imagine what my life might have been like if the war didn’t happen, if I grew up in Finland, instead of nomadically, translinguistically, switching languages and landscapes until my identity itself was open to question. In the book, I slip in words in multifarious tongues, untranslated, so the reader will have the same disorienting experience I had as a girl. I’ve been writing this book all my life. It’s all in here,” she said, tapping her forehead with her free hand. “And it’s nearly finished. I just have to fiddle with the end, which is eluding me, but I’ll finish it as soon as I get the time because there’s this other book I’m eager to start . . .”
People in the room were getting annoyed, or perhaps that was just me. The dying are a source of vexation; they are visible symbols of what’s in store for us. Aino had acquired some of the dead’s irritating habits, their disdain for order and propriety.
Herta jumped in and thanked Aino and patted her gently on the shoulder. Aino smiled and looked baffled. She put the hourglass down on the table. I don’t think she knew how long she had been talking. It was as if she was beginning to lose a sense of time, or had already entered a space where time had a new value, no value, a useless currency.
But then she looked embarrassed. She blushed, red against the faded blackness of her trench coat.
What with all her babbling, Aino started to seem like a crazy woman, and she looked the part, in that trench coat, with her bandaged head. Her face remained puffy, like a child with mumps, but she was perpetually smiling like a demented man in the moon.
I stayed clear of the weird lady with the hole in her skull. I made sure I didn’t sit near Aino, and if I saw her at the end of the hall, I would act like I didn’t see her and walk the other way. I didn’t want to get caught in an interminable conversation that would be tricky to extricate myself from, and I didn’t want to get too . . . close to her. Physically, I mean. She kind of . . . repulsed me.
Even from a safe distance, Aino’s bandages reeked, her green cardigan too—one time she told us she never washed it, so the cardigan would retain its talismanic charm.
Can’t animals smell when another animal is dying and then keep well away? From a certain perspective, I was an unfeeling human, but from another viewpoint I was merely acting like an ordinary animal.
It became obvious that death was altering Aino, inside and out, yet I thought she was going to be okay. She hardly ever acknowledged her illness, and if she did, she was upbeat, dismissing it with a wave of her hand: there are all these new technologies and the drugs are doing wonders. I believed Aino would just go on being ill . . . indefinitely. But then suddenly she wasn’t at any of the meetings and had to cancel her classes, and I didn’t have to avoid her anymore.
One afternoon I was leaving class when I saw a former student of Aino’s, Gleah, who has red hair that stands on end, like she has thrust her finger in an electric socket. Gleah was also my student, though I feel uncomfortable using that phrase, my student, in that it implies I was her teacher and therefore must have taught her something.
We began to chat, in this narrow space wedged between two classrooms, located near an emergency exit. Gleah told me she had graduated and was at the university on some financial business.
I feigned interest until I figured I could inquire about Aino. I knew they were friends; Gleah lived around the corner from Aino in West LA. She said that Aino had another tumor—or was it that the tumor had come back? This one was much smaller than the first—Aino, Gleah said, had likened it to the size of a cherry—but it was infinitely more dangerous, in a region of the brain that controls all thought and speech.
So that’s why Aino’s spiels were so free-associative; it had nothing to do with eccentricity or exuberance: the cherry-sized tumor must have been putting pressure on her brain, so her thoughts spilled out uncontrollably.
Gleah had been driving Aino to the university, until she stopped teaching, chauffeuring her around. She had even taken her to the hospital.
“The tumor is basically inoperable,” Gleah said, “but she’s been getting some last-option treatment at Cedars Sinai. I spent a whole day with her, in the basement. You wouldn’t believe what they do down there.” Gleah has pale-blue eyes and they opened really wide.
“The door was open briefly so I got a quick look. They had Aino strapped into this metal apparatus, like some medieval torture device, straight out of the Inquisition. Her head was locked into it with these big metal clamps so she couldn’t move. And then they flooded her brain with ridiculous amounts of radiation, for two or three hours; it was like they were bombing her brain, nuking it. Even though it isn’t even going to fucking help.”
Gleah was getting more and more worked up as she talked. She’s the kind of person who emotes, is quick to anger; I can only achieve this in dreams. I didn’t want to look at her face, so I stared at her hair, as red and bright as the handle on the glass emergency exit door; she must have dyed it recently.
“It made me so damn furious,” she said. “It was this experimental treatment, a research project, more for the doctors than Aino, and the doctors wouldn’t tell us anything. When they were done, I asked Aino how she felt and she told me it was like being struck by lightning, but in your brain. You know Aino; she said something about Zeus playing with his lightning bolts in her mind. Though she could scarcely speak. When I drove her home she just kind of . . . collapsed in the back seat.”
Gleah stopped talking. I looked quickly at her face and saw her blue eyes were watering, deep pools, so I returned my gaze to her hair.
“That was awhile ago. I hadn’t heard from Aino and it was kind of a relief. I thought I should check in, so I called and Aino’s brother picked up. He said that Aino couldn’t come to the phone but would love to see me. The last I heard, Aino and her brother hadn’t talked in years. I should drop in. When someone’s ill and their estranged brother visits, it can’t mean anything good.”
Gleah had been a useful source of information, but she wasn’t the one who eventually notified me of Aino’s death. That came in a group e-mail from human resources.
I stopped whatever it was that I was doing—the event of Aino’s death suspended the monotony of my work day—and read the subject heading: The Passing of a Dear Colleague.
I suppose it’s a good thing, letting everyone at the university know, but it chilled me, the idea of having your death relayed in a memo, by human resources, circulated and blind-copied in an electronic communication you’re unable to open.
As I sat at my computer and skimmed that bureaucratic document, which gave a more reliable summary of Aino’s life than the one I gave you, I thought back to those meetings, Aino’s meandering monologues, especially during her later, most manic phase, and I understood her logic, which went beyond the neurological effects of the tumor: every time she told us her biography—expanding it, repeating it, revising it, deforming it—she did so with the knowledge that she was a woman preparing her own obituary.
And then a memory rose in me, something I had forgotten. When people die, flow out of the world, a certain pressure can be relieved, through an almost hydraulic mechanism, releasing memories.
Aino had come to a reading I did at the university, a few years ago, when my book came out. Did I tell you I wrote a book, a book of all my obsessions? It doesn’t matter; you wouldn’t have heard of it. Anyway, I noticed her during the reading, sitting in the first row with this blank look on her face.
Afterward, she bought a copy and I signed it, but when I handed the book back to her with my freshly inscribed name, her mien was inscrutable; she didn’t say anything, or offer any words of congratulation. This was unlike Aino, normally so vocal in her praise. I was a little put out at the time.
Now that Aino was gone, I could see the look on her face more clearly than before, when she was right in front of me, her expression that was a kind of ghost, as all expressions are, in that they are invisible yet promote the movement of the facial muscles, to convey an identifiable emotion, or lack thereof. Only now was I able to interpret her silence; I shouldn’t have taken it so personally. It was the blankness of the dead that Aino displayed that night, their reserve, their reticence.
I had to meet with Herta that day. I walked upstairs to her office. She had taped a photo of Aino on her door. Aino looked very young: long dark glossy hair, pale skin, a real beauty—vaguely reminiscent of the woman I knew.
“Yes, she was a total knockout,” Herta said when I commented on the picture.
We were meant to discuss a work-related matter, there were some issues regarding my performance, but we ended up talking about Aino. Herta had visited her a couple of weeks before she died.
“Aino couldn’t really see by then,” Herta told me, in her usual careful tone, “but she seemed to know who I was by the sound of my voice. She asked how things were at the university. ‘I’ll be back next quarter,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to teach?’ At times she spoke as if she were going to recover, but at other times she was lucid, more . . . cognizant of her predicament. She said some students had dropped in and she gave them a brief lesson on death. ‘What better place to teach than from your deathbed?’ she said. She taught them the various words for death, and she started to recite the list for me, Halal, Mavet, Mort, Morte, Mors, Muerte, Smrt, Thanatos, Tod, oh, and Kuolema, the Finnish word for death . . . those are just a few. Aino had me write the words down and repeat them out loud like I was one of her students, which I suppose I was. When I was done, she gestured for me to come near her and she whispered in my ear, ‘You know the number of words for death is infinite . . .’”
I asked Herta what else Aino had told her about death, taught her, but Herta didn’t answer my question. She looked at me as if she was considering it, then moved on. She said their conversation was interrupted by a phone call. Aino’s friend Juliette had called from Paris, and Aino’s brother got her on the phone.
“It was incredible,” Herta said, “to hear this woman, who was in such a poor physical state, talk so gaily and quickly in French. Aino was chatting and laughing as if she were at a cocktail party. They spoke for quite a while, and when it came time to say good-bye, Aino kept saying ‘Merci, merci, amis pour toujours, amis pour toujours . . .’
“But she had tired herself out.” Herta paused, like she was getting tired as well. She was wearing a dark suit, and I gazed at the fabric’s pinstripes, so fine as to be indiscernible.
“After she got off the phone,” Herta said, “Aino seemed to be in this whole other realm, floating somewhere between West LA and Paris. She would say something tangential and translate it, not just into one language but into all those languages she knew. I think she was striving to keep her brain active, to keep practicing what she had learnt throughout her life, so she wouldn’t lose her skills. It was like being at the United Nations and hearing each statement translated over headphones into multiple tongues.
“And the register of her voice kept changing. Sometimes it was quite deep and then it would become very high and childlike. She kept shifting registers, never speaking in a register that was her own. Watching the words come out of Aino’s lips, which were cracked and covered in sores, was uncanny, like watching one of those old European movies that have been dubbed into English. I stopped talking and just sat there and listened to Aino and all her voices until it was time for me to say good-bye.
“When I did, I told Aino that I was thinking of her. Although her eyes were clouded with cataracts, they seemed to focus, and she looked at me, even though she couldn’t see me. She smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, everything is fine, all is well, everything is fine.’ She kept smiling and repeating this statement, over and over. The way she was projecting her voice and its cadence reminded me of those town criers who used to wander around villages in the medieval period, making public announcements. But the voice also seemed to . . . stream from her depths. She was virtually . . . singing her . . . proclamation, in this unearthly voice, like the Sirens . . .”
Herta had begun to speak quickly, and excitably, which was out of character, as if, like Aino, she was also channeling an alien register. As if she were channeling Aino. Or speaking from some new depths that had opened up inside of her. Ordinarily, Herta keeps herself together; she has this Germanic cool: her face and her pale-blue eyes tend to be expressionless.
She was still composed, but there was something tumultuous beneath her surface: nothing as blatant as Gleah’s show of emotion, just a flickering in her eyes. Herta grew silent, as if she were listening to Aino’s voice, as if she could still hear the voice that rose from Aino’s depths, the voice that wasn’t Aino at all, or, conversely, was truly Aino, her real voice, the voice that is only released in death. I could see that Herta had been taken off course by Aino’s song, like Ulysses and his crew, and she would have been better off not listening, plugging her ears with wax.
She appeared to have forgotten I was there, but as I made to leave, Herta added, “I won’t forget that voice for a long, long time.”
There was a memorial for Aino, but I didn’t go. It would have involved taking three buses.
Though I did have a dream about her memorial, so I did attend, in a way.
The dream took place in a church. Someone was giving a eulogy, but I couldn’t hear or see properly—the space was dimly lit and I was sitting in a pew near the back—so I moved to a pew near the front. Aino herself was eulogizing—somehow, aware that she was the guest of honor, she had circumvented the absence requirement of a memorial.
She looked handsome, austere: her hair was slicked back, her face pale, though she still wore lipstick. She was dressed in black trousers and a black shirt. The shirt’s fabric was glossy, just like a shirt I had as a teenager and misplaced. How did Aino get a hold of my shirt? Just like Mussolini’s Blackshirts—the fascism of death, I thought, a centralizing network that rules every movement of life.
Aino was standing behind a lectern, with a massive Bible spread open in front of her: Turn to Genesis, cage number 93, she said, instead of page number 93—the tumor must still be pressing on her brain, distorting her speech in death, I thought.
I tried to listen but I was distracted: without leaving the pulpit, Aino changed outfits, like actresses change their gowns when they’re hosting the Academy Awards. She was now wearing a knitted pink Giorgio Armani skirt suit from the 1970s, shot through with silver thread. I knew she was relaying her message from the dead, that every word was of great importance, but my eyes were dazzled by the silver-pink fabric glittering in the half dark and I missed most of her eulogy—which rhetorically was more of a sermon—except for these lines: Dying can be considered an act of translation in which we are converted from one form into another medium that is . . . unintelligible. The problem of death is the problem of translation, the problem of death . . .
Aino had not finished, I knew that she would never finish, but I had to be elsewhere, life I suppose . . .
Aino once compared her brain tumor to an exotic orchid blooming in a greenhouse; however, deaths are not unique, and brain tumors are run of the mill, in the scheme of things.
Yet the circumstances of her fate are worth noting. Aino loved nothing more than the life of the mind, and, alert to this, Death went straight for her brain, the organ she most cherished, just as he would go for the voice box of an opera singer or the prick of a Don Juan. Death knows where to strike.
Though perhaps he or it bears us no spite. Aino’s ninety-three-year-old mother outlived her daughter; she was alive at the time of Aino’s death. Aino flew to see her mother, expecting her to die, but when she landed in Philadelphia, they . . . swapped fates. Or Death got confused, mistook daughter for mother. Death made . . . a mistake.
That book Aino was working on, her memoir, the one that was as good as done—apparently, no one can find any record of it: no file, no hard copy, not even notes.
From what Herta and Gleah told me, there are conflicting theories going around, depending on whom you talk to.
Some friends claim that Aino finished the book, not long before she died, but she hid the manuscript and forgot where she put it.
Others are of the opinion that the book existed once, long ago, but was lost in the fire in Malibu, and Aino, heartbroken, could never bring herself to rewrite it.
A few cynics say that Aino never wrote a word of this memoir; it was something she planned to do, when she had time. The only place the book existed was in the gray folds of her brain.
I can’t settle on any one theory; they all sound plausible. I’ve even come up with some of my own, like maybe the book did go up in smoke, not in the blaze at Positano, in which all 113 of the colony’s horses were burned alive, but a more concentrated, more recent conflagration, a fire that Aino started: Aino set the book alight, as an offering, a sacrifice, hoping that in exchange for destroying her memoir, the gods would grant her life.
Or, Aino did indeed hide the book. In the delirium of illness, she appeared to have forgotten where her hiding place was, but she was being crafty, disingenuous; this was one of her more lucid moments.
She knew perfectly where she had placed the manuscript but decided, after much thought—all there is to do on a deathbed is think, die, and think—that she didn’t want anyone to read the book, not if she wasn’t around. With the grave clarity of the individual who is not long for this world, she concluded that people reading your book after your death is equivalent to someone gawking at your corpse, poking it with a stick. So she smiled and played dumb, like a little girl who doesn’t want to share her secrets with anyone.
According to the university website, which is yet to take Aino’s biography down, she continues to work on her memoir. Occasionally, as I walk the hallways, Aino’s name pops into my head. And the thought, which is another kind of ghost, produces her apparition, a mental projection of her image. If I ran into her ghost for real, most likely I would act like I didn’t see her and walk the other way. But if I gathered my courage, I could ask her about the book: where is it? Is it anywhere? I could inquire as to how her work is going in the afterlife—not writing her life story, forget life—but translating that most forked and foreign of tongues, the most difficult language to learn, the language of death; translating death, or attempting to.