Then Anne captures Olli’s attention. He can’t keep his eyes off her new body. She notices him watching her and apparently decides to allow it, because she smiles at him.
But at the same time, she looks back at Karri to make sure that he’s noticed their little game. She’s trying to make Karri jealous, Olli thinks.
Karri doesn’t seem to care. Anne looks upset. Olli is amused.
The world is bathed in bright colours. Their steps are buoyed, carefree. Anything is possible, because everything exists just for them. Olli would like to run with the wind, climb trees, and shout his joy out loud. He controls himself, though, because he doesn’t want to seem childish.
But nothing lasts forever. They’ve started talking in the dim of the evenings about how adulthood will eventually take hold of even them, and they’ll become businessmen, doctors, engineers, fathers and mothers, boring grown-ups with rules and responsibilities. But the inevitable can still be put off. You just have to keep moving. Not stay too close to adults for too long, or pretty soon you’ll start to think like them.
Aunt Anna once said, “Listen kids, once you’re grown up, the days and the summers fly away from you, and there’s not a single thing you can do about it.” They know that, of course. Schoolchildren have summer holidays, but the shift workers at the paper mill and the plywood plant, just like the ones at the rifle factory, are always either at work or at home asleep, and they don’t have time to do anything else.
There are railway workers here, too. One of them rides past them on a bicycle. His clothes are covered in dust. They know him as a gruff man who refuses to acknowledge anyone in Tourula except for other railway men.
To the Famous Five, the old man raises a hand and waves. They return the greeting politely.
Last summer at the Esso station they caught a robber who had stolen the railwayman’s bike. As a reward the old man gave them his eternal gratitude and as proof of it arranged a tour of his workplace for them. They got to go in the train engine, where he gave them pear soda and Carnival biscuits.
Karri follows a few metres behind the rest of them, dragging his tennis shoes, raising a cloud of dust that the wind can’t blow away.
They cross the little bridge and walk along the river upstream. The water flows quietly beside them. Leo, Anne, Riku and Olli stop when they come to a boat. Aunt Anna had a wooden boat here at one time. Last summer the Five used it to chart the river and the lake it feeds into. Then it disappeared, at the same time that Timi did—in fact it might have been on the same trip.
They’ve tried many times to work out the details together. The only thing they all agree on is that the day started with them setting out on a boat trip to find the river’s source, and ended with them walking back to Tourula from somewhere on the other side of town. They were tired, dirty and distressed because Timi wasn’t with them. None of them knew what had happened to him.
The next day they noticed that the boat wasn’t in its usual place. They discussed whether someone might have taken it, or whether they had forgotten it somewhere. No one remembered returning the boat. Feeling guilty, they borrowed the neighbour’s boat and searched the shores of the river and the lake, but Aunt Anna’s boat was never found.
There are derelicts with liquor bottles sitting on the bank of the river. They’re no trouble. They just ask passers-by for small change, with exaggerated politeness, and they never bother children.
Olli looks behind him. Karri has stopped on the bridge, staring into the water. The distance between them is growing. The others don’t seem to notice.
Riku suggests that they eat their lunch now. Leo has more foresight and says they can eat later, when they’ve gone farther, maybe up to Taulumäki. They are on an expedition, after all, and explorers don’t eat their lunches too early. When they find a good picnic spot they can eat and then Karri can lead them to the secret passages.
16
THE BUSINESSLIKE RESERVE of Greta’s messages bothered Olli. He could read between the lines and he was worried that Book Tower might not be the publisher for her third book. “The furrows on your brow are getting deeper,” Maiju commented at their weekly meeting.
Greta Kara was cool in her messages, but in his dreams the girl in the pear-print dress was still passionate and devoted, and the person Olli was in his sleep loved the girl back, with all his heart. When at the moment of waking the dream slipped back into the darkness between his synapses, the feeling of loss felt like it could tear his ribcage open.
“What is it?” Aino gasped one morning. Olli must have sobbed as he awoke. Aino stared at him aghast, trying to see inside his head. Her sour breath wafted in his face and he turned away. He couldn’t talk to Aino until he got the dream out of his head.
Plus he had to change his pyjama bottoms.
Aino pushed herself closer, like a reptile, opened her mouth, touched his cheek with her fingertips, and sniffed at him, her nostrils flaring.
Olli closed his eyes.
A moment before, the girl in the pear-print dress had been in his arms. They had kissed, nibbled each other, cried and whispered sweet nothings. He had licked her cheek and her neck and tasted the salt on her skin. She had caressed, kissed, sucked, bit him gently, all the while gazing at him with her green eyes until Olli came on her dress and she closed her eyes and whispered that she loved him.
Then something had changed.
They had looked at each other with the knowledge that something bad was going to happen. No time for goodbyes—the dream was torn away like a blanket and the girl was hurled into oblivion.
For several long minutes he was left shivering in the middle of a life he didn’t recognize as his own.
That evening Olli decided to play with his son. It had been a while since they had last spent time together. He didn’t mean to be a distant father; he was just very busy. But maybe they could do some wrestling today.
Olli walked from room to room, but he didn’t see his son anywhere.
Aino was in the living room. She was sitting on the sofa, her hands in her lap, her back stiff. The television was off. Aino stared at the black screen. Olli picked the remote up off the sofa and turned the television on. There was a fun show about mongooses on the nature channel. Aino liked animals. Maybe this would cheer her up. There was still an hour before the news.
Olli asked about the boy. Aino didn’t hear him, or didn’t want to hear. He concentrated on the television programme. The mother mongoose’s cubs were in constant danger and the show was steeped in drama. When Olli repeated his question, Aino said thinly, “Yeah, he’s at the neighbour’s playing.”
Ten minutes later Olli was standing in the bathroom in his pyjama bottoms doing his evening wash and brush. He didn’t feel tired. He just wanted to sleep.
A couple of days later, and Olli was in the living room standing in front of the portrait of Notary Suominen. There really was a strong resemblance between them, him and the old notary. Guests often thought it was a portrait of Olli.
His grandfather’s example had been an inspiration and an obligation ever since that resemblance was pointed out to him. The notary’s expression in the picture was inscrutable. Olli liked to think that his grandfather was looking at him approvingly, but lately he hadn’t deserved Notary Suominen’s respect.
At Olli’s graduation party, his mother had spread out the family photo albums for the guests to look at. Olli’s aunt the doctor, his father’s sister, whom the family hadn’t seen since her father’s funeral years before, was the one who compared the two photos and said that Olli and the notary resembled each other.