Olli lit a cigarette. Over the past few days he had started smoking. Not a lot—usually just two or three cigarettes a day—but he hadn’t smoked at all before. He had stopped in at the publishing house and, on a whim, pinched a cigarette from the pack on Maiju’s desk and lit up when he got outside. It tasted awful and made him cough, but it also calmed his nerves. According to the Guide, smoking could help free you of attachment to the continuum.
A cinematic way of life always has a certain fatalism, and what could be more fatalistic than allowing yourself to enjoy the aesthetics of cigarette smoke?
He focused on smoking.
Olli is playing with the smoke, losing himself in the glowing tip of his cigarette.
That fiery dot is the only thing real in all the grey; everything else is a dream. The smoke mixing with the wind is like a wordless poem. According to A Guide to the Cinematic Life, smoking is, at its core, a lyrical, metaphorical and meditative activity that can deepen the sense of meaningfulness and dispel the sensation of ordinariness. A cinematic life can’t take away pain, but it can make it more aesthetic, make of it a kind of wine of emotion, a music of feeling.
The walking path is between the river and a steep bluff. The ravine is lined with trees and bushes and along the top are houses surrounded by wooden fences. The place is cinematically beautiful. It also has drama—with enough heavy rain the bluff could collapse and send the houses tumbling into the river.
The path is still empty; the only movement is on the bridge. A bicycle whizzes past behind Olli’s back. Pedestrians come and go. Each pair of shoes has its own sound, each set of steps its own rhythm. Gazing over the valley, Olli listens and tries to guess what kind of person each one passing might be. A long-legged man in no hurry. An old person in pain with a walker. A young couple intertwined. A mother with her children, in a rush. A woman in high heels, swinging her hips.
The smell of floral perfume makes Olli turn around. A Veronica Lake copy is coming onto the bridge, headed into town. Maiju?
No. She’s shorter and stockier than Maiju, and she has an angry look on her face.
He sees another woman at the opposite end of the bridge in a beret and trench coat, carrying binoculars. She’s pretending to use them to watch the birds in the trees along the shore, but they’re actually aimed at Olli. He’s been trying not to think about it, but it’s obvious that the Blomrooses have been watching him and Greta.
In any case they’ve been watching Greta closely, no doubt through hired henchmen. Anne Blomroos has virtually unlimited resources. There could be a hundred people in Jyväskylä hired to monitor the progress of the Blomrooses’ mission of atonement. Their reconnaissance must also include analysts collecting kernels of information and formulating predictions of Greta’s behaviour. They have to be getting information somewhere to be able to know where Olli needs to go to run into her.
Olli pretends not to notice the woman. And who knows, she might be an innocent birdwatcher; the spies might be somewhere else, out of sight. He needs to focus on Greta anyway, and forget about other things.
Just as he’s starting to suspect that the Blomrooses’ information was wrong and Greta is somewhere else today, an umbrella with pears printed all over it comes into view from beneath the bridge.
Olli walks towards the downtown end of the bridge and the stairs that lead to the river. He can see the woman better now. It’s Greta, in a dark suit. Olli readies himself. It’s time to enact the Blomrooses’ kissing scene, and finally set this romance in motion.
He’s terrified. Not so much because he is acting against his morals, but because of how much he’s enjoying it. Maybe it’s the influence of M-particles, he thinks, not sure whether he’s serious.
He braces himself to run down the wooden steps. He feels light on his feet.
She’s walking down the path, taking no notice of him. Olli waves and is about to shout her name when someone grabs him by the arm.
“Suominen!…”
Olli turned around and saw three gentlemen from the Jyväskylä Club with suits and umbrellas which he recognized immediately as high-quality merchandise. They were obviously on their way to some occasion, or perhaps coming from one. One of the men coughed and said, “So, Mr Suominen, I assume you’ve paid your club membership?”
The other men chuckled.
Olli was surrounded, the men prodding at him as if he were a horse for sale.
“Well,” a man in a hat with a moustache and a red nose said with a sigh, “we’re all very busy, we all have to make a living—and luckily, for the present company at least, it’s a decent living—but when a man’s been elected to the parish council, he ought to have a place where he can take some time out of his day-to-day grind and spend an evening sitting and talking among equals without the riff-raff jumping on his every word, wouldn’t you agree? So I’m going ask you straight out, right here before the eyes of God and these humble representatives of the Jyväskylä elite: how long do you plan to keep us waiting for you to join us and take your rightful place in the club? Or do we have to call your wife and ask permission for you to come out and play with the other boys?”
The men laughed.
Olli mumbled something about being in a hurry and smiled apologetically. When he tried to leave, they scolded him for being in such a rush and one of them laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Too much hurry’s bad for the blood pressure. Isn’t that right, boys?”
The others agreed.
Now Olli could smell the cognac on their breath. He said a firm goodbye and moved off so quickly that they made way for him.
The moustached man stumbled and would have fallen if the others hadn’t grabbed him. His hat and umbrella fell on the ground and he stared after Olli in shock.
“Did he hit me?” the man asked, panting and red-faced.
“He didn’t hit you,” the others said, patting him. “Mr Suominen’s just in a hurry and didn’t feel like chatting with us, nice as we were to him.”
Olli mumbled his apologies and ran down the steps. He stopped under the bridge. His temples were throbbing.
Greta was nowhere to be seen.
The gentlemen from the Jyväskylä Club watched him from above, grumbling. Olli wondered if he should go back and offer a proper apology and exchange a few pleasantries with Jyväskylä’s movers and shakers.
Then he changed his mind, and started running upriver.
Still no sign of Greta. When he got to the cemetery he sat down on a bench to rest. The rain was stopping. It was warm, but Olli was shivering. He lit a cigarette, then immediately tossed it away.
Eventually he got up and headed towards home. As he started across Puistokatu he noticed that he no longer had his umbrella with him. He went back to the bench. It was empty.
A little farther down the river shore stood a scruffy-looking cocker spaniel. Unless Olli’s eyes deceived him, it had his umbrella in its mouth.
He tried to approach the dog, but it turned and ran off.
It took Olli fifteen minutes to walk the two kilometres home. When he got there, he climbed to the second floor, winded, and sat down at the computer to look at Greta’s Facebook status.
She had just updated it:
Greta Kara has just come from a walk through the postcard landscape along the shores of Tourujoki, continuing to get to know the old places. A pleasant walk, which nevertheless felt somehow lacking. I guess this cinematic pilgrim was hoping that since she was in the old places she might see an old friend…