He thinks of Aino and the boy, on a beach somewhere far away, waiting for him to complete his task and earn them a safe return home. Wipe your tears away and take care that your heroine gets her kiss this time. Show some passion. She’s expecting it, although she’s too afraid to show it.
Greta’s make-up starts to run again and Olli loosens his grip. He takes out his handkerchief and uses it to wipe her eyes, as if she were a little child.
“Maybe she died of some illness,” Greta whispers, unresisting, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Or maybe she was in a car accident, or was run over. I hope she had time to say goodbye to her husband and daughter. Oh Olli! It’s so terribly sad when people are torn from their loved ones and don’t even have a chance for a proper goodbye! What point is there in anything when everything that’s beautiful can end at any moment, with no warning?”
Olli puts his handkerchief in his pocket. The worst damage is repaired now. Greta stands looking at him, sad and petulant, as if the impermanence of everything were somehow his fault, or at least his to explain.
There’s nothing he can do about her fear. Words are useless. Greta has plenty of words of her own. The entire Guide to the Cinematic Life is an attempt to use words to answer a question that torments the author herself.
And the book’s answer is that lasting happiness may be impossible and joy impermanent, but life can at least be made aesthetically beautiful.
A beautiful story has a beautiful beginning and a beautiful ending. The illusion of happiness makes the beginning beautiful, but the ending draws its beauty from pain.
Olli dispenses with words, pulls Greta close to him, looks into her eyes, lays the fingers of his left hand along the back of her slender neck and kisses her.
The red umbrella falls to the ground with a clunk. A warm wind takes hold of Greta’s hat and throws it into the Puistokatu traffic.
At first she’s cold and stiff in his arms, as if in the sudden grip of death. Gradually the stiffness melts. Olli feels her lips arch into a smile. She answers his kiss, shyly at first, then devouring his mouth like a hungry predator.
Her delicate frame presses tightly against him and trembles uncontrollably. It’s the same greedy desire Olli remembers discovering in her years ago.
When they finally break away from each other, hot and breathless, Greta sighs and lays her head against his chest. “I can hear your heartbeat,” she whispers. “It’s pounding so fast. Because of me? For my sake? Silly thing. It still remembers me, after all this time. How many times will it beat before you’re taken away from me again…”
Olli breathes in the gold of her hair. He is too roiled with emotion to speak. Contradictory thoughts chase and tear at each other in his mind.
His gaze falls on a pale white wall on the other side of the street. On it is a painted Goodyear tyre ad, blue letters and a tyre with wings. That sign has followed him through all these years. He points it out to Greta and they look first at the ad, then at each other, smiling in amazement. A moment from thirty years ago rises from the secret passages of memory, its colours deepening until it’s all too easy to fall into.
It was when the Five were breaking up and Olli was walking down Puistokatu with Greta, and they stopped to look at this ad and kissed under the umbrella, hidden from the adults walking by. Olli remembers now that it was an unusual, domed umbrella that Aunt Anna had brought home from France. It was the same kind that Maura at the umbrella shop ordered for him.
And now here they are in the same spot, holding on to each other, Olli and his pear-print girl from Tourula. Olli touches Greta’s cheek and looks into the green of her eyes, amazed, as if he has only just now understood who is in his arms.
The warm wind wraps itself around them.
For a few short breaths everything that has happened since that summer they shared fades away and drops into meaninglessness.
Then Olli remembers again that somewhere in the world, right now, a woman and child are on a beach waiting for the day when they can return home.
30
The deep cinematic self is an artist that sees life above all as an aesthetic construct. It is like the voice of the conscience but instead of moralizing it leads us to make cinematic choices and interpret our roles as well as we possibly can. It also silences the stage fright of slow continuum attachment so that stories can be set in motion and cinematicness can be achieved.
As Olli begins to relive a story that started and ended thirty years before, he feels guilty because at times it is frighteningly easy to let himself get caught up in it. Every time he meets Greta in Jyväskylä’s magical places he feels the M-particles affecting his mood, feels parts of his life slowly but surely shifting into new positions within his consciousness. His whole way of thinking is gradually changing, and it terrifies him.
But he has to surrender to the change and let his deep cinematic self take over, for his family’s sake. He has to throw himself into the love story with Greta Kara; any superficiality or pretending would only lead to failure, and he has never learnt to act.
Of course the thought of his wife and son at the mercy of the Blomroos siblings casts a shadow over every moment with Greta, but the whole thing is steeped in a cinematic aesthetic, turning all his conflicting feelings into an emotional work of art.
Every time he comes home from one of their meetings, his deep self falls asleep. That’s when the seriousness of the situation hits him: his wife and child are being held hostage by psychopaths in some foreign country; he himself is holed up in his house, afraid to tell anyone about his predicament and having daily trysts with a woman he knew for one summer as a child.
While he waits for new instructions, Olli searches Facebook for signs that Aino and the boy are all right. And he finds new photos on Aino’s profile every day. They show mother and son in various travel destinations.
Apparently they are being flown to a new location every couple of days.
The photos come from beautiful, exotic, picture-perfect places around the world. In the newest one Aino is smiling into the camera, and the boy doesn’t look particularly sad, either.
They’re getting used to this, too.
31
ON THE CORNER OPPOSITE the university library is the Puistokatu cafe kiosk. Greta is sitting on the terrace. On the table are two glasses of raspberry soda. In the glasses are two straws.
Olli walks up, sits down across from her, leans his umbrella against his chair and smiles.
Today Greta looks like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. The same pink dress with the white patterns, sleeveless, her golden hair pulled back. The look becomes her.
Olli’s dark-grey coat and trousers are enough like Cary Grant’s that they complement each other’s cinematicness.
In the park below, children run squealing towards the carousel with the boy’s head on top, in the same spot as it was decades before. That was where Olli befriended the Blomrooses and Karri and touched Anne for the first time. Greta searches his face and says nothing for a long time. An unspoken greeting hangs in the air between them. Olli continues to smile, purposely teasing her.
Finally Greta speaks. “I had strange, disturbing dreams all night. I woke up after noon, ate breakfast, put on my make-up, played the piano and went out half an hour ago. I was walking downtown and on a whim I sat down here on the terrace. I bought a bottle of soda, the same kind we used to drink, in the same place. We used to come here because we thought the Blomrooses might not come to this part of town. We even kissed. We let people see that we were lovers. You said that it was like we were in some other country, so we could behave as we wished.”