Olli says he can almost remember.
Greta purses her lips reproachfully. “The park has changed a little over the years, but the spirit of it is the same. There are still M-particles here. Not as many as there were then, but enough. So, today I came here and asked for two glasses and poured soda in both of them. I thought that if I just believed hard enough, you would appear somehow, like in a dream. I waited five minutes. Just as I thought I was being a silly, stupid girl, you did appear, and here you are. So have some soda, my darling.”
Greta is smoking a cigarette. Olli feels like one, too. He takes a pack of menthols out of his jacket pocket and starts searching his pockets for a lighter. He’s left it at home.
Greta rummages in her black handbag, takes out a gold-coloured, old-looking lighter and says, “You know, this Barlow lighter was a gift from Frank Sinatra.”
“Really?”
Olli sucks the flame into his cigarette.
“Or so I was told,” Greta says. “He didn’t give the lighter to me, of course. It was a gift to Judy Garland. I was in Paris and feeling lonely and rich, and I wanted to treat myself. I went to an auction. I saw the lighter there and heard its story. I paid three thousand euros for it, so if they tricked me, I don’t want to know about it. You see darling, once a thing is done and there’s nothing I can do about it any more, if I’m offered a pleasant lie about it or a depressing truth, I’ll take the lie.”
She smiles and Olli secretly trembles at her exquisiteness.
Olli has been to Paris six times as an adult, every time to represent the publishing house at the March book fair. Two years ago he happened upon an exhibition at the Pompidou and stood for an entire hour looking at one painting.
It was Gustav Klimt’s Judith I.
Olli wanted the painting for himself, although he knew he couldn’t have it. Perhaps precisely because he knew he couldn’t have it. There were poster reproductions of the painting at the museum shop, but they weren’t what he wanted. He wanted the original. It wasn’t the most beautiful painting he had ever seen, but it felt as if it belonged to him. He stood admiring it and felt an almost sexual desire for the sensuous woman in the picture.
Finally he had to make himself leave so that he wouldn’t grab the painting and try to take it out of the museum before anyone could stop him.
As he gazes now at Greta transformed into Grace Kelly, he’s overcome with the same need to possess her that he felt for that Klimt painting.
He finds himself writing in his mind the same description of Greta that he wrote on lined paper once when he was sixteen:
She walks quickly, her body tense, yet supple as a cat’s tail, her head held high, self-assured, dropping words sometimes casually, sometimes excitedly, wrapped in mysterious scents, so that her whole way of being reaches out to the senses of the men who turn to look, and says, “Keep up with me and you just might catch me.”
Greta seems to sense his thoughts or at least the feelings behind them. Her sea-green eyes flash. Her slender hand takes hold of his shovel-like one and squeezes tight and she glows as if she’s just been given a gift.
32
Lounais Park is one of Jyväskylä’s oldest parks. It was established in the 1860s and is known throughout Finland for the music festivals that have been held there since the 1880s. Over the course of its history the park has had many different more or less temporary bandstands and amphitheatres, including the vaulted festival stage designed by Alvar Aalto for the upper part of the park in 1924. The present outdoor stage was designed by Olavi Kivimaa in 1954. On the upper edge of the park is a kiosk cafe which was refurbished at the turn of the millennium. The park also has a children’s play area, with its peculiar old boy’s head carousel, preserved through many decades up to the present.
Lounais Park has its own distinct atmosphere and its meaning fulness particle radiation levels are powerful. It also sits above numerous secret passages which rest close to the surface and intersect right below the carousel.
On the kiosk cafe terrace, people come and go. Olli and Greta remain. Their eyes plumb each other’s dark depths across the table.
Olli plays with his smoke.
Greta sucks raspberry soda through her straw, thirsty and agitated, her green irises sparkling with girlish joy at a situation which had seemed so hopeless and now seems to be turning to triumph.
Olli notices that he can feel their connection working again. He remembers suddenly how easy it once was for them to read each other: each knowing what the other was feeling and sometimes able to guess with frightening accuracy what thoughts were turning in the other’s head. Maybe they had been peeking into each other all this time by means of their dreams.
The memory is attached to a bunch of emotional mycelia and Olli is moved when he realizes that he’s never managed to create the same connection with anyone else in his life, not even his wife.
His deep self nods approval and makes some additional adjustments to his mental state.
They’ve been meeting almost every day for three weeks now. The fourth day was the only one when he wasn’t given any orders except to rest for a while and wait. On every other day the Blomrooses have informed Olli which magical place Greta will be visiting and when, and Olli has sought her out according to their instructions.
Their relationship has remained relatively chaste, limited to kisses exchanged under his umbrella in various places around the city. Once, however, at the front gate of the paper mill, Greta’s hand grazed the front of his trousers as if by accident, and she smiled, mischievously at first, then blushing. Every time they parted, they went their own ways without planning or promising anything, Greta to her unknown lodgings and Olli, as far as Greta knew, home to his family.
Coming home to an empty house has become more difficult each time.
Greta no doubt believes that these frequent encounters are due to their spiritual connection, that Olli’s ability to find where she is comes from some kind of romantic intuition. This, of course, makes the whole thing that much more magical in her eyes. Or maybe she’s only pretending to believe that they have some larger connection between them because of their magical cinematicness, and she secretly assumes that Olli has her under some sort of surveillance. You see darling, once a thing is done and there’s nothing I can do about it any more, if I’m offered a pleasant lie about it or a depressing truth, I’ll take the lie.
Whatever the case, when he can’t reveal the truth about the Blomrooses’ messages, or his family, or anything else, Olli has the paradoxical feeling of being betrayed himself.
And there are quite a few things that he would like to tell Greta, not to mention questions he would like to ask her. For instance, he’s mystified at how the Blomrooses are able to know a day ahead of time where she’ll go, and at what time.
The most logical explanation is that she’s working with the Blomrooses. But Olli doesn’t believe that. Because he can see in her eyes that she would never conspire against him. And besides, Greta hates and fears the Blomrooses after what they did to her.