I still remember the look on her face. It was a combination of disgust, anger, jealousy, sadness and something I didn’t recognize at first. She left without saying anything more. I thought I had won, and relished the feeling. It wasn’t until later that I realized what that last look on her face was.
An epiphany.
I had given her a hint about you and me.
Olli, about that last night we had in Tourula—it was wonderful, and it was awful, and if you had known how afraid I was you wouldn’t have asked me to get undressed. Because if you had recoiled in disgust, when you saw…
But that night, in that dark room, Olli, I felt myself through your touch and for the first time in my life I was able to accept myself completely.
I had never touched myself the way you touched me. That night, I had my first orgasm.
Then the morning came, and the horrible, lacerating brightness that the Blomrooses brought.
And the pain.
I’m not talking about the rusty tools. Yes, they tore my body open, but I could have lived with the pain.
The part that hurt the most happened before a drop of blood had fallen.
The most horrible part was when they dragged me into the light and made you look at me and see me the way they saw me, reading those awful papers out loud, words that destroyed all the beauty you had given me.
I didn’t even know how to hate them back then. I hated myself. The Blomrooses just took away the mercy of darkness and the illusions, the beautiful lies we’d made up, and they forced me into the light of the truth. And their truth made me a freak.
No, don’t try to console me… Don’t touch me.
Just listen.
The last thing I remember about that house was Anne showing me the drill bit.
You were lying on the floor, quiet. I wondered if they had killed you. I hoped that you were dead. I was terrified of the thought that you would live and remember what kind of freak your girl in the pear-print dress had turned out to be. I prayed to God that both of us would die.
Then Anne made me look at that red drill bit, and everything turned dark. And I was happy.
You see, I thought it was death.
43
When I woke up, my body was bandaged and there were tubes and cords coming out of it. Pain medication pumping into me. I realized I was in the hospital. Anna sat beside my bed and cried for several days. Then she stopped and just stared at me. She kept saying, “My child,” as if she were trying to reassure herself. “Karri, Greta, what does it matter? It’s still my child.”
She looked like a ghost. I didn’t know how to think of her as my mother any more. She was Karri’s mother—to me she was Anna. My aunt. She had even introduced me to the neighbours as her sister’s daughter.
They told me I had been found bloody and nearly dead at the old cemetery. I must have come from the railwayman’s house to the other side of the river through the secret passages, although I didn’t remember it at all.
The police came to question me. Eventually I made up a story about a drunken drifter down by the river, said he had started following me and dragged me into the house, knocked me unconscious and done terrible things to me.
The police searched our room by the river. They asked if I had been there. I told them I had been there many times to play the piano and think about things, when I wanted to be alone. And I told them that other people besides me went there, too. It was obvious that the police had examined the bed and found evidence of our games. You weren’t mentioned, of course.
I couldn’t go to high school as planned, so it was decided that I would take a year off to recover, physically and mentally.
The doctors started examining me again, like a fascinating specimen. They prodded, measured, took pictures, peered at me, felt around my most private parts. Sometimes when the doctors were between my legs arguing over whether I was more boy or girl, I felt like I was in the hands of Anne and her brothers again. I had to break a water glass over a doctor’s head before it occurred to them that I might not be that interested in listening to their medical attempts to define me.
I asked them if they could fix me and make me a real woman.
They said, in theory, yes. But Anna had already assured them that regardless of my special genitalia, I had always clearly been a boy, a boy who had simply been very mixed up and confused lately. So the doctors didn’t want to rush into anything under those circumstances, and some of them thought that physically I was more a boy than a girl. I would have to see a psychiatrist and a psychologist for at least a couple of years before thinking of surgery.
Every moment that I was in the hospital I hoped and feared that you would walk through the door. I didn’t really want to have anything to do with you if I couldn’t show myself to you as what I was meant to be in your eyes, in bright light, without shame. But when you didn’t come, I was crestfallen. I made up excuses for you, Olli; sometimes I hated you. What kind of thing is that, to know that I hated the very person I was fated to love for the rest of my life?
You sent me a letter?… I never got it. That might have been when I’d already left home. If it came earlier, Anna probably destroyed it. She sensed that Karri’s change into Greta had something to do with you, so she was quite bitter towards you.
My life was unbearable. To pass time in the hospital I watched old movies on the little television in my room and planned how to kill myself.
I gave up on the idea, though, when I realized that death was easy, when you thought about it—I could kill myself later, any time I wanted. I understood that even if I did keep living I didn’t have to accept the flat ordinariness that everyone was trying to drag me into—with their diagnoses and reports and measurements. That didn’t have to be my reality. To their way of thinking I was nothing but a curiosity, a freak of nature, a walking developmental irregularity, Mother Nature’s defective goods.
So I learnt to think cinematically.
I started to see my life as an adventure and myself as its tragic but glorious heroine, who would eventually triumph over her hard fate if she only learnt to live fearlessly. I was Natalie Wood, Kim Novak, Vivien Leigh, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Anita Ekberg and Audrey Hepburn all rolled into one. You only have one life, so why settle for a small part?
It was winter when I got out of the hospital. Anna had saved Karri’s clothes, and she offered them to me. It was like being offered the clothes of a dead person. I asked where the pear-print dress was. Anna said she couldn’t find it anywhere. I cried for several days. She eventually got tired of listening to me and sewed me a new one.
As soon as I put the dress on, my mood improved and I started to think about my life going forward.
I’ve never been able to actually remember the things that Karri experienced. His memories are like stories someone told me, or pictures in a stranger’s photo album. But I found all the information that had accumulated over the course of Karri’s life within myself.