The sound of the piano filled the room as Greta pounded out Chopin études with precision and force.
At some point she became aware that her hands felt stiff.
She found herself struggling more and more to make her fingers strike the right keys. First her playing slowed. Then she started to make mistakes, and a few wrong notes escaped. When she finally lost the notes completely, she lifted her fingers from the keyboard.
She shook her head in horror. She couldn’t play any more.
“What’s wrong?” Dr Engel asked, annoyed at the interruption.
“I don’t know,” Greta gasped.
Oh. So it’s happened, she thought, only slightly afraid. I’m finally going to die!
She stood up and looked the doctor in the eye, and everything went dark.
Greta didn’t die. She woke up in her own room. She was lying in bed with a blanket over her, and was no longer naked. She was wearing a dress and shoes.
It was afternoon. Of the following day. She had been asleep for eighteen hours.
Next to the bed was a packed suitcase with a plane ticket to Paris laid on top, where she would be sure to see it upon awakening.
The plane was leaving in five hours.
She was thrilled, but she didn’t understand what it was about. Had Dr Engel finally got the message that what he was doing was wrong, or had he been hurt by his protégé’s impatience? And why Paris in particular?
In any case, it had apparently all been arranged while she slept so that she could leave immediately. And who else could have done this for her but Hans Engel? She had no one else.
He must have wanted her to leave without saying goodbye. But she decided to find him and thank him for everything one more time.
She found him in the living room.
He was lying on his back on the floor in front of the piano, obviously stinking drunk. He stared at Greta, his eyes wide, sticking his tongue out at her like a naughty child.
It was bewildering. Greta turned to leave.
But something made her hesitate for a moment.
In spite of his clowning, the doctor didn’t look like he was feeling very well; his face was an unhealthy blue and his eyes were more bloodshot than she’d ever seen them. Greta went to look closer.
Then her legs gave out.
While Greta slept, Dr Engel had strangled himself with his own tie.
A note was stuck to his chest with a scalpel. It was written in Brazilian Portuguese.
Over the previous seven years Greta had learnt enough of the language to know that it said something about unpaid debts which were “hereby paid in full”. The letter also mentioned Greta’s name and said sardonically, My little pet—mimada—it’s time you were on your way, because your host—mestre—is now morto.
Greta fetched the suitcase, ran out of the house, caught a taxi to the airport and flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
45
“WHAT DID YOU DO IN PARIS?” Olli asks warily.
Greta smiles. She’s relaxed now, lying on the bed and stroking her stomach like a cat. Her eyes twinkle. The bad part of the story is over now.
“All the things a twenty-six-year-old woman can do in Paris. I went places. Learnt about art. Met people. Read books. Started to plan to write a book of my own. Went to the movies. Lived. I had seven years of my life to get back, after all.
“Olli, it would be sweet to say that I saved myself for you, but neither one of us is stupid. I was scared, but I wanted to experience my new body and practise sex. Often. I had many lovers, men and women. At first I did it in the dark, then in bright light. I tested myself and my ability to experience pleasure, conquest. I wanted to know if I could do it.”
Greta stretched, let out a joyous laugh and looked at Olli with a mischievous grin.
“You’re not jealous, are you? I hope you are, at least a little bit. You had gone on with your life and I was thinking of you. When I went to bed I always imagined what sorts of girls you might be lying with. I was tremendously jealous and I took my revenge on you for your presumed sexual adventures many times.
“I met a famous photographer couple at a party. They wanted to take pictures of me, and I let them. When I undressed in the studio, they looked at each other and I could tell that they liked what they saw. The man asked me about my scars and I said I’d been in a car accident. The woman said that I was beautiful and that the scars were beautiful, too, and she wanted to touch them. I let her. The three of us went to bed together.
“The pictures they took were wonderful; they were displayed at the Carrousel du Louvre. We had fun together. We went to concerts, to artists’ cafes, bicycling, on picnics in the countryside. Then I realized that both of them had fallen in love with me. They started to compete for my attention and bicker with each other, so I left them. It was too easy to do. I wasn’t able to genuinely connect as long as the thought of you was always with me in bed. Or maybe I was just afraid of intimacy and used you as an excuse. I don’t know.
“I found new friends. Life was interesting and pleasant. I missed you of course, but I learnt to live with that feeling. Several times I almost got in touch with you. I looked up your number and held the telephone in my hand, found your address and wrote letters. But I always put down the receiver and burned the letters—because I didn’t have the courage. I thought that you would surely have completely forgotten the girl in the pear-print dress who you loved for one short summer. I was sure that if I were to appear in front of you and tell you that I had been thinking about you all those years, you would look at me with pity and wonder. I couldn’t bear that.”
Greta describes how she lived in Paris for twenty years, making her living writing art reviews and articles for newspapers and travelling all around the world. Shortly after moving to Paris she officially changed her name from Greta Kultanen to Greta Kara to sever herself once and for all from Rio de Janeiro, Bombay and Jyväskylä. Every couple of years she returned to Jyväskylä to look around and think about her life.
“I walked down Puistokatu and even went to Tourula—or what was left of it—but I could never stay there for long; the magic of our summer always came too close to me eventually, and I started to change from Madame Doinel to the girl in the pear-print dress. Every time I came here it was harder to return to my family in Paris.”
Olli flinches. “Madame Doinel? Family?”
Greta rolls onto her stomach, swings her feet in the air and avoids Olli’s gaze. “Yeah. When I was thirty-one I met an engineer named Armand. He was twelve years older than me, a widower with a daughter. Simone was five at the time. We lived a very comfortable life as a middle-class family for six years. I didn’t ever actually marry Armand, although he wanted me to, but I used his last name and introduced myself as his wife. I didn’t love him, but I was faithful to him. When I felt temptation I thought, I’m practising being a faithful wife so I can live with you someday, if fate ever brings us together.”
“Then what happened?”
Greta sighs. “Armand wanted more children. He wanted a son. And of course I couldn’t give him a son. There were arguments. I finally moved out and after that lived on my own. I never really saw anyone. I travelled a little, went to a lot of movies, and spent many years writing a book, which came to be A Guide to the Cinematic Life. I sold it to a large French publisher. Everything was going beautifully. Sometimes I felt a bit depressed, but medication and therapy helped.”