When they go upstairs to bed that evening, Greta takes out A Guide to the Cinematic Life and reads aloud from the chapter on cinematic death and renunciation:
Everything that is truly awful becomes, by its very inevitability, profoundly beautiful. We have only to learn to embrace the deep shadows of life along with its bright moments, for otherwise we won’t have the courage to really live. You don’t have to like the pain. It is enough to love it.
Afterwards, they cling to each other.
That night Olli awakes and realizes he’s alone in bed.
It’s raining.
He hears Chopin from downstairs. Sonata no. 2. He clasps his hands behind his head and listens. Forces himself to comprehend that he is listening to the music of his dying lover.
His chest begins to heave as if gripped by an earthquake. He lets the tears come, covers his face and allows himself to grieve for the first time in months. He’s crying for Greta, but also for his own suffering, and that of others. Especially the others.
At the same time, no doubt due to the M-particles, he senses the beauty of his grief, allows himself to enjoy it, like a cigarette or a glass of wine or the music he’s listening to at that moment. The feeling comes from deep inside, from the same place as music and literature and all art, filling every corner of his consciousness the way the organ music filled Notre-Dame as he sat in the last pew and listened.
It’s just as Greta says in Cinematic Life—sorrow, when experienced properly, is an even more beautiful and cinematic emotion than love, though difficult to endure.
The piano plays until wrong notes creep into the composition. Olli sits up.
Silence.
There is a bang from downstairs and a cold draught flows through the house.
Olli runs to the window.
Greta is pacing back and forth in the garden, oblivious to the rain, wearing nothing but a dressing gown.
She seems to be looking for something.
Olli pulls on his pyjamas, stuffs his feet into his slippers and goes down to bring her inside.
When he gets outside he doesn’t see Greta anywhere.
The rain is increasing and growing colder. The plants in the garden tremble under it. Olli shouts for Greta. The large, dark garden is filled with hiding places. He checks the storage shed, peeks into the greenhouse and goes to the Apple Gate to make sure she hasn’t wandered out into the street. Then he returns to the yard and checks every inch of it, several times. He even looks in the apple trees, in case she’s taken it into her head to climb one of them.
His wet pyjamas are clinging to his skin. He’s shivering, but he’s too worried to notice the cold. Finally he stops in the middle of the garden and stands in his striped pyjamas looking around helplessly, trying to think.
Could she have gone back inside? No, he’s sure he would have seen her.
Then he notices Greta’s dressing gown lying under a bush, and his heart sinks. Now she’s naked, and will surely take a bad chill.
He walks over to the dressing gown. It is, of course, soaking wet and dirty, but looking more closely Olli notices that part of it has also been pulled down into some kind of hole.
An animal’s burrow.
Some dirty, diseased, yellow-toothed animal, probably oozing bacteria.
Olli feels like he’s going to throw up. His head is buzzing. He has a tremendous desire to forget he saw the dressing gown, to look the other way and get out of there, get away from that revolting hole.
But he makes himself stay because the feeling itself tells him what is happening. He falls on all fours and finds the narrow opening in the tall grass where Greta crawled in. He starts to tear away the grass and withered flowers and wet leaves, until the entrance to the secret passage is finally visible.
He starts to shiver harder as he looks into the darkness that waits under the ground. No person in his right mind would even put his hand in there. There could be beetles, snakes, centipedes, rotted carcasses, rats or larger, sharp-toothed animals…
All his instincts tell him to cover the hole up again.
Right now.
Before something awful happens.
He takes a deep breath, willing his pulse to level off, his stress hormones to dissipate. He empties his mind of thought and focuses, as though preparing to dive into cold water.
Then, without thinking, he sticks his hand into the hole in the ground.
Then his head.
Followed by his upper body.
The smell of earth strikes his face and he almost pulls himself out again. What in heaven’s name is he doing? The only sensible thing to do is of course to run into the house and call the police, or the fire department, to come and get Greta.
Olli sobs and trembles as he forces himself farther under the ground.
Eventually his body begins to crawl, automatically, like he learnt to do as a child with the other members of the Tourula Five. He can still remember Karri’s words: Think of your body as a crawling machine. Don’t think about anything else.
You can only go into a secret passage if you learn to eliminate your natural psychological resistance.
Wet mud gets into his nostrils, his mouth, his eyes. The cold earth tears at his skin. His pyjamas are no protection. He coughs and snorts. He doesn’t just fear, he knows that in a moment he will suffocate and die, get stuck, have a heart attack, or bleed to death when some fierce animal—a weasel, or maybe a badger—bites his face, goes for his throat.
But Olli’s body remembers thirty years ago, ignores his instinct for self-preservation, and crawls ahead, deeper into the cold and the dark.
49
OLLI CRAWLS.
Once you manage to get inside a secret passage, moving forward becomes easier. Your mind stops struggling, opens up to the M-particles, and starts to move.
Then the secret passages begin to lure you deeper and deeper.
Reality becomes a Rubik’s cube played with by invisible fingers. Olli starts to remember things he’s forgotten, and at the same time to forget the parts of his life that he left above the ground a moment ago—or maybe hundreds of years ago. Time has no meaning here. In the secret passages, the past and the present are touching, as are what is and what simply could be. In the secret passages you can remember every choice you’ve ever had to make and all of those crossroads are spread out in alternative continuums. You just have to know how to listen to the music of the M-particles.
Karri once warned them that the magical feeling in the secret passages is powerful and dangerous and can rinse your mind so clean of all human connection that there is no return.
Even a short visit there always changes a person somehow.
Olli crawls. He knows he’s searching for something. But what?
A girl.
Not a girl.
A woman.
The woman that the girl became.
Greta, the girl in the pear-print dress, is here somewhere. It’s dark. Olli holds on to that name, and to the shadow of Greta; he can’t drop them, no matter how hard the M-particles shake him.
Shadows waver in the blackness. Sometimes he thinks he sees something, but in the secret passages you can’t trust your eyes. You might see all kinds of things and become so confused that you forget to crawl. And you can’t stop crawling, not for more than a second, or something bad could happen.