One of the memories is of one of the numerous times that the Tourula Five returned from under the ground. It follows the earlier memory, but large portions are missing.
In the memory, Olli and the others are crawling, first in the dark, then in the light, although they don’t notice it at first. Finally they realize that they can let their bodies stop crawling, and they look around in stunned silence.
They’re in a large fenced garden. Higher up the slope is a grand, palatial house with pillars like the Greek temples in Olli’s geography book, curved, ornamented windows and some sort of glass pyramid attached to its side, with plants growing in it.
The house makes Olli tremble with excitement. He whispers that it’s exactly the sort of house he wants to live in when he grows up.
Karri turns and looks at him from under his hood, seeming to sniff at the words, trying to see the thoughts behind them.
Anne wrinkles her nose and says sure, it’s a fine house, but too small and modest for her taste. Once she’s rich she’ll be able to buy it for a place to stay whenever she has business in Jyväskylä. But her permanent home will be in France, or maybe Spain.
Leo and Riku chuckle. They don’t take their sister’s plans very seriously.
Then the balcony door opens and the occupant, an old woman, appears.
The Five take to their feet.
As he runs with the others, Olli notices that Timi isn’t with them.
He doesn’t have time to stop and mourn because the mistress of the house is now standing at the ground-floor entrance, in front of the pillars, and next to her is a German shepherd with a booming bark.
The memory ends with them running out to the road in relief, and at the very end Olli turns back to look one more time and sees apples carved into the curved top of an arch.
Olli puts the memory aside. He has to concentrate on crawling and keeping himself together. He thinks and remembers and organizes his thoughts as he turns right and left, up and down in the twists of the passages, making his way by instinct. Some of the memories are wrong and have to be discarded, and even the correct pieces don’t all fit together. But eventually he thinks he’s whole enough to venture to pay attention to what’s outside him.
There’s space around him now.
He stops, wraps his aching arms around his bruised and bloody knees and sits naked in the dark, waiting for the light particles to begin to gather around him.
Eventually he sees something. He’s in some kind of chamber. Or cave.
In the darkness he looks at his hands, his legs, his stomach, his hairy chest, his cold-bitten penis, his sad, muddy testicles and time-battered skin, and is amazed to realize how old he is, how adult, when just a moment ago he was a smooth, slim young boy.
If he could go back to the branch of the passageway he came from maybe he could reach his childhood and stay there…
But he remembers what he has to do: find the girl in the pear-print dress, the woman pianist, and bring her back.
He’s tempted to forget the whole thing, but the task must be very important to him above the ground.
So he gets up and gropes his way forward—until astonishment stops him. There’s a tree growing from the ceiling, upside-down, with branches sagging under a weight of pears.
He reaches out and finds he can touch them. Then his eye falls on two grey boys sitting among the branches, staring at him with pitch-black eyes.
They look at each other for a long time.
Olli recognizes them. Leo and Riku Blomroos.
Then the boys smile and point at their heads. They both have a small, black hole in the middle of their forehead, and a peculiar, thick darkness is seeping out of the holes.
The lips are moving on the one who looks like Leo, and although there’s no sound, Olli understands what he’s saying.
We’re dead now.
When Olli turns to the ghost that looks like Riku, it nods grimly and points at something.
Look over there. Look familiar?
Farther away, Olli sees the remains of Aunt Anna’s boat. He’s been to this place before.
We can’t eat the pears, but you can have one. Take a bite. That’s what she’s doing.
That’s when Olli notices the naked, golden-haired woman sitting on the other side of the tree.
Greta.
She’s tasting pears, which are arranged around her, taking a bite of one and then another, as if she were deciding which one is best to eat.
Her face is filled with utter pleasure.
Olli becomes curious, picks a pear from a branch and warily takes a bite.
A soft flavour spreads through his mouth and his mind fills with living images that are like memories of things that have never happened. They are clear and enthrallingly cinematic and they show him his life as it could have been if he had only made brave, cinematic choices.
He has to see more, to finish the story. He takes another bite, and another.
When he’s eaten the first pear, he eats a second one, and a third. After that he takes just one or two bites from each fruit.
Every one shows him a different film version of his life. He bites a bitter pear that is a tragic story of survival, filled with illness and misfortune, and spits it out. The next one is sweet and filled with success, glory, riches. Almost all of them have larger-than-life love stories. Some of them are romantic comedies, others portentous melodramas. There are many different women that he’s met during his life, and others that he’s never heard or dreamt of.
He goes through hundreds of lives, forgetting each one as he tastes the next, smiling in the dark. The naked, golden-haired woman is eating pears nearby, but he doesn’t pay her any attention.
There are plenty of pears. The Blomroos brothers drop more for them. What kind of life is this? Good or bad? Sadness, fear, excitement or insane, intoxicating love?
Then, from out of the dark, a dog appears.
A cocker spaniel. It barks at him, growls and shows its teeth.
Timi, he says, testing the name.
The dog recognizes him and its tail wags joyfully, but it still approaches yapping and growling.
He realizes that the dog is looking at the bitten pear in his hand.
He throws the pear away, teeters and falls on his back. There’s something leathery beneath him, something fragile that crunches. Dead birds with delicate bones, he thinks, cringing. Or bats’ carcasses.
As the light particles gather around him, he sees that he was mistaken—he’s lying on umbrellas. There are umbrellas everywhere; the whole floor of the cave is covered with them.
He sits up and takes hold of one of them. It’s the starry-night umbrella that he lost at Sokos department store. It’s not the only one he recognizes—all the umbrellas he’s ever lost seem to be here.
He remembers now that he often saw the dog at the same time that he lost an umbrella.
He shakes his head, looks at Timi for a moment, then pushes him aside and goes back to the pear tree. There are still a lot of pears to taste, regardless of what that ghost dog thinks about it.
Riku and Leo each ply him with pears, their black eyes glittering, dark puffs of air coming out of the openings in their skulls.
Have a taste of this firm little one and tell me what you see!
No, take a bite of this one first. It’s got to be something amazing; look how juicy it is…
Olli chooses the pear Leo is offering. Timi comes back just as he takes a bite, and drops something at his feet.
Olli picks it up. It’s the dome umbrella from thirty years ago. His skin tingles.
Aunt Anna brought this umbrella home from France, and Olli and his girl in her pear-print dress kissed under it as they walked through the streets of Jyväskylä. Their very first kiss was under this umbrella, on the bridge over the Touru, on the first day of the summer they spent together.