They look at each other. The doctor seems to remember something. “Ah, yes. I nearly forgot something in the bedroom…”
He goes upstairs and remains there for several minutes. Returning with his bag, he avoids eye contact, bows quickly and leaves.
After the doctor left, Olli packed up the things he’d brought with him to the house. There wasn’t much. He put the suitcase by the front door. Then he sat down at the dining-room table, poured himself a cup of thick, bitter coffee, turned on the computer and opened Facebook.
Greta’s last status update said:
Greta Kara is completely happy.
Olli stared at the text for a long time.
Finally, he closed the computer. He knew that he was supposed to leave so that everything could progress as it was meant to. His part of the story was over. His life would continue elsewhere, more or less attached to the slow continuum. He had many things to take care of.
But he wanted to see what happened after the credits rolled, so he stayed to watch.
55
SOME TIME PASSED, and then Olli heard sounds from the bedroom. First the squeak of the bed. Then coughing.
He didn’t go to look, just poured himself some more bad coffee. He could imagine what was happening upstairs. Karri had briefly described what would happen by chat, saying that he didn’t want to give Olli a scare or mislead him unnecessarily. But certain things had to happen in a preordained manner.
In spite of his curiosity, Olli didn’t think it wise to go and look as the body of the one he had loved more than he had ever loved anyone opened its eyes and emerged from under the covers as a different person.
The medicine he had given to Greta was a substance that slowed the vital functions, and the doctor had gone upstairs just before he left to give the faux deceased an antidote.
Someone opened the front door with a key. Olli heard people talking. A white coffin was carried in. Two men set it down in the middle of the floor, glanced at Olli and walked out again.
A bustling, well-groomed woman came in after them. Olli guessed that she was a beautician. She had a garment bag over one arm and some kind of tool satchel in the other. She greeted Olli and pointed at the stairway.
“Up there?”
Olli nodded.
She smiled gratefully and climbed the stairs.
About an hour passed. The woman came back downstairs, waved at Olli and left.
Olli looked up at the staircase.
On the top step stood an androgynous figure with black, shoulder-length hair, a white dress shirt, grey trousers and a black waistcoat with shiny buttons.
Karri smiled, descended the staircase, looked at the coffin with a furrowed brow and sat down across from Olli.
“My hairdresser told me that there was a stylish gentleman down here drinking coffee,” Karri said light-heartedly, in a voice only partly familiar. “The plan was for you to leave before I arrived, but I’m glad you waited. So, Greta Kara’s funeral is in three weeks. She’ll be buried—or at least her pear-print dress will—in the old Jyväskylä cemetery, near to you and to all the places where she was happy. It was her last wish. Of course, you’ll be expected at the funeral, both as a grieving lover and as a grieving publisher.”
Olli lit a cigarette and offered it to Karri. He shook his head. “Thanks, but I don’t smoke. That was Greta’s vice, not mine.”
Olli looked at Karri’s neck, where his teeth marks were still visible, and sighed.
Karri smiled. “I’m sorry. I know that this is all strange to you. No doubt you won’t be able to get it into your head that Greta is gone, and that this is Karri sitting in front of you. My hair is short and black now, I’m wearing different clothes, the red is gone from my fingernails, but…”
“Yeah,” Olli muttered.
Karri shrugged and said, “Actually, Karri is no more real than Greta. He’ll have to step aside soon, too. Greta was created in a bombardment of M-particles to be a girl that you could love. I gave her all my love for you and it became her defining characteristic. Karri, on the other hand, was a boy, like his mother wanted. Both are only half the truth. I’m going to find myself a new name in the secret passages, but for now you can call me Karri.”
Olli looked at the graceful creature sitting across from him and said, “But I loved Greta.”
It sounded like an accusation, and it was something like it.
Karri took his hand, looked at him thoughtfully, and said, “And Greta loved you, Olli. That was what she was created for. As a matter of fact, she loved you a thousand times more than you could ever love her back. The years spent without you were torture to her.
“She could only bear it because she believed that in the end the two of you would get to be together, one way or another. And you did. We arranged it. I arranged it, for Greta. But I knew Greta better than anyone did. She expected a lot from your love. She expected too much. Over these past few weeks you learnt to love her so much that it was just barely enough for her, and in the end she dared to be happy. But in a year, or two at most, your feelings would inevitably start to fade, while she was destined to love you more and more as time went by. Do you understand what that would have done to her?”
Olli nodded, but he didn’t understand completely. Although in his chat last night Karri had tried to explain what was happening and why.
He patted Olli’s hand now and explained gently, as if to a child: “You read her book. Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. We thought that a beautiful ending would be the right thing to do for you, and…”
“You said we,” Olli interrupted. “Who’s we?”
“Us,” Karri said, confused. “Me and Anne Blomroos. Didn’t I mention her? Greta went to shoot the Blomrooses—she was always so dramatic in her cinematicness—but she was also too weak to carry out what she came to do. That was why I had to free her from that horrible Dr Engel, and take care of the situation with the Blomrooses.”
“My Greta is not a murderer,” Olli said stiffly.
Karri’s eyes flashed and an expression came over his face that Olli could never have imagined on Greta’s face. “Well, she certainly would have shot Anne, who tortured her thirty years ago, without batting an eyelid, but she probably would have decided to take pity on those foolish brothers and got herself into a lot of trouble. That’s why I pushed her aside, shot Riku and Leo, and made a deal with Anne.”
“A deal?”
“Yes. Anne would use her resources to arrange it so that Greta’s greatest wish, her one and only hope in this world, would come true, and she could spend the rest of her life with you and experience complete happiness and love. Then, after the beautiful ending, and preferably before Anne herself died, I would step in to fulfil Anne’s dearest hope.”
Olli walked through the Apple Gate onto Hämeenkatu. A taxi was waiting. Snow had started to fall. A scooter pulled up in front of the house. A gaunt but cinematically elegant blonde woman dismounted—the same woman Olli had talked with at the film club.
Anne Blomroos.
“Well, if it isn’t Olli,” she said. “My dear old friend. You’re still here. I thought the show was already over. The heroine died completely happy and so on. Mission accomplished, and just in the nick of time. Olli, you should be at home now. I’m sure you don’t want your family to come home to an empty house.”