This Is Not Your City (20 page)

“It isn't fucking fair,” he wailed. She could hear the flat, thin percussion of skin against stone, his hands, she assumed, slapping the walls. “Tick, stop,” she said, and said it again, as the sound continued. “Stop!” she yelled, when she heard a dull, rounder sound, what she was terrified was the thud of his forehead against rock. She got her arms around him and managed to turn him and push him down the wall. She was grateful that he was so thin. She slid herself behind him, her legs spread to fit around his hips. He tensed, then leaned his head against her shoulder. She stroked his hair with her right hand, held him tightly across the ribcage with her left. Eventually he was quiet. She curved a palm on his forehead and felt a strange, smooth square. The postage stamp, she remembered.

“Renee?” Tick finally whispered.

“Yes?”

“I don't want to be a dad,” he said. “I don't think it's a good idea.”

“Oh Tick.” She pressed her right temple against his left and
they breathed together. His skin was damp. “It isn't, is it? I shouldn't have asked. I shouldn't have ever asked you.”

“Sorry,” he said.

She drew both arms firmly around him and felt him shake. “I'm sorry,” she said, and meant it. “I'll think of something else,” she said, and meant that too. She said it for herself, not Tick, and hearing it aloud she believed that she would. Her legs ached, spread on the hard ground. She stretched them out farther and her toes brushed the front edge of the bottom step. She was comforted by the stairway now, that in the dark it offered them a direction, a single possibility. She held Tick tighter and rocked him. “Are you ready to go home now?” she asked. She listened to his body for an answer. She listened to her own.

In a moment, they would rise and go.

Nika is missing. Her daughter is missing, and there are two policemen in Daria's kitchen. She does not know what to say to them. “Do you want coffee?” she asks, her voice cracking on the upswing of the question. It is one of the only perfect sentences she knows, one of the first she learned. The policemen shake their heads, and Daria's husband Paavo makes it understood that he will answer their questions, sign their forms. He lifts his fingers curled around an invisible pen and signs his name with a flourish on the air. Daria goes to sit on Paavo's bed. Missing is better than it could be. Paavo had groped for the word in his dictionary. The policemen looked embarrassed for them, and Daria remembered why she did not usually open the door to strangers. The first entry Paavo pointed to meant gone, and Daria almost died. It was several minutes, terrible gestures, the younger policeman with his hand like a visor on his forehead, pretending to look for her daughter under the cupboards, until Daria understood as much as she did.

She has left the kitchen still holding Paavo's dictionary. They each have one, pocket-sized, with a larger one on the bookshelf in the living room. They have not needed the big one yet; their conversation is not so complex. She turns to
dead
in Russian and rips out the page. She will eat it, she thinks, like an old-time spy, so no one can bring her bad news. She thinks
she is joking to herself until she takes a bite of the upper-right corner. She chews and swallows, creases the page in half, tears a bite from the middle. She unfolds it and holds it up in front of the window. It is late evening, but the sun is still up. She washed and bleached the curtains a week ago and admires through the paper how white they are now. The page is soft but substantial, good to chew. It has a flat taste like raw oats. She realizes that Paavo would not need this page to tell her that her daughter is dead. He would turn, of course, to the Finnish, and Daria has already swallowed the translation so she does not know what word to rip out. She eats the rest of the Russian page anyway.

Daria hears the policemen leave, and Paavo comes into the bedroom, gestures for his dictionary. He sits on the edge of the bed with a pencil and pad of paper, and Daria is relieved that he doesn't notice the missing page. He looks studious, reading glasses pushed down his nose as he writes things out for her, his Cyrillic letters as misshapen as a child's. Nika and Matti, her boyfriend, have not come back from their camping trip. They were due in the morning at Matti's house to return the car and were going to spend the day there. All day Matti's mother tried to call his cell phone. All day nothing, and at dinnertime she called the police. A Russian interpreter will be by tomorrow morning, to explain things better, to ask Daria some questions. Daria nods.

Nika is still missing, and Daria still does not know what to do, so she heats the sauna. She strips off her clothes and lets them sit in a heap on the bathroom floor. She fills the red plastic bucket with cold water and pulls the ladle from its peg on the wall. Paavo is always saying he will buy birch, a proper bucket and scoop, but Daria doesn't care. She heats the sauna hotter than she ever has before and dumps water on the rocks until sweat runs into her eyes and they hurt so badly it's okay if she cries. The steam is searing. She has left her earrings in and she can feel the silver getting hotter, drawing the burn up through the hooks into her ears. They will blister if she leaves them, burn her fingers if she takes them out. She tugs them quickly from her ears and lets them drop between the pine boards to the floor.

When she steps out into the bathroom her eyes are sore and so salted she can barely see. She wraps a towel around herself and walks to the bedroom. Paavo is sitting on the bed watching television, duvet over his legs, his chest bare. He has an old man's body, with small, pointy breasts, white hairs curling around the nipples. Skinny legs and arms, a great melon of a belly. His hair is gray but thick, with a swoop above his forehead; he is not so very old, yet.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“No. Yes.” She mimes sweating, rubs her eyes, says “ouch.” Paavo nods, willing as ever to be lied to.

“Sauna. Still hot. If you want,” she says.

Paavo shakes his head. Daria wonders if her body is still hot enough to scald him, wonders what damage she could do if she reached for him now. Paavo turns the channel from Formula One highlights, looking for something he thinks she will like better. He stops at an old episode of
Friends
and Daria listens to the laugh track. Someday, she thinks, if she grows old in this country, she will know by herself what's so funny. She has seen this episode already, back at home in Vyborg, the voices dubbed. Chandler is inside a box on the floor, apologizing. She recognizes this much, his apology, and she realizes it is a word that Finnish people never speak aloud.
Excuse me
they say easily, but never this,
olen pahoillani
, a sad man locked in a box. She wonders if Nika knows this word yet,
pahoillani
, if she could say it in their new language and be understood.
Olen pahoillani. Tyttäreni.
I'm sorry. My daughter, I'm sorry.

Daria puts on her nightgown and joins Paavo in the bed, he under his comforter, she under hers. She lies on her side, facing away from her husband. She hears him turn the television off and put the remote on the nightstand. He puts his hand on her shoulder, and she is waiting for it to trail lower, down her spine or over the curve of her hip, when instead he touches her hair. He pets her head like a child's. “It will be all right,” he says, and Daria is grateful, but somehow lonelier. Sex is a language they can pretend to have in common; he grunts, he waits for her to sigh, and they can imagine that they understand each other. She doesn't like it when Paavo talks in bed. Her ears know he is a
stranger, and if he spoke while he touched her, her skin would know it, her bones would know it, her sex would know that she has agreed to spend her life in a stranger's bed.

The agency promised her no better. She has not been cheated. You have a daughter, they told her. Fourteen years old. What do you expect us to find for you? A divorcée, no less, which seemed to imply to the matchmakers a lack of fortitude, fatally unrealistic expectations. Her first husband did not beat her, she had been forced to admit to them. He was drunk only on weekends when he was in Vyborg, which was only two weeks out of every sixteen. He went to the oil fields in Western Siberia, and brought home money, and how could she be so dissatisfied with someone who was not even there? You wouldn't understand, she said to them. It is what she has been saying for nine years, and what started as reluctance to unburden herself to nosy aunts and cousins has in those nine years become something true. She has forgotten why she staked her hopes on something better, something different, why she was so sure of success. Daria knows that if she thinks about the divorce too long she will be forced to admit that she would not do it again. It is a monstrous realization that she has made a mistake of that magnitude with her life, something that cannot be mended or taken back. If she could choose again she would stay, and it seems like the worst thing she could know about herself.

If she had stayed, she might never have had to go to work at the Vyborg market hall, the building by the bay that still has
Kauppahalli
inscribed in cement above the main doors. In the years after the war, her parents told her, thousands of such signs were scratched out, repainted, re-hung. The statelier ones, letters cut into granite or marble, have stayed. So she knows the Finnish for
market hall
, for
train station
, for
bank
. She also knows the Finnish for
chocolates
, and
taste
, and
very inexpensive
, the words she used behind the broad table at the back wall, plastic bins of foil-wrapped candies before her. The teenager at the next table sold bootleg CDs and taught her to recognize the Finns. Terrible clothes and stylish glasses, he told her. Jogging suits and sharp dark frames. That's the look of money.

Daria thinks she will not sleep this night, the sky a starless waking blue, but hours later she finds herself stirring, groggy, the early light pale and confused. When Paavo wakes she has porridge ready, homemade and heavy, a pool of black currant jam in the middle of the bowl. He manages to ask her if she wants him to stay home from work. “Go,” she tells him. Paavo works at the pulp factory, and the smell of him after a shift is the smell of the air over the town, the wind off the lake; it smells something like stewed cabbage, and the townspeople have only one joke about it. Smell that, they say, noses in the air. The scent of money. On good days the breeze comes from the other end of the lake, where the Japanese have built a new sawmill. That smell reminds Daria of the forest near Ladoga, picking at bark with her fingernails and opening a divot that bled sap and the pine scent of the tree. She told this to Nika one day when the wind was good, and Nika rolled her eyes. “It's a sawmill, Mom. That's the smell of dead trees. Dead trees getting chopped into little bits.”

Not little bits, Daria thinks, not unless the grain is bad. She knows the trees she smells are being planed into boards, long and straight and someday someone's home. But they are dead all the same. She must grant her daughter that, and to explain the rest seems like so much effort. Nika is fifteen now and does not like to listen.

While Daria waits for the interpreter, she cleans the kitchen. She cleans the venetian blinds slat by slat because she cannot figure out how to unhook them from the window frame. The thin panels are sharper than they look, and she cuts her fingers in three places. She leaves a streak of blood on a slat close to the ceiling. She likes hiding a part of herself in the apartment, as if it is a claim to the space, a promise that she will not have to leave it, although her entire life has taught her otherwise. She was born in a city that once spoke another language. She thinks the Finns who visited came only to be angry; they kicked the dissolving sidewalks like the tires of an old car they would have taken better care of. This is not your city anymore, she wanted to tell them. It has not been your city for fifty years. Leave us alone.

Daria scrubs the stovetop and wonders if the translator will be a Russian-speaking Finn, or the other way round. She wonders
whether to make tea sweetened with jam, or the endless cups of coffee her husband drinks. The doorbell rings and Daria's heart is frantic. Through the peephole there is only a sour-looking man, older than she is, younger than Paavo. “Daria Kikkunen?” he says when she opens the door, and she nods. She listens to his accent and makes them coffee. The interpreter asks her about Nika and Matti, about their weekend plans. Daria is embarrassed at how little she knows. Only the backpack Nika filled, the sleeping bag she borrowed from Paavo and complained smelled like an old man, smoke and aftershave. The borrowed car to drive north of Kuusamo, to celebrate the midsummer weekend.

The interpreter asks about Matti, and Daria tells him what she knows, how one night four months ago they were all sitting in the living room when a car pulled to a stop outside and honked its horn. “Poikaystäväni,” Nika announced in Finnish, “my boyfriend,” took her coat from the hallway closet and left. Nika cannot speak the language, had at that time been in the country for all of eight weeks; what kind of a boyfriend could she have? The interpreter gives Daria an ugly look, but leans closer, his hands stretching over his notepad and pen, his sleeves sweeping the table. Daria leans back without thinking, then asks herself why she is bothering to be afraid of this man, balding, his skin the white-yellow of new potatoes. Daria tells him that she has seen Matti a few times, that she remembers a boy like a great gold mastiff, giant and eager and mysteriously happy. Dogboy, Daria says to herself, although she is forced to admit he is handsome in a way that seems terribly young.

Nika thinks they have never spoken, her boyfriend and her mother, only nodded at each other from the apartment door as she comes or goes. Nika does not know that six weeks ago they ran into each other in the Prisma parking lot. Daria remembers being surprised when she left the store that evening and there was still light in the sky. A cold wind, but a portion of sun: signs of spring. Matti and Daria recognized each other and said “hello,” cleared their throats, shifted their feet. Then Matti said, “Nika is a very nice girl.” He said it slowly and clearly, and she understood him. He said it a little loudly, too, which embarrassed her, but she could see he was trying. “I like her very much. Do
you understand?” he asked, and Daria nodded. “I can take—” he said, pointing at her shopping bags, and before she could protest he'd lifted them out of her arms and begun to walk toward Paavo's car. He waited while she unlocked the trunk and then put them down carefully. He handed her the plastic bag with the eggs, and Daria was surprised that he would think to do that. She was surprised that he seemed such a decent boy, so surprised, in fact, that she felt guilty for her astonishment. He took her hand, held it for a moment. “It is good,” he said. “That you bring her. That you bring Nika here. It is a happy thing.”