Minä, sisareniby Katriina Ranne

A sample translation of parts of the novel

(published by Nemo, 2010)

Translation: Arttu Ahava

The translation has been funded by FILI

(Finnish Literature Exchange)

© Katriina Ranne 2013

Extracts from Part I

Tuuli

In the beginning was the River. The River was broad and deep, and

looked dark from the edge of Grandma’s pier, where Mother sat

dangling her legs in the water. And the spirit of God moved under the

face of the waters, and watched Mother’s toes. Her big toes were

large and shaped like potatoes, splashing water high into the air. And

God saw that they were good. So God chomped a piece off Mother’s

left big toe, and created Father from it.

Mother’s big toe was left stunted, but from the chomped piece

Mother was given a husband with whom to row; Father tilted the

boat so that Mother could bail out the last few drops of water. Mother

grabbed one oar and Father the other, and together they rowed to the

middle of the River. They let the current take them, falling asleep

side by side on the bottom of the boat. Their legs were so close that

their toes touched, and a drop of sweat from Father’s toe rolled onto

Mother’s toe. And God blew that drop of sweat like a glassblower

blows glass, and that drop became a daughter.

After God had blown me into Father and Mother’s lap, home

was no longer empty, for I crawled into every room. And Mother

said: “You are Tuuli, free to go wherever you like.” I, Tuuli, which

means wind, was free to choose the bedtime story and decide

whether I would go to Sunday School in the morning with Mother or

stay to sleep next to Father. When I was with Father, I could put on

my rain pants and jump in the puddles in the yard while Father read

the papers. But then I would climb on the bike behind Mother,

because I wanted more sheep for my Sunday School sheet, the one

with grass and a blue sky and Jesus in his freshly ironed robes. Jesus

carried a shepherd’s rod that could make water out of stone, in case

the sheep got thirsty. My sheet always had more snow white sheep

than anyone else: a whole meadow full of them. And I always took

them to the greenest of pastures. I also added some sheep from

Mother’s purse, when it lay on the bed after Sunday School – but

only because the last sheep left on the sticker sheet looked so very

lonely.

At the maternity clinic, I filled in the picture of a fuzzy sheep,

colouring it grey. And it was good. The lady at the clinic looked at it,

and said that my fine motor skills were rather undeveloped. Back

home, Father said that all it meant was that I was a little clumsy.

Mother snorted, and said that the important thing was that I was

colouring. I stopped moving my chalk, and looked at my colouring

book, where the colours ran over the lines, but Mother said that it did

not matter. It was my colouring book and I could do whatever

I wanted with it. So it was that I clutched the chalk tightly in my fist

and coloured with such passion that soon the whole sheet was full of

vibrant colours. Even the floor was stained red, so I pulled the carpet

over it. Nobody noticed.

Mother and Father often played with me, but they could not

understand all of my games. So it was that God decided that I needed

a better playmate. And God came to Claymaker Street to dance in the

rain. He took a drop of rain from the heavens onto his palm, and blew

a baby from it. I was the greater light that ruled the day, but the little

bundle snuffling in the crib was the lesser light that ruled the night,

with shrieks that pierced the darkness. It was hungry. I lay in bed

with my eyes open, and from between a crack in the door saw

a bright night light turn on in Mother’s and Father’s room the

moment the little pipsqueak started to cry.

Finally, the bundle pushed itself to its feet and started to walk,

leaning on the edge of the bookshelf in the living room, and learned

to say “Tuu-i”. God had sent me a sister; He had sent rain to the

world. For her name was Sade, which means rain. The rights of the

first-born were mine: I ate with fork and knife, while my little sister

ate with spoon, and only after I had finished did Sade climb into my

chair and eat my leftovers with shaky stabs of the fork.

When it was below freezing, Father would dress us in splash

suits and neckwarmers, letting Sade ride piggyback as he showed us

big dippers and great bears and little bears on the telescope. They had

taught us in Sunday School that God lived up in the sky and that

children were his gifts. But I was the only one who knew that when it

was cold you could look at children-to-be on the telescope. One

evening, I saw one of those future babies shoot down toward our

redbrick house. I said nothing, going to sleep happy. The next

morning Mother’s belly had grown. Every morning I listened to the

baby kick, singing lullabies to it with my mouth against Mother’s

belly-button.

Soon, Mother’s balls of yarn were packed up from the upper

bunk and stuffed into boxes under the bed. I moved from the bottom

bunk to the upper bunk, and Sade from the crib to the lower bunk.

A third sister came to the crib: Meri, which means the sea. She cried.

Meri had been sent from a star, but she was born into the world as

a tear. Mother cradled Meri in her arms, but she just cried: quietly,

but endlessly.

The next baby was sent down so quickly that I did not even

have time to look through the telescope the night she came. God

picked up a wrinkled leaf from our back yard, and from a dew drop

in the middle He created a fourth daughter, so that Meri would not be

sad anymore. The baby was baptised Usva, which means mist, but

Father called her Last-of-the-Litter. Mother did not like it when

I used that name, because she said that it was a word for pigs. Of

course, the baby did have pink skin and translucent hair. Otherwise

she was an excellent baby: never cried much, and always laughed

when you chucked her under the chin.

From then on, every second day Father would read the bedtime

story sitting on the lower bunk and every other day sitting on the

upper bunk. And so it was that I was no longer treated every night to

the story of the boy or got to sob at the part where the boy tells the

fish goodbye. But I did learn how to bribe Sade to wish for the same

story every time. And when that no longer worked and Sade no

longer wanted to hear stories about boys, I started to notice that by

letting the other person have her turn, you got many stories rather

than just one.

Sade

When Father was not yet my father and Mother was not yet my

mother, Father sat two rows behind Mother during the service, and

heard Mother sing. Mother’s voice quavered, but rose higher than the

others, so clear that it rang through the whole church and stirred the

hair of those sitting in the congregation. In order to keep their hair in

order, the clergy and some of the ladies wore hats. That Sunday,

when Father heard Mother sing for the first time, Mother’s voice

rung clearer than ever. During a mournful hymn it rose several

octaves higher than the choir, then slipped away from the lines of the

stave, and rose higher still, right up to the stained glass windows of

the church, finally piercing one of them. The other voices fell silent,

as they listened to the shards of glass tinkling onto the floor, seeing

the stained glass Virgin Mary with her neck severed and her head

gone. The others fell silent, but Mother’s voice still echoed in the

Church, spreading to the heavens through the broken window.

Mother rose from her pew and walked out, and Father, who

had never heard a voice like that and never wanted to hear anything

else, walked after her. From Turku Cathedral, Mother walked to the

bus station and took a coach for Pori. After a moment’s hesitation

Father, who had been shadowing her, got on the same coach. At Pori

Mother changed coaches and Father followed again, as they drove to

Noormarkku.

Mother disappeared into the yard of a farm house. Father

waited for a moment in the shelter of a big rock, before walking into

the yard. He saw the River as he went to greet Mother, who sat in the

yard swing with a glass of water in hand, and asked her whether he

was allowed to swim at their shore. “Of course,” Mother said. “Are

you thirsty, would you like some water?” Father did want water, and

he wanted Mother to swim with him. Mother dropped her towel onto

the pier. They swam in the River against the current until their arms

fell slack, and then floated back in the embrace of the River. They

raced each other, swimming with the current without worrying about

the way back, until one of them suddenly decided to pull on the

other’s legs, swearing that it was no big thing to swim up to the head

of the River. But the River had no head and no tail, it just went on

and on. Perhaps it turned into a loop, or perhaps they had without

noticing changed directions, because in the end they were again in

front of the pier, and the sun was shining on the shore shingles at

Grandma’s house and on the birches and hay on the opposite bank of

the river. Father and Mother swam to the opposite shore, picking

sweet-scented wild strawberries from among the hay and sliding

them onto stalks of meadow cat’s tails, swimming with stalks in

mouth to the pier and eating strawberries from the stalks and from

each others’ mouths.

The empty cat’s tail stalks fell into the shore water, taking root

in the river mud, and from the mud was born a child, who grew up

and crawled up a stalk to the surface. During the night she slithered

onto the pier, and over the grass to the house, crawling into Mother’s

belly. The River water was teeming with all sorts of living things, all

of them women, and four of them grabbed a stalk and climbed into

the world: first one, then two years later another one, then three years

later a third, and then after one year the last one. I am the second. But

every summer, after I crawl out of the water, I jump head first into

the muddy river, diving back to the beginning, and only rise back up

after I cannot tell which way is heaven and which way is bottom, and

the river water is hammering at my head.

Meri

My first real memory is suffused with a picture from a photo album.

I was after all only one year old, certainly too young to remember

that day without the photo and the stories told by my big sisters. But

that photo was not merely a photo; through it, I could jump into

flickers, a story woven from flickers. I jumped into a pair of tights,

pulled on the wrong way around; I jumped into our long, narrow hall.

My big sisters had made hurdles out of all the pillows in the house,

and there was laughter and silliness in the air. Vellamo was in a

gentle mood. Vellamo was Grandma’s friend, and better at cooking

semolina porridge than anyone else. She was the only one who was

allowed to take care of us with Father and Mother at the hospital, and

Grandma in the waiting room, pretending to knit a sock while she

waited for Father’s joyful shout. We were also headed there soon,

which was why a pair of quilted pants were being pulled over my

tights. Suddenly, we had cause for joy: Vellamo gave us permission

to wear whatever we wanted.

We three happy big sisters to-be spilled out from the back seat

of the Toyota to the yard of the hospital. In the snapshot, which

Father took, we were all sitting on Mother’s bed: Mother in the

middle with her fresh baby bundle, the rest of us around her in our

lace dreams. Our short sleeved, yellow ruffle dresses were stretched

over our waists, pulled over our green quilted pants. Mother was

laughing at lace dresses in January, but we smiled proudly. We were

the first coltsfoots of spring.

Later in spring, we no longer needed yellow clothes: the

ditches were full of yellow coltsfoot flowers, which filled all of the

bowls Mother had made and put in the kitchen, and after they were

full, yet more flowers were stuffed into jars of baby food. Every

spring, the land was yellow with new coltsfoots. In summer we

would weave garlands out of dandelions, and use dandelion stalks to

dye circles onto our shirts. With broadleaf plantain and dandelion tea

we cured all wounds and illnesses. Grandma had planted her own

tree for each of her granddaughters the day we were born. We

climbed to the tops of our fragile trees, on the lookout for new lands

to conquer. We toured the grounds of Grandma’s place, charting

distant forests and collecting medicinal plants, which we would carry

on the milk cart to our pharmacy by the cowshed. In the blink of

an eye, our medical cart became a wagon, as suddenly we were

orphaned wanderers, sent off to the barren wilderness.

Tuuli and Sade were my big sisters, who knew how the world

was made and where names came from. Usva and I were stars, but

Tuuli and Sade were the sun and moon. They told most of the stories,

which were long and meandering. Occasionally, these stories would

be interrupted for long stretches of time, and it was always part of

their charm whether they would ever be continued. Now and again,

Usva and I would create our own endings for these stories. And

anyone could always start a new one.

We knew how to tune into the frequency of each others’

imaginations: every story and every character dreamed up by one of

us was as real to all of us as Grandma’s brick house on the other side

of the field or the adults drinking coffee inside. We would run away

from potato picking, sprinting over the field and away from our

neighbor shaking his fist at us. We would run hand-in-hand, but at

the same time alone; we would run to the woods, the river, the mud,

the heavens. We ran hand in hand, but on our own two feet.

I stood with legs straight and toes bare, ignoring all danger.

I knew the land, and I was unshakable. That is what I remember

when I look at the photo of me standing behind the barn at

Grandma’s, blowing fluff away from a dandelion. My eyes are

slitted, confident, and my gaze is full of power. It is the kind of

power that countless photos have strived for, the subject gazing

defiantly at the camera, blowing cigarette smoke at the lens. And yet,

none of these cigarette photos have managed to reach even half of

that power. In the photo of me at the edge of the field, my short hair

is flying in the wind, as free as I have ever since wanted it to be. It is

at the same time a boy cut and a girl cut, both indifferent and capable

of moving in any direction. Its owner has the power of a dandelion-

blower.

Usva

Our family had so many children because Father wanted a son.

Mother and Father stopped trying only after their fourth failure. It

was clear that, lacking a boy, Meri would become their first born son.

In answer to an advert for a father/son camp, Father signed up with

Meri, apparently because she had short hair. They cancelled only

after Meri realised she would not be allowed to go to the sauna. The

others remember the father/son camp as just a plan, a joke, and none

of them remember that we four children were four attempts at a son.

Sade once admitted that she may have told me a made-up story like

that as a joke.

I have been dragged by stories this way and that ever since the

beginning. I have also been dragged everywhere by my sisters,

always the youngest and smallest. Going to the open air swimming

pool, I walked under the counter while my big sisters paid the lady

knitting behind the counter, and we used the extra money to buy

a big bag of candy. In our back yard, Tuuli put her hands under my

armpits and hoisted me high into the air, so that when Meri was

calling out the ditty “Fresh washed clean back, circle and line, who

poked that with their dirty nail”, I poked Sade between the shoulders

with my finger, and she never knew, because she was sure I could not

reach that far up. I was small, but unpredictable.

We played hide and seek in the back yard, baseball in the town

park, and field hockey on the street. I was there, either riding

piggyback or on the back of a bicycle. In winter I sat in the sled,

squeezing the handles with my thick mittens when the shoes of the

sled puller sprayed snow more violently than expected. I was a little

slower to find hiding places, so they fudged the rules for me a little.

At first I often had little idea what was going on, but always took part

– except for the time that my hiding place at Grandma’s was too

good. The others had already cycled home by the time I climbed out

of the hatch in the attic of the cowshed.

I particularly liked it in the paper waste shed at Circle Lane.

We all sat in our own cardboard boxes among the piles of paper,

while one of us held onto the end of a fishing line. The line slithered

out from between the boards of the shed to the bushes and from there

to the street. The other end of the line was tied to a nice wallet

stuffed with scraps of paper. We were entertained by many quick

stops, greedy grabbers and violent swearwords. All of us got a taste

of adrenaline, sitting there in the shed. But not everyone got to hold

the line – as the smallest, I was passed over.

Tuuli

Grandma had taken the ice cream out to thaw early that morning.

It was Christmas Eve, and we had just arrived at Grandma’s,

sung carols and decorated the Christmas tree that Father had brought

to Grandma’s living room the day before. Mother had said that this

year we would wait until we got home before eating Christmas

dinner, as Grandma was too old for all the fuss. So we were

expecting nothing when Grandma opened the fridge, and said:

“Come look, children. I took some ice cream out for you.”

Grandma took a flat dish from the refrigerator, with a slightly

soggy package of vanilla ice cream. Grandma’s hand trembled,

sending dribbles of ice cream onto the floor and onto Grandma’s

slipper. Father rushed to get a larger plate, while Mother glared at

Grandma, asking with the kind of voice you do not use with

Grandma: “When did you take it from the freezer? What were you

thinking?”

“This morning,” Grandma said. “I thought I’d take it out to thaw

for you.” Grandma’s hands shook a little.

Father took a plate and put it over the larger one so that the ice

cream no longer dripped. “The children will be happy to eat it

anyway,” Father said calmly, wiping drops of ice cream from the

floor. But he could do nothing about the smears on Grandma’s

slippers. We all got a big spoon, sitting there on the floor around the

stacked plates.

As I opened the top of the package, more ice cream sludge

spread over the plate, right up to the edges. It was yummy, like

sweet vanilla sauce, and we were allowed to eat all of the package in

one go with our big spoons. But I knew that this was serious

business, because only small children fail to realise that ice cream

must be eaten before it melts.

Mother sat by the kitchen table, staring through the hyacinths

and the window. There were frost ferns on the window, the kind that

Meri and Usva always gawked at with their fingers tracing the glass,

but Mother probably did not even see them. She now had a fifth child

to take care of.

Mother was the one who lifted the comb from the toilet after

Usva accidentally dropped it – Usva liked to brush her hair standing

on the toilet seat, because that was the only way she could reach to

see herself in the mirror. The comb slipped and Meri squealed,

bringing Mother to the toilet. Usva was on the floor, running

a second comb through her hair, while I and Meri stared aghast as

Mother calmly reached down into the toilet to pick up the wet comb.

Mother could do anything at all, but it sometimes took its toll.

Mother stared out of the window, and did not want any vanilla sauce

ice cream.

They said that Grandma had to move to an old people’s home,

because she could no longer remember how quickly ice cream

melted. At the old people’s home, she forgot other things. Almost

everything, in fact. Father said that Grandma had Parkinson’s and

perhaps something more. Mother’s voice grew quiet, as if she

regretted almost shouting at Grandma, and on Christmas Eve at that,

right after the Archbishop had declared the Peace of Christmas.

Grandma was supposed to move from the old people’s home to the

hospital, but she looked so happy. She had only grown younger, and

soon she would be a baby. So it was that she went to the hospital, to

wait for birth.

Grandma was not really Grandma anymore. She kept saying that

the cows needed taking care of, and that she lived in Hiitola, which

was lost to the Russians in the war. She had a daughter, but she

seemed to think that her grandchildren were little girls from the same

village. We still went to sing to her in the hospital, rather like you

sing to a baby, singing lullabies for someone who hardly understands

what you are saying. Lullabies make you sleep. When we sang,

Grandma usually closed her eyes, and one day Father said that she

had entered the final sleep.

It was not sad: Grandma had been sleepwalking for years, and

now she could finally sleep properly. We had grown older, while

Grandma had grown younger, becoming a baby and sleeping all the

time.

At the funeral, the priest said that Grandma had gone to heaven.

Was that not a happy thing? And yet, everyone seemed quiet and

sober, and I realised that they were not quite sure. That was why the

priest had to repeat it: she has gone to heaven. But the way he said it,

it sounded like it was something he had learned by heart. I realised

that no one was sure.

Sade and Meri cried a little, probably mostly because everyone

was so quiet and wearing black. I do not believe that my little sisters

even really remember what Grandma was like before she was already

completely different from when I was small and Grandma was really

herself.

For that matter, it was hard for me to remember all of it: I could

remember Grandma’s gentle voice, but not much of what she had

said before all she talked about were cows and Hiitola. What

I remembered were mostly things that Mother had told about

Grandma’s life when she was already in hospital. But I would always

remember that you had to eat your ice cream before it melted.

Sade

”No, let’s keep on floating for a second,” I answered every time

Mother wanted to return to the shore. Mother said that my lips had

turned bluer than the seawater, but agreed to float for just another

second.

The shore at Yyteri was so shallow that it took me and Mother

forever to wade to deep water. The waves were perfect right then. We

let them carry us, floating side by side. I floated with my eyes closed,

rocking onto the seafloor and back, drifting to distant shores; I fell

asleep lulled by a trance brought on by the wash of the waves. I was

certain I would wake on the shores of distant Brazil. My hands and

feet were so cold I could barely feel them, my fingers and toes equal

parts yellow and violet. My stomach churned. I wished that I could

suck in plankton like the fish and mermaids, so I would never have to

leave the waves.

Grandma had gone to heaven, and Mother liked to lie on the

waves with her eyes open, watching the heavens. In the end Mother

dragged me away and walked me to the blanket. She wrapped me in

a rough towel and rubbed me dry, pulling a hoodie over my head.

Mother held my chilled hands between her warm ones, while Tuuli

and Meri were my extra fingers, feeding me crisps tasting of salt and

oil, sprinkled with sand. Tuuli’s fingers were spiced with the added,

sweet flavour of the inflatable mattress. Usva sat on the blanket

playing with her blocks of wood, which could be arranged to form

a jigsaw puzzle in six different ways. She stuffed a half-eaten crisp

into my mouth, tasting of sunblock.

My mouth was full of the salt from the crisps and the sand and

the tastes of a day at the beach. As mother let me drink from

an orange carton of Brazil juice, I knew I was in heaven. It seemed so

strange that a few minutes ago I had been ready to give up my feet

and crisps for a fish tail and the ability to swim forever.

Meri’s swimsuit had been passed on first by Tuuli and then by

me. After many years of use, it was so sheer that the wearer’s nipples

showed through. Usva’s nipples were completely uncovered, because

she had forgotten her bikini top. There was nothing special about

Usva’s bare nipples, nothing that kept drawing your attention because

you could just see them. That was why we kept grinning at Meri’s

breasts, visible through her swimsuit. By turns, Mother called Meri

her merman or her mermaid, but it was true that Meri had started to

look more like a woman.

It did not matter much, in a family without boys: we could be

girls or tomboys or girlish boys or boyish girls without comment. We

had no idea what games were supposed to be boys’ games, smoothly

moving from war with inflatable mattresses to playing with pink

Barbie dolls and back as the mood would take us.

We only rarely got to go to Yyteri, and we did not go to the banks of

the River every day, but we did have a frog ditch in our back yard.

Sitting on the edge of the ditch, I found some clay. I cleaned the mud

and blades of grass from the lumps of clay I had dug up from the

ditch, shaping the clay into birds: mallards of different sizes,

swimming in a row.

My birds were delicate, with beautiful wings. Once the clay had

hardened, they won a place of honour on the windowsill of the

playhouse. Usva and Meri fought over who got to pick first, when

I told them they could have one each. The prettiest of my mallards

uncurled their necks, stretched their wings, shook the clay dust off

their feathers and took flight. I lay on my back by the ditch, watching

as my clay-grey birds turned into tiny dots in the sky, leaving me half

sad, half proud.

Tuuli did not believe in birds.

“Let’s make people instead.”

My hands were used to the shape of the mallards, so I hesitated

as I stretched the clay into long limbs and a straight back.

“Yes... Look. Make it more like a woman.”

In Tuuli’s fingers, the lump of clay instantly became a woman.

She grew hips, a belly, pert breasts and soft thighs. Tuuli had

breathed life, human life into the clay, and I wanted to as well. We

made skinny women and round women, full, expecting mothers and

delicate, budding girls. We moulded women who were embracing,

crazed with each others’ bodies, and women who demurely covered

themselves with their hands. Our Venus statues lined the bank of the

ditch, but in the end most of them were sacrificed to the frogs,

dropped into the ditch to dissolve into clay. A few were elevated to

the window of the playhouse, to watch over the back yard.

After the clay statues had hardened and started to crack, after I had

finished the bag of crisps and after Tuuli and I were done telling

about how the world was created, we had grown long legs. I could

reach the bough of the plum tree that protruded into our yard from

our neighbour’s property.

”That isn’t our tree,” Mother said, shaking her head, but

I replied that that branch had intruded into our yard. I plucked one

ripe plum for each, gathering them up in the hem of my shirt, and

brought them to the kitchen table, next to the jars of wild raspberries

and strawberries picked by Tuuli.

Mother, who had been drinking coffee at the head of the table,

called out “Mind the stone” just as I bit greedily into the plum, teeth

cracking on the middle.

“It’s not a stone, it’s a seed,” I replied. “I want to eat it so

a plum tree will grow in my tummy.”

Tuuli and Meri took a handful of strawberries, and so did I, even

though I had not swallowed the plum stone.

“Girls, too much of a sweet thing. Don’t eat it all,” Mother said

as Tuuli took a second handful of raspberries.

”But Vellamo said that we have to eat everything, or we won’t

grow up. Vellamo lets us eat anything,” Tuuli said.

“You’ll grow up soon enough anyway. All too soon,” Mother

said.

”And Vellamo lets Usva walk in her high heels up and down the

corridor,” Meri said.

“I want to know what it’s like, being grown up,” I said.

At that moment, Usva walked into the kitchen, wobbling oddly.

She had put pieces of wood from her jigsaw inside her socks, under

her heels – after all, Mother had no high heels to borrow. In answer

to our laughter, Usva gave us a broad grin.

Mother shook her head, walking outside to hang up the laundry.

We were hungry, so we ate the last of the berries.

An Extract from Part II

Sade

I could go to the swimming hall just for the jingling of the locker

keys, even without the water. I would push my arms in front and my

head under the surface, and listen to the jingling of keys from dozens

of fellow swimmers, fixed to their arms or legs by rubber bands.

When I drew my hands together and raised my nose above the

surface, the chimes went quiet. I loved to listen to that choir of keys,

but what was essential was that they also fell silent, obeying the

rhythm. Stroke, kick, slide. Up, down. Out, in. To the end of the pool,

and back. The swimming hall was a place of meditative breathing, of

rhythmic lovemaking: flood and ebb, waves washing in and sliding

past. I loved the chlorine smell of the swimming hall. I even loved

the exhaust of some of the new cars, because it smelled like the pool.

There was no swimming hall at Noormarkku. I had gone

swimming every morning ever since I moved to Pori as a high school

senior. However, I had still not figured out why the woman in the

blue dress would stand in the swimming pool every morning,

standing there in the shallow end of the first lane for at least half

an hour: silent, neither swimming nor moving.

Even though the woman never moved, my view of her changed

constantly. Every second stroke I would see her submerged half, with

broad waist and hips, pale stocky thighs and skinny calves, and every

other stroke I would see her upper half, with tightly bound dark hair

and beautiful Asian features, décolletage wrinkled with age. Even

though the parts of this picture changed in the blink of an eye, the

pieces could as well have belonged to two people: I never saw the

whole woman.

Why did the lady in blue just stand there? Perhaps her

meditation simply consisted of watching the swimmers. Perhaps

there was someone whose flexing muscles and shifting buttocks she

never tired of watching. But her gaze never revealed who it was.

I usually watched the lady in blue for a moment, before getting

so wrapped up in my swimming that I barely noticed people stopping

at the ends of the pool or the fingers of nearby swimmers brushing

me, a necessary by-product of narrow lanes and numerous swimmers

passing by. I started – this touch meant something. The back of

a man’s hand lightly but lingeringly brushed over my side, from thigh

to waist. It was not the kind of touch that happened by accident.

I stopped by the side of the lane, holding onto the rope so that

it sunk into the water, as I turned to look at the next lane. A man in

yellow trunks was swimming calmly by with breast strokes, not

glancing back. When we next passed, the man stayed on his own

lane, leaving me smiling at my fantasies. But the third time, it came

again: a long, soft brush over my thigh. I was sure it was no accident.

I decided to answer in kind. When his head next bobbed

nearby on the next lane and I thought his goggle-shrouded eyes were

fixed on me, I swam only with my legs and right hand for a moment,

stretching the bottom of my swimsuit with my left hand so that the

swimmer could almost see inside me. He swam past. As I was

adjusting my swimsuit, I felt something brush my big toe. A faint

touch, perhaps of his big toe – just a small signal. Everything was

clear. The next time, he would dive under the rope to my lane and ask

me for tea in the swimming hall canteen. Our teas would cool as we

chatted and we would fetch new cups, and only after our second teas

had cooled would he happen to ask my name and I his, and then he

would never again be just the swimmer in yellow trunks to me.

After swimming to the other end of the pool, he got out and

walked away to the showers without glancing back. Unnecessary

discretion, I thought. One smile would not have been too much,

would not have drawn attention. After all, no one walked from the

pool to the sauna without glancing back. Perhaps he wanted to make

clear how certain he was that I would follow. Where? The door of the

canteen was the safest bet. In the dressing room, I did a rush job with

the hair drier, quickly put on some mascara, and then went to the

table by the door of the canteen.

My tea did not cool even once. The canteen was empty, and

I could hear every noise the middle-aged woman leaning on the

counter made as she read her tabloid. None of the men passing by

looked like the swimmer in the yellow trunks. As I ordered a second

cup of tea, I played back my recollections from finish to start,

analysing my interpretation of the bypasser’s brushing caresses.

What emerged was a girl flashing her privates at a confused

swimmer, or perhaps a swimmer in yellow so focused on his last lap

that he had not even noticed the girl.

Perhaps there was no swimmer in yellow, or his three brushing

strokes. Perhaps it had been two different, random swimmers, two

different yellow speedos bought at a sale, the flickering of the light in

the water, a head dazzled by the beauty of rhythmically breathing in

and out and an imagination carried away by buttocks flexing, a story

spun from nothing by the rush of flexing pectorals. Perhaps even the

woman with the Asian features never glanced at my swimming body.

Perhaps there had been no woman with Asian features standing at the

end of the pool in the first place.

Extracts from Part III

Meri

I had legs that spread well. When I spread my legs and pressed my

chin to the floor, the yoga teacher would smile at me, and usually say

that I had a wonderfully open pelvis.

Sitting with my pencil skirt on the Tube, I stared at the men

sitting opposite me. Why did they sit with their legs spread? Women

sat with knees pressed together, or one leg resting on the other, but all

men sat with legs as wide as possible, as if they needed to prove that

they were men by the tightness at the crotch of their pants. Men

breathed and spoke forcefully and used more musky colognes than

women, yet they still claimed that it was women who wanted to be

noticed. Maybe women’s magazines taught people how to look

beautiful, but men’s magazines taught in their own uncomplicated

way how to draw gazes: spread your legs.

One day, when I was changing lines on the Tube at London

Bridge, a young man jostled my shoulder with his elbow as he

stepped through the doors at the last moment. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s

OK,” I answered, sitting down. I read a newspaper that had been left

on the bench. It had been left open to show a spread of messages

posted by people who had developed crushes on the Tube. “To the

beautiful girl who got on the Jubilee line train with me at London

Bridge, 6 pm Wednesday. I said: ‘Sorry’. You said ‘It’s OK.’ Let’s

meet.”

I looked around, but the man who had jostled my shoulder had

already gotten off at the previous station. A woman sitting next to me

was reading the same newspaper, face almost stuck to the pages. The

men sitting opposite stared into nothingness, legs splayed. I glanced

again at the woman reading the newspaper, and realised she was

crying.

The next day, I read every message in the newspaper, but no

one had written to the girl who got on the Tube at London Bridge.

I said “It’s OK,” but perhaps he was not listening. Perhaps he did not

even hear me when I said I was OK with him touching me.

I remembered how the woman sitting next to me had kept her

magazine pressed almost against her face. I wondered if she had been

squinting hard, looking for a message. But no one had written to her,

either.

Sade sometimes said that men might be afraid of me, because

there was an “etheric, delicate beauty” about me. And yet, it does not

work like that. Men are afraid of attics and the dark and war, just like

women, but they are not afraid of breaking others: the further a man

is from etheric and delicate, the more directly he approaches women,

no matter how beautiful they are. The man who had said “Sorry” to

me had either forgotten my words or been thinking of something else

the moment they left my mouth.

I was still wearing my yoga tights, so as I stared at the men

sitting opposite, inside seams of their pants proudly displayed,

I decided to try it. I spread my legs, as easily as at yoga class, as

easily as unrolling a yoga mat. My tights were stretched over my

skin, but no one stared. I watched the ruddy faces of the men sitting

across from me, wrinkles and creases unmasked by the harsh lights

of the Tube. It was hot, and their skin glistened. One man wore

a dress shirt, collar glued to his sweaty skin. I wondered whether

even the most handsome men would one day turn into the middle-

aged, tired commuters sitting across from me on the Tube, pouches

drooping under their eyes.

What if desire is not, after all, a tune that is so beautiful from

start to finish that tears drip onto the piano keys after eyes have

found notes and fingers keys, to bring the sheet music alive? What if

desire is like a hankie, a big white sheet covering your view before

a good sneeze, made of paper so it cannot be washed afterward.

A hankie left by accident in the pockets of pants bound for the

washing machine disintegrates into small, annoying fluff that is only

good for throwing in the bin. That would be awful. Eternal longing

can be a torment, but infinitely better than not wanting at all. Perhaps

only an imaginary man remains perfectly handsome after years of

lovemaking. But if the greatest is love, desire must be at least as

great as art.

The train wobbled, people swinging in time with its jerky

motions as if they were dancing. You could have made a music video

of it. On that video everyone would have the same empty gaze as the

men sitting with legs akimbo. Everyone would be dancing even if

they did not know it. I loved London, the Tube where no one stared

at a woman who had decided to spread her legs, London where you

never saw the same person twice on the Tube, London where –

against the odds – one man had written to the girl who said “It’s

OK”.

Sade

None of my sisters would believe that I had ever failed to ask

”What?” when I was uncertain of whether I had heard correctly. But

it did happen once, in the blue room at an indeterminate time

between Sunday and Monday.

We had gone to sleep, Johannes upstairs, I downstairs. That

night, I woke from a dream of Johannes. I was at the same time

disappointed that it had ended and glad to have woken up, able to

remember it. I lay on my back on the sofa bed, already musing on

Brazil, when suddenly I heard a small thump from the stairs.

I kept my eyes shut, even though I could hear Johannes’

creeping steps. I thought that if I pretended to sleep, he might come

to me.

Johannes did not come to bed, but he did sit on the edge. He

stroked my cheek with feather touches, whispering something that

sounded like my interrupted dream, although he spoke in a calm

tone. “I love you,” Johannes whispered so quietly that I could almost

have heard him wrong. But it was enough. I kept my eyes squeezed

shut and said nothing.

When the fire in Grandma’s old baking oven was lit, the whole

kitchen glowed with warmth. The baker had to wear light clothes:

Grandma and Vellamo always bustled around the kitchen in

sleeveless dresses and aprons. When I on Monday decided to bake

some Karelian pastries, I pulled on Tuuli’s old t-shirt.

Of course, some of my own shirts were still clean, and it is true

that I had noticed how sheer the shirt had become due to wear. But

I was hot, and Johannes was not even there. He was at the

kindergarten when I stirred the rice porridge, flattened the pastry

dough with the rolling pin, pinched the pastries into shape, placed the

pastries on the parchment paper and opened the oven door – one tin

out, another in.

But Johannes did come home, eating a big pile of pastries

dipped in melted butter. I sat at the table, watching him eat. Every

now and then Johannes would bend down to take something from the

plastic bag he had placed next to his chair. I always found it funny

how he refused to buy a bag or accept Father’s old bag when

I offered it to him. Of course, he had not bought the plastic bag

either, having found it in front of the shop. Johannes was a man of

quiet, but absolute principle.

“A plastic bag is just fine,” was what he would always say.

Johannes placed a book on the table: The Helper’s Shadow, by

Martti Lindqvist. “We don’t have an exam on this until December,

but I just wanted to crack it open already. Lindqvist was a fine

theologian and ethicist.”

I flipped through the book, but when Johannes turned on the

water for the dishes, I went to the blue room with my own book.

I read by the table, because my sheets were drying on the sofa,

spread half over the banister.

After lifting the tins on top of the oven, Johannes came to the

blue room. He caught me up in his arms and carried me to the sofa.

I did not protest, even though the sheets were still a little damp and

did not cover the whole sofa. Johannes stroked my cheek, and told

me that that day one of the teachers had accidentally fallen asleep

next to a child. He had been lying in bed to put the children to sleep,

stroking the cheek of the smallest girl. Johannes had sat on the other

edge of the bed, and suddenly noticed that the girl lying next to the

teacher had put her hand on the sleeping adult’s cheek, stroking it

with soft, careful touches.

I smiled, kissing Johannes’ cheek. He drew me to him. We

kissed, our clothed legs entwining. Johannes tasted of Karelian

pastries and butter.

That would have been it, had we not both fallen asleep. If only

I had fallen asleep, Johannes would have kissed my brow, and crept

upstairs. Had he fallen asleep, I would have covered him up with the

blanket draped over the back of the chair and watched him sleep. But

we both fell asleep, and when we woke we were in the twilight

boundary between sleep and waking. I kissed Johannes’ neck, and he

rolled on top of me. I wrapped my legs around him. Johannes had no

suspenders to keep his pants up.

I would not have unbuttoned my jeans, or his. On the other

hand, pulling a zipper did not feel like crossing a boundary; after all,

we had already made love with our jeans on.

I did not manage to get my socks or Tuuli’s T-shirt all the way

off, nor Johannes his jeans. Johannes’ penis was small and curved,

but it pierced me like a key. I squeezed it tightly inside me.

I came. He came. But where? Into love? To a story shared in

good times and in bad? Or just onto that sofa, onto the drying cotton

sheets, onto the faded fabric of the sofa cushions? Johannes came

partly inside me, but drained away. I hoped that he would come

again, and stay.

Johannes fell asleep immediately. Tuesday morning, he had

already left for the kindergarten by the time I woke up. That

evening, he came home late, sat at the kitchen table and sighed.

“I can’t get past the first page of this book,” he said, taking

The Helper’s Shadow from his plastic bag. “I tried to read the whole

bus trip, both going and coming, but always got stuck on this one

sentence in the middle of the first page. Listen. ‘No man is an

island’. The moment I read that, I heard Lauri Otonkoski’s poem in

my head: All men are islands. All men are a wanting ship’s cabin on

the open sea. All men are the cockiness of an apple. All men are an

abstract figment. All men are a millstone. All men are islands.”

I had raised my little finger into the air, even though Johannes

did not know about the signal we sisters used so the others knew we

had something to say.

“All men are the eighth evening of the week, are alone, are in

the middle of things. All men are dust on the crest of a coin,

woodworms on the anvil of god’s idea, nostalgia in a train yard in

the wee hours,” I continued. “It’s a lovely poem. Me and Meri have

read it a million times in the rowboat. Meri loves to hear the same

part over and over again: All men have been frightened once, have

been left behind, are a milk can on the edge of the field, the silence in

the laundry basket. Even though I don’t really think men are islands,

but rowers on a boat to an island with those they like so much that

they want to be with them for a while in a world without anyone but

them and the people they love. The island is an illusion of Paradise,

of the world’s beginning.”

I looked at Johannes, expecting him to recite more verses.

“I don’t really know how it is,” Johannes said. Then he sighed

again, and put the book back in the plastic bag.

The next night, I did not wake to his touches or hear those

three words. But I slept soundly, so perhaps he crept by my bed to

say those words anyway.

How can something that you have expected so long be over in an

instant? How was it that I barely had time to notice anything except

the change in Johannes’ breathing and the birth mark on his lower

abdomen?

Johannes slept upstairs, while I lay in his scent on the sofa in

the blue room, and wanted to know so much. What did the skin of his

belly feel like when you stroked it? What did his penis look, and taste

like? Had Johannes caught a glimpse of the shadow of God when

everything went dark for a moment? Were there moles on his back?

Were his shoulder blades the small wings that they had felt like

through his shirt? What did he like? How would he touch my breasts,

and how would he look at them if he saw them without the cover of

my T-shirt? I had always been a girl who wanted to know, and even if

so far the knowing part had been key, right now wanting was at least

as important. I wanted to know everything about Johannes, his skin

and his soul. I wanted to know him.

With Johannes sleeping upstairs, I played back in my mind,

over and over again, how we had fallen asleep on the sofa in the blue

room, and how we had woken up. It was all based on that one night.

I did not dream of complicated positions, roleplaying, toys, swings,

aeroplane toilets, balconies, not even the kitchen table or Grandma’s

kitchen rug. I wanted to put that one song on a loop, listening to it

over and over again. I wanted that one night to bloom into a thousand

and one nights.

Perhaps a boundary had after all been breached along with the

zippers. As we sat by the kitchen table next evening, Johannes looked

troubled.

“How has the reading been going?” I asked.

“It hasn’t,” he sighed, nudging the plastic bag lying next to the

table with his foot. “I can’t get over that one sentence.”

I wondered whether it was the sentence he had uttered by the

bed in the blue room.

I decided to ask him directly.

Johannes flushed – with rage:

“Every sixth second, a child somewhere in the world dies of

hunger, someone dies of cigarettes and someone else is raped. And

what do we do? We think of sex every damn sixth second! How can

we close our eyes and think of sex while someone somewhere is

being raped and two people are dying!”

Johannes said “damn” in a muffled voice, but he said it

anyway, so I knew this was serious. Johannes never swore. He had

only said “blast” a few times. Even though “damn” was not a proper

swearword, it was for Johannes; a little like Father saying something

else than “oh, dang” or “oh, poot”. Though Father never did say

anything worse than that.

Now it was my turn to feel troubled, waiting for a moment

before replying.

“I don’t believe in those figures, but in any case... One second

out of six still leaves five for everything else. And perhaps we won’t

have the strength to work for good things if there’s nothing to

balance it out?”

Johannes shook his head. “Sade, you’re living in Never-

Neverland. People in real life don’t strive for good things. Or perhaps

they do strive with the sweat of their brows, but nothing comes of it.”

Johannes said he needed some distance to clear his head. He

would move in with his parents for a while. He was not sure if he

wanted to go to Brazil.

Meri

Life consists of donning stockings. When we are young, we like to

think that the adult life waiting for us will be full of men with strong

hands ripping our stockings down from waist to thighs, thighs to

knees and then ankles, perhaps pulling them off our feet. Or perhaps

leaving them on, like socks flapping on the ground, as he bares our

ankles and glues his tongue to them like to a frozen flagpole. We

never think of the moments when we shall have to pull those

stockings back up again. We do not imagine the moments when we

check whether our stockings have snagged, pulling them more

carefully back on. When we are young, it fails to enter our minds that

these moments not only exist, but that they are essential.

Even when we have a man to rip off our stockings, it is we

who must pull them on every morning, and that takes far longer than

the heated moment in which they are ripped off our legs. That is why

it is important to savour every second, every thousandth of a second

where you pull nylon over the smooth skin of your legs, feeling the

roundness of your calves, the shapeliness of your thighs. The

moments when a man passionately tears the stockings off our legs

are, even with some luck, only passing flashes in a life that mostly

consists of donning stockings.

It is only our stockings that caress the whole skin of our legs

from dawn to dusk. No man will curl his arm around our waists with

every step, softly but firmly. That is why we need form-fitting coats

that clasp us around the waist like a man’s arm. Our weekday

evenings need tea ceremonies with green jasmine tea and macarons,

tokens of our love for ourselves.

Walking the streets of London in my form-fitting coat, pencil

skirt and fine stockings, I watched teenage girls dressed in tight

jeans, with thighs like the arms of middle-aged women. An old

woman who is slender is almost always bony, whereas the young are

like blades of grass, tall and thin but soft, as if they had no bones.

Perhaps our bones grow as we age, because we work too much and

laugh too little.

It was only with my sisters that I could laugh and laugh

without end. I laughed the most with Sade. When I was alone,

I sometimes thought that growing up was having your innocence and

your memories of real intimacy gradually stripped away, but listening

to Sade, I realised that whatever happened, she would always have it

all. Sade would make long phone calls, telling me about Johannes

with an overflowing passion, stopping every now and then to ask

about me and to apologise for how she just kept talking, even though

I asked her to tell more. Perhaps Sade was filled with a flood of

stories because it had been a floody spring when she was born.

Mother always smiled when Father mentioned the floods, even

though it was one of many springs when the river overflowed. I was

born in January, among the snow and ice.

Nevertheless, in Sade’s company I was more talkative than

usual. When we had not seen each other for a long time and at last

met at Claymaker Street or even talked on the phone, my words came

with such terrible speed and force that it almost hurt.

I sometimes wondered whether we sisters would have become

friends had we not been sisters, just girls from the same village. We

would have certainly played hide and seek with each other, but

would we have put up with all the arguments and the feeling that the

other person is digging at our opinions or choices just because she

wants to feel different? Or would that not have happened either, had

we not been sisters? Perhaps it was a good thing that we had wanted

to have our own way. Perhaps it had brought us to balance, like with

the ground hockey bag: Sade pulling the left handle her way and I the

right handle, the heavy bag would swing lightly between us, without

banging into either of our legs. Carrying that bag with your sisters,

you also learned to walk far from your sisters.

I think it was mostly belief that separated us: belief in

ourselves and in everything else. I believed that everything was

possible, because I was willing to do the work. Sade believed that

everything was possible, because God had made us to be wondrous

and without bounds. Tuuli and Usva of course thought that they were

realists. But I think they did not even want to know what they were

capable of, because the most frightening thing is to realise that you

can do anything and everything.

Only a year separated me and Usva, yet it was precisely Usva

who always rubbed me the wrong way. Of course, I could understand

how difficult it was to be the youngest child. When we resembled

each other, everyone always thought the younger was aping the older.

Of course, we were in the end similar because we were sisters, and

therefore the question of choosing your friends was impossible. One

of the reasons why sisterhood is such a powerful thing is that you

cannot choose your sisters. And at the same time you do, by listening

to their stories and sharing your own with them. Because you cannot

start out by choosing your sisters, you have to choose them later on,

again and again.