Marisha Rasi-Koskinen: Katariina – Chapter 1

Chapter 1 from the novel Katariina by Marisha Rasi-Koskinen
Translated by David McDuff

Katariina II

We played at dying, especially we played at dying. We climbed and fell. We escaped at nights to the outskirts of town and always took a shortcut home through the darkest park. We put a plastic bag over our heads, each of us in turn. When you breathed in, the plastic went into your mouth, and on the second attempt the bag misted up and stuck to your face. Three knocks on the floor and the bag had to be cut off. Three knocks and your lungs were filled with already forgotten air to the point that it hurt. That was the sort of thing we played at, Margareetta and I. Yet the real ending had nothing to do with our games. I know that now. But before I conclude, I must go back to the beginning.

1.

First, I hear the sound. It’s a repeated sharp click followed by two rhythmic thumps. Click thump thump like the soft drum of a heart. When I see her, I see two furiously treading legs, around which the hems of a skirt are entwined. Hair that sways to the rhythm of the heart and descends in a ball. Hair behind which the sun gleams.

Click thump thump.

The legs stop. The skipping rope hits the wooden surface of the landing with a single empty blow and stops at the toes. The rhythm remains. Thump, thump, I think, though the sound is gone now. She looks up and I see her face. I see the serious eyes, the freckled cheekbones and narrow lips. There is something familiar about her, it is just that I do not yet know what.

“You,” she says. “Where did you spring from?”

She doesn’t seem surprised. On the contrary, she talks as if she had been prepared for my arrival. As if she knew me, though we’ve never met before.

I draw my breath.

“Me? What do you mean?”

She laughs. Her laugh is strange, only slightly more of a laugh than a hiccup. She sounds like a little girl, though a rather big one. Too big to be skipping with a rope in a pleated skirt and with scabs on her knees. Too big to speak familiarly to strangers, especially those older than herself. Too big to lick each finger one by one after slipping something from the pocket of her pleated skirt.
.
“I’ve seen you before. Tell me who you are.”

She isn’t laughing any more. Not only that:  she is completely serious. Her hiccups have turned into inexpressiveness in the time it takes to blink an eye or take half a breath. To open a mouth to speak. To intend to. When I say my name, she repeats it as if she knew it in advance.

“Katariina” she says. “You’re probably eighteen now.”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. I’m Margareetta. Thirteen.”

Then she offers a sweet. I take the sticky yellow oval. It puts up a little resistance before agreeing to free itself from the sweaty palm of her hand.  The sweet is fluffy and rough, so sugary that it hurts one’s cheeks.

We have introduced ourselves, exchanged the codes that are sufficient to bring us together during the weeks to follow.

We are Margareetta and Katariina, in that order.

The rules are simple.

“We’ll only meet at your place,” she says. “You can’t come to our place, and don’t come looking for me. I’m the one who decides when we meet, I’ll come when I can and if I don’t it means that I couldn’t. Don’t ask any questions, you don’t need to know.  I will take care of knowing and telling you what you need. Got it? ”

The rhythm of her speech is like a poem. A slow monologue rehearsed in front of the mirror, or a cheat sheet from a civics test.  A preliminary guidance lecture for youth camp participants.

Margareetta does not wait for my reply. Or what I would say if I did reply, for I don’t.  I have known her for five minutes and I already know that it is useless to resist her.

“I’ve done my skipping now, haven’t I, Katariina.”

I must have closed my eyes, as I didn’t see her face turning into a smile. Yet there she is, smiling, rolling up the skipping rope and throwing it over the railing. She smiles again. I see the rope fall and open up.  The sun brushes the plastic surface. My heart stops. It’s a thirty foot drop.

And later, many hours or days or weeks later, we sit on the roof of the house, on either side of the chimney, with the cooling bricks under our bare legs. Behind Margareetta the sun dazzles me so that I can’t see her properly. We sit with every muscle tensed, every nerve-end receptive, in the pit of our stomachs a fist that presses and of which we are unable to say whether it feels good or horrible.

From the roof we can see far away.  The cars. The trees. The dogs. The people.

Margareetta speaks first.

“How many of them are actually thinking,” she asks, “those people down there?”

“Not very many,” I suggest.

“None of them. They’re all just props. They’re there to make us feel lonely. In the right kind of way.”

I look at the props far below, props that walk and run, props that stumble, cycle or stagger. Pee against a tree trunk, if they happen to be dogs. Shriek and fly up to the branch of a tree, if they’re birds.  How real it all looks. The sound effects carry upwards faintly: a cry, a laugh, the shouting of children.

“The sounds are a bit too quiet,” I say. Margaret nods gravely.

“If you fell from here,” she says, “it would be a thirty foot drop.”

“We’d land with a thump in the middle of the stage.”

Margaret laughs. She looks at the thirty foot drop and continues almost as if in a dream.

“If you lost your balance you’d end up sliding down the drain pipe.”

“It would give way.”

“Which way would you fall?”

“Legs first, then head. Or maybe head first. The head is heavier.”

“It wouldn’t look good,” she says. After that she doesn’t say anything for a long time. And then, at last: “I wonder what mother would say when she found you lying on the ground.”

“I don’t know. Cry, probably.”

“Or maybe she wouldn’t.”

Margareetta gets up and stands on the ladder. She stands with her legs apart and her hands outstretched as though she were trying to hold the sky in her arms. Her long shirt flutters. Her long hair streams.

“I wouldn’t just cry. If you were to fall, I would fly after you.” She closes her eyes. “I’d fly so hard and so fast that I’d be able to catch you before you hit the ground.”

I believe it. Margareetta always takes hold of me before I fall. If she wants to.

She’s a bird. Quite soon she will take flight. Quite soon she will fall. I don’t dare to look, but hug the chimney tighter and close my eyes. Then I remember the skipping rope. How it fell. How it opened like a cry. For a moment I think she is the skipping rope that fell. Or not her. I am.

Until she laughs again. Opens her eyes on the roof ridge.

“What about trying an experiment,” she says, and I know that soon we will start to play again. “Let’s stage a fall. It would be great.”

“It’s boring here, isn’t it,” Margareetta says, slipping another sweet into her mouth. To me she no longer offers one.

“Let’s go to your place, Katariina.”

We do that. We go to our place.

In the coming weeks we sometimes meet in other places too. In the city. At the harbour. Sometimes in a garden, in a park or under a bridge. Most often however, we  meet at my place. At hers we don’t. I go there only once, and uninvited.

Our place. Soon, she starts to talk like that about my home.

Why did I obey? In this, and then in everything else as well? I simply obeyed. She was one of those people who are obeyed. The people who handle others like puppets and make them do things for them. Besides, if I really think about it, I wouldn’t have had anything better to do.

2.

The house where I live is the middle one in a row of seven, the fourth house in both directions. Margareetta learns the route quickly, as though she had known it before. On her bicycle she is silky streaming hair, fluttering shirt, unintentionally too-short dress. If a boy whistles after her, she lifts her middle finger in the air without bothering to turn her gaze. Then she lifts her other arm as well and squeals, doesn’t stop at the zebra crossing, just laughs and waves to me to hurry up. I have to work hard to keep up with her, even though I keep both hands tightly on the handlebars. At first I am scared, but soon I too begin to laugh. We cycle on the pedestrian walkway. The pedestrians fall back before us in two swaying human masses, two gasping fronts composed of wavering walking sticks or umbrellas, between which we zigzag like war machines that have lost their direction. We don’t care about the angry shouts that echo after us. We don’t stop until we get to the front entrance.

My house is blue and large. “It’s sky-blue,” Margareetta says, “don’t you think it’s sky-blue? It has to be.” I nod, and she circles the courtyard, circles around, pointing here and there. “And what an amazing lot of bay windows and balconies there are. I really love bay windows and balconies.”

In the garden her fingers creep along the brick wall like ivy, probe the ancient bark and the grey-blue panelling, cling to the wild vine that covers the house. “If you stayed standing next to this wall”, she says, “the creepers would grow round your arms and legs. Fancy that. If you stood here, you would stay here forever.”

The garden is so big that from the front entrance you can’t see to the bottom of it. There are elms and an ancient oak tree which touches the windows with its branches. The trees have always been there. They were there before me and they will remain there after me.

“I suppose you’ve always lived here.”

“All my life.”

That is clearly important. Margareetta also asks about it many times later on. She wants to know what it’s like when you never need to move, and your friends stay the same from one year to the next. How it feels when you see trees and bushes growing around you, and the woods, rocks and swings don’t get smaller while you’re gone. What it’s like when everything grows with you.

Perhaps Margareetta is inventing the game right there as we stand in the big front yard of my house for the first time. “All my life,” she repeats. “If I had a house like this, I’d live here all my life.”

That was how I learned to know Margareetta. From time to time she fell away somewhere where I could not follow her. It always happened unexpectedly. In the middle of a footstep. A sentence. A laugh. Then she returned, was there again, continued her sentence as though she had never been gone at all.

“I guess your parents aren’t back yet, are they, Katariina?”

“Probably not.”

“Do they work in summer, too?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, but is already looking around. “That’s what they always do, but it’s okay. So we can have all the days to ourselves.” Now she is further away, points to the bay window half-covered in wild vine on the upper storey, asks if it’s my window. “I guessed it,” she says, when she sees me smiling. “Fancy, I always guess right.”

She jumps up and down. She bounds around, her face glowing with enthusiasm and her legs full of scratches. “I guess I’m a pretty childish thirteen year-old,” she says. I nod, because she really is very childish for someone who is thirteen. But she doesn’t get angry. She picks up a stone and pretends to throw it towards me. Then she turns round, throws the stone properly, and hits my window.

“See, I’m a good shot. The window is just the right height.”

Margareetta really was a good shot, she aimed and hit. Later, when the days were no longer enough, she came at nights, too. When I pulled the curtains open, she waved and beckoned to me to come down. Or up, if she happened to be climbing the branches of the oak tree to the roof. “Get dressed,” she would whisper. Later it was enough for her to whistle. Until I stopped even closing the curtains in the evening and put on my clothes on as soon as I heard the knock at the window. In the end I knew to be ready and waiting. You could get straight from my window to a branch of the oak. It was easy to manoeuvre yourself onto the branch, along the branch towards the trunk and up or down it, like a ladder. Margareetta admired my agility, wanted to know if I had done this since I was a child. In order to please her, I admitted that I had.

“Mother would die if she knew,” she always said whenever we walked in the light night towards the centre of town. Or when we climbed the branches of the oak, got up to the roof via the fire escape, or took a dip in the lake from the end of the jetty with our clothes on.

“Mother is a silly fusspot.”

That was how she said it. She meant my mother.

“Isn’t she?” she would follow up, if I didn’t say anything.

“Yes.”

“She would never want to let us go anywhere. Would she?

“No she wouldn’t.’

“But we’re the sort of pair who go anyway.”

At the front door Margareetta slips in front of me, blocks my way. She is holding my keys before I notice it.

“Wonderful keys. And what a door. So many security locks.”

She has to turn each of the keys several times before the door opens. The keys slip into her pocket. Then she is already inside.

“Is anyone at home?” she shouts into the hallway. “Margareetta has come home!”

No one replies, and Margareetta doesn’t say anything for a long time either. She strolls around the hall carpet with her head tilted back, until she knocks into an armchair, snorts with hiccups of laughter, and sits down.

“We’ve never had such a big hall. Heehic. We’ve never even had a living room the size of this hall.” Her delight is overwhelming. It is almost too much.

“Don’t laugh, Katariina!” she says, and I realize that I am giggling.

“Show me your room.”

In my room she rushes to the window and opens it. The curtain sways. The wild vine stirs. The shadow of the creeper changes its shape on the walls and the stuffed toys. When Margareetta discovers the fluffy toys on my bed, she grabs them and squeezes them. They adapt to her hands. Their fur mingles with her fingers. When she sits down on my bed, the toys all bend towards her as if they were alive.

“Just take it,” I say, as she fondles a dog that is missing a leg. “I’m not interested in them any more.”

“You’re wonderful,” she says. “Thank you, I shall keep this one always.” She looks at the dog and changes her voice, speaking more to the dog than to me. “Let this dog be my memory of you until the end of our days.” Then she dandles the dog in a patch of sunlight and says: “There, there, is your leg sore, let mummy blow on it.”

A moment later I pick up the toy from the floor. I put it back on the bed, and she never asks about it again.

Instead she peeks into my boxes, draws lines on my posters, takes out my books and browses through them. On each page a set of sweet-sticky fingerprints remains. The pages stick together.

“You can probably hear a sound,” she says. “When the pages stick together, you can hear a sound. If we record it. If it we speed it up and increase the volume to full, it’ll make a sound. A pattering sound. Or maybe a sucking one. ”

Later we try. She holds the microphone very close and presses her sticky fingers on the pages of each book before she closes it. My encyclopaedia. My girls’ books. My maths books. She carefully presses the pages together, flattening them. We never hear any sound. Not even though we connect the leads to the home theatre in the living room, turn up the volume to full and press our ears against the speakers. All we can hear is breathing. Her own enthusiastic breathing.

“A toilet of our very own!” Margareetta rejoices. The Dutch tiles make her voice echo, accompanied by the rattle and clink of various stuff. Margareetta paints her lips and applies eye shadow to her eyes. Pink and pale blue. “You probably think I look ridiculous,” she announces, looking ridiculous. She is right, as always.

She opens cabinets and doors. Peeks into the clothes room, where the dresses and shirts hang on clothes-hangers like a row of headless soldiers, and the pairs of shoes rest side by side on a rack. “Too tidy”, she snorts, and in her voice there is something that makes me feel ashamed and want to kick the shoes Swipe some dresses to the floor. Overturn the sock drawer. Knock over a box of hairpins, so there will at least be something untidy in the room.

Margareetta takes the clothes from the shelves and parades coquettishly in front of the mirror. In her movements there is eagerness. It is as if her hands seek something that they know is here. It is a long time before she remembers me again.

“Katariina,” she says. Now she sits on my desk. Her face is in shadow again, but I sense that she is smiling. “This is exactly the kind of house I have always dreamed of. One day I will also live in such a house.”

My keys clink in her pocket, and I don’t doubt her prediction for one moment. One day it will surely come to pass.