Free True by Riikka Pulkkinen Page A

is dripping down my sides. Soon she calms down in my lap. It feels as if she were about to fall asleep. She leans against me, breathing evenly.
    Her tummy is round and warm, rising and falling feverishly.
    â€œYou seem to like her,” Elsa says.
    I nod. I’m afraid that my uncertainty shows. I exaggerated my child care experience a little. I want to get away from Vieno’s sarcastic remarks, want to be in these rooms, in this friendly, self-assured woman’s sphere of influence.
    Elsa tells me about her research group, her traveling. Here is Elsa, proud, permissive, and sure of herself, explaining her extraordinary plans as simply and modestly as other people talk about an evening bowl of oatmeal.
    I realize immediately that she is one of those people who will have it all, people compared to which others are wallowing in shiftlessness.
    Elsa asks her husband to help her in the kitchen for a minute. I know that a discussion of whether to hire me is going on in hushed voices.
    I don’t know that it’s the man who’s not sure. He later tells me about it when we’re lying silently side by side. He had an inkling of this and suggested the wrinkly one, but went along with Elsa’s wishes.
    I sit on the sofa with the little girl in my lap trying to hear a conversation about me. The little girl covers the sounds with chatter. I look around. A chest of drawers, books on a shelf. Careless housekeeping, modern furnishings. There’s a television in the corner. I don’t know if I know what to do with it.
    On the wall are paintings, some of which, I later learn, are painted by the man, others by friends. The little girl climbs off my lap to the floor and runs to her mother and father in the kitchen. She’s still shy of me.
    I go and look at a painting leaned upside down against the wall. Something sloshes inside me. It’s a Schjerfbeck. I’ve only seen them in museums.
    Elsa steps into the living room, straightens her back.
    â€œWhy is this here in the corner?” I ask.
    Elsa flutters a hand in the air and laughs. She bends toward me and lowers her voice like she’s sharing a secret: “It’s old-fashioned. My husband wants to take all the old pictures off the walls. Do you like it?”
    The man is looking at me, smiling. I look away, then back again.
    Elsa says with eagerness in her voice, “We’d like to hire you. If the position interests you.”
    The little girl turns her head and looks at me, her eyebrows raised. I do the same, and she bursts into bright laughter.
    â€œI GOT A job,” I tell Kerttu that evening.
    She’s sitting at the table eating. Her expression of surprise changes in a moment to enthusiasm.
    My Kerttu: dark, thick hair, eyes black as lumps of coal. Kerttu’s family is well-to-do. People still call her grandfather by his Swedish name, Brännare, although he changed it to Palovaara, believing that the country deserved people who said their names in their own language. Kerttu’s home is a place where fervent pronouncements are made with big words like religion and fatherland, but Kerttu hides a whole great world in her dreams, unknown countries like exotic jewels.
    I met her in the registration line for German class.
    Don’t you feel like we ought to cause some kind of scandal? she whispered to me, smiling. Take off our shirts, run across the lobby? I’ll give you one mark, all my coffee breaks at the university, and my heart, if you’ll do it with me.
    We didn’t take off our shirts, or even our socks, but we did spend all our coffee breaks together after that.
    We’ve lived together in these rooms for two years and I’ve acquired Kerttu’s habits and beliefs. She sleeps till noon one day and gets up at six the next. Sometimes she’ll live for a week on risotto. Sometimes she eats in restaurants on a gentleman’s tab, flashing her stocking seams on the way to the ladies’ room.