True by Riikka Pulkkinen Page A

the reality of self for the first time is the primordial moment of loneliness. It also offers the first opportunity for happiness. Every person’s existence is a certified opportunity for great loneliness and great happiness. They are both within a child’s reach at the moment she realizes her separateness from her parents. At that moment, the child is also a stranger to herself. It is only in the continuous recognition of the self in the safe, caring gaze of an adult that a child can become recognizable to herself. Recognition consists of experiences of both participation and separation. The beginnings of the self are in that rift, in that tension between blessed participation and rending separation. The event would perhaps hold nothing but tragedy if it didn’t also bring the beginning of hope that is part of the solitary human condition.
    Imagine Luna, a girl found by a stranger, living in a cardboard box, a child who had experienced unheard-of sorrows. Imagine her groping attempts to reach out. She spent her first week of treatment rocking in a corner, apathetic, refusing to look anyone in the eye. In the following weeks she clung to her caregivers with a vise grip that seemed a cry for help. Little by little her trust grew. Imagine her first smile, from across the room, her first bold laugh in the playpen. Human life in its bare essentials is about nothing so much as trust. It’s about the love that every person, even the maimed and oppressed of the world, bears toward others.
    Anna remembers a childhood moment at the lake sauna, Grandma’s strong arms and big soft breasts as she bent to turn on the hot water tap.
    Maria was five, still shamelessly honest as small children always are, and she marveled at Grandma’s breasts.
    You’re big up there, Maria said, pointing.
    Yes, I guess I am, Grandma said with a smile.
    Will those grow on me, too? Maria asked.
    They might, Grandma said.
    Then I’ll be a mother, too, Maria said sagely.
    You can’t become a mother right off, Anna said. For that you need a man.
    She was eight, and knew a few facts.
    Yes, you can, Maria said. You never know. Some people might just turn into mothers.
    Only in fairy tales, Anna said, taking to her role as the instructive, wiser older sister with satisfaction.
    That Grandma, with the big breasts, is gone now. But there’s still the Grandma that thought those thoughts, wrote those words in the book.
    The book will be sold here after she’s dead, too. People will thumb through it, read the introduction and think Elsa Ahlqvist must have been a wise woman, a good mother, a good grandmother.
    Anna walks to the escalator. She again has the thought that she was toying with earlier. An unbelievable number of beginnings slept between the covers of all these books.

1964
    L OVE BEGINS UNINTENTIONALLY. We’re unguarded and we take no notice of the signs we may see weeks or even months before anything actually happens.
    At first we avoid each other, exchange nervous courtesies and remarks about the weather. He sits at the kitchen table, preoccupied. He butters his bread, opens the newspaper, scratches his neck. What an abundance of private gestures, what a spectrum of fine gradations. I turn away; I don’t want to know all this about him.
    I wander from room to room as if I’ve found myself in a movie.
    The man invites friends over for two evenings and closes the door on me. I hear a storm of laughter through the door, turn on the television. The newscaster on television looks worried. I didn’t know that facts have to be told with a furrowed brow—I’ve only heard about the state of the world on the radio.
    On the third evening he paints. Also the fourth and fifth. Night after night I hear him come clumping down the stairs as the dimness phases into morning. Maybe he’s been drinking. I lie awake, listening, hearing every thud, the even sound of his breathing—it’s strange and