True Read Online Free Page B

out for ice cream.
    Hmph!
    That’s just a dream now. It ended when she grew breasts. That’s what happens when grandchildren grow as big as their grandparents—nothing’s left but well-meaning self-consciousness.
    Her grandfather smiles.
    â€œI’m going out to take some time off, as your mother calls it.” He says it with a grin, laying stress on each syllable.
    He makes taking time off sound like some new kind of coercion, something invented by the most adept overseers of concentration camps.
    They share a knowing smile. It helps them keep their pact of disobedience, keeps them out of reach of this methodical woman’s influence. That’s what they used to be like. They would go to the Fazer sweet shop and buy treats in secret, although Anna’s mother had forbidden her to eat sweets before dinner. They were freethinkers, happy-go-lucky, riding around on the tram and making up lives for the people who passed by.
    Anna still has that habit.
    She picks someone out from a street corner or tram car and imagines that person’s days, their joys and sorrows. It makes the weight of her own days easier to bear, the grief like an ink stain that sometimes trickles through her, Tuesday evenings when the hallway in her building is filled with the smell of fried fish, nothing ever changing.
    It’s easy to tell a stranger’s story. It’s harder to stay in your own.
    â€œWhat’s Matias up to?”
    The same question he asked yesterday.
    â€œHe’s at the library rendering an account of decades past. Same as yesterday.”
    She cherished Matias in her mind. They had their days, too. It was only five months ago that they carried the sofa over the threshold, and all their other things. Sheer madness, after knowing each other for one month! They ordered pizza on their first morning and played old vinyl records—Neil Young, the Beatles. They played “All You Need Is Love” over and over, neither one admitting that they needed reassurance of their happiness. After shifting their furniture distractedly from one corner to another they made love in the armchair, because they couldn’t think of any place to put it.
    They put the blown-up photograph—the Aino photograph—in the closet. It was still there.
    Anna wanted to take it down to the trash bins.
    â€œYou can’t throw this away,” Matias said. “It’s still you in the picture.”
    â€œThe old me,” Anna said. “It’s not me anymore.”
    â€œYes it is,” Matias said in the way he had of seeming to understand the whole world, which sometimes pushed her to the brink of fury. “People carry all their former selves with them.”
    In the photo, Anna’s legs are breaking the surface of the lake. She looks serious, more serious than she feels, like the kind of woman who carries her fate proudly, unbowed. Carries it into the water, the cool rooms of the water, and through those rooms into another world. Although the picture is grave, the day when it was taken had been a happy one. He hadn’t turned his gaze away once.
    SHE AND MATIAS had a blank spot on the wall. They thought about asking her grandfather for one of his prints—were they at the cabin at Tammilehto or were they here in Helsinki, in the attic of the apartment on Sammonkatu? But they hadn’t yet asked him about it. They had a lot to do, their chores, their Tuesday nights, all the usual things.
    Matias knew Anna, and Anna knew Matias. Anyone would have thought them happy, and maybe they were. They had days, nights, morning after morning, camaraderie, meals prepared together, walks on the seashore when the moon was a pale fingerprint on the sky.
    But still Anna secretly dreamed of picking up a colored pencil one day and writing her good-byes on the floor. She would only take a few things with her—one of Matias’s socks as evidence that he had existed, one Moomintroll cup.
    It’s