The Lion

FICTION

by Timo Teräsahjo

          I arrived at my brother’s place on a Friday evening. You’d expect to see people then, but the station was deserted—only a few footsteps echoing in the tunnel.
         On the small square, the buildings exhaled a frozen silence.
         I hitched up my backpack, took a deep breath, and started walking down the street. About a kilometer to my brother’s place.
         He lived in an apartment building on Keskuskatu, so visiting him always meant seeing the center of my hometown as it was now. And it was not flattering. Things were not going well here—if they ever had. I doubted it.
         I knew I was unfairly harsh on this place. But tonight it really was deserted—that much was true.
         The street bent into a gentle slope. I thought about grabbing a meal, but the options—Hesburger, a kebab joint—were already behind me. Ahead stood the familiar water tower, and at last the block from the seventies.
         That was where he still lived.
         “I saved it for myself,” he had told me.
         Many times.
         It mattered to him.

         He had fallen ill as a young man, in another city. Panic attacks, constant trips to the bathroom, a stressful job. And later—the heavy medication.
         The neuroleptics had a crushing, permanent effect.
         His once fluid, recognizable lines froze in his drawings. His movements slowed. His sharp thinking dulled. Like falling into a tunnel, at the bottom of which lived another person. At least that’s how I saw it.
         The diagnosis was schizophrenia.
         That could mean one thing, or something else entirely. The diagnosis itself was a muddle. Yet I had never heard him speak nonsense, never knew of hallucinations. I was convinced the diagnosis—and the treatment built on it—was wrong. Thoughts of his illness circled in my head as I approached the door, his figure vivid in my mind.
         I grasped the handle, my stomach clenched with dread.

         Three flights of stairs. No elevator; back then, they weren’t built in low-rise blocks. Not here, not anywhere, until prosperity and accessibility laws brought them in.
         The stair rail rang metallic when my shoe brushed it. Climbing, I caught the building’s smells: tobacco, some kind of meat, something else—wet dog, maybe.
         On the third floor, his door stood open.
         In the doorway, or a little beyond, his figure.
         “Welcome to the small town,” he said, smiling cautiously, stepping back into the hall.
         I entered, took off my shoes. From there into the single-room flat. Dropped my pack, glanced into the kitchenette. My brother stood by his chair, watching me, uncertain.
         “Hi.”
         “Welcome,” he said again.
         I disliked how I always felt the need to take charge around him. To say “let’s make some coffee” or something equally forced, too bright. I couldn’t shake it off. I played someone I wasn’t.
         So I went to the kitchenette and busied myself with the coffee, too brisk, too deliberate.
         When the cups were empty, I rocked in my chair. He in his, the one he’d rocked in for decades. So much that the backrest had carved a horizontal groove into the wall, through plaster and into the grey concrete. I rolled the cup in my hands, wondering if such damage could be patched alone or needed a professional.
         I set the cup down.
         He showed me his certificates, as he always did. Work records, school diplomas, photographs. Encased in plastic, yet worn soft from handling. Looked at so many times.
         They no longer struck me as they once had.
         As a student, I’d wept over his evening school diploma, the top line reading: university track.
         But university never came. Nothing ever did. He remained here.

         We sat in silence. Outside, an old block loomed—1940s, maybe. In its yard, men with bottles. Beyond that, a strip of road. And a tree, its leafy shadow stretching over the sidewalk.
         The documents lay finished. My eyes roamed the shelves, then the room, until there was nothing left to see.
         From outside, men’s voices sang.
         I said I’d take a walk.

         The sky was grey-blue, the light milky. I climbed past the water tower to my old school. The same one my brother had attended. He had once told me the year it was built. Standing in the yard stirred nothing.
         I moved on.
         Out of town, along a gravel road, past the house of a childhood friend. I dared not look too closely—he might still live there. A light burned in the hall. We no longer kept in touch.
         The path cut through the cemetery, under broad trees. Then past the sports field where we had played football. I recalled the sharp thunk of boot on leather, the smell of cut grass.
         Soon the pavement under my feet again. Back in town. Shops with paper cups and old newspapers on the floor.
         The town felt alien, as it must have to my brother, who had moved here from Helsinki with our father.
         “On the way here, I saw a cow,” he once said.
         The first cow he’d ever seen.

         I sent a message to my son. He replied simply: We went swimming.
         I remembered how he had once summed up the town: Dark. Oppressive. Perhaps I’d passed that on to him without knowing.
         “Nice,” I texted back, awkward.
         We had visited my brother together before. Stayed at a hostel, surrounded by strange dolls the owner had scattered about like props from a ghost film.
         I suppose I wanted to acquaint him with my roots. Isn’t that what people do?
         We even took a cab out to my old home in the woods.
         The house was decayed, smothered in lupines. The forest hacked into a scruffy mess.
         We walked the town too, that time.
         He joked about the town crest—suction-cup arrows, he called them.
         They did look like that. Though they were squirrel arrows, really.
         Now my walk brought me to the lakeside beach. It was as quiet as the park that edged it. Behind me came a rustle. A man in a motorized wheelchair. We nodded, paused a while side by side, watching clouds shape the water’s surface.

         I’ve tried to visit my brother once a year. In summer.
         Each time, I wander my own history, my childhood—searching for places lodged in memory.
         The old spruce near our house. For years, I was amazed how unchanged it looked. Then it was felled.
         The lakeside beach. I thought I had found the exact spot I first swam. The little cove, the roots reaching into the water, fixed in memory despite the years.
         But one summer I realized: those memories lived nowhere anymore. Only in my head. Nowhere else.
         Here, I drifted in no-place.

         My brother opened the door for me.
         On the kitchen table, a foil-covered ready meal. Home care brought them now.
         “The town was quiet,” I said.
         “This must be a shrinking town,” he replied with a faint smile.
         His hand traveled from chin to crown and back again. My presence tired him.
         We rocked in silence, awkward. Then we spoke of our father.
         Where he had lived. Where he had worked before moving here with my brother.
         Then he spoke of his mother, whom I had never met, who had died just a few years ago.
         “I held a kind of memorial,” he said. “The pastor came. I gave him an apple.”
         In the dusk, I studied his pencil sketch on the desk.
         A cat, a dog, whatever.
         I leaned from my chair, trying to see.
         What did it matter.
         All of it overgrown, choked out.

         I had decided to stay the night. I laid my sleeping bag on a foam mat, brushed my teeth. Looked out the window. The men still sat in the yard, bottles in hand. I messaged my wife: Depressing.
         Looking at Dream Homes, she replied.
         I opened the fridge, closed it.
         We lay down.
         Far too early to sleep.
         Time began to crawl. Curtains stirred. The light dimmed.
         After maybe ten, fifteen minutes, he said, almost apologetically:
         “This is what my life is.”
         I couldn’t answer.
         But I thought how slowly time must have passed here, through nearly thirty years of this life.
         And yet, when stripped of everything extra, was anyone’s life really different?
         In the end, we are here.
         In this room.

         A week later, he sent me a message.
         I opened my phone and stared.
         It was an acrylic painting: a lion, bright colors, eyes straight ahead.
         Its mane burned between red and gold, the background shimmered in greens, blues, and yellows.
         Nothing uncertain.
         It stared back.
         I called my wife.
         Listened to her breathing.
         “Are you there?”

(translated from the Finnish by the author)