The Core of the Sun Read online

  I remember how you shrank from Neulapää on that first day, the new smells and strange furniture, the wrong kind of light, the trees in the yard that were too big. You were forlorn and teary-eyed and I tried to comfort you, even though I was worn out from homesickness and the hard journey and everything that was scary and new. It wasn’t a simple thing to move from a suburb of Madrid to a little farm in the middle of the Finnish woods.

  Aulikki was probably nearly seventy then. She was our only close relative. We had almost no relatives because our father had been an illegitimate child. Aulikki had never married. Maybe our father’s father was a minus man or some other shady type. That would explain a lot. I never dared to ask Aulikki about it.

  Many other things about Aulikki dawned on me only later. They probably never occurred to you. Aulikki was sent to Sweden as a war refugee in the 1940s, and that was why she was away from Finland when the final sex decree was made law. Her biological parents both became seriously ill when she was about twenty. Her father had kidney disease, her mother cancer. They were both about to die, because the Health Authority said that their illness came from unwholesome, wrong ways of living, so they weren’t allowed any treatment by the state. They didn’t have any money for a private doctor, and Aulikki returned to Finland in 1954 to help them. I don’t understand why she came back. They were both going to die anyway.

  But she did come back. She had Swedish citizenship in addition to her Finnish citizenship, so when she decided to stay and take care of Neulapää, she was living under a strange sort of diplomatic immunity that reserved her full citizenship rights. She was even allowed to act as an employer. That’s why she was able to hire a young masco graduate from the agricultural school every summer.

  Aulikki harvested enough from the vegetable garden to keep her own cellar full and also sell potatoes and other vegetables to a local farmer, who in turn sold them, along with his own berries and apples, at the Tammela Market. We got by as well as we could, and Aulikki got some state child-care money and did sewing in the winter for extra income.

  The strongest of all my early Neulapää memories is from when we first got there. We had already started to get used to our new home, to the too-bright nights and the strange sounds of nature. We were playing in the yard when Aulikki came and led us over to the storage shed, and as we got near it she put her finger to her lips. She gestured for us to crouch down and peek under the shed. How delighted we were when we saw a pair of bright, startled eyes staring back at us. A stray cat had had kittens under the shed. Aulikki told us that she’d seen the homeless cat wandering around the edges of the property and thought that it would be good to keep the voles in check, but she hadn’t realized it was going to have kittens. The mother cat had managed to keep the litter a secret, but now the kittens were opening their eyes and learning to walk, and Aulikki had found them when she heard a scratching sound and a faint mewing from under the building. The mother cat was away, probably out hunting. One of the kittens stumbled toward us, curious. Its downy fur and clumsy walk, its trembling little tail stuck straight up like an antenna, and its round little head with its almost too-big ears and eyes—its whole soft and delicate and yet intensely energetic presence—flooded me with a deep, sweet anguish.

  Later when I looked at you or remembered you, I would feel a splash of that same feeling.

  Aulikki promised that we could keep one of the kittens, but just a couple of days after we found them, the litter and the mother cat disappeared. Aulikki said the mother must have become nervous after the nest was discovered and moved the kittens someplace else.

  Of course when I got a little older I understood that there were also a lot of foxes in the woods at Neulapää.

  Another very powerful early memory is from almost right after we got to Finland, when we had to have our final gender specified. I was already very late because they didn’t have rules like that in Spain, of course. The Health Authority sent two child welfare workers to test us.

  First they examined our appearance. Round heads, small noses, large eyes, light hair—it all seemed clear. They took photos of us. Then they started the tests.

  They showed us pairs of pictures. There would be a tractor and a baby, or an airplane and a flower, or a hammer and a kettle, and we were supposed to choose which picture we liked better. I remember very well how you grabbed the picture of the baby and made your voice even more soft and childish than it really was. “Ooh, ooh, baby, ooh,” you babbled. You glanced at me now and then, and I chose the baby, too, to encourage you. “Pretty baby, nice baby,” I cooed, more to you than to the social worker. I thought the tests must be to find out if we were good sisters. Maybe something bad would happen if we were too different, if we didn’t agree. So I chose some pictures even before you did, the ones I thought you would like better. I didn’t know at the time how pivotal this would be.

  Then the social workers took some toys out of a big suitcase. There was a wooden fire truck painted shiny red that I loved at first sight. There was a doll the size of a real baby dressed in pink. There was a stuffed cat, and they put a tin train engine down next to it. There were blocks with letters and numbers on them and sparkly stickers with pictures of hearts and smiling wedding couples. There was a wonderful wooden wrench and a pretty little ladle decorated with roses. A conductor’s hat and a frilly apron. Little bright-colored rectangles that you could connect by pressing them together—the social worker showed us how to do it. You could build anything you wanted out of them, castles and cranes and airplanes.

  They told us to choose the toys we liked. You immediately toddled over and hugged the cat—I’m sure your memory of the fluffy, adorable creature toddling out from under the shed was still quite fresh—and then you ran over with the cat in your pudgy little hand and pushed it into the arms of the baby doll and said happily that the baby liked the kitty. I was entranced with the fire truck, and I couldn’t help running over to it first and picking it up to look at it. Then I noticed the social workers’ response: as if a whiff of tar or smoke had drifted in on the air, like a distant forest fire somewhere off in the woods.

  Something wasn’t right.

  I let go of the fire truck and it fell to the floor with a thud. I even kicked it a little, as if I’d just realized that, in spite of its bright color, it was a cold, dull thing. The smoky smell cleared up immediately and started to change into something more like the smell of a warming sauna, pine soap and dried birch whisks. I noticed that the nice smell they were exuding grew stronger and lingered when I rejected the tools and trucks and put on the apron and picked up the ladle. I built a circle of letter blocks and threw the little plastic bricks in the middle and mixed them around with the ladle and said I was making oatmeal. I scooped up a ladleful of bricks and offered them to the doll you were holding and told her to be good and eat her porridge.

  I saw how one social worker looked at the other one and there was a hint of metal in the air. One of them gathered up all the dolls and stuffed toys—you protested so loudly!—and left the fire truck and the wooden wrench and the bricks and the conductor’s hat.

  You immediately knew what to do. You were a little copycat, and you put the bricks in the conductor’s hat with your chubby hands and started mixing them with the wrench. I was left with the fire truck. It had a folding ladder and real wheels that rolled. I picked it up again.

  Grandma Aulikki took a little breath and I could smell something faint, sharp like lemon juice. The social workers’ eyes were cold, waiting.

  Then I knew what to do.

  I pulled the fire truck to my breast and rocked it. I said, “Aa-aa.”

  I saw the looks on the social workers’ faces and my grandmother’s face, and there were two completely different kinds of smells in the air: a sweet, almost overripe smell around the social workers, and a smell from my grandmother like the freshness of laundry dried in the sun.

  That was the first
time I heard someone use the word “femiwoman.” The other social worker used the word “eloi,” but they were both talking about us.

  The social workers didn’t give us another glance as they wrote on their papers. They told Aulikki that we would need new names, and that for simplicity’s sake they would use the same first letters. I’m sure you don’t even remember that you were once Mira and I was Vera. After that we were Manna and Vanna.

  The new smell around our grandmother got stronger, like the cleaning fluid you use to scrub the bathroom, but she nodded and smiled and murmured her agreement that the names suited us perfectly.

  The social workers gathered up the toys and I was tense, wonder­ing if they would remember the little tin train engine, which had rolled out of sight under the table. They did, and I was terribly disappointed, so disappointed that I was afraid they would notice the dark, earthy smell coming from me.

  After that Aulikki called us Vanna and Manna. That same day I named your dolls Vera and Mira, to at least keep our real names that way.

  Aulikki didn’t care in the least about how she was supposed to raise elois, but I realized that only much later. When I turned seven and was supposed to go to school, she asked for permission to homeschool me. It was a long way from Neulapää to the nearest school, she didn’t have a car, and the state school transport would have been an extra expense to society because there were no other houses in the area with school-age children. So she had no trouble getting permission.

  Just before the education inspectors came to Neulapää, Aulikki asked me to change out of my overalls and sweater into a dress and patent-leather shoes. She took my erector set and books and wooden train set into the shed and hid them behind the firewood. I was old enough by then that she didn’t hide the seriousness of the situation. She told me to sit at the kitchen table and looked me in the eye.

  I remember every word of that conversation. “Vanna, there’s something I have to ask you to do. I want you to not tell the nice men that you know how to read and count. When they come here I want you to play house with Manna and be polite and smile and be very good and agreeable. Copy everything Manna does.”

  “Why?”

  She started to laugh. The pear smell of amusement mixed with the lemon of worry. “Never, ever ask ‘why’ when they’re around. You see, those men don’t like little girls who are too smart and curious. Remember the story about the feisty shepherd girl who was really a princess under her ragged clothes?”

  “I remember.”

  “Now think the other way around. Pretend that you’re a clever shepherd girl, and you’re just dressed up in pretty clothes, and you’re trying to make everybody believe that you’re a spoiled, empty-headed little princess. So no one guesses that under your clothes you’re a brave shepherd girl who climbs trees and chases away wolves with your staff.”

  A fun, challenging game. I nodded enthusiastically.

  “I know you can do it, sweetheart. Even the little girl in the story must have found it very useful to know how to be a fancy princess sometimes and a clever shepherd girl at other times. She had to be the most capable shepherd of all when she was with the shepherds, and the kind of princess who demanded ten mattresses to sleep on a pea when she was in a palace.”

  The inspectors found two little flaxen-haired, pink-swathed darlings. They inspected our toy box with a single glance, watched for a little while as we played house. I was the mother and you were the child and the baby doll was the other child and the teddy bear was another and the sofa cushion was the daddy, who went to the sofa to go to work. The inspectors nodded with satisfaction and smelled as sweet as jelly. They gave Aulikki a thick stack of booklets and notebooks with instructions for early eloi education.

  When they had left, Aulikki put the notebooks and booklets aside and took a key out of her pocket. She went to the wide cabinet with the glass cupboard on top where she kept the good china. She unlocked the lower doors of the cabinet. All the books were kept there, out of sight. She gave me permission to touch the books again and read them. But all the toys I liked best had to be kept in the barn loft from then on, and I could play with them only where you couldn’t see me.

  It surprised me for a moment, but then I understood. “If Manna accidentally tells someone then everyone will know that I’m a shepherd in princess’s clothing.”

  A smile spread over my grandmother’s face and her eyes shone. “Vanna, you might be the smartest little girl in Finland. And I mean that literally.”

  Her tears smelled like a warming sauna.

  I didn’t want to keep secrets from you. I didn’t want to treat anyone wrong. But I trusted that Aulikki knew best.

  I miss you so much.

  Your sister,

  Vanna (Vera)

  MODERN DICTIONARY ENTRY

  morlock — A popular unofficial vernacular word, first entering the language in the 1940s, for what is now properly called a neuterwoman. Refers to the sub-race of females who, owing to physical limitations (infertility, etc.), are excluded from the mating market. The word has its roots in the works of H. G. Wells, an author who predicted that humanity would be evolutionarily divided into distinct sub-races, some dedicated to serving the social structure and others meant to enjoy those services. The morlocks are a disposable segment of society whose use is limited mainly to serving as a reserve labor force for routine tasks.

  Dear sister!

  Do you remember the tests? There were two of them each year at the little school in Kaanaa.

  We sat side by side at shiny, varnished desks with slanted tops that opened on hinges. The pupils who attended regularly could keep their pencils and notebooks inside.

  The tests were exciting and fun. I got to play princess. I wrote in poor penmanship and purposely forgot my spelling and pretended not to understand the questions. We wrote shopping lists and read them aloud, said the names of plants and mushrooms and fish on classroom charts, remembered what temperature to use to wash wool or cotton. We calculated how to alter a recipe for four to feed six. I’d heard that some elois never learned to read, but they could listen to their recipes on recordings. You were a good learner. You were smart for an eloi. I always thought of those delicate, lively little kittens as I watched you toil over your notebook, writing down the numbers, and sometimes you erased them so many times that you almost wore through the paper. Sometimes I peeked at your paper and copied your mistakes.

  The eloi class had a room where we practiced making beds and washing windows. We boiled potatoes, made gravy, mixed bread dough, scrubbed grass stains out of fabric. We knew how to darn a sock and sew on a button. I was older, so I learned to iron a man’s shirt, too. It wasn’t a skill I particularly needed at Neulapää, but you had to show you could do it to pass the class. The higher levels of education like child care weren’t taught until we were at the eloi college, the National Institute of Home Economics.

  We had both learned the basics of planting, watering, thinning, and weeding the garden; hilling and harvesting potatoes; staking pea vines; and drying onions from Aulikki. Do you remember how little you liked those things? Sometimes when you had to put your hands in the dirt you would hesitate, as if there were dangerous things that could bite under the ground.

  I, on the other hand, enjoyed many of the garden chores, like grafting the apple trees. It was magical to me that one tree could grow several kinds of apples if you wanted it to.

  But school and chores didn’t take up all our time. When Aulikki didn’t need our help in the kitchen or the garden and was sure we knew everything that would be asked on the test, we could use our time as we wished. Do you remember the little porcelain tea set with roses and lilies of the valley on the saucers? You never tired of setting out meals for your dolls on those plates. In the winter we slid down the little hill on our sleds and I built a lantern out of snowballs and Aulikki put a candle inside it in the evening.
r />   I remember so clearly one fall evening when we were sitting next to each other on the sofa in the living room. Aulikki was sitting in her favorite chair listening to music. She had a small collection of records, mostly classical music and jazz records she’d brought from Sweden. She didn’t care for the state music.

  I was ten. You had just turned eight in August. Aulikki was listening to Mozart’s Requiem.

  I had a heavy encyclopedia in my hands.

  The Concise Encyclopedia was my favorite thing to read, although the books my grandfather had left at Neulapää included plenty of books on individual subjects as well. I was most interested in biology and botany, but I also read about physics, geography, and world history. I muddled through the basics of French and English for fun and learned the table of elements by heart. Aulikki had brought a collection of European and American literature with her to Neulapää, and the worlds it described were as strange to me as the alien cultures in my father’s old science fiction novels.

  I was sitting there with volume M through P of the Concise Encyclopedia in my lap. The pounding, stirring music had awakened a desire in me to know more about Mozart.

  You were holding a copy of Femigirl magazine.

  It was sent to all elois’ homes when they turned six. It had romantic stories, written in the simplest sentences, about elois competing for the same masco, and one girl would always get him in the end through feminine wiles. There were pictures of elegant weddings and instructions on ladylike behavior and proper dress. Your lips moved when you read, painfully, slowly making your way through the stories, but you waded through every issue again and again.

  I understood for the first time—sharply, painfully—the depth of the difference between us.

  I couldn’t help noticing that for a long time your favorite game was wedding.

  I wasn’t the prince or the knight in our games anymore; I was the groom. You would don a pillowcase veil and clutch a crumpled bouquet of dandelions and cow parsley, but the light in your eyes showed how real it all was to you. You didn’t see a sister beside you; you saw a future where you would be supported and safe, sheltered by undying love.