The Death of a Much Travelled Woman by Barbara Wilson

Author:Barbara Wilson [Wilson, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781879427327
Publisher: Third Side Press
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Last Laugh

“WE FINNS, WE ARE the most depressed people on earth,” said the man in the airplane seat next to me. “We are more depressed than the Scandinavians. We are more depressed than the Slavs. That is because Slav and Scandinavian blood runs in our veins together, so the depression is doubled.”

“Are you depressed about anything in particular?” I inquired. He was a mere sketch of a man, pale eyes, pale hair, outbrillianced by the cobalt blue of his soccer T-shirt.

“No,” he sighed, and looked even more morose. “Just depressed.”

“Well,” said Luisa Montiflores. She was on my other side on the FinnAir flight from London to Helsinki that was taking us to a writers’ conference. “You can’t be more depressed than the Uruguayans. We are famous all over South America for our melancholia.”

“But you at least have a reason in Uruguay,” the Finn argued. “Your politics, your economy, everything like that. While for us, so stable and well-off, it is the human condition in the morning when we wake up that hurts us.”

“It’s not just a hangover?” I asked, for I recalled that the Finns were serious drinkers. The pale man ignored me. “We’re depressed just to wake up and still be alive!” he said.

I got up to use the toilet, and when I returned Luisa had taken my middle seat and the two of them were relating stories of pathology and paralysis, phobia and frenzy, with voluptuous glee. Luisa turned to me only once during the rest of the flight. “But why have I not come to Finland before?” she demanded. “We are made for each other, me and the Finns!”

I’d once had a similar thought years ago, when I spent a weekend in Finland with a young translator I’d met at a conference in St. Petersburg. Helga, who had an arrestingly unpronounceable last name, had invited me back to her family’s cabin somewhere north of Helsinki. We ate grilled reindeer steak and potatoes with sour cream, washed down with vodka, and spent most of our time in the wood-fired sauna. Helga could stay in forever, but I was always having to dash out into the snowy drifts. Occasionally she ran out too; she had the longest legs I’d ever seen, and a jubilant laugh as she leapt into the snow. For a while afterward we’d written, but then I’d lost contact with her until a printed wedding announcement with no personal message came in the mail. That must have been eight years ago. I’d heard nothing of her until Luisa showed me the conference brochure. Helga was one of the main organizers.

It was long-legged Helga who was at the gate to meet us, tall as ever and even more beautiful, though far more subdued. She held out her hand to me, but her cool blue eyes betrayed nothing, even though she said formally, “Pleasant to see you again, Cassandra.”

“You already know each other?” asked Luisa.

“Another conference years ago,” murmured Helga. “In what was then Leningrad. We’ll have to catch up sometime.

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