Silence by Jan Costin Wagner Read Free Book Online Page B

never came out again, dwelling on the fact that he, Tapani, had warned them but no one listened to him, no one took him seriously.
    ‘I take you very seriously’ said Ketola.
    ‘Yes, but the others -I mean, the others don’t understand anything. I’d like some water,’ said Tapani.
    Ketola nodded and fetched a bottle of water and two glasses. Tapani drank greedily and said he’d been thinking of learning to do flip-flops in the next few days.
    ‘What?’ asked Ketola.
    ‘Flip-flops. Lots of backward somersaults like the gymnasts do. Then I could get about very fast. It would be much quicker than walking. I just have to find someone who can teach me how to do them.’
    Ketola poured water into his glass and topped up Tapani’s as well, and when he looked up he thought, for a moment, that he saw a flash in Tapani’s eyes. Then Tapani laughed and Ketola laughed too.
    ‘Didn’t mean it seriously,’ said Tapani.
    These were the best moments for Ketola, the times when Tapani was the way he used to be for a few seconds. So far no one had been able to give an adequate explanation of what had really happened to Tapani. No doctor, no psychologist. Ketola could have worked out what such people said for himself. Drugs. Obviously a wild, haphazard mixture. Obviously consumed to excess. Ketola had known that for a long time, and he also knew that it couldn’t all be explained nearly so simply.
    About ten years before, Tapani had told him and Oona, on the evening before the party celebrating the end of the final school exams, that he had passed only with the aid of certain substances, that he probably didn’t tolerate those substances well and he was telling them because he intended to kick the habit. Because he had a feeling that it wouldn’t be good for him in the long run. Tapani had been sitting on this same sofa, putting his parents in the picture very objectively, infuriatingly objectively. Ketola had shouted at him, slapped his face and stayed away from the ceremony next day when the exam certificates were handed out.
    Now Ketola was thinking of that, of his own appalling failure, while Tapani, very serious again, talked about a villa he had bought in Spain, where he intended to spend the next few years.
    He knew now that Tapani had not stopped taking drugs, but instead had massively increased his consumption. He had gone to study mechanical engineering in Joensuu, although he hadn’t had the faintest interest in mechanical engineering, and all the time he had been taking cocaine and synthetic drugs in a weird and wonderful mixture.
    Meanwhile, Ketola had separated from Oona, his wife and Tapani’s mother, because he didn’t get along with her any more, for reasons that he couldn’t have specified today, and he had taken very little interest in Tapani during those years. For instance, it had never entered his head to ask why on earth he was studying mechanical engineering, of all subjects.
    Joensuu was hundreds of kilometres away; Ketola hoped his son was all right and suppressed any other ideas. About two years ago, just when his young colleague Kimmo Joentaa had lost his wife, Tapani too had had a nervous breakdown. He had appeared at the door one evening, saying what a nice, mild wind was blowing and looking at his father with an expression that went right to Ketola’s guts.
    A little later a woman from some official department had got in touch and told him, with many bureaucratic turns of phrase, that Tapani Ketola had been picked up on the runway at Helsinki airport and taken to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. Couldn’t Ketola, she asked, or the young man’s mother, Oona Ketola née Vaisänen, now living in Tampere, do something to help their son?
    After that Tapani had spent a week with Ketola and then the three of them – Oona too had come to visit for several days – furnished a flat for him in a high-rise building on the outskirts of Turku. That had been a good time, but it passed quickly, it