Norma

Sofi Oksanen, Owen F. Witesman

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782399773
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

From the internationally acclaimed author of Purge and When the Doves Disappeared, comes a deliciously dark family drama that is a searing portrait of both the exploitation of women's bodies and the extremes to which people will go for the sake of beauty. When Anita Naakka jumps in front of an oncoming train, her daughter, Norma, is left alone with the secret they have spent their lives hiding: Norma has supernatural hair, sensitive to the slightest changes in her mood--and the moods of those around her--moving of its own accord, corkscrewing when danger is near. And so it is her hair that alerts her, while she talks with a strange man at her mother's funeral, that her mother may not have taken her own life. Setting out to reconstruct Anita's final months--sifting through puzzling cell phone records, bank statements, video files--Norma begins to realise that her mother knew more about her hair's powers than she let on: a sinister truth beyond Norma's imagining.

Twelve

There are so many girls. I don’t know what will happen to all of them after the Big Bang. Nothing will be gained by delaying, though. Business isn’t slowing down. Eva said I shouldn’t think about the girls who are involved. Everything has its price.

The realization hit like white lightning. Norma stopped the video. Her mother’s new camera bag was visible in the image, as was a suitcase into which she was throwing something: her first digital camera. It was old enough now for thieves to ignore, so she always traveled with it. But she had taken the videos with her brand-new model, which currently sat on the bookshelf.

Norma checked her mother’s final messages again. Not a word about her old camera disappearing on the trip. She sent Margit a text and received an instant reply. Margit hadn’t seen the small pink camera, and she hadn’t taken it. Norma grabbed her mother’s roller bag and checked the contents again. Swimsuit, cotton skirts, sunscreen. Linen jacket. Souvenirs for Norma: a new silk wrap and lemongrass ointment. Her mother intended to give them to her on a night that never came. More silk. No camera.

The hotel where her mother stayed reported that nothing had been left behind. The Bangkok airport gave the same answer. At Helsinki-Vantaa, Norma’s call was forwarded to the Finnair desk. Norma described the camera and gave the two dates when it could have gone missing, the departure and arrival days. On the strap it had a small charm with Rossetti’s Regina Cordium, Elizabeth Siddal’s wedding portrait, on the medallion—

Norma hadn’t misheard. The camera was at the Finnair desk. The same worker had happened to be on duty when it was brought to her. Another Finn had seen the woman drop the camera, but the group had been moving so quickly she hadn’t been able to catch up to them.

Norma dumped a mixture of nutritional supplements into a cup, drained it, then cut a length of her hair. She mixed bits of hair with tobacco and rolled a spliff. After slowly smoking it, she glanced at Eva’s picture staring at her from next to the laptop and ordered a taxi for the airport.

As the wind chimes jangled, the patches on the armpits of Marion’s white blouse grew. Alvar had come to the salon to pick her up for a client meeting, and as always, the omens of a bad night were building. The banana bun she had rolled her hair in couldn’t hide the dampness and rancid oil of her unwashed scalp.

“Ready?”

“Of course.”

Marion went to spray on another layer of hair gloss. She was stalling. She didn’t want to leave, and everything in her screamed that one desire. Since her return from the airport, Norma realized she’d misinterpreted Marion because she didn’t know what to look for. But the smoking helped. Anita had been right about that. Without it, her roots wouldn’t be so calm or her thoughts so clear.

After being left alone, Norma pulled Marion’s car keys out of her pocket. She had stolen them from Marion’s bag while she was finishing her makeup. If Marion missed them, she would think she’d forgotten them in her agitation, along with the blotting papers and lipstick she always carried but had left on the edge of the sink. Norma grabbed a brush, dustpan, and handheld vacuum in case anyone wondered what she was doing and went to search Marion’s car.

In the trunk she found a carry-on-size roller bag. Norma put it in a garbage bag and carried it to the back room of the salon. The baggage claim tags had all been removed, and all that was inside were a few hotel and travel brochures from Kiev, Tbilisi, and Bangkok, a hairbrush, and a stack of Source Agency brochures with the same titles in several languages. The agency address was located in Kiev, with offices in Bangkok, Mexico, Ukraine, Poland, and St. Petersburg. Norma opened the Finnish brochure and glanced over the biographies of the staff who presented themselves as surrogacy experts. The head of the agency reported getting the idea to start the company after going through the same thing as her clients—a surrogate mother had been the only way for her to experience the joys of motherhood, and now she had two children. The staff at the partner clinics also gave convincing accounts of personal experiences that helped them relate to their clients’ difficulties. The final pages listed the client coordinators, the medical advisers, the area directors in charge of surrogates and donors, and the customer service representatives. All the necessary legal counsel, travel documents, and arrangements related to the child’s nationality were included in the package. Above the picture of the ideal family on the back cover read the words: making dreams come true. Nothing in the information presented made any direct mention of Lambert or gave any hint of dubious practices.

Norma went out back to smoke another roll-up and then got to work. The bag had never been vacuumed or cleaned. It was a treasure. The first hair she found was Vietnamese. Definitely from a pregnant woman who was young and well nourished. There was some sort of chemical, too, but Norma didn’t recognize it. Pregnancy hair should have a springtime buoyancy, but this one was similar to the Vietnamese women at the nail studios, and the stress level was higher than expectant mothers generally. The next hair protruded from the hotel brochures. It belonged to a Nordic woman on a low-carb diet who was probably infertile. Norma had learned to recognize polycystic ovary syndrome ages ago from excess hair growth. Although the disease could be controlled with medicine, it was obvious from the woman’s hair, as were the clomiphene tablets she was taking. The third and fourth women’s conditions resembled menopause. The fifth was taking pituitary hormones and enjoyed cheese and organic wines. From the sixth, she picked up at least clomiphene, and from the seventh, pituitary hormones again. All were over thirty, two over fifty. The third and fifth could cut down their alcohol use, and the sixth was a lactose-intolerant anorexic who suffered from magnesium and several other trace element deficiencies. There were seven women in total, all with traces of infertility treatments in their hair. Norma also found a few hairs that belonged to men. One was Alvar’s, the other two from unidentified Scandinavians. The men’s standard of living and diet was similar to that of the women. And then it hit her—a strong scent memory. Her mother’s handbag, which Norma had torn apart searching for her mother’s last message. The Scandinavian hair stuck in the zipper. No chance of children, lots of grapefruit juice, too much aspirin, classic home remedies for infertility.

This roller bag was not the luggage of a hair dealer. The hairs were not extensions. They were missing the taint of silicon and chemicals. Earlier Norma had thought Marion’s almost daily work meetings had to do with wholesalers from the large network Alla had created. But Marion joked around with the Nigerian braiders, and she seemed lighthearted whenever she went to the warehouse. Norma picked up the hairbrush from the suitcase. It proved the same thing: the meetings Marion had gone to with this bag made her nervous.

Norma slammed the suitcase shut. Although the evidence covered a long period of time, there was no mistaking Marion’s complicity in the clan’s surrogacy operations. They were all the same.

She had fifteen minutes until her next customer. Norma returned the roller bag to the trunk, then glanced at the jackets hanging in the car—they were still in their dry cleaning bags and wouldn’t provide anything interesting. Then she went back inside and put the car keys on the floor under the counter where Marion usually kept her purse.

The customer with the tangled hair was one of those who dreamed of a career in Hollywood, who found Finland stuffy and narrow-minded. For some reason, every one of these types was sure that a career path would open up in America just so long as they had the basics sorted out, meaning white teeth and long, shiny hair full of body. This one was too short for the catwalk, but she was certain she could succeed as a lingerie model. She had already spent her inheritance from her grandmother on silicone. She had gone to Tallinn to get them with her mother.

Enduring the girl’s chatter was more difficult than usual today. A one-minute clip from her mother’s pink vacation camera played in Norma’s ears: “After the baby, I go to America. America after the baby.” The Asian girl in another clip was in bad shape and had no English. The room looked like a hospital, and she was in hospital clothing. She was late in her pregnancy, and her wrists were cuffed to the bed. Norma’s mother showed the girl pictures and also flashed them at the camera. Norma recognized only two of the men in the pictures, Alvar and Lambert. “Have you seen any of these men here? Have you been talking to any of these men?” The girl nodded toward Lambert’s photo and spat at it.

The contents of her mother’s vacation camera and the glimpse of Alla on Kristian’s widow’s video proved that the livelihood of the Lambert clan was not simply a story that could be chalked up to Helena’s insane ramblings. But getting mixed up in it was insane. Norma couldn’t afford that.

norma removed all the videos from her mother’s computer that referenced hair, the straightening irons of Harlem, and the extra-strength hairnets Eva used. She removed the video in which her mother ordered her to go to Bangkok if anything happened. She removed all mentions of Grigori. The talk about Helena’s accent was true, she couldn’t erase that, and she left most of the clips that included Helena herself. The cigarette in Helena’s hand looked normal, so it could stay, as could the pipe that Helena seemed to carry with her everywhere. The scenes with too much Finnglish in Helena’s speech went into the recycling bin, as well as the ones where madness or drug-induced stupor was too obvious in her eyes. That didn’t leave much, but there was enough.

Norma went through the material left on the machine one more time and quieted the incessant pounding in her head with painkillers. Occasionally she browsed the departures timetable for the airport, while listening for sounds in the stairwell. The doorbell remained silent, and only the sounds of her neighbors came from the stairs. Still, she expected that at any moment someone might appear on her threshold. She had a bread knife in her jacket pocket and another in her bag. They had a calming effect, as did the cigarettes she rolled from her hair. They didn’t make her see visions or hear voices. She didn’t know whether she hoped for that. When she opened her mouth, her own voice came from her throat, not Eva’s American accent with its higher pitch. Helena’s and her mother’s madness hadn’t taken her.

From the vacation camera, she removed nothing, instead copying the contents onto two memory sticks. One of the sticks she hid in her bra, the other in her suitcase, already packed with bundles of hair, her best scissors, and Eva’s pictures hidden in envelopes—Norma didn’t want to look at her face just now.

She was almost ready.

marion hoped to get a moment to herself before dinner. She needed only one moment, plus a little something from the sauna bar. Norma had called in sick, so the final customers before the Midsummer holiday had fallen to Marion alone. She was tired, and she would have liked to stay at home and sleep through the holiday, but everything had to seem normal. The clan couldn’t suspect anything. That was why she was cleaning Alla’s scalp with firm, professional strokes, then turning off the faucet with a flip of her wrist and grabbing the blow-dryer. She would act when Alla and Lambert returned from Hanoi and would definitely be on Finnish soil. By that time, she would have her own affairs arranged and in the best-case scenario would have succeeded in getting the girl to understand the benefits of her plan.

Just as she was inserting the plug into the wall, Alla turned to her.

“I just have to ask. Have you been having any symptoms like Helena did back then?”

The question came out of nowhere. Alla never spoke about Helena.

“Don’t take this the wrong way. We’re all under a lot of pressure, and that can trigger mental illness.”

Marion’s fingers clenched around the blow-dryer so hard, the plastic creaked like the ice crust on a lake, and for a fleeting moment, she saw herself grabbing the file from the table and jabbing Alla with it, even though she wasn’t Helena and didn’t act like Helena.

“Max can’t stand the idea that you might end up in an institution.”

That was a threat. Marion recognized the Lamberts’ intimidation tactics, and they always worked on her like a stun gun. They wanted her to understand that Lambert could institutionalize her. Not in Finland but somewhere else. That would be her vacation.

“Luckily you don’t have any children. Who knows what would have become of them,” Alla said with a sigh, picking up her guide to Japan, which opened to a picture of cherry blossoms. “I think of you every time we have a client come in who’s afraid of passing on schizophrenia. But let’s not speak of that anymore. I’ve continued conversations with Unno, Mr. Shiguto’s representative. Max also thinks she’s a little strange. Alvar thinks the two of them are only going to put Interpol on our tail. On the other hand, Shiguto’s father is the nineteenth-richest man in Japan.”

Marion’s hands were stiff, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Epilogue
• Also by Sofi Oksanen
• Copyright