Chapter 1 Part 2

Chapter 1 of the Novel Finlish

I convinced myself otherwise. I brought a British novel from home that Petra had started reading a week ago. She had this habit of folding the corner of the page into a small triangle several times to mark her spot where she had stopped reading. I wondered why she had this particular habit. I wanted to ask her about this unique habit. I was angry with myself that she was unable to answer me.

Page forty six or page forty seven? I did not know on which page she stopped, so I started reading aloud to her at the top of page forty six. I apologized to her if I started on a page she had already read previously. Of course she couldn’t answer, but I pretended she could.

I was reading in the middle of page forty nine when my attention was diverted to Petra’s mother standing at the door of the room. I closed the book but before doing so tried to emulate the fold Petra made to indicate the point on the page where she stopped. I could not do it very well and made a complete mess of the page.

I decided to stand up to face Petra’s mother Anna. She was only eight years older than me.

Anna had stopped seeing Petra just before our marriage. She was in complete disapproval of our relationship and marriage from the beginning. She still was opposed to it. The opposition was not in my love for her daughter, which she knew was strong, but rather in the age difference. When we married I was nearly forty five years old. Petra was almost twenty six, nearly twenty years younger.

I had not shaved or properly bathed in three days. The sleep deprivation also made me look much older. No doubt the gray hairs on my three day beard contributed to that fact.