At the heart of friendship
The importance of friendship is gradually understood as the years go by. The camaraderie of youth deepens, and they can dream of a joint retirement under the sun, walking hand in arm.
A charming sight from my childhood comes to mind: my mother walking arm in arm with her sister or friend in front of me. They wear tight-fitting summer dresses, permed hair and bare legs. We are going to a Midsummer party or a summer wedding. The women talk lively but in a whisper, and I don’t dare to go next to them, let alone intervene. I’m happy and jealous, curious and miserably an outsider at the same time – and above all, a child. There’s something in the closeness between them that I don’t have a word for yet: friendship. Since then, these small gestures – slipping a hand under my arm and adjusting my steps to a common rhythm – have meant a special level of lightness and trust to me: a short union, a moment of secrets between women.
Something similar was also evident in the boys’ boisterous brotherhood when they walked around the yard of the primary school. It was a sovereign front for backpackers, with no gap for a girl to go through. In its firmness, it also evoked an outsider, but also a wild feeling of joy. These physical alliances or chains of friendship – arm in arm and arm neck – are rarely seen anymore. They have been replaced by hugs, kisses on the cheek and high fives. Only old married couples and old women walk on the hook, leaning on each other so as not to fall.
When a girl from the 50s has three sisters, a little brother, a lot of relatives, a lake nearby and forests around her, she realizes to her surprise as an adult that she didn’t have a childhood friend. Not even invisible. Didn’t hit, didn’t fit? It wasn’t until my teenage years and being away from my home circle that I made friends in my life. There were a few girls’ rings, from which pairs, triplets, those who were left out or left out in turn. In teenage friendships, they mirrored themselves, fit into the class picture, sought their own voice on all frequencies, from muteness to screaming.
During my school years, my family background was hardly visible to the outside world, but there were mysteries hidden in the middle of my friendships. The fact that a friend’s mother was a headmaster’s wife, someone else’s housewife and Martha, a third’s cleaner and a Social Democrat, was uninterpretable background noise for us, who first alternated between girls’ books, then The Catcher and The Bystander, and made confessions to each other. Friendship was real, love was mere theory.
And when love then took over all living space, it alternately undermined and strengthened friendships. Where love was a burden, friendship made it easier.
Of all the friends of my youth, the most enigmatic is a friend who died early. His memory causes ghost pain in those of us who have already lived a long life. He remains in the time capsule of our youth, and every time we meet, we start talking about him passionately, marveling at his style and enchantment, sorting out his love affairs as if we were at the door of adulthood again.
My comedy depicts four women trying to live their old age together in a shared artist’s house, and it doesn’t try to say the last word about friendship between women. To paraphrase former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright : hell has a particularly hot section for those women who don’t help each other. Maybe it is, maybe not. For many women, life on earth is difficult enough, and in a male-dominated world, women have often been more competitors than sisters to each other.
Theatre is called the art of transience, and that’s why the most enduring thing that remains of decades of work are colleagues who have turned into friends over time. Maybe after a victory, maybe after an argument, maybe after failure – or maybe secretly, with time? I don’t know about hell, but I would like to believe that there is a heaven for actors where Ritva Valkama and Marilyn Monroe, Jean Gabin and Jussi Jurkka – remembering their favourite lines and comparing their knee problems – can walk arm in arm.
Text Helena Anttonen