Atu’s Relationship with His Pregnant Disciple Malena

Atu’s relationship with Malena becomes visible through two linked revelations: Pirjo’s suspicion that the pair are growing closer, and Atu’s later report that Malena had been pregnant and miscarried. The relationship is not presented through a private scene between the two. Instead, its intimacy emerges in Pirjo’s anxious interpretation of their absence and in her response to the pregnancy, which makes Malena’s loss a turning point in Pirjo’s own hopes for a child and a place in Atu’s future.

Signs of an Intimate Bond

At a gathering in the hall, Atu leads the crowd in a chant about feeling one another and sharing Malena’s pain. Pirjo looks around for Malena and finds that she is not there. Atu’s words therefore reach her without Malena’s presence to explain them: the assembly is being asked to attend to someone who is elsewhere, and Pirjo is left to infer what the absent woman means to Atu.

Her thoughts turn immediately to the possibility that Malena is in Atu’s chamber, trembling with desire. Pirjo wonders whether the pair are about to become more attached to one another than she can permit. This is her suspicion, not a confirmed account of what is happening between them, but it establishes how she reads their connection: as intimate, increasingly binding, and threatening to her position. She also considers whether she was wrong not to let Wanda challenge that relationship. The thought briefly opens the possibility that Malena and Atu’s closeness might have been resisted; Pirjo then rejects it and insists to herself that Wanda had to disappear. Her conclusion shows how jealousy and her decisions about other women are entangled with what she fears or believes about Atu and Malena.

The Pregnancy and Its Disclosure

The relationship’s stakes sharpen when Atu tells Pirjo that Malena miscarried a few hours earlier and that she had not been there when he needed her. He says Pirjo should have accompanied Malena in the ambulance to the hospital. His reproach gives Pirjo a concrete measure of the bond: during Malena’s medical crisis, Atu expected Pirjo to be present, and her absence is treated as a failure of support. At the same time, the pregnancy itself confirms a sexual relationship between Atu and Malena, rather than merely the possibility of one that Pirjo had imagined at the gathering.

Pirjo’s first response to the news is to avert her eyes and struggle to take it in. Her thoughts leap from Malena’s miscarriage to the question of whether Atu had got her pregnant. The abrupt question registers both shock and rivalry: Malena’s pregnancy makes Atu’s other intimacy undeniable, while forcing Pirjo to consider what that might mean for her own future with him. Atu adds that Malena bled uncontrollably. Pirjo gathers herself and tries to appear neutral, answering with apparent detachment. The contrast between that controlled exterior and the urgency of her thoughts makes clear that she is not emotionally neutral at all.

Pirjo’s Claim on the Future

Pirjo interprets the pregnancy through her own fear of time passing and her belief that her fertility is waning. She rejects the prospect of sharing Atu with others while the clock seems to her to be moving faster and faster. Her answer is not to accept Malena’s pregnancy as an independent event, but to imagine the child she wants Atu to father: her child, who should succeed him and become a new savior. In Pirjo’s mind, motherhood would secure a future and a special claim within Atu’s world.

That imagined future also reveals the unequal emotional positions in the relationship. Malena has been pregnant and has miscarried; Pirjo, hearing the news, turns at once to the child she wants and the successor she hopes to produce. The text does not show Atu promising Pirjo that future, nor does it establish that he shares her ambitions. Instead, her desire appears as her own urgent response to the evidence of his intimacy with Malena. The pregnancy thus makes their connection consequential beyond Pirjo’s suspicions, while exposing how she measures closeness through access to Atu and the possibility of bearing his child.

Loss and Relational Consequences

The miscarriage brings the relationship into the open through its consequences rather than through a scene of courtship. Malena’s absence at the gathering, Pirjo’s fear that she and Atu are becoming more attached, and Atu’s later account of the pregnancy form a sequence in which Pirjo’s suspicions gain substance. The news also places Malena’s physical suffering beside Pirjo’s private calculation about fertility, succession, and her own place in Atu’s life.

Atu’s reproach that Pirjo was not with him when he needed her complicates the rivalry. Malena’s crisis has become a test of Pirjo’s support for Atu, even as Pirjo experiences the pregnancy as a threat to her hopes. Her outwardly neutral response does not resolve that conflict; it conceals it. The episode therefore defines Atu’s relationship with Malena through both intimacy and loss, and shows how that relationship intensifies Pirjo’s jealousy and her determination to imagine a future in which she, rather than Malena, bears Atu’s child.