Malena's escape from the academy

Malena’s escape from the academy begins when she refuses Pirjo’s attempt to pay her to leave and declares that she will return to the center. Pirjo responds not with force but with a calculated warning: she presents Malena’s miscarriage as a mortal danger, then tells Atu that Malena is still recovering. The delay gives Malena a head start, and she vanishes before Atu can find her.

The rejected offer and Pirjo’s change of approach

Malena initially treats Pirjo’s offer as an insult rather than an opportunity. She pushes the money away, accuses Pirjo of trying to get rid of her, and insists that Atu wants nothing to do with Pirjo. Malena says that Atu has told her so himself and describes Pirjo as his servant. She intends to return to the center within hours and reclaim the position she has fought to attain. Her confidence rests on her belief in her relationship with Atu, and she rejects the idea that money can displace her there.

Pirjo knows that a direct contest over Atu would expose the feelings she conceals. She therefore presents herself as someone who has accepted those feelings and is glad for Malena and Atu. She claims that years beside Atu have given her a particular understanding of him, and uses that claimed intimacy to establish herself as a trustworthy source of warning. The approach is a reversal: having failed to persuade Malena to leave through payment, Pirjo tries to make returning seem fatal.

The warning about Atu

Pirjo tells Malena that she is the third woman whose pregnancy with Atu has ended in miscarriage. She claims that Atu is over forty, has no children, and wants children more than anything; she portrays him as devastated and betrayed by the miscarriage. These statements are presented as Pirjo’s case to Malena, not as independently confirmed facts about the other women or Atu’s intentions.

Pirjo then describes the miscarriage as opening an abyss of negative energy that Atu cannot tolerate, and makes the threat explicit: if Malena returns, he will sacrifice her. She says he will drown her as he supposedly drowned the other two women, and predicts that Malena’s body will be found naked on a distant beach. Malena initially meets the warning with mockery and asks whether Pirjo could not think of anything better. But the narrative makes clear that the words do reach her: Pirjo has planted doubt and shock, and expects those feelings to give way to fear and powerlessness. The warning’s force lies not in proof but in its attempt to unsettle the certainty with which Malena had just claimed her place beside Atu.

A concealed departure

After what the narration calls her successful mission, Pirjo returns to the center and tells Atu that Malena is recovering and will be discharged in a day or two. That account gives Malena a head start. Pirjo’s deception is important because it keeps Atu from immediately understanding that Malena has left the hospital and is not coming back.

Malena never turns up at the center. Atu cannot get answers about why she left the hospital or where she went, and spends several weeks trying to track her through his contacts. She has disappeared so completely that, in the narrative’s image, she seems to have been swallowed up. The text does not reveal her destination or describe the mechanics of her escape; its emphasis is on the break in contact and on the time Pirjo’s lie buys her.

Aftermath and significance

Pirjo offers Atu accounts of the depression and irrational decisions that can follow a miscarriage. He listens, saddened and disheartened, and eventually resigns himself to Malena’s absence. Her disappearance thus remains unexplained to him, while Pirjo supplies an interpretation that encourages him to accept it rather than continue searching indefinitely.

One morning, after Atu has gone out early to chant while looking toward the sea, Pirjo brings him warm tea and a damp cloth. She washes and massages him, then initiates sex. The scene follows the period in which Malena has vanished and Atu has resigned himself to her absence; it shows Pirjo acting when the rival she sought to remove is no longer present. The escape is therefore both a separation and a turning point in the center’s relationships: Malena gets away from the return Pirjo had tried to prevent, while Pirjo’s concealment creates an opening with Atu.