New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (11 page)

‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t got the heart to hope for anything. I’m making do with storing up things to hope for! Time will tell me which to continue hoping for and which to set aside,’ she replied at last, still forcing her mouth into a smile, but it was a ghost of what had gone before.

I didn’t understand her answer, but I didn’t ask for explanations; they no longer held any interest for me. Ilma was silent for a moment; she was breathing hard, perhaps holding back tears.

‘Don’t you have any hopes at all? Is there nothing that you wish for?’ she managed to ask again, though she was clearly having difficulty getting the words out.

‘Yes, there is: I hope to find some memory of me in someone else; I hope to find someone who can tell me about even one single day in my past life: about one summer’s afternoon when I was a child, some outing, what games I played. Because surely I too must have run around a courtyard kicking a ball?’

I had spoken emphatically, almost angrily; but my tirade vanished into the unresponsive darkness as though I had not spoken.

‘But perhaps I’m wrong,’ I went on bitterly. ‘Perhaps that’s not what I should be looking for.’

‘Tomorrow this will already be a memory, a small seed pearl,’ said Ilma after a long sigh. I was rejecting her and still she was trying to comfort me.

‘To keep a memory, you have to have somewhere to store it,’ I shot back tersely.

‘You can glue it into your album of memories along with the
Porilaisten marssi
. Night with Ilma, you could call it.’

Her forced smile irritated me.

‘I have no memory, I have no past. My souvenir album ends practically before it has begun,’ I protested.

‘Who cares about the beginning of a fairy story? It’s hearing the end that keeps children awake till all hours, with the book hidden under the covers, curled up in the candlelight, shivering with fear at the weird noises all houses make at night.’

A falsely cheerful note had crept into her voice; it rang out firmly, then trailed off suddenly into silence. She had responded to my every remark with the most persuasive words that she could muster, whereas I had flung the most cruel that I could marshal back in her face. With her silence, she seemed to be asking me why. Then we both stopped talking: nothing, we felt, could fill the gap that had opened up between us, however small: we would bear it within us always, until the end of time. Because of those few fateful moments, our feelings would never weigh equally upon the scales: there would always be something left over, some unspendable small change. I had sought her affections, I had let her run towards me, then I had rejected her. For no reason: just for the subtle pleasure of disappointing her and proving to myself that any attempt at breaking out of my solitude was vain. I was enjoying my suffering: by fooling myself that I was fighting it, I was putting it to some purpose. My lost memory had become my excuse for giving up on life. Now, in the moonlight, each could have seen the other’s face; but both of us were looking straight ahead. As in the bay below us, ice had had once more closed in upon me.

‘I’ll write to you when I’m in Viipuri,’ said Ilma, almost as though to reassure herself she could still speak.

‘And what will you write about?’

‘Memories,’ she said, laughing loudly now, as though by way of reproach.

‘Do you at least promise that you’ll answer?’

‘I promise,’ I said, barely audibly.

Now we were back on the Mannerheimintie, plodding along side by side in silence, heads bowed. A distant strip of grey above the sea marked the start of a hard-won dawn: soon light would trickle from the close mesh of the sky, casting its faint glow over what was left of the snow, over the muddied earth. In the open space below us, black motorized columns were crawling over the snow like snakes, breaking up and reforming, breathing out steam. A hoarse whistle broke the silence; the lights of the station were coming closer, there was the sound of the odd engine in the distance. Suddenly Ilma took my arm again and broke into the
Porilaisten marssi
, but her voice was thick with emotion and I had trouble making out the words. I tried to join in, to keep her company, to cover her voice with my own, but my head was heavy and I found that the words were suddenly beyond me. Outside the main Post Office, an elderly man on the other side of the road stopped in his tracks to look at us. He was well-dressed, and wearing a fur hat; he took off his gloves, hooked his walking-stick over his arm and started to clap. The walls of the Post Office building sent his solitary applause echoing back to us; amplified by the silence and filling the square with that martial sadness that bodes defeat, it stayed with us as we walked under the lanterns clasped in the bronze hands of the colossal statues on the station façade. The troop train for Viipuri was already on the platform. The whole place was in ferment: soldiers in brand new uniforms and gleaming helmets were boarding by the dozen, amidst much stamping of feet; groups of nurses gathered around their luggage were seeking each other out and gesturing to one another. A loudspeaker was barking out names and destinations. I said goodbye to Ilma before she got on to the train: I could not bear the idea of seeing her leaning out of the window. Amidst all that bustle I quickly pulled off my gloves, took her hand and squeezed it hard, then fled, without another glance.

The
Porilaisten marssi
is indeed a song that speaks of war and banners fluttering over battlefields; I hummed it again to myself, alone this time, looking out over the frozen bay, in the snow-covered Kaivopuisto Park, standing motionless next to the tree of memories. I sang it loudly under the cold covers until alcohol and exhaustion won out in the fight against anxiety.

Here the manuscript is strangely blank, with just the odd disjointed phrase, Ilma Kovisto’s address in Viipuri and the text of the
Porilaisten marssi.
I felt that it should be included here, not just for documentary completeness, but because of what it also means for me: exile, the absurdity of war and all its menacing allure, personal defeat. Glued on to the back of this page I also found the programme of the benefit-concert given on 24 March 1944 by the choir of the
Lotta-Svärd
at the hotel Kämp. Apart from the
Porilaisten marssi
it also included the following pieces:
Oi kallis Suomenmaa, Jääkärimarssi, Isänmaalle, Suomalainen rukous, Laps’ Suomen, Siniristilippumme, Terve Suomeni maa, Vala
and
Olet maamme armahin Suomenmaa.
The pianist in the over-large uniform was Sergeant Veijo Vihanta, from the corps of frontier guards. The unknown soldiers belonged to the native Karelian Brigade, which was decimated on Lake Ladoga in June 1944.

After reading these pages I too went to the tree of happy memories; and I too found my own. In summer I used to go to play near it as a child, in the copse next to the Observatory. After school my mother and a woman friend would take me to the park and sit there chatting, while I would set about playing with a vengeance. On the esplanade behind the port I would create a world of my own, full of adventure, hiding behind the hedges and secretly observing the park keeper as he sat on a bench eating his lunchtime herring. He would take off his hat with its shiny leather brim – how I envied him that hat – and set the table with his thermos of coffee, a packet of herrings and a screw of paper containing berries. I was a bloodthirsty Viking who had recently landed on those shores in order to put the city to the sword. I would take the park keeper prisoner and drag him in chains to the president’s residence, like the slaves of Sigtuna in the coloured illustrations in my reading-book. Then I would rush off to sink the enemy ships as they rode at anchor in the port. But no sooner had I gone down the hill again than I would come face to face with my mother, who would grab me firmly by the arm, complaining that she had been calling for me for quite some time. My love affairs, on the other hand, would be conducted elsewhere, in the streets behind the harbour at Pohjoissatama, between Kruununhaka and Tervasaari, where I would hide in doorways, never weary of clasping a body which, by virtue of repeated embrace, I deluded myself that I might cause to enter mine. But I didn’t go down there: I want the memory I still have of those places to remain intact, softened by time, cleansed of all pain. Perhaps, indeed, the day will come when memory will ebb away from those images too, letting them fade into oblivion. Here I agree with Miss Koivisto: never to forget anything would be unbearable.

Porilaisten marssi

Pojat, kansan urhokkaan,

Mi Luolan, Lützin, Leipzingin

Ja Narvan mailla vertaan vuoti,

Viel’on Suomi voimissaan,

Voi vainolaisen hurmehella peittää maan.

Pois, pois, rauhan toimi jää,

Jo tulta kohta kalpa lyö

Ja vinkuen taas lentää luoti.

Joukkoon kaikki yhtykää,

meit’entisajan sankarhenget tervehtää.

Kauniina väikkyy muisto urhojemme,

Kuolossa mekin vasta kalpenemme.

Eespäin rohkeasti vaan,

Ei kunniaansa myö

Sun poikas milloinkaan!

Uljaana taistolippu liehu,

Voitosta voittohon

Sä vielä meitä viet!

Eespäin nyt kaikki, taisto alkakaa,

Saa sankareita vielä nähdä Suomenmaa!

Although we had a relationship of mutual trust, the pastor had never asked me about my accident in as many words; he had never made any reference to my short past, but I knew he was aware of it – he had read Doctor Friari’s letter, which was kept in the archives in the reception area, in the grey folder, still without a name. In his dealings with me, Koskela always tried to act with the utmost naturalness. But he could never treat me quite like one of his own: my story was too mystifying, my condition too anomalous. So he ended up by treating me as a sort of student of his language for whom he had been called upon to devise an intensive course in quintessential Finnishness. With teacherly resolve, he tried to focus my attention on the simple things of everyday life; he tried to show me that the mundane here-and-now – that area where my humdrum mind was floundering – was indeed all man can truly know. But he himself was unconvinced of what he was preaching, because he too had a present without a future. The pastor lived every day as though it were an act of obligatory unpaid labour – as though it were his last, as though everything had to be set out in perfect order prior to death. His true aim, in all likelihood, was to nudge me towards a place where I would be able to survive on my own; to edge me out of that dull despair which is the prelude to madness. But his instinctive cynicism showed through at every turn. That avoidance of regret, which he imposed upon me like some spiritual exercise, together with his blind conviction that each day would be the last, turned my existence into a mad rush towards nothingness. Each hour spent with the pastor was so intense, so thought-provoking, that there was no room for dread. In that portion of my thoughts that I had put in the pastor’s care, no doubts could grow: nothing grew there. Without realizing it, I was marching beside him, escorting him to his own end.

That day, he had come to sit beside me in the refectory. I had never seen him eat there before; I assumed he ate his meals at the table in the sacristy. Without a word, he began drinking his soup with his usual systematic haste. When he had wiped the bowl clean and devoured the last bit of bread, he pushed the tin tray away from him and raised his eyes.

‘The ice is melting! The Germans have reached Uhtua!’ he pronounced cautiously, as though imparting a secret.

‘Soon it will be up to us again,’ he added darkly. ‘And then we will have to do what the great
runoilija
Väinämöinen did: find the right words to break the spell. Because in essence the war we’re fighting now is the same war we Finns have been engaged in ever since our birth, the one we started so long ago with Pohjola, queen of the shades: to speak, and sing, more loudly than the rest. You who are studying our language, you must know this. To sing is
lauluaa
, which also means to enchant. But for the ancient Finnish poets, to sing – or, if you like, to chant – and to enchant, were one and the same. Anyone who could sing could also enchant. Not for nothing does the
Kalevala
begin with a singing contest between two singers, or
runoilija
. Joukahainen, presumptuous and ill-prepared, dares to challenge the ageing Väinämöinen in the art of magic song and is beaten by him, silenced by his art. Väinämöinen puts stone shoes on Joukahainen’s feet, wooden breeches on his legs, a heavy weight upon his chest, piles of stones upon his shoulders, stone gloves on his hands, a granite cape upon his head. This is what the
Kalevala
says. Such is the magic of song. But only those who are fully acquainted with the power of the word should dare to have recourse to its magic!’

Now the refectory was emptying out. Weak rays of sun were filtering through its high windows, casting a gentle light over the violet smoke rising from the cigarettes of the last few stragglers; clouds of dust swarmed in the gilded air. Some nurses had already started cleaning the floor, dragging heavy pails of steaming water behind them and dipping soapy cloths into them. From time to time, their metallic clang drowned out the pastor’s words, causing him to raise his voice in irritation. When he was saying something complicated, he knew that he had to repeat himself, and break the more complex sentences into their simpler component parts so that I had a chance of understanding. But, in the grip of habit, with time he had come to use this method indiscriminately, each time he addressed me. That was how he proceeded that day in the refectory, heedless of the nurses as they looked in his direction, shooting him politely curious glances.

‘Väinämöinen was above all a shaman, a worker of magic. Such shamans used to drug themselves on magic mushrooms, whose hiding places in the woods were known only to them. These mushrooms sent them into a state of ecstasy which cut them off from the real world: they would leave their own bodies to hover somewhere outside reality, where they would discover signs, receive revelations, cures for illnesses, formulae which would drive off wild beasts and serve as protection against injury. They were vouchsafed the world of visions, of another realm, of dreams. The greatest of all these shamans was the giant Antero Vipunen: he travelled so far from his own body that he could never get back into it. His words were so powerful that they changed the course of nature; even today, in his vain effort to return to it, his soul wanders around the tangle of brambles that his abandoned body became. And it is to Antero Vipunen that Väinämöinen goes to ask for the three words he was lacking to complete his magic boat, the one that was to take him to the land of Pohjola. In the primitive world everything was new and boundless, even pain. That is why, when they are feeling pain, the heroes of the
Kalevala
can split the eternal ice with a single blow of the foot, raze a forest to the ground with a single sabre cut, bring about a migration of cranes with a single shout. That is why, even today, we Finns are capable of infinite endurance. Soon the Russians will attack, and then it will take all the strength we can muster, all our powers of endurance, all the words of Antero Vipunen to stop them. Nothing good has ever come out of the East: only invasions. Relentless waves of Slavs have poured repeatedly over our land; war against them will cease only when we have exterminated them or driven them off. Because, by some quirk of fate, we have stuck ourselves right in their path. If only the Turks had stopped at Samarkand!’ he exclaimed, waving his arms in the air with rage.