New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (5 page)

‘Where will you go, here in Helsinki?’ it asked me, a buttend clamped between its owner’s lips. He had posed me the same question on the voyage a hundred times. Perhaps he was hoping to catch me out, to discover some inconsistency in my replies.

‘I have the address of a military hospital; and a letter of introduction, from Doctor Friari,’ I told him yet again, in my rough and ready Finnish.

‘Anyway, wherever I go, it’s all the same to me,’ I added.

The officer shifted his gaze towards the city, turned his back on me and replied:

‘This isn’t just any city. It is an encampment of Mongols who surfaced at the other end of the continent by mistake; savages whose only thought is to get drunk, even on ethyl alcohol if they can’t find anything else!’ Pleased with his words, he turned around and drew deeply on his cigarette.

‘Welcome to Helsinki!’ he added sardonically, then walked away, tossing the butt end into the sea. Perhaps he had had those words stored away for me right from the beginning of the voyage.

I walked away from the port with my knapsack over my shoulder. I felt a slight feeling of nervous excitement, but it was not unpleasant, indeed it was more like a kind of sharp and unaccustomed happiness. Walking in the tracks left by the lorries, between the piles of muddied snow, I felt that I was going to make the acquaintance of my own city, my own country, and that thought filled me with hope. A soldier pointed out the military hospital, on a wide street in the centre of town. I shook the snow and mud off my boots and found myself walking over a red-tiled floor, shiny with wax, and entering a tall, poorly-lit entrance hall. The nurse at the reception desk asked me a quick question which I could not understand. I answered by repeating the introductory sentence which Doctor Friari had taught me, and handed her the envelope marked with the seal of the Tübingen. The woman got to her feet and nodded to me to wait, pointing at the wooden benches against the wall; then she went off elsewhere. I removed my cap and took a deep breath of air, which smelled of a combination of paint and ether. Some petty officers came in through the main doorway and stood chatting in the hallway before going off down the corridor, their voices echoing until they died away behind some door. I listened to them with interest, as though amazed to hear them talking like Doctor Friari. So that was really it – the Finnish language at last, alive and well around me, filling that unknown space with sounds I knew. Within the network of my ear, straining to catch each syllable issuing from the mouths of those men, among so many that were unknown or mangled, certain whole words remained trapped, still living when I caught them. I held on to them, took them apart, compared them to those I knew, repeating them under my breath. They were real, they were already mine!

A soldier who had come to sit on the bench opposite mine now distracted me from my wandering train of thought. He had put his elbows on his knees and let his head droop. Eyes on the floor, he seemed to be following something moving in the geometrical design of the tiles, and every so often he would raise the tips of his boots as though to let something pass by. I noted that he was wearing a jacket like my own: the same dark blue, the same horn buttons, but with badges sewn into the collar. I stretched out my arms and looked at them. I stroked the rough material and thought, yes, this country must indeed be mine.

I did not have to wait long. The nurse appeared from a door opening off the corridor and ushered me into the out-patients’ department. The doctor who received me had already read Doctor Friari’s letter; he had it open in front of him on his desk. I sensed that his worry was how to make himself understood. When he began to talk, he pronounced each syllable unnaturally clearly, letting each word die away before starting on the next. This was helpful. From him I learned that Doctor Mauno Lahtinen, the hospital neurologist, was away at the front in Karelia, but he would soon be back, and would certainly take care of me. For the moment, all they could offer me was a camp bed and food from the soldiers’ mess. The doctor repeated this last phrase in a different voice, perhaps for emphasis. These were words I knew, among the first I had learned on board the Tübingen. He added others which I could not grasp, but they cannot have been important, because he was already looking in another direction. Folding my letter back into its envelope, he put it into an unnamed file among the others heaped up on a cabinet behind him. The doctor noticed me casting a worried look in the direction of the still blank label on the sheet of grey cardboard, but he said nothing to reassure me. Then he stood up, to let me know that our interview was over, and shook me vaguely by the hand.

The nurse took me down the corridor to a large room whose walls were lined with shelves and white-painted cupboards, and handed me some rolled up sheets and blankets. I followed her again, this time through empty dormitories lit by large barred windows, then into a lighter corridor running around a courtyard, and finally into a slightly smaller room, where I counted six camp beds. She stopped at the foot of the last of them, handed me a key bearing the number six, and pointed to an iron trunk. She asked me something I could not understand, then waited for a moment for my answer. She smiled at my perplexed expression, then lowered her eyes, even more at a loss than I. When even the rustle of her uniform had died away, seated on the mattress of that unknown bed I felt all the silence, all the loneliness against which I had battled during my long voyage from Trieste to Helsinki, close up like water over my head. I was like one of those fishes left trapped by the ice under the Arctic sea. I could see light above me, but the call of the deep was stronger. I took off my shoes, somehow managed to cover myself up and fell asleep. It was weeks since I had slept in a real bed.

I was awoken by a bell whose sound seemed to be coming from outside. I had no idea how much time had passed. I heard steps in the courtyard outside the window, a vague sound of voices. I buttoned up the jacket I had not even bothered to take off, put my knapsack into the trunk and went out, following the sound of the bell, to join a queue of soldiers and nurses which was moving in the direction of a white church; on entering it, I saw that everything inside it, apart from the organ, was white too. The daylight was fading, and I could see red reflections of it on the glass of four skylights set into the ceiling. Three gilded numbers hung from a wall to one side of the altar. On the bench I found a missal bound in waxed paper, and a Bible with a red marker. There was a sound of rustling missals, and the singing began. A military chaplain walked up to the altar. He read out several passages from a large volume placed on a tripod; he was wearing a grey uniform, and his hair was so fair that it looked almost white. After he had read from it, he held each page of the book between his fingers before turning it gently over, a candle flickering beside him. The service did not last long, and was punctuated by fervent silences at the end of each hymn. I leafed through that strange Bible, looking from one line to the next, trying to recognize at least the names. I listened to my neighbours’ singing, envious of those mouths so full of words. At the end of the mass, people filed out one by one, though some remained kneeling in prayer.

The smell of the wood and the wax had had a calming effect. I felt safe, out of the clutches of the captain of the Ostrobothnia and the metallic voice of the loudspeakers announcing each station’s name; far from the carriages of the Red Cross train, from the smell of smoke and sweat rising from the endless soldiers asleep on their kit-bags. I too stayed in my pew, clutching that Bible as though to squeeze out of it the prayers I could not say. I felt besieged. Outside that church lay loneliness, and as soon as the last soldiers had filed out of its doors, that loneliness would seep in through the cracks in the wood, from under the door, through every chink and crevice; it would envelop me, sucking away my breath, but leaving me alive. My mind was running through doorless corridors, when I felt a hand on my shoulder and, turning round, recognized the nurse who had showed me to my room. She was with the military chaplain, who bowed his head slightly by way of greeting and said:
‘Tervetuloa taloon!’
(Welcome home!)

This was how I met the Lutheran Pastor Olof Koskela, the only friend I ever had, the only person I now miss. He left for the Karelian Isthmus at the beginning of June and I have heard nothing of him since. A few days ago, a soldier from the twentieth regiment of frontier guards, wounded at Kuuterselkä, called out his name in his delirium. During all these months, not a day has passed without my being seated at the rough table in the sacristy behind the church, where Chaplain Koskela taught me Finnish with the patience that only a missionary can muster. Bent over an old yellowing notebook gradually filling with new words, day after day I learned what I believed to be my mother tongue, conjugating verbs and declining cases, reciting prayers, singing the hymns from the services and learning strange stories from the
Kalevala
. It is Chaplain Olof Koskela who has taught me to love this country. If he had had the time, he might have managed to make a real Finn of me.

Weeks passed, but there was still no news of Doctor Lahtinen. The nurse kept telling me that he was expected any moment, that he could not have been posted elsewhere because no replacement had been appointed. But I soon realized that no one at that hospital had time to devote to me. Those were terrible times for Finland. After the Winter War thousands of refugees had poured out of a ravaged Karelia; no one knew where they were to be housed. Those who could went to Sweden, to stay with relatives; others wandered from one train to another, ending up outside some village and building themselves a wooden shack in which to pass the winter. Many of the sick and elderly were taken temporarily into hospitals and assorted shelters; I was regarded as belonging to this category, and I paid for my bed and board by helping the nurses. But the doctors had other things to do apart from tending to my lost memory: there were the wounded and sick to be looked after, hungry people to be fed, children to be nursed through illnesses. It even occurred to me to wonder whether Doctor Lahtinen actually existed, or whether Doctor Friari had invented him, to reassure me, and that he had said as much in the letter I had given to the doctor on duty.

One morning, Pastor Koskela went with me to the War Office, in search of some clue which might help me discover my identity, but the staff had been transferred to safer places outside the city. The General Staff were said to be lying low in some bunker in Lapland; the archives were inaccessible. The sole employee we found in the empty rooms of that abandoned building clearly had other matters on his mind: perched on a ladder, he was clearing the upper shelves of a gigantic filing catalogue. He came down, somewhat unwillingly, and leafed through the registers of ships and those who had sailed in them, taking them from the crates where he had just placed them, and telling us brusquely that without the name of the ship or the date of recruitment he would be unable to give us any information. He advised us to talk to the Servicemen’s Association, which had lists of the dead and missing. ‘And anyway there’s no saying that this is a naval jacket. It hasn’t got the badges; it might be just something a sailor happened to be wearing!’ he told us as we were walking away down the corridor, cluttered with trunks and dusty documents. We also went to the Central Registry Office, but the employee we spoke to made a despairing gesture when he heard my name. ‘Half Finland is called Karjalainen! Without even a date of birth, where am I going to start?’ he exclaimed despondently, gesturing towards the rows of numbered shelves behind him, bursting with files done up with string.

As time passed, though, all this began to matter less. The pastor became my family, the hospital visitors’ quarters my home. Every so often I would be joined there by some officer who was passing through, though mostly all I would see of him was the rumpled bedclothes in the morning, or some vague outline under the sheets when I returned at night. I always came back late, because the quiet and loneliness of the visitors’ quarters frightened me; loneliness had become my great bugbear. When I was alone, all the unanswered questions kept temporarily at bay by my fitful daily activities would come flooding back. For such relief was indeed only temporary: even if I deluded myself into thinking that I could bear it, the wretchedness of not knowing who I was, was gradually building up within me and sapping my strength; slowly and firmly, it was swelling to occupy the space that it deserved; for without memory, no man can live.

I would spend my nights in the lobbies of the larger hotels, the Kämp or the Torni for example, which were always crowded with journalists, soldiers and a motley cross-section of humanity at large. There, in the din and fug, anonymous among people unknown to me, I felt at ease. When even the bar in the Kämp emptied out, leaving only the odd waiter clearing up the ashtrays, I would go back out into the street and wander aimlessly through the city, or take refuge from the cold in the station, where I would watch the soldiers and evacuees arriving from the front. I would feel a gleeful shudder of apprehension when the carriage doors opened, and men with bloodied bandages and stricken eyes would step down on to the platform without any idea of where they were going to go. One by one I would look them straight in the eye, recognizing the same expression of bewilderment I had seen on my own face, reflected in the mirror, that morning so many months ago on board the Tübingen. If I heard cries for help, I would hasten to the spot, offer to help bear a stretcher, unload a crate, give my support to an elderly evacuee standing in tears beside his few worldly goods tied up like rags. But deep within me I was delighting in all that hardship. It was only fair that I should not suffer alone, that other people’s desperation should prevail around me. I would return to the hospital only when I was thoroughly exhausted, certain that I would fall asleep the moment I lay down. Yet by dawn I would be awake again, would get up and go to light the stove in the chapel. Of course the few bits of wood available were not enough really to heat the space, but at least they would take off the night chill. When it was time for the service, a faint warmth would greet the figures who came in out of the darkness to kneel down on the benches. For reasons of economy, I would light the candle only when the bell stopped ringing. When the chaplain went up to the altar, I would take my place in what had become my own personal seat and lead the singing of the hymns, though without yet fully understanding the meaning of all those round, plump words. But I pronounced them confidently, as though they were my own. One by one, I would home into their meaning, take them apart, pigeonhole them. I was learning to use them outside the church, in my as yet rudimentary conversations with the pastor. Singing those words was my way of taming them. Since I could not ferry them to the shore of meaning, I had to approach them cautiously, ensure that they would not slip from my grasp, be lost in the unbroken flow of the singing. When I was sure of their phonetic outlines, Koskela would help me copy them out: as a result, together with the columns of verbs and nouns, the pages of my notebook somehow also emanated music, as though the notes had mysteriously become fused with the letters. At the end of the service I would collect the missals, blow out the candle and enter the sacristy to say goodbye to the chaplain before going to the refectory, where a cup of milk and a piece of bread which tasted of resin awaited me.