Making Enemies (19 page)

We retraced our steps to the point where Hammerson had fallen. I could make out the course of his body as it fell down the snowy hillside. It had torn a path in the virgin snow. Carefully, we climbed down after him. The snow had drifted here and sometimes we fell in it up to our waists. As we went down, the minders indicated with casual sweeps of their carbines which way our attackers had gone. It seemed we were safe enough not to worry about cover.

We reached the bottom of the hill. There was no sign of Hammerson’s body, though there were marks in the snow where he had come to rest. There were other marks, too, footmarks, imprinted in the snow. Our enemies had removed Hammerson.

‘He must be still alive,’ Mika said. ‘They’d never bother with him dead. I do not like to think what they will do to him.’

He made it sound as if he were writing Hammerson’s epitaph.

*

I was sliding out of control, my hands tearing at roots, branches, grass, anything that could stop my fall. But the roots came away, the branches broke and the wet grass gave me nothing to grip on. Faster and faster I fell, my body jarred and bruised as I bumped my way down the rocky surface of the hillside. I knew there was nothing I could do to stop myself and the certainty of what was happening terrified me. It seemed such a pointless way to end one’s life.

I saw the sand below racing up to meet me and with what little consciousness I had left I braced myself for the impact, no time even to wonder if I would survive. But there was no shock, no sudden grinding stop as my bones and ligaments were crushed and torn by the weight of my own body: only a gentle deceleration, like being in a slow-motion film. I was standing upright on the sands, staring at the waiting ship only a hundred yards or so away and the thin line of soldiers snaking towards it.

Then the explosions came, bullets tearing up the sand dunes and bombs bursting all round. I saw the bodies of men disintegrate in front of me. One moment there were groups of soldiers, the next nothing but fire-scarred flesh and horror. I fell on my face, the grit of sand in my mouth, my hands tight around my head, trying desperately to shut out the horrifying sights and sounds of the battle and make myself invisible.

Through the smoke and the screams I heard a voice say: ‘I cannot imagine dying on a beach.’ And the dead and the dying on the beach rose up and turned their broken bodies towards me and mocked me with their laughter.

I woke up then, my body shaking with fear and my head still full of a noise I could not recognize. The bombs and the bullets had gone but I was in darkness and could see nothing. I could not remember where I was.

‘Are you all right?’

Voices near me, unfamiliar voices. Hands came out of the darkness and touched me reassuringly on the face and shoulder. At least I knew I was alive. The high-pitched rattle of mocking laughter stopped.

Someone said: ‘Don’t turn the light on yet.’

I knew then what had happened and I did what I always did on these occasions. I murmured: ‘I’m sorry. Sorry.’

A woman’s voice asked: ‘Do you want a drink?’ She handed me a glass of water.

‘Was I shouting?’ I asked.

‘Screaming.’ It was the woman again. ‘And hiding. You were face down on the bed.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Someone switched on a light in the bedroom. I saw Mika and Tanya and the mess of the bed in which I had been sleeping. In my nightmare I had wrecked it.

‘Are you all right now?’

I nodded in response. My throat was too dry to speak.

‘It’s three o’clock. Try to sleep. If you want anything, call.’

I didn’t sleep again. I relived my life since the beginning of the war. But this time I was in command of the demons and they lay quiet.

*

‘Does it happen often?’

It was morning. I was drinking tea in Tanya’s apartment. I had no idea where Mika was.

‘The nightmare? No. Not often.’ That wasn’t true. It happened more often than I dared admit to myself.

‘What makes it happen?’

‘If I knew that,’ I said, ‘I’d be able to control it.’

‘What do you dream about?’

‘The war mostly. Memories of war.’

‘What stimulates those memories? We say we cannot remember something but we store every event of our lives in our minds; it is all there, waiting like an old film to be rerun some day. But with time these events sink deeper and deeper. They break up, fragment. They are not lost. They are only harder to find, more difficult to reassemble. The mechanism we have for retrieving those memories is not strong. It is not well-trained. It has difficulty in reaching deep enough.’

‘It reaches deep enough with me.’

‘These memories are recent. They are not buried. Something releases them within your mind, something deep within yourself that you would like to stay buried for ever. There is a trigger. What it is remains a mystery.’

‘You’re the doctor. What do you think?’

She laughed. ‘I know what Freud would think. He would look at you and he would think to himself: guilt. That is it. English guilt.’

I wasn’t sure if she meant it seriously or not.

‘Why English guilt?’

‘The English are born guilty. The first word they learn to say is sorry.’

‘I don’t feel guilty.’

‘You think you don’t feel guilty.’

‘I’ve nothing to be guilty about.’

‘You think you have nothing to be guilty about.’

‘Are you suggesting a course of psychoanalysis?’

‘I am suggesting nothing. I am trying to make you laugh.’

She was laughing herself, her head thrown back and her body arching away from me. I wanted to reach out and touch her, to take her in my arms and hold her to me. I did not want this moment to pass.

‘Is that better?’ Her face was close to mine, her smile still there. ‘You looked so worried just now.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You see? You apologize. You are always sorry, you English. Even when it’s not your fault. It is in your nature.’

We laughed again and she poured me some more tea.

‘What happens now?’ I asked.

‘What you are really asking is where is Mika.’

‘I don’t want to be a burden to you.’

‘I am pleased you are here,’ she said, and it sounded genuine. ‘Mika wants you to stay a few days until it is quiet once more. Then you will be able to leave.’

‘Will I see Mika again?’

‘Probably not. He will telephone with instructions about your departure. That is all.’

We talked on through the morning. She told me she had trained to be a doctor before the war and had worked in casualty stations near the front line during the Winter War. She had seen men die, but she had expected that. What had distressed her was the terrible nature of the dying she witnessed, the dreadful injuries men inflicted on one another and how the wounded could live on though their bodies were shattered beyond repair. Sometimes she had willed her patients to die to release them from pain.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I wanted the power to kill, to put the poor creatures out of their misery.’

‘Do your memories of that time come back to haunt you?’ I asked.

‘No more.’

‘I envy you.’

‘All that is over now. I have made a new life. Those memories are are under my control. I bury them in my new experiences with my mothers and their babies.’

‘But you still help Mika.’

‘Mika is all of my family I have left. He knows I think what he is doing is wrong.’

‘He is fighting for a cause he believes in.’

‘No, he is fighting for revenge, he is fighting because that is all he knows and he cannot give it up. Perhaps you are too. Perhaps that is why you have nightmares.’

I wanted to tell her about myself then, but before I could say anything, she said: ‘Come. It is dark again now. It is safe to go out. I will show you this city where I live.’

I have never known a city whose nature through the seasons matched that of its people more closely than Helsinki. In winter, deprived of the light, it is a dour place, its buildings granite-hard and grey, its people concentrating all their energies on outfacing the long days of darkness and cold. In summer, when light rules unopposed, the streets are never quiet, whatever the hour. A kind of summer madness takes over, a real coming to life after the rigours of winter. Even the houses seem changed, the greens, blues, yellows and reds of their painted walls making the streets seemed decked with enormous flags.

But the festival of summer is short-lived: soon after midsummer, the days start to shorten again, the extraordinary warmth of the Gulf Stream ebbs away and the long journey into the darkness and the cold begins once more.

But I love that city. I love its intimacy, I love the decorations on the buildings, each carved stone or shaped brick expressing a sense of the country and its people and their slow fight for independence. I love its Russianness, the beech trees and the Chekhovian houses in the diplomatic quarter. But most of all I love the water that surrounds it, so green and inviting in the summer months, so grey and treacherous in winter.

It was on that cold and blustery afternoon that I fell in love with the city and in my mind, Tanya and the city became one.

*

‘What will you do now?’

Mika had telephoned earlier. Arrangements for my departure had been made. I had picked up my ticket from the ferry office. In a few hours I would be on my way. Tanya was in the kitchen making me something to eat before I left.

‘I go back the way I came,’ I said.

‘Home?’

She had her back to me as she stirred something in a saucepan.

‘Berlin isn’t home. Berlin is where I work.’

At that moment Berlin had no reality. It was a distant city on the map whose streets I didn’t know, whose people I had never met, somewhere I never wanted to see again.

‘What do you do there?’

‘I ask the locals questions. If they give the right answers, they get a tick against their names, if they don’t, a cross. Something like that.’

We had been together for more than forty-eight hours. In that time we had only touched when she had taken my arm in the street. Now, in a few hours, we would say goodbye and I would probably never see her again.

‘You don’t sound happy about it.’

‘I hate it.’

The words were out before I knew what I had said. Tanya turned towards me at once.

‘Since I met you that is the first time you ever tell me how you feel about anything. Why are you so afraid of saying what you feel?’

That’s when the confession began. I told her things I didn’t even know I knew or thought or felt, things that had been buried deep in me for a long time. It was like talking about someone else, someone whose existence I would rather not have owned up to.

I talked about the war, about those few but soul-destroying moments of fear when you think your life is about to end, and the humiliating sense of relief when you know you are still alive. How the ordinariness of life, everyday sights and sounds – the sun rising, a bird singing, rain falling – suddenly become more precious than gold. I described the humour and the boredom of war, the way that fighting with men over weeks and months changes you so that afterwards, when the war is over, you are no longer who you were before, and how sometimes you don’t know who you are any longer. I told her about my father, about the paradox of his detachment from me and yet what I felt to be his need of me to fulfil his idea
of what I should be. How I would always fail him in that respect, and how that sense of failure shamed me, since I longed for him to accept what I had become.

Tanya said very little. She didn’t need to. The words poured out of me. At some point we ate something, I can’t remember what it was; we drank, and I talked. Once I looked at my watch but she covered the face with her hand.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘This is more important.’

It was after midnight when I stopped, and the ferry had sailed two hours before.

‘Why did you let me do that?’ I asked.

‘Once you started,’ she said, smiling, ‘I don’t think anyone could have stopped you.’

‘And now?’

‘I think you have to stay another night.’

She bent towards me, put her hands on my face and kissed me. I took her in my arms and felt the weight of her body against mine.

‘Why did you not do this earlier?’ she asked after a while. There was nothing I could say, except confess my weakness that this was what I had wanted from the moment I had first seen her.

‘But I thought you did not like me,’ she said, between kisses. After all, you have seen me naked. I have not met many men like that, you know.’

All the time beneath the surface lay her laughter, the gentle mockery both of me and of herself.

‘Then I thought you did not like women.’ She laughed again. ‘I have heard dreadful stories about your English schools. Then I listened to you and I knew why. You are afraid. Not of guns and bullets, I am sure you are a brave man. But you are afraid of yourself. Of the person you have become. The bad dreams will not stop until you accept who you are.’

Her hands were on my face, soothing me, drawing the pain out of me.

‘You are like a man frozen. So I have to make the first move.’ More laughter. ‘We are not used to that in our country. Finnish girls are shy. But I could not let you go away to Berlin without telling you that I have fallen in love with you. Will you tell me that you do not hate me for saying that? Or will you look at me like a sphinx for ever?’

*

We lay together in the dark.

‘What happens next?’ I asked.

‘For most men that would be enough for now. Perhaps with the English it is different. I have never made love to an Englishman before.’

‘And … us?’

‘In a few hours you will catch a ferry and go back to your Germans and their questions, and I will go back to my women and their babies.’

‘We say goodbye and that’s it?’

‘What else can we do?’

‘But—’ I was confused. ‘You said you loved me.’

‘You never said you loved me.’ It was neither a reproof nor a question. It was a simple statement of fact.