New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (10 page)

The meaning of this last sentence escaped me. I had watched it emerging from her mouth, followed the sound of it for a time. Then, without my realising, my eyes had ventured in the direction of her own. I felt the muscles of my face relax: everything in me was now letting go.

I copied out the words of the
Porilaisten marssi
, barely understanding them, as though they were the ingredients of some secret spell, and now they struck me as more magical than ever. Of all the words I’d written in that notebook, it was the ones which had made the soldiers cry that most intrigued me. That they had to do with war was plain as a pikestaff. Some of them were quite long, full of repeated vowels, with umlauts like helmets and aitches like slung arms. Others, much shorter, chopped off by apostrophes, seemed to be waving their stumps in the direction of the empty line. Certain capital letters referred to places where famous battles had taken place, although I could not recognize them. I saw the word for flag, and it did indeed seem to flutter, making a snapping sound as it left one’s lips.

‘Now you must sing it!’ suggested Ilma, suddenly warming to her task, elbows on the table, hands awkwardly intertwined.

‘I would like you to sing it with me,’ I said, overcome with shyness.

‘In march time, and till dawn?’ she asked, suddenly playful. ‘Till dawn!’ I answered, getting up and pulling on my jacket. Drunk with an exhilaration I had never known, I let the words slip from my mouth careless of where they might lead me, although I sensed it might be far.

Ilma’s face had lit up. The delicate sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks and cheekbones looked sharper, warmer, her expression suddenly unguarded, and a strange sense of reserve caused me to look away. I realized, then and there, that something was happening which I did not want to happen.

‘Wait for me outside,’ she said, pushing back her chair. Looking back through the ice-clad window pane I saw her rejoin her fellow-singers at the table, where her outline merged with the rest. There on the silent street the biting cold brought me to my senses: I felt unreasonably bothered, I wanted to run, to disappear back into my solitude, which now seemed both troublesome and comfortable, like some non-life-threatening disease. Now the very thought of even the most tenuous link between myself and that young woman filled me with dismay. How could I have yielded to such easy temptation? It must have been the alcohol. I was suddenly sickened by the idea of that unknown presence beside me, demanding warmth and care. I would be required to take an interest in another life and all its petty doings, to feign concern for a person who was nothing to me, to share my anxieties with someone else and agree to lower my gaze to meet their own. Above all I would have to listen – listen to someone else’s story, sympathize, mull over their feelings, be dragged into sufferings not my own, though I would have to serve as comforter; have that face before me each day, pleading for understanding, pity, help; promising me joys I do not seek, affection I do not want to give. See my time merge, my boredom fuse, with hers; smell her smell on my clothes, pick out her shape along the street; sleep in her bed and wake up each morning, always the first, alone in the grey light, waiting for another endless day to start – to be spent with her, to be dragged out of silence by force and carried in my heart till evening, until the moment when darkness would return to drown out our solitude, both mine and hers. The idea was abhorrent to me. I was repelled by the way all those around me clung so doggedly to life, the way they were born again beneath the ruins, instantly rebuilding what the bombs had flattened, in the grip of that unquenchable desire to be brought back to life which is the scourge of the human race. My own instinctive desire was to get through such life as remained to me without sullying myself, with the least possible damage and the least involvement. Because mine was no longer a life, but a leftover, some leavings I had picked up along the way. To rediscover my true past was an impossibility; to seek out a future, a huge effort. Doctor Friari was right: language is our mother, and it is through language that we come into this world. But I had lost both, forever; to me, rebirth was denied. The best that I could do was to live out the remainder of the life I had as one smokes the last bit of a cigarette, in a hurry to get it over, already looking around for somewhere to throw the butt-end. Determined to avoid forging that dangerous link, I was about to walk off towards the darkness of the Esplanadi, but Ilma was already beside me; she placed her arm on my blue jacket, and I instinctively took it.

It was no longer snowing. The wind blowing in from the sea was now less cold. It smelled of seaweed, but also of resin: as though, on its journey from the open sea, before reaching the city it had become lost in the woods, soaking up the smell of the earth. The Esplanadi was deep in snow, its course marked only by two rows of bare trees.

When we reached the Mannerheimintie, it was dark and deserted; the great dark shapes of the buildings loomed above it, many with their windows still glued with strips of protective tape. We passed a group of soldiers, but fortunately they immediately turned off into the Aleksanterinkatu; perhaps they had just come out of the Capitol. They were talking loudly and walking at a fair pace, and we were irritated by the racket. But soon they were out of hearing, and we were plunged once more into the silence of the great avenue, streaked with tyre marks on the dirty snow. We turned into the Bulevardi and walked towards the sea. Ilma was walking in silence, but I thought I could catch the drift of her thoughts; she was working out what she was going to say. I looked at the sky, above the tangle of bare branches: it had a strange glow to it. Somewhere up there a wind must have been blowing; the odd gust made its way down among the trees, dislodging the snow from the branches. I could see the clouds fraying and whitening in the pale light of stars too distant to have any resonance.

‘Now we can sing!’ said Ilma in a whisper.

It was too dark to see her face, and I felt nothing but relief that she could not see mine. We walked faster as we sang, picking our way between heaps of snow-covered rubble, along the dismal road suddenly enlivened by our song. The city lay around us, motionless, crouched like a hunted animal. Disembodied and brazen, our voices were dashed against the walls, falling back upon us in fragments. What with the singing and the marching, I was soon out of breath; but the more I sang, the emptier my head became. At the end of each verse Ilma would remind me of the words of the next. I followed her as best I could, and I felt as though I were marching towards the front, towards the Russian batteries hidden beyond the horizon; or towards that battlefield which I myself had become. Hearing me flounder over some difficult word Ilma would laugh, tightening her grip upon my arm, and it was by that arm that I felt clamped to the life I had decided to clutch at; that life I had so often seen flowing at my feet without finding the courage to leap into it, to wallow in it, like the rest. Now I was allowing myself to be dragged along, into song and down that street, away from loneliness, away from silence; away from myself.

When we reached the shores of Hietalahti Bay, we came to a stop; it was so quiet that you could hear the fat raindrops falling from the trees; and I too was a raindrop, I too was a tree. I was the snow, and I was no longer frightened of melting, of running down the streamlets into the sea, to merge with the relentless march of all that is endlessly transformed and never dies. For the first time I had found the courage to leap out of my beleaguered consciousness and mingle with something different from myself. I had gone down into the slime of life, my feet experiencing its disagreeable consistency. My awareness of this careless intermingling made me at once euphoric and dismayed: I had become vulnerable. My fragile memory, hothouse-reared, kid-glove tended, now lacked all protection; now parasites and mould could attack and destroy all that had cost me so dear to nurture. Now that I was alive, I might also die. A door had opened up before me, and it filled me with foreboding: to go through it meant steeping myself in life, letting each cell merge with millions of others, becoming part of that chaotic brew of organisms which is life, where the individual is insignificant and life and death are mere moments, ways through towards some other place, some point in the universe where everything is rushing headlong – to disappear. On the one hand I was drunk on that new sensation of surrender and belonging, on the other I was alarmed by the idea of losing control of my individuality. I regretted that I would never be able to go back to that freezing evening when I had gone into the Kämp and sat down among those soldiers with their unknown uniforms.

‘It’s starting to thaw,’ said Ilma, pausing to listen. She looked around, narrowed her eyes and added: ‘Can you hear, the wind has changed? It’s coming from the sea.’

We both looked behind us at the dark mass of the city, then turned towards the white expanse of sea.

‘Does that mean there will be no more snow?’ I asked.

‘It will rain. A lot. Everything will turn to mud.’

‘But the trees will come into leaf.’

‘That takes time. Here, spring is the worst season. The earth and sky soak up the mud churned up by all the rain; even the seagulls get spattered with it when they come to peck at rubbish in the puddles. Everything that has died in winter goes bad only in spring, because the ice keeps it alive for months. You’ll see, there will be a smell of rotten wood, dead animals and stagnant water, all coming from the woods. It’s like that on battlefields: it’s only now that many mothers will weep; only now will the earth be soft enough for digging graves. That is another thing the summer does: it frees us from the dead.’

In front of us the ice was creaking, the trees were dripping and the clouds breaking up in the darkness of the sky, swept by a gale that we down here could hardly hear. Ilma fell silent, let go of my arm and turned towards the open sea. Now I could smell her hair: it smelled of smoke and lacquer; it smelled of life. I felt an urge to take her by the shoulders, to take her in my arms, to hold that being made as I was made. But something held me back: each of us was locked into an equal solitude, lonely conditions which touched one another but did not blend, like two drops of different liquids. We carried on walking around the bay, towards the hill in Kaivopuisto Park; a shapeless bit of moon had emerged from a strip of cloud piled up on the horizon, its glancing light gashing the countryside like machine-gun fire. Shadows dense as pitch danced down from the trees on to the walls of the buildings, carving dark, unsettling fissures in the snow. The houses thinned out as we approached the hill; Ilma was walking a few steps ahead of me, as though she were in a hurry to reach her goal.

‘I want to show you a secret,’ she said.

She walked quickly up the slope, turning around every now and again. I could hear her breath, and the splashing sound our steps made in the wet snow; from time to time the wind would send a lock of our hair flying over our faces like a long scratch. I was having trouble keeping up with her, and would stop every so often to draw breath. I sensed, from her enthusiasm and her determined step, that she had something specific in mind. She stopped in the middle of a field of untouched snow, on the brow of a downward slope running towards a little cobbled lane.

‘Here we are!’ she exclaimed breathlessly, pointing towards a great tree, gnarled and bare, which forked into two almost at its base, one branch running immediately upwards, the other running horizontal to the ground for several feet before doing the same, so as to form a seat. Ilma went to sit on it, brushing the remains of the snow from its smooth bark, and casting a shadow which looked alarmingly like that of some prehistoric animal.

‘This is the magic tree – the tree of happy memories! It’s here that I hang all the good things that have happened to me in this city. Of course, it’s more impressive when it’s in leaf – summer evenings are the time to come here, when the light is red and the air taut as a sail. That’s when it casts its spell. Would you like me to tell you how it works?’

I nodded, and went to sit beside her on the seat.

‘Whenever I meet someone I get on well with, I bring them here, talk to them here, let the tree take in something of our memories, and the magic starts to work. Then each time I come here that memory will return: that moment, that person are mine for ever, here, inside the magic tree!’

‘Do you have memory trees everywhere you go?’

‘No, only here.’

‘Why only here?’

‘Because in this life you have a right to just one memory tree. Otherwise, it would be too easy, people would just rush from one tree to the next so that nothing would ever be forgotten, so that nothing of one’s own memories would be left lying around. Then nothing would be forgotten, and memories would cease to exist.’

‘But without memories there would be no nostalgia, either,’ I objected.

‘That’s true. So how would people carry on living? After all, we live in hope that a memory will come back – that it will prove to be a premonition.’

A prolonged silence followed. I listened to the wind as it whistled through the branches; I wished that they could speak instead of me, for I had nothing more to say. But rather than keeping silent, I persisted:

‘And why would you want to remember me?’

It gave me a certain painful pleasure to say these words; nor did I try to soften their meaning with my tone of voice. Amidst the throng of rowdy thoughts that had surged through my mind during that night, I recognized the face of my own solitude: it was my damnation and my raison d’être. It was calling me now; I had to go. Ilma bowed her head; she knew what I was thinking.

‘So that this night may be remembered, so that it won’t fall into the dark pit of everything that’s past,’ she answered bitterly.

‘So you hope that this night will come back? That it will be a premonition of something else?’

My question was badly formulated, put together in haste without the words being properly sewn together. Ilma had to think for a moment before she understood what I meant.