New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (19 page)

In the middle of June, three of the remaining beds in the visitors’ quarters were occupied, and I was no longer alone; but only for a few days, because my companions were three Russian officers who had been taken prisoner, and it was not long before they were transferred elsewhere. During their stay I listened to them curiously – their language was so different from Finnish. Pretending to study my notebook, I observed their gestures and their faces. So, that was what Russians were like. I thought of what Koskela had said, of the Uspenski Cathedral, of Ilma and her fear. The soldiers had occupied the three beds on the other side of the big room; the red-tiled floor ran between us like a frontier. They too were watching me in their turn; when they smoked, sometimes they would toss me the odd cigarette. I would nod my thanks, expressing my gratitude by lighting up immediately; then I would let them burn without actually smoking them, because they were so strong and bitter. One of the soldiers had been wounded in the foot, and moved around on crutches; the others too clearly had facial wounds, since their heads were bandaged. They stayed shut up in the room all day, with two guards watching over them from the corridor. When I came back, late at night, I would find them asleep, their uniforms neatly folded on their small iron trunks, their boots at the foot of their bed. I could see the tips of the guards’ cigarettes glowing in the corridor, and this I found somehow reassuring: it was not that I was afraid of the Russians, but I liked to think that the guards were watching over me, too, warding off the oppressive dreams which thrust themselves upon me in the loneliness of sleep. The Russians’ presence had livened up the visitors’ quarters, made them somehow more welcoming. One night, after I had managed to lay hands on a bottle of spirits at the Kämp, I went back to the hospital earlier than usual, hoping to find the Russians still awake, as indeed they were, playing a game of cards. They invited me to sit with them; I understood nothing of the game, but I looked at the gilded figures on the cards, and they reminded me of the saints in the Uspenski Cathedral. The bottle was received with hearty slaps on the back, was passed round and very soon emptied; we consoled ourselves with cigarettes, of which there was no shortage, and also devised some form of conversation, using gestures and scraps of words which we spelled out in the air. One of the three, the one with the red stripe on his tunic, even spoke a sort of bastardized Finnish: he would throw one word out on top of another, then separate them with his hands. The verbs, however complicated, he would simply mime, as though he were quite used to expressing himself in that fashion. He showed me dog-eared photographs of women and children, the shape of whose eyebrows resembled his own, taking them out of his wallet and then replacing them with the greatest care. He also tried to explain to me which Russian city he came from, with the aid of an imaginary map of Russia, drawn with one finger on the wall. I went to my trunk to get the map of Europe which Koskela had used during our lessons, the one he’d used to describe the misguided migrations made by the Finno-Ugrians; but it didn’t serve much purpose, since it stopped at the Urals. When we opened it out on the floor, the city this man came from turned out to be two tiles beyond the edge.

‘
Suuri
, Russia on
suuri maa!
’ he exclaimed, laughing and banging the floor with his fist. That night in June was the last time I felt the warmth of another human turned in my direction, the last time I spoke heart to heart with one of my fellow men. The next morning, when I came back from mass, I found the three beds empty, the mattresses rolled up. It seemed to me that I could still see the outline of Russia which the officer had sketched out with his finger on the wall.

Now it was a pastor from the nearby cathedral who came to say mass in the hospital chapel. But after having heard Koskela’s sermons, those of the new officiant struck me as glib and infantile; his use of language was unsubtle, his words came straight from the Mass Book, I could understand them without any difficulty, and hence heard them without interest. I offered the newcomer my help as a sacristan, but I did not seek his friendship, indeed I made sure that I kept my distance. I talked with him enough to ensure that church business went smoothly, but no more than that. Yet, despite my unresponsiveness, the new pastor showed me considerable kindness: noticing my interest in language, perhaps on the nurses’ suggestion, he gave me a new notebook, with plain white pages. But my attitude towards him remained unchanged. As I had done with Koskela, in the morning I would wash the floors and dust the holy objects, in the evening I would light the candle before the service and put away the missals at the end. But the intimacy I had established with Koskela was not something that could ever be repeated; it was the fruit of long and careful nurturing, and I had no desire to dull its memory by finding a substitute. The new pastor did not use the sacristy; he prepared his sermons elsewhere, and came into the little room just to hang up his hat. I had put Koskela’s
Kalevala
and the bottle of
koskenkorva
back into the little cupboard and sometimes, in the evening after the service, when the pastor had left, I would stay on there for a time, thinking about the past. In my hands, the bottle did not replenish itself; when I had finished it, it remained resolutely empty. But even that empty bottle served as a reminder of my old friend. I took it away, together with the
Kalevala
, and put it in my little trunk, as though it were a relic. The faded label and the lingering sweetish smell reminded me of my first afternoons in the sacristy, with the crackling stove and the ice on the window panes: they spoke to me of a world which now seemed infinitely far away.

One sultry evening, when I was tossing and turning in my bed, unable to sleep, a nurse came in and asked me to run to get the pastor, saying it was urgent. The condition of one of the wounded who had arrived the previous day had suddenly worsened; he was a private, a member of an anti-tank division, one of whose legs had been amputated. I remembered him, because he was the only member of the convoy whom we had taken off the lorry on a stretcher. Wounded at the battle of Kuuterselkä, he had been left untended for several hours, since he had been thrown into a crater made by a mine, under Russian fire. The stretcher-bearers had not been able to reach him until the evening, when they had taken him into no-man’s-land. He had caught diphtheria some days earlier, and had to be transferred immediately so as to avoid infecting his fellow troops, and that was how he had arrived in Helsinki. Extremely weak from loss of blood, that night he had also had a bad attack of dysentery and was completely dehydrated; the doctor did not give him many hours to live. I leapt out of bed and ran out into the courtyard, then down Unioninkatu, where my footsteps rang out on the stone still warm from the day’s strong sun. I could feel a throbbing in my temples, and sweat was running down my back. In no time I was at the Suurtori, then I was passed the cathedral and found myself knocking at the door of the low block of flats on the eastern side of the square. In words mangled by my heavy breathing, I explained the situation to the pastor, who followed me anxiously into the street, panting and buttoning up his clothes. The wounded man had been taken into a room the size of my own, situated next to the casualty department, away from the other wards, and used for infectious patients. He was the room’s sole occupant, lying in the furthest away of the six beds, and a nurse was wiping his forehead with cold cloths which she was picking out of a bucket at her feet. At the other side of the bed, the doctor, in his shirt sleeves, was taking his pulse. The room smelled of human flesh, of blood and faeces, laced with a dash of carbolic acid, against which the faint breeze coming in through the open window battled in vain. An oil lamp, attached to the bars of the bed, cast an oblique light over the sick man, and it bounced off the metal of the other beds, projecting a pattern of flickering, intersecting lines on to the ceiling.

‘Is he conscious?’ the pastor asked under his breath; the doctor nodded, and drew back. The nurse too picked up her bucket and went to stand at the foot of the bed. When the pastor entered the strip of bluish light cast by the lamp, his features hardened, made suddenly prominent by deep, cold shadows, his eyes like two empty pits. As he leant over the sick man, the crucifix around his neck swung suddenly from side to side, and his shadow seemed to grow larger on the wall.

‘Father! My leg hurts – it’s all hot, and wet!’ the soldier moaned. Standing beside the bed, the pastor had opened his breviary; holding it towards the bluish light, he began to say a prayer.

‘You can’t get through there, father! Don’t go that way! It’s dangerous!’ the solider was saying, suddenly seizing hold of the pastor’s jacket. The nurse came up from the other side of the bed and moistened his forehead, whispering words which seemed to comfort him.

‘That’s the road to Mustamäki, that white line down there. On the other side of it are the Russians. That’s where they’re firing from! They’ve taken possession of the railway, they’re advancing with their tanks!’

The wounded man continued to thrash around, and his blurred speech drowned out the pastor’s voice. He was looking at the breviary open above him as though it were a scalpel poised for yet further action.

‘Don’t go that way, father! They’re not afraid of dying, they’re not like us. That’s what you said, father! They go to Heaven, but we don’t!’

The nurse had removed her cloth and was still trying to calm him, but now with no success; as though possessed by some new strength, the dying man was now lifting himself up on to his elbows.

‘Father Koskela! Don’t leave me alone! I don’t want to die!’ the soldier shouted, and his cry hung on in the silence.

The pastor’s prayer rang out, clear as a bell, falling upon the death-laden air like disinfectant. He performed the last rites with sharp, clear-cut gestures. Then he remained kneeling by the dead man for a few minutes, murmuring a psalm before moving off, together with the doctor. I heard their steps dying away at the end of the corridor. The nurse had gone off to fetch water to wash the corpse, and I stayed on beside him alone; leaning against the wall, I looked at his sweat-veiled face with some alarm, stared at his twisted mouth and stiffened fingers, just visible above the sheet. That man had seen Koskela; a few moments before he went off to die. My friend Olof Koskela. Perhaps he was still out there somewhere. I looked towards the window through eyes made dim with tears; a few wan stars were floating in the pallid sky. I imagined the pastor lying on his back on the ground, his eyes wide open, looking at those same stars that I could see, fading beyond the window.

In the registers of the Finnish Lutheran Church which I consulted in the offices of the Tuomiokirkko, the Pastor Olof Koskela was said to have fallen in the battle of Kuuterselkä on 14 June 1944. It was not known where he was buried. A short note attached to the file gave a resume of the military report describing the circumstances of his death and the finding of his body, by the road which runs between the turn-off for Kuuterselkä and the village of Mustamäki. The Finnish troops’ hasty retreat from the Karelian Isthmus probably meant that the bodies of the fallen could not be transported behind the lines.

What follows is the last letter sent by Ilma Koivisto, which the author at some point copied into his document. In fact, Miss Koisvisto told me that she had also written a fourth letter, which she had never sent, and which still has in her possession; she said that I could read it if I felt it might help me in my reconstruction of events. I did not think it appropriate to probe any further into the private world of a woman who had already suffered so much. I would prefer that the last words addressed by Ilma Koivisto to the man she believed to be Sampo Karjalainen continue to be known only to the person who wrote them.

Viipuri, 19 June 1944

Dear Sampo,

I don’t know what sense it makes to carry on writing to you, but I can’t resist throwing these few words into your silence. To be honest, they are words which it is better not to carry around inside oneself, because after a time they will begin to rot, infecting everything around them like gangrene. Each day I’ve waited for a letter, each morning when the post was being distributed I thought I’d hear my name. I even thought that something might have happened to you, that you had gone away, had disappeared, had died. But, in that case, my letters would have been returned. So I know that you’ve read them, and this knowledge I find even more hurtful. But there seems to me to be something false, something fabricated about your unresponsiveness; it is a bit like the personal war you are waging against the figments of your memory. Here, war – I mean real war – has arrived in earnest; the front is a few kilometres away, we can see the German planes bombing the Russian lines. Viipuri itself is threatened; the twentieth regiment is lining up against the imminent attack. Tomorrow we are going to a field hospital beyond the river Vuoksi, where all the wounded from this sector of the front will be brought. We are needed everywhere: everywhere there are soldiers with shattered limbs who do not yet know whether they will live or die. I have never seen so many dead all in one place, so much life draining out of bodies so fast. It is a tragic irony that with so many memories being abandoned by their legitimate owners, you cannot find one which meets with your approval, and persist in wanting one all of your own. We are leaving the refugee centre with a great sense of foreboding; months of work will be destroyed by bombing, or fall into the Russians’ hands; but then in war everything is made to be destroyed, perhaps including our own friendship. That’s why it was doomed from the start. But it’s my fault, I was asking for too much. I instantly demanded from you that touch of the infinite which human relationships can never provide. Both for better and for worse, we can never perceive the infinite; even when we believe that we are the bearers of immense suffering, in reality we are like ants carrying crumbs. God measures out the pain that each of us can bear, the least and the most. Everything is bearable, until we die of it. Nothing of us outlasts us, and if some pain outlives us for some time, it is only in order to be sure that it has killed us well and truly. People have been evacuated out of Viipuri for some time, ever since the rout at Kuuterselkä. The Russians broke through our defences all along the front. Yesterday refugees arrived from as far away as Petroskoi, a whole lorryload, stuffed to the gunwales with people and furniture, hoping to be taken in by relatives. But there’s no one left here now: the city’s empty, its only occupants are stray dogs and horses driven mad by fear. Dear Sampo, this is the last letter I’ll be writing you. By the end of the page, each of us will be free to suffer again on our own, free to reclaim our solitude. All in all, this is the condition to which man is best suited; it is the ideal condition for whole-heartedly pursuing our own self-preservation, the only real task God has assigned to us. If one day I come back to Helsinki, I shall not look for you; I shall not want to remember you, and this time I shall not even feel sorry for you. I shall go and remove you from the tree of happy memories. I didn’t tell you, but my tree is also capable of forgetting. I’ll go and find it on my own, one evening towards the end of winter like the time when I took you there, and your memory will melt away like snow in the breath of the sea wind. Forgetting is the only form of defence left to us; nothing which has been forgotten has the power to harm us any more; yet there you are, mercilessly scrutinising your consciousness in the hopes of digging up a few shreds of memory. I shall forget, I shall recover from this illusion as I have from others, but you won’t: all this is something that you will want to remember. And I know that you will keep my letters, that you will reread them. Not for what they contain, but because they too will have turned into precious relics of your reconstituted past. But be warned: for many years to come, these words – which you today have wanted to ignore – will continue to haunt you. And then you will be defenceless in the face of regret; all the time that you have so greedily hoarded, unpicking the embroidery of the days life offered you, will become snarled up in hopeless disarray; because it is not yours, it is the fruit of plunder. Time is not sewn patiently from little, ordinary things, it is not a carpet of words and silences, of glances and moments within which memory slowly envelops us.