New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (2 page)

At first, our meetings took place in silence, taking the form of a dance of movements, courteous gestures and affable nods. After a few days, Doctor Friari began to talk to me, but using words that were different from those he addressed to the nurses – ones with rounder, more full-bodied, lingering sounds. I was as yet unaware of the tragedy that had befallen me, I did not know that the trauma of which I was the victim had debarred me from the world of language. My mind was a ship whose moorings had been shattered by a storm. I could see the landing stage bobbing not far off, and I thought that as I regained my strength I would be able to reach it. What I did not know was that the wind of desperation would carry me ever further out to sea. I could not understand the words that Doctor Friari spoke, nor did I feel any instinct or desire to answer him. But this did not worry me. Without really thinking, I put all this down to the wound I had sustained, to the immense tiredness from which I was gradually recovering. Furthermore, though only in the vaguest possible way, the hazy notion of a foreign language was surfacing in my mind, and this, as far as I could see, would explain why I failed to understand the doctor’s words.

As I learned later, right from those early days, the doctor was speaking to me in Finnish, his own language, which he believed also to be my own. He hoped that the soft, welcoming words of my mother tongue would soothe my pain and lessen my bewilderment, making me feel that I was among friends. I did not try to talk because I simply did not feel the need. All linguistic feeling, all interest in words, had died away. I could not speak any language, I no longer knew which was my own. But I was unaware of this: a subtle veil, like a form of hypnosis, was shielding me from the violent colours of reality.

One morning Doctor Friari opened up a map of Europe on the table and gestured to me to do something I could not understand. I thought that this was some new exercise and set myself to observing the green and brown patches, the jagged indentations of the blue sea, the deep furrows of the rivers. I knew that this was a map, the shapes of the countries meant something to me, I had already seen them on countless occasions. I had a clear idea of the things that I was seeing, but my understanding seemed trapped just below the outer skin of reality. I recognized those outlines just as I did every other object around me, but I could not put a name to them. My mind jibbed at any effort in that direction; as I noted later, it was as though it no longer had the tools to do so. My body, my hands had begun to move again. The movement of my joints gave me the sensation of having a body. I would lay hands on everything I saw: by touching things I would regain some knowledge of them. But my mind no longer knew how to link words and things; detached from me yet alive within me, it moved around without my being able to catch up with it, like a fish in a tank apparently expanded by the water and the glass, so that the edges too seem far away even when they are near. So I no longer knew what I was supposed to do with that map.

By way of encouragement, the doctor pointed a finger at a stumpy green strip fretworked with blue. I looked first at his eyes and then at the map, frowning in a state of growing confusion. Then at last I understood. Of course, the doctor wanted me to show him where I came from. Reassured, I gave a polite smile and lifted my finger, casting my eyes over the map. It was then that I felt my blood run cold. It was like leaning over the brim of an abyss. I recognized the shapes carved out on the map by the red scars of the frontiers, but I no longer knew what they were. The capital letters straddling valleys and mountains meant nothing to me. France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania wandered around my mind as outlined shapes, but I could no longer put a name to them. Mentally, I could reach the threshold of those concepts, but then could find no handle to gain access to them. It was chilling to discover that half of my mind was clearly not under my control. It was as though the blood which should have bathed my brain had been left blocked in some distant and obstructed artery. When I tried to grasp them, ideas that seemed perfectly straightforward simply melted away before my powerless gaze. Even the letters, which I thought I knew one by one, which I had the feeling I could write without difficulty, had now become signs without sounds, mute hieroglyphics from some vanished civilization.

Then, urgent as a desire to vomit, I felt the sudden need to speak. Once again I had that feeling of obstruction. My head was spinning and I felt a shower of stabbing pains swarming behind my eyes like sparks. I opened my mouth, hoping to produce some sound, but all that came out was a gasp of air. I realized that my tongue, my mouth, my teeth were incapable of coherent speech. The air passed from my throat to my palate only to dissolve into a forlorn sigh. The horror of that dreadful discovery rooted me to the chair which I was clutching, my nails digging into its painted surface. I stared at the doctor in wide-eyed terror, hoping for help. My head was seized by the familiar swarming feeling, followed by the usual stabs of pain. I was prey to a fear such as I’d never known. I felt that I was sinking, losing all contact with the outer world. Here and there things seemed to be fading from sight, as though the faint glow lighting up the last narrow passageway between myself and reality was dying out. The doctor tried to conceal his dismay; he turned the map this way and that, keeping his finger pointing towards the outline of Finland. He let slip the odd word, an exclamation he repeated several times: for me these were just sounds, which I could hear but could not understand. For a moment, his expression seemed to betray the perplexity of someone who finds himself having to deal with a madman. The nurses rushed towards me to take me back to bed. Once again I felt something cold against my arm. The doctor stayed beside me until I fell asleep.

I opened my eyes again perhaps an hour or so later, too exhausted to panic and too stricken to go back to sleep. The night-light in the corridor was flooding the walls of painted sheet-metal with yellow. The pitching, the black porthole, everything conspired to make me feel as though I were sinking slowly into a whirlpool, into a dark and cold abyss, peopled by monstrous fish. I felt weak, numb, unable even to cry. It was pitch-dark, both inside me and out. Grinding my teeth, I marshalled such rage as I could still summon up, and swore wordlessly at a God who could not hear me.

The next morning, Doctor Friari entered my cabin with a smile. The previous day’s dismay seemed to have been forgotten, and he gave me a confident look. Under his arm he had a bundle done up in wrapping paper, and now I saw its contents for the first time. It contained a blue jacket, the kind that sailors wear. The doctor opened the package on my bed and showed me a bit of cotton tape sewn into the inside of the collar, with two words with capital letters written on it. I could make out the letters, but I was unable to read them. Doctor Friari was looking at me closely, and his expression was clearly intended to be reassuring. He had now begun to speak, his finger pointing at the label on the collar’s lining. Stressing the initials, slowly he spelt out the words ‘Sampo Karjalainen’ with the metallic voice of an automaton. I tried hard to understand. I sensed that he was repeating what was written on the label. Standing in front of the porthole, he waved the garment before me, holding it by the shoulders. Thus taken hostage, the jacket seemed to take on a life of its own and struggle with the doctor, who had gone red in the face with effort. The sleeves flew upwards and then fell down again, as though inhabited by invisible arms, setting the buttons clicking. As though in some clumsy embrace, Friari passed his hands over the front of the jacket, looking for the pockets. He rummaged through one, then the other, and pulled out a folded handkerchief. This he opened up on the bed, letting the jacket fall to the floor. In one corner, embroidered in blue between blue lines, two letters stood out: S.K. I had no difficulty recognizing them: they were the capital letters of the name that appeared on the label. I could sense that the doctor was hoping for some reaction on my part. But, like the jacket lying on the floor, I too stretched out my arms in a helpless gesture, implying that I was beaten. My eyes were darting from the initials to the expectant face, the letters whirling in my mind, merging into a single indecipherable sign. Who was Sampo Karjalainen? Was I Sampo Karjalainen? Was that blue sailor’s jacket mine? Overcome by hopelessness, I took my head between my hands, then let it droop until my chin touched my chest. I saw the doctor’s shoes moving away over the wooden floorboards, then gliding towards the door. When I looked up, the blue jacket was still swinging slightly, now hanging from a hook in the wall.

I registered all the stages of that man’s awakening from his coma with the utmost care. His blood pressure and temperature as they slowly rose, the first dawnings of consciousness, his gradual recovery of movement, everything was entered in his patient’s file, together with the medicines I gave him. Even if I remember the order in which things occurred, much of what I wrote in those pages remains impenetrable to me. Often, adjectives and verbs follow one another in a succession of dry, bald words without any grammatical structure, stuck there like cut-out shapes. Rereading them, I could make some dim sense of them, I recognized the vague outlines of the sensations which that man felt and which I observed from the outside. I saw again the eyes which fixed me with such dismay, but I shall never be able to tell of the abyss from which they were surfacing.

A long time passed; the days seemed endless. Meanwhile I had recovered my sight. When they removed the bandages, I spent the whole afternoon looking at myself in the mirror screwed to the wall above the basin. At later stages, too, I often caught myself stealing a look at my reflection, trying to recognize myself. With the utmost caution, at times I would even venture delicately to feel the wound on the nape of my neck. But I was alarmed by the big hairless folds my fingertips would come upon amidst my ravaged hair. I skimmed over them with revulsion, as though touching my own brain.

With Doctor Friari’s help, I had learned to whistle. This was a first step towards recovering my speech. The little military marches which I whistled were irresistible: indeed, I began to move in time with them. I spent whole afternoons doing the pronunciation exercises the doctor set me. Without understanding them, I had begun to utter my first words. As I began to learn more about my condition, I resigned myself and tried to cope with it with the means at my disposal. The doctor helped me to take my bearings in the sea of my unknown drowned consciousness. Thanks to him, I came to understand that I had a relatively extensive grasp of reality. From the windows of his office, where I would go each morning to work on my rehabilitation exercises, the doctor would point to some object in the landscape of the bay and ask me to draw it in his notebook. In this way I realized that I knew how a building was put together, how a lighthouse worked, how a ship was made. Doctor Friari would write the name of each object underneath the drawing and teach me how to pronounce it. I repeated the sounds I heard him say, hesitantly at first, then with ever growing confidence. They were becoming my words; I could repeat and read them on my own and, over time, I learned to put them together. Later, when I could answer the questions that were put to me, the doctor was able to map out my technical knowledge more accurately, asking me to give him information about the various images he showed me, sometimes by means of gestures. In other words, I found that I knew how a car functioned, that I could work a gramophone, use a monkey-wrench or screwdriver; furthermore, although I was unable to formulate it very precisely, I found that I was also in possession of a certain amount of nautical knowledge. My brain responded to the proffered stimuli, the current was getting through. It was just the switch of language which failed to function. But the emergency lead installed by Doctor Friari gradually made good this deficiency; however temporary and prone to leaps in voltage, it nonetheless managed to fuel my gradually redawning consciousness. My memory, on the other hand, was still shrouded in darkness, and no amount of seeking the point at which it had short-circuited would yield results. Of the flow of events which the doctor put before me with the help of photographs, maps and flags taken from his books, none served as an anchor for my identity. Here everything became a blur, slipping away as though shut off by clouded glass.

Accompanied by a nurse, I had begun to venture out on deck for the occasional short stroll, walking the length of the ship, holding on to the taffrail. Once I had reached the stern, I would sit down in the sun, facing the blue sea which for so long I had glimpsed only from the porthole. Later, I would learn that I was on board the German hospital ship Tübingen, riding at anchor off the Italian port of Trieste, waiting to unload its cargo of wounded so that they could be transferred on to Red Cross trains headed for Germany. On sunny mornings the distant city, dotted with green domes, seemed to be set upon rows of glittering waves, and I took pleasure just sitting and gazing at it. I felt reassured by that expanse of limpid water, that ordered countryside. On deck I also met other soldiers, thin-faced men with an absent air about them. All had some bandaged limb or were more or less obviously maimed. Some dragged themselves along leaning on makeshift crutches, which they still handled clumsily. Others seemed physically unimpaired, but on closer inspection turned out to have a bewildered look that was scarcely human. They gathered together in small groups, on the more sheltered benches, playing cards, chatting, or staring wordlessly into the distance, taking the odd puff of a cigarette. I tended to steer clear of them, since I myself had nothing to contribute. But when I caught some snatch of conversation I would eavesdrop, trying to make sense of the words I heard them utter. I would single out those I could hear most clearly, those they seemed to pronounce most often, and move away in order to repeat them aloud to myself. But those unknown sounds would echo emptily in my mouth and head without leaving anything behind, like an echo dying away gradually. At an unconscious level I felt that they were not those that figured in the language spoken by Doctor Friari. Even when I did succeed in reproducing them, they would melt away like bubbles without my being able to gain the knack of repeating them. I would go back to sitting alone, looking out to sea. But not even that majestic sight could calm my sense of dread. My gaze bore into the distance in the desperate hope of finding some foothold, some memory, some image which might miraculously bring the vanished part of me back to life.