New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (3 page)

Each morning after my walk, I would go to Doctor Friari for my daily session. Petri Friari – a neurologist at the university hospital in Hamburg – was a German citizen, but originally from Finland. As I was later to learn, he had fled his native land many years earlier, when he was little more than a boy. At first I had difficulty understanding his story, even though he had told it me on several occasions, aided by that same map of Europe and every gesture he could think of. It was not clear to me why he had left, but I sensed that his departure had tragic overtones. But, as I gained in understanding, as words proliferated in my mind, I managed to piece his tale together.

During the years when Russia was being riven by revolution, Finland too was caught up in the maelstrom. Workers in the industrial centres rebelled, took up arms and set up a communist government. The country split into two and civil war broke out, with the white armies commanded by Marshal Mannerheim emerging victorious after a long struggle. Once order had been restored, mercilessly repressive measures were taken against those who had sympathized with the Bolshevik cause. Doctor Friari’s father, a university professor with socialist leanings, was arrested and sent to a prison camp. After the terrible winter of 1918, no more was heard of him. So Petri Friari, then a young medical student, had left Finland with his mother to seek refuge in Hamburg, to stay with distant German relatives. There, in order to survive, he had become a jack-of-all-trades, making huge sacrifices in order to complete his studies. He had not been back to his country since the age of twenty-three. But he had never forgotten his language; nor his people.

Backed up against the railway, blackened by smoke, the Gothic building of the Finnish sailors’ church stands just outside the port of Hamburg, where the cranes thin out and the city dwindles away into grey countryside. There the doctor would meet up with fellow-Finns who had arrived by merchant ship; they would tell him the latest news, bringing him letters and newspapers. Every Sunday he would accompany his mother to mass, and spend some hours in the afternoon doing charitable work for the city’s small Finnish community, whose members he would treat free of charge. In exchange he received warmth, affection and the occasional bottle of spirits, but above all the opportunity to speak his language, and it was this that he most welcomed. This was why Doctor Friari had taken such an interest in my case: the name embroidered on the label in my jacket was a Finnish name, and perhaps he saw my wretched situation as mirroring his own. I too had been unceremoniously flung out of my own country, and the language which the doctor believed to be buried somewhere in my damaged brain was also his. He cared for me and my wounds in the same spirit as he had tended to the sailors who frequented the church in Hamburg. During our sessions he would tell me about his past as though it were some sad tale whose ending he did not know himself, but which he enjoyed telling me, as though to ward off further misfortune. Welcoming me into his office, he would rub his hands as though in anticipation of some pleasant diversion. He would sit down and open his green notebook, which he constantly consulted as he told his tale, or questioned me.

Then he would show me pictures, different on each occasion, which were glued into his notebook or taken from some other book, and put names to them, asking me to repeat what he had said. The words he used were different from those I heard spoken by the soldiers on deck; at first I had difficulty pronouncing them; certain vowels I found particularly hard. But the doctor was wonderfully persevering. Later he told me that he himself was surprised at how fast I learned. A light dusting, a sprinkling of sounds had gradually settled on the smooth rock of my mind, becoming denser and more full-bodied over time. A rich, deep humus had formed, where words were now taking root and thriving. The linguistic memory which my injury had uprooted from my brain was being born afresh in another part of my mind, bolstered by reason but at the same time as spontaneous as a natural language. That was how the doctor put it, and indeed he was amazed that I could learn so quickly, drawing on mental resources which he had thought to be unsuited to the learning of a language. Secretly hoping to believe his own optimistic words, he ventured the fantastical hypothesis that my brain cells had tracked down the remnants of my language which lay scattered among the folds of my wound, and that the effort of learning had caused them gradually slowly to reknit, to take on shape and consistency. Some unknown chemistry was at work within me, new capillaries were branching out, bringing their juices to unexplored regions previously known only to the animal life of blood and flesh.

As he observed it, the doctor referred to this phenomenon as miraculous, and he took the greatest pleasure in all the stages of my progress. He noted down my reactions to his exercises in the greatest detail, together with the new words I was learning to use. He regarded my recovery as a personal triumph, a great step forward for science. But what he found most moving of all was the retrieval of a language which, in his own way, he too had kept safe within himself, ferrying it from exile into the seas of memory. Even though we could not engage in sophisticated conversation, and our dialogue consisted of single words, repeated to the point that they seemed almost to take on bodily form around us in the air, Doctor Friari felt that in some abstract way we both belonged to the same world. We were bound together by some mysterious link, some bond which was not to do with blood, but which resonated in the sound of language. In the doctor it revived the sweetness of memory, and in me it aroused the will to live.

I had been picked up on the verge of death, my head badly smashed, at dawn on 10 September 1943, on the quayside near the railway station in Trieste. I was not carrying any documents or personal possessions. All that I had was the clothes I was wearing. I had probably been attacked and robbed, hit on the head with the lead pipe found beside me, still daubed with blood and hair. During those same days the hospital ship Tübingen had arrived in the port of Trieste from North Africa, and it was to this ship that the sailors who found me belonged. They hoisted me on to their lifeboat and took me aboard, where I was put into the hands of Doctor Friari, a medical officer with the German navy. As he himself later admitted, in view of my serious condition, and the extent of my wound, he did not think that I had long to live; to the point, indeed, that he had not thought that it was appropriate to operate on me, so that he had accepted me on board the Tübingen for purely compassionate reasons, because of the name stitched into my jacket. But he immediately decided to have me transferred to the ward where the comatose wounded were admitted, and to keep me under observation in the recovery room. A large area at the nape of my neck had suffered deep lesions, and it was difficult to assess how much of my brain had been affected. But perhaps the doctor had sensed that something, somewhere within me, was still alive. As he later explained, clinically there was nothing to distinguish me from the other comatose wounded; whatever it was that had led him to tend me so meticulously, he saw as a nod from fate. As a man of science, practical and down-to-earth, he would come to see me each morning in the recovery room expecting to find me dead. When he saw that in fact I was making progress, he scented a miracle: from that moment on, he never left my bedside. The day I came out of the coma, the nurses swore that they had glimpsed a tear on one of his far from tender cheeks. He insisted on taking personal charge of my rehabilitation; each morning it was he who put me through certain exercises using coloured cardboard cut-outs. When he realized that I could not speak, that the injury had destroyed my memory for language and my ability to articulate sounds, he hoped in his heart of hearts that I would die. Surprised at the speed with which my brain was retrieving lost knowledge, at first he was intrigued above all by the scientific aspect of my injury. But he could not remain untouched by the fear, the bewilderment of a man part of whom had been taken from him, a man deprived of his past, his name, his language, obliged to live without memory, nostalgia, dreams. The supposition that I too was Finnish, having ended up for some unknown reason in those distant seas, led him to care for me with a devotion rarely met with by the wounded in a time of war.

In the weeks he spent at my bedside, peering into my eyes for the least sign of consciousness, he had become convinced that I must indeed be a Finnish sailor, who had come to Trieste on board some ship, possibly a German merchantman; that I had then been set upon by one of the sharks who hung around port cities and railway stations in those war-torn times. The name on the jacket and the initials on the handkerchief left him in no possible doubt. So he swore that he would move heaven and earth to get me back to my own country, to give me the chance to pick up the broken thread of memory. After all, the very fact that I was still alive was at least in part his doing, for better or for worse. He had put his scientific knowledge in the service of blind fate, while his heart had been won over by the familiar sound of my name.

I waited on board the Tübingen for many weeks. Various problems had delayed the organizing of the troop trains to Germany. Now the ship was anchored in the port of Trieste. From my vantage point on deck I had noted frantic outbursts of activity on the shore and quays: military vehicles were arriving all the time, disgorging troops and weapons. When the wind was right, I could even hear the shouts of the commanding officers. Sometimes I would accompany the doctor to the station, where he would go to supervise the organizing of the troop trains or to procure medical supplies. On those occasions we would have lunch together, in some little restaurant near the port. As we ate, he would encourage me to tell him about everything I was doing, every detail of my day, even the most insignificant. At first I found this tedious, then I understood what he was aiming at. It was out of these spots of time that I would rebuild myself a past, a memory. He laid great stress on the importance of persisting with this exercise. Though he had not yet told me as much, the doctor was already mulling over a plan to get me back to Finland, and was slowly preparing me to make the break.

While the doctor was talking with his colleagues from the Medical Corps in the military quarters which I was not allowed to enter, I killed the time by taking walks. At first I did not stray far from the station, but later I began to venture into the city. On sunny afternoons, each street running inward from the sea was a gilded strip up which I walked as far as the shady squares further inland, where large buildings of white stone stood out against a deep blue sky. I enjoyed wandering at random, following the mirage which appeared beyond each corner and then emerging again into the blinding seaside light. Those were months of deep uncertainty for Trieste. I knew that new German troops had come to occupy the city since the Italian armistice, preparing to fend off a possible landing. The German allies had become potential enemies. Many Italian soldiers had fled into the mountains, joining up with the partisan groups, or had already been disarmed. Black Shirts and Salo soldiers had taken up their posts, under the German command. Doctor Friari was wary of these men, not regarding them as soldiers like himself. I had noticed that he tried to avoid them, and above all that he treated them with hostility. In the last days before my departure, during my solitary ramblings, I would hear sudden volleys of sub-machine-gun fire breaking the silence of the almost deserted streets. I was even stopped by the occasional patrol. But my
laissez-passer
had invariably sent the arms of the officers who opened it into a smart salute. Their voices immediately changed, and they allowed me to proceed. In the station, no one stopped me watching the troop trains leaving for the Yugoslavian front. Often I would go and look at the place where I had been found, a few steps from the commercial quay. I would search among the cranes and anchored ships for some trace, some clue that I might transform into a memory. Sometimes, while I waited for the doctor who was dining with some high-placed officer, I would find myself in the city until late at night and, just for a bit of human company, would take refuge in the first bar I came upon. Here, amidst German soldiers and Black Shirts who were getting drunk and singing, I would nurse my small glass of beer for as long as I dared, singing songs I could not understand along with my unknown drinking companions. It was reassuring to hear my voice mingling with others, to hear my own words overlaying theirs, emerging from my mouth and springing into life as though they were truly my own, as though behind those sounds which I had learned to imitate so well there were also some awareness of their meaning. Without addressing a word to me, the men around me would raise their glasses, clink them with my own, treat me as one of themselves. In the fug and din of those bars I felt protected: I was not alone. My fear of loneliness worried the doctor. He said I must get over it: it was a sign of my inability to accept my new destiny.

One morning in November Doctor Friari asked me to go with him to the small town of Opicina, up on the Carso just outside Trieste. He had to go to the German headquarters to meet a high-ranking civil servant working for the civil administration who had just arrived in town. I was still unaware that it was I who was the object of this trip. A car came to pick us up on the quay. It was a grey morning, though to the east the light-filled sky promised sunshine. The road that led up to the Carso was shrouded in thick mist. The whole of the upland plateau was oozing moisture; every so often fat droplets fell from the trees on to the windscreen, like sudden summer rain.

The German headquarters were housed in a fenced-in villa with an imposing white gate, set back a little from the street. We crossed the gravel-strewn courtyard embarrassed at the noise of our own steps, to be met by a soldier who, I noticed, walked with a limp. He exchanged a few words with the doctor and led him towards a door at the end of the hallway, gesturing that I should go into the officers’ mess, which was empty at that hour. I sat down and began to leaf through some old magazines. After long minutes spent in silence, I heard his limping step returning, then the door opened and the soldier appeared, beckoning me to follow him. I was escorted into the office, where the doctor and the civil servant were deep in conversation. The civil servant was solidly built, with a red face and a genial smile. He came towards me to shake my hand, gesturing towards an armchair in front of his desk. I sat down, and the doctor, seated beside me, carried on with a conversation which my arrival must have interrupted. He was speaking in German, but I sensed that it was my story he was telling. He pointed to the jacket, which I had taken off and was now holding folded on my knee. At a gesture from the doctor, I pointed to the label, brought the handkerchief with the initials out of a pocket and laid it on the desk. The civil servant turned it over in his hands, frowning, then handed it back to me. The conversation did not last long. The civil servant nodded as the doctor spoke, and took some notes. Then he stood up, took us to the door and bade us a warm goodbye. He also addressed a sentence to me personally in his warm, raucous German; I did not understand it, but sensed it was intended to be well-meant. The doctor, on the other hand, did understand, and shook the civil servant’s hand, giving him a grateful look. I too thanked him, bowing my head in place of words. The lone soldier led us through the gravel-strewn courtyard to the gate. We waited for his limping step to die away before getting into the car.