New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (7 page)

Oddly enough, when he gave me lessons during our enforced stays in the air-raid shelters, the pastor would not hesitate to launch into some almost dangerously liberal analysis of languages and people, without worrying in the least about divulging his personal ideas concerning good and evil. His sermons, on the other hand, were always very decorous and unimpeachable in terms of dogma; when he was preaching he did not make so bold as to divert the course of migrations, nor did he follow shamans into forests. When he was at the altar, Koskela was a different man: he closed ranks with his church and his sermons took the form of simple moral precepts, hand-me-down phrases which he uttered with a hint of tedium, as though he were acting a badly-learned part in a play he didn’t much like. All that remained of his exuberant personality were the sweeping, tragic gestures, his way of sending his hands flying upwards, fingers outstretched. When he talked of God, he reverted to the familiar tone he used when discussing Ural-Altaics; but only someone who knew him as well as I did could have noticed. He always seemed to be in a hurry to bring matters to a close, not because he had some other duty to perform, but because for him everything had to be concluded as quickly as possible; as though life were a warehouse to be cleared, a lorry to be unloaded – a corvée like any other in the perpetual motion of the universe. Despite the fact that war and devastation were tightening their grip upon the city, the hours that I spent with Koskela were always utterly serene. We did not know it, but cutting ourselves off from the world during that endless winter was the saving of us. Trapped beneath the ice, harm was powerless against us.

‘As long as it’s snowing, they can’t fight!’ the pastor would say resignedly, looking out of the sacristy window. We were both looking forward to the thaw, although for different reasons: he because he may already have known of the death which he was going to meet and which, like everything else, he simply wanted to be over and done with; I because I cherished the fond hope that the part which had died within me might reawaken with the spring. As soon as I was out of his company I was again assailed by all the desolation which had dogged me since my reawakening on the Tübingen. I was beginning to be able to express myself, even if somewhat stiltedly. I would learn the words already declined, a different one for each case, and when I did not know how to put them together I made do with saying them at random, hoping that intonation and gesture would go some way towards making up for lack of syntax. And yet, while still lacking firm banks, the Finnish language was gradually carving itself out a bed in the quicksands of my mind, with the words that I had tamed coursing down it and gradually informing me of the meaning of others. Branching out and joining up, they sent the thousand drops of sound which make up a language into circulation, watering and strengthening my awareness, my ability to sense the boundaries of meaning. But I was still haunted by my ignorance of my own past. Wandering around Helsinki, I would sometimes be jolted by a fleeting sense of memory: the view from a corner of the street would suddenly seem familiar, and then I would set to scouring every foot of road, peering at the names on bells on the doors of the buildings to see whether there might not be some Karjalainen among them. I would dream that I was outside my old house, that someone up there was waiting for me, gazing nostalgically at an old photograph which had been slipped into the glass of the dresser. We had mingled but not totally bonded, Finland and I; something in me remained untouched by this mingling, as though deep down some buried identity was refusing to be wiped out and was struggling furiously to rise to the surface.

These are the clearest pages in the document. Koskela had evidently lent a hand in the drafting of these memories, which were probably put down on paper a long time after the author’s arrival in Helsinki. Some sentences have corrections in a different hand, or are recopied correctly beneath the original. The frequent exercises in inflection and breaking down into syllables of the nouns subject to vowel-change, interspersed throughout the text, bear witness to the perseverance and tenacity with which the author studied the Finnish language, at least during the time the pastor was at his side.

A few days ago, Miss Koivisto suggested that we visit the air-raid shelter where the hospital staff would take refuge during the bombardments. I too was interested in seeing another of the places mentioned in the manuscript, in the vague hope of finding some trace of its author. We turned off the road and found ourselves in a dark space, littered with lumps of plaster and broken glass. Purely by chance, my torch picked out various names and bits of writing carved into the black tiles on the wall, and I suddenly felt deeply unsettled, my instinct telling me that I should instantly look away again. And yet, deep down, some deeply buried compulsion drove me to read each and every one of them, as though they might contain some secret. It was climbing the stairs, back into the white light of the road, that the memory flashed into my mind, that on the other pavement I suddenly recognized the barracks to which my father had been taken the evening they arrested him at the university. In my mind’s eye I saw again the ill-lit parlour, the guards standing around it, the wooden plank beds carved with threatening words, recently gouged resentfully out of the dressed wood like so many wounds, and my father looking at me wordlessly from the other side of the grille. It was meant to be a reassuring look, it was an attempt to inspire trust, but in fact that mask of bogus confidence would sometimes slip, leaving me alone, exposed to the full weight of his own fear. That was the last time I saw him; and, as though I knew as much, I remember how determined I was to slip my fingers through the mesh of the grille for one last clasp of his hand.

Dusk came early at that time of the year. The snow was not enough to light up the empty city, barred and bolted as it was, with all the windows dark. The main monuments, caged in by wooden beams, were reminiscent of the catafalques of some forgotten religion. The buildings in the city centre were empty, the ministries and government offices deserted, having been transferred to underground premises out of town. Although it was not yet at war, Helsinki was a city in a state of siege; the only people in its streets were hurried civilians and drunken soldiers. Fear oozed into the city from the frozen bay, lapping at the streets and squares. Death entered it with the trainloads of refugees, and spread throughout the smoke-filled lairs where the few remaining inhabitants had taken refuge. There was feverish talk of the latest news from the Russian front, of the siege of Leningrad, of the railway at Murmansk which no one had the courage to blow up. Some people cursed the war; the future seemed to be closing in on all sides, like the horizon around us. Each day seemed likely to be the last. This sense of doom was at its most tangible in the fug of the press-room in the Kämp, where I would take up my position in an armchair by the bar, among people I did not know. Together with the book of grammar Koskela had lent me, I would open up my notebook and start copying out words from the newspapers, while listening in on the conversations going on around me. Whenever some important army officer or civil servant entered the room, a small knot of journalists would suddenly form, shouting out questions and leafing through their notepads. I would slip in amongst them, listening to each question as though it were the one I myself would have liked to ask and staring firmly into the eyes of the person being questioned while he gave his reply. Although I had only the barest grasp of what was being said, I laughed along with the reporters, and shook my head to indicate that I shared their irritation when the replies were too evasive. They offered me cigarettes and glasses of brandy, which I accepted without a word of thanks, as though they were my due. When the hubbub died down and everyone went back to their seats, I too would settle down on a nearby sofa, open the
Helsingin Sanomat
and pretend to read.

It was in the Kämp that I finally became friendly with a German journalist, although perhaps he was rather an acquaintance than a friend. We would greet each other and sit together without speaking, as though we had no need of words to understand each other. He must have pieced together his own version of my story from the few words we had actually managed to exchange. I knew that he was a journalist, and that he was German: that was enough for me. Hearing him talk his language, on the telephone or with some diplomat, I was reminded of the weeks I had spent on board the Tübingen, of the merciless blue of that sea, so different from the desert of ice that lay before Helsinki, of the radiant vision of Trieste and the kindly attentions of Doctor Friari. Since any attempt at conversation required an extreme effort, we had tacitly decided to abandon any further deepening of our friendship. After all, in that doom-laden atmosphere nothing seemed to have a future and friendship, like love, served merely to pass the time. For me, not having to talk was always a relief; but his presence reassured me, gave me a sense of warmth. I would pretend that I had ended up sitting beside him by pure chance; with my notebook, pencil and newspaper, I liked to imagine that I too was a journalist, but I kept this piece of make-believe to myself. He would glance at me out of the corner of his eye, and seemed to have understood everything about me. One night the lobby of the Kämp was strangely deserted; he was sitting typing in a corner, next to the piano, I was in an armchair trying to put off the moment of returning to the hospital for as long as possible. I had drunk and smoked too much and was about to fall asleep, when I heard him whistling a tune which I must already have known. Without realizing it, I began to sing:
‘Davanti un fiasco di vin, quel fiol d’un can fa le feste, perche xe un can de Trieste, e ghe piasi el vin!’
He turned round, intrigued, breathing the smoke from his recently discarded cigarette out through his nostrils. I raised the empty glass I was still holding and repeated that one verse of a popular drinking-song I’d heard so often in the beer-houses in Trieste. Smiling though disconcerted, the journalist offered me a cigarette and made some surprised comment in German. I shrugged, pointing to a print of a ship which was hanging on the wall. From then onwards he took to calling me ‘Trieste’, and that was how he introduced me to his colleagues. He had realized that I was not in fact a journalist, but apart from some vague questions about Trieste, he had never asked me anything. He observed and respected the mysterious notebook in which he saw me scrupulously taking down the words I would underline in the
Helsingin Sanomat
; without guessing the secret thread that ran between them, he had nonetheless sensed that they were not taken entirely at random. Seeing that I spent most of my time wandering around without anything to do, at first sporadically but then increasingly often he began to use me as an errand boy, sending me to the post with telegrams, to the Hotel Torni to pick up messages or buy him a newspaper, rewarding me with the odd mark and the occasional cigarette. He made his requests known to me by means of an extremely effective range of gestures, backed up by his personal brand of international German:
‘Trieste, bitte, telegramm presto zum Post!’
he would say, without taking the cigarette from his mouth. When he left for the front at the beginning of June, other journalists employed my services. So, as time passed, everyone at the Kämp knew me, even though they knew nothing about me. The Kämp had become my home from home; I felt less anxious there, and my jacket was just one blue sailor’s jacket hanging among others.

‘They’re looking for people to help with the bonfires. Tonight’s the night.’ I was the only person in the room, lying stretched out on my bed and staring at the ceiling, but the pastor had come into the visitors’ quarters on tiptoe and had spoken in an undertone.

‘The bonfires?’ I asked.

‘The army’s putting great piles of wood together to the north of the city. Tonight, when the Russian bombers come, our men will set fire to them. It’s a trick: they’ll think they’re seeing Helsinki going up in flames, and that’s where they’ll drop their bombs!’ he explained, taking my jacket off the nail and throwing it towards me.

We piled into the lorries, which then drove off, lights dimmed, towards the forest further inland, along a track of frozen snow. It was pitch black; the snow gave off no reflection, and the dark sky loomed above us. Suddenly we stopped, deep in the woods; the whole column waited in silence, scanning the sky. I couldn’t see hair or hide of the pastor, but I sensed that he was near me; I recognized the unmistakable smell of his overcoat, which smelt of musty paper, as did the sacristy. We carried on walking until we came to a large clearing, where groups of men were already at work around large heaps of cut-down trees; there were also several tractors, and dray-horses. The lorries drew up in a circle; we clambered out and formed a line, to be handed axes and saws. Then we were divided into teams, and each was given a task. I worked for hours in silence, unable to make out the faces of my companions. I recognized them by their movements, by the way they walked across the snow. The pastor was wearing a cap with the earflaps unfastened, so that they swung around with his every movement, making him look like one of the magicians from the
Kalevala
that he would show me from his illustrated version. Our team’s task was to drag the trunks into the clearing after they had been cut down and roughly trimmed by other soldiers in the forest. We would saw them up into bits, then another team would come to collect them and pile them up. The exhaustion, the sweat, that whole clearing swirling with the men’s white breath, those bodies working in silence, all gave me a sense of peace, of harmony. I was no longer alone, no longer an outsider. I was among my own people; I was working with them to protect our land. It was a powerful feeling; it lent strength to my right arm as I drew on the great toothed blade which bit so effortlessly into the flesh of the wood, as though it too was eager to bolster that surge of concerted energy. The pastor must have noticed, because he came up behind me and slapped me on the shoulder. The earflaps swung around, and I could imagine the expression on his face, although I couldn’t see it. A whistle halted us in our tracks; the tractors turned off their engines and we all ran into the woods, then waited in silence. Shortly afterwards we heard a rumble, followed by several explosions: they were bombing Helsinki. Orders were barked out; a tanker emerged from the woods and began to douse the piles of wood with naphtha; the lorries formed into columns, in preparation for departure. I followed Koskela’s earflaps, then found myself seated next to him, puffing and sweating. No one said a word; the only sound was my companions’ laboured breathing. The column started up. Before we turned into the woods, a gigantic burst of flame lit up the whole clearing, then bounded skywards. Suddenly the faces of my companions leapt out of the darkness, each with its own fear, its own amazement.