The Winter War (7 page)

‘We'll see. If she comes, I'd be the one doing the driving.'

‘I can help out.'

‘So how's it going with your job?' asked Katriina.

‘Same as usual. We're getting a new teacher after Christmas. A history teacher. It's kind of a sad story. His wife died in a car accident, so then he and his daughter moved to Helsinki.'

‘Oh, that's terrible!'

Helen didn't seem to think it was anything to get upset about. She continued talking in the same tone of voice as before.

‘You know our principal? Gunvor? Well, apparently she's hoping he'll be some sort of genius. She's been running around talking about how we need to update our teaching methods, step into the digital age, and things like that. But I don't know …'

‘To change the subject,' said Katriina, ‘I think it's important right now for Eva to work out what she's going to do with her life. She seems keen on this whole artist thing, so I assume that London is a good place for her to get into the right circles and learn something …'

‘Or else she'll find a husband and have kids. Then at least she'll have something to do.'

‘Hmm,' said Katriina, nodding.

She leaned back in the armchair. She loved her Artek chair, not just because it reminded her of her youth, but because it had been such a sensible purchase, one of those things in life that she never needed to regret.

‘I think I'd better go now, Mum.'

‘Okay, give those little darlings a hug from me.'

‘I will.'

After putting down the phone, Katriina went out on to the balcony to have a smoke. It had started snowing, big wet flakes that settled damply on her cigarette. She couldn't see anything except the inner courtyard below. Someone walked across and tossed some rubbish into the bin with a faint splash. She happened to think about flowers: the fact that she needed a lot of flowers for Max's party. Not just a few bouquets here and there, but completely filling the flat. Tuula almost never invested extra energy in flower displays.

She pulled the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and saw that only one was left.

seven

MAX HAD FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT
the interview idea for
Helsingin Sanomat
when Laura Lampela suddenly rang him up one day after he'd given a lecture for his first-year students. He was sitting in his office, just about to leave for home. He agreed to Laura's suggestion that they meet for lunch at the Kosmos on Friday. Max met a lot of young women at the department, but he'd always kept a certain distance, feeling more than anything like an uncle to them. And most of the women preferred to consult his female colleagues when it came to term papers and the like. He hadn't enjoyed this much attention in quite a while. In 1993, the publication
City
had named him one of the ‘young intellectuals of the year'. At the time he considered himself too old for such a label, but now he realised how young he actually was back then. He knew that certain factions within the department thought he was a dinosaur, that his views on evolutionary psychology were ludicrous and that he was becoming increasingly isolated professionally. Today's sociologist was supposed to focus on gender studies, environmental issues, or new research in the wake of the influential theories propounded by Pierre Bourdieu.

Max mentioned the lunch interview to Katriina.

‘So I guess you'll be home at the usual time on Friday, right?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Because you're just having lunch.'

‘Oh, right. I assume so,' he said. ‘Although I have a tennis game booked for that evening.'

He realised that this whole interview was a foolishly minor event, but if there was anything he needed right now, it was a foolishly minor event to take his thoughts off the book he was writing. His editor, Matti, had phoned to ask him how it was going. The conversation had set his nerves on edge.

In many ways Edvard Westermarck was a mystery, and the biography was a much bigger project than Max had initially thought. How did it happen that in 1888 an unmarried twentysix-year-old Finn – with very little research experience – had managed to write a book about the history of marriage? And, even more surprisingly, write it in English?

Max had often pictured Westermarck sitting under the great dome of the British Library in London and writing most of the work that would make him a celebrated scholar of international renown. One of the first from Finland.

Westermarck was a man who seemed to possess the huge amount of patience required to gather all the facts, constantly retest hypotheses, latch on to the very latest research and also embark on lengthy travels to parts of the globe where the most primitive conditions prevailed. He was a Finland–Swedish aristocrat from a sheltered world who chose a life that could only be described as cosmopolitan.

The fact that no one remembered Westermarck today was just one more reason to dust him off and restore him to the public spotlight.

When he started on the project, Max had harboured an ambition to travel to at least some of the areas where Westermarck had lived, such as Sicily, Morocco and England. But he never seemed to find time for more than a brief trip to London, and his attempts via phone calls to track down Westermarck's old villa in Tangier had proved fruitless. He'd started his research in Åbo, reading Westermarck's letters, but now it was a matter of actually buckling down to write the biography.

‘I'm assuming it's great,' Matti had said on the phone. Max had made several visits to see Matti in his office at the publishing house, each time proclaiming how amazing the book was going to be. He'd told Matti that the work would present a survey of the entire intellectual climate in the early twentieth century – highlighting Darwin, Freud, and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim. And it would show how groundbreaking Westermarck's work had been. Max had enthusiastically recounted the many elements that would add dramatic flair to the text: Westermarck's suppressed homosexuality, his travels to Morocco, his sister who joined the suffragettes, and much more.

By now Max had been working on the biography so long that he'd begun to dream about it. In his dreams he would find himself in a Bedouin tent up in the mountains somewhere near Marrakesh, among bandits and camels, in the nineteenthcentury settings that Westermarck described in his memoirs. Max had the same dream night after night: he was sitting on a hill, looking at the lovely women, men and children making their way up dusty trails in the dawn. When he awoke, he was always thirsty.

Matti had sounded less impressed during their last phone conversation.

‘Good Lord, Max, we only need fifty to a hundred pages to write up the catalogue copy and the hype for the back cover.'

Max promised to send him something ASAP, but several days had now passed, and today he had no intention of even thinking about the book.

Instead, he devoted the whole morning to choosing the right shirt to wear. He'd also put on aftershave – something he almost never did. He found the tube of Boss cologne, in cream form, which had been in the medicine cabinet for as long as he could remember. He thought it still smelled okay. There didn't seem to be any noticeable difference in the scent from when it was first opened. Helen had given it to him as a Christmas present the year she got her first job.

As far as Max's own profession was concerned, he'd fallen into it more or less by accident. When he was in secondary school, he read the course descriptions in a brochure and thought that sociology sounded the easiest. So he got a copy of
Introduction to Sociology
by Erik Allardt and Yrjö Littunen, the primary text used during nearly all of the 1970s. To his surprise, Max passed the exam with high marks, and when he entered the university, he realised that he had a talent for the type of research still prevalent in the field of sociology at the time: Marxist tinged and yet solidly anchored in positivism and the idea of correlations – i.e., that c follows a and b, and so on. Max's father knew nothing about university studies, but both parents had gone to secondary school. So Max was expected to make the move to Helsinki to continue his studies, no matter how suspicious Vidar might be about his son's chosen field.

‘Aren't they all just a bunch of communists?' he'd asked. Max had staunchly denied this claim, even though sociology was crawling with communists.

He felt the same need to defend himself now, in the Kosmos, as Laura sat in front of him with a notebook and asked him whether sociology wasn't merely a ‘typical 1970s discipline'.

‘No, on the contrary. The whole nineties period was incredibly exciting for us, because of what happened with the economy. Plus there was our study of Finnish sexual practices. And now all the focus is on the Nordic welfare model – and how it's being dismantled. There's a lot going on. Although these days I have a more social-psychological perspective …'

Laura nodded and took notes. Before they'd started the interview, Max had been subjected to a tedious photo session lasting a good fifteen minutes. When he arrived at the restaurant, Laura and the photographer had been waiting for him outside. The photographer was a young guy, barely twenty, with a bizarre haircut, and it was obvious that he didn't know who Max was. Nor did he have the slightest interest in finding out. He wanted to take the photos outside because it was snowing. He asked Max to put on a ‘pensive' expression and look up at the sky. Max felt like a real idiot but did as he was asked.

When he was finally able to sit down with Laura – and at first he'd worried that the photographer would accompany them inside, but fortunately the guy went back to the newspaper office – they started off with some polite chit-chat. Max asked Laura about her job, and she gave him the short version of her life story. After studying sociology, then journalism, she'd taken a year off (Max thought to himself: how typical, these kids and their gap years). During that period she travelled to Australia and New Zealand, and then spent some time in Shanghai, where she wrote freelance articles for the Finnish media, mostly about the Chinese economy. When she returned home, she became a freelance reporter. She shared an office with some friends in Berghäll.

No boyfriend? Max wondered, but he decided to save that question for a later time.

‘But it's cultural issues that I want to write about,' Laura told him as the waitress brought their first course. They had both ordered borscht, which seemed appropriate for this sort of winter day with heavy snowfall that was making Helsinki look like a city in an old Russian postcard from the nineteenth century.

They were sitting at a corner table next to the window. Max had insisted on ordering wine with their lunch. (‘Is that okay? I don't have any lectures this afternoon.') Now he filled Laura's glass for the second time.

‘Since the newspaper is paying, I'd love some wine,' she replied.

For Max, the Kosmos restaurant was a familiar stomping ground, even though lately he came here mostly for nostalgic reasons. The customer base had changed, with the journalists and artsy bohemians now replaced by business people and tourists.

The only thing that bothered him a bit was that a history professor from Tampere whom he happened to know slightly, a man by the name of Pekka Kantokorpi, was sitting at a table not too far away. Pekka was with a woman that Max didn't recognise.

He found the professor's presence annoying, since this was an opportunity that wouldn't come along again. He could feel himself sweating under his jacket as he tried to make Laura think he was perfectly relaxed.

She set down her wine glass and picked up her notebook. ‘I think we should start with one of those “fact boxes”. Do you mind if I ask you some questions they always print in women's magazines? You know: age, marital status, and so on?'

‘Sure, go ahead.'

‘Okay. I know that you're about to turn sixty. Are you married?'

‘Yes, my wife's name is Katriina.'

‘Okay. And what kind of work does she do?'

‘She handles human resources and staffing issues for the hospital districts of Helsinki and Nyland.'

‘Is she a doctor?'

‘No, she has a degree in political science.'

‘Any children?'

‘Helen and Eva. Helen is … let me see … She's thirty-two. And Eva is three years younger, so she's twenty-nine.'

‘No other children?'

‘No.'

‘What do your children do?'

‘Helen is a teacher. Eva is studying art in London. From what I understand, it's supposed to be an exceptionally fine university.'

‘Art? Do you mean art history or something like that?'

‘No. As far as I know, they paint and work in other media.'

‘Sounds exciting.'

‘Uh-huh. I suppose so. But Eva has always wanted to go her own way; that's a big deal for her. Maybe because she's the little sister. To be honest, I don't know how she's managing to make ends meet in London. What we send her isn't much, at any rate. Although … You're not going to write about any of this, are you?'

‘No, the article's not about your children.'

The waitress served their food. Max had chosen filet de bœuf with sauce rouennaise and racines alimentaires rôtis. Laura had selected one of the restaurant's classic dishes: Sylvester sandwich au gratin, which consisted of toasted black rye with a rum and morel sauce. They drank a toast and then started eating.

‘So how do things look for the field of sociology nowadays? When I was a student, there was a lot of talk about population statistics.'

‘Right. And there always is,' said Max. ‘Although lately there's also a great deal of focus on feminism and gender studies. Lots of attention paid to post-modernism and post-everything.'

‘Are you a feminist?' asked Laura.

It had been a long time since Max had thought about that question. Of course he was a feminist, or at least he'd convinced himself that he was during the seventies and eighties.

‘You know, I'm so old that I can remember when we organised groups for men out in the archipelago so we could talk about feelings and explore our feminine side. With exercises where we would hug each other and walk around naked, and things like that.'

‘And that made you become a feminist?'

‘Yes. In reality, some of the Stalinists thought that the women's movement was nothing but bourgeois bullshit. In a socialist society the differences between the sexes were supposed to be automatically erased.'

‘But you don't agree?'

‘I think that feminism is necessary. But … maybe I shouldn't say this, but I think it's a shame that it has taken centre stage in such a dominant way. It scares off quite a few students, in my opinion.'

‘What do you mean?'

Max paused to think. He wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to have this discussion at the moment.

‘Well, why do all relationships between people have to be interpreted from a feminist perspective, so that nothing is ever left to chance any more? All behaviour is explained by the so-called balance of power between the two sexes. I understand the theoretical significance, and I understand why it's important for us to take a critical view of norms, but I don't understand why everything that happens to people, everything that people experience, all the sorrow and longing and clumsiness, has to be explained by feminism. Sometimes men act like real bastards – that's true – but it's not always because of the sexual power hierarchy. Some men are just bastards, plain and simple. And sometimes there's an even bigger overriding structure involved, like capitalism. I think we need more complex models for explaining things.'