To the Hermitage (31 page)

Some were quietly drunk, and some were noisy drunk. Some were in the infernal pits of despair, and others on the soaring heights of euphoria. A Nobel prizewinner lay with his head in a toppled soup-bowl. A famous children’s writer trilled to herself before a row of empty glasses. And so a deep truth struck me, for the first time but not for the last. The writer’s life, now my chosen path, was not always one of delicious pleasure, eternal freedom, endless fame. It was too not amusing at all. It was mournful, self-created, lonely, an unending struggle against failure, fate, ignorance, idleness, blankness, insecurity and death. No wonder the writers of Finland felt the need to join together, raising their glasses in celebration of creativity and comradeship. No wonder their heads felt heavy with the weight of delicious thoughts. Or, of course, there could have been a different reason. After all, they were Finns.

Whatever: I’d arrived at the literary heartland at last, and I passionately felt the need to join them. I gladly took my place on the minstrels’ bench, and soon we were all drinking together and telling stories, as writers so often do. Somehow, here in the Kafé Kosmos, it really didn’t seem to matter that my stories were in English, and theirs were in Finnish. Many interesting things were said that day, though heaven alone knows what they were. Then, finally, in the very late afternoon, my translator appeared: a huge man, six foot or so, bearded, sweatshirted, an outdoor type, seemingly fresh from the forest. He wrote plays himself, and poems, and had translated James Joyce into Finnish. The problems of my work were, he said, modest in comparison, but he confessed he had found a few. Story fine, prose fine, but something was missing: a true intensity of soul. He’d had just the same problem in Joyce. What was wrong with western writers was they’d never probably imbibed the great Russians: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Biely. Yet Russian writing taught the true spirit of the novel: rage, extremity, wildness, passion, torture of the heart.

‘You’ve never been to Russia, I can tell,’ he said. ‘I will take you. When your trip is finished, we will go.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘No, forget your tour, why don’t I take you tonight?’

‘I don’t think so, Pentti,’ said one of my publishers.

‘Sure. Look, it’s simple. We go to the station, we get on the military train with the sealed windows. Then we go through the lovely lands of our lost Karelia, which you will not be able to see because the windows are sealed, and we wake up in the writer’s city.’

‘The writer’s city?’

‘Petersburg. The place where all writers come from.’

‘It’s not so simple, Pentti, he needs papers,’ said my publisher.

‘Bureaucrats, all that paper shit, let’s just forget it, right?’ said my translator, staring me in the eyes.

‘But if he doesn’t have a visa from the embassy, they won’t let him in. Do you want him to go to jail?’

‘I’ll get him in. You just have to give the guards a ham or something. They haven’t eaten for months. You know in Russia nobody believes in the law, and everything is for sale.’

‘But the Russians don’t like westerners just walking into their country.’

My translator put his huge arm lovingly around me. ‘Just don’t listen to any of this shit,’ said my translator. ‘I know Russia, all the back passages and little arseholes. I go into Russia all the time.’

‘When did you go last?’

‘Five years ago,’ said my translator, filling up his glass and mine. ‘Maybe ten.’

‘It’s crazy,’ said my publisher.

‘You know me, I’m your friend,’ said my translator, squeezing me tight, ‘Would I do anything crazy? I just don’t take shit, that’s all. Paper shit. Border shit. The world is a forest. In it a man goes where he wants to go. We’re writers. The world is ours, huh?’

‘That’s right, the world is ours,’ I seem to have said.

‘Our writer wants to come,’ he said. ‘You see, he wants to come.’

‘He’s English, he’s just being polite, Pentti. That’s how they are.’

‘You know, I love this man. I’m proud to translate him, even if his book is shit. Get him papers if you like, that’s only some more shit.’

‘He has a tour to do, it’s all arranged.’

‘Okay, and when you come back from the tour, my friend, we get on the sealed train and go to Russia, all right?’

‘To the Finland Station?’

‘To the Finland Station. Yes, my dear good old friend. You will never forget it. It will be the greatest experience of your life—’

‘Yes, Pentti,’ said my publisher.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know . . .’

During that night the whole world changed. A heavy new snow fell all over Finland and the Baltic. When I woke in my red-painted, thin-mattressed bed next morning, feeling no better than I had the morning before, a strange white light filled my hotel bedroom. The maid, letting herself in with the pass-key, brought coffee and opened the curtains, revealing the white-filled square below and the great snowfall my walls had reflected. Suddenly I recalled that on this snowy day my ten-year tour round the small towns of Finland was due to begin in earnest. Then, as I drank my coffee, I remembered something else – how, in the literary glow of the Kafé Kosmos, I had agreed to go on the sealed train to Leningrad as soon as I returned. Various small problems now crossed my mind: students back home to teach, a wife and little child waiting. Still, writers are writers; the world is ours. I packed up my baggage, and went down in the Hissi. I signed my hotel bill, and sat in an armchair in the lobby, waiting for my publisher friends to take me to the station.

And the world truly had altered overnight. A new snow had fallen all over Finland. Beyond the windows, cracked ice had turned to fresh fleece, which filled every space and turned everything to the purest white. The snowiness lit up the cars and brightened the street, where Finns in big hats, great coats and boots walked by, half-bounced along by the weather. Flakes the size of cottonballs whirled past the windows, wiping away the buildings across the way, plastering a huge snowsuit on the patient hotel doorman. Whenever the swing doors opened, a howling frozen whirlwind scurried through the lobby. My publishers arrived by car, grinding through packed snowpiles in the gutter. As soon as I walked outside, the bitter wind sliced, my eyebrows froze, my face turned to a mask. My raincoat offered no protection at all, so my publishers thoughtfully took me to a great department store, Stockmann, to kit me for the journey. Winter wares – snowshoes and skis, Parkas and sledges – were everywhere on sale. Wooden stands held domed fur hats in every fashion: seal and beaver, mink and fox, wool and nylon. Soon I was suitably clad. A huge fur pelt with ribboned ear-flaps covered my ears and most of my brow. I had huge fur mittens, stout blue moonboots. ‘Wonderful,’ said my publisher. ‘How nicely it goes with your smart English blazer.’

Helsinki train station is designed by the elder Saarinen. A noble modernistic façade makes a grand effect, though it leads to sadder and rather etiolated hinderparts, unroofed and open to swirling blizzard. Here, in the snow, a train of six very ancient wooden carriages was waiting behind a black steam locomotive, tender stacked high with birch-logs. My publishers said farewell, and I climbed aboard a first-class carriage. A metal stove steamed in the corner. A stout female attendant sat beside it issuing glasses of tea. Thick curtains hung at the misted windows. Heavy armchairs formed the seats. Slowly and wearily, the train begin heaving itself out of the station. It didn’t matter; I was in no hurry, no hurry at all.

Once the train leaves Helsinki station, it’s soon into the pine and birch forest that seems to cover the rest of Finland. In fact the forest comes right into the city, growing round the new apartment blocks. In moments the city becomes the country, the urban scene turning into a vast rolling forest. Yesterday’s world had gone too; the overnight snow had covered all Finland with a coating that, seen from a train seat, was pure delight. Snow hung heavy on the pine and birch trees, highlighting the twigs with a precise white detailing. Occasionally branches would crack off and shatter, opening a white wound in the trunks. Everything seemed suspended – not least the train itself, which moved so slowly through this noiseless world every little scene appeared to go on for ever. There were red wooden houses, with metal ladders to their roofs. Steam rose from the big square chimneys of the sauna houses. Animal tracks ran through the drifts, birds of prey hung in the sky. Skiers made their way through the forest paths. Muffled ancient ladies stood up on the runners of high-backed sledges, pushing them along with booted feet.

In my chair in the slow-moving wide-coached train, I felt myself caught in a happy delusion. I felt in some perfect space: out of time, motion, history, politics. I imagined myself in a peaceable kingdom, more peaceful than any I’d known. Foolish and dangerous nonsense, of course. Finland was not outside history. It was a troubled, squeezed, divided, often occupied small country, still under threat. It had known the Great Wrath and the Little Wrath, its own bloody Red Revolution and the Winter War. This rail line once led on past Lahti to the lost lands of Karelia, from which the population had been expelled, to Vyborg and the Finland station. The Russian border now lay not so far ahead: armed soldiers in the watch-towers, mines and mantraps in the snow. Lenin fled here twice, disguised as a fireman on a railway engine, protected by the Finnish reds. Then in 1918 refugees from the Cheka purges had taken this same railway, carrying their fake Swedish passports and what valuables they could manage. Some had made it through the sentries, many had not. Even then their problems were not over; for half of Finland supported the Russian Reds, the other half hoped the Germans would bring a solution for their Baltic peril. Finland had never really been used to peace; it was too near Russia. ‘The ghastly logic of geography,’ one famous Finn noted in 1917. ‘Petrograd is so close. There is blood everywhere.’

Short of the border, I got off the chugging train – at Kuovola on the Kymi. The Kymi is Finland’s great logging river, and as I descended on to the bare snow-swept platform the sawmills ground and the rank papermills were steaming. In the blizzard the local schoolteacher was waiting; she didn’t know me at first, so odd did I look in my fur hat and moonboots. She walked me through town, past brand-new shopping centres, to the local hotel. And there, that night, while some forty Finns sat dining rather mournfully, I rose at the table and began to read from my work. It came to seem an absurd activity, as I went through the most parochial details of contemporary English life, while my tolerant audience of good citizens – businessmen, teachers, butchers, shopkeepers, librarians – stared up at me in friendly mystification. Next day I took another train through the snow, heading northward up the Kymi past chugging sawmills, rancid papermills, the odd landed estate or so, as the blizzard deepened. So the days passed, taking on a familiar rhythm, as I zig-zagged through the freezing heart of Finland, a land of small settlements, vast frozen lakes, huge silent forests. A little train would emerge from the blizzards to deposit me at some little local capital, entirely shut in snow: Kuopio, Mikkeli, Tapiola, Jyväslykä, Kyyjärvi. Another meeter on the platform, a teacher, a librarian, a local doctor. Another hotel, ancient or modern. Another audience, gathered in the hotel dining room or some local ravintola, eating a hearty dinner while I talked and read to them my strange little tales of British life in distant industrial cities.

The towns I descended on out of the blizzard in my silver moonboots came to seem to me stranger and stranger. They were towns out of Nikolai Gogol, remote provincial outposts like those in Russia, ancient, folkish, faintly touched up with modernity, but happily and timelessly spared what had happened just over the border – the political purges, the grand electrifications, the Gulags. And in fantasy I was beginning to feel like a character out of Gogol’s stories too: the wandering bureaucrat, the travelling dignitary, the confidence trickster visiting the regions from the great capital where the reins of government lay. I ride through the forests, I come to the next town, even more remote than the last one. It’s called, let us say, B—. Pigs and cats run in the streets, and in the normal way everything must be as dull as ditchwater, except when the cavalry regiment is stationed or the government inspector visits. There’s a town square, a local inn, a shop selling saws, horse-collars, barrels and ropes. There are a few fine-looking residences and a row of neat merchant houses, nice enough except when they catch fire, or fall in under the weight of snow. There’s a mayor, a doctor, a police chief, a fire chief, a town drunk, some shopkeepers, some landowners, some business folk, some sparky little wives, and a bevy of those fair to middling gentlefolk with estates out of town who always want news of the world. The visitor descends from the capital, the best dresses come out, and there’s a reception at the hotel or the restaurant. Gaiety rules for its moment, till the visitor leaves, returning to the distant bright lights of the capital, to parties and palaces, and then life goes on as before.

Everyone was extremely kind to my stories; kind to me, especially after night fell and drink began to pour. They congratulated me warmly on my good English, my little tales. ‘Your book was so funny that we almost laughed,’ one of them said to me. ‘Do you like Finland?’ ‘Do you like Sibelius?’ ‘Do you like hunting?’ ‘Do you like sauna? You must do it properly, jump in the lake and roll in the snow.’

In Kuopio I went to the sauna, surrounded by someone’s stout wife and gleaming daughters, who dropped me in the lake and then slapped me with birch twigs to bring me back from what felt like my final moments. In Mikkeli I was taken cross-country skiing, and had two planks strapped to my legs for a four-hour plod on the flat. In Kyyjärvi they took me elk-hunting, though all I brought down was a frozen branch or two. In Jyväskylä I went to the ski-jump competitions, where figures no bigger than dots descended from huge wooden gantries and crashed into snowdrifts. My stories seem to grow ever odder to me, my skin got drier, my voice grew fainter. The days got colder, the mercury dropped lower, and I moved onward, ever upward and northward.