New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (12 page)

The nurses’ mops were already lapping at our feet; the floor was steaming from the boiling water. The smell of ammonia had won out against that of turnip soup. My thoughts were with the giant Antero Vipunen, locked out of his own body, and I knew how he felt. I had not understood the story of the magic boat, but it was too complicated to ask, so I decided to ask what the word
kattohaikarat
meant instead. Koskela rose suddenly to his feet, imitating a large bird with a long beak and outspread wings. The nurses looked at him wryly.

‘No lessons today; I’m expecting visitors,’ he said abruptly, and his eyes, now strangely cloudy, were also strangely bright. I took my jacket from the coat rack and followed him from a distance into the corridor, then into the courtyard. As usual, I had not slept much that night, and was thinking of going to lie down in the visitors’ quarters, but then I saw him heading for the church, and automatically went after him, reaching the sacristy door just in time to hear the key turn in the lock. That was the day that I learned that Olof Koskela took drugs. I saw him through the sacristy window. Seated at the empty table, he was slipping a pinch of some greenish powder under his tongue; it looked a bit like mildew, and he had taken it out of a small pocket snuff-box. Then he placed his elbows firmly on the table, stretched his fingers out over the veining in the wood, so similar to that on his own hands, and stayed there motionless, staring interminably at the wall in front of him, as though he could see something there: something infinitely small, or the size of the wall itself, I do not know, but it was as though it could be seen only from that particular spot. As it appeared, his features changed, his face became a mask, with empty eye sockets and a gaping mouth. The being seated in that sparsely furnished room was no longer a man: he was a totem, with a tough wooden skin. On making this discovery, at first I felt betrayed: I felt that even the pastor was deserting me. His strength of spirit, which had brought me such support and comfort, appeared to me now merely as some chemically-produced elation, on a par with my own
koskenkorva
-fuelled drunkenness. But this feeling was short-lived. I preferred to believe that, like Antero Vipunen, the pastor was going down into his unconscious in search of the right word, the answer to all pain. Finding him suddenly so vulnerable, I felt that he was closer to me. I realized that his harsh exterior served not to shut others out, but to shut himself in: to contain the unstable magma which seethed within him. The order he imposed upon his days was a form of self punishment, meted out as penance for the unruly ramblings of his spirit; the rigour with which he went about his daily round offered some protection against the irrational into which he periodically ventured. Now I found his various fixations more understandable: behind his dogged insistence that the missals be tidily stacked away each night, the candlestick cleaned, the pencils sharpened and the brass numbers indicating the psalms put back where they belonged – behind all this lay the fear of the obscure forces he unleashed within himself. Perhaps, I thought, it was even possible that all that trawling through narcotic worlds might have caused him to stumble upon some trace of my own past.

After Ilma’s departure, my life resumed its dubious normality. I swallowed the days down whole, like shots of
koskenkorva
; I had also started to resume my regular visits to the Kämp, and my occupation as general dogsbody. At times I would accompany my journalist friend on his expeditions around the city and the outlying countryside, together with an eccentric ambassador friend of his, visiting bombed-out villages and abandoned prison camps. As Ilma had predicted, everything was now sunk in yellowish mud. The streets were slimy canals down which our vehicle slithered, sending up spurts of mushy filth. Nature was slow to reawaken; in the fields, the trees still looked completely dead, and the huts where the refugees were lodged added further desolation to the landscape. The fact that the days were drawing out seemed to be serving no purpose; for weeks on end the sky remained smoky and louring, so near the earth that it too looked as if it were soiled with mud. In the time for which I could find no other use, I wandered round the city, calling on all the people called Karjalainen I found in the phonebook. Mostly, no one came to the door; or I would be shown into dark hallways to find old women seated stock-still beside the window, or frightened families who looked at me with alarm, fearing bad news. I went up the stairs of half-empty buildings, repeated my name and received blank looks in return. I unearthed dusty little worlds of people living buried in their own houses, with nothing but a bed, a table and a tea chest of potatoes covered with a scrap of sacking. I would be met by limp bodies whose reptilian movements spoke of long confinement; by absent glances, muffled voices. They responded to my questions with incomprehensible answers, repeating them in precisely the same words when I shook my head to tell them I had not understood.

One afternoon at the end of April I ventured as far as the new parts of Vallila, where the houses petered out and the roads crossed the railway to disappear into the open country. The day was mild and windy, the sky streaked with white. It had not rained for several days and the wind had at last dried out the ever-present layer of mud. The tracks of dried earth running across the fields looked like petrified snakes, with the odd military lorry lumbering along them, sending up a line of dust like a whip-lash trail of dynamite, glowing on the horizon. I was walking along a road called Teollisuuskatu, looking for number 456, which turned out to be almost the last house, near the brick buildings by the railway. It was a large modern apartment block, with stone balconies and small windows, the main door separated from the road by a stretch of grass. I went into a gravelled courtyard, lined with rows of closed shutters. A red-haired man was mending a motorbike by one of the walls, his tools spread out beside him on a scrap of cloth; he was kneeling on the ground and peering into the open engine.

‘Excuse me, I’m looking for the Karjalainens. Heikki Karjalainen,’ I explained.

‘Second floor,’ he said, pointing towards a flight of stairs; I could hear my steps echoing out through the courtyard as I climbed them. Seeing a brown-painted door bearing a nameplate carved with the words H. Karjalainen, I stopped and listened. A smell of musty cellars rose through the air; somewhere, a wireless was playing. I pressed the brass bell; the door opened a crack and an elderly man appeared.

‘Yes?’

‘Are you Mister Karjalainen?’

‘Yes.’

‘I need to talk to you. Can I come in?’

The man peered at me from over his spectacles, hesitating for a moment before he let me in. I found myself in the gloom of a shabby living room. The only window looked out over the courtyard; I noticed a crumpled newspaper lying on a threadbare sofa. The wall opposite the window was occupied by a dark sideboard, on which stood a ticking wooden clock, decorated with stags.

‘If it’s to do with Sampo, we already know,’ the old man whispered.

‘Sampo?’ I gave a start. It was only then that I noticed a shelf cluttered with sacred images in one corner of the room, lit by a little oil lamp, in whose flickering light I now glimpsed the black-edged portrait of a sailor in uniform. I took down the photograph and went up to the window. His jacket was identical to my own; or rather it had the same collar, but the buttons were metal rather than horn. The old man followed me, shuffling around the room.

‘Second Lieutenant Manner has already been. He said it happened on the twenty-third of August.’

I stared at that face as though my life depended on it, seeking some resemblance to my own: eyes, mouth, hair. Could it be me?

‘The twenty-third of August,’ I repeated as if in a daze.

‘Yes, the day my wife and I went to eat at Kappeli’s to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I remember it well. We should never have done it, I could feel it that same evening as we were getting on to the bus. Something just wasn’t right: that red sun on the sea, our long shadows on the cobbles in the square. When you have a son who’s on active service, you don’t go to a restaurant. We were eating baked salmon and rice pudding while our son was dying; and what place is there in this world for a mother and father who have lost their son?’

The old man left the question dangling in the charged silence of the room; he was looking towards the window, and the pale light from the courtyard was reflected in his thick spectacles; behind the lenses, his eye sockets looked like two reptiles in jars of formalin.

‘That news drove Leena clean out of her mind,’ he whispered, pointing towards the half-closed door of the next room. ‘She’s like one of those soldiers who’ve trodden on a mine and got off scot-free. You must have seen them: they just sit there like statues. They look perfectly all right, just like you and me; but they don’t see, and they don’t hear. They’re like the walking dead.’

I looked around me in some disquiet, running my eyes over the room – the sideboard, the sofa, the marble table – in search of some familiar object.

‘What … what exactly happened to Sampo?’ I asked.

‘Second Lieutenant Manner said it all happened very fast. A torpedo. The Riilahti listed, caught fire and sank. All dead; but they never found Sampo.’

‘Never found him?’ I asked sharply. Noting my sudden agitation, he looked me straight in the eye for the first time.

‘Did you know him? Was he a friend of yours?’

‘I … I am called Sampo Karjalainen!’ I burst out, clutching the sailor’s portrait in both hands.

At that moment a shriek tore through the silence of the room: an old woman in a dressing-gown appeared at the door, walking towards us with staring eyes and shrieking ‘Sampo! Sampo!’ I retreated to the other side of the table in alarm.

‘Leena! Calm down! Leena!’ repeated the old man gently as he tried to restrain the woman; after a few moments she collapsed on to the sofa, fixing me with a frightened stare and whimpering.

‘Leena! What’s got into you? The gentleman won’t do you any harm, he’s just come to pay us a visit!’ He turned back to me, pulling a chair out from the table.

‘Please, do make yourself at home! What a fool I am, I haven’t even asked you to sit down! We have so few visitors, you see, I’m out of practice. Now, let’s make a pot of tea! Eh, Leena? A nice cup of tea for the gentleman! A cup of tea, that’s what we need,’ said the old man, opening the sideboard and setting teacups, saucers and teapot down haphazardly upon the table.

‘Let’s talk about Sampo,’ he added, carrying on talking as he went into the little kitchen, where I could hear him striking a match.

‘Sampo liked to have tea with us when he got back from work. Always cheerful, that boy! He would sit just where you’re sitting now, and tell us all the latest news.’

Pinned to my seat, I couldn’t take my eyes off the old woman; rocking from side to side, she stared straight back at me, repeating the fateful name under her breath. I could read it on her lips, as they opened and closed, soundlessly, non-stop.

‘Then he would go and have a wash, get on his motorbike and go into town. He bought it with his savings, you know. A German machine, a fine piece of work! That was all he was interested in. Now we’ve sold it to a neighbour. What good is a motorbike to us?’

The old man now appeared holding a steaming teapot, which he put down on the table; the steam wafted through the room, and now there was suddenly a smell of old soup, of cigarettes forgotten on some painted surface.

‘He worked as a lathe operator, did you know? And he’d found a good job – with Abloy, quite near here, the firm which makes locks.’

I picked up my teacup absently and put it down next to the photograph of Sampo Karjalainen which the old man had left lying on the table.

‘But his real passion was for his motorbike; whenever he had a moment he would go down to polish it. On summer evenings he’d take it out to the stretch of grass in front of the building and stay there listening to the engine, looking at the smoke from the exhaust. Then he’d drive off into the blue yonder, and that was the last you’d see of him! Isn’t that right, Leena?’

The old man had sat down on the sofa, next to his wife, holding her steaming teacup, stirring it slowly and helping the old woman to take sips from it, which she did from between half-closed lips; no sooner was her mouth free than she persisted with her endless muttering.

‘Leena’s taking tea with us, aren’t you, Leena? Just like when Sampo was here, making us both laugh. And could he make us laugh, that Sampo! Telling us about his friends in the factory, those two brothers, do you remember?’

The clock on the sideboard ticked on quietly in the silences between his broken sentences; from the courtyard came the sound of an engine backfiring.

‘Only Sampo could make that thing do what he wanted. Isn’t that so, Leena?’

I suddenly felt sick: in need of light, fresh air.

‘I really must be off!’ I exclaimed, pushing the cup away, walking backwards towards the door and turning the handle.

The old man shuffled after me, but did not try to stop me leaving. He blinked behind his spectacles, staring at a gap in the balcony as he spoke.

‘Sampo, please be careful with that motorbike. Don’t drive too fast, and don’t be back late; and don’t drink too much, either, Sampo! It’s dangerous!’

I left without bothering to close the door and rushed down the stairs. On the pavement outside, the red-haired man was doggedly kicking the start pedal of the motorbike; the engine would turn over for a moment, spark briefly into life and then become flooded. A ray of sunlight falling through the main door lit up the dust and violet smoke suspended in mid-air over the pit of the courtyard. I went out with relief into the airy street, into the wan evening sunlight and began to run; I did not stop until I had left the place well behind me, stopping at last amidst the ruins of a bombed-out factory, where I sat down on a low wall, closed my eyes and breathed deeply, until my head began to spin.

At the bottom of this page the address, Teollisuuskatu 456, the date, 23 August 1943, the name of Second Lieutenant Manner, and of the ship, the Riilahti, have been noted down in block capitals, with a line drawn round them. Next to the name of the ship the author had pencilled in the word ‘minelayer’, and a question mark.