New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (15 page)

‘Clinging to the rock, the mistress of Pohjola looked on in terror as her ship sank and her soldiers disappeared into the waves like bits of useless iron. Then she laid hold of five rusty scythes and five twisted hooks, and turned them into talons which she bound on to her hands. She collected the timbers and made them into huge wings, cut out a tail for herself from the sails, fashioned herself a pointed beak from the mizen-mast, into which she drove sharp nails. She placed a thousand archers on one wing, a thousand armed men on the other and hurled herself at Väinämöinen’s boat. Seeing the monstrous bird that was throwing itself upon him, Väinämöinen raised his eyes to the heavens and said: “Mighty Ukko, you alone can save us”. But the valorous Lemminkäinen rose to his feet, unsheathed his sword and severed the talons of the monstrous bird with a single downward stroke; then he hacked its wings into pieces, and the thousands of archers and armed men hurtled into the sea and disappeared in the black water. The mistress of Pohjola, clinging to the three heroes’ boat, flung herself upon the magic
Sampo
and clasped it to herself, but it slipped out of her hands and fell into the sea. She tried to regain her hold of it, but managed only to seize one of its lids. Heavy as a mountain, the
Sampo
sank down into the sea and shattered into a thousand pieces on the warm rock of the sea bottom, where the red seaweed grows. Suddenly the waves froze, the fish became nothing but white bones and stone birds plummeted down from a smoke-filled sky. Nothing moved. Life had disappeared from the face of the earth. The god Ukko had sucked it all back into himself. The magic
Sampo
had been destroyed, and darkness had once more taken possession of the earth.’

He had spoken without drawing breath. Now he was looking puzzledly at the dark nave, as though he had forgotten where he was. He stepped down from the altar, shaking back the hair which had fallen over his eyes and came to sit beside me on the bench. The downpour that was falling on to the oval of glass above the door cast a teeming shadow on the floor.

‘The right word. That’s all the difference between life and death. Memory is inseparable from words. Words draw things out of the shadows. Learn the words and you will recover your memory,’ were his last words before he fell silent. Head in his clasped hands, he seemed not even to be breathing. I cannot be sure of this, but it seemed to me that he had his eyes wide open and was staring fixedly into the darkness. Drunk on his words, tired after our long walk, I too was dozing off. I dreamed that I was surrounded on all sides by a fretful, silent crowd which was dragging me with it on its random course. Someone, swept along by the mass, had their arms around my neck so as to avoid being trampled under foot. I felt their spasmodic grip, their nails upon my skin, and I woke up with cramp in the upper part of my back. Leaning over to one side, I had collapsed on to the bench. Aching all over, legs and arms numb, I straightened up; the pastor was standing in front of me.

‘The storm is over, let’s go,’ he said without any sign of emotion, and set off for the door of the church, hands clasped behind his back.

This is the first time that I have read an account of the events of our civil war told through the eyes of a Finn. I lost my father in that war, and today he does not even have a grave where I can go to mourn; I find it hard to endorse certain patriotic myths, and it grieves me, but also enrages me, that this sometimes causes me to pass for a traitor. Often, even within one single people, the fatherland will be riven into groups, each failing to acknowledge the other; and it is this that lies at the root of the madness which has reduced Europe to ashes. Despots masquerading as patriots insist on the importance of their own myths, proclaiming that, without such myths, there can be no true patriotism. Thus the fatherland is reduced to a matter of borders, proclaimed as sacred above all other contending ones, sometimes in the name of the same god. The leaders who today are boasting of having reunified a Finland formerly divided into Reds and Whites, fail to see that they have carved a deep rift within our people. They claim to have made Finland whole again; yet the men shot without trial by Mannerheim’s white guards were part of the country too. One day someone will have to have the courage to wrest the monopoly of the fatherland from these impostors and give it back to all free men, to those who draw up frontiers with ideas and not with barbed wire. Essentially, the fatherland is the land of your fathers, but my father is dead and I am the son of others, enrolled by force in the German army to fight a war which was not my own. There is no longer any fatherland in which I can believe.

I had never realized that the word
Raamattu
derived from Grammar. It is one of those things that is so utterly obvious that you fail to notice them. Yet perhaps it tells us a lot about the Finns’ own deep love of their own language. For us, language is the word of God, even when you don’t believe in Him, and grammar is an exact science, made up of commensurable meanings and based on unquestionable theorems. The right word gives thought a sense of harmony, the mathematical inevitability of music. But each age plays different music, and chords which were once regarded as the work of the devil no longer frighten anyone. There is no such thing as eternal harmony: like everything else in this world, sounds too have their day, and man has to invent new ones in order to ward off silence. What we today regard as music would have been seen as noise a hundred years ago. Yesterday’s mistake is just today’s harmless oddity. The rule always succeeds the word: this is the great weakness of all grammar. The rule is not order, it is just a description of some form of disorder. Like everything peculiar to man, language too changes, and to strive for linguistic purity is as senseless as to strive for its racial equivalent. Linguists say that all languages tend towards simplification, aiming to express the maximum of possible meaning through the fewest possible sounds. So the shortest words are also the oldest, the most worn away by time. In Finnish, the word for war is
sota,
and these two syllables are eloquent pointers to how many we have indeed waged.

A language’s prescriptive baggage comes into being less to facilitate its comprehension, than to prevent foreigners’ access to it. Each language barricades itself behind the hard won knowledge of its grammar, like a secret sect behind its mumbo-jumbo. But language is not a religion in which one can believe or not believe. Language is a natural phenomenon, peculiar to all humanity. Human stupidity has divided it up into a plurality of grammars, each claiming to be the ‘right’ one, to reflect the clarity of thought of a whole people. Thus each people learns the rules of its own grammar, deluding itself that it is these same rules that will resolve life’s mysteries.

Ever since Finland had refused the peace conditions laid down by the Russians, the spectre of war had returned to haunt Helsinki. Just as it was beginning to recover from the February bombings, the city was once more plunged into a state of fear. Troop movements began. In the wan spring sunshine, the green uniforms of the frontier guards patrolling the Suurtori, their blue and white cockades a-flutter, had something cheerful yet also grimly determined about them. Trains laden with troops and cannon manoeuvred laboriously in front of the harbour before finally moving off, whistling lugubriously. The bay filled up with warships, looming up suddenly from the archipelago and coming to anchor offshore, where they remained, as motionless as whales. The Kämp itself was a sea of activity. Many new faces had arrived, receiving haughty treatment from the old-timers. The questions they asked showed that they knew nothing about the country, let alone the city. On foot, they never ventured beyond the Esplanadi, and went around exclusively in taxis, even just for a few hundred metres. They seemed irritated by the fact that nothing was yet happening, and spent their mornings in the hotel press-room, glued to the telephone with their reports. A rumour was going around to the effect that the Russians were preparing a landing. At the slightest press leak, taxis packed with journalists would dash out of the city and head in the direction of some distant bay, awaiting ships which never came. Once I accompanied my journalist friend on one of these forays. We went through Porvoo and carried on the road to Kotka, rounding a promontory with a lighthouse and driving down towards the sea. Kilometre after kilometre had gone by without our encountering a living soul. Immediately inland from the coast, the woods began, approached by a stony track across a field. We positioned ourselves at the side of the road, enjoying the weak sunlight. The beach was strewn with rock spikes, stuck into the sand point upwards, to prevent panzers from landing. The reporters had their cameras at the ready; one American journalist had even brought his binoculars. We waited endlessly, in silence, like hunters on the
qui vive
. The landscape stretching before us had something curiously geometrical about it: the white beach, with its rocky prisms drawn up in tidy ranks, the glassy slabs of sky and sea, welded together by the line of the horizon, crisp and watertight. Some time in the middle of the afternoon, everything changed colour: the blue of the sea deepened, the blue of the sky faded to white and the rock spikes ceased to cast a shadow. Some people went down on to the beach and began strolling along it, kicking idly at the shells. Others went back to the taxi, and asked the driver to take them back to a shop they’d passed on their way, to get something to drink. The reporters had put down their cameras and were sitting on the sand, having a smoke. A wind got up, soughing through the wood behind us. We ended the afternoon throwing stones at an empty barrel bobbing in the water, and at sunset we set off again for Helsinki.

‘I expect we’ll find the Russians waiting for us at the Kämp,’ joked someone as we piled back into the car.

With May came light. They put little tables out at Kappeli’s, and in the morning fishing boats would tie up at the wharves in front of the market, selling salt fish and onions. The ferry to the islands came back into action, a little old wooden steamer smelling of diesel and wet rope. It would make a languid departure at mid-day, taking a broad turn in the bay before disappearing behind the island where the yacht club was. The days were pulling out, and all that light would send me wandering the streets till late, almost always on foot, stopping to rest on the benches when I was well and truly exhausted. Sometimes I would board the first tram that came along and go on to discover new parts of the city. By now I’d been through every suburb of Helsinki, from Laakso to Valilla. Koskela had given me a map which he’d torn out of the telephone directory, putting pencil rings around the places I should visit. A conscientious tourist, I had been to every single one, always bringing back some memento, a theatre programme, a ticket I’d found on the ground, an empty packet of some unknown brand of cigarette. I took notes, followed my routes on the map, copied out words I had not understood, and had the pastor explain them to me during the next lesson. Day after day, I had gradually taken possession of Helsinki’s streets. I began to sample the reassuring feeling of already knowing what awaited me round the next corner. Like an animal on its own home ground, I had dug my own personal itineraries out of the tangle of streets, the routes I took to go from one place to another without bothering to try and find the shortest one. But I knew the city as a tourist, not as a native.

The moment anyone asked me anything, no matter how banal, my reassuring sense of anonymity deserted me. My words betrayed my outsider status: my very voice gave off sounds that did not ring true, like a cracked glass. The language did not flow with ease; I had to construct each word carefully before pronouncing it, laboriously seeking the right amount of breath, the correct pressure of the lips, sounding out my palate with my tongue in search of the only point which could produce the sound I was looking for and then turning it into the right case before actually delivering it up. That cavity which was my mouth, which seemed so small, would suddenly become immense. It seemed impossible to me that everything should be played out within those fractions of a millimetre, that a segment of muscle, if too tense, should alter a meaning completely, that one puff of air too much, or too little, should be enough to cause me to be mistaken for an Estonian or Ingrian, or indeed break off the thread of meaning entirely.

Often on the tram I would pick up bits of phrases, snatches of conversation which I would brood over mentally until I learned them. Then, when I was alone, stretched out on my bed before falling asleep, I would repeat them aloud, building up the missing parts around them and projecting invented worlds on to the grey walls of the visitors’ quarters, in which I would engage in conversation with imaginary friends to whom I gave the faces of the people who had been around me in the tram. When Koskela left, and I was absolutely alone, I could no longer distinguish real people from those I had imagined. One day, at the no.7 tram stop, I said a friendly hello to an elderly gentleman with a moustache who had showed me the way to the Olympic Stadium not long before. Only later did I realize that I had imagined the whole thing or, to be more accurate, that I had muddled things up: the gentleman with the moustache had given the relevant information not to me, but to a young man sitting next to me on the tram; and it wasn’t the Olympic Stadium he’d wanted, but the university hospital. The Olympic Stadium was what I could see out of the tram window at that moment. I remembered every one of the words they had exchanged, the expressions and even the gestures that had gone with them. Like so many others, I had repeated them a thousand times: I had made them my own.

In my wanderings, I would mingle with the silent crowds leaving church on a Sunday, or with the queues outside the grocers’ shops. I also liked to join the throng of people boarding a tram: I would pretend that I too was getting off at a certain stop, that I too was going somewhere specific, and from time to time I would look out of the window to see how far it was to my imagined destination. Then I would get off at some randomly chosen street, walk purposefully for ten or twenty paces, to give the tram time to move off, then resume my aimless ramblings. I would go on to the next stop and wait for the tram on the other side of the street, taking it back where I had come from. To all intents and purposes I was a Finn like all those around me, except that no one knew me; six months ago, no one would have seen me. They greeted one another, recognized each other when they met. I was not included in any handshake. If all the inhabitants of Helsinki had come together one day to talk about that lonely individual with the strange accent who walked from one end of the city to the other at the strangest hours, getting on and off trams at random, they would have found that not one of them knew me, that not one of them knew where I was from.