New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (18 page)

“No, my son, that will not help you, nor will time bring you solace or forgiveness until the whole of your allotted destiny has been played out,” answered his mother, crushed by grief. For she knew that only when he had massacred the whole house of Untamo would her son be free of the hatred that she herself had planted in his heart. Now he had turned into a giant, twisted tree, one which no axe could dint.’

As he spoke, Koskela had become in turn a wolf, a bear, a barracuda. Now he was a tree, motionless in the middle of the room: his skin had become bark, his outstretched arms gnarled branches, waiting expectantly. He was breathing heavily: like the real trees outside, he rustled in the night wind.

‘The day he left to wage war against Untamo, Kullervo did not know that he would never see his mother again, that with the conclusion of his mission his life too would end; that the pain which had driven him to it would be put out. His mother, like all mothers, sensed as much; but she could not hold him back. She had dreamed that he would have a happy life, that she would enjoy a calm old age beside him. Fate had decreed otherwise, and that fate was now being inexorably played out. In vain she begged her son to stay; she would rather have him alive and accursed than dead and liberated. But Kullervo was deaf to her entreaties, and proceeded to massacre all of Untamo’s kith and kin, leaving their village a smoking wreck. When he returned home and found only the dog, Musti, he saw that this was the end. It was remorse that killed him; nothing else could have.’

Here Koskela broke off again, poured out another two glasses of
koskenkorva
and again downed his own in a single gulp. That night’s story included many words I did not know, mention of many objects I had never heard of; but I didn’t feel that I could interrupt him and ask for explanations. Even when I lost the thread, I was captivated just hearing him speak. In the darkness, I could no longer read his lips. His eyes were two craters in his lunar face, his mouth a black abyss, a volcano that spat out sounds; it was those I now followed, rather than the words. Above all, I liked the names: Antero, Kullervo, Untamo, Kalervo. They were not merely names, they were magic formulae. It was as though, by pronouncing them, their owners would emerge alive from the pastor’s throat, like so many monsters which he had been harbouring deep in his entrails, and wander around the room, bemoaning their fate and dancing around as though possessed.

‘The fight against the evil which drove Kullervo to commit his crimes goes on to this day. Väinämöinen was right: we can do nothing against it. Human life bursts into flames, then burns and dies out without a jot of all the pain we bear within us being consumed. Quite the reverse: this insatiable animal feeds upon every man who comes into this world, upon every life which is added to the lives already here. It grows and grows, devouring everything around it, like those loathsome fish which live in the muddy depths of lakes where no algae grow. All we can do is to deny it its nourishment. If the world’s evil feeds upon our lives, only without them will it grow hungry, and so die. That is why the killing must go on, why every war is good; why every death takes us nearer our goal!’

Now there was anger in the pastor’s eyes. His irate shadow lashed the room, and I felt I had to get up from where I was sitting to protect myself. I flattened myself against the wall, that same wall that Koskela used to stare at during his hallucinations. I sounded out its cracks and lumps, my hands behind my back. I had the impression that they were mysterious signs, key to some rite of passage, and that that wall was the doorway to another world. In the guttering light of the candle I saw the figure of Kullervo in the
Kalevala
that lay open on the table, the painting by Gallen-Kallela that Koskela had showed me on several occasions. His eyes raised to the skies, his face distorted in a furious grimace, his fist firmly clenched, his whole appearance made me shudder. The red light falling in through the window was now becoming slowly tinged with grey. The sun was sinking behind the forests and a dense layer of salt-laden cloud was settling over the sleepless city. The pastor was waving his fist in front of the square of transparent window, but it no longer cast any shadow.

‘What is the message of the cross, if not death? Powerless in the face of evil, God has at least tried to show us the way out!’

That night I dreamed that waves of soldiers were emerging silently from the sea and falling upon the city; they had black lumps instead of eyes. All that was to be seen of their faces was their mouths, twisted with effort. They were running through the streets of the town centre at breakneck speed, their steps echoing on the cobbles like the roll of a broken drum, swarming all over the place like so many black insects. They came pouring into the Suurtori, climbed the steps up to the cathedral and went down the other side. They were running but not stopping, never firing, they had no weapons. They went through the city, making their way through the terrified crowd, then vanished into the woods, dived into the lakes, never to re-emerge. Then suddenly we realized that it was they who were frightened of us, it was they who were fleeing. Then we ran after them, hoping to grab hold of them, but there were too many of them, they slipped through our grasp like shadows, like clouds in the sky, like mice. Then they were no more to be seen, and all that could be heard was our shouts as we ran after them.

I woke up with the feeling that I had not slept at all. My head ached, and there was a bitter taste in my mouth; the walls of the room looked softer in the pink dawn light. Something told me that it was late. The bell had not rung. Suddenly I understood. Walking slowly into the church – I was no longer in a hurry – I found the nurses somewhat flustered, muttering irritated comments without moving from their seats. The door of the sacristy was wide open; the half-empty bottle of
koskenkorva
was still on the table, and the
Kalevala
open at the page with the picture of Kullervo.

In the days following Koskela’s departure, I clung to my studies as though to a life jacket. When the time for my lesson came, I would shut myself in the sacristy and study every word I’d put down in my notebook, declining it in all possible cases, conjugating each verb in every voice I knew, down to the most tortuous forms of the passive, the conditional, even the past potential; undaunted now by irregular verbs with alternating consonants, I had in my head all the ‘p’s which became ‘v’s, the ‘lke’s which became ‘lje’s, the ‘ht’s which became ‘hd’s. Strong or weak, there was no stem of any verb I could not pick out in the forest of syllabic mutations, where it was enough to add one vowel to cause three consonants to disappear; then there were those nouns without so much as a diphthong, where the ‘i’s of the plural put paid to every syllable not protected by solid dentals. The only thing that sometimes floored me was polysyllabic stems, and then I would fill page after page getting them right, feeling an unhealthy pleasure at seeing those sheets so densely packed with words, those elixirs of grammar whose every line contained three or four rules, one entangled in the exceptions of another but always itself correct. When I had reached the end of my own notebook, when I’d exhausted my stock of headed notepaper from the Hotel Kämp, I had the nurses give me sheets of wrapping paper. I spread them out on the table as though they were maps of my personal campaigns, filling every last bit of them with formulae as unforgiving as equations, where every letter that I wrote weighed heavy as lead in terms of sheer mental effort. Fragile as houses of cards but logically indestructible, those syntactical digests were my defence against an enemy who was attacking me from behind. I had no tanks, no bombardiers, and each day surprised me on a different front, drawing me into the open, far from reason’s hiding-places, towards a chasm of gloomy, giddy thoughts. It was then that I needed all fifteen Finnish grammatical cases, the four forms of the infinitive, not to mention the negative pluperfect to keep my mind engaged, to drag it clear of that carpet bombing. Then I would even resort to declining my name, ‘
Sampo
’, as a noun, one of those which have a slightly odd partitive plural, and
karjalainen
as an adjective – at least that was regular, as round and perfect as a circle. Once again, my name was all I had. The label coming unstitched from the neck of my jacket was my identity card, my sole claim to existence, the fragile line of communication allowing me to carry on restocking my trenches and resisting the temptation to disappear, to do away with myself, like the pastor, to go back into the darkness from which I had come. The words of Doctor Friari often came into my mind, when he had encouraged me to love the Finnish language, to abandon myself to it as one would to the arms of a loving woman. Then the fire that still burned beneath the ashes should have taken on new life: I’d been blowing on those embers for months, for months I had been coaxing into life a flame which would not take. The words came out of my mouth and disappeared like stones thrown into the sea; nothing of them stayed in my brain. My memory was nothing but a list of words, a dictionary, a conversation manual. Ilma – perhaps she was the answer; but I could not love Ilma without first knowing who I was. I could not offer her the heart of someone I did not know. Perhaps because I wished her well, I could not love her. Not even my feelings were really my own. I bore the name of the body I inhabited, but I did not have its heart. This was something that Doctor Friari had never understood, and I did not have the words to explain it to him. After all these months, I realized that I was as alone as I had been on that first day. The anguish which had nailed me to the bed that first afternoon was still within me, entire and unabated.

Had I been able to be at that man’s side during his time in Finland, I am certain that today we would be able to laugh together about Sampo Karjalainen. We would have gone to Kappeli’s, sat down in front of a tankard of beer and talked to each other about our experiences in the war, mine on board the Tübingen and his on the streets of Helsinki. Then even this grim winter would have seemed less dire, its snow and stars dispelling thoughts of darkness. I feel even more bitter reading these lines when I think how little it would have taken for him to have come through unscathed. If he had held on for another few weeks the war would have been over, Miss Koivisto would have been back in Helsinki and everything would have been different; because, however unfeeling, no human heart can hold out against a woman in love. A woman in love is a physical presence, a body which, of all those on earth, seeks out and desires only our own. We are animals, we are made of flesh and blood, we have need of the body in order to gain a sense of the soul. Of each lost love, it is the body that we mourn and, could we but keep it, even lifeless, even mute, but intact, we would make do with that. For bodies we are ready to build pyramids, and even after a hundred years a man is not dead until his body has been found. We refer to him as missing, we imagine him dragging out some kind of existence in a distant, hostile land, clinging grimly on to life, desperate to come home. We cannot help him, we cannot go out towards him, because anyone who has gone so far away is always in the wrong and must pay a price, a ransom. All we can do is wait for him, it is our duty to wait for him, and this may be a lifelong wait. Only the return of his body can free us from this waiting.

It is little consolation to me to see that my advice was valid: only a woman could have saved that man, and Miss Ilma almost succeeded. I had been right. My diagnosis had been correct; the medicine had been what was needed. But I had proffered it to the wrong patient.

These last pages are in a poor state. Some parts are stained with liquid, possibly
koskenkorva,
and the writing is smudged, though the basic meaning has not been lost. I found no trace of the second exercise book of which the author speaks, presumably used solely for studying the Finnish language, nor of the sheets of packing paper given him by the nurses. From this point onwards the document is no longer written in ink, but in indelible pencil. Although it is less methodical than the earlier parts, it shows a surer grasp of the language which this man had been so effortfully obliged to learn; even the mistakes are more academic, often due to the discrepancy between the spoken and the written language. All in all, it might indeed be said that that man had learned, or perhaps constructed, his own personal version of the Finnish language, a language all his own, handworked and roughly cut, where each word needed correcting, filing down, before it could come into complete possession of its meaning.

How such a language must have sounded is hard to imagine. Miss Koivisto says that he managed to make himself understood perfectly adequately, even if he had to reformulate his sentences several times before they became comprehensible. He would alternate rudimentary and ungrammatical constructions with others taken from a printed book or idiomatic phrases, sometimes used in the wrong context. He had no concept of linguistic registers, and would use adjectives taken from the Bible alongside nouns he had heard in the bar at the Kämp. He did not give the impression of knowing the rules, but seemed to have learned the inflected forms of words according to their usage. He did the same thing with verbs, preferring the simpler constructions of the impersonal passive. As a neurologist I still marvel at this feat. My scientific knowledge fails to explain how that man could have built himself up a personality out of nothing, forged a language for himself by sheer willpower. Clearly, our minds are infinitely more powerful than we know. Shamans, saints and madmen gain mastery of this lethal weapon in different ways, and sometimes it kills them. They stray into this unknown dimension and, in their delirium, bring us back scraps of it which we find indecipherable.

It was only after the battle of Kuuterselkä, when the first wounded began to arrive back in Helsinki, that we realized what was really going on in the Karelian Isthmus. They were brought back to the city by night, so that people wouldn’t see them, in lorries driven by the medical corps. I heard them arriving, saw them going into the misty courtyard; then I started to get dressed. I stayed seated on my bed, waiting for the nurses to come and call me. In the bruised light, their bandages looked the same colour as the gravel in the courtyard. They emerged from beneath the tarpaulins like ghosts, and we shepherded them slowly into the building, helping those who were incapable of walking. We took them to the innermost wing of the hospital, the one which also housed the visitors’ quarters. They were almost all very young, more perturbed by what they had escaped than by the wounds themselves. They were unwilling to speak of life at the front, and answered the nurses’ questions in monosyllables. Many were running fevers, and for several days all that could be seen of them was their outline, standing out beneath the sheets. The others too stayed lying down, staring at the ceiling or, if they were able to get up, going into the courtyard, where they wandered around smoking cigarettes they never finished. The few veterans from the Winter War told us about the breakthrough at Valkeasaari; they said that they had never seen such aggression, that this time the Russians were really bringing out the big guns. The line of defence at Kuuterselkä, too, had been breached with the utmost ease. But how could anyone hold out against such force? Both the nurses’ questions and the soldiers’ answers suggested a shared concern, hitherto kept hidden, the nervous allusion to a place which no one dared to name. I had looked for the places I was hearing about on the map; without exception, they formed a ring around Viipuri, a circle which was closing in. People discussed the news in the papers without ever making explicit mention of the name of the great city, almost as though they thought it would bring bad luck, as though not naming it would cause the Russians to forget about its existence. In the hospital refectory the patients would gather around the soldiers returning from the Isthmus and listen carefully to what they had to say, seeking the slightest sign that the Russians were directing their attack elsewhere, that Viipuri was in the clear, and anything would serve to bear out that conviction: current rumours, letters from the front, the most abstruse strategic reflections from some returning soldier. People would reassure themselves by repeating that the capital of Karelia was too well-defended, that the Russians would never run the risk of incurring the huge losses that such an attack would incur. The Germans were retreating, Leningrad was not in danger. Why would the Russians persist in attacking Viipuri?