New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus Europe 2011) (20 page)

It’s a lovely summer’s evening. The sun is sinking into the sea, lighting up the trunks of the trees, catching the buds of new resin on their bark, making the streamlets glitter. There was a time when this landscape would have gladdened my heart; I would have run down to the bright shore, to the waves of our own sea, unthreatening as a lake. But today this brightness holds no joy for me, and the long shadows on the meadows put me in mind of crosses. Death is all around me, and something within me, too, is dying: the affection that I felt for you, the faith I had in you. Now that their place is empty, I see how big it was. Like a bomb crater, it will fill up with water and with mud; but time will make the grass grow even there and, before long, the coots will nest there too. You, Sampo, are a plunderer of time, but I allow time to grow, and thrive.

Goodbye,

Ilma

Ilma’s last letter arrived yesterday, together with the news of the fall of Viiipuri. This one too I read under the tree of happy memories, and now it’s with the others in my jacket pocket. Once again, I did not understand it all, though I could not fail to see that it contained harsh words. It had clearly been written in a hurry, and I had difficulty copying it out. The steady, rounded hand to which I was accustomed had given way to one that was flatter, less legible. The margins were no longer neatly aligned, with the syllables conveniently marked off; now the words were twisted and choked, as though the writer had not had the time or indeed the inclination to make them comprehensible, and there were crossings out and blank spaces. Even the letters of my name on the envelope might have been written by a different hand; reading them was like hearing myself summoned by an unknown person. But nothing matters any more after what happened today at Katajanokka.

Ilma was right in saying that everything is bearable until it kills us. Man’s struggle against pain is a war where each of the two sides has its own rightful role. The winner acknowledges the dignity of the defeated, even when it is a death sentence. But my war was of another kind; it was a war in which I was my own enemy. And now I have lost it. To spare myself would have made no sense; there are no prisoners in this kind of challenge.

For days now, the city has been sweltering under a sultry cloak of haze. The air is heavy, dust-laden, full of animal smells; the sea gives out a bitter smell of rotten seaweed. As they cross the bay to reach the market, the fishing boats create waves which linger on behind them, slow to close up. Night and day follow one another under the same uncaring, leaden sky, whiter where the sun is; even at night it carries on glowing, like embers buried under ash. Beneath this stagnant air, the city barely moves; it trembles slightly as the trams pass, like the faded scenery of some old theatre. Houses and blocks of flats seem on the point of crumbling away, as though some imperceptible underground explosion had silently snapped the iron framework of their reinforcements.

Last night a land wind brought cool air, and this morning clouds streaked with violet massed above the city, shutting out the horizon from all sides. After my stint in the laundry, I had gone down to the port to enjoy the freshness, and walked as far as the point at Katajanokka. There was a lot of coming and going in the harbour at Pohjoissatama. A train was worming its way along the shore, where a big old rusty merchantman was moored. Beside me, a group of sailors seated on the ballast were watching the ships as they passed in front of the wharf, and the plumes of smoke from vessels further out to sea. A gunboat was coming out of the port, probably on its way to the Isthmus; it was heading in our direction, cleaving the water powerfully as it went, sending up wings of foam. Black in the black water, all flags flying, it was a daunting sight; we could see the sailors running busily to and fro on the deck. Now it was passing right in front of us, an imposing hulk of riveted sheet metal, bristling with cannon, teeming with shouting sailors. Two whistles from its siren threw the whole bay into a state of alert. One of the sailors on the ballast pointed to it, saying:

‘That’s German goods! It arrived here from Danzig in 1943, Walhalla, it’s called. We repainted it ourselves in the shipyards at Suomenlinna!’

I too watched the ship as it sailed by, the blue cross snapping in the wind to the stern, smoke pouring from the smoke stack, adding further grey to the dull sky. Behind the city darker clouds were now rising, swollen with rain. The sailors who’d been sitting beside me on the ballast were now walking away, caps in their hands, down along the side of the hill. Even when they had disappeared from sight, I could still hear snatches of what they were saying, as though from another world. Now I was quite alone on Katajanokka Point, and fate was preparing its show for me alone.

I was gripped by a sudden, almost physical sense of unease; it was as though my mind had not yet received the message which my eyes had sent it. My face to the wind, I carried on looking at the ship, more because it happened to be before my eyes than out of any genuine curiosity. It was then, and only then, that I saw the large white rust-streaked letters on its towering hull: ‘Sampo Karjalainen’. I have no words to describe the sensation that came over me: rather than surprise, or disbelief, my predominant feeling was one of fear: at first it felt like a blow, a sudden lash to the defenceless brain, then, like a poison, it slowly seeped into every vein in my body. I let out a cry; but even a thousand cries would not have been enough. A cruel God has fashioned us in such a way that pain never bursts out all at one time, tearing us limb from limb; filters in mind and body intervene to slow the process down, to make us fully present at our suffering, so that we may sound out each portion of ourselves as it goes into agony, gasping and wheezing and powerless to die. That was what I experienced that morning on Katajanokka Point, nailed to the spot by that sight, my mind darkened by a maelstrom of thought. So that was it: that name, which I had always believed to be my own, written on the discoloured label of my seaman’s jacket, was nothing other than the name of a warship. Thinking back to what the sailor had said, I realised why no one had ever linked my name with that of the warship ‘Sampo Karjalainen’; it had not long been part of the Finnish navy. So no one had heard of it, and there was no knowing where it had previously been operating. So, did my jacket belong to one of the sailors on the warship? Indeed, was I one of them? And how had I landed up in Trieste? Or had I got hold of that jacket in some other way? So, who was I? What about the monogram on the handkerchief? What did those letters mean? They could not refer to the name of the ship. Whose initials were they? That volley of unanswerable questions toppled my certainties like bowling pins. The identity I had built up for myself with so much difficulty crumbled away in an instant, was blown sky-high by that explosion of white letters rising from the sea like a shout, an insult, a jeer. The warship ‘Sampo Karjalainen’ slipped slowly out towards the open sea, taking my name with it. Trieste, the Tübingen, Doctor Friari, Stettin, the Ostrobothnia, Ilma, Koskela, they were all whirling around in the kaleidoscope of my mind, turning every image into so many unfamiliar fragments. I was not Sampo Karjalainen, perhaps I was not even Finnish; now, I was no one at all.

Paradoxically, this discovery – which in fact was taking me nearer to the truth – had the effect of utterly weakening my resolve. I no longer had the strength to search, to try to stay afloat. I was seized by an irresistible urge to let myself founder, to disappear into the innermost recesses of my twisted mind. It no longer made sense to carry on seeking my real name, my real past. Eventually, I had indeed become Sampo Karjalainen, but not the one I dreamed of, with a house, a past, a family awaiting him. I was a non-existent man, invented by a label on a seaman’s jacket, a huge misunderstanding which had taken on life through a cruel coincidence of accidents of which I was unaware. No shadow of uncertainty any longer lay between me and a tragic fate which I could not avoid. Such knowledge as I had, believing that I could legitimately claim it as my own, might after all have nothing to do with my true story, with my true name. Just a short time ago, I had believed that my real past was at my fingertips as I walked the streets of Helsinki, had dreamed that I would sooner or later take complete possession of it; now it was disappearing before my very eyes, sucked away by that whirlpool of unquestionable truth. Because now I knew it: that was the truth.

Now I started running: away from the sea, into the densest tangle of streets, where I wandered like a madman. It seemed to me that the whole city was reading that name as it was paraded around the bay on the ship’s hull, that the journalists from the Kämp, the nurses in the hospital, even the sick and wounded, had gone down to the shore to take a good look at it, and that they were now marching threateningly towards me, demanding an explanation. Now the black crowd was driving me back into that same sea by which I had arrived that distant winter morning: they were fending me off, they were rejecting me. They were punishing me for having deceived them. I could not make out their faces, all I saw was the odd profile, part of a face, a snarling mouth, an outstretched leg, a raised arm. Some were shrieking, others were responding with a raised fist. A hand would seize me, trying to knock me to the ground, another would grab me by the collar, shouting: ‘Who are you?’ I wandered around the city, no longer recognizing it, no longer distinguishing what I was imagining from what I saw. I jumped with fright at every approaching passer-by, I peered about me, frightened that I was going to be attacked. I drifted around in a daze, taking streets I’d never seen before. The blood beat in my temples, my eyes throbbed, my hands trembled. Anguish was slowly taking over, paralysing my every action, choking down my every thought. It began to rain, a monotonous downpour, without thunder or lightning, which drowned out all other sounds. The city could breathe at last; I too heaved a sigh of relief. The clouds above me seethed and swelled, seemed to be ever growing. A quiet earthquake was shaking skies where, during those long days of heat, a bewitched city had grown up, an evil mirror of the real one, made up of fog and clouds. I walked the streets dreaming that the warship too was part of that diabolical double game, that the rain would carry it away as well, and that the white letters of its name would dissolve like a mirage over the distant sea.

The cold water on my skin, my eyes, my face, lessened my terror somewhat; I felt its coldness running down my every limb, soothing and washing my wounds. I recognized the Bulevardi, went as far as the Esplanadi, then reached the hospital, still in the pouring rain.

I have been here all day, seated on my bed in the visitors’ quarters, finishing writing these last pages. I have not been to mass, nor to the refectory; I have neither eaten nor drunk. It is late now; another night without darkness has fallen over the city. Now my mind is made up: I shall leave for the front at dawn with the first troop train. Over all these months I have believed that I was someone I am not. I have looked among these people for my race, my kith and kin; I have learned the language in which I thought I had once called my mother, but whose sounds in fact had maybe never issued from my mouth. I shall never know in which language my mother sang me her lullabies. My language – my real language – is lost for ever. It slipped away, together with my memory; seeped away into the sea, together with my blood, that night on the wharf in Trieste. Perhaps my memories are drifting around in the oceans like unnoticed oil slicks, perhaps the waves are carrying them to some distant beach where they will be scattered, or sink into the sand like foam. If I had not gone down into the port that morning, perhaps I would never have known the truth; or perhaps that moment would simply have been delayed, who knows by how long. I might have lived for another fifty years without ever coming across the ‘Sampo Karjalainen’. One day, in some distant future, when I was old and tired, I might perhaps have been able to accept the truth as a joke played on me by destiny. A whole life lived inside a wrong name makes it the right one, turns falsehood into truth. Two steps away from death, I would have laughed in the face of anyone who had come to tell me that I was not Sampo Karjalainen. More probably, though, the relentless burden of unease which I had borne ever since my awakening on board the Tübingen would have grown heavier over time, would have crushed all my efforts to find myself a life. No country would have felt like home. Even when I was at my most convinced that I would indeed be able to rediscover my past, I often had the feeling that I was moving in the wrong direction. Such faint traces of myself as I did occasionally come upon in my ravaged mind led elsewhere; and yet, as soon I began to follow them, they became indistinct. Perhaps I should never have taken up Doctor Friari’s suggestion, never have thwarted the fate which had taken me to Trieste. That was my path, and I have strayed from it. I had the gall to make a choice; but in this world we have no choices. Or perhaps my destiny was precisely this: to come all this way, to learn Finnish, to become a Finn, even if I have never really become one. All in all, by now I owe this country everything; or rather, I owe it such little as I have managed to become. Without even knowing who I was, without asking for anything in exchange, it lent me a name, a language. In its hour of need, it took me in; all it required to be accepted, to be recognized as one of its own, was a name tape sewn into a sailor’s jacket. A letter from an unknown doctor in the German army was enough to ensure me a bed and a succession of hot meals. So, because I am called Sampo Karjalainen, and because I speak Finnish, I shall go and fight for this country at dawn, and if I have not succeeded in being a real Finn in life, at least I shall be one in death. On the cross which they will place upon my grave, the name I bear will at last be mine. Mine alone; completely mine. I am leaving you my story, reader, so that you will make a memory of it. In this way I, who will live on in no one’s memory, who, when alive, never existed, will be able to die hoping to be remembered.