Sixty Degrees North (23 page)

For centuries, fishing was the main industry here, alongside the export of cattle, timber and animal hides. Craftsmen too began to congregate in the area – tailors, weavers, tanners, cobblers – and in the higgledy-piggledy lanes of the old town, streets still carry the names of the professions they once housed. There is Hattmakaregatan (hat-makers' street), Smedsgatan (smiths' street), Linvävaregatan (linen-weavers' street), Handskmakaregatan (glove-makers' street). The buildings too are named after the fish and animals that once would have driven the local economy: the eel house, the goat house, the bream, the roach and the herring.

Some mornings, Ekenäs felt stripped out, almost absent from itself, as though in winter the town didn't fully exist at all. I enjoyed exploring at those times, walking back and forth through the hushed streets, past the same shop windows and the same houses. Sometimes I walked out to the
edge of town, where the trees took over, then turned back. I crossed the bridge to the little island of Kråkholmen, then turned again and headed to the Town Hall Square, where the sweet tang of antifreeze rose like cheap perfume from the parked cars.

At night things were quieter still. Parents and grandparents dragged young children on sleds through the town centre, the snow lit like lemon ice beneath the streetlamps' glow. A few walkers, dog walkers, youths, couples and me: it was peaceful, and pleasant to be out. Only later on was the stillness broken, when boy racers practised handbrake turns at the icy junction outside my hotel, their cars spinning and sliding from one side of the road to the other.

Quietest of all, though, were the narrow streets and lanes of the old town, where footsteps creaked like leather on the trampled snow. Along Linvävaregatan, the oldest section, many of the houses were painted that earthy, Swedish red, with white window panels and features, while on nearby streets the boards were pastel blue, peach, olive and butterscotch. In the garden of one of these houses, a male bullfinch, bright ochre-breasted, seemed almost aware of how perfectly he fitted in this colourful corner. The brightness of the town was completed by strings of Christmas lights slung over windows and trees. Though it was already mid-January, Yule wreaths were displayed on front doors, and electric candle bridges were arched behind glass. In Britain we rush to remove our seasonal decorations, to maintain an arbitrary tradition. Here, though, lights and candles are kept in place. They feel like a natural response to the cold and darkness, not just for Christmas but for the whole winter.

In a narrow lane in the old town, I stood one evening outside the small, square windows of a house. On the vertical weatherboards, the red paint was flaking away, leaving scars of age on the warped wood. Inside, there was no light, but I thought that I could make out two pictures hanging
on the far wall: one a painting of a sailing ship, the other of a snowbound landscape. I could see only a few details of the room, but not the room itself. It looked abandoned, as though no one had been in there for years. It was an empty house that held a piece of the past intact. I am not sure what prompted me to want to take a photograph of this window. Perhaps it was the incompleteness of it, and the suggestion that, somehow, what lay beyond the glass was not entirely of the present. I wondered, maybe, if the lens might capture what I could not see, if it might illuminate the fragments and make them whole. But as I lifted the camera from my bag there was a movement inside, a shadow that crossed the space between me and those paintings. It looked like a person shuffling past in the darkness. I jumped back, as though I'd been caught doing something terrible, then turned and walked on, feeling guilty and unsettled. As the moments passed I found myself uncertain about what exactly I'd seen. Had there been a person there or had I only imagined it? I still can't say for certain.

Until the twentieth century, Finland had never existed as a nation, only as a culturally distinct region under the control of one or other of its powerful neighbours. Sweden occupied the territory from the mid-twelfth century up until the beginning of the nineteenth, but after the Napoleonic wars it was ceded to Russia, and became a semi-autonomous ‘grand duchy'. In the century that followed, a cultural and political nationalism began to grow in the population. Although the Finnish parliament opened its doors in 1905 (and was the first in Europe to offer universal suffrage), it was not until more than a decade later that the country truly became a country. In the wake of the Russian revolution, Finland declared independence in December 1917, and despite the violence it had suffered at Russian hands in the past, it did
not, in the end, have to fight for that independence. Lenin, who had spent time in hiding here from the tsarist authorities back in St Petersburg, was a supporter of Finnish nationalism, and one of his earliest acts as leader was to let the grand duchy go. Had his own history been a little different, the history of this country might also have been so. Though a short, bloody civil war ensued, between those who wished to emulate the new Russian socialism and those in favour of a monarchy, the country ultimately settled on neither, becoming instead an independent democratic republic.

Finland is often described as a strange place, one of the most culturally alien of European states, and in a sense that fact is remarkable. For despite being dominated from outside until just a century ago, this country always maintained an identity that was very much its own. That identity, and that very real sense of difference, was founded first of all upon linguistics. Contrary to a common misrepresentation, Finland is not a Scandinavian country, and its language is entirely unrelated either to those of its Nordic neighbours or to Russian. In fact, Finnish is not an Indo-European language at all. It is Uralic, and related therefore to Estonian and, more distantly, to Hungarian and Sami. However, this cultural odd-one-outness is complicated by the fact that, in parts of Finland, Swedish still predominates, with around five per cent of the population using it as their first language. This southwest region is one of those parts. Ekenäs is a Swedish town, and its Finnish name – Tammisaari – is far less commonly used by its residents. In cafés here, both languages rise from the tables, and nearly every sign, label and menu is printed both in Finnish and Swedish. This biculturalism is different from that of Greenland. For though they once would have been, these are no longer the dual languages of coloniser and colonised. These are two cultures existing side by side, complementary rather than competing. And the difference between the two is not one
of national allegiance, either. Swedish speakers in Ekenäs do not consider themselves to be Swedes living in Finland but, rather, Swedish-speaking Finns. To me this seems a refreshing contrast to the simplistic vision of a national identity that is ethnically and culturally defined. It is an acknowledgement that identity – even linguistic identity – is always complicated. But of course, not everyone agrees.

In the centre of town, a row of boards displayed campaign posters for each of the eight presidential candidates in the forthcoming elections. These candidates included a representative of the Swedish People's Party, which fights to protect the interests of Swedish speakers, and also a candidate from the True Finns, a nationalist group hostile both to immigrants and to the Swedish minority. Supporters of the True Finns resent the continuing use of Swedish as an official second language, and its compulsory teaching in schools. They thrive on a lingering bitterness over the country's historical mistreatment by its neighbour. On a Friday night during my stay, in an act of quiet political sabotage, one of the True Finns' posters was removed from its board, and the face of their leader, Timo Soini, was torn from the other, leaving a blank hole that drew laughs of approval from shoppers the following morning. Though replacement posters had been put up by Saturday evening, those did not make it through the night unscathed either. Once again Soini's face was removed from one, while on the other a neat Hitler moustache was added. In a place as clean and graffiti-free as this, such vandalism was notable. Ekenäs clearly was not natural territory for the party.

In most nations, urban, literate culture has traditionally been valued more highly than rural or peasant culture, and Finland was once no different. But here, up until the nineteenth century, the culture of the town was Swedish, while the culture of the countryside was not. Finns were largely excluded from urban, economic life, and theirs for the most
part was an oral culture, a culture of the home, the fields and the forest. After the annexation by Russia in 1809, however, things began to change. For the first time there was a sense that this rural culture could become a national one, and since they were keen to minimise Swedish influence in the territory, the Russians did nothing to discourage this new nationalism. And so, gradually, it grew.

Key to the rise of a rural, national, Finnish culture was the publication in the middle of the nineteenth century of a work of epic poetry called
The Kalevala
. This huge book, consisting of almost 23,000 lines, was based on the oral verse of the Karelia region, and was collected, collated and expanded by Elias Lönnrot, a doctor, who began his schooling in Ekenäs in 1814. Lönnrot brought together creation myths and heroic tales in a work of folklore and of literature. It was a deliberate attempt to set down a national narrative, comparable to the Icelandic sagas and Homeric epics. And though
The Kalevala
is less famous internationally than those predecessors, there is no doubt that within his own country Lönnrot succeeded. The book had an extraordinary influence, politically and culturally, and continues to do so even now. A national day of celebration, Kalevala Day, is held each 28th of February.

The oral poetry of Finland persisted into the nineteenth century not
despite
the fact that it was a suppressed language but
because
of it. The verses Lönnrot gathered were a kind of treasure that had been kept safe from harm in homes and villages across the region. And likewise, the survival of Finnish as a language and as a culture was possible precisely because its rural heartland was separate from the urban heartland of Swedish. The result of this geographical divergence was that, as a national culture came to be imagined and created, it was the countryside that was at its core. It was the landscape of Finland – the forests, lakes and islands – that shaped the nation's art, its music and its literature.

Though his first language was Swedish, Jean Sibelius was a fervent Finnish nationalist, and throughout his career he produced work directly inspired by
The Kalevala
. But it was nature that provided the energy and imagery that moved him most of all. It was that ‘coming to life', he wrote, ‘whose essence shall pervade everything I compose'. While working on his Fifth Symphony – the last movement of which was the only music to be heard in Glenn Gould's
The Idea of North
– Sibelius wrote that its adagio would be that of ‘earth, worms and heartache'. And seeing swans fly overhead one day he found the key to that symphony's finale: ‘Their call the same woodwind type as that of cranes, but without tremolo,' he wrote. ‘The swan-call closer to trumpet … A low refrain reminiscent of a small child crying. Nature's Mysticism and Life's Angst! … Legato in the trumpets!' Gould, hearing this music in his native Canada, recognised something distinctively northern about it, something that chimed with the themes he wished to explore. It was, he said, ‘the ideal backdrop for the transcendental regularity of isolation'.

On the broad pier down at the north harbour, summer restaurants stood abandoned, their outside tables, chairs and umbrellas deformed beneath six inches of snow. On one side of the pier, behind a tall metal gate, was a jetty that housed two public saunas, one for men and one for women. To the right of the jetty were the saunas themselves, and to the left was a square of sea enclosed between three platforms. Half of this square was covered by ice, like the rest of the harbour (the Baltic's low salinity means that it freezes more easily than most seas). But a patch beside the boardwalk was kept clear by a strong pump bubbling from below. Those few metres of ice-free water were the swimming pool.