Helena Halme - The Red King of Helsinki - Lies, Spies and Gymnastics

‘Mrs Mäkelä…’ Mr Linnonmaa began.

‘Maija, please.’

Linnonmaa looked up and smiled briefly, ‘I’m Jukka.’ He reached his hand across the table to Maija. How old-fashioned, Maija thought. She accepted Linnonmaa’s gesture and shook his hand.

‘Maija, I’ve asked to see you because I need to explain something to you.’

‘Oh.’

‘Has Pia told you that I’m a diplomat now?’

‘Yes.’ Maija recalled what her former work colleagues had said about this man. That he had special duties at the border, to do with the illegal immigrants from the Soviet Union.

Maija’s degree in Russian language had always been a problem. First her mother was against it. Maija’s grandfather fought the Reds in the Civil War in 1917, and her father the Russians twenty-five years later in the Winter War. His family were from Karelia.

‘It was the war that killed him,’ her mother said. Maija knew it was the years at the Lappeenranta paper mill that had given him lung cancer but said nothing.

Maija’s aunt talked about the two evacuations from Karelia, where 400,000 had to leave their homes and livelihoods. Her home as well as the childhood home was near Viipuri, now beyond the border in the Soviet Union. Maija’s aunt was a fierce woman. Her father’s older sister, she had a small build, dark eyes and a temper that could take her from burst of anger to fits of laughter in seconds. Maija was a little afraid of Aunt Eija. She was the cook in the family and would turn up before parties to make her Karelian pies and complicated cinnamon pastries and cookies. Her pies had the thinnest of rye casings and the rice filling was lathered with butter. ‘We didn’t have any luxuries like butter after the war,’ she’d tell Maija, when, as a little girl, she was ordered to help Aunt Eija. Auntie’s husband had died in the war; how, Maija wasn’t ever quite sure. She had visions of Uncle Kaarlo in a fist fight with a tall Russian while their large farmhouse with beautifully carved porches was in flames in the background. Aunt Eija carried pictures of the farmhouse they had lost as well as a black-and-white portrait of her dead husband in her purse. She never lost an opportunity to take the pictures out and decry the Soviet state.

‘We lost our homeland, but Finland kept her independence. We didn’t lose the war against Stalin’s Russia, and we were never occupied like those poor Baltic states.’

But Maija took to the Russian language easily. She even loved the impossible alphabet. Her teacher got her a scholarship to Jyväskylä University. When she left, her mother stayed inside the wood-panelled house, sitting with her back to the window, refusing to wave her goodbye. The night before Maija was due to leave, she’d cried and said, ‘You’ll come back a Communist, and then all the pain and suffering your father, grandfather and uncle went through fighting for an independent Finland will be in vain.’ Maija tried to explain how the language had been there long before Stalin and that she’d have nothing to do with politics, but her mother wouldn’t listen.

After graduation she had several job offers. Most of her friends were married with small children and no money while Maija took a well-paid job with the Customs in Hamina as a translator. Whether it was Maija’s good work prospects or the three lonely years her mother spent in the little cottage by the lake in Lappeenranta, while Maija was at university, when she came home her mother was finally placated. She arranged a feast with Aunt Eija, with a long table laden with Karelian pies, meat stew, pastries and cookies. There was even home-brewed beer, sahti, and strong black coffee, which some of the men strengthened with large glugs of grain vodka.

The first months in Hamina were her happiest. Maija loved the translation work. She had money to buy what she wished. She went home at regular intervals to see her mother. The Customs had built a new block of flats and Maija got a small studio with an alcove kitchen. Many of her colleagues were young and lived in the same kind of flats. After a few months she was asked to interpret for a Russian man who’d crossed the border. He was unusually thin with wispy blonde hair and an untidy beard. He never stopped smiling, as his eyes darted from Antti, the Finnish Immigration Officer to Maija. After he’d given his name and occupation – carpenter – he was asked why he wanted to settle in Finland

‘I am escaping Communism.’

Maija translated.

Antti lifted his head from the pad he was writing on. He leant back in his chair and looked at Maija. He coughed and said, ‘Miss Kuortamo, can I have a word?’

He took Maija to a long corridor running the length of the old red-brick building.

‘This is a little awkward,’ Antti said.

Maija looked at his pale eyes. She’d only met Antti once before, at a drinks party thrown in the first week of Maija’s new job by one of her new friends from the customs office. He was engaged to a pretty dark-haired girl who worked in the grocery shop in Hamina. The girl had been a little drunk, holding onto Antti’s arm the whole of the evening, so Maija hadn’t really spoken to him at all.

‘Did I do something wrong?’

Maija was afraid she’d spoiled her first big chance in her new job. She preferred simultaneous translation. It gave her a thrill. There was no time to go back and correct your mistakes. You had to be right first time. Compared to interpretation, editing and re-editing long passages of translation was boring.

Antti looked down at Maija. He was a head taller than her.

‘No, it’s just that these Russians…’ Antti paused, ‘they don’t know what they’re saying. But if you translate everything, I have to note it down.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Antti looked up and down the corridor where they stood. He came closer to Maija and lowered his voice, ‘If I put he’s here for political reasons, we’ll have to send him back. Finland’s neutral, remember?’ he said and winked.

Maija had been naïve, even stupid. Of course, she must be careful. She nodded. Antti followed her back to the interview room.

The carpenter had been lucky. Most of the Russians trying to cross the border were shot by Soviet marksmen before they reached Finland. The ones who got through were helped by Antti and a few others who shared his convictions, but many were marched back to the Soviet officials. ‘Shipped to Siberia if they’re lucky,’ Antti said to Maija.

‘The KGB are all powerful in Finland. They can take whoever they like and do whatever they like to them.’ Antti shrugged his shoulders, ‘We just do as much we can. Which isn’t much.’

This was October 1961, the same year the Soviet Union closed the border between East and West Berlin and started shooting anyone trying to climb over the wall and escape to the West.

Linnonmaa had been Antti’s superior. Maija thought Antti must have reported to him, and he often phoned Maija up to ask for some clarification or other on the transcripts. Maija never found out what happened to Antti. Whether he ever married the dark-haired girl or not.

Maija hung her head. She didn’t want to remember how, indirectly, she had betrayed that poor man, and others like him, who thought they had reached safety in Finland. She’d believed that the immigration process was fair. It was only in the month she gave in her notice that she’d realized the Russian had not been granted refugee status in Finland. In the files she happened on accidentally, not one appeal was accepted. And there were at least a hundred names on the list she saw. The man had told Maija he’d be imprisoned, if not killed, if he was returned to the Soviet authorities.

But when she found out the truth, Maija was engaged to be married to Ilkka, and ready to start her new life in Helsinki. She hadn’t wanted to get involved in politics, not with a baby growing inside her. So she never spoke to anyone about her work. But every time she saw a Russian in Helsinki, she remembered and felt ashamed she hadn’t done anything. Like the tiny Finnish nation, in the face of the whole of the Soviet machinery, Maija was helpless. With bitter disappointment she realised she had little of the fighting spirit, sisu, that her father and grandfather had displayed in standing up to the Russians.