Diego Marani - New Finnish Grammar

One sultry evening, when I was tossing and turning in my bed, unable to sleep, a nurse came in and asked me to run to get the pastor, saying it was urgent. The condition of one of the wounded who had arrived the previous day had suddenly worsened; he was a private, a member of an anti-tank division, one of whose legs had been amputated. I remembered him, because he was the only member of the convoy whom we had taken off the lorry on a stretcher. Wounded at the battle of Kuuterselkä, he had been left untended for several hours, since he had been thrown into a crater made by a mine, under Russian fire. The stretcher-bearers had not been able to reach him until the evening, when they had taken him into no-man’s-land. He had caught diphtheria some days earlier, and had to be transferred immediately so as to avoid infecting his fellow troops, and that was how he had arrived in Helsinki. Extremely weak from loss of blood, that night he had also had a bad attack of dysentery and was completely dehydrated; the doctor did not give him many hours to live. I leapt out of bed and ran out into the courtyard, then down Unioninkatu, where my footsteps rang out on the stone still warm from the day’s strong sun. I could feel a throbbing in my temples, and sweat was running down my back. In no time I was at the Suurtori, then I was passed the cathedral and found myself knocking at the door of the low block of flats on the eastern side of the square. In words mangled by my heavy breathing, I explained the situation to the pastor, who followed me anxiously into the street, panting and buttoning up his clothes. The wounded man had been taken into a room the size of my own, situated next to the casualty department, away from the other wards, and used for infectious patients. He was the room’s sole occupant, lying in the furthest away of the six beds, and a nurse was wiping his forehead with cold cloths which she was picking out of a bucket at her feet. At the other side of the bed, the doctor, in his shirt sleeves, was taking his pulse. The room smelled of human flesh, of blood and faeces, laced with a dash of carbolic acid, against which the faint breeze coming in through the open window battled in vain. An oil lamp, attached to the bars of the bed, cast an oblique light over the sick man, and it bounced off the metal of the other beds, projecting a pattern of flickering, intersecting lines on to the ceiling.

‘Is he conscious?’ the pastor asked under his breath; the doctor nodded, and drew back. The nurse too picked up her bucket and went to stand at the foot of the bed. When the pastor entered the strip of bluish light cast by the lamp, his features hardened, made suddenly prominent by deep, cold shadows, his eyes like two empty pits. As he leant over the sick man, the crucifix around his neck swung suddenly from side to side, and his shadow seemed to grow larger on the wall.

‘Father! My leg hurts — it’s all hot, and wet!’ the soldier moaned. Standing beside the bed, the pastor had opened his breviary; holding it towards the bluish light, he began to say a prayer.

‘You can’t get through there, father! Don’t go that way! It’s dangerous!’ the solider was saying, suddenly seizing hold of the pastor’s jacket. The nurse came up from the other side of the bed and moistened his forehead, whispering words which seemed to comfort him.

‘That’s the road to Mustamäki, that white line down there. On the other side of it are the Russians. That’s where they’re firing from! They’ve taken possession of the railway, they’re advancing with their tanks!’

The wounded man continued to thrash around, and his blurred speech drowned out the pastor’s voice. He was looking at the breviary open above him as though it were a scalpel poised for yet further action.

‘Don’t go that way, father! They’re not afraid of dying, they’re not like us. That’s what you said, father! They go to Heaven, but we don’t!’

The nurse had removed her cloth and was still trying to calm him, but now with no success; as though possessed by some new strength, the dying man was now lifting himself up on to his elbows.

‘Father Koskela! Don’t leave me alone! I don’t want to die!’ the soldier shouted, and his cry hung on in the silence.

The pastor’s prayer rang out, clear as a bell, falling upon the death-laden air like disinfectant. He performed the last rites with sharp, clear-cut gestures. Then he remained kneeling by the dead man for a few minutes, murmuring a psalm before moving off, together with the doctor. I heard their steps dying away at the end of the corridor. The nurse had gone off to fetch water to wash the corpse, and I stayed on beside him alone; leaning against the wall, I looked at his sweat-veiled face with some alarm, stared at his twisted mouth and stiffened fingers, just visible above the sheet. That man had seen Koskela; a few moments before he went off to die. My friend Olof Koskela. Perhaps he was still out there somewhere. I looked towards the window through eyes made dim with tears; a few wan stars were floating in the pallid sky. I imagined the pastor lying on his back on the ground, his eyes wide open, looking at those same stars that I could see, fading beyond the window.

In the registers of the Finnish Lutheran Church which I consulted in the offices of the Tuomiokirkko, the Pastor Olof Koskela was said to have fallen in the battle of Kuuterselkä on 14 June 1944. It was not known where he was buried. A short note attached to the file gave a resume of the military report describing the circumstances of his death and the finding of his body, by the road which runs between the turn-off for Kuuterselkä and the village of Mustamäki. The Finnish troops’ hasty retreat from the Karelian Isthmus probably meant that the bodies of the fallen could not be transported behind the lines.

What follows is the last letter sent by Ilma Koivisto, which the author at some point copied into his document. In fact, Miss Koisvisto told me that she had also written a fourth letter, which she had never sent, and which still has in her possession; she said that I could read it if I felt it might help me in my reconstruction of events. I did not think it appropriate to probe any further into the private world of a woman who had already suffered so much. I would prefer that the last words addressed by Ilma Koivisto to the man she believed to be Sampo Karjalainen continue to be known only to the person who wrote them.

Viipuri, 19 June 1944

Dear Sampo,

I don’t know what sense it makes to carry on writing to you, but I can’t resist throwing these few words into your silence. To be honest, they are words which it is better not to carry around inside oneself, because after a time they will begin to rot, infecting everything around them like gangrene. Each day I’ve waited for a letter, each morning when the post was being distributed I thought I’d hear my name. I even thought that something might have happened to you, that you had gone away, had disappeared, had died. But, in that case, my letters would have been returned. So I know that you’ve read them, and this knowledge I find even more hurtful. But there seems to me to be something false, something fabricated about your unresponsiveness; it is a bit like the personal war you are waging against the figments of your memory. Here, war — I mean real war — has arrived in earnest; the front is a few kilometres away, we can see the German planes bombing the Russian lines. Viipuri itself is threatened; the twentieth regiment is lining up against the imminent attack. Tomorrow we are going to a field hospital beyond the river Vuoksi, where all the wounded from this sector of the front will be brought. We are needed everywhere: everywhere there are soldiers with shattered limbs who do not yet know whether they will live or die. I have never seen so many dead all in one place, so much life draining out of bodies so fast. It is a tragic irony that with so many memories being abandoned by their legitimate owners, you cannot find one which meets with your approval, and persist in wanting one all of your own. We are leaving the refugee centre with a great sense of foreboding; months of work will be destroyed by bombing, or fall into the Russians’ hands; but then in war everything is made to be destroyed, perhaps including our own friendship. That’s why it was doomed from the start. But it’s my fault, I was asking for too much. I instantly demanded from you that touch of the infinite which human relationships can never provide. Both for better and for worse, we can never perceive the infinite; even when we believe that we are the bearers of immense suffering, in reality we are like ants carrying crumbs. God measures out the pain that each of us can bear, the least and the most. Everything is bearable, until we die of it. Nothing of us outlasts us, and if some pain outlives us for some time, it is only in order to be sure that it has killed us well and truly. People have been evacuated out of Viipuri for some time, ever since the rout at Kuuterselkä. The Russians broke through our defences all along the front. Yesterday refugees arrived from as far away as Petroskoi, a whole lorryload, stuffed to the gunwales with people and furniture, hoping to be taken in by relatives. But there’s no one left here now: the city’s empty, its only occupants are stray dogs and horses driven mad by fear. Dear Sampo, this is the last letter I’ll be writing you. By the end of the page, each of us will be free to suffer again on our own, free to reclaim our solitude. All in all, this is the condition to which man is best suited; it is the ideal condition for whole-heartedly pursuing our own self-preservation, the only real task God has assigned to us. If one day I come back to Helsinki, I shall not look for you; I shall not want to remember you, and this time I shall not even feel sorry for you. I shall go and remove you from the tree of happy memories. I didn’t tell you, but my tree is also capable of forgetting. I’ll go and find it on my own, one evening towards the end of winter like the time when I took you there, and your memory will melt away like snow in the breath of the sea wind. Forgetting is the only form of defence left to us; nothing which has been forgotten has the power to harm us any more; yet there you are, mercilessly scrutinising your consciousness in the hopes of digging up a few shreds of memory. I shall forget, I shall recover from this illusion as I have from others, but you won’t: all this is something that you will want to remember. And I know that you will keep my letters, that you will reread them. Not for what they contain, but because they too will have turned into precious relics of your reconstituted past. But be warned: for many years to come, these words — which you today have wanted to ignore — will continue to haunt you. And then you will be defenceless in the face of regret; all the time that you have so greedily hoarded, unpicking the embroidery of the days life offered you, will become snarled up in hopeless disarray; because it is not yours, it is the fruit of plunder. Time is not sewn patiently from little, ordinary things, it is not a carpet of words and silences, of glances and moments within which memory slowly envelops us.