Diego Marani - New Finnish Grammar

Stefan Klein had been an agent working for the military secret service. Until August 1943 he had been in Finland, working as a military instructor for the Finnish navy. After the Italian armistice he had been promptly transferred to the zone of operations on the Adriatic coast, at Trieste, with the task of infiltrating the Italian forces and providing information aimed at averting possible hostile operations on the part of the former allies. The son of an Italian mother, Agent Klein spoke Italian fluently. This was what Doctor Reiner had learned from district headquarters. He had immediately sent a telegram to Klagenfurt; shortly afterwards, that same morning, a patrol from the security battalion, reconnoitring a sector of the Carso in search of partisans, had come upon the body of Stefan Klein, killed together with other soldiers taking orders from Salo. He was wearing the uniform of an Italian infantryman; several objects had been found about his person, though only the tag had enabled him to be identified. At first, Doctor Reiner could not remember where he had seen a similar handkerchief, but those initials were somehow vaguely familiar. The information provided by district headquarters came like a bolt from the blue. In all likelihood Agent Klein, who had come straight to Trieste from Helsinki, had attacked the soldier called Brodar at the railway station in order to lay hands on an Italian uniform and thus infiltrate the enemy forces more easily, dressing his victim in his own clothes so as to avoid suspicion, but forgetting completely to empty the pockets of his sailor’s jacket … Some days later, however, Stefan Klein had been tracked down by the partisans, and shot. Massimiliano Brodar’s leave permit, which had been in the lining of his jacket, had probably been overlooked during the search. The man found in such desperate straits on the quayside near Trieste Railway Station, the man whom I had cared for and helped regain the use of language, was therefore Massimiliano Brodar. It was not his name which appeared on the label inside the jacket he was wearing, but that of the Finnish warship ‘Sampo Karjalainen’, the former German ‘Walhalla’, on which Agent Klein had served as an instructor before being sent on assignment to the zone of operations on the Adriatic coast.

This is the true story of the author of the manuscript, of the man whom I had caused to call himself Sampo Karjalainen. That was what I had come to tell him, if only I had found him still alive.

In the long months spent on board the Tübingen, just waiting for that awful war to finish, I often thought about that man, and tried to explain to myself how I could have come to make such a mistake. It was undoubtedly my blind attachment to my country which led me to take him for a Finn; and it was an equally blind self-confidence which led me to believe that that label was the proof of his identity. Instinctively, I did my utmost to save that unknown Finnish man whom war had cast my way. But, in reality, it was my own salvation I was seeking. As I had done in Hamburg, by helping a compatriot, I believed once again that I was atoning for my father’s crime. This had been a lifelong obsession with me. For me, the death of my father — who had been murdered, having been unjustly accused of Communist subversion — became a crime that must be expiated. I took his place at the court martial which sentenced him to death, and for all these years I have been trying relentlessly to right a wrong which was not my own. Today I realise that this has been my whole life’s work, that I have spent my days making amends for him, seeking a pardon that neither he nor or I were called upon to ask for. Every sailor who came to seek medical assistance in the Finnish church in Hamburg was my father’s executioner, shaking with fever, seeking help. On each occasion, I could kill him or save him. And I saved him, time after time, and his thanks were my absolution. But that was not enough: the whole of Finland had to absolve me, every single Finn had to pass through my hands in order that the pardon be complete. Had I found Massimiliano Brodar alive, I might have managed to shake off this past. Giving him back his name, his life — that would have set me free. But as it is, I carry on with my work of expiation, moving from one crime to another, because even after all this time I still feel myself a Finn, and as a child a priest like Koskela taught me that life is a matter of repentance, of punishing ourselves for ever being born. This unforgiving fatherland killed my own father; it drove me into exile, offered me nothing but affliction, and I yearn for it and curse it to this day. We come into this world in one place only, and only there do we belong. Sooner or later, the globetrotter who leaps from one identity to another like an acrobat on a trapeze will lose his footing, find himself down on the ground, pinned down, well-travelled though he be, by the memory of a few houses and a dusty road. When the hour of death draws near, even those who have spent their whole lives claiming they do not have a country will hear the sudden call of the place where everything began, and where they know they are awaited. There, and there only, everything will always be the same, each smell, each colour, each sound in its right place. When we go home, memory vanishes; and, with it, pain. When end and beginning meet, it means nothing has happened. All was a dream within another dream, and perhaps man too is the stuff of dreams.

It has now been snowing for some hours, but the sky is none the lighter for it; it remains as louring and furrowed as the roof of a cave. The daylight has drained away like the remains of a doused fire, and remnants of smoky light linger in the streets. Now there is nothing to keep me in Helsinki. This evening I shall take the boat for Stockholm, then on to Hamburg. Before leaving, I asked Miss Koivisto to go with me to the visitors’ quarters where Sampo Karjalainen lived. I wanted to stay there just for a few moments, to think things over.

So here I am, sitting on his bed, bed number six, looking out at the snow falling gently over the courtyard. It’s all very quiet; lamplight, reflected on the snow, is sending a faint shadow of window bars on to the wall. A bell is ringing, probably calling people to mass. I get up and go into the courtyard, then follow indistinct figures making their way towards the little wooden church, their footsteps creaking in the snow. Inside, there is a good smell of wax and burning wood. Two candles are burning on the altar. A soldier is arranging the missals on the benches, hanging the gilded letters of the day’s psalms up on the wall, opening the breviary on the lectern. I stare at him in the faint light, trying to catch a glimpse of his face in the flickering candlelight. I would like to go closer, I would like to talk to him. Then I decide against it, retrace my steps back into the middle of the courtyard and stay there in the darkness, watching the falling snow.