Diego Marani - New Finnish Grammar

I had been picked up on the verge of death, my head badly smashed, at dawn on 10 September 1943, on the quayside near the railway station in Trieste. I was not carrying any documents or personal possessions. All that I had was the clothes I was wearing. I had probably been attacked and robbed, hit on the head with the lead pipe found beside me, still daubed with blood and hair. During those same days the hospital ship Tübingen had arrived in the port of Trieste from North Africa, and it was to this ship that the sailors who found me belonged. They hoisted me on to their lifeboat and took me aboard, where I was put into the hands of Doctor Friari, a medical officer with the German navy. As he himself later admitted, in view of my serious condition, and the extent of my wound, he did not think that I had long to live; to the point, indeed, that he had not thought that it was appropriate to operate on me, so that he had accepted me on board the Tübingen for purely compassionate reasons, because of the name stitched into my jacket. But he immediately decided to have me transferred to the ward where the comatose wounded were admitted, and to keep me under observation in the recovery room. A large area at the nape of my neck had suffered deep lesions, and it was difficult to assess how much of my brain had been affected. But perhaps the doctor had sensed that something, somewhere within me, was still alive. As he later explained, clinically there was nothing to distinguish me from the other comatose wounded; whatever it was that had led him to tend me so meticulously, he saw as a nod from fate. As a man of science, practical and down-to-earth, he would come to see me each morning in the recovery room expecting to find me dead. When he saw that in fact I was making progress, he scented a miracle: from that moment on, he never left my bedside. The day I came out of the coma, the nurses swore that they had glimpsed a tear on one of his far from tender cheeks. He insisted on taking personal charge of my rehabilitation; each morning it was he who put me through certain exercises using coloured cardboard cut-outs. When he realized that I could not speak, that the injury had destroyed my memory for language and my ability to articulate sounds, he hoped in his heart of hearts that I would die. Surprised at the speed with which my brain was retrieving lost knowledge, at first he was intrigued above all by the scientific aspect of my injury. But he could not remain untouched by the fear, the bewilderment of a man part of whom had been taken from him, a man deprived of his past, his name, his language, obliged to live without memory, nostalgia, dreams. The supposition that I too was Finnish, having ended up for some unknown reason in those distant seas, led him to care for me with a devotion rarely met with by the wounded in a time of war.

In the weeks he spent at my bedside, peering into my eyes for the least sign of consciousness, he had become convinced that I must indeed be a Finnish sailor, who had come to Trieste on board some ship, possibly a German merchantman; that I had then been set upon by one of the sharks who hung around port cities and railway stations in those war-torn times. The name on the jacket and the initials on the handkerchief left him in no possible doubt. So he swore that he would move heaven and earth to get me back to my own country, to give me the chance to pick up the broken thread of memory. After all, the very fact that I was still alive was at least in part his doing, for better or for worse. He had put his scientific knowledge in the service of blind fate, while his heart had been won over by the familiar sound of my name.

I waited on board the Tübingen for many weeks. Various problems had delayed the organizing of the troop trains to Germany. Now the ship was anchored in the port of Trieste. From my vantage point on deck I had noted frantic outbursts of activity on the shore and quays: military vehicles were arriving all the time, disgorging troops and weapons. When the wind was right, I could even hear the shouts of the commanding officers. Sometimes I would accompany the doctor to the station, where he would go to supervise the organizing of the troop trains or to procure medical supplies. On those occasions we would have lunch together, in some little restaurant near the port. As we ate, he would encourage me to tell him about everything I was doing, every detail of my day, even the most insignificant. At first I found this tedious, then I understood what he was aiming at. It was out of these spots of time that I would rebuild myself a past, a memory. He laid great stress on the importance of persisting with this exercise. Though he had not yet told me as much, the doctor was already mulling over a plan to get me back to Finland, and was slowly preparing me to make the break.

While the doctor was talking with his colleagues from the Medical Corps in the military quarters which I was not allowed to enter, I killed the time by taking walks. At first I did not stray far from the station, but later I began to venture into the city. On sunny afternoons, each street running inward from the sea was a gilded strip up which I walked as far as the shady squares further inland, where large buildings of white stone stood out against a deep blue sky. I enjoyed wandering at random, following the mirage which appeared beyond each corner and then emerging again into the blinding seaside light. Those were months of deep uncertainty for Trieste. I knew that new German troops had come to occupy the city since the Italian armistice, preparing to fend off a possible landing. The German allies had become potential enemies. Many Italian soldiers had fled into the mountains, joining up with the partisan groups, or had already been disarmed. Black Shirts and Salo soldiers had taken up their posts, under the German command. Doctor Friari was wary of these men, not regarding them as soldiers like himself. I had noticed that he tried to avoid them, and above all that he treated them with hostility. In the last days before my departure, during my solitary ramblings, I would hear sudden volleys of sub-machine-gun fire breaking the silence of the almost deserted streets. I was even stopped by the occasional patrol. But my laissez-passer had invariably sent the arms of the officers who opened it into a smart salute. Their voices immediately changed, and they allowed me to proceed. In the station, no one stopped me watching the troop trains leaving for the Yugoslavian front. Often I would go and look at the place where I had been found, a few steps from the commercial quay. I would search among the cranes and anchored ships for some trace, some clue that I might transform into a memory. Sometimes, while I waited for the doctor who was dining with some high-placed officer, I would find myself in the city until late at night and, just for a bit of human company, would take refuge in the first bar I came upon. Here, amidst German soldiers and Black Shirts who were getting drunk and singing, I would nurse my small glass of beer for as long as I dared, singing songs I could not understand along with my unknown drinking companions. It was reassuring to hear my voice mingling with others, to hear my own words overlaying theirs, emerging from my mouth and springing into life as though they were truly my own, as though behind those sounds which I had learned to imitate so well there were also some awareness of their meaning. Without addressing a word to me, the men around me would raise their glasses, clink them with my own, treat me as one of themselves. In the fug and din of those bars I felt protected: I was not alone. My fear of loneliness worried the doctor. He said I must get over it: it was a sign of my inability to accept my new destiny.

One morning in November Doctor Friari asked me to go with him to the small town of Opicina, up on the Carso just outside Trieste. He had to go to the German headquarters to meet a high-ranking civil servant working for the civil administration who had just arrived in town. I was still unaware that it was I who was the object of this trip. A car came to pick us up on the quay. It was a grey morning, though to the east the light-filled sky promised sunshine. The road that led up to the Carso was shrouded in thick mist. The whole of the upland plateau was oozing moisture; every so often fat droplets fell from the trees on to the windscreen, like sudden summer rain.