Diego Marani - New Finnish Grammar

This was how I met the Lutheran Pastor Olof Koskela, the only friend I ever had, the only person I now miss. He left for the Karelian Isthmus at the beginning of June and I have heard nothing of him since. A few days ago, a soldier from the twentieth regiment of frontier guards, wounded at Kuuterselkä, called out his name in his delirium. During all these months, not a day has passed without my being seated at the rough table in the sacristy behind the church, where Chaplain Koskela taught me Finnish with the patience that only a missionary can muster. Bent over an old yellowing notebook gradually filling with new words, day after day I learned what I believed to be my mother tongue, conjugating verbs and declining cases, reciting prayers, singing the hymns from the services and learning strange stories from the Kalevala . It is Chaplain Olof Koskela who has taught me to love this country. If he had had the time, he might have managed to make a real Finn of me.

Weeks passed, but there was still no news of Doctor Lahtinen. The nurse kept telling me that he was expected any moment, that he could not have been posted elsewhere because no replacement had been appointed. But I soon realized that no one at that hospital had time to devote to me. Those were terrible times for Finland. After the Winter War thousands of refugees had poured out of a ravaged Karelia; no one knew where they were to be housed. Those who could went to Sweden, to stay with relatives; others wandered from one train to another, ending up outside some village and building themselves a wooden shack in which to pass the winter. Many of the sick and elderly were taken temporarily into hospitals and assorted shelters; I was regarded as belonging to this category, and I paid for my bed and board by helping the nurses. But the doctors had other things to do apart from tending to my lost memory: there were the wounded and sick to be looked after, hungry people to be fed, children to be nursed through illnesses. It even occurred to me to wonder whether Doctor Lahtinen actually existed, or whether Doctor Friari had invented him, to reassure me, and that he had said as much in the letter I had given to the doctor on duty.

One morning, Pastor Koskela went with me to the War Office, in search of some clue which might help me discover my identity, but the staff had been transferred to safer places outside the city. The General Staff were said to be lying low in some bunker in Lapland; the archives were inaccessible. The sole employee we found in the empty rooms of that abandoned building clearly had other matters on his mind: perched on a ladder, he was clearing the upper shelves of a gigantic filing catalogue. He came down, somewhat unwillingly, and leafed through the registers of ships and those who had sailed in them, taking them from the crates where he had just placed them, and telling us brusquely that without the name of the ship or the date of recruitment he would be unable to give us any information. He advised us to talk to the Servicemen’s Association, which had lists of the dead and missing. ‘And anyway there’s no saying that this is a naval jacket. It hasn’t got the badges; it might be just something a sailor happened to be wearing!’ he told us as we were walking away down the corridor, cluttered with trunks and dusty documents. We also went to the Central Registry Office, but the employee we spoke to made a despairing gesture when he heard my name. ‘Half Finland is called Karjalainen! Without even a date of birth, where am I going to start?’ he exclaimed despondently, gesturing towards the rows of numbered shelves behind him, bursting with files done up with string.

As time passed, though, all this began to matter less. The pastor became my family, the hospital visitors’ quarters my home. Every so often I would be joined there by some officer who was passing through, though mostly all I would see of him was the rumpled bedclothes in the morning, or some vague outline under the sheets when I returned at night. I always came back late, because the quiet and loneliness of the visitors’ quarters frightened me; loneliness had become my great bugbear. When I was alone, all the unanswered questions kept temporarily at bay by my fitful daily activities would come flooding back. For such relief was indeed only temporary: even if I deluded myself into thinking that I could bear it, the wretchedness of not knowing who I was, was gradually building up within me and sapping my strength; slowly and firmly, it was swelling to occupy the space that it deserved; for without memory, no man can live.

I would spend my nights in the lobbies of the larger hotels, the Kämp or the Torni for example, which were always crowded with journalists, soldiers and a motley cross-section of humanity at large. There, in the din and fug, anonymous among people unknown to me, I felt at ease. When even the bar in the Kämp emptied out, leaving only the odd waiter clearing up the ashtrays, I would go back out into the street and wander aimlessly through the city, or take refuge from the cold in the station, where I would watch the soldiers and evacuees arriving from the front. I would feel a gleeful shudder of apprehension when the carriage doors opened, and men with bloodied bandages and stricken eyes would step down on to the platform without any idea of where they were going to go. One by one I would look them straight in the eye, recognizing the same expression of bewilderment I had seen on my own face, reflected in the mirror, that morning so many months ago on board the Tübingen. If I heard cries for help, I would hasten to the spot, offer to help bear a stretcher, unload a crate, give my support to an elderly evacuee standing in tears beside his few worldly goods tied up like rags. But deep within me I was delighting in all that hardship. It was only fair that I should not suffer alone, that other people’s desperation should prevail around me. I would return to the hospital only when I was thoroughly exhausted, certain that I would fall asleep the moment I lay down. Yet by dawn I would be awake again, would get up and go to light the stove in the chapel. Of course the few bits of wood available were not enough really to heat the space, but at least they would take off the night chill. When it was time for the service, a faint warmth would greet the figures who came in out of the darkness to kneel down on the benches. For reasons of economy, I would light the candle only when the bell stopped ringing. When the chaplain went up to the altar, I would take my place in what had become my own personal seat and lead the singing of the hymns, though without yet fully understanding the meaning of all those round, plump words. But I pronounced them confidently, as though they were my own. One by one, I would home into their meaning, take them apart, pigeonhole them. I was learning to use them outside the church, in my as yet rudimentary conversations with the pastor. Singing those words was my way of taming them. Since I could not ferry them to the shore of meaning, I had to approach them cautiously, ensure that they would not slip from my grasp, be lost in the unbroken flow of the singing. When I was sure of their phonetic outlines, Koskela would help me copy them out: as a result, together with the columns of verbs and nouns, the pages of my notebook somehow also emanated music, as though the notes had mysteriously become fused with the letters. At the end of the service I would collect the missals, blow out the candle and enter the sacristy to say goodbye to the chaplain before going to the refectory, where a cup of milk and a piece of bread which tasted of resin awaited me.

I never became close to any of the other soldiers. I was afraid of not understanding what they said; above all, I did not want to tell my own story. So I would always sit alone, next to the window, looking out at the silver birches in the courtyard. I would spend the rest of the morning giving a hand to the nurses, the lotta . I had learned from the chaplain that the corps of nurses at the military hospital, with their grey tunics and white belts, were known as Lotta-Svärd . I helped them wash the sheets, boil up the bandages in drums of water, disinfect the surgical instruments. There was a mid-morning break; the nurses would make tea, and sit and chat. They talked quietly, rubbing their reddened hands over the rough cotton fabric of their uniforms. Those hands reminded me of something I couldn’t quite bring into focus, something familiar and motherly; whatever it was floated, tantalisingly, just outside the reach of my consciousness. Only then, in the warmth of the laundry with its steamed up windows, lying on a heap of covers, did I feel sufficiently untroubled to find sleep. Cradled by the reassuring chatter of the nurses, I found that loneliness had no more power over me.