The Lost Sisterhood

by Anne Fortier

  I lowered the manuscript, almost breathless with agitation. “It actually mentions a jackal bracelet. There has got to be some truth to this story. What do you think?”

  Nick’s brow was plowed by deep thoughts, and for a moment I thought he had not actually been listening to the last part of the translation. Then he said, “Would you mind reading that passage again? The one where she tells him why she can’t stay?”

  And so I did, whereupon he fell silent once more, fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

  “What is it?” I asked. “You’re making me terribly curious.”

  “I am almost certain,” he said eventually, “my Amazon mother told my dad something along the same lines. Some poetic hogwash about the jackal and the moon and not being allowed to share his daylight.”

  I put a hand on his thigh and gave it a squeeze. The forest surrounding us was dense and all consuming, covered in frosty silence, its manner everything but welcoming. And yet the wry Moon that had accompanied us on our drive to Frankfurt the night before was now directly ahead. The undisputed monarch of Arctic winter, it seemed, was beckoning us.

  “Well,” I said, leafing through the last few pages of the Historia Amazonum, “the rest is just obsequious drivel meant to persuade some emperor—probably Tiberius—to let the author return to Rome. But poor P. Exulatus very likely died in exile, like so many others, and no one back home ever knew of this manuscript.”

  “Too bad,” said Nick. “I like that last story.”

  “Even if it doesn’t explain anything?”

  “But it does.” He looked at me. “ ‘Only we, the Amazons, will live forever.’ What more do you need to know?”

  THE TOWN OF SUOMUSSALMI was little more than a small contingency of shops and buildings huddled against the unfathomable wilderness bearing down on it from all sides.

  When we stopped at a gas station to ask for directions to the nearest hotel, it struck me that the locals seemed rooted in the same mystical element as the silent Kainuu forest. They looked at us as if they knew precisely who we were and had only been wondering when we would finally arrive … but even so, their eyes betrayed no emotions. We might be friends, or we might be foes. It would take more than the halting exchange of a few stock pleasantries over a cash register to find out.

  Nor did the hotel room greet us with any particular enthusiasm, although one could choose to see its vacant college dorm aesthetic as an example of modern Nordic elegance.

  “Just for the record,” said Nick, putting down our bags on the birch-wood floor, “in case this comes up in the future … and I know it will”—he swept me off my feet and growled right in my ear—”it was you who ran away from my decadent suite at the Çira?an Palace.” Walking over to the bed, he set me down on top of the spartan comforter and hovered above me. “What is it with you Brits? Why are you so afraid of comfort?”

  “Comfortable people lose their edge.”

  “You know—” Nick started kissing my neck. “It’s lucky I never taught you any self-defense techniques. And I still don’t see your dueling sword anywhere. Now I can do whatever I want with you.”

  “You seem to forget I just dragged you all the way to the Arctic Circle.”

  “Oh, I’m aware of that.” Nick lay down on his back, arms behind his head, smiling a challenge at me. “And now I get my reward. Don’t I?”

  I laughed. “You’re such a caveman.”

  “And you should be thankful for that,” he pointed out. “It wasn’t cavemen who invented misogynist metaphysics. It takes a little bit of civilization to come up with that kind of evil.”

  Later that night, after some wonderfully uncivilized hours in bed and a long, sensuous shower, I was once again reminded of the fragility of our present happiness.

  “What’s that?” asked Nick, when I began brushing my teeth, his smile fading. “Where did you get that toothpaste?”

  I stared at the innocuous tube lying by the sink and felt a creeping panic. Before we boarded the plane that morning, he had instructed me to get rid of everything that had been lying around in my hotel room in Kalkriese while I was out. But somehow the toothpaste had escaped my attention.

  “What are you doing?” I asked when he began squeezing out the white paste in the sink.

  “There … feel that?” He let me touch the bottom part of the tube, where a small, hard nodule appeared to have lodged itself.

  Our eyes met. Was this a tracking device?

  “Do they know where we are?” I asked, chilled by the thought that we might have to flee yet again from Reznik’s goons, so late at night.

  “Not necessarily,” said Nick, getting dressed. “But I don’t want to take any chances. Keep the bed warm. I’m taking our fluoride friend for a little drive.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Let us make a firm agreement

  That we will not hurt each other,

  Never in all eternity

  While the golden moon still glimmers.

  —The Kalevala

  SUOMUSSALMI, FINLAND

  THE WINTER WAR MONUMENT IN SUOMUSSALMI WAS SO UNUSUAL that we drove right by it several times before realizing what it was. Making the most of the noon sun, we had been on the lookout for an army of identical tombstones lined up in marching order, but what we found was stunningly different.

  It was the grocer across the street from the hotel who had suggested we visit the Raatteen Portti, as the war memorial and museum were called, since that was apparently the gateway to Suomussalmi history. Earlier that morning we had chatted with the hotel receptionist, who had informed us that “Vaburusi” was, in fact, not one but two names. “Vabu” was a Finnish girl’s name, and “Rusi” was a surname. Unfortunately, there was not a single Rusi in the regional phone book. That was how we had ended up at the grocer, who claimed he didn’t know of anyone with that name, either.

  “But try at Raatteen Portti,” he had suggested, drawing a quick map of the route. “Marko, who works there, remembers everything about everyone. Even the things”—the man had looked away, hardened lines of strain around his eyes—”we don’t want to remember.”

  And so we drove out to the Winter War Monument around lunchtime, when the sun was at its strongest, quickly realizing that nothing about this place was predictable. Despite its modest surface—or perhaps precisely because of it—I sensed that Suomussalmi had a deep, dark soul full of well-kept secrets.

  Entering the memorial park, we were met by a teeth-chattering east wind that had us both pulling up our hoods and putting on the thermal gloves we had bought that morning before heading out on our excursion. The coats we had purchased at the Frankfurt Airport simply weren’t enough in a country where the November sun barely made it into the sky before plunging headlong into polar night at three in the afternoon.

  “Let’s go inside,” said Nick, his voice muffled by the hood.

  “Not until we’ve seen the park. I’ll warm you up later.”

  Around us, thousands of rough boulders, each with its own individual shape, sat in a large clearing in the forest, reminding us that every fallen soldier commemorated here had been an independent human being—someone whose last thoughts were likely not of international politics but of his loved ones and the buddies around him. At least that was my interpretation, offered from behind my scarf as we picked our way across the icy gravel.

  Walking toward the small bell tower at the center of the monument, we saw a man approaching from the nearby museum building, carrying a ladder. When he realized we were headed the same direction, he put down the ladder, adjusted his glasses, and came forward to greet us. Even though he wore only a leather jacket and nothing woolly whatsoever, his handshake was as warm as his smile.

  “I am Marko,” he said, flipping up the collar of his jacket. “I was just going to clean the bells. There are one hundred and five, all different sizes.” He pointed at the top of the bell tower, which was not really a tower, but rather four curved beams of wood leaning together
to form a gigantic Y-shaped chime. “One bell for each day of the Winter War. You can hear them when the wind blows. But come inside and have a coffee. We have karjalanpiirakat this week.” Seeing we did not understand him, Marko smiled and held out his arms. “Don’t worry. It is a Karelian specialty.”

  There were few people at the Raatteen Portti museum that day. A couple of talkative women were working in the café, and an elderly man in a wheelchair sat at a table by the window, quietly sorting through photos.

  Although Marko was clearly curious, he didn’t ask where we were from but merely walked us quickly through the exhibition, assuming—as he likely did with everyone, and for good reason—that we didn’t have the faintest clue about the dates or circumstances of the Winter War that was his passion.

  “It was Stalin’s attempt at invading Finland in the winter of 1939—40,” he explained, pointing at old laminated photos of the Red Army hanging on the wall. “We were outnumbered ten to one, and Stalin thought that with all his modern machinery he could take little defenseless Finland in two weeks. He didn’t even bother to give his soldiers winter uniforms.”

  We walked through the exhibition in silence, looking at mannequin tableaux with Finnish ski patrols wearing snow camouflage and bone-chilling photos of dead Russian soldiers frozen in place, their bloodless hands forever raised in surprise and self-defense.

  Seeing our horror, Marko stopped to explain. “It was a very cold winter that year. In minus forty, you must not sweat, even with fear, because the moisture will turn to ice and freeze you. But at the same time, you must keep your pulse up. The moment your blood slows down”—he nodded at the grim photos around us—”for example, when you are hit by a bullet, or someone slits your throat with a knife strapped to a ski pole, your body simply freezes the way it is … sitting, standing, it doesn’t matter. If you read our national epic, The Kalevala, you will see that we Finns have learned to respect the frost, and that we have made a pact to live with it. Stalin did not respect the Finnish winter. He sent his soldiers here for murder, and they found it.”

  We stopped to look more closely at some of the personal objects that had been carried by the dead Russians, and I understood that Marko pitied them just as much as he pitied the Finns. Just like the Romans at Teutoburger Wald, they had been sent into hostile, unfamiliar territory by arrogant leaders only to be torn to pieces by underdogs refusing the leash of empire.

  “What exactly happened here at Suomussalmi?” asked Nick. “You would think Stalin would go for Helsinki first.”

  “He did,” said Marko. “He went for everything. He bombed Helsinki without even declaring war, and after that he attacked the border with airplanes and tanks, causing terrible carnage. And what did we have? Brave men who ran right up to the tanks and threw Molotov cocktails at their air intake.” He straightened with pride. “We invented them, you know. In the Winter War. That was why we named them after the Russian foreign minister.” Perhaps feeling he had been carried away, Marko squeezed both hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, elbows sticking out dismissively, before continuing, “Here at Suomussalmi it was mostly guerrilla fighting. Many of the old veterans still refuse to talk about it, even now. They just say they did terrible things.” Marko ground his shoe into an imaginary cigarette butt. “Two Russian divisions came across the border right here, east of Suomussalmi, along the Raate Road. They had many armored vehicles, so they had to stay on the road through the forest, in one long line, in frigid weather. The Finns were on skis, wearing snow camouflage. The Russians were sitting ducks. Twenty-three thousand bodies, frozen like statues, kilometer after kilometer along the Raate Road.”

  Arriving at the cozy cafeteria at last, sitting us down with coffee and cake, Marko went on to say that even today few people wanted to live near the Raate Road. There were wolves and bears in the forest, but even more disturbingly, thousands of Russian soldiers were buried in mass graves along this route of slaughter. In his usual fashion, Stalin had wholly denied the defeat; by refusing to take the bodies of his soldiers back, he had left it to the Finns to bury the men sent to destroy them. Some graves were marked; most were not. According to Marko, any cluster of healthy birch trees among the scruffy firs was a sure sign of a mass grave beneath; Nature had erected her own memorial to the lives cut short in this haunted forest.

  “I don’t suppose,” I said after a silence, “you have ever heard of a woman named Vabu Rusi?”

  Marko thought for a moment. “No. But Aarne might know.” He got up and walked over to talk with the man in the wheelchair.

  I didn’t realize quite how on edge I had been until I saw the old man perking up and responding animatedly to the query. And then Marko waved us along, taking us into a room with metal archive cabinets and a slide projector trained at a white pull-down screen.

  Talking quietly in Finnish, the men started riffling through drawers full of slides, until, eventually, Aarne held up a narrow box, checked the handwritten notes on the sides, and nodded an unsmiling confirmation.

  While the projector warmed up, Marko explained that Vabu Rusi had been a wartime Lotta—one of the many female volunteers helping the Finnish soldiers behind the lines. “Aarne says Vabu was an excellent nurse, and that she always helped with the amputations. The young men liked to”—Marko frowned—”look at her pretty face instead of the doctor … you know.” He shook his head sadly. “But her story was a tragic one. Vabu’s husband fell in the Winter War, and she and her little daughter were taken hostage by Russian partisans—at least Aarne thinks so. As with so many other Finnish mothers and children, no one ever saw them again. But take a look.” Marko shoved the first slide in the projector, and we saw an old black-and-white group photo of women standing in front of a building, wearing nurses’ uniforms.

  Aarne leaned forward to study each individual face, then shook his head. Only when Marko put the fourth slide in the machine—yet another group photo of smiling nurses—did Aarne finally nod and point excitedly at a young woman sitting on a long bench in the front row.

  “There!” said Marko. “That is Vabu Rusi. She was an only child, says Aarne. A shame, for all the young men would have liked to marry her sisters.”

  I walked as close as I could to the grainy projection, studying the sweet, smiling face. It was impossible not to feel a connection with Vabu Rusi after hearing about her sad life, but I wasn’t sure if the knot of tears in my throat bespoke more than just sympathy. Did this woman bear any resemblance to my grandmother? It was hard to say. I could not remember ever seeing Granny smiling.

  “And the daughter?” I asked the men, holding up my hand against the beam of the projector. “I don’t suppose you have a photo of her?”

  Marko shook his head with regret. “She was so young when they were taken. Aarne doesn’t even remember her name.” I could see he was itching to know why it mattered so much, but politeness prevented him from voicing his curiosity. Perhaps living his life surrounded by Winter War veterans, I thought, had long since taught Marko when to stop asking questions.

  WHEN WE LEFT THE museum, the sun had long since disappeared below the horizon, and the air had a touch of night to it that chilled me to the core. Walking to the car with Nick, I couldn’t help wondering if I would ever be completely warm again. It was not merely the disappointment of discovering that poor Vabu Rusi was in no position to help us unravel the mystery of my grandmother; the truth was that the whole place made me profoundly sad. I could not wait to leave this frozen wasteland and its thousands of homeless ghosts. “So much for talking to Vabu,” I said, burrowing my hands into my pockets to find the car keys. “Where to next? The city archive?”

  But Nick was oddly unresponsive, glancing now and then across the road at a motorcycle and rider, idling in the shadow between two street lamps. “That,” he said eventually, “is a KTM motorcycle. Just won the Dakar Rally. Again.” Perhaps realizing I was waiting for the punch line, he added, “I saw one this morning, when we were at the clothes store
. I bet it’s the same one. There are only so many people who would ride a bike in weather like this.”

  No sooner had he said that than the motorcycle sped off into the darkness, in the direction of the Russian border.

  “Reznik?” I said, feeling another shiver, this time of fear.

  “I don’t think so.” Nick was still staring into the black void of the Raate Road, a small quartet of muscles playing in his jaw. “But I do think we’re being watched.”

  Back at the hotel, I pulled Nick into another shower, desperate to have him to myself one more time. Although we had made no plans to either stay or leave, I knew the sirens would be calling out for Kamal al-Aqrab soon—not to mention the unforgiving paternal Cyclops that ruled his life.

  “Exquisite, rare Goddess,” he said, stepping into the tub. “We both know what happens to mortal men who see Diana bathing.”

  “Yes.” I drew him into the hissing stream of warm water, longing to indulge in his perfections and forget the imperfect world around us. “But I promise to make it worth your while.”

  “I would never have imagined,” he mumbled, pulling me tightly against him, “I would be engaging in hieros gamos in Finland in November—”

  I laughed with surprise, only too well remembering our naughty dinner conversation with Rebecca in Crete. “I thought you didn’t know Greek.”