Icebreaker

by Horatio Clare

  I thought about how my heroines and heroes would approach the rest of the evening. Jan Morris would wander the streets. Her first essay on Helsinki dances with the relief of leaving the Soviet Union of the 1950s. Of the local citizenry she said, ‘They are a people that nobody in the world, not even the heart-throb marching progressive, could possibly feel sorry for. They are as tough as nails, and twice as spiky.’ On a return journey thirty years later she declared Finland the ‘Lucky Country’. Michael Jacobs would have followed a tip to a dive bar, and made friends over food and drink. Norman Lewis would have sidled in and out of Helsinki without anyone noticing him, and missed nothing.

  My wanderings have taught me that first you should eat as well as you can afford; whatever follows will be the better for it. Then I tend to lope about hopefully, on the lookout for good talkers. The Finns are going to test this strategy because they define themselves as taciturn introverts, though they have apparently changed much since the explorer and composer Giuseppe Acerbi published his Travels through Sweden, Lapland and Finland in 1798. ‘The people have a gloomy and ferocious deportment,’ he wrote. ‘The young of both sexes remain in the company of each other without the least of that playful gaiety which is so becoming in their years. I never once observed a young man direct a smile of compliance towards a young woman …’

  Acerbi would have been dazzled by the boisterous crowds in Helsinki on Saturday night and ascribed their metamorphosis to drink. Women downed pints of lager, and here and there men sat alone, some smiling, quietly and decisively smashed. The main action on the streets seemed to be negotiation with bouncers. Stolid imperturbable men in black held long conversations with swaying hopefuls, a notable lack of anxiety or aggression on either side. Given that Finnish education is free to doctorate level it is quite possible they all had PhDs.

  In the end I deferred exploring to Oulu and the north the next day. In truth I was listless with the land. I longed for the day after tomorrow, and the ice, and the ship. This transition time is particular and isolated, as you remember who you are alone and fit yourself around the shape of the missing pieces of you, your family. I wished they were with me, making a mess of a table, charging into Finnish legs, marvelling at the Wi-Fi, whingeing, rowing, laughing.

  Morning brought a darker Helsinki, smearing rain falling on a city still prey to Russian moods. Outside the museum a bronze horseman and his mount overlooked the traffic, the animal alert as if it had seen some threat, the rider casting a wider gaze as if he looked out on a vista. On the plinth the legend MANNERHEIM suggested no other words were necessary.

  A Swedish-speaking Finn of an aristocratic family, Lieutenant General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim had thirty years’ service in the Russian army behind him when he fled the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, returning to Finland, which declared independence in December of that year. A power vacuum, food shortages, the disbanding of the gendarmerie and the revolution beyond the Russian border made a crisis of class division. Socialist ideals and the inspiration of the Bolsheviks led urban and rural labourers to form the Red Guards and set up a revolutionary government in Helsinki. The government declared the bourgeois Civil Guard the army of the state and withdrew to Vaasa on the Bothnian coast, splitting the country between the largely White-held north and the Red industrial south. Appointed commander of the White forces, Mannerheim was able to deploy the Jäger Battalion, a thousand Finns who had volunteered to fight for Germany in the Great War, accompanied by ten thousand German soldiers sent by the kaiser to form another front against Russia.

  The White Devil, the Reds called Mannerheim for his brutal victory in the battle for Tampere, the major industrial city of the south. Two thousand Reds were killed in the fighting and ten thousand captured, many dying in captivity of disease and starvation. The Red terror in the civil war killed over fifteen hundred Whites; it took decades for the scale of the reciprocal White terror to emerge. Ten thousand Reds were summarily executed and eighty thousand interned in camps, where an estimated twelve and a half thousand died of hunger and Spanish flu. The end of the war in 1918 drove many Reds to emigrate; thousands crossed the border into Russia, where they would eventually face Stalin’s purges.

  If his initial intervention in Finland’s history was fearsome, Mannerheim’s subsequent feats were extraordinary. He managed to distance Finland from the kaiser’s Germany in the eyes of the victorious Allies, established the nation as an independent state and brought the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands (at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia) under Helsinki’s control – one of the few achievements of the League of Nations. In 1919 Mannerheim rejected an attempt by hardline Whites to install him as a dictator. Serving as regent for six months, he persuaded the Allies that Finland should receive grain shipments, thereby saving the nation from famine. Having lost the election for first president of Finland, Mannerheim devoted himself to child welfare, travel and arguing for the strengthening of the Finnish armed forces. By the late 1930s he was pointing to the threat from the east and begging for resources to build up the army or leave to retire. Neither were forthcoming. He stepped down from an advisory post to the army aged seventy-two.

  Two days into his retirement the Soviet Union shelled the border and bombed Helsinki. Mannerheim was immediately made commander-in-chief of the armed forces of a country suddenly united. His total forces numbered less than a third of the million Soviet soldiers who now attacked Finland on multiple fronts. Lacking men, material and preparedness, Finland should have been overrun in weeks. The means and manner of their resistance made Finland and Mannerheim famous, along with a Finnish word, sisu, which summed up the attitude of the defenders.

  No one looked up at Mannerheim that grizzly day. On my way out of the city, on the airport bus, I watched the cloud break to the north-west. In a high gap appeared a gold-scaled chalcedony blue like a promise of adventure. At the departure gate my fellow travellers for Oulu were notably well covered, bulked out in woollens and coats. We landed in darkness. Beyond the windows, under the airport lights, the world was suddenly white.

  CHAPTER 3

  Oulu

  SNOW! I HAD forgotten the joy of it, the amazement and delight of it, the all-changing miracle of its deepening. The cold was abrupt and thrilling, like icy hands fishing for your ribs. With three Austrian men I engaged a taxi to the Lapland hotel, which aspired to be in Lapland clearly, though Oulu is actually in Ostrobothnia. Finland’s west coast retains its Swedish name, ‘east bay’, or ‘eastern bottom’ (lowlands). Names have become divorced from logic, remarrying practicality and commerce. We took off along a double strip of ice, clouds of snow blooming behind the car. On studded tyres we skidded like a boat onto the motorway. The driver’s thick cap and thick glasses made him look like a half-blind fisherman. He accelerated to ninety kilometres an hour, relaxed. The Austrians were impressed.

  ‘I like Finland, it is very laid-back,’ said their leader, hanging on to a strap just in case. ‘We are in gems and crystals! We are working for Swarovski. We are here meeting VTT.’

  VTT, the state-owned Finnish technical research company, is pioneering 5G in Oulu. The fifth generation of wireless technology will allow faster Internet speeds, enabling ‘beautiful variables’, the Austrian said. ‘One day your ring will monitor your health, or your brooch will tell you to go to a doctor.’

  Highly skilled technicians have been coming to Finland for a long time thanks to Nokia, a Finnish company making paper when Finland was still a Grand Duchy, which went on to lead the world in mobile phones during the period of their exponential growth. Between 1992 and 2000 Nokia’s phenomenal rise carried Finland with it. At the turn of the millennium, Nokia, with a staggering 41 per cent of the world mobile phone market, accounted for 4 per cent of Finland’s GDP and a fifth of Finnish exports. Its profits were not buried offshore: Nokia rescued Finland from the banking crisis and recession of the early nineties with huge tax revenues and twenty thousand jobs. The country was able to make investments in education and techno
logy that transformed it. When Nokia fell, deposed by the rise of smartphones, its legacies of entrepreneurship, technology start-ups and a highly employable workforce meant Finland still prospered. If Mannerheim founded Finland’s first century, its second is being built on the back of Nokia.

  ‘Beautiful variables’ was so pleasing I adopted it as my expedition motto. At the hotel we checked in, the Austrians turned in, and I set out into the peace and wide silence of the night, determined to grasp something of Finland and snow-test this ridiculously orange coat.

  The receptionist was adamant: the place to go at that hour was in the centre and it did delicious burgers. I emerged from the snow into a small wooden cabin of a place decorated with benevolent graffiti.

  LILLUHHEET WAS HERE declared a loopy hand. Double consonants are a particular trick of Finnish – you spin them out with a relishing stutter-pause.

  ‘What sauce would you like?’

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘We have nine types of mayonnaise and twenty-six kinds of beer.’

  One should have little truck with burgers, I know, but when in Oulu … The burger arrived and multiple mayonnaises made dreadful sense. Ninety sauces could not have improved the monster, suppurating sugar and salt. The locals adored them. At midnight customers were still coming in. ‘After Finland, the worst food in the world,’ Jacques Chirac said of British cuisine. ‘To be endured,’ said Silvio Berlusconi of Finland’s. The British might have relished these burgers after gallons of drink, but the Finns here were apparently sober. It rather changed the weight of the proverb. ‘The brave eat the soup, the timid die of hunger’ may not be about courage but cookery.

  There was no late-night feel in the cafe and I wondered, if half the year is basically darkness and the other half always light, if you can work on your phone via 5G any time, anywhere, and if there is always somewhere open, then had not the clock lost some of its grip on the psyche? There seemed a universal absence of rush. It was the weekend, but still I had seen no taut faces. Have the Finns found a loophole in the tyranny of long demands and short time?

  At the bar up the street I ordered a nightcap.

  ‘Good choice,’ said a rich American voice thoughtfully.

  Erick was famous, you could see it immediately; some combination of charisma and the way light liked him. ‘I’m an actor,’ he confessed, ‘And I work here.’ He had the policeman’s trick of quick listening, prompting you to talk. His own story came out rapidly. After ‘a period in the military’ he became a private investigator in Albany, New York State. He married a Finn, a literature specialist whose work brought them here. They were divorced now. Erick had stayed in Finland to be near his daughter.

  With sudden animation he spoke of his investigative work, of finding a man in days who had been on the run for months.

  ‘The guy who hired me said, “How did you do that? How did you do that?” He wanted to make me a partner.’

  The triumph subsided wistfully. Although he had good Finnish, Erick lacked the deeper local knowledge and the contacts which would allow him to practise investigating here. Instead of tracking down targets he scanned the bar. Men shook his hand and women hugged him as he asked how they were.

  A blonde woman with a lurching gaze lamented her loss of Finnish. ‘Been in fucking Portugal all these fucking years and now my language is gone fuck.’

  ‘I told you not to go,’ Erick said.

  A swaying woman emerged from the shadows and spoke to Erick in what sounded like cuckoo calls played backwards, a dialect blend of alcohol, affection and Finnish. He made sure she knew where she was going and was accompanied.

  ‘You know everyone!’

  ‘Oh yeah. We did that British musical, The Full Monty?’

  ‘Did you do the full Monty?’

  ‘Every night. In Finnish. For weeks.’

  ‘What was that like?’

  ‘We were swamped,’ he said, making comical saucers of his eyes.

  When the bar shut, Erick led me to 45, which stayed open into the small hours. There was live music downstairs and bars above, and very soon Erick was swamped again and I was talking to a mysterious Swede about Russia and submarines. He was an intense young man, friendly, forward-bent like a heron, given to covering his mouth with his hand and looking you hard in the eye.

  ‘Where are the Finnish submarines?’ he asked.

  ‘You tell me!’

  ‘Finland is not allowed any. The Paris treaty, 1947. But Finns were expert submarine builders. They built the U-boats!’

  The prototypes for the Nazi U-boat fleet were constructed here, funded by Germany as the country sought to dodge the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles.

  ‘Perhaps Finland is the hidden knife in Nato’s coat!’ he said.

  The Russians are alert to the notion. ‘Nato would have no qualms about fighting Russia down to the last Finnish soldier,’ Vladimir Putin told a press conference in Finland last year. The Finnish press reported that the line was delivered with a smirk. Russia has re-opened an abandoned military base on the Kola peninsula, forty miles from the border. Mobile anti-aircraft missile systems have been moved up to the Finnish frontier and nuclear missiles stationed in Kaliningrad. To the north Russia has renovated and constructed a string of military bases on Franz Josef Land, Novaya Zemlya, Northern Island and the New Siberian Islands. By 2018 it plans nine bases with airstrips in the Arctic. The high north is suddenly a contested place. Sweden has just reintroduced conscription, while in Finland all males turning eighteen are called up for military service, with 70 per cent completing it. (The rest do longer civilian service, with a stalwart fifty individuals a year sent to prison for conscientious objection.)

  Soon we were picking our way across the town through the snow, ending up in someone’s flat for a continuation party, and then the sky greyed through the windows and Oulu emerged, deep in crystals, the dawn glowing with a strange luminescence, light both soft and bright kindled between snow and sky.

  As I took my leave, Erick was relaxing on the floor, cradled by his sister-in-law. I had been told about Finnish benefits (good) and rents (high), Russians (enigmatic), and Erick had imparted a ruse by which you might serve divorce papers on a runaway American husband: find out where he works and gain entry by claiming to be his cousin – if both of you are black no one will question you until you slap the papers on him. I had been introduced to Finnish laws (humane) and judges (enlightened), the comfort and splendour of Oulu flats (considerable), and Finnish hospitality (near paralysing).

  A musician and his friend outlined Finnish feelings about their neighbours.

  ‘So you like the Danes?’

  ‘Umm yeah …’ they equivocated, wobbling flat palms in the air.

  ‘The Norwegians?’

  ‘The Norwegians are OK.’

  ‘The Swedes?’

  ‘Nooo!’ they chorused.

  ‘What’s wrong with the Swedes?’

  ‘Ooh … everything! No … not really …’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘They did invade us a lot.’

  Sweden, Christian and powerful, invaded the pagan Finnish wilds in a series of crusades, taking the south-west corner in 1248 and expanding across the territory, dominating the south-west by 1323, gaining the lot by 1617 and holding most of it until the Finnish War of 1808. In that year Sweden and Russia fought over Finland, as opposed to fighting in Finland, which they did regularly, notably in 1590 (the Russo-Swedish War) and again from 1700 to 1720 (the Great Northern War).

  Victorious, finally, in 1808, Russia controlled the Grand Duchy of Finland until 1917. Thus the ruling class of Finland were Swedes for the best part of seven centuries – longer, if you credit medieval Swedish chroniclers who claim the First Crusade of 1248 was actually the Second, the sequel to an original crusade which did or did not take place around 1150. There is no written or archaeological evidence for this expedition, but it does make a fine justification for a ‘successor’ a century later.
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br />   Farewells made, I stepped out into the early light, having taken a bearing on the spire of the cathedral, built by Finns under Russian rule and attached to an eighteenth-century church named after the wife of a Swedish king.

  CHAPTER 4

  Otso

  THE TAXI CURVES out of Oulou, takes a long dog-leg around the port and approaches a barrier. At the word ‘Otso!’ the lady on watch waves us through. We slither over frozen ground to the end of a long quay.

  Icebreaker Otso rises above black water and ice patches, snow jumbling in the wind. The ship looks like a sawn-off ferry, her hull planed down, low and rolling, her superstructure bulked up. A hundred metres long and forty metres high, seven thousand tonnes of her tower above the quay, her harbour generators humming and roaring, air intakes rushing. She is a snub blue-and-white machine, carrying her orange lifeboats high up on each side like tiny water wings. Her master comes down the gangway.

  Teemu Alstela is a burly man, young for a captain and blond-bearded, the golden spines of his moustache a jutting overhang, a hairy spindling that must function as insulation. His eyes are a snow-pale shade of grey I have not seen before, and he seems amused. I think it may be my coat. His is a slow and forgiving scrutiny. I have been foisted on him by Arctia, the state-owned company responsible for keeping Finland’s sea trade running through the ice. I will mean work and answering questions, but perhaps diversion too, says his hopeful smile.