Icebreaker

by Horatio Clare

  ‘My father was a ten-year-old boy in 1918 when they came to fetch his father for execution. He was strongly influenced by this: he lived his entire life as a leftist and communist – a defender of the poor,’ said one. The programme’s balancing account ran: ‘Grandmother remembers when the Red Guard came looking for her father. She crawled through Red ditches with her family to escape. We ingested her message along with our mother’s milk: we have never voted for or supported any party or candidate that was Red, socialist or communist.’ What stays with me is almost an aside in Yle’s commentary on their survey: submissions which spoke of the ‘vindictive treatment of orphaned Red children’. If there is a measure of the psychosis of civil war, perhaps this is it. A century later Yle reported that Finnish children are now among the happiest and least dissatisfied on the planet. The contrast is dizzying, an astounding tribute to the progress of a people, of a continent, of a world. What miracles we can achieve in only a hundred years.

  Tem is watching a ship heading for the shallows. ‘She is trying to make a run between there,’ he says, indicating two outcrops. ‘We keep an eye on her in case anything strange happens.’

  I turn to Arvo. ‘Have you ever seen anything weird at sea? Anything you could not explain?’

  ‘Yes! Fireballs. Meteorites. Strange stuff. If you sit half of your life here in the dark … Glowing plankton!’ He mimes rubbing his eyes and grabbing binoculars.

  ‘Are you superstitious?’

  ‘Of course we are!’ Arvo cries. His smile has amazement in it – partly at the question, partly at the answer.

  ‘Never sit on a … thing you tie the ship to?’ Ville says immediately.

  ‘A bollard?’

  ‘Never sit on a bollard. It’s unlucky.’

  ‘No whistling,’ Arvo says. ‘Brings storms.’

  ‘Never light a cigarette from a candle,’ says Ville. ‘If you do a sailor drowns.’

  Sampo appears, not a superstitious man. ‘The striped flags are out today. We have finally legalised gay marriage in Finland!’

  ‘Congratulations! What took you so long?’

  ‘It’s embarrassing. The Finns party, you know the True Finns, the right wing? We had a vote in 2014 but then there was a challenge.’

  ‘How are you on immigration?’

  ‘It’s an issue. Not for me. I don’t mind we have immigrants. I’m more than happy to pay a solidarity tax if my kids have good hospitals and good schools. I’m glad my kids’ school is mixed – and immigrants.’

  ‘How is that done?’

  ‘When they built the housing it was deliberately mixed, so the schools are mixed.’

  ‘So simple, again!’

  ‘Yeah. And I like living next to the sprout hippies. I take great pleasure in driving past them in my Silverado …’

  ‘Sprout hippies?’

  ‘Ituhippi!’ Tem and Sampo laugh. ‘Sprout hippy, vegetarian, green …’

  ‘It’s not quite Norway,’ Sampo says to Reidun. ‘At your cash points you just put your social security number in and it asks how much you want.’

  ‘That’s what you guys are doing,’ she says, ‘Citizens’ wage.’

  Sampo is tracking the shortcutting ship. ‘How’s our hero? She’s got a draught of … five metres … and what’s she carrying? Phenyls! Oh, so that’s OK then. Poisonous to all life but soluble in water! And another one following her, look. Save fuel.’

  The ship sits idle in the ice until the light dims to blue-purple. During a walk around the deck a hail of black shot-like soot fires out of the funnel and falls like gravel. Lasse was cleaning the boilers, he says at supper.

  ‘I tell you an engineer’s joke. A man jumps out of a plane and his parachute doesn’t work, so he tries the reserve parachute. He pulls the cord but it doesn’t open. He pulls the cord on his third parachute and that doesn’t work either. Just then he sees a man coming up towards him, flying through the sky with no parachute. He says, “Hey, do you know anything about parachutes?” The guy says, “Do you know anything about steam boilers?”’ Everyone laughs, and I want to hug them for it, and Lasse for his effort. Lasse takes the applause like a man who has just brought off a card trick as well as it could be done.

  You do not have to have Finnish to follow the silences and half-conversations of these gentle, inward men: they do not seem shy so much as withheld, reminiscent of the farmers I know at home, more given to listening than speech. The mid-twentieth century in Finland saw over a million people leave farming and forestry for work in the cities of the south. (‘My grandparents were from the country,’ Tem told me. ‘They moved to the city and changed their name.’) Within a few decades half the population was urbanised, a vastly accelerated version of a process which took two centuries elsewhere in Europe. Perhaps the self-reliance of a recently rural people suddenly displaced and re-rooted became self-containment, the heritage of the wilds carried into the noise and crush of the cities.

  Just after nightfall, as we leave the ice for Rahja roads, the wind drops and the bay calms. The open water is an invisible void, perfectly still, as though we sail over space. Below us small rafts of ice hover as if on a starless sky. We back a little way into Rahja’s channel, clearing it pointlessly, as far as I can tell, then come out again and set course for Kokkola. The approach to our last night’s station takes us across a soulful sea where a ship’s lamps glow like campfires. The Patricia V has completed her loading in the bay. She weighs anchor, her lights spilling shimmering tracks across the black water, and turns south, loaded with seventy-five thousand tonnes of iron ore pellets for Rotterdam. Ville parks us in the ice, in the same foxhole we left two days ago, and the ship falls into peace.

  CHAPTER 16

  Changeover

  ‘VILLE IS WHISTLING!’ Tem cries.

  ‘He wants storms,’ Arvo says, making tea.

  Tem watches Ville start the engines. Otso puffs out a balloon of her thickest, blackest smoke. ‘I have never seen this before, but for some reason Ville is happy.’

  ‘How do you feel, Tem?’

  ‘For some reason I am a little bit sad. Happy to be going home but also sad to leave.’

  ‘There are a lot of happy people on this ship!’ Arvo declares as we swing towards Kokkola.

  Reidun shakes her head. ‘Not me. I never like to go home.’

  ‘What will you do, Tem? Have a drink tonight?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I will wait; we are taking the children to go skiing this weekend. I will have a drink then. Where we are skiing I will be chauffeuring. There is a place I wait to pick them up. They will ski and I will have coffee, and when they call I will say, “Ye-es?”’ He bursts out laughing. ‘Ye-es?’ is spoken with a rising intonation, a comical mockery of a child’s demands.

  Dark rain gathers to the west as one gull appears before the foremast, leading us into port. Kokkola harbour is heroically bleak, iron, concrete and machinery in symphony under a low sky. The quay is piled with rust-coloured cones of ore and looped with conveyor belts on stilts. Three cranes are working over Kumpula, a dwarfing black and red bulk carrier. ‘One of the largest ships in Finland,’ Ville says, as we inch through shuga towards our berth behind her. Kumpula’s lifeboat is set high up behind the bridge on a chute aimed steeply at the water.

  ‘Have you ever been on a free-fall boat?’ Ville says. ‘I did it on a course. You strap in facing backwards. There is a moment of noise, a moment of silence and then bang, you hit!’

  ‘Did you scream?’

  ‘Sailors are quiet and cool,’ he returns.

  Now Tem steps up to perform the ritual of manoeuvring Otso into her berth.

  ‘The master brings us alongside unless the master is drunk!’ Arvo announces. Arvo is a-bustle with energy this morning, his flight connections to the Ålands lined up, his bags packed. Tem slow-juggles the controls, Ville behind him like a coach, concentrating as if on Tem’s behalf. This is not quite the silent teaching he gives Arvo, more a silent solidarity. We edge forward
and then back, slowly, slowly, tiny touches – Come on, I find myself urging Otso. In a bit, come left for him! In order to fully disguise any sense of pressure you must also disguise the sense of relief: as the heaving lines are thrown ashore we all let out a breath we did not know we were holding. At 08.09, six minutes early, our gangway touches the quay.

  We make our farewells with handshakes (Arvo and Lasse), bashful laughter (Ville and Sampo) and small speeches (Reidun and me). We will keep in touch, we promise. Tem, Reidun and I will share a taxi and a train to Oulu. Tem appears in fawn corduroy and fawn trainers, wheeling a mint-green suitcase. You might guess he was a teacher or a civil servant, but a captain leaving his ship, never. We disembark, slipping over pellets of iron ore the size of fat grapes, frozen in bunches. As the taxi pulls away I turn for the apocryphal Filipino seafarer’s favourite view of the ship, framed in the back window. Beside Kumpula, Otso looks small, neat and impatient, her smart blue and white out of place in her rusty surroundings, her calling clear in her lines. She will be back in the ice tonight.

  The drive is solemn. Reidun is dreading work emails. Tem is adjusting; land is a demotion to any captain. I am sorry to leave our mission, our ark apart from the world. Our moods change as we reach the station: the cold is vivifying and cheering; unfamiliar faces seem wonderfully exotic. A long goods train heaves a thousand pine logs northwards, trailing their sap-green scent. The smell is sharp and thrilling and I realise how strange it has been to be within sight of land and utterly apart from it. No scent or sensation that belongs to it has been anywhere near us until now. I want to walk and wade through snow and inhale the Christmas smell of pines, to eat well and slowly, to swim and stretch and hug.

  Our train includes a separate compartment, glassed in.

  ‘For people with allergies,’ Tem explains.

  Hay fever and asthma rates have soared in Finland, as they have throughout the wealthy world, but researchers point to a particular Finnish obsession with scrupulous cleanliness. Everything from tarmacked roads to anti-allergenic rugs is blamed for robbing Finns of their immunity. Over the border in Russian Karelia, where allergy rates are very low, contact with dust, dirt and animals is much more common than in Finland, researchers report. Allergies would seem to be the price of hygiene.

  The contrast with grimy, immunity-boosting British trains is fabulous. Finns enjoy cabinets for telephone conversations, self-service tea and coffee and an easy punctuality. Through the windows Ostrobothnia passes in scrolls of birch and pine trunks, white meadows, farms painted pale yellows and greens, horses in rugs and a stillness in the air, snow-lit and soft.

  Tem refills his coffee and launches into a round of seafarers’ jokes.

  ‘This one is Finnish. The coastguard calls a Swedish ship: “How many persons on board?” “No Perssons, one Jansson!” Because Persson is a Swedish name …’

  ‘Got it!’

  ‘The coastguard calls again. “Where are you?” “On the bridge.” “No, what is your position?” “Second mate!”

  ‘Classic.’

  ‘“Mayday, Mayday, I am sinking.” “What are you thinking?”’

  ‘I surrender!’

  ‘Ha! OK. Look! These are breast-cancer awareness.’

  Where a pasture meets the forest are a line of silage bales wrapped in bright pink plastic. We talk of farmers and schools and children; Tem’s daughter attends a school which also trains teachers.

  ‘It is quite wonderful,’ he says. ‘They are taught maths by a Japanese teacher who speaks no Finnish! So the only language is maths.’

  For all the health centres, the technology hubs, the effortless transport, the equality and progressive values I have heard and seen and read about, it is this line of Tem’s which seems to speak most deeply of Finland: a Japanese teacher and a ten-year-old Finn speaking mathematics to each other. The teacher will be here because Finnish education is among the best in the world, and teachers are accorded a commensurate status in society. In a recent poll of graduates a quarter said teaching was their ideal profession. Instead of piles of tests and homework, Finnish children are given highly trained and motivated teachers, and free education to PhD. At the end of basic education children are evaluated, not tested. They can take two to four years to complete high school, depending on their progress. I feel something like physical pain thinking of the contrast with education in my country, where children’s success is largely determined by their parents’ education and address.

  ‘And what do you do with your time, Tem, when they are at school?’

  ‘When it is quiet I collect coins. It’s an interesting thing to do. I like British coins, Edwardian and Victorian but also anything before decimalisation. I am always looking for them on the Internet, for the strange ones, but they are very expensive.’

  ‘Why British?’

  ‘The history, the silver coins which actually are silver, shillings and florins. I am interested in them before they were alloys. So when the kids are at school sometimes I am researching and arranging …’

  It casts another light on this man whose shipboard life is constant responsibility, near-constant noise, companionship, motion, decision. For some reason I do not picture Tem the numismatist with music playing or the radio on; rather in peace, working on his hobby in a slip of time.

  Maja, Tem’s wife, will meet us at Oulu. We are all going out to lunch.

  ‘There are two restaurants, and I have the menus here,’ Tem says, producing printouts. ‘There is a modern one or a more traditional one.’

  We tease him for his efficiency and settle on the traditional.

  Tem’s phone rings.

  ‘Oh, you are at the port? OK. And do you have a number for the ship? OK, here it is. If you call them they will contact the security. I am on a train now, but you can speak with Seppo – he is the captain – and then they will help you. Oh, I am sorry. Yes. This is the number …’ His manner is so soft and mollifying he might be a therapist.

  He hangs up. ‘The admiral’s daughter is stuck at the port gate,’ he says.

  ‘The way you deal with people is extraordinary! So gentle …’

  ‘I am always being calm or pretending to be calm.’

  Maja stands straight-backed, the inverted V of grey hair in her fringe a striking highlight against blonde, her manner warm and direct. Husband and wife embrace briefly, no fuss, no great homecoming. The restaurant is a log cabin, with red and white checked tablecloths in the comfortable dim light of dark wood. Maja and Tem defuse and defer the tension of the approaching holiday in rapid shorthand: plans for the packing, the kids and the long drive north are all in hand, and Maja has work to do before departure. She is a health and safety inspector now, which means travel all over Finland.

  ‘Do you miss the sea?’ I ask.

  ‘No!’ She smiles. Then she hesitates. ‘Sometimes in summer I think it could be nice to be out. But no.’

  ‘And you were a rarity out there, a female officer?’

  ‘Yes. You had to be strong. If a man needed help he could ask, but a woman no, you felt a pressure.’

  ‘A pressure to be better than everyone else?’

  ‘Oh yes! Of course. But I always feel this. On land too, we always feel this.’

  ‘Sometimes you did not ask for help when you should, when anybody should,’ Tem says.

  ‘Yes,’ she returns. ‘That is how it is. Anyway I prefer the land.’

  ‘It seems like a wonderful job, Tem. You would not change it, would you? Apart from the absences.’

  They look at each other.

  ‘The only thing is knowing when he will be free,’ Maja begins.

  ‘You do not know when you are working,’ Tem says. ‘For some weeks yes, but not for some months.’

  ‘Last year we had to cancel our holiday,’ Maja adds. ‘They needed him to work.’

  ‘It is the only bad thing in my life,’ Tem says. ‘I do not know when I will be working and when I will be free. I do not have control of the fu
ture.’

  A waitress comes for our order. Maja spends a long time detailing allergies; the waitress is confident and reassuring. Waiters and waitresses in Finland are expert in this area, Maja says. ‘You know we are all lactose intolerant?’

  Tem grins. ‘Well, all except me.’

  ‘And you met on a ferry between Holland and Britain?’

  ‘Yes!’ Maja laughs. ‘Our first date was in Middlesbrough.’

  ‘Did you like Middlesbrough?’

  ‘It was terrible! Do you remember where we went?’ she asks Tem.

  For the first time in ten days he hesitates. He looks at the menu, with its choices of fish, reindeer, elk and pasta, as if for help.

  ‘It was an Italian …’

  ‘It was an Indian! Do you remember what we had?’

  ‘Yesss … It was … spicy.’

  ‘It was chicken curry!’

  ‘Yes! I know it had lots of rice. Yes.’

  She laughs and rolls her eyes. ‘He wasn’t thinking of the food.’ Reidun laughs. ‘This is good!’

  ‘And you were his senior officer, Maja?’

  ‘Yes!’ She looks at her husband with a sweet affection. ‘He made his reports to me.’

  ‘It was twice as hard,’ Tem says, meeting her gaze. ‘The first date and she was the boss. And it’s been that way ever since.’

  It is snowing when we leave, heavy wet flakes skidding sidelong through grey air. The temperature is only a little below freezing.

  ‘I hate it when it is warm like this,’ Maja says. ‘It will be better at the weekend, minus ten, minus fifteen – no slush. Everyone is happier when it is really cold.’

  She has a report to write. We drop her at her office. There is no question of Reidun and me taking a taxi to the airport, they insist.

  ‘We have time for me to show you something,’ Tem declares, spinning the car through the snow. He drives us to a suburb of tall houses separated by stands of birch trees.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘That is ours.’

  It is a grand yellow house girt with sheds and a snowy garden, set about with winter light. I am hoping for a look at the coin collection, but there is no time. We drive around the block and set off again.