by Diego Marani
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.
The German headquarters were housed in a fenced-in villa with an imposing white gate, set back a little from the street. We crossed the gravel-strewn courtyard embarrassed at the noise of our own steps, to be met by a soldier who, I noticed, walked with a limp. He exchanged a few words with the doctor and led him towards a door at the end of the hallway, gesturing that I should go into the officers’ mess, which was empty at that hour. I sat down and began to leaf through some old magazines. After long minutes spent in silence, I heard his limping step returning, then the door opened and the soldier appeared, beckoning me to follow him. I was escorted into the office, where the doctor and the civil servant were deep in conversation. The civil servant was solidly built, with a red face and a genial smile. He came towards me to shake my hand, gesturing towards an armchair in front of his desk. I sat down, and the doctor, seated beside me, carried on with a conversation which my arrival must have interrupted. He was speaking in German, but I sensed that it was my story he was telling. He pointed to the jacket, which I had taken off and was now holding folded on my knee. At a gesture from the doctor, I pointed to the label, brought the handkerchief with the initials out of a pocket and laid it on the desk. The civil servant turned it over in his hands, frowning, then handed it back to me. The conversation did not last long. The civil servant nodded as the doctor spoke, and took some notes. Then he stood up, took us to the door and bade us a warm goodbye. He also addressed a sentence to me personally in his warm, raucous German; I did not understand it, but sensed it was intended to be well-meant. The doctor, on the other hand, did understand, and shook the civil servant’s hand, giving him a grateful look. I too thanked him, bowing my head in place of words. The lone soldier led us through the gravel-strewn courtyard to the gate. We waited for his limping step to die away before getting into the car.
Now the mist was clearing, rising hazily towards the woods. As we left Opicina flashes of sunlight were already visible over the rocky coast, falling on the sea and dispelling the last strips of cloud. At the first turn in the road the bay came into view, spread out in front of us. The doctor pulled the car to the side of the road; we got out and walked along a stony track running round the side of the hill. Even though the countryside was bright with the fiery colours of the woods, there was a touch of winter in the cold sky. In the deeper dips in the uplands, where patches of cloud still lingered, the trees were already bare. When we reached the top, we sat down on a low stone wall, looking out at the empty horizon and the city below us, set in the dazzling sea.
‘In two days the troop train will be ready,’ the doctor told me. He was gazing into the distance, trying to find words which I could understand. Raising his voice, as though hoping that it would penetrate more deeply into my mind, he went on:
‘The time has come for you to face this journey. You must not be afraid. Basically, this journey is a return. Here you are living in a sort of limbo, a no-man’s-land, your life is in abeyance. Do you understand me?’
I nodded, even though I had barely grasped the meaning of what he said. Looking out to sea again, the doctor went on:
‘You must go back to your past life. Only there can you hope to find something that will jog your memory. Sometimes all it takes is some smell, some trick of the light, some sound that you have heard a thousand times, however unknowingly.’
Smell, light and sound, these had been the instruments of my awakening. The doctor fell silent for a few moments, giving me a conspiratorial look. I did not know what he was thinking, but I sensed that he would have liked to be leaving with me.
‘Now you must start to learn your language. This above all will
help you with your memory. The merest breath is enough, if there is still any fire at all beneath the ashes.’
Seeing my blank expression, he repeated what he had just said, miming the lighting of a match, the flame swelling, and rising.
‘You’ll see, it won’t be difficult. But you will have to make an effort. You won’t be able to make do with just a few words and the odd gesture, as we have done these past few weeks. You will have to work hard at your language. Finnish is the language in which you were brought up, the language of the lullaby that sent you to sleep each night. Apart from studying it, you must learn to love it. Think of each word as though it were a magic charm which might open the door to memory. Say each word aloud as though it were a prayer – prayers are made up of words. Turn over its every meaning, its every usage, in your mind.’
I frowned. I could no longer follow what he was saying, but I did not want to interrupt the flow. His words were music, and that music was about me. The doctor saw my difficulty, and tried to describe the more difficult concepts, once more with the help of gestures. Some words he could only uselessly repeat, breaking them down into syllables to show me the pieces one by one. To no avail, the meaning still escaped me; yet, though they dissolved like morning mist, those syllables were not entirely lost. Repeating them to myself I somehow captured traces of them and, much later, those fossil remains yielded up the doctor’s thinking.
The wood around us was rustling with the faint sound of raindrops instantly drunk in by the earth. I felt I could hear the leaves shrivelling, as though all autumn were draining away in a few minutes. The doctor clasped his hands, trying in vain to find some way of communicating his feelings, his advice. Finally he spoke without caring whether I understood or not, in a sudden outburst, giving vent to an evident irritation that his words would simply be borne off on the wind.
‘One more bit of advice,’ he said. ‘I speak now as a man, not as a doctor. Since language is our mother, try and find yourself a woman. It is from a woman that we come into this world, from a mother that we learn to speak. Fall in love, give of yourself. Switch off your brain and follow your heart. You must fall in love with a voice, and with every word you hear it utter.’
Perhaps because it was followed by a long silence, that last phrase, without my understanding it, stayed in my mind. I repeated it, committing it to memory as a frozen block of sounds within which I could discern some meaning. Later, as it dissolved in my mind, I picked the words out of it, the most important last: rakkaus, which means love.
But the glorious landscape laid out before us, the glassy sea, puckered in the distance by the movement of the wind, and the sun, now hot in the still hazy sky, were not conducive to such weighty thoughts. Enchanted by that heartening view, we both fell silent for some time. Even the war seemed far away. From up there the city, so ill-at-ease and anxious, looked like a Christmas crib, and the warships criss-crossing the bay like so many toys. The doctor turned his face to the sun. I stared at the rock at my feet, dropping away steeply into the blue abyss of the sea, and pursued my thoughts. More than his words, which I had barely understood, it was the doctor’s tone which had struck me. I sensed that some moment of truth was approaching, that I was moving towards an appointment I could not fail to keep. I had to solve the puzzle which had cut my life in two. Even if I was by now more or less accustomed to the atmosphere of that unknown city, of that ship anchored outside time, I felt that I could not stay there for ever. The slow-moving smoke from the odd chimney rose from the dazzling city at our feet, together with muffled sounds. As though he were reading my thoughts, the doctor said:
‘And seeing that we are compatriots, when you get there, please send my old Finland my warmest greetings! These weeks of teaching you such little as I could remember of our language has been a voyage of discovery for me too. I have found words which had been forgotten in the cracks in my memory. When I was a child, my mother would often come out with the following saying: ‘Oma maa mansikka, muu maa mustikka’ (One’s own land is like a strawberry, other people’s is like a bilberry). Mansikka is the strawberry, red and sweet like our land. Mustikka is the bilberry, black and sour like other people’s. In other words, everyone is best off in their own home. Who knows, perhaps my mother foresaw the fate awaiting me, and those words were a warning. Perhaps meeting you in this way in such a far-flung place is a sign, a message she is sending me from the other world to say that it is time for me too to go back home!’ He gave a crooked smile, perhaps wanting to believe as much himself; he looked at me for a moment, then quickly turned his gaze in a less challenging direction, towards the distant sea.
The doctor had made the preparations for my departure. I would leave with the troop train that was taking the wounded from the Tübingen back to Germany; from Trieste, it would go to Dresden via Ljubljana, Vienna and Prague. From Dresden, I would carry on to Berlin and then Stettin, with a laissez-passer the doctor had obtained from the civil servant we had met in Opicina. From there I would be able to take ship for Helsinki. The doctor gave me several letters of introduction to be given to a colleague of his in the military hospital in Helsinki, in which he explained my situation and described the injury I had sustained.
‘Ask for Doctor Mauno Lahtinen,’ he said, making sure I had understood. ‘He’s an old classmate of mine from the time when I was studying at the University of Helsinki. We have seen each other only once over these last twenty-six years, at a neurologists’ congress in Berlin, but we are in regular correspondence. I know that he is doing service at the main military hospital in Helsinki.’ He also gave me the money for the journey, and for my initial expenses. He was insistent that I should not hesitate to mention his name if I had problems with the German authorities.
‘If the worst comes to the worst, tell them to telegraph the Gauleiter of Carinthia, Doctor Friedrich Reiner, the man we met in Opicina. He knows all the details.’
A fine rain was falling on the morning I boarded the train to Dresden. The sky was full of billowing, low-lying clouds. Doctor Friari came with me to the platform. I sought for words of thanks, but could manage only to clasp his hand. He noted my emotion, but on this occasion contained his own.
‘Courage! You are going home! Oma maa mansikka …’ At the moment of our leave-taking he assumed a soldierly indifference which he had never shown before. His last words were as follows:
‘I hope you will be able to make a new life for yourself. Or find the one you lost. I will not ask you to keep in touch. I know that when you find peace and serenity you will not want to think back to these days. But at least, if you can, remember me. Being remembered – that is all we ask for, is it not?’
Drawing his overcoat around him, he said another quick goodbye as the train pulled out. I never saw him again.
Reading these pages, I felt deeply moved. Reflected in this narrative I glimpsed aspects of myself that were quite unknown to me. It contains almost all the words I spoke, and my own personal story sounds even more bitter as told here. Though he could speak no language at the time, that man could read into my silences, could sense my fear. I well remember our first meeting in my office, on board the Tübingen. Without realizing what I was doing, I had begun telling him my story. I was convinced that he could not understand me, and I was talking mainly in order to give vent to my feelings, something I had never been able to do, not even with the sailors in the Hamburg church, for fear that someone was spying on me. I had not realized it, but my pain was so intense that it leapt clean over those words and straight into the heart of that man, whom I had treated like a deaf-mute. How he managed to articulate whole portions of my outbursts, I do not know. Luckily I still have the diary I kept during that time. The green notebook, as he called it. Alongside my personal notes, I registered everything significant that happened on board. That notebook has helped me to reconstruct the chain of events with considerable accuracy, and to recall our conversations. Above all in the first part, some passages of the document were hard to interp
ret, and I had trouble making sense of them. But, spelling mistakes apart, many of the sentences I used to tell my story are reproduced here with alarming accuracy, as though they had been learned by heart. So heavily had those words weighed on that man’s mind that he had put his trust in me.
After long weeks spent off Cyrenaica, picking up the war-wounded from the fighting in Africa, my periodic returns to Trieste came as a relief. That light-filled bay gave me an illusion of peace; I had my feet on dry land at last. No longer haunted by a sense of danger, at night I finally found sleep, I had time to do a little reading, even to do nothing, if I so chose. I was drawn to that unforthcoming, foundling city. Neither Italian, not Austrian, nor Slav, it thrust its shameless beauty in my face, and I looked back at it a little shyly, as one might cast glances at a woman known to be unattainable. Sometimes I fantasized that I would stay there when the war was over. But I felt that it was too grand a setting for a life as colourless as mine. Those who live in such a city have an obligation to be constantly in love, because great joys, like great sorrows, demand grand backdrops. When the Tübingen, emptied now of its cargo of suffering and its stench of flesh, weighed anchor to sail northwards once more, the sight of Trieste receding into the distance brought with it an overwhelming sense of the most tender melancholy; parting is indeed such sweet sorrow. Once again I felt that I had missed an opportunity to embrace that city, and I imagined that perhaps, disdainful though she was, in some sense she too yearned for me.
The journey to Opicina on that autumn morning, over the Carso emerging from the mist, remains imprinted in my mind, together with everything I said, so I was able to reconstruct its gist. It was hard to find a way of making myself understood. We were dealing with concepts, ideas, and at that time the author of these pages had words for things, and things alone. Today I see, with some surprise, that he had retained my words until such time as he was able to decipher them. It is true, I too would have liked to have been sailing back to Finland; to take advantage of the chaos of war in order to do away with the neurologist from the military hospital in Hamburg and replace him with the Helsinki university student of twenty-six years earlier. But this was no longer possible. Twenty-six years do not go by without leaving their mark. Memory overlays itself like lava, causing recollections to be preserved, it is true, but also stealing them from us for ever. Memory, which the author of these pages was so wretchedly pursuing, still has me in its grip. Memory is the tithe of pain I pay, each day, when I wake up to this world and agree to live in it. Why, I do not know. Perhaps because it is easier to be born than to die; perhaps because of the unwholesome interest which all men feel in seeing how it will all end, whatever pain it may cause them.
