New Finnish Grammar

by Diego Marani

  Had I been able to be at that man’s side during his time in Finland, I am certain that today we would be able to laugh together about Sampo Karjalainen. We would have gone to Kappeli’s, sat down in front of a tankard of beer and talked to each other about our experiences in the war, mine on board the Tübingen and his on the streets of Helsinki. Then even this grim winter would have seemed less dire, its snow and stars dispelling thoughts of darkness. I feel even more bitter reading these lines when I think how little it would have taken for him to have come through unscathed. If he had held on for another few weeks the war would have been over, Miss Koivisto would have been back in Helsinki and everything would have been different; because, however unfeeling, no human heart can hold out against a woman in love. A woman in love is a physical presence, a body which, of all those on earth, seeks out and desires only our own. We are animals, we are made of flesh and blood, we have need of the body in order to gain a sense of the soul. Of each lost love, it is the body that we mourn and, could we but keep it, even lifeless, even mute, but intact, we would make do with that. For bodies we are ready to build pyramids, and even after a hundred years a man is not dead until his body has been found. We refer to him as missing, we imagine him dragging out some kind of existence in a distant, hostile land, clinging grimly on to life, desperate to come home. We cannot help him, we cannot go out towards him, because anyone who has gone so far away is always in the wrong and must pay a price, a ransom. All we can do is wait for him, it is our duty to wait for him, and this may be a lifelong wait. Only the return of his body can free us from this waiting.

  It is little consolation to me to see that my advice was valid: only a woman could have saved that man, and Miss Ilma almost succeeded. I had been right. My diagnosis had been correct; the medicine had been what was needed. But I had proffered it to the wrong patient.

  These last pages are in a poor state. Some parts are stained with liquid, possibly koskenkorva, and the writing is smudged, though the basic meaning has not been lost. I found no trace of the second exercise book of which the author speaks, presumably used solely for studying the Finnish language, nor of the sheets of packing paper given him by the nurses. From this point onwards the document is no longer written in ink, but in indelible pencil. Although it is less methodical than the earlier parts, it shows a surer grasp of the language which this man had been so effortfully obliged to learn; even the mistakes are more academic, often due to the discrepancy between the spoken and the written language. All in all, it might indeed be said that that man had learned, or perhaps constructed, his own personal version of the Finnish language, a language all his own, handworked and roughly cut, where each word needed correcting, filing down, before it could come into complete possession of its meaning.

  How such a language must have sounded is hard to imagine. Miss Koivisto says that he managed to make himself understood perfectly adequately, even if he had to reformulate his sentences several times before they became comprehensible. He would alternate rudimentary and ungrammatical constructions with others taken from a printed book or idiomatic phrases, sometimes used in the wrong context. He had no concept of linguistic registers, and would use adjectives taken from the Bible alongside nouns he had heard in the bar at the Kämp. He did not give the impression of knowing the rules, but seemed to have learned the inflected forms of words according to their usage. He did the same thing with verbs, preferring the simpler constructions of the impersonal passive. As a neurologist I still marvel at this feat. My scientific knowledge fails to explain how that man could have built himself up a personality out of nothing, forged a language for himself by sheer willpower. Clearly, our minds are infinitely more powerful than we know. Shamans, saints and madmen gain mastery of this lethal weapon in different ways, and sometimes it kills them. They stray into this unknown dimension and, in their delirium, bring us back scraps of it which we find indecipherable.

  It was only after the battle of Kuuterselkä, when the first wounded began to arrive back in Helsinki, that we realized what was really going on in the Karelian Isthmus. They were brought back to the city by night, so that people wouldn’t see them, in lorries driven by the medical corps. I heard them arriving, saw them going into the misty courtyard; then I started to get dressed. I stayed seated on my bed, waiting for the nurses to come and call me. In the bruised light, their bandages looked the same colour as the gravel in the courtyard. They emerged from beneath the tarpaulins like ghosts, and we shepherded them slowly into the building, helping those who were incapable of walking. We took them to the innermost wing of the hospital, the one which also housed the visitors’ quarters. They were almost all very young, more perturbed by what they had escaped than by the wounds themselves. They were unwilling to speak of life at the front, and answered the nurses’ questions in monosyllables. Many were running fevers, and for several days all that could be seen of them was their outline, standing out beneath the sheets. The others too stayed lying down, staring at the ceiling or, if they were able to get up, going into the courtyard, where they wandered around smoking cigarettes they never finished. The few veterans from the Winter War told us about the breakthrough at Valkeasaari; they said that they had never seen such aggression, that this time the Russians were really bringing out the big guns. The line of defence at Kuuterselkä, too, had been breached with the utmost ease. But how could anyone hold out against such force? Both the nurses’ questions and the soldiers’ answers suggested a shared concern, hitherto kept hidden, the nervous allusion to a place which no one dared to name. I had looked for the places I was hearing about on the map; without exception, they formed a ring around Viipuri, a circle which was closing in. People discussed the news in the papers without ever making explicit mention of the name of the great city, almost as though they thought it would bring bad luck, as though not naming it would cause the Russians to forget about its existence. In the hospital refectory the patients would gather around the soldiers returning from the Isthmus and listen carefully to what they had to say, seeking the slightest sign that the Russians were directing their attack elsewhere, that Viipuri was in the clear, and anything would serve to bear out that conviction: current rumours, letters from the front, the most abstruse strategic reflections from some returning soldier. People would reassure themselves by repeating that the capital of Karelia was too well-defended, that the Russians would never run the risk of incurring the huge losses that such an attack would incur. The Germans were retreating, Leningrad was not in danger. Why would the Russians persist in attacking Viipuri?

  In the middle of June, three of the remaining beds in the visitors’ quarters were occupied, and I was no longer alone; but only for a few days, because my companions were three Russian officers who had been taken prisoner, and it was not long before they were transferred elsewhere. During their stay I listened to them curiously – their language was so different from Finnish. Pretending to study my notebook, I observed their gestures and their faces. So, that was what Russians were like. I thought of what Koskela had said, of the Uspenski Cathedral, of Ilma and her fear. The soldiers had occupied the three beds on the other side of the big room; the red-tiled floor ran between us like a frontier. They too were watching me in their turn; when they smoked, sometimes they would toss me the odd cigarette. I would nod my thanks, expressing my gratitude by lighting up immediately; then I would let them burn without actually smoking them, because they were so strong and bitter. One of the soldiers had been wounded in the foot, and moved around on crutches; the others too clearly had facial wounds, since their heads were bandaged. They stayed shut up in the room all day, with two guards watching over them from the corridor. When I came back, late at night, I would find them asleep, their uniforms neatly folded on their small iron trunks, their boots at the foot of their bed. I could see the tips of the guards’ cigarettes glowing in the corridor, and this I found somehow reassuring: it was not that I was afraid of the Russians, but I liked to think that the guards were watching over me
, too, warding off the oppressive dreams which thrust themselves upon me in the loneliness of sleep. The Russians’ presence had livened up the visitors’ quarters, made them somehow more welcoming. One night, after I had managed to lay hands on a bottle of spirits at the Kämp, I went back to the hospital earlier than usual, hoping to find the Russians still awake, as indeed they were, playing a game of cards. They invited me to sit with them; I understood nothing of the game, but I looked at the gilded figures on the cards, and they reminded me of the saints in the Uspenski Cathedral. The bottle was received with hearty slaps on the back, was passed round and very soon emptied; we consoled ourselves with cigarettes, of which there was no shortage, and also devised some form of conversation, using gestures and scraps of words which we spelled out in the air. One of the three, the one with the red stripe on his tunic, even spoke a sort of bastardized Finnish: he would throw one word out on top of another, then separate them with his hands. The verbs, however complicated, he would simply mime, as though he were quite used to expressing himself in that fashion. He showed me dog-eared photographs of women and children, the shape of whose eyebrows resembled his own, taking them out of his wallet and then replacing them with the greatest care. He also tried to explain to me which Russian city he came from, with the aid of an imaginary map of Russia, drawn with one finger on the wall. I went to my trunk to get the map of Europe which Koskela had used during our lessons, the one he’d used to describe the misguided migrations made by the Finno-Ugrians; but it didn’t serve much purpose, since it stopped at the Urals. When we opened it out on the floor, the city this man came from turned out to be two tiles beyond the edge.

  ‘Suuri, Russia on suuri maa!’ he exclaimed, laughing and banging the floor with his fist. That night in June was the last time I felt the warmth of another human turned in my direction, the last time I spoke heart to heart with one of my fellow men. The next morning, when I came back from mass, I found the three beds empty, the mattresses rolled up. It seemed to me that I could still see the outline of Russia which the officer had sketched out with his finger on the wall.

  Now it was a pastor from the nearby cathedral who came to say mass in the hospital chapel. But after having heard Koskela’s sermons, those of the new officiant struck me as glib and infantile; his use of language was unsubtle, his words came straight from the Mass Book, I could understand them without any difficulty, and hence heard them without interest. I offered the newcomer my help as a sacristan, but I did not seek his friendship, indeed I made sure that I kept my distance. I talked with him enough to ensure that church business went smoothly, but no more than that. Yet, despite my unresponsiveness, the new pastor showed me considerable kindness: noticing my interest in language, perhaps on the nurses’ suggestion, he gave me a new notebook, with plain white pages. But my attitude towards him remained unchanged. As I had done with Koskela, in the morning I would wash the floors and dust the holy objects, in the evening I would light the candle before the service and put away the missals at the end. But the intimacy I had established with Koskela was not something that could ever be repeated; it was the fruit of long and careful nurturing, and I had no desire to dull its memory by finding a substitute. The new pastor did not use the sacristy; he prepared his sermons elsewhere, and came into the little room just to hang up his hat. I had put Koskela’s Kalevala and the bottle of koskenkorva back into the little cupboard and sometimes, in the evening after the service, when the pastor had left, I would stay on there for a time, thinking about the past. In my hands, the bottle did not replenish itself; when I had finished it, it remained resolutely empty. But even that empty bottle served as a reminder of my old friend. I took it away, together with the Kalevala, and put it in my little trunk, as though it were a relic. The faded label and the lingering sweetish smell reminded me of my first afternoons in the sacristy, with the crackling stove and the ice on the window panes: they spoke to me of a world which now seemed infinitely far away.

  One sultry evening, when I was tossing and turning in my bed, unable to sleep, a nurse came in and asked me to run to get the pastor, saying it was urgent. The condition of one of the wounded who had arrived the previous day had suddenly worsened; he was a private, a member of an anti-tank division, one of whose legs had been amputated. I remembered him, because he was the only member of the convoy whom we had taken off the lorry on a stretcher. Wounded at the battle of Kuuterselkä, he had been left untended for several hours, since he had been thrown into a crater made by a mine, under Russian fire. The stretcher-bearers had not been able to reach him until the evening, when they had taken him into no-man’s-land. He had caught diphtheria some days earlier, and had to be transferred immediately so as to avoid infecting his fellow troops, and that was how he had arrived in Helsinki. Extremely weak from loss of blood, that night he had also had a bad attack of dysentery and was completely dehydrated; the doctor did not give him many hours to live. I leapt out of bed and ran out into the courtyard, then down Unioninkatu, where my footsteps rang out on the stone still warm from the day’s strong sun. I could feel a throbbing in my temples, and sweat was running down my back. In no time I was at the Suurtori, then I was passed the cathedral and found myself knocking at the door of the low block of flats on the eastern side of the square. In words mangled by my heavy breathing, I explained the situation to the pastor, who followed me anxiously into the street, panting and buttoning up his clothes. The wounded man had been taken into a room the size of my own, situated next to the casualty department, away from the other wards, and used for infectious patients. He was the room’s sole occupant, lying in the furthest away of the six beds, and a nurse was wiping his forehead with cold cloths which she was picking out of a bucket at her feet. At the other side of the bed, the doctor, in his shirt sleeves, was taking his pulse. The room smelled of human flesh, of blood and faeces, laced with a dash of carbolic acid, against which the faint breeze coming in through the open window battled in vain. An oil lamp, attached to the bars of the bed, cast an oblique light over the sick man, and it bounced off the metal of the other beds, projecting a pattern of flickering, intersecting lines on to the ceiling.

  ‘Is he conscious?’ the pastor asked under his breath; the doctor nodded, and drew back. The nurse too picked up her bucket and went to stand at the foot of the bed. When the pastor entered the strip of bluish light cast by the lamp, his features hardened, made suddenly prominent by deep, cold shadows, his eyes like two empty pits. As he leant over the sick man, the crucifix around his neck swung suddenly from side to side, and his shadow seemed to grow larger on the wall.