by Diego Marani
The cold water on my skin, my eyes, my face, lessened my terror somewhat; I felt its coldness running down my every limb, soothing and washing my wounds. I recognized the Bulevardi, went as far as the Esplanadi, then reached the hospital, still in the pouring rain.
I have been here all day, seated on my bed in the visitors’ quarters, finishing writing these last pages. I have not been to mass, nor to the refectory; I have neither eaten nor drunk. It is late now; another night without darkness has fallen over the city. Now my mind is made up: I shall leave for the front at dawn with the first troop train. Over all these months I have believed that I was someone I am not. I have looked among these people for my race, my kith and kin; I have learned the language in which I thought I had once called my mother, but whose sounds in fact had maybe never issued from my mouth. I shall never know in which language my mother sang me her lullabies. My language – my real language – is lost for ever. It slipped away, together with my memory; seeped away into the sea, together with my blood, that night on the wharf in Trieste. Perhaps my memories are drifting around in the oceans like unnoticed oil slicks, perhaps the waves are carrying them to some distant beach where they will be scattered, or sink into the sand like foam. If I had not gone down into the port that morning, perhaps I would never have known the truth; or perhaps that moment would simply have been delayed, who knows by how long. I might have lived for another fifty years without ever coming across the ‘Sampo Karjalainen’. One day, in some distant future, when I was old and tired, I might perhaps have been able to accept the truth as a joke played on me by destiny. A whole life lived inside a wrong name makes it the right one, turns falsehood into truth. Two steps away from death, I would have laughed in the face of anyone who had come to tell me that I was not Sampo Karjalainen. More probably, though, the relentless burden of unease which I had borne ever since my awakening on board the Tübingen would have grown heavier over time, would have crushed all my efforts to find myself a life. No country would have felt like home. Even when I was at my most convinced that I would indeed be able to rediscover my past, I often had the feeling that I was moving in the wrong direction. Such faint traces of myself as I did occasionally come upon in my ravaged mind led elsewhere; and yet, as soon I began to follow them, they became indistinct. Perhaps I should never have taken up Doctor Friari’s suggestion, never have thwarted the fate which had taken me to Trieste. That was my path, and I have strayed from it. I had the gall to make a choice; but in this world we have no choices. Or perhaps my destiny was precisely this: to come all this way, to learn Finnish, to become a Finn, even if I have never really become one. All in all, by now I owe this country everything; or rather, I owe it such little as I have managed to become. Without even knowing who I was, without asking for anything in exchange, it lent me a name, a language. In its hour of need, it took me in; all it required to be accepted, to be recognized as one of its own, was a name tape sewn into a sailor’s jacket. A letter from an unknown doctor in the German army was enough to ensure me a bed and a succession of hot meals. So, because I am called Sampo Karjalainen, and because I speak Finnish, I shall go and fight for this country at dawn, and if I have not succeeded in being a real Finn in life, at least I shall be one in death. On the cross which they will place upon my grave, the name I bear will at last be mine. Mine alone; completely mine. I am leaving you my story, reader, so that you will make a memory of it. In this way I, who will live on in no one’s memory, who, when alive, never existed, will be able to die hoping to be remembered.
Here Sampo Karjalainen’s manuscript comes to an end. The notebook itself has several more pages, with various telephone numbers, addresses and the names of some places in Southern Karelia. Folded into the notebook I also found a plan of the City of Helsinki, torn out from a telephone directory, and a few tram tickets. Between the last page and the cover is a pressed leaf, probably from a service tree, which has left a green mark on the paper. Ilma Koivisto claims that it is a leaf from the tree of happy memories. The cover bears the initials S.K., in Indian ink, similar to those embroidered on the handkerchief which was found together with the manuscript. War Office file n. 37895 tells us that private Sampo Karjalainen, who enlisted as a volunteer on 24 June 1944 and was assigned to the third division of the frontier guards, fell in the battle of Ihantala, but there is no mention of where he is buried. Perhaps he lies not far from his only friend, the Pastor Olof Koskela, in some mass grave beside the road to Mustamäki. Perhaps he was crushed beneath the tracks of a tank, and nothing of his body now remains. No one knows how the author of this manuscript met his death – this man whom I decided should be called Sampo Karjalainen. I, today, know who Sampo Karjalainen really was; that is why I have come to Helsinki to look for him: to make up for my wretched mistake, to give him back, if not his memory, at least his true identity and a place to which he can return. But the war carried me far away from him, prevented me from reaching him in time. Only today have I been able to accomplish my mission, and now it is too late.
Epilogue
While we were still anchored off Trieste, a few days after the departure of the convoy which took Sampo Karjalainen towards his death, Doctor Friedrich Reiner came in person to call on me on board the Tübingen. It was the evening before we set sail for North Africa. The sailors were making the final adjustments by the light of the ship’s lanterns. A strong bora was blowing, hurling itself upon the ship with all its force; the autumn sky was filling up with clouds, glowing pink in the light of the setting sun. I was lying low in my study when the watch officer informed me of the doctor’s arrival. The gust of wind that entered the room with him was as chilling as the news that he brought with him. He placed a package on the table – it was tied up with shoe laces, and wrapped up in a blue-striped pocket handkerchief with the initials S.K. embroidered on the edge – then proceeded to undo it with a solemn air. It contained a military identification tag engraved with the name Stefan Klein and the number 97840028, an empty wallet, an Italian railway ticket and a piece of crumpled paper, folded into four. On inspection, this turned out to be a document issued by the Italian navy, granting a fortnight’s special leave, starting from 7 September 1943, to the soldier Massimiliano Brodar, born in Trieste on 6 December 1916 and resident in Via San Nicolo 10. Noting my bewildered expression, Doctor Reiner unbuttoned his greatcoat and began to explain.
Stefan Klein had been an agent working for the military secret service. Until August 1943 he had been in Finland, working as a military instructor for the Finnish navy. After the Italian armistice he had been promptly transferred to the zone of operations on the Adriatic coast, at Trieste, with the task of infiltrating the Italian forces and providing information aimed at averting possible hostile operations on the part of the former allies. The son of an Italian mother, Agent Klein spoke Italian fluently. This was what Doctor Reiner had learned from district headquarters. He had immediately sent a telegram to Klagenfurt; shortly afterwards, that same morning, a patrol from the security battalion, reconnoitring a sector of the Carso in search of partisans, had come upon the body of Stefan Klein, killed together with other soldiers taking orders from Salo. He was wearing the uniform of an Italian infantryman; several objects had been found about his person, though only the tag had enabled him to be identified. At first, Doctor Reiner could not remember where he had seen a similar handkerchief, but those initials were somehow vaguely familiar. The information provided by district headquarters came like a bolt from the blue. In all likelihood Agent Klein, who had come straight to Trieste from Helsinki, had attacked the soldier called Brodar at the railway station in order to lay hands on an Italian uniform and thus infiltrate the enemy forces more easily, dressing his victim in his own clothes so as to avoid suspicion, but forgetting completely to empty the pockets of his sailor’s jacket … Some days later, however, Stefan Klein had been tracked down by the partisans, and shot. Massimiliano Brodar’s leave permit, which had been in the lining of his jacket, had probably been overlooked du
ring the search. The man found in such desperate straits on the quayside near Trieste Railway Station, the man whom I had cared for and helped regain the use of language, was therefore Massimiliano Brodar. It was not his name which appeared on the label inside the jacket he was wearing, but that of the Finnish warship ‘Sampo Karjalainen’, the former German ‘Walhalla’, on which Agent Klein had served as an instructor before being sent on assignment to the zone of operations on the Adriatic coast.
This is the true story of the author of the manuscript, of the man whom I had caused to call himself Sampo Karjalainen. That was what I had come to tell him, if only I had found him still alive.
In the long months spent on board the Tübingen, just waiting for that awful war to finish, I often thought about that man, and tried to explain to myself how I could have come to make such a mistake. It was undoubtedly my blind attachment to my country which led me to take him for a Finn; and it was an equally blind self-confidence which led me to believe that that label was the proof of his identity. Instinctively, I did my utmost to save that unknown Finnish man whom war had cast my way. But, in reality, it was my own salvation I was seeking. As I had done in Hamburg, by helping a compatriot, I believed once again that I was atoning for my father’s crime. This had been a lifelong obsession with me. For me, the death of my father – who had been murdered, having been unjustly accused of Communist subversion – became a crime that must be expiated. I took his place at the court martial which sentenced him to death, and for all these years I have been trying relentlessly to right a wrong which was not my own. Today I realise that this has been my whole life’s work, that I have spent my days making amends for him, seeking a pardon that neither he nor or I were called upon to ask for. Every sailor who came to seek medical assistance in the Finnish church in Hamburg was my father’s executioner, shaking with fever, seeking help. On each occasion, I could kill him or save him. And I saved him, time after time, and his thanks were my absolution. But that was not enough: the whole of Finland had to absolve me, every single Finn had to pass through my hands in order that the pardon be complete. Had I found Massimiliano Brodar alive, I might have managed to shake off this past. Giving him back his name, his life – that would have set me free. But as it is, I carry on with my work of expiation, moving from one crime to another, because even after all this time I still feel myself a Finn, and as a child a priest like Koskela taught me that life is a matter of repentance, of punishing ourselves for ever being born. This unforgiving fatherland killed my own father; it drove me into exile, offered me nothing but affliction, and I yearn for it and curse it to this day. We come into this world in one place only, and only there do we belong. Sooner or later, the globetrotter who leaps from one identity to another like an acrobat on a trapeze will lose his footing, find himself down on the ground, pinned down, well-travelled though he be, by the memory of a few houses and a dusty road. When the hour of death draws near, even those who have spent their whole lives claiming they do not have a country will hear the sudden call of the place where everything began, and where they know they are awaited. There, and there only, everything will always be the same, each smell, each colour, each sound in its right place. When we go home, memory vanishes; and, with it, pain. When end and beginning meet, it means nothing has happened. All was a dream within another dream, and perhaps man too is the stuff of dreams.
It has now been snowing for some hours, but the sky is none the lighter for it; it remains as louring and furrowed as the roof of a cave. The daylight has drained away like the remains of a doused fire, and remnants of smoky light linger in the streets. Now there is nothing to keep me in Helsinki. This evening I shall take the boat for Stockholm, then on to Hamburg. Before leaving, I asked Miss Koivisto to go with me to the visitors’ quarters where Sampo Karjalainen lived. I wanted to stay there just for a few moments, to think things over.
So here I am, sitting on his bed, bed number six, looking out at the snow falling gently over the courtyard. It’s all very quiet; lamplight, reflected on the snow, is sending a faint shadow of window bars on to the wall. A bell is ringing, probably calling people to mass. I get up and go into the courtyard, then follow indistinct figures making their way towards the little wooden church, their footsteps creaking in the snow. Inside, there is a good smell of wax and burning wood. Two candles are burning on the altar. A soldier is arranging the missals on the benches, hanging the gilded letters of the day’s psalms up on the wall, opening the breviary on the lectern. I stare at him in the faint light, trying to catch a glimpse of his face in the flickering candlelight. I would like to go closer, I would like to talk to him. Then I decide against it, retrace my steps back into the middle of the courtyard and stay there in the darkness, watching the falling snow.
Copyright
This book has been published with the support of Ministero Affari Esteri Italiano and Arts Council England, London.
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,
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Publishing History
First published in Italy in 2000
First published by Dedalus in May 2011
Reprinted in June, July, September & October 2011 and January & February 2012
Nuova Grammatica Finlandese © copyright RCS Libri S.p.A.- Milano Bompiani 2000 Translation copyright © Judith Landry 2011
The right of Diego Marani to be identified as the author and Judith Landry to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed in Finland by Bookwell
Typeset by Marie Lane
Dedalus would like to thank Peter Marten of thisisFINLAND.fi for his help editing the text.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
