Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  ‘Shall we say about six then?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We look forward to it.’

  ‘There’s just one thing.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘My name’s Forster, not Stevens.’

  William Forster, one of the small British delegation to the Helsinki conference, had fallen ill the week before but his name had been left on the list. Monty had agreed that I could impersonate him in an emergency. ‘God knows,’ he had said, ‘I don’t want you anywhere near the Brits. If you have to go into the conference, and I’d rather you didn’t, keep your head down and your mouth shut.’

  I heard the rustle of paper in the background. Lander was searching for some mention of the name Forster. I was sure it wouldn’t feature on the ambassador’s list. Forster was Reading, not Oxbridge.

  ‘Here we are,’ Lander said, lying through his teeth. ‘Forster, William. I’m so sorry. We’ve got you down for Thursday night.’ There was a beguiling smoothness to his resumption of control that I had to admire. ‘I’ll be in touch again soon. I’ll know where to reach you, won’t I?’

  That was the jolt that set me tumbling headlong into the real world. Monday and ambassadors and distinguished locals for Nobel-prize winning professors, Thursday for the rest – bottles of beer and a second secretary if we were lucky. I was back with the old brigade of hypocrisy, privilege, snobbery and the diamond-edged rules of a game that men like Lander played effortlessly every minute of their waking lives. I had come up against Lander and his kind in the army, and I had never overcome my dislike of them. Monty’s view didn’t go far enough. Lander wasn’t useless. He was pernicious.

  The sun streamed into the apartment. I lay back on the sofa, hands behind my head, and closed my eyes. I sought some kind of consolation for my return to civilization by reliving the events of the past few days.

  How long had Tanya and I been away? I had no idea, no sense of day or night or the passage of time, only an overwhelming awareness of Tanya, her presence, her body, her laughter, her questions, her uncertainties, her passion and her love as we absorbed each other with an extraordinary desire. We lived in the absoluteness of our involvement with each other, our world bounded by the experience of our selves, what we could touch, what we could feel. All other concerns were ignored and forgotten for those few days because they could neither be touched nor felt by either of us. It was an overwhelming sensation. You cannot live for long in that intensity of feeling, but while you do it is intoxicating.

  To others – if there had been any others to see us or care about us – we were one more love affair, one more passionate exchange in thousands of years of passionate exchanges, while the sun rose, blazed overhead, and sank back to hover over the horizon before it rose again in all its glory. There were no days and no nights: I lived by the light in Tanya’s eyes, I forgot myself and found myself in one wonderful unending moment. We were obsessed with each other because we had so little time, and in the exercise of that obsession we had no sense of time passing. There is nothing new in the discovery of love except for those who do the discovering. For three whole days we loved each other as if the world was about to end.

  Then it was over. The world didn’t end. It did what it always does, it reclaimed us.

  Tanya had kissed me awake, and we had swum naked in the lake for the last time. We had eaten at the table under the birch tree, closed the shutters and taken down to the boat the boxes that it seemed we had brought ashore only a few hours before. As I watched the house slip from my view, I felt an uncontrollable sadness, tears welling suddenly in my eyes, as I relived all the partings of my life in a single moment.

  *

  ‘The Soviet delegation won’t arrive until Monday afternoon,’ Monty had told me, ‘in time for the opening ceremony. We expect Marchenko to make contact on Tuesday morning when she’ll fix the meeting with your father for Wednesday or Thursday. That gives you forty-eight hours to get your father to pull out of this madcap scheme. If you can’t get him to see sense, and I hope to God you can, stick to him like glue. The last two days of the conference are when he’ll be at greatest risk.’

  My dilemma had been whether or not to tell Tanya what had brought me back to Helsinki.

  ‘Follow your instinct,’ Monty had said. ‘If you don’t want to involve her, say nothing.’

  He had been surprisingly unsympathetic to the argument about a relationship built on lies.

  ‘So what? She can’t help you if you don’t tell her and she can’t help you if you do. Let her get on with her doctoring. She doesn’t need to know what’s going on.’

  I wanted to tell Tanya when we went to her island but I didn’t know how and I took the coward’s way out – I put off the moment, arguing to myself that it would have spoiled everything. She helped me in this, not asking to know why I’d come to Helsinki, simply accepting that I was there. I was a fool to leave it, in more ways than one. It was a betrayal of trust and I should have told her.

  I slept after that, and when I awoke it was nearly five and the day had become very hot, the air still and lifeless. I walked down to the harbour. I passed the Havis Amanada‚ the young woman emerging from the sea, the monument to Finland’s youth, and looked around the open market where I was offered winter hats and coats in sable and silver fox. How difficult it was at that moment to imagine ever being cold again.

  Then on past the harbour, the gulls dazed into silence by the heat, to the Uspensky Cathedral, the Russian Orthodox church. I watched the women, all with scarves on their heads, kneeling on the stone floor, and listened to the sounds of the deep bass voices intoning plainsong behind the coloured wooden panels that separate the congregation from the clergy. Occasionally the panels would open and we would glimpse the gold cloth of the priests’ vestments and see the candles glittering on the altar, a rich world of mysteries invitingly displayed. Then the panel would close and the act of worship became invisible once more. I wandered back as the market was packing up for the day, and laughing attempts were made in sign language to get me to buy a fur hat before it was replaced in its box.

  I heard raised voices as I let myself into the apartment. The sounds of a quarrel are the same in any language. Mika was there, standing over Tanya. He came unsteadily towards me.

  ‘My English friend. Welcome to our country.’ He grinned foolishly at me and held out his hand. ‘The last outpost of the civilized world before you experience the barbarism of our neighbours.’

  ‘He’s drunk,’ Tanya said in anger and embarrassment.

  We shook hands and he sat down heavily on the sofa.

  ‘I want to know everything,’ he said. ‘Are you looking after my sister? What are your intentions? Will you marry her?’

  There was a furious exchange in Finnish. Mika grabbed Tanya by the arm and tried to drag her on to the sofa but she resisted.

  ‘She is my little sister,’ he said. ‘I swore to our father before he died that I would always look after her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tanya said to me. ‘Please forgive him.’ She looked hurt. I felt powerless.

  Tanya spoke to her brother in Finnish again.

  ‘No,’ Mika said. ‘You must speak in English before our English friend. Do you know what she is saying? She is asking me to leave.’ He spoke a few words in Finnish to Tanya. Then he turned to me. ‘I will tell you what I am saying. I am saying no, I will not leave. I have things to tell you. Information you will like. Useful information.’

  ‘Say what you have to say,’ Tanya said in English, ‘and then go.’

  ‘I need a piss first.’

  Mika lurched towards the bathroom. There were tears of anger and humiliation in Tanya’s eyes. ‘I am sorry, I am so sorry,’ she kept saying. ‘He has been drinking all day.’

  Mika came back into the room. He put his arm round my shoulder and leaned his weight against me. I could smell brandy on his breath.

  ‘Do you remember your friend Hammerson?’ he asked. ‘Well, he is
recovered. His wound is mended. The Soviets have emptied him of all his secrets and now he is useless to them. So they are sending him back to the West. Probably at this moment he is not far from us, maybe he is locked in a cabin on one of those warships in the harbour. Very soon he will be free. There. That is my information. What do you think of that, my English friend?’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  He laughed loudly at that. ‘Do you think I will tell you?’

  ‘How do I know what you’re telling me is true?’ I said. I should never have said it.

  Mika gripped my jacket by the lapels and almost lifted me bodily off my feet. He brought his head very close to mine.

  ‘People I trust tell me soon he will be free. And do you know what will happen then?’ He let me go at that, standing back and looking first at Tanya and then at me. ‘When I see him, I will kill him.’

  He produced a revolver from his jacket pocket and pointed it towards me. Tanya screamed and put her hands to her face. Then she spoke harshly to Mika in Finnish and for the first time she had some effect. He lowered the gun and answered her. Then he turned to me.

  ‘She is trying to tell me that Hammerson has not betrayed my people, but I know that he has.’

  ‘Hammerson is your friend. He would never betray you.’

  ‘The Russians asked questions. Hammerson told them answers. My friends are dead. He is the one who has killed them.’

  ‘Hammerson killed no one,’ Tanya said.

  ‘He did not put bullets in their heads. But he betrayed us. He is responsible for their deaths. He deserves to die.’ Mika sat down on the sofa, his eyes streaming with tears. He put his head in his hands. ‘They were good friends. Now they are gone. They must be avenged.’

  ‘That is not your task,’ Tanya said. ‘Nothing you can do will bring them back to life again.’

  Again they shouted at each other in Finnish. This was a conflict between brother and sister, its roots in the history of their lives together. I was forgotten because I had no part in it.

  Tanya went into the bathroom and fetched a flannel. Mika wiped his face with it slowly and deliberately as if his skin was painful to the touch.

  ‘Get her to tell you about Matti Sigrin,’ Mika said to me. ‘Then you will see whether she is the angel you think she is.’

  ‘Go,’ Tanya shouted. She flew at him, her fists flying. ‘Leave us alone. You’ve done enough damage. Go away from here. Get out.’

  He stood up. ‘I will look for Hammerson,’ he said. ‘When I find him, I will kill him. Do you hear that? I will put bullets into his heart and head.’

  I watched him stumble out of the door of the apartment. He left it ajar and Tanya banged it shut. When she turned to me she was crying. I held her in my arms.

  ‘When he is like that, he is not my brother,’ she said. ‘I wish you could see him as he is. He is a good man, not a murderer. He cannot understand that the war is over. For him, there must always be a battle, always an enemy. Whatever I say, he will not give up. One by one his friends are dying. Soon it will be his turn to be killed. That is what I am afraid of.’

  She cried again, and there was little I could do except let her cry it out of her system. I knew then that somehow I had to tell her what was going on, or as much as I knew, which was less than I needed to know. But this time my excuse for doing nothing was that she was too upset to listen.

  *

  The damage that Mika wanted to inflict was done. He had fuelled my anxiety. I had a name now, Matti Sigrin, and with a name came an identity, an imagined one that I created in my mind, but effective none the less. He was the creature of my uncertainty: could Tanya really love me? Would she leave Finland if I asked her to? Did I dare ask her? If she said no it would be the end of my dreams. Slowly, Matti Sigrin worked his sinister way into my consciousness until I was completely in his power.

  Why did I care about her past? It was over and unalterable, a time on which I could have no possible claim. Sigrin and his presence in Tanya’s life, unspoken, unspecified but all the more insidious because it could not be pinned down, haunted me. Had she been his lover? Surely, yes. Did she think of him still, did he appear in her dreams? Was she free of him now? If I could not trust myself, how could I trust her protestations that she was?

  I wanted to squeeze Sigrin out of her life by possessing all of it, present, future and past. I wanted to make Tanya wholly and completely mine, to exclude any experience that might threaten us. It was an impossible dream but one I could not relinquish because I needed an escape route in case her love couldn’t match the demands I made on it. I had created a monster out of my own lack of confidence which I could blame if our relationship were to fail. I was inflicting on her the weakness I perceived in myself. I was griped by a madness, powerless to deny it.

  We’d had dinner in a restaurant near the Opera House and were walking back through a square with a wooden church in it and, to one side, a statue of Zacharias Topelius, one of the founders of modern Finnish literature. I listened as Tanya explained the Kalevala, the epic poem of the ancient myths of Finland collected by Topelius and published in 1822, which had created a platform for the nascent Finnish nationalism that had resulted, in 1911, in the departure of the Russians and the establishment of the first Finnish state.

  ‘He was one of the great men of our country. He gave us our language and our past. A mythical past perhaps, but something from which we can take strength. Before that, we had no roots, nothing to link us with a history we could proclaim, only generations of peasants working the land. Not very inspiring. With those stories he told us who we were. It was a moral liberation.’

  Her pride in her country and her eagerness to tell me its history reminded me of our night walks around a winter-dark Helsinki, but the sense of elation I had experienced so strongly then was missing now.

  ‘What is it?’ Tanya asked. ‘Why are you so silent?’

  I could restrain myself no longer. ‘Tell me about Matti Sigrin.’

  I regretted it the moment I said his name but it was too late. I had spoken the words I should have buried for ever.

  ‘He was someone I knew once.’ She let go of my arm and walked on beside me. ‘An old friend. You have old friends, don’t you?’

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘Oh, Danny.’

  She threw her head back, drawing her hair tight against her skull with both hands and slowly pulling backwards until her hair was released and it fell over her face again.

  I heard the beating of my own heart, I felt the pressure of jealousy and anger about a past which I had no right to ask about. She was giving me a last chance to stop before it was too late, time to change my mind, but I ignored her.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, careless of the damage I was doing.

  The expression on her face changed but at that moment I did not understand the reason why. ‘Matti Sigrin was once my teacher. Then he was my lover. Then he was neither my teacher nor my lover. That is all I want to tell you, but it will not be enough, will it?’

  She had folded her arms and was holding her elbows tightly.

  ‘We met in my first week at university. I was very young, little more than eighteen. I had never met anyone like him before. He was so much more certain about everything than the boys I knew because he was so much older. For a time he obsessed me – I would have done anything for him, married him, lived with him, gone to the ends of the earth for him. But slowly, perhaps with his help, I grew up. I saw myself more clearly, I saw him more clearly too. He was no longer a god I worshipped but a man who was good but not that good, who could disguise his selfishness so cleverly but who was selfish. I knew he had a wife and children but I had never thought about them, only about myself and him. Then one day I saw them together, laughing and happy, eating in a restaurant, and I knew that I was the one deceived, and the truth was that I had deceived myself. It was a very painful moment. I went back to my room and cried. I tried to stop seeing him, but he was persua
sive, clever. He told me he loved me. He wanted me to take him back. I hated myself for it but I did.’

  There were tears in her eyes now and her face was drawn. I wanted to stop her but I knew that if I tried, she would push me away. I had to wait until she had told me everything.

  ‘When a love affair ends, why do you think you will never fall in love again? I was afraid of being unloved, that is why I took him back and stayed with him until the war broke out, when I left Helsinki to look after the wounded soldiers at the front. That was my chance to leave him and I took it. He wrote to me again and again, he told me how much he needed me, he promised to leave his wife if only I would return to him. I never answered his letters.’

  She wiped her eyes but the tears kept falling.

  ‘The years went by. The letters stopped. I had almost forgotten about him. Then last summer I met him again. He had aged. His hair which once had been blond and thick was grey and thinning now. The laughter that I had once loved so much was gone. In the years we had been apart he had lost so much. His wife had left him, one of his sons had been killed in Karelia, the other had gone to live in America. I was all he had left, his memories of our happiness together. We went to the island together. I felt sorry for him. That was all.

  ‘One evening, a week after you had left Helsinki, Matti came round to my apartment to beg me to come back to him. I told him it was impossible. I said I had found the love that I always wanted. I was happy. My life was closed to him now. He wouldn’t accept that at first. Then I told him that the marks he had made on me, which once had been so strong, were now barely visible. Soon there would be nothing left at all. That was when he accepted that I was telling the truth.’

  She took my hand.

  ‘That was the moment when I wanted you most. I had made a declaration of my love for you, but to another man. Now I wanted to make the same declaration to you. But you were not there. I was very sad. I wondered where you were, what you were doing, whom you were with. I wanted so much to tell you, not everything I have told you now, but enough for you to know that I am yours and no one else’s, and I always will be.’