‘Yes, I have been frightened many times. The mind goes narrow. It’s obsessive. You want to follow your instincts but that’s very dangerous. Instincts are not for the engine room. It’s very stressing, quite the same as firefighters have. But they train and they have protection. You have to think very quickly what to do. The frightening thing is when you are icebreaking and you have a big ship behind – you have all the engines on full and something goes. Because she can run over you. I had a fire off Alaska, a grey-water pump was burning. I decided quickly. I called the bridge, I said don’t let the alarm go off in the cabins, we have it under control.’
At the memory Lasse swells his cheeks and exhales a slow puff, mimicking the way he must have forced himself to calm down and think. If he makes a mistake he could cost the crew vital minutes; being right keeps them from the dreaded continuous bell, the ship’s fire alarm, which brings everyone to the muster station in whatever clothes they can grab, imagining the worst – the particularly hellish worst is fire in an icy sea. Fire is the reason you study the cleanliness of a ship when you first board.
‘We had to shut the doors and find a route out through the air conditioning for the smoke. Electrical fires are very poisonous.’
‘How do you cope with the fear?’
‘You know The Lion King?’
‘Yes?’
‘Shit happens and you just try to survive.’
Disney must have injected some of the country’s bluntness into the film when they dubbed it into Finnish.
‘There was one ship, a tanker, she was junk. But the engine room was very clean. We were taking oil between Wilhelmshaven, Shetland and Liverpool. We had many swells, it was very rough. It was leaking all the time in the engine room but the crew were very good. One ship I hated, I hurt my back, burned my face.’ He scowls. ‘And the chief engineer was Finnish, he was very nasty. He never washed. He was an arsehole. We were taking oil from Algeria to Fiumicino. There were two Russians, number two was all right but number one was very strange. Every morning he took me by the sleeve and led me somewhere.’ He assumes a high, lilting Russian accent. ‘“Lasse please, clean this!” And then the sleeve again. “Lasse please, clean this!” He wasn’t a bad person but I hated it. That was just hateful.’
In his vehemence he has coiled forward in his chair and you can feel that ship’s magnification of his irritation and resentments, the steel bulkheads bouncing his annoyances back at him, the roil of indignation inside him as he was plucked by the sleeve, the escalation of the ship’s torments a misery. I change the subject, asking about Algiers. He saw little of it.
‘Do you have a favourite port?’
‘Trieste!’ he says immediately, and his hands go up behind his head. ‘Trieste was wonderful. I was so relaxed when I was there. I love their Italian humour. And you know cabs in Trieste are very cheap from the port, and they are honest,’ he says, searching my eyes as if for confirmation. Taxis matter to seafarers. The first money you spend after the weeks or months spent making it ought not to be stolen or squandered.
Lasse laughs suddenly.
‘The Filipinos say the best view of a ship is in the back window of your taxi as you are driving away.’
CHAPTER 10
Long Friday
FRIDAY IS JUST over an hour old and the bridge is an intertwining of dim screens, darknesses and subdued bulbs. The beams of our searchlights illuminate glittering curtains of snow. I love coming up the last stair into the shadows and atmospheres of the bridge, to the night’s strange theatre and the feeling of half-forgotten, half-stolen time. The world never seems so asleep and so elsewhere as it does on the bridge of a ship during the late watch.
‘Good morning!’
‘Good morning! What are we up to?’
Sampo has cut a barge out of ice in the fairway and turned south.
‘A ship and pilot are waiting to come out of Fish River, the pilot wants an icebreaker and the north end is confusion.’ He points to a symbol with a cursor.
‘Atle has been trying to free her and she’s stopped. Sisu is—What’s Sisu doing? Chaos! The pilot wants to know when we’ll get there. You know rule number one of icebreaking?’
‘Go on, tell me.’
‘Never give them a fixed time. Everything will change and the time never works out. There was an attempt by a tech company to coordinate it all through an AI. It failed completely. The wind direction, the different kinds of ice, the speed of the craft, sticking or not – incalculable variables.’
A Finnish cover of ‘Yellow Submarine’ plays on Nova. Sampo claims the words have been changed to ‘Let’s all break ice.’
Sampo changes places with Villi-Matti. The chief is the only officer whose shyness I do not quite dare assail. A tall, lean man with close-cropped hair, he concentrates on our heading with particular attention when I appear. When we steam through darkness or mist the navigating officers enter a kind of trance, the body engaged on maintaining course and speed, the mind in that half place engendered by long-distance driving. The helm schedules are relentless. Arvo and Ville are on from 6 p.m. until midnight and 6 a.m. until noon, with Sampo and Villi-Matti taking the other halves of the clock. I dread being the tic, the tug on the sleeve, that dims Villi-Matti’s voyage. There is something drawn about him which asks to be left alone. I do not blame him. A non-seafarer with a notebook, clogging up the bridge, asking questions … His pairing with the loquacious Sampo is a neat balance.
Tonight Sampo discuss Finland’s defences and military posture, the recent purchase of howitzers from South Korea and the proposed acquisition of fighter jets from the US. The Finnish government is cancelling land purchases by foreigners near Finnish airports and bases, he says.
It turns out a number of these transactions were registered to Russian companies with no business interests in Finland. The sense of shadow-boxing is palpable: is this comic paranoia or outlandish war game? Is there a difference now? From the bridge of Otso it feels absurd and bizarre even to contemplate conflict in the region. The entire idea seems to belong to a suddenly chaotic land-based life. In comparison the sea is so simple, its demands so clear. In the gulf tonight are Russian sailors relying on Finnish icebreakers; the coast is lined with Finnish ports loading Russian cargo. The strength of nature here, the sea’s rude laws and the rule of the ice make curiosities of nationalism and flags. No wonder Russian oligarchs are so keen on very big yachts. The sea remains the last place to which you can run away.
By the time the light returns there is a skewering bitterness in the air. The wind has veered, pushing the ice southwards. We go with it, setting course for Kokkola, which was once a famous front line.
In 1854 Kokkola, known then by its Swedish name of Gamla Karleby and locally as the Town of a Thousand Sails, was a major port selling tar and timber to the great maritime powers. The absurd Crimean War brought British warships to the Bay of Bothnia to blockade the gulf and deny these strategic materials to the Russian empire.
It was a peculiar campaign. In Raahe (then called Brahestad) ships, timber, warehouses and tar were torched. In Kemi landing parties burned two miles of stacked timber. The word went down the coast that the British promised to burn naval stores but not private property. Many Bothnian traders did business with the British, spoke English and considered the raids harsh treatment. With Finnish stoicism they parleyed with the attackers, offered no resistance and watched the destruction. The British kept their word, sparing a Cossack barracks in Oulu, then called Uleaborg, for fear the fire would spread to Finnish buildings. A huge pyre was made of shipbuilding materials the British said belonged to the Russian government, but the townsfolk still felt sufficiently well disposed to the raiders to send fresh provisions out to their ships. According to the naval historian Andrew Lambert, some of the material destroyed in the attacks was the property of British merchants who, four years later, were still trying to obtain compensation.
In Kokkola the presence of Russian troops and the very shallow approac
h to the harbour brought out the locals’ sisu. The warships could not get close, negating the threat of bombardment, and British demands backed with threats to destroy the town were rejected by a delegation led by a merchant, Anders Donner, who owned stores and warehouses the British were proposing to burn. In small boats the invaders advanced into an ambush. Seventeen died and thirty-nine were wounded or taken prisoner. The rowing boat which now occupies the English Boathouse in Kokkola’s English Park was stranded and forced to surrender.
It was a ‘melancholy catastrophe’, according to the British vice admiral in charge of the Baltic fleet, who was blamed for it. To the Russians it was a triumph, propaganda proof of the fraternity between Finns and the tsar. Anders Donner was invited to the coronation of Alexander II. To the Finns it seems to have been an extraordinary moment. A local hero was made of Matts Kankkonen, a seal hunter who killed a British officer with the first shot of the ambush. His portrait by Wladimir Swertschkoff still hangs in the palace of the president of Finland. Matts does not look comfortable in the picture, standing rigidly, one musket in his large right hand, a second weapon thrust awkwardly through his belt. A medal hangs from his hunting coat like a target. With a British warship stranded on the horizon behind him, Matts seems somewhat weighed down by resolve, his blond fringe as severe as a monk’s and his bony face set. As painted by Swertschkoff, Matts is part of that chain of inadvertent warriors which stretches through the civil war, the Winter War, the Continuation War and onwards. By his distant gaze you might almost think he knows it.
Kokkola took its victory with exemplary seriousness. Prisoners were invited to balls, the wounded were cared for, and the graves of the deceased are tended to this day, their maintenance paid for by Britain. The meticulous local museum records that there was one injury on the defending side, ‘a horse which had to be put down due to a broken leg’. The British seem to have taken the defeat with typical idiosyncrasy, issuing a series of requests for the return of the captured boat. Kokkola turned them down. The marauders returned the following year, fired enough ammunition to make their point and withdrew.
There is something in the Bothnian campaign emblematic of the absurd and thudding destruction which great powers visit upon the world, no village too small, no port too distant, no local trading relationship too minor to be blown or burned away. While historians such as Lambert might be right in praising the Bothnian blockades and raids as strategic successes (Sevastopol was taken in the same month the British returned to Kokkola; the deployment of Russian troops around the gulf may have contributed to its fall, Lambert argues), the disasters in the Crimea erased the entire Baltic campaign from the British national memory, its events overwhelmed by the tides of butchery on the Black Sea.
There is a telling detail in the story for an icebreaker on the way to Kokkola this Friday afternoon. As they made their way along the same track we are using, the heavy British paddle steamers struggled through ice thick enough to smash boards out of their paddle wheels. It was 29 May. Such thick ice endures so late in the season only in the far north now.
We begin our approach to Kokkola through mist, trundling into an opacity of ice and sky. Sea smoke in our track is the overture to Bothnian fogs.
‘In springtime for days on end you can’t see squat,’ Sampo says, evidently delighted with the word. ‘Sometimes it’s so low down, the bridge is above it while the rest of the ship is covered.’
We make the port in blowing snow, Sampo spinning us on our axis, breaking open the mouth of the channel. Vessel movements and the discharge of cooling water keep the inner port clear.
‘I like this tradition,’ Sampo says. ‘Look at the bow.’
Otso performs a skidding pirouette, shuddering slightly, leaving a rubble of ice chunks nodding in a slew of black water. The port is a line of chimneys, a steel mill, a zinc-smelting plant and a small dinosaur herd of cranes loading a carrier from pyramids of iron ore. Otso comes to rest. Postprandial stillness descends; we are digesting pork and potatoes in cheese. Peace permeates the corridors, the air conditioning mumbling softly.
In their control room the engineers are watching ski jumping. On other channels are Emmerdale Farm in Finnish, a loopy sketch show involving a man dressed as a kind of owl-priest with wing mirrors, and The Voice of Finland, an X Factor spin-off. The ski jumping is the pick of it. We watch the Ladies Normal Hill Individual competition, hypnotised by the long floating fall of the jumpers, their landings, apparently identical each time, and the gentle repetition. To an expert each second of launch and flight must be a fascinating compression of craft, athleticism and skill, but to us the only variations are the colours of the competitors’ suits and their reactions. Ski-jump spectatorship seems to turn on whether a helmeted head shakes in disappointment or a gloved fist punches the air. Watching it is like being in a tribute to Sartre’s Huis Clos, set in purgatory rather than hell, where placidly we study people experiencing strong feelings.
I am getting better at diagnosing silences: this is an almost interested, almost contented silence. As long as the ski jumping lasts we are licensed to sit in a relatively easy companionship of introversion, nourished by the tiny variations of engagement which filter through the screen to us, the minute distillations of the emotion of the jumpers. When a Finnish competitor appears there is a ripple in our shared atmosphere, I think. She launches herself, swoops down, rises off the ramp a hundred metres up, sets in the air and flies. The crowd cheer, hoot and warble. Eighty-six metres and four seconds later Julia Kykkaenen returns to earth, slows, turns and acknowledges her supporters with a wave. She finishes in nineteenth position, a good effort in a sport which turns out to be dominated by Germany and Japan.
‘Well done, Finland!’ I offer.
‘Ey …’ someone responds.
(‘What is the difference between a Finnish extrovert and a Finnish introvert?’ runs a local joke. ‘The extrovert stares at your shoes when you talk to him.’)
It is an afternoon for reading The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna, published in 1975, an enduring classic in Finland, a hit in France, filmed twice and translated around the world. Vatanen is a journalist on an assignment with a photographer, ‘two dissatisfied, cynical men, getting on for middle age’ in Herbert Lomas’s translation. ‘The hopes of their youths had not been realised, far from it. They were husbands, deceived and deceiving; stomach ulcers were on their way for both of them; and many other worries filled their days.’ On a dusty midsummer evening they run over and injure a hare. Vatanen sets off after it, shedding wife, job, possessions and all constraints in an odyssey through the succour and cruelty of strangers, forest fires, military manoeuvres, pagan rites, a love affair and various encounters with vets. The imperturbable Vatanen, always accompanied by his hare, discovers passion, rage and obsession, embarking on a homage to Moby-Dick in pursuit of a murderous bear which leads him across the Russian border, a one-man dismissal of the Cold War. (The Russians turn out to be delightful: ‘On behalf Red Army, congratulations! Now I arrest you as spy. But no worry – this formality. Have drink.’) The reader emerges from the book gently sluiced of the irritations of the age. To be ‘profound in reflection’ is to do right by the situation before you, regardless of social norms; to be ‘benevolent in disposition’ is to balance your rights with those of others (including hares), unshackled by received thinking. To be both is to be a true subversive.
Paasilinna’s critique of a Finland comically in hock to regulation, time-serving, convention, authority and acquisition is the same as Sartre’s in Huis Clos: L’enfer, c’est les autres. Sartre’s three immoral sinners in a comfortable hell learn that their punishment is to crave redemption from each other; reliant on the esteem of others for their self-worth, having mistreated others and now having no choice but to see themselves and each other unalloyed – there is no blinking in this hell – they are trapped in an infernal eternity. Similarly, Paasilinna explores the idea that hell is not the existence of other people; rather it is self-su
bjection to their opinions. Vatanen walks out of his grinding job, bad marriage and all convention in a moment of existential inspiration: the injured hare matters as much, as little, as anything; caring for it punctures the absurdity of normative ideas about what a life is and should be. Ceasing to care what his wife, employer or anyone else thinks of him sets Vatanen free. With the hare he finds an apparently ludicrous but entirely pure relationship where self-worth is not dependent on another’s judgement. Perhaps Finnish taciturnity is a reaction to the torment of self-definition through the opinions of others: if I say nothing you have less by which to judge me, and I have less from which to suffer.
Finland is deeply involved in the question of how self-made hells can be alleviated. Depression and suicide rates are high by European standards, as they are in Norway and Sweden, where well-being and general happiness are also high. The happiest nations have the highest suicide rates. Researchers speculate that this may be a consequence of perceptions of relative inequality: being surrounded by the apparently happy makes the unhappy feel worse. In Europe suicide rates rise as you travel north-east and fall as you reach the Mediterranean. No doubt it is a coincidence that temperature, quality of food and loquacity all rise as the rate falls. No doubt it is also coincidence that European suicide rates and Internet use – the most powerful device for exposing the individual to the apparent happiness and the judgement of others that it is possible to conceive – are both highest in the Nordic countries, and lowest in Italy, Spain and Greece.
By half past eight the ice is a pristine field, and the mist has fallen back to an orange luminescence behind the chimneys of the port. A tangerine glow is cast queerly through the driving snow by the small blazes of the harbour lights. I do not find isolation frightening when experienced alone, but isolation shared, being cut off together, seeing your own solitude reflected in another, feeling another’s loneliness like a pang in you, like a dread third force – these are shivering things. The chimneys smoke but there is no sign of human agency, as if the towers and lights were erected long ago then left. There must be a canteen, a control room; there must be men working the smelters. There is something heroic in the gaunt scene: how many little industrial outposts on how many anonymous shores are keeping their lights burning tonight?
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