by Jan Morris
17 The juvenile social worker
On my very first evening in Sweden, in the 1950s, I impertinently adopted as my paradigm of the country an antiseptic woman I saw having dinner in my hotel restaurant. She was very handsome, and very cool. She looked as though she had been to her hairdresser’s half an hour before. She was eating alone, with a bottle of German white wine, but seemed not in the least lonely or bored. It took her only a moment to decide what she wanted from the menu, and her orders to the waiter were polite but brisk. Her mastication was regular, as if she were timing herself for statistical purposes. Sometimes I thought she was breathing to a conscious rhythm, too. When I engaged her in conversation she was courteous but unforthcoming, her pale blue eyes engaging mine with absolute confidence and no perceptible interest. She was all I expected of Sweden, I thought, and she could never have guessed how delighted I was when she told me her profession. ‘Juvenile social worker,’ she said in her impeccable English, taking an extraordinarily deliberate sip of her hock.
She was how we all thought of Sweden in those days. Like the Swiss and the Irish and the Portuguese, the Swedes had been neutral in the Second World War, leaning slightly towards the Nazi cause – in which they were only human, as German power surrounded them on three sides, while Russian power seemed to threaten them on the fourth. We thought of them as smug, fortunate, rich, efficient, socially trendy, spared the anxieties of greater States, with complacent ideological preferences and a high suicide rate, which served them right. No wonder, I thought that evening, the juvenile social worker drank her wine with such prissy calculation – I can see her now, removing a minute segment of cork from her tongue with the tip of a well-manicured little finger.
18 Imperial Swedes
After that initial visit, however, I soon came to realize that Sweden had once been a Nation-State of a very different kind: presumptuous, swanky and aggressive, the Terror of the North – another of those damned Powers, in fact, which have so often snarled up Europe’s progress. I think my perceptions were changed by a statue of King Karl XII (1682–1718) which stands in the Kungsträdgården in Stockholm. The gardens themselves are almost exaggeratedly Swedish. All around them is a bustle of restaurants and cafés, and the bulk of the Opera House stands above. In summer, when the sun shines and the sky is a theatrically northern blue, the air is filled with the slapping of ropes from the harbour and the snapping of flags in the wind (Sweden is a terrific place for flags, most of them in the national blue and yellow, and all of them apparently brand-new). At the foot of this agreeable place stands old King Karl. He does not look in the least like a Swede in the contemporary kind. He looks demonstratively imperial, and he is holding out his right hand in a peremptory fashion in the direction of St Petersburg, as if to say, ‘On, on, you noble Swedes,’ adding something about gentlemen in Sweden now abed. This is not just sculpted histrionics, either. The Swedes really have invaded Russia more than once, have sent their armies storming across half Europe and their colonists to the Indies East and West – where on the French island of Saint-Barthélemy, years after my conversion, I came across the extremely Swedish mansion of the island’s quondam Swedish governors, clean and trim as could be beside the tropic sea.
Forty years ago one occasionally saw in Stockholm representatives of the old imperial class. The King of Sweden was still a proper king in those days, living in his vast palace beside the harbour, and sometimes there stalked the streets late representatives of the Swedish aristocracy. They looked slightly oriental – Finnish blood, no doubt. Their greatcoats were Junker-like, almost down to their heels as they strode through the snow, and their boots were patently made of supple deerskin by family cobblers on ancestral estates. Were they corseted, or was that just their masterful bearing? Did they wear monocles, or am I making that up?
19 Beyond the archipelago
I never see them now, and I look in vain for their images in the Stockholm gossip pages. The King and Queen no longer usually live in that great palace beside the harbour, but at the sweeter, softer palace of Drottningholm, leaving behind the helmeted dragoons of the royal guard to blow their trumpets and wheel here and there in the courtyard. The longer I have known the Swedes, though, the more jejune I realize my original paradigm to have been. No longer one of the Powers, there is still something rather heroic about them. They are certainly not the most beloved people in Europe, but that is perhaps because they have so successfully looked after their own interests throughout a century of general uncertainty. For years after the Second World War they kept their warships in huge excavated sea-caverns, from which they emerged into the daylight with vastly echoing rumbles of their engines: there is no denying heroism to that!
Besides, if their country is hardly an earth, a realm set in a silver sea, it really is epically situated. Its northern territories protrude into the frozen North; its southern peninsula commands the entrance to the Baltic, to my mind the most ominous and eerie of Europe’s waters. Fearful things happen in the Baltic. Wars embroil it. Ice freezes it. Unidentified submarines prowl it. Empires storm this way and that across its shallows. Predatory Powers one after the other covet its control – now the Germans, now the Russians, now the Swedes themselves. An archipelago of small islands protects Sweden from this sea, and although nowadays it is largely the province of affluent second-homers with yachts and saunas, it always seems to me to be protecting, too, against all the threats and mysteries of the wider world. Behind the archipelago Sweden stands plump, confident and well-armed beneath its bright new flags, a Power no longer, a threat to nobody: beyond the archipelago anything may happen.
20 Ibsenesques and Griegisms
Norway next door has never been a Power at all, and has been a State only since 1905, when it broke away from Sweden’s rule. Back in the 1950s it seemed to me magically northern, provincial and introspective, like a mise en scène from Ibsen. I was invited to lunches of perfect bourgeois decorum, to eat gravlax and boiled potato in decors of heavy velvet, white-painted panelling, polished wooden floors, paintings of stern ancestors and stormy seascapes. Writers still looked wonderfully writerly in the Norway of the 1950s, painters were like painters then, middle-aged ladies properly middle-aged and cardiganed. I happened in Oslo one night to see some members of a theatre cast assembling for a post-performance supper in a restaurant, and watching their meticulously staged arrivals, their accomplished greetings and their mastery of incidental business was almost as stimulating as seeing the play itself. Nothing then seemed to me more absolutely of the country than Edvard Grieg’s suburban house in Bergen – not a showy house at all, but homely and full of bric-à-brac, secluded in a garden, with a wooden pavilion among the trees in which the composer, warmed by a big iron stove in the corner, had settled at his worn old table to write his melodies. And what grand Norwegian themes had come to him through the trees, from the still water of the fjord in front of his windows, from the wooded hills behind! Norway was just the place, I concluded, for writing A-minor piano concertos.
21 New Norway
Forty years later, primed by North Sea oil, richer than most countries, Norway showed every sign of cosmopolitan modernity. One day, as I sat on a bench in Oslo, I jotted down in my notebook all that I saw about me, and here is the register. A man with a pigtail pushed a baby-carriage along a pavement. A young executive talked into a car-phone. A Eurobus set off on a holiday trip to Andalusia. An interracial procession of raggle-taggle students marched by holding ecologically protesting banners. There were shops with names like Ambiente and Marc O’Polo, a Pakistani corner store and a Bulgarian tourist centre, a sushi bar, a pizza counter and a graffito on a wall claiming Norway for the Norwegians. There were statues of playwrights, animals, nude and preternaturally athletic children. The yellow-brick Stortinget, the national parliament, looked more interesting than lovely, I thought – like an aardvark perhaps. The National Theatre looked unmistakably national and theatrical. The university looked, with its classical columns and sandwich
-eating students, indisputably academic. All in all, Oslo had become a little epitome of modern Europe.
Even in more utter parts of the country there seemed to be nothing very insular or introspective to Norway any more, even in reaches of the bleakest North, where all is desolate sea and tundra, the wind howling off the Arctic and the little fishing-towns, hundreds of miles from one another, huddled beneath their rocky bluffs in the half-light. By the 1990s hardly a one of those towns was without its modern chain hotel, with Country and Western Music on Saturday Nite. At Bergen by then there was a Gay Disco at weekends. At Skjervöy, far above the Arctic Circle, they were advertising package tours to the Canary Islands. At Trondheim I came across two whole-hog Rastafarians drinking hot chocolate in a café, together with a genuine punk couple, complete with Mohican haircut and ethnic jewellery. Mexican restaurants were all over the place, video shops, soft-porn magazines, and wherever you looked there was likely to be an infant drinking Fanta through a bent straw. I did once see a scrawl on a wall, in Ålesund, which seemed to speak of that older Norway. ‘TELL ME ONE REASON FOR LIVING,’ it said, and I was tempted to add another: ‘IBSEN RULES‚ O.K.?’
22 From An Enemy of the People, 1882, by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Peter Watts
DR STOCKMANN: I feel so indescribably happy at being part of all this teeming, flourishing life. It’s a wonderful age we’re living in – it’s as though a whole world were springing up around us!
THE MAYOR: Do you really think so?
23 The Lucky Country
Yearsago at the airport in Leningrad, as they then called St Petersburg, I chanced to see an acquaintance of mine from the British Embassy in Moscow, waiting for a flight to Finland. It was winter, and he was dressed in full paraphernalia of fur hat, fur coat and heavy boots. I thought he looked like an English Muscovy merchant in an old painting: lean, clever, ready to drive the hardest of sealskin bargains, or arrange a cruelly advantageous shipment of amber. What was he really going to Finland for? He was going to the dentist.
It used to be thought that there was something magical about the Finns – lightfooted, high-cheeked, speaking a strange language, addicted to mystic folklore: it was claimed that the very word ‘Finn’ meant ‘magician’, and even at the end of the nineteenth century British sailors were reluctant to sail with Finns because they thought they had unearthly powers. Magic or not, certainly throughout my fifty years Finland has been the Lucky Country of Europe, maintaining a brilliant equilibrium through all history’s convulsions. The Russian invasion of 1939 was Stalin’s one example of restraint in military expansionism. The German alliance which followed it was soon forgotten. Nobody holds grudges against the Finns, unless there are inherited Scandinavian grievances that I know nothing of; the Finns are respected by one and all, if only for the slippery skill of their diplomacy. In the days of the Communist Empire, whose dominion it so narrowly escaped, Finland was like a safety-valve on the edge of Russia. Not only young men from the British Embassy went there for their comforts: Communist apparatchiks, you may be sure, knew their way across the frontier, or over the narrow waters of the Gulf of Finland, to the dentists, the restaurants, the dressmakers, the fleshpots and the bankers of Helsinki. ‘o to be in finland,’ wrote e. e. cummings in 1950, ‘now that russia’s here.’
Going there from Leningrad then was a tonic. The wind out of a Russian sea was like a death in the family, but the same wind in Finland was just a tingle in the cheek. An hour in a Finnish sauna, after even a week or two in the Soviet Union, seemed to scour some miasma from your person, to leave you clean, brisk and ten years younger. Nobody could possibly feel pity for the Finns, as I often felt pity for the Russians. Besides, you could do anything you liked in Finland! You could take a ride in a pony-sleigh across a frozen harbour without being watched through binoculars by suspicious policemen. You could drive a car at a proper pace – in Russia in those days they never seemed to go more than thirty. You could go to a French film or an American play, and read the English newspapers. You could march around with a placard demanding currency reform or forecasting the imminent end of everything. You could satisfy your every craving. My own particular desire, when I first flew into Finland out of the Soviet Union, was for raw carrots, and when I arrived in Helsinki I went straight to a grocer, bought half a pound, washed them in my hotel bathroom, and ate them luxuriously with a glass of schnapps. Gogol once wrote that in the land of the Finns ‘everything was lost, flat, pale, grey, foggy …’. He should have tried carrots with schnapps.
24 Lucky still
Thirty years or so after those long-ago visits, when the Soviet Union had disintegrated, I went back again to Helsinki. I arrived by sea this time. Hoisting my bag on my back, I walked around the south harbour towards the centre of the city, and found the whole place en fête. It was Helsinki Day, and I was greeted at the Kauppatori market-place, where the daily mart of the waterfront was already in full swing, by a uniformed band playing from the first floor of the City Hall. Flags were everywhere, the café tables were hedonistically crowded, and Senate Square, the handsome focus of all Finland, was taken over by an extremely merry marching ensemble – a military band which undertook such hilarious convolutions of march and countermarch, the drum-major sometimes leaping in the air with his baton, the bandsmen often breaking into a puffing trot to maintain the pattern of movement, that I found myself laughing out loud in appreciation. Helsinki seemed flushed with success and self-esteem – well-dressed citizens promenading, tourists from all over, androgynous youths distributing brochures, trams trundling, bands playing, yachts scudding, musical marchers strutting, shops opulent, hotels fully booked, and nearly everyone smiling.
The Lucky Country! Actually it was not quite as lucky as it looked, there being an economic slump at the time, and 20 per cent unemployed. It seemed lucky to me, though, and I felt almost as fortunate to be there as I had all those years before when it had given me most of the relief of an escape from jail. I tried hard to re-enjoy my happy sensations of the 1950s, and succeeded with most of them – the freshness, the newness, the liberty, the variety, the colour. When it came to satisfying that old craving of mine, though, for the life of me I could not remember what the craving had been.
25 Luck changes
Only fifty miles from Finland, across a narrow gulf, is Estonia: an independent State before the Second World War, a Soviet republic for fifty years, since 1991 an independent State again. Tallinn, its capital, has been the very opposite of Helsinki. It has been the Unlucky City, repeatedly fouled by the historical detritus of our times. Grabbed by the Russians in 1940, by the Germans in 1941, by the Russians again in 1944, it entered Estonia’s post- Communist independence burdened with an incubus of unwanted Russian settlers that formed a third of the entire population. Luck could not come much worse. Yet by 1995, when I got there, you would scarcely have known it. Tallinn’s Old City, scarcely damaged by these events, had evidently determined to make itself one of the great destinations of mass tourism. All was ready for the rush. The cobbled streets were in good order. Piano music sounded romantically from upstairs windows. Baubles gleamed fresh-gilded on church steeples, and the grand central square, Town Hall Square, was done up like something from a medieval picture-book, with ice-cream stalls and cafés added. The Festival Grounds on the edge of town were ready for the next All-Estonian Song Festival – 200,000 people usually came: the biggest concert audience in Europe, so I was told a hundred times if I was told once. In multitudinous cellars and crannied storage-places the antique salesmen, bistro chefs and boutique proprietors were eagerly at work, and tandoori kebabs were sizzling at Sanjay’s. I had heard that the Estonians were famously taciturn – asked why he had spoken for the very first time only at the age of twenty, a deaf-mute of Estonian legend replied that he’d had nothing to say until then – but in 1995 Tallinn seemed to me downright talkative. I had lunch at one of those cellar restaurants with an Estonian academic, and she was almost as amazed as I was by this capitalist
transformation of the capital – only four years before mired apparently interminably in the Communist bog. We ate crayfish, and they reminded her loquaciously of her childhood in the Estonia of long before, before the Communists had come at all, when she had fished for them with her parents in limpid streams among the birch trees, and boiled them in cauldrons on the river-bank.
Unfortunately it turned out upon inquiry that the crayfish came from Louisiana, but that did not spoil the spirit of the occasion. Nor did all the standard post-Communist complaints I later heard about lost jobs, low wages, rising prices, crime, sleaze, housing shortages and all those wretched Russians – some of whom were pointed out to me skulking about in a Marxist manner in one of their insalubriously Stalinist suburbs. No unpalatable truths could alter the fact that in 1995 Tallinn, the Unlucky City, had struck a lucky streak at last.