by Diego Marani
Love,
Ilma
I had found this letter on my bed, when I went back to the dormitory to collect my notebook for my lesson with the pastor. It was the first time I’d seen my name on an envelope. It looked good, written there in black ink; so good that I almost didn’t want to open it. I did not immediately understand all that I read. I rushed excitedly from one line to another, looking for words I knew and skipping those I felt I would be able to decipher later. Sometimes a few letters were enough to tell me all I needed to know about a verb and then a whole line would dance before me, the words opening out one after another, letting the meaning shine through. But often whole sentences remained unclear, clouded by very little words, like so many padlocks obstructing the flow of meaning. I read all that I could, then I curled up on the bed, holding the unfolded sheet of paper firmly in my hand. Weak sunlight fell through the window, slithering across the floors right up to the beds. The room was flooded with perfect silence, like still water, through which my body was slowly surfacing. Those words were bringing every part of me to life, enlarging me through their magnifying lens. Ilma had called out to my grief, had given it a name, and it was answering her call.
‘I was expecting you. Are you not feeling well?’
It was Koskela; he was standing in the doorway.
‘No, I’m fine, I’d just dozed off. I’m all yours.’
I got off the bed, picked up the notebook and straightened the blanket. The pastor pretended not to notice as I stuffed the letter into the pocket of my jacket. Then, without asking for any explanation, he answered the questions I put to him about the bits I had not understood, copied down into my notebook.
‘Today we’ll have our lesson in the open air. I want to show you something,’ he said, striding off with his hands in his pockets. We went out into the road, came to the Suurtori and went down to the wharf at Katajanokka. The day was mild and colourless; a pearly light fell from the white sky, casting no shadows.
‘There’s something you need to understand: the frontier on which this war is being fought does not just divide two peoples, us and the Russians. It also separates two different souls. Sister souls, it’s true, but tragically at odds on one essential point: the idea of the world to come. And for man, a mortal creature who lives a fleeting life upon this earth, the world to come is all-important.’
We had crossed the Katajanokka Canal in front of the presidential palace. Now we were climbing the hill on which the Uspenski Orthodox Cathedral stands. I tried to keep up with the pastor as he climbed the steep slope, the better to understand his words.
‘That’s typical of the Russians,’ he said, stopping at the main door. Luckily he was out of breath, and this forced him to speak more slowly.
‘Look how solidly it’s built. Their truth is as heavy as stone, as conspicuous as those gilded domes, massive and down-to-earth. They named this church after the dormition of the Virgin. That’s a myth of their own making, to spare the mother of God the brutal shock of physical death: it makes death into one endless sleep. A noble ruse, it’s true. But if death is sleep, the world to come is just a dream, a fleeting vision.’
I did not know what katoavainen meant but, since he pronounced it next to näky, or vision, I could hazard a guess. I repeated the two words to myself to bind them to one another in my memory. We went into the church. The walls were crowded with images, the floor was elaborately worked and the altars were laden with gilded candlesticks, so that the cold light falling from above seemed to have a warmer glow, to be less harsh. We were surrounded by a circle of saints who looked down on us benevolently. Beneath each holy image, candles shone, their stems as slender as those of flowers. The steps leading to the niches were covered with red carpets. Elaborate brass lamps hung from the marble columns. We took a few steps in silence. Walking ahead of me, the pastor pointed to one picture, then another, then to the domes, with their coloured mosaics with scenes from the Old Testament. When we came out, the dull light hurt my eyes. The ethereal city stretched out below us, aloof and uncaring. We went down again towards the market square.
‘You see, in the Orthodox World you are never alone. You end up by believing that when you go into the next world, you will be received into that crowd of welcoming saints and angels who are gathered there especially to meet you. They will keep you company until the Last Judgement, which, for the Orthodox, is nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a rite of passage, a bit like the day when soldiers take the oath, nothing more. Then a new life will begin, exactly like this earthly one but without suffering, in a glittering many-splendoured earthly paradise. For the Orthodox, death does not exist and paradise is just like this world, with some slight alterations for the better.’
From the seashore we turned to look at the Uspenski Cathedral once more before turning down the Esplanadi. With some difficulty, one by one, I was taking in Koskela’s words. In the pauses between them, I heard them die away. I watched them floating down into the landscape of the city around us, so as to note where they fell, so that I could go and collect them later: a belltower would remind me of a verb, I wasted a whole ship on an adjective and entrusted the all-important subject to a tram. The pastor’s thought was scattered throughout Helsinki, and I could reread it every time I pleased.
‘For us, however, there is no redemption. We grow up with a need for expiation and continue to punish ourselves throughout our lives. We entertain no hopes, make no demands. We are gobbets of pure evil, and the best thing we can do is to melt away, wither away, without any fuss. Only in the world to come will some of us be vouchsafed a way out. Nor do our actions serve to earn us any reward, for our fate is predestined. Our damnation or salvation is already sealed, right from the day of our birth. But only after death will we know this. That is why our lives are just one stricken period of waiting.’
Lunastus, redemption, is a lovely word. I liked to repeat it to myself, to feel its mysterious murmur on my breath, as though some spirit were unleashed by those lisping sounds and set soaring upwards towards higher worlds. We had now crossed the Mannerheimintie; after walking in front of the Hotel Torni, we turned into the Lönrotinkatu. We went into a park, full of well-grown, shady trees, in the middle of which we could just make out a white building with a greenish roof. Here the pastor suddenly came to a standstill.
‘That, on the other hand, is our soul. Look at these memorial tablets. They’re all over the park.’
I looked around and noticed marble slabs set into the thick grass. Some crooked, others half sunk into the earth, they were thinly and discreetly scattered throughout the great stretch of grassy land.
‘They’re tombs; this is a cemetery. But it’s also a park, where living people go to walk among the dead, This is our idea of the world to come: a place half a metre below ground, not a cheerful throng of saints. Nothing celestial or sublime about our world to come: it’s a gloomy, colourless limbo where absence of guilt does duty for beatitude. Guilt is the wellhead of all that gives us life. We do not know what it is we feel guilty about, we have forgotten, it’s not important any more. Perhaps it is just the guilt we feel at having come into the world at all. Eternal peace is liberation from guilt. Or, if you like, from life.’
A gust of wind swept through the trees, then ran along the grass. The weather was changing: a storm was brewing up. Above the sea the sky was still white and still, but black clouds were rolling in from the west, and the park suddenly became dark. Beneath the trees the light began to fade, and the first raindrops pattered onto leaves which had now taken on silvery tones, like those of olive-trees.
‘Come on, let’s go into the church, at least we’ll be in the dry,’ said the pastor, pointing towards the white building we’d seen earlier. We ran towards the doorway and went into what turned out to be a Lutheran Church. It was built entirely of wood, a single space without nave or aisles. Once inside, Koskela stopped under the organ loft and pointed out a notice hanging on the wall. It had a red and black border, and looke
d somehow ominous. I tried to read it, but there were many words I did not know. I understood only bits of any one sentence, but nonetheless I gleaned an idea of the general meaning. It talked of mothers, suffering and the homeland. Even the title bristled with dishearteningly long words, studded with umlauts. But, taken letter by letter, the screws that held them so tightly in place began to yield, allowing some drop of meaning to seep out.
‘This is a proclamation by Marshal Mannerheim, father of Finland, the man who led us out of Russia as Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. It says that he is awarding every Finnish mother the Cross of Freedom, as compensation for the pain of having lost their sons in war. What a baffling title – Ylipäällikön päiväkäsky. Order of the day from the Commander-in-chief. But for those who can read between the lines, it’s actually a war bulletin; and nowhere else in the world would you find a war bulletin posted up in a church. This proclamation was issued two years ago, on 10 May 1942, when the Finnish authorities had agreed to let the German troops go through their country on their way to launch a new attack on Leningrad. This was the beginning of our revenge; or of our ultimate defeat. At the end of hostilities with the Russians in 1940, we had had to accept extremely harsh conditions of surrender. Without having lost a single battle, with her army still intact, Finland was forced to hand over those very battlefields where her little fighting force had managed to stand up to the mighty military power of Soviet Russia. We had no choice. To have refused would have meant total annihilation. So Finnish provinces and cities had to be evacuated. There was a massive exodus from Karelia. Viipuri, Finland’s second city, was emptied of its inhabitants and handed over to Russia. We have taken it back; but how long will we be able to hold on to it? We have always played for high stakes with the Russians, always bet heavily with nothing to fall back on. And, so far, this has paid off. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Finland too was caught up in the civil war. Red and white Finns were massacred and exterminated so viciously that our country lay all but empty for decades. Even today we do not talk about those years, we do not mourn those who died, and many graves remain unmarked. Even today the military authorities are afraid that some of the soldiers who go off to defend our frontiers might be covert Reds, who would fraternize with the Soviets! We have taken a great gamble, we have risked our all! The victory of the Whites meant the survival of our nation, of our way of life, our God. If the Reds had won the civil war, if we had refused peace in 1940, today this place would be an army depot or a communist party headquarters. And the memorial tablets you saw out there would have ended up serving as paving for some city street. In reality, this ‘proclamation’ is an appeal, launched by Mannerheim to invite our people once again to risk their lives in the eternal struggle against the Russians. Accepting Hitler’s help meant incurring Russia’s fury and risking annihilation. Awarding the Cross of Freedom to Finland’s mothers meant asking them to make the supreme sacrifice, giving their country even those sons who had survived, who had come unscathed through the Winter War. Their country was calling upon them once again. Marshal Mannerheim is the Väinämöinen of our time. He made Finland a free country, he saved us twice over: from the Reds and from the Russians. For us, these words come second only to the Bible. Do you see the difference? The Orthodox bow down before gilded images, we bow down before a typewritten order of the day! Now do you understand why we are two separate races?’
I was surprised at having understood almost all that the pastor had said. The words, I mean. As far as the politics were concerned, I was in no position to pass judgement, and I knew that he was often swept away by the sheer fervour of his vision. As in an unfamiliar forest, my mind had to make its own way as it went along. Whenever I lost the pastor from sight as I followed him on his frenetic ramblings, I had always managed to regain my bearings, to catch up with him again without too much difficulty, taking other paths. By now, in the discussions that had become the staple of our time together, I had acquired a reasonable mastery of his vocabulary, using my common sense as best I could, leaning limping words up against able-bodied ones in order to move forward. As Koskela walked before me towards the centre of the church, I noted with satisfaction how stark and unadorned the proclamation was, as indeed was the place where it was hung: not a single picture, not a single ornament on the whitewashed walls: except, in the middle of the apse, one single framed canvas, a Last Judgement where God the Father, with a white beard, was descending from a sulphurous heaven to separate men into sheep and goats. To the right were the damned, already licked by the flames of Hell, and to the left the blessed, a formless multitude clad in white tunics. Now Koskela had reached the altar. He made an expansive gesture, then spoke.
‘Here no one is going to come forward to greet you; no saints, no cherubim. Here there are just black missals on the pews, and the numbers of the psalms hanging up on the walls. Our very church furnishings tell you what is important, that is, prayer. Because all in all it is the word of God which absolves or damns you. In Finnish, the word for Bible is Raamattu, that is, Grammar. Life is a set of rules. Beyond the rule lies sin, incomprehension, perdition.’
Outside, the storm was raging. The rain was beating down on the copper roof, drowning out the pastor’s words. A sinister darkness now filled the empty church.
‘At heart, we have always been Lutherans, even before we became Christians. The heroes of the Kalevala were already Lutherans in the same way that Achilles and Ulysses were already Orthodox. Ulysses practised his wiles on a sophisticated and sceptical society which was familiar with mental trickery. Väinämöinen’s mode of speech is craggy, immediate, uncomplicated, like the first blow of a chisel on rough stone. The Greek gods mingled with men, wrangled and negotiated with them. The god Ukko never comes down to earth; he judges our actions and then visits light or darkness upon us, punishment or reward. The fate of the Greeks is erratic, ironical; it makes great warriors of simple men. Its will seems to be inescapable, yet it can in fact be outmanoeuvred. The destiny that awaits the Finnish heroes is brutal, inflexible. It turns great warriors into simple shepherds who serve out their sentence until the very last.’