by Diego Marani
Long, long ago, I too believed in promises that are written down on notepaper. Deluding myself that I would keep them, I covered fragile sheets of paper with feelings that were bigger than myself, that I thought I could master simply because I was able to write them down. In fact, here too I was behaving like a scientist: I described my state of mind just as I would have the symptoms and course of a disease. I had not yet realized that nothing that concerns man ever happens the same way twice, that nothing is made to last and that the feelings by which I was being carried away would be vastly outlived by the organs which were producing them. I declared myself in love with the same lightness of heart with which certain of my patients declared that they had tuberculosis, as though TB were not some serious pulmonary pathology but a sort of state of mind. Like them, I was not aware of the seriousness of my illness. Indeed, it seemed to me that, written down, the awesome phenomenon by which I was beset would be more easily tamed, become more rational. I thought, wrongly, that my feelings, if written down on paper, would take on more solid form, and that such solidity would communicate itself to the person who read my letters. But one day, quite unexpectedly, words – set on their course long before I could read them – reached me, and killed me. Of all the types of cruelty that the person who loves us may inflict upon us, even without meaning to, this is the worst.
At Hamburg, one autumn evening on my way back from the university, I had stopped to watch the sunset over the port. It was unusually mild for the time of year; the windows of the city were glowing red, the tram lines were a tangle of strips of blazing colour. Suddenly, in the pearly sky to the east, I saw a silent flock of migrating storks; soon they were above me, majestically large. Their shadow slipped over me like an embrace: up there in the soft air, the sight of them gave me a sudden feeling of peace. I gazed out over the iron-grey sea and allowed the beloved face of the girl I had left behind me in Helsinki to surface in my mind: I offered up that moment, that sunset, that flight of storks, to her. Some weeks later, I received a letter: words dry as thorns informed me, with brutal accuracy, how all that she had once felt for me was well and truly over. The date at the top of the letter, and the time of day, mentioned in the first few lines, told me that the words which were now crushing me had been written on the very evening that I had seen the storks. At the very moment I had been offering up that burst of joy to her, she had been signing my death sentence.
One evening in June, the pastor went away. He told me nothing about his intentions; indeed, he told nobody. He left no word, no message. From the surprise and bewilderment caused in the hospital by his departure I realized that he had long ceased to communicate with his colleagues on the medical staff, and indeed with the wounded whom he visited daily. He would talk to them, they said, but did not listen: it was as though he was always talking to the same person, carrying on with what he was saying to one when moving on to talk to the next. He seemed to speak in riddles, about a God whom he never referred to by name but whose end he sensed to be imminent; he had cut himself off from the world and lived like a castaway, alone with his thoughts, so that to leave was the most natural thing he could have done, an action which was quite simply the last step in a long and anguished process of estrangement.
Although I understood this only later, on his last evening the Military Chaplain Olof Koskela had in fact taken his leave of me, after his fashion. After the service I had blown out the candle on the altar and tidied away the missals, as I always did. The dread of yet another white night was looming; I lingered on among the pews, taking a little bite out of the endless hours when I was supposedly asleep. When I had done everything there could possibly be to do, when I had exhausted every excuse for further loitering, I went to the door of the sacristy to say goodnight to the pastor. I found him seated at the table, with the Kalevala open in front of him, the coloured illustrations glowing in the light of the setting sun. The little cupboard with the glass knobs was open and the bottle of koskenkorva was on the table, together with two small glasses, just as it always was during our lessons. Without further ado, I went in; Koskela waited for me to sit down. In the past, each time he had begun to speak, I would concentrate on his words, ever hopeful that I would understand him; and indeed, with time and practice, my understanding of his Finnish had broadened and deepened. But it was above all at the beginning of any speech, before I could tell where it was going, that I would surprise myself by leaping from one phrase to another without losing my balance. Words and thought ran straight as a pair of rails, and I would feel the engine of grammar springing smoothly and harmoniously into motion. But the higher he clambered up the steep slopes of his cosmogony, the harder I had to struggle to follow him. Sometimes, noticing that I was in difficulties, he would reformulate certain ideas in simpler terms; as time went by, however, less aware of my plight, he ceased to do so. So that night too I sat down in front of the pastor with my eyes fixed on his mouth, so as not to let one single movement of his lips escape me.
‘It was Väinämöinen, the great runoilija, who made a people of us. Before that we had been uncivilized, without a history, nomads who abandoned their dead wherever they happened to be. Väinämöinen gave us a land, taught us the art of working iron, the art of war, how to hunt and to grow crops. But there was just one thing Väinämöinen knew he could not do for us, namely, prevail over the evil that is inherent in all the things of this world: against that we are powerless, we and all other human beings. That was what Väinämöinen was thinking about on the evening of the great summer festival. After the hunt, while the bear meat was roasting in the coals, during the preparations for the great feast in celebration of the return of summer, of coots to the skies and salmon to the rivers, Väinämöinen was thinking back on his past life. The heroic age which had witnessed his birth was now long gone. Single-handedly he had broken up that earth, cleared it of woods and snakes. His people had grown in number; thanks to him, they were now acquainted with song, and the owners of the magic Sampo. Seated downcast before the fire on that June evening – because, even if the Kalavela does not say so, I am certain that it must have been an evening in June, every bit as white and dazzling as this one now – Väinämöinen realized that this last battle was to be one he could not win. Pain is not something that can be shared; each must pay his own dues. The great runoilija felt too old and weak to take on that last challenge along with all the rest; so he decided to go away, back to those still waters from which he had come, to the margins of the created world, the abode of Antero Vipunen and all the greatest shamans who, having left their bodies, wander around their empty carcasses as though around some ancient temple long since claimed by brambles.’
Here the pastor paused – for breath, I thought, or possibly for thought. But it seemed as if he were listening out for something, awaiting some sound. He went up to the window, straining his ears; I stayed where I was. But all that could be heard from outside was the sound of the wind in the trees. That seemed to bring him back to the present; he drained his glass of koskenkorva and carried on.
‘Beware how you bring up your sons, you future generations – do not let them be lulled to sleep by strangers. Children who are cradled without gentleness, raised uncaringly, dragged up harshly, will not become intelligent, will never have the gift of wisdom, will never become men, even should they grow up strong and healthy and live for a hundred years! It was with these words, so many years earlier, that the old Väinämöinen had responded to the news of the death of Kullervo, son of Kalervo. On the evening of the great banquet, no one would have thought to speak of it, to remind him of it – Kullervo after all had killed the wife of Ilmarinen, the virgin of Pohjola, he had violated his own sister and finally taken his own life, throwing himself upon his sword. But thinking of the evil by which man is dogged – which worms its way even into those things which are most beautiful, which tracks them down wherever they are hidden – Väinämöinen bethought himself of the ferocious Kullervo and his wretched life. Such ferocity is mor
e than a man’s share. We find the seed of hatred on this earth and sow it along with the rye, believing it to be good. It was Untamo who sowed that hatred when he slaughtered the family of his brother Kalervo, burned down his village and dragged the only survivor, a pregnant woman, off to prison: the child who was born was Kullervo. His mother nurtured his hatred, fuelling his craving for revenge. He grew up in a state of slavery, and without memories, for there was nothing in his life to be remembered. From Untamo’s kindred he received kicks instead of fondling, insults instead of gentleness, hatchets for splitting wood instead of toys. From his mother, he received a grounding in ruthlessness. Day after day she would look into his heart, uprooting any shoot of tenderness because she wanted his soul to be a desert. Kullervo never knew what childhood was.’
The room was sunk in glowing semi-darkness. Koskela lit a candle, and his face appeared, etched out of the darkness by its light. His gestures cast a shadow on the wall, serving as background to his story. In those shadows I could see Untamo raising his knife, Kalervo’s village going up in flames – scenes from another world, summoned up and sent dancing mysteriously upon the wall in front of me by Koskela’s words, which put me in mind of some formula uttered during a spiritualist seance.
‘When Untamo saw the bestiality that blinded that child’s gaze, he was stricken with fear: he realized that that little creature would be the instrument of his own death. He ordered that he be put in a barrel and cast out to sea. But after three days and three nights the barrel was washed up on the shore, and Kullervo was found to be unscathed: the hatred burning within him had saved his life. Then Untamo ordered that a great pile of wood should be made, and that the child should be tied up in its midst; but when, after three days, the flames died down, Kullervo was still alive, up to his knees in ashes, and his eyes burned like the fire which was to have been his undoing. Then Untamo drove him from the village, hoping to exorcize the threat he posed. Kullervo was purchased by the smith Ilmarinen, who tried to make a good servant of him. But Kullervo was a beast, born to hate and destroy. He slaughtered the smith’s wife, the beautiful virgin of Pohjola, and fled into the forests of the North, banished from the society of men for the atrocities he had committed. The old woman he met by the side of the black river separating the land of Kaleva from Tuonela, the kingdom of the dead, was certainly a demon. It was she who told him that his father, his mother and his sister were still alive, on the shore of the lake which bordered Lapland. “My hapless son, are you still wandering this world with your eyes open?” These were the words with which his mother greeted him. But not even family affection could deflect Kullervo from his brutish mission. In vain did his father attempt to teach him to make himself useful. He sent him off to fish; but Kullervo’s hands were too powerful to simply hold the oars, they had been trained to crush, to wreck. He broke the rowlocks, shattered the keel. Then his father told him to pull on the nets and beat the water, so as to catch some fish. But Kullervo made mincemeat of the fish and reduced the oars to pulp.
In desperation, his father then told him to take a sledge and go off to pay the taxes.
‘Perhaps your strength will serve you on the journey,’ his father sighed. It was on Kullervo’s return, as he was roaring through Pohjola’s lands, knocking down trees and flattening the hillsides, that he met his sister and, failing to recognize her, raped her. When, returning home, he realized what he had done, Kullervo gave up all hope. “May I find death in the jaws of the howling wolf or the roaring bear, or in the belly of the barracuda!” he yelled amidst his tears, on his knees before his mother.
“No, my son, that will not help you, nor will time bring you solace or forgiveness until the whole of your allotted destiny has been played out,” answered his mother, crushed by grief. For she knew that only when he had massacred the whole house of Untamo would her son be free of the hatred that she herself had planted in his heart. Now he had turned into a giant, twisted tree, one which no axe could dint.’
As he spoke, Koskela had become in turn a wolf, a bear, a barracuda. Now he was a tree, motionless in the middle of the room: his skin had become bark, his outstretched arms gnarled branches, waiting expectantly. He was breathing heavily: like the real trees outside, he rustled in the night wind.
‘The day he left to wage war against Untamo, Kullervo did not know that he would never see his mother again, that with the conclusion of his mission his life too would end; that the pain which had driven him to it would be put out. His mother, like all mothers, sensed as much; but she could not hold him back. She had dreamed that he would have a happy life, that she would enjoy a calm old age beside him. Fate had decreed otherwise, and that fate was now being inexorably played out. In vain she begged her son to stay; she would rather have him alive and accursed than dead and liberated. But Kullervo was deaf to her entreaties, and proceeded to massacre all of Untamo’s kith and kin, leaving their village a smoking wreck. When he returned home and found only the dog, Musti, he saw that this was the end. It was remorse that killed him; nothing else could have.’
Here Koskela broke off again, poured out another two glasses of koskenkorva and again downed his own in a single gulp. That night’s story included many words I did not know, mention of many objects I had never heard of; but I didn’t feel that I could interrupt him and ask for explanations. Even when I lost the thread, I was captivated just hearing him speak. In the darkness, I could no longer read his lips. His eyes were two craters in his lunar face, his mouth a black abyss, a volcano that spat out sounds; it was those I now followed, rather than the words. Above all, I liked the names: Antero, Kullervo, Untamo, Kalervo. They were not merely names, they were magic formulae. It was as though, by pronouncing them, their owners would emerge alive from the pastor’s throat, like so many monsters which he had been harbouring deep in his entrails, and wander around the room, bemoaning their fate and dancing around as though possessed.
‘The fight against the evil which drove Kullervo to commit his crimes goes on to this day. Väinämöinen was right: we can do nothing against it. Human life bursts into flames, then burns and dies out without a jot of all the pain we bear within us being consumed. Quite the reverse: this insatiable animal feeds upon every man who comes into this world, upon every life which is added to the lives already here. It grows and grows, devouring everything around it, like those loathsome fish which live in the muddy depths of lakes where no algae grow. All we can do is to deny it its nourishment. If the world’s evil feeds upon our lives, only without them will it grow hungry, and so die. That is why the killing must go on, why every war is good; why every death takes us nearer our goal!’
Now there was anger in the pastor’s eyes. His irate shadow lashed the room, and I felt I had to get up from where I was sitting to protect myself. I flattened myself against the wall, that same wall that Koskela used to stare at during his hallucinations. I sounded out its cracks and lumps, my hands behind my back. I had the impression that they were mysterious signs, key to some rite of passage, and that that wall was the doorway to another world. In the guttering light of the candle I saw the figure of Kullervo in the Kalevala that lay open on the table, the painting by Gallen-Kallela that Koskela had showed me on several occasions. His eyes raised to the skies, his face distorted in a furious grimace, his fist firmly clenched, his whole appearance made me shudder. The red light falling in through the window was now becoming slowly tinged with grey. The sun was sinking behind the forests and a dense layer of salt-laden cloud was settling over the sleepless city. The pastor was waving his fist in front of the square of transparent window, but it no longer cast any shadow.
‘What is the message of the cross, if not death? Powerless in the face of evil, God has at least tried to show us the way out!’
That night I dreamed that waves of soldiers were emerging silently from the sea and falling upon the city; they had black lumps instead of eyes. All that was to be seen of their faces was their mouths, twisted with effort. They were running through th
e streets of the town centre at breakneck speed, their steps echoing on the cobbles like the roll of a broken drum, swarming all over the place like so many black insects. They came pouring into the Suurtori, climbed the steps up to the cathedral and went down the other side. They were running but not stopping, never firing, they had no weapons. They went through the city, making their way through the terrified crowd, then vanished into the woods, dived into the lakes, never to re-emerge. Then suddenly we realized that it was they who were frightened of us, it was they who were fleeing. Then we ran after them, hoping to grab hold of them, but there were too many of them, they slipped through our grasp like shadows, like clouds in the sky, like mice. Then they were no more to be seen, and all that could be heard was our shouts as we ran after them.
I woke up with the feeling that I had not slept at all. My head ached, and there was a bitter taste in my mouth; the walls of the room looked softer in the pink dawn light. Something told me that it was late. The bell had not rung. Suddenly I understood. Walking slowly into the church – I was no longer in a hurry – I found the nurses somewhat flustered, muttering irritated comments without moving from their seats. The door of the sacristy was wide open; the half-empty bottle of koskenkorva was still on the table, and the Kalevala open at the page with the picture of Kullervo.
In the days following Koskela’s departure, I clung to my studies as though to a life jacket. When the time for my lesson came, I would shut myself in the sacristy and study every word I’d put down in my notebook, declining it in all possible cases, conjugating each verb in every voice I knew, down to the most tortuous forms of the passive, the conditional, even the past potential; undaunted now by irregular verbs with alternating consonants, I had in my head all the ‘p’s which became ‘v’s, the ‘lke’s which became ‘lje’s, the ‘ht’s which became ‘hd’s. Strong or weak, there was no stem of any verb I could not pick out in the forest of syllabic mutations, where it was enough to add one vowel to cause three consonants to disappear; then there were those nouns without so much as a diphthong, where the ‘i’s of the plural put paid to every syllable not protected by solid dentals. The only thing that sometimes floored me was polysyllabic stems, and then I would fill page after page getting them right, feeling an unhealthy pleasure at seeing those sheets so densely packed with words, those elixirs of grammar whose every line contained three or four rules, one entangled in the exceptions of another but always itself correct. When I had reached the end of my own notebook, when I’d exhausted my stock of headed notepaper from the Hotel Kämp, I had the nurses give me sheets of wrapping paper. I spread them out on the table as though they were maps of my personal campaigns, filling every last bit of them with formulae as unforgiving as equations, where every letter that I wrote weighed heavy as lead in terms of sheer mental effort. Fragile as houses of cards but logically indestructible, those syntactical digests were my defence against an enemy who was attacking me from behind. I had no tanks, no bombardiers, and each day surprised me on a different front, drawing me into the open, far from reason’s hiding-places, towards a chasm of gloomy, giddy thoughts. It was then that I needed all fifteen Finnish grammatical cases, the four forms of the infinitive, not to mention the negative pluperfect to keep my mind engaged, to drag it clear of that carpet bombing. Then I would even resort to declining my name, ‘Sampo’, as a noun, one of those which have a slightly odd partitive plural, and karjalainen as an adjective – at least that was regular, as round and perfect as a circle. Once again, my name was all I had. The label coming unstitched from the neck of my jacket was my identity card, my sole claim to existence, the fragile line of communication allowing me to carry on restocking my trenches and resisting the temptation to disappear, to do away with myself, like the pastor, to go back into the darkness from which I had come. The words of Doctor Friari often came into my mind, when he had encouraged me to love the Finnish language, to abandon myself to it as one would to the arms of a loving woman. Then the fire that still burned beneath the ashes should have taken on new life: I’d been blowing on those embers for months, for months I had been coaxing into life a flame which would not take. The words came out of my mouth and disappeared like stones thrown into the sea; nothing of them stayed in my brain. My memory was nothing but a list of words, a dictionary, a conversation manual. Ilma – perhaps she was the answer; but I could not love Ilma without first knowing who I was. I could not offer her the heart of someone I did not know. Perhaps because I wished her well, I could not love her. Not even my feelings were really my own. I bore the name of the body I inhabited, but I did not have its heart. This was something that Doctor Friari had never understood, and I did not have the words to explain it to him. After all these months, I realized that I was as alone as I had been on that first day. The anguish which had nailed me to the bed that first afternoon was still within me, entire and unabated.