by Diego Marani
‘Father! My leg hurts – it’s all hot, and wet!’ the soldier moaned. Standing beside the bed, the pastor had opened his breviary; holding it towards the bluish light, he began to say a prayer.
‘You can’t get through there, father! Don’t go that way! It’s dangerous!’ the solider was saying, suddenly seizing hold of the pastor’s jacket. The nurse came up from the other side of the bed and moistened his forehead, whispering words which seemed to comfort him.
‘That’s the road to Mustamäki, that white line down there. On the other side of it are the Russians. That’s where they’re firing from! They’ve taken possession of the railway, they’re advancing with their tanks!’
The wounded man continued to thrash around, and his blurred speech drowned out the pastor’s voice. He was looking at the breviary open above him as though it were a scalpel poised for yet further action.
‘Don’t go that way, father! They’re not afraid of dying, they’re not like us. That’s what you said, father! They go to Heaven, but we don’t!’
The nurse had removed her cloth and was still trying to calm him, but now with no success; as though possessed by some new strength, the dying man was now lifting himself up on to his elbows.
‘Father Koskela! Don’t leave me alone! I don’t want to die!’ the soldier shouted, and his cry hung on in the silence.
The pastor’s prayer rang out, clear as a bell, falling upon the death-laden air like disinfectant. He performed the last rites with sharp, clear-cut gestures. Then he remained kneeling by the dead man for a few minutes, murmuring a psalm before moving off, together with the doctor. I heard their steps dying away at the end of the corridor. The nurse had gone off to fetch water to wash the corpse, and I stayed on beside him alone; leaning against the wall, I looked at his sweat-veiled face with some alarm, stared at his twisted mouth and stiffened fingers, just visible above the sheet. That man had seen Koskela; a few moments before he went off to die. My friend Olof Koskela. Perhaps he was still out there somewhere. I looked towards the window through eyes made dim with tears; a few wan stars were floating in the pallid sky. I imagined the pastor lying on his back on the ground, his eyes wide open, looking at those same stars that I could see, fading beyond the window.
In the registers of the Finnish Lutheran Church which I consulted in the offices of the Tuomiokirkko, the Pastor Olof Koskela was said to have fallen in the battle of Kuuterselkä on 14 June 1944. It was not known where he was buried. A short note attached to the file gave a resume of the military report describing the circumstances of his death and the finding of his body, by the road which runs between the turn-off for Kuuterselkä and the village of Mustamäki. The Finnish troops’ hasty retreat from the Karelian Isthmus probably meant that the bodies of the fallen could not be transported behind the lines.
What follows is the last letter sent by Ilma Koivisto, which the author at some point copied into his document. In fact, Miss Koisvisto told me that she had also written a fourth letter, which she had never sent, and which still has in her possession; she said that I could read it if I felt it might help me in my reconstruction of events. I did not think it appropriate to probe any further into the private world of a woman who had already suffered so much. I would prefer that the last words addressed by Ilma Koivisto to the man she believed to be Sampo Karjalainen continue to be known only to the person who wrote them.
Viipuri, 19 June 1944
Dear Sampo,
I don’t know what sense it makes to carry on writing to you, but I can’t resist throwing these few words into your silence. To be honest, they are words which it is better not to carry around inside oneself, because after a time they will begin to rot, infecting everything around them like gangrene. Each day I’ve waited for a letter, each morning when the post was being distributed I thought I’d hear my name. I even thought that something might have happened to you, that you had gone away, had disappeared, had died. But, in that case, my letters would have been returned. So I know that you’ve read them, and this knowledge I find even more hurtful. But there seems to me to be something false, something fabricated about your unresponsiveness; it is a bit like the personal war you are waging against the figments of your memory. Here, war – I mean real war – has arrived in earnest; the front is a few kilometres away, we can see the German planes bombing the Russian lines. Viipuri itself is threatened; the twentieth regiment is lining up against the imminent attack. Tomorrow we are going to a field hospital beyond the river Vuoksi, where all the wounded from this sector of the front will be brought. We are needed everywhere: everywhere there are soldiers with shattered limbs who do not yet know whether they will live or die. I have never seen so many dead all in one place, so much life draining out of bodies so fast. It is a tragic irony that with so many memories being abandoned by their legitimate owners, you cannot find one which meets with your approval, and persist in wanting one all of your own. We are leaving the refugee centre with a great sense of foreboding; months of work will be destroyed by bombing, or fall into the Russians’ hands; but then in war everything is made to be destroyed, perhaps including our own friendship. That’s why it was doomed from the start. But it’s my fault, I was asking for too much. I instantly demanded from you that touch of the infinite which human relationships can never provide. Both for better and for worse, we can never perceive the infinite; even when we believe that we are the bearers of immense suffering, in reality we are like ants carrying crumbs. God measures out the pain that each of us can bear, the least and the most. Everything is bearable, until we die of it. Nothing of us outlasts us, and if some pain outlives us for some time, it is only in order to be sure that it has killed us well and truly. People have been evacuated out of Viipuri for some time, ever since the rout at Kuuterselkä. The Russians broke through our defences all along the front. Yesterday refugees arrived from as far away as Petroskoi, a whole lorryload, stuffed to the gunwales with people and furniture, hoping to be taken in by relatives. But there’s no one left here now: the city’s empty, its only occupants are stray dogs and horses driven mad by fear. Dear Sampo, this is the last letter I’ll be writing you. By the end of the page, each of us will be free to suffer again on our own, free to reclaim our solitude. All in all, this is the condition to which man is best suited; it is the ideal condition for whole-heartedly pursuing our own self-preservation, the only real task God has assigned to us. If one day I come back to Helsinki, I shall not look for you; I shall not want to remember you, and this time I shall not even feel sorry for you. I shall go and remove you from the tree of happy memories. I didn’t tell you, but my tree is also capable of forgetting. I’ll go and find it on my own, one evening towards the end of winter like the time when I took you there, and your memory will melt away like snow in the breath of the sea wind. Forgetting is the only form of defence left to us; nothing which has been forgotten has the power to harm us any more; yet there you are, mercilessly scrutinising your consciousness in the hopes of digging up a few shreds of memory. I shall forget, I shall recover from this illusion as I have from others, but you won’t: all this is something that you will want to remember. And I know that you will keep my letters, that you will reread them. Not for what they contain, but because they too will have turned into precious relics of your reconstituted past. But be warned: for many years to come, these words – which you today have wanted to ignore – will continue to haunt you. And then you will be defenceless in the face of regret; all the time that you have so greedily hoarded, unpicking the embroidery of the days life offered you, will become snarled up in hopeless disarray; because it is not yours, it is the fruit of plunder. Time is not sewn patiently from little, ordinary things, it is not a carpet of words and silences, of glances and moments within which memory slowly envelops us.
It’s a lovely summer’s evening. The sun is sinking into the sea, lighting up the trunks of the trees, catching the buds of new resin on their bark, making the streamlets glitter. There was a time when this landscape wou
ld have gladdened my heart; I would have run down to the bright shore, to the waves of our own sea, unthreatening as a lake. But today this brightness holds no joy for me, and the long shadows on the meadows put me in mind of crosses. Death is all around me, and something within me, too, is dying: the affection that I felt for you, the faith I had in you. Now that their place is empty, I see how big it was. Like a bomb crater, it will fill up with water and with mud; but time will make the grass grow even there and, before long, the coots will nest there too. You, Sampo, are a plunderer of time, but I allow time to grow, and thrive.
Goodbye,
Ilma
Ilma’s last letter arrived yesterday, together with the news of the fall of Viiipuri. This one too I read under the tree of happy memories, and now it’s with the others in my jacket pocket. Once again, I did not understand it all, though I could not fail to see that it contained harsh words. It had clearly been written in a hurry, and I had difficulty copying it out. The steady, rounded hand to which I was accustomed had given way to one that was flatter, less legible. The margins were no longer neatly aligned, with the syllables conveniently marked off; now the words were twisted and choked, as though the writer had not had the time or indeed the inclination to make them comprehensible, and there were crossings out and blank spaces. Even the letters of my name on the envelope might have been written by a different hand; reading them was like hearing myself summoned by an unknown person. But nothing matters any more after what happened today at Katajanokka.
The End Foretold
Ilma was right in saying that everything is bearable until it kills us. Man’s struggle against pain is a war where each of the two sides has its own rightful role. The winner acknowledges the dignity of the defeated, even when it is a death sentence. But my war was of another kind; it was a war in which I was my own enemy. And now I have lost it. To spare myself would have made no sense; there are no prisoners in this kind of challenge.
For days now, the city has been sweltering under a sultry cloak of haze. The air is heavy, dust-laden, full of animal smells; the sea gives out a bitter smell of rotten seaweed. As they cross the bay to reach the market, the fishing boats create waves which linger on behind them, slow to close up. Night and day follow one another under the same uncaring, leaden sky, whiter where the sun is; even at night it carries on glowing, like embers buried under ash. Beneath this stagnant air, the city barely moves; it trembles slightly as the trams pass, like the faded scenery of some old theatre. Houses and blocks of flats seem on the point of crumbling away, as though some imperceptible underground explosion had silently snapped the iron framework of their reinforcements.
Last night a land wind brought cool air, and this morning clouds streaked with violet massed above the city, shutting out the horizon from all sides. After my stint in the laundry, I had gone down to the port to enjoy the freshness, and walked as far as the point at Katajanokka. There was a lot of coming and going in the harbour at Pohjoissatama. A train was worming its way along the shore, where a big old rusty merchantman was moored. Beside me, a group of sailors seated on the ballast were watching the ships as they passed in front of the wharf, and the plumes of smoke from vessels further out to sea. A gunboat was coming out of the port, probably on its way to the Isthmus; it was heading in our direction, cleaving the water powerfully as it went, sending up wings of foam. Black in the black water, all flags flying, it was a daunting sight; we could see the sailors running busily to and fro on the deck. Now it was passing right in front of us, an imposing hulk of riveted sheet metal, bristling with cannon, teeming with shouting sailors. Two whistles from its siren threw the whole bay into a state of alert. One of the sailors on the ballast pointed to it, saying:
‘That’s German goods! It arrived here from Danzig in 1943, Walhalla, it’s called. We repainted it ourselves in the shipyards at Suomenlinna!’
I too watched the ship as it sailed by, the blue cross snapping in the wind to the stern, smoke pouring from the smoke stack, adding further grey to the dull sky. Behind the city darker clouds were now rising, swollen with rain. The sailors who’d been sitting beside me on the ballast were now walking away, caps in their hands, down along the side of the hill. Even when they had disappeared from sight, I could still hear snatches of what they were saying, as though from another world. Now I was quite alone on Katajanokka Point, and fate was preparing its show for me alone.
I was gripped by a sudden, almost physical sense of unease; it was as though my mind had not yet received the message which my eyes had sent it. My face to the wind, I carried on looking at the ship, more because it happened to be before my eyes than out of any genuine curiosity. It was then, and only then, that I saw the large white rust-streaked letters on its towering hull: ‘Sampo Karjalainen’. I have no words to describe the sensation that came over me: rather than surprise, or disbelief, my predominant feeling was one of fear: at first it felt like a blow, a sudden lash to the defenceless brain, then, like a poison, it slowly seeped into every vein in my body. I let out a cry; but even a thousand cries would not have been enough. A cruel God has fashioned us in such a way that pain never bursts out all at one time, tearing us limb from limb; filters in mind and body intervene to slow the process down, to make us fully present at our suffering, so that we may sound out each portion of ourselves as it goes into agony, gasping and wheezing and powerless to die. That was what I experienced that morning on Katajanokka Point, nailed to the spot by that sight, my mind darkened by a maelstrom of thought. So that was it: that name, which I had always believed to be my own, written on the discoloured label of my seaman’s jacket, was nothing other than the name of a warship. Thinking back to what the sailor had said, I realised why no one had ever linked my name with that of the warship ‘Sampo Karjalainen’; it had not long been part of the Finnish navy. So no one had heard of it, and there was no knowing where it had previously been operating. So, did my jacket belong to one of the sailors on the warship? Indeed, was I one of them? And how had I landed up in Trieste? Or had I got hold of that jacket in some other way? So, who was I? What about the monogram on the handkerchief? What did those letters mean? They could not refer to the name of the ship. Whose initials were they? That volley of unanswerable questions toppled my certainties like bowling pins. The identity I had built up for myself with so much difficulty crumbled away in an instant, was blown sky-high by that explosion of white letters rising from the sea like a shout, an insult, a jeer. The warship ‘Sampo Karjalainen’ slipped slowly out towards the open sea, taking my name with it. Trieste, the Tübingen, Doctor Friari, Stettin, the Ostrobothnia, Ilma, Koskela, they were all whirling around in the kaleidoscope of my mind, turning every image into so many unfamiliar fragments. I was not Sampo Karjalainen, perhaps I was not even Finnish; now, I was no one at all.
Paradoxically, this discovery – which in fact was taking me nearer to the truth – had the effect of utterly weakening my resolve. I no longer had the strength to search, to try to stay afloat. I was seized by an irresistible urge to let myself founder, to disappear into the innermost recesses of my twisted mind. It no longer made sense to carry on seeking my real name, my real past. Eventually, I had indeed become Sampo Karjalainen, but not the one I dreamed of, with a house, a past, a family awaiting him. I was a non-existent man, invented by a label on a seaman’s jacket, a huge misunderstanding which had taken on life through a cruel coincidence of accidents of which I was unaware. No shadow of uncertainty any longer lay between me and a tragic fate which I could not avoid. Such knowledge as I had, believing that I could legitimately claim it as my own, might after all have nothing to do with my true story, with my true name. Just a short time ago, I had believed that my real past was at my fingertips as I walked the streets of Helsinki, had dreamed that I would sooner or later take complete possession of it; now it was disappearing before my very eyes, sucked away by that whirlpool of unquestionable truth. Because now I knew it: that was the truth.
Now I started running: away from t
he sea, into the densest tangle of streets, where I wandered like a madman. It seemed to me that the whole city was reading that name as it was paraded around the bay on the ship’s hull, that the journalists from the Kämp, the nurses in the hospital, even the sick and wounded, had gone down to the shore to take a good look at it, and that they were now marching threateningly towards me, demanding an explanation. Now the black crowd was driving me back into that same sea by which I had arrived that distant winter morning: they were fending me off, they were rejecting me. They were punishing me for having deceived them. I could not make out their faces, all I saw was the odd profile, part of a face, a snarling mouth, an outstretched leg, a raised arm. Some were shrieking, others were responding with a raised fist. A hand would seize me, trying to knock me to the ground, another would grab me by the collar, shouting: ‘Who are you?’ I wandered around the city, no longer recognizing it, no longer distinguishing what I was imagining from what I saw. I jumped with fright at every approaching passer-by, I peered about me, frightened that I was going to be attacked. I drifted around in a daze, taking streets I’d never seen before. The blood beat in my temples, my eyes throbbed, my hands trembled. Anguish was slowly taking over, paralysing my every action, choking down my every thought. It began to rain, a monotonous downpour, without thunder or lightning, which drowned out all other sounds. The city could breathe at last; I too heaved a sigh of relief. The clouds above me seethed and swelled, seemed to be ever growing. A quiet earthquake was shaking skies where, during those long days of heat, a bewitched city had grown up, an evil mirror of the real one, made up of fog and clouds. I walked the streets dreaming that the warship too was part of that diabolical double game, that the rain would carry it away as well, and that the white letters of its name would dissolve like a mirage over the distant sea.