The War at the End of the World

by Jenn Burke

  The Finns have stacked their skis against the farmhouse wall. Joseph holds onto one for balance as he tests the ice-slick paving stones with his cane. He finds purchase, and then stares out toward the barn, where a little light flashes through the cracks of a shuttered window.

  "Lange," he whispers, shuts his mouth against the cold, and sets off.

  Joseph uses the path that Lange has already trod. The crunch and slide of snow is barely audible, because a wind has picked up. White clumps fall with a puff from heavy-laden firs, drumming the earth softly, with no rhythm. Joseph's smile is both grim and joyful.

  There's a sense of rightfulness that mounts in me as he approaches the barn. I've helped give Joseph what he wants. To be a witness. To act.

  His hair, dark in this light, has become spangled with snowflakes. When he dies, the world's beauty will be so greatly diminished. I don't want to outlast him. It's a mercy that I won't, and for the first time I'm thankful for our tied fates.

  The prisoners in their chains are shuffling into the woods. Lange waves them on with his Luger.

  "This is not the way to the road," says Joseph, in Russian.

  There is no attempt at lying or concealment. Lange turns, aims, fires. Joseph dives into the snow, following the direction of his weaker right leg. No. Not yet. I would feel it.

  He'll shoot right through me. Oh God, my frozen desperation will not shield Joseph.

  A prisoner hurls himself at Lange, clubbing at him with stiff hands, and I dare to imagine that Joseph will live.

  Lange shoots the Russian in the face. The gunshot seems to fracture the world, but there's no time to worry about Death's arrival.

  Joseph rises from the snow and swings his cane in a whip-fast arc. He hits Lange's pistol hand. The gun falls and is swallowed by the snow.

  I think Lange knows he's dead now, and I'm sorry that it came to this, even for such a man.

  The Russians drag Lange down. One of them scrabbles in the snow for the pistol, wraps it in a sleeve to keep the metal from biting his flesh, puts it to Lange's forehead, and pulls the trigger.

  The forest is silent and still once more.

  "They told me you were dead," says Joseph, leaning on his cane and breathing hard. He does not look at Lange's body, or the dark red blood and foamy pink brain matter that covers the snow as if it had been sprayed from an aerosol can. Strangely enough, a smile seems to tug at one side of Joseph's mouth. I realize he hadn't planned on living through this, either. Or maybe it's just the adrenaline. Or hysteria brought on by the shock. I don't know him at all. Not anymore. "They won't bother taking you to a camp, they'll just kill you. You need to run."

  "Who are you?" one of the prisoners asks, in between gasping out huge mouthfuls of condensation.

  Yes, who?

  Joseph's reply is terse and formal. He straightens his posture. "An American."

  "You'll come with us." The man raises the Luger to point at Joseph's heart.

  But I am not looking at the gun, or at Joseph. I am looking at Lange, sprawled out on his back in the snow. At the horrible green light that fills his eyes and mouth.

  "The situation—your relationship—is untenable." The message is crisp and technical, perhaps the result of filtration through Lange's dead mind. The act of dying has become mechanical, industrial, it follows that Death herself would be corrupted, too.

  I don't care, I want to shout. He's alive. Look at the lives he's saved. He changed the world. Isn't that worth it?

  The Luger drops again. A burst of red appears on the Russian's forehead and he collapses backwards, his body breaking the snow's crust, falling through until his dead face is level with it. In the emptiness after the rifle crack, there is the sound of wind—no, louder than the wind...

  The Finns are coming, skiing towards us, skimming like ghosts over the snow and through the trees. There will be no escape for anyone.

  Of the three remaining prisoners, two fall to their knees; one sways and mutters and closes his eyes. Will the Finns be able to tell that Joseph is not one of them? Will they care to, after what he's done?

  Lie down, I beg him. Live. Please live.

  "Järvilehto!" shouts Joseph. "Lopettaa! Stop. Stop. These men are prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention states that—No!" He lunges forward, stands in front of the kneeling men, and spreads his arms. Staggers in the snow. "No!"

  Järvilehto tugs his scarf down to free at his mouth as he prods at one of the corpses with a ski pole. "That's Lange," he says. "Well, well." The statements are both so bland, there's no way of reading his intent. He turns to Joseph and extends a hand. "We'll have them taken to a prisoner of war camp. We treat them well. You can report on the process. But of course, given this incident... I would advise you to leave this country shortly after the report. Our co-belligerents will want to perform their own investigation."

  His voice is so light for handing down such an order, as if he isn't making a threat at all. It's disconcertingly anti-climactic.

  "I understand," says Joseph. He seems taller now, more solid. His eyes are twisted, but it's just a few frozen tears he can't quite manage to blink away.

  The Finns escort them all back to the farmhouse. Three bodies remain to be buried by the snow. This is no climate for grave digging.

  One of the Russians whispers to Joseph along the way. "Thank you, comrade." I wonder, now that he has been spared, is there another like me, walking this earth, tethered to a life that should not be? Instabilities, multiplying and contagious. Untenable.

  Joseph and I leave Death behind.

  Joseph's hands still shake. It has been three days. Three days without gunshots, without blood, without even the lingering cold of death or winter. Three days ensconced in the safety of the fortifying heat of his flat's kitchen stove and endless cups of coffee.

  I don't think he quite believes he's won his life, his freedom.

  With no more news to write now that the POW story has gone out, he's taken to writing letters home instead. Many, many letters, more than he's written in the last two years put together. They're rambling, filled with bits and pieces of political philosophy and poetry and memoirs and rants and regrets.

  He hasn't mailed them. He's going to walk them home.

  He folds the last one into his notebook, tucks the notebook into a leather satchel, and puts the satchel inside his suitcase. I imagine his mother in Brooklyn unpacking them for him, setting his clothes into empty childhood drawers. His room, which she kept for him, waiting for him to come home. And now he will.

  Away from all this. Safe. As of last week and the news of Pearl Harbor, America is no longer the remote sanctuary it once was; it has been permanently altered, the world fracturing once again. But it's better than here. Joseph, with his cane, will not return to Europe, nor will he be sent across the Pacific, and that will have to be comfort enough. He can fulfill the duty he yearns towards in other ways—with writing, with translation, with all of the skills of his mind and the compassion of his heart.

  "Let me help you with that," says Markku, approaching from behind. He reaches around Joseph's body, brushing fingers over Joseph's on his way to fastening the suitcase's clasp. Joseph's hand darts back, curling protectively against his chest. Markku smiles. "I wish you weren't leaving, Joe. Don't you think you should at least wait until Spring? Cold as a nun's tits out today. Well, there's no helping it I guess. You want me to walk you to the port? I could carry your case." He gestures to Joseph's cane, as if to remind him of his disability. "Least I can do."

  Strange, how regret can turn goodbyes into reconciliations.

  "Sure. That's swell. Do you want me to carry anything back for your folks?"

  "They're all the way in Minnesota. Don't bother." Markku lifts the suitcase and leads the way out of their apartment. The mention of home seems to have disturbed him, knocked him back into taciturn glowering.

  Joseph shrugs and follows.

  The streets of Helsinki are swept nearly free of snow. The early af
ternoon twilight is descending, but there's a clear view to the Baltic Sea. It's brilliantly white, frozen solid, snowed over. The ferries to Stockholm are all harbored for the winter, but Joseph will be joining a truck convoy from a port depot.

  Markku increases his pace until Joseph has to skip ungracefully to make up some of the distance.

  "Wait!" calls Joseph, careful not to reveal his gasps of exertion. "That's not the way."

  Marrku sets down the suitcase and turns. He's in a narrow gap between two bombed-out buildings. Wreckage has been piled high on either side of the street. I feel like we're back in the forest, crowded in by the somber firs. The sound of soft drumming. The hellish sights of the Winter War, bodies stacked like cordwood, faces frozen into inhuman leers, arms randomly spiking upward to the sky.

  Turn back. Please, don't follow.

  Joseph doesn't hear me anymore. A rage fills me. My life is his, my soul, my face. I want nothing for myself, everything for him. And still he closes himself against me.

  Let me in. Listen to me. Turn back.

  Markku has one hand in his coat pocket and a rage to match my own burning in his eyes. "Why did you do it. Why did you have to do it." He seems almost on the verge of tears.

  "What do you mean, Markku? You're not making sense. Have you had—"

  "You make me weak. You've always made me weak. And now I understand why."

  Joseph tightens his grip on his cane and eyes his suitcase, sitting at Markku's feet. He doesn't understand. But oh God, I think I'm beginning to.

  "We're both a long way from home," Joseph says in what's meant to be a comforting, conciliatory voice, and smiles with no teeth, in the way that people sometimes smile at snarling dogs. He keeps looking at his suitcase.

  Leave it. Just run.

  "You. Your whole people. The Nazis figured it out. You're a fucking contagion. Corrupting everything that's healthy, turning it sick and twisted and—"

  "That's not true, Markku. You know it isn't. We're friends, Markku. Remember th—"

  "Go to hell."

  He pulls out a pistol and sends us there.

  June 1965

  What is it with the awful Swedish food in the cafeteria today? These meatballs taste like wood pulp. I finish my plate anyway, because I've been on my feet for about six hours straight, at this point, and I need the protein buried somewhere in these sorry grey lumps.

  The coffee's good here, though, and the view can't be beat. Looking out the big seaward window, the Baltic's right there, summer blue and dotted with jaunty ships. I sip my coffee and come alive again, watching with veiled interest as a couple of new resident doctors file up to the cafeteria counter, talking to each other in voices too low to eavesdrop on. The third in line catches my eye—or rather, his short-cropped ginger hair does—but I quickly look away. He's too pinky-pale, his hair too coppery, his skin too dappled by freckles.

  I've been dreaming of a red-haired man since I was a little boy. Well, that's kind of an incorrect statement. He's not always a man. Sometimes he's a sickly little boy and sometimes he's a teenager. Sometimes I think he's me.

  But maybe not, because sometimes he's a man, and those are the times I wake up fevered or twisted in my sheets or in a cold sweat or crying or so rock fucking hard I have to grind against the mattress for relief.

  Sometimes he's dying. In a hospital or after a horrible motorcycle accident, or in some frozen winter woods or in a dirty post-apocalyptic alley surrounded by rubble. Those are the cold dreams, the dreams where I wake weeping and I don't know why.

  My younger sister, who's done a couple semesters in America and brought back a taste for Hare Krishna and power crystals and the Kalevala set to electric guitar (and maybe a few psychedelic drugs if my mother's to be believed) says it must be my past life. The dreams do seem old fashioned, like watching an old movie where people say things like "dame" or "flatfoot" or "whistling dixie", but to be honest the first thing that comes to my mind isn't past life, it's purpose. And I'm not sure I care to know what that purpose is. I'm happy—for a Scandinavian, I'm positively ecstatic—without one.

  I can't help being curious, though. Maybe she has me believing a little bit of her mixed-up nonsense.

  So I'm on break at the hospital cafeteria, and instead of leafing through the smiling faces in Suomen Kuvalehti, I'm carefully cracking the pages of an English treatise on the transmigration of souls in Jewish theology. I'm good at the language—I've always had a gift for languages—but it's still pretty damn arcane.

  I don't get very far before my break is over.

  I put my book away, down the last of my coffee, wash my hands, and start my round. The summer sunlight helps me stay alert. This hospital is modern, with a few full walls of windows, exploding with natural light, a far cry from the old stone dungeon in Turku where I did my nursing practicum.

  Walking the halls, I'm relieved I'm on day shift. Nights here can be downright spooky sometimes, especially if you're the type to believe in ghosts, which—I hate to admit—I am. Even in the middle of the day I get this kind of creepy sense that there's somebody watching me, following me, not to hurt me I don't think, but still.

  The other day I was doing a night shift, seven-to-seven, and I swear to God I saw this old-fashioned nurse, like the ones in the class of ‘41-'42 group portraits that hang in the hallways of my old dormitory, skulking around down in ICU. She looked right at me, beckoned as if she wanted me to fetch her something—pillows, an IV bag, who knows—and then she sighed, and shook her head and threw up her hands and... disappeared.

  Of course I asked, and of course nobody had any idea what I was talking about. They thought I'd just seen a patient or another nurse and been too tired and well, you know the drill. Except none of that explains why her eyes were glowing freaky green.

  The war still haunts us all. In my case, it's just a little more literal, I guess.

  I'm following the ghost nurse's path, silently cursing my compulsion, when a doctor catches me by the elbow. "The American patient's awake," the doctor tells me, not even glancing up from his chart to look me in the eye. I might as well be a robot or a janitor, for all the recognition I get. "Go check in on him."

  Well, fuck him anyway. Nursing's an honest job, and a good job, and I'd rather be a nurse who knows every patient's name and story than a high and mighty doctor who's only in it for the Mercedes-Benz.

  Which makes it kind of strange that I don't know this American.

  I walk into the ward with a grin, excited to practice my English. "Welcome to Helsinki, Mr..." I take a glance at the bracelet around his tanned wrist, but he answers me before I get a chance to read it.

  "Green," he finishes. "Joe Green."

  He's tanned, gorgeous. A Hollywood movie star in Technicolor. I run a hand through my own pale blond hair, hoping his reaction will key me in on whether it's worth it to flirt.

  "Vodka martini? Shaken, not stirred?" I ask him, and he laughs. Yeah, maybe it is.

  "Just pour it in the IV." He has the kind of smile that I don't associate with Americans, not all brash and fluoride-gleaming, more calm and speaking of a quiet confidence. I'm reading a lot into his smile, I realize. Like I already know him and understand the subtleties of his expressions. "How about you?"

  His question kind of takes me aback, and I don't know why. For a second, I forget my own name. Jeeze, I'm falling hard.

  "Umm, Tenho. I mean, that's my name." I remember my duties, finally. "How's your leg? Are you experiencing any pain?"

  "Nah," Joe replies. "They got me on the good stuff, I think."

  I nod stupidly, not sure what to say next. What to say... what to say... "What brings you to Finland?" I blurt out.

  Instead of being snide about my awkwardness, he smiles again, this time shy, unable to quite meet my eyes. He fists the light blue blanket draped over his good leg and then higher over the bulky shape of his cast. "Promise not to laugh."

  "I'm a male nurse. I promise." I put my hand over my heart for emphas
is.

  "You read any Jack Kerouac?" I shake my head. "Not to sound like a big head, but it's kinda like that. I'm a writer. I did journalism in college, I've written some stuff for the Berkeley Barb, but I feel like... I want..."

  I realize I have moved closer to his bedside, lingering, anxious to sit and hold his hand or comb my fingers through his hair. It feels like pillow talk, somehow. Intimate and sweet. I wait for him to finish his sentence.

  "Well, I guess I just want to write something real."

  Real. Yeah, I know that feeling, like your whole life is a dream, like you're waiting for something to happen, something that's gonna change everything, make you a new kind of man.

  Except now I know what it feels like on the other side.

  The other side? I catch myself. Don't get ahead of yourself, Tenho. Don't scare him off.

  "And I think I'm almost there," Joe says. "I was putting it down. And then I got in that stupid motorcycle wreck. I can't believe I—you people have been fantastic, though. You've got this great spirit. Sisu, you call it, right? I should have the words for what I feel here, in this land, but I don't, not yet. They slip away." He pauses and takes a deep breath, winces. I wonder if he's telling the truth about the pain. "But then, sometimes I think the search for wholeness is overrated. I can't know everything, comprehend everything, articulate everything. Incomplete things, they're beautiful too, you know? I have to work with my limitations."

  I know what Joe means, perhaps before even he does. I rest my hand on his. "Hey, you'll walk again. Just give it some time. We've got an excellent physical therapy program."

  The sun slips over the curtain just then and touches his hair. There's a subtle flame dancing in the light between the strands. It's dizzying. This man makes me feel like shouting poetry. I resist the urge, but I don't deny it.

  "It looks like I'll be here a while, yeah. Are you a regular here? You'll come and visit me? I can't offer to help practice English, because yours is already perfect." He catches my eye and smiles. That smile again, talk about perfect.