The Rhythm of Memory

by Alyson Richman

  A few months after the letter went missing, Hugo Sorenson found himself agonizing over the welfare of his adopted daughter yet again. He had never known such fear, such deep despair, when the letter arrived from the government agency announcing that all of the Finnish children adopted during the war were being reclaimed. He feared he would lose her forever.

  “How can this be?” he asked Astrid, his face now white with grief. “She has been with us nearly five years. We are the only parents she knows.”

  “Let me see the letter, Hugo.” She took it from his hand and stared at it, revealing that she too was baffled.

  “We have raised her,” she said, sounding indignant, almost insulted by the letter. “Now they tell us we must return her? How can that be?” She shook her head before placing the letter down by the kerosene lamp. Hugo looked at his wife with surprise. After all, it was the first time he could remember that Astrid had come to the child’s defense. She had always been distant with Kaija, but now, he had to admit, she truly seemed concerned.

  “Perhaps we can fight it,” he offered weakly. “Perhaps they will make exceptions,” he stammered. “Kaija was only two when she arrived!”

  While the Swedish newspapers commended the families who had cared for the Finnish war children over the years, the consensus was that, now that the war was over, the children should be returned.

  The man Kaija called Papa packed her bags for her. He bought her a new suitcase, as the red one she had arrived with was far too small to pack all the things she now possessed. He folded her six cotton dresses, the velvet one she wore on the eve of Santa Lucía, the three wool sweaters, the eight pairs of small cotton socks, and the tiny black patent-leather shoes that were still shiny and new. He laid out a yellow-checked dress with a white collar for her journey home and fluffed the wool coat they had bought her the last winter, the pale blue one with gold buttons that offset her warm blond hair.

  He wondered what of his he could send along with her, that which in later years she could look back upon and remember them by. She was now old enough that she wore her mother’s crucifix, yet young enough that she still clutched her old tattered bear.

  “We should give her something by which we can be remembered,” he lamented to Astrid.

  “If she doesn’t remember us after all we’ve done, then good riddance,” Astrid said, but he saw that her eyes were filled with tears. He seldom understood his wife. Her words were so often cruel, but he had to believe that her heart held some form of compassion. After all, he had fallen in love with her. It was only after they had tried unsuccessfully to have children of their own that her moods had begun to blacken.

  He often wondered if it was insensitive of him to insist that they adopt a child. He had originally thought it would be good for them, and for her especially. But it seemed that, with Kaija, it had been more difficult for his wife when the child had first arrived.

  He thought things had been better for them over the past year. That she had warmed to the little girl, and that she was beginning to forget that the child was not truly her own. But then this had happened. The letter had arrived and they had no power to fight what was far larger than they were.

  “She was never really ours,” she said one night, but he heard the muffled tears in her voice.

  She refused to help him get the child ready for her journey home. She wouldn’t pack her clothes or organize her things, so he had been left to do it alone. He took a day off from the office and went into the little girl’s room, where she had slept for the past five years, where she had played with her friends, and where she had slipped from being a stranger to daughter in a matter of days. He had loved her from the moment he had seen her standing there at the arrival center, with her kneesocks and tiny red valise. “We have a daughter now,” he had whispered that evening to his wife, as the tiny, frail toddler slept quietly nearby, in her new, wooden bed.

  She had not answered him. But he could see her in the moonlight, stroking her flat stomach, crying to herself, apologizing aloud. “As for Kaija,” she said through her weeping, “she is not ‘ours,’ so how can we come to love her as our own?”

  More than five years had now passed and Hugo had long given up trying to understand his wife. In his mind, Kaija had become their daughter. He could not understand how his wife could turn her emotions off so easily, how she could allow him to prepare for the child’s departure alone.

  But he did it anyway. He packed her things and told her as best he could where she would be going. He was surprised that she seemed to have memories of Finland. “Papa, I remember it was cold there,” she said, and tried to smile, as she clutched her bear. “Not warm like it is here, with the smell of bread.”

  “You’ll see your other mama and papa,” he said, trying to fight back his tears.

  She looked at him with those bright green eyes and he felt his words choking in his throat.

  “You might have other brothers and sisters with whom you can play. You’ll have the lakes and the forest that you love.”

  “Will I have bread and honey?” she said softly.

  “Of course you will, älskling. Of course you will.”

  The night before she was to leave, he had yet to think of something he could send back with her. Something that, in the years that followed, she could hold and remember. Something like her crucifix that would travel with her and help her recall.

  He rose early that morning, before anyone else awakened, and went to the kitchen. He could not send anything made of glass or ceramic, because it could break. He sat down on the stool and held his temples. His head ached.

  On the table rested the honey jar and the little silver spoon that he had used to feed her with when she’d arrived. Astrid and he used it almost exclusively for honey now, but it was one of the first things Kaija had claimed as her own.

  He reached for it and held it in his palm. The curled handle was smooth except for the faint engraving of a cluster of rose tendrils. Had it been Astrid’s when she was small, or had it been his mother’s? He couldn’t remember.

  The delicate bowl of the spoon had a soft patina; the slight arch of the handle seemed to retain the little girl’s grip. He smiled as he remembered all of the times he had caught Kaija with it in her tiny pink mouth, the spoon mischievously protruding from her lips. He would send that, he thought to himself. He went to the cupboard and withdrew some scrap pieces of wrapping tissue and carefully rolled it between them.

  He went to Kaija’s room, where she still lay sleeping, her open mouth like a small lion’s, her unlatched suitcase carefully placed on the floor beside her wooden bed.

  He laid the spoon amid the piles of clothes, the wedding portrait, and the prayer book that he had packed the day before and stood there watching her. He prayed that his memory would last him and that he would be able to remember everything she had ever done, committing to his mind all he had ever shared with her. He was so afraid that there might be some small detail of this child he might forget.

  He knew he should try to mask the jealousy that was beginning to creep into him. After all, her parents had a right to reclaim the child they had brought into this world and only sent away so that she would be safe. But secretly he had to believe—because he had to harbor some hope—that she might someday return.

  Little Kaija’s return to Finland at the tender age of seven and a half was not the sort of reunion a child dreams about. No mother met her at the threshold with outstretched arms and tears that welcomed her and promised to never again let her go.

  She journeyed first by boat from Stockholm to Helsinki, then by train to Mikkeli, arriving at a station that was bleak and whose rooftop was covered with charcoal-laced snow. Outside, the chimneys of the factories were blowing soot into the low, dark clouds overhead. In her pale blue coat, Kaija was the only bit of color in the landscape of ashen gray. Like a Chinese ink painting, a splash of pigment against a black-and-white sky.

  The mayor of the town was there to greet he
r. She stepped onto the platform, to a group of unrecognizable faces, just a small gathering of people wrapped in woolen scarves and coats that were worn and thin.

  “Kaija?” a voice asked softly and with hesitation. “Is it you?” She could not understand him, her father, as he stepped past the mayor and knelt by the little girl. He only remembered her by her blond hair and green eyes and her now threadbare bear.

  She stood there and looked at him shyly. She did not remember him at all, and he didn’t look anything like the photograph she had treasured and looked at every night by her bedside. His red hair was now gray, his face gaunt. His flesh hung like melted icing from a whipped-cream cake, and his blue eyes were lifeless as old flannel.

  He motioned to two tall, gangly boys to come and greet her, and they too seemed foreign to her, their gaze distant and remote.

  “These are your brothers, Kaija,” he said to her, and although she could not understand Finnish, she understood who they were.

  “Mama?” she asked, looking fervidly into the crowds.

  But the man who was now once again her papa just shook his head, his eyes brimming with tears.

  She later learned, as they passed the old Karelian church with the frosty, spiraling cupolas, that her mother and third brother were buried there. Two snowcapped crosses that overlooked Lake Saimaa. Sirka’s only daughter’s return was, sadly, three years too late.

  Yet, her father tried his best to make his daughter comfortable. He gave her the bed that he and her mother had once slept in, their worn wedding blanket encasing the old, lumpy mattress with delicate blue flowers. The perfume of stale violets clinging faintly to its edges.

  Toivo and the two other boys slept in the kitchen where they had slept since infants. However, now as the brothers had grown bigger, their shoulders pressed into each other and they argued about having to share a bed with their father.

  The boys grumbled about the food too. The war had ended, but the shortage of food in the household had not. An extra mouth to feed did not go unnoticed, as the boys openly complained that they were still hungry after Toivo tried to evenly distribute the flat bread, the pieces of cheese, and the porridge gruel.

  They looked at their sister, how she arrived softly rounded with baby fat, her pretty starched dresses, and blue wool coat, and their resentment was as raw as their hunger. And, although Kaija could not understand the exact words that her brothers exchanged in sharp tongues with their father, she could sense their resentment. It was incapable of being disguised.

  So at night, she slept alone in the cold, large bed that had belonged to the mother she would never know. She longed for her old bed, the familiar embrace of her Swedish papa, and the delicious smell of baking bread and the full jar of honey. There was no place for the spoon her other papa had sent along with her. She would keep it wrapped in tissue paper, only withdrawing it at times to place in the stitched mouth of her bear, whose belly was as aching and empty as hers.

  Her first few weeks in Finland seemed like an eternity for her. Every night, Kaija went to bed crying, and her tattered bear, now a wilted lump of matted fur and floppy limbs, brought her little comfort.

  She dreamt of her adoptive father. His distinct smell of sandalwood and the faint perfume of his shaving foam. Every night since she was two years old, he had come into her room and kissed her on her forehead. She recalled, as her stomach now made loud noises from hunger, how he would bring her two sandwiches with honey and jam before bedtime. One for her, and one for her bear, and he would sit with her until she had devoured both of them and washed them down with a full glass of milk.

  This man who was her birth father, she felt no affection for him at all. While in Sweden, she had hardly contemplated his existence. He remained simply an expressionless man whose eyes stared blankly at her from the wedding portrait beside her bed. It was the image of her mother that had fascinated her. The regal woman with the gossamer veil and the laurel of flowers in her hair. She had spent her five years as an adopted child wondering what kind of woman her mother was, wishing that she possessed tangible memories of her. If she could have had her own way, she would have chosen her Finnish mother and her Swedish father as her parents. Intuitively, she felt if that union had existed, she would have received the most love.

  Now, in this cold house with barely enough food among them, Kaija understood little of what was happening around her. She could not understand what her birth father or her brothers said to her. Their Finnish tongues formed sounds that were foreign to her ears.

  Some days, while her brothers busied themselves with the wood chopping and clearing the snow off the roof, Kaija would make her way to the railroad ties that lay only a few hundred meters from their house. There, under the canopy of silver birches and fragrant pines, she would walk on the side of the tracks, hoping to follow them. Hoping, since she remembered arriving on these tracks only weeks before, that she would be able to retrace them back to where they had started. Back to her home in Sweden.

  The tracks were laid next to the river, a frozen, shimmering sheet of ice that, when melted, emptied into Lake Saimaa. Little Kaija in her pale blue coat stepped lightly beside the thick wooden planks, singing a Swedish psalm, her footprints embedded in the snow.

  Her brothers had found her one evening when she had traveled too far. They had come looking for her with gas lights, their faces lined in frowns. Her father following them only a few steps behind.

  “Where were you going?” they asked her in Finnish, and although she was not sure exactly what they were asking, she replied quietly in Swedish, “Jag vill åka hem.” “I want to go home.”

  They scooped her up like a ragamuffin doll. Her frozen limbs sticking out from her woolen sleeves like sapling twigs broken off from the stem.

  “She will be trouble,” one brother said to the other. “Wild and spoiled girl,” the eldest muttered to himself. Their father remained four steps behind. Silent, his back bent over his wooden crutches. His graying red beard covered in patches of frost.

  “She hasn’t just lost her mother, as you boys did,” Toivo reminded his sons, as they carried his little girl home, tears welling in her eyes.

  “She also lost us a long time ago.” He shook his head sadly. “She was trying to find her way home.”

  They returned her three months later to Sweden, thin and fragile like porcelain. Hugo picked her up at the boat, his heart beating anew since he’d received word of her return.

  Her father had been kind, and as difficult as it was for him to let her go again, he knew he couldn’t provide the best life for Kaija. When Hugo took the letter to be translated, he couldn’t believe that his prayers had been answered, that her father was asking if she might return to Sweden.

  He never judged the man, though his wife did. He knew how difficult it was to feed a family, and with Kaija’s mother gone, he could understand Toivo’s insecurity in raising the girl alone. Hugo was just so grateful that, with his consent and the necessary forms completed, she could be returned to him. That finally, she would be theirs alone.

  On his deathbed eighteen years later, he held her hand and confessed that which he had kept secret for so many years.

  “There was a letter that was sent over with you when you first arrived, Kaija, and I lost it.”

  “That’s all right, Papa,” she said with tears brimming in her eyes. “Nothing is important now but your getting your strength back.”

  “I am beyond that, my darling,” he said softly. “But please, listen. You must know what I am saying.” She was kneeling at his bedside, her tiny hands enveloped by his.

  “When you first came to your mother and me, you came with almost nothing.” He paused and tried to gather himself.

  “Yes, Papa, I know.”

  “No, no, you don’t. When you arrived, I was the one who unpacked your suitcase. In there, I found a wedding portrait of your birth parents, a crucifix, and a prayer book.”

  “But I still have all those things.” She
clutched her crucifix to show him that she had kept it all these years.

  “Kaija, dear, there was a letter written in the prayer book and I took it out for safekeeping because you were so young at the time. I placed it in my desk drawer and always promised I would give it to you when you grew old enough to understand.”

  “Do you know what it said, Papa?”

  “No, and that makes my guilt even more terrible. When you left to return to Finland after the war, I thought you would find your mother there waiting for you, and the letter wouldn’t be as important to you.…I had no idea she had already died.”

  Kaija remained silent.

  “When you were returned to Astrid and me, and you cried in my arms and told me how you would never return to Finland because your real mama was dead and your brothers didn’t want you, I so desperately wanted to give you the letter right then and there. I knew the letter was from your mother by the penmanship, the careful, delicate strokes of a woman’s hand. I knew it said how much she would always love you. Because I know how much I love you.”

  Kaija was crying now. Her face red and her lips trembling.

  “You never found it, Papa?”

  “No, and I am so very, very sorry.” She could feel his fingers tighten against hers and she held them close to her lips.

  “They loved you, sweet Kaija. How could they not have?” His eyes were now gray with death, his white hair swept behind him, his pillowcase imprinted with the tracings of his tiny head, a fleeting fossil in a weave of cloth.

  “I know it has been hard for you here sometimes. But Astrid loved you too. One day, you will give birth to a child of your own and you’ll have compassion for a woman who is unable to bear children.”

  Kaija nodded. She knelt down and pressed his brown-spotted fingers close to her cheek. “You have been the most loving father I could ever have hoped for. You cared for me, fed me…” Her voice was breaking and her face flooded with tears. “I have never doubted your love. The letter is unimportant.”