How, he wondered, could he convey to his family that he didn’t want to spend his last months being coddled and told to “take it easy”? How could he make it clear that he didn’t want to undergo the painful, extensive treatments that were incapable of curing him, that would only lengthen his soon-to-be-pathetic existence by at most a few weeks?
For another three days, he said nothing of his diagnosis. He sat at the table rearranging the food on his plate to make it appear as though he had eaten. He went to his study and spent a few hours reading over his monthly journals to the sound of classical music to maintain the appearance of regularity. He checked the locks and the window latches, to make sure they were tightly secured as usual. Finally, after taking the morphine tablets that the doctor had prescribed only days before, he lay down and embraced his beloved wife.
She slept gently in his arms. Her blond hair was beginning to show the first traces of gray at the crown. Only a month before, she had commented on the thin lines around her eyes and the featherlight creases by the corners of her smile. He had told her not to worry. What he wanted to say now, what he should have said then, was that she had never been more beautiful. That he wished he could see how she would be in thirty years’ time, when her hair was all white, her skin like rice paper. He would still love her.
There is something about the noble sick. They never want to disturb anyone. But after about a week had passed, Samuel realized he would not be able to keep his illness a secret any longer and that it wouldn’t be a quiet ending for him.
Already, his jaundice had intensified, and Kaija still prodded him to go to the doctor. She feared he had hepatitis or a malfunctioning of the liver. He began wearing pajamas to mask his protruding ribs and a stomach that seemed to cave in like a balloon that had lost all its air.
He had no choice but to tell them. So he canceled his appointments for the afternoon and spent the day sitting in his office trying to think of the best way to break the news.
That evening, he arrived home early. His black hair was wet with perspiration around his temples, and his eyelids seemed tired and weighed heavily over his warm, brown eyes.
“Come in from the cold, darling!” Kaija beckoned. “You know you haven’t been well lately. What are you doing walking home instead of taking the bus!”
She took off his coat and hung it on the hook by the door. “Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. Why don’t you go upstairs and help Sabine with her Spanish homework? She’s been bothering me all day to quiz her on the verbs.”
“All right, but later, I need to talk to you both,” he said.
“How about after dinner, sweetheart?” she called. She was already back in the kitchen with her head buried in the stove.
“Okay,” he sighed. He felt as though he were in a trance. All his movements seemed to be in slow motion. He picked up his satchel and slowly made his way upstairs.
“Daddy? Is that you?” Sabine called. “Can you help me with these verbs before dinner? Mommy said you would do a better job.”
Samuel had barely made his way up the stairs before he saw the bright-eyed face of his thirteen-year-old daughter peeking through the crack of her bedroom door.
“Of course, älskling. Let me just unpack my things.”
He walked down the hallway to his study and turned on the light. His office was his retreat. There he could play his music, savor a cup of tea, and write in his journals without being disturbed. The crimson walls were studded with his diplomas, his certificate of residency, and a few of his treasured maps.
It smelled of books. He had always loved that aroma, for it had the capacity to calm him. Until now, when everything that had previously given him so much pleasure suddenly seemed rather pointless. He only wanted to be with his wife and child.
He went to his daughter’s room and, for the first time, saw many things that had previously escaped his notice. He looked out from her bed and saw her small, childlike collections of painted ceramics, her dolls, and the sticker albums and souvenirs that lined her shelves.
As he helped with her Spanish homework, he yearned to savor these priceless, few remaining moments between them. He would suggest a verb and she would conjugate it. He knew his daughter had spent all day trying to memorize the different tenses, but it was difficult for him to remain focused. He had to concentrate to avoid breaking down and crying.
The same feelings of wanting to grow old with his wife were matched by his desire to see his daughter grow up to be a woman, married with her own children. He would be denied sharing those things, never witnessing these milestones in his family’s lives. That alone made him crumple like wet tissue when he was again by himself in his office.
His stomach was on fire and needles were floating in his lower intestines. He aimlessly cut at his food. His throat tensed. He didn’t know how he would be able to get out the words that needed to be said.
“I have cancer.” His eyes remained focused on his plate.
The words fell out.
“What?” Kaija’s fork dropped from her hand. The sound of chipped porcelain rang in the air.
“I met with the doctor as I promised, and…it’s not an ulcer.”
Both Kaija and Sabine were staring at him. He felt the weight of their eyes. When he raised his head, he saw that both their faces were white as eggshells.
“Daddy!” Sabine cried. “What are you saying? Are you going to be all right?”
“Yes, Samuel…what are you saying?” Kaija’s voice cracked before she could utter anything more.
“It seems I have cancer of the pancreas.”
The room fell silent.
“I didn’t want to have to tell you this way…” His voice was weak, his head felt dizzy.
“Cancer of the pancreas?” Kaija whispered. Again, her words seemed to choke in her throat. She covered her mouth with her fingers. “Oh my God, Samuel. Oh my God.”
Later that evening, as she lay sobbing in his arms, Samuel tried to explain to Kaija the desperateness of his illness and the futility of any treatment.
“No, no,” she insisted. “We must have hope. There are treatments, I’m sure of it! You—we—must fight this!”
“No, Kaija,” he told her firmly. “There is nothing. The treatments available will only be painful. They’ll only weaken me. I want…” He hesitated. “I need to live the next months as close to the way I have lived my whole life.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand, Samuel! I don’t. Wouldn’t you rather live a few more weeks and spend that time with Sabine and me? Wouldn’t you choose life at any cost?”
“No, I wouldn’t. I honestly wouldn’t.”
“I don’t understand you! After all we’ve been through, how can you give up without a fight?” she cried as she pushed her face into her pillow and ran her small fingers deep into the mattress. “You’re being selfish, Samuel. You’re not thinking about how your wife and child might feel about this!”
“Kaija,” he said softly, retrieving her from the cocoon of twisted sheets and mounds of pillows. “I need to live, truly live, not just delay my death. I want to remember everything, not just spend my last days in a morphine haze. I need…to know the difference between your face and a cloud of steam.” She could feel his tears beginning as he pressed himself against the veil of her nightgown, and she thought that night they would both drown in the sadness that flooded the room.
Sixty-two
VESTERÅS, SWEDEN
MAY 1985
Samuel pressed Kaija to go with him to Mikkeli, the town in Finland that bordered the forest where she was born. For years, he had wanted them to return to his wife’s birthplace. “We’ll visit the grave of your mother,” he told her as he lay wrapped in her arms. “Before I go, I want to see the pale blue and saffron-yellow buildings of Helsinki. I want to walk in the Karelian forest and bathe in the cold, deep lakes.”
In the past, Kaija had always resisted. Her mother was dead and her father and brothers were but str
angers to her. After her Swedish father had retrieved her, she had sworn that she would never return to the country she believed had abandoned her.
But with only a few months left to his life, Samuel found himself growing more persistent. “We’ll take Sabine. She’s a teenager now and should see it,” he told Kaija. Only three years before, they had gone as a family to Paris, where his family had come from, and now he was insistent that they do the same with Kaija’s homeland. “Children should know where their roots are,” he told his wife. “And for you,” he told her firmly, “it’s important that you return.”
“None of this should be about me, Samuel,” she said.
He smiled at her, his lips cracked like old parchment. “It’s not, Kaija. This is about us.”
She cried in his slender arms. He smelled strange to her now. He had only recently begun using cologne. It was his futile attempt to mask the feral smell of the illness leaking from his pores.
Kaija noticed his eyes were now rimmed in pink, like a newborn baby’s, and remembered how Sabine had looked when she’d first held her in her arms. Her small head covered in soft, downy fuzz, her lids swollen and finely veined. How odd, Kaija thought, that sickness could reduce a grown man to the image of a child. When she looked at her husband now, swaddled in layers of cotton, with his shrunken, yellow head and swollen eyes, she felt, in a way, that she was seeing him as her baby.
In other moments, he reminded his wife that he was still very much a man. He did not want to be coddled. He did not want to be pitied. “There are things that I want to do,” he had insisted. “I want to eat oysters from Brittany. The big blue-gray ones that I ate as a little boy in Paris. I want to taste the salt water as I suck them from the shell.”
“We can do that, darling,” Kaija promised through her tears.
“And I want to go to Finland with you,” he said again. “I want to dance in the midsummer sun when it’s midnight and the sky is white with light.”
“Of course.” She squeezed his fingers tightly.
“And I want to go to your childhood home and see where you were born. I want to go to the church where your mother is buried. Most of all, I want you to make peace with her memory. It’s important, Kaija.”
She looked at him in bewilderment. “Samuel, I made my peace a long time ago when you and I started our own family.”
“That’s not making peace, Kaija. That’s starting over.”
“You and Sabine are my family. Anybody still there is a stranger to me.”
“We will go together. The three of us. I know that if I don’t insist now, you’ll never go.”
“I will, Samuel. I promise you.” Her green eyes were now clouded with tears.
“No, I want to be there. I want to be the one who supports you as you finally visit your parents’ graves.” He paused. “Also, I don’t want you to go to a cemetery and think of me. Not yet.”
“Oh, Samuel,” she cried as she slid lower in his arms. “Why is this happening to us? Why? Why? Why is God doing this to us?”
He smoothed her blond hair with his palm. She had always seemed so fragile to him. Even with his sickness, he imagined himself far stronger than she.
“We will always be there for each other, my love. I promise.” He paused. “For now, we should just concentrate on living the months ahead.”
In June, they traveled by train to Stockholm, then ferried by boat to Finland. Samuel was frail from his loss of appetite. His spartan limbs were wrapped in two layers of sweaters, despite the summer heat. A loden-green muffler enshrouded his head.
“I don’t even remember the way to my home,” she told him.
“Don’t worry, Kaija,” he told her, as his thin fingers stretched out and found their way into hers. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”
The three of them spent two days sightseeing in Helsinki before boarding a train to Karelia. “I wonder if the station in Mikkeli will be as I remember it,” Kaija mused aloud. “Pale green with white trim, the old iron clock by the ticket window. I can see it so vividly…”
Stepping off the platform, Kaija felt as though she were again that young Finnish war child. She remembered the pale blue coat she had worn when she was greeted by a woman from the Red Cross and ushered to her family.
The skeletons of the city’s wartime past remained. The proud statue of General Mannerheim. The memorial to the lost soldiers. The freight trains that had ferried ammunition to the front to fight the Russians, were those originals or replicas? Kaija wondered of the brown trains that still crowded the rail yard.
“My family lived farther out,” she recalled as she turned to Sabine and smiled at Samuel.
“Should we ask at the town hall for an exact address, or a map, maybe?” Sabine asked her mother.
“There wouldn’t be a street address.” Kaija laughed. “We lived in the forest, sweetheart. I don’t remember exactly where. But, if we follow the tracks, I know it will lead us there, eventually.”
“Daddy will be too weak,” Sabine whispered to her mother as Samuel looked on.
“Yes, I know.”
“We could rent bicycles, though, and follow them that way. Perhaps the store has two-seaters, and Daddy could sit while I pedal.”
Sabine went into the station and inquired where they might find some bikes.
The two women pedaled alongside the tracks, Samuel seated behind his daughter, who was carrying him as if he were a bushel of bruised fruit. His feet rested on his pedals as they rode past Lake Saimaa, the river, and into the leaf-studded forest. Nearly two hours later, Kaija took her feet off the pedals and stared, almost transfixed, at an expanse of trees. “It was in there! That’s it! I remember it! Our house was over there!”
They parked their bicycles and walked over the soft earth, the summer bees flying in the bushes of wild lavender and lupine.
Kaija could see the house in the distance. A long, symmetrical cabin with timber walls and a mud roof covered with straw. There was nothing distinctive about the outside facade save for three long windows with pale beige frames accented with tiny crosses.
She stood there, separated from it by several meters, for what seemed like hours. Throughout the entire journey from Vesterås, Kaija had convinced herself that she would not remember a thing, that she had been too small when she’d left.
But the memories of that seven-year-old girl returning for the first time from a life of privilege in Sweden came flooding back to her. And, to her surprise, this mature woman of forty-five was now thinking the same thing she had as a small girl stepping out from her father’s wagon. That this was a place of deep, heart-wrenching poverty, where the forest merged with the end of the world. Where the tall leafy junipers and pine, and the slender white birches, sheltered a strong, proud people who had little but one another, the lakes, and the snow.
Both Kaija’s frail husband and her daughter were beside her now. And like reverent pilgrims, they followed Kaija as she made her way to the dilapidated house.
The summer sun struck the modest shelter with warm, canary light that illuminated the overgrown wild poppies, tarflower, and pink clover in a halo of gold.
“Can you smell the flowers, Kaija?” Samuel asked, his voice pained, as he fumbled through his breast pocket to find his flask of liquid morphine. “They smell so wonderful.”
Kaija turned back to face Samuel and saw his jaundiced, jawlined face tightening in a smile. She went over to him and slid her arm into his, noticing how much more slender his limb was than hers.
She patted his brown-spotted hand with her own and agreed with him. “Yes, Samuel, they smell sublime.”
Inside, the house was far from idyllic. Years of neglect had left it with holes between the rafters and rain-soaked floorboards. One could still see the traces of its former occupants’ lives in the ruin of abandonment. One or two chipped ceramic bowls, a birchwood basket, a few spatulas, and scattered empty tins lined the rough cabinetry.
The windowpanes were broke
n. The lace curtains—probably forty years old—were now tattered shreds, fragile strips covered in ash.
“They must have abandoned it years ago,” Kaija said. She didn’t want to think that her father must be dead and buried alongside the grave of her mother. As for her brothers, she knew Viktor had died, but she hadn’t heard from Olavi or Arvo once she’d returned to Sweden for good.
“My brothers and father slept in this room, near the fireplace,” she said as a few rusty nails and broken twigs crushed underneath her feet. She pointed to the large wooden bed and the image of the boys sleeping together, with each of their backs curling into the other’s, came flooding back to her. “I slept in the room behind, alone.”
Kaija walked slowly through the space, and more memories returned to her.
“I suppose that it was kind of them to let me have my own room. I never appreciated it then. I only felt lonely.”
“But it was so hard for you, Mother.”
“And it was hard for them. Here, I was this little chubby girl returning from a life that had known no hardship during the war.” Kaija paused. “My poor brothers. No wonder they were so cruel to me.”
Samuel placed his hand on one of the doorposts to steady himself and readjusted his scarf. In the midsummer sunlight that streamed through the broken glass, he looked like an ascetic who had just walked in from a long pilgrimage.
“I see where your love of the forest and lakes comes from,” he said to Kaija before turning to gaze at the view outside the window. Hundreds of square meters of blooming flowers and tall, lush trees surrounded the tiny house. He wondered what it might look like in the snow.
The Rhythm of Memory Page 30