With about three days remaining in our journey, we were lying in our reindeer-hide bags, exhausted, listening to the wind buffet the tent in noncommittal fits and spurts. Eberhard’s foot twitched at the canvas as he dreamt, and his eyes wriggled against their lids.
Tapio, who did not generally do so, heaved a great sigh. This roused me from my drifting. It seemed like an opening.
“Are you well, my friend?” I asked.
He was silent for a minute, and I thought perhaps he had declined to answer, as he often did. Then he sighed again. “Sven. You oblige me with your concern. I am well enough, thank you. But all is not well at home.”
“Oh?”
“In truth, things could not possibly be worse.”
“Will you not speak of it?” I said. “Will you not unburden yourself?”
“I may try,” he replied. “I have tried countless times since we started for Camp Morton, and the words don’t seem to form as they should.”
“Did you tell Charles, at least?”
“I did not. His sympathy—his grave understanding—would have been too much. It would have undone me entirely, and we needed to leave Longyear.”
I sat waiting, wide awake now, determined not to press him.
“The situation is complicated, as I have told you,” he said at last. “The nuances will undoubtedly escape you and I don’t have the heart to explain them in detail. Nor do I even have all the facts, filtered as they are through a few garbled radio reports and a handful of blotted letters.”
I nodded for him to continue.
“The Finland that I knew is no more. The home that I loved is gone. A civil war is tearing my country in two. Still it rages, and yet what more can be done to scrape out this hole that I now carry?” The letters had come from his mother, he explained. One of his sisters was dead—whether from a bullet wound or a mortar, he didn’t know. His father had succumbed to typhus in Tammisaari, the prison camp from which his mother had written, and his younger sister wasn’t doing well either. Everyone was desperately hungry. “My dear mother, always the strongest, says the people are beginning to die in waves, like a crop of wheat, and to be lumped outside the camp in great piles. She keeps alive, she writes, knowing that I am safe in Spitsbergen. Can you fathom it? ‘Safe in Spitsbergen’!”
I stared at him in horror. I reached out my hand and withdrew it. His eyes were dry, but his voice was bleak and cracked. He kept his palms pressed against his temples as though trying to contain an explosion.
“So much hope,” he said after a while. “We had independence, Sven! Freedom from Mother Russia at last! And to go from such hope to such ruin and despair. Everything lost. Everything.”
He provided me then with the outline of Finland’s woes. In the immediate aftermath of Finland’s independence in December, a terrible struggle between the socialists and the conservatives had sundered the country. On one side was the White Army: largely northern, Swedish-speaking landowners and elites, with some of the peasantry as well, many of them conscripts. Opposing them were the Red Guards: Finnish-speaking workers and poor crofters from the country’s industrialized southern end. The Whites were given a great military advantage by the German Imperial Army—tanks, troops, and training. The feared Jäger battalions represented the White Army’s vanguard. The Reds were supported, in a limited fashion, by Russia, of course.
The Red front was a true egalitarian entity, Tapio insisted, and not Bolsheviks. They were democratic socialists, valuing freedom of speech, assembly, and press. Most of their fighters, as opposed to the Whites, were volunteers. Several thousand of them, in fact, were women, like his brave sister. It was early May now, and the war was going badly. It might even have been over for all Tapio knew. His sister Pinja had fallen sometime around Easter, in the Battle of Tampere. The rest of his family had been in Helsinki, where Tapio grew up, when that great city fell on April 13. Helsinki, a place Tapio loved and loathed in equal measure—the city against which he had defined himself—was now occupied by Germans.
That was the extent of his account. If he knew more, he did not say. I struggled to think of something, anything, I could do to show him that I felt his bereavement keenly, and that I cared for him, and that his trust in me was not misplaced. I wanted him to know that, in all the cruel wastes of Spitsbergen, I could not wish for another teacher, another traveling companion. That he was the most capable man I had ever known or was likely to meet. But these were still the early days of our friendship, with conversation rarely extending beyond the necessary, and Tapio was not known for his warmth. So I said nothing. I just looked at him, and that seemed to be enough. Eventually, heaving a few more mournful sighs, he lay back and turned his head to the canvas.
That night I was awakened from a fitful sleep by Eberhard, who was sitting up, alert, and emitting a very faint whine that seemed to come from his nose. The noise carried on and on, stopping only for him to expand his lungs and resume. But he did not seem agitated or fearful, as when he scented bear. Midnight sun blasted our tent with light and I could see that his eyes were on Tapio, who was seldom a subject of much interest to him. And then I saw that Tapio’s sleeping bag was rising and falling in a jerky shudder, sometimes with a violent spasm. The unnatural movement had caught the dog’s notice. At first I was alarmed, but after a few moments I understood, and I put my hand on Eberhard’s head to reassure him. Better to let Tapio mourn, even if his paroxysms of grief were silent and secret.