A SMALL FINNISH INTERLUDE
Well now, all this takes us back a little, to the distant days you must also remember: days of social democracy and the dawning of the welfare state, when the charming word ‘Scandinavia’ aroused liberal images of democratic justice, social improvement and neat square furniture. The world was existentially divided into two polar opposites, East and West, and you were supposed to support one or the other. Travel was still exciting, and every single country you went to was different. They didn’t bother to check you out for weaponry at Heathrow. All British airline pilots were called Captain Strong, you travelled everywhere like a real gentleman, the gin served in the air did not come out of miniatures. Everywhere there was a whiff of spying. At this time I was a young writer, or just beginning to think about myself as one. I’d published enough and taught enough to be able to stick ‘teacher and writer’ onto my passport. On the other hand I was so splendidly unknown I was totally amazed if anyone recognized my name or recalled even a single word of the various books – the youthful first novel, the odd works of lit. crit., the volumes of humour and satire – I had managed to get into rather obscure print.
One day I heard I’d been awarded a striking literary honour. One of my books, my dear first novel, was to be translated into a foreign language: something that happened far less commonly then than it does now. On the other hand, the language it was to be translated into was Finnish, which meant the people who were so keen to read me lived in a part of the world I didn’t know at all. I wasn’t even sure whether Finland was in Europe, or just off the edge of it – a question that, I would later discover, the Finns were constantly asking of themselves. In fact at that time I think I knew only five simple facts about the Finns. They drank. They ski-jumped. They produced remarkable architects. They spoke an obscure agglutinative language strangely related to Hungarian which nobody else could understand, not even fellow Finns. And – how I loved them for this – they were a great nation of readers. Yes, they read books, amazing numbers of them, more books than any other people: quite possibly, though I didn’t quite realize this at the time, because in that land of vast forest, wide lakes, great deer ticks, huge mosquitoes, open and empty landscapes, deep and endless snow, a wintry universe of engrossed solitude where one person hardly ever spoke to another, there was very little else to do.
I imagined the Finns to be a thoughtful bespectacled people, ever in and out of libraries, constantly discussing the novels of Charles Dickens, the tales of Tolkein, modernist fragmentation in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. And then one day a letter came from my Finnish publisher (oh, what words!) with a striking invitation. He didn’t simply want to have my book translated; he hoped I would fly to Finland on his invitation, meet the press, be photographed with my translator, and then take a tour to the country talking to the various literary circles and reading groups that all spoke English and gathered, it seemed, in every little town and hamlet. I read the letter; and of course I said yes. Even back in those days whenever I was asked I always said yes.
So: the place was Finland, the month was February, the time was the early and innocent beginning of the sixties. Now, as I say, to me at that time Finland seemed distant, strange, remote, as far off as Mongolia, as politically obscure as Dubai. I knew really nothing about its history: except it lay on the topside of the Baltic, whose shores at one time or another seem to have been disputed by just about everybody; that it had suffered terribly under the Russian invasion during the Winter Ski-War; that it had since then stayed free of occupation from its predatory and expanding neighbour, though no doubt at a very high price. In political terms it looked like a land suspended in history, somehow tucked in a trap between East and West in a knife-edge deal that was actually known as Finlandization. For the Cold War, at this date, was extremely cold. In fact it was a prime period of nuclear anxiety. Stalin had gone, but the spy-planes swept the skies, erect missiles pointed their warheads in every direction, the crisis of global annihilation seemed to wait there just a few minutes away, and the Cuban crisis was just round the corner.
But the grim political weather that worried everyone seemed not a bit colder than the chill Nordic winter I encountered when I set off on what was to be my first real literary voyage. I crossed the North Sea from Britain in some old propeller aircraft, captained, of course, by Captain Strong. There was a refuelling stopover at Stockholm, I recall, and we were allowed off the plane to wander briefly around the endless pornography stalls before we rose up again and began to cross over these same troubled waters, the political seas of the Baltic. Russian warships ploughed these channels, western submarines slipped about underneath the ice, spies and refugees struggled to find information or refuge. Seen from my viewpoint, a dusty plane-seat, the Gulf of Finland was just one great frozen crust. Huge ice-breaker tugs were working the waters below me, carving narrow black shipping tracks through the massive white ice-cap. The plane signs came on. We flew lower and lower, beginning our descent over a landscape that, like the frozen sea, seemed entirely without colour: spiky whiteness, conifer forest everywhere, a world filled up with snowdrift.
To me, Helsinki’s tiny airport felt like a strangely obscure place. A long way away, it seemed, from any city, it was enfolded in that strange silence that somehow descends on a world of total snow. I took the slow-moving airport bus into the city, riding on ploughed-out and hard-crusted roads through thick forest, past sawmills, log yards, steaming wooden huts. When we reached the capital, Helsinki, also caught in snowfall, seemed weirdly silent too. The trams glided noiselessly along its boulevards, the cars moved without making a sound, the heating steam puffed silently from the city roofs. I found my way through freezing streets and squares to my hotel: a charming white establishment called the Hotel Gurki, which I later discovered had been used as Gestapo headquarters during the war. But that of course was twenty years before – in another time, when there were different enemies, different politics, different alliances and sympathies. It may even have had something to do with the air of comfort it offered the frozen travelling writer; my pleasant hotel was as crisply and self-consciously warm as the world outside felt cold.
I unpacked in a clean comfortable room, discovered the lift (it was called the HISSI), and went down to the lobby, where my foreign publishers had said they would come to collect me. I felt wonderfully content. To my own surprise, I was now the kind of person who had a foreign publisher, persons who would take my work to transmit it to an audience of whose nature I had absolutely no idea. To pass the time, I sat in a chair and picked up the local newspapers, provided on sticks for easy reading. Besides the fact that the pictures struck me as peculiarly bloody (horrific car crashes, people shot dead in the middle of the woods, or hanging from trees), I found myself staring at a language of total incomprehensibility. The nouns behaved like cancerous bodies, adding syllables with careless profusion; the verbs seemed missing. The vocabulary came from ancient word-stock carelessly thrown about as in some semantic accident. Everything was prolix, random, anarchically inventive, as if the whole language was still being made up. It seemed odd to think that my own writing, with its realistic statements and social observations, could be transmuted into this, or mean anything if it was.
I read for a while, then watched as some workmen struggled to release some guests – an American tourist in plaid pants, a weeping wife – from the Hissi.
‘My wife’s been stuck in there two hours,’ said the tourist.
‘Our Finnish Hissis are excellent,’ said the manager indignantly. ‘They are exported everywhere all over the world.’
‘Oh God, you mean I could end up in another one like that?’ asked the tourist, comforting his sobbing wife. ‘Why did we ever come to Europe?’
‘Finland is not Europe, Finland is only Finland,’ said the manager.
At this point two huge men, wearing great snow-dusted leather overcoats and vast fur hats, walked into the lobby and began looking dangerously around. They exactly resembled my idea of the Gestapo agents who had used these premises twenty years before. They went over to the desk. A moment later I heard them pronounce my name.
Then I understood. These tough guys weren’t agents at all. They were publishers, from the house that meant to publish my work. It was, I discovered when they came over and led me downstairs to the bar, one of the great Finnish houses, the house that over generations had published the major Finnish writers – Runeberg and Topelius, Kivi and the remarkable Lonnrot, without whom we would never have had the Kalevala, and therefore not Longfellow’s Hiawatha either. My hosts were hearty men (I have always found the Finns a warm people in a cold land) and great specialists in vodka: or rather in the amazing variety of vodkas on offer near the Arctic circle, each one of which they insisted I try. We went into the restaurant to continue the experiment over reindeer steak and whale meat. So the evening went on.
In answer to my questions, my excellent hosts told me all I wanted to know about Finland, a squeezed and flattened country that had been Swedish when it was not being Russian, and had scarcely ever been itself. They told me about the Great Wrath and the Little Wrath, the Swedish occupation, the Russian terror; about Mannerheim and their own Red Revolution, the Winter War and painful postwar loss of Karelia, the most beautiful Finnish lands of them all. They told me about life in a land of four-fifths forest, lake and tundra, about the sea, bears, wolves, trolls. For some reason just possibly to do with the unending supply of vodka, the information they gave me began to seem more and more obscure. When our meal was complete, and I had finally consumed a dessert of mysterious forest bilberries that made me feel even stranger than before, they took me upstairs again, and there introduced me to a waiting bevy of press photographers, who all took my photo for the morning papers. In Finland, they explained, it was considered extremely rude to photograph a writer when sober. Then, with the greatest kindness, considering the condition they were now in themselves, they got me into the Hissi and managed to find my room, which as far as I was concerned had quite unaccountably disappeared.
There, when I woke in the morning, it was, again, in far better condition than I was. I was in a neat modern bedroom with red iron bed, clear white curtains. A maid or warder of some kind was admitting herself into the room with a pass key, and handing me a tray with a green pot of coffee and the morning papers. On the front page of the Sanomat, a raddled, bloated, broken British writer, looking ninety years old at the very least, peered out over my name. The telephone rang and it turned out to be my hosts who were calling. They were waiting for me down in the lobby, feeling as fresh as daisies, ready to take me on the tour of Helsinki which I had apparently demanded of them the night before. They in big coats and furry hats, myself in a Burton’s shortie raincoat, we set off into the freeze. Sliding, slithering, slipping, I walked round a city like none I had ever been in: deep-locked in ice and snow, frozen in time and space. Great winds swept down wide boulevards. Long-trailered rattling trams carved their powdery way through streets that seemed far too full of snow to allow any traffic at all.
The city itself struck me as completely charming. It was at once the most imperial and the most colonial of capitals, equally western and Russian. There were big, bow-fronted, art nouveau apartment blocks, troll-covered residences from the Nordic Revival, square blocks of concrete modernism. Great Nordic architects had done their work here: a couple of Aaltos, a couple of Saarinens, the famous Jop Kaakinen. Most were in the modern manner, yet they were covered in the most obscure of signs. They said RAVINTOLA, YLIOPPILASPALVELU, OOPPERA, MATKAILIJAYHDISTYS, ARVOPAPERIPORSSI, POSTIPANKKI, SUOMEN PANKKI, HAPPII HOTELLI, HANKKI PANKKI. We arrived at the grand Senate Square, a fine spread surrounded by domed public buildings in the style of nineteenth-century classicism: Senate, White Lutheran Cathedral, the splendid high-stepped university. There amid them in the snow, covered in evergreen wreaths, was the statue of the one liberal Tzar, Alexander II, emancipator of the serfs, the man who had permitted the Finns to express their nationhood – until, as usual, he was assassinated.
So we went on, slipping and slithering, to the Baltic esplanade. Despite the frozen weather a flourishing market was working. Vast ships stood along the dockside, the Swedish ferries: not high-sided monsters like ours, but old steamers smoking like papermills. Out in the harbour of Sandviki the icebreakers pulsed, cutting the channel open with a cracking noise like thunder, carving the boatpath out past Suomenlinna. To one side was a Lutheran church, to the other a huge onion-domed mass, the Russian Orthodox Cathedral. Huge dirty buses marked Intourist were parked all round it, and people from seaside postcards, men in suits and medals, women with false blonde hair, vast in spotted dresses, were unloading and going inside. We went inside too, to see the black metropolitans, coroneted priests, the swinging censers, the flickering candles, the worshippers kissing the golden icons.
‘The Russians still come, then?’ I say.
‘Oh, yes,’ says my host, ‘we always expect them at any time.’
Finland’s winter days are very short, and very sweet. So somehow it was already the middle of the afternoon, and the light was rapidly darkening. In fact it was time to go and meet my Finnish translator at a famous writers’ café. We walked over to the place, somewhere near my hotel. I remember it was called the Kafé Kosmos. And, as soon as you lifted the heavy door curtain and felt the fug inside, you could sense it was exactly what it was. The walls were hung with prints, lithographs, photographs of the Finnish literary heroes: Runeberg, Topelius, Kivi, the great Lonnrot. The hot fuggy room was noisy, the tables were full. It then suddenly occurred to me (I was young then, remember) that never before had I ever seen so many writers at any one time, gathered in any one place. There they were, writers of every kind: male and female, fat and thin, young and old, well-dressed urban writers, fur-clad brutish peasant writers. Some had high intellectual brows, some had no brows at all. There were adult writers, children’s writers, writers of history or biography, writers of folk and fairy tale, writers of humour, writers of Gothic terror. There were realists, and there were modernists. Literary writers who had won great prizes, commercial writers who had won great advances. Poets and dramatists. Novelists and journalists. So many writers, and only one thing in common. The Kafé Kosmos was certainly not alkoholfri; every single one of them was drunk.
Some were quietly drunk, and some were noisy drunk. Some were in the infernal pits of despair, and others on the soaring heights of euphoria. A Nobel prizewinner lay with his head in a toppled soup-bowl. A famous children’s writer trilled to herself before a row of empty glasses. And so a deep truth struck me, for the first time but not for the last. The writer’s life, now my chosen path, was not always one of delicious pleasure, eternal freedom, endless fame. It was too not amusing at all. It was mournful, self-created, lonely, an unending struggle against failure, fate, ignorance, idleness, blankness, insecurity and death. No wonder the writers of Finland felt the need to join together, raising their glasses in celebration of creativity and comradeship. No wonder their heads felt heavy with the weight of delicious thoughts. Or, of course, there could have been a different reason. After all, they were Finns.
Whatever: I’d arrived at the literary heartland at last, and I passionately felt the need to join them. I gladly took my place on the minstrels’ bench, and soon we were all drinking together and telling stories, as writers so often do. Somehow, here in the Kafé Kosmos, it really didn’t seem to matter that my stories were in English, and theirs were in Finnish. Many interesting things were said that day, though heaven alone knows what they were. Then, finally, in the very late afternoon, my translator appeared: a huge man, six foot or so, bearded, sweatshirted, an outdoor type, seemingly fresh from the forest. He wrote plays himself, and poems, and had translated James Joyce into Finnish. The problems of my work were, he said, modest in comparison, but he confessed he had found a few. Story fine, prose fine, but something was missing: a true intensity of soul. He’d had just the same problem in Joyce. What was wrong with western writers was they’d never probably imbibed the great Russians: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Biely. Yet Russian writing taught the true spirit of the novel: rage, extremity, wildness, passion, torture of the heart.
‘You’ve never been to Russia, I can tell,’ he said. ‘I will take you. When your trip is finished, we will go.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘No, forget your tour, why don’t I take you tonight?’
‘I don’t think so, Pentti,’ said one of my publishers.
‘Sure. Look, it’s simple. We go to the station, we get on the military train with the sealed windows. Then we go through the lovely lands of our lost Karelia, which you will not be able to see because the windows are sealed, and we wake up in the writer’s city.’
‘The writer’s city?’
‘Petersburg. The place where all writers come from.’
‘It’s not so simple, Pentti, he needs papers,’ said my publisher.
‘Bureaucrats, all that paper shit, let’s just forget it, right?’ said my translator, staring me in the eyes.
‘But if he doesn’t have a visa from the embassy, they won’t let him in. Do you want him to go to jail?’
‘I’ll get him in. You just have to give the guards a ham or something. They haven’t eaten for months. You know in Russia nobody believes in the law, and everything is for sale.’
‘But the Russians don’t like westerners just walking into their country.’
My translator put his huge arm lovingly around me. ‘Just don’t listen to any of this shit,’ said my translator. ‘I know Russia, all the back passages and little arseholes. I go into Russia all the time.’
‘When did you go last?’
‘Five years ago,’ said my translator, filling up his glass and mine. ‘Maybe ten.’
‘It’s crazy,’ said my publisher.
‘You know me, I’m your friend,’ said my translator, squeezing me tight, ‘Would I do anything crazy? I just don’t take shit, that’s all. Paper shit. Border shit. The world is a forest. In it a man goes where he wants to go. We’re writers. The world is ours, huh?’
‘That’s right, the world is ours,’ I seem to have said.
‘Our writer wants to come,’ he said. ‘You see, he wants to come.’
‘He’s English, he’s just being polite, Pentti. That’s how they are.’
‘You know, I love this man. I’m proud to translate him, even if his book is shit. Get him papers if you like, that’s only some more shit.’
‘He has a tour to do, it’s all arranged.’
‘Okay, and when you come back from the tour, my friend, we get on the sealed train and go to Russia, all right?’
‘To the Finland Station?’
‘To the Finland Station. Yes, my dear good old friend. You will never forget it. It will be the greatest experience of your life—’
‘Yes, Pentti,’ said my publisher.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know . . .’
During that night the whole world changed. A heavy new snow fell all over Finland and the Baltic. When I woke in my red-painted, thin-mattressed bed next morning, feeling no better than I had the morning before, a strange white light filled my hotel bedroom. The maid, letting herself in with the pass-key, brought coffee and opened the curtains, revealing the white-filled square below and the great snowfall my walls had reflected. Suddenly I recalled that on this snowy day my ten-year tour round the small towns of Finland was due to begin in earnest. Then, as I drank my coffee, I remembered something else – how, in the literary glow of the Kafé Kosmos, I had agreed to go on the sealed train to Leningrad as soon as I returned. Various small problems now crossed my mind: students back home to teach, a wife and little child waiting. Still, writers are writers; the world is ours. I packed up my baggage, and went down in the Hissi. I signed my hotel bill, and sat in an armchair in the lobby, waiting for my publisher friends to take me to the station.
And the world truly had altered overnight. A new snow had fallen all over Finland. Beyond the windows, cracked ice had turned to fresh fleece, which filled every space and turned everything to the purest white. The snowiness lit up the cars and brightened the street, where Finns in big hats, great coats and boots walked by, half-bounced along by the weather. Flakes the size of cottonballs whirled past the windows, wiping away the buildings across the way, plastering a huge snowsuit on the patient hotel doorman. Whenever the swing doors opened, a howling frozen whirlwind scurried through the lobby. My publishers arrived by car, grinding through packed snowpiles in the gutter. As soon as I walked outside, the bitter wind sliced, my eyebrows froze, my face turned to a mask. My raincoat offered no protection at all, so my publishers thoughtfully took me to a great department store, Stockmann, to kit me for the journey. Winter wares – snowshoes and skis, Parkas and sledges – were everywhere on sale. Wooden stands held domed fur hats in every fashion: seal and beaver, mink and fox, wool and nylon. Soon I was suitably clad. A huge fur pelt with ribboned ear-flaps covered my ears and most of my brow. I had huge fur mittens, stout blue moonboots. ‘Wonderful,’ said my publisher. ‘How nicely it goes with your smart English blazer.’
Helsinki train station is designed by the elder Saarinen. A noble modernistic façade makes a grand effect, though it leads to sadder and rather etiolated hinderparts, unroofed and open to swirling blizzard. Here, in the snow, a train of six very ancient wooden carriages was waiting behind a black steam locomotive, tender stacked high with birch-logs. My publishers said farewell, and I climbed aboard a first-class carriage. A metal stove steamed in the corner. A stout female attendant sat beside it issuing glasses of tea. Thick curtains hung at the misted windows. Heavy armchairs formed the seats. Slowly and wearily, the train begin heaving itself out of the station. It didn’t matter; I was in no hurry, no hurry at all.
Once the train leaves Helsinki station, it’s soon into the pine and birch forest that seems to cover the rest of Finland. In fact the forest comes right into the city, growing round the new apartment blocks. In moments the city becomes the country, the urban scene turning into a vast rolling forest. Yesterday’s world had gone too; the overnight snow had covered all Finland with a coating that, seen from a train seat, was pure delight. Snow hung heavy on the pine and birch trees, highlighting the twigs with a precise white detailing. Occasionally branches would crack off and shatter, opening a white wound in the trunks. Everything seemed suspended – not least the train itself, which moved so slowly through this noiseless world every little scene appeared to go on for ever. There were red wooden houses, with metal ladders to their roofs. Steam rose from the big square chimneys of the sauna houses. Animal tracks ran through the drifts, birds of prey hung in the sky. Skiers made their way through the forest paths. Muffled ancient ladies stood up on the runners of high-backed sledges, pushing them along with booted feet.
In my chair in the slow-moving wide-coached train, I felt myself caught in a happy delusion. I felt in some perfect space: out of time, motion, history, politics. I imagined myself in a peaceable kingdom, more peaceful than any I’d known. Foolish and dangerous nonsense, of course. Finland was not outside history. It was a troubled, squeezed, divided, often occupied small country, still under threat. It had known the Great Wrath and the Little Wrath, its own bloody Red Revolution and the Winter War. This rail line once led on past Lahti to the lost lands of Karelia, from which the population had been expelled, to Vyborg and the Finland station. The Russian border now lay not so far ahead: armed soldiers in the watch-towers, mines and mantraps in the snow. Lenin fled here twice, disguised as a fireman on a railway engine, protected by the Finnish reds. Then in 1918 refugees from the Cheka purges had taken this same railway, carrying their fake Swedish passports and what valuables they could manage. Some had made it through the sentries, many had not. Even then their problems were not over; for half of Finland supported the Russian Reds, the other half hoped the Germans would bring a solution for their Baltic peril. Finland had never really been used to peace; it was too near Russia. ‘The ghastly logic of geography,’ one famous Finn noted in 1917. ‘Petrograd is so close. There is blood everywhere.’
Short of the border, I got off the chugging train – at Kuovola on the Kymi. The Kymi is Finland’s great logging river, and as I descended on to the bare snow-swept platform the sawmills ground and the rank papermills were steaming. In the blizzard the local schoolteacher was waiting; she didn’t know me at first, so odd did I look in my fur hat and moonboots. She walked me through town, past brand-new shopping centres, to the local hotel. And there, that night, while some forty Finns sat dining rather mournfully, I rose at the table and began to read from my work. It came to seem an absurd activity, as I went through the most parochial details of contemporary English life, while my tolerant audience of good citizens – businessmen, teachers, butchers, shopkeepers, librarians – stared up at me in friendly mystification. Next day I took another train through the snow, heading northward up the Kymi past chugging sawmills, rancid papermills, the odd landed estate or so, as the blizzard deepened. So the days passed, taking on a familiar rhythm, as I zig-zagged through the freezing heart of Finland, a land of small settlements, vast frozen lakes, huge silent forests. A little train would emerge from the blizzards to deposit me at some little local capital, entirely shut in snow: Kuopio, Mikkeli, Tapiola, Jyväslykä, Kyyjärvi. Another meeter on the platform, a teacher, a librarian, a local doctor. Another hotel, ancient or modern. Another audience, gathered in the hotel dining room or some local ravintola, eating a hearty dinner while I talked and read to them my strange little tales of British life in distant industrial cities.
The towns I descended on out of the blizzard in my silver moonboots came to seem to me stranger and stranger. They were towns out of Nikolai Gogol, remote provincial outposts like those in Russia, ancient, folkish, faintly touched up with modernity, but happily and timelessly spared what had happened just over the border – the political purges, the grand electrifications, the Gulags. And in fantasy I was beginning to feel like a character out of Gogol’s stories too: the wandering bureaucrat, the travelling dignitary, the confidence trickster visiting the regions from the great capital where the reins of government lay. I ride through the forests, I come to the next town, even more remote than the last one. It’s called, let us say, B—. Pigs and cats run in the streets, and in the normal way everything must be as dull as ditchwater, except when the cavalry regiment is stationed or the government inspector visits. There’s a town square, a local inn, a shop selling saws, horse-collars, barrels and ropes. There are a few fine-looking residences and a row of neat merchant houses, nice enough except when they catch fire, or fall in under the weight of snow. There’s a mayor, a doctor, a police chief, a fire chief, a town drunk, some shopkeepers, some landowners, some business folk, some sparky little wives, and a bevy of those fair to middling gentlefolk with estates out of town who always want news of the world. The visitor descends from the capital, the best dresses come out, and there’s a reception at the hotel or the restaurant. Gaiety rules for its moment, till the visitor leaves, returning to the distant bright lights of the capital, to parties and palaces, and then life goes on as before.
Everyone was extremely kind to my stories; kind to me, especially after night fell and drink began to pour. They congratulated me warmly on my good English, my little tales. ‘Your book was so funny that we almost laughed,’ one of them said to me. ‘Do you like Finland?’ ‘Do you like Sibelius?’ ‘Do you like hunting?’ ‘Do you like sauna? You must do it properly, jump in the lake and roll in the snow.’
In Kuopio I went to the sauna, surrounded by someone’s stout wife and gleaming daughters, who dropped me in the lake and then slapped me with birch twigs to bring me back from what felt like my final moments. In Mikkeli I was taken cross-country skiing, and had two planks strapped to my legs for a four-hour plod on the flat. In Kyyjärvi they took me elk-hunting, though all I brought down was a frozen branch or two. In Jyväskylä I went to the ski-jump competitions, where figures no bigger than dots descended from huge wooden gantries and crashed into snowdrifts. My stories seem to grow ever odder to me, my skin got drier, my voice grew fainter. The days got colder, the mercury dropped lower, and I moved onward, ever upward and northward.
At last I came to my final and furthest destination: the little town of . . . Well, let us call it O—. It lay somewhere high on the ice-packed Gulf of Bothnia, toward the Lappish lands and the Arctic circle. I had only one last reading to give; then I was off on the midnight express, back to the capital, then on to Leningrad. I was very tired now, exhausted by the readings, the generous hospitality, the sauna, the elk-hunting, the cross-country skiing. My head was blurred, my voice was beginning to fade away completely. I climbed down from the train into freezing temperatures and a whirling wind. My eyebrows promptly frosted, my face froze in a hideous grimace. My windpipe seized, I felt decidedly unwell. I looked around for the usual quiet librarian or schoolteacher, waiting to greet me. I noticed something different. Standing there on the station platform, in a veil of blizzard, was the entire town band, in their tassels and their epaulettes. It was not hard to guess what they were waiting for; the tune they struck up was ‘God Save the Queen’. British flags waved. A banner was unrolled. A small girl in a white folk costume ran forward to present me with a scroll.
Behind her stood a snow-dusted row of local dignitaries. There was the town mayoress, her blonde hair drawn tight and strict, formally dressed in ermine and fur. There was the provincial governor, with a feather in his hat, the police and fire chiefs, in grand uniform, the head of the gymnasium, wearing an academic gown. And there in a long civic line were the merchants, the shopkeepers, the librarian, the fair to middling gentlefolk, the sparky young wives, the town drunk, all of them waiting to greet me. The lady mayoress lifted a sheet of notes and made a warm speech of welcome, translated for me by the schoolteacher. Then, to the sounds of ‘Finlandia’, we set off in procession down the main street. Frost-bitten citizens stopped and waved at me in welcome. There, out of Gogol, was the scatter of small stores, selling horse-collars and ropes. There was the little wooden inn, with chickens in the yard. Frost-bitten citizens halted their work and gave me warm waves of welcome.
Then, ahead, was a fine provincial town square, crowded with snow-filled trees. Around them stood a fine spread of metal-roofed civic buildings. A white Lutheran church, a wooden Orthodox church. A grand old-fashioned white wooden residence with smart shutters, perhaps for the provincial governor; an illuminated stone building with a clock on it that was presumably the Town Hall. In front of this stood a Lapp in blue costume, holding two tethered reindeer. A horse-drawn sleigh went by with a jangle of bells, just avoiding the huge logging trucks laden with forest timber that constantly swept at speed through the town. The band ceased, we came to a stop . . .
‘But I thought this was about going to Leningrad,’ says Manders.
Yes, in a moment . . . We all swept into the fine Town Hall, walked up on to the platform. Practically all of the local citizens must have gathered in the big audience that sat in front of me, evidently under the illusion they were enjoying the visit of a major celebrity (I later traced this confusion to an article in the weekly paper, written by one of the writers from the Kafé Kosmos, who had seemingly confused me with William Golding, an odd mistake to make anywhere but in Finland). The mayoress rose and made a long speech of welcome, explaining (according to the shopkeeper’s thoughtful translation) how grateful they were that, of all the many towns scattered by the good Lord through the whole wide world, I had made such a point of visiting this one. Then, after reciting many lines from the Kalevala, she waved me to the centre of the platform to speak.
My throat now felt as if it had been filled by a thorn bush. I rose up in my silver moonboots. I croaked out a few words of grateful thanks to the mayoress and the town council, and then I began to read from my work. My voice was truly fading now; after a few moments I ground to a total halt. ‘There’s a problem . . .’ I whispered hoarsely, and then my voice box totally seized. There was nothing to do but wave my hands in despair, look round helplessly, sit down . . . The mayoress stared at me grimly. I shrugged in despair. She rose furiously, and swept off the platform. The town band struck up ‘The Swan of Haemenlinna’. The audience rose, and in moments the entire place was empty. There I was, in the grand civic room of an empty town hall somewhere up near the Arctic Circle, voiceless, a useless writer, robbed of the only thing that had brought me here in the first place: words.
I had already been told that a grand dinner and reception in the little wooden hotel across the square had been arranged that night, in my honour, or at any rate in William Golding’s. I presumed the event would now be cancelled, so I walked across the square, sat in the hotel, and ordered a restorative hot drink, resigned to wait here until it was time to take the midnight express that would take me out of town, back to Helsinki and my translator. But, as I waited in the salon, something began to happen. The entire hotel began to fill with people, all of them dressed in their best evening finery. There again they all were, the leading citizens of O—: the blonde strict lady mayoress, the sly little governor, the portly police chief, the thin fire chief, the headmaster from the gymnasium, the town drunk, the fair to middling gentlefolk, the sparky little wives. Their expressions remained a little grim and dour, but it was very evident they had no intention of missing a great evening’s entertainment. The band appeared, and struck up. I sat and watched them. No one came over and spoke to me at all: fine by me, of course, since I was totally incapable of answering them anyway. A bevy of waitresses in folkloric dresses appeared with huge clear bottles of vodka and went round the room. I sat in the corner and looked on with interest, knowing in about four more hours I would be out of here on the train and gone from this world for ever.
It was the close of the week, a Friday. Nobody had told me what happens to Finns on a Friday night. The truth is, they turn into different people. In half an hour they had gone from misery to good humour. Another half hour took them from grey solemnity to ravening happiness. Around the room everyone who was still upright was laughing at something.
‘It’s you,’ explained the shopkeeper kindly, coming over to bring me a huge vodka. ‘You have made them very happy. They are all laughing at you.’
‘Oh really?’ I attempted to croak.
‘Nothing so wonderful has taken place here for many years. We met you from the train. We provided the band for you. We all came to the Town Hall.’
I nodded sympathetically.
‘And then what did you give us? Nothing. You came a thousand miles and gave us nothing at all. Thank you. It made us very happy tonight.’
I nodded generously.
‘On Friday night we really like to relax. To amuse.’
And that did appear to be true. Something had indeed transformed the excellent people of O—. The portly police chief was dancing on a table with the drummer from the town band. The head of the gymnasium was undressing the local librarian. The sly governor was lying full-length in a corner, surrounded by a great bevy of the sparky little wives. Only the town drunk seemed unhappy, as he wandered round the place looking sober by comparison with everyone else.
Half an hour more, and they had all gone again from happiness to near-stupor, from joy to the pits of lachrymose misery. I sat there watching over a beer; by now I’d learned the menace of the vodka. And it was now, as the band played in a confused and senseless discord, that the lady mayoress came over to me. Her blonde hair had now fallen down crazily over one eye. Her dress had split. She was smiling at me warmly.
‘She wants to thank you very much for coming to our simple town,’ explained the shopkeeper.
I nodded.
‘She says you have done us a real honour. She has one small request of you, she hopes you will grant it.’
I nodded again, graciously.
‘She would like to have a child by such an eminent person.’
I raised both eyebrows.
‘It need not take long. Her house is very near. And you still have two hours before your train.’
I croaked again, pointed at my throat.
‘She quite understands, but the important thing is not your throat. She does not speak good English anyway.’
The mayoress beamed, very attractively, and said something graceful in Finnish.
‘She says it would be such a nice memento of your stay,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘When we travel we should always leave something behind.’
I looked at the fecklessly charming woman, who seemed to have become so very different after vodka time, now that her mayoral chair was off and her hair was let down, and that’s why . . .
‘I know just what you’re going to say,’ says Manders. ‘This is why you never managed to get to Leningrad. For some strange reason you were delayed that night and you missed your train back to Helsinki.’
‘Oh no, I did catch the train all right,’ I said. ‘The mayoress kindly saw me on board.’
‘The town band too?’
‘No, just the mayoress. She took excellent care of me.’
‘So this is the famous Finnish Friday night,’ says Manders admiringly. ‘We know all about that in Sweden.’
‘Yes, and then it was a Finnish Friday night on the Helsinki express too,’ I say. ‘I swear to you every single person on board, man or woman, beautiful or ugly, first class or third, from one end of that train to the other, was blind drunk as well.’
‘I believe you.’
‘There was this beautiful blonde woman sitting opposite me all the way, wearing long black furs and a splendid ermine hat. She spent the entire journey having a loud quarrel with her own reflection in the window. Then, when we rolled into Helsinki station in the early hours of the morning, the porters were all on the platform with their barrows parked outside all the coach doors, waiting to stack the recumbent passengers in large piles on the trolleys and wheel them out to the taxi rank.’
‘Does that mean you did make it to the sealed train to Leningrad, after all?’
‘Well, not exactly. My translator went, but he went on his own. They arrested him the moment he stepped off at the Finland Station. He spent the next three weeks in a Russian jail. Unpleasant, I believe, though he did say he was able to pass the time translating my book. Finally the Finns protested, or the Russians got tired of him. At any rate, they bundled him in a truck and dumped him over the Finnish border, in the snow.’
‘Did the translation ever appear?’
‘Yes, it did, the following year. It was very successful. The Finns read a lot of books. It’s the winter, you know, when there’s hardly anything else to do. The critics were very kind, and I had met most of them in the Kafé Kosmos. Some of them even called me the youthful heir of Gogol.’
‘Well, you were probably wise not to go. The Russians wouldn’t have let you out that easily. You were heading for real trouble.’
‘I expect so, but I didn’t know that then.’
‘Why didn’t you go?’
‘Oh, didn’t I say? After I got off the train from O—, I went right back to the Hotel Gurki—’
‘Gestapo headquarters in the war?’
‘That’s the one, and the next morning I woke up delirious, with swollen glands and a raging fever.’
‘Tonsillitis, no doubt. You had probably over-exerted yourself on your travels.’
‘Quite. My kind publishers got a doctor who said I wasn’t fit to travel anywhere and shot me full of antibiotics. After a couple of days they drove me out to the airport, and I returned to my family and my normal life. Except it took three weeks for my voice to come back. I’ve been to Russia since. But somehow I never did make the journey to the dandy city, always preening itself in front of Europe.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what Gogol called Petersburg. Otherwise Leningrad.’
Manders looks at me. ‘And the mayoress?’ he asks. ‘Up there in your Let Us Call It O—, by the Arctic Circle? Is there perhaps a little professor now?’
‘No, no,’ I say, feeling rather embarrassed. ‘You should understand, I was extremely moral in those distant days. In those days the world wasn’t a screwfest. We discussed the moral life all the time. It was when we believed in virtue, followed the good and the true.’
‘I suppose we all did then. Even in Sweden.’
‘Especially in Sweden. But I always felt a little rude about leaving like that. When she and the others were all being so very nice to me.’
‘I hope so. The town band and everything.’
‘Do you suppose she made an offer like that to all the visitors?’
‘I don’t know Finland all that well, but I doubt it. She was entirely taken by your charms, I’m quite sure.’
‘I must admit I was by hers. She really was a most attractive woman. I was never quite sure, though, whether she really meant it or just wanted to make sure I didn’t go home thinking my trip had been totally wasted. And I suppose at that time I was just too young and foolish to accept the irresponsibility.’
‘You know, I seem to remember Diderot said something about all this,’ says Manders, getting up and going to stare out over the rail.
‘Really? I don’t remember.’
‘Yes, in the essay he wrote about Bougainville’s voyage to the South Seas, when the French sailors met all those wonderful noble savages. I seem to recall he took the multi-cultural approach and the sexual freedom line.’
‘Do what you like, you mean?’
‘“Be monks in France and savages in Tahiti,” that was how he put it.’
‘But he did believe in the moral approach as well. The rule of virtue. Didn’t he also say: “You can put on the costume of the country you visit, but always remember to keep the suit of clothes you need to go home in.”’
‘It’s true,’ says Manders.
‘Anyway, now you can see why I feel such a soft spot for Finland,’ I say. ‘In fact to tell the truth, I wouldn’t mind a bit if we didn’t go to Petersburg and this ship changed tack and rerouted to Helsinki.’
‘I’m sorry, I really don’t think it’s going to do that,’ says Manders, leaning windblown over the rail.
‘You never know,’ I say.
‘I think I do,’ says Manders, looking out at the channel.
‘Do you see that island showing up ahead? I know that. It’s Kotlin. That’s Kronstadt castle.’
I get up to look out too. A huge and battlemented land-shadow is rising from the cold oily waters in front of us, surrounded by a mass of moving grey ships. On the decks down below us, sensing a change in the climate, the Diderot pilgrims have suddenly begun to appear again: Agnes and Sonnenberg, Verso and the Swedish nightingale, Bo and Alma, looking happy and chattering warmly as they stare out over the side. Here, in a hurry, comes Lars Person.
‘Kronstadt?’ I say.
‘Revolution Island,’ says Manders. ‘Where the sailors started the Russian Revolution. And where Catherine the Great came to arrest her own husband Peter, so she could jail him and take over the throne.’
‘This means we’re getting near then?’
‘Kronstadt’s where the old harbour used to be. Just beyond is the sea-terminal at Vasilyevsky Island. You see, you really are going to Petersburg, after all.’