Translated by Sarah Death
Stockholm, 25 February 2007
Dear Mamma,
Two months ago, I invented a photograph of you, taken in 1942. I was one track short for the album I was recording; the working title of the record was Family Life and my idea was to use pop music to tell the story of the most recent period in my life: divorce from my previous wife; moving back to Sweden from Berlin after twelve years in voluntary exile; how I met my current partner; falling in love once more, against all the odds, in spite of all my bitterness, in spite of all the ingrained cynicism that afflicts divorced men of my age; and then the little miracle of becoming a father for the first time, at forty.
I had written songs about being in love again, about the pregnancy, about my daughter’s birth, about my relapse into doubt; I had written a bitter farewell ballad to my ex-wife, taken my leave of Berlin (which had given me so much, not least in artistic terms) but I was still missing a song that could plumb the family depths, cut across chronology to put me and my little family in our historical context. And that was how I came to create the song ‘The Photograph’, based on your tragic fate.
The lyrics have you standing on the quayside in Åbo harbour. You’re three years old, and there’s an address label hanging on a string round your neck. There are vague figures, Red Cross staff, in the background. Doctors, nurses. And children everywhere: thousands of Finnish refugee children waiting to be shipped across the Baltic. You’re amazingly like my daughter, your granddaughter. You’re both the same age. Both raven haired, with the same sensitive mouth. But in your look there is something I have never seen in hers: deep, existential terror.
There are appalling accounts of the transportation of refugee children from Finland to Sweden during the ‘Continuation War’ of 1941–44. Russian planes pursued the convoys out over the sea and attacked them with machine-guns. The children, many never to return to their families (you were one of them), were desperate. Your sister Ritva ought to have been with you. But she was two years older and realised intuitively that catastrophe lay ahead. Poor Ritva. She was supposed to be looking after you. Your father was at the front, your mother was seriously ill. The idea was for you both to be sent to the same host family in Sweden and then return safe and sound to Finland as soon as the war was over.
But it didn’t turn out that way. Minutes before the ship sailed, she wriggled out of a nurse’s grip and rushed back to the quay where your aunt was standing; she got down on her knees, they say, and begged to be allowed to stay. People have told me that the last they saw of you was a small figure, hand in hand with a Red Cross worker, swallowed up in a tide of children who were swarming like lemmings up the gangplank; you were too little to understand what was happening.
In one of my earliest memories, you are showing me some medals that you keep in a kitchen cupboard. ‘These are your grandpa’s bravery medals from the war,’ you say. I’m maybe seven. There are about fifteen metal plaques, fixed to a board; if I were to believe the evidence of my own eyes, my biological grandfather on my mother’s side must have been awarded every honour that had existed in the Finnish army since the days of Runeberg. But when I ask to have a closer look, you put them back up in the cupboard with an expression as if to say: they’re not intended for children to look at. It’s only in adulthood that it begins to dawn on me: you were showing me your old sprinting medals from local athletics tournaments …
There was another time, during the summer holidays when I was about ten, when Swedish Television showed an old feature film about the Finnish Winter War. I think it must have been based on some of Väinö Linna’s novels, maybe The Unknown Soldier. In one key scene, Russian tanks advanced through a forest on the Karelian Isthmus; one incredibly brave Finnish soldier attacked a tank completely unaided, and managed to knock it out with a Molotov cocktail.
‘That character is based on my Pappa’s exploits,’ you said. ‘He stopped a tank like that, all on his own.’
As a child, of course, I felt mightily proud that my biological grandfather was a decorated Finnish war hero who had stopped tanks single-handed in the forests of Karelia; I told anyone who would listen about his martial prowess, oblivious in those days to the in-built racism of the Swedes towards their former colonial subjects to the east. The only thing this episode brought me was a new nickname: bloody Finn.
I don’t think any of your lies have been deliberately misleading. I know they spring from an old habit of trying to make life a little more beautiful, a little more adventurous, a little more bearable. I believe you started inventing life right from the age of three, as a survival strategy …
It’s not easy for me to write that I love you, Mamma. I have never said those words. Something stopped me when I was little, maybe that unreliability, those remarkable stories that later turned out to be fabricated, your wildly fluctuating moods and the recurrent crises in your life, your uncertainty about who you were and where you really belonged.
Your biological parents wanted you to go back after the war, but your step-parents refused; legal proceedings were begun, and in the end the authorities gave permission for adoption. On grounds of language, they said. By that time you had forgotten all your Finnish. Finnish and Swedish are two entirely different idioms, with entirely different roots: Swedish is Germanic; Finnish is Finno-Ugric, and thus not even related to Indo-European. You were said to have been fluent when you reached your new country at the age of three: perfect Finnish pronunciation and a wide vocabulary. In Sweden you became virtually deaf mute: you understood nothing, nor could you make yourself understood. Three years later, the situation was reversed.
I wish I could say I love you. But I can’t. It’s not that I don’t love you, because I genuinely do, in a way that’s so natural there’s no need even to formulate the feeling. I have no choice, so to speak: unlike you, I’ve never had two mothers to be torn between. The biological one, forced by the war to give you up, thinking you had better chances of survival in Sweden and would soon come back – and your step-mother, who became so attached to you that she insisted on adopting you.
It’s strange – or perhaps not so strange – that since I became the father of a daughter myself, you have triggered emotions in me that I didn’t know I was capable of. Terrible attacks of separation anxiety; manic retrospective looks at my own history and at your fate, which in a sense has moulded mine. And imagining myself in your biological parents’ situation plunges me into what I can only describe as clinical depression.
You were thirteen when you finally saw them again, very briefly. That was in 1952, during the Olympic Games in Helsinki. Your adoptive parents took you there so you could meet the two people who brought you into the world, but on neutral territory. They lived in the middle of Finland, in Jyväskylä I think. I’m told your adoptive parents wouldn’t let you stray more than a few metres from their side: they were petrified you might be kidnapped.
It may have been after this trip that you came up with the story of being related to the Romanov family. You told me on quite a few occasions, even when I was well into my teens, that an ancestor on your father’s side had supposedly been in service at the court at St Petersburg and become pregnant by one of the Tsars. When I double-checked the story with my father, he explained in a pitying tone that it was a story you had made up when you were a girl, to help you feel you were a cut above the average abandoned Finnish war child.
It all fits together, Mamma. ‘And I understand you much better now,’ as I sing in the chorus of my song. It’s all about blood, about blood being thicker than water. I really do love you. And that’s why, finally, I’m writing this, in a love letter you will never read. Paradoxically enough, doing it this way makes it all the more ‘true’, because I have nothing to gain.
So I write those incomparable words and let my readers bear witness: I love you, Mamma.
Your son, C-J