Pietari Varila was also musing that morning as he skied alone northward from Kuopio. Two things were on his mind.
The first was trying to guess where the American might be. Pietari and his friends had years of experience skiing across primitive landscapes, as children and in the war, so they had a fairly good idea of where in general they’d find Koski. Still, in general covered a lot of territory. Pietari was roughly in the middle of the dragnet he and the others had planned out on the train the day before, giving him a good chance of being the one to find one of the racers. Then, it was a fifty-fifty chance that it would be the American. They’d all agreed that the most likely scenario was meeting the racers on the next day, Saturday, but that depended on how fast the racers had been moving south. In any case, it was almost certain they’d have to spend Friday night in the open, to all of them, more of an inconvenience than a hardship.
The second thing on Pietari’s mind was that if he did intercept the American, what he was going to say to him. His mother had done the usual mother thing of eliciting his sympathies, this time for the wife and kids of the Russian. Certainly, if the Russian lost the race, it would go very badly for him and his family. To hell with him, and he’d told his mother that. He couldn’t, however, bring himself to feel the same indifference for his innocent children. Yes, his mother had gotten to him. The American’s wife, on the other hand, Louise—he chuckled to himself—she’d simply bowled them all over with American enthusiasm. Of course, he would find her husband. There were only countless square kilometers of wilderness. Just go out there and tell her husband the problem and the problem would get fixed. Can do, he thought, the American version of sisu. Sisu was about toughness in the face of what other cultures would call hopelessness. It was about enduring. As the Finns had done for the past seven years and would continue to do for as long as the Soviet Union threatened their border. Those years of death, starvation, and terror at the hands of the Russians would never be forgotten—or forgiven.
Everything he’d heard about Americans was that they could hardly endure anything for long, but they were very good at changing things so that they didn’t have to endure anything for long. He snorted aloud in grudging admiration, moving gracefully, alternately pushing off the skis’ inside edges. But now that he was out here, he was feeling, not just remembering, the war again. Why should he give a damn about the life of this Russian or his family? What were his mother and this wife of a shirttail relative thinking? Forgive the Russians for giving him the constantly intruding memory of digging the body of his friend Toivo from the snow, one leg blown off, the blood frozen solid, mixed with snow? They’d only found Toivo because the platoon’s dog had smelled the body.
He shook the image away, focusing on the horizon, a low line of hills. Stay present. Don’t slip back. Focus on efficiency and speed. They thought he’d want to save a Russian? Why? The childhood Lutheran in him said because it’s the Christian thing to do. The thinking adult in him said that it was time to get along with the Russians for the sake of a free and prosperous Finland. But the warrior in him wanted every Russian he encountered to feel pain before he killed him.