The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (16 page)

I had been let off with only a very stern warning never
never ever
to attempt to pilot a boat in the Hamburg harbor again.

My punishment was to lie in bed at Marianne’s and have her read Gloria de los Angeles to me, first in Spanish, and then, to improve my German, in her translated version. When I got better, however, Astrid took me out one day to the banks of the Elbe and showed me how to identify the birds that lived on the river and in the marshes. I tried to get her to show me the full extent of her tattoos, and finally, in reluctance and pleasure, she did. But the next time I saw her she was with Karin, who had not made up with Helmut after all. They planned to struggle for the ecological revolution and to bring up little Sappho together.

I forgot the difference between a robin and a sparrow.

Days passed. Weeks. One day I got up, as if an alarm clock had rung. I looked in the mirror at my forehead, the bump now turning a mellow jonquil-plum color, and I saw my wasted limbs. And then I took the boat train to London.

“W
E FINNS, WE ARE
the most depressed people on earth,” said the man in the airplane seat next to me. “We are more depressed than the Scandinavians. We are more depressed than the Slavs. That is because Slav and Scandinavian blood runs in our veins together, so the depression is doubled.”

“Are you depressed about anything in particular?” I inquired. He was a mere sketch of a man, pale eyes, pale hair, outbrillianced by the cobalt blue of his soccer T-shirt.

“No,” he sighed, and looked even more morose. “Just depressed.”

“Well,” said Luisa Montiflores. She was on my other side on the FinnAir flight from London to Helsinki that was taking us to a writers’ conference. “You can’t be more depressed than the Uruguayans. We are famous all over South America for our melancholia.”

“But you at least have a reason in Uruguay,” the Finn argued. “Your politics, your economy, everything like that. While for us, so stable and well-off, it is the human condition in the morning when we wake up that hurts us.”

“It’s not just a hangover?” I asked, for I recalled that the Finns were serious drinkers. The pale man ignored me. “We’re depressed just to wake up and still be alive!” he said.

I got up to use the toilet, and when I returned Luisa had taken my middle seat and the two of them were relating stories of pathology and paralysis, phobia and frenzy, with voluptuous glee. Luisa turned to me only once during the rest of the flight. “But why have I not come to Finland before?” she demanded. “We are made for each other, me and the Finns!”

I’d once had a similar thought years ago, when I spent a weekend in Finland with a young translator I’d met at a conference in St. Petersburg. Helga, who had an arrestingly unpronounceable last name, had invited me back to her family’s cabin somewhere north of Helsinki. We ate grilled reindeer steak and potatoes with sour cream, washed down with vodka, and spent most of our time in the wood-fired sauna. Helga could stay in forever, but I was always having to dash out into the snowy drifts. Occasionally she ran out too; she had the longest legs I’d ever seen, and a jubilant laugh as she leapt into the snow. For a while afterward we’d written, but then I’d lost contact with her until a printed wedding announcement with no personal message came in the mail. That must have been eight years ago. I’d heard nothing of her until Luisa showed me the conference brochure. Helga was one of the main organizers.

It was long-legged Helga who was at the gate to meet us, tall as ever and even more beautiful, though far more subdued. She held out her hand to me, but her cool blue eyes betrayed nothing, even though she said formally, “Pleasant to see you again, Cassandra.”

“You already know each other?” asked Luisa.

“Another conference years ago,” murmured Helga. “In what was then Leningrad. We’ll have to catch up sometime. But now we have to hurry. We’ll be getting to your hotel just in time to catch a bus with the other participants for the place where your conference is being held. It’s by a lovely lake north of the city.”

This prestigious writers’ reunion had taken place every two years since the early sixties, when Finland had created it to establish dialogue between East and West. Once it had been famous for the drunken Russians speechifying about God and morality and their Western male counterparts trying to keep up with the toasts and saying that they wished someone in their country cared enough about
their
writing to put
them
in the Gulag. But with the end of the Cold War, the organizers had tried to bring in new blood. They cut back on the Bulgarians and invited the feminists, among them Luisa Montiflores and her translator (Luisa always asked for one, on principle, though her English, except in extreme moments, was quite good), Cassandra Reilly.

Luisa loved a junket, but she had another motive for wanting to attend. She knew that the Venezuelan writer Gloria de los Angeles had been invited to the conference two years before, and since then she herself had been angling for an invitation. Her rivalry with Gloria was ludicrous, given that the Venezuelan’s magic realism novels had sold in the millions in twenty languages, while Luisa had only been translated into French and English and languished on the backlists of prestigious and impecunious literary publishers. It is the contrary nature, however, of those who write hermetic texts that only postmodern scholars can fully decipher, to long for an enthusiastic public response at the same time as they take pride in their obscurity.

Whatever Gloria had, Luisa wanted, too, but she did not want to hear Gloria’s name mentioned, and it was like poison to her when Helga politely said to her in the taxi, “And do you know Gloria de los Angeles? She was here two years ago and made such a sensation. So elegant and witty and such an amazing writer. What a vivid imagination she has. I adore her books, don’t you?”

“Her books are shit,” said Luisa briefly, running an indifferent hand through her Romaine Brooks style black hair with the white streak in it. “Pots boiling, no more.”

Helga was taken aback, but realizing her gaffe—this was neutral Finland, after all—she said, “I certainly can agree with you about her last collection. It was so…predictable, really…it had nothing new to say. Not like your fiction, Luisa, which is so…challenging…”

And Luisa unbent slightly to say, “I will autograph my latest book for you.” Luisa pulled out a copy of
Saturn’s Children
. “Whom shall I inscribe it to?”

“To Helga…and Pekka,” Helga said, avoiding my eyes. “My husband is a literary critic and admires your work. He’ll be so pleased.”

The next morning I woke up in the hotel room I was sharing with Luisa to find light streaming across my face. It was only four a.m., however, and I had only gone to bed, in a pearly blue light, three hours ago. I stared out the window at the lake, which was shimmering brightly. Beside it on the shore was an old-fashioned wooden sauna, like Helga’s family’s.

At the cocktail party the night before, Helga had come in with her husband, this Pekka. He was certainly good-looking, in a sardonic way, but much shorter than she. His long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a white shirt and black jacket and black jeans. His English was pure SoHo-Manhattan. Helga kept him away from me, so I didn’t meet him, but she couldn’t keep him away from the rest of the women there, particularly if they were young or wearing décolleté. Helga had the choice of standing awkwardly by his side as he flirted, or removing herself to the other side of the room where, with some dignity, she could pretend to be involved in other conversations while watching him all the time. He didn’t care if she watched him. He smoked and he drank, quite a bit, and toward the end of the evening, he pawed. At one point I saw him stroking the round little posterior of a young Dutch writer, who was herself fairly inebriated. Her name tag said she was Marion van Gelder. She had bleached hair about a knuckle-length long and multiply-pierced ears. I thought I saw a contemptuous look in her eye, but she didn’t try to stop Pekka. Fortunately Helga seemed to have left by then.

In the morning light, I looked out at the lake; and I looked at Luisa, who, for all her much-publicized angst, had never enjoyed anything but a very good night’s sleep (“But my dreams! Absolutely nightmares. Every night, Cassandra.”), and who was snoring peacefully. Then I rooted around in my bag and found my notebook. “Finland,” I wrote. “Saunas. Reindeer steak. Depression. Midnight sun.”

I had another, unannounced reason for wanting to come to Finland. Luisa with her notions of high art, and her family’s wealth, would be surprised to find out that in spite of my best intentions, I occasionally thought about money, or my lack of it. The fact is that the career of literary translator into English isn’t especially lucrative. Very rarely do any of us manage a small percentage of the royalties; our fees are based on the number of words in a text. In many European countries, literary translation is a respected occupation that provides a steady income. My colleague in Germany, Marianne Schnackenbusch, for instance, constantly has work. But this isn’t true in the English-speaking world, at least as concerns literature. There is more work in technical areas, and I’d done plenty of it, but I found it mind-numbing in general.

Thus, I hadn’t been adverse to the suggestion made by an American journalist I’d met by chance in Romania a few years ago that we collaborate on a series of travel pieces. Or, as Mr. Archie Snapp wrote when he suggested the idea: “You do the leg work, Cass, and set the scene; I’ll rewrite for the public.” Archie’s public was primarily in the Midwest, beginning with his own local paper in Ann Arbor,
The Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner
, but we (he) had been successful in placing some of our pieces in larger newspapers on occasion.

In Archie’s hands, topics like “Revisiting the Paris of the Modernists” had become “Shakespeare and Co.—The Tradition Continues,” and my article on the archeological museum of Mexico City had turned into “From Olmec to Aztec, or How Hot Chocolate Was Invented.” I let Archie provide the titles and rewrite my sentences. And with no problem at all did I let him take the credit and the byline. All I did was provide him with three to five pages of notes and a few angles, and sometimes a roll of film. And I got half the check. Archie was honest as salt and very reliable. But so far I’d had more disillusion in Finland than inspiration. Every time I wrote
sauna
, I thought of Helga and her obvious unhappiness. I’m used to women lovers getting married; but I like them to marry nice men.

Besides, I wanted some coffee, and breakfast wasn’t until eight. I got back in bed with my notebook and soon was fast asleep again.

When I woke up next, it was ten o’clock and Luisa was gone. The first seminar must have already started. I rushed downstairs and ran into Helga, who was carrying a microphone and looking distracted.

“Listen Helga,” I said, “about this husband of yours,” but she rushed on, explaining, “I
told
the other organizers that the ‘Writer and Gender’ group would be the biggest, but they said only a few women would want to attend that, that everyone else would want to go to the ‘Writer and History’ and the ‘Writer and the Imagination.’ But the ‘Writer and Gender’ group overflowed the little balcony they assigned them, and we have had to put them under that oak tree. There are so many we need a microphone.”

I followed her across the lawn to a group of about thirty people, mostly women, sitting cross-legged in a circle. The discussion was in full swing:

“You can say that because you come from a country like Holland,” a woman whose name tag said she was Simone from Algeria was saying vehemently. “I tried to write about myself as a sexual being and what happens? I sell 60,000 copies of my book, but my publisher’s life is threatened, there is a public burning, and I end up having to live in Paris.”

“I know about notoriety and stigma,” the Dutch woman shot back. It was Marion, whom Pekka had flirted with so heavily. She was one of the youngest women there, in her late twenties, and this morning was wearing a skirt and a vest with nothing underneath. Several blue tattoos were visible. “The Dutch pride themselves on their tolerance about prostitution, but they didn’t want to hear the true story of my life as a fifteen-year-old call-girl to wealthy men. I too became famous, in the wrong way.”

Mayumi, a Japanese woman in her fifties, with a frizzy gray permanent and a no-nonsense air, spoke up. I recognized her as one of Japan’s best known writers. “What I wrote in the sixties was regarded as pornography, in the seventies as erotica, and in the eighties as literature. We must have faith in our literary intent, and in ourselves, no matter what they say about us.”

“The worst censorship,” Luisa said flatly, “is the censorship we perform on ourselves.” And she, normally so arrogant and convoluted when she spoke of her work, began to tell a simple and wrenching story about her mother finding her journal when she was fourteen, a journal where she’d written the story of falling in love with another girl.

When she lost her words in English, I took over for her. “That is when I first learned that writing is dangerous. After that I wrote my diary in code. I have written my novels that way too.”

The few men in the group had said little up to that point, but now one spoke. He was a tall Finn with little round glasses like John Lennon and floppy hair, younger than the woman he sat next to, who had been clenching her hands until they were almost white. “It is important to recognize that there are other ways to silence a woman writing about sexuality than banning her or her books, or threatening exposure or punishment. Ridicule is an effective silencer, too, and in a small country like Finland, which prides itself on equality, ridicule is perhaps the best weapon there is.”

This unleashed a torrent of stories from the Finnish women in the group. How for all the years that this conference had been going on, they had never been invited to speak or lead a group or participate fully. How the whole thing was controlled by a male literary Mafia who just thought of it as a place to get drunk and screw around and play soccer.