The Ice Museum (27 page)

‘This is me with my mother. Here I am three,' said Gunvor. ‘It is after the war.'

The girl with the child was trying to smile for the camera. She was a pretty girl with blonde hair, dressed smartly. She looked extremely young. It was a posed photograph, an act of defiance perhaps, when the authorities were trying to pretend the war children didn't exist. But perhaps I was reading too much into the motives of a young mother. She had loved her child, and wanted to have a photograph of her taken. Perhaps it was that simple.

‘It's a nice photograph,' I said, because I could think of nothing else to say, and Gunvor took the photograph back and put it carefully away again.

‘My neighbours bring their children home from school round about now,' she said. ‘And you know, they don't know about my past at all.'

‘Surely now it would be OK to tell them?'

‘Yes, perhaps,' she said. ‘But I came here so long ago, and I never told anyone. It would seem strange to tell them now. They would feel I had hidden it from them for so long. To a close friend, I might tell it, but I have never come to know my neighbours very well,' she said.

I imagined the loneliness of concealing the past from your neighbours, after all these years. Yet Gunvor insisted that she had been one of the lucky ones. She had ended up in a pleasant house, in a quiet northern town. It wasn't where she came from, she said, but she didn't want to name her hometown. ‘I would feel bad for the people who shunned us; I don't want to point a finger at them. They were just doing what everyone did at the time. It's a pressure, to be the same. There were people much worse off than me, I could tell you terrible stories. A friend I now know, another
krigsbarn
, he was in children's homes for all his life, he was never taught to read properly, he can't speak a word of English. He was bullied and maltreated. He worked as a janitor, and has lived in poverty. These people were failed by the system. They were innocent, they were only children, anyone should have pitied them, but the state hated them, thought they were tainted by their genes.'

For years after the war, the state failed to intervene in the guilty maltreatment of the
krigsbarn
, taking its lead from the medical establishment. In the haggard world after the war, children were blamed for the actions of the Nazis, for the actions of their parents. The children were punished by a society that could hardly bear to remember.

Later, I said goodbye to Gunvor as we stood in her hallway. She was used to people not liking her, she said, and it was always odd to meet new people. I had found I liked her a great deal, with her nervous hospitality, her cakes and coffee and her accelerated speech. I admired her for her lack of self-pity, even as I suspected that her briskness might be a veneer.

She shut the door, quite sharply, as if she was glad it was over.

 
 
At Kirkenes I had picked up a car, driving it out of the town through the green forests and silver lakes, along a silent road to the east. The rocks were stacked up along the road. Nothing moved on the ridges. I arrived without noticing it in Karasjok, a small village by the Finnish border. I stopped the car, slammed the door, and walked around, ducking into a supermarket where everyone was buying hats and gloves, because the wind was growing harsher and more persistent by the hour. When I walked, I noticed I was swaying slightly from the sea voyage. The wind was trying for an early winter, tugging the leaves from the trees, landing them in piles. The countryside lay ragged and beautiful around the village, with the sun shining in a pale sky. I arrived at a wooden building, like a pine palace. Planks of pine, drawn into a curved wall, with props of pine set between them. Everything smelt of pine; the palace seemed to be new.

I had arranged to meet Pal outside the palace, and he was waiting, a small man, wearing a bright red-and-blue tunic, with a multi-coloured hat, like a jester's. He had a sword tied to his belt.

‘We were never Aryans,' he was saying. ‘But our ancestors were in these regions for thousands of years, even before the Nordic tribes came, we think. Tacitus wrote about Fenni, but we think it was us all right. For a while the Scandinavian governments pretended we didn't exist, but they were so ashamed after the war, things got better for us.'

He rattled his belt, and for a moment I thought he might draw his sword, but he was looking for something else. He took out a key, and moved towards the pine door of the pine palace.

‘This,' he said, pushing the door open, with a flourish, ‘is the Parliament of the Sámi. You are more likely to have heard us called the Lapps, but we decided we didn't like that name.'

The entrance hall was full of lights and splashy paintings in bright colours hanging down the wooden walls. In glass cases they had stored a significant piece of fish skin, a significant piece of reindeer hide. There were rows of books and papers, and a few Sámi in bright tunics, sitting behind desks.

Pal offered a quick tour of the Parliament, taking in the president and a few other sights in the place. He had worked in the Parliament for a few years, he told me, since it was opened. The Parliament was made up of corridor after corridor of perfect pine, leading into large light meeting rooms, painted vivid colours. The Sámi, Pal was saying, were a quiet non-Aryan people, blanched out by the Nazis in their Nordic fetish. Blanched out by the Scandinavian governments for years. The Sámi, or people a little like the Sámi, Pal wasn't quite sure which, had appeared in ancient accounts, called the Wildlappmanni, Scrithifini, Scritobini, Screrefinni. They hunted through the forests and across the mountains. They appeared in early writings on the north, in Tacitus, in Procopius, later in the medieval clerics, who made up wild fantasies and entwined them with contemporary knowledge. They ate nothing but the flesh of animals, they couldn't sew, tying skins together with sinews. They slung their babies over the branches of trees, so the women could go to the hunt. These early Sámi were a curiosity for centuries, with their strange magic, something called gam, and their cloudy history, mixed up with fables and fantasies. Close to the land of the Scrithifini or the Scritobini, or the Finni, was an abyss of water, claimed the fanciful writers, called Ocean's navel, which twice a day sucked the waves down and spewed them out again. There were crazier rumours still, trickling through clerical pens, that the Scrithifini lived near to the women with beards, and the Amazons, and the Cynocephali, and the Cyclopes.

They had been ignored, said Pal, and suppressed for a while, by Scandinavian governments wound up on patriotic slogans. But they had a good claim to being the most ancient people in the north. ‘It's not a claim we'd make,' Pal was saying, ‘and anyway we don't believe in the ownership of land. Mother Earth cannot be owned by humans,' he said devoutly.

The Sámi never had a certain land; they hardly recognized the national borders of the countries they lived in. They had herded reindeer through generations around the northern reaches of Scandinavia. Lapland was a region in the north of Finland, but there was a larger region of Sámiland, real to the Sámi, stretching across the north of the Scandinavian countries, but hardly represented by lines and divisions on the maps. It was a land unacknowledged, an informal homeland for them.

The President appeared, a small man with dark hair holding his sword like a pen, and he said he had to rush to a meeting but he knew that the Sámi were the earliest inhabitants of the north, he was quite convinced, and though there was no such thing as membership of land it was unpleasant to be sitting in the Parliament with no power at all. They had no power, no money, said the President, they needed a lot more money, and significantly more power, and the pipelines and oil wells that everyone kept building in the northern regions were not his idea of a nature-friendly use of the land. In Western society, he said, everyone was always talking about development, about money, but the Sámi had a different sense of things.

‘You know,' he added, after a pause, ‘we are not bitter about the past.'

He looked frustrated, as he nodded sternly, bowing slightly, shuffling along the corridor to a meeting. He wouldn't say what it was about. ‘Business, business,' he said, clinking his sword against his belt buckle.

In the
Kalevala
, the Finnish epic, Northland, or Lapland, was a place of darkness and magic, a perilous place. The heroes Lemminkäinen, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen wander the north: god-heroes, reciting verses and having fights. They slide through the frost-covered lands in the far north; they move through the wilds, hearing the dogs barking and Lapland's children crying, and the women laughing. Lapland is a fabulous place in the poem—the barren lands, the unsown pastures, the battlefields, the rustling grasses, the vast oceans, the black mud of the seas, the smoking whirlpools, the rapids, the clouds and gales and wind-blasted lands. It is a place where there is no daylight through the winter, it is the dreary north, its shadows veiling the lives of the inhabitants.

In the
Kalevala
, Väinämöinen is taken on an eagle's back to the furthest north, to the dark lands of the Lapps. Troubled by the terrain, he lies by a stream crying, asking to go home. Louhi, the queen of the north, rows him to a strange cabin, where she says she will show him the way home if he makes something for Lapland, an object called the Sampo—a sort of grail. Väinämöinen promises to send Ilmarinen, the smith, to forge the Sampo.

Väinämöinen returns home, and asks the wind to carry Ilmarinen to the dark lands of the north. The smith lights his fire, makes his bellows, and sets up a forge. Ilmarinen produces the bizarre object, the Sampo, with a corn mill on one side, a salt mill on another, a money mill on another, and a gleaming bright lid. The queen of the north takes the Sampo into the rocky mountains of Lapland, and buries it. Meanwhile the rogue Lemminkäinen decides to travel to Lapland. He visits Kauppi the Lapp to get some skis, and goes sliding through the wilds, skiing across swamps and over the blackened hills. Trying to win the girl of the north, Louhi's daughter, Lemminkäinen is killed. His mother comes to find him, travelling through the swamps as a wolf, through the waters as an otter, pushing aside the rocks and the stumps, searching for her son. When she finds him, dead in the river, she sews him back together again.

The north has something in it of the Underworld; Tuoni's black river runs like the Styx. Louhi is an ancient hag of the north, controlling events with a malevolent will. But Lapland is also where the beautiful girl of the north lives, and after Lemminkäinen has failed, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen join the suitors' fray. She chooses Ilmarinen and prepares to leave the north, regretting the loss of her simple life, spent growing strawberries and flowers, eating butter and pork, leaving cares to the fir trees, to the birches on the heath.

Lemminkäinen, restored to life, kills the master of Lapland, and Lapland prepares for war. Fleeing from the armies, Lemminkäinen sets out by sea towards the north-west, but Louhi sends the Frost to follow him, and Lemminkäinen is forced to leave the ship and walk across the ice. Ilmarinen's wife, the girl of the north, is killed by a serf, and though Ilmarinen tries to console himself by forging a wife from gold, he fails. So he returns to Lapland, to ask for the other daughter of the north. He is refused, but he sees that the land is prosperous because of the Sampo, because it grinds things to eat, and things to sell and things to store at home. So Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen, with Lemminkäinen, decide to return to Lapland, to take the Sampo. The
Kalevala
culminates in a great war between Lapland and the animistic forces of Väinämöinen and his men. When Väinämöinen and his band claim the Sampo, Lapland becomes poor.

‘And the Lapps became poor,' said Pal, looking at his watch. ‘We lived in an uncertain land through the century, invaded and invaded again, its borders changing hands, from Finland to Germany to Russia, from Russia to Finland. We sat the century out, waiting for the wars to end.'

There was a strange atmosphere in their lush pine palace, a palace without any real power, because the Sámi were the dependents of Scandinavian governments, given a sort of guilt money, reparations for years of neglect. When I shook Pal's hand, and he unlocked the pine gates, gently pushing me back out into the windy street, I left feeling that some deep-lying dissatisfaction haunted the Sámi, some sense of ancient pride subjected to a continued humiliation. They told me they were poor people, living in countries they did not govern. About the important things, they said, they had no choice.

 
 
The Hyperboreans had escaped Nemesis, the Greeks wrote, but it was impossible to maintain the ideal of a remote north that escaped the ravages of the twentieth century. The white wilderness of Siberia became a place of prison camps and death; the white lands were spotted with the dark shapes of prisoners, dragged in chains. Nuclear submarines ploughed through the Arctic Ocean, conducting clandestine operations during the Cold War. Secret military bases were set up in Alaska, in Greenland, in Siberia. The Sámi had watched the Second World War, the German soldiers torching the towns. They had seen the official borders—lines which meant nothing to them, cutting through the lands they lived in—shifting throughout the centuries, as the regions fell under the sway of the Scandinavian monarchs, or the Russian tsars, later the Soviet Army, stamping through the north during the Second World War.

For a few moments, as the wind blasted across the hills and the evening fell, I thought I could go south. I could end there: it was a neat decline from ideal to disaster, from innocence to experience. It supplied the resounding note, the cymbal crash, with the explorers and Victorians coming on for a curtain-bow—the dream of Thule, bound into the polar craze in the late nineteenth century, savaged by 1945. I was gathering the Victorians, Burton, Tweedie and Trollope, the explorers, Nansen and Amundsen, into a choir, imagining them singing a mournful elegy, a lament to the lost ideal of Thule. Poor Thule, they were singing, sotto voce, ruined by the century, the perfect place, dragged into a terrible war. I found myself thinking of London, wondering if I should get back to my life in the city. It was late summer in London. The parks would still be green, the trees still decked with leaves. I could go back to the flat overlooking the Westway, and watch cars passing over the bridge, moving above the trees and houses. I could watch the streetlights turning orange in the early evening, and the neon strips flickering in kitchens below the Westway, walls vibrating to the rhythm of the cars passing overhead. I could return to the honest complexity of the city, a place where the present was raucous and the past was omnipresent. The city didn't feign a peacefulness it would fail to surrender. The city flaunted its antiquity, its violence and tragedy.