The Rhythm of Memory (40 page)

In the past, Kaija had always resisted. Her mother was dead and her father and brothers were but strangers to her. After her Swedish father had retrieved her, she had sworn that she would never return to the country she believed had abandoned her.

But with only a few months left to his life, Samuel found himself growing more persistent. “We’ll take Sabine. She’s a teenager now and should see it,” he told Kaija. Only three years before, they had gone as a family to Paris, where his family had come from, and now he was insistent that they do the same with Kaija’s homeland. “Children should know where their roots are,” he told his wife. “And for you,” he told her firmly, “it’s important that you return.”

“None of this should be about me, Samuel,” she said.

He smiled at her, his lips cracked like old parchment. “It’s not, Kaija. This is about
us
.”

She cried in his slender arms. He smelled strange to her now. He had only recently begun using cologne. It was his futile attempt to mask the feral smell of the illness leaking from his pores.

Kaija noticed his eyes were now rimmed in pink, like a newborn baby’s, and remembered how Sabine had looked when she’d first held her in her arms. Her small head covered in soft, downy fuzz, her lids swollen and finely veined. How odd, Kaija thought, that sickness could reduce a grown man to the image of a child. When she looked at her husband now, swaddled in layers of cotton, with his shrunken, yellow head and swollen eyes, she felt, in a way, that she was seeing him as her baby.

In other moments, he reminded his wife that he was still very much a man. He did not want to be coddled. He did not want to be pitied. “There are things that I want to do,” he had insisted. “I want to eat oysters from Brittany. The big blue-gray ones that I ate as a little boy in Paris. I want to taste the salt water as I suck them from the shell.”

“We can do that, darling,” Kaija promised through her tears.

“And I want to go to Finland with you,” he said again. “I want to dance in the midsummer sun when it’s midnight and the sky is white with light.”

“Of course.” She squeezed his fingers tightly.

“And I want to go to your childhood home and see where you were born. I want to go to the church where your mother is buried. Most of all, I want
you
to make peace with her memory. It’s important, Kaija.”

She looked at him in bewilderment. “Samuel, I made my peace a long time ago when you and I started our own family.”

“That’s not making peace, Kaija. That’s starting over.”

“You and Sabine are my family. Anybody still there is a stranger to me.”

“We will go together. The three of us. I know that if I don’t insist now, you’ll never go.”

“I will, Samuel. I promise you.” Her green eyes were now clouded with tears.

“No, I want to be there. I want to be the one who supports you as you finally visit your parents’ graves.” He paused. “Also, I don’t want you to go to a cemetery and think of me. Not yet.”

“Oh, Samuel,” she cried as she slid lower in his arms. “Why is this happening to us? Why? Why? Why is God doing this to us?”

He smoothed her blond hair with his palm. She had always seemed so fragile to him. Even with his sickness, he imagined himself far stronger than she.

“We will always be there for each other, my love. I promise.” He paused. “For now, we should just concentrate on living the months ahead.”

In June, they traveled by train to Stockholm, then ferried by boat to Finland. Samuel was frail from his loss of appetite. His spartan limbs were wrapped in two layers of sweaters, despite the summer heat. A loden-green muffler enshrouded his head.

“I don’t even remember the way to my home,” she told him.

“Don’t worry, Kaija,” he told her, as his thin fingers stretched out and found their way into hers. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

The three of them spent two days sightseeing in Helsinki before boarding a train to Karelia. “I wonder if the station in Mikkeli will be as I remember it,” Kaija mused aloud. “Pale green with white trim, the old iron clock by the ticket window. I can see it so vividly…”

Stepping off the platform, Kaija felt as though she were again that young Finnish war child. She remembered the pale blue coat she had worn when she was greeted by a woman from the Red Cross and ushered to her family.

The skeletons of the city’s wartime past remained. The proud statue of General Mannerheim. The memorial to the lost soldiers. The freight trains that had ferried ammunition to the front to fight the Russians, were those originals or replicas? Kaija wondered of the brown trains that still crowded the rail yard.

“My family lived farther out,” she recalled as she turned to Sabine and smiled at Samuel.

“Should we ask at the town hall for an exact address, or a map, maybe?” Sabine asked her mother.

“There wouldn’t be a street address.” Kaija laughed. “We lived in the forest, sweetheart. I don’t remember exactly where. But, if we follow the tracks, I know it will lead us there, eventually.”

“Daddy will be too weak,” Sabine whispered to her mother as Samuel looked on.

“Yes, I know.”

“We could rent bicycles, though, and follow them that way. Perhaps the store has two-seaters, and Daddy could sit while I pedal.”

Sabine went into the station and inquired where they might find some bikes.

The two women pedaled alongside the tracks, Samuel seated behind his daughter, who was carrying him as if he were a bushel of bruised fruit. His feet rested on his pedals as they rode past Lake Saimaa, the river, and into the leaf-studded forest. Nearly two
hours later, Kaija took her feet off the pedals and stared, almost transfixed, at an expanse of trees. “It was in there! That’s it! I remember it! Our house was over there!”

They parked their bicycles and walked over the soft earth, the summer bees flying in the bushes of wild lavender and lupine.

Kaija could see the house in the distance. A long, symmetrical cabin with timber walls and a mud roof covered with straw. There was nothing distinctive about the outside facade save for three long windows with pale beige frames accented with tiny crosses.

She stood there, separated from it by several meters, for what seemed like hours. Throughout the entire journey from Vesterås, Kaija had convinced herself that she would not remember a thing, that she had been too small when she’d left.

But the memories of that seven-year-old girl returning for the first time from a life of privilege in Sweden came flooding back to her. And, to her surprise, this mature woman of forty-five was now thinking the same thing she had as a small girl stepping out from her father’s wagon. That this was a place of deep, heart-wrenching poverty, where the forest merged with the end of the world. Where the tall leafy junipers and pine, and the slender white birches, sheltered a strong, proud people who had little but one another, the lakes, and the snow.

Both Kaija’s frail husband and her daughter were beside her now. And like reverent pilgrims, they followed Kaija as she made her way to the dilapidated house.

The summer sun struck the modest shelter with warm, canary light that illuminated the overgrown wild poppies, tarflower, and pink clover in a halo of gold.

“Can you smell the flowers, Kaija?” Samuel asked, his voice pained, as he fumbled through his breast pocket to find his flask of liquid morphine. “They smell so wonderful.”

Kaija turned back to face Samuel and saw his jaundiced, jawlined face tightening in a smile. She went over to him and slid her arm into his, noticing how much more slender his limb was than hers.

She patted his brown-spotted hand with her own and agreed with him. “Yes, Samuel, they smell sublime.”

Inside, the house was far from idyllic. Years of neglect had left it with holes between the rafters and rain-soaked floorboards. One could still see the traces of its former occupants’ lives in the ruin of abandonment. One or two chipped ceramic bowls, a birchwood basket, a few spatulas, and scattered empty tins lined the rough cabinetry.

The windowpanes were broken. The lace curtains—probably forty years old—were now tattered shreds, fragile strips covered in ash.

“They must have abandoned it years ago,” Kaija said. She didn’t want to think that her father must be dead and buried alongside the grave of her mother. As for her brothers, she knew Viktor had died, but she hadn’t heard from Olavi or Arvo once she’d returned to Sweden for good.

“My brothers and father slept in this room, near the fireplace,” she said as a few rusty nails and broken twigs crushed underneath her feet. She pointed to the large wooden bed and the image of the boys sleeping together, with each of their backs curling into the other’s, came flooding back to her. “I slept in the room behind, alone.”

Kaija walked slowly through the space, and more memories returned to her.

“I suppose that it was kind of them to let me have my own room. I never appreciated it then. I only felt lonely.”

“But it was so hard for you, Mother.”

“And it was hard for them. Here, I was this little chubby girl returning from a life that had known no hardship during the war.” Kaija paused. “My poor brothers. No wonder they were so cruel to me.”

Samuel placed his hand on one of the doorposts to steady himself and readjusted his scarf. In the midsummer sunlight that streamed through the broken glass, he looked like an ascetic who had just walked in from a long pilgrimage.

“I see where your love of the forest and lakes comes from,” he said to Kaija before turning to gaze at the view outside the window. Hundreds of square meters of blooming flowers and tall, lush trees surrounded the tiny house. He wondered what it might look like in the snow.

Samuel grew slightly melancholy realizing he would never see this landscape in another season. He wanted once more to be the father who rode through the streets of Vesterås with his little girl strapped to the backseat of his bicycle, not the other way around. He wanted to again be able to love Kaija as he had that first year in Göteborg, with that same virility, and the same mad recklessness that had led them to the balcony of his tiny apartment with hungry passion. But he also realized that he needed to accept that there was still so much beauty around him. He did not want to spend his last days regretting what he would never have.

“You look tired, Daddy,” Sabine said, her voice interrupting him from his thoughts. “We should head back to the inn.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “But only if your mother is ready.”

They did not want to rush Kaija, who now stood in the center of the tiny, two-room house where she believed she had been born. Kaija imagined her mother giving birth in the sparse, wooden bed and holding her for the first time.

She had no idea that she had been born on the very lake that made her heart still soar. She had no idea that her mother had cried nearly every night after Kaija was first taken, or that her mother’s young life had ended at the very place where her own had begun.

M
IKKELI
, F
INLAND

J
UNE
1985

The old church’s copper cupola looked like a green cabochon, cut against the blue Finnish sky. Kaija did not want to go to the cemetery, but she did it anyway for Samuel’s sake. By this point, if Samuel wanted to trek across the Arctic, she would have agreed, no matter how implausible it seemed for a man in his condition. She wanted no regrets for him or her; she finally understood what her husband had tried to convey to her. He had a few more things left to do on this earth, including making sure that she was taken care of, both physically and emotionally, after he was gone. If he believed visiting her mother’s grave would begin her healing, she would follow.

The cemetery was fastidiously maintained, which surprised Kaija at first because she wondered where all the people lived now. She thought of these proud people who had fought for their independence on skis, clad in white uniforms that blended in with the snow.

The small wooden church with the domed peak recalled the architecture of a Russian church. She knew her parents were Russian Orthodox because she remembered the tiny relic by her brothers’ bed. And she knew this was the church where they had held
her mother’s funeral because her father had pointed it out to her the first day she was returned in the winter of 1948.

The cemetery was completely full. Rows of iron crosses lined the grassy hill. Red flowers marked the graves of lost soldiers. Kaija began to walk through the cemetery. She leaned down over each plot to read the names on the graves, wondering if she would eventually stumble on one that read
Sirka Laakso
and, if she did, whether there would be an adjoining one inscribed with the name
Toivo Laakso
.

It was Samuel who finally found the names for her. He had walked only a few meters before discovering both of their iron crosses, rusted over from the years of rain and snow. But what he had not expected to find were the two other names beside the graves of Kaija’s mother and father, Viktor and Olavi Laakso, Kaija’s two brothers.

“Have you found them?” Kaija called out to him, the hem of her red dress billowing in the wind.