To the Hermitage (30 page)

A SMALL FINNISH INTERLUDE

Well now, all this takes us back a little, to the distant days you must also remember: days of social democracy and the dawning of the welfare state, when the charming word ‘Scandinavia’ aroused liberal images of democratic justice, social improvement and neat square furniture. The world was existentially divided into two polar opposites, East and West, and you were supposed to support one or the other. Travel was still exciting, and every single country you went to was different. They didn’t bother to check you out for weaponry at Heathrow. All British airline pilots were called Captain Strong, you travelled everywhere like a real gentleman, the gin served in the air did not come out of miniatures. Everywhere there was a whiff of spying. At this time I was a young writer, or just beginning to think about myself as one. I’d published enough and taught enough to be able to stick ‘teacher and writer’ onto my passport. On the other hand I was so splendidly unknown I was totally amazed if anyone recognized my name or recalled even a single word of the various books – the youthful first novel, the odd works of lit. crit., the volumes of humour and satire – I had managed to get into rather obscure print.

One day I heard I’d been awarded a striking literary honour. One of my books, my dear first novel, was to be translated into a foreign language: something that happened far less commonly then than it does now. On the other hand, the language it was to be translated into was Finnish, which meant the people who were so keen to read me lived in a part of the world I didn’t know at all. I wasn’t even sure whether Finland was in Europe, or just off the edge of it – a question that, I would later discover, the Finns were constantly asking of themselves. In fact at that time I think I knew only five simple facts about the Finns. They drank. They ski-jumped. They produced remarkable architects. They spoke an obscure agglutinative language strangely related to Hungarian which nobody else could understand, not even fellow Finns. And – how I loved them for this – they were a great nation of readers. Yes, they read books, amazing numbers of them, more books than any other people: quite possibly, though I didn’t quite realize this at the time, because in that land of vast forest, wide lakes, great deer ticks, huge mosquitoes, open and empty landscapes, deep and endless snow, a wintry universe of engrossed solitude where one person hardly ever spoke to another, there was very little else to do.

I imagined the Finns to be a thoughtful bespectacled people, ever in and out of libraries, constantly discussing the novels of Charles Dickens, the tales of Tolkein, modernist fragmentation in T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
. And then one day a letter came from my Finnish publisher (oh, what words!) with a striking invitation. He didn’t simply want to have my book translated; he hoped I would fly to Finland on his invitation, meet the press, be photographed with my translator, and then take a tour to the country talking to the various literary circles and reading groups that all spoke English and gathered, it seemed, in every little town and hamlet. I read the letter; and of course I said yes. Even back in those days whenever I was asked I always said yes.

So: the place was Finland, the month was February, the time was the early and innocent beginning of the sixties. Now, as I say, to me at that time Finland seemed distant, strange, remote, as far off as Mongolia, as politically obscure as Dubai. I knew really nothing about its history: except it lay on the topside of the Baltic, whose shores at one time or another seem to have been disputed by just about everybody; that it had suffered terribly under the Russian invasion during the Winter Ski-War; that it had since then stayed free of occupation from its predatory and expanding neighbour, though no doubt at a very high price. In political terms it looked like a land suspended in history, somehow tucked in a trap between East and West in a knife-edge deal that was actually known as Finlandization. For the Cold War, at this date, was extremely cold. In fact it was a prime period of nuclear anxiety. Stalin had gone, but the spy-planes swept the skies, erect missiles pointed their warheads in every direction, the crisis of global annihilation seemed to wait there just a few minutes away, and the Cuban crisis was just round the corner.

But the grim political weather that worried everyone seemed not a bit colder than the chill Nordic winter I encountered when I set off on what was to be my first real literary voyage. I crossed the North Sea from Britain in some old propeller aircraft, captained, of course, by Captain Strong. There was a refuelling stopover at Stockholm, I recall, and we were allowed off the plane to wander briefly around the endless pornography stalls before we rose up again and began to cross over these same troubled waters, the political seas of the Baltic. Russian warships ploughed these channels, western submarines slipped about underneath the ice, spies and refugees struggled to find information or refuge. Seen from my viewpoint, a dusty plane-seat, the Gulf of Finland was just one great frozen crust. Huge ice-breaker tugs were working the waters below me, carving narrow black shipping tracks through the massive white ice-cap. The plane signs came on. We flew lower and lower, beginning our descent over a landscape that, like the frozen sea, seemed entirely without colour: spiky whiteness, conifer forest everywhere, a world filled up with snowdrift.

To me, Helsinki’s tiny airport felt like a strangely obscure place. A long way away, it seemed, from any city, it was enfolded in that strange silence that somehow descends on a world of total snow. I took the slow-moving airport bus into the city, riding on ploughed-out and hard-crusted roads through thick forest, past sawmills, log yards, steaming wooden huts. When we reached the capital, Helsinki, also caught in snowfall, seemed weirdly silent too. The trams glided noiselessly along its boulevards, the cars moved without making a sound, the heating steam puffed silently from the city roofs. I found my way through freezing streets and squares to my hotel: a charming white establishment called the Hotel Gurki, which I later discovered had been used as Gestapo headquarters during the war. But that of course was twenty years before – in another time, when there were different enemies, different politics, different alliances and sympathies. It may even have had something to do with the air of comfort it offered the frozen travelling writer; my pleasant hotel was as crisply and self-consciously warm as the world outside felt cold.

I unpacked in a clean comfortable room, discovered the lift (it was called the HISSI), and went down to the lobby, where my foreign publishers had said they would come to collect me. I felt wonderfully content. To my own surprise, I was now the kind of person who had a foreign publisher, persons who would take my work to transmit it to an audience of whose nature I had absolutely no idea. To pass the time, I sat in a chair and picked up the local newspapers, provided on sticks for easy reading. Besides the fact that the pictures struck me as peculiarly bloody (horrific car crashes, people shot dead in the middle of the woods, or hanging from trees), I found myself staring at a language of total incomprehensibility. The nouns behaved like cancerous bodies, adding syllables with careless profusion; the verbs seemed missing. The vocabulary came from ancient word-stock carelessly thrown about as in some semantic accident. Everything was prolix, random, anarchically inventive, as if the whole language was still being made up. It seemed odd to think that my own writing, with its realistic statements and social observations, could be transmuted into this, or mean anything if it was.

I read for a while, then watched as some workmen struggled to release some guests – an American tourist in plaid pants, a weeping wife – from the Hissi.

‘My wife’s been stuck in there two hours,’ said the tourist.

‘Our Finnish Hissis are excellent,’ said the manager indignantly. ‘They are exported everywhere all over the world.’

‘Oh God, you mean I could end up in another one like that?’ asked the tourist, comforting his sobbing wife. ‘Why did we ever come to Europe?’

‘Finland is not Europe, Finland is only Finland,’ said the manager.

At this point two huge men, wearing great snow-dusted leather overcoats and vast fur hats, walked into the lobby and began looking dangerously around. They exactly resembled my idea of the Gestapo agents who had used these premises twenty years before. They went over to the desk. A moment later I heard them pronounce my name.

Then I understood. These tough guys weren’t agents at all. They were publishers, from the house that meant to publish my work. It was, I discovered when they came over and led me downstairs to the bar, one of the great Finnish houses, the house that over generations had published the major Finnish writers – Runeberg and Topelius, Kivi and the remarkable Lonnrot, without whom we would never have had the
Kalevala
, and therefore not Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
either. My hosts were hearty men (I have always found the Finns a warm people in a cold land) and great specialists in vodka: or rather in the amazing variety of vodkas on offer near the Arctic circle, each one of which they insisted I try. We went into the restaurant to continue the experiment over reindeer steak and whale meat. So the evening went on.

In answer to my questions, my excellent hosts told me all I wanted to know about Finland, a squeezed and flattened country that had been Swedish when it was not being Russian, and had scarcely ever been itself. They told me about the Great Wrath and the Little Wrath, the Swedish occupation, the Russian terror; about Mannerheim and their own Red Revolution, the Winter War and painful postwar loss of Karelia, the most beautiful Finnish lands of them all. They told me about life in a land of four-fifths forest, lake and tundra, about the sea, bears, wolves, trolls. For some reason just possibly to do with the unending supply of vodka, the information they gave me began to seem more and more obscure. When our meal was complete, and I had finally consumed a dessert of mysterious forest bilberries that made me feel even stranger than before, they took me upstairs again, and there introduced me to a waiting bevy of press photographers, who all took my photo for the morning papers. In Finland, they explained, it was considered extremely rude to photograph a writer when sober. Then, with the greatest kindness, considering the condition they were now in themselves, they got me into the Hissi and managed to find my room, which as far as I was concerned had quite unaccountably disappeared.

There, when I woke in the morning, it was, again, in far better condition than I was. I was in a neat modern bedroom with red iron bed, clear white curtains. A maid or warder of some kind was admitting herself into the room with a pass key, and handing me a tray with a green pot of coffee and the morning papers. On the front page of the
Sanomat
, a raddled, bloated, broken British writer, looking ninety years old at the very least, peered out over my name. The telephone rang and it turned out to be my hosts who were calling. They were waiting for me down in the lobby, feeling as fresh as daisies, ready to take me on the tour of Helsinki which I had apparently demanded of them the night before. They in big coats and furry hats, myself in a Burton’s shortie raincoat, we set off into the freeze. Sliding, slithering, slipping, I walked round a city like none I had ever been in: deep-locked in ice and snow, frozen in time and space. Great winds swept down wide boulevards. Long-trailered rattling trams carved their powdery way through streets that seemed far too full of snow to allow any traffic at all.

The city itself struck me as completely charming. It was at once the most imperial and the most colonial of capitals, equally western and Russian. There were big, bow-fronted, art nouveau apartment blocks, troll-covered residences from the Nordic Revival, square blocks of concrete modernism. Great Nordic architects had done their work here: a couple of Aaltos, a couple of Saarinens, the famous Jop Kaakinen. Most were in the modern manner, yet they were covered in the most obscure of signs. They said
RAVINTOLA
,
YLIOPPILASPALVELU
,
OOPPERA
,
MATKAILIJAYHDISTYS
,
ARVOPAPERIPORSSI
,
POSTIPANKKI
,
SUOMEN PANKKI
,
HAPPII HOTELLI
,
HANKKI PANKKI
. We arrived at the grand Senate Square, a fine spread surrounded by domed public buildings in the style of nineteenth-century classicism: Senate, White Lutheran Cathedral, the splendid high-stepped university. There amid them in the snow, covered in evergreen wreaths, was the statue of the one liberal Tzar, Alexander II, emancipator of the serfs, the man who had permitted the Finns to express their nationhood – until, as usual, he was assassinated.

So we went on, slipping and slithering, to the Baltic esplanade. Despite the frozen weather a flourishing market was working. Vast ships stood along the dockside, the Swedish ferries: not high-sided monsters like ours, but old steamers smoking like papermills. Out in the harbour of Sandviki the icebreakers pulsed, cutting the channel open with a cracking noise like thunder, carving the boatpath out past Suomenlinna. To one side was a Lutheran church, to the other a huge onion-domed mass, the Russian Orthodox Cathedral. Huge dirty buses marked Intourist were parked all round it, and people from seaside postcards, men in suits and medals, women with false blonde hair, vast in spotted dresses, were unloading and going inside. We went inside too, to see the black metropolitans, coroneted priests, the swinging censers, the flickering candles, the worshippers kissing the golden icons.

‘The Russians still come, then?’ I say.

‘Oh, yes,’ says my host, ‘we always expect them at any time.’

Finland’s winter days are very short, and very sweet. So somehow it was already the middle of the afternoon, and the light was rapidly darkening. In fact it was time to go and meet my Finnish translator at a famous writers’ café. We walked over to the place, somewhere near my hotel. I remember it was called the Kafé Kosmos. And, as soon as you lifted the heavy door curtain and felt the fug inside, you could sense it was exactly what it was. The walls were hung with prints, lithographs, photographs of the Finnish literary heroes: Runeberg, Topelius, Kivi, the great Lonnrot. The hot fuggy room was noisy, the tables were full. It then suddenly occurred to me (I was young then, remember) that never before had I ever seen so many writers at any one time, gathered in any one place. There they were, writers of every kind: male and female, fat and thin, young and old, well-dressed urban writers, fur-clad brutish peasant writers. Some had high intellectual brows, some had no brows at all. There were adult writers, children’s writers, writers of history or biography, writers of folk and fairy tale, writers of humour, writers of Gothic terror. There were realists, and there were modernists. Literary writers who had won great prizes, commercial writers who had won great advances. Poets and dramatists. Novelists and journalists. So many writers, and only one thing in common. The Kafé Kosmos was certainly not
alkoholfri
; every single one of them was drunk.