Kaputt (34 page)

Suppers at Fiskatorp, by the lakeside had begun,- suppers with the Romanian Minister, Noti Constantinidu and Madame Colette Constantinidu, with Count de Foxá, with Dinu Cantemir, Titu Michailescu, also the evening parties at the Spanish, Croatian and Hungarian legations. The long afternoons around the tables of the open-air café at the end of the Esplanade or at the Kämp Bar with Minister Rafael Hakkarainen and the musician Bengt von Törne had begun,- also the strolls along the Esplanade sidewalks under the green trees thronged with birds; also the long hours on the veranda of the Swedish Yachting Club, on the little island anchored in the middle of the harbor, where people watched the waves gliding like white lizards over the green water. The delightful week ends in the
stugas
{14}
on the lakeshores or on the seashores of the Barösund, in those villas that the French, ever boastful, call
châteaux
, and the Finns, ever modest, more simply call
stugas.

They are old country houses built of wood and stucco on neoclassical lines inspired by Engels—the Doric order of the portico covered by a slight green mold. The happy days in the villa the architect Saarinen, who designed the Parliament House in Helsinki, has built for himself on the islet of Bockholm in the middle of the Barösund—there at sunrise we went picking mushrooms among the silver birches and red pines, or else fishing between the islands of Svartö and Strömsö. At night one heard the sirens of the ships mooing plaintively through the mist and the seagulls shrieking harshly with childish voices.

The light days and the white nights of the Finnish summer had begun, and the hours in the front and communication trenches before Leningrad seemed endless. Under the night sun the vast gray city cast metallic reflections on the green background of woods, meadows and marshes. At times Leningrad seemed like a city of aluminum so deadened was its glow and so mellow; at times a city of steel, so cold and cruel its glow,- at other times the glow was so vivid and deep that the city seemed as if it was made of silver. On certain nights, gazing at it from the low hills of Beli Ostrov or from the edge of the Terioki woods, it really looked to me like a silver city etched on the delicate skyline by the burin of Fabergé, the last great silversmith of the St. Petersburg Court. The hours seemed endless to me in the front and communication trenches along the sea, facing the fortress of Kronstadt that rises from the waters of the Gulf of Finland among the Totlebens, the artificial steel and concrete islets that encirle it.

I could not sleep at night, and I roamed about the trenches with Svartström, lingering now and then by a loophole to look at the Leningrad parks and trees on the Vasilii Ostrov, beloved by Eugene Onegin and by Dostoevski's characters, or to gaze at the domes of the Kronstadt churches, at the red, green and blue lights of the aerials, the gray roofs of the arsenal or at the flashing glint of the Soviet fleet moored in the harbor in front of us, almost within arm's reach. It really seemed to me that by stretching my hand out toward the parapets of the Beli Ostrov and Terioki trenches, I could touch the Leningrad houses, topped by the dome of St. Isaac's, and the bastions of the Kronstadt fort, so transparent was the air during those white summer nights.

In the Raikkola forest along the shore of Lake Ladoga, I spent long hours in the front-line
korsus
listening to the Finnish officers talking about Colonel Merikallio's death—my friend Merikallio who, before dying, had asked his daughter to convey his last greetings to de Foxá, Michailescu and me. Or else I went to a
lottala
in the depth of the forest to drink raspberry sirup with the pale and silent
sissit
—the rangers with their sharp knives hanging from their belts, under the distant and attentive eyes of the young
lottas
dressed in gray linen, their sad faces resting lightly on white collars. Toward evening I walked down with Svartström to Lake Ladoga and we spent long hours sitting on the shore of a small bay where, during the winter, the heads of the horses gripped by the ice had emerged above the glistening crust of ice, and where a little of their jaded odor still lingered in the damp air of the night.

After I left the front and returned to Helsinki, de Foxá would say to me: "Tonight we will go to have a drink in the cemetery." One night, after leaving Titu Michailescu's house we walked to the old Swedish churchyard that has remained unscathed though it was in the heart of Helsinki between the Boulevardi and the Georgkatu. We sat on a bench that stood by the tomb of a certain Sierk. De Foxá drew a bottle of Bordsbrännvin from his pocket and, while we drank, we argued the relative merits of several Finnish brandies—whether Bordsbrännvin, Pommeransbrännvin, Erikoisbrännvin or Rajamaribrännvin was best. In that romantic churchyard the tombstones stand in the grass like the backs of armchairs,- they really seem to be old armchairs ranged on a stage with a wood for a backdrop. Under the large trees shadowy soldiers sat motionless and dismal on the benches. The high trees with their tender green foliage, the blue reflection of the sea trembling on their leaves, rustled sweetly.

Toward dawn de Foxá glanced around suspiciously and asked me softly, "Have you heard the talk about the ghost of Kalevala Street?" He was afraid of ghosts and insisted that the time for them in Finland was the summer. "I would like to see a ghost, a real ghost," he said in a low voice and he shook with fear, glancing suspiciously around. As we came out of the churchyard and passed the Kalevala monument, de Foxá closed his eyes and turned his head away so he would not see the ghostly statues of the Kalevala heroes.

One evening we went to see the ghost that appeared every night, punctually at the same time, on the threshold of a house at the end of Kalevala Street. It was not so much his childish fear of apparitions that drew my friend de Foxá to that squalid street, as his morbid curiosity to see a ghost not in nocturnal darkness, the traditional setting for ghosts, but in the full glare of the sun, in the dazzling light of a Finnish summer night. For some days all the Helsinki papers had been talking about the ghost of Kalevala Street. Every evening close to midnight, the elevator in a house at the harbor end of the street started suddenly by itself, went up to the top floor, halted and, after a brief pause, came quickly and noiselessly down again; the door of the elevator was opened with a gentle sound; then the handle on the outside door turned a little and a woman stood on the threshold—a pale, silent woman who gazed for a long time at the small crowd gathered on the opposite sidewalk; she withdrew quietly, closing the door very slowly; shortly afterward the sound of the elevator door was heard followed by a noise of the elevator as it went quickly and quietly up the steel shaft.

De Foxá walked cautiously, taking hold of my arm from time to time. Our figures seemed ghostlike in the reflection of the shop windows,- our faces had the white glitter of wax. A few minutes before midnight we stood opposite the ghost's house in the weird glare of the nocturnal sun. It was a new house, built on the most modern lines and glistened with light paint, glass and chromium steel. The roof bristled with radio aerials. On the jamb—it was one of those doors that can be opened from the inside of each flat by pressing a button—was an aluminum plate with a double row of black, metal bell-buttons and, in a double column a list of names of the tenants. Beneath the aluminum plate gaped the mouth of a speaking tube with its nickel-plated lips by means of which every tenant could speak with his visitors before admitting them. To the right of the door was the window of an Elanto department store in which canned fish was displayed—two very green fishes standing out on a pink label evoked an abstract world of symbols and ghostly signs; a combined barber shop and beauty parlor was on the left with the inscription
Parturi-Kampaamo
painted in yellow on a pale blue background; a waxen female bust, two or three empty bottles and two celluloid combs glistened in the window.

Kalevala Street is narrow and the front of the house when seen from below, appeared to be off balance, as if it were suspended dangerously over the little throng that had gathered on the opposite sidewalk. It was a most modern house, built with great lavishness. The radio aerials bristling on the roof, the bare, smooth, white front in which the countless glass sockets of windows mirrored a clear night sky, with a frosty aluminum glint, made an ideal setting not for one of those lugubrious nocturnal ghosts, horrible and pitiful with livid and fleshless faces, that, wrapped in chilly shrouds, exhale a tainted odor of tombs in the ancient streets of Europe, but for a most up-to-date ghost such as would be evoked by Corbusier architecture, Braque and Salvador Dali paintings and Hindemith and Honegger music—for one of those streamlined, nickel-plated ghosts that appear on the funereal threshold of the Empire State Building, on the lofty pediment of Rockefeller Center, on the deck of a luxury liner or in the cold bluish light of a central power station.

A small crowd waited silently before the ghost's house—people belonging to the working and middle classes, several sailors, two soldiers and a group of girls in Lottasvärd uniforms. Now and again a streetcar passed along a near-by street and made the walls shake and the windowpanes tinkle. A bicycle dashed around the corner, rushed by us, and for a few moments the rustle of tires on the damp asphalt lingered in the air. Something invisible seemed to pass before our eyes. De Foxá was extremely pale. He stared at the house with a greedy look, pressing my arm, and I felt him trembling with fear and impatience.

Suddenly we heard the elevator start—a slight, prolonged hum; then came the sound of the elevator door opening and shutting up on the top floor—the hum of the descending cage. All at once the door of the house opened and a woman stood on the threshold. A tiny, middle-aged woman dressed in gray, with a black felt hat—it may have been made of black paper—balanced on her blond hair streaked with silver. Her very light eyes made two dull blotches on the pale lean face with its high cheekbones. Her hands were concealed in a pair of green gloves. Her arms hung at her sides, and those green hands against the grayness of the skirt seemed like two withered leaves. She stopped on the threshold, gazing at each of the inquisitive onlookers gathered on the opposite sidewalk. Her eyelids were white, her stare lifeless. Then she turned her eyes to the sky and slowly raised one of her hands; she rested it against her forehead to screen her eyes from the sharp glare of the light. She scrutinized the sky for several moments, lowered her head, let her hand drop by her side and fixed her glance on the crowd that watched her with a cold, almost evil attention. Then the woman withdrew and closed the door. We heard the elevator start with a slight, prolonged hum. Holding our breath, we kept on listening for the sound of the elevator door up there, on the top floor. The hum ascended, growing more distant, and faded away. It seemed as if the elevator had melted into the air, or that it had pierced the roof and risen to the sky. The crowd raised their eyes peering into the clear sky. De Foxá pressed my arm hard; I felt that he was shaking from head to foot. "Let's go," I said to him. We moved off on tiptoe, gliding through the stupefied crowd absorbed in watching a small white cloud high up above the roofs. We walked the length of Kalevala Street and entered the ancient Swedish churchyard, where we sat on the bench next to Sierk's tomb.

"It was not a ghost," said de Foxá after a long silence. "We, ourselves, were the ghosts. Did you notice how she looked at us? She was afraid of us."

"It was a modern ghost," I replied, "a northern ghost."

"Yes indeed," said de Foxá laughing, "modern ghosts go up and down in elevators." He laughed nervously to disguise his childish fear. Then we left the churchyard; we walked down the Boulevardi and crossed Mannerheim Street back of the Swedish Theater. Men and women were stretched on the grass under the trees of the Esplanade and were offering their faces to the white, nocturnal light. During the "white nights" of summertime the people of the North are a prey to a queer restlessness, to a kind of cold fever. They spend the nights walking by the sea, or they stretch out on the grass in the public gardens, or they sit on the benches by the harbor. Later they walk home skirting the walls, their faces turned upward. They sleep only a few hours lying naked on their beds, bathed in the cold glare that penetrates through the wide-open windows. They lie naked in the nocturnal sun as if under a sun lamp. Through their open windows they can see moving through the glassy air, the ghosts of houses, of trees and of the sailing boats rocking in the harbor.

We had gathered in the dining room of the Spanish Legation around the massive mahogany table supported by four huge legs resembling elephant feet and laden with glass and old Spanish silver. The tapestries of red brocade hanging on the walls, the dark squat furniture carved with figures of dancing children, with festoons of fruit and game and with heavy-breasted caryatids—that Spanish interior so sensuous and so funereal, contrasted oddly with the white dazzle of the nocturnal light coming through the open window. The men in evening dress and the bejeweled women in low-cut dresses around that massive table with elephant feet sticking out between silk skirts and black trousers, in the gloomy red glow of brocade and in the dull glint of the silver, had a funereal appearance under the constant stare of the portraits of Spanish kings and grandees hung on the walls with thick cords of twisted silk. A golden crucifix hung over the sideboard, and Christ's feet touched the necks of champagne bottles sunk in buckets of ice. They looked like paintings by Lucas Cranach; the flesh seemed livid and worn, the eyes circled with blue, the brows pale and hot; a greenish, cadaverous hue spread over every face. The guests sat with staring, wide-open eyes. The breath of the nocturnal day dimmed the windowpanes.

Midnight was approaching and the sunset glow was reddening the treetops in Brunnsparken. It was cold. I looked at the bare shoulders of Anita Bengenström, the daughter of the Finnish Minister in Paris, and I remembered that I was leaving next day with de Foxá and Michailescu for Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle. Summer was already far advanced. We would reach Lapland too late for the best salmon fishing. The Turkish Minister, Agah Aksel, remarked with a laugh that being late is one of the many pleasures of a diplomatic life. He told us that when Paul Morand was appointed Secretary of the French Embassy in London, Ambassador Cambon, who knew Paul Morand's reputation for laziness, at once said to him: "My dear fellow, come to the office whenever you please, but not later." Agah Aksel sat facing the window; his face was copper-colored, his white hair encased his brow like the silver frame of an icon. He was short and stocky and moved cautiously. He always seemed to be looking around with suspicion. "
C'est un jeune Turc qui adore le Konia,"
said de Foxá about him. "Ah, you are a young Turk then?" asked Anita Bengenström. "Alas, I was much more of a Turk when I was younger," replied Agah Aksel.