Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism Read online

  The rain, once my own umbrella was in hand, ceased to fall. Perhaps it had been all in my mind.

  Back in the hotel room, a newspaperwoman called, asking for an interview, and this, too, like shopping, was familiar, friendly territory. I swapped an interview for a ride to Retretti, the partially subterranean art center twenty-three kilometres away. Vast underground caverns had been supposedly blasted out of the bedrock by a young entrepreneur, Pekka Hyvärinen, to serve as art galleries, a concert hall, a restaurant, and a nightclub; but it was hard for me to believe that the caves hadn’t been already there, carved for some more governmental purpose like the storage of armaments or of nuclear wastes. But no Finn I talked to admitted that this was the case. Finns seem to cherish the aesthetic uses of dynamite: one of the few sights I was taken to in Helsinki was the Temppeliaukio Church, a large round church blasted out of rock in 1969, with a skyey roof suggesting a hovering spaceship. In the towering, dripping Retretti caves, chunks and hardened puddles of glass, by Timo Sarpaneva, were displayed. I ascended from this mineral world into miles of surreal art—Belgian, Austrian, Romanian—hung in a huge shed. Surrealism, I began to feel, had only two ideas, blasphemy and pornography. Outdoors, lumps of cracked stone and grassed-over earth, by Olavi Lanu, defied recognition as sculptures.

  Retretti boasts of being the largest art center in Finland, and it was certainly too large for me. Not many miles away, at Kerimäki, stands the largest wooden church in the world. I did not visit it. I did visit, however, in Helsinki, what was alleged to be the largest bookstore in Europe, the Akateeminen Kirjakauppa. This yen for largeness may be a mark of young countries; Finland achieved national independence only in 1917. I was assured that other countries consider it “the America of Europe.” I suppressed my incredulity: the Minnesota of Europe, at most. But the Finns are proud of the independence they managed to salvage from two world wars fought on the losing side, and of the enterprise that has enabled them to exploit to their economic advantage their potentially oppressive closeness to Russia. More than once, I heard the joke that Finland treats the Soviet Union as its colony—importing raw materials (oil and natural gas, above all) and exporting manufactured goods. But the Soviets, I was also told, are beginning to want not Finnish shoes but Italian shoes, and the Finns must improve their trade relations with Western Europe in order to preserve the prosperity that their endless forests and special Russian connection have given them since the war. They hope, specifically, that the Soviets will build a highway south from Leningrad to Poland, which would enable the Finns to drive their cars and trucks into Europe instead of, as now, shipping them by ferry across the Baltic to Sweden, driving down through Sweden, and ferrying them again to the European mainland.

  Helsinki is a handsome city—not playful like Copenhagen, or elegant like Stockholm, or crabbedly picturesque like Oslo, but with a certain somber massy grandeur in its center and a fragrant woodsy looseness in its parks and suburbs. I was taken to one of its four “tourist islands,” Seurasaari, where antique buildings from all over Finland have been assembled, so that one can experience the space and the furniture and even the aromas of a village parsonage, a sod-roofed hut from Lapland, and a low-ceilinged farmhouse from the time of Napoleon. It was Napoleon who, to bring pressure on Sweden, persuaded the Czar to annex Finland. Down near the South Harbor stand the prodigious Russian Orthodox Cathedral and, at the top of the St. Petersburg-like Senate Square, the pale-gray Lutheran Cathedral. Though raised as a Lutheran, I had never seen a Lutheran cathedral before, and was charmed by the unexpectedly austere and symmetrical interior—its bare walls, its box pews, and its square nave, which had at its four corners, counterclockwise, a cylindrical marble pulpit and statues respectively of Melanchthon, Luther, and Michael Agricola, whose translations from the Bible created literary Finnish much as Luther’s Bible established written German. Senate Square, rimmed by Italianate Empire façades housing government, university, and police offices, has in its center one of the few statues of a czar left standing anywhere in the world—of Alexander II, whose government granted Finland, organized as a grand duchy with its own language and institutions, more autonomy than had the Swedes. When, in 1917, the czarist regime in Russia collapsed, the Finnish Parliament declared first limited, and then total independence. In the course of a brief but bloody civil war between Reds and Whites, the Germans came in to help drive the Russians out. After the Winter War, Finland was dragged into World War II as a reluctant co-belligerent with the Germans; in 1944, as part of the terms of their separate truce with the Russians, the Finns were compelled to drive the Germans out, and they did, up through Lapland into Nazi-occupied Norway. Such are the shifts of keeping intact a small nation among mighty ones. As part of the price of their peace with the Soviet Union, the Finns paid immense reparations and ceded the long-disputed Karelian region west and north of Lake Ladoga, which meant that one in ten Finns had to be relocated, and that the homeland of the Finnish epic the Kalevala was lost.

  It is a fashion, now, in Scandinavian countries for blond girls to dye their hair shoe-polish black, and to dress in black jumpsuits, so they suggest a race of lissome trolls. Punk goes well with the mischievous Finnish looks. The English language sweeps in all day long, as English and American rock throbs over the radio and from restaurant walls, and as American television serials play, with subtitles, on state-run Finnish television. Whatever the makers of Dallas and Dynasty and Falcon Crest intended, it was probably not to give English lessons to millions of European children. This is, however, what such programs do. With a Swedish-speaking minority of about six percent, Finland is officially a bilingual country, and has signs in two languages, as Canada does; yet in its schools English has thumpingly replaced Swedish as the second language of choice. My publisher, Matti Snell, who knows Swedish as well as English and Russian and French and German, lamented to me that younger Finns can talk to the Swedes in English only, and that Finland is generally losing its old cultural contacts with the Continent, as the electronic winds blow in from London and Los Angeles. Three-quarters of the books used by college students are in the English language, and four-fifths of all works translated are American or English titles. American-style football, even, has caught on here, and the Finns were hosts of the European championships at the time of my five-day visit.

  On my last night, I was free in Helsinki, and took a looping trolley-car ride that my guidebook had recommended, promising that it would return me to where I began. In my Finnish hat I sat disguised as a workaday passenger and let the city glide by. Some of the neighborhoods looked rather sullen, architecturally, but none of them looked poor, and there were streets that still had wooden houses, in the complicated gabled style. The trolley passed the stadium for the 1952 Olympic games, its entrance marked by a quite naked statue of the other Finn (besides Sibelius) who won global name-recognition, the great runner Paavo Nurmi. I had read in my guidebooks about Finnish drunkenness but in fact had seen only sobriety, and been sober myself. Ordering mineral water (kivennäisvesi) is easier than in America, where the waiters sometimes refuse to believe their ears and generally condescend to you as a party poop. In Europe, water, internally and externally applied, has an honored place in ancient health regimens linked to witchcraft and miracle-cures. But onto the trolley car unsteadily climbed a number of men who, in response to the white summer nights or the gray winter days, to Russian fallout or American popular culture, were still self-administering the alcohol-cure, and who sat with the uncanny stillness of those who, like pregnant women, are holding a wondrous world inside themselves. A dating couple side by side across the aisle, in a fine sweat already, took alternating pulls at a beer bottle, and the girl began to roll a mysterious cigarette while still on the tram. ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, said the marquee of the Svenska Teatern, the Swedish Theatre. On the façade of the railroad terminal four stone giants held globular lamps in two stone hands each. I was back in the middle of town.

  Almost at home in Helsinki, I went, at l
ast, to the Clock hamburger-restaurant and, surrounded by denim-clad patrons less than half my age, watched Finland get beaten by West Germany in American-style football. It looked much like the real thing, even to zoom shots of the frowning Finnish coaches, both black Americans; but the European players had a disconcerting way of carrying the ball in two hands, like the statues on the railroad terminal, and swinging it daintily back and forth as they ran. They seemed lighter and bouncier than their American counterparts, so that long unimpeded runs occurred, on a somehow more spacious field. They hadn’t yet learned how to invest the game with our lumbering, obstructive passion.

  I had been warned that the Finns put ground-up fish in their hamburgers, but mine, under its burden of obligatory condiments, tasted remarkably like those being served up four thousand miles away. The planet Earth is like our allotted span of life—ample but finite. Seven continents, seven decades. As a child, I used to wonder whether or not I would live to the year 2000. It seemed incredibly far away. Now, here in Finland, I sat gray-haired among unintelligibly chatting teen-agers who had every expectation of entering the twenty-first century. I was happy in their company. The two national treats tourists are expected to savor—taking a sauna and eating reindeer meat—I had managed to avoid, but I had survived my nights in hotel rooms, and I had brought sunlight to this waterlogged land by the simple act of buying an umbrella. I had seen the lakes and forests. I had filled in another blank space in the coloring book of the world.

  1987

  THE PARADE

  I HAD NOT EXPECTED the parade to be such agony. At the pace of a constrained walk, it threaded back and forth through the neat brick blocks of Hayesville’s square mile. I was reminded of those mazelike mathematical puzzles that call for connection of all possible dots of a set. There was scarcely a block we did not crawl past, the fire sirens up ahead wailing as if in attendance upon some peculiarly static disaster. The borough was celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its incorporation; I, as a prominent former resident, had been invited, by mimeographed form letter, to ride in one of the limousines. I had been a fool to accept.

  In what way prominent? In alien cities and universities, where the dialect spoken would be unintelligible in Hayesville, I have scaled certain immaterial heights, with no company save the icy winds of truth and the whispering voices of the mighty dead. For twenty years my achievements were obscure, buried in technical journals; in the last decade the medium of the television talk show, in which I proved to have a certain aptitude—provocative yet genial, relaxed yet not at the sacrifice of accuracy or intellectual passion—has given me a celebrity which I welcomed at first but which has become, as far as my actual work goes, a burden upon both my time and imagination.

  They had put my name and the simultaneously empty and pregnant word “Celebrity” on a paper banner on the side of the limousine. I was to ride with the local Congressman, who was running for reelection and who said he had been one of my supervisors at the old Hayesville playground. I didn’t remember him, but, then, as a child I had rarely looked up at those adults whose gargoylish heads loomed at the level of the sun and the moon. Even then my focus had been on the transpersonal, my gaze stubbornly fixed on the pavement, the pebbles, the grass, the dirt. The dirt at the playground had been a pale ochre, beaten by innumerable pairs of energetic sneakers to the fineness of milled flour and given therefore to rising up in little eye-stinging clouds at the merest stir of breeze. The same breeze would bring out from under the open-sided shelter of the pavilion the lonely, banana-ish smell of the shellac we used to solidify the tablemats and little striped bowls we “crafted” of multicolored gimp, and the desolate sound, the hesitant clickclack, of checkers being played. I had spent summer after summer there, never believing there would be a last summer. Obscene incredible things were written and drawn on the back of the equipment shed, and I never believed that such things—such blooms of hidden flesh, such violent conjunctions—would become on the larger playground of life not only credible but commonplace.

  Besides the Congressman and myself, there were to be fourteen marching bands, thirty-seven fire engines, three probate judges, a Hollywood stunt man whose father used to peddle pretzels door to door, Miss Junior Pennsylvania, Mr. Gay Pennsylvania, and a flatbed truck of supposed Delaware Indians—real survivors, those. But when, before the parade mustered, I made anthropological inquiries of them, they turned out to be all brothers and uncles in the fuel-oil business, operating out of Chester County.

  On the mustering-field—the parking lot of the newly enlarged regional high school—the personality I had created for use in the world outside Hayesville began to disintegrate. With downcast head I sensed from all sides a certain irradiation, as if the television sets out of which I had so urbanely expressed myself had reversed their currents and now were burning my reality away. In the tangle of assembled marching units and minor dignitaries I became obsessed with avoiding contact, and slithered back and forth in my inappropriate seersucker suit like a pariah or like a gossip reporter from some universally loathed but, because this is America, tolerated journal. The lead car of the parade, I observed, contained the burgess—an irrepressible bully, my contemporary, once nicknamed, because of his multiple warrior wounds, Scabs, and still, after forty years, called that. Also in this car rode the four borough aldermen, all wearing uniformly black suits as if to emphasize their remarkably distributed disparity in size, like a set of toys. The smallest was a virtual dwarf, a tailor called Runt Miller, and the tallest Gus Horst, a six-foot-eight-inch giant famous, in my high-school years, not only for his basketball prowess but for his skill at the discus, which flew from his long hairless arm as from a sling. The limousine behind theirs was to hold four beribboned veterans, one each from the two world wars and the two Asian involvements. Then some fire engines festooned with tricolor bunting, and a marching band led by stocky-legged young twirlers in white plastic boots and silver sequinned miniskirts, and the truckload of Indians, some more fire engines, and a limousine holding a probate judge, and the flower-banked float holding Miss Junior and Mr. Gay Pennsylvania, both gorgeous in chiffon, and another marching band. Our open limo, a ’68 Caddy with corrosion-speckled chrome, came toward the end.

  The streets were lined with faces, unfamiliar most of them, hatched since “my time,” yet all of them in another sense profoundly familiar, with that Hayesville look, a doughy solidity, a way of sitting, “just so,” on the curbs and porches and aluminum folding chairs brought out to the sidewalk, and with that Hayesville accent in their singsong voices, those voices with always something sardonic and something kindly about them, that small-town mix of street slyness and barnyard slyness, with love in the slyness, and menace in the love. Block after block was lined with these faces; they called my name, they pointed and laughed at my banner. I was trapped and had no idea how to act. My fellow limousine passenger, the Congressman, kept gladly waving, gathering votes; he called out people’s names; he bounced back to these sidewalk crowds their own belief that by being born in a place and staying there year after year they had performed a great and cherishable feat.

  When I tried to imitate the Congressman’s waving, my hands felt like lead. My face seemed imposed from afar, a mask stiff with fear. I had traversed every inch of these streets, as a child, in all weathers, dragging a sled in winter, bouncing a basketball in summer, sashaying in a noisy group of semi-delinquent, cigarette-puffing buddies, or clinging awkwardly to the fragrant body of a solid local girl; but never had I moved as slowly as in this infernal siren-plagued inane caravan. I would have screamed, as one screams in a stalled elevator, but for the illusion that I was in a narrow glass display box and a scream would use up all my air.

  An old classmate, now a beefy master plumber in a denim leisure suit, capered to the side of the limousine and offered me a beer. A middle-aged woman in purple slacks held aloft a sign upon which my face, torn from the cover of a sensational magazine, had been pasted and captioned in Magic Marker
with the words NOT THIS BUT JESUS. The parade was heading down Filbert Street now; at its corner with Elm lived a woman who had been kind to me, who had let me sit in her kitchen while her daughter entertained more amusing boys in the parlor—a disconsolate paranoid widow who had always been fighting with her neighbors but who had served me Ovaltine on her porcelain kitchen table and let me shell peanuts into her wastebasket while she told me the plots of the cellophane-wrapped novels she read all day in her dark and manless house. (She rented those novels from the Hayesville Drugstore’s lending library; how gaudy and dynamic and precious books seemed then, well worth a nickel a day!) At her corner the crowd was thick but she, who had seemed old then and would be ancient now, was not present among her neighbors—still fighting with them, I supposed. I looked toward her big front window and, indeed, a watching shadow lurked within, not close to the glass, where she might have attracted hostility, but deep in the aquarium gloom of that living room in whose brown, nappy, welcoming furniture I had once sunk so gratefully, as respite from the exhausting furniture of my own home. I waved, and the shadow in that dim parlor waved back. “Now you’re cooking,” the Congressman told me. “Give ’em the high five.”

  Hayesville tots in strollers clutched balloons and flags. Some tots looked like candy apples, big heads on sticks, their faces smeared with sugar. Older boys raced in and out of the crawling parade, taunting it as they would tease a half-crushed snake. I saw a young father lift an infant to his shoulders, and I remembered my own father’s shoulders under me, and my panicked grip on his high unsteady head, on that brown straight hair of his, hair so fine that in the coffin, while the minister was doing the eulogy, some strands of it had riffled in an imperceptible draft. That infant being lifted now would never forget his glimpse of this parade. History’s grind was beginning in his poor soft brain.