Joe’s career grew and grew.
And now, finally, he had made it all the way to Finland. The country was bafflingly sweet and bracing and fresh. Once a year, it was roughly roused from its slumber: Wake up! Wake up! An important person is a’comin’! As we kept walking through the airport with our publishing entourage, I realized that if I wanted to, I could easily disappear into the wilds of this country and never return. I wouldn’t stand out in Finland, with my fair hair and pale skin. I would fit right in, and they would think I was one of them. How wonderful to be able to begin a bewildering new life here, instead of returning in a week to the house in Weathermill, New York, with my giant baby of a husband, my genius, my very own winner of the Helsinki Prize.
“Joe,” I said, “look to the left. They’re trying to take your picture.”
He turned obediently, and there was a rapid flutter of stutter-whirring, and he held himself a little more stiffly and grandly. Tomorrow the photographs would appear in newspapers, showing this old American Jewish man squinting into the lights, revealing his awkward humanness, his exhaustion from air travel mixed with the vanity that had long propelled him through airports and the world.
Outside the terminal, a limousine waited for us, as dark as its driver was fair, and the first strike of frozen air made me feel as though my lungs would collapse as we quickly slipped from building to car. It was the beautiful fall-foliage time of year here that the Finns called ruska, with its changing flip-book of brooding colors. Only late autumn, and yet Joe and I were both shocked by the cold. It was unmanageable, I thought, and I imagined a society in which people went skittering from house to car to office and back to car to house, and then the day was done. There wasn’t much sunlight left in this day, though right now the sky seemed hugely bright and endless. The sunlight in Finland tricked you into believing it would last; you couldn’t imagine thatit would shut itself off with such grim finality even before the enzymes in your stomach had barely started to break down the components of your lunch.
The car ferried us gently past the waterfront and the glass fronts of shops on the boulevard called Mannerheim that sold delicate things wrapped in foil and crinkled paper, and past sudden, long stretches of bridge rail. We’d been to Finland once before over the course of our marriage, back in the 1980s, when Joe had been invited to give a reading as part of the five-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the Finnish book, and it had seemed to me at the time that the entire country was shot through with ice.
I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels. A depressed country: this was an easy diagnosis to make, given the suicide statistics, which Scandinavia sometimes tries to deny, just the way Cornell University tries to allay the fears of incoming students’ parents about the famous Ithaca gorge, which, like a harvest ritual each fall, claims the life of a few more hopeless freshmen. Don’t worry, the college brochure should say. Though some students do in fact leap to their deaths, most prefer keg parties and studying.
All of Scandinavia was alluring, with its ice fishing and snowcaps, but everyone knew about the legend of ingrained unhappiness among Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes: their drinking, their mournful, baying songs, their muffled darkness smack in the middle of the day.
“And here is the Helsinki Opera House, Mr. Castleman,” the driver said as our car smoothly went past an enormous building that appeared capable of containing an entire kingdom within its thick walls. “It is where you will go, sir, to receive your award and be feted.”
“Yes, Joe, you will be fetid,” I murmured, but he didn’t
And now, finally, he had made it all the way to Finland. The country was bafflingly sweet and bracing and fresh. Once a year, it was roughly roused from its slumber: Wake up! Wake up! An important person is a’comin’! As we kept walking through the airport with our publishing entourage, I realized that if I wanted to, I could easily disappear into the wilds of this country and never return. I wouldn’t stand out in Finland, with my fair hair and pale skin. I would fit right in, and they would think I was one of them. How wonderful to be able to begin a bewildering new life here, instead of returning in a week to the house in Weathermill, New York, with my giant baby of a husband, my genius, my very own winner of the Helsinki Prize.
“Joe,” I said, “look to the left. They’re trying to take your picture.”
He turned obediently, and there was a rapid flutter of stutter-whirring, and he held himself a little more stiffly and grandly. Tomorrow the photographs would appear in newspapers, showing this old American Jewish man squinting into the lights, revealing his awkward humanness, his exhaustion from air travel mixed with the vanity that had long propelled him through airports and the world.
Outside the terminal, a limousine waited for us, as dark as its driver was fair, and the first strike of frozen air made me feel as though my lungs would collapse as we quickly slipped from building to car. It was the beautiful fall-foliage time of year here that the Finns called ruska, with its changing flip-book of brooding colors. Only late autumn, and yet Joe and I were both shocked by the cold. It was unmanageable, I thought, and I imagined a society in which people went skittering from house to car to office and back to car to house, and then the day was done. There wasn’t much sunlight left in this day, though right now the sky seemed hugely bright and endless. The sunlight in Finland tricked you into believing it would last; you couldn’t imagine thatit would shut itself off with such grim finality even before the enzymes in your stomach had barely started to break down the components of your lunch.
The car ferried us gently past the waterfront and the glass fronts of shops on the boulevard called Mannerheim that sold delicate things wrapped in foil and crinkled paper, and past sudden, long stretches of bridge rail. We’d been to Finland once before over the course of our marriage, back in the 1980s, when Joe had been invited to give a reading as part of the five-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the Finnish book, and it had seemed to me at the time that the entire country was shot through with ice.
I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels. A depressed country: this was an easy diagnosis to make, given the suicide statistics, which Scandinavia sometimes tries to deny, just the way Cornell University tries to allay the fears of incoming students’ parents about the famous Ithaca gorge, which, like a harvest ritual each fall, claims the life of a few more hopeless freshmen. Don’t worry, the college brochure should say. Though some students do in fact leap to their deaths, most prefer keg parties and studying.
All of Scandinavia was alluring, with its ice fishing and snowcaps, but everyone knew about the legend of ingrained unhappiness among Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes: their drinking, their mournful, baying songs, their muffled darkness smack in the middle of the day.
“And here is the Helsinki Opera House, Mr. Castleman,” the driver said as our car smoothly went past an enormous building that appeared capable of containing an entire kingdom within its thick walls. “It is where you will go, sir, to receive your award and be feted.”
“Yes, Joe, you will be fetid,” I murmured, but he didn’t
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