The Almost Nearly Perfect People Read online

  It all feels kind of Scandinavian, but not. There are the familiar state-run alcohol shops – over-lit, their tills staffed by the usual disapproving old ladies; the Finns dress like Scandinavians, with big puffy jackets, sensible shoes and expensive-looking spectacles; they drive cheap French cars; and are blond, unsmiling and considerably taller than me. There were audible gasps of disapproval when I crossed the road on a red light, even though there was not a car in sight. All is tidy, ordered, functional and extraordinarily ethnically homogenous, even by Scandinavian standards.

  I soon learn that the Finns are even more obsessed with summer houses (mökki – they have 470,000 of them) than either the Danes or Swedes; that they are also big on parental leave after childbirth (the father and mother get a year to share between them); and that they are mostly atheistic, rarely setting foot inside their spartan Lutheran churches, just like the rest of Scandinavia.

  One key characteristic of Nordic cities is the lack of people. Queues, jams and crowds are a rarity in the North; even the capitals can have a semi-deserted air if you are arriving from London or New York. Where are all the people? But Helsinki made Oslo look like Mumbai. There was no one there as far as I could make out. One morning I crossed the square to the east of the main station at the height of rush hour, stood for a while and counted fewer than sixty people. The shop displays were strangely muted too, the city’s commercial signage was low-key, and there was virtually no billboard advertising. It was quite liberating not to be bombarded with messages imploring you to buy stuff at every turn.

  Slowly I grew aware of other signs of ‘otherness’ that set Finland apart from the rest of the Nordic region. The language is the most glaring. Finnish bears no resemblance to, and has virtually no words in common with, the other Nordic languages. Most Finns speak Swedish, but few Swedes speak Finnish, and when Danes or Norwegians meet Finns they speak English. In Norway, Sweden and even Iceland, my second-rate Danish means I can understand most of what I see written around me, but in Finland my Danish was as much use as Klingon (which, now I think of it, Finnish resembles). On my first day of largely aimless wandering, I grew obsessed with spotting outlets of what I presumed was a highly popular Italian restaurant chain, called Ravintola. Virtually every restaurant in the city appeared to be part of the chain. Was it a throwback to some communistic government-run monopoly, I wondered? Turns out, ravintola is Finnish for ‘restaurant’.

  There isn’t a great deal to see in Helsinki by way of sights or museums and, unlike Stockholm or Copenhagen, it has no twee medieval heart. The central part of the city, where most government and university buildings are situated, is dominated by cakey nineteenth-century Russian architecture (it looks like a mini St Petersburg and, during the Cold War, often stood in for the Russian city in movies). Most icing-sugary of all is the white cathedral. Devoid inside of both ornament and worshippers, as per the Lutheran Nordic template, it overlooks the only statue of a Russian tsar (Alexander II) outside of Russia. Beyond him is the western harbour, where ferries potter in and out depositing commuters from islands further out in the fjord.

  I browsed in the produce market here on the quayside, its stalls laden with chanterelle mushrooms and wild berries (including the enigmatic, elusive cloudberry), before heading west through a park lined with grand cafés, bandstands and hotels – again, much like Oslo, but without all the Porsches. I stopped by the swoopy glass-and-concrete modern art museum, filled with angry sixth-form-style installations railing against capitalism and men. The National Gallery had chocolate-boxy nineteenth-century paintings of angels, children’s funerals and melancholy peasants toiling through the tundra, all depicted in an unremitting palette of grey, ochre and black (although there was also that rare thing, a cheerful Munch self-portrait). The National Museum, meanwhile, was housed in a batty National Romantic building; a kind of ‘spooky mansion’ affair where I imagined a deformed baron might live with his organ-playing hunchbacked butler. Its various attractions included the world’s oldest fishing net and a fragment of a Stone-Age ski. Here I learned that, two thousand years ago, Finland actually had quite a pleasant climate, comparable to Central Europe’s today. Scant consolation now, I imagine.

  The museum’s tone was resolutely downbeat, the captions defining the Finns as much in terms of what they weren’t – they were not Russian, nor Swedish, nor Vikings, and so on. A constant theme was the remoteness of Finland and its marginalised role in European history. Some Roman coins on display were said to have ‘even [my italics] found their way to Finland’, for instance. The Industrial Revolution didn’t reach these parts until the early twentieth century and, if the museum is to be believed, prior to that Finland didn’t appear to have invented a single thing.

  There was little mention of the Swedes, a curious omission given they ruled Finland for 659 years; meanwhile the Russians, who ruled for over a century after the Swedes were kicked out and continued to loom threateningly for almost another century thereafter, were generally painted in a positive light. The reforms of Tsar Alexander II were lauded for their effects in ‘promoting the economy and the evolution of cultural pursuits’, for instance, and there were numerous gifts from Russia on display, including portraits of the various tsars that once hung in Finnish government offices.

  I also read about intriguingly named military conflicts, terrible battles that wreaked senseless devastation on the Finnish people over the centuries, such as the War of the Hats and the Greater Wrath. ‘If only they’d put as much creativity into naming their restaurants,’ I thought to myself.

  Afterwards, I tried to find the main shopping area. I wandered for a while, stopping occasionally to enjoy the concert-standard classical musicians busking on every other street corner, but could only find a light smattering of shops. I asked a female passer-by where the centre of Helsinki was. ‘You are standing in it,’ she replied, puzzled.

  ‘Yes, this is Ginza!’ laughed Roman Schatz, a German actor and writer who has lived in Finland for twenty-eight years. We were walking in the same area together the following day, after a long and bibulous lunch. Schatz is one of Finland’s most famous foreign residents, much loved for his gently sardonic take on the Finnish character. A newspaper columnist, TV presenter and sometime actor, he has written several books about the Finns and, judging by the number of greetings he received as we walked through the city centre, this tall, handsome German in his early fifties is fast approaching national-treasure status in Finland. He, in turn, seemed to hold his adopted homeland in equally high, albeit still slightly bemused, esteem.

  ‘You know, I wouldn’t trust a Swede, and I wouldn’t trust an Icelander, but you can always trust a Finn,’ Schatz told me while we had sat eating reindeer in a traditional restaurant just across from the cathedral. ‘If you are hanging by your last thread over the chasm, you want the next person who comes by to be a Finn. If a Finn tells you they are going to bring you firewood on Friday, you can bet your sweet ass the firewood will be there on Friday because, fifty years ago, if the firewood wasn’t there, you might die. Make a mistake in this country, and everyone will know you screwed up.’

  According to Schatz, the Finns’ ‘can-do-will-do’ attitude is reflected in their language: ‘You know, there is no future tense in the Finnish language. While in English or German you might say, “I am going to do this or that,” or “I shall have done that,” a Finn would say, “How can you trust people who have different ways of talking about the future?” Either you do it, and consider it done, or not.’

  Finnish nouns have no gender, in fact people have no gender – the word for ‘he’ and ‘she’ is the same, the masculine hän. A Finnish friend tells me that, increasingly, the Finns are just using ‘it’ to refer to everything: ‘It is getting married in the morning,’ ‘It has been drinking vodka since breakfast,’ and so on. There are no prepositions in Finnish and neither are there definite or indefinite articles: ‘a book’, ‘the book’ and ‘book’ are all just ‘book’, or kirja. (That sa
id, Finnish does apparently have fourteen case-endings, so perhaps it is not all that straightforward.)

  Schatz spoke Finnish almost perfectly, of course. ‘There was a breakthrough moment when I was sitting with my wife, who is a psychologist, at our marriage therapist’s, and I realised I had been discussing my marriage with two psychologists in Finnish. I thought to myself, “Hey, how cool is that!” He had a theory that the Finnish language – which some argue has its origins in the same group as Mongolian, Japanese and Turkish – directly informs the character of the people. ‘Behaviours and value systems come from the grammar, the language. In Sweden, Norway, all of Scandinavia really, Germany and England we all speak languages that are dialects of one another, but in Finland the way of organising thoughts, the world, feelings, expressions, emotions is so completely different. It has taught me a new way to think. The Finnish language works like Lego, you can put any two pieces together and they always fit, somehow.’

  When I first started to learn Danish, it often seemed to me quite shockingly direct – ‘Give me a loaf of bread,’ a Dane will command on entering a bakery – but Finnish makes Danish seem like the courtly French of Louis XIV’s Versailles. ‘If you want to say “She appears to pretend to sleep” in Finnish, you just need two words,’ said Schatz, although why one would want to say that he did not explain. ‘Finland is a very primitive culture, but that is a positive thing for me. They have a very simple approach to human life: are you thirsty, hungry, or do you want a blow job? Just ask. They have a good basic understanding of basic human needs, whereas countries like yours and mine, or France, have had centuries of urban neuroticism, which you might call “sophistication”, and most Finns want that too now. But I am looking for the opposite. If a Finn tells you “I love you,” you will have had to wait for ten years, but they will mean it.’

  It is not just the Finns who take their time with this particular word: all the Nordic tribes seem to have a similar relationship to the word ‘love’ as the pilot of the Enola Gay had to the big red button next to his joystick – something to be deployed at the end of a very long journey, and only then if you are absolutely certain you are above the target. One woman I met in Helsinki, who worked in the Finish Foreign Office and was helping me with some connections, confided that she could say ‘I love you’ in other languages, but to say it in Finnish was more difficult because it seemed to carry so much more weight. My Danish wife has said something similar to me (at least, that was her excuse). Meanwhile, Swedish ethnologist, Åke Daun, has written that, to the Swedes, ‘I love you’ sounds ‘artificially romantic, like something from a cheap romantic novel.’ The word ‘love’ is just not bandied around in the North with the same ease as it is in the States, for instance, where it is perfectly natural to express one’s love for what someone might be doing with their hair, say, or a particular muffin recipe.

  ‘In Finland they show affection in other ways. Here, a husband can show his affection by repairing the washing machine,’ said Schatz. ‘It takes a while to understand, and like, the Finns. First impressions are that they are very uptight unless you give them alcohol and then they get very sexual or very violent. But I was twenty-five years old when I came here so that was okay with me.’

  Far from taking offence, the Finns, by all accounts, can’t get enough of Schatz’s diagnoses of their personality quirks and foibles. ‘They were isolated for so long, and are only now really coming out into the world, and they are fascinated by what others think of them. There is a joke about this,’ he chuckled. ‘They call it the elephant joke: a German, a Finn and a French guy are somewhere in Africa and they see an elephant. The German says, “If I kill the animal and sell the ivory, how much money will I make, I wonder?” The Frenchman says, “What a beautiful animal, a marvellous creature.” And the Finn says, “Oh God, I wonder what the elephant thinks about Finland.”’

  Chapter 2

  Silence

  IT IS EARLY evening and I am walking alone, and a little lost, through one of the shabbier parts of central Helsinki. The tenements here are built from porridgy concrete and are occupied at street-level by Thai massage parlours, sex shops and peep shows. Every Nordic capital has a nicely contained, almost stagey vice quarter like this, set-designed with the comatose junkie slumped on a bench, his trousers at half-mast and a needle sticking out of his thigh here, a heavily rouged African lady loitering on a street corner there; all of it set against a backdrop of shops with various by-products of the Polyurethane industry languishing in their dusty windows.

  If one relied only on the British and US media’s images of Scandinavia for one’s view of this part of the world, with their images of sun-tanned children frolicking in pristine fjords, men with pipes sitting in austere wooden chairs, and women in arcane knitwear making spelt bread, this might come as a shock, but Scandinavia’s urban sleaze districts are just as much a part of the scenery as the austere churches and cosy cafés. They are almost a kind of tourist attraction. In fact, the equivalent part of Copenhagen, Istedgade, actually is a tourist attraction.

  I never usually feel threatened when I visit these parts of town (on those odd occasions when I have to pass through them to get somewhere else, you understand), but on this occasion there is a fist of anxiety in the pit of my stomach, for I am about to submit to something truly terrible, of my own volition.

  I stop for a rethink. Oops, no, too close to that lady in the leopard-print top. I walk on and stop again. I haven’t told a soul where I am going, so no one need know whether I actually go through with it or not, I tell myself. Yet onward I walk, compelled by my morbid curiosity, egged on by the reckless freedom that anonymity affords, gripping a small piece of paper with an address.

  I could just as easily head back to the library where I have spent the afternoon in a cosy corner researching, but if I leave Helsinki without going through with this, my Finnish experience will be incomplete. When I return home, people will ask if I did it, and I will be forced to admit that I wimped out. They will raise their eyebrows and I will have to bluster feeble excuses. Either that, or I’ll have to lie, and what I am about to do is far too alien to me to get away with that. I need to experience it first-hand but to do so I must violate several principles that I have held dear for much of my life.

  I am on my way to experience the archetypal Finnish pastime. Actually it is far more than a pastime, in Finland it is considered one of life’s necessities, intrinsic to, and indivisible from, elemental notions of Finnishness. This ungodly act is simply something that Finns do, like the British and their DIY, or the French and their adultery. I have a Finnish friend who talks of virtually nothing else. The first time we met he raved about it for over an hour, and every time we have met since he has raised the subject again, always with the ulterior motive of trying to persuade me to have a go.

  I am talking, of course, of the sauna. The Swedes like their saunas too, and Icelanders have their thermal baths, but the Finns take the appreciation of saunas to a whole new level. The sauna lies at the heart of Finnish social life and leisure time. There is one for every two of them in the country, more saunas than cars – over 2.5 million. The sauna is their prime meeting place, a venue for physical relaxation with family and friends of both genders. At the same time. Naked. Like a pub, or a village hall. But naked. And hot.

  The Finns will tell you that their saunas are the hottest in the world, and that any non-Finnish sauna isn’t really a sauna at all. They mock the tepid temperatures of Swedish saunas (anything under 80ºC is a ‘warm room’, they will tell you), citing them as merely one more example of what they perceive as Swedish softness. The Finns even have a Sauna World Championship, in which the sole requirement is to see who can sit for longest at the highest temperature. Last year a competitor died when the sauna he was competing in was turned up to 110ºC. He was Russian.

  Members of the Finnish parliament meet once a week in a sauna (I am assuming they also have a conventional parliamentary chamber) and, since the days whe
n their Cold War president, Urho Kekkonen, ruled the country, there has been a tradition that the president invites foreign leaders to a sauna evening when they visit the country. (It is wrong that my thoughts turn immediately here to Angela Merkel, isn’t it?)

  Being raised in England in the 1970s I know that nudity is something shameful, embarrassing and to be avoided, when alone, if possible, but certainly at all cost when in the company of others. Meanwhile, the cumulative process towards human enlightenment resulting in our current apogee of civilisation has thus far been defined by the wholly admirable desire to minimise our physical suffering, pain, risk, danger, exposure and discomfort. Why on earth would you want to invite these things, to wallow in them, by sitting with your arse out in a big oven?

  Rudimentary low-level vigilance has preserved me from experiencing a sauna up until now, but that is about to change. I am heading for the oldest wood-fired sauna in Helsinki, built in 1929. It isn’t difficult to spot. Gathered outside like a nudists’ picket is a group of men dressed in towelling robes and, in some cases, just towels, sitting or standing around a low wall by the entrance, smoking and drinking beer from bottles.

  I walk brusquely past them and in through the front door, trying to look like the kind of fellow who knows his way around a sauna. A young man is sitting behind a glass window in a small kiosk. Affecting a casual tone, I say: ‘I’d like to . . .’

  Does one ‘have’ a sauna? Or ‘take’ one, or perhaps ‘visit’ one?