Odd Jobs Read Free

is, I suppose, postmodern in itself. But honest labelling never goes out of date, and an honest laborer usually gets his due.
    J.U.
September 1990

Fairly Personal

FIVE DAYS IN FINLAND AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-FIVE
    A S I GET OLDER , my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago. In one of my first memories, I am lying on the floor reading newspaper headlines to my grandfather, who has been temporarily blinded by a cataract operation, and the cartoon on the editorial page shows a little fellow on skis defiantly standing up to a huge bear, who is wearing bandages and has the cartoon symbols signifying dizziness and pain scattered about his head. The bear is Russia, and this must be the Russo-Finnish “Winter War” of 1939–40, when I am seven. At some later moment in my childhood, I am pondering a photograph of Jean Sibelius, perhaps in
Life
. His head is spectacularly bald, whereas all the other composers I have seen depicted are very hairy. His eyes are shut, as if he were intently listening or having a headache, perhaps from the veins that stand out on his bald head. He lives in Finland, the caption tells me, among lakes and forests. Finland: a cold, shaggy place, far away. To me at that age the world is like a coloring book, full of outlined spaces. When one visits such a space, that colors it in.
    Although, by the age of fifty-five, I had been to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and, on the far side of Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, I had never been to Finland. All I had added to my images of Sibelius and Finnish valor were yards of splashy Marimekko fabric, with which my first wife had draped our windows and herself. Then an opportunity arose: I was asked to come to Sweden, for a conference, and agreed if I could also spend five days in Finland, for fun. People seemed amused. Finland? A number of my professional acquaintances had attended conferencesin Helsinki, much as they had in Tokyo, Aspen, and Atlantic City. Helsinki to them was a set of hotel rooms, a city without qualities.
    But I take an interest in hotel rooms. To the man travelling alone, his hotel room, first entered in rumpled clothes, with a head light from sleeplessness, looms as the arena where he will suffer insomnia, constipation, loneliness, nightmares, and telephone calls; his room will become woven into the deeper, less comfortable self that travel uncovers. My room in Helsinki was shaped like a triangle with a tip cut off, and in the truncated corner was fitted a long wooden tray that would be my bed. Pieces of upright varnished wood were spaced about on the walls, notched as if for some utilitarian purpose but revealing to inspection no other purpose than to look Finnish. Wood, it seemed, was the Finnish look—wood, and a certain determined stylishness of design. The closet coat hangers were especially progressive—abstract sculptures of white plastic it took some practice to manipulate. One’s hotel room is a place one is always trying to leave and yet always returning to. Staying in it, alone with the television set, seems cowardly and a waste of the airplane ticket, and yet leaving it—stepping into the long, windowless, carpeted hall, letting the door click shut as you tap your pocket to make sure the key is there—has a sadness, too, the sadness of rejecting a symbolic mother, a place that would serve as home.
    It was raining when I arrived in Finland, in mid-August of what people told me had been the coldest and rainiest summer in a hundred years. I set out from the hotel room to walk around Helsinki, but the rain defeated me. I found a handsome esplanade, of unoccupied benches and tightly shut kiosks, but there was no place, at six o’clock on a Saturday evening, where I could buy an umbrella. In an American city, some capacious all-night drugstore would have had a basket of umbrellas tucked away over in a corner by the discounted bathing caps