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and welcome mats, or some boutique would have hungrily kept open an extra hour to catch the stray tourist, but here a grave mercantile decorum had shut up everything except for a bright-yellow
hamburgerrestaurant
called Clock. The Finns had umbrellas, most of them, and some even wore boots—ankle-high wading boots with pale soles—but others, the younger ones, walked along as if the rain were all in my mind. I ducked from doorway to doorway along the esplanade until I arrived at a harbor where a towering white ferryboat was slowly turning its stern upon the city and heading out through a misty maze of islands. Destinations that are not ours always seem romantic. I was in Finland, but sitting on it like a raindropthat, unlike the drops on my scalp and raincoat, had not begun to soak in.
    Next day, a Sunday, I took a train to Savonlinna, the heart of the region of lakes and forests. In the railroad station (designed by Eliel Saarinen), a brilliant arcade of food shops contrasted with the abandoned gloom of most American terminals, and I attempted to start soaking into Finland by making a purchase. In a candy store I spotted a bag of what in England are called “licorice all-sorts.” I read on the label E NGLANNIN L AKRITSI; these words seemed within my capacity to pronounce but the woman at the counter stared at me with alarmed incomprehension, and even my pointing gestures took her some time to decipher. She counted out my change for me in a mincing, rebuking English. The Finnish language, a non-Indo-European tongue related to Hungarian and Estonian and a number of minor variants like Karelian, Olonets, Lude, Vepse, and Vote, yields few clues to an American. As a focus of Finnish nationalism through centuries of domination by Sweden and, after 1809, Russia, it resists loan-words, though APTEEKKI identifies an apothecary, POSTI a post office, POLIISI the police, and ESPLANADI and MOOTORI what you might imagine. POSTIPANKKI is a postal bank, but PÄIVÄRANNAN RUUSU is the name of a flower shop and not a Russian restaurant. During the six-hour train ride to Savonlinna, I kept seeing on other railway cars AIDS ON TAPPAVA TULIAINEN: I thought the first word could not be what it seemed but it turns out that indeed the Finns have borrowed the English acronym and were publicizing a campaign against the disease. There is a certain bliss in being surrounded by a language that no one expects you to know. Nevertheless, it annoyed and even frightened me that for five days I was unable to recall so much as the word for “thank you,” which is
kiitos
. The double “i” would come to mind but the consonants kept scrambling.
    Through the train windows, the Helsinki suburbs fell away, and lakes and forests began. Relatively few species dominated—pine (
Pinus sylvestris
, Scotch pine, the trunk pinkish, as if rubbed raw, above the lower portion), spruce, and white birch—with here and there silvery willows, twinkling aspens, rowan trees decked out in their bright-orange berries, and alders clogging the drainage ditches. The fields, irregular in shape, were all drained by ditches, and the stands of rye and wheat were flattened in ragged patches, as if by rambling dogfights. It seemed a restless, struggling agriculture: some fields were being reclaimedby the forest, and others had been recently cleared, with heaps of stumps left to dry and blanch in grisly bone-colored tangles. Muddy cabbage-patches near the tracks flicked past, and towns hurriedly assembled and dispersed. The traditional wooden architecture mingled vertical and horizontal boards in a way that looked faintly barbaric, like the hatching in a Steinberg drawing; the older houses showed a complex abundance of gables and dormers. These domestic fortresses, whose prominent double-casement windows bespoke winter’s long siege, were roofed mostly with ridged tin, and sometimes with tile, rather than with the battened planks of earlier centuries. A picture-book farm whose manse