It is not that I am a particularly avid drinker, but one partial to a glass of beer or a glass or two of wine with a meal, and then a lift at the start of the evening—apart from specific drinking occasions; but since I came to Finland I have been goaded almost to a Finn’s method of dispatching the glass, or usually it’s the bottle, put before him, by the difficulty of getting the fancied nip at the place and moment when I fancied it. And with the difficulty has gone such disapproval ranged against one’s request for help.
“Can I have a beer, please? Oh, not without food? Well, I’ll have some ham. Oh, not here at all? I can have milk? Oh, thanks. In the restaurant opposite? Yes, thanks. Yes, I like milk, and sour milk too. No, I have nothing against milk. I’m being quite serious. Some food, I agree, tastes as good with it. . . .”
“. . . Oh here you don’t serve beer at the bar? Only spirits at the bar, but beer at the tables? Beer is allowed when one starts one’s lunch? . . .”
“. . . Oh, I see, if I am in such a hurry — for a drink, that is” (I’d been waiting for twenty minutes) — “I ought to have gone to a higher grade of restaurant? Oh! . . .”
“. . But there isn’t a bar anywhere! I’ve looked already down a dozen streets. No, I don’t want a meal. You see, in this weather I get so cold, I need a shot of cognac. No, I don’t want an illicit bottle. I’d settle for a beer if there was a pub in sight. …”
“. . . Here is my passport, so I can order what I like? It’s not recorded in a book, in the case of a foreigner? So I’ll have three bottles of Fundador, your number 3985, and a bottle of 4497, and some 6413, yes, two bottles, and how about 2022 for an akvavit? You have no views upon it? No, it’s not for a name day. No, I am not buying it for a Finnish citizen. You see, it is such a walk to get here, and the hours are awkward, and it’s all so difficult, I’m just buying it, to have, to offer to people, to have an occasional drink by myself. Oh dear!” — for the square-faced matron, an officer of the government at the government store wielding this monopoly, with Finns along the counter whispering their orders then waiting while the details were recorded in their individual books, then popping the liquor into an attache case or some such dissimulating carrier, felt, she felt that my attitude was wrong. I can’t say why, but I suppose I didn’t show that I knew it to be devil’s milk. The need was proffered but not the guilt.
So I called on the painter hoping for a sherry, and the chance of again looking at his paintings that were slashed as though the vibrant colors had themselves at that point torn the canvas, but of course all his opened bottles were empty. And as I saw him about to open a whisky and remembered what that in particular did to him, as the need to drain it would speed up, I cried out that I was on the wagon, and he checked himself and his wife brought coffee (and his gestures, I noted, as with other Finns, while handling the bottle had been underlined as though this were the momentous side to life) and after some moments we could talk again as usual. I slipped away back to the Suusanens. It was second-best to sip sherry alone—from bottles hidden in my suitcase and wrapped in woollies against a telltale clink—but no one here understood the sipping. Mrs. Suusanen disliked liquor in the home, bar the little she imported. So I secretly drank, as the girls smoked, and as Aarne toned down his record playing, and as Marjatta perhaps had once hidden her love of crime beneath the pillows. We were linked in the Lutheran underworld.
Direction North: A View of Finland is an unusual sort of travel book. John Sykes was a Quaker who volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver with the Finns during the Winter War with the Soviets. One night, a doctor pointed at one of the wounded soldiers in his ambulance and remarked that the man — a working class labor organizer — had it in him to become Prime Minister of Finland one day. Sykes looked at the man and felt an immediate connection, one that stayed with him years after the war. And so he undertook to locate the man when he had some time to spend in Finland on the way back from a visit to the Soviet Union.
He finds the man, Pekka Suusanen, now a manager in a large textile factory in Tampere, and moves into a room in the Sussanen’s apartment. Despite the family’s hospitality, it’s something of an awkward situation because, well, as Sykes puts it, Suusanens always seem to be longing for time to be alone and seek’ “as Finns seemed to do, the kernel within the kernel of his thoughts.” For Finns, the ideal vacation would be “to find a retreat where at least for a fortnight no other human would intrude his presence. There would only be you there, and God. God would wrap you about with his silence. . . .”
“You have to get used to silence in Finland,” he writes. “It is a major part of social communion.”
Sykes — whose somewhat effusive prose style is evident in the passage above — does manage to divine some of the underlying tensions in Finnish society in the 1960s. Even with the country’s prosperity and the elevation of men like Pekka into the establishment, there are deep-set rifts — between labor, with its Communist roots, and capital, between the Finns and the Swede-Finns who still hold the old money and the old ties to the Swedish nobility. They all seem to culminate in Pekka’s resistance against the idea of accepting the gift of a house by the lake — every Finn’s dream, as Sykes sees it — from his company.
The contrast between Sykes’ open and spontaneous manner and Pekka’s dogged stolidity also provides Direction North with a certain comic air. Pekka often reminded me of my father-in-law, who used to greet visitors with, “I hope you have a hotel and restaurant for yourselves tonight.” There’s an occasional sense that Pekka plays up his grimness just to get a rise out of Sykes.
Things in Finland have probably changed since 1967, but Direction North can be enjoyed as an oddball bit of human comedy even if you never plan to go there.
Direction North is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.