Finnish for Beginners
Inkeri, you look at me. The night is like forgotten coffee and I can barely see you. My hair stands on end, dandelions stretching toward the sun. This I will never tell you. Instead I shrug and try my best to look bored. I say goodbye and start to count the hours till next Tuesday, till next week’s instalment of a course in a language I will never master and a grammar I will never grasp. You lecture me, help me, but I am a lost cause. I do my homework badly so that you will come and help me, stand next to me and explain while I watch your lips and smell fabric softener and something else, something like podzol.
I walk away from the bus stop. In my pocket, your watch, forgotten on the lectern. It’s warmed up quickly, a chick in my careful fist, now less cold aluminium and more a throbbing part of me. I sleep with it under my pillow but dream no dreams to speak of.
Inkeri, I want to speak your language, but more than that I want to be quiet next to you, just after. The amount of courage it takes for me to come here and feel a fool in front of a studious passel of hogs is tantamount to kamikaze. But still, every Tuesday I put my pencil case and my pocket-sized dictionary in my bag and come. This Tuesday I will return your watch to the lectern.
Teacher-Student Confidentiality
Paula, I’ve seen you in the faces of others. Small babies and grandparents, and pimple-ridden young folk on mopeds. I’ve seen you disappear in crowds. Even invented errands to take me forty steps behind you all the way to your house. A dank number 42 shared with other long-haired, noodle-nourished third-years.
Eyelids close the day, I pull the blanket over my head to keep my breath in and warm me. Heating goes off at eleven; I don’t fall asleep till one. I lie, now warm, and my mouth breathes in the night’s darkest corner. Floorboards creaking as my husband comes back from the toilet. He grunts and farts, and in his own way he loves me.
Waiting for my bus I’ve watched you turn left and walk away so many Tuesdays. Always on the other side, to the underground passage, into shade, darkness — textbook recommended by me weighing you down. Paula, you my hardest working student, you my least gifted, least likely to succeed. I pretended not to notice you. For your own good.
The mechanical carrier pigeon flying between us from the lectern. A ticking, unspoken, wordless love letter. A metal reminder, a promise, a forerunner. A cheap Timex bought at the train station in Warwick. Once you returned it with a new battery. Another time, it was a new strap. I said nothing.
- Active Third Infinitive in Illative of Syödä
- Agent Principle of Syödä in Illative Singular
Summer, a moratorium. My feelings — the colt’s kick in my chest — stowed away as I made thousands of coffees to pay for the tuition and the extra curricular self-harm. Classes suspended till the leaves turn golden. Inkeri, you’ve gone to Turku to stay with your sister, a language brush-up and admiration for a new-born niece. In the meantime your husband sleeps with a colleague, forgets to delete a message on his phone, and for this pleasure he is granted half the house and some of his things.
When classes resume there is a white band on your finger where there used to be a golden one. That’s not a thing I can ask about in any language, not a thing I can slip in between ‘How do you pronounce ‘Ä’ properly?’ and ‘What’s the right way to conjugate ‘syömään’ (to eat)?’
That first day after class you held me back, told me you wanted help with the photocopying. Instead you bought me a fruit loaf in the cafeteria and cried and told me and cried and asked me if I wanted to come with you to a cabin over the weekend. You said you had lots to do but could use my help. The question, the held hand, the packed bag, the exit from my old life, all swift, all with less fireworks and noise than I would have imagined.
We left for, and arrived at, the cabin one Saturday when the birds flew to Africa. A walk in the woods, straight legislated pine. Small waves lapping the rocks above Pitlochry, and you kept telling me how much the place reminded you of home, of the things you loved so much before you started to love him.
Evening light fell as you put more and more firewood in the fireplace, a large black egg suspended sideways over the floor, an expensive import, an eye-catcher in the sparse Scandinavian room. I fell asleep on the sofa before I knew I was tired, while you were bettering the fire.
Helsinki Syndrome
Bread and butter. You and me. Tea with milk and two sugars I learned, always took you for a coffee person. And when the clock struck three, a blanket made of wool, shared, spread over our legs, we sat out on the creaking wooden bench, in the lee by my little house, half his, but all mine in decoration and memories and trinkets brought over from Finland.
In the evening I watched you fall asleep. Spread the same blanket over you. I didn’t touch you as much as I wanted, as much as I could have. The first hour of fire was cold but I busied myself with sweeping. I diluted my blood with ethanol to find the courage. When I found it I picked you up and carried you through. Then I lost my nerve and put myself on the sofa, still indented from you, still warm. I realised I would never find you unless I made sure my intentions were clear. But they weren’t clear to me either.
Clouding myself with more drink made some difference, but not enough. The weekend was a balancing act of tact and improper conduct. Expelled, shamed, suspended came to mind when it should have been kissed, laughed, touched. I left it at that. Composed myself. Changed our plans and made us go home, back to the city and our defined roles early the next day. You looked so disappointed, I wanted to open my door and lean out till my face was scraped away, cheese-grated on the gravel road leading to the B8079 (A9).
When I dropped you off you asked for the time, in Finnish. That melted me. The over-pronouncing, the letters slowly formed first in your mind then by your lips. You said, Saisinko aika — Can I have the time, or rather, Please give me time. I told you it was ten past six. You smiled, and asked for my watch, now in English. I wasn’t sure what you meant but handed it to you, thinking I would get it back on Tuesday. I knew full well you picked it up from the lectern.
I didn’t know you’d keep it so long. I didn’t know your inner clock was slow, that the weekend had unwound your spring.
Amin + Wandering Mind ≠ Happiness or Disciple
I immerse myself in the administrative tasks set out for the survival of my course. For the greater good of the language, and to make sure that the hand which feeds me keeps doing so. To forget my husband, to move on, to preserve who I am. All good reasons, but I’m finding it hard to care. I’m finding it hard to focus my eyes. I’m finding it hard to enjoy food.
My desk is slowly covered by lists, and it soon looks more like landfill than workflow. Paragraphs that used to fly out of my fingers now linger and wilt. It takes me a full working day to write:
Finnish for Beginners is designed for students who are familiar with the following basics: Numbers, Days of the week, Greetings, Introducing oneself, Basic vocabulary (names of food items, adjectives, places and frequently used verbs).
The course will cover grammatical information taught on the Suomi 1 level: verb types (rakastaa, rakastan; uida, uin; tulla, tulen; herätä, herään; tarvita, tarvitsen)
The most common noun types (punainen, punaisessa; huone, huoneessa; pieni, pienessä; uusi, uudessa; sairas, sairaassa; kaunis, kauniissa; kokous, kokouksessa)
The partitive case (kaksi huonetta, juon vettä) and local cases (talossa, talosta, taloon; asemalla, asemalta, asemalle)
The construction of “to have” (Minulla on koira; Minulla ei ole koiraa)
Consonant gradation (hattu, hatussa; ottaa, otan)
Many discussion and vocabulary exercises will be done during the course. After completing the course, you may continue your studies on the Suomi 2 level.
That’s less than twenty words per hour. I really shouldn’t be here. I’m stuck between my own sudden ineptitude and the fear of being found out. I almost cry with relief every afternoon when I am not. I march on. Twenty words today. Hopefully thirty tomorrow.
I’m treacle-slow on my own and in meetings I lose the thread almost immediately. No one seems to notice my decline, and I’m not sure if I should be grateful or sad that the me that was before wasn’t more different from the dishrag I am now.
Eventually I’m forced to teach, to interact, to mark and talk. To drink coffee and gossip, to wade in the dead ponds of paper and admin I am guilty of creating and neglecting.
There are others like you, but on closer inspection they’re not like you. You’re not here, you’re not here, is all I can think. A tango-like refrain I can’t get rid of.
Leeds Trinity/Southhampton Solent
I leave you behind, Inkeri, as I somehow have been offered a better job than I deserve. I now operate within the not very prestigious walls of the Solent campus. Since I am quite silent, people seem to think I am competent.
As soon as I am given the tour of the flat I will be sharing with three other hopeful and recent graduates, I decide to put a time-limit on shared living space. Instead of socialising I scrimp and save, and soon I can leave behind the crowded cupboards and the milk that’s always left out. I move into a small flat of my own. It’s not much, and it’s not mine, but I know whether I have tea bags or not, hand soap or not, and I know that no housemates will be moaning on the other side of thin walls.
Then by accident I see a film in Finnish at a student festival I am asked to attend. All through it my stomach lurches. For 122 minutes I heave as if I am at sea. The whole way home I speak to myself in snippets of Moomin-language, and asking myself, not in Finnish, as I don’t possess enough grammar to properly construct sentences of this magnitude, ‘What am I doing here?’
The Teeth Of Time
Three years later you are a colleague, transferred from a university in England. Not sure how you managed that. You teach, not Finnish, but Ancient Greek. In your own car, paid for with your first proper paycheck, you waited for me till it was my turn to cross the car park. Then you stepped out and cross-examined me, a new glint in your eyes. The years in the South had done you well.
Next weekend you pick me up. Quick off the mark, not wasting any time. You are more certain of yourself, of your way, your mien. Take-away coffee and a tea, milky-sweet, from smiled-at, thousand-fold-in-your-imagination-spat-at, former employer. You remember the way to the cabin. I sit in the map-reader’s seat. Hands folded, heart ticking faster and faster as the miles tick by. When we turn off the main road and onto the soft squelch of drowned gravel, you put the car in neutral, cock the handbrake and kiss me with all your might.
The next day we go and buy matching watches, same clock face, different wristbands. We will swap them like lovers do toothbrushes, umbrellas, their own bed for the other’s. And I learn that in time, good things come to those who wait, to those who suffer, to those who put lost-looking girls out of their minds after teaching them you can’t love a Finn.
