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Daniel Katz:
Blind man's buff
Daniel Katz
Photo Pertti Nisonen
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Daniel Katz's new novel Laituri matkalla
mereen ('A jetty to the sea', WSOY, 2001), tells the
story of the impossible romance between the Bosnian wife of a blind
Finnish colonel and a history teacher. Introduction by Tuva
Korsström
At some point 250 years ago, a Swedish monarch
decided to grant town status to some villages in the estuary of
Kuhnusjoki ('Sluggish river') on the south-west coast of Finland.
There the little town lies today and
is, with its environs, the setting for Daniel Katz's new novel Laituri
matkalla mereen ('A jetty to the sea'). It's the late 1990s,
early autumn, and this year the autumn gales come early. The history
teacher Henry Loimu goes down to the bank of the river to repair
his jetty in the gusts of wind.
Suddenly he finds himself, like another
Buster Keaton, sitting astride the end of the jetty, which has come
loose from its moorings. Henry and the jetty are off at full speed
down the river towards the sea. In a bend of the river he gets a
fleeting glimpse of a strange, seductive young woman who is watching
him quizzically - until with a bang he bumps into the neighbour's
jetty, grabbing hold of it as his own vessel hurtles onwards.
Thus begins the romance between the
beautiful Mavra from war-ravaged Bosnia and the young Finn Henry.
Mavra is entrenched in the mysterious neighbouring house on the
lower reaches of the river. She is married to a vigorous but elderly
Finnish colonel who has been a peacekeeper in Bosnia. The odd couple
are constantly watched and attended by the Bosnian Serb Jovan, who
is also an import from the ex-Yugoslavian conflict. Later the former
horse-breeder turns out to be Mavra's father.
Henry's love for the mysterious Mavra
opens Henry's eyes to Europe's tragic recent history, both on a
personal and a more general plane. In the war in Bosnia Mavra has
been subjected to group rape by former schoolmates, Jovan has lost
everything he owns and the colonel has lost his eyesight. The threads
of the narrative go back to the history of the Balkans and also
to the Second World War in Finland. And yet Daniel Katz's thirteenth
book is a funny one, characterised by the colonel's and Jovan's
grim verbal humour, Mavra's whimsical ideas, and Henry's perpetual
irresolution, whether in love affairs or social behaviour.
Katz (born 1938) made his debut and
also his breakthrough with the novel Kun isoisä Suomeen
hiihti ('When grandfather skied to Finland', 1969), in which
he combined the history of his Jewish family with that of Finland.
His narrative art is characterised by gallows humour and a black
comedy of the absurd. In Finnish prose he is a foreign voice because
of his anchoring in Eastern Europe and the Orient, but he nonetheless
always succeeds in binding the threads to Finland.
In the 1990s Katz proved to be one
of the few authors who, with lightning swiftness, were able to comprehend
and describe the changes in Europe without losing contact with history.
His novel Saksalainen sikakoira ('Schweinehund', 1992; translated
into Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian and Slovak) is an
example of this, as is Laituri matkalla mereen – one
of the few fictional interpretations to date of the crisis in ex-Yugoslavia
by a Nordic writer.
At the end of the novel the action
takes a surprising turn, and the inexperienced history teacher suddenly
finds himself in the midst of history. It is his turn to be a peacekeeper,
in a Bosnia that is with difficulty recovering from the war. In
the legendary town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina he
gathers material for a dissertation about the Nobel prize-winning
author Ivo Andric, at the same time pessimistically declaring that
the suspicion and bitterness from the war still hovers over the
piles of ruins. The peace may only be a brief lull before ethnic
conflicts flare up again.
In spite of everything, Laituri
matkalla mereen is less a political portrayal of contemporary
reality than the depiction of a love affair and a love triangle.
In the following extract, the colonel and Henry openly confront
each other for the first time in their rivalry for Mavra's favour.
It all develops into something that
resembles an old-fashioned duel à la Pushkin, but the battle
takes unexpected forms. As so often in Daniel Katz's work, the battle
is fought with words: the two conflicting parties attack each other
by the edge of the gravel pit mainly with ironic phrases and black
wisdom about life.
Translated by David McDuff
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