The Bus Goes Eastwards

By Kristina Rotkirch

It‘s something of a miracle that we in Finland, with our traditionally unsympathetic immigration policy, should now be starting to get an immigrant literature. What‘s more, its foremost representative is a Russian woman who writes so well in the minority language of Swedish that she was this year awarded the Runeberg Prize, a prestigious prize for which both Finnish- and Swedish-language literature of all genres is nominated.
Zinaida Lindén is her name, born in Leningrad in 1963 and for the last fourteen years living in Turku. Even her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Överstinnan och syntetisatorn (The Colonel’s Wife and the Synthesizer, 1996) caused mild exhilaration amongst the critics. A new writing temperament and a new subject area had landed in Finland-Swedish literature. And on top of that, it turned out that this exotic bird expressed herself in shimmeringly individual and precise Swedish. How was this possible?
One explanation is that Zinaida Lindén had in fact studied Swedish in her home city, and had moonlighted as a guide for Swedish-speaking tourist groups. Another has to be the fearlessness and appetite for life that one also finds in the main character of the title story in her second collection of short stories, Scheheradzades sanna historier (Scheherazade’s True Stories, 2000).

The Kolhos jacket and the carrot knife
„Scheherazade“ is a young student in Leningrad, who can’t even dream about ever being allowed to travel abroad. She is completely satisfied with taking the local train to the student residence for foreigners in Peterhof, sneaking past the doorkeeper and dashing up to her lover Djamal, a mathematician from Syria. It will be their eighty-fourth night ... On the way home, she yawns her way through the foundation course in historical realism and thinks up a white lie for her family – it’s not a simple matter going out with an Arab!
It contains much about life in Leningrad during the final years of the Soviet regime. The atmosphere of the time is strong, both in the musty university corridors and amongst the carrot boxes during the obligatory farming work, in which the kolhos jacket fosters romances:
Ah, the kolhos jacket, the students’ sex symbol! Slightly damp, drenched in tobacco smoke, you warmed a frozen girlfriend´s shoulders better than a dozen mink coats! And how could one have improvised a love-nest in the boiler room without you? You and your companion – the sharp carrot knife shoved into the bootleg – what girl could resist your combined power?

Meetings in the border zones
It’s lively, it has a light irony, and it races along – even when the short stories take place outside the student world. We meet the city’s proletariat in the person of The King – a pickpocket and lady-killer – we are taken into courtrooms and telephone exchanges, we meet ballerinas and bakers. Somewhere in the background lives the city, with its layers of past greatness and painful recent history.
Nevertheless, the central thing for Zinaida Lindén is the interplay between people. How does it happen that the tentative love story between the student and the Arab simply dissolves when the borders rear up? These are both political and geographical borders, but the people in Lindén’s short stories are in general at home in border zones, whether they are different stages of life or an uncertain sexual identity. Sometimes she links two transitional phases, youth and perestroika, and in the second collection of short stories the divergence between the Finnish and Russian cultures also comes into the picture.

Time measured in kilometers
It is both fun and slightly sad to share Zinaida Lindén’s sharp-eyed observations of her new homeland. The perspective is often that of the Russian immigrant: what’s it like, for example, for a highly educated young Russian woman when she gets married to a Finnish bus-driver? It’s not in fact too important that she would rather go to a concert and he would prefer the disco. The problem lies in the Finnish man’s emotional awkwardness and the Russian woman’s inconsolable loneliness:
Lonely. The telephone is silent. Nobody rings, nobody calls round. This is not Russia, with neighbours and friends. Nobody gets involved, nobody disturbs. This is not Russia, where one is always fighting one’s way through a tight crowd of people who Know Better, Zinaida Lindén points out that there is another problem that is peculiar to those Russians who live in Finland. A Russian who marries an American and moves to Vermont can measure time normally, like the rest of humanity. But a Russian who has ended up in Finland lives with their gaze fixed eastwards, constantly subjected to the temptation to measure time in kilometers. Zinaida Lindén seems to be one of those who succumb to the temptation to get on a bus in Turku early in the morning so that in the evening they can experience the pleasure of going out „into the evening-weary sea of humanity in St. Petersburg, assuming a matter-of-fact expression and allowing oneself to be swallowed up by these dour but oh-so-loved waves of people“.

A fairytale transformation
This is also how Zinaida Lindén has, unlike most emigrant authors, succeeded in maintaining a closeness to her previous homeland. Without that closeness, she would hardly have been able to write I väntan på en jordbävning (Waiting for an Earthquake, 2004), a novel which in my opinion is totally unique in the way it gets to grips with the social transformations of the last few decades. The hero is called Ivan, just like in the old Russian fairytales, and his path through recent Russian history is just as unpredictable as many people’s fates in today’s Russia.
The whole thing begins in the small, dilapidated village of Mikhailovka, where the blond giant Ivan makes his strength felt even as a schoolboy. He is raised to be a weightlifter, first at special schools and training camps, and later with anabolic steroids and blue hormone pills. In the end, he becomes a nervous wreck and breaks down, just like the Soviet Union under perestroika. Ivan is forced to return to Mikhailovka, where capitalism is now growing „like a fig on a dung heap“. In the 90’s, he gives blood in exchange for food coupons, and picks potatoes for people who pay him in potatoes. But then his life gets an unexpected lift: he is taken on as a sumo wrestler in Japan.

It is tempting to see Ivan as „a typical Russian“ – he is happy, open-hearted and compassionate, at the same time as he lacks energy to steer his own life. But Zinaida Lindén gives her Ivan nuances by letting him tell the story of his life in the first person. By addressing the reader directly, Ivan becomes easily understood and relates his amazed experiences credibly, for example when he describes his first trip abroad to Poland, and a psychiatric clinic in Leningrad.
At the same time as Ivan is being painfully sidelined, society is breaking up around him: family ties, working communities, local surroundings. As a sign of the times, disused gynaecological stools with rust spots in the enamel have been thrown out into a ditch in Mikhailovka. But Zinaida Lindén stoops neither to nostalgia nor to the hate that characterises much of modern Russian literature; on the contrary, she gives a multi-levelled picture of the old Soviet Union – showing us not only the strain of the collective but also its warmth.

The capacity for change
What grows most strongly out of Zinaida Lindén’s novel is nevertheless her confidence in people’s ability to extend themselves and change. The latter part of the novel describes Ivan’s laborious but ultimately euphoric conversion into a Japanese sumo wrestler. It must remain a mystery how Zinaida Lindén has developed her knowledge of Russian sporting practice and the hierarchies of sumo wrestling – at any rate, as a reader one has complete trust in Ivan when he describes the sumo school Genjiyama-beya: „It was a commune, a collective, a community. In short, everything that we had just done away with in Russia.“
Of course, Ivan occasionally suffers an outbreak of an aching homesickness for pickled cabbage and vodka, but the feeling of triumph when he overcomes linguistic and cultural barriers is still more important. The first time he spontaneously understands a Japanese song, happiness wells up inside him: „Only someone who has gone through the minefields of living in a foreign land can understand what I felt“.
But in Waiting for an Earthquake, Zinaida Lindén has once more crossed the Finnish-Russian border – which is still mined – and confirmed Finland as her literary homeland. She has already been published in Russian, and also writes in her mother-tongue. Now, after the Runeberg Prize, she has even been promised translations into Finnish.

Kristina Rotkirch is a critic and translator

Translated by Roy Hodson