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A FINNISH SOJOURN

Most of my first afternoon in Finland was spent sitting in the sun on a shelf of water-smoothed rocks jutting out into Jaajalahti, a protected cove of the Baltic Sea on the northwestern edge of Helsinki. The waters of Laajalahti are tidal and come lapping in against the rocks of a shoreline dense with tufted fir trees and silver birches barely twenty yards from the lovely, unobtrusive hotel the Finns call KALASTAJATORPPA, the "Cottage of the Fisherman."

Kalastajatorppa, is made of slabs of white marble set so artfully into descending ledges of granite that it is virtually unnoticeable from the road above the water. It is, however, one of the finest of all Finnish hotels, and one of the best equipped saunas in Helsinki is built into its lake level. And that is where I spent the rest of that first afternoon, alternately poaching myself, perspiring in rivulets, and diving into the cold waters of Laajalahti.

I recall that afternoon squinting through the steam clouds of the sauna at a tall Finn sitting next to me on a bench and commenting to him with a good deal of enthusiasm that the ritual of sauna was to my mind more than merely invigorating, it was really quite wonderful. "Yes it is," he agreed. "That is why we have over a million of them in Finland." (Which works out to one sauna for every four people.)

That brief exchange established a pattern that would be repeated throughout my visit to the country the Finns call Suomi — gasps of wonder, the happiness of discovery, expressions of delight, all acknowledged laconically with subdued satisfaction.

For reasons that are quite sensible the Finns don't boast all that much about their country. With a landscape of such lean and unsullied beauty, of equal measures of rugged red granite, dense green timber forests, and coldly blue-gray waters, they simply don't have to. They allow their pure water and their sixty-two thousand lakes, their uncountable miles of firs and spruces and birches, the clean widths of low-profiled cities with boulevards open to the sun, their dynamic sense of environmental design and style, their efficiency and an assured self-effacing wit to speak for them.

Clinging stubbornly to their geography, resisting changes that would alter their environment, the Finns relish their country's shifting moods, the essence of which has perhaps never been captured so ably as by their best-known composer, Jean Sibelius, in his tone poem "Finlandia." The land, like the music, encourages solitude and introspection, and, as you travel about the land you find yourself wishing over and over again that you might stay here, in your evergreen-decorated hideaway of a Helsinki hotel, or here, in a forest cabin near Rovaniemi just below the Arctic Circle, or perhaps here, up on the ramparts of a castle in Turku, watching the busy, bobbing traffic up the Aura River, for some limitless measure of time.

If a visitor would understand Finland, I was told more than once, then he or she should think of the country, of Suomi, in terms of the letter "S." "We are Sibelius, Sauna, and Sisu," a man told me one evening over an iced glass of koskenkorva, the Finnish schnapps. Sibelius because his music has captured the many moods of the country, Sauna because this is indispensable to the Finns, and Sisu, for this is the word that the Finns say defines the essence of their character — courage, stamina, and stubbornness. It has been these characteristics that have seen the Finns survive, first as a partitioned possession of Sweden, later as a duchy of czarist Russia, still later as the fiercely independent nation it is now, which coexists with the Soviets along a shared seven-hundred-mile border.

The Finns, tough reserved, are friendly, given to tending to their own business but willing to share their country, their table, and a koskenkorva with you anytime. A Finn may be reticent initially, but if you ask his or her help the response will be one of generosity, offering not only what you have requested but the hospitality of home and food as well. The Finns are proud of their food, which is basic and hearty, and of their food markets — pockets of unsurpassed freshness — stocked high with salmon and crayfish, chanterelles, dill, new potatoes, thick and heavy rye breads, smoked trout and pork and sausages, and the dense meat of the reindeer, raised by the hundreds of thousands in Lapland just as we raise domesticated cattle.

On my recent visit I was invited to roam about this country, which retains many historical vestiges of Sweden and Russia, and a varied trip it was, encompassing ten different flights of Finnair, its state airline; crisscrossing Helsinki by metro, tram, taxi, and bus; riding Finnrail to Turku, once Finland's Swedish-dominated capital; traveling through fourteenth-century Porvoo and twentieth-century Tapiola by tourist coach; and sailing overnight aboard a giant two-thousand-passenger cruise ship from Stockholm to Helsinki.

It was a visit of images clearly retained, of serendipitous experiences well remembered. I recall an evening at WALHALLA, a restaurant fashioned from a portion of the old-stone fortress walls of Suomenlinna, the eighteenth-century Swedish version of Gibraltar that sits on six connected islands guarding Helsinki's harbor. The restaurant is a series of arched domes, formed by sandblasted old brick and stone. Its floor is of waxed bricks, and its chairs and tables are polished birch. Its table settings that night were remarkable — Arabia porcelain sitting on Saarinen wood plates, Iittala glassware and Hackman stainless, and the vases holding sprays of fresh daisies were classic Savoy by Aalto. The table linens — a pattern of black waving reeds on beige — was Marimekko. It was quite simply dinner in a living museum, a setting so breathtaking that I almost neglected, but not quite, the cold smoked salmon, the marble-sized potatoes with dill, and the compote of fresh Finnish berries that was our waterside dinner. Imagine the subsequent shock of pleasure when, on the very next morning, in the Museum of Applied Arts, Helsinki's museum devoted to Finnish industrial design, just off the Esplanadi, I discovered every item from that restaurant setting on exhibit, including the Marimekko cloth, which was draped in great rolling folds overhead at the museum's entrance.

Other memories are as vivid.

There was the somewhat frantic observance of the beginning of the crayfish season, an annual event that begins the last week of July, when crowds of Finns with net shopping sacks come pushing into the old Kauppahalli Market hall in Turku like so many lemmings to pick up the little, nipping creatures, which they then boil Louisiana-style and serve with icy beer and icier koskenkorva. It is an event the Finns love to share with the rest of Europe, and so the signs in restaurants like Havis Amand and Kappeli in Helsinki fairly shout, "Krapuja! Kräftor! Crayfish! Ecrevisses!"

I recall my wonder at the massive railroad station in the middle of Helsinki designed by Eliel Saarinen and the excitement of watching the daily evening train to St. Petersburg chug out to the east. I recall the clean, mustard-yellow neoclassicism that Carl Ludvig Engel left in his buildings in Helsinki and Turku, and I remember biting into the fresh sausage of pork, rice, and raisins called rusinamakkara in the Turku market. There was pleasure in watching families scrub their household rugs on floating docks lashed to Baltic Sea piers and seeing the sun still up at midnight through the clear roof of a bus rambling along a Lapland highway.

And I remember the odd juxtaposition of the four spirited American students from Tulsa, singing with guitar and tambourine that, "Soon and very soon we are going to meet the king," oblivious to the masses of tourists inching their way through the spectacular underground stone, concrete, and slate church, Temppeliaukiio, blasted out of the bedrock of central Helsinki.

I remember the fun of the tongue attempting to cope with the Finnish language, a language in which easily enough a bank is a pankii, the police are poliisi, a hotel is a hotelli, but where a railroad station is a rautatieasema, your luggage is matkatavara, a waitress is a tarjoilijatar, and a telegram is a sähkösanoma. I experimented with it but was thankful that virtually every Finn spoke English, which is taught in all of the country's schools as a second language.

And there was always the recurring sense of space. In the Helsinki planned by Engel the buildings are massive but low, the streets and the boulevards extraordinarily wide. The market squares in every city from Helsinki to Turku, from Porvoo to Rovaniemi are vast open areas, and parks seem to be everywhere, all of them seemingly fronting on some body of water, either a patch of the Baltic or a lake.

In the best of parks like the one dedicated to Sibelius and dominated by a giant steel and aluminum paean to music, which looks like a pipe organ suspended in space, an effort is made to keep them atmospherically natural. Thus grass is tended but grows free and unedged, walks are of packed dirt or gravel, and trees are in clumps or in groves, not artificially placed for effect. All of this is simply because the Finns prefer it that way; their country is not one of soft beauty. Finland seems rather to take your breath away, and it does so with its waters, trees, and boundless space which its cities seem merely to interrupt. In the south it is all archipelago with thousands of treed islands offshore separated by zigzagging currents. Inland Finland is a variation on the theme of forest and lake beneath a sky that is cloudlessly bright for long periods during the short summer, coldly brittle in winter when it is constantly altered by scudding clouds.

All routes through Finland, except of course if you're coming south from the Arctic, begin in Helsinki, the capital and home to one tenth of the population. The city sprawls, constantly spreading from its historic waterfront in all directions to its quite considerable suburbs. A large, modern city packed with museums and markets, with a clean and highly efficient public tram system, it is remarkably free from crowding and urban blight.

Surrounded on three sides by the waters of the Gulf of Finland, Helsinki is a city wedded to the sea. Each day the fishing boats, large and small, pull alongside the quays of Market Square, nets filled with fish that are carried directly to nearby kiosks for sale. Around the peninsula that is Helsinki sprawl long commercial piers, equally lengthy receiving ports for container ships, huge dry docks, and giant shipyards. Still farther along are the piers from which the massive ships of the Silja Line depart on their overnight trips to Stockholm. Thousands of pleasure boats dart about the harbor between Helsinki and Suomenlinna, and all along the shore there are parks, restaurants, and promenades facing the water, for it is to the water that the Finns come for sustenance and holiday pleasures. As you travel about Helsinki you are never far from some glimpses of water, and , in the summer on the sunniest days, the blue sky and the reflecting waters impart to the city a brightness that enhances its vast open spaces.

Great is the pleasure of walking around Helsinki in the sun, to the grand railroad station and the Art Museum of the Ateneum across the street, a wonderful Baroque building filled with Klees and Mirós, Ernsts and Henry Moores, Arps and Yves Tanguys, Picassos and Légers; or to the Mannerheim Museum in a lovely park called Kaivopuisto, the home of the late Marshal Gustaf Mannerheim, Finland's national hero and former president; or along the Mannerheimintie, the broad avenue named for him, past Alvar Aalto's Finlandia Hall to Stockmann's, Finland's largest department store, at the head of Aleksanterinkatu, a street for Italian shoes, Icelandic sweaters, Russian fur hats, and Finnish Lapponia jewelry; or to the next block, the Esplanadi, with its fine shops of Marimekko, Vuokko, Arabia and iitala.

How delightful to lunch in the delicate Russian-built gingerbread pavilion called KAPPELI on the Esplanadi facing Market Square, a one-hundred-year-old café of copper-sheathed roof and colonnaded front from which to watch the brass band concerts in the mall of a park that separates the two sides of the Esplanadi. The restaurant has a horseshoe-shaped buffet table that may include such specialties as fried whitefish with dill, mushroom broth, and fresh strawberries that come from the market just outside.

A walk among the orange awnings of that food and flower market is a party of color and taste. All around are bunches of yellow, red, pink, even orange roses, as well as red, white, and pink carnations and the pale purple Arctic brambles. Stacked alongside are piles of fresh mint, dill, basil, salvia, and parsley and leeks, onions, lettuces, white beans, and cucumbers. I buy small baskets of strawberries, raspberries, and lingonberries and eat them as I stroll among the kiosks with their potted violets and rush baskets filled with beets, carrots, cauliflower, and radishes. Or the granite steps leading down the quay into the harbor waters the fishermen sell salmon fillets and steaks from the bow of their boats.

How fine to walk through the market before dusk and watch the tents fold, the trucks with mechanical brushes clean the cobbled square, and the men with hoses bathe the stones clean, ready for the next morning. Then I walk back up the Esplanadi to the climbing street called Kalevankatu to the restaurant SóKKIPILLI, "the Bagpipe," and my first totally Finnish meal — a soup of salmon, potatoes, and dill in cream, called lohikeitto, served with a heavy rye roll called a limppu, the stew of shredded reindeer meat and morels called poronsienipata, and tiny crêpes filled with lingonberries and napped with raspberry cream — an excellent meal but, oddly enough, in a restaurant where one is greeted by a portrait of Prince Charles in Royal Stewart tartans and served by waitresses similarly clad. Excellent nevertheless.

On another such bright day we are en route westward out of Helsinki over a series of causeways to Tapiola, a thirty-year-old planned community five miles outside the city's center. In Tapiola, housing and shops and buildings of the Helsinki University of Technology blend into the greenery to produce an unobtrusive, self-contained, self-supplied city within Helsinki's borders. It is a prestigious address and a perfect place in which to immerse yourself in the essence of Finnish architecture. Buildings are of brick and poured concrete, of stucco and fieldstone, of slate and wood, of copper sheathing and glass. Roofs soar, timbers and steel frameworks jut out from thickets of firs like the prows of ships. Broad open greens surround the town and the Hotel Dipoli, governed and operated by the university students. Tapiola is home to only about twelve thousand of Helsinki's people, which I am told with a smile is "the way Tapio, King of the Forests, would have liked it."

Tapio, you see, is the hero of Finland's national saga, the Kalevala, an enchanted, unwritten folktale passed along by poets and storytellers for centuries. Often compared to the Iliad, it encompasses what the Finns think of themselves, their sisu. In it, the people of the kingdom of Kaleva, ruled by Tapio, constantly fight against an enemy called the Pohjola for possession of a powerful symbol called the Sampo. The stories evoke Finland's forests and lakes, its customs such as the sauna, and its traditional occupations of lumbering and seafaring.

These mythical struggles, only put down in writing less than a hundred years ago, have come to symbolize to the Finns not only the battles of long ago against the Laplanders of the north but conflicts of more recent times such as those with the Swedes and the Russians. Nor do the Finns attempt to erase in any way their subjugated past from their consciousness. Russian architecture abounds in Helsinki's Senate Square and in the icons of Uspenski Cathedral, under whose thirteen golden domes sits the largest Orthodox church in the West. Statues of Czar Alexander II stand in Finland's cities as a mark of respect for a ruler who they believe was kind to them. In cities such as Helsinki and Turku street signs and location names are in Swedish as well as Finnish, because Swedish is still one of the country's official languages. These days the boats and planes go between Helsinki and Stockholm, Helsinki and St. Petersburg, and there is a large and receptive audience for the food, drink, and products of Russia.

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