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in the logs’ watery descent toward the sawmill, into great floating corrals pulled to the next river by oared or steam-driven boats. The chains of logs had been tied together with knotted withies, and snow as well as water had been employed to skid the trees out. The tools of this epic labor, the axes and grapples and the marking sledges that branded the logs like heads of cattle, the antique measuring calipers and early chain saws and the long files that restored metal’s virginal edge composed that solidest type of poetry, the shapes of fact and necessity. The poetry sang without words to me, for the only words in English were DON ’ T TOUCH THE OBJECTS, PLEASE , a command which in Finnish was even more forbidding: NÄYTTELYESINEISIIN KOSKEMINEN KIELLETTY !
    As if worn out with all this vicarious logging labor, I fell asleep easily after dinner in the hotel; but I awoke at two, and stayed awake until six, when it would have been eleven at night at home. The bone-deep self-estrangement of jet lag: is it for this racking existential confrontation that we travel? In the wrestle with insomnia, my heart felt stuffed with tremulous agitation, and my head seemed a bundle of electricity irrepressibly twitching my body. All the people of my life, from my eighty-three-year-old mother to my three-month-old grandson, passed through my consciousness in a murky, nebulous cloud of unfulfilled responsibility. Dread crystallized as a strange, periodic, unlocated clicking from the direction of the bathroom. The hotel room was paler and more modern than the one I had left in Helsinki and to which I would return; but the bed also suggested a tray—a tray on which I was being offered to Morpheus, who turned up his nose.
    In the vain effort to escape myself, I shifted my pillow and my head to the bed’s other end, and, that failing, I stepped onto the balcony and gazed at the sleeping resort city. The names of hotels and stores were spelled in light, but nothing moved. Not even the clouds moved—yellowish strips of nimbus that seemed the hellish underside of something else. I had never before been—not in Leningrad, not in the Orkney Islands—this far north on the planet, and the arrangement of reservations and obligations whereby I would make my way home seemed impossibly rickety and precarious. The precariousness of being alive and human was no longer hidden from me by familiar surroundings and the rhythm of habit. I was fifty-five, ignorant, dying, and filling this bit of Finland with the smell of my stale sweat and insomniac fury.
    But in the morning, a Monday morning, the stores were open, and it was so blowy and cold the people in the market were wearing gloves and wool caps. For twenty finnmarks—a bargain, less than five dollars—I bought an umbrella from a girl in a market stall. “Cold,” I said. She laughed: “Very cold!” The joys of exchange. Because it was so comically cold, I bought a hat and some candy along a main street of stores that reminded me of one in a busy English tourist town, like Windsor—especially the sweetshop down a few steps off the street, with candies and nuts loose in jars, and a bored girl weighing the purchases on a computerized scale. At times, as when I had watched on television an earnest Algerian documentary about nation-building, or observed the elderly, slightly shabby Finns around me in the hotel, I had felt I was in a Socialist country—a relatively liberated one, like Yugoslavia—but Mondaymorning banished any doubt that consumerism reigned in Finland. The department store, in its layout and contents, spelled out an intelligible code, even to the word KASSA for cashier; the language of buying and selling, of displays and price tickets and receipts and correct change, was one I could speak, though I couldn’t manage to say “
kiitos
.” At an APTEEKKI , I bought a little round, drum-shaped box of Oropax, those fuzzy wax earplugs available only in Europe. They seemed smaller than