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the Oropax you get in Italy—there was less noise, possibly—and cost only twelve finnmarks. On second thought I went back into the drugstore and bought another box. Our attitude to spending foreign currency goes through two stages: at first, one is reluctant to part with it, as if its uncertain value makes it immeasurably precious; then one begins to spend quite freely, as if it is play money, and one is playing a trick by getting real goods for it.
    The rain, once my own umbrella was in hand, ceased to fall. Perhaps it
had
been all in my mind.
    Back in the hotel room, a newspaperwoman called, asking for an interview, and this, too, like shopping, was familiar, friendly territory. I swapped an interview for a ride to Retretti, the partially subterranean art center twenty-three kilometres away. Vast underground caverns had been supposedly blasted out of the bedrock by a young entrepreneur, Pekka Hyvärinen, to serve as art galleries, a concert hall, a restaurant, and a nightclub; but it was hard for me to believe that the caves hadn’t been already there, carved for some more governmental purpose like the storage of armaments or of nuclear wastes. But no Finn I talked to admitted that this was the case. Finns seem to cherish the aesthetic uses of dynamite: one of the few sights I was taken to in Helsinki was the Temppeliaukio Church, a large round church blasted out of rock in 1969, with a skyey roof suggesting a hovering spaceship. In the towering, dripping Retretti caves, chunks and hardened puddles of glass, by Timo Sarpaneva, were displayed. I ascended from this mineral world into miles of surreal art—Belgian, Austrian, Romanian—hung in a huge shed. Surrealism, I began to feel, had only two ideas, blasphemy and pornography. Outdoors, lumps of cracked stone and grassed-over earth, by Olavi Lanu, defied recognition as sculptures.
    Retretti boasts of being the largest art center in Finland, and it was certainly too large for me. Not many miles away, at Kerimäki, stands the largest wooden church in the world. I did not visit it. I did visit, however,in Helsinki, what was alleged to be the largest bookstore in Europe, the Akateeminen Kirjakauppa. This yen for largeness may be a mark of young countries; Finland achieved national independence only in 1917. I was assured that other countries consider it “the America of Europe.” I suppressed my incredulity: the Minnesota of Europe, at most. But the Finns are proud of the independence they managed to salvage from two world wars fought on the losing side, and of the enterprise that has enabled them to exploit to their economic advantage their potentially oppressive closeness to Russia. More than once, I heard the joke that Finland treats the Soviet Union as its colony—importing raw materials (oil and natural gas, above all) and exporting manufactured goods. But the Soviets, I was also told, are beginning to want not Finnish shoes but Italian shoes, and the Finns must improve their trade relations with Western Europe in order to preserve the prosperity that their endless forests and special Russian connection have given them since the war. They hope, specifically, that the Soviets will build a highway south from Leningrad to Poland, which would enable the Finns to drive their cars and trucks into Europe instead of, as now, shipping them by ferry across the Baltic to Sweden, driving down through Sweden, and ferrying them again to the European mainland.
    Helsinki is a handsome city—not playful like Copenhagen, or elegant like Stockholm, or crabbedly picturesque like Oslo, but with a certain somber massy grandeur in its center and a fragrant woodsy looseness in its parks and suburbs. I was taken to one of its four “tourist islands,” Seurasaari, where antique buildings from all over Finland have been assembled, so that one can experience the space and the furniture and even the aromas of a village parsonage, a sod-roofed hut from Lapland, and a low-ceilinged farmhouse