“There’s a way through the forest where you are no longer in Finland but in Russia.” They point to tree-darkened depth, the lofty canopy, the chaga fungi spotting the rough brown bark like clumped charcoal, the shadowed path you can’t see.
“Every year, picking berries and mushrooms, Finns wander into Russia, Russians into Finland.”
“You want to go to Russia?” They laugh. “Too hard to get visa; have instead a bowl of kasha, maybe with some spring onions.”
We pass signs in Finnish echoed by Cyrillic beneath, curves and lines like mysterious symbols. Here somewhere my grandparents fled Russia, traveled the path to the mountains, my grandmother’s wooden bowl cradling the last of the Karelian pies and wrapped inside a ragged babushka of faded red and gold flowers, my grandfather tugging the hand of my seven year old mother while her sister rode in a sling on his shoulders. How much snow then? How cold? What shoes? What coats?
It doesn’t matter.
What’s a little snow? A little cold? Worn boots?
Here somewhere on the other side of the border they stuffed hay into their shoes to absorb moisture and warm their feet. Somewhere else they found the boat to take them over the water to another somewhere else that would lead to different mountains and then, at the next somewhere else, another path to yet another border to yet another alphabet, to yet another ship to the Lower East Side of New York, where everyone it seemed spoke Russian and played sidewalk baseball.
But then, how else would a Jew in 1920 flee Russia?
Read more of this in Ensemble Anthology no. 1
