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statue of the other Finn (besides Sibelius) who won global name-recognition, the great runner Paavo Nurmi. I had read in my guidebooks about Finnish drunkenness but in fact had seen only sobriety, and been sober myself. Ordering mineral water (
kivennäisvesi
) is easier than in America, where the waiters sometimes refuse to believe their ears and generally condescend to you as a party poop. In Europe, water, internally and externally applied, has an honored place in ancient health regimens linked to witchcraft and miracle-cures. But onto the trolley car unsteadily climbed a number of men who, in response to the white summer nights or the gray winter days, to Russian fallout or American popular culture, were still self-administering the alcohol-cure, and who sat with the uncanny stillness of those who, like pregnant women, are holding a wondrous world inside themselves. A dating couple side by side across the aisle, in a fine sweat already, took alternating pulls at a beer bottle, and the girl began to roll a mysterious cigarette while still on the tram. A LL Y OU N EED I S L OVE , said the marquee of the Svenska Teatern, the Swedish Theatre. On the façade of the railroad terminal four stone giants held globular lamps in two stone hands each. I was back in the middle of town.
    Almost at home in Helsinki, I went, at last, to the Clock
hamburger-restaurant
and, surrounded by denim-clad patrons less than half my age, watched Finland get beaten by West Germany in American-style football. It looked much like the real thing, even to zoom shots of the frowning Finnish coaches, both black Americans; but the European players had a disconcerting way of carrying the ball in two hands, like the statues on the railroad terminal, and swinging it daintily back and forth as they ran. They seemed lighter and bouncier than their American counterparts, so that long unimpeded runs occurred, on a somehow more spacious field. They hadn’t yet learned how to invest the game with our lumbering, obstructive passion.
    I had been warned that the Finns put ground-up fish in their hamburgers, but mine, under its burden of obligatory condiments, tasted remarkably like those being served up four thousand miles away. Theplanet Earth is like our allotted span of life—ample but finite. Seven continents, seven decades. As a child, I used to wonder whether or not I would live to the year 2000. It seemed incredibly far away. Now, here in Finland, I sat gray-haired among unintelligibly chatting teen-agers who had every expectation of entering the twenty-first century. I was happy in their company. The two national treats tourists are expected to savor—taking a sauna and eating reindeer meat—I had managed to avoid, but I had survived my nights in hotel rooms, and I had brought sunlight to this waterlogged land by the simple act of buying an umbrella. I had seen the lakes and forests. I had filled in another blank space in the coloring book of the world.
    1987

THE PARADE
    I HAD NOT EXPECTED the parade to be such agony. At the pace of a constrained walk, it threaded back and forth through the neat brick blocks of Hayesville’s square mile. I was reminded of those mazelike mathematical puzzles that call for connection of all possible dots of a set. There was scarcely a block we did not crawl past, the fire sirens up ahead wailing as if in attendance upon some peculiarly static disaster. The borough was celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its incorporation; I, as a prominent former resident, had been invited, by mimeographed form letter, to ride in one of the limousines. I had been a fool to accept.
    In what way prominent? In alien cities and universities, where the dialect spoken would be unintelligible in Hayesville, I have scaled certain immaterial heights, with no company save the icy winds of truth and the whispering voices of the mighty dead. For twenty years my achievements were obscure, buried in technical journals; in the last decade the