Deep River

Karl Marlantes

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786498854
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786498847
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

'An unforgettable novel.' - Washington Post At the turn of the twentieth century, as the oppression of Russia's imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings - Ilmari, Matti and the politicized young Aino - are forced to flee. They settle among a community of Finns in Deep River - a town on the western edges of the United States. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness. But while they are climbing and felling trees one-hundred metres high, Aino is organizing the country's fledgling labour movements. As the Koskis strive to rebuild lives and families in an America in flux, they also try to hold fast to the traditions of a home they can never return to. And so the seasons change, the decades pass and the denizens of Deep River slip in and out of love; they become engineers and fishermen, midwives and widows, soldiers and fugitives. In this profoundly moving epic Karl Marlantes masterfully depicts the tyranny of nascent America, the limits of human survival and the enduring might of family love. 'A finely-hewn portrait' An Amazon Best Book of July 2019

PART ONE

1893–1904

Prologue

A thread of light on the eastern horizon announced the dawning of full daylight and with it the end of a night the Koski family would never talk about and never forget. A skylark called across the rye field, full throated, pouring out its desire to mate and be fertile. The cold blue sky into which it would rise sat back and let it sing.

It was on this morning in 1891 that Maíjaliisa Koski returned from a three-day absence, helping a Swedish-speaking woman from a poor fisherman’s family with a difficult delivery. She found her two oldest daughters and her baby son laid out in their Sunday clothes on the rough planks of the kitchen floor. Although cleaned just hours earlier, the house still smelled of vomit and excrement. Her husband, Tapio; her oldest son, Ilmari Väinö; age twelve, her daughter, Aino, age three; and her now youngest son, Lemminki Matti, two, were sitting on the floor, their backs against the wall, staring dumbly at the bodies. Maíjaliisa threw herself to the floor beside her dead children and covered their faces with kisses.

She’d left them with mild fevers just three days earlier, begged by the woman’s husband who’d skied and run over thirty kilometers from the coast through the spring thaw to reach her, a midwife renowned throughout the Kokkola region. Knowing that a mother and baby might die, flattered by the heroic effort of the father to reach her, she thought her own children would all pull through.

Few survived cholera.

When she’d finished crying, she stood and looked at her husband. “We’ll bury them tomorrow in the churchyard. I want to be with them today.”

Her husband said, “Yoh.”

* * *

That terrible night marked the children differently. Aino, in whose little arms her baby brother, Väinö Ahti, had died, learned that no one was coming. She was as alone as the meaning of her name—the only one. Ilmari, ill to the point of staggering, had exhausted himself bringing snow from the remaining patches to stem his sisters’ fevers. He’d fainted and had visions of angels coming for his siblings. When he regained consciousness, soaked with melted snow, his father was slumped unconscious against the ladder leading to the loft where his sisters Mielikki and Lokka lay dead in the bed all the children shared. From that night, Ilmari knew there was a God and God was to be feared, but He sent angels. Lemminki Matti, not fully aware of what was happening, retained a vague uneasiness about the future. As he grew older, he realized the wealthy feared the future less than the poor. How wealth was attained was less important than gaining it.

The children never knew the name of the woman Maíjaliisa went to help that night nor the name of her son who survived and grew to manhood, but their fates were linked.

1

That September of 1901, four years after Ilmari left for America, both for its opportunity and for fear of being drafted into the Russian army, the district was still without a teacher. The Evengelical Lutheran Church of Finland would not confirm an illiterate child, and this made even the poorest of Finnish peasants different from peasants in almost all other European countries: all children learned to read in church-led confirmation classes. For further education, however, the parents had to pay. This was where the bulk of Maíjaliisa’s midwifing earnings went. Classes were rotated among farmhouses.

To find a teacher, Maíjaliisa and the other mothers had been writing letters most of the summer. The geese were already on their way south when Tapio came from Kokkola with a letter saying that a young man named Järvinen from the University of Helsinki had accepted the post.

He turned out to be a radical, giving the parents great concern. Aino, now thirteen, along with the other teenage girls, fell in love with him.

Her feelings for the teacher intensified when it was the Koskis’ week to board him.

Aino was at the kitchen table working on an essay Järvinen had assigned, when he sat down next to her. He carefully slipped a small pamphlet in front of her, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in Russian.

“Are you supposed to have that?” she whispered.

He put a finger to his lips. “No. You are.”

Aino looked over to see Maíjaliisa knitting and Tapio snoring, the harness he’d been working on still in his hands. “Why me?”

“Your mother told me your father’s been teaching you Russian. She says he’s fluent because he worked in Saint Petersburg as a young man.”

“He stopped teaching me when the czar began making it the language of government.”

Järvinen chuckled. He waggled the booklet in front of her. “I can help you with the Russian, but I’m really giving it to you because of your questions in class. Why do people let the czar be so rich and stay poor themselves? Why must families who can barely feed their children do work rent on horse stables and roads that go nowhere for some count who lives in Stockholm? Good questions. This might help answer them.” He slid it under her work. “Just between you and me.”

When Tapio and Maíjaliisa were safely asleep, Aino lit the kerosene lamp next to her bed and stayed up until just before Maíjaliisa rose for her morning chores. Then she slipped the pamphlet under her mattress. Aware of Matti watching her, she said, “Don’t you say a word, or I’ll tell Father who took that mink trap from Mr. Kulmala.”

“No one here objected to the extra mink pelts.”

“Even more reason you’ll catch it when they find out the extra pelts are coming from a stolen trap.”

Matti glared at the obvious blackmail. “All right. I won’t tell; you won’t tell.”

“Deal.”

All through the winter Aino plied Järvinen with questions during lunch breaks, after school, after supper—whenever she could. Is there really going to be a revolution? Why aren’t the working classes already throwing off their chains?”

When Aino finished working through The Communist Manifesto, Järvinen gave her a Swedish translation of a pamphlet by Rosa Luxemburg titled Reform or Revolution? Aino daydreamed about meeting Rosa Luxemburg and being at her side reforming all of Europe. She also daydreamed about Mr. Järvinen.

That March of 1902, during another one of Järvinen’s weeks with the Koskis, he asked if Tapio would like to accompany him to hear a lecture by Erno Harmajärvi in Kokkola—and if Aino could come along.

Maíjaliisa shot a quick glare at Tapio. “He’s a socialist,” she said.

Aino held her breath.

“He’s really a Finnish nationalist,” Järvinen said.

Järvinen had hit Tapio where his heart beat. He’d named all his children after heroes and heroines of The Kalevala, the national epic poem of Finland. The reason he’d worked on churches in Russia was that he’d lost his government job by preaching Finnish independence.

Tapio looked at Maíjaliisa. “He’s right. What harm would it be for Aino to hear from someone who is actually doing something to get rid of these Russians?”

Aino stood up and whirled around silently clapping her hands. Her mother was shaking her head, tight-lipped.

Maíjaliisa urged Tapio over to the corner of the kitchen.

“They’ll have someone there taking names,” she said in a fierce whisper. “You know the Okhrana probably has your name from your time in Russia and the police are already keeping an eye on you for that speech about Finnish independence at last Midsummer’s Eve dance.” She took hold of his loose blouse with both hands and pulled him closer to her face. “I ask you. Don’t do this.”

Putting his large hands over hers, he gently pulled them away from his blouse. “Living in fear is not living.”

“Neither is living without a husband.”

“When a woman is humiliated, it doesn’t make her less a woman. When a man is humiliated, there are only two choices for him, fight or live in shame. Would you have a husband who is not a man?”

They looked into each other’s eyes, neither of them blinking. Then Maíjaliisa sighed. They both knew her answer. She picked up her pipe and walked out the door.

* * *

At the lecture, two men stood just inside the door taking notes, their faces stern and unmoving. They would occasionally ask someone’s name, but it was clear that they didn’t need to ask either Tapio’s or Mr. Järvinen’s.

Aino, Tapio, and Mr. Järvinen filed into seats near the lectern. A few minutes later, a boy about Aino’s age sat down on a seat by the aisle. She quickly took off her glasses.

She hated them. One day Matti found out she couldn’t see a lark that he could. He told her father. Her father asked her that night at family reconciliation—when they all had to recite their sins before they could eat—if she had trouble seeing. She confessed she had been walking by the blackboard during lessons and memorizing it before taking her seat. Her parents drove her into Kokkola to a hardware store where they tried on wire-rimmed glasses until they found a pair that worked for her. It cost them several months of cash, so she felt guilty every time she wouldn’t wear them. Like now.

She smiled and looked down at her apron. He was very good-looking.

He politely asked if he could sit next to her. She nodded yes, then wished she’d said something instead of just nodding like an imbecile. He sat silent, intent on the empty podium. The intensity of his eyes drew her attention. She tried not to look at him.

He leaned over and whispered, “This is going to be interesting.”

She nodded, then resolving to say something, she whispered, “He’s really not a socialist. He’s a Finnish nationalist.” She glanced quickly to see how that went over.

Then the boy leaned back toward her and whispered, “He’s really not a Finnish nationalist. He’s a revolutionary.”

The way he said it excited her, the implication of the righting of all wrongs—of revolution. Then, both tried to sneak a look at the same time and their eyes met again. “I’m Oskar Penttilä,” he whispered. He looked around. “I’m called Voitto.”

That thrilled her. He had a revolutionary name. Voitto meant victory.

“I’m Aino Koski.”

“Are you a socialist?” he whispered.

“Oh, yes. A socialist. But my father, he’s a nationalist.” She hesitated and looked around. “He goes along with most people saying he just wants to return to autonomy, like what we had under the Swedes. It’s safer, but he really wants the Russians gone.”

“And the man next to him? Your brother?”

“No, the district teacher. He’s from Helsinki. He’s staying with us.” She looked around, then leaned in and whispered, “He gave me a copy of The Communist Manifesto.” She watched for a reaction. He nodded his head and craned around her and her father to look at Mr. Järvinen. Then Aino asked, “Have you read it?”

“Of course,” he said quietly now, no longer whispering. “I’ve read everything he wrote, Engels, too.” There was a pause. “I can read German.”

She was thrilled; he was trying to impress her.

“I read it in a Russian translation,” she replied.

“Did you really read The Communist Manifesto in Russian?”

“Yes. Plekhanov’s eighteen eighty-two translation.”

His eyes narrowed. “How do you know Russian?”

“My father is fluent.” She hastened to explain. “He’s educated. So is my mother,” she added. Then she felt bad. She was trying to say that her family weren’t just peasant farmers, but a socialist shouldn’t care. “Worked for the government, before he got into political trouble. Then he built churches in Russia before he met my mother.” She smiled. “It was a game with us, but the Russian lessons stopped when it became mandatory for government wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Part One: 1893–1904
• Part Two: 1904–1910
• Part Three: 1910–1917
• Part Four: 1917–1919
• Part Five: 1919–1932
• Lördagsvalsen
• Author’s Comment
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author