[Subsection]

During the passage Myyriäinen had been seized by the demon of fear.

Sanni's peaceful sleep had turned into a heavy, agonized unconsciousness. Gurgling sounds pressed forth from her throat, and spasms of twitching ran through her body. Her bluish face changed with each moment that passed, assuming more and more that fearful aspect a face gets when death has made its last brutal incision into the living tissues. "We'll get there too late, we'll get there too late," said the hammering in Myyriäinen's brain. He was overwhelmed by a sense of life's impotence. He felt tired unto death. Everything that had been elevating and mystically transcendent in the mood which lately had filled him disappeared, and he had a nauseating sensation of corruption and fatigue. Something heavy spread itself over his soul. All the accreted mortal fear of the age seemed to press down upon his breast. Dark faces with malignant expressions rose up from his nocturnal dreams, dreams about dead men he did not know, and the earth groaned beneath the weight of corpses which lay piled upon it. His thoughts circled unceasingly around a single and terrible word, and that word was corpse. He tried with all his might to drive the thought away, but it came back again and again, biting itself fast into his consciousness. There was something in the word   [p. 58]   itself which he did not wish to think to an end, something evil and repulsive which it was not fitting for him to think to an end. A picture which he had seen somewhere in a newspaper came to the surface of his memory, a picture of some children, mutilated and burned, on a street in Shanghai, and it seemed as though only this single picture was needed to open the gate of the Kingdom of the Dead within him. One image after another came forward with terrifying clarity, maimed, tortured, fear-driven figures, as they had accumulated on the bottom of his consciousness during the years of suffering. The phantoms pointed at the small charred corpses in Shanghai with hideous delight, and he heard a voice which said: "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for to such belongeth the Kingdom of God."

He imagined that an abyss opened before him, and that he could not keep from throwing himself into it with a cry.

As the boat slowly pulled alongside the cloister's jetty, a remarkable calm descended upon him. Bending down over little Sanni, he saw that her spirit had not yet fled. The death struggle continued as before, but he watched it without fear. As soon as he set foot on the cloister's island, he knew that a miracle would take place. As though enclosed within an invisible magnetic field, he ascended the hill with the dying child in his arms. He paid no attention to what was happening around him and seemed scarcely conscious of his companions' existence. He moved with great lightness, without being sensible of his own body, like a pilgrim who has been under way for a long time and who finally feels the holy earth beneath his feet. He did not turn around a single time to admire the unique beauty of the place to which he so unexpectedly had come. He did not see the lake's magical play in the sunset nor the roses' luxuriant glow against the stern white walls. The sentimental values which the cloister   [p. 59]   as a form of life can offer to the chance visitor did not exist for him. He had business with the Mother of God, and he was aware of nothing else.

Iivana Lampinen trudged along at his side, the last feeble heir to a spiritual empire which counted Jesus Christ as its founder. Zealous and not a little proud, he kept getting underfoot; he pulled at his comrade's arm, pointing at first one thing and then another with the expression of a child who wants to show his treasures to an outsider. Now that he had actually arrived, he was seized by the atmosphere of the holy place, entering into a state of euphoria and mild intoxication which was not so very different from the pious ecstasy which had gripped the pilgrims of former days upon their first sight of the wonder-working Madonna's sanctuary. Myyriäinen was not aware of Lampinen's overtures and comprehended his chatter no more than he did the sound of the lake's waters. His strange inaccessibility made Lampinen turn rather thoughtful. Was it perhaps a holy man whom he had come upon by accident? Or what else could it be that had wrought such a change in his friend?

The fact that his comrade's condition, so much like a sleepwalker's, made an impression on Iivana Lampinen was not surprising. He had no experience of the enormous tensions that are released within the soul when it suddenly enters into contact with the invisible world after a profound absence. For all his worldliness and naive superficiality, he himself lived within the invisible realm as in the very air he breathed, like a child who is so absorbed by a game that he thinks of nothing save the vicarious meaning the game has given the objects with which he plays. It was natural for him to communicate with the invisible world, just as natural as it was to lift up his soul into a union with that of some other human being. Indeed, to his eyes temporal authority was much more mystic and distant than were the silent protectors   [p. 60]   with whom he had been familiar since his childhood.

As a matter of fact, going to one side of the church steps in order to relieve himself before entering the sanctuary, he cast a shy sidelong glance at his stern and silent comrade. But above the portal of the church there stood an icon which he knew well and loved, and this sight gave him a feeling of security as he did his business. He crossed himself, in a friendly but somewhat hurried manner, before the blessed being which gazed down upon him through the image's eyes, and hastened to follow Myyriäinen into the temple.

Except for a single suppliant beside the high altar, the great cloister church was empty. With half-closed eyelids, Myyriäinen went straight across the floor and up to the Madonna. He moved with a calm surety as though he knew the place well. Lampinen hurried forward in his self-important way in order to awaken the girl. Gliding out like a shadow from somewhere or other, the priest-monk stopped him. "The Holy Mother of God will rouse her when the time has come," he said in a low voice, and then disappeared.

Holding the girl in his arms, Myyriäinen stood unmoving before the miraculous icon. Lampinen knelt by his side. He mumbled his prayers briskly, sighed heavily a couple of times, crossed himself, and made such a deep bow that his forehead touched the floor. Every now and then he looked up with his clear eyes at God's Mother and at the two small candles he had lit before her image, one for himself and one for his sick child. In the flickering candles' beam, the jewels of her setting glittered with a living light that could mean many things. An atmosphere of intense expectation formed around the little group. Pulses pounded, frail blood vessels contracted, and nerves trembled at an unfamiliar touch. The deepening silence around the Madonna was broken only by   [p. 61]   choked, guttural sounds and feeble death rattles. Myyriäinen's heart was calm. Neither unrest nor hesitation plagued him. He stood where he should stand, that was all. A child of man would have her fate confirmed and sealed, once and for all, as it is proper for one who belongs to an order of things not governed by chance. He did not notice time's passage. He did not know whether hours or minutes went by. Lampinen had gone away and come back and disappeared again, but he had no awareness of it. The candles had flared up one last time and gone out. He did not notice. He had his eyes fixed unswervingly upon the magnificent icon. And the more he looked at it, the more living the Madonna's mild and darkened face became. It seemed to float forth from the heavy setting---the setting whose splendor human hands had assembled---dissolving into a transcendent expression of care which pierced straight into his heart.

The Child Jesus on the Madonna's arm toyed with two small heavenly doves.

Did her lips move, or was it only a trick of his imagination? A faint tremble passed through the body of the dying child. Myyriäinen looked around, as if involuntarily seeking support from someone else. There was no one in the church. He was alone with what would happen. The girl uttered a sound of lament. Her body contracted, then raised itself, as in the birth pangs of death, and her face froze in an expression of brutal pain. Myyriäinen did not take his eyes from it. "I shall see it, I shall not turn my glance away," he said to himself. His heart was calm. He knew that this was not the end. But his hands which bore the little bundle trembled with exhaustion and terror.

Suddenly her features were made smooth, as if by a gentle hand, and the strain in the tormented body gave way. Her breast lifted itself once or twice, she let a gentle sigh escape,   [p. 62]   and then there came that great stillness which portends life's extinction. A frozen calm descended upon the face.

"Her heart has stopped beating," Myyriäinen thought. "Sanni has gone without regaining consciousness."

All of a sudden, the bundle grew terribly heavy in his arms. A feeling of desolation, of loneliness, came upon him. Was there nothing more? Little Sanni was gone, like the myriads of other dead, and that was all. God the Father had forgotten a sparrow. He turned his eyes away. He wished to see her face no longer. He thought that it must have changed. Something strange and terrible must have entered into it. He was seized by sympathy for poor little Sanni, who was dead. He remembered the words so well which she had spoken when she still existed, and how with her officiousness she had tried to drive away the shadow which had descended upon her path: "---and so they say that somebody's dead and stuff him into the ground." He felt sorry for everyone who was dead. How homeless they were, cast out into a fathomless darkness where not a single friend could follow them. And he would also die and be left in loneliness without a single friend. He stood trembling before the source of his own feeling of isolation; he saw how lonely all men in fact were, and why they were so lonely and could not be otherwise, however much they tried to hide it from themselves.

In his distress, he thought that since Sanni was dead he would not go along with Lampinen as he had agreed. What reason did he have for visiting the strange village?

He was about to leave, yet he could not help casting a last glance upon her face. There he saw that something like a light cloud, bearing life's color, lay upon it. As he watched, she opened her eyes. They were clearer than he had ever seen them before, illuminated through and through by the uncompromising light of consciousness. Without knowing   [p. 63]   what he did, he moved a step nearer to the icon and raised up the dying girl as high as the Child Jesus and the small white doves of the image. A sweet and half-surprised smile glided over her face, and her hand made a weak movement, as though to seize life's fading visions. With a clear but somewhat unfamiliar voice she spoke the words: "Sanni Maria Lampinen, Iivana's daughter," as her name was written in the church register. There was a strange echo in the old arches, as if God the Father Himself, mumbling, had repeated this mortal being's name. For a moment it filled the spaces of the temple, mirroring itself with a dusky golden shine in the ornaments of the iconostasis. Angelic choirs repeated it through the eons of time.

When Sanni had fulfilled the demand of her spirit, raising herself up to the dignity of those who have been given names, she collapsed in her exhaustion and died. On her countenance was an expression of finality and perfect peace which words cannot express; only a faint trace of froth around her lips bore witness to the last defense she had made of her life.

He contemplated the expression on Sanni's dead face. He would have liked to take it with him, to devote the remainder of his life to its study. He guessed that he could never be finished with it. It was consummate. Here, a child of man had finally found itself. It was a miracle: the greatest of all the earth's miracles had taken place before his eyes, and he realized that whosoever could be touched by this miracle would be freed from his chains.

What was this enigmatic perfection's source? Was it not this same perfection which rendered the work of a human hand immortal? He thought of the poor name which the dying child had uttered in the knowledge that it was the most important component of her life, and the only one to which God's Mother would pay attention, and he was   [p. 64]   struck by the thought that the name had been lifted up to the same rank and dignity as those of the immortal masters. How mysterious is the knowledge that one possesses a name---a name confers a countenance upon a human being, and this countenance is as perfect in the least of men as in the mightiest; one must merely learn to tell it apart, refusing to be led astray by whatever else one sees.

He felt the need to talk with his dead friend, and to come close to her, as close as it was possible for a living being to come to a dead one. He wished to feel that the contact between them had not been broken. He thought he would put his cheek against her cheek and speak softly to her, as one speaks to the flowers and trees which have no voice. But a curious shyness held him back. The dead girl rested like a Sleeping Beauty within her enchanted castle, and he did not know what he must say to approach her. He felt so poor with his clumsy words and his memory which went no further than to his own childhood. He imagined that she knew so much more about life than he himself could remember. She knew more than any living being about all the dead people and the dead trees and the ancient stones which lay concealed in the earth. She knew more than any living being about all those mute things which lay concealed within the earth and within the breast of men, all that which had never achieved expression or consciousness, and which had existed since the dawn of time. He remembered the old and hallowed words: "From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return," and he felt that they contained another import than that of darkness and decay. A memory of an obscure connection with the dead stirred in the depths of his soul, and it seemed as though his own existence suddenly became only a thin membrane which separated him from the maternal womb where all that is living and all that is dead repose in a mute and indissoluble communion.

He bent down and gave little Sanni a kiss.

And he got the feeling that the dead girl wished to tell him something. The deep serenity on her face seemed to form itself into a word, a great and soft and single word, which contained all other words within itself and gave them meaning. He felt that he was the one who was mute, that it was the dead girl who spoke. She talked unchangingly and serenely about something which he could not grasp, although he knew all the while what it was, about something which he perhaps had seen in his distracted dreams, or heard in a moment of secret inspiration, and he knew that if he could remember it, then he would understand what she said and receive such joy from her as he could never get from any living being.

"We can say she's really happy now. May God be merciful to her little soul."

Lampinen had entered unnoticed; he stood looking at his dead child. He seemed quite satisfied. There were no signs that the event had grieved him deeply in any way. He knelt down with utmost serenity, crossed himself before the Most Holy Madonna, and spoke a prayer for the soul of the departed. When he got up, an expression of apprehensiveness, of worry, entered his face. He rubbed his nose reflectively, wondering what Palaga was going to say about this useless journey now. The creature could have died at home just as well as in this cloister, she'd say, and Lampinen would not have needed to loaf away three days on the journey's account.

"It will be a first-class funeral just the same," he said a little hesitatingly. And after a while, in order to provide a further justification: "And you can't help thinking that she'll sleep with a lighter heart now."

Myyriäinen turned little Sanni over to Lampinen and his quiet speculations; then he left the temple.

As he opened the door of the dark church, a blinding flame burst upon him. The short summer night was at an end, and the sun had risen. He turned his grayish face toward the sun's blessed light as though astounded. A thrill of joy ran through him, and with all his being, with his skin and with his limbs, he felt the incomprehensible sweetness of existence.