The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  Suddenly they heard a racket from the food printer. Green mush was oozing to the floor and the machine was spraying what looked like blood all over. It wasn’t blood, though; it was Tauno making a mess. His back was so hunched he had a hard time reaching the screen and pressing the pictures there, not to mention the fact that his hands shook so violently that it was impossible to know what button he was trying to press. Ritva rushed over to help him, which was surprising, because generally Ritva was the first to remove herself the moment anyone needed assistance. But of course this was no health-related emergency, and Ritva knew how to handle machines as skilfully as she did corpses. Like a magician, she put a stop to Tauno’s rampage with a few strokes of her hand, and peace was restored to the dining room.

  Solitary residents sat at their trays; the room was void of cheerful banter. Every now and again, the elevator’s monotone narration echoed from the lobby: ‘Going. Up.’

  Ritva and Tauno joined Siiri and Irma at their table, but before they had taken their seats, a little round cleaning robot had started bustling about at the floor in front of the food line.

  ‘Now that one I like!’ Irma said. ‘So cute and efficient. Just look at it!’

  The cleaner was black and white, and thanks to its curves had an oddly human appearance. It thrummed busily and importantly back and forth in the catastrophe zone of Tauno’s creation. Water squirted out one side, brushes thrust forth from the other, and sponges dried up the traces. The end result was astonishingly tidy. Upon finishing its work, the little robot seemed to thank its audience, flashing a red light and then a green one before returning to await the next emergency.

  ‘Bravo, bravo!’ Irma cried, giving the little worker a rousing round of applause. ‘Or is it a girl? Should I be shouting brava?’

  ‘It’s so quiet, too,’ Siiri said thoughtfully as she eyed the robot. ‘Maybe some of this automated tomfoolery really is intelligent.’

  ‘This morning I thought the window was rainy, but because my husband didn’t make it into the polytechnic school, we’re going to have to give the dog away, too,’ Ritva observed.

  Siiri stopped eating and studied the doctor, whose eyes projected their usual common sense and vaguely inebriated fatigue. Tauno didn’t appear to pay any attention to what Ritva was saying. He was shovelling long red tubes into his mouth as if they were particularly delicious field rations.

  ‘Did you have many dogs?’ Irma asked blithely.

  ‘Who can be bothered to count dogs, they’ll die come winter anyway. But my enormous aphids grew in my mother’s garden.’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘We brought those flags all the way from Ahvenanmaa, we always had to have flags everywhere and sometimes flowers too, red flowers, those pretty ones . . .’

  Ritva stopped talking, and her fork dropped to the table, leaving a green stain that escaped the attention of the cleaning robot in the corner. Irma and Siiri exchanged nervous glances and waited to hear what Ritva would come up with next.

  ‘What are those flowers called?’ Ritva asked, looking each of them in the eye in turn. Then she started laughing her rough cigarette laugh. ‘Geraniums, that’s what I meant! Goddammit, this happens to me sometimes, not being able to remember totally normal words. They just vanish, even though there’s nothing else wrong with my memory. I know it’s completely normal, but it’s still annoying.’

  Ritva continued eating serenely, and after emptying her plate offered to carry everyone’s trays and plates over to the DishGullet.

  ‘I may as well take them while I’m at it,’ she said, gathering up the dirty dishware, sorting it quickly at the automatic dishwasher and calling from the door: ‘Anyone care to join me for a pint at Ukko-Munkki? Of course not. Just thought I’d ask.’

  ‘Poor woman,’ Tauno remarked, appropriately so. ‘She’s getting demented without realizing it. Oiva’s like that too, sometimes. You never get used to it.’

  And so it was. Any one of them might suddenly start spouting off all sorts of gibberish, but that was nothing to be afraid of.

  ‘Who is this Oiva?’ Siiri asked. She could tell Irma wanted to learn more about Oiva, too, and for once her friend seemed satisfied that Siiri beat her to it. Tauno gazed out of the window and didn’t reply. Despite it being late September, it was still unseasonably warm. An uncomfortably long moment passed without anyone saying anything. The elevator had time to announce it was going up twice before Siiri spoke.

  ‘Where does he live?’ she asked, to ease Tauno’s burden.

  ‘Oiva is . . .’ he said and paused to take a deep breath. ‘Oiva lives in a municipal retirement home in Haaga. We weren’t assigned to the same place because . . . well, there wasn’t room. I had to come here.’ His voice faded until it was practically inaudible.

  ‘But Haaga’s not far from here!’ Irma said encouragingly, and started blabbering about taxis that carried you wherever you wanted to go without any trouble, and her cousins who lived in various retirement homes around town unless they were already dead, as the greater part of them were, of course, even though their family was very long-lived. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, now I have to settle for you two. Döden, döden, döden.’

  Siiri paid Irma no heed; she just let the chatter babble in her ears as she watched the enigmatic Tauno. She was very fond of him, one of the new friends she had made during her final years.

  Chapter 5

  Siiri had her work cut out coaxing Anna-Liisa to join her for a pointless tram ride. Of course Siiri could have ridden around gorgeous Helsinki on her own on such a bright autumn day, during that wondrous fleeting moment of the year when the leaves of the birches, lindens and horse chestnuts burned in various shades of yellow and orange but hadn’t dropped yet. Anna-Liisa had been low for days now and downright glum as they sat at the card table this morning. Siiri decided a little joyride would be just the thing to cheer up her friend. Anna-Liisa simply didn’t appear to be recovering from her husband’s death, even though the couple’s shared journey, which had commenced at Sunset Grove, had barely lasted two years.

  ‘You can’t measure it in time,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘Those two years were the happiest of my long life. I don’t particularly mourn the days we shared or what we did, nothing that concrete, but the man. My amazing Onni. I was so privileged to have him at my side, and at this age.’ Her voice, typically so resonant, died as the tears welled up in her dark eyes.

  From time to time Siiri and Irma wondered how long they’d be forced to tolerate Anna-Liisa’s grief. She repeated the same phrases, beautiful no doubt, every day as her tears fell. It had been touching for a while, but they had come to feel their friend should gradually be moving on. Her expressions of mourning had somehow taken on a flat tone. The same didn’t go for Anna-Liisa’s feelings, of course: the sorrow visibly weighed on her more and more heavily as the days passed. Her back was no longer as straight, her stride began to drag, and her face darkened in contemplation. More than once, Irma and Siiri had been tempted to remind Anna-Liisa of the amazing Ambassador’s business affairs in the Helsinki underworld. Off-the-books rental units, bordellos and exploitation of immigrants, all of which had clearly played some role in their temporary commune in Hakaniemi, even though they had discreetly put the kibosh on investigating too closely.

  ‘Yes. I suppose the sadness never goes away,’ Siiri said, as the number 4 tram slowed to make the shift to the temporary tracks on Paciuksenkatu. The city had been building an underpass beneath the four-lane road just so a few joggers could run straight from Pikku-Huopalahti to Seurasaari; for as long as the project had been going on one would think they were erecting St Isaac’s Cathedral. ‘You just have to get used to it. That’s what I did, little by little. Two days might pass now without me thinking about my husband.’

  Anna-Liisa’s eyes radiated disbelief. ‘Really?’

  ‘That’s how it seems, although it might be that I think about him every day. But it’s no longer as painful a memory as it once was. Now, my boys�
� deaths I’ve never been able to process. It seemed so impossible, having my children die of old age before I did.’

  ‘They didn’t die of old age. They killed themselves.’

  ‘Anna-Liisa! How could you say such a thing? You know my sons—’

  ‘One drank himself to death; the other ate himself to death. What is that, if not killing yourself?’

  Anna-Liisa clamped her mouth into an impervious line and focused her gaze out of the window. At the Allergy Institute, a few immigrant women boarded the tram with their children, along with a troop of chattering Swedish-speaking schoolchildren. This drew their attention away from the unpleasant conversation and brightened the mood, since Siiri no longer needed to fear Anna-Liisa’s brutal tongue-lashings.

  Two girls sat down behind them and started squealing loudly. One of them was putting on her make-up, applying mascara and eye shadow with her mouth open; the other was engrossed in her phone.

  ‘Det är så embarrassing!’

  ‘Look, hon ha deleted den!’

  ‘Nej, va being stupid.’

  ‘Helt so fun.’

  Siiri always enjoyed listening to how the Swedish dialect spoken in Helsinki grew more and more garbled by the day. First Russian was mixed in, then English, but now almost half of it was Finnish. One would have thought this would have cheered Anna-Liisa’s profoundly Fennoman heart, but the more actively the girls behind them spoke, the more indifferent Anna-Liisa appeared to grow. ‘Va ska vi gö me den där private event? Man måste get liksom tickets.’

  Suddenly one of the girls popped up and dashed out of the door. ‘Ska du inte coming?’

  ‘Jag ska käppä to Kluuvi.’

  ‘Hejhej, nähää!’

  Siiri wondered whether ‘nähää’ was Finnish or Swedish. Did it mean nähdään, ‘see you later?’, or was it some youthful Swedish-language idiom for ‘no’? The tram sped up Tukholmankatu, picking up fatigued nurses and confused alcoholics with bandaged heads at the Meilahti Hospital stop. The moment they sat down, the latter broke out the first aid they had bought at the state liquor store conveniently located right outside the hospital grounds and started administering it to themselves. The reek of stale and freshly opened booze settled over the other passengers.

  ‘I went in for a shot. I haven’t been drinking, I’m heading home. Might go for a run,’ a rather intoxicated young fellow lied over the phone to his mother, wife or sister. He had gone in to get his publicly funded dose of narcotics, which were distributed to drug addicts so they’d be able to wean themselves off illicit drugs. Siiri had often listened to these detox patients as she sat in the number 4 and had been mystified to hear one relate she’d been receiving regular treatment for nine years. This didn’t strike Siiri as particularly effective. But what did she know about illegal drugs? She did know something about the legal kind, as they were distributed by the fistful by the automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, that made the rounds of Sunset Grove.

  Before they reached the stop at the new opera, Siiri suggested they change to a number 7 or number 8, as a dose of brisk autumn air would do them good after the alcohol-laden fug of the tram. But the gang of alcoholics disembarked there, and so Siiri and Anna-Liisa stayed put in the number 4.

  ‘Maybe we should take this all the way to Katajanokka,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘I’m not particularly interested in changing trams out of a sheer love for rail traffic. This line goes past that dreadful sugar cube designed by Alvar Aalto. Perhaps you aren’t aware that the offices of the Awaken Now! Association are located there.’

  The infamous Sugar Cube to which Anna-Liisa referred was the Enso-Gutzeit forestry company’s former headquarters, a 1960s structure built on the site of the old Norrmén building designed by Theodor Höijer. The demolition of the Norrmén building had caused an uproar, even though Siiri had never found it particularly stylish or the least bit practical, since it only had one enormous flat on each storey. The fact that it had housed the Soviet Union’s surveillance commission had done nothing to improve its reputation. And so it ended up in the dust heap of history, the gaudy old gewgaw. Siiri found Alvar Aalto’s streamlined marble-faced replacement beautiful indeed, especially if you happened to catch it during a heavy snow – then it looked downright magical, glowing white against the golden onion domes of the Russian Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral. But how was it that the Sugar Cube had been taken over by charity organizations? She had had no idea.

  ‘You don’t keep up with the times, Siiri. I’ll be happy to bring you up to date. Enso hasn’t been Enso-Gutzeit for ages. It was simply Enso for a while, then it became Stora Enso, when a Swedish family, the Wallenbergs, and the Finnish government merged their failing forestry companies.’

  Anna-Liisa was in fine form again. She launched into a thorough lecture on the reasons why no hope remained for the European forestry industry. No one used paper, plywood or cardboard any more. The only cellulose product for which there was still a demand was toilet tissue, and that was produced far from Finland’s shores. Apparently the cheapest place to manufacture paper was in South America. Stora Enso had been chopped up, sold, and driven into receivership or something of the sort. The Wallenbergs got their money and the Finnish government got even poorer.

  Now anyone who wanted to could lease space in Aalto’s Sugar Cube.

  ‘And if there’s anyone who has money, it’s these soul-savers, since they’re running a flourishing caregiving business.’ Anna-Liisa was outraged by everything she had just explained, and Siiri felt that her friend’s ire was partly directed at her, as if it were Siiri’s fault that trees grew faster and taller in Brazil than in Finland, that eastern trade had collapsed along with the Soviet Union, and that these days people read the newspaper from annoying flickering screens built into the backs of tram seats.

  ‘Put your money in caregiving! We guarantee the best possible ROI! Interest rates as high as 8.5%!’ the screens screamed at this very moment. It was a paid advertisement, not financial news, although similar supposedly journalistic advice had appeared on Irma’s green flaptop back when it still obeyed her. Irma claimed that her flaptop no longer understood her swipes, and so her beloved toy spent most of its time lolling at the bottom of her handbag.

  ‘How is the settling of the estate going?’ Siiri asked, trying to sound as nonchalant as Irma when she said something particularly tactless.

  Anna-Liisa was a wealthy woman now, since the Ambassador had been opposed to drafting a prenuptial agreement, which meant half of his estate belonged to his widow. Unfortunately there had been a delay in disbursing the estate, as simply tracking down the Ambassador’s heirs in the former Communist countries had proved extremely problematic. Once most of the beneficiaries had been identified, the greedy heirs started a ferocious battle over the money. None of them wanted Anna-Liisa to inherit half, because she had only been married to Onni for such a short time.

  Siiri had followed these developments with concern, as Anna-Liisa was too frail to deal with such trivialities. Even now, her dark eyes went so black that Siiri could see herself in them: a worried face, wrinkled and creased, with a few silly strands of hair poking out from under her blue beret. She adjusted her hat and waited for Anna-Liisa to frame her thoughts.

  ‘The fact of the matter is, the lawyers are still arguing over which of Onni’s former family members are entitled to an inheritance.’

  One man, apparently a retired dealer in bathroom tiles, had popped up out of the blue somewhere in Yugoslavia and announced he was Onni’s son. It had taken quite some time for the lawyers to successfully investigate the veracity of his claims. Then a Serb had asserted that his dearly departed older sister had also been sired by the Ambassador. The lawyers had been forced to root around Central Europe and Central America looking for this sister’s five children from three marriages, and the more that turned up, the angrier the heirs in Finland had grown.

  ‘Then we had to conduct DNA tests, which indicated that the man truly was Onni’s offspring, but only
two of this sister’s children were, which was a strange outcome indeed. If the mother of the children is Onni’s daughter, how could only two of her children carry his genes?’

  ‘I don’t believe that’s possible,’ Siiri said cautiously, without completely comprehending the landscape Anna-Liisa was cracking open for her.

  Anna-Liisa laughed sourly. During her brief marriage she had learned enough about life’s realities to realize that such genetic aberrations pointed to fraud. She lowered her voice and slowed her cadence as if Siiri were a slow learner who couldn’t comprehend the difference between an adjective and a noun. ‘The other three are not this woman’s children. They’re trying to swindle us. And that’s not all. I’m being sued.’

  Siiri squealed and was instantly ashamed of her reaction. An ice-cold stab pierced her head, and her heart started pounding more quickly than she would have liked. She clenched her fist to her breast and tried to breathe deeply, unsure of how long it would be before she was capable of thinking again. Sued! Was it possible that Anna-Liisa, as the recipient of property that had been acquired through illicit means, would be called to task for her husband’s crimes? That did not bode well, not at all. But Siiri and Irma had never mustered the courage to confront Anna-Liisa about the Ambassador’s affairs, and Siiri was incapable of asking anything useful now either. When it came down to it, she was far from certain that Anna-Liisa was aware of the type of criminal the Ambassador had been.

  Anna-Liisa saw the boundless care in Siiri’s face, took her hand and patted it soothingly.

  ‘But they’re all insane, so I have no cause for concern,’ she said with such a carefree laugh that Siiri also convinced her heart to slow down again.

  Chapter 6

  Just as Siiri was rushing out of her flat to go down to play cards with her friends, she noticed a letter on her doormat: a proper, old-fashioned envelope, but no stamp or address. It didn’t even have her name on it.