‘It’s beautiful! Thank you, I’ll take it,’ he said.
Siiri leaned in to see what this foodstuff might be. ‘Beef oesophagus and lungs, three euros thirty a kilo. Oh my.’ She had to cover her mouth, so as not to look idiotic as she gaped at the black man’s purchases.
‘Cheap, tasty food,’ he said, flashing a dazzling white smile.
‘I’m sorry – is that for your dog?’
‘I don’t have a dog!’ he laughed, waving the plastic bag containing the cow’s lungs and oesophagus in Siiri’s face. ‘I’m going to cook lung stew, it’s easy to make. The best place for spices is a couple of blocks away. The African grocery at Hämeentie five.’
‘Is there one of those here, too? An African grocery?’ Siiri marvelled.
Now it was the black man’s turn to be surprised. ‘You must not be from the neighbourhood. Where are you from?’
Irma was clearly put off: ‘We’re not from anywhere but right here. Our families have lived in Helsinki for ten generations, which you clearly cannot say for yourself.’ She was quiet for a moment and then smiled. ‘But we don’t know Hakaniemi that well.’
The man laughed a deep, rumbling laugh so that the beehive on his head trembled.
‘You can find anything you want in Hakaniemi; this is the best place in the world! We have a Chinese grocery, Indian, Moroccan, Japanese, African, you name it. You can get anything you want, and for a good price, too. Are you familiar with halal?’
‘Who?’
‘Halal. The best meat in the world, like kosher for Jews, but the Muslims say halal. There’s a little shop nearby that sells excellent halal meat for a much better price than those plastic-wrapped pork chops you get at the supermarket.’
‘How interesting! I don’t particularly care for pork myself,’ Siiri said. ‘You must be a cook?’
‘Me? A cook? No, no!’ The man laughed loudly again. ‘But I do cook for my wife and children every day. Do you live far from here?’
Siiri explained that they had recently moved to Hakaniemi. Irma launched into a detailed account of the sordid particulars of the Sunset Grove renovation before a reproachful look from Siiri silenced her. The man in the funny hat was as nice as could be and thrilled when he saw how much oxtail Irma had bought. He wanted to know how they planned on preparing it and recommended a recipe that called for raisins, pine nuts and chocolate.
‘Why, that sounds crazy!’ Irma laughed, but the man was serious. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and jotted down the recipe for them. ‘You make it a day in advance, do you understand? This is not fast food, it’s slow food. It needs to stew in the oven overnight. You add the chocolate at the very end.’
‘Do we have an oven? I don’t remember. But the one thing we have plenty of is time!’ Siiri said.
‘You can also do it on the stove, no problem.’
After accepting the recipe for chocolate stew, Siiri and Irma thanked the man and introduced themselves. Their new friend had come to Finland years ago from Nigeria, lived just a few blocks away, and was called Muhammed Haani Abubakar. He had to write the name down for them, because Irma and Siiri could make neither head nor tail of it, even though he tried to say it slowly and repeated it three times.
‘Muhammed, this is my first name. In Finland everyone calls me Muhis. Haani is my middle name, it means happy and content. Look at me: I’m happy and content!’
He spread his arms and laughed his deep laugh. They wished each other luck in the kitchen, and then, lugging his bag of lungs, Muhis disappeared into the hubbub of Hakaniemi hall, his colourful hat bobbing among the drab Finns.
Chapter 15
Upon returning to their temporary lodgings, Siiri and Irma were greeted with a surprise: two men in their entry hall. At first they thought the men were in-home caregivers, because the City of Helsinki Western Health-Care District In-Home Care sent nurses of every description who let themselves in with their own keys at any hour of the day. Siiri and Irma no longer flustered easily; their refugee asylum had turned into Grand Central Station now that the doctor had ordered in-home care for Anna-Liisa. One day, three caregivers had appeared within an hour of each other, all claiming to be from different shifts: one from the morning, one from the day, and one from the evening. The caregivers had too many clients, which threw their schedules into disarray. The time spent with clients counted towards their workdays, but travel time didn’t, and Anna-Liisa’s living in Hakaniemi, although she belonged to the Western Health-Care District, created an extra burden, which meant many of the caregivers started or ended their shift with her.
If you could call it caregiving, that is. Occasionally, the caregivers were so young one felt sorry for them; frequently they were so angry one was afraid of them. They were slaves to their mobile phones, as they were required to constantly report their comings and goings and doings to their employer. One girl of Somali extraction had been frightened to death after spending three minutes more than the allotted time washing Anna-Liisa’s bottom.
The two fellows purported to be policemen. They were just boys, actually, young and very nice-looking: blond, strapping Finnish lads. Both were neatly dressed, although not in police uniforms; they were wearing dress pants and dress shirts buttoned up all the way. They tried to slip out into the corridor, but Siiri stopped them on the doorstep.
‘Who died? Anna-Liisa?’ Siiri asked grimly, although she could feel her calcifying heart beating in a rapid arrhythmic syncopation. She’d heard that if an old person died happily in her own home, you were supposed to call the police to verify that it hadn’t been a homicide. Would they be interrogated about Anna-Liisa’s death now, like in one of Hercule Poirot’s escapades? What other business could two police officers in civilian clothing have in an old folks’ home?
‘Anna-Liisa?’ asked the quicker of the pair.
‘Our friend Anna-Liisa, the one caregivers are traipsing in and out all day to look after. Or are you fellows actually from in-home care?’
‘If you’re looking for Hasan, he doesn’t live here any more,’ Irma added.
‘We’re detectives. To our knowledge, no one has died. We came to retrieve a jewellery box that had been reported stolen.’
‘So Anna-Liisa reported it! Fantastic.’ Irma was thrilled. ‘We were right, those construction workers are crooks.’
She shot Siiri a victorious look and dropped two kilos of oxtail to the parquet. The policemen gaped at the heap of bloody bones. When the taller of the two lads bent down to see what exactly it was that had appeared there on the floor, Siiri and Irma could clearly see he was holding a mahogany box behind his back.
‘That’s Anna-Liisa’s jewellery box! Where did you find it?’ Irma cried.
‘And where are you taking it?’ Siiri wondered.
‘We’re not at liberty to discuss the details . . . the investigation is still pending, we’re collecting evidence . . . as ordered. We’ll be inspecting it more closely at police premises.’
Siiri started growing suspicious of this pair, skulking like a pair of naughty boys who’d been caught red-handed. Who had let them in, and why were they trying to sneak out like this, taking Anna-Liisa’s jewellery? Siiri hadn’t told Anna-Liisa about saving her valuables yet, because life at Hakaniemi had got off to such a hectic start and Anna-Liisa had spent most of her time convalescing in her room. Siiri had forgotten all about the jewellery box in the turmoil. How had these men found it in the chaos of Siiri’s belongings? Had they rummaged through her underwear drawer and made a mess of the delicates she had finally got around to carefully organizing? The longer she looked at the discombobulated duo and thought about the jewellery box, the more irked she grew. In the end, she couldn’t control herself. She snatched the box from the taller policeman, who hadn’t foreseen the attack and was caught completely off guard.
‘Beat it,’ Siiri ordered, pointing at the still-open door. ‘We may have one foot in the grave, but we’re not suckers. Anna-Liisa’s jewellery box belongs to An
na-Liisa, and if a single cameo has gone missing, I’m going to report you to the police. And you’d better believe it!’
The astonished men left, slamming the door behind them. Irma looked at Siiri in admiration, and wrapped her in a big, sickly sweet, perfumed embrace.
‘Oh, Siiri, you are a rock! How could I ever live without you? Döden, döden, döden.’
They gathered up their oxtails and went into the living room. Irma crowed several cock-a-doodle-doos, but the Ambassador and Margit were out and Anna-Liisa was too feeble to respond from her bed. They stashed Irma’s bag of bones in the fridge and went in to present the missing jewellery box to Anna-Liisa and to explain what had happened. At first she was overjoyed that the box had been found, and Siiri had saved it so cleverly, but then she went white as a sheet.
‘Am I to understand that thieves, complete strangers, have been creeping about our apartment and I didn’t hear a thing?’
Irma tried to lighten the mood, since the worst was over: ‘Would it have been better if the thieves had been someone you knew?’
‘Like your darlings, you mean?’ Anna-Liisa parried, eyes flashing. ‘They robbed you back at Sunset Grove while you were in the hospital, presumed to have dementia. No, but . . . how can . . . Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’
Anna-Liisa had opened the box. Her valuables were intact and were now spread across the bed. But beneath them, at the bottom of the box, was an enormous wad of five-hundred euro bills. It must have added up to tens of thousands of euros. They gaped at the money, flummoxed, and Irma admired the currency’s violet tones.
‘Look how pretty. It’s modern architecture of some sort . . . Can either of you make out what building this is?’
‘Is that your money, Anna-Liisa?’ Siiri asked hesitantly. Anna-Liisa looked as if she would die then and there. She was breathing in tiny, shallow gasps, unable to speak. Finally, she started coughing and nearly vomited. Irma scurried off to the spa to fetch a bucket, while Siiri slipped pillows under Anna-Liisa’s back.
‘It’s not my money,’ Anna-Liisa said finally, in a barely audible voice. ‘And I never reported the theft to the police.’
Chapter 16
Irma and Siiri made a chocolate stew from the oxtails based on Muhis’ recipe. They started by simmering the bones for a couple of hours with root vegetables and onions; Siiri scraped the foul-looking foam from the surface with a strainer. Irma grated carrots, celery and onions, grumbling why Muhis didn’t just let her dice them. But Muhis had written: ‘Must be grated, otherwise the sauce will be too thin.’ Siiri patted the boiled bones dry with a towel and browned them in two pans. Irma sautéed her grated vegetables in a third, and stirred them in with the bones. Then they added generous splashes of white wine, chopped tomatoes and soup stock, until the bones were covered. Irma was suspicious of Muhis’ spices, but Siiri sprinkled in the pepper, cinnamon, cloves and salt. Then they put the pots in the oven they discovered embedded in the wall and let them cook overnight, adding chocolate, pine nuts, and raisins the next day and letting the black gruel simmer down until smooth.
For once everyone was present, even Margit, whose schedule diverged drastically from the routines of the rest of the household. After waking up early and watching morning television for a couple of hours, she generally left for her clubs and other activities, ate lunch who knows where, visited Eino at the SquirrelsNest and didn’t come home until evening, utterly exhausted. The lack of synchronicity was actually a good thing, as Margit was the only one who had mastered the television’s complicated remote controls and had an unfortunate habit of letting it blast if she were at home, even when she wasn’t watching it. She had other unfortunate habits as well: she would wander about naked, forget to flush the toilet, leave her belongings strewn haphazardly about the flat, and doze off on the sofa with her reading glasses on, snoring heavily.
The Ambassador was a meticulous, tidy fellow; he gave his co-lodgers no cause for complaint. He was surprisingly busy, with any number of appointments, errands and engagements in town, fraternal organizations and the like, but no set schedule. He spent quite a bit of time in the bedroom with Anna-Liisa when she was too tired to rise from her bed, reading her the poetry of Saima Harmaja or The Tales of Ensign Stål in a pleasant voice. If Anna-Liisa was feeling livelier, they would entertain each other by listing noun cases and German prepositions. But the Ambassador found the presence of the caregivers so disturbing that he always tried to slip off before their arrival. If a caregiver happened to appear suddenly in their living room, the Ambassador would immediately remember somewhere he needed to be; once, when he hadn’t had time to dress, he panicked and retreated to the spa in his silk dressing gown and spent over an hour sitting there in the unheated sauna.
Irma and Siiri got along famously with the caregivers, and they had already come to know a few of the more faithful rehabilitators. On occasion they would join Anna-Liisa on the mandatory outings included in her mobility plan. Paasivuori Park had become a favourite destination; the little square in front of the massive headquarters of the Social Democratic Party was peaceful and had sturdy benches. From this vantage point, they would spend a moment gazing at The Boxers, the simultaneously dynamic and static statue by Johannes Haapasalo. Irma never failed to mention that Haapasalo had studied with Rodin, at which point the conversation generally died, because Irma loved Rodin’s statues but Anna-Liisa found them crude. Anna-Liisa could barely manage the walk to the park and, after a brief rest there, the return journey home. Somehow she wasn’t putting on any weight, despite the fact that Siiri and Irma were feeding her like a growing child.
‘Not bad, I must say,’ Irma said, after her first sip of the chocolate stew. She slurped the broth from her spoon and smacked her lips as if it would bring out the flavours better. They were perched in their now-familiar places around the awkward bar-counter. The stools didn’t support their backs, and Irma said the upholstery buttons were digging into her rear end.
‘Is it supposed to taste like a Christmas dish?’ Anna-Liisa asked. She hadn’t touched her spoon yet; she was still sceptically eyeing the mounded stew Siiri had doled out into her bowl. Margit was gobbling down her helping, sucking loudly on the bone marrow.
‘This is scrumptious!’ she bawled.
The Ambassador fell in love with the chocolate stew, too. At first he nibbled warily, then with increasing gusto, until he stopped, closed his eyes, and purred in satisfaction. Anna-Liisa also praised the dish, and was the first to take seconds.
‘It’s so lovely cooking again,’ Siiri said. ‘I can never be bothered to cook for myself, but now that there are so many mouths to feed, I’m enjoying it. I think I’ll try Muhis’ rabbit stew next week.’
Siiri and her Nigerian friend often happened to be at Hakaniemi Hall around the same time, tennish, when things were relatively quiet and there was room to move. They’d got in the habit of talking about food, what they were planning on preparing that week, and how. Siiri had picked up a few exotic dishes from Muhis, but had yet to try her hand at stewed okra, corn porridge, or deep-fried yam, despite her friend’s detailed instructions on how to cook and serve them.
Muhis’ unquenchable enthusiasm for innards and all manner of stewed dishes had taken Siiri back to the foods of her childhood. She’d grown up cooking with tongue, blood and kidneys back when most Finns didn’t even dream of beef. She had stumbled across a copy of the Hard Times Cookbook in one of the stands in the hall; it was sold as a joke these days, she supposed, and when Muhis saw it, he had chuckled his deep chuckle and read long passages out loud.
‘“Blood milk: Place pieces of blood pudding in a pot and cover with milk. Bone fat: remove meat (if any) from the bones and set aside for other purposes. Put the bones in a pot and simmer on a low heat for six hours.”’
Siiri had been a little offended by Muhis’ chuckling, because the book’s recipes were familiar from her own life. Not many decades had passed since Finns had eaten that way.
Anna-Liisa and the
Ambassador had their doubts about Siiri’s Nigerian friend, and had no interest in being forced to eat Third-World finger-food. Irma defended Siiri and explained what a nice man Muhis was and how he always helped them carry their groceries home.
‘What was the other boy’s name, his friend? The one with the kinky hair who walks around in sandals?’
‘Metukka. Muhis and Metukka are both from Nigeria and speak Finnish so well that even you would be surprised, Anna-Liisa.’
Muhis had introduced Irma and Siiri to his friend Metukka, whose real name was Mehdi Fuad Emeagwali. Muhis had jotted it down in the margins of the recipe for stewed rabbit and explained that Fuad meant heart and that Metukka had a good heart.
‘Whatever will they come up with next,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘Although this is delicious, I must admit. Was it this Muhammed who taught you how to make this?’
‘It was him. My friend Muhis,’ Siiri said.
‘I see.’ Anna-Liisa continued eating with a healthy appetite, until suddenly she dropped her spoon and looked at Siiri almost angrily. ‘So are Muhis and Metukka your new Mika Korhonens? Are they going to become our guardians, too, until they disappear, never to be heard from again?’
Mika Korhonen! A stabbing pain shot through Siiri’s head and she started feeling so light-headed that she had to take hold of the countertop with both hands. Anna-Liisa certainly knew how to strike at the most corroded circuits of her calcified heart. How many times Siiri had tried to reach Mika Korhonen after he had fixed everything at Sunset Grove! But she had never got through to him, not once. Mika’s phone number was no longer in use, and he had vanished into thin air. This had convinced Anna-Liisa that he was the most dastardly drug dealer of all, more hardened than even Erkki and Virpi Hiukkanen, and had been sentenced to a life behind bars. Siiri was having none of it. Perhaps Mika had moved abroad, or gone off to school and moved away. But she missed Mika often, and Anna-Liisa hadn’t been far from the mark in teasing Siiri about her new young male friends.
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 13