‘I . . . I’m just Siiri Kettunen and I live here, hello –’ Siiri said uncertainly, and the woman steamrolled through this tentative introduction.
‘Yeah, this is a pretty unique living arrangement. In all of my years of bum-washing I’ve never seen anything like it. But the only one on my list at this address is this Anna-Liisa Marjatta Petäjä, and there’s no room for anyone else in here. I have three minutes to get Ms Petäjä tidied up and tucked in. If you can’t hold it, I can give you a pad, courtesy of the city. You can pee in that.’
The woman looked over at the gargantuan bag that served as her portable toolbox. She was holding a coarse, old-fashioned scrubbing brush, the kind still sold at farmers’ markets during the summer and upstairs at Hakaniemi Hall year round. Siiri had always thought they were for washing rugs. Pink drops dripped from the woman’s brush to her big boots. In her other hand, she held a grey rag Siiri wouldn’t have used to wipe the stairwell floor during an October sleet storm.
‘Siiri, you came to rescue me!’ Anna-Liisa wailed from the dim depths of the bathroom. She was sitting on a washing stool, bloody legs draining into the shower. Water was beating down on her frail shoulders. The window had been flung wide open, and a brisk autumn breeze was blowing in. No doubt it felt lovely to the caregiver, as she was doing heavy physical labour and smelled sharply of sweat. Without loosening her grip on her scrubbing brush, the woman raised an elbow and wiped away the perspiration beading up on her forehead, then gave Siiri a murderous look and turned towards her client.
‘That’s the end of this bath, then. Time’s up.’ The woman yanked Anna-Liisa up from the plastic stool and started rubbing her down violently with a scratchy linen towel. Where on earth had she found it? Siiri and Irma had discovered an enormous linen closet behind the front door, but it only contained soft, white terry cloth towels and endless piles of white sheets, like in a hotel. Anna-Liisa trembled and cried like a child at an orphanage, fearfully holding back the tears between her silent sobs. She must have felt humiliated, in addition to which it looked as if she were hurting all over.
‘I came, I thought –’ Siiri stammered, still not daring to step into the bathroom in her shoes. She wasn’t comfortable going without shoes indoors, especially here in Hakaniemi, where the apartment was more or less a public thoroughfare.
‘Hold your water. The john will be free in a sec,’ the caregiver said, dragging the dripping Anna-Liisa along to her room. ‘Put a little Vaseline on those cuts and tomorrow you’ll be good as new!’ her voice boomed from the bedroom, and a moment later she had stomped off to care for the next unlucky senior somewhere in Helsinki.
‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Irma, who had been following events from behind one of the living-room pillars. Margit had fallen asleep on the sofa and barely noticed that a strange woman had been terrorizing Anna-Liisa in their bathroom. Siiri helped Anna-Liisa into her dressing gown and led her over to sit on the round bed. Anna-Liisa was still sobbing. Her body was covered in scratches; the worst wounds were on her legs. She was holding a jar of Vaseline but her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn’t open it. Irma and Siiri tried to comfort their friend, which compelled Anna-Liisa to pull herself together into her usual composed state; Anna-Liisa didn’t care to be the object of anyone’s pity. She hurled the jar of Vaseline to the floor, which it struck sharply. It spun for a second, and then opened.
‘The fact is, I can’t use Vaseline. It irritates my skin. I have very thin, very dry skin, and scouring it the way that woman did is violence. If, on top of everything else, she had forced me to put Vaseline on my wounds, I would have been making the rounds of Helsinki’s hospitals and health centres in an ambulance again before some dermatologist would have figured out what was going on. Thank God you came to save me, Irma.’
‘Actually, it was . . . ’ Siiri began, but then decided not to correct Anna-Liisa, because Irma was already graciously returning the gratitude in her inimitable style, downplaying the significance of her role; she was certain that Anna-Liisa’s courageous mention of self-determination and the laws of the European Union had been more decisive in putting a stop to the unpleasant situation. In Irma’s mind, nothing frightened a Finn quite as effectively as the European Union.
‘Nothing like a supranationalistic-intergovernmental organization to put the fear of God into them. Wait, I think that might be a record – thirty-five letters, but there’s the hyphen in the middle . . .’
‘Indeed,’ Anna-Liisa said, giving Irma a perplexed look. ‘But do you know what that woman had the gall to say to me? That she’s not some overindulgent lullaby-crooner; she’s the old-fashioned type of caregiver whose job is to keep things as clean as a whistle. As if she were a garbage truck or a vacuum cleaner. Her superiors probably think this visit met the criteria for high-quality caregiving and assistance.’
‘On computer it did,’ Siiri said. ‘I’m sure she’ll report that the visit was successful.’
‘Döden, döden, döden.’ Irma shook her head and tugged the wrinkles out of the bedspread. ‘Where did this come from?’ She was holding a thick roll of cash she had discovered on Anna-Liisa’s and the Ambassador’s bed. ‘It’s not from your jewellery box. These are hundred-euro bills; those were magenta.’
Anna-Liisa looked at the roll of bills, snatched it out of Irma’s hands, and slipped it into the desk drawer so swiftly that it was hard to believe she received in-home care.
‘It’s Onni’s money. I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Good evening. Maija Saaripolku from Western District In-Home Care.’ A friendly, experienced-looking woman was standing in Anna-Liisa’s doorway. They all turned to look at her in astonishment. Her hair was tumbling out of a sloppily knotted ponytail but she radiated enthusiasm. Anna-Liisa tugged her dressing gown around herself more modestly, looked guilty, and shut the drawer where she had just hidden the large stack of cash. ‘What are YOU doing here, pray tell?’ she frostily. ‘Your colleague just left, and I have yet to recover from her manhandling.’
Now it was the woman’s turn to be bewildered. She pulled a mobile phone out of her well-worn handbag and consulted it.
‘I was assigned – what is this phone doing . . . I was supposed to – oh, it was the morning shift. Did anyone come by this morning?’
Anna-Liisa, Siiri and Irma exchanged another round of astonished looks. This morning? Suddenly none of them could remember what had happened that morning. What day was it, even? Wednesday, perhaps? The in-home caregivers whirled in and out their front door at such a frenetic pace that they no longer paid much attention to who was coming and going. And since their home was teeming with complete strangers seven days a week, it was impossible to ever know if it was a weekday or the weekend. The days couldn’t avoid becoming a jumble. Or were they supposed to be keeping a log of the caregivers’ visits?
‘I think I’ve mixed up my notes in the system,’ the woman said, and jabbed at the phone’s touchscreen, her forehead deeply furrowed in concern. ‘Blasted piece of junk!’ she shouted surprisingly violently, flinging the phone back into her bag. Across the bed, Anna-Liisa had gone rigid, as if to ensure that no other caregivers would be molesting her today.
‘Why don’t we step into the living room,’ Siiri said, and the caregiver followed her through the pillars towards the bar stools. She felt like she was starting to get the hang of this caring for caregivers.
‘This is a very unusual apartment,’ Irma began, and Siiri knew Irma was about to drown her discomposure in a verbal deluge. Siiri went into the kitchenette, filled the pan with water to make some tea for the caregiver, and let Irma babble. It took her a few tries, pressing different spots on the smooth black surface of the stove, to get the red numbers to come on and the correct burner to start glowing.
‘. . . and some think that this apartment is some sort of pornographic lair. I believe Anna-Liisa was the first one to say so out loud; the rest of us found the matter too delicate because the owner is her husband,
the husband of my friend you’re here to care for, who is an ambassador and apparently some sort of businessman as well, very wealthy, although we don’t know much about his affairs, since we only met a couple of years ago at Sunset Grove, our retirement home, which is being gutted at the moment. Do you know anything about the renovation there? We’ve been getting rather suspicious about the whole thing; nothing is ever finished and everything just gets worse and worse and not a single one of the workers speaks Finnish, not one! Do you speak Finnish?’
‘Yes,’ the woman said, moving over to the sofa and gratefully accepting the cup of tea Siiri offered her. It wasn’t a cup, actually, it was an ugly mug that read ‘Hot drinks for hot girls’. Everyone seemed to drink coffee and tea from big mugs these days. In Siiri’s day, coffee and tea were served from different kinds of cups: coffee from smallish ones and tea from a wider-rimmed variety, and that was why she found drinking from tankards like these off-putting. You lost the pleasure of the third cup, too, when filling two mugs emptied the coffee pot. But what were you going to do, when your own belongings were lost amid the wreckage of Sunset Grove, unless they had been stolen and sold off at a flea market in Tallinn? Which is what some claimed.
Over on the sofa, Margit snorted and woke up. She wasn’t the least bit disturbed to find a complete stranger sitting next to her, sipping tea; she just cheerfully asked Siiri to bring her a mug of something hot, too, and some pulla, too, if there happened to be any.
‘Pulla? You think I have time to bake for you, too?’ Siiri muttered as she shuffled off to get Margit’s tea. She was growing increasingly irritated with her new status as servant, which she had unintentionally accepted when she made the mistake of taking on the cooking. She remembered Muhis had asked about the pulla that grown Finnish men ate, tears in their eyes, then washed down with milk like little babies. Muhis wanted to learn how to bake pulla, and Siiri seemed to have remembered promising to show him. Where was she ever going to find the time? At Sunset Grove she’d cursed the fact that all she had was time, time, time, time, and now she didn’t have time for anything. But Muhis and Metukka were sweet boys, good-natured and helpful, and Siiri felt herself perking up in their presence. She found an old packet of cookies in the cupboard and set them out on a plate on a cloth napkin. It looked very nice. She had bought the napkin upstairs at Hakaniemi Hall from a charming old woman who was, no doubt, decades younger than Siiri herself.
Irma was thrilled when she saw the cookies. ‘Oh, we have cookies, too! Can you bring me a mug, too, since you’re already up?’ She was ensconced in the low sofa and unable to extract herself without assistance. Generally, the Ambassador pulled the women up one by one, but they couldn’t rely on the courtesy of his arm at present.
‘Get it yourself,’ Siiri blurted rather rudely to Irma, who looked at her in sincere surprise.
‘What’s got into you?’
Siiri saw Anna-Liisa shuffling slowly out of her room; she had her cane and kept pausing to steady herself against the wall. She was wearing a beautiful dress but no stockings, and the cuts on her legs looked frightful. Siiri poured three mugs of tea, thought for a moment, and decided to leave Irma without. She could get her own tea herself.
Margit was already engaged in a deep discussion about euthanasia with the caregiver, who believed it should be allowed for those who suffered too much. She spoke about sedation and pain reduction, palliative care, end-of-life care, and who knows what. The real problem was that old age wasn’t viewed as a factor that resulted in death.
‘Old age isn’t a disease,’ the caregiver said. ‘Although these days doctors talk about “frailty syndrome”, because it sounds like a diagnosis. It’s absurd, isn’t it?’
‘Goodness, what blockheads! What does frailty have to do with being old?’ Irma laughed and sneezed loudly into her lace handkerchief. She didn’t even seem to notice that she hadn’t been served any tea. ‘Döden, döden, döden.’
‘So “frailty syndrome” is code for “old age”?’ Anna-Liisa asked.
‘Yes. Or you know, if an old person doesn’t contract some diagnosable disease, they’ll still gradually grow frail and die. But doctors aren’t the ones keeping an eye on the elderly; we practical nurses are. That’s why there’s no treatment available, although personally I believe all dying people ought to receive care, and those in the most pain ought to receive help, if you understand my meaning.’
‘We understand!’ Margit shouted in praise, raising her hands heavenwards. Finally, she had met someone to discuss euthanasia with, even if semi-directly. This nurse, Maija Saaripolku, was her saviour. Nurse Saaripolku had seen the deaths of many old people and didn’t approve of patients in decline being moved by ambulance to a health centre or hospital.
‘They want them out of sight, so they’ll die somewhere else. Retirement homes don’t want you dying on the premises, although they claim just the opposite in their brochures. “You can even die here!” That’s what they advertise when they’re trying to attract clients. But if granny’s breath starts to rattle or she gets a touch of fever, the practical nurse who’s been left alone to cover the shift panics and calls an ambulance. That’s the way it goes, every time. They even have instructions on how to outsource responsibility for a patient’s death.’
Margit told Nurse Saaripolku about Eino and the SquirrelsNest and everything else, their long marriage, her own fears and agony, the room-mate strapped to her bed. Nurse Saaripolku listened with interest, taking the occasional sip of tea and fixing her ponytail. She said she knew the SquirrelsNest, had done ‘gigs’ there herself, and said that the pay there was a little better than average. ‘But of course there aren’t any doctors there. There aren’t anywhere, except health centres. And the ones at health centres are too young, or else there aren’t enough of them.’
‘I don’t think a doctor is going to do Eino any good. Euthanasia is a crime, after all. Or do you think there might be someone who might agree to – to help, you know . . .’
According to Nurse Saaripolku, assisted suicide was legal in Finland. It wasn’t talked about much in general, and it was never discussed when it came to the elderly. Sometimes with cancer patients or others suffering from other terminal illnesses, some very progressive doctor would write the necessary prescription. Morphine, mostly, in sufficient amounts. The other alternative was to give a patient a lethal dose of sleeping medication and call the procedure sedation.
‘I’ve never met the doctor who’s treating Eino, although the head nurse at the SquirrelsNest has said there is one. I’m starting to feel like the doctor is some sort of imaginary being. Sometimes I’m afraid that even the staff in the dementia ward have lost their grip on reality . . .’
Nurse Saaripolku chuckled.
Margit edged closer to her; this woman was her only hope. ‘I have a list of Eino’s medication in my handbag. Could you help me?’
Maija Saaripolku looked at Margit matter-of-factly, as if the old woman had asked for help solving a crossword. She drained her mug of tea, rose to her feet, helped Margit up, and went with Margit into her room. She strode briskly, as if the opportunity to assist in the mercy killing of an old dementia patient were the best thing ever to happen to her during her career.
Chapter 21
‘Use your hand to test if the milk is warm enough,’ Siiri said to Muhis. He looked doubtfully at his grey-haired friend, who had wrapped the curious undersized apron around her to protect her clothes. A large porcelain bowl stood on the bar, and two pans of milk were heating on the stove.
‘Are you saying I should put my hand in the milk? And how do I know if it’s the right temperature?’
‘It’s supposed to be room temperature. You’ll be able to tell. Then we add the yeast but not in one big chunk, in little crumbles.’
Muhis obediently followed Siiri’s instructions, tested the milk with his hand and pronounced it the right temperature, poured the warm liquid into the bowl and broke in the yeast. He had never touched yeast before
, and he got a kick out of its squeaky, crumbly texture. He didn’t need to stir the milk long before the yeast had dissolved. The mixture was an unpleasant grey, but Siiri looked at it in satisfaction.
‘Why didn’t Metukka come over to bake? I thought he wanted to learn how to make pulla, too?’ Siiri asked.
‘He got a job for the day. We have to take any work we can get.’
‘Where do you boys work?’
‘All sorts of places. Mostly construction. Sometimes I clean, sometimes I work banquets, and I’ve driven a taxi a couple of times. Under the table, of course; otherwise, you lose all your benefits.’
‘Don’t stir the milk. Now, “under the table” means you don’t pay taxes, is that it?’
Muhis explained that foreigners had two options in Finland: either be unemployed or have a permanent, full-time job. As far as the authorities were concerned, nothing else would do. And so Muhis and Metukka and other refugees were forced to do the little work they could hidden from the tax office’s eyes. Muhis claimed that many Finns preferred to work under the table, too, since taxes were so high in Finland and welfare benefits were so good, but Siiri didn’t believe him. Taxes had to be paid; otherwise there wouldn’t be any trams, schools or hospitals. And Finns were a hard-working, respectable people. Many worked so hard they ended up on rehabilitation leave or disability in the prime of their life. All the practical nurses tending Anna-Liisa were being crushed by the weight of their burdens.
‘Most Finns pay taxes the way they’re supposed to,’ Muhis admitted. ‘But believe me, there’s one Finnish businessman who’s been running quite the under-the-table amusement park in this apartment. Bad things don’t always come from abroad. What do we do now that the yeast has dissolved?’
Siiri handed Muhis a teaspoon of cardamom and two decilitres of sugar and sprinkled the salt in herself, measuring it with a wooden spoon from a big box. Irma had brought it from her apartment at Sunset Grove; it was an old salt box that had been passed down in her family from mother to daughter, with a wooden lid and the word ‘Salt’ on the side in ornamental writing.
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 17