‘Now crack an egg into it. Not everyone does, but I think the dough is better if you add an egg.’
‘The incredible edible egg!’ Muhis chuckled, cracking the egg neatly with one hand against the edge of the bowl. It was plain from every movement that he was used to cooking and baking. The bowl was an old piece of Arabia porcelain Siiri had found in a funny little junk shop on Toinen linja. The sign outside the store said ‘Antique Shop’ and the young, toothless salesperson claimed that the dish was vintage, which was why Siiri had been forced to pay twenty euros for a simple bowl. Irma thought it was highway robbery, and she claimed the salesgirl was pulling the wool over their foolish old eyes, but Siiri knew that they would get a lot of use out of the bowl.
‘And then you can start adding the flour, but don’t put in too much. You have to add it little by little, just like that, and keep stirring. Stir, stir! The dough needs air!’
Muhis stirred. There was no electric mixer in the commune, so he had to use a whisk. Muhis was wearing a shirt with no sleeves, and his coal-black skin accentuated his muscular arms magnificently. Siiri had offered him her apron, but when Muhis saw what was written on it, he laughed and politely declined. Only a queen should wear a queen’s apron, he said. Now Siiri was afraid his shirt would get messy as he whisked with big, rapid movements.
‘Do you want me to take off my shirt?’ Muhis laughed. He stopped stirring and stripped off his shirt so quickly that Siiri barely had time to squeal. Muhis continued stirring more furiously than ever, and flecks of white batter splattered onto his black skin.
‘What now? What are you thinking, Siiri?’
Siiri was distracted, marvelling at this man who could bake: ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking about anything. Right, you were adding the flour. You pour; you can put in almost all of it, but leave a couple of decilitres.’
It was impossible to know how much flour it took to make a good pulla dough. You had to feel it. Suddenly, Siiri remembered the butter; she had bought some lovely hand-churned butter from Hakaniemi Hall, and the salesperson had wrapped it prettily in wax paper. Siiri looked for the package, first in the fridge and then on the messy counter, where a sweaty shirt now swam among the ingredients and eggshells. The butter was hiding under the shirt, of course. Carefully, Siiri moved the shirt to a bar stool. She let Muhis test how the butter was supposed to feel, soft enough so that you could blend it into the dough when you start kneading.
‘Needing?’
‘Knead. K-N-E-A-D. There’s even a joke about that . . . how did it go . . . What did the dough say to the baker? I need you to knead me.’
Muhis laughed but looked at Siiri quizzically, because he still didn’t know what kneading was. Siiri told him to twist, fold and punch the dough with his bare hands until it stopped sticking to them. Kneading could take a while; baking pulla was not something to undertake when you were pressed for time. Muhis said that Africans always had plenty of time, and Siiri laughed merrily, because if that were true, Africans and old Finns were in the same boat: nothing but time on their hands.
Muhis dived right into the kneading as if he’d been baking pulla his entire life. Siiri looked on in admiration as her friend wrestled with the dough. Muhis’ movements were swift and elegant, simultaneously sharp and fluid, like those of a wild cat. Siiri had never seen any cats in the wild, but she had never seen a man baking at home, either. If one of her sons had ever cooked, it had consisted of standing at a smoking grill with a bottle of beer in one hand, scorching sausages. No wonder they had died before retirement of gluttony, alcohol and other affluenza-related diseases. Muhis sang and laughed; the soft dough was fun to slap around until it grew pliant. The pale, late-autumn sun fell on his back muscles, which tensed splendidly in time to his kneading. And before long, the dough was pulling away from the sides of the bowl.
‘There we go. Knead until no more kneading is needed. I’ll make sure we knead out all the looseness,’ Muhis said, continuing to abuse the dough. ‘Doesn’t “loose” refer to the kind of woman who’s bad in some way? The kind that used to hang around here before you moved in?’
Siiri was embarrassed. ‘You must mean loose lips, but that can be a man just as easily as a woman. Someone who has a big mouth. That’s enough, Muhis! Stop!’
Muhis obeyed as promptly as if he were one of Anna-Liisa’s students. Siiri tested the dough. It was almost perfect: firm, quite thick and stretchy. ‘Now we add the rest of the flour. I think one decilitre is enough.’
As Muhis finished kneading the dough, Siiri rummaged through the drawers in the kitchenette, looking for the linen cloth she’d bought the day before, the one with the little pigs on it. She didn’t find it in the drawers and continued her hunt at the coffee table and the chairs in the entryway. She wandered through the cavernous apartment without seeing a trace of the towel. Then she spotted it in the spa, on Anna-Liisa’s bath chair. Siiri couldn’t grasp how her nice new kitchen towel had ended up there, and she hoped from the bottom of her heart that Anna-Liisa’s in-home caregivers hadn’t seen fit to use it. She lowered the towel over the bowl of dough and placed the bowl in the corner cupboard. It was in front of the radiator and a little warmer than the other cupboards.
‘Then we just wait for the dough to rise. In the meantime, we can have a cup of coffee,’ she said to Muhis, clicking on the coffee machine.
They seated themselves on the bar stools and sipped hot coffee, gazing out at the vista, across Tokoinranta Park and Hakaniemi market, the trains travelling past in the distance and the trail of souls wandering into the metro tunnel. Siiri wanted to know more about Muhis’ life. It was a pity that a man as fine as Muhis wasn’t allowed to work. Muhis told her he’d attended very little school in Nigeria, because his parents couldn’t afford to educate all their children and Muhis was the second youngest of nine sons. He told Siiri he’d run through the fields barefoot and lived very humbly.
‘I had a wretched excuse for shoes during the war, too,’ Siiri said. ‘Can you imagine, we made shoes out of newspapers and cardboard, and children wore them in temperatures so cold your spit froze.’
Then they drifted into talking about food again, as always. Muhis’ unvaried diet in Africa hadn’t been so different from Siiri’s memories of Finland during the depression. Siiri got a kick out of the fact that she and the young Nigerian man had been through such similar experiences.
‘Of course I’ve always been privileged, even on a Finnish scale. I was able to attend as much school as I wanted. Our family always had work and food. Many of my contemporaries spent their childhood in deprivation and poverty like you. But you need to work. And you’re a well-bred man, even though you didn’t have the chance to attend school in Africa.’
‘What’s a well-bred man?’
‘A man like you,’ Siiri said, looking amiably into Muhis’ coal-black eyes. ‘You’re kind to other people. You listen and care; you’re considerate and courageous. And then you speak many languages and learn things quickly. You take care of yourself and adapt to difficult conditions, even here in Finland. And you have a good sense of humour. Doesn’t that make you a well-bred man?’
Muhis told her that he dreamed of owning his own restaurant. He used to help out in the kitchen of a friend’s kebab-pizzeria, but the tax office had raided the restaurant and the friend had been forced to shut it down. Muhis had done most of his work in construction, although most of the men working in the field were Russian and Estonian.
‘It’s a mafia. If a Finn is in the construction business, he has to have good connections in Eastern Europe.’
‘Mika talked about the mafia, too, but it was the gay mafia, as I recall. There were all sorts of messes at Sunset Grove involving Russians, drugs and ice hockey. And now they’re using Russian and Estonian men on the renovation. Is that a bad thing?’
Siiri tried to remember the name of the company doing the construction work at Sunset Grove, but all she could think of was the cleaning product Spic and Span, which took her
back through the years to an old television advertisement for Black and Decker: ‘A pair of hands and a Black and Decker is all you need to make dreams come true.’ Diverting as these anecdotes may have been, they weren’t much use, since she couldn’t remember the name of the construction company, even though she was singing a bit of the Black and Decker jingle. That reminded her of Jerry Siilinpää and his information session for the residents of Sunset Grove. She mimicked Jerry, which amused Muhis.
‘The name of the construction company is Fix ’n’ Finish,’ Muhis said, growing serious. ‘Unless it went bankrupt for a change and switched names again.’
Muhis knew all about Fix ’n’ Finish, even though he had never worked for them. He thought it was one of the worst companies in the business, and Siiri wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘worst’ in this context. After all, Muhis didn’t pay taxes himself: what right did he have to be judging companies that did business under the table, or hired foreigners?
‘Fix ’n’ Finish isn’t just a construction company. Its tentacles reach everywhere. Including this apartment,’ Muhis said, looking around Siiri’s living room. Just the way he was looking made its heavy pillars, curving walls, coloured chandeliers, bar and other eccentricities take on a suspicious cast. Siiri had grown used to the apartment and, after her initial bewilderment, no longer wondered why someone would choose to decorate their apartment in this fashion, and add floor-to-ceiling soundproofing to boot. The Ambassador had held forth proudly on it once, the floor mats, triple windows and the like, thanks to which the noise didn’t travel up to the apartment from the street or from one apartment to another, the way it did in most old buildings in central Helsinki.
‘Do you know someone named Hasan?’ Siiri asked after a long silence. The mysterious, sinister-seeming men who came asking for Hasan had been nagging at her.
‘I wish I didn’t, I really do. But do you know what that pole is for?’ Muhis pointed at the metal pole that they had imagined was a support of sorts. ‘It’s for dancing.’
‘I thought dancers’ barres were horizontal? Ballet dancers lean on them while they practise their leg lifts,’ Siiri said.
Muhis laughed gleefully yet again, and told Siiri the poles were all the rage, now that even your average housewives were practising Indian pole-dancing.
‘So I suppose it has uses that are other than pornographic.’
Siiri nearly choked on her coffee. She lowered her mug to the table and started coughing nastily. Muhis pounded her on the back a little too hard and the coughing just grew worse. Then Muhis made her stand up, wrapped his strong arms around her, and spoke in a low, soothing tone.
‘Everything’s fine, Siiri, everything’s fine. Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, even though the world is a crazy place.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Anna-Liisa’s voice suddenly said. Apparently, she had roused herself from her nap and stood there, one hand clutching her cane and the other the dancing pole. To Siiri’s eyes she looked like a naughty housewife about to start her daily exercise routine, and Siiri giggled. But Anna-Liisa wasn’t smiling.
‘Siiri Kettunen!’ she cried, as if the commune’s living room were the auditorium at the Kallio Comprehensive School. ‘Sit down and calm yourself. What on earth are you doing? And who is this . . . topless individual embracing you in the middle of our living room in broad daylight?’
Siiri hurried to introduce Muhis and Anna-Liisa to each other. She had told Anna-Liisa about her Nigerian friend, but never in her wildest dreams did Anna-Liisa think that one day a black man in a hat bigger than a bucket would be standing in her home, groping Siiri.
‘We’re making pulla,’ Siiri explained, immediately understanding that this explanation would not suffice. ‘Muhis wanted to learn how to make Finnish pulla. We already kneaded the dough; it’s rising in the cupboard. As a matter of fact, it might be ready.’ She scurried into the kitchenette, opened the corner cupboard and shrieked. The dough had risen over the edges of the bowl and spilled onto the shelves of the cupboard. The sight made Muhis laugh; Anna-Liisa was disgusted.
‘I’ll clean this up,’ Siiri said. ‘You two have coffee in the meantime. Muhis, please pour some for Anna-Liisa.’
Muhis didn’t have to speak with Anna-Liisa long before the ice had melted. His elegant, fluent Finnish caressed Anna-Liisa’s ears and his pleasant manner pleased the Ambassador’s wife; and since Muhis was capable of discussing literature, Siiri could hear Anna-Liisa’s purr of approval all the way to the corner cupboard.
‘. . . and I use alliteration to teach the comitative, kissan kanssa, kissoineen . . .’
The three of them decided to use the pulla dough to make korvapuusti, cinnamon buns, and Anna-Liisa was no longer the least bit bothered that Muhis remained bare-torsoed as he rolled out the dough. She buttered the dough energetically, Siiri and Muhis sprinkled on the cinnamon and sugar, and in the end Siiri rolled the dough into a tube and showed Muhis how to cut the slices the right thickness with a sharp knife.
‘Then we pinch them like this, so they spread at the bottom, and brush egg on the top to give them a nice shine,’ Siiri said. Anna-Liisa brushed on more butter, and Muhis got to sprinkle the pearl sugar on top. He said it reminded him of snow. Anna-Liisa corrected him: more like hailstones, actually.
‘Hail can consist of sleet or pure ice. And it’s true that hail formed of sleet can resemble snow, even though it’s something different. But this cinnamon is rather reminiscent of the sands of the Sahara, don’t you think? Do you have as many words for sand as our indigenous Sami do for snow?’
‘I have no idea.’ Muhis smiled. ‘I’m not from the desert; I’m from the jungle.’
Anna-Liisa laughed, tickled by the thought, and started to muse on which of them, her or Muhis, was from deeper in the forest. Siiri hadn’t been aware that Anna-Liisa was born in the backwoods of Karelia, at the end of a dirt track, and Anna-Liisa hurried to point out that her parents had moved from the jungles of Karelia to the city of Joensuu when she was quite young.
‘The point being that I attended school in civilization and was raised in furnished rooms.’
When the cinnamon rolls were in the oven, Anna-Liisa taught Muhis how to braid four lengths of pulla dough into a loaf of coffee bread. She was very adept at it, and Siiri was quite awe-struck by Anna-Liisa’s skills.
‘When I was a girl, it was my job to bake pulla every Saturday. Oh, how I hated it then, but I’m rather enjoying it now!’
Irma and Margit came home from water aerobics, utterly exhausted, just as Muhis was pulling the last sheet of cinnamon rolls from the oven. The aroma of baking pulla filled their pornographic lair, and Irma started singing old Schlager songs and waltzing around, so thrilled was she about Siiri’s surprise.
‘I’m not the least bit tired any more! That just goes to show: exercise is exhausting, but pulla perks you up,’ Irma said, twirling around the pole one last time and flinging herself onto the sofa, where she waited to be served warm pulla and cold milk. Margit retreated to her room.
‘Muhis knows the company doing the construction work at Sunset Grove, and he thinks it’s involved in illicit human trafficking,’ Siiri said, once they were ensconced on the soft sofa, eating fresh-baked pulla.
‘What do you mean by “human trafficking”?’ Anna-Liisa asked; the way she sat up straighter indicated that she found this topic interesting in the extreme.
‘It can be almost anything,’ Muhis said, mouth full of pulla. They waited with bated breath for him to finish chewing. ‘Bringing people into the country illegally. Forcing them to work under the table. Construction work, restaurant work, but also prostitution. And, of course, drugs are always involved.’
Irma and Anna-Liisa shrieked as one. The memory of the drug ring run by Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen out of Sunset Grove was still fresh in their minds. They had learned the hard way that, in the eyes of a drug dealer, a retirement home was paradise, because young people wanted to get silly on old people’s medication.
But hadn’t they moved beyond all that, now that Mika Korhonen had so masterfully exposed the Hiukkanens’ malfeasance? Siiri felt a powerful throbbing in her head and couldn’t swallow. The pulla had turned to cement that filled her whole mouth; she started feeling repulsed. She looked out at the bleak view and, breathing calmly, chose a point to focus on: the letter M on the Metalworkers’ Union headquarters.
‘This pulla is divine!’ Muhis said. He ate with his eyes closed, drank his cold milk, allowing it to mingle with the hot, soft, sweet dough in his mouth. He wasn’t worried about human trafficking or drugs at the moment, because now he knew what Finnish men in pubs meant when they reminisced about eating warm pulla, straight from the oven in their mother’s kitchen. After devouring three large korvapuusti, he pounded his chest rhythmically, stood, and said he had to go.
‘I’m in a hurry,’ he said, without further explanation. Anna-Liisa was about to make some snide remark about African notions of time, but a sharp glance from Siiri brought her up short. After all, he had spent all day with them without complaint. Siiri packed up one of the braided loaves for him, and with that Muhis vanished into the dark stairwell, the freshly baked pulla under his arm. As Siiri was closing the door, she heard Muhis run into someone on the stairs, with whom he engaged in a brief but intense debate in a language that wasn’t Finnish, perhaps English.
After that, all was silent.
Chapter 22
Doing laundry at the commune was quite an operation. Luckily, a large room behind the spa-cum-bathroom had been dedicated solely to this purpose; it had enough room to pull the sheets taut before folding them and still line-dry clothes for five. The washing machine was as big as a hospital’s, spacious and powerful, and next to it there was a dryer and a rotary iron for pressing the sheets. The latter was surprisingly easy to use. Siiri and Irma would first stretch each sheet flat by hand, then fold it, and in the end Siiri would hold the sheet while Irma slipped it into the rotary iron and pressed the button.
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 18