‘Hocus pocus, and out comes a flat sheet!’ Irma said, watching, eyes gleaming, as the pressed sheet appeared at the far edge of the device. They would fold the hot, smooth sheet and add it to the pile of clean linens. No one else had time to do laundry, so naturally this task as well had fallen to Siiri and Irma. Siiri was pleased that Irma liked using the rotary iron, because otherwise her friend might have shirked this responsibility as lightly as she did the cooking and cleaning, and she said so.
‘Nonsense, I’ve gone shopping with you I don’t know how many times, and even help out with the cleaning now and again. Does it make any sense to mop a clean home every day? Why, just yesterday I scrubbed both bathrooms, including those stupid bidets, although I’m not sure who’s using them,’ Irma responded.
It was true. The day before, Irma had participated in the weekly housework by pulling on a pair of pink flowered rubber gloves and the lace-trimmed housecoat she had sewn herself. Then she had stormed the spa and attacked it for over an hour, splashing and singing, because she loved the way her high soprano echoed in the vaulted space. Meanwhile, Siiri had dusted all the surfaces, taken the duvets out to the balcony to air, wiped the doors and jambs with a damp rag, and vacuumed the entire apartment while listening to Irma’s arias. Irma had brought her tour de force to its conclusion by singing a rendition of Violetta’s death scene from Verdi’s La Traviata, collapsing to the couch and gasping with the last of her strength: ‘Döden, döden, döden.’
‘You’re folding the sheet wrong. They taught us at the Nursing Academy how to do it properly,’ Irma said to Siiri, as they pulled the sheet flat prior to sliding it into the rotary iron. The sheet-stretching was fun; you could lean back into emptiness as long as you trusted the other person to keep you from falling. Siiri leaned with all her weight and closed her eyes. She felt unusually tired, a little weak, as a matter of fact; running a large household might not be suitable for an old woman. She sighed deeply. Just then, Irma’s nose started to itch, and she let go of the sheet. Siiri crashed to the ground and hit her elbow nastily on the corner of the dryer.
‘For calamity’s sake! What have you done, you silly goose?’ Irma cried, and bent down over Siiri. Irma huffed as she tried to help Siiri up from the floor, but she didn’t have the benefit of in-home caregiver training, and so she plopped to the floor, too. There they sat on their backsides, bewildered, until they looked at each other and started laughing so hard they peed in their pants. There was a faint knock at the door, and a dark-skinned girl in a long robe peered in quizzically at the old women giggling on the floor.
‘Are you all right?’ the Somali-Finn asked shyly.
‘Yes, yes! We’re just resting for a moment before we finish up the laundry,’ Siiri said. Her arm didn’t hurt the tiniest bit any more.
‘We have under-floor heating, would you like to try? It’ll warm your bum right up!’ Irma cried at the in-home caregiver, and they burst out laughing uncontrollably again. Irma felt around the sleeve of her housecoat for her lace handkerchief, found it in the pocket, and wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘Under-floor heating and laundry rooms, of all the things people come up with when they don’t have anything better to do!’
The shy caregiver explained that she was looking for Anna-Liisa and continued on her way. Siiri and Irma climbed up stiffly, stretched their aching limbs, and looked at the mountains of dirty clothes and clean sheets surrounding them.
‘This is impossible,’ Irma said, grabbing items at random and shoving them into the washing machine’s gargantuan drum. Her in-house dye-shop had already turned out clothes in a variety of tints, generally pale pink. But even the Ambassador didn’t chide her; he just bravely slipped on the shirts Irma had tie-dyed, as long as they were clean and ironed.
‘Ironed, on top of everything else,’ Siiri huffed. She knew men wore permanent press shirts these days, but the Ambassador refused to buy them. His were custom-made by a tailor who lived somewhere on the other side of the world. The Ambassador had sent the tailor his measurements, and once a month he would pick up a package from the post office containing a new shirt or trousers, sometimes an entire suit. Luckily, Anna-Liisa and Onni’s suite had a separate room for clothes. Siiri set up the ironing board in front of the window and turned on the iron.
‘Do you suppose the Ambassador’s shirts are made under the table? I mean, is it possible Onni had this made somewhere inexpensively the way you’re not supposed to?’ Siiri asked, as she ironed the cuffs of a hand-tailored shirt.
‘It’s all the same to me where he has them made; I just wish he would take care of this rigmarole himself. My husband certainly didn’t change shirts every day. Why, Veikko and all of my darlings put together produced less laundry than Onni does by himself. Oh, my dear husband was such a sweetheart. And now I miss him again!’
They spent a moment reminiscing about their husbands, dried their tears on Irma’s lace handkerchief, and got back down to the task at hand.
Irma had been to Sunset Grove a month ago, to retrieve her winter clothes in good time, but Siiri had nothing warmer than an autumn coat. October was well underway and the first snow could come at any moment. Irma said she had run into Tauno again, who was swaying amid the devastation like the last of the Mohicans. And when Irma had stepped into her apartment, she had found three hairy brutes moving her belongings around.
‘I tried to give them a piece of my mind, but the blockheads didn’t speak a word of Finnish. I switched to shouting in Swedish, German, English and French, even a couple of words of Latin, although I think those were the scientific names of plants, but all that did was improve my mood. I even let them have it in Italian, with a few musical terms and operatic phase. Perfidi, what a wonderful curse word. That’s what Count Almaviva shouts in The Marriage of Figaro, and that’s the best opera in the world. Oh dear, Mozart, you were an amazing man, even more amazing than my dear Veikko. Those demolition dolts just gaped at me as if I were a madwoman.’
Irma had retrieved her warm clothes from the moving boxes while the gorillas looked on. Just to be sure, she had slipped her kitchen silver in among her wool knickers, because she was thoroughly convinced the men were after her valuables.
‘Not that I have any valuables left, since my darlings already divided everything up,’ she said casually, as she carried the stack of pressed sheets to the linen closet, which was bigger than her bathroom at Sunset Grove. ‘Döden, döden, döden.’
‘Should we go to Sunset Grove and have a look around?’ Siiri asked. She had stopped ironing after pressing three shirts into presentable condition and was following at Irma’s heels like a faithful dog. She discovered Irma was as enthusiastic as she was about the possibility of getting to the bottom of whatever major scandal was lurking in the shadows of Sunset Grove’s retrofit. Besides, it would be lovely to ride the tram again; it had been such a long time.
Irma quickly packed the necessities: playing cards, a miniature bottle of whisky, two lace handkerchiefs, her tram pass, wallet, keys, cigarettes, lozenges, spare stockings and the iPad. They were already in her handbag, but Irma took everything out and laid it on the entryway console to make sure that nothing was missing, and then dumped it back in with both hands in no particular order.
‘Now we can go. Oh, but where’s my beret?’
She spun around in circles in the entryway, unable to decide on a sensible place to start looking. Siiri checked the hat shelf, but only found the Ambassador’s felt hat and Anna-Liisa’s red spring hat, the grand symbol of their love. Then she rummaged around the umbrella stand and picked up the newspapers from the chairs, in case Irma’s beret happened to be under something. But it wasn’t.
‘Siiri, you’re wearing it! You’ve stolen my beret!’
Irma snatched the blue beret from Siiri’s head. Siiri was sure that the hat she’d happily been using for weeks was hers, but Irma held her ground. She placed the beret on her grey curls and eyed her reflection in the dim entryway, satisfied.
�
��Look! Just like Garbo . . . all that’s missing are the sunglasses.’
Siiri opened the top drawer of the entryway console to pull out the scarf Margit had given her, and lo and behold, discovered Irma’s light-blue beret.
‘Yes, well. I believe that one’s mine after all. Give it here. I thought this one was a little flat,’ Irma said, handing the dark-blue beret back to Siiri.
Now they were ready to leave.
Chapter 23
As abominable as the weather was, waiting at the tram stop was still good fun. A cold wind skimmed across the faces of the waiting passengers, and the drizzle was so fine that no one bothered using an umbrella, despite a sure soaking. That was Helsinki in October for you. But there were so many different kinds of people wandering around Hakaniemi that Siiri could have watched them forever, these strangers who were all in a hurry to get somewhere. Siiri and Irma tried to guess where they were going, who they were, what they did for work, what their families were like. And where their elderly parents spent their days while these folks rushed around with stony looks on their faces.
They took the number 9 tram downtown but didn’t get off at the train station, because Siiri wanted to roller-coaster up her favourite route: climb Simonkatu, take a sharp right onto Annankatu, and then immediately left onto Urho Kekkosen katu. They were sitting at the back of the tram, in the last row, where the winding curves gave you a lovely feeling in your tummy. Irma sang her ‘Siribiribim’ high and hard and laughed out loud. They exited the tram at the Electric Building, designed by Gunnar Taucher and ruined by Alvar Aalto, so they wouldn’t end up at the West Harbour.
‘We’re breaking the rules now, walking from stop to stop,’ a slightly irritated Irma remarked, and then admitted that the superfluous hill-climb had done them good. Just as they were crossing the street to make their way to the number 3 stop, a number 9 came from the direction of the harbour, and they hopped on, delighted to spare their tired old legs, and followed the serpentine route back down the hill. From the train station, they walked to Mannerheimintie, since they had already violated the beautiful principle of transferring trams without ever having to change stops.
‘Look, it’s one of the new trams!’ Siiri cried, as an LED-lit number 10 slid silently up to the stop. Two trams custom-built in the backwoods of north-eastern Finland had been delighting the residents of Helsinki for some time now, but Siiri hadn’t had a chance to test them yet. Such a rare opportunity could not be passed up; they would have to adjust plans and take the number 10. They entered the tram from the front, but to their consternation did not find a ticket scanner there, and so they had to push their way through the wall of humans to the middle door.
‘That’s what you get when you let bumpkins design your trams,’ Irma huffed.
Two polite young men stood when they saw the old women, which gave Siiri and Irma the opportunity to try out the seats, too. They were very nice, just the right height, and pleasantly firm, with a hint of softness. The windows were large and offered a beautiful view of the landscape racing past. The tram was nearly soundless but rocked rather violently, which Siiri found alarming and Irma amusing. A digital screen advertised the tram as being more environmentally friendly and reliable than the old trams, because it was made in Finland and would run in the foulest weather without any trouble. This was, of course, a jab at the trains. The State Railways had gone and ordered trains from Italy, which got jammed up by wet leaves in the autumn, couldn’t take the summer heat, and got stuck in the snow during the winter. Far too many people had been late for work, and demands had been made for the director of the railways to resign. A smaller screen announced the tram’s destination and the next stop, but here our northern Finnish engineers had pulled a real boner, as Irma put it. The sign was far too small. It read ‘Central Railway Stat’ and ‘National Pensions Insti’ because the rest of the letters didn’t fit. ‘But the driver’s cabin certainly is handsome,’ Siiri said.
The driver was perched in lofty solitude, and the glass-walled aquarium he sat in was larger than the nurses’ office in your average dementia unit. A schoolchild who was trying to pay for her trip had to stand on tiptoes to reach the slot where transactions with the driver took place.
‘He looks like the captain of a ship, piloting the tram from up high like that. Luckily, these aren’t being automated like the metros,’ Irma said.
‘Don’t the metros have drivers any more?’ Siiri exclaimed. ‘If I had known that, I would have insisted on taking a taxi to the SquirrelsNest that time I went there with Margit.’
The little girl finally succeeded in paying for her ticket when a Russian woman sitting nearby offered her assistance. The Russian woman was wearing a full-length fur, even though it wasn’t winter yet. Finns didn’t dare wear fur coats any more, even on the most frigid January days, because young animal rights activists stained and cut them. Siiri and Irma had quietly packed up their old minks and forgotten them in the attic at Sunset Grove, from where, presumably, they had been snatched before being sold to Russians well before the July heatwave.
‘Putin is a good president,’ the Russian woman said, as she seated herself across from Siiri and Irma. The new trams had the same sort of four-person tables as the low-floor trams, with two benches face to face.
‘Is he?’ Irma’s curiosity was piqued, because she was under the exact opposite impression. ‘He certainly is rather fit and apparently gets a lot of exercise.’
‘Marriage is for a man and a woman,’ the woman continued in relatively fluent Finnish. ‘I think it’s ugly, very ugly, when two men . . . patamusta . . .’
‘You’re the one with a black heart,’ Irma said, although she gathered full well that the woman had slipped into Russian, where patamusta meant ‘because’, not ‘black-hearted’, as it did in Finnish.
‘Excuse me?’ the woman said and started explaining over again. She thought Putin was a good man because he didn’t allow gay marriage. Siiri knew how much Irma loved her homosexual darlings, her grandson and his beautiful boyfriend. Irma had been ready to march in the Pride parade on their behalf, but at the last minute her darlings had put the kibosh on the idea, because marching on behalf of gay rights was even more dangerous than traipsing about in a fur coat. You might take a tomato or a smoke bomb to the head.
‘Don’t we need to transfer to the number 4?’ Irma said. Siiri pressed the glowing red button that, to her disappointment, wasn’t as responsive as she would have wished. They rose and exited the tram at the University Pharmacy stop. Through the tram window, they could see the fur-clad Russian move across the aisle, doggedly trying to convert Finns to homophobia.
‘Damned Russki,’ Irma said, sparking a squabble with Siiri about the use of the word. Siiri felt that you shouldn’t say it, because it had the same unpleasant tone as ‘the n word’ used in reference to black people. But Irma stoutly defended Russki.
‘We’ve always called Russians Russkis. There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m not about to start learning my language over again at the age of ninety-three just because some upstart language police is sitting around, sniffing out politically incorrect attitudes in perfectly acceptable words that have been around for ages. Or am I ninety-four already?’
The number 4 came quickly, and they forgot all about Russkis and other ugly words and concentrated on observing the wretched youngsters on their way to the narcotics clinic. Irma had heard that you could get drugs for free at Meilahti Hospital and that was how they kept drug addicts clean and in line.
‘They have to be sober when you go there; that way they don’t contaminate themselves with dirty needles. But it’s nonsensical to me that they’re given drugs instead of being taught how to live without them.’
Two young people sitting in front of Irma and Siiri were complaining that their weekly government-funded dose was too small, because they had the flu and were taking antibiotics and the drug didn’t hit them the way it was supposed to. Irma was just about to engage the young people in con
versation, but they exited at the Hilton hospital stop. Siiri sighed with relief. They rode the remainder of the trip in peace, and as the tram sped across the Paciuksenkatu Bridge, she felt her heart leap; it was so lovely coming home to Munkkiniemi.
‘No matter how we feel about Sunset Grove, this is my home,’ she said, clenching her hands to her breast, revelling in the joy the yellow-leafed lindens and little boutiques of Munkkiniemi Allée brought her. There was Max’s Cafe, and people were still sitting outside, even though the weather was lousy and the air chilly. And before long, Raikka over at the hardware store would put up his window display for Christmas, the miniature village with a train running through it. One year Raikka had run out of money and hadn’t done his traditional Christmas window, but the neighbourhood had felt so badly about it that they had gathered a collection to pay the electric bill and other expenses.
‘That’s right; I suppose it will be Christmas again soon,’ Irma sighed, as if the holiday were some onerous burden to be borne. Which it was. For as long as they could remember, they had baked, cooked, crafted, decorated, knitted and wrapped for weeks on end so their families would enjoy a proper Christmas. Of course, this year they hadn’t imagined they’d be celebrating Christmas on the wrong side of the Pitkäsilta in a Finnish businessman’s private entertainment venue.
‘Perhaps the remodel at Sunset Grove will be finished by Christmas,’ Siiri said, trying to lighten the mood, but this time not even Irma could join in her optimism. And when Siiri passed through the automatic doors and entered the lobby of Sunset Grove, her good mood swirled away, like rainwater draining into a kerb-side gutter and into the bowels of the earth.
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 19