Siiri thought poor Tauno had been shown in the wrong light; he seemed dotty and more confused than he actually was. But where on earth had the reporters got the idea to use the Sunset Grove renovation as an example of all the horrible things that can happen to old people at a retirement home?
‘All it takes is for one loved one to call the news desk. Seniors are a media trend these days,’ Anna-Liisa said. She had grown tired of every newspaper and every television broadcast reporting on abandoned, unhealthy old people whose incontinence pads no one was paying for and whose care was driving society into bankruptcy. ‘It’s the wrong tone, somehow. Old age shouldn’t be some new phenomenon that has caught contemporary society off guard, a liability we have to rid ourselves of as quickly and cheaply as possible. That’s the impression you get from these sensationalistic stories.’
Anna-Liisa was right, of course. They didn’t recognize themselves in the portrayals of the elderly that appeared in the media. Nor did they see themselves as particularly exceptional. Why, they were completely normal people.
‘That’s asking too much!’ Anna-Liisa laughed. ‘People, ha! Toxic waste is what we’ve become.’
‘Hmmm. That’s not a very nice thing to say.’
Irma thought about Anna-Liisa’s words. But she didn’t have the mental stamina for much doom and gloom, even in matters that concerned her, like this old age no one could do anything about.
Siiri had read in the newspaper that a human life consisted of cell division, and during this process something called a telomere grew shorter every time a cell divided. In the end, there were no longer enough telomeres, which is when you died. ‘Life keeps time in telomeres,’ she said. ‘It’s that simple.’
‘What time is it?’ the Ambassador asked, looking at his watch. ‘Shall we play cards? Didn’t we all say we missed our canasta club at Sunset Grove?’
Irma pulled the pack of cards out of her handbag and skilfully started shuffling them. She didn’t need the table; she knew how to knock the decks against each other in her hands without a single card falling out. ‘Who’s in?’
Everyone wanted to play, and with Margit gone, for once they had the right number for canasta. The Ambassador had a good hand and was pleased. He laid out his first canasta right away, humming to himself. Even Irma managed to concentrate and didn’t show her hand the way she normally did, and that made Anna-Liisa’s game more tranquil than normal. Siiri had been dealt a bad hand and she found herself having a hard time concentrating, as much as she enjoyed the fact that they were all sitting there happily together, like old times, playing cards. But why hadn’t Margit come home yet? And what had happened to Eino?
Chapter 27
Irma felt they ought to join forces and report their property that had gone missing from Sunset Grove during the renovation. She just didn’t know whether they ought to lodge a criminal report with the police, or if a simple complaint with the Loving Care Foundation, which ran Sunset Grove, would suffice. At the very least, Project Manager Jerry Siilinpää and Director Sundström needed to be made aware of what was happening at the retirement home under the pretence of a remodel. The Ambassador didn’t want to participate in their complaint, but Anna-Liisa was in such high spirits that she decided to help Irma and Siiri. Margit was at the SquirrelsNest waiting for Eino’s rescue from pneumonia or some other infection.
Irma swatted at her device as if she were screaming obscenities in sign language, despite the fact that she was looking for information, officials, forms and addresses. Suddenly a wet, embarrassed-looking cat floundering about in a shower stall appeared on the screen. ‘Now, where did you come from?’ Irma muttered, and she tried to push the cat off the screen with a determined swipe. ‘Dratted contraption,’ she said, shaking her flaptop, and then, to her own surprise and the other’s relief, managed to turn it off. ‘So be it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ she said to her favourite toy, after setting it aside as a punishment.
Anna-Liisa sharpened a pencil to write a draft – she would pen the official document in ink afterwards – and Siiri made them all coffee and found some pound cake in the cupboard. They had already drawn up a list of all of the furniture and other belongings each of them had lost during the remodel. Or remembered losing. Irma had reminded Anna-Liisa about her missing jewellery, but Anna-Liisa didn’t want it on her list, because she still had the roll of cash squirrelled away and it didn’t really belong to her. She blushed and looked uncomfortable as she spoke about the jewellery box.
‘Have you noticed how much better this drip coffee is than the instant kind we always drank at Sunset Grove?’ Siiri asked, as she filled their mugs with the piping hot brew.
‘You can say that again. Although at the time I never thought the coffee was bad. But cake is always delicious when you dunk it in hot coffee. Oh dear oh dear, it’s important to know how to make the most of life until the very end. Döden, döden, döden.’
They decided to deliver a memorandum about the stolen items and furniture to Director Sundström and Jerry Siilinpää, send a complaint to the board of Loving Care Foundation, and file a criminal report with the police. It was Anna-Liisa’s suggestion: in her view sufficiently robust and it followed a logical procedural hierarchy.
‘What shall we say? We would like to call your attention to the fact that during the remodel at the Sunset Grove retirement home, numerous items have been removed from our apartments . . . Or should we say stolen?’ Anna-Liisa looked at them questioningly.
They sat there thinking about the right term. The fact of the matter was, they weren’t sure whether the furniture and moving boxes had been stolen or not. They had simply been removed without their knowledge, and who knew, perhaps the intent was to return them all one fine day. Regardless, residents should have been informed about the removal of their belongings somewhere other than on the Internet, and in this respect, their outrage was justified.
Irma started remembering the satirical vignette ‘A loan is a loan.’ In it, the Man with the Black Beard is accused of stealing Mr Rakohiili’s gold watch, although it was only a case of multiple loans, first from Mr Rakohiili, and then on to someone else, who had lent it on again.
‘Do you remember it? It’s so funny that I used to know the whole thing by heart.’
Anna-Liisa raised her eyebrows in surprise; she wasn’t the least bit upset with Irma, despite the fact that her friend had wandered off onto a side-track again. Just the opposite: Anna-Liisa was filled with deep respect. It would never have occurred to her that Irma was capable of memorizing long passages of silliness to keep her brain working.
‘Let’s hear it,’ she commanded.
‘Oh, I don’t know it any more. But the Man with the Black Beard says to the judge: “Exaggeration, Your Honour, I borrowed it.” And then he explains that the watch may have ended up in Canada and says: “It is where it is; what’s the sense in getting worked up over it?” That’s the only bit I remember. I should read Scenes from Olli’s Life again. I had a big collection, but I suppose it’s at some pawn shop now, too, or at Mustamäe Market in Tallinn.’
‘It is where it is; what’s the sense in getting worked up over it?’ Anna-Liisa remarked aphoristically, lowering her pencil to the table. ‘Mightn’t that be the right precept for us to follow, too? What difference do our chairs and books make at this point? We’ll be leaving this place behind before long, and when that happens our treasures will be nothing but rubbish and trouble for our inheritors.’
‘Nonsense, my furniture was new. I bought it from IKEA after my darlings divided up my Biedermeier set, the thirties couch from Stockmann, my hand-painted porcelain table, and the rest of my lovely belongings. Put down that a brand-new Bögen dresser, bed, table and chairs were misappropriated from me. At least four chairs. Or were there six?’
‘Bögen? Doesn’t that mean homosex—’
‘I don’t remember what they were called, some funny Swedish word. Put down Murran, doesn’t that sound like a cosy IKEA nam
e?’
‘Misappropriated is quite a nice verb.’ Anna-Liisa savoured the word and started writing again.
‘Shuffle and cut! Misappropriated under the pretext of a loan!’ Irma squealed, clapping so her gold bracelets jangled.
‘Some funny instinct tells me I’ve heard that before,’ Siiri said.
The presiding judge accused the Man with the Black Beard of misappropriation under the pretext of a loan. The Man with the Black Beard also loaned a pawn shop Mr Tikkumetso’s fur coat, as well as a wall clock, bicycle and hunting dog from other acquaintances, but in the end the case fell apart because in 1927 the presiding judge had borrowed some book on the history of the Finnish justice system that he had never returned, because he had lent it on to someone else and it had never been returned to him. Siiri and Irma laughed so hard that they peed in their pants, but Anna-Liisa looked stunned.
‘Can’t you use that term in our report, misappropriated under the pretext of a loan?’
They burst into fresh gales of laughter. Irma wiped her eyes on her lace handkerchief and lent it to Siiri, too.
‘In his stupidity, he gave me his gold watch – that’s what the Man with the Black Beard said when he explained why Mr Rakohiili’s watch had ended up in his possession,’ Siiri managed to say between fits of laughter. ‘Write: “In our stupidity, we left our belongings in our homes”.’
‘My dear friends!’ Anna-Liisa raised her voice so that she sounded testy, although her words were kind. It was an old trick of the trade for teachers.
‘Don’t you like Scenes from Olli’s Life?’ Irma said, genuinely taken aback.
Anna-Liisa stared off into the distance and started jabbering robotically: ‘The pronunciation of the Finnish language demands an antireciproicalpropsilarically accepto-suffobic approach insofar as it is animalistically rotundifolic, in other words overexpelled to the extent that it does not laryngicalize both the vowel o and the vowel y in the same contextual context, in other words sociology. This being the case, one cannot say, for instance, olyt; the correct form is olut, beer. Nor can one say olympialaiset, Olympics; one must say either olumpialaiset or ölympiäläiset.’
‘What are you going on about?’ Irma said.
Siiri was worried, too. ‘Are you . . . how are you feeling, Anna-Liisa?’
They exchanged glances and knew they were both thinking about that hot summer day when they were having lunch at the French restaurant and Anna-Liisa abruptly excused herself to correct preliminary examinations and ended up the victim of a descending spiral of hospitalization and in-home care. Had their fun with the Man with the Black Beard permanently hurled Anna-Liisa into the abyss of dementia, and when she was on the cusp of her heroic recovery? At Irma’s urging, Anna-Liisa had even called City of Helsinki Western Health-Care District In-Home Care and informed them that she had recuperated sufficiently from her hospital treatments for her to no longer require interns running in and out, disturbing her domestic peace. But nothing was ever that simple. Anna-Liisa had to wait for the head nurse to have enough time in her busy schedule to conduct a home inspection and patient evaluation; only after successful completion of both could treatment be voluntarily waived.
‘That was “A Little Refresher” from Scenes from Olli’s Life. Don’t you remember?’ Anna-Liisa said with a delicious laugh, leaning back and letting out tinkling staccatos like a young girl, so that her molars, which had clearly been filled on numerous occasions, gleamed brightly. She looked at the still-confounded Siiri and Irma in satisfaction.
‘I don’t remember that,’ Siiri said finally.
‘My husband Veikko always talked about drinking ölyt,’ Irma pondered. ‘I wonder if he got that from Olli? Have you noticed that almost all Finnish sayings come from the Bible, Topelius’s tales, the Kalevala, or Scenes from Olli’s Life?’
‘The satirist Olli, in other words Väinö Nuorteva, was an astonishing writer. His vignettes grew funnier and funnier by the day, and they have never lost their edge. In his time they were exaggerated, of course,’ Anna-Liisa said, sitting up straighter. Nevertheless, she refrained from launching into a long lecture; she wanted to return to the matter at hand, their reason for sitting there, and started turning out meandering sentences in the style of Scenes from Olli’s Life, so that the authorities would understand in no uncertain terms that these compositions penned by hands well past the age of ninety needed to be taken seriously. She was convinced that the more tortuous and dreadful Finnish they wrote, the more attention their matter would receive.
‘We need to use expressions like “the opaqueness of the project’s sourcing framework” and “overestimated under-resourcing”, for instance. And “deficit” too, an “accountability deficit” at least.’
They had a grand time cooking up bureaucratic language and managed to get a few terms down on paper that were so long and nonsensical that Irma had to count the letters. Unfortunately, not a single one beat the previous record of twenty-six letters. Anna-Liisa brought her considerable experience as a Finnish-language professional to bear on their epistle, composing endless sentences heavy with participial phrases in which the noun being modified remained deliberately vague. That was the custom, evidently. In the end, she read the memorandum, complaint and report to Irma and Siiri in her strong, melodic voice.
‘Bravo. I give ten points to all of them, but my favourite is the memo. I can make neither head nor tail of it, and I’m sure that will further our cause,’ Irma said.
The criminal report relied heavily on main clauses composed of a clear subject, predicate and object, because they believed this was the type of text the police would prefer receiving. They boldly announced that their movable property had been stolen in toto. But in their letter to the Loving Care Foundation they marvelled that such practices were allowed, as they could not be sure whether their property had been robbed, stolen, temporarily moved to another location, or misappropriated under the pretext of a loan. They demanded an immediate written account of events and declared that the foundation suffered from a serious confidence deficit among residents. The letter to Jerry Siilinpää was priceless. Anna-Liisa had masterfully cross-bred Olli’s impenetrable style and Siilinpää’s consultant-speak into such a dense mat of cobwebs that even the wisest presiding judge wouldn’t be able to determine if they were blaming Jerry or themselves for the fact that, in their stupidity, they had left their belongings behind to be stolen by others.
‘Sign your names at the bottom,’ Anna-Liisa said, after she had copied out each of the documents in her neat 1940s hand. Then they slid the folded sheets of paper into envelopes, printed out the addresses, glued the stamps in their places, lamented the fact that stamps were no longer lickable now that they had been turned into stickers, reminisced about the tang of postal glues past, debated whether the glue was made from bones and, if so, whose, and then headed off to deposit the letters in the mailbox, even though they knew it wouldn’t be emptied until the following Monday.
Chapter 28
Not even the hardiest Finn drank her coffee outdoors at Hakaniemi Square on a sleety November day, despite the fact that the stands were tented and warmed by glowing heat-lamps and the air was oddly mild for the time of year. There was no hope of a proper snow, which suited Siiri and her friends just fine; they had endured enough mountainous snowbanks during their lifetimes and had no interest in frolicking through snowfields. Margit, Siiri and Irma had moved their daily coffee outing to the second floor of the Hakaniemi Hall in hopes that President Tarja Halonen, Finland’s first and so far only woman head of state, would one day sit at the table permanently reserved for her, but no luck yet.
Margit had much to report. Her coffee cooled in its cup as she apprised her friends of her adventures in the jungle known as the Meilahti hospital complex. It had taken some time before she found Eino at the Haartman Hospital, abandoned in a hallway surrounded by belligerent, unruly drunks.
‘Be grateful he ended up at Haartman. At least it’s new and nice, co
mpared to those old dumps where the plaster is falling down on the patients’ heads.’ Irma was informed, because she had made the rounds of nearly every hospital in Helsinki during her bout of temporary dementia.
Unfortunately, the hospital had managed to begin treating Eino before Margit’s arrival: an IV drip was delivering liquids and drugs from two bottles into his arm, an oxygen moustache had been shoved up his nose, and his chest was full of electrodes or whatever those sticky magnets were called.
‘Why on earth would they drive a man with a fever to the hospital when there’s no room for him there anyway?’ Siiri huffed in empathy, although they all knew the multi-hospital circus was normal practice, the Finnish way of doing things.
The living will Irma had written had proved effective once Margit got her hands on a doctor, which was no easy undertaking. If a member of the staff happened to sail past in the corridor, it was a nurse, and nurses had no interest in living wills or the concerns of loved ones. ‘The doctor will be here soon,’ they all said to Margit, and more than one had clocked out in the meantime. But Margit hadn’t given up. Every few hours she had trudged off to the petrol station to chew down a dry, plastic-wrapped sandwich and returned to Eino’s bedside, until a Russian doctor had suddenly appeared at her side the next morning.
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