‘This is so fucking horrible,’ she said with sorrowful eyes. ‘I’m so fucking . . . like really sorry.’
But the SquirrelsNest staff nurse was a more seasoned professional and didn’t stoop to sentimentality. He reached for the phone and evidently called an old friend at the hearse service. ‘Jaska here, hey – Yeah, we got one for you at the SquirrelsNest – Bueno.’
Then he dug a red candle stub out of the cabinet and strode off to Eino’s room, clearly irritated about the extra work piling up during his shift. Siiri chased after him, and the spike-faced night-nurse trainee slunk off without saying anything to anyone, presumably to some big, boisterous downtown commune.
It was still dark in the room, and the whale of a woman was still rumbling and rattling in her bed. Margit was sitting at Eino’s side now, holding his cold hand in hers. She gave the male nurse a beautiful smile, and he said something brief and intended as polite in a low voice before lighting the candle and placing it on the table. He stood at Margit’s side for a moment, shifting his weight, before blurting:
‘The body will be picked up in fifteen minutes and taken to cold storage; I’m not sure where yet. It will stay there until a doctor is able to confirm death, which probably won’t be until late next week, if not the following. You’ll get the burial permit after the doctor confirms the death. Those are the rules.’
The nurse left the room, and with that, end-of-life care had been delivered according to SquirrelsNest Nursing Home procedures. Siiri stood at the foot of the bed and looked at Eino, who looked exactly the same as he had a week ago: asleep. Even back then, he had looked more dead than alive. The fact of the matter was that dying didn’t happen in a moment; it was a long process. Eino hadn’t had to struggle, exactly. He had just gradually faded, unlike Siiri’s husband back in the day. Had it already been fourteen years? Siiri didn’t remember and couldn’t be bothered to count. Margit was calm and unruffled, caressed Eino from time to time, but didn’t say a word. The whale of a woman stopped breathing, and Siiri was afraid that they had another dying patient on their hands. She remembered having read a novel where death was an epidemic without any attendant diseases or illnesses. And then there had been José Saramago’s fine story about contagious blindness, but that was different. Siiri felt disoriented and out of touch with reality; her thoughts meandered down odd paths, and she thought it all must be due to how tired she was. She hadn’t looked at the time that morning, and now she pulled her watch out of her handbag. She didn’t like wearing it on her wrist, even though it was a beautiful timepiece she had got from her husband long ago, on her seventy-fifth birthday. Goodness gracious, only six-thirty. What time had they left Hakaniemi? And had it really been a caregiver waiting for Anna-Liisa on their doorstep? The whale of a woman was snoring steadily again, so at least she wasn’t dead. But Eino was, and that was a good thing. That had been the intention, and this was what Margit had been waiting for all summer and autumn.
The door popped open, and two men, one short and one tall, stepped in. They introduced themselves as father and son, and at second glance it was clear that the short one was still a minor, perhaps still in school. What on earth was he doing carrying bodies around? But the men had practised movements and practical tools. Without asking any questions or saying anything, they pulled the blanket off Eino, took hold of the grey plastic sheet, and, with a couple of neat flicks, rolled his body onto the shroud. Then they fetched a wobbly-looking stretcher from the corridor, lowered the rolled-up plastic to it, strapped it down tightly with three handy-looking cable ties, lifted the stretcher at either end, and were on their way.
Siiri and Margit looked at each other, stunned. Siiri felt like bursting into tears, but suddenly Margit started to laugh, riotously and uncontrollably.
‘There he goes, the love of my life. Eino finally made it out of here,’ she said. ‘Poor Eino, I wonder if he’s finally at peace . . .’ She blew her nose, and her laughter slid into tears. Margit threw her arms around Siiri’s neck and jiggled, cried and jiggled out all her muddled feelings. They stood there holding each other for a long time, and in the end, neither one was crying any more. Margit dried her face on a paper towel, blew her nose loudly, extinguished the red candle, and looked one last time at the bed where the only memory of her husband was a narrow hollow.
‘That’s that, I suppose,’ she sighed.
They made their way back to Hakaniemi. By the time they arrived, the sun still hadn’t come up.
Chapter 30
The big, peculiar apartment on the second floor of the Arena building was very quiet that November weekend. Eino’s passing didn’t shock or surprise any of them; they all knew that Margit had been hoping for a merciful death for a long time. But society’s engineer-like practicality and efficiency in dealing with the body combined with the country’s under-resourced and misguided health-care system put them in a reflective mood. They were all thinking about their own deaths and, above all, the unnatural consequences of that natural event. What sort of cold storage would they end up in, and for how many weeks, before someone had time to come and confirm that the death had taken place? And did it make any difference? What if you weren’t really dead, and you ended up lying there in cold storage for no good reason?
‘Döden, döden, döden.’
It was about all Irma was capable of saying. She shook her head and smoked what was at least her sixth cigarette, which was unusual indeed. Her whisky tumbler had already been filled twice, Siiri noted in concern. She was afraid Irma would start feeling poorly, although she understood that Irma had good cause for behaving the way she was.
The Ambassador and Anna-Liisa were sitting side-by-side on the sofa, holding hands. Anna-Liisa had an empty crossword in her lap, and the Ambassador was absent-mindedly fingering the black tie he had donned in memory of Eino. Margit was lying on the other sofa. She had covered her face with a copy of Finland Today which she’d been trying to read. It was impossible to say whether she was awake. She had been oddly calm and collected since Eino’s death, and spent the bulk of her time sleeping.
With Margit in mind, Siiri had made such a generous pot of lamb-and-cabbage stew that it had lasted for days. She knew that, like the rest of them, Margit loved lamb-and-cabbage stew, and no one had complained, despite the fact that they had been eating the same dish for several days now. Siiri hadn’t had the energy to even consider cooking on a gloomy November Sunday like today, when time simply didn’t seem to pass and it felt like they were sitting in glue, unable to move on from Eino’s death.
‘Is it just a coincidence that so many people die in November? My husband died on 7 November. And both of my sons died in November,’ Siiri said after a long silence. Anna-Liisa perked up at this. She set her crossword down on the coffee table and cleared her throat.
‘The Finnish marraskuu, or November . . . The word marras refers to various death-related phenomena.’
Anna-Liisa held forth for what seemed like ages. She taught them that marras was of Indo-European origin, and the root word was presumed to be martas. She claimed that martas had travelled to Finland from ancient India, landing in Latin in the forms mori, meaning ‘to die’, mors, ‘death’, and mortas, ‘mortal’. Anna-Liisa clapped her hands between the Latin words to facilitate reception of her message. She transitioned smoothly from Latin to English and French, making a detour to Spain and Italy en route. None of her listeners understood at what phase the ancient Indian martas settled in Finland, to describe the penultimate and overwhelmingly gloomiest month of the year.
‘Marras also appears in any number of folk contexts. Its meaning is not restricted specifically to death; it can also refer to a dying soul or portents of death, as well as creatures of the underworld, imaginary creatures reminiscent of . . . elves,’ Anna-Liisa said, bringing her lecture to a rather uncertain conclusion.
The Ambassador looked at her in admiration. Irma was on the verge of saying something, but Anna-Liisa beat her to the punch: ‘Not a word of S
wedish now, Irma.’
Siiri was still unclear if more people died in November than during the other months, or if her life was simply marked by peculiar coincidences.
‘But if you’re not sure whether or not you want to keep living, and you happen to look out the window in November, chances are you’ll die,’ Irma said, stumping out her cigarette against the bottom of the brass ashtray. ‘Blech, this cigarette tastes bad. It’s unpleasantly heating up the titanium ball bearing in my hip, too. Does anyone have any red wine?’
No one answered. They were loath to interfere in each other’s alcohol consumption, but it seemed plain that if Irma drank a glass of red wine in addition to everything else she had imbibed, she would be in less than optimal condition. Siiri made coffee for all of them and brought over some pound cake. This proved an effective ruse, and successfully distracted Irma from her wine. She was already digging around in her handbag to find her Amaryllie pillies, which she felt she had to take any time she ate something sweet.
‘Since I have this touch of diabetes.’
‘How does everyone want to die?’ Margit asked, rising from under her magazine into a half-sitting position, looking refreshed indeed. Since becoming a widow in mourning, she had dressed in black more often than normal, and today she was wearing black loungewear consisting of a tunic and loose trousers.
‘I’d like to die with all of you around me,’ the Ambassador said and smiled. It was difficult to say whether he was being serious.
‘It’s all the same to me where I die,’ Margit said. She had seen so much in the way of institutions, hospitals, mistreatment, pain, suffering and hopeless waiting that she had given up on the idea of dying at home. ‘It’s a fantasy, a utopia. Everyone says they want to die at home, but it makes no sense.’
‘Yes. Everyone hopes they’ll die of old age and without suffering, in their own bed and in the presence of loved ones,’ said Anna-Liisa. ‘But that would mean that even if the old person were fit as a fiddle, after a certain age their loved ones would have to gather at their bedside every night just in case they kicked the bucket in their sleep.’
‘I don’t think it makes any difference to the dying person where they die. Most of them are so medicated they don’t even know they’re alive.’
Pondering Eino’s fate as she had, Margit had developed greater fluency in death-related statistics than the others. She had read a study concluding that 90 per cent of elderly Finns died in the inpatient wards of health centres, and under 10 per cent died in their own bed. Half of those who died annually were over the age of eighty-five, which meant that the death hadn’t come as a surprise. ‘Or shouldn’t have. But the notion that an old person has to die drugged out in a health centre is idiocy. Just as idiotic as putting corpses in the deep-freeze for a week. Someone at Sunset Grove always used to say, “while I’m waiting for my turn at the crematorium”, do you remember? Now Eino’s waiting for his burial permit, and no one knows how long that will take.’
‘I think what people are afraid of isn’t death; it’s pain,’ Siiri said. She had poured coffee into their cups and brought a creamer and a sugar bowl to the coffee table. ‘And they’re not necessarily afraid of getting old, either, but of getting sick.’
‘Alzheimer’s! That’s what everyone’s afraid of. That’s the real bugaboo,’ Irma exclaimed. ‘If you don’t remember what day it is right away or some stupid PIN code, then everyone immediately panics: she has Alzheimer’s! Boo!’ She crooked her fingers and made a scary face. ‘I’ve always told my darlings that I’m a scatter-brained old woman. It’s completely natural to forget all sorts of things at this age. It’s a blessing. Just imagine if you remembered everything; now, that really would be horrible.’
‘Yes. Perhaps moderation in all things, after all,’ Anna-Liisa said.
‘Even sausage,’ Irma cheerfully added. ‘That’s from one of Topelius’s fairy tales: moderation in all things, even sausage.’
But Margit agreed with Siiri. She believed Eino had got by easier than she had over the past year. Eino didn’t have the foggiest clue where he’d ended up and how he’d been treated. Margit was the one who’d suffered from the fact that her husband had lost his personality, lain in bleak rooms and been left alone in corridors, turned into a vegetable.
‘Although Eino went through his share of difficult times as well. When he realized what was happening to him—’
‘I don’t approve of euthanasia,’ Irma proclaimed. So this was how she felt today. ‘At least for the elderly. Luckily, Eino didn’t die from your yogurt concoction. If one of my darlings were suffering from some painful terminal illness, I might think otherwise. But there’s no point with old people; we die just fine on our own.’
‘It wouldn’t seem so,’ Anna-Liisa remarked frostily. She had been listening silently and seriously to the conversation. Maybe Anna-Liisa had her own fears and anxieties regarding death; there was no way the others could know. Or was Anna-Liisa afraid that her Onni would die and that she would have to give up something so precious a second time?
‘Siiri, my love!’ a carefree voice called from the entryway. They all jumped. The voice indisputably belonged to Muhis, but where did he get the nerve to let himself in to clean and do laundry on a quiet Sunday afternoon, and while they were still in mourning? Although, of course, there was no way he could have known that.
‘Eino? I don’t believe I met him,’ Muhis said, abashed. He apologized and offered Margit lovely condolences. When he heard how Eino had been moved into cold storage somewhere in the Helsinki central morgue, he was even more shocked.
‘In Africa we don’t . . . we do things differently,’ he said. ‘It’s important to say goodbye to the dead.’
Muhis told them about his mother’s death and how the entire village had stayed awake and mourned her, how beautiful his mother had looked dressed in her finest clothes and how good it had felt to be able to take his time bidding his mother farewell in the company of friends and relations. They had eaten and sung for three days, and then held the funeral, where they all danced joyfully together. The memory of it still moved him. Then he looked at Margit and took her hand. Margit let Muhis share in her grief, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
‘It’s not your fault Eino isn’t here now and we can’t say goodbye to him,’ Muhis said.
‘It’s the welfare state’s,’ Siiri said.
And that’s how she felt. She had almost started hating the welfare state, the endless abundance that had killed both of her boys at the age of sixty and thanks to which no one had time for anyone and the dead were swept off into cold storage. The supermarket shelves were stocked with seven types of every snack and sweets, and it was impossible to know which eggs to buy, as every alternative promoted the well-being of the chickens who laid them or the humans who ate them in a different way, but healthy young people didn’t have jobs and old people had no one to help them, and a law was in the works that would force children to look after their parents.
‘Don’t start claiming that everything was better in the good old days,’ Irma said, with a laugh. ‘It’s not true, and besides, it smacks of desperation.’
‘Nostalgia gilds everything,’ the Ambassador said. ‘Old age and death are the only things nostalgia cannot sentimentalize. That’s why we’re afraid of them.’
Muhis had come to clean the apartment by himself. Metukka had been offered a gig somewhere; Muhis didn’t know all the details. He had brought a couple of microfibre cloths and a mop that looked rather handy. It had neatly trimmed strings and a fancy mechanism that squeezed out the extra water. The bucket appeared to be part of the same set, because it had a dedicated stand for the mop.
‘But why on earth did you come here to clean on a Sunday?’ Siiri asked, as she examined the miracle mop.
‘Sunday? Siiri darling, today is Monday!’ Muhis laughed his best laugh so riotously that Siiri was afraid his funny headwear would topple to the floor.
‘Monday?’ Mar
git cast a suspicious eye at the black man who wasn’t perhaps as offensive as she had originally assumed. They all looked at each other, flummoxed, until Irma burst out in a merry falsetto, like a young soubrette soprano from an operetta.
‘Alzheimer’s, now we all have it! Boo!’
Since Eino’s death, which had taken place early on Saturday morning, they had been wandering around as if in a fog and had spent most of their time sleeping. None of them had gone outside, turned on the television or read the newspaper. Siiri’s lamb-and-cabbage stew was the only thing that had intermittently brought them together for mute meals. But had they really lost a full day saying their silent goodbyes to their friend Eino, who, with the obvious exception of Margit, hadn’t been in their lives long? Eino, whose sad convalescence they had witnessed and whose death had been far too slow?
Muhis went and got the stack of newspapers from the entryway. There were four fat Sunday editions and four flat Monday papers.
‘Land’s sakes alive,’ Irma said, and she started browsing her personal copy of the Sunday paper. ‘I wonder if there are any funny obituaries today,’ she said, true to form, without devoting much thought to whether this sentiment was the most appropriate for this specific extended weekend. ‘Our dearly beloved district superintendent . . . Oh dear, so many people my children’s age have died again . . . Hasan . . . what a peculiar name: Hasan Babenstuber, and he wasn’t very old, either, the poor cross-breed. Was this the Hasan that all of those fishy fellows came creeping around asking about?’
Muhis’ ears pricked up and he leaned in to read the obituaries over Irma’s shoulder.
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 25