by Alexia Brue
The next morning, I pushed through the line of silent, red-nosed alcoholics waiting for the 10:00 A.M. Alko opening, on my way to the exclusive, members-only Finnish Sauna Society. I had secured an invitation by passing myself off as a bathing expert, though any foreigner can make an appointment to visit the society. Part of the society's mission is sauna education, which foreigners need more than Finns.
Gaining membership to the Finnish Sauna Society is like gaining admission to the French Academy — you need a combination of manners, breeding, and political clout. First you must be recommended by a member with a solid five-year standing in the society, and from there you must produce various documents and letters of recommendation to prove that you are truly a stalwart friend of the sauna. Membership itself is inexpensive, not more than $250 per year, but the bragging rights are priceless. The society was founded in 1937 and now has 2,800 members.
The society's mission is to record and promote sauna rituals, history, and architecture. They vigilantly guard sauna integrity and protect against the forces of sauna denigration. If a feckless company tries to market a body tent or substandard heating unit as a sauna, the Finnish Sauna Society swoops in, vanquishing anyone who has taken the sauna's name in vain. With the Finnish Sauna Society as a watchdog, the Finnish sauna will not be the setting for any blue movies or euphemistically named 'massage parlors.'
I expected a massive building for the headquarters of such a venerable group, a huge cedar log cabin with a sauna for giants. I expected something that screamed authentic Finnish sauna. I expected, at least, a sign out front. But I was not yet in touch with the understatement that is quintessentially Finnish. As I walked down a recently tarred narrow street surrounded by woods, I thought that surely this couldn't be the Finnish Sauna Society headquarters. Then I inhaled the rich, smoky smell of a birch-and-alder bonfire hanging in the air like a rolling mist.
Ahead of me, amid the birdcalls and racing squirrels, was a modest wintergreen compound plopped down in a clearing in the woods. I followed the line of a long jetty down to the water. I noticed several women breast-stroking languidly through the water; one climbed out of the water, without a stitch of clothes, and wrapped herself up in a pink towel.
Before I could join them and swim naked in the Gulf of Finland, I had to locate Sinikka Korvo, my entrée into this pink-toweled world. Soon enough, I found myself in a strangely conventional office. This was the bureaucratic nerve center of the Finnish Sauna Society. Its archive looked large enough to launch a good fifty sauna Ph.D's. The society also publishes its own quarterly magazine, as well as medical research articles with alarming titles such as 'The Influence of the Sauna on Histaminopexy, Histamine, and Its Discharge Through the Urine' and 'Experimental Exposure of Rats to the Sauna.' Whereas I had taken banyas a lot more seriously than most Russians, I couldn't hold a candle to Finnish fanaticism.
Sinikka, a tidy blond woman in her mid-forties with an air of competence and resourcefulness, was sipping coffee and planning for the next congress of the International Sauna Society. She greeted me with a warm smile and lively blue eyes shining behind her square wire-rimmed glasses. An executive assistant all her life, she enjoyed the sauna as all Finns do but never imagined she'd have a full-time job tending to sauna business. After two years as the society's secretary, talking shop meant talking sauna, and her eyes sparkled every time she worked the word löyly into the conversation.
'Wait, how many syllables does löyly have?' I asked, pronouncing it like lowly. 'I'm saying it with two syllables, and you're saying it with six.'
She smiled understandingly. 'This is a difficult word for foreigners to say, just as it is a difficult concept to understand. Löyly sums up the spirit and mysticism of sauna, even though literally it refers to the steam produced when water is thrown on the rocks. Here, try saying it with me. Looohleee.'
I followed Sinikka back into the sauna wing of the society. My arms had goose bumps - I was about to see the sauna in its purest, most authentic form. Sinikka sensed my reverence and smiled. We walked into a café with a large-stoned hearth that opened in the middle of the room. Its menu consisted of beer, juice, sausages, and salads. 'We always try to have salads on ladies' day. The men just eat sausages and drink beer,' Sinikka said, and we exchanged knowing glances: Ahh, men and their sausages.
'Here's where members sign in and pick up towels.' She handed me a generous helping of pink towels. This was rather a steep step up from begging the Russian banya ladies for an extra hand towel. Sinikka continued, 'Downstairs you'll find the locker rooms, but first let me give you a tour of the sauna compound. It can be confusing.' She slipped off her shoes, and I did the same.
'Here you have your showers, self-explanatory, I should think,' she said while we padded barefoot through the gray-tiled chamber containing two rows of showers, with a picture window overlooking the placid bay. The Finnish Sauna Society's setting was so rural, tucked away and sheltered from civilization, that a picture window in the shower room posed no threat to privacy.
'Over here,' Sinikka said, pointing to an alcove with a massage table, 'a washerwoman will give you a traditional scrubbing with pine soap, and because today you are our guest, I invite you to try this special washing free of charge.' Sinikka introduced me to Aino, the washerwoman. Aino was in her sixties and wore a dress and apron. She could have as easily been a waitress as a sauna scrubber. 'We'll leave the cupping for next time,' Sinikka teased. Cupping, also known as bloodletting, was still practiced into the early 1990s at some of Helsinki's public saunas. The premise, that off-balance humors in our blood lead to illness, goes back- to Empedocles, a Greek. After bacterial ointment is spread over the body, the cupper makes small incisions, then attaches the horns (small bulbous glass containers) to pull out the blood. After the bloodletting, the client goes to the sauna to add dehydration to anemia. It's still popular with older Finns.
'Last month we were the Sauna of the Month, and we had five hundred people a day coming through here, with huge lines out the door,' Sinikka said on our way through the showers and down a dark-wooded passageway with latticed windows.
'Sauna of the Month?'
'It's a special program because we are a European City of Culture.'
'That sounds like a great honor — European City of Culture.'
'No, it is nothing, just a silly EU marketing ploy.' All Finns seemed equally skeptical about this City of Culture business. Sinikka continued, 'Sauna of the Month allows access into normally private saunas. You see, Finns all have their own saunas at home or in their apartments, but sauna is such an obsession that we are curious about private saunas.' In America, we are curious about how the rich and famous live; in Finland, they are curious about how the rich and famous sauna.
'Where is the featured sauna this month?'
'A very unusual one on the island of Suomenlinna, the so-called Fortress of Finland. It is probably the world's largest sauna, designed to fit an entire company of one hundred and twenty men. Though up near Lapland you can visit the world's largest savusauna.'
Savusauna? This was a new word for me, and Sinnika explained its meaning and history. Savusauna means 'smoke sauna' and refers to the heating process of the oldest saunas. Some would argue that a sauna by any other name is not a sauna. Originally, saunas were nothing more than holes dug into the side of a hill where the ancient Finno-Ugric people would essentially have indoor campfires, take off all their clothes when it got hot enough, and pour water on the campfire rocks. This gave way to building a structure, generally a rectangular one-room log house, for the express purpose of bathing, as well as salting meats, brewing beer, giving birth, and preparing the bodies of the dead.
Early savusaunas contained an open stove piled high with rocks and a raised platform with benches. In a process that takes three to four hours, the rocks in the stove are heated, while smoke from the burning wood fills the room before escaping through a vent in the wall or ceiling. Black soot covers everything — the walls, benches,
and ceiling — but the charcoal, though messy, is bacteria-resistant and makes the sauna an even healthier environment.
Slowly, saunas with chimneys were introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century. For all their magic, savusaunas had several drawbacks: They frequently caught fire, they took four hours to prepare, and the soot from the smoke required constant cleaning.
Sinikka explained my options. 'We have five saunas here. The first, and least popular, is a futuristic electric sauna with self-producing löyly. It is state of the art, but people don't come here for electric coils, they come for the smell of smoke. Back here are the two most popular saunas, the savusaunas.'
I peeked through the window into the darkness of a room lit by the faint red glow of the hot rocks and a few small windows that created silhouettes of the blackened benches. 'How are they different?' I asked.
'Number four is hotter than number three, and you are only allowed to use the vasta in number four.' So many rules, I should probably have taken notes.
'Who heats the savusaunas? It sounds complicated.'
'Oh, it is. Our sauna major, Hanu, heats the savusauna. He arrives at seven in the morning to have it ready for the two o'clock opening.'
Sauna major? Then Sinikka showed me the continuous wood-burning chimney saunas, which fall between electric saunas and savusaunas on the continuum of sauna purity. Again, they were heated differently, and one allowed vastas and the other didn't. I tried to imagine all these rules in Russia. I couldn't.
It was 2:00, opening time for the society, and women were starting to arrive in droves. Sinikka handed me a vasta, the most beautiful green leafy bouquet of birch leaves I'd ever seen. It was thick and verdant and smelled as if it had been cut just moments ago. A far cry from the anorexic veyniks in Moscow, which at the time I thought were perfectly acceptable.
One of the ladies in the dressing room said to me, 'Feel free to ask anyone inside the sauna for help.' Who needs help inside a sauna, I wondered, though at a place with an official 'sauna major' anything was possible. If I survived the St Petersburg banya witches, nothing inside a tranquil Finnish sauna could possibly trip me up. I remembered the flavors of saunas as explained by Sinikka: Saunas two and three are cooler, and vastas are not allowed; saunas one and four are hotter, and you can whisk yourself to death. What I didn't yet know is that inside a sauna there are as many subtle rules as there are kosher dietary laws.
I had too many saunas to choose from, so I just stood indecisively in the hallway, like a Soviet at the grocery store choosing between recently unveiled brands of toothpaste, until I heard a voice ask, 'Can I help you?'
'I don't know which sauna to go into,' I confessed.
'You should try the savusauna. If this is your first time, maybe you should try the milder one.'
'No, the hotter the better.'
'Okay, well then, come with me,' the pink-toweled stranger said, smiling, and I followed her.
'These are the savusaunas,' she said, ushering me inside.
I put down my towel and sat across from the enormous kiua, the sauna stove that assumed the position of an altar. The five other women in the room were all silent. I looked around, hoping to make eye contact with someone. A lifelong member of the society welcomed me. She was in her late sixties and told me that her father had been a founding member of the society. This tidbit was presented as if she were a Daughter of the American Revolution. Teaching me the subtleties of sauna behavior, it was obvious, was both a pleasure and a burden to her. She touched her cane, which she had placed next to the stove, and said, 'In Finland we have a saying: "In the sauna you must behave as in a church."' Here's a summary of her imparted gems.
1. Ask permission of your sauna sisters before making löyly.
2. When leaving the sauna, ask the other bathers if they would like you to pour water on the rocks. This is akin to asking anyone if you can get them a refill while you're up.
3. Do not discuss business, politics, or malicious gossip.
4. Do not discuss your job.
5. No bottles of water or any other liquid are allowed in the sauna.
6. Herbs and essential oils may not be poured on the rocks, lest someone is allergic.
It is common for sauna sisters who have been saunaing together for years not to know one another's last names or professions. It is even considered sacred not to know these things, because inside a sauna, profession, rank, last name, and address simply do not matter.
I watched my sauna sisters wiggle around the rules. My presence raised their curiosity. They wondered, 'Have you ever been inside a real sauna?' I could honestly answer:
'No, not like this.'
I asked someone if sauna is trademarked by the Finns. It is, after all, the most popular loanword from Finnish. Aside from sauna, the only Finnish word I knew was Nokia. One word for communing, the other for communication. A woman in her thirties told me that it was the more market-savvy Swedes who trademarked the word sauna and who now run a large kiuas export company using this generic name.
She shook her head in dismay. 'Everyone knows the Finns are the world experts on all things sauna. And the Swedes are trying to steal Santa Claus, too. Santa's official address is in Lapland, and now the Swedes are building a Santa's village of their own.'
I didn't care who got credit for Santa Claus, but I thought it criminal that the Swedes would hijack sauna, and a Finnish word to boot. The Finns lavish such unrestrained love and fanaticism on their saunas that they deserve exclusive use of the word. Modesty and understatement don't help in global marketing.
I commiserated with an understanding nod and looked around. The savusauna was perfect — the dark wood beams, the smell of recently departed smoke, the low-key conversation. There was no average member. The women ranged in age from their early thirties to early seventies. They all had practical, no-nonsense haircuts. No indulgently long hair or carefully tweezed eyebrows. This was not a culture that valued preening, manicures, pedicures, or body waxing. The bodies were different from those in Russia, not at all what I had expected. For some reason, I visualized Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish women as cut from the same genetic cloth - six feet tall, thin, blond, and symmetrically featured. Walking clothes hangers. But the Finnish women were actually quite lumpy, to use Reeta's word.
The sauna's grande dame ladled water onto the rocks, and the five of us inhaled the resultant wave of löyly while staring out the windows in silent satisfaction. Contemplating nature is a huge part of the sauna ideal, and all good saunas have well-placed windows. When people get too hot they leave, careful to shut the door behind them, and either sit outside in the cool, crisp air or rush down the jetty, leaving their towels on the dock, to plunge naked into the gulf. A little while later I took the plunge, and diving off the jetty, I half expected to hear the sizzling sound of a hot pan being rushed under cold water. It may have been August, but the water was unbearably cold, and I swam for only a few minutes. A woman in a pink towel said that I must come back when the gulf is frozen to swim in the ice hole. Finns are universally macho about their beloved polar swims.
I returned for round two. The number of times you go back and forth between sauna sessions and cooling off distinguishes the Finnish sauna experience from the American gym variety. A German travel magazine explained the masochistic routine thus: 'If you want heaven and hell at the same time, go to a Finnish sauna.' Real sauna aficionados repeat the hot-cold cycle as many as ten times, at which point their endorphins are ricocheting off the timbered walls. When endorphin levels increase — remember, endorphin literally means 'the morphine within' - we feel euphoric and carefree. Endorphins flood the brain after a jog, after sex, during daredevil stunts, and after an intense sauna cycle. That familiar postsauna glow prized by all Finns comes from the prolonged exposure to hot, dry heat followed by a sudden plunge into cold water. The president of the Finnish Sauna Society, a medical doctor, wrote, 'The increase of cardiac load in the sauna is similar to that seen during brisk walk
ing.' While sweating in sauna, the blood pressure decreases as the major flow of blood moves from the internal organs to the skin level, the capillaries. A sudden dive into cold water reverses this cardio output, and the bather's blood pressure suddenly increases. All the while, endorphin levels are mounting.
During my second of four sessions, and having absorbed all the sauna knowledge one, even very sauna-curious, person can absorb in a day, I began to muse about Charles's arrival next week. Even though e-mail made it easy to know what he'd eaten for dinner, I had no idea if his state of mind was as anxious and foreboding as mine. In the background, there has always been a silent disappointment about what doesn't pass between us. The months away made me wonder if we hadn't moved in together rather too quickly. And when I thought of playing house back in New York when I returned the felt like a hurried, forced situation.
Time-consuming activities began to take shape in my head. We would return to Lauttasaari one morning to watch the sauna major smoke up the savusauna, we'd make that northern pilgrimage to the world's largest savusauna in Kuopio, and we'd figure out how to finagle an invitation to an Alvar Aalto-designed sauna. I would keep us so occupied, we'd have no time to ask ourselves whether we were in love.
On my way out, I stopped by Sinikka's office to thank her.
'Please let me know if you wish to drop by again. I might not be able to arrange another washing, but you can certainly use the saunas.'
'Actually, I have an odd favor to ask. Could I come back one morning and watch the sauna major heat the savusaunas?'
'Yes, of course. Hanu would be delighted to teach you how to smoke up the savusauna. Try to arrive by seven-thirty. He'll have coffee brewed.'