Good-bye, for now! How exciting! St. Petersburg! Happy travels! Departure is a perfect excuse for a little merriment and movement. Bon voyage! Hyvää matkaa! Can anyone say it in Russian? Three bottles of secret champagne appear after dinner, provided by Pearl, and a shot of vodka apiece for those who think they want one.
“Give it back,” she says, annoyed when Mary Minder hesitatingly touches her dark tongue to the rim of the glass. Pearl tips it back in one go, and oh, how it hurts!
It’s another special occasion in the Green Room, and Pearl snaps her fingers to send two ladies to fetch the record player on a wheeled cart. Russian folk dances are played, and someone contributes a tin of caviar received as a gift, now given again. It sits opened on the table with the coffee, black, glistening, bulging, uneaten.
“Did you read about Faye’s comet?” says Mrs. Numminen. Pearl turns away, too busy, leaving Mary Minder to listen. “It was in the newspaper. Faye’s comet passes every eight years and we can see it from here, if the sky is clear.”
“What’s a comet, again?” Mary asks.
“Have you been to St. Petersburg?” Julia asks Laimi.
“Yes, of course,” she says. “Several times.”
“Did you enjoy yourself?”
“I was there as a student,” says Laimi.
“I knew a man from St. Petersburg,” says Julia. “He was teaching in Helsinki. Then he moved to Turku to teach Russian language and literature at the university. He hated it. And I agreed with him, because I found it hard living among you, too.”
“You’ve been here long enough to understand that he should have gone home,” says Laimi. “Nobody here wants to learn Russian. Especially not students.”
“But Finland was part of Russia,” Julia says, “whether you like it or not.”
“Not technically true,” says Laimi, “though I’m sure your friend said so.”
Laimi is quite all right, quite unoffended; Laimi leans forward to take up the pot to refill her own cup of coffee, pausing first to offer some to Julia. You see? Unoffended. A few bars short of amused, maybe, but certainly not offended, and when Laimi looks fixedly at Julia it’s clear she doesn’t feel the touch of intimidation that some others might. It’s as though she has already said to Julia, Why are you being deliberately obtuse? And as if Julia has answered, I’m not. To which Laimi has said, You are, but you’re lying, so I have to assume you’re incapable of straightforward communication. Laimi sits back again, watching Julia.
“Go on,” says Laimi. “I’m somewhat curious to hear you.”
The stack of records makes a waxy clatter when browsed. Someone finds sound effects to be used in pantomimes and drops the needle. There’s the sound of a dog, barking in the distance.
“What’s that?” says Pearl. “Turn up the volume.”
The barking is joined by more barking, growing louder like a pack of dogs circling closer. The barking peaks, drops off, resumes. There’s a howl, and a squeal, like a dog just kicked, which makes Mrs. Minder laugh. She uncrosses her legs and leans forward in her seat.
“Oh, my bladder!” she says. “Put it to the windows.”
She rises and on tiptoe pushes the cart toward the glass-paned wall. Someone else cranks a window open and the sound of barking moves out into the quiet evening; it’s easy to imagine someone imagining a pack of wolves running loose among the trees.
“You don’t like dogs,” says Julia.
“Not particularly,” says Laimi.
“Did you get a bite, when you were little, maybe?”
“No, Julia, but it’s nice that you ask. In fact I saw a pack of dogs bring down a bear once. It was a horrible thing to witness.”
“Hunting is a natural outlet for animal urges,” says Julia.
“That’s sometimes true,” says Laimi, “but these men tied up the bear, and I don’t believe it was natural when they forced a pole between his jaws so that they could pry his mouth open, and leave him until his tongue cracked, and his voice went hoarse from crying. They were shaking the pole, in time to music. They meant to infuriate the bear, of course, and to torment him, and make him crazy with pain and confusion. It worked, and it was cruel and stupid.”
“All people are cruel and stupid,” says Julia. “I’m sure they put him out of his misery, eventually.”
“They pierced a ring into his nose, first. Then they broke his paws, so he couldn’t hurt them, and then they untied him, and then they shot him. For sport. It was quite impressive behavior, by some very brave men, clearly.”
Even Julia looks down at this. “Is that a typical Finnish sport?” she says.
“Oh, no,” says Laimi. “No, these were Russians on a hunting holiday. These were Russians, having a party, in Karelia.”
Julia accepts another small glass of vodka, tipping it into her coffee. “How could you watch?” she asks. “I couldn’t have stood by for that.”
“Really?” says Laimi. “Do you think your tender feelings are that valuable? Or that ignoring something very bad means you’re not participating in the cruelty?”
“And yet you did participate. You watched, and you keep a bearskin blanket folded in your room. I’ve seen it, when your door was standing open.”
“Ah, Julia. That bear was shot cleanly by my uncle, years before I was born. There is a philosophical difference.”
“But the end result is the same, for the bear.”
“You can’t be serious,” says Laimi, and then she laughs, unguarded and incredulous. “How could you possibly think that?”
“I have nothing more to say to you,” says Julia. “You’re laughing at me. I’m just an old woman, and you should be ashamed. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Strange,” says Laimi. “I don’t think I feel anything like that.”
“Then that’s what’s wrong with you,” says Julia. “No shame.”
“I can’t find any,” says Laimi, looking thoughtful. “So it must be true, I haven’t got any shame. I also don’t have any of the—” and she pauses again, to find the right words in English. “I don’t share your obvious feelings of self-hatred. All of you.”
“But what if we frighten someone?” says Mrs. Minder suddenly. “What if we give someone out there a heart attack?” She turns down the volume. “Someone down in the regular rooms?” She whispers this, and then they are sorry, a little. But it was worth the fun while it was happening, wasn’t it?
Until the silence, the deep silence after the needle is lifted. Then there is the night outside, and the ice in the air, and the moonlight. Something should be done or said, probably? To atone for the flippancy? They step out then, through the wide glass doors onto the swept concrete, to stand with arms crossed. But the atmosphere is impassive, and they have no effect. Their voices are absorbed, wicked away from their mouths, and it is clear that against the night they are very small, very insignificant indeed.
Parties notwithstanding, everybody wants to feel unflustered and calm. The ideal private hospital was a haven of rest, extremely clean by the contemporary standards, where all of the practical details of rest and recuperation would be taken care of by an efficient system. That the up-patients were able to live as they did marks out Suvanto as a hybrid, part hospital, part hotel, upstairs, anyway. Even the doctors did not include the up-patients in their daily rounds, leaving their observation more or less to Sunny and her staff—much as the Head of Nursing believed that nothing in Sunny’s reports was likely to be of interest. All were in agreement that these patients weren’t sick enough to be here; these patients were taking time they did not deserve, filling spaces and beds they did not need. But there was the agreement with the timber concern—when their North American employees came permanently, or for a few years at a time, the wives, and daughters if there were any, wanted English-speaking doctors. The men didn’t care so much. The men were able to make do with local doctors. But in exchange, the annual contribution in American dollars spent treating their wives would ensure that more local women, including poor women, and rural women, could be taken into the downstairs wards, where all would remain normal. Where, just as in the States, ordinary patients had little control over their treatment, where female patients especially were told less, because anxiety might provoke new symptoms. Peter Weber, whom we call Dr. Peter, had been trained in that kind of regulated atmosphere. He had expectations of a certain kind of order, of protocol. It can hardly have been otherwise.
William Weber leaves for Russia, and Pearl goes as well. This is when Dr. Peter becomes immediately more present at Suvanto, walking in the halls with a slight limp left over from an accident in childhood. This is how babies will come to be born at Suvanto, and how plans will arise to remodel the top floor into a maternity ward.
There is more underneath than just casual agreements and the admission of the first expectant mothers. There is the fact of Dr. Peter’s qualification in gynecology as a surgical specialist, and also his interest in obstetrics. There is also the proposition that he had made the year before: let him bring obstetrics into the routine at Suvanto, let him perfect the stitch, and in return Dr. Peter will invest some of his own money, as a gesture, taking the place of the timber subsidies for at least two years.
Not yet, though. He’ll have to wait until the mothers are ready. But decisions made for the future give Dr. Peter a legitimate right to install a few problem maternity patients at Suvanto a bit early; this is how the change becomes inevitable.
Rumors are the first way in which Sunny is offended in the month of November. It is humiliating, to be asked for details at an Orvokki staff meeting: one of the nurses has heard in the sauna that changes are being discussed. Is it true that a few obstetrical cases will be brought experimentally to Suvanto? And that in time one of the wards will be given over to mothers needing care for complicated births? And that the babies might even be kept with their mothers, in the same room? And is it in any way true that Dr. Peter is perfecting a new version of a cesarean section? And that he’ll be perfecting that surgery here?
“Well,” says Sunny, who has not heard any of this until now, “nothing has been decided, but as we know, Dr. Weber is a specialist.”
“There’s no nursery.”
“They’ll keep the babies with the mothers the whole time,” someone says.
“That will change everything.” But this is said with a degree of fascination, a novelty that provokes some institutional pride. Not quite what Sunny herself is feeling.
“Is he bringing nurses from town?”
“Nothing has been decided,” she says, and thinks, He’d better be.
In her office she thinks over the first few words of a letter of resignation, trying to compose it in Finnish, but she stops because these words would look so indulgent, so melodramatic, and because she is practical by nature and knows that the proposed change is just a rumor at the moment. And where would she suddenly go, anyway? Back to the States? In any case, she knows from experience that things do not change drastically here, not quickly, and not during the winter. But if it happens, she thinks, I’ll have to get out of here, before the babies come.
Sunny has always made it clear that she cannot work with maternity cases. She accepted this position in faith that she would never have to. Remember the story half-told, the birth of her younger sister and the injury suffered by her mother during a long, hard labor. Some injuries can never be fixed, or at that time could never be fixed, and one of these injuries, a terrible trauma, permanently disabling and intensely painful, was a certain kind of fistula, a bladder ruined by the grinding skull of a reluctant baby. What can you do, when the tissue is flayed, destroyed? All you can do is suffer, for years. Her mother’s injury was long before the corrective surgery was perfected… and the pain, the dressings, the unbearable shame of the obvious, the slow horror of the undisguisable trickle of continual incontinence, the rotten smell of a ruined body, of spoilt bedding, the damp mattress, Sunny as a teenager going out to find linens, bandages, replacement rubber covers, and the pain, the pain, the pain… let us say simply that by the time Sunny was grown it seemed quite obvious that her experiences in the home would lead to a career in nursing. That she is disinclined to touch a pregnant woman. That she avoids them. She never speaks of it.
It is not long after the rumors of the change reach Sunny, accidentally and through her staff, that Dr. Peter lets Sunny know that he will be visiting her patients in their rooms. And would she accompany him? He would like to become much better acquainted with the workings of the residential floor.
Accustomed to her own routine, Sunny takes the hour needed to see how the residents are feeling… to make sure they’re all clothed and presentable and in their own beds, and then she is in the supply room at the far end of the floor when Dr. Peter arrives. The charge nurse presses the small bell to get Sunny’s attention while Dr. Peter waits at the nurses’ station. He is writing something down; some kind of evaluation is already in progress. She walks toward him with an armful of charts, looking entirely correct, aware that she must be careful to play this role well today. He looks up at her and smiles and says, “Good morning, Nurse Taylor.”
And Sunny also says good morning. Even though she has been awake since 4:30 and it does not feel like morning. She is polite, she is obliging, she is as courteous to him as she would be to any of the doctors, Finnish or American, but she will not be lulled by the ease of speaking a common language. She doesn’t have reason yet to distrust his intentions, and being unaccommodating with the doctors would be, at best, counterproductive; actually it’s hard to say what the reaction might be, as none of the nurses ever disagree with them outright. But Sunny sees that in contrast with his white coat, which is starched and ironed, he is wearing outdoor shoes and that the cuffs of his pants are damp. He hasn’t yet realized the wisdom of changing wet, heavy outdoor shoes for dry, light indoor ones. There will be a trail of sand from the paths dropping behind him throughout the day every day of the winter until he looks around and notices that everyone else has left their outdoor shoes behind, arranged neatly by the doors.
He would like to see all of the patients, including those he has not yet seen in the clinical wing. Sunny looks at the side of his head as he is writing. His hair is clipped and smooth. His dark eyes flicker to brown only when he looks at her directly; his obvious curiosity about the layout of the floor feels judgmental, except that of course he has hardly been there before, and so curiosity is normal. She leads him along the curving hall. All of the doors ordinarily kept open midmornings as a nod to the nurses, from which daylight might angle weakly into the hall, are now closed. She might have expected to see this at Pearl’s empty room, but here too is even Laimi’s door, at the end, closed like all of the others.
Hadn’t she, earlier that morning, spoken of Dr. Peter’s rounds to the residents, and hadn’t she said to make yourselves available?
At the door beside Julia’s he taps once, a courtesy. “Doctor’s rounds,” he says, and opens the door, and there is no response because the room is empty.
“Occupied,” he says to Sunny, “yet empty.”
She gives him the chart and says, “Early riser.”
He makes a note and the next room is Julia’s. He taps the door once with a knuckle, again a courtesy warning, and turns the handle, and the door does not respond.
“Occupied?” he says, and Sunny is embarrassed. She hands him the chart, and he says, “Is Mrs. Dey also an early riser?”
“Not in my experience.” Julia had been there earlier, still in the bed.
Dr. Weber raps again uncompromisingly, such that his knuckles must have felt pulpy and sore later, but the sound is deadened, and there’s no answer.
“There was a going-away party last night for Pearl,” says Sunny. “Some of them are sleeping late because of that.”
“A party,” he says. “That’s interesting. Is Julia the one with the bad behavior?” He looks through Sunny’s notes and although it is indeed what she has written, in abbreviated detail, she wants to soften it now.
“Mrs. Dey is more comfortable now, and she’s doing much better.”
“Do they take the keys with them?” he asks. There are keyholes and surely keys must exist someplace—on a ring in Sunny’s office, for example—but even in times of petty theft they do not hand out keys for the doors of the up-patients. Invariably some would lose them, perhaps in the snow, and what would happen then? Endless copies being cut of endless keys.
“No, we don’t give them room keys. I don’t know how she can have locked it.”
Sunny carries the master on her ring and tries it now in the keyhole.
“It must be barred from the inside,” she says.
“Which means that she’s in there, I suppose. Is there any good reason why she might lock herself in?”
“No, Doctor.” We’d prefer to avoid you, Doctor, no offense intended.
“Wait here,” he says. “And listen for her.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
At the nursing station he tells Nurse Todd to call someone to get the door open. Sunny stays where she is, waiting; she knocks once, and says her own name. Down the hall she can see Dr. Peter looking back at her, looking at her and seeing—not her, really, but only a woman in a blue uniform. He is assessing her, and he is not impressed.
“Julia, open the door,” says Sunny, believing that she ought to submit, in her own best interests, because although the up-patients are well looked after, it is still the doctors’ prerogative to see them. Of course it is. She puts one ear to the crack and simply stands, in her silent shoes, with the side of her white cap touching the door frame. It is very quiet within. She lifts her head, realizing belatedly that behind each door, someone is waiting. Waiting for Dr. Weber to leave, and Sunny too, though realistically of course they can’t. Won’t.
Sunny touches the key ring at her waist out of habit. The shadowy forms of the residents seem obvious behind those other closed doors, as if the walls are as membranously transparent as oiled paper. And most disturbing is the attitude of listening—each form seated at the edge of a bed or before a bureau, inclined a little forward, waiting, as she herself is waiting, to see what will happen when the doctor returns. Straining to hear in the controlled, muffled rooms. This has never seemed sinister to her before, the hidden presence of others up and down the hall. But today, it does. She can feel them, all around, in all directions, behind every wall and door.
He comes and says, “Is there a chance she might hurt herself?”
“No, Doctor.” She almost laughs, but doesn’t. Of course she does not laugh.
Dr. Peter puts his eye to the keyhole, but can see nothing. Sunny watches, keeping her face plain and opinionless. She can’t bring herself to participate in this, although she knows that his intentions, his concerns, seem logical to him because he doesn’t know Julia, doesn’t know her personality at all.
And now soon here is Kusti, who of course has slipped off his boots for a pair of indoor rubber clogs, after zipping himself into a clean, dry set of coveralls. On seeing him in his clogs Sunny realizes that she does not know where he enters the building, whether he comes from one of the connecting underground passages, or where he leaves his shoes and his coat. At the foot of her own stair, for example, there is a door, and beside it a place for outdoor shoes and hooks on the wall for the supervisors’ coats. Kusti holds his own ring of keys and doesn’t look directly at Dr. Peter.
“This door,” says Dr. Peter. Kusti squints at the hinges.
“Just open it, please,” says Dr. Peter.
Kusti slowly flips through his keys, examining the numbers on each.
“It’s barred from the inside,” says Sunny.
Kusti finds the appropriate key and tries it, but the door will not open.
“It’s barred from the inside,” she says again.
“Take it off the hinges,” says Dr. Peter.
Kusti takes a screwdriver from a pocket of his blue worksuit and methodically removes the screws from the hinge plates, slipping them into another pocket, and then he gently lifts the door away from the frame. There is a sound of something metal falling to the floor inside.
Dr. Peter looks at the blankets of the unmade bed. He turns back to the door.
“Where’s the inside bolt?”
“Det finns inte,” says Kusti. Meaning, there isn’t one. And Sunny remembers that he’s a Swedish speaker. She hasn’t actually ever heard him speak before.
“Where is she?” says Dr. Peter. Kusti will not step into the room but waits at the threshold. Sunny goes to the window, though she knows that it will not open wide enough to permit exit.
The room is exactly as it was when Sunny had last been in it. On the bureau there are combs, a pair of gloves, and a bottle of cold cream with the lid screwed on incorrectly. And the smell of some perfume that reminded simultaneously of birthday cake and faint intestinal gas.
“This just isn’t acceptable,” says Dr. Peter to Sunny. “They shouldn’t be able to lock these doors from the inside.” He looks to the wardrobe and Sunny realizes that he still expects to find Julia, uncooperative, somewhere in the room.
“Yes, Doctor. This has never happened before. I’ll speak to Mrs. Dey.”
“It isn’t up to Mrs. Dey,” he says. “It’s our responsibility to keep track of her. It’s your responsibility. What if she falls? What if there was a fire? She needs to be accessible at all times, especially if she’s any danger to herself.”
“She isn’t,” says Sunny, who knows that there is no record in the charts of her suspicions about the nocturnal pranks, or the butter knife. She knows what will happen now if she ever tells Dr. Peter about them; at the very least, a restraining board will be tied to Julia’s bed frame at night, and who knew what dreams this might inspire.
“Where do you think she is?” he says.
“She could be out for a walk, or she could be on the promenade. She might be in the dining room,” says Sunny. “They come and go pretty much at will.”
“Then when do you complete your rounds?”
“Early. I’m quicker than they are.”
He smiles, but only to show that he does not understand, she can see that he does not understand, and he shakes his head slightly.
She says, “If you’d like to come with me at that time—”
“No,” he says, almost gently, as if Sunny and everyone else were mistaken, as from his perspective they must certainly have seemed. “This is not a hotel. Tell them all that I’ll see them in the afternoon.”
When Dr. Peter leaves to visit his surgical cases downstairs Sunny gets into the elevator with him, to look for Julia, although she does not tell him this. Kusti is by then carefully replacing the door on its hinges, wiping the edges clear of his own invisible handprints.
In the elevator, he says, “Competent nursing should prevent this kind of chaos.”
And Sunny says, “Yes, Doctor,” because it is true.
It is nothing personal, it has only been a statement, Sunny can see this although Julia will not admit it. Back in the room later Sunny finds the bent butter knife on the floor near the wastebasket, and thinks that it had been wedged into the hinge somehow as Julia left the room that morning.
“How did you manage to block the door?” she asks.
“I didn’t,” says Julia.
“How did you expect to get back into your room?” says Sunny.
“I didn’t.”
“Dr. Weber will be back after lunch,” says Sunny. “I’ll be here with him.”
“Fine,” says Julia. “I’ll be here with him too.”
It would be wrong, though easy, to assume, as some of us did, that Dr. Peter’s later advice to Julia is a response to this stressed beginning; that would imply an impulse to punish that wasn’t ever there. At most, he might have wanted to cut through any silliness, misdirection, or waste of energy. His intentions were always good. And when Dr. Peter comes to Julia’s room they speak about the pessary as if it were an orthopedic shoe, nothing more, something useful for a while, but not something to ever be proud of or very much attached to. There is a better solution. Surgery, he explains, will correct her problem permanently, and allow her to feel normal again.
“There’s no reason to wear that pessary any longer than you have to. It’s uncomfortable and unnecessary. And there is a remedy.”
Julia sits at her table, hands in her lap. Her eyes are dull, turning inward like those of a fish pulled up and left to suffocate in the sun. She turns her head, looks at Sunny.
Sunny moves to answer him, but she has nothing to object with, nothing other than Julia’s own previous fears of being tampered with. And Julia is not actually protesting; Julia says nothing. Anyway Sunny has not been asked, and the decision is settled as part of a story already determined.
“A hysterectomy will make her a lot more comfortable in the long run,” he says, looking at Julia’s chart later, and he smiles, now that a minimum of order has been established. Now he is walking in the hall quite naturally, as if he will never leave it. He turns his head, so solidly attached to his shoulders, and there is a nagging in Sunny’s brain—perhaps a premonition of things to come—an observation of the contour where Dr. Peter’s head would be most efficiently separated from his body. There is an invisible red line sketched below his chin, curving where his head would be most easily scooped away from his neck. The thought is a sudden effort to restore proportion, because the weight of all his intention is too heavy. But it’s ridiculous to imagine that decapitating him could restore proportion because then, of course, he would be dead.
She hardly knows she’s had the thought, so similar is it to the many other momentary, inchoate impulses, like the urge to cut down young trees, to lop off rosebushes at the ground. To ride her bicycle into the cemetery wall. To walk down to the shore and fall forward, at the edge of the water, splitting her skull and cracking a line to the cold mantle of the bedrock somewhere below.
Sunny parks her bicycle in the covered shed near the kitchens, protected from the waist-high snowdrifts on either side. It is dark after her evening ride and she has her personal key ring in her hand in readiness, though she feels perfectly comfortable in the darkened yard. She can see quite well by the lights of the circular front drive off to the side. The keys are ready in her hand and heavy because keys have been especially much on her mind today. She cuts across the yard, through the shadows toward the side door in the base of the supervisors’ tower. Her fingers are cold and the ring of keys just simply slips away. She hears them click together in the air, but there is no sound of them hitting the ground. She stops. They have disappeared neatly into airy, porous snow, leaving no hole behind. Without moving her feet, she tries to reconstruct their trajectory. She is carrying a small flashlight as usual and she takes it from her coat pocket and turns it on, but can see nothing to help. And the light in her hand suddenly seems to call attention to herself. Above, she thinks that anyone passing in the hallways of the hospital can easily look out and see her sinking to her knees. Most of the windows are invisible behind drawn thermal shades, and those rooms whose lit ceilings she can see don’t offer the silhouettes of any observers. Some of the upper rooms are dark, however, and invisible, with shades left undrawn, probably empty, since it’s still the dinner hour. As she looks up she hears an unexplained sound, like ceramic against glass, from a high unidentifiable source, and this is so unaccountably disturbing that she shuts off her flashlight immediately. It’s a little ridiculous; she can still be seen against the snow, after all. She’d felt an instinctual fear of something being dropped, or thrown at her, but of course that’s ridiculous. And the windows don’t open wide enough anyway. But isn’t it strange? Isn’t it strange that she feels nothing out of place while riding through the trees, even in the dark, even through the graveyard, but one small creaking sound this close to the building floods her mouth with the tinny taste of adrenaline?
She still needs her keys and she’s got no choice but to begin in the only way she can think of, by brushing her hands, ungloved now, through the bottom layers nearest the ground in a sweeping circle, disrupting the snow and possibly burying the keys further, but what else to do? And after a long interval, after her hands have grown painful and wet and then numb, she finds them, suspended in a bank to one side of the path. She sits back on her heels for a moment, relieved, but a soft sound behind her, much closer than the first, makes her spring up and turn in time to see something, she’s not sure what, drop quickly from near the roof and disappear almost silently into the snow near the building. Falling icicles, probably. Dangerous. They can impale you, easily. She’ll tell Kusti, or someone. Not trusting her fingers now she puts the keys away in a pocket, from where they radiate cold, even inside later when she spreads them out on a towel to dry.
After a cup of tea she has still not entirely thrown off the cold. Nor has she thrown off that feeling of standing alone outside at night, a shrinking of the world down to her own body, a shrinking down to her own warmth in layers of wool and cotton, simultaneous with an expansion of the world out toward the remote, cold, inhuman expanses. On this night, in this state, she goes down and puts her coat and shoes back on, and walks across the grounds to the nurses’ pavilion for a sauna among others.
She undresses in the anteroom, showers, and wraps herself in a clean white towel. She knows that she is not alone here, because there are silent dresses and sweaters hanging neatly on the hooks, shoes lined up inside the door, and the living quality of a shared sauna in the air. She knows there are others inside already, and this is a relief. In the early days Sunny felt anxious there in the darkness if, when alone, she heard the anteroom door open, imagining another woman unbuttoning a dress, slipping off her shoes, lifting a towel. Then the shower, the sound of water hitting the tiles. Waiting for the door to open. The outline of a body entering against the lit doorway. Then where to look, and whether to speak, and what to say if so? And if the other woman speaks, then how much to answer? To make eye contact or not? To try to speak in Finnish or not? Or to leave the other woman tactfully alone?
For them, the Finnish women, it seems easy. They are at ease here, and they seem at ease with themselves generally. Maybe they have learned to sit like this, comfortable in their nudity, from childhood? They can relax easily in the circumstance, but Sunny is still learning to be calm. To come and go from the heat and to stand without embarrassment at the wide-open windows, her flesh exposed to the ice, the stars. Recalibrating her core so that the cold won’t touch her, can’t enter her afterward when she steps out, ready to ride over to share whatever Sister Tutor and Mrs. Anderson are listening to on the radio.
She pulls open the wooden door and steps into the dark heat. At first she can’t see the faces of the other women who are there. She steps up to the top tier, and as she relaxes in the warmth she feels the heat changing the contours of her face. The end of her nose begins to feels pinched, narrow, her cheeks seem to flatten, her ears are receding. It is like finding the natural expression that underlies all others. It is like turning back the changes that come over her face by degrees during the day.
The practical nurse and her niece who worked together in the Daisy ward have since been separated during work hours, but they are here together now. It is quiet for several minutes, and then the girl speaks of a woman in her new unit who, throughout the night, calls out from her bed.
“She says, ‘Apu apu apu apu… help help help help.’”
“Some of them do that,” says her aunt.
“But then she slaps me away. She won’t stay in her bed. I find her half in and half out almost every night. She had a stroke.”
“All you can do is dress her properly. Then put her in a chair, wrap her in a blanket, set the brake, and leave her someplace where she can look out the window into the trees. That’s all you can do.”
They’re quiet then, and Sunny knows they are silently sympathizing with how much that woman would hate to see herself so reduced, so dependent and in need. The shame she would feel, if she understood. Much better if she doesn’t.
A thickish sweat slips over her skin. The women on the tiers around her start speaking quietly again. They talk about work a little more, but then they drift away, toward other things, and the patients who consume the hours of their shifts are left behind. They’ve been to a movie in town. They’ve been out for lunch in town, to one of the department stores on the Kauppatori, to the tearoom on the third floor with a view of all the people shopping in the square. One of them says something funny that Sunny doesn’t quite catch. It would have been nice if she’d been able to make friends here. Maybe it would have been nice. There had been Laimi. But Sunny herself was the obstacle, she knows.
The aunt stands and makes a gesture to the bucket of water—does Sunny mind?
“Thanks,” she says, absurdly, because there’s no word for please.
The water makes a shushing outburst when it vaporizes against the stones. As the vapor rises the heat pushes back at them, touching and scalding everything sensitive, Sunny’s lips, her ears, her nipples, and she is afraid to breathe, to draw the heat in because it feels hot enough to scorch her lungs. But as it settles she feels her face tightening again, the daytime mask of artificial expression hardening and retracting even more, nearly ready to pop free so that her real face, humid, fresh, young again, can be restored to her. And wouldn’t that be wonderful.