December is joulukuu, named for Christmas, because Christmas itself is called joulu. We love to look forward, especially here, especially now, we love the excitement of the tree, the candles, the presents, the singing, and all the special treats of the season. Christmas prune tarts! Christmas prune rolls! Christmas prune soufflé! And of course lots of prune-filled Christmas cookies. But first, much more mysterious, comes the celebration of Lucia; the Christmas season here can only commence when the Swedish speakers celebrate Saint Lucy’s day. She used to mark the solstice, so you’d thank her when the light came back, up north especially, but doesn’t that mean her day was also the darkest, shortest day of the entire year? They used to wait for her and she used to wake them up, at dawn, with a crown of gentle flames in her hair, and then look, wake up, it’s your eldest daughter bringing you the coffee, wearing candles. And so we’ll wait, too, and count our twelve days of Christmas from then, as locals do, because Lucia takes place, now that we think about it, precisely twelve days before Christmas. Until then the days pass comfortably, because in joulukuu we’ve learned that warmth, distraction, and a comfortable indoor life are the answer to the darkness outside. Routine and leisure tick along best when small projects keep nervous or idle hands occupied. It’s good to work at the craft tables in the Solarium. Take best advantage of the short daylight hours, when the ice of the bay is a mirror bouncing back the sun and everything in the room is illuminated. The knitters don’t even need their glasses.
Some would like to go to church; services are held in the chapel of a Sunday. What else is there to do? There’s the wood fire in the Radiant Room, stoked highest at midmorning into big yellow flames that bounce against the granite mantel in reflected points of blue, silver, graphite. You can make little fire starters there if you’d like, it’s Mrs. Minder’s pet project, little twists of newspapers torn and then burned unread. What else is there to see? A large display of Christmas boughs and berries and pinecones, put together by the staff. In the afternoons the patients gather near the boughs for coffee, and there are always piles of shiny round pulla bread, fatter than your fist, plain or with cardamom, or dimpled with a deep navel of glistening baked sugar. Sometimes there are sweet, nap-inducing prune puddings served around the fireplace. The others, downstairs, will of course get their pudding in little dishes, brought around on a trolley with the meals.
Are there more cookies? More keksi? Of course, there are always plates of cookies, more now than ever, would you imagine a Christmas season without them? No, thank you. Ei, kittos. Mrs. Anderson oversees the beating of scores of eggs while sweating buckets of butter stand softening beside the stove, where pots of fruit bubble down to hot dark syrup.
“Can I toss these lemons in the pig bin?” One of the girls taps a lemon, hard and dry as an old stiff shoe, against the counter.
“Absolutely not,” says Mrs. Anderson, who methodically tenderizes them with a rolling pin so that, when cut, the shrunken and leathery lemons are wet and sweet once more. Mugs of hot lemon water are given that afternoon, pulpy flesh floating on ribbons of dark peel, studded with a clove to rinse germs from the throat. Some of the cookies turn out spicy—ginger, pepper, cumin—and tingle in the mouths of the sensitive. But such small burns are easily extinguished with a spoonful of cream, and no one cries, because suddenly it is Lucia.
This year Lucia is the eldest daughter from the doctor villas, and she is followed, in her procession, by other staff daughters, the last of which is Dr. Peter’s little girl, so little that she doesn’t walk with the others, or carry a candle, but sits in Mrs. Dr. Peter’s arms, in a white dress, watching, like the rest of us. Lucia and the other girls bring candy, and ginger cookies, and they give these away as they proceed, walking slowly, in a well-balanced way, through the lobby, aiming for the corridor.
Mrs. Minder of course loves Lucia, loves Saint Lucy, doesn’t know who she is but loves her celebration day, the white gown, the berries in her crown and the buns and cookies in her hands. She loves it all because obviously more than anything she loves that crown made of tall fat candles—very tall, very fat—and the way that their glow, thrown over the girl, makes the group into a court of angels, moving through the building together. Mrs. Minder’s hands are raised, in hopes of receiving anything the girls might offer. This year, one of them gives her a Lussekatt—a double saffron bun, two swirls that meet, each with a gleaming dark prune in the center. She clutches the bun, watching them file into the corridor, Lucia herself already out of sight.
“Where are they going?” asks Mrs. Minder, disappointed.
The girls are going to the chapel. It’s a saint’s day, after all. Don’t forget that Lucia was beheaded, or blinded, depending on who you ask, and that although by refusing to marry the pagan of her parents’ choice she technically died virgo intacta, her eyes are nonetheless no longer with her. Her eyes have been removed, and are being kept elsewhere. Sometimes she displays them on a plate to indicate that she is also, remember, the patron of the blind. But she does that in paintings, not in person.
Julia passes Mary, still holding her Lussekatt to her chest.
“What’s that?” Julia asks.
“I don’t know,” says Mary Minder, “but I’m supposed to eat it, for the holiday.”
“Jesus, Mary,” says Julia. “You’ll eat anything.”
“Isn’t it rude not to?” says Mrs. Minder, puzzled.
“Don’t you know what that is?”
Mrs. Minder does not.
“Those spots are eyeballs. Those are cat’s eyes.”
“Go away with that kind of lying,” says Mrs. Minder.
“You saw it yourself, pigs and wild cats at the smokehouse. Ham and cat buns for the holidays. Loose cats. Ask Anneli. I dare you.”
“I will,” says Mrs. Minder, dubiously.
“Good girl,” says Julia.
Mrs. Dr. Peter is among the last filing toward the chapel, bouncing the little girl, talking to one of the other wives, holding the little boy’s hand. Her hair is braided, and held up with a large comb. Long hair used to be in fashion here. Now we bob ours, but she’s the kind who never will, Mrs. Dr. Peter, even though she’s stylishly modern-minded about other things, in her little leather walking boots, with her ears pierced, like an actress. We can’t get close enough to see whether they’re really pierced, but we’re curious about her. We want to know but would never ask whether Dr. Peter himself delivered their two babies. She spends her days feeding them, in their high chairs, offering them puddings, soft vegetables, mashed meats. Diapering, stroking, bathing, and asking, Where’s Mousie? Is Mousie in the house? This is the kind of exchange we strain to hear, from the path below their house, and if we can’t, well, that life is not really so hard to invent. Because some of us have left just this behind, in other life, existences the same as hers, or the same as what we imagine hers to be. Except that she is, strangely enough, happy there. Happy in that life.
The up-patients take breaks from activities kept somewhat secret from one another, projects involving silver paper, sequins, glue. There are a few favorite possibilities for gifts to be made and exchanged: precious oranges sacrificed on the radiators, dried to be used as sachets for the closet or drawer. Hand-sewn bags of lavender and other herbs, stitched into dream pillows to increase lucidity. Knitted hats, scarves, socks, gloves. Some tear up magazines to make rolled paper beads that move lightly and quietly when dangled. Mrs. Minder makes a wreath of glued and painted rocks from the beach and hangs it on her door, there in the building surrounded by pines, and then she not-so-secretly strings bracelets of red and green beads, often dropped and regathered, to give away: Surprise!
At the craft cabinet in the Solarium there are bowls of hard red berries for stringing to hang on the tree in reception, a shapely fir sacrificed for the spectacle, to be decorated with small candles on aluminium clips—lit only under supervision, of course, and only on the day, much to the frustration and delight of at least one. What’s the word for Christmas tree? Tuotantoventtiilistö. Can you pronounce that again? Just call it the joulukuusi—much easier. The bowls of berries must be replaced often as some will chew as they work. One of the day nurses has seen Julia putting them into her mouth and then spitting them back into the bowl, masticated and damp, for others to unwittingly touch. Julia is handed a scrap of tissue paper.
“Pick those up.”
“No harm done,” says Julia, showing her rough red tongue on purpose, like a melancholy chimpanzee, as if to say, Have pity. The boredom here is killing me.
Won’t some go home for the holidays? Some do, most don’t. Some families will visit. It depends, it all depends.
Laimi goes to spend the holidays with family, at her grandmother’s apartment in Turku. Before leaving, she spends time with a paper knife in her room, with tracing paper, a ruler, a grid, cutting patterns that pop out into cards, which when opened present words in relief: Hyvää Joulua ja Onnelista Uusi Vuotta. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. She makes a joulukortti for Sunny that opens into a circular stairwell, one door at the bottom, another at the top, strung with a garland. Sunny had hesitated over whether or not to make one for Laimi, and then over whether or not to actually give it to her. The up-patients usually made cards or gifts for the nurses, as small children do for their teachers, and it’s odd to receive so many little things without quite knowing how or whether to reciprocate. It doesn’t seem to matter, either way. Most of the nurses don’t, just to be easy, neutral. Of course with Laimi it’s different. Laimi is… what is Laimi? She’s not really a patient, not really. She’s just here, at times, for recurring treatments, staying afterward for a while and always already mentally on her way back to work. She doesn’t want to be here. And this makes her something more like—not a colleague. What would you call it? Sunny can’t say she’s a mere aquaintance. She wouldn’t presume to say she’s a friend. Not now. Sunny makes a noncommittal card for her, not especially special, one that says, carefully, Lykkyä tykö!—and she hopes this means Best Wishes! She keeps it in her apron pocket, and is glad it’s there when Laimi stops at the nurses’ station, and says, “Sunny, I made you a card for Christmas.”
“It’s wonderful,” says Sunny, as it unfolds in her hands.
“No, it’s just, you know, with a paper knife it’s possible.”
Laimi smiles when she opens Sunny’s card. “Lykkyä tykö,” she says. “And I’ll wish the same to you.”
“Is that wrong?” asks Sunny; she hadn’t been sure, and she hadn’t asked Sister Tutor, because making the card had embarrassed her. If her Finnish is wrong, she’ll be more embarrassed still.
“No,” says Laimi, “it’s perfectly correct.”
“But not quite right?”
“It’s not wrong. Thank you.”
The stairwell in the card from Laimi is very like the one near the promenade upstairs, near some crawl spaces full of spare porcelain pieces, but who else would know that? The card contains no message. No secret message, that is. Just Hyvää Joulua ja Onnelista Uusi Vuotta. And Laimi also makes one for Mrs. Minder, of the silhouette of a fir tree with tiny candles that rise from the card when it is opened, and one for absent Pearl, of the moon rising at the tree line.
Sunny thinks she might get herself a pair of ice skates for Christmas. She’d like to get out onto the grounds even more than she already does, because exercise is a protection against the threat of insomnia and she never wants to repeat the first year, when for many weeks before and during Christmas she shrunk to a rattling specter of fatigue. The other nurses had offered their best advice. Warm milk before bed, of course. A warm bath or a sauna to raise the body temperature, to produce the drop-off into coolness that the body seeks in sleep. Valerian tincture, lavender pillows, a glass of secret brandy. And, most persistently, the option of getting one of the doctors to give her a sleep aid—a real one. Or maybe just take something light from the pill room yourself. But you’ve got to do something.
It is the eagerness with which the patients take up their nighttime prescriptions that makes Sunny avoid them herself. The mildest of the sleep aids are brought around at nine o’clock on stainless steel trays, a dose apiece in waxed-paper cups with a chaser of spring water left on each bedside table for convenience. There is not much monitoring of these particular doses because they come in a sticky liquid form that can’t be hoarded. They’re mild, and voluntary, and truthfully the cups don’t contain much more than herbal syrup (though some are given the real thing; Mary Minder, for example, is always given a real dose). The patients look forward to this end of the day. They go up and down the corridor in their dressing gowns, up and down from the bathing rooms. They could brush their teeth in their own rooms if they wanted to, each at a round white sink before a small round mirror, but they look forward to meeting at the communal basin instead. When the toothpaste runs low Nurse Todd snips off the end of the tube and they scrape the last bit onto their brushes dutifully. And then afterward they drift to bed. Good night, good night all around. They tie their ribbons into small bows, put back their hair, tucking curls into caps, releasing the smells of cold cream, hand lotion, and nightgowns.
No problems for them, seemingly, with sleeplessness. But Sunny’s insomnia comes from without, from shortened daylight hours affecting her circadian rhythms. She thought she would get used to it. But sleeping doesn’t get easier, neither by ignoring her wakefulness nor by trying to overcome it. She has to get up early enough and goes to bed early in turn to accommodate this, but she wakes again and again before midnight and cannot drift back. And the temptation to remain in bed hurts more than it helps, when she is trying to fall asleep again in the darkness with the pillow warming under her neck and the pointlessness pressing down.
Is it possible to lie in bed for several hours and not to fall asleep at all? Isn’t it likely that she sometimes drifted off without knowing it? She couldn’t be sure, because the darkness outside did not change in degree very much during the hours she spent lying in the bed with her eyes and curtains open, with the dark outside a pressure at the glass intimating that all was not well; she repressed the urge to get back up, get dressed, and go back to the floor to reassure herself simply that all was more or less the same as always. In the mornings her eyes were clicking and dry and there were sparks of phantom activity glimpsed in every corner, and there seemed no point in trying harder. She began to close her curtains and turn on her reading lamp and to read from the novels or biographies or novelized biographies until the clock by her bed said that it was time to get up and begin again. And her eyes felt like they were sinking backward and down, pulling her face grimly out of shape. Sometimes she would stop at her desk and suddenly press the heels of her hands against her eyelids, hard, so that afterward her vision blurred, taking as long as a minute to sharpen up again. Sister Tutor, noticing, had touched her arm once, in the hall.
“You need your bed,” she’d said, sympathetically. “You don’t look well.”
“Thank you,” said Sunny. “But I’ll be fine.”
When her concentration finally broke nothing could hold her attention, and she gave up the books as pointless. She couldn’t remember whole pages at a time after reading them. It could be dangerous; she might make mistakes, misread the medication cards. Not sure what else to do, she had gotten dressed and drifted toward her office through the corridors, all quiet with the assistance of the placebo sleep aids. She walked the halls for no specific reason, with no destination, or so she’d thought. But the feelings of unease were prompting her farther into the building, to check that everything was as it should be. Like what? Nothing in particular. She drifted deeper into corridors with patient doors closed for sleeping, through passages and supply rooms without windows. There was some false alarm sounding off in her, regularly and needlessly, probably a product of the insomnia, she decided, because nothing was ever really out of place here. Knowing this did not, however, diminish the compulsion to get up, get dressed, and walk. And this was the circumstance in which, during that first year, she had become friendly with Laimi Lehti.
Laimi wore her flannel nightgown and a woolen cardigan as long and warm as a dressing gown, and pointed house shoes lined with rabbit fur, and she walked slowly in the halls with her arms crossed over her chest. Sunny had paused and looked into her face; it is more or less standard, if at three o’clock in the morning a patient is roaming the halls, to check whether or not she is walking in her sleep.
“Don’t worry,” said Laimi. “The charge nurse knows I’m up.” Sunny was in uniform, pressed for the day, but Laimi had known. “You can’t sleep?” she’d said, in English, stopping. “You look tired.”
Sunny had been surprised, because even then, just a few months into that first year, it was already clear that the up-patients didn’t and wouldn’t ever care about, or even notice, any difficulties Sunny might have. Laimi’s question stops her, not least because Laimi is herself ordinarily so reticent.
“I sympathize,” said Laimi. “It’s hard to adjust to the darkness.”
“I’m not adapting well.”
Sunny’s feet feel heavy on the floor at that moment, and she is nauseated with fatigue. From habit, she feels she ought to keep moving. Laimi is clearly comfortable enough in silence, comfortable left alone in the hall. But then she says, “I’m going to the Radiant Room. Have you tried that? It couldn’t hurt.”
Sunny had not considered this for herself; it seemed like something reserved for the patients, but they walk together slowly, taking the elevator downstairs. At this hour the room is empty but the lamps are on and the fire is burning as it always is at night there behind the special clay radiants, an experiment borrowed from the Swiss and designed to throw the benefits of healthy radiation straight into the red cells of the blood. Laimi settles in one of the armchairs, rests her feet on an ottoman. She is obviously in some discomfort and Sunny feels she should probably leave her to herself, but again she does not. She doesn’t know where else to go. They sit before the fire and do not speak. Then it is as if they both doze, open-eyed, before the glow.
A long time later Laimi wakes, repositions her feet on the ottoman, and says, “Physical exercise is the only good cure for insomnia.”
“Does that work for you?”
“Oh yes, it always worked for me. But at the moment…” She shrugs, her hands palm down on her thighs. “I used to go out on skis, and that was pretty good. Obviously I can’t do much of that now, so I come here instead. You really should try it.”
Had exercise helped Sunny? She’d started taking walks on the paths, every day, and that had helped a bit, enough anyway to avoid asking for a real sleep aid, as most of the foreign staff had already done. Sometimes she still got up, put on her uniform dress without an apron as a compromise, and found Laimi there on the couch. But sometimes she deliberately did not go to the Radiant Room, only because she did not want to intrude on the other woman’s privacy.
Sometimes Laimi has a book or a magazine with her, but if Sunny comes she will not open it, even despite the silence between them. And Sunny thinks of bringing a magazine or book of her own along as well, to make it seem less awkward. It’s a little strange for her to simply sit before the fire, doing nothing, saying little. She thinks too much about it. And then, having overthought it, she is too shy to bring a magazine, especially since she is partially in uniform.
“Sunny, I have a question,” says Laimi.
Sunny is quick to say, “Of course.”
“Why did you decide to come to Finland?”
And, having expected some other kind of question, she has no ready answer. And anyway there is no good answer. Why anywhere? Why anything?
“I was curious. I saw an article in a nursing magazine. I wrote the letter because I was curious and I wanted something different, and I’d heard that it was beautiful here, and peaceful.” But this sounds so pale, so pathetic, not a good enough reason to have traveled so far. “And my mother died the year before.”
“That’s a good reason,” says Laimi kindly. “It’s important to know something about the world. To travel and to see new places. It helps with grief.”
“Yes, but—” says Sunny. And what Sunny would like to say, but doesn’t, is that she’s afraid that after living here she’ll go home no different. She’ll be the same as she was, and she won’t have learned anything about anything.
Laimi waits.
“I haven’t seen much of Finland,” Sunny says.
“But you’re on the land a lot,” says Laimi. “In the trees. That’s good.”
“Yes,” says Sunny. “I suppose.”
“What were you expecting? Something different?”
“I didn’t know what to expect. But I didn’t think it would be so difficult. I’m trying to learn Finnish, but the Americans aren’t, so I can’t practice, because every time I try to start a conversation with a Finnish person it’s over before it begins. I ask a question, and Finnish people will be polite, and they’ll say yes, or they’ll say no, and that’s all.” Sunny stops herself; was that all too frank? Was she being insulting?
But Laimi laughs. “I’ll tell you something about Finland,” she says, in Finnish. “Don’t feel bad if you don’t fit in. People here won’t seek you out or offer to help, unless you ask. They’ll leave you alone and expect to be left alone, and that’s not considered rude. That’s considered polite. Keep this in mind, and don’t be insulted if you feel like people are ignoring you. Everyone says Finnish people are quiet. But I’ll talk to you. In Finnish, if you want. Can you understand anything I’m saying?”
“Yes, thank you,” Sunny says, and wishes she could say more. But she doesn’t, and can’t, and feels bad about her own ineptitude. So she says, in English, “I got about 70 percent of what you said just now.”
“Your Finnish isn’t too bad,” says Laimi. “Really, you’re surprisingly good.”
So they are friends, and they have conversations beyond what either would have had with anyone else at Suvanto, even if those conversations seem to emerge from a distance, taking place while seated side by side instead of face to face. Which is why it seems natural to mention it one evening when she sees an envelope between the pages of Laimi’s magazine, unopened.
“You have a letter,” says Sunny, and Laimi looks at it. “Please, go ahead and read it, if you like. I mean to yourself. Don’t let me keep you from it.”
But she already feels intrusive, her curiosity bright in the air.
“My fiancé,” says Laimi. “He’s working in Stockholm for the year.”
“Your fiancé?” Sunny didn’t know about an engagement, even after weeks in the Radiant Room. And she doesn’t know all that much about the other woman’s life beyond Suvanto. Or even at Suvanto. Maybe it only seems odd because one has the impression of knowing so much, so many private details, but not details of personality.
“I’m reluctant,” says Laimi, rolling the r extravagantly. “Maybe I’ll never get married,” she says, looking into the flames. Sunny would like to say something reassuring, but can’t seem to.
“If I can fix my health, then I’ll go home and decide.”
“You’re going home?”
“Yes, of course.” A quick look. “Of course,” she says again. “I’m not going to stay here longer than I have to.”
The fire before them makes a natural sound of burning, but the warmth seems intensified, penetrating. It is probably only the knowledge of the purpose of the clay radiants that creates this feeling.
“I’ve been here a long time. Long enough, it should be. My friends are sending pictures, to remind me of what they look like. It’s nice, but then again it’s not so nice, looking at the places I’d rather be. So no, I won’t stay, I still have a life to go back to, after all. And my job. I like my job.”
“I don’t really know what you do. I mean, not exactly.”
“I’m a draftsman. For architecture. But you still don’t really know what that is, and it’s all right, don’t worry.”
“You draw plans.”
“More or less, yes. You saw one hanging in the lobby, didn’t you?”
“Maybe sometime you’ll show me another,” says Sunny; she doesn’t know what to say to express interest in Laimi’s life.
“You’re kind, to ask, Sunny, but it would be very boring.”
“Then maybe you can show me some photos, sometime.” There are limits to what all she can suggest as any further interaction, any other way to speak to each other. And everyone here seems to have photos, everyone except Sunny. The patients collect them, indiscriminately. Look, look! they say, on the days when mail arrives, their airmail envelopes slit open on the tables, trying to catch Sunny’s elbow or apron as she passes. Look! Here’s a photo of my sister, and here’s one of my sister’s children, and here’s one of their neighbor’s new car, and here’s one, wait, I don’t know who this is, maybe somebody my sister knows. Sunny now has the habit of skirting any table at which a photo album can be seen, lying in wait. And so this willingness to look at Laimi’s photos is something of a sacrifice, a token of unspoken esteem.
“I’d be happy to show you,” says Laimi. “If you like.”
She seems to want the company tonight, though Sunny is as always overwatchful against taking this for granted, and would at any moment turn away rather than impose. Except that this is also, arguably, her job. She’s really not sure, in these early hours, what their relation is to one another, except that Laimi is the only person in the building whom she honestly likes.
Laimi blinks at the flames, looking worn, and soon rises to go upstairs. Sunny is ready to go as well, finds herself going along, pushing the elevator buttons as if clearing the way. In Laimi’s room, black-and-white photographs hang pinned in a neat line along one wall.
“I was learning,” she says. “I took these myself.”
A mole, a squirrel, a bird in a nest with an opaque eye, alarmed and flat.
It is not that Sunny has never been in the room before, because of course she enters it daily. But there is a difference between entering and being invited. On this occasion the belongings of the occupant seem more apparent, more important, resolving into a setting that is more human than at other times, when it has seemed, to Sunny anyway, quite appropriately impersonal and temporary. Just a room. But different women can make rooms into different rooms, at different times. The fur blanket is very black, startling, rolled at the foot of the bed.
“If you don’t mind, can you lift out the album from the bottom of the wardrobe?”
It is a heavy album, with photographs carefully and evenly pasted. Sunny puts it on the table and Laimi turns on the reading lamp. She lowers herself onto one of the chairs, tucking her long cardigan around herself. She opens the album and looks at Sunny, and then with one hand questioningly invites her to the other chair.
“You said you’d like to see some pictures?” says Laimi. “I have two or three hundred to show you, so please, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I’m kidding. Just a few, since you were kind enough to ask.”
And Sunny had meant it as she said it, but considering Laimi’s habit of privacy she had not truthfully expected to be shown, and had felt she’d overstepped herself by asking. But she is pleased, and she is careful to appear interested. Is interested, of course is interested.
After living in this functional building, designed in the urban architecture studio where Laimi worked, and now sitting in this starkly arranged room, Sunny imagines from the photos that the mirrors of the past must have tilted too far forward from those walls, too far toward the younger Laimi. The furniture must have been heavy, overwhelming, the mantel of the ceramic hearth too choked with photographs in ornate silver frames, distracting the eye away from the place where flames would burn.
“This is my grandmother’s home. I live with her, in Turku.”
In the photograph there is winter sun through gauzy curtains, a room with potted miniature palms. Great pale roses in the rugs like bleach poured out. Framed photographs. On the wall behind the piano, more portraits.
“This,” says Laimi, “this is a very Finnish scene, very typical for my grandmother’s generation. Here’s her portrait of Alexander II, the czar who freed the serfs. There’s a statue of him in the Senate square on Aleksanterinkatu. No? You don’t know? In the street named after him, in Helsinki. My grandmother and her friends were in love with him. When they were young and beautiful they chased his carriage through the snow in their ballroom shoes and ruined them and didn’t care. I don’t know what they might have done if they’d caught him. You must have seen the statue sometime.”
“But I believed…” says Sunny. Laimi waits. “I’m sorry, I’m ignorant. I believe you said there was a lot of bad feeling toward Russia.” Laimi’s voice never rises, not even for questions, and Sunny works to keep hers level as well; her own natural rising inflection sounds forced, chatty, very American in her own ears.
“Toward the government, of course. I share those bad feelings, and a lot of other people don’t like Russians for personal reasons that go back a long way. But some people from the older generation still had a friendly feeling for the czar, because he did recognize Finland as a distinct nation. He liked it here. He used to come to Finland on hunting holidays. My grandparents took it rather personally. They felt they had a treaty with the czar, but not with Russians, if you follow. When there was no more czar there was no more agreement, as far as they were concerned. The Russians felt differently.”
To the right of Alexander hangs a much smaller portrait on a wide ribbon.
“Do you know something about Finnish politics?”
“Only a little.”
“That’s Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse. For two months he was the first king of Finland after independence, and my grandmother was more delighted than I can tell you. But she never got a chance to chase his carriage.”
“Because he was assassinated?”
“No, it just wasn’t a good time for monarchy after all. The German empire fell and my grandmother was so disappointed. That’s why she keeps the portrait.”
Laimi skirts the third portrait in the photo. “This one presumably you recognize: Our Lord Jesus Christ.” A lack of inflection, impossible to interpret. Sunny adjusts her hands in her lap, holds her posture as she leans forward to look.
“It’s a beautiful room,” she says, her voice still too high, still too bright. “It’s not what I expected, though.”
“No, it’s not modern, I know. It’s not my kind of style. I actually don’t like the furniture very much. Never tell my grandmother I said that. I just thought it might be somewhat interesting, if you haven’t been in any Finnish homes before.”
“This is your father’s mother, or your mother’s mother?”
“My father’s.”
“So it’s your Grandmother Lehti.”
“Well,” says Laimi, and there’s a hesitation. “It was Löf. We Finnicized our names after independence. We’re Finnish, of course. We were always Finnish. But a lot of the Swedish-speaking Finns around here made the same decision.”
I shouldn’t be prying, thinks Sunny. And she wants to know, but certainly doesn’t ask now, whether this means Laimi had grown up speaking Swedish. And did that mean Laimi had a Swedish name originally, a Swedish first name? And what was it?
Laimi shows her other photos, of trees, of lakes. Sunny finds them mostly indistinguishable from one another, blurs of leaves and water, except those with people in them. There is a picnic table with a white tablecloth, a plate of sausage and another of cakes, a pile of glinting bottles. The women wearing sun hats and full-shouldered sleeves. The men with careful mustaches. Formal, but informal too. Maybe a party, maybe they’d all dressed up for this photo. It appeared as though a lot of work had gone into the picnic: packing the heavy china, carrying the bottles, setting up the chairs.
“At the summerhouse,” says Laimi. “Going to the summerhouse is real life for us. If you’re still in Finland next year, I’ll bring you out to ours, if you’d like. My uncle has a car, and he’ll take us.”
“I would love that.”
“I’ll be done here, I hope,” says Laimi, “but we’ll come back for you.”
This is an old photograph, and Laimi lies in the grass before the table of seated adults, propped on her elbow, a young teenager, her lips curving, pale, arrogant. The sun is obvious, and so is her irritation with the full sleeves of her cotton dress; but there is also, almost, the heady drone of summer captured and the prickling of the grass through the fabric. And then Sunny’s eyes are drowsy, a little bit. Not from boredom, but only from relaxation, as if the power of nostalgia is strong enough to be contagious.
It feels like a rebuff, then, when Laimi stops coming to the Radiant Room. She sleeps at night now, longer and longer hours, until in time she sleeps too much, waking in the morning to drink a cup of coffee and then going back to sleep, waking again for a late lunch and then going back to sleep, accruing days that end in early evenings, a dreaming, monotonous existence with an inscrutable focus.
Sunny surely knows it is nothing to do with herself; she knows this. It’s only the sad feeling of having nobody to talk to now in the night that makes her think so. That, and her own self-consciousness.
It is something of a surprise then to see Laimi there again at half past three in the morning, dozing on the couch as before. Sunny hesitates in the doorway. Laimi scarcely turns her head when Sunny sits in the usual place.
“How are you feeling?” says Sunny.
“Not good,” says Laimi.
She’s leaning back against the cushions and her eyes are nearly closed, hands folded neatly on her belly. “Coming downstairs seemed like a good idea from upstairs.”
“If you’d rather be alone, I’d understand that,” Sunny says.
There’s no expression on Laimi’s face, and they sit without speaking. But then she says, “I think you’d better help me up.”
And so, it seems to Sunny, Laimi would rather leave than sit together? What did I do wrong? Consider that Sunny has still not had a complete night’s sleep in weeks, maybe in months, that she still sees sparks in the corners, that her dexterity is dulled and she sometimes bumps against the walls, that at dinner that night she bit her tongue, hard, from lack of coordination. In this moment she takes Laimi’s forearm and pulls her up with more force than is strictly necessary. But Laimi hesitates.
“Get up,” says Sunny. “You asked for help.” She pulls both arms and the blanket falls away. For a moment nothing is wrong, but by the time she gets Laimi upright there is sudden blood, red and fresh and shocking, pouring down through her nightgown, so much blood that it falls weightily onto the floor before the fire, into the rabbit fur slippers, and onto Sunny’s shoes.
Sunny sets her back down gently, very gently but quickly and runs to reception to bring an orderly and summon the doctor on call. Only on the way back does she see that she has tracked footprints down the hall, in Laimi’s blood.
“I’m sorry,” she says, returning with pads and slipping them quickly under the nightgown. “Laimi, I’m so sorry,” she says again, but Laimi still doesn’t answer, because she has, uncharacteristically, fainted.
It was Dr. Ruotsalainen—Dr. Peter, of course, hadn’t yet arrived—who removed the worst of the fibroid tumors for which Laimi had been receiving radiation, tumors that had seemed benign enough, except for their presence, until they’d begun to hemorrhage. These were tumors that tended to return after being removed, and he’d been trying, and would keep trying, to get rid of them in a more permanent way. Sunny sat with Laimi while she was clammy and cold, before she fully regained consciousness, and stayed as she drifted up through the layers of anesthesia into sleep, remaining asleep even while making use of the vomit pan held by Sunny. Every fifteen minutes Sunny checked on her, and sometimes more often, until finally Laimi was fully awake the next day, chilled even under the heavy fur blanket.
“Good morning,” Sunny says, from the chair beside the bed. There is a cool touch in the air from the window, but Laimi always wanted it left open. She must be in pain, Sunny knows. But she also knows that Laimi would just as soon not take pain medicine if she can avoid it. Her skin is the suffering color of half-risen bread, her lips and gums pale and anemic, from the loss of blood.
“I’m going to check your dressings now,” she says. Laimi submits to this with her head deep in the pillow, indifferent. She is still bleeding and Sunny changes the dressings, gentle over the stitches. She pulls the bedding back up.
“You ought to have a different blanket,” she says. “Fur’s not sanitary.”
A nod, an acknowledgment that Sunny has spoken, rather than an agreement.
The injection is ready, in case she asks for it. Sunny sees the signs she should not have missed the night before, even in her own distraction, signs she’d assumed were part of Laimi’s nature, part of her Finnish reserve. In retrospect she saw physical pain in the quietness, the fading energy, the heavy sleep, the increasingly inward focus. The paleness of her face, and her dilated pupils. Her molars pressed together. Very clearly on that day Sunny recognized the solitude Laimi had created by the effort of guarding herself, holding her body rigid when she should have been at ease. Her habit of retracting one leg, a little, when sleeping or sitting, in an unconscious effort to minimize abdominal pain. And her motionlessness in the bed and elsewhere; such stillness is a sign of constant vigilance. Sisu is the word Sister Tutor taught her to describe something like this, a Finnish form of endurance, but more than that, fuller than that; sisu is facing adversity squarely, using inner reserves of strength, without complaining, and so sisu is something like a foundation of inner bedrock.
Sunny is sorry, she is very sorry now for her impatience in the Radiant Room. She would like to apologize again. But she knows that she can’t draw attention to herself with this apology, not now when Laimi has retreated into the distance. Apologizing now would be putting her own wishes first. And that would be selfish.
Sunny goes outside, and for the first time she trusts the ice. She steps over the contorted and cracked shore onto the smooth surface and walks, quickly, away from Suvanto. She has never tested the ice before but now, ashamed of herself, wanting to scratch out her own eyes with frustration, she walks quickly over other footprints already made. And in her pale blue and white uniform, under her gray coat, she begins to run, and in a few minutes she disappears against the frozen landscape.
This is why, this year, she now recognizes the signs of insomnia in Dr. Peter. She sees the effects of weeks without good sleep slowly building. His face looks as if he’s wiped it on one of the deep blue tissue papers folded between the nurses’ aprons to keep them sharply white, and the thin skin around his eyes has begun to darken like the shadow of his beard. She recognizes it too in his written orders, increasingly vague, and in his handwriting, which has become, at times, almost unreadable.
“Dr. Peter?” she asks, wanting to venture a suggestion or two, from experience.
But when he looks up, preoccupied, impersonal, waiting, irritated, she says nothing to him. Feels nothing for him.
She goes, alone, finally, into town for the joulumarkt. She walks and looks at the city’s market square, the Kauppatori, decorated for the season with thick piles of evergreen branches and filled with stalls full of handmade goods for sale. Boots on the slick ice, how do they do it? She steps carefully, slowly, and buys a few things at the stalls with markka from her pockets, counted out painfully and slowly as she deciphers the numbers spoken to her in Finnish. Numbers are hard. Numbers are always spoken in shorthand, kakstoi, but then they realize, and repeat for her, slowly: kaksi-toista. That means twenty, doesn’t it? A pair of thick, wheat-colored knitted socks with scalloped cuffs, maybe for Laimi, and a deck of playing cards illustrated with the different fishes of the Baltic, to take to Mrs. Anderson and Sister Tutor. And a pair of ice skates, tan and stiff above the silver blades, as a necessary present for herself.
She moves along with the other people, toward the bridge and over the frozen Aura River, past the heavy cathedral and into the square of the Christmas Peace. In one of the buildings along the square she finds, by accident, the old man in his chair, in his fur cap, using a small sharp knife to make birds out of slips of pine that wait soaking in a pail of water by his feet. He cuts, carves, fans the wood. A peacock, perhaps. A Christmas bird to be suspended on a red thread. He doesn’t look up from his work. She drifts away to buy a cup of hot spiced punch. The hall is full, but no one jostles the cup in her hand, and no one speaks to her.
At one stall she finds a collection of little dolls in red wool cloaks, with smooth waxed faces that might or might not be smiling, and small dark eyes under peaky red caps. She feels a sudden peculiar stab of wanting one, and can’t resist touching the ambiguous little face with her finger.
The woman at the stall speaks to her in Finnish, but Anteeksi, puhutko Englantia, do you speak English? Ei, no; the woman realizes she doesn’t understand, and speaks more slowly, but still, Sunny doesn’t understand.
“Joulupukki,” says the woman, wrapping the doll. She points to it. “Joulupukki,” she says again.
Back at Suvanto Sunny should of course just go and ask someone, ask Sister Tutor, ask Laimi, that would be the natural thing. But she is embarrassed. She looks in her dictionary. For joulupukki, the dictionary says Santa Claus. But the doll isn’t a Santa Claus, not even allowing for some big difference in the costume. She looks up pukki. The dictionary says goat. Or Santa Claus. Or, alternately, a dirty old man.
It’s an overreaction and she knows it, but she feels humiliated, frustrated. It is such a small, stupid thing. She takes the doll to Sister Tutor to ask, What is this?
“Ah, joulupukki!” says Sister Tutor, and claps her hands.
“It’s for you,” says Sunny, “take it.” And Sister Tutor squeezes the doll in delight with both hands, so firmly that Sunny thinks the little waxed face will be crushed. But it isn’t, and the joulupukki sits on the table in the sitting room of the little house in the trees for the rest of Christmas. Whenever she stops for tea with Sister Tutor and Mrs. Anderson, Sunny sees the little face and remembers how very much she’d wanted it, and feels warm and impatient with embarrassment again. She goes often, because Sister Tutor is still teaching her Finnish. Sunny brings a notebook and they work through the simple things. The months of the year. The colors: punainen is red. Siinainen is blue. Valkoinen is white. And pinki? Surely you can guess pinki!
And what then really is joulupukki?
“Well, we can say it’s like a spirit,” says Sister Tutor.
Sunny thanks her after each lesson, and Sister Tutor says, “Kiitos!” Maybe she thinks Sunny is asking how to say thank you, though they have of course been over this…
“I mean thank you, I’m thanking you very much.”
“Kiitos kiitos paljon!”
“All right then,” says Sunny, embarrassed. “Kiitos paljon.”
“All good,” says Sister Tutor.
They walk together, Sister Tutor, Mrs. Anderson, and Sunny under a bright black sky, and she sits with them for the Christmas Eve staff dinner: there is ham of course, glazed with mustard and marinated in honey, and herring salad, and casseroles of sweet fermented turnip and rutabaga. Gingerbread, clotted cream, and cloudberry jam. And joulutorttu: the nicest plum tart possible, baked brown and shining in the shape of a five-pointed star. Later tonight, a long while after dinner, Sunny plans to go to the staff sauna, heated on this as on other holidays. In the morning, the others will wake early to meet for a Christmas service in the chapel. Sunny, having precious little interest, will imply, without actually perjuring herself, that she doesn’t feel very well, and she’ll stay in her room, reading and napping instead. And then later, on Christmas afternoon, she’ll slip out for a ride, passing through the little graveyard where the long-burning candles will still be visible among the snowy graves, each in a melted hollow made wet and smooth and solid by these flickers of heat, persisting in the dark.