On Wednesday Irma had a book-club meeting at her daughter-in-law’s house in some godforsaken place, probably East Helsinki or Espoo. She was supposed to have read George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual for the meeting but she’d found it so tiresomely long-winded and convoluted that she had stopped reading. It was definitely intended for someone younger than ninety.
‘You didn’t finish it? How are you going to participate in the discussion, then?’ Siiri asked nervously, but Irma just waved her hand with her jangling golden bracelets and laughed.
‘I’m sort of their mascot. They invite me because they’re afraid I’ll be lonely. They think I’m senile and they don’t expect me to understand what they’re talking about anyway. The fun thing about being my age is that I can act however I like and no one’s surprised. My daughter-in-law always serves the most wonderful goodies. That’s why I go. Of course, I have to remember to bring my pillies.’
Irma hopped into a taxi in front of the Japanese restaurant at Laajalahti Square and Siiri went to catch the tram, taking a few running steps to make the nearest one. First the number 4, then one and a half times around the loop on the number 3. When the number 3 got to the last stop, at the Zoological Gardens, she had to sit in the tram and wait for several minutes. It felt awkward to just sit and watch the driver smoke his cigarette. A proper last stop has a little turnaround, like the number 4 has at Munkkiniemi. She particularly liked the little loop on Arabianranta, where the number 6 and the number 8 had their last stops. When the tram was going at a good clip it made her stomach do a lovely flip.
The driver had left the radio on, tuned to a programme about the unusually large number of people in Finland who mixed alcohol and drugs, much more than in other European countries. In other places people knew to use just one or the other. Mixing the two was most common among the young and the old. This surprised her. There was no denying that everyone at Sunset Grove drank large quantities of alcohol and popped large quantities of pills, but they were doctor’s prescriptions for various maladies. However, Siiri never took anything but a little red wine with Irma now and then, and a blood sugar pill every morning, like everybody else. She needed it because she was too fat, or too thin. Was she a mixed user? What about Irma, who drank nothing but red wine and took all kinds of pills? The Serbian doctor who prescribed Siiri’s diabetes medicine didn’t say anything about the dangers of mixing them with alcohol, he just tried to convince her to change her eating habits and drink her coffee without sugar, but Siiri told him that a ninety-four-year-old can eat what she likes and she still won’t die.
Finally the driver finished his smoke and the trip continued to Alppila. There, behind the amusement park, was one of Siiri’s favourite buildings, the Alppila parish hall. Its white beauty always had a strangely calming effect on her. Or was it the actual church? Churches were all just boxes nowadays. The one in Munkkiniemi was such a grey-brick monstrosity that people would stand in front of it and ask passers-by how to get to the church. Eventually, they built a tower on one corner of the building and put a cross on top so people would understand what it was. Siiri had wondered why there were no church bells in the tower, not one, and the vicar had explained that the bells were played on a CD player.
‘Isn’t it just as much trouble to climb the tower to turn on a stereo as it would be to play real bells?’ Siiri had asked, trying to be amusing, but the vicar was a serious woman.
‘The stereo is not in the tower; just the speakers.’
The number 3 tram was getting lively. A confused but smartly dressed woman started to give a speech in such a smooth, resonant voice that even Anna-Liisa would have approved.
‘There are tremendous numbers of laboratory rats in Helsinki. They bring bacteria and diseases with them and this organ-transplant business is important, particularly in Spain, with which Finland has significant ties. They use old people’s organs, too, kidneys and livers, anything at all. In our laboratory there were hallways full of large boxes of kidneys and livers, styrofoam boxes that were taken away and hidden in the basement, but I saw everything.’
The woman sitting next to Siiri got out her phone and started shouting into it to drown out the story of rats and organ transplants.
‘Are you going to start the potatoes?’ she said, without announcing herself or asking who she was speaking to, as was the custom now. She apparently meant put the potatoes on to cook. Her husband – or maybe it was her child – had started the potatoes. The food would be on the table when she got home. Siiri’s husband had never cooked. He hadn’t known how. He was lucky if he could get the skin off his own potato once it was cooked.
The woman from the laboratory hallway had moved on to a new subject. ‘Once, when I was talking on the tram, a man got on who looked like Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen. He lived in Töölö. I had been to the door of his building and the trams don’t go there because people in Töölö are so fancy that they live in a closed society and nobody’s allowed to see their lives from the window of a tram. I also know which building Kai Korte lives in. Nobody remembers who Kai Korte is any more, but he was the Finnish Chancellor of Justice until 1986, and there are now almost a million people who have this device inside them, which I have, too. They install them in people and they cause inflammation of the soles of your feet.’
The other passengers exchanged glances, some moved further away from the lunatic, some spoke louder into their phones, and a schoolgirl with multiple piercings sitting across from Siiri started to giggle nervously. Siiri wished she could relax and enjoy the beautiful buildings and the sounds of the children. In fact, the incident at the card table the previous week was still playing on her mind. No one had seen Reino or Olavi Raudanheimo since Reino had been sent to the Group Home to calm down.
‘He’s probably been drugged into dementia and sent to the closed unit permanently,’ Irma had said that morning when she’d come to Siiri’s apartment for coffee before the book-club meeting.
They had both heard horror stories about old people being drugged into unconsciousness. People who had seemed deeply senile might be completely in their right minds once their medication was stopped. Old people who’d forgotten their own names would suddenly recognize everyone in their family, and even their neighbour’s relatives. They couldn’t comprehend how such a thing could happen. What good would it do anyone to drug an old person senseless? It certainly was no way to save money. It would be cheaper for them just to die and get it over with.
The confused woman on the tram was shouting even louder now, working herself into a kind of frenzy. The driver glanced at her nervously in the rear-view mirror, but he couldn’t do anything because he had to keep driving.
‘I can tell you that Kai Korte was a good man, but even he, among all those piggy banks and brokerages, couldn’t do anything about the bacteria from the laboratories and the infected feet. It may be that the doctors were eating the rats. They eat rats in China and they have better medicine than we do! They used styrofoam boxes to transfer the rats – and I saw everything!’
Siiri escaped from the tram at the railway station, along with many other passengers. She pitied the driver, who had to continue his route with the woman on board. She looked at the railway station and the City Centre building with its sausage-shaped concrete awnings, two of Helsinki’s ugliest structures, and wondered why Eliel Saarinen and Viljo Revell had designed both ugly and beautiful buildings – Revell, the Sausage Building and the Glass Palace; Saarinen, the railway station and the Marble Palace at Kaivopuisto. And why did Helsinki call such little buildings palaces?