On her way back from a visit to the hairdresser Siiri Kettunen met a man at the lift who looked like someone she knew, though he wasn’t. Because it was so embarrassing to not be able to place someone who looked familiar, Siiri did as she always did in these situations and greeted the man, introducing herself, just to be on the safe side.
‘Antti Raudanheimo,’ the slightly greying, upright man said by way of introduction. He must be Olavi Raudanheimo’s son. He had the same narrow face and straight nose.
He was an intelligent fellow and told her he’d rescued Olavi from Sunset Grove and taken him to the hospital, where he still was at the moment. He spoke of the ‘terrible incident’, and Siiri knew he meant the assault in the shower, although he didn’t use those words. But something very distressing had happened and Olavi’s son intended to file a criminal report. He had tried to discuss the matter with Sinikka Sundström, but the director wouldn’t believe that anything so awful could happen in her retirement home.
‘She’s very sweet, but perhaps not informed about everything that goes on here,’ he said.
They stood for such a long time in the foyer talking about Olavi that Siiri started to feel uneasy. She couldn’t concentrate on what the man was saying, but instead kept glancing towards the office and looking behind her, although there didn’t seem to be anyone about. Then she remembered that even the walls had ears at Sunset Grove, and she grabbed Olavi’s son by the arm and pulled him closer.
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about these matters here,’ she whispered.
The man looked at her in bewilderment. ‘Has anything else happened here besides my father’s terrible incident?’
Siiri asked him to come to her apartment, although she didn’t really know him and couldn’t remember ever inviting a strange man into her home before. But he seemed trustworthy and direct; he looked her in the eye and spoke in a strong baritone. He came into her apartment but didn’t take off his coat, just sat down at the table and talked for a long time about everything. He was almost more thorough than Anna-Liisa in his attention to detail, and at times Siiri felt like she might fall asleep, but luckily she wasn’t sitting in the comfortable armchair. She was sitting on a hard kitchen chair that squeaked whenever she moved. What with her fatigue and the squeaking, she couldn’t quite commit everything he said to memory, and she knew that Irma would be mad at her for this later. But one thing was quite clear in her mind: he had arranged to get his father out of the Group Home, where he had indeed been relegated, just as Irma had said.
‘Do you happen to know if your father’s friend, Reino Luukkanen, is in the Group Home too? A large man in tracksuit bottoms, poorly shaved?’
‘That I don’t know,’ the man said apologetically. ‘I couldn’t really work out who all those poor souls were. One man was sleeping in the same room as my father, but I have no idea how long he’d been lying there or what kind of trousers he was wearing. He hadn’t been shaved in a long while, but then no one there had.’
Siiri got up and pulled a bottle of red wine out of the flour bin, but Olavi’s son declined to have any alcohol in the middle of the day.
‘I usually don’t either, but I’ve heard that red wine is good for you. It has some sort of particle in it that halts the ageing process. Are you sure you won’t have just a little?’ she asked, but he said that he had to get back to work.
Siiri escorted Antti Raudanheimo down in the lift. He intended to work for three more years before retiring, had two adult sons and a very nice wife. He laughed happily as he said goodbye, and his handshake was manly and soothing. Nevertheless, Siiri was quite worked up after he left. Some red wine really could have done her good. She stood dumbly in the lobby and regretted that the Sunset Grove cafeteria wasn’t a real restaurant where you could buy yourself a little sip, in the evening at least. The residents had to sit alone in their own little boxes to drink their nightcaps.
‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’
Irma and Anna-Liisa were coming down the hallway of C wing, on their way back from the activity session. Irma showed Siiri a cardboard tube peculiarly decorated with glued-on curls of wool. ‘It’s a lamb. I can give it to you as a Christmas present.’
‘I didn’t make anything. I just watched the others having fun,’ Anna-Liisa hurriedly explained, so Siiri wouldn’t think she was silly.
‘I’m so glad you two are here! Do you have a moment? Sit down on the sofa and rest a bit.’
‘You’re agitated,’ Anna-Liisa said as she installed her red Zimmer frame between two chairs.
‘She must have met some charming man!’ Irma laughed and automatically started to search her handbag for a deck of cards. Her glasses, lipstick and coin purse were soon on the table.
‘Yes, I have, and I invited him to my apartment.’
Irma screeched with delight, stopped emptying her bag, and started picking her things up off the table and putting them back into it. Anna-Liisa turned her good ear towards Siiri, and Siiri quickly told them what Antti Raudanheimo had said, or as much of it as she remembered, and especially how she felt about it all.
‘It’s really horrible. Nightmarish. The whole thing makes me feel sick. My ears are ringing and my head is aching. But Olavi Raudanheimo is at the Hilton now, and quite clearheaded. Not a sign of any dementia.’
‘You mean the Meilahti Hospital,’ Anna-Liisa said. Siiri nodded in agreement. The fifteen-storey Meilahti Hospital tower looked so much like a large hotel that people called it the Hilton. ‘If there’s going to be a criminal report, they’ll need witnesses. Were there any eyewitnesses to this terrible incident?’
‘Just Olavi’s word,’ Siiri said, looking sad. ‘Do you think the police will believe him?’
‘Of course they’ll believe him!’ Anna-Liisa shouted, rapping on the table as if the whole episode invigorated her. ‘It would be a strange state of affairs if they didn’t listen to the word of a war veteran!’
They knew Anna-Liisa was right again. They were all reassured by the fact that Olavi’s son had taken care of the matter in such an upright manner. Luckily there were still some people with decent relatives. The fact that Sinikka Sundström didn’t want to believe what she’d been told about what had happened to Olavi didn’t surprise any of them. Sinikka was so well-intentioned and so stressed. Lately she had been even more nervous and absent-minded than usual. A lot of staff had left. There were always a lot of staff changes among the nurses, but this autumn the turnover rate had sped up so much that Director Sundström herself didn’t seem able to keep up.
‘Oh my, I don’t know. Ask Virpi. Or somebody else,’ Director Sundström would answer desperately whenever anyone made the mistake of asking her why there was no nurse available, why the physical therapist had cancelled all her appointments, or why the activity director hadn’t shown up for the joke group. The young girls who made up things for the residents to do were called activity directors. They believed that old people could be cheered up with songs from the war years, black-and-white movies and crafts.
Sunset Grove also offered rehabilitation and memory exercises. There were pictures and activities glued to the walls for the Memory Game. They looked almost like they might have been donated from a preschool centre – hand-drawn flowers, boats, houses and animals. Siiri was particularly bothered by the one that someone had glued right next to her door, a picture of a family of bunnies on a summer outing. But Irma was a curious person and had played the Memory Game more times than she could remember. Anna-Liisa came at regular intervals for a ‘memory check’ at the afternoon activity session, because she knew that the more you use your brain, the slower your memory breaks down. She started every day with a crossword puzzle and every night in bed she went through all the case endings for the Finnish interrogative articles, to keep her mind in working order.
‘Self-care. It saves the state money,’ she always said proudly.
Rehabilitation was a very broad concept at Sunset Grove; it might include anything from massage to toe wiggling. It was compulsory and free for the men because they were veterans, but the women had to pay for their own rehabilitation, even though many of them had been in the Lotta women’s auxiliary, and some of them, like Siiri, were even stationed at the front. Of course all she’d done was wash bodies and put them in their coffins. It hadn’t really felt like front-line work, but still, it was a tough job for a young girl. During the Winter War the bodies were frozen so you had to thaw them out. In the Continuation War they were full of maggots and had a sickening smell.
Siiri and Irma occasionally went to exercise class or to the pedicurist out of sheer pity for the nurses. They didn’t really know what they were being rehabilitated for.
‘For death,’ Irma said. ‘Döden, döden, döden.’
‘Why in heaven’s name do you keep repeating that?’ Anna-Liisa said, almost angrily.
The Swedish author Astrid Lindgren had said in a TV interview, when she was quite old, that she often talked on the phone with her sister about who would be the last to die, and when they realized that all they talked about was death and dying, they got into the habit of starting their phone conversations by saying, ‘Döden, döden, döden.’ That’s where Irma had got it. She still liked to read Astrid Lindgren’s books, and often had a copy of Pippi Longstocking on her bedside table.
‘Emil of Lönneberga is my favourite, though. He’s just like my third son – the one who ran away to China. He was a real Emil when he was little, just as sweet, and quite impossible.’
‘I heard that the boy who was the cook here hung himself,’ Anna-Liisa said.
‘Who?’ Siiri said, but Irma was still talking.
‘I like the Moomin books, too,’ Irma continued. ‘They’re such clever stories!’ She thought that the older a person got, the more like a Moomin they became. ‘Until eventually it’s hard to tell whether someone’s a man or a woman – or maybe it’s not, but anyway. Just think how fun it would be if we could all grow tails. We could hold them out at right angles and the nurses would urge us to cheer up like Moominpappa did at the Hemulens’ kindergarten.’
‘What are you girls lazing about for?’ Exercise Annie said, interrupting their wandering conversation. She smiled brightly, patted Siiri and Anna-Liisa, and waved her exercise stick invitingly. They called all the young rehabilitation directors Exercise Annie.
‘You’re not too late for the stick exercises! And today we get to play with balls, too!’
Anna-Liisa and Irma promised they would come to the exercise class and left to get their exercise clothes from their apartments. Siiri didn’t feel like it. There was something degrading about messing around with sticks and balls, especially when you had to do it in front of a wall of mirrors with everyone looking so old and wrinkled that it was difficult to recognize yourself. They did, in fact, look like Moomins in their grey exercise outfits, just as Irma had said.
Siiri went out and caught the number 4 tram, accidentally ending up at the stop in front of Stockmann department store although she had intended to get off earlier and transfer to the number 10. She walked through the store, past the perfume counter and the magazine racks, to the stop on Mannerheimintie. The number 10 came quickly and she took it past the old Surgery Hospital, which wasn’t a hospital any more. She’d read in the paper that they were building new hospitals in Meilahti for hundreds of millions of euros so that they could move out of the beautiful old buildings. The more medicine progressed, the more expensive it became because people were healthier and didn’t die when they were supposed to any more.
When the tram came back around to the Mannerheim statue, Siiri got on the number 6 and rode it to Hietalahti market square. That was where the old brick and stucco market hall designed by Selim A. Lindqvist was, the most beautiful market hall in Helsinki. On her way home she got off on Bulevardi and glanced in the window at Cafe Ekberg. She’d never been in, and she didn’t go in this time, either, although Irma always talked about how nice it was. Irma liked to go to the Ekberg with her old schoolmates.
Siiri walked through the Plague Park to Yrjönkatu and stopped to look at Wäinö Aaltonen’s relief sculpture on the Suomi building, with its heavy horses and strange, ungainly angels. She continued to the Swimming Hall and couldn’t think of the architect’s name and wondered when she had last been swimming. But she couldn’t remember. Then she went around the back of the ugly Forum building and looked into the courtyard of the Amos Anderson Museum, and missed her husband, and turned onto Simonkatu, and finally arrived at the tram stop for her own number 4, in front of the Glass Palace.
She almost fell asleep on the tram and was so tired when she got off that she stopped to catch her breath at the tram stop. She leaned on her cane and looked at Sunset Grove through the trees. It was a repulsive, 1970s concrete building with a flat roof and little windows. It was probably impossible to build anything beautiful out of concrete. Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an image of Tero, beautiful, long-haired Tero, hanged, came into her mind: his face swollen and distorted, his feet swinging loose in the air. She’d seen hanged people like that on television. But why did this horrible vision come to her so powerfully, so realistically? Even his familiar red checked shirt was vivid in her mind. She closed her eyes to get rid of the sight, but the image didn’t go away, the buzz in her head only grew louder. She started to feel dizzy, her cane fell out of her hand, and she had to hold on to the tram stop railing for support. She hoped her feeling of nausea wouldn’t make her vomit, and she realized she was crying.