There wasn’t much attention paid to Christmas at the retirement home. Unit Operations Manager Erkki Hiukkanen brought a sparse-limbed spruce tree into the common room, a preschool group came to sing Christmas carols, and they tried their best to make traditional straw ornaments in the craft club. Many of the residents went to visit relatives, but there were even more who spent the holiday at Sunset Grove.
Siiri often spent Christmas with her daughter’s children, but this year they informed her well in advance that they were all going on safari in South Africa. Siiri was a bit hurt that they were all going somewhere together and she was no longer a part of the group. But even her daughter was no longer part of her own children’s Christmas, since she’d moved into a French convent. And you couldn’t have convinced Siiri to spend Christmas on the other side of the world, surrounded by who knew what kind of famine and disease, even if you’d shaken a stick at her.
So under the circumstances, and partly out of choice, Siiri had Christmas at Sunset Grove all to herself. She didn’t give or receive any gifts. She honestly didn’t need anything any more. The Hat Lady had tried to begin one of those horrible things where everyone gives a present to someone and they pass them all out in the common room with some man dressed up as Santa Claus.
What would have been the point? The gifts the Ambassador bought would have been too expensive and the ones from the Hat Lady too cheap. Director Sundström was the only one who tried to keep up the gift tradition at Sunset Grove, but this year even she had decided to let this lovely idea slip and passed out a memo well beforehand announcing that in lieu of flowers or sweets, the director would prefer a donation to her travel fund.
On Christmas Eve, Siiri slept late, brewed herself some real coffee, and read the newspaper from beginning to end. That easily took an hour. She listened to Christmas music on the radio and was glad to still have Yule Radio 1, which broadcast a proper Christmas programme, until the science programme began talking about stem-cell therapy and space satellites in honour of Christmas. She turned off the radio and looked at the clock: there were still two hours to wait until Christmas Eve dinner, celebrated on Christmas Eve in Finland, in the cafeteria downstairs. Right now they were holding a moment of devotion. After that it would be cake bingo, and she didn’t want to participate in that either.
Most of the staff were on holiday, even Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen, and, of course, the poor director, who’d had two weeks of sick leave before her official holiday, and was getting ready for a trip to India to rest her nerves, which were overtaxed by taking care of old people. There were more temporary staff than usual during the holiday season, mostly Muslim girls, who didn’t mind working on Christmas, watching over this crowd of Christians as they sang hymns, ate ham and baked gingerbread.
Siiri had bought a little pre-cooked ham at Low Price Market and planned to carve bits of it for sandwiches when needed, and she wouldn’t need anything more than that. She was halfway through Selma Lagerlöf’s Jerusalem again, for the umpteenth time. It was what she felt like reading. She had put the red Christmas tablecloth from her childhood home on the table. It was much too big for the table the retirement home provided, but she folded it double and smoothed it carefully, and it looked pretty. She put two brass candlesticks over the red wine stains and lit the candles to create a mood. What kind of mood? What did Christmas really mean to her except the passage of time and another full year about to end? Were the last few Christmases she’d had among her last?
She remembered how her little brother Toivo had designed a mathematical equation for subjective time. He had drawn several parabolas to illustrate the fact that the very same year can be significantly longer in the life of a three-year-old than in the life of a ninety-year-old. And yet a child’s life passed more quickly than an old person’s. Or was it the other way around? Maybe an old person’s time passed more quickly but was more tiresome, which sounded like a mercy, of course. Toivo had explained his calculations but she no longer remembered the details.
Toivo was dead now, as were her other siblings. And her husband and her two sons. And her cat. She had an unpleasant, powerful feeling of missing her husband, and all the people who had died. Her little boy, playing in the garden in his ragged clothes. Having Christmas all to herself no longer felt like a good idea. But what would help? She had to think of something to do. She tried doing the crossword, but she didn’t recognize the people or things the clues were referring to: ‘rap artist and TV presenter’, ‘minister’s manfriend’. The sudoku was easier. After solving a couple of sudokus she felt a bit weak and so sliced some ham and made herself a sandwich and filled a milk tumbler with red wine.
‘Döden, döden, döden,’ she toasted to herself, and had an enjoyable cold Christmas dinner.
After all, it was lovely not to have to slave over a stove to make Christmas dinner for a large family, with no help at all. The herring, the casseroles and beetroot salad – phew! – the pies and gingerbread cakes. Even the ham had to be salted back then, and after that baked, and now she could just slice some nice ham, cooked by somebody else, onto a piece of bread.
She almost missed Irma even more than she did her own family. Siiri could no longer imagine her life without Irma’s company. But she didn’t know where Irma was. Virpi Hiukkanen had taken her somewhere in a wheelchair and she hadn’t been heard from since.
Siiri had asked Virpi about Irma, but the head nurse had just snapped that the medical condition of residents was a private matter and could not be disclosed to anyone but next of kin. Which was true, of course. Siiri had tried several times to call Irma’s daughter Tuula, but she hadn’t been able to get hold of her and Siiri didn’t know Irma’s grandchildren well enough to be able to call them.
Irma had customarily spent Christmas with her family, and she always enjoyed having everyone together, and didn’t seem to get upset if Christmas dinner ended up being Vietnamese dumplings and Moroccan stew. She didn’t even complain about the fact that her darlings gave her goats, sheep and trees as Christmas gifts. They were cooperative-development donations, philanthropy. Irma never saw the gifts, but every Christmas she would laugh and tell Siiri how her herd of cows and grove of trees had grown.
‘Who would have thought that a tenth-generation city girl could become a cowherd and forest ranger in her old age?’
Siiri hoped, tried to believe, that Irma was spending Christmas somewhere with her family right now. They must be at the summer house, the one on the lake shore at Lohjanjärvi; there was room for the whole family there. Irma would be happy and she would get another Brazilian goat or African cow, and there would be nothing said about Alzheimer’s.