‘Hello Siiri, dear. It’s the director calling. Good news! Your cane was found at Laakso Hospital.’
All through the winter Siiri had wondered where her cane had disappeared to, but she hadn’t yet bought a new one. It certainly would have been useful to have one in the slippery weather; the freezing temperatures had made the streets treacherous. Director Sundström’s voice on the phone was even more energetic than usual as she shared the exciting news. She commended Siiri for being so clever as to put a label on the cane with its owner’s name and address, as if she were a small child. Siiri asked politely how the director’s winter holiday had been, but that was a mistake.
‘Absolutely fantastic! You can’t imagine what a country India is – it’s amazing, absolutely amazing. A lot of tourists just go there to enjoy the hotels and beaches and never see the poverty of the country, which is so heart-rending. Pertti and I were there for three weeks and we really threw our hearts into India’s problems, especially the children. Just think, Siiri, there are tens of thousands of orphans there, illiterate and unhealthy, sweet little children, and seeing them touched me so deeply that I’ve decided to help the orphans of India. We’ve started up a collection for Indian orphans here at Sunset Grove. You will, of course, contribute, won’t you, Siiri?’
‘Well, I put quite a lot of money into the collection for the Brotherhood of War Invalids over Christmas.’
‘Yes, I understand if the Indian issue seems distant to you. But these orphans don’t even have shoes on their feet; they absolutely need help from people like us, who have piles of everything. After all, there are hardly more than a couple of Finnish war invalids still alive.’
‘I suppose that’s true.’
‘Well, we can chat about it some other time. I have lots of photos of Indian orphans, and when you see their pictures I’m sure your heart will melt for this important cause. But listen, unfortunately, you’re going to have to go and get the cane from Laakso Hospital yourself. There’s no one here who has the time to help. We haven’t a single spare hand at the moment, and there’s so much work to do that I fear for the health of my employees. Elderly work is difficult, and rather uninteresting, to be honest. And not terribly rewarding. And who ever even thanks us? And the pay is so low, because society doesn’t understand the significance of our work. In short, it’s very hard nowadays to find workers for retirement homes, and thus we are shorthanded this week.’
As soon as she managed to get off the phone, Siiri started getting ready to leave. She searched for her comb and mirror. When she found them, she noticed Mika’s key ring on the table and was going to put it in her handbag, until she realized that her handbag wasn’t on the chair by the door. She forgot about combing her hair because she couldn’t find her glasses, and then she noticed that they were on top of her head. Next, she wondered where her cane was, before remembering that she was on her way to get it. Finally, she put the keys in her bag. Just as she was ready to leave, and was standing in the hallway with her coat on, she heard someone opening her front door with a key. She froze where she stood and watched as the door slowly opened. The corridor was dark, and the first thing that came through the door was a toolbox.
Siiri wasn’t exactly surprised when the man carrying the toolbox, Erkki Hiukkanen, followed, wearing blue overalls and his ever-present billed cap. He tiptoed through the door, looking over his shoulder into the hallway, and fumbled for the light switch. He had a considerable fright when he saw Siiri standing in her winter coat in her own apartment. Closing the door in a panic, he dropped the toolbox loudly on the floor, and pushed his cap to the back of his head. He stood there for a moment, then said with a stutter that he ‘d come to check the bathroom drain. Siiri said the bathroom drain had worked flawlessly for all the years she’d lived in the apartment.
‘Yeah. Well, We’re checking all the drains because we’ve had some complaints,’ Hiukkanen lied, so Siiri let him into the bathroom, although she had to leave. She really didn’t want to sit there in her coat watching him grub around in the drain.
As she sat on the tram, Siiri tried to remember when she had gone to Laakso Hospital. How in the world had her cane ended up there? She didn’t dare trust her memory. Just yesterday Virpi Hiukkanen had come to fetch her from the common room in the middle of a game of cards for her blood-pressure check. She could have sworn that she’d never agreed to such a thing. It cost an additional fee, after all.
‘Don’t you remember, Siiri? We all agreed to it just a short while ago,’ Virpi had said, as if she herself were one of the old people, and then she’d dragged Siiri to her office and started asking about arrhythmias and zest for life. Siiri didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘Well, you did go to Meilahti Hospital in December to chat with a cardiologist. Don’t you remember?’
Virpi’s questioning had been unpleasant, and Siiri felt a bit nervous, too, because her blood pressure was normal, not low, like it usually was.
‘Now, don’t be aggressive,’ Virpi had scolded her, and that had made Siiri so angry that she had firmly said ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ and gone to her apartment. The Ambassador and Anna-Liisa could play cards by themselves, although Siiri was ever so slightly upset about the interruption of the game, because she’d been dealt two jokers. Or was that yesterday? Or the day before? It was best not to think about it, she decided now, and got off at the stop at Tullinpuomi. It was a puzzle that would never be solved, unless it was, as Irma would say. Siiri looked for a moment at the sun shining against the wall of the Aura building and set off on foot to climb the hill to Laakso Hospital.
The hospital was a confusing place and it took Siiri a little while to find someone who had time to hear her reason for coming.
‘Ah. I don’t have any information for you about where to look for your cane. Have you looked on the web?’ said a girl in a booth with a sign that read: ‘Information’.
‘You mean I should go on the web to get my cane? Where on the web would it be?’ Siiri asked in a friendly tone, and then the girl seemed to realize that there was no way for her to get her cane from a computer. The girl said she would find out for Siiri and asked her to sit down in the waiting room. As she sat there Siiri remembered that Olavi Raudanheimo had been moved to the Laakso chronic-care unit before Christmas, but she didn’t think she had come to visit him here; she ‘d only been to see him in his room with a view at the Hilton. They had served him thin pork gravy and they’d had fun reading the newspaper together.
The friendly girl came back with the cane in her hand.
‘My trusty cane always comes back to me!’ Siiri said, as Irma would have, and the girl smiled such a happy smile that Siiri ventured to ask her how the cane had ended up at Laakso Hospital.
‘Because I don’t remember ever coming here. But perhaps I don’t remember everything any more, since I’m so old.’
‘Actually, it was found among one of the patient’s belongings,’ the girl said, and Siiri instantly realized what had happened.
‘Olavi Raudanheimo! Of course. I left my cane in his room at the Hilton and now he’s been transferred here with all his things. I could go and see him now, since I’m already here. What ward is he in, can you tell me?’
The Information Girl looked troubled and said that a visit wasn’t possible, because Mr Raudanheimo was no longer in the hospital.
‘Oh, what a shame. Where’s he been transferred to?’
‘He’s . . . he, um . . . passed, is resting . . . I mean he died.’
The girl said that Olavi had died of old age. But Siiri knew that such a cause of death had been expunged from the Finnish medical establishment long before the girl had even been born, probably because it was the only human function over which they had no control. Eventually, the girl fetched an older nurse, a friendly woman who’d seen something of life, and she explained that they didn’t have the authority to tell outsiders about the exact cause of a patient’s death.
‘But I can tell you that Mr Raudanheimo refused to eat for the last few weeks of his life, and his personal health-care directive prohibited tube feeding. It caused quite a bit of trouble and a lot of meetings among the staff, but what can you do?’
The nurse gave Siiri a meaningful look, and Siiri understood what had happened. She had heard of such things before. Irma had told her about a cousin named Sylvi whose children had put her in such a horrible institution that she eventually stopped eating just to get out of it.
‘If you know what I mean,’ Irma had said. ‘Like that fat woman in A wing.’
‘They gave her too much insulin, didn’t they?’
‘Don’t be silly! My cousin didn’t have diabetes, not even a touch of high blood sugar. She killed herself by going on a hunger strike, like Gandhi, but in her case nobody came to stop her before it was too late, because it’s a good thing when an old person dies, just like it was a good thing Gandhi didn’t, although, of course, he did in the end, but not from his hunger strike. Sylvi stopped eating and since she’d always been a skinny thing, she died two weeks later in the hospital. For a thin person it’s quite easy. If you remember to stop drinking, too, you’ll be in a bad shape in no time.’