‘Siiri? Siiri who?’ the nurse asked at the door of the Group Home. The name on her lapel read: Yuing Pauk Pulkkinen. Siiri explained that she had come to visit Irma Lännenleimu, and repeated that she had a visitor’s pass expressly requested for her by Irma’s daughter and approved, finally, by Director Sundström.
‘Irma? Irma who?’ the nurse asked, and Siiri started to wonder if the company the woman was keeping was starting to rub off on her. Nurse Pulkkinen explained that she was just visiting and thus wasn’t acquainted with the patients.
‘We’re all just visiting, it seems,’ Siiri said, but Nurse Pulkkinen didn’t understand her.
She let Siiri into a kind of common room, talking the whole time about temp work, bad pay, and Mr Pulkkinen’s serious alcohol problem. They went to a glass cubicle that served as the nurses’ office and break room, and the nurse started flipping through the papers on the desk. Finally, she found Irma’s information and showed Siiri where her room was.
The lighting in the Group Home was glaringly bright and the place was filled with institutional furniture, as if it were a government auditor’s office. The smell of chemicals, urine and floor wax was powerful and Siiri found it hard to breathe.
‘What does “expressly requested” mean?’ Nurse Pulkkinen asked as they walked down the hall.
All the doors were closed and shouting could be heard from two of the rooms. The hallway ended in an unused sauna and next to it was Irma’s room. The nurse went on her way and Siiri stepped fearfully into the little room, which had a picture of Mount Vesuvius on the wall and a window that looked out on the concrete wall of the building next door. There was a woman lying in a bed on the right, and another was tied to a wheelchair, dozing. Siiri warily approached the woman in the wheelchair, who showed no reaction at all, even when Siiri touched her hand. The woman snorted, a glassy look in her eyes, food stains down her front, looking strangely fat – swollen, in fact. Her hair stuck out in every direction, dirty and untrimmed, and long hairs grew from her chin. It was a mighty sad sight. Then Siiri saw a familiar string of pearls around the old lady’s neck, and knew that this unfortunate creature was her dear friend Irma Lännenleimu. A cold feeling went right through her, paralysing her limbs and her thoughts, and made the whole room feel like a cellar. She couldn’t move her hands; she just stood and stared at the stranger before her. Irma, who was always so particular about cleanliness, who wore a stylish dress even on an ordinary weekday! And now she was in completely unrecognizable clothes, loose green tracksuit bottoms and a shirt that said ‘I’m sexy’ in sparkly letters.
‘Döden, döden, döden,’ Siiri said in a choked voice into Irma’s ear, trying to perk her up, but Irma didn’t respond in any way, she just stared at the wall without blinking. Siiri felt like she was going to cry, felt like screaming and throwing herself on the floor, but she had to remain calm. She slumped onto the bed next to the wheelchair, took hold of Irma’s hand, gave it a hopeless squeeze, and stroked Irma’s cheek. It was incredibly soft, like a little child’s.
‘Are you taking me to Karelia?’ asked the other old woman, who was dressed in pads and overalls and tied to the bed with some kind of harness. She looked intently at Siiri with her small, dark eyes. ‘Shall we sing?’
Siiri was startled to find someone watching her, but singing actually seemed like a good idea. She smiled gratefully at the old lady, sighed deeply, and began to sing ‘I Remember Karelia’, a bit timidly at first. Then, singing more briskly, she switched to ‘Cuckoo, Cuckoo, that Faraway Cuckoo’. This clearly made the old woman, who must have been evacuated from Karelia during the war, very happy. Then Siiri sang ‘Oh, My Darling Augustine’ for Irma. It was a song Irma had once sung in a school song contest. She had been disqualified because, although she sang it well, the teacher had thought the song was indecent because of the lines: ‘With pants off and shirt off and socks off and shoes off, oh, my darling Augustine, everything’s off!’ Irma had tried to explain to the teacher that the song was about a drunk who passes out and gets mistaken for dead and tossed into a mass grave and then wakes up naked and foolish. Granted, it was a strange choice of song for a little girl to sing in a contest, but everybody sang ‘Oh, My Darling Augustine’ back then without thinking about what it meant.
When Siiri got to the naked part, Irma came to life.
‘With pants off and shirt off,’ she tried to sing along, but just then the nurse appeared in the doorway.
‘Keep your pants on. We’re not going to the toilet. You’ve got your pads,’ she yelled in Irma’s ear, so loudly that Siiri could see that it hurt. So much so that Irma got angry. She yelled and screamed and when the nurse took hold of both of her hands, Irma bit her. Nurse Pulkkinen yanked her hand away and let out a screech, in that order. Siiri looked on in shock. She didn’t recognize this madwoman as the Irma she knew; she couldn’t understand what had happened, or why.
Irma kept singing the Augustin song as if it were a political manifesto, so loudly that her voice changed to a strange sort of growl. The old woman in the bed started to pray aloud and the nurse ran away to dress her wound. Irma calmed down immediately once the nurse was gone and started the song over from the beginning very quietly and pleasantly, in her own high soprano. She smiled to herself, not looking at anything, and seemed happy.
‘. . . with pants off and shirt off and socks off and shoes off, oh, my darling Augustine . . .’
Siiri was so engrossed in watching Irma, this unpredictable stranger with thoughts she couldn’t fathom, that she didn’t notice when Nurse Pulkkinen came back into the room. Suddenly the nurse was standing next to Irma, bending over behind her to pull down the back of her tracksuit bottoms and give her a very professional-looking poke with a syringe in the behind. It all happened incredibly quickly and efficiently. Irma wailed as if her heart would break. Siiri realized that she was wailing, too. She got up in a rage, but froze where she stood, unsure of what to do. She sputtered Irma’s name, embraced her desperately, and felt Irma gradually go limp, her head lolling backwards, her eyes closing. Nurse Pulkkinen didn’t stay to watch the scene, she just took hold of Siiri with both hands and told her that unfortunately she would have to leave and not cause any more disturbances in the Group Home.
Irma’s room-mate could be heard all the way down the hallway, praying ecstatically as the nurse tugged Siiri by the hand, scolding her like a four-year-old who’d got lost on a field trip. The ward door locked with a clack behind Siiri’s back and the sound of it echoed in her ringing ears until everything around her gradually became a dark grey roar. She couldn’t understand where she was. She stood alone, swaying in a hallway somewhere outside the ward, winded and confused, and then felt herself slowly waken from this horrible nightmare that wasn’t a dream.