Finnish Easter week was a dreary holiday, and it was a particularly hard one now, because on Maundy Thursday Irma’s apartment was emptied. Some Estonian men came early in the morning and started carrying her things out to a truck parked in the car park. None of the darlings were present, just these foreign men who knew so little Finnish that Siiri couldn’t figure out what was going on. Apparently, Irma’s things were being taken to some storage warehouse, because the men were talking about a container. On Good Friday, the same men carried some cherry-veneer tables and a horrible, black TV stand into the apartment.
‘Why are someone else’s things being put in Irma Lännenleimu’s apartment?’ Siiri asked Virpi Hiukkanen when she saw her in the A-wing hallway. Without blinking an eye Virpi let flow a pack of lies, all about serious dementia, long-term care, a special exception being made to provide Irma a bed in the Group Home, long waiting lists for the apartments, and these difficult times.
‘You can’t live your life thinking that a ninety-two-year-old chronic patient is going to experience a miraculous recovery,’ Virpi said. She couldn’t remember the new tenant’s name.
Siiri called Irma’s doctor daughter Tuula ten times before she answered from some resort in Japan where it was night-time in the middle of the day. The call didn’t go well.
‘Living in a retirement home isn’t cheap. It’s not fun and games, as I’m sure you are aware,’ Tuula said, yawning audibly, and Siiri could already guess what had happened. ‘Virpi Hiukkanen advised this course of action. She has kindly arranged everything – I simply don’t have the time.’
‘May I ask where Irma’s things were taken?’
‘Things? It was just a lot of junk. The young people in the family went and looked at it and none of them wanted anything. Electric mixers and other antiques, and, to top it all, some addled retirement-home resident came in yelling incoherently at them. The only valuable item was the TV, but they didn’t bother with it. Did you want it? For practical reasons everything was put up for auction through a company Virpi Hiukkanen recommended, but I doubt we’ll get much money for it.’
Siiri didn’t want to spend Easter at Sunset Grove. The new tenants were in the craft room with feathers and toilet-paper rolls covered in yellow trimmings, and the cafeteria was serving mämmi – black rye Easter pudding – for the second week in a row because it was so easy on the old people’s mouths and it never went bad. Siiri didn’t like mämmi, but it was Irma’s favourite. She always heaped sugar on it by the spoonful – and then poked a hollow in it so that she could fit more sugar and cream in.
On Holy Saturday, Siiri bought a tub of mämmi, a kilo of sugar, and a carton of cream from Low Price Market and headed for Laakso Hospital. There were little plastic chicks on the hospital windowsills.
‘But no Easter mämmi! Just the same old fruit trifle, can you believe it? Oh, Siiri, you’re a treasure, bringing me real mämmi. And a kilo of sugar! You’re a wonder.’
‘The store didn’t have granulated sugar in anything smaller. You’ll eat it up in no time. Why not put it on your rye crisp? It’ll crunch nicely between your teeth.’
Irma got a cup and spoon from the refugee-turned nurse and ate the mämmi with relish, although the cup might have been some sort of specimen container. Irma offered some of the viscous black pudding to the nurse, but the woman couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw what Irma was spooning into her mouth, and hurried away.
‘It does look a bit like crap,’ Irma said, humming and crunching the sugar between her teeth, in an impossibly good mood. Siiri couldn’t bear to tell her what had been done to her apartment, although she knew she ought to. Irma said her rehabilitation was progressing rapidly. She had walked three steps yesterday without support, and had got to know two sweet therapists.
‘Very gentle. One of them has a two-year-old daughter named Irina. Isn’t your daughter named Irina, too? The one who graduated as a nun in France? Why don’t you ever talk about her? Do you think we should become nuns, too? Why haven’t we ever thought of that before!’
Irma seemed half serious. She immediately started thinking about the upside of a nun’s life. No abbess could be as mean as Virpi Hiukkanen, although Virpi wasn’t a boss like an abbess was, of course, just a sort of vice-abbess, which wasn’t even a real title. There would be no men there, and it would be nice not to have to worry about anyone forcing hugs upon you in the lifts or kissing you in the hallways or feeling you up while you waited at the water fountain. It would be too hard for Anna-Liisa, of course, now that she’d started her new path in life. And the main thing was that in a convent nothing would cost anything.
‘We would save thousands of euros a month and we could buy enough goats and cows to fill Africa!’
‘True,’ Siiri said, and thought grimly that a convent might, in fact, be their only alternative. ‘But I would probably have to become a believer.’
‘Oh, that’s easy. No one will question that you’re a believer, in the last leg of life. Just say that you’ve come to the conclusion that there is something eternal, that this can’t be all there is to life. I’ll be your godmother at the christening, of course. It’ll be fun. Is there an entrance exam for a convent?’
Siiri got Irma to stop her dreaming by telling her about Mika Korhonen, and since Irma was already in the mood, she practically had an experience of enlightenment when she finessed who Mika Korhonen was.
‘Our archangel! The boy who drove the taxi, who wanted to be bald and took us to eat peppery food in the new plastic Restaurant Kämp. Why haven’t you talked about him before?’
Irma still had good moments and bad moments. Siiri decided to use this lucid moment while she had the chance and told her about Mika’s latest findings. Irma was mostly interested in the fact that he was Siiri’s advocate now. She started to laugh, because she thought that an advocate was the same thing as a guardian and she remembered how it used to be that every village had some mentally retarded person who had been placed under guardianship.
‘There was a case like that in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville! Dr Bartolo was Rosina’s guardian, wasn’t he? Is Mika your Dr Bartolo now? The doctor was a complete ninny and just wanted to marry her. Aha! Could that be what’s happening here? Mika must want to marry you!’
Eventually, Irma got back to where she’d started and came to her senses. She was pleased with Siiri and Anna-Liisa’s initiative and happy that the guardianship didn’t apply to her, since she had a big family and lots of loved ones, unlike Siiri, whose children had died from affluenza and escaped reality to live in convents.
‘So I don’t at all need to start asking people I meet on the street to be my guardian.’
‘But my family isn’t about to start dividing up my possessions while I’m still alive,’ Siiri let slip, and Irma looked very serious.
Then Siiri had to tell her about the apartment, about the Estonian moving men, the warehouse and the auction. She tried to make it sound vague and confused and repeated many times that no new tenant had moved in yet, and she didn’t know whether anyone would. This was true in a way, because Virpi Hiukkanen had just talked about long waiting lists and hadn’t mentioned anyone by name. But Irma understood all too well, including the things Siiri wasn’t telling her. She’d had time lying in various hospitals to think about all kinds of things and had come to the conclusion that maybe she wasn’t all that important to her precious darlings.
‘It’s my own fault, of course. Maybe I’m just a nagging old lady. A bad mother and a tedious grandmother, a burden to everyone.’
She started to cry and said how she had gradually realized that she was no joy or any earthly use to her children or grandchildren. They were actually waiting for her to die and get out of the way, and it was a relief to them when she was moved to the dementia ward to be a vegetable so that they could forget about her without feeling guilty.
‘They can’t wait to get my electric mixer. I’m worth about as much as an old kitchen gadget. Can you believe it? I’ve had it for more than thirty years. It’s just a piece of junk. Although it is a Philips.’
‘Well, your granddaughter seemed to want your jewellery, too, and I’m sure that’s valuable,’ Siiri said consolingly, but Irma wouldn’t laugh at anything now.
‘Nobody but you and Anna-Liisa has come to see me in the hospital. It didn’t occur to any of my family to come and cheer me up with some mämmi – they’ve never even noticed that mämmi is my favourite. They’re all in Cairo and Japan and in a great hurry, even when they’re on holiday, but that’s probably an excuse. If they have time to go to the other side of the earth, you would think they’d have time to visit the hospital and tell me I’m homeless. Oh, I wish I knew how to die. That would be the best thing I could do for them.’
Siiri had never heard Irma talk this way. It sounded unflinchingly honest, which was why it was so awful. Siiri started to feel like her own life was actually pretty good, since she didn’t have to wonder why no one remembered her. She hugged Irma, who had grown oddly small and thin. She wiped her tears away with a lace handkerchief and tried to console her. Loneliness was part of growing old, and there was nothing you could do about it. Even old people who had lots of things to do and saw people every day felt lonely. You couldn’t sit by the phone growing bitter because nobody called. Your children and grandchildren had their own lives, and so they should. Everybody was focused on their own life. Old people too. And Siiri and Irma in particular, because they still had lots of things they knew how to enjoy.
‘You can move in with me. We still have time to do lots of fun things together,’ Siiri said, and Irma’s smile returned. She said that Siiri snored, that she could hear her through the wall and no earplug was tough enough to keep the noise out. She blew her nose loudly into Siiri’s handkerchief, tucked it into her sleeve as if it were her own, and explained that if you blow your nose all the time, then the stuff that comes out isn’t snot, it’s allergy fluid. Then she let out a deep sigh and wanted to hear more about the romance between Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador, and when Siiri told her about the trip to Tallinn for veterans and their spouses, Irma laughed so much she gave herself a stomach ache.