Irma was enjoying her four-person room at the Kivelä Hospital Trauma Therapy Unit for Geriatric Assessment and Rehabilitation tremendously. She had started to develop a routine for adjusting to a new hospital and she had quickly got to know her room-mates. Kivelä was the fifth hospital where she was the oldest patient in the room, sort of like the oltermanni, the old village alderman.
‘Or is that only men? And Oltermanni cheese?’
The hospital was built in the 1930s, but it had been remodelled several times since then. The ground-floor lobby looked like it had been designed by some Alvar Aalto worshipper, with a broad staircase and terracotta floor tiles.
‘Do you know, I found a sign downstairs that had a twenty-six-letter word on it,’ Siiri said.
‘No! What was it?’
‘It was . . . hmm. I can’t remember now. It was a very complicated medical term.’
Irma could move on her own now, and was able to get around quite well with a Zimmer frame, although her progress was still slow and unsteady. She was eager to go on her first circuit of the hospital and look for Siiri’s word.
‘We can get some coffee while we’re out. There’s a cafeteria next to the stairs.’
Siiri helped her to her feet, which wasn’t much trouble because Irma was so thin and had more energy than before. She took firm hold of the Zimmer frame and started pushing herself forward.
‘It’s peculiar when your head and your feet aren’t going at the same tempo. But singing helps. I sing with my physical therapist – my father was a soldier, young and handsome, too . . . and voilà, my feet get marching. The main thing is not to end up in a wheelchair. That would be horrible.’
It was a long way from Irma’s room to the lift and another complicated trip from the lift to the cafeteria. But they weren’t in any hurry. They found a bronze plaque on the wall that said that President Ryti had spent his last years at Kivelä Hospital.
‘In other words, he died here. I don’t see how that’s such a great honour for a hospital,’ Irma snorted. She started to turn her Zimmer frame, with some difficulty. Once she’d got herself facing the right direction she lifted her gaze to the door across the hall.
‘Omahoitotarvikejakelupiste!’ she said, overjoyed. Self-care supply distribution point! ‘There’s your word! Wait, let me count.’
Irma’s soprano singing voice echoed gloriously as she counted the letters, crowing and laughing. She noticed that next to the Omahoitotarvikejakelupiste there was an apuvälinelainaamo, assistive-device loan centre, but to her disappointment the word had only seventeen letters.
They admired the lobby and thought Kivelä was a very nice hospital, the most pleasant one in Helsinki, so far. Irma thought the physical therapists at Kivelä were better than the ones at Laakso, but the food was worse, and the beds were awful. The other patients in her trauma therapy unit were a very colourful bunch; among them were a few recovering from serious brain infarctions and their behaviour was unpredictable. One man slunk around the ward at night and came into women’s rooms and stood next to their beds. A lot of the patients were afraid of him, because it was unpleasant to wake up in the middle of the night and find a complete stranger standing there staring at you. There was a woman in Irma’s ward who was very confused and had a filthy mouth and thought Irma was a madame at a bordello.
‘Was I that confused in the Group Home?’
‘Well, you thought I was the nurse and you came out with all kinds of crazy things. You ordered me to pack a meal in a backpack and make sure I brought the alphabet book along, too.’
‘Like I did back when Kekkonen was president! Oh, how funny! But how could you stand me like that?’
‘Of course I could,’ Siiri said, carrying their coffee cups to a free table by the wall. ‘After all, I knew that you weren’t really dotty. It was all because of the medication.’
‘And that thought never occurred to my darlings.’
They sat down to enjoy their coffees and Irma started to talk about her dreams for going home. They actually called it the ‘homecoming process’, and Irma was supposed to meet several times with a group of people called the multi-professional team, as threatened in Anna-Liisa’s brochure. The group included a social worker, a physical therapist, a nurse and an occupational therapist, all of them cute young interns soon to graduate. The occupational therapist seemed to be like the activities directors at the retirement home. Irma had asked if she had to make an Easter chick before she could go home, but the girl had said that it would all become clear over time and that an activities director was a very different thing from an occupational therapist.
After a good beginning, however, Irma’s homecoming process had come to a halt because they couldn’t get hold of her family.
‘None of my darlings are answering the phone! They should be ashamed of themselves. I told the social worker that it was because all that appears on the little screen is an unknown number when you call from the hospital. My children have told me that you shouldn’t answer calls like that because they could be from anyone – a cold-caller or some other annoyance. Although sometimes they do have good things on offer. I once got a free Japanese kitchen knife and some Swiss wrinkle cream when I ordered a set of books, which I gave to my darlings as Christmas gifts. The nurse didn’t believe me. But let’s talk about something more fun. Tell me about Anna-Liisa’s spring fling!’
Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador, now known as Onni, were going around everywhere holding hands and there was no sign of the Zimmer frame at all. Onni told impossibly long stories about his diplomatic adventures and Anna-Liisa listened with her cheeks glowing, believing everything he said, though half the Ambassador’s stories were pure hogwash.
‘Heaven protect us! And Anna-Liisa has always been so critical!’ Irma squealed and laughed so hard that her coffee went down the wrong way. Siiri pounded on her back, and Irma coughed and crowed.
But that wasn’t all. The craziest thing about the blossoming love at Sunset Grove was that Anna-Liisa and Onni quizzed each other about interrogative case endings, pronouns that demand the dative, and Finnish bodies of water while they played doubles solitaire. Last weekend they had both memorized the price list for the Sunset Grove cafeteria, in loud voices, and had thought it great fun. When they were in Tallinn, they had danced the foxtrot and the waltz and spent time with a lot of complete strangers, other veterans, in a ‘jacuzzi’, which was a tub filled with hot, bubbly water. They brought back a linen tablecloth with pink hearts and white angels on it as a souvenir for Siiri.
‘The tablecloth of love, so you’ll remember the wonderful veterans’ holiday!’
Irma was sure that Anna-Liisa and Onni would end up getting married, and she made Siiri swear to ask if they could be bridesmaids. They could wear lacy dresses and purple silk bows in their hair, which Irma promised to make for them in the craft sessions for her homecoming test. Irma laughed so hard that she peed in her pants but it didn’t matter because everybody at the hospital wore incontinence pads.
‘They make you. It’s horribly uncomfortable and humiliating. But the nurses don’t have time to help the patients to the bathroom, and no matter how hard I swear I can walk there myself, they won’t believe me.’
The pads were changed three times a day, which was apparently a great luxury because at the Malmi Hospital they only changed them twice, or that’s what someone had told her.
‘One poor woman was positively in agony yesterday at lunch because her pad was so full, but the nurses just said that she could have a clean one at four o’clock. As if it were pre-programmed that you have to wait all day!’
When they’d finished their coffee, Siiri accompanied Irma back to the first floor. The staff had been looking all over the ward for Irma, but the nurses didn’t get too upset, as long as the patient was capable of finding her way back to her own bed. Siiri was frightened, though. She had lured Irma into breaking the rules. She knew that patients were supposed to just lie there and wait to be rehabilitated. After their little escapade Irma was happy and fell asleep as soon as she got into bed.
On the way home, Siiri was vigilant, and justifiably so, because she saw a man who looked like Erkki Hiukkanen standing around on Ruusulankatu with his back to her. He had the same dishevelled hair and sloping shoulders. Siiri quickened her step and saw to her horror, from a reflection in a restaurant window, that the man was following her. She managed to cross Mannerheimintie before he did and the number 4 came just as the pedestrian light turned red. Relieved, she climbed aboard the tram and left her pursuer staring into a bridal-shop window.