It’s the kind of memory I’ve never spoken to anyone about, not even Juhani. Despite the fact that he shares it with me. The memory combines conversations that I remember clearly, word for word, and fragments of less clearly defined moments, but all the same it is like an old photograph that I can take out whenever I want to and check what kind of jacket someone was wearing or how much their cheeks tightened or their lips narrowed when they smiled. And what makes this all the more jarring is that Juhani was the only person smiling that day, and by the time the day was out, even he had stopped.
We were in Lahti, burying our parents. Our mother had died only three and half days after our father. They had both died of old age, exhausted from all the years of wild dreaming, though they had only reached what might be called late middle age. I didn’t know why or how they had ended up in Lahti. I didn’t think they knew anybody in that area.
I was neither surprised nor unsurprised by the number of people who attended the funeral. Our parents had always attracted people wherever they went, even if only briefly. In their own way they were attractive, positive and open people; my former boss would doubtless have said they had a strong, positive, dynamic forward vision and the guts to dive headlong into the unknown. The flip side of this, however, was that their entire life was one long series of diving from one burning boat to another. Judging by the fact that I only counted twenty-four people at the wake, I assumed that our parents had only been in Lahti for a very short time.
The funeral itself was suitably short, and the priest who gave the eulogy had clearly received his instructions from Juhani. Nothing the priest said about our parents’ lives was factual, and the handful of things that were partly true were presented in a distinctly one-sided manner. I wasn’t planning on bringing it up and didn’t want to comment on the arrangements at all. Juhani had organised the event, and he was allowed to do it the way he saw fit. For me, organising a funeral would have been impossible: I was a student of mathematics and my monthly budget was very carefully calculated. Juhani, on the other hand, was a successful businessman. Or so he’d said many times.
We moved from the chapel through to the church hall, where there was tea and coffee, sandwiches and cream cakes. A few people came up and squeezed my hand, and I learnt what had brought our parents to Lahti in the first place. People were sad that my parents never had the chance to open their private tram line connecting the world-famous ski-jump tower at Salpausselkä with their very own pizza village, a growing community of pizza restaurants situated on the outskirts of the city, where visitors were able to stay at pizza hotels and spend time at the pizza spa whenever they weren’t patronising one of numerous other pizza restaurants. The potential, an elderly gentleman explained to me, his eyes darting from side to side, was in mass tourism during the ski-jumping week and in the direct tram line. When I asked the man whether the pizza village or the tram line existed yet or whether they were even under construction, he told me that my parents had already bought a giant pizza oven and there was a model tramcar lying in the middle of the living room of their one-bedroom apartment.
At some point, Juhani had disappeared. I noticed it as the funeral guests were starting to leave. The room became empty and quiet, and his full coffee cup on the table next to me seemed to have cooled and a clear growth ring had appeared on the inside of the cup, slightly above the level of the liquid.
Eventually I found Juhani in the foyer.
‘One small problem,’ he said. ‘Nothing dramatic, but it’s going to need a bit of … juggling.’
First he took me to one side, then into the chapel. He carefully closed the door behind us, and we found ourselves standing in a quiet room, warmed by the soft afternoon light, along with our parents – only one of whom was in a coffin. It didn’t require a degree in applied mathematics to work out that it was our father.
For a moment, I felt as though I couldn’t breathe.
Our mother was lying on her back on a plinth, as though she’d just lain down for a nap. She was wearing a long grey dress, a dark-brown cardigan and a pair of black, polished shoes. Of course, she was quite pale, but in all other respects she looked perfectly normal. I had to look away.
‘They went to find another coffin,’ Juhani said quietly. ‘There was a misunderstanding about the price of these services, the payment schedule and what was actually included in this package. I had to decide between the fish terrine and the coffin, but by then most of the terrine had already been eaten.’
‘You swapped our mother for a cake?’ I spluttered, and I could almost taste the salmon in my mouth. That and the shock. I knew that Juhani was always full of surprises, but this was a different level of magnitude. Perhaps it was the combination of surprise and shock that allowed me to remain calm so I was able to listen to him.
‘The good news,’ said Juhani, ‘is that I haggled them down, and the digger is included in the new price, but that means we’re in a bit of a hurry.’
‘A hurry?’
‘We’ll have to carry the coffin to the graveside by ourselves,’ he said. ‘The digger will be here in twenty-five minutes. There’s a funeral going on at the other side of the park too, and he’ll do this one right afterwards.’
‘I don’t follow…’
‘Henri,’ he said. ‘This, if anything, is pure mathematics.’
Mother was stiff.
We couldn’t decide whether she should lie on top of our father on her stomach or her back. Both solutions felt wrong, for different reasons. Finally, we managed to roll our father onto his side, then there was just enough room for Mother to slip in beside him. Closing the coffin was a little more complicated, mostly because our parents were like blocks of wood: hard and, given their volume, surprisingly heavy.
I didn’t think I was doing right, and I didn’t feel good. But I couldn’t see any other option: I was still penniless and, judging by everything I’d seen, so was my brother, the supposedly successful businessman.
My general wellbeing didn’t improve as we hauled the coffin onto the same trolley that only a moment ago was carrying the exorbitant terrine. The trolley had been designed for use in an industrial kitchen, and I doubt it was ever meant to bear the weight of two adult humans in rigor mortis, let alone transport them along the sandy pathways of the cemetery. But, as we had established, this was the best we could afford.
The process of pushing and pulling the trolley turned out to be painfully slow and arduous. Its wheels kept getting stuck in the sand and the smallest dips in the path. The trolley itself kept sliding across the path from right to left and from left to right, as though it were drunk. It also seemed to want to spin around, switching its bow and stern back and forth.
We were both soaked through with sweat. It was late spring, and a hint of summer warmth already hung in the air. We left our jackets on a bench by the path.
The trolley kept spinning, getting stuck, moving again, sliding a metre or two, then became stuck in a narrow ditch furrowed out by the rain, and lifting it out again took all the strength the two of us could muster. I was aware that time was passing, and I imagined Juhani must have been too. We didn’t speak. Each time the paths reached a fork, we checked our direction from a print-out of the cemetery’s plots. The grave was marked on the map with a red rectangle. It was situated as far away from the chapel as it was possible to get. We puffed our way onwards, the trolley creaked, the coffin was silent and heavy. The old spruce trees stood motionless and watched our progress.
Waiting for us was a hole in the ground: a wide, dark opening about one and half metres deep. The width was understandable: there was room for two. We saw the digger arriving from the other direction. Now we worked quicker than before: we improvised a set of straps – for budgetary reasons we hadn’t been able to use the proper ones – and had to lower the coffin quickly and with lactic acid still coursing through our muscles from wheeling the coffin there in the first place. The tablecloths held out, and we managed to pull them from underneath the coffin and out of the grave just before the digger arrived.
This digger was like a miniature model of the real thing, and it seemed to create an optical illusion against the landscape: the man inside the digger looked like a giant, though he was of average size. This became clear after the motor was turned off and he stepped out of the cabin. The driver adjusted the position of his baseball cap, greeted us, walked right up to the edge of the grave and peered down, then looked up at us.
‘Says here there’s supposed to be two,’ he said. ‘Where’s the other one?’
We stood there in silence, still sweating, and tried to hide the tablecloths behind us. I thought our travails might be about to get the end they deserved: exposure, shame, punishment. I was going to say something when I heard Juhani’s astonishingly clear and sincere voice.
‘She’s actually feeling much better now,’ he said. ‘She’ll be coming along later. So, it’s just one today.’
The man looked at each of us in turn. Then he looked down into the grave, stepped back into his digger and started moving the dark-brown earth back from whence it had come.
On the way home, neither of us said a word.