‘Oh, it’s heavenly here; it’s like paradise,’ Siiri sighed contentedly.
Unlike weekdays, Hakaniemi Hall was packed to the gills on Saturdays. Siiri and Irma meandered around the ground floor, basking in the ambience, taking in the smells, admiring the delicacies. Customers here didn’t have their noses in the air the way they did at the Stockmann delicatessen or the downtown Market Hall, where Siiri felt ill at ease. Irma liked popping into Stockmann for smoked salmon and fish roe herself, but even she had to admit that the atmosphere at Hakaniemi Hall was special. People of every description strolled the aisles, lively chatter permeated the beautiful old building, and no one seemed to be in a hurry or a bad mood. Best of all, there were plenty of salespeople, several at every counter. The merchants were pleasant and talkative, served their customers cheerfully and without pushing their wares too aggressively.
‘I can’t stand it when I go to the mall and I make the mistake of stepping into a store out of curiosity. Those salesgirls pop out like jack-in-the boxes: Can I help you?’ Irma complained.
They watched a handsome, foreign-looking butcher prepare oxtail for an elderly customer according to the latter’s instructions. The saw shrieked, filling the air with the smell of burnt bone as the pieces fell to the wax paper. The butcher expertly cut longer slices from the tip of the tail, shorter bits from the butt-end.
‘Do you girls know how to make oxtail stew?’ the old rascal asked them flirtatiously, and then started boasting about his prowess in the kitchen. Irma was so stimulated by the exchange that she bought two kilos of oxtail, a kilo more than the randy old fellow. The foreign-looking butcher wrapped her purchase in wax paper, put it in a plastic bag, threw in a marrowbone for free, and wished them a nice day in perfect Finnish.
‘Oh my! This certainly is different to the Low Price Market in Munkkiniemi,’ Irma said, pleased. ‘Veikko used to love my oxtail stew, although I haven’t the foggiest what I put into it. But it mustn’t have been too complicated; as I recall, I used to make it for him nearly every week. Oh, dear, he was such a lovely man, and now I miss him again.’
‘Are you going to be able to haul all those bones home?’ Siiri asked, concerned. She was also unsure whether the oxtails would fit into the pans at their luxury lodgings. Their cookware was all so very small.
‘Pshaw. We’ll just divide them up into smaller pots and season them separately,’ Irma said with a dismissive wave.
The rarest delicacies appeared to be comfort food for Hakaniemi Hall’s shoppers. No one else seemed to find any of it – the pullets swimming in a herb bath; broiler livers, hearts and gizzards; weeping Toholampi Emmental; Muscovy duck thighs; whole pike heads; or French champagne brie – the least bit strange. But Siiri and Irma stopped, peered, squealed, stepped closer, frowned and asked questions like tourists at a Marrakesh bazaar.
‘Or at a Persian market! Like in that Albert Ketèlbey song about the dawn of time they still play sometimes on Saturday Wish List.’
They tried to piece together the song, but it was no use. They remembered that it began with percussion, flutes, piccolos and the rumble of a male chorus, and that the cello solo during the languid bridge built into a beautiful melody. But how did it go?
‘It’s always hard remembering a tune without the lyrics,’ Irma said. ‘Theo Mackeben’s “Warum” is much easier. It goes like this.’ She started warbling long passages of German in a shrill voice that climbed higher and higher, like Miliza Korjus at the apex of her career. ‘It ends in a vocalize, doesn’t it?’ She continued trilling without words and then jumped back into the chorus.
‘The Berlin Nightingale! Wasn’t that what they called her?’ Siiri interjected, hoping to bring Irma’s street concert to a rapid conclusion.
‘Yes! And Jenny Lind was the Swedish Nightingale. We don’t have a Finnish Nightingale, unless you count that singer from Pakila who whistles, what was his name . . . Look, Siiri! A whole rabbit! Which park do you suppose they caught it in, Tokoinranta or Karhupuisto?’ Irma was laughing so hard that the tears streamed from her eyes. No, on further reflection, the beast was too scrawny to be one of the well-fed bunnies that had overrun Helsinki’s parks. It was only when Siiri didn’t join in that Irma realized her friend had turned away and was standing stock-still, watching a butcher hold up an enormous, pale, bloody slab with a pair of tongs for a black fellow to inspect. The slimy pancake went on and on until it dangled high in the air, revealing the nasty stub of some severed tube at the bottom. The black man looked pleased. His head was crowned by a pot-holder that looked like a beehive and jiggled precariously as he nodded.
‘It’s beautiful! Thank you, I’ll take it,’ he said.
Siiri leaned in to see what this foodstuff might be. ‘Beef oesophagus and lungs, three euros thirty a kilo. Oh my.’ She had to cover her mouth, so as not to look idiotic as she gaped at the black man’s purchases.
‘Cheap, tasty food,’ he said, flashing a dazzling white smile.
‘I’m sorry – is that for your dog?’
‘I don’t have a dog!’ he laughed, waving the plastic bag containing the cow’s lungs and oesophagus in Siiri’s face. ‘I’m going to cook lung stew, it’s easy to make. The best place for spices is a couple of blocks away. The African grocery at Hämeentie five.’
‘Is there one of those here, too? An African grocery?’ Siiri marvelled.
Now it was the black man’s turn to be surprised. ‘You must not be from the neighbourhood. Where are you from?’
Irma was clearly put off: ‘We’re not from anywhere but right here. Our families have lived in Helsinki for ten generations, which you clearly cannot say for yourself.’ She was quiet for a moment and then smiled. ‘But we don’t know Hakaniemi that well.’
The man laughed a deep, rumbling laugh so that the beehive on his head trembled.
‘You can find anything you want in Hakaniemi; this is the best place in the world! We have a Chinese grocery, Indian, Moroccan, Japanese, African, you name it. You can get anything you want, and for a good price, too. Are you familiar with halal?’
‘Who?’
‘Halal. The best meat in the world, like kosher for Jews, but the Muslims say halal. There’s a little shop nearby that sells excellent halal meat for a much better price than those plastic-wrapped pork chops you get at the supermarket.’
‘How interesting! I don’t particularly care for pork myself,’ Siiri said. ‘You must be a cook?’
‘Me? A cook? No, no!’ The man laughed loudly again. ‘But I do cook for my wife and children every day. Do you live far from here?’
Siiri explained that they had recently moved to Hakaniemi. Irma launched into a detailed account of the sordid particulars of the Sunset Grove renovation before a reproachful look from Siiri silenced her. The man in the funny hat was as nice as could be and thrilled when he saw how much oxtail Irma had bought. He wanted to know how they planned on preparing it and recommended a recipe that called for raisins, pine nuts and chocolate.
‘Why, that sounds crazy!’ Irma laughed, but the man was serious. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and jotted down the recipe for them. ‘You make it a day in advance, do you understand? This is not fast food, it’s slow food. It needs to stew in the oven overnight. You add the chocolate at the very end.’
‘Do we have an oven? I don’t remember. But the one thing we have plenty of is time!’ Siiri said.
‘You can also do it on the stove, no problem.’
After accepting the recipe for chocolate stew, Siiri and Irma thanked the man and introduced themselves. Their new friend had come to Finland years ago from Nigeria, lived just a few blocks away, and was called Muhammed Haani Abubakar. He had to write the name down for them, because Irma and Siiri could make neither head nor tail of it, even though he tried to say it slowly and repeated it three times.
‘Muhammed, this is my first name. In Finland everyone calls me Muhis. Haani is my middle name, it means happy and content. Look at me: I’m happy and content!’
He spread his arms and laughed his deep laugh. They wished each other luck in the kitchen, and then, lugging his bag of lungs, Muhis disappeared into the hubbub of Hakaniemi hall, his colourful hat bobbing among the drab Finns.