Doing laundry at the commune was quite an operation. Luckily, a large room behind the spa-cum-bathroom had been dedicated solely to this purpose; it had enough room to pull the sheets taut before folding them and still line-dry clothes for five. The washing machine was as big as a hospital’s, spacious and powerful, and next to it there was a dryer and a rotary iron for pressing the sheets. The latter was surprisingly easy to use. Siiri and Irma would first stretch each sheet flat by hand, then fold it, and in the end Siiri would hold the sheet while Irma slipped it into the rotary iron and pressed the button.
‘Hocus pocus, and out comes a flat sheet!’ Irma said, watching, eyes gleaming, as the pressed sheet appeared at the far edge of the device. They would fold the hot, smooth sheet and add it to the pile of clean linens. No one else had time to do laundry, so naturally this task as well had fallen to Siiri and Irma. Siiri was pleased that Irma liked using the rotary iron, because otherwise her friend might have shirked this responsibility as lightly as she did the cooking and cleaning, and she said so.
‘Nonsense, I’ve gone shopping with you I don’t know how many times, and even help out with the cleaning now and again. Does it make any sense to mop a clean home every day? Why, just yesterday I scrubbed both bathrooms, including those stupid bidets, although I’m not sure who’s using them,’ Irma responded.
It was true. The day before, Irma had participated in the weekly housework by pulling on a pair of pink flowered rubber gloves and the lace-trimmed housecoat she had sewn herself. Then she had stormed the spa and attacked it for over an hour, splashing and singing, because she loved the way her high soprano echoed in the vaulted space. Meanwhile, Siiri had dusted all the surfaces, taken the duvets out to the balcony to air, wiped the doors and jambs with a damp rag, and vacuumed the entire apartment while listening to Irma’s arias. Irma had brought her tour de force to its conclusion by singing a rendition of Violetta’s death scene from Verdi’s La Traviata, collapsing to the couch and gasping with the last of her strength: ‘Döden, döden, döden.’
‘You’re folding the sheet wrong. They taught us at the Nursing Academy how to do it properly,’ Irma said to Siiri, as they pulled the sheet flat prior to sliding it into the rotary iron. The sheet-stretching was fun; you could lean back into emptiness as long as you trusted the other person to keep you from falling. Siiri leaned with all her weight and closed her eyes. She felt unusually tired, a little weak, as a matter of fact; running a large household might not be suitable for an old woman. She sighed deeply. Just then, Irma’s nose started to itch, and she let go of the sheet. Siiri crashed to the ground and hit her elbow nastily on the corner of the dryer.
‘For calamity’s sake! What have you done, you silly goose?’ Irma cried, and bent down over Siiri. Irma huffed as she tried to help Siiri up from the floor, but she didn’t have the benefit of in-home caregiver training, and so she plopped to the floor, too. There they sat on their backsides, bewildered, until they looked at each other and started laughing so hard they peed in their pants. There was a faint knock at the door, and a dark-skinned girl in a long robe peered in quizzically at the old women giggling on the floor.
‘Are you all right?’ the Somali-Finn asked shyly.
‘Yes, yes! We’re just resting for a moment before we finish up the laundry,’ Siiri said. Her arm didn’t hurt the tiniest bit any more.
‘We have under-floor heating, would you like to try? It’ll warm your bum right up!’ Irma cried at the in-home caregiver, and they burst out laughing uncontrollably again. Irma felt around the sleeve of her housecoat for her lace handkerchief, found it in the pocket, and wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘Under-floor heating and laundry rooms, of all the things people come up with when they don’t have anything better to do!’
The shy caregiver explained that she was looking for Anna-Liisa and continued on her way. Siiri and Irma climbed up stiffly, stretched their aching limbs, and looked at the mountains of dirty clothes and clean sheets surrounding them.
‘This is impossible,’ Irma said, grabbing items at random and shoving them into the washing machine’s gargantuan drum. Her in-house dye-shop had already turned out clothes in a variety of tints, generally pale pink. But even the Ambassador didn’t chide her; he just bravely slipped on the shirts Irma had tie-dyed, as long as they were clean and ironed.
‘Ironed, on top of everything else,’ Siiri huffed. She knew men wore permanent press shirts these days, but the Ambassador refused to buy them. His were custom-made by a tailor who lived somewhere on the other side of the world. The Ambassador had sent the tailor his measurements, and once a month he would pick up a package from the post office containing a new shirt or trousers, sometimes an entire suit. Luckily, Anna-Liisa and Onni’s suite had a separate room for clothes. Siiri set up the ironing board in front of the window and turned on the iron.
‘Do you suppose the Ambassador’s shirts are made under the table? I mean, is it possible Onni had this made somewhere inexpensively the way you’re not supposed to?’ Siiri asked, as she ironed the cuffs of a hand-tailored shirt.
‘It’s all the same to me where he has them made; I just wish he would take care of this rigmarole himself. My husband certainly didn’t change shirts every day. Why, Veikko and all of my darlings put together produced less laundry than Onni does by himself. Oh, my dear husband was such a sweetheart. And now I miss him again!’
They spent a moment reminiscing about their husbands, dried their tears on Irma’s lace handkerchief, and got back down to the task at hand.
Irma had been to Sunset Grove a month ago, to retrieve her winter clothes in good time, but Siiri had nothing warmer than an autumn coat. October was well underway and the first snow could come at any moment. Irma said she had run into Tauno again, who was swaying amid the devastation like the last of the Mohicans. And when Irma had stepped into her apartment, she had found three hairy brutes moving her belongings around.
‘I tried to give them a piece of my mind, but the blockheads didn’t speak a word of Finnish. I switched to shouting in Swedish, German, English and French, even a couple of words of Latin, although I think those were the scientific names of plants, but all that did was improve my mood. I even let them have it in Italian, with a few musical terms and operatic phase. Perfidi, what a wonderful curse word. That’s what Count Almaviva shouts in The Marriage of Figaro, and that’s the best opera in the world. Oh dear, Mozart, you were an amazing man, even more amazing than my dear Veikko. Those demolition dolts just gaped at me as if I were a madwoman.’
Irma had retrieved her warm clothes from the moving boxes while the gorillas looked on. Just to be sure, she had slipped her kitchen silver in among her wool knickers, because she was thoroughly convinced the men were after her valuables.
‘Not that I have any valuables left, since my darlings already divided everything up,’ she said casually, as she carried the stack of pressed sheets to the linen closet, which was bigger than her bathroom at Sunset Grove. ‘Döden, döden, döden.’
‘Should we go to Sunset Grove and have a look around?’ Siiri asked. She had stopped ironing after pressing three shirts into presentable condition and was following at Irma’s heels like a faithful dog. She discovered Irma was as enthusiastic as she was about the possibility of getting to the bottom of whatever major scandal was lurking in the shadows of Sunset Grove’s retrofit. Besides, it would be lovely to ride the tram again; it had been such a long time.
Irma quickly packed the necessities: playing cards, a miniature bottle of whisky, two lace handkerchiefs, her tram pass, wallet, keys, cigarettes, lozenges, spare stockings and the iPad. They were already in her handbag, but Irma took everything out and laid it on the entryway console to make sure that nothing was missing, and then dumped it back in with both hands in no particular order.
‘Now we can go. Oh, but where’s my beret?’
She spun around in circles in the entryway, unable to decide on a sensible place to start looking. Siiri checked the hat shelf, but only found the Ambassador’s felt hat and Anna-Liisa’s red spring hat, the grand symbol of their love. Then she rummaged around the umbrella stand and picked up the newspapers from the chairs, in case Irma’s beret happened to be under something. But it wasn’t.
‘Siiri, you’re wearing it! You’ve stolen my beret!’
Irma snatched the blue beret from Siiri’s head. Siiri was sure that the hat she’d happily been using for weeks was hers, but Irma held her ground. She placed the beret on her grey curls and eyed her reflection in the dim entryway, satisfied.
‘Look! Just like Garbo . . . all that’s missing are the sunglasses.’
Siiri opened the top drawer of the entryway console to pull out the scarf Margit had given her, and lo and behold, discovered Irma’s light-blue beret.
‘Yes, well. I believe that one’s mine after all. Give it here. I thought this one was a little flat,’ Irma said, handing the dark-blue beret back to Siiri.
Now they were ready to leave.