As abominable as the weather was, waiting at the tram stop was still good fun. A cold wind skimmed across the faces of the waiting passengers, and the drizzle was so fine that no one bothered using an umbrella, despite a sure soaking. That was Helsinki in October for you. But there were so many different kinds of people wandering around Hakaniemi that Siiri could have watched them forever, these strangers who were all in a hurry to get somewhere. Siiri and Irma tried to guess where they were going, who they were, what they did for work, what their families were like. And where their elderly parents spent their days while these folks rushed around with stony looks on their faces.
They took the number 9 tram downtown but didn’t get off at the train station, because Siiri wanted to roller-coaster up her favourite route: climb Simonkatu, take a sharp right onto Annankatu, and then immediately left onto Urho Kekkosen katu. They were sitting at the back of the tram, in the last row, where the winding curves gave you a lovely feeling in your tummy. Irma sang her ‘Siribiribim’ high and hard and laughed out loud. They exited the tram at the Electric Building, designed by Gunnar Taucher and ruined by Alvar Aalto, so they wouldn’t end up at the West Harbour.
‘We’re breaking the rules now, walking from stop to stop,’ a slightly irritated Irma remarked, and then admitted that the superfluous hill-climb had done them good. Just as they were crossing the street to make their way to the number 3 stop, a number 9 came from the direction of the harbour, and they hopped on, delighted to spare their tired old legs, and followed the serpentine route back down the hill. From the train station, they walked to Mannerheimintie, since they had already violated the beautiful principle of transferring trams without ever having to change stops.
‘Look, it’s one of the new trams!’ Siiri cried, as an LED-lit number 10 slid silently up to the stop. Two trams custom-built in the backwoods of north-eastern Finland had been delighting the residents of Helsinki for some time now, but Siiri hadn’t had a chance to test them yet. Such a rare opportunity could not be passed up; they would have to adjust plans and take the number 10. They entered the tram from the front, but to their consternation did not find a ticket scanner there, and so they had to push their way through the wall of humans to the middle door.
‘That’s what you get when you let bumpkins design your trams,’ Irma huffed.
Two polite young men stood when they saw the old women, which gave Siiri and Irma the opportunity to try out the seats, too. They were very nice, just the right height, and pleasantly firm, with a hint of softness. The windows were large and offered a beautiful view of the landscape racing past. The tram was nearly soundless but rocked rather violently, which Siiri found alarming and Irma amusing. A digital screen advertised the tram as being more environmentally friendly and reliable than the old trams, because it was made in Finland and would run in the foulest weather without any trouble. This was, of course, a jab at the trains. The State Railways had gone and ordered trains from Italy, which got jammed up by wet leaves in the autumn, couldn’t take the summer heat, and got stuck in the snow during the winter. Far too many people had been late for work, and demands had been made for the director of the railways to resign. A smaller screen announced the tram’s destination and the next stop, but here our northern Finnish engineers had pulled a real boner, as Irma put it. The sign was far too small. It read ‘Central Railway Stat’ and ‘National Pensions Insti’ because the rest of the letters didn’t fit. ‘But the driver’s cabin certainly is handsome,’ Siiri said.
The driver was perched in lofty solitude, and the glass-walled aquarium he sat in was larger than the nurses’ office in your average dementia unit. A schoolchild who was trying to pay for her trip had to stand on tiptoes to reach the slot where transactions with the driver took place.
‘He looks like the captain of a ship, piloting the tram from up high like that. Luckily, these aren’t being automated like the metros,’ Irma said.
‘Don’t the metros have drivers any more?’ Siiri exclaimed. ‘If I had known that, I would have insisted on taking a taxi to the SquirrelsNest that time I went there with Margit.’
The little girl finally succeeded in paying for her ticket when a Russian woman sitting nearby offered her assistance. The Russian woman was wearing a full-length fur, even though it wasn’t winter yet. Finns didn’t dare wear fur coats any more, even on the most frigid January days, because young animal rights activists stained and cut them. Siiri and Irma had quietly packed up their old minks and forgotten them in the attic at Sunset Grove, from where, presumably, they had been snatched before being sold to Russians well before the July heatwave.
‘Putin is a good president,’ the Russian woman said, as she seated herself across from Siiri and Irma. The new trams had the same sort of four-person tables as the low-floor trams, with two benches face to face.
‘Is he?’ Irma’s curiosity was piqued, because she was under the exact opposite impression. ‘He certainly is rather fit and apparently gets a lot of exercise.’
‘Marriage is for a man and a woman,’ the woman continued in relatively fluent Finnish. ‘I think it’s ugly, very ugly, when two men . . . patamusta . . .’
‘You’re the one with a black heart,’ Irma said, although she gathered full well that the woman had slipped into Russian, where patamusta meant ‘because’, not ‘black-hearted’, as it did in Finnish.
‘Excuse me?’ the woman said and started explaining over again. She thought Putin was a good man because he didn’t allow gay marriage. Siiri knew how much Irma loved her homosexual darlings, her grandson and his beautiful boyfriend. Irma had been ready to march in the Pride parade on their behalf, but at the last minute her darlings had put the kibosh on the idea, because marching on behalf of gay rights was even more dangerous than traipsing about in a fur coat. You might take a tomato or a smoke bomb to the head.
‘Don’t we need to transfer to the number 4?’ Irma said. Siiri pressed the glowing red button that, to her disappointment, wasn’t as responsive as she would have wished. They rose and exited the tram at the University Pharmacy stop. Through the tram window, they could see the fur-clad Russian move across the aisle, doggedly trying to convert Finns to homophobia.
‘Damned Russki,’ Irma said, sparking a squabble with Siiri about the use of the word. Siiri felt that you shouldn’t say it, because it had the same unpleasant tone as ‘the n word’ used in reference to black people. But Irma stoutly defended Russki.
‘We’ve always called Russians Russkis. There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m not about to start learning my language over again at the age of ninety-three just because some upstart language police is sitting around, sniffing out politically incorrect attitudes in perfectly acceptable words that have been around for ages. Or am I ninety-four already?’
The number 4 came quickly, and they forgot all about Russkis and other ugly words and concentrated on observing the wretched youngsters on their way to the narcotics clinic. Irma had heard that you could get drugs for free at Meilahti Hospital and that was how they kept drug addicts clean and in line.
‘They have to be sober when you go there; that way they don’t contaminate themselves with dirty needles. But it’s nonsensical to me that they’re given drugs instead of being taught how to live without them.’
Two young people sitting in front of Irma and Siiri were complaining that their weekly government-funded dose was too small, because they had the flu and were taking antibiotics and the drug didn’t hit them the way it was supposed to. Irma was just about to engage the young people in conversation, but they exited at the Hilton hospital stop. Siiri sighed with relief. They rode the remainder of the trip in peace, and as the tram sped across the Paciuksenkatu Bridge, she felt her heart leap; it was so lovely coming home to Munkkiniemi.
‘No matter how we feel about Sunset Grove, this is my home,’ she said, clenching her hands to her breast, revelling in the joy the yellow-leafed lindens and little boutiques of Munkkiniemi Allée brought her. There was Max’s Cafe, and people were still sitting outside, even though the weather was lousy and the air chilly. And before long, Raikka over at the hardware store would put up his window display for Christmas, the miniature village with a train running through it. One year Raikka had run out of money and hadn’t done his traditional Christmas window, but the neighbourhood had felt so badly about it that they had gathered a collection to pay the electric bill and other expenses.
‘That’s right; I suppose it will be Christmas again soon,’ Irma sighed, as if the holiday were some onerous burden to be borne. Which it was. For as long as they could remember, they had baked, cooked, crafted, decorated, knitted and wrapped for weeks on end so their families would enjoy a proper Christmas. Of course, this year they hadn’t imagined they’d be celebrating Christmas on the wrong side of the Pitkäsilta in a Finnish businessman’s private entertainment venue.
‘Perhaps the remodel at Sunset Grove will be finished by Christmas,’ Siiri said, trying to lighten the mood, but this time not even Irma could join in her optimism. And when Siiri passed through the automatic doors and entered the lobby of Sunset Grove, her good mood swirled away, like rainwater draining into a kerb-side gutter and into the bowels of the earth.
Sunset Grove was a sad sight, downright heart-breaking. They had seen ruination of all sorts of during wartime and vividly remembered the February 1944 bombing of Helsinki, yet the construction site yawning before them struck them as ghastlier than any of their memories. The lobby was dark and cold; evidently the electricity had been cut off for quite some time. Walls had been ripped open, the ends of wires and various coloured pipes stuck out everywhere, and the floor was strewn with bags of cement, a cement mixer, ladders and all manner of construction material scattered haphazardly about. A pair of men with black beards and safety vests were leaning against the wall, smoking cheap cigarettes, as calm as you like.
‘That’s a familiar smell,’ Irma said, as they walked past the men.
They had to advance carefully because the floor was treacherous, littered with mines they might trip over. Not real mines, of course, which they’d also had to pick their way through during their lifetimes, but, nevertheless, the floor was full of traps. The elevator didn’t work, which meant they had to brave the stairwell.
‘Halt!’ a shaky, slightly hoarse voice rasped from the landing opposite.
They squinted at the voice in the gloom and recognized a familiar figure. Tauno was standing there in his cap, eternally hunched, flailing his arms more furiously than normal. Apparently, he didn’t recognize them, and was defending his fortress from enemy attacks with those tactics still available to him.
‘Cock-a-doodle-doo! Tauno, it’s just us, Irma and Siiri!’
Irma’s password sufficed. Tauno was visibly happy to see old friends among the hunks of concrete. He reached for his hat and tipped it politely.
‘My dear girls! You’re still alive!’
He bobbed his way over to Irma and Siiri as quickly as he could, gave them both awkward hugs, and started babbling like a pot of boiling beans. He hadn’t had anyone to talk to for weeks, and that wasn’t even the saddest thing about his life amid the annihilation of Sunset Grove.
‘This is no normal plumbing retrofit,’ Tauno said, with a shake of his head. He had conducted scouting expeditions around the entirety of Sunset Grove and discovered walls between units being knocked down, entire kitchens demolished, doors carried out to dumpsters. Floors had been jackhammered up and balconies removed. Director Sinikka Sundström had fled to India to care for orphaned children with funds she had raised during a campaign she had organized at Sunset Grove. He had seen neither hide nor hair of Jerry Siilinpää since September, when the worst of the destruction had begun.
‘So he wasn’t fired?’ Irma asked.
‘No, although he should have been.’
‘So where are you living?’ Siiri asked, horrified, as it seemed all the flats had been demolished in the name of the renovation.
‘And what happened to our belongings?’ Irma shouted.
They rushed to their hallway with Tauno at their heels, and there was no need for them to dig around for their keys, because there was no door to their apartments. Their homes had been emptied. Every plastic-wrapped item of furniture and decorative object was gone, as were the moving boxes in which they had packed their dearest and most prized possessions. They gaped at the unrecognizable wastes of construction debris that had once been their homes. The kitchens and living rooms had been turned into one big room; the cupboards and fixtures had been torn out. The room looked oddly small; it was hard to imagine all the things it should have contained fitting in it. There was no longer a hole in the bathroom wall, because the entire wall had disappeared. Their bathrooms had been melted into one big cement cave with pipe-ends jutting oddly out of the walls.
‘Is this . . . are they turning these two apartments into one big one?’ Irma asked slowly, as she wandered around in the darkness, perplexed.
Tauno continued his incessant jabbering, as for him the sight was nothing new. He told them he had moved his scant belongings from one room to the next as the construction work advanced. He had two old suitcases and a mattress, that was all, so a camp life had been more or less manageable.
‘But now I’m staying in the last room at the end of the corridor. If they don’t finish the first apartments soon, I’ll be out on the street. That pathologist spends all her days at the Ukko-Munkki and sleeps wherever she can find a spot to lay her head. Who knows, maybe she’s made it into some hospital, thanks to her connections? I haven’t seen the old cow in a while, and I can’t say that I’ve missed her, either.’
Siiri quietly corrected Tauno: ‘She’s a medical examiner, not a pathologist.’
‘Heavens to Betsy!’ Irma exclaimed. She was standing in the middle of her apartment, next to a heap of broken bathroom tile. ‘Shouldn’t they have . . . How can they just . . . Was this announced somewhere, that our apartments are going to be emptied?’
‘On the Internet, apparently,’ Tauno said. ‘But since I don’t have any way of accessing that magical world, I’ve been scouting around with my senses on high alert. I rescued this box from your room.’ He dug into the old backpack he was hauling around and handed Siiri Anna-Liisa’s jewellery box. ‘I thought it might be valuable, or have sentimental value. Aren’t women sentimental about jewellery?’
Irma and Siiri looked at the box in Tauno’s hand, stunned. How could it be here in Sunset Grove when they had seen it in Hakaniemi just a short while ago in September? The day the two phony police had come sniffing around for it and Anna-Liisa had found the enormous wad of cash inside.
‘Thank you, Tauno,’ Siiri said finally, accepting the box. It wouldn’t fit in the handbag she had brought, but she had the strength to carry it back to Hakaniemi.
Tauno wanted to show them his current foxhole, and they dejectedly followed him down the deserted hallway. The same annihilation had afflicted every apartment, as if they had been bombed.
‘At least most of the walls are still standing,’ Tauno said. ‘Bombs usually take out the whole building.’
In the last flat, the plastic flooring was still in place, but the toilet, shower stall, shower and sink had been torn out of the bathroom, and the kitchen cabinets had vanished. The pipes jutted out of the wall and the lights didn’t work. Tauno had dragged his dusty mattress over to the windows; he claimed it was still bright enough to read there during the daytime, even though the building was wrapped in plastic and this time of year there weren’t more than a few odd hours of sunlight anyway. Tauno’s pair of old cardboard suitcases looked like artefacts from a museum. They contained his clothes, winter boots, a hunting knife, a water bottle and a copy of Väinö Linna’s The Unknown Soldier. He read it to himself every day, although he already knew it by heart.
‘I’m holding the line here, the last man. What would have happened at the Battle of Ihantala if everyone had abandoned their comrades and run off? You’ll never make a deserter out of me,’ he said proudly, and Irma and Siiri gathered that he took heart from the notion that he’d ended up in World War Three.
‘Tauno,’ Irma said in a serious voice, taking hold of the hunchbacked man’s perpetually swinging hands. She held them for a moment and looked Tauno in the eye, then glanced at his field gear. Tauno had an old green canvas backpack, the kind Siiri’s sons had had back in the fifties when they went camping as scouts. Siiri was relatively sure Tauno had packed it with a camp stove, a mess kit, matches, a flashlight, rope and other necessities for survival.
‘Tauno dear, you can’t stay here. You’re coming to Hakaniemi with us. There’s room for you, and you won’t need to drag that filthy mattress around any more. We have so many clean sheets that we need a room bigger than this apartment to store them in.’
But Tauno refused. He reminded them that Finland wouldn’t be an independent country if everyone had jumped on the milk train home at the first sign of trouble. He opened his backpack and showed them everything Siiri had predicted was in there, along with hard tack and enough dehydrated food for weeks – or so he claimed. Irma started talking about the delicious meals Siiri prepared every day, what a fancy whirlpool tub they had in their spa, and how lovely it would be to be able to warm up the sauna and sweat out the grime and stench of the renovation.
‘Thank you, Irma, but I can’t leave,’ Tauno said. He lowered his voice and started sharing secrets with them: how he’d delved into the operations of Fix ’n’ Finish, eavesdropped and spied on the construction workers, and discovered a thing or two. Most of Tauno’s revelations were familiar, as he had already divulged them to Irma.
‘I speak Russian, you know,’ he whispered, continuing his tale. Fix ’n’ Finish was owned by a prominent Finnish civil servant who’d had shady business dealings in former Soviet countries for years. ‘They’re based on contacts he made during his career; apparently, he worked in many Warsaw Pact countries.’ Tauno was sure the possessions of Sunset Grove’s residents had been sold, and their bank accounts had in all likelihood been emptied, too. He had seen the construction workers exchanging thick wads of cash, and he firmly believed that drug dealing and money laundering were somehow involved. Siiri started wondering if Tauno was all there.
‘But there aren’t any drugs here any more, because there aren’t any old people,’ Irma said. She didn’t seem to believe all of Tauno’s ranting either.
‘Mark my words, the taps are flowing,’ Tauno said, looking enigmatic.
‘There’s not a single tap that works in the entire building!’ Irma cried in vexation.
‘The taps of illicit drugs. Of illicit money. Any tap you can think of,’ Tauno said, still enigmatically, whirling his arms as if he were trying to take off in flight.
‘This can’t go on forever,’ Siiri said. ‘The renovation was supposed to last four months and so far it has lasted – how long has it been?’
‘Five months, two weeks and six days,’ Tauno stated. He tightened the straps on his backpack, fastened the leather loops, and, handling it as tenderly as a kitten, lowered it to his miserable excuse for a mattress. ‘It’s lasted longer than the Winter War. But I’ve lived through two wars, from the first trench to the final battle, and I’m not about to surrender now.’ He asked Irma and Siiri to leave and laboriously laid himself down on his mattress.
Siiri and Irma sat in silence for the whole ride back to Hakaniemi, at first on the number 4, then the number 9. Irma clutched her handbag in her lap as if it were the last thing on earth she owned, and Siiri clenched Anna-Liisa’s mahogany jewellery box.