by Philip Teir
‘You can say what you like about Estonian workmen, but the ones who redid our kitchen were extremely meticulous,’ Katriina usually said whenever the subject came up.
Now, even in the dim light of November, anyone could see that the kitchen had passed its expiry date. The surface of the wood had multiple stains and grease spots. The cupboards really should have been regularly polished and oiled, but nothing had been done to them in all the years the family had lived in the flat. Some of the cupboard doors had loose hinges or refused to close fully, and the fridge – which had once been shiny white and modern, with an ice machine in the door and a container for bottles – had yellowed and was starting to make strange coughing noises. They never used the ice machine any more. One night it had stopped working after sending a flood of water cascading across the parquet floor in the hall.
‘There’s really nothing wrong with this kitchen. It just needs a little freshening up. No kitchen redesign lasts longer than fifteen years, not even a Puustelli Brothers kitchen.’ That was what Max had said when she’d broached the subject recently, and that was the extent of his comments.
When Katriina mentioned the matter of the kitchen to her children, they both agreed that she should have it redone.
‘You’ll make Mum happy if you get the kitchen redone,’ their older daughter, Helen, had said when she was visiting one weekend. Helen was the sensible one, and Max usually followed her advice.
‘Well, maybe. But I need to do it my way. If I let her take charge, who knows how the costs will skyrocket. It’s so easy for companies like that to tack on a thousand euros here, another thousand there, and for no good reason.’
‘But what kind of cost overruns are we really talking about? Two thousand euros here or there won’t matter much in the big scheme of things when you consider that the kitchen is going to last fifteen or twenty years.’
Katriina could hear from Helen’s voice that she was truly trying to coax her father into agreeing. She thought it was nice to know that at least the children were on her side.
Eva agreed with Helen. She’d been staying with her parents during the summer, and she had a ready opinion about everything. To such an extent, in fact, that Katriina’s patience had been tested daily.
‘Besides, it’s not just about the kitchen, Dad. It’s about your marriage. You can’t let this kitchen dispute turn into a weapon she uses against you. You need to choose your battles wisely, and think a bit more strategically.’
Eva always said exactly what she thought, and Katriina had the feeling that in this case her opinion had more to do with trying to provoke a reaction rather than taking her mother’s side in the matter. Eva was slender and blonde. She had the self-confidence and easy disdain of a person who has always been told how beautiful she is. Katriina would never say this to anyone (not even Tuula), but sometimes she had the feeling that Eva looked down on her, as if she couldn’t really accept that Katriina was her mother. That might be normal behaviour for a teenager. But a twenty-nine-year-old?
Katriina had paid attention to what her daughters said. And she had come up with her own idea of how the new kitchen should look: all white and shiny, no open shelves, and very modern, to an almost exaggerated degree. Cupboard doors that would roll and slide as if they were straight out of the interior of some science-fiction space ship. When she pictured her new kitchen in her mind, she also saw a life that was simple and white, white, white. Orderly and tidy. A life with perfect solutions to everything.
Katriina noticed that the food she’d eaten had made her tired. She went back to the bedroom and set the alarm clock for eight. Helen and the children were coming to visit later in the morning, and even if she couldn’t sleep, she did need to get a few hours of rest.
three
THE FLAT WAS FILLED WITH the sound of the grandchildren and of Katriina exclaiming loudly: ‘Oh, how wonderful!’ ‘Did you make that yourself?’ ‘What a lovely dress you have on!’ All the voices seemed to be coming from a life that was happening someplace else. Through the window Max could see that it had to be past nine, maybe closer to ten in the morning. Something about the dazzling light outside told him that the rain had turned to snow during the night.
He must have forgotten that Helen was coming to visit today. Katriina hadn’t mentioned it, but then she’d hardly said a word to him last night.
He lay in bed, thinking about a theory that had come to him in his sleep. What Katriina didn’t know, what she had no clue about, was that Max had actually given their kitchen a lot of thought over the past year. Max hated the word ‘integrated’. It seemed to be some sort of mantra that he kept hearing everywhere lately. Integrated, wireless, everything was supposed to be hidden away. In the future only blank surfaces would exist; everything was a potential touch screen. In Max’s opinion, the whole world was being transformed into a gallery. That was why he had a hard time accepting that Katriina wanted to order a clinical-looking kitchen from an interior design firm.
A home was meant to be comfortable; it should slowly fill with things that you loved, and with which you had some relationship. Max despised the whole modern building tradition, which involved throwing out all things old and human, and replacing them with severe, clean lines. Essentially, he thought that a home was a living organism. Why did so much of contemporary design require all sense of life to be erased? Why couldn’t people live in pleasant and beautiful settings? Why did everybody have to be forced into the same box-like structures, the same industrially produced mould, the same – and this was precisely what he meant – clinical laboratory surroundings? They were utterly without soul, and there was no reason for that. Today you could no longer see where consumerism ended and someone’s personal living space began. Everything was supposed to look like a hotel lobby or like the Keskinens’ sociopathic flat in Nordsjö.
Max had a theory that a lot of people based their aesthetic ideal on things that they’d encountered as children. For him, it was obvious that his ideas about Beauty with a capital ‘B’ stemmed from his childhood in Österbotten: the snug cottages, the red-painted buildings with white trim, the furniture handcrafted by uncles on both sides of his family for wedding gifts and Christmas presents. Furniture that had a history, that might have travelled across the Atlantic and could say something about people’s lives and hardships. It was impossible to establish any sort of relationship with a piece of furniture from IKEA; it held no surprises, no hidden inscriptions. And it had no story to tell, except possibly about the Chinese children who had toiled from morning to night making all the components.
Max also thought that certain experiences of beauty were comprised of something that lay deep inside the evolutionary coded consciousness of human beings. A study done in the nineties had shown that people all over the world tended to like the same kind of landscape, a landscape that largely resembled the savannahs where the human race first developed millions of years ago.
His train of thought was interrupted when his granddaughter Amanda suddenly came running into the room and jumped on to the bed to give him a hug. The annoyed feeling that he’d had only a few seconds earlier surged up inside him to be mixed with a feeling of gratitude and … what was it? Happiness? Amanda was an intelligent nine-year-old who seemed to love the world with a solemn passion. She hugged and petted him, whispering in his ear, ‘Grandpa, I love you,’ which always made Max melt, as if newly in love. This, if anything, thought Max, has to be an example of universal beauty. A grandchild’s smile.
‘Grandpa?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know what?’
‘What, sweetheart?’
Amanda sounded excited. She looked him in the eye. ‘Grandma says that you promised to do something with us today.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes! You’re going swimming with us.’
‘I am?’
‘Well, Grandma says that you don’t have anything more important to do today.’
‘Did she say that?’
Max thought it wasn’t such a dumb idea, after all. He had no desire to tackle his manuscript today.
‘Grandpa?’
‘Yes?’
Now Amanda sounded worried. ‘Do we have to take Lukas with us?’
‘You don’t want him to come along?’
‘No. He’ll just start whining because he thinks it’s too cold. And he’s not allowed in the big swimming pool.’
‘I think he’ll have to come too.’
Amanda sat up straight on the bed and peered at Max. ‘Grandpa?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t get upset, but your mouth smells yucky.’
Amanda made a big show of holding her nose. Max instantly closed his mouth, but he was also touched by her words: ‘Don’t get upset.’ He felt a lump in his throat.
‘That’s because I haven’t had time to brush my teeth yet. Hop down so I can go and do it. I need to get dressed and then I’ll be ready to go.’
Amanda ran out to the hall. Max got up, noticing at once how sluggish his whole body felt. Sometimes it could take an hour before all the machinery started functioning as it should. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth as he stood under the shower, doing a thorough job of it, brushing for several minutes to rid himself of the feeling that he smelled like an old man. He loved the anonymity that his grandchildren gave him – to them he was merely Grandpa. At least until the day when they discovered how to Google.
When he went into the living room he kissed his daughter on the forehead and asked: ‘Did Christian come with you?’
Helen lowered her eyes for a moment, as if hesitating over what to say. ‘Uh-huh. He must be looking for a parking place. You’re looking a little pale.’
‘I’m fine. I just didn’t sleep very well.’
Max had no intention of admitting that he’d been up late, sitting in front of the computer again. He realised that if he went to the swimming pool with the grandkids, the argument with Katriina – if it really was an argument – would be forgotten. The fact that Katriina had suggested he take them swimming was, in his view, practically a gesture of reconciliation on her part.
Katriina went into the kitchen and he followed. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail. Under normal circumstances he might have hugged her from behind, but today he settled for placing his hand on her shoulder.
‘Apparently I’m going swimming,’ he said.
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘Fine, fine. Could you take the dog for a walk first?’
‘Are you pissed off about something?’
‘Pissed off? I’m not pissed off. But the dog needs to go out. I took him out briefly early this morning, and now it looks as though he has to pee. Why don’t you take Amanda along to keep you company?’
As Max and Amanda stepped outdoors, he was struck by how the whole world had been transformed. The sun was shining and the air was very clear, so clear that he almost felt dizzy, a sober Finnish landscape that spoke directly to him, saying things like: pull yourself together, look sharp, today is the first day of the rest of your life!
They walked towards Töölö Bay, with Edvard happily running ahead alongside the buildings. Edvard was a West Highland white terrier, named after the nineteenth-century sociologist Edvard Westermarck, who had consumed Max’s thoughts over the past several years. The book he was writing was supposed to be the first real biography of Westermarck.
They stopped at the traffic light on Mannerheimvägen and waited for a tram to pass. Amanda was wearing a black winter jacket and a cap meant to resemble the head of a koala, ears and all.
The Sparbank wharf was visible across the water on the other side of Töölö Bay. Max’s office was on Kajsaniemi. Aside from a few trips abroad – first to Berkeley in the late seventies, then a brief stay in Oxford during the eighties, and another visit to Berkeley when the girls were little – he’d worked in the same two city neighbourhoods during his entire career as a researcher.
Max Paul was a sociology professor at the University of Helsinki. He’d held the post for fifteen years, giving guest lectures, writing books and articles, contributing to research projects, participating in an intellectual talk show in the nineties (called The Brain Trust), and attending various international conferences. He had at most five or six years left on the job before he retired. In the nineties he’d published a study about Finnish sexual habits (as part of FINSEX, a larger research project), and for a few years he did nothing but travel around speaking about the statistics related to the sexual practices of Finns. Helen and Eva were both teenagers at the time. Helen, in particular, had to endure the sting of notoriety when her classmates saw Max speaking on TV about the Finns’ relaxed attitude towards anal sex. One day she came home crying because a friend had seen a headline in which Max was dubbed ‘The Sex Doctor’. He’d had to explain that his work involved serious research and headlines like that never presented a proper image of sociology as a scientific discipline.
In three weeks Max would turn sixty.
When he was younger he’d never worried about time running out. Back then it seemed endless. Now it felt like the ten years between fifty and sixty had vanished in the blink of an eye. There was plenty of research showing that people experienced time as moving faster the older they got, and Max had definitely felt the effect of this phenomenon over the past few years. It was also said that it was possible to counter this feeling by giving your brain new experiences. One theory was that the brain registered new experiences more strongly than those that were repeated, which would explain why everyone could remember their first kiss, but not the thousandth. Yet this was a theory with rather problematic implications: what should a person do in order to constantly experience new things? Was that why Stefan and Gun-Maj took their yoga trips? To create new memories for themselves and in that way slow down time?
Max decided that he and Amanda should walk around the bay and go up to Fågelsången. From there they went across the bridge and headed towards Tokoistranden. Amanda kept up a lively chatter, jumping from one topic to another. (‘You know what food I hate the most? Fish with slimy gravy. We ALWAYS have that at school.’ ‘Grandpa, do you think some people never brush their hair?’) Max quickly noticed that it was enough to murmur a simple ‘hmm,’ and Amanda would be satisfied that he was paying attention. She seemed as preoccupied with her own thoughts as he was with his.
He’d started at the university in the autumn of 1970, when sociology was all the rage. People flocked to the courses. Marx was everyone’s professed idol, and the lectures were open to anyone who wanted to attend. Women students who came to the seminars would breastfeed their infants as they debated working conditions in the Finnish steel industry.
For Max it was an exciting and eye-opening time; he was swept up in leftist politics – and who wasn’t? – but he always found the partying more fun than the rhetoric. In the February of his first year as a university student, a week-long strike was organised, beginning at the sociology department. Max was assigned to the picket line, and he recalled how narrow-minded some of his fellow students seemed to be (‘We will never accept a sociology that takes precedence over the class struggle!’). They actually seemed to believe in a revolution, and a lot of them dropped out because it was only a matter of time before the university came under Marxist rule. They reminded him of those religious fanatics who eagerly await the end of the world.
Having grown up in Österbotten, with roots in the rural district of Kristinestad, Max had a hard time understanding his fellow students from Helsinki. Even though they talked about the labour theory of value and social alienation, many of them lived in flats they had inherited, thanks to the very societal structures they were protesting.
Max, on the other hand, had taken lodgings with a family in Rödbergen, with a reduction in rent because he helped take care of the family’s only child. Many of
his peers from Österbotten lived in student housing on Rautalampivägen in Vallgård, but he rarely visited them. He hadn’t come to Helsinki to spend time with other Österbotten natives, whose first language was Swedish. He was determined to learn to speak fluent Finnish as fast as possible. For the first six months he was forced to resort to his old high-school Finnish grammar book to figure out what to say every time he went into town.
His parents, Ebba and Vidar, came to visit him in Helsinki only once while he was at the university. He remembered it as an uncomfortable weekend, with his father constantly grumbling about how expensive everything was. He met them at the train station. They had decided to stay at the hotel in the nearby Sokos building, since they didn’t want to walk too far. One of the first things his father did after disembarking from the train was to comment on a dark-skinned man he saw on Mikaelsgatan. (‘I didn’t know you had Negroes here in Helsinki!’)
Max recalled how nervous his mother was about meeting the family he was living with. She’d phoned him ahead of time to ask what sort of gift she ought to bring and how much she should spend. He had assured her that a gift wasn’t necessary, and that the family might not even be home when they visited, but she insisted. So after they had checked into their hotel room, she took a hideous painting out of her suitcase – the kind of artwork that was popular back then (this was in 1971), presumably done by some local artist in Kristinestad, using pine cones and corks that had been spray-painted.
Now that Max thought back on the matter, he found the whole thing rather touching, but at the time he was furious, since he was painfully aware that his parents belonged to a different era – maybe even a different century. It was obvious that they didn’t fit in with the milieu that he’d now made his own. He was afraid that they’d drag him back down, into their musty old world.
