The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘Why did you tell me Irma Lännenleimu was in the basement? And that you were keeping a lookout to make sure no one noticed?’

  Siiri brushed away the question as casually as Irma, even though she had no gold bracelets jangling at her wrists. ‘Is that what I said? Oh dear, silly me. Don’t take anything I say seriously; after all, I’m ninety-seven years old and a bit dotty.’

  Chapter 29

  ‘You have to take the will back to Anna-Liisa,’ Irma chided Siiri, after licking the lingonberry jam from her plate.

  Siiri had been holding on to the will she’d found on Anna-Liisa’s nightstand for weeks without figuring out what to do with it, what with Mika refusing to take it. The steeper Anna-Liisa’s decline grew in the company of German literature and Charlie Chaplin, the worse the idea of bringing up the will seemed. But of course Irma was right. Siiri would have to grab the bull by the horns and deliver the document back to her friend. Siiri could tell her firmly but kindly that she’d be wise to retract her wish to turn over her property to the Awaken Now! Association. Siiri and Irma knew it wasn’t what Anna-Liisa really wanted, but that she simply didn’t have the energy to resist the pressure on her own, and now they had to present a solid, united front on behalf of their friend, as they always had in the past. Sirkka the Saver of Souls’ breakdown and the scandalous revelations she had leaked simply reinforced what Siiri and Irma had suspected from the start: the motivations of the religious volunteers weren’t altruistic, but suspect. The further away they stayed, the better.

  ‘Although I’d love to go down to the basement and nose about a bit,’ Irma said before they set off for Anna-Liisa’s to return the will.

  It was a normal morning at Sunset Grove: not a soul in sight. At the elevators, a lone cleaning creature spun in a circle and beat its head against the wall. It reminded them of the wild animals at the zoo that were confined to enclosures too small for them. Siiri and Irma meandered down the empty corridors and remarked on the machines’ narration as they passed.

  ‘Door. Opening.’

  ‘Why thank you; how very sweet of you.’

  ‘The. Elevator. Is. Empty.’

  ‘Ooh, how fascinating! Thank you for the information.’

  ‘He delivereth the poor in his affliction, and openeth their ears in oppression. Job 36:15.’

  ‘Hallelujah and Amen! Maybe Margit can finally get rid of her hearing aid.’

  Siiri missed the rats; it had been days since she’d seen a single one. Had Mika been so effective in chasing them from Sunset Grove? A couple of days after his visit, Siiri’s rat had come by to nibble at its piece of cheese, but since then its daily ration had remained untouched, which made Siiri sad.

  ‘I’d rather talk with a refrigerator than feed filthy vermin,’ Irma said.

  An abandoned or overworked caregiving robot, one of Ahaba’s relations, was lying in the middle of Anna-Liisa’s corridor. It had become clear of late that toiling with old people was even too onerous for many of the machines. Overstressed, inattentive, immobile and completely nonfunctional equipment was turning up with increasing frequency in random corners of Sunset Grove. Ahaba’s cousin didn’t show the least reaction, even though Siiri patted it.

  ‘Keep your head up, you’ll be fine. No one’s expecting miracles here. A bit of company and the occasional touch, but I don’t suppose you’ve been programmed for that.’

  ‘Yes, it’s not that contraption’s fault. The poor wretch isn’t to blame for its circumstances, just like us.’

  They left the stunted mechanized runt to its dozing and knocked on Anna-Liisa’s door. There was no answer, despite frequent attempts. The knocks echoed with a dreadful hollowness in the silent building, as if someone were endlessly repeating the first two counts of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but Siiri and Irma didn’t give up. There were no doorbells on the doors any more, so old-fashioned knocking was the only way to try to get in.

  ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo! It’s us, Anna-Liisa! Good morning!’ Irma screeched in her high singing-lesson voice, rousing the companion robot. ‘The sun’s already shining!’

  Then Irma retold the story of how she’d been at the villa and one of her darlings had come to wake her up at five in the morning to go fishing, crying in his bright boy soprano in the middle of the night that the sun’s already shining. Like many of Irma’s stories, Siiri had heard it thousands of times, and she smiled in satisfaction, as Irma was always so enthusiastic and happy as she recalled times past.

  But Anna-Liisa didn’t open the door for them. Then Siiri remembered that everything was connected to everything else and her fob would also open Anna-Liisa’s door. She pulled her watchband out of her sleeve and flashed the fob at the blob on the wall. Open Sesame, the door started opening in their faces. ‘Eureka, it worked!’

  The air inside was stale, and the apartment was very dim. Anna-Liisa had drawn the curtains across the window and clearly hadn’t remembered to air the place for a few days. A curious agitation came over Siiri in the hallway, as if something were awry.

  ‘Yoo-hoo, Anna-Liisa! Are you still asleep? It’s broad daylight!’

  Irma marched in to pull back the curtains. The March sun shone in through the grit-spattered windows, revealing the dust motes that had descended over Anna-Liisa’s scant furnishings. Siiri went into the bedroom and found Anna-Liisa in her marriage bed with her reading glasses on. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain lay open on the bedspread, and Anna-Liisa’s hand was resting on a page of the book. She had fallen asleep while reading and hadn’t even woken to their cries. The random pile of yellow Post-Its was still on the nightstand, along with a small black notebook and four pencil stubs that had been sharpened down to the quick.

  Siiri reached down to remove Anna-Liisa’s reading glasses, but before her fingers touched them she felt Irma’s hand on her shoulder and started. She hadn’t heard her friend enter the room.

  ‘Siiri, she’s dead.’

  Irma whispered so softly her voice was barely audible. Siiri looked at Anna-Liisa, who didn’t look dead. She had genuinely believed her friend was asleep and had been trying not to wake her. Now she took a closer look at Anna-Liisa lying in the gloom, and her heart started racing arrhythmically. She carefully took hold of Anna-Liisa’s hand. It was cold and stiff. Her eyes were closed, and she had a restful look on her face, although her mouth hung open slightly. She looked incredibly beautiful, miraculously smooth-faced and younger than normal. Anna-Liisa Petäjä had truly died.

  Siiri could hear Anna-Liisa’s voice in her ears, resonant and powerful, and could picture her smile, slightly amused but accepting when Siiri and Irma had acted up in the middle of one of Anna-Liisa’s book clubs or lectures. And her laugh! It tinkled in Siiri’s ears as it had back when the new red spring hat, a token of Onni’s love, had appeared on Anna-Liisa’s head. So this was how Anna-Liisa had died and left them? Anna-Liisa, who had brought so much sense, order and grammar to their lives?

  ‘She bowed out in style,’ Siiri said, stroking Anna-Liisa’s cold forehead. She bent down to give her friend a kiss, her final farewell, even though Anna-Liisa was who knows where by now. Then she gently removed the reading glasses from Anna-Liisa’s nose and stroked the coarse, silver-white hair. She had read somewhere that hair kept growing after death, and thought it might still somehow contain a hint of the living Anna-Liisa.

  ‘Oh heavenly days! What a calamity! How did this happen?’

  Suddenly Irma was vociferously upset, bustled back and forth at the foot of the bed and clapped her hands together without looking at Anna-Liisa. Siiri left the bedside and went over to Irma, wrapped her arms around her friend and soothed her, rocking her like a little child. It put her at ease, too, feeling another’s warmth.

  ‘Anna-Liisa was lucky. She died in her sleep. Look how her eyes are so beautifully closed. She was reading The Magic Mountain, shut her eyes, and died. Could there be a finer end to a life?’

  Irma sighed and looked doubtfully at Anna-Liisa. She had
to admit that it was a lovely sight. Anna-Liisa’s grey hair was clean and combed, and her white nightshirt looked like it had just been pressed. Everything was like a scene from an American movie; even the light from the living room fell magically on Anna-Liisa’s face. The serenity there was conclusive, and for that reason merciful. Downright enviable, at least in the minds of her still-living contemporaries. The crowning touch was the book Anna-Liisa had studied so diligently in her final weeks, as she prepared to welcome death.

  ‘It is wonderful that she was able to die with her passion at her side,’ Irma said, bending down to pick up The Magic Mountain. She glanced at the page open there. It was from the end of the long chapter ‘Snow’, when Hans Castorp gets lost in a blizzard and wanders at the fringes of his consciousness. When he recovers, he feels unusually clear-sighted and ponders death, without which there would be no life.

  ‘Remarkable, Anna-Liisa knowing to die over such reflections,’ Irma said in astonishment.

  Anna-Liisa knew the novel from front to back and might well have opened it at the desired page when she sensed death approach. Was it possible to intuit one’s death? Siiri believed it was. So many stories supported the notion. People expressing important things before expiring, completing tasks and then being prepared to close their eyes. Those long-term cancer patients who refused to die, confounding their physicians’ prognoses until they were able to see their loved ones and only then loosening their grip on life. That couldn’t be chance.

  ‘You must be kidding. Look!’ Irma suddenly cried. Siiri had been so lost in thought that she hadn’t noticed Irma had risen. Now she was standing at the smartwall and pointing at it.

  ‘Fatal error! No measurable sleep results! Verify that 1) the sensor is in place 2) the device is on 3) the patient is alive.’

  ‘I wonder how long that announcement has been there?’ Irma huffed. ‘If we hadn’t happened to come in here, Anna-Liisa would have rotted away before the automatic alarm system alerted some volunteer lazybones to check the sensors and verify the death. This voyeurism-based elder-care is even more preposterous than enhanced in-home care! The only thing more absurd would be a cross-eyed Cyclops.’

  ‘Should we call a doctor? A doctor always has to confirm the death; otherwise there will be problems.’

  Irma started reminiscing about her various cousins’ deaths, how one had been found in a pool of her own vomit, and how even though a blockhead would have realized that her cousin Heddi was no more and guessed the cause had been a heart attack, Heddi had been frozen for weeks until someone had time to perform an autopsy. To everyone’s great surprise, the cause of death was determined to be a heart attack.

  ‘Madness, in other words. And my cousin Erik starved to death, on purpose of course, after having been left a widower for a third time at the age of ninety-eight and ending up in a municipal retirement home, but investigating his death also demanded enormous resources and costly hours of professional input from a variety of fields. In the end, his grandchildren received a piece of paper in the mail noting cachexia as the cause of death and then presenting bizarre suspicions regarding supposed neglect, even though cousin Erik was never in anyone’s care. There can be no neglect, can there, if there’s no one to do the neglecting? Oh well, I suppose some random social worker came by once a week with her computer to report on her own doings. That is a delicious word, though, cachexia. But let’s not rush now; let’s take our time and enjoy Anna-Liisa’s company while we can before the authorities barge in to bag her up.’

  They perched a little uncomfortably on Anna-Liisa’s vast bed and gazed reverently at their friend. For a long time nothing happened. They simply sat there, lost in thought, and it was lovely. Siiri felt a warm touch on her shoulder, even though there was no one there. It seemed as if Anna-Liisa’s scent was surrounding her with an unusual intensity; it was a smell she’d never paid any attention to but now recognized. As if Anna-Liisa were present. Odd how death could involve so many inexplicable phenomena, even at the age of ninety-seven. Siiri remembered the composer Jean Sibelius’s death, the flight of cranes that had flown over his home, one of which had broken off to circle the house before rejoining the flock, and the simultaneous radio concert being broadcast from the university’s great hall, where a white butterfly had fluttered indoors in late September to bear news of the death to the audience. There was something awe-inspiring about such events. Maybe it was a good thing humans couldn’t explain everything.

  Eventually Irma got up and started studying the notes on the nightstand. They contained muddled phrases, random sentiments from various sources and Anna-Liisa’s thoughts.

  ‘Sobriety and gravity are the pillar of existence (Sepeteus, The Heath Cobblers). Youth hopes for everything, old age for nothing (Sakari Topelius). That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else (Limelight). To this class old age especially belongs, which all men wish to attain and yet reproach when attained (Cicero). Wagtails in February, not a good sign. The reporter from YLE Radio 1 said: “if she was”.’

  Irma arranged the notes into a tidy stack and shook her head. They portended death and the end of the world. And when the announcer from public radio’s cultural programming abused the subjunctive form and wagtails arrived in southern Finland three months early, the final shreds of Anna-Liisa’s will to live had blown away.

  Irma found one more note that consisted of nothing but numbers.

  ‘What’s this? She wrote 484548 on a slip of paper.’ Anna-Liisa’s hand had been extremely weak, and they had a hard time making out the numbers. They racked their brains trying to decipher the reference.

  ‘What if it’s two numbers?’ Irma said.

  ‘And they’re hymns?’ Siiri suggested.

  ‘Shuffle and cut!’ Irma exclaimed. ‘“Spirit of Truth” and “Walk with Me, Lord”. Hymns 484 and 548.’

  ‘I’m glad one of us is still playing with a full pack. Do you suppose Anna-Liisa was planning her funeral?’

  ‘Good heavens! We’ll have to find the strength to arrange that, too. Although it might actually be quite nice, and we can plan our own funerals while we’re at it. Let’s make a template, a funeral template: enter the church here, the Bach chorale there and a tasty sandwich cake there. It will be fun and therapeutic! That’s what they say these days, therapeutic. People turn to their doctors for happy pills to be able to stand their grief, and I’m sure they’re offered funeral therapy too, as needed. That way they can avoid facing their sorrow. Isn’t that odd? This bit of paper is a good start for a funeral; I like these hymns. I could use them myself. Hilja Haahti’s and Sakari Topelius’s gorgeous lyrics. Did you know I’m related to Hilja Haahti? She was my great-aunt. Good choice, Anna-Liisa,’ Irma said, patting her friend’s colourless cheek.

  They started pondering when Anna-Liisa must have died. Irma had collected her glasses from Anna-Liisa’s apartment around six o’clock the previous evening, and at the time Anna-Liisa had been talkative and in good spirits, despite being in bed. Irma couldn’t remember what they had talked about.

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t hymns, though,’ she mused.

  All signs indicated that Anna-Liisa must have drifted off into her ultimate slumber in the middle of the night. She was cold, her limbs were stiff and they couldn’t get her chin to stay in place when they tried to close her mouth.

  ‘Rigor mortis starts a couple of hours after death and lasts for a few days,’ Siiri said, accurately.

  ‘And she used to like to read when she couldn’t sleep. She might have woken up after midnight to read. Was that reading lamp on or did you turn it off?’

  ‘I didn’t touch it. Maybe Anna-Liisa turned it off herself. She was always so . . . sensible. I could imagine her turning it off so she could die without wasting electricity.’

  They decided to announce Anna-Liisa’s time of death as 5:48, because it was the number of the deceased’s favourite hymn. It sounded as precise as the times of death noted on the offi
cial documents, although death never took place in one minute.

  Then they carried out a little ritual in Anna-Liisa’s honour. Siiri started reading The Magic Mountain out loud more or less from where Irma had left off.

  ‘Death is a great power . . . Reason stands foolish before him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love – there is no rhyming them . . . Love stands opposed to death – it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, yields kind thoughts.’

  Siiri read in a steady voice, rather softly, as if trying not to disturb her friend who had turned her face towards death. Each word was charged with extraordinary significance, as those lines pertained to the imminent death the lover of literature had welcomed with the beloved novel she had read so many times.

  Siiri closed the book. She and Irma sang the hymns Anna-Liisa had noted, all the verses from memory, and in the end belted out the jolly Schlager ‘Siribiribim’, because when it came down to it this was a day of joy and jubilation. Anna-Liisa had happily forsaken all her earthly cares in one massive sigh. Everyone hoped to die just as she had at that midnight moment: in one’s own bed, without pain, of old age.

  Chapter 30

  ‘What do you think, do you suppose Anna-Liisa has some red wine in her cupboard?’

  Irma was already flinging the cabinet doors open. To their happy surprise, they found a bottle in Anna-Liisa’s pantry next to the cream-of-wheat. It had a fancy label and a twist-cap, which Irma managed to open with only a few swear words. Just as they were toasting their friend’s memory at her deathbed, giggling about all the fun they had experienced together, a familiar curly-headed fellow stepped into the hallway accompanied by his paladins. All three removed their shoes at the door and crept into the dim bedroom without saying a word. Pertti had a hole in the heel of his left sock. Siiri decided it was a fitting moment to offer the fellow some darning assistance; she even had a clever little darning mushroom tucked away somewhere.