The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘God’s blessings on this home,’ the preacher said mildly. ‘What are we celebrating here?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, we’re having a wake,’ Siiri said briskly.

  ‘Yes! We’re celebrating our dear friend’s unusually successful death!’ Irma added, making a show of taking a big gulp from her wine glass. ‘But lo, when the circle finally closes, we drink and forget everything. The Heath Cobblers, I don’t remember chapter and verse.’

  Pertti eyed the women sceptically and eventually leaned in towards Anna-Liisa, rigid and from too great a distance to bid the deceased a natural goodbye. It seemed to Irma and Siiri as if this messenger of God had never seen a dead body before. His face was twisted in an expression of faint horror, and he instinctively raised his hand to his mouth and nose.

  ‘Anna-Liisa died last night . . .’ Siiri began.

  ‘At 5:48 a.m. Or was it 4:84? Oh yes, that’s not a time, 4:84. It’s her favourite hymn, which we already sang before we found a bottle of wine in the pantry.’

  ‘I see,’ Pertti said, glancing uncertainly at the young men at the door, who nervously fiddled with their satchels as they stood sentry as if they had swallowed spears. ‘That makes our business all the more timely.’

  Siiri looked at the ringletted shepherd in disbelief. Was Pertti referring to the will? Siiri had forgotten all about the document; it was what they had come to deliver when they found Anna-Liisa expired in her bed. Siiri felt the blood rise to her face and her bile boil. She couldn’t restrain herself; she started shouting insults in the preacher’s face. ‘You vultures! You hyenas and carrion eaters! Is there no limit to your gall? How dare you come here before Anna-Liisa’s body is even cold to fill your bottomless pockets with her property. You should be ashamed of yourselves, you scavengers!’

  ‘Actually, her body is quite cold. Downright frigid,’ Irma interjected.

  ‘You and your wealth-management advice can be justifiably accused of causing Anna-Liisa’s death. She was so dismayed by your aggressive expert assistance that in the end she couldn’t even get out of bed.’

  Now Irma roused herself too, and jumped on-board.

  ‘Who knows, she might have died of cachexia while she was lying here alone. Cachexia! Do you know what that is, you snot-noses? My cousin Erik, who was the same age as Anna-Liisa, died—’

  ‘No cousins right now, Irma.’ Siiri felt like she was in the prime of her life. No force in the world would stop her now. She spoke in a steady, low voice, savouring the pauses. ‘Oh, don’t worry, no one is going to accuse you of anything. This death was as eagerly anticipated as all deaths are at Sunset Grove. And when it comes to that dismally infamous will . . .’ Siiri theatrically paused and went off to find her handbag. The men were so stunned by all they were witnessing they couldn’t get a word out. Siiri masterfully claimed the stage, strolling serenely into the living room and twirling around a few times before spotting her bag on the kitchen table. She unsnapped the old handbag and started rifling through its contents, taking her time to build suspense. In the end, she struck upon her goal and victoriously pulled out the will Anna-Liisa had signed. She held it aloft, like the bare-breasted woman waving the French flag in Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

  ‘Here it is! The document you so lust after!’

  Before anyone could say anything, Siiri tore the will in half. She tore it again and again until nothing but a pretty pile of shredded paper remained. Then she gathered the mound into her fist and shoved it into her cheerfully smiling mouth.

  She concluded with ‘It’s this simple,’ but it was hard to make out the words. She was pleased with her performance and knew Anna-Liisa would be proud of her. The only unpleasant aspect of this bravura moment was the faint nausea caused by the shredded paper.

  Irma clapped, spellbound. ‘Brava, Siiri! A superb performance! What do you have to say now, you imbeciles and infants?’

  ‘The destruction of an official document . . . A criminal act . . .’ Pertti cried in a panic. ‘In the presence of witnesses.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Irma said with a laugh. ‘Siiri ate her own shopping list. It read: “Half a litre of skimmed milk, one package of slightly spoiled liver casserole, a box of supple red wine, bread, butter, and cheese for the rat.” Isn’t that right, Siiri? Did I guess correctly?’

  Siiri had spat the shredded paper into her bag on the sly, because she was incapable of swallowing Anna-Liisa’s will as smoothly as she had hoped. Her mouth was dry, and the paper didn’t soften but formed a hard clump that refused to move towards her oesophagus. She turned towards her audience, trusted in her stage presence, pretended to munch on the paper and nodded at Irma. Then she rushed to retrieve her glass of wine from Anna-Liisa’s nightstand.

  ‘There we are. Now we’re ready,’ she said after draining her glass, at the same time washing the unpleasantness away. ‘Will you contact the police and the funeral home or do we have to do that, too?’

  ‘It’s not actually our responsibility—’ Pertti began, but Siiri shut him up.

  ‘Listen, if there’s anything that’s suitable for simpletons, it’s that. We don’t even have phones, so just reach into your suit pockets and pull out your smart gadgets, dial 112 and tell them that Anna-Liisa Petäjä, MA, passed in peace at the age of ninety-six in her own bed and in the presence of witnesses. You’ll discover that the world won’t come to an end. They’ll tell you what to do. We’ll wait right here for the police or some other authority to show up. But you have to leave, because we want to be alone. Even though death is a mundane occurrence at this age, Anna-Liisa was our dear friend, so we have a lot to digest here. Even more than in her will.’

  Siiri rubbed her belly with one hand as if the will were giving her a stomach-ache. Then she firmly pointed at the door.

  ‘Siribiribim and good day to you!’ Irma shouted as she shoved the suited men into the corridor, shoes in hand. ‘Remember to be good little boys and call emergency services right away!’

  Chapter 31

  The next one to die was Tauno, the same week as Anna-Liisa. Oiva told them when they happened to run into him in the lobby. That was life these days at Sunset Grove: no one knew anything, and residents were dropping right and left. This may have been due to the increased median age, but the general perception was that the gerontechnological conditions at Sunset Grove had boosted the mortality rate. And ever since the accidental casualties of the electricity outage had called unfortunate attention to themselves, the smartwalls no longer published electronic obituaries.

  They lived by rumours, and days could pass before word of a friend’s death reached the others. Even the flag outside Sunset Grove was no longer lowered to half-mast as a sign of mourning, presumably because it wasn’t sufficiently cost-effective to bring in a living human being to take care of it. All respect for the dead had vanished.

  ‘I suspected something, but not this . . .’ Oiva spluttered when they saw him. ‘We last spoke the night before last . . . Just chatted about this and that.’

  Oiva didn’t react to Tauno’s death as serenely as they had to Anna-Liisa’s skilfully executed exit. Oiva was beside himself with grief and required Siiri and Irma’s support.

  ‘He never really recovered from what he had to go through . . . I don’t even know exactly what happened . . . do you know what I’m talking about . . .’

  All they could do was listen as Oiva couched his tempest of emotions in fumbling words, then a cascade of sentences. They went into the canteen, and Irma carried over a plateful of cheerfully coloured cones and cylinders for Oiva.

  ‘Have something to eat, so you don’t die from cachexia, too.’

  ‘Tauno was ninety-three years old, but that doesn’t mean he should have died . . . at least not like this.’ Oiva cried heart-rendingly. He was convinced the Awaken Now! Association’s attempt at healing Tauno had robbed him of his will to live. ‘The thought that he’d have to go through something like that, after everything we’ve been through
together.’

  Tauno had evidently committed suicide, although whether this was actually the case remained unclear to Irma and Siiri, as Oiva spoke in meandering digressions, at times with food in his mouth, and was incapable of detailed reporting. Irma and Siiri tactfully refrained from asking the shocked man too many questions. Oiva had found Tauno in his nightshirt in bed at noon, and there had been three empty pharmaceutical vials on the nightstand. Sleeping aids and something else, but Tauno had left no note.

  ‘He wasn’t on any regular medication. He was a healthy man, always had been, never got sick or complained. Rainy-day pills of some sort, I don’t know why he would have had them . . . in such amounts.’

  Gradually Oiva calmed down and started remembering the life he and Tauno had shared, spooning the nutritional mash into his mouth at the same time. He was very hungry, and Irma treated him to a second serving from the MealMat. Food sprayed to the table as Oiva spoke, and the story sounded like an unbroken chain of difficulties: rejection from the family, being disinherited, trouble at work, evictions, fake wives, constant fear of being caught and who knows what other subterfuges, and they couldn’t follow which of the indignities had been suffered by Oiva, which by Tauno, and which by some third party. In the end, everything came to a climax at Sunset Grove, where Tauno and Oiva were refused admittance as a couple and where religious fanatics felt it was their duty to free Tauno of his demons, with tragic consequences.

  ‘That’s what broke him . . . that terrible treatment here.’

  ‘Probably,’ Siiri said thoughtfully. ‘And he’s not the only one who has settled on death as a sensible solution under the circumstances.’

  Silence fell. Oiva had finally eaten his fill and was wiping green mush from his walrus whiskers with his napkin. Eventually Irma decided to lighten the mood.

  ‘Oiva, did you know they invoice you for confirming a death?’ she said brightly. They had found the bill in Anna-Liisa’s home when they had gone to check if the fast-moving heirs had removed the furniture yet. ‘That’s how the City of Helsinki remembers its long-term residents. Fourteen euros and seventy cents. And for once the municipality acted swiftly; the invoice arrived before any decisions about the funeral had been made!’

  They tried to make sense of the bureaucratic bill and wondered if the city had instigated a bidding process for the service, as mandated by EU regulations. Perhaps health-care technology could have shaved a bit off the cost of the procedure.

  ‘Some magnetic tube and a handy little sensor to glance at the body, that would be handy.’

  Siiri and Irma had left the invoice on Anna-Liisa’s counter. They weren’t sure if the idea was that the dead person would personally pay the bill or if it was a cost covered by the retirement home. Anna-Liisa’s apartment had looked depressingly deserted now that its resident was gone, although her belongings were in place.

  ‘That’s the way it was in Tauno’s flat, too. And they hound you to empty the apartment so they can get the next paying customer in as quickly as possible,’ Oiva sighed. He had conscientiously started packing things the moment Tauno had been carted off to the morgue.

  Siiri and Irma had done a little poking about in Anna-Liisa’s cupboards and sniffed her belongings longingly. They each took one of the black mourning dresses in memory of their friend: Siiri a stylish straight dress, Irma a loose-wrap caftan that barely fitted her. They would wear them to Anna-Liisa’s funeral.

  Irma suggested they arrange a joint memorial service for Anna-Liisa and Tauno, but Oiva politely declined. Tauno didn’t belong to the church, and he and Oiva had planned their own modest ceremony at the seashore that involved nocturnal ash-scattering.

  ‘I have to do it on my own,’ Oiva said seriously. ‘And of course I will. For Tauno.’

  Chapter 32

  Too much was too much. One was forced to tolerate all sorts of injustices during one’s lifetime, they were used to that, but with Anna-Liisa’s and Tauno’s deaths a line had been crossed. Siiri and Irma could no longer sit still; they decided to investigate the premises of the Awaken Now! Association at the former Enso offices in Katajanokka. Anna-Liisa had said the cult’s headquarters were located there. And the more they thought about everything Anna-Liisa had told them, the more convinced they became that it was their responsibility to intervene in the activities of the criminal cult. After all, that had been Anna-Liisa’s intent; she had simply been too exhausted, despite having been first to catch scent of the volunteer organization’s true mission: robbing the elderly.

  ‘And a lot more, too. Like committing psychological violence,’ Irma said, as the number 4 tram sped down a grey Mannerheimintie towards downtown Helsinki.

  March was a dispiriting month. A thick crust of dirty ice covered the ground, and tall snow piles blocked the pavements. Nor were they an idyllic white, as in tourist advertisements for Lapland, but icebergs in variously shaded strata of brown, grey and black so heavily caked by road-sanding grit that the idea of them ever melting felt like an impossibility. Over a month would pass before the tiniest buds appeared on the birches. Grimy spatters smeared the windows, and no one bothered to wash them yet, as weeks of sleet and slush still remained in store. Siiri sighed deeply, her voice trembling, and felt the familiar pressure in her upper abdomen. It was sadness. Whenever someone dear to her died, she experienced this dark pain without being able to pinpoint its precise location. Near the liver, deep in the spleen, perhaps at the head of the small intestine. In the same vicinity as the unbridled joy and happiness she felt when something lovely happened. It was akin to grief. And she wouldn’t be grieving so concretely for Anna-Liisa or Tauno if they hadn’t brought her incredible amounts of joy in the last years of her life.

  ‘So we march in, find the supreme god of this cult and give him a piece of our mind, is that it?’

  Siiri came out of her reverie on Aleksanterinkatu, as Irma was concluding the plan of attack she had apparently been devising for the bulk of the tram ride. She gazed at the headquarters of the venerable insurance company Pohjola, the century-old structure designed by Gesellius, Lindgren and Saarinen. Logs and other national romantic conceits had been etched into the soapstone, but for some reason the gentlemen architects had turned over the design of the main entrance to a woman. Siiri loved the facade Hilda Flodin had arranged, its bright-eyed bear cubs standing stoutly and their mother slumbering off her exhaustion, the wood patterns reminiscent of Anton Gaudí, and the smiling and crying faces a reference to theatre. Had Flodin believed that to ever get compensation from the insurance company, one had to possess good acting skills? Siiri also wondered why the right-hand doorframe read ‘Kullervo’, the name of the most sorrow-ridden antihero from Finnish legend, under a beautiful lighting fixture. Perhaps the point was that if Kullervo had had homeowner’s insurance, he would have suffered less from the incineration of his house and his belligerent tour of vengeance? Siiri grunted sourly at her own thoughts, then started when Irma jabbed her in the arm with a dismayed grumble.

  ‘. . . and you haven’t heard a word I’ve said, you silly architecture fanatic. What am I ever going to do with you? Why did things have to end so sadly, with the two of us the only two left in this world? Siiri, are you sleeping? Or did you decide to go deaf at this blessed moment? Aren’t we supposed to get off at the next stop? I can already see that dreadful Sugar Cube, look! Are you ready for our blitzkrieg?’

  The tram curved from Mariankatu onto Kanavakatu and past the president’s palace, carrying them up to Alvar Aalto’s marble-faced, compellingly rhythmic edifice, where each square window was elegantly embedded in its individual niche. Siiri never tired of the beauty of this much-maligned building, but kept her mouth firmly shut, as she had no interest in arguing with Irma over whether the modern building was appropriate for the city’s silhouette.

  A moment later, they were standing at the doors to the former headquarters of the Enso company. The doors’ bronze handles had a familiar curve to them; Aalto had designed similar
ones for the House of Culture, the Pensions Institute and Finlandia Hall. Siiri wondered how often she had reached for a similar handle over her thirty-six years as a typist at the Pensions Institute. At the time, she hadn’t considered herself particularly privileged to be able to enjoy beautiful architecture every day. The Sugar Cube’s pillared portico commanded respect and even compelled Irma to think twice about the wisdom of their venture.

  ‘What on earth are we doing here? It’s a stroke of luck the cheapskates at Enso didn’t get their wish when they wanted to replace the frostbitten marble with granite. Imagine the tombstone this place would be. But the facade is no longer Carrera marble. Some funny intuition tells me this marble was imported from Portugal. Not that it makes much difference, except in terms of cost. I don’t suppose Portuguese stone will tolerate Finnish winters and freezing winds any better than Italian did. The granite foundation is stylish, I must say, but to have the whole building in granite . . . I never knew the main entrance is here at the west side. Somehow I imagined you entered through that recess across from the Uspenski Cathedral. I’m sorry, I’m babbling again.’

  They were standing in the immense lobby that had served not only as the port of call for the international paper giant but as the sales office for a shipbuilding company. After glancing around, they discovered a directory of clearly later vintage, a plastic plate that clashed badly with the dignified original interior. The names and logos of tenant companies were listed on it. Only one had a comprehensible name: Awaken Now! The others were progressively peculiar mishmashes of pseudo-Latin and global English: Carendo, Caritas, Sanario Senilitas, Midas, Funtander Consumer and Finnvalue Finance.