The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  ‘. . . I mean a, you know, a sauna, please?’

  ‘Do you have a towel?’ the man asks. Damn, I don’t. Now I will be exposed for the sauna rookie I am. No matter, he can rent me one he says. He gives it to me along with a key dangling from a rubber wristband and gestures to a door on my right.

  Inside the timeworn, wood-panelled changing room I am greeted by a gaggle of saggy, white, wrinkled backsides. At least, I notice with relief, there are no women, which would have presented a whole other range of challenges. I find a hidden corner and begin to disrobe. I place my clothes in the locker and stand holding my towel. But what next? I have little idea. Should I wrap the towel around my waist, or would that – heaven forbid – appear prudish and Anglo-Saxon? Perhaps there are different grades of nudity depending on where you go in the sauna complex. Come to think of it, I don’t even know which direction I am supposed to be going. I pretend to order my things once again, watching the others out of the corner of my eye while at the same time conscious of the risk of being caught perving anyone up. Eventually another sauna-goer walks past me, his towel tossed jauntily over his shoulder, his buttocks rising and falling like someone weighing up a pair of blancmanges, and exits through another door. I decide to follow him, my towel now over my shoulder.

  Walking naked in public I feel immediately, cripplingly self-conscious. The more I try to concentrate on walking normally, the more awkward my gait becomes. We enter the shower room and I am horrified to see that, at one end of the room, a man lies naked on a massage table where he is being beaten with with a birch switch BY A WOMAN.

  She is clothed and carries on without looking up, but, well, for heaven’s sake! I bustle over to a shower and turn to face the wall. Having washed, I realise with mounting panic that I have lost the man I was shadowing. Where has he gone and, crucially, has he taken his towel with him? There are several towels hanging on the wall but is one of them his? What am I supposed to do now? I know that the Finns are obsessive about sauna cleanliness. Would a towel be considered unhygienic in the sauna itself? Or would it be considered unhygienic not to take a towel in with me? Would I need it to sit on, or are you supposed to experience a sauna bare-bottomed? Oh God! Why did I even consider subjecting myself to such indignities?

  Another door, at the far end of the shower room, opens and a large gust of steam billows out. A man carrying a towel enters. Aha! I catch the door as it is closing and enter the sauna. The air is hot and wet and smells pleasantly of wood smoke without being smoky. Inside all is dark but then my eyes begin to adjust. Two sides of the room are taken up with concrete steps formed in a right-angle. Through thick steam I can make out two figures: the man I had been following, and another man, not dissimilar to the late American actor, Ernest Borgnine. He has a cannonball belly which, thankfully, shields his nether regions from view. The men are sitting as far away from each other as possible, which immediately presents me with another dilemma. Where should I sit? I notice that there are small wooden pallets stacked by the door. Are they for sitting on? I pluck up the courage and asked Ernest. He grunts something indecipherable but hostile in tone. It appears that merely by speaking I have already breached some aspect of sauna etiquette.

  I smile weakly, take one of the pallets and sit in the middle of the sauna, precisely equidistant from the other men. I had been warned by my sauna fanatic friend that the higher up you sit in a sauna, the hotter it gets. Not wanting to appear the feeble foreigner, I choose a mid-range step, one step higher than the other two occupants, and sit down.

  Within three seconds my face is burning. Trickles of sweat start to tickle all over my body. After about a minute, my lips are red raw and each breath burns my lungs, but there is no way I am leaving this room before one, or both, of the other men. Another man enters. He leans over and turns some kind of tap. An unearthly noise rumbles up somewhere in the bowels of the sauna, and steam fills the room. The temperature rises by a good couple of degrees and, as I sit there for another couple of minutes, I am mortified to notice that every new arrival thereafter opens the tap like this. Etiquette breach No. 2.

  Time passes, very, very slowly. I grow resigned to my nakedness, almost at ease it with. It still troubles me, obviously, but the silence is far more vexing. Two more men enter, turn up the heat, and sit together. Clearly they are friends, but they do not exchange a single word.

  Ernest Borgnine leaves. So does the other man. I now have an excuse to leave myself but, the truth is, I want to stay. The burning heat, the pumping heart, the floods of sweat – I am finding it all strangely compulsive. Ernest Borgnine returns, followed soon after by the other man. Of course! They have been for a cold shower.

  Prior to coming to the sauna, I had given the whole cold shower/ice plunge aspect a great deal of thought and decided that there was no way I would subject my body to that kind of masochistic abuse. It is not so much that I have a low pain threshold, more that, as my wife will gladly tell anyone who’d care to know, I have zero tolerance for even minor discomfort; you’ll find no woollen trousers in my wardrobe; pebbly beaches are a no-go. But, right now, a cold shower actually sounds rather appealing.

  I go out, stand beneath the shower head, brace myself, turn the handle to full cold and am drenched in an icy waterfall more refreshing, invigorating and, strangely, soothing, than anything I have ever experienced. It is wonderful.

  Back in the sauna I head straight for the top step, high above Ernest. It is scorchingly, bakingly hot. My head begins to swim. My vision goes speckly and I am forced to slink down a few steps, forgetting the wooden pallet, and branding my bum on the concrete when I sit back down. I muffle a yelp, take a deep, burning breath, and try not to look at the next two arrivals – Colonel Blimp and Tollund Man – as their sex vegetables swing by.

  Increasingly short of breath and, I fear, close to cardiac arrest, I totter out, shower, dress and emerged into the brisk dusk of Helsinki feeling cleaner than I have ever felt, fiercely thirsty, and exhausted.

  I am still sweating copiously an hour later as I sit drinking the most fantastic, crystal gold chilled beer of my life in a bar back in the centre of town, reflecting on the Finns and their sauna addiction. Against all the odds, I had enjoyed my visit, although my feelings about public nudity are, if anything, now all the more entrenched, and I can’t say I’ll be rushing back. But why are the Finns so obsessed by saunas? Is it some inherent masochism, or its close cousin, machismo? Do the Finns feel they deserve some kind of daily punishment? Or, is it just that, because it’s so damn cold most of the time, they have an extra need for warmth in their bones? If so, whither Canadian sauna culture?

  It certainly didn’t seem to be doing much for them in terms of social interaction, so why pretend otherwise? It seemed to me that – at least from my brief experience, and I may have been unlucky, or unbeknownst to me, visited on the weekly quiet day – the Finnish sauna experience is characterised as much by the communal silence as it is by the heat. This may be the root of the sauna’s appeal to the Finns. They are a famously non-verbal race.

  ‘Foreigners in Finland are struck by the taciturnity of the males,’ wrote US academic and Finnish expat Richard D. Lewis in his book Finland, Cultural Lone Wolf. The Finns, he says, dislike gossip or extraneous chitchat. Lewis is very much of the geographical determinism persuasion, believing that the Finnish climate and environment have directly formed the character of the people here: ‘Low temperatures necessitate outdoor succinctness. One does not dally on the street at 20 degrees below freezing . . . A broad American smile in a Helsinki easterly makes one’s front teeth ache.’

  Finland’s climate and topography must clearly have played a part in forming the Finnish character, but it also seems likely that the Finns’ taciturnity is in some way connected to their homogeneity. Finland has very little ethnic diversity (only 2.5 per cent of the population are immigrants, compared with over a third in neighbouring Sweden). So, if you were to interpret Finnish society according to the famous high-conte
xt/low-context theories of US anthropologist Edward T. Hall, it would be considered a very high-context culture – probably one of the highest context cultures in the world.

  According to Hall, a ‘high context’ culture is one in which the people share the same kind of expectations, experiences, background, and even genes. Such people have less need for verbal communication because they already know so much about each other and the situations in which they typically find themselves. In high-context cultures words take on a greater meaning, but fewer are needed. In a low-context culture, like London, where hundreds of different nationalities, races and religions are represented, there is a greater need to communicate verbally to be sure of making oneself understood. There is less common ground, fewer unspoken assumptions are made, more gaps need to be filled in.

  This could be said, in varying degrees, of all the Nordic countries. They are all comparatively homogenous and thus high-context. Norwegian social anthropologist Tord Larsen identified a similar phenomenon in Norway where, because everyone is broadly similar, ‘paradoxes and surprises are rare’. In such high-context societies as Finland and Norway, it is generally easy to predict what kind of people you are dealing with, how they are thinking, how they will act and react. The Finns barely need to speak to each other at all.

  ‘Finnish small talk is minimalist in terms of communication, but can convey the same amount of information as a two-minute conversation,’ agreed Roman Schatz. ‘You can be with a Finn in silence for some minutes and all of a sudden they will say, “Give me the coffee,” and you’ll think, “Wow, that was blunt,” but the thing is, we are friends, we don’t need to verbalise everything like the English, with their “Would you mind awfullys,” and their “Please thank you terriblys.”’

  Though the Finns’ taciturnity may work among themselves, problems arise when they travel or have to work with foreigners. The men, in particular, can be simply too frank, too direct, sometimes to the point of rudeness. They find it especially challenging to engage in the social lubricant of small talk, something even Norwegians can manage if they put their minds to it.

  ‘Finns distrust verbosity. If you speak for more than four or five minutes at a time, they begin to wonder what you are trying to hide,’ writes US academic and expat in Finland, Richard D. Lewis, adding that they belong to a reactive or listening culture, one which does not typically initiate conversations but prefers to watch and wait and see how things pan out before contributing. Lewis concedes there are historical as well as geographical influences at work here: ‘Sandwiched between Swedish and Russian bosses in a cold climate, Finns had no incentive to open their mouths unless they were asked to.’

  A Finnish acquaintance told me this story, which he said perfectly sums up the Finns’ attitude towards the normal conventions of human interaction. He and his brother-in-law were driving in a blizzard in the countryside when their car broke down. They waited for half an hour before another car finally passed. It stopped and the driver got out to help them. He peered under the bonnet and managed to get their car started for them, all in silence. There was a nod or two of acknowledgement, but my friend swears not a single word was exchanged. The man drove off. My friend said, ‘Wow, we were lucky there. Wonder who he was?’ To which his brother-in-law answered, ‘Oh, that was Juha, we went to school together.’

  Another Finn told me that on her days off she loves to go walking up in the hills but she admitted that she prefers to walk alone and that if any friends or family offer to join her she gets vaguely irritated. ‘If we go walking and stay overnight in one of the public cabins up there and find another group is also staying in them, I do get disappointed. I think most Finns would be. We would always prefer to be alone,’ she told me. And she was one of the chatty ones. In contrast, most Danes would positively relish meeting other Danes in such circumstances; it would be another chance to find common acquaintances, share a can of Tuborg or two and sing some songs.

  ‘I get headaches when I visit Helsinki for more than a couple of days – there are simply too many people, not enough personal space,’ another Finnish woman told me. ‘I went to Hong Kong once,’ she said, shuddering at the memory. ‘It was just too much. The people!’

  Once, when flying over the country, I looked down as Finland passed by beneath me. I was struck by how, even in the midst of what appeared to be forest wilderness (75 per cent of Finland is forest wilderness, with another 10 per cent frigid lakes), I would occasionally spot a flash of sunlight reflected from the Velux window of an isolated house, or the smoke rising from a sauna, apparently many miles from civilisation. ‘A Finn is at peace,’ I thought to myself, strangely comforted by the thought, ‘without a neighbour in sight.’

  The Finnish reticence might also be interpreted as shyness. The Finnish for shy, ujo, doesn’t carry the negative connotations it does in English, nor do the various other words for ‘shy’ elsewhere in the Nordic region. Up here in this part of the world, where modesty and equality are so esteemed, shyness is not perceived as a social handicap but, more often, as a quality demonstrating modesty, restraint, one’s willingness to listen to others.

  There are, though, varying degrees of Scandinavian shyness. In the category of ‘really good to sit next to on a long-haul flight but not so great if you are sat next to them at a dinner party’, the Finns are the heaviest dance partners conversation-wise, followed by the Swedes who share the Finns’ fondness for silence; then come the Norwegians and Icelanders. The Danes are almost human in this context. Perhaps because they have a tradition of being a trading people and are closer to mainland Europe, they are more comfortable with small talk – the hygge imperative at work. As a result of this, the rest of Scandinavia eyes the Danes with some suspicion – they are the Slick Willies and blabbermouths of the region: ‘They’ve a little of the south in their blood,’ is how one Norwegian put it to me, quite seriously.

  This description of the Danes as almost Latin in temperament – as fast-talking, party-loving, rule-bending, devil-may-care, maverick sophisticates – can seem a little far-fetched to those who have actually visited Denmark. On first acquaintance the Danes seemed to me to be pretty much like Germans, but with better furniture. Having now spent some time among them and their sibling tribes, I can see why the Danes have this image further north. Compared to a Finn or a Swede your Dane is a veritable Las Vegas cabaret host.

  There is definitely a gender division when it comes to Nordic reticence: Scandinavian men are, broadly speaking, comfortable with silence, while the women are generally more willing to help put a foreigner at ease. Of course, this may well be down to my considerable personal charms, but in Finland I found the women far, far more chatty than the menfolk. That said, to give them their due credit, at least you know that, when the men have finally thought long enough about their contribution to a conversation, you will get their definitive opinion, unembellished with linguistic flourishes, unburdened by etiquette or politesse, an opinion not to be changed.

  Still, one imagines that, as they glide through the salons of Paris, or venture out into polite society in London or Tokyo, the Finns must leave a good deal of bemused and offended people in their wake. They are said to share many traits with the Japanese – according to Richard Lewis they employ virtually no body language, are good listeners, non confrontational, and so on – but even the Japanese find the directness and abruptness of the Finns upsetting.

  A digression: we have heard how the Scandinavians are not especially chatty, but they do have some mysterious, non-linguistic ways of communicating which, as with the high-frequency clicks emitted by bats, are virtually inaudible to the rest of us. This is their portfolio of seemingly insignificant subvocal utterances, which I am only just now learning to decode. The most common is the brief, sharp intake of breath, which is used in combination with a slight grunt, to indicate a kind of agreement; something along the lines of a ‘yes, but’. With some Danes this can be quite pronounced, and the first few times I found myself on the re
ceiving end I grew alarmed and wondered if the person I was talking to was having some kind of fit. Richard D. Lewis describes the Finnish version of this as ‘sighs, almost inaudible groans, and agreeable grunts’. Every race and language has their affirmative ‘uh-huhs’, their quizzical ‘hmm?s’, and their verbal tics, but the Scandinavians seem to have turned them into a key mode of communication.

  In some senses, the Finns can be considered über-Scandinavians. As we have discovered, the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians self-censor according to Jante Law – one must not boast about one’s achievements or possessions, one mustn’t think one is better than anyone else, and so on. The Finns take this kind of modesty to a whole other level, to the extent that many claim it has a negative effect on their export economy.

  ‘We don’t have the guts to go out there and bravely boast about how good we are,’ the country’s tourism director said recently. ‘We stand in the corner with our hands in our pockets and hope that somebody will pay attention to us.’

  Roman Schatz has a similar take on Finnish modesty. ‘Take a screw. An American presenting a screw would say something like, “This screw is going to change your life! It will make you happy. It is the best screw in the world,” and then bore you for two-and-a-half hours about the technical details of that screw. A Finn will just say, “Here is screw.” Selling something is so much against the Finnish mentality. Only untrustworthy people sell or market things. But of course that doesn’t work in a global context.’

  Sometimes it doesn’t even work in a Finnish context either. Heikki Aittokoski, the foreign editor of Finland’s leading broadsheet newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, told me he often felt frustrated by his colleagues’ reticence. ‘I like that Finns are low-key,’ said Aittokoski, who had worked as a correspondent in Berlin and Brussels before returning home. ‘But I have trouble at work when journalists are presenting ideas and good stories. They never say, “We should run this big.” I keep telling them they can be proud of their ideas. I was looking for someone from another department who spoke good English. I found someone and asked her if it was true, and she said, “Well, I suppose. I studied it a bit.” It turned out she majored in English! She was totally fluent.’