‘Public radio employees have time to go to funerals. On our tax contributions,’ said the Ambassador, loud enough to be heard.
‘Public radio funds come from licence fees, not taxes,’ Margit Partanen corrected him even more loudly.
‘But didn’t they just change it? Isn’t it taxes now instead of licence fees? Our tax payment doubled. They’ve laid on so many taxes that pretty soon they’ll tax you to get laid,’ her husband said, and Margit silenced his babbling as efficiently as ever by hissing a threat in his ear.
Munkkiniemi Church had slippery, pale-coloured pews and the floor sloped steeply downwards. This had its good points, because you could see the coffin even from the last row but the downside was that their Zimmer frames and wheelchairs kept rolling uncontrollably downhill. The pastor spoke into a microphone. This was hard for them to understand – why weren’t people able to talk without a microphone? Even in churches built in the fourteen hundreds, there were microphones and speakers now, as if no one would be able to hear without them.
‘What? Hear what?’ asked Margit as everyone fell silent for the prayer.
The pastor was a relative of the Hat Lady and was certainly over ninety himself, a tottering old man whose voice broke from emotion and a heart malfunction. He had to take long pauses and lean on his crutches, and when he trowelled some sand onto the coffin, ‘. . . from dust you came, to dust you shall return . . .’ and so on, they feared he was going to topple over completely. But by some miracle he made it through alive and dragged himself with the last of his strength to sit down on a chair behind a pillar. The cantor had such a jazzy intro for the hymn that it took them a little while to realize that it was the familiar, lovely tune ‘Come with Me, Lord Jesus’.
The presentation of flowers wasn’t until the end of the ceremony, but they didn’t dare go up to the coffin. They would have first had to slide down the hill and then find the strength to climb back up afterwards, which was a recipe for tragicomedy. The other mourners were more interesting to watch than usual anyway.
‘To Aino, an editor who was a cut above,’ said a stocky man with an awfully familiar voice as he put a bouquet of glowing red roses on the coffin.
‘Isn’t he the sports announcer who was drunk at the Sapporo Olympics? It was a terrible scandal. What was his name?’
They tried to beat each other at recognizing the public radio personalities who were taking turns leaving flowers and saying their personal farewells to the Hat Lady.
‘I’ll never forget your hat,’ whispered a bent, bearded man.
The Ambassador and Anna-Liisa almost had a fight about this bearded fellow when they couldn’t make up their minds whether he was an anchor or a correspondent. Or, rather, a former correspondent, since all of these people were long past retirement and not likely to be wasting the Ambassador’s tax money. After the presentation of the flowers the cantor improvised a cacophonous piece and eight decrepit men, most of them radio legends, carried the coffin, huffing and puffing, up the hill to the foyer, across the courtyard, and down some stairs to the hearse. It hadn’t occurred to the architect to just put the stairs in front of the door.
They decided to go to the memorial service, upstairs at Restaurant Ukko-Munkki, because they hadn’t yet had a chance to name all the famous public radio retirees and it was exciting to think of a memorial with such drinking companions as these.
‘Public radio live,’ the Ambassador said, and Anna-Liisa almost giggled, hanging on her new friend’s arm.
The pastor-relative who was at death’s door didn’t come to the bar at all, but a scar-faced, long-haired lay preacher from the Hat Lady’s Bible study group served as host. He spoke fervently, leaning on the bar, of Ms Aino’s deep faith and the fulfilment of her life after her long journey, by which he meant her death, and then he took a saw out of a violin case – a perfectly ordinary saw – and started to play it. He drew the bow and bent the blade of the saw in such a way that something like a melody came out of it. The sound had a piercing, skull-penetrating quality and Margit Partanen put her hands over her ears. First he played what was probably ‘Finlandia’, and then several hymns, or perhaps they were modern art pieces. It was God-awful.
‘Lucky they haven’t used this music to cheer us up at Sunset Grove. That thing is some kind of torture,’ Anna-Liisa said, loud enough to be heard, and it looked to Siiri as if the Ambassador took hold of her hand under the table as he said that they had their own ways of cheering themselves up nowadays.
‘What do you mean, Onni?’ Siiri asked, and the Ambassador jumped when he heard his own name.
‘I mean that I don’t like the musical saw, or hymns. Do you?’
Then he poured himself and Anna-Liisa more red wine. There were several bottles on each table so you could pour yourself as much as you liked. The bottles at the public radio tables were emptied immediately, but the scar-faced man diligently fetched some more. The stocky radio announcer gave a fun speech where he told a few naughty stories about the Hat Lady and their leisure activities on Fabianinkatu in the 1970s, and thanked dear Aino, almost tearfully, for all the times she’d rescued all the public radio staff and clocked them in when they were drunk or had passed out.
‘In memory of studio ten!’ he said in conclusion, and lifted his glass high. All the public radio people exploded into laughter and the Sunset Grove table fell into uncomfortable silence.
‘There is no such studio,’ a pudgy woman with teased hair whispered to them. ‘We always called the Kellarikrouvi bar studio ten.’
Siiri found it hard to believe that they were at a funeral – wine was flowing, the saw was playing, and old people were furiously flirting under the table. By the time they left to go back to Sunset Grove, the Ambassador and Anna-Liisa had taught the first fifteen old market towns to Eino Partanen, although he was supposed to be senile and suffering from memory loss.
Chapter 44
Irma’s hip surgery went well, and she was moved the very next day to Laakso Hospital for rehabilitation. There were no screws in her hip, the helpful Egyptian nurse told them, just one large spike at the top of her thigh bone. Irma claimed she could feel it poking her, but Siiri found it hard to believe they would drive a spike into an old lady.
‘And when I smoke, I get this strange feeling that it’s glowing!’
‘Have you started smoking here in the hospital?’ Siiri asked, though she didn’t want to sound like she was nagging.
‘Just a tiny bit. There’s nothing else to do here.’
Irma’s glowing spike was made of titanium, and she was sure that titanium was very valuable. She was even planning to tell her blessed darlings about it so that when the time came they could ask the funeral director to extract it for them as a keepsake, maybe to put over the hearth at the summer cabin. And if they hit hard times, they could sell this titanium part from their grandma, and she also had a gold filling in one tooth that shouldn’t just be burnt up with her bones. They made up a saying about it – to ‘throw the gold filling out with the urn ashes’, so they would have an alternative to the baby and the bathwater.
Siiri had brought Irma’s medical papers with her, the whole record of horrors, but she didn’t dare show them to her. They had now gone over the events at Sunset Grove to some extent, the fire and the wad of money Siiri had been given, but this part was difficult, despite the fact that Irma understood that her dementia had been caused by her medication.
To avoid the unpleasant subject, Siiri told Irma about Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador. Irma practically fell out of bed, she thought it was so horribly funny, and she immediately started to tell Siiri about her cousin who’d got married for the first time at the age of eighty-seven, to the first love of her youth, after waiting sixty-five years for the man to be widowed.
‘Almost like Solveig of the fjord, although my cousin’s suitor wasn’t a cad like Peer Gynt.’
The cousin had had a real wedding, a ceremony in the cathedral and a big reception, just as a young c
ouple would have had. There was the first waltz, the cutting of the cake, throwing the bouquet and robbing the bride, and at the end of dinner the eighty-seven-year-old groom sang a serenade to his damsel.
‘Just think, we might have a party like that at Sunset Grove! But they should have the ceremony somewhere other than Munkkiniemi Church, so the bride’s Zimmer frame doesn’t roll down the hill to the altar.’
Irma’s attitude was infectious, though at first Siiri had been caught short by Anna-Liisa’s great love; she realized, to her surprise, that she disapproved of it. To go and get all lovey-dovey while all sorts of horrible things were going on around them seemed indecent somehow. But gradually, as they talked about it happily like this, the love between Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador seemed like good news.
‘Why should we live alone, remembering the past and grieving for husbands who died a long time ago? Old people should absolutely seize the moment and fall in love and enjoy each other’s company, just like everyone else should.’ Irma stopped for a moment. ‘Hmm. I don’t know, though. Does this relationship between Anna-Liisa and Onni include . . . everything? What do you think? Do you think they’ve even kissed?’
They pondered this question for a while and came to the conclusion that Anna-Liisa and Onni most definitely had kissed, and that they didn’t want to think any more about the subject. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Irma remembered another cousin; he was dead but Siiri had met him several times. He had been left a widower when his much younger fourth wife got so depressed about her husband’s age that she jumped off a balcony. And then the fellow had had the audacity to give Irma the nod and started popping in at Sunset Grove.
‘Einar and I drank some red wine together a few times. He would always pick up another jug at the Alko when we ran out, just dash right out – he was in good shape, a regular Kekkonen, an avid volleyball player till the day he died. No, it was President Koivisto who played volleyball, not Kekkonen. Anyway, Einar would dash out to the Alko to get another jug of wine while I gathered my strength and took a catnap. But then one time, when he’d finished fetching all the wine and was on his way out of the door, he suddenly kissed me, and I mean a manly kiss, like my Veikko used to give me. I was in quite a dither, it was so unpleasant. And a week later, the poor fellow died . . . at least a little happier, I hope.’
Siiri liked sitting on the edge of Irma’s bed; she was never in a hurry to leave. Irma was starting to look more and more like her old self as the days passed and Siiri knew that soon they would be sitting at Sunset Grove together again, eating an ever-so-slightly spoiled liver casserole. This was the fourth hospital that Irma had stayed in since the fire had rescued her from the closed unit, and both of them thought it was very interesting getting to know so many of Helsinki’s hospitals.
‘First the Hilton, then Suursuo, after that Töölö, and now Laakso – yep, it’s four hospitals. Töölö Hospital has the best food, all of them have the same awful nightgowns, and every one of them has exceedingly nice nurses. Though, of course, I don’t remember anything about the Hilton or Suursuo, but I’m sure it was very pleasant there, too.’
But, of course, who wouldn’t be nice and pleasant to Irma? Siiri had so missed Irma’s ‘Döden, döden, döden’ and her stories about her cousins and all the fun they’d had together that she was as ready to burst with happiness about Irma’s recovery as she was about Anna-Liisa’s Onni.
When Irma started to get tired, Siiri tiptoed out and got on the number 4 going in the wrong direction out of sheer joy, and took it into town to say hello to the old tram halls. She didn’t head home until she’d ridden once around on the number 3 through Töölö and Kamppi. As the tram was passing the nursing school, she thought she saw Erkki Hiukkanen sitting on the same tram as she was, right behind her on the other side of the aisle. She didn’t dare turn to look to see if it was really him. She had an unpleasant, uneasy feeling and all her humming high spirits disappeared in a moment. Was it a coincidence that the caretaker was always on her tram route? And when had Hiukkanen started flitting around the city?
As Siiri was walking from the lift to her apartment, Virpi Hiukkanen came hurrying down the hallway towards her and brushed past her with her mouth in a tight line, hardly even greeting her. When Siiri had closed her door and taken off her coat, hat and walking shoes, she went into the kitchen. She put her handbag down on the kitchen table next to her pill counter, and froze. The pill counter stared at her from the table. She was sure she hadn’t left it there. She always kept the stupid thing on the side, where it was easier to take out the day’s pills and hide them in the cupboard, which is exactly what she had done that morning, she could have sworn it. But now the pill counter had been moved and it was full of so many different kinds of pills that the extra slots had pills in them now, too. Virpi Hiukkanen had been coming into her apartment and filling it, just as she had suspected.
Chapter 45
‘It’s you! My angel!’ Siiri squealed into the telephone. She was so happy that Mika had called. She immediately started telling him about Irma, who was rapidly recovering from her hip surgery, and listing all the different hospitals, though perhaps in the wrong order, but she didn’t stop to think, there was so much to tell him. ‘They’re trying to force pills on me, and the caretaker is following me as well. He’s been running around the city after me. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s the point: they’re trying to drive me crazy.’
‘Can I see you? I’ve got something to tell you,’ Mika said quickly when she’d finished talking.
They met in Munkkiniemi. Mika left his taxi parked at Laajalahti Square and had to buy a ticket on the number 4 because he didn’t have a pass like Siiri had. He thought two euros eighty was a steep price to go a couple of stops, but Siiri pointed out that he could use the ticket to travel for an hour if he wanted to. They went to sit in the spot where the two halves of the tram met, the spot hidden around the corner near the door. They could talk about whatever they liked there without being bothered, but Mika was so burly that it was a tight fit for him. He grunted and searched for a good position but his knees wouldn’t fit comfortably no matter what he did and he had to tuck them up in a comical position.
‘But don’t you think the tram drives so quickly and smoothly?’ Siiri asked.
‘Sure does,’ Mika sighed and then he relayed everything he’d learned. The goings on at Sunset Grove included falsified drug prescriptions, secret links between companies, bogus billings, and contacts with Russia. Siiri liked Mika’s cryptic way of talking about it, his large hands groping the air. Mystery and clumsiness were part of his appeal, along with his blue eyes and gruff voice.
When they got to the old tram halls, Siiri felt so sorry for him sitting in the cramped tram seat that they got off. Mika wanted to go for a coffee and Siiri promised to treat him to a cardamom roll, too, since he’d got so little value out of his tram ticket. There was a cafe and museum in one of the oldest tram halls. It was a pleasant surprise to Siiri. She’d never been in the building, which was designed by Waldemar Aspelin.
The cafe was a charming spot. Part of the hall had been left unchanged, and you could look at the old trams there, while part of the building had been made into an exhibition space and restaurant. Siiri peeked into the gallery, which had large, colourful pictures on the walls, and insisted that Mika go through the exhibition with her. The pictures in the gallery were very beautiful, very bold and powerful, but Mika thought they were too expensive.
‘You’d have to be crazy to pay twelve thousand euros for a painting.’
‘I may be crazy, but I wasn’t planning on buying one; I just like looking at them,’ Siiri said, and calculated that it had been thirty-one years since she’d retired and bought herself a painting to mark the occasion. ‘I haven’t bought one since then. But it was a good purchase. I’ve looked at that painting every day, and it’s always the same, happy and colourful, even though everything else has changed.’
‘Yep,’ Mika sai
d, and he told her that he’d been born four years before she’d retired.
They walked around, looking at the trams from various decades. It was incredibly fun – all the wooden seats, driver’s cranks, old tracks and signs! Old route 15 from Diakon to the old Töölö customs gate and her beloved number 4 from Munkkiniemi to Hietalahti – she remembered them all from some faraway place, and here they were again.
‘An open-air tram,’ Mika read with a chuckle. ‘Transfer marked only upon payment.’
You could go into some of the trams and sit down, and Siiri told Mika about all kinds of things she remembered, even the smells – wet wool, sweaty working men, and winos who ate onions just like apples.
‘It was cheap, and a lot of food for someone living on the street, but it gave off such a peculiar smell, that mixture of homelessness and alcohol and onions. That smell doesn’t exist any more.’
Mika listened politely and started to look like he might just be a little bit interested in trams after all. He even tried out the driver’s seat, although it probably wasn’t allowed. Finally, they went to the cafe, where there were two lovely trams from the 1950s, and Siiri bought them coffee and a cardamom roll, as she had promised. The coffee was poured into soup bowls, which seemed very strange, but the girl cashier didn’t react at all when Siiri marvelled at it, and didn’t seem to understand what a saucer was. They settled into seats by the window. Siiri looked at the old trams and felt as though she were on some fantastical trip back in time. She told Mika about the ticket takers and about Sipoo Church, also designed by Aspelin.
‘The ticket takers were always women, very busty and plump, sitting in their nests in their grey uniforms all dignified and full of themselves, so serious, hissing their S’s.’
Mika grinned when Siiri showed him how they would peer at your ticket and stamp it.
‘They were all Swedish speakers, from Sipoo – back then, you still had to know how to speak Swedish on the Helsinki tram – and people called their apartment block the “Sipoo Church”, because it had a steeple like a church. It was a very beautiful building, right next door to this one, but it was probably torn down before you were born. Now there’s just an ugly concrete box there.’
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 21
