Lowest Common
Denominator
Lowest
Common Denominator
Pirkko Saisio
Lowest Common
Denominator
Translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg PENGUIN
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First published in Finnish as Pienin yhteinen jaettava by WSOY 1998
First published in the United States of America in agreement with Helsinki Literary Agency and Regal Hoffman and Associates by Two Lines Press 2024
First published in Great Britain by Penguin International Writers 2025 This work has been published with the financial support of FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange
001
Copyright © Pirkko Saisio, 1998
Translation copyright © Mia Spangenberg, 2024
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Lowest Common Denominator
e first time it happened I was eight years old.
It was a November morning. e street was black and shiny, swollen behind the windows wet with sleet.
I saw myself in the window: a chubby, bad-tempered child.
I pulled on wool socks too tight for my feet. A button was missing from my vest. Mother took a five-mark bill out of her purse. I stuffed it in my sock.
And that’s when it happened.
I wrote a sentence in my mind: She didn’t want to wake up. I changed the sentence: She didn’t want to get up yet.
I added another sentence to the first: She was too tired to go to school.
And then I improved the second sentence: She was just too, too tired to go to school.
I looked triumphantly at Father, who was in his shirtsleeves drinking black coffee and reading the Työkansan Sanomat newspaper.
Mother stood by the entryway mirror spreading a touch of rouge from her lips to her cheeks as she hummed “Harbor Nights.”
Neither of them noticed that I had become she, the one always under observation.
e heat hadn’t let up, even though it was already September. I’d been gone for two weeks.
e linden trees on Pohjoisranta street dangled their dusty leaves, tired and dispirited. Even the new windows were sticky and covered in dust. e apartment was overfl owing with stiff plastic sheeting. e chairs, books, Tibetan thangkas, and a painting of an African orchestra she’d bought in Stockholm shone from underneath the plastic ice like remnants from the Titanic .
e windows had been replaced while I was in Korea. I removed the souvenirs from my suitcase. Lost in the sea of plastic, the Korean objects looked absurd, like tiny shipwrecks.
My fever rose; I’d already had it for over a week. I smiled and said something, but not about the fever. It was time to be a mother again, and a partner. And a daughter.
In Korea I’d settled in the heart of old Seoul, which excavators, McDonald’s restaurants, concrete office buildings, and parking garages were crowding into an ever-shrinking corner.
On the street, in front of the hotel, the cables had been pulled out of the ground, so you could only enter the hotel by crossing over a series of planks thrown across the fistula cut into the earth.
But the old Korea emerged behind the black lacquered door.
In the center of the courtyard grew a tree. ough bent, it thrust its branches tirelessly toward the sun.
A clay oven stood next to the tree. Empty Coca-Cola crates were stacked in front of the firebox. e clay oven was no longer in use, as the hotel was scheduled for demolition.
Sliding paper doors enclosed the courtyard. Each opened into a room about thirty square feet in size where, at night, a thin bast mat was spread on the dirt floor.
Before the building became a hotel, these rooms had been home to an extended family including grandparents and parents, children and in-laws.
e grandparents had been in charge then, and everyone would gather to eat rice and kimchi in the courtyard, by the oven.
e oven had released its smoke through a narrow flue. Now dust clouds, kicked up by the excavators, circled high in the sky.
e elderly innkeepers, always smiling, pretended not to notice the clouds.
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We hotel guests in search of the past coughed into our handkerchiefs.
e number of planks we had to cross to reach the hotel grew with each passing day. Soon we could only come and go via the back door. It opened into an alley that smelled of urine and fish guts.
As I carried my suitcase to the taxi—the driver had refused to drive up to the hotel—I saw a German tourist dressed in hiking clothes carefully remove a ceramic decoration from one of the hotel’s eaves with a Swiss army knife.
I didn’t place a call to Hämeentie road until evening. I had to wait a long time for the phone to be answered. Father’s voice was tired and depressed, again.
“It’s just me calling.”
Her voice was soft, honeyed somehow. She had started talking to her father as if he were a child.
“Oh. All right then.” en Father put the receiver on the table. I took a sip of Calvados. I’d bought it in Paris on my way back home. It tasted faintly of smoke and even more faintly of apples. Aged twenty-four years, it was
just what a good Calvados was supposed to taste like, but I still couldn’t enjoy it. My fever sent nasty shivers up my legs and spine.
A minute passed, then another.
I heard rustling, the clatter of a cane, the familiar cough. en:
“All right. I got a chair. So you’re home.”
“Yeah. I got back just an hour ago.”
Why did she lie?
“All right. I see.”
“Yeah.”
I sipped more Calvados. It burned my throat, and my brow broke into a sweat, then just as quickly cooled.
“You sure do travel. All the time.”
“It was a business trip.”
She was on the defensive.
For some reason she felt the need to defend herself.
“So how are you?” I asked.
“Can’t complain.”
“Hmm.”
“Just hanging on. is life.”
“ at’s how it is. In the end.”
She swayed to the rhythm of her father’s voice like an aquatic plant in the warm currents of the ocean.
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“Sure does.”
“Yeah.”
“ at’s life.”
“Right.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s Kerttu?”
Kerttu was eighty-six. Father called Kerttu his girlfriend. When she had first met Kerttu ten years ago, Kerttu sat in the same armchair once occupied by Mother, and then after Mother’s death by other women who had since disappeared including Aune, Lempi (who drank vermouth and played solitaire at eight in the morning), and Siviä (whom Father had found through an ad for a pen pal).
Kerttu had been a stylish, elderly widow, the type who coughed daintily as she sipped the cognac she’d been offered with coffee. In the ten years Father had known her, he’d introduced her to whiskey, Koskenkorva and Smirnoff Vodka, sweet berry liqueurs, beer, and gin long drinks.
“ ey take her away every evening.”
“Kerttu?”
“Yeah.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know.”
Father’s voice has grown agitated. She’s forced to give up her pleasant, feverish swaying.
“So where do they take her?”
“Well, wherever they take old people. ey don’t tell me anything.”
I light a cigarette. It tastes like fever.
“Who takes her?”
“Raimo. Her son. He picks her up and takes her away every night in his car. Every night, I’m telling you.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yeah.”
More rustling on the line. Now the rustling is impatient.
“Maybe you could call,” I hear Father’s timid voice.
“Who?”
“ ose people.”
A pause. It stretches unbearably. I need to take my temperature, she thinks.
“All right, I’ll call,” I lie.
“Yes, do.”
“Yep.”
“ ey’ll tell you.”
I don’t have the energy for this. To be a daughter. Today. When I have a fever. Why am I thinking of myself as her again? she wonders.
“I’ll stop by tomorrow,” I say, lowering my voice so it’s even softer.
“You do that.”
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“I’d come today, but it seems I have a bit of a fever.”
“Oh.”
“Hang in there.”
“Got to.”
“See you tomorrow.”
She puts down the receiver and looks out the kitchen window into the courtyard.
e building superintendent is sweeping, wiping his brow as he works.
e flowers poking out of the wooden window boxes look burned in the evening sun. is summer is never going to end.
at night I found myself transported to Fleminginkatu street again.
Mother had returned from a long trip, but she had no suitcase.
Cheerfully absent, Mother sat in her armchair, wearing her Bucharest Festival skirt with the people of the world dancing hand in hand along the hem.
I stood at the front door trying to think of a word or a sentence or a song that would stop Mother from leaving again.
A ray of sunshine pierced through the curtains, casting deep shadows under her eyes and along her sharp nose. Mother smiled to herself. She didn’t look at me.
en I woke up. My fever had gone down slightly.
I called Father as early as nine. No one answered.
At ten I called Raimo.
Raimo told me he’d taken Kerttu to a memory care home the previous Tuesday and hadn’t been to see Father since.
I set off for Hämeentie road right away. But she stops as soon as she reaches Pohjoisranta street, because between the tired linden trees she glimpses a schooner with scarlet sails gliding serenely along the oil-smooth sea.
She commits the scene to memory. She needs the schooner, the sea, and this moment, and she prays it would end here and now so she wouldn’t have to go to Hämeentie, open the door, and find what she already knows is waiting for her.
e previous summer, in June, Father sold the cabin. I didn’t look at the lake when I went to collect my things, but I knew it must be glittering, just as I knew the birch trees must be celebrating the lushness of early summer the same way they’d been celebrating it for the past twenty-eight years.
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In November, Father went to the health clinic to get a cane, and in January, he put the car up for sale.
As the Lada disappeared from view, Father grabbed my arm, then, noticing his mistake, supported himself on the garage’s concrete wall instead.
“Got nothing left now.”
In March we buried our relative Jopi.
I got Father a pastrami sandwich and caramel cake from the buffet table in the funeral home that had sprung up next to Malmi Cemetery; in recent years I’d learned the buffet offerings by heart.
“Everyone ends up going,” Father said, and again she had to flee the rundown hopelessness in Father’s voice, so amid the quietly burning, indifferent candles and the hostile clinking of coffee cups she found herself somewhere else, far away, on a shining, shoreless sea in her boat that smelled of gasoline, a boat that in her daydream wasn’t rotten at all but a proud sailboat cutting rigidly through the waves on a journey far away. Somewhere far away.
In July we buried Sisko, my godmother.
Father waited for me in front of the chapel in a white tracksuit.
His tie was in his coat pocket. Father could no longer tie it himself, and Kerttu couldn’t remember the steps for the complicated knot.
e laces on Father’s sneakers were undone.
I bent down to tie them and led him into the chapel. I got Father a pastrami sandwich and caramel cake from the buffet table. I cut the sandwich into bite-sized pieces and put a piece of cake on his spoon, which Father was able to guide to his mouth.
And she felt uneasy and guilty about the intense looks of approval and pity momentarily trained on her: Now look, there’s a good daughter.
I rang Father’s doorbell. (Twenty-nine years ago it had been my doorbell, too.)
Silence on the other side.
I rang the doorbell again. en I peeked through the mail slot, but the inner door was closed.
I lit a match to illuminate the threshold. His newspapers lay there untouched. e light went out in the stairwell.
And she stands in the darkness, wishing she could fall into the soundless ellipsis of time and find herself somewhere else, far away from this dark stairwell. But instead
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I switched on the light again and tried to focus.
I need to hurry, I tried thinking.
I rang the neighbor’s doorbell—somehow I managed. No one came to the door.
I rang the doorbells on Father’s floor—somehow I managed to ring them all.
No one came to their doors, and then
she finds herself in the elevator.
After the elevator comes the front door and a long stretch of pavement.
She sees herself running down Hämeentie road, feverish and out of breath.
She sees herself wishing a police car would pull up, and a police officer would step out with a key and tell her what to do next.
She sees herself running to the police station to get an answer and a key and permission to enter her father’s home, her home.
She’s almost reached the station and the answer and the key when two drunken men approached me, their arms around each other’s shoulders.
Hämeentie rumbled indifferently, showing no concern for me, and I realized one of the men was an old childhood friend.
Afraid he would ask me about Father right then and there, I dove into a Chinese restaurant.
I crashed into booth after booth until I was stopped by a
menu thrust into my hands by a Chinese waiter.
“Huva päivä,” the waiter tried to greet me in his best Finnish.
And she sees herself sitting on a soft bench in a booth, studying the menu. is is ridiculous, she thinks.
I need to do something, she admonishes herself. is is a nightmare—her next thought. Or a scene from a Woody Allen movie.
I need to think straight, right now.
And getting up from the booth and apologizing to the baffled waiter, I rush out the door into the street and I don’t stop until I’m inside the subway station.
I buy a ticket; I don’t remember where I’m going, but I do remember I have a fever, a very high fever.
I remember that Father is behind two locked doors and unable to retrieve his newspapers from the threshold, and yet she stands by the ticket machine and lets the rumbling from the tunnel take her away from this time and place, somewhere far away.
A Romani woman’s abundant skirts have gotten caught in the escalator, and with dazed satisfaction she hears the quick footsteps of the subway guards and the screeching of the escalator as it’s forced to a halt; she watches
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as a steady, noisy stream of families, Japanese tourists, unhurried drunkards, retirees in white hats, veiled Muslim women, Somalis, Senegalese, and exasperated Finnish children flushed from the heat all rush past.
She has time to imagine she’s back at the National Museum of Korea, in front of a display case in which a doll, galloping at full pelt, wears a golden helmet with wings on the sides, and she realizes the wings look just like flames before suddenly remembering where she is again.
I need to think straight runs through her mind, and she rips herself out of her sleepy delirium.
She only needs to walk from the ticket machine to the kiosk in the tunnel.
I need a pen—her next desperate thought—and she repeats it out loud to the salesperson at the kiosk.
e salesperson stares at her in surprise.
Did I say it wrong? she wonders, but now the salesperson is smiling.
“A pencil or a pen?”
I have to make a decision! she thinks in a panic. “How about a pencil,” she chooses randomly.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have any.”
And the salesperson smiles again.
e salesperson is a soft, ample girl whose Savo accent is already receding. And now
I wish I could stay right here and press my head into the valley formed by her soft, undulating breasts and
complain about my fate, about how hard it is to be a mother and a partner and a daughter at this very moment.
But
she still has some fight left—she has to.
“A pen then.”
“I’m sorry, we don’t have pens either.”
Now she sees herself standing helplessly in the shadow of the girl with her smile and her undulating breasts, but she won’t let herself vanish from this time and place again.
“Perkele,” she hears herself curse, calmly rolling the r. “Every kiosk sells pens.”
And she fixes her eyes on a ballpoint pen lying unsuspectingly on a graph-ruled notebook.
“ at’s a pen right there,” she hears herself say triumphantly.
“It belongs to the staff.”
A menacing, cool draft of air ripples up from the depths of that warm Savo accent.
“I’m taking it,” she hears herself say, and
I’m forced to run back along Hämeentie, trying to remember why it was so important to get a pen.
At the door to the stairwell I remember: I need to call the building superintendent.
I need to go into the stairwell and find the super’s phone number in the directory and go to a phone booth and
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call to get a key to the door so I can open it and find Father, dead or alive.
e super unlocks the door.
“All right,” I say.
e bathroom door is open.
Father is on the floor in his underwear, grasping the washing machine’s drain hose, nails white.
One of his cheeks is blue.
e super stands on the doormat in the entryway.
I stand at the bathroom door.
“Well then,” says the super. “I guess you won’t be needing me here.”
“Guess not,” I say, and before I go to Father, I fish a hundred-mark bill and the kiosk pen out of my pocket and sign the receipt for opening the door.
e super leaves. e door clicks shut, and time refuses to budge.
Now she’s the one standing on the doormat, the one who doesn’t know what to do.
Yawning, she remembers her fever.
She brushes her hand over the phone, and only then does she manage to step into the bathroom.
Her father’s eyelids twitch.
“Hey,” she says, not knowing where to put the pen she compulsively shifts from one hand to the other.
e pen feels sullied; it’s been violated by her cold, sticky sweat.
Her father’s lips move, and after a moment’s hesitation, she puts her ear to his blue-tinged lips and toothless mouth.
“You came. After all.”
green cap; yellow airplane
I’m an only child.
But I have so many people around me, it takes me a while to realize it.
ere’s Mother.
At first Mother is always home, but later she goes to work at Irja Markkanen’s corner store and I end up in preschool.
Mother wears a white lace blouse, even on weekdays, and it has beige buttons.
At home, Mother usually listens to the radio or sings Russian battle songs; she was a member of the Finland–Soviet Union Society Performers when she was younger.
Sirpakka used to be in the same troupe, which is why Mother lets her in, even though Sirpakka is always drunk, which isn’t appropriate for women.
Sirpakka is from Varkaus, just like Mother, but while Sirpakka has gone astray, Mother has not.
When Sirpakka brings Mother a bouquet, Mother unwraps it in the kitchenette and finds a bottle of
Koskenkorva Vodka inside, already opened.
Sirpakka drinks the rest while Mother sits on the bed, anxiously glancing at the clock and hoping Sirpakka leaves before Father comes home from work.
Father calls Sirpakka Ronttonen, or “Old Shoe.”
Father has thick, curly hair and wears a wool cardigan with moose on it, knit by Grandma.
Father works for the Finland–Soviet Union Society. On weekends he travels around the country showing Soviet films, teaching Finns about socialism’s achievements and that sort of thing.
Aunt Ulla visits often.
Aunt Ulla has a gorgeous green coat made of soft, faux fur.
Her black velvet hat is studded with gold stars.
Aunt Ulla prefers to visit when Father isn’t home.
Father and Aunt Ulla don’t get along very well, because Aunt Ulla once voted for a candidate from the centerright National Coalition Party simply for his beautiful brown eyes.
Aunt Ulla is Mother’s big sister.
We get plenty of visitors, and most don’t mind if Father is home.
Lots of people come over for meetings. But these people are boring; they take minutes at our only table, and I have to be quiet and play all by myself. I’m the only child at the meetings, but that’s not what
makes me an only child—it’s far more serious and complicated.
When people Mother knows from her troupe visit, or when the sewing club meets, or when Father’s relatives come to see us, there are plenty of other children around—but I’m still considered an only child.
Being an only child means, for instance, that the children out in the courtyard act jealous of my Sunday walks with my parents, of my not having to get up at eight on Sunday mornings to go to Sunday school like they do, because Mother and Father and I don’t believe in those things.
I get everything I want, and I don’t have to share anything with anyone—that’s what everyone says—and so I’m at risk of growing up to be selfish and ambitious. It may even be inevitable.
Everyone says Mother is young and beautiful, and I agree.
But then they go on to say Mother is young and beautiful because she’s only bothered to have one child. ey say Father is handsome and a proper family man who doesn’t appear interested in booze. at makes me happy, but then they go on to say that, if push came to shove, they doubt Father could hold his own against a real man, one of those men who drinks and beats their wife and children on Saturdays after the sauna, because they’ve been to war and have shrapnel in their heads.
I ask at home about this war and shrapnel business, then
go back to the others and explain that Father served in the coastal artillery on the island of Suomenlinna and was never injured, thanks to Stalin and the fact that it was more important for the Soviet Union to win WWII than to conquer an insignificant country like Finland. Someone says they hate to break it to me, but it was Finland that beat the Soviet Union and not the other way around, and besides, the coastal artillery was never involved anyway.
And so yet again I’m the only child whose father wasn’t at the decisive Battle of Raate Road or even at one of the battles fought in the village of Summa.
Much later she finds out her father is also an only child. But first she has to swallow the shocking fact that her father was once a child.
It’s far too overwhelming to believe that Grandma wasn’t born a grandmother but was and still is a mother, her father’s mother.
And that before becoming a grandmother and a mother, Grandma was also a child and someone’s daughter. At least Grandma looks like herself in her class picture from Kallio Elementary School, even though she’s so small and young with a big nose and lace collar.
But the bald, chubby, sour-faced child posed on the sofa in knee-high boots can’t possibly be her father, because her father is thin and lively with curly hair. Grandma’s album also has photographs of a little girl with a bow in her hair wearing something so flouncy it’s impossible to tell if it’s a skirt or a pair of pants.