The Pale Yellow House Series: Jussi Toivonen

Tales of life on Green Mountain Street - Part 1

Lotte Laserstein: Evening Over Potsdam

1.

I lean out the window and watch his immaculate quiff as he shuffles his way down the road, the ploughed pomade of dark silver hair like a perfectly turned late autumn field. Below his neckline a tangle of mis-buttoned dishevelment, but his pompadour, like the final outpost of a once fine demeanour, was flawless.

Twice a day Jussi Toivonen takes a slow walk to the shop, once in the morning for milk and a bun, and once in the afternoon for cigarettes and beer. He has something of the tumbleweed about his bearing, skeletal and delicate, an increasingly ramshackle old school gent perpetually navigating the lush hinterlands of inebriation, his watery eyes flickering with a heady combination of poise and shame. Soon enough, he’ll come rolling back with a six pack and cigarettes, which he’ll slowly absorb as he sits for the rest of the day on his balcony.

I watch him carefully, evaluating his progress. He’s clutching the few notes I’ve just given him. Not much. I don’t have much to give. But Jussi Toivonen has nothing and whatever he does have is fast dissolving as the world continually reshapes itself around him. He clutches the money, uncertain already of its origin, his memory seemingly packing its bags, preparing to move out, while his emotions are firmly staying put, growing ever more concerned, ever more uncertain, ever more bewildered.

I had answered the door and there he stood, hands shaking, his faded blue eyes so watery they looked like small puddles on a summer’s morning as he quietly explained he had run out of money for the week, “I thought maybe…”. He was already in debt to me and I was running fast out of funds myself. Writing is no gold mine. For obvious reasons the market has decided to punish anyone who spends their days recording the human condition. The market doesn’t like accountability. I’m not surprised. The market’s a cold inhumane bastard to say the least. I sighed and handed him a few notes without a word, and he nodded and somehow, also without words, said in his forlorn and remote way, that he would, of course, when he could, you know, when he could, of course he would. I nodded and smiled. I’ll never see that money again.

As I watch Jussi heading toward the mini-market located on the ground floor of our building, I saw Johnny Hardbread coming the other way, his hands fumbling with the bunting flags he’s forgotten to place into their holders on the mini-market’s facade. He looks annoyed as he sidles past Jussi, ignoring him. “Hardbread’s forgotten the flags again.” I say out loud for no reason.

The sun is beating down on yet another sweltering summer’s day. I’m drenched in sweat, leaning out of the apartment window to cool down in the strangely smokey summer wind. Jussi Toivonen’s cotton shirt is billowing around his skeletal frame so he looks like a clipper ship heading out to sea. There are people whisking past him on e-scooters calling to each other like a flotilla of small boats. Across the street I can see the hairdresser in mid-persuasion, battling with a client struggling with her artistic vision. The hairdresser notices Toivonen meandering past and flips her balance from one hip to the other as she smiles and finger waves at the old man, who smiles back because he’s always had that kind of twinkle in his watery eyes.

By the time Jussi Toivonen finally rounds the corner, Johnny Hardbread has overtaken him and disappeared into the mini-market where he’ll spend his day wandering up and down the tiny aisles making himself busy doing almost nothing. The mini-market is a slowly decaying space where the three co-workers are in a state of perpetual micro-conflict with each other, with the management and with most of the customers who enter their tiny kingdom of rotting fresh produce and an over-priced, never-evolving, out-of-date range. The only truly reliable thing to come out of the mini-market are the nicknames it unwittingly generates. Even Johnny Hardbread is called Johnny Hardbread because of his penchant for manically chasing shoplifters down the street and the poor quality of his bread. No one knows his real name.

As the smokey wind blows I suddenly think of our children who have never lived anywhere but this pale yellow block of quicksand, and how they christened the mini-market, Old Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard. I think how this shop has treated all of us with such disdain. They’ve watched the most elderly neighbours, who moved in during the fanfare of 1960’s new-builds, grow even older and perish, like Ragnar at 96, and Old Lady Lansing at 98. They’ve seen new families move into the vacated apartments and then move out again, they’ve witnessed marriages and divorces and babies being born and young people moving out, and all the while they’ve lived here in this pale yellow building as the rest of the city has slowly morphed into a rocking boat of inequality and greed and Old Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard has offered nothing but contempt.

Somehow this pale yellow building has stood firm in a changing world, like a tiny forgotten village, perpetually weaving its complex tapestry of being and belonging, where random changing configurations of interweaving experiences are tied together in a bundle of mundane yet extraordinary stories, the telling of which reveal the smallest and most intimate moments, day in and day out, in the ever growing entanglement of human life. This commonplace pale yellow building, built along Green Mountain Street on the ever-rising cliffs of Södermalm, teeming with the tales of spectacular yet ordinary lives.

2.

I decide to check on Jussi’s progress so I walk down to the mini-market and there he is, scanning up and down, back and forth, searching for Pripps Blau Beer, struggling with his newly dawning disorientation, anxiously looking for some familiar thing on which to anchor his aching desire. I take a can of Pripps and hand it too him, which ignites something deep in his mind and he smiles like he’s finally found the right house on a dark winter night. “Naaamen heeeeej,” he says, his beautiful Finnish lilt lending musicality to the Swedish. “There you are,” warmly, addressing the beer can before taking five more from the shelf.

As the never ending current of time flows on and on, Jussi’s spirit anchored itself in the past, in a lifetime spent in blue overalls on factory floors, his hands inked, his careful eye and gentle patience gleaning trust and respect, anchored in days when drinks were drunk and jokes were told and loves were won and lost. Days that would surely never end. Days that now call upon Jussi more and more often, enticing and tempting him to return.

Occasionally, over the years, when I’ve joined him in his kitchen to drink coffee, he’d empty a brown manila envelope of technicolour snapshots onto the kitchen table, spreading out his meagre archive of grinning workers in worn overalls. Small squares of men feeding enormous grey machines, resembling the innards of old submarines, with beautifully constructed paper and silk and metal plates, men smiling and drinking in large rooms, women dancing in flower print dresses smoking cigarettes with glasses of beer spread over small tables, men who resembled Jussi, sporting immaculate quiffs, staring at the camera, women standing beside lithograph printing machines looking sheepish with bandanas tied around their hair.

“You see that?” Jussi would say pointing at a Lotte Laserstein print on the wall, “that’s one of mine,” and I would nod and stare at the painting of five people around a table on a balcony in Potsdam looking pensive and haunted, each lost in pathos and a shared disquiet, on the brink of some collective identity crisis, even the dog under the table seemingly wary and sober. “I know, Jussi, I know,” I’d absently reply, astonished by the way Laserstein captured the growing uncertainty and disillusionment of a past era on the brink, where the promises and dreams of a generation were once more crushed, broken and stolen. “She was an immigrant too,” he’d say raising his coffee in a toast. “We three immigrants,” nodding at the print and at myself as we clinked our coffee cups at the dawning of another era of rising tension and stupidity.

Jussi’s quiet life in his one room apartment on the first floor of our pale yellow building has been slowly disintegrating for 20 years. Then, almost overnight, a cruel shift happened upon him, as fast as you can forget why you entered a room. This place where he made his life, this place he now belonged, began dissolving around him, disappearing, changing into a strange new world where the deep connections pinged apart like the guide ropes on an airship and the memories that held him in place, the memories that gave reasons and meaning to the minutiae, all sailed off over the horizon, leaving Jussi, as the lifeless silver moon rose on a cold night, alone in his bed, wondering where he was and when he’d be going home.

3.

There are people, few and far between, that have a certain clarity, a lack of self-consciousness, an ease. They seem grounded, connected. These are the people who know what should be done and simply do that thing, where others dawdle or calculate, human lighthouses that shine through the gloom. My wife Anna is one. She has immunity, both natural and acquired, from whatever drags the rest of us into the quagmire of ambivalence. As the outline to Jussi’s life began fading away and nobody made it their business, Anna made Jussi our business, so in the end I’m following him into the mini-market to check on him.

It was his loneliness that tipped the balance. He began packing a nightly bag and knocking on random doors to inform perplexed neighbours that he was ready to go home, clutching on to his carrier bag like a life raft in a vast empty ocean of solitude. He wanted to return to his family. To be cared for. To be loved and supported by familiar faces. Except, he had no people. There was no one but us, and we were no one. We just kept an eye. Anna would take him down the stairs to his apartment and remove the electric fans or unopened letters or kitchen sponges or cassette tapes or a toaster, one by one and place them back on shelves and counters.

“Are we going by car?” he’d ask.

“We’re not going anywhere Jussi, you live here,” she’d reply and sit him down and make him coffee and send me to pick up this or that at the mini-market. And I’d shake my head and buy whatever it was and know that we are all lost in loneliness, our ancient relationships diminished, the natural world broken, our kinship’s lost and a yearning for a deeper connection aching through all of us.

4.

Sitting at the till is Johnny Hardbread’s co-worker, Hop-along, who is studiously ignoring me as she always does. I’m waiting behind a bear of a man who’s dragging along an enormous bag of empty cans, his hair and beard disheveled and matted, his shoes broken and flapping below a brand new pair of jeans.

“I see you’ve got yourself some new pants,” Hop-along says making small talk. The bear says nothing. “Just so you know, the recycling machine is working again so you can turn those cans into pure profit,” she says, smiling as he places a packet of chewing gum on the moving band and she rings it through, but he hasn’t any money yet so she removes the gum from the till and just hands him the packet. Without a word he drags his cans toward the recycling machine.

When it’s my turn she looks down and rings up my items and informs me of the price. “Can I pay for Jussi’s beers too,” I say and she rings through 6 Pripps on top. I blip my card and thank her. She says nothing.

As I’m leaving I realise she’s preparing to speak and then she says “That was nice of you,” and I turn fully and look at her. This is the first time she’s spoken to me in 16 years so now I am speechless and she looks down, paralysed by her shy uncomfortableness with the foreign man and his peculiar accent. “So was that,” I say.

As I pass the window I can see Hop-along explaining to Jussi’s utterly perplexed face that his beers have been paid for. I raise my chin to the hairdresser, who, having triumphed in her persuasion is now deeply engrossed in her new creation and absently raises her eyebrows in salutation as she careful sections out the hair.

The sun is relentlessly beating down on a landscape unprepared. The air lightly laced with the aroma of smoke ringing like a distant alarm, a light dusting of panic gnawing at the back of the mind. The forest fire, burning for days now, seems a lifetime away, but is coming closer as the smoke drifts on the summer winds across the city. I feel mighty orange flames crackling through the pines like whirlpools, churning and spinning and rolling as if a tide of fire were flooding across the world at it crumbles and falls under the weight of it’s own foolishness, yet here we are, in our ancient mutual affinity, falling into each others arms and forging alliances of kindness and being. All these small and generous acts of communality happening for no other reason than this is what we do, we humans, when we free ourselves from the idiotic narrative of competition and selfishness devised at the creaking conference tables in the great glass skyscrapers that coldly reflect nothing but themselves.

I see such a tender vulnerability and a compelling compassion from the hairdresser across the road, as she coaxes a shy customer into taking the tiny plunge into a new haircut. I see such tenderness and bravery in Hop-along’s tender treatment of the bearman, both lost and nervous in this world that created them, then ignored them. I see a fearful child in the eyes of Jussi as he slowly fades into his encroaching dementia, reaching out for help and finding only the hand of Anna, reaching back to grasp his own. And even as the smoke from the forest fires, set alight in this time of Great Stupidity, waft through this city, I feel hope that these simple acts of human decency that we on Green Mountain Street express, these small, beautiful and rebellious acts of love might eventually triumph in the absurdity of our times.

And then, as I’m contemplating this gorgeous madness, there’s a knock on the door and I open to Jussi, who, smiling like a maniac, hands back my few meagre notes and says with a look of beautified wonder “Beer is now free, can you believe it? Free!”