Sari Anneli Heikki (née Koivunen)

The Choirmaster's Daughter

Sari Anneli Koivunen was born on 27 May 1960 in Kuusamo, a forestry and border town in north-eastern Finland, some two hundred kilometres east of Oulu and less than thirty from the Soviet frontier. She was the second of three children of Yrjö Tapio Koivunen and Eila Katariina Koivunen (née Nissilä). Her father, born in 1929, worked in the state forests around Kuusamo for most of his life and served two terms on the municipal council in his fifties. Her mother, born in 1932, was the secretary of a primary school in the town and, for more than thirty years, the choirmaster of the local Lutheran parish.

Her elder brother, Jouko Ilmari Koivunen, had been born on 14 February 1956. Her younger sister, Tuula Marjatta Koivunen, followed on 2 October 1964. The family lived in a red timber house on the southern edge of the town, with a sauna by the shore of a small lake and a woodpile that Yrjö restacked every autumn whether it needed it or not.

Kuusamo in the 1960s had been rebuilt almost entirely since the war, when the retreating German army burned the town to the ground, and the generation that rebuilt it carried a frugality that never left them. Nothing in the Koivunen house was thrown away that could be mended. Eila sewed the children's clothes, Yrjö resoled their boots, and the family ate what the forest, the lake, and the garden provided for much of the year.

What the house did not lack was music and books. Eila rehearsed hymns at the upright piano in the front room most evenings, and Sari learned to sing in harmony before she could read. The mobile library came to their road once a fortnight, and from the age of seven she met it every time, carrying back the maximum number of books and finishing them before it returned.

A Girl Who Read Everything

She was a quick, sharp-tongued child who did well at school with little apparent effort and was regularly in trouble for correcting her teachers. Jouko, four years older and slow to speak, followed their father into the forests at sixteen. Tuula, four years younger, was the gentle one, and Sari spent much of her adolescence defending her sister from the world and resenting having to do it.

Her relationship with her mother was close and combative in equal measure. Eila expected a great deal of her elder daughter and said so; Sari met every expectation and made sure her mother knew how little it had cost her. Her father she found easier. Yrjö said very little, read the newspaper from front to back each evening, and took her out on the lake in the summer to fish without requiring her to talk.

She sang in her mother's choir until she was eighteen, more from duty than devotion, and lost whatever religious conviction she had once had somewhere in her mid-teens without ever announcing the fact at home. She went on attending church at Christmas and Easter, largely for the hymns.

She passed her matriculation examinations at Kuusamo Upper Secondary School in the spring of 1979 with some of the highest marks in her year. Her teachers urged her towards literature or law. She chose teaching, partly because it was what she wanted and partly because her mother, who had spent her working life in a school office watching other people teach, had always assumed she would.

Oulu

In the autumn of 1979 she moved to Oulu to train as a class teacher at the University of Oulu's faculty of education. She lodged with a widow in the district of Tuira and spent her first winter homesick, cold, and determined not to admit either. Oulu was the largest place she had ever lived, and she found it noisy and impersonal before she found it exciting.

She met Kalle Juhani Heikki in the spring of 1980 at a dance at the student union. He was twenty-one, a builder's son who had come with a friend and stood at the edge of the room for most of the evening. He asked her to dance three times before she agreed, and she agreed mainly to make him stop asking. She found him serious, slow to speak, and entirely without the conversational tricks of the student men she knew. It took her some weeks to realise that she preferred it.

They married in the summer of 1981 in the parish church at Kuusamo, where Eila conducted the choir for her daughter's wedding and wept through most of the second hymn. Sari was twenty-one. Her father shook Kalle's hand at the door of the church and told him, in the longest speech anyone could remember him making, that Sari would be right about most things and that he would be wise to accept it early.

She completed her teacher training in 1984 and took a post at Höyhtyä primary school, on the eastern side of Oulu, teaching the youngest classes. She kept that post, with one change of building and several changes of head teacher, for thirty-six years.

The House at Hiukkavaara

In the early years of the marriage, Kalle and his father, Aarne Matti Heikki, built a timber house for the young couple in the Hiukkavaara district, working in the evenings and at weekends over the better part of two years. Sari chose the plan, argued for a larger kitchen than Aarne thought necessary, and won. She never lived anywhere else.

Marriage into the Heikki family brought her a mother-in-law, Liisa Marjatta Heikki, whose household ran with a precision Sari admired and resisted in roughly equal measure. The two women were wary of each other for several years and then, gradually, became allies, chiefly in the shared project of getting Heikki men to say what they meant. Aarne she found gruff, decent, and impossible to argue with, because he simply stopped talking.

The marriage itself was steady rather than easy. Sari read constantly and talked about what she read. Kalle listened, nodded, and went back to the workshop. She ran the household, its accounts, and nearly all of its social life, and she resented, more often than she said, how much of it fell to her. They argued about his hours more than anything else. He showed affection by fixing things, and it took her some years to learn to read the repaired door or the new shelf as the message it was.

Children were slow to come, and the couple spent most of the 1980s waiting. In 1988 Sari lost a pregnancy in its fourth month. She took a week away from school and then went back, and only her closest colleague, a fellow class teacher named Pirjo Kangas, knew the reason. Kalle worked longer hours. Sari grieved largely alone, at the kitchen table in the evenings with a book she was not reading, and the distance that opened between them that year never entirely closed.

Two Children and a Depression

Their son, Aldo Mattias Heikki, was born at Oulu University Hospital at 04:17 on 15 March 1992. Sari was thirty-one. The birth came at the worst moment of the early 1990s depression, when the collapse of Finland's trade with the Soviet Union brought the building industry in the north almost to a standstill. Heikki Construction shed more than half its staff, and for two years the household lived largely on Sari's teacher's salary.

She managed it with lists, a ledger of her own, and a refusal to discuss money in front of the baby. She also learned, in those years, that Kalle would not tell her how bad things were at the firm unless she asked directly, and often not even then. She stopped asking. It was a decision she would think about a great deal, twenty-five years later.

Their daughter, Ella Krista Heikki, was born at Oulu University Hospital at 15:42 on 7 September 1996, by which time the worst of the depression had passed. Sari took a year away from the classroom, the longest break of her career, and went back with some relief.

She was a firm, attentive, and occasionally sharp mother. She read aloud to both children every night until each in turn told her to stop, and she made them finish what they started. Aldo was quiet and eager to please, and she watched him try to meet his father's standards with a worry she could not get Kalle to share. Ella was loud, quick, and fearless, and argued with her father from an early age in ways her brother never dared. Sari rarely took sides in those arguments in public. In private she usually took Ella's.

The Classroom at Höyhtyä

For most of her working life Sari taught six- and seven-year-olds to read, write, and sit still, and she was very good at it. Her classroom was orderly, cheerful, and slightly old-fashioned. She sang with her pupils every morning, kept a reading corner stocked largely from her own shelves, and expected parents to read with their children at home, a demand that made her both respected and occasionally unpopular at the school gate.

She was offered the deputy headship at Höyhtyä twice and turned it down both times. Administration did not interest her, and she distrusted colleagues who wanted it. Over the years she trained a long line of student teachers from the university, several of whom remembered her as the most demanding supervisor they had and the one from whom they learned the most.

Her parents' later years drew her back to Kuusamo more often. Yrjö died of a stroke in the spring of 2005, at the age of seventy-five, and Eila of heart failure in 2011, at seventy-nine, after several years in which Tuula, by then a nurse in Kuusamo, did most of the caring and Sari drove up at weekends and felt guilty on the drive home. She sang at her mother's funeral, the only time she had sung in public since leaving the choir.

The Last Years of the Marriage

Kalle was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2009. He took the medication, ignored most of the advice that came with it, and went on spending long days on site. Sari nagged him about his health with increasing frustration and decreasing effect, and eventually settled into a weary truce in which she cooked what the doctor recommended and he ate whatever he found at lunchtime.

With Aldo apprenticed to the firm and Ella gone south to study architecture, the house at Hiukkavaara grew quiet. Sari and Kalle found themselves alone together for the first time in twenty years and discovered that they had less to say to each other than either had expected. They were not unhappy. They were careful with each other, and settled into routines, and spent their evenings in separate rooms more often than not.

Aarne died in September 2015, and Sari watched her husband withdraw further into work and silence. When Aldo came home from Tuscany in early 2017 with Leena Mäkinen, a talkative artist and cook from Helsinki, Sari liked her at once and worried about her almost as quickly. Oulu was a small, quiet city for a young woman used to the capital, and Sari, who remembered her own first winter there, made a point of inviting Leena to things.

At the wedding beside the family lake cottage near Pudasjärvi in July 2017, she spent much of the evening in the doorway of the cottage, watching the long table on the jetty, the two families taking one another's measure, and her husband talking timber with Leena's father as though nothing else in the world needed saying.

Over the following winter she noticed changes in Kalle she could not explain. He slept badly, took telephone calls in the yard, and lost weight. In the spring of 2018 he began to complain of tightness in his chest, which he called heartburn. She booked him a doctor's appointment in April, and he cancelled it for a site meeting. She was angry about it for a week and then let it go.

Ledgers

On the morning of 4 May 2018, Sari was teaching her class at Höyhtyä when the head teacher came to the classroom door. Kalle had collapsed on a school site in Kiiminki. By the time she reached Oulu University Hospital he had already been pronounced dead. Aldo arrived twenty minutes later, still in his site boots. Ella came north on the overnight train.

Kalle was buried beside his father at Intiö Cemetery later that month. Sari organised the funeral with the same efficiency she brought to everything, and did not cry in public. She cried that night alone in the kitchen.

Within weeks, going through the firm's books with Aldo, she learned what her husband had kept from her: a fixed-price care-home renovation in Kempele that had overrun badly, borrowing against the firm, suppliers who had not been paid, and debts owed to the firm that had never been chased. Some of the borrowing carried Kalle's personal guarantee. Sari, who had been married to him for almost thirty-seven years, learned more about his last three years from his ledgers than she had from him.

The house at Hiukkavaara had been paid off for more than a decade. To meet the guarantees and keep it, she took out a new mortgage against it in the late summer of 2018, at fifty-eight, and put aside the plans she had made to retire early. She told almost no one. Her anger at Kalle was real, and it arrived alongside her grief rather than after it, and for a long time she could not separate the two.

A Contract Abroad

That summer Aldo worked himself to exhaustion trying to keep the firm afloat. In August he told his mother he had been offered a subcontracting position with Killerton Enterprises on a large residential development at a remote site, at a rate of pay nothing in Northern Finland could match. Sari asked where the site was, and received an answer that sounded like an answer until she repeated it to Ella and realised it was not one.

Aldo left in late September 2018, leaving the firm in the hands of its longest-serving foreman, Veikko Laakso. Leena followed him in November. Sari drove her to the airport, and Leena held her hand in the car for longer than either of them mentioned afterwards.

After that, contact came through Killerton. Messages from Aldo and Leena arrived as short recordings or typed notes, usually several days after they were evidently made. Sari's replies went back the same way. There was no address she could write to, no telephone number that reached them, and no possibility of a visit, for reasons the company described as operational. Aldo's messages were affectionate, brief, and carefully empty of detail.

In the autumn of 2019 the firm, unable to manage its debts without him, was sold to Veikko Laakso for considerably less than it was worth. Sari, who held Kalle's shares jointly with her children after his death, signed the papers at Laakso's office on Aldo's instructions, which had reached her by message the week before. Laakso was decent about it, and visibly uncomfortable. Sari drove home afterwards and sat in the car outside the house for some time before going in.

Two months later, on 21 November 2019, Liisa Heikki died in Oulu at the age of eighty-five. Sari helped her sister-in-law Elina arrange the funeral and stood at the graveside with Ella and the Heikki siblings. Aldo did not come. His message of apology arrived four days after the burial. Sari watched it twice and did not reply for a week, the longest she had ever gone without answering her son.

A Grandson in Recordings

Her first grandchild, Aukusti Mikael Heikki, was born on 4 April 2020. Sari learned of it several days afterwards, through a short recorded message from Aldo, holding the baby up to the camera in a room she did not recognise. She watched it many times that evening. She was a grandmother to a child she could not hold, in a place she could not name, and she found that she could not be only happy about it, and was ashamed that she could not.

She retired from Höyhtyä at the end of the spring term in 2020, a few weeks after her sixtieth birthday, on a smaller pension than she had planned and with the mortgage still running. Her colleagues gave her a reading chair for the garden. Her last class sang to her on the final morning, which she had not expected, and which undid her more than anything since the funeral.

In the years that followed she came to know Leena's parents, Mikko and Helena Mäkinen in Helsinki, through long telephone calls in which the two families compared what their children had said and, more often, what they had not. Helena was the only person Sari could speak to frankly about her doubts. The two women agreed that something about the arrangement made no sense, and agreed with equal firmness that their children were adults and must be trusted.

Sari was not easily fooled, and she did not fully believe the explanations she was given. She wrote twice to Killerton's offices asking for an address and received polite replies that told her nothing. She wondered, at different times, whether Aldo was in some kind of legal or financial trouble, whether the work was dangerous, and whether he simply did not want to come home. She settled on none of these, and stopped raising them with Aldo when she saw how little it achieved.

What arrived instead were the recordings. Aukusti at one, unsteady on his feet. Aukusti at three, mixing Finnish and English in a single sentence. Aukusti at five, announcing that he intended to be a builder, a cook, and an artist. Drawings came with them, folded small: his parents, buildings that did not exist, and once, a picture of a woman with grey hair and a book, labelled in careful letters as his grandmother in Oulu. Sari framed it and hung it in the kitchen.

Hiukkavaara, Alone

Ella finished her architecture studies and settled in Helsinki, where she joined a small practice and worked longer hours than her mother approved of. She became, by default, the child Sari saw. Sari took the train south every few months and Ella came north at Christmas and for a week each summer. The two argued about Ella's work, Ella's flat, and Aldo, whom Ella defended with a loyalty Sari found both admirable and irritating, and they were closer in those years than they had ever been.

Sari's life in retirement was full and somewhat solitary. She read to children at the Hiukkavaara branch library on Tuesday mornings, took occasional supply work at Höyhtyä when the school was short, sang again, cautiously, in a small community choir, and spent a fortnight each summer in Kuusamo with Jouko and Tuula, both of whom still lived within a few kilometres of the house where they had grown up. She kept the house at Hiukkavaara exactly as it had been, partly from attachment and partly because she could not afford to change it.

She did not remarry and showed no interest in doing so. She visited Kalle's grave at Intiö on the anniversary of his death and on his birthday, and on neither occasion said much. Her anger at him faded slowly into something more like understanding, though it never disappeared. She came to think that he had hidden the debts out of the same pride that had made him a good builder, and that she had let him, and that both of those things were true at once.

By the autumn of 2026, Sari was sixty-six, still in the timber house her husband and father-in-law had built for her, with a little over a decade left on its mortgage and a framed drawing on the kitchen wall. She recorded a message for her grandson most Sundays, reading him a chapter of whatever book she was reading to the children at the library, and sent it through the only channel she had. She did not know where it went. She sent it anyway.