Cold Snap: Enemy #1 of the street-people

On the coldest night of the winter so far, fourteen tired souls hang out in Helsinki's all-night café for the homeless

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By Merituuli Ahola
     
      "Hah! You're still in the land of the living, then?" says the man in his sixties, bundled up in a parka against the cold, as he steps into Kalkkers, the all-night café for the homeless, at around 2 a.m. on Tuesday morning.
      The quiet figure to whom this cheery greeting is addressed - a man with wispy beard and whose facial features are almost entirely hidden under a green woolly hat - moves for the first time in several minutes.
      "More or less, more or less", replies woolly-hat man. His chapped lips turn up towards his ears for the first time in the evening, revealing a mouth several teeth short of a full set.
     
Over Monday night until Tuesday morning, at the café for homeless nighthawks, a dozen men and two women sit slumped at tables. Outside Helsinki shivers in the coldest night of the winter. The mercury is down to 18°C below in nearby Kaisaniemi. The café in Vaasankatu offers a place to come in, get warm, rest your head on the tables, and eat a cheap cheese roll.
     
In one corner, a man who earlier threw his playing-cards on the table noisily has now nodded off to sleep on his side, although strictly speaking it is forbidden to go horizontal in Kalkkers.
      You can doze sitting up, but there's no lying down here. Marika and Jarno, the staff on duty in Kalkkers tonight, ignore the snoring figure. The place isn't that busy anyway.
     
There are around 4,200 homeless people in the Greater Helsinki area, and their numbers include junkies, "mixed (ab)users", and people with mental problems. The majority of the Kalkkers clientèle, however, are what the Alko liquor stores call "heavy consumers".
      "The junkies have got some good places to get themselves looked after, so you don't see them in here so often these days", says Jussi Roiha, project leader of No Fixed Abode (Vailla vakinaista asuntoa, VVA), an association for homeless people.
      At the table near the door sit Timppa and Markku, rolling cigarettes. They both acknowledge that they have a taste for the electric soup themselves.
      "When you are on the streets you have to have a hit of the bottle now and then", says 57-year-old Timppa. Markku, three years younger, nods in agreement.
     
At the all-night café, the bottles are extracted from sleeves and breast-pockets and stored in blue lockers.
      The only drinks served here are coffee - and sometimes juice. There was one occasion when even that went electric, after some joker managed to pour a litre of Koskenkorva [40° grain vodka] into the jug.
      "The staff were a bit astonished at the constant queue for the orange juice", laughs Roiha.
     
Timppa and Markku both have seven homeless years behind them. Before that, Timppa drove a van for a living. Markku was in real estate sales, and for a short while he even went to work while living in a downstairs hallway. It is also seven years since the death of Timppa's wife.
      "First my wife died, and then a year later my father, and another year and it was my mother's turn. Eighteen months after my mother died, I found my best friend dead", recalls Timppa.
      With the demise of his wife, Timppa lost his home.
      "They said the apartment was too big for me. All 49.5 square metres of it. They promised me they'd look for a new apartment for me 'as a matter of urgency'. I don't know much about urgent, since it's now been seven years."
     
For many of the others here, the story is similar: the process of marginalisation has been given a shove by divorce or by the death of a wife.
      At the next-door table, a relatively spruce-looking man speaks in a quiet voice about his wife's suicide, which took place last autumn. "After that I went down so far I hit rock bottom. You can't get any lower."
      From underneath a black baseball cap, 41-year-old Ari-Pekka nods his head. He has been homeless for three years.
      "My old lady kicked me out, and I haven't had a roof over my head since. But I'm not blaming anyone. I'm the one who screwed things up for myself", he says.
     
The topic of discussion at Timppa and Markku's table has segued from handy hints on collecting empty bottles (for the deposit money) to a contemplation of the best places to kip down for the night.
      Frost is their worst enemy.
      "You don't starve to death in Finland, but you can freeze to death out there."
     
Over Sunday night to Monday morning, Markku slept on the upstairs landing of an apartment block. Timppa chose "Helsinki's cheapest one-roomed flat", one of the steel public conveniences dotted around the city centre.
      Neither man has much time for the dormitories for the homeless.
      "Too regimented, and they are very tight on letting you in if you've had a drop to drink."
      And the derelicts' shelter on Sahaajankatu in Herttoniemi, out in the eastern suburbs, sounds no more appetising.
      "No, you can't get any sleep there. People all around you completely trashed. They fall all over you and throw up everywhere", says Timppa.
      "Yes, it's more peaceful in a hallway."
     
Unless, of course, things pan out the way they did for Markku the previous night.
      "I got up in the night and went outside for a slash. I stuck a mitten in between the door so it wouldn't close on me, but when I got back in, there was this young bloke coming home from work, and he saw me. He followed me upstairs to the landing and asked what I thought I was doing there. I said I was just getting warm if that was alright, and that I wasn't disturbing anyone. He said no, it wasn't really alright to use the place to doss down and get warm, so that was that", shrugs Markku.
     
Kalkkers, the all-night café for the homeless of Helsinki, is located on Vaasankatu, and is open every day from 22.00 until 6.00 in the morning.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 2.3.2005


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Night of the Homeless on Sunday night (18.10.2004)

Links:
  No Fixed Abode
  FEANTSA

MERITUULI AHOLA / Helsingin Sanomat
merituuli.ahola@hs.fi