They were entered through a thick wood door leading to a dim corridor, connecting two separate dressing rooms and a spacious washing area covered with light gray tile floors and walls. The Sauna chamber was accessed from the washing area and sealed with a glass panel door supported by a bulky spruce frame. Transparency enabled parents to watch over children and condemn them if they soaped the floor tiles to slide flat across the room. They considered themselves a modest and modern Sauna. They didn’t exhibit any traces of hammer hits missing nail heads as the interior panels were attached using iron nails shot from a compressor driven nailgun. The panels expressed a warm yellow colour and covered the insulations and ceiling neatly, modestly hiding the surrounding concrete walls.
The rooms of the Sauna had very small windows at ceiling level which faced the inner yard. The window frames were angled towards to the floor, echoing times when coal had been poured into basements and electric lights were scarce. The two current electric lights of the Sauna chamber were covered with wooden shades. Ten thin straight pine sheets angled light downwards, so that the people sitting on the birch benches stretching the back wall would not feel exposed. The stove was generous with a deep pit of fist size stones, safely distanced from the corner panels and surrounded by sturdy birch handrail. The glass of the outer window of the Sauna was textured to resemble water droplets allowing only light trough.
Like its sibling, they were in a basement but not ashamed. They were in different buildings, numbered 35 and 37 of the same housing company, located in A district which was a moderately fancy neighbourhood. The siblings were only made distinct by their usage. 37 also housed weekly jogging-saunas but these were seldom attended, even though like the annual Christmas Sauna, they were free and open for all occupants. Most people either reserved a weekly Thursday shift or signed up for vacant Saturday shifts by writing their last name and apartment number on a schedule by the door. Shifts were an hour. On Saturdays both Saunas heated for seven hours straight, welcoming seven families, individuals or groups. Because of the latest energy crisis the price of a reservation rose from 2€ to 3€.
The two buildings had been constructed for the employees of a nearby hospital. This explained the small apartment size. They were for single nurses and worked to keep them this way. Some of the first occupants still lived in the house. The small apartments were balanced by big shared spaces such as the Saunas, a hobby room which could fit fifty occupants, fully featured laundry and drying rooms. These were the expressions of the collective desire of the housing company owners.
Because of a particularity of the building’s memory system, it took time for new occupants to learn the buildings behaved. News concerning the free and open jogging-sauna events and other details regarding shared spaces were conveyed in bulletin board literature, a niche style of fiction which required excessive efforts from younger readers. Elders understood that this literary form was appreciated by observing how pins holding the changing prints gradually frayed the soft fibres of the bulletin board. This process offered great comfort for the initiated. Not reading also spared the younger occupants from complicated questions. It was a blessing that they did not know that nobody, not even landlords owned the apartments. Owners only had shares in a collectively owned housing company, which could take any form.
“A text of the agreement would make their experience less tangible”. The Sauna reasoned though a process which took countless bathing cycles to compute and to store in a spruce panel colour change. If the people had learned that their comfort was based on an agreement which took the shape of two separate buildings, they would have been stressed by the responsibility of maintaining them.
On the days the Sauna in building 35 was not heated they were only interrupted by scheduled cleaning or distant noises of people passing by in the basement corridor. Five days a week the Sauna rested and contemplated its existence peacefully. This kind of slumber was common for housing company Saunas in the city, who all had a lot of time to think. Despite this vast computational power, their processing was very slow because it was affected by a specific type of amnesia. The housing company Saunas only retained residual memories. This meant they could only keep track of their thoughts in material changes such as chalk formations near water outlets, appearance of rust on their nails or screws and by following seasonal changes.
This Saunas chalk formations were cleaned diligently and the nail heads were too deep in the panels to see. So, it kept track of its thought and retained coherent memories by observing slow changes in the colour of its spruce panels. This slow thought was paced by occasional wood rattle and pops, caused by the panels undergoing seasonal changes. The Sauna knew it was owned collectively and was very forgiving to itself. It had very few responsibilities and keeping ludic thought was a self-indulgent side project. It enjoyed making observations and storing them patiently in the panel colour changes.
Despite its best efforts it could not distinguish between its guests. All the people had soft cheeks and were too similar to keep track of. All the guests returned the two blue plastic and the one steel bucket on the same bench of the washing area. Because the Sauna was pacing its thoughts slowly, it was as if the three buckets never moved. Between each visitor, even the löylykauha and white plastic kippa were positioned the same way, to relieve water and traces of use. The only thing notable about the different users was how few traces they left. Even on Saturdays, when occupants and families used the Sauna in turns for hours, each returned the buckets and tools on the bench between the shifts. A kumilasta was used to clean the floor tiles of soap and excess water.
None of the residents, the Sauna nor the janitor could explain why the buckets were kept in their particular order. The contract had been silent and maintained too meticulously for any thought to occur. The steel bucket, intended for löylyvesi on the right by the window, the plastics to the left and löylykauha and kippa on the front. For the uninitiated these tools appeared as they had been dropped in their place. Placed this way the containers would take the least amount of space on the bench, allowing people to sit before bathing and being close to the radiator they would dry swiftly. There was no guarantee that this the plan but it was maintained. The Sauna was reset every time it was used. It was a beautiful non-ornamental composition which the Sauna enjoyed.
The Sauna was not bothered that it couldn’t remember how many years it had been in service. When it needed assurance of the passing time to form some coherent thought, it observed the changes in the yellow hue of the wooden panels. Judging from the current hue, it assessed it was at least 30 years old. In conversations with its closest neighbour the Air-raid shelter, it knew it had been first built on this site in the fifties and had always been intended for the building. It was part of the design, a self-evident feature, outlined in building plans without any mental strain.
Over the years The Air-raid shelter had been largely converted into a bicycle storage, but it maintained core features, the iron doors, ventilation shafts and the small room for protective gear, insulations and air pumps. It was an exhausting neighbour, constantly making noise of itself, claiming to be on a holy mission, responsible for raising the final generation of men. In moments when the Air-raid shelters’ rants and dark grunts bothered the Sauna, it took slow comfort in witnessing rays jumping across the panel seams. In the winter it followed frost forming on the outer windows. It smiled patiently.
Unlike the Air-raid shelter, eagerly waiting for deployment, this Sauna… Like its peers, the armada of modest Saunas scarred in housing company basements in Helsinki, they were marked by regular use. This regular use was only made remarkable by how little evidence of the use was left. As if the people did not exist at all and were characterized by what they could not be remembered for.