Cathedrals of the Flesh (17 page)

'My friend lives next door, and maybe you can take a sauna with her. Lenin hid in that building before sneaking back into
Russia. So you can use the same sauna as Lenin.'

I appreciated Maarta trying to provide a cultural experience for me, but I had made it a point not to visit Lenin's tomb in
Moscow, and I had no desire to walk in Lenin's Helsinki footsteps. No, I had shifted gears. I wanted to see Sibelius's and
Alvar Aalto's saunas. The renowned composer and designer had both taken great care with their saunas, and Aalto had designed
some curious, curved sauna benches.

There were only six days until Charles's arrival. Six days to complete the bulk of my research. Six days to declare a winner
in the unspoken banya-sauna rivalry. Six days to uncover enough offbeat Finnish delights to keep Charles entertained. Of course,
Charles's entertainment was not my responsibility, and we could discover things together; but in a way, he was a guest on
my fantasy trip. This wasn't a vacation we were taking together. Rather, he was visiting me on an odyssey that had spiraled
out of a vacation to Istanbul. That made me the de facto host and tour guide. I looked forward to getting caught up in the
swirl of wonder and curiosity that characterizes Charles's approach to life. Yet I loved the greater spontaneity and serendipity
of traveling alone. Was this an approach to travel or an approach to life? I wasn't sure.

The next morning, I pushed through the line of silent, red-nosed alcoholics waiting for the 10:00 A.M. Alko opening, on my
way to the exclusive, members-only Finnish Sauna Society. I had secured an invitation by passing myself off as a bathing expert,
though any foreigner can make an appointment to visit the society. Part of the society's mission is sauna education, which
foreigners need more than Finns.

Gaining membership to the Finnish Sauna Society is like gaining admission to the French Academy — you need a combination of
manners, breeding, and political clout. First you must be recommended by a member with a solid five-year standing in the society,
and from there you must produce various documents and letters of recommendation to prove that you are truly a stalwart friend
of the sauna. Membership itself is inexpensive, not more than $250 per year, but the bragging rights are priceless. The society
was founded in 1937 and now has 2,800 members.

The society's mission is to record and promote sauna rituals, history, and architecture. They vigilantly guard sauna integrity
and protect against the forces of sauna denigration. If a feckless company tries to market a body tent or substandard heating
unit as a sauna, the Finnish Sauna Society swoops in, vanquishing anyone who has taken the sauna's name in vain. With the
Finnish Sauna Society as a watchdog, the Finnish sauna will not be the setting for any blue movies or euphemistically named
'massage parlors.'

I expected a massive building for the headquarters of such a venerable group, a huge cedar log cabin with a sauna for giants.
I expected something that screamed authentic Finnish sauna. I expected, at least, a sign out front. But I was not yet in touch
with the understatement that is quintessentially Finnish. As I walked down a recently tarred narrow street surrounded by woods,
I thought that surely this couldn't be the Finnish Sauna Society headquarters. Then I inhaled the rich, smoky smell of a birch-and-alder
bonfire hanging in the air like a rolling mist.

Ahead of me, amid the birdcalls and racing squirrels, was a modest wintergreen compound plopped down in a clearing in the
woods. I followed the line of a long jetty down to the water. I noticed several women breast-stroking languidly through the
water; one climbed out of the water, without a stitch of clothes, and wrapped herself up in a pink towel.

Before I could join them and swim naked in the Gulf of Finland, I had to locate Sinikka Korvo, my entrée into this pink-toweled
world. Soon enough, I found myself in a strangely conventional office. This was the bureaucratic nerve center of the Finnish
Sauna Society. Its archive looked large enough to launch a good fifty sauna Ph.D's. The society also publishes its own quarterly
magazine, as well as medical research articles with alarming titles such as 'The Influence of the Sauna on Histaminopexy,
Histamine, and Its Discharge Through the Urine' and 'Experimental Exposure of Rats to the Sauna.' Whereas I had taken banyas
a lot more seriously than most Russians, I couldn't hold a candle to Finnish fanaticism.

Sinikka, a tidy blond woman in her mid-forties with an air of competence and resourcefulness, was sipping coffee and planning
for the next congress of the International Sauna Society. She greeted me with a warm smile and lively blue eyes shining behind
her square wire-rimmed glasses. An executive assistant all her life, she enjoyed the sauna as all Finns do but never imagined
she'd have a full-time job tending to sauna business. After two years as the society's secretary, talking shop meant talking
sauna, and her eyes sparkled every time she worked the word
l
ö
yly
into the conversation.

'Wait, how many syllables does
l
ö
yly
have?' I asked, pronouncing it like
lowly.
'I'm saying it with two syllables, and you're saying it with six.'

She smiled understandingly. 'This is a difficult word for foreigners to say, just as it is a difficult concept to understand.
L
ö
yly
sums up the spirit and mysticism of sauna, even though literally it refers to the steam produced when water is thrown on the
rocks. Here, try saying it with me. Looohleee.'

I followed Sinikka back into the sauna wing of the society. My arms had goose bumps - I was about to see the sauna in its
purest, most authentic form. Sinikka sensed my reverence and smiled. We walked into a café with a large-stoned hearth that
opened in the middle of the room. Its menu consisted of beer, juice, sausages, and salads. 'We always try to have salads on
ladies' day. The men just eat sausages and drink beer,' Sinikka said, and we exchanged knowing glances: Ahh, men and their
sausages.

'Here's where members sign in and pick up towels.' She handed me a generous helping of pink towels. This was rather a steep
step up from begging the Russian banya ladies for an extra hand towel. Sinikka continued, 'Downstairs you'll find the locker
rooms, but first let me give you a tour of the sauna compound. It can be confusing.' She slipped off her shoes, and I did
the same.

'Here you have your showers, self-explanatory, I should think,' she said while we padded barefoot through the gray-tiled chamber
containing two rows of showers, with a picture window overlooking the placid bay. The Finnish Sauna Society's setting was
so rural, tucked away and sheltered from civilization, that a picture window in the shower room posed no threat to privacy.

'Over here,' Sinikka said, pointing to an alcove with a massage table, 'a washerwoman will give you a traditional scrubbing
with pine soap, and because today you are our guest, I invite you to try this special washing free of charge.' Sinikka introduced
me to Aino, the washerwoman. Aino was in her sixties and wore a dress and apron. She could have as easily been a waitress
as a sauna scrubber. 'We'll leave the cupping for next time,' Sinikka teased. Cupping, also known as bloodletting, was still
practiced into the early 1990s at some of Helsinki's public saunas. The premise, that off-balance humors in our blood lead
to illness, goes back- to Empedocles, a Greek. After bacterial ointment is spread over the body, the cupper makes small incisions,
then attaches the horns (small bulbous glass containers) to pull out the blood. After the bloodletting, the client goes to
the sauna to add dehydration to anemia. It's still popular with older Finns.

'Last month we were the Sauna of the Month, and we had five hundred people a day coming through here, with huge lines out
the door,' Sinikka said on our way through the showers and down a dark-wooded passageway with latticed windows.

'Sauna of the Month?'

'It's a special program because we are a European City of Culture.'

'That sounds like a great honor — European City of Culture.'

'No, it is nothing, just a silly EU marketing ploy.' All Finns seemed equally skeptical about this City of Culture business.
Sinikka continued, 'Sauna of the Month allows access into normally private saunas. You see, Finns all have their own saunas
at home or in their apartments, but sauna is such an obsession that we are curious about private saunas.' In America, we are
curious about how the rich and famous live; in Finland, they are curious about how the rich and famous sauna.

'Where is the featured sauna this month?'

'A very unusual one on the island of Suomenlinna, the so-called Fortress of Finland. It is probably the world's largest sauna,
designed to fit an entire company of one hundred and twenty men. Though up near Lapland you can visit the world's largest
savusauna.'

Savusauna? This was a new word for me, and Sinnika explained its meaning and history.
Savusauna
means 'smoke sauna' and refers to the heating process of the oldest saunas. Some would argue that a sauna by any other name
is not a sauna. Originally, saunas were nothing more than holes dug into the side of a hill where the ancient Finno-Ugric
people would essentially have indoor campfires, take off all their clothes when it got hot enough, and pour water on the campfire
rocks. This gave way to building a structure, generally a rectangular one-room log house, for the express purpose of bathing,
as well as salting meats, brewing beer, giving birth, and preparing the bodies of the dead.

Early savusaunas contained an open stove piled high with rocks and a raised platform with benches. In a process that takes
three to four hours, the rocks in the stove are heated, while smoke from the burning wood fills the room before escaping through
a vent in the wall or ceiling. Black soot covers everything — the walls, benches, and ceiling — but the charcoal, though messy,
is bacteria-resistant and makes the sauna an even healthier environment.

Slowly, saunas with chimneys were introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century. For all their magic, savusaunas had
several drawbacks: They frequently caught fire, they took four hours to prepare, and the soot from the smoke required constant
cleaning.

Sinikka explained my options. 'We have five saunas here. The first, and least popular, is a futuristic electric sauna with
self-producing
l
ö
yly.
It is state of the art, but people don't come here for electric coils, they come for the smell of smoke. Back here are the
two most popular saunas, the savusaunas.'

I peeked through the window into the darkness of a room lit by the faint red glow of the hot rocks and a few small windows
that created silhouettes of the blackened benches. 'How are they different?' I asked.

'Number four is hotter than number three, and you are only allowed to use the vasta in number four.' So many rules, I should
probably have taken notes.

'Who heats the savusaunas? It sounds complicated.'

'Oh, it is. Our sauna major, Hanu, heats the savusauna. He arrives at seven in the morning to have it ready for the two o'clock
opening.'

Sauna major? Then Sinikka showed me the continuous wood-burning chimney saunas, which fall between electric saunas and savusaunas
on the continuum of sauna purity. Again, they were heated differently, and one allowed vastas and the other didn't. I tried
to imagine all these rules in Russia. I couldn't.

It was 2:00, opening time for the society, and women were starting to arrive in droves. Sinikka handed me a vasta, the most
beautiful green leafy bouquet of birch leaves I'd ever seen. It was thick and verdant and smelled as if it had been cut just
moments ago. A far cry from the anorexic veyniks in Moscow, which at the time I thought were perfectly acceptable.

One of the ladies in the dressing room said to me, 'Feel free to ask anyone inside the sauna for help.' Who needs help inside
a sauna, I wondered, though at a place with an official 'sauna major' anything was possible. If I survived the St Petersburg
banya witches, nothing inside a tranquil Finnish sauna could possibly trip me up. I remembered the flavors of saunas as explained
by Sinikka: Saunas two and three are cooler, and vastas are not allowed; saunas one and four are hotter, and you can whisk
yourself to death. What I didn't yet know is that inside a sauna there are as many subtle rules as there are kosher dietary
laws.

I had too many saunas to choose from, so I just stood indecisively in the hallway, like a Soviet at the grocery store choosing
between recently unveiled brands of toothpaste, until I heard a voice ask, 'Can I help you?'

'I don't know which sauna to go into,' I confessed.

'You should try the savusauna. If this is your first time, maybe you should try the milder one.'

'No, the hotter the better.'

'Okay, well then, come with me,' the pink-toweled stranger said, smiling, and I followed her.

'These are the savusaunas,' she said, ushering me inside.

I put down my towel and sat across from the enormous
kiua,
the sauna stove that assumed the position of an altar. The five other women in the room were all silent. I looked around,
hoping to make eye contact with someone. A lifelong member of the society welcomed me. She was in her late sixties and told
me that her father had been a founding member of the society. This tidbit was presented as if she were a Daughter of the American
Revolution. Teaching me the subtleties of sauna behavior, it was obvious, was both a pleasure and a burden to her. She touched
her cane, which she had placed next to the stove, and said, 'In Finland we have a saying: "In the sauna you must behave as
in a church."' Here's a summary of her imparted gems.

1. Ask permission of your sauna sisters before making
l
ö
yly.

2. When leaving the sauna, ask the other bathers if they would like you to pour water on the rocks. This is akin to asking
anyone if you can get them a refill while you're up.