Photographs Susanna Helke   What's it like to live in a paradise of   postmodernist architecture if you haven't got a job? This is a beautiful place, but a strange one.      The suburb of Kallahti, which has grown up near Vuosaari in eastern Helsinki in the 1990s, has the same kind of charm as deserted funfairs or modern airports with their sealed escalators. There is something similar, too, in the cities of film sets, where nothing is at it seems.      Here, a building's façade curves over the main street in a bluish-violet wall, lofty as the Kremlin; but as you turn the corner everything becomes more familiar, like the yellowing paint of the bathroom at home.      Here, everything is fun: French balconies, nautical porthole windows, mushroom-shaped steel structures as canopies. Multi-storey parking lots which, with their curving walls, look like concert halls. Piazzas and pergolas, although shady creepers seldom adorn their frameworks as they ought.      Within these pastel walls many people already live, about six thousand of them; and in the area as a whole, including Meri-Rastila and Vuosaari, almost 24,000.      This is a satellite town dedicated to small children and the long-term unemployed: one in five inhabitants of Kallahti is under the age of six, and almost one in six of the workforce of the entire area is without work. As in all of east Helsinki, there are a large number of long-term unemployed people, almost 40 per cent of the unemployed.      In some families, the children are waking up once more this morning to play among themselves; then they nudge their parents, who have stayed up to the small hours:      'Wake up, wake up, we're hungry.' On Monday at eleven a man in his fifties emerges from a Kallahti apartment block. He pulls his woollen cap deeper over his ears and hugs his coat tighter. It is always windy here.      Keijo Lehtonen is beginning his daily ritual: he trots off to the bus stop and takes a bus into old Vuosaari. At the job-seekers' club he reads the day's papers, glances at the pools and the racing tips, drinks a cup of coffee.      There are other, similar, solitary men on the move. Some of them busy themselves maniacally with courses and trips. Keijo is a quieter type. He has not worked in more than seven years, and he has got used to it. Once upon a time he was proud to call himself a shipyard worker.      From here, the men drift to the unemployed canteen where, on weekdays, you can buy a bowl of soup for five Finnmarks. After eating and chatting for a moment, Keijo hurries to go about his business at Kolumbus. This giant-sized shopping centre rises above the area like a steel sun with rays. You can get all you need there, and from next winter you will also be able to get the metro into town - if you have any business there. The radio is always on. Without company, the days are long. Around the time Keijo was dismissed from the docks in the early 1990s, his marriage broke up, and Keijo was left with three teenage children to look after.      'That trollop has been surfing the Internet again,' Keijo sighs, stuffing a thousand-Finnmark telephone bill into the cupboard. In seven years of unemployment he has learned that unemployment, single parenthood and teenage children are not meant to go together. Someone always has their hand up: to Rosso for a salad, to Hesburger for a hamburger, to the Itäkeskus centre for some makeup.... The list of demands is endless.      The children often ask: 'Why can't you get us a bigger flat, dad?' Space is cramped for four in a three-roomed apartment: the teenagers sleep in a double bed, and one in her own, Keijo on a mattress on the bedroom floor.      But Keijo says that in fact it's better for him to sleep on a hard surface. 'Good for my back.' When Keijo's mother died, she left her son an inheritance: a little flat she had saved up for in Oulu, in the far north, and some reproduction furniture. Stroking its velvet upholstery, one can easily imagine what she may have thought.      Did she imagine, as she waitressed night after night at the Tankard restaurant, that she was building a better future for herself and her son? With her savings, did she hope she was safeguarding her grandchildren's lives, giving them a start in their education?      The result of his mother's hard work, her capacity to rise, through industrious saving, above her own class, collapsed at the moment her son lost his job. Now Keijo's mother's inheritance is being squandered on everyday living, food and rent.      When the inheritance came, all government support was cut, with the exception of the labour market grant. Including child benefit, this grant amounts to 130 Finnmarks per weekday – 2,080 Finnmarks a month cash in hand.      Because of his age, Keijo is unlikely to get another job. And without a job, he cannot raise a loan, either. There is a lot of telephone sales work going, but he couldn't get a job there either. 'They said they'd be in touch on Friday, and that Friday never came.'      The youngest of Keijo's daughters dreams of becoming an astronaut when she grows up - to get a long way away from here. The older was supposed to go to work in Tiimari, a stationery shop in the Kolumbus centre, in the summer, but during her trial period she realised what a tough business working was.      'I felt just like a slave, like. Up and down stairs, all day.' The smell of baking wafts into the stairwell.      A group of neighbours have arrived at Kari and Pirjo's home to listen to Kari lecture on the products of the Golden Neo-Life Diamite franchise company. Kari has baked buns for the visitors and made some little savouries for the coffee-table.      Golden's washing powders and nutritional supplements are set in a semicircle on the living-room table, while more stand on the bookcase above the television, pointing toward the ceiling as if on a sacred altar.      The entire flat is bathed in the spring light. Water drips from the clothes line on the balcony on to the concrete floor.      Kari asks for a moment's attention. He wants to tell us about the threats that all of us encounter in our everyday lives. He knows effective medicines for these quotidian dangers:      'When our Sonja vomited orange juice on the bedspread.... Once my sister's dog crapped on the hall mat... we got it out with this G1.... Pathologists have found a grey film in the stomachs of people who don't put rinse-aid in their dishwashers....'      Salmon, pasties and lime-flavoured capsules pass from hand to hand. They melt in an accustomed manner in the mouths of Kari's three small children. Two red-eared tortoises emerge from their aquarium, waving their heads from side to side. Kari's cheeks shine with enthusiasm. The wall is embellished with a poster with a picture of Hawaii's Waikiki Beach. Kari and Pirjo are going there this autumn if Kari can sell enough Golden products and can get his own resale network working efficiently.      'Network selling is the only way a normal person can get rich,' Kari says. It is based on the principle that the supplier gets a percentage of the turnover of the resellers and their resellers for the rest of his life. Up to a certain point.'      Kari is now 28 years old. When he lost his job as a cook a couple of years ago, it was a relief to the family. In the last years, he had had to work mad hours overtime, always dancing to his employer's tune. In the end dad was never home.      The Golden world appeared in that situation like a miracle, in the form of an old school-friend. In the first month Kari recruited seven new dealers to the network; altogether, there are about fifteen thousand Finnish believers in Golden.      Although Kari has been with the company for more than eighteen months, income has so far been so modest that the family is still living on various benefits and unemployment grants.      'Sometimes, I must say, you get a feeling of wellbeing, and then you get lazy,' Kari says. There are days when the living room resounds constantly to the sound of Nintendo. Father and son switch the playstation on first thing in the morning, and the entire family participates in the game, giving advice. Dying on the third level is a catastrophe.      On efficient days Kari rushes to the Itäkeskus shopping centre first thing, to 'play darts', as he puts it. That means looking for resellers for the network.      He picks people up everywhere: in the liquor store, in clothes shops, in cafés, cleaners at the railway station. Kari asks them, 'Are you really in your dream job?', and few of them are. Only the children have regular work: in the morning they go to the half-day care centre and kindergarten, in the afternoon they come home. The only difference between weekends and weekdays is that the children are at home all day and the carpets must not be beaten outdoors; for some people rest at weekends.      Pirjo is now 26. Before the birth of the children, she worked at the Arabia ceramics factory, gluing pictures on to Moomin mugs. Now that her child care benefit has finished, she is in her qualifying period for the unemployment centre. With only a basic secondary education and little work experience, her chances of getting a good job are not great. Pirjo tried telephone selling for a magazine for invalids, but didn't last a fortnight.      'Coercion doesn't suit my nature,' Pirjo says. Now she dreams of working as a model, for the Anttila mail order catalogue, for instance. She has applied to a couple of model agencies, but one said it already had enough girls, and she hasn't heard anything from the other.      On the kitchen table is Seitsemän päivää ('Seven days') magazine: Pirjo is its Star Girl. If the readers vote her through to the final of the competition, she can look forward to a week's foreign holiday.      'And you never know what else could follow on from that.'      She has tried a bit of everything, including stripping at a night-club. Dancing has always been easy and spontaneous for Pirjo. The children are always told that mummy's going dancing.      'When Pirjo goes out to work, she's much more relaxed and cheerful than when she's at home. She gets a lot more done, and we don't argue so much.' The dinos, legos and my little ponies lying cheerfully higgledy-piggledy on the floor would doubtless agree, if only they could speak.      Some women have told Pirjo about stripping gigs where they have earned wild sums - on the black market, of course. Better than a minister's salary, they say.      'I myself am certainly aiming to gradually come off the dole and get rich selling this soap,' Kari says. He captures his youngest in a tender hug. There are still buns in the basket, but the decorations have been bitten off.      'Then I'll leave the business to the children.' From the window the view is of an endless stretch of waste ground. Along its little paths go ant-sized mothers with prams. A child-care centre has been thrown into the middle of the wasteland, black stones sticking up sharply out of the ground like sculptures. Kallahti's own Stonehenge.      On the edge of the waste, in a terraced house, lives Marjo Urbanski and her two little children. The house is flat-roofed and businesslike, but a bright red square has been painted on the corner of the upstairs window.      That's what Kallahti is like: always some bright little detail amid the darkening concrete.      Marjo sits in her kitchen and speaks volubly and quickly. She has something to say to society, to all of us.      She wants to know why she has never had a regular job, although she has all sorts of skills: she speaks four languages fluently, she knows how to use computers, and examine mosses, and by the way she can also draw beautiful microscopic enlargements of them.      Marjo is a biologist by training. She is thirty, and knows that it could soon be too late.      Although economic recovery is underway and people are beginning to be recruited for jobs, Marjo belongs to the group of highly educated women whose position in working life is still indefinite: badly paid, short-term jobs are all that is on offer, not proper work that reflects their training.      Marjo is preparing herself as if for a military expedition, waiting for the moment when battle finally begins. She prays every day that she could be useful. While one child is at the care centre and the other at pre-school, she studies more and more, revises her knowledge and works for projects for the common good - most recently the founding of a Polish school.      Her small children, too, she prepares for a hard life. Teaches her five- and seven-year-old foreign languages at home; tells them that if you mess up in life, you are never forgiven.      Even in this idyllic pastel suburb, dangers are already lurking: drugs are dealt on street corners, and men with sweeties entice children into cars.      Marjo is quite alone with her children.      One Christmas morning the alarm clock rang, her husband took the rucksack he had packed the previous night out of the cupboard and left. Ten thousand marks a month (US$ 2,000), net, would be enough. That is how much pay Marjo has calculated she needs to keep the family's heads above water.      Badly paid supply teaching jobs are on offer, but even the social services officials say it is not worth taking them, or the family will be many thousands of marks worse off.      Marjo, too, has tried all possibilities.      'I had this Golden phase,' she begins. 'Network selling was the hope to save the family. I bought a pile of Golden cleaning products and nutrition supplements and founded a company.'      But the network collapsed. The network team above Marjo did not do its job, and Marjo was left with debts and so many cleaning products she could have cleaned the whole of Kallahti. And not a penny of benefit, because Marjo now had a company.      Perhaps she was too soft and nice. But perhaps it's just that not all of us have what it takes to be an entrepeneur, whatever the government would like to think.      In the end, what happened to Marjo was what happens to many thirty-somethings in difficulties: her parents came and saved her. Her father bought the company, horrified at his daughter's social uselessness.      Marjo's mother often wonders, on the telephone, why her daughter does not pack her bags and get a teaching job in a small country school. Marjo knows all there is to know about East African mosses and their conservation.      And that is a lot.      She fears the increasing demands that the unemployed should be placed in a workforce reserve where people could be ordered to work anywhere, on a minimum wage. For such subordination Marjo is much too educated and indebted - and much too responsible for her two children.      Marjo believes she is already a lost cause as far as to a middle-class life is concerned. She cannot imagine owning anything but the cultural capital which she has acquired through loans and hard work. Even in her current rented idyll the linoleum splits if even a plate falls on to it. The neighbours' conversations can be heard through the walls.      On the employment office's career planning course, Marjo was given a pile of coloured pencils and a sheet of paper. She was told to draw My own good future.      And Marjo drew: a big sun and an endless sea. A gypsy woman once told Marjo that she would become rich and famous, that she would live in a brick house on the shore of a refreshing sea.      Marjo looks out of her kitchen window at the waste land. Under the snow the tufts of grass that have been planted there are beginning to show; landscaping, it's called.      In the back yard an allotment has been fenced in. This summer Marjo will plant her own green oasis there. Translated by Hildi Hawkins This article was first published in Helsingin Sanomat   Top of page