The Glitter Scene (23 page)

“Poland.” And a stomachache.

“… the black Madonnas, the incomprehensible language …”

“You were never really there. And certainly not pregnant? Take it easy now, Susette. I understand completely.”

Still, Maj-Gun, who was she? Majjunn, like a sound in your mouth?

“Hell, Susette, what are you doing with a revolver in your sauna bag?”

And suddenly, something she had forgotten, even though it was not more than a week ago. Maj-Gun had been standing in the kitchen in her apartment with the pistol in her hand. “Djeessuss, Susette.” As if she had not known up or down, what she could have said otherwise.

Then put the pistol to her heart.

“Maj-Gun!” Susette shouted. “It could be loaded!”

How Maj-Gun looked at her then. “Take the pistol and put it away, Susette.”

Snip
, nothing.

As if nothing had happened.

CAN you actually go on after this as if nothing happened?

Answer. Yes. You can.

Maj-Gun in her childhood, the Pastor’s Crown Princess, at the cemetery. Stood and pointed at the Confession Grove.

“There it is. Shall I show you the way?”

“I’m fascinated by the Death in her.” Her first boyfriend, Tom Maalamaa, had spoken that way once at the cemetery. To his sister Maj-Gun: the two siblings, who otherwise were always at each other’s throats, could, you had discovered, have certain very close moments just the two of them. Like that time in the cemetery back when Tom Maalamaa was her boyfriend and she had been on her way into his room where his sister also was: they had not noticed her at first and Susette had stood in the doorway and heard them talking to each other like that, certainly not about her but it still felt that way.

Two children at the cemetery, with masks, Liz Maalamaa.

Answer again. Yes. You can. Because those were just images, scenes.

All of that darkness, the death, nourished by guilt from longing, fear of yourself, not from Maj-Gun but from herself.

The whole time with Maj-Gun, as if that was exactly the point with Maj-Gun. How she calls forth those things
in you. Intensifies them until they roar in your head and dunk dunk become more real than the original scenes, what actually happened.

More real than the real. Maj-Gun in the kitchen, how they were cutting rug rags, Maj-Gun’s laughter, Maj-Gun’s panting laugh, the sweat running down her face. Maj-Gun at the newsstand … the ordinary that became strange all of the time.
In the midst of life there is an instinct to death
. She wanted to get away from there, but still, had to stay, motionless on the stool.

You thought you could see horrible slimy underworld-fungus hanging from Maj-Gun’s head as if it were hair.

Something held them together, but what? Maj-Gun like a message she tried to decipher.

Something held them together. In the midst of life …

And neither of them wanted it, as if both of them were fighting it.
Starling darling
, to life, an invitation.

Still: “a logic you have to go along with.”

From room to room, they were in the same room.

Maj-Gun, her, and her mother.

Crehp. Crehp
.

Maj-Gun, a figure,
silk velvet rag scraps
in her head.

“I was standing there, reeling in the fear.” Susette in the middle of the ring on a square. Cars driving around. Nah. She had
not
been afraid. Other than, then, of a destiny. Had wanted to blow up the ring, Maj-Gun, everything else in the way.
We are two Angels of Death, Susette, in a timelessness
.

•

Still. Susette. She is not there after all, on the square. She is here of course. Has been here the entire time, dancing, on the floor of the disco.

“Little” Susette, big earrings and a lot, even though you cannot see it, of death inside her head.

•

She becomes aware of everything again: the smoke, the sweat, the people.

Blue Angel. The nausea wells up inside her, she has to run to the restroom, push her way past the whole line and puke and puke in the stall and when she is back in the hall she searches for Maj-Gun but does not find her.

The sofa where they had been sitting is filled with other people. Four umbrellas are neatly lined up on the table. Among the cigarette butts and stickiness from a milk glass, half empty.

“Hey.” A hand on her shoulder. She is standing face-to-face with Tom Maalamaa.

In a blazer, some sort of beard, and a polo shirt.

•

And Susette Packlén, a bait for life, has run, is running running away, has left the disco.

The cat meets her in the hallway in her little apartment when she comes home.

Then she is completely calm, takes off the horrible new clothes.

The avenues, running in the avenues.

Overturning houses.

Houses made of balsa. A fragile structure.

Buries her face in the cat’s fur.

“Mom. I have the feeling that I want it to be over now. Everything.”

•

Susette who is sitting on the sofa in her little apartment and cutting up the garments that had been bought
that day. The parrot jacket with the shoulder pads, the creased pants.

The cat deep asleep in the corner of the sofa, in the light of a solitary floor lamp.

With the “textile scissors,” an inheritance, one of the few things of her mother’s Susette had taken with her from the parental home before it was sold. Long strips, loom lengths.

THE NEXT MORNING SUSETTE PACKS her backpack and takes the morning bus out to the capes to bury the white kitty.

Sunny day, few clouds, tepid. No one on the bus except her. She gets off at the last stop at the grove of trees where the Second Cape and the sea are, on the other side. Roaring, wind in the trees, is felt, is heard.

She walks back on the road toward the mainland, onto the cousin’s property from the left, where it looks deserted as usual. To the barn, which is never locked, across from the house where she is also going to leave something, but it will have to be later, the other thing is more important now. Takes a shovel from the barn and continues into the woods on the path that starts on the other side of the road below a high hill where a half-burned house gapes with a large, dark hole in its side, like always. Otherwise it is quiet, no people anywhere.

Into the woods, to a place where the ground is soft enough to be dug into. Not particularly easy to find, she has to walk quite a ways, backpack heavy on her back, shovel in her hand. Turns down on the path to Bule Marsh, which reveals itself, still, shiny water, between the trees. Does not continue all the way down because she discovers a pretty glade a few feet off to the side of the path. Hardwood trees, soft mossiness. Shovel in the
ground, yes, no bedrock there. Carefully takes away the whole layer of moss first.

When the hole is deep enough she takes the package with the dead animal out of her bag: has wound it in terry cloth towels and in thin light blue plastic bags used for cleaning. Lays the bundle in the ground, hears a noise behind her, turns around. He is standing there on the path looking at her. She becomes a bit nervous but not scared; not because of him, he is not a stranger after all, but the surprise.

He asks her if she needs help. “Nah.” How thick and strange her own voice sounds, in the midst of everything. Together they cover the bundle with soil and place the layer of moss on top.

Later she is going to tell him about the beautiful small white cat she took from the Glass House on the Second Cape where she had cleaned during the summer, about the French family, the diplomatic family, that just left it behind. About how she brought it home and how she had it for only a few weeks when the night before she met him she found it dead on the floor in the hall in her apartment. That she did not want to take it to a cemetery for animals, or to the veterinarian, but put it in the earth, out in nature, where it belonged, where it came from.

Now they were walking in silence back on the path toward the road, she with her backpack in hand, he with the shovel. He says he saw her from the cousin’s house. Saw her take the shovel from the barn, became curious. She says quickly that she only wanted to borrow the shovel, she knew there was a shovel there since she used to come to the house and clean when the old
man was still alive, she works for Solveig’s cleaning company. And then suddenly it also occurs to her
who
he is. Here.
The Boy in the woods
. Solveig’s brother. Bengt.

How long had he been here, in the cousin’s house? He shrugs. A while. Then Susette thinks he looks the way she had imagined based on Solveig’s descriptions. Like someone who has been here and there and at some point stopped accounting for anything, even with just a little bit of effort, placing anything into some sort of context, coherence. “Completely washed up.” Which Solveig had also said, in the company car. “Gone to hell.”

He takes her hand on the forest path. Strange. She squirms out of his grip and when they come out of the woods she keeps going, alone. Along the road, in the direction of the main country road and the town center. She walks for several miles, then the bus from the capes comes, she gets on.

We can leave her here, Susette Packlén. Wandering forward along the road, one fall day in the sun, the Fjällräven backpack dangling over her shoulder. Small poor child I am, in cowboy boots,
boots
. Or on the bus, where she is the only passenger on this Sunday morning. Gets off at the square in the town center, walks home.

Arrives at her apartment, it is well cleaned. Hangs her backpack on the hook in the bathroom, again. Yes, she has forgotten the pistol; it was going to go back to the cousin’s house of course. At the bottom of the backpack, wrapped in a towel, that too, as always.

At that point she is so tired that she falls asleep with her clothes on, on the sofa in her tiny living room. Sleeps for a long time, without dreaming.

And in the evening, he is there. At her door, ringing the bell. “Hey.”
Newsstand toppler
. She invites him in.

•

Newsstand toppler?
One evening, a weekday a few weeks later, Maj-Gun Maalamaa is at Susette’s door. She has two trays of cat food, in cans, 2 × 24 in each, which she bought at the wholesale store where she actually should not be allowed to shop, not even for the newsstand, because all of the acquisitions at the newsstand are dealt with centrally by the Head Office. But Maj-Gun has been to the wholesale store anyway, with her wholesaler’s card, on the newsstand’s budget, in and of itself, on the Head Office’s behalf. Something in the stockroom that had run out, needed to be restocked quickly. Chewy ducks, small sweet troll hearts filled with truffel or the like which there is a rapid consumption of in certain seasons at her newsstand on the square in the town center. You barely have time to fill the minimal plastic bags in which the sweets are sold, five or ten in each, tied at the ends in knots, and they are sold out. So Maj-Gun has, in exceptional cases, been driven in the Head Office’s truck to the wholesaler in the industrial area on the outskirts of the city by the sea, from the newsstand and back.

The cat food she had probably paid for with her own money at the wholesale shop: a whole load to drag around, the apostle’s horses, from the square almost half a mile past the new and the old cemeteries to the apartment complex where Susette lives in the hills above the town center.

Filled with anecdotes from the day and similar days and the past days—it has been a while since Susette
properly visited the newsstand in the evenings—Maj-Gun rings Susette’s doorbell in the D-block.

•

Susette opens and Maj-Gun walks in, “here,” giving the cat food cans to Susette and luring
kitty kitty kitty
but then she is already in the tiny living room and there is the Boy in the woods, he says “hi.”

“The cat?” is the only thing Maj-Gun gets out, she is standing in the middle of the room. Susette, behind her, says that it is not there anymore, “It got run over.”

There is a language that is called the Winter Garden
. Pictures on the wall, soiled water colors and a sweetness in the room, stink, tobacco, sweat, beer.

My
love,
pure and true
.

The surprise, the heartbreak. Maj-Gun, speechless, stumbles out.

We can leave her here.

•

Maj-Gun and Susette, November 1989
. They meet again, it is about a month later then, at the beginning of November, in the boathouse, the American girl’s hangout on the Second Cape. Snow is suddenly pouring down: in the morning, or maybe it was early afternoon, when Maj-Gun came down there to the boathouse, the ground was still bare, the hard wind, the waves were crashing against the other side of the pine forest grove. Cold, yes, but the freshness, the openness, coming there.

To the boathouse, that is where she is, Maj-Gun Maalamaa, sleeping on the floor in the middle of the room among old junk; nah, nah, not exactly the leftovers of some old story, no remains like that either, meaningless now, so long ago. But things from the sea, fishing tackle, the like—a broken outboard motor that someone had
thrown an old rug over. It is the rug Maj-Gun pulls over herself on the floor. Falls asleep, sleeps deeply, does not dream about anything in particular, about the square maybe, hayseeds at the square,
pistol awakening
with their revolvers, how they shot the empty tin cans. Not a dream you have been longing for either; one of these hayseeds had, earlier that morning, picked her up when she was wandering around in the town center and driven her out to the Second Cape and gotten rid of her after a brief exchange of words a few miles from the cousin’s house where she had later walked, and been there, before she came here.

And when she wakes up on the floor in the boathouse it is almost with a smile about her dream, then she becomes aware of where she is, and the snow that is snowing now and—a dark shadow on the terrace. She crawls up, Susette turns around, and they discover each other at almost the same time, on either side of the window. Both of them just as surprised, it was not the intention after all, in no way was it arranged.