The Glitter Scene (30 page)

The writing that had carried her there, from one room to another room, an empty room despite the fact that there was a lot of paper there, a lot of dreams, stories, tales, feelings, jealousy—but her, personally, somewhere else,
I am without space
.

Talk about it, in some way. And about Susette. Rug rags, Susette. What was it about Susette?

“Sometimes that you are two who are one. I sought that in her as well.”

Susette in the hangout. Her eyes. Maj-Gun who was hitting, and blood.

At the same time. She
had wanted
to kill her. She wanted to kill her.

And Bengt.
The Winter Garden
. “What are you babbling about?”

And another image. Which was not an image. A scene that was hanging, pulled loose, but was still true.

Him lying in the house, the room, and blood—

Talk about Bengt. The Love that was no love. But he died, despite everything, anyway.

All of this that could be explained—is not, after all.

•

Because
PRRRR
. There, in the middle of the night, the phone rings.

The Manager jumps up from the sofa bed, runs out into the hall, closes the door, and when he has finished talking he comes back.

“I’m afraid, my dear girl, that it’s bad news,” he says carefully. “That was your father. Your aunt, Elizabeth. In Portugal. She’s dead. He asked me to give you the news.

“Well.” The Manager stands there in the doorway and it comes out quickly, as if he were ashamed. “He said that he would very much like to speak to you personally but we agreed I wouldn’t wake you since you had already gone to bed—

“She’d been ill. She went peacefully. Your brother and his fiancée were there. Good that she has found peace.”

The Manager suddenly looked so old: his beer belly, his nakedness. Lions brother. The old men’s choir.

And that night, when everything is over, Maj-Gun says the most beautiful thing she knows about Love.

The newsstand again, what it was like there, all of the magazines she had read. How they were filled with such a language, like in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” which existed everywhere, made itself superior, you could not keep up, regardless of how you printed and printed the best bits. “You can say anything here”: everyone who went around and “expressed themselves,” outside the newsstand, everywhere, all the people who were saying the same things to each other.

“But Love,” says Maj-Gun, and
that
is the beautiful thing she says so that the Manager will have it in his
head his whole life, despite the fact that in a few weeks they will not see each other again. Ever.

“Is. Searching. A unique language.

“That is the urge to Love.
The Winter Garden
. A Winter Garden—language.”

Kapu kai.
The forbidden seas. The hacienda must be built. Silk velvet rag scraps—

And the Manager who is listening says, softly. “Dear child, lie down here. Time to sleep now. Tomorrow is a new day.” Takes Maj-Gun in his arms, they fall asleep.

But Maj-Gun not Maj-Gun, it does not work, she is awake. More awake than she has ever been her entire life. An Animal Child’s dark eyes peering out into the darkness. “Your brother, his fiancée were there, she went peacefully.”

Liz Maalamaa. “I didn’t understand what connected people, Manager. Now I guess I’ve grown. Been slapped in the face.”

The rose—which you threw at me. It is Carmen, who is walking into a room that is the most terrible room of love, and the most wonderful—there is only seriousness there, and she becomes locked in there. Locks herself in, it was just a matter of opening the door and walking out, really.

And love, the rose, an abstract room: love is the bullfighter who is dancing with her. And everyone died and Carmen died. But she had already died: died for love, a rose. Love is the bullfighter who is dancing with her—

But how does it help to think?

•

Because now: sirens, blue lights, an ambulance, pulling onto the property. Maj-Gun gets up in the night, stands at the window. Someone is being carried out on a stretcher
from another building. It was, she will find out later, the neighbor, the lady from the other building who had complained about the noise in the pipes, but nothing too serious, an asthma attack, the old woman will get better.

Blue lights that fall in, blink blink, light up the room that so far, just a few days, but still, has been a whole world.

The Animal Child, in the window, stares out into the darkness, peering. Out into the night, a panting blue light.

But cannot be kept hidden.

“Can you see yourself killing for love? Or dying?”

“A love that is greater than death, Susette.”

“Maj-Gun, you have said that, yes.”

And farther back in time. A girl at a cemetery: the folk song. The same thing happens in the folk song, in every verse, over and over again. A repetition. That girl, her eyes. She could reinforce fear. The mask. Her art.

Susette’s eyes in the boathouse, when she fell. Kill her.

Walk in whiteness, in whirling snow.

And later: standing there on the cousin’s property. Looking in through the window, cupping her hands. He is lying there.
The Boy in the woods
. Unmoving, in blood. And she in the snow. Blood on her hands.

Blue lights. Sirens. Justice.

“What is it?” the Manager asks behind her, heavy with sleep, blue blinking over him too.

The nakedness.

Only a Manager’s testicle can look like a small pink bebé tart when blue light falls over it in the darkness.

Djeessuss
. And just a hellish Animal Child Maj-Gun Maalamaa can be so hopelessly idiotically elephant pregnant that her stomach turns over, because a great Nausea
just cannot be held back, has to rush to the bathroom,
in the middle of the night
.

“Some bug.” The Manager tucks her into the sofa bed in that sleeping bag, puts fresh, clean sheets under it. “Dear child.” Cold towel on Maj-Gun’s forehead, the Manager kisses this forehead before he leaves the room, closes the door, goes back to his business.

MAJ-GUN IS WALKING across the square in the town center. One of the first days after Christmas and New Year’s, freezing in her fall coat, is not wearing any mittens, lugging things that have fallen out of a just-broken plastic bag, her hands slowly turning to ice cubes in the cold. On her way to the old rental place in the attic in the neighborhood below the square, in order to settle accounts with the landlord family and empty the boarder’s room in the attic, because she has terminated her rental agreement via telephone. Is going to leave the District, move now. Is coming from the newsstand where she collected some of her remaining personal items that have, in other words, been in the plastic bag that broke just after she left the newsstand for the last time; the new shop assistant is the one who packed the bag and had it lying on some shelf in the back room.

The new shop assistant. Just an ordinary girl, nothing special about her. After having worked for only a few weeks, has her own system for everything and has cleaned properly too. A good, not to mention
exemplary
, organization everywhere. Maj-Gun had almost thought of saying it to her too, “exemplary,” like a compliment, but let it go. Besides—what does it have to do with her, Maj-Gun, anyway? And her contacts with the Head Office too:
the Head Office
, which the new girl pronounced with almost the same respect in her voice that Maj-Gun
recognized from herself, from when she had been working at the newsstand.

“If there’s anything else then you’ll need to talk with the Head Office. Even though you, seeing as how you’re no longer an employee, cannot be in direct contact with the section, the operator can certainly help you.”

The Head Office, once such a
central
place in the world. Maj-Gun also, for a brief moment, wanted to say something friendly, a bit humorous, about it to the girl, in general. Maybe add something personal to it too: about her own experiences from this newsstand in particular and give some good advice that the new girl might find useful. But this girl was not exactly talkative. After she reeled out the bit about the operator and the direct line, Maj-Gun had suddenly been like air to her: during Maj-Gun’s continued presence on the other side of the counter, “the customer’s side” (there was not a customer’s stool anymore either), in what was now her “place of employment” she had practically strained to be demonstratively unaware of Maj-Gun altogether.

Hummed a pop song while she energetically sorted magazines: old issues from new issues that she had collected in bundles to return—bundles to tie strings around, hard, sharp plastic strips and Maj-Gun was suddenly almost able to feel the burning and tearing in her hands from working with them.

Maj-Gun looked away and tried to maintain some distance. From the newsstand, everything here—in general too, as it were. A short moment from inside the newsstand, where she is never ever going to return, looking out over the square. The square that, during many years—djeessuss, how many had there been?—had been
her place, her place here in the world. Just hers too. An empty square, but a space where so much could happen—
the potential
, but where, in reality, not much had happened at all.

And then, since this is over on her part, experience some sort of superiority in relation to all of this. In relation to the new stuck-up shop assistant who did not want to have anything to do with her, and also, in some way, in relation to herself. The one she once was but is no longer. NOW when so much had happened and a new page had been turned in her story: new life in her stomach,
The Law Book
under her arm (figuratively speaking, hell, no one goes around lugging that tome around out here on a cold day like this!). A change had arisen, which could, for example here and now, also be seen in that she had actually managed to keep her mouth shut when necessary. Despite the fact that her tongue had undeniably been itching to speak, she refrained from beginning any form of sarcastic dialogue filled with ambiguity with the new one here; but of course you have seen that, one of those girl shop assistants who can be knocked over with subtleties in three seconds flat—all of which Maj-Gun was once so good at.

But, then, had not felt anything at all. Just looked out over the square, that possibility, and suddenly completely unrelated to everything Maj-Gun understood that she could easily be here again. Stay in the newsstand, continue being here. Would not need many days, not even one, not more than a few hours and everything would in some way be the same again, that timelessness. Going back. Difficult to explain maybe but not mystical, not a bit. Just calmly established so to speak, as it was, is.

“You can say just about anything here.” All of the tips, coupons, and games. “Everything about …” all the magazines.
Be happy every day
and “Are You Borderline? Test Yourself!” Sticky lip gloss under the counter, a hundred miniature plastic containers originally prepackaged in small crackling transparent plastic bags glued to magazine covers but carefully pried off with the use of a paper knife,
when I wanted some!
Various hues, Blue Anemone and Pearl Rain and Champagne—

But at the same time, at exactly that moment, Maj-Gun understood something else as well. Whether it was with the life after this one or whatever it was, for example all of the phenomenal views in it—and she will have them … from the window at the law firm in the dapper southern area of the capital city’s center, from the Municipal Legal Assistance Bureau in the northern part of the country (a square again, but rather small), even by the sea, the wild sea as it will appear from a patio in Portugal from a house she will inherit from her aunt. At the top of a mountain that falls right down into the sea. Yes yes, fantastic, three thousand feet below: breakers, the foam, the salt, the birds, and the horizon, all of the nuances in it … still all of this, all of these views, in the end rather interchangeable after all. In any case that is how it was with the future, law, all of the houses she is going to live in and own, all of the properties—she knows NOW that it is
this
view in particular, the view from behind the counter at the newsstand, or from the newsstand’s door where she had a habit of standing and smoking, the same square, this square, in the District, the town center she has stared at the most in her life, that will come to live inside her the most. Be her most, regardless of whether or not it means anything.

“Where are my things?” The girl has stopped humming, shuffles lazily toward the back room but hesitates immediately, because she does not want to drag a former shop assistant in there either really, not to mention a complete stranger. On the other hand she also wishes Maj-Gun Maalamaa would leave and in other words quickly disappears behind the curtain to the back room and is back a few seconds later with the stupid plastic bag that she pushes over onto the other side of the counter. Maj-Gun takes the bag, peeks inside: sweaty tiger blouse, half a carton of cigarettes of an unusual brand, “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.”

Today is the first day of the rest of your life
. The card? The girl shakes her head, shrugs her shoulders, but the card has undeniably been removed from the cash register; there are not even any tape marks left on the aluminum, that girl really has scrubbed and polished and had many things to do. “Forget it.” Maj-Gun takes the plastic bag, goes on her way—it was not really that important anyway, the card, it was not even hers; had been there from the beginning when she had started, but certainly thought she would like to have it with her as a memento, in some way.

“Wait!” the girl yells when Maj-Gun is already almost out on the street. “THE POISON STICKS from here!
I
don’t smoke!” The girl with her fingers like a clothespin over her nose and …

“Yes yes yes.” Maj-Gun Maalamaa lumbers back up the three steps. An opened pack of cigarettes from some corner on the shelf under the counter, cigarettes into the bag and Maj-Gun hurries out, never returning to that newsstand in her life! Across the square, toward the
boarding place in the house “Sumatra” in the lush neighborhood to the right with the plastic bag that ripped at the bottom after only a few feet, the contents spilling onto the ground. Picks up “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” shirt, carton of cigarettes, and with more or less all of this in her hands continues and then there comes Solveig Torpeson walking toward her.