The Glitter Scene (45 page)

And always, alone. She sees that now, and everything, all forgetfulness, everything everything. Standing on the Glitter Scene, a girl who is chasing her, running around her, “the Angel of Death the Angel of Death.” Could not put up with listening to it, silence her. But it was true of course. It is true, what she is and was.

The Glitter Scene, the girl who fell, the mask, Bengt and blood, the girl who fell and Portugal and her mother, Liz Maalamaa, “never again alone,” medication.

The absurdity. But undivided. Maj-Gun, Majjunn Majjunn, was not there. Where she was, had always been, is alone.

Because there was something else, something white and soft.

And it was not here. Not here. But there.

“Once I was in a wood.” Always in a wood, the same wood.

If you later come to wander in the valley of the shadow of death
.

It is not possible.

•

And then here, it is possible, for Susette Maalamaa born Packlén in the end. That she leaves the house in the darker part and goes back to the path. Completely dark now, but her eyes see well in the darkness, here in the Boundary Woods. She has been here before, knows where to go.

A bit in on the path, there it is, down to the right. Toward the marsh, the place, what she had forgotten. Off to the side of the path, soft moss, mortality.

And she sees it, confirmed, she goes down to the water.

It is like this, was: that
stardust stardust
from one place to another place the home the scissors the sofa where she once sat and cut again, alone.

And that image when it rushes toward her here, at the marsh.

GOD LIKES, said her mother, THE SMALL-TIMID BLESSED

IT WAS QUIET IN THE NIGHT

SHE TOOK THE CAT AND STRANGLED IT AND THE LIFE RAN OUT OF THE STILL ONE. IT WAS
TERRIBLE AND SHE STRUCK WITH THE SCISSORS AND THEN SHE STARTED CRYING.

The Winter Garden is burning, sirens, Spanish wolfhounds howling loudly in the night.

Flames in the sky, reflecting in the still water in a special way.

Susette is not afraid, never afraid, does not falter.

Bule Marsh, the darkness, the flames. November 2006.

Takes off the silver shoes.

Steps out into the water.

Kitty mine, oh please come back
.

MAJ-GUN IN THE WINTER GARDEN. Who is she? The Red One. Lawyer: after graduating from the university she worked as a lawyer, in family law, for a few years, in the private sector. Quit her job and for the last eight years she worked as the manager of the Municipal Legal Assistance Bureau in the northern region of the country, in a small city where she lives in a big, beautiful house on the outskirts of town.

Has, for a long time now, been able to sand down the “offensive” in herself that she received criticism for during her studies.

“After the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible.” That is also true. She is slender and red, solvent, controlled, “well preserved” for her age, and so on. “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.” Yes. She still has it. A relic, a memory only, of something, past, old, different now.

The newsstand. But here now, 2006, in the Winter Garden, the Red One, cutting rags. Red rags, long strips. Just an occupation, a loneliness. Evening now, in the Winter Garden.

But who is she? It is difficult to get a grip on it herself. She does not look at herself in the window of the newsstand, where she once was; the window provides no reflection. Nah. Nothing. So: the square. Sees the square, cuts rags, she sees it one more time.

Cars drove up onto it sometimes, Hayseeds, from “the pistol awakening,” “the revolver revival.” Drove around and around—disappeared.

And if someone was on the square, she was then enclosed in the ring. Some girl, of course, to the hayseeds, girls, they were, are, more amusing that way.

Some girl from the junior high, the high school, chin raised, from here in her gaze, Madonna-like.

Or someone else, with big eyes. Older, almost thirty, but still so small. Big eyed, stationary. Susette Packlén. “Djeessuss, Susette,” how it whistled out of Maj-Gun’s mouth. “The way you look. Don’t you get what kind of signals you’re sending out? A small poor child I am. In cowboy boots,
boots.”

And Maj-Gun who reeled her in. “I stood here and reeled in the fear,” or whatever she had said, does not remember that clearly. That is the truth. She had said so much. The fear? The truth was also that she had become happy. And Susette had become happy. Which she also said, earlier today, 2006, November, during the day. “I liked you more in the newsstand. There was so much life inside you.”

But at the same time, with Susette, on the square, in the newsstand as well. Rug rags. Remarkable connections, as if they wanted something from each other, were drawn to each other because of that. Had cut rags together for a while in a kitchen in a house that was Susette’s childhood home, after her mother’s death. And Maj-Gun, already then, had told her stories.

The Angels of Death, in a timelessness
. But all of that is gone now. No longer exists.

Still—not everything can be kept hidden away. The silver shoes. “Death in Portugal.” No. It is not possible. Cannot be like that.

And yet: first hours later, she started calling her brother. Not been able to get hold of him, he has not had his telephone on. All of those things she should have said to him. On the other hand, it is so big, so difficult. That she possibly still would not have been able to say it over the phone. “We need to meet. Soon. It’s important.”

About Susette, his wife. And death. “The Angel of Death.” Susette with the big eyes, and all the death, everything strange around her. “They called her the Angel of Death at the nursing home.”

A white cat that was suddenly gone. “It got run over.” Susette in an apartment, a long time ago, shifting gaze.

And Janos, a Lithuanian, and someone who was called the Boy in the woods—Bengt.

“What the hell, are you playing private detective? I don’t know you anymore. You’re so different now, Maj-Gun. After the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible.

“I liked you much more in the newsstand. Why don’t you say those other things, like in the newsstand? Kiss kiss kiss—?”

•

Who is Maj-Gun? In the Winter Garden, 2006? She does not know. Cutting rags again. Just a preoccupation. Maybe, for her, it was never anything more than that. Susette at the window.

This day, in the middle of the day, it is evening now, dark—

“This reminds me of Portugal. Death in my hands—”

And it had been then, when Susette started talking like that, that Maj-Gun slowly realized everything. Which she in some way had known earlier, had come like breezes earlier in life, many times, but kept it hidden, because of all of the other things with Susette. She who had almost beaten Susette to death once, blood on her hands. And all the rest. The big eyes. The jealousy. A bad conscience. Own guilt.

Susette at the window, that day, earlier, in the middle of the day. High above everything, beautiful house. There are neighborhoods in the world, they all look the same. Tom Maalamaa lives with his family in neighborhoods like that: wife, three children, aupairgirl Gertrude.

But this has been the homeland, “home now.” The mess in the house, things everywhere, paper boxes and bags, clothes, and so on.

And Susette who had been standing there with her back toward her and suddenly starting speaking strangely, about Death in Portugal, her therapy, her life.

“I was terribly depressed. Sometimes I still am. Because of Mama, everything. And I’ve been afraid of becoming crazy, like her.

“And what happened between us, Maj-Gun, in the end, was the culmination of an acute depression. In a way. No matter how strange it sounds. In the boathouse. I don’t think about it often, but sometimes. It shook me. You helped me live. Beat me back to life. And then suddenly, I came here.

“Maybe it was like that. I don’t always remember—forget quite a lot. What was it we were fighting about?”

And she has remembered too.

“The Boy in the woods, you called him that. Do you know what it was like with Bengt? Like being in a wood. I didn’t understand what he was saying. Like with Janos, ‘the Pole,’ or the Lithuanian, which he actually was. From the strawberry-picking fields. Just talked and talked and I didn’t understand anything. That’s how that story goes—”

“But Bengt is dead, Susette!” Maj-Gun suddenly stands up and yells.

“Janos is dead too,” Susette says then, laconically, calmly.

“Janos? Dead? No! I’ve met him—” Maj-Gun started automatically, as it were, but at the same time completely bewildered, not come any farther. Because suddenly, she was standing in the middle of the room with a silver shoe in her hand.

Liz Maalamaa’s silver shoe, one of them: both neatly placed in a paper box with glass. Those wonderful shoes, which Liz Maalamaa loved. “Come and see my gallery.” The aunt who had sent pictures of this “gallery” in her winter home in Portugal, photographs on the wall, of Maj-Gun also, and other things, “everything I hold dear.” And the silver shoes, on a shelf. These shoes that the aunt would become so angry about if you snuck into the guest room and borrowed them from her in secret when you were a child and she came to visit at the rectory—she rarely wore them but always had them in her luggage. Elegant and shimmering. And otherwise she almost never got angry at her goddaughter Maj-Gun Maalamaa.

“Damn it, Susette, do you have to have the silver shoes too?”

Maj-Gun wanted to say, roar loudly, because suddenly with the silver shoe in her hand, Susette turned around and stood there, staring at her, and Maj-Gun understood how everything was. Solveig’s little girl Irene who in Portugal, a long time ago when the child had been born in Portugal, had run around like a passerine in the aunt’s house, curious, pulling out drawers, opening all the cabinets, which children do. “Look!” Had come running in the midst of everything with her arms full of medicine bottles. Empty, half full, a desert, and there had been more in a certain place in the refrigerator. “SO sick, SUCH a shame about her.” Irene’s voice full of sympathy. And her mother Solveig who had laughed: “That girl will probably become a nurse when she grows up.”

Sedatives, sleeping pills, the like. And Maj-Gun had known at least one thing for sure: that her aunt, after her marriage where she had been drugged with sedatives by the family doctor, instead of being someone in the family, everyone was aware of the abuse that had occurred in the home, who decided to do something about it … that after that, she had sworn she would never take a pill like that in her mouth again. “I would rather walk on hot coals, be awake twenty-six hours a day. Clear mornings, Majjunn, are so wonderful.”

The aunt who passed away so peacefully in her sleep. “They called her the Angel of Death at the nursing home.” That medication, not forgotten directly, just put away. Which suddenly reminded Maj-Gun of something else. Rag-cutting scissors, white hairs, dried darkness, blood? In a kitchen cabinet in that apartment where she had once been and was, and had waited for sirens, justice—certainly put away, but not thrown out, still there.

And stood so exposed in front of Susette, now, without all the words. Susette who paid attention to the bit about Janos, turned around and hissed so strangely about some kind of private detective, and … “Shouldn’t you say kiss kiss kiss?”

Kiss kiss kiss. Yes. She understood.

A strange moment. When there had been nothing to say. Nothing at all.

And rug rags. All of the strange connections between them. Gone. No bonds.

Susette a stranger. The Angel of Death. Maj-Gun did not know, has never known, anything about her.

And at the same time, such a sorrow in that moment. Such an abandonment, and such abandoning.

And Maj-Gun did not want it to be like that. She suddenly wanted to tell another story, about that Janos, for example, “Black Rudolf,” in the corridors of the city hall in the northern region of the country. Been salivating at the mouth, so real and it is as if it has come out of her anyway, one last amusing story, a real newsstandanecdote besides, but Susette is listening now, it was not that bad, listen!

And Janos, the Lithuanian, from the same city in the north where she lives, lives there with his family in peace and quiet. “An engineer now … works at the Office for Land Surveying, which is housed in the same building as the Municipal Legal Assistance Bureau, my workplace these days. And one of those conversations over lunch once, you know, in the presence of many colleagues, and there is talk of this and that.” And once when a conversation which, as it were in general, was about one’s choice of profession, or “life choice” as it is called in
those magazines, just as if it is something you can steer rationally. How you become who you become, end up where you end up. How much it’s still a matter of chance, really.

And Janos then, a tall jovial man of the sort who normally would not leave anything to “chance” or dreams, who had suddenly started explaining that he knew exactly why he had become a land surveyor and why he devotes himself to orienteering in his spare time. And not only him, but his entire family, all of them are orienteerers, Susette: mom dad all the kids, they run around like wolves, tongues hanging out, with a map and a compass and they try to navigate correctly in the woods. They’re smart, one son has even competed in the national championships.

But once when Janos was young, he had really gotten lost in the woods. In the middle of the country, after having run away from a strawberry-picking field where he had not been making any money, while at the same time being expected to be grateful over having been allowed to get out “and breathe the fresh air of the free world” as a link in the international friendship exchange under the sign of solidarity. Because at that time, Susette, there was the Iron Curtain in Europe and Janos was, in other words, from the other side even if he wasn’t from Poland not “the Pole,” which everyone at the strawberry fields was determined to call him no matter how much he protested. And despite the fact that he would rather have been in any other place on earth at that point in time, for example Paris—he was a first-year student of French—he, without grumbling, had to take the only opportunity that was offered to him to spend a few days “in
the free world” somewhere. “The free world, the strawberry field, the same berries berries as at home on the collective farms, ha, ha, ha, ha.” So in other words, that summer: plants plants is what he had in front of him and he quickly understood that in addition to plants, it also wasn’t the idea that he was going to see much more before,
pjutt
, a few coins in his pocket, and back to the homeland behind the Iron Curtain again.