The Glitter Scene (13 page)

And to support herself while studying for her interviews she has, in other words for a while now, started working full-time shifts at the newsstand at the square in the town center.

Susette has, as said, at this point in time been gone for almost three years; she has just turned twenty. “In Poland,” that is what it is called, has been called, and will still be called. With her second love, but it came to nothing. And due to the poor telephone connections, the poor postal service, and poor communication in general … Susette has come home only when it has been too late. On the whole she gets to hear what happened when it is too late.

Maj-Gun Maalamaa is the one who meets her at the ferry terminal as they had agreed by telephone. “What a nice backpack, Fjällräven—” Maj-Gun spells out. “Is it new?”

Thick plastic bags filled with rug rags remain everywhere in the house, in piles on top of each other too along the walls in the kitchen (the old woman with the loom in the Outer Marsh has been dead for a long time already).

“What we did toward the end?” Maj-Gun stood there in the middle of the mess and the musty smell and asked herself rhetorically. “Cut. Rug rags. It was a calm and restful hobby.”

“She was terrified of dying,” says Susette.

“You can rest assured, Susette,” Maj-Gun replies, “it was over in a few minutes. I called the ambulance. But it was too late.”

“Can love make you crazy, can grief make you crazy, can regret, can—” Susette asks, no, whispers, because it can barely be heard. And her stomach hurts so badly, so damned much, as if her body is in the process of being cut in two, and her legs that collapse under her; then she has to go to bed and sleep, rest—remains bedridden for several days.

Maj-Gun, who hears, sees, says nothing. But she puts her arm around Susette: it is heavy, such a weight that holds on to Susette, almost like a vise. But in it there is, completely genuine: such tenderness, leniency, such comfort—

Later, Susette will remember that conversation with Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the home that day she returned, as clear as a bell, despite so much else being forgotten, also consciously, so obscure.

Maj-Gun, whom she has not seen since childhood, whom she quite literally does not know at all. Except for “Pastor’s Crown Princess,” a few scenes from the
cemetery that are buried in her from a distant childhood, and so, naturally, what you managed to see of Maj-Gun in the rectory in her role as the sister of your first love Tom Maalamaa whom you went out with for six–seven months when you were about fourteen years old. Though, in and of itself, you did not see a lot of Maj-Gun, in the rectory, either. She was not home very much but mainly it was that she and Tom Maalamaa spent most of their time behind the closed door in Tom’s room. And listened to music: classical music, Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, always “Mahler’s Ninth.”

A fantastic reconciliation with mankind’s existential conditions, a feeling of life so closely connected to a simultaneous consciousness of death
. As Tom Maalamaa used to say, almost solemnly, sometimes.

•

What she said, what Maj-Gun said in response. Because those have, so to speak, been the last sensible sentences for a long time. She has not really been able to explain why either. But also because a few months later when that time in the house with Maj-Gun has passed, has been over, it has been something she knowingly and wittingly preferred not to think about after the fact.

The house is sold after these two months, Maj-Gun forced to vacate her attic study on the second floor and move away. And Susette bought a small apartment with her inheritance from her mother and father, which was divided in three among her and her brothers. A studio on the first floor in a row of apartment buildings on the fields on the north side of the town center.

And she started working for Businesswoman of the Year Jeanette Lindström again: actually gone looking for
Jeanette Lindström on her own after a period of idleness when the money started drying up and more or less begged for a job, any job whatsoever. “I’ll see what I can do for you,” Jeanette Lindström had said. Jeanette whom Susette had worked for one summer once long ago, as a teenager after almost a year at the private nursing home in the District for the elderly and infirm. A few days in Jeanette Lindström’s two-window Ice Cream Stand on the square in the town center, then the strawberry fields.

And a few years later Jeanette Lindström had added, stupidly jokingly so to speak but with some sort of warning in it: “But this time we’ll let the strawberry fields go, right? Who knows where the butterfly might flutter off to this time and we don’t want to be party to a flight like that again. Not to mention it gets costly and difficult for the employer to find a replacement on such short notice.”

Where the butterfly might flutter off to this time
. That is how she spoke, Jeanette Lindström, in other words like an allusion, that it was from those miserable strawberry fields up north where Susette had been sent as extra labor from the ice cream stand at the square where she really should have been working that summer three years ago that Susette ran away with a “Pole,” Janos, whom she had met there, while working.

He
was the one who had wanted to get away from there: he had not been happy or grateful in the least about this means of getting a visa to travel to a country outside the so-called Iron Curtain and then under controlled means, like a member of an official friendly exchange between the two countries, earn a
little
bit of money (actually
no
money, that is how it was for everyone at the strawberry
fields, and Businesswoman of the Year was not exactly someone who drove up the wages).

Janos—her second love, dull and intense. And besides, he was not from Poland but Lithuania but everyone said Poland so it just stayed like that.

“Well, this time I was thinking of a real job that you can live on,” Susette had replied, deathly serious, but now in this situation almost four years later, Jeanette Lindström has not grasped the sore spot rather let it go and actually offered Susette a job with a decent wage in her legitimate business activities, which found itself in an expansion stage at this point in time. And so it turned out that during the years that followed, Susette worked for her on different projects: shop assistant in the Little Gift Shop, assistant in catering and so on, up until the point that as a result of an argument she had with her employer, she quit her job and started cleaning for Solveig Torpeson in her cleaning business Four Mops and a Dustpan.

“With these words I’m transferring things to you, Susette,” on Solveig’s wedding day no less. Jeanette Lindström had pushed Susette Packlén in her server’s apron up to the bride in a puffed-sleeved wedding dress at the bride’s table after Susette, in a hurry and because Jeanette Lindström had been in the way the whole time, managed to drop a few plates from the fellowship hall’s white bone china set on the floor so that they had broken. These words have become legendary, because afterward no one remembers what “these words” were, and in and of themselves, they were unintelligible because by that point Jeanette had pinched some of the wedding cognac. Of course, these types of stories were loved in the District.

•

But, as said, there was a time right before, before Jeanette Lindström, before Solveig, before everything: a short period lasting just a few months which, while it lasted, was still as long as an eternity,
perpetuum mobile
. At home in the house with Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Just her and Maj-Gun who becomes
Majjunn
again during that time. From the cemetery, the gate,
tjii
this way
tjii
that way. “Say Pastor’s Crown Princess …” That Majjunn. A sound from a childhood, a name that has glued itself to your tongue.

Majjunn sitting on a kitchen chair in the house with Susette’s mother’s old sewing scissors. Cutting old clothes into rags. Long, skinny strips whirling down into a bucket at her feet. At their feet: because Susette has also been sitting there, on another kitchen chair, in her pajamas and she also had a pair of scissors in her hand.

Crehp crehp
the scissors fly through the fabric, rags, clothes. Majjunn’s scissors, and her own. Majjunn talking, humming.

Silk velvet rag scraps yes I have seen the most I have—

That song, which becomes Majjunn’s song, like a strange refrain in a silence that when Majjunn does not speak, a humming envelops them in the empty house.

And the sound of the scissors, as said.
Crehp crehp
. How they flew through the fabric.

But then later it passed so to speak and when it was over—yes, why should you, why should Susette think about it then?

Life has gone on. And besides, it has at least been clear: these thoughts, feelings, they do not get her anywhere.

•

But this she remembers, despite the fact that so much else from that time becomes forgotten afterward: that the last thing she and Maj-Gun do together during that time in the house after her mother’s death is go to the movies. Sitting perfectly positioned in the best seats in an otherwise empty movie theater. Maj-Gun ordered the tickets for them over the phone a few days in advance so they would be sure to get a seat. It is, Maj-Gun has been sure to explain, a very popular young adult film they are going to see. “A real young adult movie for young adults like us,” she explains. “I got the best seats!”

Which, according to Maj-Gun, is important because they are supposed to be celebrating something. “That everything is over now,” she says and not just that it is over but that they have made it out of “all of that” with “lives and youth intact”—that is Maj-Gun’s own illustrious wording too, her emphasis on “youth” as well. Susette, for her part, does not say very much; in and of itself Maj-Gun is of course the one who talks the hind leg off a donkey the most even during that time but also because it actually is not necessary to talk because the house where they have been living together for a while is for sale and a reasonable offer has been made that Susette and her brothers, who are beneficiaries of the estate after their parents, have accepted and Susette herself has rather quietly placed a down payment on an apartment in the apartment complex above the town center and only when it is done does she tell Maj-Gun that she will need to look around for somewhere else to live. “You have to move, you’ll certainly find something.”

“But where am I supposed to go then?” Maj-Gun says, rapidly, unexpectedly pours out of her there where she
has been standing in front of Susette in the kitchen, complete surprise on her face, almost on the verge of tears. Before Susette has time to repeat that Maj-Gun will certainly quickly find a better, not to mention more agreeable, room to rent, Maj-Gun’s mood changes and she excitedly starts planning the farewell festivities that will take place as soon as the “moving work” as she calls it in that moment is “taken care of”—and these festivities will in other words, as said, be crowned with a visit to the movies. “As if,” Maj-Gun says, “welcome back, in other words. The scissors on the shelf: TO youth, life,
an invitation.”

When they get inside the movie theater that predetermined evening it is, in other words, empty; a long long time passes during the minutes before the film starts and no one is there. “Aside from the usual jack offs of course,
typical,”
which Maj-Gun loudly and expertly but with an awkwardly audible relief in her voice whispers to Susette as she is sitting there, squirming restlessly and glancing around furtively and then finally catching sight of some occasional losers of the male sex who trickle into the theater before the lights dim and the merciful darkness sinks and the movie at last gets started.

The film is called
Skateboarding
and is about a boys’ gang in a run-down big city suburb in America, one of those against-all-odds-gangs united by its great passion for skateboarding and a lot of youthful complications along the way to the happy ending that is their own skateboarding ramp behind the apartment buildings and shaking hands with the mayor.

Not a film to write home about, in other words, and no one other than Maj-Gun and Susette stuck it out until
the end. But still, unforgettable. Susette will always remember the feeling of liberation on the bus on the way back home to the District.

That it was over now, whatever that was: Mom, the Pole, all the rest …
Does not even need to be mentioned in detail any longer—
AND Majjunn
.

Like a wave that is receding. And the feeling is her own, private. Absolutely indivisible, much less with Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Because that is also what the liberation was about, a small decisive insight: they had not meant the same thing when, before the visit to the movies, Maj-Gun said that they were going to “celebrate” having gotten past “it.”

On the one hand: yes, it was over. On the other hand: for Susette it means, has meant something else, something more—beyond Maj-Gun too, all of that.

But: “Skateboarding, to life, then?” It is almost like she is standing there saying it herself, Maj-Gun in the rain after the movie, at a loss outside the movie theater, alone on a rain-covered asphalt road where she suddenly, for a few seconds, just stands and dies. Maj-Gun who is wearing what she calls “going-out clothes” for the disco under her coat but Susette who just says, “I’m going home now,” and leaves.

Starts walking, rapid steps in the direction of the bus station for the provincial buses. Maj-Gun who trots after her, at a proper distance of course, maybe thirty feet, in silence. Without calling out, without trying to catch Susette’s attention at all.

Is just there, behind her.

And on the bus, Susette, got on before Maj-Gun, takes a seat at the very front, in a row for just one person and
Maj-Gun walks past her to the very back without looking in Susette’s direction. During the journey Susette gets up anyway and goes and sits next to Maj-Gun in the last row and they travel on in silence and when she and Maj-Gun go their separate ways at the bus stop at the square in the town center Susette understands that she and Maj-Gun will no longer be together as friends, or at all, for that matter. And it hits her too when she wanders home to her own, new apartment that she has not asked Maj-Gun where she has moved.