The Glitter Scene

THE MASK

TO THE WINTER GARDEN, Liz Maalamaa’s things:

The Angel of Death, Liz Maalamaa (a mask).

A mask that Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa received in a small package at the post office in her childhood during the forties. Came from Hollywood, she was pen pals with them. The movie stars. Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner. Really, truly. She received autographed head shots with letters at home. She took them and saved them in a scrapbook, or hung them on the wall in her room in the farm up north. And then the mask, one time. You could put it on and then you had the face of a movie star. Maybe Ava Gardner, Janet Leigh? Funny, as an adult she would not remember. Funny too that when you put that mask on, you did not look like a movie star at all. Just horrible, and frightening.

Did not go to the movies that much, there in the countryside, there was no movie theater. The movie theaters were in the cities. The movie stars, Hollywood, she had come in contact with them through a magazine, the Film Journal. An exciting magazine that she read, in addition to God’s word, the latter of course increasingly more.

There were strange things in the Film Journal, you did not know much English back then. Readers who sent in letters and asked questions, how should that movie star’s and the other one’s names be pronounced? In particular she remembered a question like that, they used to laugh themselves silly about it, and the answer, her and her brother, Hans, in the parental home. “Janet Leigh, but how do you say Janet?” Djanet was written out phonetically in the column, it was wrong that too. It should have been Djehnet.

She would explain this to the family she came to later, when she married a man from a society family in the city where she attended a training school for deaconesses. They would not understand. They would be absolutely certain that she was the one who had said Djanet, and in these circles they, skilled in languages, would correct her Djehnet Djehnet, in a well-mannered way. But first repeat her Djanet, so that the tone could be heard like a sheep bellow from the farm where she originated.

She would learn to hold her tongue in these circles.

She gave the mask to her niece and nephew later. She and her husband were childless.

THE GIRL FROM BORNEO, 1

SHE CAME FROM BORNEO, the little girl. Borneo’s docklands, she dances there, the Happy Harlot. Hamba hamba, for her brother in the rectory. Maj-Gun Maalamaa, or Majjunn as her aunt Liz calls her, the aunt who often comes to the rectory to visit, comes to “rest,” in dark sunglasses, sometimes she has bandages. Maj-Gun, and her brother, Tom, who is lying stretched out on his bed in his room behind the closed door, peering through the fingers of his hands he is holding in front of his eyes, “Idiot, there aren’t any docklands in Borneo, there’s just jungle, an island.” But then, he cannot control himself, he starts laughing so that he chokes, more and more, in the musty summer heat in the room—he sits up, stamps a beat on the floor with his feet, claps his hands.

Maj-Gun, hamba hamba, a dried dandelion in her mouth, it is supposed to represent the harlot’s red rose. And her aunt’s silver shoes, she has once again been into the guest room and swiped them from her aunt’s bag without permission. The aunt does not like it, she gets angry.

“And now for the thousandth time: get out! Out into the fresh air!”

And then suddenly, of course, in the middle of the dance, the door is flung wide open and Mother is standing there or the aunt herself, yelling.

Two sweaty children, must go out into the summer day—wrinkled brows, still in high spirits from playing indoors, out out into the hot sun, the sunshine from the hazy high-pressure-filled sky is always stuffy in this childhood that is not unhappy, just the opposite. They do not know, these two siblings, what they are going to do, what they should get up to out there. On the other hand, the dance, there is no question about that either. A means of passing the time when you do not go outside. Not wanting to go out; these siblings have that in common. And a means of not fighting. Maj-Gun and Tom, always at each other’s throats, it is almost comical. Like mama Inga-Britta says, dog and cat, dog and cat.

Sometimes when they have been chased outside, Tom will sneak back in. Locking the door behind him, lies there and reads the first best book, such as Gustav Mahler’s memoirs, something like that. But then his sister is not allowed to come in anymore; she is going to stand there knocking on his door for ages if she also manages to sneak into the house again without anyone seeing her. Just silence on the other side of the door, dog and cat, she does not get in. As it turns out somewhat later, as teenagers, when her brother has his first girlfriend there. The Big-Eyed One, from the cemetery, who has grown up. The brother on the other side of the door, not talking, and Mahler’s Ninth playing over and over again. Maj-Gun rushes to the cemetery and is hamba hamba the Happy Harlot, with everyone who wants to. The DAY OF DESIRE with the hayseeds, it is pretty and big and strong and everyone who wants to come—hamba hamba, dancing there, with everyone for a while. Imagines her brother at the window and the pale girlfriend at the window. And he is standing there, really: “The Disgust, Maj-Gun,” you are Vile Disgusting Get Out of My Sight, buttons the cuff links of his shirt, no girlfriend there then, just the two of them and a pale, icy mood.

The Big-Eyed One, the first girlfriend, from the cemetery, that is in other words where they meet her, Susette Packlén, both of them almost at once. Because sometimes on a frustratingly beautiful summer day it just is not possible to get indoors again. Then they take the mask with them and run down to the cemetery. The mask: the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa—it is the unofficial name (if papa Pastor knew he would become furious of course). They had gotten it from their aunt, you see, and to do something with their time, which is now spreading out in front of them like an ocean, they run down to the cemetery and scare people, in other words. It is actually a mask that is supposed to represent the face of some stylish dark-haired old movie star, but the interesting thing is that in reality it is frightening, you can become scared of it yourself, when you strap it to your face and look in the mirror in the bathroom when you are alone (yes, Maj-Gun has tried).

Buhuu, the Angel of Death! Liz Maalamaa! Which of course upsets papa Pastor when he finds out—and he does find out of course.

Maj-Gun first, Tom after, sometimes alone, often Maj-Gun just on her own too. Pastor’s Crown Princess hangs around the cemetery gate, tjiihit, tjiidit, “Pastor’s Crown Princess,” she tries, “say the password to my kingdom.” No one says it. Everyone walks past.

And there comes the Big-Eyed One with her mother, they are almost always there. Wildflowers picked on the meadows arranged in neat bouquets, several of them. Newly washed glass jars filled with water, bouquets placed in them to later be set on the graves, often the ones that no one else really looks after.

“Buhuu! I’m the Angel of Death!”

The girl fills jars with water in the stone grove where the water pump is located, a good opportunity; her mother somewhere else. Maj-Gun rushes up with the mask on. The girl looks up, confused but not afraid, not the slightest. And Tom Maalamaa behind Maj-Gun suddenly, says, “hi.” To the girl, the girl answers, “hi.”

And back to the rectory again, in her brother’s room. Two siblings, dog and cat, throwing pillows at each other.

“Her big eyes,” says Tom Maalamaa, who is throwing a pillow on his sister with the dandelion in her mouth and the silver shoes on her feet again.

“Her big stupid eyes,” his sister clarifies. Hamba hamba. Throws the pillow back, right in her brother’s face. But you can definitely see that she, the Big-Eyed One, has made an impression on him.

And later, after childhood: not so much anymore. Grows up. The family leaves the rectory because the father is given a position in another place. Tom Maalamaa moves away after high school graduation and starts studying law at the university, finishes quickly, becomes a lawyer. Maj-Gun, herself, in some way, the Girl from Borneo, takes her bag and baggage and moves to a rented room in the leafy suburbs below the square in the town center. Remains in the District, does not get anywhere for a long time. Works in the newsstand at the square, for many years it turns out, and moves from one rented room in the attic of one house to another rented room in the attic of another house. The years pass, Maj-Gun in the newsstand, sitting where she is sitting, on a bar stool. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” it reads on a card on the back of the cash register. And then one afternoon in the late summer of 1989 Big-Eyed Susette Packlén, whom she has already gotten to know a little, separate from Tom and everyone else, comes walking across the square.

SUSETTE AND THE DARKNESS, 1989

Sometimes Susette Packlén imagines that she is a horrible flower that is about to bloom. But often, with Maj-Gun at the newsstand, she thinks about love.

MAJ-GUN, AT THE NEWSSTAND. Maj-Gun Maalamaa.

On a bar stool behind the counter, among the newspapers and lottery tickets, tips and games. Sweaty, perspiring, in time a luxuriant creature. At some point maybe shiny letters on a yellowed card on the back of the cash register, the first thing you see when you come inside: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

Worn text on a grayish-blue landscape, rather abstract. Round, white moon in the upper right-hand corner and shadows of a spruce forest down to the left—an explicitness?

But first, they are still only children then, Maj-Gun is at the rectory, at the entrance to the cemetery, the old part. Nothing strange about that, of course: Maj-Gun is the Pastor’s daughter and her mother works as deaconess in the assembly. Or Majjunn, that is what she is called back then, or at least the name she uses for herself.

“Say Pastor’s Crown Princess,” Maj-Gun yells, “that’s the password.” Hangs on the metal gate, it goes tjii this way tjii that way, back and forth in the wind despite the weight of Majjunn’s large body. Not exactly a fat body but significantly larger than Susette Packlén’s, which is almost as old. They go to the same elementary school, she and Majjunn, but they do not hang out, are not friends.

“Say Pastor’s Crown Pr—”

You do not say it. You say nothing. You walk past. The gate is open even though Majjunn is hanging on it. But still, amusing, when you walk by, how that name Majjunn sticks in your head. Plays there, sometimes, in silence. Majjunn Majjunn you repeat silently to yourself; the name glues itself to your tongue, becomes stuck in your mouth.

You carry bluebells in your hands.

One bouquet and several, sometimes a whole armful that will be divided into smaller bouquets inside the cemetery; tidily organized in glass jars you bring from home. You: Susette and her mother, that is, who have a habit of going to the cemetery, just the two of them, together. Moreover, sometimes they have boiled the glass jars in water at home in the kitchen in their own house with a garden where they are living at that time in the lush suburbs below the square in the town center so that they have become really transparently clean. Not even just the two of them then, during her childhood, rather Susette and her mother and her father and two older brothers.

And they fill the jars with water from the buckets placed by the hydrant in a stone-covered arbor rather close to the entrance.

Flowers to place on the “Graves of the Forgotten.”

You have been out yourself, picking flowers in the meadows above the town center.

With Mom. It is hard to explain this without sounding crazy: but seriously, nothing strange in that work at all. Picking flowers, taking them to the graves in the cemetery that look decayed, abandoned.

“Say Pastor’s Cr—” Into the cemetery as said, and Majjunn’s voice petering out in the background. Later: at the gravestones, Susette knows some of the names by heart. Ephraim. Aline. Betel. Strange names, but still very pretty.

Scrapes the letters clean of earth and various bits of trash, weeds the ground in front of the stones.

And sets out bluebells and wood anemones in jars with water. Comes and replaces them: new flowers, fresh new water. They tend to laugh together, Susette and her mother: barely have time to wither and they are there again replacing them.

The Confession Grove. It is a bit off to the side. There is not exactly a sign with “The Confession Grove,” but Majjunn who, as said, is from the Pastor’s family, knows that sort of thing. Because she follows them sometimes, Susette and her mother, like a willing pathfinder even though no one has asked her.

“You’ll see it down there. To the left.”

And adds, rather pompously, “If you then wander in the valley of the shadow of death no harm will come to you.” And, then, holding a hand to her ear. “Listen. Here at the cemetery you can say things that would sound completely cuckoo anywhere else.”

Maj-Gun has a toy mask over her face. “Ho ho ho,” she laughs. It is cuckoo; Susette’s mother laughs, the mask reminds her of a movie star. “Ingrid Bergman? Ava Gardner?” Majjunn takes off the mask, wipes sweat from her brow, does not answer.

Maj-Gun has a brother, Tom Maalamaa. It happens that he comes up behind Maj-Gun at the cemetery, sneaking up so that the others see without Maj-Gun noticing. Points silently at Majjunn who is standing in front of him, twirls one hand a few times, as if to say “scatterbrained, idiot.”

And smiles at Susette. And Susette smiles back, cannot help it. Only then does Majjunn turn around and discover her brother behind her back, becoming audibly angry at him. Tom Maalamaa: the Pastor’s Crown Princess’s big brother and, somewhat later, as teenagers, Susette’s first love. They are together for a few months, not at the cemetery of course, but otherwise completely ordinary.

And later, gradually, when the first love is over the second love comes to Susette—a Janos—she runs away with him from the strawberry fields in the middle region of the country where they meet. And then, though really a lot of time has passed in between, Susette is already close to thirty, the third love.

“Confession.” The mother, during Susette’s childhood, at the cemetery, smiles a bit hesitantly. Susette thinks “confession” is a beautiful word and when Majjunn is out of earshot Susette wants her mother to explain what it means. Her mother has not felt like it, you can see it on her, it has made her feel ill at ease. Standing between the graves in office clothes—she works at the bank otherwise but lost her father in the war; she is of the generation that death for her has become at once a self-evident and vile thing—and hesitates for a few seconds. Then she laughs and whistles softly, almost a sharp whistle of the kind Susette’s much older brother struggled to teach her when they were children at home in the house in the town center. And the mother shouts, with an almost endless tenderness in her voice:

“But what beautiful flowers you have in your bouquet, Susette.”

Not: “What a cute little Angel of Death,” which Majjunn later, when the mother is out of earshot, comes there to whisper in Susette’s ear.

Or: God likes the small, timid and defenseless. Which she says sometimes when she suddenly appears at the water hydrant in the stone grove when Susette has gone there on her own to fill the glass jars with water.

The mask on: “It’s not a movie star, it’s the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa, aren’t you afraid of her?”

Susette busy with the water, the jars, shakes her head as if to ward it off.

“I don’t want to play with her,” Susette says to her mother when at some point her mother admonishes her and says, “You need to be nice to the little girl, maybe she’s lonely.”

“Don’t want to.” Susette sulks.

“But she is right about one thing,” her mother continues, maybe pretending not to listen to her daughter, “some words really do sound beautiful here. Ringing the church bells for the weekend service, for example. Words like ‘ringing church bells’ I particularly, especially love.”

But then later she adds in a somewhat softer voice:

“But I understand, Susette. You don’t have to play with her if you don’t want to.”

But nothing more about that either. And that is okay too, perfectly normal. Because going to the cemetery and placing flowers on the Graves of the Forgotten is, as said, something Susette and her mother have a habit of doing, just because, when they are together. That is to say: there is nothing about it that is great or fatefully filled with meaning. A ritual in twosomeness that is only theirs sometimes, in the family. Nor was it a twosome fellowship, in the sense of excluding everyone and everything else.

Like cutting up old clothes and rags to take them to get woven into rugs by a woman they know with a loom. A real rug weaver, she lives outside the town center, somewhere far far away in the Outer Marsh. She is old too, probably has twenty cats, lives in a drafty old shack of a cottage, where it smells of cat piss and the loom is rigged up, almost always in motion, in the only room. It is big too, takes up almost all of the floor space. And, rather new: the Bankers’ Employee Club, where Susette’s mother is a secretary and very active, has bought it for her with money they earned by organizing bazaars and lotteries, and selling baked goods to each other, that sort of thing.

Beautiful rag rugs are produced, with many colors, beautiful patterns: the woman then sells them at the square or via the bankers’ network and she can almost live off of it.

So, as said: in other words it is one other thing Susette and her mother tend to occupy themselves with in the evenings sometimes in the house in the midst of family life. Cutting up old rags, clothes, towels, their own or ones they have received from neighbors or others, sometimes they ask for them in the surrounding neighborhoods, go from door to door.

In the kitchen in the house or in the living room in front of the television. Just because, in other words not anything significant. Maybe you can describe it like this: that it is Susette and her mother partially in their own world that still, while Susette is a child, consists of so much more, so many other people too. There are, which has already been mentioned, two brothers almost ten years older who settle down somewhere else after finishing school; move away from the District in order to start families and work in another area. And the father of course who later, due to his work, is forced to be gone quite a lot. He is a doctor of engineering and receives an assistant professorship at a college in a city located rather far away in the eastern part of the country—and because of the distance and the expensive travel he comes home only on weekends and holidays. In other words, his profession is not that of a sea captain, which Susette likes to say at some point in school when someone asks her what her father does: but later, when Susette is in her early teens, he becomes ill, he spends a lot of time in the hospital. Not in the local hospital but in a larger hospital in the city by the sea, it is that serious. He passes away and a few years later her mother passes away: is hit with a massive heart attack and drops to the ground in the house in her own kitchen where she so enjoyed being.

But then, when it happens, Susette Packlén is already grown up and not there.

It is Maj-Gun who tells her how it happened. Maj-Gun Maalamaa, she knows everything. Has been living upstairs in the house as a boarder in the guest room for almost a year and a half already by the time Susette comes back after having been gone for three years.

Maj-Gun explains that her father, the Pastor, has during that time received a position in another parish, and she did not want to move with her parents to the new rectory. She explains to Susette that she has realized that despite everything she likes it in this municipality; and besides, she also had to prepare for all of the admission interviews and application interviews for the university. So therefore, and for practical reasons too, staying in the District has been a better alternative. And Maj-Gun has furnished a real attic study for herself in the guest room in Susette’s absence: thick tomes of paper and compendiums lie in piles, drifts of paper on the desk and in the bookshelves.

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.

But she takes a shortcut through the cemetery that night.

And suddenly, there, she gets an impulse and turns off in the rain over to the new side of the cemetery, a few hundred feet away from the path where her mother is buried next to her father, even though her mother had said many times after her father’s death, while Susette was still living with her mother, that she and father should “rest” on the old side where it was much more peaceful.

Her mother had thought that the new side was so deserted. Not much in the way of trees or leafiness yet either, from what Susette can make out in the darkness. But fuller now, though certainly none of the vegetation that provides a cemetery feeling of life and death, the passage of time—not seconds, days, but centuries, decades, “generations follow in the footsteps of generations,” as her mother sang toward the end when they still went to church often, she and Susette, in black clothes, “from a house of sorrow,” crowed loudly, her mother with a false and frail singing voice which, if you were not careful, was embarrassing; old silence, dignity.

But still, despite everything anyway, here now as well. Such a calm, at the cemetery, under a bright red umbrella in the pouring rain.

And in the midst of everything, all of that exhaustion that had been inside her, or whatever it is, had been, as if she could finally think, just herself, Susette.

“… It only took a few minutes. I called the ambulance.” Maj-Gun who had stood and said that in the house then, at the very beginning—and how Susette had lost her balance, had pain in her stomach. Maj-Gun’s hand on her shoulder, but the tenderness in her grip too, which had held her. But still: no future—the feeling she had sometimes with Maj-Gun in the house, that they were two children playing while waiting for the mother to return.

When the mother would not be returning.

When she came from “Poland” her mother was dead. “Poland,” she had not been there of course, it was just a designation. But it was not a secret or important, in and of itself. In contrast to what Maj-Gun had insinuated at the ferry terminal where she had met Susette, when she asked about the backpack. “Fjällräven, is it new?”

A long time, somewhere else. Did not come home. Did not keep in touch with her mother in the house in the town center on a regular basis. Cannot say exactly why, not even in hindsight.

And what has she been up to? Working in different places. Home help, care for the elderly, reading out loud for an old lady. Quite a lot of the type of work she had already done in the District—at the private nursing home for the elderly and infirm where she started working after finishing high school, before selling ice cream, and the strawberry fields.

And it had been good, nothing special about that either. She was used to old people, liked old people. But then, as said, she called her mother at home one day as she had a habit of doing and Maj-Gun answered the phone. It perplexed her, she hung up. She called again a few minutes later. Maj-Gun on the phone that time too.

“Where are you?”

“I’ll be on the first ferry.”

Maj-Gun’s voice, calm and resolute: “Give me the date and time and I’ll meet you at the terminal.”

She met Maj-Gun there at the terminal because they had set up the meeting on the telephone, not because she wanted to pull the wool over someone’s eyes on purpose.

In reality she was coming from somewhere else, much closer. But she stood there at the terminal and made it look like she had come with the morning ferry. Brand-new backpack, Fjällräven, on her back.

“Your mother is dead. You didn’t make it to the funeral. My deepest condolences—”

She had been living in another city, in other places. Would have been too complicated to explain. On the other hand, explain to Maj-Gun, why did she have to do that?

“It’s not that bad, Susette.” But there in the night in the rain at the cemetery as if she suddenly heard her mother’s voice, she does not of course, not really, but—

If you later come to wander in the valley of the shadow of death no harm will befall you.

And about the cemetery: “But, Susette, it will surely be fine here too.”

Now, it is crystal clear. Her mother was not, had never been angry at her.

And when she had left home, not “run away,” because of the strawberry-picking fields—how her mother had come into her room at night and kissed her on the forehead.

That kiss remained as well (Susette could almost feel it, in the rain, with her fingers).

“It will surely be fine here too.”

And Susette cries a little, her own tears, just her own. Peaceful crying at the cemetery and then she walks quietly back to her new apartment in the apartment complex above the town center.

Does not need Maj-Gun anymore.

Several weeks after the visit to the movie theater, when Maj-Gun notices that Susette has pulled away, for example never has time to talk on the phone when she calls, retreats rather quickly. Stops getting in touch, stops suggesting a lot of things. “Don’t we need to get out and get some fresh air?

And so has it become, without any accusations or talk of betrayal. And Susette gradually also realizes where Maj-Gun is living: as a boarder in another family home in the lush suburbs below the town center.

But then, it is seven–eight years until the summer of 1989 when Susette Packlén and Maj-Gun Maalamaa become friends again. Or if not friends exactly at least they start hanging out a bit again. In and of itself: they have not exactly lost sight of each other completely or anything during the time in between. During the years that have passed Maj-Gun Maalamaa remained sitting at the newsstand up in the town center. In the end she did not head off anywhere, neither to the admission interviews for various educational institutions nor to any other places. No. Sat where she sat.

“Sitting where I’m sitting.” That is how she expresses it herself as well, an answer to a silent question Susette never asks her in the years that pass when they only exchange a few words about ordinary things in the newsstand when Susette is buying candy and chips when she gets cravings in the evenings.

Maj-Gun at the newsstand, behind the counter, the postcard on the cash register. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Worn text, once a glittery silver? Buckled letters on a grayish-blue landscape, rather abstract. Moonlight, spruce forest.

An explicitness, in other words?

Oh! Susette does not think like that either. During those years when she sees Maj-Gun in the newsstand sometimes she does not think very much at all.

Maj-Gun, a doughnut on a tall, three-legged stool on the other side of the counter, the pork pouring over the edges of the stool: one obvious fact is that as Maj-Gun gets older, she puts on a considerable amount of weight.

And: she has started smoking. A particular brand of cigarette, which she also makes a big fuss about with her customers. How unusual the brand is, so unusual that it is not part of the ordinary selection but needs to be specially ordered from a place, the “Head Office” in the city by the sea from where all of the newsstands in the country are centrally run, something you can also hear her explain with authority in her voice, to whoever happens to be at the newsstand and will listen.

Maj-Gun standing, puffing on her cigarettes in the doorway of the newsstand, which is eventually turned into a small room with a window facing the square:

“Had to fight with the Head Office but at least NOW I won’t get varicose veins until I turn thirty. Won’t you be thirty soon, Susette?” she asks, if Susette is the only one there, but as if in passing, without waiting for an answer.

“Djeessus, Susette!” Maj-Gun sighs, whistling between her two front teeth. “The Head Office!”

Djessus. Remains in Susette’s head for a little while on her way home.

Maj-Gun rolling her eyes, at the newsstand, “djeessus” this, that, and the other.

Maj-Gun on the three-legged stool, beads of sweat along her hairline, like an old woman.

Evaporated a few seconds later—gone.

It is sometime during the summer of 1989 that Susette Packlén starts seeking out Maj-Gun at the newsstand again, more than just as a random customer. In some way expressly to see Maj-Gun, talk about this and that, pass the time. And she often stays there, hanging out. Perched on another stool, “the customer’s stool” as Maj-Gun calls it, a little off to the side of the counter behind which Maj-Gun herself is sitting. Or rather, standing in the doorway, as a smoking buddy.

Even though she really does not want to, or maybe that is the wrong way to say it because it is only when she is actually in the newsstand, listening to Maj-Gun talking the hind leg off a donkey (and it is always Maj-Gun who is jabbering away, Susette who is listening), that she simultaneously in some way regrets having come, almost does not understand why she is there, longs to get away from there.

But then again tearing yourself away without hurting Maj-Gun is not that simple.

Tearing yourself away at all. Which is a rather strange feeling.

And she would not have time of course. A bit later, in the fall, she gets a cat too, a white, long-haired abandoned summer cat from one of the houses she cleans, the beautiful Glass House on the Second Cape. Only partially purebred, has difficulty taking care of its coat properly, needs to be brushed regularly every day. And still quite the kitten: starved for attention.

And thus, of course, there is the cleaning during the day with Solveig. Susette likes her job, that is not it—just you get tired of being on your feet all day long, it sucks the energy out of you sometimes. And this particular summer and fall of 1989, Solveig has taken on, for her part and the company’s, the final cleaning for the newly built residential area Rosengården 2 in the woods rather close to the Outer Marsh where Solveig lives, though to the south, closer to the sea. But still, far too much work for just two people, especially if there are already signed contracts for other places. Joint projects where Solveig and Susette regularly clean together, and individual ones, where each cleans on her own. During the summer, Susette has, for example, been busy with the summer guests on the Second Cape as well; they need to have cleaning done by the company that has been her special area of responsibility for a long time. Such as the Glass House, being rented by a French diplomatic family: mother, father, and three children, two boys and a girl in their early teens, who have a habit of making music together on the veranda—the Winter Garden—in the evenings. A complete small chamber orchestra where all of the members are dressed in the same long red- or blue-and-white-stripped polyester blouses, the evening dress that they change into every evening around six o’clock, a domestic design from the best brand—but still… as if they were sitting there on the veranda in their pajamas, playing calming classical pieces, the sea behind them, wild, in revolt because it is very windy that summer.

White foam from the waves that crash against the windows and remains there as a stickiness, a hell to scrub away, something that is part of Susette’s work: hang on the windowsill, try and get at the crap from the inside, rig up an A-ladder in the water along the beach, wedge it into place between the rocks, and climb up and scrub, scrub… it is really stuck as said, so you really have to focus, she does not have time to think about much of anything else, such as hating the sea for example.

Or going to the cousin’s papa in the cousin’s house, which is located right behind the Second Cape behind a copse of trees, farther in toward Solveig’s former home, which Susette was immediately assigned as an individual project when Solveig hired Susette a thousand years ago and Susette had given an account of her work experience in which cleaning was not included but quite a bit of care work with the elderly and the sick, both at the private nursing home in the District and after that in other places.

“Can you take care of the old man?” Solveig had asked and added, “I’m going to say it like it is. I just can’t be bothered. But that stays between the two of us and for Christ’s sake, don’t ask any questions.”

And of course, Susette certainly said yes: she is used to old people, likes old people. And so maybe there was not anything particularly lovable about the old guy but there was not anything horrible or repulsive about him either. Tired, cranky, bulging from having drunk too much aquavit in the middle of a mess of shit and gloomy clothes and unwashed pots and pans and a sweet corroding stink of old sweat and alcohol and tobacco that hangs in the air in there. And of course, obviously, it must feel rather terrible to see that decay in person when it is your own home so she understands why Solveig does not want to go there herself.

But for Susette, who does not have any roots like that—mainly a job among others, and she has a habit of going there once or twice a week. Airing things out and doing the dishes and cleaning and what have you and when the weather is nice she quite simply forces the grouchy old man out into the garden so he will not be in the way while she was cleaning. He goes along with it most reluctantly of course, but in reality Susette has the impression that he protests mainly for the sake of protesting. Because he certainly must like having things cleaned up a bit and maybe he did not have anything against bickering with her; with a glint in his eyes too, “sweet tease,” the loneliness becomes quite lonely, having a bit of company.

Once, in the very beginning, when she had gotten the cousin’s papa out into the garden, she discovered a pistol lying on a pile of newspapers on the refrigerator. She took it, slipped it into her backpack, Fjällräven, among her things for the sauna, because she is going to the sauna later that evening, is planning on going there right after work, but something else comes up, and then the backpack is left hanging on a hook in her bathroom.

On the other hand, with Solveig, that old man the cousin’s papa is rarely brought up at all.

“How’s the old man?” Solveig asks now and then, mostly in passing. “Fine,” Susette replies, adding, “Still going strong. He seems to have nine lives.”

But then he dies after all despite everything, several years later, but still. Exactly in that year, 1989, when Susette starts hanging out with Maj-Gun at the newsstand again. A Thursday in the month of August he is lying on the kitchen floor in the cottage unconscious when Susette arrives there by bus and she calls for an ambulance, calls Solveig, and the old man is taken directly to the District Hospital where he dies that same night from a subsequent heart attack without ever having regained consciousness.

An old age regardless; he was eighty-two.

But then, that time, when she sees Maj-Gun again and starts hanging out with her, in the middle of her life—completely occupied with her everyday existence, work and hobbies.

In her life. In My Life, which she also starts thinking about in a particular way when she starts hanging out with Maj-Gun in the newsstand. Like a newspaper headline or something to write down in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” (Maj-Gun’s notebook that she sometimes quotes from).

My life. With contours in other words, so nameable, chiseled.

“What happened with your admission interviews, Maj-Gun?”

“I don’t know.” Maj-Gun shrugs on one of those late evenings when they are standing in the doorway to the newsstand, Maj-Gun is smoking. Tosses the cigarette away, a spot of ember lands on the dark sidewalk on the asphalt in the twilight.

“Lost steam. I guess.”

“And then there weren’t any good opportunities to study at the new rental place either. Concentrating was difficult, to put it mildly. Motormouths, motormouths in that family. Djeessus, Susette. If you only knew—”

“Well—.” Maj-Gun holds the door open, they walk in again. “Moss is growing on our heads, years are passing—but, Susette, maybe it is just a way of saying something else. Maybe I’m sitting here… waiting. For, option one, the less likely: that my horrible godmother Liz Maalamaa will die so I can get her money. After having nagged her husband to death at an early age, he drank himself to death on the Sweden–Finland ferry, wasn’t even fifty, maybe he just had to drink aquavit in order to put up with her… If he was DRUNK, Susette, then she has been SOBER all her life. My dad the pastor used to say that a little bit of wine made you NICE but she didn’t listen at all.

“An old hag with lots of money, mercy me. Millions, you know.

“And then, Susette, I’ll fly away. Far away from here.

“Flyyy,” Maj-Gun, sitting on the stool at the newsstand, clarifies. “Fjuuh, Susette.” And she stretches her arms out at her sides behind the counter, gliding in other words. “What a screamingly funny sight, Susette. With my extra weight—I know what you’re thinking. A giant bee with helicopter wings flidderfladdering away. Djeessuss,” Maj-Gun establishes and grows serious again.

“Doesn’t seem particularly likely in other words. So, option two, the other possibility. And believe it or not the more realistic one, because she’ll never die of course, for example. My only love, my greatest love. The Boy in the woods. That he will come. Back.

“And, Susette,” lowering her voice, whispering, “a little crow has whispered in my ear that it will happen soon—the Boy in the woods. Bengt.”

And Maj-Gun tries to make eye contact with Susette with a meaningful blink blink.

“I have always been the romantic type, Susette. Feel feel feel,” placing a hand on her large torso. “How it’s pounding. Inside. My heart. My blood. Love.

“Djeessusss—” she stops herself then when she does not really reach Susette in that way, gets new ideas, new clues, there are always new clues. Starts for example continuing the flight humor, since that association was actually funny, folding paper airplanes using empty lottery tickets, which she throws around wildly and then, more high-spiritedly, starts tearing pages out of certain magazines, The Joy of Motherhood that is lying on the counter in order to get them to fly as well. “Just a few sample issues, Susette,” she shouts with excitement, “so don’t shed a tear over them—”

Calms down again. “So many men, so little time, Susette. If I looked like you. With your looks I wouldn’t be sitting here, rotting away.

“I mean,” she adds more officiously, after a small, pregnant pause, “not the way you look now. But the potential. Come along and change. A bait for life.

“Your eyes, Susette. Those globes. A whole… world.”

Though there are of course other versions of how things went when Susette started going to the newsstand at the square in the town center and hanging out with Maj-Gun again, Maj-Gun’s own, for example.

The square, it is empty there in the afternoon and evening, in the summers too, on weekdays when the vacation period is over. An almost ghostlike emptiness hangs over it. Sometimes the only things that break the silence are cars that drive up, around around the square: three–four cars, often the same ones, hayseeds inside them. They roll down the windows, honk, yell, and if you happen to be on the square then you end up in the center, captured, for a few minutes, in a circle.

Susette ends up in the middle of the circle, maybe one of those evenings, possibly actually the evening after the day when Susette has been in the cousin’s house on the First Cape and found the old man the cousin’s papa beaten and unconscious on the kitchen floor. She cannot say for sure as said but it could have been that evening because it was fairly early after all and for once she was in no hurry to get anywhere.

She has a clear memory of it—because she had been working almost every day that summer from morning till night sometimes, at the usual places, with or without Solveig and then with Solveig in the afternoons and often later on overtime at Rosengården 2.

But this evening in particular they are free because they have not been able to go to Rosengården since the old man, Solveig’s relative the cousin’s papa from her childhood home, had died or is dying at the hospital and Solveig has to be there.

Susette who comes from the cousin’s house after the ambulance and Solveig have left; it is Susette herself who has offered to clean up the house, suddenly felt so sorry for Solveig, which she still has not said directly to Solveig because she and Solveig do not talk to each other in that way and Solveig herself has also been as calm, almost unaffected as usual.

“I want to,” is all Susette said when Solveig offered to give her a ride up to the town center.

She remained in the house for a while, but then later still without the energy to take care of anything at all after everyone had left, the exhaustion had suddenly rushed through her body. Left, her as well, walked along the road up to the main country road until the evening bus from the Second Cape came along and she jumped on it, empty that too, and rode it up to the square in the town center.

Got off the bus at the square, started walking to the other side in order to continue along the walking path through the small town center and then turn off on the pedestrian and bicycle path past the church and the old and new cemetery up to the northern hills and the apartment complex where she lives. But at the square, the cars that were suddenly there, had driven up and encircled her, around around for a few laps so that she had to stand still and wait until they finished. Windows were rolled down, shouts, that she was cute, that sort of thing.

Stares in front of her, it takes time: suddenly someone else who is shouting, waving—from the newsstand on the other side, right across from her. That is of course whom she is staring at even though she is not even aware of it herself while all of the other stuff is going on around her. Maj-Gun of course. Maj-Gun Maalamaa.

Susette in cowboy boots, tight jeans, short jacket, her long hair hanging loosely—and big, big eyes. “Djessuss, Susette. You’re totally spaced out. You don’t seem to have a clue about what kind of signals you’re sending out.”

Naturally it is Maj-Gun who says it, making Susette aware of what she looks like from the outside. When Susette walks up to her after the cars drive off, Maj-Gun true to habit is standing in the doorway, smoking. “My God, Susette.” Maj-Gun rolls her eyes, whistles. “A small poor child I am in farm pants, boots. Djeessuss, Susette. And those eyes. Your eyes, Susette. Like globes. A whole world—

“But close up like this you can see your age as well. And the fatigue, the wear,” Maj-Gun adds, but Susette does not get mad at her, just the opposite. For a brief moment she thinks “so true” and that Maj-Gun sees it too. Fatigued feet and—so empty, suddenly. All the death, fresh death, the old man on the floor in the kitchen of the cousin’s house, in her body, in her hands.

“Do you want some chocolate? I have a lot of samples today! Hearts, Susette. Small spirited trolls with truffle filling—”

Maj-Gun holds the door open, they walk in. And yes, it is nice coming into the newsstand, not like having wandered a long way and coming home, but just being able to leave the everyday for a bit. Step out of it, to the newsstand—Maj-Gun’s stronghold, her kingdom.

“Those boys,” Maj-Gun says, almost motherly, “pistol awakening. The hayseeds in the cars. Are a bit obtrusive but, Susette, you don’t need to be afraid of them.”

“Afraid?” Susette looks at Maj-Gun blankly.

But Maj-Gun is not paying attention, Maj-Gun at the newsstand, in the place “pistol awakening,” what she wants to talk about for example and all sorts of other things she has been waiting to share with someone and now with Susette as audience, it pours out.

“My father the Pastor called it that. They drink milk and don’t watch television and keep their wives on the straight and narrow having babies, strongly believe in Our Lord’s Salvation but then they go out into the backyard and shoot at cans and bottles. They are TRIGGER-HAPPY, pang pang pang.

“Or however it goes. But when papa Pastor told me about it it was funny, but now, djeessuss, Susette, I’ve been sitting here so long, I don’t remember anything from the rectory and all of papa Pastor’s fun stories at the dinner table, or my brother’s, the human rights lawyer, Tom Maalamaa.

“Don’t remember anything. Empty slate. Tabula rasa.”

In other words this is how Maj-Gun will stubbornly claim to remember how things were when Susette came to the newsstand for the first time.

“… The fear, Susette. Your fear. How I saw it. Your big eyes. And I stood here and reeled it in.”

“I wasn’t scared—” Susette objected, but futilely, you have to give in, keep your mouth shut, Maj-Gun does not want to hear that either.

“Well, whatever you were,” Maj-Gun continues, whistling. “When I saw your eyes I thought… like globes. A whole world. Something in them that reflects, so to speak. You can see yourself in them. That was a compliment, Susette. Hasn’t anyone given you that compliment before?”

All About Animals in Nature, All About Relationships, A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and Personal Development, Everything About Being in a Good Mood and Everyday Interactions, The Nuclear Family and the Dog, Aquarium Fish in Four Colors, All About Dogs, Cats’ World, Everything About the Underwater World of the Sea, and The Joys of Motherhood.

And then, Maj-Gun, at the newsstand, the fall of 1989. Maj-Gun among all of the magazines and newspapers that she lugs around and lines up on the shelves behind her and in front of her on racks and on both sides of the counter. Separates new issues from old issues that have not been sold; she gathers them in bundles and ties them with sharp ribbon in the back room to be returned to the Head Office from where a car comes and picks them up regularly a few times a week.

And reads them herself of course: new magazines and old magazines and certain particularly interesting issues she plows through from cover to cover during long, uneventful days before the evening rush hour and what she calls the “weekend whirl,” the hours leading up to the weekly lottery ticket deadline that takes place on Friday afternoon.

So that she has them memorized. In any case certain sections. “The memorable ones worth remembering,” she says and she writes down the particularly striking ones in her “Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” a small notebook with a black wax cover. “You never get a cavity in a clean tooth,” “Test yourself if you’re borderline,” Maj-Gun quotes. Reads out loud, flidderfladder sentences from here and from there, My statements.

And yes, there is even a blank page in the notebook, in other words blank on purpose. “Tom’s world,” Maj-Gun has written at the very top in large letters with a blue ballpoint pen. Holds it up for Susette. “My brother, do you remember?” Knowingly, so to speak, not to mention with a silly, childish emphasis. Susette nods, of course, her first boyfriend, of course she remembers, and what about it? “The human rights lawyer,” Maj-Gun clarifies later, suddenly rather bitter. “That’s what he became later when he graduated from law school. And successful. All the raped women and children, djeessuss.”

But stops herself, something else suddenly catches her attention on the other side of the window on the square in the town center. And in the next moment she sighs, almost devoutly: “Think about what Madonna has done for fashion” because at the same time oneofthose girls from the high school or junior high is crossing the square in tight pants, short leather jacket with shoulder pads, curly hair in a ponytail, bow on her head, and a knickknacknecklace around her neck.

And then she says, in a tone new for the moment, serious, so tender that it is suddenly impossible not to like her: “So many men, so little time, Susette. If I looked like you. With your looks—I wouldn’t be sitting here rotting away.

“I mean,” she adds more obtrusively, after a small pregnant pause, “not how you look now. But the potential. Come along and change. A bait for life. To life, an invitation.”

And then she takes her makeup kit out of her purse that she keeps stored under the counter, takes a hand mirror and lip gloss from it. She has several sticky colors in round plastic cases sealed in small crackling plastic bags that she has carefully, so that there certainly would not be any marks, scraped away from the cover wrapping around certain women’s magazines with a knife before setting them out for sale on the shelves. And starts daubing the sludge on her pale, cracked lips, several shades at once. “Starling darling kiss-ready for the evening enjoyment,” then she hisses and smacks wildly at the pocket mirror that she holds up when she is finished.

“Kiss kiss kiss.”

And calms down a little, looking around roguely. “Or maybe you just need to color your lips because you’re going out for a smoke. A woman of the world, Susette, always leaves lipstick on the end of her cigarette.” Grandly, quoting from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.” “SO,” Maj-Gun explains with an eternal poker face because of course she knows that what she is going to say next is sly, “you can see in the ashtray that a Real Woman was here.”

“Stop.” Susette is laughing so hard she almost chokes. But today is the first day of the rest of your life. Maj-Gun sits up straight, there is a customer walking across the square toward the newsstand, and she takes her position on the customer serving stool again, meek as a lamb.

“Look, Susette,” she says just before the door chimes. “Who we have here! Now we’re going to have some fun!” In other words it is that customer, an older gentleman with a lot of lottery tickets. And when he has taken the three steps up to the counter with three quick youthful strides Maj-Gun is sitting ready with a quote she has randomly chosen from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” (which, in other words, is the point of the hobby: saying to the first best customer exactly what happens to be on that page in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” regardless of whether or not it sounds stupid or crazy).

“Just because you’re a count doesn’t mean you have the right to walk in and out of my life as you please,” Maj-Gun says to the man, with her softest and most beautiful customer service voice.

And he, the man—incidentally the Manager of Susette’s apartment building—stands there speechless for a moment without knowing how to react. Certainly not angry my goodness, just the opposite. Hums something cheerful, suddenly almost embarrassed because he has a hard time hiding what a good mood this girl has put him in, and most of all, for a second you get the feeling that he might like to stick out his chubby hand and pinch Maj-Gun Maalamaa on the cheek.

And it is entertaining, of course, both of them laugh heartily, Susette Packlén and Maj-Gun Maalamaa, when the Manager has gone on his way. “Now I seem to have gotten one of those gaffers on the hook again,” Maj-Gun determines, and adds with a bit more irony: “As you can see, Susette, I really am surrounded by a crowd of admirers,” wiping sticky lip gloss from her mouth with an almost ill-tempered sweep of the back of her hand.

But then she shrugs. “Bother! Forgetabout it. That isn’t love, it’s a hobby. What do you know about love, Susette? And, Susette, what do I know?

“Love is something bigger… Oh, Susette. Now I’m suddenly getting nervous. Come on. I need a smooooooke!”

And she hastily snatches a newspaper to use for holding open the door.

All About Animals in Nature, All About Relationships, A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and Personal Development, Everything About Everyday Interactions, Cats’ World, All About Dogs—and of course All About Love.

Susette and love.

Because suddenly the magazine that Maj-Gun has stuck under her arm slips from her grasp there where she is standing in the doorway to the newsstand, in the process of lighting her cigarette with a lighter. Falls to the ground, opens to a column, it is just too fantastic, they both stand there staring.

“Do you see?” Maj-Gun says after a few seconds, in total genuine surprise and for a moment without her usual sweaty excitement. “Your story, Susette. And what it’s called. Oh, oh, oh, Susette. ‘Your Love.’ ”

Susette and love. A black-and-white sketch of a woman’s face illustrates the story, a car, lanterns, a few trees, and broken fog—and behind her face, in the background but in the distance so to speak, a man. With sideburns, wearing a polo, a blazer.

“And what is love?” Maj-Gun continues, once they have come inside. “Sharing the everyday and not forgetting to take turns washing the coffee cups?

“Oh no,” Maj-Gun immediately determines. “That isn’t anything other than ordinary everyday servility. You can have different kinds of arrangements, with or without legal validity.

“Or a marriage between friends. Two bank directors in a mixed Lions Club who found each other through their mutual interest in charity.”

And so, Maj-Gun who dives into her book again, “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” her statements.

“More like this…” Skims, skims until she comes to a suitable place. “‘He taught me to walk’… ‘She made me see’ …

“‘It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Love means doing everything for love.’ Even dying, not just for show but PANG truly.

“I am more romantically inclined than you, Susette. In other words, it is just as I suspected—

“I don’t mean it in a bad way, but… now. I see. That we—might be two. That maybe YOU were also created for a greater love.”

“My God, Maj-Gun.” Susette Packlén laughs in a girlfriend sort of way. “Isn’t it enough already?”

“Can you imagine dying for love? Yes, Susette, when I look at you. These globes, Susette. Your eyes. A whole world. I feel it. That your love is great, Susette. So great it can overturn houses. Duel in the sun. Life and death.

“So that later, afterward you can say that there were two of us who loved. Though,” Maj-Gun adds elatedly, thoughtful, “of course if it happens to go that way for us then afterward, in and of itself, there won’t be so much for us. But”—brightening at the thought—“the memory of the two of us will remain.

“I remember when I saw you come running across the cemetery, Susette. To the rectory: like a romantic heroine from a movie. A movie with deserted plains, clouds and rain and hard winds. I love you… her whole body screaming, the loneliness inside her, the heavens opening, church bells.

“It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It is love, Susette.

“To the rectory. But yet, it has to be said, love’s representative in that story looked a little pale, so to speak,” Maj-Gun determines with reference to her own brother, Tom Maalamaa. “So the question is,” she says thoughtfully, “Susette and love. If I am going to love the Boy in the woods then who are you going to love—now?

“Well.” Maj-Gun shrugs after a brief pause. “Should I tell you another story then instead, as an illustrative example? A true story?”

“I have to go home now, tomorrow is another workday,” Susette says but Maj-Gun anticipates her. “But listen to this now and then maybe you’ll understand me better, Susette. We were at sea, so to speak. Life is a cruise, so to speak, that’s how she said it. And she took out her flask and poured out ‘her medicine.’ Then she also said, ‘My flask.’ Held it up. ‘My medicine.’ A small cute bottle, as it were.

“You know who I’m talking about. My godmother Liz Maalamaa who had become a widow and wanted to head out to sea and invited me to come with her as a female companion. Didn’t want to travel alone, she whined, and I was a child then and I guess she thought that I needed some entertainment in the sea of balls for example.

“But the same miserable routes Susette, Sweden Finland Sweden Finland, which her husband, of blessed memory, had often traveled alone in his spare time until his heart, liver, kidneys just exploded inside him and he was found dead under some berth under the car deck by the cleaners when the boat had reached port.

“The buffet room, the shrimp shells, milk glasses; her talking and her talking; swans in the archipelago that filed past on the other side of the window. TWO swans, that was what she saw even though there were several of course, black swans, white swans, but in other words, she had to pause at just the two of them. Dick and Duck, her and her husband, and crying over the shrimp shells… and how you can long for someplace else, Susette, despite being so young! So I left the restaurant and ran ran out through the ship back to my own normal childhood as it were that I suddenly didn’t know where it was at all, but the sea of balls then, like a hypothesis; to drown myself in the sea of balls, I wanted to DIE! And I tried, I swam in and under the balls and squeezed my eyes shut but nah nah there was no nice sister in a blue bathing suit, for example, who wanted to come to my rescue.

“There was just one—an older woman: one single lady in the universe. My aunt Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Maalamaa, in comfortable sandals size ten—a reminiscence from her happy childhood on the farm up north where she and her brother dreamed about becoming missionaries, and sometimes you need to walk a long way if you’re going to save heathens, Majjunn, which she always called me, she explained sometime during her bedtime stories for me and my brother Tom when she came to visit at the rectory in order to rest during the time her husband was still alive. Sometimes on unruly ground, Majjunn, and there in the jungle, the conditions and laws of the jungle prevail, looked a bit like she had come from that wilderness herself, bruises on her wrists and a black eye on the left side… But yes, it was those sandals I saw in the sea of balls when I opened my eyes that I had squeezed shut because I thought it would make me invisible like when an ostrich sticks its head in the sand. On the other side of the windowpane that separated the children’s playroom from the ship’s corridor while chubby girl on the run chubby girl on the run echoed from all of the ship’s loudspeakers. I WAS not exactly fat then, Susette, just big.

“But, no escape, pjutt spit a ball out of my mouth and back to the dining room, the buffet tables from which all of the other people had already excused themselves and we were alone: the swans, Dick and Duck, her and the husband… while darkness fell, Susette. Over all of these lies too. And the archipelago, on the other side of the window. The only thing that could be seen, one solitary lighthouse. A white light, at a distance.

“And then, Susette, it disappeared too—

“Do you think this is funny, Susette?”

Maj-Gun stops in the middle of her story.

“I don’t know,” Susette replies truthfully. “I don’t think—” She tries, does not know how to continue, she wants to say that she does not really believe what Maj-Gun is saying, that maybe Maj-Gun should not exaggerate so much, but suddenly Susette sees the tears in Maj-Gun’s eyes behind the counter and it pains her.

“Then I saw hell,” Maj-Gun says and big, shiny tears run down her cheeks. “A life I never want to live.

“That marriage which wasn’t much of a marriage but she pretended to sit there and miss it when in reality she was just embarrassed because she was drunk.”

“But you said she never drank.”

“But, Susette!” Maj-Gun shouts impatiently through her tears. “Don’t you understand anything? Djeessuss! Those three–four thimbles she poured into her milk glass, her medicine, it was her big secret. And it’s her, never me, who talks big. ‘A little bit of wine makes you nice,’ papa Pastor said at the rectory and I say so too. But I had caught her red-handed.” Calmer now, she is no longer crying, dries all the snot and tears from her face with the back of her hand just as determined as she had been with the lip gloss on her lips, sits up straight. “But this is what I want to say, Susette. That the life lie—” Maj-Gun starts with such seriousness that all of the issues of Positive Consciousness she has ever studied pour out of her. “That. The end. Fuck. The end. Never. THERE. Djeessuss. That you can long to get away!”

And she grows silent again, determines later, thoughtfully, but with great emphasis. “Her life. Her damned shit of a life, Susette Packlén.”

“Well,” Maj-Gun says then after she has caught her breath, “now we come to the little turn in this idiotic story that happens to be true, to boot. Sorry, Aunt Liz suddenly says there on the boat. In the restaurant where we remain all alone except for the servers because by that time it’s really late. And she looks at me and says that, at exactly the same moment as I get a burning liquid in my mouth that looks like regular milk because what has happened, which she has realized before me even if it was too late for her to do anything about it, is that I have gotten thirsty and taken her glass by mistake instead of my own.

“Sorry. But she, Liz Maalamaa, is like me—unfortunately we aren’t related for nothing and what belongs to the genetic material we seem to share is that you are never allowed to have a pause in the conversation regardless of whether there is something important to say or not. Babble, it just continues, especially if someone unmasks you, or even worse, you unmask yourself. SEE the life lie shit life: she never loved him after all. And he, yes, he wasn’t nice to her anyway—but she immediately has to jump over to the absolution that happens later.

“‘Majjunn,’ she says accordingly, taking that babble in her mouth. If Majjunn doesn’t tell anybody about this then when Auntie dies, Maj-Gun won’t get the prince because Auntie doesn’t have a say about that but she will get the whole kingdom.

“And then, Susette, we go down to the cabin and she writes her will. After my death all of my earthly possessions will go to… and so on.

“And it was for real. I get to inherit everything. Including the apartment in Portugal where she spends her winters these days because of the varicose veins that also run in the family.

“Djeessus, Susette. Tom Maalamaa. HE isn’t going to believe his eyes. That miser. That He. Will Be. Left With Nothing.

“But, Susette, she’ll never DIE of course, and then, well”—Maj-Gun grows quiet as if she has run out of air—“we were back in port again.”

And at the newsstand now, Maj-Gun who is drumming her fingers on the surface of the counter and suddenly it is really quiet and dark, after closing time, a good while, because neither of them has looked at the clock.

Dark over the square too: only one solitary streetlamp is lit. A cat who is leisurely moving across the empty square, not even black, an ordinary gray tabby, a fat barn cat.

“Everything can happen here,” Maj-Gun finishes. “Just that… that… do you think, Susette, that anything happens here at all?

“You can say anything here. That’s how it is, at the newsstand. In general.”

“It’s late.” Susette clears her throat, now she wants to get home right away.

Maj-Gun sighs, gets up as well, is going to start closing up.

Counts the register first, opens the cash drawer, PLING.

“Wait, Susette,” Maj-Gun calls when Susette is already at the door. “I think. About your mother. I understand, Susette. More than you know.”

“What do you mean?” Susette asks quickly, almost spitefully.

“What I’m saying,” Maj-Gun calmly replies, “your mother. She was for real. Not like my aunt or… like someone else. Your mother, Susette. Was as healthy as could be. In some way healthier than everyone else in the world who is healthy. Does that sound like a cliché? But still, what I want to say. It was just a logic. To go along with.”

“Maj-Gun. Don’t bother—” Susette says, but still, she cannot pull herself away, in some way wants to hear more.

“Life like a room, Susette. That’s what she said, maybe to you too, there at the rag-cutting bucket in the kitchen—a special mood that never leaves you once you’ve been there. Room after room after room that you enter and leave and then go on to the next one. That house, what it looks like on the inside, you don’t feel but you know… suddenly you’ve just ended up there… Not in a basement or in some dusty attic.

“But maybe just somewhere where it is… empty.

“Brown. Nasty. She spoke like that. Cut up her office clothes, they were like that shade you know, you remember. Worn woolen fabric. We cut. For the most part she cut and I listened. I really listened, Susette, because it was touching for real. Listened like I had never listened before and maybe will never listen again either because it hurt, and continues to hurt too.

“Is that death? It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Is that it? Maj-Gun? Susette? Questions like those. The most terrible or the most comforting, because that is where life and death cancel each other out, laughter grief same thing, there is no answer of course.

“But she remained sitting there cutting, didn’t give in.

“She remains sitting there, doesn’t give in.

“It demanded respect. But on the other hand I understand that you can’t live in it.”

“Maj-Gun. CAN we stop talking about this now?”

“Yes, Susette. But you don’t need to be jealous. It was, it IS, your mother. My occasional affinity with your mother, Susette. Originates from there and only there.

“She didn’t pretend. You could see it in her. A logic. I mean, also in the most absurd of contexts, at the rug rag bucket and among all of the rags.”

“Be quiet now!”

“Sorry, Susette,” Maj-Gun says again, one of the last things she says that night but then Susette is already outside. “I mean something else.

“When you don’t pretend. It isn’t like it is at the newsstand. That you can say anything. But it isn’t like that.

“You can’t say just anything and yet, even though you think so, it is so beautiful and right when someone says so—so you still keep going, the words pour out of you.

“I want…” But Susette is already halfway home on the pedestrian and bicycle path, when she really takes it in, the normal, fresh air, the autumn night. “I want something real.

“A love for example. Which is greater than death. Which overcomes death. It is… if nothing else… then my… readiness.

“The Boy in the woods. Someone who loves despite everything, Susette. That’s me.”

And Maj-Gun who calls out after her: “Sometimes I have the feeling that we are the Angels of Death. The two of us. In the same timelessness.

But otherwise, Susette in the everyday, ten thousand miles away from that. Cleaning with Solveig, traveling with Solveig in the company car to different places, joint cleaning projects and individuals ones, where they clean, each on her own. They have a good collaboration, get on well together, even if they are not friends in that way. Solveig is Susette’s employer, has her own life as well; has a five-year-old daughter, Irene, lives somewhere in the Outer Marsh. In a room on the top floor of an old house, not a single-family home exactly, Solveig laughs sometimes when she is in a good mood, but a shack with “room for many generations” that flow freely over all of the floors, small fry, cousins, sisters-in-law and in the midst of it all the mother of the clan, Viola Torpeson, with a can of beer and Benson & Hedges cigarettes and the apple of her eye Gossip Queen Allison, certainly full grown by now, who comes and goes, on “beauty trips,” as she says to the kids, they worship her and several kids crawl across the floor when she comes home.

At some point Solveig says she would like to move away with her girl: her husband, Torpe, who comes from that house, has traveled to Germany with his brother Järpe and some cousins, is doing construction work there. Move, not to Germany but to someplace that is just hers, and the girl’s, Irene’s, of course. Should not be impossible, business is booming, this year in particular has been great, with the assignment in Rosengården 2.

On the other hand, the Outer Marsh, it is okay: the girl gets on well there and does not need to be on her own very often, there are, as said, other kids to play with and always someone acting as babysitter: Gossip Queen, the sisters-in-law, Viola Torpeson.

Besides, Solveig can also say when she is in one of those moods: the Outer Marsh, an interesting environment. The marshiness, stinging sand in the air, fires on opposite beaches at night. Often someone is burning something there: at night when you cannot sleep, stand at the window on the second floor that faces the marsh, look at the fires, something a bit magical about it all, so to speak, comes close. And then sometimes, when Solveig talks like that, in passing, it whizzes through Susette’s head too: a rug weaver in a small cottage next to a body of water filled with reeds, she was there once. She, Susette, with her mother and the rug rags in sacks, loads of them, which they had cut up at home, brought them by taxi from the town center. Thousands of cats, the stink of urine, and a massive loom in one single room. Solveig shakes her head, no, did not know that woman, knows nothing about it. On the other hand, she is not originally from there. Has, as mentioned, grown up next to the First and Second capes, the cousin’s property, closer to the sea, which she also says as if it is in some way nicer. Still, without having gone into detail, you understand there is a lot of shit in that life: orphaned early on, a twin sister, Rita, who left the District several years ago and has broken all ties with her sister completely.

Rita, Sister Red. And Solveig, her twin sister, once upon a time they were inseparable, she was Sister Blue. In the swimming school for the District’s children on the Second Cape, a long time ago, where they were the teacher’s assistants for Tobias the swim instructor, who is still a good friend of Solveig’s, because they were skilled swimmers even from an early age. Were going to become swimmers, trained hard: there, at the Second Cape, and later, for a while, when the public beach was moved from the sea bay out to the woods, to Bule Marsh. Sister Blue, Sister Red, they were called that based on their bathing suits because otherwise it was quite impossible to tell who was who, especially in just their bathing suits and with their hair wet. But sometimes at the swimming school they changed bathing suits on purpose in order to confuse everyone and especially Tobias who stubbornly insisted on calling them by their first names, claimed that he definitely saw the difference, which was not true of course, he mixed them up all of the time too.

But “I was the one who was Sister Blue.” Solveig has been able to carry on with Susette in the company car sometimes, these hundred years later. Because an episode that Solveig remembers very well but that Susette has almost completely forgotten belongs to the time in the swimming school when Susette was also a student once when she was really little. That one time at swimming school she, Susette, had ended up too far out at sea and almost drowned, but then, in other words, it was Solveig who had been the attentive one and thrown herself into the water and crawled out to Susette who was sinking already then, Solveig and no one else got hold of her and pulled her to land and gave her CPR there on the cliffs. And later, that same fall, Solveig was awarded the Lifeguard’s Medal, at the Lifeguards’ Club’s yearly banquet even though she had not been able to be there herself. Was at home in bed with the mumps, but got the medal by post.

“I was the one who was Sister…” with Susette in other words, in the company car, she insisted on it and could sometimes get really agitated too. If Susette, for example, in order to tease her tossed out the idea that what IF the one who had saved her had been her sister Rita who happened to have Solveig’s blue bathing suit on that day.

“I mean. I don’t know, of course. You two looked so much alike.” Though in reality, it is just for fun, because Susette really does not imagine for a second that Solveig could be wrong.

Not because she has any real memory of it, just something blue flickering before her eyes, she was so little after all, long before Majjunn, the Pastor’s Crown Princess, the loom, the rug rags, that is how it feels anyway. Apart from in general, what it had felt like to sink, lose her breath, blubb blubb… she can certainly recall that in her consciousness but mostly in situations when she is not thinking about it, it rises up, a discomfort and then of course the fact that she hates the sea so vehemently that it is almost a secret, at least it is not something she discusses with anyone. Besides, she has her job to do. The Glass House, the Second Cape, she cleans there in the summer after all, one of her cleaning projects, the individual ones. Is being rented by a French diplomatic family during these years: they play music on the glass veranda in the evenings, the whole family, mother father children, in floor-length polyester shirts, it becomes a complete tiny chamber orchestra, freshly squeezed orange juice in icy frosted pitchers on a small glass table for refreshment when they take their breaks. Looking in through the crack in the door, on the way to the second floor with the ammonia bucket—the music, the orange juice, and the sea in the background, in protest. High rolling gray waves, white foam, a hellish roar from the sea, which is thrown up against the windows.

And becomes stuck there. And you, if you are Susette, the following day, alone on an A-ladder wedged in between the rocks on the beach right next to the bay where she once swam out and almost drowned. The Frenchman’s white summer cat meowing on the cliffs, hating the sea, but high up on the ladder, not thinking, scrubbing, polishing the windowpane clean, not looking back—or down.

But otherwise, Solveig, Rita: it is obvious that it was Solveig and not Rita who came to the rescue in the swimming school, no doubt about it, seriously.

Back then she had not needed more than a few seconds in Rita’s company to realize it. Businesswoman of the Year’s two-window ice cream stand on the square where Susette and Rita had worked together for a few days before Susette was transferred to the strawberry fields in the middle region of the country by her employer.

Rita Rat with higher prospects: would never have lifted a finger to help anyone without thinking about what was in it for her. Could clearly be seen on her face. Rita’s sullen silence, a mute rage in the air, tangible like an approaching thunderstorm. A trembling point of power, collected energy. Certainly fascinating but it had not interested Susette any further, she was preoccupied with her own problems. Some pangs of conscience for having quit her job at the private nursing home for the elderly and infirm where she had a full-time position. “They will be so sad, the old sick men and women, they are so attached to you,” the manager’s farewell words echoing in her ears and a certain disappointment, which she had had her hands full trying to hide. The ice cream stand, was this it? The J.L. kerchief and Rita Rat grumbling beside her: is this what she had longed for in the quiet hospital corridors where she had stood in front of the window and looked out over the square on warm spring days, scoops of ice cream on cones, sweet tastes, wild strawberries, pears, and chocolate?

Had not really made heads or tails of those thoughts either, so what she had done at the ice cream stand with Rita Rat was what she had already been good at, at the time: making it look like she was sleeping. But she was not sleeping, was as alert as could be, conscious of everything going on around her. A peculiarity she in other words still has, and Solveig in the company car can sometimes get annoyed about it. Some mornings in the car for example when they are heading into the city by the sea and need to get an early start and Solveig picks her up at the first bus stop by the main country road outside the town center, where Susette has walked all the way from her apartment in the complex on the hills on the north side; how she then sits there and dozes next to Solveig who is driving and playing the radio or one of her old cassette tapes. As they approach the city, how Solveig turns the volume up to an insufferable level in order to wake the bear who is sleeping, as she says. But completely unnecessary, which is proved by Susette who, several hours later in the middle of the working day, suddenly just starts rambling loudly about the high water level from the weather forecast or singing some song, and the girl she moves in the dance with red, golden ribbons, which Solveig was playing in the car that morning.

But in the car Susette is startled by an unpleasant surprise, the sound buzzing through the front of the car, she straightens her back, says grouchily, “Thanks for saving my life Sister Blue. I am so damned grateful.”

“And with these words I give you Susette Packlén,” Solveig says in turn and then you are supposed to remember what no one remembers, what “these words” were, that is to say what Jeanette Lindström had said when she and Susette got into an argument while catering and Jeanette pushed her employee up to Solveig in the middle of her wedding.

But joking aside. Sister Blue, Sister Red—or Rita Rat, no more about her. I was Sister Blue. Except one thing. Susette can certainly understand exactly what it is like to be the shapeless one of two who are so alike on the outside.

The other, the one off to the side, whom no one has any real memory of. Because it is true after all, also for Susette. You do not remember Solveig, you remember Rita.

And then to just be left behind alone when the other has left for good.

Left at the childhood home, the cousin’s property, just that old man, the cousin’s papa, whom Susette always cleaned for and visited and looked in on sometimes as part of her work responsibilities and who had died in the late summer before that fall.

“What are you going to do with the house?” Susette asks Solveig after some time has passed. Solveig shrugs her shoulders, answers that it is not hers. The old man left everything to her brother. The whole shitload, Solveig clarifies, spitting out the words, poorly restrained wrath bubbling under the surface, Susette has never seen her so angry so angry. “That property still has a certain value after all.”

“You have a brother?” Susette asks in surprise while at the same time realizing how stupid the question is. Of course she knows, has always known. Just had not really thought about it.

“Of course I have a brother,” Solveig hisses impatiently. “Bencku. Don’t you remember anything?”

“Djeessuss!” rushes out of Susette’s mouth, because in that moment something else has occurred to her of course. The Boy in the woods. Bengt. My love it is pure and true. Maj-Gun at the newsstand. Susette just cannot, even though it is unsuitable, hold back a little laugh.

“What are you laughing about?”

“Nothing, sorry. But shit, Solveig. Seeing as how you’ve been stuck with everything.”

“I’ll be fine,” Solveig says, cutting her off, collected again. “Business is good. There are loans from the bank.”

“That brother,” Solveig asks carefully. “Where is he now?”

Solveig laughs shortly. “Djeessuss. Who knows? And I don’t mean anything mystical by it. To hell with him. That’s it. And don’t ask me where it started for him. Nowhere, everywhere. Being adrift, more shit. He is drawn to it, so to speak.”

And that has almost been the most Solveig has ever said about herself in that way, in the company car, or while working.

Because Solveig and Susette, they do not exactly talk about personal matters, whether they are cleaning or riding in the company car together. So, seriously, they do not talk about anything really. Ordinary things and that jargon they have, isolated observations from various cleaning projects. Susette about the Frenchman on the Second Cape, for example. Not about the sea or the music on the veranda and all that, but about the floor-length polyester blouses that the entire diplomatic family, mother father and three children, change into every evening when it is not about representation but having spare time, whether or not they are making music. The French family’s idea about how a real summer archipelago life should be lived, running around in pajamas on the cliffs.

On the other hand, with Solveig, in general: it is good. Stories; old stories, been there done that, it blows away. Traveling with Solveig in the company car—that year, the last year Solveig and Susette clean together and in general, Solveig gets a new car, a Volkswagen Transporter, marbled gray, four-wheel drive. And Solveig who plays the radio, the news, the weather forecast or her old cassette tapes. Folk songs, Micke’s Folk band, And the girl came from her lover’s meeting, the volume higher, less exorbitant.

With Solveig during the day, but actually, how do you know a person? How do you get to know them? By talking, endless arguing about this and that, stories, stories about life and death and success and adversity and all the experiences you have had? Nah. That is not the only way, Susette knows. Because with Solveig, despite the fact that they never share information about themselves—when Solveig says something for real, something important about herself, it comes in passing—but still, Susette knows exactly who Solveig is. And that both of them, she and Solveig, in some way are alike. Not like twins, but parallels so to speak.

And besides, does everything have to be attributed to something that has happened, something in the past?

Because later, with Solveig, in Rosengården 2. Walking, running down the avenues, in such a pounding NOW, sunshine.

Tabula rasa. Being nothing, and new. That possibility.

As mentioned, it is early fall, they are in Rosengården 2 almost all the time when they are working together. Vacuuming, washing windows, polishing so that the houses will be ready to be lived in. Those who have bought the houses and are going to live in them are rarely seen, you do not know who they are of course except for the fact that they have a lot of money and most of them come from somewhere else, not from the District. A mother-in-law or wife with girlfriends with an eye for color and good taste who show up sometimes, give good advice. My grandmother this, at Marttorna we learned it this way… and so on, though of course they do not grab the polishing rags personally, but they know exactly how they should be used.

But for the most part Solveig and Susette alone, in Rosengården, in the empty houses: all architectonic masterpieces, different from one another but certainly at least three floors in each one of them. Enormous spaces, millions of feet up to the ceilings, the floor space. Furnishings like landscapes that in some of the houses should be completely ready when the residents arrive. Curtains hung up, beautiful patterns, material, paintings along the walls, sculptures, art. An exquisite family of rabbits, for example, made of heavy and transparent glass, in countless pieces. Two larger and two smaller ones that for several weeks have been standing ready on a podium on one of the landings outside the door to a room that presumably will be the nursery: washing machine–friendly jungle animals on the wallpaper in there.

These rabbits collect dust: need to be dusted, crrrrfllll Solveig hisses all the time.

Moving inside the houses, a bit like a thief. With endless care, of course, no Solveig is needed in order to point that out. Tippytoe. But a certain thieflike merriment amid the respect.

Or, then, outside: on the lush avenues cutting through Rosengården 2, which is going to be fenced in with high walls and have an electronic monitoring system at the gate so that the area can be kept closed off from outsiders. “This is the future.” Solveig laughs, there on the avenues, silly maybe, though when you find yourself in that exact place, it is not at all.

Walking in the future with Solveig, in Rosengården 2: on the open asphalt roads where the trees are already growing tall. Full grown from the beginning, symmetrical and richly branched, as if they have been standing in the same straight line in the same places in straight rows and are not, as they are, newly planted.

“Tobias would say that it’s cheating,” says Solveig. “Tobias would say that you can’t buy history and experience.”

“But, Susette,” Solveig says later. “Forget about Tobias. You don’t need to think so much—

“There is also that possibility, Susette, that all of the old stuff can disappear. And it’s not silly. Doesn’t need to mean obliterated or forgotten. Just that you don’t need to walk around and see with the same eyes, the eyes of the old people.”

And right after, something else, something about herself. “It was hell for quite a while but it’s good now. It took a hundred years before I got my child. I had so many miscarriages.”

Susette nods, she understands exactly. No more words are needed, no words spoken from the heart, nothing that big. Just walking with Solveig, in that openness. A clear day at the beginning of September, thinning, blindingly white clouds racing across the sky.

Here you are nothing and everything disappears. The possibility of new. A great laughter grips Susette, remains a few steps behind Solveig, spins around and around on the spot. Dizzy. The empty slate. Tabula rasa.

“She was terrified of death. Everyone around her just died.”

There was a time, they were cutting rug rags.

But “love,” stated Maj-Gun, sitting at the newsstand reading from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” “is partly. To create yourself, and new.”

There among the tall buildings, on the avenues: “Is your love like my love? So great that it can overturn houses?”

My life. NOW—Susette and love.

So yet, inside Susette. There is a small seed. Of love. Baby bird under your jacket, at your chest. Small heart, small sparrow. Bird. Baby. Starts growing—

“Come on, we’re in a hurry, silly!” Solveig is already at one house, in the yard, has turned around and yelled.

And Susette stops spinning and jumping and acting like an idiot and runs as fast as she can to catch up with Solveig and bumps into her playfully, like a small dog.

“It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” she chants, with a dull and solemn voice, imitating Maj-Gun Maalamaa, right in Solveig’s ear. “Duel in the sun—” And then she adds, as usual, “Solveig, do you know Maj-Gun?”

“Nah. Which Maj-Gun?”

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Her. In the newsstand.”

“Nah,” says Solveig. “Do you?”

“Not… really,” says Susette. “Or—well. A little.

She’s… okay. Just talks a bit funny. Says strange things.”

Simultaneously: it is hard knowing with Maj-Gun and your connection to her what you should say. There are not any of those coherent, real memories to reproduce. If she were for example to say, “We were classmates in elementary school,” then it is also true that she does not remember anything from that time. The Pastor’s Crown Princess? Cuckoo. Good evening. “Say the password.” Or: “The sister of my first boyfriend, Tom Maalamaa.” What do you mean first boyfriend, saying that when you are almost thirty years old? But then it starts burning somewhere again. My love. But: a damned preparedness and no candidates.

“Strange things about what?” Solveig asks.

“All sorts of things. Just think if there is someone inside you who is dying for love?” Susette yells out, laughing into the happy day.

“Ha ha ha,” says Solveig. “Stop dawdling now. We’ve got work to do.”

And they go inside the house.

Susette in landscape. It is a little while later, in that house, Rosengården 2, the one with the glass rabbits on the podium on the third-floor landing. She has gone up there, and suddenly that merriment from outside on the avenues fills her, a bit thieflike too, upward upward, three and a half floors, in this house, to the very top floor. A small staircase, a door, she opens it and comes out.

An empty landscape, and how large. A wide wide space, warm wooden flooring and a window at the other end, enormous, reaching almost from the floor to the sloping roof, probably fifteen–eighteen feet at the highest point. Walks up to this window, there is, so to speak, a door in the window, there is of course some sort of artistic idea behind it. A glass door that leads out to—everything.

And it is fantastic, what is revealed. The sea in the distance, and the woods, the capes. Everything exists in there and then the sky as well, the clouds, everything—that space. And to stand there, like on a stage, as if someone had thought about it. Because heavy curtains are already hanging at the sides of the window, curtains made of velvet, soft, like theater curtains.

Tippytoe, carefully, hop hop, Susette walks up to the window. And stands there, alone, in the emptiness, the silence, with everything in front of her—it is dizzying.

Tabula ra—

But suddenly, at the window, where she is standing there at the window, the handle on the door that most certainly cannot be opened even though it looks like it can, and yes, steady on her feet, is not afraid of heights, not afraid, not—but suddenly, exactly right there, another thing. Which comes back.

Silk velvet rag scraps—I have seen the most I have. Maj-Gun, her stories, at the rug rag bucket. The rug rag bucket. The scissors. Crehp crehp. Mom.

Maj-Gun, again, again Maj-Gun. That strange time eight–nine years ago, mother was dead, they were cutting rags in the kitchen in her childhood home. Silk, velvet… Maj-Gun’s conjurations, like refrains. And her stories, or just that she talked, talked all the time. My horrible aunt Liz Maalamaa. The Boy in the woods.

Not important in and of themselves, not even then; it was just the purpose of them: to lighten the grief in an otherwise rather sorrowful and confusing time.

And at the same time, silly too. The Boy in the woods. Maj-Gun’s great love, for example. This Bengt, that is, Solveig’s brother—whom you had never thought about, and you do not think about in any more detail now either. Just a boy, of course you remember him—even if Susette never knew him at all, just known in the way that everyone who grows up at about the same time in the same place knows each other.

Somewhat older, the kind the girls in the District had crushes on: looked pretty good, drank a lot of beer already back then. But in an interesting way, so to speak, celebrated, and could be attractive at a certain point in life, a short period, but nothing more.

Maj-Gun’s: “My undelivered love, it is pure and true.” So yes, there was already a lot of forced comedy around this at the rug rag bucket in the house. Something Susette had understood back then already despite the fact that she had been rather dazed there, sitting in her pajamas, listening. That there was not much truth in Maj-Gun’s story, that he would have been interested in someone like Maj-Gun, who had neither the looks nor the manner about her, was rather unthinkable.

Of course in addition to the fact that maybe he had been there and “helped himself” there at the cemetery for a while as a teenager, according to rumors that Maj-Gun, who no longer was the Pastor’s Crown Princess, had “received.”

But at the rug rag bucket Susette had not said to Maj-Gun that Maj-Gun’s love was a fantasy-fetus born of a lot of wishful thinking, and she was not planning on saying it now either.

And besides, what did she know about it anyway? She had not been with the girls and had a crush on some Bencku in her youth, or had a crush on anyone at all. During that time she kept company with Maj-Gun’s brother Tom Maalamaa and when she had not been with Tom Maalamaa in his room at the rectory she had been at the hospital with her father who was suddenly dying and when he died she had not been able to be with Tom at the rectory anymore so she and her mother remained alone in the deserted family home in the lush neighborhoods below the town center. Far away from all the ordinary youth life in the District, far away, in some way, from everything.

“The Disgust.” An empty page: “Empty world.” And suddenly again here at the window in Rosengården, an old memory: Tom Maalamaa standing at the window of his room in the rectory that faced the cemetery where his sister Maj-Gun Maalamaa, the self-appointed Pastor’s Crown Princess, wanted to hold court, but with little success. “My kingdom,” she said that too. But Liz Maalamaa the Angel of Death mask (not scary, just idiotic) or without the mask, had hung on the metal gate tjii this way tjii that way… and you had, everyone had, walked past. That cemetery, which a few years later, as teenagers, had been transformed into a place where it was whispered that his sister “received.” “The Disgust,” Tom Maalamaa at the window who said that and Susette standing next to him nodding in silent agreement even if they did not talk about it with more words than that when they were alone in Tom’s room at the rectory. Behind the closed door, just the two of them, in the music, Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, always “Mahler’s Ninth—”

That you could escape to the music from the Disgust. “The Disgust.” In these moments in the room at the window with the view that otherwise is so beautiful: trees and hills, the church with its bells ringing on the weekends, six o’clock on Saturday evenings. Isolated words that had been thrown into the air, when the record, “Mahler’s Ninth,” on the record player had ended.

As that relationship with Tom Maalamaa had also, in other words, gradually ended. Nothing dramatic about it either: they parted as friends of course and lost touch with each other as a matter of course. Tom Maalamaa who, according to what his sister Maj-Gun said at the newsstand, had finished high school and moved away from home and started studying law at the university and after finishing his studies became a human rights lawyer for an international charity.

And Susette herself who had finished school after high school in connection with her father’s death and started working at the private Christian nursing home for the elderly and infirm in the town center. She worked there for almost one year: kept watch over the dying ones, which the manager maintained Susette was good at and maybe it was true but suddenly she had enough and quit and gone to the Businesswoman of the Year and begged for a normal summer job instead. Which later, as said, after a few days of working at the ice cream stand in the two-window shack on the square in the town center, had continued at the strawberry fields in another part of the country, to Janos, the Lithuanian, the second lover, what later became “Poland,” all of that.

But Tom Maalamaa’s voice, how it pushes its way through her memory. Speaking “softly,” says, “the Disgust,” at the window in his steady but soft voice. One spring evening, March–April, big and bright. Tom who is speaking, Susette who is nodding, the quiet understanding around a feeling that they share without needing to formulate it into words.

Afterward, in that other life that was not “Poland,” which she had said to her mother, to Maj-Gun, which had gone on for a while, three years in other words before she returned home again, she had been able to recreate that feeling many times. A feeling that became inseparably glued to the District in particular, the entire district, what had happened to her personally, her mother’s death, everything mixed together. “This Disgust” over everything.

The cemetery, the death, all death, her father’s death. “No, Susette,” her mother had said admonishingly when she let go of everything, “it’s not easy living in a house of sorrow.” And Maj-Gun, Majjunn, the Pastor’s Crown Princess, “say the password”… a metal gate tjii this way tjii that way in the wind… and Maj-Gun older, receiving: Maj-Gun’s bleeding teenage bottom in the sleet between the headstones.

And at the nursing home later, the lonely dying ones on whom Susette, according to the manager, had a favorable effect: to these beds in particular where both nursing home cats were often already lying at the foot—they had a habit of sneaking in just before death came, jumping up onto the beds, had a nose for death.

Sitting there on a chair at the bedsides, holding hands, saying good-bye.

The Disgust. Instead of the beautiful and the normal. Which had been exactly that, no descriptions. Her mother at the cemetery: “What a beautiful bouquet, Susette!” “Listen! They are ringing for the weekend service. Listen how beautiful it is.”

The Disgust. In relation to the District—her youth, her home, everything. In relation to herself with: the memory of it—padding steps, soft and meek, down those corridors. Did not say much, almost mute, but stick thin and with those big eyes, bulging globes that greeted her in the mirrors of the nursing home. Padding over shiny waxed floors: were seasons, summers, springs, falls, going on anywhere?

Looking out through the window, the square, the life, the movement.

“Kitty, kitty come to me.” Scchhhh hisssss: the nursing home cats who saw red at the mere sight of her and ran for their lives down the corridors.

The Disgust in relation to time, to herself, to everything.

Which had also been a reason why she remained in the city by the sea, in other cities, in other places, a long time. Sporadically getting in touch with her mother at the house. Called from “Poland,” just a designation, no camouflage for anything tremendous.

Because Janos, her second love, the Lithuanian, from the strawberry fields, there had not been much to it. The story had barely started when it ended.

And gradually undeniably, you came up with a way to talk about it and think about it, with the comic points as well. How they had “escaped” from the boardinghouse in the middle of the summer night where all of the strawberry pickers were lying, sleeping, packed their things, headed off. Out into the woods—but the woods in the center of the country are bigger and more deserted than those in the District could ever be. And getting lost there.

She had found her way out again a day and a half later, suddenly found herself by the side of a road on which cars passed now and then. Hungry and exhausted she set herself up by the side of the road in order to bum a ride: it had not gone very well and she had been so tired she had not been able to stand and had to sit on a rock to rest. She had fallen asleep on the rock and when she woke up there were some boys in a car that had stopped by the side of the road and they asked her if she was feeling all right, if she needed a ride.

And she had been allowed to hang out with them, they gave her food and she slept in the backseat the whole way and when she woke up again they were in the city by the sea and she stayed there with the guys for a while, somewhat older, nice guys, had been their “mascot,” but no one was allowed to touch her, they were very kind.

Everyone had been so nice to her: “mascot.” But then she left and got a job and her own place to live. And stayed in the city awhile, and then traveled to another city, and so on.

Janos, her second love. A few days there, then—the whole time, gone.

But here, now. My life. How it is flying by. An opportunity exists. Be nothing and new. The Disgust? Of course it was, of course it is, so beautiful here. The open spaces.

But still, Maj-Gun. At the cemetery, one April evening as a teenager, Susette who happened to come by, on her way home from Tom, the Disgust? It had not been like that. Indifferent, almost in a bad mood, told Susette to go away. And Susette had gone away, home. They had not spoken about it either, ever.

Maj-Gun at the rug rag bucket—no, that was something else. Maj-Gun at the newsstand… “I was standing there, reeling in the fear.” But she had not been scared. In the middle of the square, Maj-Gun waving.

As if there was a connection between them. Invisible threads, rags, rug rags. Moss that was growing over their heads, moss like a fungus from the earth, old folk songs.

Maj-Gun with a mask over her face: Liz Maalamaa the Angel of Death.

Oh. Up here in the empty room, it blows away, so beautiful, open.

“Overturn houses?” Nah, standing firmly you know, on the ground.

Tiny love, tiny baby bird under your jacket, tiny seed—

I love you. And running over plains.

“SUSEEETTTE!”

Solveig’s voice blasting from one of the lower floors, through the house. Have to go.

But then CRASH. A glass rabbit that splits into a thousand pieces, raining over the hard, stone floor. Susette has left the attic, polishing rabbits half a floor down, has returned to her work.

This house: partially open plan living divided over three floors, ceiling height and space and Susette at the railing on the third floor: high above the ground level where Solveig is polishing the hard floor made of expensive Italian granite way down below, and Susette who is supposed to be dusting, but that strange thieflike merriment in her again.

Susette with polish on her rag is polishing the rabbits, my love, your love, finding a tiny seed, tiny baby bird under your jacket, light heart little sparrow hopping crow hopping sparrow. “Look, Solveig!” Cannot resist rollicking a little. “Look look!” Holding a rabbit in her hand, over the railing, Solveig far down below, Susette pretending to juggle the rabbit, pretending to throw it dangerously up into the air. Look, Solveig! “Gråhara northwest nineteen, Bulleholm northeast thirteen…” starts rattling off the weather forecast from the company car that morning, it echoes through the house, sings the song, but dearest my little girl don’t tie the bands too hard, “the folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one, over and over again, an eternal repetition, look, Solveig!”

“You’re crazy!” Solveig yells loudly too, through the house. “Crazy idiot!”

And then: “NO! Susette!” because it is in that moment that Susette loses her grip on the little glass piece, slippery from the polish, and it slips out of her hands and they both understand what is going to happen, it cannot be stopped. The rabbit that is falling, falling through the whole house and breaks on the floor into millions of small, hard shards that fly everywhere and Solveig is forced to run run away, is barely able to take cover behind a door.

Then silence, a fall day that has come to a standstill—and Solveig is furious of course.

Is silent the rest of the working day, they leave together in silence. On the avenues, the sun that has been covered by the clouds, Solveig walking a few steps ahead, quick, jerking steps, toward the car, Susette who is sauntering after her.

But then, in the middle of everything, Solveig turns around, and you can see that everything is okay again, the anger has blown over.

“Come on now you damned dreamer and idiot. We have to hurry home.”

“Now I remember her,” Solveig says in the company car as they are leaving Rosengården 2 behind.

“Who?”

“Maj-Gun. Maalamaa. The Pastor’s daughter. Because a long time ago, when I was little. She stole an apple. From Doris Flinkenberg. The biggest apple in the fruit basket that Bengt won at the bazaar in the fellowship hall and gave to her. She was stubborn, Doris, had to have everything, though it was a shame about her.”

Maj-Gun Maalamaa, stuck her hand through the cellophane and took the biggest apple.

“They were both very greedy. She did not give in to Doris.” Solveig laughs.

“Then you remember all sorts of cuckoo. Which Doris?”

“This Doris. On the cassette.”

And the girl she walks in the dance with red golden ribbons on Solveig’s tape player in the car. The folk songs.

A few days later Susette picks up a white cat at the Glass House on the Second Cape. The French family that had been renting the house as a summer residence have left and Susette is there on behalf of the cleaning company to help with the move: air out bedclothes, dust and roll up rugs, and wrap things in silver paper and pack them in moving boxes for transportation back to the winter residence in the city by the sea. But their summer cat, long haired, white, mixed breed, which the diplomats had adopted from the animal shelter in June, has in some way or another been forgotten.

It is sitting on the kitchen stairs of the locked, abandoned house when Susette returns a few days later: as if it had been waiting for her when she, as if led by a sixth sense, suddenly got the inclination to take the bus from the town center out to the Second Cape one Saturday morning. The wonderful white cat. And what a different cat in comparison to other cats Susette Packlén had, up until then, come across in her lifetime: both of the nursing home cats in the ward for the elderly and infirm where she had worked as a teenager, her very first job. Two peevish cats, siblings with shiny coats, who snuck around the corridors, so calm and at home where they spent their days padding from room to room, bed to bed, from dying person to dying person, but got out their claws and hissed at the very sight of her, “little Susette,” which had been the nursing home manager’s nickname for her.

The white cat is hungry, almost emaciated. So it eats, eats when she comes home with it. “Damned animal torturer,” Maj-Gun establishes at the newsstand about the French family in the Glass House when Susette comes to the newsstand to buy more cat food that same night because all of the grocery stores are already closed and she tells Maj-Gun everything in broad strokes.

Personally Susette does not care that much about the summer family on the Second Cape having abandoned the cat: actually, deep down inside, she is happy. To suddenly have the little white kitty, it is almost like a gift and at the newsstand with Maj-Gun she is suddenly gripped by a great eagerness to show it to someone.

“But come and see it then!” she exclaims and before she knows it she has, in other words, invited Maj-Gun to her home. And then Maj-Gun immediately forgets everything else, lights up and says, almost devoutly, humbly, yes. “You have to give me the address,” she adds later with a small laugh, but still happily so that it does not sound like it would sound otherwise, like a dig because Susette has never asked Maj-Gun to visit her before, during all the years she has lived in her own apartment on the hills north of the town center.

“Oh! Are you still in your pajamas!” Maj-Gun howls when she rings the doorbell that following Sunday, during the morning, not particularly early, certainly at the appointed time, Susette has slept through her alarm. “I’ve come to look at the kitty! Here is my contribution!” Maj-Gun, who purposefully pushes her way into the apartment, has a chocolate swiss roll and ice cream with her and a one-pound package of coffee as well as some family magazines from her newsstand, throws herself down on the love seat in Susette’s tiny living room and immediately starts speaking expertly about everything she knows about various cat breeds and their particular oddities in accordance with what she has read in some magazine “Cat’s World” despite the fact that she is, after all, which she still gets to point out in the same sentence, “really a dog person.”

“Must have a little bit of rag doll in it,” Maj-Gun determines. And clarifies: “Rag doll. A rag doll. One of those soft ones. Loose joints. Can easily be confused with characterlessness.” Lifts the cat up into the air in order to demonstrate: and yes, indeed the animal hangs limply and loose limbed, folded double in her grasp. But so, finished with that demonstration, she throws the cat away again, back on the floor with it—as if done discussing this and moving on to other things, things that are more important, more important things that she has on her chest and that certainly, in her opinion, are the real reason for her visit, naturally, in addition to, as a guest you don’t diet, drinking coffee and stuffing herself with as much chocolate swiss roll as possible.

Like, for example, the magazines she has with her then. “Family magazines.” Which Maj-Gun underlines so you can hear that she has thought out everything she is going to say ahead of time and cheered herself at the shrewdness in it:

“Magazines for the entire family. It can be informative to read about what the rest of mankind is up to, don’t you think?”

With reference, of course, to their mutual solitary situation in that regard.

Humorously said, but still, the smile that Susette has had ready at the corners of her mouth freezes, ebbs out, and she suddenly stops in the middle of everything. Because in exactly this moment it is as if it hit her with full force. That humbug. Maj-Gun, everything. And not because of the talk or even because of the cat, which Maj-Gun pretended to be interested in at the newsstand but which she is now barely paying attention to when she is actually here, rather everything she knows about it. You understand that THAT is not meant so seriously, as usual Maj-Gun’s know-it-all attitude of the well-known type that, in and of itself, could sometimes even be entertaining to listen to at the newsstand.

Maj-Gun who knows everything, so to speak, and establishes: the one with the other and the third. My statements, and notes, chosen pieces in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” that she loves to quote from. Urbanely, as it were, occasionally superior too—and very sure of herself even if often later, almost always, it turns out that she was wrong.

And how wrong Maj-Gun is: it did not start in the newsstand or even with the skateboarding film that did not turn out to be a young adult blockbuster either, which Maj-Gun persisted in claiming when they were going to go out and get some fresh air among their peers after a difficult and strange time in the house in the town center. Nah, simply originates from the beginning of time, that incorrectness, from the cemetery, the Pastor’s Crown Princess, all of that.

Everything with which Maj-Gun had gotten hold of the wrong part of the stick. About her and her mother for example, the flowers on the Graves of the Forgotten, as if there had already been something crazy about it to begin with. Stood and hissed “the Angel of Death” at Susette at the water hydrant in the stone grove when her mother had been out of sight, wearing that silly mask, “Buhuu aren’t you afraid of me?”

But if you then much later, so to speak, when the water had flowed under the bridges and you had more of a will of your own, for example in the newsstand, personally ventured to hint to Maj-Gun about everything she had been wrong about, just something completely normal, even in joking, then Maj-Gun would instantly become grouchy and snap:

“Well! You’re probably lying too.” And of course put you on the defensive. “What do you mean?” Maj-Gun has started tallying. “First, The Sea Captain. Your father. Back in school. When we were little. YOU said that he was a sea captain. AND second…” And then of course you were forced to stop listening, it is not possible to discuss things with Maj-Gun when she is in that kind of a mood, putting her own spin on things, it just gets worse, leads nowhere.

But still, nothing of that NOW, here, in the apartment, not even important. Just the following, so simple. That here for once you have gone to Maj-Gun as one friend to another and been beside yourself about a cat you had just gotten as your own and wanted to share your happiness with her, with someone. But Maj-Gun who, as soon as she has commented on her commonplace knowledge, “rag doll,” has just brushed the cat aside as if what was coming out of her mouth was so much more important.

Humbug. And Susette feels the anger pulsating inside; so angry so angry like she has never been before.

Even if you cannot see it on her, because she does not say anything, does not move a muscle.

But it has become quiet for a few minutes during which Maj-Gun, with her feelers, registers that her joke was not appreciated, maybe she can hear that it is not as funny as she thought it would be. But immediately, in the next moment, she pulled herself together and so to speak discovered the cat anew. Carefully lifted it up in her arms again, burrowing her face into its fur. “Joking aside,” blinking a bit roguely, eyes narrowed through the cat hair, “you can find a lot of almost fat-free recipes in them, for single people too.”

And it is a little bit funny after all, cannot be helped, Susette cannot help but break into a smile. And she softens, the hot fury disappearing almost as quickly as it came over her.

Ventures to ask too: “Something from ‘The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings’?”

“Oh,” Maj-Gun answers, squirming a bit in her seat, but of course she cannot hide that she is happy again, about the appreciation and the attention. “Just something I made up. By myself, so to speak.”

“But now, Susette, for the remaining entertainment,” Maj-Gun continues then, the afternoon that passes, the chocolate swiss roll eaten, the ice cream melted into slush in the bowls on the table, the cat fallen asleep in Susette’s arms, heavy and sweaty on her pajama-covered legs, still in her bedclothes, wearing just her bathrobe. “Shall I tell you about something else? Something about myself and my life? Things are happening there too even though it may not look like it from the outside. But a little bird has whispered in my ear: that I may not be here for very long. It is starting to burn, Susette…

“You know, Susette, as I have a habit of saying. I’m flying away. The two alternatives… money or love, you remember. And now I’m not talking about the former. My aunt Elizabeth and all of her money that I’m going to inherit and that will provide me with the opportunity to live an independent life as a single person with loads of financial freedom so that I can leave this joint… I’ll be able to have a nice apartment too, and certainly be able to get started on the right diet right away, so that my life, oh djeessuss how I’ll be able to say it, my life, like an architectural monument, white and airy and with high ceilings… so that my life—well, it won’t be any story about Fat-Dick and Fat-Sally who found love together, 484 pounds of true love and then they lived happily ever after with only vegetable fat on the table, Susette—ha-ha.” Maj-Gun laughs at her own joke but then she suddenly grows quiet and, “where was I?” Looks around Susette’s cozy little living room as if she had just woken up, a living room that is such a different environment from the newsstand where she otherwise sits and tells her stories, everything sounds so different here. A few seconds’ pause, and then she has found her place again. “Well HERE I was: that, the jump in the lake, Susette.

“The old bitch will never die, believe you me. It never becomes evening there—nah, always morning in that life. Early morning hours, a hysterically bursting dawn particularly in the company of someone with her healthy fluids who would love to lie around in her pajamas and lounge around until the afternoon. And five glasses of water every morning to not feel hungry and she doesn’t feel any hunger, I promise, before her morning aerobics and the long morning walks that occur daily. But—what do you get out of it, Susette? From those kinds of healthy habits? Hallelujah, Susette, you get eternal life.

“But now that wasn’t what I was going to talk about rather it was the other alternative: a small bird has whispered in my ear that the Boy in the woods is back. Love, Susette. That possibility.

“Yes, in other words,” she adds. “I haven’t actually seen him. But I know. There is so much you know that you don’t know. Can you explain it?

“A criminal returns to the scene of the crime. That’s what I mean. I love him. Because he… loved so much he killed—‘Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.’ It was a tragic story. The American girl who died at Bule Marsh. Do you remember?”

Certainly, of course, an old story from the District, Susette shrugs her shoulders: “And what about it then?”

“Well. HE. Loved her. The American girl. So much that he killed—”

“Sorry, but who are you talking about again?”

“Djeessuss.” Maj-Gun rolls her eyes, opens them wide. “I’m talking about the Boy in the woods of course. Haven’t you heard? Djeessus, Susette. If you weren’t so curled up in your own suffering,” Maj-Gun continues, but not at all as exaggerated as she sounds. “And now I don’t mean you personally but for example you—

“Or me for example. Because that’s how it is with all people. Your head is filled with so many other things, so many other things, your own things, that you aren’t attentive. And then of course you need—protection. To protect yourself, protect each other.

“Like you at the rug rag bucket when we were young, in the house. You were in shock after your mother’s death and you had such a terrible stomachache and of course I talked about my love then too but I couldn’t just tell you everything because you were so unwell. What it was really like. With him and the American girl.

“Well, anyway. What I want to say is that there is a suffering which, even if you see and hear it, regardless of how obvious it is, you don’t bother with it, not out of meanness but because you’re so preoccupied with your own things. So. For example me. I should have been more aware because that girl went and shot herself. Pang. A bullet through the head. Also at Bule Marsh. The same place where the American girl drowned.”

“What are you talking about? What girl?”

“Doris. That was her name. A year or so older, the folk band girl. The soloist in that band, Micke’s Folk Band… Micke Friberg whom all the girls had a crush on because he was good-looking and musical and so deep, something big was going to become of him, do you remember? Oh, well, Susette. I don’t either. The two of us are just as forgetful. There are lots of golden boys with prospects and there isn’t room for all of them on Olympus or whatever it’s called later in life. Well. Anyway. Doris Flinkenberg was his girlfriend for a few weeks that fall and Micke Friberg was in love with her and she also tried to love him but it didn’t work out because she was in love with someone else.

“We, Doris Flinkenberg and I, in other words, had raked the cemetery together the summer before. Of course, she was the one doing the raking because it was her summer job but I had summer vacation, long, free vacation days at the cemetery, my hangout in the world at that time. And as I said, it would turn out, her last summer but you couldn’t know that then, not even later in the fall when she came back to the cemetery once and I met her there a few days before she took her own life.

“Maybe it was like this. That she knew something about all of that with the American girl that made it so she no longer wanted to live. Something really awful. But I thought about that later when it was too late so to speak. Maybe we should have brought everything out in the open while there was still time, so it wouldn’t have been just a few sentences she had spoken in passing. Just think if I had been able to help her. I saw that she was depressed, of course: the fear, the anxiety that stank around her. Still, oh hell, I didn’t understand—not then.

“And I was so angry at her too. Thought she was proud. During the summer, at the cemetery, she just walked around and talked about everything she was going to do later when her summer job was finished. Travel to Austria with her best friend and all of the fun things they would do there. Rather dismal for an outsider to listen to in the long run. But in and of itself, it’s understandable in hindsight too: you know, how you can pin all your hopes on a trip like that to anywhere, just escape, when you don’t see any other way out. Because there wouldn’t be any trip later, with her friend. It was probably just daydreams and bragging.

“In other words, we didn’t really get along. And in some way, I had certain expectations of her. Her and her friend: I had seen them wearing the same shirts with the writing LONELINESS&FEAR on the front and thought that maybe there was something a bit different there, something with spice for real, in some way. And yes, it can be said in passing even though it isn’t important in this context: it was of course her friend, Sandra Wärn from the house in the darker part of the woods, whom she was really in love with but the two of them ended up fighting in the end and it broke Doris’s heart; Micke Friberg whom she was together with later, regardless of how he tried to make her forget, oh no, Susette, Doris didn’t forget.

“Because later, in the fall, at the cemetery, in other words she came there again once the way some people come to the cemetery in a fateful mood, was so upset, beside herself, you could see it. But then I was angry at her, as it were, because during the summer she had gone to the caretaker at the church and complained about me. Said she couldn’t do her summer job properly because I was following her all the time and babbling and babbling about myself. So she had arranged a gag order with the summer workers and papa Pastor he was mad because the bit about the Liz Maalamaa mask that I had started using again had reached his ears. Just for fun, of course.

You remember the mask, which Tom Maalamaa and I used to run around with at the cemetery when we were little, you were there of course, you and your mother, with the flowers by the graves. Papa Pastor had to deal with a lot of complaints, not from you and your mother, of course, but from others who had business at the cemetery and he forbade us to take the mask with us there. He detested that mask because we called it the Liz Maalamaa mask after our godmother and aunt who was also his own sister of course—”

“Maj-Gun, wait a second,” Susette interrupts her then. “Were you wearing that mask when you saw Doris at the cemetery?”

“Yes. At some point. Why?”

“But—isn’t it… I mean… you weren’t a child anymore you know?”

“Nah, Susette, that’s true. At the very beginning, in the summer, for the most part I definitely wanted to make myself interesting too, in some way, show that I could have some interesting stories too. Later, in the fall, I guess I just wanted to scare people. WANTED it to have an effect on her. Well. It did.

“She got scared. Quite simply damned disproportionately shitscared. But, Susette, it was never my intention to scare her for real. Here is the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa.

“But, Susette—” Maj-Gun gets ready again out of her contemplativeness and says with emphasis, “Actually. I didn’t care about her.

“All the time from the beginning. NOW I’m going to tell you what it was like: that the reason I got close to her at all during the summer was her story. That is to say, what she had been through. Everyone in the District knew about it, it had been in the local papers. That it was her, Doris Flinkenberg from the cousin’s house, who had found the corpse of the American girl. FIVE years after she drowned at Bule Marsh.

“She had died back in 1969 but her body didn’t surface until five years later. It’s true, no fraud about it there, no sir. But a strange body of water there in the woods, currents, deep and ice-cold. Like a refrigerator. She must have gotten stuck at the bottom in some way, everyone knew the whole time of course that she was there somewhere in the mire, the deep. And she had a red raincoat on; that is what Doris Flinkenberg saw. A red spot somewhere in the reeds… and yes, in and of itself, not much left of her then, of course.

“The corpse itself I mean. But the plastic was whole, plastic doesn’t decompose. Think, Susette,” Maj-Gun suddenly exclaims, “all the plastic that’s still going to be here when we’re gone—

“So, Susette. That was what I had in my head when I first tried to get to know Doris Flinkenberg that summer at the cemetery. And I had summer vacation, I had time to do a lot of thinking, so to speak.

“About a corpse in the marsh, for example, and what it would be like to find it. What something like that would feel like, as it were. That was what interested me. That experience, in general.

“But when I brought it up with her—well, yes—

“She really didn’t want to talk to me. She got scared. I understood it later, in other words. What she got scared about.

“And in the fall, a few months later. Scared shitless. She was shaking—

“Then the fear in her had grown, a horrible flower had blossomed inside her. Or, like an island. Late one night, as I said. In the darkness, under a solitary lamp there at the cemetery. Just a few days before she shot herself. But no one could know it then, of course, not me either. I was completely defenseless.

“That revelation. You couldn’t imagine there had been only a few months in between.

“Not everyone saw it, of course, but I’ve spent a lot of time at the cemetery, Susette, and grown up in a pastor’s family and I have special eyes for that sort of thing.

“So beautiful on the outside, in the midst of everything—but it was her appearance that was deceptive.

“Wanted to sing. The folk song had come to her. And the girl she walks in the ring with red golden ribbons. The girl came from her lover’s meeting.

“Cute. You might think.

“But, Susette, not at all. Because in the eyes of some there is—like there is age in my eyes, or timelessness. The weight, Susette. The eternal repetition. The idea behind the folk song. You walk out into the woods and there comes the wolf and tears your throat open. In all of the verses, over and over again, and the folk song has many verses, Susette, in time and space.

“And it should have happened then, Susette, between me and her. It should have been like in one of those stupid movies when after a brief conversation during which a lot of repressed feelings and aggressions you’ve had toward each other finally get aired and you actually get to talk, for real.

“Well. It didn’t happen.

“Idiotic. I was just thinking about how angry I was.”

“Wait a second, Maj-Gun,” Susette says suddenly. “So you were standing there at the cemetery with the Liz Maalamaa Angel of Death mask on in the darkness and you scared her?”

“I already said that I regretted it!”

“And how may I ask do the American girl and the Boy in the woods fit into all this?”

“If you would have a little patience, Susette, for once,” Maj-Gun says leisurely, “we’ll get to it, we’re almost there. The fear, her fear.

“I know interesting things about all sorts of things, Susette.

“And the fear then, for example the following. That it is a common feeling, like a state, which in the beginning has in and of itself been set off by something specific. But the fear itself, once it has been woken, doesn’t disappear. It is separate: a latent state that just exists inside someone. Once scared, always scared. And you can, if you see it, draw it out.

“Call forth the fear in someone who is scared to begin with. Hold the one who is scared captive that way. So yes, as I said and I’m up front about it but I’m not proud of it no sir; I wanted to scare someone. Irritated at first when she just ran away from me and was busy with her own business. And then later in the fall when I was angry because the caretaker at the church had spoken with papa Pastor about my disobedience when he was there, demanded to have the extra key to the old, beautiful side of the cemetery returned, the one he had given me in secret.

“So yes, I told her about my horrible aunt Liz Maalamaa. The Angel of Death, with the mask on.

“But, Susette: this is where I wanted to get to. Her reaction was not in proportion to how scary it actually was. It was silly of course, she wasn’t a child anymore, sixteen years old already and it was in the middle of the day.

“Later in the fall, then she was in and of itself so far gone in everything that if you had touched her with your pinkie then fjutt she would have sunk down to the ground. I didn’t, of course, just asked a few questions about all sorts of things, the cousin’s house, the American girl—which I had been going around, pondering about.

“But it was crazy, Susette. I just didn’t understand the extent of it all. The gravity. It was only when I heard about the suicide that I understood.

“That she knew something about all of that, which made it so she didn’t want to live any longer. And that was where the fear was coming from, its specific origin, so to speak. Maybe something she had always known but kept hidden, also from herself. But her friend, it had been just the two of them together, those two against the world and that had been a protection against it as well. And when it was gone then there was nothing.

“And the folk song. Came pouring into her.”

“What everything did she know about?”

“Well, of course, the American girl. What really happened. She knew who killed her. And she couldn’t live with the knowledge—

“Because it was someone close to her, a cousin.

“All of them were from there, of course. ‘Cousins’ from the cousin’s house.”

“What are you saying actually happened? There wasn’t anything mysterious about that, was there?”

“Yes, Susette: that’s where the problem lies. When the American girl died people said it was her boyfriend, who was jealous, who pushed her into the water from a cliff at Bule Marsh, and when he realized what he had done he became desperate and went and hanged himself.

“That boy. Also a ‘cousin’ in the cousin’s house. There were several there. The three siblings, the three cursed ones. Rita, Solveig, the oldest brother Bencku, the Boy in the woods, in other words. And then Björn, who had come to the house together with the new mother. And when Björn was gone: Doris Flinkenberg.

“But, Susette, there was also someone else who loved her. And she, yes, she loved him too. Maybe even more than her real boyfriend. Despite the fact that it was impossible. The age difference alone. She was nineteen, the Boy in the woods was only thirteen. She had promised him something, but then later, she was leaving.”

“Did she TELL you all of that? Doris Flinkenberg?”

Maj-Gun squirms a little. “Something like that, Susette. But, Susette, I know… Nobody knew my rose of the world but me. That is like the melody to the story. The rose in the wound. Which no one, no one suspects.

“And when I started the conversation about that then, you could see, she felt terror.

“The Boy in the woods. He was also her ‘cousin’ in the cousin’s house you know. And brother to the other ‘cousins.’

“Pure fantasies, Susette. I see what you’re thinking.

“But she spoke about three siblings who shared a dreadful secret. She said that. And that everything was spinning, she didn’t know what she should think or believe about anything. So just sang, folk songs.

“Yes. And then—” Maj-Gun hesitated a little. “Then she died. And when I heard about it… that was when I really fell in love with the Boy in the woods.

“I put two and two together and then it hit me. My love. Was cemented.”

“But, Maj-Gun,” Susette starts. “If you now know all of that for certain, shouldn’t you go—to the police? Or should have gone, a long time ago?”

THEN Maj-Gun pays attention. Then Maj-Gun looks at Susette again, like at a ghost.

“The police? What, the long arm of the law?

“The law’s long fucking arm I say. Don’t you get anything? Djeessus. I’m planning on fucking.

“I love him, Susette. That kind of love. Like a fate you don’t choose yourself.

“I want it to take possession of me. Want and want, moreover. Just as if love… were my will.

“Love him because he died for the sake of love. It’s for real. Something that has happened. And the only salvation.”

“Yes, you’ve said that.”

“But don’t you understand, Susette? Love like a conversion. Like when the princess kisses the frog, the spell that is broken. Or the white cat in the folk song that says to the prince ‘cut my throat’ and I will become your princess and the prince does and she becomes one.

“You have to be careful. You have to come to love. New.”

“You’ve said that too—”

And silence, when it zooms through Susette’s head of course that fundamental silliness in everything Maj-Gun is saying about the Boy in the woods, again: in other words, one Bencku in a barn where people partied and Bencku partied the most and for a while in his youth that made an impression, plus the fact that he was good-looking and the girls in the District had taken their bikes out there just in order to sit, lined up along the walls of the barn in the darkness, slowly becoming DRUNK too while waiting to be seen and some were cuter than others and then they were seen more often and so on. Starling darling kiss ready for the evening entertainment. It must be Maj-Gun Maalamaa in order to get something meaningful out of that.

But at the same time, on the other hand. Something that effectively obscures all desire to laugh for example. The three siblings. The cursed ones. Bencku, Rita—and Solveig. And Doris Flinkenberg, with the folk song. Not because Susette had not known, but she had, so to speak, not thought about Solveig that way. Solveig in the company car, Doris Flinkenberg on a cassette tape. Nah, Susette does not know anything about Doris, that fall when she killed herself, Susette had not been in the District any longer. And the cousin’s house, where Susette had cleaned, cleaned, the old man, the cousin’s papa. Who had died—and not that long ago either. And there, in the cousin’s house, after the ambulance had left she walked around with death in her hands.

And so, still, how all of that is also suddenly obliterated because of another image, another scene.

Just: a terrified girl at the cemetery, Maj-Gun with the mask, the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa.

“Damn it, Maj-Gun! You scared her! With your damned mask! And do you HAVE to say the Boy in the woods all the time? He’s probably a hundred years old and his name is Bengt!”

Damp. Down on the ground, reality. Maj-Gun grows quiet, does not say anything, looks down—at her hands, her nails.

“My bladder is about to explode,” she says then and gets up. “I have to go pee.”

And she walks out into the hall and into the bathroom. Susette gets up off the couch too, opens the window slightly and fresh air pours into the room. Starts picking up empty coffee cups, empty ice cream bowls and carries them into the kitchen and turns on the hot water and puts the dishes to soak in the sink.

A relief, as if something had let go, no fury, nothing is pounding now. No “What does Maj-Gun want from me? What is she doing in my apartment?” No feeling of connections, rags, fungus.

But just ordinary, normal. The cat is purring at her legs now, begging for food because it is hungry. Susette takes a can of cat food out of the cabinet, looks for the can opener but as usual does not find it, takes the old pair of scissors instead, uses the tip to make a gash in the lid of the can and bends it up, ladles the food out onto a plate and sets it on the floor in front of the cat who starts eating.

Hears Maj-Gun behind her, coming from the bathroom, and in the midst of everything Susette thinks of something funny, which is also an ordinary way of finishing a conversation.

“Maj-Gun!” she calls. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you don’t need to wait so long. The Boy in the woods. Bengt. He inherited the whole house.”

But then Maj-Gun is standing in the doorway with a pistol in her hand.

“Damn, Susette. What are you doing with a revolver in your sauna bag?”

On the other hand, still, at the newsstand, a few evenings later. “More cat food?” Maj-Gun in the doorway, puffing on a cigarette that she tosses away half smoked when she catches sight of Susette who is approaching across the square, holds the door open, bows. “Just because you’re a duchess—” Susette shakes her head, Maj-Gun does not finish the sentence, they go in.

“Think about what Madonna has done for fashion! It’s crazy! Djeessuss!”

A girl is crossing the square, they see her through the window where they are, as always, sitting on either side of the counter among all of the magazines, lottery tickets, games. The same girl as all the times before: hair teased, bow in her hair, medium-length leather jacket, knickknacknecklaces. And Maj-Gun who yells what she has yelled a thousand times before, and lacking just as much irony in her voice—the opposite, almost filled with reverence, esteem.

Susette who laughs, Maj-Gun who stares at her, and speaks so that it sounds like an accusation:

“You’re so spaced out, Susette. Don’t know anything about what is going on!

“If I looked like you, Susette. Not exactly what you look like now, but the potential.

“Come along and change!” Maj-Gun calls out. “With you as bait, Susette. To life, an invitation. NOW we’re going to the disco.”

And that is what they do the following Saturday when Maj-Gun does not have to work: go into the city by the sea and buy clothes and then they go to the disco. Only clothes for Susette, because there is nothing in large enough sizes in the regular stores for Maj-Gun, something she cheerily points out. She is wearing what she calls the tiger blouse party shirt: an ill-tempered leopard mouth with red sequins that swell over her stomach.

And Susette in the fitting rooms in the stores, in the junior department: Maj-Gun who is lugging clothes between the fitting room and the department, fitting room and department, serving as fashion adviser, choosing and deciding. Dresses Susette up for all she is worth, like bait. Broad-shouldered yellow blazer, aviator pants with creases, and in front of the mirror in the restroom at the train station Susette’s hair is combed back into a curly, poodlelike hairstyle with a ponytail.

The disco is enormous, an ash-gray hall; Susette is sucking on a Blue Angel, which is a blue drink with an umbrella stuck in the glass with white foam on top. “It’s stardust,” Maj-Gun explains when they take a seat on a group of couches suitably close to the dance floor, “stardust stardust,” stirs her finger in the whiteness, sticks her finger in her mouth, “mmmmm.” Raises her milk glass—Maj-Gun never drinks anything stronger—says cheers! One Blue Angel, two Blue Angels, and a few more: Maj-Gun picks umbrellas out of the glasses as Susette finishes them, one after another, places the umbrellas in a row on the table. Maj-Gun orders new drinks from the waiter or goes to the bar herself and brings more when the hall and the sofas fill with people; “you can’t yell waiter because then they’ll get offended!” Maj-Gun drums her fingers on the low coffee table in time with the music and Susette is drinking, later dancing—drinking, dancing, boys are asking her to dance. One boy after another, boys boys how they crowd around her: “She has good luck!” Maj-Gun laughs when Susette returns to the sofa between the dances only to immediately have a new boy there who is going to lead her out onto the dance floor. “Luck, luck.” Maj-Gun laughs until she stops laughing, new people sit down on the sofas, lots of people, strange people, forcing Maj-Gun farther and farther into the corner. Susette too, of course, but then she is not really there but on the dance floor, on the dance floor the entire time, and gradually Maj-Gun grows quiet, just sits, does not say anything at all anymore.

But Susette on the dance floor: under the blue, white lights, in the smoke that comes from the floor and whirls around the dancers under the disco ball turning around around silver and glittering on the ceiling. Susette who is dancing, dancing—and sees Maj-Gun at a distance, on the sofa, among all the unfamiliar people, squeezed in between them, in the corner. And not that Maj-Gun is looking in Susette’s direction any longer, does not try to make eye contact with Susette in order to signal an understanding like she did earlier in the evening. Now, is sitting, is sitting where she sits, among all the ordinary girls and boys who are swelling in every direction on the group of sofas, pretending not to notice Maj-Gun, not bothering about her, Maj-Gun is like air to them. But yet, it is still Maj-Gun who, due to her size, is the most obvious of them all. Is shining, fleshy white around the arms, paler than ever: Maj-Gun like a beacon through the gray smoke and silver light, a leopard mouth adorned with sequins exploding over her enormous bosom and a half-filled glass of milk on the table in front of her that she no longer touches.

Rag doll. “Dance my doll while you are young, when you become old you’ll be no fun.” No, Maj-Gun does not sit there and hum that rhyme now anymore either, just sits, Maj-Gun, alone. I’m more romantically inclined. The Boy in the woods will come soon. And all my longing will be enclosed in my dream of love. Maj-Gun’s stories about love, Susette suddenly finds herself thinking on the dance floor: Why can’t Maj-Gun get them, fantasies or not?

But Maj-Gun disappears there, no thoughts any longer, out of sight in the sea of all the people on the dance floor. Susette who is dancing, dancing, with boys boys, all the boys and they do not call her the Angel of Death even though it feels that way. Because it is like this and it is inexplicable: “Such a beautiful little Angel of Death.” Her mother, her voice in Susette’s head in the midst of everything, and cuckoo of course because her mother who in and of herself had death on her mind those last years never spoke like that. But now, in any case, like from a dream: glitter glitter in her head in time with the stromblights, which Maj-Gun earlier in the evening had for sure incorrectly informed Susette that was what those blinking lights at the disco were called. Her mother, in a memory that in other words is not a memory even though it could have been one of course because in reality, during Susette’s childhood and also as a teenager after her father’s death when Susette had quit school and been working full-time at the nursing home for the elderly and infirm, she and her mother had done the same thing. Picked flowers and taken them to the cemetery, set them out there. On the Graves of the Forgotten: that is what her mother used to say and Susette thought it was beautiful. All of these graves that no living person took care of aside from the general grave maintenance of the parish.

“If you later come to wander in the valley of the shadow of death no harm will befall you.” Her mother had also said that. And in the church later, during Susette’s teenage years, her mother and funerals. Suddenly they had been there, for real, she and her mother at the very back of the church, together, her mother had sung along with the hymn. And afterward, at the funeral reception in the fellowship hall, organized addresses on the funeral table in alphabetical order, in neat fans with a grave and dignified hand about which her mother used to preach to Susette in silence. “The grieving have their own sorrow to think about.” These dead ones then, not exactly strangers but certainly often ones they had not known directly—for example, former patients at the nursing home, which was Susette’s place of employment at the time.

Her mother, glitter, at the disco: Susette small again, during her childhood. Her mother who suddenly, in the middle of picking flowers on the way to the cemetery, looks at her daughter and does not say what she says in reality, “What beautiful flowers you have in your bouquet, Susette,” but:

“What a beautiful little Angel of Death, my Susette.”

And it IS true: the essence of a development. The normalcy that disappeared and was obliterated. And she, Susette, could not say when it happened, just a peculiar transition from the one to the other.

The rug rags that suddenly piled up in the kitchen in the house: garments, garments, old garments and towels and worn-out sheets, you cut and cut but could not keep up. “It’s not easy living in a house of sorrow.” Her mother’s words, at the rug rag bucket, and later: all the death that was suddenly everywhere but rug rags were to be collected and cut up and wrapped in spools that would be placed back into the bags for weaving even though the weaver had been dead for a long time already. Her father who, while he was still alive, had built houses out of balsa, a fragile structure. Measured and cut out teensy pieces from paper-thin wood with a small saw, glued the pieces together carefully, and Susette had liked watching. One of her father’s hobbies in the living room in the evenings in the house during the time when everything was still normal and ordinary. That house, it had been standing there on the living room table later—

And buried in rags, crushed by the weight of rug rags too.

“Where is the weaver, Mom? And the loom, where is it?”

Gone from door to door, she and her mother, in the picturesque suburbs below the square where ordinary families lived in beautiful single-family homes, a lot of family noise and dogs and cats and neat gardens; apple trees, plum trees, and cherry trees in the gardens. Her mother and her, pushing a wheelbarrow in front of them over the cobblestones, over asphalt and on sandy paths. Rung doorbells, knocked and asked for, begged for, silk velvet rag scraps, everything that could be woven into rugs instead of being thrown out. And Susette who had been ashamed, gradually anyway: when everyone knew that the rug weaver in the Outer Marsh was dead and there was no other loom anywhere. Transported plastic bags home and washed garments, or not washed them, started cutting right away, long scraps that were called loom lengths, to roll up onto the spools later. But still, away from everyone’s eyes, easier to be there, in the house, the kitchen. The mother and Susette, just the two of them, each with scissors, each sitting on a stool at the bucket… and Susette who left her first love because of the grief, the death, her mother—or not left exactly, just walked away from the rectory once and then never went back. Her father’s death, which got in the way then; maybe she thought he, the boyfriend, would arrive as her savior, take her away from the house, her mother, all of it. On the other hand, furthermore, she had not thought that way at all: she knew of course Tom Maalamaa was not like that.

Her mother with the better scissors, the textile scissors, her dearest possession, you might think. Were kept stored in their own case in a kitchen drawer and were not to be used for anything other than cutting fabric so that the edges would not become dulled, her mother had been very careful about that. Her mother who had asked Susette to sharpen the scissors before using them, her eyes were so bad.

So no, you could not have lived there. Understandable. Gone away and stayed away too long, and Maj-Gun on the telephone: “Your mother. They buried her. Mydeepestcondolences. When are you coming home?”

“Calm down now,” Maj-Gun said again, when Susette had returned, her hand on Susette’s shoulder. “I understand completely.”

“Understandable.” The mess in the house when Susette returned after having been gone for three years. Her mother who had been a “collector” due to the war, that generation. And in the mess, Maj-Gun who had stood and said exactly that: “It’s the war, she told me. Understandable.” All the old rags in the plastic bags along the walls, everywhere, cut, uncut—and when Susette became better they had gotten the house in order. Thrown things out, dragged out black plastic bags filled with clothes, rags, glass jars for flowers, plastic yogurt containers for the flowers… which her mother had collected.

And so, still, in the midst of everything, in the middle of the cleaning, sat down there again. At the rag bucket in the kitchen, with the scissors.

“Your mother. She was for real.

“She didn’t give in.

“Such a cute little Angel of Death.

“We cut rug rags… we talked about you.

“Silk velvet rag scraps—”

Each on her own stool, Maj-Gun’s stories later, cloth in long strips that whirled down into the plastic bucket between them.

Who was Maj-Gun?

Still, so easy to blame it on Maj-Gun. Her silliness, stupid talk. Maj-Gun had been friendly too, for real. Comforted, in her own way, as best she could. And not held Susette responsible for her lies. Lied, could not stop lying, had to have another story, coherence, there has to be life.

“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.

SUSETTE, MAJ-GUN, AND THE BOY IN THE WOODS, 1989

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.

Susette comes into the boathouse. Words are exchanged, maybe no words. But Susette who is just standing there, with her big empty eyes and Maj-Gun who attacks her, suddenly, hits and hits and hits. Things to add to the Winter Garden: Young man against a background of flames, 1952, was it in Rio de Janeiro? But in any case, that place, a hotel room, where Liz Maalamaa hit the wall for the first time, hamba hamba, the Girl from Borneo, she had bought one of those statues at the market, the one that flew out of her hand when she flew in the room, on top of the bed, the last thing Liz Maalamaa saw before she lost consciousness, everything went black, a portrait: young man against a background of flames, on a wall. Or did she see? Because in reality, when she came to again, there was only a bouquet of flowers in a vase on the wall and her husband was remorseful, bought her silver shoes, that was him. But Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the boathouse in the month of November 1989 who hits and hits: and Susette Packlén, little Susette Packlén, who does not put up a fight really, loses her balance, falls backward, hits her head on an anchor and just lies there. Already dusk now, Maj-Gun who leaves and walks out into the snow.

And up in the cousin’s house, on the other side of the grove of pine trees, the Boy in the woods. He is lying on the floor in a room as well, in blood.

Walk walk in whiteness and walk in whirling snow that shrouds you, walk walk walk in the snow.