The Glitter Scene

LIZ MAALAMAA AND THE ROSES

TO THE WINTER GARDEN: a rose, a type of rose. Flaming Carmen/Carmen in flames.

One of the types that Tobias Forsström is going to try to cultivate in the greenhouse.

Liz Maalamaa did not like roses. Or maybe “didn’t like” is too strong.

But she had no relation to roses.

Sometimes, of course, she thought about roses. She had a romantic side too, of course, don’t we all?

But in reality, not roses either, in that way (there had been lilies of the valley in her wedding bouquet, she had liked the simplicity). But when she thought about roses, this is how she thought about roses:

The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at, that is how she thought, on the one hand, like T. S. Eliot (in later years she read a bit of poetry, but in other words not much, scant).

Liz Maalamaa was more robustly inclined, her dreams had been concrete ones. For example, comfortable shoes, and China.

On the other hand, a proverb. Life is also a dance on a bed of roses.

A strange proverb, because roses, they prick of course, whether you sleep on them or not.

And in time, because she had thought about it mostly when she was young, she understood that it was a rather universal wonder. She was not the only one who had thought about it either.

But roses, in general. Carmen in Flames. Flaming Carmen. Would have been altogether too… for her.

THE GIRL FROM BORNEO, 2

SHE CAME FROM BORNEO, she dances there, in the docklands. “The Girl from Borneo,” it was an amulet, that was where Maj-Gun had gotten the idea to call herself the Girl from Borneo in that hamba hamba Day of Desire dance. Woman with slanted eyes, dark hair, and flamenco skirts. A gift to her niece, her goddaughter Majjunn, from the aunt sometime when Maj-Gun was younger too. A souvenir from Rio de Janeiro where the aunt and her husband went on their honeymoon, a round-the-world trip with some cruises, it might have been 1952 (the silver shoes were from Rio de Janeiro too).

So she, the amulet figure, was not from Borneo at all. Maj-Gun had made the name up. Inspired in turn by another story that in turn will inspire her a great deal later, later in her early twenties when she leaves her parental home, her possessions in a seaman’s chest a third of a mile from the rectory down to the town center where her first rented room is located—she has the amulet with her then as well. She is, in any case, thinking like that, then. A story like that, so amusing… but it does not turn out like that of course.

It is, in other words, that story, a story about two houses, down in the town center. In the suburbs, below the square where she later starts working at the newsstand. Tall, white houses, “colonial architecture,” a bit of the American Deep South style, so maybe not very much of the Southern Pacific in them really. But the South Pacific houses is what they are called, Java and Sumatra—those are their names too. And at some point in her childhood, Maj-Gun and her brother Tom have in a passing sort of way spoken about those unusually beautiful houses. “Twin houses” because they are identical in plan and construction—and completely different from all of the other small picturesque buildings around, which come later.

Probably a hundred years old, two captains lived there. They were brothers, confirmed bachelors, who had sailed the seas to strange countries and had gotten to see so many strange things. Like the South Pacific islands, Java, Borneo, Sumatra. Come home, leave the harbor, try and relive their beautiful memories here. It does not really work, there are just occasional photographs, black and white, barely that kind even, and if they exist they are rather meaningless. Function mainly as documentation; I was there but otherwise no real life or real feeling in them. But Negro in Sunshine, hanging breasts on dark patinated native women, almost naked, next to White Man in the Tropical Hat, pulled down properly so that you cannot even see the eyes.

It wasn’t like that. So the captains built these houses instead and lived there for the rest of their days, each on his own hill across from each other. They had been confirmed bachelors, both of them, had no blood offspring, but one of them got married to his housekeeper in his later years, a Ms. Lindström who was a widow with her own children, and when the captain passed away the Sumatra house went to the Lindström family—and Göran Lindström, one of the sons and eventually also a teacher at the school, would later, in addition to his wife Gunilla and their children, take it over.

It turned out that the other captain had been a bit in debt, so after his death the Java house had to be sold at a compulsory auction; it was purchased at the end of the ’50s by an engineering family named Packlén.

The Girl from Borneo, that is where the journey leads, from the rectory to Java and Sumatra. First to Java, later, as it turns out, it is not planned but is a coincidence, in reality to Sumatra. The seaman’s chest with her possessions loaded onto a wheelbarrow that she pushes a few blocks over the cobblestones, from the one house to the other.

And of course, it should have been a nice story to tell, rather amusing too, even beautiful—because those two houses really were beautiful, white with bright attic rooms that would become her room in each house. And nice people there too: Packlén who cut rug rags in Java, and Lindström, the teacher’s family, in Sumatra. So, in a way, she really would have been able to get on well there.

But it was funny. Because at the same time as she was supposed to be in this funny story, the Girl from Borneo—not the Harlot anymore, but the Seaman, with the seaman’s chest—it started falling apart for her. But not so that the story itself would betray her; it would go on as usual, Borneo and Java and Sumatra—but her personally. Suddenly there was no room in it. Or another room—but which one?—other than the one she had planned for herself.

It was in the attic room in Java where it all started. She had come there with her books, compendiums, was going to study for the entrance exams at the university. There turned out not to be so much studying after all, and the letters she wrote to her brother who was eagerly studying and dynamically interested in his major—these letters where she vividly and humorously was describing her journey, from Borneo to the South Pacific Islands and yet it was still just ha-ha-ha the town center, the District! Just that way—think, Java, now that I’ve arrived here… yes, they had rarely, gradually never, been finished, and besides, she had very quickly stopped writing to her brother altogether.

All of that in and of itself might be meaningless, but still funny, which only her brother, she thought, would be able to understand. Was forgotten. Even the interesting information that the woman, who often sat in the kitchen on the ground floor in Java, was the mother of the big-eyed Susette Packlén from the cemetery, your first girlfriend!, which when she figured that out, she really thought she would be able to take pleasure in it—to be able to write that, to Tom!—yes, even that started feeling meaningless before she even had the energy to get out her light pink stationery.

But still, despite everything: it was meaningful anyway, what happened in Java, even if from the outside, it looked liked nothing was happening. A slightly crazy woman who cut rug rags and talked about things like death and grief—but in a particular way, which was absolutely impossible to recreate or communicate directly afterward, just a feeling of something real, almost completely revolutionary in Maj-Gun Maalamaa’s life. And it had such an effect on her—in addition to the fact that she and the woman who would die just a few years later became good friends—that everything changed. She threw away, stopped thinking about—in her head that is—everything, all stories, all amusing things, anything smart, all the thises thats from her fantasy, rather started writing, something simple, honest, real. And that is what she did in the attic room, summers, winters when she was not at the newsstand or with the woman on the first floor, wrote and wrote and it was to darkness and to light it was to everything and back and forth, but there it was, worlds opened. And were imposed with meaning, another light—her personally, about her, everything she saw—

And did not see. The woman died, the big-eyed one came home, Susette Packlén, then they almost became friends. A while, something with Susette, always with Susette… yes something, something called forth in Maj-Gun… something she wanted to get to and was frightened by… no, it could not be explained, but a driving force… to that in particular, there it was, like with the woman with the rug rags in the kitchen, Susette’s mother, entirely real, realistic.

But then she was in Sumatra, and for many years already. And had lost a thread, a rag, while at the same time she had all the threads, rags in her hand—wrote and wrote, further, but all of the stories just multiplied in her head. And at the newsstand and in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” where she sometimes wrote down this and sometimes the other, “useful,” my statements or whatever it was—it multiplied, but there it was, I am without space, it did not exist. And she had to get to it, could not live without it.

And then Susette was there again, a big-eyed one, who was a connection, because among all the stories she had in her head, everything she had dragged out of herself, all of the this and that and the Literature, the Critics, with the new landlords, Gunilla, Göran, art was suddenly happening here, in this house like starry-eyed listeners in the house, so that was what she gradually started telling Susette, the rag cutter woman’s daughter, which was the only real thing—and yet that realness did not exist in what was told. Strange? Yes? Because she would become angry at Susette later, and kill her.

Out of love, another story, which suddenly, even though it was not real, also was. All the feelings, everything that flew past, just sitting… Because it was also like that with all of these stories, even though they were a façade for what was real, it was there, so they started, like the story about the Girl from Borneo from Java to Sumatra, to affect her too.

Anyway, confused. Anyway, she got on very well in Sumatra. Better than anywhere else, after the rectory—she loved the children, and Göran and Gunilla. That is what it was like—well. Maybe this should not be investigated further here, it just was like that. Strange. But in the end, a confusing fall, it is this fall 1989, led up to the horrible, the horrible thing that has now happened and that is irrevocable, thus she has been sitting there in Göran and Gunilla’s kitchen serving them stories about the Girl from Borneo as if on a silver platter, and they have been enjoying it so. How beautiful, the seaman, the seaman’s chest…

And of course how beautiful. But what would she do with that story now? And everything else, which she has, as it were, gotten herself mixed up in? Nothing worked. Yes, except maybe. Follow the story line to the end, in order to find the beginning of another story, her own, if afterward—a story that is about losing everything and winning everything but then not knowing what you should do with any of it. Complicated? Metaphysical? Maybe. “We aren’t much for the metaphysical,” as her brother Tom will tell her later in life when they, after a great deal of shilly-shallying, renew their brother-sister bond for real, and then Maj-Gun is able to start a future, become a lawyer, the Red One, become skinny, after the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible, and have her own life, with her own independent rooms to live in.

Well, follow the story line to its end. And then this is not the least bit metaphysical. Just the Girl from Borneo, the Happy Harlot, or the Seaman (and she threw that amulet away somewhere a long time ago of course—does not exist). Because in the final chapter of that story the following now happens: the shipwreck.

And if you have been shipwrecked then you have been shipwrecked, you have come from nowhere to nowhere, are no one—someone who is clinging to a nearby piece of driftwood and lets go.

THE SHIPWRECK

Experiences from the apartment. She becomes the Animal Child. Peering into the darkness. In that apartment, an apartment complex on the hills above the town center. November 1989. Three–four days maybe, does not keep track of the time when she is there. The Animal Child is timelessness, notime.

She is alone there. The pictures on the walls.

“The Winter Garden.” That “exhibition.” At one point in time this was a lovers’ nest, abandoned now, has not been taken down. She does not see the pictures. Was in a story once. The Boy in the woods. There are no stories here, nothing and notime.

She has turned off all of the lights. She is in the dark. The Animal Child’s peering eyes. Dark dots in a darkness. Waiting, different kinds of waiting, rumbling in the pipes in the building, the building is an organism.

Snowfall, slush, rain, snowfall, rain, decay.

Tear apart, “I’m fascinated by the Death in her,” “the manuscript of a life.” Tear, rip into pieces, and “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.”

The wolf, the folk song. A cassette tape from another room. From room to room to room.

Tearing to pieces. Time. Cat food. Sirens, ambulances, police cars, blue lights, waiting, different types of waiting.

Later she is in another apartment. Music surges there in the evenings: Carmen. Ratata. Lucia di Lammermoor’s aria of craziness, it is eight minutes long. At a low volume, in the background, but the walls in the apartment are thin, all noises can easily be heard. The Manager—it is his apartment—has carried his stereo into the room next door: a simple gadget, a small portable record player, two plastic boxes for speakers. He is the one on the other side of the door, which is closed in the evenings, reading, working. Using his small nightstand as a workspace since the desk is in the other room, or his bed, a lot of papers, books, spread around him. She has glanced in.

There is also a dining table in the room she is in, a television, and a sofa bed where she sleeps in a sleeping bag at night, on top of clean sheets. A bookshelf with many books. History and Progress, We Are the Future, Architecture and Crime, a lot of titles fly by. Nordic Family Book, an encyclopedia, several volumes, “half French,” a funny term that pops into her head, from the rectory, another context. Pushes it away, or pushes, does not push—however it is, not consciously. Gardening books, books about butterflies, insects, birds, a herbarium for collecting plants.

They eat their evening meals in this apartment at the dining table at five thirty in the evening when the Manager has come home from work. Watch the news. At quarter past six and eight thirty, both newscasts.

Sometimes the Manager is on the telephone out in the hall, the door is closed, the music in his room is playing. He speaks softly, she cannot make out what he is saying.

Sleeps. A lot. She falls asleep as soon as she rests her head on the pillow with its fresh pillowcase. To the music, Carmen, Lucia, faint in the background. Sleeps calmly without dreaming, long nights, like a child.

The Manager moves carefully around the apartment, does not want to disturb her. “Have a good rest.” She rests.

But the waiting. On the television police cars can be heard, sirens—ambulances. Susette’s empty eyes. When are you coming to get her? Justice. The law. She has no plans to escape.

She does not ask because she is mute, but the Manager just says in general that she does not need to explain if she does not want to.

The waiting. Time is passing. Nothing happens. You get used to it. The waiting. Becomes more abstract with time.

She is alone in the apartment during the day. After a while she discovers that it resembles the other apartment, the one she was in for several days. Rather quite the same, but where you had a wall in the other one here there is a door that leads to a room where she is now allowed to stay. The very biggest room, with the bookshelf and the sofa and the television. And a balcony facing the town center.

The building is located on a high hill, the apartment is on the fourth floor, you can see quite a ways.

When she gets more energy, she huddles on the balcony, wrapped in blankets, smoking. Cigarettes the Manager gives her: he has a pack, Marlboro, which he bought on a cruise to give to guests, he explains, he does not smoke.

“And now it is coming in handy.”

Smokes, looks through the railing on the balcony on the side, the church with the rectory, the cemetery, the old side and the new side, a ways away.

And straight ahead, as said, maybe a third of a mile, the town center. The jumble of buildings, houses, shops. The square in the middle, a square, well lit.

Cannot be seen, but it is there.

And she does not look toward the town center, sits, as said, on the floor of the balcony, keen on not being seen, not seeing, wrapped in blankets, smoking, huddled.

But the square. It is there after all. The square that is empty for the most part, sometimes a car drives up on it. Hayseeds, “the pistol awakening,” in their vehicles, farmers’ Mercedes-Benzes, all of the fathers’ rusty Toyotas and the like. Driving around around on the square, in wide circles, or tighter ones.

And at the newsstand then. Her personally, on the stool behind the counter in the middle of her busy business. Among the lottery tickets, magazines, and games: not many customers came, especially not during the “wintertime” which included all but three months during the summer.

And then: Ciiiiigarette break! Took the pack of cigarettes from the shelf under the counter where she kept her own things: “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” makeup bag, wallet. Three steps down to the entrance, pushed the door open, lit up.

Hayseeds, if they were still at the square, honking, giving the finger. And she, if she was in that kind of a mood, flipped them off too. Windows rolled down, impertinences, and she, sometimes, yelled back.

The cars disappeared, the sounds of the engines died out; though sometimes, a while later, they were back.

Someone who came walking across the square. A girl from the high school, in fashionable clothes and who, when the cars were suddenly there again circling around her in wide circles, around around, came to a standstill, like Madonna, think about what Madonna has done for fashion Like a Virgin heavy crosses around her neck, in the middle. Nose in the air, eyes looking up. As if: above all of this, toward life, the future whatever, which was around the corner anyway if you just finished grade school, high school, and got out of this hole.

Someone else. Her with the big eyes. The globes. Susette Packlén. Not that young either, your own age. Still, at a distance, so small, minimal. Jeans, cowboy boots—boots.

Surrounded by the cars too. Stood and pretended nothing was happening so to speak. But frozen, not invincible.

And Maj-Gun, suddenly gripped by a feeling of recognition, liked what was inside her so much. And remembered: they knew each other, youth. Rug rags.

Susette who was looking ahead and straight at her. Maj-Gun who waved, “Come.” Or did she wave? In any case, the cars left, Susette came. The one did not follow the other, that the cars would have left just because of that, like cause-effect, but in some way, that was what it felt like.

“I reeled in the fear.” Reeled in Susette. And the quotes pouring out of her mouth.

“A small poor child I am, in cowboy boots, boots. Wow, Susette. The way you look. Do you have any idea what kind of signals you’re sending out?”

A big smile, neither of them could keep from laughing. And how the quote had just plopped out of her, cracked lips, dry mouth, as if she had not spoken for a long time, maybe she had not. And all of the rest suddenly, the stories, were brought to life.

Susette’s round eyes, lifeless in the middle of the laughter. Or empty: you had to fill them in yourself, quite a lot. Those globes. A whole world.

But then, on the balcony. The next memory that rushes in here exactly now, nothing else in between. Susette in the boathouse on the Second Cape. The American girl’s hangout. The same eyes that just stared at Maj-Gun. Stared and stared, surprised but so to speak confirming. As she, Maj-Gun, hit and hit. And Susette who fell and fell and fell.

And snow. Whirling. Her there later, slipping on the cliffs. And beyond, out into the whiteness.

It was from there, from the Second Cape, that she had come to the first apartment. Opened the door with a key she had begged off the Manager somewhat earlier. From this Manager. Perhaps several days beforehand in real time, but still an eon. Spoken about a friend who was away and Maj-Gun had promised to water the plants. Stood outside the Manager’s door in the Manager’s building, this complex where the apartment she is in now is located, and showed off like she had a habit of showing off to him at the newsstand, she knew that he liked it. “Just because you’re a count doesn’t mean…” Dot dot dot. Or whatever she had said, picked a page at random from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.” “Susette! Look here!” and the old man with his lottery tickets had been delighted. He had also known they were friends too of course, she and Susette Packlén from the apartment complex where he was the Manager. He had seen them together at the newsstand.

But then that evening, when she arrived at the other apartment straight from the boathouse, it was, as said, another time. No time, not even the Animal Child’s, because it began to be born there again, later, in the darkness. There, in the apartment, where she had waited. First waited in one way, later in another, but both ways had effectively kept her from making a reality out of all the wild plans she had. The “Getawaybag” she had packed in her rented room before heading off, killer rabbit on a killer journey (that was how she had felt, but not at all amusing). A few blouses, makeup stuff, two pairs of underwear, and the Gombrowicz journals that a book editor thought she should read at some point, “how you can use self-pity productively, carry it to the extreme,” but what was this now really, travel reading?

What was in her bag was forgotten. The bag was forgotten. Rug rags. Discovers a multipurpose knife in this bag later, a knife with many uses, for example as a can opener. Useful.

When she was there, in that apartment, the telephone had rung a few times. She only answered once. That was the first evening, or maybe it was already night.

Susette’s employer, Solveig Torpeson.

She had said loud and clear to Solveig that Susette was sick. Angina. Throat was swollen, could not come to the telephone herself but her friend Maj-Gun was there taking care of her so there was nothing to worry about, “she’s sleeping now,” and they had an appointment at the clinic first thing in the morning so that Susette would get medicine for the streptococcus and a doctor’s note to present to her employer regarding her statutory sick leave.

She had also said that Susette would call when she was feeling better.

It surprised her how the words were formed into lies and how the lies carried her. Carried her voice also, how, from speaking, it became that much higher and more definite, climbing to a story. Statutory sick leave. In another situation she would have laughed but now there was nothing to laugh about.

She never wanted to hear that voice again.

Scenes to add to the Winter Garden: Susette lying on the floor in the boathouse. Blood running from the corner of her mouth.

“If you weren’t so curled up in your own suffering, Susette.”

She had hung up the phone and stood in the darkness in the apartment for a while and looked out the window. The snow had turned to rain and she suddenly understood exactly what it was she had understood in the moment she told Solveig on the telephone that Susette was “sleeping now.” Hey. Impossible. Susette.

She would not be coming back.

She had turned on all of the lights in the apartment. The Winter Garden. That Winter Garden, “the exhibitions” on the walls.

The hacienda must be built. Kapu kai, the forbidden seas, a blue girl on a cliff, a scream. But she had not looked at it. The Boy in the woods. My great love, pure and clean, et cetera. Not that either. Turned on a lamp, turned it off, on off, blink blink blink.

Finally, she turned off all the lights and did not turn them on again the rest of the time she was in the apartment.

The Animal Child peering into the darkness. And did not open the door when the doorbell had rung and stopped answering the phone.

Drank water, lived on water that flooded out of the faucet. And when she got hungry she ate cat food: there were two packs of unopened cans, 2 × 24 cans in each, still wrapped in plastic that she tore open, hacking the lids open with a knife—the rag scissors, rusty blood with white hairs, were lying on a shelf in the pantry, she got it on her hand when she was looking for a weapon to open the cans: could not be used, she put it in her bag, get rid of it.

Bent open the lids and ate with her fingers directly from the can. Tasted like shit, of course, but when hunger struck hunger struck. There was a hunger that could not be checked, the one that came in fits and needed to be silenced despite the fact that it turned into nausea right after. She had not thrown up. Strained in order to hold back the gagging, hold back the food in her. More water, that helped.

But: it had been surprising, this unruly seed of life that existed inside her, like an instinct. Had not really been able to relate to it. Though, naturally, that she had started reflecting on it at all was a sign—then some time had already passed.

The telephone rang. The pictures on the walls. A body of water reveals itself in the woods. The Winter Garden. The hacienda must be built. Kapu kai. Words that went inside her, meant nothing. A blue girl on a cliff. Hand over her mouth—a scream.

Sirens, ambulances, shouts, from outside.

Justice, according to the Law. She waited. Nothing happened. It did not come.

At some point she started cleaning a little, took the pictures down from the walls, placed them in her bag in the hall, just away. That getawaybag, it was as if she had discovered it again, properly. Put the pictures in her bag. Not for any particular reason, just not to have them there in front of her eyes. Because it was upsetting.

And when she saw the bag in the hall it hit her. That it had been there the whole time. It had just been a matter of opening the door, heading on her way.

Right then the doorbell had rung again, voices could be heard on the stairs, a key was in the lock, and she ran ran back into the apartment. Huddled in a corner of the sofa.

That was how the Manager found her. The Animal Child. The surprise, the disgust. But he had immediately come to his senses there out in the open, returned to the stairwell, she heard how he spoke calmly to some grumpy hag, everything was in order, shooshed the woman away—later he would tell Maj-Gun it was a neighbor who had complained about the noise in the bathroom. This week in particular the building’s super was on vacation and the Manager was filling in and when no one answered the telephone or opened the door when she rang the bell, the neighbor had gone to him.

The Manager had closed the front door, come back into the room and taken her away from there. Spoken to her calmly, carefully, and wordlessly, she allowed herself to be convinced, followed along.

To his apartment in another building, next door. And there he had gotten some real food into her, gotten clean clothes on her. Men’s boxers, men’s socks and washed-out overalls, green and wide, but made of jersey cotton, comfortable and soft. Her own clothes thrown in the washing machine.

But the very first thing had been to run a hot bath for her in the bathroom. And then she lay there in the tub and listened intently to all of the sounds outside. On the one hand, all of her senses on alert, the Manager’s low voice in the hall, he was talking on the telephone. The police? Lain there and imagined scenes, how she would give herself up. Just the handcuffs on. Guilty, guilty. On the other hand, nodded off in the warmth, the water. Woke again when the Manager knocked on the door and when she came out of the bathroom in the overalls he had made up a bed for her in the sofa bed in the small living room that had become hers.

In a sleeping bag, clean sheets beneath.

NAH. Tobacco, the balcony, the square in her head, “the square, the square”—this huddling in blankets on the floor of the balcony, suddenly she could not stand it.

When the Manager comes home from work that day she says she is thinking about quitting smoking. Marlboro, it is not even her brand. But does not matter. She has been thinking about quitting anyway. He becomes happy, he smiles.

“Senseless to ruin your health when you’re so young.” She shrugs. “It gives me a bad taste. And I’m not young. Soon it will be Holy Innocents’ Day. I’ll be thirty.”

These have been the first sensible words to come out of her mouth in that apartment, after days, maybe more than a week, a sentence with coherence. And “djeessu—” automatically following it, whistling it through her teeth, she stops herself. And grows silent.

A fraction of a second, how the Manager’s mouth twitches. As if in laughter, as if he actually, here and now, in this situation, a long way from the newsstand, likes what she has said.

“Now you’re starting to become yourself again.” As if he wanted to say it. Like in the newsstand, all of those times she had said something funny to him when he looked like he wanted to pinch her cheek. But naturally, he does not. Tousles her hair, lightly, when he walks by, turns on the TV. “The news is on.”

“I give up. Unconditionally.” She is on the verge of saying it to the Manager—

Police cars, sirens.

They watch TV, the news.

Two newscasts. The one a little past six, the one at eight thirty.

But the Manager, justice, the law, where is it? The Manager plays on his side of the wall, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor.

Current events, sirens. The waiting. More abstract. Weeks which pass; it has become Christmas.

A small plastic tree with plastic balls and glitter and electric lights in different colors. The Manager retrieves it from the basement where he keeps it stored and the two cardboard angels with hair made of yarn in a cardboard box marked CHRISTMAS THINGS.

Places the Christmas tree on the desk, the angels on the television set. Homemade angels, the work of kids, you can see that, not very nice at all.

“Do you have kids?”

“No.”

“Have you been married?”

“No.”

His “almost” goddaughters are the ones who have made these angels, he explains, and gave them to him for Christmas. When they were little, they are grown up now. And they have names as well, the angels, that is: Sister Blue, Sister Red, or if you want, the Astronaut, the Nuclear Physicist. “Which one do you think is which?” the Manager asks jokingly as if it were a particularly interesting thing to ponder and answer, it is neither, just idiotic. AND you cannot see a difference anyway. Both are just as ugly, the empty toilet paper rolls benevolently camouflaged in water color, but she does not say that, Maj-Gun shrugs her shoulders, says nothing.

They eat ham and turnip casserole for three days. And listen to music, the same opera, during the day too. She says that he can leave the door ajar, she likes music.

On the television, the news, the third day: a dictator and his wife have been shot. An old couple is lying dead under a wall on frosty ground—the image, black and white, opens the newscast. Thick winter clothes, fur, do not look peaceful, or wretched, just dead. Terrible people, terrible regime. And soon fresh earth and sandy earth, that serves-them-right-earth will soon be shoveled over them.

But “djeessus!” comes out of Maj-Gun’s mouth then, loud and clear, whistling between her teeth, it is also a surprise. From Carmen, Lucia, small electric lights to this. The first image from the first real newscast since the highlights on Christmas Eve.

Maj-Gun puts her hand over her mouth—

Then the Manager turns the TV off in the middle of the news.

They sit in silence on either side of the dining table.

And the Manager suddenly speaks, softly. Says serious things to her. She should not be ashamed. Regardless of what has happened, life must go on. Also her life.

Then he adds, word for word, and calmly: that he liked her so much there in the newsstand.

When she said the kinds of things she said, who she was. She was not like other people, like no one else. She should not misunderstand him when he says this but there is so much life in her.

It becomes quiet again. So much life, and suddenly, just because he says it: everything she once was comes pouring into her—

But stop now. Because in the following and immediately: Susette with the big eyes, the globes, a whole world.

“If you weren’t so curled up in your own suffering, Susette.”

Her own voice from somewhere—had she actually said that, had she personally really said that? Yes. And it comes back. Susette falling in the hangout. Her eyes during the fall. The emptiness in them, not even surprise. Before she came to lie there, dying and dying.

And Maj-Gun, what is she doing here? Justice, the law. Why doesn’t anything happen?

Later, in the Manager’s living room, she has started crying. A big child’s big tears: screaming and shrill and insistent, and then, while she is crying, it comes out of her. She left her friend to die in the boathouse. And everything else too, pell-mell: the Boy in the woods, the jealousy, Susette, the fight, the meeting, the boathouse—and the snow, the cliffs, and the snow.

Why did Justice not come? What is so wrong with it?

And now when the crying, many weeks after, in the Manager’s apartment, Boxing Day 1989, is set free in the quiet apartment, how it sprays out of her eyes, nostrils, mouth, all orifices. Tears, snot spray over the rest of the ham, the mustard, and turnip casserole on the plate.

At first the Manager does not say anything. He lets her cry. Does not come to her to give her a hug, comfort her or the like. Nor does he put the TV on again, or some other record in order to drown it out, does not leave but goes to the kitchen to get more paper towels, which they have used as napkins during their meals, and tears a few sheets from the roll that he gives to Maj-Gun to snuffle in.

Then he sits down on the other side of the dining room table, clears his throat, and says, “Maj-Gun. Should we start from the beginning? Your friend, Susette Packlén. Right? She isn’t—dead—”

At first Maj-Gun is so absorbed in her crying that she does not even hear but then it forces its way inside, she stops crying, everything stops, stop—and a desertlike silence follows.

The Manager’s mouth is moving. In a state of shock she only sees his mouth moving at first, but the anesthetic slowly eases and she hears as well.

“And is in good health. She has been tired and upset. They traveled to Portugal during Christmas to rest. She and her fiancé.”

Fiancé?

But, the Manager adds, “of course it’s a tragedy,” and then he tells an amazing story that does not match up with anything at all.

There has been a fire, in the cousin’s house, the whole house has burned down. Bengt, Solveig’s brother—yes, they’re good friends, Solveig and the Manager, have known each other their entire lives—had fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand. The fire truck came, but it was too late.

It was burning. That house is located pretty remotely, the Manager says, and the weather was bad, it took some time. And when the call came in, there was nothing to save. A tragic accident, even though he was “an alcoholic, washed up,” says the Manager.

“I’ve understood that they were close in some way.” The Manager is talking about Susette now, about Susette and Bengt, though it takes a while before Maj-Gun understands this too. I was the one who loved him. On the other hand, right when she is about to say it, like a real objection, a type of reflex just like all of the millions of “djeessus” that come out of her mouth as soon as she does not pull herself together, it hits her again again again: but it was just a story. And in the same moment, how that story leaves her; it is almost terrible.

The Boy in the woods. Bengt, and at the same time. She had been there with him. She, Maj-Gun, that exact same day, beer (he had been drinking) and cigarettes she had brought with her and then yes… dot dot dot… this and the other but damn it, “What are you babbling about?” how he had looked at her like a crazy person and laughed at her, but then everything was already over. No one came, she was alone with him, a complete stranger whom she did not know, and in some way was afraid of too.

But: she had been in that room, that house. And he: so alive. And he: lying on the floor in the room.

But why, Manager, why why had he not said anything earlier?

The Manager says that yes, he should have said something, he knows that. In particular, he should have asked when she had gotten more energy and become more herself again. Says that again, herself, with almost happiness in his voice. But then… in the beginning. She was so weak. And the other apartment: had been such a shock to him too. He had not understood very much, first lately, in this apartment, it had started dawning on him that it might be a question of a misunderstanding.

But he had known that they were friends after all, she and Susette Packlén who had had Bengt in her apartment. Not living there, Susette had explained to the Manager several times. It was the neighbor lady who alerted the Manager to the fact that Susette had Bengt there, and that if he was living there then a notice of change of address should be filled out. So the Manager had asked, but of course he knew what stories like that could be like, here today, gone tomorrow. But Susette Packlén had flat out denied it and held her ground.

And yes, he also knew of course what it could be like between girlfriends, if jealousy was playing a role, or otherwise, discord, sadness over the other one having left. He had not been able to imagine that she, Maj-Gun, had gone around brooding in another way.

And yes, that mess in the apartment, and—yes, he had been shocked too. Thought about asking about it too, when she got better, but on the other hand, had not wanted to bring it up. He had thought, yes, has thought, that it was so nice seeing her get her strength back and become… hersel—

This is where the Manager stops, as if he had suddenly become confused. That it was absurd.

But he tries to explain, as businesslike as possible. He has enjoyed having her in the apartment. The days that have passed, and celebrating Christmas… which there was not anything really special about… but, in any case…

SO he has gotten it together again, gotten a grip and told her everything he had de facto set about doing for her during this time. Contacted her family, spoken with her father the Pastor on the phone, the old vicar whom he knows and has in confidence, between two old men, been able to tell him a little more about the situation, her condition, and kept him updated the entire time: to the others he said that she has severe angina, but everyone has been worried about her. And her brother Tom Maalamaa had personally been in touch.

He had also been in touch with the newsstand, the Head Office, been connected to the correct personnel department via the operator… and her landlords down in the town center whom he is acquainted with too. Said that she is recovering at her parents’ home, with the Pastor’s family, who live in another county. Her landlords, Gunilla and Göran, sent many warm greetings to the patient and are not worried at all about the rent being paid. Maj-Gun has always been a hundred percent exemplary boarder. It has been easier that way, this white lie, the Manager explained, referring to himself as well: for example his job as a teacher at the school where both Göran and Gunilla are his colleagues and Göran a Lions brother, outside of work.

“Angina!” A breeze through Maj-Gun’s head, something she once said on the telephone. To Solveig, Susette’s employer, the only conversation in that horrible apartment which, in that moment, and for always, seems like a million years ago. Then it dawns on her, so she does not need to ask anything else about the matter that is for certain. The angels on the television set. Solveig, Rita. “My almost goddaughters, friends for a long time.”

And maybe, a little, Rita, Solveig—and Bengt. Three siblings, the three cursed ones. Something she also always knew but had not thought about in relation to anything in reality, so to speak. Exactly because it still has never been real to her, a story.

The Boy in the woods. “The one who killed out of love.”

“But what are you babbling about?” That is what Bengt said, she will not forget it, when she, on that horrible day, had actually said that to him. What are you babbling about? He quite simply had not understood a word.

But WHERE is Susette Packlén? It was almost ridiculous later, because in the midst of everything Maj-Gun has known the answer to that question too, before she even finished thinking that thought.

“Portugal.” The fiancé. Djeessuss! Djeessuss! Tom Maalamaa who spoke with the Manager, about his fiancée.

But djeessuss too, which cannot be said either, not to the Manager, not to any one at all.

The polo shirt, the blazer, and the disco. Susette and love. Oh God. “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.” A blank page, “Tom’s world.” Djeessuss.

She remembers herself at the disco. Sitting, squeezed onto the sofa, in an unbearability, though nothing compared to later unbearabilities, but out of whack, Melancholy. Susette dancing on the dance floor. Rag doll. Dance my doll. For a while it had been a bit entertaining. As if that which connected them—rug rags, long strips, loom lengths—made it possible to control her, Susette, as it were. Perhaps stated exaggeratedly, but still. “You are so easy, Susette,” which she had also said once.

Susette who was dancing, disappeared, slipped away on the dance floor. One among the crowd, bodies, bodies, smoke. And then, in that moment, how Maj-Gun had suddenly thought, a pang inside her. A pistol in the bathroom, in a bag. “God, Susette, what are you doing with a revolver in your sauna bag?” The utterly incomprehensible.

That which had become so clear when Susette slipped away, disappeared, on the dance floor.

That Susette was a stranger. That she, Maj-Gun, knew nothing about her.

“I’m fascinated by the Death in her.”

And then, at the disco, she caught sight of her brother. Tom Maalamaa, in the throng at the disco, on the dance floor. Like a fish in water, the blazer, the polo shirt, and those crooked idiotic cones that were running down along his cheeks. Then she immediately got up, careful so that her brother should not see her, and left the disco. Because it had first been, at the sight of her brother in the crowd that she had, there in the throng, squeezed onto the sofa, been gripped by… not shame, but some type of hopelessness in her that was out of step, fat or skinny, it was not important, but so old. And not on her life had she wanted her brother, who immediately would have understood, the only one in the world who would have understood, to see it.

Goatee? she asked him roguishly on the phone when he called a few days later. Rather unexpectedly, and despite the teasing tone, she had been a bit happy, certainly. He had not understood what she was talking about. She said that she had seen him at the disco, he sounded surprised, oh, she had been there. Yes, she said, with a big group of young people, other shop assistants and the like, from newsstands, and they had so much fun, so much so that she only caught a glimpse of him in the crowd, but was so caught up in the music then, the young people, the dance, that she lost sight of him and when she looked for him she could not find him.

She also said, as if in passing but certainly oh so meaningful, that Susette had been there, and he was rather surprised about that too. And she knew her brother well enough that she could tell when he was lying and this time he was telling the truth.

“Hee hee hee… maybe you want her phone number?” she chirped on the phone. “Do you want to get in touch with her? She’s quite lonely.” Because that had been before she brought the cat food to Susette’s apartment and everything had fallen apart for her.

But he took the phone number, Tom Maalamaa. That he had.

And my God, they HAD gotten together, and oh God, everything about Susette—what you did not know about her. Scissors in the cabinet, dried blood—

But the Boy in the woods, Bengt, what was he to her?

“I don’t know anything about anything.” Again, Susette in the hangout. No, unavoidable. It had been real. And when Maj-Gun had hit, not even then had Susette been unsympathetic.

And it IS for real, cannot be talked away, pushed away. “If you weren’t so curled up in your own suffering.” Everything else disappeared in the presence of this attempted murder, a concrete action almost carried out. Susette’s big eyes, the boathouse, the snow. It happened: and she, Maj-Gun, had to remember it, carry it in her consciousness, it always had to be there.

“I was so angry so angry so angry…” she says to the Manager. “Probably jealous too. I thought I was… in love with him…”

“Maj-Gun, I’ve understood that she has had a difficult time,” the Manager says. “But she is going to therapy. Some great sorrow in her past. Unresolved,” the Manager determines and it is probably true, very true, because that is also what Susette, many years later, in the future, will say. “Like being in a forest. Not finding your way out.”

I love you. Running over the plains. All stories, and blood. “Can you imagine killing out of love?” Susette. Duel in the sun. Bengt. Djeessuss. Oh God. Tom. Someone in a polo shirt. Tom Maalamaa came and got her. And behind her it was burning.

“But it’s better now,” says the Manager. “Everything is better now. And now it seems like she and all of us are ready to move on. You too, Maj-Gun—”

Yes. But first. Bengt. She has to say it anyway.

“But Bengt—”

“It’s very tragic,” the Manager says again and though it can seem indifferent there is still nothing sugarcoated about it.

The angels on the TV. Rita, Solveig—and the third one, the brother Bengt.

Pictures on the wall. His pictures, drawings. Blue pictures. “The Exhibition.” The Winter Garden.

“Did you know… him?” Maj-Gun asks carefully.

“Of course. Were very good friends, the three of us. The kids had no real childhood. I knew them since they were little. Tried to help them as best I could. Especially the girls.

“But,” he adds, “it can, well… you know, sound… the way it sounds. But, it wasn’t exactly unexpected, what happened. But, dear Maj-Gun. You need to think about yourself now. You have so much inside. So much life.”

And then he catches his breath, stretches, and asks her about the future, what she is planning on doing now, on becoming “when she grows up.”

“I am grown up, Manager. I don’t know. I—I wanted to become a pastor once, I think.”

And then she starts relating an episode from her childhood, at the rectory. That childhood, that rectory: one Sunday at the dinner table, her brother Tom Maalamaa, who was a pompous brooder as a teenager and this particular Sunday he brooded a bit more than usual and realized what he decided to “proclaim,” to his gathered family this Sunday in particular, his word that too, wearing a blazer, which he always did back then, despite the fact that he was only fifteen or sixteen. That HE did not have a calling to become a pastor and would, for that reason, unfortunately not be able to pass on the family tradition from father to son.

“I’m sorry, Father,” he added, like in an old-fashioned movie. One of those brooding films that played nonstop in his head at that time; they had in common that it was always his alter ego in the lead role that, after long scenes in an inappropriate childhood, youth, ended the same way: with the alter ego becoming “famous,” something “successful,” Gustav Mahler, Ingmar Bergman, the like.

On the other hand, Tom Maalamaa had on this Sunday afternoon explained that he understood that he could “serve humanity” in another way and had in other words come to the conclusion that he would become a lawyer. He had already mail-ordered the compendium for “the preparation course” for the admission exam at the law school.

“Where is your girlfriend?” was all papa Pastor asked with a small roguelike glint in his eyes, when Tom Maalamaa had stopped speaking, because that girlfriend with the big eyes, cuute, who never said a word, but who, during the past few months, had been present at all of the Sunday dinners at the rectory, was not sitting at the place at the table where she usually sat despite the fact that the place had been set for her: the chair was gaping emptily for a quiet and big-eyed Susette Packlén, poking at her food, in tight jeans, boots.

“She’s gone. Ended things,” his sister willingly and helpfully prompted loudly after a hasty destructive look at her brother Tom—Tom in the sense of TOM, seen as a world, in that subjective perception of reality that no one other than the two siblings in this family shared.

A world where the Happy Harlot in the middle of the DAY OF DESIRE, which had been great and wonderful (in any case, it should be mentioned, like a hypothesis), has been transformed into the Disgust, a world where it was “a shame about,” there… there… and Maj-Gun had almost stammered internally out of anger and here here here Tom Tom you’ll get for this.

“And to be honest,” his sister added in a steady voice, “you can have some understanding for it. I love you over the plains. Love’s representative, a bit pale in that perspective.” This too like a silent reference to something that only the brother and the sister in the family shared: then, a long time ago, before Tom Maalamaa started hanging out with his first girlfriend, he had certainly enjoyed himself when his sister Maj-Gun, when talking about that mother with the big-eyed girl Susette at the cemetery, had grown quiet at the mere thought of the name, “CAN you be called that, Tom?” Asked humorously, rhetorically so to speak, and added, “nah I don’t think so. Newsstand toppler. Susette. I love you over the plains—”

“We are SEPARATED,” Tom Maalamaa, with poorly restrained anger, personally declared out loud at the dinner table, though somewhat paler in the face. In and of itself, possibly, not entirely wrong either because in reality his sister did not know the details surrounding the breakup of his relationship—that Susette Packlén’s father was ill, dying, both of them knew that, probably papa Pastor too, who looked after the members of his congregation but that was work, nothing to touch upon with great seriousness during these pleasant Sunday dinners when the whole family had the opportunity to get together in peace and quiet for once.

So it could just as well have been Tom Maalamaa himself who had slowed things down, because in some way, the Weakling that was hiding under the Ponderer’s cowl that he had invisibly put on and that did not suit him very well, significantly less well fitting than those woolen mantles of quality he would use later in life… that Weakling was not prepared for illness, death. Unthinkable, for a thousand reasons, also because quite simply if it affected someone else more, then that person’s rules applied, there would be another main character in the story, so to speak. Following that sweet girl who says nothing to the very darkest, Death’s landscape, no, that had not occurred to him. But he was afraid of death too, in that blunt, naked way that healthy youths, who are not dragging themselves out into war and dying the hero’s death, are—the difficult, lengthy illnesses, death as violent but relentless decomposition, death as a physical utterance too, and handling the dead body, the whole coffin hell, quite simply, should be handled by deaconesses, mothers, wives, girlfriends—that was their role in life, which would come to show itself in practice later.

But it was not exactly something you wanted to endure. Your fear. That kind of “disgust.” And then the contemplation came in situations exactly like that and it existed so that it would come to you in situations exactly like this, with messages like the following: that you were young and had your future ahead of you, a boy with prospects, a purpose in life. Do something, for, like, humanity. And Gustav Mahler, but regulated, not like it had surged at the worst moments in your room with your girlfriend, in order to soften the anxiety in the presence of a disownment—because, say what you want to about Tom, maybe he was empty but not stupid. His sister in her capacity as the Happy Harlot as a happy appellation, not fresh, but hamba hamba, in the openness of childhood, without boundaries, who was not let into his room, but was left outside, pounding on the door.

“Well, well, let’s not quarrel, children.” Mama Inga-Britta finally jumped in and as always, when she stepped in, it became calm around the dinner table, even a relatively nice mood again.

“I have the church’s calling,” Maj-Gun explains to the Manager in the apartment on Boxing Day 1989, that she had carefully whined at the dinner table on that Sunday. That is in other words what she says: not about Tom Maalamaa and Susette Packlén and her father, or about the Happy Harlot and so on—or about her own shortcomings with her brother, in general, the metaphysical violence in them, that does not belong there. Brave but determined, this whine, she points that out here to the Manager now, since there were drawbacks to coming with a similarly brave announcement in this Pastor’s family, which was Old Testament–minded.

“The woman in the congregation is silent,” the Pastor, who was gentle despite his religious indomitability and strictness, which unfortunately unfortunately still had to come before everything, sorrowfully determined in the presence of his daughter but looked at her with an endless gentleness and started speaking about the work of the deaconship as a true challenge to her… um… femininity. At that point he had some difficulty again because she was just a teenager after all, almost genderless in her own eyes too. That DESIRE in her from the DAY OF DESIRE, for example the Girl from Borneo, was not Woman’s Dawning Sexuality that would gradually lead to a balanced marital sensuality that could then be stimulated further with sex tips from all the magazines and regular childbirth but that was mankind’s happy horrible amoral physicality, wonderful on the one hand, but no show-off, also terrible and dangerous as a-moral is, but crossing all boundaries: wanted to enjoy enjoy, caress, play… feel… her life, her life force without all the boundaries. Without gender, a life force unpersonified and so on, but no more about that now—there is also something here with the Manager now, the mood, during all of these days, which makes it so that it is important not to travel forward with too many words, move carefully, with caution.

But papa Pastor had, in other words, become a bit shy in regard to femininity, which implied certain things, not to mention at the dinner table, as it were. Maybe he was also thinking about the fact that his beloved daughter was in the process of growing up, going out into life, away from him. “Deaconship.” He got hold of himself again… which had been such a… um… challenge and source of happiness for his dear sister Liz and his dear wife: dear dear Shadow Inga-Britta who always smiled so pleasantly—it was true!—at all of the amusing phrases at the dinner table, considerately poured more brown gravy over new pieces of steak on everyone’s plates. With rowanberry jelly, mmmm, made from berries she picked herself.

The Manager, when he hears that, listens amused but quickly gets a rascallike glint in his eyes, familiar from other places, it strikes Maj-Gun. Of course the newsstand, and in some way, despite everything that has happened, how wonderful, what a happy recognition. And then says in a sober tone of voice that maybe we should have a small bit of snuff. “I knew your father when he lived here in the District.” He chuckles. “We were brothers in the Lions Club,” and ho ho ho, “at that man’s house, who is one of the nicest people I’ve met, there was a lot of open-mindedness. Oh, Maj-Gun, you’re a good storyteller, so lively, self-willed, enticing. But, unfortunately, your father, he probably isn’t fundamentally inclined at all.”

He was right of course, but in some way, what Maj-Gun could get irritated about at the newsstand, especially with Susette Packlén, was when someone did not believe her, when she was questioned about her stories that she liked to tell when there was an audience, does not bother her now.

Rather it was a bit nice not to be steered onto the right road but still, within this framework, I am not without space, can it be like that, with the Manager, that, here?

And the feeling, like a seed, the beginning of one, do you even dare say it—a rose, so powerful inside you. Back to reality again, it is not the newsstand, not the other apartment, the rooms in the attics, the rectory—but here?

“Maj-Gun,” the Manager starts, but then he does not really know what to say.

“Well, it was just a story anyway,” says Maj-Gun. “Manager, I like telling stories. And in some way, Manager, there is still a grain of truth to what you say. Or it should be like that. You carry something to its point in order to make it clear. Though sometimes in the newsstand I got the feeling that you can tell, say, whatever, as long as it sounds good, has flow so to speak. But it isn’t like that, Manager. You can’t say just anything.

“I mean, becoming a pastor. It was just a thought… among many others. At the time.

“And, Manager,” she adds after a little while, “we were a family, at the rectory, that liked telling stories… not my brother Tom of course, he would rather hold speeches and lectures. Reason. He can reason, he can. About almost anything. But I don’t want to reason about just anything. I want to say something I believe in.

“But we had quite a lot of fun together sometimes, there at the rectory.” And then, in the midst of all the emotion and warmth inside, she comes to the almost most important thing of all: “And how is Father doing?”

The Manager smiles, says just fine and that he has been worried about her, of course.

“You know what, Manager,” Maj-Gun says, the last thing she says that strange, perplexing evening. “I think I’ve always wanted to become a lawyer too.”

The Manager smiles, tousles her hair, and then they go to bed—and that night, is it not as though he played Carmen, a rose you threw at me, a little bit louder than usual?

FLAMING CARMEN

ON HOLY INNOCENTS’ DAY, the twenty-eighth of December 1989, when Maj-Gun turns thirty, the Manager gives her The Law Book as a present. Bound in red, unbearably heavy and in small print, wrapped in glaring red silk paper with a similar indecently colored bow around it, which Maj-Gun tears apart in an attack of birthday girl happiness that knows no boundaries, as if all of the happy birthdays she has had that have lived their quiet lives inside her flame up in one moment, and she throws her arms around the Manager’s neck.

Remains clinging. A few seconds. An eternity. The Manager carefully but gently loosens Maj-Gun’s hands from his neck.

“Now I finally get to read articles,” Maj-Gun adds but softer, because both of them are a bit embarrassed. “At the newsstand I mean. Maybe the newsstand really is my calling.”

The Manager does not answer, does not look up, he is suddenly completely and entirely occupied with transferring the birthday cake from the cardboard box from the bakery in the town center to a cake plate that is really just an ordinary plate. But he has put a paper doily with edging under it so it will look extra festive: an Enormouscake, with green piping and a sugar bud, a small pink rose on top. And then there is coffee in the kitchen that must not be allowed to boil over and all the cups and saucers need to be set out and the silver spoons that he has six of in a special case, stored in a special cabinet in the living room.

Maj-Gun grows quiet, in other words, sits down on the chair and neither of them says anything for a good while.

I love you sweet child never change! But the Manager, who almost said that a long time ago in the newsstand and almost put his hand out over the counter in an almost irresistible eagerness to pinch Maj-Gun Maalamaa on the cheek. So overwhelmed by who she was, who she is, all her pretty quotes too, from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” and otherwise, all her oddities. “I love you don’t ever change!” Or, now, two days ago, that evening when Maj-Gun found out about everything, for example that she had not murdered her friend as she thought and would not be spending the rest of her life in prison, and they had spoken about the future, what would become of her, later: how the Manager, when he had gone to his room on the other side of the wall that night, played Carmen like always, at a low volume, but still a little louder than usual. Or? And, as if in the midst of everything it had been a message to her, Maj-Gun. The rose that you threw at me—a seed that had been planted, the Manager, was it imagined? A seed that had grown during the night and the days that followed. Even if new music played on the record player, in the middle of the day too, Old Men’s Choir Singing in the Fellowship Hall, a choir in which the Manager as well as her own father, papa Pastor, had been members, sung the highest part—her father, “with true pastor’s vibrato in his voice,” as her father had said at the rectory once. Maj-Gun suddenly remembers how her father had said it, rascal-like, as it were, because regardless of how much her father liked singing, he had never really had much of a singing voice but he had, in other words, never made a secret of it either. More than generously admitted to himself, among others, the following: that the Manager had been as right as anything when he soberly claimed in the middle of Maj-Gun’s somewhat free-flying story where the Pastor had the lead role in another way that no, no father certainly had not been strict, not the least bit “Old Testament–minded” at all. Yes, of course, so right, for real. At papa Pastor’s there was, there is, a lot of open-mindedness. And Maj-Gun may have wanted to say that to the Manager too when they were listening to the men’s choir, but drag father into this now, in this mood during these days, full days, where everything that has been said, and not been said, all the silence and all the music have become one peculiar hidden message about the will to and the longing for touch. It is a rose blooming, but Manager, don’t you hear WHAT they’re singing? All possible invisible threads between them, and the Manager has, without a doubt, felt it too because in the middle of everything he cleared his throat and started, in an extra-objective tone of voice, to lament the lack of men in the District who enjoy singing, resulting in that the Men’s Choir, shortly after Maj-Gun’s father quit as vicar in the parish and received a new post in another municipality, had to be put down altogether. “He was a real enthusiast,” the Manager tried to explain further and the social life in the municipality in general owed so much to her father too… but then he suddenly grew quiet in the middle of that thought and that sentence, stopped. But the music, undeniably, roaring about roses, played on on the record player.

I love you over the plains, church bells? Nah, no. Rather, like this: a road like a path that hesitantly reveals itself in the woods, out of a fog that scatters, for a while. But it can disappear, the fog can thicken again, at any moment. So—hold on to it, the road, the image of a road, carve it into yourself like a map before it is gone.

A rose, your rose, which is thrown at you, your Winter Garden. Take the golden ribbons, Maiden, go into the dance—

And here, now, the birthday. The Manager has finally gotten everything on the table, clears his throat. Ceases with all other business as well, sits down, like her, on a chair, on his chair, on the other side of the dining table and neither of them says anything. They just sit there on their respective sides of the table: saucers, coffee cups, the Enormousbirthdaycake like a half coconut, turned upside down, swollen with a pink, wartlike bud on top. The Law Book, the red silk paper fallen under the table, the bow. Maj-Gun looks down between her legs, picks up the bow, the ribbon, winds it around her fingers, damp, shiny. “Just because you’re a count, Manager,” she starts, looks up, around her, in the room. Two hellish angels with golden stars, bodies made out of empty toilet paper rolls, standing on the television set, weak wings painted with water color, Sister Blue, Sister Red, or whatever it was, The Astronaut? The Nuclear Physicist? Guess which one is which? But HOW interesting, Manager, couldn’t care less. “Just because you’re a count, Manager,” she tries again but it does not work, suddenly the sentence has gotten stuck in her head, the words that were grinding inside her. But at the same time, in this attempt and that sentence which artificially starts running out of her mouth, from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” the newsstand, which goes on and goes on, because it is so long, Count, then it changes and is transformed into a seriousness that is—enormous. “Forget it, Manager,” she mumbles because she does not get any farther, “just forg—”

“Maj-Gun,” the Manager says then, almost pleading.

And Maj-Gun looks up at him lightning quick, meets his gaze, a bird in my hand? “Shall I tell you something?” she asks quickly, heatedly suddenly with an urgency that surprises even her.

The Manager brightens, another story, and you can see he is also relieved. “I like your stor—”

“Something I read, in the newsstand, once.” Maj-Gun cuts him off. “Magazines, informations, Manager, everything was there. About this and the other, quotes, ideas, this and that from here and from there. Something about reincarnation, Manager—

“About people who were convinced they had a life before this one. Famous people everyone had been prior to this life, princesses and the right-hand man of kings, Vincent van Gogh and the like.

“You know what, Manager?” Maj-Gun grows quiet for a moment before continuing, more carefully, hesitating. “I think… about myself… that I—was a relatively lonely person in my previous life.

“Someone who—was in the Lions Club and who liked spending time outdoors, for example. Picking rowanberries with the Nature Friends, collecting plants in a herbarium, catching butterflies. At least in theory, seen as an idea: you could never get away forever, not to mention that the days were long, and you were often tired. But someone who watched the news every evening, quarter past six, eight thirty, both broadcasts. And listened a lot to—music, opera music, for example.

“Had management as my great interest. On the side of course, in addition to the daily tasks during the day, at school.

“Later then… yes, he met someone. Someone who, let us say, might have been from… the Lions Club. Another lion, one of those newcomers. Certain people… other people I mean.” And when Maj-Gun speaks now she is not speaking in a rascal-like way, but hesitantly, her voice filled with seriousness. “Other people who don’t devote themselves to that sort of activity under the guise of friendship and charity, think that only they have interesting lives. They are the only ones who have creativity and personality and a thousand and one wines to taste before they die, a lot of quality in their daily lives and jogging… They, these people, are wrong, of course.

“And how do I know that, Manager?”

Maj-Gun pauses, a few seconds and then, NOW, she looks at him. Stares at him, her whole life in that moment, a bird in my hand, don’t give way now.

“I know that because I have been old my entire life.

“For ages, Manager.

“And sometimes it has been. Strange. Lonely, of course. At this age.

“I thought it would help to, for example, meet people the same age, go to the disco.

“There is so much we think, Manager. Which later, when reality forces its way in, turns out to be wrong.

“A bird in my hand, Manager.

“It is a rose, blossomed. It didn’t help.”

And the words that catch in her throat, but he gets up, he comes to her.

Maj-Gun in the bathroom later, brushing her teeth, looking at herself in the mirror.

Walks out, opens the door to his room. Walks in, crawls into the bed, he opens his arms to her. The Animal Child and the Animal Tobias meet, in the darkness, all walls come crashing down.

The nausea starts immediately the following morning. The Manager has gone to school in the middle of Christmas break to prepare his teaching for the spring semester; “fresh air,” “snuffle a bit at the everyday”… He said ahem, and the door shut after him and a Giantbirthdaycake has been left sitting on the table since yesterday, alongside The Law Book with its bordeaux red spine and the crumpled-up fire-red silk paper under the table as well as the red ribbon bow, curly and streamerlike at the ends. Invoking seasickness, all of it; the nausea has been intense: Maj-Gun rushed to the bathroom and threw up but despite her birthday and the other extenuating circumstances, no avoiding it, she knows immediately what it is. Quite right, it will turn out: the next morning and the next and the next the nausea is back. “What are you babbling about?” The Boy in the woods, in that house that room, with the men in the fields.

No immaculate conception in other words, Jesu Maria Annunciation, a funny word that can be looked up in The Nordic Family Book if you are in that kind of a mood, but Maj-Gun is not in that kind of a mood, will not be either, push it aside, do not think about it at all for a while. “Some bug,” she says to the Manager who is suddenly back that first morning while she is in the bathroom. He has been gone forty-five minutes at the most, stands and counts the minutes out loud in the hallway when she comes out, could not keep her thoughts collected. Out of breath, panting, thin hair wet from the rain, it has been raining hard out there but he has run the whole way and he comes to her.

And then, yes, it is, has been, possible to set aside all thoughts, exist right here, nothing else, nowhere else. Just here. In the woods a body of water reveals itself, the third possibility, like a hypothesis. Appears in the fog, a path, it clears—becomes almost two days during which Carmen is played in the apartment, Lucia di Lammermoor, but most of all an old Christmas hymn that sounds the way Christmas songs usually sound when you are still listening to them on the days between Christmas and New Year’s. Discarded, a bit past their prime, but that is exactly why they draw you in. It is a rose, blossomed, words and melody that emit other meanings too, reveal themselves to what is most personal and you get to be part of it. Some kind of excitement also, in the apartment, listening to Christmas carols this way, because the weekend is not over just because of that.

Carmen in one room. A room of love, where she has shut herself in. With the bullfighter who was with her, who was in other places, who had his bulls, his fights, his… everything. Carmen in the room of love (maybe in a hotel), jubilation at first, but at the same time a destiny, she was trapped, had locked herself in.

A bird in my hand. The rose that you threw at me. A body of water reveals itself in the woods. A moment, closed in the fog, imperceptible.

It becomes New Year’s, clingclang the clock at city hall rings in the town center, New Year, a new decade, they drink nonalcoholic wine from plastic champagne glasses that the Manager conjures up at midnight. One glass of wine per person, cheers, Maj-Gun laughs, the bubbles rush to her head. And are cast in metal; Maj-Gun’s “happiness” is a weak clump with knobbles that are money and when you hold the Manager’s up against the wall in the kitchen in the light the shadow of a pretzel stands out against the yellow wallpaper, which means: even more loneliness—and suddenly, pain in her stomach, it hurts so damn much, all of it, everything. But she does not say so, she says “sugar pretzel,” tastes, stretches out her red tongue. Hamba hamba. The Long Afternoon of Desire, dancing in the kitchen. The Manager laughs, maybe a bit insecurely, The Long Afternoon of Desire, one should look it up in The Family Book whatever it was that faun was now called. But he does not walk over to any bookshelf, there is no time—says afterward, when they are lying naked, entangled like streamers on the sofa bed in the room, as the District’s mainstay, which he also is, grade school teacher and mixed school teacher and pedagogue all sorts of things, with that voice in other words, that he has a little weakness for Cookies certainly, even if it they contain, as it were, pinching Maj-Gun’s naked bum, “quite a lot of carbohydrates.”

Maj-Gun sits up in the sofa, laughs, the docklands in Borneo, the Happy Harlot, gathers her hair in her hand at the nape of her neck and lets it fall, so to speak, shakes her head, her hair flies, stupid angels, the TV, straddles the Manager, on all fours above him, hisses, Starling, darling, ready to be kissed, like she once had in the newsstand.

“Come.” The Manager pulls her down on the sofa and they do a little more of that and later when they are lying in the darkness taking a breather the Manager asks Maj-Gun how she ended up at the newsstand anyway.

“The newsstand?” Maj-Gun asks, dazed with sleep, does not really know how she should relate to the question, if she even likes it. The newsstand, the last decade, this is new, and now. But in order to say something she starts talking about her godmother Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa and all of those years that maybe in the big picture were not so many: a miserable childhood, youth for example, which she was never really able to get away from. In contrast to her brother Tom Maalamaa who had shared the misery with her for a while, without the siblings still being able to, or maybe exactly because of that, have this misery in common. Which was not exactly unhappiness, just a type of restlessness, out of place. Her brother left it behind but she personally, in some way, remained behind with it. But is that how it should be said? In any case, the godmother, Aunt Liz, who became a widow early on, “husband drank himself to death on the Sweden–Finland ferry,” and she and her aunt on the Sweden–Finland ferry later, life as a cruise—as an image of it.

The aunt who retired and had not really known what she should do with her time at first. But the freedom she had spoken about loftily, “I am so happy and free!” But she was sad in the very beginning, turnedupsidedown. And during that period she had been busy spending time with her only goddaughter, Maj-Gun Maalamaa, whom she invited along for company on the cruise, to rewrite a marriage with an, in and of itself, appallingly wealthy but violent and alcoholic husband who was not exactly someone to write home about, to a story about belonging despite everything and the love that never died. Dick and Duck, two swans among other swans; “climb into a story, Manager, you need it.” Maj-Gun interposes as a moral here, seems to fit, but otherwise she does not know. And as mentioned, it had of course been a passing phase in her aunt’s life: she took her maiden name back later and bought a house in Portugal where she spent the winters because of the hereditary varicose veins that Maj-Gun personally also suffers from. “Cottaage,” the aunt has a habit of saying about the place in Portugal in order not to sound rustic; the reason is due to her “country origin,” on the farm in the north that her husband’s good family from the higher burghers of society indirectly heckled her for in the city where she and her husband lived while he was still alive; it has never truly left her. But it certainly is no cottaage but a château. Has sent pictures: the house, the dog, Liz, and the sunglasses.

She had a dog for a while, a real pet dog, an ittybittydog under her blouse. Handsome, Ransome: from the beginning they were two but one of them died as a puppy from some sort of canine disease while the other one died in its sleep of old age after ten years of happiness with its master. “That kind of little dog, Manager, they don’t get very old.” Handsome: named after some movie star, whom the aunt had loved in her distant youth, who had a dog of the same breed with almost the same name. “Come and see my gallery,” in other words, she sent these pictures to her goddaughter from Portugal. Liz and the dog on a patio, the sea behind them, the horizon.

Come and see my gallery. Written cards and letters. “But I didn’t go, didn’t answer either.” Had been busy with, well, all sorts of things: admission exams, compendiums, a book that needed to be written, The story of my own life… cutting rags. Rug rags… which she still does not have time to delve deeper into because suddenly the Manager is paying attention, truly alert: “You write? That’s what I thought. Maybe you’re going to be a writer? You have so much, life, all of your clever wordings—”

“Come and see my gallery, Manager,” Maj-Gun reiterates because if there is something she does not want to talk about then it is that. And besides, for once, to remain in that other right now, which is just as important. About her godmother, her aunt, who is still as alive as could be. That she had thought get old now old hag and die and she had that and she stills feels bad about it—maybe it will improve if she says it, but it does not help very much. “But, Manager, Aunt Liz, she’s okay, even if she has her quirks…” Dreams from her childhood of being a missionary, which she has nagged about more and more as she gets older, walking in the jungle in comfortable shoes, searching for heathens to save… “But, quirks, Manager,” Maj-Gun adds, so to speak, philosophically, “don’t we all have them?” And isn’t that the delightful thing about us? Everyone? Everything we have that is not written in the family chronicles and the magazines and in Everything about the world, you can say anything here as long as it sounds like something… not very much has been written about it anywhere at all, and maybe there won’t be either. Because a lot of it doesn’t make you feel good, you just become cuckoo, from being written down in pretty formulations.

And well, later, the whole time, she was, so to speak, in the newsstand and the moss was growing over her head, living with Susette Packlén’s mother for a while as a boarder while Susette was away and her mother was, during the final years, not really right either. “Rug rags, Manager, she collected them. Crehp crehp. Had to be cut, cut—

“But we had fun together, I really liked her.” And the mother died and Susette came back and the house was sold and suddenly Maj-Gun became a boarder with another family in another house there in the same neighborhood below the square in the town center. A normal family, Gunilla, Göran, a pair of teachers; moreover the Manager’s colleagues at the school. “But shhh, Manager, they aren’t, no one is allowed to know about this relationship… I respect the Count, the charm of the office manager and maintaining the façade in your capacity as the District’s mainstay.” Maj-Gun stammers, suddenly in the middle of the story about something other than the intense indignation that pours into her, an appallingly bad mood.

“Maj-Gun”—the Manager takes her hand in his—”it isn’t like that.”

“With, then, Manager,” Maj-Gun continues with the Manager’s hand in hers, it feels better, “a thousand cranky kids on the ground floor,” and there at the new boarding place she fattened up for real. Not because she had eaten that much; “it wasn’t a feel-good problem, Manager,” or a hormone imbalance or Femininity, which was exploding, uncontrolled inside her, swelling over every orifice and border, but a condition that was given form: “I am without space.

“This isn’t very coherent, Manager.” Maj-Gun suddenly interrupts herself, but in a new way. Because in the midst of everything she realizes maybe it is the Manager’s hand in hers, a body of water reveals itself in the woods, the fog disperses entirely, right here, in the open, New Year’s night: the possibility. That she might be able to. Can. Tell, everything. Both everything that is clear and everything else, less clear, more incomprehensible. Images, scenes, that she does not know what she is going to do with. About Susette Packlén. The revolver in Susette’s bathroom. And the cat, which all of a sudden was not there. “It got run over.”

And also. That which in some way belongs to what is obvious, though it was a fantasy fetus, but not any less because of it, it was real too. She has to beat it into her head: not the Boy in the woods, but Bengt. Maybe she would be able to say something about that too. In some way. That she had never known him. It had been her story, a story that has gone on and on in her head. And that received a continuation in reality, at the newsstand, with Susette Packlén on the other side of the counter. And flowed out, unchecked, ran away—like “The Manuscript of a Life,” a novel she had been sitting and writing in her rented room. “Promising! Short! Kill your darlings and tone down the self-pity.” Sometimes she opened the leather-bound folder where she kept the comments from the book editor on a first draft she had sent to the publisher a long time ago. As the years passed, she had opened the binder more often, and those comments and how they sounded had grown inside her head too. Had, in and of itself, almost become a monument and that is where the talk had come in, about Literature and all of the interferences that should be done to it, regardless of whether or not the Critics would have any understanding for it; a topic of conversation she had introduced in long monologues she held in the kitchen, with her landlady Gunilla as a willing, respectful listener because more was happening here in the house now than “1,001 Castles to Furnish Before You Die,” recurring purchases of new curtains for the kitchen that never turned out right regardless of how you tried. In other words Art was happening here in the house. And no, it was not as though she had stopped writing, not even in secret. No, she sat in her room and wrote and wrote, it surged and surged, the more Gunilla and Göran, her landlords, moved around on tippytoe in the house, shooed away the children who wanted to play with the renter, “Come out now Terrible Animal Child and chase us!” But “Shhh, kids, get away from here,” could be heard from the other side because the Writer should not be disturbed during the “working&editingphase” of the “great manuscript”—that word “great” had also come about with time—Maj-Gun herself when she was not in her room had, with importance in her voice, led the landlords to believe that was what was occupying her behind the door in the boarder’s room, which always needed to be kept shut so “the creation process” could proceed.

So yes, she wrote, but the more she wrote, that was strange, the more she took notes and took notes in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” “collected material,” the farther away she got… yes, that was strange.

But something had existed for real, in earnest, a place where everything had started. Something terrible and great that pulled, had pulled her toward it. Rug rags. The Animal Child’s peering eyes in the kitchen of a single-family home, among rags. A woman who was cutting, cutting, Maj-Gun who was cutting, but it was no image, it was for real, not one of those similes, metaphors.

Rug rags. Which need words.

Silk velvet rag scraps I have seen the most I have… Yes, “raw, unworked,” which the book editor had also written in his comments. But still: honest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is. Searching. A unique language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how does it help to think?

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

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

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

But cannot be kept hidden.

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

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

“Maj-Gun, you have said that, yes.”

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

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

Walk in whiteness, in whirling snow.

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

Blue lights. Sirens. Justice.

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

The nakedness.

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

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

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

“A WILD PAIN”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They meet in the middle of the square, as if they had arranged to meet in that exact spot. Of course they have not, they barely know each other. “My deepest condolences,” Maj-Gun says in rectory language, a language that resides in her bone marrow but she despises how it automatically pours out of her in that moment.

Because what she sees: “a wild pain.” In that face, in those eyes, in some way the entire posture. Winter jacket is buttoned halfway, no hat in the bitter cold, scarf wound too tightly so that glimpses of thin white skin shine through the knitting—indefensible. No. No façade here, no rosy nights or birthdays, nothing. But—accidents. The folk song. Has many verses. Same thing in every one. Pearls on a necklace. An eternal repetition. Over and over again.

“Such a different way of looking at time.” An old cassette tape in an old room, the renter’s room, played and played, a few months back in time. Maj-Gun suddenly hears it NOW, in her head, and so clearly: a whole story rolled out, again.

The Boy in the woods. Susette in the hangout. And again: “What are you babbling about?” Freeze that picture now. It does not help.

“I love you because you killed for love.”

“What are you babbling about?”

The Boy in the woods. A stranger. She did not know him. Except as someone in a story, her story. No idea who he really was. But he, who he was later: in the room, the cousin’s house, before she had gone to the Second Cape and the boathouse and before a hellish snowstorm had started outside while she was lying, sleeping in the boathouse, dreaming about the hayseeds who were shooting on the square, and before she was awoken by a shadow outside the window, on the veranda.

But her in that house. “What are you babbling about?” She had already wished then that she said what she was first inclined to say, aside from all of the stories, everything: “But dear friend. Regardless of who you are, you can’t stay here in this shithole, the cold, come away now. I’ll lend you money, we’ll buy you a bus card!” But she had not said that. Instead, that other thing.

“What are you babbling about?” He did not say it once but two–three–four times and he was already cuckoo drunk. And she was smoking cigarettes, smoking cigarettes and then, case in point… dot dot dot what had happened had happened, not much else to say about it.

But: the alienation. There is no story. And the terrible: she knew nothing about him. Had never known.

“A wild pain.” But what had happened had happened, cannot unhappen, that is true as well.

Like the realism here now, on the square, almost takes the wind out of Maj-Gun despite the fact that maybe it is not visible because Solveig does not say anything. Not, “He fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand,” as the Manager had said, or something similar. Or about the funeral, which the Manager had also mentioned to Maj-Gun: the cremation, the simple memorial service, no one else present except Solveig, her daughter Irene, and Tobias. A sister, Rita, who was supposed to come but never showed up.

But then, when the Manager told Maj-Gun this she had mainly focused on the angels on the television set: how ugly they were, those angels, Manager, CAN’T we get rid of them?

“Maj-Gun,” Tobias said then, movingly. “Tobias,” Maj-Gun replied. And then, they carried on for a while, “Maj-Gun,” “Tobias,” “Maj-Gun,” “Tobias.”

“Have you started working again? Wasn’t it the newsstand?” THAT is what Solveig asks now, as if in passing, the only thing she asks Maj-Gun at all.

Maj-Gun, a shake of the head, a mumble, almost inaudible. That well… she is going to move, probably. Start going to school, probably, study law at the university.

“I’ve heard,” says Solveig. “Tobias told me.” And yes, the angels again, remembers the Manager’s, “my friends, goddaughters.” As said, that connection is so familiar but suddenly, here now with Solveig in front of her, in the middle of the day, truly fresh information, like a scoop.

“Tobias is kind,” Solveig says without any particular feeling, as if it was something she has said a thousand times before. “What would we do without Tobias?”

“Tobias.” How Solveig says it, that self-evidence, that right to ownership. It was a shame about those girls—no, it was never hers, Maj-Gun’s, could never be.

The Manager, the Tobias Animal: that was hers, that closeness. And, of course, it is some sort of gilded story about the future, how it would be like that, regardless of where Maj-Gun finds herself in the world, the connection would remain. Letters, phone calls, “How’s it going?” “How are you doing?” and so on. But it is only a story because it does not turn out like that. When Maj-Gun, in about five and a half years from this point in time, becomes a board certified lawyer, she is going to invite Tobias to her graduation party, but he kindly replies by letter that he will not be coming—something to do with school, something that prevents him from coming, insurmountable. But he sends flowers, some kind of orchids, no roses.

And yes, it will also happen later in life that she calls the Manager herself. Late in the evenings, nights, farther in the future, from her rooms. Dials the number, but for the most part it rings emptily. Of course, then she remembers that the Manager sleeps in the bedroom with the door closed or has the music on, and if he is sleeping he sleeps like she sleeps when she sleeps, and it is still for the most part, deep, without dreams. And if someone answers, she becomes mute. Though he must know that she is the one on the other end of the line: “Maj-Gun” he will get out only once after a lot of silence on his end. But then suddenly she does not know what she should say and hangs up and later she stops making these strange phone calls in the middle of the night. And then in reality that story ends, the one about the Animal Child and the Tobias Animal—the story about it from a certain perspective, the only closeness that existed.

You cannot step into the same water twice. But you still have to go there with your foot, dip, dip, move it around, over and over again.

Which also is, quote, “mankind’s predicament.” Her own exceptional formulation, one of them. For example from all of those appeals for trials she is going to write for work, for the defense, at the law firm—though fewer there than at the Municipal Legal Assistance Bureau in the north.

In and of itself, most of those speeches that she writes she never gives at all—in contrast to her brother Tom Maalamaa, in the service of the international organization, him, on well-paid podiums, he can talk. She just sits at home in her rooms and writes them: walks from room to room to room, different kinds of views to look at in order to find inspiration for the task at hand. Thick, fantastic woods, as said, broad views, horizons, perspectives.

Walks there and if she is in that kind of a mood and is thinking, writes as a means of passing the time.

And it is not that bad. A bit lost. Has lost something, but it is not very dramatic, just as it is, and she is not particularly lonely either.

Djeesss… nah. Tass tass in feng-shuied spaces, on warm wooden flooring, in rag socks.

Because otherwise, during those times: has toned down the “offensive” in herself a long time ago, which she would get criticized for already at the beginning of her college career. “Maj-Gun, you don’t need to attack like a hyena, going right for the jugular.

“There is nothing wrong with strong opinions, a strong belief in right and wrong is the backbone of all legal proceedings, the fertile soil from which the judicial system originates…” blah blah blah ink squiggled in the margins of her notebook, talk talk… while she looks up, smiles, at the lecturer whose name is Markus.

“A hyena does not go for the jugular, Markus,” she says. And djeessus, it sometimes still whistles silently between her teeth.

Sanded away. And in reality, her imbalance during that first period at the university is due to a long period of loneliness and sun and sea, and the child—like a want. Also a physical want. How she milked her breasts, read true stories about surrogate mothers. True Crimes. Because nah, there really is not a single experience in life that is just yours.

Come and see my gallery. Read for her entrance exams, walked around in rooms, whitewashed walls, admired landscapes, views, the sea in different ways, the foam on the waves, the horizon, the patio.

“After the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible.” It was a lasting expression during her college years, afterward. “My transformation.”

Otherwise: age has been an advantage. Partially the visible, that she had been circa ten years older than most of her classmates. Partially the other, the timelessness.

He became her lover later, for many years, the lecturer, the corporate lawyer Markus.

“Solveig,” Maj-Gun suddenly bursts out here on the square in the town center in the month of January 1990, with a sudden urgency that almost makes her stammer. “I don’t know how much you know,” she starts, does not even know how she is going to continue but, regardless of what is has been and is like with everything, after all she, someone, has to get something sensible out. “I would like to say something. That I—liked him very much. Your brother.”

Solveig grows stiff, stares at her.

And again, fleeting, such a need in Solveig’s eyes.

But she has pulled herself together in the next moment, cuts her off. “It’ll pass, Maj-Gun. You have your whole life in front of you. And I have my girl, Irene. I’m planning on building a new house at the old place.

“There must be life,” Solveig adds, like a conclusion. Which is of course something you just say but suddenly, exactly when she says it, Maj-Gun feels as though she is staring at her roundish belly.

This year I have something kicking in my stomach.

“You think you’re so important with all of your secrets. Your damned songs. But shall I sing a folk song for you?” The girl at the cemetery, the lass with the folk song, Doris Flinkenberg, the last time she was there. But it was not Doris who was singing that time, that song, it was Maj-Gun herself, with the mask on. The Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa: Maj-Gun who wanted to tease her, get back at her, angry because Doris had not wanted to talk to her during the summer and had gone and tattled on her to the church caretaker who, furthermore, had gone to papa Pastor and told him everything.

“Last year I walked with the boys in the field. This year I have something kicking in my stomach!” Maj-Gun had sung, she had not wanted to hear any of the girl’s secrets at all at that point. “What do you do if you know something terrible, something everyone has known, all of your cousins, everyone but you?”

Doris, who had been so depressed and spoken so strangely, had, in other words, not gotten any response from Maj-Gun at that point, just a ridiculous song that of course did not exactly make her any happier in any way. But all of her fear of Maj-Gun had, in that moment, fallen away from her anyway; she had just wanted to turn away bam, run away, you could see that, but Maj-Gun had been standing in the way, singing and preventing free passage in the solitary glow of a cemetery lantern in the otherwise compact October darkness.

Until Doris Flinkenberg herself in the middle of Maj-Gun’s stupid song hissed, angrily, almost disgusted: “What the hell do you want from me you damned idiot?”

Then Maj-Gun lost all interest and Doris Flinkenberg left and that was the last Maj-Gun had seen of her because Doris killed herself a few days later. But from there, when Maj-Gun had known that and had all the time in the world to think about Doris and what had been said between them—most of all, everything that had not been said but insinuated in passing,—from there, in any case, a crazy story was born. The Boy in the woods, which here, now in the middle of the square with Solveig, ends.

Like all stories end.

Here again, in absolute reality, realism.

Though the song does not stop because of that; Maj-Gun’s own little folk song, it keeps playing in her head and her body, like a mockery.

And Maj-Gun, on the square, fingers like ice cubes: all of the things she is carrying that slip from her hands, fall down on the ground. “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” the shirt, the carton of cigarettes, the opened pack of cigarettes among others. Because suddenly she has known, an insight that becomes formulated clearly first somewhat later but it comes to her exactly here and now. She cannot keep the child. She cannot. It was never hers.

“Here, the cigarettes.” Solveig helps her pick things up off the ground.

“And good luck with school!”

They go their separate ways, Maj-Gun and Solveig, each in her own direction on the square.

“You look fresh. Pale. But fresh. Have you also started dieting?”

“After the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible. Strong character and discipline. Starting anything is difficult. Then it becomes a habit.”

And just a few minutes later Maj-Gun is sitting at the table in the cozy kitchen in the Sumatra house, where she lived as a renter for several years up until the beginning of November, stuffing down Danishes that her former landlady Gunilla had purchased expressly for this afternoon when she has a free period from school and Maj-Gun, as agreed, arrived to settle business. Pay the outstanding rent, empty the room, say good-bye. “Oh, sweet Maj-Gun we’re going to miss you, and the kids will miss you too! They’re at school now. Look at what they drew for you as a farewell present!”

A drawing representing a large monster sitting in a recliner: “Good-bye Terrible Animal Child!” it reads under the drawing in straggling middle school handwriting followed by a red heart, and it cannot be helped, Maj-Gun is moved to tears; she likes those kids so much, the kids who would often stand at the door to her room with the desk and the Thinking Chair upstairs despite the fact that their parents, “Gunilla,” “Göran,” often rebuked them with shhhh, the genius is working, don’t disturb! “Grrr, Terrible Animal Child, come out and play!” The Animal Child, that was Maj-Gun’s own name she used with the kids, she had come up with it herself.

“And how was it at the rectory?” Maj-Gun replies “fine.” As usual she cannot hide how much Gunilla also always appreciated that Maj-Gun Maalamaa, that she in particular, their renter, was the daughter of the former, very well-liked vicar. In the beginning, to the point it was almost uncomfortable.

Not to mention, what a transition. From the other rental place, Java, the rug rags, Susette Packlén, to Sumatra, here. Suddenly being someone. How Gunilla, otherwise a robust woman, a math teacher at the junior high school and the high school, rather round as Maj-Gun herself had gradually become here at the house, but partially due to other reasons, without space, it was true too—that Gunilla was almost embarrassed in front of the old pastor’s daughter about everything that perhaps was not “proper” enough in this house. Not only that the classics were missing and all sorts of good literature on the bookshelves, bookshelves were missing altogether in that sense, instead filled with other knickknacks and record collections, but everything with the furnishings was always turning out wrong wrong… probably had something to do with her senses of color and taste not being as they should be, in a fundamental way, so to speak. Regardless of how she approached the business of furnishing the home, buying wallpaper, paint samples, different types of knickknacks, and other things to place tastefully here and there.

“Maj-Gun, do you think this is nice?” she had a habit of asking anxiously, as if Maj-Gun, just because she was who she was and not to mention was sitting upstairs in her room, “with the Literature,” which Maj-Gun already at that time, in other words, was writing that Book. “The Manuscript,” which Maj-Gun later, with a growing irritation that was not dependent on Gunilla though Gunilla thought so, had corrected her.

“Maj-Gun, do you think this looks nice?” Maj-Gun had replied: “‘1,001 Castles to Furnish Before You Die,’ Gunilla, I don’t know anything about home furnishings.” As was the case but it was also an amusing line from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” at least she thought so herself, but Gunilla had not understood the verve in the quote, had only become sadder. Sighing, uncertain: “Well, maybe one should find another hobby.” And flipped through to a new page in the magazines Maj-Gun tended to bring home from the newsstand and of course she did not have to flip through for very long before, quite right, a new possibility had revealed itself. Inga and Petrus have wine tasting as their hobby. “Maybe that could be something?” But then quickly changed her mind again: “Yes, of course, I know you don’t drink, if you’re going to create something then you need to do it with a sober mind, right?”

And Maj-Gun had smiled mysteriously, like a real sphinx, because at that point she had of course quite simply started hating that word, “create,” but could not show it, she liked Gunilla, after all, did not want to make her sad. “Yes, for a while now I’ve been in the working and editing phase in close contact with the Book Editor, then what is known as the finalspurt remains.”

“And may I ask how it’s going with the Bo—” Had, like always with Gunilla, come back to the same thing.

And Maj-Gun’s angry shrug of the shoulders, which had given rise to even more misunderstandings. “Yes, sorry, I’m walking along like an elephant in a china factory.”

But Maj-Gun, with regard to her size, had laughed loudly. The Book, the Manuscript. Or whatever it was called, Authorship. That was in a way what was wrong with everything after all, or had started to be, there in the cozy house, the cozy family life. I am a dwarf in these rooms, Maj-Gun tried to say to herself, but it did not fit either really. Because otherwise, if it were not for “the Book,” which had started taking on mystical proportions at that kitchen table, “go upstairs and work, write,” then Maj-Gun would have been able to spend time sitting in the kitchen with Gunilla whom she really appreciated and talk chitter chatter about just about anything, “One should really start dieting.”

“Listen to this, Gunilla, what your stomach fat says about your character.” A funny thing she had also written in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings.” But the talk, which there was not anything special about, still fun, relaxing.

And Göran and the kids too, of course, when they were in the kitchen. “Maj-Gun is walking around here like a Poet in Bourgeoisie,” Göran could say, with a funny tone of voice, and then all of them could actually laugh, a bit relieved.

On the other hand: “I should probably go up and write some now,” because right then, in moments like that with Göran and Gunilla and the kids in the kitchen, Maj-Gun had once again been reminded in some way about something she should have. Like flipping through to find a new page in a magazine. Get something like that for herself. Become hungry like a wolf, go to the movies, the disco, out and hunt.

“No, now I really should go up and write.” So Maj-Gun, book-pregnant elephant girl, girl, gradually the only gracious thing about that creature, had removed herself from the warm, bright kitchen.

I am without space. Up to the room. The novel. Djeessuss. The Thinking Chair. The Book. Authorship, the Animal Child here and paper there, in all places.

Paper paper, between her, the world, everything. Had been working “in tight connection with the Book Editor for a while now” who had certain “minor” changes, that hellish word which always entered her mouth when she was standing, hanging by the door, wanting—certain “minor” suggestions for changes and comments…

The room, the Thinking Chair, the desk. But the truth was also the following: at the very beginning, ages ago, when she had come to this house, from Java to Sumatra, she had “the manuscript” with her. But it had not been “the manuscript” then, in any case not in the same way, but at that time this writing had in other words been real.

Where she had started writing, in the other rented room, with the woman on the first floor, rug rags. Suddenly, amid the rags in that kitchen in Java, she had seen the Animal Child, peering into the darkness. Demanding. So close. She had almost been able to touch it and feel the raw, slightly damp fur with her fingers. Unexplainable, but not crazy; it became crazy only when you tried to explain the Animal Child. Here it is. That closeness.

But then, the woman died, the talk. All of the talking. Became vaporized. Rug rags. Susette.

Search for it in Susette as well, in Susette’s big eyes. But djeessuss, still, every time she had become so disappointed with Susette.

“And may I ask how it’s going with the boo—” Gunilla has asked her one last time in the kitchen now during the farewell coffee. And then for once Maj-Gun does not look moody instead she says that she is thinking about putting the book project on the shelf and starting to study law at the university. Which, she still has to add out of loyalty to something she once was, may be bad news for the Literature but good news for the kids—they worship that typewriter, that is why she is giving it to them.

Gunilla cheers up, whether or not it is the typewriter, she seems a bit relieved otherwise too.

“Oh, but I’m sure it must still have been nice to rest up at the rectory. You looked, to put it mildly, a bit worn out.”

And in the room for the last time, and alone. Gunilla had to go back to school: “Don’t worry, we haven’t touched anything, no one has been in the room since you left!” The key in the lock, pushing the door open carefully, almost sneaking in. The mess. Almost even worse than she imagined. There was paper here, paper everywhere. “The Manuscript of a Life,” ten thousand pages, swelling over the desk, the floor, the Thinking Chair, and the bed, “all the shortcomings.”

“The true story” and that and that and that… one of those thousand working titles in horrible glittery red letters, solidified nail polish, red and mother-of-pearl, which she and the children had amused themselves with by coloring together when she let them come in at some point, also wanting to play, not be alone.

And other papers: the letter from the Book Editor, which she still, before the appointed evening that had been the last evening in this room when everything had overflowed, neatly stored in a leather-bound folder in the top desk drawer and taken out and hastily glanced at sometimes, reading a few lines: “Promising in places, kill your darlings and tone down the self-pity…” And periodically it had given her a calm feeling of confidence but she had not been able to follow the advice, had not toned down but up. All of the humiliations, everything that was done to me and me and me, in a thousand scenes, “characters,” an ocean, billowing waves that could, from the Thinking Chair, be heard like a satisfied clucking from her mouth sometimes when she thought she had been able to jot down a few particularly good parts. Sometimes not written at all, just thought things out, because she would gradually become so inspired that she did not even have time to write anything down, ideas, impressions that rushed through her head. And the jealousy. And Susette. MY love. A new story that came pouring in. Had not exactly improved matters any.

But now, as mentioned. All of that. Foreign. Gone.

Despite the fact that everything is exactly the same as when she left the room almost two months ago, turned off the lights, click, click, taken the getawaybag, and headed out.

In the morning. Early. Susette, on her way to work, was going to be picked up by Solveig down by the main country road, she had known that. Had waited for Susette in the darkness, stood in front of her on the walking path a bit past the town center. “I don’t know anything about anything.”

Had she said that? Could not remember, maybe she had not said anything. Just stood there and stared ahead, with her big dumb eyes.

“You’re so easy, Susette.” And Susette had become frightened, pushed past her.

They were going to meet up later in the day. On the Second Cape. Neither of them had known that then. Then, in the morning, Maj-Gun still had no idea that she would be heading out to the capes, not at all.

In other words, they had not arranged to meet at the American girl’s hangout in the early afternoon. “Come down there, and we’ll settle things.” Nah. The Killer Rabbit had not said anything like that on the walking path that morning-night, it in no way had any plans. Killer Rabbit. That was namely how she had felt, as well, somewhere. Like a terrible black rabbit who, because it looked so horrifying, was called the Evil Rabbit, not the Killer Rabbit even though that was the word you thought about in that context, the context of the children’s garden, and in other words for that reason, the rabbit had been considerately placed on the highest cabinet where it could not be reached or seen in order not to scare the life out of the kids in the children’s garden from where it was now on the run.

A fictive children’s garden in other words, of course she did not know anyone who would have or had such an experience from their own children’s garden and Maj-Gun did not have any memories like that either. She and her brother Tom never went to the children’s garden, in their own home; it was always looked after by Mama Inga-Britta, or by Aunt Liz who came to the rectory and “babysat” sometimes when she needed to rest. No, nothing less than the novel writing again, the Book, again an “interpretation,” and “tone down the self-pity.”

And: she had, as usual, not toned down but toned up and stood there on the walking path right between the church and the main country road that morning-night in front of Susette who had, in any case at first, looked so sleepy—the Killer Rabbit who, in its violent fury, had practically cried out of exasperation. My love, the Boy in the woods, and so on.

At the same time as the Killer Rabbit’s urge to kill was completely intact. And it could be felt: Susette had suddenly been one hundred percent on the alert. Like an animal who has met another animal: wide awake, and, in the midst of everything, also scared to death in those big eyes.

So alike. The Angels of Death. The likeness.

“Go away.” Though Susette had done her best to hide her fear. “I don’t know anything about anything.”

Call forth the fear, reinforce the fear. But there had been no time for that. She had attacked immediately.

“Go away!” Susette’s pathetic whining.

“NO!”

And then, just as fleetingly, the situation was over, as dreamlike as it had started. But if a Nightwalker with a dog had not come along on the walking path, Maj-Gun certainly would not have gone away.

A compass through Susette’s eyes. It was night in the world for the Animal Child, the clock had stopped, five in the morning.

Left unfinished. But later.

Susette had suddenly arrived down at the boathouse on the Second Cape, in the middle of her own working day which she seemed to have left, of her own accord, and alone.

Why? You did not understand. You did not understand anything. Parallels. Rags.

But there where Maj-Gun has found herself anyway: just as much to her own genuine surprise, at exactly that moment. The American girl’s hangout, filled with all sorts of junk, nothing nice about it, sleeping. Lying on the floor there, barely enough space, the getawaybag under her head. Some old rag pulled over herself, among the boat motors, fishing equipment, and a large metal anchor. Slept heavily and deeply.

Awakened by a shadow on the veranda. Sat up, dazed with sleep. Susette had not believed her eyes, it had already started snowing then.

Lots of snow. And Susette, a dark figure in all of the whiteness. And Susette, had seen her through the window, eyes met. What a resignation in her. As if: walking toward a destiny.

Rug rags. That was how it was going to be. Death’s Angels.

Is that what had spurred Maj-Gun on?

Susette had opened the door, come inside.

“What are you doing here?”

She was going to the sea, she replied, like Susette in love, Susette and love. And Maj-Gun suddenly assaulted her.

Hit hit hit.

And Susette had fallen and while falling hit her head against the anchor and Maj-Gun rushed out. Into the whirling snow, onto the slippery cliffs. Struggled through the snow, up and away from here and farther.

The cousin’s house. Which she had left a few hours earlier. That was where she had been. But Bengt. Not the Boy in the woods: it had disappeared, right there, when she was in the house together with him.

Because that was suddenly where she decided she was going to go, from the town center. That morning. Had in some way lost her sense of direction after the meeting with Susette on the walking path. Killer Rabbit. Its power inside her. It had not become light. That time of year when it almost never became light.

First around nine o’clock. Then she had already been on her way to the Second Cape. In a car. With a hayseed, in a rascallike mood: wanted to set up a time to meet. Some movie at some movie theater that just had to be seen.

She had also been in the other apartment. Susette’s apartment. Empty. Susette at work; Maj-Gun had an extra key, which she had begged off the Manager. Walked around there in the Lovers’ Nest. Alone. The pictures on the wall, the Winter Garden, the “exhibition.” Bluebluepictures. Many strange words. People float freely from themselves. Otherwise. An appalling mess, but I don’t know anything about anything, at least it had been true in that moment. He had not been there.

Gone on his way. In reality, she would have liked to have gone home and slept. But home, an impossibility. No space. Across the cemetery and the walking path again, and out toward the main country road, the bus stop. Away. Was going to run away, at least fulfill that intention. The bus stop. No buses. But a car. The hayseed, all fathers’ Toyotas, one of those. The window was rolled down, “Need a lift?” And why not?

Where? Have an objective. Mushy. The capes. He drove her there. Small kid who had actually been embarrassed about driving around and around this morning when everyone else was at work, not able to sleep.

Well, long story, cut it off here. Slammed the door shut, ended up on the side of the road heading toward the capes, a few miles from the house, had started walking. In which direction, did not matter. But THEN she had gotten the cousin’s house on her mind for real. The Boy in the woods. Her love, her purpose. Maybe he was there, he was.

Come to the house, cold, ice-cold, beer and cigarettes, syrupy.

She had wanted to say, actually, if she had been in full possession of her senses: “But come away from here now, you can’t live in this shit.”

But still. Her dream of love. The only one. Pure. Hold on to it. Instead spoken like a ghost about the other things. I love you because you killed out of love.

“What’re you babbling about?”

That was the lasting meaning. He had not understood one bit.

But keep on to the bitter end. Her end.

Ha-ha. Realism is here.

What do you do with your dream of love the second after you know that it has been forfeited but you want to hold on to it anyway? Answer: if you are Maj-Gun newsstandess, you tackle it. Programmed to kiss it back to life again.

And it had allowed itself to be kissed, indolent, without resistance, without interest as eroticism is, and what had happened had happened and on the floor, in an old parlor where she was lying, through the window she had seen: the wind, the cloudy sky, the dirty gray of midmorning, the trees.

Had removed herself. He was sleeping then. Not like a child, but sawing wood.

That was the last she had seen of him alive.

The sea, clean, smelled good, wind and freshness, and then such a tiredness in her. To the hangout, through the pine trees, the cape, the openness.

Snowflakes had started falling, so tired in the hangout—snow snow snow. While she slept, dreamed about the hayseeds, the pistol awakening, snow and more snow.

Susette. And the anchor.

Hours later. The whirling snow, the cliffs, bloody. The road again, the house was there, called for help, ambulance, police.

Gone to the house. First. Like a Peeping Tom. Looked in through a window.

What she had seen was indescribable.

She had lost everything, all purpose. Run run away from there. In the snow, the slipperiness, the zero visibility. A thousand miles forward, but on the same road, the same Toyota, the same redneck.

“Do you want to run away with me to the ends of the earth? We’re going now?”

He had shaken his head, hesitantly. Nah. Nah. Time to eat. Homeandeat.

But over now. Here in the room, never think about it again. If she were to think then everything would just start spinning again, an old folk song.

Now. Here, on the desk, in the room that will be left behind. “Hungry like a wolf.” Folk songs. The cassette tape on the desk with all the paper.

Doris. A demo tape that a boy named Micke Friberg had sent around to various record companies back then. Micke’s Folk Band. Back then Maj-Gun had gotten a copy off of him, Micke, granted “for compensation.” Pulled out into a long, brown, small curly strip.

How nice: what a cassette tape later becomes when it gets tangled in the machinery and you have, in the end, lost all patience, and torn at it, who cares if it breaks.

Magazines. One particular one, open. Wrinkly. Glossy photo. Woman’s face, big eyes. The compass, with the needle that poked through these paper eyes. Maj-Gun’s compass, her needle.

Through Susette’s eyes. Not Susette of course, a look-alike. How similar. One of those young women, a dime a dozen, an article. Which had been about just that. A serious magazine with a socially critical spin. How stupid that girl was, clueless, that was the message. Was not written out clearly, what was the art of formulation not good for? But, should be clear, based on the descriptions. Her stupid everyday existence, her stupid life.

That girl had been upset later. They met her at a café after she read what they wrote in the article that was going to be published—this meeting was also described in the article. “That’s not me at all,” she cried, otherwise defenseless, they chased after her with their camera. On the last photo, big-eyed in a wood, a small dog at her legs. She who had been crying and crying. “I’m not at all like that… and stop taking pictures!” Of course they had not, they became interesting pictures. As if in harmony with a revelation. Don’t know anything about anything. Even about herself.

Maj-Gun hastily cleans everything up. The papers, the magazines, the cassettes, the compass, pens, and so on. In a black garbage bag that she drags down the stairs and leaves it next to the garbage can by the door. She puts the room key on the table in the hallway, the house is empty, glances all the way into the kitchen, cannot help herself.

The distinguishing feature about this house, Sumatra, is, as said, that on the inside it is exactly like the other house, Java, the same blueprint. The same view in other words, out into the kitchen. In Sumatra like in Java, when you come down the stairs from your rented room on the upper floor. The woman at the rug rag bucket. She had thought it was a dream at first; it was not.

“Can you help me with this?” The woman had looked up from her work, among the rags, the bags in the kitchen, piles of them. In half darkness in the middle of the day, the window shades pulled down.

“An office rat on the lower floor.” Maj-Gun had started a letter to her brother Tom about life there in Java. “In gray clothes, all of her gray.”

A letter, among others, that was never finished.

Because she had liked that woman, they had become friends, for real. “Susette, she didn’t give way.” Whatever she had meant by that, Maj-Gun, then it was one hundred percent true and real.

But now. Gone forever. Giving away.

So: here in the house, Sumatra, everything is normal. The table wiped clean, coffee cups and saucers in the sink, lemons against the dark blue bottoms of the curtains, really nice, fresh. A dull January afternoon light.

And left, left the big, black garbage bag by the garbage can. Everything from the newsstand in it too, except for “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” which she still did not dare throw away, keep it, like a memory. But the cigarettes, the blouse, and so on. She puts the remainder of what had been hers from the furnished room that she had rented into the seaman’s chest that she had brought with her when she moved in many years ago.

There is room for a lot in the chest, everything she has. A few weeks later, after her aunt’s funeral, right before she travels to Portugal, she transports the chest to a storage space in the industrial area on the outskirts of the city by the sea where it will remain until she returns one year later, buys a little house in another part of the city, a lush suburb, where she will live during her university studies.

She puts some other things in the chest as well. Red bow, a piece of wrinkled silk paper carefully folded, everything from the getawaybag that was hanging around forgotten in a closet in the Manager’s hall for many weeks. It was close to being left behind altogether. The Manager, from the stairs, came running after her with it when she was already seated in the passenger’s seat of the rented delivery van next to the delivery man. Tobias in the slush, temperatures above freezing again. Maj-Gun had taken the bag, good-bye, they never see each other again.

The drawings were also placed in the chest. Bengt’s drawings from the walls in the other apartment, which she put in the bag while she was there. Blueblueblueblue pictures, watercolors, which she has not inspected more closely, will not end up doing so either actually. That “exhibition.” That Winter Garden. Which may come to exist in the Winter Garden later, the one on the Second Cape.

She gives these drawings to Rita, some years later. Rita, Solveig’s and Bengt’s sister, from the Rita Strange Corporation. They do not know each other, cross each other’s paths during a legal dispute. Maj-Gun is the lawyer, recently graduated from the university where already in the final stages of her studies, which she completes quickly and “brilliantly,” she is offered a good position at a law firm with a good reputation, which has its reliable offices in the nice southern quarter of the city. A law firm where the lawyers occupy themselves with inheritance law and the like. Rita is the client. In her capacity as party in that corporation, Rita Strange. An elegant context for wild elegant ideas. Advertising people, artists, architects, gladly calling themselves “avant-gardist.” Those kinds of dreams, which can be taken seriously thanks to their financial solvency, “the backing.” Feasible, you can dream big.

And it is back then, in the wake of a recession, when dogs are eating dogs and some have become full even if it is not spoken about publicly.

Build. The Winter Garden. Architecture. The Second Cape. An idea on paper that has been born out of all of this? Maybe. But it is not interesting, in any case in the perspective that Maj-Gun cannot muster any interest in it, not even enough to pay more attention to it than she needs to for the purposes of her job, not in the least. Market transactions, inheritance and gifts, and so on, the kinds of things that can be bought with money, and the kinds of things the law is there for, plus the money, to secure them. The Glass House on the Second Cape is owned by a friend, Kenny, who is also a member of the corporation, she inherited it from a relative she once lived with. And Jan Backmansson, who is Rita’s husband, has the hill on the First Cape, but some sister Susanna is being obstinate, and so on. Several transactions, legal obstacles, but those kinds of obstacles are there to be overcome. An idea. Which may be realized. But what is just as true is that the Winter Garden, a few years after it has come to be, is transformed.

Has already aged then. An idea that was an idea, a thought, but when it was realized: well, not what you had thought. Not a lot of added value either, a bit clumsy too.

Is sold, is bought by someone else. As a physical place, the Winter Garden can be seen as a process, that light is transformed and transformed.

But the brochures will remain. Kapu kai. The hacienda must be built. That, for example, and other things.

Lengthy? Diffuse? Maybe. Maj-Gun thinks so in any case while she carefully, and down to the last letter, becomes acquainted with all of the details in the matter, she is being paid for it. But My God when it comes to the business matters that person cannot stop babbling she thinks, which could be an interesting observation since Rita, cool as a cucumber, is someone who de facto does not babble. At all. Puts forth facts. Papers on the table. One of those, could have been fascinating.

She gives the drawings to Rita during the final stages of the proceedings. Says, “I knew your brother.” And adds, after a brief pause, “We had a relationship.”

Rita looks at Maj-Gun Maalamaa, one moment, takes it in, so to speak, what does one say: the revelation. She is wearing red clothes. Expensive skirt, expensive small jacket with discreet and solid buttons, and slim, that stomach fat like all of the other fat she dieted away of course. Attractive. Shrugs her shoulders. “Bengt,” Rita says later, as if it were nothing, shrugs again, “had many relationships.” Tragic? Neither of them says so, nor “he was washed up” as Solveig said once a long time ago on a winter day on the square in the town center, “a wild pain,” which for Maj-Gun settled everything, in one moment, but—in and of itself, the pain, the words, for Rita’s part does not mean that it does not, could not, exist there.

In some way, perhaps it is audacious, it makes an impression on Maj-Gun. Reluctantly. No nonsense. Rita’s attitude.

Rita just takes the drawings and puts them in her bag. Nothing more about that. And maybe, if you had been in another mood, or in some way, in relation to everything, could have sat on your high horse, you could have hissed, You could actually call Tobias now and then, someone who did so much for you too.

Two angels on the television set. The Astronaut, the Nuclear Physicist. Sister Red, Sister Blue. But that is something Maj-Gun no longer thinks about every day. Been there done that. But giving the drawings to Rita is no whim, no impulse.

Rita. She sees Solveig. Rita might as well be Solveig, no difference. That twin likeness, still.

Getting rid of an old story. Which still, seen as a story, possibly as a crime, never really stopped following her. “Countryman Loman covered things up.” One of her classmates at the university had been fascinated by that kind of information. Gaps, holes, misunderstandings, when the law had seen things through the fingers, women and crime, men and crime, these people without legal rights. Information she does not gather or think about, but to which she will return, like a refrain.

And maybe when she gives the drawings to Rita she thinks for a moment about Doris Flinkenberg, at the cemetery, before she died, the folk song. Just a breeze, through her head.

The Winter Garden. The idea for the Winter Garden was not born there, Rita Strange, those contexts. It has existed for a long time. Whole long lifetimes. A game on a hill, three siblings. The three cursed ones in the eyes of others, rumba tones. She knows that, and does not know.

But she thinks about other things too, which she does not think about of course but which exist nonetheless. The Child. Solveig. The Child.

Sometime later, in the middle of the 1990s, she quits her job at the law firm, leaves a brilliant career that has picked up pace on the private side and gets a position as chief legal assistant in a small city in the northern region of the country.

THE FUNERAL

MAJ-GUN IS REUNITED with her family at her aunt’s funeral in January 1990. Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa—she took back her maiden name when she became a widow—has passed away at a respectable age; after a brief illness, quietly “fallen asleep,” literally, died in her sleep. A peaceful passing, the best you can think of, in her Portuguese winter home. And avoided being alone at the end. Her nephew Tom Maalamaa and his fiancée happened to be visiting, and after her death they took care of all the practical details. All papers, documents and, naturally, the repatriation of her remains to the homeland and the funeral in the little city her husband was originally from and had, for some time now, been resting in a spacious family plot where, during his lifetime, a spot had been reserved for his wife.

The whole family, in the church, and at the reception afterward. Relatives and a large circle of acquaintances and friends and surviving relatives of the many old and sick whom Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa, during her career within the deaconry, had cared for with a big heart and tireless effort.

“She made the last days for our loved ones so bright.”

Flowers, telegrams, and loads of addresses that later, during the memorial service in the nearby fellowship hall, were read aloud by Tom Maalamaa in a loud, steady voice.

And before, in the church: Maj-Gun’s father the pastor emeritus ministers the ceremony, speaking devoutly about Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa’s exploits during her career. And, next to the coffin below the altar, he wants, before he takes a small shovel and pours sand over the white coffin, grains of sand on folded, white silk fabric with beautiful white- and lilac-colored flower arrangements, from the earth you came, to the earth you shall return, say something personal too.

About his own sister, the dearly beloved. For example: there were once two siblings, Elizabeth and Hans (the Pastor himself, that is), who found God early on, on the farm, up north in the country where they had grown up. Both siblings, and God: wandered in the woods that were large, like China, the wonderful Middle Kingdom. They decided they were going to become missionaries when they grew up, picked pinecones off the ground and lined them up neatly in a row on a rock and the pinecones were the Chinese to whom they preached the joyful message of Christianity that had come to them, Elizabeth and Hans, already at an early age. Almost like a miracle, their own revelation, in an environment that otherwise was not more than normalpiously religious.

And when Hans, who was two years younger than his extremely more patient sister, sometimes grew tired and allowed his eager playfulness and his own rascalness take the upper hand, and started throwing the pinecones around—his sister did not get angry at him, she never did, but led the small, high-spirited boy back to their serious business with a gentle hand.

“But with an affectionate hand”: it became a lasting childhood memory. And a character trait that would stay with his sister throughout her life, the affection, how it would just grow inside her.

“A large and hardworking heart that would find many outlets later in life.” And of course, as it is in life, endure many trials.

But also had a wonderful sense of humor, and when she became older she was able to laugh heartily at the somewhat exaggerated melancholy of her childhood. Because a playful humor existed inside her, even though she did not always let it out. And here in the church papa Pastor urges forth the image of a girl with hair braided far too tightly who became a young woman and let her hair down; swooned over film stars from the movies, wrote letters to them in Hollywood and received autographed pictures in return, greetings from Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner.

So the small “missionaries” in the woods, the wonderful Middle Kingdom, the pinecones grew pale with time. Plans for the future under that cloak, but not God—not for Liz Maalamaa, never God. Just life, which got in the way… “and young women have their own dreams as you well know.” Papa Pastor pauses here where one can, at least if you are his daughter Maj-Gun Maalamaa, hear the ellipses hanging in the air. And it is and remains there in the church, where even several members of the upper-middle-class family that the dead husband belonged to are present, the Pastor’s only reference to the childless and not particularly happy marriage that followed.

“On the other hand,” papa Pastor reasons—and yes, maybe this speech becomes long and certainly personal, it is often the case when Father gets going, but the devoutness and his own evident emotion make it so that all thoughts one could possibly have about a tiresome choice of words fail to come. The wordiness that the Pastor could devote himself to during ordinary Sunday sermons too and for which he sometimes had to endure certain criticism for; mild criticism, in and of itself, because on the whole the Pastor was a respected vicar in all of the congregations where he has worked. But there had, in other words, been those who at some point in passing had said that when the Pastor was speaking in church it could, quite simply, sometimes become a bit too much of a good thing; maybe also a small reference to what was not said out loud, oh no, my goodness, but about the Pastor’s “country upbringing,” which perhaps made it so that he did not have the same well-developed mind for “the simplicity in the heaviness,” “the elegance of the unsaid,” and similar things that certain other people had gotten from their mother’s milk.

“I just get carried away so easily,” papa Pastor used to say in front of the family at the Sunday dinner table, apologetically as it were but with a rascally glint in his eyes because in reality he did not care what people said about him when he was preaching in church and the following Sunday he would, if he was in that kind of a mood, carry on the same way as always.

Rascallike. That was a reminiscence for Maj-Gun as well, here and now in the church, of something old, not forgotten, but something she had not thought about very much for a long time. Her beloved father, how he is, was, and could be.

“On the other hand,” papa Pastor continues as it were, pulling himself together. “The foundation that exists in everything,” Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa never lost it.

Faith like a mountain. A child’s belief in God, innocent and self-evident but as an unspoken demand. Belief as something to answer to.

Belief places certain demands on us when we have left childhood, become older. These demands can be formulated into words but should not be answered with words, but with actions. Belief is activity.

And many times, papa Pastor remembers again, and when he speaks, the tears glimmering in his eyes, and no, it does not need to be said, he is not embarrassed about them, not in the least. When he personally, the brother, failed in his belief. For example during the difficult years at the theology department when he was beset with heavy doubts, pondered and pondered, fallen and fallen. Of course some of this brooding was the normal brooding of youth of the kind brooded on during a certain period in life, a passing phase. You understand everything, understand nothing, know a lot, lack experience, the experience that comes from the heart, the blazing core of faith and life.

But there had also been a great, alarming question which, since he had left his comfortable and cozy childhood home, had been assaulting him: in the form of images, scenes of loneliness in a student room at a boarding school for “country boys,” made him defenseless. So, suddenly, he felt as though he had lost all contact with the living, with mankind. And with God: that if God—that question, so simple, but struggling with it was like walking on hot embers, about God—where was he then in this world?

I call to you from the abyss, Lord. But then, how his sister Elizabeth, “Liz,” student at the deaconess school, had come to see him at his student dormitory. Time after time, spoken to him, as in their childhood, in the woods—and gotten him to see. All the grace. The Light.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

And finally, here in the church, now, papa Pastor says that the innocence of our childhood is the best thing we have.

Maj-Gun, the warmth swells within her. And: how proud she is. Her father, there, in front of her, everyone. His words, his endless love.

And how he personally, just in the moment when he has spoken about the grace the light, looks up, over all of the people in the church and at Maj-Gun, meets her gaze there where she is sitting in one of the back rows.

The lost daughter who has returned. “On the other hand”: it was never like that. “On the other hand,” in some way, in that moment, as if father and daughter both, like in a mutual silent agreement, in some way want it to be like that. Inside both the father and the daughter there is a certain rather well-developed feeling for the dramatic, to take the opportunity and reinforce the drama, but not just because. But because of something obvious, and maybe that is the essence in the story about the lost child’s return. Something that has been murky and therefore impossible to say out loud.

In the daylight. That it is over now, Maj-Gun. Beloved. Regardless of who you are, and that, whatever you have done, I love you and forever.

The hymn in the church later. “Glorious here on earth.”

Maj-Gun in the next-to-last row, the very end. She had to sneak in and take the first best possible seat because the memorial service had already started when she arrived and that is why she is not sitting at the front with the rest of the family. She was running late, nothing particularly special about it. Just taken the wrong bus, gone the wrong way.

But then gotten on the right bus after all. “As it often is in life.” Maj-Gun smiles at the memory, in the middle of the memorial service.

Something her father also said once, at that dinner table at the rectory, during her childhood. With a certain humorous emphasis too, but with the same good mood as always. Speaking of some of the new pastors who wanted to make use of modern analogies and the language of our time when they were preaching. Simple everyday similes and words besides, as easy to understand as possible. The way it is in life. Getting on the wrong bus, the right bus, remembering to stop at a red light, go when it is green, and brake for all of the pedestrians in the crosswalk. Sometimes you made a mistake, did something wrong, everyone does, but Jesus, who was forgiveness, forgave you.

And the whole family had laughed at the dinner table, not harshly, because there, at the dinner table, there was no meanness. Just as the Manager once pointed out when Maj-Gun had let things get out of hand when she was talking about the future, “the pastor’s calling” that she still, just like her brother Tom, had never actually had, then her father papa Pastor that open-mindedness, he was not fundamentally minded, not the least bit. But just did not want to have “the language of our time,” everyone’s everyday in the church. Not because it was wrong but these trifling rules, concerns which were just concerns that had nothing to do with the great, life, death, both extremes. Which all of us in some way are affected by and which can be felt in church in particular.

Everyone’s life that is, as it were, larger than that, and it needs to be taken seriously, not be diminished, just because it may not immediately be comprehensible.

So not that, in the church. Wanted, in church, to have God’s holiness because it was what it was, almost in Esperanto. Have that space, that glory. And the words, the melodies, the words and the melodies that brushed against the unspeakable, the tremendous. We go to paradise with song.

These words, not because they were supposed to be “solemn,” as it were, but because it was exactly these words which were felt in your body or which, in some way, already existed there. Set down inside you and when you heard them, came close to them here, how they were brought to life: something great, a glimpse of what is time but not directly history, rather time as an archaeology inside oneself, and inside other people, inside people in general. To feel that for a moment as well, such a participation. That all of us are also in some way the same: we carry ourselves in the same landscape—and time. That there was, is, another time, we carry ourselves in time that is not seconds minutes days years decades, my life, the story of my family… but time in the sense of “generations follow in the footsteps of generations.” A greater time, a landscape, everyone’s time.

Wander inside God in time, in a landscape that we share, we have a share in each other, can see a glimpse of it sometimes. A woman who is cutting rug rags by a bucket, long strips, silk velvet rag scraps—

There was room in that language. For everything. I am not without space.

And there in that time then, a moment, a fragment of your own life. A fragment in a landscape with fragments of other landscapes inside it, the landscape of others. Across all borders, in time and space. Across narrow family borders too of course: mother father child inheritance beyond these inheritances but also these. And how obvious that the DAY OF DESIRE is housed in this landscape too. Something old that is not you but has come up inside you. The Happy Harlot, the Girl from Borneo, whatever; they are of course, were of course, just denotations. The Disgust as it were, as it was called for a time after childhood when there had been a built-in sense of that which was yourself but yet so much bigger than. But the Disgust then, devastating so to speak, so termed by Tom Maalamaa, in royal supremacy, Gustav Mahler behind his back. The Pastor’s Crown Princess who was the heiress to the words, and the words existed for him and became his and that pathetic girlfriend who quietly rolled her eyes next to him. Prompting, nodding in silent support, as if on order. Though, it was easier to agree of course, no resistance in it. Be in his landscape that was given limits the more he spoke, the limits of his words, became secured as the only landscape.

So that you became, if you were his sister Maj-Gun, an extremity. Some sort of comment, the other. The Harlot, that is, with a capital letter suddenly hamba hamba, she came from Borneo—at least it was effective. Something in your eye then, if nothing else, because the brother who was standing at the window in his room in the rectory was suffering the view over the cemetery in a grand way. The Disgust still would have been a little tantalizing if not for the fact that this Happy Harlot was his own sister.

But djeessuss, if you were the sister, you were supposed to be all of that to a T, you received. In order to prove a point. The Day of Desire. Don’t give way.

But on the other hand, all that was just as true but that she, the sister, had not wanted to bear: first, the jealousy. The brother and the girlfriend behind the closed door in the brother’s room in the rectory and Maj-Gun on the other side, alone. Without her brother, rather much alone, regardless of how the siblings had been like cats and dogs with each other during childhood.

“What do you see in her?” Maj-Gun could go into her brother’s room and ask when the girlfriend was not there. “I am fascinated by the Death in her,” he would have been able to say then, while he, as it were, was preoccupied with buttoning the cuff links on his starched shirt. But all of it was just silliness really, a slight becoming feeling of the “metaphysical” (he had loved that word for a while too) because later, when death showed itself for real, the girlfriend’s father who became ill and was suddenly dying, Tom Maalamaa had pulled away or maybe she was the one to retreat but one thing was certain: that when she left the rectory for the last time he had not exactly run after her. Let it be. Ordered Reader for the Preparatory Course for Future Lawyers as COD “papa is paying,” and became engrossed in it.

Second, We go to paradise singing. The Day of Desire. An experiment—or whatever it had been. It had drained off of her rather quickly—that is to say the Desire in all of it. Partly for the obvious: that it had not been much fun. Standing with your freezing bum among the headstones and that girlfriend who naturally happened to come running from the rectory just at the moment when she truly realized it was rather shitty, all of it, and out of resentment Maj-Gun had, in other words, cried. In other words cried NOT because she was ashamed or because it was a pity about her. In any case not in the way the girlfriend with the saucer eyes had seen it, poor poor thing what have they done to you? Which of course had made Maj-Gun even more frustrated and in combination with the jealousy that also always came to the fore during that time, in the girlfriend’s immediate presence, she had suddenly been standing there, howling about the WONDERFUL in all of this… about the Desire that was great and strong and et cetera. Djeessuss. The girlfriend, who had not understood a thing, had looked at Maj-Gun, frightened and suddenly so unhappy, confused, alone (her father was very ill then too), who Maj-Gun had, many times afterward with Susette, developed even more of a bad conscience from it.

But as said, not amusing. Something violating about it too, there among the headstones, “receive.” That is to say, completely private. The innocence of one’s childhood. The boys who had come to the cemetery, the hayseeds often with some religious affiliation. Well, she had not really bothered about it actually, but afterward they had not looked at her and those years later, on the square, they seemed to have completely and totally forgotten that it was her, the Happy Harlot, the same person as the fatty in the newsstand, “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” The Happy Harlot had just been an idea to them. They drove cars around around the square, but around others “just think what Madonna has done for fashion,” girls like that, or that hollow-eyed one who had suddenly been there again—Susette Packlén, “I am fascinated by the Death in her,” silk velvet rag scraps rug rags. That one.

At their level given Maj-Gun the finger from the cars; ordinary fingers, nothing special about that. And her personally, of course, if she had been in that kind of a mood, flipped them off in return.

And at the same time, on the other hand, again again: he had been nice, that hot-rod farmer who had driven her from the square to the capes in his car that terrible day in November, just a few months ago when she was going to… yes, what was she going to do, kill, die? Who had carefully asked about “meeting.” “Go to the movies?” In other words, one of those kinds of meetings, youthful, normal. And nor was there in that question any apology for anything that had taken place at the cemetery in the past, he had possibly been one of them, but been there done that, in this situation, a question only, from a boy to a girl, perfectly normal. “Don’t have time. First I’m going to do something terrible. Then I’m going to run away to the ends of the earth. So.” Naturally she had not said that because she could not have known what was going to happen ahead of time, but still, she had that feeling, transparent in exactly that moment, an imminent catastrophe, like a fate, because you were the catastrophe, not for any other reason. And then not drag some other outsider into this: then what she had de facto said in the car had been that she might be busy, did not have time to chitchat, and fired up by the catastrophe that was pounding inside her right when everything could have been normal shot off as a closing remark, “and now there have been quite enough of these advances, you can let me out here!” “Here?” They had in other words been in the middle of the woods, or in the middle of nowhere, on this road out to the capes, but a whole two miles there and almost as far to the cousin’s property where she had consequently ended up in the following.

“Can I call you?” had been his last question before he drove off the side of the road and stopped but hmptt tjjjmp she slammed shut the car door, a powerful existential slam that echoed in the silence, in the entire world. And the car, the hot-rod farmer inside it, had driven off.

But that fate had an irony: after everything, hours later, he had been there again. The same lout, the same car, the same road, roughly the same place, whirling snow. Terrible road conditions. The car that suddenly showed up just right in front of her in the middle of the road where she had been plowing her way through the snow just falling and falling, in an unbearable state of terror and shock, inexpressibly that she never wanted to suffer again. Bloody hands in her pockets, no mittens. The car had stopped, the door opened again, and she had been grateful then, gotten in.

“Shall we run away together? To the ends of the earth? See. I have the getawaybag with me.” She had said, or something along those lines.

“Nah,” the hot-rod farmer had replied, and added, a bit legendarily: “I dunno. Can’t. Homandeat.”

So: back to the square again, they had skidded their way there, slowly slowly. To the middle of the square, the familiar square, despite the abundant snow that was walling up everything there too. But suddenly, when she stepped out and the car started with a vroom and slid out of view, Maj-Gun, bloody paws even more well hidden in her pockets, had not had a clue about where she was.

Started walking, up to Susette Packlén’s apartment above the town center. Justice. The sirens.

But now, in church, as if she had awoken from a dream. To reality. HERE she is after all, now. Has gone through everything, to this, to the middle of the hymn, the church, to her father’s house. A fragment of everything, in everything, others, her own, inside her. And her father who is looking at her: “Welcome home.” And suddenly, she knows exactly how she is going to introduce herself to her father again when they have the chance to talk after the funeral, just the two of them. How she, with a glint in her eye, will go up to him and say to him that unfortunately she came late to the memorial service because she had, by mistake, gotten on the wrong bus a few times on the way there but then she had gotten on the right bus after all. And arrived. And how he, her father, now she knows this too, will look at her then with yes—he knows how he would look at her regardless of what she says to him. That dearest Maj-Gun, we have all missed you, welcome home. Open-mindedness. We go to paradise with song… but

OWWW in her stomach.

An intense pain, like a reminder, she almost folds over double inside on the church pew because she can control herself after all: but that is the memory, this year I have something kicking in my stomach. Unpleasant consequences… how could she forget that? And at the same time, exactly at the same moment she becomes aware of it: something that she, of course, in some way had been aware of the entire time, has been said to her besides, should not come as a surprise. But still, like a bombing. The gaze that traveled over the pews in the church, over the people in them, naturally also to the family in the first rows. Her brother’s erect neck that is sticking out of the stiff shirt collar, his neck sunburned—and another neck, the one next to his. Hair in a ponytail, gray shoulders, skin shining, despite the great amount of sunshine in the south where it has also been—white.

Maj-Gun remains staring.

It is Susette Packlén. Who turns her head slowly, looks back in the middle of the hymn, eyes meet Maj-Gun’s eyes, big eyes.

Suddenly, during a few seconds, which will later slip away, for a long long time, Maj-Gun has understood exactly everything.

On the other hand, of course, the obvious though nonetheless fantastic for that. Susette and love. Polo shirt, blazer, sideburns. Susette from the underworld, under the disco ball, gray, glittering. Susette on the dance floor, through the cigarette smoke. At the other end of the dance floor: polo shirt, blazer, sideburns. Tom Maalamaa. Her own brother.

Rag doll. “Loose limbed.” Dance my doll… Susette and love: like a story to dance to.

“Sometimes I have the feeling that I planted things inside her, Manager.” The Manager, who has not really understood, but on the other hand, she had not really been able to to go into detail or explain what she meant. But: all stories. The Boy in the woods. Duel in the sun. Dead. For love. The boy in the house. Susette in the hangout. When she was falling and falling—

Rug rags.

On the other hand, this is the landslide, something she will keep hidden for a long time in life because it is so amazing. That Susette, a stranger. She knows nothing about Susette. Has never known anything.

Her head spins, her stomach turns. Her stomach. OW! OW! OW!

Her stomach. This year I have something kicking in my stomach. Solveig on the square: “a wild pain.”

“What are you babbling about?”

The Boy in the woods. A violation.

She cannot keep the child. It was never hers.

So after the memorial service, the burial. At this cemetery, another place, another city, the little town where Liz Maalamaa’s husband had come from. This is where she will now be lowered after all: in this earth, for her not the earth of home but foreign earth, though no more heartfelt singing about this either. The swans, Dick and Duck, her aunt on the ship, maybe there was some truth in all of this too. “I didn’t understand what connected people, Manager. Though now I guess I’ve grown up. Been slapped in the face.”

A lush cemetery, picturesque, you can see it despite the fact that it is a dull and snowless January day, no leaves on the trees, gobs of old, dirty snow on the ground. The temperature is above freezing again but there is a biting wind that goes down to your bones and it makes it feel like fourteen degrees at least. Maj-Gun has been freezing in her new red winter coat with a silky soft lining during the roughly thousand feet she and all of the other funeral guests wandered from the church behind the creaking black cart with the white casket on top—three male descendants on either side, Tom Maalamaa at the very front on the right, the most important spot, like oxen pulling the hay wagon along behind them.

The cemetery grove itself where the family grave is located is particularly nice: so if one had the desire to say something nice, something that could be said in the presence of all relatives from both sides of the family, then it would, for example, be exactly what Maj-Gun herself is going to say afterward at the reception, mainly in order to put an end to a certain burial ecstasy that has caused some of the closest relatives on the dead husband’s side to start getting out of hand.

“God knows everything,” Maj-Gun is going to say, “but the grove is beautiful and that Aunt Liz Maalamaa would have appreciated resting in that place is something we all can agree on.

“A childless marriage but God gives and God takes away and that sorrow which lasted so many years only brought the two of them closer together.” Afterward, consequently, some relative from the husband’s side suddenly felt the need to determine this despite the fact that there had not been a single person at the table for the closest mourners who would not have known exactly what the married life between the two, now dead, people in question had been like. If not the “family doctor” himself—a cousin who is enthroned at one end of the relatives’ table instead of at the cousin’s table where he actually should be sitting but has apparently received a better seat due to his respectable age in addition to his task as “physician in ordinary,” which they say in that family, to that family. He is ninety-four years old but clear as a bell, possibly a bit loose tongued in his old age; that is to say less restrained with what he in company as company might happen to allow to come out.

That “doctor” whom even Liz Maalamaa was forced to see many times while her husband was still alive for a neck brace and bandage and grogginess-inducing calming tablets as a result of what, of course, did not exist, something everyone was well aware of—her own cowlike clumsiness that caused her to fall down the stairs all the time. Which is, in other words, what her husband had pointed out in public where still no one had spoken out against him: that his wife so to speak had to stumble, fall, or come tumbling from the second floor to the first floor in that beautiful house, which was in everyday language called a “shatoe,” on comfortable sandals where they lived. But “ssshh,” even “the doctor,” just like the entire family, put his finger to her lips. “Ssshhhhhh,” had not even needed any form of extra request to “the doctor,” he was bound to confidentiality in any case and then of course it was decorum too. But then in any case, with great sympathy—because he was no wild animal of course—generously prescribed all of those calming medications that sometimes made the aunt float forward so to speak, under the influence. Not over the ground, but in her head, where a lot of strange things—China, memories from a life as a missionary that had never been lived in reality—started welling forth.

But that is, consequently, when “the doctor” here at the reception after the funeral suddenly starts speaking like that, in small print over the sorrow of childlessness and about some sort of despite-everything-union between the two partners, that Maj-Gun is going to look at her own father, the dead one’s brother. And notice for once that he has a hard time keeping his own council; his hand that is gripping the coffee cup—fine Chinese porcelain, a fine china, they had to drag the most exquisite family china to this exhibition as well—starts shaking unreasonably and you suddenly understand for once that he is not planning on being the country boy from the boardinghouse in the company of these people, which he is in all other places except for in the church where he is so keen to stay on good terms with everyone; too good terms, he has just realized now and now in other words, readiness, he has decided for the first and the last time to say things as they are, speak, shout out.

Accordingly, this is when his daughter Maj-Gun quickly jumps in and states that bit about the grove which, despite everything, is so lush in the summer of course in any case. And her father then, when he hears that, how he comes to his senses again and relaxes and places his warm pastor’s hand on his daughter’s hand on the table.

And THAT IS HOW Maj-Gun, after a period of absence, introduces herself to her father, with that line, not as she had imagined in the church during the service. Though before she has the chance to say anything else here in this situation her father will personally say something, wink with one eye and say softly, just to her: “Came too late? Maybe you took the wrong bus?”

A warm smile spreads over his daughter’s face then, and her father’s warm hand in hers, and her warm hand in his—and hands, in general, everyone’s hands will, for a little while, become warm. Even Tom Maalamaa’s paw that is pounding his sister’s back, exaggeratedly brotherly. “Hey, Sis,” with a painful pluckiness that rhymes poorly with his impeccable exterior. As if he, for one moment, when he sees her again after a long time, finds himself in a childhood where he and Maj-Gun never were, either alone or together, for the same age exists in him as in her and that was always what united them—and divided them—actually.

But Tom, there at the reception, otherwise brown like a gingersnap next to his fiancée, white and pale in the face, in the middle of all the warmth, she is beaming as well. One of those, a few seconds, a complete moment, in reality. “Ahem”: Tom Maalamaa who is going to clear his throat and get up and with his future wife in his wake will walk up to the table where a photograph of Liz Maalamaa is standing next to a tea light and a large pile of telegrams and addresses. Which he consequently starts reading aloud with his fiancée’s help: she, next to him, hands the addresses to him one after the other and then she carefully arranges the read ones in a perfect fan on the table. Susette Packlén, a glorious light around her. Those eyes, like globes, a whole world, silk velvet rag scraps—so filled with life and meaning now. The engagement will be made official later in the spring in connection with one, in a line of her brother’s many appointments, that he is also casually sitting and talking about at the table with relatives from the husband’s side of the family without it sounding like boasting.

And what are you supposed to think then, about Susette Packlén? Love. Susette and love. My life. That there had ever been another lover. The Boy in the woods. A newsstand toppler? But that is just absurd.

A long, LONG time later, many years, hundreds from this point in time, Susette Maalamaa like Maj-Gun Maalamaa will, who otherwise will not have any contact at all over the years, explain it like this:

“Do you know what it was like with him, Bengt? Like being in a wood. Getting lost. I didn’t understand what he was saying. Like with Janos, the Pole, or the Lithuanian, which he actually was. From the strawberry fields. Just went on and went on, I didn’t understand a thing. That’s how it was with that.”

Mrs. Maalamaa, which is what becomes of her later, for many years. Susette Packlén from the District who cleaned for Solveig at Four Mops and a Dustpan, got a white cat for herself for a while, and walked around and did not get anywhere in the District.

Susette at the window. It is high there, above everything. A window in a room in her own house in the outskirts of the city; there are parts of cities in the world, does not matter in which city, these neighborhoods, exclusive outskirts, by water if there is water, they all look the same. Tom Maalamaa with family will come to live in neighborhoods like these in the cities where the international organizations he works for have their headquarters.

Tom Maalamaa. You will be able to read about him in the paper sometimes, hear him speak from well-paid podiums, see him in pictures. “Improving the world”—unpretentiousness. “The wife in the background.” Can be recognized by her large eyes. Cute. Three children. Karl-Olof, Mikael, and Elizabeth Ida. No pets due to the allergies in the family. The aupairgirl, Gertrude.

“This,” Susette will suddenly say at the window in her home in the living room, second floor, view over a bay, “reminds me of Portugal. Death in the hands. I had it then as well.”

But STOP, here now, stop. Right here, NOW, still, the inevitable. The cemetery, before the memorial when Liz Maalamaa receives many dear greetings filled with memories from the past, before everything: as if one wanted, through these jumps in time forward backward, to get away from the unavoidable in front of you. The GRAVE. The coffin with the aunt being lowered down, roses falling on the coffin in the hole before the wooden lid is placed on top and wreaths with flowers rain over it.

Two roses, no more. From both godchildren, Maj-Gun’s, Tom’s. Maj-Gun’s a small, simple pink one that the Manager helped her pick out at the flower shop in the town center where they had gone together in public that last day they had been together. The rose, which had already been standing in a vase in fresh, nourishing, lukewarm water, a few delicate slits with the knife in the stem, on the counter in the kitchen in the Manager’s apartment during what had been the last night.

And Tom’s rose: dazzling, huge like a sunflower, dark red, becoming in the way it matches his cashmere scarf. Pjutt, drops it, an unnatural gesture, which is exactly why it cannot, with that movement, avoid etching itself onto the retinas of the audience.

But it does not help. My child my child, I am going to make you so happy. The dead one, Aunt Maalamaa, gulping on a ship with her goddaughter a long time ago, a will. It has not been fun, as it will turn out.

Because Maj-Gun Maalamaa inherits everything, the entire estate—“the whole kingdom,” including a winter home in Portugal. In her brother Tom Maalamaa’s face who had the entire coffinhell to deal with personally in Portugal, which he, in the moment he grows pale beneath his sunburn, hisses at the lawyer’s office when the will is opened and read aloud which, according to the wishes of the deceased, takes place first thing after the funeral—these, the aunt’s final requests, which have been quite a few and had mostly to do with the funeral and the shape of it, meticulous instructions, right down to the china that should be used during the reception, a fine china, were neatly written down in a notebook in the nightstand drawer next to the aunt’s bed in Portugal. And Tom and Susette have followed these to a T, with the exception of the seating of the family doctor because, in regard to him, there has in Liz Maalamaa’s notes not been a single mention.

Coffinhell. Tom Maalamaa has given the show away, but only for a few moments, then he pulls his act together again—and forever.

Maj-Gun gets everything, right in front of the noses of the husband’s side of the family too, who have been putting on a show for the aunt since she became a widow. Dick and Duck, amusing maybe, because against the good advice of his relatives’ and his family’s lawyers her husband had refused to sign a prenuptial agreement so everything he owned went to his wife. Properties, stocks, and what in inheritance language is called “loose money,” cash in other words.

The significance of this inheritance for Maj-Gun should not be underestimated. Not due to any malicious pleasure in the presence of the relatives or her brother who had hidden his greediness well with his smooth walking and talking: things like this pass, are evened out. And besides, those differences of opinion they had during childhood, they really were not that bad: mutual frustration and irritation as said, like dogs and cats, which Mama Inga-Britta always used to say.

Not to mention that Maj-Gun is going to give her brother a portion of this “loose money,” including a share of the revenue from the aunt’s home in Portugal when she sells it a few years later.

But Maj-Gun Maalamaa is going to become respectable. A word she quickly learns to master during her law studies, which she starts a year and a half after her aunt’s passing and finishes brilliantly and quickly, with family law, inheritance law, and the like as her areas of specialization. And she finds daily use for it during those years after graduation when she works as a family lawyer at a distinguished law firm in the city by the sea.

But financially independent, djeessuss. It will provide her with a certain freedom—and space. She will have many rooms, rooms upon rooms upon rooms. Will not have to live in an apartment, never live in an apartment again.

“Susette, wait!”

But, still, at the cemetery, the burial: the wooden lid and the flowers, the wreaths, a sea, the ribbons: “wonderful is short,” “a final farewell.” One thing, the most important.

Maj-Gun in a red coat, like a stoplight alone by the grave, she has stayed behind. A few others, a couple, also dawdling on the gravel path. Susette and Tom.

“Wait! Susette!”

Susette obeys, turns around, hesitates.

Tom Maalamaa one step ahead of his fiancée, scarf flapping in the wind, also stops, looks back. Susette says something to him, speaks softly, he shrugs, waves to Maj-Gun “so long”; they are going to see each other at the reception. Removes himself with determined steps, perhaps a bit relieved.

Maj-Gun and Susette. Susette on the gravel path, Maj-Gun who walks up to her. And again: how long ago. The newsstand, all the stories, an apartment, a cat. Susette, to life—an invitation, shoulder pad wearing, in smoke, at a disco. Susette now: her big eyes, eyelashes covered with mascara, but only a bit, and on her full lips, a little lipstick, coral colored, “discreet.” In nice clothes. Gray winter coat, ankle boots, dark gray suede, heels just the right height, elegant.

Rug rags, silk velvet rag—something unexplainable that bound them together. And the District, the marshiness. Maybe it can still, faintly, be discerned, like from under layer upon layer upon layer: the smell of a winter day. Rain that became whirling snow, her wet mittens, fingers frozen anyway, blocks of ice. Wind and tight jeans. That thing inside Susette which made it look like she was always cold. And cowboy boots, boots.

The defenselessness. And: Susette in the hangout. One moment, gone. And nevermore.

Because now Maj-Gun says: sorry. A few times. And, well, she knows it does not make things better by saying it but is there something she can do now?

Susette is silent, picks at the ground with the toe of her boot, globs of snow, earth. Starts, “It turned out… wrong…”

Looks up again, as an introduction to something else, so to speak, longer. Maybe that she, so many years later when they meet again by chance, is going to mention, in passing. How depressed she was, had been. For many years, the Sorrow: over and after her mother—the words she does not have now but will have later. Has had the common sense to get therapy.

Or maybe she, Susette, actually thought about saying something else.

But she has grown silent again, lowered her gaze again, toward the ground and then says softly but clearly, audible and determined: “Maj-Gun. Now you have to promise me something. That you, we, will NEVER talk about this again.”

And before Maj-Gun has a chance to answer, say that she promises because she does of course (she promises something else at the same time in silence: that they, she and Susette, will never ever again under any circumstances whatsoever hang out in any way shape or form), Susette has looked up again and pointed at her stomach. Smiling, in the midst of everything, brought her finger to her mouth: “Sshhhhhh…”

And Maj-Gun, who idiotically, but almost as a reflex, thinks in that moment about pointing at her own stomach as well.

Oh no, still not. Remains an idea and then Susette says, “It is more than a month now. Tom and I. We’re going to get married and have a baby.”

Tom. That rascal—

But at the same time. Maj-Gun remembers. Solveig on the square. In Solveig’s eyes. “A wild pain.”

“Djess… Wow, Susette,” Maj-Gun quickly corrects herself, now you can say whatever you want, came pouring out like from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” almost grotesque but still. “Moving fast. At least he shaved off those awful cones on his cheeks, what were they—sideburns?”

Susette laughs. Yes yes, her suggestion, terrible, she has to admit.

And then in the middle of everything, an even bigger smile on her face, and it comes suddenly, almost like an exhalation.

“Oh, Maj-Gun. I remember you in the newsstand. Starling darling. How cuckoo so to speak.” She never forgets, she adds, with delight. As if it were a thousand years ago—“And how did it go again? Just because you’re a count—”

Maj-Gun thinks, hardened. She had reeled Susette in, on the square. Did not know what she was going to do with her. “It turned out wrong.”

“The Angels of Death,” “I’m fascinated by the Death inside her.” Tom Maalamaa, the rectory, their childhood. Then—rug rags…

She does not answer. What should she say? Cuckoo?

“Maj-Gun you could. Say everything so well. Starl—”

And then there is not much more, Susette suddenly grows quiet, they have started walking.

“My deepest condolences,” Susette says later, serious again.

“Me too,” Maj-Gun replies. “So Susette,” she has gotten ready, because the bad conscience has hit her again and hindered other thoughts, “you remember—how I could carry on. But I just wanted to say. That she, Liz, my aunt, was actually quite okay.”

“You’ve gotten thinner. Red suits you. I’m going to sell the apartment—”

But then they were already at the gate, had left the cemetery behind them.

And her brother there, Tom Maalamaa by his dark car in the parking lot. Regardless of how stupid it looked when he leaned against it, Maj-Gun is not able to contain herself; in the middle of everything she runs away from Susette, up to her brother, and practically throws her arms around his neck. “Congrats congrats, she told me,” whispered this, as if for that reason, that is, in other words, what the hug looks like.

“Hey, hey, Sis, careful…” But in reality, something else. Maybe like this: that both siblings, Maj-Gun, Tom, suddenly know something else too. Two children from the rectory, siblings, ruffled hair, uncomfortable wrinkled brows in the sun, pulled from inside the house, a summer day. Recently pulled from their activities inside the house. “Out into the fresh air, out out!”

After Hamba Hamba, the docklands in Borneo, hey Harlot there aren’t any harbors here, Hamba Hamba, anyway, clap clap, the Girl from Borneo—

Like a farewell, an end to childhood, farewell to this: that childhood, it stops here.

And Liz Maalamaa, the mask, it belonged here. Death, the Angel of Death, all of it. But still, is Maj-Gun the only one?—maybe, leads over into something else—

At the same time, a feeling, inexpressible: away, do not look back, pushes her face against Tom’s throat so long that it almost becomes cuckoo.

“Are you coming with us?” Susette is suddenly asking, is standing behind them.

“Nah,” Maj-Gun jumps back, shakes her head.

“I’m going with…” Whom is she going with? She will certainly get a ride from one of the other relatives and friends and so on to the reception in the fellowship hall.

“See you.”

“See you.”

And Maj-Gun is standing alone in a pretty much empty parking lot.

On the other hand. In a way too: idiot. Everyone has already left. But of course there is always, as her aunt Liz used to say, “the apostle’s horses.”

The apostle’s horses. Comfortable shoes. Missionary boots. You certainly get around that way too. Half a mile to the reception, the fellowship hall, she has started walking.

A few weeks later Maj-Gun travels to Portugal where she gives birth in September. She calls Solveig. Solveig comes, with her daughter Irene. She cannot keep the child. Solveig gets the child.

Come and see my gallery. A white wall in Portugal.

And then she studies law and is accepted into law school.