The Glitter Scene

THE SILVER PARTY SHOES

To the Winter Garden (Liz Maalamaa’s things): the Silver Party Shoes, made of strass, with a brooch. Purchased in Rio de Janeiro, 1952. She loved the shoes. Her party shoes. Liked dancing too. Sometimes.

Come and see my gallery. A white wall in Portugal. Liz Maalamaa’s gallery. Everything she held dear on the wall. Photographs, a brother, a family on a farm, a map of China. Portraits of her idols, black-and-white pictures, with autographs. Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner.

A postcard, two swans among other swans. Dick and Duck. And the godchildren, her brother’s children, several photos. Maj-Gun on a boat. Majjunn, as Liz Maalamaa always called her niece, in a sun hat, dress, laughing, looks happy. A child’s drawing. A woman with a mask. Represented her, the children’s aunt Liz. “To Liz from Majjunn.” The dogs of course. Handsome, Ransome: she had two. Expensive lapdogs, the first one died almost right away from a congenital condition, the other died ten years later after securing a happy life and old age under the aunt’s jacket.

The silver shoes on a podium. They are a memory, not even particularly worn. Liz Maalamaa, who comes from simple circumstances, is careful about dealing with things carefully.

TO ROSENGÅRDEN 2 (Tom Maalamaa, 2006)

THERE IS A CAR on its way into Rosengården 2. It has stopped at the gate, the chauffeur rolls down the window, punches in a code on the keypad, the right number, they are expected guests, okay okay, green light, the gate opens. Entrance road, November 2006, dark car, strong headlights that light up the deep, dark fall night.

“Courage.” Tom Maalamaa is the one who is driving, his wife is sitting next to him, just the two of them. Both children who are still living at home are home, with the aupairgirl Gertrude. In the new service residence on the other side of the city by the sea, a suburb, the diplomats’ area. They have recently arrived, just a few weeks ago, back in their homeland again. They are going to stay for a while, maybe even a few years; this appointment. The family has not lived in the house for many days, yet the husband, who is otherwise always a pillar of patience with his wife and the family in general, despite the fact that he has a lot on his mind when it comes to his job, had time to get irritated about the fact that the unpacking was taking so long, going at a snail’s pace, mess everywhere.

So it is nice to get out a bit, away, on an invitation. Maybe Tom Maalamaa says “courage” to his wife in the car for exactly that reason. His wife does not always like going out, spending time with other people, acquaintances, strangers, “keeping up appearances” or, like now, meeting some of his friends from way back when, during his time at university. Peter and Nellevi, both architects, whom it will be really nice to meet up with after so many years, now, here in the homeland where Tom Maalamaa with family has not lived in seventeen years. Even if it cannot be seen on her, the wife, that is. Susette Maalamaa never complains; that she can feel uncomfortable in the company of others is something only he, Tom, her husband, knows. Or feels, because they have not spoken about it very much.

Actually, Tom Maalamaa thinks in the car in Rosengården about his wife Susette, that there is a lot he does not know about her. But that is okay, as it should be. There are mysteries, air between people, especially the ones who are closest to you. He has a habit of saying that to his wife sometimes. She agrees, nods, smiles, looks at him, her beautiful eyes. Which he cannot “read”; her look. Still, even though it was many, many years ago, he can remember the time she came to him in his tiny bachelor pad in the center of the city by the sea. It was that year, 1989, when they met again after having been together for a short period as teenagers when they were both living in the District. That fall, somewhat earlier, he had, after many years, run into her anew at a disco in the city by the sea. Actually that time he had only seen her at a distance but it stirred something old in him to life. Strongly.

He called her a few times that fall and they had seen each other, fleetingly, at a café. She had been evasive, distant, and he already had time to think: disappointment. But then in November, that same fall, November 1989, one night, a telephone call from her: “You have to come.” And he had come, he had found her, picked her up. So still, because she was the one who had called, because of that attraction in her, in the end it was still she who had come to him.

Moving. Those eyes, of course. But also something else. There was, in other words, in all of her something appealing, in general. Had been there from the beginning, as a teenager. And at the same time, when you thought about it, with that word, determined it in that way in your head, it still turned out wrong. It was still something else.

Which maybe was something that could not be expressed in words, and it had always existed between them.

She and he, Susette and Tom: what had really started as a game during childhood, and not even an innocent game, one she really had not wanted to get involved in. But a game he had played with his sister Maj-Gun, in the rectory. A restless childhood, not on the outside, but maybe exactly for that reason, in peace and quiet, a certain frustration. They were two children who had, in some way, not really done themselves justice; there were growing pains of course, because it passed later. But there are children who are not in step, not with other children or with their childhood in general. In step with their childhood the way they expect it to be: often intelligent children, sensible—because only intelligent and sensitive children clearly sense such expectations from their surroundings. Especially unspoken expectations, and they can, these children, if they are keen, receptive, be petrified by them. Not difficult children, but calm ones: children without all that energetic spring inside them that would make it possible for them to rush away from all thoughts, feelings, revelations.

“That old age in us,” as his sister Maj-Gun said on the telephone later, when they had gotten back in touch with each other a bit. No intensive socializing, but sometimes telephone calls, sporadic. “Old age.” Hm. His sister Maj-Gun had, in and of herself, always been the older of the two of them, and far more dramatically minded. In that childhood, youth, she also had a way of going whole hog, trucking on until the bitter end. For example, a chapter, which the siblings had not touched with a single word afterward, also belonged to that time. The Day of Desire. The Happy Harlot. Hamba hamba. How his sister danced for him in his room in the rectory, hot summer days, inside, where it had been quiet and pleasant and cool alongside the hot, taxing summer day. Been the Happy Harlot from the docklands in Borneo. “There aren’t any docklands in Borneo, it’s just jungle,” he had of course soberly, precociously pointed out to his sister then already but still played along: clapped his hands in the dance, whistled, “like a sailor,” hamba hamba.

As a game it is silly, especially described in this way, in hindsight. But on the other hand, children, even siblings, sometimes play lightly erotic games with each other, that is normal. But he had, of course, felt ashamed afterward even back then, during his childhood, youth. And actually sometimes already while the game was going on thought it felt good to leave it behind and get out into the summer day—even if he later did not really know what he should help himself to there. Consequently, since an adult had literally chased both obstinate siblings from the room out into the fresh air: their mother, sometimes Aunt Liz who was often visiting at the rectory during that time despite the fact that she was married and living with her husband in another city. But her husband was violent, had drinking problems, and the aunt sometimes needed to get away and “rest.” The mother or the aunt would tear open the door to his room where he and his sister Maj-Gun were spending their time: “and now children out into the fresh air!” Well, as said, the irresoluteness continued out there in the yard but it still was not entirely stupid leaving the game and he had even been able to enjoy carrying out some punishment tasks he was allotted if he snuck in again, which he often did. Back to his room, alone, with a book. Closed the door, even for his sister then. Wanted to be alone, read Gustav Mahler’s biography. Cuckoo. He had not understood a bit of it of course: Mahler’s music says more about the nature of emotion than all philosophers.

But the aunt had often caught him red-handed and as a punishment for his disobedience he was forced to scrub the sink in the bathroom with a dish brush and detergent. Small, horrid paper edging to glue on the tiles above the same sink. “Remember to wash the washbasin after every use!!! That goes for Tom too!” That strip was taken down when the aunt went home again; Mama Inga-Britta had not wanted to hurt the aunt’s feelings while the aunt was there but she thought the paper edgings made the furnishings look terrible. And yes, maybe they did.

But the Day of Desire, the Happy Harlot. For Maj-Gun, his sister, the game had not remained in the room, at the rectory. She had to take it with her. To the Cemetery. And how Tom, her brother, had been ashamed, disgusted, been angry, angry at her—because at that time they had not even been children anymore, teenagers. His shame, his fury, had naturally just egged on his sister even more, though he truly understood that only afterward, as an adult. And how everything had become even worse for a while, combined with his sister’s jealousy when he got his first girlfriend and she, the sister, who in and of herself was always at loggerheads with him otherwise too, still had, as it were, become more alone and kept to herself. Had been a peculiar one among the teenagers in the District, a rather quiet one of course, nothing that reached the ears of the adults. How Maj-Gun Maalamaa “held court” at the cemetery. But inside her, no shame. It had been her idea from the beginning, she had held to that when he, her brother, in various ways, tried to explain to her the disgust he felt.

In any case. Gone. And they, he and Maj-Gun, as said, have set it aside, a long time ago. Nothing to talk about. And she is someone else now, a lawyer like him, and he can, for example, admire her because she left at the beginning of a brilliant career; quit her job at one of those awful family law firms, one of those with “a good reputation” that tend to be the very worst, and started working with law and justice for real, as the director of a legal assistance bureau in the northern region of the country. His sister, Maj-Gun. Another, but still the same. Because the Disgust. No. When he thought about it later sometimes, as an adult, he realized that it had for the most part been about him when they were young. That he had been ashamed and irritated on his own behalf. Because still, always, his sister: such a purity in her.

But despite everything, this should be interposed in the context: Tom Maalamaa has also sometimes felt a certain relief and gratefulness that his own children do not seem to take after either his sister or himself in that respect. Children completely of their time, in step with everything. The oldest, Karl-Olof, sixteen years old, badminton champion and fencing champion and soccer player and popular among his friends at the boarding school in Canada where he goes to school; like a fish in water, here, there, everywhere, and it is not hard won—is planning on beginning his studies in international relations and political theory at some esteemed university in the United States or England. And Mikael, the middle child, who when he was younger you might have worried a bit about: trouble concentrating at home, at school, not far from an ADHD diagnosis at one point—had suddenly on his own found an outlet for all of this extra energy and restlessness. Computer games. Now earns money from his hobby even though he is not more than fifteen years old: plays and tests games for a large gaming company. Yes yes, too good to be true, you can almost laugh, but it is true, is completely true. And then the youngest, Elizabeth Ida, named after the aunt, twelve years old but seems young for her age. How calm, how sweet, with her stuffed animals, her dolls, her small friends who visit her and whom she visits. Elizabeth Ida: not the center of the party but always invited to them, Little Miss Friendly, that type. Crawls up in her father’s lap in the evenings. He tells her stories. She, big eyed, listens. Well. They outgrow you too, the kids. Because the stories, Tom cannot help but break into a smile when he thinks about it more deeply. Stories: despite everything it has been quite a while ago now with Elizabeth Ida. How she, all of the kids, are growing, outgrowing you.

“I just want our children to be happy and well-balanced people,” his wife has a habit of saying sometimes. And Tom agrees. Small individuals, all of them. To see your children develop into that, a privilege. “Well-balanced.” Tom Maalamaa particularly likes hearing her, his wife, say that. Has always had a certain forgetfulness about her, a kind of absence, sometimes, like… not with major things—but the worst in that respect was when the children were younger and she forgot them in a park in Rio de Janeiro. Just forgot, came home, but there was something she had forgotten. After that they hired an aupairgirl: Sonja, Anna, and the last in a line for a few years, Gertrude.

But she cried after that, his wife, and how she had cried. It was that Sorrow which existed in her too that he had never really understood and gradually he was able to admit that to her openly as well; in the beginning he had a guilty conscience. “You don’t need to understand,” she once said, with that endless gentleness that exists within her. And it had been a relief, as said, and in some way, even though it sounded like the opposite but it was not, had brought him and his wife, Tom and Susette, even closer together. And she has gone to therapy, many years, and it has, according to herself, helped her.

But maybe it belongs to her character, to sometimes go somewhere else, as it were, to Sorrow’s Room, or whatever it is, maybe it is a part of their life together—of that unnamed bond that exists between two people who neither can nor want to live without each other. An integrated part of their way of being with each other, but unnamed—quite simply because there are no words for it. Like in Portugal, in the month of December 1989. They had spent a few weeks there, with the aunt who became ill and happened to pass away while they were visiting.

It was that month of December that they had started being together again, had found their way back to each other. She had cried then too, in Portugal, not come out into the sun where he had been, on the patio. But taken care of the aunt like an angel those last days, so in that way certainly been present in situations where presence is required; she had cried in spare moments and at night.

But when the aunt died there were other things to think about: everything that needed to be done, repatriation of the body, all of the practicalities, and then she had livened up again, jumped into it whole-heartedly. And when they had come home again she took a pregnancy test, it was positive, they have always spoken about their first child, Karl-Olof, as a love child who came to them, in Portugal.

But the Sorrow inside her—that was her word, though it is highly likely that it originated from the therapist, the therapists. Or “long-term depression,” but in that case he preferred the Sorrow, a sorrow with an element he referred to as appealing, which moved him so deeply it was almost terrifying.

“We met at the cemetery,” she would sometimes say, but with a laugh, because she could joke about her melancholy as well.

Which could of course still stir certain guilty feelings in him, even if his wife was not aware of it, even needed to be aware of it, all of the details surrounding it. In other words, that game which led to him getting to know her, during childhood. And how messed up he had been at that time. The game that started everything, another crazy one he and his sister Maj-Gun had, out of frustration, devoted themselves to as children, like dogs and cats they had been, running around together when they were not allowed to be at the rectory and he had not been able to sneak in again because his sister had pulled him with her, down to the cemetery, and had a mask with her—they called the mask “Liz Maalamaa,” “the Angel of Death,” or “Liz Maalamaa the Angel of Death.” Many names, though rather alike and secret. But papa Pastor, whom they needed to be kept hidden from most of all since the aunt was his sister, had of course in some way found out about them anyway and become furious. As if the complaints that reached him via the caretaker at the cemetery had not been enough: that his children were running around scaring people with the mask.

They had received the mask as a gift from the aunt, from there the nicknames. It was supposed to represent the face of a movie star, probably Ava Gardner, dark haired, sharp facial features, but the special and terrible thing about it was that when you strapped the mask to your face you looked terrifying—would become afraid if you saw yourself in the mirror.

Not the least bit funny, actually. Not the mask, not the secret names for it. So to speak when the aunt came up, he and his sister, lying on the bed in his room talking about all the money they would inherit from her, whose godchildren they were, after the aunt’s death; her husband had died at some point during that childhood, they had no children of their own and the husband had been tremendously rich.

As luck would have it no one had listened to him and his sister THEN. No one in the world because IT had been the height of childishness, a true manifestation of killing time in the musty summer day, without energy: that aunt, she had been okay, both siblings liked her despite her fervor for cleaning toilets when she came to visit the rectory and that she was so determined that instead of reading real bedtime stories she would sit on the edge of their beds one after the other and paint stories about various imaginary missionary exploits in China, “the wonderful Middle Kingdom”—where she had, as said, never been, despite the fact that the couple had traveled around the world several times with various fine cruise ships. Life is a cruise, she used to say; but then toward the end it had really gotten soiled, her husband’s final years, his spare time spent going back and forth on the Sweden–Finland ferry where he drank himself to death.

But Tom’s future wife, Susette born Packlén, had, in other words, been at the cemetery as a child, come there accompanied by her mother and brought flowers to the graves. Those eyes back then too—and somewhat later, as a teenager, she became his first girlfriend and he the first boyfriend for her too.

But wait now, first this. The Angel of Death. That was what they had called her. He and his sister Maj-Gun, when they were together. The girl who came to the cemetery with her mother, with flowers they had picked from the meadow that became the new side of the cemetery later on. The girl who filled jars with water at the water hydrant, placed the flowers in them. Big eyes. “Have you seen those globes?” he asked his sister. “Should we scare her?” And she galloped ahead, his sister, and he followed after her. Wearing the mask—but the girl was not afraid. Maj-Gun said to him later, “Death is not afraid of Death,” and they laughed. That is why she had for a time in private been called the Angel of Death by the two siblings. But he had of course too, in private, alone, without saying anything to his sister, immediately taken a liking to the girl with the big eyes. Not because of the Angel of Death, but because of who she was. Calm, a bit lost. Something steady in here, anyway. And a few years later he started dating her.

“I’m fascinated by the Death in her,” he had admittedly solemnly recited back then for his jealous sister, which he actually had not meant a word of. Because he had been embarrassed of course, shy. In the presence of everyone. In the presence of himself. The infatuation. Which there had been no words for. Then not inside him in any case And, dear Lord. What an unbearable person he had been, in public. What could be seen of him. As a person. “Old age,” which Maj-Gun talks about. Yes, yes, certainly.

Had gone around wearing a suit and a tie in school and a bow tie at festive occasions and cuff links and the like. God knows why. It had not exactly brought him closer to “friends” his own age at school for example. Not rejected, bullied, just off to the side. As if he wanted to, in some way, prove a point about something, but what this point was would be unclear, completely hidden in the mist, which would have been completely clear if someone had pushed him up against a wall and asked about it in detail—or “interrogated,” which is how he certainly personally would have described the matter at that time. No one had done so, none of his classmates exactly enjoyed getting into a discussion with him: he could debate, follow a line of reasoning, already then. In a way that was truly overbearing too, an overbearance that he would consciously eliminate when he got to the university. It had been easy. On the other hand, he found his place then and was so much more content with life and with himself, in general. Was incredibly interested in his studies from the beginning, it was also something that swallowed him up. So the smugness had disappeared; he knew what he was going to do, and now instead perhaps a bit exaggeratedly but still, almost a humility, a leniency started revealing itself in him. He could move and carry himself in company, deal with people which, granted, had carried and would continue to carry him far in his career.

But “I’m fascinated by the Death in her.” His solemn words to his sister at the rectory. He could barely think about it now. Of course he had not said it to poor Susette personally, not then and not ever. That would certainly have scared the life out of her from the beginning—or no, incidentally, despite that appeal, that Sorrow, whatever it was, there was something in her that did not yield. But it would without a doubt have called forth a coloring in their relationship from the beginning, transformed it into something it was not.

There as teenagers in his room at the rectory they had listened to music. Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. He remembers that, truly, even if he does not want to. Those pretentions in him. During the pauses he had spoken when the record was finished playing. Not many words as luck would have it, which quite simply also depended on his rather great shyness and strong timidity. He had not known, of course, what he should say to her, just wanted to be with her, so much. But what had come out of his mouth, however spare, insufferable. “Consciousness of life” and “consciousness of death,” which were united in an “intricate way” in Mahler’s Ninth, which was playing on and off on the record player. “Gustav Mahler’s music says more about the nature of emotion than all philosophers.” Elegant? Terrible. And maybe she had understood that intuitively, nodded (but submissively), absent as it were but still agreeing, in other words. But sought to be closer to him, his body, like a kitten.

Was this romantic? “All of us were young once.” And that fumbling, clumsiness. Yes, he could think like that. But he has still never been able to listen to Gustav Mahler after that.

And will never—incidentally—listen to Gustav Mahler again. With Susette they do not listen to very much music, have never done so. Sometimes they go out dancing. Just the two of them, she and he. Tango, salsa, Latin. Transformed in the dance. Good together. And the nights afterward.

That night 1989, seventeen years ago, when they started being together again, for real, in reality, she had called him. He had driven through the darkness after her, the same time of year, the same darkness, as now. But in snow. Here, now, no snow, just black black on the ground, everywhere. An appalling whirl of snow then and she had said on the telephone that she did not know where she was, but was on a road, and had been very upset, he had to come after her. Had been difficult to find out exactly where she was, but he had not hesitated for a second. Borrowed a former classmate’s car—Peter Bäckström’s, incidentally, the one they are going to visit now, and his family in Rosengården 2 where they are driving down the avenues to the right address—and yes, he, Tom, had found her in the end.

That night when he had picked her up in the snow, on the side of the road, in this area (as said, she was also from here, so that was not strange), and seen her, a small figure with a Fjällräven backpack on the side of the road in the snow, in the light of the headlights, he had known not only that she had been found, but he as well.

And not many words were needed after that, that had been clear. She had tried to speak, said, “I’ll do everything for you. I’ll—” Repay? No, she had not said it like that, not that word, there were no complicated words like that inside her, had never been, and also, for that reason, how he loved loves her.

But that had been her message, she was worn out: bloody, beaten, but appealed quietly and determined for a promise that he would never ask about it—but, she pointed out, no one had done anything to her. She would go to therapy, never talk about what happened, otherwise. Otherwise she would not be able to… live?

She had not needed to say that. He had promised, just as silently. And it had been clear. He had thought it would be good for her and for both of them to get away for a while. Thought about his aunt, in Portugal, who often wrote and invited him but he had not visited, had not had time; in and of itself had not had time then either, but he had been able to arrange the leave from work. The aunt was also sick, of course, needed help. “I know where we’re going!” he said to his fiancée Susette Packlén who was going to become a Maalamaa and have a child with him already that next year at the same time and then they would be living in New York, his first lengthy foreign assignment. “We’ll go to Portugal!” And she became as happy as a child too because she had never been abroad really and the aunt had also sounded happy on the phone and immediately wired money for the airline tickets, and shortly thereafter Tom and Susette were sitting on a plane, flying above the clouds in the beautiful clear air, her pale skin, her tired eyes—but held his hand, as said, those attacks of sorrow and melancholy were not over, of course, it would periodically be difficult in Portugal as well. But the main thing was the direction, the will, the approach, and he had not needed to say it out loud like when he held a speech for work, lay out the direction, the approach—this was without words, she knew. “Ja sieltä ei sit tuoda mitään ruumiita Kotiin / and then no corpses are brought home from there,” someone in the row behind them on the plane had said, vacationers in a vacationing mood who were describing how they had been let off by friends from their hometown when they were going on their first charter, country bumpkins among country bumpkins who had never been anywhere who clapped their hands when the plane took off, cheers!, in red wine and beer and sangria! No corpses. Ironic maybe, amusing, because it turned out that way when, roughly a month later, Tom Maalamaa and Susette returned to the homeland it was in connection with the repatriation of a corpse: the aunt who had died while they were there visiting her. A difficult time, a lot to take care of those final days in Portugal, so it had not exactly turned out as they thought it would. But Susette, his future wife, mother to his three children, had been invaluable, and still, also, as if the hardships involved with everything that needed to be arranged down there in Portugal and later with the funeral in the homeland only brought them closer together.

And—this is becoming long now, when Tom Maalamaa is driving with his wife down the avenues of Rosengården 2, this November evening 2006, a Thursday.

“Courage,” he says to his wife, takes her hand in his, maybe thinks she is nervous about tonight, his old university friends… or maybe he takes that hand because he has a bad conscience because he has, the entire afternoon, earlier in the evening, up until now, been rather grumpy and cross. About the mess at home, and the new workplace, chaos there too: that is what it is always like arriving in new places, he certainly knows that, should be used to it after so many years. But he had shouted and carried on, and that is why they have been quiet the entire drive from their home to Rosengården 2. For example not spoken about any “dear” old memories that both of them, together, separately, could have from these places, the District, after all they are both from here. Here, where Rosengården 2 now exists, it did not exist back then. This striking, luxurious—almost absurd—development in the middle of what once was a wood where Mama Inga-Britta used to pick mushrooms and cloudberries, lingonberries, rowanberries with the Nature Friends. And possibly somewhat exaggerated this peachy keenness, but “architectural dreams are architectural dreams,” which, for example, is something that Tom Maalamaa under normal circumstances certainly might have said here in the car, with a small bitonality too, though well-balanced because the Bäckströms and certainly many of the others who live here are his friends of course, if not now, then they will be; he has that kind of a job, lives a lot on “contacts.” Still, it is something grotesque, something almost frivolous, amoral. No, not because it would have been showing off—a lot of, as it were, too much of a good thing and Dallas, money&poortaste, but exactly because it is not that, PLUS the money that exists but cannot be seen cannot be seen cannot be seen… the style, all of the good taste, so perfect AND being enclosed, fenced in. Seen as a metaphor the irony of all this had of course not been wasted on him either. These people, these enclosures, these people inside their personally staked-out borders—people just like him, who always have the best, as well as education and class and taste and civilization and the best schools and universities and the power, on their side—how, for example, they can still carry out good deeds there, as he does in the service of mankind. And in contrast to those who have only money, he also has the power of language: can reason well, about almost anything, also their own shortcomings and this grotesqueness which, after all, it is. But with his own quick phrases he can also win people over so that it sounds not only plausible but also something worth striving for. “Here you can say anything as long as it sounds good.” That feeling.

The irony naturally also applies to what he sees in his job: the other, “the other side,” those lacking legal rights. So too, him personally. And in contrast to what his sister Maj-Gun once thought, he takes his job seriously, what he does—the difficulty then is that it always becomes pompous when you are talking about it. He actually does not like hearing his own voice at all, going on and on about justice and equality in the world. But he likes what he gets accomplished, what he does.

Well, philosophers. He, Tom, can get carried away too, like papa Pastor in the church when he gets started and talks, talks. As luck would have it, his wife Susette Packlén does not have a predisposition for philosophizing, either to philosophize or to listen to the outlays of others. So it has therefore always been nice to come home, to her, the kids, the family, and just be something else, turn things off. And sometimes, as said, the two of them go out dancing.

But this day in particular he, in other words, became furious when he came home—or had already been before, at work, but he lost his self-control first at home and quite simply made a racket. And therefore, as a result of just this mess, Tom Maalamaa has, this afternoon, this evening in particular, not had his telephone on and not been able to take the phone calls, the phone calls from his sister Maj-Gun who tried calling many times—and who is now, without his knowledge, right here in the area, exactly right now, this evening, at this point in time. In the Winter Garden, or on the field, or in the woods. The Boundary Woods—below Rosengården 2, its large enclosures, at the edge of the woods, below the Glitter Scene, with her daughter, which he also does not know she has, her name is Johanna.

On the other hand: if he had the opportunity to speak to his sister, then you can ask yourself, would anything have been different as a result of this conversation in particular? Highly unlikely, because his sister Maj-Gun would not have been able to say anything about everything she needs to say to him on the telephone. They would most likely have arranged a meeting, later. Met for example the following day—it is important but too terrible to speak about on the phone—at some café. As soon as possible, but not soon enough. Because then, in any case, everything that will happen this night would already have happened, it would already in all ways be too late.

His sister will know that as well, certainly. Because what she has to say almost takes her breath away, it is so great.

But as said, Tom Maalamaa has not had his telephone on. He usually always has his telephone on. But earlier that day there was something with the telephone lines at work: the new telephone system, the computer integration in it—one big chaos there and chaos when he came home: moving boxes, cardboard boxes everywhere. Of course these urgent phone calls for work are not directly connected to his own separate private telephone but the problems today have certainly affected his attitude toward telephones in general so that he, after a day of working, in one moment of fury and complete frustration, angry at his phone, turned it off at home in his own bathroom.

After he has, in other words, yelled at his wife, screamed at the aupairgirl Gertrude and even at twelve-year-old Elizabeth Ida, who unlike his wife does not answer back, just looks at him with her big eyes, in contrast to Gertrude, who produces long shrill harangues in French, German, and with assistance Italian as well, if she gets insulted. Which she has been this late afternoon and develops a cacophony of everything, and Tom Maalamaa from his Service of Mankind stood there and battled with the Swiss she learned at the nice private schools and secretarial institutions (oh no, there aren’t any Sri Lankan domestic servants in this household) with complete self-control. And handle things with great care, it does not say things or great on the boxes with the sherry glasses that he fumbles down from the dining room table, craaasssh; it says HANDLE WITH CARE, but he sees the sentence in his head in that way, for some meaningless reason. Well, glass like glass, sherry glasses, wineglasses, china cups, a fine china, can always be bought new but then it has already been way too much, over the edge, and he felt ashamed inside like a dog on the one hand, on the other hand he still barked like the same dog on the outside. For a while. So. Away from here: such an impulse and he went to the bathroom. Where the telephone in the pocket of his blazer started ringing and the name on the display was not the name of one of his golf buddies (he does not like golf, but sometimes you have to play golf, go and bond, he has golfed with cannibalistic dictators and played cricket with terrorist leaders in India; well-brought-up boys from good schools too, besides)—rather from the Head Office! Not the one that is his superior in this country, but another one, the only other one—the Head Office that was and is the entire goal and direction of his career, that level, which he thought he still had a ways to go to get to, now wanted to get in touch with him. But he stood in the bathroom in his own home, overwhelmed by his own rage, and looked at that, stared at it, damned telephone, angry angry at it because he suddenly understood not only that he should answer but that he WANTS to answer but cannot due to the fury still pounding at his temples, it is too great, he is not capable of getting himself together, which rarely happens, he is usually always able to get it together. So he did not answer, it stopped ringing, he turned it off, put it in the pocket of his blazer, and then first calmed down, took care of business, and carefully washed his face with ice-cold water for a good while.

Ashamed like a dog and mellow mellow. But that energy inside him: if there had been a fresh brush set out ready in the bathroom, which there had once been in the rectory and the Coral washing powder in a glass jar “Goes for Tom too!” he certainly, out of regret and frustration, would have scrubbed and scrubbed the sink shiny with it.

But, the avenue now, Rosengården 2, they are almost there. “Courage.” “I’m not afraid.” Her hand. In his hand. Handle things with great care. This turned out to be long.

But it has to be, long, this. And still, these thoughts, ideas, maybe only a distillation of an entire story too long to fit into the few minutes between an entrance gate to a large house in a fantastic location just a third of a mile away. Of everything possible, everything, he had wanted, wants, should have said to her. Which he will always think about, the rest of his life, afterward.

It has to be long. Eternally ongoing. It is, has been, his explanation of love for her.

Her eyes, “I’m not afraid.” The Sorrow, an appeal? What it is. In her. No, he cannot find the words for it. Cannot. But he has loved her, he loves her, for it. The unknown in her, because of the question mark. And, in contrast to what his sister once thought, he is not very preoccupied with fine-tuning pretty formulations that run out of his head like water, a tap, or like diarrhea, when he is going to hold a speech, debate, he can certainly debate, “You can say anything here as long as it sounds good.”

The opposite. Here. Susette. His wife. A love that simply makes him defenseless, and mute.

Later, he will wish for a great deal, about talking, in the car, that bit to Rosengården 2, that that night some kind of dialogue between him and his wife had played out, a dialogue that could have gone something like this:

“What are you thinking about?” she would have asked suddenly, since they had been sitting in silence the entire car ride.

“I’m thinking,” he would have replied, “about us. About everything.”

“What do you mean?” she would have said but with poorly concealed happy surprise. Despite the fact that she usually does not engage in disputes with him, she has always been good at sulking and keeping quiet and then, when you are going to make up, he has always been the one who has started speaking, spoken his way forward the entire way—but then, despite the fact that she does not want to show it, she has of course become happy.

And then he would have placed his hand on her hand, which he had also done in reality, despite the fact that he had not said any of it, here in the car, on the avenues in Rosengården 2, and she would have taken his hand, held it, as she also does, for real.

“I like it when we dance together,” he would have said.

“Yes,” she would have answered. “I do too.”

And as if it were… or it is, this snippet of a conversation that was never held but that existed anyway, silence between them, which makes it so that despite the fact that he, in the entire future, will have facts and laws and justice against him, there will always be a figure inside him who will never believe what they accuse her of after her death.

They have arrived now. At the right address. Get out. He discovers the small shoe bag with the silver shoes in the backseat, the party shoes, she has remembered them. Liz Maalamaa’s party shoes, strass, with a brooch, fifties model, small heel, which he and Susette had taken with them as a memento from Portugal, seventeen years ago. He liked them back then already, how they had fit her perfectly.

“Don’t forget—”

He will always remember the shoes, the silver sandals in the backseat, and her, her eyes, all of her, when he handed them to her.

“Courage,” he says. She laughs a little, everything is okay. And how she takes the silver sandals he hands to her, he has loved, loves her.

THE GLITTER SCENE (Susette in landscape, 2006)

THIS, FIRST, is shorter. Suddenly on the avenues, in Rosengården 2, in the darkness, in the car after the entrance and the gate that has closed behind her, she recognizes where she is.

Maybe it is something with the trees, the same trees in straight lines along the road, as if they had always been there. And the tall houses, several stories, despite the fact that there is a light on in almost every window, which there was not then. Remembers. Tabula rasa. Being nothing, and new. That possibility. Spinning around around in the avenues, one fall day, sunshine then.

My love, my life, around around, nothing and new.

She remembers a feeling, a body, her body, her skin, the skin on her wrist, patinated by the summer and the sun and the scrubbing of windows on a veranda called the Winter Garden in the Glass House, the French family’s summerhouse, on the Second Cape. Standing high on a ladder wedged between rocks on the beach, scrubbing scrubbing, hating the sea like a secret, not looking up not looking down, a cat meowing on the cliffs, long haired and white.

“I’m only twenty-nine after all”: pulling her nails across her dry summer skin, white powder stripes on the skin.

Twenty-nine years, she never became any older. Has never become. And: as if she has never been anywhere else but here.

Jump, jump, in the avenues. A small baby, a baby bird under her jacket, love, life. My love, my life, hop crow, hop sparrow—

“You have arrived at your destination,” says the woman’s voice on the navigator, the engine stops. The navigator lady has a name, Gertrude, named after the aupairgirl. “Oh, Gertrude.” They have a habit of saying that, she and her husband, in the car sometimes, even though that lady on the navigator actually has a different name, now she does not remember what it is.

But: a private joke they have, because Gertrude, their Gertrude, can undeniably maintain order and navigate the family’s sometimes chaotic life filled with children and many residences around the world and a great deal of keeping up appearances. What would we do without Gertrude? is the question they often seriously ask themselves and each other.

Gertrude who steers and arranges with the same calm voice as the navigator in the car—except when she gets angry, of course; then she roooars, and she has done so today, the aupairgirl’s terrible scream that Susette still has ringing in her ears. Despite the fact that it has not been anyone else’s fault but hers, Gertrude’s, that a bunch of fragile glass was sitting in an unpacked box in an open box in the wrong place in the new residence where the family had just moved from abroad and that Tom, who had been in an unusually bad mood and had come home earlier than usual from his job, managed to knock down on the floor by accident so CRASH, a lot of invaluable drinking glasses broken into thousands of pieces.

So Gertrude, she does not always find the right path, does not always navigate correctly. And she has that in common with the lady in the navigator: suddenly ending up in the middle of a winery somewhere in Germany just because she has directed you there—it must have been the previous summer? “Oh Gertrude, Oh Gertrude.” Tom had laughed in the middle of the jungle of vines and suddenly the embittered German wine farmer with the rifle on the little road in front of them, “an auf hinter zwischen wir sind turisten,” pretended not to speak the language so that things would not get any worse. “Grüss Gott.” An amusing family memory, pointing with the tip of the rifle, but they had gotten out in one piece.

“Make a U-turn,” Susette says out loud in the car in Rosengården 2 suddenly alarmed by the strange merriment growing inside her. Hop crow, sparrow, CRASH, tabula rasa. But “courage,” her husband Tom said a little while ago, while they were still driving down the avenues, he had taken her hand, it had calmed her down and calms her, a little, now. But she has not been afraid, and besides, he certainly wants to make up after the scene at home earlier. And of course: when she says that about the U-turn Tom does not hear it, even as a joke. He has already gotten out of the car and is on his way to the other side to open the door for her. Then, briefly, almost simultaneously, it quickly rushes through Susette’s head that she has forgotten to tell him that surprisingly his sister Maj-Gun came by the new home that day for a visit. And that Maj-Gun sends her greetings to him—or does she? Now Susette does not remember exactly how it was, also not exactly what was said between her and Maj-Gun, so to speak. Just a bad feeling, and a complete feeling of alienation, nonconnection. Red and slender, after the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible, a person like that, new.

But Susette did not have the intention of hiding from her husband that Maj-Gun had stopped by that day. There just has not, during the afternoon and evening up until now, been an appropriate time to mention it: Gertrude and Tom had been shouting at each other.

And now. No turning back. They are there, here. And Susette: never anywhere but here. Never more than twenty-nine; there. Tom Maalamaa opens the door, she steps out.

“Don’t forget.” He discovers the shoe bag with the silver shoes in the backseat. “Thank you.”

And then she drifts away again. Forever. Everything else disappears now. Never anywhere but here. Never more than twenty-nine. The silver shoes. Tabula rasa.

To the house that is beaming; they have stepped into the house.

Also here she has recognized where she is, but no longer a surprise. Italian granite on the ground floor. And crash! Yes, that house. In other respects, foreign.

“Peter, Nellevi.” Laughter. Naturally your name cannot be Nellevi nor can it be Susette either. A name from a tabloid, a serial Susette and love.

“So nice.”

A daughter. Ulla. Talented. Oh oh oh. “The theater, the dance, the music… a band called Screaming Toys.”

Headstrong. Does not come downstairs.

“ULLAAAA! Ulla is sulking. Temperamental. Artistic temperament—ULLAAA!” resounds through the house. “Peter also has a good singing voice,” the wife, Nellevi, laughs.

ULLLAA! Susette’s ears temporarily become deaf.

“Oh well, to the oysters. When she’s done sulking. Ulla loves oysters.”

“I CAAAAAN HEEEAAR YOU! LAAATER!”

A voice from upstairs. The voice cracks everything. Absurd, immense. Like from the abyss.

“Ulla is talented.”

“Are you cold?”

Tom Maalamaa puts his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Nono.

The living room, the kitchen… beautiful view. You see: the Winter Garden. Like a blaze of light, strong, farther away. Light over the trees as well, part of the road.

The Winter Garden. The Rita Strange Corporation.

In the living room, the sofa.

“We knew each other. From the Rita Strange Corporation. The Winter Garden. Was going to be magnificent. Wasn’t. An idea. Became something else.”

“Architectural dreams.”

“Ho-ho, Tom.” Peter Bäckström laughs. Tom, like himself.

These people, Peter and Nellevi, are also in the “business,” of course, architects, both of them.

But she, Susette, as mentioned, actually, she is not listening. Is not really even there. Twenty-nine years old, never got any older. Rosengården 2, her Rosengården. Recognizes and recognizes.

She gets up.

“The bathroom is upstairs, one floor.”

I know. She mumbles, quietly, to herself. Already on the stairs then.

“The American girl.” A black-and-white poster on the wall in the bathroom.

The girl on a cliff, her hair flowing, flying. She is going to fall.

Black-and-white photography on the poster, matches the decor. White tiles, black trim. THAT was what it was like then. Otherwise she does not look at the picture. An old story. Neither it nor the old theater poster says anything to her.

She steps out. Not back to the others, but up the stairs, landings. The third landing. There they are. The rabbits.

She is here. Has never been anywhere else.

And farther, quickly up the small stairs, to the attic room. The door is slightly ajar, but she sees, before she sneaks in, THE GLITTER SCENE in glittery letters, on a plaque on the door.

And Susette in landscape here again. The same room, the empty room, fall 1989, before everything. The duality NOW, still, full empty full empty, the old new at the same time, everything here: Susette on the Glitter Scene.

And it is windy on the Glitter Scene. The door has been standing open as said, but wedged fast with a small piece of wood, because you notice the draft when you come in. Because of the glass door at the other end, the one that was part of the large window and could not be opened, is open all the way. Cold late fall weather wells into the room.

The girl is standing in the opening. Not far from the edge, many feet of open fall down. All the openness.

The girl, the daughter, Ulla Bäckström, in white, with her back facing the room. A great mane of hair falling over her shoulders, long white skirt flapping around her legs.

Does not notice Susette in the door opening.

Susette who has taken off the silver shoes, left them at the door to the room. And tippytoe, an old thieflike merriment now completely unstoppable, tippytoe tippytoe, sneaks onto the stage carefully, into the room, the greatness.

The empty landscape/the Glitter Scene. A room where there is nothing and everything.

And EVERYTHING. Theater things, books, papers, manuscripts. Musical instruments and clothes, more clothes, ordinary clothes, dress-up clothes, on racks along the walls or in piles on the floor, notes, bags, shoes, and things, things.

Pictures on the wall, art, posters: Screaming Toys.

And: the American girl, the same poster here too. And other posters, theater performances: Singin’ in the Rain, Miss Julie, among others. The same girl, the theater, the dancing, the music, the same name, Ulla Bäckström, on all of them.

But here, still, you might think that at least something would stir something to life inside Susette, a connection, shake her, to something else. The American girl. That old story. Which was Maj-Gun Maalamaa’s story. The one about the Boy in the woods, which she went on about.

Maj-Gun at the newsstand, kiss kiss kiss, red sticky lips, glitter. But nah, does not stir anything. Maj-Gun does not exist. “We are two Angels of Death.” Which she said once. But nah. We. Are nothing. Maj-Gun had stopped existing. They have seen each other today, earlier in the day. The Red One. Another. No connection. Rather Majjunn Majjunn, but for Susette it is something else, has always been: a sound in her head.

I am, in other words, alone here on the Glitter Scene.

So: stirs nothing. Nothing nothing, which might also depend on the multitude, EVERYTHING here. So much, too much, incentive and things, messages, impressions. Takes herself out. Becomes: mute.

Susette does not see them. She is inside the old emptiness but here there is no connection between now and then, the one and the other.

“ULLLAAAAA!”

She hears that. That scream. Is standing in the middle of the room and wishes the father downstairs would stop yelling.

“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!” The girl at the open glass door in the panorama window suddenly turns around and yells in toward the room, with everything she can muster too. That enormous voice which sounds even more grand and more special up here. Not surprising that she likes screaming up here.

Right in her face. That is how the girl becomes aware of Susette. Has turned around in the middle of everything and, as it turns out, she screams at Susette! About fifteen feet away from her right in her face.

Which is of course comical; the girl, a bit surprised at first, but not so much, starts laughing. “Hi. Who are you? Our guests?” Susette nods and introduces herself and the girl says that she is Ulla Bäckström and runs past Susette to the door at the other end and yells down the stairs one more time: “I just saaaid I waaas coommmiiing!”

Then she closes the door. Takes the wedge out and the two of them are alone up there.

“Ah and then we were rid of him. Dad, he’s great, but he can be so naggy.

“It’s like this some evenings,” the girl continues. “You need to be alone and… think. In a strange mood. Can you keep a secret?”

Ulla Bäckström puts a finger over her lips and peers mischievously at Susette. “You’ll understand. I’m not allowed to have this door open”—the glass door. “Papa confiscated the key when he found out but I confiscated it back, he has no idea. But, it isn’t always like this. Just sometimes. Certain nights. Standing there, in the wind, above everything, thinking. I usually think. About everything that is going on. About everything that is going to end. Mortality. In the midst of everything beautiful. On the edge. Do you understand?”

Susette nods, of course, even though she really is not listening, cannot manage to focus. But the girl in the middle of the room in front of her, still, silencing. Those white clothes, the skirt, the ankle boots with a heel, and in her hair, which is swelling around her face, small metal insects: they are butterflies, in different colors, glittering in the sharp light from the ceiling that falls over her like a spotlight. The Glitter Scene. That is how it is. Of course. And the girl who on the one hand is like from outer space but on the other is fully conscious of the effect she has on people.

Still: a child. Like her own children. But Susette is not thinking like that. All of that is gone now, she is tabula rasa, she would not be able to be here otherwise. The emptiness here, her emptiness, and the girl, shining, shimmering, in the middle of it. It is confusing.

“Isn’t it great up here?” The girl looks around her own room. “I have everything here! And look. What I got today. In the Winter Garden.”

It is a mask she is putting on. It is that mask.

That stirs a feeling of recognition. The girl, with the mask on, suddenly hisses, almost humorously, theatrically: “I am the Angel of Death. Liz Maalamaa.”

That is the connection.

Still, Susette is not surprised. Strange, absurd, but like a dream is strange, absurd. And Ulla Bäckström says, “Come,” and pulls Susette with her toward the open glass door. They stand there and look out over the darkness, far away there is an island of bright light, before the sea. “The Winter Garden there. How it is shining. Do you know the Winter Garden?”

Susette does not answer, maybe she knows, she does not remember. Everything is familiar and foreign.

“I am the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa!” The girl is suddenly standing there screaming out into the open, into the darkness. To the wind, out into everywhere that cannot be seen. Toward that Winter Garden by the sea, even farther out, there, solitary dots of light, a ship, a lighthouse.

Susette Maalamaa does not like the scream, she jumps back, steps back into the room.

“What is it? Do you want to try on the mask?” The girl comes toward her laughing and Susette puts the mask on, it is just a game after all, just a game, kiss kiss kiss, merry, tippytoe, tabula rasa, clings to it. And: nothing else happened, she never became older than twenty-nine. Be nothing, new, that possibility, spinning around around in the avenues, small playful kitty cat.

She is standing in the middle of the room, wearing the mask, the girl is dancing around her.

“The Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa!” the girl calls to Susette. “Here, come and take me! Grab on…”

But do not scream. Quiet now. But the girl has gotten started, does not grow quiet. And the girl walks toward the window, come come come. And calls, but QUIET now.

The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again.

And Susette cannot hear that, she walks straight toward the girl in the opening now against the wind QUIET now, and pushes the girl—

The girl falls. A quiet fall, it is quiet. Maybe it is the surprise. And in the distance: flames jump up from the Winter Garden.

“Look! The Winter Garden is on fire!” Both of them saw that. The girl who turned around at the last moment—but then she just fell, quietly.

And yes. The Winter Garden is burning. What a scene. Susette in the opening. Something she has forgotten.

That impossibility. All impossibility.

Flames in front of her eyes. Rug rags.

“Mama, where is the loom? The rug weaver?”

Susette on the rocks. Lambada, among rags, like once, at a disco.

She has closed the door and turned around. Walked back across the floor, left the room. Puts on her silver shoes again, they are standing where she left them just inside the door where she, just a minute or so ago, walked over the wooden floor to where the girl was at the other end, in white skirts. But the girl, where is the girl now?

Torn a small hole in the heel of her bone-colored panty hose. A small splinter in her skin, it is bleeding just a little. But she is used to blood, it is not dangerous, she has Band-Aids in her purse, Band-Aids, bandages, you have to be well prepared when you have children.

Leaves the room, goes downstairs again, to the laughter, the socializing. On the stairs she realizes that she has the mask on, takes it off.

“Where were you?” Tom Maalamaa asks when she sits down next to him on the sofa in the bright living room.

“Up there.”

But now she is neither here, there, swinging a bit. Flames in front of her eyes.

“Did you see Ulla? She loves oysters. They will be served shortly.”

The father who is asking and making an attempt at starting to call for the girl again, with that terrible voice.

“I think she’s sleeping,” Susette says quickly in order to avoid hearing the scream.

“Sleeping?”

“Looked that way.”

“She was just awake. Ulla usually never sleeps. She’s hyperactive.”

Peter Bäckström laughs, as if calmed by his own explanation because for just a moment he became a bit strange because of Susette Maalamaa. Oysters, Ulla comes to the oysters: he goes to get more wine from the kitchen.

Tom Maalamaa touches her hand.

“You’re so cold. Have you been outside? What do you have in your hand?”

Everyone looks at what she has in her hand.

“One of Ulla’s thousand toys. It’s like the attic of a theater up there. You were there? Ulla loves the theater. A mask. Let’s have a look.” Nellevi takes the mask Susette hands to her, laughs.

Tom Maalamaa does not laugh.

Nellevi puts the mask on. Buhuu.

Peter Bäckström calls from the kitchen that the Winter Garden is on fire.

Everyone rushes up, around. The Winter Garden is burning, can be seen from the kitchen. But Nellevi does not run there but up the stairs to her daughter’s room. “Ulla!” Maybe it is an instinct during times of danger. Susette knows that instinct well, she is a mother too after all.

She has three children, and in the empty living room where she has been left alone because Tom Maalamaa also ran out to the kitchen, she should start thinking about these children—their ages, abilities, characteristics. If someone were left, but no one is left, nor she.

The mother’s screeeaaamm from the Glitter Scene, throughout the entire house.

Then Susette is no longer in the house anymore. She has taken her coat in the hall and is walking down the avenues where she once walked and where she is walking now, twenty-nine years old, never became any older. It is dark, the silver shoes, the gates are closed. But you can get out from the inside, but not in from the outside, as if she did not know this. This is the future. Solveig on the avenues. You don’t need to see with the Eyes of the Old.

No. But the impossibility. Susette hurries on.

Because she has forgotten something. And how long, almost an entire life.

“Mama, where is the loom?”

LOOM, AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF FLAMES (Susette at the house in the darker part, the Boundary Woods, 2006)

HERE IT IS. Susette in the Boundary Woods, she has run there and onto some path and ended up at a strange, empty, dark, decomposing house; it is the house in the darker part. A basement window, flames in front of her eyes, lighting up the guts, she peers in. Flames and there it is rising up, taking up the entire basement. Loom, against a background of flames.

And fabric hanging over it and around it like scraps. All sorts of fabric, silk fabric, ordinary fabric, rag scrap, velvet, linen—entire large layers and strips, loom lengths.

Sees the loom. She does not get there.

Sirens, ambulances, fire trucks, Spanish wolfhounds.

But at father’s deathbed it was like this. He was on his way away and needed to go and find peace, you could see that. “Sleep now, dear father. You will get to rest soon.” But her mother who was crying and shouting, “Don’t go! Come back!” “But, Mama—”If you’re going to leave then you’re going to leave, it’s unavoidable. Then you have to be allowed to do it peacefully and with love, surrounded by your loved ones, not filled with anxiety about having to leave. And there at the hospital, the final minutes, they had already taken all the tubes out of him so that it had not been Susette or he who had personally decided he was going to pass away right then.

It had been at home in the house after the funeral that Susette tried to explain that to her mother. Because suddenly, when they were alone again, the brothers with their families gone home, her mother in the kitchen furious at her, Susette. Because she had not stood next to her father’s deathbed where it had just been the two of them and called her father back. Not called together with her mother that he should not leave—

“You let him go. You let him go away.” Her mother had said that, of course not: “it was your fault Susette,” it would have been too much. Her mother understood that too, of course, because somewhere, at that time, she still had a certain mind for the possible and impossible. She was still also active in her position at the bank, even if she had been forced to go down to part-time due to her husband’s illness and also not had time for her position as secretary of the Bankers’ Employee Club. But in any case: if you deal with money, particularly other people’s money, you have to stay levelheaded, rational in your mind, she said that to herself many times, also earlier in life when she had still been normal.

But half a year later she was put on one hundred percent sick leave. Not a particularly large pension, but that, plus the widow’s pension and what Susette earned at the nursing home when she started working there after high school, had been enough so they could afford to stay in the large house.

And then everything had gotten out of control. As if there suddenly were two realities for Susette: one at home, one on the outside. But gradually it was the first reality that gained ground even though she did not want it to. The normal teenage life in the District, which she in and of herself never really was a part of, but it had existed like a background, but that background paled, disintegrated just like the fact that she had once had a real boyfriend too. Despite the fact that it had mostly been a youthful infatuation, Gustav Mahler’s music, Sunday dinners at the rectory. Was made unreal. Instead, the nursing home, the empty corridors, the old, the dying in their beds, and two very disobliging hospital cats who saw red at the sight of her.

“I didn’t let him go! You’re wrong, Mama!” In the beginning then, Susette had roared like a stuck pig when her mother suddenly accused her of having let her father go. And later, calmer, tried to explain the dignity and the importance of the dying one needing to find peace.

Her mother had started crying. Her wailing. But they had hugged, hugged and never fought again. Her mother had said, “There is a lot to cut up. Rags, fabric. Can you sharpen the scissors for me, Susette? My eyes are getting so bad.” And Susette sharpened her mother’s scissors and took her own scissors (she had her own pair, which she threw away later when she moved out, but her mother’s she took with her to the apartment on the hills above the town center) and they had sat down at the rag bucket, each on her own stool. Behind closed blinds, in a once cozy kitchen. And crehp crehp, let the scissors travel through the fabric, rags, scraps, long strips, loom lengths, which whirled down into the bucket between them.

“But the loom, Mama. Where is it?” Susette had asked at one point, weeks later, maybe months, when they just continued cutting fabric, rags, and been and collected more, more: transported rags in plastic bags in the wheelbarrow from the nearby houses, and all of the other houses in the lush neighborhood below the town center, gone from door to door and rung the bell and knocked. Susette had not said to her mother what they both knew: that the rug weaver herself, her in the Outer Marsh, had been dead for a long time already. It was impossible to say. The word “death.” Susette had not dared take that word in her mouth even in the house with her mother because it would have been like giving her mother a signal to let everything inside her well forth. Also that terrible thing she had screamed at Susette after the funeral. “The Angel of Death.” No, she had not said that exactly, but that was what it had felt like.

Her mother had not answered Susette’s question about the loom, she never answered it. It was probably so, that she did not know. She lost the loom, it had become mislaid in some way, but continued, still, maybe just because, due to her forgetfulness, cutting cutting anyway.

“It is never easy coming to a house of sorrow, Susette.” She had said, for example, admonishingly, at the rag-cutting bucket.

And then the funerals, the cemetery again. The flowers to the graves. To her father’s grave in the new cemetery where the meadow had once been where they, she and her mother, back when everything had still been normal, picked flowers and brought them to the cemetery. And now her mother was sad about that too: that the meadow was no longer there and her father “was resting” on the new side that she thought was so bare and deserted and she became even more sorrowful because of it, that poor him had to “rest” there, could you even “rest” there, come to peace, which you should be allowed to do after you die?

Flowers on the graves of others as well. Still, like always. But the jars they had with them to place the flowers in were rarely washed and boiled, transparent and clean like before, rather nasty, sometimes just yogurt jars, helpfully washed, made of plastic—

And the funerals, her mother and the funerals. Sitting in the church, listening to the blessings, sorting addresses into neat fans on the tables in the fellowship hall afterward.

“The grieving have other things to think about.”

All death, Susette had sometimes thought in secret, in my hands.

But cutting rags with her mother, it had become like a language. Her and her mother’s only way of being together, of communicating. “So ugly,” the brothers said when they, together with their young families, had at some point in the beginning still come to visit their former childhood home. And father’s house of balsa wood that needed to be collected because one of the kids in the family was so “interested in construction” but of course it could not be found anywhere—when it later surfaced it was broken. Balsa is fragile, thin wood: as if someone stepped right on the veneer sheet on which it was constructed. Not Susette, maybe her mother, or otherwise it had ended up under the piles of fabric or other junk, trash, and been crushed under the weight.

“Susette, maybe you should…” the brothers insinuated, meant clean, keep things in order. “We can see mother isn’t well, that she can’t do things on her own right now.” And snap it had been so that the brothers with their proper wives and proper small children, self-fulfilled in their own lives and business like everyone in the whole world, would have such an understanding for “the difficult daily life of a young family,” stopped coming to the parental home altogether. Mother had gone and visited them sometimes instead. In office clothes, which she still had. Susette had her job of course and could not get away. On the other hand, she had not actually wanted to go along. Nice to be alone, at least for a few days, now and then. Catch her breath, not cut rags. And when her mother came home again she was usually quite energetic and normal, but after a day or two everything was just like before.

So yes, it had been clear. She, Susette, had not been able to do anything about it. Powerless. And of course in the long run she had not been able to live there either.

So she had left, gone to the strawberry fields in the central part of the country and ended up in a wood and it was not until three years later that she came back, but then, as mentioned, her mother was already dead.

But with the lady, old Elizabeth Maalamaa in Portugal, she had been able to get it back. Well, a kind of reconciliation. The word “reconciliation” was not Susette’s own, she had gotten it from the therapist, therapists, she had regularly seen during her seventeen-year marriage to Tom Maalamaa. “Reconciliation”: but a good word, when she, sitting there at the office, had spoken a bit about her mother and Liz Maalamaa.

For example, the following: about what it had been like, in Portugal, December 1989, like coming home. Or another possible image, also fitting: from a road in whirling snow in the District to Tom to Portugal—so self-evident. To Liz Maalamaa, who had become bedridden rather soon after Susette and her fiancé Tom arrived then, in December 1989, and Susette sat at her bedside for hours when Liz Maalamaa was not sleeping, and sometimes then as well, watching over her, as it were. How she liked Liz Maalamaa. And how Liz Maalamaa liked her. “I want to protect you from everything evil,” Liz Maalamaa had even said. “I like you so much, my Susette.”

As if Susette had been her girl and Liz Maalamaa her mother. It had also almost been said: not like a game exactly, but like a silent, mutual agreement. Liz Maalamaa never had a child of her own, and how she longed for a child of her own, she talked about that too. “Susette, my own girl.” And Susette had her mother again, but then what had gone wrong with her mother, for real, everything, everything, in the house, that she personally had left and not been there at the end, not even at the funeral… could in some way be repaired, now. Liz Maalamaa had also told Susette about her careful preparations for her own funeral, neatly written down in pencil in a notebook that she kept in the drawer of her nightstand next to her bed: “Yes. I haven’t thought about dying yet, especially not now when you’re here, Susette, my girl, but you never know of course.” And then when she shortly thereafter had been dead, Susette made sure to follow all of Liz Maalamaa’s funeral instructions to a T, to the point that it was exactly that very expensive porcelain, a fine china that her husband’s family had so cared for, which should be set out and used at the family’s table during the reception in the fellowship hall after the burial.

“I so like it when you take care of me, Susette. I take my medicine so gladly. It’s almost as if I want to be sick all the time when you’re here. Now I’m finally getting some peace and rest, it’s been quite lonely, especially after the death of my dog. But now, Susette, here with you.”

And Liz Maalamaa had swallowed her medicine: all obligatory portions according to the doctor’s prescription and more, gradually, which Susette portioned out for her in transparent, colored medicine cups. She, Susette, was used to it, how medicine should be portioned out, had of course worked so much with the old and the sick during her lifetime.

And she had found more tablets too, consequently, other medicine, hidden away in the medicine cabinet in a special container: bottles, bottles with sleeping pills, calming pills, with a few years under their belt, but medicine as medicine, Liz Maalamaa needed her medicine. “I need my medicine, Susette,” she said as well. And Susette had started placing more pills in the medicine cups, and increasing the dosage and even mashing, discreetly, pills into Liz Maalamaa’s food too.

“Reconciliation.” Though that, about the medication, she had not been able to say anything to the therapist, therapists, or to Tom Maalamaa or anyone else.

But the following, as a backdrop to what it had been like to come home to Liz Maalamaa in Portugal, she had certainly mentioned at one therapist office or another:

“I needed protection. Up until then. I went around carrying a pistol without really knowing why.”

The therapist had listened, not moved a muscle. “Yes, it can be like that. We need protection. All of us have a buffer zone that is invisible but cannot withstand being trespassed. And if it has been trespassed upon, it can be the case that you have not been aware of it—especially if it happened during childhood. But it provokes a disturbance, and often such a disturbance, if it originates in the childhood infantile, can take on an absurd expression in adulthood.”

That therapist used some of her other patients as examples, granted without naming any names. Some director of a large business corporation who walked around with a teddy bear: a large, large teddy bear who had to have his own seat in business class. A day-care manager with a toy gun in her apron. A movie where someone had lost a sled, Rosebud, which was the key to the mystery his entire life had developed into.

Completely illogical but all of us are irrational beings, especially when we struggle to be the most rational, the therapist had said—but added: “There is understanding. We must try and understand each other. What things say, what language everything we surround ourselves with is speaking… We must listen, be observant, speak, speak.”

The therapist at the office had spoken, one of those therapists who, in addition to listening, liked talking. Because there were therapists like that too, had been, all kinds of therapists, all manner of schools, Susette had, during all the years in therapy, learned. But the therapist who liked hearing her own voice about the movie and the literature and all the patients who visited her who flew business class had been good, in any case. Aside from the fact that Susette of course understood that the therapist took for granted that it had not been a real pistol, which had been loaded to boot and had ended up in her Fjällräven backpack that she had sometimes carried with her in the middle of the day, rather one of those daycaremanagerpistols, toy, certainly plastic, like the yogurt containers at the cemetery.

On the other hand, the pistol. If she had started thinking about it too much at the office, the offices, then it would have become too absurd and completely impossible. “We’re here to help you build a story for yourself that has some sort of coherence, context. A story with not necessarily a happy ending, but a story that you can live with. There is understanding. It is always easier to look things right in the eye. Give them words. Then you can go on living. And you deserve to live, Susette. Your life, Susette,” the therapist had said. “You haven’t had it easy, Susette. But now you have so much that is valuable. It’s your turn now. It’s about time you start thinking about the fact that you have a right to be thinking this way.”

So she had forgotten about the pistol. With this therapist and all therapists later. And otherwise. There was a forgetfulness in her, that was also true. She had forgotten so much so much and when she remembered what she had forgotten then it did not come in the form of any coherent stories, it came like breezes, drafts of wind through her head, images pulled loose, sentences.

But she had cried a lot. There, in Portugal, the crying had started there, already while Liz Maalamaa was still alive. She cried at night, during the afternoon when Liz Maalamaa was sleeping and Tom Maalamaa was sunbathing on the patio. Stood at the window and watched him where he was lying, wearing sunglasses and reading Gandhi’s memoirs in a deck chair in front of a marvelous sea and cried. Out of love, and out of sorrow. Something comfortless in that crying, everything she was—at the same time, when she saw Tom, who calmly accepted and would, during their entire lives together, accept the crying as a part of who she was, a crying filled with leniency, even hope.

Letting the crying out.

“The sorrow doesn’t disappear just because of it,” the therapist also said, given the crying, the weight, that word: the Sorrow. It was beautiful, fitting. More beautiful than “a life-long depression,” which became the diagnosis.

“You can live with depression, as long as you get help… And then there is medication—”

So yes, after Portugal, she no longer needed any protection. But the crying had continued. And there had been the thing she had said to the therapists that had not really come out the right way, not exactly how it had been, not due to the information provided, but otherwise just, because it was unexplainable.

Maj-Gun Maalamaa. It was that day in November, the last in the District, when everything culminated: Susette had been on her way to the sea, which she hated, but there, for some reason, going out there, a logic, because she could not live. Suddenly Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the boathouse there at the Second Cape where Susette as a child had been saved in the swimming school—so now when she was going to swim it was logical that it was going to happen, without being saved, exactly right here. Maj-Gun, who had been furious and started hitting. And beating and beating and beating Susette black and blue so that she blacked out awhile in the boathouse and when she woke up again it was dark and Maj-Gun was gone. Maj-Gun who had such power in her blows, and she who had not defended herself, just accepted them. But how strange, that she had also wanted to say to Maj-Gun, afterward, if there had not been so many other things, “Thanks to you I found my way back to life.” Maj-Gun saved her life, that had been true. When she had woken up in the boathouse she knew one thing. Away from the sea, not staying here, away from here.

She had told the therapist about that “fight” with her friend, as said. But there it has, as it were, been “diminished,” in some way. Become, which maybe it also actually was, of course (there was a lot of jealousy and other frustrations there too), a violent encounter between two friends who were tired of each other and needed to free themselves. “Friendships between women are often like that. You become the other person. A lot of mirroring. And becoming an adult is to free yourself from these reflections. Dare to stand on your own, on your own two feet.”

And it was true, of course. Sounded plausible. But still: all she needed to do was remember the frenzy inside Maj-Gun, Maj-Gun’s blows, yes, she was going to kill, and her own complete lack of will, her total passivity in the situation, in order to become completely perplexed. Going out into the sea was a gentle way of dying; being beaten to death hurt, damn it.

On the other hand, Maj-Gun, of course you could not tell anybody about her in a way that it would be right. Better said: you did not want to. Maj-Gun at the newsstand, what she had been like there. “We are two Angels of Death, Susette, an eternity.” That she had said that, and all those stories she told, which were about all sorts of things, but inside a message about something else the entire time.

Maj-Gun at the rag-cutting bucket. Rug rags. Her dearest, most devout connection. “The loom, Mama, where is it?” A completely unintelligible question in reality, because there was no answer—but Maj-Gun, if you had said that, would have understood it, intuitively.

On the other hand. That Maj-Gun. Did not exist. Anywhere. A figure in your head only, Majjunn Majjunn, a sound from your childhood, in your mouth.

Had been clear the entire time afterward. At the cemetery after Liz Maalamaa’s funeral. Maj-Gun had been so different, so stiff, so ordinary. And today, earlier this day, when everything happened, she had been on the Glitter Scene, a girl lying dead in the woods, they found her now, the entire family, but Susette does not know about that because she is at the house in the darker part of the woods now, she has forgotten everything else.

Thinks, at the loom that is rising up inside the basement before her eyes, only her eyes, no one else’s eyes: Maj-Gun during the day, that same day. How she should have said something, about something, which Susette had forgotten. But she had stood there and been ordinary, red, slender, and like all of the other people in the world. Had not spoken kiss kiss kiss as she once had at the newsstand, about the silver shoes for example.

We are the Angels of Death, Maj-Gun. I am alone. We are nothing.

Helpless in the presence of her story. “A life-long depression. You can live with depression. And then there is medication—”

Liz Maalamaa, the stories, the medication. Liz Maalamaa had already been ill when they came to Portugal, she and Tom, in December 1989. Had been going on for some time, heart failure, dizziness. She had been walking about then, but already the next day she had not gotten out of bed. And then Susette immediately started spending time with her in the bedroom while Tom enjoyed the sunshine on the patio. But he did not dislike it, just the opposite, said that it was so nice that she wanted to devote herself to the aunt.

And Liz Maalamaa, while she still had the energy to speak, told Susette about her life. No anecdotes that made you sleepy listening to them, those people who have it on their minds to talk and talk about themselves, about their business, who assume that only they can explain vividly enough, so that you will sit there in silence and be transformed with joy too, all ears because it is so wonderful to just listen. But—if you did not want to, did not have the energy, to listen? In what way does this affect me? If you thought like that. And did not come up with a single connection; then that person who was just babbling and babbling was transformed into just babble. But quiet now. Stop screaming.

Maj-Gun, at the time she was Maj-Gun at the newsstand, had caught sight of it. Because everything that Maj-Gun had told her had, as it were, been something else, at the same time. Another message, so to speak. A signal. The rug rags. A bucket. Mama. “Don’t be afraid.” “She didn’t give way, your mama.” At the same time both of them had been unaware if it too, what it was that pulled them together.

Young and insecure and fragile. There was that something in each other they wanted to reach, rug rags, but could not figure out how. So it had turned out wrong, that too. “The loom, where is it?”

“It’s so nice that you’re together with Tom,” Liz Maalamaa had said in the bedroom.

“I know Maj-Gun too. We’ve been good friends.”

“Do you? That makes me so happy. Maj-Gun is a special girl.”

And Liz Maalamaa had brightened up considerably and despite the fact that they had not spoken about Maj-Gun or Tom, Susette’s fiancé, anymore, whom Susette would live happily ever after with, the fact that Maj-Gun had been mentioned, both of them felt, brought them closer together.

But otherwise, in the bedroom, which was transformed into a sickroom and to a death room, but soft, normal, when Liz Maalamaa had spoken about her life it, had, in other words, been brief. In occasional images, scenes, some episode from here or from there. The transience, like from an album, come and see my gallery, so beautiful.

A dog, Handsome. Two swans, Dick and Duck. Young man against a backdrop of flames; an image on a wall in a hotel which, for a few terrible moments, looked that way but which later, afterward, had still been something else, just an armful of roses, in a bowl. “You know, Susette, hotel room art, it can be very anonymous.” And the silver shoes, which she liked dancing in and her husband too. “Life with him wasn’t easy, never easy, but I miss the dancing.” And the movie stars she had loved in her youth, Ingrid Bergman, and China where she had never been but traveled to so much in her fantasies that it had almost become real, “that wall, it is LONG, you know, long walk, I think that sometimes, and God and me and reality… There is a kind of loneliness too, in God, that loneliness is intangible.”

“I’m staying here. I’m not leaving,” Susette had repeated several times and gotten medicine, food, made the bed with clean, fresh sheets.

Toward the end, when Liz Maalamaa no longer had the energy to speak, Susette just sat there and held her hand. And the very end, the final days, mama Liz mama, I’m not leaving you, never again alone, she had crawled up into the bed next to Liz Maalamaa and laid down next to her. “My girl.” Liz’s arms around her, pulling her closer.

And there, in the bed, two bodies pressed against each other, something that could have been called Susette’s story could have been told, that which was not her mother, but the other, which had also happened. Though without words, words are unnecessary, a story that had pulsated between them like blood in their bodies. And from her to the older woman. From Susette Packlén to Liz Maalamaa.

A story in rags, fragments. Also about what had fallen and would fall outside the actual story, with context, coherence that had to do with coming out of a wood to Tom to here, Liz Maalamaa, Portugal—and farther on in life.

About being in a forest: “Once I was in a wood…”

Or, “all walls collapse.” About leaving work in the middle of the day, one day in November, just a few weeks earlier at that point in Portugal, but there in the bed with Liz Maalamaa, already an eternity since then. That morning, a project in the city by the sea that she had come to, an independent one that she did not work on together with Solveig but alone and that was that, an apartment in a high-rise in a suburb of the city by the sea, where Solveig had dropped her off that morning.

An old woman there as well, in the apartment, who was playing a film and had the radio on at the same time. “All walls crashing down.” A historical moment, in Germany. The wall that had come down in Berlin and now people were moving in hordes, happy, singing, from one side to the other. The woman had recorded newsreels from the day before and was sitting, while the radio was on, playing morning pop songs, watching those clips over and over again, tears running down her cheeks, and said, “a historical moment, all walls are coming down.”

Under normal circumstances Susette would have asked about it of course. If the older woman knew anyone in Germany, or if she was just happy about the step forward in history.

But it had not been an ordinary day. She had met Maj-Gun on the walking path in the town center that morning, and Maj-Gun had been angry, an omen that too.

About the impossibility, of everything. And she had taken the rugs out onto the courtyard, hung them over the rug rack, and there, “all walls coming down” ringing in her ears, she understood what it was. What she had forgotten, kiss kiss kiss, as if Maj-Gun had said it too, had she said it? If not, then she should have.

And suddenly she heard the folk song. “The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again—”

The girl at the cemetery who was singing, a song from the company car in the morning. And then Susette had understood: there is no way out of this.

Susette left the rugs on the rack, and left. Took the bus back to the District and came back home and took the backpack and then the bus again, to the capes, the sea, she was headed there.

The Winter Garden. Some scribble, pictures on the wall in her apartment, a lot of words there too. Kapu kai. He had been in the cousin’s house, of course, he was there when he was not hanging out in her apartment. She was going to drop off the pistol, she did not need it any longer, she was headed to the sea after all.

But he was in the way. The Boy in the woods, the boy from the woods. But she did not know him. Another story, had always been. All walls coming down. The cat in his eyes as well.

And there had, certainly, been blood, blood, there too. She did not remember. It was difficult to remember. Some things just cannot—

In any case she had not had the pistol or the backpack when she came down to the Second Cape, the cliffs, the sea.

But wait, Liz, about this blood. The Boy in the woods, the following must be said. Bengt, who he was—and was not.

“That once, Liz, I was in a wood.” Another wood. In the middle region of the country. Janos, the strawberry-picking fields. Fifteen years old, or sixteen. And she and Janos her second love, “the Pole but actually he was from Lithuania,” had gotten lost in this wood after they had run away from the strawberry fields. His idea, but good ideas and most of all, who had been the originator of them is easily forgotten after a day’s wandering about in the woods and they had started fighting violently, wordlessly, and suddenly in the woods even Susette had become furious.

He had hit her, she had hit back. That damned unintelligible language, and they had nothing to say to each other anyway. He teased her because she did not know the way out, this was her damned wood, her country. They had not eaten for days, water could be found in the wood, of course, in any case.

He accused her of all sorts of other things too. A scuffle, naturally Janos had been stronger than her. But she had been angrier: might one have been able to tell, in general, have been able to tell a therapist about such a rage? Which just grew inside you, as a result of all the powerlessness in the world, CRASH, someone who stepped on a house of balsa wood, and it went to pieces, The Angel of Death the Angel of Death, someone who was standing and yelling at you. One’s own mother. And the cats at the hospital who were hissing, and the manager, Little Susette, Sweet Little Susette, the old dying ones will become so sad if you leave now.

On the other hand. Maybe in hindsight it was a fabrication. Because she had forgotten that moment, would forget, more and more, just here in the bed, with Liz, wordless, let it come out.

Maybe she took the rock just because it happened to end up under her hand there in the middle of the seventymilewoods in the middle region of the country where east was west and north was south, she had no idea, just that it was twelve o’clock somewhere certainly, because the sun was shining that way, as if it were the middle of the day. And Janos had pushed her down on the ground. She took the rock and threw it and it hit him and he sank down to the ground, it was like in a movie, remained lying there.

Moss, mosquitoes, and hunger thirst in her stomach. And a strong sun, as mentioned, and a damned silence, loneliness.

She had continued walking.

“Once I was in a wood…” And though she might have regretted it then already that she had left him behind, it really did not matter, the woods were the same the same everywhere, she still would not be able to find her way back to that place.

And suddenly she had been out of the wood. Almost laughable, maybe just a few hours later after a day of being lost with her second love: found a road where there were cars. And she had just sat down on a rock, taken a breather, out of relief. And fallen asleep. And when she woke up there had been someone who was shaking her and it was a boy, not Bengt, but Magnus, a friend of Bengt’s who was in the car. She did not recognize him, or them: she realized first several years later when she met Bengt in the woods anew who he actually was.

Just two guys, maybe in their twenties, who were on their way from somewhere to somewhere like youths are, in a car, loving that vagueness too: “from somewhere to somewhere.”

She got a ride with them, and they gave her food, she had been so hungry after all. Fallen asleep in the backseat and when she had woken up again she was in the city by the sea. “Our mascot. We can’t leave her here.” And she stayed with them for a few days in an apartment in the city by the sea. There was a lot of partying and a lot of beer and a lot of people coming and going, sometimes the guys went to the docks in order to earn money, you could do that sort of thing back then.

“Our mascot.” They had been so kind, she had not been Susette but mascot, no one had been allowed to touch her. And as said: no talk of the District, no thought about the District either, just a few youths, she like a little sister-mascot, and the two boys, in an apartment, the city by the sea. And the last thing she wanted to do was tell them who she was, where she came from. Because it had been so obvious: back to her mother, she could not. She had known that already before Janos, before she left for the strawberry fields.

It had lasted a week maybe, then she left on her own, gone on her way. Of course she could not have stayed there with the guys, had to get organized, earn her own money, a life.

And of course she had to do something about Janos too. That was obvious. It was not that she thought about it all the time—just the opposite, it almost surprised her at first how easy it was not to think about it. In the apartment with the boys, the parties, the beer, Bengt and Magnus. In the city by the sea, all the people and places, the cars, buses, all the sounds. Different kinds of weather, sunshine, rain and thunder. It evaporated; sometimes she had to, when she was feeling lonely, take Janos’s passport out of her bag (she had not taken it from him, she was the one who was carrying everything in the woods) and look at it in order to understand that it was real, it had happened, something had happened. The rock in her hand, her on her knees with the rock: an image that remained exactly that, an image, like in the beginning with Liz Maalamaa, in Portugal, forced its way out. There, before the crying, in order to later vaporize again.

His name and date of birth and place of birth and similar facts that are usually listed in passports were listed in his. The only thing that was not new information was the first name, Janos. Otherwise she gradually remembered only someone who had clowned about with her in that nothing-language, eventually kissing her right in front of all of the other youths there on the strawberry fields, in the middle of Finland, dry hot days, crawling around on their knees in earthy rows, of course gradually hating strawberries too.

But she had nightmares of course. In the beginning, in the apartment, with the boys. But on the other hand there had always been people there, “the mascot,” she had liked it, “our princess, so sweet,” the one no one was allowed to touch, and as soon as she opened her eyes from sleeping she had been in a story like that.

She had told Bengt and Magnus that she had lost her friend by the side of the road where they found her on the way from somewhere and picked her up in their car. They had not asked any questions, of course, Bengt and Magnus, only tried to say “forget about him,” they probably thought that Janos had run off on his own, gotten a ride in some other car and not woken her while she was sleeping on the rock by the side of the road.

But then when she left the boys in the apartment she had said that she needed to find him. And maybe they thought that it was a bit beautiful too, the sweet girl who had not forgotten her friend—had to find him. Bengt, the Boy in the woods whom she met in the woods anew in October 1989, had said that anyway. Something along those lines, at least. Made it clear that he had liked her.

Had to find Janos. She called around a little bit, went to the police station in the city by the sea of course and asked about him, but no one knew anything, nothing happened.

She had not shown them the passport, not to anyone, but she had his full name from there that she could give to the police. But as said, nothing more about that, nothing had happened, no informations, and then she had just about immediately gotten a job in home care and gotten an apartment and at the same time thrown that passport away. Tabula rasa.

Time passed and quickly, gradually, all of that had become unreal. Like the time she had gotten a ride in the car from the boys, in the apartment, like being in a wood, that to.

And she did not want to be in a wood, she was not like that. Not at all. She wanted to live normally, ordinary. And in time, the nightmares disappeared, and Janos, everything with Janos, the reality, the small reality that had existed for her, was pushed away completely, while at the same time Janos, “Poland,” became a story to turn to. With her mother, for example, whom she of course got in touch with and called, not regularly but every now and then. “Greetings from Poland,” for many years, in different ways, from the city by the sea, and from other places where she lived.

And with Maj-Gun later, when she returned to the District when her mother was suddenly just dead. Though Maj-Gun had seen through her. “You weren’t in Poland, were you.” And when she lied about being pregnant when she suddenly, in her childhood home with all of the rug rags everywhere, had gotten such a terrible pain in her stomach, there must be life it had also hurt inside her wordlessly, then Maj-Gun unraveled that lie as well. As if Maj-Gun, the only one, who had been able to see the rug rags, the only one who would have been able to understand the question: “Where is the loom?”

That Maj-Gun, who no longer existed. Or maybe she never existed. Majjunn Majjunn, like a sound only, from childhood, left in your mouth.

As if they had been in the same room. But they were not. Not in the same room.

“Hell, Susette, what are you doing with a revolver in your sauna bag?” Maj-Gun who should have seen that “need for protection.”

But Maj-Gun had been preoccupied, her talk. Talked, talked about Love. Told her stories, you were pulled along.

No. Impossible. With Liz Maalamaa, in the bed, that story did not exist there, that rag, that fragment, forever, nowhere.

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

Bengt. The Boy in the woods one morning in October. Where he had suddenly been and taken her hand as they left the woods. He had not seen through her, he had not seen anything really. And still: “The whole time I thought you were familiar in some way,” he had said, but meant, then a long time ago, in the apartment, when she was the mascot for a while. “That we would meet again.” He had not forgotten anything. And still you could see it in him: he had forgotten everything. “Completely washed up,” as Solveig had said, and strange too, there in the woods where she had initially recognized him as something all his own, separate: as the one who had been there, one of them, when she had once come from a wood, and given her a ride, “from somewhere to somewhere”—when she had realized that it was Bengt, Solveig’s brother, then she had not been surprised at all. But he looked exactly the way Solveig had described, “completely washed up,” no entrance there to anything at all. If anything, then a reminder: “Once I was in a wood.” When she had met him in the woods again it had been in a terrible moment, just enough to understand that she had to get out of the woods, had been close to ending up there again, but out out of here and now.

So there on the path she had pulled her hand out of his. They did not know each other at all, had never known. Not she him, not he her. He had shown up, of course, at her apartment, it had not even been a surprise, and she was forced to let him in of course. One time he and his friend helped her, she could not deny him that. But there had not been any “story.” He had his drawings on the wall, the Winter Garden, an exhibition, scribbly sketches, screaming meanings, like Screaming Toys, shut her ears to them when she looked at them so she avoided seeing them. And she wished he would leave even if she could not throw him out. But that story he spoke about, a coincidence that was like a stroke of luck, like winning the lottery, so to speak, “everything has gone to hell but I’m lucky at games,” he had said as well, also all sorts of idiotic things he spoke about while drunk and he was often drunk, almost all of the time. The Winter Garden. His sketches on the walls. A language. He liked speaking it. Kapu kai. Cuckoo.

But she thought it would pass, and she was not there all the time, with him in the apartment. Had her job with Solveig, which she of course naturally had not said anything about her brother hanging out in her apartment. She could however remember something that Solveig said about her brother: “a dreamer who goes out of control.” And agree. Her personally, Susette, like Solveig, they were parallel, as it were, neither of them in a dream, “a wood.”

And Tom Maalamaa, an old love, had started calling too. Life was moving slowly, somewhere. On the avenues. Being nothing, and new.

So, the Boy in the woods. It had been like that. And blood. She could not remember for the life of her what it was like, would never be able to, that was true. The cousin’s house, blood. The fragments. “His eyes.” “Once I was in a wood.”

All of what she was not in his eyes, all of what she was not, which she could not be. Someone who came like an old promise that suddenly had to be fulfilled, “We can build here, it is mine, settle down.” Good Lord. That in him—but later too, the great sorrowfulness, unavoidable. “Are you thinking about leaving?” Maybe the question had not even been asked, but it was so obvious, so hurtful. In his eyes, are you leaving me or the cat? But she was not something lost, or found, for him a thread to sort out. The mascot. It was he who she had been. Otherwise: a rag. Like one of them, an old layer of fabric hanging over a loom, which she sees one last time, flaming inside her eyes now, 2006, here in the woods at the house in the darker part.

“Sinking sinking like a Venice.” Remember this now too, about the house in the darker part. Bengt who had said it, about the house, once. Fluttering through her head. How true.

The blood, the sea, the cliffs, the terrace of the boathouse. “All walls coming down.” The morning in her head, the impossibility. Maj-Gun in the boathouse. Maj-Gun Maalamaa!

Who had beaten her to life. And when she had woken she had been alive, to life, and away from here! The sea, the cliffs, nevermore there. She had left, dragged herself over the cliffs, through the pine grove in the snow, back to the cousin’s house, into the room where he was lying on the floor in his own blood in pools but only to the hallway where the telephone was, she had phoned from there. First Solveig, that was true. But Solveig in Torpesonia had not been home, it had been some Allison on the phone. She would be in touch with Solveig first the following morning, but then from somewhere else. About the cousin’s house. “I think something terrible has happened.”

But then she, Susette, had personally already been in another place. Saved to life—because after she tried to get hold of Solveig in the cousin’s house she reflected and started crying and called the only person she knew who would be able to save her, that was Tom Maalamaa. And asked him to come even though she could not explain where she was. But she had walked on that road later, forward forward in the snow, and he eventually found his way to it.

That was how it had been, these shreds of something else—“Liz. Mama. I like you so much.” This, pulsating, quiet, and everything else, all rags, like blood in their bodies, in the bed, Portugal, between them.

Rug rags. Could not be made clearer. Because clearer than this it does not get.

And immediately in the next moment: true? Was all of this true? “Liz, is it true?” But Liz Maalamaa had caressed her head.

“Little child, little child. Only I would be able to protect.”

And the tears had come, started for real there.

But also: a cry of jubilation. Because then, there, with Liz Maalamaa, always there: she had not needed to think, ask about the loom, the rug rags. Nothing, at all.

“If you later come to wander in the valley of the shadow of death no harm will befall you, my little Susette. I want to give you the silver shoes, the finest I have.”

And that night she had passed away, Liz Maalamaa. It had been a calm and dignified end. And the funeral—everything. Calm, dignified, an end.

A heart attack in her sleep, Liz Maalamaa’s doctor, who came and determined the cause of death, had said. The doctor filled out the death certificate, no autopsy was needed.

So it is clear that life had not bounded away in happiness. The Sorrow, “a life-long depression,” it was still there. “But you can live with this.”

But no one would need to be left behind anymore, be alone.

Loom, against a background of flames, 2006. At the house in the darker part, the Boundary Woods, the basement, a window, but the flames in her eyes have gone out now. She has seen the loom. She cannot get there. She is so small, frozen in the woods. Sirens, ambulances, fire trucks, alarms, Spanish wolfhounds howling in the background.

And the loom, magnificent, covered in old silk fabric, rags, scraps that had never been cut but remained lying there. In an old swimming pool, a house that was decomposing, sinking sinking like a Venice regardless of how she, little Susette, standing in other parts of the world, all parts of the world, on heavy floors, admiring views, views everywhere.

The loom. Disappeared. The darkness. She no longer sees it.

Kiss kiss kiss.

Because it was something else, the whole time, kiss kiss kiss, something white and soft.

And now she remembers everything. “Kiss kiss kiss,” something Maj-Gun should have said. Earlier in the day. Because she was the only one who could have seen. But Maj-Gun, that Maj-Gun, no longer existed. After the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible. Had become one of those, like all the rest.

“Janos isn’t dead, Susette. I’ve met him—”

But information, what the hell was she doing, Susette now, with all the information? And Maj-Gun had also stopped, stood there with the silver shoes in the middle of everything.

Been cut off. The conversation. All connections.

Rug rags. They did not exist, do not exist anymore.

But Maj-Gun, it was not Maj-Gun’s fault. Like at a disco a long time ago. Lambada, in the middle of the dance floor, smoke, among rags. Alone.

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

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

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

Because there was something else, something white and soft.

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

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

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

It is not possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IT WAS QUIET IN THE NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

Takes off the silver shoes.

Steps out into the water.

Kitty mine, oh please come back.

DEATH IN PORTUGAL (Child in a field, 2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she has remembered too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kiss kiss kiss. Yes. She understood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But as luck would have it there had been girls there then. There were always girls, “cute girls.” And one of them—with such amazing hair and these blue eyes—he had especially spent time with, so that shortly thereafter he and this girl had just run away, in the middle of the night.

And ended up in a wood. Walked and walked for days, just hills bushes moss around them. There had been water to drink, brooks, small forest lakes, pools, the like—and raw mushrooms and berries to eat, but the hunger was not quieted by them, and the more time went on, and the less they got anywhere, both young lovers were transformed into two small animals. Became “les petits animaux sauvages” with each other. All of the sweetness in the girl washed away, just silly and idiotic weakly unfocused staring big-eyedness left over. And of course they couldn’t say a word to each either; her English had been just as bad as his, and it was her only foreign language. And like a frustrated speedball he had made trouble with her. The strength that was running out, the exhaustion; a great fight had broken out. He had pushed her, splat, she landed face-first on the moss and he had done that to her over and over again. But suddenly, she caught on fire, and one time when she crawled up on her knees, she had gone after him like a vixen. With unforeseen powers, besides: hit him with a rock. And he had passed out for a few minutes, but when he came to again he had been alone in the woods and the girl had been gone forever.

So it wasn’t that bad, Susette. You didn’t kill him. And pretty soon after that he had gotten out of the woods and come to some farm where there had been kind people who took care of him. And then, in other words, after that, Susette, Janos decided there wouldn’t be any more French, les petits animaux sauvages. To the School for Land Surveying, to learn to always have a map and a compass with him.

And how did I know that girl was you, Susette? Because something in that story sounded familiar and so afterward I quite simply went up to him and asked what the name of the girl in the woods was, did he remember? And ho-ho, Susette, poke and blink and pinch in the corridors of city hall, of course he remembered. A beautiful name, like a chocolate waffle, he said, she had also been a bit like that… and a little more poking and pinching, “see Black Rudolf he is dancing, all of us have been young once…” But Susette, he liked telling stories too, just like me. So he didn’t ask me why I had decided to ask him something like that, but carried on with his youthful reminiscence, the strawberry-picking fields, all of that. And the song “Black Rudolf,” which had been the first song he learned in “the free world”: at a social gathering in the fire station for the area’s residents, it was a religious area, so Susette, no dancing. Just this community sing-along that had resounded, drawling like a hymn from the mouths of the area’s gathered residents and from other parishes, berry pickers including “the international brigade,” which had been transported there in their own bus for what looked like was going to be the only evening entertainment for the month. “Iltamat,” a dance with songs to which the text had been handed out to everyone so you only needed to sing along as a warm-up before the evening highlight, which was going to be some minister on summer work who was going to give a “speech to the countryside” while his wife was buying local weavings to hang on the wall in the cottage.

“In the middle of the song I thought,” Janos said, “that I’m never getting to Paris, I will die in exactly this spot. But then, Maj-Gun, in the next moment I thought that if I die I will die with the words to ‘Black Rudolf’ as black as a tropic night on my lips and then it suddenly became funny, I started laughing, at everything. And in the middle of the laughter I looked around and my eyes met her eyes… the chocolate waffle’s.” And poke again, Susette, and blink blink blink. “And the chocolate waffle was squirming just as impatiently as I was and she smiled at me, and Jesus Christ, those eyes… Maybe, Miss Leading Legal Aid Assistant, a little bit of romance anyway, hein?”

Hein? Susette. But sure enough, a story too long to tell in just a few seconds, seconds during which you understand everything. A silver shoe in your hand, but you don’t want to understand anything.

One final story for you, Susette, but in silence only.

Because for real, there in that house, Susette in front of her, she has not said anything at all.

Susette a stranger. The abandonment, the brokenness.

And maybe the same sorrow in Susette too, one moment. Because she has suddenly recovered, said: “Sorry, Maj-Gun. It spills over sometimes. It’s so messy, rags everywhere. You get irritated. Yes, the shoes. Liz Maalamaa gave them to me before she died. She liked me, she said. And wanted me to have them.

“And Tom likes them. We go out dancing sometimes, just the two of us together. And tonight we’re going out. If the shoe fits. Liz and I, we had the same size.”

And Maj-Gun has of course understood that she is powerless. With Susette. Nothing she can do here.

“And don’t misunderstand me, Maj-Gun. I’m not unhappy. I’m doing all right. A life I never thought I would have… Maybe it’s strange but I have missed… you. Sometimes. My mother. I have a bad conscience. I was, to put it simply, depressed.”

There are no collected conversations. Is left unfinished, Susette at the window. Maj-Gun left the room, the alienation.

In reality it is not even Susette she has come to see, but her brother. For a different reason, suddenly just wanted to see Tom, such a confusion about everything.

“How did you know Susette anyway?” Maj-Gun had asked Solveig earlier in the day.

“She worked for me at the cleaning business and came from here, of course. She worked for Jeanette Lindström too, and for a while when she was terribly young she was employed at the private nursing home for the elderly and demented. At the nursing home they called her the Angel of Death. Jeanette Lindström told me that.

“How adults can be so brutal. It was probably that paleness, the big eyes. Her mother wasn’t really right those final years. Dragged Susette with her to all sorts of strangers’ funerals—”

“She had a pistol in the bathroom,” Maj-Gun put in. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

Solveig and Maj-Gun: they met at the café up in the town center earlier in the morning. And they had spoken about the past, despite the fact that it was Maj-Gun who had called Solveig and wanted to meet her even though she had come on entirely different business, which she still had not managed to get out later.

“Solveig,” she started instead, “sometimes I think about everything with—Bengt. What really happened?

“I saw him lying in the house, dead,” she added.

“You’ve said that.”

“Have I?”

Solveig did not answer, did not comment on the bit about Susette and the pistol in the backpack in the bathroom at Susette’s apartment: passed over, as if she had not even heard it.

But suddenly said instead, “Is that why you’re here? Is that why you’ve come now, Maj-Gun?” And focuses her eyes on Maj-Gun there at the cozy local café, Frasse’s Pastries and Coffee, authentic through and through, “provincial,” of course, really looks the way it is supposed to. But still in some way sterile, fabricated like an exhibition, “the coziness.” Solveig who had asked, in the middle of all that familiarity in her eyes even if it was a long time ago, “a wild pain.”

No fear, no avoidance, just that pain.

Well, no. Maj-Gun was not able to answer that properly either. It had not been because of that, shrug of the shoulders… “I don’t know.”

And then suddenly Solveig said she was the one who burned down the cousin’s house. Set fire to it, she did not care about the consequences, had gotten the insurance money. But speaking of Susette, she was the one who called Solveig and told her about Bengt in the cousin’s house: “I think something terrible has happened at the cousin’s house.” She had said, almost whined, early the next morning, when she had, in other words, phoned from where she was, with her fiancé, in the city by the sea.

And it was she, in other words, who had alerted Solveig to the fact that she had found Bengt dead in the house, he had probably shot himself. She had not said that, of course, but sounded truly shaken and worn out and Solveig had seen it later with her own eyes.

And besides, Solveig continued after a brief pause in the café, spoken softly but calmly as always—that yes, if there was something strange about it all, something else, in other words… then it might as well have been in another way. Maj-Gun herself, for example. Whom Solveig had spoken to on the phone before she got the chance to speak with Susette, already the evening before. Solveig had come home late to Torpesonia where she was living at that time and some Allison told her that Susette had called. And Solveig had, despite the late hour, dialed Susette’s number because she had been a bit angry but certainly worried too about what happened with Susette who had just up and left an independent project in the middle of the day. Just left without saying a word, which was, despite the fact that Susette could undeniably be a bit scatterbrained, rather unlike her. And then it has, in other words, been Maj-Gun in Susette’s apartment who lied on the phone about Susette being there but that she could not come to the phone because she had a bad case of angina.

And speaking of the cousin’s house, what it had been like when Solveig had gotten there and found her brother the next morning, “those cigarette butts, in all of the ashtrays.” No lipstick on the filters, but cigarettes of such a brand that certainly no one else in the whole District smoked except one, whom Solveig personally happened to see with her own eyes somewhat later, one day in January, when she and Maj-Gun had run into each other on the square and Maj-Gun had been weighed down with things from her old place of employment. All of those things Maj-Gun lost hold of in the midst of everything and the splendor spilled over the square, including those unusual cigarettes. As obvious as she could be, Solveig remembers, she personally helped pick up Maj-Gun’s belongings.

You still seem convinced that it is a question of some sort of Immaculate Conception Virgin birth, the storks in Portugal?

Maj-Gun had the desire to point out in a loud, old newsstand voice in the middle of the picturesque café silence among the pastries and the homemade textiles. Djeessus, Solveig. I’m just saying. Djeessuss.

But not gotten anything out at all, instead she just sat there with her mouth open and in the midst of it all understood that it would not matter for Solveig if she were to mention the Fjällräven backpack that she had also seen when she looked in through the window and seen what she had seen, the terrible. Susette had personally called—from where? Certainly from the house. And then she had gone on her way and taken the backpack too.

But suddenly, at the café, Solveig stopped herself and almost started laughing.

“But take it easy, Maj-Gun. For Christ’s sake. Let it go. What do you think of me anyway? I’ve never thought it was you. I know. Tobias told me—about Susette’s apartment. How he found you there and that you were pretty miserable and feverish and made sure you got to the rectory and were able to rest.”

“Tobias?”

And Solveig later said, that yes, she and Tobias had been good friends, and now that he was gone, how she missed him sometimes, so much that she could be completely upside down in the middle of the day. “Sometimes you realize how much you care about someone and how much you value him first when it’s too late. That you should have shown your gratefulness. Not much would have become of me if it hadn’t been for Tobias. He was always there, always, for everything—”

This and more, Solveig has talked for a while so that without being mentioned directly Tobias also knew that the house had been set fire to and maybe he had possibly had, via some brother at the Lions Club, connections at the insurance company too.

“But I guess that’s the way it is, Maj-Gun,” Solveig said at last, in general, as it were. “Been there done that.

“But one more thing, Maj-Gun, which I still want to say. That regardless of Tobias or anything else, I would never seriously have been able to think poorly of you. Because this is how it is with me, Maj-Gun. That either I like someone or I don’t… and I liked you from the very beginning. That’s how I am—”

And Solveig suddenly started telling a story from her childhood, a Christmas bazaar in the fellowship hall, some fruit basket her brother Bengt had won in the lottery and he had immediately given it, the entire basket, to their new “cousin” Doris Flinkenberg who had recently come to live at the cousin’s house. Just because Doris wanted it and she was so little after all, and besides, she had had such a terrible time with her real parents there somewhere in the Outer Marsh and now that she had finally gotten a real foster home she deserved all the joy and love and all the presents she could get in this world.

But then the Pastor’s daughter Maj-Gun had been there wearing a terrible mask over her face and stolen the largest green apple from the basket. Scratsch, just stuck her hand right through the cellophane, not paid attention to Doris, just taken it for herself.

“That was funny,” Solveig determines in the presence of Maj-Gun who of course has no memory of it. Who remembers things like that? “Though I didn’t dare laugh then. It was such a shame about Doris. You couldn’t say anything bad about her. And yes—well. Despite everything that happened later, you know she killed herself, of course; I just didn’t like her.

“I guess that’s my secret, Maj-Gun. Because Doris just came and took everything away from you.”

“You remember all the cuckoo stuff later.” Maj-Gun could not help but smile.

“But that’s how it is for me, Maj-Gun, as I said. With Susette too. She is who she is. Did you know that I saved her life once when we were little? She was close to drowning, in the swimming school. I was wearing a blue bathing suit, was Tobias’s teacher’s assistant, I was Sister Blue.

“And she, Susette, had helped the cousin’s papa for several years and God knows that there was a revolver lying around in that house and she didn’t do anything with it—”

Solveig grows quiet for a few seconds, but then she says again, in conclusion, as it were: “Been there done that, Maj-Gun. That’s how it is, has been for me, with Susette too. Like with you. You either like someone or you don’t—”

So: no more about that. They had gone their separate ways at the square in the town center, Solveig, Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Solveig asked again, as if in passing, “And how long are you thinking about staying?” Hesitation, and for a few seconds that wildness in Solveig’s eyes.

The girl is there of course, the child, an old agreement. “Not very long. I’m going to see my brother, then I’m leaving.” The child, one had to carefully deal with everything important, for her sake, Johanna’s.

Been there done that. Maybe it is like that. In the middle of the square in the town center, which had been transformed into some sort of parking lot; both of them had their cars parked there, so not because of that. No newsstand at the square either, incidentally. Though Maj-Gun there next to her Volvo did not ask Solveig who got into her Toyota with the name of the real estate agency on the side about the newsstand. Not even in passing, as if it had been raining: “And where is the newsstand these days?”

It has not been raining, but snowing a little, hesitant flakes, sparse, descending. A horde of youths who have come wandering across the square, filling it with their own business for a few minutes. Laughter and jokes and shouts: no ordinary country bumpkins, no sir. There has been something precious about them, exclusive, talent… the theater, the dance, the music. And in the middle of the group someone in particular catches your eye: a girl with big, teased hair that falls around her, over her back, shoulders, small small butterfly clips in her hair, many, many, shimmering. The most merry, the obvious center point: suddenly she stays behind the rest and runs out among the cars to the very center of the square and stands there laughing and looking around, everyone looks at her as if she is on a stage, and catches snowflakes, slowly falling around her in the chilly November day, with her tongue.

A bewitching girl, who looked at everyone, looked at no one, laughing, snowflakes on her tongue.

“Come on now, Ulla, we’re going to be late!” one of the youths who is waiting for her in the group on the other side of the square calls out.

“I’m COMMMMIIIING!” How she shouts, what a voice. Unforeseen vocals, sounds like it is coming from the abyss—looks around, again. As if: did you hear? Yes. Yes, we certainly did.

But, one moment there, then gone and neither Maj-Gun nor Solveig remained on the square to express her admiration for the small spectacle of the unusually dramatically talented girl in more detail. Solveig drives off and Maj-Gun starts the Volvo’s engine, heads away, at full speed to the other side of the city by the sea, an hour’s drive to the address her brother had stated that he and his family would be living at for the coming years. “See my brother,” which she had said to Solveig, not that it was planned, but as soon as she is alone and sitting in the car she knows that is where she is heading. To her brother, to see him, no one else.

Her brother Tom: they had gotten back in touch with each other over the last few years, not very intensely but they had spoken on the phone now and then. Not about great important things but about work, the like. Things in general, so to speak. About how the doldrums can grab hold of you during the day. “You want to make a difference, Tom, do something for someone, not sit in a dusty law firm and for the clients tally and distribute their money in the most beneficial way between rich people.”

Still, there could be the same crap at the legal assistance bureau as well. Not in the same way, not as much money, for example, but in some way still the same. “These people without legal rights,” which she, like her brother Tom Maalamaa at some point, had spoken about grandly, not held lectures like him, but certainly spoken that way with him, privately. All of those who come to her, without money. But money no money, the same hunger. People are prepared to do almost anything for nothing.

For example: a crime that had attracted a lot of attention not only up there, in the north. A woman had shot her husband and her child and then run away and chased her departed lover who, when he refused her, got shot as well. And then sat there on various chairs and got in the papers too and stammered about “ménage à trois” just as if she knew French. Because that woman had really been in love then, had too much beer to drink too, had sex had sex and et cetera. “All of this climbing toward a story that gives life meaning—” Become someone who at least can stammer her way to some unusual drama and be the center point of it.

And when she had told her brother about it on the phone she added that sometimes she can hear papa Pastor, as it were, laughing rascallike at the Sunday dinner table in the rectory at certain ministers of the new school who wanted “the language of our time” and everyday trite similes in order to dramatize all of the big mysteries found in the church about life, death and make them understandable. Red light. Green light. “Tom, sometimes I’ve started thinking, imagine if people would first learn to stop at a red light, drive on green, and stop for all of the pedestrians in the crosswalk.”

“Ha ha ha.” Her brother Tom Maalamaa had laughed. He has been the only one with whom she has ever been able to carry on such conversations, despite the fact that he had then said what she really wanted to hear, which granted she understood first when she heard him say it. “Hey, Sis, what’s wrong? Got up on the wrong side of the bed?” Or… “Come on, the metaphysical doesn’t suit you. Me neither, for that matter. You must remember that from our childhood, which in certain respects was boring. We were rather alike. But I don’t remember anything about myself that was particularly funny, but certainly a lot that was funny about you. The Girl from Borneo. Get real, you were more fun as the Girl from Borneo, you know.

“Hey, Sis, what’s wrong? Isn’t it something else? Have you heard this one? ‘You become moral as soon as you become unhappy.’ I came across it on a blog once. Joking aside, Maj-Gun, you know that you can always come to me, I’m you’re brother, you can tell me anything—”

So yes, Tom. Now, that morning, she wanted to tell him… that, Tom, in the middle of everything, such a confusion about everything. Had in addition to the story such a burning low-voiced interest for—yes, what had it said in the obituary? Nature, roses? Music? She did not remember or, of course, she did, of course, but it was the formulation, “an interest, discreet, burning,” that has been eating away at her. So Tobias, so to a T, him. That text she had consequently found in her home, an old issue of the local paper, almost a year old, from the District, that she had at some point started subscribing to but never had time to read. Old issues strewn around her rooms. Happened to open a paper lying on a shelf even though she had actually been looking for something else.

That was of course what she had wanted and had thought about asking Solveig, that was why she had come—suddenly been in the District without letting anyone know ahead of time, which had been outside their agreement regarding the child, Johanna. That Tobias had died, why had no one told her?

But she, Maj-Gun, had not gotten it out, of course. Maybe because as soon as she was sitting in that café with Solveig, she understood that there possibly was no logical answer to that question. Solveig, Tobias. At the same time: there had never been any “pact” there—Solveig who had calmly said when she told Maj-Gun that Tobias had told her about Maj-Gun in Susette’s apartment, that Tobias had taken care of Maj-Gun then and made sure that she got to rest at the rectory. Flaming Carmen. Oh, no. Regardless of what Solveig had known she had not known that. No one had known.

But that confusion toward her brother. But her brother had not been home; at work, of course. Susette alone in the home, among the moving boxes, unmoving, at a window later, the children at school, the aupairgirl at the store.

And what were you supposed to do with Susette? In that frame of mind? Say to her: “Everything in my life has happened in the wrong order,” as you would have liked to have said to Tom, your brother, so that he would then say, after having comforted you, “Hey, Sis, it’s not that bad.” And that if you started thinking like that, “your life,” then you would lose your sense of reality, it became pretentious, metaphysical, too big. “And yes, Sister, I still think we’re doers, not talkers.”

But my life. Which despite the fact that it had not been said to Susette it still hung in the air between them, my life, like in the newsstand once. “Everything in my life…” Like something to write down in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” yes, she still has it, like a memory only, a relic.

Still as if just that saying existed between them because that is when Susette walked up to the window and started speaking strangely about her life.

The Boy in the woods, Janos,… and Maj-Gun caught sight of the silver shoes.

And Maj-Gun, it stands to be repeated, understood, during the span of a split second, everything. In addition to the alienation, the shock, the surprise—understood that Susette was unreachable, she could no longer do anything for Susette.

Like a towel over her face, an anesthesia that had lasted a long time afterward.

Ringing in her ears, Susette’s: “You are so different now, Maj-Gun. After the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible. I liked you much more in the newsstand. There was so much life inside you.”

And: “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not unhappy. I’m doing okay. More than okay. I have a life I never thought I would have. I still want to thank you for making it possible.”

An anesthesia that has lifted only hours later, in the Winter Garden.

And only then has she started calling Tom; you just can’t push it away. The silver shoes. Aunt Liz. The medication. “At the nursing home they called her the Angel of Death.”

So in the Winter Garden, she is there again, Maj-Gun, afterward. Cutting, cutting red, whirling strips. But: it is only a preoccupation, almost an image. A preoccupation among other occupations, an image among many.

There is a girl, it is the one from the square, the Troll Girl, with the voice, butterflies in her hair, shimmering, who is suddenly there, outside, wandering in the corridors. “I’m searching, searching, for rooms under the earth, the truth about everything, I come here sometimes.”

An old story. The American girl. “Do you remember?”

Stories, informations. The girl in her room. The Winter Garden. And red whirling, scissors cutting, rug rags. Everything you can think about and share if you want to. “Do we know each other?”

Yes. They do. In some way. But a while ago. The American girl. The Boy in the woods, in a different way. He is a love story. The American girl, in that way. A story that in different ways parallels Maj-Gun’s life, my life, and now she is suddenly sitting there laughing about it too. A story that has not belonged to her, not to the girl either, in the way they are, have been, alike. At some point they have e-mailed, chatted a bit. “Hey, Theater Girl.” The girl who talked about a play she was working on and Maj-Gun who had gotten in touch with her on a site for unsolved crimes where the girl had posted a question about wanting to get in touch with someone who knew something about it.

Maj-Gun had replied, then, with about the same thought she had when she started subscribing to the local paper even though she did not have the energy to read it: no sensible thought. Or: you can’t step into the same river twice, still you have to go there with your foot, dip dip, over and over again, move it around. Or maybe not. Maybe she wrote to the girl only because she felt some sort of protective instinct because the girl probably was not fully aware of what she was doing, what signals she was sending out, by posting a bunch of pictures of herself as the American girl on a cliff, in the moment when she falls and dies. “Here I am singing a song from my upcoming play that is called ‘Don’t Push Your Love Too Far, Eddie,’ the song about the American girl, the final song about her.” Suggestive black-and-white photographs.

And now, in the Winter Garden, Maj-Gun sees that it is her, despite the fact that the girl is older, looks a bit different, has become more woman, so to speak, has different clothes—ordinary clothes, jeans and a shirt. The same girl who was catching snowflakes with her tongue on the square. That morning, and even though it is only afternoon now, after the visit with Susette: eons ago.

Ulla Bäckström from the Glitter Scene, Rosengården 2. “My room, EVERYTHING is there…

“… and my band, Screaming Toys.”

Informations. Everything that Maj-Gun has also known, knows, regarding for example the American girl. Countryman Loman who covered things up. She has known that since her college days: some female classmate who had devoted her time to things like women and crime. Old cases, maybe not unsolved but with something strange about them.

And other strange things. Some of it said, some of it heard, sometimes one plus one becomes two aching in your head, not conscious of it. “Three siblings, a secret that drove them apart. The three cursed ones.”

Also: an eternal memory, impossible to really share with anyone. Except for one who had communicated it, Susette, but in connection with another story, somewhere else.

A girl is standing at the cemetery. She is afraid. Her name is Doris Flinkenberg.

The folk song inside her. “The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again.”

Calling forth the fear. Maj-Gun with the mask, a teenager. Angry. Doris who is afraid, but not of the mask, it is something else. But Maj-Gun never finds out what, more than a few random words, sentences, because Maj-Gun putting the mask on only irritates Doris—she leaves, runs away.

Like the girl here now in the Winter Garden, Ulla Bäckström, is going to leave, run away in just a second. Meet Johanna in the house in the darker part, scare her or call forth an earthquake—and then home home to her fate, the Glitter Scene, the open glass door… Susette in the silver shoes, all of that you do not know about yet that is going to happen in a few hours.

Then it is all too late.

And Maj-Gun sits there with the girl, even though it does not matter. And then she says anyway: “I’m going to tell you another story. Which might make all of the incomprehensible comprehensible. Not the truth about everything, the rooms under the earth. But about two people in a newsstand once.”

The girl yawns. Looks around, says uncertainly, “You have to let go of your childhood. I don’t think… that is interesting for me anymore.”

And adds: “The American girl in a snow globe. I think I gave it to Johanna.”

Discovers the mask, a relic that Maj-Gun sometimes has with her—like “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” there is so much life inside you.

“Buhuu those girls,” Ulla Bäckström shouts at Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the Winter Garden with the mask on, “and lady, here’s another thing.” Laughs suddenly, almost cheekily. “Why are you always asking about Johanna?”

And with these words the girl with the jungle voice is “like from the abyss,” shimmering, with all of the theater the dance the music inside her, gone.

Here for a while, then gone.

And has, of course, swiped the mask too. Ha-ha-ha, Troll Girl. It definitely is no surprise.

But—

The Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa. You cannot always be getting rid of everything, pushing it away.

And when the girl has left: no, Maj-Gun is no longer cutting, she understands, she has to speak with Tom Maalamaa. And only then has she started calling, late afternoon, early evening, and Tom Maalamaa has turned off his phone.

Thrown away rags, put on her clothes. Maj-Gun heads out into the night, the darkness, runs out. Yes: so this, on the one hand. Blueblueblue images in her head now too. The Winter Garden. A blue child who is screaming on a cliff. An old story in images told again. Existed on a wall once, in a room, another room, an apartment where she was for no time. Words on the walls, a language, Kapu kai, the forbidden seas. They had a game. The Winter Garden.

“Three siblings who shared a secret that united them but turned them against each other.”

The Winter Garden, like a place. Rooms under the earth, the truth about everything, the Rita Strange Corporation.

Bengt lying dead in the cousin’s house.

And Solveig, Sister Blue. Who said that morning, “I saved her life once in the swimming school. I was Sister Blue.”

Ulla Bäckström’s words: “The American girl in a snow globe. I think I gave it to Johanna.

“And another thing, lady. Why are you always asking about Johanna?”

Johanna. My child.

Throws away the rags, puts on her clothes, runs out. On the other hand, honestly: that is not why she is running, Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Out of the Winter Garden, leaving it behind her. Stories, tales. What it was like what it was not like, tear to bits: there is also goodness, regardless, and beauty, flowers, blue skies.

Stories, tales are not the body, the blood, the longing, here.

What exists is here.

The Red One on a field. She is there.

Outside the house and inside the house another one with stories, projects. Project Earth, tear to bits, has been torn, old, finished playing its part. A girl pounding with loneliness, with another story, about rhythm and secrets—

Whirls of fear in the girl’s head, until nothing is left. One book, one image in it. Blueblue, that one too.

But tear to bits.

Johanna sees the Red One. Never more afraid, never more certain. Johanna goes out, to the Red One.

The Child, fluorescent. Explosion, transcendence?

Images to take to the Winter Garden: mother, child on a field. Or?

No. Maj-Gun holds her daughter, Johanna, tightly, Johanna holds her mother tightly back.

Explosions? Oh, bother.

Because then, exactly then, flames rise up behind them.

During the embrace, Johanna looks around the field.

“Look, Mom! The Winter Garden is burning!”