The Glitter Scene Read online

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

  “Is. Searching. A unique language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But how does it help to think?

  •

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

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

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

  But cannot be kept hidden.

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

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

  “Maj-Gun, you have said that, yes.”

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

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

  Walk in whiteness, in whirling snow.

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

  Blue lights. Sirens. Justice.

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

  The nakedness.

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

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

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

  “A WILD PAIN”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  •

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

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

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

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

  “I love you because you killed for love.”

  “What are you babbling about?”

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

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

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

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

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

  •

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

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

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

  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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