The Glitter Scene Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  •

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

  OWWW in her stomach.

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

  Maj-Gun remains staring.

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

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

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

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

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

  Rug rags.

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

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

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

  “What are you babbling about?”

  The Boy in the woods. A violation.

  •

  She cannot keep the child. It was never hers.

  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  •

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

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

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

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

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