The Glitter Scene Read online

  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 da
y.

  “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 he
lp 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?”