The Glitter Scene

by Monika Fagerholm

  Buhuu, the Angel of Death! Liz Maalamaa! Which of course upsets papa Pastor when he finds out—and he does find out of course.

  Maj-Gun first, Tom after, sometimes alone, often Maj-Gun just on her own too. Pastor’s Crown Princess hangs around the cemetery gate, tjiihit, tjiidit, “Pastor’s Crown Princess,” she tries, “say the password to my kingdom.” No one says it. Everyone walks past.

  And there comes the Big-Eyed One with her mother, they are almost always there. Wildflowers picked on the meadows arranged in neat bouquets, several of them. Newly washed glass jars filled with water, bouquets placed in them to later be set on the graves, often the ones that no one else really looks after.

  “Buhuu! I’m the Angel of Death!”

  The girl fills jars with water in the stone grove where the water pump is located, a good opportunity; her mother somewhere else. Maj-Gun rushes up with the mask on. The girl looks up, confused but not afraid, not the slightest. And Tom Maalamaa behind Maj-Gun suddenly, says, “hi.” To the girl, the girl answers, “hi.”

  And back to the rectory again, in her brother’s room. Two siblings, dog and cat, throwing pillows at each other.

  “Her big eyes,” says Tom Maalamaa, who is throwing a pillow on his sister with the dandelion in her mouth and the silver shoes on her feet again.

  “Her big stupid eyes,” his sister clarifies. Hamba hamba. Throws the pillow back, right in her brother’s face. But you can definitely see that she, the Big-Eyed One, has made an impression on him.

  And later, after childhood: not so much anymore. Grows up. The family leaves the rectory because the father is given a position in another place. Tom Maalamaa moves away after high school graduation and starts studying law at the university, finishes quickly, becomes a lawyer. Maj-Gun, herself, in some way, the Girl from Borneo, takes her bag and baggage and moves to a rented room in the leafy suburbs below the square in the town center. Remains in the District, does not get anywhere for a long time. Works in the newsstand at the square, for many years it turns out, and moves from one rented room in the attic of one house to another rented room in the attic of another house. The years pass, Maj-Gun in the newsstand, sitting where she is sitting, on a bar stool. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” it reads on a card on the back of the cash register. And then one afternoon in the late summer of 1989 Big-Eyed Susette Packlén, whom she has already gotten to know a little, separate from Tom and everyone else, comes walking across the square.

  SUSETTE AND THE DARKNESS, 1989

  Sometimes Susette Packlén imagines that she is a horrible flower that is about to bloom. But often, with Maj-Gun at the newsstand, she thinks about love.

  MAJ-GUN, AT THE NEWSSTAND. Maj-Gun Maalamaa.

  On a bar stool behind the counter, among the newspapers and lottery tickets, tips and games. Sweaty, perspiring, in time a luxuriant creature. At some point maybe shiny letters on a yellowed card on the back of the cash register, the first thing you see when you come inside: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

  Worn text on a grayish-blue landscape, rather abstract. Round, white moon in the upper right-hand corner and shadows of a spruce forest down to the left—an explicitness?

  •

  But first, they are still only children then, Maj-Gun is at the rectory, at the entrance to the cemetery, the old part. Nothing strange about that, of course: Maj-Gun is the Pastor’s daughter and her mother works as deaconess in the assembly. Or Majjunn, that is what she is called back then, or at least the name she uses for herself.

  “Say Pastor’s Crown Princess,” Maj-Gun yells, “that’s the password.” Hangs on the metal gate, it goes tjii this way tjii that way, back and forth in the wind despite the weight of Majjunn’s large body. Not exactly a fat body but significantly larger than Susette Packlén’s, which is almost as old. They go to the same elementary school, she and Majjunn, but they do not hang out, are not friends.

  “Say Pastor’s Crown Pr—”

  You do not say it. You say nothing. You walk past. The gate is open even though Majjunn is hanging on it. But still, amusing, when you walk by, how that name Majjunn sticks in your head. Plays there, sometimes, in silence. Majjunn Majjunn you repeat silently to yourself; the name glues itself to your tongue, becomes stuck in your mouth.

  You carry bluebells in your hands.

  One bouquet and several, sometimes a whole armful that will be divided into smaller bouquets inside the cemetery; tidily organized in glass jars you bring from home. You: Susette and her mother, that is, who have a habit of going to the cemetery, just the two of them, together. Moreover, sometimes they have boiled the glass jars in water at home in the kitchen in their own house with a garden where they are living at that time in the lush suburbs below the square in the town center so that they have become really transparently clean. Not even just the two of them then, during her childhood, rather Susette and her mother and her father and two older brothers.

  And they fill the jars with water from the buckets placed by the hydrant in a stone-covered arbor rather close to the entrance.

  Flowers to place on the “Graves of the Forgotten.”

  You have been out yourself, picking flowers in the meadows above the town center.

  With Mom. It is hard to explain this without sounding crazy: but seriously, nothing strange in that work at all. Picking flowers, taking them to the graves in the cemetery that look decayed, abandoned.

  “Say Pastor’s Cr—” Into the cemetery as said, and Majjunn’s voice petering out in the background. Later: at the gravestones, Susette knows some of the names by heart. Ephraim. Aline. Betel. Strange names, but still very pretty.

  Scrapes the letters clean of earth and various bits of trash, weeds the ground in front of the stones.

  And sets out bluebells and wood anemones in jars with water. Comes and replaces them: new flowers, fresh new water. They tend to laugh together, Susette and her mother: barely have time to wither and they are there again replacing them.

  •

  The Confession Grove. It is a bit off to the side. There is not exactly a sign with “The Confession Grove,” but Majjunn who, as said, is from the Pastor’s family, knows that sort of thing. Because she follows them sometimes, Susette and her mother, like a willing pathfinder even though no one has asked her.

  “You’ll see it down there. To the left.”

  And adds, rather pompously, “If you then wander in the valley of the shadow of death no harm will come to you.” And, then, holding a hand to her ear. “Listen. Here at the cemetery you can say things that would sound completely cuckoo anywhere else.”

  Maj-Gun has a toy mask over her face. “Ho ho ho,” she laughs. It is cuckoo; Susette’s mother laughs, the mask reminds her of a movie star. “Ingrid Bergman? Ava Gardner?” Majjunn takes off the mask, wipes sweat from her brow, does not answer.

  •

  Maj-Gun has a brother, Tom Maalamaa. It happens that he comes up behind Maj-Gun at the cemetery, sneaking up so that the others see without Maj-Gun noticing. Points silently at Majjunn who is standing in front of him, twirls one hand a few times, as if to say “scatterbrained, idiot.”

  And smiles at Susette. And Susette smiles back, cannot help it. Only then does Majjunn turn around and discover her brother behind her back, becoming audibly angry at him. Tom Maalamaa: the Pastor’s Crown Princess’s big brother and, somewhat later, as teenagers, Susette’s first love. They are together for a few months, not at the cemetery of course, but otherwise completely ordinary.

  And later, gradually, when the first love is over the second love comes to Susette—a Janos—she runs away with him from the strawberry fields in the middle region of the country where they meet. And then, though really a lot of time has passed in between, Susette is already close to thirty, the third love.

  “Confession.” The mother, during Susette’s childhood, at the cemetery, smiles a bit hesitantly. Susette thinks “confession” is a beautiful word and when Majjunn is out
of earshot Susette wants her mother to explain what it means. Her mother has not felt like it, you can see it on her, it has made her feel ill at ease. Standing between the graves in office clothes—she works at the bank otherwise but lost her father in the war; she is of the generation that death for her has become at once a self-evident and vile thing—and hesitates for a few seconds. Then she laughs and whistles softly, almost a sharp whistle of the kind Susette’s much older brother struggled to teach her when they were children at home in the house in the town center. And the mother shouts, with an almost endless tenderness in her voice:

  “But what beautiful flowers you have in your bouquet, Susette.”

  Not: “What a cute little Angel of Death,” which Majjunn later, when the mother is out of earshot, comes there to whisper in Susette’s ear.

  Or: God likes the small, timid and defenseless. Which she says sometimes when she suddenly appears at the water hydrant in the stone grove when Susette has gone there on her own to fill the glass jars with water.

  The mask on: “It’s not a movie star, it’s the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa, aren’t you afraid of her?”

  Susette busy with the water, the jars, shakes her head as if to ward it off.

  •

  “I don’t want to play with her,” Susette says to her mother when at some point her mother admonishes her and says, “You need to be nice to the little girl, maybe she’s lonely.”

  “Don’t want to.” Susette sulks.

  “But she is right about one thing,” her mother continues, maybe pretending not to listen to her daughter, “some words really do sound beautiful here. Ringing the church bells for the weekend service, for example. Words like ‘ringing church bells’ I particularly, especially love.”

  But then later she adds in a somewhat softer voice:

  “But I understand, Susette. You don’t have to play with her if you don’t want to.”

  •

  But nothing more about that either. And that is okay too, perfectly normal. Because going to the cemetery and placing flowers on the Graves of the Forgotten is, as said, something Susette and her mother have a habit of doing, just because, when they are together. That is to say: there is nothing about it that is great or fatefully filled with meaning. A ritual in twosomeness that is only theirs sometimes, in the family. Nor was it a twosome fellowship, in the sense of excluding everyone and everything else.

  Like cutting up old clothes and rags to take them to get woven into rugs by a woman they know with a loom. A real rug weaver, she lives outside the town center, somewhere far far away in the Outer Marsh. She is old too, probably has twenty cats, lives in a drafty old shack of a cottage, where it smells of cat piss and the loom is rigged up, almost always in motion, in the only room. It is big too, takes up almost all of the floor space. And, rather new: the Bankers’ Employee Club, where Susette’s mother is a secretary and very active, has bought it for her with money they earned by organizing bazaars and lotteries, and selling baked goods to each other, that sort of thing.

  Beautiful rag rugs are produced, with many colors, beautiful patterns: the woman then sells them at the square or via the bankers’ network and she can almost live off of it.

  So, as said: in other words it is one other thing Susette and her mother tend to occupy themselves with in the evenings sometimes in the house in the midst of family life. Cutting up old rags, clothes, towels, their own or ones they have received from neighbors or others, sometimes they ask for them in the surrounding neighborhoods, go from door to door.

  In the kitchen in the house or in the living room in front of the television. Just because, in other words not anything significant. Maybe you can describe it like this: that it is Susette and her mother partially in their own world that still, while Susette is a child, consists of so much more, so many other people too. There are, which has already been mentioned, two brothers almost ten years older who settle down somewhere else after finishing school; move away from the District in order to start families and work in another area. And the father of course who later, due to his work, is forced to be gone quite a lot. He is a doctor of engineering and receives an assistant professorship at a college in a city located rather far away in the eastern part of the country—and because of the distance and the expensive travel he comes home only on weekends and holidays. In other words, his profession is not that of a sea captain, which Susette likes to say at some point in school when someone asks her what her father does: but later, when Susette is in her early teens, he becomes ill, he spends a lot of time in the hospital. Not in the local hospital but in a larger hospital in the city by the sea, it is that serious. He passes away and a few years later her mother passes away: is hit with a massive heart attack and drops to the ground in the house in her own kitchen where she so enjoyed being.

  But then, when it happens, Susette Packlén is already grown up and not there.

  It is Maj-Gun who tells her how it happened. Maj-Gun Maalamaa, she knows everything. Has been living upstairs in the house as a boarder in the guest room for almost a year and a half already by the time Susette comes back after having been gone for three years.

  Maj-Gun explains that her father, the Pastor, has during that time received a position in another parish, and she did not want to move with her parents to the new rectory. She explains to Susette that she has realized that despite everything she likes it in this municipality; and besides, she also had to prepare for all of the admission interviews and application interviews for the university. So therefore, and for practical reasons too, staying in the District has been a better alternative. And Maj-Gun has furnished a real attic study for herself in the guest room in Susette’s absence: thick tomes of paper and compendiums lie in piles, drifts of paper on the desk and in the bookshelves.

  And to support herself while studying for her interviews she has, in other words for a while now, started working full-time shifts at the newsstand at the square in the town center.

  Susette has, as said, at this point in time been gone for almost three years; she has just turned twenty. “In Poland,” that is what it is called, has been called, and will still be called. With her second love, but it came to nothing. And due to the poor telephone connections, the poor postal service, and poor communication in general… Susette has come home only when it has been too late. On the whole she gets to hear what happened when it is too late.

  Maj-Gun Maalamaa is the one who meets her at the ferry terminal as they had agreed by telephone. “What a nice backpack, Fjällräven—” Maj-Gun spells out. “Is it new?”

  Thick plastic bags filled with rug rags remain everywhere in the house, in piles on top of each other too along the walls in the kitchen (the old woman with the loom in the Outer Marsh has been dead for a long time already).

  “What we did toward the end?” Maj-Gun stood there in the middle of the mess and the musty smell and asked herself rhetorically. “Cut. Rug rags. It was a calm and restful hobby.”

  “She was terrified of dying,” says Susette.

  “You can rest assured, Susette,” Maj-Gun replies, “it was over in a few minutes. I called the ambulance. But it was too late.”

  “Can love make you crazy, can grief make you crazy, can regret, can—” Susette asks, no, whispers, because it can barely be heard. And her stomach hurts so badly, so damned much, as if her body is in the process of being cut in two, and her legs that collapse under her; then she has to go to bed and sleep, rest—remains bedridden for several days.

  Maj-Gun, who hears, sees, says nothing. But she puts her arm around Susette: it is heavy, such a weight that holds on to Susette, almost like a vise. But in it there is, completely genuine: such tenderness, leniency, such comfort—

  Later, Susette will remember that conversation with Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the home that day she returned, as clear as a bell, despite so much else being forgotten, also consciously, so obscure.

  Maj-Gun, whom she has not seen since childhood, whom she quite literally does not know
at all. Except for “Pastor’s Crown Princess,” a few scenes from the cemetery that are buried in her from a distant childhood, and so, naturally, what you managed to see of Maj-Gun in the rectory in her role as the sister of your first love Tom Maalamaa whom you went out with for six–seven months when you were about fourteen years old. Though, in and of itself, you did not see a lot of Maj-Gun, in the rectory, either. She was not home very much but mainly it was that she and Tom Maalamaa spent most of their time behind the closed door in Tom’s room. And listened to music: classical music, Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, always “Mahler’s Ninth.”

  A fantastic reconciliation with mankind’s existential conditions, a feeling of life so closely connected to a simultaneous consciousness of death. As Tom Maalamaa used to say, almost solemnly, sometimes.

  •

  What she said, what Maj-Gun said in response. Because those have, so to speak, been the last sensible sentences for a long time. She has not really been able to explain why either. But also because a few months later when that time in the house with Maj-Gun has passed, has been over, it has been something she knowingly and wittingly preferred not to think about after the fact.

  The house is sold after these two months, Maj-Gun forced to vacate her attic study on the second floor and move away. And Susette bought a small apartment with her inheritance from her mother and father, which was divided in three among her and her brothers. A studio on the first floor in a row of apartment buildings on the fields on the north side of the town center.

  And she started working for Businesswoman of the Year Jeanette Lindström again: actually gone looking for Jeanette Lindström on her own after a period of idleness when the money started drying up and more or less begged for a job, any job whatsoever. “I’ll see what I can do for you,” Jeanette Lindström had said. Jeanette whom Susette had worked for one summer once long ago, as a teenager after almost a year at the private nursing home in the District for the elderly and infirm. A few days in Jeanette Lindström’s two-window Ice Cream Stand on the square in the town center, then the strawberry fields.