The Glitter Scene

by Monika Fagerholm

  Walking in the future with Solveig, in Rosengården 2: on the open asphalt roads where the trees are already growing tall. Full grown from the beginning, symmetrical and richly branched, as if they have been standing in the same straight line in the same places in straight rows and are not, as they are, newly planted.

  “Tobias would say that it’s cheating,” says Solveig. “Tobias would say that you can’t buy history and experience.”

  “But, Susette,” Solveig says later. “Forget about Tobias. You don’t need to think so much—

  “There is also that possibility, Susette, that all of the old stuff can disappear. And it’s not silly. Doesn’t need to mean obliterated or forgotten. Just that you don’t need to walk around and see with the same eyes, the eyes of the old people.”

  And right after, something else, something about herself. “It was hell for quite a while but it’s good now. It took a hundred years before I got my child. I had so many miscarriages.”

  Susette nods, she understands exactly. No more words are needed, no words spoken from the heart, nothing that big. Just walking with Solveig, in that openness. A clear day at the beginning of September, thinning, blindingly white clouds racing across the sky.

  Here you are nothing and everything disappears. The possibility of new. A great laughter grips Susette, remains a few steps behind Solveig, spins around and around on the spot. Dizzy. The empty slate. Tabula rasa.

  “She was terrified of death. Everyone around her just died.”

  There was a time, they were cutting rug rags.

  But “love,” stated Maj-Gun, sitting at the newsstand reading from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” “is partly. To create yourself, and new.”

  There among the tall buildings, on the avenues: “Is your love like my love? So great that it can overturn houses?”

  My life. NOW—Susette and love.

  So yet, inside Susette. There is a small seed. Of love. Baby bird under your jacket, at your chest. Small heart, small sparrow. Bird. Baby. Starts growing—

  “Come on, we’re in a hurry, silly!” Solveig is already at one house, in the yard, has turned around and yelled.

  And Susette stops spinning and jumping and acting like an idiot and runs as fast as she can to catch up with Solveig and bumps into her playfully, like a small dog.

  “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” she chants, with a dull and solemn voice, imitating Maj-Gun Maalamaa, right in Solveig’s ear. “Duel in the sun—” And then she adds, as usual, “Solveig, do you know Maj-Gun?”

  “Nah. Which Maj-Gun?”

  “Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Her. In the newsstand.”

  “Nah,” says Solveig. “Do you?”

  “Not… really,” says Susette. “Or—well. A little.

  She’s… okay. Just talks a bit funny. Says strange things.”

  Simultaneously: it is hard knowing with Maj-Gun and your connection to her what you should say. There are not any of those coherent, real memories to reproduce. If she were for example to say, “We were classmates in elementary school,” then it is also true that she does not remember anything from that time. The Pastor’s Crown Princess? Cuckoo. Good evening. “Say the password.” Or: “The sister of my first boyfriend, Tom Maalamaa.” What do you mean first boyfriend, saying that when you are almost thirty years old? But then it starts burning somewhere again. My love. But: a damned preparedness and no candidates.

  “Strange things about what?” Solveig asks.

  “All sorts of things. Just think if there is someone inside you who is dying for love?” Susette yells out, laughing into the happy day.

  “Ha ha ha,” says Solveig. “Stop dawdling now. We’ve got work to do.”

  And they go inside the house.

  •

  Susette in landscape. It is a little while later, in that house, Rosengården 2, the one with the glass rabbits on the podium on the third-floor landing. She has gone up there, and suddenly that merriment from outside on the avenues fills her, a bit thieflike too, upward upward, three and a half floors, in this house, to the very top floor. A small staircase, a door, she opens it and comes out.

  An empty landscape, and how large. A wide wide space, warm wooden flooring and a window at the other end, enormous, reaching almost from the floor to the sloping roof, probably fifteen–eighteen feet at the highest point. Walks up to this window, there is, so to speak, a door in the window, there is of course some sort of artistic idea behind it. A glass door that leads out to—everything.

  And it is fantastic, what is revealed. The sea in the distance, and the woods, the capes. Everything exists in there and then the sky as well, the clouds, everything—that space. And to stand there, like on a stage, as if someone had thought about it. Because heavy curtains are already hanging at the sides of the window, curtains made of velvet, soft, like theater curtains.

  Tippytoe, carefully, hop hop, Susette walks up to the window. And stands there, alone, in the emptiness, the silence, with everything in front of her—it is dizzying.

  Tabula ra—

  But suddenly, at the window, where she is standing there at the window, the handle on the door that most certainly cannot be opened even though it looks like it can, and yes, steady on her feet, is not afraid of heights, not afraid, not—but suddenly, exactly right there, another thing. Which comes back.

  Silk velvet rag scraps—I have seen the most I have. Maj-Gun, her stories, at the rug rag bucket. The rug rag bucket. The scissors. Crehp crehp. Mom.

  Maj-Gun, again, again Maj-Gun. That strange time eight–nine years ago, mother was dead, they were cutting rags in the kitchen in her childhood home. Silk, velvet… Maj-Gun’s conjurations, like refrains. And her stories, or just that she talked, talked all the time. My horrible aunt Liz Maalamaa. The Boy in the woods.

  Not important in and of themselves, not even then; it was just the purpose of them: to lighten the grief in an otherwise rather sorrowful and confusing time.

  And at the same time, silly too. The Boy in the woods. Maj-Gun’s great love, for example. This Bengt, that is, Solveig’s brother—whom you had never thought about, and you do not think about in any more detail now either. Just a boy, of course you remember him—even if Susette never knew him at all, just known in the way that everyone who grows up at about the same time in the same place knows each other.

  Somewhat older, the kind the girls in the District had crushes on: looked pretty good, drank a lot of beer already back then. But in an interesting way, so to speak, celebrated, and could be attractive at a certain point in life, a short period, but nothing more.

  Maj-Gun’s: “My undelivered love, it is pure and true.” So yes, there was already a lot of forced comedy around this at the rug rag bucket in the house. Something Susette had understood back then already despite the fact that she had been rather dazed there, sitting in her pajamas, listening. That there was not much truth in Maj-Gun’s story, that he would have been interested in someone like Maj-Gun, who had neither the looks nor the manner about her, was rather unthinkable.

  Of course in addition to the fact that maybe he had been there and “helped himself” there at the cemetery for a while as a teenager, according to rumors that Maj-Gun, who no longer was the Pastor’s Crown Princess, had “received.”

  But at the rug rag bucket Susette had not said to Maj-Gun that Maj-Gun’s love was a fantasy-fetus born of a lot of wishful thinking, and she was not planning on saying it now either.

  And besides, what did she know about it anyway? She had not been with the girls and had a crush on some Bencku in her youth, or had a crush on anyone at all. During that time she kept company with Maj-Gun’s brother Tom Maalamaa and when she had not been with Tom Maalamaa in his room at the rectory she had been at the hospital with her father who was suddenly dying and when he died she had not been able to be with Tom at the rectory anymore so she and her mother remained alone in the deserted family home in the lush neighborh
oods below the town center. Far away from all the ordinary youth life in the District, far away, in some way, from everything.

  “The Disgust.” An empty page: “Empty world.” And suddenly again here at the window in Rosengården, an old memory: Tom Maalamaa standing at the window of his room in the rectory that faced the cemetery where his sister Maj-Gun Maalamaa, the self-appointed Pastor’s Crown Princess, wanted to hold court, but with little success. “My kingdom,” she said that too. But Liz Maalamaa the Angel of Death mask (not scary, just idiotic) or without the mask, had hung on the metal gate tjii this way tjii that way… and you had, everyone had, walked past. That cemetery, which a few years later, as teenagers, had been transformed into a place where it was whispered that his sister “received.” “The Disgust,” Tom Maalamaa at the window who said that and Susette standing next to him nodding in silent agreement even if they did not talk about it with more words than that when they were alone in Tom’s room at the rectory. Behind the closed door, just the two of them, in the music, Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, always “Mahler’s Ninth—”

  That you could escape to the music from the Disgust. “The Disgust.” In these moments in the room at the window with the view that otherwise is so beautiful: trees and hills, the church with its bells ringing on the weekends, six o’clock on Saturday evenings. Isolated words that had been thrown into the air, when the record, “Mahler’s Ninth,” on the record player had ended.

  As that relationship with Tom Maalamaa had also, in other words, gradually ended. Nothing dramatic about it either: they parted as friends of course and lost touch with each other as a matter of course. Tom Maalamaa who, according to what his sister Maj-Gun said at the newsstand, had finished high school and moved away from home and started studying law at the university and after finishing his studies became a human rights lawyer for an international charity.

  And Susette herself who had finished school after high school in connection with her father’s death and started working at the private Christian nursing home for the elderly and infirm in the town center. She worked there for almost one year: kept watch over the dying ones, which the manager maintained Susette was good at and maybe it was true but suddenly she had enough and quit and gone to the Businesswoman of the Year and begged for a normal summer job instead. Which later, as said, after a few days of working at the ice cream stand in the two-window shack on the square in the town center, had continued at the strawberry fields in another part of the country, to Janos, the Lithuanian, the second lover, what later became “Poland,” all of that.

  But Tom Maalamaa’s voice, how it pushes its way through her memory. Speaking “softly,” says, “the Disgust,” at the window in his steady but soft voice. One spring evening, March–April, big and bright. Tom who is speaking, Susette who is nodding, the quiet understanding around a feeling that they share without needing to formulate it into words.

  Afterward, in that other life that was not “Poland,” which she had said to her mother, to Maj-Gun, which had gone on for a while, three years in other words before she returned home again, she had been able to recreate that feeling many times. A feeling that became inseparably glued to the District in particular, the entire district, what had happened to her personally, her mother’s death, everything mixed together. “This Disgust” over everything.

  The cemetery, the death, all death, her father’s death. “No, Susette,” her mother had said admonishingly when she let go of everything, “it’s not easy living in a house of sorrow.” And Maj-Gun, Majjunn, the Pastor’s Crown Princess, “say the password”… a metal gate tjii this way tjii that way in the wind… and Maj-Gun older, receiving: Maj-Gun’s bleeding teenage bottom in the sleet between the headstones.

  And at the nursing home later, the lonely dying ones on whom Susette, according to the manager, had a favorable effect: to these beds in particular where both nursing home cats were often already lying at the foot—they had a habit of sneaking in just before death came, jumping up onto the beds, had a nose for death.

  Sitting there on a chair at the bedsides, holding hands, saying good-bye.

  The Disgust. Instead of the beautiful and the normal. Which had been exactly that, no descriptions. Her mother at the cemetery: “What a beautiful bouquet, Susette!” “Listen! They are ringing for the weekend service. Listen how beautiful it is.”

  The Disgust. In relation to the District—her youth, her home, everything. In relation to herself with: the memory of it—padding steps, soft and meek, down those corridors. Did not say much, almost mute, but stick thin and with those big eyes, bulging globes that greeted her in the mirrors of the nursing home. Padding over shiny waxed floors: were seasons, summers, springs, falls, going on anywhere?

  Looking out through the window, the square, the life, the movement.

  “Kitty, kitty come to me.” Scchhhh hisssss: the nursing home cats who saw red at the mere sight of her and ran for their lives down the corridors.

  The Disgust in relation to time, to herself, to everything.

  Which had also been a reason why she remained in the city by the sea, in other cities, in other places, a long time. Sporadically getting in touch with her mother at the house. Called from “Poland,” just a designation, no camouflage for anything tremendous.

  Because Janos, her second love, the Lithuanian, from the strawberry fields, there had not been much to it. The story had barely started when it ended.

  And gradually undeniably, you came up with a way to talk about it and think about it, with the comic points as well. How they had “escaped” from the boardinghouse in the middle of the summer night where all of the strawberry pickers were lying, sleeping, packed their things, headed off. Out into the woods—but the woods in the center of the country are bigger and more deserted than those in the District could ever be. And getting lost there.

  She had found her way out again a day and a half later, suddenly found herself by the side of a road on which cars passed now and then. Hungry and exhausted she set herself up by the side of the road in order to bum a ride: it had not gone very well and she had been so tired she had not been able to stand and had to sit on a rock to rest. She had fallen asleep on the rock and when she woke up there were some boys in a car that had stopped by the side of the road and they asked her if she was feeling all right, if she needed a ride.

  And she had been allowed to hang out with them, they gave her food and she slept in the backseat the whole way and when she woke up again they were in the city by the sea and she stayed there with the guys for a while, somewhat older, nice guys, had been their “mascot,” but no one was allowed to touch her, they were very kind.

  Everyone had been so nice to her: “mascot.” But then she left and got a job and her own place to live. And stayed in the city awhile, and then traveled to another city, and so on.

  Janos, her second love. A few days there, then—the whole time, gone.

  But here, now. My life. How it is flying by. An opportunity exists. Be nothing and new. The Disgust? Of course it was, of course it is, so beautiful here. The open spaces.

  •

  But still, Maj-Gun. At the cemetery, one April evening as a teenager, Susette who happened to come by, on her way home from Tom, the Disgust? It had not been like that. Indifferent, almost in a bad mood, told Susette to go away. And Susette had gone away, home. They had not spoken about it either, ever.

  Maj-Gun at the rug rag bucket—no, that was something else. Maj-Gun at the newsstand… “I was standing there, reeling in the fear.” But she had not been scared. In the middle of the square, Maj-Gun waving.

  As if there was a connection between them. Invisible threads, rags, rug rags. Moss that was growing over their heads, moss like a fungus from the earth, old folk songs.

  Maj-Gun with a mask over her face: Liz Maalamaa the Angel of Death.

  Oh. Up here in the empty room, it blows away, so beautiful, open.

  “Overturn houses?” Nah, standing firmly you know, on the ground. />
  Tiny love, tiny baby bird under your jacket, tiny seed—

  I love you. And running over plains.

  “SUSEEETTTE!”

  Solveig’s voice blasting from one of the lower floors, through the house. Have to go.

  •

  But then CRASH. A glass rabbit that splits into a thousand pieces, raining over the hard, stone floor. Susette has left the attic, polishing rabbits half a floor down, has returned to her work.

  This house: partially open plan living divided over three floors, ceiling height and space and Susette at the railing on the third floor: high above the ground level where Solveig is polishing the hard floor made of expensive Italian granite way down below, and Susette who is supposed to be dusting, but that strange thieflike merriment in her again.

  Susette with polish on her rag is polishing the rabbits, my love, your love, finding a tiny seed, tiny baby bird under your jacket, light heart little sparrow hopping crow hopping sparrow. “Look, Solveig!” Cannot resist rollicking a little. “Look look!” Holding a rabbit in her hand, over the railing, Solveig far down below, Susette pretending to juggle the rabbit, pretending to throw it dangerously up into the air. Look, Solveig! “Gråhara northwest nineteen, Bulleholm northeast thirteen…” starts rattling off the weather forecast from the company car that morning, it echoes through the house, sings the song, but dearest my little girl don’t tie the bands too hard, “the folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one, over and over again, an eternal repetition, look, Solveig!”

  “You’re crazy!” Solveig yells loudly too, through the house. “Crazy idiot!”

  And then: “NO! Susette!” because it is in that moment that Susette loses her grip on the little glass piece, slippery from the polish, and it slips out of her hands and they both understand what is going to happen, it cannot be stopped. The rabbit that is falling, falling through the whole house and breaks on the floor into millions of small, hard shards that fly everywhere and Solveig is forced to run run away, is barely able to take cover behind a door.