“And how do I know that, Manager?”
Maj-Gun pauses, a few seconds and then, NOW, she looks at him. Stares at him, her whole life in that moment, a bird in my hand, don’t give way now.
“I know that because I have been old my entire life.
“For ages, Manager.
“And sometimes it has been. Strange. Lonely, of course. At this age.
“I thought it would help to, for example, meet people the same age, go to the disco.
“There is so much we think, Manager. Which later, when reality forces its way in, turns out to be wrong.
“A bird in my hand, Manager.
“It is a rose, blossomed. It didn’t help.”
And the words that catch in her throat, but he gets up, he comes to her.
Maj-Gun in the bathroom later, brushing her teeth, looking at herself in the mirror.
Walks out, opens the door to his room. Walks in, crawls into the bed, he opens his arms to her. The Animal Child and the Animal Tobias meet, in the darkness, all walls come crashing down.
•
The nausea starts immediately the following morning. The Manager has gone to school in the middle of Christmas break to prepare his teaching for the spring semester; “fresh air,” “snuffle a bit at the everyday”… He said ahem, and the door shut after him and a Giantbirthdaycake has been left sitting on the table since yesterday, alongside The Law Book with its bordeaux red spine and the crumpled-up fire-red silk paper under the table as well as the red ribbon bow, curly and streamerlike at the ends. Invoking seasickness, all of it; the nausea has been intense: Maj-Gun rushed to the bathroom and threw up but despite her birthday and the other extenuating circumstances, no avoiding it, she knows immediately what it is. Quite right, it will turn out: the next morning and the next and the next the nausea is back. “What are you babbling about?” The Boy in the woods, in that house that room, with the men in the fields.
No immaculate conception in other words, Jesu Maria Annunciation, a funny word that can be looked up in The Nordic Family Book if you are in that kind of a mood, but Maj-Gun is not in that kind of a mood, will not be either, push it aside, do not think about it at all for a while. “Some bug,” she says to the Manager who is suddenly back that first morning while she is in the bathroom. He has been gone forty-five minutes at the most, stands and counts the minutes out loud in the hallway when she comes out, could not keep her thoughts collected. Out of breath, panting, thin hair wet from the rain, it has been raining hard out there but he has run the whole way and he comes to her.
And then, yes, it is, has been, possible to set aside all thoughts, exist right here, nothing else, nowhere else. Just here. In the woods a body of water reveals itself, the third possibility, like a hypothesis. Appears in the fog, a path, it clears—becomes almost two days during which Carmen is played in the apartment, Lucia di Lammermoor, but most of all an old Christmas hymn that sounds the way Christmas songs usually sound when you are still listening to them on the days between Christmas and New Year’s. Discarded, a bit past their prime, but that is exactly why they draw you in. It is a rose, blossomed, words and melody that emit other meanings too, reveal themselves to what is most personal and you get to be part of it. Some kind of excitement also, in the apartment, listening to Christmas carols this way, because the weekend is not over just because of that.
Carmen in one room. A room of love, where she has shut herself in. With the bullfighter who was with her, who was in other places, who had his bulls, his fights, his… everything. Carmen in the room of love (maybe in a hotel), jubilation at first, but at the same time a destiny, she was trapped, had locked herself in.
A bird in my hand. The rose that you threw at me. A body of water reveals itself in the woods. A moment, closed in the fog, imperceptible.
•
It becomes New Year’s, clingclang the clock at city hall rings in the town center, New Year, a new decade, they drink nonalcoholic wine from plastic champagne glasses that the Manager conjures up at midnight. One glass of wine per person, cheers, Maj-Gun laughs, the bubbles rush to her head. And are cast in metal; Maj-Gun’s “happiness” is a weak clump with knobbles that are money and when you hold the Manager’s up against the wall in the kitchen in the light the shadow of a pretzel stands out against the yellow wallpaper, which means: even more loneliness—and suddenly, pain in her stomach, it hurts so damn much, all of it, everything. But she does not say so, she says “sugar pretzel,” tastes, stretches out her red tongue. Hamba hamba. The Long Afternoon of Desire, dancing in the kitchen. The Manager laughs, maybe a bit insecurely, The Long Afternoon of Desire, one should look it up in The Family Book whatever it was that faun was now called. But he does not walk over to any bookshelf, there is no time—says afterward, when they are lying naked, entangled like streamers on the sofa bed in the room, as the District’s mainstay, which he also is, grade school teacher and mixed school teacher and pedagogue all sorts of things, with that voice in other words, that he has a little weakness for Cookies certainly, even if it they contain, as it were, pinching Maj-Gun’s naked bum, “quite a lot of carbohydrates.”
Maj-Gun sits up in the sofa, laughs, the docklands in Borneo, the Happy Harlot, gathers her hair in her hand at the nape of her neck and lets it fall, so to speak, shakes her head, her hair flies, stupid angels, the TV, straddles the Manager, on all fours above him, hisses, Starling, darling, ready to be kissed, like she once had in the newsstand.
“Come.” The Manager pulls her down on the sofa and they do a little more of that and later when they are lying in the darkness taking a breather the Manager asks Maj-Gun how she ended up at the newsstand anyway.
•
“The newsstand?” Maj-Gun asks, dazed with sleep, does not really know how she should relate to the question, if she even likes it. The newsstand, the last decade, this is new, and now. But in order to say something she starts talking about her godmother Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa and all of those years that maybe in the big picture were not so many: a miserable childhood, youth for example, which she was never really able to get away from. In contrast to her brother Tom Maalamaa who had shared the misery with her for a while, without the siblings still being able to, or maybe exactly because of that, have this misery in common. Which was not exactly unhappiness, just a type of restlessness, out of place. Her brother left it behind but she personally, in some way, remained behind with it. But is that how it should be said? In any case, the godmother, Aunt Liz, who became a widow early on, “husband drank himself to death on the Sweden–Finland ferry,” and she and her aunt on the Sweden–Finland ferry later, life as a cruise—as an image of it.
The aunt who retired and had not really known what she should do with her time at first. But the freedom she had spoken about loftily, “I am so happy and free!” But she was sad in the very beginning, turnedupsidedown. And during that period she had been busy spending time with her only goddaughter, Maj-Gun Maalamaa, whom she invited along for company on the cruise, to rewrite a marriage with an, in and of itself, appallingly wealthy but violent and alcoholic husband who was not exactly someone to write home about, to a story about belonging despite everything and the love that never died. Dick and Duck, two swans among other swans; “climb into a story, Manager, you need it.” Maj-Gun interposes as a moral here, seems to fit, but otherwise she does not know. And as mentioned, it had of course been a passing phase in her aunt’s life: she took her maiden name back later and bought a house in Portugal where she spent the winters because of the hereditary varicose veins that Maj-Gun personally also suffers from. “Cottaage,” the aunt has a habit of saying about the place in Portugal in order not to sound rustic; the reason is due to her “country origin,” on the farm in the north that her husband’s good family from the higher burghers of society indirectly heckled her for in the city where she and her husband lived while he was still alive; it has never truly left her. But it certainly is no cottaage but a château. Has sent pictures: the house, the dog, Li
z, and the sunglasses.
She had a dog for a while, a real pet dog, an ittybittydog under her blouse. Handsome, Ransome: from the beginning they were two but one of them died as a puppy from some sort of canine disease while the other one died in its sleep of old age after ten years of happiness with its master. “That kind of little dog, Manager, they don’t get very old.” Handsome: named after some movie star, whom the aunt had loved in her distant youth, who had a dog of the same breed with almost the same name. “Come and see my gallery,” in other words, she sent these pictures to her goddaughter from Portugal. Liz and the dog on a patio, the sea behind them, the horizon.
Come and see my gallery. Written cards and letters. “But I didn’t go, didn’t answer either.” Had been busy with, well, all sorts of things: admission exams, compendiums, a book that needed to be written, The story of my own life… cutting rags. Rug rags… which she still does not have time to delve deeper into because suddenly the Manager is paying attention, truly alert: “You write? That’s what I thought. Maybe you’re going to be a writer? You have so much, life, all of your clever wordings—”
“Come and see my gallery, Manager,” Maj-Gun reiterates because if there is something she does not want to talk about then it is that. And besides, for once, to remain in that other right now, which is just as important. About her godmother, her aunt, who is still as alive as could be. That she had thought get old now old hag and die and she had that and she stills feels bad about it—maybe it will improve if she says it, but it does not help very much. “But, Manager, Aunt Liz, she’s okay, even if she has her quirks…” Dreams from her childhood of being a missionary, which she has nagged about more and more as she gets older, walking in the jungle in comfortable shoes, searching for heathens to save… “But, quirks, Manager,” Maj-Gun adds, so to speak, philosophically, “don’t we all have them?” And isn’t that the delightful thing about us? Everyone? Everything we have that is not written in the family chronicles and the magazines and in Everything about the world, you can say anything here as long as it sounds like something… not very much has been written about it anywhere at all, and maybe there won’t be either. Because a lot of it doesn’t make you feel good, you just become cuckoo, from being written down in pretty formulations.
And well, later, the whole time, she was, so to speak, in the newsstand and the moss was growing over her head, living with Susette Packlén’s mother for a while as a boarder while Susette was away and her mother was, during the final years, not really right either. “Rug rags, Manager, she collected them. Crehp crehp. Had to be cut, cut—
“But we had fun together, I really liked her.” And the mother died and Susette came back and the house was sold and suddenly Maj-Gun became a boarder with another family in another house there in the same neighborhood below the square in the town center. A normal family, Gunilla, Göran, a pair of teachers; moreover the Manager’s colleagues at the school. “But shhh, Manager, they aren’t, no one is allowed to know about this relationship… I respect the Count, the charm of the office manager and maintaining the façade in your capacity as the District’s mainstay.” Maj-Gun stammers, suddenly in the middle of the story about something other than the intense indignation that pours into her, an appallingly bad mood.
“Maj-Gun”—the Manager takes her hand in his—”it isn’t like that.”
“With, then, Manager,” Maj-Gun continues with the Manager’s hand in hers, it feels better, “a thousand cranky kids on the ground floor,” and there at the new boarding place she fattened up for real. Not because she had eaten that much; “it wasn’t a feel-good problem, Manager,” or a hormone imbalance or Femininity, which was exploding, uncontrolled inside her, swelling over every orifice and border, but a condition that was given form: “I am without space.
“This isn’t very coherent, Manager.” Maj-Gun suddenly interrupts herself, but in a new way. Because in the midst of everything she realizes maybe it is the Manager’s hand in hers, a body of water reveals itself in the woods, the fog disperses entirely, right here, in the open, New Year’s night: the possibility. That she might be able to. Can. Tell, everything. Both everything that is clear and everything else, less clear, more incomprehensible. Images, scenes, that she does not know what she is going to do with. About Susette Packlén. The revolver in Susette’s bathroom. And the cat, which all of a sudden was not there. “It got run over.”
And also. That which in some way belongs to what is obvious, though it was a fantasy fetus, but not any less because of it, it was real too. She has to beat it into her head: not the Boy in the woods, but Bengt. Maybe she would be able to say something about that too. In some way. That she had never known him. It had been her story, a story that has gone on and on in her head. And that received a continuation in reality, at the newsstand, with Susette Packlén on the other side of the counter. And flowed out, unchecked, ran away—like “The Manuscript of a Life,” a novel she had been sitting and writing in her rented room. “Promising! Short! Kill your darlings and tone down the self-pity.” Sometimes she opened the leather-bound folder where she kept the comments from the book editor on a first draft she had sent to the publisher a long time ago. As the years passed, she had opened the binder more often, and those comments and how they sounded had grown inside her head too. Had, in and of itself, almost become a monument and that is where the talk had come in, about Literature and all of the interferences that should be done to it, regardless of whether or not the Critics would have any understanding for it; a topic of conversation she had introduced in long monologues she held in the kitchen, with her landlady Gunilla as a willing, respectful listener because more was happening here in the house now than “1,001 Castles to Furnish Before You Die,” recurring purchases of new curtains for the kitchen that never turned out right regardless of how you tried. In other words Art was happening here in the house. And no, it was not as though she had stopped writing, not even in secret. No, she sat in her room and wrote and wrote, it surged and surged, the more Gunilla and Göran, her landlords, moved around on tippytoe in the house, shooed away the children who wanted to play with the renter, “Come out now Terrible Animal Child and chase us!” But “Shhh, kids, get away from here,” could be heard from the other side because the Writer should not be disturbed during the “working&editingphase” of the “great manuscript”—that word “great” had also come about with time—Maj-Gun herself when she was not in her room had, with importance in her voice, led the landlords to believe that was what was occupying her behind the door in the boarder’s room, which always needed to be kept shut so “the creation process” could proceed.
So yes, she wrote, but the more she wrote, that was strange, the more she took notes and took notes in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” “collected material,” the farther away she got… yes, that was strange.
But something had existed for real, in earnest, a place where everything had started. Something terrible and great that pulled, had pulled her toward it. Rug rags. The Animal Child’s peering eyes in the kitchen of a single-family home, among rags. A woman who was cutting, cutting, Maj-Gun who was cutting, but it was no image, it was for real, not one of those similes, metaphors.
Rug rags. Which need words.
Silk velvet rag scraps I have seen the most I have… Yes, “raw, unworked,” which the book editor had also written in his comments. But still: honest.
The writing that had carried her there, from one room to another room, an empty room despite the fact that there was a lot of paper there, a lot of dreams, stories, tales, feelings, jealousy—but her, personally, somewhere else, I am without space.
Talk about it, in some way. And about Susette. Rug rags, Susette. What was it about Susette?
“Sometimes that you are two who are one. I sought that in her as well.”
Susette in the hangout. Her eyes. Maj-Gun who was hitting, and blood.
At the same time. She had wanted to kill her. She wanted to kill her.
And Bengt
. The Winter Garden. “What are you babbling about?”
And another image. Which was not an image. A scene that was hanging, pulled loose, but was still true.
Him lying in the house, the room, and blood—
Talk about Bengt. The Love that was no love. But he died, despite everything, anyway.
All of this that could be explained—is not, after all.
•
Because PRRRR. There, in the middle of the night, the phone rings.
The Manager jumps up from the sofa bed, runs out into the hall, closes the door, and when he has finished talking he comes back.
“I’m afraid, my dear girl, that it’s bad news,” he says carefully. “That was your father. Your aunt, Elizabeth. In Portugal. She’s dead. He asked me to give you the news.
“Well.” The Manager stands there in the doorway and it comes out quickly, as if he were ashamed. “He said that he would very much like to speak to you personally but we agreed I wouldn’t wake you since you had already gone to bed—
“She’d been ill. She went peacefully. Your brother and his fiancée were there. Good that she has found peace.”
The Manager suddenly looked so old: his beer belly, his nakedness. Lions brother. The old men’s choir.
And that night, when everything is over, Maj-Gun says the most beautiful thing she knows about Love.
The newsstand again, what it was like there, all of the magazines she had read. How they were filled with such a language, like in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” which existed everywhere, made itself superior, you could not keep up, regardless of how you printed and printed the best bits. “You can say anything here”: everyone who went around and “expressed themselves,” outside the newsstand, everywhere, all the people who were saying the same things to each other.
The Glitter Scene Page 22