A fictive children’s garden in other words, of course she did not know anyone who would have or had such an experience from their own children’s garden and Maj-Gun did not have any memories like that either. She and her brother Tom never went to the children’s garden, in their own home; it was always looked after by Mama Inga-Britta, or by Aunt Liz who came to the rectory and “babysat” sometimes when she needed to rest. No, nothing less than the novel writing again, the Book, again an “interpretation,” and “tone down the self-pity.”
And: she had, as usual, not toned down but toned up and stood there on the walking path right between the church and the main country road that morning-night in front of Susette who had, in any case at first, looked so sleepy—the Killer Rabbit who, in its violent fury, had practically cried out of exasperation. My love, the Boy in the woods, and so on.
At the same time as the Killer Rabbit’s urge to kill was completely intact. And it could be felt: Susette had suddenly been one hundred percent on the alert. Like an animal who has met another animal: wide awake, and, in the midst of everything, also scared to death in those big eyes.
So alike. The Angels of Death. The likeness.
“Go away.” Though Susette had done her best to hide her fear. “I don’t know anything about anything.”
Call forth the fear, reinforce the fear. But there had been no time for that. She had attacked immediately.
“Go away!” Susette’s pathetic whining.
“NO!”
And then, just as fleetingly, the situation was over, as dreamlike as it had started. But if a Nightwalker with a dog had not come along on the walking path, Maj-Gun certainly would not have gone away.
A compass through Susette’s eyes. It was night in the world for the Animal Child, the clock had stopped, five in the morning.
Left unfinished. But later.
Susette had suddenly arrived down at the boathouse on the Second Cape, in the middle of her own working day which she seemed to have left, of her own accord, and alone.
Why? You did not understand. You did not understand anything. Parallels. Rags.
But there where Maj-Gun has found herself anyway: just as much to her own genuine surprise, at exactly that moment. The American girl’s hangout, filled with all sorts of junk, nothing nice about it, sleeping. Lying on the floor there, barely enough space, the getawaybag under her head. Some old rag pulled over herself, among the boat motors, fishing equipment, and a large metal anchor. Slept heavily and deeply.
Awakened by a shadow on the veranda. Sat up, dazed with sleep. Susette had not believed her eyes, it had already started snowing then.
Lots of snow. And Susette, a dark figure in all of the whiteness. And Susette, had seen her through the window, eyes met. What a resignation in her. As if: walking toward a destiny.
Rug rags. That was how it was going to be. Death’s Angels.
Is that what had spurred Maj-Gun on?
Susette had opened the door, come inside.
“What are you doing here?”
She was going to the sea, she replied, like Susette in love, Susette and love. And Maj-Gun suddenly assaulted her.
Hit hit hit.
And Susette had fallen and while falling hit her head against the anchor and Maj-Gun rushed out. Into the whirling snow, onto the slippery cliffs. Struggled through the snow, up and away from here and farther.
The cousin’s house. Which she had left a few hours earlier. That was where she had been. But Bengt. Not the Boy in the woods: it had disappeared, right there, when she was in the house together with him.
Because that was suddenly where she decided she was going to go, from the town center. That morning. Had in some way lost her sense of direction after the meeting with Susette on the walking path. Killer Rabbit. Its power inside her. It had not become light. That time of year when it almost never became light.
First around nine o’clock. Then she had already been on her way to the Second Cape. In a car. With a hayseed, in a rascallike mood: wanted to set up a time to meet. Some movie at some movie theater that just had to be seen.
She had also been in the other apartment. Susette’s apartment. Empty. Susette at work; Maj-Gun had an extra key, which she had begged off the Manager. Walked around there in the Lovers’ Nest. Alone. The pictures on the wall, the Winter Garden, the “exhibition.” Bluebluepictures. Many strange words. People float freely from themselves. Otherwise. An appalling mess, but I don’t know anything about anything, at least it had been true in that moment. He had not been there.
Gone on his way. In reality, she would have liked to have gone home and slept. But home, an impossibility. No space. Across the cemetery and the walking path again, and out toward the main country road, the bus stop. Away. Was going to run away, at least fulfill that intention. The bus stop. No buses. But a car. The hayseed, all fathers’ Toyotas, one of those. The window was rolled down, “Need a lift?” And why not?
Where? Have an objective. Mushy. The capes. He drove her there. Small kid who had actually been embarrassed about driving around and around this morning when everyone else was at work, not able to sleep.
Well, long story, cut it off here. Slammed the door shut, ended up on the side of the road heading toward the capes, a few miles from the house, had started walking. In which direction, did not matter. But THEN she had gotten the cousin’s house on her mind for real. The Boy in the woods. Her love, her purpose. Maybe he was there, he was.
Come to the house, cold, ice-cold, beer and cigarettes, syrupy.
She had wanted to say, actually, if she had been in full possession of her senses: “But come away from here now, you can’t live in this shit.”
But still. Her dream of love. The only one. Pure. Hold on to it. Instead spoken like a ghost about the other things. I love you because you killed out of love.
“What’re you babbling about?”
That was the lasting meaning. He had not understood one bit.
But keep on to the bitter end. Her end.
Ha-ha. Realism is here.
What do you do with your dream of love the second after you know that it has been forfeited but you want to hold on to it anyway? Answer: if you are Maj-Gun newsstandess, you tackle it. Programmed to kiss it back to life again.
And it had allowed itself to be kissed, indolent, without resistance, without interest as eroticism is, and what had happened had happened and on the floor, in an old parlor where she was lying, through the window she had seen: the wind, the cloudy sky, the dirty gray of midmorning, the trees.
Had removed herself. He was sleeping then. Not like a child, but sawing wood.
That was the last she had seen of him alive.
The sea, clean, smelled good, wind and freshness, and then such a tiredness in her. To the hangout, through the pine trees, the cape, the openness.
Snowflakes had started falling, so tired in the hangout—snow snow snow. While she slept, dreamed about the hayseeds, the pistol awakening, snow and more snow.
Susette. And the anchor.
•
Hours later. The whirling snow, the cliffs, bloody. The road again, the house was there, called for help, ambulance, police.
Gone to the house. First. Like a Peeping Tom. Looked in through a window.
What she had seen was indescribable.
She had lost everything, all purpose. Run run away from there. In the snow, the slipperiness, the zero visibility. A thousand miles forward, but on the same road, the same Toyota, the same redneck.
“Do you want to run away with me to the ends of the earth? We’re going now?”
He had shaken his head, hesitantly. Nah. Nah. Time to eat. Homeandeat.
•
But over now. Here in the room, never think about it again. If she were to think then everything would just start spinning again, an old folk song.
Now. Here, on the desk, in the room that will be left behind. “Hungry like a wolf.” Folk songs. The cassette tape on the desk with all the pa
per.
Doris. A demo tape that a boy named Micke Friberg had sent around to various record companies back then. Micke’s Folk Band. Back then Maj-Gun had gotten a copy off of him, Micke, granted “for compensation.” Pulled out into a long, brown, small curly strip.
How nice: what a cassette tape later becomes when it gets tangled in the machinery and you have, in the end, lost all patience, and torn at it, who cares if it breaks.
Magazines. One particular one, open. Wrinkly. Glossy photo. Woman’s face, big eyes. The compass, with the needle that poked through these paper eyes. Maj-Gun’s compass, her needle.
Through Susette’s eyes. Not Susette of course, a look-alike. How similar. One of those young women, a dime a dozen, an article. Which had been about just that. A serious magazine with a socially critical spin. How stupid that girl was, clueless, that was the message. Was not written out clearly, what was the art of formulation not good for? But, should be clear, based on the descriptions. Her stupid everyday existence, her stupid life.
That girl had been upset later. They met her at a café after she read what they wrote in the article that was going to be published—this meeting was also described in the article. “That’s not me at all,” she cried, otherwise defenseless, they chased after her with their camera. On the last photo, big-eyed in a wood, a small dog at her legs. She who had been crying and crying. “I’m not at all like that… and stop taking pictures!” Of course they had not, they became interesting pictures. As if in harmony with a revelation. Don’t know anything about anything. Even about herself.
•
Maj-Gun hastily cleans everything up. The papers, the magazines, the cassettes, the compass, pens, and so on. In a black garbage bag that she drags down the stairs and leaves it next to the garbage can by the door. She puts the room key on the table in the hallway, the house is empty, glances all the way into the kitchen, cannot help herself.
The distinguishing feature about this house, Sumatra, is, as said, that on the inside it is exactly like the other house, Java, the same blueprint. The same view in other words, out into the kitchen. In Sumatra like in Java, when you come down the stairs from your rented room on the upper floor. The woman at the rug rag bucket. She had thought it was a dream at first; it was not.
“Can you help me with this?” The woman had looked up from her work, among the rags, the bags in the kitchen, piles of them. In half darkness in the middle of the day, the window shades pulled down.
“An office rat on the lower floor.” Maj-Gun had started a letter to her brother Tom about life there in Java. “In gray clothes, all of her gray.”
A letter, among others, that was never finished.
Because she had liked that woman, they had become friends, for real. “Susette, she didn’t give way.” Whatever she had meant by that, Maj-Gun, then it was one hundred percent true and real.
But now. Gone forever. Giving away.
So: here in the house, Sumatra, everything is normal. The table wiped clean, coffee cups and saucers in the sink, lemons against the dark blue bottoms of the curtains, really nice, fresh. A dull January afternoon light.
And left, left the big, black garbage bag by the garbage can. Everything from the newsstand in it too, except for “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” which she still did not dare throw away, keep it, like a memory. But the cigarettes, the blouse, and so on. She puts the remainder of what had been hers from the furnished room that she had rented into the seaman’s chest that she had brought with her when she moved in many years ago.
There is room for a lot in the chest, everything she has. A few weeks later, after her aunt’s funeral, right before she travels to Portugal, she transports the chest to a storage space in the industrial area on the outskirts of the city by the sea where it will remain until she returns one year later, buys a little house in another part of the city, a lush suburb, where she will live during her university studies.
She puts some other things in the chest as well. Red bow, a piece of wrinkled silk paper carefully folded, everything from the getawaybag that was hanging around forgotten in a closet in the Manager’s hall for many weeks. It was close to being left behind altogether. The Manager, from the stairs, came running after her with it when she was already seated in the passenger’s seat of the rented delivery van next to the delivery man. Tobias in the slush, temperatures above freezing again. Maj-Gun had taken the bag, good-bye, they never see each other again.
•
The drawings were also placed in the chest. Bengt’s drawings from the walls in the other apartment, which she put in the bag while she was there. Blueblueblueblue pictures, watercolors, which she has not inspected more closely, will not end up doing so either actually. That “exhibition.” That Winter Garden. Which may come to exist in the Winter Garden later, the one on the Second Cape.
She gives these drawings to Rita, some years later. Rita, Solveig’s and Bengt’s sister, from the Rita Strange Corporation. They do not know each other, cross each other’s paths during a legal dispute. Maj-Gun is the lawyer, recently graduated from the university where already in the final stages of her studies, which she completes quickly and “brilliantly,” she is offered a good position at a law firm with a good reputation, which has its reliable offices in the nice southern quarter of the city. A law firm where the lawyers occupy themselves with inheritance law and the like. Rita is the client. In her capacity as party in that corporation, Rita Strange. An elegant context for wild elegant ideas. Advertising people, artists, architects, gladly calling themselves “avant-gardist.” Those kinds of dreams, which can be taken seriously thanks to their financial solvency, “the backing.” Feasible, you can dream big.
And it is back then, in the wake of a recession, when dogs are eating dogs and some have become full even if it is not spoken about publicly.
Build. The Winter Garden. Architecture. The Second Cape. An idea on paper that has been born out of all of this? Maybe. But it is not interesting, in any case in the perspective that Maj-Gun cannot muster any interest in it, not even enough to pay more attention to it than she needs to for the purposes of her job, not in the least. Market transactions, inheritance and gifts, and so on, the kinds of things that can be bought with money, and the kinds of things the law is there for, plus the money, to secure them. The Glass House on the Second Cape is owned by a friend, Kenny, who is also a member of the corporation, she inherited it from a relative she once lived with. And Jan Backmansson, who is Rita’s husband, has the hill on the First Cape, but some sister Susanna is being obstinate, and so on. Several transactions, legal obstacles, but those kinds of obstacles are there to be overcome. An idea. Which may be realized. But what is just as true is that the Winter Garden, a few years after it has come to be, is transformed.
Has already aged then. An idea that was an idea, a thought, but when it was realized: well, not what you had thought. Not a lot of added value either, a bit clumsy too.
Is sold, is bought by someone else. As a physical place, the Winter Garden can be seen as a process, that light is transformed and transformed.
But the brochures will remain. Kapu kai. The hacienda must be built. That, for example, and other things.
•
Lengthy? Diffuse? Maybe. Maj-Gun thinks so in any case while she carefully, and down to the last letter, becomes acquainted with all of the details in the matter, she is being paid for it. But My God when it comes to the business matters that person cannot stop babbling she thinks, which could be an interesting observation since Rita, cool as a cucumber, is someone who de facto does not babble. At all. Puts forth facts. Papers on the table. One of those, could have been fascinating.
She gives the drawings to Rita during the final stages of the proceedings. Says, “I knew your brother.” And adds, after a brief pause, “We had a relationship.”
Rita looks at Maj-Gun Maalamaa, one moment, takes it in, so to speak, what does one say: the revelation. She is wearing red clothes. Expensive skirt, expensive small jac
ket with discreet and solid buttons, and slim, that stomach fat like all of the other fat she dieted away of course. Attractive. Shrugs her shoulders. “Bengt,” Rita says later, as if it were nothing, shrugs again, “had many relationships.” Tragic? Neither of them says so, nor “he was washed up” as Solveig said once a long time ago on a winter day on the square in the town center, “a wild pain,” which for Maj-Gun settled everything, in one moment, but—in and of itself, the pain, the words, for Rita’s part does not mean that it does not, could not, exist there.
In some way, perhaps it is audacious, it makes an impression on Maj-Gun. Reluctantly. No nonsense. Rita’s attitude.
Rita just takes the drawings and puts them in her bag. Nothing more about that. And maybe, if you had been in another mood, or in some way, in relation to everything, could have sat on your high horse, you could have hissed, You could actually call Tobias now and then, someone who did so much for you too.
Two angels on the television set. The Astronaut, the Nuclear Physicist. Sister Red, Sister Blue. But that is something Maj-Gun no longer thinks about every day. Been there done that. But giving the drawings to Rita is no whim, no impulse.
Rita. She sees Solveig. Rita might as well be Solveig, no difference. That twin likeness, still.
Getting rid of an old story. Which still, seen as a story, possibly as a crime, never really stopped following her. “Countryman Loman covered things up.” One of her classmates at the university had been fascinated by that kind of information. Gaps, holes, misunderstandings, when the law had seen things through the fingers, women and crime, men and crime, these people without legal rights. Information she does not gather or think about, but to which she will return, like a refrain.
The Glitter Scene Page 25