And now. No turning back. They are there, here. And Susette: never anywhere but here. Never more than twenty-nine; there. Tom Maalamaa opens the door, she steps out.
“Don’t forget.” He discovers the shoe bag with the silver shoes in the backseat. “Thank you.”
And then she drifts away again. Forever. Everything else disappears now. Never anywhere but here. Never more than twenty-nine. The silver shoes. Tabula rasa.
To the house that is beaming; they have stepped into the house.
•
Also here she has recognized where she is, but no longer a surprise. Italian granite on the ground floor. And crash! Yes, that house. In other respects, foreign.
“Peter, Nellevi.” Laughter. Naturally your name cannot be Nellevi nor can it be Susette either. A name from a tabloid, a serial Susette and love.
“So nice.”
A daughter. Ulla. Talented. Oh oh oh. “The theater, the dance, the music… a band called Screaming Toys.”
Headstrong. Does not come downstairs.
“ULLAAAA! Ulla is sulking. Temperamental. Artistic temperament—ULLAAA!” resounds through the house. “Peter also has a good singing voice,” the wife, Nellevi, laughs.
ULLLAA! Susette’s ears temporarily become deaf.
“Oh well, to the oysters. When she’s done sulking. Ulla loves oysters.”
•
“I CAAAAAN HEEEAAR YOU! LAAATER!”
A voice from upstairs. The voice cracks everything. Absurd, immense. Like from the abyss.
“Ulla is talented.”
“Are you cold?”
Tom Maalamaa puts his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Nono.
The living room, the kitchen… beautiful view. You see: the Winter Garden. Like a blaze of light, strong, farther away. Light over the trees as well, part of the road.
The Winter Garden. The Rita Strange Corporation.
In the living room, the sofa.
“We knew each other. From the Rita Strange Corporation. The Winter Garden. Was going to be magnificent. Wasn’t. An idea. Became something else.”
“Architectural dreams.”
“Ho-ho, Tom.” Peter Bäckström laughs. Tom, like himself.
These people, Peter and Nellevi, are also in the “business,” of course, architects, both of them.
But she, Susette, as mentioned, actually, she is not listening. Is not really even there. Twenty-nine years old, never got any older. Rosengården 2, her Rosengården. Recognizes and recognizes.
•
She gets up.
“The bathroom is upstairs, one floor.”
I know. She mumbles, quietly, to herself. Already on the stairs then.
“The American girl.” A black-and-white poster on the wall in the bathroom.
The girl on a cliff, her hair flowing, flying. She is going to fall.
Black-and-white photography on the poster, matches the decor. White tiles, black trim. THAT was what it was like then. Otherwise she does not look at the picture. An old story. Neither it nor the old theater poster says anything to her.
She steps out. Not back to the others, but up the stairs, landings. The third landing. There they are. The rabbits.
She is here. Has never been anywhere else.
And farther, quickly up the small stairs, to the attic room. The door is slightly ajar, but she sees, before she sneaks in, THE GLITTER SCENE in glittery letters, on a plaque on the door.
•
And Susette in landscape here again. The same room, the empty room, fall 1989, before everything. The duality NOW, still, full empty full empty, the old new at the same time, everything here: Susette on the Glitter Scene.
And it is windy on the Glitter Scene. The door has been standing open as said, but wedged fast with a small piece of wood, because you notice the draft when you come in. Because of the glass door at the other end, the one that was part of the large window and could not be opened, is open all the way. Cold late fall weather wells into the room.
The girl is standing in the opening. Not far from the edge, many feet of open fall down. All the openness.
The girl, the daughter, Ulla Bäckström, in white, with her back facing the room. A great mane of hair falling over her shoulders, long white skirt flapping around her legs.
Does not notice Susette in the door opening.
Susette who has taken off the silver shoes, left them at the door to the room. And tippytoe, an old thieflike merriment now completely unstoppable, tippytoe tippytoe, sneaks onto the stage carefully, into the room, the greatness.
The empty landscape/the Glitter Scene. A room where there is nothing and everything.
And EVERYTHING. Theater things, books, papers, manuscripts. Musical instruments and clothes, more clothes, ordinary clothes, dress-up clothes, on racks along the walls or in piles on the floor, notes, bags, shoes, and things, things.
Pictures on the wall, art, posters: Screaming Toys.
And: the American girl, the same poster here too. And other posters, theater performances: Singin’ in the Rain, Miss Julie, among others. The same girl, the theater, the dancing, the music, the same name, Ulla Bäckström, on all of them.
But here, still, you might think that at least something would stir something to life inside Susette, a connection, shake her, to something else. The American girl. That old story. Which was Maj-Gun Maalamaa’s story. The one about the Boy in the woods, which she went on about.
Maj-Gun at the newsstand, kiss kiss kiss, red sticky lips, glitter. But nah, does not stir anything. Maj-Gun does not exist. “We are two Angels of Death.” Which she said once. But nah. We. Are nothing. Maj-Gun had stopped existing. They have seen each other today, earlier in the day. The Red One. Another. No connection. Rather Majjunn Majjunn, but for Susette it is something else, has always been: a sound in her head.
I am, in other words, alone here on the Glitter Scene.
So: stirs nothing. Nothing nothing, which might also depend on the multitude, EVERYTHING here. So much, too much, incentive and things, messages, impressions. Takes herself out. Becomes: mute.
Susette does not see them. She is inside the old emptiness but here there is no connection between now and then, the one and the other.
“ULLLAAAAA!”
She hears that. That scream. Is standing in the middle of the room and wishes the father downstairs would stop yelling.
“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!” The girl at the open glass door in the panorama window suddenly turns around and yells in toward the room, with everything she can muster too. That enormous voice which sounds even more grand and more special up here. Not surprising that she likes screaming up here.
Right in her face. That is how the girl becomes aware of Susette. Has turned around in the middle of everything and, as it turns out, she screams at Susette! About fifteen feet away from her right in her face.
Which is of course comical; the girl, a bit surprised at first, but not so much, starts laughing. “Hi. Who are you? Our guests?” Susette nods and introduces herself and the girl says that she is Ulla Bäckström and runs past Susette to the door at the other end and yells down the stairs one more time: “I just saaaid I waaas coommmiiing!”
Then she closes the door. Takes the wedge out and the two of them are alone up there.
“Ah and then we were rid of him. Dad, he’s great, but he can be so naggy.
“It’s like this some evenings,” the girl continues. “You need to be alone and… think. In a strange mood. Can you keep a secret?”
Ulla Bäckström puts a finger over her lips and peers mischievously at Susette. “You’ll understand. I’m not allowed to have this door open”—the glass door. “Papa confiscated the key when he found out but I confiscated it back, he has no idea. But, it isn’t always like this. Just sometimes. Certain nights. Standing there, in the wind, above everything, thinking. I usually think. About everything that is going on. About everything that is going to end. Mortality. In the midst of everything beautiful. On the edge. D
o you understand?”
Susette nods, of course, even though she really is not listening, cannot manage to focus. But the girl in the middle of the room in front of her, still, silencing. Those white clothes, the skirt, the ankle boots with a heel, and in her hair, which is swelling around her face, small metal insects: they are butterflies, in different colors, glittering in the sharp light from the ceiling that falls over her like a spotlight. The Glitter Scene. That is how it is. Of course. And the girl who on the one hand is like from outer space but on the other is fully conscious of the effect she has on people.
Still: a child. Like her own children. But Susette is not thinking like that. All of that is gone now, she is tabula rasa, she would not be able to be here otherwise. The emptiness here, her emptiness, and the girl, shining, shimmering, in the middle of it. It is confusing.
“Isn’t it great up here?” The girl looks around her own room. “I have everything here! And look. What I got today. In the Winter Garden.”
It is a mask she is putting on. It is that mask.
That stirs a feeling of recognition. The girl, with the mask on, suddenly hisses, almost humorously, theatrically: “I am the Angel of Death. Liz Maalamaa.”
That is the connection.
Still, Susette is not surprised. Strange, absurd, but like a dream is strange, absurd. And Ulla Bäckström says, “Come,” and pulls Susette with her toward the open glass door. They stand there and look out over the darkness, far away there is an island of bright light, before the sea. “The Winter Garden there. How it is shining. Do you know the Winter Garden?”
Susette does not answer, maybe she knows, she does not remember. Everything is familiar and foreign.
“I am the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa!” The girl is suddenly standing there screaming out into the open, into the darkness. To the wind, out into everywhere that cannot be seen. Toward that Winter Garden by the sea, even farther out, there, solitary dots of light, a ship, a lighthouse.
Susette Maalamaa does not like the scream, she jumps back, steps back into the room.
“What is it? Do you want to try on the mask?” The girl comes toward her laughing and Susette puts the mask on, it is just a game after all, just a game, kiss kiss kiss, merry, tippytoe, tabula rasa, clings to it. And: nothing else happened, she never became older than twenty-nine. Be nothing, new, that possibility, spinning around around in the avenues, small playful kitty cat.
She is standing in the middle of the room, wearing the mask, the girl is dancing around her.
“The Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa!” the girl calls to Susette. “Here, come and take me! Grab on…”
But do not scream. Quiet now. But the girl has gotten started, does not grow quiet. And the girl walks toward the window, come come come. And calls, but QUIET now.
The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again.
And Susette cannot hear that, she walks straight toward the girl in the opening now against the wind QUIET now, and pushes the girl—
The girl falls. A quiet fall, it is quiet. Maybe it is the surprise. And in the distance: flames jump up from the Winter Garden.
“Look! The Winter Garden is on fire!” Both of them saw that. The girl who turned around at the last moment—but then she just fell, quietly.
And yes. The Winter Garden is burning. What a scene. Susette in the opening. Something she has forgotten.
That impossibility. All impossibility.
Flames in front of her eyes. Rug rags.
“Mama, where is the loom? The rug weaver?”
Susette on the rocks. Lambada, among rags, like once, at a disco.
•
She has closed the door and turned around. Walked back across the floor, left the room. Puts on her silver shoes again, they are standing where she left them just inside the door where she, just a minute or so ago, walked over the wooden floor to where the girl was at the other end, in white skirts. But the girl, where is the girl now?
Torn a small hole in the heel of her bone-colored panty hose. A small splinter in her skin, it is bleeding just a little. But she is used to blood, it is not dangerous, she has Band-Aids in her purse, Band-Aids, bandages, you have to be well prepared when you have children.
Leaves the room, goes downstairs again, to the laughter, the socializing. On the stairs she realizes that she has the mask on, takes it off.
“Where were you?” Tom Maalamaa asks when she sits down next to him on the sofa in the bright living room.
“Up there.”
But now she is neither here, there, swinging a bit. Flames in front of her eyes.
“Did you see Ulla? She loves oysters. They will be served shortly.”
The father who is asking and making an attempt at starting to call for the girl again, with that terrible voice.
“I think she’s sleeping,” Susette says quickly in order to avoid hearing the scream.
“Sleeping?”
“Looked that way.”
“She was just awake. Ulla usually never sleeps. She’s hyperactive.”
Peter Bäckström laughs, as if calmed by his own explanation because for just a moment he became a bit strange because of Susette Maalamaa. Oysters, Ulla comes to the oysters: he goes to get more wine from the kitchen.
Tom Maalamaa touches her hand.
“You’re so cold. Have you been outside? What do you have in your hand?”
Everyone looks at what she has in her hand.
“One of Ulla’s thousand toys. It’s like the attic of a theater up there. You were there? Ulla loves the theater. A mask. Let’s have a look.” Nellevi takes the mask Susette hands to her, laughs.
Tom Maalamaa does not laugh.
Nellevi puts the mask on. Buhuu.
Peter Bäckström calls from the kitchen that the Winter Garden is on fire.
Everyone rushes up, around. The Winter Garden is burning, can be seen from the kitchen. But Nellevi does not run there but up the stairs to her daughter’s room. “Ulla!” Maybe it is an instinct during times of danger. Susette knows that instinct well, she is a mother too after all.
She has three children, and in the empty living room where she has been left alone because Tom Maalamaa also ran out to the kitchen, she should start thinking about these children—their ages, abilities, characteristics. If someone were left, but no one is left, nor she.
The mother’s screeeaaamm from the Glitter Scene, throughout the entire house.
Then Susette is no longer in the house anymore. She has taken her coat in the hall and is walking down the avenues where she once walked and where she is walking now, twenty-nine years old, never became any older. It is dark, the silver shoes, the gates are closed. But you can get out from the inside, but not in from the outside, as if she did not know this. This is the future. Solveig on the avenues. You don’t need to see with the Eyes of the Old.
No. But the impossibility. Susette hurries on.
Because she has forgotten something. And how long, almost an entire life.
“Mama, where is the loom?”
LOOM, AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF FLAMES
(Susette at the house in the darker part, the Boundary Woods, 2006)
HERE IT IS. Susette in the Boundary Woods, she has run there and onto some path and ended up at a strange, empty, dark, decomposing house; it is the house in the darker part. A basement window, flames in front of her eyes, lighting up the guts, she peers in. Flames and there it is rising up, taking up the entire basement. Loom, against a background of flames.
And fabric hanging over it and around it like scraps. All sorts of fabric, silk fabric, ordinary fabric, rag scrap, velvet, linen—entire large layers and strips, loom lengths.
Sees the loom. She does not get there.
Sirens, ambulances, fire trucks, Spanish wolfhounds.
But at father’s deathbed it was like this. He was on his way away and needed to go and find peace, you could see that. “Sleep now, dear father. You will get to rest so
on.” But her mother who was crying and shouting, “Don’t go! Come back!” “But, Mama—”If you’re going to leave then you’re going to leave, it’s unavoidable. Then you have to be allowed to do it peacefully and with love, surrounded by your loved ones, not filled with anxiety about having to leave. And there at the hospital, the final minutes, they had already taken all the tubes out of him so that it had not been Susette or he who had personally decided he was going to pass away right then.
It had been at home in the house after the funeral that Susette tried to explain that to her mother. Because suddenly, when they were alone again, the brothers with their families gone home, her mother in the kitchen furious at her, Susette. Because she had not stood next to her father’s deathbed where it had just been the two of them and called her father back. Not called together with her mother that he should not leave—
“You let him go. You let him go away.” Her mother had said that, of course not: “it was your fault Susette,” it would have been too much. Her mother understood that too, of course, because somewhere, at that time, she still had a certain mind for the possible and impossible. She was still also active in her position at the bank, even if she had been forced to go down to part-time due to her husband’s illness and also not had time for her position as secretary of the Bankers’ Employee Club. But in any case: if you deal with money, particularly other people’s money, you have to stay levelheaded, rational in your mind, she said that to herself many times, also earlier in life when she had still been normal.
But half a year later she was put on one hundred percent sick leave. Not a particularly large pension, but that, plus the widow’s pension and what Susette earned at the nursing home when she started working there after high school, had been enough so they could afford to stay in the large house.
And then everything had gotten out of control. As if there suddenly were two realities for Susette: one at home, one on the outside. But gradually it was the first reality that gained ground even though she did not want it to. The normal teenage life in the District, which she in and of herself never really was a part of, but it had existed like a background, but that background paled, disintegrated just like the fact that she had once had a real boyfriend too. Despite the fact that it had mostly been a youthful infatuation, Gustav Mahler’s music, Sunday dinners at the rectory. Was made unreal. Instead, the nursing home, the empty corridors, the old, the dying in their beds, and two very disobliging hospital cats who saw red at the sight of her.
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