It has not been raining, but snowing a little, hesitant flakes, sparse, descending. A horde of youths who have come wandering across the square, filling it with their own business for a few minutes. Laughter and jokes and shouts: no ordinary country bumpkins, no sir. There has been something precious about them, exclusive, talent… the theater, the dance, the music. And in the middle of the group someone in particular catches your eye: a girl with big, teased hair that falls around her, over her back, shoulders, small small butterfly clips in her hair, many, many, shimmering. The most merry, the obvious center point: suddenly she stays behind the rest and runs out among the cars to the very center of the square and stands there laughing and looking around, everyone looks at her as if she is on a stage, and catches snowflakes, slowly falling around her in the chilly November day, with her tongue.
A bewitching girl, who looked at everyone, looked at no one, laughing, snowflakes on her tongue.
“Come on now, Ulla, we’re going to be late!” one of the youths who is waiting for her in the group on the other side of the square calls out.
“I’m COMMMMIIIING!” How she shouts, what a voice. Unforeseen vocals, sounds like it is coming from the abyss—looks around, again. As if: did you hear? Yes. Yes, we certainly did.
•
But, one moment there, then gone and neither Maj-Gun nor Solveig remained on the square to express her admiration for the small spectacle of the unusually dramatically talented girl in more detail. Solveig drives off and Maj-Gun starts the Volvo’s engine, heads away, at full speed to the other side of the city by the sea, an hour’s drive to the address her brother had stated that he and his family would be living at for the coming years. “See my brother,” which she had said to Solveig, not that it was planned, but as soon as she is alone and sitting in the car she knows that is where she is heading. To her brother, to see him, no one else.
Her brother Tom: they had gotten back in touch with each other over the last few years, not very intensely but they had spoken on the phone now and then. Not about great important things but about work, the like. Things in general, so to speak. About how the doldrums can grab hold of you during the day. “You want to make a difference, Tom, do something for someone, not sit in a dusty law firm and for the clients tally and distribute their money in the most beneficial way between rich people.”
Still, there could be the same crap at the legal assistance bureau as well. Not in the same way, not as much money, for example, but in some way still the same. “These people without legal rights,” which she, like her brother Tom Maalamaa at some point, had spoken about grandly, not held lectures like him, but certainly spoken that way with him, privately. All of those who come to her, without money. But money no money, the same hunger. People are prepared to do almost anything for nothing.
For example: a crime that had attracted a lot of attention not only up there, in the north. A woman had shot her husband and her child and then run away and chased her departed lover who, when he refused her, got shot as well. And then sat there on various chairs and got in the papers too and stammered about “ménage à trois” just as if she knew French. Because that woman had really been in love then, had too much beer to drink too, had sex had sex and et cetera. “All of this climbing toward a story that gives life meaning—” Become someone who at least can stammer her way to some unusual drama and be the center point of it.
And when she had told her brother about it on the phone she added that sometimes she can hear papa Pastor, as it were, laughing rascallike at the Sunday dinner table in the rectory at certain ministers of the new school who wanted “the language of our time” and everyday trite similes in order to dramatize all of the big mysteries found in the church about life, death and make them understandable. Red light. Green light. “Tom, sometimes I’ve started thinking, imagine if people would first learn to stop at a red light, drive on green, and stop for all of the pedestrians in the crosswalk.”
“Ha ha ha.” Her brother Tom Maalamaa had laughed. He has been the only one with whom she has ever been able to carry on such conversations, despite the fact that he had then said what she really wanted to hear, which granted she understood first when she heard him say it. “Hey, Sis, what’s wrong? Got up on the wrong side of the bed?” Or… “Come on, the metaphysical doesn’t suit you. Me neither, for that matter. You must remember that from our childhood, which in certain respects was boring. We were rather alike. But I don’t remember anything about myself that was particularly funny, but certainly a lot that was funny about you. The Girl from Borneo. Get real, you were more fun as the Girl from Borneo, you know.
“Hey, Sis, what’s wrong? Isn’t it something else? Have you heard this one? ‘You become moral as soon as you become unhappy.’ I came across it on a blog once. Joking aside, Maj-Gun, you know that you can always come to me, I’m you’re brother, you can tell me anything—”
So yes, Tom. Now, that morning, she wanted to tell him… that, Tom, in the middle of everything, such a confusion about everything. Had in addition to the story such a burning low-voiced interest for—yes, what had it said in the obituary? Nature, roses? Music? She did not remember or, of course, she did, of course, but it was the formulation, “an interest, discreet, burning,” that has been eating away at her. So Tobias, so to a T, him. That text she had consequently found in her home, an old issue of the local paper, almost a year old, from the District, that she had at some point started subscribing to but never had time to read. Old issues strewn around her rooms. Happened to open a paper lying on a shelf even though she had actually been looking for something else.
That was of course what she had wanted and had thought about asking Solveig, that was why she had come—suddenly been in the District without letting anyone know ahead of time, which had been outside their agreement regarding the child, Johanna. That Tobias had died, why had no one told her?
But she, Maj-Gun, had not gotten it out, of course. Maybe because as soon as she was sitting in that café with Solveig, she understood that there possibly was no logical answer to that question. Solveig, Tobias. At the same time: there had never been any “pact” there—Solveig who had calmly said when she told Maj-Gun that Tobias had told her about Maj-Gun in Susette’s apartment, that Tobias had taken care of Maj-Gun then and made sure that she got to rest at the rectory. Flaming Carmen. Oh, no. Regardless of what Solveig had known she had not known that. No one had known.
But that confusion toward her brother. But her brother had not been home; at work, of course. Susette alone in the home, among the moving boxes, unmoving, at a window later, the children at school, the aupairgirl at the store.
And what were you supposed to do with Susette? In that frame of mind? Say to her: “Everything in my life has happened in the wrong order,” as you would have liked to have said to Tom, your brother, so that he would then say, after having comforted you, “Hey, Sis, it’s not that bad.” And that if you started thinking like that, “your life,” then you would lose your sense of reality, it became pretentious, metaphysical, too big. “And yes, Sister, I still think we’re doers, not talkers.”
But my life. Which despite the fact that it had not been said to Susette it still hung in the air between them, my life, like in the newsstand once. “Everything in my life…” Like something to write down in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” yes, she still has it, like a memory only, a relic.
Still as if just that saying existed between them because that is when Susette walked up to the window and started speaking strangely about her life.
The Boy in the woods, Janos,… and Maj-Gun caught sight of the silver shoes.
And Maj-Gun, it stands to be repeated, understood, during the span of a split second, everything. In addition to the alienation, the shock, the surprise—understood that Susette was unreachable, she could no longer do anything for Susette.
Like a towel over her face, an anesthesia that had lasted a long time afterward.
Ringing in her ears, Susette�
��s: “You are so different now, Maj-Gun. After the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible. I liked you much more in the newsstand. There was so much life inside you.”
And: “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not unhappy. I’m doing okay. More than okay. I have a life I never thought I would have. I still want to thank you for making it possible.”
An anesthesia that has lifted only hours later, in the Winter Garden.
And only then has she started calling Tom; you just can’t push it away. The silver shoes. Aunt Liz. The medication. “At the nursing home they called her the Angel of Death.”
•
So in the Winter Garden, she is there again, Maj-Gun, afterward. Cutting, cutting red, whirling strips. But: it is only a preoccupation, almost an image. A preoccupation among other occupations, an image among many.
There is a girl, it is the one from the square, the Troll Girl, with the voice, butterflies in her hair, shimmering, who is suddenly there, outside, wandering in the corridors. “I’m searching, searching, for rooms under the earth, the truth about everything, I come here sometimes.”
An old story. The American girl. “Do you remember?”
Stories, informations. The girl in her room. The Winter Garden. And red whirling, scissors cutting, rug rags. Everything you can think about and share if you want to. “Do we know each other?”
Yes. They do. In some way. But a while ago. The American girl. The Boy in the woods, in a different way. He is a love story. The American girl, in that way. A story that in different ways parallels Maj-Gun’s life, my life, and now she is suddenly sitting there laughing about it too. A story that has not belonged to her, not to the girl either, in the way they are, have been, alike. At some point they have e-mailed, chatted a bit. “Hey, Theater Girl.” The girl who talked about a play she was working on and Maj-Gun who had gotten in touch with her on a site for unsolved crimes where the girl had posted a question about wanting to get in touch with someone who knew something about it.
Maj-Gun had replied, then, with about the same thought she had when she started subscribing to the local paper even though she did not have the energy to read it: no sensible thought. Or: you can’t step into the same river twice, still you have to go there with your foot, dip dip, over and over again, move it around. Or maybe not. Maybe she wrote to the girl only because she felt some sort of protective instinct because the girl probably was not fully aware of what she was doing, what signals she was sending out, by posting a bunch of pictures of herself as the American girl on a cliff, in the moment when she falls and dies. “Here I am singing a song from my upcoming play that is called ‘Don’t Push Your Love Too Far, Eddie,’ the song about the American girl, the final song about her.” Suggestive black-and-white photographs.
And now, in the Winter Garden, Maj-Gun sees that it is her, despite the fact that the girl is older, looks a bit different, has become more woman, so to speak, has different clothes—ordinary clothes, jeans and a shirt. The same girl who was catching snowflakes with her tongue on the square. That morning, and even though it is only afternoon now, after the visit with Susette: eons ago.
Ulla Bäckström from the Glitter Scene, Rosengården 2. “My room, EVERYTHING is there…
“… and my band, Screaming Toys.”
Informations. Everything that Maj-Gun has also known, knows, regarding for example the American girl. Countryman Loman who covered things up. She has known that since her college days: some female classmate who had devoted her time to things like women and crime. Old cases, maybe not unsolved but with something strange about them.
And other strange things. Some of it said, some of it heard, sometimes one plus one becomes two aching in your head, not conscious of it. “Three siblings, a secret that drove them apart. The three cursed ones.”
Also: an eternal memory, impossible to really share with anyone. Except for one who had communicated it, Susette, but in connection with another story, somewhere else.
A girl is standing at the cemetery. She is afraid. Her name is Doris Flinkenberg.
The folk song inside her. “The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again.”
Calling forth the fear. Maj-Gun with the mask, a teenager. Angry. Doris who is afraid, but not of the mask, it is something else. But Maj-Gun never finds out what, more than a few random words, sentences, because Maj-Gun putting the mask on only irritates Doris—she leaves, runs away.
Like the girl here now in the Winter Garden, Ulla Bäckström, is going to leave, run away in just a second. Meet Johanna in the house in the darker part, scare her or call forth an earthquake—and then home home to her fate, the Glitter Scene, the open glass door… Susette in the silver shoes, all of that you do not know about yet that is going to happen in a few hours.
Then it is all too late.
And Maj-Gun sits there with the girl, even though it does not matter. And then she says anyway: “I’m going to tell you another story. Which might make all of the incomprehensible comprehensible. Not the truth about everything, the rooms under the earth. But about two people in a newsstand once.”
The girl yawns. Looks around, says uncertainly, “You have to let go of your childhood. I don’t think… that is interesting for me anymore.”
And adds: “The American girl in a snow globe. I think I gave it to Johanna.”
Discovers the mask, a relic that Maj-Gun sometimes has with her—like “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” there is so much life inside you.
“Buhuu those girls,” Ulla Bäckström shouts at Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the Winter Garden with the mask on, “and lady, here’s another thing.” Laughs suddenly, almost cheekily. “Why are you always asking about Johanna?”
And with these words the girl with the jungle voice is “like from the abyss,” shimmering, with all of the theater the dance the music inside her, gone.
Here for a while, then gone.
And has, of course, swiped the mask too. Ha-ha-ha, Troll Girl. It definitely is no surprise.
•
But—
The Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa. You cannot always be getting rid of everything, pushing it away.
And when the girl has left: no, Maj-Gun is no longer cutting, she understands, she has to speak with Tom Maalamaa. And only then has she started calling, late afternoon, early evening, and Tom Maalamaa has turned off his phone.
•
Thrown away rags, put on her clothes. Maj-Gun heads out into the night, the darkness, runs out. Yes: so this, on the one hand. Blueblueblue images in her head now too. The Winter Garden. A blue child who is screaming on a cliff. An old story in images told again. Existed on a wall once, in a room, another room, an apartment where she was for no time. Words on the walls, a language, Kapu kai, the forbidden seas. They had a game. The Winter Garden.
“Three siblings who shared a secret that united them but turned them against each other.”
The Winter Garden, like a place. Rooms under the earth, the truth about everything, the Rita Strange Corporation.
Bengt lying dead in the cousin’s house.
And Solveig, Sister Blue. Who said that morning, “I saved her life once in the swimming school. I was Sister Blue.”
Ulla Bäckström’s words: “The American girl in a snow globe. I think I gave it to Johanna.
“And another thing, lady. Why are you always asking about Johanna?”
Johanna. My child.
•
Throws away the rags, puts on her clothes, runs out. On the other hand, honestly: that is not why she is running, Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Out of the Winter Garden, leaving it behind her. Stories, tales. What it was like what it was not like, tear to bits: there is also goodness, regardless, and beauty, flowers, blue skies.
Stories, tales are not the body, the blood, the longing, here.
What exists is here.
The Red One on a field. She is there.
Outside the house and inside the house another one with stories, projects.
Project Earth, tear to bits, has been torn, old, finished playing its part. A girl pounding with loneliness, with another story, about rhythm and secrets—
Whirls of fear in the girl’s head, until nothing is left. One book, one image in it. Blueblue, that one too.
But tear to bits.
Johanna sees the Red One. Never more afraid, never more certain. Johanna goes out, to the Red One.
The Child, fluorescent. Explosion, transcendence?
Images to take to the Winter Garden: mother, child on a field. Or?
No. Maj-Gun holds her daughter, Johanna, tightly, Johanna holds her mother tightly back.
Explosions? Oh, bother.
Because then, exactly then, flames rise up behind them.
During the embrace, Johanna looks around the field.
“Look, Mom! The Winter Garden is burning!”
EPILOGUE
SOLVEIG, SISTER BLUE
(and what it was like with the American girl, 1969)
I LIKE THE PARLOR in the cousin’s house. That’s my secret. I have a habit of going there and spending time there, even though it isn’t allowed. Not even Rita, my twin, my sister, knows; we live together in our own cottage on the field across from the cousin’s house. The cousin’s mama, the parlor, it is her creation. There’s a round table there with a white, embroidered tablecloth and a glass cabinet with china. The cousin’s mama has arranged it, it wasn’t there before her time. The parlor is used only when there is a party. Then the door is opened wide, the table is laid with coffee cups, napkins, plates. You spend a few hours there, then you leave. The door is closed, and until the next grand occasion no one is allowed to go in there again.
I still sneak in there sometimes. There is a closet in the parlor. That’s where I stay, on the floor among the shoes, I can fit without a problem, I am so small. I sit and listen to everything around me, inside the house, outside. The walls in the house are thin, sounds are easily heard. Off to the side, but still a part of things. In peace, but not alone. The calm and the quiet in the parlor, while the normal time that has come to the cousin’s house together with the cousin’s mama and Björn continues outside.
The Glitter Scene Page 36