That is how it was, has always been for me, with Maj-Gun Maalamaa. And maybe I regret it now, that maybe I should still have told Johanna more about her.
•
Well. No more about that now. It exists in a time in the future, which is many years from now. This morning. So terrible, but still exactly, just because of that, so glittering, meaningful. That you have to go through the terrible in order to come out on the other side. But for the most part if you have determination, you will get out. And then everything is that much stronger, more beautiful, also the smallest tiniest good thing has meaning. I believe that.
The time starts now. When I leave the hill in about an hour and walk down. And I have to do it. I don’t want to, not right then, but there is no choice.
Up there, at the base of the house. If you don’t play the Winter Garden and aren’t filled with your own fantasies, then you see clearly. A great panorama that reveals itself right here.
I am sitting here this morning watching what is happening below.
•
The cousin’s mama on the cousin’s property again. Where I met her when she looked at the pistol and looked at me like a crazy person and an idiot—but her rage! And I landed solidly on the ground with both feet, ran in with the pistol and ran away.
But the cousin’s mama can’t run away. She has been to the outbuilding, she has seen, what I know later, Björn there, and now she is standing in the yard calling for someone. Bengt! Not for me. Maybe that’s better. I still wouldn’t have been able to help her. Or anyone. In such a way.
Later I understand that the cousin’s mama is standing in the yard due to the fact that she still doesn’t dare go inside the cousin’s house again. The cousin’s papa is there—who’s probably still snoring, he was just a little while ago, when I was inside with the pistol, but then I wasn’t thinking about waking him anymore—and there was everything that had led up to this.
The cousin’s mama is appallingly alone. Doesn’t know where she should go. What she should do.
Then someone comes running along the road. From the country road, not from the Second Cape where she actually lives.
It’s Eddie de Wire the American girl. She comes running toward the cousin’s property in a red coat, on fire, an alarm. Whom is she looking for? Which one of her boyfriends? Bengt? Who is waiting for her somewhere else, he has her bag too. He has packed it because they are running off together. Nonsense. But in the middle of all of those dreams, the American girl has been called to the baroness, she has stolen something there. Now she has to leave. The baroness had enough. She arranged it so that someone with a car will take the girl away.
Locks her inside a room while she is waiting for the person who is going to take the American girl away to arrive, I don’t know. What I do know is that Bengt isn’t there with her then. He’s waiting somewhere else. Somewhere simply. Not in the barn, not in the cousin’s house, not on the hill on the First Cape, not at Bule Marsh. In the wrong places, quite simply. Where he usually is.
With her bag that he is going to have with him later and will place under the floor in the barn when he moves out. Keep it like a relic, a souvenir. A real memory, of something unusually beautiful. Some sort of promise about something, somewhere, he never got too, never came.
And that promise may not have BEEN the American girl Eddie de Wire as she was, or is—but she was a figure for it. Or maybe, what do I know? I will also think about Bengt and Eddie on the terrace of the boathouse. Right in front of the sea, the guitar, Bengt with his sketchpad, the music. Laughter, talking, both of them talking just as much. Maybe it was the way it was, the two of them, one plus one and true.
•
But Björn was also the American girl’s boyfriend. And she comes running toward the cousin’s property now, to the barn, maybe Björn is there, she barely sees the cousin’s mama who is standing in the middle of the yard. The cousin’s mama walks toward her.
I don’t know what they say, but it is soon evident that it is an argument. Almost a fight. “Children’s mama.” Is that what she’s like when she is beside herself? My body is pounding—but I see, I have to see.
But then they disappear too. Eddie runs toward the woods, the path. And the cousin’s mama runs after her, it’s like a dance. They disappear, the cousin’s mama is chasing her, screaming and shouting can also be heard. The cousin’s mama who grabbed her as hard as only the cousin’s papa usually does in the yard.
She’s so angry. Björn, suddenly it’s as if everything that the cousin’s mama can’t control or understand is, or could be, the American girl’s fault.
I don’t know.
That is where they are running to now anyway, toward the marsh.
The cousin’s mama can’t know how strong the currents in the water under the cliff are. She’s just beside herself. Onto someone. Who is not her “child,” who has taken her “child” away from her.
And you achieve nothing by raging against the cousin’s papa. You’re powerless against him. She knows it in her bones now.
It is quiet, some time passes.
Shouts again.
The cousin’s mama comes running from the marsh, she runs into the cousin’s house and shuts the door behind her.
Doris a little while later, from the woods, in a blue bathing suit, crying. On the steps of the cousin’s house, pounding on the door, but no one opens, she doesn’t get in.
She sits down on the steps, Doris crying, Bengt who shows up, has a bag in his hand.
He runs to the marsh, and back. Doris on the steps across from him. But Bengt in the wrong places, everywhere.
First he runs to the marsh. And then to the outbuilding—yes, he runs there too.
And Doris after him, Doris in a blue swimsuit, crying, toward the outbuilding behind Bengt. He goes inside, knocks Doris over, but only so that she won’t go in!
It isn’t Bengt who is screaming in the yard. It is Doris Flinkenberg.
•
But I don’t see that, then I’m no longer there.
I have left the hill, gone down, straight through everything, to the twins’ cottage.
It has become morning for real—me through the beautiful morning, the sun that is already high in the sky, but everything is still completely still. How everything is glittering again, it is getting windy.
Home. Rita. The twins’ cottage. Rita is back.
I come to the cottage. Walk into the cottage. Sun. Pouring in through the windows and with the wind and the trees the sun makes sun cats, which are playing on the floor where I am standing. In the middle of the room in the house, next to Doris’s rolled-up sleeping bag.
A glance in the round mirror on our wall. So long, stately, tall. Solveig. She is lying in her bed on her stomach, Rita. In her swimsuit. The red swimsuit, even darker. Dirt on the bottoms of both feet and around her ankles and calves. The towel over her head.
“Rita.” She isn’t sleeping, she’s awake. She is moaning, her body is shaking.
I carefully get closer. “Rita.” Then she turns over and I get a red towel thrown in my face.
•
I was the one who was the lifeguard, Sister Blue.
I know that. I know everything about Rita.
Then we are also, from that moment on, together but also apart. But also. Such tenderness.
Which will never disappear later. Even though we don’t see each other anymore, despite the fact that Rita doesn’t return, you’re sad at first, but that’s how it goes.
And, understandable—that she doesn’t come back.
It was Rita who was forced to lie the most, to Doris Flinkenberg. She and Doris at the beach at Bule Marsh. First Rita alone, then Doris Flinkenberg. No one else, no Miss Andrews. She was still in her house, because of Eddie de Wire.
And Tobias was away during these weeks. Sometimes I have thought that things could have been different if Tobias had been there. With his swimming ability, for example. Or just because.
And among
everything that is falling apart, cracks, there is always something else. Something just as meaningful, maybe more meaningful, even if you don’t see it right away. With Tobias, for example, when he comes back in a few days and finds out everything. He comes to me and Rita in the cottage, like before. We don’t hug each other or anything. It is never like that with Tobias. But he, in some way, without a lot of fuss and big gestures, without words, walks beside us.
For me it is enough. I’m here. Even more.
•
But it was Rita who was there and saw everything and has to tell Doris a little lie. The American girl who ran out onto Lore Cliff, the cousin’s mama after her, and the American girl couldn’t get any farther.
The cousin’s mama on the cliff who remained standing there. Doris up onto the cliff to the cousin’s mama, but the cousin’s mama had already run away. On the cliff, Doris who was standing and screaming, blue, in my bathing suit, as if she were Sister Blue.
And turned and ran after the cousin’s mama.
Rita alone, who came home.
Told Doris Flinkenberg that it was a game, “she came up again later.” You can believe that sort of thing if you want to, if you’re young and a child.
Even if it still doesn’t leave you, it remains there. Is that why Doris needs to drag her new friend Sandra Wärn from the house in the darker part into it a few years later? Into the story? Start over again, “find out.”
Possibly. I don’t know.
But we lied to Doris, everyone lied to Doris, it was never written down on paper like an agreement.
The cousin’s mama, the “children’s mama,” who really didn’t know what she had done. But then there was also Björn.
She stayed with us.
And we, all of us, wanted it that way.
•
But later, when Doris grew up and was unhappy, then she wanted to know how things had been. So. Asked Rita. Rita had to answer.
In any case: in the newspaper much later when I take care of the cousin’s papa alone and am cleaning up in the kitchen, find in a cabinet, a newspaper from the fall Doris died, there is a crossword puzzle, half finished. There is a last name in the row where the correct word is supposed to be filled in: “Astrid a pop song for the day.” And it is the idea that you’re supposed to fill in the surname of the singer who had sung that song some time during the ’60s I guess it was. “A song for the day.”
I don’t remember that song. Doesn’t mean anything to me.
But it is the name, Astrid. And after the name, in straggling angry teenage letters there is a long word that doesn’t fit in the boxes following it, there are only four of them. Letters on top of each other, a terrible word, I’m not going to say it, but something with m.
•
I never showed it to the cousin’s mama when I went and visited her, she was living in the neighboring municipality back then. I threw the paper away. I forgot. And have forgotten.
•
“The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one, over and over again, an eternal repetition of time and space. Such a different way of looking at time.”
Doris Flinkenberg who is singing folk songs on an old cassette tape, talking about the folk songs between the songs. “And the girl she walks in the dance with red, golden ribbons”; “I went out one evening, out into a grove so green”—those kinds of songs, others like them.
I used to play the old cassette in the company car sometimes. Susette, my colleague who was sleeping next to me, in the morning. I turned up the volume so she would wake up, sometimes just the news and especially the weather forecast; a morning sleepy person who otherwise could sleep almost anywhere, standing, and sitting then, in the company car.
I don’t know if I liked those songs Doris sang, in some way it already felt so big, bewitching, exaggerated. But you could of course also see them as Doris’s message to all of us who would be left behind and live on after her too. I don’t know. I didn’t think about that then, at least. Rather mostly that they could still in some way carry me back to certain memories that I had from when it was still so beautiful in some way, but not in the way that you wanted to talk about it anyway.
Or maybe to muffle a bad conscience because I was never able to like Doris Flinkenberg. I don’t know.
In any case. After Bengt’s death I stopped playing that cassette almost completely. That simple. Just turned it off.
Turned the radio to the morning news and the weather forecast instead. The sea level, all of the lighthouses. Bulleholm southwest eighteen. But for a while it only made me sad. I came to think about Susette, my colleague Susette, and missed her. Susette, who in order to show me how awake she still was in the morningcar even though it looked like she was sleeping, would start rattling off those reports in the middle of the workday too. Idiotic. But also charming, a bit.
Started thinking about what became of her. Here for a while, then gone. I’ve never been angry at her exactly, definitely not, but I thought that it would have been nice to hear from her, that she could have been in touch, sent a card, the like. On the other hand, of course, we were colleagues, had our own separate lives, we didn’t know each other.
And then I closed the cleaning business, sold it to Jeanette Lindström, who naturally, when her entire “imperium,” which she called it in her prime, fell in connection with the recession at the beginning of the nineties, drove it into bankruptcy. Four Mops and a Dustpan; but shall I grieve, as Doris sings, I had already started my real estate business instead at that time. And Irene was there and Johanna—all of us living in the newly built house below the hill on the First Cape. Tobias came by a lot, it was a new life, a different life, a good life. And nothing more about that here, now.
•
But Rita and I, still on this morning. The moment before I get a red towel thrown in my face—but I don’t care so much about that, I know Rita, her anger too, her fear too, her still, like my own, smallness.
Sun cats that reflect in the room, like a dance. I stand there where they are dancing over my body, warm beams, here in the room, it is warm.
Rita and I, Bule Marsh in my head, like an image.
The beaches at the marsh: root ends winding around each other. But you see that only when the sand around them has washed away, which will happen in the time to come, gradually. When the sandy beach washes away, it wasn’t natural either, transported there. Heavy, thick roots, with large knots, which are hiding underneath, and in the reediness.
That image can’t really be explained. But it exists. Has an effect on you, always.
And we won’t become swimmers, Rita and I.
•
I drive home. I have been at exhibitions, looked at a few new objects in another part of the District. It is the month of November 2006, in the evening, late, maybe already night. There has been a fire at the Winter Garden, fire trucks pass me on the road. You don’t see much of the fire, it has already been put out. The darkness suddenly falls now and it’s only when I drive past Tobias’s old greenhouse on the side of the road that it hits me that it’s due to the fact that the lights from the Winter Garden aren’t on, the fire that has been neither large nor destructive seems to have taken out the lighting, goodness knows what it’s good for: the Winter Garden, I have never been there.
Light in the window of the house.
I come home. Johanna and Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the kitchen. We drink tea, and eat sandwiches, and then I tell them this.
JOHANNA, THE GLITTER SCENE, 2012
(OTHER SONGS)
PROJECT EARTH. ORPHEUS was going to his Eurydice. What had been lost. There in the underworld. The Winter Garden. Underworldly rooms. Which are burning, disappearing. No one was ever there. And yet: you were there the whole time.
I am Johanna, I’m growing up. The Winter Garden, on the Second Cape. Doesn’t exist, but does. For real. Was something else. Becomes something else, “SPA-ponderings,” further changes.
The old stories,
tales aren’t there anymore. For example the story about the American girl, the American girl in a snow globe, the souvenir shop, it is fading. The story itself lives on in the District but is also fading. There is so much else after all, a lot of other things that are happening. There are other stories, more brutal ones, more terrible, violence, murder. Like what happened with Ulla Bäckström, for example, in November 2006. How she fell from the Glitter Scene, died.
For a while after, in school, in the entire District, the shock was intense. But later, almost more shocking, it passed. Rather quickly, faster than the American girl was ever forgotten. The Bäckströms moved away. New girls came, and new girls come, all the time, the theater the dance the music. But then I was no longer there. Came somewhere else. To the music, the stories. Yes, you could put it that way.
That was in any case when I got out all of the old stuff, my stories, the beginning of my Project Earth. The Winter Garden, what existed for real and in my head, all of my “material.” The Marsh Queen too, an eternal first chapter, where did the music start? What was left, in other words, still quite a bit, which I never tore up. And then I had so much of it in my head, of course.
And started writing a story about me and my cousin Robin whom I miss sometimes, he moved with Allison as said, I never heard from him. But a story about how we are children and left the house at the foot of the hill on the First Cape, and the Winter Garden reveals itself in front of us, an island in darkness, all the promises, beaming with light. A feeling that can exist only when you are young, a feeling you have never felt before: to there. Must go there.
The girl in the story grows up, but the same longing, the Winter Garden. And into the story comes a boy, his name is Glitter (!). He is the Marsh Queen’s son and returns in the story about a Project Earth, which you do together because you don’t want to do it alone. Because you already know that “lose an innocence, find a treasure,” it can truly be frightening, turn everything upside down. In the middle of the Winter Garden there is Kapu kai, the forbidden seas.
The Glitter Scene Page 42