Scrapes the letters clean of earth and various bits of trash, weeds the ground in front of the stones.
And sets out bluebells and wood anemones in jars with water. Comes and replaces them: new flowers, fresh new water. They tend to laugh together, Susette and her mother: barely have time to wither and they are there again replacing them.
The Confession Grove. It is a bit off to the side. There is not exactly a sign with “The Confession Grove,” but Majjunn who, as said, is from the Pastor’s family, knows that sort of thing. Because she follows them sometimes, Susette and her mother, like a willing pathfinder even though no one has asked her.
“You’ll see it down there. To the left.”
And adds, rather pompously, “If you then wander in the valley of the shadow of death no harm will come to you.” And, then, holding a hand to her ear. “Listen. Here at the cemetery you can say things that would sound completely cuckoo anywhere else.”
Maj-Gun has a toy mask over her face. “Ho ho ho,” she laughs. It is cuckoo; Susette’s mother laughs, the mask reminds her of a movie star. “Ingrid Bergman? Ava Gardner?” Majjunn takes off the mask, wipes sweat from her brow, does not answer.
Maj-Gun has a brother, Tom Maalamaa. It happens that he comes up behind Maj-Gun at the cemetery, sneaking up so that the others see without Maj-Gun noticing. Points silently at Majjunn who is standing in front of him, twirls one hand a few times, as if to say “scatterbrained, idiot.”
And smiles at Susette. And Susette smiles back, cannot help it. Only then does Majjunn turn around and discover her brother behind her back, becoming audibly angry at him. Tom Maalamaa: the Pastor’s Crown Princess’s big brother and, somewhat later, as teenagers, Susette’s first love. They are together for a few months, not at the cemetery of course, but otherwise completely ordinary.
And later, gradually, when the first love is over the second love comes to Susette—a Janos—she runs away with him from the strawberry fields in the middle region of the country where they meet. And then, though really a lot of time has passed in between, Susette is already close to thirty, the third love.
“Confession.” The mother, during Susette’s childhood, at the cemetery, smiles a bit hesitantly. Susette thinks “confession” is a beautiful word and when Majjunn is out of earshot Susette wants her mother to explain what it means. Her mother has not felt like it, you can see it on her, it has made her feel ill at ease. Standing between the graves in office clothes—she works at the bank otherwise but lost her father in the war; she is of the generation that death for her has become at once a self-evident and vile thing—and hesitates for a few seconds. Then she laughs and whistles softly, almost a sharp whistle of the kind Susette’s much older brother struggled to teach her when they were children at home in the house in the town center. And the mother shouts, with an almost endless tenderness in her voice:
“But what beautiful flowers you have in your bouquet, Susette.”
Not: “What a cute little Angel of Death,” which Majjunn later, when the mother is out of earshot, comes there to whisper in Susette’s ear.
Or: God likes the small, timid and defenseless. Which she says sometimes when she suddenly appears at the water hydrant in the stone grove when Susette has gone there on her own to fill the glass jars with water.
The mask on: “It’s not a movie star, it’s the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa, aren’t you afraid of her?”
Susette busy with the water, the jars, shakes her head as if to ward it off.
“I don’t want to play with her,” Susette says to her mother when at some point her mother admonishes her and says, “You need to be nice to the little girl, maybe she’s lonely.”
“Don’t want to.” Susette sulks.
“But she is right about one thing,” her mother continues, maybe pretending not to listen to her daughter, “some words really do sound beautiful here. Ringing the church bells for the weekend service, for example. Words like ‘ringing church bells’ I particularly, especially love.”
But then later she adds in a somewhat softer voice:
“But I understand, Susette. You don’t have to play with her if you don’t want to.”
But nothing more about that either. And that is okay too, perfectly normal. Because going to the cemetery and placing flowers on the Graves of the Forgotten is, as said, something Susette and her mother have a habit of doing, just because, when they are together. That is to say: there is nothing about it that is great or fatefully filled with meaning. A ritual in twosomeness that is only theirs sometimes, in the family. Nor was it a twosome fellowship, in the sense of excluding everyone and everything else.
Like cutting up old clothes and rags to take them to get woven into rugs by a woman they know with a loom. A real rug weaver, she lives outside the town center, somewhere far far away in the Outer Marsh. She is old too, probably has twenty cats, lives in a drafty old shack of a cottage, where it smells of cat piss and the loom is rigged up, almost always in motion, in the only room. It is big too, takes up almost all of the floor space. And, rather new: the Bankers’ Employee Club, where Susette’s mother is a secretary and very active, has bought it for her with money they earned by organizing bazaars and lotteries, and selling baked goods to each other, that sort of thing.
Beautiful rag rugs are produced, with many colors, beautiful patterns: the woman then sells them at the square or via the bankers’ network and she can almost live off of it.
So, as said: in other words it is one other thing Susette and her mother tend to occupy themselves with in the evenings sometimes in the house in the midst of family life. Cutting up old rags, clothes, towels, their own or ones they have received from neighbors or others, sometimes they ask for them in the surrounding neighborhoods, go from door to door.
In the kitchen in the house or in the living room in front of the television. Just because, in other words not anything significant. Maybe you can describe it like this: that it is Susette and her mother partially in their own world that still, while Susette is a child, consists of so much more, so many other people too. There are, which has already been mentioned, two brothers almost ten years older who settle down somewhere else after finishing school; move away from the District in order to start families and work in another area. And the father of course who later, due to his work, is forced to be gone quite a lot. He is a doctor of engineering and receives an assistant professorship at a college in a city located rather far away in the eastern part of the country—and because of the distance and the expensive travel he comes home only on weekends and holidays. In other words, his profession is not that of a sea captain, which Susette likes to say at some point in school when someone asks her what her father does: but later, when Susette is in her early teens, he becomes ill, he spends a lot of time in the hospital. Not in the local hospital but in a larger hospital in the city by the sea, it is that serious. He passes away and a few years later her mother passes away: is hit with a massive heart attack and drops to the ground in the house in her own kitchen where she so enjoyed being.
But then, when it happens, Susette Packlén is already grown up and not there.
It is Maj-Gun who tells her how it happened. Maj-Gun Maalamaa, she knows everything. Has been living upstairs in the house as a boarder in the guest room for almost a year and a half already by the time Susette comes back after having been gone for three years.