Maj-Gun explains that her father, the Pastor, has during that time received a position in another parish, and she did not want to move with her parents to the new rectory. She explains to Susette that she has realized that despite everything she likes it in this municipality; and besides, she also had to prepare for all of the admission interviews and application interviews for the university. So therefore, and for practical reasons too, staying in the District has been a better alternative. And Maj-Gun has furnished a real attic study for herself in the guest room in Susette’s absence: thick tomes of paper and compendiums lie in piles, drifts of paper on the desk and in the bookshelves.
And to support herself while studying for her interviews she has, in other words for a while now, started working full-time shifts at the newsstand at the square in the town center.
Susette has, as said, at this point in time been gone for almost three years; she has just turned twenty. “In Poland,” that is what it is called, has been called, and will still be called. With her second love, but it came to nothing. And due to the poor telephone connections, the poor postal service, and poor communication in general… Susette has come home only when it has been too late. On the whole she gets to hear what happened when it is too late.
Maj-Gun Maalamaa is the one who meets her at the ferry terminal as they had agreed by telephone. “What a nice backpack, Fjällräven—” Maj-Gun spells out. “Is it new?”
Thick plastic bags filled with rug rags remain everywhere in the house, in piles on top of each other too along the walls in the kitchen (the old woman with the loom in the Outer Marsh has been dead for a long time already).
“What we did toward the end?” Maj-Gun stood there in the middle of the mess and the musty smell and asked herself rhetorically. “Cut. Rug rags. It was a calm and restful hobby.”
“She was terrified of dying,” says Susette.
“You can rest assured, Susette,” Maj-Gun replies, “it was over in a few minutes. I called the ambulance. But it was too late.”
“Can love make you crazy, can grief make you crazy, can regret, can—” Susette asks, no, whispers, because it can barely be heard. And her stomach hurts so badly, so damned much, as if her body is in the process of being cut in two, and her legs that collapse under her; then she has to go to bed and sleep, rest—remains bedridden for several days.
Maj-Gun, who hears, sees, says nothing. But she puts her arm around Susette: it is heavy, such a weight that holds on to Susette, almost like a vise. But in it there is, completely genuine: such tenderness, leniency, such comfort—
Later, Susette will remember that conversation with Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the home that day she returned, as clear as a bell, despite so much else being forgotten, also consciously, so obscure.
Maj-Gun, whom she has not seen since childhood, whom she quite literally does not know at all. Except for “Pastor’s Crown Princess,” a few scenes from the cemetery that are buried in her from a distant childhood, and so, naturally, what you managed to see of Maj-Gun in the rectory in her role as the sister of your first love Tom Maalamaa whom you went out with for six–seven months when you were about fourteen years old. Though, in and of itself, you did not see a lot of Maj-Gun, in the rectory, either. She was not home very much but mainly it was that she and Tom Maalamaa spent most of their time behind the closed door in Tom’s room. And listened to music: classical music, Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, always “Mahler’s Ninth.”
A fantastic reconciliation with mankind’s existential conditions, a feeling of life so closely connected to a simultaneous consciousness of death. As Tom Maalamaa used to say, almost solemnly, sometimes.
What she said, what Maj-Gun said in response. Because those have, so to speak, been the last sensible sentences for a long time. She has not really been able to explain why either. But also because a few months later when that time in the house with Maj-Gun has passed, has been over, it has been something she knowingly and wittingly preferred not to think about after the fact.
The house is sold after these two months, Maj-Gun forced to vacate her attic study on the second floor and move away. And Susette bought a small apartment with her inheritance from her mother and father, which was divided in three among her and her brothers. A studio on the first floor in a row of apartment buildings on the fields on the north side of the town center.
And she started working for Businesswoman of the Year Jeanette Lindström again: actually gone looking for Jeanette Lindström on her own after a period of idleness when the money started drying up and more or less begged for a job, any job whatsoever. “I’ll see what I can do for you,” Jeanette Lindström had said. Jeanette whom Susette had worked for one summer once long ago, as a teenager after almost a year at the private nursing home in the District for the elderly and infirm. A few days in Jeanette Lindström’s two-window Ice Cream Stand on the square in the town center, then the strawberry fields.
And a few years later Jeanette Lindström had added, stupidly jokingly so to speak but with some sort of warning in it: “But this time we’ll let the strawberry fields go, right? Who knows where the butterfly might flutter off to this time and we don’t want to be party to a flight like that again. Not to mention it gets costly and difficult for the employer to find a replacement on such short notice.”
Where the butterfly might flutter off to this time. That is how she spoke, Jeanette Lindström, in other words like an allusion, that it was from those miserable strawberry fields up north where Susette had been sent as extra labor from the ice cream stand at the square where she really should have been working that summer three years ago that Susette ran away with a “Pole,” Janos, whom she had met there, while working.
He was the one who had wanted to get away from there: he had not been happy or grateful in the least about this means of getting a visa to travel to a country outside the so-called Iron Curtain and then under controlled means, like a member of an official friendly exchange between the two countries, earn a little bit of money (actually no money, that is how it was for everyone at the strawberry fields, and Businesswoman of the Year was not exactly someone who drove up the wages).
Janos—her second love, dull and intense. And besides, he was not from Poland but Lithuania but everyone said Poland so it just stayed like that.
“Well, this time I was thinking of a real job that you can live on,” Susette had replied, deathly serious, but now in this situation almost four years later, Jeanette Lindström has not grasped the sore spot rather let it go and actually offered Susette a job with a decent wage in her legitimate business activities, which found itself in an expansion stage at this point in time. And so it turned out that during the years that followed, Susette worked for her on different projects: shop assistant in the Little Gift Shop, assistant in catering and so on, up until the point that as a result of an argument she had with her employer, she quit her job and started cleaning for Solveig Torpeson in her cleaning business Four Mops and a Dustpan.
“With these words I’m transferring things to you, Susette,” on Solveig’s wedding day no less. Jeanette Lindström had pushed Susette Packlén in her server’s apron up to the bride in a puffed-sleeved wedding dress at the bride’s table after Susette, in a hurry and because Jeanette Lindström had been in the way the whole time, managed to drop a few plates from the fellowship hall’s white bone china set on the floor so that they had broken. These words have become legendary, because afterward no one remembers what “these words” were, and in and of themselves, they were unintelligible because by that point Jeanette had pinched some of the wedding cognac. Of course, these types of stories were loved in the District.