But, as said, there was a time right before, before Jeanette Lindström, before Solveig, before everything: a short period lasting just a few months which, while it lasted, was still as long as an eternity, perpetuum mobile. At home in the house with Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Just her and Maj-Gun who becomes Majjunn again during that time. From the cemetery, the gate, tjii this way tjii that way. “Say Pastor’s Crown Princess…” That Majjunn. A sound from a childhood, a name that has glued itself to your tongue.
Majjunn sitting on a kitchen chair in the house with Susette’s mother’s old sewing scissors. Cutting old clothes into rags. Long, skinny strips whirling down into a bucket at her feet. At their feet: because Susette has also been sitting there, on another kitchen chair, in her pajamas and she also had a pair of scissors in her hand.
Crehp crehp the scissors fly through the fabric, rags, clothes. Majjunn’s scissors, and her own. Majjunn talking, humming.
Silk velvet rag scraps yes I have seen the most I have—
That song, which becomes Majjunn’s song, like a strange refrain in a silence that when Majjunn does not speak, a humming envelops them in the empty house.
And the sound of the scissors, as said. Crehp crehp. How they flew through the fabric.
But then later it passed so to speak and when it was over—yes, why should you, why should Susette think about it then?
Life has gone on. And besides, it has at least been clear: these thoughts, feelings, they do not get her anywhere.
But this she remembers, despite the fact that so much else from that time becomes forgotten afterward: that the last thing she and Maj-Gun do together during that time in the house after her mother’s death is go to the movies. Sitting perfectly positioned in the best seats in an otherwise empty movie theater. Maj-Gun ordered the tickets for them over the phone a few days in advance so they would be sure to get a seat. It is, Maj-Gun has been sure to explain, a very popular young adult film they are going to see. “A real young adult movie for young adults like us,” she explains. “I got the best seats!”
Which, according to Maj-Gun, is important because they are supposed to be celebrating something. “That everything is over now,” she says and not just that it is over but that they have made it out of “all of that” with “lives and youth intact”—that is Maj-Gun’s own illustrious wording too, her emphasis on “youth” as well. Susette, for her part, does not say very much; in and of itself Maj-Gun is of course the one who talks the hind leg off a donkey the most even during that time but also because it actually is not necessary to talk because the house where they have been living together for a while is for sale and a reasonable offer has been made that Susette and her brothers, who are beneficiaries of the estate after their parents, have accepted and Susette herself has rather quietly placed a down payment on an apartment in the apartment complex above the town center and only when it is done does she tell Maj-Gun that she will need to look around for somewhere else to live. “You have to move, you’ll certainly find something.”
“But where am I supposed to go then?” Maj-Gun says, rapidly, unexpectedly pours out of her there where she has been standing in front of Susette in the kitchen, complete surprise on her face, almost on the verge of tears. Before Susette has time to repeat that Maj-Gun will certainly quickly find a better, not to mention more agreeable, room to rent, Maj-Gun’s mood changes and she excitedly starts planning the farewell festivities that will take place as soon as the “moving work” as she calls it in that moment is “taken care of”—and these festivities will in other words, as said, be crowned with a visit to the movies. “As if,” Maj-Gun says, “welcome back, in other words. The scissors on the shelf: TO youth, life, an invitation.”
When they get inside the movie theater that predetermined evening it is, in other words, empty; a long long time passes during the minutes before the film starts and no one is there. “Aside from the usual jack offs of course, typical,” which Maj-Gun loudly and expertly but with an awkwardly audible relief in her voice whispers to Susette as she is sitting there, squirming restlessly and glancing around furtively and then finally catching sight of some occasional losers of the male sex who trickle into the theater before the lights dim and the merciful darkness sinks and the movie at last gets started.
The film is called Skateboarding and is about a boys’ gang in a run-down big city suburb in America, one of those against-all-odds-gangs united by its great passion for skateboarding and a lot of youthful complications along the way to the happy ending that is their own skateboarding ramp behind the apartment buildings and shaking hands with the mayor.
Not a film to write home about, in other words, and no one other than Maj-Gun and Susette stuck it out until the end. But still, unforgettable. Susette will always remember the feeling of liberation on the bus on the way back home to the District.
That it was over now, whatever that was: Mom, the Pole, all the rest… Does not even need to be mentioned in detail any longer—AND Majjunn.
Like a wave that is receding. And the feeling is her own, private. Absolutely indivisible, much less with Maj-Gun Maalamaa. Because that is also what the liberation was about, a small decisive insight: they had not meant the same thing when, before the visit to the movies, Maj-Gun said that they were going to “celebrate” having gotten past “it.”
On the one hand: yes, it was over. On the other hand: for Susette it means, has meant something else, something more—beyond Maj-Gun too, all of that.
But: “Skateboarding, to life, then?” It is almost like she is standing there saying it herself, Maj-Gun in the rain after the movie, at a loss outside the movie theater, alone on a rain-covered asphalt road where she suddenly, for a few seconds, just stands and dies. Maj-Gun who is wearing what she calls “going-out clothes” for the disco under her coat but Susette who just says, “I’m going home now,” and leaves.
Starts walking, rapid steps in the direction of the bus station for the provincial buses. Maj-Gun who trots after her, at a proper distance of course, maybe thirty feet, in silence. Without calling out, without trying to catch Susette’s attention at all.
Is just there, behind her.
And on the bus, Susette, got on before Maj-Gun, takes a seat at the very front, in a row for just one person and Maj-Gun walks past her to the very back without looking in Susette’s direction. During the journey Susette gets up anyway and goes and sits next to Maj-Gun in the last row and they travel on in silence and when she and Maj-Gun go their separate ways at the bus stop at the square in the town center Susette understands that she and Maj-Gun will no longer be together as friends, or at all, for that matter. And it hits her too when she wanders home to her own, new apartment that she has not asked Maj-Gun where she has moved.
But she takes a shortcut through the cemetery that night.
And suddenly, there, she gets an impulse and turns off in the rain over to the new side of the cemetery, a few hundred feet away from the path where her mother is buried next to her father, even though her mother had said many times after her father’s death, while Susette was still living with her mother, that she and father should “rest” on the old side where it was much more peaceful.