“Well—.” Maj-Gun holds the door open, they walk in again. “Moss is growing on our heads, years are passing—but, Susette, maybe it is just a way of saying something else. Maybe I’m sitting here… waiting. For, option one, the less likely: that my horrible godmother Liz Maalamaa will die so I can get her money. After having nagged her husband to death at an early age, he drank himself to death on the Sweden–Finland ferry, wasn’t even fifty, maybe he just had to drink aquavit in order to put up with her… If he was DRUNK, Susette, then she has been SOBER all her life. My dad the pastor used to say that a little bit of wine made you NICE but she didn’t listen at all.
“An old hag with lots of money, mercy me. Millions, you know.
“And then, Susette, I’ll fly away. Far away from here.
“Flyyy,” Maj-Gun, sitting on the stool at the newsstand, clarifies. “Fjuuh, Susette.” And she stretches her arms out at her sides behind the counter, gliding in other words. “What a screamingly funny sight, Susette. With my extra weight—I know what you’re thinking. A giant bee with helicopter wings flidderfladdering away. Djeessuss,” Maj-Gun establishes and grows serious again.
“Doesn’t seem particularly likely in other words. So, option two, the other possibility. And believe it or not the more realistic one, because she’ll never die of course, for example. My only love, my greatest love. The Boy in the woods. That he will come. Back.
“And, Susette,” lowering her voice, whispering, “a little crow has whispered in my ear that it will happen soon—the Boy in the woods. Bengt.”
And Maj-Gun tries to make eye contact with Susette with a meaningful blink blink.
“I have always been the romantic type, Susette. Feel feel feel,” placing a hand on her large torso. “How it’s pounding. Inside. My heart. My blood. Love.
“Djeessusss—” she stops herself then when she does not really reach Susette in that way, gets new ideas, new clues, there are always new clues. Starts for example continuing the flight humor, since that association was actually funny, folding paper airplanes using empty lottery tickets, which she throws around wildly and then, more high-spiritedly, starts tearing pages out of certain magazines, The Joy of Motherhood that is lying on the counter in order to get them to fly as well. “Just a few sample issues, Susette,” she shouts with excitement, “so don’t shed a tear over them—”
Calms down again. “So many men, so little time, Susette. If I looked like you. With your looks I wouldn’t be sitting here, rotting away.
“I mean,” she adds more officiously, after a small, pregnant pause, “not the way you look now. But the potential. Come along and change. A bait for life.
“Your eyes, Susette. Those globes. A whole… world.”
Though there are of course other versions of how things went when Susette started going to the newsstand at the square in the town center and hanging out with Maj-Gun again, Maj-Gun’s own, for example.
The square, it is empty there in the afternoon and evening, in the summers too, on weekdays when the vacation period is over. An almost ghostlike emptiness hangs over it. Sometimes the only things that break the silence are cars that drive up, around around the square: three–four cars, often the same ones, hayseeds inside them. They roll down the windows, honk, yell, and if you happen to be on the square then you end up in the center, captured, for a few minutes, in a circle.
Susette ends up in the middle of the circle, maybe one of those evenings, possibly actually the evening after the day when Susette has been in the cousin’s house on the First Cape and found the old man the cousin’s papa beaten and unconscious on the kitchen floor. She cannot say for sure as said but it could have been that evening because it was fairly early after all and for once she was in no hurry to get anywhere.
She has a clear memory of it—because she had been working almost every day that summer from morning till night sometimes, at the usual places, with or without Solveig and then with Solveig in the afternoons and often later on overtime at Rosengården 2.
But this evening in particular they are free because they have not been able to go to Rosengården since the old man, Solveig’s relative the cousin’s papa from her childhood home, had died or is dying at the hospital and Solveig has to be there.
Susette who comes from the cousin’s house after the ambulance and Solveig have left; it is Susette herself who has offered to clean up the house, suddenly felt so sorry for Solveig, which she still has not said directly to Solveig because she and Solveig do not talk to each other in that way and Solveig herself has also been as calm, almost unaffected as usual.
“I want to,” is all Susette said when Solveig offered to give her a ride up to the town center.
She remained in the house for a while, but then later still without the energy to take care of anything at all after everyone had left, the exhaustion had suddenly rushed through her body. Left, her as well, walked along the road up to the main country road until the evening bus from the Second Cape came along and she jumped on it, empty that too, and rode it up to the square in the town center.
Got off the bus at the square, started walking to the other side in order to continue along the walking path through the small town center and then turn off on the pedestrian and bicycle path past the church and the old and new cemetery up to the northern hills and the apartment complex where she lives. But at the square, the cars that were suddenly there, had driven up and encircled her, around around for a few laps so that she had to stand still and wait until they finished. Windows were rolled down, shouts, that she was cute, that sort of thing.
Stares in front of her, it takes time: suddenly someone else who is shouting, waving—from the newsstand on the other side, right across from her. That is of course whom she is staring at even though she is not even aware of it herself while all of the other stuff is going on around her. Maj-Gun of course. Maj-Gun Maalamaa.
Susette in cowboy boots, tight jeans, short jacket, her long hair hanging loosely—and big, big eyes. “Djessuss, Susette. You’re totally spaced out. You don’t seem to have a clue about what kind of signals you’re sending out.”
Naturally it is Maj-Gun who says it, making Susette aware of what she looks like from the outside. When Susette walks up to her after the cars drive off, Maj-Gun true to habit is standing in the doorway, smoking. “My God, Susette.” Maj-Gun rolls her eyes, whistles. “A small poor child I am in farm pants, boots. Djeessuss, Susette. And those eyes. Your eyes, Susette. Like globes. A whole world—
“But close up like this you can see your age as well. And the fatigue, the wear,” Maj-Gun adds, but Susette does not get mad at her, just the opposite. For a brief moment she thinks “so true” and that Maj-Gun sees it too. Fatigued feet and—so empty, suddenly. All the death, fresh death, the old man on the floor in the kitchen of the cousin’s house, in her body, in her hands.
“Do you want some chocolate? I have a lot of samples today! Hearts, Susette. Small spirited trolls with truffle filling—”
Maj-Gun holds the door open, they walk in. And yes, it is nice coming into the newsstand, not like having wandered a long way and coming home, but just being able to leave the everyday for a bit. Step out of it, to the newsstand—Maj-Gun’s stronghold, her kingdom.
“Those boys,” Maj-Gun says, almost motherly, “pistol awakening. The hayseeds in the cars. Are a bit obtrusive but, Susette, you don’t need to be afraid of them.”