But then she shrugs. “Bother! Forgetabout it. That isn’t love, it’s a hobby. What do you know about love, Susette? And, Susette, what do I know?
“Love is something bigger… Oh, Susette. Now I’m suddenly getting nervous. Come on. I need a smooooooke!”
And she hastily snatches a newspaper to use for holding open the door.
All About Animals in Nature, All About Relationships, A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and Personal Development, Everything About Everyday Interactions, Cats’ World, All About Dogs—and of course All About Love.
Susette and love.
Because suddenly the magazine that Maj-Gun has stuck under her arm slips from her grasp there where she is standing in the doorway to the newsstand, in the process of lighting her cigarette with a lighter. Falls to the ground, opens to a column, it is just too fantastic, they both stand there staring.
“Do you see?” Maj-Gun says after a few seconds, in total genuine surprise and for a moment without her usual sweaty excitement. “Your story, Susette. And what it’s called. Oh, oh, oh, Susette. ‘Your Love.’ ”
Susette and love. A black-and-white sketch of a woman’s face illustrates the story, a car, lanterns, a few trees, and broken fog—and behind her face, in the background but in the distance so to speak, a man. With sideburns, wearing a polo, a blazer.
“And what is love?” Maj-Gun continues, once they have come inside. “Sharing the everyday and not forgetting to take turns washing the coffee cups?
“Oh no,” Maj-Gun immediately determines. “That isn’t anything other than ordinary everyday servility. You can have different kinds of arrangements, with or without legal validity.
“Or a marriage between friends. Two bank directors in a mixed Lions Club who found each other through their mutual interest in charity.”
And so, Maj-Gun who dives into her book again, “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” her statements.
“More like this…” Skims, skims until she comes to a suitable place. “‘He taught me to walk’… ‘She made me see’ …
“‘It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Love means doing everything for love.’ Even dying, not just for show but PANG truly.
“I am more romantically inclined than you, Susette. In other words, it is just as I suspected—
“I don’t mean it in a bad way, but… now. I see. That we—might be two. That maybe YOU were also created for a greater love.”
“My God, Maj-Gun.” Susette Packlén laughs in a girlfriend sort of way. “Isn’t it enough already?”
“Can you imagine dying for love? Yes, Susette, when I look at you. These globes, Susette. Your eyes. A whole world. I feel it. That your love is great, Susette. So great it can overturn houses. Duel in the sun. Life and death.
“So that later, afterward you can say that there were two of us who loved. Though,” Maj-Gun adds elatedly, thoughtful, “of course if it happens to go that way for us then afterward, in and of itself, there won’t be so much for us. But”—brightening at the thought—“the memory of the two of us will remain.
“I remember when I saw you come running across the cemetery, Susette. To the rectory: like a romantic heroine from a movie. A movie with deserted plains, clouds and rain and hard winds. I love you… her whole body screaming, the loneliness inside her, the heavens opening, church bells.
“It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It is love, Susette.
“To the rectory. But yet, it has to be said, love’s representative in that story looked a little pale, so to speak,” Maj-Gun determines with reference to her own brother, Tom Maalamaa. “So the question is,” she says thoughtfully, “Susette and love. If I am going to love the Boy in the woods then who are you going to love—now?
“Well.” Maj-Gun shrugs after a brief pause. “Should I tell you another story then instead, as an illustrative example? A true story?”
“I have to go home now, tomorrow is another workday,” Susette says but Maj-Gun anticipates her. “But listen to this now and then maybe you’ll understand me better, Susette. We were at sea, so to speak. Life is a cruise, so to speak, that’s how she said it. And she took out her flask and poured out ‘her medicine.’ Then she also said, ‘My flask.’ Held it up. ‘My medicine.’ A small cute bottle, as it were.
“You know who I’m talking about. My godmother Liz Maalamaa who had become a widow and wanted to head out to sea and invited me to come with her as a female companion. Didn’t want to travel alone, she whined, and I was a child then and I guess she thought that I needed some entertainment in the sea of balls for example.
“But the same miserable routes Susette, Sweden Finland Sweden Finland, which her husband, of blessed memory, had often traveled alone in his spare time until his heart, liver, kidneys just exploded inside him and he was found dead under some berth under the car deck by the cleaners when the boat had reached port.
“The buffet room, the shrimp shells, milk glasses; her talking and her talking; swans in the archipelago that filed past on the other side of the window. TWO swans, that was what she saw even though there were several of course, black swans, white swans, but in other words, she had to pause at just the two of them. Dick and Duck, her and her husband, and crying over the shrimp shells… and how you can long for someplace else, Susette, despite being so young! So I left the restaurant and ran ran out through the ship back to my own normal childhood as it were that I suddenly didn’t know where it was at all, but the sea of balls then, like a hypothesis; to drown myself in the sea of balls, I wanted to DIE! And I tried, I swam in and under the balls and squeezed my eyes shut but nah nah there was no nice sister in a blue bathing suit, for example, who wanted to come to my rescue.
“There was just one—an older woman: one single lady in the universe. My aunt Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Maalamaa, in comfortable sandals size ten—a reminiscence from her happy childhood on the farm up north where she and her brother dreamed about becoming missionaries, and sometimes you need to walk a long way if you’re going to save heathens, Majjunn, which she always called me, she explained sometime during her bedtime stories for me and my brother Tom when she came to visit at the rectory in order to rest during the time her husband was still alive. Sometimes on unruly ground, Majjunn, and there in the jungle, the conditions and laws of the jungle prevail, looked a bit like she had come from that wilderness herself, bruises on her wrists and a black eye on the left side… But yes, it was those sandals I saw in the sea of balls when I opened my eyes that I had squeezed shut because I thought it would make me invisible like when an ostrich sticks its head in the sand. On the other side of the windowpane that separated the children’s playroom from the ship’s corridor while chubby girl on the run chubby girl on the run echoed from all of the ship’s loudspeakers. I WAS not exactly fat then, Susette, just big.
“But, no escape, pjutt spit a ball out of my mouth and back to the dining room, the buffet tables from which all of the other people had already excused themselves and we were alone: the swans, Dick and Duck, her and the husband… while darkness fell, Susette. Over all of these lies too. And the archipelago, on the other side of the window. The only thing that could be seen, one solitary lighthouse. A white light, at a distance.