“And then, Susette, it disappeared too—
“Do you think this is funny, Susette?”
Maj-Gun stops in the middle of her story.
“I don’t know,” Susette replies truthfully. “I don’t think—” She tries, does not know how to continue, she wants to say that she does not really believe what Maj-Gun is saying, that maybe Maj-Gun should not exaggerate so much, but suddenly Susette sees the tears in Maj-Gun’s eyes behind the counter and it pains her.
“Then I saw hell,” Maj-Gun says and big, shiny tears run down her cheeks. “A life I never want to live.
“That marriage which wasn’t much of a marriage but she pretended to sit there and miss it when in reality she was just embarrassed because she was drunk.”
“But you said she never drank.”
“But, Susette!” Maj-Gun shouts impatiently through her tears. “Don’t you understand anything? Djeessuss! Those three–four thimbles she poured into her milk glass, her medicine, it was her big secret. And it’s her, never me, who talks big. ‘A little bit of wine makes you nice,’ papa Pastor said at the rectory and I say so too. But I had caught her red-handed.” Calmer now, she is no longer crying, dries all the snot and tears from her face with the back of her hand just as determined as she had been with the lip gloss on her lips, sits up straight. “But this is what I want to say, Susette. That the life lie—” Maj-Gun starts with such seriousness that all of the issues of Positive Consciousness she has ever studied pour out of her. “That. The end. Fuck. The end. Never. THERE. Djeessuss. That you can long to get away!”
And she grows silent again, determines later, thoughtfully, but with great emphasis. “Her life. Her damned shit of a life, Susette Packlén.”
“Well,” Maj-Gun says then after she has caught her breath, “now we come to the little turn in this idiotic story that happens to be true, to boot. Sorry, Aunt Liz suddenly says there on the boat. In the restaurant where we remain all alone except for the servers because by that time it’s really late. And she looks at me and says that, at exactly the same moment as I get a burning liquid in my mouth that looks like regular milk because what has happened, which she has realized before me even if it was too late for her to do anything about it, is that I have gotten thirsty and taken her glass by mistake instead of my own.
“Sorry. But she, Liz Maalamaa, is like me—unfortunately we aren’t related for nothing and what belongs to the genetic material we seem to share is that you are never allowed to have a pause in the conversation regardless of whether there is something important to say or not. Babble, it just continues, especially if someone unmasks you, or even worse, you unmask yourself. SEE the life lie shit life: she never loved him after all. And he, yes, he wasn’t nice to her anyway—but she immediately has to jump over to the absolution that happens later.
“‘Majjunn,’ she says accordingly, taking that babble in her mouth. If Majjunn doesn’t tell anybody about this then when Auntie dies, Maj-Gun won’t get the prince because Auntie doesn’t have a say about that but she will get the whole kingdom.
“And then, Susette, we go down to the cabin and she writes her will. After my death all of my earthly possessions will go to… and so on.
“And it was for real. I get to inherit everything. Including the apartment in Portugal where she spends her winters these days because of the varicose veins that also run in the family.
“Djeessus, Susette. Tom Maalamaa. HE isn’t going to believe his eyes. That miser. That He. Will Be. Left With Nothing.
“But, Susette, she’ll never DIE of course, and then, well”—Maj-Gun grows quiet as if she has run out of air—“we were back in port again.”
And at the newsstand now, Maj-Gun who is drumming her fingers on the surface of the counter and suddenly it is really quiet and dark, after closing time, a good while, because neither of them has looked at the clock.
Dark over the square too: only one solitary streetlamp is lit. A cat who is leisurely moving across the empty square, not even black, an ordinary gray tabby, a fat barn cat.
“Everything can happen here,” Maj-Gun finishes. “Just that… that… do you think, Susette, that anything happens here at all?
“You can say anything here. That’s how it is, at the newsstand. In general.”
“It’s late.” Susette clears her throat, now she wants to get home right away.
Maj-Gun sighs, gets up as well, is going to start closing up.
Counts the register first, opens the cash drawer, PLING.
“Wait, Susette,” Maj-Gun calls when Susette is already at the door. “I think. About your mother. I understand, Susette. More than you know.”
“What do you mean?” Susette asks quickly, almost spitefully.
“What I’m saying,” Maj-Gun calmly replies, “your mother. She was for real. Not like my aunt or… like someone else. Your mother, Susette. Was as healthy as could be. In some way healthier than everyone else in the world who is healthy. Does that sound like a cliché? But still, what I want to say. It was just a logic. To go along with.”
“Maj-Gun. Don’t bother—” Susette says, but still, she cannot pull herself away, in some way wants to hear more.
“Life like a room, Susette. That’s what she said, maybe to you too, there at the rag-cutting bucket in the kitchen—a special mood that never leaves you once you’ve been there. Room after room after room that you enter and leave and then go on to the next one. That house, what it looks like on the inside, you don’t feel but you know… suddenly you’ve just ended up there… Not in a basement or in some dusty attic.
“But maybe just somewhere where it is… empty.
“Brown. Nasty. She spoke like that. Cut up her office clothes, they were like that shade you know, you remember. Worn woolen fabric. We cut. For the most part she cut and I listened. I really listened, Susette, because it was touching for real. Listened like I had never listened before and maybe will never listen again either because it hurt, and continues to hurt too.
“Is that death? It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Is that it? Maj-Gun? Susette? Questions like those. The most terrible or the most comforting, because that is where life and death cancel each other out, laughter grief same thing, there is no answer of course.
“But she remained sitting there cutting, didn’t give in.
“She remains sitting there, doesn’t give in.
“It demanded respect. But on the other hand I understand that you can’t live in it.”
“Maj-Gun. CAN we stop talking about this now?”
“Yes, Susette. But you don’t need to be jealous. It was, it IS, your mother. My occasional affinity with your mother, Susette. Originates from there and only there.
“She didn’t pretend. You could see it in her. A logic. I mean, also in the most absurd of contexts, at the rug rag bucket and among all of the rags.”
“Be quiet now!”
“Sorry, Susette,” Maj-Gun says again, one of the last things she says that night but then Susette is already outside. “I mean something else.
“When you don’t pretend. It isn’t like it is at the newsstand. That you can say anything. But it isn’t like that.
“You can’t say just anything and yet, even though you think so, it is so beautiful and right when someone says so—so you still keep going, the words pour out of you.