Because later, with Solveig, in Rosengården 2. Walking, running down the avenues, in such a pounding NOW, sunshine.
Tabula rasa. Being nothing, and new. That possibility.
As mentioned, it is early fall, they are in Rosengården 2 almost all the time when they are working together. Vacuuming, washing windows, polishing so that the houses will be ready to be lived in. Those who have bought the houses and are going to live in them are rarely seen, you do not know who they are of course except for the fact that they have a lot of money and most of them come from somewhere else, not from the District. A mother-in-law or wife with girlfriends with an eye for color and good taste who show up sometimes, give good advice. My grandmother this, at Marttorna we learned it this way… and so on, though of course they do not grab the polishing rags personally, but they know exactly how they should be used.
But for the most part Solveig and Susette alone, in Rosengården, in the empty houses: all architectonic masterpieces, different from one another but certainly at least three floors in each one of them. Enormous spaces, millions of feet up to the ceilings, the floor space. Furnishings like landscapes that in some of the houses should be completely ready when the residents arrive. Curtains hung up, beautiful patterns, material, paintings along the walls, sculptures, art. An exquisite family of rabbits, for example, made of heavy and transparent glass, in countless pieces. Two larger and two smaller ones that for several weeks have been standing ready on a podium on one of the landings outside the door to a room that presumably will be the nursery: washing machine–friendly jungle animals on the wallpaper in there.
These rabbits collect dust: need to be dusted, crrrrfllll Solveig hisses all the time.
Moving inside the houses, a bit like a thief. With endless care, of course, no Solveig is needed in order to point that out. Tippytoe. But a certain thieflike merriment amid the respect.
Or, then, outside: on the lush avenues cutting through Rosengården 2, which is going to be fenced in with high walls and have an electronic monitoring system at the gate so that the area can be kept closed off from outsiders. “This is the future.” Solveig laughs, there on the avenues, silly maybe, though when you find yourself in that exact place, it is not at all.
Walking in the future with Solveig, in Rosengården 2: on the open asphalt roads where the trees are already growing tall. Full grown from the beginning, symmetrical and richly branched, as if they have been standing in the same straight line in the same places in straight rows and are not, as they are, newly planted.
“Tobias would say that it’s cheating,” says Solveig. “Tobias would say that you can’t buy history and experience.”
“But, Susette,” Solveig says later. “Forget about Tobias. You don’t need to think so much—
“There is also that possibility, Susette, that all of the old stuff can disappear. And it’s not silly. Doesn’t need to mean obliterated or forgotten. Just that you don’t need to walk around and see with the same eyes, the eyes of the old people.”
And right after, something else, something about herself. “It was hell for quite a while but it’s good now. It took a hundred years before I got my child. I had so many miscarriages.”
Susette nods, she understands exactly. No more words are needed, no words spoken from the heart, nothing that big. Just walking with Solveig, in that openness. A clear day at the beginning of September, thinning, blindingly white clouds racing across the sky.
Here you are nothing and everything disappears. The possibility of new. A great laughter grips Susette, remains a few steps behind Solveig, spins around and around on the spot. Dizzy. The empty slate. Tabula rasa.
“She was terrified of death. Everyone around her just died.”
There was a time, they were cutting rug rags.
But “love,” stated Maj-Gun, sitting at the newsstand reading from “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” “is partly. To create yourself, and new.”
There among the tall buildings, on the avenues: “Is your love like my love? So great that it can overturn houses?”
My life. NOW—Susette and love.
So yet, inside Susette. There is a small seed. Of love. Baby bird under your jacket, at your chest. Small heart, small sparrow. Bird. Baby. Starts growing—
“Come on, we’re in a hurry, silly!” Solveig is already at one house, in the yard, has turned around and yelled.
And Susette stops spinning and jumping and acting like an idiot and runs as fast as she can to catch up with Solveig and bumps into her playfully, like a small dog.
“It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” she chants, with a dull and solemn voice, imitating Maj-Gun Maalamaa, right in Solveig’s ear. “Duel in the sun—” And then she adds, as usual, “Solveig, do you know Maj-Gun?”
“Nah. Which Maj-Gun?”
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Her. In the newsstand.”
“Nah,” says Solveig. “Do you?”
“Not… really,” says Susette. “Or—well. A little.
She’s… okay. Just talks a bit funny. Says strange things.”
Simultaneously: it is hard knowing with Maj-Gun and your connection to her what you should say. There are not any of those coherent, real memories to reproduce. If she were for example to say, “We were classmates in elementary school,” then it is also true that she does not remember anything from that time. The Pastor’s Crown Princess? Cuckoo. Good evening. “Say the password.” Or: “The sister of my first boyfriend, Tom Maalamaa.” What do you mean first boyfriend, saying that when you are almost thirty years old? But then it starts burning somewhere again. My love. But: a damned preparedness and no candidates.
“Strange things about what?” Solveig asks.
“All sorts of things. Just think if there is someone inside you who is dying for love?” Susette yells out, laughing into the happy day.
“Ha ha ha,” says Solveig. “Stop dawdling now. We’ve got work to do.”
And they go inside the house.
Susette in landscape. It is a little while later, in that house, Rosengården 2, the one with the glass rabbits on the podium on the third-floor landing. She has gone up there, and suddenly that merriment from outside on the avenues fills her, a bit thieflike too, upward upward, three and a half floors, in this house, to the very top floor. A small staircase, a door, she opens it and comes out.
An empty landscape, and how large. A wide wide space, warm wooden flooring and a window at the other end, enormous, reaching almost from the floor to the sloping roof, probably fifteen–eighteen feet at the highest point. Walks up to this window, there is, so to speak, a door in the window, there is of course some sort of artistic idea behind it. A glass door that leads out to—everything.
And it is fantastic, what is revealed. The sea in the distance, and the woods, the capes. Everything exists in there and then the sky as well, the clouds, everything—that space. And to stand there, like on a stage, as if someone had thought about it. Because heavy curtains are already hanging at the sides of the window, curtains made of velvet, soft, like theater curtains.
Tippytoe, carefully, hop hop, Susette walks up to the window. And stands there, alone, in the emptiness, the silence, with everything in front of her—it is dizzying.
Tabula ra—
But suddenly, at the window, where she is standing there at the window, the handle on the door that most certainly cannot be opened even though it looks like it can, and yes, steady on her feet, is not afraid of heights, not afraid, not—but suddenly, exactly right there, another thing. Which comes back.