Silk velvet rag scraps—I have seen the most I have. Maj-Gun, her stories, at the rug rag bucket. The rug rag bucket. The scissors. Crehp crehp. Mom.
Maj-Gun, again, again Maj-Gun. That strange time eight–nine years ago, mother was dead, they were cutting rags in the kitchen in her childhood home. Silk, velvet… Maj-Gun’s conjurations, like refrains. And her stories, or just that she talked, talked all the time. My horrible aunt Liz Maalamaa. The Boy in the woods.
Not important in and of themselves, not even then; it was just the purpose of them: to lighten the grief in an otherwise rather sorrowful and confusing time.
And at the same time, silly too. The Boy in the woods. Maj-Gun’s great love, for example. This Bengt, that is, Solveig’s brother—whom you had never thought about, and you do not think about in any more detail now either. Just a boy, of course you remember him—even if Susette never knew him at all, just known in the way that everyone who grows up at about the same time in the same place knows each other.
Somewhat older, the kind the girls in the District had crushes on: looked pretty good, drank a lot of beer already back then. But in an interesting way, so to speak, celebrated, and could be attractive at a certain point in life, a short period, but nothing more.
Maj-Gun’s: “My undelivered love, it is pure and true.” So yes, there was already a lot of forced comedy around this at the rug rag bucket in the house. Something Susette had understood back then already despite the fact that she had been rather dazed there, sitting in her pajamas, listening. That there was not much truth in Maj-Gun’s story, that he would have been interested in someone like Maj-Gun, who had neither the looks nor the manner about her, was rather unthinkable.
Of course in addition to the fact that maybe he had been there and “helped himself” there at the cemetery for a while as a teenager, according to rumors that Maj-Gun, who no longer was the Pastor’s Crown Princess, had “received.”
But at the rug rag bucket Susette had not said to Maj-Gun that Maj-Gun’s love was a fantasy-fetus born of a lot of wishful thinking, and she was not planning on saying it now either.
And besides, what did she know about it anyway? She had not been with the girls and had a crush on some Bencku in her youth, or had a crush on anyone at all. During that time she kept company with Maj-Gun’s brother Tom Maalamaa and when she had not been with Tom Maalamaa in his room at the rectory she had been at the hospital with her father who was suddenly dying and when he died she had not been able to be with Tom at the rectory anymore so she and her mother remained alone in the deserted family home in the lush neighborhoods below the town center. Far away from all the ordinary youth life in the District, far away, in some way, from everything.
“The Disgust.” An empty page: “Empty world.” And suddenly again here at the window in Rosengården, an old memory: Tom Maalamaa standing at the window of his room in the rectory that faced the cemetery where his sister Maj-Gun Maalamaa, the self-appointed Pastor’s Crown Princess, wanted to hold court, but with little success. “My kingdom,” she said that too. But Liz Maalamaa the Angel of Death mask (not scary, just idiotic) or without the mask, had hung on the metal gate tjii this way tjii that way… and you had, everyone had, walked past. That cemetery, which a few years later, as teenagers, had been transformed into a place where it was whispered that his sister “received.” “The Disgust,” Tom Maalamaa at the window who said that and Susette standing next to him nodding in silent agreement even if they did not talk about it with more words than that when they were alone in Tom’s room at the rectory. Behind the closed door, just the two of them, in the music, Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, always “Mahler’s Ninth—”
That you could escape to the music from the Disgust. “The Disgust.” In these moments in the room at the window with the view that otherwise is so beautifuclass="underline" trees and hills, the church with its bells ringing on the weekends, six o’clock on Saturday evenings. Isolated words that had been thrown into the air, when the record, “Mahler’s Ninth,” on the record player had ended.
As that relationship with Tom Maalamaa had also, in other words, gradually ended. Nothing dramatic about it either: they parted as friends of course and lost touch with each other as a matter of course. Tom Maalamaa who, according to what his sister Maj-Gun said at the newsstand, had finished high school and moved away from home and started studying law at the university and after finishing his studies became a human rights lawyer for an international charity.
And Susette herself who had finished school after high school in connection with her father’s death and started working at the private Christian nursing home for the elderly and infirm in the town center. She worked there for almost one year: kept watch over the dying ones, which the manager maintained Susette was good at and maybe it was true but suddenly she had enough and quit and gone to the Businesswoman of the Year and begged for a normal summer job instead. Which later, as said, after a few days of working at the ice cream stand in the two-window shack on the square in the town center, had continued at the strawberry fields in another part of the country, to Janos, the Lithuanian, the second lover, what later became “Poland,” all of that.
But Tom Maalamaa’s voice, how it pushes its way through her memory. Speaking “softly,” says, “the Disgust,” at the window in his steady but soft voice. One spring evening, March–April, big and bright. Tom who is speaking, Susette who is nodding, the quiet understanding around a feeling that they share without needing to formulate it into words.
Afterward, in that other life that was not “Poland,” which she had said to her mother, to Maj-Gun, which had gone on for a while, three years in other words before she returned home again, she had been able to recreate that feeling many times. A feeling that became inseparably glued to the District in particular, the entire district, what had happened to her personally, her mother’s death, everything mixed together. “This Disgust” over everything.
The cemetery, the death, all death, her father’s death. “No, Susette,” her mother had said admonishingly when she let go of everything, “it’s not easy living in a house of sorrow.” And Maj-Gun, Majjunn, the Pastor’s Crown Princess, “say the password”… a metal gate tjii this way tjii that way in the wind… and Maj-Gun older, receiving: Maj-Gun’s bleeding teenage bottom in the sleet between the headstones.
And at the nursing home later, the lonely dying ones on whom Susette, according to the manager, had a favorable effect: to these beds in particular where both nursing home cats were often already lying at the foot—they had a habit of sneaking in just before death came, jumping up onto the beds, had a nose for death.
Sitting there on a chair at the bedsides, holding hands, saying good-bye.
The Disgust. Instead of the beautiful and the normal. Which had been exactly that, no descriptions. Her mother at the cemetery: “What a beautiful bouquet, Susette!” “Listen! They are ringing for the weekend service. Listen how beautiful it is.”
The Disgust. In relation to the District—her youth, her home, everything. In relation to herself with: the memory of it—padding steps, soft and meek, down those corridors. Did not say much, almost mute, but stick thin and with those big eyes, bulging globes that greeted her in the mirrors of the nursing home. Padding over shiny waxed floors: were seasons, summers, springs, falls, going on anywhere?