Looking out through the window, the square, the life, the movement.
“Kitty, kitty come to me.” Scchhhh hisssss: the nursing home cats who saw red at the mere sight of her and ran for their lives down the corridors.
The Disgust in relation to time, to herself, to everything.
Which had also been a reason why she remained in the city by the sea, in other cities, in other places, a long time. Sporadically getting in touch with her mother at the house. Called from “Poland,” just a designation, no camouflage for anything tremendous.
Because Janos, her second love, the Lithuanian, from the strawberry fields, there had not been much to it. The story had barely started when it ended.
And gradually undeniably, you came up with a way to talk about it and think about it, with the comic points as well. How they had “escaped” from the boardinghouse in the middle of the summer night where all of the strawberry pickers were lying, sleeping, packed their things, headed off. Out into the woods—but the woods in the center of the country are bigger and more deserted than those in the District could ever be. And getting lost there.
She had found her way out again a day and a half later, suddenly found herself by the side of a road on which cars passed now and then. Hungry and exhausted she set herself up by the side of the road in order to bum a ride: it had not gone very well and she had been so tired she had not been able to stand and had to sit on a rock to rest. She had fallen asleep on the rock and when she woke up there were some boys in a car that had stopped by the side of the road and they asked her if she was feeling all right, if she needed a ride.
And she had been allowed to hang out with them, they gave her food and she slept in the backseat the whole way and when she woke up again they were in the city by the sea and she stayed there with the guys for a while, somewhat older, nice guys, had been their “mascot,” but no one was allowed to touch her, they were very kind.
Everyone had been so nice to her: “mascot.” But then she left and got a job and her own place to live. And stayed in the city awhile, and then traveled to another city, and so on.
Janos, her second love. A few days there, then—the whole time, gone.
But here, now. My life. How it is flying by. An opportunity exists. Be nothing and new. The Disgust? Of course it was, of course it is, so beautiful here. The open spaces.
But still, Maj-Gun. At the cemetery, one April evening as a teenager, Susette who happened to come by, on her way home from Tom, the Disgust? It had not been like that. Indifferent, almost in a bad mood, told Susette to go away. And Susette had gone away, home. They had not spoken about it either, ever.
Maj-Gun at the rug rag bucket—no, that was something else. Maj-Gun at the newsstand… “I was standing there, reeling in the fear.” But she had not been scared. In the middle of the square, Maj-Gun waving.
As if there was a connection between them. Invisible threads, rags, rug rags. Moss that was growing over their heads, moss like a fungus from the earth, old folk songs.
Maj-Gun with a mask over her face: Liz Maalamaa the Angel of Death.
Oh. Up here in the empty room, it blows away, so beautiful, open.
“Overturn houses?” Nah, standing firmly you know, on the ground.
Tiny love, tiny baby bird under your jacket, tiny seed—
I love you. And running over plains.
“SUSEEETTTE!”
Solveig’s voice blasting from one of the lower floors, through the house. Have to go.
But then CRASH. A glass rabbit that splits into a thousand pieces, raining over the hard, stone floor. Susette has left the attic, polishing rabbits half a floor down, has returned to her work.
This house: partially open plan living divided over three floors, ceiling height and space and Susette at the railing on the third floor: high above the ground level where Solveig is polishing the hard floor made of expensive Italian granite way down below, and Susette who is supposed to be dusting, but that strange thieflike merriment in her again.
Susette with polish on her rag is polishing the rabbits, my love, your love, finding a tiny seed, tiny baby bird under your jacket, light heart little sparrow hopping crow hopping sparrow. “Look, Solveig!” Cannot resist rollicking a little. “Look look!” Holding a rabbit in her hand, over the railing, Solveig far down below, Susette pretending to juggle the rabbit, pretending to throw it dangerously up into the air. Look, Solveig! “Gråhara northwest nineteen, Bulleholm northeast thirteen…” starts rattling off the weather forecast from the company car that morning, it echoes through the house, sings the song, but dearest my little girl don’t tie the bands too hard, “the folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one, over and over again, an eternal repetition, look, Solveig!”
“You’re crazy!” Solveig yells loudly too, through the house. “Crazy idiot!”
And then: “NO! Susette!” because it is in that moment that Susette loses her grip on the little glass piece, slippery from the polish, and it slips out of her hands and they both understand what is going to happen, it cannot be stopped. The rabbit that is falling, falling through the whole house and breaks on the floor into millions of small, hard shards that fly everywhere and Solveig is forced to run run away, is barely able to take cover behind a door.
Then silence, a fall day that has come to a standstill—and Solveig is furious of course.
Is silent the rest of the working day, they leave together in silence. On the avenues, the sun that has been covered by the clouds, Solveig walking a few steps ahead, quick, jerking steps, toward the car, Susette who is sauntering after her.
But then, in the middle of everything, Solveig turns around, and you can see that everything is okay again, the anger has blown over.
“Come on now you damned dreamer and idiot. We have to hurry home.”
“Now I remember her,” Solveig says in the company car as they are leaving Rosengården 2 behind.
“Who?”
“Maj-Gun. Maalamaa. The Pastor’s daughter. Because a long time ago, when I was little. She stole an apple. From Doris Flinkenberg. The biggest apple in the fruit basket that Bengt won at the bazaar in the fellowship hall and gave to her. She was stubborn, Doris, had to have everything, though it was a shame about her.”
Maj-Gun Maalamaa, stuck her hand through the cellophane and took the biggest apple.
“They were both very greedy. She did not give in to Doris.” Solveig laughs.
“Then you remember all sorts of cuckoo. Which Doris?”
“This Doris. On the cassette.”
And the girl she walks in the dance with red golden ribbons on Solveig’s tape player in the car. The folk songs.
A few days later Susette picks up a white cat at the Glass House on the Second Cape. The French family that had been renting the house as a summer residence have left and Susette is there on behalf of the cleaning company to help with the move: air out bedclothes, dust and roll up rugs, and wrap things in silver paper and pack them in moving boxes for transportation back to the winter residence in the city by the sea. But their summer cat, long haired, white, mixed breed, which the diplomats had adopted from the animal shelter in June, has in some way or another been forgotten.
It is sitting on the kitchen stairs of the locked, abandoned house when Susette returns a few days later: as if it had been waiting for her when she, as if led by a sixth sense, suddenly got the inclination to take the bus from the town center out to the Second Cape one Saturday morning. The wonderful white cat. And what a different cat in comparison to other cats Susette Packlén had, up until then, come across in her lifetime: both of the nursing home cats in the ward for the elderly and infirm where she had worked as a teenager, her very first job. Two peevish cats, siblings with shiny coats, who snuck around the corridors, so calm and at home where they spent their days padding from room to room, bed to bed, from dying person to dying person, but got out their claws and hissed at the very sight of her, “little Susette,” which had been the nursing home manager’s nickname for her.