And it is a little bit funny after all, cannot be helped, Susette cannot help but break into a smile. And she softens, the hot fury disappearing almost as quickly as it came over her.
Ventures to ask too: “Something from ‘The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings’?”
“Oh,” Maj-Gun answers, squirming a bit in her seat, but of course she cannot hide that she is happy again, about the appreciation and the attention. “Just something I made up. By myself, so to speak.”
“But now, Susette, for the remaining entertainment,” Maj-Gun continues then, the afternoon that passes, the chocolate swiss roll eaten, the ice cream melted into slush in the bowls on the table, the cat fallen asleep in Susette’s arms, heavy and sweaty on her pajama-covered legs, still in her bedclothes, wearing just her bathrobe. “Shall I tell you about something else? Something about myself and my life? Things are happening there too even though it may not look like it from the outside. But a little bird has whispered in my ear: that I may not be here for very long. It is starting to burn, Susette…
“You know, Susette, as I have a habit of saying. I’m flying away. The two alternatives… money or love, you remember. And now I’m not talking about the former. My aunt Elizabeth and all of her money that I’m going to inherit and that will provide me with the opportunity to live an independent life as a single person with loads of financial freedom so that I can leave this joint… I’ll be able to have a nice apartment too, and certainly be able to get started on the right diet right away, so that my life, oh djeessuss how I’ll be able to say it, my life, like an architectural monument, white and airy and with high ceilings… so that my life—well, it won’t be any story about Fat-Dick and Fat-Sally who found love together, 484 pounds of true love and then they lived happily ever after with only vegetable fat on the table, Susette—ha-ha.” Maj-Gun laughs at her own joke but then she suddenly grows quiet and, “where was I?” Looks around Susette’s cozy little living room as if she had just woken up, a living room that is such a different environment from the newsstand where she otherwise sits and tells her stories, everything sounds so different here. A few seconds’ pause, and then she has found her place again. “Well HERE I was: that, the jump in the lake, Susette.
“The old bitch will never die, believe you me. It never becomes evening there—nah, always morning in that life. Early morning hours, a hysterically bursting dawn particularly in the company of someone with her healthy fluids who would love to lie around in her pajamas and lounge around until the afternoon. And five glasses of water every morning to not feel hungry and she doesn’t feel any hunger, I promise, before her morning aerobics and the long morning walks that occur daily. But—what do you get out of it, Susette? From those kinds of healthy habits? Hallelujah, Susette, you get eternal life.
“But now that wasn’t what I was going to talk about rather it was the other alternative: a small bird has whispered in my ear that the Boy in the woods is back. Love, Susette. That possibility.
“Yes, in other words,” she adds. “I haven’t actually seen him. But I know. There is so much you know that you don’t know. Can you explain it?
“A criminal returns to the scene of the crime. That’s what I mean. I love him. Because he… loved so much he killed—‘Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.’ It was a tragic story. The American girl who died at Bule Marsh. Do you remember?”
Certainly, of course, an old story from the District, Susette shrugs her shoulders: “And what about it then?”
“Well. HE. Loved her. The American girl. So much that he killed—”
“Sorry, but who are you talking about again?”
“Djeessuss.” Maj-Gun rolls her eyes, opens them wide. “I’m talking about the Boy in the woods of course. Haven’t you heard? Djeessus, Susette. If you weren’t so curled up in your own suffering,” Maj-Gun continues, but not at all as exaggerated as she sounds. “And now I don’t mean you personally but for example you—
“Or me for example. Because that’s how it is with all people. Your head is filled with so many other things, so many other things, your own things, that you aren’t attentive. And then of course you need—protection. To protect yourself, protect each other.
“Like you at the rug rag bucket when we were young, in the house. You were in shock after your mother’s death and you had such a terrible stomachache and of course I talked about my love then too but I couldn’t just tell you everything because you were so unwell. What it was really like. With him and the American girl.
“Well, anyway. What I want to say is that there is a suffering which, even if you see and hear it, regardless of how obvious it is, you don’t bother with it, not out of meanness but because you’re so preoccupied with your own things. So. For example me. I should have been more aware because that girl went and shot herself. Pang. A bullet through the head. Also at Bule Marsh. The same place where the American girl drowned.”
“What are you talking about? What girl?”
“Doris. That was her name. A year or so older, the folk band girl. The soloist in that band, Micke’s Folk Band… Micke Friberg whom all the girls had a crush on because he was good-looking and musical and so deep, something big was going to become of him, do you remember? Oh, well, Susette. I don’t either. The two of us are just as forgetful. There are lots of golden boys with prospects and there isn’t room for all of them on Olympus or whatever it’s called later in life. Well. Anyway. Doris Flinkenberg was his girlfriend for a few weeks that fall and Micke Friberg was in love with her and she also tried to love him but it didn’t work out because she was in love with someone else.
“We, Doris Flinkenberg and I, in other words, had raked the cemetery together the summer before. Of course, she was the one doing the raking because it was her summer job but I had summer vacation, long, free vacation days at the cemetery, my hangout in the world at that time. And as I said, it would turn out, her last summer but you couldn’t know that then, not even later in the fall when she came back to the cemetery once and I met her there a few days before she took her own life.
“Maybe it was like this. That she knew something about all of that with the American girl that made it so she no longer wanted to live. Something really awful. But I thought about that later when it was too late so to speak. Maybe we should have brought everything out in the open while there was still time, so it wouldn’t have been just a few sentences she had spoken in passing. Just think if I had been able to help her. I saw that she was depressed, of course: the fear, the anxiety that stank around her. Still, oh hell, I didn’t understand—not then.
“And I was so angry at her too. Thought she was proud. During the summer, at the cemetery, she just walked around and talked about everything she was going to do later when her summer job was finished. Travel to Austria with her best friend and all of the fun things they would do there. Rather dismal for an outsider to listen to in the long run. But in and of itself, it’s understandable in hindsight too: you know, how you can pin all your hopes on a trip like that to anywhere, just escape, when you don’t see any other way out. Because there wouldn’t be any trip later, with her friend. It was probably just daydreams and bragging.