SHE CAME FROM BORNEO, she dances there, in the docklands. “The Girl from Borneo,” it was an amulet, that was where Maj-Gun had gotten the idea to call herself the Girl from Borneo in that hamba hamba Day of Desire dance. Woman with slanted eyes, dark hair, and flamenco skirts. A gift to her niece, her goddaughter Majjunn, from the aunt sometime when Maj-Gun was younger too. A souvenir from Rio de Janeiro where the aunt and her husband went on their honeymoon, a round-the-world trip with some cruises, it might have been 1952 (the silver shoes were from Rio de Janeiro too).
So she, the amulet figure, was not from Borneo at all. Maj-Gun had made the name up. Inspired in turn by another story that in turn will inspire her a great deal later, later in her early twenties when she leaves her parental home, her possessions in a seaman’s chest a third of a mile from the rectory down to the town center where her first rented room is located—she has the amulet with her then as well. She is, in any case, thinking like that, then. A story like that, so amusing… but it does not turn out like that of course.
It is, in other words, that story, a story about two houses, down in the town center. In the suburbs, below the square where she later starts working at the newsstand. Tall, white houses, “colonial architecture,” a bit of the American Deep South style, so maybe not very much of the Southern Pacific in them really. But the South Pacific houses is what they are called, Java and Sumatra—those are their names too. And at some point in her childhood, Maj-Gun and her brother Tom have in a passing sort of way spoken about those unusually beautiful houses. “Twin houses” because they are identical in plan and construction—and completely different from all of the other small picturesque buildings around, which come later.
Probably a hundred years old, two captains lived there. They were brothers, confirmed bachelors, who had sailed the seas to strange countries and had gotten to see so many strange things. Like the South Pacific islands, Java, Borneo, Sumatra. Come home, leave the harbor, try and relive their beautiful memories here. It does not really work, there are just occasional photographs, black and white, barely that kind even, and if they exist they are rather meaningless. Function mainly as documentation; I was there but otherwise no real life or real feeling in them. But Negro in Sunshine, hanging breasts on dark patinated native women, almost naked, next to White Man in the Tropical Hat, pulled down properly so that you cannot even see the eyes.
It wasn’t like that. So the captains built these houses instead and lived there for the rest of their days, each on his own hill across from each other. They had been confirmed bachelors, both of them, had no blood offspring, but one of them got married to his housekeeper in his later years, a Ms. Lindström who was a widow with her own children, and when the captain passed away the Sumatra house went to the Lindström family—and Göran Lindström, one of the sons and eventually also a teacher at the school, would later, in addition to his wife Gunilla and their children, take it over.
It turned out that the other captain had been a bit in debt, so after his death the Java house had to be sold at a compulsory auction; it was purchased at the end of the ’50s by an engineering family named Packlén.
The Girl from Borneo, that is where the journey leads, from the rectory to Java and Sumatra. First to Java, later, as it turns out, it is not planned but is a coincidence, in reality to Sumatra. The seaman’s chest with her possessions loaded onto a wheelbarrow that she pushes a few blocks over the cobblestones, from the one house to the other.
And of course, it should have been a nice story to tell, rather amusing too, even beautiful—because those two houses really were beautiful, white with bright attic rooms that would become her room in each house. And nice people there too: Packlén who cut rug rags in Java, and Lindström, the teacher’s family, in Sumatra. So, in a way, she really would have been able to get on well there.
But it was funny. Because at the same time as she was supposed to be in this funny story, the Girl from Borneo—not the Harlot anymore, but the Seaman, with the seaman’s chest—it started falling apart for her. But not so that the story itself would betray her; it would go on as usual, Borneo and Java and Sumatra—but her personally. Suddenly there was no room in it. Or another room—but which one?—other than the one she had planned for herself.
It was in the attic room in Java where it all started. She had come there with her books, compendiums, was going to study for the entrance exams at the university. There turned out not to be so much studying after all, and the letters she wrote to her brother who was eagerly studying and dynamically interested in his major—these letters where she vividly and humorously was describing her journey, from Borneo to the South Pacific Islands and yet it was still just ha-ha-ha the town center, the District! Just that way—think, Java, now that I’ve arrived here… yes, they had rarely, gradually never, been finished, and besides, she had very quickly stopped writing to her brother altogether.
All of that in and of itself might be meaningless, but still funny, which only her brother, she thought, would be able to understand. Was forgotten. Even the interesting information that the woman, who often sat in the kitchen on the ground floor in Java, was the mother of the big-eyed Susette Packlén from the cemetery, your first girlfriend!, which when she figured that out, she really thought she would be able to take pleasure in it—to be able to write that, to Tom!—yes, even that started feeling meaningless before she even had the energy to get out her light pink stationery.
But still, despite everything: it was meaningful anyway, what happened in Java, even if from the outside, it looked liked nothing was happening. A slightly crazy woman who cut rug rags and talked about things like death and grief—but in a particular way, which was absolutely impossible to recreate or communicate directly afterward, just a feeling of something real, almost completely revolutionary in Maj-Gun Maalamaa’s life. And it had such an effect on her—in addition to the fact that she and the woman who would die just a few years later became good friends—that everything changed. She threw away, stopped thinking about—in her head that is—everything, all stories, all amusing things, anything smart, all the thises thats from her fantasy, rather started writing, something simple, honest, real. And that is what she did in the attic room, summers, winters when she was not at the newsstand or with the woman on the first floor, wrote and wrote and it was to darkness and to light it was to everything and back and forth, but there it was, worlds opened. And were imposed with meaning, another light—her personally, about her, everything she saw—
And did not see. The woman died, the big-eyed one came home, Susette Packlén, then they almost became friends. A while, something with Susette, always with Susette… yes something, something called forth in Maj-Gun… something she wanted to get to and was frightened by… no, it could not be explained, but a driving force… to that in particular, there it was, like with the woman with the rug rags in the kitchen, Susette’s mother, entirely real, realistic.
But then she was in Sumatra, and for many years already. And had lost a thread, a rag, while at the same time she had all the threads, rags in her hand—wrote and wrote, further, but all of the stories just multiplied in her head. And at the newsstand and in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” where she sometimes wrote down this and sometimes the other, “useful,” my statements or whatever it was—it multiplied, but there it was, I am without space, it did not exist. And she had to get to it, could not live without it.