“I am grown up, Manager. I don’t know. I—I wanted to become a pastor once, I think.”
And then she starts relating an episode from her childhood, at the rectory. That childhood, that rectory: one Sunday at the dinner table, her brother Tom Maalamaa, who was a pompous brooder as a teenager and this particular Sunday he brooded a bit more than usual and realized what he decided to “proclaim,” to his gathered family this Sunday in particular, his word that too, wearing a blazer, which he always did back then, despite the fact that he was only fifteen or sixteen. That HE did not have a calling to become a pastor and would, for that reason, unfortunately not be able to pass on the family tradition from father to son.
“I’m sorry, Father,” he added, like in an old-fashioned movie. One of those brooding films that played nonstop in his head at that time; they had in common that it was always his alter ego in the lead role that, after long scenes in an inappropriate childhood, youth, ended the same way: with the alter ego becoming “famous,” something “successful,” Gustav Mahler, Ingmar Bergman, the like.
On the other hand, Tom Maalamaa had on this Sunday afternoon explained that he understood that he could “serve humanity” in another way and had in other words come to the conclusion that he would become a lawyer. He had already mail-ordered the compendium for “the preparation course” for the admission exam at the law school.
“Where is your girlfriend?” was all papa Pastor asked with a small roguelike glint in his eyes, when Tom Maalamaa had stopped speaking, because that girlfriend with the big eyes, cuute, who never said a word, but who, during the past few months, had been present at all of the Sunday dinners at the rectory, was not sitting at the place at the table where she usually sat despite the fact that the place had been set for her: the chair was gaping emptily for a quiet and big-eyed Susette Packlén, poking at her food, in tight jeans, boots.
“She’s gone. Ended things,” his sister willingly and helpfully prompted loudly after a hasty destructive look at her brother Tom—Tom in the sense of TOM, seen as a world, in that subjective perception of reality that no one other than the two siblings in this family shared.
A world where the Happy Harlot in the middle of the DAY OF DESIRE, which had been great and wonderful (in any case, it should be mentioned, like a hypothesis), has been transformed into the Disgust, a world where it was “a shame about,” there… there… and Maj-Gun had almost stammered internally out of anger and here here here Tom Tom you’ll get for this.
“And to be honest,” his sister added in a steady voice, “you can have some understanding for it. I love you over the plains. Love’s representative, a bit pale in that perspective.” This too like a silent reference to something that only the brother and the sister in the family shared: then, a long time ago, before Tom Maalamaa started hanging out with his first girlfriend, he had certainly enjoyed himself when his sister Maj-Gun, when talking about that mother with the big-eyed girl Susette at the cemetery, had grown quiet at the mere thought of the name, “CAN you be called that, Tom?” Asked humorously, rhetorically so to speak, and added, “nah I don’t think so. Newsstand toppler. Susette. I love you over the plains—”
“We are SEPARATED,” Tom Maalamaa, with poorly restrained anger, personally declared out loud at the dinner table, though somewhat paler in the face. In and of itself, possibly, not entirely wrong either because in reality his sister did not know the details surrounding the breakup of his relationship—that Susette Packlén’s father was ill, dying, both of them knew that, probably papa Pastor too, who looked after the members of his congregation but that was work, nothing to touch upon with great seriousness during these pleasant Sunday dinners when the whole family had the opportunity to get together in peace and quiet for once.
So it could just as well have been Tom Maalamaa himself who had slowed things down, because in some way, the Weakling that was hiding under the Ponderer’s cowl that he had invisibly put on and that did not suit him very well, significantly less well fitting than those woolen mantles of quality he would use later in life… that Weakling was not prepared for illness, death. Unthinkable, for a thousand reasons, also because quite simply if it affected someone else more, then that person’s rules applied, there would be another main character in the story, so to speak. Following that sweet girl who says nothing to the very darkest, Death’s landscape, no, that had not occurred to him. But he was afraid of death too, in that blunt, naked way that healthy youths, who are not dragging themselves out into war and dying the hero’s death, are—the difficult, lengthy illnesses, death as violent but relentless decomposition, death as a physical utterance too, and handling the dead body, the whole coffin hell, quite simply, should be handled by deaconesses, mothers, wives, girlfriends—that was their role in life, which would come to show itself in practice later.
But it was not exactly something you wanted to endure. Your fear. That kind of “disgust.” And then the contemplation came in situations exactly like that and it existed so that it would come to you in situations exactly like this, with messages like the following: that you were young and had your future ahead of you, a boy with prospects, a purpose in life. Do something, for, like, humanity. And Gustav Mahler, but regulated, not like it had surged at the worst moments in your room with your girlfriend, in order to soften the anxiety in the presence of a disownment—because, say what you want to about Tom, maybe he was empty but not stupid. His sister in her capacity as the Happy Harlot as a happy appellation, not fresh, but hamba hamba, in the openness of childhood, without boundaries, who was not let into his room, but was left outside, pounding on the door.
“Well, well, let’s not quarrel, children.” Mama Inga-Britta finally jumped in and as always, when she stepped in, it became calm around the dinner table, even a relatively nice mood again.
“I have the church’s calling,” Maj-Gun explains to the Manager in the apartment on Boxing Day 1989, that she had carefully whined at the dinner table on that Sunday. That is in other words what she says: not about Tom Maalamaa and Susette Packlén and her father, or about the Happy Harlot and so on—or about her own shortcomings with her brother, in general, the metaphysical violence in them, that does not belong there. Brave but determined, this whine, she points that out here to the Manager now, since there were drawbacks to coming with a similarly brave announcement in this Pastor’s family, which was Old Testament–minded.
“The woman in the congregation is silent,” the Pastor, who was gentle despite his religious indomitability and strictness, which unfortunately unfortunately still had to come before everything, sorrowfully determined in the presence of his daughter but looked at her with an endless gentleness and started speaking about the work of the deaconship as a true challenge to her… um… femininity. At that point he had some difficulty again because she was just a teenager after all, almost genderless in her own eyes too. That DESIRE in her from the DAY OF DESIRE, for example the Girl from Borneo, was not Woman’s Dawning Sexuality that would gradually lead to a balanced marital sensuality that could then be stimulated further with sex tips from all the magazines and regular childbirth but that was mankind’s happy horrible amoral physicality, wonderful on the one hand, but no show-off, also terrible and dangerous as a-moral is, but crossing all boundaries: wanted to enjoy enjoy, caress, play… feel… her life, her life force without all the boundaries. Without gender, a life force unpersonified and so on, but no more about that now—there is also something here with the Manager now, the mood, during all of these days, which makes it so that it is important not to travel forward with too many words, move carefully, with caution.