“Well.” The Manager stands there in the doorway and it comes out quickly, as if he were ashamed. “He said that he would very much like to speak to you personally but we agreed I wouldn’t wake you since you had already gone to bed—
“She’d been ill. She went peacefully. Your brother and his fiancée were there. Good that she has found peace.”
The Manager suddenly looked so old: his beer belly, his nakedness. Lions brother. The old men’s choir.
And that night, when everything is over, Maj-Gun says the most beautiful thing she knows about Love.
The newsstand again, what it was like there, all of the magazines she had read. How they were filled with such a language, like in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” which existed everywhere, made itself superior, you could not keep up, regardless of how you printed and printed the best bits. “You can say anything here”: everyone who went around and “expressed themselves,” outside the newsstand, everywhere, all the people who were saying the same things to each other.
“But Love,” says Maj-Gun, and that is the beautiful thing she says so that the Manager will have it in his head his whole life, despite the fact that in a few weeks they will not see each other again. Ever.
“Is. Searching. A unique language.
“That is the urge to Love. The Winter Garden. A Winter Garden—language.”
Kapu kai. The forbidden seas. The hacienda must be built. Silk velvet rag scraps—
And the Manager who is listening says, softly. “Dear child, lie down here. Time to sleep now. Tomorrow is a new day.” Takes Maj-Gun in his arms, they fall asleep.
But Maj-Gun not Maj-Gun, it does not work, she is awake. More awake than she has ever been her entire life. An Animal Child’s dark eyes peering out into the darkness. “Your brother, his fiancée were there, she went peacefully.”
Liz Maalamaa. “I didn’t understand what connected people, Manager. Now I guess I’ve grown. Been slapped in the face.”
The rose—which you threw at me. It is Carmen, who is walking into a room that is the most terrible room of love, and the most wonderful—there is only seriousness there, and she becomes locked in there. Locks herself in, it was just a matter of opening the door and walking out, really.
And love, the rose, an abstract room: love is the bullfighter who is dancing with her. And everyone died and Carmen died. But she had already died: died for love, a rose. Love is the bullfighter who is dancing with her—
But how does it help to think?
Because now: sirens, blue lights, an ambulance, pulling onto the property. Maj-Gun gets up in the night, stands at the window. Someone is being carried out on a stretcher from another building. It was, she will find out later, the neighbor, the lady from the other building who had complained about the noise in the pipes, but nothing too serious, an asthma attack, the old woman will get better.
Blue lights that fall in, blink blink, light up the room that so far, just a few days, but still, has been a whole world.
The Animal Child, in the window, stares out into the darkness, peering. Out into the night, a panting blue light.
But cannot be kept hidden.
“Can you see yourself killing for love? Or dying?”
“A love that is greater than death, Susette.”
“Maj-Gun, you have said that, yes.”
And farther back in time. A girl at a cemetery: the folk song. The same thing happens in the folk song, in every verse, over and over again. A repetition. That girl, her eyes. She could reinforce fear. The mask. Her art.
Susette’s eyes in the boathouse, when she fell. Kill her.
Walk in whiteness, in whirling snow.
And later: standing there on the cousin’s property. Looking in through the window, cupping her hands. He is lying there. The Boy in the woods. Unmoving, in blood. And she in the snow. Blood on her hands.
Blue lights. Sirens. Justice.
“What is it?” the Manager asks behind her, heavy with sleep, blue blinking over him too.
The nakedness.
Only a Manager’s testicle can look like a small pink bebé tart when blue light falls over it in the darkness.
Djeessuss. And just a hellish Animal Child Maj-Gun Maalamaa can be so hopelessly idiotically elephant pregnant that her stomach turns over, because a great Nausea just cannot be held back, has to rush to the bathroom, in the middle of the night.
“Some bug.” The Manager tucks her into the sofa bed in that sleeping bag, puts fresh, clean sheets under it. “Dear child.” Cold towel on Maj-Gun’s forehead, the Manager kisses this forehead before he leaves the room, closes the door, goes back to his business.
“A WILD PAIN”
MAJ-GUN IS WALKING across the square in the town center. One of the first days after Christmas and New Year’s, freezing in her fall coat, is not wearing any mittens, lugging things that have fallen out of a just-broken plastic bag, her hands slowly turning to ice cubes in the cold. On her way to the old rental place in the attic in the neighborhood below the square, in order to settle accounts with the landlord family and empty the boarder’s room in the attic, because she has terminated her rental agreement via telephone. Is going to leave the District, move now. Is coming from the newsstand where she collected some of her remaining personal items that have, in other words, been in the plastic bag that broke just after she left the newsstand for the last time; the new shop assistant is the one who packed the bag and had it lying on some shelf in the back room.
The new shop assistant. Just an ordinary girl, nothing special about her. After having worked for only a few weeks, has her own system for everything and has cleaned properly too. A good, not to mention exemplary, organization everywhere. Maj-Gun had almost thought of saying it to her too, “exemplary,” like a compliment, but let it go. Besides—what does it have to do with her, Maj-Gun, anyway? And her contacts with the Head Office too: the Head Office, which the new girl pronounced with almost the same respect in her voice that Maj-Gun recognized from herself, from when she had been working at the newsstand.
“If there’s anything else then you’ll need to talk with the Head Office. Even though you, seeing as how you’re no longer an employee, cannot be in direct contact with the section, the operator can certainly help you.”
The Head Office, once such a central place in the world. Maj-Gun also, for a brief moment, wanted to say something friendly, a bit humorous, about it to the girl, in general. Maybe add something personal to it too: about her own experiences from this newsstand in particular and give some good advice that the new girl might find useful. But this girl was not exactly talkative. After she reeled out the bit about the operator and the direct line, Maj-Gun had suddenly been like air to her: during Maj-Gun’s continued presence on the other side of the counter, “the customer’s side” (there was not a customer’s stool anymore either), in what was now her “place of employment” she had practically strained to be demonstratively unaware of Maj-Gun altogether.
Hummed a pop song while she energetically sorted magazines: old issues from new issues that she had collected in bundles to return—bundles to tie strings around, hard, sharp plastic strips and Maj-Gun was suddenly almost able to feel the burning and tearing in her hands from working with them.
Maj-Gun looked away and tried to maintain some distance. From the newsstand, everything here—in general too, as it were. A short moment from inside the newsstand, where she is never ever going to return, looking out over the square. The square that, during many years—djeessuss, how many had there been?—had been her place, her place here in the world. Just hers too. An empty square, but a space where so much could happen—the potential, but where, in reality, not much had happened at all.