Now. Here, on the desk, in the room that will be left behind. “Hungry like a wolf.” Folk songs. The cassette tape on the desk with all the paper.
Doris. A demo tape that a boy named Micke Friberg had sent around to various record companies back then. Micke’s Folk Band. Back then Maj-Gun had gotten a copy off of him, Micke, granted “for compensation.” Pulled out into a long, brown, small curly strip.
How nice: what a cassette tape later becomes when it gets tangled in the machinery and you have, in the end, lost all patience, and torn at it, who cares if it breaks.
Magazines. One particular one, open. Wrinkly. Glossy photo. Woman’s face, big eyes. The compass, with the needle that poked through these paper eyes. Maj-Gun’s compass, her needle.
Through Susette’s eyes. Not Susette of course, a look-alike. How similar. One of those young women, a dime a dozen, an article. Which had been about just that. A serious magazine with a socially critical spin. How stupid that girl was, clueless, that was the message. Was not written out clearly, what was the art of formulation not good for? But, should be clear, based on the descriptions. Her stupid everyday existence, her stupid life.
That girl had been upset later. They met her at a café after she read what they wrote in the article that was going to be published—this meeting was also described in the article. “That’s not me at all,” she cried, otherwise defenseless, they chased after her with their camera. On the last photo, big-eyed in a wood, a small dog at her legs. She who had been crying and crying. “I’m not at all like that… and stop taking pictures!” Of course they had not, they became interesting pictures. As if in harmony with a revelation. Don’t know anything about anything. Even about herself.
Maj-Gun hastily cleans everything up. The papers, the magazines, the cassettes, the compass, pens, and so on. In a black garbage bag that she drags down the stairs and leaves it next to the garbage can by the door. She puts the room key on the table in the hallway, the house is empty, glances all the way into the kitchen, cannot help herself.
The distinguishing feature about this house, Sumatra, is, as said, that on the inside it is exactly like the other house, Java, the same blueprint. The same view in other words, out into the kitchen. In Sumatra like in Java, when you come down the stairs from your rented room on the upper floor. The woman at the rug rag bucket. She had thought it was a dream at first; it was not.
“Can you help me with this?” The woman had looked up from her work, among the rags, the bags in the kitchen, piles of them. In half darkness in the middle of the day, the window shades pulled down.
“An office rat on the lower floor.” Maj-Gun had started a letter to her brother Tom about life there in Java. “In gray clothes, all of her gray.”
A letter, among others, that was never finished.
Because she had liked that woman, they had become friends, for real. “Susette, she didn’t give way.” Whatever she had meant by that, Maj-Gun, then it was one hundred percent true and real.
But now. Gone forever. Giving away.
So: here in the house, Sumatra, everything is normal. The table wiped clean, coffee cups and saucers in the sink, lemons against the dark blue bottoms of the curtains, really nice, fresh. A dull January afternoon light.
And left, left the big, black garbage bag by the garbage can. Everything from the newsstand in it too, except for “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” which she still did not dare throw away, keep it, like a memory. But the cigarettes, the blouse, and so on. She puts the remainder of what had been hers from the furnished room that she had rented into the seaman’s chest that she had brought with her when she moved in many years ago.
There is room for a lot in the chest, everything she has. A few weeks later, after her aunt’s funeral, right before she travels to Portugal, she transports the chest to a storage space in the industrial area on the outskirts of the city by the sea where it will remain until she returns one year later, buys a little house in another part of the city, a lush suburb, where she will live during her university studies.
She puts some other things in the chest as well. Red bow, a piece of wrinkled silk paper carefully folded, everything from the getawaybag that was hanging around forgotten in a closet in the Manager’s hall for many weeks. It was close to being left behind altogether. The Manager, from the stairs, came running after her with it when she was already seated in the passenger’s seat of the rented delivery van next to the delivery man. Tobias in the slush, temperatures above freezing again. Maj-Gun had taken the bag, good-bye, they never see each other again.
The drawings were also placed in the chest. Bengt’s drawings from the walls in the other apartment, which she put in the bag while she was there. Blueblueblueblue pictures, watercolors, which she has not inspected more closely, will not end up doing so either actually. That “exhibition.” That Winter Garden. Which may come to exist in the Winter Garden later, the one on the Second Cape.
She gives these drawings to Rita, some years later. Rita, Solveig’s and Bengt’s sister, from the Rita Strange Corporation. They do not know each other, cross each other’s paths during a legal dispute. Maj-Gun is the lawyer, recently graduated from the university where already in the final stages of her studies, which she completes quickly and “brilliantly,” she is offered a good position at a law firm with a good reputation, which has its reliable offices in the nice southern quarter of the city. A law firm where the lawyers occupy themselves with inheritance law and the like. Rita is the client. In her capacity as party in that corporation, Rita Strange. An elegant context for wild elegant ideas. Advertising people, artists, architects, gladly calling themselves “avant-gardist.” Those kinds of dreams, which can be taken seriously thanks to their financial solvency, “the backing.” Feasible, you can dream big.
And it is back then, in the wake of a recession, when dogs are eating dogs and some have become full even if it is not spoken about publicly.
Build. The Winter Garden. Architecture. The Second Cape. An idea on paper that has been born out of all of this? Maybe. But it is not interesting, in any case in the perspective that Maj-Gun cannot muster any interest in it, not even enough to pay more attention to it than she needs to for the purposes of her job, not in the least. Market transactions, inheritance and gifts, and so on, the kinds of things that can be bought with money, and the kinds of things the law is there for, plus the money, to secure them. The Glass House on the Second Cape is owned by a friend, Kenny, who is also a member of the corporation, she inherited it from a relative she once lived with. And Jan Backmansson, who is Rita’s husband, has the hill on the First Cape, but some sister Susanna is being obstinate, and so on. Several transactions, legal obstacles, but those kinds of obstacles are there to be overcome. An idea. Which may be realized. But what is just as true is that the Winter Garden, a few years after it has come to be, is transformed.
Has already aged then. An idea that was an idea, a thought, but when it was realized: well, not what you had thought. Not a lot of added value either, a bit clumsy too.
Is sold, is bought by someone else. As a physical place, the Winter Garden can be seen as a process, that light is transformed and transformed.
But the brochures will remain. Kapu kai. The hacienda must be built. That, for example, and other things.