“Can I call you?” had been his last question before he drove off the side of the road and stopped but hmptt tjjjmp she slammed shut the car door, a powerful existential slam that echoed in the silence, in the entire world. And the car, the hot-rod farmer inside it, had driven off.
But that fate had an irony: after everything, hours later, he had been there again. The same lout, the same car, the same road, roughly the same place, whirling snow. Terrible road conditions. The car that suddenly showed up just right in front of her in the middle of the road where she had been plowing her way through the snow just falling and falling, in an unbearable state of terror and shock, inexpressibly that she never wanted to suffer again. Bloody hands in her pockets, no mittens. The car had stopped, the door opened again, and she had been grateful then, gotten in.
“Shall we run away together? To the ends of the earth? See. I have the getawaybag with me.” She had said, or something along those lines.
“Nah,” the hot-rod farmer had replied, and added, a bit legendarily: “I dunno. Can’t. Homandeat.”
So: back to the square again, they had skidded their way there, slowly slowly. To the middle of the square, the familiar square, despite the abundant snow that was walling up everything there too. But suddenly, when she stepped out and the car started with a vroom and slid out of view, Maj-Gun, bloody paws even more well hidden in her pockets, had not had a clue about where she was.
Started walking, up to Susette Packlén’s apartment above the town center. Justice. The sirens.
But now, in church, as if she had awoken from a dream. To reality. HERE she is after all, now. Has gone through everything, to this, to the middle of the hymn, the church, to her father’s house. A fragment of everything, in everything, others, her own, inside her. And her father who is looking at her: “Welcome home.” And suddenly, she knows exactly how she is going to introduce herself to her father again when they have the chance to talk after the funeral, just the two of them. How she, with a glint in her eye, will go up to him and say to him that unfortunately she came late to the memorial service because she had, by mistake, gotten on the wrong bus a few times on the way there but then she had gotten on the right bus after all. And arrived. And how he, her father, now she knows this too, will look at her then with yes—he knows how he would look at her regardless of what she says to him. That dearest Maj-Gun, we have all missed you, welcome home. Open-mindedness. We go to paradise with song… but
OWWW in her stomach.
An intense pain, like a reminder, she almost folds over double inside on the church pew because she can control herself after alclass="underline" but that is the memory, this year I have something kicking in my stomach. Unpleasant consequences… how could she forget that? And at the same time, exactly at the same moment she becomes aware of it: something that she, of course, in some way had been aware of the entire time, has been said to her besides, should not come as a surprise. But still, like a bombing. The gaze that traveled over the pews in the church, over the people in them, naturally also to the family in the first rows. Her brother’s erect neck that is sticking out of the stiff shirt collar, his neck sunburned—and another neck, the one next to his. Hair in a ponytail, gray shoulders, skin shining, despite the great amount of sunshine in the south where it has also been—white.
Maj-Gun remains staring.
It is Susette Packlén. Who turns her head slowly, looks back in the middle of the hymn, eyes meet Maj-Gun’s eyes, big eyes.
Suddenly, during a few seconds, which will later slip away, for a long long time, Maj-Gun has understood exactly everything.
On the other hand, of course, the obvious though nonetheless fantastic for that. Susette and love. Polo shirt, blazer, sideburns. Susette from the underworld, under the disco ball, gray, glittering. Susette on the dance floor, through the cigarette smoke. At the other end of the dance floor: polo shirt, blazer, sideburns. Tom Maalamaa. Her own brother.
Rag doll. “Loose limbed.” Dance my doll… Susette and love: like a story to dance to.
“Sometimes I have the feeling that I planted things inside her, Manager.” The Manager, who has not really understood, but on the other hand, she had not really been able to to go into detail or explain what she meant. But: all stories. The Boy in the woods. Duel in the sun. Dead. For love. The boy in the house. Susette in the hangout. When she was falling and falling—
Rug rags.
On the other hand, this is the landslide, something she will keep hidden for a long time in life because it is so amazing. That Susette, a stranger. She knows nothing about Susette. Has never known anything.
Her head spins, her stomach turns. Her stomach. OW! OW! OW!
Her stomach. This year I have something kicking in my stomach. Solveig on the square: “a wild pain.”
“What are you babbling about?”
The Boy in the woods. A violation.
She cannot keep the child. It was never hers.
So after the memorial service, the burial. At this cemetery, another place, another city, the little town where Liz Maalamaa’s husband had come from. This is where she will now be lowered after alclass="underline" in this earth, for her not the earth of home but foreign earth, though no more heartfelt singing about this either. The swans, Dick and Duck, her aunt on the ship, maybe there was some truth in all of this too. “I didn’t understand what connected people, Manager. Though now I guess I’ve grown up. Been slapped in the face.”
A lush cemetery, picturesque, you can see it despite the fact that it is a dull and snowless January day, no leaves on the trees, gobs of old, dirty snow on the ground. The temperature is above freezing again but there is a biting wind that goes down to your bones and it makes it feel like fourteen degrees at least. Maj-Gun has been freezing in her new red winter coat with a silky soft lining during the roughly thousand feet she and all of the other funeral guests wandered from the church behind the creaking black cart with the white casket on top—three male descendants on either side, Tom Maalamaa at the very front on the right, the most important spot, like oxen pulling the hay wagon along behind them.
The cemetery grove itself where the family grave is located is particularly nice: so if one had the desire to say something nice, something that could be said in the presence of all relatives from both sides of the family, then it would, for example, be exactly what Maj-Gun herself is going to say afterward at the reception, mainly in order to put an end to a certain burial ecstasy that has caused some of the closest relatives on the dead husband’s side to start getting out of hand.
“God knows everything,” Maj-Gun is going to say, “but the grove is beautiful and that Aunt Liz Maalamaa would have appreciated resting in that place is something we all can agree on.
“A childless marriage but God gives and God takes away and that sorrow which lasted so many years only brought the two of them closer together.” Afterward, consequently, some relative from the husband’s side suddenly felt the need to determine this despite the fact that there had not been a single person at the table for the closest mourners who would not have known exactly what the married life between the two, now dead, people in question had been like. If not the “family doctor” himself—a cousin who is enthroned at one end of the relatives’ table instead of at the cousin’s table where he actually should be sitting but has apparently received a better seat due to his respectable age in addition to his task as “physician in ordinary,” which they say in that family, to that family. He is ninety-four years old but clear as a bell, possibly a bit loose tongued in his old age; that is to say less restrained with what he in company as company might happen to allow to come out.