But despite everything, this should be interposed in the context: Tom Maalamaa has also sometimes felt a certain relief and gratefulness that his own children do not seem to take after either his sister or himself in that respect. Children completely of their time, in step with everything. The oldest, Karl-Olof, sixteen years old, badminton champion and fencing champion and soccer player and popular among his friends at the boarding school in Canada where he goes to school; like a fish in water, here, there, everywhere, and it is not hard won—is planning on beginning his studies in international relations and political theory at some esteemed university in the United States or England. And Mikael, the middle child, who when he was younger you might have worried a bit about: trouble concentrating at home, at school, not far from an ADHD diagnosis at one point—had suddenly on his own found an outlet for all of this extra energy and restlessness. Computer games. Now earns money from his hobby even though he is not more than fifteen years old: plays and tests games for a large gaming company. Yes yes, too good to be true, you can almost laugh, but it is true, is completely true. And then the youngest, Elizabeth Ida, named after the aunt, twelve years old but seems young for her age. How calm, how sweet, with her stuffed animals, her dolls, her small friends who visit her and whom she visits. Elizabeth Ida: not the center of the party but always invited to them, Little Miss Friendly, that type. Crawls up in her father’s lap in the evenings. He tells her stories. She, big eyed, listens. Well. They outgrow you too, the kids. Because the stories, Tom cannot help but break into a smile when he thinks about it more deeply. Stories: despite everything it has been quite a while ago now with Elizabeth Ida. How she, all of the kids, are growing, outgrowing you.
“I just want our children to be happy and well-balanced people,” his wife has a habit of saying sometimes. And Tom agrees. Small individuals, all of them. To see your children develop into that, a privilege. “Well-balanced.” Tom Maalamaa particularly likes hearing her, his wife, say that. Has always had a certain forgetfulness about her, a kind of absence, sometimes, like… not with major things—but the worst in that respect was when the children were younger and she forgot them in a park in Rio de Janeiro. Just forgot, came home, but there was something she had forgotten. After that they hired an aupairgirclass="underline" Sonja, Anna, and the last in a line for a few years, Gertrude.
But she cried after that, his wife, and how she had cried. It was that Sorrow which existed in her too that he had never really understood and gradually he was able to admit that to her openly as well; in the beginning he had a guilty conscience. “You don’t need to understand,” she once said, with that endless gentleness that exists within her. And it had been a relief, as said, and in some way, even though it sounded like the opposite but it was not, had brought him and his wife, Tom and Susette, even closer together. And she has gone to therapy, many years, and it has, according to herself, helped her.
But maybe it belongs to her character, to sometimes go somewhere else, as it were, to Sorrow’s Room, or whatever it is, maybe it is a part of their life together—of that unnamed bond that exists between two people who neither can nor want to live without each other. An integrated part of their way of being with each other, but unnamed—quite simply because there are no words for it. Like in Portugal, in the month of December 1989. They had spent a few weeks there, with the aunt who became ill and happened to pass away while they were visiting.
It was that month of December that they had started being together again, had found their way back to each other. She had cried then too, in Portugal, not come out into the sun where he had been, on the patio. But taken care of the aunt like an angel those last days, so in that way certainly been present in situations where presence is required; she had cried in spare moments and at night.
But when the aunt died there were other things to think about: everything that needed to be done, repatriation of the body, all of the practicalities, and then she had livened up again, jumped into it whole-heartedly. And when they had come home again she took a pregnancy test, it was positive, they have always spoken about their first child, Karl-Olof, as a love child who came to them, in Portugal.
But the Sorrow inside her—that was her word, though it is highly likely that it originated from the therapist, the therapists. Or “long-term depression,” but in that case he preferred the Sorrow, a sorrow with an element he referred to as appealing, which moved him so deeply it was almost terrifying.
“We met at the cemetery,” she would sometimes say, but with a laugh, because she could joke about her melancholy as well.
Which could of course still stir certain guilty feelings in him, even if his wife was not aware of it, even needed to be aware of it, all of the details surrounding it. In other words, that game which led to him getting to know her, during childhood. And how messed up he had been at that time. The game that started everything, another crazy one he and his sister Maj-Gun had, out of frustration, devoted themselves to as children, like dogs and cats they had been, running around together when they were not allowed to be at the rectory and he had not been able to sneak in again because his sister had pulled him with her, down to the cemetery, and had a mask with her—they called the mask “Liz Maalamaa,” “the Angel of Death,” or “Liz Maalamaa the Angel of Death.” Many names, though rather alike and secret. But papa Pastor, whom they needed to be kept hidden from most of all since the aunt was his sister, had of course in some way found out about them anyway and become furious. As if the complaints that reached him via the caretaker at the cemetery had not been enough: that his children were running around scaring people with the mask.
They had received the mask as a gift from the aunt, from there the nicknames. It was supposed to represent the face of a movie star, probably Ava Gardner, dark haired, sharp facial features, but the special and terrible thing about it was that when you strapped the mask to your face you looked terrifying—would become afraid if you saw yourself in the mirror.
Not the least bit funny, actually. Not the mask, not the secret names for it. So to speak when the aunt came up, he and his sister, lying on the bed in his room talking about all the money they would inherit from her, whose godchildren they were, after the aunt’s death; her husband had died at some point during that childhood, they had no children of their own and the husband had been tremendously rich.
As luck would have it no one had listened to him and his sister THEN. No one in the world because IT had been the height of childishness, a true manifestation of killing time in the musty summer day, without energy: that aunt, she had been okay, both siblings liked her despite her fervor for cleaning toilets when she came to visit the rectory and that she was so determined that instead of reading real bedtime stories she would sit on the edge of their beds one after the other and paint stories about various imaginary missionary exploits in China, “the wonderful Middle Kingdom”—where she had, as said, never been, despite the fact that the couple had traveled around the world several times with various fine cruise ships. Life is a cruise, she used to say; but then toward the end it had really gotten soiled, her husband’s final years, his spare time spent going back and forth on the Sweden–Finland ferry where he drank himself to death.